Title: Feather Scars
Author: Sparkle Itamashii
Feather Scars
Falling, for Castiel, was not instantaneous. He did not rip out his Grace as Anna had done, nor was he cast down as Lucifer had been. It began with a single feather; not a primary, not even a secondary, but one of the small coverts under his right wing.
He remembered it, the static-spark feel of the unnatural separation. His wings were not even corporeal in those first few weeks, when he still believed he could retain his Grace after choosing Dean's side in the war ripping apart the world. When it released, the feather turned from energy and light into a soft, mottled-grey feather Dean plucked up from where it had drifted to the floor of the cabin. Castiel didn't have the words to tell Dean it was the beginning of the end for him, but Dean could see it plain as day in his eyes, and he silently folded the feather in between the pages of his father's journal to keep it safe.
The second feather was, coincidentally, a secondary that came away bloody from his left wing. Dean worried more that time, but Castiel told him it was fine even as he picked up the feather with a shaking hand. He flexed his wings through the veil, assuring himself that they were still intact, that one feather would not ruin them. Shortly after they reached Bobby's, Castiel disappeared in a rush of wing beats, needing to escape for a time, to visit everywhere he thought he'd lose. They didn't see him again for a week, and no one breathed a word about the tan that had crept onto his previously impervious skin.
It was a feather shed sometime after the second dozen that finally pulled his wings into the physical realm. That was perhaps the most painful; the sudden, shattering sensation of being thrown permanently from the veil. He had thought he'd come to terms with his disgrace, but the loss of flight nearly broke him. He locked himself in his room and it was two days and a half dozen bottles of whiskey before he returned to the camp. If someone had asked Dean, he would have said it was from that point on that Castiel was never the same; but the world was falling apart around them, and no one thought to ask Dean why his heart was breaking.
There were hundreds of feathers to lose, and Castiel didn't notice all of them. Some he lost in battle, clawed off by furious croats, splintered by rogue bullets, plucked from the ridge of his right wing by the demon that snared him the night he'd wandered out of camp to sulk. Most mornings he woke prickled by the three or four small feathers rubbed off during the sleep he didn't used to need. He couldn't decide if the knowledge that he was losing them was worse than the knowledge that they would never grow back. He decided it didn't matter.
The loss of his first primary was what dumped him from one sort of bottle to another. He felt it slide out of his flesh, jerked his wing away from the horrifying sensation of loss. Choking on his inability to breathe, Castiel sat staring at the long, sleek feather, world closing in around him until the terrifying sliver of black on the floor was all that existed. Dean found him like that - mid panic attack, like a shell shocked bomb victim - and removed him from the cabin. He steered Castiel to the medical tent, asked for something to stop the bleeding and ease what he assumed was physical pain. Then he left to clean up, and Castiel never told him that was the day the medic pressed the first Vicodin into his palm. Dean never told him what happened to that feather, and Casitel considered it a fair trade.
When the flesh of his wing began to show through the mangy-looking feathers, Castiel tried to ignore the rotting. He avoided Dean until Dean made it impossible, until Dean showed up at his cabin and shouldered him into a corner, growling mad. Even then, as human as he'd become, Castiel probably could have removed him from his room without a problem, but he only spread the tatters of his once beautiful wings for Dean's inspection. The skin was patchy with scabs that weren't healing, feathers cracking off by pieces when the skin beneath them peeled and dropped. Everything ached, and Castiel knew what was next, after the feathers, after the skin and the flesh. I'm fine, he whispered, and the gentleness with which war-hardened Dean handled him that night was enough to make it almost true.
The last feather detached six months after the first, plucked out by Castiel's own long fingers so that chance could not take it from him. It was a covert, like the first, and Dean folded it into his father's hunting journal just the same. His left wing had stopped working days ago, the muscles completely gone, leaving only pale white bones hanging limply behind him. By the sunrise after the last feather, his right wing followed suit, and Castiel locked himself inside his cabin. The screams which emanated from within for the next two days reminded everyone at camp that Castiel had not always been human. Dean sat with his back pressed to the front door, hands over his ears, through every moment of it.
The scars on Castiel's back from where the camp medic had removed the last vestiges of his wing bones were long and white and ached like phantom limbs if he let himself think too much about them. Sometimes, when there was a quiet, lucid evening, Castiel would find himself at Dean's cabin, with Dean's fingers tracing apologies over the scars like the prayers that used to find Castiel no matter where he was in creation.
They look like feathers, Dean would tell him softly.
Castiel wished they didn't.