"Is it hard?" Anna asks one day.
"Is what hard?" Castiel asks, trying to ignore her. For some reason, as much as he instinctively loves her, he doesn't much like her anymore—maybe because she still feels so human. There's something about the feel of her Grace that's been altered irreparably, something that reminds Castiel not only of Dean and Sam and the Impala but of things like rain and dirt and blood; things that are only beautiful to Castiel in the abstract, in a way that he doesn't understand. There's something else about her, too, something warped in a way that reminds him of watching human children being spoiled, being given too much too soon without having had to earn it.
Castiel is busy watching over the Winchesters, and Anna is tagging along—he doesn't know what else she does with her time, ever since she regained her Grace. She likes to watch Dean, and, for some reason that Castiel doesn't quite understand, that bothers him; Dean is his charge, and Sam, to some extent, as well, and he doesn't like the thought of someone else guarding over them. It worries him sometimes, these flickers of possessiveness, but he tries to ignore them.
Anna makes a disbelieving noise, as if she finds Castiel impossible to understand; she's so self-righteous these days, so convinced that she knows more than he does. He's terrified that she's right—that she has seen deep into the soul of humanity and gleaned some beauty that Castiel can only dream of—and it doesn't endear her any further to him. "Being so far away from him," she says, as if this is obvious.
He doesn't answer—doesn't exactly know what the question is, really, until after he's betrayed her and she breaks in heaven and tries to kill the Winchesters. The question has been with him the entire time, seething under Jimmy Novak's skin like the blood that used to keep him alive, and by the time Castiel finally comes to understand it, it is far too late.
It is hard. It's hard like blood and death, like depression and alcoholism and lust, like the millions of unthinkable things that humans go through every day, and every day that Castiel feels that distance he imagines that he can feel it shrinking. What else is there but pain, sweet glorious pain like only humanity can know, that can close that distance? He thinks that Anna—or who she used to be or who she might have been, not as she was at her last—would be proud of him, and for a moment he can almost find it in himself to forgive her. Almost.
After all, at this point, the only thing more unthinkable to him than someone else guarding the Winchesters is someone trying to destroy them.
Years later, when Dean Winchester has summoned Death himself in order to find a way to kill the new god, Castiel will look back at all of this. (He is Castiel here, at the end, just as he was Castiel at the beginning of it; he was Cas in the middle, something entirely different and near enough to human that distances could have almost been forgotten, but he's lost that now, just as he's lost that feeling of distance because for the first time in years it doesn't feel like there's anything on the other end.) The last thing he remembers thinking as the Leviathans steer his deteriorating body into the water is a question, twisting desperately out of him as it all goes black: What have I become?
Was originally going to be part of a longer fic but didn't happen. Threw it up on my tumblr and now here just because I wanted it out of the document it was in and didn't want to put it anywhere else but kind of wanted it saved somewhere because I liked it.