Sonnet 57
Being your slave what should I do but tend
Upon the hours, and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend;
Nor services to do, till you require.
"Of course. Your problems always come first."
Don't they though? Haven't they always? Even now, everything he's doing…isn't it all for Dean, to keep Dean safe? Yet he can't stop himself from letting slip that barbed comment. Maybe he isn't a very good angel, but he would have made an incredible human; he's so selfish. He doesn't begrudge Dean any of his help or time, but he does want to be appreciated sometimes. Would a moment of gratitude really kill the man?
Instead he gets angry questions about where he's been, what he's been doing to help retrieve Sam's soul. Does Dean ever ask him if he needs help?
Castiel thinks all these things and is ashamed. He should not feel this way; no angel should. But is it really so wrong to want Dean to acknowledge, just once, how much he does for him? Instead of acting like it was Castiel's job to throw himself into the line of fire over and over?
Nor dare I chide the world without end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are, how happy you make those.
"It sounds so simple when you say it like that," he says, and he is thankful for the gravel of his voice that hides the cracks in it. "Where were you when I needed to hear it?"
"I was right there," Dean retorts. "Where were you?"
I was fighting a war on two fronts and trying to fix your messes at the same time, Castiel thinks. I was trying to let you have a normal life. I was alone. I was right beside you. I was waiting for you to want me to be right beside you.
He knows all of those things are true, but somehow he still thinks Dean is right. Does it stop him from going through with his plan? No. He's come too far, put in too much work, and he's at the end of his strength. He sees no other way out, and he takes it.
Only when he's up to his ears in Leviathan and coming apart at the seams does he fully admit how wrong he was. Of course, it's too late to do anything about it then. He manages to say he's sorry.
He's not gone; he sees all of it. He watches the grief overtake Dean's face and feels the water lapping at his ankles, then his knees, then filling his ears and nose and mouth as he wades into the lake. A tiny, selfish, corrupted little part of him wants to hate Dean—Dean, with his aversion to talking and his inability to see past his own problems, Dean who expected Castiel to somehow just know without being told that he could come to him for help—but he can't. This is his fault, not Dean's. He knows that. He thinks, at the last second, that even if Dean were somehow to blame, he couldn't do it.
A moment later there is a mad rush for the exits: purgatory's worst monsters are unleashed into the world in all directions, and Castiel just floats away.
So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
