Wow, I haven't updated this for a while...sorry guys. Anyway – actiony things will happen soon, so stay tuned and stay patient.
Castiel actually stops breathing the first time he feels it.
Angels.
There are angels nearby. He's scared that if he makes a sound, even the soft passing of air through his vessels lungs, then he will lose the feeling of connection, fine as a glass filament. So he doesn't breathe or move, or speak.
It disappears anyway.
It's been four months since Dean's death, months of loneliness in the cold woods, wishing he could starve or drown or suffocate – but he can't. Angels are hard to kill, even one in his weakened state, and he lacks the ingenuity or the resources to succeed. Even if he did, only oblivion would greet him anyway, angels do not have an afterlife.
The half human aspect of him, unfurled like the wet spawning of new wings on a pallid insect, still tortures him with desire and loneliness and love and loss. His body aches with physical discomfort and he finds sleep difficult, he dislikes the need for gratification that arises periodically, as if his borrowed flesh is not aware of the fact that Dean is gone.
And now there are angels.
He feels them again a few weeks later, longer this time, the crystalline hum of their presence like cold water on his fevered, fleshy brain. A taste of the detachment and peace that he once had.
Balthazar comes to him, dream walking as a blond man beside the ring where he first fought Dean, a place he often visits. He speaks the three words that before would have lit him with joy, purpose and the full hallelujah of the host in ecstasy.
"God has returned."
And he barely cares.
The agony of his grace being reignited burns him to the core. He screams, screams until he's raw and open like a nerve, the power flowing back through him like freezing acid, burning away the parts of him awakened by Dean and concealing his wings anew as his grace grows in strength.
Balthazar takes his pain wracked body away from the tiny cave, the section of the wood that was soaked in the blood of the love he'd lost, back to heaven. His vessel lies sleeping, and dimly Castiel knows that this is like a story humans tell – the sleeping form remaining unchanged while the spirit wanders, waiting.
But he doesn't know how the story ends.
He already thinks of humans from a great distance.
He returns to his true form, enormous and bright, without physicality, only thought, which creates and destroys and links them all.
In this form he would burn Dean's eyes, or the eyes of his host. He would burn the shadow of his lover away with his own brilliance.
Were Dean not already dead.
He cannot enter hell, not without the protection of the host, and so he will never see Dean again. Even God, whose love touches him like a soft tickling on his skin, the kind an imagined insect would create, does not know him as fully, as perfectly, as Dean once did.
Eternity alone is an even more painful concept now that he is surrounded by the whispering thoughts of a thousand angels, all of whom can see Dean's hands all over his grace, the soft coil of demon smoke that rises in the centre of him like a dying hearth. Crystalline bright as he is, transparent and pure, he cannot hide that one facet of darkness, tourmaline quartz to their diamond brightness.
He is taint itself.
Even his voice is not the same. The clear ringing angelic tones of the others resound around the heavens at their father's return, and yet his own voice, the only black key on the piano, a hollow note to make their joyous cry one thousandth threnody. His wings are somehow the wrong way round, like black snow falling onto white ground. He looks wrong, feels wrong.
He feels. And that is the worst crime of all.
Dean wanders the unholy depths, dark and wet with blood like the veins of some foul creature. The cancerous bowel of humankind, where souls never stop screaming because they have no need of breath, where their hearts never run dry of blood to pour upon the sandpaper harsh rock, and where the stink, the sulphur and vomit, come and innards and sweat and tears, has nowhere to escape to.
He walks, never sleeping, tail curled around his wrist for comfort, black eyes and gore covered skin making him almost invisible as he passes, a shadow. The only thing that marks him out is the silvery shine Castiel left on him, the faint aura of love and grace that drives other demons from him like holy fire. When he speaks to remember what his voice is, to comfort himself in the endless dark that used to be his pleasure trove, his harem and torture chambers and banquet hall, his words are tainted with a sharp, lilting cry like a bird in first flight. It cuts his throat like silver, fills his ears with salt.
It is the yawning space of Castiel's breaking heart, screaming from the touches of grace on his spirit.
Sometimes he speaks, shreds his skin with the sound, just to feel him.
Hell echoes with the misery of an angel, and he laughs bitterly at the thought, driving Castiel's misery into the demons and the damned like a sickness. The cries of the tortured join that one brittle sound and swell it.
Sam hears the resonating song of his brother and the angel, joined in chorus with the damned.
He knows they cannot continue like this.