Chapter 26.

Castiel was listening to Jules, breathing quietly as she slept and watching the faint smile on her lips and the relaxed way her hand lay on his chest, as if it were normal and natural for it to be there. Even in sleep, her touch had a powerful effect on his emotions. There had been little of this in his life. He hugged his friends, sometimes, but there was something beautiful about someone trusting him enough to fall asleep easily in his arms and loving him enough to want to be there.

She loved him. She had virtually said it. She had said it, he decided, as he ran through the conversation in his mind. Hearing it, really taking it in, was hard for him, because he felt so completely unworthy of any human's love. In the hours between midnight and the bustle of bunker breakfast times, he often found himself listing all the things he had done that made him unworthy. It wasn't the falls that upset him, but the heartless acts, the monstrous acts, the blood of other angels' vessels on his blade, deaths by the Leviathans, deaths he had chosen to inflict, deaths where he had never had a choice.

He had wronged humanity. He had wronged Heaven. Dean forgave him because his intentions had always been good, but the purity of his intentions did not make any of his actions right and nothing could make killing Balthazar right. He didn't even understand how he had reached a point of paranoia where he could convince himself he had to kill his brother for conspiring with the Winchesters to save him from himself.

Jules didn't know it all. She knew some. She knew he was fallen and that Heaven had good reason to hate him. She knew he had slain countless angels. Countless was the wrong word. Their names were playing on a loop in his mind. He knew how many. He knew who. He saw their faces still. Jules knew enough to see him as a monster, but she never saw him that way. She said he was good. Odd how her opinion mattered to him more than the lofty judgements of Heaven.

But then, he very probably loved her.

That thought should have made him happy. It was what he wanted. Dean and Sam and Sarah kept telling him that he could find love and now maybe he had. It was just that he wasn't sure it was so good for Jules. He was not a catch. He was more of a "Throw it back and never speak of it again." He had betrayed everyone he had ever loved. He had broken promises. He had all but destroyed Heaven.

There were so many good reasons for her to walk away, so many reasons for him to make that decision for her and give up on the stupid idea that he could find happiness, when he deserved misery. He should never have allowed things to get this far. He should never have pretended to himself that he was fit to be among humans, to act as if he were one of them. That bordered on blasphemy.

But blasphemy felt so good. Her head and hand on his chest, touching him so trustingly, her voice when she had told him she cared, her gentle laughter when he misunderstood, her happiness when he understood perfectly ... Jules gave him joy and peace and a feeling of acceptance, even redemption.

His vessel was human and humans had urges like angels had righteousness. It was part of who and what they were. Humans liked to touch and embrace and entwine and had his response to Jules been only the intensely physical attraction he felt for her, the thoughts in his head of sensual delights, he could have dismissed it as a side-effect of inhabiting a human body, but it was not only that.

His mind was angelic, celestial, besotted. As Dean had inspired in him a friendship that altered every part of his life, so Jules now inspired him to something else. Conversation had never before felt like an intimate act. He craved any interaction with her, any contact, however fleeting. At the party, he had danced with her and that had been wonderful and physical and exciting in all manner of ways, but what had shocked him was the power a glance could have over him, a look across the room when she was dancing with someone else ... someone she barely looked at, because her eyes were on him.

It seemed like love. It felt like love. And as Dean had once said, "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, why is it in my car? It's a duck, Cas. I mean, these things poop everywhere." He smiled to himself. Dean wanted him to find love. Dean always wanted the best for him.

Dean forgot what a flawed being he was. Dean, who could list all his own faults, real and imagined, always forgot his. He thought Cas worthy of the love of someone like Jules. Cas knew, with absolute certainty, that he was not.

He should wake her now and tell her the truth. He should end this before she got hurt, an innocent victim of his next big mistake. He could live without her, he had done so for a very long time. Whatever happened, he would always have the sweet memories of this one, perfect night, the knowledge that she had seen something good in him, that she had trusted him. After so many dark, cold ages with so little love, he could live a long time on this blazing light.

He opened his mouth to speak, but no selfless words of regret and respect presented themselves. To wake her now seemed a profanity. To wake her in order to reject her was an abomination. He acknowledged to himself that his reasons for not ending the relationship immediately were utterly selfish, but one of them was that he could not bear to see her smile fade away and the light in her eyes dwindle. She loved him and he probably loved her and it should have made everything so simple, but he was Castiel, the angel who broke Heaven and he needed her love to save him, but knew that she deserved better.

He had two fatal flaws, his indecision and the rash, stupid decisions he made to try to overcome it. As those flaws fought for control of how, exactly, he would destroy this beautiful thing he had found, by idiotic action or impotent paralysis, he remembered something Sarah had said to him. "Fear gives bad advice. Love is wiser."

He put his hand over her hand on his chest, as if by doing so he could protect both her and this seedling relationship. In reality, he feared he would lose both, but not yet.