Dean lying with Cas’ back pulled against him, fingering Cas real slow and careful, both of them really sleepy and exhausted after a long hunt- dean resting his chin on Cas’ shoulder and Cas curling his toes weakly and moaning quietly into the pillow ;u;
It’s after a week of Castiel sulking and generally being miserable that Dean slaps down a piece of a paper and a pen on the kitchen table in front of him.
Castiel stares uncomprehendingly at it a moment then peers up at Dean. “What’s this?”
“You think being human sucks so bad? Fine. I’m gonna show you just how awesome it is.” Dean’s voice is forcedly optimistic, and Castiel knows that it’s for his own sake and is grateful. “Write down the top 5 things you want to learn as a human, and I’ll teach you how to do them.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Yup, I am.” Dean’s eyes brighten and he grins. “Hey, I can be like your, uh, your human Yoda.”
This, Castiel thinks, cannot go well.
Dean doesn’t know what to expect. Hell, he’s not even sure if there’s anything to expect; when angels start falling out of the sky like sparks from the butt-end of a cigarette, that’s when you know almost anything’s possible in this wide world after all.
Almost anything’s possible, he thinks in those gray hours before dawn, gunning the Impala down the highway and blinking through the fog across his vision, almost anything can happen now.
And he thinks about comets crash-landing inside vessels of skin and bone, stealing hands and hearts and eyes, angels crowding out each former soul and waking in the morning in a bed they hadn’t made. Almost anything’s possible, even once-infinite angels becoming slow-growing miracles that will rise out of the earth nine months from now, opening their eyes to the light of day as they are placed inside their mothers’ arms.
Almost anything can happen, but that’s the problem: Dean can see a new world rising up on the horizon, a world where every last truth he’s clung to in these years he’s spent fighting against the dark has disappeared between one heartbeat and the next, because angels are falling and his might be lost for good.
Dean falls asleep that night wondering if he will still have blue eyes the next time they meet.
A month goes by, and Dean wonders if he’d know Cas if he saw him again, and blue eyes and dark hair shouldn’t matter so much, but they do; Cas might be Cas without those things, but a Cas with brown eyes or silver hair might not be his Cas after all, a Cas that never touched his soul in hell or stolen his fries or leaned into his shoulder as Dean half-carried him to the car.
Anything’s possible, but Dean’s not going to hold his breath, he’s not going to hold out for the sight of a rumpled tan trenchcoat on the side of the street, or a static-lined phone call that starts with Hello, Dean and ends with Take me home. Anything can happen, and Dean knows this better than most, and he knows better than anyone that a world where angels fall is a world where happy endings just don’t happen.
But because anything’s possible, he finds himself reading the newspaper every day, scanning the personals because what if? And because anything can happen, anything at all, he makes the calls and steals Sam’s laptop and checks each voicemail every day.
The hardest part is knowing that anything could happen, and that’s what drives him up the wall, knowing that there might be a Cas out there somewhere for him to find, a Cas that still exists somehow, a Cas that still has Dean’s heart revolving around the very idea of him the way the earth turns around the sun.
The hardest part is not knowing if searching is stupid or sensible, the most frightening part is the thought that Cas might have been under his nose the whole time, and Dean hasn’t found him because Dean never knew what he looked like in the first place; that Dean only knows Cas by those silly half-smiles and the wild hair and the set of his shoulders, that Dean doesn’t know him well enough to recognize him if he sees him, that Dean just plain doesn’t know Cas at all.
But anything can happen, and it usually does, and Dean spends afternoons in coffee shops, trying to catch a glimpse of every stranger who walks through the door, staring into every pair of eyes just in case he feels something, anything. He doesn’t know what to expect, but he thinks he’d know the feeling once he felt it, so he gets a box at the post office in Lebanon, Kansas, and for weeks he runs an ad that only says I still pray to you every night.
Months go by and nothing happens, and Dean’s left waiting and hoping and not-hoping and he wonders sometimes if this isn’t faith after all.
Anything’s possible, but Dean doesn’t expect to know him in a heartbeat; he’s spent so much time worrying he wouldn’t recognize Cas if he saw him that he’s not ready for the gut-punch reaction of having Cas’s arms crawling tight and desperate up between his shoulders or Cas’s beard whisking across his cheek.
Cas breathes in his ear, gravel and grit and road-dust weary, I looked everywhere for you, and Dean wonders how he ever could have thought he wouldn’t know Cas if he found him again.
But he says it anyway, dizzy with that feeling he’s always known he’d recognize and stupid with relief, Your eyes are still blue.
Let’s say that Cas wears Dean’s amulet and Dean wears Cas’s grace
I'm not an angel anymore. I went mortal.Virginia Woolf “The Waves”
