When I saw this beautiful piece of art, I couldn’t not be inspired by it. Happy birthday, my foxy lady <3
Ever since it began, Castiel has been terrified of falling.
For all of creation—or as much of it as he has existed for, at least—he has been an angel. An angel with wings, and grace. A warrior of heaven.
And then he met Dean, and he gave it all up, everything, for his Righteous Man.
Not that he regrets any of his decisions, not at all. He’d do anything for Dean. But the idea of falling, of suddenly being stripped of his grace… it scares him.
He turns to different outlets; writing, crafts, creation. Castiel tries metalwork and knitting, pottery and poetry, but none of it works. None of it helps.
It’s only when he visits a glass studio, after weeks of searching for something that will work, that he finds what he’s been looking for. He spends hours sitting there, mesmerized by the artist and his slow, careful creation of a glassblown bowl. Half an hour before the studio is set to close, the man pauses in his work, raises his eyebrows at Castiel where he’s been quietly sitting and watching, and asks if he’d like to have a try.
Glassblowing, it turns out, is the perfect outlet for Castiel’s desperate need for a creative distraction. And, when he produces a tiny, glowing paperweight (much to the confusion of the glass artist), he finds that it also serves a completely different purpose entirely.
If he instils a tiny piece of his grace into each piece of art that he makes, then he can fall slowly. He’s still falling—he’s made his peace with that, mostly—but he gets to control it. He’s choosing his fall, and how he lets go of his grace, instead of losing it to fate.
And so he sets up, with Dean’s help, his very own studio in an old building outside the bunker. His request gets him an odd look at first, but Dean has long since learned not to question Castiel’s odd habits, so he goes along with it. Dean handles the ordering of all the supplies and equipment, and they work hard once everything has arrived to get it set up, until Cas has his very own glassblowing studio.
He’s known exactly what he wants to make for a while now, but it’s complicated in a few different ways, and it’s going to take some practice to reach that level of competence. Instead, he sets about first making smaller items, some practical and some purely artistic; blue-speckled twists or spheres of blown glass.
Slowly, he gets better and better at his craft, and with each piece that he creates, his grace is depleted further.
As he practices, he keeps thinking about that special idea. He doesn’t go as far as putting pencil to paper and designing it, but he thinks about it a lot, watches it take shape in his mind. When his next order of sand and oxides arrives, he experiments with the colours, the balance, until he gets it just right for what he’s been seeing in his head.
And then, one afternoon, when he’s finished all his other projects and is looking for something new to do…
He figures he may as well get started.
It takes a few tries—what Castiel has envisioned is complex, and he is technically still a novice glassblower—but after a few days, and his grace more expended than he’s used to, he manages to get it right. It’s with aching arms and skin damp with sweat that he steps back to admire his finished piece.
The glass takes hours to cool, and by the time Castiel is able to handle it with his bare hands, night has long since fallen outside. He wraps it carefully in a cloth and cradles it against his chest as he leaves his studio and makes his way back inside the bunker. Today has taken more out of him than he’d expected, and he feels… almost depleted. There’s not much of his grace left inside him, but that’s okay.
He makes his way through the bunker quietly, trying to figure out where Dean and Sam are. Sam is likely still in the library, buried in research for their newest case, but Dean… Dean could be anywhere.
Eventually, Castiel finds him in his room, lying on his bed and reading a dog-eared copy of Slaughterhouse Five. He clears his throat in the doorway, and Dean glances up, then sits up once he sees who it is. “Cas. Hey,” he says, closing the book and setting it aside on his nightstand. “You alright?”
“Yes, Dean.” A smile curls Castiel’s lips, and he shifts his grip on his armful of cloth and glass. “I’m alright. I… I have a gift for you.”
Dean raises his eyebrows, gaze dropping to the bundle in Castiel’s arms and then returning to his face. “Something you made? For me?” Slowly, a small smile curls his lips, as though he can’t quite believe that Cas would make something for him. “Can I see?”
The bundle of cloth feels heavy in Castiel’s arms as he carries it over to Dean’s nightstand. He’s put so much of himself into this—so much of his emotion, his thoughts, his grace. Carefully, he sets the bundle down, then unwraps the cloth from it to reveal his gift.
It’s a lamp, made of glass as dark as the night sky. It’s tall and twisting and elegant, dotted with tiny pockets of glass that glow silver-blue. Beside him, Castiel hears Dean inhale sharply, and when he looks over, Dean’s eyes are wide.
“You… you made this for me?” he asks, and there’s an awed tone to his voice. “Cas, it’s beautiful, I—“
Castiel reaches out to touch the base of the lamp, pressing his fingers to the only shallow indent in the glass creation. Slowly, the room dims, and a gentle blue light grows in the centre of the lamp, until there’s a glowing tendril within the glass that twists up from the base of the lamp to the very tip.
And on the walls, on the ceiling, projected onto every surface of the room, is the night sky.
Galaxies, collapsing stars, every marvel and wonder of space, here on the bedroom walls of Dean Winchester. For a good minute, they both look; Dean open-mouthed at the quiet beauty of Castiel’s piece, and Castiel with a soft gaze at the only person he would ever go to such lengths for in all of creation.
“Cas,” Dean breathes, and when his gaze returns to Castiel, his eyes are wide, and full of wonder. He’s smiling, wide and soft and full of the same emotion that thrums beneath Castiel’s sternum. “I… thank you. It’s beautiful.”
It’s everything that has been said between them, but also everything that is still yet to be said. They have a lifetime for those things, but now, Dean knows.
They sit side by side on Dean’s bed and watch the stars, and when Castiel quietly takes Dean’s hand and interlaces their fingers, neither of them are truly surprised.
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