it's hard to wrap my head around, at 400 million years, just how old Castiel actually is. 400 million years puts his creation in the Devonian Period, a time when complex relationships were first being formed on land. Castiel is as old as terrestrial ecosystems. He's older than songbirds, than flowering plants and all land vertebrates. The famous "don't step on that fish, Castiel," is still 35 million years away when the tiktaalik becomes the first first four-legged vertebrate to clamber onto land. The trees of his day didn't have the hard insides we know, but were weird and soft and spongy inside. Without animal vocalizations, the world sounded like wind, like water, like insect wings. Castiel is older than the seven stars that make up Orion and older than Sirius by hundreds of millions of years. He was a young when the mountain range that is shared by Scotland and Appalachia was still connected. He's older than motherfucking Pangaea.
Maybe Naomi knew then, that he was doomed from the start. Of course he'd feel a fondness and a desire to protect life when he was there for it. Of course, he'd love the dirt bound, the struggling beauty, the evolution, the animals in the sun.
