@nameliachango prompted me with a fic about candy learning the song castiel wrote for her. idk if this is the direction you were expecting, but its the way i went. kind of in the same vein as the previous fic i wrote
It’s the same thing as always, these days. Late nights, sitting up, too distracted to sleep, too tired to function. Reaching across her bed, she tries to find her phone, judge the time. What time was it today, where her heart felt like it stopped beating in her chest, where not even the sweetest song could lull her to sleep? Five in the morning. She should’ve known — it was always five in the morning when she felt like this.
After all, it was the time where she watched him walk away. And really, she should’ve known better than to listen to her song before bed. Maybe it’s because she remembered the date specifically, and wanted to be wrapped up in something other than blankets and sorry looks. ‘Sorry we don’t know the details’. No, no one really knew. No one was allowed to know.
But she gets up, and she marches on, because that’s all she has going for her. Ignores the poster on the wall, a candid shot taken when he was first starting out, that has gone a long way to being the most recognisable thing about his band. Ignores the spread of CDs on the floor, and the one vinyl, framed stage left of the dresser. Was it sad that her friends thought she wanted all this, when all she wanted was him?
There’s a guitar, tucked in the corner of the room. Not the cherry red that accompanied Castiel everywhere, but what he instead spent his first pay on, when he released his first song. A deep black, that almost glittered purple in the light. Like her hair, he’d insisted, fingers twirling in her curls as she’d held the instrument in her arms. And people said that Castiel could never be romantic, that he had no heart. She knew better.
She knew him.
At five am, she settles on the chair, her guitar in hands. The strap was her choice, but the colours on the thread were starting to fade. Overuse, probably, recognisable from the lack of sleep. In her hands, she switches to his song, and slips her headphones on. Castiel’s voice was raspy, deep, and even after everything, warmed her from top to bottom. A love song. He wrote her a love song. That was the anchor, for them, no matter what (at least, she always hoped).
With a sigh, she catches up, fingers following familiar patterns on the strings. Words leave her, not quite the level of depth, but this song is etched into her skin, that she just closes her eyes, and she’s there. Headphones on, staring at the little USB stick placed into the sound system. Castiel watching her, expectant, nervous, as the song plays for the first time. Second time. Third, fourth, twentieth, hundredth.
Sitting on the bed, strumming his cherry red guitar, singing when she comes home from work late. On the porch of Lysander’s farm, just the two of them awake, always the last to go. Never a song he’d been practicing and writing for weeks on end. Whenever he saw her, it was always their song, sung low and quiet, like a private message she was only privy to hear.
Mumbled as she dyes his hair, loudly in the shower when she’s using the hairdryer. Lyrics laughed as they go christmas shopping, trying to place the words in tune to the noise around them. And she’d repeat them right back, stamped on her heart, nowhere else to go.
She memorised the song by listening, over-listening. Knew all the strokes, all the words, every little catch in his breath. There was no embarrassment in the way he sang to her, talked to her, about her. So sure and calm and determined, as if he didn’t believe his feelings ever got across.
Of course he knew better, at the time. But here she sat, in her little apartment, playing a song that would remain theirs. Always.
