Snow Falls Like Love
Written for @celestialcastiel for the @destielsecretsanta2020
1.6k under the cut of Castiel and Dean stumbling through snow gazing as Castiel considers what it means to fall.
Listen to a short accompanying playlist here: Snow Falls Like Love
Read Snow Falls Like Love on Ao3 Here
Water freezes at 32-degrees Fahrenheit, but snow doesn’t form until 28-degrees.
Thin plates develop from vapor around a mote of dust or pollen, which then fork into dendrites if the air becomes more humid. As it gets colder, needles, columns or even solid prisms start to take shape until around 15-degrees when the crystals begin to burst back into dendrites and plates. Huge, fat, fluffy flakes of icy lace titter and dance on gusts of wind through the atmosphere. Every fall from the heavens to the Earth follows a slightly different path. Every fall from the heavens to the Earth yields a slightly different pattern. There is nothing magical about it, just physics ordering a chaotic universe; molecules following the unwritten rules of crystallization along an errant draft of air. But, even so, Castiel finds himself transfixed.
His Father, in His great wisdom, imbued all of His Creation with the kind of subtle beauty Castiel could lose himself in. All creatures great and small, every mountain, every nebula, and every act of nature is holy; each time he witnesses his Father’s work, it inspires in Castiel a reverent sort of wonder.
He watches a different flake fall again and again, and each time his awe is renewed. Some seem to hurtle towards the ground, while others linger along updrafts, sauntering only vaguely downwards in their slow, but inevitable descent. His chest swells with every upward lilt and aches with every sinking lull. He puffs out a sigh, sending a flake which had ventured too close to him careening off, half melted with the heat of his breath and hopelessly off course.
Snow falls like him, he thinks. He recalls each tumble, each broken Seal, every pitch and every one of his brethren to burn out on the end of his blade. He recalls Naomi and he recalls his defiance and he wonders for a moment if the needle in her hand was the rising or the falling act. He recalls Dean’s prayers, each one arranged in his memory like a tributary of frozen water along his path, and the choices that brought him from the heavens to the Earth.
He recalls Dean. He recalls sulphur and brimstone and meat and the searing of Dean’s flayed skin under his hand. He recalls his orders, the only orders that mattered: to protect Dean Winchester. He recalls freckles and the way they are scattered over Dean’s skin like these snowflakes across the sky. He recalls the line of Dean’s profile against a backdrop of white. He recalls Dean and, as if summoned, the screeching of the bunker’s rooftop door heralds his sudden arrival.
“Here you are, man. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“Hello, Dean,” Castiel prompts, glancing over his shoulder with wry regard. Dean lingers in the doorway, one hand still on the handle, as if he were considering going back inside. He’s wearing the same henley from this morning, but with his green, canvas jacket atop, the one that brings out his eyes. Castiel smiles and something about the line of Dean’s shoulders melts as he steps out onto the rooftop and shoves the door back shut.
“Yeah, hey,” he huffs out, wrapping his arms around himself and stuffing his fingers underneath his lined canvas overcoat as he steps closer. He brought a grey woolen blanket with him, draped over his arm, and is hugging it awkwardly to his chest. “It’s freezing out here. We’ve gotta find you a better coat if you’re gonna make it a habit to play gay chicken with a snowstorm. And, do you even own a pair of gloves?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Castiel answers absently looking to his hands, suddenly sore with cold. He frowns as he flexes the stiff digits. A moment ago, he was mid-flight, wings outstretched; a moment ago, he felt a lifetime away. He looks back up at the falling snow, coming faster now. “I was just watching the snow fall.”
They both look up at that and although the sun is beginning to set somewhere behind the clouds, the sky is still bright with the white of the snowflakes. It seems to glow from within, like a lighted snow globe. Dean fidgets at his side for a moment before letting the blanket unfold messily and propping it over Castiel’s shoulders with a painfully effected nonchalant draping of his arm. Cas reaches across his own chest to take the makeshift cloak from where Dean had wrapped it around him, his fingers brushing along Dean’s own hand and resting there keenly. Dean does not withdraw his arm and neither does Castiel withdraw his hand and for a moment, Cas stands pressed against Dean’s side, heat blooming at each point of contact and diffusing into Castiel until it settles heavy in his limbs. He smiles.
He recalls the snowflakes, now falling wet and thick on his face. He wonders now if snow falls instead like love; slow at first, but then heavier, radiant in its beauty and growing only deeper with time. Because although Castiel is falling, his fading grace waning within him, receding like a riptide that sometimes threatens to pull him under, it is not as though this is something beyond his repair. It is not as though this is something beyond his choice. He isn’t helplessly plunging towards the Earth. He is succumbing of his own accord.
“Angels don’t experience cold,” he says quietly.
Dean looks at him out of the corner of his eye, the bolt of his jaw flexing as he considers the words, his hand shifting beneath Castiel’s icy fingers nervously. Dean looks to the snow. It’s one more moment before Dean finds the words and he answers as quietly as Cas had spoken, “You’re saying you’ve fallen.”
“I didn’t fall, Dean,” he starts, perhaps a bit too indignant, a bit too combative. He shakes his head. He considers the snow flakes. He sighs. “I didn’t...” he tries again, grasping for the right words, “I didn’t stumble blindly.” He looks to Dean and sees those bright, green eyes watching his lips and the freckles like snowflakes and the longest, golden brown lashes he’s ever seen and he remembers. He recalls it like each and every step he’s taken since. He recalls what happened. He levels an even gaze at Dean, licking his lips and waiting for their eyes to meet again.
“I made a choice. I chose you,” he states and it’s said with a finality that makes Dean swallow and look away. Castiel licks his frostbitten lips as his nerves overtake him. He stutters out, “I chose you and Sam and every beautiful thing the Earth had to offer and I leapt.”
That gains him another carefully guarded look from Dean and Castiel wraps his frozen fingers around the heat of Dean’s hand and squeezes gently before he loses his nerve completely.
“I didn’t fall from grace," he continues, "I leapt to freedom. And, I may not know what I am or what I am becoming, but I’d do it again. Without hesitation.”
Dean ducks his head, the pink flush from the cold along his cheeks deepening to a burning red, so hot that Cas swears he can feel it radiating across the inches they’re apart. Personal space, Castiel recalls, but they were always in each other’s orbit, always moving closer. Castiel tilts his head down to try to catch Dean’s eye, but he’s looking a little dazed, so Cas ventures, “I would always choose you.”
Dean looks up, skittish but hopeful, gaze unsure of where to land on Castiel’s face, dancing between his eyes and his mouth and sometimes somewhere lower. Dean licks his lips.
“I have always chosen you,” Castiel breathes and flakes of snow dance between them on the air from his lungs.
The snow is falling so fast now, it has left a thick layer already on top of the blanket over Cas’s shoulders and the realization sparks something in Dean. He straightens up, blinking at the snow swirling around them and feeling the icy bite of the wind now that he isn’t being sheltered by the blanket and Cas’s body.
“I think we’ve officially hit blizzard, Cas. What say we head inside and I make you a cup of hot cocoa? I’ve got a whole can of Swiss Miss… plus a bottle of whiskey if you prefer your Miss Irish.”
“Swiss Miss?” Castiel asks in acceptance as he leads them towards the door.
“Oh, she’s a sweet girl, hot, and the marshmallows?" Dean asks, hands upturned in front of his chest in a pantomime of holding breasts before intoning with a lift of his eyebrows, "Jumbo.”
“And, she comes in a can?” Cas frowns in confusion as the door screeches its protest at being yanked open.
“Well, she’s not Prince Albert, but...” Dean laughs as Castiel gestures for him to precede him and the ease with which they fall into this should be frustrating, but their path has never been straight.
“I’m pretty sure I don’t understand that reference, Dean.”
“Oh, whoa, baby, I just wanna show you,” Dean croons as they step inside.
“What a clear view it is? I got that reference!” comes the last of Castiel’s voice as the door is pulled shut tightly behind them.
The rooftop stands quiet now, the snow falling thick and heavy until even their footsteps are lost to the depths of it, how they got there perhaps less clear than where they are. Snow falls like love, Castiel had decided, and it did that night. Wondrous and beautiful and as deep as the road is long.
