Dean's had the long fitted jacket for a while now, and the thin leather boots, but as he and Sam step out of a 7-Eleven on Roy street, he can't help but stare at the boy on the other side. Faux Armani button up with a lazy one loose at the collar, Italian loafers. Not great on hunts, pointless around the bunker...but that blush pink tie wasn't going to buy it's self ▲
I'm kind of disappointed that the spn writers didn't have Mama Tran try to hug Kevin and phase through his ghost, thereby having her learn that he was dead that way. It would have been really interesting and emotional, instead of having an awkward cut to the scene where she finds the ring attaching him to earth.
It was purer, but purity is increasingly strained; Castiel does not know what it is meant to mean anymore, why he should care for it so much. He thinks he doesn't. There is nothing pure on God's earth, the dirt world He made: water is adulterated with minerals and the air is made of gas, the soil has worms and feces, and all of this is right. All impure things sustain life, there is nothing so impure as a body in its machinations, the digestion and sweat of living, the hormonal fires internally and the bacterial surface: in living, things make other things, give life to other things, allow them to consume and be consumed and rejoin and break apart in endless cyclical combination. Human beings cry salt tears and pass urine. Angels do neither of these things, but neither do angels sing new songs.
Oh, the songs they voice are glorious. They are resonant in heaven's upper registers, they thrum below the foundations of the earth and they have filled Castiel to the point of breaking. They do not bear comparison to human music, except in one way: as far as Castiel knows, human songs are better. Less pure. Love songs sung with grief and anger mixed with desire and desire mixed with sweetness, like dirt that has been stirred with manure, ready to give life to the seed. Castiel has tried to sing and his breath cracked at the high points and slipped away at the low ones and even his sad, ugly voice comforted a living child, made a soft human baby stop weeping for a moment. Humans are like weeds that live on the barest moisture in the smallest cracks of pavement, the smallest kindness causes them to flower, they can live on almost nothing and yet love their lives. Their cruelties cannot compare to their capacities. God laid them before the angels and said, see? But they did not see, not soon enough. Castiel wonders if Lucifer saw it, if Lucifer understood: the only one among them, or only the first. And if that was what drove him mad, gave him the very human gift of hatred: if he first saw the helpless nakedness of humanity and knew in that instant that for all his glory he was nothing, the same thing that angels become when they die.
Castiel wants to die as a man. It is a impossible for an angel to want a soul but he wants one, he wants it more than anything, in the small spaces where he allows himself to want things. Souls are power, but a kind of power that humans cannot wield: they can only carry them around, like a handful of apples. The universe tucked inside a human chest while the human chest rises and falls. People buy toilet paper and kiss their lovers and argue with other people on the bus about nothing at all, and all the time they have starlight lodged in themselves. It would be tragically ironic, terrifying, if it were not so wonderful: humanity is the hiding place of God's might, fragile eggs whose contents are the only things that will endure with Him into the end of the world. Castiel wants to be powerless and yet filled again, wants to lie on his back in dirt and let the sun burn his skin. He wants a human soul and the flesh that cradles it. He wants to make new songs. He wants to love as humans do: in rushing waves, all at once, clumsily, like spilled water.
When he was a man everything was an arrow to him, love and hurt alike. Dean had picked a thorn out of his bleeding palm and wrapped a paper towel around it and Castiel had known then, had been sure, even if knowing had put a cold spike of fear into his spine, for the sin of it. He did not love heaven more than this. He would never be able to go back, to be the same. He would not ever want to.
He does not know if he will ever have the things he longs for. He does not know if it is possible. They are wondering at him, he knows. Angels do not become men and become angels again, it is so strange that it cannot even be a blasphemy, it is a new thing in itself.
That gives him hope, a little.
"What will we do?" his new followers ask, and he hardly knows what to tell them. For the time being they must do what humans do. Break their old ways and find a new image, roll themselves in earth and try to understand: less pure, no longer held apart. Nothingness will give way to night and day, water and firmament, as it was meant to. They will make it up as they go.
