Chapter Text
This is a memory from the past.
---
There is smoke and Castiel thinks he’s dreaming. There’s heat and screaming, and the telltale sounds of fire, but the feeling of Hell isn’t quite there. He thinks of Dean—The Righteous Man; he would be here somewhere, if this were Hell. Castiel must be here for him, again.
He shivers and the tremors running through his spine make him open his eyes.
Smoke greets him, the thick of it quickly blurring the peeled paint on the ceiling of the small, windowless room he’s in. There are sounds in the distance: crying and shouting and a cackling that sounds all too familiar, but he can’t place it. He breathes, face drenched in sweat. He was sick, he recalls. A fever, someone had said. He stays still, cold, burning, delirious. He watches the paint peel until someone breaks through the door in his little room.
---
The next time he comes to, he’s sitting on the back of an ambulance; a tall, pale woman by his side. There is a blanket over him and not three hundred feet in front of them a building burns to the ground. The flames are vicious, devouring all in their wake, making the firemen work relentlessly, but in vain. The building will collapse, taking a dozen lives with it.
Castiel watches it all from under a blanket. The woman tends to him; tells him how lucky he was to get out and alive, but all he can see is a place he had gotten to call home turning to ashes. It’s cold and quiet outside, except for the deafening sounds of the flames and the anxious voices of the firemen. He sits, barefoot. He hadn’t managed to take anything out of his room when the rescue team came for him. He thinks about all of the little things he had been collecting these past months, about what little money he had, and his leather bag—the one Dean had given him—full of sentimental memorabilia: All gone. His shoes, the blue worn sweater he favoured. What remained of his trench coat. He wonders idly if this is how Dean felt when he was a kid and watched his house burn, but he pushes the thought away. He doesn’t want to think about Dean right now; not when he can feel the claws of despair tearing at his throat.
The shelter is gone, the little life he was building is gone, and once again, Castiel has nowhere to go.
--
Amidst the chaos of dawn, when the fire has abated and the people who have survived mourn their losses, his boss finds him. She is a tall, tanned woman of forty-something who manages—managed—the shelter the same way a mother would manage a tight family of a hundred members.
“Castiel,” she says, her voice tired, cheeks framed by ash and dirt, “you’re alive.” There is a lot to be said about this woman. She was the first person to offer Castiel kindness without expecting anything in return, and the first to give him a warm meal, a place to sleep, and a makeshift home ever since he had parted from the little broken family he used to call his own.
Castiel wishes he could offer a word of comfort in return. He thinks, shocked as he is, about telling her they will be alright; thinks of lying about the gravity of the situation and pretending like there is a silver lining to this tragedy. He is, after all, human; he has learned the truth is not always the right thing to say. But being human has also taught him the real measure of human loss, and before he can spew words that have no real meaning behind him, he can feel his throat close up and a dark, deep thing settle in his gut. He makes an involuntary noise; an ugly, desperate noise. The woman—Ms. Penny— comes forth and embraces him, and it takes him a few choked sobs to realise he’s crying.
For the first time in his mortal life, he’s weeping, barefoot and cold, in the arms of a woman he had known for barely a year.
--
After the shock washes away and the fire squad and medical staff refuse his offer to help out yet again, Castiel is picked up by Ms. Penny’s partner and taken to their personal home, where he crashes heavily on the living room couch and sleeps the rest of his cold away. He’s grateful for Penny and Linda’s kindness, but he’s worn out and weak and can barely stand talking to anybody without spacing out, so they leave him alone for the most part of two days until he recovers, and when it’s clear that he’s overstayed his welcome, he gets ready to pick himself up and be on the move again.
Ms. Penny sits him down in the kitchen before he leaves. Her eyes are red rimmed; she had let Castiel know how many young lives were lost in the fire, and Castiel can’t help but think that a little bit of herself had gone with them as well.
“You should go back to your family, if you can,” she says quietly. “Linda says you kept calling for someone in your sleep. You’re always telling stories about those boys you used to live with.”
All of Castiel’s muscles clench, and he straightens up. He doesn’t think he can go back. He doesn’t know if he will be welcomed.
“Cas,” Penny says, gently touching a hand to Castiel’s jaw, “You could have died in that fire, and they would have never known.”
She gives him a new pair of shoes and a hundred bucks.
He buys a bus ticket to New York and waits and waits and waits for his bus to take off. Later, as the road goes by and Detroit gets left behind, he prays to nobody for the lives of the kids they were supposed to protect.
He makes it all the way to New York, somehow, into the heart of the Bronx. Some invisible force pushes him forward despite all his instincts telling him to go back. Except he has nowhere to go, and what little money he had left he’d spent on a metro card and a couple of sandwiches for the homeless woman living outside the bus station.
He has Dean’s last known address memorized, has fantasized one too many times about making the long trip from Detroit, and even though the little shabby building that greets him is nothing like what he expected, the knowledge that it’s Dean’s home makes it feel like the most cherished place in the world.
It’s close to midnight, and nobody answers the buzzer. He thinks about leaving, but the memory of the fire and Penny’s words root his feet to the ground.
I could have died without seeing him or Sam again.
He stays.
He doesn’t know that he will end up staying for longer than he could have dreamt.
---
---
Fast forward a few years into the future.
It’s a Thursday afternoon not unlike every other Thursday afternoon, and Castiel sighs, standing on the top of an unsupervised ledge, somewhere in upper Manhattan. He rarely ever ventures this far into the city, but his usual haunts are now well aware of his… tendencies, or so they say. Castiel has tried to explain to them, countless times, that his goal is not to injure himself, but to take his feet as far from the earth as he can; to un-ground himself. There’s a difference. God is in the details, they say, but these days neither seem to be very important.
Inhale, exhale.
He looks at the traffic below him, squinting his tired human eyes so he can get a better look at the hundreds of little people going about with their lives, unaware that a former angel stands above their heads. Not that it makes a difference to them; but the thought used to fascinate him. Now it just makes him nauseous.
Inhale.
Being human is terribly complicated. Too many social conventions, too many rules that make no sense. He feels out of sorts, most of the time; inadequate. Incapable.
Exhale.
Same old story, but he tries. For his own sake. For Dean, even for Sam. For the kids who lost their lives in the fire, and for the ones who wish they had.
Inhale.
He’s building something here, slowly, finally, with his own hands.
With his own human hands. A house with stained ceilings and paper windows.
His house.
Their house.
--
Exhale.
--
His heart falters and he feels light. A rush of heat courses through his spine, and he’s suddenly very dizzy, on this ledge, twenty stories above the ground.
He wonders, vaguely, as his mind clouds, If I fall, will I be able to fly?
The answer is immediate: No. The next thought tells him his feet are no longer holding him, and he’s suspended on air, as he falls, quite literally, off the ledge. Someone yells something, whether at him or in his direction, but his mind spins and things make little sense.
There is the one thought: Dean is going to be so mad.
For a split second, he thinks he can fly.
--
He falls back, into the building.
A security guard catches him before his head crashes against the hard concrete, and a woman from the cleaning department helps him bring Castiel inside. They take him to the building’s resident doctor.
“I may be wrong,” she says, later, her words cutting sharply through the fog in Castiel’s head as she checks his vital signs and makes sure he doesn’t have a concussion, “but you may have suffered an arrhythmia. You will have to go to the hospital to get more tests.”
Castiel nods his head, unable to stop his hands from shaking. He’s not yet entirely sure what just happened, other than him thinking he was facing certain death and waking up a few minutes later on a table made of formica and a doctor looking sternly into his eyes. Certain death isn’t something he hasn’t dealt with before, but the aftermath has never felt like this. Like something in his chest is both compressing his lungs and trying to rip it’s way out at the same time.
“I would also recommend seeking professional help,” the doctor continues, carefully, softly, pushing some papers into his trembling hands. Her dark eyes gleam with a worry that is uncalled for; and her empathy, their empathy, the human capacity to care even in the hardest of times makes him flinch, makes him gasp. “You don’t have to go through this alone.”
Castiel understands that this is a mercy for his sake; that she doesn’t say exactly what she means to say, and that it should infuriate him, but he nods vacantly, and he recognizes his current feeling for what it is: fear.
The doctor reminds him to go to the hospital, several times, as he pushes himself on unsteady feet and stumbles off the table, into the elevator and outside, where his bicycle is chained to a post on the street. He won’t be able to ride all the way to the Bronx, that much is clear.
--
The first tears come as soon as the lock on his bicycle clicks open.
It’s always a weird sensation, crying. Castiel is wildly unfamiliar with it, always thinking that his lungs are acting up before noticing that the pain in his chest is merely contained anguish. He isn’t very sure this time, having actually just fainted, but once the first sob wrecks through him, he feels the relief of knowing he isn’t going to fall again, and he allows himself this weakness.
He cries, hard enough for the people around him to stare, clutching his bike against him like a lifeline, until it becomes evident that he won’t stop any time soon. He wants to be home, in his bed, on his balcony, he wants to stare at the humidity stains on his wallpaper until he gets sick of it, and feel the warmth of his room and his mustard-coloured duvet, and frown at the hideous plastic container he keeps putting Dean’s flowers in. He wants to hear Dean complaining about the water pressure, about Cas forgetting the kettle on the stove for so long that the fire burned holes into its base.
--
He’s still crying when Dean picks him up about an hour later, having rushed out of his bus rounds as soon as he got Castiel’s phone call.
Castiel is pretty sure Dean looks as scared as Cas feels; he sounds alarmed and he approaches Castiel as he would a caged animal.
“Cas, what’s wrong?” he says, a look of despair on his face. Castiel has no words yet, but he shakes his head and asks to be taken home.
The drive back home feels stilted, silent, and more than a little tense, but Dean’s hand never once leaves Castiel’s, and for that and the lack of questions, Castiel feels profoundly blessed.
---
tbc...