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Human souls are beautiful creatures. It’s almost a shame, Cas thinks, that they cannot truly see themselves for what they are, at least not until they die and their soul is all that remains, all there is left to be seen. If they were to perceive their own souls while still alive and in the flesh, he thinks they might only be able to see a glow, light and colour, energy. Some humans call these auras, or spirits. Weak shades of the truth.
Cas enjoys being able to see souls. The way they meld when humans hug, physical and celestial arms entwining, colours bleeding together like watercolour. The way their wings tuck neatly behind them when they’re in crowded rooms, and spread out, catching invisible breezes, when they’re in wide open spaces. Sometimes he finds himself staring, watching with rapt attention as fingers made of pure light and colour run along tabletops, rub behind dog ears, twirl their own hair. Every soul acts and reacts differently, each uniquely wonderful in its own way.
Dean’s soul has been his favourite since he first saw it.
It’s a lovely swirl of warm greens, the same colour as his eyes when they catch the light. It reminds Cas of a forest, all hanging branches and creeping moss and soft, dappled sunlight filtered through foliage.
There are three sets of arms, not including his physical limbs, and they never stop moving. At first Cas thought this was a common trait for human souls, but the more of human behaviour that he observed the more he came to realize that was very much not the case. Dean’s soul-hands interacted with the world around him constantly, touching surfaces as he passed them and resting on people’s shoulders and flapping when he got excited. As far as Cas could tell, humans are completely unaware of how their souls behave, their actions unconscious. It explained a lot, seeing Dean physically close himself off while glowing green fingers would still reach out, ruffling hair and tugging on clothes in a mothering sort of way.
His soul has wings, as they all do. Something about being built to fly back up to heaven after death, although Cas knows that’s not exactly how it works. Dean’s wings are most similar to those of a dragonfly, double his arm span in width, powerful and impossibly intricate. Cas could get lost tracing the millions of leaf-green veins of light. There has never been another set of wings that Cas has wanted to see in flight quite like Dean’s. Such a pity, a bitter irony, that every human carries around its own pair of perfect wings and yet, in life, none can know what it is to fly.
Cas had fallen in love with Dean the moment he gripped him in Hell, feeling those bloodied, forest-coloured palms against his true form the way no mortal’s soul had touched him before. Knitting together the tendrils of light that made up those beautiful wings had been the most intimate act the angel had ever done. When he’d seared that handprint into the human’s flesh, he’d done it to match the numerous handprints along his arms and rings, burned into him by Dean’s tormented soul as he’d raised him from perdition.
Cas had fallen in love with Dean the moment he gripped him in Hell, though it took him a long time to realize it. He never expected the human to love him back.
One night stands out to Cas, looking back. They were out on a job, doing 20 over the speed limit on an abandoned 1am interstate. Dean was driving, as he usually was, wings folded down against his back, partially phasing through the seat. Sam was asleep in the passenger seat, leaning against the window with his head cushioned on his scrunched up jacket. His wings, warm hazel-brown light stretched in the membranes of a fruit bat, were folded protectively around his physical body like a blanket. Earlier, when the younger Winchester was awake and the two brothers were talking, their souls had been interacting, a few hands absentmindedly playing Rock Paper Scissors, a game Cas has yet to fully understand the fun of. Now Sam’s soul was tucked in on itself as the man slept and Dean’s arms had all pulled back except for the one hand on his brother’s shoulder, as it often was when they were in close proximity. It was a protective gesture, Cas had come to understand.
The track playing switched over and the opening chords of an old rock ballad started playing. Cas didn’t know the name of the band or the song, but when the first verse started, he thought the vocalist sounded somewhat sad, like the woman he was singing about could never understand why he sang for her, could never reciprocate his love. Slowly, a moss-hued hand slid through the back of the bench seat and reached for Cas, sitting quietly by himself in the back. The angel didn’t move as Dean’s soul groped the air for him, settled on the angel’s right knee.
By the second verse of the song, Cas tentatively reached out a hand to meet Dean’s on his leg; not his vessel’s hand but one of his own, an appendage of sky blue light scaled down so that his palm was just a little bigger than Dean’s. He wasn’t sure what to expect, thinking maybe the soul would pull away, but it didn’t. Instead, the human slid their fingers together and held his hand. Behind the wheel, Dean shifted a little in his seat but showed no real indication that anything was different. When the song ended, the hand stayed, the blue and green light washing together. The human didn’t pull away until they’d stopped, an hour or so later, at a scummy roadside motel and Dean was getting out of the car.
Cas hauled their duffle bags out of the Impala while Dean bought their rooms on fraudulent credit cards. Sam woke up long enough to drag himself from the car to the creaky motel mattress closest to the door and promptly passed out again, soul wrapping back around himself as his breathing evened out. Dean was quick to follow his brother, stopping long enough to pull off his boots and climb beneath the covers, still in his clothes.
“I’ll watch over you,” Cas had said softly.
“Creep,” Dean had mumbled back, already half asleep. A few minutes passed before a hand, the same one that Cas had held in the car, reached across the bed, flopping open lazily as if waiting for something to be placed in its palm. After another minute the fingers wiggled, beckoning to the angel. Unable to resist, Cas went to sit on the edge of the bed, once again slotting their fingers together. Dean didn’t wake, just sighed quietly in his sleep and shuffled further under the grubby motel comforter.
Cas stayed by the human’s side all night, and the soul never let go. It wasn’t until the first watery grey tendrils of dawn slanted between the gap in the curtains that Cas realized things would not, could not, be the same after this. He fell in love just a little bit more in the combined light from their ocean-hued hands.
Since that day, they held hands when they could, on long drives and sitting across from each other in dingy diners and just standing next to each other. Cas always let the human reach out first, and he always did. In all that time, Cas never held hands with the human’s body, never felt his flesh and blood between his fingers, but the angel had something much more valuable. Much more precious. Much more beautiful. He had the soft light of a human soul.
His favourite human soul.
Unlike his physical body, Dean’s soul could always see Cas’s trueform, his soul eye turning to stare whenever the angel got close. In response Cas always made sure to greet Dean’s soul with as much affection as the human allowed, which became more over time. Cas lived for the moments when those prismatic limbs would reach for him, finders sliding softly between his. It took him a long time to see that for the first time in his eternal life, the angel was starting to feel happy.
Of course, everything has its price. Happiness, for Cas, had one of the steepest of prices. He paid it with his life.
In those final moments, the world shimmering with tears, when the angel finally said those three dangerous little words out loud, he didn’t expect the human to return them. He didn’t know what to expect besides the cold void swallowing him into itself one last time.
In those final moments, the human’s soul reached out with every single one of its hands, grabbing at his arms and rings, holding on like he could never let go. Like just by holding on, he could stave off the darkness and keep Cas there, tethered to the mortal world. Cas wished above all else that it would work, that the Empty would not be able to rip him out of the human’s grip.
His wish was not granted.
If Cas had been able to see the world he left behind, he would have seen the man he loved slumped in on himself on the floor, reduced to tears. He would have seen all six of Dean’s soul-hands splayed out around him, palms up on the concrete, all lying still for the first time in the human’s life. Waiting, limply, for the angel to take hold of one. As the time slipped past and the angel did not return, did not fill the gap between the waiting fingers, the colour slowly drained away, leaving the human in the dull light of a grey, half-dead soul.
Time passed strangely in the darkness, and when the angel was lifted back into Heaven time passed strangely there too. He was unsure of how long Dean has been living without him, it could have been weeks, it could have been years.
He felt when Dean died, felt in some way the bloodied chunk of rebar cut through him, punching the life out of him. The angel knew Dean was a better hunter than that, knew there was no reason for him to die, bloody and tired, on the floor of a barn. On a hunt.
Dying exactly the way he always claimed he would.
Cas pushed the implications away, unable to face the idea of the human taking his own life. Unwilling to think of what would push him to do it.
When Dean’s soul attained Heaven, the angel spent some time avoiding him, letting the human gain his bearings first. It took all his ethereal strength to not simply wing his way to the man’s side as soon as he could, knowing that Dean probably wasn’t ready to see him. Not after how they’d parted ways.
Cas doesn’t know how long he waited. Time is a fickle thing in Heaven, sluggish and eternal. The moment would present itself, he was sure. He had to have faith in the human.
As is so often the case, the moment presents itself quietly.
Dean, in a hallucination of his former body, driving a shade of his former car, stops by the idea of a roadside, where the gravel he perceives gives way to tall grass and wildflowers. The meadow stretched on forever, until it becomes light and colour and code and the idea of time itself. Dean starts walking, wandering, taking in the endlessness with apathy. Cas knows, decides in the chaotic millionth of a second, that this is his moment.
The angel unfurls himself hesitantly into Dean’s perception, slowly coalescing out of the sunshine like the being of light he is. Dean stops in his tracks, staring up into the space that’s quickly being taken up with rings and wings and a thousand ocean eyes. The idea of his jaw falls slack, his soul eye comically wide.
Cas feels a rush or something almost like adrenaline at being perceived by the human like this, as his true self. Would the man fear him, hate him, flee from him? Would he simply realize that after all these years the man he’d befriended was a creature so huge and eldrich and monstrous that he could not possibly call him a friend any longer?
Dean’s wings flutter. He fidgets, not the happy flap of hands or snap of fingers but the nervous twist of wrists that has always betrayed his anxiety to the angel. Then, slowly, ever so torturously slowly, the human reaches out a hand. Not one of the pale grey limbs of his soul but one of the hallucinations he sees as skin and bone. A hand of flesh extended to a creature of energy and stardust and divine intention. His dominant hand, the one he’s used all his life to pull triggers and caress the bodies of strangers and write messy little notes that no one will ever read.
It should mean nothing. That hand no longer exists, not in Heaven and not on Earth, nothing but charred remnants left to scatter in the wind. And yet…
The human has never held hands with the angel like this. Not consciously, not mindfully, not with intent.
Cas reaches out with a tendril of grace, forming it into the idea of flesh. A vessel’s hand, Jimmy’s hand, just the right size to slip his fingers between the human’s. For a second, the longest second in the universe, Dean doesn’t move. The angel waits for him to pull away, to leave in his fantasy of a car and drive until the end of time, forever grey.
But then Dean melts into the touch, literally, the idea of his skin and bone dissolving, a phantom in the daylight, leaving only his soul—his true form—behind. The colour slowly drains back down the length of his wings, forest green dripping down his many fingertips and swirling in the iris of his single remaining eye, the one that can see the unseeable.
Cas drifts downward, inward, folding in on himself until he’s only about three times Dean’s size. He waits, as he always has, for the human to make the first move, just as he did all those years ago, what feels like a lifetime and a hundred galaxies away. Dean just hovers there for a while, his eye raking over Cas hard enough that the angel feels like the gaze leaves scars.
Then, to the angel’s slight surprise, the human falls forward into a messy hug, reaching for Cas with all six hands at once.
Cas wraps the human in a gentle embrace, arms and wings wrapping around Dean’s form and holding on, scared to let go now that he’s finally, finally, allowed this. The soul shifts a little in Cas’ embrace, fingers shaking, and he realizes that Dean is crying. Tears made of starlight well up in his eye and spill over onto the angel’s feathers.
Cas just holds him tighter.
Then, much to the angel’s surprise and mild trepidation, Dean climbs inside him, using his many hands to position himself in the middle of the tangle of rings and tiny supernovas that is the centre of Cas, a concentrated galaxy of light and eternity. The soul is warm and weightless within him, and Cas tucks a few of his smaller wings inward, doing his best to cushion the soul curled where nothing besides light has ever been before. Dean snuggles down into the summer sky feathers, a few stray hands stroking through the angel’s plumage.
Shocked, Cas watches Dean’s eye slip shut, something he’s never seen the human relaxed enough to do. Even in sleep, the man’s soul-eye would never fully close, always open just a sliver to watch for danger. Now, cuddled deep inside Cas’ true form, his ever-present guard finally slips away.
Cas thinks he can see the colours of the meadow in Dean’s wings, streaks of gold and pink and pastel blue shifting among the green.
When the human speaks, it’s with a thousand voices, all the former iterations of his voice combined into one eternal drawl. It’s only five words, and maybe at this point they mean nothing. But maybe they mean everything.
“Cas…I love you, too.”
In the heat of their combined forms, Dean reaches out a hand and Cas slips their fingers together.
Together, for eternity.