It doesn’t register until after he hits solid ground, scrabbling to his knees and clutching a heaving chest as he cries out Sam’s name. And then Castiel remembers: a woman. Blood dripping from her fingers. An insidiously chirpy accent. A blinding burst of pure white.
A banishing sigil.
Slowly, he stands on his own two feet, pawing at the walls and squinting at the iridescent glare of lights along what appears to be an empty corridor, every bit as cold and sterile as the angels inhabiting this place.
He’s back in heaven.
Castiel isn’t certain how he ended up here—he expected the Mojave desert; the inside of Mount Kilimanjaro, perhaps—or more importantly, why. But that doesn’t stop him from immediately making his next move, a flurry of trench coat behind him as he calls up the intra-celestial transit for the residential district.
He visits the D sector.
There are other plaques with the name Dean Winchester, although none display the birthdate belonging to his Dean. For a brief moment, Castiel can feel his heart begin to sink into his stomach, but he squares his shoulders and steels himself. There could be other explanations: maybe Dean hasn’t made it through processing yet. Yes, that must be it. Amara had left a massacre in her wake; even with the few reapers that stuck around after Death’s passing, there could be an entire backlog of souls waiting to cross over. Dean could still be in limbo; Dean could be—
“Not on the list,” the head of Intake Operations says pointedly, barely glancing over her monitor to look Castiel in the eye.
Were he human and in need of a functioning cardiovascular system, his heart skips so many beats that he’d be pronounced clinically dead. “What do you mean?” His knuckles whiten, insides churning. “How is that possible?”
“I mean he’s not on the list,” she repeats, slower this time, as if Castiel’s brain were made of dried dung. “A man with his track record…surely you’ve considered there’s a reason for that.”
Darkness creeps up along the edge of his sight, his fists clenching and head spinning. No. No, that—she’s wrong. She has to be wrong. Because that means…
“Dean Winchester"—he’s shaking so hard, he’s nearly spewing at her through gritted teeth, tunnel vision turning from black to red—"is a better man than you. Better than…than all of you!” He gestures wildly to the rest of the room as everyone freezes, all eyes on him, and let them stare—let them. “You were all willing to just…give up, and he—”
His hands fall to his sides, the tears bitter on his lips. He couldn’t teach fish to read poetry.
What could fish possibly know about love?
Castiel exits—less than gracefully, he’ll admit—but he thinks that if he stays one moment longer, they’ll have to drag him away after testing his right swing on any angel within a ten-foot radius. Because now he gets it; he gets the anger and the fear and why Dean was always so quick to throw himself into the fray. He gets what it feels like to be used as a punching bag and what it feels like finally want to punch back. He gets why Dean always fought tooth and nail for everything he wanted and—
Oh, Dean.
But instead of that deep, unrequited ache, suddenly, a surge of warmth blooms in the hollow of his chest, a familiar longing calling out to him.
There’s someone you’re gonna wanna meet, Mom. He’s a little dorky, but I think you’ll like him. ‘Cause you were right all along.
An angel really has been watching over me.
