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It had been a long day. That was the only way to rationally explain what was going on right now. It was the trickster playing—tricks, or maybe a demon had slipped some sort of hallucinogenic sludge into his beer or maybe—
“I can show you the world,” sang Cas in a gruff baritone. His arms were outstretched dramatically and he refused to meet Dean’s dumbfounded stare.
“Shining, shimmering sple—“
“No.” Dean interrupted. “Please don’t.”
Cas met his eyes, brow creased in confusion. He looked like an angel in the headlights, like Dean had thrown him off of a long-practiced speech and he didn't know where to pick up again. After about three seconds of infinitely awkward silence, a determined look came into his eyes, and he raised his arms again, singing a little more loudly—
“I can show you the world, shining—”
“No, really,” interrupted Dean again. “What, what, what are you doing?”
Cas hung there, arms outstretched like some sort of drunken stork. His eyes darted around the room, seemingly looking at anything but Dean's face. Finally his arms slowly deflated, the tan trench coat rippling sadly in their wake.
“Clearly that option does not appeal to you,” he said carefully, as if searching for the appropriate words.
“Dude, I am either so drunk, or so confused.” Dean looked at the side-table in the hotel room. There were five or six empty beer bottles, but at least two of them had to have been Cas’. So more confused than drunk.
Cas was pulling something out of his pocket. A sheet of paper. He looked at it carefully, and then at Dean. “An alternative is to perhaps take a flight up above a city. You could stand on my feet. Our physical proximity would be very close.”
Dean stared.
“Or,” Cas said, glancing again at the paper, “we could get caught in unexpected inclement weather. I could carry you—”
“Why,” said Dean. Articulating his confused thoughts was more difficult than he expected. He looked down. A fifth of whisky sat comfortably on his stomach, half-empty. Cas would say it was half-full. Maybe those beers were not the full story. “Why am I the girl in all of these situ-narios?”
“That was not my intention,” Cas said quickly. He scanned the list again. Apparently it was quite long. “You could be severely wounded in the Second World War. I could nurse you back to health. I could be French.”
“You could be—what?”
“A nurse,” said a clearly insane Cas. “A French nurse. We could live in a villa.”
For the sake of his friend, who was clearly in a state of mental deterioration and would soon be nothing but a slobbering vegetable and needed his pity, Dean said, “What are my other options? I’d rather no-be severely wounded. Enough of that for a—” he gestured around the hotel room, “y’know, life.”
“Um,” said Castiel the Crazy. “I could be a mermaid. I have never seen humans before but I see you, and I risk everything to save your life and to be with you—”
Cas was cut off by Dean’s maniacal laughter. “Merman!” he muttered, giggling. “Merman!”
“Coworkers!” Cas exclaimed, “Who dislike each other until one day—”
“I’m sorry,” Dean interrupted, still giggling (but never giggling, he never giggled), “but how exact—exactly are you supposed to be a mermaid?” He stood up and (the room spun, but not too badly) scanned Cas for flippers, or any sea-creature paraphanalia. Negative. “Or a French nurse?” Dean tilted his head. No short white uniform clung to the angel’s increasingly sheepish frame.
“Gabriel was powerful enough to make his visions a temporary reality,” Cas said determinedly. “I was hoping you would acquiesce to the same.”
Cold fingers of sobriety tickled down Deans spine. “Wait,” he said, “what are—”
But it was too late.
He stoode on a heathered moor, his blacke riding cloak billowing broodingly in the westerly winde. A willowy maid with doey eyes and buxom bosom stoode but a foot from him, staring helplessly into his stormy face. “Oh, Mister Winchester,” she swooned, and he caught her in his steely grippe, her swanne-like neck laide bare for his ravishment. Overcome with lust, he bent towards her lips, stung red from the briske winde, and—
“No!” Dean exclaimed, forcing the reality of the seedy hotel room back into his mind. He found himself cradling a strangely quiescent Cas in his strong yet delicate graspe—
“No,” he told himself again, and set a bashful looking Cas firmly onto his feet. “Uncool, man, uncool. Very…weirdly uncool.” He was sobering up rather quickly. “What is this—why, exactly, do you have to change reality? Or,” he grimaced, “sing Disney songs?”
Cas stared over Dean’s left shoulder, carefully keeping a blank expression. This was actually the first time Dean could remember Cas ever avoiding his gaze. Usually his complete lack of social awareness put them into awkward staring contests which pitted Dean’s alpha-male ego against the angel’s incredible obliviousness. Cas usually won.
“This was,” Cas took a breath, obviously searching for words, “that is, I was—” he stopped. Dean wasn’t sure whether to be alarmed or proud that he had rendered an angel speechless. Cas started again. “You are, or, rather, you have…” he trailed off, finally looking at Dean. His face was characteristically blank, unreadable.
Perhaps in heaven, Dean had speculated, where angels had no set form, there was a sixth sense—an emotional sense that allowed the divine creatures to convey what humans did with facial expressions. But here on Earth, Cas’ emotions were a complete mystery. It was like he wasn’t sure what to do with a human face—how to contort it to convey the unspoken language that humans took for granted. How to inflect his voice to show anger, or concern, or intimacy. How to discern sarcasm from sincerity. In fact, as far as Dean could tell, the only vocal nuance Cas had figured out so far was volume.
But right now, at this very moment, he seemed almost—vulnerable. And since Cas, being the stupid, emotionally stunted angel that he was, was not remotely capable of deception in that vein, this meant he was feeling vulnerable. He was an angel, and he was vulnerable. It was extremely scary.
“You have,” he started for a third time, “made me aware that fighting for humanity while not understanding humanity is…inadequate. Humanity is defined by two things: your mortality and your ability to love. I am not able to understand mortality. However, I only know divine love. My intention was to learn to understand love in the way that humanity defines it.”
Dean stared.
“In the…um,” Cas gestured. Dean was pretty sure that Cas did not know how to gesture the thing he was hoping to gesture, and so his gesture was just one of general gesture-ness. His hands did not look like they were attached to his wrists, in this gesture. It was a hopeless gesture of the failed ability to communicate. The trench coat sighed.
“So,” Dean tried to clarify the angel’s failed gesture. “So you are…recreating bad romantic comedies? Why?”
“Is this not how you,” Castiel searched for the phrase, “‘fall in love and live happily ever after’?”
“Um,” sometimes Dean hated being Castiel’s ambassador to reality. On occasions like this, it really sucked. “No. Short answer, no. Stuff like that doesn’t really happen, Cas. It’s called fiction. Humans have another thing that you do not have, known as imagination.”
“I understand imagination.” Cas said.
“Right. So…yeah. Not real.”
Cas took a second to process this. Dean prayed.
“I do not understand,” he said finally. “Where then, does one find a model for love?”
“Cas,” Dean said slowly, “love is a feeling, okay? Not a circumstance.” He realized what he’d just said and gagged a little bit. “God, that sounds like a cheesy love song. And we’re not talking about this anymore, Casanova, because this is. Really. Awkward.”
An expression of processing flashed across the angel’s face before he blinked out of existence with the faintest flapping of wings.
Dean flung himself back down on the cheap motel bed as soon as he was sure the angel was gone. Drunk. He was so drunk.
Two minutes later he giggled. Or laughed in a manly, not drunk way. Cas. Casanova. Heh.
Three minutes later it crossed Dean’s mind in a white-hot flash that not only was Cas trying to understand human love, he was trying to understand it with Dean. He was totally hitting on Dean.
Angel count: 2.
At this rate he’d bang all of heaven before the apocalypse started.