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Dean hadn’t asked why Cas wanted to get drunk. For one thing, he really had no business questioning anyone else’s drinking choices. Which, honestly, was probably why he was the one pouring shots right now. If Cas wanted to talk about his feelings, he could’ve gone to Sam. He wanted to drink, so here they were. Dean tried not to think about what that said.
“These are much more potent than I remember,” Cas said after the second shot. His face was already flushed, and he grimaced a little and looked away as Dean downed his own.
“Yeah, well, you were mojo’d up last time,” Dean said, and hesitated with the bottle half-tipped over Cas’s glass. “Might wanna slow down till you figure out your limit.”
Cas nodded vaguely. Then his gaze slid, a little woozily, back to Dean, hovered there for a moment, and he shoved the glass forward. Dean shrugged and filled it. Cas took a deep breath and knocked it back. It stayed down, despite the brief uncertain expression on Cas’s face; but Dean didn’t move to pour another, and Cas left the glass where it was. He was quiet then, hunched over his elbows on the table, eyes closed, and Dean half-wondered if he was going to zonk out and that’d be it. He thought about pouring another shot for himself, but decided to hold off. Even if he was barely even buzzed, it seemed like a good idea to stay operational in case Cas decided to keep his experiment going.
“You know… I used to be terrified of falling.”
Dean glanced up. Cas’s eyes were still closed, his head bowed. If he didn’t have an empty shot glass clutched in one hand, he’d almost look like he was praying.
“Not for the reason I should’ve been. I was afraid of the end… the implication of being stripped of everything I was. Of being cast out, rejected. But what I should’ve feared was the means.”
He opened his eyes right into Dean’s, and the alcohol that had apparently loosened his tongue hadn’t done anything to soften that stare. Dean didn’t look away. He never seemed to be able to, moments like this. “I’m not following,” he said.
“The means,” Castiel repeated. “The act of falling. No one ever really talks about that. There’s the cause—Lucifer refuses to love humans before God—and the effect—permanent and total separation from God’s presence. That’s what we’re supposed to focus on, that pain, the torment of punishment for the fallen.”
He took the bottle from Dean’s hand and poured his own shot, sloshing only a little over the sides, and downed it, eyes squeezed shut. The glass fell over when he sat it down, and he moved to right it, but stopped, drew his hand back.
“But no one talks about the torment of falling, itself. I guess because no one ever asks a fallen angel what it was like.”
He looked up into Dean’s eyes again, and before he could think to stop himself, Dean asked, “What was it like?”
“Agony.” Cas pushed the shot glass away, and it rolled in a little semicircle and clinked against the bottle. He sat back in his chair. “Angels are created to feel one thing. There’s no exact equivalent in human emotion. It’s this… all-consuming, inextinguishable passion and righteousness. The love of God, the wrath of God, united in a single burning state of existence. And all the emotions we appear to express are simply reactions manifested from that single, ubiquitous feeling. That’s what we’re meant to feel. That’s all we’re equipped to feel.”
Dean gripped his own glass, his jaw tense. He kind of wished that Cas had gotten a little more sloshed before he’d opened up. Who the hell said “ubiquitous” while drunk? And Cas hadn’t looked away from him in a good couple of minutes now, and there was this weirdly blissed-out smile crooking his lips that reminded Dean a little too much of his future hippie counterpart.
“I didn’t know, for the longest time,” Cas continued. “I only knew that I was changing. And we don’t change. That alone was terrifying beyond words. So, fear—that was the first human emotion I realized I was experiencing. And soon after that, doubt, which Anna had alerted me to. Jealousy. Guilt. Loneliness. Wrath, but not God’s; rage and vengeance that was mine alone, on behalf of myself, my brothers and sisters, my friends. Any one of these emotions could have, should have broken me, and they just kept piling on.
“But besides that. Beneath that. The reason I was afraid for myself, the reason I doubted what I was sent to do, and felt guilt for doing it. The reason I stayed here with you, and Sam, why I… kept coming back, why I preferred to be here rather than with my own kind. Why I needed to look after you, long after it stopped mattering that you were the Righteous Man. Why it meant so much to me to see you happy.”
“Cas—” Dean said, and was about to launch into an impromptu lecture on things we say when we’re drunk and how even though there’s kind of an unspoken agreement that we don’t talk about them in the morning, it’s a lot less uncomfortable for everyone if we don’t say them in the first place. But Cas fixed him with a glare that he hadn’t had turned on him since he threatened to fling him back into the pit, and leaned across the table, just a little unsteady.
“Dean,” he said. “What I’m saying is.” His eyes unfocused briefly. “What I’m saying. Is I l… I…”
And then he twisted away and clapped his hand to his mouth, and Dean snapped out of it just in time to stand up, knocking his chair over, grab Cas by the shoulders and hustle him toward the bathroom, where he proceeded to throw up mostly in the right place. While he clutched the sides of the toilet seat, still retching, Dean let out a tense breath that he may have been holding for the past five minutes or so and closed his eyes, insistently ignoring all the thoughts flinging themselves against the back of his mind.
A little while later, once Cas was passed out on Sam’s bed and the motel bathroom was as sanitary as it was ever going to be, he sat down on his own bed, and stared at the sleeping ex-angel, and let the thoughts come. He didn’t really confront them, just let them have their say, and when they were mostly quiet again, he got up and dumped the rest of the alcohol down the sink. He’d deal with the rest in the morning.