Title: Evolution
By: Rina
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Okay, the angel has been babbling in my head and this is what I managed to get down.
Summary: Change comes to all of us, even angels.
Disclaimers: If I owned Supernatural, Castiel would be in every episode!

In the beginning there was the wondrous glory of the Heavens: boundless vistas of beauty and above all, the glory and magnificence of God. War came, those who followed Lucifer seeking to strike down those who were loyal to the Lord. Bloody battles were fought, and for the first time since Creation, angels died.

Lucifer was cast from Heaven, those loyal to him falling as well, the Heavenly Host mourning their loss along with that of their dead brethren.

Castiel remembered that moment well, recalling the sharp twist of grief that curled in his gut, cutting as sharply as any angelic blade, reminding him that even angels could be tempted, that only God was incorruptible.

A foot-soldier in the battles against evil, he did his duty without question, enforcing the Lord’s will against demons he knew by name and had once counted among his brothers. Millennia passed, and the human race multiplied as God had promised, their numbers ranging from the devout to the corrupt, the latter swelling the ranks of demon-kind as they died and descended to Hell. The angelic Host lost members as well, some of their number choosing to leave their kind and dwell with the humans as one of them.

That act had always confused Castiel. They were the army of the Lord; they had perfection; why would any of his brethren choose to abandon that to partake in the messy, confusing world of God’s children?

And then he was given his current assignment.

Retrieving Dean Winchester from Hell had been a simple enough task, as was healing the human’s body of its injuries and the decay that had set in over the months he had been in the grave. The task of loosening the ground around his grave and weakening the boards of the plain pine box his body was interred in was equally simple, though communicating with him had proven an impediment.

God had chosen Dean Winchester for a task, and Castiel was to share that with him, so he chose a human body, a devout man who wished to serve the Lord. Melding with a human vessel proved difficult; earthly sensations were sharper, and the vessel’s emotions threatened to overwhelm him, pummeling him with unexpected and unknown feelings.

His mission was to tell the man of his task but not to provide details; it was a matter of faith - in God, in himself, and in his brother - and finding out that Dean did not believe in God was a setback that had shocked and bewildered him.

The second time he had appeared to Dean proved as frustrating as the first; the man wanted answers as to why God did not directly intervene to keep good people safe. Human emotions crashed through him, and the angel did something he never could have contemplated before in his existence: he lied.

Leaving Dean to think about his threat to return him to the Pit, Castiel sought out battle, joining those of his brethren who now walked the Earth in their attempts to keep Lilith from breaking more of the seals, for if Lucifer walked free, the human race would burn.

It was Jehoel who noticed his anger, commenting on it as the remains of the hosts of the demons they had battled burned away to ash around them. The anger melted away to shame at his words, the new emotion foreign and ill-fitting, especially as he realized how easily the anger had wrapped around him, brought on first by the loss of six of their number and compounded by Dean’s accusations and continual disbelief.

He knew Dean dreamed of Perdition, that he kept himself from remembering those dreams in order to retain his sanity, and so appeared to him next after one of those dreams at a time when his charge was gone, consorting with the demon in human form who claimed to be aiding him.

The outcome of the visions of the past Dean was granted was given, but Castiel found himself wishing the man could have changed his future even if it meant sending Creation into flux. The pain he bore, the strength with which he bore it, and his expression when he saw that his brother was not there in the room with him when he awoke...

Castiel saw all those things, and for the first time, he understood why his brothers had made the choice to fall, to live as humans. He understood why the human race performed so many acts of dazzling beauty and squalid depravity all in the name of one emotion.

He understood love. Not the pure form he felt for his brethren, but the raw, magnificent form that humans were graced with. Love for this traumatized, scarred man on whom, in part, the fate of the world rested.

With love, came fear: fear for the fate of the world, fear for the man in his care, and, most of all, fear that he could never go back to what he was before now that he had lived in the morass of these emotions. Fear that they had branded his essence and that the choice had been made the moment he closed his hand on a bleeding and tortured man’s soul, raising him from the blackness and despair of Hell and back into the light of existence.

Fear that, as he told Dean, there was no changing destiny, and that he had just learned his. He would do his duty, do it in the manner God had ordered, but at the end, if they all survived, the Earth would be his home. He would chose humanity and live his life alone, for the one he chose that life for would hate him for what was to come and what had already transpired.

END

Next story in series - A Devout Man.