AN: Season 4: End Scene of On The Head of a Pin. Castiel learns what it is to be human.

Learning Humanity

"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."
― Ralph Ellison

The sharp scents of disinfectant – ammonia, chlorine, the reeking attempt at a pine simulacrum – will always bring back memories of walking through the healing centres that humans call hospitals.

Dean lay on a bed in a private room. He was conscious at last. His face was misshapen, which Sam had told me was a result of being beaten. Apparently the flesh swells.

I didn't know how that felt. It seemed odd to me to have a vessel that was so susceptible to being broken, to becoming useless. I thought it was unlikely that most humans get beaten so regularly, however.

He rolled his eyes around to see me, and then looked away. I could see that he was feeling some sort of pain, revealed by the micro tightening of certain muscles in his face. It was difficult to discern if the pain was purely physical or held a component of mental or emotional pain, both of which seemed to be as caustic as that delivered by the body's nervous system.

He was an especially vulnerable human, in more ways than one, and although I had faith in my Father's plan for him, I wondered sometimes if he would be strong enough for the tasks he would have to face. Then again I remembered, strength is a very relative term.

There was a chair against the wall of the room. I pulled it toward the bed and sat down. It seemed an appropriate thing to do.

"Are you alright?" I enquired politely. Looking at him, I could see that he wasn't but all the humans that I've encountered seem to use the phrase as an opening gambit to further conversation. Dean had often mocked me for not understanding the social conventions of the humans I came into contact with. It was difficult. I had spent thousands of years watching my Father's favourite creations, but very little time in actual interaction. There seemed to be a lot of rules governing their lives.

"No thanks to you," he said sourly.

I am learning, slowly, that Dean attempts to hide his true state of mind with sarcasm or outright rudeness. I am not sure why, but so far it is a consistent trait. I could, I believed, therefore assume that he wasn't.

"You need to be more careful," I told him. Thinking of Uriel, and the little he'd told me of Raphael's plans, I couldn't think of a way to keep the Winchesters safe.

"You need to learn how to manage a damned devil's trap," he retorted, the words coming out a little mushily through the swelling of his facial muscles. He was hiding a memory, I thought. The leap in his pulse, visible against the side of his neck, gave that away to any entity with eyes, but it didn't seem to occur to him.

"That's not what I meant," I corrected him gently. It'd been my insistence that had put him into that room with the demon. I had had my misgivings but I had asked, demanded it of him anyway. His brother had been right. I had put Dean in danger, and I should have been able to repair the damage done but I couldn't. Shut off from Heaven, I couldn't reach for the power of the souls to miraculously heal – and even if I had been able to heal his injuries, I could not have healed his mind, or his heart. Alastair's revelation to him had gone so deeply, I didn't think anyone would be able to heal it.

In his face, I saw apprehension and a fleeting glimpse of outright fear. I didn't understand the way human memories have the ability to be relived in such detail in the human mind. Our memories are more like photographs in an album. Clear. Precise. Analytical. They come with no emotional overtones at all. I had seen the memories of the man lying on the bed beside me just once, in great clarity. His soul had been open to me as my Father's power had lifted us both from the accursed plane and the terrible memories had been as infected sores, covering him and eating from the outside to deep within. Returning him to his body had not done anything for the memories, or for the way he felt about them.

"Uriel is dead," I told him. Anna had said that the conspiracy in Heaven was endemic. A rot that spread through the upper hierarchies. My foundations, everything I'd believed once, all of my faith … it was gone.

"Was it demons?" Dean asked.

Clearly he wasn't understanding what I was saying, although to my knowledge I'd said it plainly enough. This is the difficulty with language. Had I been able to speak to him in my true voice without killing him, there would be no misunderstandings between us.

"It was disobedience." I looked at him carefully, wondering if that would penetrate. "He was working against us," I added, in case it hadn't.

He turned away, staring at the wall. I waited for him to say something. But when he spoke finally, it was not of the corruption and rebellion in Heaven.

"Is it true? Did I break the first seal? Did I start all this?" His voice was rough and lacking in the deep timbre in which he usually speaks. I wondered if his throat had been injured or if this was an effect of the seething emotions I could sense but not see, filling his mind, filling his soul.

I thought about how to answer him. It was true, of course. It was precisely why Sam had been targeted by Azazel. Dean was predictable when it came to his family. And his father had not broken.

"Yes," I admitted it reluctantly. "When we discovered Lilith's plan for you, we laid siege to Hell and we fought our way to get to you before you – "

"Jump started the Apocalypse," he cut me off, finishing the sentence with the strange jargon he preferred. Perhaps his phrasing was more … precise than my own would have been.

"And we were too late," I added redundantly. From the look on his face, the admission I'd made was the thing he'd most feared to hear.

"Why didn't you just leave me there?" He turned his head away, looking at the wall, and abruptly, belatedly, I realised that he was in despair. Humans are strange creatures. Even without faith, without my Father's love and strength to help them, there are some that have the ability to see evil and to take on the responsibility for it. Whereas my brothers … I still didn't know how to think of them, their deceit and their disobedience.

"It's not blame that falls on you, Dean," I told him, adding force to my voice to emphasise the point.

I wanted him to see the truth of this. It was vital that he understood it, in fact. Raphael's seraphim were whispering about the things that he had done in Hell. But they were uninformed. Dean had been chosen for this more than two millennia before. He'd had little choice in the way that it had all fallen. No demon would have given the game away. None would have told him that it wasn't just his soul at stake.

"It's Fate. The righteous man who begins it is the only one who can stop it."

I thought that knowing the full prophecy, knowing that it was Fate who had woven this thread for him, and that he was absolved of responsibility in the matter would leaven his despair, dissolve his guilt. I was wrong.

"Lucifer? The Apocalypse? What does that mean?"

His tone was strident, disbelieving, as if I'd just told him that it was up to him to lift the Sun. I could see that I'd misjudged the uplifting qualities of the prophecy. I didn't know what else I could say to him and I turned slightly in discomfort with my helplessness. I was an angel. There should have been something I could have done.

He looked at me sharply. "Hey! Don't you go disappearing on me, you sonofabitch!"

I blinked, caught in my intention before the intention had even been clear to me. It might have been a habit, I suppose. To remove myself before he could berate me too severely for my short-comings.

"What does that mean?" He stared at me, the one eye still functioning correctly a bright green.

The only answer I had was the least likely to satisfy him. "I don't know."

His face twisted up in the expected disbelief. "Bull."

"I don't." I shook my head helplessly. "Dean, they don't tell me much."

It was a difficult to admit, given the fact that I'd recently asked him to take up an act that had already warped his mind so much, on orders from the same people who wouldn't tell me why. But it was the truth. "I know our fate rests with you."

He looked at me for a long moment; his expression incredulous. "Well, then you guys are screwed."

I don't know what expression was on my face but he turned his head away from whatever it was he saw and his voice dropped in volume, in strength, "I can't do it, Cas. It's too big. Alastair was right. I'm not all here. I'm not strong enough."

His despair was rising and I didn't know what to do, or what to say to help him find strength and the courage to face down that despair and look for hope. My attempts thus far to show him that faith could help had failed, been met with either disbelief or more often, ridicule. I was more surprised at how important it felt to me to help him. As an angel, as a warrior, I was more often distant from humanity, charged with orders over events much larger than a single man. I didn't know if some kind of bond had been formed when I'd carried him from the pit, or if that bond had come later, watching his fear and determination to overcome it in the shadowed barn that had been covered with symbols. He was a conundrum to me.

"Well, I guess I'm not the man either of our dads wanted me to be. Find someone else. It's not me."

He laid back on the pillow, the tears rolling from his eyes down his cheeks. I sat there, unable to think of anything that would reassure him or even ease the burdens that had been placed upon him. A part of the problem was that I didn't really know what it felt like to be human. Anna had been right about that at least.

I couldn't feel it.

I reached out and touched his hand. He made no move to stop me. The human habit of physical contact with each other was not something I was comfortable with, but it would be the quickest way to understand, to bypass language and its potential for error, and see the source.

I took his hand in mine. That got his attention. He pulled back, looking at me with a rising confusion. Within the lattice of connection created through the touch, I caught odd glimpses of what he was thinking as he looked from our joined hands to my face. Belatedly I realised what he feared. I shook my head.

"No. Trust me."

For a moment, I thought he would argue, as he tugged to free his hand, still held securely by me. But apparently his emotions had overruled his mind and he gave up, turning his head away again, the little fight in him disappearing. He left his hand in mine and I closed my fingers around his tightly.

I closed my eyes and the physical sensation of touch vanished.

At first, it was like being in a dark room, an unknown room where any piece of furniture could trip you or block your route. But gradually I could feel … and incrementally, I began to understand.

Every memory that flashed past me was riddled with pain. And that pain – it was pain that was impossible to describe, without feeling it first. Pain that ate through him like acid. And through me as I remained there, feeling for the first time what it was like to be human, to be fallible. To make decisions that could change destiny. Or destroy those that one loved. The responsibility of it fell like a cliff-side upon my shoulders, bending me down, until I felt the futility and hopelessness of an ant trying to hold back the stars.

This is what humans endured every single moment of every single day of their lives? The strength, the endurance and fortitude required staggered me.

I couldn't take in the enormity of it. The human mind, dually powered by soul and imagination, was the most sophisticated of torture chambers, bleeding and rending the victims without killing them, taking confidence and hope and feeding back their mistakes in an endless litany of blame and guilt and shame. I struggled against the emotions that churned in the mind of the man, drowning in them as I tried to remember who I was – and why I was there.

I had asked him, once, if he felt that he hadn't deserved to be raised. He hadn't answered then, but the answer had been in his eyes, in the fear that lay like a shadow behind them. At the time, I was less able to see the human condition, to understand human emotions and human fears, and I had missed my opportunity to tell him that he'd been forgiven. That God had forgiven him his sins and had raised him, not because he was the man of the prophecy, but because my Father knew that he was the right man.

There was no peace in his mind, no quiet, quiescent corner where he could rest, where he could be himself and I couldn't help but wonder how long he could last in a place where everything he'd done, and felt and thought, were so against him.

Then, in the midst of that ocean of torment and anguish, I discovered another memory. This one was different to the others. It was lit like the heart of a star, glowing in the grey darkness. I recognised her, of course. But it was the emotion that surrounded the memory of the woman that caught at my breath and stopped my heart.

Love. Pure and unselfish. Perfect and unconditional and unyielding.

In that moment, I knew what my Father had given humanity, what made them so different from us and all of His other creations. A spark, a divine spark of His love, bound into every human soul, enabling them to feel Him through their own relationships with each other. Nourishing, life-giving, hope-filled. Their true armour against everything that might befall them and the most potent power in creation. That most didn't realise they had that power was something I would ponder many times in the years that followed.

The memory was edged with pain because Mary had died in terrible circumstances, her life cut short before he'd been ready to let her go. Still, it coruscated in his mind, a beacon of sanity in a sea of delirium.

There were other such beacons, not many but here and there, and perhaps they were enough to enable him to keep going despite the futility he felt, the corrosive loathing of the way he saw himself, the terrible pain that filled him. Through them I could feel – a little – of what it felt like to love another, to feel heart-rending sorrow, to feel the bubbles of elation, and laughter, the warm glow of a hand held tightly, the tender softness of a kiss, the iron strength of trust and love, bound and intertwined, for friends and family.

And among them, I was given a glimpse of why my Father had been so certain of this man's strength.

I released his hand slowly, watching it fall unchecked to the covers on the bed, knowing that nothing I could do or say could ease his pain or assuage his guilt. He would take no absolution, at least not from me, nor listen to my promises of redemption.

But he would fight on, no matter that he did not believe he had either the strength or the skills to do so. It was written on his soul, by no hand of Destiny or of Fate, but by himself, the result of the free will he'd been given, the choices he made, the responsibility he willingly shouldered. He believed in nothing but that if it took his last breath, his last drop of blood, he would do what he could.

I felt something roll down my face and lifted my hand wonderingly to my cheek. Angels do not cry. Our emotions are not as those of humans. We keep order in the spheres and we obey.

My fingertips came away wet.

END