A/N: Idk if I'm happy with how this turned out but here you can read it anyways.. I might rewrite it or something so reviews are very welcome

(Psst: if you read it while listening to All I Want by Kodaline it'll set the mood :3)

A Pretense

Smoke burned his insides like it burned dry grass. Cas held the cigarette between his lips, heartbeat erratic, mind empty and dull. He wasn't Castiel anymore, he didn't deserve that name, and he wasn't called by that name for almost five years. He was Cas, the Fallen angel that Fell from the Heavens then tripped over his own two feet on Earth. He was the man more broken than one with broken bones; he was the man that made his life by losing it.

He shared a cabin with two other women who might have been sweet at one point in their life, but the apocalypse has a way of yanking you by your chains and choking you, throw you from one side to the other because happiness? It just doesn't exist anymore. Happiness was a pretense that you got from drugs or sex, not this soft light that used to glow in your chest.

He filled his own mind with thoughts of Dean; it was the only thing that really kept him from sinking through the soil under his feet. The Dean he met, the Dean he fell in love with, and the Dean that became the Dean that was seven cabins away planning an attack on Lucifer. All the beauty that grew like roses from his eyes and shone like the sun from his soul that Cas could just barely see these days—it was all he looked for.

Cas dropped the cigarette on the cabin floor, not paying attention to where it landed. He felt wrung out and spent, seeing eyes looking past everything that was fabricated, everything that people used to say mattered. He found himself wondering why all the beauty in the world was eventually tarnished, and why with his powers in the past, by he didn't just freeze time to stay in one moment with Dean, moments he only experienced in dreams these days.

What he hated about humanity was it hurt. His heart felt like it was being torn apart when he saw Dean, it thrummed and beat like it was going to drop and some days it did. This tearing feeling that make his eyes burn and drown. And then Dean smiled, and suddenly Cas was back home, in Heaven, under a roof he thought he'd lost forever. And in this twisted, perverted world, Cas realized he found love.

From that day on Cas was swept away like crumbs under a table and killed softly by a blunt knife. He bled for every day he felt his heart skip and he drowned for every night he stay awake to think of the stars, or what many people called Dean's eyes. He played in symphonies, and in each crescendo and diminuendo he skinned his knees on nothing at all and remembered this infatuated was unrequited, that it was in his head.

Maybe he was okay with that.

And suddenly he feels cold, something freezing up his sides and locking his soul away where no one can hide. In the middle of the blazing sun, he feels like he should loathe himself for loving someone who was so impossible—because happiness, I've told you before, it doesn't exist, and in turn, neither does love.

Cas was an empty vessel, Grace gone, he was empty, waiting to be filled by something, and that something was easily found in pills. They became something he needed to live, but at the same time, needed to die. Cas didn't realize, didn't think about what he was doing to be suicidal when he took more sleeping pills than he needed. All he could think was that he wanted to sleep longer, maybe never wake up.

Cas didn't notice the cabin door opening right before he unscrewed the bottle an poured all of the pills into his mouth. The woman screamed first, probably of shock, and then yelled for help. A crowd started to collect at the door and Cas didn't understand why.

"Get out!" he heard a voice shout. The voice.

People were pushed, shoved, and thrown from his path as he stumbled into the cabin. Everything was feeling slower, and Cas smiled. The figure of the voice ran over to him; Cas felt the bed shake with his steps. He knew the figure not by his face, he couldn't see that, but by his voice and his stance and his gait.

His body was shaking, Dean was shaking it. "Spit them out," he shouted at him, "Spit them out now!"

Castiel couldn't find the strength to respond. He felt so tired. A small spark started to glow in his chest, and it took him a while to realize it was happiness. True and pure happiness, because Dean was there, holding him, no matter the context. His lips tugged into a tiny smile, lips moving, trying to tell Dean he was happy, but he couldn't speak. Why was breathing so hard?

"Don't you fucking smile at me! You can't do this!" Dean got angrier. Castiel got more tired, and eventually he dropped the empty container of sleeping pills.

Castiel's face stung as Dean hit him. His consciousness prickled quickly and dwindled faster. His eyelids drooped, his body felt heavy. His bed had never felt more comfortable.

"Stop it! Stop this!" Dean shouted louder and pounded his fists on Cas' chest.

"Dean," Castiel found his voice weak.

Dean's heart stopped. For just a moment, he believed he would never hear Cas' voice again.

"I…" talking was so difficult. Castiel vaguely wondered why people spoke if it was too hard. Still, he tried to tell Dean, for it was only fair. "Love… You."

Castiel's cheeks felt wet, but they weren't his own tears. Dean shook him harder from above him, voice choked and breathing jagged.

"This isn't some fucking television show! You don't—Don't say things like that—then do things like this—"

Dean stopped talking as Castiel's bright blue eyes lost their light, and suddenly the world shattered around him. He shouted in pain as a scorching fire burnt across his palm and forearm from where he was trying to hold Castiel, and he looked behind him—

Angel wings were burned into the cabin and the bed under Castiel's lifeless body.

It was the last straw for Dean, he collapsed on Castiel's corpse and allowed himself to cry for the years he never did. How was he supposed to carry on without Sammy or Cas? Dean's body shuddered with each sob he screamed out, the loss of what he never thought he would lose breaking down on him like dropping a glass. His hand and arm blistered with untreated burns, and he fisted his hands in Castiel's shirt. Castiel, albeit without powers, was an angel all that time. He was always an angel, the smallest spark of Grace ablaze inside him to keep him alive, but not enough to perform miracles. And that smallest spark of Grace…

Something like this, there really is no conclusion.

It wasn't suicide, it was an accidental drug overdose, Dean rattled out for the forty-third time. The more times he said that, the less he believed it. The cabin was closed and Castiel's two roommates were separated and sent to different cabins, and still, after four months, it felt like a dream. Everything that Castiel had done to him, for him, it all amounted to nothing.

Dean raked a hand through his hair. He needed to stop thinking about that day, or days before that. Dean opened a new bottle of whiskey and took a swig, setting it down forcefully on the table again. He stood on his unreliable legs and leaned against the window—

Was that..? Is that me?

Copycat, Dean called him, awoke handcuffed. Dean didn't trust him. Somehow, he wasn't any kind of monster they'd encountered so far, and now he was claiming to be him from the past? It was all absurd. And still he felt something unwelcome clawing at his chest, ask him, ask him, one question bubble up from within without permission.

"How's Cas?" the nonchalant question felt heavy on his lips.

Copycat made a face. "Cas? What the hell? I just spill out this whole thing about being from the past and how it's supposed to teach me some lesson and you ask about Cas?"

It infuriated Dean, how Copycat spoke like he wasn't important. Had Cas really meant that little to him back then? Had I ever actually appreciated him until

Nonetheless, Dean pulled a gun from the drawer and slammed the door as he left. At least with the reaction Copycat gave, Castiel was still well back then, on a different timeline. He wanted to dig up this route, this future and throw it somewhere else if only it meant every other Cas in every other timeline would be happier than the one in his, the one he couldn't save.

He wished to go deaf from the gunshots if only it meant Cas' last words would stop echoing through his skull. I love you.

(You couldn't have said that sooner?)

"Dean, we're running out of perishables," Chuck had told Copycat-Dean, or as he called himself, me-me-not-future-me, but it's easier to go with Copycat-Dean.

Some babble of something Dean didn't quite catch, and still he threw out some words in reply that somehow satisfied Chuck, and after that a girl came to slap him for a reason he could probably put together. He raised a hand to his cheek because damn that girl had an arm on her. The air around him felt thick with sorrow, loss, and smoke. This was what the future held for him?

"Your hand healed?" Chuck sounded surprised, his eyes crawling over the hand that Dean just raised to his cheek.

"My hand?" Dean looked at his hands as if he hadn't seen them before. It was some mind trick that people did when asked a question like that.

"It isn't burned. At all."

Dean answered with a shrug that didn't satisfy Chuck, but at least he pretended it did. Dean's eyes searched for something to change the topic and his eyes fell on a cabin with flowers by the door. He saw people walking by it, never glancing twice as if it didn't exist at all.

"Someone got a secret admirer?" he joked.

Chuck looked at him like he'd just shot him. "What?"

"Who lives there?"

"You don't… You don't know?"

Chuck found an excuse to leave.

Curiosity dug through Dean's chest with sharp nails.

The leaves under his feet crunched as he walked over, peeking through the window. The lights were off. He knocked on the door, and it resounded hollow. He pushed the door open slowly, stepping over the flowers that he could see were daisies now that he were up closer. His mouth went dry as he entered.

It was…

It was a burial.

The beds were removed, all except for one that there was a casket on, herbs and spices adorned the sides and a blanket lay overtop—It was beautiful, for lack of a better word. Was there a better word?

Dean wondered why there was a burial in a cabin, and if there was, why only one tomb? Why not bury the body under the ground or burn it? It made very little sense in Dean's mind, especially in circumstances like this where there was small living options.

He walked closer and his heart stopped in his chest.

He saw the wings.

We will always end up…

Here.

"Do you understand now?"

The lesson.

"Not the one you were trying to teach."

Castiel.

Don't ever change.

(Don't ever leave.)