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They fall all night. The first ones to fall weren’t even in the door when they were thrown out, barred from their home after a long day’s work. The rest fall in waves, slowed by the walls of heaven that they shatter against as they hit and bounce and break and heal again behind them. If they’d thought to avoid the walls, they could have. But the walls had never barred them before.
The fall is forever; the fall is instantaneous. They try to fight it, but it just makes it worse. They are angels, they are power, they are God’s Will; they do not give up, even to a foe they cannot beat. Their very self is their downfall, what makes them burn. They could have winged away from the fires and the pain if they tried. They didn’t.
Castiel watches everything from his perch on the hill. His fall was uneventful, and he is unhurt. In truth, it is probably because he was forewarned- by his enemy, yes, but still warned- but he can’t help but think it’s because he’s not angel enough. He watches his family fall and crash and his tears spill over.
“Humans are selfish,” he thinks. He should be crying for his brothers and sisters, but he isn’t. He’s crying for himself.
He wonders how many of his brothers fell to Earth only to meet the sea and the ice and the hungry maw of nature. How many of them, landing in wasteland, will starve and die in the coming day. He doesn’t know. It isn’t a strange thing for him to not know something, not after all these years, but he thinks it might be for his brothers.
He wonders how many were killed at the hands of the humans they were meant to protect, and he wonders how many deserved it.
The falling stars begin to slow near dawn. There should have been more- There would have been more, only a few years ago. His fault, he knows. It’s always his fault, nowadays. He wonders if it was ever not his fault, but he doubts it.
He recognizes the forest he stands in, now, as the now-blinding sun rises. The Winchesters are not 4 miles northwest, which he could almost thank Metatron for if there was any room for feeling in him other than sorrow.
The sun rises on a new world. Across the Earth, newly-human angels stagger upright in their alien bodies. Their spirits are broken, and they don’t know why. Humans ask them, over and over, but they don’t understand. It is not a new feeling for most of them. They have never been required to understand their superiors, after all. You don’t have to understand something to know it. Their superiors will be here soon, the angels assure their new brethren. They will explain what’s happening, surely. They know it.
They know nothing, but maybe if they pretend to, they’ll feel better. They need something to cling onto, in this old world made new. For some of them, the only thing they know to cling to is this: Castiel, and anger.
The world is going to heaven, and the only ones who know why are standing in a forest in the middle of nowhere, America.