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“Hello, Sun,” Castiel says. He sits back against a tree, a small apple tree on the Kansas property Sam bought just four miles from the bunker, and looks up at his old friend through the leaves.
The sun has, historically, been extraordinarily kind to Castiel. When this planet was new — before it had a moon, even — Castiel knew the sun. As gods, they spoke with each other. Castiel’s gravitational field had collided with the sun’s own denseness, radiation. As supernovas, they laughed with each other, and played with the generosity of matter, sparking new and nucleic beauty out of the gaseous void.
Unlike Castiel, the sun was in time. This was their greatest point of contention as friends. Castiel had been small, of course, much smaller than the sun — but the sun had been trapped in a strange and particular linearity that struck Castiel as absurd. Don’t you remember, Castiel had asked, in the booming voice of creation, the first one to look up at you? Isn’t it strange that they all knew, instinctively, that it was you who brought them forth? Wasn’t that wonderful, and didn’t you love them?
He’d asked these things because the beauty of these creatures was so clear to him. Humans and not; before they were called humans, and before they were what would be called humans. Looking back, of course he’d asked these things because he, Castiel, had fallen in love with them himself.
Sun hadn’t known them yet. Earth then was hot and molten. Great orbital rings were only just forming around the giants, the ones who would be named after other gods. Castiel and Sun had argued over the possibilities of time, had perhaps caused more destruction than its inverse — Castiel remembers blasting away the red planet’s atmosphere in one foul rage — while the other angels busied themselves with other galaxies. None of them were to know, of course, that this Earth was the one that would win. The ambiguity of it — like Schrödinger, Castiel realizes — led other angels to cast their nets wide. They knew what would happen or where, but not both, not at the same time. Or rather, not as the same angel, for they were and are and will be out of time, naturally. Castiel set his sights on the planet that would become Earth, while the other angels remembered the battle of the apocalypse, and coiled long tendrils of knowing across galaxies.
So Castiel and Sun began to know each other well. At the time, Castiel hid what was fast becoming friendship from his superiors, or reported it as a mere experiment in making. Now, he likes to think it was the precipitating turn of his long and stuttering fall.
He laughs, thinking about it. “We were both wrong,” he says goodnaturedly. “You, in thinking my carbon life would never come. And me, for thinking their beauty came from worship.”
Sun doesn’t respond, of course. Or perhaps Sun does respond, in ways too distant and loud for Castiel to comprehend now. He can imagine a great spitfire of hydrogen radiation, wonders if a sunspot observed tomorrow by NASA machinery will be a response to Castiel today.
It doesn’t matter. Castiel has rarely required reciprocation for his love. He says, “At times, I miss our discussions.”
A breeze blows past. He never imagined breezes as an angel. The dancing movement of air — what a frivolous, tenuous thing in an eternity of crashing meteors.
“You must think I was so naive,” Castiel says. “I admit, I feel naive too. Of course it wasn’t worship that made them beautiful.”
What Castiel had said to the sun in those days was untranslatable into English. He’d said, don’t you love these humans for the way they love you, but it also meant, don’t you want to create again the same turn of their gaze in your direction — and it also meant, isn’t your weight the same as theirs in the end, if you balance well? And he had said, they’ve named you, so won’t you name them too?
All of it had been wrong. Humans named themselves. They worshipped the sun because it gave them each other. They looked up at the sky and honored it, yes, but there was always — and it was this that Castiel loved so much — always one person who looked down, to the side, behind, instead of up and to the sun. Always someone looking up at the sky being looked at by someone else. Always someone admiring the turn of their lover’s nose, the curve of their chin, the line of their throat tilted back as they looked up at the sky. One person calling a sunset beautiful and the other saying, yes, you are.
Castiel has done this with Dean. Dean once took him to a dock out over Lake Erie, for example, and commented on the size of the trout in it and described the gravity of Niagara Falls and reminisced about the history of cross-border shipping and Gordon Lightfoot’s song about Detroit. And Castiel had just looked at him, his mouth moving across well-trodden topics like old friends, and loved him so.
“There’s a man,” Castiel tells Sun. “Maybe I knew it all along. Maybe that’s why I was so insistent you know them, the humans — because I wanted you to know one in particular. And, well — you do know him.” Castiel smiles, thinking of it, brushes his right thumb over the back of his left hand in sense memory. “He has freckles. From you, you know. His name is Dean.”
Sun says nothing, but the breeze curls softly in the trees and around Castiel’s shoulders. In two hours, Castiel will return to the bunker where Dean will have cooked dinner or found a case or turned on a record. And he’ll invite Castiel to join him to eat or hunt or listen, with the paranoia of desire behind his eyes, and Castiel will put a heavy palm on the shoulder that was once his and his alone, and thank him for the food.
Dean may kiss him, or he may not; he may invite Castiel to stay the night, or he may not. To a supernova-god put in time, desire itself shapes meaning so fully that reality matters little. He sees Dean and the fact of his body, the love that pours from him more wholly than light from the sun which was the first dawn over the great plains — all of this means more than whether they touch or not. To want him is enough.