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Living?
What was living?
Was it freedom?
Castiel had taken his freedom, this long length of rope, had twisted it into something no one else had dared to, and yet…
He should have had it all. Shouldn’t he? Didn’t he want to take the other ropes from all the other people and keep them from setting the noose around their throats? Why did they just feel like puppets now? Why was the rope cutting into him?
If freedom wasn’t life, he didn’t have it. He didn’t have anything.
Maybe he was simply nothing at all.
But no, he was definitely something, definitely a piece here and a piece there, bound in rope and tied to the cross, each mistake another nail in the coffin.
Life must be about freedom, Dean had said so—Though Dean had also betrayed him, so his word should be void. Yet, if Dean’s word was void, what was anything else? Was that all void too? Was he made of something empty and unfillable?
“Is the glass half empty or glass half full?” he remembers Bobby had asked him once. Castiel isn’t sure of the context, but he remembers that it had struck him as a rather futile question. The glass was both empty and full, there was no further need to define it, no need to bring it up really.
It reminds him of when Sam had posed the question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” He hadn’t said it as if it were a rather intelligent question—And it wasn’t—Which was unusual for Sam now, but it was the early days before the betrayal, before Lucifer was freed, before he rebelled, and Castiel had looked at the boy with demon blood in his veins and gave him the simple answer. It was the egg. Not necessarily a chicken, but what would become a chicken, and the first one was barely even recognizable as a chicken at all. So what really was a chicken back then anyway?
Sam had pretended to understand in the simple way that humans could.
But the chickens bring his mind back to the Ship of Theseus; How much can you change something before it is not itself anymore? How can you define something and both account and not account for change? Nothing lasts forever.
Castiel wonders if Dean sees him as the Ship, if he believes Castiel has replaced every part of himself, taken on too many souls for his grace, the material of his foundation, to be the same thing anymore and instead just a brighter, newer replica.
But maybe Dean can’t understand change. Castiel does not doubt that he is still himself, but he wouldn’t say he’s the same Castiel as before either.
He is many things now.
The universe, he decides, is nonsense. Life isn’t freedom, Dean must have been wrong and that means that the whole universe is just a void. How could he unbind himself from the universe?
“We can help you,” a voice—no, many voices whisper from within him. He feels as they stretch and writhe, pushing against his ribs like the bars of a cage, over his stomach like butterflies caught in a net. He doesn’t understand why they want to leave.
“We can show you how to be free.” They want freedom. He can feel it in every push and shove as they try to barrel out of him, his bones breaking, his body changing, his grace moving to heal before anything can get loose.
“Let us help you.” They shout from his mind, pushing back against his grace a thousandfold, needles prickling under his skin creating sound through it with force. He feels the heart of his vessel accelerate and looks down to find that his veins have been flooded with ichor and he knows he is God. He is God. He is God.
“You are God,” the voices praise, chanting with his thoughts as his body moves without his cognition, laughter coming through pulled back lips as the ropes bind tighter over his limbs—from within his limbs and he knows that this must be the way to true freedom, to the noose of life.
“We will be free together.” His grace, the original idea scared of dying, resists them even as the pores of his body shift and open and the ichor exits, but does not leave him, maintaining his status as God. It crawls across his body, pulling this way and that, moving him in the facsimile of a dance.
He hears the music of the Gods. Screams from the thousands below, from the dirt, and from the glories up above. Screaming that melds together like a song and he sings along.