Freedom of Fate ~ Castielxreader

14 - Everything Silver Will Dull

Castiel's angelic duties eventually caught up with him and his attendance in the bunker dwindled away as he resumed his search for Metatron. You begged to go with him every time he left, but he refused. He was convinced he had to do this alone, his desire for redemption driving him. He also said he was worried about the other angels hunting the scribe, and if you were to run into them he speculated they would not react kindly to the angel who's grace made them fall from Heaven, nor the human accompanying him who he had an illicit relationship with. This hardly consoled you. Two months passed this way, he'd text or call almost every night, but the poisonous dreams continued to intrude on your consciousness almost every night regardless, if you could bring yourself to sleep at all. The angel would visit you whenever he could, and it was then that you could catch up on sleep lost during the week, both because feeling his presence by your side was a solace and because he'd use his grace to console any nightmarish thoughts. The best rest you'd get though was when the four of you would be going on a supply run or out to eat or heading back from a bar when you could just curl up with Castiel in the backseat of the Impala, the men's voices flowing into a soporific lullaby that soothed you to sleep. In those moments you knew where your boys were, and that they were safe, so you could finally let your guard down.

Constantly concerned about Castiel's well-being was another weight on your mind, a weight that became unbearable when you hunted with the brothers. You'd accumulate new gashes and bruises faster, having picked up the self-destructive habit of using yourself as a human shield against any threat to your boys, which they reprimanded you for persistently. Cas, who at first had faith you would get better when he discovered something was wrong all those months ago, began faltering in optimism having to be the one to heal all your gruesome wounds as soon as he returned. Hunting was all you ever knew, it wasn't something you could ever abandon, as much as they tried to persuade you to. You were torn between your family and your purpose. During this time you became addicted to hunting alone, sneaking off while the brothers slept, under the guise of meeting up with Cas, or even pretending to take a mini-vacation like they asked you to. Those few times you could indulge yourself in killing monsters in solitary, watching no-one's back but your own, hunting like an apex predator and walking away relatively unscathed, you could even sleep nightmare-free. Your gravest concern was losing time, usually the journey to and from a job was quickly erased from your short-term memory, never the thrill of the monster execution itself. One time you'd woken up in a motel shower, blood stained water trickling down your body and across the tiled floor. Another time you'd woken up while driving, jolted awake by another car's headlights, almost swerving into oncoming traffic. Castiel knew this and tried his best to heal the problem in your mind, though there was no way to tell if it had worked until the next time you blacked out and found yourself 20 hours from where you last recalled. The brothers, through your efforts and Castiel's subservience, remained oblivious. 

These are the thoughts you wrote in your journal: your perception of your dwindling grasp on reality and the mental anguish. The plan originally was to record events impartially, as an observer, in case you lost time you had a foundation on which to rebuild memories. It soon evolved into a biased first-person account of your thoughts and actions, technically what a diary is meant to be. You wrote this way in fear that eventually you wouldn't just black out for a few hours, but begin losing yourself as well. 

You lay the ball point pen down on your desk and looked at your hands. They were stained black from the ink, as expected from cheap stationary you stole off a motel reception counter. You shut your journal; it was almost full now that you record every omissible detail of your day so as to not be caught in a lie like before. You checked your phone: a text from Dean asking what you felt like having for dinner. The last week had been quiet for the boys; no hunts for them, not to your surprise of course because you snuffed out any monsters as soon as they came across your radar. They were getting restless though, Sam dragged you on runs in the morning and Dean grabbed you for a drive as soon as you got back. You made your way to the library, feeling stupid to text Dean back if he was just a few corridors down. They spent too much time in there, always shifting through the archives, reading the lore or hypnotised by their screens until they found a job. It wasn't a surprise when you walked in and saw the brothers muttering between themselves, their faces illuminated by their laptops.