Angels With Only One Wing -- Castiel Fanfic (Supernatural Fanfiction)

Chapter 9: The Silence Remains (Uncensored)

A/N: This chapter is uncensored. So you guys know the drill. You must be tall enough to ride this ride.

Chapter 9: The Silence Remains (Uncensored)

"I know it's stupid that I come back here in my dreams, but I can't help it. Sometimes I miss it here."

Tabitha turns to lean her back against the railing. She takes the opportunity to overlook the main bullpen that had been on the floor below her office in what seems like another life. And perhaps it was another life she thinks.

Castiel carefully eases forward, his steps almost hesitant until he's standing beside Tabitha, looking down on the bullpen of agents below.

Turning sideways, she eases her weight onto her elbow again as she ponders the angel observing the scene below.

"You miss him."

Tabitha follows Castiel's line of sight, finding his gaze targeted onto her former partner smiling and talking animatedly with a pretty woman. The man who had been a multitudes of formers to her. Friend. Colleague. Partner. Flirt… Lover.

A heavy sadness suddenly swells in her chest, washing over her until even her skin feels warm and taut, her heart painfully squeezed by that desolate feeling as even her breath becomes a shudder. The encompassing sorrow is so swift…so…unexpected…that it takes her a moment to process as she stares unspeaking at Castiel, struggling to regain her composure.

When he's met by silence, Castiel glances up from staring at Casey below, darting a curious look at the woman beside him. Those stormy eyes flit across her emotion-filled brown gaze before darting away, drifting downward again to settle sadly on the previous target of his gaze.

"You still love him," Castiel quietly surmises in a defeated voice.

"You're such an idiot for something so old," she chokes out, voice caught still in her tumultuous emotions but edged with laughter.

Shaking her head ruefully, she reminds him, "We've traveled this road before. Casey was a friend, but I never loved him. Not in the way you mean." To herself, she wonders how she can possibly explain looking at Casey and feeling such sorrow not for him…but the angel beside her.

Once more, she glances down at her former…partner, watching as he sits on the edge of an attractive female analyst's desk. A scene has played out many times in their…history. But she feels no more jealousy now for his blatant flirting than she did when they'd been sleeping together.

His flirting…and her ambivalence towards it had been the normal course of their…relationship. It was how their dalliance had been defined. And even what made it work.

Physically, they'd had a lot of sparks. And personally, they had an easy and unrestrained friendship. But even though they had a professional, personal, and a sexual relationship, the lines of the three never blurred. Didn't intersect. Never crossed.

And though she mourned his death, and regretted her indirect part in causing it, she didn't lament all the positions he'd once filled in her life being marked off as "former." It merely felt like a normal progression to fondly remember in her increasingly abnormal life, she thinks as her gaze falls on him again.

"Then why do you stare so sadly at him?" Castiel wonders, his voice and face mirroring his confusion.

Because I'm not sure how I'll ever survive you slipping from any of the positions you fill in my life and becoming a former…anything, she thinks. Never has she truly mourned any of the multitude of formers in her life—not even truly mourned Cort for all the love in her heart he still claims as her first—but she shudders at the thought of Castiel ever joining that number. Even when she's tried to push him away, her discussion with Gabriel only made her realize how impossible it truly is for her to lose him. But how can she possibly tell Castiel what's in her mind? How can he ever understand such a complicated human emotion when she still struggles with it herself.