Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you forever. Hands trembling like frightened birds, he takes a hyperactive breath and reminds himself that this is all part of the routine. Shake it off, Cas. How many pills? Three. No, five. Five's good. Get them out of the packets (he's never understood the purpose of the fluorescent colors and cute shapes of the small tablets, but to each their own, he supposes) and grind them. Powder? Good. No rough bits? Good. Roll the paper. Is the powder in a line? Good. Paper into nose, snuff in, tilt head back-and ahh. Relief. He spends the next few hours on the ground, picking up ants and putting them in matchboxes, blowing into the dirt, making patterns, and collecting bits of glass to decorate the wall with, admiring the tiny red dots that appear on his fingers when he grabs the shards too hard, before sucking off the blood, which tastes more like gunpowder than iron and salt.

But whatever. All in a day's work.

This is his life now. When he's high, he doesn't care. When he comes down, when he has to wait another two days for more, he starts to remember what it was like to fly. This just makes him sob harder and try to drink the rubbing alcohol, which he already knows from experience is not a good idea. He doesn't even think he's capable of overdosing anymore. He just knows he needs it. Because the pills are the only thing that ease the numbing pain in his shoulder blades, where his wings used to be. His mind is fuzzy now, can barely even remember when they were taken from him-was it when Heaven discovered he and Dean, or when Heaven inflicted punishment?

Either way, the wings are gone now, and so is the one person that could have ever made him fly. Sometimes when he's hallucinating he still feels fingernails digging into his back, still feels fingers making knots in his hair and stubble against his mouth, but then he's down again and shaking and twitching and the tears come, not because he can't control them but because they feel so sweet and taste saltier than blood.

Sometimes he hears Dean's voice again. Mostly it's laughter and it makes the tears come faster and his smile even wider, to the point where his face could nearly rip apart. It's the most beautiful thing he's ever heard and he at once loves and despises the pain it causes him to miss that damned gorgeous laugh.

He'll be high and suddenly his dream will become a nightmare, reliving Heaven's wrath upon the discovery of such sacrilegious informality, and the suffering it has caused him since, being forced to hear the screams of the man he once loved (and still does, more than life) being tortured once again; and being forced to bear not only this pain but the searing burn and gagging stench of wings torn apart from flesh, locked under chains and the feeling of being cast down from Heaven and grace and all he once stood for.

Once upon a time, he thinks, there were two princes. And one was a righteous man, and the other was a warrior of the Lord. Through only their own faults, the righteous man was doomed to the Darkness and the warrior was shut away to find solace in the venom and deathliness of small, colorful, dusty things. He thinks he should write it down, but instead he only tells it to a girl on the street, a slender bird with short brown hair and kaleidoscope eyes whose hands no longer shake as she lights a cigarette-she reminds Castiel of someone in Heaven, someone who would get in regardless of how she lost her virginity to someone four years her senior, regardless of how she felt after her dog and her father died in the same year. She just writes it down, everything he says, and scribbles a number on his arm. She won't tell him if it's a new dealer or the nearest Narcotics Anonymous, but he discovers on his next drive that it's hers, and that she's capable of listening to just about anything.

So he trades in pills for words, and finds old photos to show her, and she laughs and she looks like Dean's younger sister and he vows to protect her no matter what. And so they talk for a while, and then longer, and he never forgets Dean, but writes to him every day.

The girl helps him burn the letters, and they watch the smoke rise.