The first thing Castiel registers is the weight.

Not physical; he has not worn a body long enough to confuse that, but metaphysical, a gravity that tugs behind his sternum where grace once moved freely. It is unfamiliar and yet intimate, like standing too close to a memory that does not belong solely to him.

Heaven did this deliberately; God did this deliberately. When Castiel disobeyed, when he chose again what Heaven labeled as wrong, the punishment was not death or erasure, but proximity.

It was you.

Another angel, another sibling: fully formed and yet bound, your essence braided into his like a second pulse threaded through his own. A separate consciousness tethered by decree, not choice. Family, Heaven insisted, as if that single word could sanctify the violation.

Castiel remembers the moment of the binding clearly: the searing quiet, the way the universe seemed to hold its breath as two souls were made and forced to acknowledge one another without permission. He did not scream; angels do not scream but something in him fractured all the same.

Now, on Earth, the tether is constant. He cannot move without feeling the echo of you, cannot focus his grace without sensing the way yours hums in response, adjacent, parallel, unreadable. Your presence does not intrude so much as exist, a closed book pressed against his ribs. He tries, instinctively, to categorize you.

Seraph? Soldier? Something older? But your personality resists definition, neither hostile nor warm, neither obedient nor rebellious. Indecipherable, Heaven called it, as if mystery itself were a flaw.

The mission is unclear in the way Heaven prefers its cruelty: fragments of instruction, half-prophecies, an expectation of compliance without context. Castiel stands in a forgotten stretch of road, human skin prickling under a sky too wide to feel holy anymore. He is acutely aware that he cannot leave. That even if he wanted to fall back into the silence between stars, your soul would pull him short, elastic and unyielding. Exile, shared. Duty, doubled.

He wonders, quietly, dangerously, if God intended this as correction or temptation. If your presence is meant to stabilize him… or test how much further he is willing to bend before he breaks. Castiel has lost faith in simple answers. What unsettles him most is not the binding itself, but the subtle, growing realization that your nearness does not feel like surveillance. It feels like witness.

He adjusts his trench coat, a meaningless gesture meant to anchor himself in something mundane, and turns his attention inward—not to dominate, not to withdraw, but to acknowledge.

There is no hierarchy here, no command encoded in grace. Only coexistence and only the road ahead and the certainty that whatever happens next will happen together. “I am aware that this arrangement was not your choice,” Castiel says quietly, voice steady despite the tension threaded through his soul.

“For what it is worth, I will not treat you as a burden... but the situation is not very adequate.”