Title: Third Person Omniscient
Universe: Supernatural
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing/s: God, Castiel (light mentions of DeanxCas if you want to see them)
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers through 5x18. Also blasphemy. I'm pretty sure there's some of that too.
Word Count: 2,455
Summary: God is learning as he goes and Castiel is like a universe.
Dedication: tinyangl? I OWE YOU A BIRTHDAY FIC I THINK but in retrospect I don't even know what you like in SPN so this is kind of a crap shoot.
A/N: SOMEONE STOP ME. I started an OP fic and then kind of circled it a few different ways and then hated myself and wrote this. I THINK I AM IN TROUBLE. Also it is two in the morning, I'm starving, PMSing, and sore so this obviously doesn't make any sense HOLY CRAP.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.

"You son of a bitch. I believed in you."

The words sting.

God, contrary to popular opinion, can indeed flinch. He flinches then, as Castiel speaks, voice bitter and dark and broken in all the worst ways.

It's not the kind of thing a father ever wishes to hear from his son; it is the kind of thing that makes a father want to reach out and embrace his injured child, to pat his hair and assure him that he's there, that everything is alright. But at the same time, God knows that hearing his child say that (or hearing any of the multitudes of things very much like it that children will say when they are displeased with their parents) is something one might call inevitable. It is something that must happen.

God has learned this.

And also contrary to popular opinion, he can do that as well; being God is not about all-knowing and all-seeing so much as it is all-learning. That is why he created angels and then humans in the first place. He wanted to learn what it means to be parent, a sibling, a family, a universe.

And he has.

What God has learned from all of those lightning quick eons and eternal minutes and tick-tock seconds is that children grow, families expand, the universe gets larger and larger and in the end, everything comes all the way back to the beginning again, a perfect circle except not quite, slightly different each time.

It is the simplicity of existence, and it is convoluted and complex and full of chaos, as all creation is meant to be.

First, there is a beginning. God discovered that in the beginning, when your sons and daughters are very small, you are meant to take them by the hand. You feed them and love them and explain to them the workings of the universe, the workings of yourself, the workings inside of them. When you talk they listen, and they take your word as absolute because they have no reason to doubt you. They are your children and you love them and you do everything in your power to make them happy and keep them safe. The beginning is simple enough in that respect, God thinks; he imagines it is why people often look back upon their childhoods nostalgically.

But then your children grow older, and you age with them as well, and everything starts to get a little more complicated. As your children become stronger and smarter and surer of themselves they begin to see your flaws in their periphery, things they hadn't noticed before. Some of your children might keep these observations to themselves in their hearts and obey your rules regardless, but some of them, many of them, will begin to question and to doubt your reasons and your actions and that your age and your wisdom mean anything at all. All of your children will question you; some of your children will defy you.

That part is infuriating, God has learned; the first time any parent is faced with the disobedience of a beloved child is always infuriating, and not all parents deal with it very well, not even God. You do things you regret when it happens; you yell and you storm and you anger and you say things that come back one day to haunt you, things that make you think if only in the back of your mind but that you're too stubborn to admit out loud. You throw your kids out of the house or you beat them down or you tell them you can't stand to look at them anymore because they're so different now, from how they were when they were young, when they used to look up at you like you were absolute and faultless and the center of their needy little universe. You tell them you miss that—the past— and as you hurt them this way, this is what will start to separate you from them.

This is where the middle starts, God thinks, and the middle is often difficult.

You get older and you learn more; your children grow up, and they stop listening to you. Maybe they will do what you ask them to do or humor you every now and again, but that doesn't mean they are listening anymore; they're too much a part of themselves to hear everything you say to them at that point. They have become that individual being that you created but that you can no longer control.

But this is not always bad. It is difficult, yes, but not always bad. Because this is when you can finally take a moment to look away from your children, a moment to breathe and think to yourself. There is no need to hold their hands anymore, to watch their every move and moment because you fear that they cannot handle themselves. They can now, and that means it is time for a father to reflect. God knows now that a parent ages at the same time that his children grow, and as you age, you must think about all of the things that you have learned and felt and experienced along the way.

God has learned that being a father is tiring. It is often thankless and nerve-wracking and full of equal parts joy and love and wrath and pain. It exhausts him, because even if you are God there is nothing about having children that is easy. Especially as you get older.

In that time, somewhere in-between the middle and the end, God looks at family and also realizes that soon there will be no place for him anymore. His children are grown or growing and he himself has just grown weary. He cannot always be here, at his children's beck and call, only to be seen or implored in times of need. He is not needed very often anymore at all, really, and when he thinks about enduring another eternity of this when his children would prefer to make their own decisions without him, it is a deeply exhausting idea.

The thing about being a father, God discovers, is that all fathers are meant to die. There will come a time and place when there is no space for him in the universe anymore, because it will have grown vast and beyond him and it will want to circle around again, so as to begin anew without him. This is death, he thinks.

God looks forward to learning what death is like, what it means to die.

But first he has to face the end.

The end comes after the middle, when your children are fully grown and the lights in your eyes start to dim and grow blurry. You taught your children things in the beginning when they were young, and you fought with them in the middle as they got older, and now, in the end, you can only prepare them for what is to come. Perhaps they will have children of their own one day, and become parents themselves just as you did. Perhaps they will be better at it than you. Perhaps they won't, and one day, when they are old and tired, they will feel the same regrets you do, the same joys and sadness. It is not for you to know either way, because a parent's time is meant to end long before his children's does.

God's end is near.

And God knows that his last task as a father is to shove his children away from him, into a future where he doesn't exist and where they will be fine without him. This is the end.

And this is why the end is, perhaps, more difficult than the middle.

But the end is also the prelude to the next beginning, and in the beginning, there is light and hope and endless potential to look forward to.

It is why God is here now, on Earth, watching his children squabble and doing nothing about it.

He is pushing them towards the future, and the blood and death and suffering he sees is the chaos that exists before creation begins, just as it was before he made this universe with his own two hands eons ago. Now this chaos is in his children's hands instead, a roiling ball of infinite potential waiting to begin anew.

He studies them but stays apart from their actions as this happens, because this is what it will be like for them without him, when he is dead and gone and cannot help them anymore. They will need to make do without him.

He watches their decisions carefully; the sons and daughters who doubted and questioned him but who did as he asked in the end, even if only to humor him.

He watches the sons and daughters who rebelled as well, the ones who hate him, who have cast him from their hearts as they do everything they can in direct opposition to his will.

And in-between all of that he watches Castiel, too. Castiel who struggles to understand.

In the beginning, Castiel held God's hand and listened to God's words and lessons with quiet intensity, just like all of his brothers and sisters. In the beginning, when Castiel was young, he found God's words to be powerful and absolute and without question.

In the middle—Castiel's middle— he doubts. He remembers all of the things God had taught him in the beginning and finds incongruity between some of those lessons and the ones he is starting to learn on Earth, in the inevitable, gravitational pull of Dean Winchester's haunted human eyes.

He isn't the only one to find this disconnect of course; his brothers and sisters learn new things on Earth as well, as they were meant to. But their reactions are far different than Castiel's.

Uriel refuses to acknowledge the existence of the things he discovers on Earth as significant; he retreats backwards into God's old teachings and does not wish to learn beyond that. Uriel willfully misunderstands the humans because he is comfortable with his perspective staying small. That small perspective is what leads him to his own destruction.

Anna is different in the opposite way; she discovers things on Earth that make her happily throw out all of the previous knowledge God had given her; she wishes so much to fill her head with entirely new things that she discards all of the parts of her that came before, in the beginning. She discards her own knowledge and falls.

Castiel is the only one of his children who grows larger in the middle, who doesn't shrink back or shrink forward as he takes the things God had taught him in the beginning and the things that Dean teaches him after that and cautiously joins them together to broaden his sight. He learns and questions and learns more, and as he does, he carefully puts all of the knowledge he gains somewhere deep inside of himself, knitting the different pieces together like he's doing a puzzle without any defined edges, one that is truly endless in its outward growth.

Now, as they near the end, Castiel angers and hates, feels betrayed and alone. He is expanding on himself by learning what all of these things are, growing in the knowledge of what each of these things feels like and tastes like even if they are not necessarily good or pleasant. Lucifer was taught the same lessons once; God remembers the words Lucifer had uttered to him as he'd fallen from them, something a lot like, "I loved you, you son of a bitch."

Those words had made God wince then, too, even if they were also inevitable.

But unlike Lucifer, who took the lessons and longed to destroy everything that had led to them rather than learn from them, somehow, despite his pain, Castiel only longs to try and understand it all. God watches, and sees that Castiel's actions are the actions of someone who desperately wants to know.

Castiel struggles to understand why his father has forsaken him, even as he adheres to the lessons learned from his father in the beginning, when they had held each other's hands as he had listened faithfully to God's commands.

Castiel also struggles to understand how he can continue to move forward when there is little hope. He saves lives, as Dean had taught him to do in the middle, because they are invaluable, because he has learned that people matter even if everything else is lost.

He struggles to understand why he still believes in Sam and Dean, even when the words he says to Dean don't, even when Dean has lost faith in himself. Castiel bleeds for Dean even as he glares at him, the anger and hate and betrayal and loneliness he has learned here in the end very much present but somehow, unable to overtake him as they did Lucifer.

Meanwhile, God watches as the rest of the heavenly host carefully doesn't ask questions. They have learned all they have ever wanted to. They are done with their father and his lessons and think that all along, this was his plan.

God watches as the demonic armies do the same but different. They never tried to learn anything at all. They think they are more powerful than the all-powerful, that when this is done, they will have thwarted God's plan.

In reality, God is just old and tired. He looks forward to dying.

But before he dies, he does the last thing a father is meant to do for his children in the end. He cannot leave until he knows that one of them can stand up and take his place, can become the father who will hold the hands and teach the lessons in all the beginnings of the children and the families and the universes yet to come.

God watches the bloody, messy turmoil all around him and waits for someone to learn that he no longer needs his father, that he is all grown up now and that all he ever needed was himself and everything that he has ever been willing to learn as himself, from beginning to middle to end.

Because if anything, God has learned that to be God, you have to be willing to learn. It's not about all-seeing and all-knowing at all. It's not about mercy, or wrath, or even forgiveness. It's about the struggle to grow, to understand something, anything, everything.

And as God stands amidst the swirling chaos of a new universe on the brink of its creation, he thinks that Castiel has an infinite capacity to learn.

END