It's Not a Wonderful Life

"Three more beers over here!" Dean tells the barmaid, with a wink and a smile wider than any Castiel has ever seen him wear before. The blonde girl nods and smiles back, blushing slightly as she makes her way to behind the bar, and Dean turns back to his two brothers and rests his face-splitting grin on Sam, who meets him with a bright smile of his own. Castiel feels the corners of his mouth upturn involuntarily in return as his eyes settle on the pair.

They're in a bar somewhere in Northern California, where Castiel understands Sam has finally completed his final year of Stanford. The bar is heaving with young adults, whom he assumes are also college students, and his sensitive eardrums catch every vibration of the speakers above his head as hard rock blares throughout the room. Drunken laughter and the smell of whiskey fill his senses, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't feel somewhat uncomfortable in this environment. But currently, he's sat at a table in an alcove with his family, and not only is it making the whole thing tolerable, but it's actually enjoyable.

"I'm proud of you, Sammy," Dean speaks loudly over a song Castiel knows he's heard in the impala, but can't quite name. Castiel can't ever remember Dean looking so happy, and the knowledge that his true joy in life hinges upon Sam's doesn't surprise the angel in the slightest. He has always known that Dean's greatest dream was for Sam to be able to achieve his – for Sam to live the white picket fence and apple pie life he's always longed for and deserves more than most.

"Congratulations, Sam," Castiel says, and smiles so genuinely that he feels his mouth ache. And he means it. He understands how far the ex-hunter has travelled to get to this moment in life, where he has beaten all expectations and all odds stacked against him; fought the battle of free choice versus destiny and actually won. He feels a sudden rush of appreciation for the boy and his brother, so intense that he imagines, hopes, that it could eclipse the hole in the world that it seems only he can feel. Even just temporarily. Even just for now.

Sam beams back at them. Their beer arrives. They drink. And they drink. And they drink again. Dean's laugh becomes gradually louder. Sam's eyes are getting smaller and his hair actually seems to be getting bigger, although eventually Castiel can't be sure if he's imagining it or not. He feels the tell-tale sensation of his skin tingling and he wants this numbness to swallow him. He gives in and lets it.

Another hour passes, he vaguely notices. Castiel has drunk literally half the premises and his own smiles are becoming bigger, easier. They seem to slide off his numb lips like water from the well in his mind, cascading from the corners of his mouth and into the open air like the syrup she put on his pancakes one morning and he knows he's getting poetic again even as he's thinking it but really, he always did like the poetry. He loved the beauty of it, he loved the thorns in it, he so tenderly loved the vulnerable pain hiding just beneath the surface of its' quirky half-smile and glittering eyes, and there's no limit to the poetry his mushy, half-inebriated Jimmy Novak brain can come up with now because there's no-one to tell him to put up or shut up, anymore.

The train of thought ends abruptly and Castiel distracts himself by trying to burn off Jimmy's tongue with the unidentifiable substance in his shaking right hand.

It's hours later again when he hears Sam's voice cut through some sort of fog - "Lets go, Cas," - and feels a warm hand on his shoulder. The bar's closing, it seems. Castiel doesn't mind; it's spinning past him anyway, like an annoying, unreachable bee that keeps flying just beyond the grasp of his fingertips and won't let him nurture it.

Warm night air kisses his skin and they're on the street outside the bar now, walking in a direction Castiel doesn't recognise but follows instinctively because his brothers are walking with him. He sees Sam is stumbling as he slurs animatedly about his plans for attending some law school, and Dean walks alongside him with a protective grip on his shoulder, his walk reasonably steady and with a clarity in his voice that can only come from a lifetime of building up his alcohol tolerance. Castiel's not so surprised. Dean drinks hard and sobers fast. He's still a hunter by choice, and his fingers are always going to have that distinct trigger-happy twitch that means he can't risk being unprepared for any real length of time.

Somewhere, lost in his abstract observations, Castiel missed the conversation. Sam appears to have made a reference to something, a film or other medium, and Dean is laughing with him. Something about 'the truth' being 'out there.'

"I don't understand that reference," he slurs, only for the brothers to laugh harder.

"You've gotta get more involved with pop culture, Cas," Dean breathes, his voice high with mirth. "Read some books, watch some movies, man."

Castiel nods. "I agree. I certainly have enough time…" he yawns lightly, "…on my hands." He wants to. He wants to gather all these tiny human cultural quirks and understand them. He knows he's adapted well enough during his years on the earth, but it's not enough.

Because he missed all those little things she threw him. A sharp sensation stabs him somewhere below the chest at that realization - because he's never rationalized it that way before, not even to himself. All those references he never understood that she tossed him with the quirk of an eyebrow and a twisted lip –her lips, her face, her, Meg, Meg- feel like angel tablets locked away behind some door he can't open anymore, and if he can't decode them and understand them then he's letting a piece of her fade away.

And he knows that's stupid. He knows it makes no rational sense, but right now he knows exactly what he means. They were her words; she spoke them, and they meant something. If he won't understand them now then she wasted her breath on them, breath she could have just saved and stored up and maybe used to live for just a few moments longer.

"She used to call me Clarence," he says, and his voice is a cracked whisper. The roaring world around him goes quiet as the brothers turn their heads to look at him in a strange mix of surprise, unease and sympathy. He has never once spoken of her to them, not since the day they told him of her death, and not even when he killed her murderer in an act he'll never admit was purely vengeful. To mention her at all is to tear and rip anew at the aching, Meg shaped hole she has left in the centre of his being. If he were to use her name, if he were to repeat aloud the mantra in his mind that he clings to when the weight of the world feels too heavy to bear, he's sure it would kill him altogether. To give a voice to the thought that he doesn't know how to be himself in a world where she doesn't exist would be the surest form of suicide.

They're still looking at him as they continue to walk. They've slowed down somewhat, and their expressions are almost expectant. They don't want to say her name either, he notices. He finds bitter irony in the fact that for a demon whose name was once feared across the heavens and earth and all hell, now it was feared only by her two greatest enemies-turned-allies who were merely afraid of upsetting him, the angel who left her to die, with the direct mention of her.

"She used to call me Clarence," he repeats, and they're looking at him now with such profound sympathy, Sam especially, that he has to look away before the broken hollow ache resurfaces in his voice again. He pushes on. "She implied it was a reference from popular culture. I never understood it." He tries to put a little more force behind the pathetic whisper that his voice has become because he can't stand the way they're looking at him. "Who is Clarence?"

Silence settles in the warm night air between them, before Sam replies. His words, slightly slurred as they are, are like a lifeline to Castiel and he feels that this might be the most important thing he will ever hear. "There's an old movie called A Wonderful Life. It was based on a book, but I can't remember the name. I never read it." He pauses, the way a healer pauses upon trying not to aggravate painful wounds, before saying, "The angel's called Clarence. And it's a happy ending."

Hours later, when the sun is almost too bright and he becomes aware of the dull, monotonous throbbing in the back of Jimmy Novak's head, Castiel stands at the shop counter and tells the bored, tired looking clerk that he'd like to buy this, please. When he finds himself in a lonely motel room, he pushes the DVD into the player and sits on the edge of the bottom of the too-large double bed and watches. He doesn't move for one hundred and thirty-two minutes.

And it's not a happy ending.

The trivial nuances about the lives and order of angels, that are falsely depicted and untrue in real life, are irrelevant. George Bailey is irrelevant. His wife and daughter are irrelevant. Clarence himself is almost irrelevant.

Castiel just wants to know where Clarence's wife is. He wants to know what happened to the soul of the woman who gave Clarence the nightgown he died in for his last birthday, before he ever ascended the heavens and became an angel. He wants to know why she is never present, why she is never mentioned again; he wants to know if she is in heaven or if she's been condemned to some hell where her husband can't reach her. He wants to shake the youngest Winchester's shoulders and yell and ask him how this can possibly be a happy ending, when Clarence is still alone by the end of the film and the soul of the woman he must have loved so unendingly still has not joined him or shown herself to him.

And he almost wants to smight the angel for looking so unconcerned. He wants to know why Clarence hasn't torn heaven and hell apart looking for her. He wants to know why he hasn't summoned Death itself and begged for it to bring her back to life. He wants to know why Clarence hasn't ripped through the fabric of the world and screamed out to her that wherever she is, whatever she is, he'll move whole worlds and swallow purgatory and everything in between to find her.

And it's not a happy ending. It's the saddest thing he has ever seen.

A/N: From happy to tragic in 0.4 seconds. I'm sorry. I'm still grieving for 8x17.