{ dear idiot } castiel

Pain transforms us. It hollows out men and women once filled with joy. It sharpens our tongues to bitterness, scathing all who dare lay their eyes upon us. It is a knife twisting and twisting and twisting until I bleed seas and my own blood engulfs me and everything that surrounds me, trapping me beneath the surface of agony.

It steals the breath right out of my lungs and oh, how they scream for air until my ears burst.

The absence of his presence leaves a gaping hole in a once perfect puzzle, crushing any sanity I had in to begin with. Writing letters back and forth do not keep me sated. I cannot hear his voice in the rivers of ink scrawled across the paper, though I can read his words. I cannot feel his warmth through the parchment that I constantly hold in my hands - it is the closest I can get to Aeric in his absence.

I have contemplated thrusting the letters into the flames and allowing them to shrivel until they are nothing but piles of worthless ash. I have pondered for hours upon hours, What if I just ceased to respond? I could slice through the heartstrings that tie me to him and my misery, but pain would only terrorize me further, ripping every tranquil piece left of me to shreds, and turn my entire chest into a void, as if the mouth of the hole cavernous enough.

He is the lone resident of my once vacant, bitter heart of stone.

"Your heart has always been soft, Castiel, once the shield is breached. You just never noticed because of all the steel," he once said.

But perhaps he lied - he was always a fucking liar.

"I'm not going anywhere."

Lies.

"I can't promise you forever, Cas, because forever is a myth. But I can promise . . . a very long time."

LIES.

He was right about one thing: forever is a myth. It hangs above us, so far out of our reach. We leap to ends of the skies just to barely brush our fingers against it, feel the warmth of its light that whispers in the purest hope, "Forever is always; always is devoid of death and abandonment."

We try to live until our skin is more wrinkled than the half-finished letters I crumpled up and tossed into the trashcan - where they belong. We savor each breath of life on this world, triumph coursing through us with each inhale and exhale, because we are still alive. Every year in the Games, twenty-four children savagely vie survival, even if it means skewering through their best friend, or worst yet, family. We want eighty, ninety years, and yearn for more than that. It is all out of sheer fear of the darkness that approaches us with each passing heartbeat, with each step closer to the end.

Life is so precious and he threw it all away the moment his ambition to be a Peacekeeper peaked, and he turned and walked away from everything he grasped in his hands.

I guess it wasn't fucking perfect enough for you, Aeric. I guess you didn't have enough power.

If it is power he was after, he holds all of it in his hands. The ominous authority of a Peacekeeper. Mother's wistfulness. Father's wilted spirit. My heart.

And with each passing moment he is in damned District Two, he crushes it. With every inch of ink on a letter, my flame falters.

A tear that has fallen upon the paper smears the intro of the letter -

Dear Idiot,

I crumple the paper and toss it into the fire.

Ash.