We Can Do Anything

Age: Balthazar was created shortly before the Cambrian Explosion, only a couple million years after Castiel. This makes him one of the younger angels, but not the youngest. (My rationale here is that if Cas saw life first emerging from the primordial ocean-"Don't step on that fish!"-he'd have to be 500 million years old or so, not that I've done much research into Paleontology.).

Vessel: His vessel's name was Levi Gilman, and he was an artist, born circa 1865 and picked up somewhere around 1912. He was alone, disillusioned, and an atheist, and also not a particularly successful artist (though Balthazar maintains he had remarkable talent).

Quirks:

He has a thing for cheesecake. It's not quite as pronounced as Castiel's hamburger addiction, but given the opportunity, he will order and eat it, sometimes in amounts no human could without getting sick.

He also likes alcohol (obviously) and especially the higher-end stuff.

Secretly, he finds children sweet and endearing. He'd be the worst guardian ever, because any kid in his care will get no ground rules and all the sugar they can handle, but he likes them. In fact, he was quite fond of Aaron Birch, even though he was willing to buy his soul away. His moral compass is skewed that way.

Probably, he got the name 'I. P. Freely' from a child's joke book. Good thing. Otherwise the officer who saved the Titanic (until the timeline was reset properly) might have been named Mike Hunt.

And, yes, he genuinely thinks puns are funny.

I don’t remember which of us was the first one that dared say God was not coming back.

I know it wasn’t any of the Archangels still in Heaven after Lucifer’s fall. No, it was probably someone in the rank-and-file, some poor little Cupid with nothing to lose. I imagine it was whispered at first: What if He never returns?

Ideas travel quickly in Heaven. Angels’ minds can touch very closely. Someone careless can end up broadcasting every thought—not that there aren’t secrets among the Host. Far from it. But thoughts of our Father do tend to be…loud. And unsubtle. I’m sure whoever it was got hushed quickly, one way or another. But the idea lingered.

What if He never comes back?

From there, it’s only half a step to ‘How can we make Him come back?’ I think most of us started by trying to be on our best behavior. To make Him proud, so proud He would return with open arms, and those of us who had never seen His face or heard His voice, we would be rewarded for our faith.

That didn’t pan out well. After a while, 'best behavior' devolved to 'getting God’s attention at all costs'. Bickering, backbiting, disobeying orders, threatening to tamper with the Earth…if you stopped to listen, you could hear the desperation building, and the anger.

I think Uriel was the first one to say God was dead.

No one tried to hush him.

Me, I try to stay away from the big philosophical questions, but I figured that if God was still out there, he would do what he wanted to do. Nothing the Host did would change his mind. Nothing I did would matter in the long term. I was only one angel. Still, I followed most of my orders, stood up for the brothers I knew best, and waited to see how things would go. Waited for a sign.

Cas was the sign. Maybe if it had been an angel I knew less closely, someone I had never fought side by side with, I wouldn’t have felt the same way. But Castiel, the consummate company man, the straight-laced, ever-sincere Captain? If he could break the rules, maybe so could I. Maybe all of us could. Hell, maybe there were no rules.

I didn’t fall. I jumped headfirst.

In retrospect, I wonder if that’s precisely what our Father intended.