A/N: A missing scene for On the Head of a Pin, just before the angels bring Dean to Alastair. Originally posted on AO3 on 4/28/15.

Anathema

In many respects, a slaughterhouse was an appropriate place to torture a demon.

Not that the place was currently in use, or had been at any time within the last two decades. The choice of location had not been Castiel's—many choices from now on would not be made by him—but he had to admire the poetic streak of the angel that had passed down the order for him to paint the Devil's Trap on the cold cement floor of the chamber, a graveyard of broken glass and walls smeared with a composition that Castiel identified as eighty percent the grime of age and twenty percent the remains of animals unfortunate enough to have been born, raised and sacrificed here. The fan in one wall circulated foul air, cast choppy shadows on the floor: a stark interplay of black and white, good and evil. Then he remembered that angels didn't have imagination—didn't have faculties for art or poetry of any kind—and even if they did, that was not something he was permitted to admire.

Perhaps that was simply the proof of how close he'd come to the edge. Of unbelief, of sin, of falling Grace and failing wings. The thought terrified him, and yet he couldn't seem to stop himself. It reminded him of the First War, when soldiers (brothers and sisters) traumatized from the fighting intentionally destroyed their wings, invited the Rit Zien to finish the job.

He tried to turn away from these darkened thoughts, but his surroundings were not any more conducive to easing his burden. He hoped Uriel would come soon, even if it meant following orders he'd only ever been accustomed to giving in the past. More than ever, he could do with following orders.

Only a few short feet away, as if he could perfectly read the run of his thoughts, Alastair grinned at him.

Even strung up in chains, bound by the ancient spellwork that Castiel had uttered in faultless Enochian as an additional precaution, the demon's presence still unwound something in him. He had been charged with watching the demon while Uriel finished up following a lead on the deaths of their brothers and sisters. They both knew what the answer would be, however; and they both knew what would have to be done.

They had not attempted to break Alastair. Had not even touched him. For that, they would need Dean Winchester.

Likely, also, that the demon knew it.

He had danced in his chains like a galvanized puppet, and sung, and crowed about oh how I so missed the prettiest Winchester, you know the one, D-E-A-N-O—and Deano was his name-oh! Castiel would have gladly sustained an angel blade wound before allowing any part of Dean to be in the same room as that abomination, but his own private thoughts so rarely translated into actions, so rarely seemed to make a difference to either the agendas of Heaven or earth. And now, all he could do in the interim was wait, his back turned towards the demon, his ears and Grace alert. Yet the image of the demon remained in his mind like an eternal thought, a stocky human with sunken eyes, eyes that nonetheless sparkled with cunning—

But no. That wasn't right. Demons weren't human. And it was ridiculous that Castiel should not have understood this from the very moment they'd captured Alastair, having burned enough hellbound spirits out of their grateful (but much more often, dead) hosts to know the difference.

Even before hell, Castiel had known of Alastair's reputation. And he realized now that the demon was never so simple—or so decent, perhaps—as to take a human that had already passed on. He had proven that he liked to be entertained.

Anathema. That's what it was. He could feel it in his borrowed form, an accusatory thing that reached right down into his organs—or maybe right down to the piteous soul of Jimmy Novak, who still cried sometimes for love of lost family and had to be soothed back to sleep. He had already been demoted once, and Heaven knew—in every sense of the phrase—that angels did not operate off of a three-strike system. He should have left well enough alone until Uriel arrived to convey him to the Winchesters. Should have left well enough alone, because it would be Uriel doing it and not himself.

It didn't stop him from moving towards the demon, over the carefully laid lines of the trap. Moving to directly face the ghastly visage of the creature strung up on the rack, its eyes bulging out of sallow sockets with an anticipatory pleasure, mouth almost drooling with its lust for bloodshed, even its own.

"Well, well, the angel's come out to play," Alastair hissed, in tones that would always remind the angel of a snake, even when he knew that snakes didn't speak and wouldn't know what one sounded like even if they did. "I'd been looking forward to seeing what Heaven's finest had to dish out, before we got to the main course. Give me a few good ideas for the return trip home, you know—"

Castiel could have told him that they had no intention of letting him leave the building alive, that this ruined, gore-streaked chamber would be his grave. That would have been the angelic thing to do. Righteous, even. Instead, he narrowed his eyes—a very regrettably human habit that did absolutely nothing to improve his senses—and attempted to see.

Being an angel, he could of course see all manner of supernatural things: ley lines and elementals and ectoplasmic sheddings. And souls. With humans, it was very much an out of sight out of mind outlook with which they muddled through life, but angels were held to a higher standard. Or had been, once. Now he was risking further demotion—or, much more likely and unspeakably worse, penance—by giving this creature any more attention beyond the promise of punishment it so richly deserved.

The soul inside of Alastair wept. He couldn't get a name, because the soul didn't even know its own name anymore; all he knew was that it had suffered from an untreated metabolic syndrome in infancy and worked thanklessly as a janitor in a factory for many years before being turned out into the cold when the business went belly-up, without family and even less without friends, forced to fend for himself beneath the shelter of a rotating kaleidoscope of bridges and bus stations and the occasional jail cell. Castiel could see it now, shivering with cold, twisting and moaning no i don't no i don't i don't wanna be bad

The soul did not want to hurt anyone. It had cried and protested and howled as Alastair ripped through bodies, slashed jugulars out of throats for his own amusement. Even as he had been ridiculed and shunned by others in life, he had loved people, the good and the bad alike, the kind and the cruel. For He maketh the sun to rise on the just and the unjust. And what it had never understood in its innocence was that its torment had pleased Alastair, had driven him to commit more, ever-escalating acts of evil. Castiel's Grace ached, listening to its appeals for a mercy that would never come.

Alastair said something else—some other cloying, thickly sweet pronouncement of masochistic delight—but Castiel no longer heard him. All he could hear was the voice of the soul. It had recognized him and was calling out for him now. Like Mama said. God and Jesus and angels with great big wings. The angels would save him, the angels would protect him.

Castiel would never tell him that the angels would not save him, or that the angels would not hesitate to punish one of their own for even daring to bear witness to his suffering. That they wouldn't care if this one tiny soul was brutalized along with the sentient taint that held it in its grip, if (when) Dean Winchester arrived. Collateral damage was acceptable. His heart stiffened as if it had been replaced with a stone when he realized that only a few months ago—before Sam, before Dean—he would have been no different. He'd never healed Pamela, after all.

Anathema.

He reached for—into—through—the demon's chest cavity, even as Alastair's cackles rumbled faintly along the cochlea of his vessel's inner ear. He sifted through organs and bones and lipids with surgical precision, ignored the viscous oil slick that attempted to dull his Grace, more for the sheer sport of it than because it thought it could do him harm. The soul came to him, as acquiescent as a child, and he withdrew his hand in less time than it took for Alastair to complete his depraved thought.

"Naughty, naughty," the demon admonished, and although his voice was light, Castiel could detect the thinly veiled undertones of anger and displeasure as clearly as he perceived all supernatural realities. "What if your bosses found out about your little bleeding heart, hm? What if, I just let something slip—"

"Be silent." It would be Castiel's first and last acknowledgement that the demon existed. He turned away, not waiting for a response, and raised his palm, cupped around the speck of pneuma like a candle holder for a dying flame, to his face. His lips parted and he breathed out softly, letting a generous portion of Grace sink into the shallow pool of spirit. The gesture was ostensibly to help speed the soul's ascent towards Heaven, but he felt gratified when the cold, shivering lump grew warmer by slow degrees, spread to entirely cover the surface of his palm. He breathed on it once more, this time for no other reason than to convey comfort—you are good, you are safe, you are going home now—and familiar thoughts of blasphemy raced through his mind on a quiet thread of unease.

He turned his eyes upward and gazed through the roof of the factory—through the dome of the sky, to the ineffable reality of his Father's realm—and waited one long moment before flicking his wrist, releasing the spirit to its eternal reward. It lingered, hesitant to leave him, but he encouraged it forward with a soft sweep of his wings and watched it depart, still glowing in its core with the light of his Grace. Any loss of human life was regrettable (that same unangelic part of him would say heartbreaking), but now at least this one would be at peace. Even if he had doomed himself, thrown his lot in even further with the Winchesters, he realized that he was happy to have achieved that much.

He had no sooner done the deed than he felt planes of reality shifting and bending behind him, and Uriel manifested in a cold wave of Grace that he would not have dared to display so openly had Castiel still been his superior. The angel started to turn to face him, but halted when he realized that the expression on his face—entirely too soft, too emotional, too human—would betray him. He worked to school his features into one of serene acceptance, a countenance cut from stone.

"How did it go?" he asked, but Uriel just shook his head. Castiel was surprised—not by the admission, but by how much learning it still hurt him.

"Oh, oh," Alastair cooed, as the dark angel stalked towards the edge of the Devil's Trap to glower at him. "You should have seen what this one did, yes. Made the bunch of you look like Hallmark Christmas ornaments, he did."

Uriel turned to Castiel. "What is the vermin babbling about?"

Castiel regarded him coolly. "I told him that I looked forward to seeing every stain of him scoured from the face of the earth."

He didn't need to see the look on Uriel's borrowed face—an arch of the eyebrow, a tightening around the lips—to know that the other angel doubted him very much; the quizzical undulations of his Grace, like ocean breakers crashing against rocks, were proof enough of that. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it. Castiel waited.

"Let's go pay our Father's pets a visit, then," Uriel finally said. "And see if the little hound of hell won't bite."

Castiel nodded, face still carefully blank, and they unfurled their wings.

His mind remained a swirl of confusion as they took to the air, each beat of every feather of every pinion bearing them forward faster than the speed of light, and every hundredth of a second of it was spent wishing to be forgiven—by his superiors, by Sam, by God, by Dean. He wanted to be happy about sparing one of his Father's creations needless suffering, but not at the price of sending another of them spiraling into his own slough of despond. Heaven willed that Dean should torture the demon, but he did not will it. If angels were permitted to scream, he would have done so by now, a thousand times over.

By the time they landed in the motel room that the Winchesters had just begun bedding down in, he had decided that God was God and anathema was anathema. Later he would seek revelation and pray in his own way for forgiveness (not yet knowing what he needed forgiveness for), but for now he would continue to obey... if not to entirely trust. Perhaps he was not a good angel, but he could still be a good soldier. It was, to his knowledge, the only thing he had ever been good at.

He only hoped that, whatever came in the days ahead, he would no longer be entrusted with the burden of choosing.