A/N: Post-Apocalypse AU. There was no Croatoan virus, so this is more Jericho than Resident Evil. The Winchesters were never hunters so the boys weren't the chosen vessels for Michael and Lucifer. It's bleak more than angsty, but I rather like it.
A story told in pieces, rather than the whole, because pieces were all I had. Another chapter will be going up soon. As the story in itself is not cooperating, I have a rare opportunity here: the floor is open for reader prompts. One word prompts as a title for a piece, or a scene that I will attempt to work into this 'verse.
1. Angel
Four years after the Apocalypse, Dean finds an angel in his barn.
The house is a couple miles outside of the one-time college town of Lawrence, and has arable land on only two sides- ahead across the road and off the back of the house about five hundred yards away- all of which was sold off long before Dean inherited the place. In a post-apocalyptic world, After, there's little place in farm country for someone who doesn't know how to farm, so Dean acts as mechanic and hired muscle for anyone who needs any sort of help, and the farmers tolerate him because he's a born-and-raised local, not some city kid trying to find an easier life. He keeps up on the barn's upkeep because it's something to do, something to help wile the hours away while waiting for something to happen. The end of the world again, maybe.
One brisk spring evening, the drizzling rain cold enough that Dean's hair is standing up in frozen spikes, he opens the door and heads inside and stops dead when he nearly walks right into someone.
The man is wet and muddy, shaking slightly. He's wearing a suit, which Dean hasn't seen since Before, and blood is tracing the lines of his right palm and dripping off his fingertips. He watches Dean with the biggest, brightest blue eyes Dean has ever seen.
"I don't…" he began, his voice a harsh rasp of a noise, and then Dean is lunging forward to catch him as he collapses.
He has no ID of any sort- not that big a surprise these days- except for the source of the blood. Dean stares at it, drags a towel over the vicious cuts to wipe away the blood, studying the patterns carved into the skin. The cuts are along the inside of his right forearm, from wrist halfway to elbow, deep and an angry red- doused with salt water, if he has to guess- and old but still bleeding. They had not been allowed to heal, which makes sense- so long as the symbols remained, the wards will restrain him, and the angel cannot use even the most basic of his powers. Until the wounds heal, he is almost human.
And he is an angel, no doubt about that.
Dean hasn't seen one of these celestial jackasses before, but he has heard the stories. Angels are only so much light, poured into and possessing a person like a demon. Soldiers of Heaven, they are, and woe be to the humans who had forgotten that vital fact- soldiers of Heaven, not Earth. They had watched the world burn and had fanned the flames; two of their own were ultimately responsible for all of it, or so Dean had heard. And then, like the demons, they had disappeared, returning to Heaven and Hell and leaving the world in between alone.
Dean washes off the angel's warded, carved arm and winds pieces of a worn old t-shirt around it as a temporary dressing. He doesn't know the angel's chances of surviving in this world, marked or not. He also doesn't know why the idiot is here. Certainly Heaven had to be a lot more appealing than this train wreck. He gets the towels and the rough wool blanket out of the locker under the stairs and half-carries, half-drags the angel to a relatively secluded corner, tucking him in. Then he sits back on his heels and waits.
"Where'd you come from?" he asks almost an hour later. "And don't say Heaven."
"North," the angel replies in his ruined voice. North, Dean thinks. The militia? Their leader Grayson certainly has the balls to try to catch himself an angel. "Where am I?"
"Farm country," Dean says, using the new name for the agriculturally rich heart of the country. "Little town called Lawrence, back Before. Heard of it?"
"Yes," comes the soft reply. "Kansas."
Dean waits, but it seems no more is forthcoming. After a while he shifts a bit, leaning forward so he can see the angel's face in profile.
"Any particular reason why I shouldn't just kill you now?" he asks. The angel doesn't even blink.
"No," he whispers, then grabs the blanket and pulls it up over his face. Dean takes the hint and heads back to the house, where he goes and gets a beer- highly limited, those, and therefore a special treat. He has an angel in the barn- by nature, lying double-crossing hypocritical bastards. And he was, however passively, taking care of the thing.
It takes a long time for sleep to come that night.
2. Injury
The angel is not the best company, Dean finds. He's skittish and standoffish and hides in the barn like a scared cat. Anytime Dean goes anywhere near him, the angel watches him like a rabbit watches a fox, normally from some shadowy corner where Dean can feel that intense gaze on him but can't actually see the angel, thus creeping him out majorly and encouraging him to leave quickly. He doesn't eat or sleep, which holds with what the humans learned about angels during the war, and the only conversation they've had was on that first night.
He had assumed the angel would say something about his arm not getting any better, if it was necessary. Somewhere about day four he abruptly realizes that the angel wouldn't know the injury isn't getting better, is in fact getting worse, as this is probably the first time in his life that he has encountered something he can't heal.
So Dean did what he does best and took matters into his own hands.
He drags his toolkit, plus a few extras, into the barn and sets to work repairing the stairs, carefully not watching the angel. After the first few minutes of tension and wariness, the two settle into their respective tasks, Dean prying up the most rot-worn boards and the angel doing whatever it is he does in here all day.
Then Dean drops his hammer, which clatters away and comes to a rest just shy of the angel's hiding place, and the angel makes the mistake of bringing it back over. Dean waits until just the right moment before lunging at the angel, catching him around the waist in a tackle that a three-hundred-pound linebacker would be proud of. And even as much as he hates these bastards, he can't help but wince in sympathy when the angel's breath whooshes out of him in a rush when he hits the ground.
By the time the angel can breathe again, he's flat on his back, Dean kneeling over him and straddling his waist. His left hand is pinned beneath Dean's knee and the right caught in an iron tight grip. When Dean feels him tense in preparation of a struggle, he digs his thumb into the angel's wrist, putting just enough pressure on the wounds that his captive gives a tight little whimper and holds himself statue-still.
It's not right, an angel yielding to a human, lacking the strength to do otherwise. Dean unwinds the bandages, feeling fever-hot skin under his fingers, and knows there's trouble even before he sees the angry red swelling.
"See this?" he asks the angel, turning his arm so he can see the injuries. The blue eyes flicker briefly to his wrist, then focus back on Dean's face. "That's infection," Dean continues, ignoring the quiet fear in those eyes. "You can't just ignore shit like this. Something like this happens, you tell me, got it?"
His toolbox is within reach, barely. He pulls out the bottle of rubbing alcohol and unscrews it with one hand, not trusting the angel's good behavior enough to let him go. Then he pauses, meeting the angel's gaze again.
"This is gonna hurt like a bitch," he says, honest and blunt. "But you sit still and do what I tell you, and I'll get this done as fast as I can."
It does indeed hurt like a bitch, and not just for the angel- at some point Dean goes from holding his wrist to holding his hand, and even without his angelic superstrength the guy manages to just about break all of Dean's fingers- but the patient is amazingly cooperative for the most part. There is one bad moment when Dean pulls out the knife, sterilized in boiling water back in the house. The angel goes tense, his breathing fast and ragged- flashing back to the day he got these wounds, Dean guesses. He ignores it and continues with his work, using the knife to open pockets of infection and cut away the worse of the affected tissue, and when the cuts he's making fail to form any sort of pattern or symbol, the angel slowly relaxes again.
"What's your name, anyways?" Dean asks when he's almost done, trying to get the stupid medical tape to behave.
"Castiel," the angel says. He looks at his butchered arm, freshly tended to and already looking better for it. "Thank you," he adds. Dean spares him glance, wondering for the first time why he was even trying to help this creature.
" 'M Dean," he replies, catching the tape with his teeth and forcing it to straighten out. "An' don' mention it."
3. Militia
He hears them long before he sees them. It's hard to miss- even in these parts, so close to Texas and its oil rigs and fuel monopoly, the sound multiple vehicles catches attention. Gas is simply too hard to get hold of these days to justify driving around any more than absolutely necessary.
Dean's at the Richardson's, trying to patch up a corroded line in their combine since there's no way in hell he'll find a replacement, when the convoy rides past. It's only three camo-painted jeeps, no doubt gotten off a raided military base, but it's heading towards Dean's house. And he's been waiting for this since the angel turned up in his barn and told him he came from the north.
He pushes himself out, squirming free of the combine's engine compartment. Mitch Richardson, hand-rolled cigarette parked firmly in his mouth and sealant bucket at his feet, spares him a knowing glance.
"Need help?" he offers as Dean twists free and manages to land on his feet.
"Nah," Dean says. "They like to think they're civilized."
"So did the Nazis," Mitch says, and spits at their feet.
Dean doesn't say anything else. He saves his breath for running.
With the American government essentially wiped out, the country- far too big and diverse to hold together on the basis of how things used to be- fractured into undefined pieces. East of the Mississippi they hold to the old style of government and it might as well be a different planet. West of the river, from the eastern border of Missouri to the foothills of the Rockies in Colorado, from southern Oklahoma to the frigid stretch of the Dakotas, is known simply as farm country. Farther north and a bit to the west is militia land.
The militia had risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of the American government, except no one wanted this bird on their hands. They're self-entitled bullies, and well-armed at that, and their leader Grayson is a cold-blooded sociopath. Dean thinks of Castiel, cut up and bleeding because apparently torturing the angel is more fun than actually keeping him under control, and feels a surprising rage rise up. Finally, he figures out why he's helping Castiel at all.
Humans are supposed to be better than that, he wants to yell at someone. Humans are supposed to be better than that because the angels sure as hell aren't and if the humans can't be bothered to be better than that then what the hell is the whole point anyways? If this whole thing is just a competition to see who's the lowest, most despicable creatures around, then why even bother?
He reaches the house and finds one of the jeeps parked in the driveway, penning in his rarely-used Impala. The driver and another man are still sitting in it, one talking on the radio while the other keeps a lazy lookout. Dean slows down and approaches at a wary walk, eyes on the semi-autos the militia boys are carrying.
The driver watches him and, when they're close enough to talk without having to yell, nudges his companion. "You the owner?" he calls out.
"Yeah," Dean says, stopping. He's close enough to the house to dodge around the corner before they can shoot him, if it proves necessary. The militia doesn't get the warmest welcome in farm country, and farmers have the clout nowadays to say who's allowed onto their land and who's not. Still, farm country has no true defenses so Grayson's men are tolerated. Better to put up with a few ruffled feathers than spark off the Civil War, Verse Two.
The driver says something into his radio and a moment later the front door opens- went into his house without permission, rat bastards- and the leader comes out. He's wearing fatigues and the infamous buzzcut and even a chain around his neck. Still, Dean was raised by a Marine. He knows the real deal when he sees it, and he's not seeing it now.
"Patrick Coleman," he says to Dean as he comes over. He doesn't offer his hand.
"Dean Winchester. Don't know what you're looking for, but you won't find it, so get out." Good manners will only get you so far with these jokers. Coleman merely smiles.
"Son, we're looking for something special," he says. When Dean doesn't rise to the bait, he continues. "We're looking for an angel."
"An angel?" Dean echoes, feeling something like relief and possibly even hope- so foreign, that one. They haven't found Castiel, and likely won't by now. And the angel's been camping out in the barn, where he doesn't eat or sleep, so there's no indication of a second person living here. "There were never any angels here. Carthage is the closest they got."
"This one is special," Coleman tells him. "We caught him After, a few months ago. He's got," he traced his left index finger over his right wrist, drawing on his skin the sigils and wards carved into Castiel's, "marks right here. Limits his power, he's basically helpless, but it won't last. Once it heals he's back to destroying worlds."
"Even without his powers, he gave you the slip?" Dean asks, unable to help himself. Coleman gives him a long hard look.
"There was an accident. A crash, forty miles north on old 35."
"Forty miles?" Dean echoes. And on old 35, old Interstate 35, which is another thirty miles east of here. "That's a lot of ground to cover."
"Not for an angel. Even without their powers they're tough bastards." Still, it seems even the militia doubts Castiel's ability to get this far. Coleman whistles sharply and two more men appear, one from the barn and one trotting out from around the house where he had no doubt been looking over the fields. In early spring there's no place to hide until you hit the line of trees that divides the properties, some half a mile off.
"Sir," one of the men says quietly. Dean glances over and sees, across the road, his neighbor and two of his farm hands watching the militia boys nonchalantly. One of the hands, who had been an illegal alien Before, has a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder.
No doubt Mitch Richardson had gotten the word out. More would be coming soon if Coleman didn't take the hint and hit the road. The militia boys are better armed, but this is farm country. They're a long way from home. Also, Dean could drop Coleman and one, possibly two, of his men before the others could get a good bead on him, although they don't know that.
"Here," Coleman says, tossing Dean a military radio. "Channel three-eight. You see something, you tell us, hear? Another week or two, that angel'll be all healed up." He climbs into the shotgun seat as the other men jump in, still watching Dean's neighbor with a wary eye.
Dean watches them leave, then waves. The three men across the road wave back and turn to head for home.
4. Soldier
"Dean." The voice comes from nowhere as he starts up the stairs, originating from the hallway had been empty two seconds ago.
"Fuckin' hell!" Dean barks, jumping and tripping and falling up the stairs. He rolls over and stares, wide-eyed, at Castiel. "Don't do that!"
"I apologize," the angel says. Dean picks himself up, muttering the whole time, and sits on the stairs and pins Castiel with a dour look.
"Where the hell've you been? I thought you took off." And he wasn't remotely disappointed by it, either. The angel had lived in the freaking barn, for crying out loud. They had had exactly two conversations, one of which only because Dean had been sitting on him and he couldn't escape. Not to mention that other little thing- he's an angel. You know, the guys who destroyed the world?
"I waited until the militia men had left the area before returning," Castiel says, as if that tells Dean anything.
"Yeah. And, uh, why are you here again?" Dean asks. Coleman's words have been festering in his mind for the better part of two days now- once it heals he's back to destroying worlds- and he's been spoiling for a fight. It's high time he got some answers, anyways.
Castiel regards him with a solemn expression, obviously sensing that something had changed. "There is nowhere else for me to go," he says softly.
"Heaven isn't good enough for you?"
"The other way around," Castiel snaps, then looks almost surprised at his own vindictiveness. Dean is surprised for other reasons.
"They kicked you out?" he asked, anger momentarily overridden by disbelief.
"I left," Castiel corrects tightly.
"And why should I believe that?" Dean demands. "Never heard of Heaven's golden boys having issues with the grunts. Maybe you're a scout or something, coming to see what else you can destroy. Like the whole world wasn't good enough."
"Not all of Heaven agreed with the plan," the angel says steadily. He shifts position and looks over Dean's head to something a million miles away- parade rest, Dean realizes suddenly, and feels the sharp aching remembrance that somewhere in there Castiel is still a soldier. "Most of us didn't even know it. We thought we were preventing the Apocalypse, not encouraging it."
"Command lied to you, huh?"
"Michael lied to us." He says it like it's the worst insult he can think of. "And used us."
"And yet you figured it out," Dean says, not sure if he believes. Castiel hesitates.
"One of my- an angel from my garrison told me." There are almost as many pauses in that sentence as there are words. Dean wonders what it sounded like before editing.
"And how did he know?"
"Because Lucifer told him," Castiel says steadily. "He was a traitor. Lucifer was using him to stir up trouble."
Lying, betraying, and manipulating doesn't sound much like the Christian angel mythos. It does, however, sound like the angels the world was so brutally introduced to four years ago, and Dean has to swallow the urge to ask how it feels to get a dose of your own medicine.
"And he told you?"
"He tried to recruit me," the angel says evenly. "And when that failed, he tried to kill me."
The simple, matter-of-fact honesty in that statement throws Dean off-balance enough that he can't find a response to that. Castiel apparently feels the need to fill the resulting silence.
"And we didn't destroy the world."
"Really?" Dean scoffs. "Well, Japan is underwater and Australia is just plain gone. Chicago is a crater and California is an island. Also, three quarters of the world's population is dead. Sorry, Cas, but I'm gonna have to call bullshit on that one."
Those blue eyes finally refocus on the present and look back down at Dean. There is sad, quiet amusement in them.
"No, Dean. We almost destroyed the human race. The argument could be made that, in doing so, we actually saved the world."
Dean doesn't need this crap, not now. After everything the people of Earth have been through he's not going to sit here and listen to a- supposedly friendly- angel rip on them some more. He grabs the banister and hauls himself to his feet, watching as Castiel takes a half-step back. The angel does not fear him, not after that day in the barn when he'd cleaned out the infected wounds, but they haven't hit trust yet either.
"Our world, our problem," he hisses. "You don't like it, go back to Heaven."
He heads upstairs without waiting for a reply.
5. Stars
He needs to get a dog, he thinks as he listens to the back door open. It might not be much use against his guest- angels have a rapport with animals, humans had been dismayed to learn- but at least it would let him know when people decided to treat his house like Grand Central Station.
"I am sorry," Cas says from his bedroom doorway. Dean lifts his head just enough so he isn't talking into his pillow.
"In bed, Cas. Trying to sleep. Can this wait?"
"You weren't asleep," Castiel replies. "Nor were you trying. You have been thinking loudly all night."
"Thinking loudly?" Dean echoes. He rolls over and glares at the shadowy silhouette in the doorway. "You can read minds?"
"Unfortunately," comes the answer, and he sounds so pained by it that Dean finds he can't take offense at the intrusion.
"What'd you want, Cas?"
"To apologize. I should not have said that, about saving the world." He pauses for a moment. "After all, the angels have hardly done better."
It's an honest apology, Dean can tell, and a huge admission as well. He waits, but nothing more seems to be coming. When the angel moves away, Dean swears under his breath and slides out from under the blankets.
The house electricity runs off a generator, which in turn runs off diesel. The fuel runs up from Texas are unreliable at best, so Dean tends to skimp on it during the winter in order to run the AC full-time during the summer. As a result, in the chilly spring months he goes to bed fully dressed, and barely has to slow down to put his shoes on before following Castiel outside. He catches up with the angel halfway to the wheat field out back and settles in beside him, walking in silence.
"What's his name?" he asks, after a while. Cas looks at him, blank, and Dean makes a sweeping gesture to indicate the angel's body. "Him. The guy you're wearing."
"My vessel?" Castiel asks.
"Yeah. Him."
"Jimmy." Castiel wraps his arms around himself- even with his powers sealed away he seems to be less bothered by temperature than a human. "Jimmy Novak."
"He still in there?" Dean continues, feeling slightly uneasy.
"Yes. He's asleep." Cas stops in the middle of the field and Dean pulls up short a step or two later.
"He's cool with that?"
"He doesn't want to wake up." Castiel looks up at the sky, where thousands of stars glitter like distant shards of ice. "His wife and daughter were in Chicago."
"Shit." Dean rubs a hand over his face. Then, for reasons he can't even begin to understand, he says, "My brother was in Palo Alto."
The stars are brilliant tonight, as they have been every night ever since the world went dark. Dean hadn't known there were that many in the universe, never mind that could be seen from lonely little Earth. He realizes suddenly that he's looking, however metaphorically, at Heaven.
"Who won?" he asks.
Castiel is silent for a good long time after that. Then he sighs.
"Michael and Lucifer met and fought, as was meant to be. Then they were gone, and we were told to return home. I didn't go."
"Then they were gone? They disappeared?" Dean tries to figure this, tries to imagine two titans of such colossal power that all of Heaven and Hell answered to them just vanishing. "What the hell happened?"
"I don't know. Angels don't ask questions when given an order."
"Yet here you are, disobeying orders." Dean feels something like pride for a moment, pride in the angel standing next to him, who bucked countless millennia of training and conditioning and defied everything he had once believed in. "Do you miss it?"
"Heaven? Yes." There is raw pain in those two simple words, and Dean can't look at him. "But I wouldn't go back, even if I could."
"There's nothing for you here. There's nothing for anyone here." Dean snorts and shakes his head, sliding his hands into his pockets. "Are they gonna send someone to haul you back home?"
"If they were, I would have been found by now. And I am not the only one who stayed behind."
"Great." Dean stamps his feet a little, trying to chase away the cold that is seeping slowly in. "Well, I'm going back inside."
He's halfway back to the house when he stops and looks back. Castiel is still watching the stars, listening perhaps to voices only angels can hear.
"I do have a guest bedroom, you know," he calls over, and the angel looks at him.
"I don't sleep."
"Yeah, I know. I mean you don't have to hide out in the barn all day."
Cas doesn't say anything, and Dean knows he's thinking about whether it's worth it, getting friendly with a human if he's only going to move on once the wards heal. Then he nods and turns back to the sky.
And when the wards do heal, he somehow doesn't get around to leaving.