Title: The Frustrations of a Demon Playing Nursemaid

Rating: K+ for language and subject

Genre: Angst

Setting: Between episode 7.17, "The Born-Again Identity," and 7.18, "Party On, Garth."

Characters: Meg, Castiel

~o0o~

Meg opened the door to Castiel's room and slipped inside. It was almost ludicrous to believe that the body on the bed in the mental ward had at one point been powerful enough to smite an archangel without a second thought. Demons couldn't kill even the most lowly of angels; the best they could ever hope to do was inconvenience them by destroying their vessels. The power of angels, it was beyond anything that even Crowley, the King of Hell, could hope to achieve. It was cosmic.

Looking down at the still, unmoving form that had once housed such glory, she sincerely hoped that she had made the right choice, throwing her lot in with the Winchesters and their dear, not-so-dead-as-previously-thought Cas. He might have regained his memory, but he was perfectly useless to her in his current state. Leave it to Cas to look for redemption in all the least convenient places.

"My, oh, my, what is Lucifer doing to you in there, Clarence?" she asked aloud. Castiel's only response was a slight amount of drool falling from his lips. Meg sighed in frustration as she leaned down and wiped it away. "How the mighty have fallen," she noted acerbically; here she was playing nursemaid to an angel – an angel! - in the hopes that he (or, failing him, the annoyingly resilient Winchesters) might smite that smug bastard Crowley and leave the door open for her to rise to power.

For the moment, however, Castiel was going nowhere, doing nothing. Whatever was going on inside his head, he no longer reacted to anything in the outside world. As an experiment, she cut his palm, just to see what would happen. (If anything went wrong, of course, she could just say he cut himself. They'd believe it here.) He didn't even twitch. Blinking, of course, was out of character for dear, sweet Cas even when he wasn't completely catatonic. Though, at least his grace still seemed to be at work, keeping his vessel alive; the cut had healed quickly, and he didn't seem to be hurting for lack of food or sleep. Fortunately, it hadn't been too hard for her to make Cas her "special" patient, so she'd be the only one who knew that he didn't eat, or drink, or sleep. Even the idiot humans who ran this place might've realized something eventually.

Just then, her phone rang. She checked the caller ID. Dean. He was like a mother hen about Cas ever since the angel had reappeared – if only he didn't call her every five freaking minutes for an update on his favorite celestial vegetable.

"This had better be worth it, Roma Downey," she griped to Castiel as she answered the call.