This was supposed to be a drabble. Really. I promise.
My entry for superwholockthecomic's Fan Friday ( go check it out, its awesome!) :D I ended up going with Bad Wolf V.S Godstiel. I'm not sure how it really turned out on the "V.S" but I think it's alright. I was originally going to go with the prompt of Bad Wolf V.S. Lucifer, but after re-watching the Bad Wolf scene I was reminded a lot of when Cas took in all the souls from Purgatory and I just couldn't resist :)
- Snarks
There's not much left of Bobby Singer's Salvage yard by the time Castiel surfaces enough for her to reach.
The many rusted towers of cars have toppled, the abandoned machines trampled and scattered like the ill-cared for toys of a petulant child. The house of the old hunter itself is little better than a pile of matchsticks, half burnt already and teetering dangerously on unsteady ground. The earth has jagged lines carved into it, great cavernous holes where creatures much larger than the bodies they inhabit were beaten down savagely. In one, torn in two with a viciousness bordering on insanity, a Chevy Impala - newly repaired and painted just hours before - lay in ruins. The boys themselves are battered and unsteady at the ragged edges of the battle ground, wide eyed and terrified at the forces at war before them.
They hadn't known of Bad Wolf. Hadn't known to summon her for help or even how to do so if they did. But they knew Rose Tyler and the Doctor and the strange Blue Box that they traveled in. They were friends. When Sam called, sounding so small and weary and broken, it had not been to a mobile phone millions of years in the future. He had been praying to Castiel, the broken Angel who had betrayed them, had gone mad from the souls burning too brightly inside him. She had known anyway though. She was Bad Wolf. The whole of Time and Space was hers to cradle in her hands. Her friends needed help, that was all she needed to know.
The split hurt. Dividing herself between the Deleks in the future and the Winchesters in the past. It was not an easy balance to keep when Castiel - what had used to be Castiel - had arrived in a raged body and righteous fury. Two false gods, clamoring for her attention, threatening the people she cared for. Tearing her in two, pulling at her viscously from each side. It didn't matter, though. She saw everything, all that was, all that is, all that ever could be. She knew how the battles she fought would end. Knew that the pain of the divide would be only temporary. It was the pain of seeing Castiel so horribly changed that would last.
There had been so little left of her friend left. Only a deteriorating vessel and the rotting, putrid core within. She had seen the moment he appeared, mind broken and bent to the will of monsters long ago imprisoned for their evil, the seeping wound that was his fragile Grace, bleeding out with every pulse of the clock. The souls he had absorbed choked him - the Castiel she knew - weakened him to the dark things lurking within the shadows of Purgatory. He had been dying the moment he had taken in the first soul, slowly and painfully. He clung to life only for the sake of Dean and Sam and Bobby, the family he had betrayed. The family the twisted thing he had become had attempted to kill.
"Cas…" He wasn't moving anymore. His body, already melting away from the strain of so much being contained within it, was broken beyond even a False God's ability to repair. She stood over where he had fallen, his torn and tattered wings giving out on him midflight, and looked down at his bent form with the ache of mourning burning within her chest. He wasn't dead, but it wasn't so far off. She wanted him back though, before he slipped away. Wanted that tiny sliver of what was Castiel to drift to the surface, wanted to know that that part of him wasn't gone just yet. Far away she could hear Dean yelling, the crunch of metal being pulled and pushed out of the way as the older Winchester furiously attempted to make his way to them. The shout of Bobby and Sam echoed close behind, though it was Dean's name they called instead. "Oh…Castiel…"
Blue eyes turn to her at length with a choked wheeze, his head unable to turn towards her upon his broken neck. Gold drifted down from her to him, stardust and time twisting close around his bent frame as she moved to settle beside him. Her head was burning now; the effort of the battle, resisting the taxing pull of her fight with in the future, it was destroying her as surely as the Leviathans had destroyed Castiel. She couldn't leave though, not yet. Not with the sad blue eyes looking up at her, apologetic and fading. Not with the way shaky, bloody fingers twitched in her direction, his body unable to fulfill his wish to reach for her in the state it was in. She reached out and took his hand, instead, cradled the damaged limb carefully in her own.
She settled her other hand on his ragged chest, feeling the squirm of twisted souls and rotten shadows beneath her hand. The look on his face was devastatingly hopeful as she met his gaze, the look of one accepting death with wretched eagerness. This was what remained of the Angel Castiel. A broken, desperate creature searching for absolution in Death. She could see it, every thought as it sluggishly slid through his mind. Guilt and horror, pain at all the things he had done to the people he loved. It burned at her more intensely than the thrum of time swirling through her head.
Beneath her hand, she could feel the Leviathans still trying to claw their way free from Castiel's body, tearing at the thin veil of grace and flesh that separated from an unprepared world. The souls were there too, rioting against the confines of the inert body they were caught within. It wouldn't be long before Castiel was dragged beneath the rolling tide of twisted things inside him, before he was swallowed up completely and lost. Stardust and ancient things slipped down from the veil that had curled around her upon looking into the Tardis' heart. The gold drifted and settled upon his skin like dust finally settling after a harsh wind, settling down within his flesh and bones. It clung to him thickly, a harsh contrast to the brightness of the blood and the paleness of his skin as it slipped past the physical confines of his body and to the mess of grace and souls and hungry Leviathan.
They shrieked and screamed at her touch, thrashing wildly to escape the pulse of light and time. In a time far and away from the one she was in she was performing the same task, reaching out to touch at a False God's atoms, scattering them across all of time and space, beyond any hope of repair. It was more difficult doing so to intangible creatures squatting inside her friend's body. Cas seized beneath her touch, his shattered voice wheezing and gasping from the pain he could not express. She couldn't ease the pain, not with the delicacy of the task she was performing, not with all of existence wearing at her mind. He squeezed desperately at the hand she still held, the agony he was trapped in tearing her apart. In the distance, Dean's voice became clearer, closer, desperation steeped in every syllable of Castiel's name as he tore his way through the mess of Bobby's salvage yard.
The Leviathan turned to dust, scattered across the universe to be swallowed up by black holes and empty space. The souls, corrupted and tainted, she did her best to repair. Some shone under the faintest brush; others fought her as vehemently as the ancient monsters she had just destroyed. It took seconds, it took lifetimes. Castiel stopped moving, the battered remains of his body too weak to continue the struggle, his hand limp and cold in her hold. When she looked to his grace, singular once more inside him, it flickered and dimmed dangerously.
Jack Harkness would live for billions of years. She knew that because she was the reason it happened, because she saw all the things her friend had to do and knew that it was important that he one day whisper a terrible secret to her Doctor. Castiel, though, had lived longer than all of human existence. His life was measured not in years but in millennia. He didn't need forever. Just a lifetime, a single, human lifetime to spend with those he loved. She was Bad Wolf, she brought life. For a short time, she controlled it all. The sun and the moon, the day and night. She could reach out and take the pieces of the broken angel before her and change them, reshape them. A pulse beneath the warming skin, the stretch of atrophied lungs pulling in breath for the first time since the day Jimmy Novak last walked the earth. Shattered, broken grace melded back together, reformed to resemble a human soul.
She reached beyond Castiel, to the world around them ravaged by their battle. Erasing the small war from existence. The cars returned to their rusted, disused stacks. The house, still run down and worn, but whole and steady once more. The black Impala, twisted back into shape, returned to its place of honor in the drive. Sam's wall was beyond her, not even Death could properly construct a shield and she was not so powerful, but there were easier ways. Tricks of the human mind, carefully adjusted so that his mind simply slid away from hell and its terrible memories. The effort burned, the power devouring her with an intensity she could not have ever imagined as a human. It was worth the pain, worth the agony renting her head apart.
She turned to Heaven. To the slaughtered Angels and the damage that would remain once, they were revived. She could not change what happened. Even Heaven had moments in time that were fixed in place. Civil war had to happen, Raphael had to die. The Angels would remember Castiel killing them, would want their revenge. She couldn't stop that. Not without risking the delicate balance of the universe. A small push to suggest Castiel's death in their minds was all she could manage. Fragile and fallible though it was. If he was found, and there were many futures that awaited where this was a very real fear, the small dam she placed in the Heavenly Host's mind would break. Castiel would be fair game to his siblings' wrath. It would, she knew, fall to the Winchesters to protect him in either case. He couldn't return to heaven, not until his death when his grace-born soul would be admitted to the human side and out of the Angels' reach.
Castiel's hand tightened around hers as she focused on him once again. His eyes were bright again, confused at the rush of information swirling in his mind but whole and alive. Her head burned as in the future the battle with the Deleks came to a head. She could hear Her Doctor, his voice horrified at the knowledge of what she had done, of what she had become in order to protect him. Castiel reached up for her face, curled the palm of his hand – freshly cleaned of blood and damage – around the apple of her cheek. She couldn't stay much longer.
"Thank you."
He didn't say the words, was still too weak from everything to force his voice to obey, but she heard them anyway. She smiled to him, reassuring and understanding and saw him fall to the exhaustion his human body was plagued with. His hand slipped from her face, falling weakly to his chest as his slipped into restful unconscious. She envied his sleep, envied the chance at rest. She was tired, slipping away to a time far from then. She had to go, had to leave him before she burned up completely and time was altered irrevocably.
"Cas?" She turned to see Dean, stunned and fumbling and still worried for the friend who had betrayed them. It would take time to repair all the damage, to fix the hurts that had been inflicted by both sides. They would do it though. She could see it. See the slow and careful reconstruction, the powerful bond that would flourish once it was all over. They would make it, and it would start with that moment. She smiled to Dean, a final goodbye – she'd never see him again, though he and Cas and Sam and Bobby would run into the Doctor more than once in the coming years. She would be gone though, lost to another world in a time too soon for comfort – and allowed the Tardis to pull her back to the Game Station. She could hear Her Doctor's voice, closer than before. His warm hands upon hers, pulling her close, guiding her through the agony of having such power in her head.
Her last image of them – the angel and the hunters she had come to befriend – was a warm one. Dean pulling Cas close, Sam crowding in close to help, Bobby gruffly hovering nearby. A family reunited. A future assured.
I really like the sort of two-sides-of-the-same-coin feel these two particular characters have. Rose and Cas both became the equivalent of gods after cracking open something they weren't supposed to and absorbing everything inside. The only difference was what they were drawing from. Rose became Bad Wolf, this hugely powerful thing that could atomize entire armies with the wave of her hand and rewrite history itself, and because she became Bad Wolf from absorbing the Heart of the Tardis she was still very much a force of good. Everything she did was in the name of protecting the Doctor and Earth. In Cas' case he was drawing from Purgatory which was chopped full of all sorts of blood-thirsty creatures and Leviathan. When he took all of that in it corrupted him and turned him into this sort of manacle, disillusioned god-figure that caused a lot of destruction. They both did what they did for good reasons, but because they ended up using vastly different sources for the power they ended up with, things changed rapidly. The idea (for me anyway) made for a really hard plot-bunny to ignore.
I'm really tempted to go ahead and mess around with more stories with Bad Wolf and Godstiel in it, just for the sake of exploring the whole thing a little more :)