The noise of the man was a lot less jarring than he had expected, considering how far the man had fallen. He would've expected some sort of break in the sound barrier when one falls from the limit of the atmosphere. The falling man didn't think as such.
When he hit the car it crumpled beneath him like it was nothing, leaving a man sized dent in the bonnet.
Sam almost wondered what he was doing there, falling from the sky and all, before he realised that that was stupid and he should really just start expecting these things. Without thinking he drew his gun and jogged forward towards the car, before realising that it was probably wasn't going to need to use a gun on a dead person. Chances are a guy falling from the sky wasn't going to be alive.
He inched over with practiced caution. Dean was back in the hotel room, probably listening to obnoxiously loud music and eating food with enough calories to feed the titanic times ten. The man wasn't particularly large, or even very tall, though he was thin and his skin was as pale as silver. He had long, bight yellow hair, curled and untied it hung sadly around his head. He was, in most senses, one of the most beautiful people he had ever seen. Like a child or a happy man his features were soft and seemed at peace while he lay barely breathing or moving.
Sam could almost pretend that he was asleep, almost. Their was something about his posture that made him seem scared, like he was so scared he could barely protect himself. There was also, of course, the fact that his hair was stained with his crimson blood as was his librarian-like clothes and his marred, though flawless, skin. Sam stared at him in horror. This was a beautiful person and they were scored with blood, some not even his own.
It was disgusting.
He dropped the gun, not even bothering to think about the prospect of a threat. The man didn't seem to be able to keep himself conscious let alone do any physical harm. Sam cupped his bloodied cheeks, tapping them lightly and trying to make him stir. The man's face screwed up, his chin creasing as if he was about to cry. The man didn't open his eyes, he only clenched his legs closer to his chest as if he was trying to save himself from more harm.
"Hey, wake up. We gotta get you fixed up, so you gotta wake up." Sam tried earnestly to get the man to wake up though all he got was a pained moan and a small, frail hand trying desperately to push him way. "Hey. Don't worry, you're gonna be fine. Whoever was hurting you, they're gone now." It was like Sam was pleading with him, unable to convince the man was that the world was a safe place to be. Sam held onto the man's thin wrists to keep him from hurting himself more, his head swinging about, thinking of the consequences if anyone, but him had seen the man fall.
Rushly he gathered up the man and his broken nature to cradle him in his arms as if he was a child. Compared to Sam's size he did resemble that of a boy. He seemed the same age, if not younger, than then tall man, his skin barely blemished with wrinkles, excusing the small laugh lines around his eyes. Without thought Sam darted across the way, towards the hotel room where Dean was probably still stationed, leaving his bag by the car.
Sam considered himself a fairly nice person, he donated to charity's when he had the money, saved people for a career, he tried to be as kind as possible towards people as he could, but this… act of kindness seemed to him not to be the wisest course of action. If he was anyone else in the world, someone with different experiences and a different opinion of the mythical world, he probably would've called an ambulance and put down seeing the man falling from the sky a trick of the eye and that he had simply jumped from the roof. Unfortunately for him he wasn't this person, he wasn't as wise as he had once been and he certainly didn't consider the mythical world particularly mythical.
When he saw a man, bleeding and battered, falling from the sky he didn't run away, he didn't fear what a normal person would fear. Instead he ran forward, he drew a gun, and he tried to help as best he could despite the possibility of a threat.
He burst though the door to the hotel room with renewed vigour, he wasn't a good person per se, but he wasn't willing to let a man bleed out in the parking lot.
"Dean!" He had been right, of course. Dean was sitting on his bed on the far side of the room eating the chilly fries they had brought before booking the room, listening the the loudest version of Asia he had, drinking obnoxious amounts of beer and polishing his guns. That was the basic life story of Dean Winchester's adult existence.
Like his neck was made on a trigger Dean's head whipped up and met his younger brother's eyes, already analysing the situation and wondering if he was going to need his gun. It was sad really, that he could bypass out of his relaxed state so quickly, depressing even. It was the sort of quickness that only came from experience and not the nice kind.
Dean's green eyes flickered to the fallen man and his not awake, bleeding and generally frail-looking state and then back to Sam who was looking slightly distraught with the whole situation.
"You were gone like two minutes." His voice sounded as though he was seriously considering keeping the younger Winchester on a leash. Sam looked at him in distress, he was fairly sure that when the younger brother brought home a wounded pet it was the older brother that was meant to know what to do.
Sam wasn't squeamish, he had dealt with too much blood for that, but he was a concerned with how much blood the man had lost. They needed to stitch him up, now. He shook his head, deciding not to wait for Dean's cue. He wondered as he lay the man down on his bed who had done this, what had happened, why the man had been attacked. There were a lot of questions, and presumably a lot of questions that he didn't actually have.
It didn't really matter to him.
It seemed simple, if the man awoke and attacked him he would attack back. If the man didn't attack he would aspire to help, because obviously this was within his field of expertise, he could understand people falling from the sky, or at least he could try and understand without loosing his marbles. That seemed like a plus, lucky guy for falling where he did. He yelled to Dean to get the first aid kit and began to cut away the man's dress shirt and sweater with the pair of scissors he had been using to cut out newspaper clippings before he had existed the building.
The man had multiple stab wounds covering his abdomen, bruises too, like he had been kicked. Sam stared at them in disgust. He hated anyone who would do this to another person. He couldn't even like himself for doing it when it was deserved. He felt hypocritical just thinking about it, but before he could sink dramatically back into self loathing Dean joined him beside the bed, already growling with agitation. He knew his brother wasn't one for strangers, or helping people or anything of that nature really, but he also knew that he wouldn't just leave someone to die. Or at least he hoped.
"What the hell is going on?" He demanded as Sam snatched the box from him, already making an effort to stop the ready bleeding. "Who is that?" Dean pointed accusingly at the man's pale face and Sam's stomach dropped. He was angry, but that was an inherit part of his personality at this point so his didn't look into it too deeply.
"I don't know, he fell from the sky." Sam ran across the room, he needed hot soapy water and he figured that he shouldn't let Dean and his scepticism deter him.
"This stuff just follows us about, doesn't it?"
…
Dean stood beside the bed where the man lay, the elderly blanket covering the man's sown up and bandaged wounds. Sam was sitting on the other side of the man trying to get the blood out of the man's blond hair. He had woken up a few times before, during the stitching and the cleaning of the wounds only to be confronted in panic with some more antiseptic and a large amount of antibiotics; his body seemed to burn through the drugs incredibly quickly. He was currently curled on his side, facing towards Dean as Sam forced a comb through his curly hair.
In his hand was a small pair of spectacles, they were rusty and cracked and bent all out of shape, but he refused to let them go. Neither of the brothers thought they were of any importance so they let him cling them like he obviously needed to. The fallen man hadn't been carrying any weapons or even any personal effects, excluding a small, elderly, leather wallet. Not even a watch sat on his wrist, only bruises in the shape of chains lay there.
Dean stood, going thought the wallet, leafing through it with vague interest. He doubted that the man's tormentor would send him off with identification, but apparently he had been wrong. Inside the wallet were a few english pounds, a few elderly pieces of paper with scrawled, faded notes, a yellowed photo that Dean cast to the side, two credit cards and a drivers licence. It wasn't a particularly personal wallet, though it was old. On one side someone had scratched the initials A.C underlined into the soft brown leather.
"Sammy," he stated, looking over one of the credit cards and the shiny, blood splattered drivers licence. "Our mystery falling man has a name." Sam looked up from the knotty curls to his brother who held up the credit cards where a name was printed in cold, silver letters. "Dr Zira Fale, born May, the 13th 1967, London." Dean's expression showed simple contempt, but Sam looked surprised, eyes darting from the man to the card in confusion.
"1967? That would make him over forty years old, Dean." He stated it like it was impossible, like he had never met someone who claimed to be younger than they were.
"Yeah, and he doesn't look a day over twenty-five. And this photo," the rough looking man tossed the yellowed photo to his brother. "It's marked for 1823." The photo seemed to be of two men dressed in suits, smiling, arms around each other as they stood on the grass.
The man on the right was clearly the fallen man, though his blond hair was tied up and he was grinning like mad. The man on the right Sam didn't recognise. He was tall, short dark hair leafed around his cheek bones, and he had his arms playfully wrapped around the smaller man. Round sunglasses covered his eyes and his grin was entirely fond and ever so slightly menacing. It was a happy photo.
Sam turned it over in hands, careful to be gentle. On the back written in pencil were the words:
1823, February, a day in Berlin with C.
"They look happy," he mused before the photo was snatched from his hands.
"Not the point," Dean stared at him as if he daft and he stared back, the man apparently named Zira Fale still sleeping weakly between them. They didn't think that he was going to be waking up anytime soon considering how many drugs they had pumped into him, only to add to the state he was already in.
It was obvious they weren't dealing with a human here, or even a possessed human, but nothing could take what the man had been though without getting some sleep by the end of man had been stabbed, lashed, kicked, beaten, destroyed in every sense of the word.
He was going to be out for a while.
Sam would've considered the man an angel had he not been so beat up. He did have that ethereal angelicness about him, like a halo only not physical. Cas had the same thing, so had Gabriel and Balthazar.
"He's not even consistent, the drivers licence says Dr A. Ziraphale. Cant he make up his mind and stick with one aliases." Dean shook head like he was an expert in the field talking to a backyard amateur, which, in his defence, he probably was.
Sam sighed. What ever this man was doing here, who ever he had decided to be, that was none of his business. What was his business was whether 'Zira', as Sam had decided to call him, needed to be shot for unknown crimes against humanity. Either way he would deal with it later.
…
The ceiling was… fascinating.
Some will tell you that all ceilings are completely the same. This is a lie. Aziraphale didn't think so, not even slightly. He figured that ceilings, like anything else, have a story to tell if people would only look close enough. This ceiling, the one he stared at with complete conviction, was stained with some watery brown substance that made it resemble something unsavoury and undistinguished. He didn't really like it, it was too grimy for his taste.
The air seemed to smell like… crisps… and beer… and truck stop food. He remembered vaguely when Crowely and he had gone on a road trip through the Italy where they had eaten imported hamburgers, just for the sake of it. That had been a fun week.
Aziraphale ran his tongue over his teeth and thought as clearly as he could about the situation. His mind was vague and clouded and he had probably been drugged. He couldn't remember much. He remembered air rushing past his ears and fragments of course conversations. He distinctly remembered the thick, chemical smell of antiseptic and the familiar rustle of bandages. He also remembered looking up with clouded vision and seeing two men, one tall with longish brown hair, the shorter with the greenest green eyes he had ever seen. He had only seen them for a moment before something sharp was shoved into his shoulder and cool, destructive liquid filled his blood stream. He had panicked, he remembered.
He knew with vague certainty that his shirt and sweater no longer confined him, though his abdomen seemed to be covered with bandages. He could still feel his pants and he thought that was probably a good thing.
He tried to remember who he had pinpointed his fall to. It might've been Crowley, but he didn't think so. Maybe it was that Castiel boy, he had always seemed to secretly have a mind of his own. It was probably Gabriel though. As far as he knew he was still in his own personal witness protection. Before he had been imprisoned Aziraphale had gone to see him almost every month. He was the only one who had ever even vaguely thought that Crowely wasn't nearly as evil as he had the potential to be. He had missed Gabreil's visits after a while, though he suspected it was because security had gotten a lot tighter since the seals had begun to brake. Yes, he knew about that. It was still prison, rumours spread faster than the black plague. Which, for those who weren't present in the thirteenth century, was fairly quickly.
He was glad that he had sent that boy, Castiel, to pick up the righteous man, it seemed that it had been a good idea even knew. Even broken, even imprisoned and barely clinging to life, he still held some of the strings.
He turned his head to the side, mostly to investigate the figure sitting beside him. He didn't expect it to be someone he knew, he would've been able to sense them. Oddly enough he did know the person, though it took him a moment to recognise his soul. It seemed to of sustained some damage since the last time he had seen it, but that purity and heart, it was still there. Diminished and unpolished as it was, it was there, glowing softly right under his skin. He smiled.
"Samuel Winchester" He spoke with a cracked and broken voice, though it was laced, like poisoned wine, with joy. Joy that even after all these years, that he got to see that baby again, all grown up now, but still the same to him. All gurgling with curiosity at the world, his nose no longer buried in the backyard dirt, but now in a book.
The tall man looked up at him as the broken man spoke, his eyes showing shock at the man's frail smile and his apparent knowledge of his name. He was sitting very calmly in a chair beside the bed as if he was waiting for Aziraphale to wake up.
"How do you know my name?" He asked, voice soft and slightly threatened. Aziraphale patted his knee and closed his eyes to the ceiling, a small smile still on his lips.
"It has been a while, my dear, but I held you when you were a babe." It was a sad thought from back then. Those two boys, a baby who could sense the grieving, a little boy who wouldn't speak. "I read stories too your brother." His eyes weren't open, but he could see the boys soul flicker behind his eyelids. He could feel him self slipping back under. The pain drowning him, bringing the pricks of tears to his eyes. He kept his hand on the boy's knee, occasionally patting it, for comfort he supposed.
"Who are you?" The boy sounded stressed, though Aziraphale barely heard his question, he was too submerged in pain and drugs.
"I'm so proud of you…" He whispered in hope that the boy would hear him better than he could hear himself. "Your brother too… so proud…" And then he was gone, just as Dean walked in the door with dinner.
Sam was staring at the man and his sleeping state, eyes wide, lips parted, hanging open slightly, confusion and panic dominating his face.
"Did he wake up," Dean demanded. Sam nodded soundlessly. "Well? Did he say anything?" Sam slowly turned to his brother, eyes remaining wide.
"He… he told me he's proud… that he's proud of us." He faltered. "I think we better contact Meg and Castiel."