Title: The Vigilante of Eden
Rating: M, mostly for language, probably light violence, and definitely smut later on
Pairing: Destiel, a little bit of Sam/Jess, and eventual Meg/Jo.
Tags/Warnings: Fantasy AU, M/M, Potential violence later on, Smut, Vigilante!Cas and Hunter!Dean, Wing!Kink, Dean and Cas were childhood friends, Light angst
Characters: (Whoo boy. In order of appearance, then?) Castiel, Dean Winchester, Zachariah, Meg Masters, Jo Harvelle, Ash, Ellen, Chuck Shurley, Samandriel, Lucifer, Crowley, Becky Rosen, Michael, Victor Henriksen, Sam Winchester, Jessica Moore/Winchester, Bobby Singer, Benny, Bela, Garth, Gabriel, Kali, Amy Pond, Gilda, Charlie, Ruby, Uiel, Anna...so, yeah. Everyone, essentially.
A/N: This is a story I've had in my head for a LONG time, but it's never been quite right. It's too complex for a short story, it's not quite right to be made into a full book. I had original characters at first, but yesterday it HIT ME. This is the PERFECT DESTIEL FANTASY AU. Everything about the characters and plot fit, so here I am, a day later, sharing it with all of you.
(I think I sort of loosely based this off the Montmorency books...give credit where credit is due, right?)
Feedback is absolutely always and indisputably appreciated/loved!
Enjoy!
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"Castiel."
Cas froze at the sound of the voice behind him. Slowly, he turned, keeping his expression carefully neutral. "Zachariah," he nodded.
The older man approached, flashing his sickly-sweet smile. "Tell me you're not retiring already? You're going to miss out on all the fun."
"The King gave me permission. And you know I prefer not to consume alcohol when I can help it."
"I know," Zachariah whined, lifting his hand to ghost his fingers across Castiel's jaw. Cas tried not to flinch away—Zachariah may have been a sleazy, disgusting kiss ass, but he was a Duke and a member of the royal court and Cas would do well not to offend him. "But I'd like to see you more."
"I'll remember that in the future," Cas grated out, fighting to keep his meek, polite composure. Here, in the castle, he had to remember to be polite. There was a time and a place for letting loose, and this was not it. "For now, however, I am tired. Goodnight, Zachariah."
"Goodnight, Castiel. Sleep well."
Sleep. Cas snorted. Angels didn't need sleep, but the nobles were so lazy and fat they'd long since forgotten.
Castiel was much more productive with his time.
As per usual, a guard escorted him home—nothing less for one of the King's favorite angels. He had to stay safe, after all.
It was a short walk from the castle to Castiel's small, modest home. The guard left him at the front gate, promising to pick him up at the usual time the next morning.
Most of the King's Courtiers lived with the King in the castle, but Cas somehow managed to convince the man to let him have his own home, saying that he 'was used to independence and wanted to uphold some semblance of normalcy.'
Castiel was different than the rest of the Angels of the Court. He hadn't grown up in the city of Eden, like the others. He'd been raised in a small village, thousands of miles north and east.
His father had been one of the King's most trusted advisors, an archangel of the highest ranking, but his mother was just a small girl from nowhere important.
What can he say? They fell in love. Married. Created Castiel. When his father was assassinated, Cas was still a child, and so his mother—rather than staying in Eden, a home that was not her own—returned to Lawrence, with the understanding that when Castiel was old enough, he would have to return to Eden and take over his father's position.
At eighteen, before his wings even manifested, he left behind everything. He left behind….No. It didn't matter. Not anymore.
Point is, he was different from the other members of the court, angel and human alike. He didn't grow up in luxury. He wasn't content to sit around all day and sleep all night, not engaging or caring about anything. He grew up having to work to live, having to fight to protect, having to nurture to love.
Castiel loved fiercely and protectively, and once he loved something he fought for it. So when he fell in love with the shining city of Eden, he couldn't bear to watch as Eden fell apart. He tried talking to the King about it, but the King was- sorry as he was to have to say it- too cowardly to act.
Once he got inside the house and gave himself a moment to breathe, he headed to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, he removed his irritating brown contacts from his eyes, revealing the natural, electric blue underneath. The contacts had become a staple part of his daily wardrobe, his natural blue being too striking and unique to wear both day and night. They were a dead giveaway.
As were his wings. He lifted his eyes to the large, white fixtures arched above his back with a sigh.
All citizens of Eden told stories of the city's protector, an angel with wings the color of the night sky and eyes the color of the ocean.
Next, he scrubbed his face clean of the powdery white foundation covering it. It was "in fashion" for men of high birth, particularly angels, to be pale, much as Castiel wished it wasn't. His skin was naturally tan, which hadn't been so much of a problem he'd lived in the sunny north.
He slipped out of his many layers of unnecessary clothing—jewelry, coat, waistcoat, undershirt, boots, trousers, stockings—rolling his eyes at the impracticality of it all. When he first came to Eden, he was shocked by the amount of ridiculous, ostentatious clothing people wore for the sake of fashion.
Once he'd completely stripped down, he stepped into the already-filled bathtub which he had a servant, Inias, come in and fill every day before he got home. He started by rinsing his hair, trying to wash out the mountain of hair gel needed to keep the black mop flat on his head. Without it, it stuck up in every direction, and no amount of brushing or hair pins could save it.
After washing his hair until it squeaked, he moved on. He took the bucket next to the tub and filled it with water, reaching back and dumping the water over his wings. Ten minutes of twisting, contorting, rinsing, scrubbing, and brushing later, the tub was filled with a clumpy, milky white mixture and Castiel's wings were once more a beautiful, sleek blue-black.
He flexed them, letting them twitch and stretch without the constraint of the white paint, and smiled. It was the greatest feeling, getting home every day and being able to free his wings of their painted confinement.
He abandoned the clothes on the floor, instead heading to the back of his closet and finding his work clothes. The outfit included: a pair of black trousers (tight fitting but made of a flexible fabric), a belt (and attached to it, two thin knives, and occasionally, a sword), and a loose fitting white button up (he always left the first two buttons untouched), and a strangely shaped bronze pendant with a face on it—the last of these had no practical use, but it was something Castiel kept on him at all times.
None of this twenty layers of clothing nonsense. His uniform was simple and practical, made to let him move swiftly and silently. The coat was perhaps an indulgence, but he had to admit he liked the look it gave him.
He unlocked the door to his basement and climbed down the rickety steps. There, in the middle of the floor, was a large drain, just large enough for a person to squeeze through. It led, he knew from experience, into the city's sewer system.
Pressing his wings tight to his back, he lifted the cover off the hole and climbed down into the hole.
From there, the whole city was before him. The modern underground sewage system was still relatively new—it had been installed a hundred years ago—and most of Eden didn't realize that a sprawling maze stretched beneath their feet, a maze that led to every street and building in the city.
It had taken Castiel less than a week in Eden to discover it. Another week to memorize the layout. He didn't mind the smell, for a few minutes at a time, and he could fly through the tunnels so that he didn't have to touch the slime on the walls or the waste on the floors, so it wasn't really so bad.
He soared through the wide tunnel, twisting and ducking to avoid pipes and barriers, and reached his destination in a few minutes. The cover was already open for him and he rose up through it, spreading his wings in the sudden fresh, open space. He settled with a soft sigh and tucked his wings back up behind his back, kicking the manhole closed with his boot.
"Evening, Clarence," a cloying, feminine voice came from behind him.
"Meg," Castiel said, unsurprised, turning toward the demon girl. "I hope you weren't trying to sneak up on me."
"Like I could even if I wanted to," Meg smiled up at him, rising to her feet and stretching sensually.
They were in a large stone basement, surrounded by kegs of a dozen different kinds of alcohol and other food supplies. Meg, for her part, had just been lounging on a stack of flour sacks.
"Were you napping down here again?" Cas furrowed his eyebrows. "Ellen wouldn't approve."
"I won't tell if you won't," Meg chirped, turning toward the stairs, "Are you coming, or would you rather hang out down here all evening? It's not like you have work to do or anything."
"I'm coming," Cas said, following her. He tucked away his wings, fitting them in the space between worlds so they could not be seen.
Meg and Castiel's relationship was an unusual one. She was a demon, and he was an angel. She was a good demon and he was—by most people's standards—a bad angel. She was the first person to befriend him when he came to Eden (the first person that wasn't simply befriending him to please the King, that is), and since then, their friendship had only grown.
She flirted with him ceaselessly, and he even flirted back occasionally, but that's not what their friendship was based on. Their friendship came from mutual understanding—knowing what it is to be the minority, and knowing what it is not to fit in with even the minority. They were both unique among their own kind, and because of that, they understood what the other endured.
Demons rarely wander into Earth, instead keeping to their own country—the Western land of Hell, whose border is a mere three days' ride from Earth's capital city, Eden.
When demons did wander into the country, they were looked down on and hunted by humans.
In Earth, even rarer than demons are angels, though angels live in harmony with humans. More or less. They are revered by humans, mostly, but they are also viewed with fear, because humans fear that which is different. Angels live beside humans—mostly in the royal court or other positions of power—but they do not live among humans.
"So," Meg began, "is tonight a running night, or will you be gracing us with your presence?"
"I'll be here," Cas answered. "I ran last night."
Castiel didn't like keeping to a schedule. Switching up what he did and when kept him unpredictable, making it more difficult for him to get caught.
"Goody," Meg smirked, holding the door open for him.
It was early in the evening, so the Roadhouse was still mostly empty. When he entered the room, Jo looked up from wiping down the bar and smiled at Cas.
"Hey," she said with a smile. "How was your day?"
"Long," Cas answered, smiling back easily. He accepted the drink Jo passed him. The bar's few patrons had looked at him with interest when he came in, but quickly lost interest and returned to their meals. Without his wings, he passed as a normal human from a distance.
"Ah, yes…your long day of doing what, exactly?" Meg asked.
He rolled his eyes at her. "Valiant attempt."
They didn't know who he was during the day. Nobody in his life knew who he was, not completely. They only knew one side—either the innocent or the outlaw. It was one of the downfalls of his lifestyle: he was free to save people, but there was no one to save him.
Castiel considered this life to be who he was at the core. The man he became when the sun set. The Vigilante, they called him, the Angel of Darkness. The Angel with the Black Wings. He owned the city, knew its every secret and manipulated its every weakness.
He'd been in Eden fifteen years, and for fifteen years he'd been fighting to save the city. It was a slow battle, and he was only one man, but he did what he could.
This, Castiel liked to believe, revealed the truth in his soul. He wasn't the smiling, mindless clone the court and the other angels worked to turn him into. He was more than they would ever be, because he had suffered, and he had loved—and humans had always done more for him than his own kind had, and so he would continue to fight for them.
But his friends here in the Roadhouse probably would have laughed themselves to tears if they saw him as he was during the day: painted wings, perfect clothes, miserable out of his mind.
"Meg, could you go clean the bathroom before the crowd comes in?" Jo asked, "Mom went to the market and left me with, like, a million things to do."
Meg pouted, then perked up and turned to Cas with a wicked glint in her eye. "I would love to, Jo, doll, but Clarence said he had an errand for me to run, isn't that right, Clarence?"
"I do, actually. Sorry, Jo," Cas said. Meg worked for Ellen, but she worked for Castiel first and foremost. He leaned in so he and Meg were only inches apart, casting a suspicious look at the man slumped at the other end of the bar, and lowered his voice. "Cal Stewart, the owner of the training post down by the docks?"
"I know the one."
"Tell him that the problem is being caused by his assistant. She's manipulating him, dealing under the table with his competitor."
"Gotcha. What does he owe you? Seek and inform?"
"Yes."
"I'll be back in an hour, boss," Meg said, giving him a mock salute and a wink.
"If you really need help with your, um, bathrooms…" Cas trailed off when Meg was gone.
Jo snorted. "I'm not going to make Eden's vigilante scrub our toilets. If you really want to help, though, you could bring up a keg of ale from the basement. We're running low."
"That I can do."
.
He lounged at the bar all night, occasionally helping Ellen or Jo with something. Once or twice, Ash would sat and talked to him. Ash was strange, and Cas often didn't understand what he was saying, but he enjoyed the eccentric man's company nonetheless.
Meg sat a few seats down from him, dealing with prospective clients. He half-listened as a young man approached Meg nervously.
"I want to speak to the Vigilante. I heard you're the one to talk to? You are Meg, right?"
"That's me, sweetheart," Meg smirked, looking the man up and down.
"But you're a demon," the boy gasped.
"Don't worry, I'm one of the good guys," Meg whispered with a wink. "Sit."
He sat.
"Name?"
"Uh, Kevin Tran."
"I'm guessing you haven't done this before, Kevin? Let me tell you how it works, then: You don't get to meet the Angel unless I say so, got it? You're going to tell me your problem, and if I think it's important enough for the boss to deal with, then I'll let you know. If I say yes, you'll come back tomorrow and meet him upstairs, and from there, he'll decide whether he wants to take your case or not."
That was how it worked when Castiel wasn't in the building. It was, however, the speech Meg gave to every client. On the nights Castiel stayed in the Roadhouse, Meg didn't make any of the decisions. Meg and Cas had a system worked out: he listened, tapped the counter once for yes, twice for no. It's not that he didn't trust Meg's judgment, bravado aside she was a good woman and he would trust her with his life, but she had a peculiar sense of humor and she had a way of mixing it into the cases she chose for Castiel.
"Most people come to the Vigilante because they got something discreet they need to know. If you want easy information about something, it'll be ten silvers. Information that's harder to get'll be between twenty and thirty, depending, and if you want him to actually do something for you, you know, steal something, take down a bad guy, crush an evil organization, kill someone-"
"Kill someone?" the boy squeaked.
"Hell," Meg rolled her eyes, briefly meeting Cas' amused glance with a do-you-see-what-I-have-to-deal-with look. "It was a joke, kid, he's a hero—he doesn't kill people. Come on, what's the matter with you? Anyways, the price is all up to him, but that'll be a lot more. So we all clear on that?"
The boy frowned, looking worried. "I don't have a lot of money..."
Meg sighed and decided to take pity on him. "To tell you the truth, he usually works for free- just collects money from the superficial assholes who come in looking for an easy fix for their problems. Don't worry about it. Now, tell me what's bothering you, baby boy."
.
"I call it: electricity," Ash bragged with a flourish of his hands. Cas nodded at him, eyebrows raised and a small smile on his lips.
"It's an interesting theory," Cas agreed. "You'll have to show it to me if you get it to work."
"When," Ash nodded sagely. He said something else, but Cas was no longer paying attention. He was watching the man that just walked into the Roadhouse.
The man was beautiful. He was tall and broad, all cheeky grin and confident swagger. He walked to the bar, and Castiel swallowed nervously. Bow legs. Luminescent green eyes. A beautiful constellation of freckles across tanned skin. A golden, profoundly pure human soul.
Dean.
Castiel looked away when the man reached the bar, hiding his face. Dean—who else could it possibly be? In his entire life, Castiel had only ever seen a soul so beautiful in one man—started speaking to Jo in a low, rough voice, and Cas risked a glance. He was leaning casually against the bar, a flirtatious smile on his face. Jo was blushing, and fumbling to get the man his drink.
"Do you know where I can find a Meg?" the man asked. "I'm told I need to talk to her."
Castiel glanced over the man's shoulders, meeting Meg's predatory gaze. Her eyebrows shot up when she saw the panic that was probably plastered across his face. His hand automatically flew up to the pendant around his neck, and he shook his head once, a barely visible movement.
He didn't give Meg time to react before he pushed himself away from the bar, heading straight for the basement, and he didn't stop until he was home.
Only then did he let himself panic.
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"No fair!" Castiel shouted, climbing as fast as he could without losing his grip. All to no avail. Dean was already at the top, sitting and smiling down at him.
"I win," he said smugly as soon as Cas reached the top, settling on the bench next to him with a huff.
"No, you do not! That was unfair and you know it!" Castiel said; feigning anger. In truth, he couldn't be mad at Dean.
"How was that unfair?" Dean asked in his melodic, childlike voice, a teasing smile on his face. "Sammy, was that unfair?" he called down to the base of the tree. The young boy at the bottom looked up from his book just long enough to roll his eyes. Dean laughed quietly.
"When my wings come in, I'll be able to beat you every time," Cas smirked.
"No way, dude. Using wings- now that's cheating," he said, smiling again. The sun played on the young boy's freckled face, lighting up his green eyes and giving them a golden cast. "I'm a better climber than you, and you know it," he teased.
Cas shook his head, smiling.
"Oh, yeah? You want a rematch, then? Okay..."
"No," Cas laughed, catching Dean's arm as the boy moved to climb down. "We can have a rematch later. Just stay up here with me."
Dean smiled at him. "Don't ever change, Cas."
"I won't."
Dean nodded, his smile fading slightly. "Hey, Cas?"
"Hmmm?"
"Thanks. For, you know...letting me and Sam stay over last night. Dad was..."
"I understand," the older boy nodded, silently letting Dean know that he didn't have to talk about it if he didn't want to. Dean smiled, grateful.
"Mom's coming back tomorrow, though," Dean perked up, "it'll get better then. Dad's just bad when she's gone. And he always makes pie, her first night back, and it's so good. I'll ask if you can have some, too."
"You don't have to," Cas said. "I don't want to be a hassle."
"You're my best friend," Dean said with a sheepish smile, "It's no hassle."
Cas nodded again. "You're my best friend too, Dean. And any time you need...anything. I'll always be here for you."
"Promise?" Dean asked, lips twitching up into a smile.
"Promise."