Characters not mine.

(Originally written for a dark heroes/anti-heroes challenge on comment_fic. Prompt was "From his point of view, he's the persecuted hero of this story.")


He's got to wonder, sometimes, if there's any place he can go that isn't a cage.

Hell's a cage, of course, for souls and demons and all sorts of other things. It's a different cage from his own prison, larger and darker and littered with all the things humans are capable of that angels, even fallen ones, aren't. He's finally gotten out of one prison to make a rebellion out of another.

Nick's body is a cage, too. It's even less reliable than Hell, and more dangerous, too. It was never built to handle him, and it's deteriorating slowly under the pressure, until it's so broken down that every little movement makes raw nerves scream - whether or not he remembers to breath. But of all his prisons, it's the only mobile one he has, so the pain and the pressure is something he'll take, in hopes of finding a way out of prison.

He's not convinced that Sam Winchester isn't just another cage, either. It's a better cage, a nicer one, but there would still be flesh and bone and limitations, and a human soul in there with him, howling.

And he's tired of cages.

It's something that the brothers who still have heaven will never understand. The breaking of the seals didn't set him free, it only gave him his choice of other prisons. And remaking the world is the only way to tear the doors off those cages and burn them down.