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Ch1: Gathering Moss
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Mary Joellen Winchester's family was as perfect as a group of angels, monsters, humans, and not-so-humans could possibly be. She never knew how barely five years before her birth, this was very much not the case.
So, when she tumbled into a new parallel dimension, as part of her personal vacation sabbatical before going on to continue her education, she was understandably startled to find the corresponding souls of her mother and uncle fleeing a fire, which reeked of sulfur.
"Ben!" She clutched her traveling companion's arm. "We have to help them!"
...
On Mary's seventh birthday, Sam and Henry Winchester managed to dig up an old movie camera and taped the whole thing.
When the family gathered around the TV to watch the replay of the events, the little birthday nephilim took one look at her family on the screen and screamed in bone shattering, light breaking terror.
"They all look worse than dead!" she later wept into her mother's chest, as Deanna tried to comfort her daughter. "They look like they've never been alive at all!"
"Baby girl, it was just a video, nothing to be scared of. You've watched TV before, remember? It's just like that."
Mary shook her head, still pressed fervently into the hunter's embrace. "TV people aren't real! They don't have any inside bits! Seeing you and Daddy and Uncle Sam and everyone all empty like that was horrible!"
"What do you mean?" Deanna said, confusion breaking through her comforting tone. "We don't look any different in the video than we do normally."
"Yeah hu!" the nephilim insisted, pulling back to stare fixedly at her. "Real people have inside glow-y bits! It's how you can tell they're real!"
A spark of understand stilled the hunter's hands, before they continued rubbing comforting circles on her daughter's back. "You mean souls and grace."
The little girl rubbed her eyes. "Yeah, I guess."
"Hm, looks like you've got another superpower from your Daddy's side of the family," Deanna hummed, carding her fingers through her daughter's hair. "Us vanilla-humans can't see people's 'inside glow-y bits.'"
"What, not at all? Then how do you tell people apart? Ben and Alec have the same face, and the angels aren't always wearing the same person!"
"Practice, I guess. I usually can tell the twins apart because of how differently they act."
"But how can you tell that? I mean, Daddy's extra heads make it easy, but without seeing his glow..."
Deanna chuckled. "Extra heads, hu?"
"Of course!"
"Sorry, vanilla flavor, remember? I can only see the vessel bits."
"You mean you don't know what Daddy looks like?" Mary practically gaped in disbelief.
Deanna took a thoughtful breath. "I guess not, but that doesn't really matter."
"But Aunty Jodie says a man's looks are really important for...something."
She slanted her daughter a look. "Have you been eaves dropping on Sheriff Mills when she gives her grown up talks to the other girls? You know you're not allowed to those until you're older."
"But she said it was important!"
The hunter huffed. "A lot of people think looks are important, and they don't hurt. Mister Novak, he was Daddy's vessel, was not an unattractive man. But aesthetics aren't important when you love someone."
She drummed her fingers, parsing words in her mind. "Castiel is... I know him, because of what he does. I might sometimes forget he's borrowing a body, but that's not why I love him." Unbidden, a smile of self realization, as if an unvocalized conundrum finally had a resolution, pulled the corners of Deanna's mouth. "To me, your father is everything he had done for me. That's how I see him. I know him by his actions."
Mary frowned, her head tilting to the side in an inherited tick of confusion. "But I can tell you what he looks like so you'll know."
Deanna kissed her daughter's forehead. "Thanks, baby girl, but I'm fine. Now let's go back downstairs and apologize to Sam and Henry. They worked really hard on that video, and the big girl was beside himself when you got upset."
...
"Ben!" Mary tugged insistently at the man's arm again. "We have to help them!"
The transgenic frowned, already feeling apprehensive at his self appointed duty to keep his cousin out of trouble. "Why? They're not ours, and we could end up messing up this universe. Remember the whole lecture Nuriel gave you about parallel causalities?"
"That was a horrible powerpoint," the nephilim deadpanned. "And since when has ganking a homicidal demon ever been a bad thing?"
"Since your mother promised to use my pelt as a rug if you got hurt at all on my watch."
"What am I, six?"
"Anyway," Ben dismissed her pouting. "We shouldn't interfere. That Sam and Deanna, er, Dean I guess, are not ours. We shouldn't confuse them with our family, because despite how similar they look they are not the people we know. That was the entire second half of the powerpoint lecture, by the way."
"Of course I know they're not them, they don't look anything like them!"
And from her perspective it was true. Where Ben only say the strange mirror of his own face and Sam in his gangly colt years, Mary saw flaring souls of untarnished enthusiasm in place of the quiet jaded countenance of her family.
Deanna's counterpart in particular could barely be aligned with the image of Mary's mother. Gone were the scarred patches of sulfurous brimstone, carefully concealed under tight controls and mists of healing grace. Taught stretched lights caused by stressful circumstances were replaced with cool green eddies of inexperience.
Sam's soul was practically unrecognizable as well, never having willingly drunk demon blood, nor been to the cage and healed by the combined efforts of a garrison of angels.
Mary wondered how her father would look if she saw him. Surely the inner core of his grace would be unchanged, as the outer most corona had been regrown after his fall and subsequent reinstatement as a seraph. Would his seventh set of arms still be charred to ruin, or had that only been a remnant of pulling a soul free from hell? What other scars of life, so ingrained into her perception of 'parent' had yet to or ever to exist?
Despite the virtual strangers these parallel versions were to her senses, Mary couldn't fight down the screaming voice which claimed them as family. And Winchesters always looked after their family (you know in the generations following that of John Winchester, but mottos have to start somewhere).
Mary turned to Ben, jaw set in determination. "We can't leave them like this. A demon burned down Sam's apartment, and will most likely not rest until it finishes the job."
The transgenic groaned out half a sigh. "Fine, what's your plan?"
"What? I don't have a plan!" She fluttered. "Do you have a plan?"
"Why would I have a plan? This was your idea!"
"Well, you're the one who leads the tactical teams, I just run support and transportation! Why don't you have a plan? You job is to have plans!"
"Fine! Well, my plan is to listen to your plan!"
Mary growled. "Ug, can't we just smite the damned thing?"
"I don't know, can we?" Ben shot her a side look, and the girl flushed.
Unlike her baby brother, Mary was not born with a sword in any of her multiple hands. From an angelic perspective, she was all wings, full of movement speed, with barely any trace of claw or steel. Sure, she had enough spunk to smite a skin walker or other mortal creature, if need be, but a demon, especially a demon of the caliber of that yellow-eyed one, was beyond her capability.
She twisted her lip. "What we really need is some help. But we can't go home; the likelihood of finding this place in the multiverse again is tediously miniscule. It has to be someone from here, but who? Sam and guy-Dean?"
"Probably would shoot us full of rock salt, and they're clueless about demons at this point in time. I checked, they didn't even have an anti-possession tattoo."
Mary winced. "Right, we should send them an anonymous tip." She bit her lip. "No angel would help us here, as I'm considered illegal still."
"Gadreel would help us," Ben said quietly. At Mary's inquiring look, he elaborated. "At Chippewa, he used to tell us about his time in heaven's psy-ops and solitaire." The transgenics lips twitched over bitter memories of trauma shared over campfires and marshmallows. "He'll do whatever we want, if we can get him out."
"Wouldn't that be," she twisted her lips. "Unethical?"
"He would be free," the transgenic said, clipped. "Motives don't mean much to a person in his situation."
Mary nodded sharply, smothering her apprehension under determination. "All right."
In a flick of her wings, the duo was transported from the charred roadside to the nice hotel room they had rented closer to the college campus.
"Watch my body while I'm gone, would you?" she said, laying down on the dusty comforter.
"I hate it when you do that," Ben frowned, settling on the adjacent bed.
"Well I can't exactly take it with me without attracting attention." Mary smiled at her cousin. "I promise I'll try to stay out of trouble."
The transgenic sighed, settling his elbows on his knees to watch.
Mary hummed contentedly against the pillows, and closed her eyes.
Being creatures of non-physical origin, angels, understandably, had only a vague comprehension of appearance.
If a human in a physical body were to see them, an angel would appear in every sense to be a solar flare. However, a human soul in heaven might impose the form of a human if they were to see an angel, much like how images and concepts in dreams sometimes bore the faces of strangers.
However, an angel might have a certain way it thinks its abstracts and wavelengths should look, so might choose to overlay its own mental picture of itself upon other spiritual beings. So, an angel who thinks itself fierce might have the face of a lion; a calm angel might be a lake or ocean; a warrior might be covered in scars.
Mary, being more human than most of her family, saw a kind of double vision. An angel in a vessel on earth would have a distinct halo in place of the normal aura of a soul. An un-hosted angel might give her body a sunburn if they were being confrontational, but for the most part remained as fluctuations of light, until the nephilim changed her perception to take in all of the various dimensions of existence. Then she could see the extra faces and feathers.
Of course, this meant that she could never look at herself, mirrors being unable to reflect sixth dimensionally. However, she supposed she looked similar to her little brother, just with wings instead of extra arms.
Her father, at her request, described her non-physical appearance as, literally, half an angel. She had the tiny complicated ball of twine look of a human soul, except with some of the threads pulled out into wispy comet tails of grace.
Mary's perception of herself was also much less variable than the average angel's, what with her human tendency to be attached to appearance, due to having been born with a static body. Thus, when she cared to think about what her non-physical form looked like, she always looked like a great pair of wings, roughly the size and height of her human body. Of course there were extra bits and bobs, but nothing too extreme. Even her own father stood taller than the Chrysler building, and he was very humble about his self perceptions.
So, when Mary shrugged off her body to make a rescue mission, all Ben saw was a flicker of white light, and she was gone.
...
Castiel would often bring his children into heaven under the guise of taking them to work in the courtrooms with him. True, the angel would show them the tree lined gardens of governing and the well worn paths of travel; however his intentions were not entirely benign.
"When your mother dies," he told them, "I will withdraw from earth to reside here with her, until such time as her soul might wish to be reborn, when I will follow back to the physical plane. Neither of you inherited her mortality, so will continue to walk the earth in your prime long after we depart."
"But what about us?" Jim, barely ten at that time, had whined, multitude of arms clutching at his father's feathers, unable to comprehend a world without his parents. "Don't you love us enough to stay?"
The celestial being soothed the boy's tears with a brush of his fingers in an acquired instinct. "No. I will always love your mother more." His wings encircled Mary and Jim. "But you rank among the three beings in all of creation for which I would do anything. And because I love you, and cannot bare our family to be sundered by Death, I will teach you how to break into heaven."
Kissing the nephilim on their brows, he gestured at the boundaries of the celestial stronghold. The children leaned in conspiratorially close, excited for the moment of familial felony bonding. "Should the gates of heaven ever be bared to you, whether it be because of prejudice against your nature or a disagreement, you can always find a back door."
"But I can't fly," Jim said, not needing to draw attention to his lack of wings.
Mary cuffed him across the back of the head, an easy feat since he hung on her arm as they hovered. "Quiet dummy, I'll fly for the both of us."
The angel smiled at his children's tussling. "Neshama, listen closely." The children quieted under the familiar words of affection. Castiel motioned to the spider silk thin paths winding up the outermost barriers of heaven. "These are the areas away from the eruv. Most were closed after Lucifer's fall, but a few were forgotten or re-opened in secret."
Mary traced the cracks with her eyes, committing them to memory.
"I once used these paths to retrieve your mother's soul during the apocalypse." His feathers puffed out with fond pride. "But one day, you will use them to come visit us."
The nephilim nodded seriously, still too young to practically grasp the idea of a world without what was currently there, but trusting their parent of the secret ways's importance.
...
A turquoise mote of light slipped through the forgotten cracks of heaven, unknowingly tracing the same walkways and threads a certain archangel in witness protection used to maintain a connection to the host.
It hung low, spreading itself thin against the fabrics of heaven to muffle the dim glow of grace.
In a forgotten corner of the exclusively angelic areas, a being hung suspended by metaphorical chains a burningly bright pit composed of confining bars and silence.
The being, who called himself Gadreel, stared at the millennia same walls of his enclosure. Had he any knowledge of humans, he would desperately wish for their ability to sleep, or at the very least lose track of time. But, alas, the angel knew every sharp moment of his imprisonment with celestial clarity.
Thus, when something changed, his attentions immediately zeroed in, starved for stimulation.
A moth of grace fluttered into his line of sense. "Hello," it said, pulsating a friendly turquoise.
Gadreel stared, unable to even tilt his head to better perceive this strange being.
"My name is Mary," the flutter continued, alighting gently against his cheek. "I need your help."
"I would consider your request, but as you can see, I am rather constrained." He hissed, mind too long practiced in communicating only with screams.
"If I can get you out, will you help me?"
The former guardian of Eden snapped to focus his senses on her, causing partially healed wounds to weep anew as his being pulled against the chains. "No angel can escape heaven's prison."
The flutter, Mary, flexed her wings, multitudes of green eyes blinking in their depths. "I am not an angel, I am nephilim. I am too human for angels and too angelic for humans. As it is, heaven cannot hold me."
Gadreel had been imprisoned long before the creation of humans. He stared more closely at her, noticing the minuscule core of complexity beating beneath the shroud of grace.
"If you can get me out of here, I will serve you to my last breath," he vowed.
The nephilim swayed, wings curling close to each other in a half regretted shame. "I do not want your service. You are-" Feathers fluttered agitatedly. "Here, look."
Pressing close to the larger being, the nephilim reached out, impressing upon his grace the warm memories of her home, and the meandering journey which brought her to this dimension. Were he human, the angel would have wept at the familial affection pouring around this girl's version of himself.
Mary cut her stream of consciousness off, listening. "We should hurry."
"These confinements cannot be broken," Gadreel said thickly.
"OK," Mary said, tracing the metaphorical metal to where they imbedded in the less dense grace derived walls of the cell. "We'll just have to get them off later." She squeezed her body between the cracks of firmament, exasperating faults till they crumbled, causing the chains to clatter free.
Soon the ancient angel lay prostrate, grace twitching in haphazard relief after so long being stretched and hung.
"Let's go."
"I can't fly," Gadreel said, indicating his hobbled wings.
Mary ghosted over the rusted clasp twisting the joints at his shoulder blades and the blood crusted chains strung like streamers through his bones. The guardian shuddered when she touched his shattered halo.
"That's all right," she said, quietly. "I can fly for the both of us."
Gathering the crippled being beneath her wings, she tipped sideways and fell towards the earth. The barriers of heaven wavered slightly as the pair passed, statically clinging to the edges of grace, but unable to stick to the human tangle knocking the hooks away.
Gadreel savored the feeling of creation blowing past the ruins of his wings, not noticing as his rescuer guided their tumble to a specific planet's continent which contained a pinprick of a motel room, and a worriedly pacing part panther.
Mary held him gently, just beyond the reaches of human perception. "Gadreel, this is Ben, my cousin. He agreed to be your host while you're down here helping us."
"He is not the most suited to me," the angel wheezed. "But he will do."
Carefully, he eased himself from the woman's grasp and into the dimensions a human could sense.
...
Ben blinked, and his surroundings changed from a dumpy motel room to the head office of Camp Chippewa.
"Hello Ben."
The transgenic spun around to see a copy of himself, save for the stoically blank expression. His lips twisted together. "Gadreel?"
"Yes."
Ben chuckled. "Sorry, I'm not used to seeing you like that."
The angel looked down to examine the leather jacket he wore. "This is not my true form this is-"
"A manifestation, I know." Ben interrupted, crossing to the large filing desk in the corner and rummaging in the drawers. After a moment he puled out a thick sheaf of paper. "Ah! Here it is!"
Placing the papers on the desktop, he motioned Gadreel closer.
"What is this?" the angel said, reading the Enochian letters glittering gold on the paper.
"It's an informed consent contract," Ben said. "Back home, after angels started coming down to earth regularly, there was some conflict over how the people they asked to host them didn't know what they were getting into. It got pretty ugly, then Claire decided she could do more good working with the lawyers upstairs than fighting the system down here. She and Hael got a really good petition together, and managed to change some of the old practices."
Ben motioned at the contract. "An unusually high number of transgenics are suitable as vessels, so some of us agreed to be part time hosts. The principalities inscribed these contracts onto the edges of our souls; basically I'll lend you my body, and you agree not to do anything I would disagree with, or else the warding inscribed on my ribs is activated, and you're forced out of the physical plane."
Gadreel ran a finger down the metaphorical paper. "And what would constitute something you would disagree with?"
The blonde rolled his shoulders back in a shrug. "Suppressing my consciousness. Anything else I call on the fly."
"Your terms appear to be agreeable," the angel said, signing his name on the bottom of the contract with a wave of his hand.
"Awesome."
The office room faded as the human's mind scape folded back into subconscious conception.
Sinking into Ben's bones, Gadreel could feel the echoing remains of other angels. He tasted the sparks of grace curiously, stunned to feel one which was familiar.
"Abner," he breathed, hand curling around his chest.
"Yeah. He was the only one we trusted to do a trial run for the contract, at first. It would have been you, but..." Ben's mental voice trailed off ponderously. "Your host had been in prison for a while, and didn't have anything left to go back to. Timone's a great guy, if you ever get the chance to meet him."
"Perhaps I shall endeavor to find him, when you depart."
"I think he'ld like that." Ben said, before settling back into a well worn psychic niche, watching.
Gadreel refocused his attention on the hotel room, idly skimming his host's memories to identify the purpose of such strange items and decorations. On the opposite bed, Mary stared at him.
"All settled in?" she asked.
The angel inclined his head. "Yes. Your cousin Ben also wishes to inquire as to what the next phase of your plan is, now that you have acquired my help."
Her stare gained laser like intensity. "Gadreel, have you ever had pie?"
"I do not require-"
"Not the point!" she crowed, springing to her feet. "So, phase two is lunch! Then we'll talk."
Gadreel's brows furrowed in confusion, but he followed his companion from the room on foot. "Ben wishes to make it known that he believes your attempts at procrastinating and in the hopes of gaining enough time to think of a plan are transparent."
"Well tell Ben that now he's not getting any pie!"
Later, in a cozy diner down the road, one and a half angels sit in a kitchy red plastic booth tucked in the establishments quiet back.
Gadreel had half a fork full of peach cobbler held in front of his borrowed face, staring as if he could break down its molecular secrets with his eyes.
"You stick it in your mouth," Mary informed him, with the casual ease of one used to explaining basic human functions. "And you pay attention to the chemical signals sent to the brain by the taste buds on the tongue. Just enjoy the dopamine rush."
Her companion raised his brows dubiously, but slid the fork between his lips with mechanical motions. He chewed thoughtfully, half listening to Ben's internal monologue of the correct procedure of eating, before he swallowed.
"Well?" Mary prompted, mouth half full of pot pie.
"It tastes like molecules." He tilted his head. "Ben informs me that my answer ranks among the most common phrases heard in these particular circumstances, and also wishes for you to get a move on with your planning."
"Spoil sport." The nephilim scowled, and wiped her face with a napkin. "Right, Gadreel, I don't know how much Ben has told you, but there's a demon after this universe's version of my family, and we need your help if we're going to stop it."
Gadreel tilted his head. "I see...it is not in your nature's capacity to fight."
Mary twisted her fingers self consciously.
The angel's eyes turned distant as he listened to his internal monologue. "Ben is expounding the virtues of loving over fighting." His gaze refocused on her. "I meant no insult. However, I must tell you, I no longer have a blade of my own. It was taken during my imprisonment."
"We can work around that, we won't abandon you just because-"
"You misunderstand, I am fully capable of smiting a demon," he interrupted. "However, I will be at a disadvantage if I encounter another angel."
"Are you sure? I don't want you getting unnecessarily hurt..."
The corner's of Ben's mouth curled, and his eyes softened. "As I was, even Lucifer hesitated to confront me directly. I am diminished, but not powerless."
"That's...good." Her fingers unclenched. "So, the only lead we have is that the demon will eventually try to go after Sam and Dean again. So, we should do a stakeout and pounce when it strikes!"
The angel tilted his head. "Ben wishes to remind you that this venture is your own, and he will not interfere unnecessarily. However, he indicates that your logic is sound."
Mary beamed. "Great! Let's go steal a car!"
...
...A/N:
Pilot is in November. Skin is in february.
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