Death in the Centre
Castiel's sigil is left open-ended, useless. He hasn't the strength to finish it.
Dean finishes his own and limps through the flickering light of the cheap motel room, too slow to catch his friend before he slumps to the ground. Castiel half rests against the wall, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. Dean is worried - unlike himself, who sports a nasty gash to his leg and a bruise to the face, Castiel has no visible wounds and yet he still cannot stand, and that is definitely worse.
"Cas! You okay, buddy?" He knows he is not okay. He loops Castiel's arm around his neck and his own arm around the angel's torso, attempting to pull him to his feet. The angel at his side is no more mobile than a bag of sand.
Dean hears the cry of pain, despite the teeth clenched in effort to quiet it. Castiel asks him, begs him, to please wait. To give him a second. He cannot move, it's too painful. Dean lowers him as gently as he is able, muttering apologies under his breath, and assuring him that he won't try that again. The position the angel rests on the floor in doesn't look comfortable at all. Castiel's neck and back are at strange angles. Dean should move him to the bed, to somewhere more comfortable. But he won't.
"What's going on, Cas?" asks Dean. The angel doesn't look bruised like he does; his buttoned shirt looks as white as it has ever been, void of blood, void of the remnants of the dusty warehouse of their confrontation with the angels that want Castiel dead and Dean a drooling mess inside his own skin.
He felt something happen, Castiel tells Dean through coughs that rumble fluidly his chest, just before they banished them.
"Are you going to be okay?" Dean doesn't know what to do, and that's tipping his internal scale towards panic. "You just need some time to heal, right?"
Castiel finds Dean's eyes, although the gesture is clearly an effort. His eyelids are drooping. This isn't something he's felt before, the angel tells Dean, it feels like the angel blade, but everywhere. It's drawing blood from every inch of his insides, but it won't kill him. He's never heard of anything like this before.
"Those angel dickbags were saying something before we ganked 'em," says Dean, "you don't think...?"
Castiel admits he doesn't know for sure, he suspects it was an old Enochian incantation. Or it could be something new, developed for the apocalypse, developed for rogue angels like him. He doesn't know, he repeats, he doesn't...
Dean places one hand on his friend's shoulder and tells him that it's okay. He shrugs off his leather jacket and his overshirt, and uses the shirt to wipe away the blood at Castiel's lips, like doing that will fix the internal injuries that he cannot see, or even fathom. The trickle is quickly replaced, this time journeying past the angel's jawline and caressing the side of his neck.
"There has to be some mojo or some goddamn thing that can fix you up," says Dean as he shuffles clumsily through the pockets of his discarded jacket, looking for his phone. He punches a number and runs his fingers through his hair, those idle rings dancing lazily to their recipient when he wants them to be sprinting. Dean's hand shakes as he holds the phone to his ear. And waits.
Sam answers the phone casually, unaware of their predicament.
"Cas has been whacked with some friggin' angel spell." Dean's tone imparts his urgency. "I need you and Bobby to find an antidote or reversing spell or something. Fast." He can hear Sam already on his feet and striding downstairs. As he does, he asks Dean for details - what was the spell, what are his symptoms - but Dean finds himself painfully unhelpful. He gives details where he can. He can hear Sam pulling the lore books out of Bobby's library and piling them.
He and Bobby are on it, Sam tells Dean, and he hangs up.
Dean replaces the phone in his pocket and reaches for the minifridge nearby, grabbing a bottle of water and cracking the lid. He holds it to Castiel's lips to allow him to drink. "Just hold on," he tells the angel, "Sam and Bobby are working on this. They'll find something. You're going to be okay." He moves to the bed and pulls from it a blanket and a pillow; he tucks the pillow in the small of Castiel's back, trying to ignore the pained moans, and throws the blanket over him. Dean doesn't know what good it'll do, whether it'll do any good at all. "Better?"
Castiel thanks him and nods. He is poised to say something else, but stops. The flickering of the dull bulb on the ceiling has intensified; the bedside radio crackles to life; the television turns itself on and so do the lamps on the dresser. The television begins to shift through channels, but the working parts are beginning to smoke. The radio whines and the voices become distorted to noise. The lamps and the ceiling light begin to short and burst, and soon the flickering light of the television is all that remains. When the smoking parts burn through enough, that too dies.
"This room is angel-proofed," says Dean, trying more to comfort himself, "so what the hell's going on?"
He thinks this is him, Castiel says. He feels something but he doesn't know, he just doesn't know what it is. Dean has to get back, the angel says. Get back, he says. Hurry, get back.
Dean doesn't move.
Dean isn't ready for the shove that sends him stumbling over his feet, nor is he ready for the laboured cry of pain that accompanies it - Castiel has traded pain for his safety. He numbly falls on his backside. There's a flash of light, pure white, then darkness again, penetrated only by the streetlights that shine through the meagre spaces between the curtains.
"Cas?" calls Dean. There's no answer. "You are not going to die on me, you son of a bitch." Somewhere in his mind, he wonders: what good sentiment like that will do if his friend is already dead? He walks lopsidedly to the duffel bag he dumped in the corner of the room and pulls out a torch. He turns it on and, hesitantly, he points it in the direction of Castiel.
He had expected a corpse framed with a scorched pattern of wings.
Instead, his friend is breathing. Dean sighs with relief - he'll accept good news where it's present.
But it can't be a good sign that Castiel's wings are visible. They cling to his shoulder blades, twitching like fresh death.
Dean hasn't actually seen them before. He's seen their shadow, the first time he met Castiel and demanded proof that he was an angel, and he's seen their remnants after angels die. These are different to what he imagined from those fleeting images.
They're gnarled and stiff like weathered fingers. Their feathers are off-white, stained with ash, flecked with blood and unruly like trampled flower beds.
Castiel breathes heavily, and Dean wonders if he's in more pain now. He asks, and the angel nods ever so slightly with a whimper.
But Dean is curious. He stretches out his hand to touch them, then stops. He doesn't want to hurt his friend. Yet, Castiel catches his eye and nods, and tells him to be careful, just be careful. So Dean, with the lightest of touches, strokes a feather. It's soft and thin beneath his fingers, as he imagined, but it feels papery and fragile. Maybe it's because they're dying, he thinks, or maybe...
And suddenly the moment is gone. Dean jumps and recoils his hand as Castiel screams in agony. The feather snaps away from the wing with a sound like breaking glass and drifts to the floor, catching alight, burning white and leaving nothing but scorched carpet in its wake.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Dean apologises weakly, "I'm sorry."
Another feather follows a second later, and then another, and another, breaking away and combusting under their own volition. Dean doesn't know what to do. People at the motel will start complaining soon, if they haven't already, and they'll be discovered, Castiel in this state.
But soon, the feathers stop shedding and Castiel is able to regain his breath. Dean is able to regain his own, as well.
"Dammit, Sam," says Dean under his breath as he wipes blood from the angel's face again. It was taking too long, the cure was taking too long. He couldn't do anything. If only he could do something to help.
Castiel tells him it's okay.
But it isn't okay. "It isn't okay, Cas!" Dean shouts. "You're supposed to die on the front lines with the rest of us, not in some tiny friggin' skirmish!"
It's okay.
It's okay.
Castiel's wings begin to flex, popping and grinding like dislocated joints, until they're stretched at full length. Their feathers combust one after another, faster and faster until the angel's wings are a rippling wall of white hot fire; the ends and beginnings of Castiel's cries of pain merge into a single heart-wrenching scream.
Dean breathes unevenly, the white flickering light of feathers burning welding the image before him into his memory. He pulls out his phone and dials, and shouts down the open line, "Sam! Dammit, I need something now! Please tell me you have something!"
Dean hears Sam shout to Bobby, and the phone is tossed across the room; Bobby's voice tells him that he's found one thing, just one, but he hasn't substantiated it, he hasn't confirmed it, and Dean yells at him to just tell him what he needs to do, for god's sake, they're out of time. And so he grabs a knife and slices open his palm, and draws a sigil to Bobby's panicked specifications. Dean flattens his hand against it, and prays to god that it'll work, and repeats the foreign words that Bobby barks over the phone, and hopes that he said them properly, and hopes that they're the right words, and god he hopes that this will just goddamn work. Please, just work.
Just work.
Castiel slumps silent, motionless. His wings are gone, only scorch marks left. Dean wheezes in the darkness.
Oh god, it hasn't worked. "Cas?"
Dean can hear sirens in the distance. He has to go, they have to go, or there'll be questions to answer.
"Cas?"
And then there's a low moan, and Dean breathes again. He crouches beside his friend, slapping Castiel's face, trying to encourage his eyes to open and sharpen into their customary serious gaze. Castiel stirs, and Dean almost laughs. They'd cut it much too fine. But at least they were alive. His friend opens his eyes.
"Dean," Castiel says.
"I thought it was game over for a second there," Dean says, chuckling breathlessly.
Castiel smiles weakly. "Thank you," says the angel.
Dean loops Castiel's arm around his neck, and his own arm around Castiel's torso. This time, when he pulls the angel to his feet, it seems to be relatively painless. "Anytime," he replies simply as they limp towards the door, Dean collecting the duffel bag as he goes. He places Castiel in the Impala gently and they speed away from the approaching sirens, leaving behind the only scorched imprint of angel wings they would know without death in the centre.
A/N
As always, thanks for reading! I had a few problems transferring the formatting from Google Docs, so hopefully it's okay! This fic was a bit of a test run with for using different types of dialogue.
Any feedback, suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Have a great day~