After The Fall
Chapter 10
(A/N: Brief recap because it's literally been months. Last chapter, Cas and Meg basically just had sex all day and Meg had a pretty trippy dream. That's really it. That's basically all you have to remember. Enjoy.)
When Megan leaves for work the next morning it's a Sunday, and the dog is there.
She had left Castiel on the couch with Jill - both seemingly early risers by choice rather than reluctance, as she was. Jill was watching some old cartoon about a cat and mouse, deeply engrossed as usual. Castiel sat on the other end of the couch, one jean-clad leg crossed over the other knee, seemingly as fascinated by the cartoon as Jill.
He was like that, she'd noticed. Castiel looked at everything in an odd, childish sort of wonder – a kind of innocence that was at odds with how tough she sensed he was underneath all of his stoicism. In a strange way, it was something she envied about him. She was different. While he seemed to look at the world and everything in it with bright eyes, she was jaded; where he held a quiet strength, she felt weak. Since her father's surprise arrival two days earlier, she hadn't left the house until now – couldn't – and only could now because she knew innately that Jill was safe with Castiel, and only Castiel.
She cast one last glance at them, and in that moment they both seemed so similar, so cut from the same cloth, that she couldn't help but smile before she left.
There's a dog on her porch. The same one from Thursday, she realises instantly, and the smile that breaks across her face surprises even her. It had lain on the first stair, massive paws tucked beneath it's head, but upon Megan opening and closing the door it jumps up instantly and bounds towards her.
"You again?" Megan asks before kneeling in front of it and patting it on the head. It's bigger than her, but like three days ago she isn't intimidated by it in the slightest. It whines softly before nuzzling against her, black fur deceptively soft and sleek against her cheek. "I thought I told you to get back to your owner?" she says conversationally, giving the hound one last scratch behind his ear before she moves to stand up. It looks up at her, tongue rolling from it's mouth – and Megan doesn't know animals, never really wanted to, but she thinks if a dog could ever look happy then it couldn't look much happier than this one.
"Maybe you have," she whispers, but the thought sounds silly and she pushes it away.
The dog follows her faithfully, heavy paws thudding on the concrete as they walk side by side.
By the time she reaches the general store for her shift, she's certain the dog is a stray. It had seemed to cling to her side as they walked on the dirty, cracked streets of Brahms under gray morning clouds, and she had the strangest sense that she was all this dog had in the world. She's almost afraid it will run away when she enters the store, but the dog simply nuzzles against her hand when she leans over to pet it, before settling down loyally by the door. She's suddenly amused by it's gargantuan stature as it lies on the ground, almost entirely blocking the shop's door and a good portion of the sidewalk outside.
As she turns, a smile gracing her face, she notices her boss standing behind the counter. It startles her, and when she registers her own unease, she can only surmise that she's surprised to see him there because the sight of him is so rare. Of the six years she has worked here, she has only had real interactions with the man a handful of times.
"I've never imagined you as a dog person," he says, and just as it had during those other infrequent meetings, the sound of his voice grates on her nerves. The genuine smile from only seconds before falls away, but she hides it quickly by shooting him a tight-lipped smile.
"Hi, Mr. Gillespie," she replies shortly, her hands moving to unzip her jacket as she walks briskly towards the staff room.
John Gillespie is a man in his late forties, with a wardrobe of the same cornflower blue shirts two sizes too small for his generous stature, and a sense of superiority in his every action. She remembers fondly the exact shade of purple that graced his round face the first day they met, when she neglected to call him 'Mr. Gillespie' in favour of calling him by his first name. She remembers not so fondly the short lecture about respect she received immediately afterwards, and will never forget how much she has hated having anything to do with the man ever since.
When she emerges from the staff room via the side door behind the counter a few minutes later, she notices him eyeing her with a look of unabashed curiosity. She has never seen anything but disapproval on this man's face, and the expression he regards her with startles her yet again.
"What?" she bites out, unable to completely filter out the resentment in her tone.
"Your dog is blocking the door."
"So? Nobody in their right mind shops here anyway."
It's out before she can take it back, and Megan almost claps a hand to her mouth. To her surprise, though, Mr. Gillespie seems to completely ignore her remark.
"It is your dog, then?" His beady eyes fixate on her and abruptly she feels self-conscious; as though she is an insect being scrutinised beneath a microscope.
"Yeah, and what?" she says, somewhat defensively. She doesn't understand the uneasy sensation she had felt since entering the store, but realises now that it has been gradually increasing with every second.
"I meant nothing by it," he replies ingratiatingly, and the friendly smile he regards her with now is somehow worse than his characteristic haughtiness. "I only meant that I've never noticed you with a dog-"
Mr. Gillespie's mouth continues to move, and though she registers that he must be speaking to her, she cannot hear him. Panic carves a hole in her chest, settles and makes a home there - because something is wrong with Mr. Gillespie's face, twisting and turning against the grey backdrop of the sky outside the window. It has no mouth, no features but those black eyes - burning coals that seem to bore into her own grey, and the horror that grips her freezes her in place and prevents her from screaming.
She blinks through her panic and suddenly Mr. Gillespie is Mr. Gillespie again, eyeing her with a concerned expression that looks wrong on his features.
"Megan? Are you alright?"
She blinks again, needing to make sure he is really there, really real and normal, before she finds her voice.
"Yes," she says. "I'm fine, what's it to you anyway?" She turns hastily and begins stacking items on shelves, willing her hands to stop shaking and her head to stop burning.
"Well..." Mr. Gillespie begins to speak, but trails off, and the meekness of his tone is wrong and everything is wrong, but she listens long enough to know that he's leaving now anyway, that he only came in this morning to order a shipment of something or other. James and Maria will be in to work at 9 o' clock, and that she is to leave the keys for one of the other store employees to lock up later when she leaves at six. She hears the door close quietly behind him, hears her dog bark happily upon presumably being petted, and she lets out a breath she didn't realise she had been holding. She sets the delivery box of potato chips down on the floor, her head spinning.
She was on the verge of something there, she knows. The verge of the hole in the world. There was something there, just beyond her reach, and she's struck suddenly by the memory of a balloon her mother bought for her at a funfair when she was much younger; how she had accidentally let it go, how the string had slipped through her fingers before being carried away by the wind; how desperately she had ran after it, and all for nothing.
'That or I'm going crazy,' Megan thinks, and discomforting as the thought is, she'd rather she was. At least then, the burning in her head and the suddenly unbearable sense of foreboding in the pit of her stomach wouldn't be real.
She cannot see through the mist. It covers everything before her, and it is only when she reaches her arm out in front of her face that she realises it is not her arm, but someone else's. This arm is thin but lean with muscle under the sleeve of a leather jacket, and the hand at the end is pale, too pale to be her own, the skin calloused and rough from a life of hardship.
It is only when she stops in her tracks that she realises she had been walking, and the clickclickclick of high heeled ankle boots on cracked concrete stops abruptly. Another set of footsteps stop too, just a split second too late, and she whirls on the spot to come face to face with nothing. Nothing but this impenetrable fog in all directions, and those creatures lurking just out of sight.
The thought strikes her suddenly, and she realises she is surrounded by monsters she could not imagine in her greatest nightmares. She feels a moment of fleeting panic – her own – but it is pushed away by another's feelings; the already turbulent emotions of the body she inhabits. She feels the woman's underlying fear, her grief and guilt, but most strikingly her determination. On one hand, she knows innately that those things hiding in the fog will not harm her – that they are somehow akin to her, and her to them, cut from perhaps not the same cloth but something similar. On the other, all of her instincts are telling her that they will turn at any moment and devour her like the monsters they are.
She instinctively reaches her hand to the gun settled in the waistband of her jeans, and rests her fingers there – does not attempt to take it out, knowing that to do so would be the surest form of suicide in this place, but finds some small semblance of comfort in merely knowing that it is there. She turns on her heel again and begins walking straight ahead, unseen horrors flanking her on every side, and her fear somehow recedes. Because there is somewhere she has to be.
Above all else, there is someone she has to find.
Her head burns, and all at once the fog dissipates before her eyes; the skies above her darken, and the uneasy sensation of aimlessness in that mist is replaced by heart-wrenching terror in this blackness. Everything around her shifts into that of a nightmare, and when she cannot stifle the scream of pain that erupts in her head, she sees those monsters clearly – their grotesque heads suddenly turned to her – she cannot see their faces, cannot let herself look upon them – and instinctively her legs move from beneath her in swift movements and she is running, gun firmly in hand as those things descend on her, though she knows it will do little good.
She blinks, and she is not in that body anymore. She is somewhere else. This room is eerily quiet, devoid of those monsters and the woman, but there is a body slumped on the threadbare carpet, fighting for air as his chest heaves and shakes with every breath. Blood pools around him and his side is stained red.
She is in a house she does not recognise, and she is bodiless. She is nothing. She is merely there.
The man lets out an audible gasp, and though he cannot see her, and does not move his face towards her, she does not need to see his face to know who he is. She has never met him in person, but she knows him instinctively.
The scene dissolves before her eyes, back to that blackness, and orange eyes stare at her and into her. She is in that body again. The sleeves of her jacket are torn now, and the taste of blood in the air slides down the back of her throat. Distantly, she realises it is her own.
"Let me out," it says, though it has no mouth – she hears it in her head, and the tone of it – the way it is too low and too high simultaneously - tears into her mind and the pain is almost overwhelming. She has never in her life encountered such unspeakable malice, and here she stands now, defenceless in the face of it. The worst thing of all is that she knows what she will do.
She will let it out. She can't not. She has no other choice.
Her eyes open, and the disoriented feeling that follows all of her visions hits her like a tidal wave. She holds her arm in front of her again, relieved to see her own dark, wrinkled skin. She blinks her eyes blearily as they adjust to the sight of her own bedroom, in her own house, where she is safe and that thing does not exist. The pale yellow walls, the pine bookshelf in the corner, and the white wicker chair in the corner are pleasant sights to her after such a terrible one. She feels the weight of her own body and the solid comfort of her bed, and lets out a breath of relief.
Her reprieve is short-lasted, and with a growing sense of anxiety, she reaches for the phone on her bedside table and dials a number she knows by heart.
Psychic though she may be, she is still surprised by her luck when Dean Winchester picks up the first phone she had attempted to call him on.
"Hello?" Even after forty years, she could recognise that boy's voice anywhere.
"Go back to Brahms." Her voice is hoarse; shaken from both the intensity of her vision and old age.
There is a pause. "Who is this?"
"It's Missouri, boy. You have to go back to Brahms."
"Missouri? Missouri Moseley?" He sounds shocked, and she doesn't have to be psychic to know that she's probably the last person he ever expected to hear from again.
"The one and only."
Dean pauses again, before she hears him exhale loudly. "Wow." He sounds old, she notices. But then again, how could he not? He must be around sixty years old now, and the notion that it has been so many decades since she last helped John Winchester's sons makes her feel her own old age all the more acutely. He speaks again, this time his confusion laced with seriousness. "Brahms?"
"Yeah. I'm not sure when, but I think you were there not so long ago."
"Last week. Has something happened?" She hears the urgency in his voice, and knows she was right about the identity of the man who lay dying in her vision.
"Not yet, but soon – real soon. I had a vision. Something bad is happening in that town and your friend is smack in the middle of it, boy."
"Cas?"
She hadn't known the man's name, but upon hearing Dean say it she feels it innately. "Castiel. I got the feeling he had something to do with you."
Desperation rolls from Dean's voice in waves. "Is he okay?" Something darkens in his tone, and he asks, "Is this about Meg?"
Meg. Megan. The woman whose body she had been in. That conflicted, tortured soul who was about to do the most unforgivably wrong thing for all the right reasons.
"She'll raise hell."
"How?" She has never heard such a strange mix of hopelessness and defiance from one person. "How can she do that? She's human now."
Missouri blinks. "Of course she's human. What do you mean?"
Dean hesitates on the other end of the line. "She wasn't a demon? In your vision?"
"No," she replies, confused. "Should she have been?"
"I thought you were meant to be psychic."
"I thought you were meant to be a hunter, boy, not waitin' by the phone for a ninety-year-old woman to tell you where all the monsters are." She sniffs indignantly. "It's not her fault, exactly."
"What do you mean?" Dean asks slowly, jibes forgotten.
"There's something about Brahms. There's something you need to know about that town."
The taste is rancid on his tongue. He can feel every scrape of the terrible substance against his teeth and it has been a long time since he experienced such acute disgust.
"This is terrible. Why do you eat this?"
Jill blinks back at him from her end of the couch, her own sugar sandwich in hand as she draws her light eyebrows into a frown.
"What? What's wrong with it?"
"It's disgusting," Castiel replies, and he finds it strange that he has so quickly become comfortable with this girl that he can insult her culinary skills without fear of hurting her feelings – and stranger, still, that she in turn has become so used to him that she is not offended by his bluntness.
"It's awesome," she replies indignantly, and takes a ridiculously large bite from her sandwich as if to prove it.
"It won't be 'awesome' when you lose all of your teeth. I'm honestly surprised you still have any."
"Shut up," Jill huffs, and defiantly turns her attention from him to the television.
She smiles then, and he finishes his sandwich anyway.
It's six o'clock when Megan wearily pulls on her jacket and leaves the store. After what she had decided was a small brush with madness earlier that morning, the store had been rather busy all day. Normally she would have been irritated, but the constant demand of her attention had helped to distract her somewhat, and she was grateful for the reprieve.
She had, however, found time to step outside and pet the dog during less busy moments. She felt a strange sense of guilt every time she walked past the window where it lay outside and had been forced to neglect it, and it had occurred to her that he really was her dog now. After the way he had jumped up, tail wagging whenever she emerged from the store, and his dejected whine whenever she was forced to go back inside, she decided there really was no going back now.
She noticed the occasional strange look from Maria whenever this happened, but dismissed it as Maria being a stuck-up bitch who took her job too seriously.
When the door closes behind her, her dog is already standing on all fours and nuzzling against her waist, black fur tinted orange in the glow of the street lights overhead. It was strangely dark for this time in October, Meg mused, but then again, Brahms is a strange place. You can experience scorching heat one day and snow the next.
"Hey boy," Megan beams, kneeling down to wrap her arms around his neck, before giving him a quick scratch behind the ear. "I picked you up some dog food from the store. The good stuff, I promise. But don't take my word for it, I'm not a dog or anything." She stands up and turns to her left, casting the dog a glance over her shoulder. "Lets go home."
The dog walks beside her, paws thudding against the rain spattered sidewalk, and she can't remember the last time she was so happy to finish her shift at the store. The image of that twisting, turning face seems burned into her eyelids, but knowing that she is escaping the place altogether and going home to Jill brings an immeasurable sense of comfort.
And Castiel. He'll be there too. Something flips in her stomach and a strange sense of nervousness threatens to replace the relief. She hasn't yet given herself time to think about what had happened between them – hadn't wanted to think about it. Since Friday night she had only lived in the moment with him, let herself enjoy every second he was with her; but now that she's alone again and has time to think, she is suddenly confronted with the insanity of it all.
Today is Sunday. Yesterday had been Saturday, and they had stayed in bed for half of the day and spent time with Jill the other half. On Friday he had kissed her. On Thursday she had seen her dog for the first time, and three days before that had been Monday night, when he had walked her home. The day before that, she had first laid eyes on Castiel when he had appeared seemingly from nowhere in her bar. That had been a Sunday too.
Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, when Jill was just four years old and she had run to safety with her sister in her arms, Megan had set herself a specific set of rules by which she had lived her life ever since.
The first of these was that she would never put anyone above Jill, not even herself.
The second was that she would work whatever jobs she could lay her hands on to make sure Jill had the childhood she had never had.
The third, and the one she had broken in the space of just one week, was that she would keep a safe distance from men, and that any who managed to slip through the cracks would never have contact with Jill. It was for her own good. The idea of bringing someone into Jill's life only to rip him back out again was too cruel, and Megan knew all too well the importance of stability in Jill's life. The girl had lost so much already, and to put her through an endless cycle of would-be father figures was unforgivable in Megan's eyes.
And then, suddenly, she had met a man while she was working at the bar, and four days later she had invited him with her to pick up her ten-year-old sister from school, and just a day later she had asked him – asked him – to collect her from her friend's house, take her back to her own house and babysit her while she herself wasn't there. She had then let him stay the night, practically paraded him around the house the next day in front of Jill, and he was now sitting in her house and looking after her sister yet again.
And the most bizarre thing of all is that Megan regrets nothing. She knows him intrinsically - had somehow naturally trusted him the instant she had met him - and now, as she walks on down the road towards him, it dawns on her that she has nothing but pure faith in him.
The smile that blooms across her features is completely involuntary. She has never been so happy, and it feels so inexplicably fleeting that she begins to walk more quickly; willing her legs to carry her to them faster, her dog easily keeping pace beside her.
"Meg?"
She slows and turns her head to the source of the voice, and sees Kyle crossing the street towards her.
"We should go for a walk," Jill says abruptly. Castiel looks at her from across the small kitchen table, where they had set up a chess board and had been playing the same game intensely for over an hour and a half.
"Why?" he asks, slightly confused. He hadn't gotten the impression that Jill had been bored, and he was sure she wasn't simply trying to avoid defeat – if anything she was winning without Castiel even letting her, something that amazed him in itself.
She shrugs her small shoulders nonchalantly, brown eyes looking somewhere over his shoulder and not quite at him. "Just feel like stretching my legs. Wanna come with me?"
He can't argue with her, and decides he wouldn't mind a walk himself. "Yes, okay. Where will we go?"
"I dunno," she replies, and he can't help but notice how hastily she stands from her chair to pull on her shoes. "We can just wander around." She flashes him a bright smile then, but he sees something beneath it; a wariness that he has never seen on Jill's face before. "Megan should be on her way home. We could meet up with her on the way."
It occurs to him then, suddenly and blindingly, that he has not sensed Meg all day. He has not sensed anything, demon or otherwise, and for a town of at least twenty of them, it is odd. Part of him wants to object - to stay in this house with Jill where he can protect her - but the thought of Meg alone in a town of monsters where he cannot sense her or reach her makes his decision for him. The rational, less human side of his brain also reminds him that he can protect them from any demons that may be lurking outside the safe walls of this house – knows that a demon wouldn't come within ten miles of either of them if they sensed his presence beside them. "Okay," he agrees, lifting his trench coat from the hook on the back of the front door and following Jill outside.
"Hey," Megan replies, smile still in place. Kyle shoots her a crooked smile as he walks towards her from across the street, the streetlights on the opposite side of the road casting an orange glow over his tanned skin, his shoulder length brown hair turned auburn. His somewhat lanky form is dressed in jeans and one of the t-shirts from the bar. "On your way to work?" she deduces.
Kyle slows to a stop before her and nods, eyes resting on the dog at her side. "Sadly. I start at six-thirty."
"Sucks. I just finished and now I'm going home." She shoots him a smug smile.
"You're a bitch."
"I know." He leans down then, face to face with her dog, and reaches out to pat him on the head. The dog sniffs the air between them experimentally, before barking happily and nuzzling into his hand.
She raises her eyebrows. "He likes you."
He looks up at her, stands, and falls into step beside her. "Is that so surprising?"
"Well." She considers it for a moment as they turn left on a corner and begin to walk uphill slightly; Kyle on her right, the dog padding faithfully on her left. "I really only just got him, but if his reaction to Cas is any indication then I don't think he's too big on people."
"Cas..." Kyle repeats, his tone sounding something like feigned disinterest with a teasing undertone. "Who's he again? He's your new boyfriend or something right?"
She opens her mouth to defiantly rebuke him, but then her thoughts about recent events come screaming back to her and she has no real answer.
In her peripheral vision, she sees Kyle spin his head to look down at her. "Wait, is he?" She doesn't need to face him to know he's smirking lopsidedly at her, and she indignantly refuses to look at him. "He is! I knew it. About time someone cured your two-year itch, isn't it?"
"Please don't remind me of the six seconds of borderline fun you gave me," she bites back, and sees Kyle's grin grow from the corner of her eye. "I've tried my best to forget."
"'Tried' being the key word. You'll never forget me."
"How can I? It was so deeply traumatising I'll have recurring nightmares for the rest of my life."
He snorts derisively beside her and shoves her slightly. She nudges him back, her smile replaced with a smirk, and they walk in comfortable silence for a while. She only speaks again when they reach the top of the slight hill and take a right turn, crossing the quiet road together on to the other side of the street.
"Thanks. For the other night. Giving me a ride home, you didn't have to do that." It's not as difficult for her to say as it should be, and Megan idly wonders if Castiel has made her soft.
"It's nothing. Me and you, Meg, we go way back."
She turns her face to the right to glance up at him, and sees something in his face that she can't quite place. He seems to shift before her, and he doesn't quite look like himself.
She only realises she has stopped walking when he stops abruptly a few feet in front of her and turns back to look at her, eyebrow raised. "What?"
She continues to stare back at him, searching his face desperately for any hint of difference. When he looks back at her like this, he only looks like Kyle – his hazel eyes, his straight nose, his angular features – but when she looks – really, really looks – his eyes are violet, his features are smoke.
She blinks, but the image doesn't go away. He stays this way, standing in front of her, and she feels like she has finally caught up with that balloon, reached with all her might, tugged on that unreachable string and dragged it back down to her own level. She is on the verge of the hole in the world again, and this time, she might fall in.
And she isn't afraid. She realises it with overwhelming clarity – her experience that morning, so similar, could not have been more different.
"We go way back?" she asks, and she is on the precipice of the truth now – a truth so startlingly clear that she cannot understand how she has been unable to see it for so long.
Her head is pounding, the strain of looking at him like this taking it's toll on her eyes. When she blinks he is Kyle again, standing directly in front of her and looking down at her with desperation etched on his human features.
"We were on the rack together," he says, and that word alone conjures thousands of images in her mind; searing into her brain like fire, her eyes squeezing shut against the torrent of colours. The rack. Horror floods her senses and she wants to scream. The rack. Her head is pounding, smouldering and the pain is unbearable. Blades and screws and wires and blood and screams and how could she ever have forgotten that rack?
"Don't you remember?" Kyle asks, his voice low and pleading, and his hand cupping her face somehow intensifies the agony of it all and makes it so much worse. "Do you remember yet? You have to."
The dog at her side snarls suddenly, a growl rising in it's throat.
"Stop-" she begins to whisper, but she can't get it all out and her lungs are burning, throat tight.
"You're almost there," he whispers back, his voice desperate and she can hear the unadulterated joy in his tone. "We need you, Meg, don't you know that?"
His hand leaves her face suddenly and she hears both an almighty bark and a distinct crack at the same time, and through the pain she registers the cracking noise as the horribly familiar sound of bones breaking. She opens her eyes blearily to see Kyle several feet away from her now, her dog crouched on all fours in front of him, spit flying from his snarling jaws as his colossal size and brute strength keep Kyle at a distance. Through her dizziness she notes that he is still standing, despite the ferocity of the hound and the strength of the punch Castiel had thrown him.
Castiel. Castiel is here and he stands before her, his back to her in his tan coloured trench coat and he is not human. She knows it now, knows it like she knows that she isn't either, knows it like she suddenly realises she always secretly had; knows that they have been thrown together in a world they don't belong in.
The sky is darkening, everything around them dissolving into blackness. She strains her eyes to see that the streetlights are still on; the sky has not darkened since she left the store. It is her own vision blurring at the edges, and through the screaming in her head she sees Castiel take a step away from her and towards Kyle, and despite the heaviness settling into her limbs she manages to reach out one harm and tug weakly on Castiel's coat, because she suddenly and so desperately needs him.
"Don't," she croaks, her voice hoarse, and Castiel stiffens beneath her fingers. He turns to look at her over his shoulder, and he is so beautiful that she cannot suppress the gasp that escapes her lips. His face is pure starlight, crackling and sparking before her; black holes in far-flung galaxies, startling whiteness and all the stars in the sky merged into six faces that all stare back at her, but are still somehow all Castiel. The sight is terrifying and perfect all at once and despite the searing pain in her head that increases with every second, she could cry from joy.
Because she knows these beautiful faces like she knows her own, twisted and thorned and ugly as it is, and through the scream being torn from her own throat she feels such immeasurable relief that he has found her in this place.
She tries to speak but her vision is black now and she cannot see him. She knows he is saying her name but she cannot hear him. She cannot feel her own hands gripping her head, but knows that the pain has reached breaking point.
Clarence, she tries to scream out into the blackness, and doesn't know if she does.
She doesn't know anything anymore.
(A/N: Drama drama drama drama everywhere. I've decided to go in a completely different direction than I originally planned. On the plus side, this new development sets us up for about ten more chapters. Have fun. Review if you want but you won't be held at gunpoint or anything. Cheers!)
(P.S. Thanks to reviewers who messaged me and actually made me update this story. Urban Spaceman's thank you card is in the post.)