"I love you." Castiel's voice, right beside me. I looked over at him, and saw how happy he was. We were both curled up in… Our bed. The bed we shared when we were living in an apartment together. I rolled my eyes at him, looking up at his content and happy face.
"I think you just love the idea of me." I joked. "I think that you'll get tired of me one day, when you remember how good you have it as an all-powerful, immortal celestial being graced with the power of God."
"That's not true." He didn't get that I was joking. He furrowed his brows, his expression changing to one of unhappiness. "I love you, Kylie."
"Cas, I'm joking." I promised. "I'm just messing with you, I promise."
"You don't normally jest like this." His eyes narrowed a little as he examined my face. "Something is bothering you. What is it?"
"Nothing is bothering me." That part was a lie. I'd actually been asking questions about my mortality in comparison to his immortality, but I'd been pushing them down. They just… they weren't fun questions to look at.
"You lie, admittedly, extremely well." Castiel stated, kissing my forehead lightly. "But that doesn't mean I still cannot see when you lie. I have learned to see your tells as you have mine."
"Oh really?" I asked. "Name one tell that I apparently have when I lie."
"Your voice raises in pitch by a small, yet audible amount." He stated. I pursed my lips, thinking.
"No it doesn't." I tried, deepening my voice as much as possible. Castiel didn't smile though, just kept waiting. "Fine." I looked away, laying my head on his chest. "I… I'm wondering why you chose me."
"What?" He sat up straight then, maneuvering my shoulders gently so that I was facing him. I shrugged.
"Yeah." I muttered. "I… I don't quite get why you're still here with me, living with me, when you are quite literally a celestial being. You… You could live forever, do so much good, and yet…" I was blabbering, rolling on without any specific train of thought. I needed to focus on what I was saying. "You're immortal and you're supposed to be some sort of definition of perfection and yet for some reason you're choosing to live with a human. You're choosing to be here, when you could be anywhere else. So I guess I just… I'm grateful, I'm happy that you're here and that we're together, but at the same time…" I found it hard to meet his gaze. "I just don't get why you're here."
"Kylie," his grip loosened on my shoulders as his arms dropped. "How could you ask that?" He looked hurt as he spoke. "You know I love you. You know what you mean to me. You… Kylie, I have never once met a human that I cared for as much as I care for you. I have never found a human that I could live without as much as you. I have never, in all my millennia of being, wished to stretch out time like I do now." He shook his head. "Kylie, I am here because I cannot conceive of a reason to not be. I cannot imagine a world without you in it beside me. I will never be the same angel that I was before I met you, and I am glad that I will not. The angel I used to be… He didn't care. He would have looked at you and thought exactly as you do now, that it made no sense to be with a human. That angel didn't care for anything but the singular mission set before them. That angel…" He shook his head. "I would rather be a man, and be with you, than ever go back to the angel I was before I met you." As he spoke, I felt as though I could see exactly what he was thinking, and the honesty in his words. "I love you, Kylie. I never felt this emotion until I met you. Do you understand that?"
"Yeah."
"And do you understand that, now that I have known you, my life will no longer be the same without you in it?" I didn't answer automatically that time, but I understood. I felt the same way about Cas.
"Yes." I replied.
"You understand that I love you." He stated. "And you're done questioning that?"
"Yes." I agreed. "I'm sorry. I just… I get self-conscious." I admitted quietly.
"Oh my DAD will you please shut up?!" A new voice, one I didn't know. I looked over to the doorframe and saw… Lucifer. Leaning in it, arms crossed, looking extremely bored and exasperated. "Humans. I swear, you're so… So whiny. So needy. So annoying!" He unglued himself from the doorframe, sauntering towards us. "I mean COME ON. Why do you need affirmation? Are you just that starved for attention?" I looked over at Cas, terrified out of my mind, and saw… saw that he didn't care Lucifer was in our damned bedroom.
"Cas?" I asked, scooting backwards and closer to him.
"Come on, Cas." Lucifer crooned, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. "Tell her I'm wrong. I know you're not thinking it, but I also know you just wanna tell her that so she doesn't have that kicked puppy look on her face." I looked back over at Cas and saw… Nothing. No anger. No fear. Just… Calm. Relaxation.
"Well," another Castiel appeared, in the corner of the room. This one… he walked different, though. "I'd agree with you, but I'm just another version of you," the other Castiel pointed at Lucifer. "That looks like you." He pointed at Cas. I backed as far as I could in to the bedframe, gripping Cas' arm tightly.
"This is a dream." I muttered. "This… It has to be a dream."
"Oh look, the ape can think after all!" The first Lucifer crowed.
"Isn't it a wonder?" The other Castiel added.
"She tends to think quite frequently." My Cas agreed. "Her brain doesn't seem to stop doing that."
"She does think a lot." Lucifer agreed. "It's kind of annoying."
"Especially when she starts running her mouth." Other Castiel.
"It can be a bit much." My Castiel. The other two scooted closer to us, Lucifer on the other side of me and the other Castiel on the side of Cas.
"The only problem here is," Lucifer added, looping an arm around me tightly. "That you're not dreaming. We're here, we're evil, and we're staying."
"Buckle up, bunk buddies!" The other Castiel cheered. "We've got a whole life of this ahead of us!" Lucifer's arm turned to a choke around my neck. I clawed at Cas' arm, trying to choke out a cry for his help. Instead I got a pair of eyes, his and the other one's… Just watching as Lucifer choked the life out of me.
I could've sworn I even saw both Castiels smile.
I woke up, sweating and panting and clawing at my own neck. I could breathe. I could breathe. Nobody was choking me. I was… I was alive.
Castiel wasn't, but I was.
I did my best to calm my breathing. I needed a shower. I smelled like sweat and fear. But that dream… I couldn't get it out of my head. It started out as a friendly memory and ended in my worst nightmare. Two Lucifers… And Cas not even caring that they were there…
"It was just a dream." I muttered. "Just a dream." Just one dream out of many, one nightmare out of a series that had occurred ever since Castiel died. Castiel was always there. Lucifer was always there. I was always there. Sometimes I had to watch Castiel die again, other times I didn't.
The dreams were never the same, though. They were always different, save for the repeating cast, and they always got me.
Then again, when they started I tended to wish they were real. They usually started happy. They just turned to shit as they went.
I took a look at the clock. It was 4-whatever in the morning. Sam wouldn't be up for another 2 hours, Dean at least another 4 at the earliest, and Jack… He tended to rise in between the two, quiet and watchful.
He'd stopped talking to us as much since hearing what Dean said. Sam had set him up with some Netflix and the kid… He'd become a little withdrawn.
I wasn't much better, in all honesty. I couldn't get these thoughts out of my head, ones that told me I was useless and broken and never did any good. But at least you're not a monster anymore. You should've died when you were, but you're not, so now look at you. Human or thing, useless or evil, you never can make a single correct choice.
I shook my head, trying to chase the thought away. It still lingered, though, in the back of my mind. Useless. Worthless. Evil. Destroyer.
You have to create to destroy.
But you destroy more than you create.
"Shut up." I muttered, getting up. Between my own mind hating me or nightmares about the man I loved, I would rather go with the self-hate. At least then, I have a better understanding of what's real and what's fake.
At least then, I could control what I saw.
So I got up, and went to take a shower. I went about my morning routine like normal, just at 4am. Get dressed, hair back, avoid the mirror, make breakfast, hit the books, and see…
Hell, I wasn't even certain what I was researching. I was trying to go through the Book of the Damned, but I didn't even understand how any of those spells worked anymore. I'd been rooting through everything involving spells, to see what clicked, but nothing did.
I could follow the steps, but it was just following steps. It wasn't comprehending how or why any of it worked, it was just… just blindly following what I assumed was correct based off of what I was being told.
Since Sam had set Jack up with Netflix, the young Nephilim had been spending more time acquainting himself with pop culture versus doing anything else. He'd been kind enough to leave my notebooks in the same spot we'd been going over them, though. I don't quite know why, but it felt good to see them there instead of holed up in his room or in the trash, where I'd been planning on putting them.
Maybe I was just holding on to things that were useless.
Like yourself.
I let out a sigh, pulling up my inventory list on the laptop. Spellbooks. I needed some spellbooks. I'd labelled some later on as simple to complex, while I'd been a witch. I was still working through the simple ones, taking notes in a new notebook on things that I was certain I had KNOWN before, but just… Just couldn't reach at. Different spells that were achieving similar means and, in turn, had similar ingredients. Possible reasons as to why those ingredients were repetitive, backed up with whatever info I could find on the lore. I was going back to square one, back to so many things I'd known instinctively but now…
Now I had to take time, research, and figure it out manually.
There were three types of witches, that I knew. Ones that got their power from demons, ones that were natural-born, and ones that were chosen and taught by covens.
Being taught all of this must make it a little easier, but still… This felt worse than studying for my college exams had been.
I had a small wall of books around me after about an hour, going back and forth between lore and spells to double and triple check my ideas on ingredients, seeing if there were any discrepancies in their usage in other spells. I'd done a lot of crossing off and re-writing ideas already, but I was able to come to at least a few conclusions.
Not enough to figure out why they worked in the spell, or why they were used over another ingredient, but enough to at least guess why some of them were used in general. When I cross-referenced the ingredients with spells I'd done, though…
It was like taking all my notes and throwing them out the window. What I'd done had worked, but at the same time I couldn't tell if I was swapping out for more powerful items or what.
I rubbed my temples, hearing Sam's footsteps. "Hey."
"Hey." I muttered.
"You're up early."
"Trying to make sense of all of this takes time and…" I sighed. "I don't know. It's something. I have to do something with it, right?"
"No, I think you're doing good." Sam nodded assuredly at me. "I think what you're trying to do is amazing. And who knows what you'll be able to do with it!"
"I sure don't." I admitted. "I don't even get why anything I did worked, in comparison to what's in these books. It makes my head hurt to go through it all." Sam looked concerned at that point, and I shook my head. "Not like a Jack Attack headache, just… College exam headache." I knew he would understand that one.
"Anything I can do to help?"
"Tell me how in the hell any of this works?" I tried. He shook his head, but his brow was furrowed. He was thinking about something. "What? What've you got?"
"Nothing." He said quickly. "I doubt it's anything."
"So you should be able to tell me then." I replied. When he still held his tongue, I pressed further. "Come on, Sam. I'm drowning in this here. I'm trying and trying and trying to figure it all out, but it's like trying to go from German to Arabic when I don't speak either." I put my hands down, feeling defeated. "I just… I don't even know what in the hell I'm doing. I know what I'm trying to do, but I don't think it'll work. So if you've got anything, please… Just tell me."
"Just something I remembered." Sam stated. "When Cas died, you screamed." I remembered that. That whole night was burned in to my memory, like a brand.
"I know." I stated.
"But you did more than that." He continued. "You screamed and… And you slammed your fists in to the ground. You cracked the Earth, I could feel it for a second." I furrowed my brows, trying to remember that as well.
Castiel arched his back, and his eyes turned white. It felt like I was fast-forwarding through time for a moment, crying and crawling in pain towards the body of the man I loved. But there had been something in between, something I'd done purely as a reaction.
Sam was right. I screamed. I screamed the word "no." My fists met the ground solidly, and from the space… There were cracks in the ground. I'd done something, something with my power. It had been a reaction, I hadn't even cared about what was going on unless it involved Cas at that moment, yet still… I'd done it.
I'd done something involving magic, while the spell was still working to close the Rift. It could've been because the Rift hadn't been closed yet, but still… I'd been able to do SOMETHING.
Maybe I could do something again.
I smiled brightly at Sam, standing up immediately. "I have a plan!" I cheered. "I think I have a solid plan!"
"You do?"
"Yes! Thank you!" I hugged him immediately, ecstatic at this idea. I'd done something then. I might still be able to do something. I had an option. "Is that room I used before, when I was trying to track Cas… Is it still pretty empty?"
"I think so, yeah." Sam nodded. "Why?" I smiled brightly. Oh yeah. I had a few ideas. I could probably do this. I was certain I could do this.
"I've got work to do." I explained, turning to create a new pile. My laptop, some notebooks (including the most recent one), and as many spellbooks as I could add on. I had a plan, now. I had a freaking idea.
"OK?" Sam said the word as a question, but moved so I could get started. I went back to the room I'd been in before everything. It was exactly as I'd left it – barren, but with ingredients scattered about the singular table. I set the books down in a corner and my laptop in the center of the table before I looked at everything again. A bunch of different herbs, jars of stuff, and other ingredient options but… You don't remember what everything is. You can't remember the difference between wolfsbane and wolfsbrew!
I headed back to where everything had been, and picked up a few different books on how to recognize herbs. I'd already made my own notes on how to recognize more supernatural items. All I'd been doing was reading and trying to understand, but actually doing? No. I hadn't even considered it until Sam spoke up.
"I did it before." I muttered, opening up the first book in the stack. There was a spell in there I'd marked, one that I'd used frequently. "I did it before, and I can do it again damn it."
A simple spell. One that was meant to take the pain from others and put it on to myself. I could do that. I knew how to do that. I'd done it plenty of times before.
Herbs. A fair amount of them. I had them all, though. I started putting them together in a bowl, and mixed well. They had to be ground up finely together, just like last time. I kept mixing until I was absolutely certain it was ready, then thought for a moment.
I needed somebody that was hurt, someone that was feeling physical pain. And I would need their DNA. And I would need to set this all on fire.
But I needed the person first.
"Sam!" I shouted. He came over to where I was at, looking around at everything.
"What're you doing?" He asked.
"Testing a theory." I replied. I was a natural-born witch. My mom even told me. Granted, it was in a crazy-ass witch dream, but she had. There was no way all of that was gone. There was no way I couldn't do this. "I need a favor."
"What's up?"
"I need you to let me punch you." I stated simply. Sam just stared at me, uncertain and extremely confused.
"What?"
"Yeah. Punch you." I thought for a moment. "In the stomach." Had to avoid messing with the test since I'd gotten a lot of head pain from Jack's stuff. "But don't worry, if I do this right you won't feel it afterwards. Oh, and I'll need a piece of your hair, but that comes after the punch."
"Let's go back to the part about you punching me," he started to request, but I wasn't willing to wait. I needed to see how this worked. I got in close, quickly, and punched hard in to his stomach. Uppercut, just like Dean had taught me. Sam let out a grunt of pain, doubling over to grasp at his stomach. "Kylie! What the hell?!" He wheezed out. He was low enough for me to touch his head. I pulled out a hair, earning another "what the hell?!" from the hunter as I threw that and a piece of my own in to the mix.
The words… I didn't remember them, but it didn't matter. They were right in front of me anyways. I lit the mixture on fire, and hoped it would work.
"Cum sanare infirmos," as I spoke, I could feel the headache start to mount in the back of my head. I didn't care, though. I had to do it. I had to try. I had to know what would happen. "Infirmitatem meam mecum."
The pain hit me like a freight train, slamming in to my gut and then… I didn't know how to describe the feeling as anything but that of how a wall must feel when a basketball rebounds off it's surface. Except the basketball was made purely of pain, and it defied the laws of normal physics to travel upwards and slam against the inner walls of my skull. The response was instantaneous on my part, leaning over the table before me. I grasped the edges of it tightly as I started to lose anything that could've been in my stomach. I was thankful that the bowl was still on the table.
In retrospect, I was also thankful that I hadn't eaten a big breakfast.
Once my nausea had settled a little I groaned, moving one arm to around my waist and the other grasping at my head as I lost my sense of equilibrium. The ground met me quickly, but I couldn't care less. I wasn't puking anymore, and the pain I was feeling inside was infinitely worse than the pain of falling to the floor. I curled up in a small ball once I was laying down, gritting my teeth.
"Kylie?!" Sam's voice reverberated around my brain, making the pain worse. I groaned again, using both hands to cover my ears.
"Talk quieter." I requested, my own voice grating inside my mind. Sam stood still, probably thinking for a moment before making his decision.
"Screw it, you're small." Each footstep felt like a hammer on the interior of my skull, causing me to wince and flinch as he went. He picked me up gently, though, which was nice.
"Kylie!" Dean's voice, sharp and insistent as he came around to the room. He must've been woken up by Sam's shout. My whole body jerked inwards, reacting as though I had been electrocuted by Dean's voice. I kept my eyes clamped shut. I was afraid of trying to open my eyes. "What happened?"
"She tried a spell." Sam kept his voice quieter as he spoke, but he was closer and I could've sworn each word was a spike being railed in to my head.
"What?!"
"Dean," I grunted through the pain. "Please keep decibel levels to a minimum." Nobody spoke after that. I waited for a choice to be made between them, or for something to happen.
"I'll get water." Dean offered, his voice much quieter now. "And a bucket." I thought about that last part for a moment. Dean had a valid reason for getting a bucket. Granted I wasn't feeling as nauseous anymore, but still… Couldn't hurt to have a backup plan just in case.
"I got her room." Sam stated. They started moving after that, their footsteps pounding to me. Sam moved quickly, though, and in maybe a minute I was in my own room. Not Castiel's, mine.
It was odd. I hadn't really been in here much since we'd returned to the Bunker.
Sam set me down on the bed gently, putting a hand to my forehead. "You don't have a fever." He assured me. I wasn't quite certain whether that was good or bad, though.
"Did it work?" I had to know. I had to know if it was all worth it. When Sam didn't answer, I reached for him blindly and managed to grasp at his wrist. "Sam." I gritted out his name. "Tell me. Did the spell work? Did it take away your pain?"
"That's not important right now." He said, his voice rushed.
"Yes, it is." I gripped his wrist tighter, forcing my eyes open so I could look at the man. "Did. It. Work?" Sam let out a breath of air, looking crestfallen as he finally chose to answer me.
"No." He said. "No, it didn't."
"Oh." For a moment, everything froze. Something had happened, yeah, but the spell… It hadn't worked. Not like it was supposed to. Something had gone wrong, I had done something wrong. You messed up. You hit your friend for nothing. You're worthless. You're too broken to cast a simple spell. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be." Sam assured me. "It was a good idea."
Dean came in shortly later with a fair amount of water bottles, a cold towel, and a large mop bucket. "Hey kiddo, how're you feeling?"
"Like I got pummeled by a kangaroo." I muttered. "And there's a pissed-off porcupine bouncing around in my skull."
"Sounds like a hangover."
"I wish." I looked around the room, and acknowledged that the lights weren't quite making my pain worse, but weren't making it better either. Everything still hurt like all hell, but it was starting to ebb away slowly.
"What did you do?" He handed me a water bottle, and I took a few tentative sips before proceeding to gulp the entire thing.
"I tried to cast a spell." I admitted. "One that I'd done a lot before I was a full witch. I… I punched Sam." Dean looked over from me to Sam, and saw the change in his expressions as he nodded. Dean snickered a little. "It was supposed to transfer the pain from him to me, but… Sam said it didn't work." I shook my head for a moment, and instantly regretted the motion.
"Why did you try to do that?" Dean asked.
"I…" I glanced over at Sam, and saw his face as impassive as could be. I wasn't certain whether or not he wanted me to tell Dean, but I didn't want to throw him under the bus in case he didn't want me to. "I remembered creating cracks in the ground after Lucifer… killed Castiel." The words were still hard to get out sometimes. "I thought that maybe I could still cast spells in some way, and that going back to the beginnings of when I started would help me get a better understanding of what happened. But… It was a bad idea, obviously." I looked down as I said those last words. Being able to do some sort of spell or magic… that had been my last hope. I felt so… so defeated, then. Magic was rejecting me like some sort of disease, causing me physical pain at every turn. I didn't even know how I could begin to figure out why, not with even the simplest spells that a person without power could use turning against me in such pain. I knew I'd gotten the ingredients right. I knew I'd done that spell right.
So why didn't it work? How could I even start to figure out how it all worked?
"Hey, you tried, right?" Dean asked. "So… So you're stunted from all things magic. That's OK."
"No, it's not." I argued. "That spell… It shouldn't have reacted like that. It means there's something wrong, fundamentally, with me."
"Are you sure you did it right?" Sam asked. I nodded.
"I'm positive. I did that spell exactly as I should've. It should've worked exactly like it was supposed to." I tried to think on it more, but my head still hurt so much… the focus to try and solve the problem only exacerbated the pain. "I don't know what went wrong."
"Maybe…" Sam thought for a moment. "Maybe it's because we went through the Rift?"
"Huh?" Dean mirrored my own words as we both looked at Sam.
"Think about it." Sam said. "What if there's still some sort of Rift energy messing with all of us. You said it yourself Kylie, magic was different over there." He wasn't wrong. "Maybe it's still a part of us, like how angelic grace hangs around in a host for a while after the angel leaves." I winced a little at that, earning an apologetic look from Sam. "Sorry. But still, it's a possibility." I shrugged. It made sense, kind of. But without being able to physically sense it…
Maybe closing the Rift had taken more from me than I had originally thought. Maybe it had taken everything it could've, or maybe that other world had. It was a good theory, just one I couldn't test to prove.
"You're probably right." I finally admitted to them. "Maybe it is Rift stuff. Maybe I just…" I let out a small sigh. "Maybe it took everything when it closed. Maybe I just can't cast anymore, because… because the Rift took everything it could've." I wasn't certain how I felt when I said those words, but at the same time it was the only explanation I had. Rift energy still messing with me. Rift energy screwing me up.
Rift energy possibly screwing me over for life.
When a spell calls for a sacrifice, it's not always ones you expect.