an:/ how's this for a short, happy little story?
I reread part of the beginning (and aside from all the horrible typos, bleh) and I saw my original intent to write something happy.
I guess by comparison to my last story this one is kind of happy(?), but, yeah- I definitely got a bit lost along the way. Can you tell I spend most of my free time watching horror movies?I think that there is something wrong with that, but it is what it is. I've come to terms with who I am.
This is, to be honest, one of the least happy chapters possible in this story, but I needed to get back to Dean's pov, and so I had to go through Cas' first (keeping up the horrible format I made for myself).
We will get to a happy ending.
I promise.
There will be balloons and puppies and snuggles and any other good thing that y'all want.
Promises, promises.
Human bodies are horribly flawed things. Weak, wet mechanisms of bone. The only time that Castiel ever found himself grateful for being bound to a vessel was when he discovered the sorts of things his body could do with Dean's body. Those were good things, warm, sinuous, human things.
This was not those things.
This was definitively the bad, painful sort of weakness that bodies could be burdened with.
He came awake in phases. Little bits of his vessel growing painfully aware that something was wrong. It started in his legs, a clamp, a tug, the long bones creaking as they pressed together. A sharp, biting pain. Tight. Too tight. It was like the jaw of some great beast, pulling him, dragging him face down across the floor- then up. Straight up. The pain traveled to his head in an instant. Like a fluid rolling down to the lowest point, to pool behind his eyes. Pain and pressure one in the same thing.
He reached for his Grace, needing to pull it around him like a warm blanket, to block out the wash of very human pain- but it slipped away from him. Like trying to grab hold of the wind. Like trying to hold starlight. And Castiel was left swinging by his ankles, feeling defenseless and suddenly exposed without the protection of his angelic Grace.
He felt… he felt afraid and that in and of itself scared him all the more because the emotion was alien.
"Are all angels so heavy, or did I just find the double thick one?" A woman's voice asked from somewhere up near his legs- and that was wrong, but at the same time Castiel didn't know if he had ever been upside down like this before and it was a bit disorienting.
"I assume that our weight is relative to the accumulation of our individual Grace, mass of our wings, and the predefined weight of our vessels." He answered with his eyes still closed tightly, trying to keep the pain inside. To keep it contained else it might start to leak out and consume everything.
"That makes sense." She shuffled around him and made a few soft metallic noises behind him- seeming to tie off whatever she had used to hoist him up with. "You're just not what I expected, you know?"
"Most people say that about me." He thought back to Dean's less that happy response to first meeting him years ago. "I'm not sure what it is people expect angels to look like."
"More like the Boss, I suppose… maybe a bit more blonde?"
The Angel struggled to open his eyes and one stung and blurred. There was blood in it and it felt far less than pleasant. "Blonde?"
The young woman with dark hair and a split lip, who had smashed him over the head with… whatever she had hit him with, looked up from where she had decided to sit on the floor beside him. She held a pale book in one hand and paler chalk in the other.
"I just assumed that angels would be blonde." She shrugged thin shoulders and began making spider web lines of white around him on the floor.
"What are you doing?" From his limited view he could see the second girl, the younger one who had been holding Dean's phone. She was lying sprawled on the floor, candles surrounding her. The slow rise and fall of her little chest was the only indication that she was still alive- maybe sleeping, surely unconscious. Castiel was not in the position to decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing for her.
"Getting you ready." She said simply, scooting around him on her knees, continuing her careful lines.
Castiel couldn't tell if it was a good or bad thing for himself. "Getting me ready for what?" He found himself asking, more because it felt like the thing to ask and not because he actually wanted an answer. The more she kept talking the slower her movements were, the more time the Angel bought for Dean to come find him.
The hunter wasn't dead. Castiel knew that he would somehow feel the wrongness of a world in which Dean Winchester was no longer living and breathing and smiling.
He was still here somewhere. Somewhere.
He would stop this from happening.
"Ready for the Boss." She said it again like a name, like everyone knew who she spoke of.
"I don't believe I've had the chance to meet him… or her." He had to close his eyes again as a jolt of cold pain snaked from his legs down to his head, as cold and as fast as lighting. But lightening wasn't cold. That was wrong. The pain was making it hard to think straight so he took slow, even breaths like he had seen Dean do so many times, wondering how it was supposed to help.
"He told me you would come." She was fully behind him now. Her soft voice making the short hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. "He's been speaking to me for months now. Helping me find the things I need, telling me where to dig."
"Did he tell you to kill that little girl that was found in Millington?"
The girl behind him didn't answer, just noisily scooted round till she came back to his front, accompanied by the soft scritch scritch of her chalk.
"She was going to be a vessel, but the Boss didn't like her. Said something was wrong with her." The young woman stood again and made noises at his side- but Castiel couldn't be bothered to open his eyes and see what she was doing. "I thought it would be a waste to just let her go…" she made a strange noise before setting something on the ground with a dull thump. "Boss got real mad- but it's ok. I caught you. He'll be happy. He'll forgive me."
Castiel slowly opened his eyes again and the light at the end of the hall had changed. The girl was setting out candles for him now, lighting them carefully.
"Does your Boss have another name?" He pointedly looked away from the candles, straining to see the book she had left on the floor, but his eyes were still cloudy with blood and pain and he couldn't make out the words clearly.
The girl was smiling at Castiel by candle light. Six candles, carefully placed around him, lighting the corner of hallway until it was almost as bright as morning.
"He is called by many names." The light hit her eyes oddly, making them look flat and glassy like a doll's.
Castiel recognized that expression. He had seen it a thousand times over as nations of mankind rose and fell. It was fanaticism. Manic and wild.
"When I found him in the book his name was written Beli ya'al."
That name… Castiel had once known the names of all things, but Beli ya'al? It was Hebrew. It meant 'never to rise'- it wasn't a name, it was a curse old housewives spat at loaves of bread that had gone wrong.
His legs were going slowly numb- and cold had never bothered the Angel before this point, but neither had pain.
There had to be a first time for everything, he supposed.
"Belial?" He asked through the smothering cold, a horrible inkling making its way to the surface.
"It's a beautiful name, isn't it?" Her smile was almost wistful now.
"It is." That unfamiliar feeling of fear was back and Castiel hoped that it did not show on his face or in his voice. Belial had been cast out of heaven shortly after Lucifer- no longer an angel, but not a demon either. And on any normal day, laden with his God given Grace, Castiel would have stood his ground and told the thing that was once a brother exactly where he could go in no uncertain terms.
But as it was, Castiel had no ground to stand on. His feet were firmly up in the air and his Grace had fled well beyond his reach.
"You need to stop this." Castiel thought that perhaps he could just reason with her- though over the years he had found very few humans to be reasonable, especially not the female humans.
"Quiet now." She shushed him the same way you would a child, leaning down to pick up her book. "Don't go distracting me, this is the tricky part." She wouldn't look at him while she spoke, moving around out of his line of sight.
And he had thought that she was going to read from the book. Strange incantation that could only spell disaster to Castiel. He tried to reach for the woman as she circled him, but his arms did not listen, hanging limply over… under? his head, fingertips brushing against the floorboards. He craned his neck to look down at his hands, but he saw nothing wrong with them, no reason for their insubordination.
She came back around to the front of him, something gleaming in one hand. Something sharp.
It was not the book.
She held the sharp little thing in the three last fingers of her right hand while she untucked the Angel's shirt and let it bunch up under his limp arms.
Castiel did not know the girl's name, he could not use his Grace to look into her as he would have liked to. Instead he tried to speak in the low and reasonable way that he had heard Dean use so many times while trying to calm someone down.
"You don't want to do this." The words felt weird and very much not his own. He did not know how the hunter cold always say things so certainly. There was no way to know what the girl wanted, and by the small smile that she wore as she shushed him, Castiel had a strong feeling that he was lying to her.
Even before she began, he had this horrible suspicion of what she was about to do. But his Grace had always kept him safe from the brunt of mortal pain and as such he had never really had to brace for it before. Knowing what she was going to do before hand did not lessen the feeling at all.
Pain so exquisite he could find no words great enough to describe it, blossomed out from his stomach as she started her work
She was quick at least, almost efficient, not at all squeamish about the little bits she was pulling from the Angel's vessel. Some were placed in jars, some into a small wooden bowl- Castiel had to stop watching very quickly.
He chose to simply close his eyes and breathe. It was harder to manage that one might think as every inch of his body cried out for him to do something, anything, to make the girl stop. But he couldn't move any more than a slight twist of his torso which sent him turning in a slow circle and made the girl quite annoyed with him.
She struck him across the face with the flat of her hand and the pain was so insignificant by comparison that Castiel hardly took notice.
"Stop that." She said distractedly before continuing.
Castiel gave up and simply dangled as bits of his mind chipped away with each quick movement of her clever hands. He had no idea how long the whole thing took. He only knew that it hurt bad enough that his eyes had grown hot and his stomach rolled and clenched dryly. Neither were particularly helpful, but human bodies rarely did anything that was helpful.
A vague awareness of his surroundings returned as Castiel heard voices. For the smallest moment he thought that it might be Dean speaking. It was a man's voice but what little comfort that leant him vanished as he forced his eyes open.
The young woman was kneeling beside the girl in the other circle, holding the wooden bowl which now looked rather empty. Only Castiel did not need his Grace to see that something very significant had changed.
The child was sitting up now and for all intents and purposes she was still a little girl, with dark hair and drowsy eyes, the soft round cheeks of a child, but that was where the similarities stopped. The thing inside of her was far too large for her tiny frame, hunkered down, rolling and dark like an oil slick rain cloud boiling over her.
No longer an angel, but not a demon either.
Belial never had a chance at fitting in the child's small, innocent body. Castiel could not figure out for the life of him why his brother had even tried.
"Loyal child," Belial's oddly resonant voice came seemingly from the air around the tiny girl, "go and rest. You have done well."
Castiel could only see the older girl's back and shoulders as she leaned down over the smaller girl and kissed her hands reverently before raising up on shaky legs and stumbling off into the dark.
Her footsteps faded softly until there was nothing other than the soft flickering noise of twelve candles and someone's ragged, moist breaths. Dimly, Castiel realized that the second noise belonged to himself.
He watched with dim eyes as the child slowly clamored to her feet, no gracefulness in her movements, very little coordination, like it was the first time that she had ever tried to stand. It took near a whole minute for her to get her feet stable beneath her.
"Oh, what a fine thing this is." Her borrowed voice said with a grin.
Castiel could see that her mouth was vivid with blood and for some reason that made a horrible noise crawl its way from his throat.
"You're still alive?" She asked in surprise, taking a few experimental steps towards him. "How clever of Lauren to catch such a… robust angel just for me." Belial's laugh was like the roll of thunder, distant but strong. "Now, which one are you? I don't recognize this mess." She gestured at him with a bloody hand and almost lost her balance.
"My name is… is Castiel. I used to belong to… Anna's garrison." The Angel's voice sounded distant to his ears.
"Used to?"
"Anna… she relinquished her Grace an… an fell." He either closed his eyes or they simply stopped working for a moment. "The garrison dissolved … sometime… after."
"A soldier then? I should have guessed." She was much closer now and one small hand came out to touch Castiel's cheek. "It would be a shame to kill you, but far too cruel not to."
Despite what he knew to be a strong sense of self preservation, Castiel had to agree with the thing wearing the child.
"You've served a lovely purpose, dear brother. And I thank you." She kissed his forehead and Castile found another ruined noise coming unbidden from his throat.
He let out what he assumed would be a last breath, calm as he could, coming to terms with this fate because it meant that the pain would end, and in that moment that was truly all he wanted. All he could think about.
But instead of a simple and clean ending an odd sound came to Castiel, a heavy, dragging footfall and a metallic thump like the sound of a horseshoe against pavement- and he almost laughed at how strange it would be for a horse to be down here with them. Something odd must have resonated in that noise for Belial too, because her hand fell from his face and for a brief moment the angel was alone, left to hang quietly with his ribbons of pain to keep him company.
Another footfall. Another ringing thunk.
The heat from the candles no longer reached Castiel's face and he wondered if he would simply slip away without any kind of push to aid him. There was a certain peace to it that he could appreciate.
The world sort of hung there on the edge, teetering, but he did not fall over the brink.
A new noise replaced the sound of walking, a soft gasp of breath that was not his own, a whiff of smell over the almost overwhelming stench of blood.
For a brief moment, Castiel recognized that smell and he managed to get one eye to open despite the sticky blood drying slowly over his face.
Sam stood a few feet away, looking pale and filthy, phone raised high overhead, bathing the angel and the hunter both in feeble light.
Castiel could not see where Belial had gone to, his single working eye could hardly make out more than just the weak, but familiar shadows in the shape of the youngest Winchester. And many panicked thoughts suddenly rolled through his mind, warnings he needed to voice. He needed to tell Sam to run- to find his brother and get out. He needed to exorcise the former angel from the little girl who couldn't have gotten far, but that exorcism had too many words and he knew that he would not be able to get them all out. Not in his current condition.
"Gun." He managed instead. He knew Sam must have one… but that was the wrong weapon for something like Belial. Oh, but Castiel didn't feel right anymore. He was honestly surprised that he managed a word that even vaguely fit this situation. He could have just as well said 'cat', or 'banana'… well, not banana- that had too many parts.
Sam looked questioningly at Castiel before his eyes focused somewhere slightly to the side of him. "Oh." His voice was higher than it should have been, worry and something else all together compressed into that single word.
He seemed to hesitate, fiddling with his phone for a second, the light dimming before coming back. "Are you alright?"
"Sweet, simple, Sam." Belial's voice came from just to the side of Castiel, the earlier notes of kindness abandoned for something far closer to humor. "You really shouldn't have come here."
"Gun." Castiel wished that his mouth could remember how to make any other word… but Sam was smart, surly he would understand a warning when he heard it.
Surely.
"I… I don't think we've met." Sam said brokenly.
"No, we haven't. Not formally. Do you think we should?"
"No." Sam answered rather quickly and firmly, as if being properly introduced to the thing residing in that little girl couldn't be further from his mind. "I think I should help my friend down."
"Your friend?" Belial laughed again. "How charming. Friend." He said the word like he was testing it, experimenting with how it felt rolling around in his newly acquired moth. "Tell me, Sam- does your friend take good care of you as friends should? Do you two go out for drinks together? Did he pull from you the poisonous foxglove?"
Sam did not immediately reply, instead he stood there suspiciously, not moving for long moments. His phone went dark- or Castiel's eye closed. The angel really wasn't sure, and really didn't think that it mattered at this point.
"Are you his pet I wonder, or is he yours?" Belial's voice was like music, rising and falling, too perfect to be human.
"Neither." Sam answered softly. "Cas? Cas are you alright?"
Apparently Sam was not quite as smart as the angel had wanted to give him credit for. If he was then he would not still be standing there- completely useless.
Castiel thought he might have answered 'no', but honestly he couldn't feel his mouth move. He couldn't feel much of anything other than the cold that had spread from his legs to slowly fill him. It was certainly a more welcome feeling.
Sam may have said something then, or perhaps it was Belial. Masculine tones fading into a white noise that was so very soothing. Castiel did not care, the only thing that mattered was the pleasant nothingness that crashed over him and took away the pain.