Chapter Seven: someday I'll need your spine to hide behind
"Amara," Dean grumbled as Sam sidestepped to let her in and down the stairs. "Took you long enough, where have you been?"
"Jack. It's good to finally meet you." His great-aunt looked at him with gentle kindness and extended a hand to him. "I wish it hadn't taken us this long to meet, but that's my fault. Maybe we will have time to catch up."
"I hope so." Jack made himself smile through the hammering in his heart. With Billie dead he had no idea how he could still regain enough strength to kill Chuck, but either way he knew that their plan for saving the world would always have to include the elimination of both God and His sister.
"Amara, sister of the Divine, mother of all Darkness." A clatter of scuffling footsteps followed the breathless proclamation and Jack turned to see Serafiel backpedaling off the staircase, eyes wide as planets. "She has come to carry out His unfinished will." Something like a breathless cry finished her declaration, prompting Castiel to quickly move to her side.
"Sister, she means no harm," he tried to reassure her, words that did little to calm the angel when Amara turned to approach them.
"Castiel." A strange look of horror dawned on her face. "What did my brother do to you?"
A hushed stream of Enochian spilled out from Serafiel as she shut her eyes and grabbed at Castiel's wrist. Jack understood enough to know that she was praying for deliverance, as if on instinct though she must have known there was nobody listening. Amara seemed not to notice the angel's spiraling terror; her attention was fixed on the discolored markings on Castiel's neck. When she touched a finger to the base of his clavicle Jack felt an instinctive pulse of his grace rushing forward, unable to ignore the way Castiel steeled himself not to flinch.
"Can you make that go away?" Dean's rough voice broke through the tension suffocating the room.
Amara shook her head, dark curls hiding the pain in her eyes. "The scarring runs deep into his true form. I am sorry, Castiel. I didn't know my brother was unmaking angels."
"Unmaking?" Sam spoke up from beside Jack. "What do you mean? Cas said the other angels were atomized."
"Yes, but it's much more than that. When something or someone is unmade, it never truly disappears. There are traces, so to speak, left behind for eons to come. What happened to the other angels?"
"Chuck, he decimated Heaven. We…" Castiel glanced back at Serafiel whose knuckles were whitening with the tightness of her grip on his wrist. "We are the only ones left."
As Castiel continued to explain to Amara what he'd seen in Heaven Jack sidled up next to Serafiel and put a hand on her shoulder. Under his palm he could feel the waves of tremors rolling through her body. "Don't worry," he smiled warmly. "She isn't going to hurt you."
Her head swiveled around, the petrified expression unthawing as if she was noticing Jack's presence for the first time. "Can you feel it too?" she breathed, seizing his hand. "She is engulfed in the very power to extinguish the light from the stars."
The words echoed through the room as if spoken through a megaphone and Castiel paused in the middle of a sentence about the Circle. "Serafiel," he began, turning around only to stop when she stiffened, pressing flatter against the metal staircase railing.
"Sara, why don't you and Jack go get us all some coffee," Sam offered before gesturing to the others around him. "We should probably sit down and talk about all this."
"Dean taught me how to work the coffee machine. It's not as hard as it looks. I like hot chocolate better, though. We could also go and watch something." Jack kept up a steady stream of chatter as he led Serafiel into the kitchen, noticing how her legs finally stopped wobbling the further they were away from Amara. "They're probably going to be talking for a long time. Sam helped me download a bunch of new episodes of Clone Wars last night."
Confusion wrinkled Serafiel's smooth brow. "I do not recognize this war. However I would be receptive to learning more about it."
He opened the cupboard door only to swing it shut a moment later, the percussion of opening and closing doors following him as he bustled through the kitchen. "I think Dean tried to hide the last bag of Twizzlers," Jack said by way of explanation to the puzzled angel at his side. "But I think you'll like them."
"Angels don't need to eat." Serafield paused, as if debating the veracity of the statement before adding, "although lack of need does not negate the ability to experiment with these flavors."
Jack temporarily abandoned his search for the last bag of Twizzlers for a Snickers bar he found in the back of one of the drawers. Before biting into the stringy confection he offered it to Serafiel, who shook her head and continued sniffing a pack of coffee grounds that was left out on the counter. "I recall this odor," she informed him. "When I first took this vessel after The Great Fall she was incapicitated from below her neck. I, too, had been gravely injured in the fall, so I spent most of that period recovering in her vessel. She only received one visitor who frequently drank a beverage that smelled like this."
"Did you help her get better?"
Serafiel pushed her nose deeper into the golden plastic of the coffee bag. "I did, shortly before the gates of Heaven were re-opened. But by then the visitor had long ceased their visitations. I do not believe she has anyone awaiting her return home." She paused, her trembling hands gripping the bag a little too tightly and Jack heard the last, unspoken part of that sentence: just like me.
Before Jack could think of what to say in response his attention was turned to the snatches of conversation drifting in from outside, speech bubbles blown up and elongated from heightened emotions.
"So you were planning to kill me?"
"We were going to save the world!"
Dean's voice. Red and brimming with fire.
"It's about balance, Amara. If we take Chuck out you have to go, too, otherwise everything collapses."
Sam. Strained patience looping through the white.
"I know he is your family. But it must be done."
Castiel. Blue, rushing quiet and wounded.
"...he's snapping universes out of existence, he killed all the angels, you know that this world is next!"
Dean again. Panic colored black in desperation.
"He didn't kill them, he unmade them. They still exist in an atomic capacity."
Amara. Her words echoed with a rust-colored grime of wisdom and regret.
"I never found opportunity to taste the beverage that accompanied this scent. You said you knew the workings of a machine that could construct it?" Serafiel handed the bag over to Jack tentatively.
They still exist...
An idea dawned on Jack and he left Serafiel momentarily to rush into the main room, not noticing how they all immediately quieted down as soon as he entered. "What if you unmade him?" he blurted out, facing Amara who was sitting at the head of the table. "You have the power, right? You can do what he does."
"You want me to unmake my own brother?" A thin laugh puckered her lips. "Seriously?"
"Hold on, listen to what he's saying. If you unmake Chuck, that wouldn't count as killing him..." Sam stalled between words, as if trying to figure out where the numbers added and subtracted into each other. "Then there would be no need to kill you since the balance would be maintained because-"
"He would still exist in some way," Amara finished. "Not in any way where he could hurt anyone, though. But you have no idea what you're asking me to do, Jack, do you?" Her eyes landed on him now, but he didn't see her.
All he could see was Castiel writhing in Chuck's grip.
Blood vessels bursting.
Skin boiling.
Bones splintering.
The squelch of organs rupturing and screams crumbling to ashes.
"I do," Jack managed faintly. "I watched it happen."
Everyone followed his line of sight to where Castiel was sitting, except Amara who simply closed her eyes.
"Look, I know you feel-" Dean started, but she shook her head, standing up in one fluid motion.
"You don't know. You can't even begin to understand who- what we are. What unmaking him would do to him. To me. " Her fingers smoothed out the creases in her suit jacket and she moved as if to leave but then paused. "But if you are serious about trapping him, I still can take a look at that Circle."
Soft cotton strands brushed against Jack's cheek as a trickle of voices filtered into his waking mind.
"Coffee? I like drinking that sometimes too."
"I find the flavor to be warm."
Light moved across his closed eyelids and he dimly remembered falling asleep somewhere after the opening credits of the first episode of season two. His toes prodded against something warm and solid. Serafiel? His grace hummed in response to her presence, telling him she was still seated on the bed and the thought drifted through his grogginess that she might have finished the season without him.
Someone else hovered near, tucking the corner of fabric around his shoulders. Gold ribbons flared through his chest in a warmth of fireworks. Castiel. He kept his eyes closed, relaxing to the lullaby of his father's grace as he moved around the room.
"He needs to sleep because of his human side." That was Castiel talking. "His mother was human. Her name was Kelly Kline." A pause. "She was a brave and wonderful woman."
Mother. Visions flowed through him: visions of her smile, her eyes bright with love for him, her voice cradling him close. The current of pastel memories almost carried him back to blissful dreams when the sharpness of Serafiel's voice washed him back ashore.
"You were present for the birth of this nephilim? And you did not destroy him?"
"I know what we were taught about nephilim, Serafiel. But I've learned-" the muted scrape of a chair, Castiel probably sitting down "-that it's never as black and white as it seems. Sometimes you just need to have faith, even in the seemingly impossible."
"Faith?" A short, bitter laugh. More like a sneer. "Our Father would see us dismembered and you speak of holding fast to belief?"
"Not in Him. I believe in people, in the good that they do and the love they have for each other."
"Humanity. You chose them over us." There was less bitterness now. Almost longing. "You left us."
A longer pause. "I went against Heaven's will because they were trying to end the world. I didn't want to-" his words drifted off, growing distant. "I had to choose, but I never wanted to stop being part of-" The clearing of his throat. Another pause. "Serafiel, you know I have no intention to harm you, right? I am not...I am not your enemy."
Silence.
"I understand if you hate me," he added quietly. "I won't deny what you must have heard about me."
"I don't know," she said slowly. "I don't know you, Castiel. I see that now. What you told me about the happenings of Earth are vastly different to what Heaven said. We were supposed to be beings of divine truth, but now I realize that we have only ever been emissaries of lies." The blankets beside Jack rustled, as if Serafiel was pulling it up to her knees. "Our Father left us eons ago. Our elder brothers fought to the point of annihilation. We fell. We lost our wings. We killed each other in civil wars." The words stumbled over each other's feet, all at once muffled and deafening. "We have not been angels for too long."
"I know."
Again the blanket stretched, lines tightening. Perhaps she was tugging it closer to her chest. "There's nowhere for us to go, Castiel. There is no purpose to our being. We are the last children unwanted by our father. We are the scars of our species. Our existence is merely a punishment."
In the quiet following her verdict Jack thought that maybe Castiel wouldn't reply. He had nearly fallen asleep when he heard him speak, his voice aching with tenderness. "Your life is not a punishment, sister. It is yours and yours alone. You get to choose what to do with it."
Notes:
Chapter title from "Lost" by Dermot Kennedy