It isn't like angels know everything. Far from it.
Castiel has been aware of and content with that from the Beginning. His place, when he was created, was as a cog, and the cogs don't need knowledge of time for the clock to work. Of course, awareness of and confrontation of the same are as different as seeing the ocean and drowning in it, and he must have fallen into a latent delusion of omniscience over his millennia of perfect operation. In meeting the Winchesters, falling, walking the Earth as a man, Castiel has felt freezing saltwater shred his lungs and pressure snap his bones.
But there must still have been some arrogance left. Creeping back in. Because true shock only comes for those who think there's nothing left in the world to surprise them, and this...this is certainly shocking.
He stares down into the open corpse for a long time, the front of the ribcage sawn free and resting nearby like a breastplate. There are many things he doesn't know, but he's more than passingly familiar with human anatomy, and has a clear image in his mind of what healthy organs should look like. Even in death, they should not be cradled by internal hands.
They are hands. Not hand-shaped tumors. There's skin on them, nails. Most have five fingers. One each over the lungs, fingers fanned loosely to allow them to expand with breath that no longer comes. One cupping the heart, as if offering it to the observer. Several gripping loops of intestines in slack, gentle fists. Their wrists disappear below the organs they are holding.
The body cavity is filled with a shallow fluid in which the hands and organs sit, topped with a sheen oily and bruise-colored. It appears to be responsible for the primordial reek that fills the morgue, an ocean hot and fetid and teeming with strange life despite the chill of the meat surrounding it.
"Are they sewn in place?" Castiel asks the medical examiner eventually. He knows they aren't. They don't have the smell of something foreign.
The ME shakes his head. "Not glued, not grafted. Already checked. And we're still waiting on the genetic testing, but if I had to take a shot in the dark…" A deep breath. "I'd guess they'd match the, uh. The host."
Castiel would take that shot, as well. Despite the fact that the hands appear to belong to different people, in shape and size and skin color. The one holding the gallbladder appears to belong to a child.
"Is there anything that could cause this medically?"
The ME is training an intern, who asks, "What the fuck do you think, Agent?"
That earns a harsh look and hissed reprimand, but Castiel probably deserved the question. He had to ask, but there is no disease that causes this. Nothing natural, at least.
His first thought had been a talented witch, but Sam has gotten back to him after forwarding his inquiries to Rowena, and she's as bewildered as the rest of them. Not only that, but Castiel has been to the victim's apartment, and there's nothing remotely magical there. No runes, no hex bags, not even the trace of a curse...and one this powerful would leave far more than a trace.
That's not to say that the apartment is empty.
Castiel steps over crumbled mortar, chunks of brick a meaty red where breaching has broken them open. A mason by trade, the apartment's occupant, the victim lying dead and strange on the ME's table, sealed every door, window, and vent three days ago. It was upon noticing it that the landlord called the police.
"Never thought I'd say it, but fuck, am I glad the feds are in on this one," the sheriff says from behind Castiel. He is not keen to reenter the apartment. "It's...well. You'll see."
Castiel looks at the walls. The dingy off-white is spotted with handprints. Dark, varying sizes. The fingers on some are too long. The substance is shiny and flaking.
"This isn't blood," he observes.
"No," the sheriff agrees, but doesn't offer any explanation for what it might be.
Castiel walks deeper into the apartment. The closer he comes to the living room, the center of the place, the thicker the handprints get on the walls. Some are black, some are red. Still not blood. Not paint. Some glitter, oily. He is filled with an unprofessional foreboding he can't shake.
He wishes he was not hunting solo.
In the living room, no white is visible. Only handprints. Fingers overlap in fractal webs, palms haloed by splatters as if a dozen people stood and beat the walls with fury and desperation. Lights have been brought in, because every bulb and fixture in the place was shattered, but it's still dark.
The brickwork on the windows and the air vents feels less like defense than cocooning. Meant to keep something in before it ever kept anyone out.
There are only two spots that are not completely covered by handprints, on opposite walls. In one of those white patches, a crude but recognizable rendering: a swirling dark hole, lighter on the edges than the center. One of the lakes just outside town, likely the largest. Castiel surmises the medium was human excrement and blood.
On the other wall, writing, done in the same.
It calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls it calls itcalls itcalls itcallsitcallsitcallsitcalls
A spiral of words. Geometrically perfect. It surrounds another phrase.
I cannot answer the Drowning Star
Forgive me
Castiel is wingless. If he still had them, every feather would be standing on end.
Angels don't have conspiracy theories. They hardly talk amongst themselves. When they do voice suspicions, they must be worded carefully, to avoid accusations of blasphemy. Three thousand years ago, in the Levant, Balthazar was aware of this.
"It seems odd," he observed, looking out across the desert, at the green spaces man had carved out for himself. "Our Father - He is perfect, correct?"
"Of course," replied Castiel. Back then, it was reflex. He even believed it.
"Then why...has He chosen to create such an imperfect universe?" Balthazar asked, tentatively.
"The mind of God is not for us to decipher."
"I know, I know. I just wonder, sometimes." Balthazar paused, and Castiel imagines now he knew of Castiel's curiosity. Knew he couldn't resist.
"What do you wonder?"
"Our Father, He made Earth. He made humanity in His most holy image. But the rest of the universe…" Balthazar raised all his eyes to the stars above. "Perhaps. Perhaps it was created by. Something else. And God has simply - made it His own."
Castiel was silent for a long moment, before warning, "If Annanel hears you saying - "
"I am aware. Simply an errant thought."
"We should not have errant thoughts."
"I am aware."
Silence again, before Castiel asked, defensive, "What would even have made it, if not God? Where would it be now?"
"I don't know," Balthazar replied, and they never spoke of it again. Castiel hardly ever even thought about it.
He thinks of it now. An alternate creator, an alternate beginning. An impatient and immature deity taking over the ruins of an ancient world, like a child transferring his toys to a hollowed-out fort in the wake of a war. Not understanding the purpose, the horror of it, ignorantly making it his own because why not?
Castiel looks from the writing to the drawing.
Unfortunately, he knows where he must go next.
The town is a small one. The sheriff doubles as the coroner, and the medical examiner traveled here from Santa Fe to look at the body. Like many areas Castiel has been drawn to for hunts, this one is less a city than a loose collection of institutions held together by a name.
It's the type of town where, when something terrible happens, all the residents discuss, as if driven by a downright evolutionary instinct, how it's the kind of place where things like this just don't happen. Castiel is tired of telling them that this is the only kind of place where things like this happen, in his experience. Or at least the only kind of place where they make enough waves to draw in people like him.
The first settlers were brought here by the water. A cluster of lakes that are less lakes than flooded caverns, many small and one very large, all part of the same system, all so blue the color feels like a kind of assault in the harsh light and bland surroundings of the high desert. Castiel watched a documentary on cenotes once with Sam, believes the name and definition would apply to these.
About a dozen people drown here a year. The town likely wouldn't be on the map otherwise.
There are fences around the water, and a sheriff's deputy on duty at all times. Castiel goes at night. He'd expected to have to knock out the deputy, but he's already sound asleep in his patrol car, so he simply walks right past him and easily scales the fence. Chain link, concertina wire. Nothing difficult.
He sheds his coat on the line of rock that passes for a shore, his shoes and tie. The water, when he jumps in, is cold enough to shock even him. His first thought is of unprotected vacuum, even though of course that's a terrible comparison. If he'd taken a breath, if he'd had to, it would have been forced instantly out of him; no wonder humans drown here.
He dives. His eyes shine softly, a natural side effect of using his Grace to see in the dark. Lined with rock, devoid of plant and animal life, the lake, the cave goes down and down and down. Except for at the bottom, where it curves off into the earth.
Currents, powerful, tug and buffet. The water tastes strange.
The cavern is long where it snakes off, full of blind curves. There are tunnels where the other cenotes join this one. As Castiel swims along it with movements of arms and legs, it grows steadily narrower, and he finds himself wondering what he'll do if he gets stuck down here. Wingless, he's confined to much slower and more circuitous methods of travel than flight. No teleportation. He'd have to break bones to get loose, possibly leave limbs behind. He could just abandon the vessel and find another, but…
He reaches out to touch a wall, then twitches immediately back in revulsion. It's stone, smooth stone. It looks like it is, at least. He can't see any bacterial mats or algae. But it feels soft, gelid, brings to mind the slick of rotten flesh. He crushes a nonsensical urge to lick it.
The water's become warmer.
The cavern narrows, narrows, slopes up. Castiel follows it, the space tight enough now he has to pull himself along with touches to the paradoxically soft rocks. He supposes grabbing them is better than striking them by accident if he tries to swim. He wonders if he'll come to a dead end, still unsure why there was a drawing of this place on the wall of the cloistered apartment. He has a terrible feeling he doesn't see the point in naming.
He struggles past a tight bend, is just thinking to himself that he should turn back before that isn't an option anymore when he sees light above. He drags himself towards it, losing shirt buttons in the process, and then up into air. Another cavern, but this one unflooded.
The space is wide, but has a ceiling so low Castiel must crawl. It's smooth sandstone, muted, dreamy bands curling around and over him. Other holes like the one he came out of, ranging in size from a finger to a manhole, cover the floor. The water in them is completely still, flat and blue, and that unnerves him. He tries to distract himself by looking for the source of the light, but it doesn't make him feel better. There doesn't appear to be one.
It's weak, watery, a wounded purple-red. When he looks down at his hands, they appear to him like those of a cadaver. He has no shadow, and the water all around him has no reflection.
The Drowning Star.
Castiel retracts his Grace inside him. He doesn't want whatever might be here to feel it.
Directly ahead of him, the cave narrows into another tunnel. The mouth is dark. There is a smeared handprint near it, identical to the ones he saw in the apartment, and the angle makes it appear to have been made by something crawling out. He very much wishes he didn't have to go in.
Once he's in the tunnel, he becomes aware of someone humming. Echoing off the curved walls, the noise behaves strangely, sounds almost as if it's coming from behind him.
The next chamber is smaller than the last, but almost as flat and shallow. Curved ceiling, curved floor. No chance of standing even at the tallest point, although someone shorter could likely manage it. Where the floor slopes down from its meeting point with the ceiling, at the bottom of the shallow dip, water has collected. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it fluid.
There's enough of it to mostly fill the floor, leaving only a narrow beach around the circumference of the nearly-perfect circle of the cave. The edges are yellow and green, fading in towards purple, almost exactly like a bruise. The surface is covered in oily scales that glitter in a sickening rainbow of rot. Unlike the water in the cavern behind Castiel, this moves, lapping at the smooth stone around it...but the motion is unnatural. More like pulsing than the natural flow of water. It reflects, in its viscous depths, the thousands of handprints that cover the walls and floor and ceiling.
It isn't difficult to see what made them.
Castiel's eyes are fixed on what lays just below the surface of the fluid: people. Things that used to be people, at least. Or, upon closer examination, just one thing, it seems.
Flesh has pulled and stretched and piled. Ribs have hooked into each other in a complicated lattice in one spot, the mingled organs behind them visible and pulsing beneath a translucent webbing of skin. Intestines lie in a mathematically perfect whorl of viscerae, coupled seamlessly into each other at certain points and separated further down the line. Castiel sees recognizable shapes of hips and shoulders, jaws and thighs, but they flow off immediately into incomprehensible spaces when traced down. Most of the hair seems to have gathered in one multicolored copse, different lengths waving with the rhythm of the liquid. Near Castiel, a bank of eyes and mouths open and close in an undulating rhythm. There are teeth around the eyes, lashes on the tongues.
The most reticulated parts remaining are arms and hands. Every arm lays across as much of the mass as it can cover. Every hand grips whatever is closest. The thing, so obviously alive and dreaming, is holding itself here in this distant cave, like a young and lonely child seeking comfort in a nightmare.
There is an unidentifiable feeling crawling through Castiel. It takes him a moment to identify it as nausea, Grace-deep. He's never felt so ill before in his life.
The humming has continued through all this. With difficulty, Castiel wrests his eyes from the thing at the bottom of the corrupted pool, and identifies the source: a man in standard green scrubs, young, lying on the dry stone of the handprinted beach with one arm tucked beneath his head for a pillow, expression slack and dreamy. Castiel recognizes him, but takes a moment to place him. The ME's intern, he realizes after a moment.
He should call out to him. The man almost certainly doesn't know Castiel is here, and Castiel doubts he even knows he's here himself, based on his expression. But he remains quiet, laid out in the tunnel, separate still from this chamber.
Something is bothering him deeply. The humming and the liquid sounds are distracting, and the air pressure seems to be higher down here, interfering with his senses. It stinks. The smell makes him think somehow of Venus - something hot and wet and utterly primordial, boiling seas under red suns that soft things crawl through even as they fall apart and join a reeking, violent stew of strange life. He shakes his head, and the pieces click into place.
How is the intern, unquestionably human, here? There are no other entrances to this cavern besides the one Castiel came through. Miles, quite literally, of dark and airless tunnels, and he has no mask, no oxygen tanks.
It's hot here, but gooseflesh stipples Castiel's wet skin from his testicles to the nape of his neck. He has a sudden and very primal urge, almost certainly originating in his vessel, to press his back to the roof of the tunnel he's in. Ward off any attacks that could come from that direction because, at this point, even a gentle touch would be an attack.
The thing in the pool moves.
Every hand, every arm. They rise, slowly. When they break the surface, it is as if they are breaching a membrane - each one is slick and black in the air, no trace of native color beneath the oleaginous coating. Each one reaches for the intern. Castiel tenses. The ones furthest away strain sleepily, as if thinking they might reach him. The ones closest, they touch him. They take hold of him. They draw him down.
He doesn't struggle. Quite the opposite, actually. A smile splits across his face, and he closes his eyes, and holds the hands that have grabbed onto his. He slips beneath the surface without a sound, leaning into it all the while.
Castiel thinks about what it would feel like, that fluid on his skin, and he nearly gags. With his real mouths. Not his vessel's.
Is it a bad sign? How this is affecting him?
The intern settles against the flesh at the bottom of the pool, near where he entered. His clothing has begun to dissolve in a soft fizz. He looks...softer. Candle wax in warm water, though his components have not yet begun to meld. To migrate. Castiel watches him, wondering when the process begins, when a piece becomes part of the whole. The intern's eyes are still open. Beneath the fluid, they roam slowly, they move, they focus. On Castiel.
Castiel blinks rapidly. It feels like waking up. He wonders how long he's been here, on hands and knees, in the tunnel, watching, because his vessel's points of contact with the stone are in the sort of pain that doesn't come about in minutes. He looks down, wondering about blood or bruising, and that's the first time he realizes he's sieving. Leaking.
Blue-white Grace. Running in thin, feathery streams from nail beds, out of his mouth from the roots of his teeth, from his nose and tear ducts. Running down the slope of the stone. To the pool, where it has already begun to bleed along the edge.
Hello, young one.
It's not his own internal voice, but it's not something else, either. It's not Enochian. But it's not not Enochian.
Your light, it's delicious. You are like a star, aren't you, visitor?
Castiel lifts his hands, trembling. Grace continues draining.
There are many kinds of stars.
He begins to shut the channels off, one by one.
Did you know that?
He's lost a lot. It will take a long time to regenerate, if he doesn't transfuse.
Some prefer sea to sky.
He could reclaim what's run out of him, it's still there...
Flesh to fire.
But he will not put something that's touched what's in the cave back in his body.
You were once a piece of something larger.
He backs rapidly out of the tunnel.
Be that again. More complete than before. We understand making in a way your Father did not.
He finds the hole he came through in the other cavern. It's more difficult than it should be, he should have marked it.
We understand being in a way that would break him.
He dives in.
Be more, little bright one.
It hurts.
Drown with us.
By the time Castiel leaves town, his thoughts and his voice are his own again. For the first time in years, he prays, earnest and desperate, for that to last.
He speaks very briefly with the sheriff and the ME both before he goes. No one is talking about the fact the corpse vanished from the morgue, or that the apartment building said corpse was recovered from burned to a particularly fine ash the same day. If anything, they seem relieved. Only upset by the fact the missing persons case involving the ME's intern is dragging this whole thing out even longer. Castiel wishes he could tell them not to bother.
At least the topic of dredging the lakes, much as something without a proper bottom can be dredged, doesn't seem likely to come up.
Sam and Dean will ask about this case, when Castiel gets home. He will tell them it wasn't their kind of thing after all. They'll believe him, and he'll do what he can to ensure they never come here. Or to any places like it.
The Winchesters are of a certain breed. Every problem is one to be solved. Every dragon is one to be slain. They don't understand, and likely never will, that there are things out there you have to leave alone. Things you have to allow to exist.
Things you have to feed. Because there is no slaying or starving a linchpin of the original universe.