Humanitarian Aid
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It is fair to say that this fic is bleak, in the existentially nihilistic sense. It's not as bleak, in my opinion, as a lot of fanfiction out there – those that refer to personal experiences of abuse or rape or attempted suicide or drug use. But it is bleak in a larger, world-encompassing sense. It touches on displacement, failed states, sectarian conflict, environmental degradation and its social/economical/health consequences, and the often traumatic work of humanitarian aid. Just so readers are aware.
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Crowley had never been one for altruism, and he would always insist that his choices after he consented to the second cure were entirely selfish.
He had needed to escape the finite opportunities and perennial optimism within the bunker, escape the Winchesters and their shared history. Escape the relentless supernatural conflict in which he suddenly no longer had a role. There was no place for the former King of Hell among heroes.
Crowley would insist that he had signed up with Médecins Sans Frontières after randomly coming across a poster, to prove to himself he could do some good in the world. He had no hope of ever balancing that good out against the evils of the past. Only to make the attempt. Only then would he regain a sense of self-worth. After all, anyone who had spent any time working on the ground for a humanitarian organization would warn that notions of saving the world die quickly. They did the work because – for whatever personal reason – they were compelled to do it. And Crowley was compelled.
It helped that he spoke Russian, among numerous other languages. It helped he was familiar with corruption, nepotism, the failures of privatization and market liberalization, thuggery, and a whole host of other ills that are so prevalent in certain political climes. So Médecins Sans Frontières sent him to Uzbekistan, to the region of Karakalpakistan, on the fringes of the vanishing Aral Sea. Crowley took up an administrative post at the local Médecins Sans Frontières tuberculosis clinic.
And he gained a new definition of Hell.
The Aral Sea was an ecological and social disaster of enormous scale, tens of thousands of square kilometers of sea floor salinizing into a barren stretch of sand. Fishing boats beached in dry dunes. Temperatures ruptured mercury bulbs. Great dust storms ravaged the region, carrying half a century of Soviet pesticides and toxic waste with it. It was in the food and the water, scrubbed into every layer of skin and sucked into the lungs with each inhalation. The dust tucked itself into the bed sheets, curled up in the creases of clothes, piled up within the clinic compound, forming undulating dunes in the walled courtyard.
There was little clean drinking water and rarely hot water. The tea was more milk than tea, because without the milk, Crowley might as well have been drinking boiled seawater.
Conditions in the region never improved. Because the situation, by now, was recognized by everyone – the Karakalpaks, the Médecins Sans Frontières, the endless cycle of aid workers – to be irreversible. Crowley did what he could, what could be done. He established order out of the medical records. He adjusted budgets and applied for grants and reinvested in fundraising. He battled the Uzbek Ministry of Health for medical supplies and equipment, for proper means of disposing medical waste, for computers and the most basic office supplies, and with the clinic staff over proper sanitation. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. It made running Hell the equivalent of running a lemonade stand.
Crowley worked. He worked at all hours, under all conditions, worked until he forgot that tea wasn't meant to be salty and that his world had not always been composed of dust and tubercular death. Crowley worked and he learned to stop counting how many lives they saved verse how many yet needed to be saved.
After six months, they sent him back to the States for a break.
It was unnecessary, in Crowley's opinion. After Hell closed, he had felt lost, purposeless, unwanted. Working at the clinic gave meaning to his continued existence. Gave him structure and direction. Every single day was a struggle. But it was better than sitting around the bunker, ghosts lurking over his shoulder, the boys uncertain how to make him feel welcome – all of them uncertain if he was welcome at all. Crowley assisted with a few cases – research, mostly – and cooked a few meals. After only two weeks, he called the organization's headquarters and asked for his application for another six months to be fast-tracked.
Crowley returned to Karakalpakistan with something approaching relief.
Before he left, Cas said, "I want to go with you. I want to be of some use, to someone, anyone."
Poor human Castiel. His grace and powers gone, his capacity as a hunter limited by his own inexperience, by what the Winchesters would allow him to experience. The fragile new human, supposedly in need of their protection. But the former demon refused the former angel. Cas could not conceive of the challenges of the work, the lack of resolution, the given failure that still required persistence on the part of aid workers. There was no winning this battle. There was no happy ending, no relief, no redemption. Just the work. Because once someone had seen it, they could not look away.
"It's not like fighting monsters," he explained. "There is nothing to kill or overcome, no absolute or moral struggle. Poverty and environmental degradation and systematic collapse cannot be beaten back with angel blades or fixed with spellwork. And no one, absolutely no one, is ever actually saved."
He left a disgruntled Castiel behind.
Crowley returned to find the compound's newly installed medical waste incinerator rendered useless, the chamber spewing forth plastic bags and bloody gauze, broken needles and broken glass. The work of rebuilding a system never meant to properly function resumed.
He began construction on more patient rooms, a modern lab, a drug dispensary, acquired an only-moderately outdated x-ray machine. None of which would ever be enough. He returned again and again to the Ministry of Health to negotiate pay for his clinic staff. Some had not received compensation for several months. He handled the disaster tourists, those adventurous few who cycled through on three-month tours of service, there to gawk and pen stories of deprivation and sacrifice as much as provide actual assistance. When the electricity sputtered out in yet another dust storm, Crowley worked on an old typewriter, the bell ringing jarringly down the halls.
In rare moments of leisure, he visited the Igor V. Savitsky Art Museum, where one man made safe from Soviet power by distance preserved the world's most comprehensive collection of 20th century Russian art, while his contemporaries perished in gulags.
Crowley ran the business that was humanitarian aid, the fundraising and recruitment and grant work, the budgeting that was weighing the value of individual and collective human lives. At the end of his second tour, he applied to stay on a permanent basis. The organization agreed. They also sent him a new aid worker to help, another doctor for the clinic, a familiar face. Castiel.
"You're not a doctor," Crowley remarked wearily when he saw who it was disembarking the tiny plane at the Tashkent airport.
"I was here to see humankind formed," Cas replied. "I know them inside and out. I only required the time necessary to learn procedures and medicines. Sam falsify my medical degree and certifications. I am here to help." At the last, he squared his shoulders, raised his chin like the old days.
Crowley watched as the former angel realized over the following weeks how little he had understood of the situation. How different this life was than the one they had lived before.
The people of Karakalpakistan either applied for resettlement elsewhere in Uzbekistan, or they sickened and died. They died of tuberculosis. They died of radiation poisoning, of expose to anthrax from the once-secret manufacturing plant out on Vozrozhdeniya Island, which was no longer an island because the sea had consumed itself, and had been left unguarded since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anyone could walk there on foot across the salt-encrusted seafloor. They died of bronchial asthma, lung disease, stomach and throat cancers. The Karakalpaks died of depression and alcoholism and hunger, and they died of despair.
When Castiel was awake and on his feet, he was working in the clinic. And when he was not working in the clinic, he was face down in his pillow, dead to the world. There were never enough beds, never enough medicine, never enough working equipment or supplies. And even when there was enough of those things, the few patients whose tuberculosis did go into remission were discharged into a community on the verge of collapse, only to sicken and return. Castiel learned to comfort mothers whose children were not sick – not yet, but certainly would be, eventually. Learned to heal in the very limited, impermanent way that humans can heal others. He stopped holding himself accountable for every life lost, merely reached out to care for the next one.
"You can leave any time," Crowley told him. "You don't have to stay. You don't have to do this." And then, "The boys surely miss you."
But Castiel stayed. And Crowley stayed. They worked. And when they weren't working, they laughed and drank with the other aid workers, chasing away the endlessness of it all. They tended their patients in the clinic, and were tended by them, by their families. They walked the wide Soviet thoroughfares and learned the names of shopkeepers, learned their children's names, learned their hopes and fears that so closely and oddly reflected back their own. They drank tea in people's homes, shared their books, watched themselves live through those around them. And they persisted, even though there was nothing to be gained from it. There was no resolving this situation, as Crowley had explained to Castiel. There never was. But once they knew, they could not walk away.
"It's a lot like hunting that way," Cas reflected once. Except they both knew hunting supernatural predators on the back roads of America was nothing like this.
Cas went back only once, after his first six months. He returned shell-shocked, as wide-eyed and uncomprehending as Crowley imagined the angel had looked his first few days on Earth, in another life. "It was soul-sucking," Cas admitted. "No one understood. Everything seemed so trivial. The only thing that made any sense was hunting, working cases. I couldn't believe the water out of the facet was drinkable. Everything came so easily. That should have made it a paradise, but it just felt so empty."
After that, neither went back. They worked, and time rolled by. The boys occasionally sent care packages. Cas and Crowley shared it with their fellow aid workers, with their patients. Sam occasionally wrote – to Cas, never Crowley. Dean never wrote. He seemed hurt by Castiel's decision to stay away. Cas wrote countless emails, attempting to explain himself, explain the work and the place and this new self that was emerging. Half the emails were never sent, and those that were sent never received a reply. Eventually, he gave up and stopped writing.
There was the occasional monster. When the need arose, they worked a spell together. They traveled to Tashkent and read some of the oldest texts on the supernatural in an ancient library hidden from the Soviets. They listened to reports on the radio of local bombings and kidnappings. They lost patients to illness and neighbors to state-sanctioned violence and co-workers to despair. They watched the poison levels of the Aral Sea climb, watched the ecological and social devastation spread, uncontainable.
They worked, and became two very different men from the ones they had been before. Weary, resolute, disenchanted, solid. Present, and wholly a part of the reality that surrounded them – the clinic, the Karakalpaks and Uzbeks, the Aral Sea, all of it stretching out to some inevitable, unknowable ending that was both ever-present and perpetually distant. The world of supernatural monsters, angels and demons, even the Winchesters, fell away. Wasn't there a time they had schemed to be the new God and Devil? Who were those two strangers that stared at them through the sands of time?
Two more years passed. They could not stay forever, but neither could yet imagine any other future than this.
And then one day, Crowley's office phone rang. It was Dean.
It was odd to talk to him. Not only because so much time had passed, but because Crowley was used to conversations revolving around medicine, regional politics and new agency procedures. He was used to long late-night talks with Cas about patients and schedules, philosophy and moral ambiguity, and their separate, similar stumbling towards a common humanity. Crowley was used to the daily intimacy and not to this distanced, tense, heavy conversation with a man he still admired and yet could no longer comprehend. Fortunately, the conversation was brief.
Crowley sought out Castiel, and said, "Dean's asked us to come back. He says he needs our help."
"Help?" Cas asked. "What could we possibly do to help?" Their world and that one could not be farther apart. The distance between was as immense, as staggeringly severe and irreparable as the arid wasteland that was the Aral Sea.
"I don't know," Crowley replied.
The two stood in the walled courtyard of the clinic, staring at one another.
What, after all, were they doing to help here? What could anyone do anywhere, that might possibly help? It was all endless, a constant slog against the forces of darkness, and the forces of banality and indifference, and the forces of inevitability. All they could do was keep trying. That is what they did here in Karakalpakistan. It was what they did as allies of the Winchesters. What everyone, everywhere, was doing to help. The situation was hopeless, and yet, they could not turn away.
And there was their answer.
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Author's Note:
I drafted this fic some years ago, but never felt comfortable about posting it. Because it's not the normal sort of story you read in fanfiction. And it's a common experience when speaking with someone about my personal experiences and the experiences of my colleagues in the field, to watch the listener's eyes glaze over, whether out of boredom or disinterest or a sort of self-preservation. With the pandemic, that is only somewhat, infinitesimally, less the case.
Do I really think that either Crowley or Castiel would feel powerless or purposeless after becoming human? Or that they would leave the Winchesters, become humanitarian aid workers in some part of the world that suffers from the additional affliction commonly, sadly, referred to as "where-the-hell"istan? No, not really. But spn asks a lot of large, philosophical questions that overlap with such situations: How do we persevere against injustice (or supernatural monsters) when defeat is a forgone conclusion? Does it matter which fight we choose to fight? How much of ourselves are we morally required or expected to give to better the world? Who might we become (or be forced to become) if we dared to face such bleak realities? And in doing so, would we become better or worse version of ourselves? To the last question, both spn and the real world answer with an ambiguous "both."
If you want to gain a second-hand experience as to what it's like to serve with humanitarian aid organizations, I can recommend a good number of books by those who have served in similar posts, as well as "foreign" correspondents and in-the-field anthropologists. The details from this particular humanitarian crisis – the Aral Sea and the tuberculosis clinic – are based on Peace Corp volunteer Tom Bissell's experiences, published in "Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia." My own experiences working in similar parts of the world as a cultural anthropologist are not so well suited to fanfiction.
As always, thank you for reading.
- The Demonologist In Denim