"
When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
"
Eventually, the panic subsides. The build up of carbon dioxide under the sheet slows her breathing.
Dawn sticks her head out slowly, pushing a wad of hair out of her face. Smelling the sweat stuck in the ringlets. Catching a hang nail in a knot. Enjoying the brief ache pulling at it gives to her scalp, the rule of cause and effect on her physical body comforting. As if pulling at her hair will combat the evil sentiments crawling and clawing inside her skull, relieve the pressure, DIY acupuncture.
She feels so heavy. So tired.
Dawn rolls onto her back. She puts her hands flat against her temples, damp, and pulls her skin taut, dragging her fingers through her hair. She breathes in, deep, and lets it out in a huff.
A glance to her clock tells her she was under the covers for fifteen minutes.
She rests her hands on her stomach, above the sheets. They are shaking, she is shivering. She watches them rise and fall sporadically with her breath for a few moments.
So tired but wired – she will not be able to sleep.
She sits up, slowly, her hair falling heavy on her back. She slips out of the bed, taking deliberate steps, remembering how her legs went numb while Uriel plotted a sculpture of her face.
That thought sends a static shock through her brain.
"Dawn?"
Castiel's face swam in her vicinity, leaning down. He had switched on the kitchen light – it burned bright, made her squint.
He reached a hand toward her face where it rested on the wall. It emitted a warm golden light.
Dumbly, she watched for a moment. Just before he touched the cut on her cheek, she jerked away, hitting her head on the fridge in the process.
"Don't," she gurgled, swiping at him with her hand. "Don't touch."
She found her jaw was too tight to string together full sentences.
"Can you stand?"
She shook her head. Her neck ached.
She felt annoyed, he had that look on his face. Like all that time ago in the cabin when she had been hallucinating. When she was having her flashbacks. Stupid fucking concern. Concern did nothing but pity. Pity did nothing but confuse her. And she had been confused for too long.
"Is it just your cheek that requires healing?"
She could feel where her shirt had been balled in Uriel's hand. The pressure felt like it was still sunk into her sternum, holding her up. Like it had bound more than just the fabric, twisted her heart into her lungs. She thought that if she looked under her shirt, there would be a spiral of skin left behind. The sort of thing Junji Ito would sketch.
So tight, her chest was so tight, her jaw was so tight, her shoulders were so tight, she could not feel her hands. Her head was a lead ball balanced on a stiff timber slab.
"You need to rest. I will help you get to your room."
"No," she said resolutely. "Don't touch me."
"I'm not going to hurt you."
"I don't trust you." The dizziness was passing. She still shook, still so tense.
Castiel's expression had faltered at this comment, like it hurt him. She did not spend any time trying to understand why. She just wanted to be alone. She just wanted her heart to stop beating so hard against her chest, her heart to stop beating.
"I know that Uriel has frightened you, but-"
"I can't trust you. None of you."
Castiel squinted down at her. "You cannot be comfortable in the position you are in."
She had her knees up, her head lodged between the fridge and the wall, her hands clawed the floor. She could feel the smooth texture of the tiles as feeling returned to her fingers.
"I will not help you if you do not wish me to," he said. "But it would be irresponsible of me to leave before I have seen you safely to a comfortable place. I am still your guardian after all."
Dawn huffed. She straightened her neck. It ached. She pushed her palms into the floor, her back into the fridge, eased herself onto jelly legs.
Her chest felt twisted, getting worse with each ferocious thump of her heart.
Castiel handed her a glass of water. "You are panicking. You need to rest and stay hydrated."
Clinical. Logical. Practical. She took it and stared at the cool glass.
She refused to look him in the eye. She had avoided it since he arrived.
She turned, and she walked slowly to her room. It was automatic.
The glass sits on her nightstand. There is a dark circle where the condensation has settled on the wood. It looks like lacquer under the glow of the lamp.
Dawn drains the glass. It does little to relieve her dry mouth.
She realises she is getting ready to go for a walk. Despite the heaviness of her head, the stiffness of her body, she needs to leave, she needs to move.
She has pulled a backpack onto the bed, stuffed it with extra layers. She has pulled a hoodie over the joggers, shirt, and sneakers she fell asleep in.
She grabs the bag and opens her door, the light from the kitchen spraying over her.
She blinks, finds herself walking to the pantry, sifting through and grabbing odd bits and pieces. A half box of crackers. A small bag of chips. A can of chickpeas.
She finds she is compelled by a will she does not understand. She has no conscious thoughts or desires; she just tiredly obeys her impulses.
She packs a silver dagger she keeps in the kitchen.
It is not until her bag sits on the kitchen island, fully packed, bulging and awkward, that she is conscious of a question.
What the fuck are you doing?
I need to go.
There's nowhere to go.
I need to leave.
Where?
I don't know. I can't be here. I need to leave.
She shoulders the bag, walks to her door. Her hand reaches for the handle and pauses.
Dawn remembers that she cannot just walk out of the door, not like before. She huffs before her frustration can build into something uncontrollable and paralysing.
She peaks through a small, square window with a view of the front.
Blackness. She can make out the outline of the front step leading into the overgrown mountain greenery. She thinks that it has grown taller since she originally arrived, without her noticing.
She presses her cheek against the fierce cold glass, trying to bend her vision to the far corners of the outside landing. There is a narrow sandstone path that leads around the sides of the building. She has walked it many times with Castiel.
Poor Castiel.
Cry me a river.
He's going to get into trouble for this.
She shivers, the reminder of extreme fear twisting into her sternum. The cut on her cheek tingles.
Slowly, tentatively, she twists the front doorknob. She pushes the door open, taking care not to let the hinges squeak with momentum.
Cold air blooms a blush in her cheeks, dries her eyes.
To her left, it is clear, but to her right, the back of a suited man. He seems to be staring into the distant mountains.
Didn't really think this through, did we?
Shut up.
With nothing better to do before she was taken to Montana, Dawn had timed and followed the guard circulation around the building. There were always two angels stationed at opposing diagonal corners that would switch every fifteen minutes.
She hopes that the one with his back to her does not turn around when it is time.
She thinks that she does not know if there any stationed in front of the mountain. If there are, she has not seen any through the undergrowth.
It is only a minute or two before the angel moves away, the time whittling fresh crevices of worry in her stomach, extending itself. As soon as his shoulder disappears (without turning, thankfully), she takes her chance.
Dawn steps forward lightly, keeping the weight of her backpack evenly distributed over her shoulders. She pulls the door shut softly and deliberately behind her.
She steps onto the first step leading into the undergrowth. Somehow the forbidden nature of the act affects her, her stomach twisting. She descends, stepping lightly – toe first to test for sound – but quickly, afraid of the replacement angel rounding the corner.
When she runs out of steps, the ground is damp and mossy. Her eyes have not yet adjusted to the dark, so she holds her arms out ahead of her, shuffling around branches and sticks she comes across.
She thinks the angel must be in its position by now – can it not see her? Is it even looking?
She continues, taking care, squinting as the moon flits through the treetops, her feet moving on their own accord. Determination fuels her, the ongoing desire to escape propelling her forward.
It is not long before Dawn realises she is descending. The decline of the mountain is slight at first, but after about ten minutes she finds herself leaning away from her bent ankles to keep her balance.
The cold does not register on her face until she works up a sweat, blood pumping into her cheeks.
The further she gets from the cabin, the easier it is to breathe. The lighter her chest feels. The faster her legs carry her.
In a daze, she walks and walks, barely catching conscious thoughts. She brushes away each, Where the fuck are we going? with a persistent, Shut up and keep going.
The descent gets steeper steadily, her ankles beginning to ache from the strain of supporting and balancing. She feels every pebble through the thin soles of her cheap sneakers, her toes going numb in the cold as they press into the very tips. The sweat sits a cool sheen on her forehead, crawling from the nape of her neck down her back, a shocking tingle every ten steps or so.
She stops as her hair gets heavier with the build-up, dropping her backpack and her hood. She pulls the damp nest into a haphazard bun – out of her face and off her slick neck. Her breath clouds in front of her. Her heart thumps from the exertion.
For the first time since setting out, Dawn truly takes in what she can see in the moonlight.
Towering pines and birches, branches mostly bare, dominate the ground, gaps big enough between the trunks for her to manoeuvre easily without thinking. The ground is mostly even, coated with a thin green layer of grass and moss. There is the suggestion of fog, nothing thick, below her calves. The moon colours the dark a dull blue. The air is damp, crisp, like ozone.
Ahead of her, she can see tree roots like raised veins. And then a hard line, the tops of a few trees sprayed with a thicker fog.
A drop.
The layer of undergrowth gets thicker as Dawn approaches the edge of the first of many declining undulations along the mountain face, a few shrubs pulling at her pants.
She squats at the precipice, gazing into the blackness. The view opens out, a wilderness beneath her, spreading ahead. The cusps of a handful of granite boulders peek out in the light.
Anxiety simmers. Her sore feet and ankles make her legs tremble.
You've been walking for an hour.
Now that she has paused, her stomach grumbles. She drops her pack.
Throw this thing over the edge. You're going to perish anyway.
She sifts through her items, grabbing cardboard, pulling out the half box of crackers.
Good thing, too.
The crunch of the biscuit makes her ears pop. She pauses before she continues chewing, the noise too confrontational in the relentless silence.
She stares at the treetops ahead of her, the blanket of dark swallowing anything more than a kilometre away. She mechanically feeds crackers into her mouth.
There is a nagging worry that starts to overcome her silenced brain. That makes her feel sick as the food begins to line her empty stomach, making her burp nothingness.
What am I doing?
…
I said, what am I doing?
…
I can't go back. I can't stay here. I shouldn't go forward.
…
Dawn swallows the last cracker. Her throat is dry, and she did not bring any water. She brushes it away as a mild annoyance, an issue for another time.
She shoulders her backpack. She looks for a foothold below her, crouching over the edge.
There is large indent beneath the precipice her foot easily slots into. As she lowers herself, gripping the rough rockface with her hands, her free foot rests comfortably on the rise of another boulder. She lowers herself down, her hoodie riding up a little as it sticks to the porous surface.
This rock is a step from a landing, onto another, onto another. There is a walkable decline for a moment. Then another scalable rockface.
Dawn gets into a rhythm. She focuses on not falling, and it makes her brain go quiet. Her confidence returns to her as she walks slowly down another long, slanted rockface. She barely notices when a tree branch cuts her hip, or her stomach grazes as her shirt gets pulled by a challenging climb.
Her feet ache, her legs wobble, but her arms hold. She relies on her upper body strength when her footholds slip, which starts to get more frequent until eventually, she starts swinging herself from boulder to boulder.
She continues the decline for another hour. The size of the rocks begins to diminish, with the odd large boulder.
She switches up her trajectory when the way down is confusing, and she becomes disorientated. Even if she wanted to turn back, she would not know which direction the cabin was. She likes it like that, even deliberately confusing her senses given the chance. As long as she is going down, as long as the ground continues to give way to more ground, she feels compelled to continue.
After half a dozen small landings, Dawn comes across another sharp decline. She hangs over the precipice, kicking the rock face and dragging her feet around feeling for a ledge. It is too high to let herself drop, and there is nowhere to grab onto.
She feels a slight dimple, big enough for her toes to grip. The precipice's grass is wet, slimy under her clutching fingers. The fog must have settled here.
She finds a jutting rock for her free foot to push off from, leaning into the dimple. She lets go, trailing her hands down the surface for something to hold.
She leans further into the dimple, and her foot pivots. It slips on slimy moss beneath her shoe.
She breathes in sharply in shock, her foot on the jutting rock losing contact.
For a moment, Dawn's stomach is in freefall, her hands stinging where they slipped down, trying to grab at something.
She falls on an angle, still leaning into the imaginary dimple that betrayed her.
The foot finds something after a breathless moment, but gives way as her body follows, her ankle twisting, her head knocking the rock face, dragging down onto a gravelly landing that scuffs her shin and knee.
Liquid streams down her face from a cut on her scalp. She yelps as she rolls onto her back, her ankle shooting pain up her calf. Her legs shake from shock. Her head throbs.
"Fuck." She cries. Her voice is alien, husky. Her eyes brim with tears, helpless and too tired to stop the welling of emotion.
You fucking dumbass. What did you think was going to happen? Pathetic.
Oh – there you are.
She closes her eyes to blot out the thoughts.
Her stomach sinks further, folding into itself as the gravity of her situation pokes into her awareness.
She shrugs off her backpack to stop its insides sticking into her, keeping a hand on it.
Dawn is lost. She is hungry. She is scared. She is hurt. She is hopeless.
Cold sets in, making the ankle hurt more. Dawn remains motionless. She stares into the sky, trying to catch sight of the stars through the trees growing haphazard from the slopes. She allows tears to drop, unfeeling.
Given up? Yep.
Her back aches where it smacked the ground on her bad landing. She can feel the imprint of the can of chickpeas that wedged into it through her backpack.
Worth it? Yep.
And she means it. She rolls a piece of gravel between her thumb and forefinger.
Better to be broken here than to be broken in that prison. Better to be free and doomed, than to be doomed and caged. A regular Emily Dickinson.
She blows dust from the tip of her nose.
There is a rustle behind her, some pebbles tumble. Dawn finds she does not care to move, even if it were some wild animal about to maul her.
Are there bears in Scandinavia?
"I wasn't expecting to find you here."
The tired voice of Castiel grumbles close behind her, scaring her more than the hot breath of a wolf about to drag her away for a meal.
She sits up, and immediately regrets it, her bloody palms shivering and stinging.
Castiel has materialised on the edge of the landing and is looking down at her.
"What are you doing, Dawn?"
"Getting away." Her voice is quiet, deadened under a dry throat.
"What were you hoping to achieve?" He sounds more disappointed than irritated.
"I… I just wanted to be free." She lifts her legs to move them, the immediate throbbing, angry ankle making her bite her lip and inhale sharply.
"Do you ever think you will actually be free?" Empty, ominous.
She hated that he was right. That she had agreed to this convoluted, mysterious life when she thought she could trade her soul in for a trip to Heaven if she just learnt how to swing a sword.
She was running away from the angels, and she was running away from her responsibilities. The things that kept her awake at night, sent her into panic. The consequences of her decisions followed her no matter where she ran.
A tear prickles the corner of her eye. She sighs heavily.
"No. I guess not."
Dawn stares ahead, at the surging environment around them. She knows that if she tries to look up at Castiel's face, it will be silhouetted against the moon. She does not feel like trying to understand those mopey blue eyes of his right now, anyway.
"Your injuries are severe. Were you just going to lie there and do nothing?" There seems to be a harshness entering his tone, one he is barely controlling.
"I didn't see the point in trying to do anything." Her throat hurts, raw from dehydration. The fight has left her entirely, whatever fierce determination had pumped through her now dissipated.
"The point would be to survive." He says, condescending.
She frowns at the attitude. "And why would I want to do that, Castiel?"
He huffs unseen. "Because that is your job. Your duty. To protect the life given to you."
"No – my job is to be 'wrath'. To act Wrath. That's my role." Her voice is devoid of emotion.
"It doesn't have to be that way." His delivery is still pointy but softens a little.
"Why else am I here? Why else am I separated from the world? It's my destiny, is it not?" Notes of despair filter into her voice. "If I was brought back to the world of the living, and I was marked as this thing, why don't I just be what I'm s'posed to be? There's so much angst around keeping me away from the world, but there's all this talk about The Plan and what I'm meant to do, what Dean is meant to do, what Lucifer is meant to do, yada yada yada…"
She senses Castiel stiffen. "I don't think you mean that."
"Eugh!" Dawn picks up a stone and ditches it hard, over the precipice ahead of them. Anger burns suddenly in her chest. "I'm sick of your stupid fucking vague answers, Castiel! I'm sick of the confusion, and the depression, and the hush hush as I'm shunted from this place to this place to this person to that situation! It's just all so fucking confusing!"
She picks up another stone and cradles it in the crook of her thumb and finger, flicking it like a skimming stone over water.
"It would be so much easier to just let me be what I'm meant to be – an angry, evil monster! Let me get what I deserve, whatever creative torture the demons have in store! I'm useless here, anyway. Why do you even bother…"
The fire dies down, twisting into cold coals, smoking out.
Castiel is quiet, as if waiting for her to continue. She stares straight ahead, her jaw tight.
"Are you giving up, Dawn?"
"What do you mean? I gave up the second I woke up – I never wanted to be alive again."
"This is your second chance, to fulfil a better purpose-"
"Don't give me that shit. I heard what you called me when you were talking to Uriel. That's how everyone sees me. I don't care. Just don't lie to me about it. Don't talk me out of what my true purpose is."
He lets out a heavy sigh. "I can explain myself."
"I don't want to hear it." The truth – she is exhausted and does not feel like forgiving her captor.
Silence settles between them, strained. Dawn rolls gravel under her fingers, ignoring the sting it causes. Her ankle throbs.
"I don't want to give up," she admits. "But I don't see any other way out of this. I know I am being contained so I don't get used by the demons, that I'm dangerous. I feel dangerous. But this system isn't working. Uriel knows it-"
"Uriel was out of line and acted on his own volition – against the orders of the garrison." There is a serious, sombre tone to his voice. "He is being disciplined about his actions."
"Even so," she rolls her eyes at his dramatics. She refuses to call it fondness. "What he was saying is true. Why bother with me? You may as well just kill me and get it over with."
"We've been over this before-"
"I don't mean it in the sense that I don't want to be alive. I mean it as a practical solution to this problem. Keeping me alive is keeping a tool for the demons intact and is a waste of resources." She is surprised by her reasonable voice.
"That is not entirely true-"
He is cut off by a sharp intake of breath from Dawn after a particularly violent throb emanates up her leg.
"Let me heal you." He crouches down in her periphery.
The thought of an angel being so close to her again, any angel, makes her shiver. Castiel notices the hesitation.
"I'm afraid I can't take 'no' for an answer this time – your wounds are serious." He shuffles towards her leg, the gold glow from his hand particularly bright and enchanting in the darkness.
He hovers it over her ankle. Dawn flinches and bites back a cry of pain, but he continues the process anyway.
The glow is warm, and particles float and settle on her ankle like dust motes lit in the dusk. The pain shrinks back from her leg and dissipates, replaced by tingling warmth. His hand hovers just above her pants as he moves the light across her bleeding shin and scuffed knee, doing the same on the other side.
His face is focused, lit by the shine, his eye flicking to hers when her legs are healed. He nods at her palms that are face down into the gravel.
Dawn licks her dry lips, unable to move. Why are you afraid of him?
He frowns at her, in a pleading way, only for a moment, like he is hurt. His eyes move away from her gaze as if to reset his face, blinking. When he looks at her again, it is the usual stony countenance she expects of an angel.
She lifts her palms from her sides, turning them up and offering them to him. He raises his own hands above hers, flooding them with the tingling warmth.
"The main difference between angels and demons," Castiel starts to explain, moving a hand to her torso so it is a few inches from her cut hip. "Is that we can use our powers to heal and protect. They can only use their powers to hurt and attack."
"You can but you don't always choose to," she counters. The warmth travels onto her stomach without him moving, the graze disappearing.
He heals her scalp next, the dried blood on her face disappearing too, then rests his hands on his knees. Dawn brings her own up to her chest, resting her chin and hugging herself.
"That is correct. Sometimes, we forget our way, our purpose. We become blinded to the beauty of our Father's creation." His gaze travels to the stars above them. "We assume the role of warrior when it is not always necessary because it is easier."
She sighs, uncertainty still trickling down her stomach. "It must be nice to know your purpose."
Castiel makes a strange sound, a huff of amusement. Something Dawn has never heard him do. "It does not make things less complicated, I can assure you. We know our duties, but we also have to carry them out, whether we understand them or not."
"Like when you doubt them?" She looks at him, and he meets her eye.
"Yes. We are not supposed to question our orders, always to obey." He holds her gaze.
"Have your orders always been to protect me?"
"No…" His eyes flick to the ground. "For a while, there have been no orders related to you. Not since you were almost murdered."
He speaks quietly, like he is confiding something confidential.
"Don't you think that I was meant to be killed?"
"No." He looks at her again, a hardness in his eye. "I don't. There would be no point, you are very useful."
She sighs, rolling her eyes.
"I know you don't see it," he continues. "But you are an exceptional warrior, and you have value beyond physical strength and spiritual anger."
She shakes her head but meets his eye. "Even if that were the case, you've gotten into trouble over my bad decisions. Doesn't that annoy you?"
"It is a necessary part of my guardianship." A coldness enters his tone.
"And somehow, I'm still worth it… I don't believe that."
"I wish you would not give up on yourself like this, it is an unfortunate side effect of human weakness."
Dawn chuckles dryly. "You can blame your Father for that."
"The blame does not rest entirely on Him."
She raises an eyebrow at him, but finds she is without a counter argument. She is surprised, rather, at Castiel's wit.
He reaches forward suddenly, squinting, and flicks his thumb across her cheek bone, as if brushing off a spec of dirt. There is a brief static shock of warmth.
Dawn blinks, jerking her face away from his hand.
"I had forgotten about the cut." He explains. He rolls back on his feet, standing.
She absentmindedly puts her hand where the cut had been, feeling the tingle where his thumb had touched her skin. She feels herself blushing, the contact strangely intimate for an angel.
The memory of Uriel's leer as the bead of blood entered her vision freezes any fondness surfacing.
"Have you given up completely, or should we return to the cabin?" He is unphased by the act.
She swallows, her dry throat threatening to cough. She pushes off the ground, standing awkwardly. She feels dizzy with the effort.
"I guess you've talked me into going back." She admits and finds herself smiling softly at Castiel. She picks up her discarded backpack.
He reaches for her arm, the two disappearing as his fingertips brush her hoodie's sleeve. A handful of gravel spills over the edge of the landing in their wake.