Enjoy, and let me know what you think at the end! This chapter is probably the longest I've written in years...4,000 words in one chapter...oof, where did I find the time?
Did I name the NPC with the black eyes Officer Black Eyes in Japanese...? Yes, yes I did, and no one can stop me.
Thanks for reading, and please review! Your words always make my day. And hey, if you liked this fic, you might like my others, so check them out and let me know what you think.
...
"You said you're never safe...is someone around that's trying to hurt you?" The man's black eyes scanned nearby rooftops and even glanced back over his shoulder at the busy street they came from.
"...no." Castiel said after a moment of thought, brows furrowed. "I don't think Father would have left me too nearby anything dangerous..." Castiel murmured. Not after going through all the trouble of raising Castiel from the dead, more than once.
The dark man had been visibly perturbed by Castiel's words, visibly doubtful, but hadn't questioned him much further-only satisfying himself with knowing that no one was currently, actively in the area and hunting Castiel.
There was some commotion in the street out front, people pausing to stare at some spectacle, police sirens in the distance drawing closer. The dark man took this as his cue to scoop Castiel back up and tuck him under his arm. Castiel had exclaimed in protest, but his struggling, (more like wiggling, at his current size), was completely ignored.
Castiel's ears burned with anger and frustration, but it only took him a moment to stiffly resign himself to being moved wherever the dark man wanted him-Castiel didn't have the power to stop him, though he might have been tempted to try harder, if the man had tried to get Castiel any more alone than they already were. As it was, Castiel decided not to fight it, much as he wanted to, as long as the black eyed monster wasn't dragging him to some secluded lair.
Cas wasn't normally prone to petty angers, but this helplessness was frustrating. Even at his weakest in the past, he had at the very least, the power of a fully grown human man to call his own. It wasn't much power, compared to what Castiel and the Winchester's regularly faced, but it was at least enough to grant Castiel a certain agency over himself. He could at least walk under his own power and throw a punch and have his opinions and wishes acknowledged, if not always respected. The way the dark man was treating him now...Castiel had once or twice had occasion to notice humans treating their young in this way, but Castiel had until now failed to realize that lack of agency would probably be applied to him now, as most humans actively went out of their way to avoid acknowledging anything other than the ordinary facade of the world that monsters worked hard to cultivate, and Castiel's current facade was that of a child.
Castiel's brows furrowed. He could almost understand why a human man would treat him like this, even after being informed that Castiel was not a human himself, but this man was not human, Castiel was almost certain. Black was not a natural human eye colo-
The man stepped out into the street carrying Castiel, and for the first time, rather than having his attention firmly on the sidewalk to avoid stepping on broken glass, or on escaping the man's hold, Castiel really, truly looked at the (humans?) surrounding them.
As Castiel had already noticed out of the corner of his eye before now, there was an enormous increase in the number of humans with colorful hair in this country. In Castiel's experience, most humans had hair colors ranging from blond to dark brown to almost black, with perhaps one in a hundred of them having something more colorful. Here, that was not the case, and in fact, humans with black and brown and blond hair were in a minority. It wasn't just that though. The strange hair Castiel could and has been ignoring. It was just...everything else...
As the man holding Castiel stepped out onto the street from that back alleyway, another man with flesh colored bat wings in place of where his ears should be almost bumped into them. Castiel, already stiff, actually went limp in the shoulders in some shock as he stared at the man, who nodded in apology at them and then stepped around to continue on his way. What kind of monster had-?
A flash of color and light. A woman stood in front of them, trying to peer over a bit of the crowd that had formed. She wore a short dress that revealed a lot of skin, but that wasn't what had caught Castiel's eyes. Her skin was covered in hundreds of tiny, swirling patterns of freckles that lit up like bioluminescence and changed color like the strobing lights in strip clubs.
She wasn't the only odd one in the crowd. There, a large, muscular bald man with lightly blue skin was trying to usher the growing crowd away from infringing on the line outside the nearby nightclub. Across the way, a woman was cooing at a group of men at the edge of the crowd from the perspective of a display window one story up at the strip club. Their attention was easily grabbed, as every inch of her skin shone like silver glitter. The neon lights of the nearby businesses caught and glinted enticingly off her skin. One of the watching men's jaws dropped...and dropped...and unhinged like a snake...indeed, what Castiel had at first taken for a very short haircut on the man, was actually a layer of dark snake scales covering the man's scalp.
Everywhere Castiel looked, there were more strange features. Claws and fangs and fur and scales and gills and that man had a dog's tail and that woman's hair was made of ice and-and-and-
Castiel didn't get many glimpses of eyes, most of them focused away from Castiel and on the spectacle in front of the twenty four hour diner, but they were all equally strange. Even amongst the otherwise most human looking people there, the eyes set them apart. That man with the brown hair and the double pupils, that blond woman with the slitted blue eyes...
The black eyed man holding Castiel was actually one of the most human people here, appearance wise. Castiel tried to make himself very small and very still in the man's arms.
Monsters. Monsters on every side.
The black eyed man, who had only paused a moment upon exiting the alleyway to survey the crowd standing between them and the entrance to the diner, felt Castiel go limp and still and small in his arms, and looked down at Castiel questioningly. Cas could feel the weight of those black eyes on the side of his head, but he didn't acknowledge them. His intense blue eyes swept the crowd, looking for signs of hunger on the monster's faces, or intent for violence, trying to match visuals to previous descriptions of monsters he'd seen and heard. That man with the sharp teeth could be a vampire, maybe. That woman with the elongated face and the dark fur could possibly be a werewolf, though her sane and nonviolent demeanor hinted otherwise.
Castiel jerked as a whip crack split the air. Cas felt the black eyed man's gaze shift away from him as both their attention was caught by the clear and firm voice of the stripper from earlier.
"Alright boys and girls!" She called out, "I'm going to need you to start clearing out a little so our boys in blue can get through to pick up these two valiant warriors!" She cracked her whip in the air again for good measure.
The crowd started clearing out a little, bit by bit. A few of them wolf whistled or clapped as they went on by. The dark eyed man carried Castiel closer rather than farther away, and as he did Cas saw some of the crowd was lingering in the area to use the camera on their phones to take pictures of themselves and their friends standing next to the stripper and the two men collapsed and restrained at her feet. The dark blue haired stripper would smile and wink and pose, but ultimately would crack her whip and usher people along.
As they drew closer, Castiel noticed that the two men slumped and restrained at her feet were the same two men who had been violently fighting each other in the diner minutes earlier. They were deeply asleep or unconscious now, and both lightly covered in a pale purple powder. The man with his face slumped on the ground had a large, sluggishly bleeding notch in one ear, and he was drooling. Where his saliva touched the pavement it steamed and smoked, starting to form a small pothole. The man slumped on top of him had a crab's claw in place of his left hand, and on his right bicep his sleeve was ripped to show a still smoking ring of teeth marks in his skin.
The blue haired stripper noticed them coming. Her eyes were blue, but...were they a human shade of blue? Most blue eyes Castiel had seen were lighter, duller, with shades of grey in them. Her eyes were the same color as her hair, the same color as Dean's darkest pair of jeans. Castiel had never seen a human with eyes that dark shade of blue before. Still, even then, she and the black eyed man were still some of the most human looking in the area.
She made eye contact with the black eyed man and licked her lips. "Eraserhead! Where'd you wander off to? You didn't want to play...with...me..." The woman trailed off as she noticed Castiel slung under the black eyed man... Eraserhead's... arm like a sack of luggage. Her smile became a little softer around the edges, a bit less like the expression of a monster about to eat a man. "Picking up strays again, I see! And what's this little guy's name? You can call me Midnight, sweetie!" Just as Eraserhead had done earlier, the woman bent her knees so she would be more face to face with Castiel. Cas only scowled at her.
"His parents are no where to be found." Eraserhead grunted. "He says his dad left him here. I was going to hand him over to the police when they come."
Castiel jerked with alarm and renewed his struggles (wiggles) at that. "No don't!" He commanded, but it came out more as an ineffectual bark at his current size and lack of timbre. The two humans looked down at Castiel in surprise.
Dean had stressed the importance of not doing anything that would put him in the hands of the police, during those times when Cas was too weak to teleport. It would be difficult to rescue Cas from jail, even with the Winchester's many tips and tricks for impersonating law enforcement, Dean had told him, and forcibly breaking Castiel out of jail was very likely to bring the eye of the law back onto the 'Murderous Winchester Brothers' serial killing case. It was bad enough that Cas was so uselessly human now, bad enough that as a child he was one of the most useless kinds of human, but to have to put the Winchester brothers out of their way to come rescue Castiel from something that should have been so stupidly avoidable...
"Hey hey hey, it'll be alright!" The woman tried to reassure Castiel, holding her hands out placatingly at him with slightly widened eyes. "The police and heroes are here to help you, you know?"
"I didn't do anything wrong." Castiel said, once again quickly giving up on trying to wiggle out of the man's arms and turning his burning attention onto the woman. "You're only supposed to get locked up by the police if you do something wrong, and I didn't do anything wrong." Castiel asserted. He was certain he hadn't. He hadn't really had time to do anything, much less break a law.
The woman opened her mouth as if to speak, closed it, then looked helplessly up at the black eyed man.
The man sighed. "Public nudity." He grunted.
The woman gawked at him. "Eraser-!" She gasped.
Castiel snapped his head up to look at the man incredulously. "What?" He asked blankly, then scowling and insulted. "I'm not naked!"
"You're not wearing pants." The man drawled, staring down at him with one black eye through the dark strands of hair in his face.
"Wait, you're not wearing pants?!" The prostitute gasped like a hypocrite.
"A lot of people aren't wearing pants." Castiel bluntly stated, giving Eraserhead a gimlet blue eye. "And besides, I know that as long as I'm wearing clothes from the knees up and the neck down, then I'm wearing enough clothes."
Dean had said so, and Dean was usually right about these things.
Midnight was still sputtering though, so Castiel pointed to another woman nearby (she had a tail?!), who was taking a picture of herself and trying to get Midnight and the unconscious men into the background of the photo. "And look, she's wearing even less clothes than I am; her dress doesn't even cover her-" Castiel was cut off with a muffled squawk when Eraserhead slapped his free hand over Castiel's mouth before he could finish.
The woman in question, who was indeed dressed in a very tight, very small party dress, had turned to look at Castiel when she caught a glimpse of him pointing at her back in her camera, and just caught the tail end of his sentence. She gave Castiel an affronted glare, but ultimately sniffed and turned her attention to the man holding him.
"What a rude little snot." She sneered. "Hey, it's almost twelve at night, you know? Don't you think it's a little irresponsible to be taking your kid out to a place like this so late at night?" She trailed a judging eye up and down his appearance. "Is that even your kid, man? Someone should call the cops on you!"
She was right, Castiel realized suddenly. Holding someone against their will was against the law, and if you broke the law, the cops came to take you to jail. Maybe it would be a good thing if...
"I don't know this man." Castiel stated bluntly, staring up at the half dressed woman intently. "Please call the cops to take him away from me."
The black eyed man did not dignify refuting Castiel's statement, or even giving Cas a single glance. The just man stared back at the lady blandly. "The cops are already on their way." He stated with no change in his expression, and indeed, the sound of the police sirens had reached the other end of the street they were on, and there was commotion and commanding voices and stomping boots as officers made their way through the crowds towards them.
Midnight stood out of her crouch and slapped on a confident smile. "Don't worry, mam! I've got this bad boy well in hand!" She winked and posed and cracked her whip for good measure.
The woman turned her nose up at them. "See that you do." She sneered, and strutted off without a backwards glance.
Midnight sighed hard enough her shoulders slumped, but only for a moment and then she was back to smiling and cracking her whip and issuing demands the crowds disperse so the cops could get through. The cops went straight for the men restrained and unconscious on the ground, working together to haul them up and drag them back to the cars whose sirens could be seen flashing in the distance. Midnight was caught up talking to a police officer who was nodding along, asking questions, writing down her answers.
Eraserhead moved back slightly to give the officers room, and finally turned his distinctly unamused black gaze back down to Castiel. Castiel gazed back silently. The man finally grunted and looked away. "Don't be a problem child." He only said, turning his attention back to the cops. Castiel did the same, and saw Midnight pointing at Castiel and Eraserhead, the cop following her finger with his gaze and nodding, and then coming over to talk to them.
Castiel noticed, as the man came closer, that he was one of those humans that could almost look ordinary, if it wasn't for his eyes. Like Eraserhead, his eyes were black.
Unlike Eraserhead, this man's eyes were demon black.
All pupil, swallowing up the iris and whites of his eyes completely. Castiel swallowed dryly and gripped Eraserhead's sleeve compulsively. Castiel could feel Eraserhead's heavy gaze land on the back of Cas's neck, raising the little hairs there, but Castiel kept his eyes on the maybe demon approaching them. Despite all this, the man smiled pleasantly at them as he drew closer.
"Eraserhead, right? It's nice to meet you. Midnight was just telling me you found a lost child, is that right little guy?" The maybe demon did as many had done sense Castiel had obtained a smaller size and knelt down to be closer to his eye level at Eraserhead's hip. He smiled oh so cheerfully. "What's your name, little man? I'm going to try to help you find your mom and dad, alright?"
Castiel's fist tightened around Eraserhead's arm. Cas swallowed tightly. He didn't take his eyes off the maybe demon, but instead addressed Eraserhead. "I'll put pants on if you don't leave me with him." Castiel rasped in a near whisper, despite the fact that the man demon undoubtedly heard every word.
Eraserhead's stare intensified. He paused a moment, then spoke almost hesitantly. "Officer-" Eraserhead glanced at the name pin on the demon cop's vest, "-Kurome works for the police department...he wouldn't hurt you. It's his job to help you."
"Anyone but him." Castiel bargained, trying to take deep breaths, trying to keep himself calm, keep his eyes trained on the maybe demon.
Any other pseudo monster would be almost pleasant to deal with by comparison; there were few monsters that wanted to do anything worse than eat you, but a demon would relish every inch of pain it could extract from those around it, doubly so if they discovered that Castiel used to be an angel, triple if they knew Cas was the Castiel.
Eraserhead's gaze was heavy on the back of Castiel's head. The hero hesitated, but ultimately didn't have to make a decision on how to respond.
"Hey, that's alright." The cop, Kurome, smiled good naturally, standing back to his full height and backing away slightly. "Sometimes kids just don't take a liking to you. I can easily grab someone else to handle his case. Sit tight for a moment!" And the demon eyed man was striding away.
Castiel hung limply off Eraserhead's arm, almost shaking with relief. It was no guarantee that the rest of the cops wouldn't also be demons, or that the other cops would heed Castiel's desire not to be alone with one, or even that the demon would restrain itself in the presence of others, but at the very least, that possibility had been put off.
Eraserhead was silent for a moment, alternatively scanning the crowd and resting his heavy gaze on the back of Castiel's head, but eventually the man spoke. "I don't know what you've been told about the police or heroes..." he started grimly, "-but I wouldn't let anything happen to you, and neither would any decent police officer...have you met Officer Kurome before?"
"Please just let me go." Castiel stated blandly and without hope of success, staring dimly into the crowd and ignoring the man's platitudes.
Eraserhead sighed, but let it drop. A moment later, a younger looking officer that had previously been helping haul away the unconscious brawlers ran up to them, pen uncapped and notebook in hand. "Sorry!" He said, "the lieutenant said you had a lost child?"
"I'm not lost. I know exactly where I am." Castiel lied blatantly, looking the man in the eye. Actually a rather normal shade of brown, if you ignored the fact that his hair was literally made of shiny black obsidian.
Eraserhead exhaled heavily. "A bit more alarming than that I'm afraid...let me pass the kid off to someone and I'll tell everything I've managed to get out of him."
Castiel's grip tightened on Eraserhead's arm. "I don't need to go with the police." Castiel tried uselessly, one last time. "I didn't do anything wrong and I'm not lost and I'm not-" -a child, Castiel almost blurted out, but he might have luckily been saved by Midnight's sudden return.
"Don't let this big mean softy scare you, sweetie!" She cooed in interruption down at him, popping out from behind Eraserhead's shoulder and placing her hand coyly on the man's opposite bicep. "He was just kidding, you're not really getting arrested for not wearing pants! We all just want to make sure you're safe and cared for, ok honey?"
People keep saying they want Castiel to be safe. It was Castiel's job to do the safekeeping though...but he couldn't do anything. Even with an agent of the enemy right in front of him, Castiel was too weak to do an angel's duty and smite the pest.
Castiel had been failing at his most basic duties for so long now.
Castiel only averted his eyes from the other's and fell silent.
Eraserhead shifted Castiel around until he was being offered out to Midnight like a limp puppy. "Could you take him to the cars while I give my statement? And uh...try to keep him away from that officer you were talking to earlier...Officer Kurome...the kid's scared of him."
Castiel mustered up a frown, but didn't further object. It was shameful, an angel being weaker than something as pathetic as a common demon, but it was true. In his current state, Castiel was helpless. He was afraid.
Castiel was passed from one strong set of hands to another, rather awkwardly for how Castiel refused to release his hold on Eraserhead's arm at first, feeling a moment of stubbornness rise up, a desire to be contrary. It only took a moment of whispered reassurances from Midnight and some gentle prying at his fingers from Eraserhead for Castiel to remember how useless it is to try and overpower anything in this weak, unless body, and he finally let go. Eraserhead's dark eyes were softer at the end of it though, and he gave Castiel a gentle pat on his black curls before Midnight was turning with him and striding off. Castiel met his eyes and blinked in surprise at the action, and was held up from thought as he wondered, looking into the man's gaze, how eyes so black could feel so kind.
Eraserhead presently turned back to converse with the young police officer, and Castiel lost sight of him as he was carried down the street and ushered into a police car, buckled in and cooed reassurances.
Castiel was given about five minuets alone to think while the police wrapped things up. After discovering that police cars don't open from the inside and the front seats were inaccessible through the grate separating them, Castiel finally had a good moment to think as he distrustfully watched the crowds of monstrous nightlife move to and from from behind the illusion of safety provided by the window.
The first thing that came to mind was 'secret monster populated enclave' but honestly that was just too horrifying to consider. Also, Castiel definitely would have noticed something like that back when he was at his full power, and literally scouring every inch of the planet in search of his Father. This place would have been memorable.
On the other hand, the only other thing that came to mind, which was 'alternate universe populated mostly or solely by monsters', was almost more horrifying to consider. Castiel didn't have enough of an angel's sense of the world around them to tell him if he was still in the prime dimension, or even if the abnormalities around him even could be classified as what he understood a monster to be, but something told him that he wasn't; that he was very far from home...from Dean...indeed, and that he couldn't judge what was human and what was not by the same metric in this dimension.
So it turns out the dark man might...might...be a real human person after all.
Castiel wouldn't be able to be sure until he got enough of his angelic nature back to properly sense the world around him, but at the very least he is certain by now that he is in a different dimension, given their surroundings, and that his previous understanding of what a human was might not apply here.
Castiel let his forehead thunk against the glass, still mistrustfully eyeing the strange world outside. His eye caught on the man, Eraserhead, again. He was done speaking to the police officer, and was watching Castiel back. Castiel's line of sight was broken when that demon officer walked by again, heading towards the police car behind the one Castiel was in, where the two brawlers were passed out in the back seat. Castiel's eyes followed the man even as he shrank down in his seat, shoulders rising up around his ears, trying to go unnoticed. The maybe demon cop passed him by without a glance, but Eraserhead was watching him the whole time, even as Castiel never took his eyes off the cop.
After the black eyed cop had driven off with his cargo, Castiel glanced back at the crowd, but Eraserhead was gone.