Note: This chapter was written by Moira Starsong
The last kill hadn't sated the hunger but had only made it worse. Nick had told himself that he would stop once he had found those responsible for his family's murder. That was righteous, wasn't it? Sarah and Teddy deserved justice, didn't they? But of course, that was a half dozen mangled bodies ago. Nick wasn't sure he could stop anymore.
Nick had been a good man, once. Before Lucifer. (Was he, though? Or had he just been too mediocre to be evil? He had been getting hammered at the Elk's Lodge while his wife and child's heads had been getting bashed in …..) He hadn't exactly been volunteering at the soup kitchen every weekend, but he hadn't been a murderer. Nick burst into laughter at his own thoughts in the silence of the truck's cab as he rolled down the highway at dangerous speeds towards his destination. Was that the standard now? "Not a Murderer?" He thought he might have had better standards, once.
This was After, though. Life was firmly and neatly divided into Before Lucifer and After Lucifer. And not just for him. Everyone who had had any contact with the fallen archangel measured their life in Before Lucifer and After Lucifer. Whether they admitted it or not.
Sam Winchester. The perfect vessel. Nick was terrified to admit, even in the privacy of his mind (and he is not used to his mind being private. For eight years he shared housing, for eight years his mind and body contained a howling whirlwind too primal to comprehend …. the silence and loneliness was deafening now) that he had been a little jealous of Lucifer's obsession with Sam Winchester. Lucifer's thoughts during the first Apocalypse had played almost on a loop: Sam Winchester. Sam Winchester. Sam Winchester. But Sam didn't want him. Sam hated him. Sam said no. Nick said yes.
Why? Nick wondered now. WHY? Why did Nick say yes? It's the question that haunts him, drives him crazy. Nick hates Lucifer, doesn't he? Lucifer destroyed his life (No, his life had already been destroyed when Sarah and Teddy had been slaughtered). Nick was happy that Lucifer was gone, wasn't he? (No! Something primal inside of Nick screams out for his angel back, even if the cost is the entire world. Nick hates that part of himself) Nick doesn't know what to do with himself anymore, he doesn't know who is he without Lucifer, he doesn't know if he should love or hate the archangel that rode him for so long until it seemed like they were a part of each other. He doesn't know why he uttered that one fatal yes in a moment of weakness, and most of all, he doesn't know if he regrets it or not.
Nick asks his victims that question when he tortures them. "Why?" Why did they say yes? Why had they let an angel possess them, destroy their lives, traumatize their families, wreck the world around them? Why? The empty vessels before him usually cry, and sob, confused, and several of them thought he had been a demon. Close, he had chuckled. But not anymore. None of their answers had ever satisfied him.
The sniveling and weakness of the last man had disgusted Nick. Nick should be disgusted by all the blood, by his own vile actions. He knows, but he isn't. He's just fascinated by it, the hot wet stickiness of it, the way it flows from the body when he cuts. Nick knows what he's doing is wrong. But in the moment it feels right, and they did ask to be a part of a Heavenly war, didn't they? The angels that possessed and then abandoned these empty vessels, leaving them powerless and alone, are just as much to blame as he is.
Nick tells himself he's not like Lucifer, but he's starting to fear that there is a reason that the Devil choose him, other than just being second best to Sam. There must have been other appropriate vessels in the world that Lucifer could have chosen. But no, it was Nick that he came to, because his grief made him vulnerable maybe, hung off of him like ragged scraps of ruined skin that gave Lucifer a soft place to sink his claws into. But Nick thinks now that there may have always been a deeper reason than his grief for his wife and child. The way that Nick enjoys his work now, the hot slickness of fresh blood coating his hands and the iron tang in the air, tells him that he and Lucifer were more suited for each other than he might have once believed. He doesn't know how to feel about that, if he should be comforted or horrified that it was always his fate, always out of his hands.
Nick could still be merciful. He had almost let one of the last empty vessels go. She had only been a child when she was possessed, just seven years old. For five years she was possessed, not aging. When her angel had finally abandoned her, she found her family had been killed by demons, and she had been placed in foster care. Now she was thirteen years old physically, chronically eighteen if you counted the years of not aging due to angel possession. And being whored out on the streets. Angels never thought about the emotional wreckage they left behind.
A rare bout of protectiveness had come out of Nick on that hunt. After all, if Sarah had lived, he might have had a daughter, after Teddy. And a child couldn't be blamed for being dazzled by an angel's Light. Satan had never lied to him, had told him who he was from the beginning (while wearing his dead wife's skin, but … ) and Nick had said yes. How could you expect more discretion from a child?
Nick didn't torture that one. He gave her a quick death. She was emptier than he was, her eyes had told him that she welcomed it. What he had done to the girl's pimp, afterwards …. that had taken a long time.
The girl had even looked like a younger Rowena. Rowena. Nick actually suppressed the memories of what Lucifer had done to the redheaded witch as much as he could. When he couldn't, he drank. Nick may not have been an especially good man before Lucifer, but he never would have done that to a woman. The memories of how Lucifer had used his body to hurt the tiny Scottish woman were particularly horrible. The worst part was that the memory was pleasurable. Nick drowned himself in whiskey in order to forget, but he never did. Not entirely.
It's strange to Nick that most people associate the Devil with darkness. Lucifer may have been evil, but he was made of Light. All angels were. Lucifer's Grace was cold, chilling, freezing, in fact. Colder than the coldest winter you could imagine, like the first light of dawn shining through the haze over the sun and sparkling on the snow, the air so cold that your lungs hurt if you breathed in too deeply. (And it did hurt, it hurt so so so much there were no words for it, but it was a beautiful, tragic kind of pain.) It was a cold light, remote and distant, but it was still light. Divine Light. Light wasn't always comfortable and beautiful. Light illuminated all the ugly, rotting truths that humans kept hidden in the darkness, cracked open the pretty perfumed lies and exposed the maggots underneath. And for all his horror, Lucifer was truth. Lucifer showed Nick the truth of human nature.
If Lucifer was the Light of winter sun, Michael was fire. Perhaps that's why he was so dangerous; without a Father to direct his flaming sword, to tell him what to smite, and to reign in the burning passion of his absolute certainty, all Michael did was consume. Fire, they say, was an excellent servant but a poor master. He had consumed his entire world in cleansing fire, leaving nothing but ash. And the very instant that he learned of another world, his only goal was to cleanse and consume that one, too, like a raging wildfire devouring a Californian forest like so much dry kindling.
No one could truly understand just how dangerous Light was. Or how empty one was when it left.
Nick was hunting new prey now. Caroline's angel had actually released her not because it was done with her, but so that she could go back to her husband, her life, an unusual act of compassion for an angel. Maybe she would understand why he was doing this. Her life had still been devastated anyway. Caroline had still ended up in a mental institution - a cosmic storm tethered to your insides will do that to you - and her husband had left her for a much more stable, normal co-worker. Caroline now lived on the streets, Hannah's unusual act of compassion notwithstanding.
Yes, maybe Caroline would understand him. A small part of Nick still hoped that someone - anyone - would forgive him. And even if she didn't, Nick thought that Caroline might bring him Castiel, if the rumors about her angel and the rebel seraph were true. Nick hated Castiel with a particularly intense hatred - Castiel liked to pretend that he was different from all the other body snatching angels, but had admitted to Nick that his vessel Jimmy was dead and his family broken because of him. The ever-hungry beast inside of Nick stirred as he passed the city limit sign of the sleepy Montana town. His lips curled into a predatory grin. However this developed, it would certainly be interesting.
Maybe this time, the hunger would be sated.