i am so sorry for this being so late ;_;
i've been sooo busy guys. you have no idea.
our first trimester is coming to an end, and projects are piling up. being in the varsity team, i've been training three times a week every after school for upcoming tournaments (THERE ARE SO MANY. FOUR TO BE EXACT.) and then i still have to find time to spend time with my family.
so yeah, i'm pretty damn exhausted.
i haven't been able to find time to write lately :( which is really sad because writing lets me channel my frustrations and emotions into every single word
basically i'm gonna snap any time soon to anyone who bitches to me.
BUUUUUUT ANYWAY! hope you enjoyed this chapter! :)
not sure when i'll be able to put up the next one, but i'll try to in seven days. ;)
I DO NOT OWN SUPERNATURAL, OR ANY OF ITS CHARACTERS! ONLY MY OC, AUBREY MILLIGAN.
AUBREY
"You."
The sharp nose, the thin face, the suave brown hair, the green military jacket… Aubrey knew this man.
This man had met her mother during a two-day trip to Paris. This man had given her a lollipop the first time they'd met. This man had come home and had dinner with them. Aubrey could still remember how she wasn't afraid because she still didn't understand why her father was never home.
This man came and went, but Aubrey understood that her mother had loved him.
But this man wasn't there when her mother died of food poisoning, or when her dad came to claim her, or when it was time for the funeral.
The last time Aubrey saw this man, was the night before her mother's death. He and her mother had been watching a movie in the living room while Aubrey sat in her room, bored with the movie and instead wanting to play with her dolls.
When Aubrey finally raised her head to look at the Trickster again, she knew that this man wasn't a man at all. He was a monster.
"Where are Sam and Dean?" Castiel demanded, looking very sinister inside the ring of fire.
"Hi, Castiel!" The Trickster said, pacing around the circle of fire the angel was trapped in. Aubrey couldn't bring herself to think about how he knew who Cas was. "I'm sorry, but Sam and Dean are kind of busy right now…" He grinned. "I'm just trying to teach them a lesson."
Then he turned his gaze on Aubrey. "Do I know you? I feel like we've met before…" He tapped his chin. "Did we have a fling?"
Aubrey glared at him. "You knew me when I was 4 years old. My mother loved you." Her skin prickled, vaguely aware of a second pair of eyes staring at her. Castiel's. But Aubrey wasn't thinking about an escape plan. She didn't want safety. She wanted answers.
The Trickster snapped his fingers, pointing at Aubrey. "Aubrey! Your name's Aubrey, right?"
She grit her teeth as she said, "Yes."
"Oh, man, now I remember!" He stepped around the circle and walked closer to Aubrey, making her back up. For a panicked second, she looked at Castiel, but he wasn't looking. He was eyeing something above them. Aubrey didn't have the time to look because the Trickster was still advancing.
"Your mom and I met at France! She was the perky blonde thing who walked up to me and asked if I could take your picture." The Trickster seemed to be enjoying himself. He leaned against the wall and stared at Aubrey as if they were long lost friends. "Shame about her though, but she was getting clingy."
Aubrey stopped in her tracks. "What?"
He turned around and walked towards Castiel again, looking over his shoulder to say, "She was getting clingy, so I killed her."
It felt like Aubrey's heart tore itself into a million pieces. It didn't shatter. It tore. Her voice shook when she spoke. "You killed her?" Her brain tried to look for the missing pieces, but she felt like she was looking for something that wasn't there. She shook her head, unbelieving. "N-no, the police said she died because of—"
"Food poisoning," the Trickster finished. And he was right. But of course he knew that, right? Of course the police had told him what happened. Aubrey's lower lip quivered as he said, "You know, your mother really liked that bit in Alice in Wonderland where the little girl drinks from a bottle labelled drink me."
Just like that, all the pieces flew in together, all at the same time, and it overwhelmed her.
Aubrey remembered the nights where she and her mother watched Alice in Wonderland. Her mother would always laugh out loud whenever they reached the part where Alice needed to become smaller. She would say, "It's so ingenious!" Aubrey didn't understand that word at the time.
The night her mother died, Aubrey had found a little vial very much similar to the one from Alice in Wonderland. Never even thinking better of it, she had placed a handwritten tag on it. "Drink me" she wrote, knowing her mother would find it amusing.
Aubrey had watched from behind a corner as her mother drank it, and she watched as her mother convulsed on the ground.
The cops had never retrieved the vial.
"Y-you…" Aubrey glared at the Trickster, who was smiling at her, eating a chocolate bar. "You killed my mother?"
"Well, I suppose kid-you wouldn't have understood but now? I'm surprised you haven't been spending your days tracking me down!"
Her eyes brimmed with angry tears as she repeated the words, more certain than ever. "You killed my mother."
The Trickster shrugged, and the thin thread of patience and control she had left snapped. Aubrey strode forward to the Trickster and he, not even making an effort to run away, was soon in her grasp. She shook him by the jacket. "You got my father killed!"
"Wha—hey! Let's be fair here. Your dad was killed by a Crocotta."
Aubrey didn't even want to know how he knew. "The Crocotta killed him because it knew that my mother was dead!"
The Trickster looked baffled but, Aubrey knew, he was just playing with her. She didn't care. She was going to kill him. "And who killed your mother again?"
"You did!"
He waggled her finger in front of her face, like an adult telling a child he was being naughty. "Ah-ah-ah, I only placed the vial there. I didn't scribble a note saying drink me."
"You—"
"I didn't kill them." The Trickster's eyes gleamed evilly. "You did."
She wavered only for a second. Her uncertainty and guilt was quickly replaced by anger. "I'm gonna kill you."
He took another bite of his chocolate bar. "I don't see any wooden stakes on you, kid." Aubrey looked behind her, to Castiel, and he was holding out the stake she had given to him only minutes before, his face blank.
An unfeeling smile crept up her lips as she turned her gaze to the Trickster again. "Are you so sure about tha—" Her heart dropped when she saw that he wasn't there anymore. Her hands had been gripping onto nothing from the moment she'd turned to look at an angel.
"Son of a bitch!" She looked down, and found the chocolate bar by her feet. Aubrey kicked it away. A heated flame burned through her heart and she yelled, trying to get the painful blaze out, but it was embedded in her like glass shards—
"Aubrey." It was Castiel, calling to her from behind.
And just like that, her anger was gone. But the pain was still there, the glass shards, and it left her a blubbering mess of agony and nothing.
"Aubrey." The angel called her again, and this time she responded.
"Yeah," she deadpanned, finally turning away from where the Trickster had just been standing. "Yeah, okay."
Aubrey used her jacket to make a bridge for the angel over the fire, not having a care in the world to think of anything else. By the time Castiel had stepped over it, the front side of her jacket was charred. She put it back in the flames and let it burn.
She didn't move from her spot, and she was vaguely aware of the angel hovering over her shoulder.
After a few moments, he finally spoke, and she was begrudgingly snapped out of her reverie. "He wasn't lying," he said.
It was more of a statement than a question, but Aubrey answered anyway. "No, he wasn't."
The angel didn't say anything more, and she was thankful for that, but she couldn't help but wish for a distraction, some kind of distraction, because her thoughts had taken a very dangerous turn and she didn't want to become a Weak Hunter.
"Aubrey—"
"Let's just try to get home in one piece, okay?"
Castiel didn't look angry about the fact that she had cut him off two times in one day, but it only gave Aubrey more guilt. "Sorry," she said sheepishly, making her way with the angel to the exit.
Though it seemed, that day, God finally saw it fit to punish her for all the wrongs she had done.
The door wouldn't budge.
Aubrey laughed humourlessly. "You've got to be joking." She pulled and pulled at the door, tried to kick it open, but it stood firm. Castiel even laid his hand on it. Guess what? Nothing.
"Cas?" He looked at her. "Could you teleport out there and drive the car into the thing?" She gestured at the weak, wooden door. "I bet that'd work."
A full minute passed, with the angel just standing there, his face contorted in concentration that it would have made Aubrey laugh if her thoughts weren't… elsewhere. "I can't," he said, his brow still furrowed.
Aubrey cursed under her breath, looking around for any way they could get out. The Trickster son of a bitch must have enchanted the whole warehouse or something.
There were the windows. They could use the crates still left to make a platform. But then how were they going to get down? Then she spotted a considerably wide hole only a few feet off the ground. They could land easily back onto the grass outside without even a scratch.
She nodded towards the hole. "There."
Within minutes, they had successfully put together enough crates for make-shift stairs. Aubrey went first. Just as she'd predicted, jumping down was easy. Even easier for the angel because, for all she knew, he'd been jumping out of buildings for a long time.
The drive back to the motel was filled with silence; except for the time Aubrey asked Castiel if he'd had any luck with the lever. "Did anything happen?"
"I was able to see them, but only for a second," the angel answered, looking ahead with a somber expression on his face. "It seems the Trickster has them trapped in different realities. It changes from time to time. How did Dean put it… a show."
Aubrey raised her eyebrows. "You mean a TV show?"
"Yes."
"Is there anything we can do to get them back?"
"He was very strong. Stronger than any Trickster I have encountered," he said. Aubrey felt his eyes on her. "He shouldn't have known about the holy oil."
She took a moment to think. "Who could have told him about it?"
"Only angels and Archangels know about what holy oil can do to other angels. I've told Dean, but he hasn't told another soul other than Sam and Bobby."
"Well… is it possible that the Trickster could be an angel?" When Aubrey looked at Castiel again, he was staring at her, his eyes sunken as if even considering the possibility was mad. Maybe it was. Maybe Aubrey had gone mad. Or maybe her brain was just thinking harder than it usually did because she was desperate for a distraction.
"Leave it," she said. "Just, leave it."
They arrived at the motel and Aubrey didn't let Castiel in, this time. "We'll go there and try again tomorrow," she told him. He only nodded his head, but he never took his eyes off her. Aubrey felt bad about it, but she closed the door, as gently as she could.
That night, Aubrey did not dream. In fact, she didn't sleep. She spent the whole night thinking about everything.
Had she really gotten her mother killed? If she hadn't placed that piece of paper beside the vial of poison, would her mother still have drank it? Aubrey couldn't think of anything else.
Of course her mother wouldn't have drunk it. She would have thrown it away or given it to someone else, which was certainly better than what had really happened.
Deep inside her heart, Aubrey didn't blame the Trickster (but she hated him all the same). She blamed herself. Why shouldn't she have? She was stupid, though young, but she should have been smarter. She had let the Trickster use her. She was weak, and stupid, and useless.
She'd gotten her father killed as well.
What kind of daughter could live like that?
Thoughts such as this stayed with her until the morning sun came up, and it was finally time to look for the boys again.
CASTIEL
Castiel didn't need to be welcomed inside to know that the girl wasn't sleeping. Her breathing was too heavy, and the sheets rustled too much.
He pondered on everything he'd learned that day.
The girl's mother had been killed when she was only young, poisoned, and Aubrey blamed herself. For her mother's death as well as her father's. Castiel tried to think of what it would feel like to be in that situation and didn't like the results.
But he couldn't think of any reason why anyone would blame her. She was young, clueless about everything the world contained. Some part of him wished that maybe he had paid attention more to the humans. So many on the Earth had been dejected, some killing themselves to end the pain.
Castiel imagined the girl Aubrey killing herself and frowned, an odd ache in his chest. He wasn't familiar with the feeling.
reviews are greatly appreciated! :)
