there is a LOT of inner dialogue here; mostly because Aubrey's decision is going to be one of the major ones, and i've been told to emphasize on major decisions. ;)
hope you enjoy!
I DO NOT OWN SUPERNATURAL OR ANY OF ITS CHARACTERS; ONLY MY OC, AUBREY MILLIGAN.
CASTIEL
Everything happened so fast.
One second, the girl was smiling her stunning smile at him, telling him to "pull it". But then she looked down and started yelling at him. "CAS! PULL IT NOW!" And he did. He pulled the string he assumed was called the pilot chute, and that was when the scene before him changed.
Castiel was no longer enjoying the feeling of freefalling—for it was quite similar to flying if he thought about it—but was instead standing once again on stable ground. The sudden change of temperature and abruptness at which the falling sensation stopped made his knees buckle.
He quickly caught himself, however, and forced himself to look up. The unscratched faces of Sam and Dean Winchester did little to appease his shock and anger; anger at the Trickster who stood behind the brothers in a circle of holy fire. The boys had understood his message after all, and they'd deciphered what the Trickster really was before he did.
"Cas," Dean said. "You okay?"
"I'm fine." The angel barely gave the elder brother a glance, more appropriately glaring at the Trickster. But he could see his true face now, the man behind the mask. "Hello, Gabriel."
"Hey, bro," the archangel replied. Castiel could now see his true form, fearsome to behold, yet when he looked at the archangel with his human eyes he found himself unafraid.
"How's the search for daddy going?" Gabriel continued. "Let me guess: awful."
Castiel only scowled. "Bring her back."
"Bring who—" Dean started, then looked around, late to notice that one was missing from their company. "Where's Aubrey?"
The water was freezing, as cold as ice. The impact hit Aubrey like landing on concrete, though that was how people described it as. And in spite of all that, her limbs had already gone numb. She'd been able to swim up a few feet from her original fall, but now her arms and legs flailed around like the drowning fish she was.
Her lungs burned, for she'd barely been able to take a deep breath before hitting the glacial water. She started swimming up to the surface that was only but a few feet higher from her fingertips.
"Bring her back, now." Castiel said. "Or I'll—"
"You'll what?" Gabriel interrupted, spreading his arms. "You forget, Castiel. I'm still more powerful than you."
"You fell."
"And you rebelled."
Dean intervened, though he too was as angered as the angel. "Listen here, bub. We will fry you like a French Fry if you don't bring her back right now."
Gabriel clucked, wagging his finger and pouting. "I'm sorry, boys, but she's not a part of this story."
"What do you mean?" Sam said, walking closer to the archangel.
"Oh, you could call her an intervention between the real juicy parts." Gabriel put on a mischievous smile. "I'm just doing you a favour."
"Just tell us where you put her!" Dean yelled, clearly aggravated. He started wandering around the room, knocking on walls and looking behind crates.
Castiel stood his ground and glowered at the archangel. "Why are you doing this?"
Gabriel stared at him with a smile on his face. "Bro, being an angel and all, I thought you'd know what that girl could do."
The angel frowned. "What do you mean?"
"You're getting slow, Cas." The archangel laughed. Then he took out something from his pocket, a small vial. Gabriel held it very gingerly in his hands. "Do you know what this is?"
The angel held his breath, remembering that he and Aubrey had been falling towards a body of water. Was she still under? Or had she managed to survive and swim up? "No, I don't."
The liquid inside the vial was coloured a fiery orange, and it seemed to glow within its confines. Castiel noticed that Sam and Dean had stopped searching. They were now listening in as well, clueless, but still angry.
Castiel took it upon himself to fix things, and then he would find out what was in the vial. Because whatever it was, the angel could feel waves of energy beating off it. It was important. That was all he needed to know at the moment. "Bring the girl back," he said. "And then we'll talk."
Aubrey broke through the surface, gulping down selfish amounts of air while flailing her arms around, trying to get them warm. Before she could, however, metal bars appeared above her head and at her sides, confining her into a space of ten feet. The bars started lowering above her, pushing her back down into the water. Aubrey took another large gulp of air before going under once more.
As soon as she did, she started shaking the bars furiously, hoping they would somehow break. But she wasn't The Hulk. She couldn't break nor bend the bars. There were no locks or chains or clasps anywhere. There was no way out.
Gabriel laughed, clapping his hands loudly and slowly. Castiel saw Dean make a move towards the archangel, but his brother stopped him. The angel couldn't blame him. They didn't know what Aubrey was going through as of the moment, and he did. So did Gabriel. And only one of them actually wanted to keep the girl from dying.
"You just don't see it, do you?" Gabriel said. "This girl is dangerous, powerful! She could destroy us all if she wanted to and all she would need… is this." He raised the vial in his hands, holding it out so the sunlight hit the glass. The liquid inside burned into millions of colours; blue, white, red, orange. The colours of the flame.
The answer on what exactly the girl was dawned on Castiel. He didn't want to believe it, but everything seemed to make sense, then.
"She's a Phoenix, Cas," Gabriel said.
Castiel thought out loud. "She felt so familiar the first time I saw her—"
"It's because you've met her before, obviously. You were so itty bitty when dad made her kind, but you met her once by Canaan, remember? I do. I was there. She had a different body before but the attitude hasn't changed, that's for sure. What she is was one of the main reasons I killed her mother. Not her real mother, duh, but you get my point. The night I left the poison was the same night that I got this." He raised the vial again, which was what Castiel presumed to be Aubrey's Power. "So, should I leave her in there or what?"
The angel was torn. He honestly didn't know what to do. As far as he knew, Phoenixes were indeed very powerful. But they weren't dangerous. Almost every Phoenix Castiel knew, and there weren't many, had been peaceful, mostly keeping their Powers secret and living among humans in tranquillity.
If he knew Aubrey, she would do the same thing.
"Castiel," Gabriel said, snapping the angel from his thoughts. "I know you're thinking that she's still that innocent little gal from millennia ago, but come on! It's the 2000's, bro. She's sure to be corrupted by now."
Castiel was nowhere to be found as Aubrey thrashed around in the cage, kicking at the bars. When she looked down she saw a small tag wrapped around her ankle. 'Shark bait.'
"Cas, what's he talking about?" came the smooth voice of Sam.
Castiel threw the brothers what he knew to be his most convincing look before turning to the archangel again. "And yet she can only bring destruction upon the world with that." He nodded to the vial in the archangel's hand. "What will happen if she doesn't drink it?
"Bring her back," he said, continuing before Gabriel could say anymore. "And if she is indeed the dangerous being you so believe her to be… then I will bring her the wrath of God myself."
Aubrey's lungs felt like they were on fire. She couldn't breathe. Her throat constricted and tears filled her eyes, though it could have easily just been the saltwater drowning her. Shark bait? She looked around and there was no speck of marine life to be found, though that was only one problem solved.
Was she going to die in a cage?
Gabriel looked as if he was considering the idea, and Castiel certainly hoped that he was. The angel didn't know how long humans could hold their breath underwater. "Well?"
The archangel looked Castiel over. "I suppose I could let her out… then if she does decide to take her Power back, and you won't kill her, I'll have one less angel to worry about…" Castiel held his breath, waiting for the verdict.
Aubrey had run out of breath. Now, she was slamming all her weight onto the bars, though her hits were weak. The metal shook and shuddered, but gave no hints of ever breaking.
Gabriel smiled. "Alright." He snapped his fingers, and Castiel heard Sam and Dean disappear from behind him, instead running to a rather large puddle by the corner of the warehouse. The stale water churned, and Castiel started running for it as well.
Suddenly, there were no bars anymore. Just water. Aubrey surged upward, kicking the sandy sea floor beneath her. She didn't focus on why the ocean she was in was so shallow. She focused on the sunlight dancing against the waves.
Aubrey kept kicking and kicking, though she felt her legs slowly turning into lead, growing heavier and dragging her down instead of helping her up. Nevertheless, she kept her eyes glued to the sunlight above, knowing that she was not going to die without seeing the sun, the real sun, for one last time.
Hands broke through the surface of the shallow water just as the Winchesters reached the puddle. They grabbed them, and heaved, and Castiel sighed in relief as Aubrey's head broke the surface. The brothers dragged her body onto the drier floors of the warehouse as the girl coughed up water.
Castiel walked towards the three, but he did not stop in front of them. He walked on until his foot was a centimetre-deep in the water puddle. The angel leaned down, cupped some of the stale liquid, and walked back to Gabriel.
He didn't need any more of the archangel's provoking nature, nor did the girl. She needed a clear head if she was going to make the right choice; to take her Power back or not.
Gabriel sneered when Castiel approached him, though the smirk disappeared as soon as Castiel let the water pour out of his hands and onto the holy fire. It created a gap between the flames, and the archangel stepped through it.
"Leave," Castiel told him. "Now."
The archangel looked at him evenly, before bending down and letting the vial roll out of his hands. Castiel watched as the glass tube made its way directly into Aubrey's waiting hands. Her fingers fumbled for it, but eventually she was holding it up to eye-level, a look of wonder in her eyes.
When Castiel finally looked away, the archangel was gone.
AUBREY
Aubrey didn't need any explanations or clarifications. Everything came back to her as soon as the vial touched her fingertips.
She stared down at the glass tube, remembering everything her mother had told her when she was still a little girl, before they even met Gabriel in Paris. "You're something very special," mother had always told her. "You were born to do great things."
"You're a Phoenix, Aubrey. My little bird."
At that time, Aubrey was just four-years old and she understood nothing of what the woman said. If anything, she always suspected that she was just trying to make her laugh. Because Aubrey always did whenever her mother told her stuff like that.
When her mother died, and Aubrey was still very young when that happened, she forgot all memories regarding what the woman used to tell her. She grew up under the custody of her father and dismissed the seemingly-silly stories, keeping her head in more pressing issues.
Aubrey grew up to be a hunter, and during all her time doing the job and researching about different creatures, she had never heard anything about Phoenixes.
She knew that they were birds, colourful ones, that died—whether by fire or by natural causes, Aubrey didn't know—and rose again from its ashes, forced to live life over and over again, dying and coming back to life.
As far as Aubrey had known, she was no Phoenix. She was a normal human being who hunted monsters and ghosts, not an infinite being of feather and fire.
But even as she tried to resist considering the idea, Aubrey could feel the vial burning in her hands. Such power could have broken through the thin glass, but she resisted. It was a big decision, taking her Power back or not. Aubrey tried to look at it from two points of view.
What if she uncorked the vial? What if she gave herself back her Power? She could be powerful, feared, but was she really going to use her powers for those reasons? Would she really level a town with a wave of her hand? Her entire life, she'd been thriving to stop those things from ever happening.
Did she really want to become the monster? Did she really want her fellow hunters, her friends, to want to kill her? At the same time, however, she could use her Powers for good, using them to her advantage while hunting. She would be stronger, not so easy to be put down.
Aubrey tried to look for the bright side of choosing that option, and found only one other: I could kill him. I could kill Gabriel.
Now that she held her Power in her fingertips, she remembered that Phoenixes were just as strong, and almost just as old, as angels. It was kind of weird to think that maybe one other of her kind had been there when the world was created and she didn't know about it, but she put that out of her head. It gave her a migraine.
But if she did take back her Power… she could really do it. She could kill the archangel.
Okay, Aubrey thought. Next say-so please.
What if she didn't uncork the vial?
There wasn't much to see from that point of view. Without her Power, Aubrey would stay the same. She'd continue her work as a hunter, and stay that way until one of the sons of hell finally got to kill her. She'd keep fighting for human kind, knowing that she was a creature herself.
She'd hide her power some place no one would ever find it. Maybe even let it sink to the bottom of the Pacific.
When Aubrey thought about it, the second choice didn't seem so bad.
But when she held the vial once more in her hands, feeling the energy surge through her like nothing she'd ever experienced before, Aubrey was back to square one.
She walked to the puddle by the far corner of the room, where she'd apparently almost drowned in. Reflected on the musty rain water was something Aubrey really didn't want to see.
Tongues of flame enveloped her, blue and red and orange and white all mixing together to form an aura around her body. Above her head, there was a glowing halo of fire. Its light cast shadows over her face, making Aubrey's hair look like it was burning from the roots, when in fact her hair was fire itself.
Aubrey looked at her eyes and found they were a bright gold. The vial in her hand pulsed golden waves as well, and with each wave, the aura around Aubrey's body stretched outwards, like tendrils of flame.
When she straightened her back, Aubrey watched her reflection with captivation as wings sprouted from her back. They seemed to be made of pure light. They slowly extended, each wing longer than Aubrey's full height.
She looked like an angel on fire. Aubrey looked down at her reflection in the water one last time before putting the vial into her pocket. Immediately, her image turned normal. The aura's pulsing died down, her wings faded, and soon enough Aubrey was staring at a perfectly average mirror image of herself.
Staring down at herself and taking in the image of herself wearing ripped skinny jeans, black boots and a plain white T-shirt folded at the sleeves, Aubrey realized that she liked the way she looked without the fiery auras and golden wings.
But she knew there was still a decision to be made, and as she walked back to the open door that would lead her outside, Aubrey decided to trust her gut, and to make the choice when the time was right.
Aubrey forced a weary smile when she walked outside, and right after thanking the angel who was definitely watching over her, she looked around for a moment before settling her gaze back to her friends. She sighed. "I need a drink."
epilogue coming soon ;)
REVIEWS PLS! :(((
