Supernatural and its associated characters belong to Eric Kripke (lucky duck!)
Author's Note: Introducing Chapter 4...it wasn't as long as I thought it'd be between chapter posts. Funny ol' world, innit?
The odd man is familiar to the Biggerson's' six'o'clock shift, though none of them can tell her who he is or how he gets there, into the cramped corner booth with his empty wallet and emptier eyes. Alex the Busboy says he's their own personal ghost, the troubled spirit of a suicidal customer, but as far as she knows ghosts don't eat hamburgers and apple pie, and their hair doesn't smell like spearmint and snow. She knows that she writes about him sometimes, that sad blue eyed man; he becomes a millionaire who lost everything in the stock market crash, an enchanted prince swindled out of his kingdom, a magician whose family was consumed by a trick gone wrong. The stories are always thick with words like "grief" and "mourning", and they all end the same way: love discovered in a corner booth at Biggerson's. Yeah, right.
She looks up from her copy of Entertainment Weekly, which she only brings in because after eight the place is deserted and it's four long hours until her shift is over, and is very surprised to see the blue-eyed man standing in front of her. Well, across the counter from her, if she wants to get literal (she doesn't) and then he speaks.
"Are you alright?" And his voice is rough and deep, not the soft tenor of her imagination, and heat rises in her cheeks because she can't get her mouth to work and she's staring like a dumb fool.
"Faith," she replies, though fuckfuckfuck he didn't ask for her name but she doesn't want to tell him about her crap life and sucky new apartment complete with rats, bad wiring, and nonexistent heaitng. He smiles a little, softly, like she's told him a joke he's heard a million times before, and orders a slice of apple pie to go, please.
"Will that be all, sir?" she asks.
"Yes," he says, and Faith Littleton knows he won't be back in the corner booth the next day, or the day after, and maybe never again, and she walks into the kitchen and cries for reasons even she can't fully explain.
Margaret sends her home early.
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Her apartment is silent, the faint scritchscritch of a rat running in the wall and the desperate flicker of a muted TV all the welcome home she gets, and it's been like that for a year now but it bothers her tonight. She wonders if it has anything to do with the blue-eyed man's leaving, because she'd begun to believe her life would start where her stories ended and now he's gone forever. She hopes not. She hopes she's not that pathetic. Faith hangs her things up on the battered wooden coatrack and walks up to her equally battered sofa.
The mattress folds awkwardly out of the sofa, too big for one person and she thinks again of spearmint, snow, and apple pie. She sighs; her breath is a white flower in the air and Faith only has time to mutter something unpleasant about realtors before she falls forward, the cap of her skull hitting the TV stand and when she manages to turn around there is a dead man in her living room. His skin is pale blue (or maybe gray) and the skin has worn off his fingertips and his throat is slashed open, vocal cords and dessicated meat peeking through. Faith screams because there's a knife in those bone-fingers and she can see herself in the dead man's place, neck split open and then he flickers like a TV image on fast forward and pulls her head back...
And dissolves in a swirl of red and white ash, and blue eyes pin her to the floor.
"Stay here," her savior whispers, and he presses an iron poker into her hand. She's about to close her fingers around it when something moves out of the corner of her eye and the dead man grabs the other's collar, hurls him into the wall and she hears bone break over the sound of her own screaming.
"CAS!" A tall, handsome man appears in the doorway, whic she just now realizes has been kicked open and who's going to pay for that? when it happens.
The blue-eyed man begins to glow, his eyes twin flames in the dark and his face white-hot, and the dead man is roaring and the walls are starting to split. A sharp, piercing hum cuts her ears and something warm is dribbling down her neck and OhmyGod, Faith is seeing an angel for the first time. He's beauty incarnate, power personified, and his wings are huge and soft and black and the dead man begins to crumble in the face of his glory. She squeezes her eyes shut when the light becomes too bright to bear, but the sight is forever printed on her eyelids, the swirl of her soul and for the first time in her life Faith believes in God.
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Castiel and Sam pick their way over to Faith Littleton, who is small and quiet where she has pressed herself into the space between the bed and the television stand, fingers clamped obediently around Castiel's iron poker. Her large, dark eyes are fixed on the Angel's face with worshipful awe, cheeks pale and streaked with dust and her own blood, and she gasps when Castiel touches her thick black hair and his fingers come away sticky and red.
"Don't," she whispers. "Your hands..."
He sees her try to sit up, follow the line of his hand as he places it back by his side and he remembers sickness on the floor of a house full of angels and Sam pushes her back into the carpet.
"We're gonna call 911," he tells her.
"Uh, p-phone's in the kitchen," she says, and Castiel remembers watching her at the register, so sweet and friendly that he'd thought she'd make a perfect angel. She looks different now, pinched and unhappy after nights spent in a home occupied by evil, and Castiel is unable to keep himself from frowning. Why is it always the best humans who endure the worst trials? And he remembers a beach, and a man who used to love his brother and fast cars, and he huffs out an unhappy sigh.
"Hey," Faith says, matter-of-factly. "You're an angel."
"Yes."
"You saved my life," and he hears Dean in her voice, disbelieving and small and his heart breaks for this angel-girl with her night eyes and sweet face.
"Good things do happen," he replies.
And from that moment on Faith and Castiel are inseparable.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Present
He's slow to answer the door for two reasons, the first being that his left leg is still, for all intents and purposes, petrified below the knee. Has been since Missouri, but he doesn't like to think about that because he can still recall it all so clearly, the demon's face and the curl and twist of the magic that had crippled him...Sam! Are you in there?
The other reason he's come to hate the door is because he knows it's Faith. It's always Faith. Sam Winchester breathes a curse into the thick wood of the door before he opens it and there she stands, mascara and eyeliner streaked across her full-moon face and he already knows what's wrong but he can't seem to press his voice into action quickly enough to keep her out. She slides past him into the motel room, which is covered in newspaper articles and notebook paper with "vital information" printed at the top of each and every piece but none of it means anything because Castiel's picked up hunting again.
"He'll be back," he says, but he must not sound convincing because she bursts out laughing and it's sharp, and pained, and Sam remembers the fifteenth time Cas came back from a hunt without Dean and spent hours vomiting in the bathroom; her laugh sounds like that.
"Maybe," she replies.
They sit at the same time, Faith keeping her hands folded neatly in her lap and Sam sprawling out like Dean used to, because he has to keep something of his brother and this is all he's found that means anything, and their unspoken words squeeze into a silence too small to fit all of them.
"I can feel him," Faith says at last, and Sam lets out a breath he didn't know he'd pulled in. "Dean. I never even met the man, but I know what he feels like."
He's not sure whether he wants to hug her or slap her, or maybe both, for claiming a connection to his brother but in the end he stays still, because his leg hurts and his heart aches and his mind is already hundreds of miles away, skimming over cities and cornfields with Cas. He remembers flying with him once, just once, in one of those life-or-death situations he finds himself in more and more now Dean's not around to suppress his idiotic tendencies. Angelic flight is all hot wind and ringing bells; he wonders if Dean enjoys it now, three months into his new passenger-seat life. Realizes Faith is talking and has been for a while, and tries to rearrange his face into something soft and concerned. It used to come easily.
"Why wouldn't he take me with him?" She sounds close to tears. Sam can't bring himself to feel sorry for her, not really. Anyone who tries to travel with an angel is a fool; it took Sam a long time to realize that angels are more driven than Winchesters to the power of infinity, and when he finally did he stopped looking for Cas. There's just no point to chasing after someone on a wild goose chase.
"Go home, Faith."
"Not without him," she whispers. "Oh God, I can't go home without him."
Silly girl, he thinks. Didn't your mother ever teach you not to fall in love with angels?
The words slip out. Faith doesn't stay very long after that.
Chapter Four...I love you. But goodbye.
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