Supernatural and its associated characters belong to Eric Kripke (who should be reported for abuse and have his mind-children turned over to me!)
Author's Note: My little space markers STILL aren't working! Sorry people, if you've been confused this whole time as to where one segment began and another ended...grrr, !
Warning: There's a bit of slash goin' on... if you look really, REALLY hard. So, y'know...watch out, and stuff. :)
Sam sighs and presses his forehead against the upper curve of the Impala's steering wheel, inhaling the just-barely-there scent of booze, blood, and leather. The damn thing's got impressions of Dean's thick, crooked fingers -shifted just above the wider impression of John Winchester's equally crooked and graceless fingers- on it, a constant reminder of his brother. The brother he's probably not ever going to get back, not really. Maybe they'll meet each other in Hell, or wherever it is worldly hunters/angel condoms and blood-sucking Psychics of Satan go when they die. Or maybe, by some miracle, Michael will scatter Lucifer's atoms across the universe and dump Dean on Bobby's front porch...drooling and hollow-eyed and completely incapable of speaking, moving, or wiping his own ass.
Sam's not a pessimist.
He's been thinking about it for a long time, ever since he and Cas caught a sneak peek at what was left of Donnie Finnerman after Raphael took a stroll in his meat-suit. Castiel had said at the time that Donnie hadn't fought Raphael, that he'd let the angel feed every last ounce of strength and self and thought into his grace, that when Raphael left the body, he'd taken the soul with him; the angel just hadn't stopped to consider it. He'd just taken, and that was the end.
"He doesn't have faith, Sam. Not the faith it would take to completely give himself over to Michael." Castiel's voice is soft, barely audible above the hammer of spring rain and swift Seattle wind; the hand that suddenly curves over the back of the seat is softer, almost less tangible than the voice and the electric, shifting presence combined. Sam doesn't miss Faith's soft huh or the way she's abruptly absorbed by the app on her iPhone, but he chooses to ignore it. He and Faith are destined to hate each other for all eternity, and that's one aspect of destiny Sam doesn't think he'll have any issues following through on.
"Yeah."
They pile out of the Impala, slick and black under the onslaught and Sam wants to press his cheek against it, feel it steaming and humming itself to sleep and finally understand why Dean was so in love with this car. Why he spent weeks building it up from nothing, and left all the little important pieces; the Legos Dean stuffed in the vents, the army man Sam wedged into the ashtray, the clumsy knife-carvings D.W. S.W.
"Sam!" Faith hurls his duffel at him, shaking her hair out of her eyes. There's no denying she's a beautiful girl (if he were Dean, he'd probably have banged her already), but her idiocy and generally sickening angel-love takes that bright, shiny new-chick edge off in a matter of minutes.
The object of Faith's sickening love gasps behind him, and when Sam turns the only angel worth meeting is rubbing his fingers over the Impala's hood, his expression thick and unreadable.
"Something's wrong," Castiel says quietly. He's so quiet these days, after all the sleeping pills and dream-root Bobby could scrounge up couldn't lead him to Dean, after a hundred thousand encantations in languages that hadn't been spoken by people for thousands of years failed to summon Michael, after weeks of constant flight and interrogation hadn't given them any new information about Dean or aforementioned Archangel's whereabouts. "Sam, something is-"
"Cas?" Sam grasps the angel's shoulders and is once again amazed by how little he is, how Sam's hands can swallow the bone and the flesh and the fabric in one fell swoop. "Cas, what is it? ...are you about to be sick again?"
"Not me." He turns out of Sam's grip and bends over the hood of the Impala, breath puffing quickly in and out of his mouth, a white pool on the black metal. His hands come up to his face, the fingers digging into skin stretched tightly over bone; he looks like Sam felt after he'd had a vision, like Dean might have looked when Sam hurled an iron bell into his consciousness. Sam tries to remember what Dean said, where he placed his hands, because out of everything related to those drawn-out migraines, the most important was how safe, how sheltered and completely indestructible his older brother had made him feel. With just words and hands, the only things Dean had that were worth anything, that he could really call his and not Dad's or Some Guy I Ripped Off in a Bar's, Dean had given him a home and a family.
A slender shadow slides in front of him and places smooth, white hands in the center of Castiel's back, rubbing very slowly and murmuring something soft and unintelligible over the downpour's quick watery heartbeat. The angel groans; crimson blossoms under his fingertips, dribbles from his nose. Dean's gonna hate that.
"Sam, what's going on?" Faith lifts Castiel's head away from the Impala, places her palm under his chin and collects the diluted blood streaming down his face.
"I don't know." Perplexed, Sam scrubs his fingers through the angel's thick black hair (it feels dry and soft and warm under his palms, although it looks soaking wet) and uses his grip to check Castiel's eyes, the color of his face, his temperature. "Cas? Cas!" There's no response; his friend is boneless, unresponsive. "I'll take him in. Faith, you lock the car-"
"Yeah." She's aged ten years in the space of a minute, her hands as quick and experienced as a hunter's as she fishes out the remainder of the luggage and runs inside the motel. He doesn't know what lie she'll tell the clerk; he's got an armful of dead-to-the-world angel and a head spinning with a thousand questions, and he couldn't care less whether they're checked in as the Osbournes or the Beatles.
And then quite suddenly, Mr. Comatose revives.
"NO!" He screams in two voices and pushes Sam back so hard the youngest Winchester finds himself on the hood of the Impala in a heartbeat, feet scrabbling for purchase on the slick metal. Castiel doubles over as though he's been punched (and yeah, it's happened a few times since Dean left) and screams again, and the sound makes Sam's ears bleed and his heart break; he's pretty sure a few windows shatter too, although he's not really concerned with them at this particular juncture.
"Cas..."
"YOU CANNOT HAVE HIM!" Castiel is on his hands and knees now, voice raw and sharp and furious. If Sam hadn't understood Heavenly wrath before, he could have written a book on it now, listening to his brother's angel scream at something beyond his earshot... perhaps even beyond his plane. "YOU CANNOT TAKE HIM FROM ME!"
"What is going on here?" The manager and Faith are both standing in the rain with them, humiliating observers to Castiel's breakdown. Sam wants to push them both inside; this is something personal, something written and breaking deep in the heart of who Castiel is. Maybe the angel doesn't even know what it is yet, but it's there and it's being destroyed before their very eyes and the young Winchester realizes for the first time that he's straight out crying in a Dean-repellent chick flick way.
"Chill." Sam walks up to Castiel and slides to the ground, his face absorbed by that thick mess of black hair and his arm intimately familiar with the hard fragility of the angel's borrowed ribcage. He might even feel Enochian sigils on the bone.
"Hey," he whispers. "It's gonna be okay..."
"NO." Castiel replies, and his return to gentility is almost as disturbing as his shift into rage. "No it's not." His ribs jerk against the muscle of Sam's forearm in what might have been a swallowed sob, another outcry choked by grace and self-consciousness. "Sam, he has Dean."
"Who-"
"Lucifer." The little angel sighs, and the sound comes from the depths of his soul, that newly broken place inside his chest. "The Devil has Dean."
Warehouse
They take turns.
It's not something Dean thought he'd ever do with Michael, because the guy's a total white-winged douche and he'd rather let the angel take the brunt of it because hey! humans don't exactly come equipped with Instant Heal-a-Powers.
But after hours and days and weeks of hiding behind pained radio-static screams and flickering grace and tattered wings, Dean and the Archangel reach an agreement. It's not one either of them would have chosen under better circumstances -Dean would rather have his body after Michael's done throwing it at Satan, and Michael would rather use his body to beat the whole Apocalypse spiel out of his brother's whacked out head- but things being the way they are, it's the best they can come up with. So Dean takes his turn being pushed to the forefront, filling up nerves and muscle and flesh that haven't been his in months and being forced through hours of torture; Lucifer could've given Alastair a run for his money. Hell, he could have taught Alastair a few things.
"Ah, hello." The Devil slaps him jovially on the cheek, splitting a gash that Michael must have felt but Dean was safely hidden from at the time of its infliction. "I'm dealing with Dean now, right?"
Dean tries to speak, he really does, but his mouth and throat are swelling with copper and fire and the words burn out somewhere in his chest. Michael is a mute presence in the back of his head, an untouchable swirl of Enochian sigils and ancient, frayed power; he's really on his own for the first time in months.
He wishes he could appreciate it more.
"So tell me," Lucifer says, calmly lifting the deadened Archangel's Blade out of his back pocket (Dean wishes he'd cut his ass off). "Does your family have a history of cardiovascular disease?"
And he presses that freakishly huge angel-knife into the hunter's chest, splits flesh and muscle in a rift that spans from Dean's sternum to the waistband of his jeans and before Dean has time to comprehend what's happening to him, the Devil's hands slide smoothly through the gap and force bones back and away from trembling vital organs; the pain is indescribable. And Dean's been to Hell.
"Oh." Frostbitten fingers close around the thick, vital red muscle buried deep in his chest and Dean can feel his own pulse against the pads and he twists in helpless, speechless agony. The chains binding his wrists to the ceiling rasp and grate, the sound throbbing through the vaccuum pressing against either side of his head and almost drowning out the fallen angel's voice. "It's... smaller than I'd pictured."
He squeezes, and Dean reaches for Michael and finds a void instead.
Where are you?
Seattle, Washington: Five hours earlier
Faith flips idly through the thick, leather binder she "borrowed" from the locker in Bobby's panic room; it's mostly things she already knew, stuff about Seals and Witnesses and Lucifer Walking Free. There are medieval scratchings of angels that look suspiciously like Cate Blanchett, demons with curling horns and shark-toothed smiles, and a few knights in shining armor that bear no resemblance to either of the Brothers Winchester; the binder's classic B.M. (before Michael) literature, narrated in Bobby's untidy slant, but sometimes in the margins or on a scrap of floating loose-leaf paper she'll find Enochian rituals or laundry lists for the rituals. And Faith's an angel-magic kind of girl.
"Cas-"
She turns to face the other side of the hotel room, but finds Sam and Cas slumped over the cheap Ikea table; they're passed out, which may or may not have had something to do with the rapid consumption of every ounce of alcohol in the minibar. She's getting up to drag them into the spare bed (they've shared before, when there wasn't enough money to rent two separate rooms), and then she sees them.
The keys to the Impala, carelessly tossed on the keyboard of Sam's laptop, scratched and greasy and basking in the thick blue glow the screen. Once upon a time, Dean Winchester wrapped his fingers around the ignition key, and with a single twist, he'd started the Apocalypse. In the hands of an untrained girl from Wisconsin, desperately in love with a divine being and looking ahead at a future as unknown as that of the Winchesters, who knew what could be done with them? Faith looks between the keys and Castiel, struggling between one temptation and the next; while the angel might not demonstrate feelings as physically as a human girl might hope, it's become obvious he has some feelings for Faith... though they don't hold a candle to his larger mission of finding Dean. But while Sam's grateful for that, Faith's definitely not. Which puts her in a precarious position, with a series of life-altering, character determining questions to ask, like... would Castiel appreciate what she's trying to do? Would he thank her for it, if he knew? Would he be able to move on if Dean came back, healthy and happy and angel-free?
"Cas." She shakes his shoulder, hoping to wake him; she wants him to have some idea of where she's going, so he can reach and find and fly to her and watch her bring back his precious...
"Dean," Castiel whispers his name with the sort of prayerful adoration Faith's been searching for her whole life and thought maybe she'd found in a corner booth at Biggerson's, and is only just realizing wasn't meant to be.
With one word, he makes her choice for her.
The angel begins to shift and she thinks his eyes open a bit and maybe he even asks where she's going, but she doesn't stick around long enough to make sure. She has the keys and the binder and the laundry list, and she's not coming back without Dean Winchester.
And so it happens that a young woman finds herself in the middle of an empty field, its crops long since harvested and sold, the dead earth good for nothing until the season begins again. She doesn't even know what they used to grow here, and she doesn't need to; the field will serve its purpose and once it's all over she'll never have to see it again. It's quiet, relatively isolated; the closest highway is five miles off, but the soft displacement of air and the roaming of headlights suggests the presence of civilization and human beings. Not close enough for her to get help if something goes wrong, but close enough that if all goes well, Dean Winchester will have her back in Seattle before Sam and Castiel wake up. She begins.
"RAAGYOSL, E VYN NONKYF ASPT POAMAL DE ZYLD: NYYS OD DLUGA LONSA DE SYBSY MYRK OY TALHO." The words are heavy on her tongue, thick and ancient and powerful and for the first time Faith wonders if this is the right thing to do, if maybe she's in over her head. But the earth is shaking and a harsh white glow swells up over the horizon, and she's almost done... "LSRAHPM, SAYYNOV, LAVAXRP, SLGAYOL, SOAHZNT, LYGDYSA: NYYS OD DLUGA KARS MYKAOLZ LONSA TA Y OROKH PAYD MYRK OY TOLHO. OY TALHO Y PLOSY AFFA ZYZOP."
Glory and Grace and Power wash over the night sky and she falls to her knees, burying her face in the dirt and clasping her fingers over her ears; Michael is the scream of chalk on a chalk board spanning the universe, the sticky heat of napalm, the light of Washington D.C.'s Fourth of July fireworks show increased to the ten-thousandth fold and Faith is certain she's done something wrong because Michael was supposed to be Dean. She had seen this going differently, imagined man and Archangel separated as Cas had always hoped; she'd never pictured the entire world crumbling around her, taking Sam and Bobby and Castiel and six billion human beings and their cities and cars and cellphones with it into the darkness of space...
All is still. Faith takes a deep, slow breath and lifts her head; the sound of the highway flows on uninterrupted, the skies are dark and clear and set with an infinite number of stars, and the only change in all the crumbling world is that she is no longer alone in the field.
The disintegrating corpse of Adam Milligan, her pre-med freak of a college boyfriend, sprawls across her lap and it's thin and bony and blackened by fire, and she hadn't even known he was dead. He'd just...called her in the middle of the night and said he'd gone to visit his mother. I'll be back soon, baby. I love you. But when he hadn't come back soon, Faith had stopped caring about higher education or earning a bachelor's degree, and started working at Biggerson's and maybe this is her act in the Great Winchester Tragedy; she places a trembling hand on the flaking skull, leans and watches threads of eye-watering silver twist behind the empty sockets.
"Adam?"
With a shudder and a groan, the corpse begins to rebuild itself and it's like watching a cremation in reverse; the skin comes back in peachy patches, followed by the organs and the clear blue eyes and the crisp white color of the bone, and at the end soft blond hair folds out of the scalp and tickles the palm of her hand.
The recreated man inhales with a suddenness that tests her quivering nerves, long fingers gripping handfuls of the damp earth as delicate lids slide away from the midnight and glacier-ice of the eye. He looks at her for a moment, but it's not her college lover's beautiful, awkward soul spinning behind the sweet eyes, the friendly face.
"What have you done?" Michael asks.
Okie dokie artichokies... so... this is another filler chapter. I'm trying to get the ball rolling on the good stuff, don't worry! :)
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