Dean followed the four angels into the abandoned library, wondering what the hell was going on. He was taken out of his warm bed at 5:20 in the morning, just to talk to some angel chick? Where's the thinking? Why couldn't this be done when he had some food or even coffee in his system? Albeit, she was fairly cute to look at. As he followed all of them, Dean caught himself staring at her ass as she walked, that tiny ass that was so tempting in those skin-tight jeans.
"Dean Winchester." The angel chick- Ariel, she had called herself- called out his name from the front of the group. "Don't stare at my ass." How did she know? He turned a bright red of embarrassment as the other three angels accompanying her each shot him lethal glances. Michael's was particularly lethal; it was like, "One wrong move, and I'll kick your ass where you stand." Then, he remembered that Michael was this chick's brother; that definitely made him want to behave. His face normalized but a shiver crawled down his spine.
They all stopped at a small alcove: five leather chairs surrounding an Oriental carpet, likely a fake; there was a table in the middle of the grouping, just enough to place few books or magazines for other people's enjoyment. Ariel sat down immediately and looked to the chair in front of her. "Dean. I don't bite. Come, sit down. We can at least be comfortable while we do this." Without any warning, Uriel shoved him into the seat and stood guard with the others, his face a smirk of contempt for the mud monkey. "Uriel!" Her voice, when it was angry, sounded like the baying of hounds on a hunt. At that tone, Uriel backed away and the smirk faded.
"Well, ain't this peachy." Dean twiddled with his thumbs while trying to avoid staring at Ariel; he so did not want three angry angel brothers coming after him if he flirted with the angel-chick. "So, what the hell's going on?" His face blanched for a moment, before, "Is Lucifer free?"
"Not likely." This time, it was Michael that answered. "After Anna banished Alastair to Perdition when she regained her Grace two months ago, there have been no more broken seals." He glared at Uriel for a moment; Dean knew that Uriel must have been punished for hiding Anna's Grace away like that. Michael turned his head back to Dean and continued talking. "However, Father needs for Ariel to talk to you before our campaign can become more aggressive." He moved to his sister's side and put his hand on her shoulder. "Ariel, Father told me that I could stay here or go, if you wanted me to."
Ariel placed her hand over his and looked up. "Michael. You're going to want to listen to this." With that, Michael settled into the chair next to hers, turning slightly so that he could face both his sister and the human.
She turned her eyes back to Dean and blinked once. "Dean. I apologize for the rude awakening. I'm accustomed to waking up at these hours from my service, and have not as yet adjusted myself to a more reasonable schedule." She took a breath, and her face turned serious. "I know that you've heard this so many times before, but you have to forgive yourself."
Dean decided to play hard-to-get. "Forgive myself for what?"
Ariel looked at him in a way that made him squirm like a little kid in front of the principal. "You know what I'm talking about, Winchester. Father has a plan for all of us, Dean. Why would he have asked Castiel," she pointed at the holy tax accountant with her chin without taking her eyes off of the mortal before her, "to pull you out?"
"That's funny, 'cause I've been asking that question and got squat from the angel twins over there." Anger began to flow under his skin. He hated having to talk about Hell, but that was all anyone, even Sammy, wanted to talk about now.
"Dean. Alastair focused on your weak link, and exploited it. That's what gets him off." Michael grimaced at the human term, but Ariel ignored him for the time being. "What you did down in Hell, you did to survive. That's all anyone on his table can do."
"What the hell do you know about it?" That was the million-dollar question: why did everyone care so much for him?
"Because I was there."
There was silence in the room. No one even breathed. An angel gone to the Pit? Put on Alastair's table without even some assistance from the Father? Michael was the first to breach the barrier. "What?" He shook his head, the information not making any sense.
Ariel did not answer, instead she just twisted in her chair. She began to pull off the leather jacket to reveal her bared left shoulder. The angels gasped, and Dean stood up in horror. There, marring her perfect skin, was a pulsating red hand-print. Dean ripped off his jacket and lifted up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal his shoulder. Holy shit! They matched!
Ariel, with tears in her eyes, placed the jacket on the table between them and righted herself. Dean stumbled back into the chair, and Castiel, Uriel, and Michael turned away when tears began to fall from her face. Dean was scared shitless now: he had never seen an angel cry before.
"Dean, I need you to listen. Once I'm done, then you can decide what to do. All right?"
He just nodded.
Her shoulders shuddered. "It was during the Great Battle, when Michael thrust Lucifer into the Pit. I was on the sidelines with Raphael, healing the angels so that they could return to the fight. I was left alone for only a moment, when Alastair snatched me from behind. He stole my voice and my sight, and dragged me down to the Pit when Lucifer was caged and the fallen angels banished. I lost all sense of where I was, and I could not scream for help.
"I woke up, my wrists hanging from his manacles and two meat hooks keeping me in place. My wings were broken, and the pain was all that I could feel. That's when he came to me. He told me," she had to swallow back her tears, the shame of it, "that the pain I felt at that point was nothing. Then, he started."
Ariel could still feel the knife digging into her gut, twisting and shredding her innards, drawing their horrible bloody designs over her skin. The crack of the whip and the crop against her back, and the whispers of Alastair's cretins of horrible consequences if she did not scream. The heat of the fire and the burn of the brands were seared into her mind. The items that Alastair raped her with. Nothing was sacred in Hell, nothing spared her.
"His favourite exercise with me would be to pull out my feathers, one by one. If I didn't scream, then he'd cut me. If I didn't scream from the cut, then he'd whip me. If I didn't scream after all that, he would brand me. He ended up branding me all over my back." She stood up and stripped before the male angels, and turned around to show them, her arms crossed over her breasts: she had long lost her modesty, but this was something that they all needed to see.
She could hear Michael keen as he saw the sigils of Hell branded over his kid-sister's back. There were demon sigils and claw marks underneath the Seal of Lucifer. Her skin was healed, but the scars were keloided with blood, making them seem the same color as her handprint. There were scars of the flaming whip that Alastair loved to employ against her. In a word, her sister's back looked like Hell. That wasn't all: her upper arms and her torso now glowed with faded scars of knife wounds, but this were not keloided with blood. By some kind of a glamour, she had hidden them from him from he saw in back in Heaven. Was she still ashamed of them?
She slid back into her tank and jacket and stared at the silently weeping Dean. "I don't need to tell you what he did to me, Dean. You already know." Her voice was gentle, but it only made the tears come faster and harder. Dean began to hyperventilate. "I lasted four hundred years in the time of mortals, Dean. Four hundred years equals forty-eight thousand years in the time of Hell. Every day, Alastair made the same deal with me that he did for you: to torture souls, or be tortured. The only reason I held out for so long was because I prayed for help, but no help came. I was weakened by that, and I jumped off the rack without any more questions. For one thousand two hundred mortal years more I tortured the souls; that's one hundred, forty four thousand years in Hell. Dean, I grew to love it: the screams of the damned under my blade, their moans as I visited every torture upon them that had been visited upon me. I knew that if I didn't, I'd be back to the torture and then there would be no second chances.
"Slowly but surely, Dean, I became what Alastair wanted me to become. Out of my pain and my anguish was born Afriel, Alastair's best pupil and his second-in-command. He taught us everything that he knew, and we applied it willingly. The part that was Ariel hid away under shields and cowardice, letting Afriel use my body like that. Only after I was removed from the Pit could I begin to be Ariel again. Father placed her under some heavy-duty binding locks to keep her hidden; he tried to remove her from me, but found that I couldn't survive without the presence of the demon inside of me. For now she remains obedient to me because she considers me her meat-suit."
Dean could not speak. How could she be so calm about it? She was simply sitting across from him and staring at him. Why? "Wh... what happened? How'd you..."
"How did I escape?" For the first time that night, she smiled. "Father rescued me, just like Castiel rescued you, Dean. He reached down from the Heavens and pulled me out. You humans would explain it as the Great Flood of Noah, when God reached down and smote the wicked in a rainstorm of forty days. He pulled me out, and after a year of re-teaching me how to be me, he placed me in charge of the children of this world. I was to watch over them, to heal them. You see," she stared down at her hands for a moment, "they're innocent. Father wanted me to forgive myself for the innocents that I had tortured. Every ten souls that I saved, I would earn back a soul from Perdition. I have almost completed my debt: I have just one soul left. You, Dean Winchester."
She slid off her chair and got on her knees before Dean. "Dean, I know you enjoyed it. I know exactly what you went through. I'm here to tell you that you are forgiven by our Father. He has a deal for you, too." At this, all three of the angels started, but Ariel ignored them. "If you can make it through to the Armageddon, then Father will reward you handsomely, Dean."
"What?" The tears were blurring his vision, making him hear things. Nothing was making sense.
"Dean." This time, it was Michael. "She's talking about Paradise. If you can stop the Armageddon from happening, then you can guarantee a place for yourself in Paradise after your death. It is your destiny, Dean."