August 12, 1958 – October 2, 1958

Castiel landed hard and tumbled roughly over the ground. He scrambled on all fours to the nearest object and hid beneath it, wrapping his wings tightly around himself. A sharp pain lanced into his shoulder from his left wing, but terror blurred it until it was little more than a vague awareness in his mind.

It had happened. His makers, his family – they'd told him the stories, like they told all children, but he hadn't really believed. Not truly.

Angels. Monsters who came and stole children away to earth, never to return.

Grief and pain choked him. The angel took him away, tore him from his home and through the barrier. The angel and the human had hurt him – done something to him that he could feel deep down inside. And when his maker had come to get him back, the angel had killed her.

Fear was the only thing keeping back the sobs as he thought of her there on the ground with a blade buried in her heart and fluid pooling around her. 'Blood'. The word whispered through his mind. He'd crawled to her, tried to wake her, but she was dead.

When the angel lunged at him again, Castiel thought he was dead, too. But instead, he'd felt a sickening force shove against him, and then he'd hit the ground hard in this new place. He peeked out from behind his wing, but there was little to see. It was dark. It was cold. Upright objects stood like sentinels all around him. The thing under which he hid was similar, but shorter, and pricked at his feathers with its stiff finger-like protrusions.

'Trees'. 'Bushes'. 'Branches'.

The strange words filtered into his mind. He accepted them without question.

Wherever he was, he was still on earth.

Demons couldn't stay on earth – even the strong ones couldn't hold themselves to the physical plane for very long before they were yanked back home, and Castiel wasn't strong. The angel had brought him through, so maybe that's why he was still here. But the angel hadn't followed him to this place. If he stayed hidden, the ether should pull him home soon, even if the rest of his clan couldn't find him.

And so he waited, shivering and afraid until the darkness turned to gray haze. No one found him. And he didn't go home.

The gray gradually brightened off to his left. A blinding light suddenly broke through, and he squeezed his eyes tight.

'Sun'.

These words. Where did they come from? Castiel didn't know, but it was strangely comforting to have names for these unfamiliar things.

As the sun moved higher, beaming its light onto his body, the cold left him. He stopped shivering.

Slowly, he unfurled his wings, whimpering as the pain in his left wing flared, worse than before. Here on earth, he had a physical body, and it hurt everywhere. Sounds pressed relentlessly into his ears. Light and tears burned his eyes. Cold air scraped its way down his throat as his body was forced to breathe. He could feel the beat of his heart, feel the blood surging beneath his skin.

He hated it.

Castiel considered what to do. Still no one had come, angel or demon. If his family didn't find him, and he wasn't pulled back by the ether, then he was alone. He was lost.

He would die.

Demons fed on the life energy of humans. Without his makers to provide that for him, his only option would be to hunt humans himself. But how? He was small. He had no weapons. He had no training or experience. He didn't even know how to find a human.

Tears blurred his vision again.

He wouldn't give up. Folding his wings back as best he could, he climbed carefully to his feet. Flat crispy things ('leaves') and a brown powder ('dirt') clung to his skin. The cut on his palm hurt, all clotted up with the same leaves and dirt along with his blood. The blood of his maker was smeared over his arms and chest. She had died trying to retrieve him, so he would find a way to survive until he could get home. Somehow.

Castiel quickly learned how to keep himself hidden from the living things he encountered. Within a few rises and sets of the sun, he'd found his way to a place ('town') where there were people – both humans and angels. Seeing so many of the monsters set him trembling with fear, but necessity kept him there. He needed to kill a human, so he needed to learn about them. He stayed far out of sight, but he watched them every chance he could get, his curiosity eventually overpowering his fear.

Humans looked much like angels, but they didn't carry the halo of energy that emanated from angels. And neither humans nor angels had wings. It made no sense. Castiel shied away from the memory of his abduction at first, but he knew the angel that had taken him had wings. He saw them when she first appeared, shimmering white and terrifying. But when he thought about afterward, when the angel killed his maker, the white wings weren't there.

Castiel's wing slowly healed. He practiced flying in little jumps, getting used to the strange sensation of physical wings. He kept hidden in shadows – of trees, of buildings, whatever he could find. He learned where to find humans and when. He learned where angels were most likely to be and avoided those places.

The most fascinating things he saw in his observations were the human spawn. Humans had children, too, it seemed, in all sizes. He wondered what it would be like to be a baby monster.

Suddenly, he knew what to do.

He followed children to the places they clustered like schools, parks, and ice cream parlors. He waited for the right moment, so he could be certain he wouldn't be seen. Finally, an opportunity came. He crouched on a low branch of a tree at the edge of a yard. Behind a large house, a wide expanse of grass was dotted with flower beds, a rusty metal swingset, and many abandoned toys. A child played in a pit of sand. It was smaller than him, but not by much. An adult sat on a woven chair on the deck with a book. Castiel watched until the adult put the book down and went inside the house.

In an instant, Castiel was beside the child. He grabbed it by the wrist and flew immediately to the middle of a wooded area well outside the boundaries of the town. When he landed, the child stiffened in shock. It stared at him, confused. Then it began to wail.

Castiel shoved the child to the ground. He had to kill it. If he didn't, he would die.

He straddled the squirming, shrieking creature and wrapped his hands around its neck. He had to kill it. He would break its neck and take its life energy.

But he didn't.

Couldn't.

He looked down into the red, screaming face of the child, and relived his own terror from the day the angel took him. Did this child feel the same fear at being stolen away from its makers?

Before he could consider the consequences, Castiel yanked the child to its feet and flew them back to the yard he'd taken it from. He dropped the child there, barely appearing in the sand pit long enough to release it before flying back to his branch in the tree at the edge of the yard. After a moment, the adult human rushed from the house to gather up its screaming offspring. The child clung tightly to the adult as she took it inside.

Just as Castiel had clung to his maker when she came to rescue him from the angel.

Castiel stared at the house and the yard long after the humans had retreated inside. He hadn't killed the child, and he knew he wouldn't be able to do so in the future. Tears stung his eyes, and he blinked them away. In allowing the thing to live, he had condemned himself to death.

At least then this would all be over.