The Truth

I'm going to tell you something that you may or may not believe.

Let me rephrase that – I'm going to share with you something that is real. Afterwards, you may choose to believe in it or not. But, in the end, it really doesn't matter. Because it is real. Whether you believe in it now or not. If you choose to examine it further, the light of it's truth will eventually become apparent, because that is what happens with universal truths.

And that's what makes the world so special. There are truths in them. And with a little examination, they can be revealed as such.

But, I'm getting a little away from my point.

The truth is this: this world is one of many worlds. Infinite worlds, really. No one's really sure about that part, because the human mind simply isn't designed to have a grasp on the infinite. It is constrained by time, and by result, numbers. Basically, the short-hand is this: everything that has a possibility of occurring, or existing, does. That kind of throws that whole 'truth' thing into a blender, doesn't it? How can anything be an absolute truth when everything is possible? Well, that's the entire point – the universe is infinite – and anything can occur in it. Hell, even right now, I'd guess that this dictation of mine is being written and read somewhere inside of some alternate dimension where it only exists as some fantasy story, a trifle of fiction. But, you know? That doesn't bother me. Not in the least. That's the truth, and there's no changing it. Thre's a peace and safety and solidity in that that I like.

Unfortunately, that truth is the reason that I'm shaking in deep, unimaginable fear right now.

But, this is rude, I haven't even introduced myself. My name is Castiel Novak, and I'm a senior investigator for the FBI. I've managed to work myself straight into the basement...but that's not a bad thing. In fact, that's exactly how I like it.

I started here about twenty-five years ago. On a whim, really. That, and pressure from my friends and family. 'Cas!" they'd shout at me, 'Since you're so obsessed with truth, justice and all that, why don't you do something about it? Join the Army! The CIA, something! Make a difference!'

I ended up here, long story short. Confession: I was a huge X-Files fan, and I kinda saw myself as Fox Mulder. I had no idea I'd wind up mirroring the guy's career so closely, though.

My first few years in the Bureau were pretty standard. Nothing to write home about. Mostly monitoring of suspected terrorists and drug dealers. Went on my fair shade of raids. I had a knack for the 'soldiering' aspect of FBI work.

And it was during my interactions with these 'dregs of society' that I started to notice them.

I mean, I had always asked myself the inevitable question: 'Who were these people? The ones whose list of crimes read exactly like a demons resume? What happens to them in their life that makes them choose the paths they walked down? Where is their moral compass? Where is the sense of honor? Their sense of right and wrong? Are morals and right vs. wrong all artificial? How do they justify it?' The answer wasn't as simple as I thought it would be – not for all of the criminals. Some were pretty easy to explain, really. Hard life, hard lessons, not a lot of options. For them, I'd always harbored a feeling of sympathy and understanding. My partner at the time, Agent Milligan, told me to let it go, that it would get in the way of doing what I had to do.

Honestly though , if I hadn't cared as much as I did about them, I wouldn't have noticed 'The Others'.

There were some, the absolute worst of them, that I couldn't conjure up even a hint of sympathy. Psychiatric exams universally ended up classifying those exceptions as 'sociopaths'. I hadn't paid it much attention for years, really, until I had the random thought that there were an awful lot of 'sociopath' diagnoses in my file.

I looked it up online. On Wikipedia, of all places. What I saw there made me immediately want to look deeper. The percentage of criminals that we had labeled as sociopaths was way, way off to the percentage of actual sociopaths in a human population grouping.

Of course, there were several variables here; our psychiatry team could just have been lazy as all hell and get out...or it might have been the fact that I was dealing with the worst of society on a daily basis that had thrown the proportions off. Still – the numbers didn't add up.

So I began to interview them. All of them.

By that time I had enough seniority at the FBI to pursue my own investigations - that is, once all of the forms were filled out and I got approval - I went out to look for answers. Since my investigation was a) not overly time-consuming, or b) costly, it got pushed through without much effort. I titled it as 'a comprehensive study of the pathological nature of the worst offenders on the FBI captured criminals list, and their cause and effect as to their behavior', with the goal in mind of determining whether monitoring of certain behaviors or crimes could help us identify these individuals before they did something truly egregious. I got a couple of raised eyebrows for it, understandably, because it was pretty esoteric, but there wasn't much resistance. FBI Agents at my level were looking for advancement, and as such, they tended to look in the less examined corners of criminal investigation for a unique insight that they could publish and claim as there own, further advancing their careers towards management.

The interviews were….well...let's just say I noticed a distinct pattern interviewing these subjects, even after only a few such meetings. First off they were all incredibly...snarky, for lack of a better word. They seemed obsessed with smiling and cracking jokes, as if the world was a game to them, and our conversations were simply a passing amusement, and an opportunity to try to fluster me. I passed it off at first as a common trait in a sociopaths behavioral patterns, and all of the textbooks backed me up on that, so I ignored it.

Then, after about fifty or so conversations over the course of three years, I noticed a similarity that had turned my blood cold.

I had been up late, listening to tapes of the meetings, and I had gone through about half of them, when one of the prisoners, his name was Alastair Winkle, a sadist and a murderer, said, ' My dear Agent Novak, the answer is right in front of you...you asked me, again, why I had felt it absolutely necessary to skin that family of four? Simple: I'm a frikking Demon.'

It wasn't his dubious claim that caught my attention. It was the fact that I had heard it before...just a few tapes back.

I had almost tripped over the small imitation-Indian rug in my apartment as I froze, then rushed back to retrieve the other tape. I shakily plugged the cassette into the reel-to-reel and found what I wanted. The interview had been with a woman named Meg Masters, a dental school drop-out who had gone on a murder spree; splitting open the throats of several unfortunate motorists who had given her a ride while she had been hitchhiking, along with several truckers at gas-stations and Stucky's along the open roads.

' Oh, Clarence...' the tape cooed, (for some reason, she insisted on calling me 'Clarence' – she had never explained why). 'OK, I admit it, I did it...and I loved it...'

'Why?' I heard my own voice on the tape ask, weary and disinterested. I had glanced down at the tape and read that this was the fifth such interview, the fourth in two days. No wonder I had been so tired.

'Because I'm a frikking Demon.'

Same exact words. Same exact inflection.

Now, I am, or I should say, was, not one to even come close to believing in the supernatural. But I believe in coincidence even less. Twelve years in the FBI had taught me that lesson very, very well.

I had stared at the tape after hitting 'stop' for several minutes, my finger shaking. My mind was reeling, because now I started to recall that some of the others had said that as well. Again, same words, same inflection.

I spent the rest of the night and most of the next day replaying the tapes, too wired to sleep. There were five such incidences of the 'Demon' claim. Meg Masters and Alastair Winkle. Plus a woman named Ruby, Chris Rosemond, a former co-pilot who had attempted an act of terrorism on a plane by trying to open the gangway door in mid-flight, and a man named Crowley Ferguson.

The latter was in Washington, so, by way of convenience, I had gone back to see him.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Crowley had been a high-level smuggler and trafficker in exotic goods and materials. He had been a ghost on the FBI's radar for decades, always popping up here and there, pulling a big deal, then disappearing. We had caught him in a sting operation, where we used a couple of civilians looking to buy a stolen and missing artifact from him; an old west Colt .45, that supposedly had belonged to Wyatt Earp, as a matter-of-fact. It had gone missing sometime in the 1960's, and the family of the man who had owned it had been murdered, along with several of the thieves. It was a huge, legendary, unsolved mess in the FBI's cold case files. Practically every agent had read it at some point.

I remember the arrest report on Crowley as being...more than slightly unusual. There had been an almost immediate recommendation for psych-eval. He had told the arresting officers something to effect of 'only agreeing to this arrest because your jail is infinitely safer than what awaits me outside of it.' No one had paid it much attention.

I met for the second time with Crowley and confronted him with his statement. He had seemed pretty amused with the conversation, and with me. But, as I said, snarkiness was nothing new with this group. After I had threatened to have him shipped out of prison to a much less secure looney-bin, he capitulated...and showed me his eyes.

The first time I saw it, I wasn't sure how to react. I remember that I had stood up from my chair, thinking that it was some kind of trick of the low-light in the visiting room.

It hadn't been. His eyes were truly pitch black. I've seen this trick a thousand times by now.

Long story short, I checked him out (to much protestation) as a CI and FBI liaison, in exchange for a lessened sentence, (which he wasn't at all interested in) and round-the-clock FBI protection (which he was very much interested in). I just had to know more about the world he came from.

In retrospect, one should be careful about one asks for in life. What I've seen while working with Crowley over the past decade or so – well – there is literally too much to explain. Suffice it to say; I learned that fundamental truth about anything being possible during those years. I had transformed into a real-world version of Fox Mulder, relegated to the basement at Quantico and being assigned only the most strange, and unsolvable, cases that rolled over to the FBI. I've seen just about everything.

Or, at least I thought I had.

Which brings me to why I am transcribing my thoughts here today. A few hours ago, a woman came to my office, claiming to be an ancient Greek Fate – a deity or goddess named Atropos. Have I mentioned that I was in charge of some very odd stuff? Anyway, 'Atropos' claimed that unless I could produce the original, and renowned, 'Book of the Damned' to use as a focal point to anchor and protect my world, that it would be consumed by a powerful force of Darkness and Chaos – an Old One of H.P. Lovecraft fame, to be precise.

Just another Thursday at the office.

I told her to come back in a half an hour. She seemed to think that was 'cutting it a bit short', but agreed.

I called Crowley immediately, told him to come meet me here, and started this dictation. Because, apparently, either my world has only a short time left to exist, and I am making a vain and, frankly, stupid attempt to record all of this...for whom? If my world is completely destroyed, then there'll be no one left to hear it, right? Unless that theory I proposed about alternate dimensions earlier is true. It probably is. So, I'm not wasting my time after all. Suddenly I feel better about all of this.

Plus, we actually do have that book. As I mentioned before, Crowley dealt in stuff like this for decades.

So, see you on the other side, I guess, if this works.

Atropos returned to the cramped basement office filled with closed manila folder envelopes and saw Castiel put down a voice recorder on his desk, sighing deeply. He raised his eyes to her and smiled thinly.

"Has it been a half-an-hour already?", he rasped, making a point to look at the clock on the wall.

Atropos smiled and nodded. "Exactly, as a matter-of-fact. As I mentioned, we're kind of on a tight schedule." She frowned and looked around the office. "Did you get the Book?" she asked, voice literally shaking with concern.

Castiel leaned forward, considering her. "You're serious, aren't you? You're...you're really scared..."

Atropos let out a breath of exasperation. "Of course I'm scared! The more worlds we lose, the harder it is to stabilize reality and form. Chaos will reign. Does that sound pleasant to you? Not to mention, that every time that that creature devours a world, a manifestation of me gets eaten along with it." Her whole body shuddered. "If you only knew how that feels when that happens a million or so times...you'd get a inkling of how scared I am right now...so...Book? Or no Book?" She crossed her arms over her chest and bit her bottom lip nervously, her foot tapping rapidly on the floor. Castiel stared, then nodded.

"Allright. Let's play this out. You got me curious." He looked behind him at the blank wall. "Crowley?" He looked back at Atropos and smiled tightly. "OK, so, just in case you're playing a prank or something, don't say I didn't warn you."

"About what?"

"This," Castiel answered simply.

Out of the wall itself walked a man wearing a black, well tailored three-piece suit, jacket unbuttoned. He carried a briefcase in his hand and set it carefully on the desk in front of Castiel, nodded at him, then looked over to Atropos.

"This her?", he asked, still looking her in the eyes.

"Yep, this is her," Castiel answered in a murmur, watching Atropos carefully. He was a bit surprised.

She didn't seem fazed at all that a man had literally just walked out of a wall in front of her. Instead her eyes were fixed on the suitcase, a mix of surprise, expectation and hope.

"Huh," Castiel said, unlocking the briefcase and beginning to spin it towards Atropos. Crowley placed a restraining hand on his arm and Castiel looked up at him.

"Castiel, are you sure about this? She might just be a nutter, and this is a particularly nasty artifact..."

Castiel nodded, looking back at Atropos. "It's a risk. But there's...something there." Crowley removed his hand and Castiel slowly finished turning the briefcase around.

Atropos' eyes widened when she saw the Book.

"Oh thank Heavens," she muttered moving forward. She reached out for it, and saw Crowley flinch. Castiel stood up and tilted his head at her.

"Hey...careful...maybe...slow down there..." he said warningly, raisng his hand, palm out.

Atropos shot him a look of impatience and disdain and instead grabbed the Book.

There was a flash of pure, white light, and Castiel flinched back.

"What...what just happened?" Crowley gasped, leaning back against the wall.

"Did you...did you also hear that...?", Castiel asked him, breathless. "It sounded like...like...inhuman..."

"Screaming," Atropos finished for him, letting out a breath of relief and placing the Book carefully back in the case. "That had to hurt it. Good." She smiled up at the two of them. "The Old One in question has an insatiable Hunger. Think Famine of the Four Horsemen – multiplied by infinity. I just took a meal away from it. It isn't happy." She frowned, considering something. "Say...you two wouldn't want to meet the rest, would you? I mean, you actually might be useful. You've been investigating and studying this stuff for ages now, and you..." she added, looking over directly at Crowley, "...you are you," she said vaguely. "That could come in handy."

Crowley looked confused. "Whom else would I be?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised," Atropos answered, rolling her eyes. "So, whatd'ya say?"

"I'm sorry, but what are you talking about?" Castiel asked.

Atropos smiled. "I'll take that as a 'yes'."