demons are not nice people.
Summary: First there was the one where Cas jumps back into 17-year-old Jimmy Novak to Save the World and Stuff. This is the one where Cas screws up Saving the World and 17-year-old Jimmy Novak gets the short end of the stick.
He's always dived for the fall.
There’s the dizzying moment when his toes find the edge of the platform, as he judges the drop from the black of the grit to the blue - far, far off blue - of chlorine and water ten meters below. There’s the last deep breath as he brings muscle and sinew into alignment. But mostly, it’s the fall.
Springing into that endless space between wet concrete and the cold shock of water; everything in between is effortless, forward tuck, reverse plank, it doesn’t matter, because it’s the simplest moment: just him, and the rush of air, and the fall.
Then the water’s rushing up and parting around a spike of fingers and he’s buried in the cold weight of it. But he’s always digging his way back to the surface. He’s finding the side and getting a foot on the white of the walkway and heading back to the top, back to the next little mini-eternity in the space between heaven and earth.
+++
Jimmy doesn’t remember a whole lot of that afternoon: a cold March wind chasing him through the front door, hair going crunchy with frost where it’s still dripping wet from practice. He’d swung a backpack full of a weekend of homework against the back of the couch and collapsed headlong, burying his face in the cushions. His mom shouting from the kitchen: “Take your sneakers off, Jimmy.” He’d made half an attempt at digging a toe into his heel, made some kind of affirmative noise into the upholstery, then buried his face deeper into the warmth of the couch and slept.
He must’ve slept, because he remembers the dream: water dripping in the quiet echo-chamber of the empty pool room at school. The lights were off, just the red glow of the Exit sign on the far side of the pool, shining through the shadow of the pennants. He’d been on the low springboard, on his hands and knees, leaning out over the pool like he’d dropped something. He’d known he’d dropped something. Goggles, maybe, but with no lights it was hard to see. The water was pretty dark, almost black.
There’d been water dripping off his nose, a hard hammering where his heart was beating against his ribs, and he’d started to think maybe he hadn’t dropped something, maybe he’d just escaped something - wrapped his fingers around the edge of the board and pulled, dragged his feet clear of the water just before something big, something strong had wrapped its hand around his ankle.
But he couldn’t look away from the slow bloom of ripples from every droplet to hit the water’s surface.
please
And he couldn’t stop that hammering in his chest, hard and fast.
please let me i have to
--and what was a too-full voice murmuring in the bright corners of the room was becoming something else, something more like him, more like the thoughts in his own head--
i have to
--come back you have to come back i know, i know, it’s a long way to come but it’s okay--
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he’d said, and his voice had been small and empty and flat in a room where everything should’ve echoed. “I’ve got you.”
His reflection in the black of the water split apart: the hand of a drowning man, stretching blindly upwards.
please. jimmy. please.
He’d grabbed on, wet fingers around a cold wrist, and pulled.
And his reflection had pulled back.
+++
After that he doesn’t know.
The inbetween, it had been a lot like that few seconds after the dive: sinking deep into the warm embrace of the water, waiting for his heels to tap bottom. Like the games he’d played as a kid, seeing who could get deep enough to sit cross-legged on the floor. Calm, at first. Quiet. The stillness down there, floating at the bottom of the world.
He’d never made it more than three, four seconds, before the weight was too much. The knowledge of all the water piled up on top of him. Then it was the desperate rush for the surface, shoving at the water with wide sweeps of his arms and climbing agonizingly slow towards the light above, the certainty that it’s not gonna be enough, anywhere near enough, that he’ll be breathing in that last fatal gasp long before his fingertips are brushing the mirrored glass of the surface.
Then he was there, right there, staring up at the muzzled, indistinct light of a cold moon through the thin haze of water.
From below the light had looked dim.
For the indescribable moment that he was above, it was brutal. Blinding. The all-encompassing, searing bright of more light, more
(grace)
than he had ever known.
Then the light started to shiver apart. Then the light started to scream.
+++
There’d been a moment back in himself, in some nightmare caricature of reality: shuddering awake on the tail end of an inhuman sound that wasn’t, couldn’t be coming from him. This unforgettable sensation of ragged fingernails dragging white lines of pain down the inside of his ribs. It was the worst pain he’d ever known. Prying, tainted fingers that twisted and jerked inside of him and he remembers choking on his own scream and one last pulse of too-bright light burning against his face and then nothing.
He’d woken up to dark, bones aching with cold, curled on his side against hard concrete. The floor was thick with dust, and he’d gasped in a mouthful of it with waking. He rolled on his back, coughing and choking up the grit. His hands were cramped awkwardly against the small of his back, and he didn’t immediately know why; not until he rolled back to his side, still spitting and hacking, and felt something dig into his wrists as he tried to pull his hands apart. He didn’t understand that his hands were tied. He didn’t understand how that felt. He didn’t understand where he was.
There’d been his house.
His mother
(take off your sneakers, jimmy)
and his reflection
(please)
and then he was there, in that place, and everything hurt (the inside of his ribs, fingernails, scratching) and everything was cold and there were boots scuffing the dust in front of his face.
Thick fingers were wrapping up in the collar of his shirt. Jimmy remembers trying to say “What--” in a small, hollow voice, but the hands were dragging him to his feet and whatever he’d wanted to say, it got choked off. The man was huge, double Jimmy’s size from shoulder to shoulder. He let him hang there awhile, waited patiently for Jimmy to collect numb legs underneath him. Then the guy was shoving him hard into the wall, and his face was close: small eyes buried in fat cheeks above a thick, unkempt beard, and something on his breath, something rancid.
“What, what’re you doing...” And once he choked past that, the words spilled out in a flood of naked fear: “What are you doing, where am I, let me go, let me--”
The guy cut him off by clapping one huge hand against Jimmy’s cheek. “Jimmy-boy. Don’t fret. I’mma take care of you.”
Then those piggy little eyes were flooding with black, and Jimmy knew he wasn’t human at all.
Jimmy’d rolled back against the wall, then, bony shoulderblades digging into cinderblock, like he could just sink his way through and escape. “Please. Please, God, don’t--”
The man-thing dropped his hand to Jimmy’s shoulder and split its face in a smile, uneven teeth bearing hard into the flesh of his lips. “God.” He loosened up a thumb, digging it hard into the hollow of Jimmy’s collarbone. “I tell you what,” he said, and there was a soft Southern twang buried under his baritone. “You give Him a call. Try--” He rolled his eyes up, thinking. “Try that Lord’s Prayer of yours. Go ahead.”
Jimmy stared at him, but his tongue just laid in his mouth, too thick to move.
The man’s thumb eased up, shifted to center the pad of his fingertip on that ridge of collarbone. Pressed hard enough to bruise.
“Go ahead,” he said again.
The force doubled, and Jimmy jerked in pain and stuttered to a start: “O-our Father, who art in Heaven. H-h-hallowed be thy name--” The thumb bore down, but it wasn’t that that stopped him. It was the way that black swam in the guy’s eyes, like clotted ink and Jimmy thought it was going to well up and spill thick down his cheeks and tangle in wirey, unkempt beard. He shuddered and choked and continued: “Thy will be done. Th-- thy kingdom come. On Earth, as it is in H-Heaven--”
He could hear his own voice echo weakly in the corners of that cold, empty room.
Then in one quick, simple little movement, the man bent his thumb and shoved. Jimmy’s collarbone gave with a wet snap of shattering bone.
His knees unhinged immediately. He went down screaming, but he couldn’t hear it. All he could hear was that little sound, that little wet pop and the man followed him down, those black ink eyes inches from his face and the smell was worse, here, that sickly sweet smell like rotting meat in the sun. He was saying words but Jimmy didn’t understand, couldn’t hear, so he dug his thumb into the broken glass that’d been bone, one bright supernova of pain, and when Jimmy choked on the pain he said it again: “Go on.”
He didn’t understand. The man ground glass on glass with the ball of his thumb and Jimmy was crying now, and the man said: “Give us this day our daily bread,” and Jimmy sobbed, and the man dug his thumb even deeper and said, “Say it. Give us this day--” and Jimmy choked out in an uneven cadence: “Give us this day our daily bread--” and the thumb let up, the pressure left, and Jimmy gasped and pressed breathlessly on: “And-- and forgive us our trespasses--” and the man rocked back on his heels and grinned and grinned, “As we forgive those who trespass against us--” and his hand was on the other side now “And lead us not into temptation--” and his fingers were spreading wide over his shoulder “--but deliver us from evil. F-for thine is the kingdom, and the p-power-- the p-power--” and the thumb had found that same spot again, warm press of skin following that ridge of bone, and Jimmy couldn’t do it, he choked on the words, and the thumb went still and the man leaned closer and said it again: “Go on.”
“F-for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory. For ever and ever.”
And the demon grinned, and grinned, and it said: “Amen.”
And then it bent its thumb and shoved.
+++
[end scene.]
And then they all went out for ice cream, yay!