Fic: Without Mythologies
Title: Without Mythologies
Author: Bella Temple
Category: SPN, gen with hints of het and femslash
Rating: Teen
Warnings: references to body issues, background violence
Spoilers: Through "On the Head of a Pin"
Characters: Anna, Castiel, Gabriel, Ruby
Disclaimer: The characters and basic premise within are property of their original creators and producers. No money is being made off this work of fiction.
Author's note: Written for shaggydogstail for spn_women's ficathon. The prompt is the Dorothy Parker quote that kicks things off. Much thanks to liptonrm for beta duties and butterflykiki and timjr for letting me brainstorm at them. Title and cut text are from the Weakerthans. This Gabriel has quite possibly read Help! A Bear is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen. It seemed like it'd be his thing.
Summary: Anna is something that cannot be: an angel and a human
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt
'Inventory' by Dorothy Parker
Without Mythologies
"Yours was the first I heard, you know."
Castiel stood over the fallen form of Uriel, his eyes tracing the path of the scorch marks that were once glorious wings. Anna watched the shifts of his eyes, the faint twitching of his vessel's jaw, and saw in his expression's blankness every emotion fighting its way to the surface. They were not things she would have noticed, before she fell.
"September 18th," she continued. "Loud and clear. 'Dean Winchester is saved.'"
He looked at her then, and she caught a flash of recognition, of pride.
He'd have to be careful with that one.
"I thought," she said. "I thought 'I know him.' I had no memory of Heaven, of the garrison or anything of my existence as an angel. But I recognized you."
Castiel's gaze returned to Uriel. "He was my brother," he said. He looked back at her sharply. "He was our brother."
Anna didn't look back at the body, though she could sense the slow fade of life from the individual cells, the trickle of blood not just from the wound in the neck, but from the capillaries and vessels at the top of the body. The infinitesimal leak of heat into the surrounding air. It would take twenty-four hours for Uriel's vessel to cool to the core without refrigeration, longer for the cells in his muscles and bones to completely die.
She was aware of each change in the vessel without looking. She could only guess at the ones going on in Castiel.
"Does it hurt?"
He stared at her, his eyes filled with a familiar incomprehension. Castiel had always been just a little bit slow.
"It's alright if it does," she said. "It's supposed to. He was your friend. Your brother. And he betrayed you and everything you stand for. It should feel like you're being squeezed from the inside, like all your energy's been ripped from you."
There. A flicker of the eyes to the left. Recognition.
Sort of.
"It's supposed to hurt," she said again. In her human life, her voice would have tightened. Her throat would have clamped down on the words, and her eyes would have prickled. She'd have felt like she couldn't catch her breath, like she never would again. She'd killed. She'd ended the life of a being she'd once fought and worked beside. It was supposed to hurt, but all she felt was a faint regret.
She wanted to rip her grace out again, then and there, let it create what it willed on the floor of the warehouse while she fled, to be born and breathe and hurt and fear and love and cry and live and die. And she couldn't understand why Castiel didn't feel the same way.
"You should go," he said at length. "The others will have felt his passing. They'll be arriving shortly." That she would be destroyed when they did he didn't need to say. She still held the weapon that had brought Uriel down, and even if Castiel would defend her, she would not stand a chance.
She wondered if that would hurt.
She put her hand to Castiel's cheek. His eyes flicked to the side again, tracking her movement, but he didn't shift away.
"Let it hurt, Cass." She used the name Dean had found for him, let it tie him tighter to humanity. Tie them both. He frowned, his vessel's brows shifting slightly closer together. "It's supposed to hurt."
And she left.
* * *
As an angel, Anna could remember her creation perfectly. The Greeks may well have based Athena on her, springing fully formed from her father, full of purpose.
Admittedly, she rather hoped she caused her father something more than a severe headache.
Like Athena, she was gifted in strategy and battle, her intelligence leading to her placement at the head of her garrison -- or perhaps that was the other way around -- and at her command, they helped pave the way for Michael's victory over Lucifer in the very early days of the world. Unlike Athena, there was no credit to be given or reward to be reaped, but for the faint pleasure of an order well-followed. There were no cities built in her honor, no temples erected or epics written. Her life was planned beginning to end. Being a good leader was part of that plan, and her success was the will of the Lord, nothing more.
Say what you would about war, it at least demanded passion of a kind, a passion that filled each and every angel, on either side and those in the middle, to the very brimming. This was righteous, it was purpose, it was necessary, and every single creature played its part. And somehow, when it was all over, the angels were meant to simply . . . leave it behind. Or perhaps redirect it to whatever task they were given after, passion as a servant of God, passion as a duke of Hell. It was unsustainable, impossible.
Anti-climactic.
By the time the crucifixion rolled around, dare say it, Anna was bored. And with the promised sacrifice for the sins of Man completed, things slowed down even further, and when the time came that Anna was stationed on the Earth, to wander and watch, silent and invisible, she welcomed it just to get away from Heaven.
When it came right down to it, Anna fell for a very long time.
* * *
Gabriel had a man trapped beneath an enormous SUV in the Alaskan wilderness. He leaned against a tree and watched as a bear took its time munching on the man's foot. The man, still conscious and cursing everyone from the bear to the SUV manufacturers to his coworkers to his wife, scrabbled for a carton of beer he'd tucked behind the SUV's front wheel when he saw the bear approaching. Formless and newly re-graced, Anna watched Gabriel watch the asshole and waited for the man to pass out again before making herself known.
There wasn't much that could turn Gabriel's attention from one of his tricks, but Anna, it seemed, was one of the special ones.
"Well," said Gabriel. "Look who got her shiny back!"
Anna smiled. Of all the upper echelons, Gabriel had been one of her favorites. He'd abandoned Heaven even before she had, though he'd taken a very different route. She nodded to the man under the SUV. "I see you've found a new friend."
"Who, him? You shoulda heard this guy go off on the power of technology to conquer the wild. He's got a rifle powerful enough to bring down a t-rex in that car." The bear put down the man's foot and leaned against the bumper of the SUV, looking like it was getting ready for a nap, then seemed to think better of it and went after the other foot. Gabriel laughed.
"You've got a lot in common," said Anna. "You both don't have enough sense not to poke the bears."
Gabriel rolled his eyes and Anna felt something bubble up beneath her ribs. Gabriel had never been one to hold back on physical expression.
"Whatcha doing here, oh Anna of her gracefulness?"
"I need a favor."
Gabriel looked her over. "Looking for someone to spit-polish those wings? 'Cause I gotta tell ya, my rag's a little stinky."
Anna decided she didn't want to go anywhere near that metaphor. "I want my body back."
Gabriel frowned.
"My human body," Anna said. "There's things that need to be done, and I don't want to take a vessel. I won't hijack someone's life."
"Might get me back on Heaven's radar." Disgust laced his voice, and the feeling in her ribs fluttered again to hear it. "What's in it for me?"
"You owe me."
"That was a long time ago."
"Only in their terms." Anna nodded to the man under the SUV, who was showing signs of waking up again, his fingers twitching towards the beer. Gabriel sighed.
"Fine. But I do this, and we're even. No more swooping in and trying to hit a guy up." He snapped his fingers, and Anna felt the solidity of her human form take shape around her, binding her grace and soothing her like an ace bandage over broken ribs. Gabriel whistled. "But, hey, if you wanna swoop in for any other reason, let me know." He waggled his eyebrows, and the feeling in her ribs bubbled right up to her lips and formed a real smile, the first she'd had since her grace returned. "You think it was fun in college," he said, "you should try it when you've got a little magic to go along."
"I'll keep that in mind. Maybe take you up on it when we win."
Gabriel's expression fell, and in an instant he was as dour as he ever was before he'd left for greener pastures. "There's no winning this one, babe. Mike and Lucy, they're gonna bring the whole house down. You're gonna have to take your jollies while you still can."
"We'll see, Gabe." The man under the SUV started hollering something about foot transplants being covered by his HMO. "Well. I'll let you get back to it."
Gabriel snapped off a jaunty salute. The bear started shaking the SUV on its tires. Anna decided she didn't want to see what would happen when it managed to tip the thing over. She leaned in to give Gabriel a kiss on the cheek, and then she was off.
* * *
As a human, Anna had no memory of her birth.
Her earliest memories were blurred and confused, filled with fear, confusion, white walls, and shouts. Her parents never much spoke of it, her early institutionalization or her eventual calming, but her father always tread carefully, never allowing her for a moment to believe that he was angry with her, and her mother could be just as cautious, going out of her way to ensure that Anna never had cause to doubt herself or her place in the family. "You can be whatever you want to be" was never an empty promise in the Milton household, it was a commandment, and as she grew, Anna found herself wondering what would happen to her if she never found out just what that was.
She always had a sense that she was lucky, either way. That she was getting away with something, something huge. And while at times that bolstered her confidence, let her stride forward knowing that she'd made it this far, she could make it the next step, mostly it made her anxious, forever waiting to get caught.
Like any other teenager, Anna struggled with her self-image. The "proper" and "healthy" woman bombarded her from every side, from the unimaginably perfect figures of the fashion dolls and cartoon princesses to the cold diagrams in health and gym classes, from the ads for weight loss programs to the PSAs about eating disorders. "You're not fat," they told her. "But just in case you are. . . ."
Anna wasn't fat. She was, if anything, underweight, her constant tension ratcheting up her metabolism. She was a late bloomer, and her fair skin didn't so much tan or freckle in the sun as blotch. Her hair was bland, her eyes protruded, her chest was flat, her teeth were crooked, and her toes were weird, and as she approached fifteen she knew that for every swan in disguise, there were many more who just grew into really ugly ducks. This was her punishment, then. For whatever it was she'd gotten away with, this was where it bit her in the ass. She was doomed to braces and shapelessness and kids who looked right past her as she hurried through the halls at school.
As high school drew to a close and Anna started looking into college, she settled more and more into her body. The sense of anxiety never quite faded, but applications and essays and test scores took precedence. She dyed her hair for the first time on her eighteenth birthday, while her parents quietly shook their heads, and the day before she left for school, she found herself standing in the back of her father's church after the last service of the day, looking up at the images of angels gracing the stained glass windows. They'd been constant presences in her life until that point, and they were some of the last she said good-bye to before leaving.
She wondered what her life would be like without them constantly looking down on her. She knew, of course, they were only representations, frozen images of imagined blessing and grace, but she'd personified them all in her youth, considered them her guardians, along with her parents. She stared up at their unchanging faces, their eternal beauty shifting only with the back-light of the sun, the moon, or the street lights. Her body had grown, had shifted, had developed. She chose her clothes and her make-up, chose to alter her hair with cuts and dyes and straighten her teeth, and they remained, exactly as they'd been in her earliest memories.
She pitied them.
The next day, as her parents drove her away to start the newest and most daunting stage of her life to date, it wasn't the angels in the windows she watched through the back window until they disappeared around the corner, but the circular, patterned window standing high at the top of the vestibule. It was this one, with its geometric patterns and abstract whorls that she locked into her mind. It was unchanging, yes, but it was also unpretentious.
* * *
"It's all real," she said.
Ruby paused in her pacing by the door of the cabin, then turned to give Anna an inscrutable look.
Almost everything about Ruby was inscrutable, a mystery. The face of her human host warred with that of her true form, and Anna watched them both, blurring and blending together until she could make sense of neither. One was normal, even beautiful, the other unfathomably horrible.
"You've been listening in on the angels for the last two months, and you're just now figuring that out?"
Anna looked down at her hands, folded tight together in her lap, as though trying to contain the entirety of herself between them. "I wondered. In the institution it was hard to tell, sometimes. If I was really just crazy."
Ruby snorted, a wet, unfeminine sound that made Anna's lips twitch into what was almost a smile. "Hey, maybe you are. Maybe we're all just figments of your deranged imagination."
The smile vanished and Anna flinched. "Don't say that."
Ruby was in front of her, then, crouching down to peer in at Anna past the curtain of her hair. Her hands, well-shaped with trimmed, unpolished nails overlaid by twisted, curling shapes capped in talons, swooped forward to grasp Anna's own. "It's real. It's all real, and we're going to help you."
Anna looked up again, and through her hair she thought she saw the real Ruby, not the vessel or the demon, but something in between, something other and unique.
A friendly demon. Her father would laugh to hear the very idea.
"Have you ever been in love?" she asked. Ruby rocked back on her heels, pulling her hands away.
"What?"
Anna ducked her head again. "I'm sorry, that's stupid."
Ruby's hands came back and then her face, filtered into the in-between creature, fascinating and complex. "No, hey. It's not. It's cool."
"Have you?"
Ruby tilted her head, and the face Anna saw shifted, flickering between human and demon and other too quickly to follow. "Yeah. I was human once, you know."
That startled her. "You were?"
"Long time ago. We all were."
"The angels, too?"
Ruby snorted again, a harsher sound this time, and Anna half expected her to spit. "No. Not them."
"But why?" Anna shook her head. "That doesn't make sense. Why would God make humanity change into demons if they weren't going to get the chance to change the other way?" Even as she asked, her mind was working, forming theories, connecting ideas. She was thinking of mankind as the middle, the step between Hell and Heaven, but what if that wasn't the way it worked? What if angels weren't at the top, but humanity? They were God's favorite creation, right? That was why the Morningstar fell in the first place. Jealousy.
Ruby interrupted her thoughts with a flash of teeth that Anna thought was probably a grin. "Uh, maybe because they're dicks?"
Anna laughed. "They sound that way, sometimes. You should hear them argue."
"Honey, I don't wanna hear them do anything."
"You're kind of amazing, you know," said Anna. "You're like the Metamorphosis."
"Huh?"
Anna shook her head. "You change. Shift from one thing to another."
"Guess that's why I'm different." Ruby rocked back again, then pushed to her feet to start pacing again. "Why I'm helping Sam."
"And Dean."
Ruby hesitated, Anna thought, just a moment, before saying "Yeah, and Dean. You know, instead of trying to kill them."
"They're going to save the world," Anna said. She felt as though she was standing at the edge of something huge, like her whole life was about to change forever and she'd never get to go back. It was reckless and terrifying and a little exhilarating and she was filled with the urge to do, more than ever before. Whatever it was she'd been getting away with, all her life, she was about to face the consequences, and she wanted to try everything she'd never done before she lost the chance. She looked up through her hair again at Ruby, watched her stride back and forth through the cabin, distracted and powerful and something completely different from anything Anna had seen before. "Ruby --"
Ruby froze, cocking her head. "I've got to go," she said, and something in Anna's chest deflated a little. "Let Sam know where we are. Do me a favor and don't let this body die while I'm gone."
And then her head tilted back and she was screaming, thick black smoke pouring from her mouth, splitting her into her component parts and casting her humanity aside on the floor. Anna let out a shriek and shrank back in her seat, everything good in her recoiling at the clear presence of evil.
Then Ruby was gone and there was a comatose woman on the floor and Anna hugged herself and finished her question to empty air.
"-- Do you love anything now?"
* * *
For an angel, falling was like dying, and each of them knew it. For Anna, ascending was worse.
Falling hurt, cutting away a piece of herself, the piece, the defining element of everything she was and had ever been, then throwing herself downward, to be reshaped and redefined by forces she couldn't even begin to understand. With every step she wondered if it was worth it. And with every question, she pushed herself harder to keep going.
She'd watched humanity for thousands of years. Seen them grow and change, lift themselves up and cast themselves down, be born, grow up, give birth, grow old, and die, over and over again. Watched them turn on each other and turn with each other, form and break alliances, form and lose friendships, conquer and be conquered. They were a constant ebb and flow reshaping their world continuously with every tiny move they made. And she'd watched her brothers stand sentinel, silent and eternal. Humanity was punished, yet persevered. They were culled and broken and brought to the brink of extinction at times and yet they continued, expanding and developing with every rise and fall of the sun. When angels were punished, they were cast out, cast down, past the Earth to the very Pit of darkness and pain, every bit of their being reshaped into something unrecognizable, no chance of redemption. When angels were punished, they were killed.
Like Lucifer, Anna was filled with envy. Unlike Lucifer, she didn't want to eradicate humans. She wanted to be them. When Anna fell, she stopped at Earth.
When Anna ascended, she did the same.
She retook her grace and was reshaped and redefined again by forces she didn't know. With every step she rebelled and with every rebellion she pushed herself further, and what came away from that barn in Kentucky that day, what visited Gabriel in the Alaskan wilderness to be completed, was not the same as what stood on the very edge of Heaven and chose the Earth. Castiel was right about one thing -- they were not alike. Not yet. Anna became what she'd believed she'd seen in Ruby, what no one had seen in the history of the world.
What once was angelic had become human, and what once human had by choice changed again, until Anna was both and neither, something other and unique.
Something in between.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
'Inventory' by Dorothy Parker
Author: Bella Temple
Category: SPN, gen with hints of het and femslash
Rating: Teen
Warnings: references to body issues, background violence
Spoilers: Through "On the Head of a Pin"
Characters: Anna, Castiel, Gabriel, Ruby
Disclaimer: The characters and basic premise within are property of their original creators and producers. No money is being made off this work of fiction.
Author's note: Written for shaggydogstail for spn_women's ficathon. The prompt is the Dorothy Parker quote that kicks things off. Much thanks to liptonrm for beta duties and butterflykiki and timjr for letting me brainstorm at them. Title and cut text are from the Weakerthans. This Gabriel has quite possibly read Help! A Bear is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen. It seemed like it'd be his thing.
Summary: Anna is something that cannot be: an angel and a human
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt
'Inventory' by Dorothy Parker
Without Mythologies
"Yours was the first I heard, you know."
Castiel stood over the fallen form of Uriel, his eyes tracing the path of the scorch marks that were once glorious wings. Anna watched the shifts of his eyes, the faint twitching of his vessel's jaw, and saw in his expression's blankness every emotion fighting its way to the surface. They were not things she would have noticed, before she fell.
"September 18th," she continued. "Loud and clear. 'Dean Winchester is saved.'"
He looked at her then, and she caught a flash of recognition, of pride.
He'd have to be careful with that one.
"I thought," she said. "I thought 'I know him.' I had no memory of Heaven, of the garrison or anything of my existence as an angel. But I recognized you."
Castiel's gaze returned to Uriel. "He was my brother," he said. He looked back at her sharply. "He was our brother."
Anna didn't look back at the body, though she could sense the slow fade of life from the individual cells, the trickle of blood not just from the wound in the neck, but from the capillaries and vessels at the top of the body. The infinitesimal leak of heat into the surrounding air. It would take twenty-four hours for Uriel's vessel to cool to the core without refrigeration, longer for the cells in his muscles and bones to completely die.
She was aware of each change in the vessel without looking. She could only guess at the ones going on in Castiel.
"Does it hurt?"
He stared at her, his eyes filled with a familiar incomprehension. Castiel had always been just a little bit slow.
"It's alright if it does," she said. "It's supposed to. He was your friend. Your brother. And he betrayed you and everything you stand for. It should feel like you're being squeezed from the inside, like all your energy's been ripped from you."
There. A flicker of the eyes to the left. Recognition.
Sort of.
"It's supposed to hurt," she said again. In her human life, her voice would have tightened. Her throat would have clamped down on the words, and her eyes would have prickled. She'd have felt like she couldn't catch her breath, like she never would again. She'd killed. She'd ended the life of a being she'd once fought and worked beside. It was supposed to hurt, but all she felt was a faint regret.
She wanted to rip her grace out again, then and there, let it create what it willed on the floor of the warehouse while she fled, to be born and breathe and hurt and fear and love and cry and live and die. And she couldn't understand why Castiel didn't feel the same way.
"You should go," he said at length. "The others will have felt his passing. They'll be arriving shortly." That she would be destroyed when they did he didn't need to say. She still held the weapon that had brought Uriel down, and even if Castiel would defend her, she would not stand a chance.
She wondered if that would hurt.
She put her hand to Castiel's cheek. His eyes flicked to the side again, tracking her movement, but he didn't shift away.
"Let it hurt, Cass." She used the name Dean had found for him, let it tie him tighter to humanity. Tie them both. He frowned, his vessel's brows shifting slightly closer together. "It's supposed to hurt."
And she left.
* * *
As an angel, Anna could remember her creation perfectly. The Greeks may well have based Athena on her, springing fully formed from her father, full of purpose.
Admittedly, she rather hoped she caused her father something more than a severe headache.
Like Athena, she was gifted in strategy and battle, her intelligence leading to her placement at the head of her garrison -- or perhaps that was the other way around -- and at her command, they helped pave the way for Michael's victory over Lucifer in the very early days of the world. Unlike Athena, there was no credit to be given or reward to be reaped, but for the faint pleasure of an order well-followed. There were no cities built in her honor, no temples erected or epics written. Her life was planned beginning to end. Being a good leader was part of that plan, and her success was the will of the Lord, nothing more.
Say what you would about war, it at least demanded passion of a kind, a passion that filled each and every angel, on either side and those in the middle, to the very brimming. This was righteous, it was purpose, it was necessary, and every single creature played its part. And somehow, when it was all over, the angels were meant to simply . . . leave it behind. Or perhaps redirect it to whatever task they were given after, passion as a servant of God, passion as a duke of Hell. It was unsustainable, impossible.
Anti-climactic.
By the time the crucifixion rolled around, dare say it, Anna was bored. And with the promised sacrifice for the sins of Man completed, things slowed down even further, and when the time came that Anna was stationed on the Earth, to wander and watch, silent and invisible, she welcomed it just to get away from Heaven.
When it came right down to it, Anna fell for a very long time.
* * *
Gabriel had a man trapped beneath an enormous SUV in the Alaskan wilderness. He leaned against a tree and watched as a bear took its time munching on the man's foot. The man, still conscious and cursing everyone from the bear to the SUV manufacturers to his coworkers to his wife, scrabbled for a carton of beer he'd tucked behind the SUV's front wheel when he saw the bear approaching. Formless and newly re-graced, Anna watched Gabriel watch the asshole and waited for the man to pass out again before making herself known.
There wasn't much that could turn Gabriel's attention from one of his tricks, but Anna, it seemed, was one of the special ones.
"Well," said Gabriel. "Look who got her shiny back!"
Anna smiled. Of all the upper echelons, Gabriel had been one of her favorites. He'd abandoned Heaven even before she had, though he'd taken a very different route. She nodded to the man under the SUV. "I see you've found a new friend."
"Who, him? You shoulda heard this guy go off on the power of technology to conquer the wild. He's got a rifle powerful enough to bring down a t-rex in that car." The bear put down the man's foot and leaned against the bumper of the SUV, looking like it was getting ready for a nap, then seemed to think better of it and went after the other foot. Gabriel laughed.
"You've got a lot in common," said Anna. "You both don't have enough sense not to poke the bears."
Gabriel rolled his eyes and Anna felt something bubble up beneath her ribs. Gabriel had never been one to hold back on physical expression.
"Whatcha doing here, oh Anna of her gracefulness?"
"I need a favor."
Gabriel looked her over. "Looking for someone to spit-polish those wings? 'Cause I gotta tell ya, my rag's a little stinky."
Anna decided she didn't want to go anywhere near that metaphor. "I want my body back."
Gabriel frowned.
"My human body," Anna said. "There's things that need to be done, and I don't want to take a vessel. I won't hijack someone's life."
"Might get me back on Heaven's radar." Disgust laced his voice, and the feeling in her ribs fluttered again to hear it. "What's in it for me?"
"You owe me."
"That was a long time ago."
"Only in their terms." Anna nodded to the man under the SUV, who was showing signs of waking up again, his fingers twitching towards the beer. Gabriel sighed.
"Fine. But I do this, and we're even. No more swooping in and trying to hit a guy up." He snapped his fingers, and Anna felt the solidity of her human form take shape around her, binding her grace and soothing her like an ace bandage over broken ribs. Gabriel whistled. "But, hey, if you wanna swoop in for any other reason, let me know." He waggled his eyebrows, and the feeling in her ribs bubbled right up to her lips and formed a real smile, the first she'd had since her grace returned. "You think it was fun in college," he said, "you should try it when you've got a little magic to go along."
"I'll keep that in mind. Maybe take you up on it when we win."
Gabriel's expression fell, and in an instant he was as dour as he ever was before he'd left for greener pastures. "There's no winning this one, babe. Mike and Lucy, they're gonna bring the whole house down. You're gonna have to take your jollies while you still can."
"We'll see, Gabe." The man under the SUV started hollering something about foot transplants being covered by his HMO. "Well. I'll let you get back to it."
Gabriel snapped off a jaunty salute. The bear started shaking the SUV on its tires. Anna decided she didn't want to see what would happen when it managed to tip the thing over. She leaned in to give Gabriel a kiss on the cheek, and then she was off.
* * *
As a human, Anna had no memory of her birth.
Her earliest memories were blurred and confused, filled with fear, confusion, white walls, and shouts. Her parents never much spoke of it, her early institutionalization or her eventual calming, but her father always tread carefully, never allowing her for a moment to believe that he was angry with her, and her mother could be just as cautious, going out of her way to ensure that Anna never had cause to doubt herself or her place in the family. "You can be whatever you want to be" was never an empty promise in the Milton household, it was a commandment, and as she grew, Anna found herself wondering what would happen to her if she never found out just what that was.
She always had a sense that she was lucky, either way. That she was getting away with something, something huge. And while at times that bolstered her confidence, let her stride forward knowing that she'd made it this far, she could make it the next step, mostly it made her anxious, forever waiting to get caught.
Like any other teenager, Anna struggled with her self-image. The "proper" and "healthy" woman bombarded her from every side, from the unimaginably perfect figures of the fashion dolls and cartoon princesses to the cold diagrams in health and gym classes, from the ads for weight loss programs to the PSAs about eating disorders. "You're not fat," they told her. "But just in case you are. . . ."
Anna wasn't fat. She was, if anything, underweight, her constant tension ratcheting up her metabolism. She was a late bloomer, and her fair skin didn't so much tan or freckle in the sun as blotch. Her hair was bland, her eyes protruded, her chest was flat, her teeth were crooked, and her toes were weird, and as she approached fifteen she knew that for every swan in disguise, there were many more who just grew into really ugly ducks. This was her punishment, then. For whatever it was she'd gotten away with, this was where it bit her in the ass. She was doomed to braces and shapelessness and kids who looked right past her as she hurried through the halls at school.
As high school drew to a close and Anna started looking into college, she settled more and more into her body. The sense of anxiety never quite faded, but applications and essays and test scores took precedence. She dyed her hair for the first time on her eighteenth birthday, while her parents quietly shook their heads, and the day before she left for school, she found herself standing in the back of her father's church after the last service of the day, looking up at the images of angels gracing the stained glass windows. They'd been constant presences in her life until that point, and they were some of the last she said good-bye to before leaving.
She wondered what her life would be like without them constantly looking down on her. She knew, of course, they were only representations, frozen images of imagined blessing and grace, but she'd personified them all in her youth, considered them her guardians, along with her parents. She stared up at their unchanging faces, their eternal beauty shifting only with the back-light of the sun, the moon, or the street lights. Her body had grown, had shifted, had developed. She chose her clothes and her make-up, chose to alter her hair with cuts and dyes and straighten her teeth, and they remained, exactly as they'd been in her earliest memories.
She pitied them.
The next day, as her parents drove her away to start the newest and most daunting stage of her life to date, it wasn't the angels in the windows she watched through the back window until they disappeared around the corner, but the circular, patterned window standing high at the top of the vestibule. It was this one, with its geometric patterns and abstract whorls that she locked into her mind. It was unchanging, yes, but it was also unpretentious.
* * *
"It's all real," she said.
Ruby paused in her pacing by the door of the cabin, then turned to give Anna an inscrutable look.
Almost everything about Ruby was inscrutable, a mystery. The face of her human host warred with that of her true form, and Anna watched them both, blurring and blending together until she could make sense of neither. One was normal, even beautiful, the other unfathomably horrible.
"You've been listening in on the angels for the last two months, and you're just now figuring that out?"
Anna looked down at her hands, folded tight together in her lap, as though trying to contain the entirety of herself between them. "I wondered. In the institution it was hard to tell, sometimes. If I was really just crazy."
Ruby snorted, a wet, unfeminine sound that made Anna's lips twitch into what was almost a smile. "Hey, maybe you are. Maybe we're all just figments of your deranged imagination."
The smile vanished and Anna flinched. "Don't say that."
Ruby was in front of her, then, crouching down to peer in at Anna past the curtain of her hair. Her hands, well-shaped with trimmed, unpolished nails overlaid by twisted, curling shapes capped in talons, swooped forward to grasp Anna's own. "It's real. It's all real, and we're going to help you."
Anna looked up again, and through her hair she thought she saw the real Ruby, not the vessel or the demon, but something in between, something other and unique.
A friendly demon. Her father would laugh to hear the very idea.
"Have you ever been in love?" she asked. Ruby rocked back on her heels, pulling her hands away.
"What?"
Anna ducked her head again. "I'm sorry, that's stupid."
Ruby's hands came back and then her face, filtered into the in-between creature, fascinating and complex. "No, hey. It's not. It's cool."
"Have you?"
Ruby tilted her head, and the face Anna saw shifted, flickering between human and demon and other too quickly to follow. "Yeah. I was human once, you know."
That startled her. "You were?"
"Long time ago. We all were."
"The angels, too?"
Ruby snorted again, a harsher sound this time, and Anna half expected her to spit. "No. Not them."
"But why?" Anna shook her head. "That doesn't make sense. Why would God make humanity change into demons if they weren't going to get the chance to change the other way?" Even as she asked, her mind was working, forming theories, connecting ideas. She was thinking of mankind as the middle, the step between Hell and Heaven, but what if that wasn't the way it worked? What if angels weren't at the top, but humanity? They were God's favorite creation, right? That was why the Morningstar fell in the first place. Jealousy.
Ruby interrupted her thoughts with a flash of teeth that Anna thought was probably a grin. "Uh, maybe because they're dicks?"
Anna laughed. "They sound that way, sometimes. You should hear them argue."
"Honey, I don't wanna hear them do anything."
"You're kind of amazing, you know," said Anna. "You're like the Metamorphosis."
"Huh?"
Anna shook her head. "You change. Shift from one thing to another."
"Guess that's why I'm different." Ruby rocked back again, then pushed to her feet to start pacing again. "Why I'm helping Sam."
"And Dean."
Ruby hesitated, Anna thought, just a moment, before saying "Yeah, and Dean. You know, instead of trying to kill them."
"They're going to save the world," Anna said. She felt as though she was standing at the edge of something huge, like her whole life was about to change forever and she'd never get to go back. It was reckless and terrifying and a little exhilarating and she was filled with the urge to do, more than ever before. Whatever it was she'd been getting away with, all her life, she was about to face the consequences, and she wanted to try everything she'd never done before she lost the chance. She looked up through her hair again at Ruby, watched her stride back and forth through the cabin, distracted and powerful and something completely different from anything Anna had seen before. "Ruby --"
Ruby froze, cocking her head. "I've got to go," she said, and something in Anna's chest deflated a little. "Let Sam know where we are. Do me a favor and don't let this body die while I'm gone."
And then her head tilted back and she was screaming, thick black smoke pouring from her mouth, splitting her into her component parts and casting her humanity aside on the floor. Anna let out a shriek and shrank back in her seat, everything good in her recoiling at the clear presence of evil.
Then Ruby was gone and there was a comatose woman on the floor and Anna hugged herself and finished her question to empty air.
"-- Do you love anything now?"
* * *
For an angel, falling was like dying, and each of them knew it. For Anna, ascending was worse.
Falling hurt, cutting away a piece of herself, the piece, the defining element of everything she was and had ever been, then throwing herself downward, to be reshaped and redefined by forces she couldn't even begin to understand. With every step she wondered if it was worth it. And with every question, she pushed herself harder to keep going.
She'd watched humanity for thousands of years. Seen them grow and change, lift themselves up and cast themselves down, be born, grow up, give birth, grow old, and die, over and over again. Watched them turn on each other and turn with each other, form and break alliances, form and lose friendships, conquer and be conquered. They were a constant ebb and flow reshaping their world continuously with every tiny move they made. And she'd watched her brothers stand sentinel, silent and eternal. Humanity was punished, yet persevered. They were culled and broken and brought to the brink of extinction at times and yet they continued, expanding and developing with every rise and fall of the sun. When angels were punished, they were cast out, cast down, past the Earth to the very Pit of darkness and pain, every bit of their being reshaped into something unrecognizable, no chance of redemption. When angels were punished, they were killed.
Like Lucifer, Anna was filled with envy. Unlike Lucifer, she didn't want to eradicate humans. She wanted to be them. When Anna fell, she stopped at Earth.
When Anna ascended, she did the same.
She retook her grace and was reshaped and redefined again by forces she didn't know. With every step she rebelled and with every rebellion she pushed herself further, and what came away from that barn in Kentucky that day, what visited Gabriel in the Alaskan wilderness to be completed, was not the same as what stood on the very edge of Heaven and chose the Earth. Castiel was right about one thing -- they were not alike. Not yet. Anna became what she'd believed she'd seen in Ruby, what no one had seen in the history of the world.
What once was angelic had become human, and what once human had by choice changed again, until Anna was both and neither, something other and unique.
Something in between.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
'Inventory' by Dorothy Parker