fic: gethsemane // supernatural // anna/castiel
fic post!
general caveat about warnings: i try my best to cover anything that might be objectionable, but if there's anything you think should be warned for, please let me know.
gethsemane.
anna/castiel. +gabe, +dean, +chuck (+anna/gabe, +dean/cas).
pg-13; blasphemy + infidelity + 2014 + sex + unhappiness + swearing + angelcest.
3,674 words.
notes: written for feigned_living at the spn_hetexchange, using the prompt, 'something that you did will destroy me / something that you said will stay with me.' i hope you like the story!
thanks: scorpiod1, who is an amazing cheerleader and an awesome beta, who got to exactly what was wrong the first time she read the first draft. aeternitasbeach, who held my hand and sat through like four drafts of this thing, and always came up with something positive and constructive to say (even through semi-colon & lapslock hell): you are the reason for pretty much everything in this story that doesn't suck. :)
summary: Anna Milton and the angel Castiel, at the end of the world.
In the end, she walks out of Heaven. Zachariah smirks and holds the door open for her on her way out; she really wants to say fuck you and punch him in the face; on the other hand, Heaven kind of sucks, so she just gets the fuck out.
Her wings feel good, spread out. The air feels good on her face, on Anna Milton's skin. (Not that she is Anna Milton anymore, not precisely; but she is closer to Anna Milton than anyone else she has ever been.) Reality feels good; she was only a human for a heartbeat, in angel time, but nothing else compares to it in terms of joy.
She sits down in the dirt, cross-legged like a ten year old, and smiles. This is home, more than Heaven has ever been.
Of course, because nothing good happens anymore, this is when the zombies (Croatoan, she thinks, this is the end) come out of the woodwork and try to eat her face. Thanks, Zachariah, she thinks, and stabs one in the stomach with the nearest handy piece of wood.
--
She walks a lot; runs into Gabriel in Missisauga. He is running a KFC of which he is the only customer, employee and manager.
He says, "Can I take your order?"
They sit next to each other over popcorn chicken and talk shit about Michael, and it is just like old times except for the flat blankness, like death, settled in Gabriel's eyes, and the way his wings aren't anything but shadow now; she could run her fingers through them and they'd dissipate. She looks closer and sees a hint of rust-red blood magic, woven through with death. He tells her about Lucifer wearing Sam Winchester like a cheap suit, about the way Dean Winchester never said yes; he sighs and says Kali when he is talking about the last-ditch attempt of the oldgods. He tells her that their brothers and sisters have given up, that Heaven's gates are closed.
Not to you, she says.
He laughs, wry, sad. No way am I going back there, he says. This is where I belong.
She leaves in the morning because staying is like sticking thumbtacks in an open wound. He is her brother but there is nothing of the joy in him; just weary acceptance; just watching the world fall apart.
--
She hears about the resistance from a boy in Minnesota after she pulls the demon out of him, about Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel, who isn't an angel anymore but fights like an avenger, like a warrior of God, a powder keg about to explode. About the way God has forsaken them and all that's left is a bullet in a faulty gun named Dean.
The boy curls his fingers in her shirt and says, I am so scared and she says, I know, wrapping her arms around him until he falls asleep into dark exhaustion, and then she kisses his forehead and lets him move on, up. The gates of Heaven are closed, these days, but he can linger outside, at rest. She does not envy him, not really, but something in her longs, quietly, for peace.
--
Eventually she finds her way to the stronghold of the resistance, such as it is. The smell of pine trees sticks in her mouth, like sap, which she learned in first grade was like tree blood.
Her heart catches in her mouth when she sees a glimpse of Castiel, her brother, wearing faded clothes and a sharp, bitter smile. He looks worn around the edges; she cannot see his wings.
He catches her eye, grins, like a skeleton, raises his hand in a languid, laconic wave; and then he is gone.
She sits down heavily on the nearest tree stump and doesn't cry, just presses the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathes in, sharp, so the air hits her lungs like bullets.
--
She knocks on the door of his cabin, doesn't wait but goes right in.
He is sitting alone, cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by pill bottles and alcohol.
"So this is the legendary Castiel," she says. She can't not stare at him: this can't be Castiel, this broken wingless creature, all flat eyes and emptiness.
He raises a shotglass in her direction, flinches, a little at his name. "Nice to see you again, sis."
"Does Dean know I'm here?" she asks, and then answers her own question, "Of course not."
"That would involve talking to Dean about something that matters," he says, eyes fixed on a point somewhere to the right of her chest. His empty stare is all glass, no divinity. "Want a drink?"
"Sure," she says, picking her way through the detritus to sit opposite him; in her head she is seeing Gabriel and his sad dark eyes. "Why the fuck not?"
--
Three shots in:
"This place is fucking terrible," she says, half-slurring, absinthe catching at the back of her throat. Her hair sticks damply to her fingers when she runs a hand through it.
"Welcome to the end of the world," Cas says. His voice is light and wry and irreparably, irrevocably damaged. "See, I kind of did you a favour, sending you home."
"Oh god, Cas," she says. She can't keep the horror out of her voice. "What happened to your wings?"
"Well," he says, "since you mentioned dear old Dad."
"They kicked you out?" she breathes, anger burning through every molecule of her. "Fuck, Cas."
"To be fair," he says, tipping back another shot, "I told them to fuck themselves, first."
--
Ten shots in:
He is breathing into her mouth and he is saying, I missed you so much and she is saying, I know, Cas, I know and they have never done this before; it is all awkwardness and the soft shape of her wings, like a shadow across them both. But it is familiar, even though their edges don't quite fit; it is like finding an anchor, like finding home.
It is, really, like going back to your parents' house after your second year of college and realising they have turned your room into a home gym and that your father has had an affair. But Anna will take what she can get, because their father has abandoned them, and this is, after all, the end of the goddamn world.
She rises against him and pretends this is all that is right, all that is good in the world. (She does not want to admit it to herself, but it terrifies her that it might be.)
--
He is all about sex, and drugs, and alcohol. She would make a joke about rock and roll, but it is Castiel so she can't; it sticks between her teeth, like despair.
She leaves him to his iniquity, which comes in the form of white pills and green glass bottles and a notice outside that says Communing with a higher power! Orgy on Sundays, Tuesday, Thursdays, and goes for a walk.
--
She finds Dean with his hands up to the elbows in blood, and thinks about Uriel and Alastair and what it means to be a righteous man. "Hi," she says.
"Jesus fuck," Dean says. "Anna?" Something lights up in his eyes, too bright.
The guy on the table is breathing out shallow, desperate. He has black eyes, but barely. She would cast the demon out but at this point it would not be even close to a mercy.
"Nice to see you again," she says, carefully. "I can't-- Heaven's got nothing to do with me. Michael isn't mine to call."
Dean sighs. "Well," he says, "not like I didn't expect that. You're really Anna?"
"We had sex in your car," she says, remembering the smell of his sweat and the silkiness of his skin, the way he felt hot and real and dangerous and safe. There is nothing of safety in this Dean Winchester, like there is nothing of Heaven in this Castiel. "I put my hand on Cas' handprint and it made you come."
"Okay," Dean says. He splashes what she thinks must be holy water across open flesh and then Anna's face; she rubs her palm across her eyes and says, "Happy now?" while the guy screams, wrecked and raw.
"Totally and utterly," Dean says, smirking, and wipes his hands on the edge of his shirt and says, "Let's go outside."
--
In the sunlight the red smears across the cloth of his green shirt only become more pronounced; she stares at them as if they are the key to some riddle Michael wrote, once upon a time.
"So," she says. "This is fucked the hell up."
"Welcome to the last frontier," Dean says, sitting on the steps outside, arms crossed over his knees. He looks sort of vulnerable, eyelashes starkly dark against his skin. "I thought you were in Heaven."
"Ironic thing," she says, "Heaven's worse than down here, if you've committed treason and/or blasphemy, both of which I have."
He laughs, hollow, flat. "You haven't been hanging out in the right places."
She remembers the warmth of his smile, of the way she trusted him. In this Dean, there is nothing to trust. "Lucky me," she says.
"Pretty much," he says.
They sit there, for a while, just quietly, and then a dark-haired woman in grey fatigues snaps, "Dean, we need you," and she's sitting alone, thinking about good intentions and roads to hell, wondering if this is the kind of thing that makes Lucifer laugh or if there is still enough of her brother in him to mourn.
--
There's a dark-haired man looking harried and confused all the time: she squints, looking at him because he's got fate written all over him, even though he looks just ordinary, like one of the guys Anna picked up in college before she went crazy. "Excuse me," she says, "are you a prophet?"
"Oh my god," he says. "You're an angel. I'm Chuck, hello."
She runs a hand through her hair. "Don't call me that," she says. "I handed in my wings."
"I won't," he says, "if you won't call me prophet. My keyboard broke."
--
She goes out on a raid with Dean and Cas and Risa; they give her a gun and Cas tells her she has license to smite, half-grinning, something sort of like sanity level in his eyes.
She remembers how to drive from when she was Anna, but she's a shitty driver so she sits in the back, next to Risa, who is calm and pretty and so very, very deadly. It's all tense silence, in the car; she doesn't even really know where they are going.
She follows Risa's lead when they get out; the sound of the first shot startles her, but not as much as the way the bullet lands in the Croat's head. She has killed them before but this is the most human of human acts, and it perturbs her more than it should.
(For a while, when she was human, she was vegetarian.)
She exorcises a blonde girl and it takes more out of her than she thought it would, leaving her sick and shaky and weak; all of them pile back into the car, mission accomplished, Cas with a book in his hand, and the girl cries against Anna's shoulder all the way to the compound.
--
She asks the prophet about her brother; they are sitting side by side in the mess.
His eyes are soft, quiet. "He's like Dean," he says, "running on rage and grief."
She is seeing Uriel, feeling the wind of his wings spread out black across the floor; thinking what part did I play in this, in you. She pushes a mound of grey mashed potatoes around on her plate, and with the tines of her fork makes kind of a sandcastle; bites her lip, and smushes it down.
--
They wear each other too well; she knows this because when she was a human she understood, sort of, the experience of love.
She tucks her hand into his and pretends this brings back some kind of balance to their existence, that her wings can grant him flight, that her soul can fill the empty sucking void that is his heart. He says, I am not a fixable creature, and she says, you think that's going to stop me trying? with a sort of fierceness even she knows is false.
They relearn each other over piles and piles of dusty books, falling apart under their fingertips the way they never did when they were angels and immaterial, words spidering dark and inky in languages that only they can understand. Enochian is sharp and piercing in Cas' mouth; bitter when he kisses into her mouth, familiar but wrong, just like everything about him. There is a brightness when he is speaking, an unbreakable truth that makes her think everything might not be lost; it thrills through both of them, this awareness.
She has never loved dead languages the way she does now, with desperation and honesty thick in her heart; there is nothing but these infinite old words holding them together, keeping them from falling down and down and down. There is nothing but Enochian keeping her from giving up on him, and both of them know it, and it hurts.
She whispers I need you in Sanskrit; he replies, stop lying to yourself in Avestan, cruel and also painfully gentle, hand on her cheek like a benediction. They fit together too well: each as broken as the other, and she knows with a sort of tired revelation that they will never fumble together a whole.
--
They take what Dean wryly calls a day trip to Tijuana, and she watches the way Cas says our fearless leader, with something like reverence coiling through even that weary voice. She remembers singing psalms when the world was new, when Castiel was shining and proud and loyal, praising their father with everything within him; she remembers that faith, that loyalty. It hurts to see it so broken, like this: like him.
There is spare honed razor-sharp intelligence in him now, sometimes dulled by the drugs but not here, not when Dean Winchester is asking something from him.
She murmurs, very soft, so no one will hear her: so this is why you fell.
The tilt of his head is inquisitive, still; she remembers when he was young, when there was no weary grief in his movements. She is thinking about Dean Winchester, thinking you wrote the end of the world. She is thinking about Uriel, about Castiel's wide sad eyes; she is wondering when the fall started. She can't pinpoint an exact moment, she has been absent from his life far too long for that, but she knows it must have been Dean because that is all Castiel is now. He was once a soldier in God's army; now he is a soldier in Dean's.
She sighs, hard. Her hand slips against the windowledge; she finds herself tracing Enochian sigils, like loss, like remember along the bottom of the slippery-smooth glass.
--
He offers her a little white pill later, after they get back, running his fingers across the edge of where her wings would be, if they were both divine and incorporeal. She can almost feel his fingerprints seared into her shoulderblades, like the heavy weight of his gaze.
She says, "why not," and takes it; she has never been the girl with the drugs (except in a white room, when she was hearing her brother and did not know what it meant) but here and now, it is just her and him and the only thing connecting them is this creation of chemicals and structures that a thousand years ago their father's children would have called magic.
It just makes her numb, quiet. She fights up through the fog to say, there is no joy in this.
His mouth twists, rictus, deconstruction of a laugh. That isn't the point, he says.
Is there a point? she asks.
Depends how you define a point, he says. They make me not feel sad. They blunt the edges where my heart should be showing. They cauterize the bleeding stumps of my wings.
She drops her forehead on his shoulder and kisses it, throttling down her instinct to wince. I am so sorry, she murmurs, oh, little brother.
--
Cas is smiling at her, bright-eyed and perky; only there is nothing true about this, about him. His hair is ruffled and sticking up at the edges; he is all pain, when she looks properly, like a hundred shallow cuts along his skin.
She says, "You can't do this anymore, Cas. You fucking can't." She is sitting next to him, hair back in a messy ponytail, feeling alone; every piece of her misses Heaven (even the awfulness, even the hard parts, even fucking Zachariah). Cas is the closest thing here to home, she thinks, putting her hand on his wrist; like her, and Gabriel, he has divinity in his bones. "This isn't what we were made for."
This is when his eyes go glassy; he has been taking pill after pill all the while she has been talking to him, to the rhythm and cadence of her voice.
--
When she walks out, he is in a drug-induced haze, lying on his back staring at the ceiling.
She tells Chuck, "Good luck."
He doesn't say, I'll call you when he's sober and he doesn't say, stay; he just looks at Anna, calm and collected and infinitely sad. The depth of his grief makes her swallow, hard, but she has her own problems to deal with. "Same to you," he says. "I'm sorry."
"Me too," she murmurs. She wishes she could say, if you call me I will find you, but she won't. She can't. Instead she shakes his hand, awkwardly, and drops a little of the power into his bones, for protection: like a good-luck charm, and twice as futile.
He pulls her into an awkward sort of hug and whispers, you're gonna be okay. He cannot meet her eyes and this is how she knows he is lying.
There is a place she knows where the world doesn't matter; it is there that she goes now, steeling herself with lightning in her bones, against the hurt of it all.
--
When he dies she feels it like a lightning bolt to the heart, like static shocking up her veins. Cas she says, almost shouting.
Gabriel blinks at her. "Castiel?" he asks, slow, like he's paging through a reference book. "Thursday's angel."
She doesn't really know what to say to that. "He's dead." The words come out flat, emotionless. She isn't sure what to do with them.
Gabriel's eyes are narrow, considering. "He stuck around longer than most do," he says. "Had a pretty good run of it."
"Depends how you define pretty good," she says, thinking about the curve of his smile, about the heat of his hand; about the tattered shadows of his wings, and the harshness of his Enochian syllables. Everything in her is too slow, too sore; like an exhausted muscle, all her grief has been used up.
"Doesn't matter anymore," Gabriel says. "It's Lucifer's world now."
"Hell of an endgame," she sighs. "Do you ever think-- we could have been on his side, the two of us. We fell, or left."
"Not like he did," he says, lightly. "Not out of rage. Besides, can you see me backing a winner?" There is something like sympathy in his eyes, solid and soft. It's masked, though, by the tired, weary sadness.
"Yeah," she says, "you have a point."
--
It's raining outside. She tilts her head up, staring at the thunder and the lightning; feeling so alone, the only angel left in the world.
She misses Castiel, all of a sudden; misses him sharp and painful like she never did in Heaven.
There is only one way to fix this, she thinks: and then she spreads her wings in the carpark, and goes home.
--
Zachariah says, "So you see, it's all about the end of the world." He is smirking, because that is what Zachariah does.
"Yeah," Anna says, "fuck you." And then she punches him in the face-- one of the six, the one that looks like a lion, and falls.
She would think she'd be used to it by now; evidently not so much, because it goddamn hurts.)
--
"I'm so sorry," Chuck says, quiet, soft. His eyes are sharp, clear. He knows who and what she is; he is not his future self.
"Thanks," she says, quietly. "I wonder--"
"I can't absolve you," he says. "I don't-- I don't have that kind of power."
She braces her forearms on the edge of the desk. "I know," she says. "I just."
He does the only thing he can do; he pours her a drink.
She steeples her fingers over the glass of brandy and looks out his window, into the garden. When she squints she almost thinks she can see a pomegranate tree.
--
The length of Castiel's wings is dark and deep and lovely, stretching in four dimensions across Anna's eyes. Hello, Anna, he says.
She smiles, feeling the tears catch in her throat; swallows them back and it hurts, but so does everything about Cas. Every word that passes between them is loaded, something dangerous, like it never was before; she is a loaded gun, or a landmine: something that will go off if you breath on it. He flinches, when she talks about Heaven; there is no way she could bring herself to tell him what she has seen.
She is thinking I love you in sparse, spare Enochian; she is thinking you were always my favourite; this is why she cannot look at him when she says, Sam Winchester has to die.
general caveat about warnings: i try my best to cover anything that might be objectionable, but if there's anything you think should be warned for, please let me know.
gethsemane.
anna/castiel. +gabe, +dean, +chuck (+anna/gabe, +dean/cas).
pg-13; blasphemy + infidelity + 2014 + sex + unhappiness + swearing + angelcest.
3,674 words.
notes: written for feigned_living at the spn_hetexchange, using the prompt, 'something that you did will destroy me / something that you said will stay with me.' i hope you like the story!
thanks: scorpiod1, who is an amazing cheerleader and an awesome beta, who got to exactly what was wrong the first time she read the first draft. aeternitasbeach, who held my hand and sat through like four drafts of this thing, and always came up with something positive and constructive to say (even through semi-colon & lapslock hell): you are the reason for pretty much everything in this story that doesn't suck. :)
summary: Anna Milton and the angel Castiel, at the end of the world.
In the end, she walks out of Heaven. Zachariah smirks and holds the door open for her on her way out; she really wants to say fuck you and punch him in the face; on the other hand, Heaven kind of sucks, so she just gets the fuck out.
Her wings feel good, spread out. The air feels good on her face, on Anna Milton's skin. (Not that she is Anna Milton anymore, not precisely; but she is closer to Anna Milton than anyone else she has ever been.) Reality feels good; she was only a human for a heartbeat, in angel time, but nothing else compares to it in terms of joy.
She sits down in the dirt, cross-legged like a ten year old, and smiles. This is home, more than Heaven has ever been.
Of course, because nothing good happens anymore, this is when the zombies (Croatoan, she thinks, this is the end) come out of the woodwork and try to eat her face. Thanks, Zachariah, she thinks, and stabs one in the stomach with the nearest handy piece of wood.
--
She walks a lot; runs into Gabriel in Missisauga. He is running a KFC of which he is the only customer, employee and manager.
He says, "Can I take your order?"
They sit next to each other over popcorn chicken and talk shit about Michael, and it is just like old times except for the flat blankness, like death, settled in Gabriel's eyes, and the way his wings aren't anything but shadow now; she could run her fingers through them and they'd dissipate. She looks closer and sees a hint of rust-red blood magic, woven through with death. He tells her about Lucifer wearing Sam Winchester like a cheap suit, about the way Dean Winchester never said yes; he sighs and says Kali when he is talking about the last-ditch attempt of the oldgods. He tells her that their brothers and sisters have given up, that Heaven's gates are closed.
Not to you, she says.
He laughs, wry, sad. No way am I going back there, he says. This is where I belong.
She leaves in the morning because staying is like sticking thumbtacks in an open wound. He is her brother but there is nothing of the joy in him; just weary acceptance; just watching the world fall apart.
--
She hears about the resistance from a boy in Minnesota after she pulls the demon out of him, about Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel, who isn't an angel anymore but fights like an avenger, like a warrior of God, a powder keg about to explode. About the way God has forsaken them and all that's left is a bullet in a faulty gun named Dean.
The boy curls his fingers in her shirt and says, I am so scared and she says, I know, wrapping her arms around him until he falls asleep into dark exhaustion, and then she kisses his forehead and lets him move on, up. The gates of Heaven are closed, these days, but he can linger outside, at rest. She does not envy him, not really, but something in her longs, quietly, for peace.
--
Eventually she finds her way to the stronghold of the resistance, such as it is. The smell of pine trees sticks in her mouth, like sap, which she learned in first grade was like tree blood.
Her heart catches in her mouth when she sees a glimpse of Castiel, her brother, wearing faded clothes and a sharp, bitter smile. He looks worn around the edges; she cannot see his wings.
He catches her eye, grins, like a skeleton, raises his hand in a languid, laconic wave; and then he is gone.
She sits down heavily on the nearest tree stump and doesn't cry, just presses the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathes in, sharp, so the air hits her lungs like bullets.
--
She knocks on the door of his cabin, doesn't wait but goes right in.
He is sitting alone, cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by pill bottles and alcohol.
"So this is the legendary Castiel," she says. She can't not stare at him: this can't be Castiel, this broken wingless creature, all flat eyes and emptiness.
He raises a shotglass in her direction, flinches, a little at his name. "Nice to see you again, sis."
"Does Dean know I'm here?" she asks, and then answers her own question, "Of course not."
"That would involve talking to Dean about something that matters," he says, eyes fixed on a point somewhere to the right of her chest. His empty stare is all glass, no divinity. "Want a drink?"
"Sure," she says, picking her way through the detritus to sit opposite him; in her head she is seeing Gabriel and his sad dark eyes. "Why the fuck not?"
--
Three shots in:
"This place is fucking terrible," she says, half-slurring, absinthe catching at the back of her throat. Her hair sticks damply to her fingers when she runs a hand through it.
"Welcome to the end of the world," Cas says. His voice is light and wry and irreparably, irrevocably damaged. "See, I kind of did you a favour, sending you home."
"Oh god, Cas," she says. She can't keep the horror out of her voice. "What happened to your wings?"
"Well," he says, "since you mentioned dear old Dad."
"They kicked you out?" she breathes, anger burning through every molecule of her. "Fuck, Cas."
"To be fair," he says, tipping back another shot, "I told them to fuck themselves, first."
--
Ten shots in:
He is breathing into her mouth and he is saying, I missed you so much and she is saying, I know, Cas, I know and they have never done this before; it is all awkwardness and the soft shape of her wings, like a shadow across them both. But it is familiar, even though their edges don't quite fit; it is like finding an anchor, like finding home.
It is, really, like going back to your parents' house after your second year of college and realising they have turned your room into a home gym and that your father has had an affair. But Anna will take what she can get, because their father has abandoned them, and this is, after all, the end of the goddamn world.
She rises against him and pretends this is all that is right, all that is good in the world. (She does not want to admit it to herself, but it terrifies her that it might be.)
--
He is all about sex, and drugs, and alcohol. She would make a joke about rock and roll, but it is Castiel so she can't; it sticks between her teeth, like despair.
She leaves him to his iniquity, which comes in the form of white pills and green glass bottles and a notice outside that says Communing with a higher power! Orgy on Sundays, Tuesday, Thursdays, and goes for a walk.
--
She finds Dean with his hands up to the elbows in blood, and thinks about Uriel and Alastair and what it means to be a righteous man. "Hi," she says.
"Jesus fuck," Dean says. "Anna?" Something lights up in his eyes, too bright.
The guy on the table is breathing out shallow, desperate. He has black eyes, but barely. She would cast the demon out but at this point it would not be even close to a mercy.
"Nice to see you again," she says, carefully. "I can't-- Heaven's got nothing to do with me. Michael isn't mine to call."
Dean sighs. "Well," he says, "not like I didn't expect that. You're really Anna?"
"We had sex in your car," she says, remembering the smell of his sweat and the silkiness of his skin, the way he felt hot and real and dangerous and safe. There is nothing of safety in this Dean Winchester, like there is nothing of Heaven in this Castiel. "I put my hand on Cas' handprint and it made you come."
"Okay," Dean says. He splashes what she thinks must be holy water across open flesh and then Anna's face; she rubs her palm across her eyes and says, "Happy now?" while the guy screams, wrecked and raw.
"Totally and utterly," Dean says, smirking, and wipes his hands on the edge of his shirt and says, "Let's go outside."
--
In the sunlight the red smears across the cloth of his green shirt only become more pronounced; she stares at them as if they are the key to some riddle Michael wrote, once upon a time.
"So," she says. "This is fucked the hell up."
"Welcome to the last frontier," Dean says, sitting on the steps outside, arms crossed over his knees. He looks sort of vulnerable, eyelashes starkly dark against his skin. "I thought you were in Heaven."
"Ironic thing," she says, "Heaven's worse than down here, if you've committed treason and/or blasphemy, both of which I have."
He laughs, hollow, flat. "You haven't been hanging out in the right places."
She remembers the warmth of his smile, of the way she trusted him. In this Dean, there is nothing to trust. "Lucky me," she says.
"Pretty much," he says.
They sit there, for a while, just quietly, and then a dark-haired woman in grey fatigues snaps, "Dean, we need you," and she's sitting alone, thinking about good intentions and roads to hell, wondering if this is the kind of thing that makes Lucifer laugh or if there is still enough of her brother in him to mourn.
--
There's a dark-haired man looking harried and confused all the time: she squints, looking at him because he's got fate written all over him, even though he looks just ordinary, like one of the guys Anna picked up in college before she went crazy. "Excuse me," she says, "are you a prophet?"
"Oh my god," he says. "You're an angel. I'm Chuck, hello."
She runs a hand through her hair. "Don't call me that," she says. "I handed in my wings."
"I won't," he says, "if you won't call me prophet. My keyboard broke."
--
She goes out on a raid with Dean and Cas and Risa; they give her a gun and Cas tells her she has license to smite, half-grinning, something sort of like sanity level in his eyes.
She remembers how to drive from when she was Anna, but she's a shitty driver so she sits in the back, next to Risa, who is calm and pretty and so very, very deadly. It's all tense silence, in the car; she doesn't even really know where they are going.
She follows Risa's lead when they get out; the sound of the first shot startles her, but not as much as the way the bullet lands in the Croat's head. She has killed them before but this is the most human of human acts, and it perturbs her more than it should.
(For a while, when she was human, she was vegetarian.)
She exorcises a blonde girl and it takes more out of her than she thought it would, leaving her sick and shaky and weak; all of them pile back into the car, mission accomplished, Cas with a book in his hand, and the girl cries against Anna's shoulder all the way to the compound.
--
She asks the prophet about her brother; they are sitting side by side in the mess.
His eyes are soft, quiet. "He's like Dean," he says, "running on rage and grief."
She is seeing Uriel, feeling the wind of his wings spread out black across the floor; thinking what part did I play in this, in you. She pushes a mound of grey mashed potatoes around on her plate, and with the tines of her fork makes kind of a sandcastle; bites her lip, and smushes it down.
--
They wear each other too well; she knows this because when she was a human she understood, sort of, the experience of love.
She tucks her hand into his and pretends this brings back some kind of balance to their existence, that her wings can grant him flight, that her soul can fill the empty sucking void that is his heart. He says, I am not a fixable creature, and she says, you think that's going to stop me trying? with a sort of fierceness even she knows is false.
They relearn each other over piles and piles of dusty books, falling apart under their fingertips the way they never did when they were angels and immaterial, words spidering dark and inky in languages that only they can understand. Enochian is sharp and piercing in Cas' mouth; bitter when he kisses into her mouth, familiar but wrong, just like everything about him. There is a brightness when he is speaking, an unbreakable truth that makes her think everything might not be lost; it thrills through both of them, this awareness.
She has never loved dead languages the way she does now, with desperation and honesty thick in her heart; there is nothing but these infinite old words holding them together, keeping them from falling down and down and down. There is nothing but Enochian keeping her from giving up on him, and both of them know it, and it hurts.
She whispers I need you in Sanskrit; he replies, stop lying to yourself in Avestan, cruel and also painfully gentle, hand on her cheek like a benediction. They fit together too well: each as broken as the other, and she knows with a sort of tired revelation that they will never fumble together a whole.
--
They take what Dean wryly calls a day trip to Tijuana, and she watches the way Cas says our fearless leader, with something like reverence coiling through even that weary voice. She remembers singing psalms when the world was new, when Castiel was shining and proud and loyal, praising their father with everything within him; she remembers that faith, that loyalty. It hurts to see it so broken, like this: like him.
There is spare honed razor-sharp intelligence in him now, sometimes dulled by the drugs but not here, not when Dean Winchester is asking something from him.
She murmurs, very soft, so no one will hear her: so this is why you fell.
The tilt of his head is inquisitive, still; she remembers when he was young, when there was no weary grief in his movements. She is thinking about Dean Winchester, thinking you wrote the end of the world. She is thinking about Uriel, about Castiel's wide sad eyes; she is wondering when the fall started. She can't pinpoint an exact moment, she has been absent from his life far too long for that, but she knows it must have been Dean because that is all Castiel is now. He was once a soldier in God's army; now he is a soldier in Dean's.
She sighs, hard. Her hand slips against the windowledge; she finds herself tracing Enochian sigils, like loss, like remember along the bottom of the slippery-smooth glass.
--
He offers her a little white pill later, after they get back, running his fingers across the edge of where her wings would be, if they were both divine and incorporeal. She can almost feel his fingerprints seared into her shoulderblades, like the heavy weight of his gaze.
She says, "why not," and takes it; she has never been the girl with the drugs (except in a white room, when she was hearing her brother and did not know what it meant) but here and now, it is just her and him and the only thing connecting them is this creation of chemicals and structures that a thousand years ago their father's children would have called magic.
It just makes her numb, quiet. She fights up through the fog to say, there is no joy in this.
His mouth twists, rictus, deconstruction of a laugh. That isn't the point, he says.
Is there a point? she asks.
Depends how you define a point, he says. They make me not feel sad. They blunt the edges where my heart should be showing. They cauterize the bleeding stumps of my wings.
She drops her forehead on his shoulder and kisses it, throttling down her instinct to wince. I am so sorry, she murmurs, oh, little brother.
--
Cas is smiling at her, bright-eyed and perky; only there is nothing true about this, about him. His hair is ruffled and sticking up at the edges; he is all pain, when she looks properly, like a hundred shallow cuts along his skin.
She says, "You can't do this anymore, Cas. You fucking can't." She is sitting next to him, hair back in a messy ponytail, feeling alone; every piece of her misses Heaven (even the awfulness, even the hard parts, even fucking Zachariah). Cas is the closest thing here to home, she thinks, putting her hand on his wrist; like her, and Gabriel, he has divinity in his bones. "This isn't what we were made for."
This is when his eyes go glassy; he has been taking pill after pill all the while she has been talking to him, to the rhythm and cadence of her voice.
--
When she walks out, he is in a drug-induced haze, lying on his back staring at the ceiling.
She tells Chuck, "Good luck."
He doesn't say, I'll call you when he's sober and he doesn't say, stay; he just looks at Anna, calm and collected and infinitely sad. The depth of his grief makes her swallow, hard, but she has her own problems to deal with. "Same to you," he says. "I'm sorry."
"Me too," she murmurs. She wishes she could say, if you call me I will find you, but she won't. She can't. Instead she shakes his hand, awkwardly, and drops a little of the power into his bones, for protection: like a good-luck charm, and twice as futile.
He pulls her into an awkward sort of hug and whispers, you're gonna be okay. He cannot meet her eyes and this is how she knows he is lying.
There is a place she knows where the world doesn't matter; it is there that she goes now, steeling herself with lightning in her bones, against the hurt of it all.
--
When he dies she feels it like a lightning bolt to the heart, like static shocking up her veins. Cas she says, almost shouting.
Gabriel blinks at her. "Castiel?" he asks, slow, like he's paging through a reference book. "Thursday's angel."
She doesn't really know what to say to that. "He's dead." The words come out flat, emotionless. She isn't sure what to do with them.
Gabriel's eyes are narrow, considering. "He stuck around longer than most do," he says. "Had a pretty good run of it."
"Depends how you define pretty good," she says, thinking about the curve of his smile, about the heat of his hand; about the tattered shadows of his wings, and the harshness of his Enochian syllables. Everything in her is too slow, too sore; like an exhausted muscle, all her grief has been used up.
"Doesn't matter anymore," Gabriel says. "It's Lucifer's world now."
"Hell of an endgame," she sighs. "Do you ever think-- we could have been on his side, the two of us. We fell, or left."
"Not like he did," he says, lightly. "Not out of rage. Besides, can you see me backing a winner?" There is something like sympathy in his eyes, solid and soft. It's masked, though, by the tired, weary sadness.
"Yeah," she says, "you have a point."
--
It's raining outside. She tilts her head up, staring at the thunder and the lightning; feeling so alone, the only angel left in the world.
She misses Castiel, all of a sudden; misses him sharp and painful like she never did in Heaven.
There is only one way to fix this, she thinks: and then she spreads her wings in the carpark, and goes home.
--
Zachariah says, "So you see, it's all about the end of the world." He is smirking, because that is what Zachariah does.
"Yeah," Anna says, "fuck you." And then she punches him in the face-- one of the six, the one that looks like a lion, and falls.
She would think she'd be used to it by now; evidently not so much, because it goddamn hurts.)
--
"I'm so sorry," Chuck says, quiet, soft. His eyes are sharp, clear. He knows who and what she is; he is not his future self.
"Thanks," she says, quietly. "I wonder--"
"I can't absolve you," he says. "I don't-- I don't have that kind of power."
She braces her forearms on the edge of the desk. "I know," she says. "I just."
He does the only thing he can do; he pours her a drink.
She steeples her fingers over the glass of brandy and looks out his window, into the garden. When she squints she almost thinks she can see a pomegranate tree.
--
The length of Castiel's wings is dark and deep and lovely, stretching in four dimensions across Anna's eyes. Hello, Anna, he says.
She smiles, feeling the tears catch in her throat; swallows them back and it hurts, but so does everything about Cas. Every word that passes between them is loaded, something dangerous, like it never was before; she is a loaded gun, or a landmine: something that will go off if you breath on it. He flinches, when she talks about Heaven; there is no way she could bring herself to tell him what she has seen.
She is thinking I love you in sparse, spare Enochian; she is thinking you were always my favourite; this is why she cannot look at him when she says, Sam Winchester has to die.