Imaginary storytelling, Supernatural edition: Places to come from, places to go.
This is for neotoma and tiny_antares. And everyone who likes fictional anthropology.
I had a moment of great jubilation when I got to the fourth season of Supernatural - not just because the plot was kicking into high gear, not just because of Misha Collins, not just because the effects budget had been increased to about $72 per episode up from $65. A lot of it was from the fact I'd finally found something to fit the premise-in-search-of-a-plot that'd been kicking around my head for a few years.
Then I went and dedicated myself to Team Fortress 2 before I could get a chance to write anything. I did, however, take copious notes on the story idea set off long ago by the phrase "angel sanctuary" - an anime series I knew nothing about save the title, because I find late-90s anime trailers obtuse at the best of times - and might as well get around to sharing them since I don't have to be up early to go to work tomorrow.
With Supernatural, some of it was a reaction against all the fics forgetting angels are, in Castiel's words, "Multidimensional wavelengths of celestial intent" and are instead treated as physical beings - while also giving them characteristics belonging to said multidimensional wavelengths in a way that struck me as internally inconsistent. Too many stories where it wasn't one or the other, or even lacking in a clear set of rules for the story itself. I found myself wanting to read a story that didn't seem to be written yet: something with angels not as wavelengths but entirely physical beings, with fingernails, digestive tracts, oil glands for their feathers, and all that good stuff. Something where - perhaps more importantly than having clearly delineated gestation periods - the culture of the angels was also given attention and care and not just added to as the author felt the story needed. Something set in a world where where angels were in textbooks along with kappas, selkies, and werewolves. And, going with the original story idea, live fairly removed from the rest of the world for their own safety.
In addition to being one of those, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if...?" stories, the underpinning of this AU would be an exploration of the relationship between Castiel and Sam and Dean, and the impact the brothers' have on angels - and through that lens, the impact of sudden external influence on isolated cultures.
Angels, being highly magical beings, have long been hunted by humans for use in spellcraft and magic - blood, feathers, eggshells, bones. Their original homelands were the Middle East, with them seemingly going extinct in the wild by the time of the Crusades, and went extinct in captivity a couple of decades after that. England and France have the largest collections of skeletons and assorted remains, and will sometimes tap into their dwindling stores if the need is great enough, such as a potion to save the life of the ruling monarch curently ravaged by lung cancer. There are a few bone flutes that still see use, and Sam and Dean were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to hear one played once.
In addition to the shifts regarding angels, hunters are fairly well known in society as well. Somewhere between lawyers and plumbers in terms of prestige, it's a profession that ranges from the well-respected white collar academic to the dirty-fingernailed blue collar monster dispatchers. Mary and Sam Winchester lean towards the former; John and Dean, the latter.
As a side note, I didn't ever take the time to figure out if Mary and John are alive, if it's only Mary who's dead, what happened without an apocalypse two thousand years in the making to give Sam and Dean their current relationship. But I did settle on the Winchesters having a family cabin out in Arizona in the mountains somewhere. Because that's where Dean shoots down Castiel.
As it turns out, angels didn't go extinct in the wild; they managed to move themselves to the Southwestern US, a place so remote and so far from home they figured they'd be safe there to hide for a while. Deliberate exile. A couple hundred, at most, were what was left to move, and they had to rebuild their culture from the ground up. It used to be that angels lived in large, decentralized groups, with families having their own small territories and nests in the greater region. After they began life in hiding, they started to live in centralized villages, banding together for safety. As time went on, this led to a breakdown of the old social order, with the family being dissolved in favor of the society as a whole. There are now about 1800 angels, closer to 1900, the largest the total population has ever been, spread out across seven villages up and down the Rocky Mountains. Children are raised communally, not by their parents, in order to minimize the importance of individual bonds for the sake of the species at large. Pair-bonds, mated pairs, still exist, but as soon as the eggs are laid, they're taken from the mother. Angels always lay a pair of eggs, typically a day or two apart, that are cared for separately based on laying time. They ascribe the four personality types as older brother, older sister, younger brother, and younger sister, with each having its own specific word that communicates a good deal of information about that person. Gabriel and Lucifer, for example, are older brothers, and Raphael is a younger brother. Michael is an older sister. Castiel is a younger sister.
Sexual dimorphism in angels takes a lot from raptors and other birds: they have a ZW chromosome system, with females being the heterogametic ones and the larger and stronger of the two sexes. They also lack external genitals, instead possessing a cloaca roughly where the navel is on a human. The males are the village-keepers that stay and raise the children, and the females are the hunters and protectors. Castiel was traveling between one village and another, disguised as a flock of geese, when Dean shot him down thinking he was just shooting at a flock of geese.
After he finds Cas and takes him to the cabin, after he and Sam secure him in the barn - the two of them there on vacation, because it's a universal truth the Winchesters always need a vacation - they don't believe what they found was a real live angel. To test, they get a little of his blood and pull out one of the oldest recipes in any of the books they've got, something that people don't do anymore because nobody can get their hands on fresh angel blood. But this time, it works, and that's the proof they need.
Sam comments on Dean finding something long thought extinct to the point of myth by shooting it down by accident. Dean isn't amused. It gets worse when Castiel wakes up after two days unconscious and they realize he doesn't speak English and they don't speak Enochian. Sam tries a few words, but it's no good: the pronunciation is off, there's no semblance of grammar or sentence structure, and there's no time to parrot things back-and-forth until something clicks. So Dean tries another spell, something people can do now but tend to avoid because it's risky. It involves cutting his tongue and using the blood from that in a potion, and they manage to get Castiel to drink it - when he does, he has their tongue, and can speak English. It's a very literal translation, though, so when Dean asks him about his navel - something he was poking at when he was out and they were dressing the hole in his wing - Cas doesn't say cloaca, he says sewer, because that's what the word means. Translating figures of speech from the Enochian is a two-step process, from the literal "We might as well eat our eggshells" to the more pragmatic "We're down to clutching at straws." Although, as Cas points out to them, it doesn't communicate the full meaning behind the necessity of such eating, as it's only done when a pregnant mother is extremely sick as a folk remedy.
As Cas heals, they talk more and more, at least after Dean does his full-body heeby-jeeby thing he does after he realizes just where he put his finger. Cas is hesitant to talk, and explains it's because humans are the monsters in the stories he grew up with. The older brother in charge of Cas and his fellow younger siblings told them stories about how humans would hunt them, carve them up, keep them in cages and pull out their feathers that they couldn't fly away and drain their blood that they might not even draw a sigil to free themselves, blast themselves elsewhere.
Before they could talk to each other, they'd watch each other do things neither party understood. Once Cas was up and about as best he could be and wanted to get clean, it was Sam who understood what he was doing first - he was taking a bath. A dust bath. The driveway isn't paved or graveled, just loose, dusty dirt, and the angel was rubbing it in his hair and shaking it out, rubbing it into his feathers, and Sam recognized it from birds. The angel was taking a bath.
Cas never took their option to bathe in water. He never accepted their offer of eating birds, either - other animals that hatch are forbidden to him. They too spend some time sleeping before waking. Mammals are born awake, but creatures that hatch are allowed to dream, to listen to the hum of the world, and that's something which should be respected by not eating them.
The three of them spend a lot of time discussing spellcraft and spellwork and magic, and Cas tells them there's no word for magic in Enochian. What he does - it's not magic. It's just something he can do. But he can do comparatively little now, as he has no grace. When Dean says he thought all angels had grace, Cas has to explain it's not that simple. Since he's alone, apart from the group, he can't be said to have grace. He'd have it again if he was home, with his brothers and sisters, but not alone like this. He can exert influence on the world, but that's not his grace. That's different - it's just something he can do.
From their research, Sam and Dean know angels are one of the few beings in the world that can cast spells instead of just tapping into their inherent abilities. A shapeshifter can copy other people down to the memories, a siren can cast illusions and make people love them, but those aren't like drawing up a spell to to summon a ghost. Those are just things they do. Humans can cast spells to drive out demons and locate people on maps, but have no such inherent abilities. Angels, however, have both. Ritual and craft as well as raw application of power. Which is no small part of why they were hunted to near-extinction.
As Cas heals, he asks to go in the house. When he does, and sees the picture of John and Mary, it leads to another culture clash. Sam and Dean had some idea he was raised by one of his siblings - something Cas finds comfortable about Sam and Dean, the idea it was siblings raising each other, as civilized beings ought to do - without understanding the full extent of it. In modern Enochian, the words for father and mother exist only as nouns to refer to the role in reproduction, and other words for family relationship have almost totally faded from use. When he learns John and Mary are Sam and Dean's father and mother, his immediate reaction is disgust, because he knows John and Mary were incredibly selfish people to keep their children all to themselves like that. It takes a long time for Sam and Dean to understand why Cas is so bothered by the fact that they know their parents, and Cas never manages to understand why the two of them think it's so upsetting he doesn't know who his parents are or that when he has children he won't raise them himself. He knows there was an angel who laid the egg he hatched from, and there was another angel who helped make that happen, and by the time he was three he'd learned to not ask questions about who they were, no matter how curious he was. And when he has children of his own, he'll have the eggs taken from him almost as soon as they're laid.
He explains it to Dean as such: humans sacrifice. Angels relinquish.
When he's well enough to go, he casts a spell alerting some other angels that he's actually alive - when he was shot and struggling to crawl to safety, he put out a spell that declared him dead, that he wouldn't risk others' lives by coming to save him. But now he's well, and he understands Sam and Dean, at least, won't come in with guns and knives to cut his family to pieces, so he calls them that they might come. Six angels arrive, four females and two males, one of whom is the first to step forward and embrace Castiel, someone a good few inches shorter and slighter - his mate, Muriel.
It's not until after his family arrives that Cas does the spell Sam and Dean did to him, giving the two humans his own tongue of Enochian, and they'll never forget the look of joy on his face when they spoke it for the first time - blood ringing in their ears, their tongues boiling, words and ideas rushing through their heads, and even as they swore, Cas simply looked at them, and listened, and asked them to keep talking, say a few words that he could hear someone use his language. But even though he doesn't know the words they use, when Dean finds Muriel grooming Cas' wings, the two of them speaking softly, he understands what they're saying well enough he doesn't intrude. Angels have magnificent hearing - and great eyesight, but very poor senses of smell and taste, or else they never would've gotten that potion down his throat - and they still didn't hear him coming.
Around here, the story broke down somewhat in my head. I never got far beyond that image, partly because of where the canon went and what it started to bring in, and partly because Team Fortress 2 ate my brain. When I consider what would happen next, though, it'd be in the realm of the phrase "angel sanctuary," with everyone understanding if this accident happened, it'll happen again, and the best way to keep that from coming to pass is to educate and inform. Let humans know they're there. Because there's nowhere left to run, there's no place left to hide. And - this is a big hope, something that they used to sustain themselves - if they're known, and protected, then maybe, just maybe, they might be able to go back to where they came from.
It's still something I think about from time to time. There was a lot of time spent on it, and I really would like to read this sometime. And I honestly can't think of a better reason to write a story.
I had a moment of great jubilation when I got to the fourth season of Supernatural - not just because the plot was kicking into high gear, not just because of Misha Collins, not just because the effects budget had been increased to about $72 per episode up from $65. A lot of it was from the fact I'd finally found something to fit the premise-in-search-of-a-plot that'd been kicking around my head for a few years.
Then I went and dedicated myself to Team Fortress 2 before I could get a chance to write anything. I did, however, take copious notes on the story idea set off long ago by the phrase "angel sanctuary" - an anime series I knew nothing about save the title, because I find late-90s anime trailers obtuse at the best of times - and might as well get around to sharing them since I don't have to be up early to go to work tomorrow.
With Supernatural, some of it was a reaction against all the fics forgetting angels are, in Castiel's words, "Multidimensional wavelengths of celestial intent" and are instead treated as physical beings - while also giving them characteristics belonging to said multidimensional wavelengths in a way that struck me as internally inconsistent. Too many stories where it wasn't one or the other, or even lacking in a clear set of rules for the story itself. I found myself wanting to read a story that didn't seem to be written yet: something with angels not as wavelengths but entirely physical beings, with fingernails, digestive tracts, oil glands for their feathers, and all that good stuff. Something where - perhaps more importantly than having clearly delineated gestation periods - the culture of the angels was also given attention and care and not just added to as the author felt the story needed. Something set in a world where where angels were in textbooks along with kappas, selkies, and werewolves. And, going with the original story idea, live fairly removed from the rest of the world for their own safety.
In addition to being one of those, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if...?" stories, the underpinning of this AU would be an exploration of the relationship between Castiel and Sam and Dean, and the impact the brothers' have on angels - and through that lens, the impact of sudden external influence on isolated cultures.
Angels, being highly magical beings, have long been hunted by humans for use in spellcraft and magic - blood, feathers, eggshells, bones. Their original homelands were the Middle East, with them seemingly going extinct in the wild by the time of the Crusades, and went extinct in captivity a couple of decades after that. England and France have the largest collections of skeletons and assorted remains, and will sometimes tap into their dwindling stores if the need is great enough, such as a potion to save the life of the ruling monarch curently ravaged by lung cancer. There are a few bone flutes that still see use, and Sam and Dean were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to hear one played once.
In addition to the shifts regarding angels, hunters are fairly well known in society as well. Somewhere between lawyers and plumbers in terms of prestige, it's a profession that ranges from the well-respected white collar academic to the dirty-fingernailed blue collar monster dispatchers. Mary and Sam Winchester lean towards the former; John and Dean, the latter.
As a side note, I didn't ever take the time to figure out if Mary and John are alive, if it's only Mary who's dead, what happened without an apocalypse two thousand years in the making to give Sam and Dean their current relationship. But I did settle on the Winchesters having a family cabin out in Arizona in the mountains somewhere. Because that's where Dean shoots down Castiel.
As it turns out, angels didn't go extinct in the wild; they managed to move themselves to the Southwestern US, a place so remote and so far from home they figured they'd be safe there to hide for a while. Deliberate exile. A couple hundred, at most, were what was left to move, and they had to rebuild their culture from the ground up. It used to be that angels lived in large, decentralized groups, with families having their own small territories and nests in the greater region. After they began life in hiding, they started to live in centralized villages, banding together for safety. As time went on, this led to a breakdown of the old social order, with the family being dissolved in favor of the society as a whole. There are now about 1800 angels, closer to 1900, the largest the total population has ever been, spread out across seven villages up and down the Rocky Mountains. Children are raised communally, not by their parents, in order to minimize the importance of individual bonds for the sake of the species at large. Pair-bonds, mated pairs, still exist, but as soon as the eggs are laid, they're taken from the mother. Angels always lay a pair of eggs, typically a day or two apart, that are cared for separately based on laying time. They ascribe the four personality types as older brother, older sister, younger brother, and younger sister, with each having its own specific word that communicates a good deal of information about that person. Gabriel and Lucifer, for example, are older brothers, and Raphael is a younger brother. Michael is an older sister. Castiel is a younger sister.
Sexual dimorphism in angels takes a lot from raptors and other birds: they have a ZW chromosome system, with females being the heterogametic ones and the larger and stronger of the two sexes. They also lack external genitals, instead possessing a cloaca roughly where the navel is on a human. The males are the village-keepers that stay and raise the children, and the females are the hunters and protectors. Castiel was traveling between one village and another, disguised as a flock of geese, when Dean shot him down thinking he was just shooting at a flock of geese.
After he finds Cas and takes him to the cabin, after he and Sam secure him in the barn - the two of them there on vacation, because it's a universal truth the Winchesters always need a vacation - they don't believe what they found was a real live angel. To test, they get a little of his blood and pull out one of the oldest recipes in any of the books they've got, something that people don't do anymore because nobody can get their hands on fresh angel blood. But this time, it works, and that's the proof they need.
Sam comments on Dean finding something long thought extinct to the point of myth by shooting it down by accident. Dean isn't amused. It gets worse when Castiel wakes up after two days unconscious and they realize he doesn't speak English and they don't speak Enochian. Sam tries a few words, but it's no good: the pronunciation is off, there's no semblance of grammar or sentence structure, and there's no time to parrot things back-and-forth until something clicks. So Dean tries another spell, something people can do now but tend to avoid because it's risky. It involves cutting his tongue and using the blood from that in a potion, and they manage to get Castiel to drink it - when he does, he has their tongue, and can speak English. It's a very literal translation, though, so when Dean asks him about his navel - something he was poking at when he was out and they were dressing the hole in his wing - Cas doesn't say cloaca, he says sewer, because that's what the word means. Translating figures of speech from the Enochian is a two-step process, from the literal "We might as well eat our eggshells" to the more pragmatic "We're down to clutching at straws." Although, as Cas points out to them, it doesn't communicate the full meaning behind the necessity of such eating, as it's only done when a pregnant mother is extremely sick as a folk remedy.
As Cas heals, they talk more and more, at least after Dean does his full-body heeby-jeeby thing he does after he realizes just where he put his finger. Cas is hesitant to talk, and explains it's because humans are the monsters in the stories he grew up with. The older brother in charge of Cas and his fellow younger siblings told them stories about how humans would hunt them, carve them up, keep them in cages and pull out their feathers that they couldn't fly away and drain their blood that they might not even draw a sigil to free themselves, blast themselves elsewhere.
Before they could talk to each other, they'd watch each other do things neither party understood. Once Cas was up and about as best he could be and wanted to get clean, it was Sam who understood what he was doing first - he was taking a bath. A dust bath. The driveway isn't paved or graveled, just loose, dusty dirt, and the angel was rubbing it in his hair and shaking it out, rubbing it into his feathers, and Sam recognized it from birds. The angel was taking a bath.
Cas never took their option to bathe in water. He never accepted their offer of eating birds, either - other animals that hatch are forbidden to him. They too spend some time sleeping before waking. Mammals are born awake, but creatures that hatch are allowed to dream, to listen to the hum of the world, and that's something which should be respected by not eating them.
The three of them spend a lot of time discussing spellcraft and spellwork and magic, and Cas tells them there's no word for magic in Enochian. What he does - it's not magic. It's just something he can do. But he can do comparatively little now, as he has no grace. When Dean says he thought all angels had grace, Cas has to explain it's not that simple. Since he's alone, apart from the group, he can't be said to have grace. He'd have it again if he was home, with his brothers and sisters, but not alone like this. He can exert influence on the world, but that's not his grace. That's different - it's just something he can do.
From their research, Sam and Dean know angels are one of the few beings in the world that can cast spells instead of just tapping into their inherent abilities. A shapeshifter can copy other people down to the memories, a siren can cast illusions and make people love them, but those aren't like drawing up a spell to to summon a ghost. Those are just things they do. Humans can cast spells to drive out demons and locate people on maps, but have no such inherent abilities. Angels, however, have both. Ritual and craft as well as raw application of power. Which is no small part of why they were hunted to near-extinction.
As Cas heals, he asks to go in the house. When he does, and sees the picture of John and Mary, it leads to another culture clash. Sam and Dean had some idea he was raised by one of his siblings - something Cas finds comfortable about Sam and Dean, the idea it was siblings raising each other, as civilized beings ought to do - without understanding the full extent of it. In modern Enochian, the words for father and mother exist only as nouns to refer to the role in reproduction, and other words for family relationship have almost totally faded from use. When he learns John and Mary are Sam and Dean's father and mother, his immediate reaction is disgust, because he knows John and Mary were incredibly selfish people to keep their children all to themselves like that. It takes a long time for Sam and Dean to understand why Cas is so bothered by the fact that they know their parents, and Cas never manages to understand why the two of them think it's so upsetting he doesn't know who his parents are or that when he has children he won't raise them himself. He knows there was an angel who laid the egg he hatched from, and there was another angel who helped make that happen, and by the time he was three he'd learned to not ask questions about who they were, no matter how curious he was. And when he has children of his own, he'll have the eggs taken from him almost as soon as they're laid.
He explains it to Dean as such: humans sacrifice. Angels relinquish.
When he's well enough to go, he casts a spell alerting some other angels that he's actually alive - when he was shot and struggling to crawl to safety, he put out a spell that declared him dead, that he wouldn't risk others' lives by coming to save him. But now he's well, and he understands Sam and Dean, at least, won't come in with guns and knives to cut his family to pieces, so he calls them that they might come. Six angels arrive, four females and two males, one of whom is the first to step forward and embrace Castiel, someone a good few inches shorter and slighter - his mate, Muriel.
It's not until after his family arrives that Cas does the spell Sam and Dean did to him, giving the two humans his own tongue of Enochian, and they'll never forget the look of joy on his face when they spoke it for the first time - blood ringing in their ears, their tongues boiling, words and ideas rushing through their heads, and even as they swore, Cas simply looked at them, and listened, and asked them to keep talking, say a few words that he could hear someone use his language. But even though he doesn't know the words they use, when Dean finds Muriel grooming Cas' wings, the two of them speaking softly, he understands what they're saying well enough he doesn't intrude. Angels have magnificent hearing - and great eyesight, but very poor senses of smell and taste, or else they never would've gotten that potion down his throat - and they still didn't hear him coming.
Around here, the story broke down somewhat in my head. I never got far beyond that image, partly because of where the canon went and what it started to bring in, and partly because Team Fortress 2 ate my brain. When I consider what would happen next, though, it'd be in the realm of the phrase "angel sanctuary," with everyone understanding if this accident happened, it'll happen again, and the best way to keep that from coming to pass is to educate and inform. Let humans know they're there. Because there's nowhere left to run, there's no place left to hide. And - this is a big hope, something that they used to sustain themselves - if they're known, and protected, then maybe, just maybe, they might be able to go back to where they came from.
It's still something I think about from time to time. There was a lot of time spent on it, and I really would like to read this sometime. And I honestly can't think of a better reason to write a story.