Fic: The Shattered One (29/?)
See the masterpost for disclaimer, summary, and previous parts.
A/N: First of all, the wait for the next chapter of The Shattered One will be a little bit longer than usual - I will be in Philadelphia/Boston for my birthday next weekend. Which probably sounds really bad for you guys, but hey… look at it this way: the people who were reading Saving Grace as it was being posted had to suffer through lags between chapters to accommodate a trip to Los Angeles then ANOTHER one to Washington, DC. :) Does that make it better? No? Oh well, I tried.
Second, I’ve been on the outskirts of the shit-storm happening on fanfictionnet - some business about them going Delores Umbrige on what they deem to be ‘inappropriate fics’ - and some people have asked me about moving my fics to other sites, such as AO3. For the foreseeable future, I have no intention to set up an account elsewhere. Most of my fics (and some not on ffnet, because I’ve always abided by their ‘no smut’ policy) are currently on LJ, and barring any huge problem with LJ, I’m going to keep it there. Several years ago, I had fics scattered over many different sites, and it just got hard to keep track of where all my shit was, so I pared it down to just ffnet and my LJ.
Anyway… that’s it for me blabbering… on with the fic!
******************
When the familiar sound of angel wings filled the air, Dean thought it was Michael. He hadn’t said yes yet, but he had every intention to. Maybe the intent was what mattered to the angel more than the actual word. He realized he was not afraid. This was the last chance he had to save his family. If that’s how Dean finally went out, he could be okay with that.
“Cas?”
Sam’s voice jolted Dean out of his fatalistic reflections and his eyes snapped open.
Castiel was there, standing in the street to the left of the Winchesters, Lucifer to the right.
“Cas?” Dean parroted his brother. Where had he been? How did he know to find them here?
Castiel’s eyes rested ever-so-briefly on Dean, checking on him, then his gaze shifted to Lucifer.
Lucifer… holding Daniel.
Dean sucked in a breath when something colossal and unseen and dangerous rose up in Castiel. The angel’s eyes burned like blue fire. He dipped his chin menacingly, a wrathful stare locked on Lucifer. The world itself around Castiel seemed to give and make way for the newborn power swelling to biblical proportions inside him. The angel was more than the universe could withstand… or hold back.
One second Castiel was a building supernova, the next he was flying at Lucifer.
Lucifer made a noise, a protest, a grunt of surprise, a battle cry… Dean didn’t even know. It was cut off almost the moment it was begun as Castiel and the Devil clashed.
It was like two planets colliding. The ground shook and knocked the Winchester brothers to the ground. The sky belched dark, angry clouds. The sounds of angels locked in mortal combat erupted in a painful cascade that had Dean and Sam clutching at their ears. Every window in Michigan must be breaking from the tidal wave of sound. Dean watched Sam curl up on the ground, trying to keep the agonizing the wall of sound out, then he glanced toward the combatants.
They were Lucifer and Castiel as Dean knew them for only a moment. As he watched two human shapes, Jimmy and Nick, grab at each other, a light began to build. Like the sun was rising right the fuck behind them - not on the horizon behind them, but two feet behind the twisting shapes. Dean squinted and tried to see who was winning, who had Daniel, but their movements were too fast to follow. He got hints of moments in the battle, a fist here, a war-face there, the silver of a flashing blade now and then, but nothing telling.
The light grew brighter and brighter… so glaring that Dean couldn’t make out their outlines anymore; edges were swallowed in a burning knot of white.
The light began to hurt.
Dean didn’t want to take his eyes off Castiel and Lucifer, but his eyes felt like they were going to burst into flames just from seeing the angels’ light.
The split-second before Dean slammed his eyes shut, he swore he saw wings flashing in the light. Two pairs. One brown, one massive and black.
Then Dean had to clench his eyes shut and just try not to fly apart. He felt like he was in the epicenter of the world ending.
It might have been a minute or a millennium; time itself seemed to have fled from the two angels locked in battle. Dean felt like he was teetering on the surface of the sun, two suns, two suns slamming together and taking out solar systems in the process.
A boom that had to be the Earth cracking in half rattled Dean’s bones and made the ground jump and lurch under him. Light flared beyond his eyelids, light so intense that Dean thought maybe he’d been blinded anyway.
Then it all stopped.
For a second, all Dean could do was lie there panting, his heart racing. He wasn’t sure he wasn’t dead. That they all weren’t dead, that Castiel and Lucifer hadn’t destroyed the world.
It was a muffled sound reaching Dean’s dumbfounded brain that told him no, the world wasn’t gone.
That sound was Daniel crying.
Shakily, Dean pried open his eyes. At first all he saw was a splotchy after-image swimming in front of him, like he’d been staring into a lamp from two inches away for a solid hour. When his vision finally cleared, he saw Sam on the ground directly in front of him doing the same.
Then Dean lowered the hands he had clamped over his ears. The crying became sharper, much more real and near, even over the ringing in Dean’s ears from the auditory onslaught of warring angels.
The baby’s cries had Dean uncurling reflexively, scrabbling at asphalt for purchase on a world that had seemed dead-set on tossing them all off a second ago. Dean got unsteadily to his hands and knees and looked toward the sound of crying.
Two motionless bodies lay tangled in the street. Daniel was beside them, wailing mightily.
“Cas?” Dean croaked and stumbled to his feet. Sam was a beat behind him, staggering toward the bodies alongside his brother. Great cracks in the road zigzagged out from the unmoving shapes, like the angels were two meteorites that had slammed into the earth.
When the Winchesters were closer, Dean saw that Lucifer was on his back, head lolled to the side and eyes closed. One arm was flung out, at its terminus Daniel. The Devil’s fingers were hooked into Daniel’s clothes as the baby screamed and kicked. His other hand was twisted and caught in the material of Castiel’s trench coat. Collapsed on top of Lucifer was Castiel, just as deathly still. He was draped over Lucifer, chest to chest with the archangel, his head turned and eyes shut while his hands lay limply near Lucifer’s throat. Two identical angel blades lay near the angels… identical but for the fact that one had a shimmering residue, like liquid light, on the tip.
Burned into the pavement beneath the pair of fighters was a sooty impression of wings.
There was only one set, but whose?
Dean dropped to his knees next to the two angels while Sam crouched down beside Daniel.
“Cas?” Dean tried again.
Nothing.
He bit his lip and looked back at his brother. “Is Daniel okay?”
Sam was dancing his fingers over the boy’s body gently, feeling for injury. At length, he sighed and looked up. “I think he’s okay.” As if to prove it to himself, Sam batted away Lucifer’s claw-like fingers and picked Daniel up. The baby flailed his arms insistently, and Sam brought the child to his chest. It wasn’t an angel’s embrace, but it was comforting enough, and it was family, for Daniel’s cries eased off.
Dean sighed, relieved for that much, at least. Then he turned back to Castiel. Neither angel had moved so much as a muscle. Neither one was even breathing, but it wasn’t as if angels needed to. Both their clothes were in tatters, torn and burned beyond saving. Like they’d both blasted beyond the limits of their vessels in the fight, incinerating and ripping as they went.
“Cas?” Dean reached down, hooked a hand on Castiel’s shoulder, and gently pulled him away from the Devil. Castiel rolled onto his back limply. Dean leaned in closer, watching for any sign of life. There was nothing… but did that mean anything?
“Bring Daniel over here,” Dean bade his brother.
When Sam was crouching next to them, Dean took Daniel from Sam’s arms and very gently laid the baby on Castiel’s chest.
Daniel stopped crying completely.
And, ever so faintly, Castiel’s eyelids twitched.
Dean nearly buckled. As it was, he had to put out a bracing hand to keep the pavement from rushing up to meet him. “He’s… he’s alive, Sammy.”
“Thank God,” Sam breathed.
Dean wouldn’t go that far, but he’d admit it was a fucking miracle that the angel had fought the Devil and survived.
Not really sure how he got there, Dean found himself lying on the ground alongside the angel - maybe he’d collapsed after all, though he didn’t remember it - pressed to Castiel’s side with his head on the angel’s chest. Dean’s forehead rested against Daniel’s. He laid a hand over his son’s back, feeling him breathe and loving every fucking second of it. Sam’s hand was gripping his shoulder in a hold that was sure to leave bruises, but Dean didn’t give a shit.
He thought he could have stayed there forever, middle of the broken street be damned, but in the next moment they were not alone.
Where there had been only empty road seconds ago suddenly stood a man. Dean jerked up into a sitting position and eyed the stranger. He didn’t recognize his face, but he recognized his presence from a dream.
“Michael.”
Sam stiffened.
Michael, for once, wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to Dean Winchester. He was gaping down at his brothers, one dead at the hands of the other. He looked stunned. Struck completely speechless. His eyes tracked the pattern of wings burned into the street, moved in unmasked wonder to Castiel, then fell in amazement to the baby on the angel’s chest.
The attention of an archangel on his family was making Dean nervous. He got to his feet, tried to look badass, and stepped over Castiel to stand between them and Michael.
That, finally, got Michael to look at Dean. Much as he hated to make the comparison, the expression on his face reminded Dean of John. The look the Winchester patriarch would get on the rare occasions when he ended up being wrong about something. Like a world of absolutes and certainties all of a sudden had defied all reason.
The scrape of shoes on asphalt told Dean that Sam had risen, too, but he didn’t take his eyes off Michael to check.
The stand-off may have gone on indefinitely if the flutter-flap of wings hadn’t caught Dean’s attention and made him look to the right, toward the newcomer.
Gabriel took in the scene only a second before he lifted a hand and snapped his fingers.
Next
A/N: First of all, the wait for the next chapter of The Shattered One will be a little bit longer than usual - I will be in Philadelphia/Boston for my birthday next weekend. Which probably sounds really bad for you guys, but hey… look at it this way: the people who were reading Saving Grace as it was being posted had to suffer through lags between chapters to accommodate a trip to Los Angeles then ANOTHER one to Washington, DC. :) Does that make it better? No? Oh well, I tried.
Second, I’ve been on the outskirts of the shit-storm happening on fanfictionnet - some business about them going Delores Umbrige on what they deem to be ‘inappropriate fics’ - and some people have asked me about moving my fics to other sites, such as AO3. For the foreseeable future, I have no intention to set up an account elsewhere. Most of my fics (and some not on ffnet, because I’ve always abided by their ‘no smut’ policy) are currently on LJ, and barring any huge problem with LJ, I’m going to keep it there. Several years ago, I had fics scattered over many different sites, and it just got hard to keep track of where all my shit was, so I pared it down to just ffnet and my LJ.
Anyway… that’s it for me blabbering… on with the fic!
******************
When the familiar sound of angel wings filled the air, Dean thought it was Michael. He hadn’t said yes yet, but he had every intention to. Maybe the intent was what mattered to the angel more than the actual word. He realized he was not afraid. This was the last chance he had to save his family. If that’s how Dean finally went out, he could be okay with that.
“Cas?”
Sam’s voice jolted Dean out of his fatalistic reflections and his eyes snapped open.
Castiel was there, standing in the street to the left of the Winchesters, Lucifer to the right.
“Cas?” Dean parroted his brother. Where had he been? How did he know to find them here?
Castiel’s eyes rested ever-so-briefly on Dean, checking on him, then his gaze shifted to Lucifer.
Lucifer… holding Daniel.
Dean sucked in a breath when something colossal and unseen and dangerous rose up in Castiel. The angel’s eyes burned like blue fire. He dipped his chin menacingly, a wrathful stare locked on Lucifer. The world itself around Castiel seemed to give and make way for the newborn power swelling to biblical proportions inside him. The angel was more than the universe could withstand… or hold back.
One second Castiel was a building supernova, the next he was flying at Lucifer.
Lucifer made a noise, a protest, a grunt of surprise, a battle cry… Dean didn’t even know. It was cut off almost the moment it was begun as Castiel and the Devil clashed.
It was like two planets colliding. The ground shook and knocked the Winchester brothers to the ground. The sky belched dark, angry clouds. The sounds of angels locked in mortal combat erupted in a painful cascade that had Dean and Sam clutching at their ears. Every window in Michigan must be breaking from the tidal wave of sound. Dean watched Sam curl up on the ground, trying to keep the agonizing the wall of sound out, then he glanced toward the combatants.
They were Lucifer and Castiel as Dean knew them for only a moment. As he watched two human shapes, Jimmy and Nick, grab at each other, a light began to build. Like the sun was rising right the fuck behind them - not on the horizon behind them, but two feet behind the twisting shapes. Dean squinted and tried to see who was winning, who had Daniel, but their movements were too fast to follow. He got hints of moments in the battle, a fist here, a war-face there, the silver of a flashing blade now and then, but nothing telling.
The light grew brighter and brighter… so glaring that Dean couldn’t make out their outlines anymore; edges were swallowed in a burning knot of white.
The light began to hurt.
Dean didn’t want to take his eyes off Castiel and Lucifer, but his eyes felt like they were going to burst into flames just from seeing the angels’ light.
The split-second before Dean slammed his eyes shut, he swore he saw wings flashing in the light. Two pairs. One brown, one massive and black.
Then Dean had to clench his eyes shut and just try not to fly apart. He felt like he was in the epicenter of the world ending.
It might have been a minute or a millennium; time itself seemed to have fled from the two angels locked in battle. Dean felt like he was teetering on the surface of the sun, two suns, two suns slamming together and taking out solar systems in the process.
A boom that had to be the Earth cracking in half rattled Dean’s bones and made the ground jump and lurch under him. Light flared beyond his eyelids, light so intense that Dean thought maybe he’d been blinded anyway.
Then it all stopped.
For a second, all Dean could do was lie there panting, his heart racing. He wasn’t sure he wasn’t dead. That they all weren’t dead, that Castiel and Lucifer hadn’t destroyed the world.
It was a muffled sound reaching Dean’s dumbfounded brain that told him no, the world wasn’t gone.
That sound was Daniel crying.
Shakily, Dean pried open his eyes. At first all he saw was a splotchy after-image swimming in front of him, like he’d been staring into a lamp from two inches away for a solid hour. When his vision finally cleared, he saw Sam on the ground directly in front of him doing the same.
Then Dean lowered the hands he had clamped over his ears. The crying became sharper, much more real and near, even over the ringing in Dean’s ears from the auditory onslaught of warring angels.
The baby’s cries had Dean uncurling reflexively, scrabbling at asphalt for purchase on a world that had seemed dead-set on tossing them all off a second ago. Dean got unsteadily to his hands and knees and looked toward the sound of crying.
Two motionless bodies lay tangled in the street. Daniel was beside them, wailing mightily.
“Cas?” Dean croaked and stumbled to his feet. Sam was a beat behind him, staggering toward the bodies alongside his brother. Great cracks in the road zigzagged out from the unmoving shapes, like the angels were two meteorites that had slammed into the earth.
When the Winchesters were closer, Dean saw that Lucifer was on his back, head lolled to the side and eyes closed. One arm was flung out, at its terminus Daniel. The Devil’s fingers were hooked into Daniel’s clothes as the baby screamed and kicked. His other hand was twisted and caught in the material of Castiel’s trench coat. Collapsed on top of Lucifer was Castiel, just as deathly still. He was draped over Lucifer, chest to chest with the archangel, his head turned and eyes shut while his hands lay limply near Lucifer’s throat. Two identical angel blades lay near the angels… identical but for the fact that one had a shimmering residue, like liquid light, on the tip.
Burned into the pavement beneath the pair of fighters was a sooty impression of wings.
There was only one set, but whose?
Dean dropped to his knees next to the two angels while Sam crouched down beside Daniel.
“Cas?” Dean tried again.
Nothing.
He bit his lip and looked back at his brother. “Is Daniel okay?”
Sam was dancing his fingers over the boy’s body gently, feeling for injury. At length, he sighed and looked up. “I think he’s okay.” As if to prove it to himself, Sam batted away Lucifer’s claw-like fingers and picked Daniel up. The baby flailed his arms insistently, and Sam brought the child to his chest. It wasn’t an angel’s embrace, but it was comforting enough, and it was family, for Daniel’s cries eased off.
Dean sighed, relieved for that much, at least. Then he turned back to Castiel. Neither angel had moved so much as a muscle. Neither one was even breathing, but it wasn’t as if angels needed to. Both their clothes were in tatters, torn and burned beyond saving. Like they’d both blasted beyond the limits of their vessels in the fight, incinerating and ripping as they went.
“Cas?” Dean reached down, hooked a hand on Castiel’s shoulder, and gently pulled him away from the Devil. Castiel rolled onto his back limply. Dean leaned in closer, watching for any sign of life. There was nothing… but did that mean anything?
“Bring Daniel over here,” Dean bade his brother.
When Sam was crouching next to them, Dean took Daniel from Sam’s arms and very gently laid the baby on Castiel’s chest.
Daniel stopped crying completely.
And, ever so faintly, Castiel’s eyelids twitched.
Dean nearly buckled. As it was, he had to put out a bracing hand to keep the pavement from rushing up to meet him. “He’s… he’s alive, Sammy.”
“Thank God,” Sam breathed.
Dean wouldn’t go that far, but he’d admit it was a fucking miracle that the angel had fought the Devil and survived.
Not really sure how he got there, Dean found himself lying on the ground alongside the angel - maybe he’d collapsed after all, though he didn’t remember it - pressed to Castiel’s side with his head on the angel’s chest. Dean’s forehead rested against Daniel’s. He laid a hand over his son’s back, feeling him breathe and loving every fucking second of it. Sam’s hand was gripping his shoulder in a hold that was sure to leave bruises, but Dean didn’t give a shit.
He thought he could have stayed there forever, middle of the broken street be damned, but in the next moment they were not alone.
Where there had been only empty road seconds ago suddenly stood a man. Dean jerked up into a sitting position and eyed the stranger. He didn’t recognize his face, but he recognized his presence from a dream.
“Michael.”
Sam stiffened.
Michael, for once, wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to Dean Winchester. He was gaping down at his brothers, one dead at the hands of the other. He looked stunned. Struck completely speechless. His eyes tracked the pattern of wings burned into the street, moved in unmasked wonder to Castiel, then fell in amazement to the baby on the angel’s chest.
The attention of an archangel on his family was making Dean nervous. He got to his feet, tried to look badass, and stepped over Castiel to stand between them and Michael.
That, finally, got Michael to look at Dean. Much as he hated to make the comparison, the expression on his face reminded Dean of John. The look the Winchester patriarch would get on the rare occasions when he ended up being wrong about something. Like a world of absolutes and certainties all of a sudden had defied all reason.
The scrape of shoes on asphalt told Dean that Sam had risen, too, but he didn’t take his eyes off Michael to check.
The stand-off may have gone on indefinitely if the flutter-flap of wings hadn’t caught Dean’s attention and made him look to the right, toward the newcomer.
Gabriel took in the scene only a second before he lifted a hand and snapped his fingers.
Next