[Fic] God Called In Sick Today.
Title: God Called In Sick Today
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Castiel, Crowley
Rating: T
Word count: 2,023
Warnings: Violence, Angst, Character Death
Also available on AO3
Summary: The other hand, the one that holds the Blade, itches in that old, familiar way. An itch, deep in dead bones where it can't be scratched. A torment carried jaggedly along phantom nerves, begging to be drowned, however temporarily, by the relief of slaughter, gore and blood.
His eyes open and he sees nothing. Feels nothing. Is nothing. He’s not there anymore, not really. Not yet. Might never be again. For now he is merely a conduit, a vessel for a darker power. One that burns and screams through his veins, howling in gleeful release.
It takes stock of his body. It's body now, a host and nothing more. Where once it was a grudgingly accepted parasite, a means to an end that he thought he could use, now it has control. It no longer needs to be quick and cautious. No longer needs to carefully avoid situations that might check the tidal waves of hated and anger that it draws up and harnesses as they flow through him to wrest temporary control. Now it can afford to take its time. Luxuriate.
It holds the host’s hand up, examines the tanned skin and sinew. Such a curious thing, the human body. A thousand, thousand tiny, fragile components all reliant on each other. Not this one, though, not any more. Now this body is a shell, almost invulnerable and animated not by interconnecting constituent parts, but by one seething, writhing force. It doesn’t move the arms or legs or eyes, it vivifies them, floods them with brutish vital force and bends them to its will.
The other hand, the one that holds the Blade, itches in that old, familiar way. An itch, deep in dead bones where it can't be scratched. A torment carried jaggedly along phantom nerves, begging to be drowned, however temporarily, by the relief of slaughter, gore and blood. It remembers the itch, despises it. The gaps between are only bearable when they’re working up to massacre. Like the junkie with the needle, there is the ritual. A ritual that begins with the careful selection of the victim and builds up, through the hunt, to the butchery and the desecration. It doesn’t live just for ceaseless, thoughtless carnage.It lives for the whole process.
A demon stands by the bed, wittering on.It recognises him from the host’s memories. Crowley, a grasper, ambitious. Nothing particularly special, and yet he still thinks to bind it. He may style himself the King of Hell but like so many before him he’s ephemeral, transient.It cares not for his machinations, has no interest in hell, in the ruling of demons or in the orchestration of grand schemes. It exists purely for the hunt and the slaughter.
There’s no hunt to be had here, but there is at least a kind of slaughter. It stands, Blade clasped tightly by its side, unable to let go. Its hold on the host body is only maintained by the energy that’s cycling through the flesh, back and forth from the Mark to the Blade. The body is dead, still, and if it lets go before the flesh is revived this unnatural animation will sputter out.
It had this problem before, knows how to fix it. But there’s a risk. To revive the body would be to reattach the soul, to welcome him back properly into his own flesh and give him the chance to do what the first host did- throw down the Blade, rid himself of the Mark. It's spent a while living in this host’s head. It thinks he’s stronger than the previous one in some ways, but weaker in others. Crippled by self-disgust and doubt, but full of the same kind of love that allowed the first to put down the Blade and retreat to the wilderness.
It kills Crowley quickly, Blade slashing across his throat, choking off his serpentine whisperings. The Queen and King of hell are both dead now, and the pit will be as it was. Chaos and malice and pain without order or control.
It takes a moment to plot its next course of action. The angel and the brother have to be killed, obliterated so thoroughly that the host doesn’t even have graves to mourn at. This host has a habit of breaking through possessions for the ones he loves. It can see his history, paw through his memories. The deed needs to be done before the body is revived, while his soul is still drifting aimlessly around the flesh, present but not connected. That has its own risk though. One slip, one instant of separation from the Blade and it will be resigned, dormant, to a corpse until someone reconnects the circuit once more.
It kicks Crowley’s body under the bed, just in case, and straps the Blade firmly to the host’s leg. It makes for Sam’s room, finds itself stuck at the door, looks down and curses. A devil’s trap has been scrawled on the floor, Sam’s insurance against Crowley.
It hisses. It had become so used to the host’s human body that it hadn’t accounted for this. It makes things harder, but not irreparably so. It concentrates, peels the black sheen off the host’s eyes, shouts out Sam’s name and then crumples to the floor.
“Dean?”
Fear, trepidation, a sliver of hope. It can work with those. What it can’t work with is the faintest flicker of the host’s soul stirring deep within loose, redundant flesh. It tamps him down, wraps him up and smothers him in power pulled from the Blade.
“I-I can’t get out.”
“What happened, Dean?”
“Crowley, the Blade, I don’t know. I- I just woke up, tried to find you, and-”
“And now you’re stuck in a devil’s trap.”
“Yeah…”
While they’re talking it plunders the host’s memories, learning the way he talks, the way he responds to Sam.
“So, what, you’re a demon now?”
“Maybe. I don’t goddamn know, Sam.”
“Well, do you feel, I don’t know, different?”
“Uh, a little? Angrier maybe. Nothing the Mark wasn’t doing anyway.”
“This, this might be a good thing.”
“Yeah, Sam. I’m a demon. King douchebag out of all the evil things we hunt and kill. Show me the silver frickin’ lining.”
“Dean, we can cure demons. This might be the way we get you back to, well, you again.”
“Y’think?”
“It’s worth a chance.”
“Not you.”
“What?”
“Last time you cured a demon it nearly killed you. You finish the last trial, who knows that could happen.”
“Who then?”
“I don’t know, okay. But we’ll work it out. Now can you let me outta this goddamn trap?”
“Uh…”
“What, don’t trust me, Sammy?”
“Well you are stuck in a devil’s trap.”
“Okay, okay. Well, this isn’t holy ground, so you’re gonna have to let me out some time.”
“I’ll get the cuffs we used on Crowley. Stay put.”
“I’m not even dignifying that with a sarcastic remark.”
It sits cross-legged on the floor, considering. It needs out of this trap, but it doesn’t want to trade one form of imprisonment for another. It probably wouldn’t be able to break those cuffs, and that’d make the next step a lot more complicated.
Sam returns and it can read the hesitance in his body. His hunched over shoulders and the set of his jaw. He doesn’t want to do this, but if he sees the slightest hint that this isn’t his brother sitting before him he won’t balk. It stands and offers up the host’s wrists. Sam sighs, hesitates, steps into the trap.
He realises his mistake almost instantly. Unfortunately, as usual, almost isn’t enough. It grabs Sam’s hands, wrenches his wrists back with demonic strength until they snap, white bone poking obscenely up through tanned skin and fresh blood.
“Dean?” Sam chokes out.
It doesn’t bother to answer. It just grabs Sam’s right shoulder with one hand, lashes out with the other, driving an outstretched, clawed hand against his ribs as if to break through and tear out his heart. It pulls with one hand and gouges with the other, succeeds in cracking a rib, two, pushes into pulpy flesh, grabs a fistful and pulls back, laughing. It hasn’t laughed like this for a long time. It'd remembered the desperate, needy satisfaction of the hunt and slaughter. It hadn’t remembered the glee. It wants to mark this moment, gather up the blood and preserve it, find a way to tattoo it into the host’s flesh so that it’d stay there forever. A warning.
Sam moans, still just about alive. It smiles, let’s the host’s eyes slick over black again. It doesn’t want to draw this out, enjoyable as it might be. There’ll be time for play when it's safe, when the host’s primary ties to this world are broken for good. It licks Sam’s blood of the host’s fingers, delicately, savouring the taste, and then puts him out of his misery before dropping his body to the floor with a dull thunk. The blood that wells up from Sam’s wounds masses in and around the devil’s trap, breaking its power.
It doesn’t step out of the trap immediately. Instead it takes Sam’s phone. Dials a number.
“Sam?”
“Dean.”
“But, you- Metatron said-”
“He was wrong, but Crowley, he attacked us. S-Sam’s dead and I’m bleeding out. You gotta help me, Cas.”
“I’m on my way, Dean. Stay with me.”
It hangs up, draws the Blade, slashes across the host’s stomach and sheathes it again. A few sluggish pulses of blood ooze out, nowhere near enough to be convincing. It expected that. That’s why it made such a mess of Sam. It scoops up great handfuls of blood and gore from the floor, smothers the host’s jacket, shirt, face, everywhere. Then it exits the bunker, collapses just outside, forces the host’s eyes to return to normal, and it waits.
*
“Dean.”
“You came, Cas.”
“Dean this isn’t as bad as it looks, I can heal you.”
“Sammy?”
“Dean, I- you know I can’t. I don’t have enough grace to bring back the dead.”
“But-”
“We’ll work something out, we always do. But let’s get you safe for now.”
Castiel cradles Dean’s head in his hands and directs his grace towards the wound. Too late does he realise what he would have seen immediately had he still been at full power. Under Dean’s skin is a pulsing, roiling mess of red that sucks his grace up eagerly. He tries to stop, to break away, but it grabs his arms, holds them still as it leeches every last scrap of rotten grace from Castiel’s vessel. The body’s cells are scoured, drained clean of angelic essence, except for one tiny fragment which, with vindictive fury, it ignites.
If it had been the last spark of his own grace, Castiel would merely have Fallen. Because it isn’t, and because he is saturated, poisoned, by another’s divinity, he is obliterated.
The spark blazes, whiplashing through cells already made unstable by the putrid, stolen grace that they’d been struggling to keep caged. There is no path of least resistance in Castiel’s body. Every scrap of him is tainted. The blaze sears the body from inside out, igniting it, and the skeletal remains of Castiel’s wings flare out and burn onto the ground. They make a sorry sight, stunted, featherless, broken and twisted at odd angles.
It drops Castiel’s limp, dead arm, stands, dusts the host’s body off. It mixes that little of the putrefying twice stolen grace with its own demonic power and floods the host body with vitality, shocking it back to life once more. It feels Dean’s soul knit sluggishly back into the flesh, vaguely aware of his surroundings, but beyond caring.
He knows he should be angry, should be screaming and fighting to wrest back control, to avenge Cas and Sam, but he isn’t. He’s just tired. Just wants it to stop. He doesn’t want to have to do the right thing anymore, slather himself in blood and pain and misery for the sake of everyone else. He’s no Atlas. He can’t do this. Not again.
He doesn’t accept it, but he doesn’t try and fight it either. He lets it make them one.
*
He kicks the body at his feet and it rolls over. A wish he made a long time ago, when he was just him has been answered. He doesn’t feel a damn thing.
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Castiel, Crowley
Rating: T
Word count: 2,023
Warnings: Violence, Angst, Character Death
Also available on AO3
Summary: The other hand, the one that holds the Blade, itches in that old, familiar way. An itch, deep in dead bones where it can't be scratched. A torment carried jaggedly along phantom nerves, begging to be drowned, however temporarily, by the relief of slaughter, gore and blood.
His eyes open and he sees nothing. Feels nothing. Is nothing. He’s not there anymore, not really. Not yet. Might never be again. For now he is merely a conduit, a vessel for a darker power. One that burns and screams through his veins, howling in gleeful release.
It takes stock of his body. It's body now, a host and nothing more. Where once it was a grudgingly accepted parasite, a means to an end that he thought he could use, now it has control. It no longer needs to be quick and cautious. No longer needs to carefully avoid situations that might check the tidal waves of hated and anger that it draws up and harnesses as they flow through him to wrest temporary control. Now it can afford to take its time. Luxuriate.
It holds the host’s hand up, examines the tanned skin and sinew. Such a curious thing, the human body. A thousand, thousand tiny, fragile components all reliant on each other. Not this one, though, not any more. Now this body is a shell, almost invulnerable and animated not by interconnecting constituent parts, but by one seething, writhing force. It doesn’t move the arms or legs or eyes, it vivifies them, floods them with brutish vital force and bends them to its will.
The other hand, the one that holds the Blade, itches in that old, familiar way. An itch, deep in dead bones where it can't be scratched. A torment carried jaggedly along phantom nerves, begging to be drowned, however temporarily, by the relief of slaughter, gore and blood. It remembers the itch, despises it. The gaps between are only bearable when they’re working up to massacre. Like the junkie with the needle, there is the ritual. A ritual that begins with the careful selection of the victim and builds up, through the hunt, to the butchery and the desecration. It doesn’t live just for ceaseless, thoughtless carnage.It lives for the whole process.
A demon stands by the bed, wittering on.It recognises him from the host’s memories. Crowley, a grasper, ambitious. Nothing particularly special, and yet he still thinks to bind it. He may style himself the King of Hell but like so many before him he’s ephemeral, transient.It cares not for his machinations, has no interest in hell, in the ruling of demons or in the orchestration of grand schemes. It exists purely for the hunt and the slaughter.
There’s no hunt to be had here, but there is at least a kind of slaughter. It stands, Blade clasped tightly by its side, unable to let go. Its hold on the host body is only maintained by the energy that’s cycling through the flesh, back and forth from the Mark to the Blade. The body is dead, still, and if it lets go before the flesh is revived this unnatural animation will sputter out.
It had this problem before, knows how to fix it. But there’s a risk. To revive the body would be to reattach the soul, to welcome him back properly into his own flesh and give him the chance to do what the first host did- throw down the Blade, rid himself of the Mark. It's spent a while living in this host’s head. It thinks he’s stronger than the previous one in some ways, but weaker in others. Crippled by self-disgust and doubt, but full of the same kind of love that allowed the first to put down the Blade and retreat to the wilderness.
It kills Crowley quickly, Blade slashing across his throat, choking off his serpentine whisperings. The Queen and King of hell are both dead now, and the pit will be as it was. Chaos and malice and pain without order or control.
It takes a moment to plot its next course of action. The angel and the brother have to be killed, obliterated so thoroughly that the host doesn’t even have graves to mourn at. This host has a habit of breaking through possessions for the ones he loves. It can see his history, paw through his memories. The deed needs to be done before the body is revived, while his soul is still drifting aimlessly around the flesh, present but not connected. That has its own risk though. One slip, one instant of separation from the Blade and it will be resigned, dormant, to a corpse until someone reconnects the circuit once more.
It kicks Crowley’s body under the bed, just in case, and straps the Blade firmly to the host’s leg. It makes for Sam’s room, finds itself stuck at the door, looks down and curses. A devil’s trap has been scrawled on the floor, Sam’s insurance against Crowley.
It hisses. It had become so used to the host’s human body that it hadn’t accounted for this. It makes things harder, but not irreparably so. It concentrates, peels the black sheen off the host’s eyes, shouts out Sam’s name and then crumples to the floor.
“Dean?”
Fear, trepidation, a sliver of hope. It can work with those. What it can’t work with is the faintest flicker of the host’s soul stirring deep within loose, redundant flesh. It tamps him down, wraps him up and smothers him in power pulled from the Blade.
“I-I can’t get out.”
“What happened, Dean?”
“Crowley, the Blade, I don’t know. I- I just woke up, tried to find you, and-”
“And now you’re stuck in a devil’s trap.”
“Yeah…”
While they’re talking it plunders the host’s memories, learning the way he talks, the way he responds to Sam.
“So, what, you’re a demon now?”
“Maybe. I don’t goddamn know, Sam.”
“Well, do you feel, I don’t know, different?”
“Uh, a little? Angrier maybe. Nothing the Mark wasn’t doing anyway.”
“This, this might be a good thing.”
“Yeah, Sam. I’m a demon. King douchebag out of all the evil things we hunt and kill. Show me the silver frickin’ lining.”
“Dean, we can cure demons. This might be the way we get you back to, well, you again.”
“Y’think?”
“It’s worth a chance.”
“Not you.”
“What?”
“Last time you cured a demon it nearly killed you. You finish the last trial, who knows that could happen.”
“Who then?”
“I don’t know, okay. But we’ll work it out. Now can you let me outta this goddamn trap?”
“Uh…”
“What, don’t trust me, Sammy?”
“Well you are stuck in a devil’s trap.”
“Okay, okay. Well, this isn’t holy ground, so you’re gonna have to let me out some time.”
“I’ll get the cuffs we used on Crowley. Stay put.”
“I’m not even dignifying that with a sarcastic remark.”
It sits cross-legged on the floor, considering. It needs out of this trap, but it doesn’t want to trade one form of imprisonment for another. It probably wouldn’t be able to break those cuffs, and that’d make the next step a lot more complicated.
Sam returns and it can read the hesitance in his body. His hunched over shoulders and the set of his jaw. He doesn’t want to do this, but if he sees the slightest hint that this isn’t his brother sitting before him he won’t balk. It stands and offers up the host’s wrists. Sam sighs, hesitates, steps into the trap.
He realises his mistake almost instantly. Unfortunately, as usual, almost isn’t enough. It grabs Sam’s hands, wrenches his wrists back with demonic strength until they snap, white bone poking obscenely up through tanned skin and fresh blood.
“Dean?” Sam chokes out.
It doesn’t bother to answer. It just grabs Sam’s right shoulder with one hand, lashes out with the other, driving an outstretched, clawed hand against his ribs as if to break through and tear out his heart. It pulls with one hand and gouges with the other, succeeds in cracking a rib, two, pushes into pulpy flesh, grabs a fistful and pulls back, laughing. It hasn’t laughed like this for a long time. It'd remembered the desperate, needy satisfaction of the hunt and slaughter. It hadn’t remembered the glee. It wants to mark this moment, gather up the blood and preserve it, find a way to tattoo it into the host’s flesh so that it’d stay there forever. A warning.
Sam moans, still just about alive. It smiles, let’s the host’s eyes slick over black again. It doesn’t want to draw this out, enjoyable as it might be. There’ll be time for play when it's safe, when the host’s primary ties to this world are broken for good. It licks Sam’s blood of the host’s fingers, delicately, savouring the taste, and then puts him out of his misery before dropping his body to the floor with a dull thunk. The blood that wells up from Sam’s wounds masses in and around the devil’s trap, breaking its power.
It doesn’t step out of the trap immediately. Instead it takes Sam’s phone. Dials a number.
“Sam?”
“Dean.”
“But, you- Metatron said-”
“He was wrong, but Crowley, he attacked us. S-Sam’s dead and I’m bleeding out. You gotta help me, Cas.”
“I’m on my way, Dean. Stay with me.”
It hangs up, draws the Blade, slashes across the host’s stomach and sheathes it again. A few sluggish pulses of blood ooze out, nowhere near enough to be convincing. It expected that. That’s why it made such a mess of Sam. It scoops up great handfuls of blood and gore from the floor, smothers the host’s jacket, shirt, face, everywhere. Then it exits the bunker, collapses just outside, forces the host’s eyes to return to normal, and it waits.
*
“Dean.”
“You came, Cas.”
“Dean this isn’t as bad as it looks, I can heal you.”
“Sammy?”
“Dean, I- you know I can’t. I don’t have enough grace to bring back the dead.”
“But-”
“We’ll work something out, we always do. But let’s get you safe for now.”
Castiel cradles Dean’s head in his hands and directs his grace towards the wound. Too late does he realise what he would have seen immediately had he still been at full power. Under Dean’s skin is a pulsing, roiling mess of red that sucks his grace up eagerly. He tries to stop, to break away, but it grabs his arms, holds them still as it leeches every last scrap of rotten grace from Castiel’s vessel. The body’s cells are scoured, drained clean of angelic essence, except for one tiny fragment which, with vindictive fury, it ignites.
If it had been the last spark of his own grace, Castiel would merely have Fallen. Because it isn’t, and because he is saturated, poisoned, by another’s divinity, he is obliterated.
The spark blazes, whiplashing through cells already made unstable by the putrid, stolen grace that they’d been struggling to keep caged. There is no path of least resistance in Castiel’s body. Every scrap of him is tainted. The blaze sears the body from inside out, igniting it, and the skeletal remains of Castiel’s wings flare out and burn onto the ground. They make a sorry sight, stunted, featherless, broken and twisted at odd angles.
It drops Castiel’s limp, dead arm, stands, dusts the host’s body off. It mixes that little of the putrefying twice stolen grace with its own demonic power and floods the host body with vitality, shocking it back to life once more. It feels Dean’s soul knit sluggishly back into the flesh, vaguely aware of his surroundings, but beyond caring.
He knows he should be angry, should be screaming and fighting to wrest back control, to avenge Cas and Sam, but he isn’t. He’s just tired. Just wants it to stop. He doesn’t want to have to do the right thing anymore, slather himself in blood and pain and misery for the sake of everyone else. He’s no Atlas. He can’t do this. Not again.
He doesn’t accept it, but he doesn’t try and fight it either. He lets it make them one.
*
He kicks the body at his feet and it rolls over. A wish he made a long time ago, when he was just him has been answered. He doesn’t feel a damn thing.