Fic post for dc_dystopia

[seraphwings]

Don't normally post these to my home journal, as my spn fanfiction ordinarily goes straight onto the deancastiel comm, but the dystopia comm format seems to require a link to one's own journal, so ...

Feel free to skip right over this if angsty supernatural angel fanfiction is not your cup of tea.


He wakes slowly, as though he lies beneath layer upon layer of thin fabric, removed one by one as he is pulled gently upwards, towards a light that starts distant and dim and, as he approaches, grows warm and welcoming.  The final layer slides away; he is free to open his eyes, free to inhale.  He is exposed in the light, utterly naked and laid bare to the very core of himself.  A wavering moment in which he shies, gaze dropping, a swaying motion that nearly becomes a step backward, but the moment is quick and fleeting, and he looks up.

He has done this before.  Sort of.

The memory comes sluggish but brings along others; a vague glimpse of similar births and resurrections, too clear recollection of the events that pushed him into death.  (There have been too many deaths to really be comfortable with.  Clearly he needs to look into a healthier lifestyle.)  He remembers the folly that became the end of him this time (a portal, and fire, and light, and creatures) and tries to shut his eyes, to turn his face away… but there will be none of that here.  The light is awareness itself;  it is a presence that both soothes and gentles him, revives and fills him, but will not be hidden from.  It knows him, burns and dissects him and will not allow secrets, will not accept excuses.  It knows him -- it made him and it named him -- and there is no hiding here.

He knows, suddenly.  The truth of it rings deep and resounding through him, the toll of a terrible bell and the sound of his name.  It shakes him, rattles loose the frozen moment.

"Father…"

Shame wells up within him; he chokes on it, tastes bile and horror and falls to his knees (he has knees.)

"I'm sorry," Castiel gasps, moans, sobs, shrieks.  None of the above -- his communication here is the tremble of angelsong, a fluctuation of a cosmic wavelength.  Nevertheless, he has been human, and there is a part of him that remembers and seeks to return to that wicked, strange state.  Even here his true form assembles in a guise of flesh, his voice adjusts to the gravel smoke of James Novak.

"Hey-- Hey, don't… Oh, geez…"  The voice that replies is not anything Castiel expected.  It's a tenor, embarrassment coloring its tone as the words trail and clip, and he knows that voice.  Castiel straightens, up from the low scraping bow, stares in head-tilted puzzlement as the light bends, and compacts, and Chuck Shurley grimaces down at him.  The prophet seems nervous and horrifically out of place, standing in the glory and power of Heaven itself in a terrycloth bathrobe and a stained pair of bunny slippers.  He has a mug in one hand, lukewarm coffee sloshing inside.  His fingers are ink-stained.

Castiel blinks very slowly.  "Prophet."

“Cas,” Chuck returns.  “You, uh.  You look okay.  I mean, considering.”

“Considering.”  Castiel takes a deep breath.  The light -- blinding, encompassing, Creation itself -- is faded back again, a star so distant he might have only seen a memory of it.  Something in him aches fiercely; for a moment, for two, he’d thought he was with his Father.  He’d thought God had finally come to see him.  “Considering that I am dead.”

“Again,” Chuck agrees.  He ducks his head a little, and scratches at the side of his neck in a manner that seems sheepish.  “Leviathans this time.  That probably sucked.”

A noncommittal grunt; Castiel is having trouble standing, and he isn’t sure if his legs are too weak because of injury or fatigue, or if they’re too new.  He’s wobbly as a newborn colt; he can feel his wings are stiff and rather useless.  He works them open slowly behind them, unfurling wide with a wince.  They’re wet, like a freshly hatched chick’s.  He can feel -- he can remember -- the distinct feeling of being torn apart and devoured from the inside, monsters gnashing and gnawing at him, wreaking terrible hollows out of his being.  He can remember being shoved to the background, pressed down and squeezed into thin, trembling nothingness, held silent and still as the beasts slid by him, and their great, many bodies were slippery dry scales, like leather snakeskin.

He remembers water.  And that’s about it.

“I died,” he murmurs, softer this time.  “And I am back, again.  Resurrected a third time.”

“Fourth,” Chuck says.  “If you, uh.  After you reopened Purgatory.  There was a little bit, there.  You were definitely dead there, too.  So this is four.”  He holds up a few fingers to tick them off; Castiel isn’t listening.  He doesn’t need to, he knows his own deaths without hearing the Prophet recount what it is to explode in a shower of messy righteous bits.

He looks up instead, interrupting a recount of what happens when the devil decides you’re a nuisance.  “Why?” he asks.  “Why does He keep bringing me back?  What more must I do?”  He stops trying to rise to his feet, accepting a slumped seat instead.  His hands fall into his lap, head bowing.  “What does He want of me?”

There’s a notable hesitation; a few seconds later, there’s a hand in his hair.  It smells like scotch and potato chips, but fingers thread through the mess of black hair in a way that Castiel finds inexplicably soothing.  He leans into the touch, closing his eyes.  Wonders why it feels so good, if he’s really so starved for approval and affection that even a simple touch from a boozed-out writer would affect him like this.  His wings fold against his back and the feathers shiver before flitting back into place; one of Chuck’s thumbs slips down over Castiel’s forehead, rests there with a slight pressure before sliding one direction, then another.  An old motion clumsily repeated in the modern church.  Benediction.

His eyes snap open.  Holds utterly still.  For a moment, only a moment, there was a flicker of that presence again.  The Power and the Glory, in a dirty bathrobe with His hand in Castiel’s hair.  The angel does not look up; does not dare.  He stares straight forward and reaches out, tentative, for any semblance of confirmation of the impossible.

God is beside him.

He’s too shocked to do anything, too bewildered to even be overwhelmed.  The natural inclination to fall back into a bow is pushed aside by the need to gape, because God has bedhead and five o’clock shadow, and bags under his eyes, and the orange smear of a Cheetos stain on the hem of his bathrobe.  God is a human, a human is God.

“Sometimes,” Chuck shrugs, giving a faint grin.  “Mostly not, but... sometimes.  It’s kind of a weird thing.  I’ll get into it, I’ll explain.  I promise.  But, uh.  Look, Cas.  Why I’m here, now.  Why you’re here, now.”  He pulls his hand back -- Castiel flinches at the loss, feels his grace keen for the touch of his Father -- and slips it into a pocket.  That presence, most holy, fades back again.  It is only Chuck Shurley standing there, weary and rumpled and with terrible blood pressure.

“I don’t,” Castiel starts.  Stops.  Fails.  Tries again.  His existence in a nutshell.  “I don’t understand...”

“Cas,” Chuck sighs.  “Shit, Cas.  We gotta talk.”

---

Castiel has seen galaxies born and die since his creation; he’s seen simple things in the sea throw themselves, gasping, onto dry land, and seen them grow tall and straight and develop language and skill and self-awareness.  He’s seen the whole of the world, the cold dense center of stars.  He’s analyzed the spun matter of a blade of grass.  He’s dragged himself through Hell’s compact layers and he’s flown comet-bright across the circle of Heaven.  In short, Castiel has seen many things over a vast span of time.  There is little that can stun him speechless.

He has eight hundred questions and demands and not a single one will come out.  All that he can seem to focus on is that Chuck Shurley -- God -- took a seat beside him and that Chuck’s legs are uncommonly hairy, and there’s a bruise on one nubby thin ankle.  The battered bathrobe is awkward to sit on the ground in.  Castiel now knows that God wears three year old Hanes underwear, worn thin in one spot.  He knows that God stammers when God notices that you can see his underwear.

He has no idea what is happening any more.

Chuck is explaining, but the words are difficult to contain.  The humor of the situation isn’t lost on him.  After all of this time, finally -- finally! -- he has found God.  Finally, he can ask him why, why, why.  Why the apocalypse, why did you leave us, why wouldn’t you help us?  Why did you turn away from me, what was the point, what is the point now?  Why do you keep bringing me back?  Why would you let me do what I’ve done?  Why wouldn’t you just give me that one tiny sign?

Why didn’t you stop me?

But he can’t seem to utter a single damned word.  He just stares, mouth open slightly, no sound daring to escape the chapped threshold of lips.  God is speaking.  The storyteller.

He learns that God can get tired of being God.  That he can love humans so much that he needs to see what it is to live as one.  That his final act of Creation was a skinny prematurely-born baby named Charles, into which he poured himself.  That Chuck is sometimes aware, sometimes not.  It comes and goes, God says as he scratches at a knee.  The awareness that one is He Who Is Called I Am.  Mostly he’s just Chuck.  But sometimes there’s more.

“I left you,” God says.  “Not out of spite.  Not out of disappointment.  It was just... time.”  He spreads his hands and shrugs.  There’s a smear of ink on his index finger; the cuticle of his thumb has been repeatedly gnawed on.  “I had intended certain things to happen from the very beginning, Castiel.  The only thing that has ever managed to surprise me,” he adds with a smile, “is you.  You went off-script.  You changed.  That’s when I realized what I’d done, the sort of system I’d put into motion.  Things have their time.  Everything, its own time.  You reminded me.  So you, of all things, you.  I had to bring you back.  That first time with Raphael.”  He sighs.  He is Chuck, rubbing his forehead.  “You know how hard it was to stand there and wait with you, to watch you blown to smithereens?  But Raphael would’ve caught on if I’d intervened.  So I had to let you go and then bring you back.”  He pauses.  “And then Lucifer.  I don’t know what it is you kids have with blowing each other up.  It’s a pain in the ass to fix, you know.”

Castiel blinks.  He thinks of his fingers snapping, and Raphael perishing in a fine mist of blood and gore.

“Sorry,” he offers.

“Oh -- don’t.  Don’t apologize.”  Chuck shakes his head.  “Not to me.  I wish you could know, Cas.  I wish you could really know how...”  He trails off, and for a moment something in his eyes is older than the stars, older and incomparably tired.  Castiel has to look away.

There’s a long quiet before Chuck starts up again.  “The thing about angels is that you were made to love me.  I might’ve gone overboard there.  Somewhere along the line it got into your heads that you weren’t supposed to ever think for yourselves, that you were only created to serve.  Not … strictly true, but it’s a little complicated.  The end result being, when I left, things went nutters up here.  You might’ve noticed,” he says dryly, “that your siblings got kind of lost without any orders to follow.  But I had never intended to be around to give orders forever.  I started the system, and once I was sure that it was working, well...”  He smiles.  “There’s no need for God anymore.”

“There is,” Castiel says, fierce.  “There is always a need for you.  We need you.”

“Not so much,” Chuck says.  “Humans carry on just fine without constant interference.  They flourish.  They rise and fall and rise again, they build and rebuild.  They don’t need pillars of fire to outline morality.  They don’t need an Almighty Finger pointing out the obvious.  They’ve got it, now,” he says.  “I didn’t step in during the Apocalypse because I knew they could handle it themselves, Castiel.  And they did.  They’re still here.  Without Divine Intervention.  Kinda cool, don’t you think?  I made humanity so well that they’ve rendered me obsolete.  I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder.”

There’s a cold sinking feeling starting to spread through Castiel’s heart.  He swallows it back, tells himself that it isn’t hurt, although that would make sense.  He isn’t quite so selfless to pretend that he’s pleased to know that mankind is the better creation.  He’s known, of course - all of the angels know, on a certain level, though it’s another thing entirely to hear it from the mouth of God himself.  It stings to hear from the source that he is a part of the flawed first batch.  So yes, that does hurt.  But what makes him look away, what clenches at his heart, is not that.

He is suddenly quite sure that something is coming.  Chuck is heading somewhere that Castiel doesn’t want to hear.  This is going somewhere terrible.

From the look that Chuck gives him, Castiel knows that he is right.

And it gets worse.

“The problem then,” Chuck continues, and his voice has gentled, “is that while mankind can continue without me, the angels, it proved, could not.  When the Apocalypse failed, the idea that you had to continue on as you had been -- alone, without direction... Well.”  He huffs a short laugh, sniffs and rubs at his eyes.  “I don’t need to tell you how that went down.”

“We self-destructed,” Castiel says quietly.

Chuck looks at him, gaze sharpening.  There’s regret there.  It doesn’t help.  “Yes,” he says.  “In quite a few ways.  Raphael essentially decided to destroy the world out of directionless ennui.  He was tired of the game, so he wanted to throw the whole board out the window.  I mean, I get it,” he says.  “I’ve quit enough games of Monopoly.  It’s 2am and you’ve got no hotels and you just keep passing Go, and it’s like, is this game ever gonna freakin’ end?  I already know I can’t win, what’s the point?”  A pause.  “That went right over your head.  No, it’s fine, I saw it go over your head.  I should’ve taught you how to play.  I think you’d hate it too.  But, that doesn’t matter.  I just mean that, it’s no big surprise.  You weren’t built to exist without me.  It’s not your fault.  It’s just... it is what it is.”  He shifts, smooths out the bathrobe where it lays draped over a thigh.  “Like I said, everything has a time.  The time for angels is over.”

That doesn’t upset Castiel like he thinks it ought to.  He understands now, the sort of desolation that would spur Raphael on to attempting to end the fabric of everything, if it just meant he could stop for a bit.  If he could just be done.  “I see,” he says.  The end of angels.  A poet would be horrified, but as an angel, he just feels numb about it.  “Why, then?  I was dead.  You brought me back just to have me die with the rest of them?  I didn’t need to know all of this.”

“... Not with the rest of them, Castiel.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.”  Chuck sighs again, pushing himself up to his feet.  He motions at Castiel, urges him up.  Castiel obliges, finds his limbs much more willing this time.  Being taller than God is strange.  He doesn’t much like it.  “I need to get to the point.  I’ve been stalling.”  He hesitates, looks outward toward some middle-distance, sucking on his bottom lip.  “I’m sorry, Cas,” he says.  “Before anything else happens, I really want you to know that.  I’m sorry, and I do love you.  I love all of you.  I want you to know that.  I want you to never forget that.”  He looks at him; Castiel tries to avert his eyes, tries to look down, but Chuck reaches out and catches his chin, holds it up so that their gazes lock.  There’s no force in the touch, but it is the Hand of God, and so Castiel does not move.

“I love you,” God says again.

Castiel’s eyes feel strange.  Hot.  Burning, slightly itchy.  Wet.  Oh, he thinks dully.  I’m about to cry.

He wonders how Dean can stand to do it so often.  It feels terrible.

“Dean,” Chuck nods with a small chuckle.  “You still think about him.  Good.  We’ll get to that, too, Castiel, but there are things I still need to cover, and we’re low on time.”  He lets him go, looks around with a slow exhale.  Castiel reaches up quickly, wipes his face and stares at the moisture left on his fingers with something close to awe.  When he looks up, Chuck is watching him with an expression that’s bordering too close to fondness.

“I’m not worthy of that look,” Castiel whispers.

“You are,” God corrects.  “Of all of them, my Castiel, you are.  But we need to do this.  Look around you,” he says, nodding toward their surroundings.  Castiel blinks once and follows Chuck’s lead, turning his head this way and that.  Around them Heaven continues to exist, quiet and bright and lovely, light stretching in every direction and in the layers above them the souls of mankind turn and turn and turn in their eternal personal paradises.

“Heaven,” Castiel says.  “What about it?”

“You don’t remember, and I think it’s better that way.  I’m not going to change that.”  Chuck slips his hands into the pockets of his robe, and for the first time he starts to frown.  “The leviathan did more with you than you realize, Castiel.  You lost more time than you know.”

He winces automatically at the mention of the beasts, flinching away from even the memory of squeezing, crushing serpents taunting and devouring all that he is.  Yes, if there is more to that, he’d rather not know.  “What else,” he asks, aware that his voice is curiously flat.  “What else could I possibly have done?  I murdered hundreds.  Thousands.  Snuffed them out, your greatest creations, like no more than candle flames.  What else could there be?”  Dean hates me already, he does not say.

Chuck glances at him anyway.

And then looks away.

“I told you already, Castiel,” he says.  Hesitates.  “I told you, the time of angels is over.  We are standing in the center of Heaven, and we are utterly alone.”

It takes a minute to sink in.  When it does, he nearly sinks to his knees again, but for Chuck reaching out to grab his elbow, to hold him upright.  He doesn’t even feel it, staring in every direction, reaching out with all of his meagre Grace at once, pushing himself to the edges of everything to scrape and search for a hint of any of his siblings -- nothing.  Not a wisp of song, not a flicker of presence.  He starts to breathe too quickly, shaking, trying harder.  He knew -- he knew he had killed so many, killed Zuriel and Hanadriel, Laviriel and Candria, and Rachel, and Balthazar (oh, oh Balthazar, that one still stung so bitterly, I am so sorry), but there should still be multitudes, there should still be the Host, there should be Song through his head, endless Holy Holy Holy, the familiar static of “angel radio” and there is only silence.

“Dead,” he whispers.  The angels are dead.

Chuck says something but all he hears is muffled sound, and then he’s being pushed down, back to a seat, his head gently lowered between his legs and he’s being tsk’d, literally Chuck is going “tsk” and it’s the most inane thing Castiel has ever heard.  The angels are dead -- the leviathans, wrapped in Castiel and gorging themselves on his grace, had strode into paradise and obliterated them. Castiel had killed them.  And God goes tsk.  His family is dead and God is treating him like... like some histrionic human about to faint from hysterics.  He does not faint.  He’s an angel, possibly the last-...

“Wait--”  He grabs at Chuck’s arm, desperate, clutching soft fabric.  “Lucifer.  And Michael.  They’re still -- the Cage, I could not have possibly -- even the Leviathan can’t just slip into Hell, they must still be--”  He trails off, the words dying in his throat.  Chuck is shaking his head.

“Lucifer and Michael killed each other,” he says.  “Three months into their imprisonment together.  The Cage has been destroyed for a long time, blasted apart by the shock of power they released at death.  They destroyed each other, and Adam’s soul slipped free.”  He lays his hand over Castiel’s.  “You’re the only angel in existence, now.  It’s just you.”

“Why?!  Why bring me back at all?  We’re dead -- we’re dead.”  He inhales deeply, twice.  Forces air into lungs that don’t even need air.  He is an angel, too used to this vessel, he doesn’t even need to breathe, there is no reason to be dizzy.  Is this why?  Because he let himself fall?  Or because of the souls?  He was not god, he was never god, but he’d been referred to as “mutated” -- was that why?  Is he no longer even angel enough to die with his brothers and sisters?  Or...

Or is this penance?  Punishment?  Divine retribution?

“You bring me back, again and again,” Castiel says.  He barely recognizes the voice with which he speaks, so thick and tremulous.  “Is it for this?  To make me feel this?”  He looks up, forces himself to look at his Father, to accept this truth if that is what it is.  “Have I not suffered enough yet?  I fell, and I... I called you a son of a bitch once, and … I killed-- so many, I--”

“What?  Oh!  No! God, no!”  Chuck flails for a moment, hands fluttering about like papers caught in a wind.  “No, Cas, it’s not like that.  I wouldn’t do that.  I never wanted anyone to be unhappy,” he adds, hands falling to his sides again.  His tone is so mournful, so sad, that Castiel can only believe him.  There’s a bizarre comfort in knowing that God is as miserable as you are.

He dwells on that for a minute.

“There is a reason, though.”  It’s an effort to stand, but he manages.  Curls and uncurls his hands, swallows down something gross that he realizes is phlegm.  The extensive range of emotions humans can feel is alarming enough without considering the physical reactions the strong emotions can also cause.  He needs to blow his nose; he sniffs it all down instead, swallows again.  “A reason I don’t stay dead.  A reason that you’re here, now.”  He thinks of earth, and mankind, and Dean, and the league of horrors that he has unleashed upon them all.

“I’m not here to help with that,” Chuck says softly.  “The leviathan will be their own undoing.  That much is already set in motion.”

“Then...?”

“What our friend is waffling on about,” interjects a new voice -- familiar, echoing and snide, and Castiel’s spine goes stiff, wings twitching in alarm as he turns to face him -- “is that you and he are here because he needs you.”

“Death.”  Castiel squares his shoulders as he faces him.  He lifts his chin, aware that the last time he and this force met, he was sorely in the wrong.  “I... owe you an explanation.  And an apology.  For my misbehavior.”

“Don’t,” Death cuts in, waving a hand.  He looks as he always does: tall, angular and bony, posture perfect and gazing down the length of his nose; hands curled casual over the top of his walking stick.  Impeccable. Inevitable.  “You were full of yourself, yes, but your actions were the movements of a cog set within a great machine.  One does not blame the gears for the ways they must turn.”  He looks past Castiel; gives Chuck a long look and one slow nod.

“You’re early,” Chuck says.

“I am precisely on time.  You dawdle.”

“I do things carefully.  I deliberate.”

“You procrastinate.”

“Worse than my editor....” Chuck mutters.  He looks from Death to Castiel, lips thinning.  Regret again.  He rubs his hand through his hair, makes an even more unruly mess.  “I wish I had longer to do this, but... All things in their time.  I told you, Cas.  But if anything I told you, if you keep any of it, make sure it’s that I love you.  I love you, and I’m sorry, and Monopoly is a shitty game.  But, mostly that I love you.” He breathes in loudly.  “But now here’s the hard part.”

“Why is he here?” Castiel is looking at Death.  Death is looking back, bored and unaffected as ever, giving the angel a long consideration before his gaze flicks back toward Chuck.

And suddenly he knows, Castiel knows, that Death is not here for him.

He looks at Chuck slowly, mouth open.  Speechless for the second time.  Chuck grins back weakly, shrugging.  “All things,” he says again.  “Even me.”

“I have never kept it a secret that I would reap God,” Death says.  “I don’t know why nobody listens.”

“This -- this can’t happen.”  Castiel pushes himself in front of Chuck and spreads his wings wide to shield him.  “You can’t.  He’s... He’s God.  He’s needed.  The whole world, the-...”

“Castiel.”  Chuck’s hand on his shoulder; gentle, but he has no choice but to step aside as his Creator moves him.  “That’s what I’m trying to say.  I am not needed.  Mankind has succeeded every expectation I had for them.  They work best without me, without interference.  And so I can finally stop.”  He smiles as Cas stares at him, reaches out to give him a pat on the arm, like they’re “buddies” discussing... buddy things.  “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, Castiel.  I’m happy that’s it here.  I’m happy that you can be here with me.  I wish you wouldn’t blame yourself, but I know you too well to think that.”  He laughs -- he actually laughs.  “You have no idea how much the Winchesters have changed you, and it’s for the better.  I promise, this is all for the better.”

“You can’t die,” Castiel insists.

Chuck shakes his head.  “I can.  I will.  I look forward to it.  Forever is a terrible long time.  But I can’t destroy myself, and no human could ever manage, not without destroying him or herself.  And no angel until now has ever had that sort of strength within them.  The ability to think for themselves, to turn their back on an order.”  He cracks a grin.  “To call me a son of a bitch.  Not until you.  It’s you, Castiel.  You’re the one I’ve been waiting for.  I thought, once, it might have been Morning Star, but he needed me too much.  It’s got to be you.”

“You...”

“Yes.”

“You want me to...”

Again, “Yes.”

“I have to...”  He can’t say it.  He literally cannot.  He just stares, disbelieving, at the Father he has only just found, after so long, so long, of searching.

God is smiling.

Death is waiting.

Castiel throws up.

go to part 2...