Fic: "The Kingdom of Heaven" [SPN, Castiel/Dean, PG-13], Part I
And behold a dream came to me, and visions fell down upon me, and I saw visions of chastisement, and a voice came bidding (me) to tell it to the sons of heaven, and reprimand them.
(The Book of Enoch)
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.
(Revelations 21:1)
~
"You were there."
They stand above the city of dust, the city of a hundred thousand souls, like constellations thrown to the ground, shining in the dark earth. The swords of the Host flame like another sun, rising where one has set, and in every house where there is no sacrificial mark, they extinguish one of those tiny stars.
One of the Host, a column of towering light, a galaxy unto itself, pauses amid the river of glory, like one still blue stone, and the wheels and gears of him clash and churn in distress. This is not just, he thinks. This is not right. Who has spoken to the Lord that they know this is what He commands?
The center of the angel is a nuclear brilliance - in centuries to come, men will waken from scientific sleep and attempt to sketch the intricate whorls and valences of its unfolding, refolding spheres. It pulses and thrums with the light which makes the angel himself, and spreads that heavenly energy in ever more-delicate tendrils through his torso, head, and limbs. Now, in the center of an Egyptian town, barely a muddy handspan of humble shelters, the center of the angel trembles softly as he blinks his many eyes in hesitation.
The Blood of the Lamb.
He cannot help but think that something has come down incorrectly in translation; that both human and angel are missing some basic link that would eradicate the need for this slaughter. Something digs through the angel's brain like a creature upheaving itself from long burial, and his faces frown.
The angel spins with a graceful flare of wings and bears down into the trembling, dirty body of a young shepherd praying desperately for deliverance. The breathless, tear-stained prayers end abruptly, between one breath and the next, and the shepherd stands, dark eyes now still and deep, blazing like distant stars. He slaughters one of his sheep with one hand, and strides through the chaos of the streets, slamming his bloody palm onto naked doors.
~
"Cas, c'mon buddy...stay with me back there!"
Dean's foot is practically punching through the floorboard. God help any cops who take notice of him right now, he thinks. The speedometer needle trembles near 100, and the Impala vibrates around them like an airplane on takeoff.
"He's not healing!"
Sam is in the back seat, crouching awkwardly and trying to brace both himself and Castiel around Dean's hairpin curves. His voice rises with panic, and he shouts paradoxically, "Jesus, Dean, slow down or you're gonna kill all of us!"
"Whaddya mean, not healing? Why?"
Dean yells so that he doesn't have to hear the sound of Castiel's breathing - breathing? - all liquid and gasping and irregular with pain.
"The Hell should I know?" Sam is clearly with him on the yelling thing. A glimpse in the rearview: Sam's hands, slick to the wrists with blood. Dean's heart lodges up somewhere beneath his Adam's apple and stays there, pounding like a hyperactive five-year-old with a toy drum.
"Goddammit! Cas, c'mon!"
He stares into the dark like he can burn it away with his eyes and pretends his voice didn't break on that last word like it was the beginning crack that would spread through his whole self and shatter him into bits. His hands are going numb on the wheel and he starts to feel like he's floating an inch or two above his body.
"There's...there's this blue light coming out..." Sam chokes, and Dean goes cold and calm.
Just find the nearest motel. Nearest motel. Just find the closest lit sign in the dark.
And somewhere else, floating in endless rhythm across the blank screen of his consciousness, he can't help but remember:
The moment Castiel laid a hand on you in Hell he was lost.
Too much heart.
~
"You're caught up on everything that's been going on? On the crap that your brethren have been doing to humanity all this time?"
Dean looked down his nose at the rumpled, grubby little man that housed the Scribe of God. A low-grade, but somehow satisfying anger simmered in his chest. This Metatron, he'd decided in short order, was no different than the rest of the winged, self-righteous, cowardly dicks that had been running him ragged for years. It was time for a little good old salt-of-the-earth moralizing.
But Metatron looked up at him from the clutter of his tiny kitchenette with a gaze that somehow dampened the fire in Dean's belly. Metatron's eyes weren't alien, like Cas'. They looked into Dean's with the slightly sorrowful weight of a very old man, someone who had seen ages worth of shit and yet was no closer to any ultimate truth than Dean himself.
"I don't know how much you know of me..." He began, ignoring Dean's snort of derision. "But before I became Metatron, the Voice of God, I was known as Enoch."
Dean frowned, something slowly clicking over in his brain. "Wait...Enoch...like...as in...Enochian?"
Metatron nodded.
"Yes. And I was human."
What remained of Dean's piss and vinegar dissolved right out of him, like he'd just been doused with cold water.
"What?"
"I was called upon by God to witness." Metatron looked into the distance over Dean's shoulder, his eyes unfocused now, as though whatever memories he was recalling were playing on a projector screen just behind where Dean was standing.
"W-witness what?"
"The first sins of the angels."
Dean's brain floundered around a bit, and he felt as though he'd forgotten to study for the exam; hell, forgotten that he was even registered for the class. Good thing he never tried to go to college.
"Like...Lucifer's little swan-dive?" He blustered.
"No, this was before Lucifer fell. The first Fallen were those who looked down on humanity...and fell in love."
Dean's jaw stayed awkwardly half-open.
"It's true," Metatron said softly, now looking into Dean's eyes again. "The history of humans and angels has almost always been entwined, ever since humans evolved souls. When the Watchers of Earth descended to take human lovers, they changed the tide of both human and angel fate forever."
Dean opened and closed his mouth several times, but the question that was trying to ask itself couldn't find a handhold in his churning mind.
"So, therefore, most of you are part angel," Metatron continued, oblivious to or unheeding of Dean's philosophical struggles. "It was, in a way, the beginning of the end for God. Though He wouldn't truly start to leave until centuries later, after the death of the last divine messiah."
The Scribe of God filled a glass with water from the tap and took a sip, then held the glass up to the light for a moment as though it were a miraculous artifact.
"When I set down the record and punishment of those angels who dared to interfere with the evolution of humanity, before I was an angel myself, I began to realize that - as powerful and far-seeing as they are - angels are not...cannot be the unchanging moral guideposts that humans want to believe they are. That, in many ways, they are less perfect than humans, because with all that power comes all that responsibility. You see? An angel isn't free to make the choices that a human being is, because our choices are so much more devastating. But then...in their own way, so are yours. And that's something you are all slowly coming to learn."
He turned away to set the glass down, giving Dean a second - intentionally or not - to get control over the slightly gobsmacked look on his face.
"So do you really intend on closing the doors of Hell?"
At last it was a question that Dean's brain seemed to be able to latch onto.
"It...seems like the thing to do, don't it?" He rasped.
Metatron bobbed his head slightly. "It's your choice. And that's what this has all been about. The choices your kind make. But you're going to have to weigh that choice." He shrugged, shifted his gaze back to the imaginary projector screen for a second, then leveled that gaze back onto Dean in a way that reminded him, finally and alarmingly, of Castiel, standing in the dark kitchen just after they'd first met. "Ask yourself: what's it going to take to do this...and what is the world going to be like after it's done?"
~
Motel 6 rises like a shining beacon out of the darkness of Route 34, so suddenly that Dean almost blows past it. It's only after a truly alarming U-turn that they rumble into the parking lot. Everything between Dean cutting the engine and laying Castiel's terrifyingly limp, bloody body out on one of the beds like a lab specimen is a bit of a blur.
The wound in Castiel's belly looks big enough to put a fist into, and Sam was right - that bluish light seeps around the gory edges, hinting at the blinding radiance that Dean's only glimpsed once or twice. It looks weak and fluttery right now, and it gleams in the slits beneath Castiel's dark lashes, too. Dean hears his own voice as though from across the room.
"Cas, look at me. Look at me."
Firm, low, commanding. How isn't his voice shaking? How isn't he shaking? He feels like a robot version of himself, heavy and cold and precise.
There is blood all down the angel's chin. His white shirt is half red now, and beneath it, his belly rises and falls in odd jerking motions, like a motor trying to start. His lashes flicker and open with what looks like a painfully herculean effort. His lips part to show teeth stained red.
Dean's hands are dousing the wound in rubbing alcohol, pressing wads of bandage to the gaping edges, entirely independent of his higher brain function. Castiel's pain-dark blue eyes find his with that never-failing accuracy, and Dean stares into them like if he never blinks, he can hold Cas here in the land of the living by psychic willpower alone.
"I got you. Okay? I got you."
That's when the shaking starts. It starts in his stomach, rippling outward until even the fingers that are putting iron pressure on Castiel's wound are spasming, like he's having a seizure or something. His lips are numb and his face feels cold. His eyes don't leave Castiel's, and he doesn't blink, even though they're burning.
"S-Sam."
It comes out so raw and guttural that Sam is there in an instant, wordlessly putting his hands over Dean's to help. Dean's shaking so hard now that the bed, Sam's hands, Castiel's body, are all vibrating.
"Cas," Sam says softly, and Castiel grunts a weak sound that might be Sam's name, though his bleary gaze doesn't leave Dean's. "Cas, how do we help? What do you need?"
Castiel makes a horrific rattling sound, and Dean's vision swims for the second that it takes for the noise to end and the irregular gasping to continue.
"He can't breathe; sit him up," Dean orders, his voice sounding alien in his ears. They maneuver the angel with some difficulty, propping head and shoulders a bit with pillows, trying to strike the balance between alleviating the pressure on struggling lungs and keeping the wound elevated enough. Castiel coughs wetly a few times, but quiets a bit, and, thankfully for Dean's blood pressure, which is rollercoastering uncomfortably, he opens his eyes again.
They lock with Dean's.
Please don't die, please don't fucking die.
It's not very eloquent as a prayer, and Dean doesn't know who he's praying to anyway, but it's all he can coherently think.
Long, blood-stained fingers find his wrist, stroking weakly.
"D-d-ean..."
"Right here, Cas. Can you tell us what you need?" The shaking's slowly subsiding and he's getting cold again. Dean subconsciously wonders if he's going to survive this.
"Sh-shot."
"You were shot?" Sam asks, a bit too loudly. "By who? Why aren't you healing?"
"C-crowley. Made...bullets...from...angel b-blade."
Dean feels a bit more of the blood drain from his face. Under his hands, he notices that Sam's fingers are cold. Shit.Castiel seems to notice, too, because his free hand levers itself up from the bed and wavers in the air, fingers poised on their unsteady way to Sam's forehead.
"Cas, wha-- No. Hell no. I'm fine, Cas. Don't you dare."
But Sam does sound hoarse and wavery; the adrenaline wearing thin. Dean's jaw ratchets tight. This is turning into a complete shit show.
"Sam. Go sit down."
That robot commander voice again. He can feel Sam stare at him, but his brother doesn't say anything, only slowly withdraws his hands from Castiel's wound as Dean pushes down harder. Silent and momentarily obedient. God, Dean's face must really be something right now. "We'll trade off," he amends. Still doesn't break his staredown with Cas. Most of you are part angel. Heal, then, damn you. Heal.
Dean loses track of time. It's a bit delayed, that reaction, but it happens now, that space between each and every breath that seems to take hours. Like in the movies where they cut to the clock, second hand slowing down and down, each tick echoing ever louder.
He's just staring into the blood-smeared face of his best friend, stuck between one action and the next, watching a tiny bubble of blood in the corner of Castiel's mouth, and it's so freakin' stupid, so insane, because who would've thought that the awesome creature who'd smiled when Dean stabbed him in the heart in some drafty barn a million years ago would be gurgling in his own (his vessel's own) blood, slender feverish belly trembling and bleeding under Dean's hands? That that thing whose wings (and not even his true wings) spanned the width of the barn ceiling would be dying in a shitty motel in the dark in the middle of the Colorado back country? And that Dean - give-em-hell-attitude Dean, who said "fuck you" to archangels and the entire Apocalypse - would just be watching, totally helpless, trying to tether a being the size of a skyscraper to the mortal coil with nothing but gore-slicked hands and unheard prayers?
Prayers.
"Sam. Metatron. Do you think -"
"Trying," Sam grunts, and Dean flicks a glance to him long enough to see that he is - his face ashen and eyes screwed shut as he tries with all his might to get the Voice of God on the psychic phone. Blue light pulses under Dean's fingers like lightning jumping through Cas' veins. They don't have time.
Millions and millions of years, and it all comes down to minutes and that thundering second hand. Dean feels like his skull's been ripped open today, and someone's shoved whole histories inside of it, like he's finally started to read the prologue that makes the whole series make sense, and now there's no damn time. And Cas, he seems to sense it too. He struggles to sit up straighter, despite Dean's alarmed hushing, and his eyes open a bit wider, fighting to finalize that connection he always seemed to be trying to make when he stared at Dean like that - like he's trying to beam some kind of vital angelic knowledge into Dean's head.
"Shhh," Dean says automatically, trying to breathe in terror and breathe out calm, that soft careful tone he used to use with Sam when Sam was sick or scared as a kid. "It's gonna be okay, shhh."
His face still feels numb but his eyes grow hot, and distantly, he feels the tears burning down his cheeks. Dammit. Really, really not the time. He feels so stupid, staring into Cas' face, a face that's become familiar, almost mundane, but at the same time, forever beyond his understanding. The way Castiel moves it, inhabits it. All those histories that Dean could never read, right there in his eyes. Trying to tell him.
The first sin of the angels.
He was lost.
~
Metatron made tea for the exhausted prophet and his two exhausted protectors. Dean really didn't give a shit about tea, but he found himself accepting it anyway, feeling like he was just desperately trying to keep up with the script, at this point.
"So wait..." Sam was catching up, too, flopped in an overstuffed armchair and clutching his mug in front of his face with both hands. "Humans become angels?"
"Not as a rule," Metatron said mildly. He sipped his tea and Dean sort of wanted to scream, because something huge and horrible and world-changing was trying to be born in his brain. "It's only happened twice."
"Twice?" Kevin was staring up at him with an awkward mixture of complete awe and profound disappointment.
But Metatron just shrugged again. "Like I said, we're not so different. And then again, we're completely different. But not in the ways that really matter, I guess."
"Tell that to the dicks who tried to start the Apocalypse!" Sam snapped.
Metatron slowly gave him a look that was part fond parent, part stern schoolmaster. Sam closed his mouth and got a bit flushed in the face.
"That's the thing," the Voice of God said softly. "Everyone's always lookng somewhere else for the big problem of Evil. Not," he nodded at Dean, "that evil isn't real. Of course it is. Demons. Fallen angels. The main difference, though, isn't the scale of evil. It's just the power behind it. If Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Custer or Jackson, had had the power of Heaven and Hell to throw around? This world would look a lot different. A lot worse even than it does."
Kevin swirled his tea and his expression changed to something more thoughtful, more troubled.
"But," he began, hesitantly. "If demons can be cured, and angels can sin, what...what exactly are we fighting for?"
And Metatron, who had once been Enoch, just some dude picked up by God and thrust into the theater of heavenly conflict, looked down at the prophet and smiled one of the saddest smiles Dean had ever seen.
~
"You must go into Hell," they tell him. "You must raise the Righteous Man."
It's all very formal in the council meeting, of course. The scribes hand down the orders from on High with all of the glory and pomp associated with Heavenly hierarchy. It's a bit of a different story when it comes down to the actual tactical planning.
"We have seven potential targets," Tariel tells them, "so seven garrisons will descend into the Pit. We don't have a lot of intelligence on exactly where the Righteous Men are being kept, so you'll want to encamp in one of the outer rings and send your best scouts. When the most viable target has been located, we will amass and make a concerted attack."
The angel Castiel, first of the lower order within his garrison, beneath the command of Hayyel, listens with dutiful attentiveness.
"You will be the scout for our garrison," Hayyel tells Castiel. "You're quick and clever, and a formidable fighter."
Hayyel is a kind and capable leader, a bit cool and distant in the way most angels are, but Castiel allows himself for just a moment to feel regret that Anael and Balthazar are not with them. He has not seen either of them in a long time - he fears that Balthazar was killed in the war with Lucifer. No one has told him otherwise, anyway. And Anael...he feels a kind of sadness for the absence of Anael. She was quick and strong, and she smiled a lot. But ever since the fall of Lucifer, she began to seem faint, as though he were seeing her from a great distance. Then, one day she simply disappeared. He doesn't understand.
But the mission, he does understand.
At least, until they breach the third ring of Hell, and everything, as he will later learn the saying goes, goes to shit.
The Dukes of Hell are some of the First Fallen, and they are strong. Though the demons in the first few rings have never seen an angel before, and mostly flee in terror, the Fallen know exactly what to expect of their brethren, and the fight becomes fierce, personal, and chaotic.
Black and red bands of lightning split the iron skies of Hell as Castiel dives, wings tucked like jets of blue flame, straight into the deepest part of the Pit, hoping to use his speed to lose the Fallen that bellows blackly on his tail. The acrid atmosphere of the Pit half-blinds him; he doesn't know where the rest of his garrison is. He knows that Jegudiel and Abraz are dead. His own wings are tattered where a mutant hellhound tore at them. Before him, somewhere in the steaming bowels of Hell, he can see the lights of two souls - two of the Righteous, accessible within a few days' journey, at last.
One shines gleaming in a cavern on a mountaintop, closer than the other, and more easily reached. Before the garrison was split up by the fighting, Hayyel told him that this soul was his target. Get in, get out. Then the huge serpent had exploded up out of the haze between them and Castiel was thrown blindly into chaos.
Why he does not aim for the soul on the mountaintop, Castiel will never be able to say. The next nearest target is much further, and is sequestered in a great crater, lined at the top with towering spikes. It is not as bright as the other, but instead is dimmed by the grime of sin and loathing. But like colored glass underwater, the brief glitter of it, infrequent and barely discernible from this distance, catches him, tugs at something in him like a stone caught in a gear, and with barely another thought he veers in his course, disobeying.
~
Dean feels like the remainder of his life is being counted in Castiel's ragged, gurgling breaths. At least they've gotten a bit more regular now, but the angel's face is almost grey with pain and blood loss, and well, grace loss, Dean guesses. He's bound the gauze tight against Cas' wound with bandages, after the ordeal of lifting his lower back to check for an exit wound. There was none, so Dean bound him up as tight as he could. Castiel's body was sweaty and hot, and Dean was surprised somehow at how human he felt, all the heavy muscles, the blood and sweat-slick skin.
Dean is currently swearing, breathlessly and inventively, at the non-present Metatron, whose attention Sam has failed to get.
"What do we do?"
Sam is slumped in a chair by Castiel's bedside, looking a little like he's been shot in the gut himself - eyes sunken and red-rimmed with exhaustion, face rivaling Cas' for most paste-like color. But he looks to Dean, helpless, young, like a kid whose puppy has been hit by a car.
Dean is pretty sure that behind his own clenched teeth, his whole being is screaming.
"I don't know!"
Every word he's ever heard regarding angels - everything Cas has told him, everything Uriel and Gabriel and Zachariah and Anna said, everything he's dug up or researched during these last four years of cataclysmic End-Times funhouse bullshit - is all spinning through Dean's head at once, clicking by on the slide show screen of his mind, as he desperately casts about for anything that can save Cas. It's starting to make him dizzy and light-headed.
He breathes in, timing his inhale with Castiel's rough gasp.
He thinks of the impossible story that Metatron told him. Angels watching over you. Could any of them have known how true - how terribly true - that was? And Cas. Gripped you tight and raised you from Perdition. His upper arm hasn't borne that handprint for a couple of years now, but if he thinks about it, Dean can still feel it, like some weird promise without words, some label branded into his skin. Part angel.
Maybe that's why the souls were in such high demand during Cas and Raphael's big heavenly pissing contest. Souls like grace, cut from almost the same cloth...and hell, didn't that mean that Dean's was part Castiel, since Cas had put him back together after the Pit?
He raises his head from his hands.
"Cas!"
The angel's head lolls on the pillow, weak but just barely conscious, towards the sound of Dean's voice. Dean stands up, jerked like a puppet on a string, and moves to crouch over Cas' prone form. "Cas! Remember...remember when you were hurt before...when we were hunting the Phoenix, back in the Old West? You touched Bobby's soul, to heal yourself! You said...you told me that souls were like power, to the angels, remember? Cas?" He lifts the hem of his t-shirt. "Cas, you gotta touch my soul, you gotta do it now!"
In the chair, Sam, almost comatose, lifts his head a bit.
"Dean..." His eyes try to open a bit wider. "Do you...d'you think it'll work?"
"No."
Both of their heads jerk in unison to stare at Cas, who is fighting to sit up. His chest, bare beneath the ruins of his dress shirt, spasms with another shuddering breath.
"What?"
"I...D-dean...no. Too...it's too..."
"Cas, so help me, if you say it's too dangerous, I'm gonna knock your block off!"
Castiel's brows furrow, whether in confusion over the phrase or agonizing pain, Dean can't tell.
"But it is. It...Dean...could....kill...kill all three of us...the...explosion..."
Dean stares at him - the planes of his pale face gleaming with sweat in the dim motel light, the hollows around his eyes deep and dark. He looks terrible; he looks human. Until blue light flickers between his clenched teeth.
"Sam. Leave the room. Now."
Sam's halfway out of his chair. "What?"
Dean doesn't look up at him; can't let his eyes leave the drama of Castiel's bloody struggles for breath. No time.
"Sam, you have to do the third trial. You hear me? You have to do it. If this kills us, or if it kills me, you gotta close the gates of Hell. Because even if everything Metatron says is right...if angels and demons are...are part of us? Or if we're part of them...? Then you remember what he said we were fighting for. And if that's true, that's enough. To stop Crowley, to keep him from just doing whatever the hell he wants with us. From taking that away from us. Okay?"
Sam's quiet long enough that Dean almost breaks his gaze to see if he's still conscious, but then a hand descends on his shoulder, hesitant at first, then firm, squeezing.
"Okay."
Sam puts his other hand down on Castiel's shoulder, first so gently, then suddenly gripping Cas' dirty suit jacket with white knuckles. Dean feels his eyes sting again.
"I - "
Sam begins, but can't finish. Dean knows, anyway, and he just hopes that Cas does, too. The angel can barely lift his eyelids to look up at Sam, but his fingers twitch by his side.
Dean waits for the sound of the door closing before he lets the tears fall.
"So now ya got no excuse." He tells Cas, voice ragged. "Sam's gonna finish the trials, with or without us. So this soul-groping could nuke us both? Fine. Then we both go together."
~
Part II