Fic: Though the Brightest Fell, 3/9
Title: Though the Brightest Fell, 3/9
Pairing(s): Castiel/Lucifer (Dean/Castiel later)
Characters: Bobby, Castiel, Chuck, Dean, Lucifer, Sam
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Language, graphic torture, non-con, sexuality, violence/gore.
Word Count: 6,563
Summary: So the Devil's kicking around the East Coast, Sam's at Demon Blood-aholics Anonymous, there's a self-deluded and newly homeless Prophet following them around like a kicked puppy, and the only angel worth a damn has gone MIA; Dean's pretty sure life sucks. Meanwhile, Castiel is stuck in Time-Out and has something Lucifer wants... badly.
Many thanks to my sexy beta, monnified, who is hot like burning.
NOTE: This chapter contains explicit non-consensual sexuality. Please do not read if that offends you.
One | Two
~ ~ ~
Dean is crawling out of his skin by the time everyone else decides to drag their asses out of bed. Sam studies him with wide bloodshot eyes as he taps his heel repeatedly at a speed that would make a hummingbird envious. “Dude,” he says weakly, “I thought I was the one detoxing from substance abuse.”
The sarcasm is lost on both of them as Sam doesn’t crack a smile and Dean stills his foot momentarily. He sighs and pulls his hand from his mouth where it has been resting, only now realizing how sore his fingertips are from where his nails have been gnawed back to nubs. “Chuck awake yet?”
Sam shrugs and pours two mugs of coffee, dumps three teaspoons of sugar in Dean’s and two into his own. “Probably not,” he sighs as he falls into place at the table across from Dean, nudging the steaming mug in his direction. “Guy sleeps like a bear in hibernation.”
“That’s ‘cause he’s shitfaced drunk ninety-eight percent of the time,” Dean says dryly, blowing on his coffee.
There is a short, comfortable silence before Sam speaks again: “So what’s up?”
Dean grunts questioningly in response, peaking his eyebrows. Sam’s mouth tightens disapprovingly. “Don’t,” is all he says, before Dean heaves a sigh and sets his coffee down.
“Big Brother decided to go dreamwalking last night,” he admits, albeit begrudgingly.
Sam nods understandingly. “Zachariah? What’d he say?”
Dean shrugs animatedly and rubs the moisture from his palms along his thighs. “Same ol’ bullshit.” He waits for a long time, waiting for Sam to egg him on or ask for specifics, but no questions come. He can feel the burn of them, though, the weight of the answers they both want stinging on his tongue. Finally, he lowers his eyes to the wavering black surface of his coffee and says, “Cas is, uh -…”
The sound of a door opening and closing softly severs Dean’s words at the root. Sam blows out a deep sigh as Chuck rounds the corner, then gives a small hey in acknowledgment. Chuck raises a hand and pulls his robe tighter around his chest with a shivery sigh.
“You’re up early,” Sam says flatly.
“Speak for yourself,” Chuck deadpans. Sam mumbles something about the coffee on the burner, and Dean thinks he hears Chuck ask where the brandy is, but his hearing has gone all muffled and warped; nothing really sinks in.
The second Chuck settles into the chair beside him, Dean jerks his eyes upward. “You can change it.”
Things go quiet as Chuck blinks and Sam shifts to lean forward on his elbows. “Dean…”
“You can write him back in.”
A nervous smile edges its way on the prophet's lips as he shakes his head. “No,” he says quietly. “No, that’s not - I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not how it works.”
“Well, you’re a prophet, man, you write the future and it happens like you say it does.”
“Dean,” Sam says again, but Dean raises a hand and he goes quiet.
Chuck leans forward and stares hard at Dean. “Haven’t we already had this conversation before? I don’t pull rabbits out of hats, dude. I don’t choose what I write, it just - gets channeled out of me. It’s a compulsion. I don’t do it for my health.” He shrugs, eyes widening as he raises his brandy-laced coffee. “You may have noticed.”
“Zachariah said he’s in time out. The hell does that mean?” Dean presses on. When Chuck swallows and cowers nervously in response, Dean scrubs a hand across his mouth. “Dude, I swear to God -…”
“Okay! Okay. Jesus.” Chuck skitters a glance up to Dean’s annoyed face. “I’m not supposed to tell you this yet, just so you know.”
“We’re past that now, come on. Out with it.” Dean spins a hand impatiently.
“He’s locked up in Purgatory,” Chuck sighs, wilting into the back of his chair. “Stuck between this world and the next.”
Sam and Dean exchange a quick, confused stare. “So he’s alive?” Sam asks.
Chuck shakes his head apprehensively.
“Is he dead?” Dean says harshly.
Again, Chuck shakes his head. Dean pushes from the table roughly and stands, carding a hand through his hair. “Sam? I’m gonna punch him.”
Chuck’s eyes go wide as dinner plates as he looks frantically between the brothers. “What?! I didn’t - that’s not -!”
“Relax,” Sam reassures. “No one’s hitting anyone. Dean, just - chill out. Sit down, come on.”
Dean doesn’t sit, just stilts his hands on his hips. “So he’s not dead and he’s not alive. Am I missing something here, 'cause that doesn't make a damn bit of sense to all the sane people around here."
Chuck glances to Sam, presumably for protection, but Sam just shrugs and bends his mouth in a frown. A low groan fights out of Chuck’s throat as he suddenly bends forward and knocks his forehead against the table. Then again. And again. Dean raises his eyebrows as Sam blinks. “No, no, no, no,” Chuck is saying between the light bangs of his forehead meeting the table and the quiet clatters of silverware juddering. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.”
That snags in Dean’s mind and he sits. “What, like… Your prophecies are wrong?”
Finally, Chuck stills with his head against the table. For a long time he says nothing, then sits back with a grand sigh. “They’re not wrong, Dean, they’re just - it’s not always clear exactly what they mean at the time.”
“So you knew this was going to happen to Cas.”
“Not exactly,” Chuck answers with an adamant shake of his head. “Everything was thrown off when you guys showed up in my kitchen. That was never part of the plan.”
Dean draws a slow breath and tries to ignore the weight that settles low in his belly and the dull thrum of making it up as we go running a ticker-tape through his head. Goddammit, Cas...
“Look,” Chuck sighs, leaning forward onto his elbows. “I knew Castiel was going to end up in Purgatory, but I didn’t know how; I never saw that.”
“But it should have been different,” Dean argues. “You said it yourself, we changed everything when he mojo-ed us into your kitchen like that.”
Chuck shrugs weakly. “Look, man, I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do, alright? I don’t know if that changed the prophecy, or if by changing something you didn’t change anything at all - I don’t know. All I know is, you guys went off the map when he turned tail and beamed you to my house. I thought that would void out everything I’d written, but… apparently not. It's still happening.”
“So do you know how to get him back?” Sam asks softly, that marked understanding lowering his voice.
Chuck stares over at him with what Dean can only describe as desperate exhaustion. The guy looks burned out if anyone ever has. “Sorry,” he says shakily.
“Well, tell them to give you another dose of Prophecy Juice,” Dean pushes.
“I can’t choose what I see or when, man. And it’s not even clear, most of the time. I embellish it, y’know? It’s like - it’s like I’m stuck in a tunnel with a flashlight, but the batteries are dying and it only comes on every once in a while. I can’t see anything long or clear enough to know what it is. Just enough to know that it’s there.”
Dean sighs and rubs across the back of his neck. “Well that’s not helpful at all. Thanks, Willy Shakes.”
When he stands again and Sam asks where he’s going, Dean doesn’t look his brother in the eye. “I’m gonna go talk to my baby,” he throws over his shoulder. “She’s the only one that makes a damn bit of sense these days,” he finishes, but the screen door has already slapped shut behind him with a rusty creak and a sharp clatter.
~ ~ ~
Lucifer stays gone for long blocks of time, stretching periods of pain that drive Castiel to the edge of reason and make him tear at his flesh as a distraction from the burn. It never works.
Castiel sees him three more times, and each interaction is the same: Lucifer touches him and chases the pain away, refills his Grace with a flourish and reforms him; he strings Castiel along until he is keening and wordlessly begging to be touched, and then he leans close and asks for his Grace. Each time Castiel refuses, and each time Lucifer smiles pleasantly and says, “Very well.” He flitters away and leaves Castiel alone and burning alive in a helpless curl on the floor.
After a while, he begins sending demons in to do his dirty work.
They rip and shred Castiel’s clothes until his shirt falls away in crimson scraps, then knock him to the floor and punch him, kick him, jab elbows or knees into his body. One demon steps on his fingers so hard the bones come clean out of Castiel’s skin, and he almost screams at the shock, but catches himself before he gives the creatures the satisfaction.
For the most part, he remains silent.
The fourth time the demons arrive, they bring instruments.
One demon shackles his wrists, one his ankles, while another grins and inserts thin steel needles just beneath his skin.
After several dozen of those, the demons switch up and the one previously at his feet skims a peculiar-looking tool along his chest until the flesh flays off in long, wet strips. The demon does not stop until all the flesh of Castiel’s chest is gone, torn away and slithered into the demons’ rank mouths, the red stain of blood dribbling down their tar-black chins, and the white glint of his ribs peaks out from beneath glistening blackish blood.
Castiel does not scream.
When the next demon cycles around and begins picking the arteries and veins from his arms with razor-nosed tweezers, Lucifer arrives. The demons flee immediately when he appears, leaving their instruments behind as they scatter like cockroaches from a cone of light. The restraints around Castiel’s wrists and ankles vanish with a wave of Lucifer’s hand, and Castiel instinctively curls into a fetal position at their release. Bending only increases the pain, though, forces another wave of blood to pulse out onto the streaked floor, and Castiel moans as it leaves his body.
Lucifer steps closer and folds up until he is sitting at Castiel’s side. When he lays a tentative hand on the stripped flesh of Castiel’s stomach, it does not hurt as Castiel expected - instead the heat dims and diffuses, the sting of laceration blotting out completely as a cool comfort overcomes him. He knows his injuries have not yet healed, yet there is no pain when Lucifer is touching him. He whimpers, and Lucifer gathers him close until Castiel’s head and shoulders rest comfortably in the crook of Lucifer’s lap.
“Handing over your Grace would spare you this, Little Horn,” he coos softly. “You wouldn’t have to suffer these tortures anymore, you know. They would be over.”
Castiel shuts his eyes as he relaxes into the rhythmic sweep of Lucifer’s fingers through his hair. The flesh of his body is quickly rebuilding, his chest already sewn up and unmarred by slices or scars. Even the blood from the wounds has faded away. Lucifer’s voice is low and gentle as he continues.
“I do care about you, Castiel. And I hate seeing you suffer like this.”
Castiel squeezes his eyes into tight lines and buries them against Lucifer’s thigh. When Lucifer asks again for his Grace, though, Castiel still refuses to acquiesce.
He sighs and says, “No,” and Lucifer leans down to kiss his temple.
He does not see the demons when they return, so much as feel them. He can hear them as well, their filthy salivating and animal grunting as they wait hungrily to devour the flesh flayed from his body. Castiel braces himself and sighs as he stilts a hand against the floor and pushes himself up. He stares the creatures in the face for a long time before looking back to Lucifer, who for all his corruption and inimitable cruelty, seems hooded by the ghost of a certain sadness - a regret, almost.
“Do with him what you will,” Lucifer says, then cups Castiel’s cheek before disappearing.
The warmth from his hand has not yet faded by the time the demons drag Castiel down and begin snipping away his eyelids.
~ ~ ~
As it turns out, there’s not a whole lot of information out there about Purgatory.
Dean finds this out the hard way after he comes in from three hours of tuning and washing and polishing and waxing the Impala, to find Bobby and Sam buried elbow-deep in droves of dusty books. Sam glances up and sighs, with this grim frown line marking his forehead. Dean doesn’t have to ask to know the answer, but figures why the hell not.
“Find anything?” He cracks open a beer and shoves a stack of books out of the way to sink onto the couch.
“Kind of,” Sam answers, then mumbles something to Bobby.
“So?” Dean prods after a few short seconds that seem entirely too long. “How do we get him out?”
Bobby and Sam look at each other, both of their mouths moving as if they can’t decide who should deliver the blow first. It ends up being Sam.
“We can’t.”
Dean’s hand tightens around the beer bottle so hard he’s surprised it doesn’t shatter into a million little pieces. Somehow, though, he manages to maintain his cool and simply ask, “Meaning?”
"Purgatory is the mid-realm," Sam explains, which doesn't actually explain a damn thing. He sits on the edge of the coffee table and passes a brick-heavy encyclopedia to Dean. Smudged ink images gawk up at him when he takes the book with a wary glance, images of people sunk to their knees with steepled hands and distorted faces, and spindly black winged things that must be demons stabbing spears and swords into the peoples' bodies. Dean hands the book back immediately and tries not to think about what that could mean, if demons really are hanging around the same place Castiel is being kept.
"It's a place where souls go to undergo purification," Sam continues. "Where they're either escorted up to Heaven or thrown down to Hell. See, if they choose to repent their sins in perfect contrition - meaning full repentance out of pure love for God - they're shipped up to Heaven. If they repent by way of attrition - which is repentance because of a lesser motive, such as the fear of Hell - then, well. You can guess the rest."
Dean shrugs and takes a nervous pull of beer. "So, okay, great. Cas is an angel. He's good at that whole loving God thing, so he'll get his ticket punched, be shipped back home, and then zap right back down here. No harm, no foul. Back to business as usual."
Sam's eyes refract as Bobby huffs out a long sigh from behind a stack of books that nearly eclipses him completely. "It's not a weekend trip, Dean," Sam says, lower. "There are millions of souls there - billions, maybe, who knows - and they don't just stroll up to a clerk and get a stamp of approval. Near as we found, which is isn't much because it's Purgatory, souls are kept there as long as it takes to judge them fairly."
"How long are we talkin' here, Sammy?"
The corner of Sam's mouth pulls into a bitter curl as he shakes his head. "I don't know. Eons?"
"Eons? Come on."
"Look, Dean, there's nothing out there, okay?" Sam defends. "We've gone through a freakin' library's worth of information here and we're no closer to knowing anything than we were when we started. There's just nothing out there. Nobody knows anything about Purgatory because no one's ever been there and back again." He sits back, spent, and Dean feels his shoulders slump.
He doesn't say anything for a while. The condensation from the glass of his bottle slicks along his fingers and numbs them with its coldness. It doesn't make any more sense with each time he rolls it around his head; Castiel's an angel, for cryin' out loud. A rogue angel, to be sure, but that doesn't change the fact that he's still a terrifying creature built of power and energy, capable of bending time and space like it's a finger-snap. He can knock people out with two fingers and burn demons out of their hosts with a touch, and -... It just doesn't seem right that there's anything that can hold him down so easily. The Archangels definitely made sure he wasn't going to be causing any more ruckus, that's for sure.
Dean shakes his head slowly. Stupid sonofabitch, he thinks. Why the hell would he have jumped out to take the bullet like that? Painted a target the size of fucking California on his back? It freezes Dean's blood in his veins when he remembers the staggered uncertainty in Castiel's voice the last time he saw him - I'll hold them off, I'll hold them all off - and Dean's sure he would. He'd do just about anything, the dumb bastard, for the sake of keeping Dean's friendship. And here Dean wasn't even stopping him; Dean was urging him, in fact. Ever since that day on the park bench when Castiel confessed he had doubts, Dean has seen threads of the angel's Grace slowly severing as the distance between him and his holy mandate grew ever wider. He'd started to help Dean because he wanted to help Dean, not because it was an angel's duty to his charge. Dean had accepted his help without ever so much as a thank you or even a kiss my ass, for that matter, strutting along like some stupid pompous jackass, wibbling in self-pity and turning a blind eye to the monster his brother was fast becoming. He only realized it all when it had already spiraled too far out of grasp - Sam's descent into something less than human, and Castiel's ignorance - the ignorance of sacrificing millennia of existence in the name of, what, the buddy system?
It makes Dean sick. Really fucking sick.
This creature - this work of art, glorious impenetrable warrior of God - had been confused and roughed up and debased, all because of Dean. He'd selfishly taken the most precious thing Castiel owned and stomped it out, wound around it with impatient demands and all his stupid Devil's Advocate bullshit headgames - Castiel's soul. His Grace. The very thing that made him what he was. Dean fucked it up.
Dean always fucks it up.
And now, the one thing besides Sam that was worth a damn in this slippery fucking slope of a life of his, is gone.
It's all just so fucking typical, isn't it?
This time, Dean doesn't even bother stalking away to sink into his murky cloud of introspection, and luckily enough Sam leaves him to it without a word. The afternoon burns away with Metallica still crawling out of the crackling radio outside, and the heady smell of rain and the clean rustle of pages as Sam dives back into all the books that won't provide them any answers. He's swimming through postulations and theoretical musings, digging through layer after layer of hypocritical religious bullshit, but Dean knows and he thinks Sam probably does too that he won't be finding any truths between the words.
Because there is only one truth that matters now, and that is that Castiel is gone for good, and Dean can't do a goddamn thing to bring him back.
~ ~ ~
Pain, Castiel finds, is a curious phenomenon.
After a while - he cannot discern time as he once could; its passage is veiled to him now, and he cannot distinguish between hours or weeks or even decades - he becomes intimately familiar with the sensation. Pain has many facets. It is sharp when the demons drag knives and blades along his body; dull when they punch him; hot when they press white-glowing pokers into the tender flesh of his sides and, once, along his tongue to reach down his throat. It tangles and shifts as a speculum between freezing and sweltering, slow and fast, bruising and biting. Castiel wonders again, as a demon cuts a sizable hole in his side and buries its serpentine tongue in the wound, how humans can bear to live their lives dominated by such a bizarre and unpleasant phenomenon. He thinks that maybe he has not always held the proper approbation for the creatures he has been taught to think of as weak. If they can endure years upon years of the pains their bodies put forth and suffer, pains such as the ones these creatures of Hell inflict upon him during every waking hour, it is nothing short of respect that they deserve.
When the demon pulls its tongue out of the gaping hole and instead shoves it past Castiel's lips into his mouth, he twists from the contact with a low growl of surprise. This is something the demons have not yet done. In all their myriad tortures, this is the one they have not yet explored, the non-consensual defilement of his body. Of Jimmy Novak's body. Castiel recoils and presses to the scalding wall as the demons laugh and crowd around him, their motions skulking, like a pack of half-starved lions, smacking their filthy, salivating chops at the scent of blood on the air.
Protecting Jimmy Novak's body has always been Castiel's second charge, after Dean Winchester. The man's body is sacred; not many humans possess the capability for containing an angel's grace. Even through the encounter with the Archangels, Jimmy's soul remains intact, tucked firmly inside its physical vessel under layers and layers of thick armor. Castiel has done his best to ensure he stays asleep throughout the demons' torments, too, but twice now he has felt the shield around Jimmy's soul slip down and the man's soul shudder into waking consciousness with a sharp cry that stings Castiel as much on the inside as the demons' razorblades and claws do on the outside.
Castiel stumbles slightly when he rips out of the demon's grasp. The backs of his legs have not fully healed yet from when the demons drove thick spikes of iron through his calves until the tendons severed with a thick snap. He trips slightly and leans heavy against the wall, hissing out the ancient words of an exorcism. His eyes widen when the demons do not react at all, except by lunging forward and opening a deep gash along his cheek.
Castiel flings out a hand, intent on sealing it to the demon's forehead and burning it back to Hell, but the creature laughs loud and bright and catches him around the arm, jerks him down and throws him hard to the floor. There is a brief moment of overwhelming dizziness as Castiel's chin hits the floor with a sickening crack, but then the demons are on him and he cannot fight them off as hard as he tries.
They flip him onto his back and hold his arms, leaving the one demon not holding his arms to tear at his pants. He twists, but a bright pain slices up one arm, then another, as jagged teeth bore into each wrist. Castiel gasps and mutters an exorcism, the words weakly jumping from the back of his throat with nothing behind them - there is no faith in the words, no trust that it will vanquish the creatures back to their dimension, and with a short whimper he remembers why.
This is not a realm of Heaven or Hell; it is simply in between, a neutral blank zone with no more bearing from one side than the other. The words of his Father hold no sway here. The desperate cries and prayers that leave his lips in the hopes they might reach his home, his brothers and sisters, fall on deaf ears. Fall on no ears, in fact; they don't reach past the cramped Hell-forged walls of this prison. No one will hear him - not God, not the fury of the Archangels, not Zachariah, not Dean.
Castiel is truly and inexorably alone.
He is drawn from the solid weight of his thoughts by a sudden flare of heat along his now-bare legs. They've taken his clothes and they're laughing still, sliding roughened hands up and down his legs. He manages to catch a well-placed elbow in one of the demon's jaws, and kick another one in the temple, and he very nearly scrambles away, but there is a quick heat stabbing into his back and dragging down as the demons tear his back wide open with one of their polished, gleaming knives.
A sound like a sob punches out of his throat as he scrabbles at the floor, but the blade holds him still. He cannot move as the demons crawl up around him again, one of them jumping up to straddle his thighs with a wicked laugh, another bending to root cruelly through the wound in his back. They mutter filthy things back and forth, words Castiel never expected to hear directed at him, horrible, insulting things that make him flinch and fight harder to escape their grasps. The demon pinning his legs leans down to lick along his ear, slipping its slimy tongue inside with a promising murmur of, "We'll fuck you so hard you'll taste it for the rest of your pathetic life."
"Vos mando decedere!"
The words are a loud and unexpected bark, echoing around the chamber as the demons shriek and slam against the walls with a sizzle. Their carcasses slump to the floor as Castiel looks up, then lose their forms to become shapeless piles of dirty gray ash. Castiel swallows and does not turn; the pain on his back has not dimmed, and as he reaches behind him to figure out why, his fingers brush the blood-warm hilt and he cries out weakly when the blade shifts inside the wound. When he curls into a loose ball, the metal of the knife makes a scratching sound against the floor. It's gone straight through his body and out the other side, he realizes.
"Insipid animals," Lucifer growls from behind Castiel. Soft footsteps pad over before there is a notable absence of pain hitting like a bolt of lightning, electric and all-encompassing, blinding, as Lucifer pets the curved slide of his back. "I'm so sorry," he says, quiet, and Castiel's mouth falls open in a soft sound like ah. "They can't behave for five minutes, the sewer rats," Lucifer sighs, sounding so sincere it makes Castiel want to latch onto him; he doesn't, though, because Lucifer is Lucifer, he is evil and garbled and the cause of all of this. He is the reason this is happening to Castiel, he reminds himself.
"You sent them in," Castiel gasps. He keeps his eyes screwed tight against the blossom of warm pressure on his back. The feeling is not as complete as it once was. He cannot feel it simmering in his Grace, refueling it in a fashion, and he tries not to acknowledge that it might be because he is truly diminished. Maybe his Grace doesn't hold as tight as it once did. Maybe there has been a disconnect between it and him. Maybe he has lost a shade of himself in the tectonic shift into experiencing human conditions. "You let them do this to me."
The hand on Castiel's back slips down to rest on his backside, which makes him strangely nervous. It shouldn't, he tells himself. This human body is not his, so he should feel no sense of embarrassment at its nakedness. He should not be ashamed by how weak and vulnerable he feels now that his clothes are gone.
All the same, though, Lucifer slowly slicks the curves of Castiel's body until he reaches the wounds still struggling to heal themselves on Castiel's calves, and Castiel feels self-conscious and exposed at the intimacy of the contact.
He tightens his arms around himself as best he can around the knife skewered through his midsection. Lucifer does not acknowledge his accusation.
"They need to realize," he says instead, still sounding so regretful and honest, "that they can't just do whatever they want with you." He sighs heavily and wraps both hands around Castiel's legs at the wounds until they sew themselves flawlessly back together. Castiel sighs and remains stock-still as Lucifer's hands wander higher, skimming along his thighs in a slow exploration. A small hum floats into the air, a sound so hushed it is almost subconscious, and Castiel winces as the same warm pair of hands travels along his sensitized flesh until they reach the knife in his back. His eyes are closed, but he hears the rustle of fabric and the shift of movement, before there is a weight at his back and a sheltering warmth settling over him like a blanket. Soft material like linen brushes his back as Lucifer leans down to pour into Castiel's ear, "They need to realize that you're mine. They can't just have you."
The knife jerks out of Castiel's body with a sudden jolt and clatters to the floor somewhere out of reach. He moans against the awkward pressure left by the hole - not pain, because when Lucifer is touching him there is no pain, never any pain - and tries to push up onto his elbows.
He's shocked, though, when Lucifer roughly pushes him back down hard enough to hear the bones of his cheek splinter against the floor with a loud crack.
A hollow sound wheezes out of his throat. "Wait," he says weakly, but Lucifer shushes him. His fingers thread through Castiel's hair in a rhythm gentle enough to almost make him forget that he is trapped naked and underneath the Devil, with his face bloodied and broken as it tries to heal itself.
"Don't talk," Lucifer whispers as he pets the line of Castiel's neck slowly, maddeningly slowly. Castiel shifts around until his fingers brush his cheeks, the deep gash from the demon's knife on one side and the broken-open split of the impact against the floor mangling the other. He is vaguely aware of the pressure lifting from his back, and of the rasp of his own breathing as it thickens with each inch of flesh stroked by the web-thin pressure of Lucifer's fingers. They map his back carefully, stopping to swirl at the breadth of his shoulderblades, to tickle along the newly sensitized flesh where the knife-wound once was, before suddenly they are there, pressing inside of him without warning or preparation. Castiel hisses in a breath and moves to get away, but a hand fists in his hair and crushes his forehead against the floor in an impact so rough Castiel loses consciousness for a few seconds.
He wakes up when Lucifer slides in, and for the first time in all the days - weeks, months, centuries, however much time has passed - that he has been here, Castiel screams.
"Yes," Lucifer pants quietly. His grip is tight on Castiel's hips, bruising with the force of a thousand earthquakes and hurricanes, stronger than anything Castiel has ever felt or imagined, and he moves with a strange sort of slipped gracefulness, even as he pins Castiel roughly to the ground with a hand between his shoulders. "Tell them," he says through a growl, and Castiel tries to throw an arm back to fight him away, but cannot. "Tell them you're mine."
Lucifer catches his arm and shoves it at unnatural angles behind Castiel's back until the joint pops. Castiel nearly screams again but the sound catches in his throat, replaced by the bitter burn of Lucifer sliding in and out of him and the devastating realization that, in his shock, he has allowed Jimmy Novak to wake up. Quickly, Castiel stifles the man's screams and smothers him back into unconsciousness. He will not allow Lucifer to take this from him, to sully and corrupt a devout man who in no way deserves the torments he has been forced to survive. A sinking sort of desperation seizes Castiel's chest - Jimmy's chest - as he silently begs to be forgiven for his weakness.
When Lucifer stills, Castiel is overcome with the relief that it is all over, but then he is being flipped onto his back with a merciless twist, his knees thrown open and up, and Lucifer is burning a smirk into the air as he drags Castiel down until he is inside of him again, not a gentle slide but a rough, cruel shove.
Castiel fights him, or at least tries to, but against Lucifer's strength all the angelic fury and power he can summon are fruitless. Lucifer holds his knees tightly, hiking them up as his hands, those healing hands with skin smooth as lily petals, clutch at Castiel's hips. One of them strokes down Castiel's cheek and he tries to knock it away, to bite at it, anything, but then Lucifer touches the gash below his eye and something happens.
It washes over him in a furious rush, unstoppable as a gale force wind, and Castiel is positive that if he were standing instead of pinned down on his back, it would have knocked him over. He feels as if he has been reconstructed, newly born and remade out of pure light and beauty, and it is glorious as it spins through his veins in a reckless chemical reaction and lights him up from the inside out. It is beautiful and graceful and might move him to tears if he wasn't staggered completely still, and suddenly he knows that what is he is feeling is purely Lucifer, and all at once it becomes terrifying.
Castiel screams again, but his body is a physical one now, and even as he tries to channel out of it, there is still biology and he is still subject to the sensations of a provoked human anatomy. It feels good, in a bizarre sort of way, as if he is teetering on the edge of a cliff with a knot building in the base of his spine that pulses and glows brighter each time Lucifer pushes deeply inside of him, or grips his hips and holds them that certain way, or especially when Lucifer mouths at the crook where throat meets collarbone and wraps a hand slick with human sweat and human blood around his cock and strokes in long, languid movements.
The same sensation from before sideswipes Castiel again - blinding beauty and peace and power and so much pleasure he's punchdrunk on it in an instant - but he knows it is wrong, wrong, wrong, and he howls out loudly, the sound cracking his throat, and pounds and claws at Lucifer's chest and scrabbles so hard that his fingernails bend back completely out of their beds in a dark shock of crimson, but he cannot stop it. Light injects into his body from the most rudimentary molecular levels and builds up, spirals around the helixes of Jimmy Novak's DNA strand for strand, tunnels through bone and blood and fires along synapses, pushes out of pores, coils down his backbone until it is all exploding out of him in a pulse like a gunshot. This light, Lucifer, floods his system and buries into each thread and filament of his Grace, and as much as it breaks him apart on the inside, it is a bliss he has never known, sublimation so complete and overwhelming that only a rattled oh hiccups out of his throat before he comes, hot and slick between them, streaking his stomach as Lucifer cracks the bones of his hips and spills into him not a second later.
Somehow Castiel finds it in himself to push shaking hands against Lucifer's chest hard enough to nudge him backward, but Castiel thinks it's probably just that Lucifer allowed himself to be moved. He curls sideways and turns his back and curses himself inwardly because even now, he can't bring himself to completely break the contact between his own body and the one still barely touching his, with their legs tangled up and one of Lucifer's ankles caught between Castiel's. Fear of the pain he knows awaits if the touch is lost does not permit it. He is aware that it is an impossible conundrum - wanting to touch the impossibly powerful, impossibly lethal and corrupted and cruel creature that just forced him into submission and defiled him, both an angel and an innocent, thankfully still sleeping, man - but all the same he cannot build the distance between them and sink into the driving burn of the floor and the bruises welting on his flesh.
His own weakness disgusts him.
Castiel jumps when the slippery press of a hand slicks along his back. "Now they will know," Lucifer says, even and measured even as Castiel is still whimpering and desperately clawing to swallow clear air. Air, which he knows by now, is also an illusion in this place, just as everything else also is. Air. Gravity. Honesty. Faith. Hope.
It is all a lie.
Castiel feels his chest cave in with a distinct shatter, as if he has been blown of glass and flung to the floor. He is splintered, fractured and damaged, and he hurts. Not the ache of flesh and blood and bone, but something primal. Something deeper and purely a facet of himself, untranslatable to the heavy human body to which he has been fused. Something angelic.
Lucifer has taken that last remaining guidepost of his Grace, and demolished it.
Castiel feels scooped out and bone-dry, and he does not recognize the sensation of crying when it overcomes him. All he knows is that his shoulders begin quaking and his fingers still burn and throb with the gnarled tangle of his fingernails ripped from their places.
Lucifer's skin never even broke.
A quiet lull passes as Lucifer's fingers tickle along Castiel's side and ghost upward to smooth the blood-crusted fan of his hair behind his ear. He sighs, the sound sated and content. "I did that for you, Little Horn. Now they can't take you. They won't dare, if they know you belong to me."
Castiel screw his eyes tightly shut and mumbles in the weakest voice he thinks he has ever heard, "I don't belong to you. I'll never belong to you."
Lucifer chuckles happily, then leans down close to Castiel's ear, tongue curling along its shell in a seductive slither. "Oh, but you do," he whispers, and nips lightly at the lobe. Castiel shudders and pulls his arms tighter around himself. "Sooner or later you're going to realize that God doesn't exist down here, Castiel. And then I wonder what you'll have faith in."
Then he is gone, before his voice has even fully trailed off, and Castiel feels his throat break open in a ragged scream as every bruise and crush and tear Lucifer subjected him to - all the things he couldn't feel before - come flooding through his body in one inexplicable wave of agony.
~ ~ ~
Vos mando decedere is Latin for "I command you to leave."
{Continued here.}
Pairing(s): Castiel/Lucifer (Dean/Castiel later)
Characters: Bobby, Castiel, Chuck, Dean, Lucifer, Sam
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Language, graphic torture, non-con, sexuality, violence/gore.
Word Count: 6,563
Summary: So the Devil's kicking around the East Coast, Sam's at Demon Blood-aholics Anonymous, there's a self-deluded and newly homeless Prophet following them around like a kicked puppy, and the only angel worth a damn has gone MIA; Dean's pretty sure life sucks. Meanwhile, Castiel is stuck in Time-Out and has something Lucifer wants... badly.
Many thanks to my sexy beta, monnified, who is hot like burning.
NOTE: This chapter contains explicit non-consensual sexuality. Please do not read if that offends you.
One | Two
~ ~ ~
Dean is crawling out of his skin by the time everyone else decides to drag their asses out of bed. Sam studies him with wide bloodshot eyes as he taps his heel repeatedly at a speed that would make a hummingbird envious. “Dude,” he says weakly, “I thought I was the one detoxing from substance abuse.”
The sarcasm is lost on both of them as Sam doesn’t crack a smile and Dean stills his foot momentarily. He sighs and pulls his hand from his mouth where it has been resting, only now realizing how sore his fingertips are from where his nails have been gnawed back to nubs. “Chuck awake yet?”
Sam shrugs and pours two mugs of coffee, dumps three teaspoons of sugar in Dean’s and two into his own. “Probably not,” he sighs as he falls into place at the table across from Dean, nudging the steaming mug in his direction. “Guy sleeps like a bear in hibernation.”
“That’s ‘cause he’s shitfaced drunk ninety-eight percent of the time,” Dean says dryly, blowing on his coffee.
There is a short, comfortable silence before Sam speaks again: “So what’s up?”
Dean grunts questioningly in response, peaking his eyebrows. Sam’s mouth tightens disapprovingly. “Don’t,” is all he says, before Dean heaves a sigh and sets his coffee down.
“Big Brother decided to go dreamwalking last night,” he admits, albeit begrudgingly.
Sam nods understandingly. “Zachariah? What’d he say?”
Dean shrugs animatedly and rubs the moisture from his palms along his thighs. “Same ol’ bullshit.” He waits for a long time, waiting for Sam to egg him on or ask for specifics, but no questions come. He can feel the burn of them, though, the weight of the answers they both want stinging on his tongue. Finally, he lowers his eyes to the wavering black surface of his coffee and says, “Cas is, uh -…”
The sound of a door opening and closing softly severs Dean’s words at the root. Sam blows out a deep sigh as Chuck rounds the corner, then gives a small hey in acknowledgment. Chuck raises a hand and pulls his robe tighter around his chest with a shivery sigh.
“You’re up early,” Sam says flatly.
“Speak for yourself,” Chuck deadpans. Sam mumbles something about the coffee on the burner, and Dean thinks he hears Chuck ask where the brandy is, but his hearing has gone all muffled and warped; nothing really sinks in.
The second Chuck settles into the chair beside him, Dean jerks his eyes upward. “You can change it.”
Things go quiet as Chuck blinks and Sam shifts to lean forward on his elbows. “Dean…”
“You can write him back in.”
A nervous smile edges its way on the prophet's lips as he shakes his head. “No,” he says quietly. “No, that’s not - I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not how it works.”
“Well, you’re a prophet, man, you write the future and it happens like you say it does.”
“Dean,” Sam says again, but Dean raises a hand and he goes quiet.
Chuck leans forward and stares hard at Dean. “Haven’t we already had this conversation before? I don’t pull rabbits out of hats, dude. I don’t choose what I write, it just - gets channeled out of me. It’s a compulsion. I don’t do it for my health.” He shrugs, eyes widening as he raises his brandy-laced coffee. “You may have noticed.”
“Zachariah said he’s in time out. The hell does that mean?” Dean presses on. When Chuck swallows and cowers nervously in response, Dean scrubs a hand across his mouth. “Dude, I swear to God -…”
“Okay! Okay. Jesus.” Chuck skitters a glance up to Dean’s annoyed face. “I’m not supposed to tell you this yet, just so you know.”
“We’re past that now, come on. Out with it.” Dean spins a hand impatiently.
“He’s locked up in Purgatory,” Chuck sighs, wilting into the back of his chair. “Stuck between this world and the next.”
Sam and Dean exchange a quick, confused stare. “So he’s alive?” Sam asks.
Chuck shakes his head apprehensively.
“Is he dead?” Dean says harshly.
Again, Chuck shakes his head. Dean pushes from the table roughly and stands, carding a hand through his hair. “Sam? I’m gonna punch him.”
Chuck’s eyes go wide as dinner plates as he looks frantically between the brothers. “What?! I didn’t - that’s not -!”
“Relax,” Sam reassures. “No one’s hitting anyone. Dean, just - chill out. Sit down, come on.”
Dean doesn’t sit, just stilts his hands on his hips. “So he’s not dead and he’s not alive. Am I missing something here, 'cause that doesn't make a damn bit of sense to all the sane people around here."
Chuck glances to Sam, presumably for protection, but Sam just shrugs and bends his mouth in a frown. A low groan fights out of Chuck’s throat as he suddenly bends forward and knocks his forehead against the table. Then again. And again. Dean raises his eyebrows as Sam blinks. “No, no, no, no,” Chuck is saying between the light bangs of his forehead meeting the table and the quiet clatters of silverware juddering. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.”
That snags in Dean’s mind and he sits. “What, like… Your prophecies are wrong?”
Finally, Chuck stills with his head against the table. For a long time he says nothing, then sits back with a grand sigh. “They’re not wrong, Dean, they’re just - it’s not always clear exactly what they mean at the time.”
“So you knew this was going to happen to Cas.”
“Not exactly,” Chuck answers with an adamant shake of his head. “Everything was thrown off when you guys showed up in my kitchen. That was never part of the plan.”
Dean draws a slow breath and tries to ignore the weight that settles low in his belly and the dull thrum of making it up as we go running a ticker-tape through his head. Goddammit, Cas...
“Look,” Chuck sighs, leaning forward onto his elbows. “I knew Castiel was going to end up in Purgatory, but I didn’t know how; I never saw that.”
“But it should have been different,” Dean argues. “You said it yourself, we changed everything when he mojo-ed us into your kitchen like that.”
Chuck shrugs weakly. “Look, man, I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do, alright? I don’t know if that changed the prophecy, or if by changing something you didn’t change anything at all - I don’t know. All I know is, you guys went off the map when he turned tail and beamed you to my house. I thought that would void out everything I’d written, but… apparently not. It's still happening.”
“So do you know how to get him back?” Sam asks softly, that marked understanding lowering his voice.
Chuck stares over at him with what Dean can only describe as desperate exhaustion. The guy looks burned out if anyone ever has. “Sorry,” he says shakily.
“Well, tell them to give you another dose of Prophecy Juice,” Dean pushes.
“I can’t choose what I see or when, man. And it’s not even clear, most of the time. I embellish it, y’know? It’s like - it’s like I’m stuck in a tunnel with a flashlight, but the batteries are dying and it only comes on every once in a while. I can’t see anything long or clear enough to know what it is. Just enough to know that it’s there.”
Dean sighs and rubs across the back of his neck. “Well that’s not helpful at all. Thanks, Willy Shakes.”
When he stands again and Sam asks where he’s going, Dean doesn’t look his brother in the eye. “I’m gonna go talk to my baby,” he throws over his shoulder. “She’s the only one that makes a damn bit of sense these days,” he finishes, but the screen door has already slapped shut behind him with a rusty creak and a sharp clatter.
~ ~ ~
Lucifer stays gone for long blocks of time, stretching periods of pain that drive Castiel to the edge of reason and make him tear at his flesh as a distraction from the burn. It never works.
Castiel sees him three more times, and each interaction is the same: Lucifer touches him and chases the pain away, refills his Grace with a flourish and reforms him; he strings Castiel along until he is keening and wordlessly begging to be touched, and then he leans close and asks for his Grace. Each time Castiel refuses, and each time Lucifer smiles pleasantly and says, “Very well.” He flitters away and leaves Castiel alone and burning alive in a helpless curl on the floor.
After a while, he begins sending demons in to do his dirty work.
They rip and shred Castiel’s clothes until his shirt falls away in crimson scraps, then knock him to the floor and punch him, kick him, jab elbows or knees into his body. One demon steps on his fingers so hard the bones come clean out of Castiel’s skin, and he almost screams at the shock, but catches himself before he gives the creatures the satisfaction.
For the most part, he remains silent.
The fourth time the demons arrive, they bring instruments.
One demon shackles his wrists, one his ankles, while another grins and inserts thin steel needles just beneath his skin.
After several dozen of those, the demons switch up and the one previously at his feet skims a peculiar-looking tool along his chest until the flesh flays off in long, wet strips. The demon does not stop until all the flesh of Castiel’s chest is gone, torn away and slithered into the demons’ rank mouths, the red stain of blood dribbling down their tar-black chins, and the white glint of his ribs peaks out from beneath glistening blackish blood.
Castiel does not scream.
When the next demon cycles around and begins picking the arteries and veins from his arms with razor-nosed tweezers, Lucifer arrives. The demons flee immediately when he appears, leaving their instruments behind as they scatter like cockroaches from a cone of light. The restraints around Castiel’s wrists and ankles vanish with a wave of Lucifer’s hand, and Castiel instinctively curls into a fetal position at their release. Bending only increases the pain, though, forces another wave of blood to pulse out onto the streaked floor, and Castiel moans as it leaves his body.
Lucifer steps closer and folds up until he is sitting at Castiel’s side. When he lays a tentative hand on the stripped flesh of Castiel’s stomach, it does not hurt as Castiel expected - instead the heat dims and diffuses, the sting of laceration blotting out completely as a cool comfort overcomes him. He knows his injuries have not yet healed, yet there is no pain when Lucifer is touching him. He whimpers, and Lucifer gathers him close until Castiel’s head and shoulders rest comfortably in the crook of Lucifer’s lap.
“Handing over your Grace would spare you this, Little Horn,” he coos softly. “You wouldn’t have to suffer these tortures anymore, you know. They would be over.”
Castiel shuts his eyes as he relaxes into the rhythmic sweep of Lucifer’s fingers through his hair. The flesh of his body is quickly rebuilding, his chest already sewn up and unmarred by slices or scars. Even the blood from the wounds has faded away. Lucifer’s voice is low and gentle as he continues.
“I do care about you, Castiel. And I hate seeing you suffer like this.”
Castiel squeezes his eyes into tight lines and buries them against Lucifer’s thigh. When Lucifer asks again for his Grace, though, Castiel still refuses to acquiesce.
He sighs and says, “No,” and Lucifer leans down to kiss his temple.
He does not see the demons when they return, so much as feel them. He can hear them as well, their filthy salivating and animal grunting as they wait hungrily to devour the flesh flayed from his body. Castiel braces himself and sighs as he stilts a hand against the floor and pushes himself up. He stares the creatures in the face for a long time before looking back to Lucifer, who for all his corruption and inimitable cruelty, seems hooded by the ghost of a certain sadness - a regret, almost.
“Do with him what you will,” Lucifer says, then cups Castiel’s cheek before disappearing.
The warmth from his hand has not yet faded by the time the demons drag Castiel down and begin snipping away his eyelids.
~ ~ ~
As it turns out, there’s not a whole lot of information out there about Purgatory.
Dean finds this out the hard way after he comes in from three hours of tuning and washing and polishing and waxing the Impala, to find Bobby and Sam buried elbow-deep in droves of dusty books. Sam glances up and sighs, with this grim frown line marking his forehead. Dean doesn’t have to ask to know the answer, but figures why the hell not.
“Find anything?” He cracks open a beer and shoves a stack of books out of the way to sink onto the couch.
“Kind of,” Sam answers, then mumbles something to Bobby.
“So?” Dean prods after a few short seconds that seem entirely too long. “How do we get him out?”
Bobby and Sam look at each other, both of their mouths moving as if they can’t decide who should deliver the blow first. It ends up being Sam.
“We can’t.”
Dean’s hand tightens around the beer bottle so hard he’s surprised it doesn’t shatter into a million little pieces. Somehow, though, he manages to maintain his cool and simply ask, “Meaning?”
"Purgatory is the mid-realm," Sam explains, which doesn't actually explain a damn thing. He sits on the edge of the coffee table and passes a brick-heavy encyclopedia to Dean. Smudged ink images gawk up at him when he takes the book with a wary glance, images of people sunk to their knees with steepled hands and distorted faces, and spindly black winged things that must be demons stabbing spears and swords into the peoples' bodies. Dean hands the book back immediately and tries not to think about what that could mean, if demons really are hanging around the same place Castiel is being kept.
"It's a place where souls go to undergo purification," Sam continues. "Where they're either escorted up to Heaven or thrown down to Hell. See, if they choose to repent their sins in perfect contrition - meaning full repentance out of pure love for God - they're shipped up to Heaven. If they repent by way of attrition - which is repentance because of a lesser motive, such as the fear of Hell - then, well. You can guess the rest."
Dean shrugs and takes a nervous pull of beer. "So, okay, great. Cas is an angel. He's good at that whole loving God thing, so he'll get his ticket punched, be shipped back home, and then zap right back down here. No harm, no foul. Back to business as usual."
Sam's eyes refract as Bobby huffs out a long sigh from behind a stack of books that nearly eclipses him completely. "It's not a weekend trip, Dean," Sam says, lower. "There are millions of souls there - billions, maybe, who knows - and they don't just stroll up to a clerk and get a stamp of approval. Near as we found, which is isn't much because it's Purgatory, souls are kept there as long as it takes to judge them fairly."
"How long are we talkin' here, Sammy?"
The corner of Sam's mouth pulls into a bitter curl as he shakes his head. "I don't know. Eons?"
"Eons? Come on."
"Look, Dean, there's nothing out there, okay?" Sam defends. "We've gone through a freakin' library's worth of information here and we're no closer to knowing anything than we were when we started. There's just nothing out there. Nobody knows anything about Purgatory because no one's ever been there and back again." He sits back, spent, and Dean feels his shoulders slump.
He doesn't say anything for a while. The condensation from the glass of his bottle slicks along his fingers and numbs them with its coldness. It doesn't make any more sense with each time he rolls it around his head; Castiel's an angel, for cryin' out loud. A rogue angel, to be sure, but that doesn't change the fact that he's still a terrifying creature built of power and energy, capable of bending time and space like it's a finger-snap. He can knock people out with two fingers and burn demons out of their hosts with a touch, and -... It just doesn't seem right that there's anything that can hold him down so easily. The Archangels definitely made sure he wasn't going to be causing any more ruckus, that's for sure.
Dean shakes his head slowly. Stupid sonofabitch, he thinks. Why the hell would he have jumped out to take the bullet like that? Painted a target the size of fucking California on his back? It freezes Dean's blood in his veins when he remembers the staggered uncertainty in Castiel's voice the last time he saw him - I'll hold them off, I'll hold them all off - and Dean's sure he would. He'd do just about anything, the dumb bastard, for the sake of keeping Dean's friendship. And here Dean wasn't even stopping him; Dean was urging him, in fact. Ever since that day on the park bench when Castiel confessed he had doubts, Dean has seen threads of the angel's Grace slowly severing as the distance between him and his holy mandate grew ever wider. He'd started to help Dean because he wanted to help Dean, not because it was an angel's duty to his charge. Dean had accepted his help without ever so much as a thank you or even a kiss my ass, for that matter, strutting along like some stupid pompous jackass, wibbling in self-pity and turning a blind eye to the monster his brother was fast becoming. He only realized it all when it had already spiraled too far out of grasp - Sam's descent into something less than human, and Castiel's ignorance - the ignorance of sacrificing millennia of existence in the name of, what, the buddy system?
It makes Dean sick. Really fucking sick.
This creature - this work of art, glorious impenetrable warrior of God - had been confused and roughed up and debased, all because of Dean. He'd selfishly taken the most precious thing Castiel owned and stomped it out, wound around it with impatient demands and all his stupid Devil's Advocate bullshit headgames - Castiel's soul. His Grace. The very thing that made him what he was. Dean fucked it up.
Dean always fucks it up.
And now, the one thing besides Sam that was worth a damn in this slippery fucking slope of a life of his, is gone.
It's all just so fucking typical, isn't it?
This time, Dean doesn't even bother stalking away to sink into his murky cloud of introspection, and luckily enough Sam leaves him to it without a word. The afternoon burns away with Metallica still crawling out of the crackling radio outside, and the heady smell of rain and the clean rustle of pages as Sam dives back into all the books that won't provide them any answers. He's swimming through postulations and theoretical musings, digging through layer after layer of hypocritical religious bullshit, but Dean knows and he thinks Sam probably does too that he won't be finding any truths between the words.
Because there is only one truth that matters now, and that is that Castiel is gone for good, and Dean can't do a goddamn thing to bring him back.
~ ~ ~
Pain, Castiel finds, is a curious phenomenon.
After a while - he cannot discern time as he once could; its passage is veiled to him now, and he cannot distinguish between hours or weeks or even decades - he becomes intimately familiar with the sensation. Pain has many facets. It is sharp when the demons drag knives and blades along his body; dull when they punch him; hot when they press white-glowing pokers into the tender flesh of his sides and, once, along his tongue to reach down his throat. It tangles and shifts as a speculum between freezing and sweltering, slow and fast, bruising and biting. Castiel wonders again, as a demon cuts a sizable hole in his side and buries its serpentine tongue in the wound, how humans can bear to live their lives dominated by such a bizarre and unpleasant phenomenon. He thinks that maybe he has not always held the proper approbation for the creatures he has been taught to think of as weak. If they can endure years upon years of the pains their bodies put forth and suffer, pains such as the ones these creatures of Hell inflict upon him during every waking hour, it is nothing short of respect that they deserve.
When the demon pulls its tongue out of the gaping hole and instead shoves it past Castiel's lips into his mouth, he twists from the contact with a low growl of surprise. This is something the demons have not yet done. In all their myriad tortures, this is the one they have not yet explored, the non-consensual defilement of his body. Of Jimmy Novak's body. Castiel recoils and presses to the scalding wall as the demons laugh and crowd around him, their motions skulking, like a pack of half-starved lions, smacking their filthy, salivating chops at the scent of blood on the air.
Protecting Jimmy Novak's body has always been Castiel's second charge, after Dean Winchester. The man's body is sacred; not many humans possess the capability for containing an angel's grace. Even through the encounter with the Archangels, Jimmy's soul remains intact, tucked firmly inside its physical vessel under layers and layers of thick armor. Castiel has done his best to ensure he stays asleep throughout the demons' torments, too, but twice now he has felt the shield around Jimmy's soul slip down and the man's soul shudder into waking consciousness with a sharp cry that stings Castiel as much on the inside as the demons' razorblades and claws do on the outside.
Castiel stumbles slightly when he rips out of the demon's grasp. The backs of his legs have not fully healed yet from when the demons drove thick spikes of iron through his calves until the tendons severed with a thick snap. He trips slightly and leans heavy against the wall, hissing out the ancient words of an exorcism. His eyes widen when the demons do not react at all, except by lunging forward and opening a deep gash along his cheek.
Castiel flings out a hand, intent on sealing it to the demon's forehead and burning it back to Hell, but the creature laughs loud and bright and catches him around the arm, jerks him down and throws him hard to the floor. There is a brief moment of overwhelming dizziness as Castiel's chin hits the floor with a sickening crack, but then the demons are on him and he cannot fight them off as hard as he tries.
They flip him onto his back and hold his arms, leaving the one demon not holding his arms to tear at his pants. He twists, but a bright pain slices up one arm, then another, as jagged teeth bore into each wrist. Castiel gasps and mutters an exorcism, the words weakly jumping from the back of his throat with nothing behind them - there is no faith in the words, no trust that it will vanquish the creatures back to their dimension, and with a short whimper he remembers why.
This is not a realm of Heaven or Hell; it is simply in between, a neutral blank zone with no more bearing from one side than the other. The words of his Father hold no sway here. The desperate cries and prayers that leave his lips in the hopes they might reach his home, his brothers and sisters, fall on deaf ears. Fall on no ears, in fact; they don't reach past the cramped Hell-forged walls of this prison. No one will hear him - not God, not the fury of the Archangels, not Zachariah, not Dean.
Castiel is truly and inexorably alone.
He is drawn from the solid weight of his thoughts by a sudden flare of heat along his now-bare legs. They've taken his clothes and they're laughing still, sliding roughened hands up and down his legs. He manages to catch a well-placed elbow in one of the demon's jaws, and kick another one in the temple, and he very nearly scrambles away, but there is a quick heat stabbing into his back and dragging down as the demons tear his back wide open with one of their polished, gleaming knives.
A sound like a sob punches out of his throat as he scrabbles at the floor, but the blade holds him still. He cannot move as the demons crawl up around him again, one of them jumping up to straddle his thighs with a wicked laugh, another bending to root cruelly through the wound in his back. They mutter filthy things back and forth, words Castiel never expected to hear directed at him, horrible, insulting things that make him flinch and fight harder to escape their grasps. The demon pinning his legs leans down to lick along his ear, slipping its slimy tongue inside with a promising murmur of, "We'll fuck you so hard you'll taste it for the rest of your pathetic life."
"Vos mando decedere!"
The words are a loud and unexpected bark, echoing around the chamber as the demons shriek and slam against the walls with a sizzle. Their carcasses slump to the floor as Castiel looks up, then lose their forms to become shapeless piles of dirty gray ash. Castiel swallows and does not turn; the pain on his back has not dimmed, and as he reaches behind him to figure out why, his fingers brush the blood-warm hilt and he cries out weakly when the blade shifts inside the wound. When he curls into a loose ball, the metal of the knife makes a scratching sound against the floor. It's gone straight through his body and out the other side, he realizes.
"Insipid animals," Lucifer growls from behind Castiel. Soft footsteps pad over before there is a notable absence of pain hitting like a bolt of lightning, electric and all-encompassing, blinding, as Lucifer pets the curved slide of his back. "I'm so sorry," he says, quiet, and Castiel's mouth falls open in a soft sound like ah. "They can't behave for five minutes, the sewer rats," Lucifer sighs, sounding so sincere it makes Castiel want to latch onto him; he doesn't, though, because Lucifer is Lucifer, he is evil and garbled and the cause of all of this. He is the reason this is happening to Castiel, he reminds himself.
"You sent them in," Castiel gasps. He keeps his eyes screwed tight against the blossom of warm pressure on his back. The feeling is not as complete as it once was. He cannot feel it simmering in his Grace, refueling it in a fashion, and he tries not to acknowledge that it might be because he is truly diminished. Maybe his Grace doesn't hold as tight as it once did. Maybe there has been a disconnect between it and him. Maybe he has lost a shade of himself in the tectonic shift into experiencing human conditions. "You let them do this to me."
The hand on Castiel's back slips down to rest on his backside, which makes him strangely nervous. It shouldn't, he tells himself. This human body is not his, so he should feel no sense of embarrassment at its nakedness. He should not be ashamed by how weak and vulnerable he feels now that his clothes are gone.
All the same, though, Lucifer slowly slicks the curves of Castiel's body until he reaches the wounds still struggling to heal themselves on Castiel's calves, and Castiel feels self-conscious and exposed at the intimacy of the contact.
He tightens his arms around himself as best he can around the knife skewered through his midsection. Lucifer does not acknowledge his accusation.
"They need to realize," he says instead, still sounding so regretful and honest, "that they can't just do whatever they want with you." He sighs heavily and wraps both hands around Castiel's legs at the wounds until they sew themselves flawlessly back together. Castiel sighs and remains stock-still as Lucifer's hands wander higher, skimming along his thighs in a slow exploration. A small hum floats into the air, a sound so hushed it is almost subconscious, and Castiel winces as the same warm pair of hands travels along his sensitized flesh until they reach the knife in his back. His eyes are closed, but he hears the rustle of fabric and the shift of movement, before there is a weight at his back and a sheltering warmth settling over him like a blanket. Soft material like linen brushes his back as Lucifer leans down to pour into Castiel's ear, "They need to realize that you're mine. They can't just have you."
The knife jerks out of Castiel's body with a sudden jolt and clatters to the floor somewhere out of reach. He moans against the awkward pressure left by the hole - not pain, because when Lucifer is touching him there is no pain, never any pain - and tries to push up onto his elbows.
He's shocked, though, when Lucifer roughly pushes him back down hard enough to hear the bones of his cheek splinter against the floor with a loud crack.
A hollow sound wheezes out of his throat. "Wait," he says weakly, but Lucifer shushes him. His fingers thread through Castiel's hair in a rhythm gentle enough to almost make him forget that he is trapped naked and underneath the Devil, with his face bloodied and broken as it tries to heal itself.
"Don't talk," Lucifer whispers as he pets the line of Castiel's neck slowly, maddeningly slowly. Castiel shifts around until his fingers brush his cheeks, the deep gash from the demon's knife on one side and the broken-open split of the impact against the floor mangling the other. He is vaguely aware of the pressure lifting from his back, and of the rasp of his own breathing as it thickens with each inch of flesh stroked by the web-thin pressure of Lucifer's fingers. They map his back carefully, stopping to swirl at the breadth of his shoulderblades, to tickle along the newly sensitized flesh where the knife-wound once was, before suddenly they are there, pressing inside of him without warning or preparation. Castiel hisses in a breath and moves to get away, but a hand fists in his hair and crushes his forehead against the floor in an impact so rough Castiel loses consciousness for a few seconds.
He wakes up when Lucifer slides in, and for the first time in all the days - weeks, months, centuries, however much time has passed - that he has been here, Castiel screams.
"Yes," Lucifer pants quietly. His grip is tight on Castiel's hips, bruising with the force of a thousand earthquakes and hurricanes, stronger than anything Castiel has ever felt or imagined, and he moves with a strange sort of slipped gracefulness, even as he pins Castiel roughly to the ground with a hand between his shoulders. "Tell them," he says through a growl, and Castiel tries to throw an arm back to fight him away, but cannot. "Tell them you're mine."
Lucifer catches his arm and shoves it at unnatural angles behind Castiel's back until the joint pops. Castiel nearly screams again but the sound catches in his throat, replaced by the bitter burn of Lucifer sliding in and out of him and the devastating realization that, in his shock, he has allowed Jimmy Novak to wake up. Quickly, Castiel stifles the man's screams and smothers him back into unconsciousness. He will not allow Lucifer to take this from him, to sully and corrupt a devout man who in no way deserves the torments he has been forced to survive. A sinking sort of desperation seizes Castiel's chest - Jimmy's chest - as he silently begs to be forgiven for his weakness.
When Lucifer stills, Castiel is overcome with the relief that it is all over, but then he is being flipped onto his back with a merciless twist, his knees thrown open and up, and Lucifer is burning a smirk into the air as he drags Castiel down until he is inside of him again, not a gentle slide but a rough, cruel shove.
Castiel fights him, or at least tries to, but against Lucifer's strength all the angelic fury and power he can summon are fruitless. Lucifer holds his knees tightly, hiking them up as his hands, those healing hands with skin smooth as lily petals, clutch at Castiel's hips. One of them strokes down Castiel's cheek and he tries to knock it away, to bite at it, anything, but then Lucifer touches the gash below his eye and something happens.
It washes over him in a furious rush, unstoppable as a gale force wind, and Castiel is positive that if he were standing instead of pinned down on his back, it would have knocked him over. He feels as if he has been reconstructed, newly born and remade out of pure light and beauty, and it is glorious as it spins through his veins in a reckless chemical reaction and lights him up from the inside out. It is beautiful and graceful and might move him to tears if he wasn't staggered completely still, and suddenly he knows that what is he is feeling is purely Lucifer, and all at once it becomes terrifying.
Castiel screams again, but his body is a physical one now, and even as he tries to channel out of it, there is still biology and he is still subject to the sensations of a provoked human anatomy. It feels good, in a bizarre sort of way, as if he is teetering on the edge of a cliff with a knot building in the base of his spine that pulses and glows brighter each time Lucifer pushes deeply inside of him, or grips his hips and holds them that certain way, or especially when Lucifer mouths at the crook where throat meets collarbone and wraps a hand slick with human sweat and human blood around his cock and strokes in long, languid movements.
The same sensation from before sideswipes Castiel again - blinding beauty and peace and power and so much pleasure he's punchdrunk on it in an instant - but he knows it is wrong, wrong, wrong, and he howls out loudly, the sound cracking his throat, and pounds and claws at Lucifer's chest and scrabbles so hard that his fingernails bend back completely out of their beds in a dark shock of crimson, but he cannot stop it. Light injects into his body from the most rudimentary molecular levels and builds up, spirals around the helixes of Jimmy Novak's DNA strand for strand, tunnels through bone and blood and fires along synapses, pushes out of pores, coils down his backbone until it is all exploding out of him in a pulse like a gunshot. This light, Lucifer, floods his system and buries into each thread and filament of his Grace, and as much as it breaks him apart on the inside, it is a bliss he has never known, sublimation so complete and overwhelming that only a rattled oh hiccups out of his throat before he comes, hot and slick between them, streaking his stomach as Lucifer cracks the bones of his hips and spills into him not a second later.
Somehow Castiel finds it in himself to push shaking hands against Lucifer's chest hard enough to nudge him backward, but Castiel thinks it's probably just that Lucifer allowed himself to be moved. He curls sideways and turns his back and curses himself inwardly because even now, he can't bring himself to completely break the contact between his own body and the one still barely touching his, with their legs tangled up and one of Lucifer's ankles caught between Castiel's. Fear of the pain he knows awaits if the touch is lost does not permit it. He is aware that it is an impossible conundrum - wanting to touch the impossibly powerful, impossibly lethal and corrupted and cruel creature that just forced him into submission and defiled him, both an angel and an innocent, thankfully still sleeping, man - but all the same he cannot build the distance between them and sink into the driving burn of the floor and the bruises welting on his flesh.
His own weakness disgusts him.
Castiel jumps when the slippery press of a hand slicks along his back. "Now they will know," Lucifer says, even and measured even as Castiel is still whimpering and desperately clawing to swallow clear air. Air, which he knows by now, is also an illusion in this place, just as everything else also is. Air. Gravity. Honesty. Faith. Hope.
It is all a lie.
Castiel feels his chest cave in with a distinct shatter, as if he has been blown of glass and flung to the floor. He is splintered, fractured and damaged, and he hurts. Not the ache of flesh and blood and bone, but something primal. Something deeper and purely a facet of himself, untranslatable to the heavy human body to which he has been fused. Something angelic.
Lucifer has taken that last remaining guidepost of his Grace, and demolished it.
Castiel feels scooped out and bone-dry, and he does not recognize the sensation of crying when it overcomes him. All he knows is that his shoulders begin quaking and his fingers still burn and throb with the gnarled tangle of his fingernails ripped from their places.
Lucifer's skin never even broke.
A quiet lull passes as Lucifer's fingers tickle along Castiel's side and ghost upward to smooth the blood-crusted fan of his hair behind his ear. He sighs, the sound sated and content. "I did that for you, Little Horn. Now they can't take you. They won't dare, if they know you belong to me."
Castiel screw his eyes tightly shut and mumbles in the weakest voice he thinks he has ever heard, "I don't belong to you. I'll never belong to you."
Lucifer chuckles happily, then leans down close to Castiel's ear, tongue curling along its shell in a seductive slither. "Oh, but you do," he whispers, and nips lightly at the lobe. Castiel shudders and pulls his arms tighter around himself. "Sooner or later you're going to realize that God doesn't exist down here, Castiel. And then I wonder what you'll have faith in."
Then he is gone, before his voice has even fully trailed off, and Castiel feels his throat break open in a ragged scream as every bruise and crush and tear Lucifer subjected him to - all the things he couldn't feel before - come flooding through his body in one inexplicable wave of agony.
~ ~ ~
Vos mando decedere is Latin for "I command you to leave."
{Continued here.}