March-Stalkers Mighty: 10/22
Passus V: Pes sinister.
Gabriel was spiralling upwards in tight rapid turns, bright as a burning dragonfly, flittering and quivering and gilded in the air against the coarse browns and greys and greens of the giant.
Grendel in grimmest grasp thou killedst, -
seeing how long these liegemen mine
he ruined and ravaged. Reft of life,
in arms he fell. Now another comes,
keen and cruel, her kin to avenge,
faring far in feud of blood.
Beowulf, anonymous, manuscript c. 1000 (poem older), trans. Gunmere 1910. (XX)
The rattle of hooves bounced back at him sharp off the walls as Dean cantered along the ravine. There had been an intersection not too far back, where one vast crack in the rocks had split into two thousands of years ago or more. Dean wouldn’t be able to find his way back home on his own, but he didn’t need to. He just needed to leave a false trail long enough for the pack to find him.
At the intersection he jumped down, pulled off his jacket (sort of sweaty, after the last two days), and led his mare by the reins for fifty yards or so back up the other ravine, along the false trail, dragging his jacket on the ground. The scent the dogs were following now had to be as much Dean and Dean’s hoof prints as it was Sam’s paws and Gabriel’s cart, and out of them all, Dean’s was the most familiar and exciting. Given the choice and a stronger trail, it was a pretty safe gamble that they’d pick that.
He swung back into the saddle and kicked the mare forward. The jacket, he dropped after another fifty paces or so - bait and reward - and kept the bay to a nice steady trot, as clear a trail as he could manage.
Two minutes more, and the sound behind him broke suddenly into a loud joyous clamour. Time up.
Dean whistled, sharp and commanding. The hounds came, soft thunder of galloping feet and wide panting mouths under the high music of their voices.
Dean turned (at bay), slipped down off the horse’s back, and went down on one knee to meet the hot ecstatic rush of victorious bodies and paws and tongues.
“Hey guys, missed you too. Oof, get out of it, you giant hairball. Yeah, okay, you’re thrilled, get out of my face. Come here, you giant fuzzy-faced girl. Hey, Chevy, my girl, there you are. Get over here. Oi. Maxim. No. Leave him alone. Sentinel, down. Stop climbing on Chevy’s head. Shit, Bodger, mind the junk.”
And it wasn’t just self-indulgent, because behind and around and between happy squirming tan and black and white and grey, he could see the horses slowing to a stop, and he could hear the voices loud and sharp at cross-purposes, and he could see the guns. Ellen and Bobby and a couple of the other older, cooler-headed hunters were pushing their way to the front, and Dean had just proved that he wasn’t some shapeshifter that the dogs wouldn’t know, who wouldn’t know the dogs. Also, right here and now? He’d just bought enough time shielded by precious dog-bodies that no one who was all hopped up on rage and grief could have had the chance, in that first hot-blooded doubting moment, to pull the trigger.
“Okay, guys, enough.” He shoved two young excited muzzles out of his face, and stood up. “Down. Enough.”
Time to face the dissonance.
“Hey guys,” Dean grinned, broad and cocky. “Good day out?”
Bobby and Rufus swung down to the ground, grim and business-like. Rufus pulled out his silver knife.
“Oh, come on.” Dean held up his hands pacifically and backed up a step. “Really, guys?”
Bobby met Dean’s eyes with his own, unwavering and exhausted. Dean had a sudden vivid recollection of that same face, more than a decade younger, gruff and dependable, and his voice: If it ain’t shaped human, it ain’t human.
... Yeah, it had never really been that simple.
“Don’t give me the big pretty eyes, boy,” Bobby said flatly, and caught the saddle-bag Rufus tossed him. “You know the drill.”
He opened the bag.
Well, sure. There was the standard set of tests for when someone had been outside alone all night - demonic possession, shapeshifters, infection by werewights or vampires, and that was about it. Making sure they really were that person, and that there wasn’t someone else in the driver’s seat. But this, here in Rufus’ saddlebag, this was the full package. Tests not just for substitution, but every kind of influence or suggestion or discreet little hitch-hiker ever heard of. Succubus, incubus, will-o’-the-wisp and woodwose and siren. Everything that could stick a poison in your body or mind and step back to let it grow. These didn’t get pulled out very often, because most people could be trusted to have the common sense to say, “Oh, hey, I got jumped by a woodwose the other day and she stuck a splinter in me before I could get away, maybe we should cauterise that before I start to grow bark.”
Apparently Dean couldn’t anymore. Good to know.
Bobby was glowering pointedly under his cap, the “you’ve gone and done something stupid again, haven’t you, boy?” glare that he’d perfected pretty much as soon as Dean had started to walk. It was weirdly grounding.
“... Fine.” Dean held out his arm, and tried not to pull away when hands closed tight over both his elbows. The circle of faces was strange, such a foreign thing made up of familiar pieces, all turned in on him until he (the centre of the circle) became this peculiar outside thing. Like they didn’t know him. Like he didn’t know himself.
Ellen was at the front, her eyes dark and guarded. She and Jo were keeping close to each other, and there were a lot of other faces in the throng who kept throwing her sideways glances, wary and grudging, like it was only her presence that was holding them in check. Only Dean really didn’t like the way she was looking at him.
The silver knife seared a hot trail across Dean’s arm, and he tried to keep his flinch to a minimum.
That ruled out all the shifters and weres and a few others besides.
“Okay, salt?” Bobby flicked open a little phial, and Dean rolled his eyes and opened his mouth obediently for the little white crystals. It should have been reassuring to have Bobby and Rufus here, being the ones to do this, a solid bulk between him and the staring faces. Except they were holding his freaking arms, and it made Dean feel like a calf they were dosing, or something.
“He’s not a demon, guys, we know that,” Jo spat out.
When Dean looked up, the venom in her soft brown eyes was a sharp chill to his system. If he’d ever had a little sister, it would have been Jo.
Dean grinned up at her, tight and cheeky, as obnoxiously like himself as possible.
This whole thing was freaking surreal. Like it was just a scene painted on glass, something that could shatter any moment, if he just moved wrong. His shoulders were tight with the effort of not pulling away, with not yelling at them and trying to make them see, and his eyes were burning with lack of sleep.
“Chevy. Sing,” Rufus said, deep and firm and almost gentle.
Chevy leaned adoringly against Dean’s legs and bayed. He stared down at her, then back at Rufus. “Seriously? You think I’m infected with angel juice?”
Rufus returned the stare levelly. “Not a chance I’m willing to take. Are you?”
Bobby brought out the hyssop and the bronze.
“So, where’s the angel?” Mark snapped, sharp and sarcastic and tired of waiting.
Dean looked up at him, away from Bobby’s fingers where they were clamped worried and too tight around the inside of his elbow and the clean shallow cut just above them, to the narrowed grey-blue eyes and the set jaw and the restless impatience in them. There was an urge to violence in there, violence against anything available, against Dean, against Cas if he was there, in the eyes of Dean’s cousin. Human eyes.
“Fuck you, man,” he snapped, before he could stop to think. “The angel’s where he’s meant to be, and he’s a better man than you are. You’re not touching him, you hear me?”
So maybe sneakiness wasn’t Dean’s strongest point.
Everything was sickly silent for a moment. Then it was all voices, a babble of them, furious and contradictory and rising up sharply over each other and bouncing off the narrow stone walls.
Bobby winced, and levelled Dean his “why can’t you keep your fool mouth shut, y’idjit?” glower. Dean’s stomach was roiling unpleasantly, and he had to resist the urge to flip the whole lot of them off. The hell? Maybe he was sick. He knew every single face here, and they were all pressed in stiflingly close, and they all felt so very far away and alien.
He wasn’t a calf. He was an angel, pinned between them, waiting for the knife to the shoulder.
Belatedly, he realised which angel Mark had meant.
“... playing us all for fools,” he heard, harsh and loud, then Gwen halfway to a scream, “Shut up, Christian, don’t you dare, he’s still Dean,” and cutting in from the side, “... ever cared about anyone but his brother anyway?” and “what it did to my son,” and “smug screwed-up bastard,” and “make him tell us where the hell it’s gone, I want to take it apart finger by fucking finger.”
All the frustration and exhaustion and confusion of the past few weeks, and lucky him, he got to be the middle of it.
Well, screw it. Better him than Cas.
“We broke bread with him, you back-sliding sons of bitches,” he roared. There was a moment of shocked silence, of every eye on him.
“Shut up, boy,” Bobby muttered, too late. “We’re not doing this here.”
Dean took his moment by the throat. Because, damn, he was frustrated and exhausted and confused as hell too, and he could yell with all of it. “What the hell happened to guest sanctuary? We took him in and gave him a bed and Charlie’s fucking apple cider then we turned on him and locked him up in the barn, and you’re all gonna tell me you’re okay with that?”
“Forget the fucking pedlar, Winchester,” Jo screamed at him, thin and ragged. “What the hell were you doing with the angel that killed my dad? Yours is dead so no one else gets to have one, is that it?”
Dean lost all the air in his lungs for a moment, like she’d hit him in the gut. She was red-eyed and wild and looked closer to insane than Gabriel, and she looked like she wanted Dean dead.
Call in the dogs, Dean heard, dulcet and bitter in his head. Dragged out to the town square for the annual bonfire festival. Stoning. Bit of mob violence to get everyone chatty and happy again.
That little stumble was enough for everyone else to start up again. Dean couldn’t even make out the words now. Roars, growls, snarls, screeches, chatterings, like they weren’t saying anything at all.
I can hear them through the walls, you know.
“We’re humans, for fuck’s sake,” he shouted uselessly into the babel, “Looking out for each other, working out things like civilised folk, like people who wouldn’t murder a damn guest, that’s what keeps us going. We start throwing those out and we’re no better than any other animal out here, y’all hear me?”
But that tentative restraint was good and broken. Everyone was raising their voice at someone, pressing forward (in on Dean or further down past him like they were just going to gallop on blindly). Jo was half off her horse, yelling at her mother, fighting the death-grip Ellen had on her arm.
Bobby was shouting something in Dean’s ear, and Mark and Bela and Gordon were off their horses trying to push forward towards Dean. Dean was struggling to pull himself away, yelling at the people trying to push past him down the ravine, fighting to stop them because, misdirection, selling the false trail, because there was no fucking way they were getting close to Cas on Dean’s watch.
Then, just because this couldn’t get any better...
“Hey there, gang!” a too-familiar voice chirped overhead, bright and obscenely cheerful, and for some reason completely audible over it all. “Long time, no sticks and stones!”
Fuck.
Someone fired off a hasty shot, but it went wide. Gabriel didn’t even flinch.
“Sorry for skipping out on you - your hospitality’s unmatchable, guys, really, nothing like it - but you know how it is, busy social calendar this time of year and all that.”
The dogs started up again, loud and disorienting. People were scrabbling, regrouping, pulling out weapons, levelling the muzzles of guns at him, but it was a hell of an angle. He was almost right overhead, perched precariously on the edge of the ravine, hands stuffed into his pockets, head cocked like he was listening, and wings lifting large and insolent around him. For some reason, somehow, he was dressed in brilliant red, and the colour seemed to bleed out and shimmer in the air around him.
Gabriel peered down at Dean, and his mouth twisted into a vicious little smile. “Oh, hey, you caught my runaway pet. Shame,” he added, a slow drawl of saccharine intent that made Dean’s skin crawl. “I had such lovely games planned for the little wingless bug.”
Monster to the hilt. Hell. Dean had just stood up for him.
Jo and Ellen fired in unison, perfect marks. Gabriel flicked his hand, and the bullets unfolded little brown wings and fluttered away as robins. The ground began to tremble, a faint distant murmur like a cart going past when you’re lying in bed.
Gabriel spoke again, and his voice had teeth in it. “I love the passionate ones. So easy to worm your way into their heads and twist them around, y’know? It’s even funnier when it wears off and they realise what they’ve done. Sorry I’m going to miss that.”
Shit.
But he hadn’t. He was bullshitting. Wasn’t he? Dean’s head was his own, dammit.
The trembling was a shaking now, a heavy thud-thud-thud that vibrated up the bones of Dean’s legs. Tiny rocks were skittering down the walls. The horses were tossing their heads, restless, backing away, catching on each other’s nerves and the agitation of the humans and the excited yells of the dogs. Two of the more flighty turned tail and bolted back the way they’d come.
Bobby’s gun cocked next to Dean’s ear. “Get out of our boy’s head, angel,” he said, soft and non-negotiable, and even in that moment Dean felt a little swell of relief at that. Our boy.
“Relax, he’ll get over it.” Gabriel waved one hand dismissively, and glanced over his shoulder at something behind him. Two dogs were hit with flying stones, and the baying was suddenly scattered in yelps of pain. “Maybe. Hey, guys, word to the wise,” and it was a pounding now, and a crashing, something unspeakably large thundering through the trees up above, heading right for the edge of the ravine, stones flying. “You might want to run.”
Another angel shot by overhead - not Cas, wings crisp white and purple (Rachel?) - vanished at top speed beyond the ravine, and Gabriel took a running leap and launched himself into the air.
The etayn roared like a mountainous bull, and burst into view.
“Well, that’s new,” Rufus breathed.
The thing didn’t need to try to loom. It was born looming. Three times at least the size of the etayns they got inside their lands, hands that must be larger than Dean was long. It would have been impossibly tall if they’d been standing level with its feet. Here, like this, towering on the edge of a fragile crack in the rock that held pretty much everyone Dean cared about (bar two), it blocked out the sun.
It roared again, angry and confused, staggering drunkenly on the edge, boulders crumbling loose like clay under its feet, horses screaming. Then, deprived of the angel it had been chasing, it turned on the one it could reach.
Gabriel was spiralling upwards in tight rapid turns, bright as a burning dragonfly, flittering and quivering and gilded in the air against the coarse browns and greys and greens of the giant.
It batted at him, bemused and angry. He drew his sword, and laughed in its face.
His sword. Gabriel had an angel sword, but it wasn’t the slim silver thing that Cas carried, that every other angel Dean had ever seen could conjure from thin air. This was long and golden-bright, and it burst into flames as they watched.
“Balls,” breathed Bobby. “Archangel. We pissed off an archangel.”
“The hell’s an archangel?” Rufus demanded, eyes fixed on the tableau like it was only a theory, only a pretty picture, like the walls weren’t crumbling under its feet as it swung a bed-sized fist at the brilliant darting gnat swooping like a taunt around it. Like the walls weren’t breaking, skipping and sliding down towards them, ready to swallow and crush them like they had when Dean had been a child, when it had been a demon standing up there and taunting, not an angel, when Dad...
“Legend.” Bobby shrugged. “‘Til now.”
Angels made no sense, Dean thought, distantly, frantically. Every bird bigger than an owl looked heavy in the air, clumsy and slow. Angels, so much larger and clumsily human-shaped, moved as light as scraps of ash dancing over a fire. Like once they stopped touching the earth, it had no dominion over them. Like they were air.
Then there was a hand clamped bruisingly on the back of his neck, Ellen’s snapped-out “Get down, boy,” and Dean was sprawling on the ground as something deadly-large whizzed over his head. A rock split his cheek, sharp sudden pain that brought the world back into harsh, loud focus around him.
People were screaming, staggering, running, ducking the crumble and rattle of boulders and flying stones. Dogs were fleeing back up the ravine, or cowering in hapless confusion or pain, and four were lying dead. One horse was down, another hobbling uselessly, and others were fleeing with or without their riders.
They were ants down here. Wingless bugs.
“Get out! Get home!” Dean roared to the dogs, sharp and stern as he could, trying to break through the stupor of panic and misplaced loyalty, but there was no time to see if they did. Up and on his feet, and Rufus had taken a fist-sized rock to the hip and was swearing and staggering. Everyone was up and scrambling, alone or in pairs, some of them not even stopping to see if their own siblings were okay, and Dean and Bobby slid their arms around Rufus and ran.
They got thirty yards before a slide of scree and mud took the ground out from their feet, and Bobby went down nightmarishly slow under the crushing weight of a boulder.
Dean could feel himself roaring Bobby’s name, tearing at his throat, but he couldn’t hear it. There was only his hands on Bobby’s shoulders, the loose roll of Bobby’s head on his neck, the blood on his cap, Rufus and Ellen beside him yelling something, that dark incongruous line of rock across Bobby’s back, and nothing below it.
Then Bobby was gasping something, something stupid about leaving him and running because he was dead and they had to get out of here, and Ellen’s voice rising sharp and harsh, “Joanna Beth, take that horse and get your ass out of here,” and Dean and Rufus both telling Bobby to shut the hell up. There were reins pressed into Dean’s hand, and something slammed into Dean’s head and almost knocked him over, and the etayn was roaring or screaming overhead, and Dean and Ellen exchanged a hard, determined look, and set their backs to lifting the boulder.
Bobby screamed. That was something Dean could have done with never hearing in his life. Rufus had him by the shoulders and was falling over backwards pulling him out, and Dean didn’t even look at the mess of Bobby’s lower body, just dropped the boulder and hauled Bobby and Ellen together onto the flinching horse’s back, and together they fled, just as the etayn’s voice cut off.
There was a moment of stillness, of suspension. Then the world exploded behind them.
The horse flattened its ears and stretched out into top speed. Dean kept his head down and did the same, ducking and weaving when he could, expecting any moment to be bowled over or knocked out or, hell, squashed under half a freaking wall of rock, or even just turn his ankle and lose the race like that and wouldn’t that be embarrassing as all hell for the two seconds he’d have to remember it. Rufus pounded along beside him, ignoring his hip in the interest of not turning into jam, and for an excruciatingly long thirty seconds there was nothing in the world but that: just the two of them, and the earth breaking down around them.
Then they were turning the corner, around the bend and into shelter, and Dean’s legs suddenly decided they were nothing but knees, so he folded up obediently and collapsed, retching rock-dust and shaking.
The roar and the crashing died out until it was just the occasional sullen rumble, or the putt-putt-putt of a single rock bouncing forlornly down all by itself.
Rufus was on his hands and knees beside Dean. Ellen was bringing the horse back under control way away down the ravine, and there were people and dogs and horses around him, shaken and whimpering and staring blankly. Claire had her face buried in Jo’s shoulder and was either laughing or sobbing hysterically.
Dean staggered to his feet, and paced very carefully back toward the turn of the wall. He had to see.
The ravine behind them was completely shattered. That was the first thing he saw. The second was the etayn’s head, grotesque and blank, staring lifelessly past him and half hidden by a slab of rock. It was longer than Dean was tall, with broad crude features like someone had started to make a human then not polished it up, and it leaked dark purplish blood.
Behind that, the body. It had fallen - Gabriel had coaxed it to fall - so that it came down right across the ravine. Across both forks of it, Dean’s false trail and the real path out. The narrow spur between them was cracked into dust and rubble, and the bent and broken body of the giant lay like the most comprehensive log-across-the-road trick ever between Dean and the world beyond. The rocks that had come down with it were slewed and piled haphazardly around the body, up and down the ravine, messy and precarious.
It was impassable. Trying to clear it out would only set off more rockfalls. There was no way out now. They were closed off, shut in: just them, in their own little world.
Gabriel was nowhere to be seen.
The etayn’s fingers, flung out pathetically in Dean’s direction, twitched and slackened. Blunter than a human’s, almost chubby, like a child’s, if it wasn’t for the impossibility of their size. The human, writ grotesquely large and violent. Gabriel had broken the boundary of their land with the broken body of the giant, and, in breaking it, closed it.
Dean turned his back on the mess, and set about patching up the living bodies right in front of him.
---
Note: “Etain” or “etayn” is an antiquated word for “giant,” particularly associated with the giant / wild man who lives in the unknown depths of the forests. It existed in Old English and endured through into Middle English literature (see the description of the Green Knight in the quotation that heads IX.sinister, although it was already a little archaic by the time that poem was written, revived for the sake of alliteration like so many words in that poem). Tolkien’s “ent” (plural “etain”) is derived from this word.
Gabriel was spiralling upwards in tight rapid turns, bright as a burning dragonfly, flittering and quivering and gilded in the air against the coarse browns and greys and greens of the giant.
Grendel in grimmest grasp thou killedst, -
seeing how long these liegemen mine
he ruined and ravaged. Reft of life,
in arms he fell. Now another comes,
keen and cruel, her kin to avenge,
faring far in feud of blood.
Beowulf, anonymous, manuscript c. 1000 (poem older), trans. Gunmere 1910. (XX)
The rattle of hooves bounced back at him sharp off the walls as Dean cantered along the ravine. There had been an intersection not too far back, where one vast crack in the rocks had split into two thousands of years ago or more. Dean wouldn’t be able to find his way back home on his own, but he didn’t need to. He just needed to leave a false trail long enough for the pack to find him.
At the intersection he jumped down, pulled off his jacket (sort of sweaty, after the last two days), and led his mare by the reins for fifty yards or so back up the other ravine, along the false trail, dragging his jacket on the ground. The scent the dogs were following now had to be as much Dean and Dean’s hoof prints as it was Sam’s paws and Gabriel’s cart, and out of them all, Dean’s was the most familiar and exciting. Given the choice and a stronger trail, it was a pretty safe gamble that they’d pick that.
He swung back into the saddle and kicked the mare forward. The jacket, he dropped after another fifty paces or so - bait and reward - and kept the bay to a nice steady trot, as clear a trail as he could manage.
Two minutes more, and the sound behind him broke suddenly into a loud joyous clamour. Time up.
Dean whistled, sharp and commanding. The hounds came, soft thunder of galloping feet and wide panting mouths under the high music of their voices.
Dean turned (at bay), slipped down off the horse’s back, and went down on one knee to meet the hot ecstatic rush of victorious bodies and paws and tongues.
“Hey guys, missed you too. Oof, get out of it, you giant hairball. Yeah, okay, you’re thrilled, get out of my face. Come here, you giant fuzzy-faced girl. Hey, Chevy, my girl, there you are. Get over here. Oi. Maxim. No. Leave him alone. Sentinel, down. Stop climbing on Chevy’s head. Shit, Bodger, mind the junk.”
And it wasn’t just self-indulgent, because behind and around and between happy squirming tan and black and white and grey, he could see the horses slowing to a stop, and he could hear the voices loud and sharp at cross-purposes, and he could see the guns. Ellen and Bobby and a couple of the other older, cooler-headed hunters were pushing their way to the front, and Dean had just proved that he wasn’t some shapeshifter that the dogs wouldn’t know, who wouldn’t know the dogs. Also, right here and now? He’d just bought enough time shielded by precious dog-bodies that no one who was all hopped up on rage and grief could have had the chance, in that first hot-blooded doubting moment, to pull the trigger.
“Okay, guys, enough.” He shoved two young excited muzzles out of his face, and stood up. “Down. Enough.”
Time to face the dissonance.
“Hey guys,” Dean grinned, broad and cocky. “Good day out?”
Bobby and Rufus swung down to the ground, grim and business-like. Rufus pulled out his silver knife.
“Oh, come on.” Dean held up his hands pacifically and backed up a step. “Really, guys?”
Bobby met Dean’s eyes with his own, unwavering and exhausted. Dean had a sudden vivid recollection of that same face, more than a decade younger, gruff and dependable, and his voice: If it ain’t shaped human, it ain’t human.
... Yeah, it had never really been that simple.
“Don’t give me the big pretty eyes, boy,” Bobby said flatly, and caught the saddle-bag Rufus tossed him. “You know the drill.”
He opened the bag.
Well, sure. There was the standard set of tests for when someone had been outside alone all night - demonic possession, shapeshifters, infection by werewights or vampires, and that was about it. Making sure they really were that person, and that there wasn’t someone else in the driver’s seat. But this, here in Rufus’ saddlebag, this was the full package. Tests not just for substitution, but every kind of influence or suggestion or discreet little hitch-hiker ever heard of. Succubus, incubus, will-o’-the-wisp and woodwose and siren. Everything that could stick a poison in your body or mind and step back to let it grow. These didn’t get pulled out very often, because most people could be trusted to have the common sense to say, “Oh, hey, I got jumped by a woodwose the other day and she stuck a splinter in me before I could get away, maybe we should cauterise that before I start to grow bark.”
Apparently Dean couldn’t anymore. Good to know.
Bobby was glowering pointedly under his cap, the “you’ve gone and done something stupid again, haven’t you, boy?” glare that he’d perfected pretty much as soon as Dean had started to walk. It was weirdly grounding.
“... Fine.” Dean held out his arm, and tried not to pull away when hands closed tight over both his elbows. The circle of faces was strange, such a foreign thing made up of familiar pieces, all turned in on him until he (the centre of the circle) became this peculiar outside thing. Like they didn’t know him. Like he didn’t know himself.
Ellen was at the front, her eyes dark and guarded. She and Jo were keeping close to each other, and there were a lot of other faces in the throng who kept throwing her sideways glances, wary and grudging, like it was only her presence that was holding them in check. Only Dean really didn’t like the way she was looking at him.
The silver knife seared a hot trail across Dean’s arm, and he tried to keep his flinch to a minimum.
That ruled out all the shifters and weres and a few others besides.
“Okay, salt?” Bobby flicked open a little phial, and Dean rolled his eyes and opened his mouth obediently for the little white crystals. It should have been reassuring to have Bobby and Rufus here, being the ones to do this, a solid bulk between him and the staring faces. Except they were holding his freaking arms, and it made Dean feel like a calf they were dosing, or something.
“He’s not a demon, guys, we know that,” Jo spat out.
When Dean looked up, the venom in her soft brown eyes was a sharp chill to his system. If he’d ever had a little sister, it would have been Jo.
Dean grinned up at her, tight and cheeky, as obnoxiously like himself as possible.
This whole thing was freaking surreal. Like it was just a scene painted on glass, something that could shatter any moment, if he just moved wrong. His shoulders were tight with the effort of not pulling away, with not yelling at them and trying to make them see, and his eyes were burning with lack of sleep.
“Chevy. Sing,” Rufus said, deep and firm and almost gentle.
Chevy leaned adoringly against Dean’s legs and bayed. He stared down at her, then back at Rufus. “Seriously? You think I’m infected with angel juice?”
Rufus returned the stare levelly. “Not a chance I’m willing to take. Are you?”
Bobby brought out the hyssop and the bronze.
“So, where’s the angel?” Mark snapped, sharp and sarcastic and tired of waiting.
Dean looked up at him, away from Bobby’s fingers where they were clamped worried and too tight around the inside of his elbow and the clean shallow cut just above them, to the narrowed grey-blue eyes and the set jaw and the restless impatience in them. There was an urge to violence in there, violence against anything available, against Dean, against Cas if he was there, in the eyes of Dean’s cousin. Human eyes.
“Fuck you, man,” he snapped, before he could stop to think. “The angel’s where he’s meant to be, and he’s a better man than you are. You’re not touching him, you hear me?”
So maybe sneakiness wasn’t Dean’s strongest point.
Everything was sickly silent for a moment. Then it was all voices, a babble of them, furious and contradictory and rising up sharply over each other and bouncing off the narrow stone walls.
Bobby winced, and levelled Dean his “why can’t you keep your fool mouth shut, y’idjit?” glower. Dean’s stomach was roiling unpleasantly, and he had to resist the urge to flip the whole lot of them off. The hell? Maybe he was sick. He knew every single face here, and they were all pressed in stiflingly close, and they all felt so very far away and alien.
He wasn’t a calf. He was an angel, pinned between them, waiting for the knife to the shoulder.
Belatedly, he realised which angel Mark had meant.
“... playing us all for fools,” he heard, harsh and loud, then Gwen halfway to a scream, “Shut up, Christian, don’t you dare, he’s still Dean,” and cutting in from the side, “... ever cared about anyone but his brother anyway?” and “what it did to my son,” and “smug screwed-up bastard,” and “make him tell us where the hell it’s gone, I want to take it apart finger by fucking finger.”
All the frustration and exhaustion and confusion of the past few weeks, and lucky him, he got to be the middle of it.
Well, screw it. Better him than Cas.
“We broke bread with him, you back-sliding sons of bitches,” he roared. There was a moment of shocked silence, of every eye on him.
“Shut up, boy,” Bobby muttered, too late. “We’re not doing this here.”
Dean took his moment by the throat. Because, damn, he was frustrated and exhausted and confused as hell too, and he could yell with all of it. “What the hell happened to guest sanctuary? We took him in and gave him a bed and Charlie’s fucking apple cider then we turned on him and locked him up in the barn, and you’re all gonna tell me you’re okay with that?”
“Forget the fucking pedlar, Winchester,” Jo screamed at him, thin and ragged. “What the hell were you doing with the angel that killed my dad? Yours is dead so no one else gets to have one, is that it?”
Dean lost all the air in his lungs for a moment, like she’d hit him in the gut. She was red-eyed and wild and looked closer to insane than Gabriel, and she looked like she wanted Dean dead.
Call in the dogs, Dean heard, dulcet and bitter in his head. Dragged out to the town square for the annual bonfire festival. Stoning. Bit of mob violence to get everyone chatty and happy again.
That little stumble was enough for everyone else to start up again. Dean couldn’t even make out the words now. Roars, growls, snarls, screeches, chatterings, like they weren’t saying anything at all.
I can hear them through the walls, you know.
“We’re humans, for fuck’s sake,” he shouted uselessly into the babel, “Looking out for each other, working out things like civilised folk, like people who wouldn’t murder a damn guest, that’s what keeps us going. We start throwing those out and we’re no better than any other animal out here, y’all hear me?”
But that tentative restraint was good and broken. Everyone was raising their voice at someone, pressing forward (in on Dean or further down past him like they were just going to gallop on blindly). Jo was half off her horse, yelling at her mother, fighting the death-grip Ellen had on her arm.
Bobby was shouting something in Dean’s ear, and Mark and Bela and Gordon were off their horses trying to push forward towards Dean. Dean was struggling to pull himself away, yelling at the people trying to push past him down the ravine, fighting to stop them because, misdirection, selling the false trail, because there was no fucking way they were getting close to Cas on Dean’s watch.
Then, just because this couldn’t get any better...
“Hey there, gang!” a too-familiar voice chirped overhead, bright and obscenely cheerful, and for some reason completely audible over it all. “Long time, no sticks and stones!”
Fuck.
Someone fired off a hasty shot, but it went wide. Gabriel didn’t even flinch.
“Sorry for skipping out on you - your hospitality’s unmatchable, guys, really, nothing like it - but you know how it is, busy social calendar this time of year and all that.”
The dogs started up again, loud and disorienting. People were scrabbling, regrouping, pulling out weapons, levelling the muzzles of guns at him, but it was a hell of an angle. He was almost right overhead, perched precariously on the edge of the ravine, hands stuffed into his pockets, head cocked like he was listening, and wings lifting large and insolent around him. For some reason, somehow, he was dressed in brilliant red, and the colour seemed to bleed out and shimmer in the air around him.
Gabriel peered down at Dean, and his mouth twisted into a vicious little smile. “Oh, hey, you caught my runaway pet. Shame,” he added, a slow drawl of saccharine intent that made Dean’s skin crawl. “I had such lovely games planned for the little wingless bug.”
Monster to the hilt. Hell. Dean had just stood up for him.
Jo and Ellen fired in unison, perfect marks. Gabriel flicked his hand, and the bullets unfolded little brown wings and fluttered away as robins. The ground began to tremble, a faint distant murmur like a cart going past when you’re lying in bed.
Gabriel spoke again, and his voice had teeth in it. “I love the passionate ones. So easy to worm your way into their heads and twist them around, y’know? It’s even funnier when it wears off and they realise what they’ve done. Sorry I’m going to miss that.”
Shit.
But he hadn’t. He was bullshitting. Wasn’t he? Dean’s head was his own, dammit.
The trembling was a shaking now, a heavy thud-thud-thud that vibrated up the bones of Dean’s legs. Tiny rocks were skittering down the walls. The horses were tossing their heads, restless, backing away, catching on each other’s nerves and the agitation of the humans and the excited yells of the dogs. Two of the more flighty turned tail and bolted back the way they’d come.
Bobby’s gun cocked next to Dean’s ear. “Get out of our boy’s head, angel,” he said, soft and non-negotiable, and even in that moment Dean felt a little swell of relief at that. Our boy.
“Relax, he’ll get over it.” Gabriel waved one hand dismissively, and glanced over his shoulder at something behind him. Two dogs were hit with flying stones, and the baying was suddenly scattered in yelps of pain. “Maybe. Hey, guys, word to the wise,” and it was a pounding now, and a crashing, something unspeakably large thundering through the trees up above, heading right for the edge of the ravine, stones flying. “You might want to run.”
Another angel shot by overhead - not Cas, wings crisp white and purple (Rachel?) - vanished at top speed beyond the ravine, and Gabriel took a running leap and launched himself into the air.
The etayn roared like a mountainous bull, and burst into view.
“Well, that’s new,” Rufus breathed.
The thing didn’t need to try to loom. It was born looming. Three times at least the size of the etayns they got inside their lands, hands that must be larger than Dean was long. It would have been impossibly tall if they’d been standing level with its feet. Here, like this, towering on the edge of a fragile crack in the rock that held pretty much everyone Dean cared about (bar two), it blocked out the sun.
It roared again, angry and confused, staggering drunkenly on the edge, boulders crumbling loose like clay under its feet, horses screaming. Then, deprived of the angel it had been chasing, it turned on the one it could reach.
Gabriel was spiralling upwards in tight rapid turns, bright as a burning dragonfly, flittering and quivering and gilded in the air against the coarse browns and greys and greens of the giant.
It batted at him, bemused and angry. He drew his sword, and laughed in its face.
His sword. Gabriel had an angel sword, but it wasn’t the slim silver thing that Cas carried, that every other angel Dean had ever seen could conjure from thin air. This was long and golden-bright, and it burst into flames as they watched.
“Balls,” breathed Bobby. “Archangel. We pissed off an archangel.”
“The hell’s an archangel?” Rufus demanded, eyes fixed on the tableau like it was only a theory, only a pretty picture, like the walls weren’t crumbling under its feet as it swung a bed-sized fist at the brilliant darting gnat swooping like a taunt around it. Like the walls weren’t breaking, skipping and sliding down towards them, ready to swallow and crush them like they had when Dean had been a child, when it had been a demon standing up there and taunting, not an angel, when Dad...
“Legend.” Bobby shrugged. “‘Til now.”
Angels made no sense, Dean thought, distantly, frantically. Every bird bigger than an owl looked heavy in the air, clumsy and slow. Angels, so much larger and clumsily human-shaped, moved as light as scraps of ash dancing over a fire. Like once they stopped touching the earth, it had no dominion over them. Like they were air.
Then there was a hand clamped bruisingly on the back of his neck, Ellen’s snapped-out “Get down, boy,” and Dean was sprawling on the ground as something deadly-large whizzed over his head. A rock split his cheek, sharp sudden pain that brought the world back into harsh, loud focus around him.
People were screaming, staggering, running, ducking the crumble and rattle of boulders and flying stones. Dogs were fleeing back up the ravine, or cowering in hapless confusion or pain, and four were lying dead. One horse was down, another hobbling uselessly, and others were fleeing with or without their riders.
They were ants down here. Wingless bugs.
“Get out! Get home!” Dean roared to the dogs, sharp and stern as he could, trying to break through the stupor of panic and misplaced loyalty, but there was no time to see if they did. Up and on his feet, and Rufus had taken a fist-sized rock to the hip and was swearing and staggering. Everyone was up and scrambling, alone or in pairs, some of them not even stopping to see if their own siblings were okay, and Dean and Bobby slid their arms around Rufus and ran.
They got thirty yards before a slide of scree and mud took the ground out from their feet, and Bobby went down nightmarishly slow under the crushing weight of a boulder.
Dean could feel himself roaring Bobby’s name, tearing at his throat, but he couldn’t hear it. There was only his hands on Bobby’s shoulders, the loose roll of Bobby’s head on his neck, the blood on his cap, Rufus and Ellen beside him yelling something, that dark incongruous line of rock across Bobby’s back, and nothing below it.
Then Bobby was gasping something, something stupid about leaving him and running because he was dead and they had to get out of here, and Ellen’s voice rising sharp and harsh, “Joanna Beth, take that horse and get your ass out of here,” and Dean and Rufus both telling Bobby to shut the hell up. There were reins pressed into Dean’s hand, and something slammed into Dean’s head and almost knocked him over, and the etayn was roaring or screaming overhead, and Dean and Ellen exchanged a hard, determined look, and set their backs to lifting the boulder.
Bobby screamed. That was something Dean could have done with never hearing in his life. Rufus had him by the shoulders and was falling over backwards pulling him out, and Dean didn’t even look at the mess of Bobby’s lower body, just dropped the boulder and hauled Bobby and Ellen together onto the flinching horse’s back, and together they fled, just as the etayn’s voice cut off.
There was a moment of stillness, of suspension. Then the world exploded behind them.
The horse flattened its ears and stretched out into top speed. Dean kept his head down and did the same, ducking and weaving when he could, expecting any moment to be bowled over or knocked out or, hell, squashed under half a freaking wall of rock, or even just turn his ankle and lose the race like that and wouldn’t that be embarrassing as all hell for the two seconds he’d have to remember it. Rufus pounded along beside him, ignoring his hip in the interest of not turning into jam, and for an excruciatingly long thirty seconds there was nothing in the world but that: just the two of them, and the earth breaking down around them.
Then they were turning the corner, around the bend and into shelter, and Dean’s legs suddenly decided they were nothing but knees, so he folded up obediently and collapsed, retching rock-dust and shaking.
The roar and the crashing died out until it was just the occasional sullen rumble, or the putt-putt-putt of a single rock bouncing forlornly down all by itself.
Rufus was on his hands and knees beside Dean. Ellen was bringing the horse back under control way away down the ravine, and there were people and dogs and horses around him, shaken and whimpering and staring blankly. Claire had her face buried in Jo’s shoulder and was either laughing or sobbing hysterically.
Dean staggered to his feet, and paced very carefully back toward the turn of the wall. He had to see.
The ravine behind them was completely shattered. That was the first thing he saw. The second was the etayn’s head, grotesque and blank, staring lifelessly past him and half hidden by a slab of rock. It was longer than Dean was tall, with broad crude features like someone had started to make a human then not polished it up, and it leaked dark purplish blood.
Behind that, the body. It had fallen - Gabriel had coaxed it to fall - so that it came down right across the ravine. Across both forks of it, Dean’s false trail and the real path out. The narrow spur between them was cracked into dust and rubble, and the bent and broken body of the giant lay like the most comprehensive log-across-the-road trick ever between Dean and the world beyond. The rocks that had come down with it were slewed and piled haphazardly around the body, up and down the ravine, messy and precarious.
It was impassable. Trying to clear it out would only set off more rockfalls. There was no way out now. They were closed off, shut in: just them, in their own little world.
Gabriel was nowhere to be seen.
The etayn’s fingers, flung out pathetically in Dean’s direction, twitched and slackened. Blunter than a human’s, almost chubby, like a child’s, if it wasn’t for the impossibility of their size. The human, writ grotesquely large and violent. Gabriel had broken the boundary of their land with the broken body of the giant, and, in breaking it, closed it.
Dean turned his back on the mess, and set about patching up the living bodies right in front of him.
---
Note: “Etain” or “etayn” is an antiquated word for “giant,” particularly associated with the giant / wild man who lives in the unknown depths of the forests. It existed in Old English and endured through into Middle English literature (see the description of the Green Knight in the quotation that heads IX.sinister, although it was already a little archaic by the time that poem was written, revived for the sake of alliteration like so many words in that poem). Tolkien’s “ent” (plural “etain”) is derived from this word.