It's a Long Walk Back to Eden: Part III
Rec'd listening: Unkle - Glow.
Sam wakes to the rustling of wind through leaves. The sound’s comforting; fluid. He can see why he fell asleep--
Then he hears, Bang.
His eyes snap open to a trippy night sky, the moon spinning amongst too many stars. It should make him dizzy but in reality, it’s… calming.
Pressing his palms against grass and weeds, he pushes himself up and takes stock. First stop, nowhere: it’s just a field, bordered on all sides by a black forest. The too-large moon is light enough to see by, but there’s no sign of Gabriel, angel of a thousand smirks. There’s no sign of anyone.
He was expecting someone, of course. He doesn’t realize it until he looks over that empty field, but he was.
The flask is still in his hand; he shakes it and feels, rather than hears, the slosh of whatever syrupy concoction Gabriel had come up with flowing around the inside. “Hey-“ He doesn’t know what to call him, here. He settles with lowering his voice. “Gabriel?”
A hand collides with the back of his head. “Ow--”
“You want to keep it down, dumbass?” Gabriel’s an abrupt shadow at his shoulder, eyes scanning the landscape.
The angel looks mostly the same; a permanent sneer beneath narrow eyes. But if Sam stares at him close enough, there’s a little something more - under his skin, at the edges of his face - than there was before. Something the slightest bit incongruent with whatever Sam thinks he’s seeing.
Catching his stare, Gabriel looks him over with one eyebrow raised and says, “Nice Heaven. Very swanky.”
Sam scowls. “Can we get going?”
“Oh, sure, why not?”
Gabriel reaches for his shoulder, but Sam knocks his hand back. “I need the sword,” he says, palm held out.
The archangel stares at it, vaguely surprised. “What? Oh, no. No can do, kiddo.”
He curls his fingers into a fist. “’No can do’?”
“No killing in Heaven. Daddy’s rules,” he says, giving the sky a disgusted glance.
“What-you didn’t think that was important to mention? Anything else I need to know?”
“Oh, I’ve got a few pointers. We’ll worry about that at the next stop.”
He reaches forward again. Sam just knocks his hand back down. “What am I supposed to do about Zachariah if I can’t kill him?”
“Improvise.” This time, Gabriel takes a preemptive swat at his hand before he shoves his palm against Sam’s forehead.
He blinks once, reflexively. The stars take the milliseconds-long opportunity to fade into a sheet-metal ceiling, patches of rust allowing light through in narrow streams. Beside him Gabriel announces, pleased: “Here we go.”
Sam follows Gabriel’s gaze down. There’s a woman on the floor, trapped in mid-writhe. Light pours in bright streaks from her mouth, nose, eyes, throwing the broad expanse of the empty warehouse floor into stark highlights and starker shadows. There’s a bloody hole just above her heart, spilling just as much light as the rest of her. She doesn’t move; it’s a permanent rigor mortis.
Did Cas look like that?
A quarter-turn, and he might get to see.
He doesn’t turn. Not immediately. Sam stares at her instead, hyperaware of his hands heavy and worthless by his sides. When he clears his throat, he says, “This is where he died.”
Gabriel nods. “Guess they’re gonna Tarantino the whole thing, huh?”
Sam nods along with him and turns.
There are two more angels: a man, early forties, and an older, stern-looking woman on the outside. They’re bent over the floor, arms in just the right position to be pinning Castiel to the floor. Castiel isn’t there; there’s just empty air where their hands are curled, and a gush of blood where he’d been torn through.
Sam rounds on Gabriel. “Not exactly here, is he?”
“Hey, I don’t write the rules. You just gotta follow the breadcrumbs,” Gabriel answers smugly. He’s hovering over the dying angel, squinting at the grace bleeding out of her. “I think I met her at a party once. Shame.”
“So get on to the next breadcrumb-“ He drops into obstinate silence when Gabriel holds up one finger.
The shadows clinging to the edges of the room move first, tracking unnaturally fast across the concrete. At the window set high into the far wall, the sun is beginning to move, too fast to be sunset. The shadows are the only things moving - crawling - in the whole place. Sam takes an uncomfortable step back, one hand reaching for the gun that isn’t there anymore.
“These worlds don’t last, not once your angel buddies have moved on,” Gabriel casually explains. “It’ll default to your slice of Heaven. Watch.”
With a red flare, the sun disappears from the dirty windowpanes. There’s a moon in its place, ratty curtains framing it.
Sam tries to shake off the cognitive dissonance of it, but by that point the warehouse is gone entirely.
The new room is claustrophobically small compared to the last. By the looks of it, it’s a dining room, kitchen, and living room all in one, though it was made to accommodate far less. There’s only room for three crooked chairs at the scratched-up table; on the fourth side, the couch’s back digs into the wood. Opposite to that, there’s a raw patch of ply where the chair closest to the kitchen cabinet slams into it each time it’s pulled back. The measly two feet of counter is covered by one dirty bowl, an empty container of chocolate icing, and a small baking pan.
There’s a cake on the table, laid out on aluminum foil. It’s poorly made and poorly decorated. The bakers clearly ran out of icing before they got to the sides, and one corner of it somehow got broken off at one point; there’s an unlit candle stuck in sideways to keep it attached, some icing hastily shoved in as mortar. The remaining three candles, the red-and-blue striped ones that Sam remembers perfectly, are stuck into the most structurally sound sections of the rest of the cake, small wavering flames flickering at their tops. Some shaky 5-year-old hand has scripted Happy Birthday Dad on the icing in blue piping. It’s clumsy, and the r is backwards, but there’s a perfectionist kind of neatness to the lines of the letters.
One of the chairs is pulled back, but empty. That’s what holds Sam’s attention the longest. Well aware, Gabriel raps his knuckles against the chair’s back. “And who was sitting here?”
The back door slams shut, locks rattling into place. A familiar voice - younger, and maybe a little bit softer than Sam remembers - shouts, “Boys?” up the hall.
Sam grabs Gabriel by the arm, voice dropped to a low hiss. “Can we just fucking go?”
“Alright, alright, pushy.”
The cake melts away, its candles with it. John Winchester’s shadow stretches up into nothing on the far wall.
♤ ♤ ♤
When the world settles, Gabriel snorts. “That’s a nice look for you.”
Sam’s staring at himself: frozen in time. It takes him a second to work through the uncanny notion of seeing himself as a too-real wax figure, but when he does, he can see that Gabriel’s got a point. He never realized his nose scrunched like that when he was angry.
And does he look angry: the back straight, fists-at-his-sides kind of angry, that look of tight-jawed silent rage he gets when he’s set on dogging someone right out of the room with his eyes alone.
By the cell phone at his feet, he’s already succeeded. Cas has already gone. But he - that is, the frozen him, past-him - is still staring down the door with flat-eyed hate.
It’s like a bad caricature, that much rage and disgust on his face. He makes a reflexive swipe at his own, making sure it’s not still there, somehow.
Gabriel has moved on to staring at the wall like it’s of more interest than taupe-colored wallpaper. He’s got the same kind of disturbing stillness that Cas would get sometimes, not a muscle moving, not even the simple rise and fall of breathing. Sam keeps a skeptical eye on him as he bends to retrieve the cell phone from the floor. Part of him expects it to be stuck there, but it’s not. It comes up easily, and rattles the exact way he expects it to when he turns it in his hand.
“We’re catching up,” Gabriel abruptly announces. Sam’s still staring at the cell phone when the archangel drops his hand, heavy, on his shoulder.
♤ ♤ ♤
The damp hits first: his boots splash in what smells like gutter water. He’s staring at an empty hand lit orange by the sodium-arc lamps overhead.
He looks down the back alley he’s now standing in. The lines of it are perfectly familiar. There’s a flash of chrome-and-black at the far end: the Impala, waiting. And by the time he got there, Sam remembers dully, he was spitting blood.
Hit to the ribs, back to the wall, and hit to the face. He took all three.
Christ, he’d been pissed. Favored his left side for two weeks. Cas, that miserable bastard, he hadn’t given him a single fucking warning. At first, he was the complacent rag doll. Let him drag him out the joint, halfway to the car, and then-one, two, three. Bastard.
The him that’s a piece of this particular set, the too-real marionette, still has its back to the wall, head turned aside. There’s red blooming on one cheek and his arms are up, ready to hit right back.
He never got around to it.
Gabriel’s walking past him. He mimes fitting his fingers into the empty curl of fabric that’d fit around Cas’s fist, saying, “Wow, you gotta explain this one. You got beat up by the runt?”
There’s a line of blood working its way down the chin of his remembered self. Just staring at it, Sam can taste it. He rubs his hand over his mouth in disgust before he answers. “He was on a bender.”
It’s a bad answer. He knew it then, and knows it now.
“Right, the alcoholic angel.” Gabriel glances at him, grinning. “Kinda makes me proud.”
“He was being a prick,” Sam mutters flatly.
No.
He was being a human.
Trying it all on, one after another: anger, sadness, despair. If it doesn’t work, shake it off, move on to the next experience. Drinking, that didn’t work, not in the long run. Music. Hunting. He sampled it all - hand constantly on the dial, moving from one radio station to the next, and the next, and the next, an incessant restless jumble of sound byte after sound byte until Sam told him ‘Jesus, Cas, quit it’, - and none of it worked. None of it explained enough, distracted enough.
Sam knew it wasn’t Cas’s fault; that he didn’t know how. And maybe he didn’t enjoy watching him search like this, the great angel scrounging for some kind of sanity, but maybe-maybe he was satisfied by it, a little. Bitterly satisfied, for a while.
He’d humored him. Humored his failed attempts at cursing and his schizophrenic radio listening and his occasional binge. Humored him right up until he threw a wild punch in this Nowhere, USA alley.
Wasn’t that just as human? Lashing out at the last friend you’ve got. Testing how much shit they’ll put up with for your sorry ass. Hell, hadn’t he-how many arguments had he and Dean-he knew, he knows that that’s all it was. Testing. Trying it on.
But that one night, that one alley. Maybe it was too close to home, maybe it was just too damn much. Either way it ended there. Sam had told him to fuck off, or something, hell, he doesn’t even remember. Remembers the bitter taste in his mouth, the angry satisfaction of leaving Cas standing there, looking dazed. Disappointed. Lost.
Because that’s what humans do.
Gabriel’s dropping his hand, eyes trailing up towards the building’s gutter. “You’ve come a long way for a prick.” He’s stilling again, drawing up into something unmoving, inhuman.
It’s the moonlight that distracts him. It draws out a shadow that, if Sam looks just right, might be the curve of immense wings at Gabriel’s back.
He drags disbelieving eyes towards Gabriel’s face. That ever-present sarcastic twist of his lips, but there’s more beneath it. He can sense it, here, the vast something that Gabriel is, and he can see how ill-fitting this human shape is. A mask - that’s all this is. Perfectly crafted for Sam’s imperfect human mind.
Jesus.
How long has he been kidding himself?
Cas isn’t human. Never was; never will be. No more than Gabriel is.
Before Sam can think to startle away, Gabriel’s reaching for him. It’s not a shoulder-grab this time; this time he plants his hand on the middle of Sam’s chest and gives him a firm shove back. His boot catches on a crack in the pavement. Stumbling back, he lands on his ass in gravel.
The air’s thick with the peculiar tang of burning human flesh.
He knows Gabriel’s gone long before he rocks to his feet and shouts his name. This place is emptier, far emptier; there’s a low hum gone from his bones that he hadn’t known was there.
He tugs his sleeves down against the cold and paces down the rust-and-metal aisles of Bobby Singer’s junkyard anyway. “Gabriel!”
Gabriel doesn’t answer, because Gabriel’s not here; just him, again, of-fucking-course, shoved around like the human pawn he is.
To the north there’s a column of smoke curling black and still against the gray of the sky, and Sam finds the source right where he remembered it.
Past the frozen memory of himself and the indent in the gravel where Castiel had stood, the pyre’s almost burned out.
Betraying feet drag him in a slow circle around them and their morbid bonfire. Through the frozen flames, there are only bits and pieces of what had been Robert S. Singer. Charred bone. Black flesh. Ash.
Then he stares at himself - face hidden beneath mussed, unwashed hair - and tries to remember how Castiel had looked. Small and gray. Eyes on the fire, always.
Never said a word.
Sam’s mind locks around that thought: never a word. His hand fumbles the flask from his pocket as he stalks towards the shed, kicks a sheet of scrap to the ground. He pours out the sigils with a careful hand.
Part II | Part III | Part IV
Sam wakes to the rustling of wind through leaves. The sound’s comforting; fluid. He can see why he fell asleep--
Then he hears, Bang.
His eyes snap open to a trippy night sky, the moon spinning amongst too many stars. It should make him dizzy but in reality, it’s… calming.
Pressing his palms against grass and weeds, he pushes himself up and takes stock. First stop, nowhere: it’s just a field, bordered on all sides by a black forest. The too-large moon is light enough to see by, but there’s no sign of Gabriel, angel of a thousand smirks. There’s no sign of anyone.
He was expecting someone, of course. He doesn’t realize it until he looks over that empty field, but he was.
The flask is still in his hand; he shakes it and feels, rather than hears, the slosh of whatever syrupy concoction Gabriel had come up with flowing around the inside. “Hey-“ He doesn’t know what to call him, here. He settles with lowering his voice. “Gabriel?”
A hand collides with the back of his head. “Ow--”
“You want to keep it down, dumbass?” Gabriel’s an abrupt shadow at his shoulder, eyes scanning the landscape.
The angel looks mostly the same; a permanent sneer beneath narrow eyes. But if Sam stares at him close enough, there’s a little something more - under his skin, at the edges of his face - than there was before. Something the slightest bit incongruent with whatever Sam thinks he’s seeing.
Catching his stare, Gabriel looks him over with one eyebrow raised and says, “Nice Heaven. Very swanky.”
Sam scowls. “Can we get going?”
“Oh, sure, why not?”
Gabriel reaches for his shoulder, but Sam knocks his hand back. “I need the sword,” he says, palm held out.
The archangel stares at it, vaguely surprised. “What? Oh, no. No can do, kiddo.”
He curls his fingers into a fist. “’No can do’?”
“No killing in Heaven. Daddy’s rules,” he says, giving the sky a disgusted glance.
“What-you didn’t think that was important to mention? Anything else I need to know?”
“Oh, I’ve got a few pointers. We’ll worry about that at the next stop.”
He reaches forward again. Sam just knocks his hand back down. “What am I supposed to do about Zachariah if I can’t kill him?”
“Improvise.” This time, Gabriel takes a preemptive swat at his hand before he shoves his palm against Sam’s forehead.
He blinks once, reflexively. The stars take the milliseconds-long opportunity to fade into a sheet-metal ceiling, patches of rust allowing light through in narrow streams. Beside him Gabriel announces, pleased: “Here we go.”
Sam follows Gabriel’s gaze down. There’s a woman on the floor, trapped in mid-writhe. Light pours in bright streaks from her mouth, nose, eyes, throwing the broad expanse of the empty warehouse floor into stark highlights and starker shadows. There’s a bloody hole just above her heart, spilling just as much light as the rest of her. She doesn’t move; it’s a permanent rigor mortis.
Did Cas look like that?
A quarter-turn, and he might get to see.
He doesn’t turn. Not immediately. Sam stares at her instead, hyperaware of his hands heavy and worthless by his sides. When he clears his throat, he says, “This is where he died.”
Gabriel nods. “Guess they’re gonna Tarantino the whole thing, huh?”
Sam nods along with him and turns.
There are two more angels: a man, early forties, and an older, stern-looking woman on the outside. They’re bent over the floor, arms in just the right position to be pinning Castiel to the floor. Castiel isn’t there; there’s just empty air where their hands are curled, and a gush of blood where he’d been torn through.
Sam rounds on Gabriel. “Not exactly here, is he?”
“Hey, I don’t write the rules. You just gotta follow the breadcrumbs,” Gabriel answers smugly. He’s hovering over the dying angel, squinting at the grace bleeding out of her. “I think I met her at a party once. Shame.”
“So get on to the next breadcrumb-“ He drops into obstinate silence when Gabriel holds up one finger.
The shadows clinging to the edges of the room move first, tracking unnaturally fast across the concrete. At the window set high into the far wall, the sun is beginning to move, too fast to be sunset. The shadows are the only things moving - crawling - in the whole place. Sam takes an uncomfortable step back, one hand reaching for the gun that isn’t there anymore.
“These worlds don’t last, not once your angel buddies have moved on,” Gabriel casually explains. “It’ll default to your slice of Heaven. Watch.”
With a red flare, the sun disappears from the dirty windowpanes. There’s a moon in its place, ratty curtains framing it.
Sam tries to shake off the cognitive dissonance of it, but by that point the warehouse is gone entirely.
The new room is claustrophobically small compared to the last. By the looks of it, it’s a dining room, kitchen, and living room all in one, though it was made to accommodate far less. There’s only room for three crooked chairs at the scratched-up table; on the fourth side, the couch’s back digs into the wood. Opposite to that, there’s a raw patch of ply where the chair closest to the kitchen cabinet slams into it each time it’s pulled back. The measly two feet of counter is covered by one dirty bowl, an empty container of chocolate icing, and a small baking pan.
There’s a cake on the table, laid out on aluminum foil. It’s poorly made and poorly decorated. The bakers clearly ran out of icing before they got to the sides, and one corner of it somehow got broken off at one point; there’s an unlit candle stuck in sideways to keep it attached, some icing hastily shoved in as mortar. The remaining three candles, the red-and-blue striped ones that Sam remembers perfectly, are stuck into the most structurally sound sections of the rest of the cake, small wavering flames flickering at their tops. Some shaky 5-year-old hand has scripted Happy Birthday Dad on the icing in blue piping. It’s clumsy, and the r is backwards, but there’s a perfectionist kind of neatness to the lines of the letters.
One of the chairs is pulled back, but empty. That’s what holds Sam’s attention the longest. Well aware, Gabriel raps his knuckles against the chair’s back. “And who was sitting here?”
The back door slams shut, locks rattling into place. A familiar voice - younger, and maybe a little bit softer than Sam remembers - shouts, “Boys?” up the hall.
Sam grabs Gabriel by the arm, voice dropped to a low hiss. “Can we just fucking go?”
“Alright, alright, pushy.”
The cake melts away, its candles with it. John Winchester’s shadow stretches up into nothing on the far wall.
♤ ♤ ♤
When the world settles, Gabriel snorts. “That’s a nice look for you.”
Sam’s staring at himself: frozen in time. It takes him a second to work through the uncanny notion of seeing himself as a too-real wax figure, but when he does, he can see that Gabriel’s got a point. He never realized his nose scrunched like that when he was angry.
And does he look angry: the back straight, fists-at-his-sides kind of angry, that look of tight-jawed silent rage he gets when he’s set on dogging someone right out of the room with his eyes alone.
By the cell phone at his feet, he’s already succeeded. Cas has already gone. But he - that is, the frozen him, past-him - is still staring down the door with flat-eyed hate.
It’s like a bad caricature, that much rage and disgust on his face. He makes a reflexive swipe at his own, making sure it’s not still there, somehow.
Gabriel has moved on to staring at the wall like it’s of more interest than taupe-colored wallpaper. He’s got the same kind of disturbing stillness that Cas would get sometimes, not a muscle moving, not even the simple rise and fall of breathing. Sam keeps a skeptical eye on him as he bends to retrieve the cell phone from the floor. Part of him expects it to be stuck there, but it’s not. It comes up easily, and rattles the exact way he expects it to when he turns it in his hand.
“We’re catching up,” Gabriel abruptly announces. Sam’s still staring at the cell phone when the archangel drops his hand, heavy, on his shoulder.
♤ ♤ ♤
The damp hits first: his boots splash in what smells like gutter water. He’s staring at an empty hand lit orange by the sodium-arc lamps overhead.
He looks down the back alley he’s now standing in. The lines of it are perfectly familiar. There’s a flash of chrome-and-black at the far end: the Impala, waiting. And by the time he got there, Sam remembers dully, he was spitting blood.
Hit to the ribs, back to the wall, and hit to the face. He took all three.
Christ, he’d been pissed. Favored his left side for two weeks. Cas, that miserable bastard, he hadn’t given him a single fucking warning. At first, he was the complacent rag doll. Let him drag him out the joint, halfway to the car, and then-one, two, three. Bastard.
The him that’s a piece of this particular set, the too-real marionette, still has its back to the wall, head turned aside. There’s red blooming on one cheek and his arms are up, ready to hit right back.
He never got around to it.
Gabriel’s walking past him. He mimes fitting his fingers into the empty curl of fabric that’d fit around Cas’s fist, saying, “Wow, you gotta explain this one. You got beat up by the runt?”
There’s a line of blood working its way down the chin of his remembered self. Just staring at it, Sam can taste it. He rubs his hand over his mouth in disgust before he answers. “He was on a bender.”
It’s a bad answer. He knew it then, and knows it now.
“Right, the alcoholic angel.” Gabriel glances at him, grinning. “Kinda makes me proud.”
“He was being a prick,” Sam mutters flatly.
No.
He was being a human.
Trying it all on, one after another: anger, sadness, despair. If it doesn’t work, shake it off, move on to the next experience. Drinking, that didn’t work, not in the long run. Music. Hunting. He sampled it all - hand constantly on the dial, moving from one radio station to the next, and the next, and the next, an incessant restless jumble of sound byte after sound byte until Sam told him ‘Jesus, Cas, quit it’, - and none of it worked. None of it explained enough, distracted enough.
Sam knew it wasn’t Cas’s fault; that he didn’t know how. And maybe he didn’t enjoy watching him search like this, the great angel scrounging for some kind of sanity, but maybe-maybe he was satisfied by it, a little. Bitterly satisfied, for a while.
He’d humored him. Humored his failed attempts at cursing and his schizophrenic radio listening and his occasional binge. Humored him right up until he threw a wild punch in this Nowhere, USA alley.
Wasn’t that just as human? Lashing out at the last friend you’ve got. Testing how much shit they’ll put up with for your sorry ass. Hell, hadn’t he-how many arguments had he and Dean-he knew, he knows that that’s all it was. Testing. Trying it on.
But that one night, that one alley. Maybe it was too close to home, maybe it was just too damn much. Either way it ended there. Sam had told him to fuck off, or something, hell, he doesn’t even remember. Remembers the bitter taste in his mouth, the angry satisfaction of leaving Cas standing there, looking dazed. Disappointed. Lost.
Because that’s what humans do.
Gabriel’s dropping his hand, eyes trailing up towards the building’s gutter. “You’ve come a long way for a prick.” He’s stilling again, drawing up into something unmoving, inhuman.
It’s the moonlight that distracts him. It draws out a shadow that, if Sam looks just right, might be the curve of immense wings at Gabriel’s back.
He drags disbelieving eyes towards Gabriel’s face. That ever-present sarcastic twist of his lips, but there’s more beneath it. He can sense it, here, the vast something that Gabriel is, and he can see how ill-fitting this human shape is. A mask - that’s all this is. Perfectly crafted for Sam’s imperfect human mind.
Jesus.
How long has he been kidding himself?
Cas isn’t human. Never was; never will be. No more than Gabriel is.
Before Sam can think to startle away, Gabriel’s reaching for him. It’s not a shoulder-grab this time; this time he plants his hand on the middle of Sam’s chest and gives him a firm shove back. His boot catches on a crack in the pavement. Stumbling back, he lands on his ass in gravel.
The air’s thick with the peculiar tang of burning human flesh.
He knows Gabriel’s gone long before he rocks to his feet and shouts his name. This place is emptier, far emptier; there’s a low hum gone from his bones that he hadn’t known was there.
He tugs his sleeves down against the cold and paces down the rust-and-metal aisles of Bobby Singer’s junkyard anyway. “Gabriel!”
Gabriel doesn’t answer, because Gabriel’s not here; just him, again, of-fucking-course, shoved around like the human pawn he is.
To the north there’s a column of smoke curling black and still against the gray of the sky, and Sam finds the source right where he remembered it.
Past the frozen memory of himself and the indent in the gravel where Castiel had stood, the pyre’s almost burned out.
Betraying feet drag him in a slow circle around them and their morbid bonfire. Through the frozen flames, there are only bits and pieces of what had been Robert S. Singer. Charred bone. Black flesh. Ash.
Then he stares at himself - face hidden beneath mussed, unwashed hair - and tries to remember how Castiel had looked. Small and gray. Eyes on the fire, always.
Never said a word.
Sam’s mind locks around that thought: never a word. His hand fumbles the flask from his pocket as he stalks towards the shed, kicks a sheet of scrap to the ground. He pours out the sigils with a careful hand.
Part II | Part III | Part IV