The Sky is No Man's Land: Part II
Can you hear me in the rain, God? I am standing with this boy here who thinks an army at war is a reasonable thing. He thinks a soldier is something more than the uniform he is wearing. He thinks we live in a sane life and time, which you know as well as I is not what you designed for us sinners.
-E.L. Doctorow, The March
WRAY, CO
2006-08-29 02:07 PM
Sam Winchester makes a hard hitchhiker to miss: six and a half foot of lanky perched on a guardrail, freakishly long legs sprawled out in front of him, head buried in a book. Dean scoffs as he pulls onto the gravel. Castiel doesn’t shift from where he’s been passed out in shotgun for most of the drive, sweaty forehead pressed up against the glass. His hand is still curled loosely into the curve of his collarbone. Dean’d asked; got a terse ‘fine’ for an answer. Whatever it is, it’s not ripped open or bleeding or blatantly dislocated, so there’s not much Dean can do about it.
Bleeding like a stuck pig. So the demon had said.
He gives an uneasy glance towards the backseat. It’s clean. ‘cause he hadn’t been bleeding much; not like a stuck pig, no. His jerryrigged compress had done its job keeping his leather interior blood-free.
Unless it’s something he can’t see.
Dean shakes his head and grabs at the door handle.
Sam is shoving his book back into the knapsack between his knees and creaking to his feet. “Run into anything?”
“Nah. You?”
Sam shakes his head, nods towards the passenger door. “How’s the guest?”
“Sleeping it off.”
“Huh.” Sam moves towards the trunk. “I left Bobby a voicemail. Said we’d be a few more days.”
“You tell him about-“ he twitches his chin towards the passenger.
“Little bit. Nothing much.”
“What do you think? Lay low a few days, wait to see if that Gregory chick makes a comeback-“
“Grigori,” Sam corrects, immediately. Poor kid can’t help himself. “If grigori even exist, I mean, the implications would just be-“ He waves a hand, cutting himself off. “Whatever she is, that sword lit her up like the Fourth of July. We’ve gotta talk to this guy.”
Christ. He’s already going full geek out on this shit, and Dean hasn’t even gotten into this whole-feathers-bullshit. Hopefully Columbo keeps sleeping.
“Yeah, well, he’s all yours. Good luck. Guy has a two-word vocabulary, when he’s not unconscious.” He tilts his head back, taking in the heat of the sun. “How was Denver?" He leaves an eyebrow waggle to make his true point.
Sam drops the trunk closed. He keeps his hands pressed against the finish. “She’s going back to Stanford.” He’s still for a minute, then shrugs. “Expected, I guess. They’ve rebuilt a lot, and she’s already a year behind.”
Shit. Dean drops back against the trunk, arms crossed. “We can talk to Bobby, pick up a few Cali jobs. Whose territory is that, these days?”
“Sarah Langley.”
Dean groans. There aren’t many section leaders he gets along with, but Sarah Langley - she’s a royal bitch.
“Yeah,” Sam says ruefully.
“Whatever. You need some sun, anyway. Lookin’ pasty.”
“Haha,” Sam answers dryly, but any further retort cuts off when Sam’s phone gives the quick ting of a text message notification. Dean’s is echoing it a few seconds later. It’s a familiar text - he’s gotten it twice already today:
FROM: ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏
MSG: ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏ ⏏⏏⏏ ⏏⏏⏏
Sam shows him his own screen. Same thing. “Gotten three of them in the last few hours.”
“Yeah, same. Probably the same time, too.”
There’s a couple seconds of silence - each running through their own personal lists of cell phone-infecting ghouls, and coming up short - before Dean sits upright. “Oh, hey - check this out.” He digs through his back pocket, comes up with the flask he’d wrestled the demon for. There’s a clean imprint of each of his fingers in the metal.
“Badass, huh? I think I kinda like it better this way.”
Sam turns it over, eyebrows raised skeptically. “I’m guessing this is why your hand is sixteen shades of purple?” He gestures the flask with a slosh towards his right hand.
“Eh, whatever. I got a souvenir.”
“Anyone ever tell you your kind of optimism is a little disturbing?”
“It’s alright to be jealous, Sammy,” Dean answers with a shit-eating grin, and moves towards the driver’s door. “Someday you’ll be a man too.”
Sam lobs the flask across the roof of the car. It clangs against the back of Dean’s head.
“You bitch--”
♤ ♤ ♤
HORSE CREEK, WY
2006-08-29 11:37 PM
Sam wakes to a mouthful of upholstery and the sound of gravel snapping against the Impala’s undercarriage.
“There’s nothing here,” Dean’s saying.
“That’s preferable,” Castiel says back.
Sam’s blurred vision resolves to Dean giving Castiel a sidelong glance. There’s a long stretch of tarmac drifting off into black ahead of the Impala’s headlights. “You gonna puke? ‘cause if you’re gonna puke--”
“No,” Castiel answers, and pushes open the door.
Sam brushes a hand against his mouth. “Where are we?”
“Middle of nowhere, Wyoming,” Dean mutters. “C’mon, he’s being all - weird again.” He follows Castiel out into the dark.
Out in the insect ruckus of the night Sam drops back against the fender, rubbing the last bits of dream-fugue out of his eyes. He’s losing the last bits of a dream in pieces, but it’s left a lingering sourness in his mouth, and the asphalt feels strange under his feet. Pliant.
Castiel makes a strange figure himself, walking up the white line of the road’s edge in small measured steps. He stops at the fringe of the Impala’s headlights, takes four steps back, and then lies down on the asphalt, head towards the double-yellow, toes towards the gravel shoulder.
“There any mental facilites in North Platte?” Sam asks casually.
Dean huffs. “If there are, we cheated ‘em out of a customer.” He pushes off from the fender.
“’We’?” Sam mutters, and follows at a slower pace.
They come to a stop in the middle of the road, above Castiel’s head. Sam looks up the length of it. Straight blacktop as far as the eye can see. Which isn’t far, on a moonless night. “This is a trucking road, y’know,” Dean says.
“We haven’t encountered a vehicle in 47 miles,” Castiel answers flatly. His eyes are closed. “But I trust you’ll warn me.”
Dean ‘hms’ noncommittally, watches a few more seconds in silence. “What are you doing, meditating?”
“No,” Castiel answers.
“Communing with the gods? What?”
“I’m repairing something.” He cracks an eye to stare at Dean. “This will go much faster if you’re silent.”
Dean throws his arms out in a shrug. Castiel drops his eyes closed again.
Sam elbows Dean in the side, and gestures towards Castiel’s bandage. There’s a thin blue-white glow filtering between the threads of the gauze.
“Uh. Hey, Cas-ti--uh. Cas, buddy, you look like you’re leaking.”
Castiel ignores him.
They’d had the ‘angel’ conversation over burgers at a shitty Wyoming diner. (Castiel hadn’t eaten; claiming he didn’t ‘require nutrients.’ Dean had asked him if he was a plant.) Dean had met the subject with contempt, Sam with polite skepticism, but Castiel hadn’t seemed to care. If he’s mental, he’s a convinced mental. One that leaks light on Wyoming backroads.
Dean paces the distance between the reflectors set into the asphalt; Sam drops his hands into his pockets and watches Castiel.
He extends his right arm out, keeping it parallel to the double yellow, palm down towards the asphalt. Then he reaches with his left hand into the empty space above his right shoulder. He feels slowly along, not touching, just ghosting his fingertips a few inches off the asphalt.
He stops his roaming, fingers tracing slowly over the same three-inch wide patch of air for ten, fifteen seconds. His jaw is set tight, mouth drawn into a thin line.
The headlights of the Impala brighten up. Dean stops his pacing. Sam can hear the thin whine of the alternator speeding up under the rumble of the idling engine.
Castiel braces his right hand to the pavement, arches the fingers of his left hand, and shoves at something Sam can’t see.
Blue fingers of static arc across the pavement, skittering out in both directions from Castiel. They snap across Sam’s shoes, sending him jerking back in surprise, and catch on the fender of the Impala to brighten the lights - almost blinding - before they sputter and the Impala’s engine cuts out, plunging them into darkness.
The static races back towards Castiel, lightning-bright in the dark, and coalesces for one brief moment into a living electric painting of--
Wings.
Immense wings, stretching ten, fifteen feet in either direction of the 5-foot-nothing tax accountant sprawled on the pavement. Castiel’s fingers are pressed into the apex of the right wing, where a storm of white sparks spits and hisses. It’s off axis, the line not connecting cleanly with the rest of the… bone? What would be bone, Sam thinks, if the anatomy is true to a bird’s. Castiel shoves again. The profile snaps into place, goes straight, but not before Castiel seizes up, teeth gritted, and the air shakes with a sound like the one they’d heard at the trailer - deafening white noise, reverberating in the corners of Sam’s skull - when the demon had been drawing an invisible line taut over Castiel’s back, tearing with clawed fingers at-- this. At the wing.
By Dean’s grimace, he hears it too.
The static disperses in a rush of acrid air. The Impala shudders back to life, headlights throwing the pavement into sodium-halide reality. Castiel rolls gingerly to an upright position, one hand already back to the familiar rub at his shoulder.
Sam and Dean share disbelieving stares over his head.
“You, uh.” Sam clears his throat. “You have wings.”
“On some planes,” Castiel answers.
“Looked broken,” Sam continues awkwardly. “Is that what the demon was, uh, yanking--?”
“Yes. But it was already broken.” Slowly, he pushes to his knees, and then his feet. Dean is at Sam’s shoulder, and they’re both watching.
“I think you’re more willing to listen now,” he says. The brothers exchange another look; Castiel looks to Dean, and continues: “You asked the wrong question before.”
“About what?”
“You asked how to do what I had done,” he answers, speaking slow. “I didn’t lie; you can’t destroy demons the way I did. But I’ve read your grimoires, the works of Solomon. There’s much that’s been lost to your kind. Things I can teach you. Sigils, rites. Weapons.”
“Yeah?” Dean asks. “In exchange for what?”
Castiel’s silent for awhile. “Your help.”
Dean crosses his arms. “Angel of the Lord needs help, huh?”
Sam throws his brother a look. “Help with what?”
“Hunting a traitor.”
“You mean an - angel traitor.”
“Yes.”
Silence ticks by. Dean gives an impatient twitch of his shoulders. “Can you elaborate, a little? This whole--” he waves a vague hand towards the pavement “-thing is new to us.”
“Someone’s writing false orders. Sending angels into places where Grigori are waiting. I don’t know who they are, or what rank.”
Dean turns his head. “I’m guessing they know who you are.”
He nods. “They trapped me in North Platte, grounded me - left me to the demons. I have to find them and expose them, now, before they realize their mistake.”
“And you need our help because--?”
“I’m-incapacitated.” He gestures towards the empty space behind his shoulder.
“There aren’t any other, uh-“ Sam hangs up on the word, still disbelieving. “--angels you trust?”
“There are,” Castiel says. “But anyone I involve would be put at risk.”
Dean raises his eyebrows. “Which would include... us.”
“Humans are inconsequential to my kind,” Castiel says. “They’ll ignore you, and anyone with you. Help me get the proof I need. I’ll teach you what I know. It’s a reasonable exchange.” He pauses. “Please.”
Dean leans back onto the hood, arms crossed. “’Please’, he says.” But it’s clear enough he’s already made up his mind.
Sam asks: “Where would you need to go?”
“Utah. Grantsville.”
Dean groans. “Grantsville? What in the hell is in Grantsville?”
“1253 Amarillo Lane,” Castiel recites precisely.
Part I | Part II | Part III