.fic: Incipit (Castiel, Judith; Dean) PG
Incipit (Castiel, Judith [OFC]; Dean by proxy) PG | ~1,810
Post-4.22, although it happens just a bit after the episode ends. Some of this is based on speculation here (4.22 episode review) that smilla02 totally encouraged, and is based on Zachariah's remark about how telling the other angels about senior management's plan to fast-track the apocalypse would have meant rebellion. Judith first appears in this fic, which is totally unnecessary to read, but just so you know, they are in fact the same person.
Also, I was totally going to write something for the kink!meme and ended up failing pretty badly. So, um, you get this instead. Har.
Incipit
He knows Dean will worry, in the mostly silent, occasionally explosive way of his. The knowledge focuses him, gives him the direction he needs when all the old ones have failed. A yawning gulf stands between himself and Eden now, and he feels himself hemmed in from all sides, pressed into an abyss too much like Hell: Zachariah and the garrison leaders on one side, on the other, those angels who have joined themselves to Lucifer.
Lucifer, Castiel thinks as he wings his way dawnward, who has risen. You could have stopped it, he thinks - it is, almost, Jimmy Novak's voice, bitter with mistrust and doubt, not a voice he's ever heard before, not when he had been born in the certainty of a Word, knowing his name and his creator and the shape of the world. He had gotten Dean to that convent, though, when the prophecies had made no room in their paragraphs for his presence - for either of them. That has, he thinks, to count for something. Something must have changed from that one act.
Let it count, Castiel tells himself grimly, as though his willing it can make it be. It isn't a prayer, not anymore - or, at least, no prayer he directs to where he's always believed Heaven is. It is utterly within himself.
Exhaustion pulls at him. The body has its own demands; this barrier of earth, it can bleed and protest when his own energy fades, distract him with memory. As Castiel fights on, Jimmy Novak dies on the warehouse's concrete floor and begs him for a thousand years of torment to spare his daughter and his wife. His face - pale, sweaty, desperate - is as present to Castiel now as though they are in that place again.
This is a lesson he has learned: Castiel can grieve. He has learned pain.
Jimmy Novak dies on the warehouse's concrete floor. Dean begs him, asks him, You know what's real? People. Families, and turns away from the peace Castiel desperately wants for him. Thinking of Dean is a momentary paralysis of will, confusion, to go on or turn back and find Dean again, Dean his fixed point, Dean who is far more certain than Castiel's brothers and sisters.
No. He concentrates on the change of daylight around him, the presence he senses that is still familiar, and as close to safe as can be found in this world these days. Sunlight rushes up at him, and he flies on into the heart of the sun, through it into a light that is brighter and fiercer and burns the sun away.
When the world resolves again, he stands at the edge of fresh ruins. The wind blows hot across him, the desert's own heat and that left over from a firestorm called down from heaven. In the distance, mountains rear up in ancient, permanent indifference to the shattered earth at their feet. Their shadows brood over amputated pipes, frames of metal twisted and melted like limbs burned and tortured in hell, smoke wafted on the same breeze that tugs at his hair and his coat - and there, at the edge, an angel and her sword.
"Judith," he says quietly.
She looks up. The body she wears belongs to a woman whose hair is dark as his own, her skin rich and flawless under the blood and soot that bracelets her wrists and forearms. Behind deep brown eyes he can see her grace, golden, aflame, prismatic and reflecting all those things that make Judith Judith. She is far more like Anna than she is like him.
"Castiel." Judith turns to face him, but doesn't raise her sword. Her shoulders stay straight, although Castiel feels the weariness in her; she'd been sent here by herself, against a fortress demons have had the audacity to build almost in the shadow of Sinai, and she had defeated them. He wonders if she had been meant to win, or struggle home with her wings in tatters and defeat. "There's orders out now, you know."
"I know."
He holds out his hands to show he has no knife, so he hasn't come prepared for bloodwork. She looks at him skeptically, and he shrugs; she knows better now, they all know better, now that Uriel's treachery is out in the open and trust is a rare thing. His power has always been in preservation and defense, in the working-out of mysteries; he'd carved sigils into his skin, hedged himself about with spells as best he could, and they might be enough to keep her off him long enough for him to escape, enough to wound her - even badly, maybe (and this surprises him, thinking that he would be okay with that) - but not enough to kill her.
"You've always looked way too innocent for your own good," Judith tells him. She doesn't make a move for him, but she doesn't sheathe her sword, either. Castiel thinks of Uriel's promises, with you, with you we could raise Lucifer. He wonders what Uriel had seen in him that he thought Castiel would convert.
"I came," he says carefully, "to talk. I need to speak with you, Judith."
Although she has the name, she is not the same woman of the story, the Judith who saved Bethulia from Holofernes and the Assyrians. She had been in the body of the handmaid, who had accompanied her mistress to the enemy camp, who had tucked the enemy captain's head under her basket and carried it back to the city, her wings sheltering Judith in secrecy. Of the angels left in his cohort, she is one of the few he thinks he can trust, for that reason; she still remembers what it was like to live beside the human she had been sent to help.
He tells her about what he had learned, not what had spurred him to learn it. That had been Anna's doing; her words, her order for him to think for himself had started… something. Turning away from that possibility, think freely, for yourself, had been like turning away from his reflection in one of the great, mirrored corridors of the garrison: any way he turned, he would see himself, the play of memory and knowledge in the energy that is his true form. Turning away from his own questions had only brought more questions forward.
Why are all the Seals breaking? Why do we fail at every turn? Those had troubled him almost since the day he had dragged Dean up from hell and forgetting, but it hadn't been until Anna that he had gone searching for the reasons.
Castiel knows and understands patterns. He tells this to Judith, who nods reluctantly; they all know that about him too, serious Castiel, Castiel the thinker. This pattern, he says, has led only to one place: to Lilith's death at the hands of Sam Winchester, and the beginning of the end that Zachariah and their commanders want. Purification. Look, he begs her, look how the Seals have fallen so quickly, one right after another.
"It will all burn," he finishes, remembering Dean's words, the terrible purity of archangelic fire. "I need… I need your help to save what we can. Surely we were not set to guard the world so we could watch it die and do nothing."
He falls silent. He isn't good at speeches, at rallying others, and he wishes that Dean were here, to show Judith the need, with his words and the desperate truth of his human body. For her part, Judith leans on her sword and studies the ashes and the silent, hollowed-out bowl in the earth. A few bones smoke quietly in the cinders, and Judith contemplates them along with the rest of the dust.
"You're serious," she says at last, straightening. Before Castiel can say of course he is, she adds, wearily, "Of course you're serious, you're never not serious. You're also not very often wrong when you've figured things out for yourself." She studies him silently, and Castiel allows her to look beneath his borrowed flesh. "You've changed, you know."
"I know." He can't avoid that truth anymore, either. Angels change, of course; they are beings in time, creatures with beginngs, but this, this. Castiel feels it in a place humans would call the heart, a shift as though the earth's foundations themselves have moved from where God measured them out and place them.
"I don't ask you to join me," he says, when Judith doesn't seem inclined to say anything else. "But I beg you… don't tell Zachariah or the others I was here. I need to return to Dean Winchester."
"Of course you do," Judith says, laughing. Her face, its delicate features, do mischief well. "I never figured you for a rule-breaker, Castiel."
"Well, you've said I've changed."
"So I have." Judith looks up, and like Castiel, regards the sun with unconcern. The impermanent fire of dawn has given way to something more solid, the sun brassy and promising midday cruelty. Nothing stirs around them, all the animals frightened away. No humans will come this way for a time, not until they know it's safe, and maybe not even then; this place had been a backwater even before it had been a fortress for demons.
"I'll speak to Abdiel," she says when she looks back down. "He leads a cohort that's been gone from Eden for some time. Raziel will listen too, even if I have to tie him down. And Israfel… well, him too. He owes me."
Castiel releases a breath he doesn't even know he'd been holding. Again, humanity creeps up on him: the breath let go in relief, the muscles briefly liquid before tensing again. He tries to remove himself slightly, to be gentle for the man who'd given himself into to his possession. Kindness is a thing, Castiel thinks, he still needs to learn.
"It'll be rebellion," Judith says, almost idly, as though it's of no consequence. She hefts her sword, and the fine silver blade catches the sunlight, turns to gold laced with mortal blood.
The word sounds like a bell, and in the silence it shapes, gives form to all the half-formed thoughts that have chased Castiel for the past year. Rebellion. Lucifer, Azazel, Uriel, Anna.
Me.
"I know," he whispers, and finds peace with the acknowledgment, the commitment of himself to this new course. "Thank you, sister," he says as he spreads his wings, shivering as the feathers catch in the wind and gather the sun's warmth to them.
"What," Judith asks suddenly, as Castiel hovers at the edge of flight, "do you think Dean Winchester will think when you show up at his door with a legion of us?"
"One day we'll find out," Castiel answers. His borrowed heart throbs, and he thinks it might be hope.
"God willing," Judith adds piously.
Castiel doesn't say anything to that, but as he flings himself against the sky once more, he thinks, I will it, for the first time.
Post-4.22, although it happens just a bit after the episode ends. Some of this is based on speculation here (4.22 episode review) that smilla02 totally encouraged, and is based on Zachariah's remark about how telling the other angels about senior management's plan to fast-track the apocalypse would have meant rebellion. Judith first appears in this fic, which is totally unnecessary to read, but just so you know, they are in fact the same person.
Also, I was totally going to write something for the kink!meme and ended up failing pretty badly. So, um, you get this instead. Har.
Incipit
He knows Dean will worry, in the mostly silent, occasionally explosive way of his. The knowledge focuses him, gives him the direction he needs when all the old ones have failed. A yawning gulf stands between himself and Eden now, and he feels himself hemmed in from all sides, pressed into an abyss too much like Hell: Zachariah and the garrison leaders on one side, on the other, those angels who have joined themselves to Lucifer.
Lucifer, Castiel thinks as he wings his way dawnward, who has risen. You could have stopped it, he thinks - it is, almost, Jimmy Novak's voice, bitter with mistrust and doubt, not a voice he's ever heard before, not when he had been born in the certainty of a Word, knowing his name and his creator and the shape of the world. He had gotten Dean to that convent, though, when the prophecies had made no room in their paragraphs for his presence - for either of them. That has, he thinks, to count for something. Something must have changed from that one act.
Let it count, Castiel tells himself grimly, as though his willing it can make it be. It isn't a prayer, not anymore - or, at least, no prayer he directs to where he's always believed Heaven is. It is utterly within himself.
Exhaustion pulls at him. The body has its own demands; this barrier of earth, it can bleed and protest when his own energy fades, distract him with memory. As Castiel fights on, Jimmy Novak dies on the warehouse's concrete floor and begs him for a thousand years of torment to spare his daughter and his wife. His face - pale, sweaty, desperate - is as present to Castiel now as though they are in that place again.
This is a lesson he has learned: Castiel can grieve. He has learned pain.
Jimmy Novak dies on the warehouse's concrete floor. Dean begs him, asks him, You know what's real? People. Families, and turns away from the peace Castiel desperately wants for him. Thinking of Dean is a momentary paralysis of will, confusion, to go on or turn back and find Dean again, Dean his fixed point, Dean who is far more certain than Castiel's brothers and sisters.
No. He concentrates on the change of daylight around him, the presence he senses that is still familiar, and as close to safe as can be found in this world these days. Sunlight rushes up at him, and he flies on into the heart of the sun, through it into a light that is brighter and fiercer and burns the sun away.
When the world resolves again, he stands at the edge of fresh ruins. The wind blows hot across him, the desert's own heat and that left over from a firestorm called down from heaven. In the distance, mountains rear up in ancient, permanent indifference to the shattered earth at their feet. Their shadows brood over amputated pipes, frames of metal twisted and melted like limbs burned and tortured in hell, smoke wafted on the same breeze that tugs at his hair and his coat - and there, at the edge, an angel and her sword.
"Judith," he says quietly.
She looks up. The body she wears belongs to a woman whose hair is dark as his own, her skin rich and flawless under the blood and soot that bracelets her wrists and forearms. Behind deep brown eyes he can see her grace, golden, aflame, prismatic and reflecting all those things that make Judith Judith. She is far more like Anna than she is like him.
"Castiel." Judith turns to face him, but doesn't raise her sword. Her shoulders stay straight, although Castiel feels the weariness in her; she'd been sent here by herself, against a fortress demons have had the audacity to build almost in the shadow of Sinai, and she had defeated them. He wonders if she had been meant to win, or struggle home with her wings in tatters and defeat. "There's orders out now, you know."
"I know."
He holds out his hands to show he has no knife, so he hasn't come prepared for bloodwork. She looks at him skeptically, and he shrugs; she knows better now, they all know better, now that Uriel's treachery is out in the open and trust is a rare thing. His power has always been in preservation and defense, in the working-out of mysteries; he'd carved sigils into his skin, hedged himself about with spells as best he could, and they might be enough to keep her off him long enough for him to escape, enough to wound her - even badly, maybe (and this surprises him, thinking that he would be okay with that) - but not enough to kill her.
"You've always looked way too innocent for your own good," Judith tells him. She doesn't make a move for him, but she doesn't sheathe her sword, either. Castiel thinks of Uriel's promises, with you, with you we could raise Lucifer. He wonders what Uriel had seen in him that he thought Castiel would convert.
"I came," he says carefully, "to talk. I need to speak with you, Judith."
Although she has the name, she is not the same woman of the story, the Judith who saved Bethulia from Holofernes and the Assyrians. She had been in the body of the handmaid, who had accompanied her mistress to the enemy camp, who had tucked the enemy captain's head under her basket and carried it back to the city, her wings sheltering Judith in secrecy. Of the angels left in his cohort, she is one of the few he thinks he can trust, for that reason; she still remembers what it was like to live beside the human she had been sent to help.
He tells her about what he had learned, not what had spurred him to learn it. That had been Anna's doing; her words, her order for him to think for himself had started… something. Turning away from that possibility, think freely, for yourself, had been like turning away from his reflection in one of the great, mirrored corridors of the garrison: any way he turned, he would see himself, the play of memory and knowledge in the energy that is his true form. Turning away from his own questions had only brought more questions forward.
Why are all the Seals breaking? Why do we fail at every turn? Those had troubled him almost since the day he had dragged Dean up from hell and forgetting, but it hadn't been until Anna that he had gone searching for the reasons.
Castiel knows and understands patterns. He tells this to Judith, who nods reluctantly; they all know that about him too, serious Castiel, Castiel the thinker. This pattern, he says, has led only to one place: to Lilith's death at the hands of Sam Winchester, and the beginning of the end that Zachariah and their commanders want. Purification. Look, he begs her, look how the Seals have fallen so quickly, one right after another.
"It will all burn," he finishes, remembering Dean's words, the terrible purity of archangelic fire. "I need… I need your help to save what we can. Surely we were not set to guard the world so we could watch it die and do nothing."
He falls silent. He isn't good at speeches, at rallying others, and he wishes that Dean were here, to show Judith the need, with his words and the desperate truth of his human body. For her part, Judith leans on her sword and studies the ashes and the silent, hollowed-out bowl in the earth. A few bones smoke quietly in the cinders, and Judith contemplates them along with the rest of the dust.
"You're serious," she says at last, straightening. Before Castiel can say of course he is, she adds, wearily, "Of course you're serious, you're never not serious. You're also not very often wrong when you've figured things out for yourself." She studies him silently, and Castiel allows her to look beneath his borrowed flesh. "You've changed, you know."
"I know." He can't avoid that truth anymore, either. Angels change, of course; they are beings in time, creatures with beginngs, but this, this. Castiel feels it in a place humans would call the heart, a shift as though the earth's foundations themselves have moved from where God measured them out and place them.
"I don't ask you to join me," he says, when Judith doesn't seem inclined to say anything else. "But I beg you… don't tell Zachariah or the others I was here. I need to return to Dean Winchester."
"Of course you do," Judith says, laughing. Her face, its delicate features, do mischief well. "I never figured you for a rule-breaker, Castiel."
"Well, you've said I've changed."
"So I have." Judith looks up, and like Castiel, regards the sun with unconcern. The impermanent fire of dawn has given way to something more solid, the sun brassy and promising midday cruelty. Nothing stirs around them, all the animals frightened away. No humans will come this way for a time, not until they know it's safe, and maybe not even then; this place had been a backwater even before it had been a fortress for demons.
"I'll speak to Abdiel," she says when she looks back down. "He leads a cohort that's been gone from Eden for some time. Raziel will listen too, even if I have to tie him down. And Israfel… well, him too. He owes me."
Castiel releases a breath he doesn't even know he'd been holding. Again, humanity creeps up on him: the breath let go in relief, the muscles briefly liquid before tensing again. He tries to remove himself slightly, to be gentle for the man who'd given himself into to his possession. Kindness is a thing, Castiel thinks, he still needs to learn.
"It'll be rebellion," Judith says, almost idly, as though it's of no consequence. She hefts her sword, and the fine silver blade catches the sunlight, turns to gold laced with mortal blood.
The word sounds like a bell, and in the silence it shapes, gives form to all the half-formed thoughts that have chased Castiel for the past year. Rebellion. Lucifer, Azazel, Uriel, Anna.
Me.
"I know," he whispers, and finds peace with the acknowledgment, the commitment of himself to this new course. "Thank you, sister," he says as he spreads his wings, shivering as the feathers catch in the wind and gather the sun's warmth to them.
"What," Judith asks suddenly, as Castiel hovers at the edge of flight, "do you think Dean Winchester will think when you show up at his door with a legion of us?"
"One day we'll find out," Castiel answers. His borrowed heart throbs, and he thinks it might be hope.
"God willing," Judith adds piously.
Castiel doesn't say anything to that, but as he flings himself against the sky once more, he thinks, I will it, for the first time.