[Born Again Verse] Prelude: Perdition/Salvation
Authors Note: This'll be the first real chapter story I've done for SPN, and I'm a little nervous! But I got the idea in my head and it wouldn't suffice as a short story, so I'm gonna give it my best. I'll be setting up a Masterlist for the Born Again Verse when chapter one is completed; it has a rough outline already, so it probably won't take too long. Dean and Castiel will be major POVs for a while, though I may bring in other characters or outside POV. The images linked in this aren't my own, though I couldn't find proper links to the photographers. If you may know the picture-takers, let me know! These are mostly just there for ambiance, no copyright infringing or sale of someone else's material intended.
Let me know if you like! I'd love to gauge if this is a storyline people would enjoy.
Warnings: Sad stuff from the Cage, pain, misery, mild gore and dark themes, the usual. There may be other warnings for later chapters, and I'll warn for them on each update should they crop up. There's a lot of Sam whump as well! Aaaaand some unpleasant mental/emotional pain for a child in the story, so if little kids hurting (especially mentally or emotionally) makes you uncomfortable, might wanna skip out on this 'verse.
• Masterlist
Summary: Castiel flies to retrieve Sam from the Cage - but when he flees with Sam, something goes horribly awry.
Prelude.
This is all wrong. This is not how it was supposed to be.
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It is one year after the apocalypse that never happened, and he has been busy.
Castiel claws through darkness and grit and blood, celestial wings clenched against his back so that he dare not gorge them on jagged bone and metal and a palpable despair. The further down he clamors, the more sour the air is around his aura - which is a beacon, he knows, his light shining in a world that slowly compacts him, makes him feel smaller, weaker. He doesn't have much time. He needs to find him, before his brothers realize he's lurking, trespassing in their new jail cell. It's so hard to navigate, so hard to comb through and look for his friend's small and nearly insignificant glow-tiny and flickering, expanding in and out like a strangled series of breaths. In the large and daunting space, there is ice (so cold that he feels it even without a body, chilled to the core), there is a fiery precipice, and there is-Sam. He reaches out, wraps himself around Sam, is terrified and pained for a moment at how frail and thin and wispy the man's soul is next to him, like a string woven around a fingertip in comparison. The soul shivers and moans, and the softest brush of grace against it rips a vicious scream of energy through the Cage.
'Sam, what have they done to you?'
'...Cas...?'
They would not have much time.
Castiel finds Sam's body not too far from the soul, or at least what remains of it: clumped, rotting, unrecognizable as human. He doesn't know what to do completely; he needs Sam's body alive again. This isn't a broken neck like with Bobby, he thinks, this isn't a shattered cheekbone like Dean's. But even at the hollowed, angry whisper of Enochian traversing the distance (Lucifer, Michael, they've noticed something's wrong), Castiel scoops organs and bone fragments into his centuries-long fingers and begins to frantically stitch together carved up muscle, skin, hair. A face forms, looking dead and gone, once hazel eyes glazed over. Arms, legs. The chest extends as the ribs snap back into place. Sam's body. There is no time-he has to go, and go now. 'Cas,' Sam's soul pours out (Enochian, Sam is speaking Enochian), 'Cas, Cas, please; don't leave me, god, destroy me; it hurts so much'. The words are fragmented and clumsy. Castiel knows there's no time, but he holds the soul and lets his own light warm it; it's so cold, practically ice under his protection. Puffs of white frost trail after them. It's okay, my friend, I'm here, he replies. He collects the weeping soul and the motionless corpse and starts back up the bedcrumb trail his grace had ghosted behind him. He ascends, and he almost can't find the willpower to reach the living. Sam's essence is clinging to him like a child, soul burrowing fingers in deep, but Castiel doesn't expect the soft begging to be 'If they find us, throw me back down; don't get dragged down with me'. He simply clasps himself around Sam a little more intently. If he should fail and get dragged into the dark, it's not something that's about to slow him down now, and he will not throw Sam away, would never have been able to discard the image of his soul drifting back down into the endless black sea like a leaf.
He hastens, moving too fast to comprehend, time and space bowing out of the way on his behalf.
And then he flickers into life again, rather anticlimactically.
It's done.
It's done, and all he needs to do is mend whatever is left of the man's half-gnarled life.
He supposes it should be easy. An angel who can mend a body; putting a soul into flesh should not be an issue. They were made for each other, after all. Were they not? Most souls knew where they belonged. Sam's is no doubt damaged, torn and ravaged and broken, but it is still shining brightly. It's still Sam, and Sam is capable of much more than anyone had ever anticipated. He could do this. He has to do this. And so when he rises up (his trenchcoat molted with dry blood and mud and ash) and stands beneath the yellowed flicker of a streetlamp, he's already prepared to make his friend whole again. As if God, he could mend him, make him new.
His confusion grows at the bundle clasped in his arms, too small and too delicate to be anything he had dragged out of Hell. The rags are the clothes Sam had fallen in at Stull Cemetery, that was to be sure. The soul keens and cries and wails, and then the body keens and cries and wails, and for a moment Castiel is a larger-than-life entity with a thought screeching into silence. He curls his fingers in the foul-smelling fabric and a soft head of hair greets him; it's thin, very thin, and the dark eyes that squint up at him are full of tears, and they dribble down the infant's face. A hand full of fat, small fingers grab at his fingertips, and instantly he compares it to Sam's soul curling around him.
... Sam.
This child is Sam.
Fear grips him before he can process the ramifications of such an epiphany. He's never held a human child, but he is aware that they are eggshells in his grip, that even the smallest mistake can hurt them. He adjusts and tries to burrow into Jimmy's mind for a memory of normalcy, and eventually he finds the muscle memory to at least cradle the weeping baby in the crease of his arm. The sobbing baby has a keloid burn the shape of Castiel's fingers on his leg. "No-how? How is this..." he starts, and Sam's cries scald him, pierce his heart to the core. There isn't anything wrong with this child; this is Sam Winchester, breathing and alive, birthed again by brimstone in the dark. But he feels it. The soul there, straining beneath a dirty little chest, heavy and too large and too burdened in a very small, very delicate ribcage.
This child-his friend-is suffering.
Castiel is torn, and he tries to awkwardly rock the boy and calm him. He feels he's probably not doing a well enough job, and even if he had, it was obvious that Sam was aching in ways he couldn't fix right now. "It's alright, Sam. It's-It's alright." When he looks around the deserted moonlit street, just a filthy angel holding a filthy little body, he finds himself lost.
This was not how it was supposed to be.
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