Fic: Outback; PG
Outback
Summary: I spent my childhood reading fantasy. What? Dean and Cas in Purgatory. Cas is showing more of his true self, and also there are monsters that build cities.
Warnings: See above, re: my childhood Monster killing.
Note: Mostly happened because I was thinking of doing some art of Castiel in Purgatory and then I decided to take the easy way out and write about it instead. So you will have to use the power of imagination and imagine his crazy non-humanness.
Written in the last couple hours. No beta because it is silly (the fic, I mean. Not having a beta).
Update: Now with art!
Outback
Purgatory isn’t a copy of Earth.
It’s the other way around. It’s bigger, sharper, and significantly older. The mountains claw at the sky in impotent fury and ravines cut the earth to bleeding. The rivers run deep as shallow seas, too wide to cross.
In other words, the terrain is really dramatic.
There are cities here, in a way. Grown up out of the soil, walls thick as roots. Gnarled, twisted, and stronger than stone or iron. Older than any human civilization, Cas told him. Crowded and vibrant and alive. The first time they caught sight of one, rising in the distance and impregnable as any manmade fortress, Dean had remembered Bobby’s friend. Dr. Visyak had been sentient, intelligent, fierce and in her own way, brave. Torn out of her own world, she’d had surprisingly little difficulty making her way in the new one.
These fortress-builders, he supposed, were her people.
Of course none of them speak English. Or any language heard on Earth since before the continents divided. Cas tries, several times, to make himself understood, but the longer he tries the more difficult it becomes. The monsters behind the walls don’t know what to make of him. He’s becoming too strange, too different from anything here. He no longer seems human, but he’s clearly not monstrous.
The changes don’t trouble Dean nearly as much as he thinks they probably should.
--
They’re sitting by the fire and Cas is curled around the clearing. His half-present body radiates a soft white glow, and the shadows of leaves and tree trunks show through in the places where his form hasn't finished manifesting in this dimension. Feathers already litter the clearing, some fully-realized and some translucent, and there are a few scales, Dean thinks, glinting in the stubby grass. Away in the distance another fortified city beckons on another impossibly high hill. When Dean’s in a bad mood he tends to think that the cities are taunting him personally, just by existing. The last time they tried to get close, the resident’s shock at Cas’s form led to a lot of screaming and raining fire. It isn’t an experience Dean is eager to repeat.
“Can’t you, y’know, winch yourself in?” Dean asks, waving vaguely at the huge sprawling form surrounding the human body of Jimmy Novak. The manifold wings and long strange hands, the waving fronds and multiple legs, the wide intelligent eyes peering through feathers that are unlike any bird that’s ever flown on earth.
“Dean,” the angel rumbles, and there’s a piercing, barely audible note threaded through the nearly-human voice. It’s not painful (yet, Dean thinks, or fears), but it’s definitely another sign of the turn for the weird things have taken lately. He still sounds a little like the voice Dean remembers, but it’s getting harder and harder to connect the sounds this huge, faintly glowing beast makes with anything even vaguely human.
Dean sighs and pokes at the fire. It’s not that Cas’ form here really bothers him. He’s still just Cas, after all, and still the only thing in the entire vast, unmapped realm of Purgatory (yeah, that’s right, it’s a freakin’ realm) that sort of gets his jokes. That he can talk to at all, for that matter. The extra appendages and additional body mass don’t really enter into it.
Well, mostly they don’t. Except for times when the dumber denizens of wherever they happen to be get the scent of fresh meat, and give in to their programming.
Dean wonders a lot if there’s some kind of genetic code for monster souls, and if they’re doing the gene pool a favor by wiping out the ones who are too dumb not to attack a human with a companion roughly the size of a Greyhound bus. If so, he figures it’s time to give out another Darwin award when something in the underbrush rustles and a low growl starts up. Dean’s lately gotten to be a real connoisseur of growls, and of the relative intelligence associated with their owners. This one has the flavor of a particularly dumb warthog-dog-squid combination that he hasn’t come up with a sufficiently hilarious name for yet. The things are about the size of a small Volkswagen. Dean unfolds himself beside the fire with a small sigh. It’s not even worth getting a weapon out at this point.
“I’m sick of being the bai-” he begins, and doesn’t get any further as the pig-monster explodes from the underbrush with a horrible squeal of triumph and is promptly impaled on six long silver talons protruding from Cas’s nearest wing. Dean is, as usual, sprayed in black blood, and his mouth was open so he spends the next twenty seconds spitting furiously into the fire.
“Dammit Cas! This stuff tastes like-”
“Ass, yes, I know. You’ve told me that several times.” There’s a noise of tearing flesh as Castiel idly shreds the body of Dean’s would-be devourer, and in a matter of moments the steaming carcass is open to the environment, entrails spilling everywhere, blood soaking into the earth.
It’s not very appetizing. Dean heaves another sigh as he pulls his newest black-bladed knife-the one Cas taught him to make because of course he learned all about freaking flint-knapping from his time spent observing prehistoric humans. The blade is sharper than steel and keeps an edge longer, some kind of Purgatory equivalent of obsidian. Dean’s been trying not to think about the kinds of volcanoes they must have here to allow for the formation of this kind of stone.
He squats and starts the utterly disgusting task of peeling the skin off the body of the dead thing. Thinks, briefly, about taking the butchered parts as some kind of offering to the nearby city, but why bother? For all he knows they’re some kind of monster vegetarians. He could offend them eternally and get more fire flung at his head for his troubles. Better to stay out of it.
Later that night, as he’s gnawing on a tough and stringy piece of monster-meat and Cas is sort of sing-rumbling in his sleep, wings twitching faintly, Dean stares over the treetops at the distant city, and narrows his eyes.
--
Days later, and they’re running. And running. Relentlessly, without rest. Cas’s flanks (he has flanks now) heave and sometimes he manages to pick Dean up in his mouth and literally carry him, and Dean doesn’t have the breath to berate him for it. The trumpeting and crashing behind them and the reek of black decay spurs them both on when it would be easy to fall, easy to surrender. The shaking of the earth and the way it crumbles behind them chokes Dean with a fear he didn’t realize it was possible to endure.
Leviathan. Because somewhere here there are oceans and some of the things in the deep like coming up for air. And occasionally a snack.
He can’t even curse. He can’t feel his legs anymore, or his heart. If he ever had one here. Cas’s wings are trailing something like blood or essence and he can’t risk taking flight again--the monster behind them will only use it as another opportunity to rear up out of the forest and bat him out of the sky.
Cas is bigger than he was two days ago when he killed the monster-pig thing, but next to the Leviathan he’s a sparrow.
Dean doesn’t realize they’ve been running in the direction of the city until it’s too late, until the ground is rising under their feet and it’s too high, too steep, he can’t climb fast enough and the soil is crumbling. The earth is falling away and he’s sliding, clawing at the ground and Cas’s talons and huge sword-appendages are dug in deep into the steep hillside and he’s flailing his wings and snapping his massive jaws at Dean’s shoulders, trying to grasp hold. But Dean’s slipping, Cas doesn’t have the dexterity, he’s too big, too exhausted, too wounded. Dean thinks he’s screaming but can’t hear himself over Cas. His voice. His voice, it’s enormous and horrible and it’s shaking the hill, it’s punching through his eardrums, it’s his name over and over again.
“Dean! Dean! Dean!”
A claxon, a siren, and he can feel the darkness behind them both. Huge and world-devouring. Soul-swallowing. Leviathans can kill angels. They kill everything.
“Dean!”
The rancid breath of a dead shore blows against his neck. Wet and reeking of decay, fallen birds and brine, foundered ships and driftwood. Death, it promises. Death death death.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
Something scorches his left ear.
There’s a smell of burning, smoke and incandescence. He remembers the smell.
Falling fire.
Civilization.
A huge hand crashes down on him, inhuman and softly glowing. Long fingers with too many joints dig into the earth, make a cage, a shield. He hears the Leviathan thunder, howling a challenge. Castiel screams, and Dean yanks his hands from the earth and clasps them over his ears.
He huddles in the dark, blind and insensate, for a long time.
--
“Dean.” Softly.
“Mngr.”
“Dean.” Still quiet, but more insistent. He tries curling up on the blanket as if that will offer some sort of protection against the angel’s intrusion-
His eyes open.
Blanket.
Dean doesn’t have a blanket.
“Cas?” he rasps. Peers through his fingers at the familiar warm glow.
“You should drink some water.”
Dean eyes the bowl that’s presented, nudged forward across a smooth, almost glossy floor by a single huge finger. Not one drop spills.
He sits up and pulls the water toward him and tries not to drink it all in one gulp. Casts a glance around at what is very definitely a room, with walls if not corners, and amenities like blankets and what might be pillows, or at least things that are softer than the wooden floor, and a circle cut out in the middle for, maybe, a fire, and a window in the ceiling letting in the air and a little light. Cas is crammed into the space , long fronds probing at the walls and flickering around the ceiling hole. Dean can’t see around him for a door large enough to have let him inside, but who knows, maybe the monsters here have magic portals or some damn thing. Why not?
“You’re bigger,” he tells the angel.
“Not really. There’s just more of me here, now.”
Dean coughs a little. Wipes at his eyes, and his hand comes away dirty and sooty.
“You can’t fight a Leviathan off with fire,” he says, in what he thinks is a remarkably calm voice. Doesn’t bother with the word killed because he doubts, all the way down to his soul, that the thing is anything like dead.
“The rules are different here,” Cas says, way too casually in Dean’s humble opinion. “And this fortress has stood for a long time.”
Dean peers at him.
“How long?”
Cas shrugs, ripple of joints and light.
“No idea. Longer than human civilization, anyway.”
“Can you talk to them? The…people? Or whatever?”
The angel looks down, works his long fingers in a sinuous pattern. It should be creepy, Dean thinks, but it’s the only familiar thing in this whole world so he’ll take what he can get. The gesture tells him that Cas is a little embarrassed. He tries not to grin.
“Not yet. They’re not…older than me. But they’re different. And they’ve never had anything to do with angels. They don’t seem to know what I am.”
“Can you learn? To talk to them.”
Cas gets up, partway, leveraging himself on his huge forward wings. He’s less translucent than ever, and Dean can’t even see the sky through his enormous head.
“We both can,” Cas says.
--
The first word Dean learns from the monsters that builds cities is ‘brother.’
After that, it gets easier.
--
The end
--
Summary: I spent my childhood reading fantasy. What? Dean and Cas in Purgatory. Cas is showing more of his true self, and also there are monsters that build cities.
Warnings: See above, re: my childhood Monster killing.
Note: Mostly happened because I was thinking of doing some art of Castiel in Purgatory and then I decided to take the easy way out and write about it instead. So you will have to use the power of imagination and imagine his crazy non-humanness.
Written in the last couple hours. No beta because it is silly (the fic, I mean. Not having a beta).
Update: Now with art!
Outback
Purgatory isn’t a copy of Earth.
It’s the other way around. It’s bigger, sharper, and significantly older. The mountains claw at the sky in impotent fury and ravines cut the earth to bleeding. The rivers run deep as shallow seas, too wide to cross.
In other words, the terrain is really dramatic.
There are cities here, in a way. Grown up out of the soil, walls thick as roots. Gnarled, twisted, and stronger than stone or iron. Older than any human civilization, Cas told him. Crowded and vibrant and alive. The first time they caught sight of one, rising in the distance and impregnable as any manmade fortress, Dean had remembered Bobby’s friend. Dr. Visyak had been sentient, intelligent, fierce and in her own way, brave. Torn out of her own world, she’d had surprisingly little difficulty making her way in the new one.
These fortress-builders, he supposed, were her people.
Of course none of them speak English. Or any language heard on Earth since before the continents divided. Cas tries, several times, to make himself understood, but the longer he tries the more difficult it becomes. The monsters behind the walls don’t know what to make of him. He’s becoming too strange, too different from anything here. He no longer seems human, but he’s clearly not monstrous.
The changes don’t trouble Dean nearly as much as he thinks they probably should.
--
They’re sitting by the fire and Cas is curled around the clearing. His half-present body radiates a soft white glow, and the shadows of leaves and tree trunks show through in the places where his form hasn't finished manifesting in this dimension. Feathers already litter the clearing, some fully-realized and some translucent, and there are a few scales, Dean thinks, glinting in the stubby grass. Away in the distance another fortified city beckons on another impossibly high hill. When Dean’s in a bad mood he tends to think that the cities are taunting him personally, just by existing. The last time they tried to get close, the resident’s shock at Cas’s form led to a lot of screaming and raining fire. It isn’t an experience Dean is eager to repeat.
“Can’t you, y’know, winch yourself in?” Dean asks, waving vaguely at the huge sprawling form surrounding the human body of Jimmy Novak. The manifold wings and long strange hands, the waving fronds and multiple legs, the wide intelligent eyes peering through feathers that are unlike any bird that’s ever flown on earth.
“Dean,” the angel rumbles, and there’s a piercing, barely audible note threaded through the nearly-human voice. It’s not painful (yet, Dean thinks, or fears), but it’s definitely another sign of the turn for the weird things have taken lately. He still sounds a little like the voice Dean remembers, but it’s getting harder and harder to connect the sounds this huge, faintly glowing beast makes with anything even vaguely human.
Dean sighs and pokes at the fire. It’s not that Cas’ form here really bothers him. He’s still just Cas, after all, and still the only thing in the entire vast, unmapped realm of Purgatory (yeah, that’s right, it’s a freakin’ realm) that sort of gets his jokes. That he can talk to at all, for that matter. The extra appendages and additional body mass don’t really enter into it.
Well, mostly they don’t. Except for times when the dumber denizens of wherever they happen to be get the scent of fresh meat, and give in to their programming.
Dean wonders a lot if there’s some kind of genetic code for monster souls, and if they’re doing the gene pool a favor by wiping out the ones who are too dumb not to attack a human with a companion roughly the size of a Greyhound bus. If so, he figures it’s time to give out another Darwin award when something in the underbrush rustles and a low growl starts up. Dean’s lately gotten to be a real connoisseur of growls, and of the relative intelligence associated with their owners. This one has the flavor of a particularly dumb warthog-dog-squid combination that he hasn’t come up with a sufficiently hilarious name for yet. The things are about the size of a small Volkswagen. Dean unfolds himself beside the fire with a small sigh. It’s not even worth getting a weapon out at this point.
“I’m sick of being the bai-” he begins, and doesn’t get any further as the pig-monster explodes from the underbrush with a horrible squeal of triumph and is promptly impaled on six long silver talons protruding from Cas’s nearest wing. Dean is, as usual, sprayed in black blood, and his mouth was open so he spends the next twenty seconds spitting furiously into the fire.
“Dammit Cas! This stuff tastes like-”
“Ass, yes, I know. You’ve told me that several times.” There’s a noise of tearing flesh as Castiel idly shreds the body of Dean’s would-be devourer, and in a matter of moments the steaming carcass is open to the environment, entrails spilling everywhere, blood soaking into the earth.
It’s not very appetizing. Dean heaves another sigh as he pulls his newest black-bladed knife-the one Cas taught him to make because of course he learned all about freaking flint-knapping from his time spent observing prehistoric humans. The blade is sharper than steel and keeps an edge longer, some kind of Purgatory equivalent of obsidian. Dean’s been trying not to think about the kinds of volcanoes they must have here to allow for the formation of this kind of stone.
He squats and starts the utterly disgusting task of peeling the skin off the body of the dead thing. Thinks, briefly, about taking the butchered parts as some kind of offering to the nearby city, but why bother? For all he knows they’re some kind of monster vegetarians. He could offend them eternally and get more fire flung at his head for his troubles. Better to stay out of it.
Later that night, as he’s gnawing on a tough and stringy piece of monster-meat and Cas is sort of sing-rumbling in his sleep, wings twitching faintly, Dean stares over the treetops at the distant city, and narrows his eyes.
--
Days later, and they’re running. And running. Relentlessly, without rest. Cas’s flanks (he has flanks now) heave and sometimes he manages to pick Dean up in his mouth and literally carry him, and Dean doesn’t have the breath to berate him for it. The trumpeting and crashing behind them and the reek of black decay spurs them both on when it would be easy to fall, easy to surrender. The shaking of the earth and the way it crumbles behind them chokes Dean with a fear he didn’t realize it was possible to endure.
Leviathan. Because somewhere here there are oceans and some of the things in the deep like coming up for air. And occasionally a snack.
He can’t even curse. He can’t feel his legs anymore, or his heart. If he ever had one here. Cas’s wings are trailing something like blood or essence and he can’t risk taking flight again--the monster behind them will only use it as another opportunity to rear up out of the forest and bat him out of the sky.
Cas is bigger than he was two days ago when he killed the monster-pig thing, but next to the Leviathan he’s a sparrow.
Dean doesn’t realize they’ve been running in the direction of the city until it’s too late, until the ground is rising under their feet and it’s too high, too steep, he can’t climb fast enough and the soil is crumbling. The earth is falling away and he’s sliding, clawing at the ground and Cas’s talons and huge sword-appendages are dug in deep into the steep hillside and he’s flailing his wings and snapping his massive jaws at Dean’s shoulders, trying to grasp hold. But Dean’s slipping, Cas doesn’t have the dexterity, he’s too big, too exhausted, too wounded. Dean thinks he’s screaming but can’t hear himself over Cas. His voice. His voice, it’s enormous and horrible and it’s shaking the hill, it’s punching through his eardrums, it’s his name over and over again.
“Dean! Dean! Dean!”
A claxon, a siren, and he can feel the darkness behind them both. Huge and world-devouring. Soul-swallowing. Leviathans can kill angels. They kill everything.
“Dean!”
The rancid breath of a dead shore blows against his neck. Wet and reeking of decay, fallen birds and brine, foundered ships and driftwood. Death, it promises. Death death death.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
Something scorches his left ear.
There’s a smell of burning, smoke and incandescence. He remembers the smell.
Falling fire.
Civilization.
A huge hand crashes down on him, inhuman and softly glowing. Long fingers with too many joints dig into the earth, make a cage, a shield. He hears the Leviathan thunder, howling a challenge. Castiel screams, and Dean yanks his hands from the earth and clasps them over his ears.
He huddles in the dark, blind and insensate, for a long time.
--
“Dean.” Softly.
“Mngr.”
“Dean.” Still quiet, but more insistent. He tries curling up on the blanket as if that will offer some sort of protection against the angel’s intrusion-
His eyes open.
Blanket.
Dean doesn’t have a blanket.
“Cas?” he rasps. Peers through his fingers at the familiar warm glow.
“You should drink some water.”
Dean eyes the bowl that’s presented, nudged forward across a smooth, almost glossy floor by a single huge finger. Not one drop spills.
He sits up and pulls the water toward him and tries not to drink it all in one gulp. Casts a glance around at what is very definitely a room, with walls if not corners, and amenities like blankets and what might be pillows, or at least things that are softer than the wooden floor, and a circle cut out in the middle for, maybe, a fire, and a window in the ceiling letting in the air and a little light. Cas is crammed into the space , long fronds probing at the walls and flickering around the ceiling hole. Dean can’t see around him for a door large enough to have let him inside, but who knows, maybe the monsters here have magic portals or some damn thing. Why not?
“You’re bigger,” he tells the angel.
“Not really. There’s just more of me here, now.”
Dean coughs a little. Wipes at his eyes, and his hand comes away dirty and sooty.
“You can’t fight a Leviathan off with fire,” he says, in what he thinks is a remarkably calm voice. Doesn’t bother with the word killed because he doubts, all the way down to his soul, that the thing is anything like dead.
“The rules are different here,” Cas says, way too casually in Dean’s humble opinion. “And this fortress has stood for a long time.”
Dean peers at him.
“How long?”
Cas shrugs, ripple of joints and light.
“No idea. Longer than human civilization, anyway.”
“Can you talk to them? The…people? Or whatever?”
The angel looks down, works his long fingers in a sinuous pattern. It should be creepy, Dean thinks, but it’s the only familiar thing in this whole world so he’ll take what he can get. The gesture tells him that Cas is a little embarrassed. He tries not to grin.
“Not yet. They’re not…older than me. But they’re different. And they’ve never had anything to do with angels. They don’t seem to know what I am.”
“Can you learn? To talk to them.”
Cas gets up, partway, leveraging himself on his huge forward wings. He’s less translucent than ever, and Dean can’t even see the sky through his enormous head.
“We both can,” Cas says.
--
The first word Dean learns from the monsters that builds cities is ‘brother.’
After that, it gets easier.
--
The end
--