Unreachable, 1/6, [R], Castiel and others (Gen)
Unreachable
Author: Shellsanne
Genre: Gen
Rating: R
Characters: Castiel, Lucifer, Dean, Sam, Meg, and Daphne
Notes: Lots of angst, no slash (but some sexual situations)
Spoilers: This takes place after season 7, episode 17
Summary: What happens to an angel descending into madness? Trapped and seemingly alone, Castiel spirals into the darkness of his own mind.
Comments would be most welcome!
Prologue
The madness was trapped in a small space in his mind, a kind of celestial holding cell constructed in the moments after the transfer from Sam’s mind to his. It took every ounce of his strength, the entirety of his attention, every fiber of his being, to hold it there. It was exhausting, debilitating, and futile. He knew it wouldn’t last. But for five days he kept the madness imprisoned in those cell walls.
On the sixth day they began to crumble.
Cas
The second to last coherent thing that Castiel did before losing his mind was paint the walls, door and window of his dreary hospital room with angel-proofing sigils, barriers that he could never cross, effectively sealing himself in.
He drew them with his own blood. He’d crushed an empty glass against the frame of his bed, then slashed the length of his inner forearm with one of its jagged fragments. He painted the window first.
It took a few minutes before anyone noticed the commotion in his room; patient “Emmanuel” had been catatonic since his admission six days earlier, posing no risk to himself or anyone else, so constant supervision had not been required. Castiel might have finished the entire room undetected if not for the cleaner passing by who glanced in and began shrieking at the top of her lungs. Chaos ensued then.
Three orderlies, a nurse, and two doctors fought to restrain him as he frantically smeared the ancient Enochian symbols across the walls, one after another, blood dripping from each massive glyph as he rushed on to the next. He easily fended off his assailants, sending bodies hurling across the room and crashing into walls, into medical equipment, into each other, with a mere touch. The entire hospital staff could have descended on that room to stop him, and they would have failed. He would have killed them all if that’s what it took to complete his task, and to complete it correctly-each sigil had to be perfect. A single flaw could be catastrophic. And so Castiel remained fiercely, manically, focused.
Meg watched quietly from the corridor, through the open door. She was the only person present who didn’t try to stop him.
At one point during the frenzy his eyes locked on hers, wild and desperate and filled with pain. Whether he recognized her or not was difficult to say. With a flick of his gashed wrist, the door slammed shut, so violently that the entire corridor shook (though no one who was present would later admit to it), and he went to work etching a sprawling, bloody glyph on his last remaining access to the outside world.
The last coherent thing that Castiel did before losing his mind was make a conscious decision to allow himself to be subdued. Reality itself was imploding in the angel’s head, a detonation of mass destruction imminent, in the moment that he felt a needle plunging into his forearm. And Castiel decided in that moment that the harmless human drug flowing into his nervous system would be the one to take him down, to neutralize him every time, now and always, and that this decree was permanent and irrevocable. And so it was. And as his body began to sink into the clutch of flailing, grappling arms, as the world began fading into blackness, he hoped someone had taken note of the only drug that would immobilize him.
The second to last coherent thought Castiel had before losing his mind was in the form of prayer. He prayed that he’d done everything he could to protect the world from him. That it would be enough.
And the last coherent thought he had before darkness descended was of Dean. Dean leaving him behind. And he was grateful.
Chapter 2: http://shellsanne.livejournal.com/4664.html