In His Image: Sariel
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In which Gabriel brings someone back with him, and Sam reaches a decision.
Sariel, Sam, Gabriel, Dean, Bobby, Castiel.
The second paragraph of this chapter is essentially a paraphrased translation of one stanza of Kurt Weil’s Au fond de la Seine.
Tuesday, 3 September 1666.
There were flames leaping in the Thames.
Beneath the Thames, there was gold, broken boats and broken dreams, centuries of the dead. Tears and effluvia and aborted children who had never come to life. The water of drinking and dredging, the font and the fire-bucket. All the detritus of these peculiar creatures, the strange weak things that had inherited His earth. She had done her duty by them, as He would have wanted.
Her father’s house was burning. The impenetrable stone of the Cathedral named for Paul the convert and not Peter the rock, stocked full with rescued goods and papers the humans deemed important, was engulfed by the flames, just like every other building north of the river. He wasn’t there.
She had heard the prayers of the mayor, the coward who had cried out, “Lord, what can I do? I pull down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than I can do it,” who had fled the city and left the king and his brother to fight by the side of the people. She had heard the prayers of the baker’s daughter of Pudding Lane, who had gone downstairs in the middle of the night and found no fire in the oven, so that she had to go elsewhere to light her candle; who had woken nevertheless two hours later with smoke thick in her throat and mouth, and on whom would fall the blame of a nation that knew nothing of angelic battles. She had heard the prayer of a lawyer as the flames engulfed him on a rooftop, looking out over the city as she did now and crying with Aeneas venit summa dies! fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium, [Note] seeing the fall of Troy again in the city that had so often been hailed by her poets as Troy renewed.
Pestilence was put down, and would be no more until he was next raised and bound. Her work was done, and she was almost spent. She had not answered the prayers she had heard, because the prayers that were her concern were those of the plague-ridden, sent her way for more than three centuries. Pestilence and his influence were gone, and the fire that had sprung up in their footsteps as they had leaped and battled their way across his greatest stronghold would cleanse it of his legacy.
It would also destroy her.
Her vessel had never seen the city, not until Sariel - Azrael, perhaps, here and now - had brought her here, three days before. Now she saw its ruin. Would feel it in her flesh, the bite of holy fire as the earthly flames fanned it toward her.
Sariel was perplexed to find that she wished this had ended another way. Perhaps even an angel could fear the unknown.
Her borrowed feet felt very cold against the heat of the roof slabs as she turned. The cathedral to her back, the Thames to her right with its burden of history and panic-filled barges, the Tower ahead of her in the fire’s path, laden with its deadly stores of gunpowder.
“They’ll rebuild it, you know.” There was a man now, casually balanced on the edge of the roof, outlined against fire and water. He was watching her, hands in pockets. “Crowded as ever, just a bit more fireproof. Different enough to make them feel better. Similar enough to make them feel better. Give ’em a week and they’ll be blaming the Catholics or the Dutch or the French - hells, some of them already are - give them two and they’ll be publishing pamphlets with touching stories about rescuing kittens from burning buildings, give them three and there’ll be slapstick satires about it all over Southwark. Good thing the theatres didn’t catch,” he added carelessly, looking over his shoulder, out across the Thames. “If there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s adapting. Changing, and keeping on.”
He wore an unfamiliar vessel, and there was no grace in him to recognise. But the mind, hidden within it all, the mind she knew.
“Gabriel.” He lifted his chin and looked into her eyes like a challenge, a very human gesture. “Is this what happens when we die?”
His mouth curved like mockery, and bitterness flashed bright and vivid inside him. “Don’t think there’s any hard and fast rules there, cygnet.” Behind him, a wine store on the bank of the Thames exploded, sending scraps of shredded city searing through the sky. He didn’t flinch.
She moved forward, toes curling into the slope of the roof, and reached out to touch his body. Through layers of human fabric, her fingers settled unerringly against the vicious spike of wrong and bright silver pain that the human skin remembered underneath.
“What happened to you?”
He smiled, crooked and sweet and burning inside with a fierce defensive loneliness at her touch. “Lucifer.”
“That isn’t what I meant.” She traced her fingers upward, over the strong beat of the heart inside the living flesh, of the spark within that had nothing to do with flesh at all, and less to do with grace. They settled on the throat, the seat of the voice and the passage of the breath that he drew in like he needed it, and wanted it. Inside, he felt like an incomplete quilt (the analogy filtered through from her vessel’s half-buried consciousness), each patch of his own devising and selection. Except he made no sense - so many pieces were still missing, and there was nothing to hold them together, no grace, no power, no centre. Unless it was those golden threads that strung between them, haphazard and fierce. Not human exactly, but something that tasted very like… oh.
“Sweetheart.” He swayed in toward her as if she was their Father’s light, pressed his forehead against her vessel’s, then brushed his mouth against her lips. It tingled in the dry, rushing air. “I don’t know what happens when we die. But we stay here? I know what will happen. Won’t be pretty.”
She kissed him again, gentle and very tired. “There is no way out.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not exactly an angel right now, am I?” He held out his hand, fire leaping gold and deadly in his eyes. “Will you come?”
---
Present day.
“Casanova. Seriously? You broke out of prison with Casanova.”
Gabriel cackled, like the best part about travelling back in time and doing stupidly amazing things was messing with Sam’s head afterward. “Most fun you can have drunk in Venice in 1756. Trust me on this.”
Sam leaned back against the hull of an old silver Ford, and felt his mouth tugging reluctantly into the beginnings of a grin. “Everywhere you go you manage to end up in the middle of things, don’t you?”
“You’re one to talk,” Gabriel pointed out sweetly.
“So did you two…” Sam waggled his eyebrows, and let the implication skim its way silently along the line.
Gabriel whistled between his teeth, sharp and amused. “And here everyone thinks Dean’s the one with the filthy mind.”
Sam had been woken in the early hours by the soft buzz of his cell, and the message u awake? flashing up on the screen. Even mostly asleep (and more than mostly pissed at stupid inconsistent archangels), he couldn’t deny the familiar slow burn of anticipation in the pit of his stomach. The way it made the world look immediately just a bit more interesting, a bit more fun, like Gabriel was reprogramming him to light up (and lighten up) at that one little promise. Wandering outside into the pre-dawn damp to ring him back wasn’t even really a choice.
… So maybe Dean wasn’t the only one kind of hung up on an angel.
Anyway, Sam was owed an explanation for that vanishing act. Which he’d be demanding any minute now. Just as soon as Gabriel stopped being all charming, like he thought he could wheedle his way back into Sam’s good books.
“Dude.” Sam was full-on grinning now. “I’m not the one who got myself locked up in high security with Casanova.”
“Hey, he’s not all about the sex. The guy also happens to be one of the best all-human practical jokers I’ve ever seen.”
“And how did Italy not spontaneously combust when they put the two of you in a room together?” Sam enquired dryly, because it was never a good idea to encourage Gabriel.
“Sammy-Sam-Sam!” Wheedling. Annoying. Not cute, at all. “It’s almost like you think I’ve got no self-control.”
“Yeah, can’t think where I would have got that idea. Forgot to pack it before you left Heaven, did you? Left it at the back of your desk drawer?”
Gabriel made a lazy dismissive noise, like he was flicking a fly away. “Never missed it. Can’t have been that important. Hey, you should come back with me sometime and meet him. Kid would do you good. Lot of fun to be around.”
Which was a perfect opening to point out that all these fantastic expeditions Gabriel kept planning, with a sort of wistfulness under the boasting and the flash, would be a whole lot easier if Sam ever saw him. Except, except…
“Yeah?” Sam tipped his head back against the car and looked up at the pale light creeping across the sky, listened to his own voice sliding from teasing to indulgent. “How so?”
Gabriel was quiet for a moment, the way he only went when he was actually thinking about answering a question seriously. So Sam listened properly, even when the answer that finally came was drawled-out and careless, begging to be taken as a joke. “Just enjoys life, you know. Reminded me of some things I’d managed to forget.”
“Like what?” Sam pressed, because he thought maybe he could.
Gabriel made a grumbling sort of noise, then offered “Chocolate?” like a hopeful distraction. Then, to Sam’s incredulous snort, “No, seriously, chocolate. Kind of forgotten how to enjoy it. Took Italy’s greatest sensualist to remind me.”
“You,” Sam returned flatly. “You forgot you liked chocolate.”
Gabriel sighed, an impatient huff of breath that Sam could almost swear he felt, warm against his ear. “Fine. Look. Joy, okay? He revels in life, in curiosity, in fun, in… he reminded me why I liked it down here. Why I liked people.”
And that, right there, was why it was always worth pushing Gabriel, when he was in this sort of mood. Because he could be capering merrily along pretending not to give a rat’s ass about anything, then he’d turn around and hit you with something like this, something that reminded Sam just why… well, just how different he really was from what Sam had thought a couple of months back. From the sickly sweet white-robed Gabriel he’d seen in his withdrawal-induced hallucinations, or the vicious, disappointing coward he’d thought him to be after the warehouse. Someone who could take his own existence in his hands and rewrite everything he was into something better, something with meaning, and could still laugh afterwards.
Sam never did get around to yelling at him for running off.
---
Castiel was up, shirtless, and making hot chocolate, all of which meant that Dean was up. In fact, it meant that Dean was lounging about at the table watching Castiel like a lustful chocolate-craving hawk and bickering cheerfully with him over whether he should be using dark chocolate or something far more sickening and gooey. Which was… new. Especially the bit where Castiel was bickering back. Maybe chocolate had some deeply hidden symbolism for angels?
Sam manfully hid a smirk which felt like it wanted to be a smile anyway, resisted jokes about old married couples or domesticity, and took Castiel’s side on the grounds that you should never piss off the cook.
“So.” Sam stretched out his legs under the table and threw an apple at Dean’s head, because he should eat fruit sometimes and throwing things at him was always a good way to make a point. “Gabriel says we should have a guest dropping by soon. And that Bobby’s not allowed to shoot her.”
Dean made a satisfyingly indignant squawk and ducked. The apple skimmed over his head and landed with a sad little thud on the table, just as Dean grabbed the damp washcloth and threw that in Sam’s face in retaliation.
“Does he,” Castiel said in his patented inflection-free voice, and abandoned the chocolate for long enough to stalk off into the living room and fetch his sword.
Bobby, coming down the stairs just in time to catch the last few words, stomped right past the stove and made for the coffee pot. “Who’s getting the business end of that at six-thirty in the morning?”
Dean tilted his chair back dangerously on its back legs to peer at Castiel as he calmly went back to stirring the pot, with his sword in easy reach on the counter. “Some chick Gabriel’s sending over. Think you’re gonna need that, Cas?”
“Possibly. Gabriel trusts too easily.”
“Gabriel?” Dean’s eyebrows climbed in a you-sure-we’re-talking-about-the-same-guy-here way; but Sam remembered Kali, and the eager vulnerability running under Gabriel’s voice sometimes like he still expected them to throw it all back in his face. He said nothing.
“He trusts us, doesn’t he?” Castiel pointed out mildly.
“What, you think he shouldn’t?” Dean sounded halfway between amused and insulted.
Castiel switched off the heat, and turned around to catch and hold Dean’s eyes. “I think we’ve not given him good reason for it. I think he wants to, and strongly enough to override his caution.”
And hey, kudos to Cas. It wasn’t everyone who could talk their way around Dean’s stubborn we-are-always-the-good-guys glare and make him look thoughtful, with just a few careful words and a calm, inexorable voice.
Bobby put his coffee mug down on the table with a pointed click that was as good as a throat-clear, neatly breaking up the little profound-bond staring moment Dean and Castiel had going on, and Sam should learn how to do that. “Okay, so you’re thinking mystery lady friend…?”
“Either she is very persuasive, or he wants badly to trust her.” Castiel leaned over Dean to pour chocolate into the mug sitting prominent and hopeful on the table in front of him.
Dean tapped Castiel casually on the arm, like it was necessary punctuation. “Or, you have trust issues.”
“And I have trust issues,” Castiel agreed mildly. “Robert?”
“Get that damned sugar juice away from my coffee, angel.”
“Okay. So, we’re not taking chances, then?” Sam held out his mug. “Thanks, Cas.”
Dean made orgasm face around the rim of his mug. “Dude, you’re a god. Has anyone ever told you you’re a god? You’re a god.”
“Thank you, Dean, I was not previously aware of my godhood,” which was probably Cas-talk for “you’re welcome.” But as he was passing Dean’s chair to get to his own, Castiel curved one long hand around the back of Dean’s neck, a fleeting unnecessary touch, and Sam wanted to take that look of startled happiness on Dean’s face and keep it in a bottle for when all of this went to hell.
So Sam waited until Dean had just taken a disgustingly big mouthful to look meaningfully at the neglected apple and point out that someone had told him as a kid that he should always eat his fruit before he had dessert, and enjoyed the indignant chocolatey splutters that resulted. Also the hint of a twinkle in Castiel’s eyes. He decided then and there that if Dean and Gabriel kept teaming up to make Sam blush (and how they could tell over speakerphone was beyond him), it was definitely fair play for him and Castiel to gang up on Dean.
Sam got the feeling Bobby was secretly laughing at them all from under his hat. But then, he got that feeling a lot with Bobby. It felt sort of like home.
Since Castiel was done with the stove, Sam got up to commandeer it for bacon purposes, hoarding his chocolate jealously in case it suffered any mysterious Dean-related disappearances. “One of Gabriel’s pagan friends, maybe?”
---
“That’s no pagan,” growled in Castiel’s deep alert voice, was the first notice they got of the new arrival. Then he was out of the door and striding across the yard in bare feet and soft sleep pants and nothing else, sword in hand but lowered, to stand between a slight middle-aged woman and the house.
A slight middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face wearing what seriously looked like sackcloth with added ashes, Sam noted, as the human contingent scrambled to catch up with the angelic. Interesting.
And then Sam looked at her, and he just knew, and he wondered just for a moment what they had done to Castiel, that he had to greet the sister he hadn’t seen for three and a half hundred years as if she might be an enemy.
Sam kept an eye on Bobby and Dean’s positions, just in case.
She tilted her head to one side to stare at him. “Caſtiell. Thou waſt Caſtielle.”
“I am Castiel,” he replied, immediate and unshakeable, and Sam felt Dean bristle up defensively at his side. The stranger’s voice was clear and low, her words thick and close to incomprehensible, but with that strange ringing psychic burr behind the sound that Sam had come to associate with angels, and hey, could he call it or what?
Also, and probably more important, how the hell had Gabriel managed to swing this?
“Thy veſsel is broken. Why doſt not mende it?” And Gabriel might say that this one was more sympathetic than most, but Sam must have been just too used to angels who actually knew how to emote a bit, because to him Sariel sounded cool and distant as the stars.
“As you see.” The car yard felt very still and quiet, like there was no sound in the world but Castiel’s gravelly monotone. “I am cut off from the Host, and my wings are broken.”
Sam moved a little closer, fascinated. It wasn’t sackcloth she wore, just rather coarsely woven linen or wool. But those were ashes. And she smelled of smoke, like it had woven itself through her vessel’s drifting red and grey hair too closely to be washed out.
The archangel reached out a scarred hand to touch Castiel’s cheek, then narrowed tired blue-grey eyes at him, around him, at something that wasn’t quite there. Castiel flinched, and Dean moved forward immediately, bulky and protective and about twice Sariel’s size, to spread one of his hands in the small of Castiel’s back.
“Hey, lady. I don’t know who you are, but we do a thing down here called personal space.”
Castiel’s back looked far too thin, stiffened and naked like that, pale against the hard, strong lines of Dean’s hand.
“Thy Wings are not broken,” Sariel murmured, like she’d never in all of existence had to raise her voice to make anyone listen. “They are onlie… out of reach.”
Then Castiel lost his balance and staggered, like someone had struck him across the shoulders with something heavier than him and he wasn’t sure what his feet were doing about it. Sam started forward, but Dean already had his arm around him, holding him up.
“Whoa, Cas, whoa! What is it, man? What did she do?”
Castiel shook his head, snatching breaths into his chest, and pushed Dean’s arm gently away. Then he stood up slowly, rolled his shoulders gingerly like a test. This time, his balance and weight were subtly different, like he stood on the ground more squarely, held himself stronger. He stared at the archangel, long and hard, like she was the most perplexing thing he had encountered since humanity.
“Thank you. Why?”
Dean narrowed his eyes, with that expression that said he was jiggling to ask what had just gone on, but Sam thought he knew. He wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t seen something quiver like heat in the air around Castiel’s shoulders, just for a moment, arching out far bigger than he would have thought to span the little alley between rusting cars. But then, Sam was used to half-seeing things that Dean would never see.
“Because thou wast in payne,” Sariel replied, simple and cool like rainwater.
Castiel stared for another minute, then his eyes went wide, and he ducked his head, voice deep and rough. “Forgive me. It has been some time since since Heaven was governed by that rule.”
Something that was almost an expression flickered across her face then, like the shadow of a cloud passing over a lake. “So I underſtond. I am ſorry for that.”
Yes. Because of course - if Sariel hadn’t left (if Gabriel hadn’t left, if Lucifer hadn’t rebelled, if Chamael and Yrihel hadn’t chosen humanity) it wouldn’t just be Michael running his little power games upstairs with his faithful lieutenant Raphael. Jesus. Even without the whole absentee father thing, talk about family issues.
“So, Cas, you gonna introduce us to Little Miss Ren Fair here, or do we gotta guess?”
Castiel came back to the here-and-now in order to raise a pissy eyebrow at Dean. “Dean. Samuel, Robert. This is Sariel, whom I sincerely doubt to be familiar with the concept of a Ren Fair.”
Bobby cleared his throat, and then actually went down on one knee in the dust. “M’lady.”
… Sam was willing to bet he hadn’t done that when Gabriel had turned up. Judging by Dean’s perfect what-the-flying-monkey? face, Sam wouldn’t be getting good odds there.
“She’s talking English of the seventeenth century, y’idjits,” Bobby hissed. “Gabriel brought her back from the fire. Treat her like a lady!”
… English of the seventeenth century. Right. So angels knew all past and present languages, but maybe not future ones. And jumping ahead would screw that up. So maybe then… the same was true for manners?
Sam tried a bow. “Er. Good… morrow? Ma’am?”
Dean just snorted. Because Sam’s brother liked proving he was a mannerless ape.
Sariel turned her gaze on Dean, who shoved his shoulder solidly up against Castiel’s and narrowed his eyes at her. “Dean Wincheſter. Thou art Michaeles veſſele, yet thy Herte ringgeth with thy brother and Caſtiel.”
Dean went bright red, but he didn’t look away. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it does.”
Castiel blinked.
“And Samuel.” Sam squared his chin and readied himself to be called an abomination again, or Lucifer’s child; but she only looked at him for a long, steady minute, then blinked faintly. “I cannot ſee thy fate. Thou art an enigma.”
Which was… reassuring? Maybe? Or possibly scary.
(Was he meant to kiss her hand? Was that the seventeenth century?)
“Uh… thanks. Verily… thank you? I guess.”
Dean facepalmed. Nice to know Sam’s embarrassment could always distract Dean from his own.
“Robert Singer, the loial father, who healeth euerie thing he touches.” And something about that made Bobby’s head jerk up and turned him paler than Sam had ever seen. “Why did Gabryel send me to you?”
Dean blew out a short huff of irritation. “He didn’t explain? Great.”
“I haue heared the Explanation of Gabriele.” She blinked at them, slow and unimpressed. “I want yours.”
“Okay, well,” Sam tried hopefully. “You know how Michael and Lucifer have decided to jump-start the end of the world? Well, we - weren’t down with that. Obviously. I mean. Uh. Forsooth, we thought that was a bad idea? Since it involved the whole planet dying, and Dean and I being used as meatpuppets to do it. Only that means we’re trying to fight off Heaven and Hell, and Team Free Will is pretty much what you see in front of you - well, and Gabriel, sometimes, I think - and meanwhile Lucifer’s busy doing earthquakes in China and California and mudslides in Uganda and crazy storms in Australia and India and floods in Europe and tornadoes all across the South and - what, Dean, don’t you watch the news at all? - and now he’s got Pestilence on the whole turn-humans-into-zombies scheme, and - er, that is, infecting them with some sickness that makes them feral and vicious and tells them to go and attack other humans - and, well, the only way we’ve got to stop it is locking him back in his cage, but for that we need all the rings of the Horsemen, and we’ve got Famine’s and War’s, but we need the others, and we heard you - um, my lady - you’ve got it in for Pestilence and, well, you’re basically the archangel of death, aren’t you, so -”
“What my idiot brother’s trying to say is,” Dean overrode, thankfully, “we need to gank Pestilence and Death and lift their mojo-rings. Will you help?”
… Which wasn’t clearer than what Sam had been saying at all. Would it kill Dean to use plain English sometimes?
“Why ſhould I?”, and she looked implacable and stately as a lady in some old court picture, for all she was wearing what had to be a peasant, with plague scars on her neck.
“Why should you?”, Dean snapped. “Aren’t you supposed to be the poster girl for a whole freaking planet full of people not dying when they’re not meant to?”
That got a reaction, something ice-sharp in her face and edging through into her voice. “Fiue howrs and three hundred and fortye-three yeeres ago I battled the end of humanity into the ground, and no one came to my ayde. Now I heere three of my brothers haue ſtarted it agayn, two haue loſt faith in the Hoſt and fled, and the laſt ſhowes his face after a Millennyum to drag me out of time to bee his weapon. I burn’d down London around me to deſtroie Peſtilence and his new weaponn; and I regretted it. I am not the pure Creature that you suppose.” She smiled, the edge of it brittle and sincere as Lucifer’s. “Tell me. Why ſhould I not let it alle come to an end?” Sam saw bright open eyes under artificial rain and heard, I just want it to be over.
Castiel swayed forward, that hard blue look in his eyes that always made Sam feel like a sulky child who ought to be a warrior of the Lord. “Because you care. You have chosen already: not the depredations of Hell, not the inertia of Heaven. You know this is not the world’s time.”
Sariel’s voice dropped back into something more like a human register, a flat monotone. “I am too weak to face Peſtilence again; and you cannot towch Death. None of vs can.”
Sam’s breathing, and his hopes, stuttered to a stop.
Bobby took a step forward, heavy and cautious. “Gabriel seemed to think we could.”
“My brother is not such a fool as to think that one might kill a Horse man.” She did that funny angelic head-tilt thing and stared narrowly at Sam, for some reason. “But it is poſſible to bargayn with Death.”
“… Okay,” Sam leaped in. “Okay, good. Let’s go with that.”
Which brought the full strength of Dean’s protective death-glare onto him, and Bobby’s warning hand on his arm. “Bargain,” Bobby repeated flatly. “Bargain how?”
“My brother hath Death bownd unnaturalle. I muſt unbind him before I reſt. He may loane you his ryng in return.”
“You’re feeling too woozy for Pestilence but you’re happy to play the White Queen against Death?”
“I am the creature in Creation beſt equipp’d to negotiate with the final Horseman.”
“Yeah, forgive me if I don’t exactly find that reassuring, lady.”
She gave Dean a cool, puzzled look. “Why wouldst thou? I did not speak to reaſſure thee.”
Sam jumped in. “Okay, well, if you can deal with Death could you bless these possets we figured out so we can take on Pestilence without turning into goo? And maybe - you’ve got some kind of global Horsemen-tracking thing, don’t you? Can you tell us where he is?”
Dean cleared his throat pointedly. “Yeah, or. Archangel. She could just stab Lucifer with her shiny little pen-knife of heavenly doom.”
Sariel bowed her head. “It is not the Worldes time. But it was mine. I will do this thing for you, but I will not ſtand between my brothers.”
“Hey.” Dean ducked his head to catch her eye, wearing that soft kind of fierceness that seemed to always get a reaction from angels, for some weird Righteous-Man reason. “You’re seriously playing the not-meant-to-be card? Now? Lady, screw that destiny shit. You’re still here. Make your own choices like the rest of us have to.”
Sariel just looked at him with something like pity. “I haue onlie barely wreſtell’d Peſtilence and all his creatures into nothingneſſ. Vnbinding Death will use the laſte of my ſtrength.”
Dean opened his mouth to say something probably obstreporous and obstructive, but Castiel just said “Oh,” very quietly, like a revelation, and Sariel looked at him and held him in her gaze like the angel on the newest headstone at a funeral, and said, “This is my task, Castiel.”
And Sam was missing something here. The angels were looking at each other like there was a whole other conversation going on that no one else was privy to, something Sam could almost hear just under the edge of where you needed words to shape thoughts, and since when had he become so sensitive to angel radio? Come to that, when had Cas, since he wasn’t meant to be able to hear that now? But no, that wasn’t it - this was something more basic, more vital and subconscious, that had been niggling in the back of his brain since he’d done all that digging around trying to find Chamael.
“This is a ſtrange century.” Sariel’s tired voice declared, and she reached out again to touch Castiel’s face, but this time as if she might be receiving strength as well as offering. “Thou art the seccond angel I haue ſeen here in an empty veſſel, and carrying some thing hot inside him where his grace ſhowld be.”
Castiel’s hand slid slowly up to cup hers against his cheek. Then he leaned in to touch his lips to her forehead, soft, like a benediction.
Something clicked into place in Sam’s brain. Because, grace burned cold. “Gabriel? Gabriel has a soul?” Click. Click. “Hang on. Cas has a soul?”
Castiel froze. Bobby’s eyebrows climbed, and Dean’s hand closed tight on Castiel’s elbow.
Sariel just blinked at Sam, and reached out to touch Castiel’s wrist. “Obuiouſly. Caſtiel. Showe me these Poſſettes.” Then they were minus two angels.
“… Obviously,” Dean muttered, and dragged the suddenly empty hand down over his face. “Freaking angels.”
---
In the end, Sam didn’t even see Pestilence. It was kind of anticlimactic.
The Horseman was holed up in a convalescence home in Davenport, Iowa, cooking up some new batch of nasties in his own personal lab full of geriatrics. The four of them went in quiet and easy, in the late-afternoon lull, armed with the Colt, Castiel’s sword, the swords of the two angels who’d been sent to collect Adam, Gabriel’s French dagger, and tiny linen packages of herbs and bones under their shirts. Bobby peeled off to monitor the CCTV, and within a minute, stealth conveniently became unnecessary: patients and doctors began dropping around them, coughing up green muck which stank of rot.
“Second floor, ward three,” Bobby’s voice crackled over their walkie-talkies. “He knows you’re coming. You see any demons, you pretend to be sick. No point blowing the one bit of surprise we got.”
As they emerged out of the stairwell onto the second floor, “You got three demons coming up the stairs behind you in a minute, two more down the corridor on your right. There’s only one in there with the big man.”
Dean and Castiel glanced at each other, one of those whole conversations in a flash, and Dean turned to Sam and handed over the Colt and said, “It’s okay, Sammy, we’ve got this one. You hold here, yeah?”
And the thing was, they did have it. They worked together well, they took out the two demons behind him quicker than Sam would have thought possible, and they were in and out with Pestilence’s ring almost before Sam had shoved the last demon under the devil’s trap he’d scraped hastily into the ceiling.
Dean didn’t actually need Sam, not to survive. He could get by without him.
It was kind of liberating.
As Dean, grinning and cocky with triumph, advanced on the trapped demons spinning his favourite new dagger on one finger, Sam had the strangest feeling of having come full circle. From rejecting destiny in Lucifer’s face to… see, Sam was pretty sure now that it did exist. Just, the angels had it wrong. It wasn’t a road you got dragged down, it was a road you chose. And it certainly didn’t look anything like the angels’ roadmap. He knew what Sariel had meant by “it was my time.” What Gabriel meant, when he implied that going Trickster was actually more ethical than the whole Angel of Judgement thing, because he chose it and he let his victims choose. This road was Sam’s, and it fit, and it was fucking terrifying but it was his to decide, and it was right. And screw Lucifer, screw Michael, screw God - Sam had always been meant to come here, if he possibly could.
He reached out and caught Dean’s shoulder. “Stop. Don’t kill them. I think we’re going to need them.”
Three demons. If he was careful, he could get enough blood out of them without killing their hosts.
---
Sariel insisted on giving Death’s ring to Sam, and on receiving Sam’s word in exchange.
“Hold on.” Dean started up from where he’d been triumphantly sprawled on the sofa of the abandoned house in Davenport that they’d requisitioned for the night. “Why Sam?”
“Becawse he is the… the wild Card. He is the one who can change euerye thing,” She tilted her head, and fixed her eyes on Sam. “I think thou knouueſt what thou muſt do.”
Sam swallowed. She knew. He knew. This was it, then.
“I’m guessing… whatever it takes.”
“Yes.” Her eyes were deep and distant as the bottom of a clear ocean, something refreshing and dangerous that you could wallow or drown in. “I want this finiſh’d. As does Deeth. Thow alone canſt ſtopp Lucyfer.”
It was a choice he’d made long ago, without even noticing.
Sam nodded. “Yes. Of course.”
She dropped the ring into his hand, smooth and cold and heavy.
“Then I ſhall go and vnbinde him.”
“Sariel.” Castiel spoke up, from the darkness in the corner of the room. “Take Gabriel with you. Let him see to you afterwards.”
Something like regret hovered at the edges of Sariel’s voice. “Gabryel wil do as him likes.” Then, of course, she vanished. Because apparently needing to get in the last word was a family trait.
Dean glared at the empty spot, then snapped, sharp and brittle like he suspected, “What did she mean?”
Sam stared down at the last ring in his hand. So, this was what they meant by ‘the die is cast.’ “Dean…”
He had a moment of wishing, sudden and fierce, that it could have ended differently. But he knew, with everything he was, that this was their best choice. This was what he had to do, and he wouldn’t trust it to anyone else but himself.
“She means… how I’ve got to get Lucifer into the hole.”
Note.
London was often called New Troy in the later Middle Ages and the few centuries that followed - there were deliberately classicising epics written to link Britain’s mythic history back to a descendent of Aeneas (they called him Brutus, no relation to “et tu ”Brutus, and claimed the name ‘Britain’ derived from his). In this tradition, London became the ‘true’ inheritor of classical grandeur, rather than those degenerate Romans over there. (Return.)
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