Castiel (cas_is_confused) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2010-09-24 23:36:00 |
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Current mood: | gloomy |
Entry tags: | castiel |
WHO: Castiel; narrative / one-shot
WHAT: Coming to terms with being the world's worst guardian angel and simultaneously with falling from grace. Or failing on both counts.
WHEN: Backdated to perhaps 10 minutes after 'the event'.
WHERE: Lawrence, Kansas.
RATING: A for Angsty Angel, S for Self-indulgent Scene
For a long time – once he’d stopped retching, coughing sour, thin fire and spasming from the throat down, panicking that he’d broken his vessel by making what little juice he had left stretch too far, that this was dying only he did not die, just spat up bile and shivered - Castiel did not speak. There were few things worth saying, and many worth thinking about, and so he found a bench and sat, and thought, head bowed. It would have been easy to mistake the attitude for prayer, and that thought might have amused him. Or else might have lead to bitter thoughts about why humans directed their prayers down, and whether that explained why bad things kept happening. It was hard to predict which.
He thought about why taxis were too slow, and wished for many bad things to happen to the man who had driven his close enough for what little power he had left to render the jump difficult rather than impossible so that he would never arrive those precious few seconds too late for anything ever again. And then immediately felt bad, because it wasn’t really the taxi driver’s fault.
And he thought that he should have stayed, damn the consequences, should have given everything and not just most, not saved that little bit to flee before anyone else arrived. Except everything wouldn’t have made any difference because Dean was dead before he got there and nothing would change that, no matter how much of himself he poured into trying, and he’d been…. scared, he supposed, which was in itself an oddity, known what would happen if people arrived looking for Dean and found him there with a cold corpse and no answers, no way of fixing things, and fled, Dawn’s anguished cries dogging his heels. He’d told Dean – or the thing that used to be Dean and was now just empty – that he was sorry, but that didn’t matter because Dean was dead.
He wondered why one of the humans wandering past had thrown a few coins at his feet. They were gone before he could explain that he had no need for them, so he slid them into the pocket of his trenchcoat, noting the loose threads, the missing button, the smear of brownish red where he’d brushed sleeve against the gaping wound in the thing that used to be Dean (angelic dry-cleaning, after all, was a use of ‘mojo’ he could ill afford right now) and went back to thinking.
And he wondered why none of his Brothers had answered the call, why they’d let Michael’s Vessel be broken. Stopping Castiel reaching the others to tell them of War’s arrival had made sense, in a way, because they wanted the Apocalypse to happen (and Cas was sorry that he’d had to kill them, once he’d lingered in their trap long enough to build up any kind of juice while they waited for someone bigger to come deal with their wayward Brother, because they were misguided and loyal and hadn’t deserved that) but this was letting Lucifer win, wasn’t it? Someone had to have been watching Dean – to have taken the place that used to be his, before he disobeyed, before he began that long saunter downwards – and that someone had chosen to look away. Why?
He stopped, and thought It’s too quiet, and felt his blood run cold (uncomfortable: he’d long since passed the point of finding this body unfamiliar, of being unable to filter out the constant status updates humans took for granted - heart still beating, lungs still pumping - and now it was finding hew ways to surprise him, the shiver running down his spine, the twist in his stomach he didn’t know well enough to call ‘hunger’, the heavy feeling that came from not having slept in… months, probably, because he was an angel and didn’t need to) because the quiet wasn’t outside, and it was less a quiet and more an absence, and that long saunter didn’t feel quite so long any more.
Castiel glanced up. It was hardly the most inspiring canvas to direct his pleas to – the streetlights burned an unpleasant orange, and the stars were veiled behind a hazy urban fug – but the trappings should not have mattered, right? If they did, then there was little point trying – a sky veiled in smoke, an angel bound in flesh – and he had to believe the others were wrong, that somewhere out there a deadbeat dad would pause long enough to hear his wayward son and turn his gaze back, if only for a moment.
“Hi, Dad.”
– and he froze. That was not how one addressed God. Clearly he had been around the humans too long. -
“Father.” he corrected himself, clearing his throat, “Hello. It’s me. We need to talk.”