I am an Angel of the Lord! I will not be thwarted by the magic box!
Title: Death's Other Kingdom (6/?)
Pairing: eventual Destiel, slight Crowliel
Warnings: original-ish character, wing!torture, angst, dark
Rating: PG-13 for Hell and stuff?
Time measured on Earth is, of course, completely unlike time in Hell. It is not, as it appears to many, that Hell's time takes longer to pass, that what would be a single month viewed from Earth becomes an entire decade when spent in Hell. A month is a month, but where Heaven exists almost without time, Hell has an excess. It is packed claustrophobically tight inside the labyrinth of hallways, battering against The Gates with tidal force.
Hell's time is layered so thick that Castiel feels as if he is breathing mud and ash.
Crowley had promised to put his best man on the job, but that has not made things better for Castiel.
It has made them far worse.
After a chaste kiss that tasted of sulfur, Crowley had taken him by the hand, uncharacteristically quiet, and led Castiel away. The hallway he took them down was, briefly, identical to all of the rest, but it rapidly grew darker and dustier and far too narrow, until it opened into the dank caverns of the Hell Castiel remembered.
Endlessly waiting in a line to nowhere, it seemed, would not cut it for an Angel.
Crowley's best man turns out to be a sharp-eyed, spindly thing who calls herself Lugosi. Castiel can clearly see the remains of a young woman called Bela Talbot wrapped inside the taint of Lugosi's soul. Sometimes, when he blinks up at her through the fresh blood dripping into his eyes and the drunken haze of Grace-deep pain, there is a flash of the girl Abigail Kelley to be found, the child who sold her soul.
Lugosi's skin, her true skin beneath the one she manifests, is knurled with a complex map of scars, no inch left unmarred. He remembered, of course, how Hell looks swathed thick over a soul, how it looked on Dean before Castiel bathed it from him. Still, over the dense time of his own stay in Hell, he has come to see it more clearly in others as it begins to coat his own Grace.
Lugosi is brutal and thorough with him. Castiel cannot help but be grateful to her for it, though the thicker the damage grows on him, the bitterer it tastes. When he glimpses the child still buried inside her now, he cannot resist the urge to snarl.
Lugosi rewards his gnashing of teeth with a swift evisceration.
The line between pain and pleasure is beginning to blur.
Sometimes, when his mind clears, he is more afraid of himself than he has ever been.
Crowley visits periodically, his face taught and grim. He says very little, but sometimes he touches Castiel's face with hands that are much too soft. There comes a day that he catches sight of the scarred wreckage of Crowley's true face beneath that of the long dead literary agent he wears, and he cannot unsee it.
Somehow, it is not even repellent. In fact, it makes the demon all the more compelling, and that is when Castiel knows how far gone he is.
There comes a day that Lugosi is particularly cruel, clumsily violent where she is usually scalpel precise, as though Castiel's torture has reached as deeply in her as it has in him. She rips him apart and rebuilds him over and over until they both collapse, gasping for air, and she clutches him to her, thick and jagged skin pressed to his bloodied feathers.
When he can finally lift his head to see her, her face is wet with tears, smooth as a child's. He can feel Abigail Kelley humming close to Lugosi's surface, and he cannot bear it.
Castiel is not sure where he finds the strength or the weapons with which to lash out, but he does. There is an horrifying, exalted moment when Lugosi is sprawled on the cold ground and Castiel's teeth are buried in her throat before she overpowers him again.
As she shreds his wings, Castiel can only think it is merciful, and he is overcome with resentment.
He drifts back to wakefulness to find Lugosi still straddling his back, assuring him that they are almost finished, and he believes her because he can smell it on himself.
When Crowley appears to drag him back to the surface, Castiel thinks, for a moment, he glimpses the stumps of wings sprouting from the demon's back.