Fate Comes on Dark Wings, Part 2
Lights. Bright lights, strong enough to come through his eyelids, and a sense of something wrong. He must have gone into stand-by when he had tried to flee. Easy prey, especially for something like Sam. But this was not prison; there were no wards. Comfortable bed, soft sheets--he hadn't felt anything like this in ages.
Castiel opened his eyes to find himself in a hospital room. A good hospital room, not like the shabby clinics that serviced most of the world these days. Which meant that someone had taken him to one of the strongholds of humanity, like San Francisco or Singers or Mexico City. He must have been mistaken for a human if they'd brought him here instead of a healer outpost. Given his condition, he couldn't fault them--
The world was missing.
Castiel stretched out his consciousness, searched frantically for a landmark, anything. And yes, there was the world, floating at the edge of his senses, but he could not even locate himself, much less any of the billions of people on the planet. Billions! A full six billion swarming across the earth, bargaining at the bazaar and chasing after buses and falling in love! Castiel sank back into the gloriously soft bed, baffled. Now that he thought about it, Sam had not felt like Sam. He knew the feel of the Antichrist's aura all too well. But the Sam in the church was...normal. Castiel had taken him for some random human until he had gotten a good look at the other's face.
Perhaps it was a vision of some sort? But this reality encompassed the world. Only an archangel could make such a good copy of life, and he could not imagine why any of them would go to all that effort for him. Castiel racked his brains. Modern hospital, six billion people, normal Sam... Perhaps he had been thrown back in time? The idea seemed ludicrous. Time was not fluid on Earth. But then, he hadn't been on Earth, had he? He had been in the negation. Perhaps time was malleable there as it was in Heaven and Hell? It seemed the only possible answer. For now, he'd have to work on the assumption that somehow he had been thrown back several years, back before Azazel had possessed John Winchester. Which meant...which meant that he was one of the strongest creatures on Earth at the moment.
The Devil's Gate in Montana had not been opened yet and the Seals remained unbroken. So none of the truly powerful demons had escaped from Hell yet, nor had the angels begun to walk the Earth once more. Only a handful of demons polluted the Earth at the moment, and almost all of them would be run-of-the-mill types. In fact, Castiel doubted that (aside from Azazel) any of them were strong enough to color their eyes white instead of black. Nor would any of the special children had really come into their own yet. Easy pickings, all of them, for something like him.
His fingers curled into the sheets. It was impossible to change the past. But then, he had seen a number of impossible things before. He'd seen the upper ranks of Heaven become incompetant and corrupt; he'd seen humanity break free from the control of Heaven and resist the forces of Hell; he'd seen a man rescue an angel from the deepest sanctum of Heaven. And after all the lines he had crossed and rules he had broken to save the world, he had no right now to stop at another pesky "impossible."
Castiel swung his legs out of bed, pulled the IV from his arm. There was work to be done, and the sooner finished, the better. He needed to find the Colt. He needed to kill Azazel. He needed to execute the special children. And, if all else failed, he needed to warn the Winchesters about the future.
First, though, he needed to renew the bindings that held him to this body. Already parts were responding poorly to his commands, with disintegration setting in at the very edges. Castiel stumbled from the room, using a minimal amount of power to render himself unnoticeable to passerby. As he moved quietly through the corridors, he marveled at their occupants. These people took their safety for granted! They were actually fat with prosperity! It was extraordinarily bizarre. Shaking his head at the wonder of it all, Castiel snatched a scalpel from a passing tray of surgical tools and ducked into a bathroom.
Fortunately, it was empty. Castiel pulled off his hospital gown and ripped away the bandages across his chest. Apparently the doctors had tried to sew closed the broken sigils, but thankfully their efforts had not interfered with the binding spells even more. Someone could walk in at any moment, so he had to move fast. Deflection was thin protection; even these peacetime civilians would notice a man carving occult symbols into his flesh. At least scalpels were made for delicate work.
Squinting at his reflection, Castiel carefully redrew the broken sigils, pouring every drop of Grace he had left into the binding spells. He didn't have enough power to fix the keystone runes over his heart, but his work today would buy him the time he needed to regain the strength needed to finish the job. What the hell had Sam planned to do to him? Castiel probed the handprint with a finger and gasped at the pain. The spell had been a dismissal intended to expel him from his vessel in the most violent way possible. With the ties binding him in the body so tightly, the force of the spell would have torn him in two.
Wrapping himself back in the hospital gown (the ties in the back took some effort) Castiel flopped down onto the floor in order to catch his breath. Sam had to be in this hospital, he decided. His true voice would badly hurt even special children new to their powers. And humans would bring the injured from the same site to the same hospital, right? So all he had to do was to go through the hospital until he came close enough to sense Sam. Once the Winchesters checked out, it would become much more difficult to find them. So now was the time to strike, and never mind his weakness. He'd slit Sam's throat and then pass out in a corner somewhere.
An hour and a half later found him panting outside Room 421. Glancing around quickly, Castiel eased the door open and slipped through. As the door swung shut he braced himself against the wall for a moment, dizzy with fatigue. Thankfully, the room was empty. Sam himself appeared to be asleep. Clenching the scalpel in his fist, Castiel stumbled across the room to the bed. Just a few more steps. A few more steps, and he would cleanse the world of this thing.
The door swung open.
Oh shit.
Footsteps across the floor before a force slammed him against the wall, twisting his arms behind his back and squeezing the scalpel out of his hand. And a voice, low and rough against his ear: "Who the hell are you and what are you doing to my brother?" A hand curled in his hair and cracked his head against the wall. "Huh? You one of Gordon's friends?'
It was Dean. Of course it was Dean, and despite the ache threatening to bring him to his knees, Castiel found himself grinning like an idiot. "Dean," he managed to get out. "I--It's been so long--" He cut himself off. This Dean didn't know him, not yet. He'd fix that. "Okay, I know this looks bad--"
"No shit, Sherlock! Only reason I haven't gutted you is because we're in public." The grip around his arm tightened. "Now you tell me who you are or I'll cut you open anyway."
Buttons. It always came back to pushing the right buttons. Castiel licked his lips. "Don't you ever wonder what Azazel--Yellow-eyes--was doing in your brother's room that night?" Silence at his ear. "He wasn't after your mother. He was after Sam. He fed his blood to your brother, and when your mother interrupted he killed her."
Dean whipped him away from the wall and threw him to the ground. Too weak to rise, Castiel sprawled on the floor until he felt the contents of a bottle upended upon him. Holy water. He rolled over and sat up to find a pistol thrust in his face. "Who--what the hell are you?" Dean demanded.
"Not a demon, for starters," Castiel rasped. "I'm a friend." He'd save the angel bit for later.
"Like hell!"
"I'm serious. You and me, we've got the same goal: putting Yellow-eyes down."
"No, not really. My number one goal is keeping my family safe. You? Are a threat. Now get out of here. Next time I see you, I'm putting a bullet in your head."
"You know something's wrong with your brother, Dean. Sam gets premonitions, right? He gets a migraine and suddenly starts seeing the future. Maybe you've already met one other person like him, Sandra Weiss. Let me tell you, what you've seen so far, it's just the beginning.
"Sam is going to go insane. All of the special children do, it's the demon blood in them. Your brother is going to become a monster and you will have to put him down. I'm sorry, I truly am. But I think Sam would rather die human than a thing."
Dean cocked his pistol. "So you are one of Gordon's buddies," he hissed. "I shoulda shot him when I had the chance."
Time to pull out the big guns. "In a little while, you'll run into your father when you look into the death of a man named Daniel Elkins," Castiel said. Dean paled, shock rippling through his soul. "Together you'll find a very special gun that can kill anything and your family will hunt down the demon that killed your mother. It all goes wrong, Dean! Yellow-eyes possesses your father, he takes you and Sam prisoner, and he breaks you in ways you can't begin to imagine. You sell your soul for Sam's freedom, but it's too late. By the time you get pulled out of Hell, Sam is fucking demons and murdering anyone who gets in his way."
Dean swallowed, his knuckles white against the gun. "How do you know that, no one knows..." He swallowed. Castiel gazed up at Dean through his lashes, reading the hunter's soul like a book. Rage, anxiety, desperation, and not a little fear. "You're lying. No one gets out of Hell, not once they've gone downstairs."
What an odd detail on which to focus. He was grasping at straws, Castiel supposed. He gave Dean a small smile. "It happens on very rare occasions."
"Yeah? What kind--"
The door swung open. Castiel twisted around to see a nurse come in with a cart. "We just got the results from the MRI, Mr. Connor--what on earth?"
"This man broke into the room with a scalpel, Nurse...Jennifer, right?" Dean smiled, face full of charm and hands tucked behind his back. The nurse dimpled. "I found him right by my brother's bed. I doubt he had anything pleasant in mind, so if you could just..." The nurse pressed a red button by the door, undoubtedly summoning security. "Thank you, Jennif--can I call you Jenny?"
"Sure thing." Nurse Jenny searched through the instruments on her cart before producing a hypodermic needle.
Castiel's eyes widened at the sight. He shook his head to clear away the bad memories. "Please don't," he said. "I won't resist."
And then, shockingly, Dean hoisted him up by his armpits. "Let me give you a hand, Jenny." Castiel staggered forward and pressed his face against Dean's chest, unable to resist. It felt so good to be in Dean's arms again, that he forgot about the needle until he felt a prick in his backside and the flow of a sophoric into his bloodstream. Weak as he was, he could not resist the drug's effects. The world spun away into darkness.
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