Flashfic: And We Know Every Road; G
I’m trying to work out what exactly bugged me so much about new!Cas. So this happened. Very much flashfic. Wordy commentary at the end.
And We Know Every Road
Summary: Castiel looks at infinity
Warnings: Extreme weirdness
Spoilers: 7x21
One day he awoke and there was clarity. Looming over his bed, bigger than the walls, stretching away beyond the ceiling. Vast wings, bigger than his own. Bigger than his whole self. Stretching away to the east. And everything was so clear. Simple.
He sat up, stood up. Watched in amazement the way his borrowed flesh moved through the thin membrane of the world. The veneer of reality. Skin as thin as soap bubbles.
In the garden the world was a foaming white froth, rushing in on a tide. There are people in the garden, moving around, talking and sometimes crying, softly. They had shoes. They had slippers.
He didn't want to know their names or the sounds of their voices. The way they stood, the way they talked. How they laughed. It didn't matter. It wasn’t real, not really.
He knew that some of them screamed, but wasn't real either.
He watched the bees because there were so few of them left. Extinction edged around their delicate paths. He traced a few, the underlying motion, hidden beneath the leaves, beneath the earth, under the vibrations of air molecules. Under. Beneath.
True.
The paths were blackening as in a fire. But true. Hidden but not hidden, moving through time but already present. Complete. Finished. Moments of extinction and they wouldn't scream when they died.
They wouldn’t even know that they had.
--
It’s there, just out of sight. Some huge and terrible thing.
Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.
“Yes,” he doesn’t say.
Let’s pretend.
--
He leaves and he leaves and he leaves. Follows paths, curling in the backwash of a flame. Thinner than paper, the point at the end and the point at the beginning and all the spaces in between. All truth. Linear time crammed into a single point. Destiny without determination.
He’s outside a McDonalds in the middle of the night and across the street is an overpass and there are people there, sleeping. Under the heavy concrete, huddled behind huge pillars. Their paths are screams cut into the world, acid burning through. What is real what is not real. Good enough, though. That’s part of it too.
He sits on the curb and watches them. His coat would get dirty if he didn’t expend a little energy to keep it clean.
One of them comes out of the dark, at around 3 in the morning. A man. Heavy layers of coats and a shaved chin. He passes a hand over his thick grey hair. He’s a wavering flame. Pressed thin, growing thinner. Fading already. Already finished. Castiel looks up at him and sees the entirety of his life, every point, every moment. He’ll die like the rest but there’s a freedom in that, too.
“They’ll run you off,” the grey man says. Castiel shrugs a little. The gesture comes more naturally than it ever did, and he wonders why it would have once seemed strange. He blinks, catches glimpses of himself, shutter-fast and translucent. Shuts them down.
Not real. Not here. And no room for screaming.
“You should get going,” the grey man says, and Castiel nods. Gets to his feet. Takes flight as a police car starts to round the corner. As the grey man stands, frozen in disbelief, and the headlights illuminate his face.
Castiel saw all the moments of his life, but that’s how he’ll remember him.
--
He’s by a little river when it presses in on him, huge presence stooping to the earth, no mouths but whispers rushing over its surface, memories and flickering edges, papers rustling wings rustling. Breath of breath of clamoring crowds rush of hurricane.
Voice.
It hurts. Words he can’t hear press on every side, push against his head, the shape of the human body buckling like a steel frame and he falls on his knees in the mud, pressing his fingers into his hair, eyes squeezing shut.
There was an angel and he did something terrible
They said, “Don’t do it.”
“Please Cas.”
“Please.”
It whispers his name. The abyss. Mud under his knees and the long grass swaying and the noise of water moving slow. Slow. A heron circles and circles. He presses his forehead to his knees. He can’t hear. There’s fire moving through the earth. Through the world. Cutting from one side to the other, under the continents. Besieging the truth. It tastes of carbon. Incineration. Red thin lines like veins cracking everything apart.
But, he thinks, It was already done. He’d already done it. Finished it. The moment was finished before it began. Linear time in a single point. All actions at once.
The choice of no choice.
He doesn’t need to breathe but he does, anyway. For a long time.
His knees get cold from kneeling in the mud.
--
He writes the sigla for choice and fate a hundred times, all over the bridge, in the dark. Presses his fingers in deep and gouges them when the body won’t produce enough blood, when it bleeds too slow. He writes and writes, under the nodding heads of maple and sycamore and oak. The bridge is part of an old rail line, long defunct. No trains run here. Haven’t for a hundred years.
“It wasn’t the angel’s fault,” he says, to the wind, to the huge looming dark, the silence. The gap.
“It was already decided.
“Already chosen.
“Already done.”
His fingers cut deep. A chunk of stone falls and clatters down the hill. Below the river is deep. Days of rain have made it swift, and fast. Running away into the night.
But all the water has already run out. Finished and begun in the same instant. Every moment in between passed and finished and over.
The trees toss their heads and he makes bloody handprints. Presses both arms straight and hangs his head and listens to the air go in and out of lungs that aren’t even his.
--
Everything is finished. Everything is done. And the world is complete in itself.
There are no choices. All choices are already made.
--
He hangs suspended and hidden above a highway and watches passers-by drag a body up the curb, away from the crash. There are no sirens and the air smells of panic, pain, and exhaust fumes.
Death.
He could save his life. Castiel could put his feet on the asphalt and his muddy knees on the ground and save the man’s life and no one would see him or know that he was there.
But this is done. And done. And finished. And done. Everything is the result of everything else and everything that has happened is complete in itself. And true. Self-contained and whole in the instant of being.
Blood is coming from the man’s nose and mouth. His eyes are open and staring. Two pits. Dug out of the void.
The world foams like a tide and underneath is the bedrock of Truth. And those caught in it break and break themselves upon the rocks.
And that is Knowing.
Castiel departs on the wind.
He doesn’t listen to its words.
-end-
_______________________________
Title from Johnny Appleseed by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros.
Now here is the explainy bit:
All right, so this is maybe a little confusing, but it's my attempt to break down the basic issues I had with Castiel's decisions and why I feel that there's a fundamental flaw in his argument. Namely, it's to do with the issues of choices and consequences.
I'm not saying I think Castiel's argument is *wrong.* As far as I can tell, he's right. Reality may very well be complete in itself, non-linear and guided by rules that are removed from the control of a single actor. ("Why should I profit from your misfortune?" etc.) But the thing I take issue with is the relationship between choice and the consequences of them. Specifically, Castiel is a conscious actor. He has an identity. He makes choices from the context of that identity. From the construct of his Self. Whether a 'self' is a thing that actually exists or is just a projection of interacting forces is in this context irrelevant. He made choices. Those choices have consequences. If you are a conscious entity making choices, whether or not those choices are actually the result of interlocking structures arising naturally in the fabric of the universe, the consequences accrue to *you*.
As far as I can tell, Castiel is taking refuge in the idea that those consequences need not accrue to him because he’s a construct of the universe. Factors interact and generate projections, which are consciousnesses and people. Which is probably true.
But that’s not good enough.
The thing is, consequences are also constructs of reality. They occur and they happen to people. Whether you accept responsibility for them or not is a piddling, trivial issue. It’s a surfacey thing. It’s a story we can tell ourselves, to help ourselves cope. But the truth is you can’t undo consequences by how you think about them. They’re still there. We can act or not act, but that’s also a choice, and that too has consequences.
I once had a karate teacher who was chronically late to class because he said he ‘didn’t believe in the concept of time.’ His not believing in time didn’t change the fact that he was *always late.* It was just something he told himself, a story to make believe he had some sort of control over the nature of actions and consequences.
If you are acting in the universe, consequences accrue to you. The only way to avoid that is to extinguish your consciousness entirely. Then the actions really *are* arising out of non-conscious factors interacting mindlessly and the consequences accrue to the constructs as they arise and fade away.
Does it seem like Castiel has managed to do that?
Artificial zen is artificial. It’s very easy to make up stories to make ourselves feel better, and the end result is simply an assertion based in our desperate need to believe we can have control over something we can’t control. It’s storytelling. It may be based in truth, but it’s no more true than printed words are the actions they depict.
The map is not the terrain.
You can’t absolve yourself of responsibility through storytelling.
And We Know Every Road
Summary: Castiel looks at infinity
Warnings: Extreme weirdness
Spoilers: 7x21
One day he awoke and there was clarity. Looming over his bed, bigger than the walls, stretching away beyond the ceiling. Vast wings, bigger than his own. Bigger than his whole self. Stretching away to the east. And everything was so clear. Simple.
He sat up, stood up. Watched in amazement the way his borrowed flesh moved through the thin membrane of the world. The veneer of reality. Skin as thin as soap bubbles.
In the garden the world was a foaming white froth, rushing in on a tide. There are people in the garden, moving around, talking and sometimes crying, softly. They had shoes. They had slippers.
He didn't want to know their names or the sounds of their voices. The way they stood, the way they talked. How they laughed. It didn't matter. It wasn’t real, not really.
He knew that some of them screamed, but wasn't real either.
He watched the bees because there were so few of them left. Extinction edged around their delicate paths. He traced a few, the underlying motion, hidden beneath the leaves, beneath the earth, under the vibrations of air molecules. Under. Beneath.
True.
The paths were blackening as in a fire. But true. Hidden but not hidden, moving through time but already present. Complete. Finished. Moments of extinction and they wouldn't scream when they died.
They wouldn’t even know that they had.
--
It’s there, just out of sight. Some huge and terrible thing.
Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.
“Yes,” he doesn’t say.
Let’s pretend.
--
He leaves and he leaves and he leaves. Follows paths, curling in the backwash of a flame. Thinner than paper, the point at the end and the point at the beginning and all the spaces in between. All truth. Linear time crammed into a single point. Destiny without determination.
He’s outside a McDonalds in the middle of the night and across the street is an overpass and there are people there, sleeping. Under the heavy concrete, huddled behind huge pillars. Their paths are screams cut into the world, acid burning through. What is real what is not real. Good enough, though. That’s part of it too.
He sits on the curb and watches them. His coat would get dirty if he didn’t expend a little energy to keep it clean.
One of them comes out of the dark, at around 3 in the morning. A man. Heavy layers of coats and a shaved chin. He passes a hand over his thick grey hair. He’s a wavering flame. Pressed thin, growing thinner. Fading already. Already finished. Castiel looks up at him and sees the entirety of his life, every point, every moment. He’ll die like the rest but there’s a freedom in that, too.
“They’ll run you off,” the grey man says. Castiel shrugs a little. The gesture comes more naturally than it ever did, and he wonders why it would have once seemed strange. He blinks, catches glimpses of himself, shutter-fast and translucent. Shuts them down.
Not real. Not here. And no room for screaming.
“You should get going,” the grey man says, and Castiel nods. Gets to his feet. Takes flight as a police car starts to round the corner. As the grey man stands, frozen in disbelief, and the headlights illuminate his face.
Castiel saw all the moments of his life, but that’s how he’ll remember him.
--
He’s by a little river when it presses in on him, huge presence stooping to the earth, no mouths but whispers rushing over its surface, memories and flickering edges, papers rustling wings rustling. Breath of breath of clamoring crowds rush of hurricane.
Voice.
It hurts. Words he can’t hear press on every side, push against his head, the shape of the human body buckling like a steel frame and he falls on his knees in the mud, pressing his fingers into his hair, eyes squeezing shut.
There was an angel and he did something terrible
They said, “Don’t do it.”
“Please Cas.”
“Please.”
It whispers his name. The abyss. Mud under his knees and the long grass swaying and the noise of water moving slow. Slow. A heron circles and circles. He presses his forehead to his knees. He can’t hear. There’s fire moving through the earth. Through the world. Cutting from one side to the other, under the continents. Besieging the truth. It tastes of carbon. Incineration. Red thin lines like veins cracking everything apart.
But, he thinks, It was already done. He’d already done it. Finished it. The moment was finished before it began. Linear time in a single point. All actions at once.
The choice of no choice.
He doesn’t need to breathe but he does, anyway. For a long time.
His knees get cold from kneeling in the mud.
--
He writes the sigla for choice and fate a hundred times, all over the bridge, in the dark. Presses his fingers in deep and gouges them when the body won’t produce enough blood, when it bleeds too slow. He writes and writes, under the nodding heads of maple and sycamore and oak. The bridge is part of an old rail line, long defunct. No trains run here. Haven’t for a hundred years.
“It wasn’t the angel’s fault,” he says, to the wind, to the huge looming dark, the silence. The gap.
“It was already decided.
“Already chosen.
“Already done.”
His fingers cut deep. A chunk of stone falls and clatters down the hill. Below the river is deep. Days of rain have made it swift, and fast. Running away into the night.
But all the water has already run out. Finished and begun in the same instant. Every moment in between passed and finished and over.
The trees toss their heads and he makes bloody handprints. Presses both arms straight and hangs his head and listens to the air go in and out of lungs that aren’t even his.
--
Everything is finished. Everything is done. And the world is complete in itself.
There are no choices. All choices are already made.
--
He hangs suspended and hidden above a highway and watches passers-by drag a body up the curb, away from the crash. There are no sirens and the air smells of panic, pain, and exhaust fumes.
Death.
He could save his life. Castiel could put his feet on the asphalt and his muddy knees on the ground and save the man’s life and no one would see him or know that he was there.
But this is done. And done. And finished. And done. Everything is the result of everything else and everything that has happened is complete in itself. And true. Self-contained and whole in the instant of being.
Blood is coming from the man’s nose and mouth. His eyes are open and staring. Two pits. Dug out of the void.
The world foams like a tide and underneath is the bedrock of Truth. And those caught in it break and break themselves upon the rocks.
And that is Knowing.
Castiel departs on the wind.
He doesn’t listen to its words.
-end-
_______________________________
Title from Johnny Appleseed by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros.
Now here is the explainy bit:
All right, so this is maybe a little confusing, but it's my attempt to break down the basic issues I had with Castiel's decisions and why I feel that there's a fundamental flaw in his argument. Namely, it's to do with the issues of choices and consequences.
I'm not saying I think Castiel's argument is *wrong.* As far as I can tell, he's right. Reality may very well be complete in itself, non-linear and guided by rules that are removed from the control of a single actor. ("Why should I profit from your misfortune?" etc.) But the thing I take issue with is the relationship between choice and the consequences of them. Specifically, Castiel is a conscious actor. He has an identity. He makes choices from the context of that identity. From the construct of his Self. Whether a 'self' is a thing that actually exists or is just a projection of interacting forces is in this context irrelevant. He made choices. Those choices have consequences. If you are a conscious entity making choices, whether or not those choices are actually the result of interlocking structures arising naturally in the fabric of the universe, the consequences accrue to *you*.
As far as I can tell, Castiel is taking refuge in the idea that those consequences need not accrue to him because he’s a construct of the universe. Factors interact and generate projections, which are consciousnesses and people. Which is probably true.
But that’s not good enough.
The thing is, consequences are also constructs of reality. They occur and they happen to people. Whether you accept responsibility for them or not is a piddling, trivial issue. It’s a surfacey thing. It’s a story we can tell ourselves, to help ourselves cope. But the truth is you can’t undo consequences by how you think about them. They’re still there. We can act or not act, but that’s also a choice, and that too has consequences.
I once had a karate teacher who was chronically late to class because he said he ‘didn’t believe in the concept of time.’ His not believing in time didn’t change the fact that he was *always late.* It was just something he told himself, a story to make believe he had some sort of control over the nature of actions and consequences.
If you are acting in the universe, consequences accrue to you. The only way to avoid that is to extinguish your consciousness entirely. Then the actions really *are* arising out of non-conscious factors interacting mindlessly and the consequences accrue to the constructs as they arise and fade away.
Does it seem like Castiel has managed to do that?
Artificial zen is artificial. It’s very easy to make up stories to make ourselves feel better, and the end result is simply an assertion based in our desperate need to believe we can have control over something we can’t control. It’s storytelling. It may be based in truth, but it’s no more true than printed words are the actions they depict.
The map is not the terrain.
You can’t absolve yourself of responsibility through storytelling.