Fic: Monstrosity Divine - Chapter 4
Castiel looked at his reflection in the mirror, examined the red, mottled skin under his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. He frowned at the clusters of lesions and the crust beginning to form over raw sores. It was an inadequate vessel, he decided, and nothing more. Once he was finished cleaning up the mess that humanity had made of God’s world, he would rest and repair himself. After all, as Castiel recalled it, even his Father had rested after the amount of power demanded by extended periods of creation. It was not weakness, and it certainly wasn’t proof of his own inadequacy. The only thing his body proved was how weak it was, how terribly inconvenient it was to have to wander around on Earth in this form in order to purge it of the filth that had run rampant in the former God’s absence.
“Do you see how I suffer for you, children?” Castiel whispered. “Everything I do is for you. Everything.” He met his own gaze in the mirror, watching his lips curl in an unfamiliar smile as a response came from seemingly everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Cas… Castiel…
He inhaled sharply through his nose, staring harshly at the mirror as if he expected his reflection to start speaking to him. The voices were inside of him, he was momentarily certain, and yet they seemed to reverberate off the walls of the small room and echo in his ears as much as in his mind.
Out… Let us out…
“No. You’re where you belong: here with me.”
Castiel could feel the response inside him, sudden and visceral, the souls shifting around inside him and clawing at the confines of his body. His face twisted almost into a snarl as he looked at his own reflection again, regarding eyes staring back at him from the glass that no longer looked at all like his own.
“Be obedient children,” he whispered. “Be obedient.”
Castiel took a deep breath and squared his shoulders, waiting for the churning inside him to calm before he walked back out into the sun.
A group of people had gathered in the park, all gathered around a central pediment that acted as a small stage. They were mostly quiet, shuffling around each other and bumping elbows as they held up their bright, poster board signs. All eyes were focused on the man on the stage. He was red-faced from having his collar buttoned too tight around his bulging neck, and his cheeks seemed to puff and shake as he spoke.
“And we do not need to be praying for less of these so-called disasters but more! The hurricanes and the earthquakes, the tsunamis and the floods, these are how God cleanses the filth from the earth.”
The crowd cheered, a sudden, uproarious sound, and the man waited until they settled to speak again.
“The lustful. The greedy. The ones who kill babies and call it medicine. The sodomites and the homosexuals trying to corrupt our children. These are the people that need to be wiped off the face of the earth!”
Another eruption issued forth from the crowd, but this time the man held up his hands to silence them.
“Pray with me, brothers and sisters. Pray with me for another flood, another storm, another Katrina. Pray with me for God to extend his righteous fury down and smite those unworthy of living in His glorious kingdom.”
“Who are you to speak for God?”
The crowd turned, all falling silence at once as their eyes took in the strange lines of redness stretching around deep blue eyes. Castiel stepped past them with little regard for the staring, pushing his way to the forefront of the group to look up at the man directly.
“Who are you to speak for God?” he asked again.
“This is God’s word, son.”
Castiel’s eyes narrowed. “I am not your son, and these are not my words. You champion yourself as a mouthpiece for God, but what you are spewing is maliciousness and hatred. The disasters you speak of were incidents of nature, not holy wrath, and how dare you delight in the suffering of your kin. How dare you pray to me to ask for more.”
“Look, I don’t know who you think you are, but-”
“I’m God. Your God, and I will not tolerate this behavior in my kingdom. You speak hatred and violence in my name. That is the worst sort of blasphemy.”
Castiel tilted his head, watching as the man’s eyes bulged suddenly. His hands went up to tug at the collar of his shirt, nails scraping uselessly against fabric and flesh in an attempt to dislodge whatever was choking him. He couldn’t. Gurgling noises rose up from his throat, desperate attempts to breathe, and his mouth gaped open like a black void, tongue wedged too far back in the hollow of his throat to be visible. As his skin begin to flush purple, the crowd murmured in discontent, a few stepping forward as if to investigate. They were instantly stricken with the same affliction, bodies tensing sharply at the sudden expulsion of air from their lungs and the twisting of their own muscle in the backs of their throats. The speaker was the first one to fall, tumbling from his stance above them and landing face down in the dirt, one hand still wrapped around the front of his own neck. The rest followed one by one, gasping and writhing as the fell until Castiel was surrounded by a small sea of blue-lipped corpses staring at nothing.
“Hatred and blasphemy are not tolerated,” he whispered. He closed his eyes in the emerging silence. It was done. Lucifer would deal with these people, in time.
Cas… Cas…
“No. I will not hear anymore from you.”
But the devil… the devil…
Castiel opened his eyes, half expecting to face whomever was trying to speak to him.
Where is your devil right now…?
The old lab had a strange chill. The air had a putrid stench of death to it, heightened by coppery undertones that wafted from the smears and streaks of blood that colored the dingy, off-white walls and floors. What had once been Raphael was still there, chunks of gore splattered and pooled across the opposite side of the room. Lucifer froze when he saw that. He knew whose body that was, and it took no more than a glance to tell him how the death had occurred. He stood motionless, letting the sickening chill spread throughout his bones and settle down at his core.
I am so sorry, brother.
There was nothing for it now. In spite of this, Castiel was still alive. Lucifer had to save at least the one. He laid down the small collection of papers and books he’d taken from Dean, and while he was sure the boy had more information he was withholding, what he had would be enough. The bloody symbol on the wall gave him more than enough to go on, though the dog blood was a bit perplexing. Over the next hour, he began to piece things together. Purgatory had been shut off for a reason, of course. The twisted souls of once human monsters were more than enough reason to keep the place closed, but Lucifer remembered the Leviathan. He was old enough to recall catching glimpses of them as they ravaged any environment that God allowed them. They tore and devoured, destroyed and consumed. They soaked worlds in their filth until no other life could survive there, and then they would simply seek out something new to gnaw upon. They were the reason that door could never be opened, but perhaps Castiel had been too young to remember. Perhaps the Leviathan, like so many other things, had simply become a grotesque fairy tale in his mind, a story the archangels told of the time before thousands of angels lit up the heavens. Perhaps Castiel believed he could control them. He couldn’t.
The smell of blood was suddenly stronger, accompanied by a buzz of heat that carried with it a sickening sweetness. Lucifer turned slowly. Castiel’s face was mere inches from his. The strange aroma was clearly emanating from his decaying vessel. The burns had crept up his neck and spread across his face, causing his flesh to darken and peel. It was difficult to tell where Castiel’s own wounds ended and the blood of his slaughters began. The sticky red soaked into his clothes and dripped along his flesh. Castiel tilted his head slowly, a twitching, deliberate motion, and his lips pulled back into a snarl.
“I knew you would betray me.”
Lucifer stared at him, eyes wide. He had seen an overburdened vessel begin to disintegrate; he had been inside a vessel that began to fall apart under the magnitude of his power, but never anything like this. “What happened to you?” he whispered.
“Treason, apparently.” Castiel held a hand up and sent the table toppling sideways with the small gesture. The books and papers scattered across the floor, and Lucifer was nearly knocked off the chair he was sitting in. Castiel watched him recover himself, glaring and waiting until their eyes met again. “You want them for your own, I suppose. You want to take them from me.”
“Take them? Now, do you mean the Purgatory souls or the Leviathan?”
Castiel’s face spasmed in frustration. Leviathan wasn’t a word he necessarily remembered the implications of, and he couldn’t fathom any real difference between what Leviathan might be and what any other Purgatory soul was. None of it was relevant. They were his now. They were more than his. They were a part of him. Castiel’s nostrils flared as he drew in a slow, deliberate breath.
“The souls will be staying with me, Lucifer. You would do well not to question me in the future, that is assuming I am willing to forgive this particular incident of insubordination. I have not quite decided.”
Lucifer felt his chest expand with the sharp breath he took. The threat of Hell, of the Cage, was enough to make his temper flair and instigate him into defending himself, but he needed to push that instinct down. He had destroyed Castiel in the fit of a blind rage once before, and he had no desire to do so again. His eyes moved in keen evaluation, trying to see past the confines of Castiel’s vessel, trying to see where the monsters ended and the grace began, but the little light he sought was so strangled, so subjugated by the power overwhelming it that Lucifer couldn’t properly feel anything of an angel there at all.
“Look what they’re doing to you, Castiel.”
“Doing to me? Doing to me?” Castiel laughed, cold and bitter. “You’re jealous. You’re jealous of how powerful I am. You’re jealous that I did what you never could.”
“Those things are eating you alive. …You’re falling apart, little brother.”
“You think you could contain them better? You think you would be more fit to rule than I am?”
“That’s not-”
“I. Am. God.” Castiel lifted his chin, eyes blazing behind a sheen of madness. “Bow down and profess your love to me, Lucifer.”
“You’re my brother. Of course I love-”
“No. No! That’s not what I said. Bow down, Lucifer, or…” Castiel’s face twisted with pain. He could feel the tissue in the back of his throat blistering and peeling as though the tiniest reverberations of his true voice had shredded the skin. Castiel opened his mouth, and blood dribbled past his lips.
“You’re sick,” Lucifer whispered, hazarding a step forward. “Let me help you.”
Don’t let him touch us!
Castiel’s head snapped up, and he stared, eyes wide and mouth red.
He is a liar and a snake. He is fallen and corrupt. He mustn’t touch us… mustn’t touch us.
“…Mustn’t touch…”
“Castiel? What are you talking about?”
He wants to destroy us. He takes us away. He’ll damn us.
“You’ll damn us.”
Lucifer lifted his eyebrows. “Us…? Listen to yourself. They’re trying to control you.”
Lies! He lies!
“You’re lying!” Castiel’s body contorted, trying to draw up the amount of power that would be necessary to mount an attack on the archangel, but he could feel his insides growing hot, twisting with something foreign and dark. The voices in his head shrieked, then giggled, then cooed.
Not yet. Soon, little birdie. Soon. Fly away now. Fly away.
By the time Lucifer reached for Castiel, he was gone.
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