FIC: Pulling Out The Nails, Chapter 8: Vengeance [9/20]
Back to 7. Division, or go to the Masterpost.
They were past the tree line, and Dean could feel Castiel preparing to ask him where they were going, when the voice rang out behind them.
"Dean. Just the man I was looking for."
He closed his eyes, counted slowly to three, and turned on his heel to face her. Castiel paused next to him, head tipped curiously to the side as he considered the approaching woman.
"You weren't at the meeting, Bela," Dean snapped. "I've told you and told you about this-"
"And I've ignored you," she said, slipping her hands into the pockets of her jacket, her lips stretching in a coy smile. "And ignored you. What did I miss? Is this our new mascot?"
Castiel bristled at the insult; Bela's smile turned on him. "Poor dear," she crooned. "Don't let me wound your pride. Just winding Dean up a bit."
"This is Castiel," Dean gritted out.
"The djinni?" she said, her eyes widening in delight. "The one who was sent to kill you? Oh, Dean, Dean, Dean. You must stop taking in strays. It's going to get you in trouble someday."
"It already has," Dean retorted. "You're more trouble than you're worth."
"You won't be saying that when you see the newest inventory. I've found some rarities." Her smile turned placating.
"I've got things to do. What do you want, Bela?"
She slipped a business card from her pocket, a single name and telephone number embossed on the thick cardstock. "He'll deal, but only if you give the go-ahead. Don't blow this, Dean. We could use him."
"Fine. I'll make the call next time I'm in town." He slid the card into his wallet. "Anything else?"
Bela's green eyes had tracked over to Castiel. "Get him to tell you how we met," she said, already beginning to back towards the camp. "It's a brilliant story, really. I think you'll be amused."
"Ugh," Dean muttered, turning away from her. "Come on, let's get out of here."
"Was Bela sent to kill you, too?" If he wasn't mistaken, Castiel was laughing at him a little, the corners of his blue eyes crinkled in amusement. Even his masked faces were upturned, somehow, a little bit of that alien coldness leeching out of them.
"No," Dean grumbled, digging in his pockets for the keys. "She was sent to steal from me."
"Did she succeed?" There was definitely a disguised chuckle in that voice.
"Not permanently," Dean said sharply. "I got it back."
"What did she steal?"
"My car," Dean grumbled, yanking the tarp from the Jeep stashed between two unmarked trees. Castiel helped clear the branches from around the vehicle.
"This car?"
"No, not this car," Dean growled; the corners of Castiel's mouth were both turned up, now, as though he was barely repressing a grin. "This car is not worth anything, but I can't drive the Impala anywhere these days. It's too noticeable. The engine purrs too loud," he added resentfully.
"A classic car, I take it."
"A '67. Black. Had her since I was a teenager. Was my dad's car, back in the day."
Castiel paused, considering this, but when he spoke again, after Dean had turned the key in the ignition, the laughter in his voice was gone. "You shouldn't be going on supply runs at all."
"Don't know if you count hunting as a supply run. We need fresh meat once in a while, or everyone goes out of their fucking minds, and Jo and Charlie didn't come back with anything on their last outing. We need to go further out if we have a chance of shooting anything."
"Regardless, you'll be going toward a city soon, correct? To get in touch with Bela's...contact."
Dean ignored the curiosity in his tone. "Maybe in a few days. We're running low on some things. Like toilet paper. People get cranky."
"Do you know why I was sent to kill you?" Castiel's voice was abrupt. "You, and not Sam?"
Dean glanced sideways at the spirit, who regarded him with all four faces. It made the hair on the back of his neck prickle uncomfortably.
"Because I'm the leader," Dean replied, shrugging it off. "I guess."
"You're the general, yes, but you're more than that, Dean. This Resistance revolves around you. I don't know how it was before your father died, but everyone in that camp moves in orbits around your words, your moods, your actions. Do you know what would happen to them, if you died?"
"They'd be fine," Dean said, unnerved. "Sam would take over, or Bobby, and they'd keep on keepin' on."
"No," Castiel said, settling a bit deeper into his seat, "they wouldn't. You should take better precautions. You underestimate your worth."
There was an uncomfortable pause as Dean considered this, and he swept it out of his mind as soon as the thought had entered, because who was Castiel-his would-be assassin-to tell him what he was worth? He knew what he was worth. He knew what his job was. His people trusted him to bring down the assholes who had persecuted them and every other ordinary citizen for the last few dozen years, and that was what he would do. That was it.
"Well," he said at last. "Seeing as I've got a bodyguard for this trip, I think I'll be fine."
Castiel rolled his eyes, as though to say that wasn't what I meant at all, but he let it lie.
*
"Can I ask you something?"
Castiel, crunching silently through dead leaves beside him-seriously, he would pay good fake money to be as quiet as Cas, especially while tracking reluctant deer-glanced up from his study of the forest floor. "Go ahead," he said, and it seemed an honest invitation, if a little wary.
"So a spirit like you goes through thousands of years," Dean said, trying not to think too hard on that number, which made him a little queasy. "Serving dozens of magicians, doing their bidding-reluctantly, admittedly, but doing it nevertheless. Never stirs up any trouble."
"Indeed," Castiel said dryly. "That is the fastest way to be released back to the Other Place, which, as you've noticed, is the only way for us to survive."
"Right," Dean said, frowning. "But then this one magician comes along, and all of a sudden, you're an insubordinate little shit."
Castiel chuckled. Quietly, but in definite good humor. "That's one way of putting it."
"Guy must have been something else," Dean pried.
Castiel was quiet for a moment, but when Dean snuck a glance at him, the frown between his eyebrows seemed to indicate that he was gathering his thoughts, so Dean waited quietly. His other faces were restless, his wings a little twitchy, as though whatever he was remembering caused him some anxiety.
"There have always been spirits who served a cause above a magician," Castiel finally said. "They seek freedom, or destruction-our own kind of rebellion. I had never been one of them. I gritted my teeth, I got the job done, I went back to the Other Place to heal. I didn't aspire to a cause. It stinks of humanity, and those spirits who have causes...they've been too long on Earth, too often. You rub off. I thought that taking on any kind of higher ideal would leech away at my essence, the way I've seen it leech away at theirs."
He paused, frowning again. "That's not to say that I wouldn't attack a magician who didn't bind me right. We all would. It's a matter of self-preservation. A job could feasibly get us killed, but if there's a loophole, we murder our would-be master and flee back to the Other Place, safe and sound. A spirit can always take on a magician on his own. He's only human, after all. All his power comes from us."
"That's reassuring," Dean muttered, and the corner of Castiel's mouth turned up in a small smile.
"Isn't it? Without spirits, they're only men. And men die if you apply pressure in the right places. But it was always a murder born of opportunity, if I escaped a magician who summoned me. It was self-preservation at its most basic. No spirit wants to linger on Earth. You see what it does to us, if we stay here too long."
He paused again, the frown reappearing. Dean studied him without glancing away now, because Castiel seemed too distracted to catch him out with that piercing blue stare. Jimmy had been mid-thirties when he died, Dean guessed, judging by the lines around his eyes and mouth-not so much older than Dean himself. Magicians did age more quickly than commoners, though, so perhaps he'd been younger than he looked. And he'd had a wife, a child-something Dean never let himself imagine he would get a chance to have. He left that to Sam. He'd be satisfied with a nephew. The picket-fence thing wasn't in the cards for the leader of a doomed Resistance.
"Jimmy...convinced me...that I was better off giving up my survivalist instincts for something greater," Castiel said finally.
"Just like that."
"No, not just like that. It took a lot of convincing. He was persistent."
"Why you?" Dean asked. "Why did he pick you?"
"I don't know," Castiel said dryly. "I'm sure he had his reasons."
"You don't know them?"
"I don't think he had a list," Castiel returned. "As I've said, he was a man of faith."
Dean snorted. "You could have eaten him."
The corners of Castiel's eyes crinkled up. "I could have. He didn't seem concerned. He followed the Ptolemaic school of conduct with spirits."
Dean thought back to Ptolemy's Apocrypha. He'd only read the volume once, long ago, and been strictly instructed to not take it seriously, and to definitely not get any funny ideas. "That doesn't ring any bells."
"Bartimaeus was Ptolemy's closest friend. At least, it was said," Castiel replied, picking his way around a log. Dean hefted his rifle further up his shoulder. He doubted they were going to find any gun-shy buck while having a conversation like this, but he didn't mind so much. They had hours until dark, and his curiosity was strong, and it had been weeks since he'd been away from camp-there were worse places to be than stuck out in the woods with a weird djinni.
"That was the djinni involved with that Mandrake kid," Dean commented.
Castiel nodded. "Other spirits gave him a wide berth after his involvement with Ptolemy. Not that he stirred up any trouble, in the aftermath. No more than the usual. I think getting involved nearly destroyed him. He was as fond of Ptolemy as Ptolemy was of him, and the way the boy died..." He grimaced, as though the thought pained him. Dean wondered if it had been the same with Jimmy, and thought that it must have been, given the way Castiel mimicked his form.
"Their bond was deep," Castiel finally continued. "Ptolemy followed Bartimaeus to the Other Place at great cost to his personal health. As we waste away in the physical world, humans waste away in the spirit world. His body decayed during the relatively short time he was there. By the time he returned, he was an old man. It was the ultimate show of trust, that he would join a spirit in the Other Place-and that a spirit would let him through. He could only have passed the barrier if Bartimaeus had answered his call."
"How did they get to that point?" Dean asked, vaguely repulsed. "I can't believe a magician would ever be friends with a spirit. That's a lot for something that usually just wants to kill you. Not to mention-spirits aren't human. Aren't emotions kind of a mystery for you? How do you establish that kind of trust?"
Castiel shot him a wounded look. "We weren't so different, once," he rebuked sharply. "Before magicians learned the power to summon us to Earth, we were much like you, without physical form. We loved, we hated. We no longer establish bonds as you do because magicians have used them against us and against each other. We cannot be loyal to our fellow spirits when a man is commanding our every move. It is self-preservation, Dean, but that does not mean that we do not feel. You have a soul, and so do I. Just because I do not choose to display it doesn't mean it does not exist."
Dean, abashed, didn't respond. After a moment of picking quietly over more dead leaves, Castiel let out a heavy sigh.
"I shouldn't berate you so harshly," he said. "You only know what magicians and your Resistance have shown you, and it does not cast spirits in a favorable light. It is easier for them to believe that we are things of evil intent. Enslaving us provokes more sympathy if it's known that we are more human than you believe."
"Sorry," Dean muttered, because it did provoke more sympathy. A vague revulsion turned his stomach. He thought of the things he had seen Alastair summon in a new light, and the nausea intensified.
"Jimmy, like Ptolemy, understood," Castiel went on, ignoring his apology. "He was a man of great empathetic ability, and when he was finally released to be a magician in his own right, he stopped using any form of punishment on the spirits he summoned. He gained a reputation for being insane-for being a demon-sympathizer-very quickly. Spirits came to know him as a kind and judicious master. He usually only summoned us to talk-to learn. About us. About the Other Place."
"There are more of you?" Dean interrupted.
"Were," Castiel corrected quietly. "I am the only one who survived that night."
Dean stifled his second knee-jerk apology, because it would have been meaningless. The pain in Castiel's voice was old and terrible and raw, and seemed far beyond his understanding. He tried to bury his discomfort.
"He sent me away," Castiel continued, his voice hard again. "He sent me away, knowing that they were coming for him, and I went, because I thought I was doing good work-his work-saving the resilient from a magician's wrath. He thought that you would be the ones who bought us all time, who would be most equipped to handle dealings with spirits, because you had no preconceived prejudice against them, because you stood against magicians just as we did, and because your resilience put you on even footing with us. Other spirits didn't make it from their battles alive, or returned early and fought at his side as the magicians staged their assault. I only returned in time to watch him die. Amelia and Claire had already been killed."
Dean, though he tried, couldn't think of anything appropriate to say. The sympathy-the sadness-he felt for the creature striding beside him was almost crippling. Jimmy had been his family-his only family-and the man had been ripped from him. Dean remembered his mother, her features blurred and ill-lit in his memories now, and his father, hung as a warning, and his always-beating hatred for magicians surged up, choking him.
"He used his remaining strength to give me what he'd learned over the years, about us, about a possible bridge between Earth and the Other Place. Even after that massacre, he thought that things could change. That I could help them change." Castiel's disgust was obvious, twisting his deep voice until it was no longer remotely impartial, but heated and rising; it was only when he went on that Dean realized the revulsion he felt was for himself. "But I am as powerless as I have ever been, and for the last twenty-six years I have just hoarded his research, keeping it out of their hands but doing nothing with it, escaping their chains when I could but usually being used as an instrument to undo any progress he once made."
"Hey," Dean said, and impulsively-because he didn't do well seeing others in pain, and it radiated from Castiel in blistering waves-he reached out to clap a hand around the spirit's shoulder. Castiel glanced up in surprise. He was as warm as a human being beneath the thin fabric of the trench coat, and his blue eyes were less alien, tempered with grief, than Dean had seen them yet. "We can fix this," he said, fingers squeezing tight. "I'm not saying peace between us and the spirit world is nigh, but we can at least shut those fuckers down."
Castiel smiled sadly. "Your faith is moving, Dean."
Dean snorted. "Who said anything about faith? This is good old-fashioned vengeance."
He removed his hand, a little awkwardly, and they went on, Dean trying and failing to catch sight of any likely trail. His heart beat too hard in his ears; his palm still tingled from the current of electricity that hummed just beneath Castiel's deceptively warm shoulder. His throat was painfully dry, too parched to swallow right.
"Thank you, Dean," Castiel said finally. "I'm glad I didn't manage to kill you."
"There it is," Dean muttered, but Castiel smiled, a little brighter this time, and the strained silence eased into a companionable one. Dean managed to turn his attention to the hunt, and when they finally did startle a buck out of hiding, Castiel became a sleek mountain lion and took it down before Dean could even raise his rifle. The oversized cat shouldered the dead animal and brought it back to him with a look of self-satisfaction on its face, but it also seemed a little like a peace offering.
It wasn't nearly as weird walking back to the Jeep with a mountain lion prowling at his hip as it should have been.
Forward to 9. Comfort.