Oneiroi [part one]

[mclachland]

prologue | one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | epilogue


One.
"Dreams and anguish bring us together."


Angels do not dream, and so Castiel has carried a stigma long since before he ever heard the name Winchester. It has always set him apart from his brothers, not as a point of contention, but just more misunderstanding.

Uriel, on more than one occasion, expressed his distaste for Castiel's ability to envision possibilities not first meted out by those higher in the Host.

It is not for us to dream, Castiel. It is for them because they want. Said with such distain, such disgust.

Castiel can't remember not wanting. He has wanted as long as he has been. Wanted to be a soldier in the higher garrisons. Wanted to walk among mortal Men. Wanted to catch a glimpse of the humans who would someday fulfill the prophecy and house his brothers. Wanted to be the first to rescue the Righteous Man from the Pit. Wanted to stand against Heaven in the name of Dean Winchester.

Wanted Dean.

It is in his nature to want, and because of this he has been able to empathize with Humanity more than his brothers and sisters ever could. Perhaps it is why he was drawn to Dean in the first place; want called to want and tethered their fates together.

He recognizes the importance of want and, since coming to Earth, he has been able to differentiate it from need. There is no want in Sam's frightened, reedy voice as he relays his location through the phone, only need, his words rendered hollow and somehow small through the distortion of radio waves. Castiel commits them to memory and casts Jodhpur one last glance. There is a feeling, a niggle, something like regret, and he knows he will never return to this place again without the aid of an airplane.

"Maiṁ tumasē pyāra karatā hūm̐," he murmurs, drawing stares from a few passersby. He rips open a hole and slips through to the nurse's station at the Massachusetts General Hospital Intensive Care wing.

It is quiet. No, it is hushed. There is no quiet here. Quiet implies something restful; Castiel can only feel the taint of desperation and resignation, a thousand, thousand, thousand souls having come and gone, having loved and lost, having given up hope for a happy resolution. So many have come here, broken, and departed for the Kingdom. How many more will try to do the same and will find no open gate for them? How many beyond this place will be turned away?

A woman in white and blue linen -- Carolyn Straubinger -- lifts her head from the palm of her hand and twirls her pen nimbly through her fingers. She attempts to muster up a smile for him, but it is cut down by exhaustion and the recent death of one of her favorite patients (Salvatore Martinez, 35 years old, Hispanic, handsome, post-motorcycle accident, induced coma to stop edema, time of death 15:39).

"I can only let you in if you're family," Carolyn says, eyeing his coat with something Castiel recognizes as doubt. He's seen it plenty in Dean's eyes to know it well.

"I am," he lies, hopefully convincingly. He is not very good at it. "Family. I am family."

She shrugs, too tired to really care, and glances down at a desk organizer stuffed with manila folders. "Name?"

Sam had not said if Dean was admitted under an alias. If there is such a thing as luck, Sam panicked and gave the hospital Dean's real name. "I... believe he would be listed as Winchester."

Carolyn cards through the labels on the folders, worrying a piece of dead skin on her lip. It pulls and spills blood, a small amount, enough to complete a weak sigil if needed, and he tucks the information away for future reference. He had not thought to use blood of the mouth before. His lips rarely split, despite what Dean says about Chapstick.

Carolyn makes a sound of triumph and takes a file out. "Winchester, Dean. Room 449A."

Perhaps she glances up to double check his claim of being family, but he is already being met with the mechanical inhale/exhale of artificial breath in 449A.

"Sam," he murmurs to the form hunched over at the edge of the bed, the cotton of Sam's shirt wrinkled and stretched across his broad back, and Sam starts in surprise, turning, unveiling --

"You weren't there. Ellen and Jo? Your fault. Their blood is on your hands. We're done. Don't you ever come back because we're done."

Dean has never been so still, not even in slumber when Castiel comes in the night to act as a buffer against the persistent memory of Hell. Not even in anger. There is no movement not the fault of the machines scattered around the bed. Dean's chest rises and falls too sharply for it to be natural, his false breath pressing clouds to the hard, clear plastic encasing his mouth. He looks so unimportant, so insignificant, and there is suddenly not enough air for Castiel to drag into his borrowed lungs. The room is too hot, too crowded, and there is no trace of hope to be found on bare white walls or Sam's drawn, pale face.

He makes a fist with his right hand. The need to destroy something is overwhelming.

"Cas," Sam says, voice still that hollow whisper, as if he cannot find air either. "The doctor said he's -- I never thought anything of it, you know? Something like this never seemed like it was in the cards for us. Nothing like this, nothing so... normal. Being ripped apart by something, yeah, definitely, I mean it's practically a guarantee, but not... God, I used to joke about him being brain-dead." Sam rises from his chair, drops back into it and rises again, too small to contain whatever maelstrom rages inside. His voice is shaking, cracking. "How could I joke about something like that? It's not funny. It's not. It's not --"

Castiel moves quickly and places a hand on each of Sam's arms, stemming the flow of words. He can't stand to listen to any more of it.

"What happened." It is not a question. There is no question Castiel needs to know where to place the blame. Was it Lucifer's doing, or perhaps Zachariah looking for a way to bring Castiel down even further, a parting gift before the Gates close. Or perhaps it was something lower, a hurt he can heal even with his diminishing Grace.

Sam draws in a shuddering breath, closes his eyes and squares his shoulders, then fixes Castiel with a somewhat less hysterical gaze. "We were investigating a case up here. One of Bobby's friends called in a favor, and we needed something to do, anything to get out of Bobby's house, you know? After Ellen and Jo..."

"I know, Sam," Castiel says quietly, because he does know. He knows they paid for his naivety with their lives. Sam perhaps doesn't mean to be cruel in his reminder, but it hurts to hear all the same. "I know."

"It was these comas," Sam says. "Eight people in, like, five days unexpectedly going comatose. Nothing connected them -- except they all kept mentioning something about lights with wings before it happened. So we looked and we looked and we interviewed and looked some more, but we couldn't find anything. I told Dean we should call you, but he... We didn't want to bother you." Even Castiel can lie better than that. "Then he started seeing them. The lights. I couldn't see them, but he swore they were there, just like the others. And it got worse, and we got tired. Went to bed. I woke up... and he didn't."

He has never heard of such a thing. Winged light. He should know it, has seen it before somewhere dripping in gold, but every time he reaches for whatever it is, it floats away. It is hazy and altogether too far away for him to grasp in this claustrophobic room. His fingers twitch with the need to touch and diagnose as he glances back at Dean's still form. " …You found nothing else? The only complaint was the lights?"

"He thought they were faeries. He saw them for the first time at a Laundromat and said they were there to steal his all his left socks." A smile disguised as a grimace twists Sam's mouth, then falls away as quickly as a winter sunset. "I thought maybe it was just exhaustion… but he kept seeing them."

You should have called me, Castiel wants to shout, but he holds his tongue. He has nothing nice to say, so he says nothing.

Approaching Dean warily, Castiel half-expects him to jump out of the bed and proclaim this all to have been a big joke, but there is nothing to greet him except the punched-out sound of the machine forcing Dean’s lungs to breathe. He hates the contraption with a ferocity that startles him.

“Cas,” Sam says, apparently without reason or direction, and Castiel ignores him. If he is to do this right, he needs to concentrate in order to ration and distribute his Grace properly. He could very well use too much and burn Dean from the inside out, or use too little and become trapped.

“Please, don’t talk,” Castiel says, placing his palm on Dean’s forehead.

“Are you – are you exorcising him?” Sam yelps, eyes wide, and Castiel bares his teeth at him, an incredibly human gesture.

“Sam.” He allows himself to touch the soft strands of Dean’s hair, the ends tickling the pads of his fingers, but stops himself from lifting his hand and carding his fingers through them. That is too much of a transgression. He removes the clear oxygen mask from Dean's face instead.“If I am to help, I need to concentrate. No matter what you see, or hear, or think you see or hear, you cannot intervene. Not even to speak. Do you understand?”

Swallowing, the sunken skin beneath his eyes scrunching in doubt, Sam nods.

Castiel doesn’t have time to feel relief. He closes his eyes and turns his attention inward, calling to the strands of light that line his vessel’s limbs, all of them connected in a knot at his core. They vibrate weakly in response, but it’s enough. He pushes the strands through his thumb, middle and smallest finger, each of them poised at the pulse sites in Dean’s neck, temple, jaw.

Let me in, he whispers to Dean’s soul, and instead of the permission or rejection that should rise to meet his plea, he tumbles inside.

This… is worrying. It should not have been so easy, especially where it’s Dean he is invading. Dean should have fought him at every point, as is Dean’s wont, but there is nothing to buffer his intrusion. Dean is open to him in every way.

He slips through as easily as the horizon cuts across the oceans and begins his search. There is not anything here he does not know. He reforged these ribs, placed his marks on them when it was not enough, and he made this slowly-thudding heart from a particularly beautiful stone that had lain on the forest floor where Dean’s grave resided. He calls out to them, but they do not sing back in recognition. They do not sing anything.

A wave of fear crashes over him, but he forces himself to push on, stretching out until he coats everything, these small marvels that he resurrected and fixed, soothed the cracks and breathed life into decay. The blood he concocted from rainfall is forced to pulse by the false oxygen that tells the brain it must keep the heart beating, that there is something here to keep alive.

There isn’t.

This is a shell. An empty stadium.

He calls out, pleads for the soul to respond, but there is only the lie of air and heartbeat.

Flesh and bone do not a person make. Dean is not here.

This cannot be. How could an entire soul depart a body -- this body – without his knowledge? Even half the world away, Castiel would have felt Dean leave this Earth. He would have felt Michael force his way into the sack of meat left behind and the End coming upon them. But there was nothing.

He moves to pull back, tempers his Grace into strands to cause the least amount of damage, when there is a flicker. What -- ?

Castiel and his Grace are suddenly thrust back into the world, a surprisingly strong onslaught of debility following like his own shadow upon a wall. He places a hand to steady himself on the rail that lines the bed, breathing in through his nose and parting his lips to exhale. He’s dizzy; it is not a pleasant feeling.

Castiel hears the pad of hesitant footsteps, but no sound is forthcoming. Sam took his warning to heart. Good.

“Sam,” he says, and Sam lets out a long breath.

“So? Did you find him?”

He keeps his eyes closed, still attempting to steady himself. How quickly are the Gates closing? He cannot be this weak already. “I… there was nothing of Dean Winchester in there, Sam.”

The outrage Sam expresses in his voice is to be expected; the resignation, the tone that suggests Sam already figured this, is not. “Did he… did he go to Heaven?”

“I would have felt it,” Castiel says, casting his gaze back onto the body. It is not Dean.

Sam opens his mouth as if to issue a protest, or a sob, but says nothing, as if he doesn't know the right words. There are no words. Castiel knows he ought to offer some kind of comfort, a kind platitude to set Sam at ease, but he cannot think past the brush of light that pushed him out of the hollow space where Dean's soul once lay. It could have been avoided. This all could have been so easily avoided, had they called him. Had he stayed with them in Carthage instead of chasing ghosts.

"Cas," Sam says, altogether too loud in the room, and Castiel forces himself to meet his gaze.

"Why didn't you call me?" The flinch on Sam's face, the downward twitch of his mouth, seems more pronounced in the dark of the room, but he cannot find pleasure in this silent admission.

Sam swallows and looks down.

"Have I fallen so badly in your esteem that you wouldn't call me at the first sign of trouble?" Castiel asks, and is surprised the cold, heavy feeling that sweeps through him isn't the disappointment he expected. He knows the ghastly hand that dulls the world, that makes him want to sometimes turn his back on Dean and Sam’s debilitating, endlessly frustrating humanness, but this isn’t that. It isn’t disappointment, or anger, or righteousness, or joy. Whatever this is hurts.

It’s hurt. He’s hurt.

“No,” Sam says, shaking his head. “We don't blame you for Carthage. We don't.”

“Don’t you?”

"It was Lucifer's fault. I know that. Dean knows that. We do, but…"

Ah. There it is. "Say it."

"Where were you, Cas?" Sam bursts out, and it is not the usual easily spoken words Castiel has come to expect from him. These tumble out as if accidentally. "You just left us, and we needed you. We were totally exposed so that you could, what, chase a couple of reapers? Where did you go? Why weren't you --"

There is a throb from his right calf where the heat of the holy fire had seared his Grace. He'd stepped too close, so filled with rage at Lucifer's off-handed comment about Sam, about someone who was no longer just 'the boy with the demon blood'. About a friend.

It would be so easy to defend himself against the accusation in Sam's tone, to simply say that Lucifer had detained him, but Sam is right. He never should have left them, not even for the commodity of a thousand reapers.

He does not have to answer; Sam does it for him. "It doesn't matter. It was all fucked-up from the start."

Sam touches the bed next to Dean's arm -- a brief gesture, entirely human in its complicated simplicity -- and Castiel watches him mouth 'wake up'. The disappointment that furls into existence at the sight isn't new or unfamiliar. It was the first real emotion he understood upon watching the Winchesters interact, realizing he would never have such ties to his own brothers.

"Do you think it's some kind of trick or spell? We didn't think to check for hex bags with the other cases --" Sam walks over to a chair made of a hard plastic and falls into it, raking his hands through his hair.

Castiel stares. "What did you say?"

Sam shrugs, utterly exhausted. "We've run into witches plenty of ti -- Cas?"

He casts around, hoping to see a glint of light somewhere in the room, the promise of metal, but there is nothing. Hospitals are about order, he reminds himself, recalling the medical TV show Dean used to take a perverse pleasure in making him watch. When the doctors were not having sex with each other and those below their station, they were pulling pre-wrapped tools out of drawers in order to save lives.

The drawers open easily, all labeled and coded by color. He pulls out several packaged blades -- scalpel, Dr. Sexy tones to the nurse he had been kissing in the broom closet an hour earlier -- and spins to the nearest wall.

It has been years since he wrote the name of an archangel, never mind in his own blood. Not his blood. The blood he stole from an innocent man who wanted nothing more than to serve his Lord. It's enough that he can siphon it out of the soft underbelly of his arm, the flesh splitting beneath the kiss of the scalpel, and use it to paint the holiest of sigils on the white of the wall.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Across. Around.

Sam moves to stand behind him, displacing the atmosphere, smelling of sweat and salt and recycled air. "Cas?"

Castiel smears the blood from his arm onto his other hand and places his palm over the sigil, imbuing it with a touch of Grace. He must begin to ration it, save it for times, like now, when he truly needs it.

Casarmi cicles e baltoha allar e apila pi, Jabrail. Gavri'el. Gabriel.

There is a certain amount of pomp and circumstance in the arrival of any angel above the status of Principality. The Thrones, he knows, love their trumpets, so very much like thunder, both terrible and beautiful. Ophanim appear as wheels within wheels, wreathed in flame, hundreds of eyes opening and closing, judging.

Archangels arrive in holy light and righteous fury. He remembers this from his encounter with Raphael in Chuck Shurley's kitchen, the way his human ears rang with the sound of his death coming for him on swift wings.

Which is why it is somewhat surprising when he is slammed into the far wall of the room, two hands around his throat pressing him into plaster and pipe. Gabriel's vessel is smaller and more compact than Jimmy, but the strength in those lithe arms and the rage in his eyes cannot be quantified.

The smile that breaks over Gabriel's jocular face sends Castiel's stolen heart into a thunderous frenzy, fear gripping him even tighter than the hands around his throat.

"Hey there, kids!" Gabriel says cheerily, eyes wide and seething. "And here I'd thought we'd had our little reunion. Didn't expect to see you so soon -- and I certainly --" his grip on Castiel's throat tightens, the trachea threatening to collapse, "-- didn't expect to be called by name."

The door and window rattle. Sam holds onto Dean's bed frame for balance.

Castiel scrabbles at Gabriel's knuckles, his hands trying to pry the fingers from where they curl around his neck. Something inside pops and gives way, crumbling like old stone, and he chokes on the wash of blood that follows. Gabriel's wrath will crush him before he can even utter an explanation.

"Gabriel, stop!" Sam shouts, visibly torn between helping Castiel and protecting his brother.

"Remember that time I said I was in witness protection?" Gabriel murmurs, as if unaware of Castiel's struggles, moving his face closer until Castiel can feel the wash of hot, unnecessary breath against his ear. "Guess what. Still there. What the fuck were you thinking, calling me by name? If Heaven heard your little --"

Gabriel stops and cocks his head, curious. Castiel recognizes it as something Dean makes fun of him for doing, and tries to gasp out his brother's name.

"What's happening to you, bro?"

The fingers peel away and Castiel drops to the floor, unceremonious and dismissed, like human refuse. He can't recall a time when an angel treated another thusly. Even when they're at war and killing each other, there is respect.

Gabriel steps back. "You're kind of… flaking away there."

He has seen Dean and Sam both deal with injuries to the throat and has watched them suffocate, and while he always put a stop to it, the ache in his throat makes him feel guilty for not stopping it sooner. It is an utterly vulnerable feeling to which he is not accustomed, having his airway blocked. The bone and tissue are taking too long to heal, blood on his tongue and in between his teeth. He sucks it together and spits it onto the white floor, watching, fascinated, as it runs a little in between the grout. This is what will soon keep him alive, this half-coagulated and slimy substance.

"Jesus, Cas," Sam hisses, dropping to his knees beside him and tilting his chin up to study his throat. Castiel can't help but wince and cough at Sam's probing fingers, pressing against bruised skin and the broken things inside. "This should be healing, right? Why isn't it healing?"

Gabriel crouches down before Castiel, and the discrepancy of their ranks makes him uncomfortable. An archangel should not lower himself before any other. He squints, reaches out, and brushes two fingers against Castiel's neck. Almost immediately the bones knit back together, the split tissues seal; he can breathe again.

"Oh, boy," Gabriel whistles, shaking his head. "What's going on? I mean, I get that you're, like, at the very bottom of the totem pole, but even for you that shouldn't have taken so long. You Falling?"

"It is not of import," Castiel says, allowing Sam to help him to his feet.

"'Not of import'? I can feel it leeching out of y--"

He gestures to the bed, because this is where the focus should be. While he is equally touched and uncomfortable by the concern that roils from Sam's core, the only reason he called Gabriel here is still empty and cold and hooked into machinery. "Dean Winchester is not in this body. Something is inside this shell, keeping me from finding him, keeping me out. Your… immense power will overwhelm it, certainly. Gabriel, you can help him."

Gabriel tilts his head and studies him. Castiel forces himself to hold that stare even as all there is of him trembles. Heaven will soon be lost to him, and if he has lost Dean to whatever forces have taken residence in his body, then this imperfect place will be nothing more than a large grave. Don't look at me, he wants to say to Gabriel, but look at him. Find him for me, because without him I am truly homeless.

Something must register on his face because a muscle in Gabriel's jaw twitches. He looks so at ease in the body of his vessel, a talent borne of centuries spent in the same form, no doubt. Still, even with his entire Grace folded within him, Gabriel is more at home in this borrowed body than Castiel will ever be, even when his own vessel will soon just be him.

"Why should I?" Gabriel glances at Dean disinterestedly. "He has a very nasty habit of skewering me with kindling. And his brother's an eight-foot-tall moron."

"Hey!"

"Why do you want me to?"

Castiel swallows against phantom aches and turns to see Dean's chest expand suddenly, mechanically. "You want the Apocalypse to occur, don't you? If Dean Winchester does not w --"

Gabriel shakes his head, eyes dark and glinting with something that Castiel cannot name. "Not what I asked. Why do you want me to?"

There is no answer to that question that could not be used against him, and once again Sam steps in, the skin of his knuckles bleeding to white as his hands curl into fists. "Does it matter?! Look, I get that you could give two shits about your brothers, but mine is currently brain dead and maybe even just plain dead. Why does Cas want you to? Because if you don't, I will hunt you down. I don't care if you're an archangel or God. I'll find a way, and when I do I will rip you apart."

Gabriel snorts and extends an arm, flailing it mockingly. "Oh no. Someone help me. I'm so terrified. Look at me -- I'm positively trembling with fear. I knew it was a good thing I stopped wearing sequins." Gabriel drops his arm and grins at Sam, tongue poking out from between his teeth. "You gonna punish me, big boy? Teach me a lesson?"

Sam grits his teeth and starts casting about for something, perhaps a weapon, or a knife to cut himself and draw a banishing sigil, while Gabriel watches in amusement.

"Need a hand there, champ?"

Enough of this. "Gabriel. Brother. I am asking."

Dean once told him, while drinking from a bottle of whisky, that eyes are the windows to the soul. Castiel had been adamant that no, they were not, but Dean assured him it was true. That one could discern many things about a person from what they projected from their eyes. Dean also said one could discern many things about a person by the car they drove, but his wisdom about the powers of a gaze stayed with Castiel.

He recognizes the power in Gabriel's gaze, enough that he can see through the mirth there, casting the green of his irises into something deeper, darker. Castiel can see bits of him there -- the real him, hidden in order to walk the mortal world with ease -- and feels the slow dissipation of his own Grace all the more keenly.

"Asking, huh?" Gabriel says slowly, as if savoring the word. He shrugs and walks over to where Dean lies. "So, what did Sleeping Beauty do? Hit on a wood sprite? Find Gedembai and cop a feel? If that's the case, then homeboy here is lucky a coma is all he got away with."

Gabriel closes his eyes and lifts a hand, fragile human fingers imbued with power, and places his fingers upon Dean in the same fashion Castiel had. Neck, temple, jaw. Pulse points in a human body were once sites through which the Holy Word was received. Before Man was cast out of the Garden.

"If you try anything --"

"Sam, Gabriel will not," Castiel says, cutting a look at him. Because if Gabriel deliberately ruins this, then no torture Sam could ever dream of would compare to what Castiel will do.

For a moment, nothing happens, and there is something tight and straining inside of him. Perhaps anticipation. It makes him itchy, as if his skin does not fit, and he shifts in a vain attempt to find some sort of relief. If this is what Sam suffered when he performed this, Castiel will apologize.

He turns to do just that when that muscle in Gabriel's jaw twitches again, and his brows beetle in a frown.

Gabriel opens his eyes and squints down at the body in the bed, confusion written across his face, followed quickly by a dawning of disbelief.

"Gabriel?" Castiel prompts, the bone-white hand of fear gripping him in his gut, holding him fast. "Is it --"

"That can't be right," Gabriel says to himself, scoffing. He visibly shakes himself, loosening his shoulders before tipping Dean's head back so that the chin points up.

"Hey --" Sam begins, throwing Castiel a worried glance.

"Cork it, Andre," Gabriel mutters, using his thumb, middle, and fourth fingers to coax Dean's lips into parting. Something hot races through Castiel at the sight, but he holds his tongue and continues to watch Gabriel's admittedly clinical ministrations.

He does not know what to expect, but Gabriel forcing his hand into Dean's open mouth and throat is a shock, and he can't muster up the coherence to quell Sam's outraged shout. Sam's thirst for blood is slaked by Gabriel removing his hand, fingers curled into a fist and doing nothing to stopper the light that pours out from between his fingers.

"What the hell," Sam breathes, horrified.

Gabriel's fingers unfurl slowly and it flutters weakly on his palm, this tiny globule of light, this nameless creature. Castiel knows it, has seen it before somewhere, somewhen, but he cannot place it. For a moment he sees a giant tree surrounded by balls of light, and then it's gone. Gabriel does not seem to share Castiel's problem, holding it up with grim recognition.

"Well, shit," Gabriel says on a low whistle, studying the thing, watching as it attempts to lift a crushed wing made of gossamer and thought and light. He snorts, shaking his head, and sounds so terribly sad. Pitying. "You little idiots. What did you do?"

Sam steps forward, fear and hope warring in his voice when he gasps out, "Do you know what it is?"

"Yeah," Gabriel says, sounding for all the world as if he wished he didn't.

"Can you help him?" Castiel asks, quietly, unable to look away from it.

Gabriel shakes his head, peering at the thing on his palm, rolling it absently with a finger. "Sorry, kids, no can do. But I know someone who can."


prologue | one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | epilogue

Comments

[laura-trekkie.livejournal.com]

Curiouser and curiouser! Whatever the tiny light beings are must be something powerful if gabriel can't stop them. But he knows someone who can, so it's not all bad news. But how did Dean end up with that inside him just as Cas was dreaming about them?

Laura.