obstinatrix | Fic: Timshel (Castiel, PG)

I started this after 6.20. It was meant to be a lot longer, and also to have a lot more Crowley in it, but I decided it really had to be posted, in whatever form, before it was Jossed entirely to hell by the finale. ~~And also before the Rapture on Saturday~~. So I finished it this morning with ~10 hours to spare. ;)

Title: Timshel
Pairing: mild Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG
Words: ~1000
Summary: Castiel never knew humanity before. Now it is in him like a taint, like a stain; like a cicatrix that even his grace cannot eradicate.

From above, the whitewashed world seems to roll out endlessly under its curtain of rain, thinning like pastry dough, near-transparent with stress at its horizons. This, Castiel thinks, is the world that was made. This is the world where Adam walked, millions of years and Castiel's lifetime ago; and here, in this Kansas watercolour, another Adam died a second time. It is a new world, the newspapers say, but Castiel has watched it long enough to know that, in truth, it is not. This is the same old world that has always been here, the only one they can expect, and Raphael is still determined to end it.

Perhaps he knows something Castiel doesn't. Perhaps, as Crowley says, there is such a thing as too much faith, blinding Raphael to the awful possibilities that might come to pass after the Rapture. Crowley is as fond of this world as Castiel is, although perhaps his reasoning is different. Crowley is deeply attached to Manhattan, to the backstreets of London where girls sell sex out of run-down shop doorways; to the girls and the sex themselves, although, for Crowley, they are faceless. Sex is sex is sex.

Castiel has another agenda. The first time he tackled this horror - what he thought would be the only time - he stood on its brink almost human, weak and fallible, lascivious and sad. This time, for the replay Raphael has manhandled them into, he half-expected to feel differently - expected to feel less, to fall into fate as it was meant to be, angelic and faithful and unswayed. He expected things to be easier with his grace like a fire inside of him, charring away the vestiges of Dean that once clung, crippling, to his near-human core. For a time, there, Castiel was close to possessing a soul, the half-formed weight of it hanging from his neck like an albatross. Free of that, himself again, things must surely be simpler, purified, straight-edged.

In the event, it is not easier. Crowley knows it, knew it before Castiel was forced to concede it. Like Adam, Castiel has eaten from the tree of knowledge, and he can no more return to the blindness of before.

"What's the matter?" Crowley chides him. "Afraid of what'll happen to your pets after the Rapture?" He is mocking, of course, the tone of his voice wine-warm with sarcasm, but it isn't a joke, not really. They're both of them aware of that.

Of course they were part of it, of Castiel's seismic shift - the greatest part of it, the Winchester boys. Millennia, and Castiel never knew friendship before he was granted theirs; never knew anything deeper or less arbitrary than the loyalty of a soldier to his corps. Dean and Sam are soldiers, too, of a kind, but they're human. Castiel never knew humanity before. Now it is in him like a taint, like a stain; like a cicatrix that even his grace cannot eradicate.

Dean carries Castiel's scar on his shoulder. Castiel wonders if the two are connected. He feels the bond sometimes in the marrow of his bones, in the depths of himself where he is nothing but energy.

Crowley never claimed outright to know that it is Dean, really, for whom Castiel wants to preserve this world, but the rational part of him is sure that Crowley knows. Castiel tasted his forbidden fruit, once, in the swell of Dean's mouth, the wet sliding heat of his tongue. A moment only, but it was everything. God would not save a whole world for one man, but Castiel does not know how much there is of God left in him. Dean is his plumb line, now, his pole star. The axis around which he pivots. He has tried to undo it: he has tried. Some knots were not fashioned to be undone again.

If Raphael has his way, they will undo the world. Michael and the Morning Star should have put an end to it, but the world lurched beyond them, unbalanced, and Castiel understands, he does. It is only the humanity in him that resists, the part of him that never should have existed.

And yet, it does exist, grew out of the mission Castiel threw himself into for God, and it is strong, it is like iron. Castiel wonders, sometimes, how omnipotence could have failed to anticipate this outcome. Sometimes, he thinks it must have been Written.

Sometimes, he thinks the implications of that belief are his only hope.

From above, the world might be a miniature, malleable as clay, and Castiel drinks it in deep; charts it with his eyes. Crowley below, the southern front, and humanity between them like so many insects, insignificant and fully everything. Castiel is weak, the Host would say, but the kernel of pride he should not possess believes that he has a strength they do not; a passion their obedience cannot rival. Perhaps it is suicide a second time, but in his new knowledge, he cannot but try, do what he will and pray to whomever might listen. He maps the landscape with meticulous strategy, taking his advantage and wresting it greater: if he must know, then he will know everything. The sky drifts on unalterably, and Castiel records it, cataloguing its habits, the borders of sub-infinite space. Far below are the grasslands, the roads like silver snakes. The houses are like matchboxes, scattered and small. Castiel exhales, gathers himself, looks down. So vulnerable it looks, from here, and it is all there is.

He does not know what he is doing, but he is not entirely faithless. There is something strong within him, and he feels its pull. This time, he means to listen.

Below him, rounding a curve of road, runs the sleek shape of a car, minute and familiar. Above it drifts a long scrap of cumulus billowing like a bedsheet, outflung, upraised, as if to catch the falling angels.

Vertigo grips at the base of the skull he should not have, not here, watching with his formless eyes. Castiel closes them, feels them take shape in their sockets, registers the chill of the wind. His hair whips wet across his forehead; the hemispheres lurch.

Castiel spreads his arms wide, as if he could hold the sky still. In the new-carved cavern of his chest, a heart starts beating, sets the tempo of his fall.

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From:

tiptoe39.livejournal.com

As I have told you, I have absolutely no idea what happens at the end of this, but I love every word of it anyway. You're a poet. Fic writer doesn't begin to describe it. You're a poet.

I'm honored to know you. :)

From:

until they forget that they are horses

Fic: Timshel (Castiel, PG)

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