crime_and_ink (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crime_and_ink) wrote2010-10-01 09:03 pm
crime_and_ink) wrote2010-10-01 09:03 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Letting the Light In (1/?) (Supernatural)
Title: Letting the Light In (1/?)
Author: Sin_Stained_Ink
Rating: PG-13 (will go up in later chapters.)
Genre and/or Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel.
Spoilers: None.
Warnings: Implied non-con, implied torture.
Word Count: 2495 (for this chapter.)
Summary: AU. Castiel and Gabriel are part of a small underground group in a society where the only humans who aren’t locked away, or dead, are the servants and slaves of any angels and demons who desire them.
Notes: Nervous about posting this because it’s my first AU and my first multi-chaptered fic. *bites lip* Comments would be appreciated.
Master fic list can be found here.
There is the sound of skin splitting and a scream cutting through the silence. It takes him a moment to realise that Alastair’s the one screaming, not him. Blood splatters across his face, warm and wet, and someone else starts screaming, shocked, begging for mercy. He already knows that there’s going to be no mercy: there was no mercy for his parents, for the other people who died that day. There was never any mercy for them.
The last thing he hears for a long time is Sam screaming, “Dean! Dean! They’re dead, it’s okay, I killed them! We’re gonna get out of here.”
By the time the hellhounds come, he’s already fading. He feels the skin tear away, but barely flinches.
He’s gone. It doesn’t hurt here.
Castiel was grace deep in one of the humans who had been brought in this morning. There were many things that he could do by hand, such as stitch up gashes, treat infections, but the insertion of a sharp metal rod by the spinal cord required the delicacy of his grace to move it. She was the last one he was going to treat before moving on to the group that had been left just outside the clinic (who would have died had Castiel not arrived early.) There were, of course, the regular appointments, and the ‘experiments’ gone wrong (or torture which had become unmanageable by the perpetrators), as well as the emergencies and genuine accidents.
It wasn’t that the majority of the owners couldn’t heal their ‘servants’- Castiel knew that it was the politically correct term as the majority of humans were used as forms of some type of entertainment- but that they didn’t think that they had to. As long as the Laufey clinic was still standing, they preferred to let the angels who were of a lower order heal all physical wounds. They didn’t have the resources to expand into the psychological ones.
He’d seen what could be done to the human body by angels and demons alike and, sadly, there was little difference in some of them.
“This won’t cost me anything, will it?” her owner asked from the other side of the curtain. “If it will, you can just leave her. I can buy another one.”
Gritting his teeth, Castiel slowly and carefully started to manipulate the metal away from her spinal cord. The collar, which her owner had insisted stay on throughout the treatment, said that her name was Kat. “This is a free clinic, Nuriel. We don’t charge for our services.” I have told you that every time you have brought her here.
“Which is why you still own this mess, rather than running a reputable establishment.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gabriel butted in. Castiel didn’t look up, but he knew that his brother would be smiling in a way that was more like a threat than a friendly greeting. “You seem perfectly happy to bring... Kat here, and I know that you usually stop at the Roadhouse for a drink afterwards.”
“You should remember your place.”
Before Gabriel could say anything, the phone began to ring.
“Get the phone.” Castiel said.
“If you think so little of us, we could always start making you pay. Hell, you come here often enough. We could give you a frequent flier slip and make you pay for every visit- and ever tenth visit would be free.”
Sighing, Castiel stopped his work, the tip of the rod still too close to Kat’s spine for him to be comfortable, but he had to step in before Gabriel gave himself away, or Nuriel found himself as an amoeba. “Loki. Get. The. Phone.”
Gabriel relented, but shot Nuriel an expression reminiscent of a sociopathic child who had gasoline, a box of matches and a stray cat. He pulled a small ball from his pocket as he left and bounced it off the linoleum as he left.
Gabriel checked the number, picked up the phone and said, in a monotone, “You’ve reached the Laufey clinic, please leave a message after the beep. Beeeep.”
Bounce.
“Where’s Castiel?” Bobby hissed, his voice too low for him to be making a normal business call about someone who’d come into his partner’s possession.
Bounce.
“Patching up a few of the humans- and before you ask for Nick, he’s working at the Roadhouse. What’s going on?”
Bounce.
“What do you know about John Winchester?”
The ball shot off across the room, hitting a tray of antiseptic wipes and narrowly missing one of the patients. Gabriel didn’t pay it any attention. Every single angel, even the ones like Castiel who had come down long after the events of the second of November nineteen eighty-three knew the name. He and his wife had been the leaders of one of the main resistance groups. Made up of hunters, they had known enough about angels and demons to know how to fight back. Most of them had been killed, the few survivors sold. Bobby had been the only member of the original group to survive, his car having broken down on the way to the meeting.
“You’re not going to tell me he’s alive, are you? Because we’ve already got enough people hiding out here without adding another one.”
On the other end of the line, someone shouted in the background. Bobby yelled, “Then call them and tell them to slow down unless you want the pup after you!” He then lowered his voice again. “No. His sons were sold to demons when they got older. They arrived at Hel a few minutes ago. I need Castiel there now.”
“They’re for sale?” That was rare. Very few people put humans up for sale when they’d had them for this long- the boys had to be in their twenties now; they would have been sold a few days after their twelfth birthdays.
“No. They’re going to be executed in an hour. Crowley’s trying to stall them, but-”
“Castiel’s busy with patients, but I can be there in a few minutes.” Gabriel hung up and left a note for his brother, telling him that he was leaving to deal with some business over at Hel. Nuriel sneered at him condescendingly as he left.
The only thing that Gabriel hated more than low level demons who thought that they could screw him over, were the angels who used humans as slaves and bait. He and his brother spent far too long patching them up every day, only for them to turn up a few days later in an even worse state.
Gabriel spent most of his spare time punishing those who abused the humans- no one knew who he was, but they called him the Trickster. Not the most original of nicknames, but no one suspected that Loki was actually an archangel.
One of the pros of being an archangel pretending to be a Norse god was that no one ever suspected you of being an archangel, let alone being bold enough to torment angels- even if you did have a reputation for it. There was another reason, but Gabriel never factored that in.
Nuriel was going to be put through a very earthly version of Hell soon- he was considering turning him into a mouse and leaving him with a group of hungry alley cats. They wouldn’t kill him, of course (only an angel could kill another angel), but it would hurt the bastard.
And speaking of Hel...
“Crowley,” he yelled down the dingy corridor. The building was in a worse condition than the clinic, but for the same reason. The majority of the money was put into the group, funding to get people into either other countries or the few states that angels and demons hadn’t cared enough about to take over. The ones who didn’t want to leave were sold to people that they could trust not to harm them. It was better than most of the facilities: it had running water, lights, and there were beds instead of chains attached to the walls in otherwise bare concrete rooms. Crowley never allowed a human to die on his premises, and he never sold children. “Come on, you bastard. I’ve got work to do.”
The demon appeared beside him, the black of his eyes slowly becoming a pupil and iris again. “You bellowed?”
“Bobby called.” That was enough for Crowley to start walking, beckoning for him to follow. “Any idea what happened?”
“Azazel and Alastair got their comeuppance. If you’re going to torture one and poison the other human with your blood, you shouldn’t tell them that you were part of the group that killed their parents and you certainly shouldn’t tell them that you want one of them to kill the other.” Crowley opened the door to one of the rooms. It was a good distance away from the others, the blinds in the window drawn. “Utter stupidity, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t.”
Inside, a small lamp was positioned on the table between two of the four beds, illuminating the two men occupying them. They were both curled up with their eyes closed. Gabriel approached them slowly, very aware of the time, as well as the fact that one of them had killed two powerful demons.
The one whose wristband read ‘Dean’ looked to be the older of the two, his arms and face badly bruised. He was eerily still, blood seeping through the bandages around his chest and abdomen, nothing more than Gabriel had come to expect from the badly done healing efforts of the demons who were paid a pittance to collect humans. The younger one, Sam, mumbled something and shifted a little. He wasn’t as pale as his brother, but there was blood on his hands and arms, some spattered across his face. Neither of them looked dangerous.
“Sedated?”
“Sam is. Dean was unconscious by the time the bodies were found. Well, what was left. Sammy-boy there turned them into tomato puree.”
“Well they’ll be joining the pizza of demons who’ve been too stupid to realise that they’re going too far.”
Gabriel studied them. There were two ways he could do this: he could leave them to be executed, or he could take them back and piss off his brother. Castiel only had one rule, and it was that they never outright owned any humans. They could take in the few who got away from their owners’ homes before the collectors came looking for them when their owners died, they could provide them with jobs, but owning them was a big no. It was something they’d argued about since they’d met: Gabriel thought that it would look more convincing and make it easier to keep up the charade, while Castiel believed that it was barbaric and refused to go anywhere near the monthly auctions.
It rarely occurred to Gabriel that two archangels taking orders from an angel so far beneath them was unusual, which he thought was a testament to how broken their way of life had become since their Father had left.
But this wasn’t a normal situation. Sam and Dean weren’t normal humans. He could feel the demon blood in Sam, the fear that came from them, even though they were unconscious. Gabriel had never been as much of a bleeding heart as his younger brother, but he did feel for them. They’d never been given a chance, let alone a choice.
Perfect duplicates appeared on the other two beds. Crowley didn’t even blink. They would last long enough to be executed and buried, with draining too much grace. Two unconscious- or possibly catatonic- humans didn’t take very much work to maintain. It was little more than a game. What he did next, though, that was impressive.
They had to keep up the pretence, just in case anyone happened to have seen Gabriel entering. He’d send a duplicate of himself out to the spot he’d appeared when he left.
Crowley waited until the second Gabriel was at his side before he left. Gabriel reached out to place one hand of each of the brothers’ shoulders before he took a deep breath and-
He hit the ground harder than he’d meant to, the split power of his grace throwing him off, but at least he didn’t end up on the roof this time. The Winchesters had landed on the twin beds in the spare room, on top of the sheets, but in one piece.
“Well, you two stay there while I go and warn Castiel,” Gabriel said. Neither of them opened their eyes or gave any indication that they even knew that they’d moved. He sighed.
“You bought humans?” Castiel closed the office door on Missouri’s raised eyebrow- not that it would do anything: she’d known before Gabriel had told Castiel. They were sitting in the small, well-lit room that was supposed to serve as an office, but was usually used as a storage room for antiseptics and various other medical supplies. Not every angel or demon who came through the doors wanted their property to be ‘tainted’ by another angel’s grace. “What were you thinking?”
Gabriel shrugged. “It was bring them home, or there’d be two more humans Michael can call ‘savages’. And I didn’t exactly buy them. More like... acquired them through alternative means.”
“You stole them?”
“Crowley let me have them.”
His brother’s eyes narrowed. “Let you?”
“Well, it was take them or let them be killed? Would you rather I’d sent them to die?” The hellhounds had already done a number on Dean by the time he was sent to Hel- there wouldn’t have been anything left of either of them if I’d left them.” It was the so-called standard procedure, not that there were any standards. The hellhounds disposed of any humans who killed another humans, or a demon.
“No. But it is still unwise to bring them here. They’re watching us. I highly doubt that the sudden arrival of two humans will go unnoticed.”
Gabriel snorted. “They haven’t noticed that there’s an archangel pretending to be a pagan god; they haven’t noticed that an entire garrison faked their deaths; they haven’t noticed that people have been switching sides for years. They won’t notice two humans turning up a clinic that’s for humans. You know as well as I do that Michael doesn’t record the death-by-hellhounds approach. Lets him feel clean.”
Castiel shot him a reproachful look before gathered the small kit that was kept behind the door and left, apologising to Missouri for being impolite.
It felt different, softer and warmer. There was no smell of blood or dirt here, only something clean and almost sterile. It stung his skin a little, almost completely alien after so long in the darkness and filth of the room. Perdition, Alastair called it, and it was still in his mind, curling around him like an old blanket soaked with acid.
It hurt, but there was something outside that Dean couldn’t see, locked away beyond the blood and pain.
(2/?)
Author: Sin_Stained_Ink
Rating: PG-13 (will go up in later chapters.)
Genre and/or Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel.
Spoilers: None.
Warnings: Implied non-con, implied torture.
Word Count: 2495 (for this chapter.)
Summary: AU. Castiel and Gabriel are part of a small underground group in a society where the only humans who aren’t locked away, or dead, are the servants and slaves of any angels and demons who desire them.
Notes: Nervous about posting this because it’s my first AU and my first multi-chaptered fic. *bites lip* Comments would be appreciated.
Master fic list can be found here.
There is the sound of skin splitting and a scream cutting through the silence. It takes him a moment to realise that Alastair’s the one screaming, not him. Blood splatters across his face, warm and wet, and someone else starts screaming, shocked, begging for mercy. He already knows that there’s going to be no mercy: there was no mercy for his parents, for the other people who died that day. There was never any mercy for them.
The last thing he hears for a long time is Sam screaming, “Dean! Dean! They’re dead, it’s okay, I killed them! We’re gonna get out of here.”
By the time the hellhounds come, he’s already fading. He feels the skin tear away, but barely flinches.
He’s gone. It doesn’t hurt here.
Castiel was grace deep in one of the humans who had been brought in this morning. There were many things that he could do by hand, such as stitch up gashes, treat infections, but the insertion of a sharp metal rod by the spinal cord required the delicacy of his grace to move it. She was the last one he was going to treat before moving on to the group that had been left just outside the clinic (who would have died had Castiel not arrived early.) There were, of course, the regular appointments, and the ‘experiments’ gone wrong (or torture which had become unmanageable by the perpetrators), as well as the emergencies and genuine accidents.
It wasn’t that the majority of the owners couldn’t heal their ‘servants’- Castiel knew that it was the politically correct term as the majority of humans were used as forms of some type of entertainment- but that they didn’t think that they had to. As long as the Laufey clinic was still standing, they preferred to let the angels who were of a lower order heal all physical wounds. They didn’t have the resources to expand into the psychological ones.
He’d seen what could be done to the human body by angels and demons alike and, sadly, there was little difference in some of them.
“This won’t cost me anything, will it?” her owner asked from the other side of the curtain. “If it will, you can just leave her. I can buy another one.”
Gritting his teeth, Castiel slowly and carefully started to manipulate the metal away from her spinal cord. The collar, which her owner had insisted stay on throughout the treatment, said that her name was Kat. “This is a free clinic, Nuriel. We don’t charge for our services.” I have told you that every time you have brought her here.
“Which is why you still own this mess, rather than running a reputable establishment.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gabriel butted in. Castiel didn’t look up, but he knew that his brother would be smiling in a way that was more like a threat than a friendly greeting. “You seem perfectly happy to bring... Kat here, and I know that you usually stop at the Roadhouse for a drink afterwards.”
“You should remember your place.”
Before Gabriel could say anything, the phone began to ring.
“Get the phone.” Castiel said.
“If you think so little of us, we could always start making you pay. Hell, you come here often enough. We could give you a frequent flier slip and make you pay for every visit- and ever tenth visit would be free.”
Sighing, Castiel stopped his work, the tip of the rod still too close to Kat’s spine for him to be comfortable, but he had to step in before Gabriel gave himself away, or Nuriel found himself as an amoeba. “Loki. Get. The. Phone.”
Gabriel relented, but shot Nuriel an expression reminiscent of a sociopathic child who had gasoline, a box of matches and a stray cat. He pulled a small ball from his pocket as he left and bounced it off the linoleum as he left.
Gabriel checked the number, picked up the phone and said, in a monotone, “You’ve reached the Laufey clinic, please leave a message after the beep. Beeeep.”
Bounce.
“Where’s Castiel?” Bobby hissed, his voice too low for him to be making a normal business call about someone who’d come into his partner’s possession.
Bounce.
“Patching up a few of the humans- and before you ask for Nick, he’s working at the Roadhouse. What’s going on?”
Bounce.
“What do you know about John Winchester?”
The ball shot off across the room, hitting a tray of antiseptic wipes and narrowly missing one of the patients. Gabriel didn’t pay it any attention. Every single angel, even the ones like Castiel who had come down long after the events of the second of November nineteen eighty-three knew the name. He and his wife had been the leaders of one of the main resistance groups. Made up of hunters, they had known enough about angels and demons to know how to fight back. Most of them had been killed, the few survivors sold. Bobby had been the only member of the original group to survive, his car having broken down on the way to the meeting.
“You’re not going to tell me he’s alive, are you? Because we’ve already got enough people hiding out here without adding another one.”
On the other end of the line, someone shouted in the background. Bobby yelled, “Then call them and tell them to slow down unless you want the pup after you!” He then lowered his voice again. “No. His sons were sold to demons when they got older. They arrived at Hel a few minutes ago. I need Castiel there now.”
“They’re for sale?” That was rare. Very few people put humans up for sale when they’d had them for this long- the boys had to be in their twenties now; they would have been sold a few days after their twelfth birthdays.
“No. They’re going to be executed in an hour. Crowley’s trying to stall them, but-”
“Castiel’s busy with patients, but I can be there in a few minutes.” Gabriel hung up and left a note for his brother, telling him that he was leaving to deal with some business over at Hel. Nuriel sneered at him condescendingly as he left.
The only thing that Gabriel hated more than low level demons who thought that they could screw him over, were the angels who used humans as slaves and bait. He and his brother spent far too long patching them up every day, only for them to turn up a few days later in an even worse state.
Gabriel spent most of his spare time punishing those who abused the humans- no one knew who he was, but they called him the Trickster. Not the most original of nicknames, but no one suspected that Loki was actually an archangel.
One of the pros of being an archangel pretending to be a Norse god was that no one ever suspected you of being an archangel, let alone being bold enough to torment angels- even if you did have a reputation for it. There was another reason, but Gabriel never factored that in.
Nuriel was going to be put through a very earthly version of Hell soon- he was considering turning him into a mouse and leaving him with a group of hungry alley cats. They wouldn’t kill him, of course (only an angel could kill another angel), but it would hurt the bastard.
And speaking of Hel...
“Crowley,” he yelled down the dingy corridor. The building was in a worse condition than the clinic, but for the same reason. The majority of the money was put into the group, funding to get people into either other countries or the few states that angels and demons hadn’t cared enough about to take over. The ones who didn’t want to leave were sold to people that they could trust not to harm them. It was better than most of the facilities: it had running water, lights, and there were beds instead of chains attached to the walls in otherwise bare concrete rooms. Crowley never allowed a human to die on his premises, and he never sold children. “Come on, you bastard. I’ve got work to do.”
The demon appeared beside him, the black of his eyes slowly becoming a pupil and iris again. “You bellowed?”
“Bobby called.” That was enough for Crowley to start walking, beckoning for him to follow. “Any idea what happened?”
“Azazel and Alastair got their comeuppance. If you’re going to torture one and poison the other human with your blood, you shouldn’t tell them that you were part of the group that killed their parents and you certainly shouldn’t tell them that you want one of them to kill the other.” Crowley opened the door to one of the rooms. It was a good distance away from the others, the blinds in the window drawn. “Utter stupidity, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t.”
Inside, a small lamp was positioned on the table between two of the four beds, illuminating the two men occupying them. They were both curled up with their eyes closed. Gabriel approached them slowly, very aware of the time, as well as the fact that one of them had killed two powerful demons.
The one whose wristband read ‘Dean’ looked to be the older of the two, his arms and face badly bruised. He was eerily still, blood seeping through the bandages around his chest and abdomen, nothing more than Gabriel had come to expect from the badly done healing efforts of the demons who were paid a pittance to collect humans. The younger one, Sam, mumbled something and shifted a little. He wasn’t as pale as his brother, but there was blood on his hands and arms, some spattered across his face. Neither of them looked dangerous.
“Sedated?”
“Sam is. Dean was unconscious by the time the bodies were found. Well, what was left. Sammy-boy there turned them into tomato puree.”
“Well they’ll be joining the pizza of demons who’ve been too stupid to realise that they’re going too far.”
Gabriel studied them. There were two ways he could do this: he could leave them to be executed, or he could take them back and piss off his brother. Castiel only had one rule, and it was that they never outright owned any humans. They could take in the few who got away from their owners’ homes before the collectors came looking for them when their owners died, they could provide them with jobs, but owning them was a big no. It was something they’d argued about since they’d met: Gabriel thought that it would look more convincing and make it easier to keep up the charade, while Castiel believed that it was barbaric and refused to go anywhere near the monthly auctions.
It rarely occurred to Gabriel that two archangels taking orders from an angel so far beneath them was unusual, which he thought was a testament to how broken their way of life had become since their Father had left.
But this wasn’t a normal situation. Sam and Dean weren’t normal humans. He could feel the demon blood in Sam, the fear that came from them, even though they were unconscious. Gabriel had never been as much of a bleeding heart as his younger brother, but he did feel for them. They’d never been given a chance, let alone a choice.
Perfect duplicates appeared on the other two beds. Crowley didn’t even blink. They would last long enough to be executed and buried, with draining too much grace. Two unconscious- or possibly catatonic- humans didn’t take very much work to maintain. It was little more than a game. What he did next, though, that was impressive.
They had to keep up the pretence, just in case anyone happened to have seen Gabriel entering. He’d send a duplicate of himself out to the spot he’d appeared when he left.
Crowley waited until the second Gabriel was at his side before he left. Gabriel reached out to place one hand of each of the brothers’ shoulders before he took a deep breath and-
He hit the ground harder than he’d meant to, the split power of his grace throwing him off, but at least he didn’t end up on the roof this time. The Winchesters had landed on the twin beds in the spare room, on top of the sheets, but in one piece.
“Well, you two stay there while I go and warn Castiel,” Gabriel said. Neither of them opened their eyes or gave any indication that they even knew that they’d moved. He sighed.
“You bought humans?” Castiel closed the office door on Missouri’s raised eyebrow- not that it would do anything: she’d known before Gabriel had told Castiel. They were sitting in the small, well-lit room that was supposed to serve as an office, but was usually used as a storage room for antiseptics and various other medical supplies. Not every angel or demon who came through the doors wanted their property to be ‘tainted’ by another angel’s grace. “What were you thinking?”
Gabriel shrugged. “It was bring them home, or there’d be two more humans Michael can call ‘savages’. And I didn’t exactly buy them. More like... acquired them through alternative means.”
“You stole them?”
“Crowley let me have them.”
His brother’s eyes narrowed. “Let you?”
“Well, it was take them or let them be killed? Would you rather I’d sent them to die?” The hellhounds had already done a number on Dean by the time he was sent to Hel- there wouldn’t have been anything left of either of them if I’d left them.” It was the so-called standard procedure, not that there were any standards. The hellhounds disposed of any humans who killed another humans, or a demon.
“No. But it is still unwise to bring them here. They’re watching us. I highly doubt that the sudden arrival of two humans will go unnoticed.”
Gabriel snorted. “They haven’t noticed that there’s an archangel pretending to be a pagan god; they haven’t noticed that an entire garrison faked their deaths; they haven’t noticed that people have been switching sides for years. They won’t notice two humans turning up a clinic that’s for humans. You know as well as I do that Michael doesn’t record the death-by-hellhounds approach. Lets him feel clean.”
Castiel shot him a reproachful look before gathered the small kit that was kept behind the door and left, apologising to Missouri for being impolite.
It felt different, softer and warmer. There was no smell of blood or dirt here, only something clean and almost sterile. It stung his skin a little, almost completely alien after so long in the darkness and filth of the room. Perdition, Alastair called it, and it was still in his mind, curling around him like an old blanket soaked with acid.
It hurt, but there was something outside that Dean couldn’t see, locked away beyond the blood and pain.
(2/?)