SPN Archangel Week

Notes:

Sorry，I'm not a native English speaker. This article was translated from Chinese and I used a translator. If you have any questions, please contact me and I will correct them in time.

This work is written for Halloween.

It’s Halloween, but you’re still working overtime. There’s nothing you can do—the company is hell-bent on squeezing every last drop of surplus value out of all of you.

You can’t even report the company, because this place technically “doesn’t exist.” You have no idea which mysterious government agency it belongs to. Well, not that you care. Your daily work consists of waiting for your colleagues to bring in various bizarre creatures, then taking inventory and storing them away, just like any ordinary warehouse manager. Except these creatures often scream at you with bloodied heads, giving you migraines, and thanks to those damn rules, you aren’t allowed to wear earplugs. (So sirens and angels are the creatures you despise the most.)

The delivery colleague is clearly just as unhappy about working on Halloween. The massive truck rumbles into the parking lot, followed by a screech of tires scraping against the pavement as it brakes abruptly. Oh no, your headache is back.

The parking lot lights have been broken for days. Now, only a dim yellow overhead light at the warehouse entrance remains on, occasionally buzzing with the sound of electric current. You’ve always worried it might short-circuit and go out one day, too. You and the colleague who just stepped out of the truck are each holding a flashlight—both company-issue, and neither is very bright. They’re better than nothing, barely.

The capture team is on holiday. Couldn’t the damn company have waited one more night before making me deliver this? Your colleague curses the company while opening the cargo container. You’re not really in the mood to listen to him vent his frustrations—you just want to clock out. He shines his flashlight into the container. The feeble, wilted beam can’t even illuminate the depths, but you see a single short cage placed inside the vast, empty space. Inside sits a man with short golden hair.

The man looks quite tall. His large frame appears especially cramped in that low cage the company provided. He sits with his legs curled, thighs pressed against his chest, head bowed against his knees—injured and unconscious. God, the company will do anything to save money. Couldn’t they order a batch of larger detention cages? Or is this some executive’s sick preference?

Your colleague launches into the standard handover routine: No communication, no feeding, no contact… and a bunch of similar rules. You’ve heard it too many times; he’s said it too many times. In the end, both of you go through the motions with palpable impatience. Then you drag the cage, with its inevitable clattering and clanging, from the container onto a bulky iron trolley—Damn that colleague, couldn’t he lend a hand?!

Clearly, your colleague is not a mind-reader: He gets right back into the cab and drives off. Another earsplitting roar of the engine, and you can’t help but curse him inwardly. But soon, you calm down again. You’re the only human left in the parking lot now, and it’s hard to stay furious in such silence.

The trolley wheels rumble noisily against the concrete floor. A gust of wind sweeps through the late night, and you feel a chill. Maybe you should bring a jacket to work tomorrow. Or maybe you’ll catch a cold from the draft. According to the company’s “employees must work in good health” policy, that would mean a few days of sick leave. You lose yourself in daydreams.

Soon, you’re back at the warehouse entrance. After pushing the cage inside, you don’t rush to log it in—it’s already this late, and no one’s waiting for you at home anyway. So you step back out and stand under that dim light at the entrance. You light a cigarette. The parking lot’s concrete is unusually smooth, and today happens to be clear. With no artificial light sources around, the moonlight reflects off the ground with a glossy, almost wet sheen, like after rain.

You finish your cigarette quickly and head back inside to start working. Strangely, after circling the cage once, you can’t find the information tag that should be attached to it. You realize the capture team didn’t do their job. Furious, you let out a stream of curses, venting all the pent-up frustration of the night. But once it’s out, you still have no solution.

Just then, the man in the cage shifts slightly. He lifts his head and looks at you with hollow blue eyes. “Looking for my tag?” he asks. Driven by a strong urge to retaliate, you decide to break company policy and talk to him.

You say you want him to tell you his species and name, so you won’t need the tag. The man lets out a low laugh, and it sends a chill down your spine. Is this really a good idea? But somehow, it eases that inexplicable restlessness inside you. Then, he tells you his species—an angel. You feel a flicker of relief. A quiet angel is such a rarity; it’ll spare you one more headache.

After jotting down “angel” on the form, the man refuses to speak further. Being unable to get his name plunges you back into a cold, creeping anxiety. Naturally, you start pacing around the warehouse, then opt for a second cigarette.

The second cigarette isn’t as enjoyable, but you hope the fresh air and the view might ease your nerves a little. And they do—you feel calmer. Now, your attention shifts from your inner turmoil back to the outside world. You hear the light above buzzing with electric current again. The aqueous sheen on the ground outside seems dimmer than before—maybe a cloud is passing by.

Back inside, you try to engage the man in conversation again. But before you can even attempt it, he looks at you and speaks, “The scenery outside is quite nice, isn’t it? The moonlight is beautiful.” You feel like he’s hinting at something. His bleak blue eyes stare unabashedly, stirring a hint of fear in you. But resuming the conversation would help your work, so you decide to pretend those direct stares don’t exist.

“Please, talk with me. This might be our only chance to speak—do you know what your company is doing?” The man reaches a hand through the bars, waving to get your attention. It looks almost comical.

But it triggers a panic attack in you.

Every wave of his hand sends waves of suffocation through you. You feel every muscle in your body twitching and spasming. You squeeze your eyes shut, fumble for the defensive baton by the wall, and scream—

Get back! Leaving the cage is prohibited!

Then, in a near-hysterical frenzy, you swing the baton wildly. You don’t even know if you hit the man’s arm, but the metallic clangs as the baton strikes the cage repeatedly start to induce a headache. You feel like the soft, fragile brain inside your skull is about to shatter.

The violent flailing quickly exhausts you, and you collapse to the ground. As your strength ebbs, rationality begins to return. With stark terror, you gasp for air like a dying man and open your eyes. The man is sitting in the cage, smiling at you.

You finally realize the company’s rules are right. Talking to an angel might be the worst decision you’ve ever made in your life.

A while ago, you went for the company’s routine medical check-up. The doctor advised you to stop smoking, ideally quit altogether. But right now, you can’t bother with medical advice. You rush out of the warehouse and light your third cigarette of the night.

The earlier chaos has left dark spots swimming in your vision. Everything seems blurry—but can blurriness change colors? Because the watery moonlight on the ground has turned red, and it’s growing darker, as if slowly fading away.

You realize what’s wrong and look up. Only then do you notice that the once bright, full moon has been swallowed up, now hanging in the deep night sky as a dim, crimson orb. But you have no recollection of a lunar eclipse being forecast for tonight.

A sudden pressure on your shoulder makes you turn, pale and horrified—the man is standing beside you, his eyes glowing with a red light. Then, you feel a warmth in your abdomen. Reaching down, your hand touches his—the one that has pierced through your belly, covered in your own flesh and blood. He pulls his hand back, and you collapse forward from the momentum. The damp, metallic smell hits you—It turned out that the moonlight was reflecting off a vast pool of blood on the ground.

She scowls. “The very thought of ingesting this disgusts me.” Gabriel makes a sound not unlike a stifled snort. His own hands curl around a sweeter beverage, poured from a tin into a cup of steaming milk. “Trust me, Chuckles. It’ll do you good.” She sends him a disbelieving glare.

A whine comes from underneath her, high-pitched and pleading. A furry head looks back at her, tilted at an angle – its black eyes shine with uncanny intelligence. Its tail thumps against the red-and-yellow carpet. “Your dog is…” “If the next word you say isn’t on the line of perfect, adorable or freakin’ fabulous, I’m making you eat a second helping.” Raphael says nothing. Her legs ache, dull spasms travelling through frayed nerves. Despite Gabriel’s assurances that the apartment wasn’t far, the walk was arduous even without carrying two inanimate human bodies between them. Gabriel held Lucifer like something breakable and explosive – the tips of his fingers curling where they touched his limbs. Raphael’s own hands were tight against Michael. He was frighteningly easy to carry. His blue lips hung loose, steaming out sighs that froze in the city air. There must have been people around, but she could only focus on the weight in her arms and Gabriel’s shivering form. Occasionally he would brush her elbow, gently guiding her to Father knew where. Father-knew-where turned out to be up a small metal staircase, in a brick-layered building that looked three weeks away from tumbling down. Two overhead lights buzzed to life above them – one of them died on their struggling way up. With a click of jingling keys Gabriel had shoulder-pushed the door open and wrestled his body inside. Lucifer’s arm dislodged from where it had nestled across its chest and swung down, bumping against his brother’s legs. She had stood in the entrance, carrying that strangely fragile burden; had watched her younger brother deposit Lucifer on an emerald velvet couch. His fingers lingered a second – seemed to stray towards the pockmarks on his neck. Then he stepped back, put his hands on his hips, and heaved a heavy, unending sigh, a weary breath of air that settled in every corner of the room. His eyes closed. She doesn’t know how much time passed; her standing frozen on the threshold, like a spirit. Untethered. Gabriel just breathing, the centrepiece in his eclectic collection of furniture. “Home sweet home,” he said. Raphael bit her lip. Hard. Her grip on Michael tightened. Gabriel’s gaze fell back on him, and he sighed again. “Better put him somewhere else for now. I’m not dealing with either of them ‘til I’ve had two cups of cocoa in me.” Michael’s breaths are inaudible from her seat in the kitchen. She can’t hear him live, can’t be sure he still exists, that he’s not inside a Cage, trapped inside a hungry void. The only source of reassurance is Lucifer’s form on the couch, barely visible from her seat at the kitchen table. If he is here, then so is Michael. His chest rises, and Raphael imagines iridescent wings folded tight around his form. He isn’t relaxed, the way Michael was in her arms, limp and unresponsive; his muscles tense with each breath in, his shoulders hunched under the woollen blanket Gabriel had thrown over him.  Sometimes noise escapes his throat, small and tight and smothered out by sleep. Gabriel catches her glance. His lips purse, and he rests his head on his right hand, watching the couch with a careful melancholy. “D’you think he’ll wake up any time soon?” he asks, and she shakes her head. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think she’s ever known anything. “How’re you holding up?” he says. She doesn’t respond. The dog – Fen, Gabriel has called it – trails over to its master’s side, evidently tired of Raphael’s lack of response. Her brother absently scratches behind its ears, and it lets out a contented sigh. “All this time.” Her voice comes out unbidden – she hadn’t meant to talk. It worries her, how impulsive this body feels.

With Holy Fire Between Us

It wasn't the first time he'd been stuck inside a circle of fire. However, it was the first time in a long time it was the right kind of fire.

Somewhere in his mind…it was funny, that God had made them trappable. That something holy and purifying was alone what could trap them. Had He always known that they would need to be contained? That they would need to be held back from smashing all his irritating little toys. 

Gabriel's sneer grew, fire flickering like the anger at his grace. His mind was once again on Lucifer, on the brother he had loved and lost, and his eyes instinctively flickered to Sam.

The brunette had the gall to look pitying, to look remorseful.

Gabriel glared at him.

He had chosen to do this. It had been his idea.

Gabriel wanted to smite him. To flay that perfect body that he had tasted every itch of and watch it burn, certain that his brothers would just bring him back anyway. 

His eyes narrowed and he smiled. 

Then, he'd get to do it again.

Sam swallowed as if he could feel the heat of his gaze, as if he knew that Gabriel was imagining all the different ways he could make him pay for this.

The archangel's eyes didn't leave him. Wondering how the giant of a man would look without his skin, would look if he pulled his insides outside. If he gouged out those puppy dog eyes that had the audacity to look, sorry.

Gabriel's trapped grace roared, hissing and curling with rage and hatred. His fists clenched before they loosened, eyes flickering back to the flames between them. He had been the dumb one, getting so close to the tempting soul that shone so much like the Morningstar. 

He stared into the flames between them. What was the point of banishing his brother if this would always happen, if these two would always bring it back to him? His eyes rolled back to that captivating soul, hands clenching again at the idea of being forced to face him again. Wondering if the next time he looked upon Sam Winchester, he would see Lucifer glaring at him from behind those hazel eyes.

His jaw ticked from side to side, tongue swirling behind sealed lips as he kept himself in the middle of the flaming circle.

They could have made it bigger.

He could feel the heat on the tips of his true form, tucking himself deeper into his vessel as he glared at the raging fire that fueled his grace. It wasn't often he felt anger, but this… standing here, trapped by two knuckleheaded hunters who thought themselves special, it had him full of rage. Stuck in one place by one who he had chosen to linger near, had graced with his presence, his touch, his wisdom, who had then chosen to trap him. His tongue swirled within his mouth, raging and contained grace moving with it as his vessel shifted. Unlike his younger brethren, he could make choices too.

He would not play this game. 

“Castiel,” says Raphael, in an unforgiving voice, “you are free to sit at any other table.”

The club is dim and full of noise, a piano and brass—a cornet, Castiel needs a second to note, because he hasn’t had much cause to pay attention to human music in the past few centuries. Perhaps he will take up the hobby.

The live music is too vibrant in its swells and dips; nowhere in it is he allowed the safe muffling barrier of a radio’s faulty transmission. Perhaps not.

“I have demands to make of you,” Castiel says, not budging from his seat. He feels gazes linger on him from the other patrons, little stabbing pinpricks of attention, though he can’t think of why. He is either over- or under-dressed, and this is something humans take very seriously. Unthinkingly, he straightens his tie. It falls crooked, in the other direction. Raphael puts their borrowed hand around their glass. It’s empty.

“Do you.” It rankles Castiel—their unimpressed tone of voice, the glare they level at him, the million ways they do not yield when his choice has been given their Father’s favor. Raphael lost before this war began; God only saved one son on the eve of the Apocalypse.

“You will give up your control of Heaven. You will let go of the angels who follow your commands. You will…” Castiel launches into the speech, but Raphael’s eyes drift away from him and to the stage. The music crawls onto Castiel’s back, and he tries to shake it off. Raphael’s finger circles the rim of their empty glass in time with the crooning horn. “Are you listening to me?”

“No,” Raphael says. “Say something that concerns me.”

“I don’t want to fight you, brother.” Raphael tips their head back and sighs like smoke expelled from the lungs.

“Good,” they say. “Leave.”

“But for the sake of Heaven-”

“Gabriel was out here for so long, wasn’t he?” Raphael says. “I don’t know how he did it. There’s so much to grieve.”

The idea of Gabriel grieving is not one Castiel can give weight to. Not the Gabriel he had met, in the end. He’s not sure what Gabriel has to do with anything.

“Call off the war,” Castiel orders. Raphael looks at him the way a planet looks at a comet, the way a mountain looks at the rain, the way a man looks at a spider.

“What war?” they say, irritated.

Castiel snaps. “The one our siblings are dying for. They fight me in your name.” Raphael blinks.

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” they say. “You are the champion of free will.”

“And you-”

“Have lost all three of my brothers in the course of a single year. I’m tired. I won’t be going home.” The dim lights provide a sanctuary for their grief, hiding in the depths of their eyes and the lines of their face, as deeply woven beneath the skin as their own grace. Raphael shuts their eyes, and the music shoves past Castiel to reach them. “I thought I’d mourned them already, but this is what the rest of existence will be like. You took my peace from me, Castiel. I will never forget that.” They lift the empty glass to their lips. It doesn’t seem to surprise them to find nothing in it. They set it down after a few long seconds.

“So you won’t surrender.” Castiel hears the important part of what they’re saying.

“Someone should have taught you that freedom is more than a series of rebellions,” Raphael says, “but I’m the wrong creature to do so. Not that you ever listened to me, Castiel.”

“You were wrong about everything.”

“I was wrong that God is dead. He’s made that very clear.” Raphael gives no further quarter. “Fly away, Castiel. Make your war. Your siblings believe it is their freed choice to kill you; you should respect that.”

“I don’t want this,” Castiel says, leaning close.

“You’re a good liar,” Raphael says, leaning closer. “You get that from our Father.”

The lights flicker. The piano player, younger, pauses and looks up. The cornet player, as old as his instrument, wouldn’t stop for less than their absentee creator Himself, and even then, he would wait until the end of the song. Raphael tilts their head, and the light fades into a warm dark wave of blues and purples once more.

“When this is over,” Castiel tells his enemy, “then there will be peace.”

“Do you plan to kill me?” It’s a simple question. It has a simple answer.

“If you make it necessary.”

Raphael eyes him. They touch their empty glass again. The music slows.

“I haven’t been alive for a very long time,” Raphael says, “and there is no one left to mourn me.” To Castiel, that sounds like permission. They will not give in to his will. The war will continue. Heaven will bleed until he wins, and he will win.

Raphael doesn’t watch him leave. They look upon the stage, and for a brief moment, the cornet player meets their eyes. They don’t know that they entertain angels here tonight, but he understands the lamentation that Raphael would sing if they could and he plays. It is the most holy thing Raphael has let themself inspire in centuries.