The Game of God: Day 157 - part 6
Over… but not quite.
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Warnings at the end.
— Day 157, continued —
Unsurprisingly, Alison has returned to her office at Admin, likely at Teresa’s instigation. Looking at her now, he wishes that he’d been paying closer attention over the last two days. Unobserved, the deceptive energy Alison displayed earlier is stripped away, the strain of the last week painfully clear. Despite the open laptop on the desk and several stacks of paper surrounding her, her eyes are fixed in the middle distance, and he suspects that’s not because she’s engaged in long-distance communication.
Knocking on the open door, he waits for her to look at him before asking, “May I come in?”
The transformation is instantaneous, energy returning with an extra helping of annoyance; he can see why Dean calls her the Executive Secretary of the Apocalypse. The glasses are very discomfiting, especially when she looks at him over the bent rim. “Come in, of course.”
“I planned to in any case, but thank you for permission,” he answers her, closing the door and turning the lock, secure in the knowledge that Christina will redirect anyone who requests Alison’s attention unless it’s urgent (if it’s urgent, Alison will know, in any case). Leaning over the desk, he turns the laptop so he can screen (inventory), clicks on save, waits to assure it does so, then closes the lid before sitting down.
Alison blinks at it slowly. “I was doing something.”
“You have no idea what, however.” Her eyes narrow. “How are you feeling?”
“Wonderful,” she answers with syrupy sweetness. “Rocks are falling in slow motion, everyone’s gonna die. How, who can tell? That part’s still up in the air, but there are a lot of contenders.” The hazel eyes flicker away. “So—”
“We need cameras,” Castiel interrupts. “Joseph’s hand hurts.”
“Context: talk with Micah, got it.” She frowns into the middle distance, then nods. “Walter says we have some that might work; give him about an hour to find them and bring them by…”
“Here is fine.”
She frowns, there and then gone. “Walter says ‘can do.’ Apparently,” she adds with a faint smile, “they’re for indoor use only and he couldn’t figure out how to make them work on the square. Uh—okay, a TV in inventory might work so you can watch the feed live: he’ll check with Lanak and bring that, too.”
“Thank you.”
She nods, eyes fixed on her desk, but he doesn’t miss the quick intake of breath. “Cas, look—”
“I did as you requested,” he interrupts. “Perhaps I should show you, however.” Sliding his chair closer, he leans across the desk, taking her limp hand and turning it over, lacing their fingers together. He still has to be careful, of course, but with Alison, only the simplest precautions are necessary to protect her from the infinite mind of an angel, especially with a memory from a mortal perspective; in a matter of seconds, he relates the relevant portion of the meeting after she left and stops before reaching his private conversation with Dean, watching in interest as her expression go from resigned to bewildered to—
“What. The. Hell?” she demands as she examines it again; her memory isn’t eidetic, but there are benefits to receiving a carefully contained memory from a former angel. “You…”
“I told them the truth,” he answers, settling back in the chair again. “That is what I was supposed to do, correct?”
She glares at him. “Here’s the story of the evil psychic that very nearly ended humanity’s existence but let me tell you also how none of this is relevant because free will?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“And tool metaphors,” she continues in bafflement. “Holy shit, you got Alicia and Joe in on it? What the hell just happened?”
“Alison, I understand the pleasures to be found in assuming the worst of yourself—my experience with dreaming has been traumatically educational on that point—but without a very dramatic change in personality—such as being literally possessed by a demon—you are in no danger of becoming a sadistic psychopath with megalomaniacal tendencies who destroys the world. Other horrifying possibilities, yes, but that—no.”
She stares at him blankly. “That’s supposed to be better?”
“Yes,” he answers honestly. “You didn’t see his mind; I did. Anything you may become—and I do mean anything—is better than that.”
She shudders. “Okay, give you that one.”
“It also helps that you don’t want to be a monster,” he continues, trying and failing to suppress irritation. “Despite what you may think, otherwise normal people accidentally embracing evil while of sound mind are actually exceedingly rare, and those continuing haplessly upon that path, will they nil they, almost non-existent; actually, I can’t think of a single one in all of history.”
“Uh—”
“It doesn’t happen,” he clarifies, in case this isn’t as obvious as he feels it should be. “Ever.”
“I get it, but—”
’But’: there always is one. “Committing yourself to evil as a career path isn’t easy,” he starts (again). Hope springs eternal, after all, and while humans still offer up bodily fluids (Dean) and their minds (Alison) at random to anyone who might ask (or more importantly, when they don’t and have no intention of doing so), perhaps he’ll have better luck with this. “Don’t misunderstand: despite what you may think, evil takes work, that work is generally unpleasant as well as boring unless you have a taste for that kind of thing and you don’t, it’s very thin of non-minion company—they’re generally stupid, in case that’s not obvious—and it’s not nearly as enjoyable as you might assume; see points one through three. The only thing that makes it worth it is the eventual goal—conquest, riches, power, a particularly attractive courtesan, concubine, or heiress—and you don’t even have one of those. For that matter, Teresa is both beautiful and powerful, no one has money anymore, and if you want the infected zone, I seriously doubt anyone would care, but Alison, you are no general. An administrator, yes, but please don’t try conquest; it would be embarrassing for us both when I brought you to battle, and you would lose, probably in under ten minutes.”
Alison blinks once to show she’s listening: excellent.
“To continue: you have no nefarious goals nor do you show any sign of acquiring any that can’t be reached by less personally reprehensible—and far less miserable—means. It’s not impossible, but—you and Dean,” he interrupts himself. “What part of this doesn’t make sense? You both carry on as if not carefully watched, you’ll abruptly pillage the world in an orgy of unexpected villainy no one could see coming; one, the way you both warn us of it constantly contradicts the ‘unexpected’ and ‘not see coming’ and two, what is wrong with you?”
Alison leans back in her chair. “Long day?”
“Long week,” he answers shortly, slumping in his chair. “Why do you make this so complicated? It’s simple; a five year old manages it without any effort whatsoever.”
“Simple but not easy,” she retorts. “How not to be a monster, by Castiel of Chitaqua. Really helps, by the way, have I mentioned that?”
“That’s two thirds—perhaps three quarters of it,” he agrees in determined patience. “Nothing happens in a vacuum; the rest is the world and those around you, and they must do their part as well. The world we have no control over, but your family and friends—those you choose to surround yourself with, who willingly offer their support and you accept it—will do the rest.”
Her frown deepens. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Perhaps you could consider the possibility that it might be difficult for you to embark on a path of wholesale evil while sharing a bed with Teresa, a house with Manuel, Sudha, and Neeraja, and living a street away from Tony, Claudia, and Dolores. Unless I mistake them—and I don’t—they won’t react with resigned horror to your not at all inevitable slide into darkness but will probably knock you out—Dolores will help—until you stop acting like an idiot.” She winces. “If you like someone and they’re about to do something you know is stupid, you try to talk them out of it, but if you love them, you can also punch them in the face.”
“Punch them in the face?”
“Yes. From my observations, none of them would hesitate to do just that if required, and no one wants a broken nose in addition to reproaches from all who care for you. That would hurt on multiple levels and there’s a dearth of competent plastic surgeons in the infected zone if your septum became unfortunately deviated.”
Her eyebrows jump. “Who told you that? Not the plastic surgeons thing,” she says, waving her hand. “I noticed the lack of those myself. The punching thing.”
“One of my first instructors in hunting,” he replies. “It feels like it should be a proverb, doesn’t it? I wonder why it’s not?”
“Because hunters are crazy,” she tells him, and he watches her expression darken. “Look, Cas—”
“We have a plan.” She stills. “May I show you?”
Reluctantly, she extends her hand again, fingers icy against his own. Watching her face, he sees her lips tighten as he shows her the whole, eyes closing tightly as they finish, and letting her go, he sits back again.
When she opens her eyes, she makes a terrible attempt at a smile. “You call that a plan?”
“Dean calls it ‘good enough’,” he explains. “We’re working on something better.”
He sees her fingers curl in on themselves on the surface of the desk. “Cas, it’s a nice thought, but the risk—”
“The ‘shooting you in the head’ option remains on the table,” he interrupts, not quite able to conceal his bitterness. “Forgive me for not being eager to do so.”
Shoulders slumping, she braces her elbows on the desk, head dropping into her hands. “I know, Cas. I’m sorry.”
“It seems my fate to be propositioned to commit murder and the requester apologize for it,” he answers evenly. “If you truly understand why you should apologize, then perhaps it should occur to you that there are some requests you never make of a friend.”
“You don’t understand—”
“I understand perfectly.” She lifts her head, face naked. “You don’t want to survive.”
Motioning Dean to one of the sleeping bags spread on the floor in her team’s room, Alicia locks the door and takes the other one, settling cross-legged and uncannily calm.
He stares at her, trying again to see her holding a gun and pointing it at Cas’s cabin; it doesn’t work. He sees her at the kitchen table with Cas in their cabin in the morning, bright and relentlessly cheerful; the scars on her hands when she was flipping that knife on New Year’s Eve; in the Situation Room, defending the infiltrators who caused that first attack on Ichabod still carrying the memory of those four kids in isolation she gave mercy; climbing on top of Cas when he was seizing to keep him still so Vera could start the IV and talking herself hoarse like it never occurred to her he could rip her apart by accident, much less on purpose; playing bait and switch with Croats; and the bright smile when she detonated those cars.
He thinks of the way she looked when he ordered her to get up after she fell, when she tried to kick the postern door down, when she gave Andy mercy, when Kat attacked her; when she told him she was at the cabin and when she gave him the script for her own execution; when she sat in the fucking mess in a sea of isolation this morning and pretended to eat. Chitaqua toast, fucking dryer elf traps, terrifyingly vague plans of ambush practice in Chitaqua involving fucking nets (God, what are her and Cas planning?), and there is no line. If there was one and you cross it, you can cross back.
Crossing to the other sleeping bag, he sits down, and Alicia taps the notebook in her lap. “Is this verbatim?”
“Joe transcribed everything,” he answers. “Why?”
She frowns. “Micah didn’t tell you about me.”
Implied—or tried to—that she was involved, but he never stated it verbatim. “No.” Then, because he can’t stop himself, “Just think, if you’d kept your mouth shut, I wouldn’t have known at all.”
“That, yeah,” she answers distractedly. “But I mean anything. Other than that I’m his wife and a liar, probably because it’s reflex after this long.”
“And he thought I’d believe him.”
Something flickers across her face. “He’s a lawyer. He’s used to getting a jury to believe utter bullshit. I’m not saying you’re particularly credulous, but he’s a masher, you’re a potato, and potatoes are mashed, get what I mean?” She stops short, looking uncertain. “Also, all people are potatoes, I should have started with that. Some, Irish potatoes.”
“How often did you get high in college?”
“Dropped out after the first semester,” she answers promptly. “First time I got high, Cas told me I’d think thoughts and they’d be groovy. I did and they were.” She shakes her head, brown ponytail bobbing. “Anyway, it’s not just that; he didn’t even try to get you to ask any of the right questions so he could deploy bullshit in a plausible manner. Or in this case, the actual truth, which would be new for him, yeah, so maybe he was confused?”
“What were the right questions?” he asks. “Like how Erica knew your name was Stephanie. Sends her love, by the way.” It wasn’t rocket science to work out who Erica was referring to—Joe and Amanda both picked it up—but neither recognized the name, either. Which means Erica may be the only person Alicia told; that’s not just work-buddy friends shit, not at Chitaqua.
“Can’t say I miss her.” Her expression drifts between anger and regret, like something lost. “So it worked, huh?”
“What worked?”
“You didn’t know my name.” He shakes his head on cue. “Then Cas and Chuck didn’t find anything. I worked on that ID for a while, though Chitaqua’s background check wasn’t what I had in mind; never did get to road test it.” Dean starts to ask why, but she shakes her head. “You’ll know what to ask in a minute. First, Erica was Lisette Martin, only survivor of the Covenington Thanksgiving Day Massacre. Ring a bell?”
“Her entire family was killed by her boyfriend,” he says, nodding and filing away the name. “He was a Luciferite, yeah, I know.”
“I figured you knew,” she says. “After they found her, she was on a psychiatric hold for almost two months: catatonia followed by a psychotic break that included raving about Lucifer pretty much guarantees that.”
“And they let her go?”
“Not exactly,” she answers. “She killed two orderlies and seriously injured her psychiatrist when she escaped. Vanished after that—she wouldn’t talk about it, just that she was looking for that cult—then came to Chitaqua, and you know this part.” Kind of, yeah. “Dean, you can pretend here, but you had no idea what you were dealing with when it came to her. No one did.”
It dawns on him that Alicia may be trying to make him feel better about recruiting a psychopath. “I knew what she was.”
“You didn’t know shit,” she replies. “She lost her entire family, and I mean everyone: great-grandma and second cousin once removed to three-month-old niece. It was a family reunion, and they were close; three hours before he took them downstairs, she and Dave announced their engagement.” She hesitates. “And that they were having a baby.”
He wonders if he ever thought, even once, that anything—even tragedy—could be simple.
“When she woke up—about two weeks after they got her out of that basement—she had no one and nothing. And that’s also when she found out that she miscarried before they found her. Her first words after they told her were, ‘I’m still down there.’”
“She never left that basement.”
“I could be wrong, but Chitaqua—it was the closest she ever came to leaving it. With us, it was—her story might have been the worst—God, I hope—but at Chitaqua, we invented a brand new scale to deal, you know? You didn’t have to know what happened to someone to know; like knows like.”
He nods.
“Second month of training,” Alicia continues. “We accidentally ended up in the infirmary at the same time—never shall I ever forget to check my bootlaces before going anywhere, ever again—and got to know each other. We had a lot in common. More than I thought.”
Like knows like. “Her mass murdering boyfriend used to beat her up, too?” He doesn’t realize what he was going to say until the words are out of his mouth, but he doesn’t regret it, even as Alicia’s face drains of color. “Luciferite isn’t synonymous with good boyfriend behavior, just saying. I could see it.”
“Ironically,” she says slowly, “he was a perfect gentleman. It was the one before him. It wasn’t like that with me and Micah.” Then, unexpectedly, “I mean, it was, but there were rules, you know what I mean? With Micah, I mean. He had to have a very bad day, he had to have a drink, we had to be in private, I had to have done something—what could change, sure, but it was always something—we had to argue, he had to unexpectedly lose his temper… it wasn’t all the time, it wasn’t even most of the time, it was one percent, maybe two, three, five, ten at most. In between, he loved me and I loved him and everything would work out for the best if I just kept trying. Marriages take work, everyone knows that.”
“Do you even believe that bullshit?” he asks, wondering who told her that and if they’re dead yet. They’re probably alive and kicking; this world, at least, doesn’t even pretend there’s such a thing as justice.
“Sure. I mean, I had to have,” she answers reasonably. “What reasonable person stays with someone who hits them when they don’t remember to pick up that cheese that smells like socks that you can’t pronounce because its name has no vowels or say something weird to the senior partners? Hint: they don’t, no one does that. They gotta be getting something out of it, though, and that’s kind of all I got. You gotta know the statistics—okay, maybe you don’t, but I do. My therapist had a giant board and everything—and I’m saying…” She shakes her head. “My reasons were shitty. They usually are.”
Dean clenches his fists unseen in his lap and nods, letting it go. “You and Erica bonded over shitty SO’s, got it.”
“Got it,” she agrees. “And the kids I killed.” Her eyes focus on some point over his shoulder. “I was very drunk, though: never meant to tell her about that. You’d think I’d have learned by now, am I right?”
She’d done it before. “What happened?”
“Back then,” she says in an eerily calm voice, “Croatoan was still this scary story we traded on shift, you know? I was just an EMT and epidemic was just a word; I didn’t know shit.” She takes a breath. “A couple of weeks before, I was getting a check-up, and Leo caught me coming out—my supervisor,” she explains. “Wanted to warn me since I was on leave—they’d had a scare or something—and he told me what Code Green meant these days: Green for Do Not Pass Go and Get Out. Never did ask how he found out, but he told me to be careful, there’d been some weird shit. I blew it off, didn’t even think about it again until—until I heard it. Everyone started leaving. Everyone,” she says in a different voice, “but the patients.”
“Croat.” She nods, and it hits him. “It was a baby?”
“The first one,” she answers like a punch to the gut. “There were ten infected. Every baby delivered on the day shift, starting at 8:38 AM: the last was born at 3:10 PM.”
Last born there because about an hour later, the first manifested in the goddamn nursery: Christ. “How were they infected?”
“Erythromycin ointment contaminated with Croatoan,” she answers calmly. “When they’re first born, Apgar check at one and five minutes, height and weight, and erythromycin for their eyes. It’s an antibiotic to prevent blindness, in case the mother had gonorrhea or chlamydia, standard for vaginal delivery. She smiled when she did it—the nurse, I mean,” she adds in surprise. “She probably smiled at every mom there when she infected their babies, can you imagine that? Before they even got to hold them.”
It’s the sickest thing he’s ever heard. “On purpose.”
“Oh yeah,” she agrees, a ripple of something dangerous in her voice. “Andrea Simmons, happiest Luciferite I ever met; her second day on the job, came in bright and early for murder day. Pretty sure she was a Luciferite, I mean, no way to be sure, but spreading Croat was kind of their thing, you know what I mean? She was new at the hospital, they hadn’t even finished her background check. State hospital, short-staffed, limited funds, shitty goddamn pay, maybe the computer broke: what can you do? If they’d done their goddamn jobs before letting her anywhere near the maternity ward, they would have found out she didn’t exist; even the nursing license belonged to someone else, and it’d been revoked six months earlier for gross negligence.” She meets his eyes. “I didn’t know for sure, mind you, but I guessed that Green for Do Not Pass Go and Get Out didn’t end well for the patients.”
“Yeah.” This part, he never needed anyone to tell him, not knowing what happened on the border. He’s only surprised anyone was allowed out. “And you weren’t down with that.”
“I screamed fire as loud as I could and pulled the alarm at the nurse’s station in the maternity ward. It was an old hospital, and I figured they hadn’t gotten around to overriding that on all the doors, so everything unlocked. Cost-cutting, they were fans, and I knew this hospital to the ground, I worked there enough. I was right; I managed to grab a couple of the calmer people and tell them what happened and where everyone needed to go on my way.”
“No one tried to stop you?”
“Not many left: they did know how to run,” she answers, an edge of mockery in her voice. “Those nurses and doctors, they had orderlies when their patients got grumpy; I once wrestled a guy twice my size onto the ground and got him bandaged up while his wife—probably not entirely unjustifiably, our acquaintance was by necessity limited, but he was a total dick—shot at us both from the front porch of their house. Domestic violence and attempted homicide, more likely than you think: I got to see statistics in action every day.” She gets a strange expression on her face. “It was so quiet.”
Dean fights not to react. “Quiet?”
“The hospital. Weird, right? I could hear my footsteps all the way up the steps and down the hall, like there was an echo or something. It was like being in a horror movie, you know, the dumb person who has to go see what’s behind that door? I was that dumb person, but me, one, I knew what was behind the door, and two, I went prepared. I got into the drug cabinet—someone didn’t pay attention about closing those before abandoning their patients—and got everything that looked murdery. Croat’s hard to kill after it manifests, am I right?”
“Yeah,” he agrees hoarsely and hastily clears his throat. “Yeah, it is.”
“Fentanyl with a potassium chloride chaser, added a lethal dose of cyanide because why not?” she continues dreamily. “Brought that one with me, glad I did, for did I need it? I did. No mistakes: this time, had to get it right first try. Grabbed a box of syringes and some gloves, I was ready for just about anything. Moved them from in front of the door first—”
“Who?” he asks before he can stop himself and regrets it when the haze threatens to crack. The last time she told anyone this story, she was drunk, and like Cas getting high before talking to him about the cabin, he’s pretty sure there’s a reason for that.
“Five women: one was just a kid herself, maybe fifteen. They were still in their gowns, all rucked up—they just left them there, like it didn’t matter. I couldn’t just—I couldn’t leave them like that, you know?”
He nods and keeps his mouth firmly shut.
“There was blood everywhere, the coagulation—when you moved them, it made this sound… heard it a hundred times, but every time, brand new.” He nods again, tasting the acid-edge of breakfast (and maybe every meal he’s had this week) in the back of his throat. “When they heard the fire alarm, they went to save their babies. Of course they did, why didn’t I—I should have thought first, bad decision, see what I mean? I do that.”
Jesus Christ: they died right outside the nursery. “How’d they die?” he asks when the silence goes on a little too long; a glance at Alicia’s hands show them locked together in her lap, which makes him wonder if she realized he was watching them earlier when they talked.
“They were shot in the head.” She looks past him, and he wonders if she’s seeing that hospital now. “I got some sheets, covered them up—and I told them I’d take care of everything. And I did: I broke the padlock on the nursery doors with my trusty sledgehammer and went inside. You ever seen—no, I asked you that already, forgot. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he says soothingly, surreptitiously shifting to the edge of the sleeping bag.
“There was one nurse left—they locked her in, I guess. She was kind of in shock but seemed fine otherwise. Newborns don’t have teeth or much in the way of fingernails, you know, but gotta be a little unsettling when a newborn tries to kill you.”
“They were all…”
“Every one of them.” She wets her lips before continuing. “I told her to leave in a firm yet kind voice—or shouted, who knows, it’s been a while, but seriously, girlfriend needed to run far and away before they got back—and closed the door. Then I…” She licks her lips, meeting his eyes. “Five boys and four girls: one set of identical twins, two fraternal. I put on my gloves and took care of them. Their moms—they would have done it. They would have loved them enough to not make them live like that for a second longer than they had to. So I did it for them.” Her voice turns thready. “Then I went to look—I was missing a mom, you see. I knew she wouldn’t have left. She wasn’t hard to find.”
“Where was she?” he asks softly, though he’s pretty sure he already knows.
“On the floor at the end of the hall,” Alicia whispers. “She’d delivered at 2:45 PM, emergency Caesarean, not a big deal, but she’d lost a lot of blood. She—she ripped open the stitches trying to get to her kid, bled out right there on the floor. I took them all to the nursery, so—so they could be with their kids. Then I left.”
Dean shifts closer, less subtly.
“Obviously, I mean,” she continues tonelessly. “Infanticide is very much frowned upon by society, especially when Croat is just a story, epidemic is a word, I was just an EMT, and none of it actually happened. Still not sure of the events after this, kind of hazy, the infection, I didn’t really—anyway, somehow, I ended up in Chitaqua.”
Dean keeps his mouth closed and doesn’t say a goddamn thing.
Alison closes her eyes and nods. All at once, she drops the façade she’d taken on his arrival, and this time, Castiel can see not just the exhaustion and pain, but something far worse: the lack of hope.
“When this is over—” Castiel starts.
“It won’t ever be over.” Shoving herself to her feet, the chair crashes into the wall behind her. “This is my life, Cas!” He watches her run her hands through her hair, just missing a forgotten pencil and bringing the entire questionable remaining structure down around her shoulders. “I know what you said—I’m made to do this, I’ll adapt—but you said it yourself; it’s too much, too fast, and you don’t even know how much more I—”
“I do know.” She wets her lips, fighting hope and losing, and that makes it infinitely harder. “When you reach your full potential, you’ll be the most powerful psychic ever to walk the earth.”
For a moment, he wonders if she understood him. “What?”
“It’s not certain, but given how quickly you’re progressing…” He trails off, unable to meet the hazel eyes as they fill with dawning horror. “Manifestation in childhood is usually less than a tenth of a psychic’s full potential, though puberty is when the speed of progression increases exponentially. You, however—if you’d manifested at a hundredth of your potential in childhood, you wouldn’t have been sane; a child’s brain is far too malleable. It’s likely your latency was protective as well; only a fully adult mind could hope to cope with—”
“I’m not coping with it!” she shouts, hands fisted at her sides. “Cas, you’re not getting this; I can’t live like this! Not for the rest of my life! Saying it will be better when there’s less people just means until I progress again and I can start hearing the entire goddamn state! Then you’ll tell me about how I’ll get better at shielding. And then it jumps again and—Cas, I’m in an arms race with my own goddamn mind! I can’t do this! I don’t want to!”
Hands shaking, she grabs her chair, dragging it back and sitting down like falling into a hole that she hopes she won’t ever have to leave.
“When it was just Ichabod…” She blows out a breath. “It was a million times better after you showed me how to shield, yeah, but never good. It was work—every day, every night—to keep from hearing everything. I was always a little tired and always trying not to listen and always a little distracted, and since the last level up, it’s—” She cuts herself off, staring at the desk. “I know nothing is easy, Cas, I do, and everyone’s got a shit part of their lives, but the shit part is living my life. I don’t even know for sure how much of me is me anymore and how much is other people when I slip, and I slip all the time!”
He nods.
“Have you… have you ever been tired?” she asks, looking at him earnestly. “So tired that—that you didn’t care about anything?” He nods again. “Doing this—reading people’s minds all the time—you did it as an angel, I get it, and maybe it’s different then—”
“Very different,” he agrees. “Human minds are alien to us; they were open to us at all times, of course, but different. They could not intrude upon us; they were separate.”
She nods tiredly. “That sounds about right.”
“Privacy of the mind that humans enjoy is equally alien to an angel, however,” he continues. “From the moment of my Creation until I Fell, I had no concept of my thoughts belonging to me alone. I was but a foot soldier in the Host, and all of my Brothers were entitled to my mind, to read what I thought and examine all that I did at their leisure; I had no context for existence where that wasn’t a given.”
Alison nods slowly.
“For over two years on earth before I Fell, I was hunted by my Brothers, and I learned methods of hiding myself from them. They were still there, but between us was a barrier I created for Dean’s safety and my own; it was like—a wall, behind which existed a roar that never stopped. It was—in a sense—unnatural; I had no right to deny them what was theirs, to pretend to claim it as my own.”
She makes a face. “And when you Fell?”
“The silence was horrifying,” he answers honestly. “But worse was the absence. Even when I didn’t let them hear me, I could feel them there; now the space that was theirs was unoccupied. Imagine an enormous room, a room so vast you cannot see the walls. It was once filled entirely; now, it’s empty.”
“Oh God,” she whispers, reaching across the desk to touch his hand, fingers warm as they lace through his and squeeze. “I’m sorry.”
He squeezes her hand in return and pauses, startled to realize the warmth isn’t entirely physical; it’s reassurance, comfort, regret, support, woven together inexpertly but with transparent honesty. Looking at her, he spares a moment to wonder how someone who can’t help but try to ease pain even in the midst of her own would believe, for even a moment, that she would willingly become a monster. Or would ever choose to remain one if she did.
“I’m not.” He spoke truly when he told Dean that, but he didn’t realize at some point, even the memory of longing became only that: a memory. “Now, all that is within that room is my own; what I think, I feel, I decide—it’s mine alone, it’s me. The room is mine, and so is all within it. No one else has any right to it. It’s not empty; I fill it very well.”
Meeting her eyes, he shows her the empty room as it was then: a bare expanse of frozen white absence, vast beyond measure. He walked endlessly in search of its end and never found it; he might have walked forever there, but there was too much to do. He had to learn to understand this foreign thing, his not-quite human body: how to exist within it; to use it; to keep it living and healthy. He had to learn the sharp limits of corporeal existence, to navigate existence on a single plane, on a single world, in a single time. There was Dean always, first and only and all things he had ever known; there was the camp and those he must teach for him; there were people he must understand for him; there was a world he must save for him—and then there were those he must teach, because they needed him; people he must understand, because they were themselves; a world he couldn’t save, that was already over, and they were only marking time until the end.
Then it was over… but not quite. They weren’t done yet.
Without warning, more comes: patrol meetings in the morning, coffee with Alicia, sparring with Amanda and Mark, inspecting the cabins and later, the mess and imagining a better one (one with ranges and ovens that work), stringing lights and Dean stubbornly perched on that pole… Dean on the porch at their cabin while they shared an evening beer, at the kitchen table making him coffee for the first time, in their living room still worried about what Castiel did to himself that night Kansas City; sleep restless as the fever burned through him and relaxing at a touch; arguing with Vera and laughing with Joseph and teaching him how to win at poker; on their range shooting point-blank until his hand was too cramped to hold the gun and stalking Jeffrey and digging the foundation for the new mess in Chitaqua—the room should be full with all of that, he thinks uncertainly, pulling away. Yet it’s not.
“It’s never going to be full, Cas; it’s not a room.” Alison looks inexplicably satisfied. “No wonder you can’t see it anymore. I was wondering what you meant when you said that. Makes sense now, thanks.”
Castiel closes his hand around the fading warmth from her touch. “See what?”
“Infinity,” she answers in surprise. “Too much to do filling it up.”
He opens his mouth to correct her, but for some reason, the words refuse to form.
“Huh.” She extends her hand again, snapping her fingers impatiently. “Any time now.”
Reluctantly, he takes it, and she unfolds Ichabod before him as it is now. It’s almost blinding; clusters of lights like stars, bright enough to light the universe and to spare. Constellations sketched in human brilliance across an infinite sky; he almost envies her ability to see this.
“Anytime you want,” she promises, then her fingers tighten, and the focus narrows, like entering the heart of a star at the speed of light, as close and as familiar as his own skin…
He stills, staring at her across a desk and infinite space. “It’s not a room.”
“Know thyself,” she whispers, laughter in her voice as she pulls them back out, and he stares into the infinite brightness of that single light: his own. “Looks like you have too much to do to stare into infinity and contemplate amoebas these days.” Letting go, she sits back and smiles. “You didn’t know?”
He shakes his head, giving himself a moment to absorb the impossible (or rather, set it aside because that will very likely take time, perhaps years). “Thank you,” he says; it’s inadequate (much like water is slightly damp), but it will have to do for now.
“Anytime,” she answers, but her smile falters; ‘anytime’ could, if she has her way, be measured in days, perhaps hours. “Cas, look—”
“I understand,” he tells her. “To have my mind violated, to risk drowning beneath the thoughts of others, unable to find my own, to have them taken again—” He cuts himself off, startled by his own horror and forces himself to set that aside, too “I’m not sure I wouldn’t want to choose death.”
“You’d want to,” she says quietly. “But you wouldn’t do it.”
He considers that carefully. “No. I wouldn’t. Not if I had any other choice.”
“Because of Dean.”
“Yes, of course. But for myself as well,” he admits. “Dean is alive. To have him, so must I be.”
She looks away. “Teresa. That’s where this is going, right? You think I’m being selfish, not thinking about her—”
“That is what you heard?” he interrupts in exasperation. “I apologize; my intentions were to display empathy and understanding. I won’t make that mistake again.”
Alison starts to answer, then sighs. “Okay, sorry. I just—”
“You’re tired,” he says. “And you’re terrified. In your position, I would be as well. Now that we’ve established that, may I continue?”
“Sure,” she answers dully. “What were we talking about?”
“What is to be done,” he says. “Losing your abilities permanently, I assume, would be the ideal solution, am I correct?” She nods tiredly. “Which isn’t possible.”
She nods shortly.
“So best case scenario is out of the question,” he continues. “However, would you consider ‘good enough’ as an option? With the guarantee of improvement over time?”
Alison’s gaze sharpens. “What does that mean?”
“I’ve told you about my personal experience with psychics,” he says. “One I knew personally, Pamela; the other, Missouri, was a friend of Dean’s. They had much in common: both manifested in childhood, both were very powerful, but they had one other thing that they share with no other psychic in history. Except you.”
“What?”
“All of you,” he answers deliberately, “were born in the twentieth century. Specifically, after nineteen forty-six.”
He lets the silence stretch until she looks ready to talk again. “And then Micah showed up.” She nods. “How’d he find you?”
She laughs, jagged and painful. “Christ, Dean, wrong question. How the fuck did I ever believe, even for a minute, that he wouldn’t? Two weeks later, there is he, like my own private what the fuck. I really did think about telling him to fuck himself—my therapist was very adamant about rejecting any attempts at reconciliation—but problem: Stephanie was very much wanted for questioning in regard to murder.”
“He was going to turn you in?”
“Himself? No, he loved me,” she answers. “But he was really worried you might. After all, he wanted to believe me, but there was no proof. And that’s what he would tell you if you asked, he couldn’t lie. Probably without the ‘wanted to believe,’ or maybe, like, with an asterisk to express ‘totally don’t believe her,’ what do you think?”
That son of a bitch. “I would’ve believed you,” he says, and believes—because he’s got to—that the other Dean would have, too.
“Good to know,” she says with a flicker of irony. “But at the time, you might say I had trust issues. I couldn’t even get a restraining order; you don’t get those just because you’re clumsy and have no sense of balance and fall down the stairs when your husband had a bad day, was tired, was drinking, unexpectedly lost his temper, and I… not sure, but I did do something, what, who can tell? My parents didn’t understand why I’d lie about such a great guy from such a nice family, relationships have their ups and downs, and marriage is commitment you don’t just quit at the first little snag, grow up, and maybe if you’d just have a baby that would help—” She sucks in a breath, settling inside herself again. “Dad threw a plate, once, and Mom told me how he brought her flowers and it was fine: totally comparable, see what I mean? My friends…” She wrinkles her nose. “Didn’t have a lot of those. Most were married to other partners, and he was sleeping with at least two of them.”
He has no idea why that does it, but it does. “He was fucking your friends?”
Alicia blinks, face losing a little of that painful tightness. “Yeah, and Tiffy’s husband still voted him in as partner. Crazy, right?”
“Yeah,” he agrees helplessly. “Crazy.”
“You’re probably asking yourself, why I put up with it, didn’t just kick him to the curb—everyone does, even me, but like I said, bad reasons, they’re my thing—”
“I’m not.” Alicia’s mouth shuts mid-word, and he clears his throat again to get rid of the rasp; seriously, that shit’s gotta stop. “No one has the right to ask you that question.”
Her lips tighten. “You feel sorry for me, don’t you?”
“I’m not a demon or a sociopath,” he retorts. “So yeah, I do. But I’ll pretend I don’t, that work for you?” There’s something really satisfying about throwing insanely smart people off their game. Cas is getting better at hiding it, but Alicia obviously hasn’t had enough practice. “Well?”
“Sure,” she answers after a beat.
“Awesome, so let’s skip to the part where fuck knows what you’ll try to convince me happened,” he says before she gets back on script: she and Cas, they’re good at this. “Let me start. Erica was your team leader and your friend.” Somehow, he manages not to spit when he says ‘friend,’ which is a goddamn miracle. “I bet that made it hard for Micah to unexpectedly lose his temper when you weren’t around much to experience it. And when you were home, Erica’d stop by to hang out, just making him miserable; no wonder he didn’t like her.”
“It’s almost like you were there.”
Dean just stops himself from reacting. “As your team leader, she’d also know about any injuries you’d get on patrol or in training, so any others—she’d wonder about those, right? Probably told him just that and that she’d be checking, stop me if I’m wrong, though come on, we both know I’m not.”
“Yeah, she did.” Her mouth quirks reluctantly. “God, he hated her; picking me instead of him for her team, showing up all the time—”
“You weren’t invisible.”
“Yeah.” Alicia’s mouth trembles as she nods. “So—you know this part. When Erica asked me to—help—I said yes.”
“No you didn’t.”
Alicia’s expression flickers, there and gone. “I was there that night. Obviously, I said yes.”
“Not the first time. Okay, here’s the thing,” he says. “About two weeks before that night, you were injured on duty and surprise, out of everyone in Chitaqua, Erica replaces you with your asshole husband, who around the same time—maybe the same day, who knows?—Erica took to the Crossroads to make a deal. My question is, the first time she asked you, did she try and sweeten the deal by promising Micah would take the fall for Cas and Vera’s death? I never did work out how the hell she was going to explain what happened to them, but Micah as the fall guy, with a horrified girlfriend to confirm everything? I would have bought it.”
“No, she didn’t—” Alicia shuts her mouth, blue eyes focusing on him warily. “What are you doing?”
“Make a deal with you,” he says. “I’ll believe you—whatever you come up with to explain a craps-with-Cas-level series of coincidences—if you tell me why, even now, you’re protecting them?”
“I’m not!” she bursts out. “Why would I—”
“That’s what I want to know. Look at me,” he snaps when she looks away, waiting until she meets his eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me—”
“It was my choice,” she interrupts. “At the end of the day, it’s the person who pulled the trigger who made that decision, no one else.”
“No choice is made in a vacuum,” he counters. “Who put the gun in your hand, Alicia? Why did you pick it up in the first place? What would happen to you if you didn’t?”
“Nothing!” She shuts her eyes, shoulders slumping. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“What did she do to you when you said no?” he asks quietly. “Was it an accident? You were definitely injured, come on; I doubt Erica had the balls to lie to my face when it was something I could check for myself.”
She snorts softly. “Yeah, that would have been nice, someone—” She cuts herself off. “It was an accident.”
“The kind of accident that happens on patrol if you piss the team leaders off?”
“Those kind of accidents didn’t have survivors.” She makes a face. “I don’t remember it. The accident, I mean.”
“What do you remember?”
“It’d been raining most of the previous week,” she starts, voice changing, and he wonders how often she’s gone over this in her own mind before today. “Erica told us that a nest of vampires had been reported in the area—though gotta tell you, they could definitely do better than an assumed cave in the middle of the woods. It was muddy, the ground, and I may have—I must have stepped wrong. I woke up in the infirmary banged up with a concussion; Darryl told me that I went down a hill and hit every rock that existed. It—I could be clumsy—”
“Yeah, cheerleaders are known for that,” he agrees, and this time, she just looks at him. “I get it, it’s reflex. Make a deal with you: pretend that you know I’ll believe whatever you say from here on out and tell me what really happened.”
She tries to smile. “And you will…?”
“Believe you,” he answers, and her smile vanishes. “Whatever you say.”
She leans back against the wall, expression closed, and Dean waits, trying to be patient. If he could do it for her, he would, but this is as far as he can get on his own on guesswork.
“I don’t know if it was an accident,” she says abruptly. “In the weirdest of all possible worlds, it might—might have happened like they told me.”
Dean lets out a breath: okay. “You’re an EMT. Tell me your assessment of the patient.”
“Definitely went down a hill,” she answers, eyes distant. “She was unconscious before she went down; if she’d been conscious, she wouldn’t have been relaxed and the injuries would have been much worse. And it was weird, because there was one place that was just fine. You know what you do when you fall, first thing? It’s instinctive.”
He glances down at her hands. “Your hands. No scratches.”
“My right knuckles were a little swollen, though,” she says, her right hand flexing in her lap. “Later, I found out Felix had a black eye. Weird, am I right? Could happen.”
“How long did you tell yourself that?”
“I was going to ask Erica next time I saw her,” she answers. “But after Micah unexpectedly lost his temper three times in three days while I was stuck at home, being unfit for duty and everything, I got the impression she wasn’t interested in my questions before I changed my answer to hers.”
It dawns on him there might have been another reason that Micah went willingly to the Crossroads. “That’s how she got him,” he says softly. “He didn’t deal because there was a gun to his head. He dealt so she’d put down the one she’d been holding on him since she met you. He gets your place on her team, and you all to himself again, no questions asked ever again.”
“We were friends,” Alicia says slowly, but underneath the calm ripples something that makes the hair rise on the back of his neck. “She was my team leader. She hated Micah, she understood—she understood me, and she promised to help.” The blue eyes flicker to his, and he just stops himself from flinching at the raw anger, over two years old and still as fresh as it was two and a half years ago. “Then she set him on me like a goddamn attack dog when I said no.”
He’d guessed that much, but hearing it is a whole other story. “And Darryl—”
“Darryl confirmed I was medically unfit for duty, though for how long, who could say? Concussions are tricky things. Talk about foreshadowing in real life…”
“He knew, too.” Darryl, Erica, her entire goddamn team, the other team leaders, maybe some others involved: to the rest, she was invisible.
“Yeah.” She visibly braces herself. “So you’re probably wondering why I didn’t—”
“Tell someone?” he bursts out incredulously. “Jesus Christ, do I look that stupid? Who?”
Her eyes widen before all at once, she starts to laugh. Covering her mouth doesn’t seem to help and without thinking, he moves to sit beside her. As carefully as he can, he eases an arm around her shoulders, feeling her shake like she just might shatter as she slumps against him. He thinks it may be relief.
“I didn’t even believe it myself; new place, new time, and it was happening again,” she says finally, barely a whisper. “My best friend, my husband, and my fucking doctor couldn’t be lying, am I right? Darryl said—probably with a straight face, he was stoned a lot—that I should just stay home and let Micah watch over me.” She chokes back another laugh. “I wonder what was on that medical report. Never saw it, but maybe Micah just told him his skillsets and to extrapolate.”
“For two weeks,” he says out loud, just to hear it: two weeks in the middle of Chitaqua, she was being beaten by her husband, and no one knew but the people who made it happen. No visitors: to everyone else, she was invisible.
“Thirteen days.” She takes a shuddering breath. “No idea how long she planned to keep trying, but then Felix was injured—legitimately—Debra went out with them and got herself killed, and Vera went after you.”
“And Erica decided no more waiting.”
“She came to talk to me the night before. God,” she whispers, “the look on her face when she saw me—she felt guilty, you believe that? Probably not, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t seen it. She wasn’t a sociopath, Dean; she fucking wished. She felt terrible—not as bad as I felt, but I don’t think anyone could—and… And she told me this was my last chance and then she told me a story. About when she watched you interrogate a demon.” Over the roar in his ears, he hears Alicia say, “She was trying to scare me, I get that, but she didn’t need to try that hard; being in that room with her was all it took.” She tilts her head up to look at him. “You didn’t know what she was, Dean. I didn’t know, not until that night, listening to her describe torturing a demon like a how-to guide and realizing how much she was looking forward to doing it herself.”
“Yeah.” He never thought of that. In retrospect, he wonders how the fuck he could have missed it.
“Then she told me that someone had to take the fall for Cas and Vera—that’s when I found out she was a target, too—and it was gonna be me and Micah or just Micah, my choice. So you were right about that, good call. How you’d react when you found Cas’s body was up in the air, of course, but she didn’t think I’d rate higher than a demon. Especially with that history of baby killing; she showed me the warrant for my arrest and the police report, Micah’s statement, the coroners’ report,” her voice breaks on a gasp, and he tightens his arm. “All the details,” she whispers. “I didn’t even remember most of it, isn’t that weird? Wonder what that cost Chitaqua: border guards aren’t cheap.” She looks away. “I said yes. Obviously. Talk about an offer you can’t refuse: I don’t die horribly and just as importantly right then, Micah definitely would.”
He nods, numb. “Can’t blame you.”
“Dean, I—” She pulls away enough to face him, and to his horror, she looks guilty. “I didn’t believe that you’d—I didn’t, Dean, you gotta believe that. I just—it was a bad time. I’m sor—”
“You were tired and you were scared,” he interrupts; if he hears her apologize for believing a fundamental truth about Dean Winchester, he isn’t sure what will happen. “Then you were terrified and there was no way out. Micah spent two weeks unexpectedly losing his temper with you. Cas was gonna die either way, and you…” He clears his throat. “You didn’t want to be tortured to death. I get it.”
“I wasn’t into the ‘bullet to the head’ thing, either, but Erica, see ‘overkill’,” she says. “She begged me to say yes.” She presses her lips together, shaking her head. “There were other things I could have tried. I could have killed myself, and I did think about it—”
“Jesus, Alicia.”
“—but I still chose to do it.” She looks up at him. “I had two weeks, Dean; I should have gone to someone—you, if I had to, and even if you didn’t believe me, at least I’d have tried. I should have said no and spit in her face—but I didn’t. I knew it was wrong—like, in the ‘nothing can make this okay’ way, but… I didn’t care. I just wanted it to stop. I picked up my gun, went where I was told, and—when it was over, I realized I was wrong; I did care. Just too late for it to matter. Three days later, Erica showed up because I was late for local patrol, like nothing happened. And I realized I was wrong about that, too; it wasn’t over, and it never would be. I still had to live with it.
“You wanted reasons, but that doesn’t make them good ones. You pick up the gun, you take aim, and you fire: I said yes three times. No one held a gun to my head to do it.”
The thing is, another life, he would have bought that; now, he knows just how many kinds of guns there are, and that the worst shots are the ones you survive.
Warnings: description of events surrounding the death of kids under the age of three due to Croatoan. It's in the first section after discussion of Carol's condition and referred to explicitly in the second section.