Chapter Text
The bunker is intimidating.
Now, don’t get Dean wrong, he’s ecstatic——maybe more than ecstatic——to be here, to have a place that he might be able to dust off and make into a home, but it is an indisputable fact that the building is… it’s a lot. Dean has no idea how many floors are hiding underground, yet to be discovered within the labyrinth of sprawling rooms, staircases, and ladders, but he can’t imagine it’s a small number. From what little he knows, the Men Of Letters didn’t do anything by halves, and that includes constructing their secret, badass, underground bunkers. They haven’t stumbled across blueprints for the place yet, but there’s no doubt in Dean’s mind that they’d look like a maze of epic proportions.
So, yeah. Intimidating. And, as of now, Dean has decided to explore one of the lower levels. He hasn’t had any new cases pop up on his radar, and if he’s being perfectly honest, the bunker is something of a case of it’s own, considering the number of possibly cursed objects Sam has told Dean not to touch at this point (137).
Today, he fully intends on finding more.
That thought in mind, Dean finishes climbing down the ladder, and hops the last foot or so to the floor before pulling his flashlight out of his back pocket and clicking it on. Cold light hits the wall in front of him, and Dean squints at it. The wall is dusty, thick with slumped over spider webs, and comprised of thick slabs of concrete, rooted mere feet from Dean. It stretches in both directions for as far as Dean can see, and includes divots and sunken doorways that Dean knows lead to storage rooms.
He looks both directions, straining to see into the darkness, and decides to go left on a whim. Dust hangs in the air, and the whole floor feels like some kind of a time capsule. Dean’s shoes tap on the floor as he continues on, and he sweeps the flashlight across his field of vision. Originally he had thought he’d look through every room, but now he’s more curious as to just how long this hallway is, because he still doesn’t see an end.
But then Dean isn’t moving at all, because his head is pounding, his ears are ringing, and a sudden pressure inside of his skull is thudding like a thunderclap. He falls to his knees and clutches his hand over his ears, which he swears must be bleeding from the amount of pain he’s in. They still feel dry, but fuck they hurt like his eardrums have been burst twice over. A weak, pained sound rips it’s way from Dean, and then he’s on his side, flashlight gone from his hand, and his vision is swimming, fading, sinking to nothing.
***
Dean isn’t sure how long he’s unconscious, but he’s definitely not comfortable when he wakes up. His neck pops when he lifts his head, and he quickly pushes himself to his knees. He grabs his flashlight as he stands, and squints into the darkness again, trying to discern where the sound had come from.
What the hell happened?
Being in Hell had saddled Dean with some nasty side effects——Sam’s messy job of pulling him out hadn’t helped matters——but he’s learned to ignore or at least manage them over the years. Headaches, flashbacks, and phantom-wing syndrome from his near-stint as a demon are all things that Dean has dealt with before. This is something new though, and Dean can’t say he likes it.
Dean backs himself up against the wall, leans against it, and tips his head back with a sigh. It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as it did when he had just woken up, but it’s still pounding something fierce, and the ringing sound in his ears hasn’t entirely disappeared.
“Dean?”
Sam?
Last Dean had checked, Sam had been going into town with Emma for some supplies——groceries, along with some notebooks and pencils because Emma is going to school this fall——and hadn’t expected to be back for a few hours. Certainly Dean hasn’t been unconscious for that long.
He clears his throat, and calls out Sam’s name in return with the hope that his voice will carry up a few floors, or to wherever Sam is. With luck, either he or Emma will hear him, and Dean can get whatever the fuck just happened sorted and packed away sooner rather than later.
“Sam?”
For a moment, Dean hears nothing but the quiet creaking of the bunker, and the echo of his brother’s name. Then it is totally silent again, almost eerily so. Dean leans forward, over, and rests his forearms on his thighs. Grime from falling is on his palms and clothes, and he wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a spiderweb or three in his hair. This floor is going to need a deep-clean at the least, and that’s just to remove the first layer of dust.
”Dean? Three Sams call in unison, a sound that comes from Dean’s left.
That nearly makes Dean jump out of his skin, and he spins towards the sound, just to see nothing.
Cold dread curls in Dean’s chest, and he can feel himself tense up as he realizes there is something else in here with him. Something that is definitely not Sam.
Something potentially dangerous.
“What are you?” Dean barks as he grabs the pocketknife clipped to his belt.
“Sam?”
And that’s when Dean remembers just how weird it is to have your voice echoed back at you. Whatever is doing this is a master of vocal mimicry, and it’s next shout is enough to make Dean’s skin crawl, and send another vicious slice of pain through his skull.
“Dean, help!”
It sounds just like Sam, and that activates some kind of protective instinct inside of Dean that has him desperate to run in the direction of the noise, in the direction of danger. He shouldn’t, but he can’t exactly leave this uninvestigated, can he?
“Dean?”
Another spike of pain hits Dean as the creature calls out to him again, this time as Emma, but he manages to shrug it off, and takes a step in the direction of whatever is trying to summon him.
This is so very, colossally stupid. Dean knows it is, but he’s walking right into the fire anyway, and isn’t that just like him? Besides, he can’t exactly just climb up to the main floor and wait for Sam and Emma to get back from running errands when he knows that there’s something——a potentially dangerous something——down here.
“Coming,” Dean says, trying to sound nonchalant as he continues forward. He peaks into every door he comes across, just in case the monster so happens to be in that room.
Suddenly, a horrific, multi-layered scream echoes through Dean’s head, and he stumbles into the wall. He takes a moment to breathe as the sound tapers off, and bites back a groan of pain as the pain in his skull pulses in time with his heartbeat, migraine level. Dean lifts his hand, which is shaking slightly from the pain he is in, and tries to weakly massage one of his temples, like that will solve the problem at hand. It doesn’t help much, but it’s something, so Dean keeps at is as he pushes off of the wall and stumbles towards the next Sam-sounding, scared cry of “Dean!”
Not-Sam sounds really scared, and it hurts Dean’s chest to hear something that sounds just like his brother existing in such seeming fear, and possibly pain. Whatever it is, this monster knew exactly how to draw Dean right to it. It’s a crafty bastard, and probably has pretty good hearing if it had managed to learn both Sam and Dean’s names and mimic their voices, as well as Emma’s, perfectly.
The only thing Dean can think of that it might be is a shapeshifter, but that still doesn’t explain the random swap in voices from Sam to Dean’s own baritone, and then back, only to switch to Emma and back to Dean less than a minute later. No way should a shifter be able to switch that quickly, and there’s no reason it should want to. From what Dean has heard, shifting can be painful, depending on the shifter, and it almost always takes a lot of energy to completely change your appearance.
But that doesn’t explain the inhuman screaming, or why Dean’s head starts shrieking with pain every time the monster speaks.
It could all just be a coincidence. After all, it’s not like Dean is a stranger to headaches, be it from sleep deprivation, impact, or random chance. He probably just hit his head when he fell, that’s all.
Then comes another sound, something that sounds like the beginnings of Dean’s name, but the word starts to fuzz out halfway through pronunciation, like a radio station with bad signal.
There.
The sound is coming from Dean’s right now, from a slightly ajar, dusty door. He pushes it open without a second thought, and finds himself face to gagged face with the monster that has been calling out to him.
It’s… it’s an angel.
No such thing, Dean’s mind tells him, but he brushes the thought away, because he’s never seen a monster like this, and can’t imagine classifying it as anything other than angelic. Angels are nothing more than urban legends, even among the hunting community, but Dean still can’t help hoping that this is what he (irrationally) thinks it is.
But why shouldn’t it be an angel? Dean has fought gods, slain knights of Hell, his own daughter is an Amazon, angels existing shouldn’t be the stretch that Dean’s mind makes it out to be.
The angel——because that’s what it is, Dean is nearly sure of it——is bound in rune-ridden ropes at its joints, mouth taped over, wings bound against its back, crammed painfully into a cage. The area around the cage is littered with dusty oil-spill feathers, and the thing is looking right at Dean with piercing blue eyes that practically glow in the darkened room. Dean’s ears ring as it starts to say——project——communicate——something, and he clutches at his ears and stumbles back, overwhelmed with the pain that suddenly assaults him when the angel speaks again. It gets halfway through Dean’s name before the sound comes apart and dissolves into shrieking.
He yells at it to stop, or thinks he does, nothing is reaching his ears but that horrible, high pitched ringing.
Then, suddenly, everything is eerily quiet, and Dean wonders if he’s been struck deaf. The angel is still looking at him, and now Dean can see what looks like tears of blood welling up in its eyes. Dean has heard the term weeping angel before, but this sure as shit isn’t Doctor Who. This is real life, and Dean has a crying angel tied up in his basement.
Cautiously, Dean starts to approach it. He moves slowly, in an attempt not to startle the angel, and keeps one of his hands in a tight fist. Not like punching the angel would probably do much damage, not like it seems like the angel is going to attack him. Still, better safe than sorry. He just needs to remove the tape, hope that he can make the angel talk, and decide what to do from there. Whatever happens, he does need to find out how the damn thing got itself tied up down here.
The angel doesn’t attack as Dean moves closer, doesn’t react in any kind of hostile way. Instead, when Dean reaches out with the intent of removing the tape, it flinches and shuts its eyes against what it assumes to be imminent pain. Twin trails of blood track their way down its face, and it curls into itself, something Dean didn’t know it could do, considering how tightly it is already packed into the cage. Its wings quiver in fear, and a couple blue-dusted feathers fall out and drift to the floor like falling hope.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Dean assures, though the irritated tone his voice has taken on suggests otherwise. He has no intent of hurting the angel, not unless it tries to hurt him, but his ears are ringing so badly that it’s hard to keep his tone neutral. Once again, Dean reaches forward, and this time the angel doesn’t flinch back, it just looks at Dean with wide, terrified eyes. “I just want to talk.”
With that, Dean gathers his courage, and touches the angel. It takes a few seconds for him to pry up the edge of the tape, and when he finally does, the resulting sting from being partially untaped causes the angel to flinch again, and Dean barely avoids losing his grip on the tape.
It’s not duct tape, that’s for sure. It’s strong and dark, and when Dean squints at he can see runes imprinted on the material. It’s not cuneiform, not anything Dean recognizes, but he assumes that it is powerful. It has to be, if it has succeeded in holding the angel’s voice for so long. And maybe this is a particularly weak angel, maybe this is just tape, but Dean still takes a bit of pride in being able to pull it off of the angel so easily.
He sticks the tape——still slightly gluey from residue——to a bar on one of the ends of the cage, steps back once, and returns to watching the angel, is staring at Dean with wonder. It blinks, and more blood tracks down its face in clean, almost elegant lines. Dean thinks that, if the angel wasn’t so weak, if it didn’t evoke some odd sympathy from him, that he would think the blood tears as an almost pretty thing.
Instead, he’s just slightly concerned, and apprehensive as to what the angel may or may not do now that it has access to its voice. One way or another, Dean needs to make it talk, but that doesn’t stop him from being a little wary.
The angel licks its lips, pulls a face when is tastes the sticky residue left around its mouth. Its left wing twitches, which makes it flinch, but it remains silent and watches Dean warily, like it is afraid it has done something wrong.
Well, it kind of did, what with almost blowing out Dean’s eardrums, but——given that it stopped, and the remorseful look in its bloody-blue eyes——Dean isn’t so sure that was on purpose. After all, as far as Dean knows, it has been decades since the angel has interacted with anything living, let alone a human.
It’s probably just scared, like Emma had been, but they’d gotten past that. (Barely, but Sam and Emma had reached a truce, and haven’t tried to kill each other since. That Dean knows of, anyway.) The angel is just another scared monster, something that doesn’t know what wants to hurt it, or what it’s supposed to hurt in order to protect itself. Dean can understand that, after all, he’d been a little twitchy, a little too much on the defensive, after his century-long stint in Hell.
“D’you have a name?” Dean asks. He tries to sound casual, but doesn’t relax. He still has no idea what this thing is capable of, and hopes that he doesn’t need to find out.
The angel opens its mouth, forms a word, but nothing comes out. It frowns, tries again, and a low, horse csht sound comes out, which just results in a dejected look crossing its face.
For a being of supposedly unimaginable, biblical power, it seems awfully weak right now.
“Castiel,” it whispers. Its voice is deep and rough, like gravel, but not unpleasant in the slightest. Fear still lingers in its eyes, and it shifts as well as it can in the cage, in an attempt to make itself look smaller. It cranes its head to keep its eyes on Dean, and that’s when Dean notices small, dotted scars along its neck, paired with a clean slash over its throat. The Men of Letters, or whoever had been here before Dean, had obviously been hurting Castiel. Using it. From the looks of things, they’d put Castiel up on a rack, wrung out its power, and then locked it away for forgotten about it.
“My——“ Castiel starts, then breaks off to cough, which sounds weak and tired. “My grace still hasn’t returned, but you can have my feathers.” It looks at Dean nervously, with an attitude that screams for approval and kindness, or even indifference. Anything but cruelty and rejection.
Dean can work with that.
“Hey, Cas,” he says, keeping his voice even and hoping that he doesn’t startle the angel. “It looks pretty cramped in there. What do you say I get you out?”
The light in Castiel’s eyes and the small, hesitant smile that crosses the angel’s face says everything.
As he sets to work on figuring out how to free Castiel, Dean hopes that he doesn’t live to regret this.