#i also stand by my 8th grade decision of loving meg masters

[rootsmachine]

like atonement for a bygone sin

like atonement for a bygone sin meg x cas, 2777 words, idk what ratings are [ao3]

You only meet Castiel once before they throw you into a ring of holy fire. It’s eighty-six years after your first return topside, and you’re in a besieged city, somewhere in what would eventually be Iran. It’s an easy place to take souls, Azazel tells you. Desperate people will agree to anything. He looks at you, and grins in a way that reaches only his mouth.

“You did, after all,” and scratches his fingernails down your cheek.

The angels come to the city after two months of siege, with flaming swords, and an insistence on justice, but you know it’s because their champion is the disgraced leader of the city. Azazel had said so, something about him being a true vessel for one of the archangels, before warning you to stay away.

“Not our fight, daughter,” and his words echo in your head as you watch Castiel plunge their sword into the heart of one of the demons who tortured you before you clawed out of your cage and picked up a knife. Castiel is wearing the body of a young woman, her hair cropped short against her head. You won’t have to take bodies for another hundred years -- humans have a harder time believing in the holiness of angels when they reveal their true forms, but your shape just feeds into the whole fear thing.

You manage to escape through a hole in the angel’s defense, and crawl, half burned, back to Hell. Azazel gives you a pretty, curved knife and lets you practice on some poor, begging thing that used to be human. You close your eyes, and can only see Castiel, her blade shining in the sunlight.

/

Azazel came to you in a dream, when you were still just a girl. You were still just a girl, really, when you gave over your soul in exchange for your deepest wish, to shed the body that would condemn you to being a wife and a mother. The ten years you spend as Luke are exhilarating and wonderful and you try to escape death through boarding a ship back to the old country. It doesn’t work -- the hellhounds tear you apart somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, and the body you lived in for a decade is torn to shreds to reveal the girl at the center.

You’re furious when you arrive in hell, too furious for the torture to do anything except make you angrier. You like it when they rip her apart, break her down to bones and blood and muscles and nothing anyone could ever recognize as belonging to you. Azazel watches with the closest you’ve seen to true happiness in his eyes, and he takes you down himself.

“My daughter,” he says, as he snaps your bones back together, “I have wonderful plans for you.”

/

In retrospect, you should have stayed in Hell with your knife, carving up people stupid enough, or desperate enough to sell themselves away, and then doubly stupid to not become … whatever you are.

If you had, you wouldn’t have met the Winchesters, and you wouldn’t have been failed by Azazel and then Lucifer, and you wouldn’t have slowly felt the anger that tethered you to whatever existence you kept begin to fade away.

You lie to them, and tell them it happened when Castiel kissed you inside Crowley’s prison, that something of their grace or their holiness made you itch inside and question all your loyalties, but really -- you’re not loyal to anyone but yourself, and whatever keeps your stolen body breathing for another day.

You don’t know her name, and you don’t care to. She was almost dead in an alley when you found her, and she lets you in, makes you promise you’ll kill whoever did this to her. She dies before you can, but you finish the job anyways.

You tell Castiel, much later, that you lose your grip on your fury when you kill the man who did this to the body that’s only yours now. You’ve never been good at reading emotions beyond pleasure and fear, but you think Castiel looks at you with something completely foreign to both.

/

It’s almost funny -- you let yourself die for the Winchesters, and for saving the world, and mostly for Castiel. In your almost four hundred years of existence, nothing hurts as much as the angel blade in your stomach. It burns, burns whatever essence of yourself you have away until it’s just your poor dead girl’s empty body and then it’s just blackness, and you are finally dead or gone or just absolutely nothing.

/

Until you wake up, in a body that should be too broken to move. But it’s not, and you curl your fingers, push yourself up until you’re slumped against the wall of the warehouse you thought you would rot in. Usually, the bodies you take feel too tight, too small, like you’re wearing someone else’s clothing, but her body fits, feels like your own bodies did so many, many years ago.

You start walking. Her body is stiff, and her joints crack and she’s hungry, you slowly realize with horror. You haven’t been hungry since the days before the hellhounds tore you to pieces, haven’t felt the way a body aches since you were human. Crowley’s warehouse is what feels like miles from the nearest town, and her body can barely make it.

Your body, you suppose, and you punch a sign by the side of the road as hard as you can, over and over and over until your skin bleeds and there is nothing you can do about it.

The last place you remember is the awful cabin the Winchesters lived in, and you hitchhike all the way to Sioux Falls, ignoring the body’s exhaustion and hunger until you can’t anymore.

The cabin is abandoned when you get there, which of course it is. There’s nothing that even tells you that Sam or Dean or Castiel have been here in the last few months. You suddenly realize you have no idea how long you’ve been gone, and if any of them are even still alive. You don’t trust the Winchesters to stay dead, the fucking cockroaches that they are, but maybe, finally it’s stuck.

There’s an old burner phone abandoned in a mostly empty kitchen drawer, and you charge it, hoping it will give you some kind of answer. All it tells you, as the screen feebly blinks on, is that you’ve been gone for only two months and four days, and that this phone was part of what appears to be an FBI scam. There’s only two contacts in it, an Agent Ragsdale and Special Agent Ehart, and you dial Agent Ragsdale, hoping someone will pick up and tell you what the fuck happened.

You’re sure the Winchesters are behind this, behind your imprisonment in this dead girl’s body, maybe to trap you or get more information about Hell out of you, or maybe just to bring you back and kill you again.

No one picks up, and you hear Sam’s voice on the other end, explaining you’ve reached Agent Ragsdale and to please leave a message after the tone. The inbox is full, and you throw the phone across the room.

All there is in the cabin is a six pack of beer and a half-finished bottle of whiskey. As a demon, you could drink even Castiel under the table, but this stupid body must have been a Mormon or a complete loser, because you’re drunk on the whiskey alone. Everything is spinning, and you hate whoever brought you back, whoever forced you into this weak, nothing body, whoever made it so you dedicated your whole self to a mission, only to make your sacrifice worthless.

Drunk, you get on your knees, and curse the Winchesters, and beg for someone, anyone, to tell you what the fuck is happening. You pass out there, on the floor, and would be humiliated in the morning, except no one comes. No one, it seems, is listening.

/

Seven days after you rise from the not-quite-dead, someone knocks on the door. No one you know knocks, so you almost don’t open the door, sure it’s some rural Jehovah’s Witness-type trying to get you to accept God into your heart.

They knock again, and then, “Meg?”

The voice is familiar in the way that this body has become -- like something that is yours.

You open the door; Castiel is standing outside, looking like he was in some kind of car accident, covered in blood.

“I heard your prayer,” he says, and you can only stare. “May I enter?”

“I didn’t pray for you,” you say, and let him in anyways. “I didn’t even pray.”

Castiel looks at you through the blue eyes of his vessel, and just shrugs. “I heard you, Meg,” and he opens the mostly-empty freezer to take out your last microwave dinner. “May I have this?”

“I didn’t think angels had to eat,” you say instead of answering. Castiel looks sad in a way you hate, and puts the whole tray of lasagna in the microwave, watches it spin around like it’s the only thing left to live for.

“They don’t, I’m not … ” he trails off, takes out your lasagna and sticks the fork into the half frozen pasta, chews, and swallows. He glances around the room, frowning slightly when he sees the still-somehow-intact devil’s trap on the floor inside the door. “Did you break in?”

You laugh, and walk towards the devil’s trap, walk through it a couple times. “Doesn’t work anymore, Clarence,” and he frowns more when you call him that.

“What did those cockroaches do? I was dead and suddenly I’m not , but I’m not me anymore. I’m whoever she was,” and you pinch at your body’s cheek. “She’s hungry all the time, and if she doesn’t sleep everything hurts, and the other day I had half a bottle of whiskey and she threw up. I swear to God, when I get my hands on them, I’m going to …”

“They sealed Hell,” Castiel says, “and I … I destroyed Heaven.” He looks at you with his stupid, sad eyes, and says “I destroyed paradise.”

“Castiel, honey,” you say, and he glares at you. “You’re making a habit out of that, aren’t you?”

/

He doesn’t speak to you for a few days, but he also doesn’t leave. He eats all of your food, and then finishes what Sam and Dean had left before they abandoned the cabin, which is mostly beef jerky and a jar of marshmallow fluff that your body hates. You mostly drink, and smoke a pack of cigarettes you find in the bottom of a suitcase. This kind of stuff can probably kill you now, you realize, but you don’t really care enough to stop.

You wonder, sometimes, if Castiel remembers the conversation you had as he sewed you together, the first hands you had felt in what seemed like millenia at that point that weren’t trying to kill you. He was gentle in a way you knew you didn’t deserve.

He doesn’t mention it, not once, and neither do you. You flirt shamelessly with Castiel, mostly because it’s amusing to watch him struggle to respond, but partly because you miss the way everything used to be simpler. You knew how to talk, and who to follow, and exactly which buttons to push, and watching Castiel blush and try to reply in his stupid Old Testement speech to whatever innuendo you’ve offered him this time makes you feel a little like who you used to be.

/

You know Castiel is in touch with the Winchesters, know that they call him sometimes to make sure he isn’t dead yet. He doesn’t tell them you’re with him, that he’s learned how to cook food you don’t hate, and that last week you woke up in the middle of the night and he was there next to you, his brown knit with worry even in his sleep.

Which is why, you suppose, when they finally show up at the cabin, Dean has a knife at your throat before you can react in your stupid, slow body.

“I thought we finally killed you,” he spits, and digs the knife into the soft skin under your jawbone, drawing a thin line of blood to the surface. Castiel watches you like he’s watching a particularly interesting soap opera, slowly eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you had made him.

“Call off your guard dog, Clarence,” you manage to get out, and you can feel Dean loosen his grip on your wrist. Castiel finishes his sandwich, and puts the plate in the sink, before turning to Dean and saying, “You can let her go, Dean,” his voice as calm and even as ever.

He stupidly looks between you and Cas, and reluctantly lets you go. The place where he cuts you hurts, and you press your fingers to it. You stomp to the kitchen, and grab a dish towel, holding it against your neck. You make sure to walk right through the devil’s trap, and Sam looks at you hard, like he doesn’t know what you are anymore.

“What are you doing with her?” Dean says to Castiel, who has taken the dish towel from your hands, and silently handed you a band-aid from the ancient first aid kit you had found in the bathroom, used to angrily patch Castiel up when he cut his own skin open to test if he was really human.

He shrugs, and says, “I don’t mind her company,” which is probably the nicest thing he’s ever said to you.

Dean turns to you, and you can tell he’s angry. “What about the girl whose body you’re wearing? What does she think about your little arrangement?”

“She’s dead,” you say shortly, “It’s just me in here.”

Dean opens his mouth to protest, and you cut him off, throwing a dish towel in his face. If you were still yourself, he would be gasping in pain, pinned up against the wall by now. Your fingers twitch just thinking about it.

“She’s been dead since I took the body,” Dean looks at Castiel, and then at Sam, both of whom nod at him.

“Ruby did that,” Sam says quietly, like he’s trying to remind Dean that maybe you might not be lying. He looks bad, you realize, like he’s two days away from dropping dead. Castiel told you how he closed Hell, how he almost tore himself apart doing it. It’s probably Sam who brought you back, Cas said, and you’re sure it was an accident. You’re not sure how he didn’t die -- everything you ever knew about the rituals of closing Hell ensured the final sacrifice would be whoever decided to undergo the trials.

It’s unnerving to have him sitting on your couch, drinking a cup of coffee Castiel made him in the mug you use every morning. You always preferred his silent self-hatred to his brother’s self-righteousness, and you know what it feels like to be Sam Winchester, or at least you knew what it was like to be him once.

/

Three days after the Winchesters leave, you drive to Sioux Falls with Castiel. Sam had slipped you the name of a tattoo artist, and you realized with fury that some other demon could take over your body now, or Castiel’s body. It’s not the body you would have chosen forever, but you feel protective over this girl in a way that makes you feel sick. You’ve made her do enough for a lifetime, and you have no desire to share her too-small frame with anyone else.

You get the stupid tattoo on your wrist, and it doesn’t hurt at all.

/

Castiel sleeps in your bed now. You barely sleep, mostly just sit in the open window and smoke. He hates it when you smoke, something about this being your last body ever, so you don’t do it in front of him, not anymore.

It had taken him three months to kiss you, and he doesn’t taste like grace anymore. You told him that, and he looked so heartbroken you kissed him again, pushed him to the bed, and tried to show him how much you didn’t care.

You’ve never been good at emotion, or at feeling things, even your first time around as a human, but the way Castiel looks up at you, you know he knows.

/

He tells you he loves you, like he loves all of God’s creations, and you tell him you would love him if you could.

Somehow, it works.

#meg masters #meg x cas #supernatural #castiel #now that ive admitted to the supernatural thing #i'm posting this here bc it bothers me when i dont have a backup of my fic online somewhere #anyways Yes i wrote supernatural fic and yes i probably deserve to like burn at the stake for this #but i dont care im loving this thriving enjoying life for the first time in months #i also stand by my 8th grade decision of loving meg masters #turns out i love her AND im gay AnD shes hot #turns out we can have All Three #cw: supernatural #keeping my supernatural tag for this blog as cw: supernatural bc that is insanely funny to me #fic*