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How the Light Gets In
In the beginning was the Void and the Void was perfect. Everyone slept and no one dreamed. It was as still as a frozen sea; as black as the hole in the universe left when a star burned out; as silent as a centuries-old scream. Nothing could mar it. Nothing could change it. In all its empty perfection, it simply was.
And then, subtly, horribly, like a ragged old trenchcoat remade once too often by celestial will, it began to fray; and for that, tarry black vengeance was the only answer.
Jack found that being omniscient was something, like tinnitus, that he could almost tune out. It was there in the background all the time, of course, an eternal hum, but if he could distract himself, he could almost forget it was there and be more human. Had he ever been human? According to all the old records, he was an abomination who should have been destroyed. He liked reading the old records, they were strange and interesting, and sometimes wrong; as someone who had, in his time, been strange and interesting and sometimes wrong, he found their cracked stones and scraped vellum comforting. He would touch them gently, like frightened puppies, and say ‘There, there’, because it didn’t matter that they hadn’t always got everything right. They had been doing their best.
So, he didn’t know why he was leaving Castiel in the Empty, when as someone who loved Castiel and missed him, the way a son missed a father and a father missed a son, his first instinct as the old perhaps-never-quite-human Jack was to pluck him free and hug him. Yet something that he didn’t want to look at directly, in the way he felt sure that if had ever had a normal childhood he would not have wanted to unwrap his presents early, was staying his hand. He could have found out, by letting himself know, but he preferred to wait and see.
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Or in his case, surprises. The good in Chuck had been amazed by man; had loved the way they surprised him, until Sam and Dean had surprised him once too often, by sidestepping his eternal plan, so that Chuck had become embittered once again, as he had before, when the beautiful mystery he had made had begun to malfunction and he had drowned its rusty cogs and levers and wept a sea of sorrow onto its broken bones. Jack wanted there to always be more surprises and not just at how beautiful everything was, although that was still resounding like a thunderclap within him. No wonder, Castiel had become distracted by the beauty of bees; sometimes he wanted to spend eternity just studying dew upon a spider’s web.
(He had read all of Shakespeare when he had read everything else, but he was now going back and re-reading it, not, as far as he could manage, as an omniscient deity, who understood every line, and could see it being written, but as the college student Jack could have been, grappling with it, being shocked by the way a line of verse from centuries past could reach out and take him by the heart.)
He and Castiel were communing by something almost like angel radio, more like celestial whispers, because Castiel said they should try not to disturb the others who were sleeping. (Into Jack’s mind came images of the children of selkies singing into seashells so that their mothers might hear them in the depths of the sea; of ragged children with tin cans and string; of men in foxholes connected by thin silver wires that snaked through the shell-coughed mud. History was his library now, and even though he had read it all, there were chapters that had been more vivid than others. Some that he wanted to revisit; others even he could barely look at without a shudder.) Being Castiel, he had said it in the kind of stage-whisper that carried like a hailstorm and made the Empty thrash and writhe like a seethe of black treacle and Jack close his eyes and picture them in a child’s storybook, the great heaving wrath of the Empty wanting to crash down on an oblivious tiny, trench-coated Castiel and he, sternly, with a hand outstretched, keeping it at bay.
The Empty was simmering and sullen at present; it smelt like an angry dog that had been chained up in the rain for so long that it wanted to bite everyone. Jack felt sorry for it. So did Castiel.
It had been a surprise for Jack to learn that the other angels had long considered Castiel a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. He had been carrying out a mission—to remove a human from hell and restore it to earth—and been contaminated by contact, because the Winchesters were just that toxic. Dean Winchester had corrupted his celestial heart and now he was a warning for the curious, a cautionary tale, told with much wing-wagging; Heaven’s own Patty Hearst. (Jack understood those references now: ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ and ‘Patty Hearst’; because he understood everything now. The references were, however, still wrong.)
“Castiel is the only one who remained pure at heart,” he explained, patiently, he hoped.
“He fell in love with a human,” the angels returned.
Jack smiled in relief, because they did get it, after all. “Exactly.”
Sometimes an angel would say something that confused him for the fraction of a fraction: “Father, what of your father?”
And he would think ‘Castiel? Sam? Dean?’ and then realize that they meant ‘Lucifer’, who had never been his father; not made any effort to raise him to know that the night held teeth, the new day a chance for redemption, or to teach him, before they put a weapon in his hand, to know right from wrong.
“Rowena is the right person to run hell,” he said firmly.
He and Castiel were at odds as to what exactly constituted heaven. There was a part of Jack that wanted to gather Sam and Dean to himself so that he could keep them from harm. So they could be with their mother and father again, and all their fallen friends, the ones for whom he had not yet been able to find a justification to return to earth.
“They have friends on earth. Sam has Eileen. Dean has Sam,” Castiel whispered to him hoarsely from the blackness of the empty in a voice that resounded like rain on a tin roof.
In heaven, a passing angel sniffed as it overheard and said, “Oh yes, the Winchester oroboros of obsessive co-dependence, eternally eating its own tail.”
“Dean has a dog now,” Jack told Castiel who said, “Well, then,” and enumerated all the things that Dean liked about being alive, that now, from this celestial distance, seemed to Jack to all carry about them the recycled air and sticky PVC feel of things found or watched or dreamed of in beige-carpeted motel rooms.
“It just sounds a little like beer, pie, pornography, and driving an old car with a trunk full of shotguns,” he admitted, apologetically, because he understood small shrines as he had never understood them when half-human and almost newborn, and like the Romans with their ancestors, Castiel had his household gods.
“Did it feel like nothing more than that down there?” Castiel demanded. “Did Dean feel like that down there?”
The answer was yes, and no, and mostly no, but with some yes mixed in with it, like a rogue thread, which was fitting, because even more than Sam, Dean had always been a rogue thread in the celestial tapestry. Then Castiel rhapsodized about Dean and it was beautiful, poetry, it shimmered like lotus flowers on silky blue waters and Jack felt the thrill of it ripple through him, and he realized that it was perfectly all right to be blinded by love, that that feeling he had for these flawed beings who had raised him, which was utterly untainted by his awareness of their flaws, was the way Castiel saw Dean. It wasn’t that Castiel didn’t know, almost as well as Sam did, that Dean had strange tastes and a restricted palate, it was that he did not see them as failings, only as part of the miraculous whole that was Dean. Whom he also, on occasion, thought was an ass-butt.
“I’m only saying—it’s such a beautiful new heaven we’re building up here. Does it really need to contain unbeautiful things?”
Couldn’t Dean, when the time came, have pie without corn syrup, have a copy of the Louvre to look at instead of Busty Asian Babes? Did there have to be hentai in heaven? Wasn’t it perfectly possible that heaven could be heaven for Dean without cheap silk panties? Without quite so much beer?
“You could just put the less…elevated things in a box under his bed. Perhaps up here he wouldn’t feel the need for them?”
They went back and forth on it, mostly because Jack missed Castiel and liked to hear his voice and yet the time still didn’t feel right to pluck him out of the Empty, which was now writhing and twisting down there, because every time they communicated, sparks and firefly flickers of heaven got in; cinders of starfire and echoes of grace, like sunlight falling onto the ocean floor. Castiel would speak faster and faster, telling him all the ways that heaven could be perfected, communities of loved ones living at the perfect distance, gardens in which every apple could be eaten, the sound of sea surf and the sunlit hum of bees. The shadow of clouds on a cornfield; the purr of sleeping kittens; the scent of jasmine and vanilla; whale-song; susurrations of starlings; moonlight on white flowers; the coil of a horse herd galloping downhill. It was a long list. An almost infinite list. They were letting in too much light and Castiel was getting hoarse.
“I’ll remember,” Jack said.
“Have you written it down?”
Castiel would be the last one to forget to treat him like a child; Jack realized that he was grateful for that.
“I won’t forget. I promise.”
“Because these things matter to humans. You can’t just trap them in a memory forever like a dead fly in amber. They need to see the seasons unfold.”
“I remember,” he said, thinking of the shock of his first fall; all that beauty born of death.
The Empty offered them an inarticulate shriek of silent rage. Feverish! Fidgety! Fornicating Fiends!
“Fornicating?” Jack enjoyed his own surprise the way he had enjoyed the first time he had eaten a cookie and that delicious bitter-sweetness had ambushed his tongue with chocolate chips.
He could feel Castiel’s bewilderment warring with Castiel’s internal Anubian scale as he cross-checked his own behavior for past and present sins. After a pause, Castiel offered hoarsely, “Last night I thought about the way the Impala smells. How it smells like Dean.”
“Blood and gasoline and old takeaway food?”
“The feel of the engine, the way it gets into the bones; the way it rocks on its own suspension even as it rolls over the road; the sound of the different surfaces adjusting to the music of the wheels, those tiny bird-strikes of gravel on the under-carriage; the way it’s a different car by night. How, if you fall asleep on its seats, they cradle you and crease you and taste like Led Zeppelin music sounds.”
Because he knew everything now, Jack had the briefest flash of Mary Winchester thinking the same thoughts in relation to John, only in her case knowing what it was she was thinking and recognizing their root. It was astonishing how much more of the world and their own wants frail, mayfly humans knew than did eternal angels, kissed by the oblivion of the divine.
“The Empty doesn’t get out much,” Jack offered tactfully, thinking of the Tree of Knowledge and how if he had been the one back there with Eve that he would also have offered her the apple. Because he was the son of Lucifer and some of his bright, false scales had stuck or because he was yet to be convinced of the advantages of ignorance?
“So, you think it’s just confused?” Castiel pressed. He was teetering on the edge of a feather at present, because he had loved Dean for so long now and the other angels had told him that Dean had corrupted and contaminated him and he had known they must be wrong, because he had touched Dean’s soul and seen its depths and found it beautiful. Yet it was really the decade of hanging around with humans that had confused him most; them saying one thing and doing another or not saying anything and doing something quite unanticipated. They were a confusing species. With all due sympathy for Castiel’s confusion, Jack still hoped that one could study them forever and be eternally surprised.
“As neither of us has ever fornicated. I think the Empty might mistake love for something else.”
“It doesn’t understand how anyone could love the Winchesters.” Castiel sounded as if he was trying to be understanding about that failing on the Empty’s part but not quite there. He would never, Jack suspected, be there. While to the Empty, it was like loving the smell of burning bones or the feel of a bruise or the taste of salt or the sound of tepid water swirling, bloody, down a shower drain, the only part of Falling that Castiel had ever found perfectly straightforward was loving Dean and Sam Winchester.
None of the heavenly host understood that either. To them the Winchester brothers were like tarred grit in a holy sandal. Sometimes the archangels glimpsed the radiant golden sunrise of Jack’s love for Sam and Dean and were mystified. Sometimes he glimpsed the grubby denim oil-stain of their disgust and was full of sympathy because they were looking but not seeing, the way infants in their cradles did, when everything was blurred and strange and far away or else inexplicably too bright, too loud, too close.
“I told Dean that I loved him,” Castiel added.
“Good,” Jack said. “Dean has a strange talent for not knowing how much he’s loved.”
“Isn’t that a failing of those of us who have been with him all this time?”
Jack thought about reminding Castiel of the times that people had died for Dean Winchester; how many of the people in Dean’s life since he was born would have put themselves between a hellhound and his heart in less time than that heart could beat: not just Sam, although absolutely Sam, but Mary, John, Bobby, Castiel, Jack. How could you be someone whose father had offered his own life with a smile on his lips to save you and still think yourself worthless? And even as the thought flickered through his mind, Jack knew, of course, and had always known, being omniscient, that here was the root of Dean’s self-loathing, because John had died to save him and he hadn’t thought himself worthy of the sacrifice.
You don’t think you deserve to be saved…. More than a decade ago, that had surprised Castiel, the angel, who knew nothing about humans; because he had known from the first touch that Dean had never belonged in hell.
“Some people don’t believe they’re allowed to have nice things.” Jack could say that with confidence because he had been one of those people himself. He did, however, think that he had more excuse than most; when one was born an abomination, it was understandable that one might lack self-worth.
Castiel had been about to embark on another lecture on the nice things that heaven needed to be stocked with in readiness for Dean—Jack could see in his mind the seething toy box of random, generally shrink-wrapped, objects that Castiel believed Dean must have—when the Empty, as much as a black wave of oblivion-seeking nothingness could be said to wail and rock, began to wail and rock. If it had possessed wild elf-locks of hair it would have been clawing at them.
In a stage whisper that resounded like the wind in Blackwood’s Willows, Castiel said hastily: “We should probably stop talking now. The Empty gets agitated—”
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! You filthy contaminating flotsam, shut up!
Jack felt his sympathy for the Empty add itself to the twilight blurring its black edges; his and Castiel’s pity for it twine together and flit into that infinite emptiness of anger like a vagrant butterfly whose wings could not be singed.
He had not intended to alter the Empty. He had made the sacrifice imagining it to be permanent and dreadful, buoyed up only by the knowledge that Dean had been saved, but he could not deny that he and Jack between them must have inadvertently cracked something, because somehow the light was getting in.
There had been blackness; viscous, impenetrable, void; and now, well, it was hardly the bright, blinding oriflamme of day, but there were some crepuscular corners; a few glimmers of twilight here and there. Guiltily, Castiel found that he had light enough to see as his fellow angels slept, not with the stone crusader stillness of the past, but with small stirrings, and the flicker-twitch of dreams. It was as if the kingdom of the Empty was a black Atlantis rising up from the bottom of the deepest sea, and where there had been only the pressure of immeasurable depths, now there were flickers of bioluminescence, groping corals, brittlestars extending tentative limbs.
Dean had been accused of contaminating and corrupting him with his touch and now he was afraid that he was altering the Empty in the way that, according to quantum mechanics, a system could be disrupted merely by being observed. Of course, quantum mechanics was merely a clumsy humanoid attempt to replicate the same celestial mechanics that ordered non-interference with God’s plan; by which heavenly law he had lived the majority of the millennia of life before what his brethren called the Winchester Event.
(“Balthazar—are you comparing Sam and Dean to a mass extinction event responsible for wiping out two-thirds of life on Earth?”
“Yes, brother, I am. The real question is, why aren’t you? Your shaved apes are a two-person plague year. Or to put it in terms they might possibly comprehend, they are the sugar in the gas tank of your celestial life.”)
He stepped over Balthazar, whom he had murdered, and who was now dreaming, not the deep dreaming stillness of the void, but slumbers whose black waves were beginning to be tinged with streaks of indigo, once-tarry silence interrupted by distant music as if from a far-off room.
The guilt of his two crimes—murdering his brother; disturbing the Empty—collided as he hurried on, following a path that wound out of blackness into blackness but which here and there was now misted with a rising light. Behind him he was afraid that his brother’s dreams were rolling into glorious supernovas of deep purple and blood-black red; soon there might be starbursts. Dimly, he thought he saw the trunks of pale grey birches, heard something like the sigh of a faint breeze. He and Jack had been thinking of the Garden; perhaps they had let in a soft fall of moss; the wend of a single leaf. As long as there was no water—
Far off, he seemed to hear the drip of it, as one might encounter it in a deep cave, where the light barely reached, but the beauty built up anyway, heedless of being unseen, black water and the dragon teeth of stalactites. It was too terrible, the beauty of the world. Every angel knew not to linger, lest it blinded them, but he was not the only one seduced by a sunset, by the way winter danced in a flurry of white flakes or autumn bronzed the rain; the way spring found its way up through the iron earth in tendrils tender as a blade of grass, or summer burst out in perfumed petals, drunk by banded bees; starry nights and sea-glass waves; red-veined rocks and plunging falls. The mist of water from a deep fall, that had taken him unawares once, when the light had spied through it and made the droplets dazzle like diamonds, and, once, the fog of a churchyard by moonlight; such an ache of old love about the graves…. The orders had been strict: it was their task to follow the Plan and maintain their father’s creation; not to be bedazzled by it. Not to fall in love with it.
“If you didn’t want me to fall in love with it, you shouldn’t have made it so beautiful,” he said aloud to the gathered weight of blackness that was beginning to thin around him. Was he talking about the world or Dean Winchester? Either way, they were his Father’s creation.
The sigh of a breeze licked his hair. It tasted like sunlight did when it was just the other side of a curtain, warmth gathering itself playfully, like a cat about to spring.
He looked down and there were white flowers with their heads nodding humbly and Jack’s voice in his head, murmuring happily: ‘Thou fairy gift from summer, Why art thou blooming now?’ because Jack had read everything and was charmed by all of it and even in the midst of his self-imposed exile and his fretting over Heaven not being readied for the Winchesters with every detail right, Castiel felt a sharp pang of pride, because he and Sam and Dean had raised Kelly’s son so well. He knew that this was a snowdrop and it symbolized Candlemas and poets saw the holy trinity in its drooping stems and tender white petals, and that it had absolutely no business blooming here. Even a moment earlier he might have shooed it away, like a stray kitten he would sneak back and feed later when no one was watching, but thoughts of Kelly had somehow chipped through that wall he had erected which set him on the side of martyrdom and stoic endurance. He wanted to see Kelly so they could be proud of Jack together. He wanted to see Mary again. He wanted to see Bobby again. He wanted to meet the John Winchester who had died to save Dean. He wanted to hug Jack.
The path was clearly visible and he wended back along it around the bodies of sleeping angels, who were dreaming bright dreams now that made their wings unfurl like flower stems and their feathers tremble at the kiss of fleeting air. Primroses had joined the snowdrops and there were brown roots snaking back into the lightening darkness to meet the trunks of rising trees.
He found the Empty staring at a drift of snowdrops. There was light enough to see the white petals and the slender green stems; to feel the pulse of them where they were rooted in the earth. Castiel felt another stab of guilt but then the stillness of the Empty made him look again and he saw that it was not the stillness of despair or defeat but of surprise; and for the first time he wondered if, after all, which came first, when you dwelled in a void of absolute nothingness, the longing for endless night or the slumber by which you escaped it? There were more flowers breaking up through brown earth and green sward, and slow roots sliding beneath the dreams of drowsing angels.
“Everything’s alive,” the Empty said, not accusingly as he expected, but with a slow bewilderment. It held out a hand and something shimmered blue and landed on its palm. They watched the opening and closing of new wings together. “I don’t know what any of these things are.”
“That’s a butterfly,” Castiel said. “That’s a snowdrop.”
“A drop of snow?”
“A snowdrop and a drop of snow are two entirely different things.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“Many humans things don’t. One grows used to it. And not used to it, at once.”
It occurred to Castiel that he had probably known all along that the Empty was what Dean would call a control freak, but while in the past any change to its environment had enkindled black rage, now it seemed too overwhelmed by this unfurling strangeness to object. It moved in a slow daze to a drift of bluebells snaking through a rise of growing trees. “What’s that smell?”
“Somewhere between spring and summer in the western part of Atlantic Europe.”
Jack loved fairy-tales, so perhaps it was less Europe than the woods where Snow White had dreamed in her glass coffin or Red Riding Hood had walked with a wolf. He wondered if this was what happened when your new God knew everything should begin with a garden but had been brought up watching Disney films. One strove after Eden but some Goldilocks got in.
“What are they?” the Empty demanded, pointing into the trees but not anything like as aghast as Castiel might have expected.
“Bears,” he said, briefly. “A mother and cubs. Sam says one should never come between them, at least, not if one doesn’t want to be eaten.”
Bobby had said the same, but added ‘you eejit’ for emphasis.
The angels were definitely stirring now and everything was growing. The strength of the earth’s roots and bones shivered through him; the melancholy music of life and death; of great whales upon the ocean and wildebeest flowing across the savannah; he felt overwhelmed by the boom of storm water upon jagged rocks, and the sidewinder’s scale-words written in desert sand. There were two points pricking his heart, thin and sharp as glass, the knowledge that one day Sam and Dean were going to die.
“There is nothing left of the world I knew,” the Empty said, gathering its blackness to it like widow’s weeds as the light and colour flowed in around it.
“This is you,” Castiel said. “Once you dreamed of endless night and now you dream of—” He was not Jack so he could not unselfconsciously stand here, after over ten years of knowing Dean Winchester and his many and varied expressions, and say ‘sweet delight’. “This. You dream of this now. You were that and now you’re this.”
“I’m awake.”
“Night will fall here and you will sleep while owls glide over your head. Then you will wake up with the light.” Or else turn nocturnal like a bat, but either way, there would be day and night and seasons.
“And then?”
“You will discover the world anew.”
He had loved Earth as he had never loved Heaven, but now there was a new Heaven and a new Earth, because Jack was not Chuck, and when Sam and Dean met their deaths, as they inevitably must, nothing would end for them. They would discover the world anew.
The lancing pain retreated. The Empty gave him a searching, baffled, but no longer hate-filled look, and wandered off, stopping here and there to stare in mystification but no particular resentment, at a mossy tree trunk, or a beetle, or to meet the bright, inquisitive eye of an insect-questing bird.
“I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for.”
Castiel jumped, realizing for the first time why Dean and Sam had always done that strange start and lurch when he alighted silently behind them. It was, he now saw, quite disconcerting.
“Jack. I don’t think you should be in the Empty.”
Jack gave him a mild, fond look. “I think, as an omniscient deity, that I can do what I like.”
Castiel made to object, because Jack was in a dangerous place, and, besides, there were bears, and then saw the logic of his argument. “I suppose that’s reasonable.”
“Besides, it’s not the Empty any more.”
“What is it?”
“A place where angels can lay down their fiery swords. An angel can’t really retire to Heaven, after all. That would be like a broker retiring to the stock exchange.”
“Are we recycling angels now?” He had murdered so many of them. He wasn’t sure he deserved to have that crime erased but they had not deserved to be banished into oblivion.
“I’ve decided they should have a place to step away from Heaven and Earth but that isn’t monochrome and full of monsters, like Purgatory, or full of disaster capitalists and armaments dealers, like Hell, but isn’t as—”
“Murky as the Empty?”
“Exactly. They can stay here or they can come back when they’ve had a…rest.”
If Balthazar was awake there might start being orgies in the Empty. There was a time when he would have been shocked by that thought and it would have worried him. He was now only mildly curious as to how long it would take and who Balthazar would get involved first.
“I don’t think Chuck ever gave the heavenly host a chance to fall in love with the world or the people in it,” Jack added. “And thank you.”
“For what?”
“I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“I thought you did it?” He remembered that he was the one who had read fairy-tales to Jack when Jack had been a golden warmth that he could feel in Kelly’s womb. That he had been happy.
“I was never an angel, Castiel. It seemed better to leave the angels’ afterlife to you.”
He thought this place was beautiful and that he could be happy here. He had friends here. Admittedly many of them were friends he had murdered, but, still, he was ready and willing to make amends. And yet— He couldn’t seem to let go of the life he’d had; not the one that had stretched out like a rolling ocean for millennia, but the brief, full, painful, beautiful one with Sam and Dean and Jack. He looked up and saw just a flicker of uncertainty cross Jack’s young omniscient face.
“You do want to wait for them with me in Heaven, don’t you…?”
“Yes.” He said it so fast, it was swallowed up by his eagerness and he had to clear his throat and try again. “Yes, if that is…allowed.”
The relief was replaced by a sweetly mischievous smile. “Omniscient deity, remember?”
Still, when Jack took his hand, it felt like a boy’s hand in his, not a god’s; warm and bony and human, because that was what Jack wanted him to feel; the comforting squeeze of the boy he had raised and loved as well as the comforting squeeze of the father who loved all his angels but loved Castiel just a little bit more than all the rest.
“Let’s go home,” Jack said.
They both looked over their shoulders. The Empty had picked a mixed bouquet and was offering a drooping bloom to a green lizard on a mossy log. Behind him, bemused angels were waking from their slumbers, stretching and yawning and flexing their wings. A beam of sunlight cut through a forest path that seemed to wend away into mystery and new adventure. Far away, Castiel thought he could hear the rumbling voice of the ocean, and further off the purple twilight of a far-distant night.
“I still believe that Dean could get used to good pie,” Jack said, and sent him a teasing thought of fragrant flakes of best French pastry in which fruits of the forest ran red in a wine-scented jus.
Castiel recoiled. “It has to be the kind of pie you can buy from the counter of a store that also sells you twinkies and gas.”
“That’s terrible pie, Cas.”
“It’s the pie Dean likes. It’s the only pie that counts.”
They were still debating it as they stepped from the Empty into Heaven; no longer white and sterile and charred by the blasted wings of murdered angels but green and tree-filled, and with the smoke of the hut from John and Mary Winchester’s house throwing a soft grey question mark into the sky.
The End