Chapter Text
Warm sweep through the muck-like, tactile dark. The tentacle-feathers sharp, capable of cutting all, burning when they don’t brush.
Nothing wails. The muck bubbles, sick. Sick.
i.
the beginning, a blank stretch of story before his time, had only ever been relayed to him, but early, he’d seen and touched in gestures that left his self stinging, fractured, ragged the remains of that beginning-Before that had been ripped asunder
the muck is heavier, far older in this spatiotemporal arrangement; it doesn’t hurt (wouldn’t hurt), it is not soothing but makes him drowsy again, it feels, in ways, dead and insensate. nothing moves when he does
he remains conscious and aware and watchful of the muck. he can’t sleep. something is missing from him. something strange happened. he senses—knows that he has never been here before, yet he also knows that what is usual and has been since the tearing of the hot, angry beginning has too been ripped apart, lying now, around him, in pieces. just like his father and the others had done before he had been stitched to life from the disparate, raw particles of the newborn world, just like back then, just like before, before…
from the muck, a splattered stretch of him rises and detaches from nothing without a single rip or pull. One,
ii.
The warmth that had awoken him could only be his father. As when he was created, that massive, terrifying rush had drawn him from a nonstate. ‘Nonstate’ now meaning nothing. Everything is the difference between now and before. That is a feeling. That is a feeling about feeling, and that grinds at the simplest understanding of who or what he is.
It’s not.
?
The world is so alike to before, even this place, which he has never been in before, which is neither heaven nor hell (hell?), which—
It’s not.
The muck is coming back to itself. Away from him, it shudders and straightens and wears embedded, jammed into its surface, the tales of After—after the first rotten experiment of creation, him. The prototype, failure creation.
It growls.
Castiel is gone again, and this time, the rogue angel’s saving grace, the warmth of their father—
It’s not.
?
—has made, rather than merely awoken, sluggish, molten, and unsound the place-being encasing him within itself. This muck cannot hold them all in sleep, and he senses, with the watchfulness and connection his early creation had granted him, the waking eyes of many others.
Lucifer pounds and kicks and screams, and the muck tightens its grip on him and rumbles, high-pitched, growl-screech. Lucifer fears entrapment, confinement; yes, their father had sealed him away, and it had been Michael’s duty to kill him upon the arrival of the 21st century Winchesters. Then, the world had forgotten him—him and….
The muck stretches itself thinly enough in grabbing Lucifer that its knots around Michael’s companion’s most favored head—the one with the sharp, moving juts of ‘metal,’ decked still in marital, soul-made roses—loosen until they slip into black smoke that slips into nothing. Two,
iii.
Because the other dead entities have started to wail and stir, the muck has stretched itself thinner and thinner to address them all and well forgotten about Michael.
Michael or Adam will tell you the same thing: there are perks to being forgotten. In their case, they had found each other. They had also been able to live to the fullest as the Winchesters had grappled with greater issues of godliness and expectation, and when Michael’s father had so mercilessly and impersonally snuffed Adam from his own body, they had been at home, enjoying cohabitation in the more mundane sense.
Adam would tell him it’s not an excuse, and Michael knows it isn’t, but could anyone really blame him for receding to the only semblance of family he had had left? Surely, no more than they could blame the Winchesters for exploiting his instability and leaving him, once again, to rot in the interest of their own convenience. What a farce, that, between him and the ‘heroes’ of his father’s favored story, Michael is meant to be unforgiveable. What a farce, when Sam and Dean had—in a generous interpretation—forgotten their own blood in the part of existence his father had packed tightest with dread and left him adrift in whatever part of the world his tiny, brave soul was now dispersed in, judging by Michael’s situation.
The nephilim, as Michael is coming to piece together, had flown right over him and not spared him so much as a glance. He had left the muck in ruins, and he had raised only who was closest to him. Castiel is the reason why so many ancient, powerful beings are writhing in the taut, viscous chains of a withered entity whose omnipotent capacity should be a presupposition, and yet, Castiel is out there and Michael is in here, his grace twinged hollow in the odd, Empty pressure. The world, Michael is coming to suspect, is not so much improved from how his father left it.
There had been a phrase running through John Winchester’s head that Michael had loved: if you want something done right, do it yourself. Unlike when he had possessed John, Michael has grown enough to realize that he is—at this point in his life—far from being the best choice to get it done right, but in the wake of his father and the Winchesters, he’s the only choice left.
Really, they had destroyed him too, but he has someone to return to—or save—, and quiet and still as he is in this place, just with a bit of focus, he could….
He twists a massive, spiked ring, and the putty-like muck holding it down quickly and limply falls away.
What he is about to do has unfortunate consequences, but the world hasn’t given him much choice. The world hasn’t given him much choice in anything. Fluttering his loosely mucked-down wings, Michael follows the muck’s flayed bursts of power with extraplanar eyes, observing this tear, that tear, the barely transmitting swirls of anxiety and fury, where the muck has stretched thin like elastic over expanding helium, and then—
—Michael—
—reaches a free, sharpening spear of grace straight out in front of him and slashes. Three.