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The Death of Castiel
IP: 86.31.96.14
Posted on January 6, 2018 at 00:10:51 AM by Merlin


Dylan ran forwards and threw the ball over arm. He flicked his wrist at the last moment to send it spinning through the air towards his brother. Danny’s tongue protruded from between his lips in concentration, his fingers fidgeting upon the handle of the bat. Castiel waited behind the wicket, his knees bent, waiting for the ball if it should fly past his youngest son. Their three familiars lounged nearby in the sun, the two adolescent tigers curled around one another, with the sleeping caracal between them. Thwack! The wood of the bat slammed hard into the approaching ball, and it went flying up the beach towards the cliffs. Danny grinned, Dylan groaned, rolling his eyes, and Cas chuckled as both boys began to run. Danny moved back and forth between the posts, and Dylan sprinted off up the beach. Lunarian climbed steadily to his feet and loped off after his fairy, leaving Solarius behind with Monifa. The seagulls called to one another in the sky above, the tide ebbed and flowed, children laughed, everything was normal...then it happened.

Dylan skidded to a halt as three men stepped out of thin air. He stared at them with wide eyes as they pulled strange shining things from holsters on their belts. Lunarian quickened his pace and leapt in front of his fairy, his lips peeled back in a protective roar. The man pointed the shiny thing at the tiger’s head and looked Dylan in the eye. “Get your cat in hand, kid or I’ll put a bullet between his eyes.” The boy frowned, resting a hand on his familiar’s striped back. He didn’t know what a bullet was. The man sighed in exasperation and waved the shiny thing around again, “I’ll kill him.” Dylan gulped, but he did as he was told, he urged Lunarian to stand down. The tiger however fixed intense blue eyes upon the stranger, “harm him,” he snarled, “and I’ll rip your face off.”

The man’s grip on his arm was tight and cruel, his fingers pinched into the boy’s skin as he steered him to where the other people on the beach had been taken hostage. At the edge of the group, he threw Dylan down into the sand, and the boy landed on his face, his mouth full of sand. Lunarian swiped at the man’s leg, breaking the skin, and another of the invaders hit the tiger in the skull with the butt of his rifle. “Stop it!” Dylan shouted, wrapping himself around his familiar’s head, “we’ll do what you say, just stop it!” The man looked back with an expression of cruel amusement, “you’d best hope your King turns up quickly with The Goddess,” he said, over the sound of his friend’s curses as he examined the tiger slashes on his shin “or when it comes to executing hostages, that tiger will be the first thing to go.”

The men left, one with his arm draped about his friend’s shoulders, limping severely. Lunarian was smiling. Dylan, out of immediate danger, took time to take a few deep breaths. As they slowed, he found he was able to think more clearly. It lead to an horrific realisation that caused the panic to swell up inside him again. The boy clambered to his feet and began to run, pushing his way through the crowd of terrified people. “Dad!” he shouted desperately, “Dad!” There was no answer. He stopped in the middle of the group and jumped into the air, trying to make out a familiar face. “Danny!” he yelled, tears springing to his eyes as Lunarian joined him in his search, “Danny!”

Bang! Bang! Bang! The sound was deafening. Dylan clapped his hands over his ears and found that a stranger had pulled him down onto the floor. “Stay put,” the man hissed in his ear, and so the boy pulled the tiger down with him. Suddenly, people were screaming. They were screams unlike anything Dylan had ever heard before, ripped from the throats of people in fear and pain. More people started shouting, warnings, curses, familiars joined in, some hissing, some roaring, others howling. Then three more shots were fired and a furious voice bellowed for silence. The hostages obeyed. Shaking like a leaf Dylan crawled through the silent crowd looking for his family. When he finally did, he wished that he hadn’t.
Danny buried his face in Solarius’ fur and his hands shook. The tiger, who kept his eyes fixed upon the men with guns did his best to reassure his fairy with gentle coaxing growls. The boy’s free hand was clasped in his father’s as they sat in the sand and waited. Danny was terrified, for himself, for his familiar, for his father, and for his brother. He had no idea where Dylan was. He hadn’t seen him since he had run away up the beach and that had been just before the invaders had arrived. Danny chanced a look up at his father, and found that he was frowning but he didn’t seem scared. That leant him some courage and he managed to sit up. His hand slipped free of his father’s fingers and he rested it instead upon his familiar’s back. The strangers were pacing up and down the sand. They were talking about something in raised voices, something about chaos and destruction. He closed his eyes and began to pray. His family was not especially religious, his elder siblings especially did not seem to have time for such things, but Danny had always asked questions, and then he had read books. He had found the ideas he had found in them comforting, especially when there were arguments and when his sister was crying.

One of the invaders started to wave around his strange weapon, and Danny found that his father’s hand closed firmly around his lower arm. “Look at me, Danny,” Castiel said firmly, making eye contact with his son, “I need you to lie in the sand with Solarius, okay? Keep your head down and stay close to him until I tell you to move.” Danny nodded, biting down hard on his lip before obediently following his father’s instructions . The tiger was warm, and the rhythmic beating of his heart was reassuring. He felt safe. That was, until the first round of three shots rang out. Despite what he had been told, Danny turned away from Solarius and lifted his head. He found himself looking straight down the barrel of a gun. The tiger began to growl. The man retreated a few paces, lowering the gun back towards his side. He froze...then smiled. He raised the gun again and pulled the trigger, Danny closed his eyes tight shut as the sound rang in his ears. Then it stopped, and people screamed. The boy tentatively opened his eyes, and his breath caught in his throat.

“Dad!” he managed at last, his voice sounding unfamiliar to his ears. Castiel was slumped on the floor, red blood had already begun to pool, colouring the blue fabric of his t-shirt. “No,” Danny said, unaware of making the decision to speak, and then, he found he couldn’t stop himself. “No, no, no, no, no,” he muttered, the same word over and over again. Tears fell from his eyes onto the sand as Monifa crawled towards her fairy. Danny looked to her for reassurance, but he found the opposite. She had begun to fade, and flicker. “No!” Danny shouted, the sound elongating into something closer to a wail as his panic broke over him like a wave. He pulled off his own shirt, scrunched it up and pressed it to his father’s wound. Castiel looked at him with blue eyes, warm and kind. Danny gulped. Blood coated his father’s mouth, and the sight was enough to send him into great heaving sobs.

“Danny!?” A voice came from behind him, and he spun around. “Dylan!” he said, breathlessly, just as Lunarian pushed his way through in order to sit down at Solarius’ side. He nuzzled the other tiger, as if to reassure himself that his brother was okay. Danny remembered himself and turned away from his twin, pushing the shirt back to the wound. Dylan edged closer, his mouth hanging open. Everything about his face spoke of the same numb shock that Danny had felt at the moment it had happened. Panic would come next. He and his brother were enough alike for them to know that. “Dad!?” Dylan said, dropping to his knees at Castiel’s side. The man managed a small smile, he closed his fingers around his son’s...and then he lay still. Monifa lingered for a few moments longer and then, in a flurry of golden stars, she vanished. The boys exchanged horrified glances, both their faces stained with tears. They both shook, they both clung to their tigers as if they were rafts in the ocean, but neither of them knew what do to. “No, no, no,” Danny repeated in a mutter, over and over again, “no, no, no.”
Nico patrolled the skies over Shaman’s coastline on a regular basis, searching for the one thing, the one person, who he knew would be able to offer his fairy the comfort she needed. It had been months since he had last caught sight of the boy or the cheetah, and even longer since they had lingered in one place long enough for him to speak to them. Renn, the toucan knew, feared that her brother was dead. Nico searched and searched for him, but only the living him. He was determined that if Henry was dead, Renn would never know. He would certainly not be the one to tell her. He feared what it may do. She needed her hope. Adjusting his course, the toucan allowed the breeze to direct him towards the cove, his great black wings flapping now and again to steady his course. He saw the dragons first, or the ruin of them. Then he saw the group of hostages gathered in the centre of a group with weapons. There was fire too. Nico circled lower, keeping his eyes open for any hidden dragons who might be capable of pulling him from the sky. His beak made him rather easy to spot in such open country. He spotted the tigers first and his stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch. He could see Solarius, and he could see Lunarian...but there was no sign of Monifa. He was just about to turn and head back to where his fairy and her elder brother sat together in the rolling fields above the beach, when he saw it. Someone had laid a coat respectfully over his face, but blood had already begun to seep through the fibres of the fabric. The grief that hit him was almost enough to drag Nico from the sky.

“Are you all right?” Flynn asked, clearly concerned as his sister suddenly lurched sideways. She fell into the grass and her head collided with the ground. He forced himself onto his knees and approached her, his fingers combing a strand of pink hair out of her face. Her eyes were closed. Flynn touched her forehead with the back of his hand, but he could detect no sign of fever. “Renn,” he urged gently as Denahi climbed to his feet and trotted over to where his fairy was crouched. The husky didn’t bound over as he might usually have done, nor did he push his cold nose into the face of the unconscious girl. His front paws lifted from the floor in turn and he gave a single long low whine of worry. The sound brought movement back to her face, and Renn’s eyes flickered open. Flynn smiled at her encouragingly, and he watched as she blinked to bring the world back into focus. She looked at him slowly. All the colour had drained from her face and there was a haunted look to her gaze as she stared at him, apparently lost for words. A single tear broke free of the corner of her eye and trickled down the length of her nose. “Hey now,” Flynn said gently, pulling her towards him and holding her against his chest. He felt her bury her face in his shirt, and seconds later her body was wracked with sobs. It was the kind of crying you can’t imagine ever stopping. Baffled, and full of concern Flynn held her and waited for her to cry herself out.

The world didn’t seem real. Flynn felt numb, from the top of his head to his finger tips to his feet, everything had been wrapped in a case of shock and grief. He could only half feel his hands shaking and paid no heed to the winds that broke against his face. It was like he was trapped inside himself. Every emotion, every thought seemed hellishly real, magnified beyond the normal to terrible levels of intensity, but everything physical was distant and far removed. Renn had begged him not to leave her. He had been forced to prise her fingers from his clothes, from his wrists and had left Denahi with her in the lush green field. He didn’t want to go to the cove. He had wanted to stay with her, to have offered her comfort and receive it in return, but Danny and Dylan were alone and at the mercy of murderers. He had to go. Murders. The thought was enough to bring him back to himself in surge of red-hot fury. It brought some feeling back to his limbs, but it made them heavy, as if his blood had turned to lead. It made it harder to walk, but the anger fuelled him, made him press on.

Life had not been good to Flynn. He had walked a path of fear, betrayal and disappointment. It had made him question everything, and it had made him unforgiving. The cliffs began to give way to sand, and he trudged on, his footfalls taking on a new ferocious purpose. He stopped. He could see them in the distance, the hostages and their captives. In later days he would not recall ever having made the decision, but he did it. He summoned water, drawing it to him from the rock pools and the sea and fashioning it into a great orb with himself at the centre. With his other hand he created one of his turtles, large with a flat shell, and he stood atop of it within the circle of water. He would show them what grief was.


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