Work Text:
Castiel meets the man with the blue box when he's scouring London for an artifact that Dean and Sam need, searching as he always does, bending time and stepping through a thousand locales in an instant.
It's only the way time curves and pulls in around the box that makes Castiel pause. This, something tells him, isn't something you can ignore, something you can walk past without being changed.
Castiel stops. (He can change time. He'll still be back less than a second after leaving; Dean and Sam will never know whether Cas has been gone for minutes or hours or years.) He drops out of the celestial frequency on which he travels, materializes his vessel—his wings flutter closed, invisible as he steps out on the street corner where the blue box sits.
The door is locked, but that doesn't matter. Castiel goes through, flickers out of one dimension and into another as easy as breathing.
He finds himself in a golden honeycomb interior, looking up at the spiraling staircase. It runs up the center of this place, this ship, which he feels to be indeterminate, something akin to infinite in size; and it's strange and mathematically wonderful and not human at all, and that makes Castiel wonder.
He walks further inside, brushes his vessel's hands over the controls, sensing their age. He doesn't know what they do, but he can feel the veins of timestuff that run through this place, can feel the sense of detachment, displacement; this box is not of this time, nor of any time, nor any place. And—
—and there's something more, there, echoing, humming underneath the surface. He closes his eyes, blocks out the unnecessary viewpoint he gets through the vessel's eyes, reaches down with his Grace; searches for the life he knows must be there, intertwined with the wiring, the power, the shards of lost time—
A voice that isn't a voice enters his mind, speaks in sensations that he cannot rightly call words. He reaches towards it, and it reaches back—sends emotions that are so inhuman they're almost familiar, sensations that are only distant relatives of concepts like happy or sad.
As near as he can tell, the being within is saying hello.
That's when a hand closes around his vessel's arm, and another voice, a normal voice, slightly wary and a lot curious, says, "How did you get in here?"
Castiel opens his eyes.
The man in front of him looks—painfully normal, the Doctor thinks, if disheveled. The coat and the suit and the backwards tie put him in mind of a rather careless tax accountant, perhaps one that's been on a bit of a bender and spent too much time out in the cold.
The Doctor knows better than to go off outward appearances, though, and is rather too Time Lord to make silly assumptions like you look human. If the intent gaze that meets his isn't enough to tip him off, the way the thing before him emanates the aura of a foreign creature borrowing a body is; and if all that isn't sufficiently concrete, well, there's also the Huon particle detector that's going mad in the next room, focused squarely on the man in the pale tan overcoat.
"How did you get in here?" the Doctor repeats. He's itching to whip out his sonic screwdriver and run scans on the man, but the question needs answering first. "What are you?"
"I walked in," the man says, his stare carrying no hints as to what this could possibly mean. "And I am an angel of the Lord."
"An angel?" The Doctor's definitely interested, now; his face screws up in a mix of skepticism and boundless curiosity. " 'An angel of the lord'? What lord, exactly?"
"Our father," the man says, bluntly. "The one who made me and my brethren." Then, before the Doctor can get in all the rest of the questions this brings up: "Your ship is alive."
The Doctor can't help but smile. Whatever else this creature may be, it's perceptive. "You noticed!" he exclaims. "Most people don't notice. They just go, 'oh, it's bigger on the inside', and boggle, and think it's just a magic box."
"It's not bigger on the inside," the other man says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "It's big, and it's not inside at all."
The Doctor practically bubbles with excitement. "Right! Right! Brilliant! You're something else, definitely." He does pull out his screwdriver, now, steps right up in front the trench-coated man and flips on setting seventy-six, pointing the glowing blue head at his forehead.
The electrical whine is high-pitched, announcing the presence of an object that isn't fixed in time as surely as if the Doctor had pointed it at himself. He switches the setting—the man just watches, dead silent, perhaps slightly perplexed—and the Doctor allows his eyebrows to climb his head as the screwdriver also determines that this thing is old, old, old, older than the Doctor and older than the Face of Boe and maybe (just maybe) even older than the planet itself.
"You," the Doctor says, very nearly bouncing up and down, "are amazing. How old are you? Ooh, you're old. You're millions, at least tens of millions of years old! Maybe hundreds! Maybe more! What are you? What are you doing here? You're brilliant."
The man does look perplexed now, driven to confusion by the Doctor's excitement. "I am older than this world," he says, thrillingly, confirming the Doctor's suspicions. "And I am here because I felt the presence of your box." Calmly: "You are not human."
"Oh, well done," the Doctor says, circles the man. He's shorter than the Doctor is, and very still; he stands like someone wearing a body rather than someone that owns one, and that niggles at the Doctor, but he'll figure that out later, once he's finished asking questions. "I'm not. Do you know what I am?"
"I have never met anything like you," the man says. "I have watched this planet for millions of years, but I have never seen anything like you."
"Oh, then you weren't looking hard enough," the Doctor says, flashes him another smile as he switches to yet another setting, ascertains that the other man is bursting with enough energy to annihilate all of London if channeled improperly. "I've been around."
"I did not see you," the man repeats, and the Doctor thinks he detects a thin note of petulance, like the man dislikes the implication that he's missed something.
"No, no, that's all right," the Doctor says, wonders where that much energy comes from, wonders how it's being contained. By all rights, this thing should be the size of a skyscraper and should shatter glass when it speaks. "I'm not from around here, I try not to stand out." Without halting, acting on another hunch, he goes on, "How did you get in this man's head?"
Another blat from the screwdriver assures him that the body in front of him is certainly human, all the right bits and all the right chromosomes. The man—the creature?—answers, "He let me in. He was devout."
"Devout. Right," the Doctor rocks back on his heels, touches his tongue to the top of his mouth as he looks down at the thing through his glasses, "because you're an angel."
"Yes," the man says. "Because I'm an angel. I asked, and he said yes."
"Well, angel," the Doctor says, drops back to a flat-footed position, "have you got a name?"
"I am Castiel," Castiel says, and holds out a hand like it's something someone once told him he should do, but he doesn't quite get it beyond 'human gesture of greeting'.
The Doctor shakes it with enthusiasm. "Pleasure to meet you," he says. "I'm the Doctor."
Castiel likes this man.
The Doctor is—Castiel doesn't want to think strange, because he's strange, he doesn't get to call others that; but the Doctor's different, not like Dean or Sam or any other human that Castiel has ever met, and maybe it's because he isn't.
Castiel can feel the different lives that echo in this tall, thin, suit-wearing man who calls himself 'Doctor', can tell that he, too, is old (over nine hundred years of age, Castiel notes) and unaffixed, slingshotting from one period of time to another like Castiel has never tried, because he can only skip through the pages of history so many times before he grows fatigued.
Beyond that, though, he's vibrant. The Doctor acts and moves like everything's new, everything's exciting, everything's worthwhile: in his eyes Castiel becomes a curious new bauble, a subject of study and a person of interest all at once. It's startlingly different from the way humans look at him, carrying no trace of fear or awe or anger, just—fascination.
Castiel ends up seated off to the side while the Doctor practically runs rings around the central console, pulling levers and pressing buttons and checking displays. He never, Castiel has noticed, stops talking if he can help it; and Castiel lets the words roll over him like a wave, taking in the important parts of the babble, answering the parts of it that are questions.
Now, the Doctor is saying, "So, angels, you're saying that angels were here before humans, and that this father of yours made you, except now he's gone and you're left to deal with his mess, and that includes fighting the demons and starting the apocalypse, but—" the Doctor has to pause to take a breath, there, as he winds some strange bit of machinery, "—but you don't want the apocalypse, so you've gone and joined the humans in the fight against the rest of the angels, who do?"
"Yes," Cas says, simply, and thinks that, in all, that's a rather succinct way to put it. The Doctor doesn't seem to realize just what this means—that in the words I left the Host of Heaven there's more pain than Castiel can adequately convey, that he's lost very nearly everything to fight at the side of the humans that had been his charge. It's somehow refreshing to meet someone with a different perspective, someone who's so utterly uninvolved that the words the apocalypse don't move them at all. "The Host of Heaven is . . . not happy. Lucifer has risen. The Four Horsemen ride, and Michael does not yet," never, never, "have his vessel."
"This vessel idea," the Doctor says, pausing to squint up at Cas as he bends over a panel with a dozen spinning holographic wheels, pointing his screwdriver at some intricate part of the puzzle. "Why can't you just shove your way in, like these demons do? Why do you need consent? Not that I'm complaining."
"I don't know," Castiel answers, earnestly. "I think my father intended it that way. Or maybe it is because the demons used to be human, and so find it easier to return to what they used to be." It's something he's thought about: that for all the demons are 'abominations', they're infinitely closer to his father's ultimate creations than Castiel or the other angels ever will be.
"Interesting," the Doctor says, and Castiel hears him muttering something like consciousness transfer, harvested by inlaid underground machinery or force—that makes sense. "And this Lucifer, who's leading the demons—he's not one himself?"
"No." The admittance makes Cas sigh, a human gesture, one he's picked up from spending too much time around Dean. "He is one of our own. An angel, cast out of Heaven and locked away in the Pit for thousands of years."
"He's got a funny way of dealing with the expression of free will, has your dad," the Doctor says, and pops up from the console. His thoughts seem to shift gears, and he grins again at Cas, a dash of mischief entering his voice. "Ready? Hold on tight, angel."
"What is—" is all Cas has time to say. The entire ship lurches, and there's a strange noise that he hasn't the vocabulary to describe, in Enochian or English. He grips the mesh protrusion he's sitting on to prevent from being pitched head-first into the central console, and holds on until the tossing and noise cease, leaving only a louder, more active-sounding hum.
The Doctor lets go of where he's been gripping the edge of the console and looks at something just behind Castiel. "Oh, that's brilliant," he says, and beams, staring. "I was hoping you had them."
Castiel twists his vessel's head around to see, catches sight of glowing golden-white feathers, his wings growing outward into visibility until they stretch from one end of the room to the other, folded. "Yes," he offers. "They're usually darker than that. How did you do that?"
"Oh, but they're beautiful," the Doctor enunciates, strolls over to the edge of Castiel's right wing, which has filled the entirety of the entrance and is now blocking the door. He reaches out, touches the raw power the flickers there, wincing only slightly when electricity flares up his arm. Inhuman, indeed. "I just activated a part of the TARDIS that destroys cloaking mechanisms external to itself when the engine is active. And then I sent us somewhere else."
"Where are we going?" Castiel asks. He doesn't mind. He's got time, after all. He's always got time, during unfixed events.
"Barcelona," the Doctor says. "The planet, not the city. Coincidence. Want to come?"
"Yes," is all Castiel can possibly say.
Barcelona is . . .
Barcelona reminds Castiel of Jerusalem, at its highest moment. It's bustling, bursting with people and life (the people here aren't human, and Castiel thrills at the thought of meeting more people for whose creation his father is no way responsible) and built with eye-bending feats of architecture, the spirals and interwoven loops like nothing the Earth has ever had.
When they arrive the Doctor grabs a long brown coat hanging flung over a branch of the TARDIS' internal architecture and bounces out the door, armed with absolutely nothing and immensely pleased with the fact that he hasn't crashed into anything while landing at all. Castiel follows him out, his feet touching the ground of another planet for the first time since he followed Anna into battle on another of his father's worlds, there to eradicate a failed experiment.
Barcelona's capital city, through the Doctor's eyes, is magnificent. Even without his commentary, Castiel marvels at it, different yet familiar in the way its civilization pulses and thrives; but with it he sees the things that he lacks the capacity to pick up on, to notice.
The Doctor shows him all the little little things that make the city what it is, leads Cas to street vendors hawking things that look vaguely plant-like but have colors that Castiel has never seen in anything with chloroplasts. "This is a djaunia," the Doctor informs him, handing him a spiky, bulbous thing with blue and purple bits and red swirls on the ends. He pays for it with square golden coins with slits in them, adds, "Try it!"
Castiel tries it. It's incredible, but then, Castiel also thinks hamburgers are incredible, and Dean's assured him that there's nothing more common-place than a hamburger. Still, there's the guilty pleasure of enjoying something wonderful that his father didn't make, his father didn't plan.
The Doctor watches him eat, grins when he sees that Cas likes it. That's another thing Castiel has noticed about this alien man: he seems to want nothing more than to share the universe with others, to make them love everything he loves with just as much passion. At his urging, Castiel almost believes that he could.
They head into the artificer's portion of the city, next, weaving between the blue-skinned inhabitants of the planet (and Cas is fascinated by the way the extra bone plates on their foreheads slope upward, the way they handle small things so deftly with twelve fingers, the way they're beautiful without being human.)
Here the Barcelonians make things, from art to technology and everything in between. The Doctor takes Cas to a Barcelonian silica craftsman, has him watch while the blue woman on the other side of the counter molds solid smoke (aerogel, the Doctor explains, a particular kind only the Barcelonians know how to make) into the shape of a sailing vessel. Cas doesn't take his eyes off it during the process, tries to freeze every second in his memory, stunned by the intricacy the woman brings to this ephemeral substance.
Next come the art galleries, and the opera house where Castiel listens to a piece sung by a sentient with three throats and three separate voice boxes, their harmonies intermingling with themselves as well as those of the other singers around them. Listening to it is like flying—better than flying, better than hitting faster-than-light when he's in his celestial form, and Castiel finds himself unable to express his thoughts about it in words, reduced to telling the Doctor an inadequate, "Thank you."
And the Doctor smiles and nods like it's nothing, like giving Castiel this gift of another world, a world no other angel has ever seen, will likely never see or experience or even know anything about is just a trinket, just a bit of fun.
Through it all, when they're on the move or somewhere chatter doesn't impede the activity, the Doctor keeps questioning him, about angels, about demons, about the apocalypse, about, when comes right down to it, just Cas himself. He drinks in everything Cas says with the determination of a scientist running an experiment, just as Cas drinks in the surroundings.
Somehow, when they're walking along a high bridge that rises over another busy part of the city, the road made out of glass and the rooftops shimmering underneath, Cas ends up telling the Doctor about the Winchesters. "They're hunters," he says. "Like you. They find the things that shouldn't be, and they kill them."
The Doctor stops, then, his face darkening, and Castiel realizes, belatedly, that he's said something wrong. "I don't kill," the Doctor tells him. "I'm not a hunter. I'm not a killer. I just stumble into problems, and I fix them."
"But you are a soldier," Castiel says. "You protect the humans."
The Doctor shakes his head. The tails of his coat are flapping in the altitude-induced wind, and Castiel's own, shorter trench snaps in the breeze. "There's a difference between being a soldier and a protecting people," the Doctor says. "You don't have to be a killer, or a soldier, to defend the people you care about."
Castiel opens his mouth, then, but doesn't find any good answer. Somehow, with all that's happened—with the apocalypse, with the Winchesters, with Heaven and Hell and the fact that he's fighting, constantly, fighting tooth and nail just to retain his existence, just to make sure Sam and Dean retain theirs—it hasn't occurred to him that there's any other way to think, any other way to be.
Maybe the Doctor recognizes that the simple words strike Cas like a revelation, or maybe he's just amused that he's rendered Cas speechless. Cas doesn't know; bit at that moment a smile sneaks onto the Doctor's face, and he nods onward, and says, "Come on, angel. We've got places to see."
Cas follows, the thought resonating in his mind, crowding out everything else.
You don't have to be a soldier.
Castiel wonders if he will ever know how not to be.
It comes to an end. All good things do: no one knows this better than Castiel. Millions of years of watching the creatures of Earth evolve have taught him that—everything comes and goes, everything is impermanent. The Angel of Thursday has overseen a sufficient number of monarchs' deaths to know that nothing good (or bad, at that) can stay.
It's late in the Barcelonian day when they turn back towards the Doctor's blue box, strolling leisurely (and when was the last time Cas got to go anywhere slowly, really?) down the avenues. The days here are longer, nearly forty hours in total; the Doctor, like Cas, seems to have no need for sleep, and has had more than enough energy to run all over the city.
He still hasn't stopped talking, either, and Cas doesn't mind in the slightest. The Doctor's words aren't all important, but they are reassuring, as though all is right in the universe so long as the man with the blue box has something to say.
They reach the blue box—the TARDIS, Castiel reminds himself, Time and Relative Dimension in Space—just as darkness settles over this side of the planet. Castiel looks up, and sees a sky so different from the one he's encountered on nighttime Earth that it shocks him, strikes him like a mallet ringing a heavy glass bell. The stars here are so close, so large, so bright they set the sky on fire, and all Cas can think is you didn't make this, you bastard, you couldn't, next to this your masterpiece planet is a broken wind-up toy—
"I thought you might like that," the Doctor says, and leans against the TARDIS' doorway, arms crossed. "Angels are supposed to be all about the sky, aren't they? There's even human poetry about how you're related to the stars."
Castiel stares at the sky his father didn't make for a long time, speechless. For once, the Doctor doesn't break the silence, lets Castiel just—watch, while the Doctor watches him.
When he finally looks down and meets the Doctor's eyes once more, all Castiel manages to say is, "This is so much."
"Big universe out here," the Doctor agrees, mildly. He looks up with him, now, and Cas catches sight of the stars reflecting in his eyes as he smiles. "Big universe. Billions of worlds. Billions of stars. More galaxies than I can count or ever hope to visit, and I've been to a lot." He glances down at Cas again. "How does it make you feel?"
"Small," Castiel murmurs, and realizes that that's it, that's what the Doctor wants him to see here, that this is part of the reason he took him along, beyond just sheer curiosity at meeting a new form of life.
"Ye-ah," the Doctor says, and leans forward to give Cas's shoulder a squeeze. "We're tiny. We're the smallest small that could possibly be small, and there's far more to everything than your father and his will. Don't you love it?"
Cas just shakes his head, mutely, unable to speak. He feels infinitesimal, insignificant, free of the strange constraining microcosm he's spent thousands of years trapped in, free of the chains of importance.
It's the most perfect moment he's ever experienced.
And in the end Cas walks out onto London asphalt, barely a block and a day from the place he entered the blue box, and watches the TARDIS dematerialize. His mind is as full of new experiences again as it was the first time he entered his vessel, everything edged with new perspective.
Outwardly, nothing is different. When he looks at his reflection in a shop window across the street from the alleyway he exits, all Castiel sees is his vessel's usual dress, his usual expression, his usual blue eyes looking back at him.
But the cellphone in Cas's inner pocket has a new number in it. It's a secret number, a number that only this phone can ever reach, unlabeled in the contact list, as unassuming as any other but far more important.
Just before he vanishes again, leaving the street empty of blue boxes and angels and anything other than the mundane, Castiel pulls the phone out and sends a message.
Thank you, Doctor. I will not forget.