TURN LEFT

[wouldbeking]

He woke up in a garden.

Rather, he woke up in a fountain in a garden, half-submerged in shallow tepid water and flopped all over the broad stone edge like he'd tried to crawl out and given up halfway. A half-hearted spray of water pattered down his back like rain from the top of the fountain, where a stone angel looked off into the distance.

The rough stone of the fountain scratched against his cheek as he frowned. He was 75% certain that this wasn't where he'd fallen asleep last night, and still wearing pants to boot.

His surroundings weren't much help. The garden looked like any other garden, familiar and unfamiliar, some decorative shrubs and flower beds and trees all arranged in a circle around the fountain, a veritable wall of green rising up to obscure any more significant landmarks that might have been in the distance. The stone path disappearing around a corner of rosebush suggested a labyrinth.

It took a minute to coordinate his limbs, which were stubbornly pretending that they didn't belong to him (and








It wasn't much of a garden, really, just a crowded little triangle of decorative shrubs and trees arranged around a dry stone fountain, but it was more greenery than he'd seen in the last several years in one place, and he stared at it suspiciously from his awkward forty-five degree angle. Plants were shady fuckers, he'd come to realize. Angels and demons toast the planet, turn half the population into things that would eat the other half, angels fuck off to oblivion and leave monsters and demons running rampant, and who really won? Plants, that's who, when they were Lucifer's favorite.

Also the cockroaches, but he'd always had his suspicions that those were clever little escapees from Purgatory, never actually intended to skitter over the kitchens and basements of Earth and interact with the rest of its creatures.

He continued staring suspiciously at the surrounding greenery. His back hurt, mostly because he was sprawled uncomfortably across a stone bench as though he'd been dropped there out of mid-air like a sack of potatoes, but he made no move to get up. There had been too many dreams lately that began this way, with quiet and stillness and impossible things like a sky overhead that was still blue instead of gunmetal grey, and he could only watch the axe fall so many times before he started anticipating it. Any moment now, the dream would turn ugly. Any moment now, this garden would turn into that garden and he could get down to the old familiar business of screaming himself awake.

Any moment now.

The breeze that stirred his hair and rustled the leaves didn't smell like rot and gasoline or burning flesh, and the sun that shone overhead was bright and cheerful without even a hint of smoky haze to obscure it, and his eyes closed despite himself, shifting without thinking about it, turning and curling up on his side on top of the rough stone with both hands clutched close to his chest over his heart.



*****




The second time he woke it was much later in the afternoon, the fountain and trees casting long slanted shadows across the ground and the air a little bit cooler, enough that he'd curled into his ragged jacket for warmth, and two guys dressed like rent-a-cops were standing over him with disapproving looks.

Cas Novak, former angel of the Lord and current quasi-survivor of the zombie Apocalypse, sat up very quickly.

Whatever expression was on his face (or possibly the old dark rust-colored stains on his clothes) made rent-a-cop #1's eyebrows shoot up even before he said a word, and the man muttered something under his breath about goddamn weirdos and it not even being Halloween yet before slowly reaching out for Cas's shoulder, all patience and disgusted resignation. "Yeah, okay. Let's see those hands, buddy, nice and slow, and maybe some ID--"

One minute and twenty-seven seconds later Cas was running, flailing and careening across the neatly groomed landscaping while one security guard gasped for breath on the ground and the other gave chase angrily and futilely, huffing and swearing about fucking junkies, and Cas couldn't get enough air into his lungs in a way that had nothing to do with his end-of-the-world-survivor stamina and everything to do with the fact that this was not the end of the world. 2014 did not have rent-a-cops or landscaping or sidewalks with people on them giving him alarmed looks as he dashed past or pushed through them, or streets with cars and working lights, and the sky was still blue above him, and he could hardly think for the panicked throbbing in his head.

It was impossible. It was completely impossible that he should be here, there was still enough angel in him to know instinctively where he was in time and it was nine years off from where he was meant to be.

He kept running. The people on the sidewalk got out of his way, startled or alarmed or angry looks fading to the sides with some curses and interrogatives following him in his wake, dude where's the fire, oh my god is that blood, but he didn't stop even after leaving his pursuer well behind by several blocks. Running was something he'd gotten rather good at, in his time, it being a necessary survival skill right up there with learning how to handle a gun and accepting that there really weren't any depths to which people wouldn't sink in the right circumstances. Everything Cas used to be didn't translate very well into any special skills in a human, except for the fluency in Enochian, but he could run, he could outrun even Dean fucking Winchester when he needed to--

He faltered despite himself, nearly smacking into a telephone pole, because Dean, Dean, the garden, water dripping off the roses and the Colt laying on wet grass, and Dean--

When the boxy silver car honked at him from behind, pulling up into the parking lane to keep pace with him and a strangely familiar voice shouting his name, yelling at him to stop running and get in, dammit, it actually didn't seem anymore insane than anything else that was currently happening to him. He jerked away anyway, automatically mistrusting anything that knew his name, but the car pulled over right the fuck in front of him, cutting him off, the passenger's side door rising up like some kind of spaceship.

"Come with me if you want to live," Gabriel ordered from the driver's seat of his Delorean. He was wearing a leather jacket and a horrible familiar wicked smirk.

Cas stared at him long enough for Gabriel's smirk to falter, just a tiny bit, before abruptly launching himself into the











and Cas understood that reference well enough to know that the sudden urge to punch his up-until-now-presumed deceased elder brother in the face was completely justified.

When the red haze had faded a little from his vision (and Gabriel was looking slightly more uncertain) he stopped staring and stuffed himself in the car without further ado so that Gabriel could back up off the sidewalk and peel out, away from their pursuit, letting out a little whoop as the tires squealed.

They got maybe three blocks before Gabriel was turning to him, smirk still in place.

"So I bet you're wondering what's going o--"

Castiel slugged him right in the face, and it all went downhill from there.




*****




Twenty minutes later, Gabriel had lost control of the car and hit a stop sign before spinning out in the ditch (mostly because Cas had been trying very determinedly to break his face) and they were both sitting in their seats angrily, hands to themselves, staring out at the smoking wreck of the hood and pointedly not looking at each other.

"Hallucination," Cas growled.

Gabriel shook his head. "Too detailed."

"Pocket dimension."

"Ditto."

"Other angels."

"Uh, no. There's time travel and then there's resurrection of actual dead archangels, aka yours truly, and there's nothing, nothing, that can do that with just a finger snap."

Cas very fervently wished for his pills, any of them, and a couple bottles of anything alcoholic to wash them down, because this was not happening. He had not been yanked backwards through time for no apparent reason by an unknown power and tossed in with Gabriel who had also been yanked backwards through time for no apparent reason by an unknown power, that had also happened to resurrect him.

He let his head sink forward until his brow rested on the dash. His head hurt. His everything hurt. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept or eaten or more importantly, self-medicated.

Gabriel shifted uncomfortably in his seat, which meant he'd heard that, and Cas turned a mad, cruel little smile on him without raising his head.

"But there's plenty of heavy hitters that would love to get their hands on a fallen angel for a spell component, right? As far as I know, in a couple of years I'm going to be the only one left."

Gabriel's stillness was as good as a flinch in another creature. Cas didn't care. He wasn't an angel anymore, hadn't been for years, which meant he wasn't really Gabriel's brother, and even when he had been Gabriel's brother it hadn't counted for much.