Tha sin mar bhàs.

[hollystrike]

Who: Katie and you!
Broadcast: Yes!
Action: Planetside
When: Now-ish

[Amusement Park]

[So this is where she goes when she wants time to think, apparently.  The bunker is a place she won't enter; between the heavy aftermath of a mass death and the understandably stricken reactions of its visitors, the atmosphere is far too toxic.  But it doesn't mean she isn't grieving.  The deaths could not be helped and are god knows how far in the past, but the fact that these people have been forgotten - not acknowledged even by this automated town, let alone the rest of space - is something that sits very poorly.  She can't even change anything about the town to reflect its population's final days.

She's walking the rollercoaster tracks, very high up, thinking over the issue.  Don't ask how she got up that high.  And don't worry if you should be using the rollercoaster at the time; she can avoid you.  Might give you a bit of a scare, though, sorry.

Eventually, she puts a call through to Sam.]

[Outside of town]

[As far as she can go before she suspects (or hopes) she's outside the range of the city's replication science so her work isn't scrubbed.  She's not too far from the bunker; it would be pointless if she were too far away from it. 

She finds a rock face smooth enough, and between a thick blade and Kirito's lightsaber she carves a memorial.  Maybe nobody will ever see it, but if any other visitors come to this place, they should know what happened.  It's worth the extra headache.]

[And Broadcast]

I've decided to quit making dreamcatchers and move on to voodoo dolls instead.  It's more fun.  So if you'd like to take one before I end up throwing them all out, feel free.

[Just so you know.  Totally honest, as usual.  Less cheerful than normal.

If anyone wants her she'll be curled up in her office with Licorice on her lap.  She's so tired of these planets.]

Comments

[angelofthevored]

[She kind of reminds him of that zanna that had been trailing Sam for a while; the faerie folk are one of the most varied species in all Creation, one of the few not born directly of God. As such, Heaven had kept tabs on the Winchester brushes with the supernatural outside of their typical profession (though Cas hadn't been particularly in the know until later).

Maybe it's that association that compels Castiel to answer so honestly. ]

I would die first.

[But likely not. Cas has been prepared to die for the Winchesters for quite some time now.]

[hollystrike]

[Ah. He means it, too. She considers, briefly and meanly, whether she should make him swear to that. But until she saw those damning memories, she'd never thought of Castiel as anything other than a good friend; to Sam, if not necessarily to her.

Hard to be good friends with someone who basically does accidentally what Cas did deliberately, so. She turns back to her engraving.]

When did you get back?

[The matter isn't settled completely; she's always going to feel a flutter of upset about it because of the nervosa. But Sam forgave him, so may as well stop making him feel like crap about it.]

[angelofthevored]

[It feels like something around them lets out a breath, but Cas doesn't move any closer. He hadn't exactly put what happened with Sam behind him, but it was buried down far enough that dragging it back up to the surface has disturbed his footing, so to speak.

He stays behind her.] A few days ago. I don't remember anything from before, however. I may not even be the same Castiel you knew.

[hollystrike]

[She starts at that, glancing over her shoulder in a mix of surprise and dismay. Mostly surprise, though; she's used to being forgotten, too, but--]

Well. That was rude of me, I suppose. Here I am, some random stranger harassing you in the middle of nowhere.

[angelofthevored]

[Yeah, he's getting used to that vaguely disappointed look.] It's all right. You were concerned for Sam. [He didn't exactly set the record straight right off the bat, anyway.]

[hollystrike]

[She was angry for Sam. At one point, anyway. If Cas had been around at the point she'd found out the conversation would have been pretty horrid, but time, space, etc.]

Well. I'm Katie. The angel of Saturday morning cartoons.

[angelofthevored]

[look sometimes the only thing that separates 'concerned for' and 'angry for' is a mild stabbing]

...there's no such- ah. [HE CAUGHT ON. Is he being teased? ...maybe? There's an awkward moment where he's not sure if he's supposed to play along before he just decides to glide right on past that] You aren't human, though. Or not entirely.

[hollystrike]

[Oh well, she sees he hasn't changed. Katie's amused.]

I don't think anyone's entirely human. There's too much background radiation.

[angelofthevored]

[Another squinty face] ...and there's something else. [What is that? It's not her general fae-ness, it's almost...well not almost, but it can't be because it's...

Celestial. From-his-world, recognizably celestial.]

[hollystrike]

[Blink. That's new.]

What do you mean? Do I have a passenger I'm not meant to?

[Or maybe it's Sam. She has a tiny fraction of him in here somewhere.]

[angelofthevored]

[He comes closer, eyes raking over her as he looks deeper than skin, tries to find what's set off his senses. There doesn't seem to be anything in particular; her ears and tail, the shape of her eyes, all of it just out of sight but that's just faerie characteristics-

There.

Cas stops cold like a marble statue, staring down at Katie's forearm. It's almost like a pulse, like a thread that connects somewhere he can't see. His eyes snap back up to her face, the good will draining from his expression.]

[hollystrike]

[Oh, that's not the greatest look. She's still legitimately confused for most of that scan, thinks it's maybe Sam, but she followed that gaze down to her arm, and oh. Oh, fae never really forget a promise, but it'd been more than ten years--]

I suppose if you don't remember Adstring, you don't remember a lot of important things. [It's soft, and she can't meet his gaze.]

[angelofthevored]

[Five years ago Cas would already have his sword in hand, but there are a few things that stay his suspicion. He's already let Lucifer into himself already, when times seemed too desperate to ignore, and Sam is her friend. Sam is her friend, even with that mark on her arm...though it's possible he doesn't know about it.]

Why do you have a mark from Lucifer? [He at least doesn't look like he's about to get rowdy, though he is cautious. See, because he's allowed to fuck with Lucifer since he knows what he's getting into. It's allowed because, look, because he- look,]

[hollystrike]

Before I answer that, how much do you know about pooka?

[Because that really defines how she's going to frame her answer.]

[angelofthevored]

Púca? [Cas squints and tilts his head, hands sliding into his pockets.] Fae folk usually found around modern day Northwest Europe; Britain, Channel Islands...sometimes Scandinavia. Samhain had posed as the Gaelic god of Harvest some thousand years ago and enslaved a few families, if memory serves me well. [Which it might not. Naomi's meddling aside, Cas doesn't really know the details of what happened; he'd been assigned somewhere else to watch around the turn of the millennium.

...well and plus, to his mild embarrassment, Heaven didn't really give a fuck about the 'dirty pagans' back then so anything that wasn't directly related to the development of the Judeo-Christian movement was kind of ignored.]

[hollystrike]

[Well, there's a reminder Cas has been around as long as Crowley has, most likely. (Not his Crowley, the other Crowley, she has no clue how long jerkface has been around for--). The list-off makes sense but the note about Samhain is... different enough that yeah, she suspects there might be vast differences between his fae and her fae, at least in terms of history.

Especially as the fae in her world are barely holding on, hiding the way they are.]

Do you know they're trickster spirits who liked to play with words, and did it long enough that eventually they were punished for it?

[angelofthevored]

I knew they were tricksters, but I don't know anything about a punishment. A curse? [Really probably should've looked more into the politics outside of Heaven once or twice. Or a thousand times. Hindsight's revealed that Heaven really was kind of running a shitshow.]

[hollystrike]

[It's Cas's heavily disenchanted view of Heaven that means they even got on in the first place. But he's right enough about a curse. A geas, more to the point, but same deal.]

Can you make a guess as to what that curse might be, given curse-givers tend to be fond of delicious irony?

[angelofthevored]

[That squinting look doesn't go away as he thinks, recalling what he knows of his own version of her kind back home, of curses, and though it's a considerable amount to know-

"The angel of Saturday morning cartoons."

He blinks.] You can't speak plain. -answer plainly.

[hollystrike]

[Smart angel. She smiles ruefully.]

...Lucifer put a mark on my arm because he and I were the best of friends and plotting to do horrible things to Sam with a drill from heaven.

[Have fun with that. She can hopefully iron out translation kinks if he doesn't kneejerk get pissed.]

[angelofthevored]

[At least it's not filled to bursting with pop culture references he has no hope of parsing out.]

Drill...? [So some other weapon of Heaven? Obviously she and Lucifer were at odds, and though he has no doubts that Lucifer was likely plotting horrible things for Sam, she wasn't a part of it. Trying to protect him? What kind of weapon could Lucifer have had, that would cause her to accept a mark as binding as this one?]

[hollystrike]

Do you know of a woman called Naomi?

[In this case, a drill is exactly it. She knows Cas' history with the drill to some extent, thanks to playing ceiling cat in a cabin a long time ago.]

[angelofthevored]

[More than the memory of her face looming over his, or the pain of her boring into his mind, Castiel recalls the high-pitched whir of his very essence being torn apart as she roots through his memories for what to rip out.]

How did Lucifer- [No, it doesn't matter in the end how he'd gotten hold of such a device. What matters more is what he'd planned to do with it.] He was going to manipulate Sam, and you stopped him.

[hollystrike]

[Katie winces, one hand half lifting to an ear for a moment. It's the same shrill sound she heard with Rosie, which tells her a great deal.

She's not sure how Lucifer had the drill. It might have been as simple as Naomi was there-- god knows there were enough of you angels around at one point.]

Something like that. [In a sense, it's true. Lucifer attacked Rosie, but it was all an attack on Sam in the end, targetting his friends.] I asked him very nicely not to do it any more. He agreed out of the goodness of his heart.

[She offered him a bargain and he took it. Such is life.]

[angelofthevored]

[Cas's eyes flick to her ear, back to her face. After a moment of contemplation he holds out a hand, palm-up.] Let me see. [It's sort of a request, in that he doesn't just grab for her, but he doesn't want to ask just in case her acquiescing to his request counts as speaking plain.]