Song Remains the Same

Chapter 94: Walls of Jericho

"Oh your hands can heal, your hands can bruise."
- The Civil Wars

Alex hoped and prayed that she wasn't wrong about this. She hurried her steps and tried to push away the weight of worry. Please, please be where I think you'll be. Glancing left then right, she jogged across the main road and headed for the park they'd passed just a few moments ago in the car. She had this feeling Cas would go there to escape, and she was banking everything on that feeling. In her jacket, concealed but constantly on her mind, was her angel blade. Dean said demons were out to get 'Emmanuel' and she was almost worried that Cas would let himself be taken or get hurt out at this point. His sudden disappearance was upsetting to say the least but not out of character... Cas used to do nothing but disappear when things got to be too much for him.

Still about three tenths of a mile out from her destination, Alex couldn't make out too much in the park or see him yet (if he was there at all). With every step, she was fighting off more and more growing major dread of the what if. What if she got there and he was nowhere to be found? What if he'd zapped off halfway across the world? What if he didn't come back? What if he hurt himself because of his distress? What if demons found him? Alex hung onto the hope that Cas wouldn't go very far away from her and that he wouldn't do anything foolish, she really felt like he wouldn't... but she could be wrong about that... and if the demons had gotten to him first she might never have a way of knowing. And the thing that upset her the most: Cas knew Sam needed help. So he couldn't stay gone. He had to come back.

As the distance closed between her and the roadside park, she scanned it with frantic eyes in an effort to spot Castiel. The park had a few benches, three picnic tables, rusty old cookout grills, a worn out swing set and slide/climb structure beside an open area for ball games. There were a couple families and a good number of kids there but where was Cas? She didn't see him anywhere and as a result she began to feel incredibly alarmed. If he wasn't here where would he be? And then at that moment, she spotted him and stopped walking out of sheer, heart-stopping relief—she almost hadn't recognized him for a second because of the blue sweater. But it was him. Sitting on a flat wooden bench at the far edge of the park with his back turned to her and to the park, his head was hung and his shoulders were slumped and he faced the obviously abandoned and overgrown football field—yellow ragweed grew wild across the open area. Alex charged forward before he could spirit away again.

Blindly striding through a casual game of soccer between some middle schoolers and disrupting the entire thing, Alex made a beeline for the angel who had been dead just an hour ago. She was breathless with the conviction that she had to get him to come back with her and convince him to stay, to help them... to not leave her. But, as she got closer and closer to him, she slowed to a barely-moving drift as caution and worry took over. He'd remembered everything. That had to be overwhelming. Faltering in hesitation, Alex came to a complete stop behind him, a few paces off and to his left. If he knew she was there, he gave no sign of it.

This was where she needed to say something. What words would possibly reach out to him past the agony she knew he must be feeling? She was afraid to make him feel attacked. She knew he already felt lower than low—in the last moments they had shared before he had walked into the lake, his guilt and despair had been at all time highs over what he had done—and she couldn't blame him; she remembered the things that he had done—or at least what had been done through him. She remembered it very well.

Cas was probably reliving all of those horrors even now and Alex began to feel like the wind was puttering out of her sails. Would he even talk to her? Would he disappear again if he knew she was there? And then he spoke, startling her.