FIC: The Men Who Stare at Croats (Zachariah, Michael)

[whynot]

OMGWTFtentacle_fest! FOR ALL YOUR MULTIFANDOM TENTACLE NEEDS. Prompting is open until March 22, 7 am EST. CHOP CHOP. Writhe writhe?

Up next in my quest to finish all the WIPs, here is angel crackfic HOW THINGS REALLY WENT DOWN.


The Men Who Stare at Croats
Supernatural. Zachariah, Michael. G.
Set between 5x03 and 5x04. How the zombie apocalypse was born. ~1400 words


"Are you serious?" Michael asks.

Gazardiel averts all eight eyes and mumbles something that sounds like, "...Yes."

"Oh, for crying out--" He turns away, full of the emotions he decided angels aren't supposed to feel. (No one points out the selectiveness of this decree. Michael is tolerant of righteous anger, less so of casual lust.) "How we're not already overthrown by the Nephilim, I will never understand. What is Raphael doing now?"

"I believe he is standing," Gazardiel says.

"Standing?"

"There isn't a lot of room in the holy fire for him to sit."

Michael sighs.

"If it pleases you, sir," Gazardiel continues, "I can dispatch Yofiel and Sachiel to free him."

His eagle head screeches and his ox head flicks its ears. "No, no. We'll let him sit there for now--"

"Stand, sir."

"--and think about what he's done. He can plié en pointe for all I care!" Michael snaps. "Check to see if Lucifer is circling his vessel, then bring me Zachariah."

+

"Something big!" Michael is insisting. "Something grand! Something terrible and powerful that will blow his mind and break him, Zachariah, I want that yes."

"I want Dean Winchester to say yes as badly as you do," he assures Michael.

"Oh please. For all your presumptuous simpering, what have you actually achieved?"

Zachariah tries not to quail under that gaze. "When I put him and his brother in my Sandover universe, they realized that hunting is the only thing they can do, the only thing they want to do," he points out.

"Yes, that's why Sam Winchester decided to leave the hunting life in order to wash dishes in some wretched Oklahoma bar."

Zachariah would guess that this is what some would refer to as an awkward silence.

"Van Nuys didn't work, stomach cancer didn't work," the archangel goes on. "You traced them to the home of the Prophet only to be blasted away again. You followed them to John Winchester's storage facility, only to be bullied into submission by a low-ranking angel who is supposed to be dead."

"Mitigating circumstances--"

"Of which you are increasingly one!" Michael rages. "Make it happen, Zachariah. Make him bleed, make him suffer. Make him say yes!"

Zachariah bows his heads and averts his eyes. "Yes, sir."

Michael smiles. "Just like that."

+

Zachariah learned a phrase when he was doing field research for Sandover: micromanaging OCD son of a bitch. This, he thinks, is Michael to the letter.

"Time travel!" Michael announces, barging into Zachariah's workspace. "This is what we need. The only time we ever succeeded in doing anything with Dean Winchester was when we sent him to the past."

"Succeed in what?" Zachariah asks. "All he needed to do was realize the inexorable momentum of his destiny and affirm Azazel's intentions. He wasn't meant to succeed at anything except failing."

"Are you questioning me?"

"...So," he says, "you want me to send him to the past?"

Michael narrows his eyes accusingly. "That is exactly the kind of uncreative thinking that got us into this situation in the first place. No, not the past, nix the past, we've done the past. We will send Dean Winchester..." He spreads his wings wide, an oratory habit that he can't shake even in private conversation, "to the future!"

Zachariah hesitates. Time travel is difficult for humans; they are chronological creatures, anchored to linear time. It would be easier for any angel to send a human to the past - which has already been lived - than to send it to the future, which is still a chaotic maelstrom of possibilities. As a weaver of realities, Zachariah takes pride in knowing the ingredients of his art. To construct Sandover, he had looked into the Winchesters' various could-have-beens, the threads of destiny God left by the wayside, the rough drafts and rougher drafts where Mary Winchester lived and John Winchester died, worlds where Dean went to college and Sam never learned how to shoot a gun.

"Which future?" Zachariah asks. "The one where Dean goes blind? The one where Sam loses his hand? The one where they become werewolves?"

"Werewolves?" Michael frowns. "These are all legitimate futures?"

"At this point in time, yes."

"How many futures can we choose from?"

Zachariah tells him a number for which no human language has a name.

"Hmm." Michael goes silent with contemplation. Then he asks, "Do you have anything with zombies?"

+

"And then," Michael exults, "make them perpetually low on toilet paper. That makes humans cranky, right?"

"Less... toilet... paper..." Zachariah scribbles.

"And their father figure, what's his name. Bobby Singer? In the backstory, he will have turned into a zombie--"

"Croat."

"--and Dean is the one who shot him. Yes! Of course, yes, this is brilliance." Michael waves a wing in Zachariah's direction. "What have we got so far?"

"Well," Zachariah says, consulting his notes and the tangled bits of the Winchesters' possible futures in front of him, "so far we have Sam saying yes to Lucifer, the Prophet losing his visions, Sarah Palin becoming president, and the Impala becoming a 'rustbucket'."

"The Impala! And! Sometimes Dean visits the car by himself to sit in the driver's seat and be sad about things. Is there a future where he does that?"

"There are a number of them..." Zachariah says, shuffling through the futures. "What might be easier is to take that from the past. He did a lot of that growing up too."

"Good, good. Yes, find past sadnesses and superimpose them onto his zombie--"

"Croat."

"--apocalypse. Humans are often sad about things during the zombie apocalypse, right?"

"Yes," Zachariah guesses. "What about Castiel, sir?"

"What about him?"

"He's grown attached to the Winchesters. Considering that he rebelled against us, I find it doubtful he'd leave with us in this alternate reality, or that we'd let him."

"Hmm, good point, good point." Michael snaps his fingers. "You remember when you and Balthazar oversaw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and that drunk showed up and tried to know you biblically?"

Zachariah resists the urge to roll his eyes. Will he never live that down? "Is this the one who tricked Balthazar into an orgy?"

"No, actually, but that's even better! We'll go with that guy instead."

"How do you mean?" he asks wearily.

"Make Castiel that."

"Can do." Zachariah is about to make a note of it, and then pauses and looks up. "With or without the chlamydia?"

+

It took a day's work of planning, constructing, and Michael changing his mind at the last minute -- "White," Michael decides, after having gone through black, burgundy, and naked, "make it a white suit," -- but in the end, it was done.

Zachariah holds in his hands the bricolage of Dean's croatpocalyptic future, customized to Michael's specifications. It gleams with hopelessness and teems with dead ends, and Zachariah suspects he has never made anything more exacting and indulgent. The worst things that can ever happen to the Winchesters, tied up in one exultantly bleak package.

Michael inspects it, ox head lowing thoughtfully. "This is exquisite work. One of your best."

Zachariah lifts his eagle head a little higher. "Thank you, sir."

"Well done." He scratches Zachariah's lion head behind the ears. "Now go forth. I'll be expecting a yes in three days' time."

He balks. "Three days? But, sir--"

"Shoo."

And Michael does the celestial equivalent of slamming the door in Zachariah's face.

Archangels.

Gazardiel shuffles in sidelong. "There you are."

"Here I am," Zachariah mutters. Three days?

"The second battalion are taking bets on whether you'd walk out of the meeting with a wing missing, maybe some mane singed off."

Zachariah closes his eyes and his lion head growls. Which fringe religious group prioritizes angelic communication again? He has been out of touch with the minor sects. Who even knows where Dean Winchester might be by now? Maybe Zachariah should send the wanted poster to all the sects. Maybe make some people speak in tongues during the transmission, really make it a show.

Gazardiel says, "I reckon I should tell Raguel and Temeluch that they've won."

"Yes, why don't you do that? Why don't you do that right now?" Zachariah spreads his wings, and you can't prove whether he meant to knock Gazardiel over with them or not.

"Watch it!" Gazardiel cries out,and Zachariah chooses the moment to take his new favorite human colloquialism out for a test drive.

"Your face," he says. "All of them."

And then he flies down to earth.