Chapter 5:

3 Libras – A Perfect Circle

Threw you the obvious
And you flew with it on your back
A name in your recollection
Down among a million same

Dean watched as the sunlight came through the window making Liz's skin glow a light amber and the dark blanket of her hair shine with an almost blue sheen. Her arm was draped over Nate making sure their son didn't roll off the bed. They looked perfect, like a picture found on some brochure.

Castiel's words sounded through his head not making an ounce of sense. Liz had been born in Roswell Regional Hospital to Jeff and Nancy Parker. Two perfectly ordinary people who had stopped attending church after their wedding and who had only baptized their daughter out of habit. It was Liz's grandfather that made her read holy books and attend services, she was just as areligious as her parents.

And he was supposed to believe that she was an angel.

But then, he'd never met anyone who had more faith in human potential and who'd willingly put up with him for as long as she had. Sam always did joke that that took the patience of a Saint.

Difficult not to feel a little bit
Disappointed and passed over
When I look right through,
See you naked but oblivious
And you don't see me

Her husband had never been one to act conventionally but Liz was noticing more and more the differences. Between him and everyone else. Between him now and him before. God she wanted to remove that word from the dictionary. Everywhere she went it was a shadow across her path. Six letters. A thousand ways to remember.

She was trying to be there for him as much as she could while still working and taking care of Nate but she couldn't be there all the time and whenever she left him alone it felt like he got worse. The things that had happened in the four months he'd been gone – dead but she wouldn't say it – they were weighing on him.

And now, something had happened. Something that she couldn't fathom that seemed to have shaken his faith in them. He was keeping secrets.

But I threw you the obvious
Just to see if there's more behind the
Eyes of a fallen angel,
Eyes of a tragedy

The library was irritatingly silent except for the scratching of pencil on paper and the clicking of keys. There was a girl talking on a cellphone an isle over and the kid next to him had his headphones up so high that he could hear the crap they were listening to perfectly. Dean dropped his wife's ID card on the pad he'd brought with him trying not to think about how little information was written down there.

He'd been through the theology section. The pagan lore section. The anthropology section. The ancient history section. He'd even rifled through the linguistics section. And all he had was a couple of sentences about how there was an angel named Ariel that at times was confused with other angels.

It was really starting to piss him off.

Here I am expecting just a little bit
Too much from the wounded
But I see, see through it all
See through, see you

“Do you believe that angels can take human form?”

“What like possession? Like Castiel?” she kept her hands busy shaking the water from lettuce and cutting up tomatoes. The chopped meat was sizzling in the pan behind her waiting for the packet taco seasoning because she wasn't in the mood to deal with doing it properly.

“No, that they can stop being an angel and start being human.”

“It sounds like a Kevin Smith movie, in fact I think it is,” Liz looked over at her husband expecting a grin or joking remark on the inaccuracy of the film but Dean was staring at her intensely, with a sigh she put down her knife. “I don't know. There's too much that we don't know. How would it even be possible? Wouldn't it be changing species?”

He nodded and she dumped put the cutting board in the sink. In the past weeks there he had been asking more and more existentialist questions that she couldn't make heads or tales of. Sometimes it seemed like he was afraid that she was suddenly going to disappear. Other times...

Other times he looked at her like she was something he didn't understand.

She shook the thoughts from her head, “Besides why would an angel want to give up on the whole divine existence thing to become human?”

We're passing the time
By breaking apart
We're damned at the end
And we're damned at the start

“She doesn't remember anything.”

“We didn't expect her too,” Castiel said from his side. The sudden appearance of the angel didn't startle him.

“You wanted her to.”

“It would have been more convenient.”

Dean turned to face the angel, no shortage of anger in his stance, “What is so important about her? Why can't you just leave us alone?”

He'd asked himself that more times than he could count at every part of his life. Why did everything demonic or angelic have to fall on his family? All the other hunters out there, why couldn't it be them? If there was some higher power, the God that the angels had so much faith in, Dean wanted them to answer that one question for him.

“Ariel was not just another angel. Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, we've all served with her. Served under her. When Michael threw Lucifer from heaven, it was Ariel who kept back the horde,” Dean kept his head down buried in his hands. “All of this was her domain. For millenia she kept the demons on earth at bay.”

“What happened to her?”

“We don't know but her human existence has broken as many rules as her disappearance.”

'Cause I threw you the obvious
To see what occurs behind the
Eyes of a fallen angel,
Eyes of a tragedy

It had taken Sam twice the amount it should have to find the grocery store and it hadn't helped that all Nate could him was that it was next to the big building. Seeing as his nephew was under four feet tall, that wasn't saying much.

Then to top it off when they finally walked through the automated doors into the frigid air, it turned out the little man was exactly like his father when it came to food and had immediately run to the junk food aisle. Nate had excitedly grabbed at all the processed junk that Liz had specifically said no to and given Sam the biggest most pathetic set of puppy dog eyes.

He was never food shopping as a favor ever again.

Oh well, oh well
Apparently nothing,
Apparently nothing at all

“I feel like we're going around with circles,” Liz let the phrase hang in the air between them her eyes focused on her husbands back. He didn't turn toward her, she hadn't expected him to. “We're really happy until life gets in the way and then it all goes to hell.”

Life. Fathers. Demons. Death. Nerves.

Whatever happened to girl meets boy. Boy likes Girl. Girl likes Boy. Boy and girl date. Boy or girl ask boy or girl to get married. Said pair ties the knot. Pair lives out life with their children, working, and fighting over bills. At what point had it become impossible to just BE together.

Dean kept his back to her and Liz had to fight back the desire to walk away. It was an old coping mechanism that she had thought she'd left far behind her but everytime he pushed her away she wondered if it was worth it. She knew they were. Knew it like she knew the sky was blue but he'd push her away and that thought would flutter through her mind.

'What if I let him push me away? What if I left?'

“Just tell me,” his shoulder tensed under her fingers. “Whatever it is we can work through it.”

Shaking her head, she dropped her hand and stepped back. It was one thing to lose her husband because of lies or death but another for reasons she didn't understand. Feeling what little strength she had left to flight flee she couldn't think of anything more to do.

“I'm not sure where to start.”

She almost cried from relief, “Just start a the beginning.”

You don't, you don't You don't see me

It had all deteriorated too fast for him to follow.

The plan had been simple, Castiel needed Liz to remember so Castiel would meet with her. As one of her former soldiers they'd figured that maybe he would get through to that part of her. If anything he was an angel and she was more likely to take him seriously than Dean.

At least on the topic of divine origin.

Dean watched as the angel took another swing at Liz, the iron blade flashing in the light. He couldn't get closer or do anything but watch.

When Castiel had handed over Ariel's old sword, etched with runes similar to the ones on the knife they'd taken off of Ruby, they had all been surprised at the ease with which Liz handled it. She had swung it easily as if it wasn't a weapon but an extension of herself. But she hadn't been ready for Castiel's heavy handed attack when she'd gone to put it down after proclaiming the sword 'nice'.

He watched her get driven back, barely avoiding the arching blade threatening to end her human existence until she fought back moving with a fluidity that painted the scene more as a dance than a battle. With precision and grace she went at Castiel again and again driving him back with blows as hard as her human limbs would allow.

They came to a stand still; the angel purposefully withholding and the human unable to reach more. Both swords lowered, Liz's clattering onto the floor her voice threadbare and desperate.

“I'm not an angel.”

For the first time Dean finally understood the implication of what Castiel had told him: his wife wasn't truly human.

You don't, you don't
You don't see me

Pressing her forehead into the smooth slickness of the shower, Liz couldn't feel the freezing water where it was pounding on her back through her shirt, making her jeans get heavier and her body start to shiver. For her, in this place, there was nothing.

Just the crawling under her skin, the echo of a piece of her long lost that Castiel had laid his hands upon. How funny that all it took to shatter reality was a touch. Such a little thing. But then that was all life was. A million little things. A quirk of nature.

“Liz,” Dean's voice was as urgent as the hands pulling her out of the frigid water. She wanted to turn, ask him to save her like he always managed to.

She just wasn't sure if there was anything left to save.

Hey now you're bleeding for nothing
It's hard to breathe when you're standing on your own
We'll kill ourselves to find freedom
You'll kill yourself to find anything

She woke to screaming.

It was her own but not a part of her.

Vaguely she was aware of Dean beside her already out of bed knife in hand. Her warrior, always ready to fight. His figure blurred with images too recently remembered to make sense of. So much death to be held in one person. In her.

On her hands. In her mind. Her fragile human form. So ineffective, so demanding. Too slow to do what was necessary. A hindrance in a war that had been raging for longer than her husbands people had existed.

Anger more intense than she had ever felt ripped through her.

They had tried to destroy her.

She would have her retribution.

You don't, you don't
You don't see me
You don't, you don't
You don't see me at all

Chapter 6