Cas' Memories

It's twisting in her. Memories scream to the surface.

The void within taken form, alive, devouring in its emptiness. Kadoren and Vela closer than she ever would have let them, in her face, "What happened?!" And –

"Cas... What's happening?"

His voice is too perfect. Too perfect to believe in. Every scale, every piece, even the familiar look in his eyes, it's all the same as the day he left for Oxheim. But she's grown up now and she finds that she's no longer looking up at him.

How could she forget what defines her existence, what made her the husk she is today?

"You're dead." He can't be here. He can't be whole anymore.

But he only treads closer, just out of reach. "I'm right here."

What she would give to go back. So terribly, she wants to believe him. For a moment she lets herself.

And then the reminders tear through her. His scales bleached by Grey. His ashes taken by the sea and sky. The emptiness he left behind. Eternal.

He's dead.

(They're crowding around her. She can't let them get close. Kadoren, helpless. Vela, worried. What are they saying? Monsters, nightmares. Something to replace the one she can never let go. What's happening to her?)

He's changing too quick, like he's reacting to that realization, memories of the past sweeping through him all at once. His form destabilizing, his body turning to dust. "Do something." The one thing he never asked of her, the first of many things she couldn't change. "Cas, do something!"

He's dying, again, and she can't stop it. She can never stop it. But this time, it's not just a nightmare.

The kid in her who watched her brother die screams, "I don't know what to do!"

The fragmented pieces they left behind whimper, "I can't live through this again."

Inaction. In years or seconds, months or moments, there's nothing she can do but watch him die.

She finds herself somewhere else again. Not a void or an abyss. But at the ocean. This is only a dream, scripted, but for a moment she tastes salt in her nostrils, hears the hunger of the rushing waves come to take him, feels the cold sand feebly warmed by moonlight. For a moment, as he raises what's left of his disintegrating eyes to her, time intertwines. And for a moment, only as long as a last whisper, it's real.

And then he's gone. Always, he dies there. Always, she stands in shock and watches his ashes scatter. And always, she starts running too late.

Running. Time twisting in this cave. Until she's here, the others so close she can't breathe. Somehow she claws herself to her shaking paws, staggers forward. Nothing has changed. She has to keep pushing on or she'll stop.

Stop. She can't think about that. She doesn't want to think about what would happen to Slate, to the others, if she let herself stop. So she moves on. Because Cephi is still dead, and somehow, she still has to live with it. Because between then and now, nothing at all is even a little bit different.

Too late. The power she hates as it grows within her, too late to protect him. The prism bumping against her leg, too late to turn back time for him.

Too late. Always too late to save him.