[IC Contact -- Snowblind]

[bookofnope]

[There is a click noise. It sounds as though it might be judging you.]

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[godsspeed]

I don't know.

[ He really doesn't. It's hard for him to even know what he thinks anymore. After working in absolutes for so long being confronted with mixed feelings and contradictions is a confusing and stressful thing. There is one specific thing that he knows was untrue, though, and that's what he's here to clarify. ]

Vampires were never specifically forsaken by God, and I do not believe that they should have been at any point. It's an unfortunate state to be in, but it isn't a punishment. Not any more than the rest of the world's troubles.

[bookofnope]

[And now Castiel gives him this, like some kind of broken precious thing, shattered and wrapped up again and handed over as though it's the thought that matters. Beckett vaguely hates himself for the way his interest is perked, a surge of unwanted vitality. Too damn little too damn late, he wants to say. But he is, always, at the absent mercy of his own nature.]

Are there vampires in the world you come from? No - are there Cainites?

[godsspeed]

Vampires, yes. [ Though far fewer in Castiel's time than there once had been. He almost mentions this before catching himself, realizing that that's probably not a reassuring thing to say. Better not to bring it up. ] 'Cainite' isn't a term I've heard before, though. Or at least, not in reference to vampires specifically.

[bookofnope]

Ah. [Slowly - not just because his mind is not at its sharpest, if it ever were in Norfinbury, but also because he is treading on a great unknown. It could be a matter of words a d names, or it could be a matter of worlds, which he still doesn't begin to understand...]

So the vampires you know do not know themselves as the progeny of Cain, cursed by God. They are... something else, manifesting in some incidentally familiar way.

[godsspeed]

No. In the world over which I presided, Cain's descendants are all human and stay that way unless something else changes them, and vampirism is not a curse inflicted by my Father.

If anything, the first vampire seems to regard his condition as a cherished gift from his mother. Some members of the later generations less so, but to my knowledge we were never directly involved.

[bookofnope]

[A long silence follows this answer. He wishes he were in any other state of mind to receive it, reflect upon what it means and what it doesn't. But as it is his mind doesn't open to complexity. It stretches, like a dying thing to water, towards the heart of his questions.]

Do you believe - you, an angel of the Lord - do you know that God, as you know Him, is indeed One in all the worlds? God who made you, God who chose Enoch, the God to whom Solomons prays - God who cursed my kind, if, indeed, he has - are they all one and the same?

[godsspeed]

Yes. [ He believes, and to him that is as good as knowing, because it is his Father who told him, however indirectly. Nevermind that he's starting to question a great number of things he's been told that ostensibly came from God - there are only so many things he can question at one time. ]

The world I was made for is only a small fraction of creation. God made many worlds - perhaps infinitely many - and took different steps in the shaping of each, but He is still constant across all of them.

[bookofnope]

[Whatever degree it comes to, that certainty, that faith, is welcome. This is a kind of answer. A real answer. Though when its implications are laid out...]

Then - it is not precluded that He has made one world which is as you know it, and in one which, as Enoch says, all souls are welcome and there is no damnation, and then one in which he has cursed my kind. Different worlds... different degrees of mercy.

[godsspeed]

Yes. Exactly. God wears a multitude of different aspects across the many worlds of His making. Sometimes an observer, other times a protector, or teacher. But still the same God, just in different roles.

[bookofnope]

But then... [A brief pause as he licks dry lips.] Then, why such mercy in one, and none in another? Have we - has humanity, in its earliest days, gone different paths on its own? It is these early sins - if that is what they were - that have decided the fate of worlds down the line? Or was it all part of the greater plan all along?

[godsspeed]

[ Castiel goes silent for a long while, considering the question. Again, this is something he's never seen fit to question before, at least not seriously. ]

I don't know. I was created for the purpose of tending to one world and one world only. I don't know much about what happens in the others or why they exist, just that they do.

I wish I had answers. [ For himself as much as for Beckett. ]

[bookofnope]

[He's silent for a long moment after Castiel stops speaking, as if waiting for more. He is waiting for more. This can't be it, this shut door, this closed avenue, another dead end to add to his collection. And every time he thinks he's done - that the search is over, that the part of him that searches has finally shriveled and died, or learned better, as it should have that day, in that damn parking lot in the middle of the burning city, when Caine turned his back on him and said, without so many words, stop - stop wasting the time you don't have left - ]

This isn't fair, [he croaks, voice breaking, childlike with frustration. Even the cultivated careful neutrality of his pronunciation goes and lets Castiel hear the roughness of his true, native Scouse. A human voice.] It isn't fair that I can't even stop hoping...

[godsspeed]

Things have been very unfair for a long time. [ It's much the same sentiment that he expressed to Beckett in that twisted space-outside-of-space, but this time with none of the malice. Just sympathy and grief. ] There are things about the nature of God that are unknown even to us. Especially to us. You've been asking each other and debating why a just God would create an unjust world for thousands of years. Until recently I couldn't even begin to understand the question.