Bend the Bracket 7
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16
-- -- --
It was drive-thru again, mostly because the only decent breakfast restaurant in town had been shut down and neither of them felt much like waiting until lunch or driving around for an hour in downtown looking for something tastier. The weather had turned to icy rain, which was two or four months out of season. The townsfolk didn't seem to mind it. There were still pedestrians wrapped in peacoats and bicyclists covered in plastic ponchos, still cars zipping from stoplight to sign to parking spot. Sam could hardly see out of the windshield the rain was so intense and the windows so fogged from their breathing.
Maybe this weather would be alright in Canada, but not here. Not in California. Sam knew that California wasn't all sunshine and beaches, but this wasn't anything he'd ever seen near the valley.
"It's like Hell froze over, isn't it?" Lucifer's voice almost made Sam spill the remainer of his coffee all over his pants, but he caught it at the last possible second. Dean still looked at him sidelong. No lying about that one.
"You okay?" Dean asked him, and his eyes flicked to the backseat like he might catch sight of the Devil reclining on his upholstery.
"Yeah. Fine," Sam didn't try to explain. For a moment he sat in silence, his cup in both hands, before he let his eyes meet Dean's in unspoken question. The silence stretched. Dean didn't move. They simply remained in the car, in the rain, the invisible elephant named Lucifer filling the space between them.
The Devil stretched out in the back of the car and let out a long, loud sigh. "I didn't mean to scare you, Sammy. Honest. But now that it's over, how about you tell your brother it isn't Poseidon. If it was, I am pretty sure this wouldn't even be a town anymore. Just a swamp. But those old gods, they're pretty high and mighty, you know?" He reached up to the window and held out a finger like he was about to smear the condensation that had gathered there and paused. "They don't like climbing off their high horses unless they really, really have to."
"Are you seeing that?" Sam asked Dean, and Lucifer began to trace a design on the glass, his blue eyes turned so Sam couldn't read them.
"Holy-" Dean tried to turn, his fingers going for whatever weapon was handy, before he finally came out with a gun he could point at what must have looked like empty air to him. He spoke right over Lucifer's laugh. "Are we haunted? I am so tired of being haunted." He started to mumble, to rant, but Sam didn't care.
"What is it?" Sam asked Lucifer, and the Devil glanced at him before he kept right on doodling on the window.
"How am I supposed to know?!" His brother replied.
Sam didn't quite glare at Dean. Instead, he waited.
Lucifer drew a circle around the symbol he'd finger painted, added a couple doodads around it, scribbled what might have been letters. The design didn't take up the whole window, just a portion of it, but the details were swiftly fading, running in wet lines down the glass. When he was finished, his hand went to his jean covered knee and he smiled. "Enochian, actually. I'm pretty good at traditional witchcraft, but you don't like it and this should work just fine."
"To do what?" Sam didn't care that Dean was staring at him, his gun wavering.
"Summon Amphitrite," Lucifer almost shrugged but the motion didn't quite finish. He seemed lethargic, slow, like he hadn't slept or rested since the night before. Maybe it wasn't his morning. He'd never seemed that bad off, even when Nick had been falling apart around him. "You're idiot brother shrugged her off last night. She's a lot less of a dick than her husband is and this is more of a compulsion than a summoning, so it won't piss her off that you called. Gotta write it in blood though, and I can teach you the chant." He took another deep breath and turned his gaze on Dean. "Would you tell him to put that away before he hurts himself?"
Sam glanced momentarily at Dean before he realized just how crazy this all had to be to him and pushed the barrel of the gun away from Lucifer. Somehow, Dean got the hint and sat the gun carefully on the seat between them, his eyes as round as dinner plates.
"Who's Amphitrite?" Sam tried to keep his voice even.
"Poseidon's wife. She used to be the greatest sea goddess on Earth, and then men decided women couldn't hold that much power, so her legends got credited to Poseidon. Not the point." Lucifer answered, and gestured like that idea was unimportant, like there were other things that needed attention right now, like how heavily he was leaning on the seat and how thickly he swallowed. "Point is, if she's picked up a weapon and decided to wreak war on your enemies, you might as well meet her. She's not usually the type, but she's got all the fury of the sea on her side, and then some."
"Sam?" Dean tried to interrupt, but paused the instant Sam held up a hand to keep him silent. There was frustration in the line of Dean's jaw.
"And the chant?" Sam asked, because that was a much more fitting question than asking Lucifer why he looked like he'd been out on a bender and hadn't showered in the morning.
Lucifer nodded. "Get a pen when you get back to the motel. I'll tell you then. And Sam..." He pushed himself up and leaned closer, close enough that Sam could feel breath on his face, but didn't dare react to it. The Devil's icy blue eyes held him perfectly in place. He knew what was coming even before the word left Lucifer's lips. "Hurry."
There was flicker and a flash and Lucifer wasn't in the backseat anymore, just the remains of what he had drawn on the glass to show that he'd ever been there. With painstaking slowness, Sam turned to the thing on the window and tried to commit it to memory, because he seriously doubted Lucifer was going to have the strength to draw it again. But why was that? Sam didn't allow himself to think about it. Instead, when he had the symbol burned into his mind, he turned back to his brother and opened his mouth to explain what was going on.
Dean, the guy that could stare down angels and fight gods and had thought his way out of the perfect dream, looked seriously spooked. "Sammy?" His voice was just a little too airy.
"Yeah?"
Dean still had one hand on the gun, so he had to point over his shoulder at the thing on the window. "Did Lucifer just draw that on my car?"
"It's Enochian..." Sam started.
"But it was Lucifer, not some... freaky mental projection."
Sam hadn't thought of that, and the observation shocked him. "Oh, crap," he turned away from the back seat entirely and thought of that dream he'd had, that kiss, the other things that had been said. It felt to him a bit like being hit in the face with a very hard, very heavy object. The things the Devil had said made sense all of a sudden, even the parts that had seemed contradictory, the parts that had seemed impossible. "His grace. He wasn't lying about his grace," Sam said to himself.
"What?"
"It doesn't matter. We need to get back to the motel. I don't think there's much time." Sam wanted to reach for the keys himself because Dean was just sitting there, looking at him like he was an idiot, or maybe he had forgotten to shave for a little longer than was acceptable.
"You don't just say something about the Devil's grace and then we drive away to use an Enochian symbol to summon some goddess. That's not how it works. Tell me what's going on." Dean pulled the keys out of the ignition like he was reading his brother's mind, his expression as unmoving as a stone. He didn't seem angry, exactly, or even overly concerned, just confused and stubborn. He was doing that thing where he withdrew all of his emotions and mannerisms and tried to make it seem as if he didn't really care either way as long as he knew Sam was alright. Which meant that wasn't the case. He wanted everything to be normal and fine, on top of Sam being alright. It also meant that if any emotion was going to rear up and break out, it would be anger, because Dean was bad at showing concern without it.
Sam breathed in slowly and let the air out in a rush. There was no lying now, not that he could get away with. "The other day, Lucifer told me that... that when I didn't have a soul, his grace kept my body alive. Because you can't be soulless. Even when demons make deals for them, the soul stays on loan until you die, right?" He didn't really expect Dean to get it or to answer, so he talked to the rain pitter-pattering on the windshield, instead. "Point is, he's like a shadow, I guess. And I can see him, but you can't. And he can keep the nightmares and the hallucinations away, if he tries hard enough. Because I'm his last window out of the Cage, you know? Half a vessel. A quarter of one. Whatever. He doesn't want me to die, though, which is going to happen if the world gets overrun." He looked down at the garbage on the floor because it didn't have a pitiful gaze to cast at him.
Dean was quiet for almost a whole minute while he digested that. He jingled the keys. He looked out the driver's side window. "So, Satan wants to save the world because you're in it. And it's because Cas pulled you out of the pit crooked." It should have been a question, but it wasn't one. It was like Dean blamed himself for it, almost.
"More or less."
"And what happens if he gets out for good then? If he manipulates you into opening the door again and letting him walk free?" Dean's voice cut like a knife, because those hadn't been Sam's concerns, before. And now they had to be. Before, it had just been what he saw and what he felt and the things Lucifer said and did, not what he wanted.
"We haven't talked about it. He..." Sam didn't really know how to say it. Letting Lucifer free had never been in his mind, not ever.
"He hasn't asked?" And now Dean was looking at him, searching the side of his face for lies.
"No. He hasn't." Sam's words were a breath between them.
Slowly, Dean nodded. His right hand brought the keys back to the ignition and turned; the engine purred to life. He set the car in gear and started to pull out onto the street. "Goddamn it, I hate demons."
"He's an angel, you realize."
"Yeah, that makes him trustworthy."
- - -
Dean hated that Sam sounded like he was speaking Enochian. It wasn't a language either of them were familiar with, not intimately, but he could still pick out syllables that Castiel had used for things, kind of pick out commonalities. And the thing Sam had taken to practicing in the corner of their motel room sounded exactly like Enochian, down to the rolled 'R's and overuse of 'A.' Dean didn't want that to be the case. He wanted the thing in the back of his car to be anything but what it had seemed to be.
They'd done enough working with the allies of Hell. Dean didn't want anything else to do with it.
So he quietly researched what he could about Amphitrite, and realized that he'd looked at a couple of pages on her the night before but disregarded her when he had found Poseidon. She was too into the sea, not enough into smiting threats. He'd figured she didn't crawl out of it and onto roads and into cities to fight monsters.
At least Amphitrite was real. Unfortunately, there wasn't a way to look up the Enochian Sam was swiftly committing to memory, and the marks as he remembered them from the window didn't get him anything, either. There was no way of knowing what any of it meant or what any of it would do. They were left with two options, now, unless he could convince Sam that Lucifer was a lying fraud, which didn't seem likely to happen. In any case, using what the Devil gave them wasn't worth the risk. Not to Dean. He just didn't know how to tell Sam that they could not trust Lucifer without making it sound like he didn't trust Sam which wasn't a can of worms he wanted to open. There just wasn't a good way to start the conversation.
Sam mumbled something about the way the words didn't sound like words that obviously wasn't directed at his brother, then chuckled like someone had insulted him in a way he deserved - it was a surprisingly distinct laugh. The awkward little smile on his face was just too innocent, too much like the face he made when he was being teased, or flirting. And then he started to speak Enochian again, like nothing had happened, just the corners of his mouth turned up a little higher than before.
Dean would have killed for a beer, just then. There was another little problem with telling Sam they had no reason to trust the Devil.
The Devil made Sam happy.
It was only a recent development, Dean knew, but every so often it showed a little, in things he doubted his brother even noticed, in impossibly strange moments. And as stupid as it was, Dean did not want to take any sliver of happiness away from Sam, no matter where it came from.
Thus he had come to an impasse. Because nothing was worth dealing with something that evil, but maybe Sammy, because he was worth anything. Dean felt his teeth start to grind.
Usually, he would just go with his gut and regret it later. This was a lot of things but 'usual' wasn't one of them.
Belatedly, Dean realized that Sam had gone quiet on his bed and his own hand now hovered over the mouse pad about the scroll down through another article about Amphitrite. Dean let himself glance sidelong at Sam, worried. He didn't know what he expected to find, but it wasn't his brother staring at him, the piece of paper with his Enochian notes on his knees, frowning like he'd said something especially rude. Dean hadn't said anything, rude or otherwise. He'd just been sitting there, pretending to look things up, mulling over a situation he had no love for and trying to figure a way to defuse it before it blew up in his face.
"Just say it already, it'll make you feel better." Sam told him, and flipped the paper onto the nightstand with practiced ease.
"Say what?" Dean growled at a porn advertisement on the side of the web-page he was browsing.
"He's Lucifer and it doesn't matter what he wants, we can't trust him. Ask me how I can I do this again. After Cas and Crowley, how can I even think about trusting Satan, right?"
"Took 'em right out of my mouth." Dean couldn't look at Sam, not just then, because he knew what he'd see. He'd see his brother's face like a mask over all of the old guilt and worry, and a flare of pigheadedness that rivaled his own, and regret, and passion, and a desire to be trusted even if it meant putting faith in things that didn't deserve it. Dean didn't want to see all of that. Because he would, this time. Sam believed. He believed in Lucifer like he believed in God, and Dean could not tell him to his face that a couple of good dreams and a kiss meant nothing to Satan.
Sam breathed like he didn't want to be violent even though every fiber in him wanted to start throwing punches. Dean knew that's what it was because he felt that way, too. There wasn't an easy way around this. No quick fix. There were only logical, heartless ways to point out the problems, and Dean knew that wasn't what Sam needed.
Dean knew that Sam knew the problems already. That was the frustrating part.
"What's the worst that can happen, really?" Sam asked, softly. "I started the Apocalypse, Dean. I've kind of screwed the pooch well beyond anything some simple spell like this is capable of."
"We started it," Dean corrected him and accidentally met Sam's eyes. He saw everything he'd feared he'd see in them.
"What could this possibly do that we haven't already done?"
Dean thought of a thousand things in the course of a heartbeat, but none of the quite amounted to ending the whole world and sparking a war between factions of angels. Even if the spell vaporized every cheeseburger in the world, or destroyed every leader, or brought forth an ancient Hell-beast, that didn't add up to what they'd caused before. "What if destroys all porn?" Dean suggested.
Sam frowned and then shrugged. "People make new stuff."
Point and counterpoint.
"Besides," Sam went on. "There won't be much porn if Leviathans make people into cattle."
Dean took a breath and let it out in a long, drawn out sigh, and all of his fight went with it. There was something about how Sam took all of his worries and thoughts and knitted them into the wrinkles of his forehead that made keeping the fight up that much more difficult. Maybe Dean was wrong to trust his brother's judgment. Maybe he was playing Russian roulette with half loaded revolver. Maybe the world would just end no matter how many times or ways they tried to save it.
"Goddamn it, Sammy, I don't want to watch you do this." Dean was out of his chair and pacing because it felt good to move, talking to the strip of carpet that ran between the beds and the wall where the desk was. The words caught in his throat like they had barbs in them; each one tore a little, but he couldn't just let this go that easily. "And you aren't right. You aren't. We shouldn't trust Lucifer for any reason at all, but..." His green eyes met Sam's and he narrowed them, willed his brother to understand. "But I don't give one little bit about should right now. You're all giggles and goofy faces and you haven't had a moment since who knows when. So just..."
"Just?" Sam prodded.
Dean threw up his hands in defeat. "So do it! Use your freaky Devil magic to call up whatever, because I'm going to shoot it in the face if it tries to hurt you."
For a moment there was quiet in the room, stillness, but it wasn't awkward, really. Dean just kept his eyes on Sam, waiting for a response.
"What do you mean I'm all giggles?" Came the question, but he reached out an picked up the chant again like the answer wasn't important.
Dean made his way back to the computer, shaking his head, grumbling, "If you don't know, you never will."
- - -
The sunset was anticlimactic, the rainclouds and thunderheads drowned out the light long before the sun sank behind the horizon, the cloud cover thick like a wool blanket between the Earth and the sky. Lightning split the night in vibrant flashes, crackled across the belly of the clouds. The alleyway they'd settled in didn't have much cover or much light, and Sam was relatively sure he was going to be soaked to the bones by the time they were finished, no matter how closely they clung to the brick wall. They were out behind an abandoned building that might have been a house once, judging by the driveway and the two story set up. It looked like it had been converted into a business at some point, just like it's neighbors, but it hadn't survived the change. Now it was a big red thing, decaying, with a sign out front about an impending beautification process sponsored by the city.
The drainage was alright, at least, and the back of the building still hand awnings worth huddling under. The asphalt was crooked and cracked and the chain link fence at the corner of the building didn't lock, but that didn't matter.
Of course, a nature goddess would want to be summoned outside. It only made laying out the altar cloth that much harder and painting a bloody sigil across it that much less possible, and the whole ordeal a miserable effort. Dean insisted they use his blood, for whatever reason, but he let Sam do the chanting, one hand on a shotgun the whole time, the other on a machete. There couldn't be any candles or burning herbs or any of the usual personal touches that got put into rituals designed to summon specific gods. There was just rain that felt like cold marbles and wind that threatened to cut like a razor blade.
Sam could hardly hear himself speaking at normal volume, so he eventually started to yell, calling out over the crash of thunder and the flap of roofing tiles. When he faltered a voice joined his, reminding where the emphasis went, when to pause. The fact that Dean couldn't hear that voice almost, almost made him smile.
For a moment when he was finished the rain tasted salty, like sea foam thrown up into the wind. The storm lessened, the gusts reduced to a breeze, the rain lightened to a drizzle. The rush of water in the street was audible. Thunder rumbled somewhere more distant than overhead.
Sam felt cold for the first time since they'd begun. Dean visibly repressed a shiver and leaned just a little further under the awning. They didn't talk. They stood facing each other, waiting for the world to come crashing down around them.
-- -- --
It was drive-thru again, mostly because the only decent breakfast restaurant in town had been shut down and neither of them felt much like waiting until lunch or driving around for an hour in downtown looking for something tastier. The weather had turned to icy rain, which was two or four months out of season. The townsfolk didn't seem to mind it. There were still pedestrians wrapped in peacoats and bicyclists covered in plastic ponchos, still cars zipping from stoplight to sign to parking spot. Sam could hardly see out of the windshield the rain was so intense and the windows so fogged from their breathing.
Maybe this weather would be alright in Canada, but not here. Not in California. Sam knew that California wasn't all sunshine and beaches, but this wasn't anything he'd ever seen near the valley.
"It's like Hell froze over, isn't it?" Lucifer's voice almost made Sam spill the remainer of his coffee all over his pants, but he caught it at the last possible second. Dean still looked at him sidelong. No lying about that one.
"You okay?" Dean asked him, and his eyes flicked to the backseat like he might catch sight of the Devil reclining on his upholstery.
"Yeah. Fine," Sam didn't try to explain. For a moment he sat in silence, his cup in both hands, before he let his eyes meet Dean's in unspoken question. The silence stretched. Dean didn't move. They simply remained in the car, in the rain, the invisible elephant named Lucifer filling the space between them.
The Devil stretched out in the back of the car and let out a long, loud sigh. "I didn't mean to scare you, Sammy. Honest. But now that it's over, how about you tell your brother it isn't Poseidon. If it was, I am pretty sure this wouldn't even be a town anymore. Just a swamp. But those old gods, they're pretty high and mighty, you know?" He reached up to the window and held out a finger like he was about to smear the condensation that had gathered there and paused. "They don't like climbing off their high horses unless they really, really have to."
"Are you seeing that?" Sam asked Dean, and Lucifer began to trace a design on the glass, his blue eyes turned so Sam couldn't read them.
"Holy-" Dean tried to turn, his fingers going for whatever weapon was handy, before he finally came out with a gun he could point at what must have looked like empty air to him. He spoke right over Lucifer's laugh. "Are we haunted? I am so tired of being haunted." He started to mumble, to rant, but Sam didn't care.
"What is it?" Sam asked Lucifer, and the Devil glanced at him before he kept right on doodling on the window.
"How am I supposed to know?!" His brother replied.
Sam didn't quite glare at Dean. Instead, he waited.
Lucifer drew a circle around the symbol he'd finger painted, added a couple doodads around it, scribbled what might have been letters. The design didn't take up the whole window, just a portion of it, but the details were swiftly fading, running in wet lines down the glass. When he was finished, his hand went to his jean covered knee and he smiled. "Enochian, actually. I'm pretty good at traditional witchcraft, but you don't like it and this should work just fine."
"To do what?" Sam didn't care that Dean was staring at him, his gun wavering.
"Summon Amphitrite," Lucifer almost shrugged but the motion didn't quite finish. He seemed lethargic, slow, like he hadn't slept or rested since the night before. Maybe it wasn't his morning. He'd never seemed that bad off, even when Nick had been falling apart around him. "You're idiot brother shrugged her off last night. She's a lot less of a dick than her husband is and this is more of a compulsion than a summoning, so it won't piss her off that you called. Gotta write it in blood though, and I can teach you the chant." He took another deep breath and turned his gaze on Dean. "Would you tell him to put that away before he hurts himself?"
Sam glanced momentarily at Dean before he realized just how crazy this all had to be to him and pushed the barrel of the gun away from Lucifer. Somehow, Dean got the hint and sat the gun carefully on the seat between them, his eyes as round as dinner plates.
"Who's Amphitrite?" Sam tried to keep his voice even.
"Poseidon's wife. She used to be the greatest sea goddess on Earth, and then men decided women couldn't hold that much power, so her legends got credited to Poseidon. Not the point." Lucifer answered, and gestured like that idea was unimportant, like there were other things that needed attention right now, like how heavily he was leaning on the seat and how thickly he swallowed. "Point is, if she's picked up a weapon and decided to wreak war on your enemies, you might as well meet her. She's not usually the type, but she's got all the fury of the sea on her side, and then some."
"Sam?" Dean tried to interrupt, but paused the instant Sam held up a hand to keep him silent. There was frustration in the line of Dean's jaw.
"And the chant?" Sam asked, because that was a much more fitting question than asking Lucifer why he looked like he'd been out on a bender and hadn't showered in the morning.
Lucifer nodded. "Get a pen when you get back to the motel. I'll tell you then. And Sam..." He pushed himself up and leaned closer, close enough that Sam could feel breath on his face, but didn't dare react to it. The Devil's icy blue eyes held him perfectly in place. He knew what was coming even before the word left Lucifer's lips. "Hurry."
There was flicker and a flash and Lucifer wasn't in the backseat anymore, just the remains of what he had drawn on the glass to show that he'd ever been there. With painstaking slowness, Sam turned to the thing on the window and tried to commit it to memory, because he seriously doubted Lucifer was going to have the strength to draw it again. But why was that? Sam didn't allow himself to think about it. Instead, when he had the symbol burned into his mind, he turned back to his brother and opened his mouth to explain what was going on.
Dean, the guy that could stare down angels and fight gods and had thought his way out of the perfect dream, looked seriously spooked. "Sammy?" His voice was just a little too airy.
"Yeah?"
Dean still had one hand on the gun, so he had to point over his shoulder at the thing on the window. "Did Lucifer just draw that on my car?"
"It's Enochian..." Sam started.
"But it was Lucifer, not some... freaky mental projection."
Sam hadn't thought of that, and the observation shocked him. "Oh, crap," he turned away from the back seat entirely and thought of that dream he'd had, that kiss, the other things that had been said. It felt to him a bit like being hit in the face with a very hard, very heavy object. The things the Devil had said made sense all of a sudden, even the parts that had seemed contradictory, the parts that had seemed impossible. "His grace. He wasn't lying about his grace," Sam said to himself.
"What?"
"It doesn't matter. We need to get back to the motel. I don't think there's much time." Sam wanted to reach for the keys himself because Dean was just sitting there, looking at him like he was an idiot, or maybe he had forgotten to shave for a little longer than was acceptable.
"You don't just say something about the Devil's grace and then we drive away to use an Enochian symbol to summon some goddess. That's not how it works. Tell me what's going on." Dean pulled the keys out of the ignition like he was reading his brother's mind, his expression as unmoving as a stone. He didn't seem angry, exactly, or even overly concerned, just confused and stubborn. He was doing that thing where he withdrew all of his emotions and mannerisms and tried to make it seem as if he didn't really care either way as long as he knew Sam was alright. Which meant that wasn't the case. He wanted everything to be normal and fine, on top of Sam being alright. It also meant that if any emotion was going to rear up and break out, it would be anger, because Dean was bad at showing concern without it.
Sam breathed in slowly and let the air out in a rush. There was no lying now, not that he could get away with. "The other day, Lucifer told me that... that when I didn't have a soul, his grace kept my body alive. Because you can't be soulless. Even when demons make deals for them, the soul stays on loan until you die, right?" He didn't really expect Dean to get it or to answer, so he talked to the rain pitter-pattering on the windshield, instead. "Point is, he's like a shadow, I guess. And I can see him, but you can't. And he can keep the nightmares and the hallucinations away, if he tries hard enough. Because I'm his last window out of the Cage, you know? Half a vessel. A quarter of one. Whatever. He doesn't want me to die, though, which is going to happen if the world gets overrun." He looked down at the garbage on the floor because it didn't have a pitiful gaze to cast at him.
Dean was quiet for almost a whole minute while he digested that. He jingled the keys. He looked out the driver's side window. "So, Satan wants to save the world because you're in it. And it's because Cas pulled you out of the pit crooked." It should have been a question, but it wasn't one. It was like Dean blamed himself for it, almost.
"More or less."
"And what happens if he gets out for good then? If he manipulates you into opening the door again and letting him walk free?" Dean's voice cut like a knife, because those hadn't been Sam's concerns, before. And now they had to be. Before, it had just been what he saw and what he felt and the things Lucifer said and did, not what he wanted.
"We haven't talked about it. He..." Sam didn't really know how to say it. Letting Lucifer free had never been in his mind, not ever.
"He hasn't asked?" And now Dean was looking at him, searching the side of his face for lies.
"No. He hasn't." Sam's words were a breath between them.
Slowly, Dean nodded. His right hand brought the keys back to the ignition and turned; the engine purred to life. He set the car in gear and started to pull out onto the street. "Goddamn it, I hate demons."
"He's an angel, you realize."
"Yeah, that makes him trustworthy."
- - -
Dean hated that Sam sounded like he was speaking Enochian. It wasn't a language either of them were familiar with, not intimately, but he could still pick out syllables that Castiel had used for things, kind of pick out commonalities. And the thing Sam had taken to practicing in the corner of their motel room sounded exactly like Enochian, down to the rolled 'R's and overuse of 'A.' Dean didn't want that to be the case. He wanted the thing in the back of his car to be anything but what it had seemed to be.
They'd done enough working with the allies of Hell. Dean didn't want anything else to do with it.
So he quietly researched what he could about Amphitrite, and realized that he'd looked at a couple of pages on her the night before but disregarded her when he had found Poseidon. She was too into the sea, not enough into smiting threats. He'd figured she didn't crawl out of it and onto roads and into cities to fight monsters.
At least Amphitrite was real. Unfortunately, there wasn't a way to look up the Enochian Sam was swiftly committing to memory, and the marks as he remembered them from the window didn't get him anything, either. There was no way of knowing what any of it meant or what any of it would do. They were left with two options, now, unless he could convince Sam that Lucifer was a lying fraud, which didn't seem likely to happen. In any case, using what the Devil gave them wasn't worth the risk. Not to Dean. He just didn't know how to tell Sam that they could not trust Lucifer without making it sound like he didn't trust Sam which wasn't a can of worms he wanted to open. There just wasn't a good way to start the conversation.
Sam mumbled something about the way the words didn't sound like words that obviously wasn't directed at his brother, then chuckled like someone had insulted him in a way he deserved - it was a surprisingly distinct laugh. The awkward little smile on his face was just too innocent, too much like the face he made when he was being teased, or flirting. And then he started to speak Enochian again, like nothing had happened, just the corners of his mouth turned up a little higher than before.
Dean would have killed for a beer, just then. There was another little problem with telling Sam they had no reason to trust the Devil.
The Devil made Sam happy.
It was only a recent development, Dean knew, but every so often it showed a little, in things he doubted his brother even noticed, in impossibly strange moments. And as stupid as it was, Dean did not want to take any sliver of happiness away from Sam, no matter where it came from.
Thus he had come to an impasse. Because nothing was worth dealing with something that evil, but maybe Sammy, because he was worth anything. Dean felt his teeth start to grind.
Usually, he would just go with his gut and regret it later. This was a lot of things but 'usual' wasn't one of them.
Belatedly, Dean realized that Sam had gone quiet on his bed and his own hand now hovered over the mouse pad about the scroll down through another article about Amphitrite. Dean let himself glance sidelong at Sam, worried. He didn't know what he expected to find, but it wasn't his brother staring at him, the piece of paper with his Enochian notes on his knees, frowning like he'd said something especially rude. Dean hadn't said anything, rude or otherwise. He'd just been sitting there, pretending to look things up, mulling over a situation he had no love for and trying to figure a way to defuse it before it blew up in his face.
"Just say it already, it'll make you feel better." Sam told him, and flipped the paper onto the nightstand with practiced ease.
"Say what?" Dean growled at a porn advertisement on the side of the web-page he was browsing.
"He's Lucifer and it doesn't matter what he wants, we can't trust him. Ask me how I can I do this again. After Cas and Crowley, how can I even think about trusting Satan, right?"
"Took 'em right out of my mouth." Dean couldn't look at Sam, not just then, because he knew what he'd see. He'd see his brother's face like a mask over all of the old guilt and worry, and a flare of pigheadedness that rivaled his own, and regret, and passion, and a desire to be trusted even if it meant putting faith in things that didn't deserve it. Dean didn't want to see all of that. Because he would, this time. Sam believed. He believed in Lucifer like he believed in God, and Dean could not tell him to his face that a couple of good dreams and a kiss meant nothing to Satan.
Sam breathed like he didn't want to be violent even though every fiber in him wanted to start throwing punches. Dean knew that's what it was because he felt that way, too. There wasn't an easy way around this. No quick fix. There were only logical, heartless ways to point out the problems, and Dean knew that wasn't what Sam needed.
Dean knew that Sam knew the problems already. That was the frustrating part.
"What's the worst that can happen, really?" Sam asked, softly. "I started the Apocalypse, Dean. I've kind of screwed the pooch well beyond anything some simple spell like this is capable of."
"We started it," Dean corrected him and accidentally met Sam's eyes. He saw everything he'd feared he'd see in them.
"What could this possibly do that we haven't already done?"
Dean thought of a thousand things in the course of a heartbeat, but none of the quite amounted to ending the whole world and sparking a war between factions of angels. Even if the spell vaporized every cheeseburger in the world, or destroyed every leader, or brought forth an ancient Hell-beast, that didn't add up to what they'd caused before. "What if destroys all porn?" Dean suggested.
Sam frowned and then shrugged. "People make new stuff."
Point and counterpoint.
"Besides," Sam went on. "There won't be much porn if Leviathans make people into cattle."
Dean took a breath and let it out in a long, drawn out sigh, and all of his fight went with it. There was something about how Sam took all of his worries and thoughts and knitted them into the wrinkles of his forehead that made keeping the fight up that much more difficult. Maybe Dean was wrong to trust his brother's judgment. Maybe he was playing Russian roulette with half loaded revolver. Maybe the world would just end no matter how many times or ways they tried to save it.
"Goddamn it, Sammy, I don't want to watch you do this." Dean was out of his chair and pacing because it felt good to move, talking to the strip of carpet that ran between the beds and the wall where the desk was. The words caught in his throat like they had barbs in them; each one tore a little, but he couldn't just let this go that easily. "And you aren't right. You aren't. We shouldn't trust Lucifer for any reason at all, but..." His green eyes met Sam's and he narrowed them, willed his brother to understand. "But I don't give one little bit about should right now. You're all giggles and goofy faces and you haven't had a moment since who knows when. So just..."
"Just?" Sam prodded.
Dean threw up his hands in defeat. "So do it! Use your freaky Devil magic to call up whatever, because I'm going to shoot it in the face if it tries to hurt you."
For a moment there was quiet in the room, stillness, but it wasn't awkward, really. Dean just kept his eyes on Sam, waiting for a response.
"What do you mean I'm all giggles?" Came the question, but he reached out an picked up the chant again like the answer wasn't important.
Dean made his way back to the computer, shaking his head, grumbling, "If you don't know, you never will."
- - -
The sunset was anticlimactic, the rainclouds and thunderheads drowned out the light long before the sun sank behind the horizon, the cloud cover thick like a wool blanket between the Earth and the sky. Lightning split the night in vibrant flashes, crackled across the belly of the clouds. The alleyway they'd settled in didn't have much cover or much light, and Sam was relatively sure he was going to be soaked to the bones by the time they were finished, no matter how closely they clung to the brick wall. They were out behind an abandoned building that might have been a house once, judging by the driveway and the two story set up. It looked like it had been converted into a business at some point, just like it's neighbors, but it hadn't survived the change. Now it was a big red thing, decaying, with a sign out front about an impending beautification process sponsored by the city.
The drainage was alright, at least, and the back of the building still hand awnings worth huddling under. The asphalt was crooked and cracked and the chain link fence at the corner of the building didn't lock, but that didn't matter.
Of course, a nature goddess would want to be summoned outside. It only made laying out the altar cloth that much harder and painting a bloody sigil across it that much less possible, and the whole ordeal a miserable effort. Dean insisted they use his blood, for whatever reason, but he let Sam do the chanting, one hand on a shotgun the whole time, the other on a machete. There couldn't be any candles or burning herbs or any of the usual personal touches that got put into rituals designed to summon specific gods. There was just rain that felt like cold marbles and wind that threatened to cut like a razor blade.
Sam could hardly hear himself speaking at normal volume, so he eventually started to yell, calling out over the crash of thunder and the flap of roofing tiles. When he faltered a voice joined his, reminding where the emphasis went, when to pause. The fact that Dean couldn't hear that voice almost, almost made him smile.
For a moment when he was finished the rain tasted salty, like sea foam thrown up into the wind. The storm lessened, the gusts reduced to a breeze, the rain lightened to a drizzle. The rush of water in the street was audible. Thunder rumbled somewhere more distant than overhead.
Sam felt cold for the first time since they'd begun. Dean visibly repressed a shiver and leaned just a little further under the awning. They didn't talk. They stood facing each other, waiting for the world to come crashing down around them.