Bend the Bracket 13
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
-- -- --
Heaven was supposed to be brimming with happy memories - or at least pleasant ones - moments that a person defined as the best and greatest in their life, that they held on to in dark times, clung to on cold, lonely nights. Dean expected to find himself setting off fireworks with Sam or curled up with Lisa or playing catch with Ben - or even arguing about candy and pie and comedians on Bobby's couch, maybe ditching that brothel with Cas. He had not expected the silence.
The heaven he'd landed in wasn't his, because snow didn't belong in Heaven unless it had a purpose. And his arm was still broken.
Dean lay spread-eagle on a snow-covered lawn, little q-tips of ice falling down around him in the perfect stillness. There was a leafless tree not far off and it blocked out a portion of the night sky that the clouds didn't reach. Other than that, Dean felt grass under the thin blanket of snow against his back and stars he didn't recognize - there wasn't anything that screamed to him that this was a memory or a place he had been or a time when he had been happiest. It just was.
On a whim he moved his arms down and then up again and pulled his feet together, just once. Carefully, he sat up and climbed out of the mark he'd made and smiled down at it, perhaps a little more amused than a grown man had any right to be.
He'd made a snow-angel. In Heaven. In a cemetery.
Why would Heaven have a cemetery?
He turned very slowly in a circle, scanning the headstones, the tombstones. There were other trees, all of them leafless, and soft warm lights that didn't fight back the darkness so much as weaken it, shadows that could have hidden anything, but held nothing. There were no birds or bats or cars. There wasn't a path or a road out of the cemetery, either.
"Sam?" Dean called in a whisper that carried in the night like a scream. He kept turning, looking for the fallen shape of his brother amidst the dead. "Sammy?" His voice came out a little louder.
He made two full rotations and saw nothing, heard nothing. A thought filled his head and went immediately to his stomach, heavy like a stone.
The trident. He'd been so focused on the trident. And then, at the last possible instant...
"Cas..." He said into the night. Maybe he'd warped himself to the opposite side of Heaven than Sam on accident. But that would be alright if it was the case, because he and Cas could find him before they went back home.
The lights around a nearby mausoleum dimmed for a moment, just out of the corner of his eye, and he frowned at it, curious. A sign, maybe, though he didn't dare hope. The little building was decked out with angel figurines and little winged babies, overgrown with evergreen ivy, more like an inviting vacation home in the middle of graveyard than a house for the dead. The huge iron door was just slightly open.
Like someone had forgotten to shut it on their way out.
Dean made careful progress toward that door, dusted snow flurries off of his face twice before he decided that maybe nothing was going to come crashing out of the silence to eat him and started to move faster. It was cold. He didn't have any weapons. He was already dead. Odds weren't great that he should be worried.
Still, habit made him push the door just open enough to creep into the mausoleum. He poked his head in, took slow, small steps, tasted the air as well as smelled it. There was usually a dusty sort of dead smell that came with graves and the like, but the stone building didn't have that on the inside. It was damp and cool, but not cold like outside, and the heavy metallic scent that filled the air brought every hair on the back of Dean's neck to attention. Blood. Whoever this Heaven belonged to, they had a bloodstained cemetery that hardly seemed consistent with the souls worthy enough to get in.
The room wasn't large or well lit, maybe eight feet across with no urns or decorations or the like. At the back of it a staircase lead downward in a spiral.
"This looks less and less like Heaven every second," Dean whispered to himself, and wished to God he had something to shank demons or angels or whatever with. Maybe just a shotgun. In any case, he steadied himself and started down the stairs, one at a time, leaning to look as far ahead of himself as he could without risk of falling. He didn't have very far to go.
- - -
"Stay away from the demons that don't look distracted, it's impossible to tell if they'll run to Crowley or not," Lucifer told Sam in a yell that reached him as a whisper. The sulfur scented wind washed up at them impossibly fast. Falling, Sam realized, was at first frightening, and then exhilarating, and finally, when he could calm down enough to look and to see the things they fell beyond and toward, frightening for a whole new set of reasons. To start with, he didn't know how he planned to stop besides slamming into what looked like a great marble floor more than a thousand feet away. Second, there were people. Every one of them had snapped at some point in Crowley's Hell, and they were dragged to their racks kicking and screaming and angry, fierce, and the pain the demons caused them sometimes resulted in broken, hysterical laughter.
If Crowley had meant to change the system of Hell with his renovations, he'd failed. There was still pain everywhere, even if the torturers sometimes had to be a bit more creative to get the scream they wanted.
Lucifer didn't talk about the whys or hows or apologize for what Hell was. He only stayed where Sam could see him and commented on how safe they were or how likely it was they'd be noticed if they shifted too much just now. He kept conversation clipped and clean. He didn't tease or joke or even look Sam in the eyes.
It was like he was hiding something, but Sam didn't have the time or the facilities to wonder what at the moment. He had much, much bigger problems to worry about.
Sam didn't know how long they fell for. He knew it was too long, however.
"Close your eyes," the Devil said when the marble floor didn't seem too distant any more. "We're close enough now, but I don't know what will happen, so close your eyes."
"Close enough for what?" Sam's voice came out a crackling whisper, but Lucifer still heard him.
"Me."
Light, as if from nowhere, burst around them and Sam forced his eyes closed, pressed his hands over his face. He didn't know if that was the Devil or something else, but the brightness was too sudden in the half-shadows of Hell, too pure. It ruined the twilight like midday brightened out of dawn. The shock of it kept him from noticing that their descent had slowed until he felt the wind had subsided a bit. He couldn't open his eyes to see.
The last part of the fall felt almost instantaneous to him, but that the wind stopped and the light faded as soon as his numb feet touched ground. He'd almost forgotten what standing was like. A little stunned, he cracked an eyelid and fought down the questions he had for Lucifer, aware that now was not the time nor here the place to ask what had happened, or why every bone in his body was not broken. Hell had too many eyes and too may ears in its deepest parts.
Lucifer was still with him, though he looked tired, strained. The Devil's eyes moved to the left and he gestured, quick and violent. "Guards. Maybe a dozen."
Sam didn't see anything to hide behind, any shadow or table to dash under. There was just the glassed floor and smoke and rubble and chains, and stairs leading wall to wall downward. He'd come down right in the open with no weapon at hand.
"A dozen guards? Seriously? And what am I supposed to do? Fight them?" Sam hissed, and stepped back toward one of the walls in attempt to make himself look smaller.
"Blend in," Satan suggested.
"With demon guards?"
Lucifer turned his cold gaze on Sam and hissed, "Yes, Sam, blend in with the demon guards. Tell them you're a messenger or you want to fight for a post at the door or something, but don't stand there with your thumb up your ass crying about how this is Hell and you've got nothing but your great big heart and a head full of crazy to fight with." There was a tone of urgency in Lucifer's voice that Sam had never heard, honest worry. "You have a ticket out, remember? The worst case scenario here is you backing out before you get your hands on the weapon that can give you a chance to save the world."
"But what about Dean?" Sam hardly breathed. "I'm not leaving without Dean, too, you know."
"There's a chance he went upstairs while you went down, jackass." Lucifer growled. "You ever think that while you were chanting about the trident, he was thinking about his little gay angel in a trench coat?"
That made Sam's mouth go dry. There was no knowing where Dean was, if he was even in Hell, and Lucifer, of all people, pointing that out made him feel sick. But there wasn't time for that, not now. He pushed himself away from the wall and tried with all of his might to look like he was an intimidating, terrifying demon, put on a gruff face, forced himself to breathe easier. Maybe now that the initial shock was over and he'd fallen so far into Hell he couldn't think straight, fear didn't mean that much any more.
He didn't know where he was going, but he walked like he did, like he belonged, like he'd done this a thousand times before. It was just another lie, really, and he'd lied a lot. There was no reason to feel more danger lying to demons than he did lying to people.
Before long, he began to descend the stairs.
- - -
The room at the end of the staircase was not what Dean had expected, not even remotely. While he had walked down the stairs he had thought of a laboratory or a hospital room or a torture chamber, at the end of which he'd figured he'd find nothing but a dying angel and pool of blood, but that wasn't what was waiting for him. The lighting was dim like the rest of the cemetery had been, crappy electric, like something out of a horror film. There was a table, strewn with everything from pencils to knives to a child's teddy bear, and an empty chair turned toward the back wall. A notepad and a stack of papers sat in the chair, abandoned.
At the back of the room something shifted, separated from him by a metal grate or the wall of a cage. In the thickest shadows by the wall he could see nothing, only hear a sound like a stuttering breath and the catch of a hitched gasp through a clenched throat. There was no mistaking that sound. Dean could not have stopped his feet from propelling him forward until his fingers touched the key ring hanging just a foot from the chair.
He had it in the lock before he even knew what he was doing. He fought with it for a second before he realized he'd locked it rather than unlocking it and started all over again. He had the door open, the hinges shrieking their protest, before a small, familiar voice finally found his ears.
"Dean?" The disbelief was so heavy in the name it weighed tangibly on Dean's shoulders. "How could... no, you're not here. You can't be here. If you're here, you're-"
"Shut up, Cas." Dean reached out into the darkness and found something, though he could not tell in the dark what it was. Wet, and warm. He didn't care. His fingers moved from what he'd found up to a rumpled sleeve and eventually, to the curve of a shoulder. A shudder rippled through the body under his fingertips and he almost pulled back but didn't dare to let go now that he had a grip on Cas.
The angel did move then, in a way that Dean had not expected. In a surge of shaking muscle and blood-soaked clothing, Castiel moved into him, slammed him against the side of the cage and into the light.
At first, Dean could make out Cas's sea blue eyes and nothing else, too close, and then his almost-black hair, the contours and lines of his face. Blood, so much blood, from the curve of his neck to the cuffs of his shirt, the angel was covered in it, most of it dried, some of it fresh. But even that could not keep Dean's eyes from the wings that stretched out behind him, bloody and tattered, the tips pressed to either wall only half-spread.
"You're really..." Cas breathed, just air on Dean's face, and the wall of feathers behind him shivered. "You're really here."
"Yeah, Cas, I'm really... are those... your wings?" Dean tried to meet Cas's eyes, but he couldn't. He tried to decide what color the feathers were, but he couldn't do that either. With all of his will, he looked the angel and the face and fought with the emotions that roiled to life in his gut. Really, he'd had a speech planned. And now it was utterly useless, completely forgotten, locked up behind a lump that would not go down his throat, tied up in his chest somewhere. And his fingers wouldn't leave Cas alone. The moment he tried to let go they'd come back somewhere else, like metal to a magnet.
"I've been trying to get rid of them," Cas explained, and buried a blood-covered hand in Dean's coat like it was not something new or intimate. "So I can fall."
"What, no, Cas... why would you..."
"Why have I ever done anything, Dean? If it wasn't for orders?" There was just the tiniest hint of sarcasm in Castiel's voice, just the tiniest human flicker.
Dean couldn't answer that, either. He just stood there, so close and yet so very far away, waiting.
"I came here because no one will find me, the few that are left won't look. It is... something of a self-enforced exile. But they will not let me leave Heaven, not the way I have before. So I will find another way." Cas leaned closer then, if that was possible, and narrowed his eyes at Dean, searching him. "Have you come to kill me for what I've done?"
"No, God... no, Cas," Dean reached up then and laid a palm on the side of the angel's cheek, ran a thumb under his left eye. The skin felt paper thin under his touch. The way Cas tilted his head into his palm was exactly like his dreams and the similarity brought up a wave of other feelings that he really couldn't be thinking about right now. "I've come to tell you I'm sorry."
Cas blinked at him, his eyebrows pressed together like he didn't understand. He opened his mouth to say as much, but words weren't going to get them anywhere just then, Dean could see it.
So Dean kissed Castiel, instead, bravely, and slipped his fingers into the angel's hair the moment his enthusiasm became mutual. He hadn't expected much participation, but he didn't mind being surprised. The moment a tongue slipped into his mouth, fluttered against his hard palate, slipped to play along the inside of his lower lip, he didn't think about what he was going to do about the whole situation, he just embraced it. And when their mouths came apart he refused to feel awkward about how close the two of them were standing, how the heat between them had to be a thousand times hotter than hellfire.
"Was that an apology?" Cas asked him, his voice a husky whisper.
Dean ran his fingers through the angel's hair, because he could and Cas did not seem to mind and his hand was there already. "The kiss was a kiss, not an apology."
"Then I would like to insist that we kiss again, otherwise I would like to apologize, too."
Dean realized that he was smiling then, though he wasn't entirely sure how he could be. There were too many things wrong for him to be smiling. "We can worry about that later. We gotta get out of here."
"What? How?"
Disentangling himself from Cas was both easier and harder than he'd expected. To start with, he wanted to throw himself at the angel and forget all about everything that had gone wrong and just figure it out the old fashioned way. Secondly, if he didn't get away just then, they'd end up doing something stupid.
"There was a spell with this Latin phrase. All I have to do is grab a hold of you and hold on, close my eyes, click my heels, and think of home." Dean explained, and kept a firm hold of Cas's wrist while he moved back into the main part of the room. "I have to hurry, too. For all I know, Sam's back already, waiting for me."
There was a ruffling sound, like feathers, and Cas followed him through the door to the cage without pause. "You... you think that will work?"
Dean shrugged. "It was supposed to work on Poseidon's trident, so why not?"
"Poseidon's trident?" Castiel repeated, and his voice was suddenly deadpan and serious. It was enough to make Dean look up at him then, in the brighter light. He looked gaunt, hollow, weak. The tragedy that had come of his wings was hidden, maybe because he knew how uncomfortable their bedraggled state made Dean feel. "The trident? You found a spell that can pull it up, if you can find it?"
"Yeah, Cas. What's the big deal?"
Cas shook his head and squeezed Dean's hand in his. "There is no such thing as Poseidon's trident, Dean. He carried one, but it was stolen."
"Then somebody found it."
"It was stolen and reforged, consecrated in the fires of Hell, the metal mixed with the blood of demons and, some say, Lucifer. It can kill angels, Dean." The severity with which Cas spoke still did not make sense to Dean.
"So?"
The expression that got him was two-thirds annoyed, one-third horrified. "It is the Devil's weapon. He doesn't fight with a sword like a normal Archangel, he fights with a trident. The trident. I wouldn't be surprised if..." He looked down, like he might be able to see through the stone floor to the Earth, and through the Earth into the Pit beyond. He didn't say it; they both knew already.
"Then... you're telling me Sam's in the Pit right now, looking for the Devil's harpoon, and I'm up here, in Heaven, thinking about..." Dean managed to stop there, a little worried that saying his thoughts aloud might ruin their reunion, if it could be called that. Instead, he cleared his throat and barreled on. "Do you have enough juice in that grace of yours to get us into Hell?"
"No." Cas admitted. "I don't have enough... juice left to do that."
"Come here, then. Time to fly away home."
- - -
There was still fire, but the light it gave off seemed choked by the smoke-blackened walls. At first the guards simply let Sam walk by, maybe because he looked like he knew where he was going, maybe because he didn't look at them, until he came to the end of the flight of stairs and looked out on a long strip of floor, the obsidian decorated with symbols he didn't know, but vaguely remembered. They might have been devil's traps once, or something like them, but they'd faded, and few had been scratched and broken and worn thin - destroyed from the inside-out mostly.
There might have been six hundred of them, and maybe sixty-five of them were unrecognizable.
Further along, beyond the seals, built into the very foundation of whatever rock it was that Hell was built on, an impossibly huge cage rested, the width and breadth of it larger than any building Sam could think of. It might have been the size of a stadium. The gilded bars of the door were closed with a familiar looking design of four connected circles, reminiscent of the rings of the horsemen.
Sam opened his mouth to ask why they had come here, to demand answers, when he saw them, wrestling for dominance in the Cage. To say that he saw angels was not accurate, not as far as he understood them. They were creatures of anger and violence, beasts of unending light, and he couldn't tell Michael from Lucifer just then, but that that little handful of grace tugged in his chest, pulsed with every blow that landed, turned to ice the instant the tide turned. There were wings and eyes and light, but nothing even vaguely reminiscent of a human. What happened in that cage was as beautiful as it was terrifying, and he knew, somehow, that if he kept looking, he would remember things he had no desire to think about.
His memories of the Cage were sometimes infinitely detailed, but usually they bled together like a ruined painting, the subject obvious, the emotion behind it utterly lost.
There was a faint light deeper in the Cage, though it was only faint because it was surrounded by the light of Archangels. Adam, Sam knew, and tired not to think about what the kid had to be going through whenever the other two lost interest in each other.
"Why are you here?" The question was asked by a man - demon - standing not to far in front of him. The demon had come forward from the group of five standing just before the floor turned to patterns. Sam hadn't acknowledged them; their presence had been completely drowned by the display of might taking place behind them, and now Sam felt surprised they were there. He glanced at the man, at the hooked blade hanging at his side, and smiled.
"I wanted to see," Sam lied, and looked beyond the demon at the Cage again. "I never got to see him like that, you know? It's different when you don't have to worry about your eyes bleeding out of your skull." Even as he said it, the Cage rattled with the impact of one divine body against another and a roar - bone-shattering if Sam had had bones - bellowed out of the Cage like thunder.
The demon blinked black eyes at him, frowning, but didn't say a word.
"Hey, you wouldn't happen to know where I can find a trident, right? I was told it was down here by the Cage, so I thought I'd swing by to look..." Sam trailed off at the look that spread across the demon's features, at the shy step back he took. Sam hadn't expected that. Why would a demon be afraid of him? He couldn't think of any reason. The demon's hawkish nose curled in his expression of fear.
"You're here for the trident?" The demon said, and took another step away. "Crowley finally decided that there's no other way? He... he knows the risks involved, and I don't mean to speak above my station, but-"
Sam looked at him then, hard, and wished he had a way of making his eyes flick black or whatever, as long as the little demon kept believing his story. Instead, he forced his face into a cruel, depraved smile, because maybe that was close enough. Softly, he could hear Lucifer laughing at him, approving. The Devil let him do what he wanted though, without suggesting anything.
"He is well aware of the risks, but now is the time."
The demon nodded and stepped aside for a moment before he moved back to the others and started to slowly, glancing at Sam every so often, explain the situation.
Sam didn't see where the weapon could be, however. There wasn't much down here but the five demons and the Cage, and the icy jerk of Lucifer on his heart. Here, without his body, he couldn't tell where his soul ended and the grace began, though he could definitely make out the cold it radiated, and the echoed emotions that went through it.
He felt Lucifer's apology before he heard it.
"I know that you're going to think that I planned all of this, somehow, but I haven't," the Devil whispered, and Sam watched the line of demons move aside for him, worry and awe drawn across their faces like masks. "But if I'd told you, Dean would have stopped you. I didn't lie to you - I never have - I omitted the truth and I'm sorry for that."
Sam couldn't help but look at Lucifer, trying to understand, but the image beside him seemed weak now, broken, a shadow of the thing in the Cage. He could only wait for the Devil to continue, sympathy and anger warring for a place in his chest.
"The thing you're looking for is in that Cage, keeping Michael’s sword out of me for the most part. It's mine, now. It has been, since someone stole it and gave it to me." Lucifer did look at Sam then, with regret burning behind the coldness of his eyes, smothered like he had no desire to feel it.
"Then, the only way to get the weapon..." Sam started, just under his breath.
"Is to open that door," Lucifer finished for him. "I won't lie to you, Sam. If you do this, if you walk up there and open the Cage, I am not going to stay in it and I will do everything in my power to keep Michael from following me out. But I will fight them. I am not God, I am not all powerful, but I won't sit around and wait for this world to drown." The Devil sighed then, unamused. "I am the only one that gets to destroy this world and I am the only one that gets to decide when that happens, and it isn't now."
Sam looked at the line of demons, waiting for him to walk the distance to the Cage. "If all of this is a terrible lie... you know what will happen, don't you?" Sam asked, and put one foot in front of the other.
"Whatever it is, I won't be able to stop you."
- - -
It took Dean a long, quiet moment to remember the phrase he needed, and another moment to decide that he had enough of himself touching Cas to actually get the words out of his mouth. The angel kept telling him that holding hands would be enough if the magic was really that strong, but Dean wasn't going to risk it, not when he had to worry that the whole situation felt like a terribly good dream that he'd wake up from at any moment.
"Think of me, alright? Just in case." Dean whispered, and then wrapped his arms around Cas's back and started the chant, thinking of Sam.
By the third time through he was worried that maybe the spell hadn't worked. And then he said it the fourth time and everything shifted how it had before, slipped and coalesced in a liquid gossamer fog, everything became warm. And then cold. Very cold. And the body he'd held on to for the whole thing collapsed against him, pushed the air from his lungs.
"Jesus shit!" A voice, a woman's voice, erupted from somewhere by his feet, which wasn't down any more, because gravity had moved so that down was behind his back. There was wet sound, a sort of splashing, and the weight on his chest shifted away.
Dean dragged his eyes open. His eyelids felt like lead.
And Cas looked down at him, shock reflected like light from his eyes.
In that moment, despite everything, despite his worry for Sam, his concern for the world, Dean thought that he might be able to die a happy man.
"Get the gauze! Gauze! Never mind, get the whole Goddamn first-aid kit!" That was Cassandra, yelling at the Lovechild, Dean realized, his thoughts very, very slow. He lifted his left hand and touched the side of Castiel's face, smeared blood across his cheek and down his jaw, because that was more important than the hand pressing at the crook at his right arm, trying to staunch the flow of blood there.
"I'm guessing the angel brigade wasn't expecting me to pop in and warp you down here, now were they?" Dean asked, and felt his face crack in a smile.
"No." Cas answered seriously. "They weren't."
There was confusion while Stephanie and Cassandra worked to dress his wounds, which required at some point that Cas scoot back on his knees and, eventually, completely out of arms reach. It wasn't until they had Dean sitting up, dizzy and cold, but otherwise better off than he'd been four days prior, that his eyes slid across the room to Sam.
There was a pool of blood between them, thick and fresh and viscous, big enough that it felt like too much, though he was sure there was plenty left in the two of them. The shade of Sam's skin worried him, however, almost gray, the hollows under his eyes deep like bruises. Dean wanted nothing more than to lean over and lay a hand on his brother's shoulder and shake him awake.
"There's still time," Cassandra told him, her voice a mockery of reassurance. "Give it to him."
Dean didn't like it, and he didn't nod, but he turned away from his brother for a moment. "You can't send me after him, can you?"
"Not without recasting the spell, and I don't have the resources and you don't have the blood." Her answer was so straightforward, so true, it was all Dean could do to look her in the eye and keep from blaming her.
It was all up to Sam, now.
"Dean," Cas had taken to leaning on the wall beside him. He didn't look much better than Sam did, all things considered, but Cas had always been tougher to kill than his scrawny little frame had suggested. Dean refused to worry. He would just take in his sallow coloring, the thinness of his cheeks, and shiver, because there wasn't anything he could do but stare. "Why are you a room with a demon taking place in an ancient thaumaturgic questing ritual?"
Dean blinked, still a bit dazzled, before he cleared his throat and looked away. "Yeah... about that..." He started, wondering if maybe Cas would hate him when his explanation was through. He opened his mouth and drew in air to get himself started.
The ground beneath him gave a short, violent shake and stole away his words. The look that spread across the angel's face didn't help much, either.
-- -- --
Heaven was supposed to be brimming with happy memories - or at least pleasant ones - moments that a person defined as the best and greatest in their life, that they held on to in dark times, clung to on cold, lonely nights. Dean expected to find himself setting off fireworks with Sam or curled up with Lisa or playing catch with Ben - or even arguing about candy and pie and comedians on Bobby's couch, maybe ditching that brothel with Cas. He had not expected the silence.
The heaven he'd landed in wasn't his, because snow didn't belong in Heaven unless it had a purpose. And his arm was still broken.
Dean lay spread-eagle on a snow-covered lawn, little q-tips of ice falling down around him in the perfect stillness. There was a leafless tree not far off and it blocked out a portion of the night sky that the clouds didn't reach. Other than that, Dean felt grass under the thin blanket of snow against his back and stars he didn't recognize - there wasn't anything that screamed to him that this was a memory or a place he had been or a time when he had been happiest. It just was.
On a whim he moved his arms down and then up again and pulled his feet together, just once. Carefully, he sat up and climbed out of the mark he'd made and smiled down at it, perhaps a little more amused than a grown man had any right to be.
He'd made a snow-angel. In Heaven. In a cemetery.
Why would Heaven have a cemetery?
He turned very slowly in a circle, scanning the headstones, the tombstones. There were other trees, all of them leafless, and soft warm lights that didn't fight back the darkness so much as weaken it, shadows that could have hidden anything, but held nothing. There were no birds or bats or cars. There wasn't a path or a road out of the cemetery, either.
"Sam?" Dean called in a whisper that carried in the night like a scream. He kept turning, looking for the fallen shape of his brother amidst the dead. "Sammy?" His voice came out a little louder.
He made two full rotations and saw nothing, heard nothing. A thought filled his head and went immediately to his stomach, heavy like a stone.
The trident. He'd been so focused on the trident. And then, at the last possible instant...
"Cas..." He said into the night. Maybe he'd warped himself to the opposite side of Heaven than Sam on accident. But that would be alright if it was the case, because he and Cas could find him before they went back home.
The lights around a nearby mausoleum dimmed for a moment, just out of the corner of his eye, and he frowned at it, curious. A sign, maybe, though he didn't dare hope. The little building was decked out with angel figurines and little winged babies, overgrown with evergreen ivy, more like an inviting vacation home in the middle of graveyard than a house for the dead. The huge iron door was just slightly open.
Like someone had forgotten to shut it on their way out.
Dean made careful progress toward that door, dusted snow flurries off of his face twice before he decided that maybe nothing was going to come crashing out of the silence to eat him and started to move faster. It was cold. He didn't have any weapons. He was already dead. Odds weren't great that he should be worried.
Still, habit made him push the door just open enough to creep into the mausoleum. He poked his head in, took slow, small steps, tasted the air as well as smelled it. There was usually a dusty sort of dead smell that came with graves and the like, but the stone building didn't have that on the inside. It was damp and cool, but not cold like outside, and the heavy metallic scent that filled the air brought every hair on the back of Dean's neck to attention. Blood. Whoever this Heaven belonged to, they had a bloodstained cemetery that hardly seemed consistent with the souls worthy enough to get in.
The room wasn't large or well lit, maybe eight feet across with no urns or decorations or the like. At the back of it a staircase lead downward in a spiral.
"This looks less and less like Heaven every second," Dean whispered to himself, and wished to God he had something to shank demons or angels or whatever with. Maybe just a shotgun. In any case, he steadied himself and started down the stairs, one at a time, leaning to look as far ahead of himself as he could without risk of falling. He didn't have very far to go.
- - -
"Stay away from the demons that don't look distracted, it's impossible to tell if they'll run to Crowley or not," Lucifer told Sam in a yell that reached him as a whisper. The sulfur scented wind washed up at them impossibly fast. Falling, Sam realized, was at first frightening, and then exhilarating, and finally, when he could calm down enough to look and to see the things they fell beyond and toward, frightening for a whole new set of reasons. To start with, he didn't know how he planned to stop besides slamming into what looked like a great marble floor more than a thousand feet away. Second, there were people. Every one of them had snapped at some point in Crowley's Hell, and they were dragged to their racks kicking and screaming and angry, fierce, and the pain the demons caused them sometimes resulted in broken, hysterical laughter.
If Crowley had meant to change the system of Hell with his renovations, he'd failed. There was still pain everywhere, even if the torturers sometimes had to be a bit more creative to get the scream they wanted.
Lucifer didn't talk about the whys or hows or apologize for what Hell was. He only stayed where Sam could see him and commented on how safe they were or how likely it was they'd be noticed if they shifted too much just now. He kept conversation clipped and clean. He didn't tease or joke or even look Sam in the eyes.
It was like he was hiding something, but Sam didn't have the time or the facilities to wonder what at the moment. He had much, much bigger problems to worry about.
Sam didn't know how long they fell for. He knew it was too long, however.
"Close your eyes," the Devil said when the marble floor didn't seem too distant any more. "We're close enough now, but I don't know what will happen, so close your eyes."
"Close enough for what?" Sam's voice came out a crackling whisper, but Lucifer still heard him.
"Me."
Light, as if from nowhere, burst around them and Sam forced his eyes closed, pressed his hands over his face. He didn't know if that was the Devil or something else, but the brightness was too sudden in the half-shadows of Hell, too pure. It ruined the twilight like midday brightened out of dawn. The shock of it kept him from noticing that their descent had slowed until he felt the wind had subsided a bit. He couldn't open his eyes to see.
The last part of the fall felt almost instantaneous to him, but that the wind stopped and the light faded as soon as his numb feet touched ground. He'd almost forgotten what standing was like. A little stunned, he cracked an eyelid and fought down the questions he had for Lucifer, aware that now was not the time nor here the place to ask what had happened, or why every bone in his body was not broken. Hell had too many eyes and too may ears in its deepest parts.
Lucifer was still with him, though he looked tired, strained. The Devil's eyes moved to the left and he gestured, quick and violent. "Guards. Maybe a dozen."
Sam didn't see anything to hide behind, any shadow or table to dash under. There was just the glassed floor and smoke and rubble and chains, and stairs leading wall to wall downward. He'd come down right in the open with no weapon at hand.
"A dozen guards? Seriously? And what am I supposed to do? Fight them?" Sam hissed, and stepped back toward one of the walls in attempt to make himself look smaller.
"Blend in," Satan suggested.
"With demon guards?"
Lucifer turned his cold gaze on Sam and hissed, "Yes, Sam, blend in with the demon guards. Tell them you're a messenger or you want to fight for a post at the door or something, but don't stand there with your thumb up your ass crying about how this is Hell and you've got nothing but your great big heart and a head full of crazy to fight with." There was a tone of urgency in Lucifer's voice that Sam had never heard, honest worry. "You have a ticket out, remember? The worst case scenario here is you backing out before you get your hands on the weapon that can give you a chance to save the world."
"But what about Dean?" Sam hardly breathed. "I'm not leaving without Dean, too, you know."
"There's a chance he went upstairs while you went down, jackass." Lucifer growled. "You ever think that while you were chanting about the trident, he was thinking about his little gay angel in a trench coat?"
That made Sam's mouth go dry. There was no knowing where Dean was, if he was even in Hell, and Lucifer, of all people, pointing that out made him feel sick. But there wasn't time for that, not now. He pushed himself away from the wall and tried with all of his might to look like he was an intimidating, terrifying demon, put on a gruff face, forced himself to breathe easier. Maybe now that the initial shock was over and he'd fallen so far into Hell he couldn't think straight, fear didn't mean that much any more.
He didn't know where he was going, but he walked like he did, like he belonged, like he'd done this a thousand times before. It was just another lie, really, and he'd lied a lot. There was no reason to feel more danger lying to demons than he did lying to people.
Before long, he began to descend the stairs.
- - -
The room at the end of the staircase was not what Dean had expected, not even remotely. While he had walked down the stairs he had thought of a laboratory or a hospital room or a torture chamber, at the end of which he'd figured he'd find nothing but a dying angel and pool of blood, but that wasn't what was waiting for him. The lighting was dim like the rest of the cemetery had been, crappy electric, like something out of a horror film. There was a table, strewn with everything from pencils to knives to a child's teddy bear, and an empty chair turned toward the back wall. A notepad and a stack of papers sat in the chair, abandoned.
At the back of the room something shifted, separated from him by a metal grate or the wall of a cage. In the thickest shadows by the wall he could see nothing, only hear a sound like a stuttering breath and the catch of a hitched gasp through a clenched throat. There was no mistaking that sound. Dean could not have stopped his feet from propelling him forward until his fingers touched the key ring hanging just a foot from the chair.
He had it in the lock before he even knew what he was doing. He fought with it for a second before he realized he'd locked it rather than unlocking it and started all over again. He had the door open, the hinges shrieking their protest, before a small, familiar voice finally found his ears.
"Dean?" The disbelief was so heavy in the name it weighed tangibly on Dean's shoulders. "How could... no, you're not here. You can't be here. If you're here, you're-"
"Shut up, Cas." Dean reached out into the darkness and found something, though he could not tell in the dark what it was. Wet, and warm. He didn't care. His fingers moved from what he'd found up to a rumpled sleeve and eventually, to the curve of a shoulder. A shudder rippled through the body under his fingertips and he almost pulled back but didn't dare to let go now that he had a grip on Cas.
The angel did move then, in a way that Dean had not expected. In a surge of shaking muscle and blood-soaked clothing, Castiel moved into him, slammed him against the side of the cage and into the light.
At first, Dean could make out Cas's sea blue eyes and nothing else, too close, and then his almost-black hair, the contours and lines of his face. Blood, so much blood, from the curve of his neck to the cuffs of his shirt, the angel was covered in it, most of it dried, some of it fresh. But even that could not keep Dean's eyes from the wings that stretched out behind him, bloody and tattered, the tips pressed to either wall only half-spread.
"You're really..." Cas breathed, just air on Dean's face, and the wall of feathers behind him shivered. "You're really here."
"Yeah, Cas, I'm really... are those... your wings?" Dean tried to meet Cas's eyes, but he couldn't. He tried to decide what color the feathers were, but he couldn't do that either. With all of his will, he looked the angel and the face and fought with the emotions that roiled to life in his gut. Really, he'd had a speech planned. And now it was utterly useless, completely forgotten, locked up behind a lump that would not go down his throat, tied up in his chest somewhere. And his fingers wouldn't leave Cas alone. The moment he tried to let go they'd come back somewhere else, like metal to a magnet.
"I've been trying to get rid of them," Cas explained, and buried a blood-covered hand in Dean's coat like it was not something new or intimate. "So I can fall."
"What, no, Cas... why would you..."
"Why have I ever done anything, Dean? If it wasn't for orders?" There was just the tiniest hint of sarcasm in Castiel's voice, just the tiniest human flicker.
Dean couldn't answer that, either. He just stood there, so close and yet so very far away, waiting.
"I came here because no one will find me, the few that are left won't look. It is... something of a self-enforced exile. But they will not let me leave Heaven, not the way I have before. So I will find another way." Cas leaned closer then, if that was possible, and narrowed his eyes at Dean, searching him. "Have you come to kill me for what I've done?"
"No, God... no, Cas," Dean reached up then and laid a palm on the side of the angel's cheek, ran a thumb under his left eye. The skin felt paper thin under his touch. The way Cas tilted his head into his palm was exactly like his dreams and the similarity brought up a wave of other feelings that he really couldn't be thinking about right now. "I've come to tell you I'm sorry."
Cas blinked at him, his eyebrows pressed together like he didn't understand. He opened his mouth to say as much, but words weren't going to get them anywhere just then, Dean could see it.
So Dean kissed Castiel, instead, bravely, and slipped his fingers into the angel's hair the moment his enthusiasm became mutual. He hadn't expected much participation, but he didn't mind being surprised. The moment a tongue slipped into his mouth, fluttered against his hard palate, slipped to play along the inside of his lower lip, he didn't think about what he was going to do about the whole situation, he just embraced it. And when their mouths came apart he refused to feel awkward about how close the two of them were standing, how the heat between them had to be a thousand times hotter than hellfire.
"Was that an apology?" Cas asked him, his voice a husky whisper.
Dean ran his fingers through the angel's hair, because he could and Cas did not seem to mind and his hand was there already. "The kiss was a kiss, not an apology."
"Then I would like to insist that we kiss again, otherwise I would like to apologize, too."
Dean realized that he was smiling then, though he wasn't entirely sure how he could be. There were too many things wrong for him to be smiling. "We can worry about that later. We gotta get out of here."
"What? How?"
Disentangling himself from Cas was both easier and harder than he'd expected. To start with, he wanted to throw himself at the angel and forget all about everything that had gone wrong and just figure it out the old fashioned way. Secondly, if he didn't get away just then, they'd end up doing something stupid.
"There was a spell with this Latin phrase. All I have to do is grab a hold of you and hold on, close my eyes, click my heels, and think of home." Dean explained, and kept a firm hold of Cas's wrist while he moved back into the main part of the room. "I have to hurry, too. For all I know, Sam's back already, waiting for me."
There was a ruffling sound, like feathers, and Cas followed him through the door to the cage without pause. "You... you think that will work?"
Dean shrugged. "It was supposed to work on Poseidon's trident, so why not?"
"Poseidon's trident?" Castiel repeated, and his voice was suddenly deadpan and serious. It was enough to make Dean look up at him then, in the brighter light. He looked gaunt, hollow, weak. The tragedy that had come of his wings was hidden, maybe because he knew how uncomfortable their bedraggled state made Dean feel. "The trident? You found a spell that can pull it up, if you can find it?"
"Yeah, Cas. What's the big deal?"
Cas shook his head and squeezed Dean's hand in his. "There is no such thing as Poseidon's trident, Dean. He carried one, but it was stolen."
"Then somebody found it."
"It was stolen and reforged, consecrated in the fires of Hell, the metal mixed with the blood of demons and, some say, Lucifer. It can kill angels, Dean." The severity with which Cas spoke still did not make sense to Dean.
"So?"
The expression that got him was two-thirds annoyed, one-third horrified. "It is the Devil's weapon. He doesn't fight with a sword like a normal Archangel, he fights with a trident. The trident. I wouldn't be surprised if..." He looked down, like he might be able to see through the stone floor to the Earth, and through the Earth into the Pit beyond. He didn't say it; they both knew already.
"Then... you're telling me Sam's in the Pit right now, looking for the Devil's harpoon, and I'm up here, in Heaven, thinking about..." Dean managed to stop there, a little worried that saying his thoughts aloud might ruin their reunion, if it could be called that. Instead, he cleared his throat and barreled on. "Do you have enough juice in that grace of yours to get us into Hell?"
"No." Cas admitted. "I don't have enough... juice left to do that."
"Come here, then. Time to fly away home."
- - -
There was still fire, but the light it gave off seemed choked by the smoke-blackened walls. At first the guards simply let Sam walk by, maybe because he looked like he knew where he was going, maybe because he didn't look at them, until he came to the end of the flight of stairs and looked out on a long strip of floor, the obsidian decorated with symbols he didn't know, but vaguely remembered. They might have been devil's traps once, or something like them, but they'd faded, and few had been scratched and broken and worn thin - destroyed from the inside-out mostly.
There might have been six hundred of them, and maybe sixty-five of them were unrecognizable.
Further along, beyond the seals, built into the very foundation of whatever rock it was that Hell was built on, an impossibly huge cage rested, the width and breadth of it larger than any building Sam could think of. It might have been the size of a stadium. The gilded bars of the door were closed with a familiar looking design of four connected circles, reminiscent of the rings of the horsemen.
Sam opened his mouth to ask why they had come here, to demand answers, when he saw them, wrestling for dominance in the Cage. To say that he saw angels was not accurate, not as far as he understood them. They were creatures of anger and violence, beasts of unending light, and he couldn't tell Michael from Lucifer just then, but that that little handful of grace tugged in his chest, pulsed with every blow that landed, turned to ice the instant the tide turned. There were wings and eyes and light, but nothing even vaguely reminiscent of a human. What happened in that cage was as beautiful as it was terrifying, and he knew, somehow, that if he kept looking, he would remember things he had no desire to think about.
His memories of the Cage were sometimes infinitely detailed, but usually they bled together like a ruined painting, the subject obvious, the emotion behind it utterly lost.
There was a faint light deeper in the Cage, though it was only faint because it was surrounded by the light of Archangels. Adam, Sam knew, and tired not to think about what the kid had to be going through whenever the other two lost interest in each other.
"Why are you here?" The question was asked by a man - demon - standing not to far in front of him. The demon had come forward from the group of five standing just before the floor turned to patterns. Sam hadn't acknowledged them; their presence had been completely drowned by the display of might taking place behind them, and now Sam felt surprised they were there. He glanced at the man, at the hooked blade hanging at his side, and smiled.
"I wanted to see," Sam lied, and looked beyond the demon at the Cage again. "I never got to see him like that, you know? It's different when you don't have to worry about your eyes bleeding out of your skull." Even as he said it, the Cage rattled with the impact of one divine body against another and a roar - bone-shattering if Sam had had bones - bellowed out of the Cage like thunder.
The demon blinked black eyes at him, frowning, but didn't say a word.
"Hey, you wouldn't happen to know where I can find a trident, right? I was told it was down here by the Cage, so I thought I'd swing by to look..." Sam trailed off at the look that spread across the demon's features, at the shy step back he took. Sam hadn't expected that. Why would a demon be afraid of him? He couldn't think of any reason. The demon's hawkish nose curled in his expression of fear.
"You're here for the trident?" The demon said, and took another step away. "Crowley finally decided that there's no other way? He... he knows the risks involved, and I don't mean to speak above my station, but-"
Sam looked at him then, hard, and wished he had a way of making his eyes flick black or whatever, as long as the little demon kept believing his story. Instead, he forced his face into a cruel, depraved smile, because maybe that was close enough. Softly, he could hear Lucifer laughing at him, approving. The Devil let him do what he wanted though, without suggesting anything.
"He is well aware of the risks, but now is the time."
The demon nodded and stepped aside for a moment before he moved back to the others and started to slowly, glancing at Sam every so often, explain the situation.
Sam didn't see where the weapon could be, however. There wasn't much down here but the five demons and the Cage, and the icy jerk of Lucifer on his heart. Here, without his body, he couldn't tell where his soul ended and the grace began, though he could definitely make out the cold it radiated, and the echoed emotions that went through it.
He felt Lucifer's apology before he heard it.
"I know that you're going to think that I planned all of this, somehow, but I haven't," the Devil whispered, and Sam watched the line of demons move aside for him, worry and awe drawn across their faces like masks. "But if I'd told you, Dean would have stopped you. I didn't lie to you - I never have - I omitted the truth and I'm sorry for that."
Sam couldn't help but look at Lucifer, trying to understand, but the image beside him seemed weak now, broken, a shadow of the thing in the Cage. He could only wait for the Devil to continue, sympathy and anger warring for a place in his chest.
"The thing you're looking for is in that Cage, keeping Michael’s sword out of me for the most part. It's mine, now. It has been, since someone stole it and gave it to me." Lucifer did look at Sam then, with regret burning behind the coldness of his eyes, smothered like he had no desire to feel it.
"Then, the only way to get the weapon..." Sam started, just under his breath.
"Is to open that door," Lucifer finished for him. "I won't lie to you, Sam. If you do this, if you walk up there and open the Cage, I am not going to stay in it and I will do everything in my power to keep Michael from following me out. But I will fight them. I am not God, I am not all powerful, but I won't sit around and wait for this world to drown." The Devil sighed then, unamused. "I am the only one that gets to destroy this world and I am the only one that gets to decide when that happens, and it isn't now."
Sam looked at the line of demons, waiting for him to walk the distance to the Cage. "If all of this is a terrible lie... you know what will happen, don't you?" Sam asked, and put one foot in front of the other.
"Whatever it is, I won't be able to stop you."
- - -
It took Dean a long, quiet moment to remember the phrase he needed, and another moment to decide that he had enough of himself touching Cas to actually get the words out of his mouth. The angel kept telling him that holding hands would be enough if the magic was really that strong, but Dean wasn't going to risk it, not when he had to worry that the whole situation felt like a terribly good dream that he'd wake up from at any moment.
"Think of me, alright? Just in case." Dean whispered, and then wrapped his arms around Cas's back and started the chant, thinking of Sam.
By the third time through he was worried that maybe the spell hadn't worked. And then he said it the fourth time and everything shifted how it had before, slipped and coalesced in a liquid gossamer fog, everything became warm. And then cold. Very cold. And the body he'd held on to for the whole thing collapsed against him, pushed the air from his lungs.
"Jesus shit!" A voice, a woman's voice, erupted from somewhere by his feet, which wasn't down any more, because gravity had moved so that down was behind his back. There was wet sound, a sort of splashing, and the weight on his chest shifted away.
Dean dragged his eyes open. His eyelids felt like lead.
And Cas looked down at him, shock reflected like light from his eyes.
In that moment, despite everything, despite his worry for Sam, his concern for the world, Dean thought that he might be able to die a happy man.
"Get the gauze! Gauze! Never mind, get the whole Goddamn first-aid kit!" That was Cassandra, yelling at the Lovechild, Dean realized, his thoughts very, very slow. He lifted his left hand and touched the side of Castiel's face, smeared blood across his cheek and down his jaw, because that was more important than the hand pressing at the crook at his right arm, trying to staunch the flow of blood there.
"I'm guessing the angel brigade wasn't expecting me to pop in and warp you down here, now were they?" Dean asked, and felt his face crack in a smile.
"No." Cas answered seriously. "They weren't."
There was confusion while Stephanie and Cassandra worked to dress his wounds, which required at some point that Cas scoot back on his knees and, eventually, completely out of arms reach. It wasn't until they had Dean sitting up, dizzy and cold, but otherwise better off than he'd been four days prior, that his eyes slid across the room to Sam.
There was a pool of blood between them, thick and fresh and viscous, big enough that it felt like too much, though he was sure there was plenty left in the two of them. The shade of Sam's skin worried him, however, almost gray, the hollows under his eyes deep like bruises. Dean wanted nothing more than to lean over and lay a hand on his brother's shoulder and shake him awake.
"There's still time," Cassandra told him, her voice a mockery of reassurance. "Give it to him."
Dean didn't like it, and he didn't nod, but he turned away from his brother for a moment. "You can't send me after him, can you?"
"Not without recasting the spell, and I don't have the resources and you don't have the blood." Her answer was so straightforward, so true, it was all Dean could do to look her in the eye and keep from blaming her.
It was all up to Sam, now.
"Dean," Cas had taken to leaning on the wall beside him. He didn't look much better than Sam did, all things considered, but Cas had always been tougher to kill than his scrawny little frame had suggested. Dean refused to worry. He would just take in his sallow coloring, the thinness of his cheeks, and shiver, because there wasn't anything he could do but stare. "Why are you a room with a demon taking place in an ancient thaumaturgic questing ritual?"
Dean blinked, still a bit dazzled, before he cleared his throat and looked away. "Yeah... about that..." He started, wondering if maybe Cas would hate him when his explanation was through. He opened his mouth and drew in air to get himself started.
The ground beneath him gave a short, violent shake and stole away his words. The look that spread across the angel's face didn't help much, either.