thamasoma jyothirgamaya
This was written for the Sam-centric h/c challenge at the ohsam community, for vail_kagami's prompt: "After being pulled out of the cage, Sam's soul somehow ends up in purgatory. And purgatory might be like hell-light, but this is where the dead monsters go - many of which Sam has put down himself. This is where the demons go when they die - demons like Alastair, or Lilith. Purgatory is full of things that are very happy to see Sam again. It might not be like hell, but with so many evil things lining up to take their turn with him, for Sam it's not much better than the cage.
So he's pretty damn broken when finally Ruby shows up, and she might not be sorry for what she's done, and she might be pissed that he let Dean kill her, but damned if she's going to watch those stinking cockroaches torture her favourite damsel in distress any longer.
Sam doesn't trust and hasn't forgiven her, but he's so weak that he completely depends on her for the moment. Some snark and unresolved issues between them would be awesome, but through it all Ruby is totally protective of Sam while still being, well, Ruby.
Bonus if together they fight their way out of purgatory."
Warnings: SPOILERS upto 6.07: Family Matters. Blood, gore, torture, swearing, violence, utter weirdness, experimentation, present-tense, metaphor-abuse.
The title, roughly translated from Sanskrit, is: "Lead us from darkness to light".
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any of its characters.
thamasoma jyothirgamaya
At first, there is nothing.
It's shocking, this emptiness: while he had expected blood and fear and inexorable pain tearing him apart from the inside, the quiet, the whiteness, the utter lack has him reeling. He huddles into himself, seeking warmth, closing his eyes against the blinding white.
(am i standing?)
There's a void inside of him -
(am i alive?)
- whistling with loss, even if what's missing is the last thing he ever wants inside of him again -
(am i me?)
- and that stops him short, because he is not sure (he's never sure). Because if the devil is not here, and he is here and nowhere, then everything that led him to this point (Detroit, demon-blood, home impala i'm so sorry dean i'm trying i'm trying i'm here too i'm here too please i'm going to make it okay) can't have been real. He's stuck. He's lost. He doesn't know where he is, what he is, if the devil is going rip through the nothing and pull him into fire, or if he's going to spend the rest of eternity and beyond as a speck of colour against endless white -
he just -
wants -
to know.
He thinks he screams, cries, but he doesn't hear anything. He can feel the moisture running down his face, the bone-deep ache, the trembling of his muscles, but he can't taste the tears on his lips, he can't smell the stink of his own fear, he can't see his quaking hands. There is nothing, everything he's done has come to nothing, he's alone (so very very alone) and he just doesn't know anything -
Sam curls further into his cocoon of fear and lack and prepares to wait out an eternity of nothing.
He can hear.
He spends an endless instant marvelling over this (he's not alone), before he registers that it's screaming: cries of agony of the like he's never heard before.
He can see. He looks up, and colour bleeds into the white; there is red and black and grey and it spreads across everything like cancer.
He can smell. A waft of something undescribable flows through and out of him, death and blood and centuries-long decay.
He can feel, and all there is to feel is never-ending pain.
Something is reaching for him, white-hot fingers closing around his arm, and he struggles against the grip without really knowing why, just that the overload of sensation is too much and that the cocoon is so much safer, so much better, where he knows nothing, feels nothing, is nothing -
Then the pain ramps up, reaches a crescendo, and he's screaming, the noise blending with the others until it's just one twisting symphony of agony, and his body feels like it's being split in two -
(oh god make this stop)
He heaves, he struggles, closes his eyes and puts all of himself into getting away -
(dean, please)
And, finally, the pain stops as abruptly as it started. He gasps at the suddeness, feeling the absence as acutely as the pain itself, before he's falling, and the colour and pain and noise fade away to a rushing darkness. He only has time to think that maybe it's a different kind of cocoon and that he'd embrace its oblivion this time before the black envelopes him, and once again, there's nothing.
When Sam wakes up, he's outside a house.
It's dark, and the air is heavy with moisture and the low drone of insects. Moonlight filters weakly though the branches of huge overhanging trees that throw ominous shadows on the walls. He's in front of a door, the wood watermarked, the paint peeling.
This door...
He thinks it looks familiar, but more than memory, it's how it feels - like a faint tingle of electricity that has his hair stand on end, and fills his limbs with a restless energy. He reaches out with one inexplicably shaking hand to open the door - but his fingers have barely closed around the handle before the door's opening, and his father is on the other side.
The tingling anticipation is now a heat that flows through his veins, a molten thing that has him pull his lips back in a snarl as his father waves an envelope in his face; his father's talking, yelling, muscles corded in his neck and his face suffused with blood. Sam's ears are filled with a buzzing that drowns out all sound, but he can see the anger, like giant red clouds that sprout around his father and extend tendrils toward him, creeping into his ears and taking that molten anger, infusing life into it.
He's yelling back, his anger pushing against his father's - fuelled by a sort of manic desperation - until both are mixing, the whole room filled with a red mist that blinds him. He thinks he picks up something, and then he's turning away, turning to the door, turning to get out get out get out of here, because he just - he just doesn't know why, except that he needs to -
Dean's there.
And suddenly the anger's gone, and he's filled with a guilt that creeps into his every pore and locks his muscles in place.
(i'm sorry dean i'm so sorry i need to i need -)
Dean looks at him and the disappointment and betrayal is more than Sam thinks he can handle -
"You have a lot to be sorry for," Dean says, and Sam thinks just how right how he is; if only he can change this moment maybe he can change the rest of his life: and then maybe he'd feel sorry for the right things, like giving up a gilded future and a happy family, instead of the wrong things, like abandoning his brother and getting his loved ones killed and ending the world.
Maybe.
Sam's about to drop his bags and turn back to the house when Dean's eyes catch the meagre light at a strange angle and gleam
- with an almost ethereal light, and
- and, is Dean - Dean, lifting his lips in a smile that is
- decidedly dripping with malice, and utterly un-Dean, so why
And Dean throws himself at him, his irises a pale silver, slivers of skin peeling off his face and flaking onto Sam as he straddles him. "Remember me, Sammy?" Dean says, grinning too widely.
Sam can only stare as strands of memory dance in his head (shapeshifter you're not my brother your brother was always the better fighter) before Dean (but it's not Dean) raises his fist and rams it against Sam's cheek. He thinks he feels bone shattering and takes a breath to scream as white agony eats the side of his face, but Dean's not stopping; he continues to pummel Sam's face with a manic ferocity before wrapping his hands around Sam's neck and squeezing with all of his strength.
"I will finish what I started," Dean says, and even as black encroaches upon his vision and his head is buzzing with the lack of oxygen, Sam can only think this is right because Dean wants to kill me anyway and this is wrong because Dean needs me before panic floods in and brings strength out of nowhere. He struggles against the inexorable grip around his throat, ignoring the white-starbursts behind his eyelids and the need to give in to a different kind of oblivion.
Sam fights, because he thinks - he knows - that somewhere, somehow, Dean needs him.
He thinks that maybe explains most of his life.
Like most of his life, he fails.
His hands slow and drop of their own accord, and the white star-bursts give way to black: he travels from a universe where the last thing he sees is Dean killing him, to a universe that's a Dean-less nothing.
There's a fire burning in that room.
He can hear the roar; see the orange-red light that slips through the gap between the door and the floor; smell the smoke that settles heavily in his lungs; feel the heat. He needs to move, because there's a horrified panic that's narrowed his entire world to just getting into that burning room, that steals his breath in a way that's removed from the smoke.
Jessica.
He's reaching for the door, ignoring the way the heat is singeing the hairs on his arm, before another hand clutches his, and pulls him away with an astonishing strength. He's shoved against a wall, and feels warm breath on his face, ruffling his hair.
It's Brady.
Anger, desperation and betrayal rise in him, red and yellow and black, roiling and twisting in his gut. He struggles to move, but he's being held against the wall by a supernatural force and can't move a muscle. He grits his teeth, snarls, even as Brady leers into his face and his eyes flash pitch-black.
"So how about it, Sam," Brady drawls, "even here, you can't get away from it, can you?" He makes a small motion with his hand; Sam feels himself being pushed further into the wall, the plaster cracking. "You know what, Sam? You don't go to Hell - no, for you, Hell follows you."
And he reaches out and sticks his hand into Sam's chest.
Sam's eyes open wide and his jaw drops in a soundless scream, the pain stealing his ability to move, to speak, to think, a white-hot vise closing around his heart and reducing his vital organs to jelly. His entire body seizes and just as the pressure of Brady's hand inside him increases and Sam can only think please please let me die please, it stops.
Sam falls to the floor, taking in giant gasps, trembling, curling around himself. His muscles twitch in the sudden absence of that excruciating pain, his entire body on overload.
He's barely opened his eyes before he's lifted again, one hand around his throat, pulling and squeezing. He manages to get his feet under him before whoever it is tears his head off his shoulders. Through his blurring vision, all he can make out is long black hair, a blood-stained leer and fangs, but he knows who - what - this is. It's the vampire. The last thing he and Dean and Dad had hunted together.
Bitterness floods him, and Sam, for some strange reason, wants to laugh, but can't find the strength to do anything more than keep his feet as the vampire merely laughs and lowers its mouth to where his neck meets his collarbone, and bites. The pain is shocking in how alien it feels, and oh dear god, he can actually feel the suction, feel his blood being drained from, from, oh god it hurts it hurts it hurts
"Mine!"
The vampire tears its mouth away from his neck, ripping open the wound, and Sam screams as his blood gushes out, soaking his shirt. Another set of hands grab for him, and claws dig into his side. His body arches as these talons rip their way through his skin, muscle and into his gut, and by now his mind is completely detached from his suffering body, because this pain is just too much too much too much -
He's passed around, fought over, and killed over and over again by every monster he thinks he's ever fought in his entire life. After sometime, he's not really even aware of who's doing what - not that it matters, not when his whole universe is just pain-pain-pain -
Finally, after what seems like aeons spent being ripped open and stitched back together only to be ripped open again, there's a gentle touch on his face, a calloused hand that carresses his cheek. Sam still flinches, but a voice follows the touch, soft and sibilant. "Sssammy."
Sam freezes.
He knows this voice.
He opens his eyes, and sees Alistair.
Real fear seizes him; he wants to get up, run, escape, die - but he's tied down to that table again, and Alistair leans over him, smiling pleasantly. "Didja miss me, Sammy?" He places his fingertip on Sam's breastbone, and he flinches like it burns. "I've been waiting for so long for you, y'know. This is a horrible place you've sent me. No fun at all. But of course," and here he leans further, until Sam wants to gag on the sulphur on his breath, "you're gonna change that, aren't you?"
He runs his finger down Sam's chest, and he feels it like an incision, the blood welling, bubbling, flowing. He screams as Alistair continues cutting him - neat patterns, layer by layer, like he's performing a live dissection - screams as the demon smiles and tells him that he doesn't even need tools to torture anymore, screams until he chokes on his own blood, and Alistair whittles him down to nothing.
He thinks it's raining.
He's wet, and further damp soaks into his clothes, chilling him to his very core. He shivers, huddled around himself on the rough ground.
The torture stopped - well, he isn't sure how long ago, or how much time he has before more creatures come for him - but right now he isn't sure he cares. All he wants - all he wants - is respite. Stop. Take a breath. Huddle. Shiver. Live.
There's sudden warmth against his face, and Sam takes a moment to recognise it as human touch. He flinches violently, and rolls away. "No," he whimpers, curling up as much as he can, uncaring of how pathetic this makes him look. "No."
"Sam," says a female voice, tinged with anger and exasperation and maybe the slightest bit of concern, and Sam opens his eyes.
It's Ruby.
She's still with the vessel she died in, petite and dark. She regards him coolly, almost challengingly, as if waiting for his next move. He grits his teeth and gets to a sitting position. Anger rises like bile at the back of his throat (never needed the feather to fly sam you have to kill lillith you have to save the world, except he never saved the world, he only ended it) and he spits at her. "Get out of my sight," he snarls.
Her face hardens, and before he's even aware that she's moved, she's fisted her hands in his collar and pulling him up. "What," she says, and her face is so close to his, he can almost taste her breath, "are you doing here."
He glares back defiantly. "I'm here," he says, "because I locked your master back in his cage."
He gets the pleasure of watching her flinch, before she regains her composure and her face settles back into a leer. "Congratulations, Sammy, you managed to mop up your mess this time." She tilts her head. "I'd assume that big brother helped, but given you two grow off each other like lichen, that's pretty much a certainty."
"Leave me," he says simply. "Go."
"Believe me, if I could, I would, but I can't."
She releases him; he slumps to the ground. He rolls his neck on his shoulders to glare at her blearily. "And why can't you?"
"Don't you see where we are?" she asks him incredulously. "Don't you know what this place is?"
Sam looks around: they're in the centre of a field, spotted by a few trees, with the vague outline of houses in the distance - "I don't," he starts, before Ruby lifts him again and slams him against the nearest tree, the bark splintering and digging into his back. "Don't give me that bullshit," she spits, before she's punching him, pain blossoming across his jaw. "Don't you dare tell me you don't remember this."
The anger's back; his own fist is rearing in retaliation when he smells the sulphur on her breath and he remembers: this field, another lifetime. Another failed exorcism, and the crushing grief and guilt that was Dean's death forever haunting him. He was sitting around, not strong enough to do anything, while Dean suffered in Hell, for him - and Ruby, sidling up to him, providing her pseudo-comfort with her soft touches and words, but Sam? Sam wanted rage, wanted release, and he gathered her with a force that might have surprised him in another lifetime, and took her, kissing her, biting down on her lip and letting her blood flood his mouth, and -
- felt something change, that very moment, like a fire lit at his very core and the flames spreading through his veins -
- and he could, he could, he - he could do anything -
"It was the first time you took it," Ruby breathes. "From me, anyway."
Sam stares at her, and he thinks he can see the blood pulsing beneath the skin of her neck, thinks it would take no more than a simple cut, and he could taste a little - just a little, just to feel that viscous slide down the back of his throat, and let the power and energy that follow take him over and let him feel he can achieve anything - anything at all - that he sets his mind to -
"No." Sam pushes her away, covering his face with shaking hands. "No no no no. Don't do this. I won't - I won't."
"This is the moment that started it for you, Sam," Ruby says. "This is one of the many moments which took you steadily to becoming the key to Lucifer's cage." She smiles. "You're reliving those in-between moments, Sam, and all those suckers you killed on the way to ending the world? They've followed you into those moments, and they want payback."
"If that's why you're here," Sam mutters, "then go ahead. Do it." He thinks maybe if this finishes quickly, then he can get back to his respite, maybe even a torture that's different from the want-need-want that twists in his belly and leaves his throat and mouth dry and thirsty.
Ruby laughs softly. "Torture you?" She crouches next to him, and lays a hand on his arm. "But Sam," she says, "I'm proud of you."
Sam closes his eyes. He feels so tired. "I killed you. I defeated Lucifer. The Apocalypse never happened; neither you nor the angels got their way."
"I've spent centuries here, Sam, wandering with these monsters, waiting for my master to reclaim me, but he never came." Her touch moves to his face, gently stroking his cheek. "However, you came, Sammy." He opens his eyes, and she smiles at him. "I created a part of you, Sam. I am a part of you. How can I not be proud?"
Despair and anger scream silently in his head, but he can't find the words to respond.
The world around them shimmers and shifts, and they're outside a door. It's rattling, and the handle twisting and turning, and they can hear a half-scream, half-snarl from inside. Dread settles in Sam's stomach like a deadweight. "No," he whispers, before he can really stop himself.
Ruby looks at him, before reaching out and opening the door. A blurred shape, all hair and teeth and claws shoots out, and straight at Sam. He barely has time to register that it's Madison (it's Madison) before he's knocked to the floor, and she's clawing his chest, digging, digging for his heart. He doesn't fight back (he stopped fighting back long ago), but then Madison's weight disappears from over him, and everything rattles as Madison howls.
Sam struggles to his feet to see that Ruby's flung Madison against a wall and is holding her there with her mind. He thinks he meets Madison's eyes for a moment - not the monster, but the woman he once thought he was falling in love with - and he can only think of the last time he looked at her, when she sat there, sweetly accepting, as he shot her in the heart. The remembered grief is crushing; the world tilts and blurs even as Ruby clenches her outstretched hand into a fist and Madison chokes and gurgles before falling to the floor with a whimper.
Ruby looks from Madison's body to Sam, a smile of accomplishment on her face. Maybe she's waiting for him to thank her, congratulate her. But he remains silent, because he's got nothing.
He can't think.
The pain is something that Sam's come to grapple with; besides, everytime he's torn up, he's perfectly healed before being waylaid by the next creature that has something against him (an unsurprisingly large number). He thinks he might have even developed a tolerance: not enough to ignore its presence, but just enough to work around the pain, to gather his thoughts.
But he can't.
He can't reason his way through this; everytime he tries to think about where he is and how he got here, his thoughts are scattered by pain and emotion. He just can't seem to focus, and that further feeds his frustration and helplessness. Ruby tries to explain, but for all the centuries that she's spent here, even she can't describe it as anything other than an "In-Between Place": a realm that's neither Heaven, nor Hell, but somewhere in between. Sam struggles with the concept, before he finally gives up on trying to understand it.
Wherever this is, it's where everything supernatural that he's killed has gathered to cause him as much pain as possible.
And when they attack, it's in those in-between moments.
When he's nine and contemplating opening Dad's secret journal -
When he's thirteen and he decides to write about a werewolf hunt for his English assignment -
When he's sixteen and he's in the backseat of the Impala, reading for his Honours classes by torchlight -
When he's eighteen and he steps into Stanford and a new life -
When he's twenty-two and he decides to leave his girlfriend to a death he's been dreaming about for weeks -
When he's twenty-three and he chooses not to kill Jake Talley -
When he's twenty-five and he decides to save the world -
Ruby's there with him, always. Sam doesn't know how, or why: maybe she's bored, and grateful for the company. Maybe she's using him for something, even now. Either way, Sam thinks, he's sort of perversely glad that she's there.
She fights for him, even though he doesn't ask her to. "It's not like I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart, you know," she says when he asks her, shrugging, "If we are to survive, we need to survive like this, Besides," she adds with a grin, "I like your pretty, pretty packaging a little too much to let it get damaged."
Sam thinks that's actually a pretty okay way of looking at it.
There is a moment they enter that Sam definitely doesn't remember: it's a dark circular room, with a lone candle on a stone altar in the middle providing light. Six women, hooded and heads bowed, are kneeling around the altar, and in front of each of them are symbols smeared in blood, and various paraphernalia that Sam recognises as ingredients of witchcraft. The women are swaying as they kneel, chanting in an archaic language that he's unable to recognise.
One of the women breaks from the circle, and dips a finger into a cup that's beside her. She uses her blood-coated finger to draw another symbol on the altar, and when she's done, the chant rises in intensity and pitch, and when it reaches its peak -
- the air is charged with electricity and the smell of blood and sulphur -
- and a column of circling dark smoke descends upon the altar, and the women throw back their hoods to reveal horribly mutilated faces distorted in expressions of absolute rapture -
Then Ruby's grabbed his hand and is pulling him away.
Even as they walk - or rather, as Ruby drags him - through stone corridors and staircases, Sam's asking questions. "What was that? Who were they? Did you -?"
Finally Ruby stops. "Yes, I was one of them," she says quietly. "I was the witch who completed the ritual there, and the demon we summoned? It killed three villages before someone figured out how to exorcise it." She grins. "Well, that's what I've heard anyway, given that I was one of the first killed."
Sam blinks. "That was you, and that -"
Ruby shrugs. "I have no regrets. But you, Sammy," a glint enters her eye, "I was hoping you wouldn't have to see that."
Me too, Sam thinks. It's hard to think of Ruby as once-human, her soul tortured and distorted and corrupted in Hell to become what she is now. It's hard to make that association, because Sam's now afraid. He's afraid that if he spends enough time in this In-Between Place, he will become like her.
Then he wonders if there's anything left of him to corrupt. Without identity, without hope, without Dean, what is he? Nothing.
He thinks he hears Dean's voice.
He's standing in the room where he once saw hellhounds eviscerate his brother when it happens. Ruby's finishing off the Black Dog when the "Sam, come on" resonates in his ears, and both of them freeze.
Sam stares at Ruby, half-afraid of what's going to come next. He's never found the moments that involve his brother easy to handle. "Did you hear -"
Ruby signals him to be quiet, listening intently. And there it is, again: "Sam, it's me. We've... found you a way out, bro."
Sam can hardly believe this. "Dean? Dean! Where - what way - Dean!" He's not sure what he's even saying anymore, but it's his brother and it's freedom and he doesn't think there are two things that ever mattered more in his life.
"Put a cork in it, Sam," Ruby tells him, amused, before pointing to the ceiling. "Look."
He looks. Shafts of radiance are breaking through the ceiling, distorting the walls around him, and they coalesce to form a light so bright Sam has to throw an arm over his eyes. When the intensity reduces enough that he can see, he finds a doorway made of light. He stares at it for a long moment, not sure if it's freedom, or if it's just the backdoor to Lucifer's cage.
"I guess that bastard did it, somehow," Ruby says, and there's more than a trace of grudging awe in her voice. "He found a way out." She laughs. "What are you waiting for, Sam? Champagne? Go!"
And he isn't sure why, or for what, but Sam reaches out, pulls her to him, and lowers his mouth to hers in a kiss. Perhaps it's the gratitude for having protected him all this while; perhaps it's the loneliness and strong emotion that drew him to her in the first place. Perhaps it's all of these, or none of these: just that he craves the tang of sulphur on her tongue. He is a selfish creature, after all.
He lets go of her, walks toward the doorway of light, and doesn't look back.
He leaves behind nothing.
Finis
So he's pretty damn broken when finally Ruby shows up, and she might not be sorry for what she's done, and she might be pissed that he let Dean kill her, but damned if she's going to watch those stinking cockroaches torture her favourite damsel in distress any longer.
Sam doesn't trust and hasn't forgiven her, but he's so weak that he completely depends on her for the moment. Some snark and unresolved issues between them would be awesome, but through it all Ruby is totally protective of Sam while still being, well, Ruby.
Bonus if together they fight their way out of purgatory."
Warnings: SPOILERS upto 6.07: Family Matters. Blood, gore, torture, swearing, violence, utter weirdness, experimentation, present-tense, metaphor-abuse.
The title, roughly translated from Sanskrit, is: "Lead us from darkness to light".
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any of its characters.
thamasoma jyothirgamaya
At first, there is nothing.
It's shocking, this emptiness: while he had expected blood and fear and inexorable pain tearing him apart from the inside, the quiet, the whiteness, the utter lack has him reeling. He huddles into himself, seeking warmth, closing his eyes against the blinding white.
(am i standing?)
There's a void inside of him -
(am i alive?)
- whistling with loss, even if what's missing is the last thing he ever wants inside of him again -
(am i me?)
- and that stops him short, because he is not sure (he's never sure). Because if the devil is not here, and he is here and nowhere, then everything that led him to this point (Detroit, demon-blood, home impala i'm so sorry dean i'm trying i'm trying i'm here too i'm here too please i'm going to make it okay) can't have been real. He's stuck. He's lost. He doesn't know where he is, what he is, if the devil is going rip through the nothing and pull him into fire, or if he's going to spend the rest of eternity and beyond as a speck of colour against endless white -
he just -
wants -
to know.
He thinks he screams, cries, but he doesn't hear anything. He can feel the moisture running down his face, the bone-deep ache, the trembling of his muscles, but he can't taste the tears on his lips, he can't smell the stink of his own fear, he can't see his quaking hands. There is nothing, everything he's done has come to nothing, he's alone (so very very alone) and he just doesn't know anything -
Sam curls further into his cocoon of fear and lack and prepares to wait out an eternity of nothing.
He can hear.
He spends an endless instant marvelling over this (he's not alone), before he registers that it's screaming: cries of agony of the like he's never heard before.
He can see. He looks up, and colour bleeds into the white; there is red and black and grey and it spreads across everything like cancer.
He can smell. A waft of something undescribable flows through and out of him, death and blood and centuries-long decay.
He can feel, and all there is to feel is never-ending pain.
Something is reaching for him, white-hot fingers closing around his arm, and he struggles against the grip without really knowing why, just that the overload of sensation is too much and that the cocoon is so much safer, so much better, where he knows nothing, feels nothing, is nothing -
Then the pain ramps up, reaches a crescendo, and he's screaming, the noise blending with the others until it's just one twisting symphony of agony, and his body feels like it's being split in two -
(oh god make this stop)
He heaves, he struggles, closes his eyes and puts all of himself into getting away -
(dean, please)
And, finally, the pain stops as abruptly as it started. He gasps at the suddeness, feeling the absence as acutely as the pain itself, before he's falling, and the colour and pain and noise fade away to a rushing darkness. He only has time to think that maybe it's a different kind of cocoon and that he'd embrace its oblivion this time before the black envelopes him, and once again, there's nothing.
When Sam wakes up, he's outside a house.
It's dark, and the air is heavy with moisture and the low drone of insects. Moonlight filters weakly though the branches of huge overhanging trees that throw ominous shadows on the walls. He's in front of a door, the wood watermarked, the paint peeling.
This door...
He thinks it looks familiar, but more than memory, it's how it feels - like a faint tingle of electricity that has his hair stand on end, and fills his limbs with a restless energy. He reaches out with one inexplicably shaking hand to open the door - but his fingers have barely closed around the handle before the door's opening, and his father is on the other side.
The tingling anticipation is now a heat that flows through his veins, a molten thing that has him pull his lips back in a snarl as his father waves an envelope in his face; his father's talking, yelling, muscles corded in his neck and his face suffused with blood. Sam's ears are filled with a buzzing that drowns out all sound, but he can see the anger, like giant red clouds that sprout around his father and extend tendrils toward him, creeping into his ears and taking that molten anger, infusing life into it.
He's yelling back, his anger pushing against his father's - fuelled by a sort of manic desperation - until both are mixing, the whole room filled with a red mist that blinds him. He thinks he picks up something, and then he's turning away, turning to the door, turning to get out get out get out of here, because he just - he just doesn't know why, except that he needs to -
Dean's there.
And suddenly the anger's gone, and he's filled with a guilt that creeps into his every pore and locks his muscles in place.
(i'm sorry dean i'm so sorry i need to i need -)
Dean looks at him and the disappointment and betrayal is more than Sam thinks he can handle -
"You have a lot to be sorry for," Dean says, and Sam thinks just how right how he is; if only he can change this moment maybe he can change the rest of his life: and then maybe he'd feel sorry for the right things, like giving up a gilded future and a happy family, instead of the wrong things, like abandoning his brother and getting his loved ones killed and ending the world.
Maybe.
Sam's about to drop his bags and turn back to the house when Dean's eyes catch the meagre light at a strange angle and gleam
- with an almost ethereal light, and
- and, is Dean - Dean, lifting his lips in a smile that is
- decidedly dripping with malice, and utterly un-Dean, so why
And Dean throws himself at him, his irises a pale silver, slivers of skin peeling off his face and flaking onto Sam as he straddles him. "Remember me, Sammy?" Dean says, grinning too widely.
Sam can only stare as strands of memory dance in his head (shapeshifter you're not my brother your brother was always the better fighter) before Dean (but it's not Dean) raises his fist and rams it against Sam's cheek. He thinks he feels bone shattering and takes a breath to scream as white agony eats the side of his face, but Dean's not stopping; he continues to pummel Sam's face with a manic ferocity before wrapping his hands around Sam's neck and squeezing with all of his strength.
"I will finish what I started," Dean says, and even as black encroaches upon his vision and his head is buzzing with the lack of oxygen, Sam can only think this is right because Dean wants to kill me anyway and this is wrong because Dean needs me before panic floods in and brings strength out of nowhere. He struggles against the inexorable grip around his throat, ignoring the white-starbursts behind his eyelids and the need to give in to a different kind of oblivion.
Sam fights, because he thinks - he knows - that somewhere, somehow, Dean needs him.
He thinks that maybe explains most of his life.
Like most of his life, he fails.
His hands slow and drop of their own accord, and the white star-bursts give way to black: he travels from a universe where the last thing he sees is Dean killing him, to a universe that's a Dean-less nothing.
There's a fire burning in that room.
He can hear the roar; see the orange-red light that slips through the gap between the door and the floor; smell the smoke that settles heavily in his lungs; feel the heat. He needs to move, because there's a horrified panic that's narrowed his entire world to just getting into that burning room, that steals his breath in a way that's removed from the smoke.
Jessica.
He's reaching for the door, ignoring the way the heat is singeing the hairs on his arm, before another hand clutches his, and pulls him away with an astonishing strength. He's shoved against a wall, and feels warm breath on his face, ruffling his hair.
It's Brady.
Anger, desperation and betrayal rise in him, red and yellow and black, roiling and twisting in his gut. He struggles to move, but he's being held against the wall by a supernatural force and can't move a muscle. He grits his teeth, snarls, even as Brady leers into his face and his eyes flash pitch-black.
"So how about it, Sam," Brady drawls, "even here, you can't get away from it, can you?" He makes a small motion with his hand; Sam feels himself being pushed further into the wall, the plaster cracking. "You know what, Sam? You don't go to Hell - no, for you, Hell follows you."
And he reaches out and sticks his hand into Sam's chest.
Sam's eyes open wide and his jaw drops in a soundless scream, the pain stealing his ability to move, to speak, to think, a white-hot vise closing around his heart and reducing his vital organs to jelly. His entire body seizes and just as the pressure of Brady's hand inside him increases and Sam can only think please please let me die please, it stops.
Sam falls to the floor, taking in giant gasps, trembling, curling around himself. His muscles twitch in the sudden absence of that excruciating pain, his entire body on overload.
He's barely opened his eyes before he's lifted again, one hand around his throat, pulling and squeezing. He manages to get his feet under him before whoever it is tears his head off his shoulders. Through his blurring vision, all he can make out is long black hair, a blood-stained leer and fangs, but he knows who - what - this is. It's the vampire. The last thing he and Dean and Dad had hunted together.
Bitterness floods him, and Sam, for some strange reason, wants to laugh, but can't find the strength to do anything more than keep his feet as the vampire merely laughs and lowers its mouth to where his neck meets his collarbone, and bites. The pain is shocking in how alien it feels, and oh dear god, he can actually feel the suction, feel his blood being drained from, from, oh god it hurts it hurts it hurts
"Mine!"
The vampire tears its mouth away from his neck, ripping open the wound, and Sam screams as his blood gushes out, soaking his shirt. Another set of hands grab for him, and claws dig into his side. His body arches as these talons rip their way through his skin, muscle and into his gut, and by now his mind is completely detached from his suffering body, because this pain is just too much too much too much -
He's passed around, fought over, and killed over and over again by every monster he thinks he's ever fought in his entire life. After sometime, he's not really even aware of who's doing what - not that it matters, not when his whole universe is just pain-pain-pain -
Finally, after what seems like aeons spent being ripped open and stitched back together only to be ripped open again, there's a gentle touch on his face, a calloused hand that carresses his cheek. Sam still flinches, but a voice follows the touch, soft and sibilant. "Sssammy."
Sam freezes.
He knows this voice.
He opens his eyes, and sees Alistair.
Real fear seizes him; he wants to get up, run, escape, die - but he's tied down to that table again, and Alistair leans over him, smiling pleasantly. "Didja miss me, Sammy?" He places his fingertip on Sam's breastbone, and he flinches like it burns. "I've been waiting for so long for you, y'know. This is a horrible place you've sent me. No fun at all. But of course," and here he leans further, until Sam wants to gag on the sulphur on his breath, "you're gonna change that, aren't you?"
He runs his finger down Sam's chest, and he feels it like an incision, the blood welling, bubbling, flowing. He screams as Alistair continues cutting him - neat patterns, layer by layer, like he's performing a live dissection - screams as the demon smiles and tells him that he doesn't even need tools to torture anymore, screams until he chokes on his own blood, and Alistair whittles him down to nothing.
He thinks it's raining.
He's wet, and further damp soaks into his clothes, chilling him to his very core. He shivers, huddled around himself on the rough ground.
The torture stopped - well, he isn't sure how long ago, or how much time he has before more creatures come for him - but right now he isn't sure he cares. All he wants - all he wants - is respite. Stop. Take a breath. Huddle. Shiver. Live.
There's sudden warmth against his face, and Sam takes a moment to recognise it as human touch. He flinches violently, and rolls away. "No," he whimpers, curling up as much as he can, uncaring of how pathetic this makes him look. "No."
"Sam," says a female voice, tinged with anger and exasperation and maybe the slightest bit of concern, and Sam opens his eyes.
It's Ruby.
She's still with the vessel she died in, petite and dark. She regards him coolly, almost challengingly, as if waiting for his next move. He grits his teeth and gets to a sitting position. Anger rises like bile at the back of his throat (never needed the feather to fly sam you have to kill lillith you have to save the world, except he never saved the world, he only ended it) and he spits at her. "Get out of my sight," he snarls.
Her face hardens, and before he's even aware that she's moved, she's fisted her hands in his collar and pulling him up. "What," she says, and her face is so close to his, he can almost taste her breath, "are you doing here."
He glares back defiantly. "I'm here," he says, "because I locked your master back in his cage."
He gets the pleasure of watching her flinch, before she regains her composure and her face settles back into a leer. "Congratulations, Sammy, you managed to mop up your mess this time." She tilts her head. "I'd assume that big brother helped, but given you two grow off each other like lichen, that's pretty much a certainty."
"Leave me," he says simply. "Go."
"Believe me, if I could, I would, but I can't."
She releases him; he slumps to the ground. He rolls his neck on his shoulders to glare at her blearily. "And why can't you?"
"Don't you see where we are?" she asks him incredulously. "Don't you know what this place is?"
Sam looks around: they're in the centre of a field, spotted by a few trees, with the vague outline of houses in the distance - "I don't," he starts, before Ruby lifts him again and slams him against the nearest tree, the bark splintering and digging into his back. "Don't give me that bullshit," she spits, before she's punching him, pain blossoming across his jaw. "Don't you dare tell me you don't remember this."
The anger's back; his own fist is rearing in retaliation when he smells the sulphur on her breath and he remembers: this field, another lifetime. Another failed exorcism, and the crushing grief and guilt that was Dean's death forever haunting him. He was sitting around, not strong enough to do anything, while Dean suffered in Hell, for him - and Ruby, sidling up to him, providing her pseudo-comfort with her soft touches and words, but Sam? Sam wanted rage, wanted release, and he gathered her with a force that might have surprised him in another lifetime, and took her, kissing her, biting down on her lip and letting her blood flood his mouth, and -
- felt something change, that very moment, like a fire lit at his very core and the flames spreading through his veins -
- and he could, he could, he - he could do anything -
"It was the first time you took it," Ruby breathes. "From me, anyway."
Sam stares at her, and he thinks he can see the blood pulsing beneath the skin of her neck, thinks it would take no more than a simple cut, and he could taste a little - just a little, just to feel that viscous slide down the back of his throat, and let the power and energy that follow take him over and let him feel he can achieve anything - anything at all - that he sets his mind to -
"No." Sam pushes her away, covering his face with shaking hands. "No no no no. Don't do this. I won't - I won't."
"This is the moment that started it for you, Sam," Ruby says. "This is one of the many moments which took you steadily to becoming the key to Lucifer's cage." She smiles. "You're reliving those in-between moments, Sam, and all those suckers you killed on the way to ending the world? They've followed you into those moments, and they want payback."
"If that's why you're here," Sam mutters, "then go ahead. Do it." He thinks maybe if this finishes quickly, then he can get back to his respite, maybe even a torture that's different from the want-need-want that twists in his belly and leaves his throat and mouth dry and thirsty.
Ruby laughs softly. "Torture you?" She crouches next to him, and lays a hand on his arm. "But Sam," she says, "I'm proud of you."
Sam closes his eyes. He feels so tired. "I killed you. I defeated Lucifer. The Apocalypse never happened; neither you nor the angels got their way."
"I've spent centuries here, Sam, wandering with these monsters, waiting for my master to reclaim me, but he never came." Her touch moves to his face, gently stroking his cheek. "However, you came, Sammy." He opens his eyes, and she smiles at him. "I created a part of you, Sam. I am a part of you. How can I not be proud?"
Despair and anger scream silently in his head, but he can't find the words to respond.
The world around them shimmers and shifts, and they're outside a door. It's rattling, and the handle twisting and turning, and they can hear a half-scream, half-snarl from inside. Dread settles in Sam's stomach like a deadweight. "No," he whispers, before he can really stop himself.
Ruby looks at him, before reaching out and opening the door. A blurred shape, all hair and teeth and claws shoots out, and straight at Sam. He barely has time to register that it's Madison (it's Madison) before he's knocked to the floor, and she's clawing his chest, digging, digging for his heart. He doesn't fight back (he stopped fighting back long ago), but then Madison's weight disappears from over him, and everything rattles as Madison howls.
Sam struggles to his feet to see that Ruby's flung Madison against a wall and is holding her there with her mind. He thinks he meets Madison's eyes for a moment - not the monster, but the woman he once thought he was falling in love with - and he can only think of the last time he looked at her, when she sat there, sweetly accepting, as he shot her in the heart. The remembered grief is crushing; the world tilts and blurs even as Ruby clenches her outstretched hand into a fist and Madison chokes and gurgles before falling to the floor with a whimper.
Ruby looks from Madison's body to Sam, a smile of accomplishment on her face. Maybe she's waiting for him to thank her, congratulate her. But he remains silent, because he's got nothing.
He can't think.
The pain is something that Sam's come to grapple with; besides, everytime he's torn up, he's perfectly healed before being waylaid by the next creature that has something against him (an unsurprisingly large number). He thinks he might have even developed a tolerance: not enough to ignore its presence, but just enough to work around the pain, to gather his thoughts.
But he can't.
He can't reason his way through this; everytime he tries to think about where he is and how he got here, his thoughts are scattered by pain and emotion. He just can't seem to focus, and that further feeds his frustration and helplessness. Ruby tries to explain, but for all the centuries that she's spent here, even she can't describe it as anything other than an "In-Between Place": a realm that's neither Heaven, nor Hell, but somewhere in between. Sam struggles with the concept, before he finally gives up on trying to understand it.
Wherever this is, it's where everything supernatural that he's killed has gathered to cause him as much pain as possible.
And when they attack, it's in those in-between moments.
When he's nine and contemplating opening Dad's secret journal -
When he's thirteen and he decides to write about a werewolf hunt for his English assignment -
When he's sixteen and he's in the backseat of the Impala, reading for his Honours classes by torchlight -
When he's eighteen and he steps into Stanford and a new life -
When he's twenty-two and he decides to leave his girlfriend to a death he's been dreaming about for weeks -
When he's twenty-three and he chooses not to kill Jake Talley -
When he's twenty-five and he decides to save the world -
Ruby's there with him, always. Sam doesn't know how, or why: maybe she's bored, and grateful for the company. Maybe she's using him for something, even now. Either way, Sam thinks, he's sort of perversely glad that she's there.
She fights for him, even though he doesn't ask her to. "It's not like I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart, you know," she says when he asks her, shrugging, "If we are to survive, we need to survive like this, Besides," she adds with a grin, "I like your pretty, pretty packaging a little too much to let it get damaged."
Sam thinks that's actually a pretty okay way of looking at it.
There is a moment they enter that Sam definitely doesn't remember: it's a dark circular room, with a lone candle on a stone altar in the middle providing light. Six women, hooded and heads bowed, are kneeling around the altar, and in front of each of them are symbols smeared in blood, and various paraphernalia that Sam recognises as ingredients of witchcraft. The women are swaying as they kneel, chanting in an archaic language that he's unable to recognise.
One of the women breaks from the circle, and dips a finger into a cup that's beside her. She uses her blood-coated finger to draw another symbol on the altar, and when she's done, the chant rises in intensity and pitch, and when it reaches its peak -
- the air is charged with electricity and the smell of blood and sulphur -
- and a column of circling dark smoke descends upon the altar, and the women throw back their hoods to reveal horribly mutilated faces distorted in expressions of absolute rapture -
Then Ruby's grabbed his hand and is pulling him away.
Even as they walk - or rather, as Ruby drags him - through stone corridors and staircases, Sam's asking questions. "What was that? Who were they? Did you -?"
Finally Ruby stops. "Yes, I was one of them," she says quietly. "I was the witch who completed the ritual there, and the demon we summoned? It killed three villages before someone figured out how to exorcise it." She grins. "Well, that's what I've heard anyway, given that I was one of the first killed."
Sam blinks. "That was you, and that -"
Ruby shrugs. "I have no regrets. But you, Sammy," a glint enters her eye, "I was hoping you wouldn't have to see that."
Me too, Sam thinks. It's hard to think of Ruby as once-human, her soul tortured and distorted and corrupted in Hell to become what she is now. It's hard to make that association, because Sam's now afraid. He's afraid that if he spends enough time in this In-Between Place, he will become like her.
Then he wonders if there's anything left of him to corrupt. Without identity, without hope, without Dean, what is he? Nothing.
He thinks he hears Dean's voice.
He's standing in the room where he once saw hellhounds eviscerate his brother when it happens. Ruby's finishing off the Black Dog when the "Sam, come on" resonates in his ears, and both of them freeze.
Sam stares at Ruby, half-afraid of what's going to come next. He's never found the moments that involve his brother easy to handle. "Did you hear -"
Ruby signals him to be quiet, listening intently. And there it is, again: "Sam, it's me. We've... found you a way out, bro."
Sam can hardly believe this. "Dean? Dean! Where - what way - Dean!" He's not sure what he's even saying anymore, but it's his brother and it's freedom and he doesn't think there are two things that ever mattered more in his life.
"Put a cork in it, Sam," Ruby tells him, amused, before pointing to the ceiling. "Look."
He looks. Shafts of radiance are breaking through the ceiling, distorting the walls around him, and they coalesce to form a light so bright Sam has to throw an arm over his eyes. When the intensity reduces enough that he can see, he finds a doorway made of light. He stares at it for a long moment, not sure if it's freedom, or if it's just the backdoor to Lucifer's cage.
"I guess that bastard did it, somehow," Ruby says, and there's more than a trace of grudging awe in her voice. "He found a way out." She laughs. "What are you waiting for, Sam? Champagne? Go!"
And he isn't sure why, or for what, but Sam reaches out, pulls her to him, and lowers his mouth to hers in a kiss. Perhaps it's the gratitude for having protected him all this while; perhaps it's the loneliness and strong emotion that drew him to her in the first place. Perhaps it's all of these, or none of these: just that he craves the tang of sulphur on her tongue. He is a selfish creature, after all.
He lets go of her, walks toward the doorway of light, and doesn't look back.
He leaves behind nothing.
Finis