Dread the passing... (4000ish words, lots of warnings)
I've gone back and forth on whether to post this or not. I wrote this when I was feeling a bit miserable and bleak. It's probably not going to be as horrifying to you lot as it was to me when I first read through what I'd written - I guess you can take the girl out of the faith, but you can't take the faith out of the girl.
Besides the subject matter which, as I said, probably won't bother you as much as it bothered me, this is a flawed piece of writing. Please be aware of this. I wanted to try something with it and it doesn't work but it's what I produced. Thank you to those of you who helped me come round to that.
The title comes from my absolute favourite piece of music by Nick Cave, but isn't exactly as it is in the song. I am also toying with the idea of writing a commentary on this so you're not free of it yet. :)
Dread the passing of Jesus for he does not return
(4000ish words, warnings for torture, incest, non-con, blood, misuse of religious imagery, and character death)
A man of God versus the Antichrist
1:1
One Sunday six years ago, the Reverend Nathaniel Bettany stood in his pulpit, looked out over the shining faces of his congregation, closed his Bible and said, "The Beast is coming. I have seen through the eyes of the angels and the Beast is coming."
After his subsequent disappearance, the Diocese searched his home and though no one ever spoke about what was found, several people in the small town saw the flickering, orange light of a bonfire. The vicarage stood empty for some years after, no incumbent sent to replace Nathaniel Bettany, and eventually the Diocese sold it on and took property elsewhere in the town.
The townspeople don't talk about that last sermon. But it sits like an abscess in their collective memory and not one of them wonders where the Reverend Bettany is now beyond wishing that it's far away from them.
1:2
They get Dean first. A swift, brutal blow to the temple and he's on his knees in the parking lot, blood rushing into his vision and he's gasping through the pain. He tries to rise and finds a knife resting on the jumping point of his pulse.
He's hauled into the truck, flinches as he hears the truck door slam shut and the skin below the blade turns slippery with blood. They pin him down as they search him for weapons, hands twisting and turning him before finally just holding him, still and cruel. The ache of circulation being cut off pounds through his body.
A face leans in towards him and in the slanted flash of the lights they're passing on the road, Dean can see wild eyes filled with unnerving intensity and a clerical collar at the man's throat.
"Mary Magdelene was a crazy whore." The voice is soft, powerful. "Are you your brother's crazy whore, Dean? Are you his magdalen? I think you are. I've seen you. Filthy, the way he looks at you. It was almost enough to give him away just with that. What kind of man lusts after his own brother?"
Dean's lips part in a shaky grin and then he spits right in the man's face, grins even broader as he watches it dribble down the long, patrician nose and onto the bloodless line of his lips.
He stops grinning when the knife snaps upright and buries itself in his shoulder.
1:3
The fifteen or so men and women who form the cult behind the Reverend Nathaniel Bettany are god-fearing people. They also believe they are damned, miserable sinners from the cradle, and destined for the Pit. They believe in the Old Testament God, the jealous god whose punishment for disloyalty will descend down the generations.
They believe they will go down into Hell and as such, they commit acts in the name of God that earn them their place there.
Dean is a foot soldier for the Beast, precious to the Beast, and with him, they can vent their frustration and despair upon one even lower and more wretched than themselves.
There isn't any hope. There's only taking a bitter revenge for their lost souls. Revenge leaves Dean coughing up blood, the fingers on one hand snapped into unnatural angles and his skin mottled with burns, bruises and lacerations.
1:4
It's eight hours after Dean goes missing that Sam gets the call. He's frantic, sweaty hands scrabbling to answer the cellphone before it goes dead.
"Dean?" he says. "Where the hell are you? Are you okay?"
Heavy breathing is the only answer he gets. Hitching, dry sobs. Sam's throat contracts, squeezing tightly shut, and he sways on his feet, grabbing at the doorframe to keep himself standing. There's a muffled scuffle on the other end of the line, a voice saying let him hear your voice and then a wet grunt of pain.
"Dean," Sam says. Quiet and level, even as thoughts of blood-red massacre go through his head.
"Don't come. It's a trap. Don't come. Sammy, I'm just bait. They want you. Don’t come. Don't you dare come."
And Sam's knees go weak at hearing the hurt in his brother's voice. His body crumples to the floor, cellphone still clutched to his ear. He takes the directions he's given with a numb sort of concentration and is already planning how fast he can get there.
1:5
Men suffer wicked urges. It's ugly but part of their nature, part of their curse. Diana accepts it even as it fills her with disgust. She cannot expect any better. More importantly, Reverend Bettany doesn't expect any better. And if they sate these degenerate impulses with the Beast's whore then so much the better for the women who follow Reverend Bettany.
Besides, she admits to finding a certain satisfaction in it.
The Beast's brother had refused to be humbled. They bound him and they beat him, and nothing in him changed. Smirked through it all as he bled and cried and writhed. He made his snide, witty remarks as they peeled the skin off his back and carved the name of God on his belly.
But when Micah turned him over and had Duane hold him still while he took his jeans down, the smirk was wiped clean off his face. He'd fought before but never quite so frantically. There might even have been a please… don't do this in all his noise. So much softer, so much weaker than all the vicious filth he'd been spewing at them before.
It's a nasty, animalistic thing, what they do to him. Low grunts and twitching flesh, hips stabbing forward in sharp thrusts and fingers digging hard into limbs that thrash to be let loose. Duane takes a turn after Micah and when they are both done, the backs of Dean's thighs are dark with blood. He doesn't try to lift himself off the stone floor, simply lies there.
Reverend Bettany kneels at his side and caresses Dean's cheek. Dean jerks away from the touch and Reverend Bettany ignores the blood and sweat that comes away on his fingers. Instead, he takes his cross from around his neck, and the tiny, crucified figure swings in the muted light that slices through the church, a tiny pinprick of something bright and beautiful.
Reverend Bettany works the crucifix between Dean's split, swollen lips and Dean struggles, briefly, not to accept it. But Reverend Bettany holds his jaw tight and forces it in, past Dean's weakly clenched teeth. Carefully, he seals Dean's mouth closed with a strip of duct tape.
"See how sin destroys us all?" says Reverend Bettany, rising to his feet.
And Diana thinks she can see the sharp angles of the cross press against the insides of Dean's cheek as he pushes at it with his tongue and tries not to choke on it, and she nods.
1:6
Sometimes kids go up to the abandoned church on the hill to test the superstition that a glass bottle thrown against its walls won't shatter. And then they regret it because even when the sun is shining and a warm, coastal breeze is setting the cornflowers waving, there's something wrong with the hush in the air. It's a silence that is waiting for something. It's expectant.
It's raining when Sam pulls up outside, a thin hot drizzle. He has a plan but it's in a separate part of his brain and it keeps getting shouted down by the furious part that's terrified he may already be too late. If Dean is dead… he can't get beyond it. He knows what he becomes without Dean and he doesn't want to be that.
The metal of the gun is slimy in his hands as he chambers a bullet, and then he looks up at the church, printed grey against the monochrome smudge of the sky. Sweat and the rain lay thick upon his skin, blurring his vision. The thunderous heat makes it hard to think.
He needs his brother back if he's going to be human.
1:7
When the angels came to him and showed him the world The Adversary was bringing, Nathaniel had been afraid. Of course he had been. And then they showed him the face of the Beast and Nathaniel had lost all hope. Some flying behemoth, a composite of the most dreadful aspects of wild animals, was at least an honest face for the apocalypse.
Samuel Winchester, with a body that should be scarecrow-clumsy and eyes that were bashful and sweet, is the cruellest of Hell's lies. He played at normal, went to Stanford, found a pretty girl to fall in love with him. He gets tongue-tied around diner waitresses, can't hold his drink and flushes bright red when he's caught with porn on his laptop. Who's going to look at him and see the world go all ashes to ashes?
But he's showing his true face as he comes into the church. The angels directed Nathaniel in every step of his task and even in this, they told him how to strip away the veneer of ethical angst. Just give him a good look at his brother, beaten and abused, and Sam falls away into the Beast.
He lets out a shuddering breath and moves into the nave of the church, stepping over the debris accumulated from long years of abandonment. Sheets of yellowing hymn pages flutter in the sweltering, listless breeze and Sam kicks them out of his path.
Dean moans at Nathaniel's feet, shifts as he shakes his head from side to side, eyes wide and glassy with horror. The sounds he makes are distorted by the crucifix in his mouth and maybe also by the amount of screaming he's done during the course of the last day.
"What have you done?" Sam says.
He sounds outraged. More bizarrely yet, he sounds distraught. The Antichrist is distraught. Nathaniel expected more immediate violence.
Nathaniel takes hold of Dean's shoulder, one finger pressing into the wet, split skin of a knife wound, and uses his grip to haul him up onto his knees. Despite having left the Church some time back, when they refused to acknowledge the vision passed to him from the angels, Nathaniel still considers himself a man of God. It is only recently that he also learnt to think of himself as a soldier and only recently that he acquired the gun he now holds at Dean's temple.
"We summoned you, Antichrist," he says. His cult forms a loose circle around the three of them, their shadows lengthening black shapes across the stone floor of the church. "Putting a bullet into your whore's brain could very well be an act of mercy, sparing him from the chance of damning himself further. Do you want me to?"
The Beast's grip on his own gun falters. His lips work silently, going from something eerily like a snivelling pout to a firm, resolute line.
"It's me you want, yeah?" says Sam. "I'm here. Just let him go. It's me you want, isn't it? Just, please... don't hurt him."
1:8
Pastor Jim was the one Sam always got on with best. Dean had a thing about Caleb because he got to play with the vast arsenal of weapons Caleb stockpiled. And both of them knew that Bobby was the one to turn to when they got themselves into trouble.
But Pastor Jim was the one who taught Sam to pray, who made him believe there was a counterbalancing good to the evil John brought them up against. He taught Sam to believe in God and angels and the inherent goodness in humanity. He taught Sam, whether he intended to or not, to trust in the little white strip of a clerical collar.
Sam has always seen sense and goodness where others couldn't. And Sam knows Dean is a good man, capable of limitless bravery and self-sacrifice. It makes no sense to him to see Dean like this, at the hands of a man of God. No sense at all when Reverend Bettany doesn't keep his word and set Dean free the second Sam throws down his gun.
"We're not bad people," Sam tells them, and can't understand why they don't stop.
It's how they're both going to end up dead. Sam wants to tell Dean he's sorry that he failed him and he's sorry that he was so naïve and he loves him and he's sorrysorrysorry. But he's too preoccupied with trying not to pass out as they wind the barbed wire into a crown around his skull. The metal bites into his skin, stings and aches hotly. He can't see Dean, has only vague idea of how many of them there are. Their voices are an indistinct cackling and shrieking. Somewhere, he can hear something like hammering.
And his mind wanders away to where it can hear Pastor Jim reading to him from the Bible while Dean and John are gone hunting. And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, says Jim in his ear, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull.
1:9
When the first nail is driven through Sam's wrist, the blood puddling darkly on wood and stone, Dean gives a muffled scream and struggles so fiercely against the people holding him that his shoulder snaps right out of its socket. He hears the pop of it but doesn't feel it. Just as he doesn't feel any of the other hurts he should feel after the abuse he's taken. He can only see Sammy being nailed to a cross, bellowing and twisting in agony.
This is a fresh hurt, more terrible than anything else they've done. He fractures inside at the sight and sound of it, breaking little by little, the cracks spreading like spiderweb.
The crucifix scrapes the soft inside of his mouth and his teeth grind helplessly against the sour-tasting metal. It's hard to breathe and he can't get out from the bodies holding him down. Sammy needs him and he can't get there. Sammy came for him, for his worthless, already sold soul.
He thrashes and they hold him down tighter, sweaty grasping hands that will make him take himself apart before he escapes them.
Sammy's shouting turns wet and choked. The hammering goes on and on until it sounds to be coming from right inside Dean's head.
When they raise the cross, the wood creaks like an old tree in the wind and the chains that hold it in place clank and rattle. Its shadow seems incongruously spindly but it reaches out from right behind the altar where they've planted the base, along the nave, straight to the door.
Sammy's still twitching and jerking on the cross. Stupid long-legged, long-armed freak spread out on the wood. Stupid bangs getting in his eyes. Stupid blood all over his face from the goddamn crown they've forced onto his head.
Stupid stupid stupid.
The impact of Dean's head, over and over, against the ground is preferable to any more thinking or seeing. He smashes his forehead onto the stone until the hands pull at him again.
1:10
They rape Dean again at the foot of Sam's cross. It's the last thing Sam sees before he dies.
1:11
Crucifixion is not a quick death but Nathaniel is not willing to take any chances. He doesn’t want to wait for nature to run its course because the Beast is not natural.
He shoots a bullet square into the Antichrist's stomach then winces as blood gushes over the altar. The church may have been abandoned years ago but it is still hallowed space given up to God and blood on the altar is a desecration.
The altar is drenched in seconds. As it falls and splatters, the flow of blood splashes in hollow, metallic chimes into the bottom of the battered Eucharist cup, too obviously cheap to have been looted. It's nothing but chance that the Antichrist's blood should spill in the way it has but Nathaniel watches the level in the cup rise steadily, messily and he backs away.
Gradually the blood slows to a trickle as the heart of the Beast stops beating. The last drops of it hit thick and viscous, splattering Nathaniel's cuff. He is already filthy but he feels the stain of it more deeply than anything ever before.
What now? He sees the question on the faces of the faithful, those that aren't entertaining themselves with the boneless, broken thing the Beast's whore has become since the death of his brother. He sees elation and awe on their faces, but he sees the question too and the answer comes to him at once.
"The work of the Lord is never finished," he says. His voice carries through the church as sure and steady as ever. Nathaniel does not need faith because he has certainty. "Now we pray and the Lord will reveal what next we may do to serve Him."
They fall to their knees and if it seems as if they are bowing their heads to the slumped figure of the monster on the cross at the altar, it's pure misconception.
1:12
Flies begin to swarm around the corpse the next day. Their droning reaches to the vaulted ceiling of the church, as heavy and oppressive as the lingering heat of the storm that has not properly broken.
Dean stays at the foot of the cross, curled into a foetal position, body still bruised and sticky with blood and come. He has not moved in hours, not even when the cable twisted around his wrists came loose. Maybe he could run if he tried, or crawl at least, but he hasn't moved from the shadow of the cross.
The Reverend Bettany and his congregation kneel in the murky light of a sun that refuses to rise full in the sky. At noon, it sits as a wavering orange blot behind bloated, black clouds, just above the horizon. Unhappy murmurings come in below the noise of the flies. There is a sense of something wrong in the air.
Wrongness becomes malice as the Antichrist's corpse starts to stink.
2.1
When the suns sinks sullenly out of the sky, there is a sudden silence. It falls over the church as if coincidentally. Nothing unnatural in it except, all at once, everyone finds themselves in a gloomy hush.
The shadow of the crucified Beast has disappeared in the night. It's limned by watery starlight, nothing but a nebulous shape of angles and a slumped figure.
And in the silent darkness, the Antichrist twitches on his cross. Barbed wire unfurls and crawls across the ground, scratching and grating over stone. The sound of a nail falling, striking the floor, rings bell-like through the church.
2.2
Sam is not resurrected. Sam resurrects himself. He descends from his cross and takes his place at the altar.
2.3
"Don’t be scared."
Something in Dean's brain triggers an automatic response in him to that voice. Something in him twitches into life even if outwardly he gives no sign of it.
"I came back, Dean."
Sammy. Not dead. Not hurt. Not pinned up there by all those sick sick fuckers. Sammy.
2:4
Diana's lips move numbly in silent prayer but the words slip away from her. She watches with horrified fascination as the Antichrist beckons his brother towards him.
Dean creeps towards the altar, dragging himself to his feet as he approaches it. He's a terrible looking thing. No longer that deviant prettiness. Beaten and soiled, unable to stand up straight. And the Beast should be the same kind of miserable wretch. She saw the nails pierce his skin. Her own palms are bloody from where she helped twist the barbed wire around his head. She saw his blood gush from the bullet wound in his belly.
But the Beast is tall and smiling and serene. The marks at his wrist are bloodless. A dark stain covers the front of his shirt but he doesn't move like a man who's been shot in the stomach.
He touches his brother's cheek, fingertips light on the swollen flesh. Gently, he pries away the ragged strip of tape from Dean's mouth. Then he plucks the spit-slick crucifix free from between Dean's swollen, red lips. Brows tightening in a frown, the Beast throws it aside. Then he picks up the cup of his spilt blood.
"Look at me, Dean," he says. There's something deep and heavy in his voice that makes Diana's bones judder beneath her skin. "Do you accept me? Will you pray to me? Will you turn away from everything else and love me?"
"Yes," says Dean. No hesitation. "Yes."
The Beast's hand moves from Dean's cheek to his shoulder and Dean folds to his knees, face still tilted up to his brother. Diana sees adoration. She sees reverence and she strains for the words of a prayer, any prayer at all.
When the cup is brought to Dean's lips, he drinks. She sees the ripple of his throat, hears the desperate, wet sound of him drinking his brother's day-old blood, kept warm and thick by the stagnant air.
"For you," the Beast says. "It's for you. Drink it."
Dean's mouth glistens dark and red when he lowers the cup but he doesn't wipe at his lips. Instead, his tongue flickers over them, obscene and greedy. The Beast takes the cup and places it on the altar once more. Then he sinks to his knees before Dean and turns his brother's face up to his.
A smile passes between them.
And the Beast kisses his brother.
So wrong. So wicked. Diana brings her hand to her mouth and bites down on her knuckles to stifle her moan. But not quickly enough.
The Beast rises to his feet, Dean still on his knees before him, and he looks out across the church, across the cowering, shivering mass, and he smiles again.
2:5
It's six days later when the bodies are discovered. The stench of decomposition is nauseating and flies fill the air in noisy, black clouds. The first police officer on the scene stands in the doorway of the church, calls it in and then goes to wait in his car. When back-up arrives, he calmly, unyieldingly refuses to go back inside. Instead, he sits outside and listens to the cheery birdsong and lets the sun wash over his skin.
But every time he closes his eyes, he returns to the church.
No one's sure what to tell the press. Looks ritual, someone ventures and then they all fall silent. None of them want to think about the eighteen bodies with slit throats that have been hauled to the altar. They certainly don't want to think about the bloodstained cross that still casts its shadow down the length of the church.
Looks Satanic, is what they all think.
2:6
Dean brings them to Sam and Sam cuts them open. One by one.
2:7
The tide of blood sweeps out from the altar. After the twelfth death, it reaches Nathaniel, where he kneels in prayer. His faithful are begging him to do something while the Beast and his whore set about slaughtering them. Nathaniel can only pray.
Nothing stops the Beast and his whore. Not bullets, not fists, not pleading. The doors to the church stand sealed. The church has become an abbatoir.
It's Duane on the altar, Dean straddling his chest, the Beast raising his knife above his head and the blood trickles down his wrist. Duane shrieks and struggles and Dean's voice rises above it, drunk with laughter.
"Jesus, he screams like a chick! Y'know, if he hadn't shoved his goddamn cock up my ass earlier I'd be seriously doubting he even had one."
"He did that?" says the Beast. "You wanna do this one yourself?"
"Nah, I'm good just watching."
There's a sudden, slick smack and Duane's screaming cuts off into a gurgle. Dean hooks his hands under Duane's arms and drags his still kicking body off the altar, onto the growing pile of corpses.
"Who's next?" Dean calls out. Bright and gleeful.
Eventually, the church is silent. Nathaniel stays on his knees as he hears the approaching footsteps. Blood drips from the knife in the Beast's hand, splattering the ground in front of him. He doesn't look up.
2:8
The sun is rising when Sam and Dean leave the church. In the soft dawn light, Sam catches Dean by the shoulders and looks him over. Dean smiles beatifically at him through blood that is not his own. The first Communion with Sam's blood healed Dean, made him beautiful and strong again; Sam's curious what a second Communion will do. There's time for that. So much time.
They climb into the Impala and as Dean starts the engine, Sam looks out across the landscape at a world that is not waiting anymore. The Beast is not coming. The Beast is here.
2:9
Nathaniel is sprawled at the foot of the altar, bleeding out slowly but surely, when the angels come.
Well done, the angels say. You did everything we asked you to. And you did it so well too.
Nathaniel smiles to himself: they've come to carry him home. They're beautiful, he thinks. Shining white among the blood. They smile and shimmer and watch him with their flat black eyes.
Thank you, they say as they close in on him. What a wonderful Antichrist you've made.
~end
Besides the subject matter which, as I said, probably won't bother you as much as it bothered me, this is a flawed piece of writing. Please be aware of this. I wanted to try something with it and it doesn't work but it's what I produced. Thank you to those of you who helped me come round to that.
The title comes from my absolute favourite piece of music by Nick Cave, but isn't exactly as it is in the song. I am also toying with the idea of writing a commentary on this so you're not free of it yet. :)
Dread the passing of Jesus for he does not return
(4000ish words, warnings for torture, incest, non-con, blood, misuse of religious imagery, and character death)
A man of God versus the Antichrist
1:1
One Sunday six years ago, the Reverend Nathaniel Bettany stood in his pulpit, looked out over the shining faces of his congregation, closed his Bible and said, "The Beast is coming. I have seen through the eyes of the angels and the Beast is coming."
After his subsequent disappearance, the Diocese searched his home and though no one ever spoke about what was found, several people in the small town saw the flickering, orange light of a bonfire. The vicarage stood empty for some years after, no incumbent sent to replace Nathaniel Bettany, and eventually the Diocese sold it on and took property elsewhere in the town.
The townspeople don't talk about that last sermon. But it sits like an abscess in their collective memory and not one of them wonders where the Reverend Bettany is now beyond wishing that it's far away from them.
1:2
They get Dean first. A swift, brutal blow to the temple and he's on his knees in the parking lot, blood rushing into his vision and he's gasping through the pain. He tries to rise and finds a knife resting on the jumping point of his pulse.
He's hauled into the truck, flinches as he hears the truck door slam shut and the skin below the blade turns slippery with blood. They pin him down as they search him for weapons, hands twisting and turning him before finally just holding him, still and cruel. The ache of circulation being cut off pounds through his body.
A face leans in towards him and in the slanted flash of the lights they're passing on the road, Dean can see wild eyes filled with unnerving intensity and a clerical collar at the man's throat.
"Mary Magdelene was a crazy whore." The voice is soft, powerful. "Are you your brother's crazy whore, Dean? Are you his magdalen? I think you are. I've seen you. Filthy, the way he looks at you. It was almost enough to give him away just with that. What kind of man lusts after his own brother?"
Dean's lips part in a shaky grin and then he spits right in the man's face, grins even broader as he watches it dribble down the long, patrician nose and onto the bloodless line of his lips.
He stops grinning when the knife snaps upright and buries itself in his shoulder.
1:3
The fifteen or so men and women who form the cult behind the Reverend Nathaniel Bettany are god-fearing people. They also believe they are damned, miserable sinners from the cradle, and destined for the Pit. They believe in the Old Testament God, the jealous god whose punishment for disloyalty will descend down the generations.
They believe they will go down into Hell and as such, they commit acts in the name of God that earn them their place there.
Dean is a foot soldier for the Beast, precious to the Beast, and with him, they can vent their frustration and despair upon one even lower and more wretched than themselves.
There isn't any hope. There's only taking a bitter revenge for their lost souls. Revenge leaves Dean coughing up blood, the fingers on one hand snapped into unnatural angles and his skin mottled with burns, bruises and lacerations.
1:4
It's eight hours after Dean goes missing that Sam gets the call. He's frantic, sweaty hands scrabbling to answer the cellphone before it goes dead.
"Dean?" he says. "Where the hell are you? Are you okay?"
Heavy breathing is the only answer he gets. Hitching, dry sobs. Sam's throat contracts, squeezing tightly shut, and he sways on his feet, grabbing at the doorframe to keep himself standing. There's a muffled scuffle on the other end of the line, a voice saying let him hear your voice and then a wet grunt of pain.
"Dean," Sam says. Quiet and level, even as thoughts of blood-red massacre go through his head.
"Don't come. It's a trap. Don't come. Sammy, I'm just bait. They want you. Don’t come. Don't you dare come."
And Sam's knees go weak at hearing the hurt in his brother's voice. His body crumples to the floor, cellphone still clutched to his ear. He takes the directions he's given with a numb sort of concentration and is already planning how fast he can get there.
1:5
Men suffer wicked urges. It's ugly but part of their nature, part of their curse. Diana accepts it even as it fills her with disgust. She cannot expect any better. More importantly, Reverend Bettany doesn't expect any better. And if they sate these degenerate impulses with the Beast's whore then so much the better for the women who follow Reverend Bettany.
Besides, she admits to finding a certain satisfaction in it.
The Beast's brother had refused to be humbled. They bound him and they beat him, and nothing in him changed. Smirked through it all as he bled and cried and writhed. He made his snide, witty remarks as they peeled the skin off his back and carved the name of God on his belly.
But when Micah turned him over and had Duane hold him still while he took his jeans down, the smirk was wiped clean off his face. He'd fought before but never quite so frantically. There might even have been a please… don't do this in all his noise. So much softer, so much weaker than all the vicious filth he'd been spewing at them before.
It's a nasty, animalistic thing, what they do to him. Low grunts and twitching flesh, hips stabbing forward in sharp thrusts and fingers digging hard into limbs that thrash to be let loose. Duane takes a turn after Micah and when they are both done, the backs of Dean's thighs are dark with blood. He doesn't try to lift himself off the stone floor, simply lies there.
Reverend Bettany kneels at his side and caresses Dean's cheek. Dean jerks away from the touch and Reverend Bettany ignores the blood and sweat that comes away on his fingers. Instead, he takes his cross from around his neck, and the tiny, crucified figure swings in the muted light that slices through the church, a tiny pinprick of something bright and beautiful.
Reverend Bettany works the crucifix between Dean's split, swollen lips and Dean struggles, briefly, not to accept it. But Reverend Bettany holds his jaw tight and forces it in, past Dean's weakly clenched teeth. Carefully, he seals Dean's mouth closed with a strip of duct tape.
"See how sin destroys us all?" says Reverend Bettany, rising to his feet.
And Diana thinks she can see the sharp angles of the cross press against the insides of Dean's cheek as he pushes at it with his tongue and tries not to choke on it, and she nods.
1:6
Sometimes kids go up to the abandoned church on the hill to test the superstition that a glass bottle thrown against its walls won't shatter. And then they regret it because even when the sun is shining and a warm, coastal breeze is setting the cornflowers waving, there's something wrong with the hush in the air. It's a silence that is waiting for something. It's expectant.
It's raining when Sam pulls up outside, a thin hot drizzle. He has a plan but it's in a separate part of his brain and it keeps getting shouted down by the furious part that's terrified he may already be too late. If Dean is dead… he can't get beyond it. He knows what he becomes without Dean and he doesn't want to be that.
The metal of the gun is slimy in his hands as he chambers a bullet, and then he looks up at the church, printed grey against the monochrome smudge of the sky. Sweat and the rain lay thick upon his skin, blurring his vision. The thunderous heat makes it hard to think.
He needs his brother back if he's going to be human.
1:7
When the angels came to him and showed him the world The Adversary was bringing, Nathaniel had been afraid. Of course he had been. And then they showed him the face of the Beast and Nathaniel had lost all hope. Some flying behemoth, a composite of the most dreadful aspects of wild animals, was at least an honest face for the apocalypse.
Samuel Winchester, with a body that should be scarecrow-clumsy and eyes that were bashful and sweet, is the cruellest of Hell's lies. He played at normal, went to Stanford, found a pretty girl to fall in love with him. He gets tongue-tied around diner waitresses, can't hold his drink and flushes bright red when he's caught with porn on his laptop. Who's going to look at him and see the world go all ashes to ashes?
But he's showing his true face as he comes into the church. The angels directed Nathaniel in every step of his task and even in this, they told him how to strip away the veneer of ethical angst. Just give him a good look at his brother, beaten and abused, and Sam falls away into the Beast.
He lets out a shuddering breath and moves into the nave of the church, stepping over the debris accumulated from long years of abandonment. Sheets of yellowing hymn pages flutter in the sweltering, listless breeze and Sam kicks them out of his path.
Dean moans at Nathaniel's feet, shifts as he shakes his head from side to side, eyes wide and glassy with horror. The sounds he makes are distorted by the crucifix in his mouth and maybe also by the amount of screaming he's done during the course of the last day.
"What have you done?" Sam says.
He sounds outraged. More bizarrely yet, he sounds distraught. The Antichrist is distraught. Nathaniel expected more immediate violence.
Nathaniel takes hold of Dean's shoulder, one finger pressing into the wet, split skin of a knife wound, and uses his grip to haul him up onto his knees. Despite having left the Church some time back, when they refused to acknowledge the vision passed to him from the angels, Nathaniel still considers himself a man of God. It is only recently that he also learnt to think of himself as a soldier and only recently that he acquired the gun he now holds at Dean's temple.
"We summoned you, Antichrist," he says. His cult forms a loose circle around the three of them, their shadows lengthening black shapes across the stone floor of the church. "Putting a bullet into your whore's brain could very well be an act of mercy, sparing him from the chance of damning himself further. Do you want me to?"
The Beast's grip on his own gun falters. His lips work silently, going from something eerily like a snivelling pout to a firm, resolute line.
"It's me you want, yeah?" says Sam. "I'm here. Just let him go. It's me you want, isn't it? Just, please... don't hurt him."
1:8
Pastor Jim was the one Sam always got on with best. Dean had a thing about Caleb because he got to play with the vast arsenal of weapons Caleb stockpiled. And both of them knew that Bobby was the one to turn to when they got themselves into trouble.
But Pastor Jim was the one who taught Sam to pray, who made him believe there was a counterbalancing good to the evil John brought them up against. He taught Sam to believe in God and angels and the inherent goodness in humanity. He taught Sam, whether he intended to or not, to trust in the little white strip of a clerical collar.
Sam has always seen sense and goodness where others couldn't. And Sam knows Dean is a good man, capable of limitless bravery and self-sacrifice. It makes no sense to him to see Dean like this, at the hands of a man of God. No sense at all when Reverend Bettany doesn't keep his word and set Dean free the second Sam throws down his gun.
"We're not bad people," Sam tells them, and can't understand why they don't stop.
It's how they're both going to end up dead. Sam wants to tell Dean he's sorry that he failed him and he's sorry that he was so naïve and he loves him and he's sorrysorrysorry. But he's too preoccupied with trying not to pass out as they wind the barbed wire into a crown around his skull. The metal bites into his skin, stings and aches hotly. He can't see Dean, has only vague idea of how many of them there are. Their voices are an indistinct cackling and shrieking. Somewhere, he can hear something like hammering.
And his mind wanders away to where it can hear Pastor Jim reading to him from the Bible while Dean and John are gone hunting. And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, says Jim in his ear, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull.
1:9
When the first nail is driven through Sam's wrist, the blood puddling darkly on wood and stone, Dean gives a muffled scream and struggles so fiercely against the people holding him that his shoulder snaps right out of its socket. He hears the pop of it but doesn't feel it. Just as he doesn't feel any of the other hurts he should feel after the abuse he's taken. He can only see Sammy being nailed to a cross, bellowing and twisting in agony.
This is a fresh hurt, more terrible than anything else they've done. He fractures inside at the sight and sound of it, breaking little by little, the cracks spreading like spiderweb.
The crucifix scrapes the soft inside of his mouth and his teeth grind helplessly against the sour-tasting metal. It's hard to breathe and he can't get out from the bodies holding him down. Sammy needs him and he can't get there. Sammy came for him, for his worthless, already sold soul.
He thrashes and they hold him down tighter, sweaty grasping hands that will make him take himself apart before he escapes them.
Sammy's shouting turns wet and choked. The hammering goes on and on until it sounds to be coming from right inside Dean's head.
When they raise the cross, the wood creaks like an old tree in the wind and the chains that hold it in place clank and rattle. Its shadow seems incongruously spindly but it reaches out from right behind the altar where they've planted the base, along the nave, straight to the door.
Sammy's still twitching and jerking on the cross. Stupid long-legged, long-armed freak spread out on the wood. Stupid bangs getting in his eyes. Stupid blood all over his face from the goddamn crown they've forced onto his head.
Stupid stupid stupid.
The impact of Dean's head, over and over, against the ground is preferable to any more thinking or seeing. He smashes his forehead onto the stone until the hands pull at him again.
1:10
They rape Dean again at the foot of Sam's cross. It's the last thing Sam sees before he dies.
1:11
Crucifixion is not a quick death but Nathaniel is not willing to take any chances. He doesn’t want to wait for nature to run its course because the Beast is not natural.
He shoots a bullet square into the Antichrist's stomach then winces as blood gushes over the altar. The church may have been abandoned years ago but it is still hallowed space given up to God and blood on the altar is a desecration.
The altar is drenched in seconds. As it falls and splatters, the flow of blood splashes in hollow, metallic chimes into the bottom of the battered Eucharist cup, too obviously cheap to have been looted. It's nothing but chance that the Antichrist's blood should spill in the way it has but Nathaniel watches the level in the cup rise steadily, messily and he backs away.
Gradually the blood slows to a trickle as the heart of the Beast stops beating. The last drops of it hit thick and viscous, splattering Nathaniel's cuff. He is already filthy but he feels the stain of it more deeply than anything ever before.
What now? He sees the question on the faces of the faithful, those that aren't entertaining themselves with the boneless, broken thing the Beast's whore has become since the death of his brother. He sees elation and awe on their faces, but he sees the question too and the answer comes to him at once.
"The work of the Lord is never finished," he says. His voice carries through the church as sure and steady as ever. Nathaniel does not need faith because he has certainty. "Now we pray and the Lord will reveal what next we may do to serve Him."
They fall to their knees and if it seems as if they are bowing their heads to the slumped figure of the monster on the cross at the altar, it's pure misconception.
1:12
Flies begin to swarm around the corpse the next day. Their droning reaches to the vaulted ceiling of the church, as heavy and oppressive as the lingering heat of the storm that has not properly broken.
Dean stays at the foot of the cross, curled into a foetal position, body still bruised and sticky with blood and come. He has not moved in hours, not even when the cable twisted around his wrists came loose. Maybe he could run if he tried, or crawl at least, but he hasn't moved from the shadow of the cross.
The Reverend Bettany and his congregation kneel in the murky light of a sun that refuses to rise full in the sky. At noon, it sits as a wavering orange blot behind bloated, black clouds, just above the horizon. Unhappy murmurings come in below the noise of the flies. There is a sense of something wrong in the air.
Wrongness becomes malice as the Antichrist's corpse starts to stink.
2.1
When the suns sinks sullenly out of the sky, there is a sudden silence. It falls over the church as if coincidentally. Nothing unnatural in it except, all at once, everyone finds themselves in a gloomy hush.
The shadow of the crucified Beast has disappeared in the night. It's limned by watery starlight, nothing but a nebulous shape of angles and a slumped figure.
And in the silent darkness, the Antichrist twitches on his cross. Barbed wire unfurls and crawls across the ground, scratching and grating over stone. The sound of a nail falling, striking the floor, rings bell-like through the church.
2.2
Sam is not resurrected. Sam resurrects himself. He descends from his cross and takes his place at the altar.
2.3
"Don’t be scared."
Something in Dean's brain triggers an automatic response in him to that voice. Something in him twitches into life even if outwardly he gives no sign of it.
"I came back, Dean."
Sammy. Not dead. Not hurt. Not pinned up there by all those sick sick fuckers. Sammy.
2:4
Diana's lips move numbly in silent prayer but the words slip away from her. She watches with horrified fascination as the Antichrist beckons his brother towards him.
Dean creeps towards the altar, dragging himself to his feet as he approaches it. He's a terrible looking thing. No longer that deviant prettiness. Beaten and soiled, unable to stand up straight. And the Beast should be the same kind of miserable wretch. She saw the nails pierce his skin. Her own palms are bloody from where she helped twist the barbed wire around his head. She saw his blood gush from the bullet wound in his belly.
But the Beast is tall and smiling and serene. The marks at his wrist are bloodless. A dark stain covers the front of his shirt but he doesn't move like a man who's been shot in the stomach.
He touches his brother's cheek, fingertips light on the swollen flesh. Gently, he pries away the ragged strip of tape from Dean's mouth. Then he plucks the spit-slick crucifix free from between Dean's swollen, red lips. Brows tightening in a frown, the Beast throws it aside. Then he picks up the cup of his spilt blood.
"Look at me, Dean," he says. There's something deep and heavy in his voice that makes Diana's bones judder beneath her skin. "Do you accept me? Will you pray to me? Will you turn away from everything else and love me?"
"Yes," says Dean. No hesitation. "Yes."
The Beast's hand moves from Dean's cheek to his shoulder and Dean folds to his knees, face still tilted up to his brother. Diana sees adoration. She sees reverence and she strains for the words of a prayer, any prayer at all.
When the cup is brought to Dean's lips, he drinks. She sees the ripple of his throat, hears the desperate, wet sound of him drinking his brother's day-old blood, kept warm and thick by the stagnant air.
"For you," the Beast says. "It's for you. Drink it."
Dean's mouth glistens dark and red when he lowers the cup but he doesn't wipe at his lips. Instead, his tongue flickers over them, obscene and greedy. The Beast takes the cup and places it on the altar once more. Then he sinks to his knees before Dean and turns his brother's face up to his.
A smile passes between them.
And the Beast kisses his brother.
So wrong. So wicked. Diana brings her hand to her mouth and bites down on her knuckles to stifle her moan. But not quickly enough.
The Beast rises to his feet, Dean still on his knees before him, and he looks out across the church, across the cowering, shivering mass, and he smiles again.
2:5
It's six days later when the bodies are discovered. The stench of decomposition is nauseating and flies fill the air in noisy, black clouds. The first police officer on the scene stands in the doorway of the church, calls it in and then goes to wait in his car. When back-up arrives, he calmly, unyieldingly refuses to go back inside. Instead, he sits outside and listens to the cheery birdsong and lets the sun wash over his skin.
But every time he closes his eyes, he returns to the church.
No one's sure what to tell the press. Looks ritual, someone ventures and then they all fall silent. None of them want to think about the eighteen bodies with slit throats that have been hauled to the altar. They certainly don't want to think about the bloodstained cross that still casts its shadow down the length of the church.
Looks Satanic, is what they all think.
2:6
Dean brings them to Sam and Sam cuts them open. One by one.
2:7
The tide of blood sweeps out from the altar. After the twelfth death, it reaches Nathaniel, where he kneels in prayer. His faithful are begging him to do something while the Beast and his whore set about slaughtering them. Nathaniel can only pray.
Nothing stops the Beast and his whore. Not bullets, not fists, not pleading. The doors to the church stand sealed. The church has become an abbatoir.
It's Duane on the altar, Dean straddling his chest, the Beast raising his knife above his head and the blood trickles down his wrist. Duane shrieks and struggles and Dean's voice rises above it, drunk with laughter.
"Jesus, he screams like a chick! Y'know, if he hadn't shoved his goddamn cock up my ass earlier I'd be seriously doubting he even had one."
"He did that?" says the Beast. "You wanna do this one yourself?"
"Nah, I'm good just watching."
There's a sudden, slick smack and Duane's screaming cuts off into a gurgle. Dean hooks his hands under Duane's arms and drags his still kicking body off the altar, onto the growing pile of corpses.
"Who's next?" Dean calls out. Bright and gleeful.
Eventually, the church is silent. Nathaniel stays on his knees as he hears the approaching footsteps. Blood drips from the knife in the Beast's hand, splattering the ground in front of him. He doesn't look up.
2:8
The sun is rising when Sam and Dean leave the church. In the soft dawn light, Sam catches Dean by the shoulders and looks him over. Dean smiles beatifically at him through blood that is not his own. The first Communion with Sam's blood healed Dean, made him beautiful and strong again; Sam's curious what a second Communion will do. There's time for that. So much time.
They climb into the Impala and as Dean starts the engine, Sam looks out across the landscape at a world that is not waiting anymore. The Beast is not coming. The Beast is here.
2:9
Nathaniel is sprawled at the foot of the altar, bleeding out slowly but surely, when the angels come.
Well done, the angels say. You did everything we asked you to. And you did it so well too.
Nathaniel smiles to himself: they've come to carry him home. They're beautiful, he thinks. Shining white among the blood. They smile and shimmer and watch him with their flat black eyes.
Thank you, they say as they close in on him. What a wonderful Antichrist you've made.
~end