Catharsis, for mymuseandi
Title: Catharsis
Author: counteragent
Recipient: mymuseandi
Rating: PG-13 for fantasy-style horror
Wordcount: ~6,700
Warnings: Show levels of violence and horror
Author's Notes: Takes place during and directly after 8X23, Sacrifice. It is an AU ending for that episode. Inspired by mymuseandi's Prompt #2.Summary: Sam finishes the trials, trapping Dean on an alternate plane where he must fight a battle that will change the Winchesters forever.
Dean woke up nowhere, Sam’s last words ringing in his ears.
“I’m sorry, Dean.”
***
Dean had gotten there on time. Sam had still been vertical, even if he already looked like the corpse he’d be if he finished the trials. Crowley’s fear had a distinctly human tint-the treatments had been working, transforming the King of Hell back into a Scottish tailor. Sam’s hand had been raised, ready to deliver the final blow to demonkind.
Dean had zapped across the country to stop him, told him that finishing the trials to shut the gates of hell permanently would also kill him. You finish this trial, you're dead, Sam.
Sam asked, “So?”
His face was suffused with longing and shame. Dean had been just about to answer, to confess his first and only truth because you are everything when Sam had slammed his bloody hand across Crowley’s mouth.
Dean cried out and rushed to rip Sam’s hand away. Sam had held on, a preternatural strength surging through his glowing limbs. He was hot to the touch and as immovable as a statue. Dean had abandoned his frantic attempts to pull Sam back and simply hung on as Sam had started to shake apart.
Dean had seen the lit symbols from Sam’s forearm’s travel to the rest of his body, causing Sam to glow like a bed of coals. He had been there when the symbols began erupting from Sam’s skin, splitting it with light until Sam was more beacon than person. Dean had held on as long as he could, finally stumbling back only when the chunks of Sam’s arms he clutched crumbled into nothing but beams of light. Dean had seen this kind of light before.
He had just enough time to wonder where before collapsing into nothing.
***
Dean was weightless, suspended in a limitless field of gray mist. It was enough like the endless space of hell that he fought it, twisting and squirming like a fish on land as he searched for something to challenge. The result-besides his looking stupid for no one-was that Dean turned and turned, each direction the same. It was quiet; the only sounds were his breathing and the rustle of his clothes. It was room temperature; the patches of mist passing by left no wetness or chill. It was painless and effortless to move, and once Dean decided on a direction to orient himself, he even began to feel the pull of a light gravity, as if he’d willed it into being.
In short, it was kind of comfortable.
Dean hated it.
He had to figure out where he was and whose ass to kick so he could go kill his son of a bitch brother for dying and stranding him here.
A light rain began to fall, and as Dean looked closely, he saw that the drops were symbols like the ones he’d seen on Sam, streaming in orderly rows like code in The Matrix. The symbols were a grayish purple, and as he watched, they turned to English letters. On a whim, Dean cupped his hands. He soon had a sentence’s worth.
Forgive me father for I have sinned
Huh, OK.
“Dean?”
“Sammy?” Dean turned so fast that his momentum carried him around twice.
“Dean! I don’t know where I am! And I think there’s something coming to get me!” The voice was everywhere and nowhere. It sounded panicked-the blank, all-encompassing fear of a small child. It was Sammy’s voice when he was young, piping and clear as a bell; no older than five. The sound of it dug Dean’s heart out with a spoon.
“Hang tight, Sammy. I’m on my way.” Dean picked a direction and began to slog through the clinging mist.
***
Minutes or hours or days later, Dean slowed to a stop. Sam’s voice had grown neither closer nor further no matter which direction Dean chose, and now it had fallen silent.
“Son of a bitch,” Dean breathed softly, in case Sammy was listening somehow. Dean looked at his hands, words were still falling on them, running off in little streaks of sentiment. Forgive me forgive me father brother forgive me brother forgive forgive help help help me.
Dean smudged the words away on his jeans and raised his eyes again. Through the not-rain he saw Sam riding a unicorn. Dean blinked. Scratch that-he never had been and never would be that lucky.
The creature walking calmly toward him through the mist was definitely a monster. All white, it shone like the moon, but its color was its only beauty. It had the body of a stallion, whiclits legs sprawled unnaturally sideways like a lizard. Its forward-most head rose gracefully on a horse-like neck, but as it drew nearer, Dean saw its eyes were slit-pupiled like an alligator. Most disturbing of all, a torso, arms and head all unmistakably Sam’s rose from the creature’s back, marble-white skin blending with its silvery fur. Its eyes were all white with no iris, and only the fact that the whole thing was the same color kept it from looking like a demon. The figure was an animated statue, flawless but lifeless.
The horse head lifted its lips to expose a carnivore’s grin. Wolf’s teeth gleamed in the horse’s skull, and Dean shuddered. Not even the demons in hell, mocking him with all manner of Sam, had twisted him into a weirder shape.
“It’s you,” it said. That couldn’t be good.
Dean ran. He sprinted away from the Samtaur through the featureless landscape, his work boots slogging through nothing, mist and letter rain continuing endlessly. After what seemed like ten freaking miles, Dean spared a glance over his shoulder. To his horror, it was swimming after him, its reptilian legs paddling and a heavy plated tail-fuck, how did he miss that the first time-propelling it through the mist.
Dean turned to stand his ground. There was nowhere to run, if he wasn’t fast enough to shake it.
The creature slowed to a stop; it wasn’t going to charge him, at least. The whole thing folded in on itself, horse head, tail, and lizard legs crumpling into the Sam figure like the world’s weirdest Deceptacon. Dean had always been more of a Star Wars guy, himself.
Dean’s hands twitched with the instinct to reach for weapons that weren’t there. This better not end up being his own hallucination, or he was going to beat the crap outta himself for not conjuring a few weapons of mass destruction to go with all the creepy fog.
The Sam figure had two Samlike legs now instead of an extra horse-lizard. It looked like Sam-same height, same build, same features. It had human eyes, Sam’s goofy hair. It had more color than before, like a faded photograph. But the stance was off; Sam habitually minimized his height, ducked his head, moved carefully. This figure walked calmly through the not-fog toward Dean, unencumbered by years of Winchester life, and-really?-unburdened by clothes.
Dean figured with his luck he was either looking at some version of T-1000-Sam or Lucifer. He gave it even odds and crouched into a fighting stance. He’d take a shot at RoboSam gladly and while his fists wouldn’t do shit against an archangel, going down swinging was all he’d ever had anyway.
“I cannot harm you,” it said.
Dean thought of RoboSam’s knife at Bobby’s throat, Lucifer’s foot cheerfully snapping another Dean’s neck. Sam-wrapped packages were often full of nasty surprises. He asked the only question that mattered. “Where’s Sam?”
“I am Sam.” The figure radiated stillness instead of menace, which was unexpected, but its eyes were somehow blank, focused on a middle distance like it was unused to making eye contact. An itch in his brain told Dean he’d seen that look before.
“Bull. Sam would be wearing clothes.” When in doubt, stall. Also, it was true: Sam had whined about privacy since the day Dean taught him to pee standing up.
The figure inclined his head in a slow nod. “Fair point.”
It fuzzed out, temporarily turning to a man-shaped cloud of the same letters and symbols that fell like rain. It would have been disgusting if it weren’t kind of cool. When it reappeared, it was wearing a multi-layered outfit, regulation Winchester-except it was all flannel. All the same flannel. Jeans, shirt, shoes, overshirt and jacket all cut from the same soft tartan. Dean suspected flannel tightie whities underneath. The figure finished the transformation smiling with all the personality of a mannequin.
“Thanks. Look, I don’t care what dopplegang you belong to. If you’re not gonna help me find Sam, we have a problem.
It tried Sam’s puppy-dog eyes next, and it was like watching a fish interpret human body language. Dean scanned automatically for a likely exit, but his eyes found only inky letter-rain falling through the shifting gray fog. Nothing for it but to play this hand out.
The thing was talking. “…you are here with me already. This-“ it stretched his arms in a parody of Sam’s favorite dramatic gesture-“is all Sam, all me. You are inside my true form, which in turn is in heaven. I surrounded your soul-self within my true form as I ascended to this plane. It was instinctive, to protect you. With another it would have failed, but we are…linked.”
Dean’s brain began to untangle the meaning of the thing’s words and suddenly he knew where he’d seen its unfocused calm before. It was pure Cas, early days. Back before Dean had clued him in on things like hamburgers, hookers and basic human communication. Oh, this was bad. This was so much worse than--.
“You’re an angel?” Dean nearly gagged. The only thing that kept him from hyperventilating was that he suspected he wasn’t actually breathing. Dean understood Hell. He got Purgatory. They were both simple places full of simple things. They had a kind of honor. Nothing Dean knew about angels hung together; as far as he could tell they were either robots or two-faced corporate douchebags and not one of them had ever done him a solid. (Cas seemed to be more Winchester than angel nowadays--he certainly fucked up like a member of the family.)
“Nearly.” The thing didn’t notice the revulsion Dean had shoved into the word, apparently; its demeanor remained neutrally confident. “I have access to what you might think of as angel programming, both a kind of hardware-the history of heaven and earth-and software, through which I could reach the angel communication streams as well as tap into various abilities on demand, including probabilistic computational algorithms…”
“Get to the point, ‘Sam-I-am.’ Are you an angel or not?”
“No. As far as I can tell, I have the form and many of the abilities of an angel. I may actually be more powerful than your standard angel. But I have no grace; instead I retain my human soul as a power source.”
“You mean-Sam’s soul.”
“My soul.”
Whatever. “Buddy, I gotta tell you, you don’t seem all that soulful to me.” Understatement of the year-this thing made Castiel seem like a master of nuance. Compared to Samthing’s charm, RoboSam was Miss America.
The being looked down, and its hair fell forward. Dean refused to think Sam. “My transformation is not complete. I cannot find my soul.”
“Oh, hell no. I have been here. I got the shitty T-shirt. I have a closet full of them. If you are asking me to find Sam’s soul-again-so it can turn whatever you are into some kind of nuclear powered angel action figure, you can freaking forget it.”
The thing looked up, and this time it got the focus right, locking eyes with Dean in an urgent, unblinking stare. “I believe that if I do not find it shortly, my form will become unstable and begin to break down.”
“Sucks to be you.”
“Dean, your soul will be eradicated.”
“Sounds peachy.”
“As will mine--Sam’s.” Personally, Dean would rather see Sam snuffed out than be an angel dick’s battery, even if that angel dick was all that was left of Sam. His Sam might have agreed-they were in this mess because Sam was a self-sacrificing idiot, after all. But Dean was listening at least.
“And the damage to this realm-to heaven-could be considerable. Innocent human souls could become unmoored from their rest, cast back to earth as spirits, or back to Purgatory to be consumed by mon-“
“Dean! It’s definitely stalking me. Hurry!” It was Sammy again, this time sounding older, maybe 9 or 10. Thank Christ, Dean had a direction now: down.
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” Dean said, and steeple-ing his hands over his head, he dove into the mist.
***
Dean landed in the middle of a cave, blipping into position like starting a level in a video game. A burning torch had materialized in his left hand; he held it aloft. Rock walls arched above him into darkness. The letter-rain and gauzy mist were gone, this felt solid. Quartz-laden stalactites and stalagmites reached for each other, underground teeth in rock jaws, closing in slow motion. The torch’s fire animated the shadows and Dean thought of daevas and how he’d give anything for a clean monster fight instead of this trumped up angel circus.
Weirdly-or not so weirdly, given the everything-Dean had changed into a costume. There wasn’t another word for what he was wearing. Jet-black armor in a lightweight, futuristic material covered his torso, while sleeves of silver chain-mail shifted along his arms. Over his jeans (he got to keep those, at least), an honest to god sword was buckled on one side, while a thigh holster housed the Colt on the other. Dean’s right hand drew the gun without conscious prompting, and he spent an awe-filled moment admiring its newly minted gleam and perfectly oiled lock, stock and barrel. Better yet, the chamber was filled, six perfect bullets nestled snug in their beds. If he was gonna be trapped in heaven, stuffed up some angel’s ass, at least he had some firepower.
As getups went, it was kind of badass in a Batman meets Moondor sort of way. Dean looked closer at the chest plate: his tattoo design was raised in a subtle bas relief that covered much of his left pec. And there, mounted in the very center of the breastplate, was his amulet. It shone, the bronze polished enough to catch the flickering light.
“I’ll be damned.” It was body-warm when Dean touched it.
“Dean!” Sammy was closer now, down the dark corridor in front of him. Dean’s body responded immediately, launching him toward the sound.
It was tough going-the rocks underfoot were slimy with moisture, and darkness threatened to suffocate Dean’s small light. Packs of stalagmites rose up like bars on a cage, sometimes he had to backtrack to avoid them, sometimes he had to wiggle through. Crevasses creased his path, some waiting to twist an ankle, others to swallow a man.
Dean nearly fell twice before he had the idea to use his sheathed sword as a kind of walking stick to test unsteady rocks and prod ahead into the darkness. He looked like a moron. It didn’t matter.
“Dean, where are you? I can’t hold if off much longer--”
Dean scuttled forward, the landscape crippling his grace and Sam’s voice drawing him onward.
***
The cat-thing’s jaws were enormous this close up, its mouth weirdly flattened on a muzzle-less face, like a demon Cheshire cat. The taloned claw wrapped around Dean’s torso-seriously why couldn’t anything here have normal freaking feet-held him up to its face. The gloat was clear in its rumbling purr as it met Dean’s gaze with blood-red eyes.
Dean favored it with a glare, but it was just a conditioned response at this point. The thing had him, and it knew it. His weapons were useless on the cave floor below. Sam was somewhere behind it, crumpled where the thing had thrown him. Dean couldn’t see or hear him anymore, and the realization drove a sick wave of dread through his gut.
“Do you want to know who I am?” it said, and it smiled.
***
Dean had gotten there on time. He’d wriggled through a final narrow passageway to stumble into a large, multileveled cavern. Weak indirect sunlight lit the space; it had looked like high noon to Dean’s eyes compared to the darkness he’d just left. In the center of the cavern, Sam had been facing off with the biggest monster Dean had ever seen. It was easily five times bigger than a hell-hound, the ruff on its cat-like form raised into actual barbed spikes. Its similarly barbed tail lashed out at Sammy, but-good kid-he rolled nimbly under it, to spring up and land a blow on its soft underside with his scimitar. Dean had stood there for a beat, taking in Sammy’s ten-year old self dressed in an ivory belted tunic, leggings and soft boots. The small cap on his head of the same fabric made him look like Peter Pan, a guise not entirely at odds with his earnest deadliness. It should have looked stupid, but Sam made it work.
Sam had turned, alerted by some unknown Sam power. (Dean had been stealthy as hell tumbling out of that hole in the wall, thank you very much).
“It’s you!” Sam had said, and he had looked at Dean like he was Han Solo, Einstein, and Mom all in one. It had been 20 years since Sam had looked at him like that, and Dean felt the weight of all that time vanish in the glow.
“Hiya, Sammy,” Dean had said, grinning back. Then the cat-thing pounced again, just missing Sam, and Dean raised his weapons to join the fight.
It had seemed like they were even going to win for a while. What Sam lacked in size and strength, he made up for with agility, beyond what he’d had in life. Dean had quickly holstered the Colt in favor of the sword-bullets didn’t seem to do much to the thing; it liked to spit them back, absorbing them into its body and flinging them from its mouth like the world’s deadliest hairballs. Blades did the trick, though, if you could get at its undercarriage, its abdomen or the bottom of its tail. They had fallen right back in synch, communicating with the hand signals, whistles, and verbal shorthand they’d perfected over a lifetime. The Impala wasn’t the only well-oiled Winchester machine.
“Cover me!” Sam had said, suddenly backing off from the attack.
Dean hadn’t stopped to question taking orders form a pre-teen-he had simply raced around to flank the creature, rolling under a sweeping tail to nick it where the appendage met its body. The monster had hissed like a snake and suddenly Dean had had an enormous clawed foot to avoid. Understandably, he missed the transformation altogether; the next thing Dean knew, a large white falcon was diving for the cat’s eyes, causing it to flinch violently as it flung down scaly eyelids. Sam’s talons-the bird was definitely Sam, awesome-had met the cat-thing’s hide with a metallic screech before Sam arced away to try again. Sam had even landed a glancing blow to the cat-thing’s neck, digging in with his talons below its deadly barbed ruff before he had glided away, faltering in his exhaustion. It might have been the coolest thing Dean had ever seen. Dean got busy making good on Sam’s distraction, slicing and dicing in between bouts of frantic dodging.
Sam returned to his side then, and they had spent a moment back to back, sharing strength by standing together. The cat-thing had been hurting; it favored a front leg, and its tail was dripping a substance Dean didn’t want to examine too closely as it dragged uselessly on the ground behind it. Dean had just been about to whisper his plan to off the sucker when the damn thing started to talk.
“You know he didn’t even fix the car.” Its voice was entirely at odds with its appearance. It was weirdly mechanical, distorted and full of static, like a poorly recorded voicemail.
“Shut up!” Sam said, and Dean had spared a moment for surprise until he remembered that Sam was 10; of course he was gonna take the bait.
So the thing could talk. Annoying, but most of the things they hunted could.
“We’ve already had our lifetime quota of monster therapy, fuck you very much,” Dean said, more to distract Sam than anything else. Someday Dean was gonna go to a real shrink, a hot one, and spend session after session just bitching about supernatural psychoanalysis.
“You think I’m a monster? I guess that’s about right.”
It was gonna be damn therapeutic, all right. As soon as he killed this motherf’r and figured out how to not be dead. Dean tried to catch Sam’s eye, but the kid was focusing on the words dripping like oil from the thing’s lips.
“Lying about Baby is such a little thing, but there’s a nice story in it.”
“I said shut up!” Sam was so angry he had begun vibrating, starting to phase in and out of his hawk form.
“Sam! Stay with me, kiddo.” Dean tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but had met only air as Sam flickered between forms.
The monster had been circling them slowly. Dean counted no fewer than four exposed weaknesses. But Sam would have been monster chow if Dean had left him then. There had been no way out but through. Dean had tuned back in to talk Sam down from whatever lies the thing was spewing.
“Once upon a time Sam paid some girl mechanic to fix Baby. See, he had held himself together just long enough to tow her somewhere safe. Sam coulda won the empty gesture Olympics with that one. But then our hero went and had a six month stay in the nearest crazy house.”
To Dean’s horror, the cat-thing healed itself then, so effortlessly that Dean realized it had been messing with them the entire time. Dean tried to think over the fresh rush of adrenaline. If he and Sam were souls, and they got eaten, that had to be bad, right?
“He didn’t respond to at all to second gen antipsychotics, but they kept trying. And he let ‘em try. While his brother fought for his life in Purgatory, he let them strap him down and try.”
Dean had honestly started to think of death on Earth as a bit of a revolving door, but soul death in heaven was another ballpark. Even if he was ready to be snuffed out, he’d be damned if he was gonna let Sam be Fancy Feast.
“Sam, follow me back to where I came in, OK?”
Both Sam and the beast ignored Dean, their gazes locked in a deadly game of chicken.
“His chart said catatonic schizophrenia but it might have just as well said useless.”
Dean took a chance and grabbed for Sam. His hand closed on something, and he hauled Sam up and threw him over his shoulder. He bagena desperate sprint to the crack in the cavern wall-he’d carried Sam before and he’d do it again-when Sam had slipped away, his form a blur as he launched himself from Dean’s shoulder and flew straight at the monster.
“Don’t say it!” Sam’s voice was clear regardless of his form.
“Say what, Sammy? That you knew you deserved to die here? That you called Dean just because you were too selfish to die alone?”
“Sam, no!” Dean had turned back, trying somehow to stop the inevitable.
With an inhuman screech, Sam dove toward the cat’s face, heedless of angle or planning. It had been no effort at all for the thing to bat him across the cavern. The falcon met the wall with the sound of lightweight bones snapping. It dropped to the rock floor like a broken toy, utterly motionless.
***
Dean had gotten there in time, but it wasn’t going to matter. Sam’s soul was a pile of crushed bones and ivory feathers; he’d be cat chow once Dean’s soul was out of the way. Which looked to be sooner rather than later.
“Do you want to know what the thing is that’s going to devour your soul?” The worst part was that you could see its tongue when it talked, and it looked human.
“Not really.”
The catthing’s voice shifted just a fraction. It lost the mechanical static, like a cell call finally getting decent reception. The cat’s eyes were an opaque blood-red on one blink, and a clear, fresh green the next.
“It’s you.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” Time for this to be over.
In response, the cat-thing snaked its tongue slowly out from behind teeth as long as Dean’s forearm. The tongue was purple-pink, with taste buds the size of half dollars. It was rank with a smell of the sea, salt and brine and dead things bloating on a sunny beach. It slowly licked him, a warm wave of wet pressure laving him from his toes, up past his dick and stopping with the curl of tongue just beneath his chin. The tongue’s tip prodded at his belly, where Dean’s abs tensed involuntarily. Dean chewed the inside of his cheeks bloody not to react. He took a deep breath through his nostrils, then regretted it when the smell of his own blood mixed with the cat’s breath made him sputter and cough. The cat mercilessly chose that moment to continue its savoring, the tongue sliding up to seal itself around Dean’s face.
Dean didn’t even have two minutes left-he’d coughed out all his air like a rookie-and his time was going to be spent marinating in the knowledge that Dean was the thing terrorizing Sam’s soul, shrinking it down to a nice morsel-sized ten year old. Dean was the beast stalking through the corridors of Sam’s mind, inescapable even in heaven. Dean had failed to convince Sam not to kill himself, and now he was hanging around, screwing up his afterlife.
Dean’s vision began to swim with gray spots. They floated in his mind’s eye, coalescing and separating, like clouds of mist. Dean started to fade away; that particular bodiless pain that stalked him in hell taking over his senses. It wasn’t the sharp sting of a blade or the twisting tear of a bullet. Those were clean. It was the crushing disappointment of being loved less than you loved, of needing the careless, of failing the worthy. The words he saw falling through the mist in his fading mind seemed like his own. Forgive me brother I have sinned forgive me I have sinned brother brother help help forgive.
“Hey, ugly,” Sam said.
The tongue whipped away, leaving Dean gasping. Sam must have scored a hit; the crush of the talons lessened, and Dean gulped in air, trying to force himself not to black out from the rush. He managed to look up just in time to see Sam diving down in falcon form, sleek as a missile and as beautiful as an angel. He unfurled his wings right at the point of no return, arresting his dive to change form in mid-air. With a whoop, human Sam slashed the tendons of the monster’s claw with his scimitar as he fell. The creature howled and dropped Dean immediately. Dean was busy rolling off the fall and scrambling to his weapons, but somehow Sam must have changed back, because he was hovering in front of the cathing’s mouth, his falcon’s wings twisting unnaturally like a hummingbird’s.
“Dean, go! It’s me it wants,” Sam cried.
“Sammy!” It was too late. The creature’s head snapped forward, and Sam was gone, snatched from midair and swallowed whole. The creature threw back its head, shaking its head as it visibly swallowed. Sam must have been scratching on the way down.
The thing chortled, its amusement rumbling through the cavern.
Its eyes shifted back to an all too familiar shade as it loomed over Dean. Its face was even more hideous when it smiled. Dean had nothing left but a hunch. He lifted the Colt from where he’d found it on the floor and fired, one bullet right in each human green eye.
It howled, clawing the air and writhing from side to side like a bad actor in a death scene. Dean dove away as it flailed, waiting for an opportunity. He still had work to do, and time was running out.
It finally toppled onto its side and Dean darted forward, scrambling up its belly using fistfuls of hair as handholds. He stood on its still heaving flank and drew his sword.
“You ain’t me,” Dean said, and drove his sword deep into its hide.
He rode it down, letting gravity make him a cutting tool, like a pirate tearing a path through a sail. Dean leaped away, staring at the slice. It held for an unnatural second, and then burst open without warning. Ooze-covered skeletons erupted from the gash like viscera, all lifeless but fully clothed. Wave upon wave of men, women and children tumbled out like a catch of fish from a net, their eye sockets staring. Dean rushed forward, at first avoiding the carnage but finally stepping on damp bones and sopping wet clothes as he scrambled up the pile. His feet found purchase on skulls and shoulders as he climbed, but he wasn’t looking anymore, because there. There was Sam, sprawled out and as bloodless as his ivory tunic. And Dean was grabbing at him and dragging him close and he was unconscious but breathing and stupid and stubborn and perfect and he was coming around and gasping and saying the dumbest things like I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry and the words flowing around them read dean dean dean dean dean dean dean.
Then Dean was falling through nothing again, with Sammy in his arms.
***
Dean phased in and out. He thought he saw the Samtaur lift his arm to receive a young white falcon on his forearm. He thought he saw Sam handing him a newspaper-wrapped amulet or maybe it was a cup of eggnog. He thought he saw Sam lighting a firecracker or maybe he was holding a beer. He thought he saw Sam blinking up at him from his crib or maybe he was smiling with relief behind the bars of a cage door about to swing open. Dean thought he saw a lot of things.
***
Dean woke up in a forest in Oregon. At least that’s what it looked like, but he was pretty sure it was still fucking heaven.
On the bright side, Sam was there, looking down at him with an uncomfortably fond smile on his face. Uncomfortable for Dean, anyway; Sam seemed to be perfectly happy. The right age, the right weight (he’d barely been able to keep down Dean’s Joy of Cooking the last few months), the right clothes, thank god. He was limned in light, and Dean remembered how much he’d looked like Mom in the church when the glow from the trials had taken over his body.
Dean stood up, hauled Sam to his feet, and punched him in the face.
“You moron! You ignored me, got yourself killed and turned into some kind of freakyass centaur angel dickbag. Oh and. By the way? You killed me. Stand still while I kick your newly feathered ass.”
To Dean’s annoyance, Sam just opened his arms.
“C’mere.”
“If you think we are gonna just hug it ou-“
Dean’s words were muffled in multiple layers of flannel, denim and cotton-and you knew it was a bad day when you were thankful Sam’s lack of fashion sense was present and accounted for-as Sam trapped him in a hug. It took a long time for Sam to let go.
Sam cleared his throat. “You’re not dead, actually.”
Dean waved a hand around, all don’t kid a kidder. “Uh, heaven?”
“No, really. I, uh, took a peek downstairs while you were out.” Sam ignored Dean’s pointed cough at his casual tone. “Your body is still alive, just unconscious. I’m pretty sure when you wake up you’ll snap back there.”
“Oh.” Dean guessed that was comforting.
Sam actually scuffed a shoe, as if not sure whether his next words would set Dean off again. “And the gates of hell are shut.”
Dean thought of Ellie, and all the people like her who would never twist on a rack for mistakes made from love. He thought of all the murderers and thieves and brutes who never would either. He thought of Bela and that old artist and the chick surgeon and all the other people who didn’t deserve Hell, but got it anyway. He thought of himself and his brothers.
“Yeah, we might have to do something about that situation,” Dean said.
Sam gave him a wry half-smile. “Yeah.”
“So what’s the deal here; pearly gates closed for business, too? We seem to be suspiciously angel-cake free up here. Not that I’m complaining.”
Sam got a tuned out look on his face. “No, the gates are still permeable by human souls and angels. But all the angels have been cast out and turned human.”
Sam said it all simply, like he was reading a wikipedia entry, and Dean was gonna get used to the Sam-can-check-angel-radio-now thing soon, he really was. Just as soon as he stopped feeling nauseous because it just hit him again that Sam was basically dead to him now, as unreliable as any one of those feathery robots and this made time number six Sam had died on his watch, and there were no takebacks left, Sam wasn’t even Sam anymore, and shit, who knew breathing could be this hard in heaven-
“Whoa, whoa, Dean!” Sam had his hands on Dean’s shoulders and he wasn’t being gentle about it. It didn’t help. Dean felt like Sam was calling him from far away. How many times had those hands hurt him when they weren’t Sam at all? Dean couldn’t stop Sam from changing any more than he could stop him from dying. And the bitch of it all was, Dean wasn’t sure which one he thought was worse.
Suddenly Dean’s back hit a familiar shape. He realized after a moment that Sam had leaned him up against the Impala. It was parked in the forest clearing as if it had floated there, no tire tracks marking the grass around it. Dean didn’t ask if Sam had conjured it, he just sagged against his baby.
“I’m still me, man. I don’t have grace, you found my soul. You saved it. Again. You know that was me, don’t you?”
And damn it if Sam didn’t sound just like his ten year old self when he asked like that. Dean gritted his teeth, because if that bird had really been Sam, then that meant- “Saved you? I’m the thing that almost ate you.”
Sam looked upward, asking for strength, which would have been funny-is God still up in heaven?-if Dean didn’t know God had fucked off a long time ago.
“Dean, that was me, too, OK? You were trapped in my trueform space, like Charlie’s video game or Bobby’s dream-house. That thing wasn’t you, it was. Was,”
“How you think I feel about you.” Sometimes standing in heaven with your soul mate made everything painfully, embarrassingly chick-flick clear.
“Yeah.” Sam had gone from an incriminatingly dewy stare to not meeting his eyes. He came over to lean against the car next to Dean. He seemed to find his shoes fascinating.
“Yeah,” Sam said again when Dean didn’t reply.
When in doubt, stall. “Your head is freaky place, Sam.”
Dean waited for the right question to come to him. “So you don’t think I’m mad anymore? Now that we’ve slain the beast?”
“Are you?”
A thought chilled Dean. “Can you read my mind?”
“Probably.”
Oh, that was reassuring.
“…Seems like a dick move though, seeing as I almost got you killed a couple of times in the last hour.” Sam’s brief smile faded. “So, uh, are you?”
“Well, I’m not so much mad as I am disappointed.”
Sam gave him a hurt look that morphed into a hurt laugh as he obviously decided Dean was fucking with him, using a Dad line to cut him up.
Dean let him squirm because they needed to be here. “No, really. I mean, I think there’s always gonna be a part of me that’s angry you didn’t-“
“Look for you,” Sam whispered, like a confession.
Dean turned to face him fully, keeping a hand on the Impala’s hood. “That you didn’t tell me that you couldn’t look for me.”
Sam’s head whipped up and he stared at Dean. “Sam, I was in hell for a summer. When I broke, I cut people up with a smile on my face. You’ve been in hell more or less since you jumped in the cage. When you broke, you got a dog and a girlfriend.”
Sam, the idiot, looked like he was going to argue, feed him another line like “it wasn’t so bad” seeing Lucifer 24/7 or fighting his way out of a couple flashback comas. That Dean had spent half a lifetime down there, that Lucifer’s cage was somehow a cushier gig. Like there were a million ways that Dean was the only good person standing here.
“I was never gonna hate you for breaking. But now I’m stuck being pissed at you because you didn’t tell me the guilt was killing you. Until it literally killed you.”
Sam bit his lips together and nodded as he dropped his gaze to his shoelaces again. “That’s fair.”
Dean waited a long time before leaning back up against the Impala. He shuffled closer to Sam and knocked their shoulders together.
“But Sam, that part of me that’s angry? It’s…kitten sized. Not-lion-did-the-nasty-with-an-elephant sized.”
Dean had a moment to realize that no birds chirped in heaven.
“Your anger is a kitten.”
“A manly, handsome kitten.”
Sam smiled, the kind of smile Dean hadn’t seen in years. A ray of sunshine broke through the trees to spotlight him.
“Wow, that’s not freaky at all.”
Sam huffed. “Yeah, heaven sucks. We should get you back down there, back in your body.”
So this was it. Dean wondered if maybe he could drive the heaven-Impala back down to earth, wear his baby like a shield during reentry to a world without Sam.
Dean didn’t budge; he kept his shoulder soldered to Sam and his back fused to the Impala. His mouth moved without permission and words fell out. “I guess you work the inside job, and I see if I can find Cas, round up the angels downstairs? There’s also Crowley to track down, even if the gates are cl---“
“Dean.”
Dean closed his mouth with a click of teeth.
“Dean, I don't want to do this without you."
Dean turned to face Sam head on. Sam looked back steadily.
This was gonna be fun.
***
Back on earth, Dean opened his eyes to find Cas slapping him awake.
“Dean,” he said, his face nearly as impassive as usual but relief flooding his voice. “You appear to be uninjured. Good. We must leave immediately; Crowley may return with a more human assault.”
Dean stood slowly, and Cas may have been human now, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew power when he saw it. He backed off quickly, staring at Dean.
“What are you?” Cas asked, his eyes narrowing.
Showtime, Sammy.
Really, Dean?
C’mon, let me have this one.
Dean stood straighter as Samael allowed his power to fill his new vessel. Dean knew Samael’s shadow wings were rising behind him, filling the walls of the church with holy power. It felt like swallowing a comet. It felt like falling from a bridge to rise unhurt, like shooting Azazel between his yellow eyes. Like kissing a demon to save his brother, like seeing his Mom smile. Like fishing with Cas, like a well done son from his father. Like embracing his brother after he returned from Hell.
“We are the last Archangel of the Lord,” Dean said.
END
Author: counteragent
Recipient: mymuseandi
Rating: PG-13 for fantasy-style horror
Wordcount: ~6,700
Warnings: Show levels of violence and horror
Author's Notes: Takes place during and directly after 8X23, Sacrifice. It is an AU ending for that episode. Inspired by mymuseandi's Prompt #2.Summary: Sam finishes the trials, trapping Dean on an alternate plane where he must fight a battle that will change the Winchesters forever.
Dean woke up nowhere, Sam’s last words ringing in his ears.
“I’m sorry, Dean.”
***
Dean had gotten there on time. Sam had still been vertical, even if he already looked like the corpse he’d be if he finished the trials. Crowley’s fear had a distinctly human tint-the treatments had been working, transforming the King of Hell back into a Scottish tailor. Sam’s hand had been raised, ready to deliver the final blow to demonkind.
Dean had zapped across the country to stop him, told him that finishing the trials to shut the gates of hell permanently would also kill him. You finish this trial, you're dead, Sam.
Sam asked, “So?”
His face was suffused with longing and shame. Dean had been just about to answer, to confess his first and only truth because you are everything when Sam had slammed his bloody hand across Crowley’s mouth.
Dean cried out and rushed to rip Sam’s hand away. Sam had held on, a preternatural strength surging through his glowing limbs. He was hot to the touch and as immovable as a statue. Dean had abandoned his frantic attempts to pull Sam back and simply hung on as Sam had started to shake apart.
Dean had seen the lit symbols from Sam’s forearm’s travel to the rest of his body, causing Sam to glow like a bed of coals. He had been there when the symbols began erupting from Sam’s skin, splitting it with light until Sam was more beacon than person. Dean had held on as long as he could, finally stumbling back only when the chunks of Sam’s arms he clutched crumbled into nothing but beams of light. Dean had seen this kind of light before.
He had just enough time to wonder where before collapsing into nothing.
***
Dean was weightless, suspended in a limitless field of gray mist. It was enough like the endless space of hell that he fought it, twisting and squirming like a fish on land as he searched for something to challenge. The result-besides his looking stupid for no one-was that Dean turned and turned, each direction the same. It was quiet; the only sounds were his breathing and the rustle of his clothes. It was room temperature; the patches of mist passing by left no wetness or chill. It was painless and effortless to move, and once Dean decided on a direction to orient himself, he even began to feel the pull of a light gravity, as if he’d willed it into being.
In short, it was kind of comfortable.
Dean hated it.
He had to figure out where he was and whose ass to kick so he could go kill his son of a bitch brother for dying and stranding him here.
A light rain began to fall, and as Dean looked closely, he saw that the drops were symbols like the ones he’d seen on Sam, streaming in orderly rows like code in The Matrix. The symbols were a grayish purple, and as he watched, they turned to English letters. On a whim, Dean cupped his hands. He soon had a sentence’s worth.
Forgive me father for I have sinned
Huh, OK.
“Dean?”
“Sammy?” Dean turned so fast that his momentum carried him around twice.
“Dean! I don’t know where I am! And I think there’s something coming to get me!” The voice was everywhere and nowhere. It sounded panicked-the blank, all-encompassing fear of a small child. It was Sammy’s voice when he was young, piping and clear as a bell; no older than five. The sound of it dug Dean’s heart out with a spoon.
“Hang tight, Sammy. I’m on my way.” Dean picked a direction and began to slog through the clinging mist.
***
Minutes or hours or days later, Dean slowed to a stop. Sam’s voice had grown neither closer nor further no matter which direction Dean chose, and now it had fallen silent.
“Son of a bitch,” Dean breathed softly, in case Sammy was listening somehow. Dean looked at his hands, words were still falling on them, running off in little streaks of sentiment. Forgive me forgive me father brother forgive me brother forgive forgive help help help me.
Dean smudged the words away on his jeans and raised his eyes again. Through the not-rain he saw Sam riding a unicorn. Dean blinked. Scratch that-he never had been and never would be that lucky.
The creature walking calmly toward him through the mist was definitely a monster. All white, it shone like the moon, but its color was its only beauty. It had the body of a stallion, whiclits legs sprawled unnaturally sideways like a lizard. Its forward-most head rose gracefully on a horse-like neck, but as it drew nearer, Dean saw its eyes were slit-pupiled like an alligator. Most disturbing of all, a torso, arms and head all unmistakably Sam’s rose from the creature’s back, marble-white skin blending with its silvery fur. Its eyes were all white with no iris, and only the fact that the whole thing was the same color kept it from looking like a demon. The figure was an animated statue, flawless but lifeless.
The horse head lifted its lips to expose a carnivore’s grin. Wolf’s teeth gleamed in the horse’s skull, and Dean shuddered. Not even the demons in hell, mocking him with all manner of Sam, had twisted him into a weirder shape.
“It’s you,” it said. That couldn’t be good.
Dean ran. He sprinted away from the Samtaur through the featureless landscape, his work boots slogging through nothing, mist and letter rain continuing endlessly. After what seemed like ten freaking miles, Dean spared a glance over his shoulder. To his horror, it was swimming after him, its reptilian legs paddling and a heavy plated tail-fuck, how did he miss that the first time-propelling it through the mist.
Dean turned to stand his ground. There was nowhere to run, if he wasn’t fast enough to shake it.
The creature slowed to a stop; it wasn’t going to charge him, at least. The whole thing folded in on itself, horse head, tail, and lizard legs crumpling into the Sam figure like the world’s weirdest Deceptacon. Dean had always been more of a Star Wars guy, himself.
Dean’s hands twitched with the instinct to reach for weapons that weren’t there. This better not end up being his own hallucination, or he was going to beat the crap outta himself for not conjuring a few weapons of mass destruction to go with all the creepy fog.
The Sam figure had two Samlike legs now instead of an extra horse-lizard. It looked like Sam-same height, same build, same features. It had human eyes, Sam’s goofy hair. It had more color than before, like a faded photograph. But the stance was off; Sam habitually minimized his height, ducked his head, moved carefully. This figure walked calmly through the not-fog toward Dean, unencumbered by years of Winchester life, and-really?-unburdened by clothes.
Dean figured with his luck he was either looking at some version of T-1000-Sam or Lucifer. He gave it even odds and crouched into a fighting stance. He’d take a shot at RoboSam gladly and while his fists wouldn’t do shit against an archangel, going down swinging was all he’d ever had anyway.
“I cannot harm you,” it said.
Dean thought of RoboSam’s knife at Bobby’s throat, Lucifer’s foot cheerfully snapping another Dean’s neck. Sam-wrapped packages were often full of nasty surprises. He asked the only question that mattered. “Where’s Sam?”
“I am Sam.” The figure radiated stillness instead of menace, which was unexpected, but its eyes were somehow blank, focused on a middle distance like it was unused to making eye contact. An itch in his brain told Dean he’d seen that look before.
“Bull. Sam would be wearing clothes.” When in doubt, stall. Also, it was true: Sam had whined about privacy since the day Dean taught him to pee standing up.
The figure inclined his head in a slow nod. “Fair point.”
It fuzzed out, temporarily turning to a man-shaped cloud of the same letters and symbols that fell like rain. It would have been disgusting if it weren’t kind of cool. When it reappeared, it was wearing a multi-layered outfit, regulation Winchester-except it was all flannel. All the same flannel. Jeans, shirt, shoes, overshirt and jacket all cut from the same soft tartan. Dean suspected flannel tightie whities underneath. The figure finished the transformation smiling with all the personality of a mannequin.
“Thanks. Look, I don’t care what dopplegang you belong to. If you’re not gonna help me find Sam, we have a problem.
It tried Sam’s puppy-dog eyes next, and it was like watching a fish interpret human body language. Dean scanned automatically for a likely exit, but his eyes found only inky letter-rain falling through the shifting gray fog. Nothing for it but to play this hand out.
The thing was talking. “…you are here with me already. This-“ it stretched his arms in a parody of Sam’s favorite dramatic gesture-“is all Sam, all me. You are inside my true form, which in turn is in heaven. I surrounded your soul-self within my true form as I ascended to this plane. It was instinctive, to protect you. With another it would have failed, but we are…linked.”
Dean’s brain began to untangle the meaning of the thing’s words and suddenly he knew where he’d seen its unfocused calm before. It was pure Cas, early days. Back before Dean had clued him in on things like hamburgers, hookers and basic human communication. Oh, this was bad. This was so much worse than--.
“You’re an angel?” Dean nearly gagged. The only thing that kept him from hyperventilating was that he suspected he wasn’t actually breathing. Dean understood Hell. He got Purgatory. They were both simple places full of simple things. They had a kind of honor. Nothing Dean knew about angels hung together; as far as he could tell they were either robots or two-faced corporate douchebags and not one of them had ever done him a solid. (Cas seemed to be more Winchester than angel nowadays--he certainly fucked up like a member of the family.)
“Nearly.” The thing didn’t notice the revulsion Dean had shoved into the word, apparently; its demeanor remained neutrally confident. “I have access to what you might think of as angel programming, both a kind of hardware-the history of heaven and earth-and software, through which I could reach the angel communication streams as well as tap into various abilities on demand, including probabilistic computational algorithms…”
“Get to the point, ‘Sam-I-am.’ Are you an angel or not?”
“No. As far as I can tell, I have the form and many of the abilities of an angel. I may actually be more powerful than your standard angel. But I have no grace; instead I retain my human soul as a power source.”
“You mean-Sam’s soul.”
“My soul.”
Whatever. “Buddy, I gotta tell you, you don’t seem all that soulful to me.” Understatement of the year-this thing made Castiel seem like a master of nuance. Compared to Samthing’s charm, RoboSam was Miss America.
The being looked down, and its hair fell forward. Dean refused to think Sam. “My transformation is not complete. I cannot find my soul.”
“Oh, hell no. I have been here. I got the shitty T-shirt. I have a closet full of them. If you are asking me to find Sam’s soul-again-so it can turn whatever you are into some kind of nuclear powered angel action figure, you can freaking forget it.”
The thing looked up, and this time it got the focus right, locking eyes with Dean in an urgent, unblinking stare. “I believe that if I do not find it shortly, my form will become unstable and begin to break down.”
“Sucks to be you.”
“Dean, your soul will be eradicated.”
“Sounds peachy.”
“As will mine--Sam’s.” Personally, Dean would rather see Sam snuffed out than be an angel dick’s battery, even if that angel dick was all that was left of Sam. His Sam might have agreed-they were in this mess because Sam was a self-sacrificing idiot, after all. But Dean was listening at least.
“And the damage to this realm-to heaven-could be considerable. Innocent human souls could become unmoored from their rest, cast back to earth as spirits, or back to Purgatory to be consumed by mon-“
“Dean! It’s definitely stalking me. Hurry!” It was Sammy again, this time sounding older, maybe 9 or 10. Thank Christ, Dean had a direction now: down.
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” Dean said, and steeple-ing his hands over his head, he dove into the mist.
***
Dean landed in the middle of a cave, blipping into position like starting a level in a video game. A burning torch had materialized in his left hand; he held it aloft. Rock walls arched above him into darkness. The letter-rain and gauzy mist were gone, this felt solid. Quartz-laden stalactites and stalagmites reached for each other, underground teeth in rock jaws, closing in slow motion. The torch’s fire animated the shadows and Dean thought of daevas and how he’d give anything for a clean monster fight instead of this trumped up angel circus.
Weirdly-or not so weirdly, given the everything-Dean had changed into a costume. There wasn’t another word for what he was wearing. Jet-black armor in a lightweight, futuristic material covered his torso, while sleeves of silver chain-mail shifted along his arms. Over his jeans (he got to keep those, at least), an honest to god sword was buckled on one side, while a thigh holster housed the Colt on the other. Dean’s right hand drew the gun without conscious prompting, and he spent an awe-filled moment admiring its newly minted gleam and perfectly oiled lock, stock and barrel. Better yet, the chamber was filled, six perfect bullets nestled snug in their beds. If he was gonna be trapped in heaven, stuffed up some angel’s ass, at least he had some firepower.
As getups went, it was kind of badass in a Batman meets Moondor sort of way. Dean looked closer at the chest plate: his tattoo design was raised in a subtle bas relief that covered much of his left pec. And there, mounted in the very center of the breastplate, was his amulet. It shone, the bronze polished enough to catch the flickering light.
“I’ll be damned.” It was body-warm when Dean touched it.
“Dean!” Sammy was closer now, down the dark corridor in front of him. Dean’s body responded immediately, launching him toward the sound.
It was tough going-the rocks underfoot were slimy with moisture, and darkness threatened to suffocate Dean’s small light. Packs of stalagmites rose up like bars on a cage, sometimes he had to backtrack to avoid them, sometimes he had to wiggle through. Crevasses creased his path, some waiting to twist an ankle, others to swallow a man.
Dean nearly fell twice before he had the idea to use his sheathed sword as a kind of walking stick to test unsteady rocks and prod ahead into the darkness. He looked like a moron. It didn’t matter.
“Dean, where are you? I can’t hold if off much longer--”
Dean scuttled forward, the landscape crippling his grace and Sam’s voice drawing him onward.
***
The cat-thing’s jaws were enormous this close up, its mouth weirdly flattened on a muzzle-less face, like a demon Cheshire cat. The taloned claw wrapped around Dean’s torso-seriously why couldn’t anything here have normal freaking feet-held him up to its face. The gloat was clear in its rumbling purr as it met Dean’s gaze with blood-red eyes.
Dean favored it with a glare, but it was just a conditioned response at this point. The thing had him, and it knew it. His weapons were useless on the cave floor below. Sam was somewhere behind it, crumpled where the thing had thrown him. Dean couldn’t see or hear him anymore, and the realization drove a sick wave of dread through his gut.
“Do you want to know who I am?” it said, and it smiled.
***
Dean had gotten there on time. He’d wriggled through a final narrow passageway to stumble into a large, multileveled cavern. Weak indirect sunlight lit the space; it had looked like high noon to Dean’s eyes compared to the darkness he’d just left. In the center of the cavern, Sam had been facing off with the biggest monster Dean had ever seen. It was easily five times bigger than a hell-hound, the ruff on its cat-like form raised into actual barbed spikes. Its similarly barbed tail lashed out at Sammy, but-good kid-he rolled nimbly under it, to spring up and land a blow on its soft underside with his scimitar. Dean had stood there for a beat, taking in Sammy’s ten-year old self dressed in an ivory belted tunic, leggings and soft boots. The small cap on his head of the same fabric made him look like Peter Pan, a guise not entirely at odds with his earnest deadliness. It should have looked stupid, but Sam made it work.
Sam had turned, alerted by some unknown Sam power. (Dean had been stealthy as hell tumbling out of that hole in the wall, thank you very much).
“It’s you!” Sam had said, and he had looked at Dean like he was Han Solo, Einstein, and Mom all in one. It had been 20 years since Sam had looked at him like that, and Dean felt the weight of all that time vanish in the glow.
“Hiya, Sammy,” Dean had said, grinning back. Then the cat-thing pounced again, just missing Sam, and Dean raised his weapons to join the fight.
It had seemed like they were even going to win for a while. What Sam lacked in size and strength, he made up for with agility, beyond what he’d had in life. Dean had quickly holstered the Colt in favor of the sword-bullets didn’t seem to do much to the thing; it liked to spit them back, absorbing them into its body and flinging them from its mouth like the world’s deadliest hairballs. Blades did the trick, though, if you could get at its undercarriage, its abdomen or the bottom of its tail. They had fallen right back in synch, communicating with the hand signals, whistles, and verbal shorthand they’d perfected over a lifetime. The Impala wasn’t the only well-oiled Winchester machine.
“Cover me!” Sam had said, suddenly backing off from the attack.
Dean hadn’t stopped to question taking orders form a pre-teen-he had simply raced around to flank the creature, rolling under a sweeping tail to nick it where the appendage met its body. The monster had hissed like a snake and suddenly Dean had had an enormous clawed foot to avoid. Understandably, he missed the transformation altogether; the next thing Dean knew, a large white falcon was diving for the cat’s eyes, causing it to flinch violently as it flung down scaly eyelids. Sam’s talons-the bird was definitely Sam, awesome-had met the cat-thing’s hide with a metallic screech before Sam arced away to try again. Sam had even landed a glancing blow to the cat-thing’s neck, digging in with his talons below its deadly barbed ruff before he had glided away, faltering in his exhaustion. It might have been the coolest thing Dean had ever seen. Dean got busy making good on Sam’s distraction, slicing and dicing in between bouts of frantic dodging.
Sam returned to his side then, and they had spent a moment back to back, sharing strength by standing together. The cat-thing had been hurting; it favored a front leg, and its tail was dripping a substance Dean didn’t want to examine too closely as it dragged uselessly on the ground behind it. Dean had just been about to whisper his plan to off the sucker when the damn thing started to talk.
“You know he didn’t even fix the car.” Its voice was entirely at odds with its appearance. It was weirdly mechanical, distorted and full of static, like a poorly recorded voicemail.
“Shut up!” Sam said, and Dean had spared a moment for surprise until he remembered that Sam was 10; of course he was gonna take the bait.
So the thing could talk. Annoying, but most of the things they hunted could.
“We’ve already had our lifetime quota of monster therapy, fuck you very much,” Dean said, more to distract Sam than anything else. Someday Dean was gonna go to a real shrink, a hot one, and spend session after session just bitching about supernatural psychoanalysis.
“You think I’m a monster? I guess that’s about right.”
It was gonna be damn therapeutic, all right. As soon as he killed this motherf’r and figured out how to not be dead. Dean tried to catch Sam’s eye, but the kid was focusing on the words dripping like oil from the thing’s lips.
“Lying about Baby is such a little thing, but there’s a nice story in it.”
“I said shut up!” Sam was so angry he had begun vibrating, starting to phase in and out of his hawk form.
“Sam! Stay with me, kiddo.” Dean tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but had met only air as Sam flickered between forms.
The monster had been circling them slowly. Dean counted no fewer than four exposed weaknesses. But Sam would have been monster chow if Dean had left him then. There had been no way out but through. Dean had tuned back in to talk Sam down from whatever lies the thing was spewing.
“Once upon a time Sam paid some girl mechanic to fix Baby. See, he had held himself together just long enough to tow her somewhere safe. Sam coulda won the empty gesture Olympics with that one. But then our hero went and had a six month stay in the nearest crazy house.”
To Dean’s horror, the cat-thing healed itself then, so effortlessly that Dean realized it had been messing with them the entire time. Dean tried to think over the fresh rush of adrenaline. If he and Sam were souls, and they got eaten, that had to be bad, right?
“He didn’t respond to at all to second gen antipsychotics, but they kept trying. And he let ‘em try. While his brother fought for his life in Purgatory, he let them strap him down and try.”
Dean had honestly started to think of death on Earth as a bit of a revolving door, but soul death in heaven was another ballpark. Even if he was ready to be snuffed out, he’d be damned if he was gonna let Sam be Fancy Feast.
“Sam, follow me back to where I came in, OK?”
Both Sam and the beast ignored Dean, their gazes locked in a deadly game of chicken.
“His chart said catatonic schizophrenia but it might have just as well said useless.”
Dean took a chance and grabbed for Sam. His hand closed on something, and he hauled Sam up and threw him over his shoulder. He bagena desperate sprint to the crack in the cavern wall-he’d carried Sam before and he’d do it again-when Sam had slipped away, his form a blur as he launched himself from Dean’s shoulder and flew straight at the monster.
“Don’t say it!” Sam’s voice was clear regardless of his form.
“Say what, Sammy? That you knew you deserved to die here? That you called Dean just because you were too selfish to die alone?”
“Sam, no!” Dean had turned back, trying somehow to stop the inevitable.
With an inhuman screech, Sam dove toward the cat’s face, heedless of angle or planning. It had been no effort at all for the thing to bat him across the cavern. The falcon met the wall with the sound of lightweight bones snapping. It dropped to the rock floor like a broken toy, utterly motionless.
***
Dean had gotten there in time, but it wasn’t going to matter. Sam’s soul was a pile of crushed bones and ivory feathers; he’d be cat chow once Dean’s soul was out of the way. Which looked to be sooner rather than later.
“Do you want to know what the thing is that’s going to devour your soul?” The worst part was that you could see its tongue when it talked, and it looked human.
“Not really.”
The catthing’s voice shifted just a fraction. It lost the mechanical static, like a cell call finally getting decent reception. The cat’s eyes were an opaque blood-red on one blink, and a clear, fresh green the next.
“It’s you.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” Time for this to be over.
In response, the cat-thing snaked its tongue slowly out from behind teeth as long as Dean’s forearm. The tongue was purple-pink, with taste buds the size of half dollars. It was rank with a smell of the sea, salt and brine and dead things bloating on a sunny beach. It slowly licked him, a warm wave of wet pressure laving him from his toes, up past his dick and stopping with the curl of tongue just beneath his chin. The tongue’s tip prodded at his belly, where Dean’s abs tensed involuntarily. Dean chewed the inside of his cheeks bloody not to react. He took a deep breath through his nostrils, then regretted it when the smell of his own blood mixed with the cat’s breath made him sputter and cough. The cat mercilessly chose that moment to continue its savoring, the tongue sliding up to seal itself around Dean’s face.
Dean didn’t even have two minutes left-he’d coughed out all his air like a rookie-and his time was going to be spent marinating in the knowledge that Dean was the thing terrorizing Sam’s soul, shrinking it down to a nice morsel-sized ten year old. Dean was the beast stalking through the corridors of Sam’s mind, inescapable even in heaven. Dean had failed to convince Sam not to kill himself, and now he was hanging around, screwing up his afterlife.
Dean’s vision began to swim with gray spots. They floated in his mind’s eye, coalescing and separating, like clouds of mist. Dean started to fade away; that particular bodiless pain that stalked him in hell taking over his senses. It wasn’t the sharp sting of a blade or the twisting tear of a bullet. Those were clean. It was the crushing disappointment of being loved less than you loved, of needing the careless, of failing the worthy. The words he saw falling through the mist in his fading mind seemed like his own. Forgive me brother I have sinned forgive me I have sinned brother brother help help forgive.
“Hey, ugly,” Sam said.
The tongue whipped away, leaving Dean gasping. Sam must have scored a hit; the crush of the talons lessened, and Dean gulped in air, trying to force himself not to black out from the rush. He managed to look up just in time to see Sam diving down in falcon form, sleek as a missile and as beautiful as an angel. He unfurled his wings right at the point of no return, arresting his dive to change form in mid-air. With a whoop, human Sam slashed the tendons of the monster’s claw with his scimitar as he fell. The creature howled and dropped Dean immediately. Dean was busy rolling off the fall and scrambling to his weapons, but somehow Sam must have changed back, because he was hovering in front of the cathing’s mouth, his falcon’s wings twisting unnaturally like a hummingbird’s.
“Dean, go! It’s me it wants,” Sam cried.
“Sammy!” It was too late. The creature’s head snapped forward, and Sam was gone, snatched from midair and swallowed whole. The creature threw back its head, shaking its head as it visibly swallowed. Sam must have been scratching on the way down.
The thing chortled, its amusement rumbling through the cavern.
Its eyes shifted back to an all too familiar shade as it loomed over Dean. Its face was even more hideous when it smiled. Dean had nothing left but a hunch. He lifted the Colt from where he’d found it on the floor and fired, one bullet right in each human green eye.
It howled, clawing the air and writhing from side to side like a bad actor in a death scene. Dean dove away as it flailed, waiting for an opportunity. He still had work to do, and time was running out.
It finally toppled onto its side and Dean darted forward, scrambling up its belly using fistfuls of hair as handholds. He stood on its still heaving flank and drew his sword.
“You ain’t me,” Dean said, and drove his sword deep into its hide.
He rode it down, letting gravity make him a cutting tool, like a pirate tearing a path through a sail. Dean leaped away, staring at the slice. It held for an unnatural second, and then burst open without warning. Ooze-covered skeletons erupted from the gash like viscera, all lifeless but fully clothed. Wave upon wave of men, women and children tumbled out like a catch of fish from a net, their eye sockets staring. Dean rushed forward, at first avoiding the carnage but finally stepping on damp bones and sopping wet clothes as he scrambled up the pile. His feet found purchase on skulls and shoulders as he climbed, but he wasn’t looking anymore, because there. There was Sam, sprawled out and as bloodless as his ivory tunic. And Dean was grabbing at him and dragging him close and he was unconscious but breathing and stupid and stubborn and perfect and he was coming around and gasping and saying the dumbest things like I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry and the words flowing around them read dean dean dean dean dean dean dean.
Then Dean was falling through nothing again, with Sammy in his arms.
***
Dean phased in and out. He thought he saw the Samtaur lift his arm to receive a young white falcon on his forearm. He thought he saw Sam handing him a newspaper-wrapped amulet or maybe it was a cup of eggnog. He thought he saw Sam lighting a firecracker or maybe he was holding a beer. He thought he saw Sam blinking up at him from his crib or maybe he was smiling with relief behind the bars of a cage door about to swing open. Dean thought he saw a lot of things.
***
Dean woke up in a forest in Oregon. At least that’s what it looked like, but he was pretty sure it was still fucking heaven.
On the bright side, Sam was there, looking down at him with an uncomfortably fond smile on his face. Uncomfortable for Dean, anyway; Sam seemed to be perfectly happy. The right age, the right weight (he’d barely been able to keep down Dean’s Joy of Cooking the last few months), the right clothes, thank god. He was limned in light, and Dean remembered how much he’d looked like Mom in the church when the glow from the trials had taken over his body.
Dean stood up, hauled Sam to his feet, and punched him in the face.
“You moron! You ignored me, got yourself killed and turned into some kind of freakyass centaur angel dickbag. Oh and. By the way? You killed me. Stand still while I kick your newly feathered ass.”
To Dean’s annoyance, Sam just opened his arms.
“C’mere.”
“If you think we are gonna just hug it ou-“
Dean’s words were muffled in multiple layers of flannel, denim and cotton-and you knew it was a bad day when you were thankful Sam’s lack of fashion sense was present and accounted for-as Sam trapped him in a hug. It took a long time for Sam to let go.
Sam cleared his throat. “You’re not dead, actually.”
Dean waved a hand around, all don’t kid a kidder. “Uh, heaven?”
“No, really. I, uh, took a peek downstairs while you were out.” Sam ignored Dean’s pointed cough at his casual tone. “Your body is still alive, just unconscious. I’m pretty sure when you wake up you’ll snap back there.”
“Oh.” Dean guessed that was comforting.
Sam actually scuffed a shoe, as if not sure whether his next words would set Dean off again. “And the gates of hell are shut.”
Dean thought of Ellie, and all the people like her who would never twist on a rack for mistakes made from love. He thought of all the murderers and thieves and brutes who never would either. He thought of Bela and that old artist and the chick surgeon and all the other people who didn’t deserve Hell, but got it anyway. He thought of himself and his brothers.
“Yeah, we might have to do something about that situation,” Dean said.
Sam gave him a wry half-smile. “Yeah.”
“So what’s the deal here; pearly gates closed for business, too? We seem to be suspiciously angel-cake free up here. Not that I’m complaining.”
Sam got a tuned out look on his face. “No, the gates are still permeable by human souls and angels. But all the angels have been cast out and turned human.”
Sam said it all simply, like he was reading a wikipedia entry, and Dean was gonna get used to the Sam-can-check-angel-radio-now thing soon, he really was. Just as soon as he stopped feeling nauseous because it just hit him again that Sam was basically dead to him now, as unreliable as any one of those feathery robots and this made time number six Sam had died on his watch, and there were no takebacks left, Sam wasn’t even Sam anymore, and shit, who knew breathing could be this hard in heaven-
“Whoa, whoa, Dean!” Sam had his hands on Dean’s shoulders and he wasn’t being gentle about it. It didn’t help. Dean felt like Sam was calling him from far away. How many times had those hands hurt him when they weren’t Sam at all? Dean couldn’t stop Sam from changing any more than he could stop him from dying. And the bitch of it all was, Dean wasn’t sure which one he thought was worse.
Suddenly Dean’s back hit a familiar shape. He realized after a moment that Sam had leaned him up against the Impala. It was parked in the forest clearing as if it had floated there, no tire tracks marking the grass around it. Dean didn’t ask if Sam had conjured it, he just sagged against his baby.
“I’m still me, man. I don’t have grace, you found my soul. You saved it. Again. You know that was me, don’t you?”
And damn it if Sam didn’t sound just like his ten year old self when he asked like that. Dean gritted his teeth, because if that bird had really been Sam, then that meant- “Saved you? I’m the thing that almost ate you.”
Sam looked upward, asking for strength, which would have been funny-is God still up in heaven?-if Dean didn’t know God had fucked off a long time ago.
“Dean, that was me, too, OK? You were trapped in my trueform space, like Charlie’s video game or Bobby’s dream-house. That thing wasn’t you, it was. Was,”
“How you think I feel about you.” Sometimes standing in heaven with your soul mate made everything painfully, embarrassingly chick-flick clear.
“Yeah.” Sam had gone from an incriminatingly dewy stare to not meeting his eyes. He came over to lean against the car next to Dean. He seemed to find his shoes fascinating.
“Yeah,” Sam said again when Dean didn’t reply.
When in doubt, stall. “Your head is freaky place, Sam.”
Dean waited for the right question to come to him. “So you don’t think I’m mad anymore? Now that we’ve slain the beast?”
“Are you?”
A thought chilled Dean. “Can you read my mind?”
“Probably.”
Oh, that was reassuring.
“…Seems like a dick move though, seeing as I almost got you killed a couple of times in the last hour.” Sam’s brief smile faded. “So, uh, are you?”
“Well, I’m not so much mad as I am disappointed.”
Sam gave him a hurt look that morphed into a hurt laugh as he obviously decided Dean was fucking with him, using a Dad line to cut him up.
Dean let him squirm because they needed to be here. “No, really. I mean, I think there’s always gonna be a part of me that’s angry you didn’t-“
“Look for you,” Sam whispered, like a confession.
Dean turned to face him fully, keeping a hand on the Impala’s hood. “That you didn’t tell me that you couldn’t look for me.”
Sam’s head whipped up and he stared at Dean. “Sam, I was in hell for a summer. When I broke, I cut people up with a smile on my face. You’ve been in hell more or less since you jumped in the cage. When you broke, you got a dog and a girlfriend.”
Sam, the idiot, looked like he was going to argue, feed him another line like “it wasn’t so bad” seeing Lucifer 24/7 or fighting his way out of a couple flashback comas. That Dean had spent half a lifetime down there, that Lucifer’s cage was somehow a cushier gig. Like there were a million ways that Dean was the only good person standing here.
“I was never gonna hate you for breaking. But now I’m stuck being pissed at you because you didn’t tell me the guilt was killing you. Until it literally killed you.”
Sam bit his lips together and nodded as he dropped his gaze to his shoelaces again. “That’s fair.”
Dean waited a long time before leaning back up against the Impala. He shuffled closer to Sam and knocked their shoulders together.
“But Sam, that part of me that’s angry? It’s…kitten sized. Not-lion-did-the-nasty-with-an-elephant sized.”
Dean had a moment to realize that no birds chirped in heaven.
“Your anger is a kitten.”
“A manly, handsome kitten.”
Sam smiled, the kind of smile Dean hadn’t seen in years. A ray of sunshine broke through the trees to spotlight him.
“Wow, that’s not freaky at all.”
Sam huffed. “Yeah, heaven sucks. We should get you back down there, back in your body.”
So this was it. Dean wondered if maybe he could drive the heaven-Impala back down to earth, wear his baby like a shield during reentry to a world without Sam.
Dean didn’t budge; he kept his shoulder soldered to Sam and his back fused to the Impala. His mouth moved without permission and words fell out. “I guess you work the inside job, and I see if I can find Cas, round up the angels downstairs? There’s also Crowley to track down, even if the gates are cl---“
“Dean.”
Dean closed his mouth with a click of teeth.
“Dean, I don't want to do this without you."
Dean turned to face Sam head on. Sam looked back steadily.
This was gonna be fun.
***
Back on earth, Dean opened his eyes to find Cas slapping him awake.
“Dean,” he said, his face nearly as impassive as usual but relief flooding his voice. “You appear to be uninjured. Good. We must leave immediately; Crowley may return with a more human assault.”
Dean stood slowly, and Cas may have been human now, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew power when he saw it. He backed off quickly, staring at Dean.
“What are you?” Cas asked, his eyes narrowing.
Showtime, Sammy.
Really, Dean?
C’mon, let me have this one.
Dean stood straighter as Samael allowed his power to fill his new vessel. Dean knew Samael’s shadow wings were rising behind him, filling the walls of the church with holy power. It felt like swallowing a comet. It felt like falling from a bridge to rise unhurt, like shooting Azazel between his yellow eyes. Like kissing a demon to save his brother, like seeing his Mom smile. Like fishing with Cas, like a well done son from his father. Like embracing his brother after he returned from Hell.
“We are the last Archangel of the Lord,” Dean said.
END