Fic: Repo Men: The Upside-Down Apocalypse 7/9
This fic is the flashback/followup/presickle/longfic spawn of REPO MEN. READ REPO MEN HERE.
Repo Men: The Upside-Down Apocalypse
Author:
tahirire
Rating: R
Wordcount: 3671 (This chapter)
Beta:
blacklid
Genre: Gen. Angst. H/C.
Spoilers: Goes a/u from 3.16, but there will be spoilers for all episodes through 5.22.
Warnings: My generic major character death fic list. This fic contains dark imagery, excessive gore, language, violence, torture, memories of torture, memories of suicide, and gleeful pretzelfication of canon, WIP.
Chapter 1: Hell | Chapter 2: The Book | Chapter 3: Burn the Ships | Chapter 4: War and Peace | Chapter 5: Death and Taxes | Chapter 6: Occam's Razor
One Dream Rush
Dean’s voice echoes up the stairs. “When did Bobby build a safe room?”
Sam’s voice floats back, edgy and distracted. “I don’t know, Dean, it’s not like I’ve been here lately.”
He peers through the doorway with one hand tentatively resting on the cold iron plating. In response to his shout, dust spins and hovers noiselessly in the shafts of light illuminating rusty shelves, spare rations, and used auto parts in varying conditions of dismemberment. Between the shelving, he can make out slices of the concrete floor and walls. Old lead paint has been carefully crafted into sigils, some recognizable and others unfamiliar, and Dean can feel the air crackle when he takes a breath. The room doesn’t seem to have been used for anything important in a very long time.
It’s tempting to go in, to set foot on the lines and see how much this body could take. Thresholds took years to properly examine, decode and conquer and the opportunity of ones like this could still make the back teeth in his skull leave a gritty powder under this tongue. But something about this room doesn’t challenge his attention. It’s as good a place as any for storage, so he deposits his burden and swings the heavy door shut, making his way up the stairs.
When Dean rounds the corner into the living room, he finds Sam staring at the kitchen. “What’s with you?”
Sam doesn’t answer, doesn’t acknowledge him with a blink or even a shift of his weight, like Dean’s not even there.
He clears his throat. “Sam, snap out of it.”
There is still no response. The silence stretches out and Dean starts to grind his teeth.
“Hey,” reaching out with his bad hand, he grabs Sam by the shoulder.
Sam is standing by the kitchen table. Black dirt is caked on his fingers and ground into his bleeding palms. There are dark, puffy circles under his eyes. His stare is dull and lifeless, and the sight of it makes Dean shiver.
“Son, please,” Bobby is begging, “Don’t do this. Try to think about what Dean…”
Sam’s trembling fingers clench into angry fists and Bobby’s gaze wavers, dropping to the ground.
“Don’t,” Sam snaps, his voice like broken glass, “you dare. Don’t say that to me.”
“What?” The quiet register of Sam’s voice makes Dean blink. Sam is looking at him with guarded eyes. “Dean, what is it?”
Dean pulls his hand away, his tongue suddenly lifeless in his jaw. “Nothing.”
Sam throws a glance back at the kitchen, then refocuses, eyeing Dean’s chest with a frown.
“Come on, let me take a look at that.”
“It’s fine,” Dean protests, wiggling his fingers to prove it but Sam grabs for his elbow and starts to steer him to the couch.
Sam is chugging whisky straight from the bottle while Bobby digs a bullet from his thigh. “You mind tellin’ me what you were thinking?” The bullet drops with a clang into an old tin can, and Bobby threads a needle. Sam doesn’t answer, and Bobby shakes his head and sighs tiredly, “I’m supposed to be taking care of you, boy.”
Sam rouses at that, pulling away with a growl. He stands, swaying back and forth as he waves the bottle at Bobby’s face. “Don’t act like you want to help me,” he spits. “I can take care of myself.”
Bobby starts to scramble to his feet, but Sam is already walking away. His eyes reflect the dancing yellow of the fireplace, and his tone is ugly and cruel. “Thanks for the whisky.”
The slight flush in Sam’s cheeks and his intentionally even breaths tell Dean that he’d much rather be yelling. “I don’t see why you won’t just let me replace it,” he says.
Dean tracks Sam’s sight-line downward, trying to remember when he removed his shirt.
Sam has the first aid kit open and he’s dabbing at Dean’s chest with a damp washcloth, clearing away dried blood and loose tissue. Sam doesn’t bother with the forceps. He just closes his eyes, hovering his fingers over the wound, and flicks his wrist inward in a twisting motion, beckoning. Something tugs deep in Dean’s chest, and he flinches awkwardly at the pull. Sam catches the mangled bullet and drops it into the trash. The gaping hole doesn’t hurt like it should.
“It, uh,” Dean stammers, trying to pick up the thread of conversation, “I don’t think it matters,” he mumbles lamely, blinking sudden moisture from his eyes.
Sam’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t argue. He unscrews the cap off of a clear bottle of antiseptic from the library desk drawer and splashes it over the open wound. Dean flinches, anticipating the sting, but it just floods him with cold. Sam presses a gauze pad down over the blackening wound. “Put pressure on that,” he commands, shifting his attention to Dean’s left hand. He stares at it for a long moment before giving Dean a nod. “This might hurt,” he warns, and he wraps his fingers firmly around the thumb joint. With an expert pull, he sets the broken bone.
Sam is holding Dean’s lungs in his hands, gasping for air in broken, panicked sobs as he tries to put everything back where it goes. The long, torn ribbons of Dean’s flesh slip wetly away from his fingers as he tugs at the edges, trying to close the gaps where Lilith’s hounds had ripped Dean wide open. Dean’s eyes are empty, staring at nothing, but underneath the mantra of Sam’s useless prayers, underneath his frantic, searching hands, he can hear the screaming.
Sam is staring at him quietly. His arms are folded over his chest as if he’s being careful not to touch anything. The constant buzz around him is muted and still, lost behind an impenetrable wall. His expression is unreadable. He only watches, waiting for the questions floating in Dean’s eyes to bubble to the surface.
A stinging sensation in Dean’s hand becomes a throb, like the drum of a heartbeat straining against the new splint on his hand, tightly and neatly wrapped. Dean studies it, then forces a rough swallow into his dry throat before asking the question that’s been pricking at him the longest. “Sam, what happens when you die?”
Sam’s eyebrows raise a fraction. He doesn’t answer, but his slight frown indicates that he is giving the question serious thought. Dean can feel the sensation in his hand crawling its way slowly through the rest of his body. Whether it’s just the dull memory of muscle and nerve, reflex and instinct or the real thing, Dean can’t begin to guess. But Sam’s eyes bore into his with an intensity that’s bordering on the physical, and Dean is unable to retreat. The pressure eases up only when he finds the strength to break eye contact and turn his head away.
A strained sigh escapes from Sam. “Do you really want to know?” he asks softly.
Dean hesitates, suddenly unsure. Then he nods. He hears Sam take a deep breath. “Okay. But it’s better if I show you,” Sam says, and he presses one hand into Dean’s good one and lays the palm of his other hand over Dean’s heart.
Dean hisses at the bite of a blade running up his right wrist, then his left, but when he looks down, it’s Sam’s hands that he sees. He shakes his head, tries to apply pressure to the wounds, but Sam’s voice is in his ear, close enough to be inside his mind. “It’s just a replay,” Sam says, sound weightless in its register, “there’s nothing you can do about it now.”
The rotting walls of the cabin that Sam is squatting in start to flicker and fade to black. Dean struggles to relax into the pain and let the vision roll.
Sam’s tone is dispassionate, analytical. “This is the first time. I was drunk and angry, and I didn’t really think it would work, but I just felt like finding out. Let’s face it, we’ve never been that lucky.”
Dean’s - Sam’s - hands are going numb, cold below the cuts. Hot blood pours away and down onto the aging floorboards. It starts getting hard to breathe. Dean tries to open his mouth and gasp for air, but he’s so tired. Nothing is working. All he feels is Sam’s relief that he’s alone, that no one is going to come looking for him and find him this way. Dean’s eyes start to sting. It shouldn’t have been like this. Someone should have been there.
“Easy,” Sam admonishes, the sound eerily disembodied as Dean begins to float away. “Almost there.”
The pain fades into warmth. Dean finds himself staring into a brilliant light made of pure, twisting cascades of colors; whites and oranges and golds, and some that he would be hard pressed to name. The light envelops him, fills him up, surrounds him with music, melodies he’s never heard before and could never describe. He’s never felt so awed, so at peace.
Sam’s voice is silent.
Dean steps into the light and it folds around him, drawing him in closer. He is completely blinded by the brilliance, but he feels the gentle softness of a hand brushing against his cheek; a welcome warmth of belonging.
“Sam,” sighs the light, and Dean shakes his head, disbelieving. But he sees her.
His mouth opens and he hears Sam’s wavering answer.
“Mom?”
Sam is pulling his hand away. He folds it back into place, watching Dean carefully. Dean gasps for air, still blinking away the brilliance of it, still seeing the retinal afterimage of his mother’s shining golden hair and the pitying smile on her face.
Dean feels wrong, like he’s too hot inside, burning from the inside out at the memory of so much glory. “That was ...” Dean starts to say, but he stops at the flicker of reluctance passing across Sam’s face.
“You okay?” Sam doesn’t move a muscle, but his power reaches out, acting as a soothing balm against the flames.
Dean catches his breath, but not his racing thoughts. It takes too long to form words around gulps of air. An uneasy feeling settles into the pit of his stomach and he winces. It’s the first real pain he’s felt in as long as he can remember. A raw pain, barely contained, and it ripples through the energy and echoes between them like an answer. Sam knows what he saw. Of course he knows. “That was Lucifer,” Dean finally whispers.
“He said we could be a family again,” Sam says slowly, one shoulder rising in a shrug, “Once he took back Heaven. Said I could have anything, see anyone I wanted.”
Dean can’t respond. He rubs at his eyes but the image is still there, a burn blistering underwater. It was still her reflection, his mother and all of the summer heat laden memories of his innocent self, the return of things safe and full and loving. A thousand tiny unfinished thoughts were scabbing over his mind, caught inside the blue throbbing veins of his body and his silenced blood is raging vainly against the mirror that will never shatter, never set her free. Never set them free.
The emptiness does what every hate-engorged, murderous being in the world couldn’t do. Dean’s armor shatters, crumbling through his fingers, and it’s all he can do to hold it together. How Sam resisted the pull, how he’s still resisting it … it’s beyond him.
“Hey. Dean.” Sam edges closer, leaning in with his shoulders and ducking his eyes to search his brother’s face. “Talk to me.”
First time, Sam had said. Dean needs to know. “And after that?” Dean whispers, dragging his chin up. And after that, and after that? How many were there, Sammy, but he can’t, he can’t know the answer to that.
Sam nods his understanding. “It was Lucifer, the first time. But not since.” He allows himself a begrudging smile. “I get,” and Sam makes air quotes with his fingers, “‘intercepted’ now. The angel from the hotel, remember?”
Dean nods weakly, the matter-of-fact tone in Sam’s voice making bile rise in the back of his throat. Nothing about any of this is routine, nothing about it is okay.
“Anyway, I was never looking for angels. He found me. But he’s kind of cut off right now, so he sent someone else to keep an eye out. Actually, it’s someone you know. She calls you ‘the one that got away’.”
“Tessa.” The name is more a dream than a memory, floating unbidden to the surface of Dean’s mind, but Sam bobs his head in acknowledgement.
“This last time, you wanted to know what I meant by asking you to trust me.”
“It took you forever to come back,” Dean retorts, and the harsh rasp buried deep in his chest makes him sound angry. He doesn’t expect Sam to nod in agreement.
“Tessa had intel for me,” Sam continues. “Good news, for once. Something I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now.” He sits up straighter, and the darkness around him crouches like a predator. Dean can almost picture a panther twitching its tail in excitement.
It can only be one thing. “She knows a way to take down Lucifer,” Dean supplies, and Sam’s fingers dig into the worn fabric seat of his chair.
“Lucifer is more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen. He can’t be killed - not unless God does it. Personally.”
“How is that good news?”
“Because we can bind him. We can lock him back in the cage and throw away the key. When I saw her, she gave me this.” Sam reaches into his pocket and pulls out a silver ring set with a large white stone. It crackles with an old, deep energy. “Sometimes it pays to spend a lot of time with Death.”
Dean’s eyebrows shoot up. “Death? As in the reaper’s top mob boss?”
“As in the horseman,” Sam grins. “Three down, one to go.” He carefully places the ring back into his pocket, then reaches down to thread a needle from the suture kit.
When Dean shrinks away from the needle, Sam pauses. “What’s wrong?”
“When you touched me before -”
“It won’t happen again,” Sam answers. He swats Dean’s had away and removes the gauze pad. Dean flinches, but when nothing weird happens Sam tilts his head as if to say I-told-you-so.
Leaning back a little to give Sam room to work, Dean watches him thoughtfully. “So, how did you do that? Let me see in your head?”
Sam rests the needle for a moment to review his work and his lips press into a twisted smile. “I didn’t do it. You did.” When he meets Dean’s eyes the look says, Come on. This is nowhere near rocket science. “You’ve been doing it all day.”
Dean feels like he’s been caught in a lie. His skin flushes with shame at the thought of brushing against Sam’s private memories uninvited. “Hey, I didn’t realize -” he starts to explain, but Sam cuts him off with a wave of his hand.
“Don’t, man. It’s nothing.”
Dean barely has his mouth open, it’s not nothing, when Sam’s eyes flash solid black. “I said don’t,” he snaps, and he pushes back his chair and stands up, turning away from Dean to rub a hand over his face.
For the first time, Dean feels the silence between them like sand filling his lungs while Sam regains his composure, squaring his shoulders and wiping his fingers dry against his jeans. He stares fitfully at the fireplace for a moment before continuing. His tone is one of quiet accusation. “Why’d you bring me back to this shit hole?”
We’re here because you were seizing and I had nowhere else to go. But Dean can’t answer because he gets it now, why Sam is distracted and curling into himself like he’s hiding from a nightmare, why this house can never be home again. “Sam, you know I had to.”
Sam rounds on him. “You had to? Do you have the slightest idea how wrecked I was without you? How bad it got?”
“I do now,” Dean responds weakly.
“You made a deal with a demon. You did the one thing that you hated Dad for doing and you never once thought about the rest of us!” The glass panes of the windows creak and rattle with Sam’s fury, shaking loose months of collected dust from the thick curtains. “It never occurred to you that we needed you, that you leaving was a death sentence for me?”
“I’m sorry,” Dean struggles to his feet. He wants to grab Sam, to make him see that he gets it, that he feels guilty as hell, but he can’t take it back, would never take it back. But Sam advances toward him and Dean lurches back, nearly falling as the edge of the couch catches him behind the knees.
“You’re sorry?” The fireplace roars to life, and hungry blue flames reach past the grate to devour the wallpaper above. “You didn’t stop to think that if you went to Hell, your psychic freak of a brother might be able to hear you scream?”
Sam’s words plunge Dean into ice water. The crackle and heat of the fire snuffs out in a burst of wind, and the house settles back into its foundation. Sam backs away like he’s been whipped, carding both hands through his hair.
The weight in his chest becomes a thousand pound anchor, tugging him back down in a spiraling morass of screams and Dean can’t breathe around it. A hundred years of darkness, unearthly sounds from beneath him, from above him, spiking through him on lances of metal and bone dull and stuttering from centuries of use, until he was falling into a place that had no name and where all names are stripped away, where every fear and every regret has a sound, a taste, a rot, a portion that is identified, labeled and peeled away with perfect precision, a place of forgetting that no one on earth could possibly fathom ... and Sam had lived through it all, boundary-less, dream-less, watching helplessly as they became something else, inhuman and repulsive and dead. It flayed Sam alive and he remembers.
“That’s how you knew him. In the basement, that’s why Alastair knew you, and-” Dean swallows hard, almost choking on his own throat. “You saw him.”
Sam’s face goes hard, dark, and the sick feeling in Dean’s stomach turns white-hot. “You see him? Sammy - did he follow us? Is Alastair here?”
Sam looks away, searching far beyond the walls and settling his gaze on another plane. “Yes.”
“Do you know where he is?” Dean’s hands begin to tremble. His hatred is so loud in his own head that for an instant, all he sees is red. “Sam,” Dean barks his brother’s name like an order, “Do you know where he is right now?”
Sam’s eyes are cold, glittering wells of calculation. He doesn’t hesitate to answer, and he doesn’t lie. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Sam’s arms cross over his chest. “No.”
“Tell me right now, Sam. Tell me or I swear to God I’ll -”
“You’ll what? Leave me here and go after him?” Sam snorts a derisive laugh. “No. He’ll rip you to shreds.”
Sam’s will is a sea wall, and Dean’s pleas are sparse ripples in the ocean. He’s not above begging. If Sam did it, it would work on him. “I have to kill him, Sammy. You can’t stand in the way of this one. You don’t know -”
“Let’s get one thing crystal clear, alright? I do know. I was there.”
Dean’s vision swims. Can’t be just a dream. Was any of it a dream?
“You’re going to sit down, you’re going to shut up, and I’m gonna finish closing that hole in your chest because you owe me that much.”
Everything weighs double what it should and Dean complies wordlessly, returning to the couch and leaning back stiffly. Sam resumes his work, shoulders tense and jaw set, and Dean tries not to breathe, or move, or admit that the thin needle carefully re-stacking the tissue in his body feels the same now as when demons leafed through his mind and erased the words inside, stroke by stroke. Thankfully, there is weariness here, too, and Sam scrubs out the blood and pus with a satisfied sigh. He throws Dean a fresh shirt. He says they’re leaving in the morning. He leaves the room without looking back.
It isn’t a sound that wakes Dean in the dead of night, exactly. It’s the light whispering touch of spiders walking on his grave, the feeling that someone somewhere is thinking about him. His thoughts roar to life, blood-spattered and black, and destroy any chance he has of falling back asleep.
He can’t sleep with Alastair still out there. All it would take is one clue, one instant of poking his head out from under the bushes, and they would find each other. He knows it the way he knows that Sam’s not sleeping either, feels it the way he feels his brother’s power running restless through the house.
Still, Sam’s not omnipotent. It’s easy work to slide away, to steal far enough across the salvage yard to wire some piece of shit car. He grunts as he throws the stubborn clutch into second. “Sorry, Sam,” he mutters out loud.
Tonight, all Dean knows for sure is that revenge may be a dish best served cold, but he’s the one that’s starving.
Repo Men: The Upside-Down Apocalypse
Author:
tahirire
Rating: R
Wordcount: 3671 (This chapter)
Beta:
blacklid
Genre: Gen. Angst. H/C.
Spoilers: Goes a/u from 3.16, but there will be spoilers for all episodes through 5.22.
Warnings: My generic major character death fic list. This fic contains dark imagery, excessive gore, language, violence, torture, memories of torture, memories of suicide, and gleeful pretzelfication of canon, WIP.
Chapter 1: Hell | Chapter 2: The Book | Chapter 3: Burn the Ships | Chapter 4: War and Peace | Chapter 5: Death and Taxes | Chapter 6: Occam's Razor
One Dream Rush
Dean’s voice echoes up the stairs. “When did Bobby build a safe room?”
Sam’s voice floats back, edgy and distracted. “I don’t know, Dean, it’s not like I’ve been here lately.”
He peers through the doorway with one hand tentatively resting on the cold iron plating. In response to his shout, dust spins and hovers noiselessly in the shafts of light illuminating rusty shelves, spare rations, and used auto parts in varying conditions of dismemberment. Between the shelving, he can make out slices of the concrete floor and walls. Old lead paint has been carefully crafted into sigils, some recognizable and others unfamiliar, and Dean can feel the air crackle when he takes a breath. The room doesn’t seem to have been used for anything important in a very long time.
It’s tempting to go in, to set foot on the lines and see how much this body could take. Thresholds took years to properly examine, decode and conquer and the opportunity of ones like this could still make the back teeth in his skull leave a gritty powder under this tongue. But something about this room doesn’t challenge his attention. It’s as good a place as any for storage, so he deposits his burden and swings the heavy door shut, making his way up the stairs.
When Dean rounds the corner into the living room, he finds Sam staring at the kitchen. “What’s with you?”
Sam doesn’t answer, doesn’t acknowledge him with a blink or even a shift of his weight, like Dean’s not even there.
He clears his throat. “Sam, snap out of it.”
There is still no response. The silence stretches out and Dean starts to grind his teeth.
“Hey,” reaching out with his bad hand, he grabs Sam by the shoulder.
Sam is standing by the kitchen table. Black dirt is caked on his fingers and ground into his bleeding palms. There are dark, puffy circles under his eyes. His stare is dull and lifeless, and the sight of it makes Dean shiver.
“Son, please,” Bobby is begging, “Don’t do this. Try to think about what Dean…”
Sam’s trembling fingers clench into angry fists and Bobby’s gaze wavers, dropping to the ground.
“Don’t,” Sam snaps, his voice like broken glass, “you dare. Don’t say that to me.”
“What?” The quiet register of Sam’s voice makes Dean blink. Sam is looking at him with guarded eyes. “Dean, what is it?”
Dean pulls his hand away, his tongue suddenly lifeless in his jaw. “Nothing.”
Sam throws a glance back at the kitchen, then refocuses, eyeing Dean’s chest with a frown.
“Come on, let me take a look at that.”
“It’s fine,” Dean protests, wiggling his fingers to prove it but Sam grabs for his elbow and starts to steer him to the couch.
Sam is chugging whisky straight from the bottle while Bobby digs a bullet from his thigh. “You mind tellin’ me what you were thinking?” The bullet drops with a clang into an old tin can, and Bobby threads a needle. Sam doesn’t answer, and Bobby shakes his head and sighs tiredly, “I’m supposed to be taking care of you, boy.”
Sam rouses at that, pulling away with a growl. He stands, swaying back and forth as he waves the bottle at Bobby’s face. “Don’t act like you want to help me,” he spits. “I can take care of myself.”
Bobby starts to scramble to his feet, but Sam is already walking away. His eyes reflect the dancing yellow of the fireplace, and his tone is ugly and cruel. “Thanks for the whisky.”
The slight flush in Sam’s cheeks and his intentionally even breaths tell Dean that he’d much rather be yelling. “I don’t see why you won’t just let me replace it,” he says.
Dean tracks Sam’s sight-line downward, trying to remember when he removed his shirt.
Sam has the first aid kit open and he’s dabbing at Dean’s chest with a damp washcloth, clearing away dried blood and loose tissue. Sam doesn’t bother with the forceps. He just closes his eyes, hovering his fingers over the wound, and flicks his wrist inward in a twisting motion, beckoning. Something tugs deep in Dean’s chest, and he flinches awkwardly at the pull. Sam catches the mangled bullet and drops it into the trash. The gaping hole doesn’t hurt like it should.
“It, uh,” Dean stammers, trying to pick up the thread of conversation, “I don’t think it matters,” he mumbles lamely, blinking sudden moisture from his eyes.
Sam’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t argue. He unscrews the cap off of a clear bottle of antiseptic from the library desk drawer and splashes it over the open wound. Dean flinches, anticipating the sting, but it just floods him with cold. Sam presses a gauze pad down over the blackening wound. “Put pressure on that,” he commands, shifting his attention to Dean’s left hand. He stares at it for a long moment before giving Dean a nod. “This might hurt,” he warns, and he wraps his fingers firmly around the thumb joint. With an expert pull, he sets the broken bone.
Sam is holding Dean’s lungs in his hands, gasping for air in broken, panicked sobs as he tries to put everything back where it goes. The long, torn ribbons of Dean’s flesh slip wetly away from his fingers as he tugs at the edges, trying to close the gaps where Lilith’s hounds had ripped Dean wide open. Dean’s eyes are empty, staring at nothing, but underneath the mantra of Sam’s useless prayers, underneath his frantic, searching hands, he can hear the screaming.
Sam is staring at him quietly. His arms are folded over his chest as if he’s being careful not to touch anything. The constant buzz around him is muted and still, lost behind an impenetrable wall. His expression is unreadable. He only watches, waiting for the questions floating in Dean’s eyes to bubble to the surface.
A stinging sensation in Dean’s hand becomes a throb, like the drum of a heartbeat straining against the new splint on his hand, tightly and neatly wrapped. Dean studies it, then forces a rough swallow into his dry throat before asking the question that’s been pricking at him the longest. “Sam, what happens when you die?”
Sam’s eyebrows raise a fraction. He doesn’t answer, but his slight frown indicates that he is giving the question serious thought. Dean can feel the sensation in his hand crawling its way slowly through the rest of his body. Whether it’s just the dull memory of muscle and nerve, reflex and instinct or the real thing, Dean can’t begin to guess. But Sam’s eyes bore into his with an intensity that’s bordering on the physical, and Dean is unable to retreat. The pressure eases up only when he finds the strength to break eye contact and turn his head away.
A strained sigh escapes from Sam. “Do you really want to know?” he asks softly.
Dean hesitates, suddenly unsure. Then he nods. He hears Sam take a deep breath. “Okay. But it’s better if I show you,” Sam says, and he presses one hand into Dean’s good one and lays the palm of his other hand over Dean’s heart.
Dean hisses at the bite of a blade running up his right wrist, then his left, but when he looks down, it’s Sam’s hands that he sees. He shakes his head, tries to apply pressure to the wounds, but Sam’s voice is in his ear, close enough to be inside his mind. “It’s just a replay,” Sam says, sound weightless in its register, “there’s nothing you can do about it now.”
The rotting walls of the cabin that Sam is squatting in start to flicker and fade to black. Dean struggles to relax into the pain and let the vision roll.
Sam’s tone is dispassionate, analytical. “This is the first time. I was drunk and angry, and I didn’t really think it would work, but I just felt like finding out. Let’s face it, we’ve never been that lucky.”
Dean’s - Sam’s - hands are going numb, cold below the cuts. Hot blood pours away and down onto the aging floorboards. It starts getting hard to breathe. Dean tries to open his mouth and gasp for air, but he’s so tired. Nothing is working. All he feels is Sam’s relief that he’s alone, that no one is going to come looking for him and find him this way. Dean’s eyes start to sting. It shouldn’t have been like this. Someone should have been there.
“Easy,” Sam admonishes, the sound eerily disembodied as Dean begins to float away. “Almost there.”
The pain fades into warmth. Dean finds himself staring into a brilliant light made of pure, twisting cascades of colors; whites and oranges and golds, and some that he would be hard pressed to name. The light envelops him, fills him up, surrounds him with music, melodies he’s never heard before and could never describe. He’s never felt so awed, so at peace.
Sam’s voice is silent.
Dean steps into the light and it folds around him, drawing him in closer. He is completely blinded by the brilliance, but he feels the gentle softness of a hand brushing against his cheek; a welcome warmth of belonging.
“Sam,” sighs the light, and Dean shakes his head, disbelieving. But he sees her.
His mouth opens and he hears Sam’s wavering answer.
“Mom?”
Sam is pulling his hand away. He folds it back into place, watching Dean carefully. Dean gasps for air, still blinking away the brilliance of it, still seeing the retinal afterimage of his mother’s shining golden hair and the pitying smile on her face.
Dean feels wrong, like he’s too hot inside, burning from the inside out at the memory of so much glory. “That was ...” Dean starts to say, but he stops at the flicker of reluctance passing across Sam’s face.
“You okay?” Sam doesn’t move a muscle, but his power reaches out, acting as a soothing balm against the flames.
Dean catches his breath, but not his racing thoughts. It takes too long to form words around gulps of air. An uneasy feeling settles into the pit of his stomach and he winces. It’s the first real pain he’s felt in as long as he can remember. A raw pain, barely contained, and it ripples through the energy and echoes between them like an answer. Sam knows what he saw. Of course he knows. “That was Lucifer,” Dean finally whispers.
“He said we could be a family again,” Sam says slowly, one shoulder rising in a shrug, “Once he took back Heaven. Said I could have anything, see anyone I wanted.”
Dean can’t respond. He rubs at his eyes but the image is still there, a burn blistering underwater. It was still her reflection, his mother and all of the summer heat laden memories of his innocent self, the return of things safe and full and loving. A thousand tiny unfinished thoughts were scabbing over his mind, caught inside the blue throbbing veins of his body and his silenced blood is raging vainly against the mirror that will never shatter, never set her free. Never set them free.
The emptiness does what every hate-engorged, murderous being in the world couldn’t do. Dean’s armor shatters, crumbling through his fingers, and it’s all he can do to hold it together. How Sam resisted the pull, how he’s still resisting it … it’s beyond him.
“Hey. Dean.” Sam edges closer, leaning in with his shoulders and ducking his eyes to search his brother’s face. “Talk to me.”
First time, Sam had said. Dean needs to know. “And after that?” Dean whispers, dragging his chin up. And after that, and after that? How many were there, Sammy, but he can’t, he can’t know the answer to that.
Sam nods his understanding. “It was Lucifer, the first time. But not since.” He allows himself a begrudging smile. “I get,” and Sam makes air quotes with his fingers, “‘intercepted’ now. The angel from the hotel, remember?”
Dean nods weakly, the matter-of-fact tone in Sam’s voice making bile rise in the back of his throat. Nothing about any of this is routine, nothing about it is okay.
“Anyway, I was never looking for angels. He found me. But he’s kind of cut off right now, so he sent someone else to keep an eye out. Actually, it’s someone you know. She calls you ‘the one that got away’.”
“Tessa.” The name is more a dream than a memory, floating unbidden to the surface of Dean’s mind, but Sam bobs his head in acknowledgement.
“This last time, you wanted to know what I meant by asking you to trust me.”
“It took you forever to come back,” Dean retorts, and the harsh rasp buried deep in his chest makes him sound angry. He doesn’t expect Sam to nod in agreement.
“Tessa had intel for me,” Sam continues. “Good news, for once. Something I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now.” He sits up straighter, and the darkness around him crouches like a predator. Dean can almost picture a panther twitching its tail in excitement.
It can only be one thing. “She knows a way to take down Lucifer,” Dean supplies, and Sam’s fingers dig into the worn fabric seat of his chair.
“Lucifer is more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen. He can’t be killed - not unless God does it. Personally.”
“How is that good news?”
“Because we can bind him. We can lock him back in the cage and throw away the key. When I saw her, she gave me this.” Sam reaches into his pocket and pulls out a silver ring set with a large white stone. It crackles with an old, deep energy. “Sometimes it pays to spend a lot of time with Death.”
Dean’s eyebrows shoot up. “Death? As in the reaper’s top mob boss?”
“As in the horseman,” Sam grins. “Three down, one to go.” He carefully places the ring back into his pocket, then reaches down to thread a needle from the suture kit.
When Dean shrinks away from the needle, Sam pauses. “What’s wrong?”
“When you touched me before -”
“It won’t happen again,” Sam answers. He swats Dean’s had away and removes the gauze pad. Dean flinches, but when nothing weird happens Sam tilts his head as if to say I-told-you-so.
Leaning back a little to give Sam room to work, Dean watches him thoughtfully. “So, how did you do that? Let me see in your head?”
Sam rests the needle for a moment to review his work and his lips press into a twisted smile. “I didn’t do it. You did.” When he meets Dean’s eyes the look says, Come on. This is nowhere near rocket science. “You’ve been doing it all day.”
Dean feels like he’s been caught in a lie. His skin flushes with shame at the thought of brushing against Sam’s private memories uninvited. “Hey, I didn’t realize -” he starts to explain, but Sam cuts him off with a wave of his hand.
“Don’t, man. It’s nothing.”
Dean barely has his mouth open, it’s not nothing, when Sam’s eyes flash solid black. “I said don’t,” he snaps, and he pushes back his chair and stands up, turning away from Dean to rub a hand over his face.
For the first time, Dean feels the silence between them like sand filling his lungs while Sam regains his composure, squaring his shoulders and wiping his fingers dry against his jeans. He stares fitfully at the fireplace for a moment before continuing. His tone is one of quiet accusation. “Why’d you bring me back to this shit hole?”
We’re here because you were seizing and I had nowhere else to go. But Dean can’t answer because he gets it now, why Sam is distracted and curling into himself like he’s hiding from a nightmare, why this house can never be home again. “Sam, you know I had to.”
Sam rounds on him. “You had to? Do you have the slightest idea how wrecked I was without you? How bad it got?”
“I do now,” Dean responds weakly.
“You made a deal with a demon. You did the one thing that you hated Dad for doing and you never once thought about the rest of us!” The glass panes of the windows creak and rattle with Sam’s fury, shaking loose months of collected dust from the thick curtains. “It never occurred to you that we needed you, that you leaving was a death sentence for me?”
“I’m sorry,” Dean struggles to his feet. He wants to grab Sam, to make him see that he gets it, that he feels guilty as hell, but he can’t take it back, would never take it back. But Sam advances toward him and Dean lurches back, nearly falling as the edge of the couch catches him behind the knees.
“You’re sorry?” The fireplace roars to life, and hungry blue flames reach past the grate to devour the wallpaper above. “You didn’t stop to think that if you went to Hell, your psychic freak of a brother might be able to hear you scream?”
Sam’s words plunge Dean into ice water. The crackle and heat of the fire snuffs out in a burst of wind, and the house settles back into its foundation. Sam backs away like he’s been whipped, carding both hands through his hair.
The weight in his chest becomes a thousand pound anchor, tugging him back down in a spiraling morass of screams and Dean can’t breathe around it. A hundred years of darkness, unearthly sounds from beneath him, from above him, spiking through him on lances of metal and bone dull and stuttering from centuries of use, until he was falling into a place that had no name and where all names are stripped away, where every fear and every regret has a sound, a taste, a rot, a portion that is identified, labeled and peeled away with perfect precision, a place of forgetting that no one on earth could possibly fathom ... and Sam had lived through it all, boundary-less, dream-less, watching helplessly as they became something else, inhuman and repulsive and dead. It flayed Sam alive and he remembers.
“That’s how you knew him. In the basement, that’s why Alastair knew you, and-” Dean swallows hard, almost choking on his own throat. “You saw him.”
Sam’s face goes hard, dark, and the sick feeling in Dean’s stomach turns white-hot. “You see him? Sammy - did he follow us? Is Alastair here?”
Sam looks away, searching far beyond the walls and settling his gaze on another plane. “Yes.”
“Do you know where he is?” Dean’s hands begin to tremble. His hatred is so loud in his own head that for an instant, all he sees is red. “Sam,” Dean barks his brother’s name like an order, “Do you know where he is right now?”
Sam’s eyes are cold, glittering wells of calculation. He doesn’t hesitate to answer, and he doesn’t lie. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Sam’s arms cross over his chest. “No.”
“Tell me right now, Sam. Tell me or I swear to God I’ll -”
“You’ll what? Leave me here and go after him?” Sam snorts a derisive laugh. “No. He’ll rip you to shreds.”
Sam’s will is a sea wall, and Dean’s pleas are sparse ripples in the ocean. He’s not above begging. If Sam did it, it would work on him. “I have to kill him, Sammy. You can’t stand in the way of this one. You don’t know -”
“Let’s get one thing crystal clear, alright? I do know. I was there.”
Dean’s vision swims. Can’t be just a dream. Was any of it a dream?
“You’re going to sit down, you’re going to shut up, and I’m gonna finish closing that hole in your chest because you owe me that much.”
Everything weighs double what it should and Dean complies wordlessly, returning to the couch and leaning back stiffly. Sam resumes his work, shoulders tense and jaw set, and Dean tries not to breathe, or move, or admit that the thin needle carefully re-stacking the tissue in his body feels the same now as when demons leafed through his mind and erased the words inside, stroke by stroke. Thankfully, there is weariness here, too, and Sam scrubs out the blood and pus with a satisfied sigh. He throws Dean a fresh shirt. He says they’re leaving in the morning. He leaves the room without looking back.
It isn’t a sound that wakes Dean in the dead of night, exactly. It’s the light whispering touch of spiders walking on his grave, the feeling that someone somewhere is thinking about him. His thoughts roar to life, blood-spattered and black, and destroy any chance he has of falling back asleep.
He can’t sleep with Alastair still out there. All it would take is one clue, one instant of poking his head out from under the bushes, and they would find each other. He knows it the way he knows that Sam’s not sleeping either, feels it the way he feels his brother’s power running restless through the house.
Still, Sam’s not omnipotent. It’s easy work to slide away, to steal far enough across the salvage yard to wire some piece of shit car. He grunts as he throws the stubborn clutch into second. “Sorry, Sam,” he mutters out loud.
Tonight, all Dean knows for sure is that revenge may be a dish best served cold, but he’s the one that’s starving.