Dead Gods: Fifteen
Ben is in for surgery for six hours.
He crashes twice and nearly bleeds out. A doctor comes out every now and then to give them an update, and each time it’s like a little bit of Lisa’s soul dies.
If Ben doesn’t make it, she’s not sure she will, either.
Dean paces the waiting room restlessly, back and forth, back and forth, like a lion pacing the confines of its cage until Lisa finally snaps at him to sit down or go somewhere else. He heels like a kicked dog, sits down one chair over, and hangs his head.
Sam shows up a couple of hours in, looking harried and concerned, but safe enough. Dean is on him in a flash, asking if he’s okay, where he’d been, and all but patting him down to check for broken bones. Sam scowls at his brother and extracts himself from the mother henning with promises of the full story later and questions about Ben.
“In surgery,” Lisa says, angry and jealous for Ben’s sake, even though it’s petty and unfair to want to deny Sam’s place in Dean’s life.
But then Sam nods solemnly and settles in the chair next to Dean, assumes the vigil with them, and Lisa’s anger diminishes a little.
Not long after, a sheriff’s deputy appears, asking questions about the boy who was brought in with a chest wound, but Sam is on him like lightning, walks him down the hall before he gets the first question out. They have a short, apparently convincing discussion that ends with the shaking of hands and the back of the sheriff, disappearing around a corner.
“How did you do that?” Lisa asks, curious despite herself.
Sam just shrugs, ducks his head sheepishly. “I still had my Fed badge on me.”
Lisa decides she doesn’t want to know.
When the doctor comes out for a final time, he talks about diaphragmic ruptures and punctured lungs, but Lisa only hears the important thing: Ben is alive. He’s in ICU and things can still go south, but he’s alive.
They let them in to see him, she and Dean as a collective unit, as Ben’s parents. She teeters between finding it comforting and finding it terrifying that Dean is finally and openly sharing full parental status, second supernatural fathers aside. She doesn’t understand what happened out there in that field yet, doesn’t understand what Ben was doing summoning the Furies or why stabbing himself was the only way to get Apollo out of his body. She doesn’t understand why Dean claiming paternity of Ben seemed to be so important to everyone and why Athena looked so fucking displeased to hear it, but she does know that the claiming made it real somehow, real and official and powerful, and she couldn’t have kept Dean out of Ben’s hospital room even if she wanted to.
Dean, at least, loves Ben. She knows he loves Ben, was willing to take on dad duties even when he didn’t know Ben was his. She can see it as they enter the ICU and take up positions on both sides of Ben’s bed, sees it in the way he looks at him, in the way he rests his hand so tenderly on Ben’s head.
Ben has that deathly pallor still, his lips bloodless, his eyelashes dark against his pale cheeks. He’s hooked up to so many tubes and machines, to heart monitors and IV drips, Lisa can barely find a place to touch him, but she manages. She rests her hand on his chest just above the bandages to feel him breathing. She clutches his limp hand against her chest, absorbing the slow rhythm of his pulse beneath her fingers. He’s there, alive, his heart beating, blood rushing through his limbs, and it feels like she can breathe again.
She doesn’t want to remember the words of the old woman, but she does, clearly and precisely; every word, every syllable is burned into her memory though she tried her hardest to forget. Part of the fortune the blind old woman had given her that day in 1997 had just come true, sometime between the time she fell asleep next to Ben on Dean’s bed and when she went stumbling into the wheat field to find hideous hell monsters crawling out of the ground around her baby and an arrow shoved into his stomach.
She looks up at Dean on the other side of the bed, his eyes brimming with tears of relief and self-blame, his hand still on Ben’s head, and she knows she can never let the rest of the fortune happen, not for Ben and not for Dean.
She knows what she has to do.
Dean frickin’ hates hospitals.
He hates the sharp antiseptic-and-sickness smell of them and the constant white noise, the low murmur of voices and the whirr of machinery. He hates being laid up in them, hates being poked and prodded and attached to tubes, hates the helplessness and the inability to set up the appropriate defenses against the things that usually put him there in the first place. Worse, though, is having to see someone he loves laid up instead, hates sitting by and waiting, half-convinced the next time the doctor comes, it will be as the bearer of bad news.
Sitting next to Ben’s hospital bed is no exception. It’s torture watching the slow rise and fall of his chest and listening to the steady beep of the heart monitor while Ben just lies there, white as a sheet and unconscious. They moved him out of ICU the day before, but he hasn’t woken since he came out of surgery. The doctors say not to worry; it isn’t a coma, he’s just sleeping. It’s terrifying, though, the endless sleeping, especially knowing how strong Ben’s healing abilities are, but there isn’t anything to do about it, no one he can tell without drawing attention to Ben’s abnormally strong immune system.
Lisa sits on the other side of the bed silently, hand curled around Ben’s limp hand. She’s starting to worry him, too. Lisa’s a talk-it-out kind of person just like Sam, but she’s hasn’t spoken a word in hours, not since they were first allowed in to see Ben. She had even been leaving it to Dean to deal with the doctors and the nurses. She has this glazed look in her eyes, like she’s not quite there. Dean is used to her being this steady, practical oasis of calm; those nights he woke up screaming or the days when he knew one more drink would be one drink too many, she’d been the one there to talk him down from the ledge, she’d been the one to help him land on his feet. Now, her silence, that emptiness in her gaze, well, he’s not sure if he can handle the role reversal if he has to be the one talking her down.
A surge of anger wells up at his helplessness, at his inability to protect Ben and Lisa in any way. Dean wants to hit something, possibly himself - that this is his fault has not escaped his notice - but that’s not an option right now. He channels his burst of anger into getting up and going to the window. It looks down into the visitor’s parking lot, and he gets there just in time to see the Impala pulling into a spot below, the morning sun winking on her windshield.
Sam had left not long after Ben came out of ICU with promises of returning with a change of clothes and decent coffee. Dean had been unsettled to see him go, but he had a car to ditch - Artemis had dumped him in Topeka when she bothered to bring him back to Kansas - and Dean suspects that he also went to see for himself the wheat field where the Furies had come up.
Sam gets out of the Impala with a tray of coffee, pulls a duffle bag from the trunk. From above he doesn’t look like the giant he is, and Dean feels something ease in his chest. He always does better with Sam at his back.
“Sam’s back,” Dean says just to hear something other than the beeping of the machinery.
“I don’t understand,” is Lisa’s answer.
Dean starts at the unexpected but welcome sound of her voice. He turns, finds her frowning down at Ben’s hand, still limp in her own.
“You don’t understand what?” he asks, because he’s pretty sure that Sam’s return isn’t that confusing.
“Everything. What happened out on that field, or how Ben managed to kill Apollo but not himself, or how you’re his father without even being there-“ She stops, turns her glazed look on him. “I don’t understand.”
Okay, so Lisa is ready to freak out, now. That’s cool. She held it together for a long time and she’s due a freak out. Ben’s alive, Sam’s coming up with coffee, and the bad guys are dead. Dean’s got this.
Dean crosses his arms, props one hip against the windowsill. Last question first. “There are things that will steal human DNA to change their forms, and some of them use it to reproduce.” He pushes away the memory of the Amazons and Emma. “That’s what Apollo did.”
“And you’re okay with that?” Her tone is scandalized, and Dean is more than happy to hear the edge of anger in her voice, but he has no idea how she arrived at that conclusion.
“What? No,” he says. “Why the hell would I be okay with that?”
“Well, you just sound really fucking calm about a thing stealing your DNA to reproduce.”
Dean rubs a hand across his mouth, shifts from one foot to another. “Lis, I am not calm. I’m pissed and horrified, and I could probably do with a couple of hours in a hot shower with a scrub brush. But at this point?” Dean shrugs. He’s so, so tired and so completely inadequate for giving her what she needs. “I don’t know. The supernatural doesn’t give a fuck about your consent. In fact, if it doesn’t kill you, it’s probably raping you in some way. So when you get a kid out of it who’s more human than not, who’s as smart and brave and awesome as Ben is, you count it as a win. I’ve seen a lot of awful shit in my time, and what happened to us? Trust me when I say we got off easy.”
“I let it into my apartment, Dean.” Her voice trembles. “It got into bed with me.”
“I know.” There’s a surge of territorial anger, a vestigial caveman urge to kill and smash and destroy the thing that had hurt his girl, an urge which, for many reasons, Dean can’t indulge in, the least of which is the fact that Lisa isn’t his girl anymore and probably never will be again. “And believe me, if he hadn’t been possessing Ben, I’d have killed him for that alone. But he’s dead, now. You don’t ever have to worry about him again.”
She shrugs, turns worried eyes on Ben’s motionless form. “Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things to worry about.”
Dean nods. “Yeah. I know. But me and Sam are going to make sure you guys are safer this time.”
She pulls her eyes away from Ben and pins him to his spot with a look of scathing anger and disgust. “As opposed to completely erasing our memories so that we have no idea what’s out there or how to protect ourselves?” Her tone is whip sharp; he’s surprised he’s not bleeding. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
Dean hunches his shoulders. “I deserved that.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Look, Lis, I’m-“
“Don’t say it.” She sighs like she is as tired as he is, and her voice gentles though it remains stern, a more grownup appropriate version of her mom voice. “I know you’re sorry, but I don’t want to hear it right now. What you did to us? My God, Dean. Erasing our memories? What were you thinking? You can’t just do that to people. Talk about not giving a fuck about consent.”
Dean feels like Ben must when he gets one of her dressing downs. “I was thinking you deserved better than me.”
Lisa huffs, and her eyes flash, and she sits forward, body taut and straining. Her hands are tight on the arms of the chair as if her grip is the only thing keeping her from launching herself at him. “You know what, Dean? Fuck you. We dealt with your alcoholism, your screaming nightmares, and your overprotective streak. When you told us to move, we left our entire lives behind and moved. When Sam came back and you started hunting again, we dealt with that, too. Do you know why? Because we loved you, and the good outweighed the bad. When you wiped our memories, you took the good along with the bad and left us with giant gaping holes in our memories. Maybe we did deserve better, but we didn’t want better. We wanted you, even if only in our memories.” She slumps back in the chair and looks away from him in disgust. “Asshole.”
Dean doesn’t know what to do. Does he apologize anyway? Does he slink from the room with his tail between his legs? Does he just shut up and sit still and hope she doesn’t have anything else to say? Because he’s completely overwhelmed by his own failure right now. He did them wrong, and he can’t fix it, can’t undo it, doesn’t even know where to start. He can’t give them what they want, let alone what they need. He was trying to protect them by removing himself from the equation, but he couldn’t even do that right.
He feels like he’s being flayed alive, and having had the experience of actually being flayed alive, he’s not exaggerating at all.
“Lisa-“ he begins, because he’s stupid and doesn’t know when to shut the hell up, but a throat clears in the doorway and saves him from incurring any more of Lisa’s wrath.
Sam is standing there, the coffee tray in his hands and the duffle bag over his shoulder. “Um, I can come back?”
“No,” Lisa snaps in the mom voice and gets to her feet. “Give me the bag.”
Sam never had the chance to bear the brunt of their own mother’s stern mom voice, but he must recognize the tone on some instinctual level, because he obediently hands over the duffle. He watches her storm from the room with a troubled expression.
“You in trouble?” he asks, brow creased with worry.
Dean sighs and nods and pushes away from the wall. “And then some,” he says and liberates his coffee from Sam’s giant hands.
The beeping of machines and the murmur of voices bleed in first, then the pinch of an IV in the back of his hand and the itch of the nasal cannula under his nose. The deep down ache of the arrow wound comes next and the press of the quiver, there but not there, between the bed and his back, and the sluggish exhaustion of his body, worn down by the Titan magic.
Ben slowly opens his eyes, forcing his eyelids to peel apart from a tacky seam of sleep gunk.
It’s daytime, and he’s in a hospital. He’s attached to a heart monitor and a couple of other gadgets that he knows the purpose of but not the name, and his mouth tastes like a dirty sock. The surgeon did a good job sewing him up; the arrow wound is slowly mending, the sutures holding it together until his body can close the breech itself. He’ll scar, but not too badly, and it’s still a little terrifying to know how much is going on in his own body, but he also likes knowing that he’ll be okay.
“A god in the White House,” Dean says somewhere to Ben’s left, voice low and rumbling. “Look at her, she’s not even bothering to hide.”
Ben turns his head, finds Dean slumped down in a chair next to the bed, a couple days worth of stubble on his jaw. Sam is leaning against the wall next to the window, hands in pockets, and unlike Dean, clean shaven. They are both watching a press conference on the TV mounted in the corner; the president is at the podium, talking about the recovery efforts of the Chicago fires and the East Coast tsunami, while in the background, the woman who had come to accuse Hermes, the goddess Athena, stands behind the president, looking pleasantly blank.
“Not just in the White House,” Sam says. “She’s the White House Chief of Staff. She advises the president, she controls the flow of people who meet with the president, she negotiates with Congress-“
They look different, Ben decides. They haven’t noticed that he’s awake, so he looks back and forth between them while they talk, trying to figure out why they look so strange to him, so...clean.
“Yeah, Sam, I get it.” Dean sounds angry and impatient. “She’s the gatekeeper and the key master. What are we going to do about it?”
Sam shrugs. “What can we do about it? She’s in the frickin’ White House. I think the Secret Service would take exception if we showed up guns blazing. Besides, don’t we have plenty of other things to worry about right now with the trials and all?”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t see the way she looked at Ben,” Dean says with a worried grumble, and it’s then that it hits Ben. He should see the wound on Dean’s side, spurting phantom blood. And he should see the burns on Sam, bubbling and leaking yellow puss, but he doesn’t. He just sees them, just their hair and skin and hands and bodies, free of scars, phantom and otherwise.
He bursts into tears.
He sobs uncontrollably, gross, loud, hiccupy sobs like he’s a little kid, and he can’t stop it, can’t get a grip, even though he’s so horrifically embarrassed that he’s crying like a big baby now, after it’s all over. Beyond him is a flurry of activity - a chair scrapes on the linoleum, the rolling cart is pushed across the room, the TV is muted - and then Dean’s hands are on him, smoothing back his hair like his mom would.
“Whoa, hey, Ben. It’s okay.” Dean is a blurry person shape above him, his voice low and gentle. “You’re safe now. It’s okay.”
Sam clears his throat somewhere across the room. “I’ll, uh, go get Lisa.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, distracted as he pets Ben some more. “Ben, kiddo, look at me.”
Ben tries to focus on Dean through his tears, blinking and sniffling. He gets a little bit of control back, and the tears ease off, but Dean remains blurry, a glob of grays and browns.
“You did good, Ben. You’re safe. Okay?” Ben doesn’t miss how raspy and deep his voice has become. “I swear, it’s all over.”
Ben nods and sniffles again, forcing himself to stop the tears. Dean gets up and crosses the room, comes back with a handful of tissues. He helps him pull off the cannula, and Ben snatches the tissues out of Dean’s hand before he can do anything mortifying like wipe away the tears and snot for Ben, because, dude, he may be crying like a little kid, but he’s not actually a little kid.
The IV pinches his hand sharply as Ben wipes his sticky eyes and blows his nose, and then Dean is shoving a plastic cup with a bendy straw in his face and telling him to drink something. The water is sweet and clear, washing away the dirty sock taste in his mouth, and it feels so good going down throat.
When Ben pushes it away knowing that he shouldn’t drink too much too fast, Dean sets the cup on the rolling table and drags his chair closer to the bed. “Better?”
Ben relaxes back into the pillow. “Yeah.” His own voice is low and nasally from crying. “Mom okay?”
“She’s fine, but a little freaked out. She’s down in the cafeteria getting something to eat. Sam’s going to get her. How are you feeling?”
“Bad. Everything hurts.” Everything does hurt, everywhere, all over his body, especially the arrow wound. The drugs they have been giving him are wearing off, and he idly wonders when they plan to give him the next dose.
“Yeah, I bet. You nearly died, and you’ve been out for almost three days. You scared the hell out of us, Ben.”
“I know. Sorry. Had to do something, though.”
“Yeah,” Dean says softly. “I know. But the Furies, Ben? They would have, well, they would have done to you what they did to Hermes had I not laid claim to you.”
“Yeah. I get that, but he was getting so strong and there wasn’t anything else that could stop him.” Ben looks away from Dean, his eyes landing on the TV, not sure he can look at Dean right now. The president has been replaced by the mayor of Chicago, and whatever he is saying about the fires is flashing across the screen in badly spelled closed captioning. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”
In the corner of his eye, Dean stiffens. “Sorry I had to do what? Say I’m your dad? Ben, that’s the best thing that came out of this whole damned situation. Why would you even think that?”
Ben’s eyes are burning and his throat feels tight; he’s not sure he can keep himself from crying again. “What else am I supposed to think?”
“Well, not that.” Dean comes abruptly to his feet, paces to the window where he stands with his back to Ben, his head bowed, shoulders slumped. Ben lies there, tense, waiting anxiously. On the TV, the mayor of Chicago is gone, and a female reporter in a windbreaker is standing in front of a bunch of washed up wreckage on some beach somewhere.
Finally, Dean runs his hand over his mouth and turns around, comes back to the bed.
“I’m sorry you thought that, Ben.” Dean rubs the back of his neck nervously. “I’m not sure I want to know the answer to this, but did you read that book I found in your backpack?”
That’s a weird enough question that Ben has to look at Dean full on again. “No. I mean, I read, like, the first chapter. It’s what helped me remember. But it was too weird, reading about us like we were characters in a book. How did that guy even know about us?”
“It’s a long story, dude.” He perches on the edge of the chair again. “But look, if you had read the whole thing, you would have read about how when I thought you might be my kid, I was thrilled. And when your mom told me I wasn’t, you know what I told her?”
Ben shakes his head.
“I told her I’d be proud to be your dad. And I am. I would have owned up to it before, but I thought - and I’m pretty sure your mom thought it, too - I thought it would be better for everyone if we kept it a secret.”
A rush of overwhelming anger slices through Ben, not just at Dean, but at his mom, too. “Well, it wasn’t.”
Dean just shrugs. “Yeah, well, what can I say Ben? Hindsight is 20/20. But you hear what I’m saying, right? Never, ever think that I don’t want to be your dad. That’s the furthest thing from the truth. I love you. You’re my son.”
And that’s it, Ben’s tearing up again. “You’re such a girl,” Ben says, smiling stupidly.
Dean’s own answering smile is pretty stupid, too. “Yeah, well, don’t tell Sam,” he says, and ruffles Ben’s hair.
Sam looks from Lisa, eyes wide and alarmed, to Ben, who’s got one foot up in Lisa’s lap while she ties his shoe, to the orderly standing nearby with an empty wheelchair, and says, “You’re leaving.”
It isn’t a question. He and Dean were supposed to come back for Lisa and Ben tonight after they set up some rooms for them at the Bunker, but judging by the wheelchair and Ben in his street clothes and Lisa’s hand caught-in-the-cookie-jar expression, she has made other plans.
If he hadn’t forgotten his phone in Ben’s room, he would have never caught them.
“Look, Sam,” Lisa begins, sounding sincere and earnest, but Sam cuts her off.
He’s got this fury rumbling deep down inside of him, and he doesn’t want to hear whatever excuses she’s got to justify this. “If you’re about to tell me you have a good reason for leaving without telling Dean, you can save it.”
Ben turns his eyes on Lisa, and it’s chilling how much he looks like John right then. “You lied to me.”
Lisa glances between them guiltily, then her mouth flattens and her expression goes hard. She pushes Ben’s foot off her lap and gestures impatiently for the other. “Ben, foot up.”
Ben raises his other foot obediently and lets her tie his shoe, but he’s glaring at her with the heat of a thousand burning suns. “What the hell, Mom?”
“In a minute. And watch your language.” Lisa nudges his foot off her lap and stands, turns to the orderly. “Keep an eye on him. I’ll be right back.”
The orderly’s eyes are wide like he wishes he could just disappear into the floor, but he nods obediently.
“You,” she says to Sam, slipping past him and out the door. “Come with me.”
“Sam?” Ben says, looking at him like he has all the answers.
Sam shakes his head. “I don’t know, man. Let me talk to her.”
Lisa stalks purposefully into the room next door, and Sam follows. It’s empty, no signs of current occupation, and it’s dimly lit by stripes of afternoon sunlight falling through the blinds. Down the hall, nurses chatter and phones ring and human voices swell and recede arhythmically.
“This is how it is, Sam.” Lisa crosses her arms with an air of finality. “I’m going to take Ben, and you and Dean are not going to try to find us.”
Sam clenches his hands and takes a deep, steadying breath because he really wants to start yelling at her and never, ever stop.
See, he has this plan. He finishes the trials, the gates of Hell close, and whether he’s alive on the other side or not, Dean gets out of hunting. If Sam survives, he does too. His year with Amelia, despite its repercussions, reminded him what it was like to live like a civilian, to go to bed at night without checking the salt lines, to eat food that hasn’t been heated in a convenience store microwave, to wash clothes because they are dirty and not because they are soaked in blood or caked with grave dirt. If they close the gates of Hell, they should get to do that, Dean should get to do that. They’ve given so much, it’s time for them to get something that makes it all worthwhile. With Ben’s unexpected reentry into Dean’s life, Sam had seen it as his chance to make sure Dean gets to have the normal life he secretly desires. Lisa may never take him back, but Dean should get to settle down in the same town and share joint custody and just be Ben’s dad.
This is supposed to be a second chance for everyone involved, but what’s happening here? Lisa taking Ben and running? This is screwing up their second chances beyond repair.
“And you’re going to do it without telling Dean? Or even Ben?” Sam’s voice comes out nice and even, and that’s good, but he’s barely got a grip on his temper. This isn’t fair. “I get why you wouldn’t want Ben anywhere near our lives, but this is pretty fucked up. Dean’s not going to stop you from doing whatever you want with Ben, so at least have the decency to let him say goodbye.”
Lisa shifts uneasily. “I know you think I’m being a vindictive bitch, but I’m not trying to hurt Dean.” She’s being so earnest, and it’s rubbing him the wrong way. “That’s the last thing I want to do. I’m trying to protect him.”
Sam scoffs. “Yeah? What from?”
“From the fucking fortune that old woman gave me!”
Lisa’s shouting is unexpected; Sam takes a step back, startled out of his own rage by her sudden anger.
“I am trying to protect them, Sam, whether you believe me or not.” Lisa’s shaking now, and there are twin spots of color on her cheeks. “I’m sorry that I have to take such extreme measures and hurt them to do it, but I can’t let anything thing else she told me happen.”
Sam nods. “I get what you’re saying about protecting them and all.” His anger is long gone, but it has been replaced by an uneasy fear that is a thousand times worse. “I do. But, Lisa, what the hell are you talking about?”
She eyes him like she’s sizing him up for a fight, and he’s pretty sure she’s just going to storm out without further explanation. But then she huffs, closes her eyes, and presses her lips together like she’s trying to get herself under control.
When she opens her eyes again, she says, “Okay. Fine. Maybe you can help. This is what you and Dean, do right?” Her tone is defensive, and she plops down on the edge of the bed like an angry teenager being forced to talk it out with her parents. “When I was in college, about a year before I met Dean, I went to this traveling carnival with my friends. There was this fortuneteller calling herself the Oracle of Delphi, if you can believe that, and my friend Anne thought it would be a hoot if we had our fortunes told-“
“Wait,” Sam says, holding up one hand to stop her. His heart is pounding away in his chest like he’s in the middle of a fight and the other guy is winning. “The fortuneteller was calling herself the Oracle of Delphi?”
Lisa eyes him distrustfully. “Yeah. It was on a big glittery sign outside her trailer. Why?”
“Shit,” Sam mutters.
Lisa scoffs. “Oh, please. You don’t think she really was the Oracle of Delphi, do you?”
“I don’t... I don’t know.” Sam drags one of the guest chairs over to the bed and sits, puts himself on her level. “Just, tell me the rest.”
“Okay. Right. She, um....” Lisa waves one hand around like she’s trying to find the right words. “She read everyone’s palm and told them who they were going to marry, how many kids they’d have, you know, the usual fortuneteller scam stuff. I didn’t let her because I wasn’t going to waste my money on some crackpot’s lies about the future. But when I tried to leave, she called me back. I don’t know why I went back, but it was like I couldn’t help myself. It was like I had to hear what she had to say.”
Lisa pauses, mouth turned down. Her eyes drop, and she fiddles nervously with a string hanging from the sleeve of the too large Henley she appropriated from Dean. Her defensive anger is gone, and now she just looks defeated and scared.
“What did she tell you?” he asks gently, hoping to prompt her into talking again. He’s not sure at what point he stopped seeing her as the woman about to do a runner with Dean’s kid and started seeing her as a witness, but it’s happened. He almost wishes he could see her as the evil ex again because it would be a hell of a lot easier than dealing with whatever bombshell he knows she’s about to drop.
“The truth.” Lisa looks up; there are tears welling in her eyes, but they haven’t spilled yet. “I can’t tell you how I knew, but I did. She told me the truth. I could feel it in my bones. It scared me so badly, and I didn’t even understand most of what she said. For a long time I tried to forget it, but I couldn’t, so I just did my best never to think about it. After a while, I convinced myself she was just some crazy old fraud, but it was always there, in the back of my mind, you know? It affected every decision I’ve ever made about Ben, and it’s the reason I never told Dean that he was Ben’s father.”
“Lisa,” Sam asks, even though he doesn’t really want to know. “What was the fortune?”
Lisa glances away him and rubs her hands on her jeans nervously.
“Come on,” he says. “I can’t help if you don’t give me everything.”
She takes a deep breath, like she’s bracing herself to have a bone shoved into place, and recites the prophecy with the ease of perfect recall. Sam shivers at the words echoing through that empty hospital room with sunlight streaming through the slats of the blinds and the mundane white noise of the hospital humming along in the background. He’s never heard a prophecy before, but he can feel the weight of it, the power; he doesn’t know what it means, but it terrifies him, and he understands what Lisa meant when she said she could feel the truth of it in her bones.
When she stops speaking, it’s like a weight has been lifted from Sam’s chest.
“Are you sure that’s the whole thing?” he asks.
“Yeah. That’s it. Every awful, terrifying word.”
“Do you have any idea what it means?”
“Well, now I do. Ben literally has two fathers, and the parts about their fates...” The tears begin welling in her eyes again. “Sam, Ben killed Apollo out there on that field. And if that’s what that part is referring to, I can’t let the rest happen. Not to Ben and not to Dean. That’s why I have to take Ben and I have to go.“
“No. I know.” Sam slumps back in the chair, considers the fortune. He’s pretty sure that the thing Lisa is calling a fortune is the prophecy about Ben Artemis mentioned. Apollo had indicated to Dean that it was tied to Lisa in some way - it wasn’t all that unusual for prophecies in Greek mythology to be attached to the mother of a hero - but it had never occurred to Sam that it had been given directly to her. But it makes sense, somehow, especially since the last part was specifically about Lisa and no one else. And if Lisa’s right, and Apollo’s death fulfilled part of the prophecy, he doesn’t even want to consider what that could mean for Dean.
“Sam?” Lisa says. “What are you thinking over there?”
“I’m thinking that fortuneteller was the real deal. I don’t think she read your fortune, I think she gave you a Delphic prophecy.”
Lisa barks out a bitter little laugh. “Of course. I have a fucking prophecy on my head. How is that even possible?”
“Well, according to the history books, Theodosius I closed all of the oracular sites in the 4th century. But there are other stories in the kind of books we use that say that Apollo moved the Oracle when he realized that it was unsafe to house her in Delphi once Christianity became the official religion of Rome.”
“And now she’s a fortuneteller in a traveling carnival?” Lisa says skeptically.
Sam shrugs. “It’s the perfect hiding place. No one would look twice.”
Lisa wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand and sniffles a little. “You ever feel cursed, Sam?”
This time it’s Sam barking out the bitter laugh. “Every day. Dean and I even discussed the possibility of a literal curse.”
“It would be just your luck,” she says, wiping at her eyes again.
“Yeah, it would.” Sam shifts forward in his seat, mind switching to planning mode, making a list of the things Lisa and Ben are going to need to start over. “Look, give me a couple of hours, let me make some calls-“
“Sam, I don’t need your help.”
“Yeah, you do,” he says, voice hard. He feels that anger rumbling around again, but it’s not focused on Lisa this time, just the utter injustice of it all. “You’re about to disappear and change your name so Dean can never find you again, right?”
Lisa shifts uneasily. “Yeah.”
“Well, I’m going to help you do that because I want that prophecy to come true about as much as you do.” His heart feels like it’s being shredded inside of him, and here he thought his heart couldn’t be broken any further. “I can’t let anything happen to them, not if I can help it.”
Lisa eyes him, weighing him out. “Dean can’t know where we’re going and neither can you.”
Sam won’t pretend it doesn’t hurt, but he gets where she’s coming from. “Not a problem.”
She hesitates a moment, then says, “Okay. One hour Sam. Any more than that, and I’m gone.”
“Deal,” Sam says, and goes to make his calls.
The bus is idling beside them with a loud rumble and the parking lot smells like exhaust and fried food. Ben is not thrilled to find himself in another bus station about to get on another bus. He’s even less thrilled about the reason why and the fact that no one gives a damn about what he thinks no matter how loudly he’s protested it.
“There’s five hundred in cash in there,” Sam says, putting a thick envelope in his mom’s hand. “It will get you where you’re going and then some. Our friend Charlie will meet you guys in Toledo and set you up with everything you need.”
His mom doesn’t like taking the money, Ben can tell by the sour face she’s making. She’s always going on about supporting yourself and not depending on others to take care of you, so it’s probably not because it’s Sam giving it to her, but just because she has to take the money at all. “Can he be trusted?”
“She, and yeah. You can trust her. She won’t tell anyone where you are, not even me or Dean, unless you give her your say so. And seriously, Lisa, if anything happens, or there’s something you can’t deal with-“
She nods. “Yeah, I’ll contact you.”
Ben glares hard at them, so pissed he’s shaking. He’s tried bitching and whining and the silent treatment, but Sam and his mom aren’t budging. They won’t even let him say goodbye to Dean; they just keep saying it’s for the best, Sam and Dean are in the middle of something big and dangerous, and Ben and his mom had to go into hiding ASAP and blah blah blah.
Ben has already told them that’s bullshit, because it is, complete and total bullshit. Sam gave him a chiding, “Dude,” and his mother snapped out his full name with a promise that she was keeping a tally of what he would be owing to the swear jar, but Ben doesn’t care about the stupid swear jar. He and Dean just worked out their issues, and now he’s not going to get to see Dean anymore, and yeah, total bullshit.
Sam turns to him, puts his hand on Ben’s shoulder. Ben would shake it off, but the movement would pull at his stitches, and he’s not so keen on purposely making the arrow wound hurt worse than it already does. Ben settles for glaring up at him.
“Can I have a minute?” Sam says to his mom.
Her eyes flicker between them a couple of times before she nods. “Yeah. Go ahead.”
“Come here.” Sam walks Ben away, out of her earshot; Ben thinks about throwing a temper tantrum on principle, making a big, obnoxious scene in front of the whole bus station, but he decides against it out of pride. He’s thirteen and only little kids throw temper tantrums, but man, is it tempting. “You still have the quiver?”
Ben glares at him and his stupid long hair as hard as he can.. “No. I don’t know what happened to it. It’s just gone.”
Which is a huge lie. The quiver is still strapped to his back in that weird there-not there state, and when Dean had gotten around to asking him about it a couple of days ago, Ben had lied about it then, too. No one can see it, and it apparently hadn’t hampered the surgeon’s ability to cut into his chest or the nurse’s ability to bandage his wounds. He can only assume it hides in the same place where Highlanders keep their swords, which works just as well for him. It’s his, Apollo gave it to him, and he’s going to keep it, whether the adults like it or not. A magical hiding place just makes it easier.
Sam sighs. “I’m not going to take it from you. I just want to know if your aim is as good as Dean says it is.”
Ben eyes him suspiciously. “Yeah, I never miss unless I do it on purpose. Why?”
“Because I slipped a few hundred dollars into your backpack earlier. Use it to buy a bow. Something that feels right in your hand. You’ll probably want a recurve bow. That’s what Artemis uses, and I suspect that’s what Apollo used, too.”
Ben just stares at him. “Are you serious right now?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t let you keep it normally, but you and your mom need protection and after everything that’s happened, you’re better suited for the job than she is.”
He knows Sam is new to the uncle thing, and normally, he’d be all about taking advantage of it, but slipping him the money to buy dangerous weapons moves Sam right out of the cool uncle category and right into crazy gun nut territory. “You know this isn’t how it’s supposed to work, right? You’re a grownup. You’re supposed to take dangerous things away from me.”
Sam sighs and jams his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Look, man. I’ve been where you are. Supernatural shit has been messing with me my entire life, but no one told me until it was too late, and my girlfriend was burning on the ceiling.”
Ben gapes at Sam, no clue what to say to that.
“You’ve got the advantage, here,” Sam continues, oblivious to Ben’s shocked reaction. “You know what you are and what you can do. And you have a good idea of what might come for you.”
Ben didn’t like hearing that; he thought this was all over, that he’d be safe now. “Wait, you think something else might come for me?”
“You’re a Winchester, Ben. Odds are pretty good, yeah.”
Ben finds himself getting mad all over again. “Then why are you guys making me leave? Because this is just the same stupid crap Dean pulled before, but this time it’s you and Mom instead of him, and that didn’t turn out that great.”
“Ben-“
“No, screw you. I don’t see how hiding is going to help anything. If the monsters want to find me, they’re going to do it whether we’re hiding or not. Am I the only one who learned anything from all of this?”
Ben is so disgusted he can’t even look at Sam anymore. He stomps towards the bus, ignores Sam calling after him and his mom’s brief attempt to stop him. At the open door of the bus, he turns.
“Just so we’re clear,” he says, too mad to give a damn about causing a scene this time. “I think you’re both assholes, and I’m not paying into the swear jar for saying that, either.”
His mom looks hurt and Sam looks apologetic and Ben stomps up the stairs onto the bus. He finds an empty spot and throws his back pack under the seat in front of him, sits down and glares out the window, furious.
From where he’s sitting, he can see his mom and Sam. They exchange a few words. Sam shakes his head. His mom looks back at the bus nervously and sighs. Ben can’t see what she says to Sam next, but she touches him gently on the arm, like a thank you or maybe an apology, and gets on the bus.
The door of the bus shuts behind her with a swish of hydraulics. Mom sidles down the aisle, puts her duffle in the compartment above them, and settles next to him.
“Ben, baby, I’m sorry.” She feels bad about it, he can tell, and he has always hated to see his mother feeling bad, but screw it. Let her suffer some. She’s the one making him leave Dean, Dean who just happens to be his dad. She deserves to feel bad for a little while.
“Whatever,” he says and turns away from her best he can without straining his stitches too much. Sam is still out there, hands in pockets, grimly watching the bus.
The bus begins to roll. Sam gives Ben a little wave, and Ben’s stomach plummets like a lead weight. He sees it briefly as the bus pulls past Sam and out of the parking lot, just a glimpse, but enough of a glimpse to understand.
Sam’s lungs are bleeding again, and Ben can see it clear as day.
“Where have you been, man? I called you like five times.”
“I know.” Sam clears his throat, and Dean looks up from chopping onions for the stew he’s making. Sam is hovering in the doorway, wearing his bad news posture - hands in pockets, hunched shoulders, head dipped down. “Look, uh, Dean-“
And Dean knows. He just knows. “They’re gone, aren’t they?”
Sam nods. “Yeah.”
Dean puts down the knife, stares blankly at the half chopped onion. “You going to tell me where they went?”
“No. But I don’t know either. Lisa wanted it that way.”
No less than he deserves, probably. After wiping their memories and leaving them defenseless, he’s surprised Lisa hadn’t had Ben dressed and gone as soon as he woke up. And Ben, Ben had nearly died because of Dean, and yeah, no less than he deserves and probably better for everyone in the long run.
Dean wipes his hands on the dish towel thrown over his shoulder. “You made sure they’re going to be safe, right?”
“Yeah. Best I could. Look, Dean-”
Dean doesn’t have to look to know that Sam is giving him the compassionate puppy-dog eyes, and any minute now, he’s going to offer to talk about it, and then Dean is going to have to punch the sympathy right off of his little brother’s face.
“Not now, Sam.” Dean throws the dish towel down on the counter and stalks past Sam out of the kitchen “Not ever, in fact. The breaking your nose rule is back in effect.”
“Wait, Dean!” Sam calls after him, but Dean ignores him, retreats into his room where he retrieves the bottle of whiskey from under his bed and settles in to drink away the pain.
Two days later, Artemis pops into existence next to Sam at a gas station outside of Louisville, the scent of trees and wet leaves mingling with the acrid smell of gasoline. It’s just past two in the morning, Dean is passed out in the passenger seat in a whiskey induced coma, and they’ve still got a good twelve hours of driving ahead of them. Sam plans to push through the night; Kevin had called that afternoon, ranting about the angel tablet and how he and Dean needed to come right now, and he hadn’t gotten anything more coherent out of him than that. Sam was more than happy to drag Dean out of his grief induced bender and get him focused on something else, even if it meant diving back into the trials.
And he had been doing so well, easing back on the drinking, staying away from the hard stuff, but now that Lisa and Ben are gone....
“Where’s Ben?”
Sam nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of her voice and drops Malcolm Reynold’s credit card into a puddle of mysterious blue liquid.
Sam gives her a dark look as he fishes the card out of the puddle and wipes it clean on his jeans. “Not here.”
“Obviously.” She peers at Dean through the windshield, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Where are you going? This isn’t a hunt. I would know.”
Sam pulls the gas nozzle out of the pump and slots it into the gas tank. “None of your business.”
She arches an eyebrow at him, and leans against the Impala, arms crossed. “So you’ve left Ben unprotected to do what? Take a cross country trip with your inebriated brother?”
Sam ignores the judgment in her voice and watches the cents tick by on the pump’s display screen. “Ben and Lisa left. They didn’t want our protection.”
“And you just let them go?” she asks, but she doesn’t sound surprised.
“Well, we weren’t going to keep them prisoner.”
Artemis makes a noise, like he’s an idiot for dismissing that option, but says nothing else. She just leans there against the car, staring at Sam in the glare of the halogen lights.
“What?” he snaps when the feeling of her eyes crawling over his skin gets to be too much.
“You understand that now I have to do it, right?”
“Do what?”
“Protect Ben, teach him, show him what he is. You know, do all things that you and your brother are unwilling to do.”
“It’s not about being willing.”
“It is. The extent of your codependence is mindboggling, and your insistence that you two must be the ones to ride in to save the day, well, it’s idiotic. Now that you both know what Ben is, he should be your first priority, but instead, the both of you feel the need to exhaust yourselves in this futile, petty little attempt to close the gates of Hell-“
Sam goes cold. “How did you know about that?”
Artemis smirks. “I told you, Sam, I’m your goddess. You can’t hide something the size of the gates of Hell from me. With every hunt you take, I know you both a little better, I see into your souls a little further. And one day, when you’ve put aside this ridiculous quest and have reached the limit of your mortal abilities, as impressive as they are, you’re going to bring me a blood sacrifice and you’re going to put it on my altar and you’re going to worship me as I deserve.”
“That’s never going to happen,” Sam says, his voice hard and cold.
“Of course, it is. I’m the only one who knows what Lisa’s prophecy really means, and when you’re desperate enough, you’re going to pay me for the knowledge with blood and sacrifice.”
Sam sucks in a sharp gasp. Knowing the prophecy is one thing, but to have the interpretation...
“Tell me. Tell me what it means.”
Artemis smiles like the Sphinx and her eyes flash gold, quick and bright. “Only with blood and sacrifice, Sam.”
And then she’s gone, leaving the scent of forests and warm rain wafting in her wake.
In the car, Dean wakes and begins to shift around. Sam pulls the gas nozzle free of the car and shoves it back into the pump, then gets back into the car with Dean.
“Who’re you talking to, Sammy?” His voice is slurred with alcohol and sleep.
“No one, man,” Sam says, starting the car. The Impala’s engine rolls over with a deep and familiar rumble.
Dean runs a hand over his face, and squints at Sam. “You don’t look so good. You haven’t been coughing up blood again, have you?”
Sam sighs, irritated that his chance to share the burden of Dean’s caretaking with someone else has been snatched from him. “No. I’m fine, Dean. Just tired. Go back to sleep and sober up so you can drive in a few hours.”
“Yeah, okay, Sammy” Dean mumbles and slumps against the door again.
Sam pulls out of the parking lot. His hands are shaking, and he’s got a bad feeling sitting in the pit of his stomach. As soon as he gets a chance, he’s going to call Charlie and ask her to get a message to Lisa, to let her know that Artemis still has an interest in Ben and to watch her back. Lisa made a choice, and Sam joined her in it, and there isn’t much he can do about that right now, even if he’s starting to regret leaving them to fend for themselves.
Besides, he and Dean have the gates of Hell to close, and right now, the only way out is through.
When she wakes to the cawing of crows, May knows she will see her father soon. She asks Danica when she brings the morning tea, and her sister confirms that there is a huge murder perched on the power lines at the edge of the fairgrounds. They always swarm around whenever their father is near, waiting, he claims, for their vengeance.
What she doesn’t expect is the girl; she’s not quite twenty, perched uneasily on the edge of adulthood, and she is with a group of giggling girls who want their futures told. None of them really believe, so the Oracle gives them what they want to hear - this one will marry rich, this one will be famous, this one will have four children. But the girl, she scoffs and rolls her eyes at May’s fibs, and when the girls have had their fun, she tries to leave before the Oracle has read her palm.
“Lisa,” May calls after her. “Come back.”
The girl stops her egress, suspicious and frightened, but still she comes to the table, to May. “How do you know my name?”
“I read it on your soul.” She gestures at the chair on the other side of her table. “Please, come, sit down.”
The girl is silent but for her belabored breathing, but she hasn’t left yet, so the Oracle counts it as a win. May is desperate for her to sit and offer her hand; the weight of a prophecy weighs heavily on her soul, and it wants to be spoken, as all prophecies do. But she is patient and calm, waits on the girl to acquiesce to her fate.
The carriers of a prophecy want to hear it, even if they don’t realize it.
Finally, the legs of the chair scrape along the wooden planking of the trailers as the girl pulls it out to sit.
“What do you want?” she says warily. She smells sweet, like vanilla and cinnamon, a good smell, comforting. This one has a bit of healer about her, her soul like a calm and gentle breeze in the midst of chaos.
“Merely to read your palm. May I?” The Oracle holds out her hand, and after a moment, feels the soft skin of the girl’s hand in hers. May smoothes her fingers across her palm, still supple with youth and potential unlike her own gnarled, arthritic claws.
The future washes over her immediately, and in her mind, she can see the world, the glow of gods and an ocean of blood. She sees thousands dead in a wash of waves, and fires, burning through a great city, and cars caught in gridlock. She sees great black wings unfurling against the sky, a boy with his eyes burned out, a mark of such unimaginable evil burned into flesh and a jaw bone of a donkey, forged into a blade. She sees soldiers with flame throwers and angels with broken wings and sickness crawling across the land. She sees destruction and death, and the world teetering on the fine edge of fate.
It’s the single most terrifying thing she has ever seen.
“You will have a child, a boy with two fathers, two natured and strong.” The words rise up in her, a true prophecy, a thing that will always come to pass. “He will wield the power of life and death and will walk among the dead. The gifts from his fathers will be a blessing, but his fate lies in their hands and theirs in his. And when the time comes, Lisa, it is you who must take the blade.”
The clatter of the chair pulls the Oracle from her vision as the girl snatches her warm, young hand from hers and runs, terrified by the truth she heard in those words in the deepest depths of her soul.
“May, she didn’t pay,” Danica says irritably, righting the chair.
“I know, Danica. I didn’t expect her to.”
Her next customer comes in on the heels of the girl, a large man, powerful in form and in personality. The oracle can’t see him, but she can feel him; he wears an angel’s mark on his heart and his past as a bleeding wound. Within him is a great open space able to accommodate a being larger and more powerful than anything that currently walks this earth, a space that has been occupied before, though for only a short time. Next to her, Danica shrinks from his presence, odd for a girl who is always snapping and snarling like a cornered cat, odd until she hears the cock of a gun.
“Have you come to kill an old woman and a child today, John Winchester?”
“That girl-“
May shrugs. “She heard the truth, and it frightened her.”
A pause, half a breath long. “You claim to be the Pythia.”
“I do,” May says. “I am.”
“Where‘s your priest and your temple?”
“You know as well as I do that the Pythia has not resided in Delphi since Theodosius I closed it in the fourth century.”
“Then where is your interpreter?”
“My twin has been dead these past five years. I am my own interpreter these days, though Danica here sometimes helps even though it’s not her true talent. Would you like to hear your future?”
Though blind, she can feel the weight of his gaze, measuring her out.
“Or perhaps you would like a reference? You have met my sister, Missouri.” She dangles her sister’s name in front of him like a matador dangles his red cloak in front of a bull. “But, wait. You can’t do that without getting an earful from her, as she was the one who sent you here. I know how unpleasant that can be.”
On the other side of the table, there is a snick as John Winchester thumbs the safety on his gun, and the other chair creaks as it receives the weight of a body much heavier than the girl’s.
The Oracle holds out her hand. “Your palm?”
There is a heavy pause before he acquiesces. She takes his hand in her own, gently runs her old, weathered fingers along the lines of his palm, still soft, though John Winchester has done his best to wear away any softness he might still have.
The same images rise again in her mind’s eye: the broken angel wings, the soldiers, the blood and fire and water. The mark of evil and the jaw bone blade. The earth, teetering.
Then the prophecy comes.
“John Winchester. You chose vengeance and anger over your children. You will find what you are looking for but, you will die hard, and your only company will be the demon you pursue. You will never, ever get what you want, but your boys will, eventually. All three of them.”
“I only have two boys.” She cannot see his smirk, but she can hear it in his voice.
“You have three, whether you know it or not.”
“You’re wrong.” The smirk is gone now, replaced with the steel resolve of deep denial.
The Oracle smiles with pity. “I’m never wrong.”
The chair creaks again as the man stands, rising to his powerful height. “You’re not the Pythia.”
“If you prefer to think so.”
“Waste of my time,” John Winchester mutters as petulant as any child, and leaves her trailer with a frustrated tread and the slam of the door.
“He didn’t pay, either,” Danica says, using her complaints to cover her fear.
“Only charlatans make them pay for the truth, Danica,” says another man, the only indicators of his presence the scent of sunlight and fresh breezes.
“Father,” May’s little sister says, her voice little more than a devout breath.
“Danica, my girl.” The Oracle can hear the smile in his voice, his joy in seeing them. “You’ve done well, today, both of you.”
“What just happened?” May asks, uninterested in his praises. She had ceased to need them once she realized the enormous burden of her so-called gift. “I have never seen anything like it. First the girl, then the hunter-“
“I am aware, May.”
“But what was it I saw?” The future is like a lead weight on her shoulders, pressing down, exhausting her. Two prophecies in one day is not unheard of, but it has been years since she’d had to face the power of it.
Apollo comes close to her, pulls her against him so that her head rests against his side like when she was little and the visions were so overwhelming that even her twin could not comfort her. His hand covers her sightless eyes, and she sighs in relief as the gift of prophecy is lifted, and her soul is finally allowed to escape its mortal prison.
“It’s the apocalypse, daughter” Apollo murmurs as he feels the flutter of May’s soul bursting free of her body and leaping into the arms of her Reaper. The last Oracle has been born, and he can finally allow his May to rest. “It’s just not the one everyone expects.”
Next: Dead Gods: Epilogue
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