13 short sad stories Sam (boyking) later recommended, for thursdaysisters

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Title: 13 short sad stories Sam (boyking) later recommended
Recipient: thursdaysisters
Genre: gen, outsider POVs, horror/humor(??)
Characters: Sam; motley ensemble of other demons, monsters, ghosts and angels
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2500
Warnings: Spoilers through 9x23.
Summary: Today is Tuesday, too.
Notes: For thursdaysisters, whose prompt was, Sam summons Crowley right after the s9 finale and shows what a pissed off demon-hunting, Lucifer-vessel, Men of Letters, drunk little brother is REALLY capable of when it comes to revenge.


13.  He's crowned on a Tuesday.  Pelesit is the one to place the thorny crown on his master's head.  

In Hell time passes quickly, and since nothing forgets or is forgotten, legends breed like insects.  The thing before them is less a legend than an inevitability.  The loyal, from before Lilith, raise up out of the mucky corners of the realm.  Sam Winchester flashes his congregation a reptilian smile.

Pelesit watches for the other one, the brother.  He's grown up with Sam--ever since those three drops of blood on his baby tongue--and he knows what the brother's presence would mean to Sam.  But he's absent.  If Sam expected differently, he doesn't show it.

Sam looks up from under his crown.  There are demons all around him in tiers and piles.

He says, "We've got work to do."


12.  "Tell him I've already won," reads Metatron, from his cell.  "Hell of a line edit.  Cas, don't you think you should tell him?

"Shouldn't you tell him there's been a dastardly coup, and you're in charge now?"

Castiel sits stiffly on a stool on the other side of the bars.  It'd humid in Heaven these days, like there's an excess of atmosphere in the halls.  Heavy with molecular gasses.  It makes it difficult to breathe.

Which it's stupid, because Castiel picked up breathing like humans pick up smoking--a social vice.  All the same, he can't go to Earth now; the grace inside him is too little, and his vessel would crumple under the pressure down there.  It threatens to already.  

"Unless, of course, you don't think it would matter.  Sam's on a mission, after all.  You know how he gets."

Castiel frowns. 

(Breathing isn't a wrong way to measure weakness.)

"Why did you let me have this, anyway?" Metatron folds the letter into a paper airplane.  "Are you asking for my help?"

"You should know what you've done," Castiel says.  

He feels dizzy.

"So Sam gives the Veil a Cesarian.  How far do you think he's really going to get all alone?  Heaven has plenty of souls; cutting away nine months of padding still doesn't get him inside the Gates. No one gets in unless God wants them to."

"Lucifer found the Garden," says Castiel.

Metatron leers.  "Is that doubt in God or faith in Satan?"

"Sam will find what he's looking for."

"Dean's gone, Cas.  There's no finding to be done."

Castiel regards his prisoner, expression leaden.  And he repeats, "You should know what you've done."


11.  When it happens, Sheila Voigt is sitting in a coffeehouse puddled near her pituitary.  An angel is taking up the rest of her, hence the squeeze, but when the sky goes dark and green like that, it reminds them both of the tornadoes that punctuated Sheila's girlhood in Illinois.  The angel's never seen anything like it; and maybe he's frightened, or ashamed, but he gives Sheila back to herself that day.

Big baby, she thinks.  When all this is over--if it ever ends--she's converting to Catholicism.  Their Communion is silly, but at least their angels are fierce and righteous.

Pumpkin latte in hand, she looks at the sky.

There's no tunnel, but luminous spheres tumble down from the sky in a spiral all the same, blue white like SuperBall gum at the Mall of America, or baby spiders deflating their sac. Then all the air rushes from the world, up and away to fill the vacuum the spheres have left.  It's searing pain until the pressure equalizes again, several long fractions of a second later.

In six to eight hours, the whole world develops a collective rash.  Everyone complains of muscle aches.  Several people in Nantucket die of unexpected pulmonary embolisms; there are probably others, and elsewhere, but Sheila's local news station can only cover so much.  The CDC is quick to point its finger at Israel.

One of the churches on Sheila's street clamors, "Angels!"

Their streets and lawns are bedecked by the Fallen, swarms of blackbirds splattered and dislocated on the ground, wings akimbo.  Those spheres had been the Rapture, but the world had been too heavy with sin to lift; the angels died for those sins.

Silly, think Sheila and her angel. The Fall is come and gone already.  There are no angels in Heaven anymore, only traitors.  The birds are only birds.  They fell right out of the sky when the air went away.

Sheila calls it Breathless Tuesday, when she doesn't convert to Catholicism and sets up a new congregation in her living room instead.

"Do you remember the day?" Sheila asks her guest, though everyone should.  But he looks sallow and stringy, like he's been bred under unnatural light.  An IT guy, maybe, or a student holed away in a basement.  The kind of person who missed the Fall and could easily have missed everything else--that is, most people.  Not everyone is Sheila Voigt, with an angel of the Lord inside them.

He'd been beautiful once, though.  Broad chest, thick musculature.  Long hair; longer legs.  His eyes are a dry, grasshopper green.  Not ever angel has Sheila Voigt's libido to contend with.

"I know that's you in there, Sandalphon," says her guest.  "I need you to take a message to your brother."

"He won't do anything," says Sheila of her angel.  "He's a big baby." 

"Well, historically, that's what he's been in charge of."  Her guest chuffs and runs a hand through his hair, and he seems again like the earnest (if sickly) man she let inside.  In the next instant, though, he tires of his own good humor and grows bored with Sheila.  She stops existing.

So does he.

"Sandalphon," he says, voice tenebrous, hands tense.  There's a ripple through his veins.  "This is a war of attrition.  You know that, right?"

Sheila's body nods.

"Tell Metatron I've already lived someone else's hundred magic Tuesdays.  And now I've lived a hundred of my own."  

(...What did he say his name was?)  

"Tell him I'm going to win this."


10.  "Please, it's my brother," says Evgenia Dyndikova.  She's been a doctor for five weeks and her brother's been here with her in Israel since last night, Monday.  Now he's dying of a pulmonary embolism.  "Please, help me, my brother--" she repeats.

Then she remembers to say it in Hebrew.  Then Arabic.  Then English.  Even Yiddish, half-forgotten.  But the stranger in the hall doesn't seem to understand any of these.  A tourist, then.  But who tours a hospital?  This is Jerusalem.

"Please," she whispers, in a schoolgirl's French.

"Please."

She doesn't know why she's asking him.  Clearly, he's not a doctor.  Nor is he God.  If anything, he looks like a patient.  But if it will save her brother, she'll take anyone's help.

"You shouldn't," the stranger says suddenly.  So he can speak. "You can't know what that'll set in motion."

He begins to chant, in a language even Evgenia doesn't know.  The hospital generators shudder to a stop, and the lights go out.  Before they're found, some hours later, Evgenia's brother dies in her arms.

Outside, the sky is dark and full of sand.


9.  Michael Wheeler is proof.  "Please," he says.  Please, his wife is pregnant.  They have a son, he's four years old.  They'll need their mother and father.

Sam stops. His hand--his knife--shakes. 

He's fine.


8.  "It makes you a sociopath, you know," says Crowley. "When you smile at the ladies like that.  Stick to stone-cold killer--far less eerie.  Even your brother eventually dropped the Genial Stranger routine, you know?  Or did you think he actually enjoyed your company?"

"That's juvenile even for you, Crowley," Sam mutters.  "Dean's not a cartoon.  We're not a cartoon.  I'm not a cartoon."

"Clearly not," says Crowley.  "You never speak in repetitive catchphrases.  Here, have some platitudes to go with that beverage of yours, too."

Crowley gestures towards Sam's glass.  It's the strongest ristretto Europe can craft, but that doesn't mask the reddish tinge around the edges or the iron tang to the steam that crawls to the back of Crowley's throat.

"Would you like another?" asks the waitress in English.  "It's the special today, Tuesday."

"Yes please," says Sam, in mangled...something.  "Thank you."

"Honestly.  Does that make you feel kinder?" Crowley asks. 

The waitress titters.  "I like it," she says, and her eyes flick black.

She curtsies.

Crowley sours.  "One waitress doesn't make you king," he says, when she has gone.

Sam tugs at Crowley's chains.  "I'm pretty sure these do, though."

He downs his ristretto.


7. Walter Ariel is bleeding out on Moroccan carpet.  The Wednesday maid staff will not be pleased, come tomorrow morning.

"Surely you're not planning to leave him there," says Crowley, gingerly stepping over the corpse--or soon-to-be.  And lest Sam misconstrue his priorities, he adds, "The weave he's ruining is priceless.  The plant used to make that dye doesn't even grow naturally anymore."

"Yeah, well," says Sam.  "The spell said blood.  Maybe we'll need it all."

"We hopped the Atlantic for blood?  The Kansas vintage not good enough for you?  In case you wondered, your brother finds it perfectly palatable," Crowley rails, incredulous.

"This was personal."  He pumps dead Walt's chest with his fist, to help keep the blood coming.  Personal indeed.  "Just remember--I could have used yours.  Turned you human and used you up.  Just deserts."

"You could have," Crowley allows.  "But fox, meet hen, meet grain.  Am I right?"


6.  Chace Broussard is practice.  Sam remembers not to care whether he lives or dies.


5.  Gohar Bagdasarian is a mistake.  Sam didn't mean to.


4.  Yasunaga Kenichi is in the stacks at Manchester when the sky gives birth (so says his mother, but that's Aogashima for you).

To her credit, all the Vines in the world corroborate her assessment.  He's halfway to an MSc in developmental biology; Yasunaga knows what an embryo looks like.  And as they fall from the green sky, those are them.

So he calls his sister, the meteorologist.

"Ohmigawd please not you, too," whines Akemi Yasunaga-Wheeler (that is, Kelly Wheeler to everyone but her mother and the Department of State).  "Mom's pitching a fit about the sky being preggers and telling me to get out the salt."

"You saw it, though, didn't you?"

"Ken, I'm in Tampa.  It always kind of looks like that."

Then she hangs up.  Maybe he's making too much of this.

But when he gets up to his flat, he puts his ear to the door.  It sounds like it's being ransacked.

Maybe he's making too much of this.  It's only Tuesday; surely it's too early in the week for this.

He lets himself in.

There's a man inside.  It's being ransacked.

"Where is it?" the man demands.  "Where's the salt?"

"Under...the bed?" answers Yasunaga.  Just when he thinks he understands this country, someone shows up to surprise him.

The man gives him a withering look and drops the tins of rice and bonito he's been pawing through, but he doesn't question Yasunaga's organization.  As though nothing surprises him.

"But the shipping alone was over fifty quid," Yasunaga protests, because he's getting the distinct impression that he is being burglarized.  "And it's--from my mum," he finishes lamely. 

The man gives him another look, and this time he looks like Akemi sounds.  Like, Jesus fucking Christ, I did not just fly halfway around the world and navigate this ridiculous city and break into your disastrous apartment just to fight you over some salt.

Yasunaga's burglar slams an American hundred on the counter.  "There.  You happy?" he asks, exasperated.

"What are you?" Yasunaga asks back.  This is not how burglary works.

"Human," says the man, as though he doesn't quite believe it.  "You?"

"My mum's a witch," Yasunaga stutters.

The man hefts the sack of his mother's Aogashima salt over his shoulder.  "I know."


3. On Tuesday, Pelesit speaks to the pocong.  Some of them don't call themselves pocong, but that's what they are.  Pelesit knows better.  He left the islands a long time ago; he has seen plenty of the world.  He's read all the books in Sam's heart.  He knows how many names the pocong have taken for themselves.

Of course there's a spell, they tell him.  A spell to rip away the shroud that holds the ghosts.  The pocong hop about on their tied feet, which are bound white.  In Nantucket they look like clouds, Heaven's underbelly.  Cumulonimbus ready for a lightning storm.  

Are there many ingredients? asks Pelesit.

Of course, answer the pocong.  They hop.

Are they very far?

The farthest, the pocong assure him.  Pelesit, are you afraid? they ask.

I'm afraid, he admits.  He hops, too.

The full moon is tonight.  Look how we shine with its light, the pocong in the Veil console him.  You will be fed tonight, Pelesit.  Don't worry.

But Pelesit shakes his head.  I'm the demon.  The yellow-eyed one--the foreigner, Azazel--sent me to my master when he was only a child, and I was the demon.  When he fed me, I grew strong. But this--

Are you afraid of your master, Pelesit? one of the pocong scoffs.  It thinks its name is Kevin.  I mean, Sam's only human, says Kevin.

He's going to swallow me, Pelesit insists; he rankles at this stupid pocong's temerity.  Sam Winchester is becoming something different, and he's going to swallow me.  You don't know what that's like.

Kevin shrugs.


2.  Kevin's a prophet; he knows when a Winchester bites it.  But it's like Dean hits the Veil and bounces.  

Like a bird off a glass door.


1.  Dean dies in Sam's arms.  It's not the first time, but Sam doesn't pretend he's inured to the sensation.

He spends a breathless Tuesday rushing through the Men of Letters archives.  He finds the English translation of a Malay spell that reveals the name of a different book with an older spell that summons a demon who can speak to the ghosts who know of a horde of monsters that can rend the Veil.  His desperation makes it doable and the whiskey makes it favorable.  His fury makes it easy.  And his grief, necessary.

He takes more whiskey.  Then he summons Crowley.

Crowley looks smug and expectant.  "Do you hear the ruckus upstairs?" he asks.

It doesn't take much for Sam to put two and two together.

He deadens.

If Crowley wants him to cry, it is so many hundreds of Tuesdays too late for that.

And he brings out a syringe.

"Really?" Crowley intones.  "You'd seal Hell?  After all this?  You'd take your brother down with the rest of us?  Because he is 'of us' now.  You've done all the working and figured that out, right?"

Sam approaches Crowley--in chains--with the syringe, empty.

"Oh, I'm not going to seal Hell. I won't kill it," Sam assures him, and draws blood.  "I won't kill it.

"I'm going to take it from you."

---

Uh, that happened rather differently than I intended??

- Pelesit, Malay, demon. Said to be able to take the form of a grasshopper.
- Sandalphon, Jewish/Christian, angel.
- Pocong, Indonesian/Malaysian, ghost
- Aogashima is a small island in Japan known for its salt (and its volcanoes).