To Him Ascribe All Sin
Sep. 7th, 2008 08:59 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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spn_summergenTitle: To Him Ascribe All Sin
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
diva5256
Recipient:pdragon76
Rating: PG-13
Author’s Notes: I wrote for the prompts ‘Dean!whump with a side of Savior!Sam’ and ‘Do-over! Give me your rewrite of the amulet backstory’. I hope you enjoy. AU in which Bella never stole the Colt.
Disclaimer: They are Kripke’s creation – I’m just playing. One of the quotes that pervades the story comes from the same verse of the Bible as the epitaph.
Notes: A massive thanks to my truly amazing beta E. for her excellent help.
“The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin.” — 1 Enoch 8:1
It happens like a dream, disconnected and fast.
For the Winchesters it starts in a bar, like these things usually do.
It’s a Tuesday or Wednesday, one of those nothing midweek days in some nowhere town where nothing out of the ordinary happens to ordinary people, but of course they weren’t ordinary people. They had just wasted three demons two states over and it was the first placed they’d come across for a little R&R or the closest thing they could find - cheeseburgers and beers and a pool table where Dean can hustle a few local barflies out of their less-than-hard-earned cash and Sam can turn to the same computer screen he does everyday and look for new answers just like everyday before.
Day 300.
It is carved in Sam’s conscience like the graffiti etched into the bar’s hardwood table, deep and unending. His first thought on waking and his last thought on going to bed will be the same; another day has gone by and he has no answer.
Dean comes over and smiles, waving his newly acquired $50 bills in front of Sam with an air of childlike pride.
“I still got it, Sammy.” He grins as he sits down.
“You sure do.” Sam finds himself trying to smile, the same mask he’s worn since a cemetery in Wyoming, the same falseness he’s felt in every happy gesture since the day he died. It’s then that he notices it, like something moving out of his peripheral vision, knowledge that the bartender is watching them from the corner of his eye. There’s something almost too languid and easy in the bartender’s movements. And then Sam realises what it is. The bartender’s eyes are black. There are two other black-eyed bartenders lurking behind him too.
“Dean.” He leans over to his brother.
Alert, Dean quirks his eyebrow and leans in. Noting Sam’s solemn expression, Dean rolls his eyes.
“Oh god, it’s not time for the official Sam Winchester emo hour of girly-man crying, is it?” Dean asks playfully.
“No,” Sam replies in a hard tone, prime bitch face in place.
“4 o’clock,” he whispers and Dean, almost imperceptibly, turns with an expert and easy glance, relaxed yet cautious in a way that Sam still admires, a way that he has never quite mastered himself.
They put away their things cleanly, methodically, trying not to draw any attention to themselves.
A short guy, with a buzz cut and arms where no skin is visible between the tattoos, menacing in that redneck kind of way, approaches them as they’re starting to leave. He stands, unmovable, his eyes slowly curling to a deep yellow that they haven’t seen since that night in the cemetery. Sam’s first instinct is to move, to power forward, as he feels the yellow-eyed man’s sour breath in his face.
“Going somewhere, Sasquatch?” The demon leers in Sam’s face. Before Sam can answer Dean has blocked his path. Two of the demon’s buddies are suddenly standing, immovable, behind him.
“Nah, it’s you who’s taking a trip downstairs,” Dean suggests, bravado fully in place.
Dean takes a moment to breathe before trying to remember the exorcism.
But it is too late. The first demon already has purchase on him, a swift punch. Dean retaliates with a swift right hook but the demon already has a chair ready to crack over Dean’s head and Sam does not have time to react, to join the fight, before it descends. He is stunned to see his brother go down a little too easily.
Sam moves towards the demons but feels himself being flung against the wall in the tight unmovable way that has become far too familiar over the last year as another member of the pack simply raises his hand.
The demons circle around Dean, playing at his clothes, touching him, kicking him hard over and over again, until it seems they have forgotten about baby brother, pinned safely to the wall.
“Stop!” Sam screams, feeling the familiar overprotective zeal that has only grown stronger in this last year wash over him.
He shall be cast into the fire.
Words burn through Sam’s brain. He yells with such force that it takes him a minute to realise that he is free of the demons’ invisible chains, standing over his brother.
The demons turn with notable shock and begin to circle round him like dogs smelling meat.
“So, are you what they say you are, boy king?” laughs the original demon, uncomfortably close to Sam.
“Maybe,” Sam hears himself hiss through gritted teeth, punching out at the air, but the demon with the yellow eyes and his cronies are gone as though Sam’s simple wish to make it so wiped them out.
Sam leans over his brother, knowing that the end can’t be now, that he still has sixty-five full days left, that this would be too ordinary, too routine a death for the great Dean Winchester.
“Dean, c’mon wake up.” He kneels at his brother’s side.
“Dean!” his voice grows more desperate.
“I’m fine,” Dean sighs opening his eyes.“Even dogs know how to play dead,” he sniggers, clearly reacting to Sam’s less than amused expression. Sam can feel the awkward tension resonating from Dean’s voice, the tacit agreement not to speak of what just happened, of what Sam can do.
“Let me help you up, that chair still hit you pretty hard,” Sam offers.
“Get off me, dude! I said I’m fine.” Dean brushes him off, swaying as he goes.
“Clearly,” Sam deadpans.
Dean’s already walking towards the exit of the now alarmingly empty bar.
“If you think you’re driving you’ve got another thing coming,” Sam yells after his brother.
“Hell no, Sammy. The last time I actually gave you permission to drive my car you got my baby totalled by a semi,” Dean says, squinting slightly in the light, looking distracted.
“You ok?” Sam ventures.
“Err...”
“Dean?”
“On second thoughts I think you’d better drive...both of you,” he mumbles. Seeing double, that couldn’t be good.
When they get back to the motel room it becomes painfully obvious that Dean is concussed. In many ways it is a relief as Sam knows that his brother will have no choice but to be quiet and let him look after him tonight, instead of getting drunk and finding more girls to fuck and pretending the year isn’t coming to an end.
“Dude, this wallpaper is particularly high-off-your-ass-ugly when it’s spinning,” Dean observes flopping down on the bed to the far right of the room, having finally been coaxed into changing out of his blood-stained clothes and into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt.
Dean closes his eyes and for a moment Sam thinks his brother has fallen asleep.
“Sam,” Dean says, this time it’s a soft and childlike plea, and Sam watches all the colour drain from his brother’s face before rapidly sitting up and grabbing the waist paper basket and getting it to Dean just in time to watch his brother lose his lunch into it.
“I’m fine,” Dean manages when he has finally stopped heaving into the basket.
Sam almost snorts with dry laughter.
“My pain is funny to you?”
“So you do admit that you’re in pain. Only you would be insisting your fine after you’ve just puked,” Sam notes, taking the can into the bathroom to clean it out, briefly gagging himself at the smell of the contents.
“Oh god. Does this mean I’m going to have you hovering in nursemaid-mode over me and waking me up all night?”
“Pretty much.”
“Super,” Dean states dryly.
Sam gets Dean a glass of water and turns the TV to some trashy old monster movie. Dean’s asleep within minutes so Sam turns the volume dial down on the old 60s black and white TV sets up his computer and begins his nightly research routine with the same robotic, methodical rigor that he’s had since the day he came back to life. He is distracted, unable to think of anything beyond the strange new power he exhibited tonight, trying to tell himself that it was just because the demon let go, because the demon wasn’t bothered by Sam anymore, trying to ignore the demon’s final taunt.
After an hour he wakes Dean up, to a loud and resounding response of “bite me” so he’s fairly sure that his brother’s concussion is no worse than the many others he has incurred in his life so far. He repeats the routine twice more over the next two hours.
The rest of the night is much the same. If he can’t research, Sam thinks, he will watch his brother instead.
Sam is sure he does not fall asleep but he suddenly feels himself being woken by Dean tugging at his shirt. The sun is already high in the sky and the clock by Dean’s bed is blinking a functional digital 12.00 at him. Dean is already dressed and there are two no brand paper coffee cups on the table beside him.
“Dude, it’s gone. Help me look.” Dean looks unusually fraught.
“Are you delusional?” Sam enquires.
“No. My amulet thingie, the one your oh-so-girlie self gave me for Christmas that time, is gone.”
“Did you take it off in the shower or something?”
“No. I never take it off,” Dean says, upending his bedclothes.
Sam helps Dean turn the motel room upside down, until it looks like they’ve been fighting monsters in the room as opposed to in the scummy bar down the street.
“I think they took it,” Dean concludes wearily, brushing sleep from his eye and sitting down on the edge of his bed.
“The demons?”
“No, the Osmonds. Yes, the demons, college boy,” Dean snarks.
“So? It was just some piece of junk I gave you when we we’re kids,” Sam says, feeling defensive and embarrassed.
“But it must be of some value to them, otherwise they wouldn’t take it. Where did you get it again?”
Sam feels a horrible realisation crystallize within him. He sits down on his own bed so that he and Dean are level.
“From Bobby.”
“Right,” says Dean, already in the process of packing his meagre things. “Looks like we’re going to South Dakota.”
“Dean you got yourself a concussion last night. You’re going nowhere.”
“How you going to stop me Sammy?” Dean challenges. Sam recognises that tone of voice and knows it’s not worth messing with.
“Fine, but I’m driving,” Sam agrees wearily. Grabbing his own duffel, Sam follows Dean out the door. The Impala’s engine is already rumbling before he has swung the motel room door shut.
They pull up at Bobby’s just as the sun’s beginning to set. Bobby’s already swinging the door open, the Impala’s slow grumble having signalled the Winchesters’ arrival to him before they have had a chance to get out the car.
“Boys.” Bobby nods his usual stoic greeting. “What can I do for y’all this fine evening?” he drawls sarcastically.
Dean is up and out the car before Sam has a second the stop him.
“Well, that depends on how good your memory is,” Dean notes, before passing Bobby and heading straight into the house.
Sam nods a greeting at Bobby, his hands awkwardly in his pockets, as he follows his brother into the house. Bobby rolls his eyes and follows suit. Sam swears he can hear a noise, like a dog howling, a sound like Rumsfeld’s cries even though that mangy mutt died the day they brought Meg Masters to this place, the first time they brought evil right to Bobby’s door.
Once they’re inside, Dean’s still looking a little disorientated. He swings around to Bobby.
“There something different about my appearance today, Bobby?’ Dean asks.
“Aside from the fact that you appear to have gone batshit crazy, boy?” Bobby enquires sarcastically, calmly folding his arms across his chest.
“Don’t mind him. It’s been a long day,” Sam cuts off the lunacy before it can go any further. “Bobby, do you remember that amulet you gave me when I was a kid? You asked me to give it to Dad.”
Bobby looks out the window, his face cold and closed up.
“Yeah. I remember.” His voice is soft and calm, almost a whisper. “You never gave it to him,” Bobby says, with a weary tone.
“You saw that I always wear it, right?” Dean, asks, his hand on the back of one of the big table’s wooden chairs, trying to look nonchalant and that he isn’t hurting at all, but the previous day’s injuries have clearly taken their toll, his face pale and sweaty.
Bobby retreats to his liquor cabinet, pouring out the obligatory holy water shots. He walks to each of the boys and hands them a shot, watches them drink without flinching and is satisfied. Next Bobby pours out three shots of whiskey and they all drink again. Stoic and weary, Sam knows it is not worth trying to stop Dean from taking the drink. He knows he is brother probably needs at as much as he does.
“I knew you would never give it to him,” Bobby states, staring right past Dean into Sam’s eyes.
“What?” both boys enquire, as Dean slowly pulls the chair from the table and sits down.
“That was always our plan – John and I. Only way John knew to keep you safe was to make you think you came up with it yourself. Always were a damn stubborn kid.” Bobby states.
“Bobby, what are you talking about?” Dean asks, his voice deepening and rough.
“I guess it’s time you knew,” Bobby says, before picking up a book, one that had remained dusty and hidden in the corners of his living room for years, and letting it fall open at the only page that had been looked at in years.
The three men lean over it and stare, the two younger ones absorbing the revelation.
“You’re not serious.” Sam looks up as he intones the words carefully.
“Holy crap!” was all Dean could whisper under his breath, before a brief pause as his eyes connect with his brother’s.
“So I’ve been wearing something crafted by that yellow-eyed son of a bitch for the last 17 years?” Dean stands up, the chair scraping back with his anger.
“Well, yes is the simple answer. But you and I know these things are never simple.”
Bobby pauses.
“You know how the best antidote to a snake bite sometimes comes from its own venom?”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees quietly, remembering the tattered old dime store nature encyclopaedias he used to devour in the Impala’s back seat.
“In many ways that’s what it was. After all, a game’s only fun if you’re not the only one playing. He made it to control his soldiers, the army he created for himself. Every twenty-two years he would visit children in their nurseries – those already marked out for greatness - and feed them his blood.” Sam feels himself pale at Bobby’s explanation.
“You’re kidding me?” Dean says, slowly letting his gaze drift towards Sam.
“I already knew,” Sam whispers to the floor.
“You what?” Dean implores.
“He showed me. In Cold Oak he took me back to the night Mom died.”
“Oh and you only thought to share this now? Any other little gems your keeping hidden there, Sammy. Know how to save me from hell? Are you’re just keeping it inside too?”
“Dean.” Sam’s voice is shrill and pleading. Dean looks sick and horrified and it’s too much for him to take.
“Will you two girls shut up and let me finish?” Bobby’s authoritative voice interrupts. Dean slowly retreats, like a wounded animal, pulls out the chair and sits down.
“Sorry Bobby,” they both mumble like recalcitrant children.
“Well those children, the first batch at least, turned out powerful, maybe more powerful that he wanted. After all, what’s the use of a soldier whose stronger than the General. That’s no way to start a war. So he created the amulet, imbued it with his own power, and it has the power to stop those children, to suppress their powers. That’s not to say they’re more powerful without it.”
Sam thought of his time at Stanford. No, definitely not more powerful without it .
“Just that they’re strongest powers are suppressed in its presence.” Bobby looks at Sam.
“That’s why you were only telekinetic when Max Miller locked you up away from Dean, away from the amulet.”
“How did you know...?”
“Doesn’t matter how I know,” Bobby intones solemnly. “Only thing that matters is that the demons want it back, want to see how his protégé fairs without it.”
“So you’re saying that all this time, wearing the amulet, I’ve basically been Sammy’s kryptonite.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Awesome....so what do we do now?” Dean spat sarcastically.
“That’s the thing. Now it’s gone it’s not yours any more, you forfeit any power over it, meaning that whoever has it now can use it against Sam as a pretty powerful weapon. As far as I see it you only have two options. You either track it down and destroy it, or you give up on it and wait and see what happens.” Bobby fixes a steely gaze on Sam, the kind that he gave them as they stumbled out of his door the night Meg left Sam’s body. Sam feels his stomach flip-flop. He knows that Bobby thinks the second option isn’t good. He realises that what could happen without the amulet could be big. Maybe big enough, a small voice in his head pleads.
The Winchesters trundle out to the car, weary and awkward, as though the world has shifted on its axis that very night.
“So, what do you want to do?” Sam asks cautiously, his voice childlike.
“I don’t know,” Dean says, looking honestly and truly lost for the first time since they sat on the hood of the Impala after that zombie hunt in Lawrence and Dean came the closest to crying that Sam’s seen him in years.
“I’ve been thinking a lot...about...my powers lately.” Sam says my powers like they are the dirtiest words on the planet and he feels his cheeks flush a little with embarrassment.
“Yeah,” Dean replies, leaning against the Impala and looking at the ground.
“If they could help you, I mean.” Dean looks up it him then, anger passing like a storm cloud across his face, sharp green eyes boring into Sam.
They stand in awkward silence for a second. Sam changes tack.
“Tell me something. Why’s getting it back mean so much to you? I mean you were freaked when you thought it was gone, before you thought about why the demons might want it, I mean. And I know you hit your head last night, but...”
“Don’t make me say it, Sam.” Dean’s voice is hard like granite, like Dad’s, but his eyes are soft and sad. Sam knows that Dean finds it hard to say “because it made me feel like an awesome big brother” or “because it was from you” or anything else that might sound a little too much like “I love you.”
Despite Dean’s reticence Sam replies to what he knows his brother is not saying with a soft self-conscious “me too.”
Definitely, not stronger without it , he thinks.
“Dean.” Sam’s voice is filled with trepidation. “I want to try...I mean, I want to see if I can use my powers....my uninhibited powers... to save you. I know it’s a long shot, but...”
“No.” Dean cut’s him off, his tone cold.
“Dean!” Sam implores again, hoping to get a real answer, his brother’s real opinion. Dean kicks at the gravel, letting it lightly scuff his boots. He won’t look Sam in the eye.
“So, I say we start looking for these demons, have ourselves a little amulet burnin’ fiesta. But, where do you suggest we start looking?” Dean sounds tired.
“I’d say Wyoming’s a good bet,” says Bobby, standing on the porch, where neither of the boys had noticed till that moment
“Why?” Dean asks.
“Because you boys ought to know that, oftentimes, what’s dead doesn’t stay dead.”
“Wyoming it is then,” says Dean, his jovial voice and his clear expression back, the mask he uses to cover everything now firmly in place.
“Wyoming,” Sam agrees quietly “You sure you’re ok...after the bar fight last night and stuff?” Sam asks again as he slides into the passenger seat, refraining from asking the question he really wants answered.
“I’m fine,” Dean reassures as he moves the car’s stick shift into first gear.
Sam falls asleep in the car. It is the deep, cloying, oppressive sleep of those final days at Stanford, the kind of sleep you usually only get in snatches and grabs on a hot and sticky night.
The words on the great day of judgement, he shall be cast into the fire, a biblical sentence, something he remembers his father uttering before, echoing through his head, the voice sick and serpentine and too familiar too be true. He wakes with a jolt.
The car has come to a stop outside the cemetery gates and Dean is staring ahead.
Sam knows that face. Dean has a plan.
He is calculating already, something that will look off the cuff and simple, something he will never admit to thinking about before doing it. It’s a look that Sam will miss in sixty four days. He shall be cast into the fire. His stomach flips at the voice’s veracity and he shudders involuntarily.
Dean turns to look at him.
“I have a plan,” he says, in the cool calculated Steve McQueen way that he has always had.
“And?” Sam looks at his brother, too tired, too exhausted with all this searching and shocked with revelation to formulate any heroics of his own.
“For the most part, we raise the evil son of a bitch and ask him where those demons took it.”
“And when that doesn’t work?” Sam replies sceptically.
“I offer him a little something – I mean this time I’ve really got nothing to lose,” Dean notes.
With that Dean is out of the car, wearily stomping towards the cemetery.
It takes Sam’s addled brain a minute to work out what his brother is saying before chasing after him.
“Took you long enough.” There’s a snide female voice behind him and he stops in his tracks. A slender female body emerges from the shadows.
“Ruby,” he sneers.
“Nice to see you too, Sammy.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he says, feeling the uninhibited strength pulsing through him already, as he flings her up against a tree.
“Because it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she says softly.
“Without that thing stopping me, can I save my brother?” he asks his voice deepening as he holds her up.
“Ava bit the apple, Sammy, so did Jake. They’re cautionary tales, remember that.”
Ruby’s voice is sultry, appealing, like she herself is a snake proffering goods.
“I’m not like them.”
“No, you’re not. You’re like Pandora, just opening the box because you can, letting wrong out because it doesn’t matter to you, because selfish little Sammy needs his big brother, just like you let the gates of hell open.”
“And unleashed your sorry ass. Now, I asked you a question,” he hisses in her face.
“Will you two quite your little bitch fight and come and help me.” Dean was suddenly by his side. Sam let Ruby go, as she slid to a heap on the floor, the body she had possessed hurt by Sam’s strength.
“I want no part in this,” Ruby whispers quietly, before slinking away.
Dean turns and charges back into the cemetery. Sam follows, sheepish.
“Right, you get behind that grave. I’ll open the gates with the Colt and get myself behind this one” Dean pointed to another of the battered old headstones.
“And then?”
“Then we let it come until he’s here.”
“Dean?”
“Bobby said we only had two options, Sammy. We lost the amulet and now we have to destroy it or who knows what happens to you? Who knows what you could become? It’s like that freaking rabbit’s foot all over again! Now I’m not prepared to you go dark side so I’m taking care of it. You got a better plan, be my guest.”
“But you’re talking about opening the gates,” Sam shouts.
An eerie creak echoes behind them, two hundred year old metal opening for the first time in too long. A shadow is storming towards them, dark and looming and bigger than the demon ever seemed in life. His eyes are no longer yellow, now just a murky dust colour, a brief sharpness of light, chilling, yet undistinguished at the same time. He had repossessed his old body, the rotten decomposing flesh emitting a sinister and nauseating smell.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” the demon murmurs his old husky haunting voice the same as before.
Dean turns to face the demon, his shoulders straightening, his body looking ready to fight just as it had in the bar the previous evening.
“I killed you.” Dean’s voice is raw and hard.
“Well next time, finish the job,” the demon laughs. “Tell me something, Dean. Where do you think dead demons go? I spy with my little eye something beginning with... H. And the thing about going back to Hell is you can get back out again. Sure, the paperwork’s a bitch, but it’s possible,” he chuckles. “Vicious circle, you see? My favourite kind.”
Sam moves to stand behind his brother, unfurling himself to his full height. Their bodies are shoulder to shoulder, a strong army of two.
“Where’s the little bitch that took my amulet?” Dean asks.
“Oh Dean, I’m hurt,” the demon grins “Didn’t recognise me without this meatsuit?” The demon laughs, pulling the amulet from his pocket and taunting Dean with it.
Dean gears up and takes his chance, swinging a mean right hook to connect with the human face the demon had stolen. The demon staggers back, as Dean moves forward, connecting a knee with the demon’s all too human crotch, the perfectly choreographed fighter, the blunt little instrument their father always craved.
Sam moves forward to back his brother up, trying to force the swell of energy he had felt in the bar the night before, but feeling the effort force itself back into him. Bobby was right, he realised with a sudden and sinking feeling. Sam moves to approach the demon as his brother throws another punch. The demon staggers and pulls back, seeming to get a brief purchase on Dean before turning and connecting a fist with Sam’s face.
Sam stumbles back, falling but alarmed by the lack of pain. The demon laughs, but Dean delivers another swift kick and the amulet is free, tumbling to the ground. All three dive forward in an attempt to grab it, but Dean’s quick reflexes win out and he pulls it up, standing again as he dangles it in front of the demon’s face.
“Suck on that, bitch!” he laughs, always enjoying the childish glee of victory, no matter how slim or Pyrrhic.
Sam stands too, pulling the diner salt sachets and cheap gas station lighter fluid from his inside jacket pocket and handing them to Dean.
The demon reaches out a hand to stay them, sending them both hurtling backwards. Sam feels his body stop short against a tree, but winces at the hard cracking sound as he sees Dean flung against a grave stone. Dean is still holding the tools of the trade Sam had given him, alarmingly professional, even at the worst of times.
Dean fumbles with the salt, just managing to sprinkle the amulet in a liberal enough amount, before dousing it in lighter fluid and sparking the Zippo he saved for such occasions.
The amulet glows with a yellow luminescence, just like the colour of Azazel’s old eyes, as it begins to burn.
“Put it on.” Dean hears Azazel’s purring soft voice with the same persuasive clarity of Andy when he persuaded him to give him the Impala. Dean’s muscles twitch and spasm in protest, but he can not refuse, lifting the burning talisman’s rapidly charring leather strap and draping it over his neck.
He screams as the searing white-hot pain scissors through him, his skin feeling unlike skin anymore with the molten, unbearable agony.
“This is what it will be like, Dean,” Azazel warns. “Better get used to feeling your putrid flesh sizzle, boy!” the demon teases.
Sam gapes in horror at what he had just seen his brother do. He shall be cast into the fire .
“No!” Sam feels the scream ripping through his vocal cords with ferocious power and a sudden lightness, a freedom from Azazel’s imposed chains. The amulet is burning, welding and charring Dean’s skin as Dean yelps and pleads, a man made to watch himself dying, to smell his own tissue, his muscles on fire. Like mom, Like Jess.Sam thinks.
Sam’s movements are rapid and quiet. He has a fluidity he did not possess before. He knows now what Bobby was afraid to tell him, that no matter what, burn the amulet or let it stay lost his power would still grow.
Dean is begging for his life. Azazel continues to enjoy the taunting, the mockery.
Sam creeps silently to a broken tree branch, and lifts it as thought it is a twig and with one fell swoop he takes Azazel down, with a crashing thud. Black smoke pours out of him and the possessed body looks dead. What’s dead should stay dead.
Sam then pulls Dean from the gravestone and pushes him to the ground battering out the flames. Dean’s face looks pale and waxy. His body is contorted by obvious pain.
Sam tries to pick his brother up, desperation beating through his veins like a pulse, but Dean passes out in his arms, the pain too strong to endure.
Sam struggles to drape his brother over him in a fireman’s carry, careful not to touch the blood-black wound where the amulet has burnt through Dean’s clothes to his flesh, to the left of his chest, covering his heart. Sam grunts at the palpable shift in weight as he gets Dean safely on his shoulder. He knows Dean is alive, can feel his breath, heavy like tears, against his own body.
Sam reaches the Impala after what feels like a million years, and carefully lays Dean down in the backseat. Sam drives to the hospital with alarming speed, the car’s back swinging out precariously across the dusty Wyoming highway, far too reminiscent of the night a semi T-boned it for Sam’s liking.
He reaches a dark hospital parking lot and peels Dean from the backseat like deadweight. An EMT in the ambulance loading bay sees them and helps them in. The hospital smells like disinfectant and death, as far as Sam is concerned both smell the same anyhow.
Time passes in an unearthly way in the hospital, at least, once Dean is out of his sight it does. He remembers the last time he was standing in a hospital corridor, Dean turning his back on him and telling him that he needs to let him go.
He does not remember much else until he is seated in a waiting room, with a kindly middle aged doctor nodding her head and telling him he did well, that his brother will have no lasting effects, aside from a fairly nasty scar. And who knows how long that will matter anyway? Sam tries to repress the thought.
“Can I see him?” Sam asks.
The kind-faced doctor leads him down the corridor to a pristine white room where Dean seems to sleep peacefully, without giving him an answer. He does not like to think why.
Dean’s bandaged chest rises and falls with the tick of the clock on the wall, serene and normal.
The amulet is gone now, and Sam may not know the road ahead (although he knows almost certainly, with the resounding thud of each echoing well-intentioned footstep, where it leads).
As the clock ticks over past midnight Dean stirs and looks at him.
“Hey kiddo, you're getting a little rusty there,” Dean mumbles
“Saved your ass, didn’t I?” Sam jokes
“Yeah. You did.” Sam smiles more freely than he has in well over a year.
He knows that Ruby was right. He is like Pandora with her box, and God help him, he does not know what he unleashed. But with his brother alive and breathing, he knows he has one thing left.
Day 302.
Hope.
Author:
diva5256Recipient:
pdragon76Rating: PG-13
Author’s Notes: I wrote for the prompts ‘Dean!whump with a side of Savior!Sam’ and ‘Do-over! Give me your rewrite of the amulet backstory’. I hope you enjoy. AU in which Bella never stole the Colt.
Disclaimer: They are Kripke’s creation – I’m just playing. One of the quotes that pervades the story comes from the same verse of the Bible as the epitaph.
Notes: A massive thanks to my truly amazing beta E. for her excellent help.
“The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin.” — 1 Enoch 8:1
It happens like a dream, disconnected and fast.
For the Winchesters it starts in a bar, like these things usually do.
It’s a Tuesday or Wednesday, one of those nothing midweek days in some nowhere town where nothing out of the ordinary happens to ordinary people, but of course they weren’t ordinary people. They had just wasted three demons two states over and it was the first placed they’d come across for a little R&R or the closest thing they could find - cheeseburgers and beers and a pool table where Dean can hustle a few local barflies out of their less-than-hard-earned cash and Sam can turn to the same computer screen he does everyday and look for new answers just like everyday before.
Day 300.
It is carved in Sam’s conscience like the graffiti etched into the bar’s hardwood table, deep and unending. His first thought on waking and his last thought on going to bed will be the same; another day has gone by and he has no answer.
Dean comes over and smiles, waving his newly acquired $50 bills in front of Sam with an air of childlike pride.
“I still got it, Sammy.” He grins as he sits down.
“You sure do.” Sam finds himself trying to smile, the same mask he’s worn since a cemetery in Wyoming, the same falseness he’s felt in every happy gesture since the day he died. It’s then that he notices it, like something moving out of his peripheral vision, knowledge that the bartender is watching them from the corner of his eye. There’s something almost too languid and easy in the bartender’s movements. And then Sam realises what it is. The bartender’s eyes are black. There are two other black-eyed bartenders lurking behind him too.
“Dean.” He leans over to his brother.
Alert, Dean quirks his eyebrow and leans in. Noting Sam’s solemn expression, Dean rolls his eyes.
“Oh god, it’s not time for the official Sam Winchester emo hour of girly-man crying, is it?” Dean asks playfully.
“No,” Sam replies in a hard tone, prime bitch face in place.
“4 o’clock,” he whispers and Dean, almost imperceptibly, turns with an expert and easy glance, relaxed yet cautious in a way that Sam still admires, a way that he has never quite mastered himself.
They put away their things cleanly, methodically, trying not to draw any attention to themselves.
A short guy, with a buzz cut and arms where no skin is visible between the tattoos, menacing in that redneck kind of way, approaches them as they’re starting to leave. He stands, unmovable, his eyes slowly curling to a deep yellow that they haven’t seen since that night in the cemetery. Sam’s first instinct is to move, to power forward, as he feels the yellow-eyed man’s sour breath in his face.
“Going somewhere, Sasquatch?” The demon leers in Sam’s face. Before Sam can answer Dean has blocked his path. Two of the demon’s buddies are suddenly standing, immovable, behind him.
“Nah, it’s you who’s taking a trip downstairs,” Dean suggests, bravado fully in place.
Dean takes a moment to breathe before trying to remember the exorcism.
But it is too late. The first demon already has purchase on him, a swift punch. Dean retaliates with a swift right hook but the demon already has a chair ready to crack over Dean’s head and Sam does not have time to react, to join the fight, before it descends. He is stunned to see his brother go down a little too easily.
Sam moves towards the demons but feels himself being flung against the wall in the tight unmovable way that has become far too familiar over the last year as another member of the pack simply raises his hand.
The demons circle around Dean, playing at his clothes, touching him, kicking him hard over and over again, until it seems they have forgotten about baby brother, pinned safely to the wall.
“Stop!” Sam screams, feeling the familiar overprotective zeal that has only grown stronger in this last year wash over him.
He shall be cast into the fire.
Words burn through Sam’s brain. He yells with such force that it takes him a minute to realise that he is free of the demons’ invisible chains, standing over his brother.
The demons turn with notable shock and begin to circle round him like dogs smelling meat.
“So, are you what they say you are, boy king?” laughs the original demon, uncomfortably close to Sam.
“Maybe,” Sam hears himself hiss through gritted teeth, punching out at the air, but the demon with the yellow eyes and his cronies are gone as though Sam’s simple wish to make it so wiped them out.
Sam leans over his brother, knowing that the end can’t be now, that he still has sixty-five full days left, that this would be too ordinary, too routine a death for the great Dean Winchester.
“Dean, c’mon wake up.” He kneels at his brother’s side.
“Dean!” his voice grows more desperate.
“I’m fine,” Dean sighs opening his eyes.“Even dogs know how to play dead,” he sniggers, clearly reacting to Sam’s less than amused expression. Sam can feel the awkward tension resonating from Dean’s voice, the tacit agreement not to speak of what just happened, of what Sam can do.
“Let me help you up, that chair still hit you pretty hard,” Sam offers.
“Get off me, dude! I said I’m fine.” Dean brushes him off, swaying as he goes.
“Clearly,” Sam deadpans.
Dean’s already walking towards the exit of the now alarmingly empty bar.
“If you think you’re driving you’ve got another thing coming,” Sam yells after his brother.
“Hell no, Sammy. The last time I actually gave you permission to drive my car you got my baby totalled by a semi,” Dean says, squinting slightly in the light, looking distracted.
“You ok?” Sam ventures.
“Err...”
“Dean?”
“On second thoughts I think you’d better drive...both of you,” he mumbles. Seeing double, that couldn’t be good.
When they get back to the motel room it becomes painfully obvious that Dean is concussed. In many ways it is a relief as Sam knows that his brother will have no choice but to be quiet and let him look after him tonight, instead of getting drunk and finding more girls to fuck and pretending the year isn’t coming to an end.
“Dude, this wallpaper is particularly high-off-your-ass-ugly when it’s spinning,” Dean observes flopping down on the bed to the far right of the room, having finally been coaxed into changing out of his blood-stained clothes and into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt.
Dean closes his eyes and for a moment Sam thinks his brother has fallen asleep.
“Sam,” Dean says, this time it’s a soft and childlike plea, and Sam watches all the colour drain from his brother’s face before rapidly sitting up and grabbing the waist paper basket and getting it to Dean just in time to watch his brother lose his lunch into it.
“I’m fine,” Dean manages when he has finally stopped heaving into the basket.
Sam almost snorts with dry laughter.
“My pain is funny to you?”
“So you do admit that you’re in pain. Only you would be insisting your fine after you’ve just puked,” Sam notes, taking the can into the bathroom to clean it out, briefly gagging himself at the smell of the contents.
“Oh god. Does this mean I’m going to have you hovering in nursemaid-mode over me and waking me up all night?”
“Pretty much.”
“Super,” Dean states dryly.
Sam gets Dean a glass of water and turns the TV to some trashy old monster movie. Dean’s asleep within minutes so Sam turns the volume dial down on the old 60s black and white TV sets up his computer and begins his nightly research routine with the same robotic, methodical rigor that he’s had since the day he came back to life. He is distracted, unable to think of anything beyond the strange new power he exhibited tonight, trying to tell himself that it was just because the demon let go, because the demon wasn’t bothered by Sam anymore, trying to ignore the demon’s final taunt.
After an hour he wakes Dean up, to a loud and resounding response of “bite me” so he’s fairly sure that his brother’s concussion is no worse than the many others he has incurred in his life so far. He repeats the routine twice more over the next two hours.
The rest of the night is much the same. If he can’t research, Sam thinks, he will watch his brother instead.
Sam is sure he does not fall asleep but he suddenly feels himself being woken by Dean tugging at his shirt. The sun is already high in the sky and the clock by Dean’s bed is blinking a functional digital 12.00 at him. Dean is already dressed and there are two no brand paper coffee cups on the table beside him.
“Dude, it’s gone. Help me look.” Dean looks unusually fraught.
“Are you delusional?” Sam enquires.
“No. My amulet thingie, the one your oh-so-girlie self gave me for Christmas that time, is gone.”
“Did you take it off in the shower or something?”
“No. I never take it off,” Dean says, upending his bedclothes.
Sam helps Dean turn the motel room upside down, until it looks like they’ve been fighting monsters in the room as opposed to in the scummy bar down the street.
“I think they took it,” Dean concludes wearily, brushing sleep from his eye and sitting down on the edge of his bed.
“The demons?”
“No, the Osmonds. Yes, the demons, college boy,” Dean snarks.
“So? It was just some piece of junk I gave you when we we’re kids,” Sam says, feeling defensive and embarrassed.
“But it must be of some value to them, otherwise they wouldn’t take it. Where did you get it again?”
Sam feels a horrible realisation crystallize within him. He sits down on his own bed so that he and Dean are level.
“From Bobby.”
“Right,” says Dean, already in the process of packing his meagre things. “Looks like we’re going to South Dakota.”
“Dean you got yourself a concussion last night. You’re going nowhere.”
“How you going to stop me Sammy?” Dean challenges. Sam recognises that tone of voice and knows it’s not worth messing with.
“Fine, but I’m driving,” Sam agrees wearily. Grabbing his own duffel, Sam follows Dean out the door. The Impala’s engine is already rumbling before he has swung the motel room door shut.
They pull up at Bobby’s just as the sun’s beginning to set. Bobby’s already swinging the door open, the Impala’s slow grumble having signalled the Winchesters’ arrival to him before they have had a chance to get out the car.
“Boys.” Bobby nods his usual stoic greeting. “What can I do for y’all this fine evening?” he drawls sarcastically.
Dean is up and out the car before Sam has a second the stop him.
“Well, that depends on how good your memory is,” Dean notes, before passing Bobby and heading straight into the house.
Sam nods a greeting at Bobby, his hands awkwardly in his pockets, as he follows his brother into the house. Bobby rolls his eyes and follows suit. Sam swears he can hear a noise, like a dog howling, a sound like Rumsfeld’s cries even though that mangy mutt died the day they brought Meg Masters to this place, the first time they brought evil right to Bobby’s door.
Once they’re inside, Dean’s still looking a little disorientated. He swings around to Bobby.
“There something different about my appearance today, Bobby?’ Dean asks.
“Aside from the fact that you appear to have gone batshit crazy, boy?” Bobby enquires sarcastically, calmly folding his arms across his chest.
“Don’t mind him. It’s been a long day,” Sam cuts off the lunacy before it can go any further. “Bobby, do you remember that amulet you gave me when I was a kid? You asked me to give it to Dad.”
Bobby looks out the window, his face cold and closed up.
“Yeah. I remember.” His voice is soft and calm, almost a whisper. “You never gave it to him,” Bobby says, with a weary tone.
“You saw that I always wear it, right?” Dean, asks, his hand on the back of one of the big table’s wooden chairs, trying to look nonchalant and that he isn’t hurting at all, but the previous day’s injuries have clearly taken their toll, his face pale and sweaty.
Bobby retreats to his liquor cabinet, pouring out the obligatory holy water shots. He walks to each of the boys and hands them a shot, watches them drink without flinching and is satisfied. Next Bobby pours out three shots of whiskey and they all drink again. Stoic and weary, Sam knows it is not worth trying to stop Dean from taking the drink. He knows he is brother probably needs at as much as he does.
“I knew you would never give it to him,” Bobby states, staring right past Dean into Sam’s eyes.
“What?” both boys enquire, as Dean slowly pulls the chair from the table and sits down.
“That was always our plan – John and I. Only way John knew to keep you safe was to make you think you came up with it yourself. Always were a damn stubborn kid.” Bobby states.
“Bobby, what are you talking about?” Dean asks, his voice deepening and rough.
“I guess it’s time you knew,” Bobby says, before picking up a book, one that had remained dusty and hidden in the corners of his living room for years, and letting it fall open at the only page that had been looked at in years.
The three men lean over it and stare, the two younger ones absorbing the revelation.
“You’re not serious.” Sam looks up as he intones the words carefully.
“Holy crap!” was all Dean could whisper under his breath, before a brief pause as his eyes connect with his brother’s.
“So I’ve been wearing something crafted by that yellow-eyed son of a bitch for the last 17 years?” Dean stands up, the chair scraping back with his anger.
“Well, yes is the simple answer. But you and I know these things are never simple.”
Bobby pauses.
“You know how the best antidote to a snake bite sometimes comes from its own venom?”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees quietly, remembering the tattered old dime store nature encyclopaedias he used to devour in the Impala’s back seat.
“In many ways that’s what it was. After all, a game’s only fun if you’re not the only one playing. He made it to control his soldiers, the army he created for himself. Every twenty-two years he would visit children in their nurseries – those already marked out for greatness - and feed them his blood.” Sam feels himself pale at Bobby’s explanation.
“You’re kidding me?” Dean says, slowly letting his gaze drift towards Sam.
“I already knew,” Sam whispers to the floor.
“You what?” Dean implores.
“He showed me. In Cold Oak he took me back to the night Mom died.”
“Oh and you only thought to share this now? Any other little gems your keeping hidden there, Sammy. Know how to save me from hell? Are you’re just keeping it inside too?”
“Dean.” Sam’s voice is shrill and pleading. Dean looks sick and horrified and it’s too much for him to take.
“Will you two girls shut up and let me finish?” Bobby’s authoritative voice interrupts. Dean slowly retreats, like a wounded animal, pulls out the chair and sits down.
“Sorry Bobby,” they both mumble like recalcitrant children.
“Well those children, the first batch at least, turned out powerful, maybe more powerful that he wanted. After all, what’s the use of a soldier whose stronger than the General. That’s no way to start a war. So he created the amulet, imbued it with his own power, and it has the power to stop those children, to suppress their powers. That’s not to say they’re more powerful without it.”
Sam thought of his time at Stanford. No, definitely not more powerful without it .
“Just that they’re strongest powers are suppressed in its presence.” Bobby looks at Sam.
“That’s why you were only telekinetic when Max Miller locked you up away from Dean, away from the amulet.”
“How did you know...?”
“Doesn’t matter how I know,” Bobby intones solemnly. “Only thing that matters is that the demons want it back, want to see how his protégé fairs without it.”
“So you’re saying that all this time, wearing the amulet, I’ve basically been Sammy’s kryptonite.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Awesome....so what do we do now?” Dean spat sarcastically.
“That’s the thing. Now it’s gone it’s not yours any more, you forfeit any power over it, meaning that whoever has it now can use it against Sam as a pretty powerful weapon. As far as I see it you only have two options. You either track it down and destroy it, or you give up on it and wait and see what happens.” Bobby fixes a steely gaze on Sam, the kind that he gave them as they stumbled out of his door the night Meg left Sam’s body. Sam feels his stomach flip-flop. He knows that Bobby thinks the second option isn’t good. He realises that what could happen without the amulet could be big. Maybe big enough, a small voice in his head pleads.
The Winchesters trundle out to the car, weary and awkward, as though the world has shifted on its axis that very night.
“So, what do you want to do?” Sam asks cautiously, his voice childlike.
“I don’t know,” Dean says, looking honestly and truly lost for the first time since they sat on the hood of the Impala after that zombie hunt in Lawrence and Dean came the closest to crying that Sam’s seen him in years.
“I’ve been thinking a lot...about...my powers lately.” Sam says my powers like they are the dirtiest words on the planet and he feels his cheeks flush a little with embarrassment.
“Yeah,” Dean replies, leaning against the Impala and looking at the ground.
“If they could help you, I mean.” Dean looks up it him then, anger passing like a storm cloud across his face, sharp green eyes boring into Sam.
They stand in awkward silence for a second. Sam changes tack.
“Tell me something. Why’s getting it back mean so much to you? I mean you were freaked when you thought it was gone, before you thought about why the demons might want it, I mean. And I know you hit your head last night, but...”
“Don’t make me say it, Sam.” Dean’s voice is hard like granite, like Dad’s, but his eyes are soft and sad. Sam knows that Dean finds it hard to say “because it made me feel like an awesome big brother” or “because it was from you” or anything else that might sound a little too much like “I love you.”
Despite Dean’s reticence Sam replies to what he knows his brother is not saying with a soft self-conscious “me too.”
Definitely, not stronger without it , he thinks.
“Dean.” Sam’s voice is filled with trepidation. “I want to try...I mean, I want to see if I can use my powers....my uninhibited powers... to save you. I know it’s a long shot, but...”
“No.” Dean cut’s him off, his tone cold.
“Dean!” Sam implores again, hoping to get a real answer, his brother’s real opinion. Dean kicks at the gravel, letting it lightly scuff his boots. He won’t look Sam in the eye.
“So, I say we start looking for these demons, have ourselves a little amulet burnin’ fiesta. But, where do you suggest we start looking?” Dean sounds tired.
“I’d say Wyoming’s a good bet,” says Bobby, standing on the porch, where neither of the boys had noticed till that moment
“Why?” Dean asks.
“Because you boys ought to know that, oftentimes, what’s dead doesn’t stay dead.”
“Wyoming it is then,” says Dean, his jovial voice and his clear expression back, the mask he uses to cover everything now firmly in place.
“Wyoming,” Sam agrees quietly “You sure you’re ok...after the bar fight last night and stuff?” Sam asks again as he slides into the passenger seat, refraining from asking the question he really wants answered.
“I’m fine,” Dean reassures as he moves the car’s stick shift into first gear.
Sam falls asleep in the car. It is the deep, cloying, oppressive sleep of those final days at Stanford, the kind of sleep you usually only get in snatches and grabs on a hot and sticky night.
The words on the great day of judgement, he shall be cast into the fire, a biblical sentence, something he remembers his father uttering before, echoing through his head, the voice sick and serpentine and too familiar too be true. He wakes with a jolt.
The car has come to a stop outside the cemetery gates and Dean is staring ahead.
Sam knows that face. Dean has a plan.
He is calculating already, something that will look off the cuff and simple, something he will never admit to thinking about before doing it. It’s a look that Sam will miss in sixty four days. He shall be cast into the fire. His stomach flips at the voice’s veracity and he shudders involuntarily.
Dean turns to look at him.
“I have a plan,” he says, in the cool calculated Steve McQueen way that he has always had.
“And?” Sam looks at his brother, too tired, too exhausted with all this searching and shocked with revelation to formulate any heroics of his own.
“For the most part, we raise the evil son of a bitch and ask him where those demons took it.”
“And when that doesn’t work?” Sam replies sceptically.
“I offer him a little something – I mean this time I’ve really got nothing to lose,” Dean notes.
With that Dean is out of the car, wearily stomping towards the cemetery.
It takes Sam’s addled brain a minute to work out what his brother is saying before chasing after him.
“Took you long enough.” There’s a snide female voice behind him and he stops in his tracks. A slender female body emerges from the shadows.
“Ruby,” he sneers.
“Nice to see you too, Sammy.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he says, feeling the uninhibited strength pulsing through him already, as he flings her up against a tree.
“Because it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she says softly.
“Without that thing stopping me, can I save my brother?” he asks his voice deepening as he holds her up.
“Ava bit the apple, Sammy, so did Jake. They’re cautionary tales, remember that.”
Ruby’s voice is sultry, appealing, like she herself is a snake proffering goods.
“I’m not like them.”
“No, you’re not. You’re like Pandora, just opening the box because you can, letting wrong out because it doesn’t matter to you, because selfish little Sammy needs his big brother, just like you let the gates of hell open.”
“And unleashed your sorry ass. Now, I asked you a question,” he hisses in her face.
“Will you two quite your little bitch fight and come and help me.” Dean was suddenly by his side. Sam let Ruby go, as she slid to a heap on the floor, the body she had possessed hurt by Sam’s strength.
“I want no part in this,” Ruby whispers quietly, before slinking away.
Dean turns and charges back into the cemetery. Sam follows, sheepish.
“Right, you get behind that grave. I’ll open the gates with the Colt and get myself behind this one” Dean pointed to another of the battered old headstones.
“And then?”
“Then we let it come until he’s here.”
“Dean?”
“Bobby said we only had two options, Sammy. We lost the amulet and now we have to destroy it or who knows what happens to you? Who knows what you could become? It’s like that freaking rabbit’s foot all over again! Now I’m not prepared to you go dark side so I’m taking care of it. You got a better plan, be my guest.”
“But you’re talking about opening the gates,” Sam shouts.
An eerie creak echoes behind them, two hundred year old metal opening for the first time in too long. A shadow is storming towards them, dark and looming and bigger than the demon ever seemed in life. His eyes are no longer yellow, now just a murky dust colour, a brief sharpness of light, chilling, yet undistinguished at the same time. He had repossessed his old body, the rotten decomposing flesh emitting a sinister and nauseating smell.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” the demon murmurs his old husky haunting voice the same as before.
Dean turns to face the demon, his shoulders straightening, his body looking ready to fight just as it had in the bar the previous evening.
“I killed you.” Dean’s voice is raw and hard.
“Well next time, finish the job,” the demon laughs. “Tell me something, Dean. Where do you think dead demons go? I spy with my little eye something beginning with... H. And the thing about going back to Hell is you can get back out again. Sure, the paperwork’s a bitch, but it’s possible,” he chuckles. “Vicious circle, you see? My favourite kind.”
Sam moves to stand behind his brother, unfurling himself to his full height. Their bodies are shoulder to shoulder, a strong army of two.
“Where’s the little bitch that took my amulet?” Dean asks.
“Oh Dean, I’m hurt,” the demon grins “Didn’t recognise me without this meatsuit?” The demon laughs, pulling the amulet from his pocket and taunting Dean with it.
Dean gears up and takes his chance, swinging a mean right hook to connect with the human face the demon had stolen. The demon staggers back, as Dean moves forward, connecting a knee with the demon’s all too human crotch, the perfectly choreographed fighter, the blunt little instrument their father always craved.
Sam moves forward to back his brother up, trying to force the swell of energy he had felt in the bar the night before, but feeling the effort force itself back into him. Bobby was right, he realised with a sudden and sinking feeling. Sam moves to approach the demon as his brother throws another punch. The demon staggers and pulls back, seeming to get a brief purchase on Dean before turning and connecting a fist with Sam’s face.
Sam stumbles back, falling but alarmed by the lack of pain. The demon laughs, but Dean delivers another swift kick and the amulet is free, tumbling to the ground. All three dive forward in an attempt to grab it, but Dean’s quick reflexes win out and he pulls it up, standing again as he dangles it in front of the demon’s face.
“Suck on that, bitch!” he laughs, always enjoying the childish glee of victory, no matter how slim or Pyrrhic.
Sam stands too, pulling the diner salt sachets and cheap gas station lighter fluid from his inside jacket pocket and handing them to Dean.
The demon reaches out a hand to stay them, sending them both hurtling backwards. Sam feels his body stop short against a tree, but winces at the hard cracking sound as he sees Dean flung against a grave stone. Dean is still holding the tools of the trade Sam had given him, alarmingly professional, even at the worst of times.
Dean fumbles with the salt, just managing to sprinkle the amulet in a liberal enough amount, before dousing it in lighter fluid and sparking the Zippo he saved for such occasions.
The amulet glows with a yellow luminescence, just like the colour of Azazel’s old eyes, as it begins to burn.
“Put it on.” Dean hears Azazel’s purring soft voice with the same persuasive clarity of Andy when he persuaded him to give him the Impala. Dean’s muscles twitch and spasm in protest, but he can not refuse, lifting the burning talisman’s rapidly charring leather strap and draping it over his neck.
He screams as the searing white-hot pain scissors through him, his skin feeling unlike skin anymore with the molten, unbearable agony.
“This is what it will be like, Dean,” Azazel warns. “Better get used to feeling your putrid flesh sizzle, boy!” the demon teases.
Sam gapes in horror at what he had just seen his brother do. He shall be cast into the fire .
“No!” Sam feels the scream ripping through his vocal cords with ferocious power and a sudden lightness, a freedom from Azazel’s imposed chains. The amulet is burning, welding and charring Dean’s skin as Dean yelps and pleads, a man made to watch himself dying, to smell his own tissue, his muscles on fire. Like mom, Like Jess.Sam thinks.
Sam’s movements are rapid and quiet. He has a fluidity he did not possess before. He knows now what Bobby was afraid to tell him, that no matter what, burn the amulet or let it stay lost his power would still grow.
Dean is begging for his life. Azazel continues to enjoy the taunting, the mockery.
Sam creeps silently to a broken tree branch, and lifts it as thought it is a twig and with one fell swoop he takes Azazel down, with a crashing thud. Black smoke pours out of him and the possessed body looks dead. What’s dead should stay dead.
Sam then pulls Dean from the gravestone and pushes him to the ground battering out the flames. Dean’s face looks pale and waxy. His body is contorted by obvious pain.
Sam tries to pick his brother up, desperation beating through his veins like a pulse, but Dean passes out in his arms, the pain too strong to endure.
Sam struggles to drape his brother over him in a fireman’s carry, careful not to touch the blood-black wound where the amulet has burnt through Dean’s clothes to his flesh, to the left of his chest, covering his heart. Sam grunts at the palpable shift in weight as he gets Dean safely on his shoulder. He knows Dean is alive, can feel his breath, heavy like tears, against his own body.
Sam reaches the Impala after what feels like a million years, and carefully lays Dean down in the backseat. Sam drives to the hospital with alarming speed, the car’s back swinging out precariously across the dusty Wyoming highway, far too reminiscent of the night a semi T-boned it for Sam’s liking.
He reaches a dark hospital parking lot and peels Dean from the backseat like deadweight. An EMT in the ambulance loading bay sees them and helps them in. The hospital smells like disinfectant and death, as far as Sam is concerned both smell the same anyhow.
Time passes in an unearthly way in the hospital, at least, once Dean is out of his sight it does. He remembers the last time he was standing in a hospital corridor, Dean turning his back on him and telling him that he needs to let him go.
He does not remember much else until he is seated in a waiting room, with a kindly middle aged doctor nodding her head and telling him he did well, that his brother will have no lasting effects, aside from a fairly nasty scar. And who knows how long that will matter anyway? Sam tries to repress the thought.
“Can I see him?” Sam asks.
The kind-faced doctor leads him down the corridor to a pristine white room where Dean seems to sleep peacefully, without giving him an answer. He does not like to think why.
Dean’s bandaged chest rises and falls with the tick of the clock on the wall, serene and normal.
The amulet is gone now, and Sam may not know the road ahead (although he knows almost certainly, with the resounding thud of each echoing well-intentioned footstep, where it leads).
As the clock ticks over past midnight Dean stirs and looks at him.
“Hey kiddo, you're getting a little rusty there,” Dean mumbles
“Saved your ass, didn’t I?” Sam jokes
“Yeah. You did.” Sam smiles more freely than he has in well over a year.
He knows that Ruby was right. He is like Pandora with her box, and God help him, he does not know what he unleashed. But with his brother alive and breathing, he knows he has one thing left.
Day 302.
Hope.
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