Gods to Demons (1/1, R, Sam, Dean, Castiel)
Title: Gods to Demons
Author: acerbus_instar
Characters/Pairing(s): Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, Castiel
Rating: R for unhappy themes.
Warnings: Death fic. Albeit a canonical death. (Kripke killed him first, so there!)
Summary: Azazel crafts his own trump card, after Sam Winchester falls in the streets of Cold Oak.
Word Count: 2,108
Disclaimer: No own.
A/N: Written for Round 6 of spn_teamfic. (Not beta'd, and the most laconic narration in the history of ever. Sorry.)
"C'mon baby, c'mon darling--
Let me steal this moment from you now.
C'mon angel, c'mon darling--
Let's exchange the experience."
--Placebo
But the 'double' was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as Rank says; and probably the 'immortal' soul was the first 'double' of the body. Such ideas...have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the 'double' reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death... The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.
--From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, Sigmund Freud, 1914
I
Once, in more fruitful times, humans would drink the blood of demons to seal their soul’s damnation. For health, or prosperity, or preternatural ability -- petty, mortal things. Such a practice eventually slipped into the byways of legend; by the time a second millennium had passed, mere acts of lust were enough to seal the contracts of demons, and humans shook their heads in amused disbelief right up until the hellhounds came collecting.
The legend remained. On that technicality, Azazel orders the soul dragged down.
The envoy is heard before seen, in this corner of Hell: the hounds bray and snarl as they fight for their prize, and the prize screams and bellows as it fights back. On one plane, a hound screeches as it tears against the shaft of shivered metal driven between the rotting vertebrae of its neck. On another, its brother digs hooked fangs deep into the flesh of the soul’s thigh and drags it deeper still.
The craftsman waits.
Twelve days, to descend; the torn human left to bleed for two; and on the fourteenth, the demon lifts its tools. The work begins.
It takes no skill to carve a soul - but to shape a soul, that is skill. And only a choice few are aware of the art.
The base: a thin stalk of a body, comprised of little more than shadows wrapped around charred bones. Dragged from the deepest crevasse, it has no will, no purpose; a being once, before hellfire charred it to nothing more than slow, wistful, meaningless motion. Its fingers click together with the sound of dry-rotted wood as it passes a hand over the cheek of the shuddering and wild-eyed soul. With a word from the craftsmen, it lies still and waits.
To craft, requires delicate touch.
Unfurling the delicate script of soul, and then excising only the proper amount - every movement is crucial. Too much removed, and the soul unravels before the task is done. Too little, and the piece will slip through the most gently prying fingers. The craftsman has no assistants here. It is the craftsman alone that removes each piece from the shrieking soul, and delicately threads it through the essence of a new creation.
Sam Winchester was a child of great potential: he only lacked the wrong foundations. Carved free of such limitations, his possibilities would know no bounds.
Left behind, the unwanted scraps. Memories of fourth grade, and his first hunt.
And least desired, the bitter taint of faith.
On the seventy-fifth day, the human soul ceases its screams.
On the ninety-eighth, it only stares from a face without definition.
On the one hundred and nineteenth day, the task is done. The hounds return.
The craftsman is thrown to the ground and torn asunder, its knowledge ruined with it.
On the one hundred and twenty first, the reaper arrives.
It summons the soul of Sam Winchester, and a soul answers. It bears Sam Winchester’s name, and his resemblance. The charred bones at its center go unnoticed. So does the shadow that bleeds and screams as the soul is drawn back to the realm of the living.
With a shuddering gasp, Sam Winchester comes alive - for the second time, and the first.
He blinks clear vision hazed with death and steadies a clamoring heart, curling dull-tipped fingers into a jacket stiff with dried mud. Several breaths are enough to drive the slow climb to unsteady feet; the grimace at wounds remembered, but healed; the slow turn towards a silver mirror, eying an old and new body, old and new scars.
A brother appears in the doorway, and past a torn throat it - he - murmurs a startled, “Dean.”
A name both familiar and fresh.
Sam Winchester smiles, genuine. And with only the hesitation of relief, Dean Winchester smiles back.
Days, months, and years:
On earth, one year, three months, twenty-three days.
In Hell, eternity.
Few stalk this corner of Hell; none pursue the scrap of humanity that hides alone, and waits alone.
A familiar song begins, on another distant plane - a scream that shakes the edges of its small sanctuary. It keens, though it knows not why.
Years: forty. The screams abate, and a different sound begins.
In a flurry of light, an angel passes a bit of forgotten shadow, a formless and purposeless thing. The heavenly being is a strange sight in Hell - blazing on all planes, its voice a sibilant and fearsome harmony.
The strange shapeless creature parts cracked lips and prays.
II
The barrel drops a fragment of an inch.
There, he could have killed him.
In the hesitation, as he stares down the steady barrel and hisses, “Don’t. Fucking-don’t.”
Sam draws the knife high and grins his blood-rich grin.
“It’s already done, Dean. It’s already open.”
“We’ll close it. We will. But you-“
There. Again. The smallest dip as slick fingers readjust on the grip of the gun. There, he could have ripped it free. Maybe reached up and sawed that knife straight through the flesh of his brother’s throat.
Rotted from the inside, Sam grins. “Me?”
At last Dean draws his eyes up to meet those stained sulfur-yellow. “You.”
There, again.
Three times, he could have rent Dean Winchester apart.
He never does. The foundations are correct. Ultimately, the foundations are not enough.
Two years, six months, and twenty-four days: a bullet ends the second and first life of Sam Winchester. .45, iron, blessed by the passing hand of the angel Anael. It shatters his rib, punctures his heart, and lodges in his upper spine. His body is dead when it hits the ground, a mess of blood, sulfur and ash.
The charred bones stir once and lapse into stillness, felled by the holy touch. Master craftsmanship undone: with filigree threads unbound by the blessed bullet in passing, the partial scripts of an incomplete soul unfurl from their rotted prison.
To the west, the gates to Hell stand open. With ease the scripts slip through, drawn ever deeper to their source.
Two years, four months, and twenty-seven days: in Hell, two hundred and sixty-three years, one month, and six days.
A shadow breathes whole.
With a startled jerk he throws out his limbs, scraping them raw on the porous rock. He draws them, bleeding, back to a naked torso, pressing fingers rough with disuse to a face both familiar and strange.
He screams and weeps for the weight of Hell above him; and then, slowly, he looks towards the surface.
The door stands open, inexplicably far, but so tauntingly close.
Catching desperate misery in his teeth, Sam Winchester digs bare fingernails into the rocky, sulfurous earth of Hell and draws himself up, towards the distant echo of a living world.
Two hundred and sixty-three years, one month, and twenty five days, he pulls himself onto the strange solidness of cracked asphalt. A demon catches his shoulder in passing, raking claws deep into his flesh. It is the last mark the Pit leaves on him.
There’s a battle raging around the searing heat of the gate, shrieking denizens of Hell catching the wings of Seraphim, sizzling beneath blazing onslaughts of Holy grace.
For a moment he is frozen, beneath the unfamiliar warmth of sun, the furious glory of warriors of God.
Here they are, now; here they are, now that he’s escaped. They aren't so glorious at all.
An angel pauses before him, wrapped up in a mortal host but still too bright for Sam to focus on directly. It studies him with blazing eyes, some obscure pseudo-divine curiosity. With a feral yell Sam snatches a piece of broken asphalt, hurling it at its chest. The blow lands, but only rebounds. He seizes upon another, and another; four strikes, total, landed, before the thing shakes its head once and departs with a flurry of unseen wings.
In its absence a demon forces him to the pavement; Sam clutches a piece of rebar in bloody fingers and drives it through shadowed ribs. With an ear-piercing shriek and a flailed scuffle he is released; catching himself on bare feet, he swallows bitter anger and runs.
He runs towards the mountains carving the western sky. The city burns around him, unrecognizable to a frenzied mind; coming to a standstill only long enough for him to stare loathingly at the sign of a Salvation Army before smashing the window with his bare elbow.
The longest pants slip low on emaciated hips. He draws them close with a fraying belt, but they hang an inch and a half short of his ankles. From the shirts, a fraying button-up that barely reaches his wrists. Another he tears apart to wrap his torn shoulder and bleeding feet, sitting on the dusty carpet between the ties and the too-small shoes.
He doesn’t know when he falls asleep, but when he awakens, the sun has passed and returned again; the broken glass scattered across the floor is catching the first light of day.
A pair of flip-flops are all that will fit him; he slips them on over lacerated soles and continues west. Mountains, too high for the East, too many for the West. Denver, he hesitantly accedes. Denver.
He walks, hunger and exhaustion and fear burning low in his stomach. He walks until he stumbles; and then he catches himself on the rough concrete of the sidewalks and walks farther.
At the edge of the city, he can’t go on.
He’s at a rise, and suburbia - razed - stretches before him. But beyond that, the soft yellow of grass. And beyond that, trees, blue-green firs and aspens pale silver in the late afternoon light. Cicada song, distantly. And a long smooth stretch of blacktop snaking towards the distance.
He can’t go.
He crashes to the ground, drops his ruined shoulder against the rusted metal of a lamppost and wraps hands smeared with blood and dirt around his knees. The mountains’ shadows reach out and claim the forest, the field, the smooth of the highway; and still he stares, right up until the shadows claim him, too.
Long past nightfall, the lamp flickers on overhead.
A man stands at his shoulder, dressed in a prim business suit. For a stretch of time he observes in clinical silence; but eventually he hikes his slacks high and kneels before him.
Sam passes a resentful, bleary eye the man’s way, watching the grace burning under his skin.
But just as his lips part to tell it in hoarse and broken tones to leave, get away, the angel reaches out and presses a smooth palm against his forehead. “Sleep.”
He catches the human in its slump to unconsciousness and stretches him across the soot-streaked pavement.
The angel that arrives at his back is not so neat in appearance - tie unkempt, hair disheveled, and dirty sleeves rolled back to reveal arms still healing from some vicious battle. Sachiel rises, the slim form of his host blocking the piercing curiosity of his brother’s eyes.
Castiel’s shoulders rise. “This isn’t a good time for summoning, brother.”
“Dean Winchester does not fare well,” Sachiel surmises.
“He is as to be expected.” Impatience is clear in the angel’s tone.
“I found something,” his younger brother offers. Hesitantly, he steps aside.
Castiel makes no comment as he looks over the human, thin and wan in the flickering light. Sachiel fills the silence: “By the gate yesterday eve, I saw him. I do not know where he came from, but I can only assume he crawled from the Pit.”
“Sam Winchester is dead. His body was burned.”
“Look for yourself, brother. I can find no inaccuracy.”
With a reverent slow, he kneels, passing a careful hand over the unmoving soul.
When he draws back, his brow is tangled in confusion. “The script is different.”
“How?”
“Here, and here.” Brief touches to shoulder, abdomen. “This was missing, before - incomplete. I thought it was a result of the demon’s manipulation. Now it is complete.”
Neither of them stir in the chill night air. In the half-light, the human looks dead once again.
Again, Sachiel hesitates. “If it were some manner of beast-a demon, or doppelganger-“
“We would see it, surely,” Castiel murmurs, pressing a calloused palm to the flesh beneath the man’s jaw. The pulse threading past is distant, but firm.
In a decisive movement he pulls the human upright, hooking a shoulder beneath one arm. It is a ridiculous picture - his host swamped by the human’s too-long limbs.
His comrade turns his head aside. “Where will you take him?”
“To his brother." The words are spoken as though there is no other proper answer.
A/N: Prompt: Placebo - Running Up That Hill
Literal deus ex machina what? If Stephen King can do it, so can I.
Author: acerbus_instar
Characters/Pairing(s): Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, Castiel
Rating: R for unhappy themes.
Warnings: Death fic. Albeit a canonical death. (Kripke killed him first, so there!)
Summary: Azazel crafts his own trump card, after Sam Winchester falls in the streets of Cold Oak.
Word Count: 2,108
Disclaimer: No own.
A/N: Written for Round 6 of spn_teamfic. (Not beta'd, and the most laconic narration in the history of ever. Sorry.)
"C'mon baby, c'mon darling--
Let me steal this moment from you now.
C'mon angel, c'mon darling--
Let's exchange the experience."
--Placebo
But the 'double' was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as Rank says; and probably the 'immortal' soul was the first 'double' of the body. Such ideas...have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the 'double' reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death... The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.
--From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, Sigmund Freud, 1914
I
Once, in more fruitful times, humans would drink the blood of demons to seal their soul’s damnation. For health, or prosperity, or preternatural ability -- petty, mortal things. Such a practice eventually slipped into the byways of legend; by the time a second millennium had passed, mere acts of lust were enough to seal the contracts of demons, and humans shook their heads in amused disbelief right up until the hellhounds came collecting.
The legend remained. On that technicality, Azazel orders the soul dragged down.
The envoy is heard before seen, in this corner of Hell: the hounds bray and snarl as they fight for their prize, and the prize screams and bellows as it fights back. On one plane, a hound screeches as it tears against the shaft of shivered metal driven between the rotting vertebrae of its neck. On another, its brother digs hooked fangs deep into the flesh of the soul’s thigh and drags it deeper still.
The craftsman waits.
Twelve days, to descend; the torn human left to bleed for two; and on the fourteenth, the demon lifts its tools. The work begins.
It takes no skill to carve a soul - but to shape a soul, that is skill. And only a choice few are aware of the art.
The base: a thin stalk of a body, comprised of little more than shadows wrapped around charred bones. Dragged from the deepest crevasse, it has no will, no purpose; a being once, before hellfire charred it to nothing more than slow, wistful, meaningless motion. Its fingers click together with the sound of dry-rotted wood as it passes a hand over the cheek of the shuddering and wild-eyed soul. With a word from the craftsmen, it lies still and waits.
To craft, requires delicate touch.
Unfurling the delicate script of soul, and then excising only the proper amount - every movement is crucial. Too much removed, and the soul unravels before the task is done. Too little, and the piece will slip through the most gently prying fingers. The craftsman has no assistants here. It is the craftsman alone that removes each piece from the shrieking soul, and delicately threads it through the essence of a new creation.
Sam Winchester was a child of great potential: he only lacked the wrong foundations. Carved free of such limitations, his possibilities would know no bounds.
Left behind, the unwanted scraps. Memories of fourth grade, and his first hunt.
And least desired, the bitter taint of faith.
On the seventy-fifth day, the human soul ceases its screams.
On the ninety-eighth, it only stares from a face without definition.
On the one hundred and nineteenth day, the task is done. The hounds return.
The craftsman is thrown to the ground and torn asunder, its knowledge ruined with it.
On the one hundred and twenty first, the reaper arrives.
It summons the soul of Sam Winchester, and a soul answers. It bears Sam Winchester’s name, and his resemblance. The charred bones at its center go unnoticed. So does the shadow that bleeds and screams as the soul is drawn back to the realm of the living.
With a shuddering gasp, Sam Winchester comes alive - for the second time, and the first.
He blinks clear vision hazed with death and steadies a clamoring heart, curling dull-tipped fingers into a jacket stiff with dried mud. Several breaths are enough to drive the slow climb to unsteady feet; the grimace at wounds remembered, but healed; the slow turn towards a silver mirror, eying an old and new body, old and new scars.
A brother appears in the doorway, and past a torn throat it - he - murmurs a startled, “Dean.”
A name both familiar and fresh.
Sam Winchester smiles, genuine. And with only the hesitation of relief, Dean Winchester smiles back.
Days, months, and years:
On earth, one year, three months, twenty-three days.
In Hell, eternity.
Few stalk this corner of Hell; none pursue the scrap of humanity that hides alone, and waits alone.
A familiar song begins, on another distant plane - a scream that shakes the edges of its small sanctuary. It keens, though it knows not why.
Years: forty. The screams abate, and a different sound begins.
In a flurry of light, an angel passes a bit of forgotten shadow, a formless and purposeless thing. The heavenly being is a strange sight in Hell - blazing on all planes, its voice a sibilant and fearsome harmony.
The strange shapeless creature parts cracked lips and prays.
II
The barrel drops a fragment of an inch.
There, he could have killed him.
In the hesitation, as he stares down the steady barrel and hisses, “Don’t. Fucking-don’t.”
Sam draws the knife high and grins his blood-rich grin.
“It’s already done, Dean. It’s already open.”
“We’ll close it. We will. But you-“
There. Again. The smallest dip as slick fingers readjust on the grip of the gun. There, he could have ripped it free. Maybe reached up and sawed that knife straight through the flesh of his brother’s throat.
Rotted from the inside, Sam grins. “Me?”
At last Dean draws his eyes up to meet those stained sulfur-yellow. “You.”
There, again.
Three times, he could have rent Dean Winchester apart.
He never does. The foundations are correct. Ultimately, the foundations are not enough.
Two years, six months, and twenty-four days: a bullet ends the second and first life of Sam Winchester. .45, iron, blessed by the passing hand of the angel Anael. It shatters his rib, punctures his heart, and lodges in his upper spine. His body is dead when it hits the ground, a mess of blood, sulfur and ash.
The charred bones stir once and lapse into stillness, felled by the holy touch. Master craftsmanship undone: with filigree threads unbound by the blessed bullet in passing, the partial scripts of an incomplete soul unfurl from their rotted prison.
To the west, the gates to Hell stand open. With ease the scripts slip through, drawn ever deeper to their source.
Two years, four months, and twenty-seven days: in Hell, two hundred and sixty-three years, one month, and six days.
A shadow breathes whole.
With a startled jerk he throws out his limbs, scraping them raw on the porous rock. He draws them, bleeding, back to a naked torso, pressing fingers rough with disuse to a face both familiar and strange.
He screams and weeps for the weight of Hell above him; and then, slowly, he looks towards the surface.
The door stands open, inexplicably far, but so tauntingly close.
Catching desperate misery in his teeth, Sam Winchester digs bare fingernails into the rocky, sulfurous earth of Hell and draws himself up, towards the distant echo of a living world.
Two hundred and sixty-three years, one month, and twenty five days, he pulls himself onto the strange solidness of cracked asphalt. A demon catches his shoulder in passing, raking claws deep into his flesh. It is the last mark the Pit leaves on him.
There’s a battle raging around the searing heat of the gate, shrieking denizens of Hell catching the wings of Seraphim, sizzling beneath blazing onslaughts of Holy grace.
For a moment he is frozen, beneath the unfamiliar warmth of sun, the furious glory of warriors of God.
Here they are, now; here they are, now that he’s escaped. They aren't so glorious at all.
An angel pauses before him, wrapped up in a mortal host but still too bright for Sam to focus on directly. It studies him with blazing eyes, some obscure pseudo-divine curiosity. With a feral yell Sam snatches a piece of broken asphalt, hurling it at its chest. The blow lands, but only rebounds. He seizes upon another, and another; four strikes, total, landed, before the thing shakes its head once and departs with a flurry of unseen wings.
In its absence a demon forces him to the pavement; Sam clutches a piece of rebar in bloody fingers and drives it through shadowed ribs. With an ear-piercing shriek and a flailed scuffle he is released; catching himself on bare feet, he swallows bitter anger and runs.
He runs towards the mountains carving the western sky. The city burns around him, unrecognizable to a frenzied mind; coming to a standstill only long enough for him to stare loathingly at the sign of a Salvation Army before smashing the window with his bare elbow.
The longest pants slip low on emaciated hips. He draws them close with a fraying belt, but they hang an inch and a half short of his ankles. From the shirts, a fraying button-up that barely reaches his wrists. Another he tears apart to wrap his torn shoulder and bleeding feet, sitting on the dusty carpet between the ties and the too-small shoes.
He doesn’t know when he falls asleep, but when he awakens, the sun has passed and returned again; the broken glass scattered across the floor is catching the first light of day.
A pair of flip-flops are all that will fit him; he slips them on over lacerated soles and continues west. Mountains, too high for the East, too many for the West. Denver, he hesitantly accedes. Denver.
He walks, hunger and exhaustion and fear burning low in his stomach. He walks until he stumbles; and then he catches himself on the rough concrete of the sidewalks and walks farther.
At the edge of the city, he can’t go on.
He’s at a rise, and suburbia - razed - stretches before him. But beyond that, the soft yellow of grass. And beyond that, trees, blue-green firs and aspens pale silver in the late afternoon light. Cicada song, distantly. And a long smooth stretch of blacktop snaking towards the distance.
He can’t go.
He crashes to the ground, drops his ruined shoulder against the rusted metal of a lamppost and wraps hands smeared with blood and dirt around his knees. The mountains’ shadows reach out and claim the forest, the field, the smooth of the highway; and still he stares, right up until the shadows claim him, too.
Long past nightfall, the lamp flickers on overhead.
A man stands at his shoulder, dressed in a prim business suit. For a stretch of time he observes in clinical silence; but eventually he hikes his slacks high and kneels before him.
Sam passes a resentful, bleary eye the man’s way, watching the grace burning under his skin.
But just as his lips part to tell it in hoarse and broken tones to leave, get away, the angel reaches out and presses a smooth palm against his forehead. “Sleep.”
He catches the human in its slump to unconsciousness and stretches him across the soot-streaked pavement.
The angel that arrives at his back is not so neat in appearance - tie unkempt, hair disheveled, and dirty sleeves rolled back to reveal arms still healing from some vicious battle. Sachiel rises, the slim form of his host blocking the piercing curiosity of his brother’s eyes.
Castiel’s shoulders rise. “This isn’t a good time for summoning, brother.”
“Dean Winchester does not fare well,” Sachiel surmises.
“He is as to be expected.” Impatience is clear in the angel’s tone.
“I found something,” his younger brother offers. Hesitantly, he steps aside.
Castiel makes no comment as he looks over the human, thin and wan in the flickering light. Sachiel fills the silence: “By the gate yesterday eve, I saw him. I do not know where he came from, but I can only assume he crawled from the Pit.”
“Sam Winchester is dead. His body was burned.”
“Look for yourself, brother. I can find no inaccuracy.”
With a reverent slow, he kneels, passing a careful hand over the unmoving soul.
When he draws back, his brow is tangled in confusion. “The script is different.”
“How?”
“Here, and here.” Brief touches to shoulder, abdomen. “This was missing, before - incomplete. I thought it was a result of the demon’s manipulation. Now it is complete.”
Neither of them stir in the chill night air. In the half-light, the human looks dead once again.
Again, Sachiel hesitates. “If it were some manner of beast-a demon, or doppelganger-“
“We would see it, surely,” Castiel murmurs, pressing a calloused palm to the flesh beneath the man’s jaw. The pulse threading past is distant, but firm.
In a decisive movement he pulls the human upright, hooking a shoulder beneath one arm. It is a ridiculous picture - his host swamped by the human’s too-long limbs.
His comrade turns his head aside. “Where will you take him?”
“To his brother." The words are spoken as though there is no other proper answer.
A/N: Prompt: Placebo - Running Up That Hill
Literal deus ex machina what? If Stephen King can do it, so can I.