Nec Spe, Nec Metu (1/1, R, Sam)
Title: Nec Spe, Nec Metu (without hope, without fear)
Author: acerbus_instar
Rating: R (violence/gore)
Warnings: Set in 5.04 'verse. So, y'know. Spoilers.
Summary: The cheerful tale of Detroit.
Word Count: 1800
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Nec Spe, Nec Metu
(without hope, without fear)
"Well if we take all these things, and we bury them fast
And we pray that they turn to seeds, to roots and then grass
It'd be all right - it's all right.
It'd be easier that way.
Or if the sky opened up and started pouring rain,
Like he knew it was time to start things over again
It'd be all right - it's all right.
It'd be easier that way."
--Brand New
The way it goes is like this:
In Detroit, he gets caught between a guy and a broken stretch of Jersey wall. Sam hasn’t been eating well since the world went to shit, and well-fed muscle provides a little more cushion than the bundled wires wrapping his bones now. The opposing forces are just right, and his ribs snap like twigs.
He doesn’t think about angels and sigils and carved bones, not at first.
He thinks about the dead-or-dying guy pressing down on top of him, his slack mouth dribbling blood down Sam’s collar. His gut got torn open in the slashing arc of claws that had sent him flying into Sam in the first place. He can feel the blood and gore and fuck-knows-what seeping through his jacket, soaking his jeans, and the crawler that’d killed him makes a low, keening bellow as his last man shouts and fires off two echoing rounds.
Three minutes earlier this kid, this corpse, had been whistling Pinball Wizard. Max always had some kind of tune on repeat in that ADD head of his. Yesterday it was Sister Christian and today it was Pinball Wizard and tomorrow it’ll be silence.
Max got cut off mid-chorus when Charlie, the guy on point, got thrown down and torn in half by the thing that’d barreled out of the torched bushes on all fours, its claws ripping up swaths of cracked asphalt.
No one’s really applied a concrete name to these particular beasties. It’s not like the old days, with names and rituals and set rules; no one cares about that kind of thing anymore. Names don’t matter. Lore doesn’t matter. Just kill the goddamned thing and move on.
These things, they’re a good sixteen feet tall if they stand on their back legs, hairy and thick-hided and strong, built like a bear but moving with reptilian bursts of scissoring legs. Hunters call them trolls, golems, crawlers (as opposed to their friends the walkers, which are even bigger bastards), and one guy who’d spent one too many years as a Dungeonmaster called them bugbears. Whatever the label, they’re a bitch to kill and they can deal some masterful damage before they go down.
They were supposed to meet up with a camp that’d gotten cut off on the north side of the city. Only three dozen survivors, nothing major. Detroit itself burned a couple months back. Besides a couple crawlers and a scattering of Croats, the area’s unoccupied. Nothing they shouldn’tve been able to handle, except for the part where it was.
There were seven people under Sam, at the start. Four went down to the Croats on the edge of town. There were eighty more of them than there should’ve been, and they ran his group ragged before they escaped the industrial maze they’d gotten funneled into.
They’d just caught their breath. Max had picked up whistling, low and nervous, and Charlie had moved ahead, and the crawler had torn him apart.
As Sam watches, the crawler takes two bullets to the chest and rips his last man open from stomach to throat.
Max Terrell’s blood is running down his neck in warm drips. Sam isn’t breathing, and despite the urgent biological imperative to try, he doesn’t.
The crawler must assume him for dead, because after it’s torn all of his men, friends, tools, whatever apart, it sniffs the air twice, does a half-turn and saunters off.
Sam watches the thick line of saliva and blood dripping past Max’s lips and takes one careful breath. He doesn’t get far. His whole rib cage shifts on jagged fracture lines, and he barks a startled cough.
The shock of it makes him twist aside with a choked cry and the corpse slides off, somehow, his fingers slipping on the slippery ropes of torn intestines. Sam passes out for awhile with his shoulders against the cracked concrete.
He comes to choking on blood, and thinking of sigils. Sigils and angels and Castiel’s little art project from ages ago. His chest’s a mess of snapped bones, and the sigils are fucked, and he doesn’t even have time to work up a good healthy fear, because by the time he’s got his eyes focused again good old Nick is standing three feet away, hands in his pockets and a beatific smile on his face.
Sam slumps back against the wall, jacket painted black by blood that isn’t his - or at least isn’t yet - and eyes him balefully.
“I thought you might be somewhere around here,” Lucifer announces. He kneels down, close enough to be seen in the semi-dark. The vessel isn’t aging well - his skin is stretched tight and gray across the frame of the beast he’s containing. “It’s been awhile, Sam.”
‘Awhile’ had been a one-time fuck-up outside of New York. About thirty hunters had died in the messy retreat.
There’s a thoughtful hand tracing his collarbone. Sam breathes the burnt-rubber and charred-flesh smell of today’s Detroit and rasps, “Just fucking kill me.”
Lucifer considers and sighs in a put-upon way. “Alright.”
He tears Sam’s chest open with one smooth, efficient motion, and Sam breathes one wet suffocating agonized gasp.
He wakes up not on the half-collapsed beltway, but the hot tar rooftop of a warehouse, his back against weathered bricks. He’s whole again, breathing, but he doesn’t feel reborn. Just tired.
Lucifer is hanging his feet over the ledge above him. “Well, I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.” A thoughtful pause. “I think I’ll raze this city. I should’ve done it four months ago, really.”
Sam watches smoke rise on the horizon in slow, thick curls.
The Devil drops down next to him. “Look at you, Sam. Fully healed, and here you are - still exhausted.” He touches Sam’s jaw, and Sam jerks away in a clumsy, sluggish movement. “I worry about you.”
“Still no,” he says quietly, even though he hasn’t asked anything yet. He folds his arms tight across his chest and rests his head against the brick.
Lucifer shrugs. “We have plenty of time.”
And time passes.
Not a lot of it. Maybe five minutes. Sam opens his eyes, and Lucifer’s staring at him, looking calmly sympathetic.
“There’s something you’ve been thinking for awhile. Remember? We discussed it a few weeks ago.”
Sam turns his head away. He’d dreamed about Sarah Blake, dead in Philadelphia. He’d dreamed about Lucifer calmly picking his way through the rubble and taking a seat next to him. They’d talked. They’d talked about a lot of things. They’d talked about Dean.
Sam doesn’t think about Dean a lot, these days.
“We’ll keep fighting,” he answers distantly.
“They will,” Lucifer amends. “And they’ll keep losing.”
“To you. To you and your fucking Apocalypse.”
Lucifer smiles the same patient smile he’d worn the last time he’d dealt with that sentiment. “It’s still not my Apocalypse, Sam.”
He comes to life abruptly and violently - throws his weight against Lucifer in a burst of movement, and he knows that he only moves back because he lets Sam push him back, and it infuriates him all the more, so he pushes him again, knocks him flat on the tar and shouts, “It’s yours. It’s yours and the goddamned angels’-“
“And God’s, and your brother’s,” Lucifer says calmly, catching his wrists. “And everyone’s - except for you.”
Sam stares at him a long while, then rips away and goes to the roof’s edge. He feels surly and petulant and defeated.
At his back, Lucifer says, “You have no place in this, Sam. You never have.”
“Except to be your special little vessel.” Empty, venomous words.
“I consider it a bit of an honor,” he says dismissively.
“Cart me off to Hell. Carve me up. Do whatever. My answer’s still no.”
“Why bother? We can talk.”
“I don’t want to talk. No, alright? Fuck you, and no!”
They’re just words, and from the way Lucifer studies him, they both know it.
Sam throws a wide left hook at his jaw. He catches Sam’s hand and crushes the bones. Just as he’s registering the needle-sharp pain of it, the breaks knit and Lucifer lets go.
“You don’t want a place in this war, Sam. You just want it to end.” He smiles reassuringly. “I know you better than anyone.”
He jerks away and trips back and stumbles over the roof edge. But he doesn’t fall - heels on the tarred roof, arms thrown out over sooty air, he hangs from where Lucifer’s fingers are curled under his shirt collar.
Sam eyes the three-story drop and lets his eyes fall closed.
“We’ve discussed this, Sam. And I know you’ve thought on it. How do we end this war?”
He’s already thought it and dreamt it a thousand times. But aloud. He can’t say it aloud.
Except he is. Slow and hoarse and barely audible, he does. “If I say yes, he has to.”
“Yes.” No pleasure. No self-assurance. Calm gravity. “I think you’re right.”
And Sam’s staring at him, long and hard. Hanging and staring and breathing slow and even. “He has to.”
“Yes. And some of this-“ a distasteful, sweeping glance “-will burn, but it’s already burning, isn’t it? People are already suffering, and dying, and they’ll keep suffering and dying as long as this war of ours drags on.”
“People. Humans. What do you care.”
“I don’t hate you, Sam. I don’t hate what you are. I just know that there are greater things.”
“If I say yes-“
“Then your brother will follow. And Michael will have his vessel, and we will do battle. This war will end. There will be Paradise.”
Sam doesn’t know his brother anymore. Hasn’t in weeks and months and years, and doesn’t care to, you don’t need me and I don’t need you, lonely-desperate-tired, staring out at the end of the world with nothing except himself and that’s not much at all. But he knows he has to. Dean has to.
He has to.
“Keep your fucking Paradise,” he mutters to nothing in particular.
But Lucifer ignores that and draws Sam back to the safety of level ground. “Your answer, then.”
“Yes,” he answers, and the word doesn’t echo hollow and worthless and weak like he thinks it should. “It’s yes.”
He's waiting for the whole ruined world to rise up and shout, No.
He's waiting for anything.
Nothing ever comes.
Finis
Author: acerbus_instar
Rating: R (violence/gore)
Warnings: Set in 5.04 'verse. So, y'know. Spoilers.
Summary: The cheerful tale of Detroit.
Word Count: 1800
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Nec Spe, Nec Metu
(without hope, without fear)
"Well if we take all these things, and we bury them fast
And we pray that they turn to seeds, to roots and then grass
It'd be all right - it's all right.
It'd be easier that way.
Or if the sky opened up and started pouring rain,
Like he knew it was time to start things over again
It'd be all right - it's all right.
It'd be easier that way."
--Brand New
The way it goes is like this:
In Detroit, he gets caught between a guy and a broken stretch of Jersey wall. Sam hasn’t been eating well since the world went to shit, and well-fed muscle provides a little more cushion than the bundled wires wrapping his bones now. The opposing forces are just right, and his ribs snap like twigs.
He doesn’t think about angels and sigils and carved bones, not at first.
He thinks about the dead-or-dying guy pressing down on top of him, his slack mouth dribbling blood down Sam’s collar. His gut got torn open in the slashing arc of claws that had sent him flying into Sam in the first place. He can feel the blood and gore and fuck-knows-what seeping through his jacket, soaking his jeans, and the crawler that’d killed him makes a low, keening bellow as his last man shouts and fires off two echoing rounds.
Three minutes earlier this kid, this corpse, had been whistling Pinball Wizard. Max always had some kind of tune on repeat in that ADD head of his. Yesterday it was Sister Christian and today it was Pinball Wizard and tomorrow it’ll be silence.
Max got cut off mid-chorus when Charlie, the guy on point, got thrown down and torn in half by the thing that’d barreled out of the torched bushes on all fours, its claws ripping up swaths of cracked asphalt.
No one’s really applied a concrete name to these particular beasties. It’s not like the old days, with names and rituals and set rules; no one cares about that kind of thing anymore. Names don’t matter. Lore doesn’t matter. Just kill the goddamned thing and move on.
These things, they’re a good sixteen feet tall if they stand on their back legs, hairy and thick-hided and strong, built like a bear but moving with reptilian bursts of scissoring legs. Hunters call them trolls, golems, crawlers (as opposed to their friends the walkers, which are even bigger bastards), and one guy who’d spent one too many years as a Dungeonmaster called them bugbears. Whatever the label, they’re a bitch to kill and they can deal some masterful damage before they go down.
They were supposed to meet up with a camp that’d gotten cut off on the north side of the city. Only three dozen survivors, nothing major. Detroit itself burned a couple months back. Besides a couple crawlers and a scattering of Croats, the area’s unoccupied. Nothing they shouldn’tve been able to handle, except for the part where it was.
There were seven people under Sam, at the start. Four went down to the Croats on the edge of town. There were eighty more of them than there should’ve been, and they ran his group ragged before they escaped the industrial maze they’d gotten funneled into.
They’d just caught their breath. Max had picked up whistling, low and nervous, and Charlie had moved ahead, and the crawler had torn him apart.
As Sam watches, the crawler takes two bullets to the chest and rips his last man open from stomach to throat.
Max Terrell’s blood is running down his neck in warm drips. Sam isn’t breathing, and despite the urgent biological imperative to try, he doesn’t.
The crawler must assume him for dead, because after it’s torn all of his men, friends, tools, whatever apart, it sniffs the air twice, does a half-turn and saunters off.
Sam watches the thick line of saliva and blood dripping past Max’s lips and takes one careful breath. He doesn’t get far. His whole rib cage shifts on jagged fracture lines, and he barks a startled cough.
The shock of it makes him twist aside with a choked cry and the corpse slides off, somehow, his fingers slipping on the slippery ropes of torn intestines. Sam passes out for awhile with his shoulders against the cracked concrete.
He comes to choking on blood, and thinking of sigils. Sigils and angels and Castiel’s little art project from ages ago. His chest’s a mess of snapped bones, and the sigils are fucked, and he doesn’t even have time to work up a good healthy fear, because by the time he’s got his eyes focused again good old Nick is standing three feet away, hands in his pockets and a beatific smile on his face.
Sam slumps back against the wall, jacket painted black by blood that isn’t his - or at least isn’t yet - and eyes him balefully.
“I thought you might be somewhere around here,” Lucifer announces. He kneels down, close enough to be seen in the semi-dark. The vessel isn’t aging well - his skin is stretched tight and gray across the frame of the beast he’s containing. “It’s been awhile, Sam.”
‘Awhile’ had been a one-time fuck-up outside of New York. About thirty hunters had died in the messy retreat.
There’s a thoughtful hand tracing his collarbone. Sam breathes the burnt-rubber and charred-flesh smell of today’s Detroit and rasps, “Just fucking kill me.”
Lucifer considers and sighs in a put-upon way. “Alright.”
He tears Sam’s chest open with one smooth, efficient motion, and Sam breathes one wet suffocating agonized gasp.
He wakes up not on the half-collapsed beltway, but the hot tar rooftop of a warehouse, his back against weathered bricks. He’s whole again, breathing, but he doesn’t feel reborn. Just tired.
Lucifer is hanging his feet over the ledge above him. “Well, I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.” A thoughtful pause. “I think I’ll raze this city. I should’ve done it four months ago, really.”
Sam watches smoke rise on the horizon in slow, thick curls.
The Devil drops down next to him. “Look at you, Sam. Fully healed, and here you are - still exhausted.” He touches Sam’s jaw, and Sam jerks away in a clumsy, sluggish movement. “I worry about you.”
“Still no,” he says quietly, even though he hasn’t asked anything yet. He folds his arms tight across his chest and rests his head against the brick.
Lucifer shrugs. “We have plenty of time.”
And time passes.
Not a lot of it. Maybe five minutes. Sam opens his eyes, and Lucifer’s staring at him, looking calmly sympathetic.
“There’s something you’ve been thinking for awhile. Remember? We discussed it a few weeks ago.”
Sam turns his head away. He’d dreamed about Sarah Blake, dead in Philadelphia. He’d dreamed about Lucifer calmly picking his way through the rubble and taking a seat next to him. They’d talked. They’d talked about a lot of things. They’d talked about Dean.
Sam doesn’t think about Dean a lot, these days.
“We’ll keep fighting,” he answers distantly.
“They will,” Lucifer amends. “And they’ll keep losing.”
“To you. To you and your fucking Apocalypse.”
Lucifer smiles the same patient smile he’d worn the last time he’d dealt with that sentiment. “It’s still not my Apocalypse, Sam.”
He comes to life abruptly and violently - throws his weight against Lucifer in a burst of movement, and he knows that he only moves back because he lets Sam push him back, and it infuriates him all the more, so he pushes him again, knocks him flat on the tar and shouts, “It’s yours. It’s yours and the goddamned angels’-“
“And God’s, and your brother’s,” Lucifer says calmly, catching his wrists. “And everyone’s - except for you.”
Sam stares at him a long while, then rips away and goes to the roof’s edge. He feels surly and petulant and defeated.
At his back, Lucifer says, “You have no place in this, Sam. You never have.”
“Except to be your special little vessel.” Empty, venomous words.
“I consider it a bit of an honor,” he says dismissively.
“Cart me off to Hell. Carve me up. Do whatever. My answer’s still no.”
“Why bother? We can talk.”
“I don’t want to talk. No, alright? Fuck you, and no!”
They’re just words, and from the way Lucifer studies him, they both know it.
Sam throws a wide left hook at his jaw. He catches Sam’s hand and crushes the bones. Just as he’s registering the needle-sharp pain of it, the breaks knit and Lucifer lets go.
“You don’t want a place in this war, Sam. You just want it to end.” He smiles reassuringly. “I know you better than anyone.”
He jerks away and trips back and stumbles over the roof edge. But he doesn’t fall - heels on the tarred roof, arms thrown out over sooty air, he hangs from where Lucifer’s fingers are curled under his shirt collar.
Sam eyes the three-story drop and lets his eyes fall closed.
“We’ve discussed this, Sam. And I know you’ve thought on it. How do we end this war?”
He’s already thought it and dreamt it a thousand times. But aloud. He can’t say it aloud.
Except he is. Slow and hoarse and barely audible, he does. “If I say yes, he has to.”
“Yes.” No pleasure. No self-assurance. Calm gravity. “I think you’re right.”
And Sam’s staring at him, long and hard. Hanging and staring and breathing slow and even. “He has to.”
“Yes. And some of this-“ a distasteful, sweeping glance “-will burn, but it’s already burning, isn’t it? People are already suffering, and dying, and they’ll keep suffering and dying as long as this war of ours drags on.”
“People. Humans. What do you care.”
“I don’t hate you, Sam. I don’t hate what you are. I just know that there are greater things.”
“If I say yes-“
“Then your brother will follow. And Michael will have his vessel, and we will do battle. This war will end. There will be Paradise.”
Sam doesn’t know his brother anymore. Hasn’t in weeks and months and years, and doesn’t care to, you don’t need me and I don’t need you, lonely-desperate-tired, staring out at the end of the world with nothing except himself and that’s not much at all. But he knows he has to. Dean has to.
He has to.
“Keep your fucking Paradise,” he mutters to nothing in particular.
But Lucifer ignores that and draws Sam back to the safety of level ground. “Your answer, then.”
“Yes,” he answers, and the word doesn’t echo hollow and worthless and weak like he thinks it should. “It’s yes.”
He's waiting for the whole ruined world to rise up and shout, No.
He's waiting for anything.
Nothing ever comes.
Finis