Big Bang Fic: Dead Soldiers: An Oral History of the End Times (2/11)
Fic title: Dead Soldiers: An Oral History of the End Times
Author name: fryadvocate
Artist name: Sabeth (nebst
Genre: Gen
Rating: R (for language)
Word count: 43,400
Warnings/Spoilers: Religion, miracles, angels, demons, and the end times.
Summary: Although much has been written about the sociological and theological importance of the "End Times War", there has been much less written about the individuals directly involved. Using interviews with primary sources, this paper seeks to examine how Dean and Sam Winchester, two criminals with a history of violence and petty theft, became commonly known as a prophet of the Lord and the Anti-Christ.
Link to fic: Master Post
Link to art: Art is here
Chapter 2: When It Began
Joanna Beth Harvelle:
The world was a really scary place back then. It's hard to remember because things are so different now, but there was this time when all you'd hear on the news was about financial stuff falling in on itself.
I used to help my mom do the taxes on the Roadhouse, so I know a little about money, but this was like some kind of apocalypse that no one could fight. Everyone was so scared that they'd get hit next by this money thing.
The Winchesters had shown me how to steal a credit card and I'd been living on that for a while, but when the whole financial mess started, I couldn't get a new one, so I went back to working. I worked at this little shithole of a bar. It might not even be standing anymore, after the... you know. The explosions.
Anyway, it was pretty scary. If you had a job, you were happy, and you were damn well staying put.
There was all this politics going on, you know, with the wars and the new president. It was... it was really different.
Miranda Reyes:
In late 2008, there was a lot going on with the economy. Essentially, everyone thought that the sky was falling.
... you know what I mean, right? Chicken Little? Help, help, the sky is falling?
Things just began collapsing: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both bought by the government, Lehman went broke, AIG was bailed out, Washington Mutual - a bank - went bankrupt. When all that's happening, you know there are things that are seriously wrong. There was this fund, TARP, and it was disappearing. Billions of dollars! Disappearing. And no one knew where exactly it was going.
What it came down to, really, was credit. Everyone called it the credit crisis, and all I could think was that credit is imaginary money. How could we have let it get this bad?
Christmas that year was pretty sad: everyone cut back, which only hurt the economy more. And everyone wanted a piece of TARP. The banks, the credit market, the car industry, I think even Target was asking for some.
At the time, I covered international news for CNN. That's how I met Jackson and Tom, actually. CNN sent me into Iraq to do a story on the rebuilding effort and the two of them were the Marines they'd assigned to me and my camera man. It was a good story, we had some good footage, and I wanted to go back abroad. Everyone said that was how you got ahead. You did the stories people watched.
So, I knew about the problems with the economy, but I didn't know everything. I was international news, not business. Even when I worked for the Times, I covered California politics, not Wall Street.
No one really liked us very much. Americans in Iraq, I mean. I got called back and they sent this other guy, Daniel, to do the story that I'd done all the footwork for. I was really, really pissed. Instead I did a couple of talking-point pieces about the economy. You know, those ones with a nearly empty shopping mall in the background that were supposed to scare everyone back into buying.
In the end... If I could have it to do all over again, I'd still be pissed about being pulled from Iraq. But...
If I'd gone to Baghdad, I'd never have been sent to do the New Mexico story.
Jim Novak:
I was possessed by an angel. So, I didn't... So, what was happening in the real world didn't touch me that much. Castiel was mostly concerned with the war, and not the one in Iraq. Because he'd been through it before. He knew the... drill.
There were seals all over, and this demon named Lilith had to break sixty-six of them so that she could free... the devil. Castiel wouldn't say so, he'd never say so, but he hadn't heard God for a long time. Even Gabriel hadn't heard any orders.
I don't want... A lot of things from that time are missing. I just don't remember them.
And what I do remember is... bloody. A lot of it's bloody. Angels don't get tired, they don't get hungry, they don't get anything, they don't have any human weaknesses, but they were still ending up dead. They were losing a lot of the host.
Uriel used to say... he used to say that, "Humans were given free will so that they can be the most imperfect creatures in creation." But Heaven was losing, and right then, Dean spoke to his true nature. To the nature that God gave him.
Robert Singer:
As far as the boys and I could tell, it was all-out war from both sides. I was going state to state, practically door to door, trying to get all of the hunters on our side. The ones that were left after the Raising of the Witnesses. That was what we'd decided early on. I think Gordon Walker taught the boys one thing.
You do not want to be on the other end of a hunter's shotgun, not when you're already fighting on two fronts.
Especially when one of those fronts was Hell and the other was Heaven.
A lot of the guys I talked to were pretty sure about their stance on the whole thing once I explained. I talked to a few who were sitting on the fence, not sure about the Winchester boys. Pete Osgood, used to do some hunting in Florida, he said that he didn't trust John, but his boys hadn't done Pete a lick of wrong.
I thought it meant he'd fight on our side until I realized it just meant that Pete didn't want to get involved.
Then there was Cal Philips in Pennsylvania, this hunter who'd probably been doing it a lot longer than I had, and he said that he'd shoot his own dog before he listened to angels. Said they were nothing but cosmic bullies, worse than demons.
Cal died, you know, pretty soon after it began. Heard he went out fighting, the bastard.
Most everyone else, though, was happy to hear some explanation about what was going on. Because even weekend hunters, those fools with camouflage gear in their closets and a whole lotta firepower that no decent hunter would use, even they'd noticed that the hunts were more intense. There was more going on.
How all the civilians convinced themselves it was situation normal is beyond me. I remember doing at least a dozen salt 'n' burns a month for a while. And the weather was actin' up all the time.
I guess they thought that it was global warming. Idjits.
It wasn't pretty for a while there. Half the hunters I talked to thought it must have been Sam that opened the gate again to drag Dean out of Hell, the other half thought I'd let Sam raise a zombie.
But the thing is, it's pretty easy to get everyone working together when I told 'em about the seals. Even the holdouts thought that Sam and Dean were small potatoes compared to the Morningstar.
Now I know a couple of guys that want to kick my ass for convincing them that Dean and Sam weren't the big picture. Back then I believed it, too. That the boys weren't half as important as Lilith and the angels. Now...
Well, the idea was that all of the hunters would be on the lookout for demonic activity in their area. Stop Lilith from breaking a seal if they could, but mostly just get everything ready to protect people if the angels lost. There's still a few counties protected by some pretty heavy traps and hoodoo.
That's how the resistance was getting away with it. Those hunters that were too good at their jobs. Can't say I'm a bit sorry about it.
Pete Osgood:
I started hunting after I almost got eaten by a skinwalker at summer camp. I think the first thing you realize about hunting is that it's a solitary sport. It's not a team effort, and it's definitely not like deer hunting, where you go out with some buddies and a six pack and come back with venison.
Information was something that just kind of permeated, I remember that. Kind of miss it. I'd hear about something from the guy I bought silver bullets from, and he'd have heard about it from someone else, et cetera. You know.
Of course I knew about John Winchester, ’cause after what went down with Harvelle, everyone knew about him. But he didn't come far enough south, so I never met him. I heard about his boys... when was it? Sometime in early 2004. The demon John was after was a pretty big deal.
Most hunters don't like a lot of attention. No muss, no fuss type of thing. But the demon kids, we all heard about them. Gordon Walker was crazy when it came to them. I got the warning and kept an eye out.
I didn't even think anyone knew how to find me, but then Bobby Singer showed up at my door in late '08. It was after that ghost of a kid I hadn't rescued tried to hack my head off with an axe.
[pause as PO coughs]
I'm sorry. I haven't thought about that in a while. I knew it was something hinky at the time, because there hadn't been enough of that boy left for a haunting. I just tried to talk him down, and when that didn't work, some iron shot did the trick.
Eventually, he disappeared and I made some calls, found out that someone had been Raising the Witnesses. Things got really bad for a while. I'm talking about demon possessions in the supermarket, stuff that wouldn't have happened back when I first started hunting.
Bobby came through not that long after.
Looking back at it, I feel like an idiot, but all I could think about was where my next paycheck was coming from. It wasn't a great economy to be taking a few days off to go hunting. And Bobby's story was pretty out there.
I knew some exorcisms, but finding out that there's a war with Heaven going on? Please. It's not something that I could believe. It's dangerous to say now, but I'm still not quite convinced.
And Bobby wasn't that convincing. Maybe if he hadn’t been so gung-ho for the Winchesters, he might’ve had me. His argument was... let me try to remember how he said it. We were sitting in my living room because only a dumb kid would give away the home court advantage.
He had this whole speech ready about the war. According to him, there were these locks between Hell and Earth that kept Lucifer in and some demon was going around breaking them. I know that scared the living crap out of me, but... really, what the hell was I supposed to do about it?
But what he was really gunning for was for some support for the Winchesters. He had this whole idea that the Winchesters were doing good work. He kept saying something about how the Winchesters were the only ones out there fighting for humans, that they were the only ones who cared about Earth in this Heaven versus Hell, WWE RAW match.
He was laying it on pretty thick, to be honest. That was what made me take a step back. I didn't sign up to be a hunter, I just wanted to make sure that no other kid was killed at summer camp. So I said thanks but no thanks.
For a while I didn't hear anything, and then New Mexico happened and I thought about what Bobby'd said, and I started - well, I started building traps around my house. Giant steel Devil's Traps, salt circles buried in the ground. Because, after that, what the hell else was I supposed to do?
Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:
It was hard times. It was hard times for everyone, for every walk of life, for every person in our country. Men were losing their jobs, kids were being shipped overseas to fight in a war our country didn't believe in anymore, our nation was lost.
It was hard times.
I knew, I knew in my gut what I'd been preaching was true: we were fighting a war so much bigger than the one we were fighting in the holy land. But it wasn't time yet, oh, no, it was not time yet for us to take up arms.
The hard economic times made church membership go up, but most of the new members weren't saved yet, they hadn't been reborn into Christ's love. It was all lip service, it was all fear. Fear of men and women. Fear of the physical, of the financial. It wasn't true belief.
Proverbs 1 warns us to listen, listen only to God's word. He warns us right there in Scripture that you can't let just anything into your ears, you have to sit, stand, walk knowing God's words.
All this fear, all this evil in the world, it was enough to scare people back towards the path. And I tried to be a good shepherd, and teach my flock of God's love, and God's word.
But it wasn't enough.
Everyone needed to be touched, because I knew, I knew that everyone needed to be saved before the end. Before Jesus himself came back and changed all of his faithful.
I knew that God would save our country from the mess we'd made of it, that God was fighting for us, that He'd show all of humanity a sign to the path of Christ.
Ruby:
Look, it was a war. And it wasn't a pretty war with matching uniforms and bugle horns. It was a war of attrition, each side just trying to wear the other side down.
Lilith was taking out angels one by one. Angels for fuck's sake. And they were burning up demons like it was a barbeque.
I was running. Sam and Dean were acting like giant targets for both sides, not to mention Castiel and Uriel creeped me the fuck out. It was their eyes, how completely sad their eyes were.
No. Sad's not the right word for it. It was like, they were always just so sorry all the time, didn't matter for what, they were always just so sorry.
'I'm an angel, and I feel so much fucking sympathy about how your shower was cold this morning.'
'I feel such pity that the diner ran out of burgers.'
'I'm so sympathetic that Earth is about to be sucked into a literal hell.'
It's like, consciously, I'm sure they knew what was going on, but everything was sympathy with them and not a single bit of empathy. It was creepy.
I was keeping in touch with Sam all the time, because he was still the horse my money was on. But I didn't want to be nearby if the angel tag team showed up. I think Uriel would have just roasted me on the spot, fuck professional courtesy.
The thing about this war was that it was kind of complicated. On the one hand, you've got Lilith, who's a pretty big deal in the nine circles. She's like the superstar of Hell. First demon created, you know? Baby demons want to be her when they grow up.
I mean, she's twisted as fuck, but twisted is a good thing in Hell. They like twisted.
Lilith's trying to break Lucifer out of prison. And since Earth is practically Eden, Garden of, compared to Hell, I was kind of against that.
Then there's the angels trying to keep Lucifer in his prison. Supposedly.
You don't really pull out the big guns like Uriel and Castiel just for guard duty on seals. You have to want something out of the fight. You have to want to win in a way that means you don't care how many cities you have to level.
Then there's Sam, who's pumped full of demon powers that he got from Azazel - who wasn't my department, so don't ask me about him. Anyway, Azazel gave Sam these powers, but I don't think that even Azazel understood what they could do.
Because it wasn't a possession, it was like Azazel had superimposed all of his powers onto Sam. Actually, more than his powers. Sam could pull a demon from its host and cast it back into the depths. Do you know how much control that takes? How much power?
That's Sam, sitting in the middle with his brother who'd just been pulled out of Hell by an angel. And I should have been able to guess that that made him something not-human too, but back then the only thing that mattered to me about Dean was how much of a wedge he could put between me and Sam.
Right then, it was like being in the middle of a battlefield. There was demons, angels, Sam, and Dean. And you couldn't tell who was fighting who or for what.
We could have been massacring our own camp, but no one could tell because we were never really sure who was on our side and who was the enemy.
Chapter 3
Author name: fryadvocate
Artist name: Sabeth (nebst
Genre: Gen
Rating: R (for language)
Word count: 43,400
Warnings/Spoilers: Religion, miracles, angels, demons, and the end times.
Summary: Although much has been written about the sociological and theological importance of the "End Times War", there has been much less written about the individuals directly involved. Using interviews with primary sources, this paper seeks to examine how Dean and Sam Winchester, two criminals with a history of violence and petty theft, became commonly known as a prophet of the Lord and the Anti-Christ.
Link to fic: Master Post
Link to art: Art is here
Chapter 2: When It Began
Joanna Beth Harvelle:
The world was a really scary place back then. It's hard to remember because things are so different now, but there was this time when all you'd hear on the news was about financial stuff falling in on itself.
I used to help my mom do the taxes on the Roadhouse, so I know a little about money, but this was like some kind of apocalypse that no one could fight. Everyone was so scared that they'd get hit next by this money thing.
The Winchesters had shown me how to steal a credit card and I'd been living on that for a while, but when the whole financial mess started, I couldn't get a new one, so I went back to working. I worked at this little shithole of a bar. It might not even be standing anymore, after the... you know. The explosions.
Anyway, it was pretty scary. If you had a job, you were happy, and you were damn well staying put.
There was all this politics going on, you know, with the wars and the new president. It was... it was really different.
Miranda Reyes:
In late 2008, there was a lot going on with the economy. Essentially, everyone thought that the sky was falling.
... you know what I mean, right? Chicken Little? Help, help, the sky is falling?
Things just began collapsing: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both bought by the government, Lehman went broke, AIG was bailed out, Washington Mutual - a bank - went bankrupt. When all that's happening, you know there are things that are seriously wrong. There was this fund, TARP, and it was disappearing. Billions of dollars! Disappearing. And no one knew where exactly it was going.
What it came down to, really, was credit. Everyone called it the credit crisis, and all I could think was that credit is imaginary money. How could we have let it get this bad?
Christmas that year was pretty sad: everyone cut back, which only hurt the economy more. And everyone wanted a piece of TARP. The banks, the credit market, the car industry, I think even Target was asking for some.
At the time, I covered international news for CNN. That's how I met Jackson and Tom, actually. CNN sent me into Iraq to do a story on the rebuilding effort and the two of them were the Marines they'd assigned to me and my camera man. It was a good story, we had some good footage, and I wanted to go back abroad. Everyone said that was how you got ahead. You did the stories people watched.
So, I knew about the problems with the economy, but I didn't know everything. I was international news, not business. Even when I worked for the Times, I covered California politics, not Wall Street.
No one really liked us very much. Americans in Iraq, I mean. I got called back and they sent this other guy, Daniel, to do the story that I'd done all the footwork for. I was really, really pissed. Instead I did a couple of talking-point pieces about the economy. You know, those ones with a nearly empty shopping mall in the background that were supposed to scare everyone back into buying.
In the end... If I could have it to do all over again, I'd still be pissed about being pulled from Iraq. But...
If I'd gone to Baghdad, I'd never have been sent to do the New Mexico story.
Jim Novak:
I was possessed by an angel. So, I didn't... So, what was happening in the real world didn't touch me that much. Castiel was mostly concerned with the war, and not the one in Iraq. Because he'd been through it before. He knew the... drill.
There were seals all over, and this demon named Lilith had to break sixty-six of them so that she could free... the devil. Castiel wouldn't say so, he'd never say so, but he hadn't heard God for a long time. Even Gabriel hadn't heard any orders.
I don't want... A lot of things from that time are missing. I just don't remember them.
And what I do remember is... bloody. A lot of it's bloody. Angels don't get tired, they don't get hungry, they don't get anything, they don't have any human weaknesses, but they were still ending up dead. They were losing a lot of the host.
Uriel used to say... he used to say that, "Humans were given free will so that they can be the most imperfect creatures in creation." But Heaven was losing, and right then, Dean spoke to his true nature. To the nature that God gave him.
Robert Singer:
As far as the boys and I could tell, it was all-out war from both sides. I was going state to state, practically door to door, trying to get all of the hunters on our side. The ones that were left after the Raising of the Witnesses. That was what we'd decided early on. I think Gordon Walker taught the boys one thing.
You do not want to be on the other end of a hunter's shotgun, not when you're already fighting on two fronts.
Especially when one of those fronts was Hell and the other was Heaven.
A lot of the guys I talked to were pretty sure about their stance on the whole thing once I explained. I talked to a few who were sitting on the fence, not sure about the Winchester boys. Pete Osgood, used to do some hunting in Florida, he said that he didn't trust John, but his boys hadn't done Pete a lick of wrong.
I thought it meant he'd fight on our side until I realized it just meant that Pete didn't want to get involved.
Then there was Cal Philips in Pennsylvania, this hunter who'd probably been doing it a lot longer than I had, and he said that he'd shoot his own dog before he listened to angels. Said they were nothing but cosmic bullies, worse than demons.
Cal died, you know, pretty soon after it began. Heard he went out fighting, the bastard.
Most everyone else, though, was happy to hear some explanation about what was going on. Because even weekend hunters, those fools with camouflage gear in their closets and a whole lotta firepower that no decent hunter would use, even they'd noticed that the hunts were more intense. There was more going on.
How all the civilians convinced themselves it was situation normal is beyond me. I remember doing at least a dozen salt 'n' burns a month for a while. And the weather was actin' up all the time.
I guess they thought that it was global warming. Idjits.
It wasn't pretty for a while there. Half the hunters I talked to thought it must have been Sam that opened the gate again to drag Dean out of Hell, the other half thought I'd let Sam raise a zombie.
But the thing is, it's pretty easy to get everyone working together when I told 'em about the seals. Even the holdouts thought that Sam and Dean were small potatoes compared to the Morningstar.
Now I know a couple of guys that want to kick my ass for convincing them that Dean and Sam weren't the big picture. Back then I believed it, too. That the boys weren't half as important as Lilith and the angels. Now...
Well, the idea was that all of the hunters would be on the lookout for demonic activity in their area. Stop Lilith from breaking a seal if they could, but mostly just get everything ready to protect people if the angels lost. There's still a few counties protected by some pretty heavy traps and hoodoo.
That's how the resistance was getting away with it. Those hunters that were too good at their jobs. Can't say I'm a bit sorry about it.
Pete Osgood:
I started hunting after I almost got eaten by a skinwalker at summer camp. I think the first thing you realize about hunting is that it's a solitary sport. It's not a team effort, and it's definitely not like deer hunting, where you go out with some buddies and a six pack and come back with venison.
Information was something that just kind of permeated, I remember that. Kind of miss it. I'd hear about something from the guy I bought silver bullets from, and he'd have heard about it from someone else, et cetera. You know.
Of course I knew about John Winchester, ’cause after what went down with Harvelle, everyone knew about him. But he didn't come far enough south, so I never met him. I heard about his boys... when was it? Sometime in early 2004. The demon John was after was a pretty big deal.
Most hunters don't like a lot of attention. No muss, no fuss type of thing. But the demon kids, we all heard about them. Gordon Walker was crazy when it came to them. I got the warning and kept an eye out.
I didn't even think anyone knew how to find me, but then Bobby Singer showed up at my door in late '08. It was after that ghost of a kid I hadn't rescued tried to hack my head off with an axe.
[pause as PO coughs]
I'm sorry. I haven't thought about that in a while. I knew it was something hinky at the time, because there hadn't been enough of that boy left for a haunting. I just tried to talk him down, and when that didn't work, some iron shot did the trick.
Eventually, he disappeared and I made some calls, found out that someone had been Raising the Witnesses. Things got really bad for a while. I'm talking about demon possessions in the supermarket, stuff that wouldn't have happened back when I first started hunting.
Bobby came through not that long after.
Looking back at it, I feel like an idiot, but all I could think about was where my next paycheck was coming from. It wasn't a great economy to be taking a few days off to go hunting. And Bobby's story was pretty out there.
I knew some exorcisms, but finding out that there's a war with Heaven going on? Please. It's not something that I could believe. It's dangerous to say now, but I'm still not quite convinced.
And Bobby wasn't that convincing. Maybe if he hadn’t been so gung-ho for the Winchesters, he might’ve had me. His argument was... let me try to remember how he said it. We were sitting in my living room because only a dumb kid would give away the home court advantage.
He had this whole speech ready about the war. According to him, there were these locks between Hell and Earth that kept Lucifer in and some demon was going around breaking them. I know that scared the living crap out of me, but... really, what the hell was I supposed to do about it?
But what he was really gunning for was for some support for the Winchesters. He had this whole idea that the Winchesters were doing good work. He kept saying something about how the Winchesters were the only ones out there fighting for humans, that they were the only ones who cared about Earth in this Heaven versus Hell, WWE RAW match.
He was laying it on pretty thick, to be honest. That was what made me take a step back. I didn't sign up to be a hunter, I just wanted to make sure that no other kid was killed at summer camp. So I said thanks but no thanks.
For a while I didn't hear anything, and then New Mexico happened and I thought about what Bobby'd said, and I started - well, I started building traps around my house. Giant steel Devil's Traps, salt circles buried in the ground. Because, after that, what the hell else was I supposed to do?
Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:
It was hard times. It was hard times for everyone, for every walk of life, for every person in our country. Men were losing their jobs, kids were being shipped overseas to fight in a war our country didn't believe in anymore, our nation was lost.
It was hard times.
I knew, I knew in my gut what I'd been preaching was true: we were fighting a war so much bigger than the one we were fighting in the holy land. But it wasn't time yet, oh, no, it was not time yet for us to take up arms.
The hard economic times made church membership go up, but most of the new members weren't saved yet, they hadn't been reborn into Christ's love. It was all lip service, it was all fear. Fear of men and women. Fear of the physical, of the financial. It wasn't true belief.
Proverbs 1 warns us to listen, listen only to God's word. He warns us right there in Scripture that you can't let just anything into your ears, you have to sit, stand, walk knowing God's words.
All this fear, all this evil in the world, it was enough to scare people back towards the path. And I tried to be a good shepherd, and teach my flock of God's love, and God's word.
But it wasn't enough.
Everyone needed to be touched, because I knew, I knew that everyone needed to be saved before the end. Before Jesus himself came back and changed all of his faithful.
I knew that God would save our country from the mess we'd made of it, that God was fighting for us, that He'd show all of humanity a sign to the path of Christ.
Ruby:
Look, it was a war. And it wasn't a pretty war with matching uniforms and bugle horns. It was a war of attrition, each side just trying to wear the other side down.
Lilith was taking out angels one by one. Angels for fuck's sake. And they were burning up demons like it was a barbeque.
I was running. Sam and Dean were acting like giant targets for both sides, not to mention Castiel and Uriel creeped me the fuck out. It was their eyes, how completely sad their eyes were.
No. Sad's not the right word for it. It was like, they were always just so sorry all the time, didn't matter for what, they were always just so sorry.
'I'm an angel, and I feel so much fucking sympathy about how your shower was cold this morning.'
'I feel such pity that the diner ran out of burgers.'
'I'm so sympathetic that Earth is about to be sucked into a literal hell.'
It's like, consciously, I'm sure they knew what was going on, but everything was sympathy with them and not a single bit of empathy. It was creepy.
I was keeping in touch with Sam all the time, because he was still the horse my money was on. But I didn't want to be nearby if the angel tag team showed up. I think Uriel would have just roasted me on the spot, fuck professional courtesy.
The thing about this war was that it was kind of complicated. On the one hand, you've got Lilith, who's a pretty big deal in the nine circles. She's like the superstar of Hell. First demon created, you know? Baby demons want to be her when they grow up.
I mean, she's twisted as fuck, but twisted is a good thing in Hell. They like twisted.
Lilith's trying to break Lucifer out of prison. And since Earth is practically Eden, Garden of, compared to Hell, I was kind of against that.
Then there's the angels trying to keep Lucifer in his prison. Supposedly.
You don't really pull out the big guns like Uriel and Castiel just for guard duty on seals. You have to want something out of the fight. You have to want to win in a way that means you don't care how many cities you have to level.
Then there's Sam, who's pumped full of demon powers that he got from Azazel - who wasn't my department, so don't ask me about him. Anyway, Azazel gave Sam these powers, but I don't think that even Azazel understood what they could do.
Because it wasn't a possession, it was like Azazel had superimposed all of his powers onto Sam. Actually, more than his powers. Sam could pull a demon from its host and cast it back into the depths. Do you know how much control that takes? How much power?
That's Sam, sitting in the middle with his brother who'd just been pulled out of Hell by an angel. And I should have been able to guess that that made him something not-human too, but back then the only thing that mattered to me about Dean was how much of a wedge he could put between me and Sam.
Right then, it was like being in the middle of a battlefield. There was demons, angels, Sam, and Dean. And you couldn't tell who was fighting who or for what.
We could have been massacring our own camp, but no one could tell because we were never really sure who was on our side and who was the enemy.
Chapter 3