SPN fic: All Time Corrode (with constant hurt)
Title: All Time Corrode (with constant hurt)
Category: AU from the end of 5.22, gen, or squint-if-you-want slash
Warnings: (highlight) language, torture, graphic stream of consciousness, grammar that has been murdered and then desecrated, and character death from old age
Words: ~6800
Summary: Lucifer has found the cracks in the Cage, and once a year every year, he slips Sam through for a day of watching Dean.
AN: Title from Edgar Bower' The Stoic: For Laura Von Courten.
They fell together, the four brothers (who are two by blood, two by ancient bond), into a world of fear and ice. Sam gasped when he hit the bottom of the pit--or were they falling still?--on the flat of his back, and gaped for air that refused to fill his lungs.
“Adam,” Sam wheezed, but the words wouldn’t quite fit around the clog in his throat, a rushing chill that clawed at the edges of his gut, scrabbling for leverage. Adam stood before him--no, not Adam, Michael, the fury of so many lonely years shining in his eyes--arm stretched, fingers tightened, head bowed in a stance Sam knew well. He fell to his knees, spine bent by the million-year weight of Michael’s will, and coughed, choking and suffocating, black spots growing like tumours over his eyes. Sharp lances shredded through Sam’s mind, an alien will disentangling from his own, being torn away with neither grace nor care
and he listens to the screaming in the distance, through the static buzzing in his ears, and the horrible sound of a throat tearing itself to pieces.
“See that, Sam.” Michael looked up at Sam (Sam hunched over, Sam near blinded by all the breaths he couldn’t breathe) through eyes narrowed by Adam’s pinched eyebrows. “That, that is Satan spilling from your gut. Are you not a lucky child.”
Light speared from Sam’s mouth, become a poisonous sprawl of limbs, arms lengthening, bending at soft elbows, clutching at Sam wherever they could, twisting a dozen fingers through his hair. A wing flapped, cutting the corners of his lips with feathers thin like razors; a King’s imperious head adorned with an overturned crown and a smile of pride and despair forced its way out, mouth gnashing and outraged; and then, with the last lash of a reptilian tail sliding over his tongue and out, it was over.
Sam curled in on himself, breathing deep and coughing in a failed attempt to clear the oily taste of Lucifer from his mouth. He barely noticed Michael slithering away from Adam as sweetly as a diver slipping beneath the water’s edge, but he fought his way to his feet to hold Adam up by his shoulders as awareness fell over his eyes.
They dropped to their knees together, heads hanging, exhausted by fighting and by falling through the earth and beyond it. The cage was cold and scything sharp, and Sam felt the knife’s edge of a bone slipping beneath the skin of his knee, but he was tired.
He was so fucking tired.
The Cage was vast, held above Hell and between the planes of time, stretching Sam’s thought through a grinding sieve and distorting his hands (stretching and twisting like taffy, though they felt nothing) as he looked on them, lying on his lap, still sore with Dean’s blood.
“Holy shit.”
The words, drawn out and terrified, twisted and shook through Sam’s head. He looked up and saw Adam, looking down. Through the Cage.
Gaping chasms were rent around them, half-covered by spires of ice and glowing with the far-off warmth of Hellfire. Sam clawed at Adam’s shoulder. They shivered together in the steaming chill.
Sam smiled and said, “It’s okay, Adam.”
Sam smiled and lied because he remembered a voice that sounded like the crackle of the Impala’s radio as it said, not all that long ago and yet an eternity away, it’s okay, Sammy, it’s okay, I’m here, it’s okay, I’m still here.
A legion of screams flamed above them, in the pantheon of their Hell, but they didn’t raise their eyes. Even the shadows Lucifer and Michael cast were too bright to look upon.
--
They grew bored. Sam had hoped, but--they grew bored.
(And this, this was a thing he could do for his brother, and feel that racing, that burning and all-consuming, Winchester pride fill up his veins before it spilled out into the open air.)
It was only ever Sam who wronged them, Heaven’s fire and oil of the apocalypse (and where--Sam had heard that before, but where--), after all.
Adam huddled beside Sam, below Sam, forgotten, and he looked cold and alone and so terrified. Sam tracked him with his eyes until he lost them, somewhere, somehow, and after that he counted time by the measured in and out of Adam’s breath.
When Sam started screaming, he lost track of Adam completely.
--
And then, one day (after a thousand years and a hundred thousand screams and a few scarce beats of silence) a voice broke through the quiet snick snick snick of breaking bones. Sam jumped, hissed in surprise, and mourned how easily his peace was shattered--just a few words, a voice (not his own, his own was broken) filling in the silence that had followed in the wake of his acceptant understanding.
“Sam,” said Light, said the Morning and the Rising Dawn, while Glory (always at Light’s side, always there and waiting and too fierce to bow His head to look at Sam) smiled so slow. “Sam, I have found a path for you, for a gift, a present for my most precious vessel, and though you broke my trust, Sam, I will give this to you freely. I will give this to you once an Earthly year, on May the Second, and this I shall give you until the ending of Time.”
Sam startled to feel warmth slide smooth across his skin, Light’s voice fading and whisking away; fading, just a whisper through the cracks, and Sam was left standing alone, an impression snuck upon the earth like winter wind slipping through a closed window’s splintered frame.
--
On his birthday--his twenty-ninth, in the count kept by the middle world--Lucifer the Morningstar gave Sam the gift of the earth, a gift Lucifer had once been used to promising (though never before had he a chance to deliver, not really, not like this, to one so happy to recieve). It was a favour, or so the Devil smiled, done for the love he still bore for his vessel that he couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried, divorce himself from, but Sam knew--had to know, had to remember--it was only to make it all the harder to come back.
The stars spun quietly over his head. Summer air, and he couldn’t breathe it in fast enough.
(One year, one whole year, and yet a hundred years and more, filled with a voice that called to him softly, lowly, in the brightness, in the cold that misted high with blood, and--)
The stars spun quietly in the darkness of the night sky. Summer air, hazy and thick with heat, sprawled lazily down his throat, climbed into his lungs and weighted him down with warmth.
This lesson he learned in a world twice removed, in (remember--Stanford, the place he was reborn and found what it was to live and then died a very different death) his freshman year at university--contrast gives birth to context, the killer of apathy and the prologue to understanding.
It was strange, that the Cage could ever be anything but (death and dying, horror born to its most stripped state) every fear that ever was, but Sam had been silent, hadn’t he? Towards the end, he had hushed right down and forgotten what it was to scream in pain. Clever solution, this. Once an earthly year, he was to be shown stark contrast--he was to be gifted a day of watching Dean.
He had fallen, so far and so deep that he hadn’t thought of ever seeing light again. (How he was proven so very wrong, laughed the Morningstar, who had fallen so far with him.) Two brothers, casting off their vessels, had raged without consequence until Lucifer (Light and Ice) said, “Enough, brother.”
The angels had turned, had seen Sam, and had smiled their terrible smiles.
(This Sam remembered, could trail through his snapping mind. And this too: Adam crouched low, the pawn forgotten by those that crowned themselves kings, as they turned to their proclaimed traitor at court. It was enough, it had to be enough, that Sam suffered alone, family above all, protect him, the younger brother, protect.)
This time he was granted here, well, it was granted because he had stopped screaming. Years ago, maybe even decades--a timeless expanse, stretching from the banging explosion at the creation of the cosmos until the very ending of the earth itself, when the space between the atoms grew too far to support the indulgence of the earth, all at once in every moment, in a cage that existed beyond it all--Sam had stopped screaming. He knew that, could remember it, standing now on the grit of pavement under a streetlamp shining, with a dim yellow glow that was not at all close to bright, and flickering in a way that had nothing at all to do with ghosts.
(Might be due to him, to the Boy King, the whisper of Satan through the cracks.)
It was a happy birthday for Sam, here in Lafeyette, Indiana. Through the windows of a cozy suburban home, Dean ate supper with Lisa and Ben, a surrogate family for a surrogate life, but still probably better than anything Dean could have had with Sam still breathing beside him. Dean smiled just a tiny bit, and stared down at the table in a way Sam knew--Dean was remembering, was mourning, and that was okay. Dean would be okay.
For his twenty-ninth birthday, Sam was given the gift of resolve. It flowed warmly through his veins and edged away the terror he had so long ago grown accustomed to.
That warmth had almost started to feel normal by the time Sam felt the tug (like fishhooks; like talons made of bone and ice) pull at his gut. Sucking him down, into the deep, squinting against the light and shivering in the cold he had once grown used to.
“Well, Sam,” one of them said (and it didn’t really matter which). “Welcome back.”
“Now let’s see how you show us thank you.”
Dean, and he is okay, and he will adjust and nothing in the world could have given him strength like that.
(He would scream, yes, but that was for later, when Memory didn’t burnish in his mind so brightly and all he could remember was that once he knew warmth, but it was no more, in this place of terror.)
Sam smiled. Said nothing, and smiled, as his blood pittered against the ice.
--
Time passed strangely, in the Cage, in the Pit that lay beyond reason and resolve. Time snapped and slowed and did not follow Sam’s counting of breath to breath, nor beat to beat, when he had a body to count those with.
(But Adam, Sam could always track time by following his stuttering cries and endless streaming consciousness from moment to moment to moment, and if they ever knew, if Glory and Light and the fear in Sam’s heart ever knew, they would take Adam’s voice away. So Sam lay still, played their games, and counted in his head. One, for my eighth birthday I got the sickest bike, two, the first exam I ever failed made me cry for two hours straight, three I always wanted brothers, Sam, and you’re better than any I ever dreamt.)
Sam fell quiet, at that last, and marvelled, and marvelled.
--
He shivered, Sam did, in the air that lay strange against him. His skin fell flat (gooseflesh gone, hiding, strange, very strange indeed) and his fingers bled pink inside his skin, and where had the yellow white of his skin gone? Static rushed through his veins.
But those were small things, little trifles, and really, Sam thought as he stared (wondering trick or trap, or perhaps the best gift of all) across the street to a man gathering his things off a lawn. The sun swallowed the pale from the man’s face and spat freckles across his nose, and something about it--Sam knew, on the tip of his (whole, intact and whole and so very much there for the first time in an age) tongue, this man’s name, and
a motel room--that’s it, motel--when Sam had been no taller than the television set he sat before, and there were soft sound of snores behind him, and a thought of finally, of he will be so proud, as little Sam (young Sam, Sam before the world’s ending) crept up to his older, smaller, brother and tucked him into bed, tugged his boots off to lay them beside the radiator and pulled the sheets up around his face and
there they were, the freckles, and Sam knew those freckles, and he knew those eyes, always old and often sad and sometimes just a little bit happy--Dean.
Sam took a deep breath, and it felt clean inside his lungs. It didn’t hurt, and Sam laughed at that; at how good it felt to breathe without the stitch of scarring pulling unevenly inside his chest.
“Yeah, you’re technically here, Dean, but you’re never actually with us. God, you never let yourself move on, do you?”
Sound rushed through his ears and crackled, and came back to him. A woman, perched on the threshold of the house, crying and yelling and very very sad. The man--Dean, Sam’s brother who is Dean--hoisted a few duffle bags on his shoulders and grabbed the handle of a small suitcase.
“I told you, Lisa,” he said, face turned down and shoulders hunched. “I fucking told you. You knew what you were getting into, or would’ve, if you fucking listened.”
“Yeah, you ‘told me,’ but Dean, we both know that I did not fucking understand, and you didn’t actually try to explain.”
The woman, voice rising and echoing down the street (curtains twitching and neighbours hurrying indoors), rubbed a hand over her face. Kept it there.
“It’s Sammy’s birthday, Lisa. What the fuck did you expect? A couple’a Oscar worthy monologues and hug to make me all fucking better?”
“It doesn’t matter what I expected. All that matters, Dean, is that I can’t raise my kid in a house with an alcoholic who can’t dry himself up for a whole week before his own brother’s birthday.”
“Look, I’m sorry, Lisa, all right? I’m fucking sorry that I’m too fucking weak to deal with Sam still being worse than dead.”
“Oh, spare me the self pity, Dean. You’re not the only one to lose a brother. And I’m sorry for you, I am, and I’m sorry Sam’s gone, but I can’t let you stay here anymore. This is the first time in nine days you’ve been sober enough to drive, and I did a lot of thinking in those nine days. And you know what I thought, Dean? That I owe it to Ben, and that I owe it to myself. This isn’t healthy, what we’re doing, and I thought I could fix you, but I can’t.”
The man--freckles, green eyes, Dean, brother--sighed heavily and shook his head, shook the cobwebs out and away.
“I get it. Look, I’ll just go, okay? And I won’t bother you again. Family’s everything, I get it, and I can’t fit in here--I get that too. Just tell Ben I--tell him I’m sorry I won’t be around anymore.”
“I’ll tell him. Dean?”
“Yeah?”
“You have someone to stay with?”
“Yeah. Well. If I hope and I pray enough, I think I know someone who can help me out.”
“Good, that’s good. Take care--just, be careful.”
Dean smiled a little smile and said, “You take care of your boy.” He looked up and, almost as an afterthought (but his voice was heavy with meaning), said, “Sam would’ve been thirty today, you know.”
“I know.”
Sam sat on the curb and listened to a familiar rumble, smelled dark fumes, and watched the Impala roar away on the road, before he was sucked back down (far down, forever down) into the Pit.
--
A whisper and a laugh, a snapple crackle
STOP.
Sam giggled, rhymed in his head, and hushed in curiosity as his arm swung back and forth (and back and forth) like a pendulum beside the altar he was pinned to.
Blackness ate his eyes away, and The Morning and The Dawn and The Glory sighed and said, “It is time again.”
--
Sam came back to himself humming, humming deep in a throat he thought he had lost (in the wild, in the light bright Light, in penance and for the promise of Glory, and before his eyes floated a million little sparks, little flints of ice and iron, lazy on the passing drifts that rose forever on the updrafts from beneath the Cage--but
no Cage, no Hellfire glow gliding over his skin, colouring but never warming, just little motes of ice and flint--no, dust, tickling at the back of his breathing throat, and beneath him, tiling just on the wrong shade of yellow, sticking in a tacky mess to the pressed side of his face--
smell of coffee, bitter black and strong, smashing against the floor and that had been for another, not for him, not for Sam, because this cup of coffee was utilitarian and simple, nothing like how Sam drank it, but there he was, dropping a cup of coffee he had never planned to drink, and why had he dropped it? Arm in a white slung cast and a father lying on the floor and no and oh, that’s why the coffee, the black coffee pooling on the floor, running along the edge of his jeans where he kneeled, chilling his skin
but Sam knew now that that was not what a real chill was, beside the point, against the point.
A voice startled him out of (nothing, not doing anything, not a single thing, promise promise, only ever thoughts of you, of Light, of Glory, not Glory never Glory, sorry) his thoughts.
“I guess I had to come today because it’s my brother’s birthday, and for the first time in a long while, I felt like maybe I wanted to share his story with someone else. And I guess because for the first time in a long while, I felt like maybe I should drown myself in my good friend Jack and I, uh, just got some news that makes me think that might not be such a good idea.
“Spent a lot of time in the last year doing some stuff I’m pretty familiar with, but I guess I was a little more reckless than I used to be, and. Just got a phone call a couple months ago that I knocked a girl up. So.”
He cleared his throat and Sam watched him hang his head and rush through to, “Gonna be a girl, and I couldn’t--so. Gonna dry myself up, and I was doing pretty well, but my, my friend who’s been helping me out lately ain’t around today, bit busy being the new sheriff in town, and uh. It’s my baby brother’s birthday today, and he’s dead, and I miss him and I don’t really feel like missing him, but I want even less to fall off the wagon, so.”
Someone else, a lady, a lovely lady with withered hair and lines crowding around her small eyes, said, “Do you want to tell us about your brother, Dean?”
There was a small silence, and no screaming to follow it, and the light was dim and dark and notlight, the air warm like the promise of Hellfire.
“Yeah, I guess I do. ‘Cause everyone should know what Sam was like. I mean, just, there’s a lot of people who owe him a lot. And none of them got to tell him thanks, before he died.”
Wood creaked and groaned
(and splintered into edges that crept scary-slow under his skin, and shed little flakes as they made their way to his veins, through his veins, shredding the path to his heart wide, and--)
Wooden chairs creaked and groaned, people (pale, yellowed faces, tanned faces, faces dark and yet wan with stress and sleepless nights of struggling) shifting where they sat and leaning forward, a courtesy, a curiosity.
“Sam’s my little brother, and I’ve always taken care of him. Since I was small, I’ve taken care of him. Mom died when he was a baby, and my dad--his job took up a lot of time, and he wasn’t around a lot when we needed him to be, so I spent a lot of time minding Sam. And it’s just been, uh, weird, without him. ‘Cause it’s always been, look out for Sam, Dean. Look out for your brother.
“Guess I didn’t end up doing such a good job of that, really.”
The man who looked so tired, who leaned and swayed, obviously exhausted for all that he looked so much more well-rested than Sam could remember seeing him
--and how do you know, Sam, who is he to you, this stranger, when I am closer to you than any other has been, for I have crawled inside your shell and curled beside your soul--
GET OUT, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT, THIS DAY IS MINE.
The man who looked so tired curled his mouth and pinched his eyes, just a bit, just so the green crouched behind clumped-with-tears eyelashes, cleared his throat (again), and continued.
“It wasn’t, you know, all about taking care, though. I mean, there was a lot of that, but we, uh. Well, he was my brother, right? I knew him better than I never knew anyone, and we were closer than anything.
“I remember when Sam was, what, seven or eight, we were staying in this little town just south of Des Moines, by the time Mother’s Day rolled around. And Sam, he was used to not having our Mom around. I wasn’t, but he never knew any different, you know. So on Mother’s Day, I wasn’t in a good place. Wasn’t exactly a joy to be around. And Sam, he followed me around like a puppy, like always, and at home, I was always watching him, to make sure, you know, the boogeyman didn’t get him or anything.”
The room chuckled (laughs bouncing, echoing dully, crawling inside Sam’s ears and scraping, digging down and down and pushing through to the place called Memory, and
a room so dark, a dream so strange that all the air rushed out of his lungs and dragged along with it his soul, he could see it, shining white and glowing, slipping and sliding away, slithering into the mouth of a foul, black clothed monster, before
BANG
it fled, leaving his breath behind, and Sam, you have such strange dreams, Sam, such very strange nightmares).
Sam laughed, too, because jokes were always more funny when you were In The Know, and Sam was, because this he knew, this man and that memory, and the one was Dean (his brother, whom he loved) and the other was once his day job, night job, any time at all job (rhythm and a tune snaking through his brain).
Dean, his brother, Dean, continued.
“He spent all his time with me, when he could, in those days, when we were both still little, and he must’ve known why I was so, uh, grumpy. Anyway. At recess, Sammy marches up to me and pretty much throws his Mother’s Day craft at me--you know, elementary schools, always doing shitty little crafts, and Sam didn’t often have a place to put all them--and I’m there with all the other kids in my class. And I tried really hard to be a normal punk-ass kid talking to his annoying little brother, just for once, just on that one day when I was always so unhappy, but he looked so damn proud of thinking to give me that ugly clay mug, I couldn’t stop from smiling.
“‘Course, I lost all my hard-earned cred with the other kids instantly, and I don’t think they ever stopped calling me ‘Momma Dean’ until we moved away, but hey, we Winchesters look out for our own first, you know? So that didn’t matter; not to me.”
This story, this he remembered very well, from a distant land in the sprawling mess of his mind, a thing from Long Ago and Far Far Away (and that itself, another thing to remember, from that place of smoky rooms and soft mattresses and a brother who could mouth along to every word that thinned out of the shining screen).
“When we got home, Sammy made me make hot cocoa on the stovetop, and he poured it from the pot into the clay mug--which I know for a fact his teacher told him not to use for drinking, the lying little shit--and he spilled half of it over my hands, and how I don’t still have the burns, I don’t know. Damn thing leaked like a sieve all over my pants, and it tasted like dirt and the paint dissolved into the cocoa until it looked like a slushie, but you know what, for the first time since my mom died--”
pinned to a burning ceiling
“--it was Mother’s Day, and I was happy. And I guess, that’s who Sam was. Sometimes I wanted to throttle him, sometimes I just couldn’t understand him, but he was always--he always wanted us to be happy, even if he went about it in the dumbest ways. And he was never afraid to chase what made him happy. Not like I was. I admired that, even when I thought I hated him for it.”
Dean shook his head, wiped his eyes, and looked up (even though Sam knew, knew like he knew the feel of ice crushing through his veins and slushing around his aching heart, that Dean should really be looking down) as he said, “Better appreciate this, Sammy. ‘Cause no way in hell--” a sharp breath, stuttered slowly out. “On earth. No way on earth am I going to put myself through all this sharing and caring again, not even for you.”
Sam did appreciate, and he smiled, because he knew a lie when he heard one--the Devil was a lover of truths, for all he twisted them between his deceptive fingers.
--
(It was many years of timeless impossibility after that visit, that birthday of Sam’s when he remembered so much, before Sam’s screaming softened into boredom, and he wept, for this was a thing he had never thought he would ask: why did he have to go Up There just when he got used to Down Below?
He gabbled that aloud, babbled that he wanted his mind and his brother and the warmth of the earth forever, or he wanted to never leave this place of ice where he could forget and forget until everything was gone. Beneath his overturned crown, the Morningstar smiled so wide his face was severed in two.)
--
A man sat upon a rack and smiled, and hummed and hawed at the wonder of his flesh (and screamed as Light pulled it to pieces
and screamed into songs, because this was Glory, it was Right, it was Clean, and the man knew that he was dirty, felt the sickness in his blood, smiled as it ran away from him, as the Light pulled it away) pound of flesh, paying a pound of flesh, and
man in a cave, watching the play of shadows on the wall--no, impossible (where did that come from?) there are no, were no, there will be no shadows on the wall (light too bright, blinding white, cast around him)
--maybe there is a shadow under his feet (don’t look, can’t look, don’t look away or the light will spear through your eyes until all you see is red and that is sickness)--
too much white bright light for shadows, and so there are no (were no) shadows on the wall, and there is not a man to watch them dance and wonder where am I and so the man does not wonder, has never wondered.
The problem solved (has been solved, no more problem, please, please, see? No more problem, all fixed, all better, please--be quiet and that’s how they’ll know who will know? No one, no know no) the man who was no longer a man (given that up, bled away) quieted and sat and listened to the drip, drip, dripping (and the shatter scatter as the ice in his veins became the ice on the floors, on the altar of bones) he hushed and quieted.
He quieted, and stilled.
Light frowned and Glory dimmed, and stilled along with him.
“Sam,” they said (but who is Sam, and where and what is Sam but death) with voices that bled through the air like diamonds scraping along glass, cutting and slicing and so very hard and cold, “Sam, it is time.”
They gripped him with their hands of ice and fire, and they set him high up, so high, upon the ledge that wails, has always wailed, hope and freedom, and green and outside.
A room, with walls, and so dark he strained to see, to pull into focus the dark shapes that wriggled in the dark, and the man thought Adam? for that name he knew, he lived with, and he knew that name meant Duty and Honour and Your Responsibility and Little Brother, all these things, and some part of him,
some secret, silly part,
told himself that yes, there was always this brother here beside him, and he had also had this blood-brother, and Once Upon A Time, he and his brother had been closer than Light and Glory could ever hope to be
(once, he said this, by accident, aloud--truly, accident, didn’t mean it (did)--and he didn’t remember much of the shearing screams that tore through the air afterwards)
and Adam was his brother, and so he owed him the bond of love, and that was Good, as it Should Be.
Thunder cracked through his ears (rang through his ears, and Grace, this was Grace flooding the room) and thunder said, “I’m sorry. I should have been here sooner.”
Another voice, a softer voice, said, “‘S fine, Cas. You’re here, and that’s fine.”
(That voice was warm with the weight of a thousand eons of something stronger than love, and the man who sat and watched in the darkness, unseen and unheard, felt warm, and remembered that he had once loved this feeling--warmth--and this voice--love.)
“Is she sleeping?”
The man’s eyes swelled and grew as they had not since,
well,
until he could make out a bed in a soft blue room and a human and an angel (full of Grace, full of thunder and lightening) who both stared at a thing on the bed, a tiny human, who stretched and strained her arms at Grace until he plucked her up (so gentle, please don’t, be careful, please leave her be--) and stared at her small face and wide, unfocused eyes.
The man (who had heard himself called Sam, once) saw how at peace the man who had the voice Sam felt he must at least once have known was, and so Sam, too, relaxed his shoulders and felt safe.
“Was just going to give her a story, you know. Just like Sammy. Can never get her to sleep without some kind of story. Hell, she’s worse’n Sammy.”
He looked at the little girl in the angel’s arms and smiled wistfully, with eyes that said they were wandering far through memory, before he continued.
“Soft rock just wakes her up, and anything else just makes her laugh.”
The angel hitched the girl up on his hip and rifled his hand through her halo of hair.
“I think I would like to hear a story,” the angel said, and his voice was soft, was fond, and really
(--Sam thought, and his brain sparked and whirred and oh, but that was nice, to finish a thought, trail it from start to conclusion, and to be free, to have time to do so, time and time, yes there will be time, though Sam does not wear his trousers rolled and it has been so many years since he has eaten a peach and--Sam luxuriated in tumbling his thoughts around his mind, and there was no pain that shocked him away from them--)
and really, that angel was nothing like an angel at all, though his skin was lined with veins and his veins were filled with glowing Grace and Light and the lamplight behind his head folded over his halo and lit the edges of his black hair on fire. This angel was not an angel, and the black wings that furled with soft feathers around the room, tenting in the warmth, were not angel wings. For he was truly good. This was something new, something different.
Sam tilted his head and startled at the upturn of his lips.
Heat pressed down in the room, and heat choked around Sam’s throat, and this was glorious, he thought, as heat soothed at the torn edging of his melting lungs.
“Tell her about your brother, Dean,” the angel said. “It’s Sam’s birthday today.”
The man nodded and smiled and wiped at the spill that crept down his face (and Sam knew those spills, knew them, knew how to watch them--racing raindrops down a car windshield while rutted asphalt fled under the cars tires--as they tore up Adam’s face; Adam, who always crouched,
lying like a crumbling statue, a decaying jut of stone at his feet,
at the foot of the altar. Adam, who always watched Sam, and when Sam had eyes--not always, never always, but sometimes, and sometimes even enough--Sam watched Adam back, and Adam begged for Glory and Light, not knowing inevitability like Sam did)--
The man nodded and smiled and wiped at the tears that crept down his face and said, “Sam’d be thirty-six today.”
He reached out for the little girl, and she went to him with open arms, pudgy fingers wriggling at his face. She prodded at the freckles on the man’s face--a small boy, Sam boy little Sam as a boy, pressing damp-with-bathwater fingertips to another boy’s freckles, and giggling and giggling and laughing as he pulled the flesh away piece by piece, and drank the other boy’s screams and
NO, YOU WILL NOT TAKE THIS
pressing fingertips to another boy’s freckles, and they giggled together, a deep voice laughed with them, tugged blankets over their heads, murmured heavy prayers over them and kissed their hair where it peaked above the edge of the blankets.
She prodded at the freckles on the man’s face and he asked her, “Hey, you want to hear about your Uncle Sammy?”
The girl’s hair sprang about her face and gleamed dully as she nodded. The man with freckles and green eyes and that aura of comfort sat them down, shifted her against his side, and patted her cheek.
“Pay attention to this one, rug-rat. This one is an important story.”
“‘Mportant,” she said, with voice thin and reedy. “I wanna hear ‘bout Uncle Sammy.”
“Damn straight, you do. ‘Cause your Uncle Sammy was a hero, and he was a better hero than any other hero I’ve told you about. I want you to remember this, Mary. Okay? I want you to always remember that Sam Winchester was your uncle, and that Sam Winchester saved the whole world.”
The angel sat down in a chair beside the bed.
“Not your brother alone, Dean,” the angel said. “It was all of us. It was Free Will. It was a brother who loved his family enough throughout all the mistakes they made that he inspired everlasting devotion, and it was a father who raised his sons to be heroes.”
“And the soldier who turned his back on everything he once believed in to follow an alcoholic and an addict on the shittiest chances I ever saw.”
“Those are the best stories,” the girl said. “When you think the end ‘s gonna be sad, but it isn’t.”
“But it was, Mary. It was sad. Because your Uncle Sammy saved the whole world, and he died.”
The man turned to the angel and the angel nodded, wing bending down to blanket the man and his girl.
Sam--the whisper of the Morningstar through the cracks in the Cage--sat and leaned into the man’s leg, because already he could feel the shrivelling in his gut that twisted ice into his veins, and already he was thinking of the ice and light and Glory that was coming back for him--would always come back for him--and Sam wanted to wrap himself up in this man who spoke soft and yet hard, who pushed Memory to the front of his mind from where it had hidden for so long, in the Cage.
But it was still his birthday, and the Morningstar had promised him this once an earthly year, so Sam sat and listened and felt safe and warm, and this was enough. It was suppose to destroy him, and maybe it sometimes did, but this year, Sam saw his brother Dean, and his brother Cas, and his little niece Mary, and they were all smiling, and Sam felt strength run through him faster than any demon’s rush of power.
On the day of Sam Winchester’s thirty-sixth birthday, he listened to his brother tell a story, and he was four and six and seven and at home, curled beneath scratchy sheets, and he was nine and scared of the monster in his closet, thirteen and bored, twenty-seven and shivering in the wake of addiction and in so much need of distraction. And he was a thousand years of blood and fear and remembering again at last.
--
The promise made by the Morningstar to his human vessel was kept. On and on and on. Once an earthly year. This was the promise, and it was kept. It was kept right up until the cliffs crumbled into the sea and the continents were smashed together again, burning forth a new desert world. It was kept unto the dying of time, when fire bled from the heavens and the air was full with the thudding of hooves.
Yes, the promise was kept, but the man who gurgled on his place on a rack, who lost himself in mires of terror and fear and the consuming goal of Adam, brother, I will save you, stopped recognizing the difference between earth and hell, after a while. After the birthday he spent hovering (shivering, shuddering) over the hospice bed of another man, an older man, whose eyes were still green and whose freckles had faded back into his face and whose hair had frosted all its colour away.
The angel (full of Grace and Graced with unfathomable gentleness) had startled, had looked him (who hemmed and hummed and rocked and cried for the flatline on the shining monitor) in the eyes, and had said, “Sam. Sam Winchester,” and had choked on whatever else he wanted to say, mouth twisted and eyes so horribly old that the man on the floor almost felt like he could remember his own youth.
There had been a girl, in the room wrapped in shadowy angel’s wings. A woman with grey hair; a child with old and wrinkled eyes, holding on to
you’re my brother, Dean, and I’d die for you
Dean’s paper thin hands. She looked up and followed the angel’s eyes, but her face was blank when they looked on the man (who was sad without knowing why, who was lost in an echo of something so far away, something that was
looming over him, his brother, grown so big and so warm and so very safe, scooping the last of the cereal into a small plastic bowl
everything that he had lost, and here it was, the world’s ending, and wasn’t it just a joke that he knew--somehow, knowledge sewn into his mind by his cruel god--that there were a thousand years of birthdays still stretching on before him).
After that birthday, the Devil’s promise didn’t really matter anymore. Sam lost himself in the ennui of damnation.
--.
Category: AU from the end of 5.22, gen, or squint-if-you-want slash
Warnings: (highlight) language, torture, graphic stream of consciousness, grammar that has been murdered and then desecrated, and character death from old age
Words: ~6800
Summary: Lucifer has found the cracks in the Cage, and once a year every year, he slips Sam through for a day of watching Dean.
AN: Title from Edgar Bower' The Stoic: For Laura Von Courten.
They fell together, the four brothers (who are two by blood, two by ancient bond), into a world of fear and ice. Sam gasped when he hit the bottom of the pit--or were they falling still?--on the flat of his back, and gaped for air that refused to fill his lungs.
“Adam,” Sam wheezed, but the words wouldn’t quite fit around the clog in his throat, a rushing chill that clawed at the edges of his gut, scrabbling for leverage. Adam stood before him--no, not Adam, Michael, the fury of so many lonely years shining in his eyes--arm stretched, fingers tightened, head bowed in a stance Sam knew well. He fell to his knees, spine bent by the million-year weight of Michael’s will, and coughed, choking and suffocating, black spots growing like tumours over his eyes. Sharp lances shredded through Sam’s mind, an alien will disentangling from his own, being torn away with neither grace nor care
and he listens to the screaming in the distance, through the static buzzing in his ears, and the horrible sound of a throat tearing itself to pieces.
“See that, Sam.” Michael looked up at Sam (Sam hunched over, Sam near blinded by all the breaths he couldn’t breathe) through eyes narrowed by Adam’s pinched eyebrows. “That, that is Satan spilling from your gut. Are you not a lucky child.”
Light speared from Sam’s mouth, become a poisonous sprawl of limbs, arms lengthening, bending at soft elbows, clutching at Sam wherever they could, twisting a dozen fingers through his hair. A wing flapped, cutting the corners of his lips with feathers thin like razors; a King’s imperious head adorned with an overturned crown and a smile of pride and despair forced its way out, mouth gnashing and outraged; and then, with the last lash of a reptilian tail sliding over his tongue and out, it was over.
Sam curled in on himself, breathing deep and coughing in a failed attempt to clear the oily taste of Lucifer from his mouth. He barely noticed Michael slithering away from Adam as sweetly as a diver slipping beneath the water’s edge, but he fought his way to his feet to hold Adam up by his shoulders as awareness fell over his eyes.
They dropped to their knees together, heads hanging, exhausted by fighting and by falling through the earth and beyond it. The cage was cold and scything sharp, and Sam felt the knife’s edge of a bone slipping beneath the skin of his knee, but he was tired.
He was so fucking tired.
The Cage was vast, held above Hell and between the planes of time, stretching Sam’s thought through a grinding sieve and distorting his hands (stretching and twisting like taffy, though they felt nothing) as he looked on them, lying on his lap, still sore with Dean’s blood.
“Holy shit.”
The words, drawn out and terrified, twisted and shook through Sam’s head. He looked up and saw Adam, looking down. Through the Cage.
Gaping chasms were rent around them, half-covered by spires of ice and glowing with the far-off warmth of Hellfire. Sam clawed at Adam’s shoulder. They shivered together in the steaming chill.
Sam smiled and said, “It’s okay, Adam.”
Sam smiled and lied because he remembered a voice that sounded like the crackle of the Impala’s radio as it said, not all that long ago and yet an eternity away, it’s okay, Sammy, it’s okay, I’m here, it’s okay, I’m still here.
A legion of screams flamed above them, in the pantheon of their Hell, but they didn’t raise their eyes. Even the shadows Lucifer and Michael cast were too bright to look upon.
--
They grew bored. Sam had hoped, but--they grew bored.
(And this, this was a thing he could do for his brother, and feel that racing, that burning and all-consuming, Winchester pride fill up his veins before it spilled out into the open air.)
It was only ever Sam who wronged them, Heaven’s fire and oil of the apocalypse (and where--Sam had heard that before, but where--), after all.
Adam huddled beside Sam, below Sam, forgotten, and he looked cold and alone and so terrified. Sam tracked him with his eyes until he lost them, somewhere, somehow, and after that he counted time by the measured in and out of Adam’s breath.
When Sam started screaming, he lost track of Adam completely.
--
And then, one day (after a thousand years and a hundred thousand screams and a few scarce beats of silence) a voice broke through the quiet snick snick snick of breaking bones. Sam jumped, hissed in surprise, and mourned how easily his peace was shattered--just a few words, a voice (not his own, his own was broken) filling in the silence that had followed in the wake of his acceptant understanding.
“Sam,” said Light, said the Morning and the Rising Dawn, while Glory (always at Light’s side, always there and waiting and too fierce to bow His head to look at Sam) smiled so slow. “Sam, I have found a path for you, for a gift, a present for my most precious vessel, and though you broke my trust, Sam, I will give this to you freely. I will give this to you once an Earthly year, on May the Second, and this I shall give you until the ending of Time.”
Sam startled to feel warmth slide smooth across his skin, Light’s voice fading and whisking away; fading, just a whisper through the cracks, and Sam was left standing alone, an impression snuck upon the earth like winter wind slipping through a closed window’s splintered frame.
--
On his birthday--his twenty-ninth, in the count kept by the middle world--Lucifer the Morningstar gave Sam the gift of the earth, a gift Lucifer had once been used to promising (though never before had he a chance to deliver, not really, not like this, to one so happy to recieve). It was a favour, or so the Devil smiled, done for the love he still bore for his vessel that he couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried, divorce himself from, but Sam knew--had to know, had to remember--it was only to make it all the harder to come back.
The stars spun quietly over his head. Summer air, and he couldn’t breathe it in fast enough.
(One year, one whole year, and yet a hundred years and more, filled with a voice that called to him softly, lowly, in the brightness, in the cold that misted high with blood, and--)
The stars spun quietly in the darkness of the night sky. Summer air, hazy and thick with heat, sprawled lazily down his throat, climbed into his lungs and weighted him down with warmth.
This lesson he learned in a world twice removed, in (remember--Stanford, the place he was reborn and found what it was to live and then died a very different death) his freshman year at university--contrast gives birth to context, the killer of apathy and the prologue to understanding.
It was strange, that the Cage could ever be anything but (death and dying, horror born to its most stripped state) every fear that ever was, but Sam had been silent, hadn’t he? Towards the end, he had hushed right down and forgotten what it was to scream in pain. Clever solution, this. Once an earthly year, he was to be shown stark contrast--he was to be gifted a day of watching Dean.
He had fallen, so far and so deep that he hadn’t thought of ever seeing light again. (How he was proven so very wrong, laughed the Morningstar, who had fallen so far with him.) Two brothers, casting off their vessels, had raged without consequence until Lucifer (Light and Ice) said, “Enough, brother.”
The angels had turned, had seen Sam, and had smiled their terrible smiles.
(This Sam remembered, could trail through his snapping mind. And this too: Adam crouched low, the pawn forgotten by those that crowned themselves kings, as they turned to their proclaimed traitor at court. It was enough, it had to be enough, that Sam suffered alone, family above all, protect him, the younger brother, protect.)
This time he was granted here, well, it was granted because he had stopped screaming. Years ago, maybe even decades--a timeless expanse, stretching from the banging explosion at the creation of the cosmos until the very ending of the earth itself, when the space between the atoms grew too far to support the indulgence of the earth, all at once in every moment, in a cage that existed beyond it all--Sam had stopped screaming. He knew that, could remember it, standing now on the grit of pavement under a streetlamp shining, with a dim yellow glow that was not at all close to bright, and flickering in a way that had nothing at all to do with ghosts.
(Might be due to him, to the Boy King, the whisper of Satan through the cracks.)
It was a happy birthday for Sam, here in Lafeyette, Indiana. Through the windows of a cozy suburban home, Dean ate supper with Lisa and Ben, a surrogate family for a surrogate life, but still probably better than anything Dean could have had with Sam still breathing beside him. Dean smiled just a tiny bit, and stared down at the table in a way Sam knew--Dean was remembering, was mourning, and that was okay. Dean would be okay.
For his twenty-ninth birthday, Sam was given the gift of resolve. It flowed warmly through his veins and edged away the terror he had so long ago grown accustomed to.
That warmth had almost started to feel normal by the time Sam felt the tug (like fishhooks; like talons made of bone and ice) pull at his gut. Sucking him down, into the deep, squinting against the light and shivering in the cold he had once grown used to.
“Well, Sam,” one of them said (and it didn’t really matter which). “Welcome back.”
“Now let’s see how you show us thank you.”
Dean, and he is okay, and he will adjust and nothing in the world could have given him strength like that.
(He would scream, yes, but that was for later, when Memory didn’t burnish in his mind so brightly and all he could remember was that once he knew warmth, but it was no more, in this place of terror.)
Sam smiled. Said nothing, and smiled, as his blood pittered against the ice.
--
Time passed strangely, in the Cage, in the Pit that lay beyond reason and resolve. Time snapped and slowed and did not follow Sam’s counting of breath to breath, nor beat to beat, when he had a body to count those with.
(But Adam, Sam could always track time by following his stuttering cries and endless streaming consciousness from moment to moment to moment, and if they ever knew, if Glory and Light and the fear in Sam’s heart ever knew, they would take Adam’s voice away. So Sam lay still, played their games, and counted in his head. One, for my eighth birthday I got the sickest bike, two, the first exam I ever failed made me cry for two hours straight, three I always wanted brothers, Sam, and you’re better than any I ever dreamt.)
Sam fell quiet, at that last, and marvelled, and marvelled.
--
He shivered, Sam did, in the air that lay strange against him. His skin fell flat (gooseflesh gone, hiding, strange, very strange indeed) and his fingers bled pink inside his skin, and where had the yellow white of his skin gone? Static rushed through his veins.
But those were small things, little trifles, and really, Sam thought as he stared (wondering trick or trap, or perhaps the best gift of all) across the street to a man gathering his things off a lawn. The sun swallowed the pale from the man’s face and spat freckles across his nose, and something about it--Sam knew, on the tip of his (whole, intact and whole and so very much there for the first time in an age) tongue, this man’s name, and
a motel room--that’s it, motel--when Sam had been no taller than the television set he sat before, and there were soft sound of snores behind him, and a thought of finally, of he will be so proud, as little Sam (young Sam, Sam before the world’s ending) crept up to his older, smaller, brother and tucked him into bed, tugged his boots off to lay them beside the radiator and pulled the sheets up around his face and
there they were, the freckles, and Sam knew those freckles, and he knew those eyes, always old and often sad and sometimes just a little bit happy--Dean.
Sam took a deep breath, and it felt clean inside his lungs. It didn’t hurt, and Sam laughed at that; at how good it felt to breathe without the stitch of scarring pulling unevenly inside his chest.
“Yeah, you’re technically here, Dean, but you’re never actually with us. God, you never let yourself move on, do you?”
Sound rushed through his ears and crackled, and came back to him. A woman, perched on the threshold of the house, crying and yelling and very very sad. The man--Dean, Sam’s brother who is Dean--hoisted a few duffle bags on his shoulders and grabbed the handle of a small suitcase.
“I told you, Lisa,” he said, face turned down and shoulders hunched. “I fucking told you. You knew what you were getting into, or would’ve, if you fucking listened.”
“Yeah, you ‘told me,’ but Dean, we both know that I did not fucking understand, and you didn’t actually try to explain.”
The woman, voice rising and echoing down the street (curtains twitching and neighbours hurrying indoors), rubbed a hand over her face. Kept it there.
“It’s Sammy’s birthday, Lisa. What the fuck did you expect? A couple’a Oscar worthy monologues and hug to make me all fucking better?”
“It doesn’t matter what I expected. All that matters, Dean, is that I can’t raise my kid in a house with an alcoholic who can’t dry himself up for a whole week before his own brother’s birthday.”
“Look, I’m sorry, Lisa, all right? I’m fucking sorry that I’m too fucking weak to deal with Sam still being worse than dead.”
“Oh, spare me the self pity, Dean. You’re not the only one to lose a brother. And I’m sorry for you, I am, and I’m sorry Sam’s gone, but I can’t let you stay here anymore. This is the first time in nine days you’ve been sober enough to drive, and I did a lot of thinking in those nine days. And you know what I thought, Dean? That I owe it to Ben, and that I owe it to myself. This isn’t healthy, what we’re doing, and I thought I could fix you, but I can’t.”
The man--freckles, green eyes, Dean, brother--sighed heavily and shook his head, shook the cobwebs out and away.
“I get it. Look, I’ll just go, okay? And I won’t bother you again. Family’s everything, I get it, and I can’t fit in here--I get that too. Just tell Ben I--tell him I’m sorry I won’t be around anymore.”
“I’ll tell him. Dean?”
“Yeah?”
“You have someone to stay with?”
“Yeah. Well. If I hope and I pray enough, I think I know someone who can help me out.”
“Good, that’s good. Take care--just, be careful.”
Dean smiled a little smile and said, “You take care of your boy.” He looked up and, almost as an afterthought (but his voice was heavy with meaning), said, “Sam would’ve been thirty today, you know.”
“I know.”
Sam sat on the curb and listened to a familiar rumble, smelled dark fumes, and watched the Impala roar away on the road, before he was sucked back down (far down, forever down) into the Pit.
--
A whisper and a laugh, a snapple crackle
STOP.
Sam giggled, rhymed in his head, and hushed in curiosity as his arm swung back and forth (and back and forth) like a pendulum beside the altar he was pinned to.
Blackness ate his eyes away, and The Morning and The Dawn and The Glory sighed and said, “It is time again.”
--
Sam came back to himself humming, humming deep in a throat he thought he had lost (in the wild, in the light bright Light, in penance and for the promise of Glory, and before his eyes floated a million little sparks, little flints of ice and iron, lazy on the passing drifts that rose forever on the updrafts from beneath the Cage--but
no Cage, no Hellfire glow gliding over his skin, colouring but never warming, just little motes of ice and flint--no, dust, tickling at the back of his breathing throat, and beneath him, tiling just on the wrong shade of yellow, sticking in a tacky mess to the pressed side of his face--
smell of coffee, bitter black and strong, smashing against the floor and that had been for another, not for him, not for Sam, because this cup of coffee was utilitarian and simple, nothing like how Sam drank it, but there he was, dropping a cup of coffee he had never planned to drink, and why had he dropped it? Arm in a white slung cast and a father lying on the floor and no and oh, that’s why the coffee, the black coffee pooling on the floor, running along the edge of his jeans where he kneeled, chilling his skin
but Sam knew now that that was not what a real chill was, beside the point, against the point.
A voice startled him out of (nothing, not doing anything, not a single thing, promise promise, only ever thoughts of you, of Light, of Glory, not Glory never Glory, sorry) his thoughts.
“I guess I had to come today because it’s my brother’s birthday, and for the first time in a long while, I felt like maybe I wanted to share his story with someone else. And I guess because for the first time in a long while, I felt like maybe I should drown myself in my good friend Jack and I, uh, just got some news that makes me think that might not be such a good idea.
“Spent a lot of time in the last year doing some stuff I’m pretty familiar with, but I guess I was a little more reckless than I used to be, and. Just got a phone call a couple months ago that I knocked a girl up. So.”
He cleared his throat and Sam watched him hang his head and rush through to, “Gonna be a girl, and I couldn’t--so. Gonna dry myself up, and I was doing pretty well, but my, my friend who’s been helping me out lately ain’t around today, bit busy being the new sheriff in town, and uh. It’s my baby brother’s birthday today, and he’s dead, and I miss him and I don’t really feel like missing him, but I want even less to fall off the wagon, so.”
Someone else, a lady, a lovely lady with withered hair and lines crowding around her small eyes, said, “Do you want to tell us about your brother, Dean?”
There was a small silence, and no screaming to follow it, and the light was dim and dark and notlight, the air warm like the promise of Hellfire.
“Yeah, I guess I do. ‘Cause everyone should know what Sam was like. I mean, just, there’s a lot of people who owe him a lot. And none of them got to tell him thanks, before he died.”
Wood creaked and groaned
(and splintered into edges that crept scary-slow under his skin, and shed little flakes as they made their way to his veins, through his veins, shredding the path to his heart wide, and--)
Wooden chairs creaked and groaned, people (pale, yellowed faces, tanned faces, faces dark and yet wan with stress and sleepless nights of struggling) shifting where they sat and leaning forward, a courtesy, a curiosity.
“Sam’s my little brother, and I’ve always taken care of him. Since I was small, I’ve taken care of him. Mom died when he was a baby, and my dad--his job took up a lot of time, and he wasn’t around a lot when we needed him to be, so I spent a lot of time minding Sam. And it’s just been, uh, weird, without him. ‘Cause it’s always been, look out for Sam, Dean. Look out for your brother.
“Guess I didn’t end up doing such a good job of that, really.”
The man who looked so tired, who leaned and swayed, obviously exhausted for all that he looked so much more well-rested than Sam could remember seeing him
--and how do you know, Sam, who is he to you, this stranger, when I am closer to you than any other has been, for I have crawled inside your shell and curled beside your soul--
GET OUT, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT, THIS DAY IS MINE.
The man who looked so tired curled his mouth and pinched his eyes, just a bit, just so the green crouched behind clumped-with-tears eyelashes, cleared his throat (again), and continued.
“It wasn’t, you know, all about taking care, though. I mean, there was a lot of that, but we, uh. Well, he was my brother, right? I knew him better than I never knew anyone, and we were closer than anything.
“I remember when Sam was, what, seven or eight, we were staying in this little town just south of Des Moines, by the time Mother’s Day rolled around. And Sam, he was used to not having our Mom around. I wasn’t, but he never knew any different, you know. So on Mother’s Day, I wasn’t in a good place. Wasn’t exactly a joy to be around. And Sam, he followed me around like a puppy, like always, and at home, I was always watching him, to make sure, you know, the boogeyman didn’t get him or anything.”
The room chuckled (laughs bouncing, echoing dully, crawling inside Sam’s ears and scraping, digging down and down and pushing through to the place called Memory, and
a room so dark, a dream so strange that all the air rushed out of his lungs and dragged along with it his soul, he could see it, shining white and glowing, slipping and sliding away, slithering into the mouth of a foul, black clothed monster, before
BANG
it fled, leaving his breath behind, and Sam, you have such strange dreams, Sam, such very strange nightmares).
Sam laughed, too, because jokes were always more funny when you were In The Know, and Sam was, because this he knew, this man and that memory, and the one was Dean (his brother, whom he loved) and the other was once his day job, night job, any time at all job (rhythm and a tune snaking through his brain).
Dean, his brother, Dean, continued.
“He spent all his time with me, when he could, in those days, when we were both still little, and he must’ve known why I was so, uh, grumpy. Anyway. At recess, Sammy marches up to me and pretty much throws his Mother’s Day craft at me--you know, elementary schools, always doing shitty little crafts, and Sam didn’t often have a place to put all them--and I’m there with all the other kids in my class. And I tried really hard to be a normal punk-ass kid talking to his annoying little brother, just for once, just on that one day when I was always so unhappy, but he looked so damn proud of thinking to give me that ugly clay mug, I couldn’t stop from smiling.
“‘Course, I lost all my hard-earned cred with the other kids instantly, and I don’t think they ever stopped calling me ‘Momma Dean’ until we moved away, but hey, we Winchesters look out for our own first, you know? So that didn’t matter; not to me.”
This story, this he remembered very well, from a distant land in the sprawling mess of his mind, a thing from Long Ago and Far Far Away (and that itself, another thing to remember, from that place of smoky rooms and soft mattresses and a brother who could mouth along to every word that thinned out of the shining screen).
“When we got home, Sammy made me make hot cocoa on the stovetop, and he poured it from the pot into the clay mug--which I know for a fact his teacher told him not to use for drinking, the lying little shit--and he spilled half of it over my hands, and how I don’t still have the burns, I don’t know. Damn thing leaked like a sieve all over my pants, and it tasted like dirt and the paint dissolved into the cocoa until it looked like a slushie, but you know what, for the first time since my mom died--”
pinned to a burning ceiling
“--it was Mother’s Day, and I was happy. And I guess, that’s who Sam was. Sometimes I wanted to throttle him, sometimes I just couldn’t understand him, but he was always--he always wanted us to be happy, even if he went about it in the dumbest ways. And he was never afraid to chase what made him happy. Not like I was. I admired that, even when I thought I hated him for it.”
Dean shook his head, wiped his eyes, and looked up (even though Sam knew, knew like he knew the feel of ice crushing through his veins and slushing around his aching heart, that Dean should really be looking down) as he said, “Better appreciate this, Sammy. ‘Cause no way in hell--” a sharp breath, stuttered slowly out. “On earth. No way on earth am I going to put myself through all this sharing and caring again, not even for you.”
Sam did appreciate, and he smiled, because he knew a lie when he heard one--the Devil was a lover of truths, for all he twisted them between his deceptive fingers.
--
(It was many years of timeless impossibility after that visit, that birthday of Sam’s when he remembered so much, before Sam’s screaming softened into boredom, and he wept, for this was a thing he had never thought he would ask: why did he have to go Up There just when he got used to Down Below?
He gabbled that aloud, babbled that he wanted his mind and his brother and the warmth of the earth forever, or he wanted to never leave this place of ice where he could forget and forget until everything was gone. Beneath his overturned crown, the Morningstar smiled so wide his face was severed in two.)
--
A man sat upon a rack and smiled, and hummed and hawed at the wonder of his flesh (and screamed as Light pulled it to pieces
and screamed into songs, because this was Glory, it was Right, it was Clean, and the man knew that he was dirty, felt the sickness in his blood, smiled as it ran away from him, as the Light pulled it away) pound of flesh, paying a pound of flesh, and
man in a cave, watching the play of shadows on the wall--no, impossible (where did that come from?) there are no, were no, there will be no shadows on the wall (light too bright, blinding white, cast around him)
--maybe there is a shadow under his feet (don’t look, can’t look, don’t look away or the light will spear through your eyes until all you see is red and that is sickness)--
too much white bright light for shadows, and so there are no (were no) shadows on the wall, and there is not a man to watch them dance and wonder where am I and so the man does not wonder, has never wondered.
The problem solved (has been solved, no more problem, please, please, see? No more problem, all fixed, all better, please--be quiet and that’s how they’ll know who will know? No one, no know no) the man who was no longer a man (given that up, bled away) quieted and sat and listened to the drip, drip, dripping (and the shatter scatter as the ice in his veins became the ice on the floors, on the altar of bones) he hushed and quieted.
He quieted, and stilled.
Light frowned and Glory dimmed, and stilled along with him.
“Sam,” they said (but who is Sam, and where and what is Sam but death) with voices that bled through the air like diamonds scraping along glass, cutting and slicing and so very hard and cold, “Sam, it is time.”
They gripped him with their hands of ice and fire, and they set him high up, so high, upon the ledge that wails, has always wailed, hope and freedom, and green and outside.
A room, with walls, and so dark he strained to see, to pull into focus the dark shapes that wriggled in the dark, and the man thought Adam? for that name he knew, he lived with, and he knew that name meant Duty and Honour and Your Responsibility and Little Brother, all these things, and some part of him,
some secret, silly part,
told himself that yes, there was always this brother here beside him, and he had also had this blood-brother, and Once Upon A Time, he and his brother had been closer than Light and Glory could ever hope to be
(once, he said this, by accident, aloud--truly, accident, didn’t mean it (did)--and he didn’t remember much of the shearing screams that tore through the air afterwards)
and Adam was his brother, and so he owed him the bond of love, and that was Good, as it Should Be.
Thunder cracked through his ears (rang through his ears, and Grace, this was Grace flooding the room) and thunder said, “I’m sorry. I should have been here sooner.”
Another voice, a softer voice, said, “‘S fine, Cas. You’re here, and that’s fine.”
(That voice was warm with the weight of a thousand eons of something stronger than love, and the man who sat and watched in the darkness, unseen and unheard, felt warm, and remembered that he had once loved this feeling--warmth--and this voice--love.)
“Is she sleeping?”
The man’s eyes swelled and grew as they had not since,
well,
until he could make out a bed in a soft blue room and a human and an angel (full of Grace, full of thunder and lightening) who both stared at a thing on the bed, a tiny human, who stretched and strained her arms at Grace until he plucked her up (so gentle, please don’t, be careful, please leave her be--) and stared at her small face and wide, unfocused eyes.
The man (who had heard himself called Sam, once) saw how at peace the man who had the voice Sam felt he must at least once have known was, and so Sam, too, relaxed his shoulders and felt safe.
“Was just going to give her a story, you know. Just like Sammy. Can never get her to sleep without some kind of story. Hell, she’s worse’n Sammy.”
He looked at the little girl in the angel’s arms and smiled wistfully, with eyes that said they were wandering far through memory, before he continued.
“Soft rock just wakes her up, and anything else just makes her laugh.”
The angel hitched the girl up on his hip and rifled his hand through her halo of hair.
“I think I would like to hear a story,” the angel said, and his voice was soft, was fond, and really
(--Sam thought, and his brain sparked and whirred and oh, but that was nice, to finish a thought, trail it from start to conclusion, and to be free, to have time to do so, time and time, yes there will be time, though Sam does not wear his trousers rolled and it has been so many years since he has eaten a peach and--Sam luxuriated in tumbling his thoughts around his mind, and there was no pain that shocked him away from them--)
and really, that angel was nothing like an angel at all, though his skin was lined with veins and his veins were filled with glowing Grace and Light and the lamplight behind his head folded over his halo and lit the edges of his black hair on fire. This angel was not an angel, and the black wings that furled with soft feathers around the room, tenting in the warmth, were not angel wings. For he was truly good. This was something new, something different.
Sam tilted his head and startled at the upturn of his lips.
Heat pressed down in the room, and heat choked around Sam’s throat, and this was glorious, he thought, as heat soothed at the torn edging of his melting lungs.
“Tell her about your brother, Dean,” the angel said. “It’s Sam’s birthday today.”
The man nodded and smiled and wiped at the spill that crept down his face (and Sam knew those spills, knew them, knew how to watch them--racing raindrops down a car windshield while rutted asphalt fled under the cars tires--as they tore up Adam’s face; Adam, who always crouched,
lying like a crumbling statue, a decaying jut of stone at his feet,
at the foot of the altar. Adam, who always watched Sam, and when Sam had eyes--not always, never always, but sometimes, and sometimes even enough--Sam watched Adam back, and Adam begged for Glory and Light, not knowing inevitability like Sam did)--
The man nodded and smiled and wiped at the tears that crept down his face and said, “Sam’d be thirty-six today.”
He reached out for the little girl, and she went to him with open arms, pudgy fingers wriggling at his face. She prodded at the freckles on the man’s face--a small boy, Sam boy little Sam as a boy, pressing damp-with-bathwater fingertips to another boy’s freckles, and giggling and giggling and laughing as he pulled the flesh away piece by piece, and drank the other boy’s screams and
NO, YOU WILL NOT TAKE THIS
pressing fingertips to another boy’s freckles, and they giggled together, a deep voice laughed with them, tugged blankets over their heads, murmured heavy prayers over them and kissed their hair where it peaked above the edge of the blankets.
She prodded at the freckles on the man’s face and he asked her, “Hey, you want to hear about your Uncle Sammy?”
The girl’s hair sprang about her face and gleamed dully as she nodded. The man with freckles and green eyes and that aura of comfort sat them down, shifted her against his side, and patted her cheek.
“Pay attention to this one, rug-rat. This one is an important story.”
“‘Mportant,” she said, with voice thin and reedy. “I wanna hear ‘bout Uncle Sammy.”
“Damn straight, you do. ‘Cause your Uncle Sammy was a hero, and he was a better hero than any other hero I’ve told you about. I want you to remember this, Mary. Okay? I want you to always remember that Sam Winchester was your uncle, and that Sam Winchester saved the whole world.”
The angel sat down in a chair beside the bed.
“Not your brother alone, Dean,” the angel said. “It was all of us. It was Free Will. It was a brother who loved his family enough throughout all the mistakes they made that he inspired everlasting devotion, and it was a father who raised his sons to be heroes.”
“And the soldier who turned his back on everything he once believed in to follow an alcoholic and an addict on the shittiest chances I ever saw.”
“Those are the best stories,” the girl said. “When you think the end ‘s gonna be sad, but it isn’t.”
“But it was, Mary. It was sad. Because your Uncle Sammy saved the whole world, and he died.”
The man turned to the angel and the angel nodded, wing bending down to blanket the man and his girl.
Sam--the whisper of the Morningstar through the cracks in the Cage--sat and leaned into the man’s leg, because already he could feel the shrivelling in his gut that twisted ice into his veins, and already he was thinking of the ice and light and Glory that was coming back for him--would always come back for him--and Sam wanted to wrap himself up in this man who spoke soft and yet hard, who pushed Memory to the front of his mind from where it had hidden for so long, in the Cage.
But it was still his birthday, and the Morningstar had promised him this once an earthly year, so Sam sat and listened and felt safe and warm, and this was enough. It was suppose to destroy him, and maybe it sometimes did, but this year, Sam saw his brother Dean, and his brother Cas, and his little niece Mary, and they were all smiling, and Sam felt strength run through him faster than any demon’s rush of power.
On the day of Sam Winchester’s thirty-sixth birthday, he listened to his brother tell a story, and he was four and six and seven and at home, curled beneath scratchy sheets, and he was nine and scared of the monster in his closet, thirteen and bored, twenty-seven and shivering in the wake of addiction and in so much need of distraction. And he was a thousand years of blood and fear and remembering again at last.
--
The promise made by the Morningstar to his human vessel was kept. On and on and on. Once an earthly year. This was the promise, and it was kept. It was kept right up until the cliffs crumbled into the sea and the continents were smashed together again, burning forth a new desert world. It was kept unto the dying of time, when fire bled from the heavens and the air was full with the thudding of hooves.
Yes, the promise was kept, but the man who gurgled on his place on a rack, who lost himself in mires of terror and fear and the consuming goal of Adam, brother, I will save you, stopped recognizing the difference between earth and hell, after a while. After the birthday he spent hovering (shivering, shuddering) over the hospice bed of another man, an older man, whose eyes were still green and whose freckles had faded back into his face and whose hair had frosted all its colour away.
The angel (full of Grace and Graced with unfathomable gentleness) had startled, had looked him (who hemmed and hummed and rocked and cried for the flatline on the shining monitor) in the eyes, and had said, “Sam. Sam Winchester,” and had choked on whatever else he wanted to say, mouth twisted and eyes so horribly old that the man on the floor almost felt like he could remember his own youth.
There had been a girl, in the room wrapped in shadowy angel’s wings. A woman with grey hair; a child with old and wrinkled eyes, holding on to
you’re my brother, Dean, and I’d die for you
Dean’s paper thin hands. She looked up and followed the angel’s eyes, but her face was blank when they looked on the man (who was sad without knowing why, who was lost in an echo of something so far away, something that was
looming over him, his brother, grown so big and so warm and so very safe, scooping the last of the cereal into a small plastic bowl
everything that he had lost, and here it was, the world’s ending, and wasn’t it just a joke that he knew--somehow, knowledge sewn into his mind by his cruel god--that there were a thousand years of birthdays still stretching on before him).
After that birthday, the Devil’s promise didn’t really matter anymore. Sam lost himself in the ennui of damnation.
--.