Chapter 9: Friends in Low Places
Notes: Please don't hate me.
Everything is motherfucking perfect. Well. Almost.
“I’m sorry, Baby.” Dean croons, as he strokes her steering wheel. “This is gonna hurt.”
He guns the engine, getting her up to top speed and then he yanks the wheel around, launching the car into a ditch. For a brief second she flies, and then she lands with a scream of shattered glass and crunching metal. Dean climbs his way out carefully, shrugging the shrapnel out of his flesh and healing the wounds left behind.
He stretches out, quietly mourns the loss of his iPod, resolves to steal himself another one as soon as possible and then wanders off into the distance, singing under his breath as he goes.
“Livin' eeeeeeasy
Lurrvin' free
Season ticket on a one waaaaaay ride
Askin' nothin'
Leave me beeeee…”
And okay, he didn’t need to crash the car. He could have just dumped her somewhere, but that’s not the point. To quote the Joker, “it’s about sending a message.” Old Dean, he couldn’t have done this if his life depended on it. New Dean, he did it just to prove a point. Your version of Dean is gone, don’t try and get him back.
He walks about a half mile through some woods, has a bit of a fight with a bear. Well, fight is maybe an exaggeration. There’s some mutual growling on both sides, a brandishing of the Blade that just seems to make the bear pissed. It takes black eyes and an unearthly howl to get the thing to back off.
He walks for 6 hours and ends up in Concordia where he boosts some old hunk of junk. It’s a patchwork of colors, seems to be mostly held together with duct tape, and is the sort of vehicle that Dean Winchester, registered car snob, would never be seen dead in. Which is why it’s perfect.
He drives out west for a while, stopping at the next mid-sized town. He was planning on going further but the car radio is broken and he burned through the previous owner’s hideous fucking CD collection in about half an hour. Maroon 5 can lick his fucking ass, is all he has to say on that matter.
He picks up some decent CDs at a thrift store and carries on his journey in a slightly better mood. He has a goal in mind, but he wants a few days out on the open road first. He’d take a whole fucking month, a year even, but there are time pressures. He’s gone with the wind and he still has to stick to a fucking schedule. Bullshit. But at least this one is his choice. No more sitting and rotting, waiting to get chained to the wall.
He swings out in the complete wrong direction for two days, driving from dusk ‘til dawn with short breaks in between. He has to, because the world sucks and even though he’s a demon he still gets random itches, still gets stiff and uncomfortable sitting in the same position for hours on end, and most helpfully, his legs still cramp if he ignores the signs and tries to drive for too long without stopping. It takes a bit longer, mind, but it’s still a pain in the ass. He wonders idly if Abaddon ever suffered the indignity of having to slam on the brakes and practically fall out of a car because her legs had seized up without a word of fucking warning. Okay, with a lot of warning, but he ignored it because he thought, ha, I’m a demon. I’m not going to get cramp.
Famous. Last. Words.
He stops for the final time about an hour out of his destination and does a thorough sweep of his surroundings. He wants to make sure he hasn’t been followed. He hasn’t seen any sign of Sam or Cas, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t tailing him. They’ll certainly have been trying. He draws a blank and is about to triumphantly return to his little shit-heap when a voice stops him.
“Hello, Squirrel.”
“Crowley.” Dean acknowledges.
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“You said you’d be back for me.”
“You listen; it’s your greatest feature.”
“What do you want?”
“Just going to skip the foreplay?”
“I’m in a hurry.”
“I could tell by the way you spent two days driving in the other direction before you doubled back this way.”
“You’ve been following me.”
“I believe the phrase is ‘no duh’.”
“You didn’t tell Sam and Cas where I was heading, did you?”
“No. Their interests don’t happen to coincide with mine.”
“Good.”
“Surprised it took you so long to leave the nest.”
“Yeah, well, they trapped me in the bunker.”
“Awfully rude.”
Dean makes a noncommittal grunt.
“So, any reason you’re so close to the entrance to Heaven?
“I don’t-”
“Don’t even try it, Dean.” Crowley says in response to his who me innocent tone.
“Yeah, okay. I’m going upstairs. Why’s it your business?”
“You’ll never get in.”
“Watch me.”
“The entrance is warded.”
“That’s not going to be a problem.”
“It doesn’t matter what petty larceny skills you think you have, you’re no match for angels.”
“I have a way with locks and seals. Trust me.”
“Assuming I thought you could succeed, what’s the plan? It’s Metatron you’re after, I presume.”
Dean tells him his plan. Crowley laughs, open and hearty.
“It’s bold, but you’ll never do it on your own. They’ll notice, send the host after you.”
“Not if someone arranges a distraction.”
“You want my help?”
“And you want mine, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“You want to make a deal?”
“I’m a demon, you can’t get me to sign one of your dumb contracts.”
“I’m not doing anything with you otherwise. Color me suspicious, but I don’t trust you.”
Dean shrugs.
“Help me or don’t. You think this is a suicide mission and you need me for something. That means your only two options are get me to do whatever it is before I raid Heaven- which you know I won’t, or you invest the time and expendable two bit demons to keep me kicking until I can repay you.”
Crowley grinds his teeth. He can see Dean’s point. Doesn’t mean he has to like it.
“And if I help you, you’ll do my favor?”
“Depends what it is.”
“So you want me to help you on the off chance that afterwards you fancy doing as you’re told?”
“Seems that way, doesn’t it.”
“Not good enough.”
“Fine. I’ll do it so long as it isn’t too apocalyptical and it doesn’t hurt Sam or Cas.”
“Still carrying a torch for them?”
Dean shrugs.
“Not very demonic of you.”
“I don’t think I’ve gone full demon, yet.”
Crowley’s black-eyed gaze sweeps over him
“Not quite yet, no. How very dull of you.”
“So do we have a deal?”
“Let me just write up a-”
Dean slicks his eyes over, pulling up the full force of the darkness that he can feel writhing and twisting under his skin. The phantom form that has been escaping into his shadow and his waking dreams uncurls itself, towering over them both and grinning with jagged sword teeth. The predawn gloom sharpens, highlighting the crooked angles of Dean’s face and fire crackles deep within his lungs as he hisses out the words “Do. We. Have. A. Deal?”
“We do.”
“Excellent.”
Dean doesn’t bother to threaten vengeance on him if he doesn’t deliver. Crowley has just seen the specter of Dean’s true form, terrifying even though it’s still developing and solidifying as his humanity is burned away. That’s all the threat he needs.
*
There’s only one angel guarding the entrance to Heaven. Arrogant bastards. He’s sitting on a bench trying to look unobtrusive and managing anything but. Dean’s amazed no one’s called the cops on him yet, sketchy dude hanging around a kids park. Probably some bullshit mojo thing the angels are pulling.
The Mark is practically vibrating on his arm, can sense imminent death. It wants him to take it slow, make the angel suffer and daub himself in his blood. Luckily Dean still has enough common sense left to know that if you’re trying to break in somewhere like Heaven you don’t take the time to dance naked in the blood of the massacred guard.
He comes up behind the angel, years of fighting alongside Cas leading him to expect a trick or a trap or some sort of struggle. Turns out he overestimated this guy. The Blade carves his head off in one clean slice. The angel slumps off the bench, dying in a crumpled heap on the ground. Dean looks for the charcoaled wings but is disappointed to see none. The guy was definitely an angel, flashing blue lights zipping back and forth under his skin. Huh. Maybe it’s something to do with that spell of Metatron’s, or maybe you have to kill them with one of their own blades.
Dean leaves the body and wanders over to the sandbox. Now he understands why they didn’t bother with more than one guard. The entrance is sealed shut. He can change that easily enough though. They’ve been lazy, left the framework of the sigil dug into the sand, just the finer, more intricate details to fill in. All Dean has to do is concentrate, trust to his new way with seals and sigils to guide him.
He’s been to Heaven before so it’s not too difficult to conjure up the feel of the place and really key in on it. It takes a few minutes, but eventually he gets it. There’s a wrenching in his gut, like he’s about to vomit up every meal he’s had in the past five years, and then he can see fuzzy black lines overlaid in the sand. He fills in the missing ones carefully, stepping back and preparing to fight as he finishes the seal.
A faint white glow appears where the last line meets the first and then spreads, like rainwater through a dry riverbed, until the whole thing is aglow. There’s a small shockwave that makes Dean’s bones ache, and then the entrance is open. He slips inside, thinking of Metatron and trusting to Heavenly logic to take him to wherever the scribe of God is imprisoned.
*
“Dean Winchester. Now this is a surprise.”
Dean ignores Metatron, concentrating instead on the cell door. Except he isn’t seeing a cell. He looks past it and to the spell itself, to the latticework of glowing threads that make it up, woven together and interconnecting. This is the bit that he’s going to have the problem with. His time dismantling and reforming devils traps in the bunker was good training, but he’s not sure they’ve been enough. They had maybe a hundred threads for him to manipulate and unravel. This spell has something close to tens of thousands.
“I could have sworn I killed you.” Metatron drawls.
Dean sits down, cross legged on the floor and begins the long and slow process of finding the first thread. Once he gets that it should be simple, a matter of unpicking it until the whole thing collapses. It’s finding it that’s going to be a bitch.
“Getting brought back from the dead really ruined my emotional set piece, you know that. There’s no point killing people off if they’re just going to spring back. Cheapens it.”
“Cram it. Do you want out of here or not?” Dean snaps.
“I don’t see how sitting on the floor staring at the door is going to help.”
“Shows what you know.”
Dean reaches forwards and plucks at a thread that only he can see. The air vibrates and Metatron steps back, startled.
“What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like, genius?”
The place where the first and last threads meet is the center point of the spell, and as such is technically its strongest point. In theory, this means it should have the brightest glow. Unfortunately this whole set up is pretty strong, no obvious flaws and very few subtle ones, so it’s hard to tell which is the one particular bit he needs. It’s blinding enough looking at it that Dean can’t actually see Metatron. Which is good, because just the sound of his voice is grating, if he could see him as well, Dean would probably flip and just try and stab the cage open.
Dean spends an increasingly frantic fifteen minutes looking for the first thread before he’s forced to resort to another method. He doesn’t know how long he has until the angels work out that someone has slipped past their guard. Really, he needs to have been gone already.
He gives up his search for the origin point of the spell and now instead of looking for the strongest point, he looks for the weakest. Which isn’t saying much. The patch he locates is a few millimeters of off-white, as opposed to the blinding glow of the rest of the thing. He takes the Blade and jabs it forwards. The net of threads bends under the pressure he’s applying to it, but the Blade doesn’t manage to pierce it. Of course not, that’d be easy.
He pushes in as hard as he can and then begins to twist, like he’s trying to drive a screw into a hole that’s slightly too small. Bit by bit he feels the Blade creep forward, his progress measured in millimeters, if it’s measured at all.
“Good work. At this rate you’ll have the door open by the time we’re both dead.”
“The more you talk the less likely you are to survive this encounter, douchebag.”
“Is that what this is about, vengeance?”
Metatron doesn’t get his answer, because at that precise moment Dean feels the net give ever so slightly. He yanks the Blade out and examines the hole, two microscopic loose threads dangling where the Blade has finally worn them through. It might look like nothing significant, but it’s all that Dean needs. He grasps hold of the top one and yanks. That’s all it takes to make the entire thing crumble, threads unspooling and falling to the ground as the spell disintegrates.
By the time Metatron has realized what’s happening Dean already has him pinned. He draws the First Blade across his throat, just deep enough that a little blood wells up without letting his grace come tumbling out.
“The only reason your grace isn’t dribbling out onto the ground now is because you have something I need.”
“You want knowledge from the demon tablet? I’ll give it you, whatever you want.”
“Wrong. The spell you used to cast the angels from heaven-”
Metatron starts to laugh but the motion pushes his neck closer up against the Blade and that sobers him pretty quickly.
“I should have known this was all about Castiel. You want to know if any of his grace was left, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, today is your lucky day, Dean Winchester. How about we make a deal. I take you to your precious angel’s one remaining hope, and you let me go.”
“Seems fair.”
“How about we make this binding?”
Dean puts a little more pressure on the Blade at Metatron’s throat. He can see his grace sparking beneath the surface. It’d only take a tiny slip to release it out into the world. He wants to, so badly. Every cell in his body is screaming at him to do it, demanding that he take penance for what’s been done to him. If Metatron weren’t such a powerful enemy he’d do an Achilles, go one further even, pierce him through the ankle while he’s still alive and drag him by it, haul him across the world until he’s lacerated and bloody, until he’s suffered as much as it is possible for one being to do so. But the demon in Dean is canny, and while it wants vengeance it also wants, more than anything, to stay alive. It’s prepared to settle for killing Metatron. It is not prepared to settle for letting him go.
“No.”
“Then I won’t take you.”
Dean shrugs.
“Then I bottle up your grace and feed it to Cas to keep him going until he can find it for himself.”
“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”
“He objects to absorbing his brothers and sisters. I’m sure he’d make an exception for you, though, all the trouble you’ve caused. What’ll it be like? Do you just poof and die, or is it like being a reverse meat suit, trapped in another angel as they tap your batteries and you slowly fade into nothing?”
“You wouldn’t.” Metatron says, although privately he’s sure he’s about to die.
“I would. And I’m finding it very hard to reign myself in right now. Keep talking and die in your cell, or take me to Cas’s grace and we’ll see if the good news helps me feel any more merciful.”
<< Chapter 8 | Chapter 10 >>
Everything is motherfucking perfect. Well. Almost.
“I’m sorry, Baby.” Dean croons, as he strokes her steering wheel. “This is gonna hurt.”
He guns the engine, getting her up to top speed and then he yanks the wheel around, launching the car into a ditch. For a brief second she flies, and then she lands with a scream of shattered glass and crunching metal. Dean climbs his way out carefully, shrugging the shrapnel out of his flesh and healing the wounds left behind.
He stretches out, quietly mourns the loss of his iPod, resolves to steal himself another one as soon as possible and then wanders off into the distance, singing under his breath as he goes.
“Livin' eeeeeeasy
Lurrvin' free
Season ticket on a one waaaaaay ride
Askin' nothin'
Leave me beeeee…”
And okay, he didn’t need to crash the car. He could have just dumped her somewhere, but that’s not the point. To quote the Joker, “it’s about sending a message.” Old Dean, he couldn’t have done this if his life depended on it. New Dean, he did it just to prove a point. Your version of Dean is gone, don’t try and get him back.
He walks about a half mile through some woods, has a bit of a fight with a bear. Well, fight is maybe an exaggeration. There’s some mutual growling on both sides, a brandishing of the Blade that just seems to make the bear pissed. It takes black eyes and an unearthly howl to get the thing to back off.
He walks for 6 hours and ends up in Concordia where he boosts some old hunk of junk. It’s a patchwork of colors, seems to be mostly held together with duct tape, and is the sort of vehicle that Dean Winchester, registered car snob, would never be seen dead in. Which is why it’s perfect.
He drives out west for a while, stopping at the next mid-sized town. He was planning on going further but the car radio is broken and he burned through the previous owner’s hideous fucking CD collection in about half an hour. Maroon 5 can lick his fucking ass, is all he has to say on that matter.
He picks up some decent CDs at a thrift store and carries on his journey in a slightly better mood. He has a goal in mind, but he wants a few days out on the open road first. He’d take a whole fucking month, a year even, but there are time pressures. He’s gone with the wind and he still has to stick to a fucking schedule. Bullshit. But at least this one is his choice. No more sitting and rotting, waiting to get chained to the wall.
He swings out in the complete wrong direction for two days, driving from dusk ‘til dawn with short breaks in between. He has to, because the world sucks and even though he’s a demon he still gets random itches, still gets stiff and uncomfortable sitting in the same position for hours on end, and most helpfully, his legs still cramp if he ignores the signs and tries to drive for too long without stopping. It takes a bit longer, mind, but it’s still a pain in the ass. He wonders idly if Abaddon ever suffered the indignity of having to slam on the brakes and practically fall out of a car because her legs had seized up without a word of fucking warning. Okay, with a lot of warning, but he ignored it because he thought, ha, I’m a demon. I’m not going to get cramp.
Famous. Last. Words.
He stops for the final time about an hour out of his destination and does a thorough sweep of his surroundings. He wants to make sure he hasn’t been followed. He hasn’t seen any sign of Sam or Cas, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t tailing him. They’ll certainly have been trying. He draws a blank and is about to triumphantly return to his little shit-heap when a voice stops him.
“Hello, Squirrel.”
“Crowley.” Dean acknowledges.
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“You said you’d be back for me.”
“You listen; it’s your greatest feature.”
“What do you want?”
“Just going to skip the foreplay?”
“I’m in a hurry.”
“I could tell by the way you spent two days driving in the other direction before you doubled back this way.”
“You’ve been following me.”
“I believe the phrase is ‘no duh’.”
“You didn’t tell Sam and Cas where I was heading, did you?”
“No. Their interests don’t happen to coincide with mine.”
“Good.”
“Surprised it took you so long to leave the nest.”
“Yeah, well, they trapped me in the bunker.”
“Awfully rude.”
Dean makes a noncommittal grunt.
“So, any reason you’re so close to the entrance to Heaven?
“I don’t-”
“Don’t even try it, Dean.” Crowley says in response to his who me innocent tone.
“Yeah, okay. I’m going upstairs. Why’s it your business?”
“You’ll never get in.”
“Watch me.”
“The entrance is warded.”
“That’s not going to be a problem.”
“It doesn’t matter what petty larceny skills you think you have, you’re no match for angels.”
“I have a way with locks and seals. Trust me.”
“Assuming I thought you could succeed, what’s the plan? It’s Metatron you’re after, I presume.”
Dean tells him his plan. Crowley laughs, open and hearty.
“It’s bold, but you’ll never do it on your own. They’ll notice, send the host after you.”
“Not if someone arranges a distraction.”
“You want my help?”
“And you want mine, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“You want to make a deal?”
“I’m a demon, you can’t get me to sign one of your dumb contracts.”
“I’m not doing anything with you otherwise. Color me suspicious, but I don’t trust you.”
Dean shrugs.
“Help me or don’t. You think this is a suicide mission and you need me for something. That means your only two options are get me to do whatever it is before I raid Heaven- which you know I won’t, or you invest the time and expendable two bit demons to keep me kicking until I can repay you.”
Crowley grinds his teeth. He can see Dean’s point. Doesn’t mean he has to like it.
“And if I help you, you’ll do my favor?”
“Depends what it is.”
“So you want me to help you on the off chance that afterwards you fancy doing as you’re told?”
“Seems that way, doesn’t it.”
“Not good enough.”
“Fine. I’ll do it so long as it isn’t too apocalyptical and it doesn’t hurt Sam or Cas.”
“Still carrying a torch for them?”
Dean shrugs.
“Not very demonic of you.”
“I don’t think I’ve gone full demon, yet.”
Crowley’s black-eyed gaze sweeps over him
“Not quite yet, no. How very dull of you.”
“So do we have a deal?”
“Let me just write up a-”
Dean slicks his eyes over, pulling up the full force of the darkness that he can feel writhing and twisting under his skin. The phantom form that has been escaping into his shadow and his waking dreams uncurls itself, towering over them both and grinning with jagged sword teeth. The predawn gloom sharpens, highlighting the crooked angles of Dean’s face and fire crackles deep within his lungs as he hisses out the words “Do. We. Have. A. Deal?”
“We do.”
“Excellent.”
Dean doesn’t bother to threaten vengeance on him if he doesn’t deliver. Crowley has just seen the specter of Dean’s true form, terrifying even though it’s still developing and solidifying as his humanity is burned away. That’s all the threat he needs.
*
There’s only one angel guarding the entrance to Heaven. Arrogant bastards. He’s sitting on a bench trying to look unobtrusive and managing anything but. Dean’s amazed no one’s called the cops on him yet, sketchy dude hanging around a kids park. Probably some bullshit mojo thing the angels are pulling.
The Mark is practically vibrating on his arm, can sense imminent death. It wants him to take it slow, make the angel suffer and daub himself in his blood. Luckily Dean still has enough common sense left to know that if you’re trying to break in somewhere like Heaven you don’t take the time to dance naked in the blood of the massacred guard.
He comes up behind the angel, years of fighting alongside Cas leading him to expect a trick or a trap or some sort of struggle. Turns out he overestimated this guy. The Blade carves his head off in one clean slice. The angel slumps off the bench, dying in a crumpled heap on the ground. Dean looks for the charcoaled wings but is disappointed to see none. The guy was definitely an angel, flashing blue lights zipping back and forth under his skin. Huh. Maybe it’s something to do with that spell of Metatron’s, or maybe you have to kill them with one of their own blades.
Dean leaves the body and wanders over to the sandbox. Now he understands why they didn’t bother with more than one guard. The entrance is sealed shut. He can change that easily enough though. They’ve been lazy, left the framework of the sigil dug into the sand, just the finer, more intricate details to fill in. All Dean has to do is concentrate, trust to his new way with seals and sigils to guide him.
He’s been to Heaven before so it’s not too difficult to conjure up the feel of the place and really key in on it. It takes a few minutes, but eventually he gets it. There’s a wrenching in his gut, like he’s about to vomit up every meal he’s had in the past five years, and then he can see fuzzy black lines overlaid in the sand. He fills in the missing ones carefully, stepping back and preparing to fight as he finishes the seal.
A faint white glow appears where the last line meets the first and then spreads, like rainwater through a dry riverbed, until the whole thing is aglow. There’s a small shockwave that makes Dean’s bones ache, and then the entrance is open. He slips inside, thinking of Metatron and trusting to Heavenly logic to take him to wherever the scribe of God is imprisoned.
*
“Dean Winchester. Now this is a surprise.”
Dean ignores Metatron, concentrating instead on the cell door. Except he isn’t seeing a cell. He looks past it and to the spell itself, to the latticework of glowing threads that make it up, woven together and interconnecting. This is the bit that he’s going to have the problem with. His time dismantling and reforming devils traps in the bunker was good training, but he’s not sure they’ve been enough. They had maybe a hundred threads for him to manipulate and unravel. This spell has something close to tens of thousands.
“I could have sworn I killed you.” Metatron drawls.
Dean sits down, cross legged on the floor and begins the long and slow process of finding the first thread. Once he gets that it should be simple, a matter of unpicking it until the whole thing collapses. It’s finding it that’s going to be a bitch.
“Getting brought back from the dead really ruined my emotional set piece, you know that. There’s no point killing people off if they’re just going to spring back. Cheapens it.”
“Cram it. Do you want out of here or not?” Dean snaps.
“I don’t see how sitting on the floor staring at the door is going to help.”
“Shows what you know.”
Dean reaches forwards and plucks at a thread that only he can see. The air vibrates and Metatron steps back, startled.
“What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like, genius?”
The place where the first and last threads meet is the center point of the spell, and as such is technically its strongest point. In theory, this means it should have the brightest glow. Unfortunately this whole set up is pretty strong, no obvious flaws and very few subtle ones, so it’s hard to tell which is the one particular bit he needs. It’s blinding enough looking at it that Dean can’t actually see Metatron. Which is good, because just the sound of his voice is grating, if he could see him as well, Dean would probably flip and just try and stab the cage open.
Dean spends an increasingly frantic fifteen minutes looking for the first thread before he’s forced to resort to another method. He doesn’t know how long he has until the angels work out that someone has slipped past their guard. Really, he needs to have been gone already.
He gives up his search for the origin point of the spell and now instead of looking for the strongest point, he looks for the weakest. Which isn’t saying much. The patch he locates is a few millimeters of off-white, as opposed to the blinding glow of the rest of the thing. He takes the Blade and jabs it forwards. The net of threads bends under the pressure he’s applying to it, but the Blade doesn’t manage to pierce it. Of course not, that’d be easy.
He pushes in as hard as he can and then begins to twist, like he’s trying to drive a screw into a hole that’s slightly too small. Bit by bit he feels the Blade creep forward, his progress measured in millimeters, if it’s measured at all.
“Good work. At this rate you’ll have the door open by the time we’re both dead.”
“The more you talk the less likely you are to survive this encounter, douchebag.”
“Is that what this is about, vengeance?”
Metatron doesn’t get his answer, because at that precise moment Dean feels the net give ever so slightly. He yanks the Blade out and examines the hole, two microscopic loose threads dangling where the Blade has finally worn them through. It might look like nothing significant, but it’s all that Dean needs. He grasps hold of the top one and yanks. That’s all it takes to make the entire thing crumble, threads unspooling and falling to the ground as the spell disintegrates.
By the time Metatron has realized what’s happening Dean already has him pinned. He draws the First Blade across his throat, just deep enough that a little blood wells up without letting his grace come tumbling out.
“The only reason your grace isn’t dribbling out onto the ground now is because you have something I need.”
“You want knowledge from the demon tablet? I’ll give it you, whatever you want.”
“Wrong. The spell you used to cast the angels from heaven-”
Metatron starts to laugh but the motion pushes his neck closer up against the Blade and that sobers him pretty quickly.
“I should have known this was all about Castiel. You want to know if any of his grace was left, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, today is your lucky day, Dean Winchester. How about we make a deal. I take you to your precious angel’s one remaining hope, and you let me go.”
“Seems fair.”
“How about we make this binding?”
Dean puts a little more pressure on the Blade at Metatron’s throat. He can see his grace sparking beneath the surface. It’d only take a tiny slip to release it out into the world. He wants to, so badly. Every cell in his body is screaming at him to do it, demanding that he take penance for what’s been done to him. If Metatron weren’t such a powerful enemy he’d do an Achilles, go one further even, pierce him through the ankle while he’s still alive and drag him by it, haul him across the world until he’s lacerated and bloody, until he’s suffered as much as it is possible for one being to do so. But the demon in Dean is canny, and while it wants vengeance it also wants, more than anything, to stay alive. It’s prepared to settle for killing Metatron. It is not prepared to settle for letting him go.
“No.”
“Then I won’t take you.”
Dean shrugs.
“Then I bottle up your grace and feed it to Cas to keep him going until he can find it for himself.”
“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”
“He objects to absorbing his brothers and sisters. I’m sure he’d make an exception for you, though, all the trouble you’ve caused. What’ll it be like? Do you just poof and die, or is it like being a reverse meat suit, trapped in another angel as they tap your batteries and you slowly fade into nothing?”
“You wouldn’t.” Metatron says, although privately he’s sure he’s about to die.
“I would. And I’m finding it very hard to reign myself in right now. Keep talking and die in your cell, or take me to Cas’s grace and we’ll see if the good news helps me feel any more merciful.”
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