SPN: Two takes on My Bloody Valentine
These stories are both, loosely, codas to My Bloody Valentine: one from Dean's perspective, days after leaving the Salvage Yard, and one from Sam's perspective, during and just after the detox. Dean meets an AU Sam. Sam meets a hallucination (or is it?) of Dean. In the two stories, Sam and Dean come to radically different conclusions about how 'okay' they are.
An episode this horrifically good deserves as many codas as it can get.
Dean's take:
Title: A New Top Predator on the North American Plains
Warnings: Gore, angst
Characters/Pairing: Sam, Dean, cowboy stunt demons
Spoilers: Up to 5.14.
Word Count: 4500
Summary: Dean gets sucked into a dystopian alternate universe.
A long track of broken grass, feet and hooves and tires, wormed up the hill to disappear under a golden heat mirage. A caravan had passed some time after the last rain, less than four days ago.
He scanned for a lookout hill to wait on. He was following too close.
He wasn't interested in the caravan.
Dean could sleep like a rock lately.
He figured it was a perk of achieving Nirvana or atrophy of the soul, whatever you wanted to call it (not like he could care anymore). It meant that for six hours every night, he didn't have to think about the vortex of torment that he and Sam had apparently been specially bred to lie in the middle of, or the fact that he and Sam keeping each-other human was optimistic bullcrap of the first order. Not that he cared.
Just another six hours before they lost the game down the drain.
He was dozing off. Sam was rolling and sighing in the other bed, a counterpoint to the freeway noise, and just for an instant, Dean drifted-
He was falling, about to smash his skull and break his arms on rocky ground, sun-blistered grass, and he jerked, too late, but frantic to roll the fall to his shoulder, his chest-
He was sitting up in bed, the springs squeaking. He rolled over and shut his eyes again, and went to sleep for real.
"Can't you douches pick up some new tricks?" he bellowed at the empty sky.
He was on a prairie. Alone, on a prairie in the summer, in his jeans and jacket and a pair of shirts that smelled like lighter fluid and garlic. The keys were in his pocket, but he couldn't see the car.
Or a road, for that matter.
It was hot. He put the sun at his back and walked, every now and then climbing a hill to see the other side. Just more hills. Sometimes there were streams, but they were dry.
Place was ugly, too. It wasn't a Kansas or Idaho prairie-more of a Texas prairie, with sparse grass and pebbles and skies so big they wouldn't even try looking for your body. Little brambly shrubs. Spiky weeds. Vultures.
Dean climbed another hill. There was a flat rock at the top of it, and hand-sized rocks all around, so he stacked some into a Roman archway he could pass his arm through. Man was here.
When he looked up, out of the wilderness a human shape crested a nearby hill, as if summoned. He knocked down the archway, stuck a sharp rock in each coat pocket, and strode down the hillside to meet the native. He hoped he wasn't going to get shot for trespassing on this barren, worthless stretch of scrub. Texans did that.
It was Sam.
Dean had the sun at his back and Sam was staring into it, so of course Sam didn't recognize him. But Dean could see the time of his stride and the angles of his limbs and the laser focus he got when he was curious, so he threw his arms in the air impatiently and bellowed, "Sam!"
Sam's hair was even uglier than usual and he had a ragged beard. "What the hell?" Dean added.
Sam paused at his voice, cocked his head, and broke into a sprint that had Dean looking behind him to see what the hurry was. No angry ranchers. No stampeding longhorns. Dean decided he must have been gone a long time and started to jog over, as Sam slowed, stopped, and planted his feet.
And then Dean was falling, horizontal, staring into the face of the ground that was about to smash his skull like a walnut, whether or not it shattered his arms along the way. He corkscrewed, trying to take the fall on his shoulder though it was too late, too fast for catlike reflexes to keep him alive anymore.
But he didn't hit straight on. He hit at an angle, moving sideways, gouging his cheekbone on a rock, and he kept moving. He skidded down the hill, dragging along like a kite that couldn't get air, bouncing and kicking up dust. He was being pulled.
He stopped sliding abruptly and grunted as his weight seemed to jump from two-ten to two thousand and every stone and bit of gravel stabbed into him from beneath. He was being pinned.
Sam was pinning him.
Sam loomed over his face, moving with that reptilian precision that some demons had when they'd dropped their masks and meant business, that made you wonder how you'd ever taken them for your own species. He held one hand outstretched, fingers splayed.
Dean forced his mouth open to start the exorcism. Sam's hand tightened and twisted, and Dean forgot about the rocks and the words, because he was coming out of his skin.
He'd never had the chance to appreciate his body as a container before, not until now, when he felt like oil falling through a sieve. He was splitting in half, part of himself collapsing into chaos like a crazy guy pawing through his looted bag of mementos muttering "no, no, no," the other half outside, turned inside-out and alien, screeching and tearing and failing to claw its way back in. Light flashed behind his eyelids. Light flashed against the backs of Sam's closed eyes, over his serene smile.
He screeched and clawed at his body, desperate and failing to get back in, until with a snap the force restraining him let go, and in a blink he was settled again, he was a human being with a name again, he was seeing out of his eyes.
"You're alive," Sam remarked, staring down at him. His eyes had no color, and there was a steel collar around his throat, padded by his shirt.
"Christo," Dean coughed.
"You think you're Dean," Sam said, his voice as colorless and carnivorous as his dark eyes.
"I am Dean," Dean growled.
"Like I said."
Dean panted and sat up. Sam didn't offer him a hand, but he didn't back off like he was supposed to if he thought Dean was a shapeshifter, either. Idiot. "So I'm dead now," he grunted. "Wanna give me a date for future reference when I get back home?"
"May second, 2008. Eleven-forty three PM."
"No, wait," Dean protested, confused.
"You let a floor-level crossroads demon talk you down to one year for my life, like you could pick up a new soul at the Salvation Army. Hellhounds clawed your guts out onto the living room carpet in a yuppie housing development while Bobby and I watched. Any of that ring a bell?"
"Yeah," said Dean, flinching at the glass-melting fury banked behind Sam's voice. It was Sammy, but the pressure valves were gone. "Yeah, I know all that. Am I-shit, am I AWOL? Did I say Yes?"
Sam cocked his head. "You're in Hell," he enunciated.
"Again?"
Sam…switched off. His signals were all wrong-this wasn't how people looked at each-other, not topside. Dean hit the ground again and couldn't roll over to get back up.
Sam twisted his fingers and Dean's back convulsed. He did it again and a gibbering, unreasoning terror swept over him, gone as soon as it came, except for the building hum that was his own, real, fear.
Sam had figured out how to make a person squeal like a Fender Stratocaster. Dean decided this future could nuke itself into glass and the angels and demons could wipe each-other out over the ruins. "Stop playing," Sam was snarling. "If you thought getting that piss-rag you call a soul ripped out was no fun, you should see what I'll do to get information. What are you?"
"I'm your brother," Dean grunted.
"Dean's in Hell," Sam repeated, and Dean felt like an idiot, a trusting idiot, because for all he really knew, Sam could have been 'full on Vader' all through the summer of '08, and this was the Sam he had missed.
But maybe he could change that. Maybe he had changed that.
"I get out," he insisted. "I'm from the future, from twenty-ten. Somebody else-screw it, angels are gonna drag me out of Hell for their sick wargames. It's gonna be-I'm not a demon. You don't have to kill anybody, just get clean. That's all." Maybe he could change everything.
"What month?" Sam demanded, sharp.
"September," said Dean. "They pull me out September of '08. I'm alive, but things are gonna go bad in a year unless you drop the Lilith thing. It's a conspiracy-Heaven, Hell, they're both gonna want you to ice her, and when you do, it'll hit the kill switch on the entire planet, the Devil breakin' out of his chains, Four Horsemen on the road, both sides ready to wipe Humanity out like bug smears in the springtime. She's a bitch, but we can't kill her."
Sam had some expression now. Apparently he thought Dean was insane, and had killed and stuffed his puppy so it could ride along in the car without messing up the seats. "It's twenty-ten now," he said. "I killed Lilith two years ago. Haven't found you yet."
Alternate reality, Dean thought. That's technically new.
That left the question of what Sam was doing alone on the forbidding rangelands of central Texas.
"Following a community," said Sam, forging through the forbs. Dean had never been forced to hustle to keep up with Sam walking before, and he didn't like it. He figured it was one of Sam's least distressing new habits what with him apparently running on demon blood full-time, so he focused on stretching his own stride to its limits and jogging a step or two when he was sure Sam wasn't paying attention.
"Community," Dean muttered, trying to deconstruct whatever PC code word that was supposed to be. "Like a cult?"
"Like a community of survivors," Sam said, and that level of scorn was uncalled for. Sam glanced over his shoulder and huffed at him. "From the bombing. You know, the bombs? With the shockwaves and the nuclear winter and the dead birds everywhere?"
"Damn," Dean said. The nukes had cut loose, but the planet was still left.
"If your world didn't get bombed, what are you whining about?"
"Like I said-Lucifer crawlin' outta Hell, Horsemen on the hoof."
"Seriously?" Sam asked. "Thought you were being metaphorical."
"If I was, it'd be funnier. With blasphemy and sexual references," Dean muttered. "So it just-World War Three?"
"Demons did it."
"Course they did."
"Turned out Lilith didn't want to invade Earth," Sam explained. "When she died, it was like it cut the reins and all the other principalities made a rush on us. Devil's Gate opened back up. The demon with the Colt-"
"Crowley?"
"You met him?" Sam snapped, halting.
"Dealing demon, with a funny sense of self-preservation," Dean recalled. "Gave us the Colt."
"He had a reason," Sam guessed.
"Yeah."
"He's in charge of the Gate now. Everyone makes deals with him, humans, demons, on anything to do with who goes up or down. House always wins. He keeps the demons in check, enough to make sure there's still humans around, but he's turning them into game. The US is a hunting preserve."
What about you? Dean almost asked. He had a good idea of the answer, but he didn't want to hear it.
On the other hand, he didn't care anymore. "And you hunt them back," he said.
Sam paused, looked away. "Everybody over ten Hunts."
Dean started walking again, just a straight line to nowhere, and passed him, prodding gingerly at the hot bruising tear on his cheek. He heard Sam's footsteps behind him veer off a bit, so he dropped back to his side, wondering where Sam was headed. He gestured to his neck. "What's with the hardware?"
Sam smiled. It was a bad smile, full of jaded grief and poison. The heavy collar glinted with sigils that looked like they'd been engraved with a drill press. It had a bevel at the top that reminded Dean of GMC frames. Sam held up his right pinkie, which had a dull ring on it of a similar make. "Going away present," said Sam, baring his teeth around the words. "Pretty sure Bobby didn't expect me to take his hand off at the same time-"
"Jeezes!" Dean panted.
"-but you saw what I can do-"
"No, I know, Sam, I know how it works." You don't have to paint a picture.
Demons running loose and Sam's taint becomes a weapon he can't afford to do without, too convenient and too potent to go to waste, but uncontrollable and tormenting, so Sam turns to Bobby, the last man on earth he can trust, to put a leash on him. But on the blood, Sam gets hot-headed, thirsty, and uncomfortably numb, until pretty soon he doesn't care why he took the leash in the first place. Dean had a picture.
"So you follow survivors around and wait for demons to show up," Dean said. "What about the hosts?"
"Out here, it's not usually an issue," Sam replied. Not in the sun and the dry grass.
Dean followed him up a hill, where they looked out over the empty rangeland, where the heat shimmer flashed away toward the horizon. A column of vultures swirled like a thundercloud in the north.
Sam was looking westward at a pair of human shapes tracing a ribbon of tire tracks over the grass. "They made it," he muttered, pleased.
"So, what's the plan?" Dean asked, as they waited on the back of a hillside for the two demons to pass into Sam's range, however far that was. Dean could see the tire tracks winding around the base of the hill below their vantage point.
"Thought you knew how this works," Sam said.
"Yeah, but after you get yourself some demon Slurpie and juice up. Long-term. You going anywhere with this, or is this just another fix?"
Sam twitched and Dean felt something run down his spine like a gallon of smelted iron had splashed down and barely missed him. "I'm a lot better than that," he said, eyes on the prize. "I don't drain and dump."
"You can store it?" Dean asked.
Sam smiled, another of those restrained, stretched-on smiles that looked like he was planning how to kill him when he was done playing. "Don't even need a cooler in the back of the Impala."
So Sam was never clean anymore. Just great.
A shadow spilled over the edge of the hill below, quickly swallowed up in the shade. Sam froze, watching for the shadow's owner, and Dean watched Sam. Wasn't like a demon was going to be much of a problem with this Sam around.
Sam suddenly crouched behind a stand of dead seedy plants, yanking Dean after him by the arm. One demon strode into view, then the other, walking in the tire tracks, their heads turned to the trail. They didn't seem to know they were being watched-until Sam straightened, grabbed hold of the air like he was throttling it, and twisted.
The demons shrieked. Dean could hear Hell behind the screams of the hosts.
Sam marched down the hill, unconcerned as the demons twisted against his grip, still screaming.
One reached its hand under its shirt, drawing a gun.
"Sam!" Dean bellowed.
The demon flung its gun hand skyward and fired off a flare, which burst dim and glittering against the slanting daylight.
Sam did something and the demons' screams rose higher. Then he tightened his fist and dragged them, as he headed for a sloping boulder sticking out of the hill. They rolled and scrabbled against the ground, scraping out blood, breaking hands, fingers.
"Winchester," one snarled, as Sam hoisted it by one ankle and flung it with way too much strength onto the boulder, where it lay immobilized, head down. "You gotta make a deal, cowboy. Boss knows you're a one-man army, but we're Legion, got it?" It panted. "You're not gonna wipe us out."
Sam stacked the other demon next to the first. "Crowley know where you are?" he asked.
The demons writhed and glowed faintly, as if they'd been Knifed. Their screams grew echoey and unintelligible.
"Then I don't need to leave a survivor," Dean heard Sam say, and he turned around. He didn't want to see Sam gnawing on their throats like a wild animal.
Sam had evidently been doing this a long time. He could handle feeding on one and pinning the other.
Dean descended the hillside and picked up the fallen flaregun, only to spot another one lying in the broken drag trail leading to Sam. Probably still loaded, dropped by the other demon when Sam grabbed them. These two were advance scouts, bait, maybe a peace offering, and if they knew Sam was in the area, they'd gone into this knowing they'd be facing real death, not exorcism. Forty-odd years was nowhere near long enough to be an expert in demon psychology, not when demons lived for centuries of centuries, but Dean knew that whatever compelled them to stick to this plan had to be pretty nasty.
Alastair, the big scary enforcer in his own world, had been completely on board with the Apocalypse plan. With Lilith dead here, he'd either dropped her carcass like a smoking stink bomb, or Crowley's crew had torn him to bits and replaced him. Out with the old, in with the new.
That left the question of what had happened to Other-Dean. Without the Righteous-Man-Sheds-Blood-in-Hell appointment, maybe they'd stopped making him the damn offer. He might still be on the Rack.
Dean shuddered.
He forgot what Sam was doing for an instant, and looked back. Sam had gone to town with a boot knife. One of the hosts had a bib of flesh peeled down off its throat, leaving a gaping rectangle of bloody meat and windpipe. The other, Sam was still working on, crouched over it, his face buried behind its jawbone as its eyes bulged up at the sky, flickering between black and gray. Sam's hands rested lightly, one on the stone, one on its host's forehead, and the steel collar tilted back and forth with the muscles of his throat.
Dean watched until Sam stood, cut off a scrap of a host's polo shirt, and cleaned his knife, his face, and his scraggly beard.
"Crowley hunting you?" Dean asked.
Sam waved at the flare gun Dean held. "Now would be a first." He squinted at him. "You're still here," he observed.
"Nothin' else to do," Dean explained. He dropped the empty flare gun, let it clatter on a rock. "What's the demon king selling?"
"Nothing I want," Sam said.
"Not like he's got much options," Dean remarked, watching Sam.
Sam grinned, bloody teeth. "Yeah, no," he said. The staring got uncomfortable. "I like having you here, man. I mean, when my Dean died, I missed him like Hell. Lately, I just-I guess I still want him back anyway."
Dean took a breath. Two years, two centuries. "Sam…whatever's left down there…"
"I know," said Sam, turning away.
"Right," Dean muttered to his boots.
A shot went off and he jumped. Sam had fired the second flare gun and was marching up the hill.
Dean followed slowly.
The sun reached across the hilltop, low and orange, its grip slipping. Dean crested the hill, and across a valley, over three branches of a dry creek, at the top of another hill, a posse of horsemen was waiting.
Sam was sauntering down to the valley, and Dean wanted to bawl him out for giving up the high ground, walking under the muzzles of the guns they surely had. Texans did love their firearms. So did Hunters.
Sam didn't look worried. Dean hoped Sam had friends here and these guys were some of them, but they'd never been that lucky. Then he noticed the blindfolds on the horses. That was weird. Some of the guys didn't have hats, and after just an afternoon in this sun, Dean had been dying for a hat for the first time in his life.
As Sam approached, the ones on the edges steered their horses closer to the middle of the group, and as he crossed the first creekbed, they drew an assortment of rifles and pistols.
Sam stopped.
Dean couldn't think of anything to do.
"Did you bring him?" Sam bellowed.
One of the men, the only one unarmed, kicked his horse in the sides and it bounced jerkily down the hill, stumbled at the creek banks, bucked and faltered and wheezed its way to Sam. Some stranger, white, short hair. Black eyes. "Hey, Sammy," it said.
Sam marched closer, putting the demon and the horse between himself and the guns. "Dean," he croaked, and the demon swung itself down and swaggered over.
Dean hid in the grass as he watched Sam hug the ruined thing, wrapping around its shoulders like the demon was the only thing left in the world. The demon, watching around Sam's back, spotted him and snarled silently. Across the valley, the other horsemen leveled their guns.
Sam flung out a hand and the demon's horse screamed, reared, and toppled over, then he dived for the cover of its carcass, yanking the demon after him. The other riders split around and charged, pouring down the hill to reclaim their shot, but they must have passed too close, because as they crossed the creek they began to convulse and slump down from their horses, clawing at their throats as smoke poured, flaring like coals, into the ground.
Two of the horsemen yanked their animals to a stop at the last second and bolted aside. A dozen-demon hit squad, now just dying hosts and blinded horses.
Sam and the demon stood. The demon sat with a huff on the dead horse's chest. "Thanks, man," it said.
Sam stared it in the eyes, one hand light on its shoulder. "I summoned you," Sam said. "It worked."
"Still me," replied the demon. "Sorta." It grinned up into Sam's face, carefree and joyful. Dean saw Sam give it a gentle shake.
The demon glowed from within and gasped. "Sammy?" it demanded, shocked.
"You meant well," Sam said, flaring the demon again. "I'm making it quick."
Dean heard something crackle in the grass behind him, and as he checked over his shoulder, he felt a sharp punch in his chest, a burning in his ribs. One of the escaped demons was standing behind him, a rifle in its hands spitting out spent brass and swinging down toward Sam.
Dean wheezed in a breath and couldn't push it out again.
His vision tunneled. Sam must have run himself low; he saw him go for his knife and yank the struggling Dean-demon's throat closer, slash it, drop the knife, dig in, stretch out his arm.
Dean fell.
He sat up in bed, the springs squeaking. After toweling the sweat off onto a sheet, he stood in the dark and checked on Sam.
Sam's face was lined with concentration, one arm outstretched, throttling the blankets.
Dean went back to bed and let him dream.
Note on Top Predator:
My Bloody Valentine turned my stomach. That takes commitment - I used to butcher my own meat rabbits and squeeze pus out of abscesses. It was like Shark Week with fry oil. It was awesome. My favorite line: "Wait your turn."
If anyone's interested in the physics of Top Predator, let's say that there actually is an alternate universe where Sam killed Lilith ahead of schedule. Now let's say that our Sam, still sweating out the last traces of demon blood, reaches out across the void to AU Sam. AU Sam is summoning Dean so he can kill him; our Sam channels AU Sam in his sleep and pulls Dean into his head; our Sam gives Dean a push and Dean astral-projects into AU Sam's world.
I feel Top Predator is one of my weaker stories, since it wasn't plotted out so much as scrawled down and crammed into a conclusion before my writing hand seized up. (Losing computer access really cuts down the rambling.) What I hope I got across is the vibe of "wrong, wrong, WRONG!!!" from both Sam and Dean, and the brute grace of a leopard seal ripping the skins off flocks of baby penguins from Sam.
In Top Predator, Sam is almost an animal. There's a lot of stories out there where Sam goes feral and starts living on regular meals of demon jugular; here's my take. Animals don't have shame or morality. Their acts of predation are outside the domain of ethics or judgment. In his actions, Sam is only separated from the animals by his last remaining quest to put Dean out of his misery. He still has shame, but he's lost and surrendered almost all control of his shameful impulses. It's just another suicide mission.
Dean sees, understands, and immediately believes that Sam is beyond his help, beyond human, but he still can't let go of his need to protect him. Everything that Dean once loved about Sam is gone here. Dean is trapped and irrelevant.
Dean wakes up, and in the real world, he's still emotionally trapped. He lets himself be irrelevant. He watches his Sam act out his alternate self in his sleep, and he doesn't protest. He just gives up.
Sam's take:
Title: Bluebirds and Sunshine
Warnings: Hallucinations
Characters: Sam, Dean, Castiel, Sam's hallucinatory psychiatrists
Spoilers: 5.14
Word Count: 3000
Disclaimer: Stolen
Summary: Sam detoxes. When the hallucinations stop, he needs to know what was and wasn't real.
The blood was screwing with him. It was smart, vindictive: when he'd just been between doses, rationing it out, or that time Ruby had let him starve until he broke-those times it'd been normal stuff. Sweats, chills, insomnia, aches, mood swings, just like any regular heroin addiction. But when he stopped-when it knew he wasn't going to go out and get more-then it got mean.
Sam is the epicenter of every trauma on the Continental US. Mommy didn't love him. Daddy didn't love him. Each of Lilith's dead hosts-four elementary school girls and the dental hygienist-came by to say hi. There was a scene change and he was off the bed, on his feet, sprinting through a vine-infested swamp that looked like the soundstage for Dagoba, fleeing from Dean, who grinned the dead-eyed grin that Sam hated, until Sam tripped on a vine and impaled his chest and his face on a concealed pit trap. Dean caught up to him, hauled the hidden bed of spikes out of the scum-green water, and stretched Sam's arms and legs between a pair of bent saplings, singing "Mr. Brownstone" as he threaded ropes through stab wounds in his limbs, and Sam groaned around the stakes in his body and wondered how he wasn't dead until he caught scent of his own blood and went mad with hunger.
Then he'd be alone on the bed in the panic room, and it would be shakes and thirst again. Hazily, he knew he was hallucinating. But in the intervals between, when the blood wanted him to meet somebody, he would feel utterly lucid.
Like now. But now he was alone, in the dark iron pit like a bottle, blinking up at the spinning fan blades as they caught the edge of a porch-light's glow against the fathomless black sky. Waiting.
The bed shuddered under him and he jerked against the cuffs, pulse speeding.
Most of the time, he forgot about the telekinesis. It wasn't the fun part, wasn't efficient. It couldn't kill Lilith. But it was enough to roll a steel camp bed with him on it.
"Dean!" he yelled, hoarse like he'd been screaming all night, as he struggled to sit up and clutched the rails as the bed tilted. The chains jerked his ankles tight. "Stop. Stop, stop, stop." The power ignored him, lifting the head of the cot painfully slowly as Sam riffled through all the raw spots in his brain, trying to channel it somewhere else-exorcise his leg, fry the goddamn fan, hold his ground-but the blood had something planned, even if it was just to slam Sam's face against the concrete until it killed him.
A force pinned him to the bed so hard the springs squealed. "Dean!"
The bed trembled, then shot down, the head rail striking with a deafening clang, flinging Sam down like a wasp caught against a flyswatter.
He didn't hit. He panted in the dark, feeling his own breath blowing up against his face from the hard floor inches away, still squashed against the mattress with all of Jupiter's gravity.
The blood slowly, gently lowered him to the floor, and the bed squealed again and collapsed on top of him. Under the musty cotton mattress, arms and legs still cuffed to the bed frame, Sam tried to struggle, to turn his head so he could breathe, but his entire body went pins-and-needles and fell limp.
Paralysis. That was new.
The window on the iron door creaked open and a flashlight beam poked through, yellow light glancing against the floor. He heard Dean curse and slam open the latch.
Dean was here.
Dean wouldn't bring blood, Sam thought like the savage pathetic vampire he was, but if Dean was still here, maybe Dean wasn't going to ditch him so he and Castiel could find some other way to kill the Devil, alone. Maybe goodbye was going to be face-to-face with the knife instead of leaving Sam for some other hunters to track down.
Maybe goodbye was now. Sam's vision flared red. Maybe goodbye was now, and the goddamn blood was making him play dead for it. He tried to struggle, to move, blink, something, only managing to send flares of cold fire through his limbs.
Boots scuffed against the concrete and the flashlight clattered to the floor, the beam blinding him. The bed jostled on top of him and the headboard clattered away, then Dean's fingers shoved at his limp left arm, pushing it under the bed, and the cuff on Sam's right wrist began to bite into him as the bed frame rolled up. His shoulder blade slid almost off his chest from the pull of his own weight, and his head dangled dizzily from his limp neck where nerves and bones ground together.
Dean grunted. The mattress began to flop back into its original position against the bedframe, and Sam followed, the pull of the cuffs easing until the frame clunked to the floor. Dean's rough fingers jabbed at his throat where Sam's pulse was leaping. Sam tried to move again and burned for it. He just wanted to say goodbye.
Dean made a relieved puff of breath and took his fingers away to tug Sam and the mattress back into place on the center of the frame. "Sammy," Dean sighed, low, rough. "What'd you do to yourself this time?"
It's not the blood that's the problem, I need it I need it and see what happens when I don't get what I need? some corner of his mind was snarling. It was a big corner.
Dean got the flashlight and checked his scalp over, running his fingers through his hair and gripping him by the temples to turn his head this way and that. He caught a glimpse of Dean's blurred face, looking worn-down and aged in the yellow light, before the flashlight glared painfully into his eyes. First one, then the other. Blackness and stars exploded in its wake. Dean slapped him on the shoulder and moved away, taking the light with him.
No, Sam thought, stop, stop, stop, not now, and rage surged in him as he strained to just make a sound, because his last moment with Dean was not going to be like this. Nothing he could say could make this right, because he was a monster and he'd broken and re-broken everything they stood for since Dean had called him back, but he had to be there, he had to say something. The blood burned him, laughed at him.
There was a scrape of steel on concrete, and bootsteps returning. The bed tipped up again, and steel clattered and scraped together under his ears. Dean had put the headboard back. The boots and the light went away again, until Dean returned with the footboard, reassembled the bed, and gave it a shake to check its stability that sent the springs squeaking and Sam's tongue lolling against his slack-open teeth. "Hose clamps," Dean muttered. The mattress at Sam's knees dipped with a warm weight and the flashlight flicked off.
Sam listened to the soft huffs of Dean's breath over the throb of the fan.
"I don't know what I'm doing," Dean said.
Sam was eavesdropping. The blood was making him eavesdrop on Dean's thoughts and he couldn't stop, and since it was the blood doing it, Sam wasn't going to like what he found out.
"I know," Dean ground out to the dark, "I know what I gotta do. Dad told me. You told me. Wasn't that complicated, but you know me, I always screw everything up." Dean's warm hand rested on Sam's bare ankle. Twisted his foot back and forth. Left. "Just-can't-" Dean croaked. He swallowed loudly. "Know it's not right, not supposed to let you be…this. S'posed to watch out for you. But like you said. I'm weak. Spent all my time taking care of you and now I don't know how to do anything else."
Sam's body took a slow, involuntary breath as he burned in his prison, struggling to get out. The fan hummed and Dean toyed with the limp fingers of his right hand. Dean's weight left the bed abruptly and the springs bounced, squeak-squeak, up and down. Fingers pushed the hair out of his face.
"Love you, Sammy," Dean murmured. "But I wish to God I didn't."
Bootsteps toward the door, the shriek and clang of the latch, the hum of the fan, and another maddening involuntary breath.
And then it was Lilith standing over him in a spot of moonlight, Dean pinned bleeding to the wall like a clothed crucifix, and a thing like a dog but not a dog-skinned with hair springing up from glistening muscle, eye sockets filled with fog that dribbled and drifted with each eager twitch of its heavy head, knives bolted into its bleeding jaws in place of teeth-with a clear plastic tube fixed with white medical tape into its heaving throat, that Lilith held teasingly over his face, kinked shut.
Sam surged upward against the cuffs and the little girl jerked it out of reach.
"Sam! No!" Dean bellowed, and Lilith tossed her host's blonde curls in annoyance. Sam heard ribs cracking.
Lilith dribbled a little black blood from the tube into her palm and waved it up and down. Sam's eyes tracked it, his nostrils flared, his neck and shoulders tensed with the effort of holding himself off the bed. Her hand darted at him and he followed, teeth snapping, but she was too quick for him, smearing blood on his forehead before he could reach her tiny hand. The blood tingled and burned against his skin and he gasped, tensing off the bed.
"You like that, Sammy?" Lilith cooed. "It's extra Hell. Like extra sprinkles!"
Sam panted, lunging against the cuffs at the hellhound, at the catheter.
Dimly, he heard Dean groan.
"There's no coming back from this, Sammy," Lilith whispered, in that loud breathy way little kids had. "Just one taste and you're mine forever. You want it?"
Sam was salivating so hard his cheeks ached. He nodded frantically. Dean was on the wall moaning, "no, no, no," but the blood was on his face and he could smell it and feel it. He was beyond reach.
"Say please," Lilith scolded.
Sam's lips worked. He had to swallow before he could talk. "Please," he whispered. "Please, please, please-please-please-please-"
"Say pretty please."
"Please-pretty, pretty please, pretty-please-"
"Good boy," said Lilith, letting him seize the tube with his teeth. Sam's mouth burned with brimstone as he sucked it down.
But it wasn't real. It wasn't real, and the rage pulsed in him until he bellowed with it, jerking and kicking at the bed.
Eventually, Sam slept. When he woke, his arm was asleep, pulled awkwardly by the cuff, and he was starving and thirsty and shivering and he itched all over. It was almost noon, and the sun had crept across the floor into his eyes.
He hoped someone was coming to get him.
He lurched up with a jerk that had him dizzy and nauseous. The bed. The bed was off-center, like it would be if he'd TKed himself upside down and Dean had come in to reassemble it. Maybe Dean was still around. Maybe Dean was coming back because Sam was a toxic anchor on his spirit.
He tugged against the cuffs and felt the junction of the headboard and the bed frame. Hose clamps. Dean had said something about hose clamps-maybe he'd come back while Sam was out of it and screwed some on to keep the bed from coming apart again. He felt the steel tape-it was smooth, new. He swallowed and rolled back onto the bed.
He felt normal. Horrible, filthy, damp, but normal. The fan hummed the seconds like an overloud clock and he wanted to shoot it. He was going to be hearing the ghost of that noise for weeks. His head throbbed with the beat of the fan and he sank into a light daze of pain, anxiety, and boredom.
The sun and the shadow of the fan crept across his face as an hour passed. Two.
"He is," echoed Castiel's harsh voice from the hall outside. Sam roused, squinting against the sun, and watched the door from the corner of his eye. The window creaked open, then the latch. Dean came into the room, wearing the same clothes as Sam had seen him in that night, the same weariness.
The pit of nausea in his stomach tensed harder.
"Hey," said Dean, leaning over him.
Sam coughed and tasted blood. Too much yelling. "Hey," he whispered.
"You ready to get out of here?" Dean asked, producing a key.
Sam nodded heavily. Dean freed his arms and his legs, checked the scrapes and bruises Sam had put on himself, and put an arm around his chest as he wobbled to his feet.
"Dude, you reek," Dean murmured.
"Sorry," Sam breathed, half his weight flopping sideways and his feet tangling. He ignored the dance of the hallway around them and watched the ground as they headed for the elevator, step by step.
In the shower, Sam lowered himself cautiously to the floor and stayed there until the hot water ran out. Then he dressed, leaning against the wall, glanced at his hollow, bloodshot eyes in the mirror, and crept into the kitchen.
Castiel was stirring a pot of canned chicken soup with a wooden spoon in precise clockwise strokes. It reminded Sam of the fan.
"You're still here," said Sam stupidly, gripping the top of the refrigerator for balance.
"Yes," declared Castiel.
Sam waited for more, but more was not forthcoming. He pushed off the refrigerator and coasted to the nearest kitchen chair. "Can, uh, can I have some soup?"
"Yes," said Castiel again. He picked up a bowl and a spoon that sat next to the empty can and set them on the table, and filled the bowl with half the contents of the pot. He put the pot back on the stove and continued stirring.
Sam sat and watched dust dance on a sunbeam as the soup steamed. "Where's Dean?" he asked softly.
"Dean is with Bobby Singer," replied Castiel. He had not once looked at Sam, and did not now. "He asked me to feed you and to tell him when you wish to speak with him."
Sam nodded and looked out the window at the cold clear sky, wishing he could see the car. See how many duffel bags were in the car.
"He also said to tell you that he's not going anywhere and neither are you," Castiel informed him.
Sam shivered and wrapped his hands around the hot bowl. He was hungry and sick at the same time and it hurt to swallow, so he just hung his head over the steam and breathed it in. Dean wasn't leaving him. Dean hadn't shot him, not that it would do any good with the vessel thing hanging over their heads. But that left what Sam had heard Dean say last night. The visit that could have been real.
"Did Dean ever come in?" Sam asked, watching the angel by the window, an icon in a sloppy loose-fitting trench coat, tirelessly stirring.
"No," Castiel said. He glanced at Sam, hawk-like, and Sam flinched. "You had several telekinetic episodes. It would have been dangerous for Dean to enter the room."
Castiel's gaze swung back to the window and Sam took a slow breath of steam and chicken with rice. Dean hadn't been there. That wasn't Dean, standing there defeated and helpless and poisoned by Sam's presence.
It was just another horrible nightmare.
Sam gasped and his face warmed; he shot up from the table so fast the soup spilled. "Sam," said Castiel, dropping the spoon and gliding to Sam's shoulder. Sam waved him off, breathing slow and deep.
"I'm good," he choked, staggering from the kitchen. "Good. Just…stay." He collided with a wall and shouldered himself off of it, blundered toward the nearest door, the cobweb-infested linen closet, and shut himself in. He sank to the floor and buried his face in his elbow as he shook with gasp after gasp, great heaving shudders of relief that had him sobbing like a six-year-old coming down off a tantrum. That was what addicts did, right? Addicts had humiliating messy weeping breakdowns, and he was damn lucky he'd made it to the closet for his. He clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut in the dark, quashing his breath down to a soft rasp. His bare feet scuffled in the dust.
He wasn't a vampire anymore. He'd slipped, and he'd gone under, and Dean was still out there with Bobby, waiting for him, just like Sam used to know he would.
The rift was over.
Five minutes later, he wiped his face off on his shirt, dusted the lint from the closet off of his pants, drank his lukewarm soup, and followed Castiel out of the house to Dean.
A note on Bluebirds:
I'm assuming Sam and Dean have worst-case scenario communication skills: Sam never asked Dean about the Evil Voicemail Message, so he still thinks Dean thinks he's a vampire on some level, and if it weren't for the whole vessel thing, Dean would be following around waiting for the day he'd have to shoot Sam in the head. Even in this perfect storm of paranoia, Sam comes out the optimistic one.
Let's say, second to hosting Lucifer, losing control of his thirst - in front of Dean - is Sam's biggest fear. He thinks it would be the final straw that would drive Dean away for good: he wouldn't even be a person in Dean's eyes.
Second-worst fear happens. Dean is still there. Sam believes this means that Dean forgives him, that his love is unconditional: his burden is relieved.
Sam's hallucinations also present him with something new to be paranoid about: what if Dean can't leave Sam - really can't - because he's too threadbare of a person? What if Sam is killing Dean's soul? It's plausible. The hallucination itself is plausible. When Sam wakes up, all he has is detective work to figure out if it had happened or not - because he's sure as Hell not asking Dean.
Sam is so relieved Dean's confession didn't happen that he buys Castiel's explanation for why Dean never entered the Panic Room - as if concern for his personal safety would keep Dean from looking in on Sam at least once.
An episode this horrifically good deserves as many codas as it can get.
Dean's take:
Title: A New Top Predator on the North American Plains
Warnings: Gore, angst
Characters/Pairing: Sam, Dean, cowboy stunt demons
Spoilers: Up to 5.14.
Word Count: 4500
Summary: Dean gets sucked into a dystopian alternate universe.
A long track of broken grass, feet and hooves and tires, wormed up the hill to disappear under a golden heat mirage. A caravan had passed some time after the last rain, less than four days ago.
He scanned for a lookout hill to wait on. He was following too close.
He wasn't interested in the caravan.
Dean could sleep like a rock lately.
He figured it was a perk of achieving Nirvana or atrophy of the soul, whatever you wanted to call it (not like he could care anymore). It meant that for six hours every night, he didn't have to think about the vortex of torment that he and Sam had apparently been specially bred to lie in the middle of, or the fact that he and Sam keeping each-other human was optimistic bullcrap of the first order. Not that he cared.
Just another six hours before they lost the game down the drain.
He was dozing off. Sam was rolling and sighing in the other bed, a counterpoint to the freeway noise, and just for an instant, Dean drifted-
He was falling, about to smash his skull and break his arms on rocky ground, sun-blistered grass, and he jerked, too late, but frantic to roll the fall to his shoulder, his chest-
He was sitting up in bed, the springs squeaking. He rolled over and shut his eyes again, and went to sleep for real.
"Can't you douches pick up some new tricks?" he bellowed at the empty sky.
He was on a prairie. Alone, on a prairie in the summer, in his jeans and jacket and a pair of shirts that smelled like lighter fluid and garlic. The keys were in his pocket, but he couldn't see the car.
Or a road, for that matter.
It was hot. He put the sun at his back and walked, every now and then climbing a hill to see the other side. Just more hills. Sometimes there were streams, but they were dry.
Place was ugly, too. It wasn't a Kansas or Idaho prairie-more of a Texas prairie, with sparse grass and pebbles and skies so big they wouldn't even try looking for your body. Little brambly shrubs. Spiky weeds. Vultures.
Dean climbed another hill. There was a flat rock at the top of it, and hand-sized rocks all around, so he stacked some into a Roman archway he could pass his arm through. Man was here.
When he looked up, out of the wilderness a human shape crested a nearby hill, as if summoned. He knocked down the archway, stuck a sharp rock in each coat pocket, and strode down the hillside to meet the native. He hoped he wasn't going to get shot for trespassing on this barren, worthless stretch of scrub. Texans did that.
It was Sam.
Dean had the sun at his back and Sam was staring into it, so of course Sam didn't recognize him. But Dean could see the time of his stride and the angles of his limbs and the laser focus he got when he was curious, so he threw his arms in the air impatiently and bellowed, "Sam!"
Sam's hair was even uglier than usual and he had a ragged beard. "What the hell?" Dean added.
Sam paused at his voice, cocked his head, and broke into a sprint that had Dean looking behind him to see what the hurry was. No angry ranchers. No stampeding longhorns. Dean decided he must have been gone a long time and started to jog over, as Sam slowed, stopped, and planted his feet.
And then Dean was falling, horizontal, staring into the face of the ground that was about to smash his skull like a walnut, whether or not it shattered his arms along the way. He corkscrewed, trying to take the fall on his shoulder though it was too late, too fast for catlike reflexes to keep him alive anymore.
But he didn't hit straight on. He hit at an angle, moving sideways, gouging his cheekbone on a rock, and he kept moving. He skidded down the hill, dragging along like a kite that couldn't get air, bouncing and kicking up dust. He was being pulled.
He stopped sliding abruptly and grunted as his weight seemed to jump from two-ten to two thousand and every stone and bit of gravel stabbed into him from beneath. He was being pinned.
Sam was pinning him.
Sam loomed over his face, moving with that reptilian precision that some demons had when they'd dropped their masks and meant business, that made you wonder how you'd ever taken them for your own species. He held one hand outstretched, fingers splayed.
Dean forced his mouth open to start the exorcism. Sam's hand tightened and twisted, and Dean forgot about the rocks and the words, because he was coming out of his skin.
He'd never had the chance to appreciate his body as a container before, not until now, when he felt like oil falling through a sieve. He was splitting in half, part of himself collapsing into chaos like a crazy guy pawing through his looted bag of mementos muttering "no, no, no," the other half outside, turned inside-out and alien, screeching and tearing and failing to claw its way back in. Light flashed behind his eyelids. Light flashed against the backs of Sam's closed eyes, over his serene smile.
He screeched and clawed at his body, desperate and failing to get back in, until with a snap the force restraining him let go, and in a blink he was settled again, he was a human being with a name again, he was seeing out of his eyes.
"You're alive," Sam remarked, staring down at him. His eyes had no color, and there was a steel collar around his throat, padded by his shirt.
"Christo," Dean coughed.
"You think you're Dean," Sam said, his voice as colorless and carnivorous as his dark eyes.
"I am Dean," Dean growled.
"Like I said."
Dean panted and sat up. Sam didn't offer him a hand, but he didn't back off like he was supposed to if he thought Dean was a shapeshifter, either. Idiot. "So I'm dead now," he grunted. "Wanna give me a date for future reference when I get back home?"
"May second, 2008. Eleven-forty three PM."
"No, wait," Dean protested, confused.
"You let a floor-level crossroads demon talk you down to one year for my life, like you could pick up a new soul at the Salvation Army. Hellhounds clawed your guts out onto the living room carpet in a yuppie housing development while Bobby and I watched. Any of that ring a bell?"
"Yeah," said Dean, flinching at the glass-melting fury banked behind Sam's voice. It was Sammy, but the pressure valves were gone. "Yeah, I know all that. Am I-shit, am I AWOL? Did I say Yes?"
Sam cocked his head. "You're in Hell," he enunciated.
"Again?"
Sam…switched off. His signals were all wrong-this wasn't how people looked at each-other, not topside. Dean hit the ground again and couldn't roll over to get back up.
Sam twisted his fingers and Dean's back convulsed. He did it again and a gibbering, unreasoning terror swept over him, gone as soon as it came, except for the building hum that was his own, real, fear.
Sam had figured out how to make a person squeal like a Fender Stratocaster. Dean decided this future could nuke itself into glass and the angels and demons could wipe each-other out over the ruins. "Stop playing," Sam was snarling. "If you thought getting that piss-rag you call a soul ripped out was no fun, you should see what I'll do to get information. What are you?"
"I'm your brother," Dean grunted.
"Dean's in Hell," Sam repeated, and Dean felt like an idiot, a trusting idiot, because for all he really knew, Sam could have been 'full on Vader' all through the summer of '08, and this was the Sam he had missed.
But maybe he could change that. Maybe he had changed that.
"I get out," he insisted. "I'm from the future, from twenty-ten. Somebody else-screw it, angels are gonna drag me out of Hell for their sick wargames. It's gonna be-I'm not a demon. You don't have to kill anybody, just get clean. That's all." Maybe he could change everything.
"What month?" Sam demanded, sharp.
"September," said Dean. "They pull me out September of '08. I'm alive, but things are gonna go bad in a year unless you drop the Lilith thing. It's a conspiracy-Heaven, Hell, they're both gonna want you to ice her, and when you do, it'll hit the kill switch on the entire planet, the Devil breakin' out of his chains, Four Horsemen on the road, both sides ready to wipe Humanity out like bug smears in the springtime. She's a bitch, but we can't kill her."
Sam had some expression now. Apparently he thought Dean was insane, and had killed and stuffed his puppy so it could ride along in the car without messing up the seats. "It's twenty-ten now," he said. "I killed Lilith two years ago. Haven't found you yet."
Alternate reality, Dean thought. That's technically new.
That left the question of what Sam was doing alone on the forbidding rangelands of central Texas.
"Following a community," said Sam, forging through the forbs. Dean had never been forced to hustle to keep up with Sam walking before, and he didn't like it. He figured it was one of Sam's least distressing new habits what with him apparently running on demon blood full-time, so he focused on stretching his own stride to its limits and jogging a step or two when he was sure Sam wasn't paying attention.
"Community," Dean muttered, trying to deconstruct whatever PC code word that was supposed to be. "Like a cult?"
"Like a community of survivors," Sam said, and that level of scorn was uncalled for. Sam glanced over his shoulder and huffed at him. "From the bombing. You know, the bombs? With the shockwaves and the nuclear winter and the dead birds everywhere?"
"Damn," Dean said. The nukes had cut loose, but the planet was still left.
"If your world didn't get bombed, what are you whining about?"
"Like I said-Lucifer crawlin' outta Hell, Horsemen on the hoof."
"Seriously?" Sam asked. "Thought you were being metaphorical."
"If I was, it'd be funnier. With blasphemy and sexual references," Dean muttered. "So it just-World War Three?"
"Demons did it."
"Course they did."
"Turned out Lilith didn't want to invade Earth," Sam explained. "When she died, it was like it cut the reins and all the other principalities made a rush on us. Devil's Gate opened back up. The demon with the Colt-"
"Crowley?"
"You met him?" Sam snapped, halting.
"Dealing demon, with a funny sense of self-preservation," Dean recalled. "Gave us the Colt."
"He had a reason," Sam guessed.
"Yeah."
"He's in charge of the Gate now. Everyone makes deals with him, humans, demons, on anything to do with who goes up or down. House always wins. He keeps the demons in check, enough to make sure there's still humans around, but he's turning them into game. The US is a hunting preserve."
What about you? Dean almost asked. He had a good idea of the answer, but he didn't want to hear it.
On the other hand, he didn't care anymore. "And you hunt them back," he said.
Sam paused, looked away. "Everybody over ten Hunts."
Dean started walking again, just a straight line to nowhere, and passed him, prodding gingerly at the hot bruising tear on his cheek. He heard Sam's footsteps behind him veer off a bit, so he dropped back to his side, wondering where Sam was headed. He gestured to his neck. "What's with the hardware?"
Sam smiled. It was a bad smile, full of jaded grief and poison. The heavy collar glinted with sigils that looked like they'd been engraved with a drill press. It had a bevel at the top that reminded Dean of GMC frames. Sam held up his right pinkie, which had a dull ring on it of a similar make. "Going away present," said Sam, baring his teeth around the words. "Pretty sure Bobby didn't expect me to take his hand off at the same time-"
"Jeezes!" Dean panted.
"-but you saw what I can do-"
"No, I know, Sam, I know how it works." You don't have to paint a picture.
Demons running loose and Sam's taint becomes a weapon he can't afford to do without, too convenient and too potent to go to waste, but uncontrollable and tormenting, so Sam turns to Bobby, the last man on earth he can trust, to put a leash on him. But on the blood, Sam gets hot-headed, thirsty, and uncomfortably numb, until pretty soon he doesn't care why he took the leash in the first place. Dean had a picture.
"So you follow survivors around and wait for demons to show up," Dean said. "What about the hosts?"
"Out here, it's not usually an issue," Sam replied. Not in the sun and the dry grass.
Dean followed him up a hill, where they looked out over the empty rangeland, where the heat shimmer flashed away toward the horizon. A column of vultures swirled like a thundercloud in the north.
Sam was looking westward at a pair of human shapes tracing a ribbon of tire tracks over the grass. "They made it," he muttered, pleased.
"So, what's the plan?" Dean asked, as they waited on the back of a hillside for the two demons to pass into Sam's range, however far that was. Dean could see the tire tracks winding around the base of the hill below their vantage point.
"Thought you knew how this works," Sam said.
"Yeah, but after you get yourself some demon Slurpie and juice up. Long-term. You going anywhere with this, or is this just another fix?"
Sam twitched and Dean felt something run down his spine like a gallon of smelted iron had splashed down and barely missed him. "I'm a lot better than that," he said, eyes on the prize. "I don't drain and dump."
"You can store it?" Dean asked.
Sam smiled, another of those restrained, stretched-on smiles that looked like he was planning how to kill him when he was done playing. "Don't even need a cooler in the back of the Impala."
So Sam was never clean anymore. Just great.
A shadow spilled over the edge of the hill below, quickly swallowed up in the shade. Sam froze, watching for the shadow's owner, and Dean watched Sam. Wasn't like a demon was going to be much of a problem with this Sam around.
Sam suddenly crouched behind a stand of dead seedy plants, yanking Dean after him by the arm. One demon strode into view, then the other, walking in the tire tracks, their heads turned to the trail. They didn't seem to know they were being watched-until Sam straightened, grabbed hold of the air like he was throttling it, and twisted.
The demons shrieked. Dean could hear Hell behind the screams of the hosts.
Sam marched down the hill, unconcerned as the demons twisted against his grip, still screaming.
One reached its hand under its shirt, drawing a gun.
"Sam!" Dean bellowed.
The demon flung its gun hand skyward and fired off a flare, which burst dim and glittering against the slanting daylight.
Sam did something and the demons' screams rose higher. Then he tightened his fist and dragged them, as he headed for a sloping boulder sticking out of the hill. They rolled and scrabbled against the ground, scraping out blood, breaking hands, fingers.
"Winchester," one snarled, as Sam hoisted it by one ankle and flung it with way too much strength onto the boulder, where it lay immobilized, head down. "You gotta make a deal, cowboy. Boss knows you're a one-man army, but we're Legion, got it?" It panted. "You're not gonna wipe us out."
Sam stacked the other demon next to the first. "Crowley know where you are?" he asked.
The demons writhed and glowed faintly, as if they'd been Knifed. Their screams grew echoey and unintelligible.
"Then I don't need to leave a survivor," Dean heard Sam say, and he turned around. He didn't want to see Sam gnawing on their throats like a wild animal.
Sam had evidently been doing this a long time. He could handle feeding on one and pinning the other.
Dean descended the hillside and picked up the fallen flaregun, only to spot another one lying in the broken drag trail leading to Sam. Probably still loaded, dropped by the other demon when Sam grabbed them. These two were advance scouts, bait, maybe a peace offering, and if they knew Sam was in the area, they'd gone into this knowing they'd be facing real death, not exorcism. Forty-odd years was nowhere near long enough to be an expert in demon psychology, not when demons lived for centuries of centuries, but Dean knew that whatever compelled them to stick to this plan had to be pretty nasty.
Alastair, the big scary enforcer in his own world, had been completely on board with the Apocalypse plan. With Lilith dead here, he'd either dropped her carcass like a smoking stink bomb, or Crowley's crew had torn him to bits and replaced him. Out with the old, in with the new.
That left the question of what had happened to Other-Dean. Without the Righteous-Man-Sheds-Blood-in-Hell appointment, maybe they'd stopped making him the damn offer. He might still be on the Rack.
Dean shuddered.
He forgot what Sam was doing for an instant, and looked back. Sam had gone to town with a boot knife. One of the hosts had a bib of flesh peeled down off its throat, leaving a gaping rectangle of bloody meat and windpipe. The other, Sam was still working on, crouched over it, his face buried behind its jawbone as its eyes bulged up at the sky, flickering between black and gray. Sam's hands rested lightly, one on the stone, one on its host's forehead, and the steel collar tilted back and forth with the muscles of his throat.
Dean watched until Sam stood, cut off a scrap of a host's polo shirt, and cleaned his knife, his face, and his scraggly beard.
"Crowley hunting you?" Dean asked.
Sam waved at the flare gun Dean held. "Now would be a first." He squinted at him. "You're still here," he observed.
"Nothin' else to do," Dean explained. He dropped the empty flare gun, let it clatter on a rock. "What's the demon king selling?"
"Nothing I want," Sam said.
"Not like he's got much options," Dean remarked, watching Sam.
Sam grinned, bloody teeth. "Yeah, no," he said. The staring got uncomfortable. "I like having you here, man. I mean, when my Dean died, I missed him like Hell. Lately, I just-I guess I still want him back anyway."
Dean took a breath. Two years, two centuries. "Sam…whatever's left down there…"
"I know," said Sam, turning away.
"Right," Dean muttered to his boots.
A shot went off and he jumped. Sam had fired the second flare gun and was marching up the hill.
Dean followed slowly.
The sun reached across the hilltop, low and orange, its grip slipping. Dean crested the hill, and across a valley, over three branches of a dry creek, at the top of another hill, a posse of horsemen was waiting.
Sam was sauntering down to the valley, and Dean wanted to bawl him out for giving up the high ground, walking under the muzzles of the guns they surely had. Texans did love their firearms. So did Hunters.
Sam didn't look worried. Dean hoped Sam had friends here and these guys were some of them, but they'd never been that lucky. Then he noticed the blindfolds on the horses. That was weird. Some of the guys didn't have hats, and after just an afternoon in this sun, Dean had been dying for a hat for the first time in his life.
As Sam approached, the ones on the edges steered their horses closer to the middle of the group, and as he crossed the first creekbed, they drew an assortment of rifles and pistols.
Sam stopped.
Dean couldn't think of anything to do.
"Did you bring him?" Sam bellowed.
One of the men, the only one unarmed, kicked his horse in the sides and it bounced jerkily down the hill, stumbled at the creek banks, bucked and faltered and wheezed its way to Sam. Some stranger, white, short hair. Black eyes. "Hey, Sammy," it said.
Sam marched closer, putting the demon and the horse between himself and the guns. "Dean," he croaked, and the demon swung itself down and swaggered over.
Dean hid in the grass as he watched Sam hug the ruined thing, wrapping around its shoulders like the demon was the only thing left in the world. The demon, watching around Sam's back, spotted him and snarled silently. Across the valley, the other horsemen leveled their guns.
Sam flung out a hand and the demon's horse screamed, reared, and toppled over, then he dived for the cover of its carcass, yanking the demon after him. The other riders split around and charged, pouring down the hill to reclaim their shot, but they must have passed too close, because as they crossed the creek they began to convulse and slump down from their horses, clawing at their throats as smoke poured, flaring like coals, into the ground.
Two of the horsemen yanked their animals to a stop at the last second and bolted aside. A dozen-demon hit squad, now just dying hosts and blinded horses.
Sam and the demon stood. The demon sat with a huff on the dead horse's chest. "Thanks, man," it said.
Sam stared it in the eyes, one hand light on its shoulder. "I summoned you," Sam said. "It worked."
"Still me," replied the demon. "Sorta." It grinned up into Sam's face, carefree and joyful. Dean saw Sam give it a gentle shake.
The demon glowed from within and gasped. "Sammy?" it demanded, shocked.
"You meant well," Sam said, flaring the demon again. "I'm making it quick."
Dean heard something crackle in the grass behind him, and as he checked over his shoulder, he felt a sharp punch in his chest, a burning in his ribs. One of the escaped demons was standing behind him, a rifle in its hands spitting out spent brass and swinging down toward Sam.
Dean wheezed in a breath and couldn't push it out again.
His vision tunneled. Sam must have run himself low; he saw him go for his knife and yank the struggling Dean-demon's throat closer, slash it, drop the knife, dig in, stretch out his arm.
Dean fell.
He sat up in bed, the springs squeaking. After toweling the sweat off onto a sheet, he stood in the dark and checked on Sam.
Sam's face was lined with concentration, one arm outstretched, throttling the blankets.
Dean went back to bed and let him dream.
Note on Top Predator:
My Bloody Valentine turned my stomach. That takes commitment - I used to butcher my own meat rabbits and squeeze pus out of abscesses. It was like Shark Week with fry oil. It was awesome. My favorite line: "Wait your turn."
If anyone's interested in the physics of Top Predator, let's say that there actually is an alternate universe where Sam killed Lilith ahead of schedule. Now let's say that our Sam, still sweating out the last traces of demon blood, reaches out across the void to AU Sam. AU Sam is summoning Dean so he can kill him; our Sam channels AU Sam in his sleep and pulls Dean into his head; our Sam gives Dean a push and Dean astral-projects into AU Sam's world.
I feel Top Predator is one of my weaker stories, since it wasn't plotted out so much as scrawled down and crammed into a conclusion before my writing hand seized up. (Losing computer access really cuts down the rambling.) What I hope I got across is the vibe of "wrong, wrong, WRONG!!!" from both Sam and Dean, and the brute grace of a leopard seal ripping the skins off flocks of baby penguins from Sam.
In Top Predator, Sam is almost an animal. There's a lot of stories out there where Sam goes feral and starts living on regular meals of demon jugular; here's my take. Animals don't have shame or morality. Their acts of predation are outside the domain of ethics or judgment. In his actions, Sam is only separated from the animals by his last remaining quest to put Dean out of his misery. He still has shame, but he's lost and surrendered almost all control of his shameful impulses. It's just another suicide mission.
Dean sees, understands, and immediately believes that Sam is beyond his help, beyond human, but he still can't let go of his need to protect him. Everything that Dean once loved about Sam is gone here. Dean is trapped and irrelevant.
Dean wakes up, and in the real world, he's still emotionally trapped. He lets himself be irrelevant. He watches his Sam act out his alternate self in his sleep, and he doesn't protest. He just gives up.
Sam's take:
Title: Bluebirds and Sunshine
Warnings: Hallucinations
Characters: Sam, Dean, Castiel, Sam's hallucinatory psychiatrists
Spoilers: 5.14
Word Count: 3000
Disclaimer: Stolen
Summary: Sam detoxes. When the hallucinations stop, he needs to know what was and wasn't real.
The blood was screwing with him. It was smart, vindictive: when he'd just been between doses, rationing it out, or that time Ruby had let him starve until he broke-those times it'd been normal stuff. Sweats, chills, insomnia, aches, mood swings, just like any regular heroin addiction. But when he stopped-when it knew he wasn't going to go out and get more-then it got mean.
Sam is the epicenter of every trauma on the Continental US. Mommy didn't love him. Daddy didn't love him. Each of Lilith's dead hosts-four elementary school girls and the dental hygienist-came by to say hi. There was a scene change and he was off the bed, on his feet, sprinting through a vine-infested swamp that looked like the soundstage for Dagoba, fleeing from Dean, who grinned the dead-eyed grin that Sam hated, until Sam tripped on a vine and impaled his chest and his face on a concealed pit trap. Dean caught up to him, hauled the hidden bed of spikes out of the scum-green water, and stretched Sam's arms and legs between a pair of bent saplings, singing "Mr. Brownstone" as he threaded ropes through stab wounds in his limbs, and Sam groaned around the stakes in his body and wondered how he wasn't dead until he caught scent of his own blood and went mad with hunger.
Then he'd be alone on the bed in the panic room, and it would be shakes and thirst again. Hazily, he knew he was hallucinating. But in the intervals between, when the blood wanted him to meet somebody, he would feel utterly lucid.
Like now. But now he was alone, in the dark iron pit like a bottle, blinking up at the spinning fan blades as they caught the edge of a porch-light's glow against the fathomless black sky. Waiting.
The bed shuddered under him and he jerked against the cuffs, pulse speeding.
Most of the time, he forgot about the telekinesis. It wasn't the fun part, wasn't efficient. It couldn't kill Lilith. But it was enough to roll a steel camp bed with him on it.
"Dean!" he yelled, hoarse like he'd been screaming all night, as he struggled to sit up and clutched the rails as the bed tilted. The chains jerked his ankles tight. "Stop. Stop, stop, stop." The power ignored him, lifting the head of the cot painfully slowly as Sam riffled through all the raw spots in his brain, trying to channel it somewhere else-exorcise his leg, fry the goddamn fan, hold his ground-but the blood had something planned, even if it was just to slam Sam's face against the concrete until it killed him.
A force pinned him to the bed so hard the springs squealed. "Dean!"
The bed trembled, then shot down, the head rail striking with a deafening clang, flinging Sam down like a wasp caught against a flyswatter.
He didn't hit. He panted in the dark, feeling his own breath blowing up against his face from the hard floor inches away, still squashed against the mattress with all of Jupiter's gravity.
The blood slowly, gently lowered him to the floor, and the bed squealed again and collapsed on top of him. Under the musty cotton mattress, arms and legs still cuffed to the bed frame, Sam tried to struggle, to turn his head so he could breathe, but his entire body went pins-and-needles and fell limp.
Paralysis. That was new.
The window on the iron door creaked open and a flashlight beam poked through, yellow light glancing against the floor. He heard Dean curse and slam open the latch.
Dean was here.
Dean wouldn't bring blood, Sam thought like the savage pathetic vampire he was, but if Dean was still here, maybe Dean wasn't going to ditch him so he and Castiel could find some other way to kill the Devil, alone. Maybe goodbye was going to be face-to-face with the knife instead of leaving Sam for some other hunters to track down.
Maybe goodbye was now. Sam's vision flared red. Maybe goodbye was now, and the goddamn blood was making him play dead for it. He tried to struggle, to move, blink, something, only managing to send flares of cold fire through his limbs.
Boots scuffed against the concrete and the flashlight clattered to the floor, the beam blinding him. The bed jostled on top of him and the headboard clattered away, then Dean's fingers shoved at his limp left arm, pushing it under the bed, and the cuff on Sam's right wrist began to bite into him as the bed frame rolled up. His shoulder blade slid almost off his chest from the pull of his own weight, and his head dangled dizzily from his limp neck where nerves and bones ground together.
Dean grunted. The mattress began to flop back into its original position against the bedframe, and Sam followed, the pull of the cuffs easing until the frame clunked to the floor. Dean's rough fingers jabbed at his throat where Sam's pulse was leaping. Sam tried to move again and burned for it. He just wanted to say goodbye.
Dean made a relieved puff of breath and took his fingers away to tug Sam and the mattress back into place on the center of the frame. "Sammy," Dean sighed, low, rough. "What'd you do to yourself this time?"
It's not the blood that's the problem, I need it I need it and see what happens when I don't get what I need? some corner of his mind was snarling. It was a big corner.
Dean got the flashlight and checked his scalp over, running his fingers through his hair and gripping him by the temples to turn his head this way and that. He caught a glimpse of Dean's blurred face, looking worn-down and aged in the yellow light, before the flashlight glared painfully into his eyes. First one, then the other. Blackness and stars exploded in its wake. Dean slapped him on the shoulder and moved away, taking the light with him.
No, Sam thought, stop, stop, stop, not now, and rage surged in him as he strained to just make a sound, because his last moment with Dean was not going to be like this. Nothing he could say could make this right, because he was a monster and he'd broken and re-broken everything they stood for since Dean had called him back, but he had to be there, he had to say something. The blood burned him, laughed at him.
There was a scrape of steel on concrete, and bootsteps returning. The bed tipped up again, and steel clattered and scraped together under his ears. Dean had put the headboard back. The boots and the light went away again, until Dean returned with the footboard, reassembled the bed, and gave it a shake to check its stability that sent the springs squeaking and Sam's tongue lolling against his slack-open teeth. "Hose clamps," Dean muttered. The mattress at Sam's knees dipped with a warm weight and the flashlight flicked off.
Sam listened to the soft huffs of Dean's breath over the throb of the fan.
"I don't know what I'm doing," Dean said.
Sam was eavesdropping. The blood was making him eavesdrop on Dean's thoughts and he couldn't stop, and since it was the blood doing it, Sam wasn't going to like what he found out.
"I know," Dean ground out to the dark, "I know what I gotta do. Dad told me. You told me. Wasn't that complicated, but you know me, I always screw everything up." Dean's warm hand rested on Sam's bare ankle. Twisted his foot back and forth. Left. "Just-can't-" Dean croaked. He swallowed loudly. "Know it's not right, not supposed to let you be…this. S'posed to watch out for you. But like you said. I'm weak. Spent all my time taking care of you and now I don't know how to do anything else."
Sam's body took a slow, involuntary breath as he burned in his prison, struggling to get out. The fan hummed and Dean toyed with the limp fingers of his right hand. Dean's weight left the bed abruptly and the springs bounced, squeak-squeak, up and down. Fingers pushed the hair out of his face.
"Love you, Sammy," Dean murmured. "But I wish to God I didn't."
Bootsteps toward the door, the shriek and clang of the latch, the hum of the fan, and another maddening involuntary breath.
And then it was Lilith standing over him in a spot of moonlight, Dean pinned bleeding to the wall like a clothed crucifix, and a thing like a dog but not a dog-skinned with hair springing up from glistening muscle, eye sockets filled with fog that dribbled and drifted with each eager twitch of its heavy head, knives bolted into its bleeding jaws in place of teeth-with a clear plastic tube fixed with white medical tape into its heaving throat, that Lilith held teasingly over his face, kinked shut.
Sam surged upward against the cuffs and the little girl jerked it out of reach.
"Sam! No!" Dean bellowed, and Lilith tossed her host's blonde curls in annoyance. Sam heard ribs cracking.
Lilith dribbled a little black blood from the tube into her palm and waved it up and down. Sam's eyes tracked it, his nostrils flared, his neck and shoulders tensed with the effort of holding himself off the bed. Her hand darted at him and he followed, teeth snapping, but she was too quick for him, smearing blood on his forehead before he could reach her tiny hand. The blood tingled and burned against his skin and he gasped, tensing off the bed.
"You like that, Sammy?" Lilith cooed. "It's extra Hell. Like extra sprinkles!"
Sam panted, lunging against the cuffs at the hellhound, at the catheter.
Dimly, he heard Dean groan.
"There's no coming back from this, Sammy," Lilith whispered, in that loud breathy way little kids had. "Just one taste and you're mine forever. You want it?"
Sam was salivating so hard his cheeks ached. He nodded frantically. Dean was on the wall moaning, "no, no, no," but the blood was on his face and he could smell it and feel it. He was beyond reach.
"Say please," Lilith scolded.
Sam's lips worked. He had to swallow before he could talk. "Please," he whispered. "Please, please, please-please-please-please-"
"Say pretty please."
"Please-pretty, pretty please, pretty-please-"
"Good boy," said Lilith, letting him seize the tube with his teeth. Sam's mouth burned with brimstone as he sucked it down.
But it wasn't real. It wasn't real, and the rage pulsed in him until he bellowed with it, jerking and kicking at the bed.
Eventually, Sam slept. When he woke, his arm was asleep, pulled awkwardly by the cuff, and he was starving and thirsty and shivering and he itched all over. It was almost noon, and the sun had crept across the floor into his eyes.
He hoped someone was coming to get him.
He lurched up with a jerk that had him dizzy and nauseous. The bed. The bed was off-center, like it would be if he'd TKed himself upside down and Dean had come in to reassemble it. Maybe Dean was still around. Maybe Dean was coming back because Sam was a toxic anchor on his spirit.
He tugged against the cuffs and felt the junction of the headboard and the bed frame. Hose clamps. Dean had said something about hose clamps-maybe he'd come back while Sam was out of it and screwed some on to keep the bed from coming apart again. He felt the steel tape-it was smooth, new. He swallowed and rolled back onto the bed.
He felt normal. Horrible, filthy, damp, but normal. The fan hummed the seconds like an overloud clock and he wanted to shoot it. He was going to be hearing the ghost of that noise for weeks. His head throbbed with the beat of the fan and he sank into a light daze of pain, anxiety, and boredom.
The sun and the shadow of the fan crept across his face as an hour passed. Two.
"He is," echoed Castiel's harsh voice from the hall outside. Sam roused, squinting against the sun, and watched the door from the corner of his eye. The window creaked open, then the latch. Dean came into the room, wearing the same clothes as Sam had seen him in that night, the same weariness.
The pit of nausea in his stomach tensed harder.
"Hey," said Dean, leaning over him.
Sam coughed and tasted blood. Too much yelling. "Hey," he whispered.
"You ready to get out of here?" Dean asked, producing a key.
Sam nodded heavily. Dean freed his arms and his legs, checked the scrapes and bruises Sam had put on himself, and put an arm around his chest as he wobbled to his feet.
"Dude, you reek," Dean murmured.
"Sorry," Sam breathed, half his weight flopping sideways and his feet tangling. He ignored the dance of the hallway around them and watched the ground as they headed for the elevator, step by step.
In the shower, Sam lowered himself cautiously to the floor and stayed there until the hot water ran out. Then he dressed, leaning against the wall, glanced at his hollow, bloodshot eyes in the mirror, and crept into the kitchen.
Castiel was stirring a pot of canned chicken soup with a wooden spoon in precise clockwise strokes. It reminded Sam of the fan.
"You're still here," said Sam stupidly, gripping the top of the refrigerator for balance.
"Yes," declared Castiel.
Sam waited for more, but more was not forthcoming. He pushed off the refrigerator and coasted to the nearest kitchen chair. "Can, uh, can I have some soup?"
"Yes," said Castiel again. He picked up a bowl and a spoon that sat next to the empty can and set them on the table, and filled the bowl with half the contents of the pot. He put the pot back on the stove and continued stirring.
Sam sat and watched dust dance on a sunbeam as the soup steamed. "Where's Dean?" he asked softly.
"Dean is with Bobby Singer," replied Castiel. He had not once looked at Sam, and did not now. "He asked me to feed you and to tell him when you wish to speak with him."
Sam nodded and looked out the window at the cold clear sky, wishing he could see the car. See how many duffel bags were in the car.
"He also said to tell you that he's not going anywhere and neither are you," Castiel informed him.
Sam shivered and wrapped his hands around the hot bowl. He was hungry and sick at the same time and it hurt to swallow, so he just hung his head over the steam and breathed it in. Dean wasn't leaving him. Dean hadn't shot him, not that it would do any good with the vessel thing hanging over their heads. But that left what Sam had heard Dean say last night. The visit that could have been real.
"Did Dean ever come in?" Sam asked, watching the angel by the window, an icon in a sloppy loose-fitting trench coat, tirelessly stirring.
"No," Castiel said. He glanced at Sam, hawk-like, and Sam flinched. "You had several telekinetic episodes. It would have been dangerous for Dean to enter the room."
Castiel's gaze swung back to the window and Sam took a slow breath of steam and chicken with rice. Dean hadn't been there. That wasn't Dean, standing there defeated and helpless and poisoned by Sam's presence.
It was just another horrible nightmare.
Sam gasped and his face warmed; he shot up from the table so fast the soup spilled. "Sam," said Castiel, dropping the spoon and gliding to Sam's shoulder. Sam waved him off, breathing slow and deep.
"I'm good," he choked, staggering from the kitchen. "Good. Just…stay." He collided with a wall and shouldered himself off of it, blundered toward the nearest door, the cobweb-infested linen closet, and shut himself in. He sank to the floor and buried his face in his elbow as he shook with gasp after gasp, great heaving shudders of relief that had him sobbing like a six-year-old coming down off a tantrum. That was what addicts did, right? Addicts had humiliating messy weeping breakdowns, and he was damn lucky he'd made it to the closet for his. He clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut in the dark, quashing his breath down to a soft rasp. His bare feet scuffled in the dust.
He wasn't a vampire anymore. He'd slipped, and he'd gone under, and Dean was still out there with Bobby, waiting for him, just like Sam used to know he would.
The rift was over.
Five minutes later, he wiped his face off on his shirt, dusted the lint from the closet off of his pants, drank his lukewarm soup, and followed Castiel out of the house to Dean.
A note on Bluebirds:
I'm assuming Sam and Dean have worst-case scenario communication skills: Sam never asked Dean about the Evil Voicemail Message, so he still thinks Dean thinks he's a vampire on some level, and if it weren't for the whole vessel thing, Dean would be following around waiting for the day he'd have to shoot Sam in the head. Even in this perfect storm of paranoia, Sam comes out the optimistic one.
Let's say, second to hosting Lucifer, losing control of his thirst - in front of Dean - is Sam's biggest fear. He thinks it would be the final straw that would drive Dean away for good: he wouldn't even be a person in Dean's eyes.
Second-worst fear happens. Dean is still there. Sam believes this means that Dean forgives him, that his love is unconditional: his burden is relieved.
Sam's hallucinations also present him with something new to be paranoid about: what if Dean can't leave Sam - really can't - because he's too threadbare of a person? What if Sam is killing Dean's soul? It's plausible. The hallucination itself is plausible. When Sam wakes up, all he has is detective work to figure out if it had happened or not - because he's sure as Hell not asking Dean.
Sam is so relieved Dean's confession didn't happen that he buys Castiel's explanation for why Dean never entered the Panic Room - as if concern for his personal safety would keep Dean from looking in on Sam at least once.