Fic: Wont Get Fooled Again (4c/7)
b>Title: Won't Get Fooled Again
Author(s): safiyabat
Artist: evian_fork
Beta: tumblr user parvasilvi
Characters & Pairing(s): Sam/Cas, brief Sam x Ruby
Rating: M
Word Count: 52,595
Warning(s): Graphic violence, sexual content, mentions of noncon, suicidal tendencies, depression
Summary: Dean is back from Hell, but it's nothing like Sam imagined.
Previous Chapter
Ruby brought them a case, a girl who had escaped from a locked ward possibly using superpowers. Lilith’s bunch wanted her badly for whatever reason. Sam wanted to take the case. Dean didn’t, probably entirely because Ruby had brought it. They took it anyway and it took all of three seconds of looking at her to know something was off. Anna Milton didn’t know it yet though.
“Sam Winchester?” she asked when they found her in the attic. She looked at him like she could see the real him. “And the Dean?”
Great.
It turned out that she was able to hear angels communicating with one another. They didn’t get much of a chance to discuss the possibilities involved with that because that was the moment when a very powerful Lilith partisan decided to show up. Sam was able to partially pull him before the demon used his own power against him, throwing him down a set of stairs and turning his attention to Dean. He raced back up the stairs when consciousness returned, Ruby having taken Anna and fled, and managed to get the creature off of Dean for a moment by stabbing him with the demon-killing knife. It was enough of a distraction to grab Dean and make their exit through the stained glass window.
Sam patched them up at the motel, then waited for word from Ruby. Dean complained the whole time about Ruby’s influence, and Sam tried to make it clear the state that he’d been in when Dean was gone, but his brother wasn’t interested. All he got was the “sex with a demon” part. Sam sighed. Why did he bother speaking at all?
Ultimately they met up with Ruby and Anna at an old cabin in Kentucky, just over the state line. The digs weren’t that great but it was what they had. They were visited by Castiel and Uriel, who demanded that they hand Anna over for slaughter. Well, that wasn’t happening. Not at all, and Sam didn’t even let Dean be the one to tell them that. Uriel wanted to smite him on the spot for that, but Castiel insisted that they be given twenty-four hours to change their mind.
Sam then discussed with Anna what might be going on with her, what it was like to know things and feel things and experience things without understanding why. He offered to take a closer look to see if he could get some idea of what was going on - it wasn’t his usual type of work, but he was willing to see what there was to see. She assented, much to Dean’s anger.
It took Sam all of five minutes to sense what Anna’s problem was. “There’s no easy way to say this, but you’re an angel.” He could see the remnants of grace clinging to her like a shadow.
“That’s not a come-on, is it?” she laughed nervously.
“I think if you take a few minutes and look deep inside yourself you’ll find yourself remembering things. Just, uh, have a seat. In the corner and clear your mind. I’ll sit with you.”
She sat for an hour. When she opened her eyes again, she seemed to be a completely different person. “You were right.” It turned out that she’d cut out her grace and fallen to earth, becoming human or human-ish. She could still hear the angels. When Sam had reached out with his mind, he’d heard how she did that. It was a simple thing, really. If that was something you wanted of course. Her grace, fortunately had fallen somewhere nearby. The quartet went to retrieve it, but were thwarted by the fact that someone had already taken it.
“Uriel.” Sam could feel the lingering remnants of his grace all over the site, a beautiful old oak tree.
“Just because you don’t like the guy,” Dean objected.
“I don’t,” Sam admitted. “’But there are traces of him all over this place. It’s like… it’s like a dog lifted his leg and marked the whole place!”
“That doesn’t help us now!” Ruby objected. “Those angels are coming back tonight and we have no way to fight them. Unless brainiac here thinks he can exorcise angels now.”
“No,” Dean growled. “They’re the good guys. Just… not now.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “They’re leading you around by the nose, Dean.”
In the end Sam developed a plan, and it worked. Anna was saved and recovered her grace, returning to her angelic state. Alastair disappeared. Sam, Ruby and Dean drove off into the sunset together.
More seals broke. In theory the angels were supposed to be defending them. Instead they fell. And really, it was kind of an impossible task. There were thousands of seals. Lilith only needed to break sixty-six of them. The solution, the obvious solution, was to go after the one doing the breaking instead of wringing hands about which seal might or might not be next. Dean, despite what the angels were saying about him being the righteous one to end it or whatever, wasn’t interested in that. He made a lot of noises about not gunning for revenge, and doing the job that was in front of them, and everything in its time.
Sam knew he wasn’t strong enough to take on Lilith, not alone. He also didn’t know how he could get stronger. He’d been pretty damned strong in Hell, but he wasn’t a fan of going back into Hell without an angel at his back and right now he didn’t want an angel at his front, back or side. Okay, that wasn’t entirely accurate. He wanted Cas, and that was stupid. He’d only been around him for what, four months? He’d only been with him once, for one night? A night Cas seemed to have forgotten had ever happened.
Cas was still the only person to have ever been in his life to actually know him, for who he was, and make him feel good. Yes, it had all been a lie. It had been a lie, faked to get his cooperation with the mission to get Dean out of Hell. Even the sex had probably been a lie, intended to draw him in and gain his trust. Apparently he was just that easy. But he had felt good all the same. Was it so wrong of him to want that back? To want to feel like a person again?
Apparently it was. He stopped even trying to reason with Dean. It wasn’t like his brother was listening. He stopped coming inside much when he was at Bobby’s. A time or two he even slept out in one of the old junkers. Sometimes someone said something when he eventually came in. Sometimes no one noticed. They took on case after case, with Dean being a man on a mission for everything except what actually counted. Sam’s pack of demons was starting to get restless. They wanted action, action against their actual enemy not this sitting around and waiting. “The time isn’t right, Sammy,” Dean kept telling him. “The angels will let me know when it’s right.”
Then the siren thing happened and everything got blown to Hell. Thank God - well, thank who or whatever looked after freaks like him - that Nick Monroe had no idea what he was, or Dean would be dead. He’d laid down on that floor and he’d wished that his brother would just bring that axe down, because he knew Dean didn’t need the venom to say any of what he’d said. He’d been sneaking through Sam’s phone, eavesdropping on Sam’s phone calls. He just didn’t put it quite as bluntly. And maybe it was all true. Maybe the Sam he knew was gone. Maybe he’d never existed in the first place, because there had never been a Sam who was willing to have his phone calls monitored or his phone log checked and damn it what was the point of even being here when Sam had no one, not a single soul who cared about him.
Bobby came and saved the day and the brothers sat on the hood of the Impala and drank coke with their substitute father and assured him that they understood that it had been the venom speaking, that they were good with each other. But knew better. It lasted until they got to the next town, when they sat in the diner going over possibilities for the next case and Dean started throwing his own words back in his face. “That is, if you’re sure I’m not holding you back or anything,” he said with a twist to his face.
Something inside Sam snapped at that point. He got up calmly from the table, went out to the car, grabbed his duffel and his laptop and focused his will. He hadn’t teleported here on Earth yet, he wasn’t sure if he could, but he was not going to sit there and take that. Not from Dean, who’d practically disowned him. He reappeared in the town cemetery and called Ruby. “Where are you?” he asked.
She wasn’t far away and agreed to come get him. “No more of this crap, Ruby,” he told her. “It’s going to be all Lilith, all the time.”
She sighed. “I’m really sorry it worked out this way.” She put a hesitant hand on his back. “I mean, you were so glad to have him back - you worked so hard to get him back. You deserve better than this.”
He sighed. “I don’t. Not really. But what this means is that now I can focus. Like I said. We’ll get her. No more distractions. First things first though. “ He put his phone on the ground and shot it. “I’m going to need a new phone.”
The phone wasn’t the only thing he needed, although it was easily replaced. He joined his comrades - his army, small as they were - in Baltimore, where they holed up in an abandoned townhouse for the time being to strategize. For a while Sam expected that someone would come looking for him. Dean, probably. Couldn’t have the family freak wandering around without his keeper now. Maybe Bobby. Maybe, hope beyond hope, Castiel. None of these things happened, and Sam began to wish that they would. Of course it was impossible. Now that Dean was back, Sam was no longer necessary to any of them. Dean’s life was better, freer without him. Bobby had always preferred Dean and Cas -
Well. Cas.
He threw himself into training with a new fervor that frightened even Zille. Physical training in the morning, then meditation, then research, then hunting. They hunted demons all over the country, just like before, only now Sam wasn’t trying to save anyone or even to get revenge. He knew now what his purpose was. He was a weapon, aimed at Lilith. He needed to get stronger. He hadn’t been able to pull Alastair, and he needed so much more than that.
Pete suggested drinking demon blood. It would kill him eventually, probably - it was highly addictive after all - but it would give him a boost and no mistake. Sam thought about it. He didn’t care if it killed him. Truly he didn’t. He wasn’t a big fan of the idea of addiction. It was too easy for his enemies, of whom there were too many to count, to use that against him and cut off his supply in some way before he finished the job. So… no. Instead, he focused on Hell.
It was still painful to think of Castiel, but well, pain was the reward for stupidity, right? And he’d been stupid to trust, stupid to listen, stupid to hope. But Castiel had said something useful in the middle of his blather of him being “something more.” He’d said something about Sam being “of Hell,” about it being part of him. Maybe he could use his connection to the Inferno to fuel his abilities? In his meditation, he focused on once again lowering his own mental barriers. If the place was part of him he should be able to use it just as much as he could use any other part of himself for energy, right?
It was about a month after his flight from Dean that they got a visitor. He could sense “angel” from the street and for a moment he felt the stirrings of hope, but circumstances quashed it. “Hi,” Anna greeted, her pink wings with the maroon tips resplendent behind her. “Can I come in?”
“It’s okay,” Sam rasped to the others. “She’s not a typical angel.”
She smiled a little. “No. I’m not.” She glanced around. “You guys really need to put up some angel proofing.”
“Seriously? That’s a thing?”
“Totally a thing,” she grinned. “And I can teach you. Because you have a problem.”
Sam grabbed her a chair. It wasn’t much of a chair, it had been garbage picked from the curb a few weeks ago, but it was sturdy and had very little damage for having been left out in the rain. “Only one?”
“They’re holding back on the seals, Sam. They’re letting Lilith break seals with impunity. Castiel isn’t encouraging your brother to stop Lilith. He’s holding him back. He keeps telling him to wait until ‘the time is right.’”
Sam frowned. “How is he even supposed to kill Lilith? I mean, if Alastair wasn’t bothered by the knife she’s not going to be concerned by it either.”
“I have no idea, Sam. But I’m starting to think that Heaven isn’t trying to stop the Apocalypse. I’m starting to think they’re helping.”
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