Fic: Won't Get Fooled Again (7b/7)
Title: Won't Get Fooled Again
Author(s):
safiyabat
Artist:
evian_fork
Beta: tumblr user parvasilvi
Characters & Pairing(s): Pairing: Sam/Castiel, brief Sam x Ruby.
Rating: M
Word Count: 52,959 over 7 chapters
Warning(s): Graphic violence, suicidal tendencies, depression, mention of non-con
Summary: The team resolves some issues.
Previous Chapter
Lilith appeared in the trap, still wearing the stunningly beautiful blonde she’d worn in Indiana. “Rude much?” she scoffed. Blue eyes rolled back in her head and were replaced with pure white. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Little Prince.” She waved a hand and the devil’s trap disappeared.
“I don’t think that there’s any real need to explain, Lilith,” he told her easily. “You know why I’m here.” The stars started to wink out of the sky overhead; demons approaching, backup for Lilith.
“You have no idea what you’re up against,” she spat out. “I’m going to rip you apart from the soul out. I’m going to feast on your bones!” She fired off another of her blasts of light at him.
He scoffed. “I’ve heard that before.” Her backup landed around her. “Tell me, Lilith. Not so long ago you were eager to back out to save your own skin. What happened? Why’re you so suddenly ‘up with Satan’ now?”
“If I’m going to go out I might as well go out on the winning side,” she snarled. “You’re the one that pointed out I was going to die either way, Sammy-boy.”
“That’s true.” He reached out and grabbed hold of the demon inside of her body and pulled.
Lilith was unlike any other demon he’d ever handled. He guessed that made sense. She was the oldest, the first demon to be crafted from a human soul. Her spirit was massive, larger than Alastair by several orders of magnitude. Despair filled him. What the hell was he supposed to do with this? He was just a man, not even twenty-five years old. He’d seen things, done thing sure. But nothing like this. Touching her spirit was like immersing himself in the deepest tar.
She managed to push him out. “Give it up, kid, and I’ll kill you fast.”
All around him his people fought tooth and nail. He saw Zille with her hands around another demon’s neck. That demon had his claws, and they were claws, in the zealous demon’s stomach. Blood dripped everywhere but her grip didn’t loosen. Pete had grabbed a baseball bat from one of the dugouts and broken it over an enemy’s head. The enemy demon did seem to be somewhat afraid of the ash stake, so maybe there was something behind the reported protective qualities of ash. Castiel had his hands full with one of Lilith’s larger henchmen, a guy Sam knew from intelligence reports as Malphas. Dean had two demons to contend with, although he seemed to be holding his own. Ruby was hacking her way through a slew of low-life Lilith supporters and Meg had a few of her own but the amount of blood seeping into the grass here at Camden Yards was astronomical and this, this was definitely going to affect the quality of play on the field. The grounds crew is going to be pissed about this, he thought to himself, maybe a little bit hysterically.
Lilith finally seemed to grasp that her stupid light-beam attack wasn’t going to have much of an effect on Sam so she decided to change things up. Instead of trying to attack him directly with her power she telekinetically sent second base flying at his head. He managed to dodge, only to find the fiend right up and in his face. She had claws of her own and they dug right into his gut.
He gasped, because that hurt. He reached out with a hand and grabbed her by the neck. Maybe she did have a hand on his liver - was that his liver? - but he barely felt it right now. Later he’d feel it, at least for a little while. Right now it just helped him focus. He wasn’t going to get any do-overs, he wasn’t going to get to try again later. This was his only chance to get this right. He reached out with his mind again and grabbed the spirit inhabiting the pretty blonde and he grabbed it. She fought him, fought him even harder this time, but he held on even tighter. If he wasn’t going to be able to do this again he had to finish it now. He reached inside himself and he reached farther, into that reserve he’d drawn on to take down Alastair. Into the place that had put the fire in his veins. He grabbed onto that black smoke and he pulled, even as she tugged at things he couldn’t see inside his body.
“You may save your precious humans,” she gasped out, the orange light show under her skin already starting up, “but you won’t live to enjoy it.”
They were so close to each other now, wrapped up so tightly in each other that a casual observer would probably mistake them for lovers. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “I don’t care. The job’s done.” A final tug and she was gone. Her stolen body fell to the ground, rigor mortis already present.
The fall pulled her hand out of Sam’s abdomen and he hissed at the pain of the withdrawal. He was no stranger to the sight of his own blood. He grinned. It was over. They’d done the job, saved the world. There had been times when it had seemed truly hopeless, but they’d pulled it off.
His knees buckled beneath him. Oh, right. Blood loss and trauma - that stuff. He fell to the ground slowly, not even bothering to brace for impact. He wasn’t worried about a few bruises, after all. He could feel his heart straining to move something, anything through his long limbs but the tearing and pulling had done their job. Wetness pooled beneath him and to be honest it didn’t even hurt anymore. The smile broadened on his face. They’d saved the world. Cas loved him, Dean had forgiven him, and there was a world for them both to mourn and heal in.
Darkness rushed in, and he didn’t fight it at all.
He wasn’t sure what he expected. Hell, probably. Meg had said that their blood damned them and he had no reason to doubt her or to think he would be any different, but this didn’t look like any part of Hell he’d ever been in before. He came to on a bright red flannel blanket in a huge circle of green grass that had been allowed to grow just a little too long. The sun beat down from overhead and he would know that sun anywhere: California sun, the kind that seeps into your bones and makes every care in the world seem about twenty times lighter. A forest of sunflowers stood guard around the refuge.
He poked at the place where Lilith had gutted him, but there were no wounds in this place. He felt fine, in fact. The fatigue he’d carried around for years had disappeared. So had the aches and pains of a thousand injuries deemed too minor for actual attention by the staff of the Winchester Family Clinic. For the first time that he could remember, he felt okay.
He turned around. “Hello?” he called. There was no one there. “Hello?”
He sat back down on the blanket. He kind of liked the blanket. It was warm and red. Maybe he didn’t need to leave the blanket after all. He’d just saved the world. Died doing it, too. Maybe it would be okay for him to take a little rest here on the nice red blanket, in the sun among the sunflowers. He couldn’t hear anything at all around him - no birds, no planes, no stupid lawnmowers. He could always sleep some more. He’d always said he could sleep when he was dead, and he had plenty to catch up on.
He dozed off, and he had no idea how long he stayed that way. It was nice here in the sun and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to just take some time just for him, just to relax and rest and be. Eventually someone would come and tell him where to go and what to do. Or not. Maybe this was heaven, or as close to it as freaks got.
“It’s not Heaven, Sam.” The voice was Chuck’s and not Chuck’s at the same time. He hadn’t heard anyone approach, or even felt someone coming near. Chuck was just not there one moment and there the next, or at least it was Chuck’s body. “It’s a nice place, though, isn’t it?”
He sat up again and glanced at his visitor. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s Limbo. Heaven is… well, Heaven is experiencing some technical difficulties right now. I don’t think you’d want to be there right now. It turns out that some of My angels were having some difficulty following some pretty simple instructions.” He grimaced. “Honestly, you think you can leave the oldest alone for five minutes and this is what you get.”
He paused for a moment. “You’re riding Chuck.” He couldn’t pause to think about it. If he did, he’d get hysterical.
Chuck’s face grinned. “Even most angels can’t really look on My true face, Sam. I can speak through My prophets. This is just a little more direct. I wanted to say thank you for your help with the whole Apocalypse thing. You’ve made sure that can never happen - not that way, anyway, and that’s basically like taking all the major WMDs off the table so that’s a huge load off my plate.”
Sam blushed. “It wasn’t just me. I mean, it was all of us. Mostly demons, really. They took a lot of risks. Some of them gave up everything. And it was Castiel who told us how to do it in the end.”
God grinned. “Oh yes. Castiel. The little engine that could. What does that make it now, seven angels who figured out how to watch over humanity and guard them like I told them? I know it took a while, but I’m glad you were willing to give him another chance, Sam. He loves you.”
“He’ll get over it.” Sam looked away. Cas loved him, and he loved Cas. “We both knew there was no future in it, by the end.”
“I think there’s always some element of hope, Sam. You hoped that there might be something when you and he got back from Hell, and it was only when his orders changed that you realized that wouldn’t happen. And he hopes that something will happen now that Lilith is dead.” He smiled again, gently.
“I’m dead,” Sam pointed out. “That mistake has already been made once. What’s dead should stay dead. It shouldn’t come back to hassle the living.”
“You brought your brother back.”
“He shouldn’t have died in the first place! He only died because he sold his soul bringing me back. It’s not like I even did anyone any good -“
“Sam, you saved the world. You did all the good, okay?” God patted his hand gently. “Look, ordinarily I’d agree with you. You’ve done a tremendous amount of work, and with what you’ve been through in your life I’m frankly kind of reluctant to do anything but encourage you to go to your Heaven and hang out enjoying every possible happiness.”
Sam drew himself up. “Heaven?”
“Yeah, Sam. Heaven. You were there the first time you died too. I know Meg thinks it’s her blood that condemned her in life, but she doesn’t remember the choices she made. Not all of Azazel’s ‘experiments’ wound up in Hell. Andy Gallagher is in Heaven. So are Lily, and Scott Carey. You remember them.”
He hadn’t met Scott, but he remembered the name from having investigated his death. “Okay. Yeah. You said ‘ordinarily.’”
He sighed. “I did. The problem I’m seeing is that I’m not exactly thrilled with the way Hell’s been run either. It was never intended to be a place for torturers, you know? I mean, yes, it was a place for souls to expiate their sins. But even Lucifer was never supposed to be what he became. He was supposed to show people choices. Tempt them, sure. That’s the whole thing about free will, Sam. It’s only free will if they have other options.
“I need someone in charge down there who isn’t going to get caught up in Heaven’s petty scheming. Who doesn’t want power for the sake of power, and who doesn’t buy into the whole mythology thing. I mean, Lilith bought into the Lucifer myth and she knew him, he’s the one who twisted her into a demon. Azazel bought into the Lucifer myth and he knew him too, before the Cage. He was a demon before Lilith - one of the Fallen, actually.”
“Really?” Sam couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward, into the conversation.
“Oh yeah. There were a few. Most of them were destroyed in that first war but a few remained. Anyway, you’ve obviously got the talent for it. They accept you.”
“I don’t know,” he demurred. “I mean, there aren’t words to describe how not okay I am with the whole possession thing.”
“And do you have any idea how many of your followers have taken willing hosts, or empty vessels? Just to please you? You’re already turning it into a place of redemption and you don’t even know it!” He smiled expansively. “You can make Hell into whatever you want, Sam. It’s yours. That’s why you’ve been able to draw on its power.”
He bit his lip. “But I’ll still be apart from Cas. And my brother,” he added.
“No. Not if they don’t want to be, and not if you don’t want to be. You can go wherever you want, do whatever you want. You’re not a demon. You’re you. You’ll have the ability to come and go as you please - from Hell, Earth, even Heaven if you want. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. And if it truly becomes too much, you can simply designate a successor and move on into your Heaven. It’s written.”
He sighed. He didn’t want to leave his blanket. “I need to talk with Cas,” he told Him. Everything God was saying made perfect sense. He didn’t want to do it, but he had an out. And while he did kind of want to defer to Meg or Zille, if people would have accepted them as Queen Lilith would never have taken power. “I can’t face another year like the last one, never mind forever. But that’s not a no.”
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