fic: Ashtaroth - third continuation
fic: Ashtaroth
media: Supernatural
rating: R
Find Part 4(I) and Part 4 (II) at:
http://sangga.livejournal.com/87819.html#cutid1
“Nikki -“ Sam says, and her name in his mouth holds such urgency, and Tom barks out a laugh, but she is not stupid, she is getting smarter every moment and she takes the shots, above, behind, below -
“Listen,” she hisses, pulling on Sam’s jacket sleeve,” just listen to me, this guy, he’s not your brother, okay? This guy’s not even your friend anymore -“
“Nikki, get out of here,” Sam whispers, and his eyes are fervent, snapping between her and the demon. “Just run, head for the truck, and don’t stop running ‘til you _”
“So you did fuck her?” Tom laughs, almost breathless with laughter, one hand spread over his gaping midriff. “Oh, this is great, this is priceless. Sam Winchester, Mister Pure of Heart, manages to avoid all the temptations except the most important one. Oh, sweet -”
“Do you fucking mind?” Nikki snaps up at him, and Sam looks like he couldn’t be prouder even as he tugs at her to retreat. But she’s just so sick of this - sick of feeling scared, sick of feeling powerless, as she narrows her eyes at the figure on the dais. “Hey, I’ve got a question for you - how did a bigshot demon like you turn out to be such a fucking asswipe, anyway?”
Like a faucet being turned off, the demon’s smiles turn and twist south, curdle into something more dangerous as he straightens.
“Perhaps,” he enunciates slowly,” you’d like to -“
“This is what I’d like,” Nikki says firmly, and she draws the Desert Eagle out of her pocket in one smooth motion and shoots Tom in the chest.
“Jesus!” Sam yelps.
Nikki’s grinning but it only lasts a second, because the demon doesn’t even flinch. He flicks a nail over the neat black hole beside one nipple, and when she looks up she knows she’s going to be punished.
*
But to die, and go we know not where.
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
It happens so fast he can’t even step to block her with his body, even as he’s grabbing for her, still glowing inside with the warmth of her sheer crazy fucking gutsiness, the demon is clenching his jaw, and she -
Nikki’s yanked hard forward, like a rag on a string. She yells as her body moves against her volition, feet sliding, no time to scramble, dragged to her knees with her arms flailing out, all in one second collected with a solid painful thump against the stone steps of the dais.
Her head snaps forward, neck whiplashing as her top half hits the marble; Sam hears the crack of impact as he runs for her, and Tom has stepped forward, looming with a maniacal fury deforming his face, and he screams at them both, eyes boiling black and a mess of fanging teeth -
“It happens over MILLENNIA, you self-righteous little BITCH!!”
Sam hauls Nikki back, his gun-arm raising and lowering and raising, sometimes he needs two hands, but the demon has spun and marched back to the Gates of Hell, and Sam’s got a second to look down -
They’re both low on the grass now, and Nikki has a bad bruise and a cut over her left eye, blinking the blood away as Sam checks the rest of her for damage.
“Ah…goddamnit,” she whispers.
“You’re fucking insane, you know that, don’t you,” he whispers, but he can’t keep the satisfaction out of his face, out of his voice, and neither can she.
“Yeah, I know, but it was - shit! God, don’t touch that -“
“I think your knee is fucked up.”
“I think so too, it doesn’t matter, help me up -“
He struggles her up to standing, even listing like this she’s still making an effort, biting her lip against the hiss of pain. They’ve both got their eyes fixed on Tom’s stiff back, his spread arms… Sam feels good somehow, despite feeling bad as he holds Nikki up, helping her keep the weight on her good leg.
Some part of her is still reeling that this is happening right here, right now, not in some ancient church or graveyard crypt, but in the chill light of dawn on her own fucking campus, but she pushes that thought aside. From behind Sam’s shoulder she can see Tom - not-Tom, of course, but him, Ashtaroth, the demon inside the man glowing like a dwarf star about to implode, a dark black-hole radiance about him, charging the ether with swirling fury as leaves and dust and air begin to abandon gravity and stir, like they’re all on the moon.
Nikki feels her hair starting to whip, the short strands on her nape rising.
Tom is looking at her
“Nice of you to attend, by the way,” he says, and he has to raise his voice a little now, above the wind. “Really, if you hadn’t come to visit me, down in the bottom of that pit, I might never have stirred up enough energy for this little comeback. And I have to say, you and Sam, getting naked together…well, that’s really something more than we’d ever hoped for…”
“Shut up,” Sam growls, Nikki startled to hear the anger in his voice and the swell of responsibility rising inside her is quelled just a little, as she in- and exhales through her nose and keeps her eyes firmly forward. But it hurts too, oh god, it hurts…
Nikki stares at Tom and swallows around the bile and pain and hate, fuck, she hates this thing more than she’s ever loathed anything in her entire life. And the way he’s looking at her now, like a butterfly spread-winged and skewered under glass, makes her grit her teeth. Only Sam’s strong arm is keeping her up, keeping her from lunging forward, screaming -
Tom looks up at the great bronze Gate he’s lounging on.
“Incredible, isn’t it? So perfect…” He glances back at his audience. “Really the sum of its parts. So much work involved… We tormented Monsieur Rodin to death to get it right. Thirty seven years, and personally I always enjoy the scene of Ulgolino eating his children - it’s just so life-like. And then there’s the Latin…”
Sam’s eyes flick up to where the Three Shades are pointing their ghastly melded fingers, the quote from the Inferno whispering in the dawn: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Nikki chokes, shaking in his embrace, whether it’s from pain or fear or fury he doesn’t know.
“Very appropriate,” Sam grinds out, but Tom only laughs again.
“Yes, it sure is. And here we are…” he says. “Together at last.”
Smacking his lips and clicking his teeth, smiling fit to burst.
*
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Blake
The thunderclap, as Tom’s hands connect with either side of the great Door, makes them both startle. The wind picks up, an inexorable force.
“We’re not that different, you know!” Tom screams over the now-deafening roar as he raises his hands out and the Gates of Hell crack open, barely a hands-breadth but wide enough that Sam and Nikki can feel the sudden remorseless pull, the scorch of the waiting fire, the vacuum yanking at their clothes, their skin, at the very air -
Sam clutches Nikki tighter, feels her clutch at him in turn, and now the demon is flinging around to show off his face, the whole of his emptied-out torso, degenerate madness and blood-spattered decorations.
“Iron chains hold the heat - but not for much longer! How do you like being domesticated, Sam?!”
And his movement is enough to let them see the Gates behind, and Sam’s mouth gasps open, because the Gates are slithering - all the bronze figures moving, melting together and reforming…
The Thinker looking down in ghastly sorrow as Paolo reaches out, screaming soundlessly to his Francesca, who tries to claw her way back, slipping and falling, being sucked back into Hell, limb by ripping limb… The old Courtesan watching her ageing naked flesh sink and decompose, the worms climbing over her lips, her jaws wide open in terror… Ulgolino weeping, as he rips handfuls off the bodies of his starving babies and stuffs the meat into his mouth, compulsively, unstoppably, on and on… The Three Shades dissolving into each other to reappear in infinite grotesquery, arms and legs and staring eyes, bizarre inhuman combinations…and more and more -
Nikki gags beside Sam, shaking. He swallows, can’t look away, too terrified to take his eyes off the tableau. The crack in the massive Gates glows, a red-gold flaming line, all the writhing around it a mere precursor to the horrible infinity of promise, and the demon is exultant now -
“Sam.” Nikki’s voice is hoarse, hair dancing around her head; she thumps on his bicep. “Are those Gates the real -“
“Yes.”
Nikki’s expecting him to say ‘we’ve gotta assume so’, or something like that, something less definitive, but Sam’s just nodding. So…even if they were able to retreat now, could they really do it? She’s had a taste of Hell, over the last twenty-four hours, and she’s pretty sure it’s not something the rest of the world’s ready for.
Her face, for all her earlier rebelliousness, is now white with fear. He must know something, she thinks in a panic, he must be able to help -
“What do we do now?”
Sam looks at her, and his lips are white. “I have no idea.”
Nikki blanches. The Gates of Hell emit a kind of awful music, drums and screaming as the figures around it clamour, and she realizes with a shrieking horror that the figures are breaking loose of their metal fixtures, the bronze of their bodies melting and running onto the plinth as they shamble forward, towards the steps, flanking outwards.
“Sam!”
She has to yell now over the rush of whirlpooling air currents, and she jerks closer to Sam as the huge statue of Adam begins to drag its tortured dissolving feet down onto the path near her left.
“Nikki, stay close.”
But Sam’s face is still fixed on his old friend, his gun shaking as he raises it, as the figure of Eve, ten feet high and weeping inconsolable bronze tears onto her pendulous breasts, starts to stagger around to Sam’s right. The wind has a keening, scratching quality that prickles in Nikki’s ears; she’s goose-bumped all over, aware of a litany going on in her head, this is insane, this is too big, where’s security, WHERE’S THE FUCKING CAVALRY?? But she knows too, in her mind and gut, that no cavalry is coming, that it’s just her and Sam on their own…
Tom is talking, his voice lifted high over the wind. “Give me the girl!”
“Not a chance!”
“You say that like you have a choice!! You know how to end it, Sam! She’s the last of the line. All this history, all the bloodshed, so many dead… And you can finish it!”
“Forget it!” Sam bellows, and Nikki suddenly understands what Tom’s talking about. All the bloodshed…and with a cold cold feeling in her stomach she knows what it will mean if these Gates open much wider. And what she can do to stop it.
Tom steps forward, looming with a maniacal fury deforming his face, and he screams at Sam, eyes boiling black
“YOU THINK YOU CAN FIGHT ME, YOU FUCKING HALF-BREED?!”
Nikki cowers under that gaze, and then Sam’s supporting arms are gone - she flails and cries out as her bad leg takes too much weight, as Sam is wrenched away from her, flung backwards in a monumental arc that finishes six feet away in a sickening thud as his body connects with the ground.
“I WAS GUTTING YOUR KIND IN BATTLE A MILLION YEARS BEFORE YOUR MOMMA EVEN SHAT YOU OUT!”
Tom is marching and stamping the dias. Nikki can see Sam’s eyes starting to roll back in his head, a kind of spasm rocking his body… Nikki limps over quickly, each hobbling step an agony - his twitching legs bump her ankle, and she collapses, trying to reach for his arms, but now blood is starting to leak from his lips as he thrashes…
“Stop! Stop it, you’re killing him!”
But Tom won’t stop. Mindless of the groans and screeches from the writhing Gates behind him, he’s got his whole gaze focused on Sam, leaning forward, pushing forward with his eyes bulging, grinning as Sam flops and chokes like a fish, face grinding into the turf, hands scrabbling for purchase. Nikki looks on, horrified.
Oh god, she can’t do anything, she can’t - and the words are bubbling out of her, high screaming-bright, before she can think about it.
“Stop, STOP - you can have me, whatever you want -“
With a sudden lurch, Sam’s body goes limp. Nikki turns her head, and the demon is standing on the marble platform, bronze figures wailing and reshaping themselves in a semi-circle around him, and his smile is deranged, offering her derangement as well.
She lets go of Sam, stands up with effort, hobbles forward and looks straight up at Tom. “Will it be over? Tell me - will the Gates close?”
“Nikki, no…” Sam’s voice is a mere whisper, he coughs, rolls over, spits blood off his teeth.
Nikki can feel her eyes tearing up, her knee is excruciating but she knows that’s not why she’s crying, taking two fateful steps up onto the dais - and now the demon is smiling at her, just for her, leaning forward so she can hear his sibilant hiss.
“Yes. It can end right here…” He licks his lips then, with a lascivious sneer. “Just for you.”
Nikki limps quickly forward on shaking half-lame legs, trying not to think too hard about what she’s doing.
“Then take me. And let’s finish this.”
*
God loveth a cheerful giver
2 Corinthians 9:6-7
There’s no mistaking the whoop of victory from Tom as he drags a stumbling Nikki closer to the Gates.
“You did it!” Tom cries, with such a look of jubilation it almost makes him seem human again. “Oh, girl - what creatures you humans are!”
Nikki feels his sharp nails squeezing into the top of her shoulders, revolted by his nearness, too close to the heat of the Gates for her mind to process.
It’s the right thing…all the bloodshed…what else can we do?
Too many thoughts chasing around in her brain, and now the paralyzing horror of what is probably about to happen to her begins to freeze everything else out. She can barely hear Sam screaming her name as the demon leans in, as she gets a whiff of its fetid breath.
“And the best thing - you know the best thing about this, is that you get to be the first!”
Trembling hard now, barely able to stand, Nikki suddenly frowns in confusion. The demon releases her, skips to the Gates and back to her with quick jerky movements.
“What do you mean, the first?” she yells.
Tom puts a bloody hand on her cheek, soft as a father, even as he grinds out the next words. “The first of so, so many…”
And his grip hardens, becomes a claw, scratching a long dripping line down her cheek and flinging the blood away, where it sizzles onto the metal of the Gates like fat in a pan.
“You didn’t think I’d lie to you? Poor little Nikki…you should’ve got smarter, should’ve been better trained -“
And she realizes her mistake in an instant as the demon crows:
“ - that’s what we do!”
*
How thou art fallen from Heaven, Lucifer, son of the morning!
Isaiah 14:12
“NIKKI!”
She’s gone, out of his grasp, and as soon as Tom’s hand touches her, Sam’s vision turns white.
On his knees in the grass before the steps, he bellows her name three times before realizing that the wind is too strong, the music of Hell too loud, the thrall of the demon too powerful -
On his knees in the grass, he’s paralyzed for a second with the realization of what’s about to happen, and the part he’s played in bringing it to pass, the way it’s all snowballed, inexorable and out-of-control…
Could’ve trained her properly, could’ve taught her not to trust them, not to be so gullible…we could’ve been prepared, from the minute she got back from California, years before that even…
If he hadn’t been so nostalgic, his family always his weak spot forever and ever amen, if only he’d been more pragmatic, less complicated - nothing you Winchesters do ever is - then maybe, maybe…
And the only time he’s felt whole, these last twenty years, maybe his entire life, was in a hurried sweat-soaked moment made fragile by fear of discovery, made swollen by guilt, made precious by love…and maybe blood does call to blood, but maybe it was more than that too, maybe…
Maybe together you can make the circuit.
Minnie’s voice, rising to him out of some quiet place, a place he doesn’t know, and with the voice, the sense of despair that’s fallen over him like fog suddenly dissipates. The righteous anger which is Sam’s to possess, his and his alone, rushes in to replace all other emotions, and with it the power to act.
The power.
He pushes up off his knees. The tingling in the soles of his feet immediately reasserts itself, and he barely notices that he’s left the Colt on the grass as the tingling becomes a surge, a wave that rushes up his body, expanding perception immeasurably so he is everywhere, he sees everything, and it is beautiful, terrible -
Nikki on the dais, ivory face drawn so her teeth show, revulsed by the way the demon - looming black and large under Tom’s skin - grabs at her shoulders and pulls her close. Sam feels it like (he burns) he has only once before, feels it like an exhale: the power, the surge of his will blowing out, focused and directed like thinking hard about nothing only this is so different from moving coffee cups it hardly bears comparison and he feels himself laugh -
Demon-Tom has made a cut, and Nikki’s blood is sputtering on the Gates. Too late, a dispassionate part of Sam’s brain murmurs, but the other human part of him knows a few tricks of its own, and he doesn’t need to raise his hand anymore, because he just has to breathe out -
*
I’l nya pas de morts
(There are no dead)
Maeterlinck
She’s learned the first and most important lesson - that demons lie - just seconds before all lessons become meaningless. And there’s no training in the world that can prepare her for being torn limb from limb by a Hell-Gate: as Tom drags her by the hair and arm towards the Gates, Nikki pulls against him, resisting every inch as the pain in her leg becomes a scream, as the heat and suck of Hell caresses her face, drawing her in closer, so close she can feel her cheek starting to sear and blister…
Something like a sonic boom explodes beside her - her whipping hair flies back, and suddenly Tom’s vice-grip is gone.
Nikki flails, forces her momentum backwards and falls flat on her ass, sprawling on the marble. By the time she rears her head up to see what the fuck happened, Sam is in front of her, holding Tom’s arm, his weight on Tom’s body, crushing the ribs -
“Get the knife out of my jacket pocket,” Sam says, and Nikki registers somewhere that he’s got that look again - like a meditative calm wrapping around wrath as deep as the ocean. He seems ridiculously relaxed, like he’s in some tranquil pastoral scene or something, and not down on one knee, holding the wriggling arm of a demon’s human form while the Gates of Hell inch ever wider just to his right.
“Nikki - listen to me. Get my knife. I can’t hold him forever…”
Nikki’s eyes bulge, she scrambles onto her good leg side.
“Right,” she gasps, only it comes out like a gurgle, maybe a touch of hysteria, making her voice muddy. “Okay - wait -“
She leans forward, ignoring the agony in her knee, avoiding the clutching clawing arm wedged in Sam’s grip, and holding Sam’s shoulder for balance as she reefs through the material of his jacket until her hand finally closes over something long and solid-metal. Untangling, then unbuckling the sheath - the knife glows red in the light of the Hell-Gate as she hefts it up, the silver inlays swirling with their own sentience.
Sam’s bark brings her back from the sight of it. “Now cut him. Nikki -“
“Where ?”
“Anywhere. Here -“
Tom writhes and shrieks in Sam’s grasp. Sam is ignoring him, the tendons in his neck standing out as he keeps his hands firm.
“Cut him, Nikki -“
And if Sam had thought that Nikki would baulk at the act, she’s happy to reassure him.
‘With pleasure,” she snarls, and slices the blade straight across the demon’s forearm.
Tom squeals; the skin bursts obligingly, welling red, and then Sam’s voice, low and soothing, begins to sound.
“Ergo draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica …”
“You’re not blessing him?!” Nikki yells, and then she realizes that Tom’s writhing has become a lashing frenzy, and whatever this Latin is, it’s no blessing.
“…adjuramus te.cessa decipere humanas creaturas…”
“You fucking seraphim mongrel bastard!’ Tom shrieks, and Nikki’s surprised to see Sam flinch. She can see Tom, over Sam’s shoulder, the skin of his face and chest deforming and reforming, the snarl of his features human and demonic by turns as he struggles.
“Blood passed down through generations -“
“…eisque aeternae Perditionis …” Sam’s regained impassivity, voice flowing smoothly.
“ - cast down like the rest of us -“
“…venenum propinare …”
“ - always impure! And the name of him is -“
- and the next word sounds in Nikki’s ears, a guttural conflagration of utterance like the bastard child of a bell and a scream.
Tom’s heels start drumming the marble and a kind of convulsion wracks this host, Ashtaroth tearing, rolling, trying to break free. But Sam keeps his grip, the jiggling arm dripping, slick with blood on his knee. Nikki glances between Sam and the demon, unsure which sight is more terrible, unsure of what she’s supposed to do now.
The cut on her cheek stings in the heat of the Gates.
*