The Last Sacrifice
Title: The Last Sacrifice
Characters: Sam, Dean
Rating: PG (violence)
Word Count: 2000
Summary: Lucifer himself didn’t even give the orders anymore, just raged and roared and threw Sam’s body against the walls in the cage, his screams echoing through space and time and making Sam’s soul tremble on the rack. And in the few precious seconds that they sometimes forgot him, Sam prayed to a God he no longer believed in. One day, God heard.
Hell wasn’t what Sam expected. Not that he’d expected anything, really. He’d actually tried really hard not to think about it before Detroit, he was sure if he thought about it enough he’d lose his nerve and the world, the whole world had been counting on him. Dean had been counting on him. And the one thing he couldn’t let himself do was let Dean down again. But still, Dean hadn’t told him much, but what he had told him hadn’t been this.
There was no Alastair anymore, no Grand Inquisitor to keep things running smoothly, no Lilith to keep the plotline moving, just an endless horde of demons with no goals other than to extract their revenge and take out their frustrations on his soul. There was no seal to be broken and no daily offer of a knife of his own for Sam. There was only pain, endless, unimaginable, incomprehensible pain, day after day, minute after minute, second after second for Sam. He’d lost his happy place years ago, he could no longer see the quiet, resigned love and pride radiating from swollen, moss green eyes that was the memory he’d retreated to during the worst of it. He couldn’t remember his brother’s face, couldn’t hear his voice, and couldn’t picture the unfathomable love that had braved angels and demons and stood toe to toe with Lucifer himself and said “I’ll never leave you.” He remembered, but could no longer feel, a love so big that hell had been a better alternative than life without Sam, and the knowledge of that was the worst torture of all.
There was no escape, no words of Latin, no knife, no Colt, nothing but the endless expanse of eternity at the mercy of Lucifer’s Legion. Lucifer himself didn’t even give the orders anymore, just raged and roared and threw Sam’s body against the walls in the cage, his screams echoing through space and time and making Sam’s soul tremble on the rack. And in the few precious seconds that they sometimes forgot him, Sam prayed to a God he no longer believed in.
One day, God heard.
* * *
The room was dark, one tiny lamp concentrating on pushing back the night with its meager glow. There was no wave of dizziness, no shock from the presence of light after so many years in darkness, no disorientation. He was standing, sure footed and strong on his own two legs. There was no pain, no roar of fury, no screams of the damned. There was only Sam, standing in light and utter silence, whole and numb and alive. A sound like wind blowing softly through his mind was the only soundtrack to the memories that began to drag themselves out of obsolescence one at a time, then faster and faster as his whole life flashed before his eyes again in reverse. Sound rushed back into reality with a crash as one memory brought the movie to an end, and he looked down at his hand to be certain.
“Do it! I can still feel it inside me. You shoot me, Sam. You kill me now, and this all ends!” The colt was weightless in his hand as Dad shouted at him from the floor, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his leg.
Dean’s voice, so young and frightened and strained with pain drew his eyes to the wall where he was still pinned from Azazel’s power. Sam couldn’t believe how young he was, how wide eyed and innocent and untainted Dean was. “Sammy, no. Don’t, please…” Dean begged, and the fear on his face was so beautiful it hurt because it was just fear, just fear that Dad might die, and there was no underlying memory of torture or burden of sacrifice or knowledge that nothing they did could ever be changed. Until this moment, Sam had forgotten a time when their biggest fear was whether one of them had steady enough hands to keep stitches straight. He had forgotten a time when Dean’s biggest hurt was that he had killed a man to save his brother and was frightened that he had that ruthlessness in him. Their innocence had been shattered as children, but this, this was innocence compared to the terrible burdens in their hearts when Sam had thrown himself into the cage. I’ll never leave you. He prayed that it still held true. “I love you, Dad,” he whispered.
Sam pulled the trigger.
Azazel died.
Dean screamed.
Everything changed.
* * *
Sam couldn’t stop the bleeding, there was no way to bandage the holes where Azazel had punctured Dean’s flesh with his father’s own hand, no way to stop the blood that was trickling steadily into his lungs from the power that had poured into his brother as the demon had grinned at him with Dad’s own face. The engine was roaring as he shot down the narrow road, his blood pounded in his ears as he listened to his brother’s labored breathing in the passenger seat. A thought nagged at the back of his mind as he concentrated on keeping the huge car on the asphalt at more than a hundred miles per hour. The implications of what he’d done were flashing through his mind just as fast, no cage and no Lucifer, no Michael and no apocalypse. There would be no Ruby and no Lilith, no final seal and no first, because Dean would never go to hell, because Azazel was dead. Sam would never be in Cold Creek to be killed by Jake. Dean would…
Dean would be taken by a Reaper in the hospital because Dad wouldn’t be there to make a deal with a demon that wouldn’t be there to bring him back. Dean would die from his horrible injuries because…
The nagging thought in the back of his mind shoved its way to the forefront and he suddenly remembered the metal on metal scream of defiance as the Impala had done her best to protect them, her frame crumpling under the semi’s tremendous force and her axles snapping from the gut-wrenching impact as the truck had trapped her under its monstrous weight.
She screamed now as her brakes locked and her tires left streaks of terror on the asphalt. She came to a neck snapping halt as the semi shot across the road barely millimeters from her grill and Sam laughed hysterically as he hit the gas, rocketing his brother toward the hospital as the truck hit the wood line and wedged itself between trees. Twin lines of cold seared themselves on Sam’s cheeks as the wind dried defiant tears as fast as they fell.
* * *
The doctors threw words at him while his ears rang and his head swam with the implications of everything that had changed. They used huge scary words that he couldn’t wrap his head around and finally just stopped listening to until one finally snaked through to echo like a gong across the whole expanse of eternity. Recovery. “He’s going to be alright?” Sam stammered, tears flowing unchecked again. He wiped at them absently as the doctor nodded and found that he just didn’t care if anyone saw him cry.
“We’ll be keeping him sedated for a few days, and he’ll be here for a few weeks, but everything looks fine, and he should be up and around in no time,” the pretty brunette said, a smile creeping over her lips at his wide-eyed goofy grin. She laughed good-naturedly as he swept her up in a rib-crushing hug, spinning them both around before setting her back on her feet.
A few weeks turned out to be three, and Sam was so full of joy to see the moss green eyes that opened on the fourth day that he didn’t even try to make Dean talk to him. He just took the sullen silence and the hurt, accusatory glares and tried to keep from grinning as he whispered over and over, “I’m sorry, Dean. I had to.” He silently bore the scathing remarks about a brother who had killed his father. He even silently took the right hook that left his jaw aching and tears in his eyes. You can hit me all you want, Dean. It won’t change the fact that Dad’s gone, and I’m not okay, and neither are you.
But you will be.
It was nearly three months later, amid a pile of Bobby’s junkers that Dean was working on to distract himself from the fact that his father was gone, really gone, that he finally met Sam’s eyes with something other than rage. “Sammy, I’ve been thinking,” he started, and Sam wasn’t prepared for the wave of love that hit him like a fist in the gut as he remembered all the times Dean had started a conversation with those exact words. He choked, swallowed past the lump in his throat, and just nodded. “You were right, Sam. It was the demon that killed mom. It’s what we spent our whole lives chasing, training to kill. Dad gave you an order, and you did it. You got that yellow-eyed son of a bitch. I just wish…”
“I know, Dean. Me too. God, I miss him, too and I’m so sorry. But I just couldn’t take the chance that he got away…”
“I get it, Sam.” Dean sighed, wiped at damp eyes with a hand that left grease smeared on his cheek. “I don’t like it. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done it. But I get it.” The silence stretched out between them and Sam nodded as he started to turn away. “And Sam,” Dean said in a choked voice.
Sam looked at his brother and saw the statement in his eyes. Tears welled in his own as he saw, as he felt a love big enough to forgive him anything. Big enough to forgive him for breaking the world. I’ll never leave you. “I know, Dean. Me too,” he whispered as he crushed his brother to him in a desperate embrace.
He thought about the years that only he would remember, all the people he would do his best to make sure they never met. Ellen and Jo, Gordon, Anna, Rufus, Pamela, the angel that had rebelled against heaven and put his faith in two humans that had faith only in each other. He remembered all the sacrifices, all the people who’d died to help fix what they’d broken and there was only one thing left to do. “So I was thinking,” he said as he pulled away, “The yellow-eyed demon’s dead. We’ve accomplished our life’s goal. I thought it might be nice to just enjoy life for a while.” He didn’t feel even the least bit guilty was he aimed the big-gun puppy dog eyes at his brother. “When you’re feeling up to it, you know, when you can stand the thought of hanging out with me for a while, maybe we could take a road trip.”
“Wanna go see the world’s largest ball of twine again, Sammy?” Dean said with the beginnings of a real smirk. Sam had been six when they’d been there, and Dean had never let him live down how utterly, awesomely impressed he’d been.
“Actually, I was thinking Indiana. There’s a train museum in Cicero that sounded pretty cool.”
“Trains, huh? As far as museums go, I guess that’d be a pretty awesome one, but…” Dean pondered the idea for a moment. “Hey! I know a girl in Cicero.” Sam swallowed the joyful laugh that threatened to tear itself from his throat as Dean’s face lit up. “She’s a yoga teacher,” he smirked lasciviously.
“I know,” Sam whispered.