(no subject)
Title: The Shell
Pairings: Dean/Bela, Sam/Jess, Sam/Bela
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 3400
Disclaimer: Supernatural is not mine.
Warnings: Bodyswap, canon child abuse/incest, pseudo-incest
Note: Spoilers through the end of season four
Summary: Dean finds a cursed artifact that changes his life--and Bela's and Sam's and the fate of the world.
PART ONE
The Shell
Dean
Dean found the tortoise shell in the trunk of the Impala, among the silver bullets and knives and sawed-off shotguns. He picked it up, thinking it was an empty take-out container. The shell was dark and hard and fit perfectly in his hand, filling up every centimeter of flat skin from the base of his palm to his fingertips.
After staring at the shell for a good minute, Dean shrugged and tossed it back into the trunk. He figured it must have fallen out of Sam’s duffel bag. He could never tell what kind of freaky shit that geek carried around.
He grabbed the knife that he’d opened the trunk to get and was about to close it again when his eyes fell back onto the dark shell. A grin cracked his face as he picked it up and slipped it into his pocket. He wasn’t sure what Sam needed the shell for, but he couldn’t wait to see him flip out when he went to go look for it and he couldn't find it.
*
When Bela showed up at a roadside diner while Sam was taking a leak and told Dean flat-out that she wanted the shell and would pay a handsome ten thousand dollars for it, he told her that he had no idea what she was talking about. He wasn’t sure what disturbed him more, Bela’s interest in the tortoise shell or her directness.
Even though it had been weeks since he’d pocketed the shell as a practical joke, his brother still hadn’t noticed it missing. Which had led Dean to suspect that the shell, however it had gotten into the trunk of the Impala, wasn’t Sam’s. He’d continued to carry it around anyway. Throwing it out seemed like a bad idea.
Now that Bela was sitting across from him, with a perfectly pleasant expression on her face, but a hint of desperation in her eyes that Dean only recognized because it was the same look he saw in his own face every time he accidentally glanced in a mirror these days, Dean was glad that he hadn’t tossed the shell.
He sure as hell wasn’t going to hand it over to her without knowing more about it, though. Not when cursed artifacts-if that was indeed what the shell was-had an unfortunate habit of killing their previous owners. Dean figured he didn’t need a lot of help in the dying-young department. He had that one covered already.
*
Bela, it turned out, was both smarter and more patient than she looked. Dean wasn’t sure what black magic hoodoo spell she’d used, but he might as well have rolled around in hellhound shit or something because whenever he walked into a room every remotely attractive woman immediately left.
After three long weeks, Dean found himself in a booth at the back of a bar, working on his second pitcher of beer by himself and wrestling with the idea of hitting on the very male bartender. Then Bela had shown up, drawing the gaze of every male in the place simply by being the only female in the damn place and a hot as hell one at that.
*
Dean blamed his dick for what happened next.
*
When Bela tied Dean’s hands to the headboard, he didn’t even open his mouth to protest. Only to whimper as she sucked him off.
After three weeks of desperate, unsatisfactory masturbation, Dean’s dick wasn’t ready to quit after one blowjob. So Bela jerked him off, running her tongue around his nipples until he came all over his stomach.
Only when Dean awoke with a start in the darkened room did he realized that he had fallen asleep. Reaching instinctively for the gun beneath his pillow, he found his hands still tied to the bed. Even as he cursed, Dean had to admit that he wasn’t surprised. If he had been in Bela’s spot, he would have done the same thing to himself.
What did surprise him, however, was that Bela was still there. She sat on the edge of the motel bed, dressed only in a pair of black silk panties. He had to squint to see what was in her palm. The tortoise shell. Of course.
“Mind undoing these?” asked Dean, gesturing with his head toward his arms.
Bela glanced up at him, her smile stretching across her face like a large cat awakening from a nap. She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “You know, I expected so much more from you.”
Before he could respond, Bela set the dark shell down on the white sheets. Then she pulled the black silk panties off and laced Dean’s legs through the holes, tugging them up his hips and over his dick. Dean’s face flushed. “What are you-”
He shut up when Bela grabbed his dick and started stroking it through the silk. When he was on the verge of coming, Bela peeled back the panties and lowered herself onto his dick with the self-control of a lioness hunting an antelope.
Dean’s eyes rolled back in their sockets as he groaned. He was only dimly aware of anything besides the sensation of Bela slow-fucking him. It wasn’t until the cool surface of the tortoise pressed against his palm that he realized that Bela was up to something.
He opened his mouth to protest, but the protest, along with the weird tingle that zapped through his nerves as their hands clasped the shell together, was lost among the orgasmic rush and then the darkness and pain that followed.
PART TWO
Mirrors and Mothers
Bela's Mother
For Abbie’s fourth birthday, her mother buys her a life-size doll with a pink dress and blonde hair and a glittery crown. After posing for the obligatory photo album picture, Abbie disappears into her room with the doll. Her mother finds it two weeks later beneath Abbie’s bed. Its hair has been hacked off with scissors and its crown has been snapped in half, the silver plastic turning white where it was bent and twisted.
Upon finding the doll, Abbie’s mother heads straight to the living room where her daughter is lying on the floor, playing with the toy car that came with her fast-food meal. As she listens to her daughter make vroom-vroom noises, Abbie’s mother shakes her head.
This behavior, she decides, has gone on long enough. In a month, she will be starting school. Tomorrow, they will go shopping for her school uniform. No more running around like a wild creature, no more digging holes in the dirt, no more plastic toy cars. Starting tomorrow, Abbie will be expected to behave like a proper young lady.
Mary
“You’re going to love being a big brother,” Mary tells Dean when she was six months pregnant. “You’ll never be alone.”
John and Mary had a long talk before deciding to have a second child. Finances are tight. The mortgage on the house is steeper than they had anticipated. Eventually, though, they decided that they didn’t want Dean to grow up alone like they both had.
Mary isn’t worried about sibling jealousy or rivalry. Dean is an incredibly self-reliant and stoic child. During his one-year check-up, Mary had talked to the doctor about it. He had examined Dean but found nothing wrong with him, although he had suggested that they think about having a second child. He thought that maybe a connection with a younger sibling would draw Dean out of his shell and give him something to focus on.
Bela
Part of being a proper lady, Abbie learns, is going to church every Sunday. Church means even nicer dresses and stockings and polished shoes and hard pews and listening to the old priest give talks about sin and hell and the devil and a lot of other boring nonsense that Abbie doesn't think has anything to do with her.
Abbie hates church, but she hates after-church even more. After church, her mother goes out to lunch at the home of one of the other church ladies. After church, Abbie is driven home by their chauffeur alone.
Her father never goes to church. But after church, he is always waiting for her.
Abbie knows it’s wrong. A dad is supposed to teach you things like how to drive and hunt and play card games. A dad is supposed to love you, even if he doesn’t say it. Her dad says it, but she knows it isn’t true.
Dean
Dean knows that their life is weird. He’s not denying that. But whenever he thinks that maybe he wants something normal, he thinks about what his mom told him when he’d looked at his baby brother.
You’ll never be alone.
When he was younger, he used to wish everyone else in the world would go away and it would just be him. Then Sam was born.
Bela
For eight years, Abbie puts up with it. She doesn’t know what else to do. She has no one to talk to. No sibling to confess everything to as they lie in bed, heads so close that their brown hair mixes together until they don’t know which strands belong to whom. No sibling to stand up for her, to protect her.
So when the red-eyed girl shows up and offers to make it all go away, Abbie doesn’t hesitate.
PART THREE
Freak
Sam
During his first weekend at Stanford, Sam’s R.A. holds an all-floor meeting in the lounge to go over ground rules and to let the other residents get to know each other. The turn out is abysmal, but Sam goes because he has nothing else to do.
During the meeting, the R.A. suggests they play Two Truths and a Lie. Sam partners with a nerdy-looking girl who still has braces and looks like she should be starting high school not college. She tells him that she has been to Europe, been in a movie, and eaten kangaroo. He guesses that she’s never eaten kangaroo and he’s right.
When it’s his turn, he has to sift through the truth looking for something that won’t have him sent to a counselor or branded a freak.
Eventually he tells her that he’s from Texas, he’s left-handed, and he plays soccer. They’re all lies, but when she guesses that he’s not actually left-handed, he smiles and tells her she’s right.
*
College is supposed to fix everything.
It doesn’t.
*
The truth is, Sam has a crush on a chick he has never met before. He doesn’t even know if she exists. He’s been having these incredibly vivid dreams about her for as long as he can remember. He calls her Bela, because he doesn’t know her name. He feels like he’s know her his entire life, like if he were to peel off her face, there would be another face beneath it, one that he knows as well as he knows his own.
Sam spends a lot of time in the library, doing his homework, reading until the words blur together on the page. Sometimes he even falls asleep and wakes up to find that he’s doodled images of Bela on the margins in his Calculus textbook.
He actually meets Jess this way. She shakes him awake and asks if he’s okay. She tells him that some dick drew a bong on his forehead.
When she sees the pictures of Bela, she asks, “Is she your sister?”
He’s not sure why, but he shakes his head and lies. “No, I’m an only child.”
*
He tells her eventually, of course. About his brother. Not Bela.
She says it’s normal. Siblings always long to be only children, just like only children always long to have siblings.
The thing is, Sam doesn't want to be an only child. He wants a brother or a sister, wants a dog, wants a mom and a dad and a two-story house in a nice college town. He wants normal. Sam’s not sure where things got mixed up, but he’s sure that something went wrong. This isn’t the life he’s supposed to have.
He’s not sure how, but he’s positive that the girl in his visions is connected to this feeling. Somehow.
PART FOUR
Dead
Sam
Jess dies and Sam doesn’t even stick around to see her put into the ground.
Dean
When Sam dies in his arms, stabbed in the spine by that camo motherfucker, Dean doesn’t hesitate. He’s never been alone in his life. It feels like someone is peeling up the insides of his lungs with a razor blade, discarding the papery skin like a snake shedding dead skin.
He can’t live like that. Not again.
He makes the deal.
PART FIVE
Attraction
Sam
Three years later, he meets her. Bela.
Bela
The mark is hot. And clearly into her. When Bela leans in close and pretends to mop up the coffee she spilled on purpose, he squirms beneath her touch.
It turns her on. If she had time, she’d fuck him. But she doesn’t. The mark’s smart, if a little gullible. It won’t be long before he notices the missing rabbit’s foot. Bela settles for running her hand over the mark’s crotch, a smirk on her face. Then she turns and walks away, swaying her hips just for him.
Hours later, Bela still can’t get the mark’s face out of her head. Something about him is so familiar. She’s met him before, she’s sure of it.
PART SIX
Waiting
Dean
They work spare jobs, but most of their time these days is spent researching ways to keep Dean from dying. Dean isn’t sure if he deserves to live, but he’s sure as hell not above cheating a demon to keep his ticket from getting punched.
Bela
“Christ, Bela!” screams Sam as she skewers him with her lube-slicked fingers.
Bela smiles. She’s fucked a lot of people-guys and girls-but Sam is her favorite. Or maybe she’s just being sentimental. She’s got less than two weeks until the hellhounds rip her from this world and Sam still hasn’t found a way to save either her or his big brother.
She didn’t ask Sam for help. Far as she was concerned, she made a deal and she honored her deals. But Sam was not only clever enough to figure out what she was running from, he was insistent on helping her.
Bela had agreed because it was the only way Sam would let her fuck him. She would have been happy to spend the next two weeks in bed having multiple orgasms. Sam, however, couldn’t keep his trap shut long enough for her to climax once without mentioning a herb or a spell or a goddamn charm that was supposed to ward against hellhounds or hide the wearer from demons. Sam might have been the best fuck she’d ever had, but he was the neediest too.
There was a time when Bela had longed for someone like who Sam wanted to be for her, someone to care about her and protect her and tell her that everything would work out. Not anymore. Bela had seen too many people get fucked over in her line of work by the people they trusted the most. Even if Sam seemed different.
Of course, agreeing to help Sam had other advantages. Easier access to the Colt, for starters. Even before Lilith had offered to spare her life for the gun, Bela had thought about stealing it. Not for the money. To piss Sam off.
Bela doesn’t want Sam to remember her fondly. Whether it ends in two weeks in a bloodbath or not.
PART SEVEN
Smile
Sam
Sam’s on his way to the nearest crossroads to summon the red-eyed demon when a fifty-something guy just appears in the passenger seat of the Impala.
“They’re not buying what you’re selling,” the man says. His head is almost perfectly round and he’s ordinary looking, but in a creepy way. Like the mundane packaging is hiding something more.
“Who the hell are you?” demands Sam after he struggles with the steering wheel to keep the car from veering into the ditch.
“Zachariah,” says the man. “I’m an angel.”
Sam’s already reaching for his gun. Angels don’t exist. And if they do, they sure as hell don’t look like this guy.
“Relax, Sam,” says the man. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to make you an offer.”
“What can you offer me?” snaps Sam.
The man just smiles.
PART EIGHT
Dean
Dean has been cut, shot, clawed, and bitten. He’s had his teeth almost pulled out, more than a pint of blood drained from his body, and been ripped apart by hellhounds. All of that rolled together, though, is less painful than being stretched on the racks of hell.
“There is a way out,” the demon cutting him whispers into his ear, like an eager sixteen-year-old boy trying to get laid in the backseat of his dad’s car. Then he presses a whip into Dean’s open palm. Dean’s fingers clench around the grip and he opens his eyes.
Staring at the demon with his bloodshot eyes, he smiles. Then he spits in the demon’s face, blood seeping out from the cracks between his teeth. “Go to hell.”
He laughs, the sick, broken laugh of someone who has lost everything.
His answer won’t change. Not that year. Not in ten. Not in forty.
Bela
No one offers Bela an escape.
PART NINE
White Knight, White Light
Dean
The blade made of pure white light sinks into the demon’s chest, protruding through the other side, and blinds Dean. With a wet, squelching noise, the blade is ripped out of the demon’s chest and the demon drops in front of Dean, onto his knees as if Dean is his God.
Then the being that slew the demon reaches out for Dean, touches his shoulder, and rips him from hell.
When Dean wakes in his coffin, he scrambles for his lighter.
He doesn’t know yet that Sam is gone.
Bela
When the being comes for Bela, she is barely there anymore. You can’t die in hell, but you can disappear. Shrink into yourself. Waste away until you are nothing but bone, waiting to turn into dust.
Bela has been cut and burned and skinned alive a thousand times. She has had all of her teeth ripped out of her mouth, her nails torn from her fingers, her thighs and arms and breasts eaten by wild birds.
The being touches her gently, removing her restraints, and cradles her to its breast. It wraps her in its arms of light, picking her up like a small child, and touches her face. Tears stream down its cheeks, wet, heavy tears that drop onto Bela’s scarred face, but she does not wake.
The being moves its hand to her forehead. Blinding white light flashes out, across hell, turning everything it touches to dust.
When the dust settles, Bela is gone and so is the being.
PART TEN
The Shell, Part Two
Castiel
The world burned and nothing remained in its wake. Lucifer rose and tore a hole in the horizon, between heaven and earth, and hell poured out in every form. Hunters and angels alike perished. Death consumed everything.
Castiel witnessed it all.
He spent years hiding, years searching in the aftermath of the destruction for a solution. For a way to change destiny. To remake the earth as it had been. It had not been a perfect world, but its flaws were not insurmountable.
It would take someone far more powerful than himself to fix the earth. Someone aligned with neither Heaven nor Hell. Someone who believed that the human race deserved a chance.
Someone like Sam Winchester.
The who was the easy part. It took Castiel another three hundred years to think of how and an additional seventy-nine years to find what he needed to implement his plan. He finally found what he needed buried beneath a dried-up seabed.
After eighteen solid days of digging, Castiel cast his shovel into the earth. The ends of his trench coat shifted as he knelt. He picked up the small, dark object the size of his palm. Wiping the dirt off the tortoise shell, he knew exactly what had to be done.
Pairings: Dean/Bela, Sam/Jess, Sam/Bela
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 3400
Disclaimer: Supernatural is not mine.
Warnings: Bodyswap, canon child abuse/incest, pseudo-incest
Note: Spoilers through the end of season four
Summary: Dean finds a cursed artifact that changes his life--and Bela's and Sam's and the fate of the world.
PART ONE
The Shell
Dean
Dean found the tortoise shell in the trunk of the Impala, among the silver bullets and knives and sawed-off shotguns. He picked it up, thinking it was an empty take-out container. The shell was dark and hard and fit perfectly in his hand, filling up every centimeter of flat skin from the base of his palm to his fingertips.
After staring at the shell for a good minute, Dean shrugged and tossed it back into the trunk. He figured it must have fallen out of Sam’s duffel bag. He could never tell what kind of freaky shit that geek carried around.
He grabbed the knife that he’d opened the trunk to get and was about to close it again when his eyes fell back onto the dark shell. A grin cracked his face as he picked it up and slipped it into his pocket. He wasn’t sure what Sam needed the shell for, but he couldn’t wait to see him flip out when he went to go look for it and he couldn't find it.
*
When Bela showed up at a roadside diner while Sam was taking a leak and told Dean flat-out that she wanted the shell and would pay a handsome ten thousand dollars for it, he told her that he had no idea what she was talking about. He wasn’t sure what disturbed him more, Bela’s interest in the tortoise shell or her directness.
Even though it had been weeks since he’d pocketed the shell as a practical joke, his brother still hadn’t noticed it missing. Which had led Dean to suspect that the shell, however it had gotten into the trunk of the Impala, wasn’t Sam’s. He’d continued to carry it around anyway. Throwing it out seemed like a bad idea.
Now that Bela was sitting across from him, with a perfectly pleasant expression on her face, but a hint of desperation in her eyes that Dean only recognized because it was the same look he saw in his own face every time he accidentally glanced in a mirror these days, Dean was glad that he hadn’t tossed the shell.
He sure as hell wasn’t going to hand it over to her without knowing more about it, though. Not when cursed artifacts-if that was indeed what the shell was-had an unfortunate habit of killing their previous owners. Dean figured he didn’t need a lot of help in the dying-young department. He had that one covered already.
*
Bela, it turned out, was both smarter and more patient than she looked. Dean wasn’t sure what black magic hoodoo spell she’d used, but he might as well have rolled around in hellhound shit or something because whenever he walked into a room every remotely attractive woman immediately left.
After three long weeks, Dean found himself in a booth at the back of a bar, working on his second pitcher of beer by himself and wrestling with the idea of hitting on the very male bartender. Then Bela had shown up, drawing the gaze of every male in the place simply by being the only female in the damn place and a hot as hell one at that.
*
Dean blamed his dick for what happened next.
*
When Bela tied Dean’s hands to the headboard, he didn’t even open his mouth to protest. Only to whimper as she sucked him off.
After three weeks of desperate, unsatisfactory masturbation, Dean’s dick wasn’t ready to quit after one blowjob. So Bela jerked him off, running her tongue around his nipples until he came all over his stomach.
Only when Dean awoke with a start in the darkened room did he realized that he had fallen asleep. Reaching instinctively for the gun beneath his pillow, he found his hands still tied to the bed. Even as he cursed, Dean had to admit that he wasn’t surprised. If he had been in Bela’s spot, he would have done the same thing to himself.
What did surprise him, however, was that Bela was still there. She sat on the edge of the motel bed, dressed only in a pair of black silk panties. He had to squint to see what was in her palm. The tortoise shell. Of course.
“Mind undoing these?” asked Dean, gesturing with his head toward his arms.
Bela glanced up at him, her smile stretching across her face like a large cat awakening from a nap. She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “You know, I expected so much more from you.”
Before he could respond, Bela set the dark shell down on the white sheets. Then she pulled the black silk panties off and laced Dean’s legs through the holes, tugging them up his hips and over his dick. Dean’s face flushed. “What are you-”
He shut up when Bela grabbed his dick and started stroking it through the silk. When he was on the verge of coming, Bela peeled back the panties and lowered herself onto his dick with the self-control of a lioness hunting an antelope.
Dean’s eyes rolled back in their sockets as he groaned. He was only dimly aware of anything besides the sensation of Bela slow-fucking him. It wasn’t until the cool surface of the tortoise pressed against his palm that he realized that Bela was up to something.
He opened his mouth to protest, but the protest, along with the weird tingle that zapped through his nerves as their hands clasped the shell together, was lost among the orgasmic rush and then the darkness and pain that followed.
PART TWO
Mirrors and Mothers
Bela's Mother
For Abbie’s fourth birthday, her mother buys her a life-size doll with a pink dress and blonde hair and a glittery crown. After posing for the obligatory photo album picture, Abbie disappears into her room with the doll. Her mother finds it two weeks later beneath Abbie’s bed. Its hair has been hacked off with scissors and its crown has been snapped in half, the silver plastic turning white where it was bent and twisted.
Upon finding the doll, Abbie’s mother heads straight to the living room where her daughter is lying on the floor, playing with the toy car that came with her fast-food meal. As she listens to her daughter make vroom-vroom noises, Abbie’s mother shakes her head.
This behavior, she decides, has gone on long enough. In a month, she will be starting school. Tomorrow, they will go shopping for her school uniform. No more running around like a wild creature, no more digging holes in the dirt, no more plastic toy cars. Starting tomorrow, Abbie will be expected to behave like a proper young lady.
Mary
“You’re going to love being a big brother,” Mary tells Dean when she was six months pregnant. “You’ll never be alone.”
John and Mary had a long talk before deciding to have a second child. Finances are tight. The mortgage on the house is steeper than they had anticipated. Eventually, though, they decided that they didn’t want Dean to grow up alone like they both had.
Mary isn’t worried about sibling jealousy or rivalry. Dean is an incredibly self-reliant and stoic child. During his one-year check-up, Mary had talked to the doctor about it. He had examined Dean but found nothing wrong with him, although he had suggested that they think about having a second child. He thought that maybe a connection with a younger sibling would draw Dean out of his shell and give him something to focus on.
Bela
Part of being a proper lady, Abbie learns, is going to church every Sunday. Church means even nicer dresses and stockings and polished shoes and hard pews and listening to the old priest give talks about sin and hell and the devil and a lot of other boring nonsense that Abbie doesn't think has anything to do with her.
Abbie hates church, but she hates after-church even more. After church, her mother goes out to lunch at the home of one of the other church ladies. After church, Abbie is driven home by their chauffeur alone.
Her father never goes to church. But after church, he is always waiting for her.
Abbie knows it’s wrong. A dad is supposed to teach you things like how to drive and hunt and play card games. A dad is supposed to love you, even if he doesn’t say it. Her dad says it, but she knows it isn’t true.
Dean
Dean knows that their life is weird. He’s not denying that. But whenever he thinks that maybe he wants something normal, he thinks about what his mom told him when he’d looked at his baby brother.
You’ll never be alone.
When he was younger, he used to wish everyone else in the world would go away and it would just be him. Then Sam was born.
Bela
For eight years, Abbie puts up with it. She doesn’t know what else to do. She has no one to talk to. No sibling to confess everything to as they lie in bed, heads so close that their brown hair mixes together until they don’t know which strands belong to whom. No sibling to stand up for her, to protect her.
So when the red-eyed girl shows up and offers to make it all go away, Abbie doesn’t hesitate.
PART THREE
Freak
Sam
During his first weekend at Stanford, Sam’s R.A. holds an all-floor meeting in the lounge to go over ground rules and to let the other residents get to know each other. The turn out is abysmal, but Sam goes because he has nothing else to do.
During the meeting, the R.A. suggests they play Two Truths and a Lie. Sam partners with a nerdy-looking girl who still has braces and looks like she should be starting high school not college. She tells him that she has been to Europe, been in a movie, and eaten kangaroo. He guesses that she’s never eaten kangaroo and he’s right.
When it’s his turn, he has to sift through the truth looking for something that won’t have him sent to a counselor or branded a freak.
Eventually he tells her that he’s from Texas, he’s left-handed, and he plays soccer. They’re all lies, but when she guesses that he’s not actually left-handed, he smiles and tells her she’s right.
*
College is supposed to fix everything.
It doesn’t.
*
The truth is, Sam has a crush on a chick he has never met before. He doesn’t even know if she exists. He’s been having these incredibly vivid dreams about her for as long as he can remember. He calls her Bela, because he doesn’t know her name. He feels like he’s know her his entire life, like if he were to peel off her face, there would be another face beneath it, one that he knows as well as he knows his own.
Sam spends a lot of time in the library, doing his homework, reading until the words blur together on the page. Sometimes he even falls asleep and wakes up to find that he’s doodled images of Bela on the margins in his Calculus textbook.
He actually meets Jess this way. She shakes him awake and asks if he’s okay. She tells him that some dick drew a bong on his forehead.
When she sees the pictures of Bela, she asks, “Is she your sister?”
He’s not sure why, but he shakes his head and lies. “No, I’m an only child.”
*
He tells her eventually, of course. About his brother. Not Bela.
She says it’s normal. Siblings always long to be only children, just like only children always long to have siblings.
The thing is, Sam doesn't want to be an only child. He wants a brother or a sister, wants a dog, wants a mom and a dad and a two-story house in a nice college town. He wants normal. Sam’s not sure where things got mixed up, but he’s sure that something went wrong. This isn’t the life he’s supposed to have.
He’s not sure how, but he’s positive that the girl in his visions is connected to this feeling. Somehow.
PART FOUR
Dead
Sam
Jess dies and Sam doesn’t even stick around to see her put into the ground.
Dean
When Sam dies in his arms, stabbed in the spine by that camo motherfucker, Dean doesn’t hesitate. He’s never been alone in his life. It feels like someone is peeling up the insides of his lungs with a razor blade, discarding the papery skin like a snake shedding dead skin.
He can’t live like that. Not again.
He makes the deal.
PART FIVE
Attraction
Sam
Three years later, he meets her. Bela.
Bela
The mark is hot. And clearly into her. When Bela leans in close and pretends to mop up the coffee she spilled on purpose, he squirms beneath her touch.
It turns her on. If she had time, she’d fuck him. But she doesn’t. The mark’s smart, if a little gullible. It won’t be long before he notices the missing rabbit’s foot. Bela settles for running her hand over the mark’s crotch, a smirk on her face. Then she turns and walks away, swaying her hips just for him.
Hours later, Bela still can’t get the mark’s face out of her head. Something about him is so familiar. She’s met him before, she’s sure of it.
PART SIX
Waiting
Dean
They work spare jobs, but most of their time these days is spent researching ways to keep Dean from dying. Dean isn’t sure if he deserves to live, but he’s sure as hell not above cheating a demon to keep his ticket from getting punched.
Bela
“Christ, Bela!” screams Sam as she skewers him with her lube-slicked fingers.
Bela smiles. She’s fucked a lot of people-guys and girls-but Sam is her favorite. Or maybe she’s just being sentimental. She’s got less than two weeks until the hellhounds rip her from this world and Sam still hasn’t found a way to save either her or his big brother.
She didn’t ask Sam for help. Far as she was concerned, she made a deal and she honored her deals. But Sam was not only clever enough to figure out what she was running from, he was insistent on helping her.
Bela had agreed because it was the only way Sam would let her fuck him. She would have been happy to spend the next two weeks in bed having multiple orgasms. Sam, however, couldn’t keep his trap shut long enough for her to climax once without mentioning a herb or a spell or a goddamn charm that was supposed to ward against hellhounds or hide the wearer from demons. Sam might have been the best fuck she’d ever had, but he was the neediest too.
There was a time when Bela had longed for someone like who Sam wanted to be for her, someone to care about her and protect her and tell her that everything would work out. Not anymore. Bela had seen too many people get fucked over in her line of work by the people they trusted the most. Even if Sam seemed different.
Of course, agreeing to help Sam had other advantages. Easier access to the Colt, for starters. Even before Lilith had offered to spare her life for the gun, Bela had thought about stealing it. Not for the money. To piss Sam off.
Bela doesn’t want Sam to remember her fondly. Whether it ends in two weeks in a bloodbath or not.
PART SEVEN
Smile
Sam
Sam’s on his way to the nearest crossroads to summon the red-eyed demon when a fifty-something guy just appears in the passenger seat of the Impala.
“They’re not buying what you’re selling,” the man says. His head is almost perfectly round and he’s ordinary looking, but in a creepy way. Like the mundane packaging is hiding something more.
“Who the hell are you?” demands Sam after he struggles with the steering wheel to keep the car from veering into the ditch.
“Zachariah,” says the man. “I’m an angel.”
Sam’s already reaching for his gun. Angels don’t exist. And if they do, they sure as hell don’t look like this guy.
“Relax, Sam,” says the man. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to make you an offer.”
“What can you offer me?” snaps Sam.
The man just smiles.
PART EIGHT
Dean
Dean has been cut, shot, clawed, and bitten. He’s had his teeth almost pulled out, more than a pint of blood drained from his body, and been ripped apart by hellhounds. All of that rolled together, though, is less painful than being stretched on the racks of hell.
“There is a way out,” the demon cutting him whispers into his ear, like an eager sixteen-year-old boy trying to get laid in the backseat of his dad’s car. Then he presses a whip into Dean’s open palm. Dean’s fingers clench around the grip and he opens his eyes.
Staring at the demon with his bloodshot eyes, he smiles. Then he spits in the demon’s face, blood seeping out from the cracks between his teeth. “Go to hell.”
He laughs, the sick, broken laugh of someone who has lost everything.
His answer won’t change. Not that year. Not in ten. Not in forty.
Bela
No one offers Bela an escape.
PART NINE
White Knight, White Light
Dean
The blade made of pure white light sinks into the demon’s chest, protruding through the other side, and blinds Dean. With a wet, squelching noise, the blade is ripped out of the demon’s chest and the demon drops in front of Dean, onto his knees as if Dean is his God.
Then the being that slew the demon reaches out for Dean, touches his shoulder, and rips him from hell.
When Dean wakes in his coffin, he scrambles for his lighter.
He doesn’t know yet that Sam is gone.
Bela
When the being comes for Bela, she is barely there anymore. You can’t die in hell, but you can disappear. Shrink into yourself. Waste away until you are nothing but bone, waiting to turn into dust.
Bela has been cut and burned and skinned alive a thousand times. She has had all of her teeth ripped out of her mouth, her nails torn from her fingers, her thighs and arms and breasts eaten by wild birds.
The being touches her gently, removing her restraints, and cradles her to its breast. It wraps her in its arms of light, picking her up like a small child, and touches her face. Tears stream down its cheeks, wet, heavy tears that drop onto Bela’s scarred face, but she does not wake.
The being moves its hand to her forehead. Blinding white light flashes out, across hell, turning everything it touches to dust.
When the dust settles, Bela is gone and so is the being.
PART TEN
The Shell, Part Two
Castiel
The world burned and nothing remained in its wake. Lucifer rose and tore a hole in the horizon, between heaven and earth, and hell poured out in every form. Hunters and angels alike perished. Death consumed everything.
Castiel witnessed it all.
He spent years hiding, years searching in the aftermath of the destruction for a solution. For a way to change destiny. To remake the earth as it had been. It had not been a perfect world, but its flaws were not insurmountable.
It would take someone far more powerful than himself to fix the earth. Someone aligned with neither Heaven nor Hell. Someone who believed that the human race deserved a chance.
Someone like Sam Winchester.
The who was the easy part. It took Castiel another three hundred years to think of how and an additional seventy-nine years to find what he needed to implement his plan. He finally found what he needed buried beneath a dried-up seabed.
After eighteen solid days of digging, Castiel cast his shovel into the earth. The ends of his trench coat shifted as he knelt. He picked up the small, dark object the size of his palm. Wiping the dirt off the tortoise shell, he knew exactly what had to be done.