What You Hunger For pt 1
Sam stands frozen in that warehouse for what seems like ages. Seconds tick by as though time is molasses, like amber, and Sam is a hapless insect. The urge to run should be shooting through him but it's not. Where is there to go? Dean was right here.
There is nowhere he can go that this will be okay.
Dean isn't just outside this room, Dean isn't tied up somewhere by a monster. For all Sam knows Dean has been dragged down to Purgatory, or is downright dead. Dean and Castiel have just vanished into thin air and are nowhere to be found.
He's supposed to pick up his bucket of borax or something, go out with his machete and industrial cleaner. He's supposed to make it out of the building and go after all the people he's just managed to lose all at once. He has to go save them now, the only one who can.
But he's alone. And he flashes back to the time in the hospital, to sleepless nights of being kept awake by his hallucinations and Lucifer, remembers telling Dean how tired he is and how, despite the nights he's been able to sleep since then, the bone-deep exhaustion has never truly left. Bobby's time came and came again, but Sam's been killed and resurrected more than he would want, if it were only him, if not for Dean. And now Dean's gone, and he was right, all of their friends are dead. Sam is bone-tired.
He shakes himself. He bites his tongue, puts a hand to his forehead, pushes his hair back, digs his fingernails into his forearm, and squeezes the handle of his machete. He's got to get a grip.
He looks around at the lab. I've got work to do.
Sam remembers how to make the bombs. With a little prep, there's enough highly flammable material in the lab that, after locking himself to work for a few minutes, he can Molotov it after he's made it far enough down the hallway. Destroy the Leviathans' work now, find a way to destroy the records eventually.
He wants to stay there and make sure the place burns down but he's got to get out. He'll be back in the days to come, steal a hazmat suit from a truck, then the fed suit once it's cleaned up. He'll bring a dowsing rod and the EMF detector and the blood of a Purgatory native and whatever the hell he has to. He's going to get his brother back.
Sam can only spare a glance for the Impala as he runs from the building. He wants so badly to go to it, to have some solid comfort in this world, but he can't yet - it's currently half in the air, stuck through huge Sucracorp's glass sign.
Sam drives his junker across town as fast as he can, ditches it in a grocery store parking lot, walks across the street and picks up another old, beat-up car. Then he drives back to the cabin they'd been staying in. He's half expecting to see it burnt down since Crowley seems to have little use for him anymore. Except cleaning up the Leviathan mess.
Sam is having a hard time finding it in him to care about wiping out the Leviathans. Now that Dean's gone, it's the least useful thing he can think of. He really wants to fall down and cry about it, is what he wants to do. The cabin is very, very empty, and no one but the cat mewling outside will hear him. He's lost his brother, goddamn it. They walked in with the few allies they could scrounge up and Sam walked out alone. He's been so tired for so long, he doesn't feel much like a hero anymore. He doesn't feel heroic about any of this, not with all the collateral. He wants to do something selfish now. He wants to rest for years. He wants his brother back.
He can't stop the tears, so he lets himself cry, but he doesn't lie down and fall asleep. He sits at the table and writes it out, makes a map, tries to figure out a plan that means he doesn't have to be the one to save the world and find Dean again too. It's hard.
As much as he and Dean have spent their entire lives waging their own private war on the secret world of evil around them, as many "the truth is out there" speeches as they've never given… It's not that Sam realizes he doesn't have to do this alone, because he wants to be alone. He would so much rather do it alone than try to find some other partner, replace Dean with anyone. It would take too much effort to adjust. Sam feels old. He is set in his ways. And after a year of hallucinations on top of an eternity of hellish torment, he's in no position to take on anyone as a responsibility.
It feels selfish. Sam's not puzzling this out because he has run out of hope for the world's survival; he's doing it so he doesn't have to think about anything but finding Dean. If he hands off his batons, then he'll do what he does best: work obsessively.
He leaves a voicemail on Garth's cell phone, a short and simple explanation that there are monsters, the Leviathan, that melt when splashed with Borax and can die when you chop off the head and take it far away.
The tone of his voice is flat. He doesn't tell Garth what happened today, doesn't say that Dean's gone; he figures Garth will call him if he needs more information, though Sam's not sure he'd even pick up. He doesn't know when he'll be able to. He can't really talk to anyone right now, not even himself. The sound of his voice would only throw the empty cabin into sharp relief. Afraid to make a sound, to hear his own voice, Sam doesn't want to be any more painfully aware that it will echo, because there are no bodies, warm or cold, in the cabin to soak it up or listen. There's no one to say anything in response. Sam can barely comprehend what's just happened. He can't bear to listen to himself in an empty room.
In the summer that Dean was in Hell, he didn't answer the phone for months, not even for Bobby. This time it makes him ache to know that not even Bobby will be there for him in a pinch, or just to turn to, as family.
Jody. There's Jody, who stayed with him the last time Dean disappeared without a trace. Jody, who kept her head and made sure he slept and basically kept him from driving himself crazy on his own. He didn't have a Jody when Dean was in Hell. Ruby was a dangerous ally with useful secrets. But Jody… Jody's a friend.
She doesn't deserve to get dragged into this.
Sam puts her number on speed dial, just in case. She knows how to kill a Leviathan. She's got his number. She'll keep herself safe.
-
Sam drives his junker to the edge of the blocked-off Sucrocorp parking lot, finds the "Violators will be towed" sign, and makes a phone call.
An hour later, Federal Agent Sam Smith drives his evidence off the lot, a scratched-up but still shining black 1967 Chevy Impala that the lot security guy looks longingly after.
Sam got lucky without a Bobby or Dean or Frank to answer the phone in case they wanted to verify his badge, but it's pretty obvious that a corporate lab explosion of that magnitude would be Federal business, so they let it fly. If his luck keeps going, he figures, the Leviathans won't be organized enough to be chasing him down anymore. If he's really lucky they'll think he's dead. What Crowley said - cut off the head, and the body will flounder.
Sam says "Huh," to the rumble of the Impala's engine. That'd be great luck, if all the Leviathans would just flounder into oblivion
He keeps the stolen car on hand. He can't leave the state yet. He can't drive the Impala until he's far away, and he can't leave until he's searched every inch of space in the center of the room Dean and Cas disappeared in for a crack in the fabric of space. Till he's peered at every inch, looked at thin air from every angle. Sam wants so desperately to think it'll be that easy, peeling back the air and reaching out a hand to pull Dean and Cas out of whatever realm they ended up in. He doesn't want to search out a billion reasoned solutions, he doesn't want to make a list only to cross off every item as a device to search for his brother. He wants to waste no time.
Sam's always been the researcher, the methodical one. Dean was always the shoot-first guy, and not for the first time Sam finds himself yearning for such a simple, effective mindset. He used to wish he could use his anger like a blunt object to hammer at a problem, but now, three years after he jumped into the pit with Lucifer, he's given up on anger as a way of living. It was unsustainable. And now he's too tired.
He goes back with a dowsing rod, a pendulum, a strange enchanted compass they never really figured out, and a vial of Leviathan blood he collected from the pool of ooze after one long evening interrogating one of Dick Roman's arrogant underlings. He wants like to call to like. He wants the power of his own blood to be able to pierce the wall between Purgatory and this world, to seek Dean's out. He wants them to find each other. He wishes being goddamn soulmates helped him find Dean at all right now.
It doesn't.
Sam is alone a very long time.
-
Sam always expected, hoped, to go with Dean when it was time to go. One long stint down below was enough for the both of them, they got out, they beat it. But suddenly he's left with a machete and a load of lives counting on him, not an ally in the world that can actually help him, and there's a sea of black gooey body-snatching monsters out there he has to get through and then eradicate. All by himself.
Sam's been building his reality on quickly-disappearing known quantities this last year, and even after Castiel took Lucifer out of his head, Sam has his dissociative moments. Doubting what is real - that was the malicious seed Lucifer planted in his mind. No matter what Sam was seeing, no matter how vivid or surreal - he always knew it was his life before, monsters and demons and near-death experiences, but it could also be Hell, or a memory of Hell. He didn't want to confess to Dean just how unsure he felt. His unease is nothing so concrete as seeing Lucifer anymore; where before he felt mostly fine outside of the Satan-vision, now he is left with moments of dissociation and paranoia.
He spends an age in Chicago squatting in a boarded-up home on the west side. He feels homeless, more than he's ever felt before, squatting there at night and traveling to the Newberry Library to pore over their manuscript collection during the day.
When the library closes he goes up north out of his way to sit in the grimy pizza place where Dean sat years ago, sharing a pizza with Death as the apocalypse fell around them. Sam tells the waitstaff he's waiting for someone until they get impatient and then he orders for two, leaves the rest of the food. An offering or a symptom, he's not sure. He starts getting pitying looks instead of annoyed ones, but he keeps going, until he's nearly broke except for enough cash to gas up and move out of the city, towards some pool table in a bar he hasn't cased yet.
Sam can't spare the time or energy to miss Dean. Missing is so close to mourning, and if he mourns he's given up. He can't even begin to acknowledge that possibility. He's too tired.
He spends so much time trying not to hurt, focusing on books and hunting down libraries, he doesn't think he'll have the opportunity to slip into missing or mourning his brother. But of course, he manages it eventually anyway. Dean's absence is there with him all the time, like a transparency, like a negative walking with him and every moment is something to superimpose him on. Sam clings to his perfect recall of Dean's voice and the things he would say, how he looked, even in sleep. It's as if his mind has no option but to fill in the hole left in his life with what memory and longing supply. So Sam begins to dream again.
-
They pulled up to the old bar and Dean was ready with a pocket full of quarters for the slot machines, with a wallet full of bills, saying "Sam, Sam I'm gonna win us our dinners, you won't have to sing for your supper."
Sam sat there on the car hood while Dean fought off the crowds of men and demons who wanted to come between them. He sat there and sipped a soda and counted the pennies he held in his hand. They smelled like copper, which reminded him of blood.
"What do you say, Sam," said Dean.
Sam shrugged. The men turned into monsters and the demons turned into uglier monsters, , their eyes changing from black to red.
"If you say so, Sam," panted Dean.
Sam stuck one of the pennies in his mouth.
"That's filthy. It'll make you sick."
Sam sucked on it. It tasted good and hard like blood, like he remembered. "I'll get us out of this, Dean."
Dean didn't say anything. The black hordes swallowed him like a midnight tide, until all Sam could see of his brother were his white teeth and a pair of eyes shining red through blood.
"I'll get you out of this."
The tide was lapping at Sam's feet, over the hood of the Impala. It lapped with the tongues of a hundred wolves, scraped at the metal like a thousand vampire teeth. The tide left ooze like an oil spill, like a leviathan's gushing carotid.
Sam skipped pennies over the surface but the waves sucked at his feet, up his calves and onto his knees. He was trying to send them to Dean. But the tide was creeping towards his waist, and he was running out of pennies. It was no good.
-
Sam gasps awake.
It is night and he's sleeping in the front seat of the Impala way down a dirt side-road. Red taillights recede before him into the flat distance.
Sam lets his head roll back and thud against the leather of the bench seat, letting the smell of the car, the glint of light on its interior and hood, comfort him with their familiarity. Nothing but the car can hold his fear.
-
Sam drinks himself into a blackout state. He's not hopeless but sees no hope in dreaming or in waking. He's never really stopped praying since he was a kid, but the person he prays to, hangs his hopes on, changes. He's prayed to God, to angels, to the saints, to Castiel; he's summoned angels and demons; now he prays to Death.
Sam doesn't want to get high or see angels. He only wants to experience the divine if the divine can do something for him, can help him. Surely Sam can manage to grasp his mortality and have a little chat with Death.
William James is the kind of practical mystic Sam finds useful. Substances are real, altered states are real; if he believes in creatures of a different, and he does, because he's met angels and destroyed ghosts, then maybe he can transcend a plane or two, get in touch with someone who knows something about other realms. But Sam's really not eager to hallucinate anything these days.
So he goes for the old standby brushes with death: blackout drinking, reckless driving. He finds some people cliff-diving and asks them to spot him. He manages to convince himself that he could die; he is very persuasive. The problem is that the part of him that's supposed to want to go on living is crippled without Dean.
Anyone else really would be jumping off his cliff, he figures, after he hits the water and his vision whites out. They'd go at it half-assed and succumb to the current. They'd have bitten the bullet weeks ago.
But Sam has painful dreams, the kind of black-out, headpounding dreams that he used to have years ago, but this time no sulphur, no powers, and nothing he recognizes as earthly. He dreams of Dean wandering through Purgatory, his guts torn out by a rugaru, his neck covered in the lamprey-like bruises of changelings, his ribcage cracked open by a werewolf. And Dean walks, limps, crawls on, through swamp and forest and rocky desert, never dead but always dying.
So Sam can't end it, because in his dreams it won't end for Dean. He's somehow certain that this is a truth, that there's some hope of knowledge. That if he can see Dean he can get him back. If it isn't, it's some fucked-up form of wishful thinking. It's a necessary belief. The last thing.
Death's not showing up, of course. Sam's heeding the warning Death gave them about binding him again - he's thought a billion times, if death were the only thing standing between him and Dean, Sam would take it in a second, but Dean's possibly being torn apart by monsters for all eternity. So Sam can't die. Not yet.
-
Sam dreams of a dark forest with no sun, only a dim phosphorescence of fog and patches of what could be moonlight in a slate-grey sky, and Dean, who manages to trade one of his rings for help from a dragon. Flickering somewhere between a scaly lizard creature and a stocky swarthy man, scales shifting in patterns on his skin in a sickening chameleon way, the wide-mouthed creature grabs the bird Dean's shot and plucked and sears it with a hiss and sizzle, cooking the meat in a few bare seconds.
Castiel does not need to eat but this place has visibly drained him. He leans against a tree and watches Dean eat, as though somehow he can draw sustenance by proxy.
Dean tears at the bird and the dragon moves off. No virgins here, Sam guesses, and Dean's brought the only treasure they must have. What do monsters do here, without humans to hunt? What kind of strange beasts do they become?
As he wonders he sees Dean's back shiver, and shimmer, and what in any other swamp might be a trick of the light or will o' the wisp is, Sam is certain, undoubtedly something monstrous and menacing here. A ghostly wing unfolds itself from Dean's back and Dean shivers, groans, and the wing draws back in. The shape of a claw falls across Dean's face as he raises his hand to wipe his mouth.
-
Garth calls Sam and leaves him a message. Sam doesn't respond. He waits for the voicemail to pop up, and hears the guy's tinny voice come over the line, all concerned but still downright goofy, telling him "Thanks for the tip on the Leviathans, Sam. Those slimeballs are nasty. I've told all the other hunters in my address book, so with any luck we should be able to wipe 'em all out in a few months, right? Tell Dean hi for me, he's not answering his phone, and give me a call if you guys need my help on this one. You know you can always talk to your buddy Garth."
He did grow on Sam. But the message barely makes an impression in these days. He's gone from haunting Chicago's pizzerias to hitting strange food stands, diners, and delis nation-wide, occasionally trying the stuff because it makes him think of Dean and the stupid stuff he used to - he would eat. He thinks maybe he can key in to that strange love of strange foods Dean and Death seem to bond over. But all he gets is some strange, unsatisfying lunches, a case of food poisoning, and an ill feeling of discontent. The food poisoning puts him off mayonnaise for life. He doesn't stop his food tour, though. It's like communion.
It's a stop in Richland, WA, where Sam is on his way to Snoqualmie, looking at Coast Salish stories of Moon the Transformer and spirit worlds and still praying to Death, that Sam finally sees him. There's a sharp-boned old man in a formal suit sitting behind Sam in the Spudnut Shop, with an air of concentration, a potato donut the object of his focus, and a cup of coffee at his elbow.
"Sir," Sam says, approaching Death head-on. Death placidly finishes his spudnut before making eye contact.
"I know what you want from me, Sam. Don't think I haven't noticed your pilgrimages."
"I'm not going to bind you," Sam rushes to say, because he wants to get off on a better foot this time.
"Good. You've learned one thing. You're subtler than Dean."
"Not really."
"Well then. I'll tell you what I told him: it's about souls."
"Yeah?"
"Yes," Death says, biting into another donut. He looks perhaps even more longsuffering than he normally does, as if he's having to teach Sam how to count to three and be polite at the same time. "Purgatory isn't for human souls. It isn't there to twist or tear them, or generate landscapes from their energy, like Hell or Heaven."
"It's for monsters."
"Exactly. I see you've got it figured out, then."
"But the eclipse - I need -"
"That was a very large door for a great many souls. Don't be foolish, Sam. And don't waste my time. You already know what you need to do."
And then Death is gone, and Sam's raisin bran potato-muffins are gone with him.
-
A month after Sam speaks to Death, Sam is retreading every musty book collection he can get his hands on, traveling across the US to universities and once-private collections. His library searches are supplemented by visits to local psychics. There are more of them concentrated here in the cities than in the outskirts, though his luck of finding a good one is certainly diluted. They put out ads here, whether they're any good or not, but at the end of the day whoever Sam manages to see sends him away full of half-truths and impossibilities, the kind of dark and strange stuff he was trying five years ago.
He's gone done this road before, but this time his phone is off, because there's no Bobby to leave messages that stir such great anger in him, Bobby who couldn't help, who can't, who he can't share this with. What he wouldn't give to have that needling guilt back, to take care of himself, that even if Bobby couldn't understand it doesn't mean he wouldn't help. Bobby's gone now and he has no one to bring this to.
Bobby never did and wouldn't understand the measures to which he's been driven. He'd expected better of the guy than to become a ghost, but Sam understands, and yet now he'd be still more ashamed for Bobby to see him: the dead-on-his-feet version of what he used to be, beside himself with desperate grief, the listless thing he's become. He used to be cold and ruthless, and now he's just a fucking sad old man going through pages he's read before but forgotten since he doesn't know when - did he read these yesterday? Was it back in 2007, when Dean was in Hell? Was it the months before that, hunting the Trickster, trying to bring Dean back from the dead?
He feels like he's walking in circles. Altered perceptions and tools to open portals. Equivalent exchange and transformative rite. Non-satanic witchcraft, medicine men, shamans, spirit journeys, astral projection, ecstatic states. He's treading water, reading books, afraid to dive in deep because he's been so close to losing his mind in the last year. What if he lost it again? He's got nothing to tether him here but the fear.
-
Castiel hands Dean a finger, and a second finger, and a third. To the vampire stalking them, he hands the rest of his hand. He takes off his shoe, and with it his foot, and throws it for a were-bear to chase, and then they run. A bird digs its claws into Castiel's shoulder and Castiel carves out a hunk of flesh for the bird to carry away.
Castiel spends most of his effort throwing himself bodily between Dean and the monsters, and when necessary, letting the beasts carry off pieces of him. He barely bleeds, but with every piece that disappears, he grows brighter, faintly glowing as his grace condenses to fit a diminished vessel.
Dean grows stronger as Castiel grows weaker. Dean growls, and Castiel is quiet. Dean stalks prey while Castiel watches out. They drift further and further, as Castiel becomes slighter and brighter, a skeleton in an overcoat.
-
One day Sam sees on the news that Sam Winchester has been found dead. His brother Dean is still on the lam. They don't even show a real picture, just Sam's mug shot from five years ago, and the fact that some poor sap out there looked enough like him to get himself killed should bring more sadness and guilt down on his head, but no, Sam feels relieved. It's like dawn fucking breaking, and it's a cold nearly-colorless dawn, and he's hung over from squinting at books and missing out on sleep and doing what drinking he can afford. But this exoneration from the public eye is like a weight lifting off his shoulders, one he'd been carrying so long he'd given up hope of it ever lifting.
He picks up his phone, which has been turned off for god knows how long. He doesn't remember. He ignores the missed calls, doesn't even look at them, but types in Jody Mills's name.
She picks up on the third ring.
"Sam?" she says.
"Jody." His voice is cracked with sleep and disuse.
"Sam, where are you? Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm okay." He clears his throat. He doesn't know what he called to say.
"Thank god. When you and Dean didn't... I almost thought. Well. You need my help?"
"Yeah, about that. About Dean. I'm - he's missing." It sounds like a lie, because what'd be more truthful is "he's probably dead." Sam's not gonna say that.
"Where are you?"
Sam hiccups a chuckle through his tight throat. "Mom voice, huh? I'm in Austin. You still have some boxes of Bobby's, right?"
-
Maybe someone had done him a favor, Sam thinks as he shaves his face for the first time in a couple months. Maybe it was Death, though pity or mercy didn't become him. Sam can recognize his face again. He looks younger without the beard, but there's nothing can be done about the lines around his eyes. A permanent tired from the week he spent as an insomniac in the mental ward.
When he sees Jody she hugs him, and he stiffly accepts it, as though his body wasn't expecting it and doesn't know how to respond.
"Oh Sam," she says. "Not again."
Sam is revisiting another 'last time' now. Now, he's with Jody, going through Bobby's books, and Bobby has died again, and Dean has been carried away again. To think that a God of Time was more accessible than Purgatory.
"This one's out of my league, Jody."
"That's what you said last time, and we got Dean back then."
"Time travel is one thing, but..."
Jody raises her eyebrows. "I'll let you explain whatever 'something else' is over takeout."
--
Dean walking through dark woods, reaching the edge of it and looking across a swamp clothed in impenetrable fog, the despair on his face tearing into Sam's heart.
Dean lying there with a beast's teeth in his heart, having lifted it clear of his body without tearing it away from the lungs and vessels, and he is still alive. For Sam it's like watching his brother be torn apart by Hellhounds all over again, but then the film goes in reverse, the creatures put him back together, placing his heart viciously back in his chest, its beating setting Dean gasping again. His blows, in reverse, look like he's pulling the monsters toward him.
Dean playing cards with an old friend - Gordon, who died a bloodsucker. Their smiles are equally toothsome but Dean's teeth are still bluntly human. Sam won't hold on to hope. Gordon could be winning the match.
Dean chasing some version of Sam that Sam can see isn't Sam, "I'm right here!" he shouts, but Dean doesn't turn to look at him, can't hear him. Looks over his shoulder once or twice and Sam tries to do something, pleads to let Dean notice him, but Dean just turns back, and Sam sees he's looking everywhere, always watching.
The not-Sam - in fact Sam can see it's clear now that it's not Sam, he's shifting between young twelve-year-old Sam and tall Sam around the time he left for Stanford, slowing down, letting Dean catch up to him. Now he's twenty-two-year-old Sam and tired, now he's hurt-looking thirty-year-old Sam with his long hair and his sleepless eyes. And then it runs Sam's years down again.
"We'll get someplace safe," Dean says, and ten-year old Sammy takes his hand, and turns back to smirk at invisible Sam. Its eyes flash red. Sam can't make a sound. "Don't be afraid, Sammy. It's gonna be okay."
"Dean, I feel tired. I'm tired of walking. Can I ride on your back?"
Dean is exhausted but five-year-old Sammy isn't too heavy to heft up and walk a while with, and just before Sam wakes up, he sees the child-monster cling to Dean's neck with his arms, and fasten its mouth to the back of Dean's neck.
----
Sam is driven back to their own journals. They're the only ones who've talked to Death about this soul business, as far as he knows; he also knows he wasn't around for the half Dean and Bobby and Death conducted in secret to re-soul him. So it's not enough to read through his own journal, or Dad's, or even most of Dean's and Bobby's. They were all so focused on demonic possession, obsessed with the revenge that drove them into hunting life, and the last few years every minute was spent researching the apocalypse, Heaven and Hell - their work on Purgatory was barely begun.
All Death had to tell him was that it had to do with souls. Sam had tried hard not to snap at him about how that was nothing new or helpful at all; usually a healthy fear of death prevented that sort of thing but Sam without Dean was far less afraid of being dead. Death is a penetrable barrier. Death is peace, and if Sam is to believe his suspicions, his dreams, and what Death has heavily implied, Dean is in Purgatory and has no peace at all. Sam must turn his attentions away from Heaven and Hell. He and Dean have spent too long learning to think like demons and undermine angels, he thinks, and shudders. If Sam is going to get into Purgatory, he's going to have to go through older things - through monsters.
Samuel Campbell's inheritance of old hunters' journals has provided a lot of educational reading on monsters, but is utterly ignorant of Purgatory. Sam feels like he is trying to rebuild a strange new engine, and has most of the parts, but no plan to tell him how they fit and worked together, or any idea of what he is still missing.
In the end Sam spends a night with a bottle of whiskey throwing papers and books around in a tantrum. When he sobers up, despite the headache he can still think: there's no way around his suspicion, that if Purgatory is for the souls of monsters, then to get there he must become monstrous.
--
Sam doesn't have any illusions about trying to sneak into the Alpha's mansion. They don't exactly have a detente, but Sam hasn't happened to kill any vampires since they last came here, and he figures it has to help his case. Hopefully they can all be mutually grateful enough after they helped each other fight the Leviathans, enough at least. He walks up to the front door and knocks.
They take him to the Alpha, and at this point Dean would be turning around to smirk smugly at Sam while Sam urged him to keep quiet, but Dean's not here, so Sam allows himself a tiny smirk. It doesn't feel right.
When the alpha lets him speak, he says, "I want to get in to Purgatory. Do you know anything about that?"
"Why on earth would I tell you? The last time you and your friends opened Purgatory, you made this world even more unsafe for me and my children."
"I don't want to open it, I want to go there."
The Alpha glares. "That's not how doors work. Things get in, things get out. You cannot ask me to help you and I hope that you never get in."
"My brother's there, I'm not going to stand by and -"
"Of course." The Alpha sneers at him, if a sneer could be so elegant and composed. "Your selfish love. I have no time for this. Haven't I and my children been tortured and murdered enough? For this inaccessible and unruly piece of territory?"
"But you're curious too. What it's like, with the Leviathans gone. And your monster souls. I just want information. I want a look at your library, that is all."
The Alpha is silent for a while, and Sam waits, tense, restrained by the vampires at his side. Finally the Alpha rolls his shoulders in a regal shrug, and with a small gesture from his hand, the vampires are pulling Sam away.
"Stop! My brother is dying down there!" Sam shouts. It echoes, and the alpha vampire smiles in a way that is not laughing or sympathetic, just cold, regal, old.
"Stop," he says quietly, and Sam is pushed forward toward the long table again. "'Dying' is a strange word for it, Sam. Can you die in the afterlife? He is on the other side of death, after all. No, I do not think he's dying. Suffering, however." Sam feels hot with frustration and rage but he can't lose it again, not here, not now. "I am not your ally, Sam Winchester. But your enemy is my enemy."
"The Leviathan."
"Yes. If you kill no more of my children - and I will know - if you provide us a way of slaughtering our more menacing cousins, I will grant you access."
"Access?"
"To my library. My," the Alpha chuckles, as if he's just made a joke. "You are quite distracted, aren't you? Please, make good use of your time."
Sam thinks of the imminent danger he is in, of being killed, fed on, or turned. He suddenly remembers Gordon and how he went on killing both vampires and humans when he was turned. These vampires are dangerous to Sam, and Sam has been dangerous to them his whole life, and here he is in their den. He shouldn't be trusting them. They could kill him any second; why give him knowledge, resources, power, and make it a harder fight?
"A week, and then let me leave." He tries to cover his nerves with determination in his voice.
The corners of the Alpha's mouth curl up. "Yes, then we let you leave, with your vow. In the meantime you may only leave if accompanied by one of my children."
Sam is fine with that. He has his phone. If something happens, he can... call Jody and tell her he won't make it, or gurgle into the phone as he dies.
"Deal."
The Alpha blinks slow, nods barely. He looks thoughtful.
-
Sam finds the wildest things in there, about the delicacy of man, the vitality of his blood, and a fascinating taxonomy of monsters done by the vampires. There are many he's not heard of, but nothing explicit about Purgatory. He takes notes as pure research, despairing of concocting a real-world solution, and when his time is up he hasn't come up with any new plans; he has only mentally developed what seemed to be the most obvious solution.
He leaves in the afternoon, stomach rumbling but mind clear, a singular insane purpose in his mind. The vampire who escorts him to the door has gelled hair and a popped collar on his leather jacket like - Dean's. He snarls under his breath, and Sam gives him Dean's biggest "Bite me" smirk.
Sam's confident in the Alpha's protection here, but as soon as the week is up, he knows he's fair game as he was before.
Sam makes himself very easy to follow as he drives down to find a roadside restaurant, gets himself a big juicy steak dinner, and then heads down country roads into the surrounding ranch country, into the night. When he stops, it's at what seems to be an abandoned-fallen in barn. He looks around himself, already has his machete concealed beneath his coat.
He needs another hunter on this one. He needs someone he can trust, someone like Dean, someone like who he was for Dean when Dean got turned (without keeping the cure a secret, of course, manipulative soulless thing that he was). But he doesn't have one, and that's why he's resorting to measures like these.
Sam ducks behind a corner and stills his breath. When he sees the moonlight gleam blue off a dark head of hair, he recognizes the cocky swagger of the vamp he baited earlier that day. The vamp They both know there isn't another coven around here, that neither of them has backup, and they're close but not too close to the Alpha mansion - just far enough for this to look like a regular hunter-versus-vampire incident. Sam knew he was treading a fine line here and he was fucking exploiting it. He'd scoped out the area. He knew what he was working with.
Sam has the guy knocked out and tied to a chair without too much of a struggle.
"Came alone, huh?" Sam asks. "I know you're not far from your father, but you shouldn't be so cocky."
"What are you gonna do? Shoulda killed me already."
"Not yet. First, show me those fangs." Sam cuts his arm and lets the blood drip till the teeth come out. He grabs the vamp's jaw, and with a pair of needle-nose pliers, wrenches one out. The vamp screams.
"No, I'm not torturing you for fun. I have a plan." Sam takes his knife, draws it across the vamp's forearm. He can't put the blood on his mouth, he just can't, so he moves to cut his own forearm.
"What the hell?" the vampire says, but before Sam can go through with it, someone knocks him down and kicks the knife out of his hands.
'What the hell do you think you're doing?" Jody yells.
"What are you doing here? You weren't supposed to-"
"Know? That you were going to go through with this crazy turn-yourself-into-a-monster plan?" Jody is incredulous, yelling and distraught. "You didn't call me when you said you would in a week, and I got paranoid - smart, really - and turned on your GPS. You think your brother and Bobby are the only assholes who can do that, well, I'm a sheriff and I know how to find people I care about. Or fucking idiots. Comes with the job."
The vamp is snarling and lurching against his restraints. Jody flinches and jumps back when she sees the teeth. "You're gonna turn yourself into that, Sam?"
"That was the plan, yeah. I have a cure, Jody."
"The hell you do, what makes you think anything was going to go according to plan? Far as you know you were gonna get killed by this guy before you vamped out at all, or you were going to run away and eat some poor bastard."
Sam flinches. Jody's eyes widen. "If I'd been even a second later - oh, you…"
"Yeah," Sam grunts, getting up and reaching for his knife. That plan's out. He'd hoped for a few seconds that she'd see his reasoning, that she'd leave and let him do what he had to do. But she's got too much hope. The wind's out of his sails.
"You're not going monster, Sam. What would Dean say? Did you think about that? Did you really think you could be with him again, like this? I know you boys love each other but you can't turn yourself into something you hunt. You gotta find something else."
"Don't you think I've tried?!" Jody flinches and moves back, and Sam realizes he's towering over her, yelling and in her face. He winces and swallows and tries to breathe evenly. "I'm sorry," he says, and runs a shaking his hand through his hair.
He turns to the vamp still tied to the chair, its fangs out. "I'm going to leave you here," Sam says to him very clearly. "I'm not going to kill you, so your alpha doesn't have any reason to send his people after me. You let him know, I'm still working on the plan, huh?"
"C'mon," he says to Jody, who's staring at the young-looking denim-clad rockabilly guy like he's going to pop Leviathan teeth or something equally disturbing next.
They get to their cars. Jody's Jeep is parked by the Impala.
Sam sighs. "Jody, you don't even know how many times he and I have been over this kind of thing. I know what he would or wouldn't want, and I've always decided that if Dean's dead or dying or…" In Hell, he wants to say, but he doesn't really know if that's his to share with her, or how much he wants her to know about the places he's been with Dean. "The point is, I know how to reverse it."
"Yeah, well you sure as hell didn't look like you had a handle on it back there. I want to trust you, Sam. Bobby had faith in you boys, and you're grown damn men, but without each other…" She shrugs, looking sad. "You're lost."
Sam shakes his head but doesn't contradict her. He's felt plenty lost, and wouldn't mind her going on thinking that. It's better than scary. He still remembers killing the Trickster in Bobby's form, probably desperate and blinkered enough to have made a mistake; he sometimes figures that for all the bad luck he and Dean have had there are plenty of things he's done where it could've gone a whole lot worse. He's still got some kind of luck, at least.
"So... vampires."
Sam looks up. "You look pretty freaked out," he says, soft-voiced. "Were those in your supernatural-creatures primer? I assume Bobby filled you in on the things we hunt."
"Not particularly," Jody says wryly. "Here and there. Never seen one of those before, is all."
"Yep." Sam goes to put his machete away in the Impala's trunk. "You chop their heads off to kill them."
"I didn't ask, but you knew I was going to."
"Useful information," Sam mumbles. He's tired and there's no purpose in him. Jody sees it.
"Can I read your notes?"
Sam shakes his head. "There's a lot of shorthand." And tragic unmanful letters to his brother, telling Dean all the anger and grief and love he can't manage to communicate across the walls of the worlds.
"I won't ask, then." She reaches for the radio and he lets her, and they listen to the kind of music Dean would never listen to, and this is what Sam needs right now.
-
Like the rugaru metamorphosis but never fully changed, shifters are bloody, fatty, mucusoidal creatures wandering the barren landscape like nausea personified. When Dean finds them, or when they find him, they breathe sighs of relief, happy to hold the form of something so unchanging, so vivid and firm-fleshed, something less impossible, chaotic and monstrous than them and the world around them. From above in his dream Sam watches them change - into Dean, of course, and then Dean has to machete them dead, hacking at them till they don't move, just twitch there on the ground, still wearing his face.
These dreams, these visions of Purgatory are filled with improbable horror but nothing truly far from life as a hunter. They feel, dare he say, more real.
As Dean goes over the next hill and Sam tries to follow, strange invisible eyeball that he is, one of the mowed-down shifters twitches, shifts, rights its broken neck. They start putting themselves back together after a while. Dean's all out of silver bullets.
Dean finds Castiel once, a Castiel with eyes that glint yellow in the fire, a Castiel wrapped in his overcoat and covered in mud, walking a little too comfortably for an angel in Purgatory.
Dean grabs Cas's shoulders and slams him back against a tree, holding a knife to his throat before he can say a thing. "Where is he?" Dean growls and shakes the thing by its lapels. Somewhere, Cas has got to be out there without his coat.
"I'm right here, Dean," the shifter says all-too innocently. Its flesh is sagging off its face, not a quarter inch off, exposing the red at the edge of his eyelids, his nostrils, the corners of his mouth.
"You sick fuck, he's still alive, isn't he? You have to preserve the mental link, right? Where is he?" And then the thing cracks a grin and laughs, a full belly laugh that trails into a whining chuckle.
Dean guts the thing right there.
-
Sam wakes up with a headache on Jody's couch in the mid-afternoon. She's at the table with a stack of toast, coffee, police scanner and newspaper. He groans involuntarily at the bright light coming through the windows.
"So tell me about your plan."
"I don't have -"
"The one to turn yourself into a monster. What were you thinking?"
Sam touches his forehead and closes his eyes. "Can I get some aspirin first?"
He fishes it out of his bag, swallows a couple dry, and Jody goes into the kitchen.
He hears her come back and say "Sorry I jumped on you," and she presses a mug of coffee into his hands. "I just... Sam, you went AWOL, and then you went AWOL again, and I just... If you're not gonna take care of yourself you don't have any hope of getting Dean back."
"'S okay." Sam drinks from it. When he opens his eyes, Jody's still looking at him expectantly, so he talks. "You got a lot of faith in me."
"After that stunt you pulled, I've got faith in us. We got Dean back before, together, remember?"
"Right." Sam sighs. He's still pessimistic. "Jody, only monsters can get into Purgatory. Without all the crap we've done before, which involves all kinds of arcane blood ritual and dangerous stuff that we just don't have the resources for now - it's just me, me and you I guess, you know?" He looks down at his coffee and she sighs.
"So let me get this straight. You want to get into the monster afterlife, so you turn yourself into a monster, and... die?"
"I -" Sam was quiet. "I was trying to get turned into the kind of monster that could be reversed."
"Not going to get reversed if you're dead."
Sam can't actually say now that being dead isn't a big deal, because she isn't a Winchester. Death is just another obstacle to him and Dean, surmountable by destiny, love, and fate. Meanwhile, none of those things have brought Jody's husband and son back to, these years later. It doesn't even make sense for Sam to think it's possible to get Dean back from whatever impossible realm he's in, Purgatory or Hell or some other, further unknown. It was never easy or simple in the past. It always came at a cost. What's dead should stay dead. What's a monster will always be a monster.
Just guessing that it'll be all right once you get to Purgatory and find Dean, that's not a plan, you idiot, he thinks to himself. That's faith that Dean can get you out of anything when you have no reason to believe that. That's a disregard for what happens after you're together, alone in a world surrounded by monsters. That's stupid.
Sam clears his throat. "It was going to be like, like a medically-induced coma. Dean got a guy to do it to him when he was, uh. Getting my soul back. And I had a plan to reverse the vampire thing, I've done it before." He's eyeing the toast.
Jody slides it over to him. "And now that I've ruined your vampire plan, what else?"
Sam tells her about monsters that start as people, the things you can turn into. How werewolves can't be cured, he knows that from experience, how there are other things, like cannibal wendigos and their ages-long transformation, how succubi and incubi are more cyphers and types but a strange thing between monsters and demons.
"What about magic? Is that a thing?"
Sam smiles. "Yeah, magic is a thing. It might work somehow? I have no idea, Jody, I have a week's worth of notes but nothing stood out - there's still so much lore, and half of it is fake, and the other half is garbled..." he puts his head in his hands. "I could read my whole life and never find anything." Tears sting his eyes and he keeps his head down, stares at his mug of coffee.
"Sam," Jody says, in her soft Midwestern drawl. "You look at your notes and I'll make us some more coffee. And then you can take a shower and do your laundry, because you reek."
-
next
This entry was originally posted at http://zempasuchil.dreamwidth.org/274930.html.