The incestuous courtship of the antichrist's bride 3/5
part two
Dean is delighted by the unexpected gift of pie. Sam feels like a dirty old man seducing an underage kid. He wants to take the pie back - no pie for you, Dean, because I only gave it to you so you would be in a good mood when I suggest sex later on - but most of it has already disappeared down Dean's throat before Sam can get the words out. The greatest hits of Bad Company CD sits in his jacket pocket and tells him he is a bad, bad, dirty man.
If he were feeling less guilty about it, he might have put up more of a fight when he realized that a number of angels and demons decided to accompany them to the bar. As it is, it soothes his conscience a little, because it's not like he can be trying to seduce his brother, while accompanied by the denizens of heaven and hell. They're kind of a cockblock.
"Think we'll still be able to do this when you're Antichrist?" Dean says.
Sam sinks the pool ball and lines up another shot. "Sure. Why not? No point saving the world if it's all work work work after, right?"
"Goddamn you were raised right," Dean says. He pauses, head cocked as if considering what he's just said, then takes another swig from his beer bottle.
They've hidden themselves away in the corner with the pool table, right over the other side from the tables the angels and demons are occupying. If the noise is anything to go by they seem to be enjoying themselves. Sam keeps an eye on them but he's enjoying his own evening with Dean. Occasionally the conversation runs into those tricky little snags but they navigate around them well enough. Dean is flushed and happy, and when Sam's gaze catches on the line of Dean's throat as he tilts his head back, he feels a detached, tentative stab of appreciation.
"'Course, it's not like you wouldn't have minions to bring you beer if you had to stay late at the office, right?" Dean says.
Sam casts a dubious look in the direction of the angels and demons, then shares a grin with Dean. "I'm not sure I could trust my minions to organize a spit roast in Hell."
"Sure you could," Dean says, "so long as you've got a taste for charred human flesh." He takes another mouthful of his beer then sets the bottle down on the corner of the pool table. Something catches his attention and the next thing Sam knows, Dean's calling out, "Hey, Cas! C'mon over here a minute."
Obedient and eager, Castiel trails over. Sam fumes very quietly as he sinks another ball.
It's not that he dislikes Castiel. It's just that he's very aware that Castiel is pretty much Dean's second favorite person in the world, and Sam has yet to be able to find opportunity to grip Dean tight and raise him up from perdition, which leaves him feeling that maybe one day, Dean will decide he prefers the person who can do that to the one who accidentally signs him up for assfucking on an altar. At least Castiel can't provide Dean with zombies to shoot, Sam thinks smugly.
"We have been craptastic guides to life on Earth," Dean says, thrusting a pool stick at Castiel. "We completely forgot to teach you how to play pool! You need to know how to play pool, man."
Castiel looks confused. "I thought pool was just for fun?"
"Pool is what puts food on the table when the credit cards don't show," Dean says in a very serious voice.
"I don't need to eat," Castiel says. "Remember? You tried feeding me cheeseburger and my host body was unable to digest it. And then you had to teach me about Laundromats." He proudly smoothes the front of his clean trench coat.
"It's an important life skill, Cas. And I wouldn't be doing my duty by you if I didn't make sure you could play as good as any Winchester." Dean claps Sam on the shoulder and says, "Sammy here could run a table by the time he was fourteen."
"I wanna learn too," Gaviel says, having drifted over towards them.
"'Course you should learn," Dean says. "In fact-" He turns towards the rest of the angels and demons, "-pool tournament over here, guys! Lessons for the angels, humiliation for the demons! Come lose some money!"
Not only does Dean manage to attract the attention of the angels and demons, but he also reels in a good few of the decidedly human bar patrons. Soon, the pool table has become the focal point of the bar. Sam sighs. So much for an evening alone with Dean. When he shuffles his way to Dean's side, intending on suggesting they head back to the motel, the noise level is too high for Dean to hear him, and Dean just grins as he leans over Castiel to position his hands on the stick.
Somehow, Sam gets volunteered to give a demonstration in a game against some local hick, who doesn't seem to have figured out yet that something is very wrong with this picture. The angels watch Sam play with expressions of diligent interest, while the demons watch the hick as if they're planning on eating him after the game. No, there's probably no 'as if' about it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dean at the bar, chatting to the bartender, and Sam kind of hopes he's apologizing in advance for the bar's patrons being murdered and the bar itself being burned to the ground. Laidback and cool as the bartender seems, Sam doubts he's laidback and cool enough to deal with all of that.
"So you pretend to be bad at the game so people will bet large amounts of money against you, and then you reveal how good you actually are and take all their money?" Kutiel says.
The local hick Sam is playing against frowns suddenly.
"Don't they get angry when they realize you've deceived them?" Gaviel says. "And cheated them out of their money?"
Sam and the local hick exchange looks.
"Yeah," Sam says awkwardly. "That can happen."
"Luckily," Lamia says, with a pointed look at the hick, "Sam here is even better with a knife than he is with a pool stick. Hell, sometimes, he doesn't even need a knife. Just his teeth'll do."
The hick looks away from Sam.
Sam is just about to take another shot when there's a sound like something big slamming hard into the side of the bar.
"Whore!" a voice bellows, a thick, inhuman growl. "Unworthy whore! I will strip the skin from your whore-bones!"
It sounds like something that Sam should probably take a look at. Castiel and the angels are already flitting out of sight. Sam lays his pool stick down, apologizes to the hick for the interruption, and heads in the direction of the noise.
In the back alley outside the bar, Dean is on his knees and his face is painted in blood, tissue and white matter. It looks like someone's exploded a human corpse on the wall in front of him, and after a second, Sam realizes that that's because someone has. The 'someone' is probably Abaddon, who is standing by, looking pretty demonic for someone wearing an elderly man who died a few weeks ago. Sam stares at the wall for a moment and takes in the scorched shape of a skeleton and the huge, radiating splash of blood around it. Then he looks at Dean, still on his knees and looking a little shell-shocked, and now surrounded by protective angels.
Sam points at the wall, and says, "Who was that?"
"That was Mike," Dean says flatly. "Oh my god, you exploded Mike."
"Who's Mike?" Sam says.
"Mike was the bartender," Dean says.
Sam looks to Abaddon. "And the reason you exploded the bartender was?" He looks again at Dean, frowns, and says, "What are you doing down there?"
Dean flushes beneath all the blood. Abaddon's smile is not pleasant.
"Your whore had him in his mouth," Abaddon says.
The angels all instantly appear more than a little uncomfortable to be present at this conversation. More of the demons and the bar's patrons are spilling out into the alley. Dean gets up off his knees, wipes at his face ineffectually with the hem of his equally drenched overshirt.
"Dude," Sam hisses beneath his breath. "What the hell is going on?"
"He was sucking off the bartender! On his knees like the filthy, unworthy whore he is!" Abaddon's voice really carries; it's something Sam'll remember should he ever want to make a PSA in the middle of a hurricane. A discontented murmuring sets up in the crowd.
Dean pushes through the angels. He meets Sam's eyes briefly then looks back at the ground again. He shakes his head and tries to brush past Sam. Sam catches his arm, cocks his head at him insistently. "Dean? What happened?"
"I'll explain," Dean says, still not looking him in the eyes. "Back at the motel."
Reluctantly, Sam lets go of him. As they're leaving, Abaddon directs another good, loud Whore! at Dean's back.
:::
Obviously, because he knows Dean, Sam is not at all surprised when Dean disappears into the bathroom for forty minutes when they get back to the Morning Star motel. He sits on his bed and scowls at the greatest hits of Bad Company CD on his bedside table, while he listens to the muffled pounding of the shower.
He heard the angels and demons get back a while ago and they seem to have settled in their rooms for the night, which is a relief. They're all clear on the concept that unauthorized acts of senseless violence will not be tolerated, and that Sam will provide plenty of authorized opportunities, but it's always nice to know they're behaving.
On the subject of bad behavior, once he's got Dean to explain what exactly was going on, Sam thinks he's going to have to have a little conversation with Abaddon. Exploding a civilian is bad enough, but repeatedly screaming 'whore' at Dean is just going too far.
Eventually, Dean emerges from the bathroom, not a spot of blood in sight and wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants. He is still avoiding looking at Sam. He messes around with tying the knot tighter on his bag of bloody laundry, then occupies himself with examining the leftover pizza from yesterday.
"I have a few ideas about what happened, but I'd really love to hear your take on it," Sam says.
His back to Sam, Dean goes still. Then, grudgingly, he turns around and leans against the dresser, arms folded over his chest. The feeling Sam gets when he looks at the lean muscle in Dean's arms has evolved from appreciation into something new.
"I was giving Mike a blowjob. Abaddon caught us and exploded Mike all over the wall."
Sam blinks, then nods. "Yeah," he says. "That's what I thought happened." He wets his lips and wishes he hadn't drunk so much. He really thinks he should be sober for this conversation. "So, are you into guys then? Because I did not know that about you. And, considering recent events, I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention it before."
"I look like a goddamn cockslut to you?" Dean demands.
Sam shrugs and pulls an uncertain face. "I don't know what a cockslut looks like. It's not like you've got 'Bend me over, baby' written across your t-shirt. I just mean, you were giving a guy a blowjob. It's reasonable to assume you're maybe not a zero on the Kinsey scale."
"Oh fuck you," Dean says. "It was practice, okay? I thought maybe if I could blow you next time we tried fucking, your little problem -" Dean crooks his finger significantly, "- might not be such a problem. Thought maybe it'd help." He rubs his hand across his face. "And now you're pissed, Abaddon's acting like I slept with a whole football team, and Mike's a work of abstract fucking art on the wall."
There's quiet for a moment, broken only by the usual snarling and arguing from the demons next door. Then Sam picks up the Bad Company CD and offers it to Dean. Dean looks at it expressionlessly before he takes it. He looks at the front, flips it over and looks at the back, then looks at Sam, eyebrow raised.
"I got it for you," Sam says. "I thought it might, y'know, when we…" He trails off and shrugs.
"Next try fucking?" Dean says. A faint grin tugs at his lips. "Guess we've both been putting in the prep-work, huh? S'pose we can thank Dad and his regular 'preparation is key' lectures for that."
Right then, it doesn't feel awkward to think about Dad in this context. Sam would have thought that it would, but instead it just reminds him how close he is to Dean, how much he's already shared with him.
"You wanna give it a shot tonight?" Dean says. He's slightly flushed, though he's managing to look Sam in the eye as he says it.
Sam nods. "Yeah."
Dean takes a step forward then stops, rubs the back of his neck. "I'm not… uh… I didn't exactly get very far with Mike before Abaddon splooshed him, so…"
"Dude, no," Sam cuts in. "It's okay. I think, I think I got something else figured out."
Dean's eyes are on him immediately. There's curiosity on his face, before it gives way to something soft and amused. The slight quirk of his lips grows to a smile. "You realized just how hot I am then?"
Even as his cheeks burn, Sam laughs. "Oh yeah. Someone finally sent me the memo."
Obviously, Sam isn't going to mention the Antichrist side effects. Anyway, it'd be more than a little stupid and dangerous to try slipping into Antichrist mode before he got hot and heavy with Dean. Dean'd end up chained to the bed or stuck to the ceiling or worse. Nor is Sam planning on mentioning the weird places his brain goes to thanks to Sam's wandering gaze when Dean is around.
As Sam is hooking out the lube and condoms, Dean goes to the door and hangs Castiel's little 'Do not disturb' on the handle outside. He grins at Sam as he turns back into the room.
"Figured we don't gotta be subtle," he says. His smile goes a little strained as he watches Sam unbuckle his belt and lower his fly.
He stands and watches Sam undress, and Sam feels somehow shameless about it. He takes off his clothes and stands in just his shorts in front of Dean, and Dean is equally shameless about studying Sam's body. And whereas last time Sam couldn't get hard even with Dean naked and ass-up, his cock is definitely paying attention to just the weight of Dean's gaze on him.
Sam waits until Dean's eyes flick back up to his before he hooks his fingers into the waistband of his shorts and kicks them off. Dean stares resolutely at his face for a long moment, before his gaze drops down to Sam's dick.
They're somewhere between flirting with each other and playing a really gay game of chicken.
"Tell me you're a shower," Dean says, still fixedly staring at Sam's cock. "'Cause otherwise, no way is that fitting in my ass."
"Didn't realize you were such a pussy," Sam says.
"Just trying to avoid death by dicking."
Dean peels off his t-shirt and then wriggles out of his sweat pants. He hesitates almost imperceptibly before crawling onto the bed, arranging himself on his knees, arms folded beneath himself. He's very nearly vulnerable, delicate in a way Sam isn't comfortable with him being but is fascinated by all the same.
"Not so much lube this time," Dean complains. "I don't enjoy being squelchy."
"Oh, you want me to ride you dry with my monster cock?" Sam says.
"Fuck, yes, put it in me, big boy," Dean shoots back in a really trashy falsetto. Sam is deeply ashamed of his cock because it apparently thinks the trashy falsetto is kind of hot.
He feels a little more in control of the lube this time round and considerably less ends up on the bedspread. Obviously, he's not quite ready to proclaim himself an expert on gay sex just yet, but he feels less like Hailey Springfield has just let him put his hand up her skirt for the first time. He fingers Dean open more confidently because, yeah, it's still weird, but he's pretty much fucking Dean with his fingers, and Dean has got his knees spread out wide and is letting him - Dean is playing the subby little bottom for him! Dean! - and Sam has to admit that he can find the 'hot' factor in the situation.
As he watches his fingers stuff Dean's tiny, pink hole full, heat creeps over him and he thinks about Ruby's soft little belly and Jess's breasts and Madison's long long legs. And he thinks about the desperate noises of pleasure Dean makes when he's getting his first coffee of the day and the way his damp t-shirt stretches over his broad shoulders when he washes the Impala and the peaches-and-cream fairness of the skin in the hidden places of his body where the sun can't touch him: the back of his neck, his inner thighs, the crook of his knees.
Dean has bowed his head into the pillows, sides shivering as he pants for breath. Sam palms the tight roundness of Dean's ass cheek with one big hand, not rough but possessive, and Dean twitches, buries his face deeper.
When it comes to it, Sam only has to jack himself a couple of times to get his cock good and hard for Dean. There are still plenty of pornographic snapshots of the women he's known in his head, but there's a lot of Dean too. His brother is hot and his brother is his and his brother is part of every aspect of his life and so maybe it's not so surprising that Sam can integrate him into his sexual fantasies like this.
He rolls a condom on carefully - because he may have come round to thinking Dean is hot, but that doesn't mean he's forgotten the number of other people who've thought the same - and then pushes the head of his cock against Dean's hole. Despite all the fingering and lube, Sam really doesn't see how his cock - which is impressively fat and thick because, sorry, not a shower - is going to fit in Dean's teeny little asshole.
For a moment, he weighs up the merits of involving Dean in this dilemma. However, Dean has his face pressed so firmly into the pillow that Sam suspects he is hiding, and therefore should not be interrupted.
So Sam tells himself to sternly, and trying to sound as much like Dean as possible - which is 'very like' because that nagging voice he gets in his head sometimes, the one that tells him when he's being a freak about something, sounds just like Dean - not to be an idiot. Dean's ass may be virgin tight and Sam may be impressively well endowed, but it should still be anatomically possible.
Sam nudges his cock into Dean's ass. At the moment of penetration, Dean gives a high-pitched, punched-out cry and his shoulders snap tense. Cringing a little, Sam strokes the dip of his back soothingly, and then again because Dean's skin feels good under his hand.
"Sorry," he whispers. "Sorry, I'll go slow."
Sam pushes another inch in and the bottom of his stomach drops out: Dean is hot and tight and clinging, and Sam knew it'd feel good because people wouldn't do it if it didn't, but he didn't expect having his dick in his big brother's ass to feel this. Damn. Awesome.
Dean is trembling, shoulders heaving as he pants shakily, so Sam keeps stroking the small of his back, smoothing his hands over the rounds of his haunches, rubbing his fingertips over the carved out sharpness of Dean's hipbone where Sam's holding him in place under him.
He rocks his hips and sinks a little further yet. It's probably really weird that he's as distracted as he is by the sight of his cock buried right up inside Dean but right now it's all he can look at. His dick? Is inside his brother.
There's a greedy, frantic heaviness in Sam's belly, and part of him says that he should just slam in deep, balls slapping sharp against the curve of Dean's ass, 'cause isn't it easier to rip a band-aid off all at once? And maybe band-aids and buttsex aren't similar in any other way, but maybe they're similar in this.
But Sam isn't that spoiled or sadistic. Besides, it's plenty enough for him to work on filling Dean up the rest of the way with his cock. He's gentle and slow, hands still moving over Dean's body to calm him. Once the initial rush of fucking, and fucking Dean, has settled, Sam finds a careful rhythm and sticks to it, frowning each time the rhythm falters and he has to steady it out again. He thinks about giving Dean a reach-round but it isn't something they'd discussed in advance, and seeing as they're doing so well right now, Sam doesn't want to jeopardize things by putting his hands places they haven't been authorized to be.
Hips rolling slowly and steadily, Sam fucks into Dean in the near silence of the motel room, enjoying each wave of dizzy pleasure. It occurs to him that it might actually not be completely humiliating when they have to do this on an altar in front of everyone. He opens his mouth to say so when Dean lifts his head and blurts out, "Jesuschrist, Sam, stop! Just fucking stop!"
"What? Why- what's wrong?"
"Just take it out," Dean gasps. "Just take it out now. I can’t. Jesus, just take it out."
Horror-struck, Sam sees Dean is crying. Dean is crying. And yes, Dean has been remarkably prone to tears lately but this is the first time Sam ever made Dean cry with his dick. He is a bad bad evil man and he shouldn't be allowed to have a dick or a big brother. Dean's poor little virgin ass just got filled up with a pretty epically proportioned cock and it didn't even occur to Sam that it might be a little much for a first time.
He eases out carefully but is hampered by Dean wriggling and struggling to get free. Cock still stubbornly hard, Sam watches in guilty dismay as Dean flops on the bed, face crumpled into an agonized expression and mouth open in a silent scream.
"Oh my god," Sam says. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Dean hisses, white with pain. "Yeah, super… Just mild… uh… agony. I'll walk it off." He rolls gingerly off the bed and walks with a strange, limping gait to the bathroom, his bowlegs absurdly emphasized.
Sam reaches out after him. "Dean, god, I'm sorry, you should'a said something-"
"It's fine," Dean says again, through clenched teeth. "Really. I'm just gonna go, not sit in the bathroom, not gonna sit ever ever again, but maybe I'll just lean up against the wall until the pain goes away and I feel a little less like someone just shoved a frickin' baseball bat up my ass."
Dean finishes waddling into the bathroom and closes the door behind him. Morosely, Sam puts a hand on his erection and tries to push it down.
:::
The next morning, Dean is still limping. Sam winces as he watches Dean cross the parking lot to fetch his jacket from the Impala. Maybe it's not as pronounced a limp as it was last night, but it's noticeable enough for the demons. To make things worse, something is up with the demons. They watch Dean with narrowed, black eyes, and smirk and whisper to each other. Sam disapproves but doesn't know what he can do about it that won't make him sound like an overzealous grade school teacher.
Finally, he manages to get Ruby on her own. He corners her over at the ice machine, because apparently even demons aren't fans of the unearthly heat they've been having lately. The cornflower blue sky of recent weeks has given way to churning, black and blue clouds.
He glances over at where he's left Dean strategically surrounded by angels, then turns back to her and says, "What the hell is going on?"
She pops an ice cube in her mouth and sucks on it. She shrugs, uncomprehending and unconcerned, and very much lying.
"Don't make me ask again," Sam growls.
She spits the ice cube out onto the ground. "Fine. I guess we should have this conversation. Just remember, you're the one that asked." She sighs and glances around. "Look, everyone's very impressed with you reminding Dean that he belongs to you."
"What? But I didn't-" Realization hits Sam and his mouth forms a definite pout of mortification. "That's why they're so pleased to see him limping? That's very. Wrong. It wasn't like that."
"I know that," Ruby says. She drops a leering look at Sam's crotch and adds, "And I'm pretty sure I know why he's limping." Sam feels kind of violated. "But they don't. They think you fucked him senseless and made him think twice about slutting it around. But that's only going to last so long. Until you make it real clear that he's your whore, they're only going to see him as a whore."
When Sam next sees Dean, he's going to volunteer his ass for kicking because he's all kinds of insulted on Dean's behalf and he feels Dean is owed some payback.
"So what do you suggest I do?"
"It's really obvious, Sam." Sam stares at her, because he doesn't think it is. She purses her lips. "You recognize Dean as your consort in some kind of formal ceremony."
Still not obvious. She rolls her eyes. "What kind of formal ceremony usually recognizes a commitment between two people?"
Nope. Still not obvious. "Jesus, Sam, don't be this dumb in front of anyone else, okay? There are still a few demons that don't know you yet and are still in awe of you. You have to marry him."
"That would not be legal." Sam immediately addresses one of the least significant problems with that proposition first, because there are plenty of problems for him to work through but that's the only one he can properly vocalize.
"You're the Antichrist, Sam! You planning on being a law-abiding King of Hell?" She calms enough to take a certain amount of pity on him. "You don't have to do it, obviously. But, y'know, most demons are traditionalists, and if you want Dean to be looked at as anything more than your occasional blow-up doll, you'll do as Beyonce says and put a ring on it."
This is not good news. This cannot be solved with the Hand of Black-Smoke Hurting. If there is a power in the Antichrist arsenal to combat the conservative values that some demons apparently still hold dear, Sam is not aware of it. He supposes he has to give them points for being open-minded about the homosexual aspect.
Sam trails sadly back to his room, sits on his bed, and wonders if he is too old to start cutting himself while listening to emo bands and wearing heavy black eyeliner.
Thunder rumbles in the distance. It's possible that, considering Sam's the Antichrist and his mood isn't currently great, the approaching storm isn't a coincidence.
"You're unhappy," Anna says, suddenly beside him.
"You're troubled about last night," Castiel suggests.
One thing about angels is that, when they're not being jerks with wings, they have a wonderfully soothing quality. They're a serene presence in the room. Sam can count on them to understand why he can't marry Dean.
"Apparently the demons think I should marry Dean," he says. He chokes on laughter. "Because my life is not weird enough. They want me to marry my brother. Can you believe it?"
Castiel exchanges a meaningful look with Anna and neither of them says anything. Sam closes his eyes and counts very slowly to ten. Then he counts to one hundred. They're back to being jerks with wings.
"Oh my god. You think I should marry him too, don't you?" he says.
Another look passes between them. That's a yes, then.
"Many of my brothers and sisters feel that it isn't…" Castiel trails off, searching for a word. "That it isn't seemly for you to have intercourse with Dean outside of the bonds of marriage, especially not for such a purpose."
"Right, so fucking my brother in order to open the gates of Hell is a-okay with you guys, so long as we're married?" Sam spreads his hands helplessly. "Is this the wrong time for me to be applying earth logic? Because that makes no sense. I would have to be drunk, high and suffering some kind of severe head trauma for that to make sense. In fact, I wish I were drunk, high and concussed right now, because this is…" Sam can feel himself losing his temper, so he shuts up before he can accidentally explode anything.
"Just think about it, Sam," Anna says gently. "All we're saying is that whereas we are delighted you chose Dean for your Beloved Consort, we would like to see you recognize your partnership with him in a way that is meaningful to you beyond the text of Kerouac's manuscript."
"Yeah, well, so's your mom," Sam throws back, tired and pissed and totally fed up.
There's a moment of confusion, where the angels don't recognize that as the witty and stinging insult that's doubling as an order to get the hell out of Sam's face that it is. He makes it clear with the sheer venom in the glare he directs at them both. They go.
The demons want Sam to marry Dean. The angels want Sam to marry Dean. Sam guesses he needs to have a conversation with Dean about why he might possibly start being asked by people if they can be bridesmaids or whether they've picked a caterer yet.
Alternatively, Sam could try hiding.
:::
He's in his motorcycle leathers and just bending over to fix his duffle to the back of the bike when Dean finds him. He sees the approaching shadow on the ground and he reluctantly straightens up to look at him, and then realizes that Dean's gaze is still fixed on the space Sam's ass previously inhabited. There's an awkward moment where Sam is aware that Dean was checking him out and Dean is aware that Sam is aware.
"Um… hi," Dean says. "You going somewhere?"
Automatically, Sam says, "No," and then he looks down at his packed bag on the bike and his traveling gear, and amends it to, "Not really."
"Okay," Dean says, sharp and unhappy. He turns to leave.
"Did you want something?" Sam says.
Dean swings back around. "I wanted to say sorry, y'know, about last night. I guess I wasn't expecting it to hurt as much as it did. Seriously, it's only knocked off the top spot of Painful Experiences in my Life by a trip to Hell. But I know it's something we've gotta do so-" He breaks off, scrapes his fingers through his hair anxiously.
It figures that Dean is ridiculous and fucked up enough, Sam thinks, that he can take the assorted injuries of hunting ghosts and demons without complaint, but apparently bottoming is beyond his pain tolerance.
"Dude, I hurt you. You totally don't have to apologize. We'll think of something else for next time."
Dean nods and doesn't move. If they stand there much longer, Sam suspects they'll have an audience, one that either expects Sam to go down on one knee, or Dean to go down on both.
"So where were you going?" Dean says.
"Uh… hiding," Sam says. "You should know that the angels and demons think we should, uh, that weshouldgetmarried. And I thought I'd take off for a while until I could figure out a way out of it."
Dean is studying him with narrowed eyes. "They want us to get married?" he asks very levelly and very neutrally.
"Yeah," Sam says, and stares off into the distance.
"And you're leaving so you can think how to get out of it?" Dean says.
"Yeah."
There's a long pause and then, in an exceptionally dangerous tone of voice, Dean says, "So I'm good enough to fuck but not to marry? Gee, Sammy, good to see you're not settling."
Sam continues staring at the horizon, eyes going fixed, because he's not sure what exactly he did wrong, but Dean is definitely pissed. Birds sweep across the storm-black sky, wings fluttering like ash. The wind is picking up, full of portent. He opens and closes his mouth a couple of times and then has to turn to look at Dean because he has no idea what the fuck just happened.
Dean looks hurt.
The logic seems all wrong but Sam is pretty sure now that what just happened is that he hurt Dean's feelings by not wanting to marry him.
"Dude, we can't get married," he says gently. "You're my brother. You don't wanna marry me. It'd be weird."
"And fucking me on an altar isn't fucking weird?" Dean snaps. "I just don't get it, Sam! You'll tell Lucifer I'm your favorite person and you'll fuck me but you draw the line at marrying me? What the hell am I to you anymore?"
"So you're seriously suggesting we go through with it? Marriage? 'Til death do you part? That? Us?"
Dean waves a hand dismissively and wrinkles his nose. "Oh please. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce anyway. And it's not even like it's fucking legal. But-" he says and prods Sam in the shoulder with his finger, "why do you have such a problem with standing up in front of your army and making an honest man of me, huh? You think you're too good for me or something?"
"Jesus, fine, I'll marry you, bitch," Sam says, rubbing his shoulder.
Dean snorts and starts to walk back to the motel. "Hell, no, buddy. You gotta ask me nicer than that."
:::
There is a behemoth in Tulsa, courtesy of Mephistopheles. More accurately, there is a creature that is possibly a behemoth. Raum called it a behemoth but Kutiel disagreed, saying it wasn't large enough. This sparked an academic debate on the subject of minimum size requirements for Biblical monsters.
Sam really only cares about how to kill the fucking big thing that's tearing up a city.
"Napalm," Dean says promptly, taking one look at it.
"You figuring Tulsa for a lost cause then?" Sam says. "'Cause if you are, we should just get ourselves some hardcore military explosives and- You know I'm joking, right, Dean? We're not bombing Tulsa."
Sam isn't actually ruling out bombing Tulsa because, minimum size requirements aside, the behemoth is really fucking huge. And nasty.
Firstly, it's big. Has Sam mentioned it's really goddamn big? The behemoth emerges from a yawning crack in the ground, right along the street in the middle of the city, that burns red with hellfire, and the behemoth stretches up and up and up into the sky, blocking out the sun. Sam has to crane his neck back to see the top of it and its shadow turns the world dark and cold. Its skin is poached red but tough, and its thickly muscled arms end in blunt cloven hooves. Two massive horns of bone curl out from its head. Most unsettling of all, its face has a simian quality, a dreadful, twisted humanity to it. It roars in despairing hatred and smashes a hoof down on the pulverized stores that used to line the street.
They stand at ground zero, in the deserted and demolished heart of the city.
"It looks pissed," Dean says. He's got a handgun in one hand and a machete in the other, and he looks like an Action Man against the behemoth, or maybe a Ken doll.
"If you got woken up by Mephistopheles, you would be too," says Lamia, her eyes still fixed on the raging beast. "Think a less easy-going version of Alastair."
"Mephistopheles is a dick," Ruby says firmly.
"Totally," Anna says.
The behemoth writhes as if suffering a major case of muscle cramp - which, if Hell doesn't have a very high ceiling, is probably the case - and sweeps the debris of the street towards them as easily as knocking paper off a desk.
"So, what's the plan, fearless leader?" Dean says, gaze flicking briefly to Sam.
Sam ignores him. Sam ignores him because he's feeling kind of wrathful and powerful and downright Antichrist-y right now, and that doesn't mesh well with acknowledging the presence of pretty, human Beloved Consorts right beside him.
The sensation is both like watching the scene from a great distance and being the very center of the scene, its focal point. He watches the behemoth with the same mildly frustrated indulgence of a parent whose child is knocking down cans in a grocery store.
And then he raises his hand, and the behemoth looks at him, and the behemoth quiets into plaintive growls.
Turning his palm to face the earth, Sam lowers his hand. Slowly, growls fading into susurrations, the behemoth crawls back into the chasm, hooves pawing at the ground as it goes and sending up smoke. There's a lot of behemoth to get back into Hell so the process takes a while but Sam is calm, unhurried. A breeze touches his hair as the sun appears between the descending creature's horns. Its shadow falls away.
Eventually, there is nothing but the sulfurous glow of the split down the street and the distant, fading sound of the behemoth's breathing.
Sam lets his hand drop.
"He can do that," Dean says into the awed silence, "but he can't pick his own damn towel up off the floor after he takes a shower."
Idly surveying the damage done by a fucking huge behemoth jumping up into the middle of the city, Sam cocks his head to make out the sign from one of the devastated stores. He strides through the debris, easily hefts some scorched rock out of his way, and picks through broken glass to examine the tray of wedding rings from the demolished jewelers.
There's a thick, platinum band that looks expensive and subtle, which are two things Dean is not, and Sam likes it. He tests it on his own finger, and can only get it as far as his second knuckle, which he presumes means it's Dean-sized.
He turns back to Dean, who's watching him with wary skepticism. He holds the ring out.
"Marry me?" Sam says.
"Buddy, that's still nowhere near-" Dean starts to say, then his eyes widen as Sam makes to drop down on one knee in front of him. Casting a furiously embarrassed glance at their gleeful audience, he grabs Sam's arm and hauls him upright. "Yeah, fine, whatever. Gimme the ring."
Dean's hand feels small in Sam's and though he was grinning a second ago, the weight of what he's doing forces him to be serious as he slips his ring onto Dean's finger. Dean looks down at the ring, his hand still in Sam's, and the expression on his face is both soft and horrified. He curls his fingers into his palm and Sam has to fight the urge to cling to him.
"Just don't expect me to wear white," Dean says.
:::
Anyone who still doubts that Sam is the Antichrist obviously hasn't been paying proper attention. However, Lucifer is apparently a bureaucrat who expects all the necessary paperwork to be completed in full. So Sam has another couple of paths to walk before he can keep his appointment with Dean on an altar and get the gates to Hell open.
Unfortunately, most of the paths that are left for Sam to choose from require him to be some kind of foaming-at-the-mouth crazy with some serious issues regarding his sexual kinks. Sam is only just coming round to incest; he doesn't think he's up for taking the starring role in a snuff film with a cast of millions.
"How about you put something on Craigslist asking who wants to be raped and ritually disemboweled?" Raum says. "You're bound to get a couple of hits at least."
"Put your picture on there too," Ruby suggests. "I bet you'd get a couple hundred hits in the first day, easy."
"Sorry, I have a problem with my fiancé cheating on me over the Internet, even if they all end up dead," Dean says. He's pretty much absented himself from the conversation, going to sit in the corner of the room, thumbing through 'The Paths of the Black Messiah'. He mainly speaks up in order to veto proposed paths.
Technically speaking, Sam is the central voice in the conversation. However, mostly he's surfing the net on his laptop, and leaving it to Dean to stop the demons from going too far with any bad ideas. Sometimes, when he looks up, Dean is looking back at him, one hand propping up his head, the other holding the paperback open. And he doesn't look away when Sam looks back at him. It's not a hostile look but it's a thoughtful one, and Dean putting that amount of thought into Sam is a little unsettling.
"I'm sorry, Dean, but you're gonna have to accept that the Path of Cuddling Kittens does not exist," Ruby says. "The Path of Skipping Under Rainbows doesn't exist either. Sam is gonna have to-"
"The Path of the Suffering Multitudes," Dean interrupts. He turns the paperback round to show her the relevant passage, cracking the spine on the book in a way that has Sam cringing. He turns the book back and starts to read: "And the Boy King strikes a single blow, which draws wailing from every nation. To every nation, he touches anguish and loss, frustration and fury." Dean nods at Sam's laptop and says, "You cuss pretty loud when you can't get connection on that thing, don't you?"
"You want him to turn off the Internet?" Raum says incredulously, but Ruby's obviously thinking the suggestion through.
"You do get pretty pissed when you can't get online," she says to Sam. "And it wouldn't have to be permanent. Just long enough to piss people off on both sides of the globe."
Sam's jaw has dropped. "I can't believe I'm hearing this. No. No, we're not going after the Internet. Some things are sacred and I'm not inflicting that kind of mental trauma on people worldwide. What about… the assignments that won't be researched, and the eBay auctions that'll be lost and, and, and what about Busty Asian Beauties?" he demands.
Dean shrugs. "Eh, I prefer the magazine anyway. C'mon, Sammy, turn the Internet off for a couple hours and you don't have to rape a single virgin."
Put it that way… and Sam still thinks messing with the Internet is a step too far. He fondly watches the screensaver cycle through on his laptop. "I don't even know if I'd be able to turn off the Internet," he says. "It's pretty big, y'know."
"Dude," says Dean. "So was the behemoth thing."
Sam is convinced not so much by the logic of the argument itself but that Dean clearly believes in it.
:::
"I need you to choose one of these," Uriel says, while Sam is preoccupied with making the most of his last hour of time online.
He glances at the two cards Uriel is holding out to him and frowns. "What are these?" A very bad feeling hits him. "Uriel, these are wedding invitations!"
"Yes, Samuel," Uriel says, and it must be an angel thing how he manages to pronounce 'Samuel' so that it sounds exactly the same as 'mud-monkey'. "I need you to choose one. And then we need to have a serious discussion about venue and catering."
Sam scrambles backwards off his bed, shaking his head. Behind Uriel, Castiel looks disappointed.
"You can't do this," Sam says in a voice that only barely betrays his rising hysteria. "I didn't ask you to do this. I have enough to deal with right now without you organizing my wedding around me."
Uriel takes a step closer, eyes narrowed and his upper lip curled to bare teeth. "Listen to me, Samuel. You may want to treat this ceremony as a minor obstacle to get past before you can fuck your brother silly on an altar. But I intend to make sure you take it seriously."
"With wedding invitations?" Sam demands. "No! Okay? No! No invitations, no flowers, no bridesmaids' dresses, no bridesmaids. I'm marrying my brother, you understand that? You don't need to decide which magazine you're gonna sell the photos to! Low-key and simple. Treat it like the incestuous, shotgun marriage it is, okay?"
Things are about to get nasty, and Sam hasn't got a huge amount of experience in bitchslapping angels but he's willing to take the opportunity to practice, when Castiel lays a hand on Uriel's arm to silence him.
"Sam," Castiel says, "I know this marriage is not what you would have chosen and I am aware that you and Dean intend to be divorced as soon as you are crowned, but I also know that Dean is taking this ceremony seriously. Can't you do the same?"
There are many points Sam is about to make, good and important points, but before he can, something in what Castiel's said registers with him. "Wait, who said we were planning on getting divorced?"
"Dean told me," Castiel says. "And I understand why you should both want-"
"You and Dean had a conversation about him divorcing me?" Sam says. "Huh. Okay."
From the look on Castiel's face, it has hit him that Sam is not altogether thrilled. Lips set in a tight line, Sam snatches the cards from Uriel and compares them briefly, before thrusting them back at him.
"I want the Cherish style," he says. "And find out whether it's available without the ribbons. And then I want you to investigate suitable venues. Also, I'm gonna want white roses for buttonholes. And we're gonna need a photographer, a good one, and you need to find me a brochure of wedding cakes. And basically you need to do all the wedding crap you think we need. You are now the official wedding planner of the apocalypse, you hear me? And there's gonna be no talk of us getting divorced until after we're actually fucking married, okay?"
A rush of something goes through Sam, something huge and powerful, and scarcely thinking about what he's doing, Sam places his hand over the keypad on his laptop. The screen flickers, the Blue Screen of Death appears, and then the system restores itself, with a small dialogue box informing Sam that his laptop is currently unable to connect to the Internet.
Sam's just pissed off more people than he'll probably ever even meet and he doesn't care.
:::
If it seems like Sam's side is a bickering, fragmented, rag-tag bunch of beings as likely to turn on Sam as they are one another, then you should see the other sides. One important reason Sam and his team have been effectively unopposed as long as they have is because the rival demons keep killing each other and the angels still keep stopping to wait for orders from superiors that disappeared probably at least a couple of hundred years ago.
Sam's team survives because it's united behind Sam. His angels are very happy to blindly follow orders and his demons are keenly aware that he can kick each and every one of their sulfurous asses should he wish.
As for humanity, it is, on the whole, blissfully unaware of the epic battle between Heaven and Hell going on, and quite happily switches over from news reports of the freak occurrences and unexplained happenings to the latest episode of Ugly Betty.
When words gets out that Mephistopheles has succeeded in uniting three factions of demons beneath his command, Sam thinks something needs to be done. So they travel up to Duluth, Dean in the Impala following Sam on his bike, and the air thick with angels and demons.
The storm still hasn't broken and it doesn't get much cooler even as they move north. But late in the evening, as they assemble at the harbor, Sam stares at the horizon and thinks he sees a patch of blue sky. The air is almost pleasantly fresh. A small group of tourists stands near them, admiring the Lift Bridge and taking photos.
"Hey, Ruby! You sure Mephistopheles is here?" Sam says. Ruby draws away from Anna and Sam catches a flash of the cover of the magazine they're looking at as Anna shoves it out of sight; he guesses he's got at least two prospective bridesmaids.
"It's either him," she says, "or someone as nasty. Either way, you got a reason to be here."
"Any idea where?"
Patronizingly patient, she pats his shoulder. "They'll find us."
"Awesome," Dean mutters under his breath, turning back to the ocean. Sam can't help noticing he's wearing Sam's ring - paler and more striking than the ring he customarily wears on the other hand. He glances towards the tourists and calls out, "Hey, you want me to do that for you?"
One of the guys has a Polaroid camera and is trying to take a group shot of his party. He looks back at Dean, takes in the motley assortment of the angels' vessels and the demons' meatsuits, and hesitates. But Dean smiles and holds out his hand for the camera, and the guy relents.
"Thanks," he says, and moves to join the others.
The tourists beam at the camera, self-conscious and happy, and Dean takes the picture, shakes the photo when it slides out, then offers it and the camera back to the guy.
"You want one of you and your friends?" the guy says, with another, less wary, look at Sam and the others.
And that's how there ends up being a photo in existence of the Antichrist, his Beloved Consort, and a small army of angels and demons, posing at Duluth Harbor in the final days before the Apocalypse. Sam peers over Dean's shoulder at the Polaroid and Dean looks up at him, smiling slightly. He tucks the photo away carefully in the pocket of his leather jacket.
Then Sam says, "Leave," to the tourists, and the voice he uses doesn't allow them space in their heads to argue, or to tell him that he's a very rude, very weird young man and they're not done looking at the harbor yet. They can only do as he tells him, and Sam watches them traipse away, discussing amongst themselves whether they should try that interesting Chinese restaurant they passed earlier for dinner or take the safe option and stick to the Olive Garden they ate at the previous four days.
"I bet they pick the Olive Garden," Mephistopheles says. "Don't you?"
For his meatsuit, Mephistopheles has picked a hobo, small and slight and sickly. His minions have all chosen big dockworkers, and more and more of them are drifting towards Sam and his significantly smaller number of significantly smaller-built minions. The dockworkers' decidedly unfriendly expressions would probably horrify the Duluth Visitors Bureau, which relies on the harbor as one of its main attractions.
"You put my behemoth back in the ground, Sam," Mephistopheles says.
"You sure that was a behemoth?" Sam says. "'Cause we're not convinced. Seemed a little on the small side."
Mephistopheles draws closer, close enough that Sam can smell his breath, rancid with hunger. Beside him, Sam feels Dean twitch on the instinct to move in front of him.
Wind picks up over the ocean, a slow roar that builds and then drops unexpectedly back into nothingness.
"I've been wanting to meet you for quite a while," Mephistopheles says.
Sam shrugs. "I thought you were solely fictional up until last week."
Mephistopheles smiles like his lips are being peeled back from his teeth. "You're gonna wish I was."
His eyes roll back in his skull, leaving only the whites. He stares at Sam with his wiped-out gaze: pure malevolence wrapped up in a corpse. Teeth touching, he sucks in a slow hiss of breath, long and sibilant and inhuman.
Bizarrely, someone lightly pinches Sam's ass. Confused and not willing to take his eyes off Mephistopheles for too long, Sam looks over his shoulder and sees only Raum and Kutiel. And whereas Sam knows his angels and demons have thought processes that would just never occur to him, he doesn't think even they would think pinching his ass while he's trying to have a showdown with an uber-demon would be a good idea.
Mephistopheles hisses in another breath. Someone pinches Sam's ass again.
"Dude! Are you phantom pinching my ass?" Sam demands. "Cut it out!"
Flushing, Mephistopheles flashes a mortified, white-eyed look at his minions. "Of course I'm not pinching your ass!"
"I think I know when someone's pinching my ass!" Sam says.
"I'm not!" Mephistopheles insists. Lowering his voice, he says, "If you'd just bear with me, you'd realize I'm about to reopen the stab wound on your back."
"Try higher up," Sam says.
"It's kind of about here," Dean says helpfully, holding his hand at the level of the base of Sam's spine.
Mephistopheles takes a look and then nods. He hisses again. Sam sighs and looks heavenward. "Still my ass."
"Geez," says Mephistopheles. "Is my face red. I'm normally pretty good at this."
He hisses again.
Sam clutches his ass. "Man, would you stop already! My ass is gonna be purple by the time you're done!"
Mephistopheles hisses again, and Sam takes a small breath of his own.
Mephistopheles' meatsuit collapses in a heap on the ground. Sam's gaze travels over Mephistopheles' minions, and one by one, their meatsuits crumple and drop. Finally, Sam is staring out over the harbor, his own people behind him and Dean tense at his side.
"What did you do?" Dean whispers.
"And the Boy King is Legion," Sam recites, the words from 'The Paths of the Black Messiah' as clear as if they were written across the sky. "He takes them into himself and within him they are reborn as his own or they are destroyed."
To the seething mass of demons caught within himself, Sam says, "Those of you that wanna switch to my team, you're free to go find yourself a meatsuit that belongs to someone dying or to someone who deserves to play host to you. To all the others…" He burns the malignancy of those not willing to serve him, drowns them in his blood and sets fire to them. Afterwards, he opens his mouth and blows the ashes out. As he does so, he sees Dean staring at him. Sheepishly, he brushes a few lingering ashes from his mouth.
They look at each other.
"I don't think you're Harvey Dent, Sam," Dean says after a long pause. "I think you're Dr Manhattan. And I guess I'm Laurie." He nods to himself in a satisfied way. "Laurie. Man, I'd hit that."
Sam is pretty sure that Dean is trying to make an important point, and is couching it in Winchester avoidance. "Are we having a meaningful conversation through the medium of comic books?" he says.
"Actually," Castiel says, "due to the sophistication of the plot and the nature of its themes, Watchmen is arguably deserving of the term 'graphic novel', not 'comic book'."
"Oh please," Anna says. "Alan Moore is a belligerent, paranoid misogynist who thinks gratuitous violence, an emphasis on pseudo-philosophical dialogue and an unrelenting, and unrealistic, dystopia passes for sophistication and makes him look edgy."
"I think you need to consider Watchmen in its cultural context," Castiel says.
Sam rolls his eyes. Any hope he had of getting a straight answer out of Dean is now gone. Dean has had time to prepare. "If I'm Dr Manhattan, who's Ozymandias then?" he says instead. "'Cause I should probably go kick his butt before he drops a mutant squid on us."
Dean shrugs, heading back in the direction of where he parked the Impala. "Uh… how about Zachariah? He's pretty self-righteous and is all about the greater good, isn't he?"
"So what about Nite Owl then?" Someone with wings, Sam thinks, with a dark look at Castiel, who is still debating with Anna whether Watchmen is a modern classic or severely overrated and pretentious pulp.
"We don't have to cast the whole comic," Dean says.
"I want to be Rorschach," most of the demons say at once.
"Fucking Rorschach fans," Dean growls. "He's an emo sociopath with poor hygiene and mommy-issues."
"Talking of which, is it just me," says Gaviel from near the back, "or did anyone else think the Comedian looked kind of like John Winchester?" As one, Sam and Dean turn to give him a deeply unimpressed look. Gaviel blanches. "Just me then."
:::
On the way back to the Morning Star motel, Sam lets the Impala get ahead and then stops his bike by the side of the road, removes his helmet and takes out his cellphone.
He leans against his bike by a gently waving field of long grass, under a heavy, dark blue sky, and waits for his call to connect.
"Sam," Bobby says. "Been quite a while since I heard from you, kid."
"Yeah, sorry. Look, Bobby, last time we spoke, you said now don't you go doing anything stupid or crazy. Except, I kinda have. Both."
"This about the Antichrist thing or marrying your brother?" When Sam can only gape, Bobby goes on with, "Now come on, you know how hunters love to talk. Plus Dean's been checking in. I spoke to him just the other day and he let me know what you boys were up to."
"I promise I'm not gonna go darkside and end the world."
"Well, ain't like there's much I could do about it if you broke your promise," Bobby says.
"And you're not freaking out about me and Dean having to… uh… about me and Dean?"
"Well I'm not real thrilled about it, but I guess your brother is of the age where he should be thinking about settling down. And I never did think him settling down with someone else when you're still gonna be his number one priority was fair. Guess it works out even this way." Bobby sighs and adds, "And maybe you don't need Dean like he needs you, but I think, just maybe, you want him more than you need him. You boys'll be okay."
Sam frowns, shifting the phone to his other ear. "So you genuinely don't have a problem with me having sex with Dean?"
There's a pause. "That's the part of it I'm doing my best not to think about. Now, you just calling to mentally scar me or you want something in particular?"
"I… uh…" Sam flushes even though Bobby can't see him and rubs the back of his neck. "I was kind of hoping you'd be best man at the wedding. I don't… I don't have anyone else really. I mean, not that I'm only asking you 'cause-"
"Son," Bobby says, "that's a nice thought, but I'm afraid I can't."
Sam goes a little cold and sore inside. "'Cause of the sex on an altar I'm gonna be having with Dean, right? No, I get it-"
"You mention that one more time and I'm hanging up on you. I can't be your best man, Sam, 'cause Dean already asked me to give him away. Can't do both and Dean did ask first."
"Oh," Sam says, but he's smiling. "That's cool."
"Sorry, Sam."
"No, seriously, it's cool." Having an elderly, retired hunter to give his brother away at their wedding apparently makes it impossible for Sam to stop smiling. "Thanks, Bobby."
After he hangs up, Sam stays leant against his bike and thinks. He supposes it's not entirely true that he doesn't have anyone else. After all, the duty of a best man is to humiliate a groom at his bachelor party - Sam refuses to contemplate the idea of a bachelor party - and to make inappropriate speeches in public about the groom's bad behavior and to hit on any and all attractive members of the wedding party. Sam does have someone close to him who can fulfill all these duties with aplomb. And he's currently feeling pretty good about the world, which perhaps explains why he suffers a momentary bout of insanity.
"Hey!" he calls out. "Ruby! C'mere, I wanna ask you something!"
part four
Dean is delighted by the unexpected gift of pie. Sam feels like a dirty old man seducing an underage kid. He wants to take the pie back - no pie for you, Dean, because I only gave it to you so you would be in a good mood when I suggest sex later on - but most of it has already disappeared down Dean's throat before Sam can get the words out. The greatest hits of Bad Company CD sits in his jacket pocket and tells him he is a bad, bad, dirty man.
If he were feeling less guilty about it, he might have put up more of a fight when he realized that a number of angels and demons decided to accompany them to the bar. As it is, it soothes his conscience a little, because it's not like he can be trying to seduce his brother, while accompanied by the denizens of heaven and hell. They're kind of a cockblock.
"Think we'll still be able to do this when you're Antichrist?" Dean says.
Sam sinks the pool ball and lines up another shot. "Sure. Why not? No point saving the world if it's all work work work after, right?"
"Goddamn you were raised right," Dean says. He pauses, head cocked as if considering what he's just said, then takes another swig from his beer bottle.
They've hidden themselves away in the corner with the pool table, right over the other side from the tables the angels and demons are occupying. If the noise is anything to go by they seem to be enjoying themselves. Sam keeps an eye on them but he's enjoying his own evening with Dean. Occasionally the conversation runs into those tricky little snags but they navigate around them well enough. Dean is flushed and happy, and when Sam's gaze catches on the line of Dean's throat as he tilts his head back, he feels a detached, tentative stab of appreciation.
"'Course, it's not like you wouldn't have minions to bring you beer if you had to stay late at the office, right?" Dean says.
Sam casts a dubious look in the direction of the angels and demons, then shares a grin with Dean. "I'm not sure I could trust my minions to organize a spit roast in Hell."
"Sure you could," Dean says, "so long as you've got a taste for charred human flesh." He takes another mouthful of his beer then sets the bottle down on the corner of the pool table. Something catches his attention and the next thing Sam knows, Dean's calling out, "Hey, Cas! C'mon over here a minute."
Obedient and eager, Castiel trails over. Sam fumes very quietly as he sinks another ball.
It's not that he dislikes Castiel. It's just that he's very aware that Castiel is pretty much Dean's second favorite person in the world, and Sam has yet to be able to find opportunity to grip Dean tight and raise him up from perdition, which leaves him feeling that maybe one day, Dean will decide he prefers the person who can do that to the one who accidentally signs him up for assfucking on an altar. At least Castiel can't provide Dean with zombies to shoot, Sam thinks smugly.
"We have been craptastic guides to life on Earth," Dean says, thrusting a pool stick at Castiel. "We completely forgot to teach you how to play pool! You need to know how to play pool, man."
Castiel looks confused. "I thought pool was just for fun?"
"Pool is what puts food on the table when the credit cards don't show," Dean says in a very serious voice.
"I don't need to eat," Castiel says. "Remember? You tried feeding me cheeseburger and my host body was unable to digest it. And then you had to teach me about Laundromats." He proudly smoothes the front of his clean trench coat.
"It's an important life skill, Cas. And I wouldn't be doing my duty by you if I didn't make sure you could play as good as any Winchester." Dean claps Sam on the shoulder and says, "Sammy here could run a table by the time he was fourteen."
"I wanna learn too," Gaviel says, having drifted over towards them.
"'Course you should learn," Dean says. "In fact-" He turns towards the rest of the angels and demons, "-pool tournament over here, guys! Lessons for the angels, humiliation for the demons! Come lose some money!"
Not only does Dean manage to attract the attention of the angels and demons, but he also reels in a good few of the decidedly human bar patrons. Soon, the pool table has become the focal point of the bar. Sam sighs. So much for an evening alone with Dean. When he shuffles his way to Dean's side, intending on suggesting they head back to the motel, the noise level is too high for Dean to hear him, and Dean just grins as he leans over Castiel to position his hands on the stick.
Somehow, Sam gets volunteered to give a demonstration in a game against some local hick, who doesn't seem to have figured out yet that something is very wrong with this picture. The angels watch Sam play with expressions of diligent interest, while the demons watch the hick as if they're planning on eating him after the game. No, there's probably no 'as if' about it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dean at the bar, chatting to the bartender, and Sam kind of hopes he's apologizing in advance for the bar's patrons being murdered and the bar itself being burned to the ground. Laidback and cool as the bartender seems, Sam doubts he's laidback and cool enough to deal with all of that.
"So you pretend to be bad at the game so people will bet large amounts of money against you, and then you reveal how good you actually are and take all their money?" Kutiel says.
The local hick Sam is playing against frowns suddenly.
"Don't they get angry when they realize you've deceived them?" Gaviel says. "And cheated them out of their money?"
Sam and the local hick exchange looks.
"Yeah," Sam says awkwardly. "That can happen."
"Luckily," Lamia says, with a pointed look at the hick, "Sam here is even better with a knife than he is with a pool stick. Hell, sometimes, he doesn't even need a knife. Just his teeth'll do."
The hick looks away from Sam.
Sam is just about to take another shot when there's a sound like something big slamming hard into the side of the bar.
"Whore!" a voice bellows, a thick, inhuman growl. "Unworthy whore! I will strip the skin from your whore-bones!"
It sounds like something that Sam should probably take a look at. Castiel and the angels are already flitting out of sight. Sam lays his pool stick down, apologizes to the hick for the interruption, and heads in the direction of the noise.
In the back alley outside the bar, Dean is on his knees and his face is painted in blood, tissue and white matter. It looks like someone's exploded a human corpse on the wall in front of him, and after a second, Sam realizes that that's because someone has. The 'someone' is probably Abaddon, who is standing by, looking pretty demonic for someone wearing an elderly man who died a few weeks ago. Sam stares at the wall for a moment and takes in the scorched shape of a skeleton and the huge, radiating splash of blood around it. Then he looks at Dean, still on his knees and looking a little shell-shocked, and now surrounded by protective angels.
Sam points at the wall, and says, "Who was that?"
"That was Mike," Dean says flatly. "Oh my god, you exploded Mike."
"Who's Mike?" Sam says.
"Mike was the bartender," Dean says.
Sam looks to Abaddon. "And the reason you exploded the bartender was?" He looks again at Dean, frowns, and says, "What are you doing down there?"
Dean flushes beneath all the blood. Abaddon's smile is not pleasant.
"Your whore had him in his mouth," Abaddon says.
The angels all instantly appear more than a little uncomfortable to be present at this conversation. More of the demons and the bar's patrons are spilling out into the alley. Dean gets up off his knees, wipes at his face ineffectually with the hem of his equally drenched overshirt.
"Dude," Sam hisses beneath his breath. "What the hell is going on?"
"He was sucking off the bartender! On his knees like the filthy, unworthy whore he is!" Abaddon's voice really carries; it's something Sam'll remember should he ever want to make a PSA in the middle of a hurricane. A discontented murmuring sets up in the crowd.
Dean pushes through the angels. He meets Sam's eyes briefly then looks back at the ground again. He shakes his head and tries to brush past Sam. Sam catches his arm, cocks his head at him insistently. "Dean? What happened?"
"I'll explain," Dean says, still not looking him in the eyes. "Back at the motel."
Reluctantly, Sam lets go of him. As they're leaving, Abaddon directs another good, loud Whore! at Dean's back.
:::
Obviously, because he knows Dean, Sam is not at all surprised when Dean disappears into the bathroom for forty minutes when they get back to the Morning Star motel. He sits on his bed and scowls at the greatest hits of Bad Company CD on his bedside table, while he listens to the muffled pounding of the shower.
He heard the angels and demons get back a while ago and they seem to have settled in their rooms for the night, which is a relief. They're all clear on the concept that unauthorized acts of senseless violence will not be tolerated, and that Sam will provide plenty of authorized opportunities, but it's always nice to know they're behaving.
On the subject of bad behavior, once he's got Dean to explain what exactly was going on, Sam thinks he's going to have to have a little conversation with Abaddon. Exploding a civilian is bad enough, but repeatedly screaming 'whore' at Dean is just going too far.
Eventually, Dean emerges from the bathroom, not a spot of blood in sight and wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants. He is still avoiding looking at Sam. He messes around with tying the knot tighter on his bag of bloody laundry, then occupies himself with examining the leftover pizza from yesterday.
"I have a few ideas about what happened, but I'd really love to hear your take on it," Sam says.
His back to Sam, Dean goes still. Then, grudgingly, he turns around and leans against the dresser, arms folded over his chest. The feeling Sam gets when he looks at the lean muscle in Dean's arms has evolved from appreciation into something new.
"I was giving Mike a blowjob. Abaddon caught us and exploded Mike all over the wall."
Sam blinks, then nods. "Yeah," he says. "That's what I thought happened." He wets his lips and wishes he hadn't drunk so much. He really thinks he should be sober for this conversation. "So, are you into guys then? Because I did not know that about you. And, considering recent events, I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention it before."
"I look like a goddamn cockslut to you?" Dean demands.
Sam shrugs and pulls an uncertain face. "I don't know what a cockslut looks like. It's not like you've got 'Bend me over, baby' written across your t-shirt. I just mean, you were giving a guy a blowjob. It's reasonable to assume you're maybe not a zero on the Kinsey scale."
"Oh fuck you," Dean says. "It was practice, okay? I thought maybe if I could blow you next time we tried fucking, your little problem -" Dean crooks his finger significantly, "- might not be such a problem. Thought maybe it'd help." He rubs his hand across his face. "And now you're pissed, Abaddon's acting like I slept with a whole football team, and Mike's a work of abstract fucking art on the wall."
There's quiet for a moment, broken only by the usual snarling and arguing from the demons next door. Then Sam picks up the Bad Company CD and offers it to Dean. Dean looks at it expressionlessly before he takes it. He looks at the front, flips it over and looks at the back, then looks at Sam, eyebrow raised.
"I got it for you," Sam says. "I thought it might, y'know, when we…" He trails off and shrugs.
"Next try fucking?" Dean says. A faint grin tugs at his lips. "Guess we've both been putting in the prep-work, huh? S'pose we can thank Dad and his regular 'preparation is key' lectures for that."
Right then, it doesn't feel awkward to think about Dad in this context. Sam would have thought that it would, but instead it just reminds him how close he is to Dean, how much he's already shared with him.
"You wanna give it a shot tonight?" Dean says. He's slightly flushed, though he's managing to look Sam in the eye as he says it.
Sam nods. "Yeah."
Dean takes a step forward then stops, rubs the back of his neck. "I'm not… uh… I didn't exactly get very far with Mike before Abaddon splooshed him, so…"
"Dude, no," Sam cuts in. "It's okay. I think, I think I got something else figured out."
Dean's eyes are on him immediately. There's curiosity on his face, before it gives way to something soft and amused. The slight quirk of his lips grows to a smile. "You realized just how hot I am then?"
Even as his cheeks burn, Sam laughs. "Oh yeah. Someone finally sent me the memo."
Obviously, Sam isn't going to mention the Antichrist side effects. Anyway, it'd be more than a little stupid and dangerous to try slipping into Antichrist mode before he got hot and heavy with Dean. Dean'd end up chained to the bed or stuck to the ceiling or worse. Nor is Sam planning on mentioning the weird places his brain goes to thanks to Sam's wandering gaze when Dean is around.
As Sam is hooking out the lube and condoms, Dean goes to the door and hangs Castiel's little 'Do not disturb' on the handle outside. He grins at Sam as he turns back into the room.
"Figured we don't gotta be subtle," he says. His smile goes a little strained as he watches Sam unbuckle his belt and lower his fly.
He stands and watches Sam undress, and Sam feels somehow shameless about it. He takes off his clothes and stands in just his shorts in front of Dean, and Dean is equally shameless about studying Sam's body. And whereas last time Sam couldn't get hard even with Dean naked and ass-up, his cock is definitely paying attention to just the weight of Dean's gaze on him.
Sam waits until Dean's eyes flick back up to his before he hooks his fingers into the waistband of his shorts and kicks them off. Dean stares resolutely at his face for a long moment, before his gaze drops down to Sam's dick.
They're somewhere between flirting with each other and playing a really gay game of chicken.
"Tell me you're a shower," Dean says, still fixedly staring at Sam's cock. "'Cause otherwise, no way is that fitting in my ass."
"Didn't realize you were such a pussy," Sam says.
"Just trying to avoid death by dicking."
Dean peels off his t-shirt and then wriggles out of his sweat pants. He hesitates almost imperceptibly before crawling onto the bed, arranging himself on his knees, arms folded beneath himself. He's very nearly vulnerable, delicate in a way Sam isn't comfortable with him being but is fascinated by all the same.
"Not so much lube this time," Dean complains. "I don't enjoy being squelchy."
"Oh, you want me to ride you dry with my monster cock?" Sam says.
"Fuck, yes, put it in me, big boy," Dean shoots back in a really trashy falsetto. Sam is deeply ashamed of his cock because it apparently thinks the trashy falsetto is kind of hot.
He feels a little more in control of the lube this time round and considerably less ends up on the bedspread. Obviously, he's not quite ready to proclaim himself an expert on gay sex just yet, but he feels less like Hailey Springfield has just let him put his hand up her skirt for the first time. He fingers Dean open more confidently because, yeah, it's still weird, but he's pretty much fucking Dean with his fingers, and Dean has got his knees spread out wide and is letting him - Dean is playing the subby little bottom for him! Dean! - and Sam has to admit that he can find the 'hot' factor in the situation.
As he watches his fingers stuff Dean's tiny, pink hole full, heat creeps over him and he thinks about Ruby's soft little belly and Jess's breasts and Madison's long long legs. And he thinks about the desperate noises of pleasure Dean makes when he's getting his first coffee of the day and the way his damp t-shirt stretches over his broad shoulders when he washes the Impala and the peaches-and-cream fairness of the skin in the hidden places of his body where the sun can't touch him: the back of his neck, his inner thighs, the crook of his knees.
Dean has bowed his head into the pillows, sides shivering as he pants for breath. Sam palms the tight roundness of Dean's ass cheek with one big hand, not rough but possessive, and Dean twitches, buries his face deeper.
When it comes to it, Sam only has to jack himself a couple of times to get his cock good and hard for Dean. There are still plenty of pornographic snapshots of the women he's known in his head, but there's a lot of Dean too. His brother is hot and his brother is his and his brother is part of every aspect of his life and so maybe it's not so surprising that Sam can integrate him into his sexual fantasies like this.
He rolls a condom on carefully - because he may have come round to thinking Dean is hot, but that doesn't mean he's forgotten the number of other people who've thought the same - and then pushes the head of his cock against Dean's hole. Despite all the fingering and lube, Sam really doesn't see how his cock - which is impressively fat and thick because, sorry, not a shower - is going to fit in Dean's teeny little asshole.
For a moment, he weighs up the merits of involving Dean in this dilemma. However, Dean has his face pressed so firmly into the pillow that Sam suspects he is hiding, and therefore should not be interrupted.
So Sam tells himself to sternly, and trying to sound as much like Dean as possible - which is 'very like' because that nagging voice he gets in his head sometimes, the one that tells him when he's being a freak about something, sounds just like Dean - not to be an idiot. Dean's ass may be virgin tight and Sam may be impressively well endowed, but it should still be anatomically possible.
Sam nudges his cock into Dean's ass. At the moment of penetration, Dean gives a high-pitched, punched-out cry and his shoulders snap tense. Cringing a little, Sam strokes the dip of his back soothingly, and then again because Dean's skin feels good under his hand.
"Sorry," he whispers. "Sorry, I'll go slow."
Sam pushes another inch in and the bottom of his stomach drops out: Dean is hot and tight and clinging, and Sam knew it'd feel good because people wouldn't do it if it didn't, but he didn't expect having his dick in his big brother's ass to feel this. Damn. Awesome.
Dean is trembling, shoulders heaving as he pants shakily, so Sam keeps stroking the small of his back, smoothing his hands over the rounds of his haunches, rubbing his fingertips over the carved out sharpness of Dean's hipbone where Sam's holding him in place under him.
He rocks his hips and sinks a little further yet. It's probably really weird that he's as distracted as he is by the sight of his cock buried right up inside Dean but right now it's all he can look at. His dick? Is inside his brother.
There's a greedy, frantic heaviness in Sam's belly, and part of him says that he should just slam in deep, balls slapping sharp against the curve of Dean's ass, 'cause isn't it easier to rip a band-aid off all at once? And maybe band-aids and buttsex aren't similar in any other way, but maybe they're similar in this.
But Sam isn't that spoiled or sadistic. Besides, it's plenty enough for him to work on filling Dean up the rest of the way with his cock. He's gentle and slow, hands still moving over Dean's body to calm him. Once the initial rush of fucking, and fucking Dean, has settled, Sam finds a careful rhythm and sticks to it, frowning each time the rhythm falters and he has to steady it out again. He thinks about giving Dean a reach-round but it isn't something they'd discussed in advance, and seeing as they're doing so well right now, Sam doesn't want to jeopardize things by putting his hands places they haven't been authorized to be.
Hips rolling slowly and steadily, Sam fucks into Dean in the near silence of the motel room, enjoying each wave of dizzy pleasure. It occurs to him that it might actually not be completely humiliating when they have to do this on an altar in front of everyone. He opens his mouth to say so when Dean lifts his head and blurts out, "Jesuschrist, Sam, stop! Just fucking stop!"
"What? Why- what's wrong?"
"Just take it out," Dean gasps. "Just take it out now. I can’t. Jesus, just take it out."
Horror-struck, Sam sees Dean is crying. Dean is crying. And yes, Dean has been remarkably prone to tears lately but this is the first time Sam ever made Dean cry with his dick. He is a bad bad evil man and he shouldn't be allowed to have a dick or a big brother. Dean's poor little virgin ass just got filled up with a pretty epically proportioned cock and it didn't even occur to Sam that it might be a little much for a first time.
He eases out carefully but is hampered by Dean wriggling and struggling to get free. Cock still stubbornly hard, Sam watches in guilty dismay as Dean flops on the bed, face crumpled into an agonized expression and mouth open in a silent scream.
"Oh my god," Sam says. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Dean hisses, white with pain. "Yeah, super… Just mild… uh… agony. I'll walk it off." He rolls gingerly off the bed and walks with a strange, limping gait to the bathroom, his bowlegs absurdly emphasized.
Sam reaches out after him. "Dean, god, I'm sorry, you should'a said something-"
"It's fine," Dean says again, through clenched teeth. "Really. I'm just gonna go, not sit in the bathroom, not gonna sit ever ever again, but maybe I'll just lean up against the wall until the pain goes away and I feel a little less like someone just shoved a frickin' baseball bat up my ass."
Dean finishes waddling into the bathroom and closes the door behind him. Morosely, Sam puts a hand on his erection and tries to push it down.
:::
The next morning, Dean is still limping. Sam winces as he watches Dean cross the parking lot to fetch his jacket from the Impala. Maybe it's not as pronounced a limp as it was last night, but it's noticeable enough for the demons. To make things worse, something is up with the demons. They watch Dean with narrowed, black eyes, and smirk and whisper to each other. Sam disapproves but doesn't know what he can do about it that won't make him sound like an overzealous grade school teacher.
Finally, he manages to get Ruby on her own. He corners her over at the ice machine, because apparently even demons aren't fans of the unearthly heat they've been having lately. The cornflower blue sky of recent weeks has given way to churning, black and blue clouds.
He glances over at where he's left Dean strategically surrounded by angels, then turns back to her and says, "What the hell is going on?"
She pops an ice cube in her mouth and sucks on it. She shrugs, uncomprehending and unconcerned, and very much lying.
"Don't make me ask again," Sam growls.
She spits the ice cube out onto the ground. "Fine. I guess we should have this conversation. Just remember, you're the one that asked." She sighs and glances around. "Look, everyone's very impressed with you reminding Dean that he belongs to you."
"What? But I didn't-" Realization hits Sam and his mouth forms a definite pout of mortification. "That's why they're so pleased to see him limping? That's very. Wrong. It wasn't like that."
"I know that," Ruby says. She drops a leering look at Sam's crotch and adds, "And I'm pretty sure I know why he's limping." Sam feels kind of violated. "But they don't. They think you fucked him senseless and made him think twice about slutting it around. But that's only going to last so long. Until you make it real clear that he's your whore, they're only going to see him as a whore."
When Sam next sees Dean, he's going to volunteer his ass for kicking because he's all kinds of insulted on Dean's behalf and he feels Dean is owed some payback.
"So what do you suggest I do?"
"It's really obvious, Sam." Sam stares at her, because he doesn't think it is. She purses her lips. "You recognize Dean as your consort in some kind of formal ceremony."
Still not obvious. She rolls her eyes. "What kind of formal ceremony usually recognizes a commitment between two people?"
Nope. Still not obvious. "Jesus, Sam, don't be this dumb in front of anyone else, okay? There are still a few demons that don't know you yet and are still in awe of you. You have to marry him."
"That would not be legal." Sam immediately addresses one of the least significant problems with that proposition first, because there are plenty of problems for him to work through but that's the only one he can properly vocalize.
"You're the Antichrist, Sam! You planning on being a law-abiding King of Hell?" She calms enough to take a certain amount of pity on him. "You don't have to do it, obviously. But, y'know, most demons are traditionalists, and if you want Dean to be looked at as anything more than your occasional blow-up doll, you'll do as Beyonce says and put a ring on it."
This is not good news. This cannot be solved with the Hand of Black-Smoke Hurting. If there is a power in the Antichrist arsenal to combat the conservative values that some demons apparently still hold dear, Sam is not aware of it. He supposes he has to give them points for being open-minded about the homosexual aspect.
Sam trails sadly back to his room, sits on his bed, and wonders if he is too old to start cutting himself while listening to emo bands and wearing heavy black eyeliner.
Thunder rumbles in the distance. It's possible that, considering Sam's the Antichrist and his mood isn't currently great, the approaching storm isn't a coincidence.
"You're unhappy," Anna says, suddenly beside him.
"You're troubled about last night," Castiel suggests.
One thing about angels is that, when they're not being jerks with wings, they have a wonderfully soothing quality. They're a serene presence in the room. Sam can count on them to understand why he can't marry Dean.
"Apparently the demons think I should marry Dean," he says. He chokes on laughter. "Because my life is not weird enough. They want me to marry my brother. Can you believe it?"
Castiel exchanges a meaningful look with Anna and neither of them says anything. Sam closes his eyes and counts very slowly to ten. Then he counts to one hundred. They're back to being jerks with wings.
"Oh my god. You think I should marry him too, don't you?" he says.
Another look passes between them. That's a yes, then.
"Many of my brothers and sisters feel that it isn't…" Castiel trails off, searching for a word. "That it isn't seemly for you to have intercourse with Dean outside of the bonds of marriage, especially not for such a purpose."
"Right, so fucking my brother in order to open the gates of Hell is a-okay with you guys, so long as we're married?" Sam spreads his hands helplessly. "Is this the wrong time for me to be applying earth logic? Because that makes no sense. I would have to be drunk, high and suffering some kind of severe head trauma for that to make sense. In fact, I wish I were drunk, high and concussed right now, because this is…" Sam can feel himself losing his temper, so he shuts up before he can accidentally explode anything.
"Just think about it, Sam," Anna says gently. "All we're saying is that whereas we are delighted you chose Dean for your Beloved Consort, we would like to see you recognize your partnership with him in a way that is meaningful to you beyond the text of Kerouac's manuscript."
"Yeah, well, so's your mom," Sam throws back, tired and pissed and totally fed up.
There's a moment of confusion, where the angels don't recognize that as the witty and stinging insult that's doubling as an order to get the hell out of Sam's face that it is. He makes it clear with the sheer venom in the glare he directs at them both. They go.
The demons want Sam to marry Dean. The angels want Sam to marry Dean. Sam guesses he needs to have a conversation with Dean about why he might possibly start being asked by people if they can be bridesmaids or whether they've picked a caterer yet.
Alternatively, Sam could try hiding.
:::
He's in his motorcycle leathers and just bending over to fix his duffle to the back of the bike when Dean finds him. He sees the approaching shadow on the ground and he reluctantly straightens up to look at him, and then realizes that Dean's gaze is still fixed on the space Sam's ass previously inhabited. There's an awkward moment where Sam is aware that Dean was checking him out and Dean is aware that Sam is aware.
"Um… hi," Dean says. "You going somewhere?"
Automatically, Sam says, "No," and then he looks down at his packed bag on the bike and his traveling gear, and amends it to, "Not really."
"Okay," Dean says, sharp and unhappy. He turns to leave.
"Did you want something?" Sam says.
Dean swings back around. "I wanted to say sorry, y'know, about last night. I guess I wasn't expecting it to hurt as much as it did. Seriously, it's only knocked off the top spot of Painful Experiences in my Life by a trip to Hell. But I know it's something we've gotta do so-" He breaks off, scrapes his fingers through his hair anxiously.
It figures that Dean is ridiculous and fucked up enough, Sam thinks, that he can take the assorted injuries of hunting ghosts and demons without complaint, but apparently bottoming is beyond his pain tolerance.
"Dude, I hurt you. You totally don't have to apologize. We'll think of something else for next time."
Dean nods and doesn't move. If they stand there much longer, Sam suspects they'll have an audience, one that either expects Sam to go down on one knee, or Dean to go down on both.
"So where were you going?" Dean says.
"Uh… hiding," Sam says. "You should know that the angels and demons think we should, uh, that weshouldgetmarried. And I thought I'd take off for a while until I could figure out a way out of it."
Dean is studying him with narrowed eyes. "They want us to get married?" he asks very levelly and very neutrally.
"Yeah," Sam says, and stares off into the distance.
"And you're leaving so you can think how to get out of it?" Dean says.
"Yeah."
There's a long pause and then, in an exceptionally dangerous tone of voice, Dean says, "So I'm good enough to fuck but not to marry? Gee, Sammy, good to see you're not settling."
Sam continues staring at the horizon, eyes going fixed, because he's not sure what exactly he did wrong, but Dean is definitely pissed. Birds sweep across the storm-black sky, wings fluttering like ash. The wind is picking up, full of portent. He opens and closes his mouth a couple of times and then has to turn to look at Dean because he has no idea what the fuck just happened.
Dean looks hurt.
The logic seems all wrong but Sam is pretty sure now that what just happened is that he hurt Dean's feelings by not wanting to marry him.
"Dude, we can't get married," he says gently. "You're my brother. You don't wanna marry me. It'd be weird."
"And fucking me on an altar isn't fucking weird?" Dean snaps. "I just don't get it, Sam! You'll tell Lucifer I'm your favorite person and you'll fuck me but you draw the line at marrying me? What the hell am I to you anymore?"
"So you're seriously suggesting we go through with it? Marriage? 'Til death do you part? That? Us?"
Dean waves a hand dismissively and wrinkles his nose. "Oh please. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce anyway. And it's not even like it's fucking legal. But-" he says and prods Sam in the shoulder with his finger, "why do you have such a problem with standing up in front of your army and making an honest man of me, huh? You think you're too good for me or something?"
"Jesus, fine, I'll marry you, bitch," Sam says, rubbing his shoulder.
Dean snorts and starts to walk back to the motel. "Hell, no, buddy. You gotta ask me nicer than that."
:::
There is a behemoth in Tulsa, courtesy of Mephistopheles. More accurately, there is a creature that is possibly a behemoth. Raum called it a behemoth but Kutiel disagreed, saying it wasn't large enough. This sparked an academic debate on the subject of minimum size requirements for Biblical monsters.
Sam really only cares about how to kill the fucking big thing that's tearing up a city.
"Napalm," Dean says promptly, taking one look at it.
"You figuring Tulsa for a lost cause then?" Sam says. "'Cause if you are, we should just get ourselves some hardcore military explosives and- You know I'm joking, right, Dean? We're not bombing Tulsa."
Sam isn't actually ruling out bombing Tulsa because, minimum size requirements aside, the behemoth is really fucking huge. And nasty.
Firstly, it's big. Has Sam mentioned it's really goddamn big? The behemoth emerges from a yawning crack in the ground, right along the street in the middle of the city, that burns red with hellfire, and the behemoth stretches up and up and up into the sky, blocking out the sun. Sam has to crane his neck back to see the top of it and its shadow turns the world dark and cold. Its skin is poached red but tough, and its thickly muscled arms end in blunt cloven hooves. Two massive horns of bone curl out from its head. Most unsettling of all, its face has a simian quality, a dreadful, twisted humanity to it. It roars in despairing hatred and smashes a hoof down on the pulverized stores that used to line the street.
They stand at ground zero, in the deserted and demolished heart of the city.
"It looks pissed," Dean says. He's got a handgun in one hand and a machete in the other, and he looks like an Action Man against the behemoth, or maybe a Ken doll.
"If you got woken up by Mephistopheles, you would be too," says Lamia, her eyes still fixed on the raging beast. "Think a less easy-going version of Alastair."
"Mephistopheles is a dick," Ruby says firmly.
"Totally," Anna says.
The behemoth writhes as if suffering a major case of muscle cramp - which, if Hell doesn't have a very high ceiling, is probably the case - and sweeps the debris of the street towards them as easily as knocking paper off a desk.
"So, what's the plan, fearless leader?" Dean says, gaze flicking briefly to Sam.
Sam ignores him. Sam ignores him because he's feeling kind of wrathful and powerful and downright Antichrist-y right now, and that doesn't mesh well with acknowledging the presence of pretty, human Beloved Consorts right beside him.
The sensation is both like watching the scene from a great distance and being the very center of the scene, its focal point. He watches the behemoth with the same mildly frustrated indulgence of a parent whose child is knocking down cans in a grocery store.
And then he raises his hand, and the behemoth looks at him, and the behemoth quiets into plaintive growls.
Turning his palm to face the earth, Sam lowers his hand. Slowly, growls fading into susurrations, the behemoth crawls back into the chasm, hooves pawing at the ground as it goes and sending up smoke. There's a lot of behemoth to get back into Hell so the process takes a while but Sam is calm, unhurried. A breeze touches his hair as the sun appears between the descending creature's horns. Its shadow falls away.
Eventually, there is nothing but the sulfurous glow of the split down the street and the distant, fading sound of the behemoth's breathing.
Sam lets his hand drop.
"He can do that," Dean says into the awed silence, "but he can't pick his own damn towel up off the floor after he takes a shower."
Idly surveying the damage done by a fucking huge behemoth jumping up into the middle of the city, Sam cocks his head to make out the sign from one of the devastated stores. He strides through the debris, easily hefts some scorched rock out of his way, and picks through broken glass to examine the tray of wedding rings from the demolished jewelers.
There's a thick, platinum band that looks expensive and subtle, which are two things Dean is not, and Sam likes it. He tests it on his own finger, and can only get it as far as his second knuckle, which he presumes means it's Dean-sized.
He turns back to Dean, who's watching him with wary skepticism. He holds the ring out.
"Marry me?" Sam says.
"Buddy, that's still nowhere near-" Dean starts to say, then his eyes widen as Sam makes to drop down on one knee in front of him. Casting a furiously embarrassed glance at their gleeful audience, he grabs Sam's arm and hauls him upright. "Yeah, fine, whatever. Gimme the ring."
Dean's hand feels small in Sam's and though he was grinning a second ago, the weight of what he's doing forces him to be serious as he slips his ring onto Dean's finger. Dean looks down at the ring, his hand still in Sam's, and the expression on his face is both soft and horrified. He curls his fingers into his palm and Sam has to fight the urge to cling to him.
"Just don't expect me to wear white," Dean says.
:::
Anyone who still doubts that Sam is the Antichrist obviously hasn't been paying proper attention. However, Lucifer is apparently a bureaucrat who expects all the necessary paperwork to be completed in full. So Sam has another couple of paths to walk before he can keep his appointment with Dean on an altar and get the gates to Hell open.
Unfortunately, most of the paths that are left for Sam to choose from require him to be some kind of foaming-at-the-mouth crazy with some serious issues regarding his sexual kinks. Sam is only just coming round to incest; he doesn't think he's up for taking the starring role in a snuff film with a cast of millions.
"How about you put something on Craigslist asking who wants to be raped and ritually disemboweled?" Raum says. "You're bound to get a couple of hits at least."
"Put your picture on there too," Ruby suggests. "I bet you'd get a couple hundred hits in the first day, easy."
"Sorry, I have a problem with my fiancé cheating on me over the Internet, even if they all end up dead," Dean says. He's pretty much absented himself from the conversation, going to sit in the corner of the room, thumbing through 'The Paths of the Black Messiah'. He mainly speaks up in order to veto proposed paths.
Technically speaking, Sam is the central voice in the conversation. However, mostly he's surfing the net on his laptop, and leaving it to Dean to stop the demons from going too far with any bad ideas. Sometimes, when he looks up, Dean is looking back at him, one hand propping up his head, the other holding the paperback open. And he doesn't look away when Sam looks back at him. It's not a hostile look but it's a thoughtful one, and Dean putting that amount of thought into Sam is a little unsettling.
"I'm sorry, Dean, but you're gonna have to accept that the Path of Cuddling Kittens does not exist," Ruby says. "The Path of Skipping Under Rainbows doesn't exist either. Sam is gonna have to-"
"The Path of the Suffering Multitudes," Dean interrupts. He turns the paperback round to show her the relevant passage, cracking the spine on the book in a way that has Sam cringing. He turns the book back and starts to read: "And the Boy King strikes a single blow, which draws wailing from every nation. To every nation, he touches anguish and loss, frustration and fury." Dean nods at Sam's laptop and says, "You cuss pretty loud when you can't get connection on that thing, don't you?"
"You want him to turn off the Internet?" Raum says incredulously, but Ruby's obviously thinking the suggestion through.
"You do get pretty pissed when you can't get online," she says to Sam. "And it wouldn't have to be permanent. Just long enough to piss people off on both sides of the globe."
Sam's jaw has dropped. "I can't believe I'm hearing this. No. No, we're not going after the Internet. Some things are sacred and I'm not inflicting that kind of mental trauma on people worldwide. What about… the assignments that won't be researched, and the eBay auctions that'll be lost and, and, and what about Busty Asian Beauties?" he demands.
Dean shrugs. "Eh, I prefer the magazine anyway. C'mon, Sammy, turn the Internet off for a couple hours and you don't have to rape a single virgin."
Put it that way… and Sam still thinks messing with the Internet is a step too far. He fondly watches the screensaver cycle through on his laptop. "I don't even know if I'd be able to turn off the Internet," he says. "It's pretty big, y'know."
"Dude," says Dean. "So was the behemoth thing."
Sam is convinced not so much by the logic of the argument itself but that Dean clearly believes in it.
:::
"I need you to choose one of these," Uriel says, while Sam is preoccupied with making the most of his last hour of time online.
He glances at the two cards Uriel is holding out to him and frowns. "What are these?" A very bad feeling hits him. "Uriel, these are wedding invitations!"
"Yes, Samuel," Uriel says, and it must be an angel thing how he manages to pronounce 'Samuel' so that it sounds exactly the same as 'mud-monkey'. "I need you to choose one. And then we need to have a serious discussion about venue and catering."
Sam scrambles backwards off his bed, shaking his head. Behind Uriel, Castiel looks disappointed.
"You can't do this," Sam says in a voice that only barely betrays his rising hysteria. "I didn't ask you to do this. I have enough to deal with right now without you organizing my wedding around me."
Uriel takes a step closer, eyes narrowed and his upper lip curled to bare teeth. "Listen to me, Samuel. You may want to treat this ceremony as a minor obstacle to get past before you can fuck your brother silly on an altar. But I intend to make sure you take it seriously."
"With wedding invitations?" Sam demands. "No! Okay? No! No invitations, no flowers, no bridesmaids' dresses, no bridesmaids. I'm marrying my brother, you understand that? You don't need to decide which magazine you're gonna sell the photos to! Low-key and simple. Treat it like the incestuous, shotgun marriage it is, okay?"
Things are about to get nasty, and Sam hasn't got a huge amount of experience in bitchslapping angels but he's willing to take the opportunity to practice, when Castiel lays a hand on Uriel's arm to silence him.
"Sam," Castiel says, "I know this marriage is not what you would have chosen and I am aware that you and Dean intend to be divorced as soon as you are crowned, but I also know that Dean is taking this ceremony seriously. Can't you do the same?"
There are many points Sam is about to make, good and important points, but before he can, something in what Castiel's said registers with him. "Wait, who said we were planning on getting divorced?"
"Dean told me," Castiel says. "And I understand why you should both want-"
"You and Dean had a conversation about him divorcing me?" Sam says. "Huh. Okay."
From the look on Castiel's face, it has hit him that Sam is not altogether thrilled. Lips set in a tight line, Sam snatches the cards from Uriel and compares them briefly, before thrusting them back at him.
"I want the Cherish style," he says. "And find out whether it's available without the ribbons. And then I want you to investigate suitable venues. Also, I'm gonna want white roses for buttonholes. And we're gonna need a photographer, a good one, and you need to find me a brochure of wedding cakes. And basically you need to do all the wedding crap you think we need. You are now the official wedding planner of the apocalypse, you hear me? And there's gonna be no talk of us getting divorced until after we're actually fucking married, okay?"
A rush of something goes through Sam, something huge and powerful, and scarcely thinking about what he's doing, Sam places his hand over the keypad on his laptop. The screen flickers, the Blue Screen of Death appears, and then the system restores itself, with a small dialogue box informing Sam that his laptop is currently unable to connect to the Internet.
Sam's just pissed off more people than he'll probably ever even meet and he doesn't care.
:::
If it seems like Sam's side is a bickering, fragmented, rag-tag bunch of beings as likely to turn on Sam as they are one another, then you should see the other sides. One important reason Sam and his team have been effectively unopposed as long as they have is because the rival demons keep killing each other and the angels still keep stopping to wait for orders from superiors that disappeared probably at least a couple of hundred years ago.
Sam's team survives because it's united behind Sam. His angels are very happy to blindly follow orders and his demons are keenly aware that he can kick each and every one of their sulfurous asses should he wish.
As for humanity, it is, on the whole, blissfully unaware of the epic battle between Heaven and Hell going on, and quite happily switches over from news reports of the freak occurrences and unexplained happenings to the latest episode of Ugly Betty.
When words gets out that Mephistopheles has succeeded in uniting three factions of demons beneath his command, Sam thinks something needs to be done. So they travel up to Duluth, Dean in the Impala following Sam on his bike, and the air thick with angels and demons.
The storm still hasn't broken and it doesn't get much cooler even as they move north. But late in the evening, as they assemble at the harbor, Sam stares at the horizon and thinks he sees a patch of blue sky. The air is almost pleasantly fresh. A small group of tourists stands near them, admiring the Lift Bridge and taking photos.
"Hey, Ruby! You sure Mephistopheles is here?" Sam says. Ruby draws away from Anna and Sam catches a flash of the cover of the magazine they're looking at as Anna shoves it out of sight; he guesses he's got at least two prospective bridesmaids.
"It's either him," she says, "or someone as nasty. Either way, you got a reason to be here."
"Any idea where?"
Patronizingly patient, she pats his shoulder. "They'll find us."
"Awesome," Dean mutters under his breath, turning back to the ocean. Sam can't help noticing he's wearing Sam's ring - paler and more striking than the ring he customarily wears on the other hand. He glances towards the tourists and calls out, "Hey, you want me to do that for you?"
One of the guys has a Polaroid camera and is trying to take a group shot of his party. He looks back at Dean, takes in the motley assortment of the angels' vessels and the demons' meatsuits, and hesitates. But Dean smiles and holds out his hand for the camera, and the guy relents.
"Thanks," he says, and moves to join the others.
The tourists beam at the camera, self-conscious and happy, and Dean takes the picture, shakes the photo when it slides out, then offers it and the camera back to the guy.
"You want one of you and your friends?" the guy says, with another, less wary, look at Sam and the others.
And that's how there ends up being a photo in existence of the Antichrist, his Beloved Consort, and a small army of angels and demons, posing at Duluth Harbor in the final days before the Apocalypse. Sam peers over Dean's shoulder at the Polaroid and Dean looks up at him, smiling slightly. He tucks the photo away carefully in the pocket of his leather jacket.
Then Sam says, "Leave," to the tourists, and the voice he uses doesn't allow them space in their heads to argue, or to tell him that he's a very rude, very weird young man and they're not done looking at the harbor yet. They can only do as he tells him, and Sam watches them traipse away, discussing amongst themselves whether they should try that interesting Chinese restaurant they passed earlier for dinner or take the safe option and stick to the Olive Garden they ate at the previous four days.
"I bet they pick the Olive Garden," Mephistopheles says. "Don't you?"
For his meatsuit, Mephistopheles has picked a hobo, small and slight and sickly. His minions have all chosen big dockworkers, and more and more of them are drifting towards Sam and his significantly smaller number of significantly smaller-built minions. The dockworkers' decidedly unfriendly expressions would probably horrify the Duluth Visitors Bureau, which relies on the harbor as one of its main attractions.
"You put my behemoth back in the ground, Sam," Mephistopheles says.
"You sure that was a behemoth?" Sam says. "'Cause we're not convinced. Seemed a little on the small side."
Mephistopheles draws closer, close enough that Sam can smell his breath, rancid with hunger. Beside him, Sam feels Dean twitch on the instinct to move in front of him.
Wind picks up over the ocean, a slow roar that builds and then drops unexpectedly back into nothingness.
"I've been wanting to meet you for quite a while," Mephistopheles says.
Sam shrugs. "I thought you were solely fictional up until last week."
Mephistopheles smiles like his lips are being peeled back from his teeth. "You're gonna wish I was."
His eyes roll back in his skull, leaving only the whites. He stares at Sam with his wiped-out gaze: pure malevolence wrapped up in a corpse. Teeth touching, he sucks in a slow hiss of breath, long and sibilant and inhuman.
Bizarrely, someone lightly pinches Sam's ass. Confused and not willing to take his eyes off Mephistopheles for too long, Sam looks over his shoulder and sees only Raum and Kutiel. And whereas Sam knows his angels and demons have thought processes that would just never occur to him, he doesn't think even they would think pinching his ass while he's trying to have a showdown with an uber-demon would be a good idea.
Mephistopheles hisses in another breath. Someone pinches Sam's ass again.
"Dude! Are you phantom pinching my ass?" Sam demands. "Cut it out!"
Flushing, Mephistopheles flashes a mortified, white-eyed look at his minions. "Of course I'm not pinching your ass!"
"I think I know when someone's pinching my ass!" Sam says.
"I'm not!" Mephistopheles insists. Lowering his voice, he says, "If you'd just bear with me, you'd realize I'm about to reopen the stab wound on your back."
"Try higher up," Sam says.
"It's kind of about here," Dean says helpfully, holding his hand at the level of the base of Sam's spine.
Mephistopheles takes a look and then nods. He hisses again. Sam sighs and looks heavenward. "Still my ass."
"Geez," says Mephistopheles. "Is my face red. I'm normally pretty good at this."
He hisses again.
Sam clutches his ass. "Man, would you stop already! My ass is gonna be purple by the time you're done!"
Mephistopheles hisses again, and Sam takes a small breath of his own.
Mephistopheles' meatsuit collapses in a heap on the ground. Sam's gaze travels over Mephistopheles' minions, and one by one, their meatsuits crumple and drop. Finally, Sam is staring out over the harbor, his own people behind him and Dean tense at his side.
"What did you do?" Dean whispers.
"And the Boy King is Legion," Sam recites, the words from 'The Paths of the Black Messiah' as clear as if they were written across the sky. "He takes them into himself and within him they are reborn as his own or they are destroyed."
To the seething mass of demons caught within himself, Sam says, "Those of you that wanna switch to my team, you're free to go find yourself a meatsuit that belongs to someone dying or to someone who deserves to play host to you. To all the others…" He burns the malignancy of those not willing to serve him, drowns them in his blood and sets fire to them. Afterwards, he opens his mouth and blows the ashes out. As he does so, he sees Dean staring at him. Sheepishly, he brushes a few lingering ashes from his mouth.
They look at each other.
"I don't think you're Harvey Dent, Sam," Dean says after a long pause. "I think you're Dr Manhattan. And I guess I'm Laurie." He nods to himself in a satisfied way. "Laurie. Man, I'd hit that."
Sam is pretty sure that Dean is trying to make an important point, and is couching it in Winchester avoidance. "Are we having a meaningful conversation through the medium of comic books?" he says.
"Actually," Castiel says, "due to the sophistication of the plot and the nature of its themes, Watchmen is arguably deserving of the term 'graphic novel', not 'comic book'."
"Oh please," Anna says. "Alan Moore is a belligerent, paranoid misogynist who thinks gratuitous violence, an emphasis on pseudo-philosophical dialogue and an unrelenting, and unrealistic, dystopia passes for sophistication and makes him look edgy."
"I think you need to consider Watchmen in its cultural context," Castiel says.
Sam rolls his eyes. Any hope he had of getting a straight answer out of Dean is now gone. Dean has had time to prepare. "If I'm Dr Manhattan, who's Ozymandias then?" he says instead. "'Cause I should probably go kick his butt before he drops a mutant squid on us."
Dean shrugs, heading back in the direction of where he parked the Impala. "Uh… how about Zachariah? He's pretty self-righteous and is all about the greater good, isn't he?"
"So what about Nite Owl then?" Someone with wings, Sam thinks, with a dark look at Castiel, who is still debating with Anna whether Watchmen is a modern classic or severely overrated and pretentious pulp.
"We don't have to cast the whole comic," Dean says.
"I want to be Rorschach," most of the demons say at once.
"Fucking Rorschach fans," Dean growls. "He's an emo sociopath with poor hygiene and mommy-issues."
"Talking of which, is it just me," says Gaviel from near the back, "or did anyone else think the Comedian looked kind of like John Winchester?" As one, Sam and Dean turn to give him a deeply unimpressed look. Gaviel blanches. "Just me then."
:::
On the way back to the Morning Star motel, Sam lets the Impala get ahead and then stops his bike by the side of the road, removes his helmet and takes out his cellphone.
He leans against his bike by a gently waving field of long grass, under a heavy, dark blue sky, and waits for his call to connect.
"Sam," Bobby says. "Been quite a while since I heard from you, kid."
"Yeah, sorry. Look, Bobby, last time we spoke, you said now don't you go doing anything stupid or crazy. Except, I kinda have. Both."
"This about the Antichrist thing or marrying your brother?" When Sam can only gape, Bobby goes on with, "Now come on, you know how hunters love to talk. Plus Dean's been checking in. I spoke to him just the other day and he let me know what you boys were up to."
"I promise I'm not gonna go darkside and end the world."
"Well, ain't like there's much I could do about it if you broke your promise," Bobby says.
"And you're not freaking out about me and Dean having to… uh… about me and Dean?"
"Well I'm not real thrilled about it, but I guess your brother is of the age where he should be thinking about settling down. And I never did think him settling down with someone else when you're still gonna be his number one priority was fair. Guess it works out even this way." Bobby sighs and adds, "And maybe you don't need Dean like he needs you, but I think, just maybe, you want him more than you need him. You boys'll be okay."
Sam frowns, shifting the phone to his other ear. "So you genuinely don't have a problem with me having sex with Dean?"
There's a pause. "That's the part of it I'm doing my best not to think about. Now, you just calling to mentally scar me or you want something in particular?"
"I… uh…" Sam flushes even though Bobby can't see him and rubs the back of his neck. "I was kind of hoping you'd be best man at the wedding. I don't… I don't have anyone else really. I mean, not that I'm only asking you 'cause-"
"Son," Bobby says, "that's a nice thought, but I'm afraid I can't."
Sam goes a little cold and sore inside. "'Cause of the sex on an altar I'm gonna be having with Dean, right? No, I get it-"
"You mention that one more time and I'm hanging up on you. I can't be your best man, Sam, 'cause Dean already asked me to give him away. Can't do both and Dean did ask first."
"Oh," Sam says, but he's smiling. "That's cool."
"Sorry, Sam."
"No, seriously, it's cool." Having an elderly, retired hunter to give his brother away at their wedding apparently makes it impossible for Sam to stop smiling. "Thanks, Bobby."
After he hangs up, Sam stays leant against his bike and thinks. He supposes it's not entirely true that he doesn't have anyone else. After all, the duty of a best man is to humiliate a groom at his bachelor party - Sam refuses to contemplate the idea of a bachelor party - and to make inappropriate speeches in public about the groom's bad behavior and to hit on any and all attractive members of the wedding party. Sam does have someone close to him who can fulfill all these duties with aplomb. And he's currently feeling pretty good about the world, which perhaps explains why he suffers a momentary bout of insanity.
"Hey!" he calls out. "Ruby! C'mere, I wanna ask you something!"
part four