The Day Before Hell (implied Sam/Dean, 2628 words, pg-13)
My coda, of sorts, for 3.02.
The Day Before Hell
(implied Sam/Dean, 2628 words, pg-13, spoilers for 3.02)
As the world ends, someone goes to see the Anti-Christ.
Kansas is a wasteland of ash and bleached bone, through which a howling demonic wind never stops rolling. All that’s left is a diner. When the hunters gather in circles of salt and holy water, they make plans of launching a strike against the diner. They know it’s just talk but if they don’t have dreams then they all might as well blow their brains out now.
It’s from the diner, it’s said, that the Anti-Christ rules. A strange place for a demonic court, unless you consider that Sam Winchester was raised in diners and motels, in the dust of backroads with a ’67 Impala for a nursery. No one’s seen Sam for years. Last time was when he set the hellhounds on Milwaukee. Only a few hundred people escaped the slaughter. The gnawed bones of the rest still line the deserted streets of the city. It’s proof that Sam doesn’t need to leave the diner to raise Hell.
When Ben was nine years old, his mother was torn apart by demons. Right in front of his eyes. That was just after the Devil’s Gate in Clifton was opened, when the first wave of Hell swept over the earth. There were still enough hunters left in the world then that Ben didn’t die in the attack too. He was picked up by a hunter called Kat and she taught him how to survive in this cruel, new world.
Kat was a small blonde woman, good with guns and utterly fearless. Other hunters didn’t much trust her but they respected her skill. Kat was the only person Ben ever heard speak of Sam with anything other than unadulterated venom. It was only once and Ben never repeated it to anyone else, but she said, “Sam was a good man once. One of the best. He wasn’t always like this.” She never said any more about it and Ben didn’t ask her. Sometimes though, as Ben grew older, he’d catch her looking at him with this look on her face like she wanted to say more. He remembers something his mom told him before she died and has a pretty good idea what’s on Kat’s mind.
Not like Kat’s gonna say any more now. She died last Spring, ripped up inside by a demon. Ben burnt her body but only because he didn’t want her bones being picked over by scavengers, not because he thought for one second that Kat would turn down the chance to move on somewhere better than here.
After Kat’s gone, Ben wanders the country aimlessly, killing and exorcising whatever he can but mostly just running for his life. He thinks about giving up a couple of times. Sits in his car by the roadside, staring down at the sun-scorched grass with his gun in his hands. And then he gets his Damascus moment, radiant and simple. So he turns the key in the ignition and gets back on the road. Two days later, he’s at the edge of Kansas.
There’s a thick black cloud hanging in the sky. Staring across the stateline, the car engine still running, Ben thinks the colours look brighter, sharper, picked out with the clarity a coming storm always brings. It’s a storm that’s been waiting fourteen years to break.
The last person who went into Kansas and made it out alive was Jo-Beth Harvelle, and ‘making it out alive’ was only technically speaking. She’d been tortured in ways that had made even the veteran hunters turn the colour of oatmeal. She’d lasted only a few hours, even the best care the hunters could give her couldn’t hold her any longer than that. Stories told about her always end with her rumoured last words. “He says he still prays,” she’d said.
She was the last. Ever since then, anyone who goes into Kansas is never seen alive again. Sometimes remains will be found, body parts or shredded, bloodstained pieces of clothing. Sometimes any friends or family left behind will be taunted by demons during an attack with whispers of how their loved one’s still alive, begging as best they can with split tongues to be put out of their misery.
Hell is on Earth and Kansas is its heartland.
Ben climbs back into his car and crosses the stateline.
He ignores the flicker of shadows out in the desert as he drives. He doesn’t pay any attention to the crackle and crunch of the bones as his tyres roll over them. The high-pitched shriek of the wind is only unsettling until Ben gets used to it and turns Led Zep up louder to drown it out. He gets further than he expected. It’s a whole hour before the billowing rush of smoke slams into the car and kills the engine. Ben clutches his shotgun and swallows down his fear. The smoke is pouring through cracks in the windshield, a smog of hissing voices.
“My name is Ben Braden,” he says. “I’m here to see my uncle.”
There’s a moment when he thinks it’s no good, that he’s going to die and he’s almost ready for it. Then a ripple of lightning flashes in the sky and thunder churns after it. The black smoke is still wreathing around him but his engine roars into life once more.
It’s another two hours before he comes to the diner. There’s no problem finding it. There’s only one road - all the others have been blasted off the ground and have left nothing but blackened scars on the dry earth. Whatever Ben was expecting of the diner, it wasn’t this cute, cheery little place, untouched by blood and dust. There are net curtains strung halfway up the windows and a few boxes of flowers by the door, stems still straight despite the heat. There’s a single car in the lot: a sleek black Impala that glints in the blank glare of the sun.
Ben’s car engine dies abruptly and the smoke seeps away and is lost on the breeze.
Slowly but without hesitating, Ben climbs from the car and walks across the lot to the diner. The wind’s howl is oddly distant here. He pauses when he sees the rust-coloured stain of blood on the doorstep but he pushes the door wide and steps in. A bell above his head chirrups to announce his entrance.
The interior of the diner is as standard as its exterior. Sweet Home Alabama is a tinny buzz of music playing somewhere. The room is lit with dusty sunlight. There’s the aroma of freshly baked pie in the air. The diner’s deserted aside from one man sitting at a table by the window. Even hunched over a laptop, it’s easy to see he’s remarkably tall. His web-surfing is interrupted for occasional sips from the cup of coffee sitting beside him.
He looks up as Ben comes in and Ben gets a proper look at him. In his mind, Ben only has a hazy impression of the Sam Winchester he met as a child. He remembers a tall man with dark eyes and a slow, bright smile.
This man, this man who’s ending the world, is not nearly different enough. His face is more lined and there are streaks of grey in the long shaggy fall of hair that’s tucked behind his ears. But he’s similar enough to that impression that Ben feels disoriented and unclear on what the nightmare he’s been living has all been about. Because he doesn’t remember an evil man.
Sam’s staring at him, mouth open and large brow furrowed. And then it’s as if he breaks. A long shaky breath escapes him and he starts to rise out of his seat.
Ben moves out of the sunshine and Sam stops.
“You’re not him.” His frown deepens. Something crackles in the air and that’s more like the Anti-Christ Ben was expecting. “You look like him but… you’re not. Who are you?”
“I’m Ben Braden. Dean was my dad.”
Sam’s shaking his head before Ben’s even finished speaking. He flips the lid of his laptop shut and pushes it away across the tabletop, but his fingertips linger on the case.
“No. He told me. He wanted you to be but you’re not. You’re some biker’s kid. Your mom told Dean that.”
“She lied. She didn’t want him getting involved, she was happy managing by herself. But when the demons came, she told me not to be scared because Dean would come for us, because that was his job and because I was his son.”
Sam isn’t looking at Ben but his face has gone still and thoughtful. Ben fidgets slightly on the spot. It’s the first time he’s ever told anyone the truth about Dean, and he’s telling it to the Anti-Christ, his uncle.
“Dean was already dead when the demons came,” Sam says at last. “That’s why he didn’t come for you. He died and then I brought the demons.” He looks up and gives Ben a surprisingly earnest smile. “I made a deal, just like he did for me. Only his worked out better.”
“I don’t underst-“
The smile blinks off as abruptly as it had appeared.
“He sold his soul to a demon to save my life. I managed to break that deal but someone intervened, said Dean had earned it and it would cancel all our debts, and Dean said he was ready to die. So he did. And they took his soul and put it somewhere I can’t reach it. So I made deals to get it back. More deals with more demons. None of them have been a raging success yet but…” Sam trails off and drums his fingertips on the laptop lid. “I keep looking for new things to try.”
Words die before they ever reach Ben’s tongue. All this horror and cruelty, and it’s all for his father’s soul. Part of Ben wants to pity Sam - he’s clearly deranged - but all the killing and blood and death that Ben has seen because of him gets in the way of his sympathy.
“Where’d they put his soul?”
Sam leans back in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head. Ben can hear his muscles creak and he wonders for how many years Sam’s been hunched over that laptop. Sam’s smile is blinding but crooked, like it’s some joke he knows is ridiculously funny to everyone else but doesn’t quite get himself.
“Heaven,” he says. “Turns out angels aren’t as ready to make deals as demons are. And they’ve got his soul and they won’t give it back to me. Dead is dead, they say. They said it back then and they’re still saying it now. Doesn’t matter how many people I kill, God’s a stubborn sonofabitch.”
Heaven seems as foreign and out of reach to Ben as it must do to Sam. There can’t be any Heaven left after everything that Sam’s done.
Silence hangs in the air between them. Ben isn’t ready to leave yet. He came this far and he’s face to face with the Anti-Christ - the least he could do is try to kill him. He won’t succeed because even if Sam Winchester weren’t infernally blessed and surrounded, no doubt, by a horde of demons lurking out of human sight, Sam is just a better hunter than Ben.
But Ben should at least try.
It doesn’t feel time for that either though somehow.
“You look so like him,” Sam says and Ben realises he’s been studying him all this time. “You’re not as… I mean, Dean was…” He trails off into a glowing smile, a flush appearing in his cheeks. “Dean had this mouth, I could have spent hours kissing that mouth. And you don’t stand quite right either. There was something in the way Dean held himself that you don’t have. But still, you look so like him.”
Crazy, says Ben to himself. Grief-stricken, incestuous craziness. He’s not stupid enough to say that though. Yet what he does choose to say isn’t all that unlikely to piss Sam off either.
“I figure Dean’d be none too impressed with all this. Epic fail, man. Epic fail.”
Sam gets the weirdest expression on his face. His lips twitch, maybe to smile or maybe biting back a furious response. He raises his eyebrows at Ben then turns to stare out of the window. He jerks his head towards the Impala, sitting in the diner’s parking lot, so incongruous against the hellish backdrop of the wasteland and the glowering, storm-heavy sky.
“That was Dean’s car. He frickin’ loved that thing. Rebuilt it pretty much from trash this one time.” He briefly glances back at Ben. “When his time was running out, he worried that it was the only thing he was leaving behind. Like, I don’t know, he wanted a legacy or something. He said all this to me, the person he was leaving. I don’t think it even occurred to him.”
He sighs and looks down at the cheap formica tabletop, as though he’s looked as long at the Impala as he can handle in one go. He picks up his cup and swirls what’s left of the coffee around the bottom then gulps it down. When he stands up, Ben’s taken aback by just how tall he actually is and stares, with sharp terror deep in the pit of his stomach, as Sam approaches. But Sam just leans over the counter, picks up the coffee jug and refills his cup. He takes his cup back to the table and opens his laptop up again.
“I’m going to Hell when I die, Ben. One of the first deals I made cost my soul and even if it hadn’t, no way Heaven would open its gates to me now. I’m damned and that’s…” Sam looks vaguely surprised as he nods to himself. “I’ve come to terms with that.”
“So-“ Ben waves a hand at the devastation beyond the diner window. He doesn’t manage to form the words of his question but Sam seems to get it anyway.
“I’m going to Hell but not without seeing Dean one last time, before the gates really close on us. So I’m going to hang on, keep my part of the deals I’ve made, and go on looking for a way to get his soul back. And once I’ve done that…” He gives another of those crooked smiles and points towards the floor. “Then I’ll go burn in Hell for all eternity like I deserve.”
He falls into silent scrutiny of Ben again and Ben knows he’s not seeing him. He’s seeing his dead brother, whose mouth he liked to kiss and whose car is sitting in the parking lot of the most evil place in the world. It’s hard to be proud of a father who is indirectly to blame for the apocalypse, for dying and driving his brother so out of his mind at the loss that he will do anything, even end the world, for a chance to say goodbye. And Ben doesn’t feel any pride but instead, a strange sense of familial responsibility.
Casting about, he finds a clean row of cups on the shelf. He fills one with coffee and then sits down across from Sam.
“So,” he says, “what have you got?”
Sam raises his eyebrows.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m staying.” Sam’s eyebrows slide even higher. “I’m helping! Sooner we get his soul back, sooner you go to Hell, which works for me. So, what have you got so far?”
Sam goes on staring at him for a second. Then he shuffles around in some papers on the chair beside him.
“Let me show you my notes,” he says.
Outside beyond the diner, the demons go on wailing.
~end
The Day Before Hell
(implied Sam/Dean, 2628 words, pg-13, spoilers for 3.02)
As the world ends, someone goes to see the Anti-Christ.
Kansas is a wasteland of ash and bleached bone, through which a howling demonic wind never stops rolling. All that’s left is a diner. When the hunters gather in circles of salt and holy water, they make plans of launching a strike against the diner. They know it’s just talk but if they don’t have dreams then they all might as well blow their brains out now.
It’s from the diner, it’s said, that the Anti-Christ rules. A strange place for a demonic court, unless you consider that Sam Winchester was raised in diners and motels, in the dust of backroads with a ’67 Impala for a nursery. No one’s seen Sam for years. Last time was when he set the hellhounds on Milwaukee. Only a few hundred people escaped the slaughter. The gnawed bones of the rest still line the deserted streets of the city. It’s proof that Sam doesn’t need to leave the diner to raise Hell.
When Ben was nine years old, his mother was torn apart by demons. Right in front of his eyes. That was just after the Devil’s Gate in Clifton was opened, when the first wave of Hell swept over the earth. There were still enough hunters left in the world then that Ben didn’t die in the attack too. He was picked up by a hunter called Kat and she taught him how to survive in this cruel, new world.
Kat was a small blonde woman, good with guns and utterly fearless. Other hunters didn’t much trust her but they respected her skill. Kat was the only person Ben ever heard speak of Sam with anything other than unadulterated venom. It was only once and Ben never repeated it to anyone else, but she said, “Sam was a good man once. One of the best. He wasn’t always like this.” She never said any more about it and Ben didn’t ask her. Sometimes though, as Ben grew older, he’d catch her looking at him with this look on her face like she wanted to say more. He remembers something his mom told him before she died and has a pretty good idea what’s on Kat’s mind.
Not like Kat’s gonna say any more now. She died last Spring, ripped up inside by a demon. Ben burnt her body but only because he didn’t want her bones being picked over by scavengers, not because he thought for one second that Kat would turn down the chance to move on somewhere better than here.
After Kat’s gone, Ben wanders the country aimlessly, killing and exorcising whatever he can but mostly just running for his life. He thinks about giving up a couple of times. Sits in his car by the roadside, staring down at the sun-scorched grass with his gun in his hands. And then he gets his Damascus moment, radiant and simple. So he turns the key in the ignition and gets back on the road. Two days later, he’s at the edge of Kansas.
There’s a thick black cloud hanging in the sky. Staring across the stateline, the car engine still running, Ben thinks the colours look brighter, sharper, picked out with the clarity a coming storm always brings. It’s a storm that’s been waiting fourteen years to break.
The last person who went into Kansas and made it out alive was Jo-Beth Harvelle, and ‘making it out alive’ was only technically speaking. She’d been tortured in ways that had made even the veteran hunters turn the colour of oatmeal. She’d lasted only a few hours, even the best care the hunters could give her couldn’t hold her any longer than that. Stories told about her always end with her rumoured last words. “He says he still prays,” she’d said.
She was the last. Ever since then, anyone who goes into Kansas is never seen alive again. Sometimes remains will be found, body parts or shredded, bloodstained pieces of clothing. Sometimes any friends or family left behind will be taunted by demons during an attack with whispers of how their loved one’s still alive, begging as best they can with split tongues to be put out of their misery.
Hell is on Earth and Kansas is its heartland.
Ben climbs back into his car and crosses the stateline.
He ignores the flicker of shadows out in the desert as he drives. He doesn’t pay any attention to the crackle and crunch of the bones as his tyres roll over them. The high-pitched shriek of the wind is only unsettling until Ben gets used to it and turns Led Zep up louder to drown it out. He gets further than he expected. It’s a whole hour before the billowing rush of smoke slams into the car and kills the engine. Ben clutches his shotgun and swallows down his fear. The smoke is pouring through cracks in the windshield, a smog of hissing voices.
“My name is Ben Braden,” he says. “I’m here to see my uncle.”
There’s a moment when he thinks it’s no good, that he’s going to die and he’s almost ready for it. Then a ripple of lightning flashes in the sky and thunder churns after it. The black smoke is still wreathing around him but his engine roars into life once more.
It’s another two hours before he comes to the diner. There’s no problem finding it. There’s only one road - all the others have been blasted off the ground and have left nothing but blackened scars on the dry earth. Whatever Ben was expecting of the diner, it wasn’t this cute, cheery little place, untouched by blood and dust. There are net curtains strung halfway up the windows and a few boxes of flowers by the door, stems still straight despite the heat. There’s a single car in the lot: a sleek black Impala that glints in the blank glare of the sun.
Ben’s car engine dies abruptly and the smoke seeps away and is lost on the breeze.
Slowly but without hesitating, Ben climbs from the car and walks across the lot to the diner. The wind’s howl is oddly distant here. He pauses when he sees the rust-coloured stain of blood on the doorstep but he pushes the door wide and steps in. A bell above his head chirrups to announce his entrance.
The interior of the diner is as standard as its exterior. Sweet Home Alabama is a tinny buzz of music playing somewhere. The room is lit with dusty sunlight. There’s the aroma of freshly baked pie in the air. The diner’s deserted aside from one man sitting at a table by the window. Even hunched over a laptop, it’s easy to see he’s remarkably tall. His web-surfing is interrupted for occasional sips from the cup of coffee sitting beside him.
He looks up as Ben comes in and Ben gets a proper look at him. In his mind, Ben only has a hazy impression of the Sam Winchester he met as a child. He remembers a tall man with dark eyes and a slow, bright smile.
This man, this man who’s ending the world, is not nearly different enough. His face is more lined and there are streaks of grey in the long shaggy fall of hair that’s tucked behind his ears. But he’s similar enough to that impression that Ben feels disoriented and unclear on what the nightmare he’s been living has all been about. Because he doesn’t remember an evil man.
Sam’s staring at him, mouth open and large brow furrowed. And then it’s as if he breaks. A long shaky breath escapes him and he starts to rise out of his seat.
Ben moves out of the sunshine and Sam stops.
“You’re not him.” His frown deepens. Something crackles in the air and that’s more like the Anti-Christ Ben was expecting. “You look like him but… you’re not. Who are you?”
“I’m Ben Braden. Dean was my dad.”
Sam’s shaking his head before Ben’s even finished speaking. He flips the lid of his laptop shut and pushes it away across the tabletop, but his fingertips linger on the case.
“No. He told me. He wanted you to be but you’re not. You’re some biker’s kid. Your mom told Dean that.”
“She lied. She didn’t want him getting involved, she was happy managing by herself. But when the demons came, she told me not to be scared because Dean would come for us, because that was his job and because I was his son.”
Sam isn’t looking at Ben but his face has gone still and thoughtful. Ben fidgets slightly on the spot. It’s the first time he’s ever told anyone the truth about Dean, and he’s telling it to the Anti-Christ, his uncle.
“Dean was already dead when the demons came,” Sam says at last. “That’s why he didn’t come for you. He died and then I brought the demons.” He looks up and gives Ben a surprisingly earnest smile. “I made a deal, just like he did for me. Only his worked out better.”
“I don’t underst-“
The smile blinks off as abruptly as it had appeared.
“He sold his soul to a demon to save my life. I managed to break that deal but someone intervened, said Dean had earned it and it would cancel all our debts, and Dean said he was ready to die. So he did. And they took his soul and put it somewhere I can’t reach it. So I made deals to get it back. More deals with more demons. None of them have been a raging success yet but…” Sam trails off and drums his fingertips on the laptop lid. “I keep looking for new things to try.”
Words die before they ever reach Ben’s tongue. All this horror and cruelty, and it’s all for his father’s soul. Part of Ben wants to pity Sam - he’s clearly deranged - but all the killing and blood and death that Ben has seen because of him gets in the way of his sympathy.
“Where’d they put his soul?”
Sam leans back in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head. Ben can hear his muscles creak and he wonders for how many years Sam’s been hunched over that laptop. Sam’s smile is blinding but crooked, like it’s some joke he knows is ridiculously funny to everyone else but doesn’t quite get himself.
“Heaven,” he says. “Turns out angels aren’t as ready to make deals as demons are. And they’ve got his soul and they won’t give it back to me. Dead is dead, they say. They said it back then and they’re still saying it now. Doesn’t matter how many people I kill, God’s a stubborn sonofabitch.”
Heaven seems as foreign and out of reach to Ben as it must do to Sam. There can’t be any Heaven left after everything that Sam’s done.
Silence hangs in the air between them. Ben isn’t ready to leave yet. He came this far and he’s face to face with the Anti-Christ - the least he could do is try to kill him. He won’t succeed because even if Sam Winchester weren’t infernally blessed and surrounded, no doubt, by a horde of demons lurking out of human sight, Sam is just a better hunter than Ben.
But Ben should at least try.
It doesn’t feel time for that either though somehow.
“You look so like him,” Sam says and Ben realises he’s been studying him all this time. “You’re not as… I mean, Dean was…” He trails off into a glowing smile, a flush appearing in his cheeks. “Dean had this mouth, I could have spent hours kissing that mouth. And you don’t stand quite right either. There was something in the way Dean held himself that you don’t have. But still, you look so like him.”
Crazy, says Ben to himself. Grief-stricken, incestuous craziness. He’s not stupid enough to say that though. Yet what he does choose to say isn’t all that unlikely to piss Sam off either.
“I figure Dean’d be none too impressed with all this. Epic fail, man. Epic fail.”
Sam gets the weirdest expression on his face. His lips twitch, maybe to smile or maybe biting back a furious response. He raises his eyebrows at Ben then turns to stare out of the window. He jerks his head towards the Impala, sitting in the diner’s parking lot, so incongruous against the hellish backdrop of the wasteland and the glowering, storm-heavy sky.
“That was Dean’s car. He frickin’ loved that thing. Rebuilt it pretty much from trash this one time.” He briefly glances back at Ben. “When his time was running out, he worried that it was the only thing he was leaving behind. Like, I don’t know, he wanted a legacy or something. He said all this to me, the person he was leaving. I don’t think it even occurred to him.”
He sighs and looks down at the cheap formica tabletop, as though he’s looked as long at the Impala as he can handle in one go. He picks up his cup and swirls what’s left of the coffee around the bottom then gulps it down. When he stands up, Ben’s taken aback by just how tall he actually is and stares, with sharp terror deep in the pit of his stomach, as Sam approaches. But Sam just leans over the counter, picks up the coffee jug and refills his cup. He takes his cup back to the table and opens his laptop up again.
“I’m going to Hell when I die, Ben. One of the first deals I made cost my soul and even if it hadn’t, no way Heaven would open its gates to me now. I’m damned and that’s…” Sam looks vaguely surprised as he nods to himself. “I’ve come to terms with that.”
“So-“ Ben waves a hand at the devastation beyond the diner window. He doesn’t manage to form the words of his question but Sam seems to get it anyway.
“I’m going to Hell but not without seeing Dean one last time, before the gates really close on us. So I’m going to hang on, keep my part of the deals I’ve made, and go on looking for a way to get his soul back. And once I’ve done that…” He gives another of those crooked smiles and points towards the floor. “Then I’ll go burn in Hell for all eternity like I deserve.”
He falls into silent scrutiny of Ben again and Ben knows he’s not seeing him. He’s seeing his dead brother, whose mouth he liked to kiss and whose car is sitting in the parking lot of the most evil place in the world. It’s hard to be proud of a father who is indirectly to blame for the apocalypse, for dying and driving his brother so out of his mind at the loss that he will do anything, even end the world, for a chance to say goodbye. And Ben doesn’t feel any pride but instead, a strange sense of familial responsibility.
Casting about, he finds a clean row of cups on the shelf. He fills one with coffee and then sits down across from Sam.
“So,” he says, “what have you got?”
Sam raises his eyebrows.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m staying.” Sam’s eyebrows slide even higher. “I’m helping! Sooner we get his soul back, sooner you go to Hell, which works for me. So, what have you got so far?”
Sam goes on staring at him for a second. Then he shuffles around in some papers on the chair beside him.
“Let me show you my notes,” he says.
Outside beyond the diner, the demons go on wailing.
~end