SPN fic: To the Land of Moriah
Title: To the Land of Moriah
Pairing: Sam/Abel (minor human character)
Type (friendship, romantic, other--please specify): conversational
Rating: G
Word Count (if applicable): ~1540
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any related character. Any additional disclaiming goes here as well.
Summary: A series of conversations about family history, of a sort.
Warnings: Biblical revisionism and other religious themes
Notes: For spnpairingbingo. Full disclosure for the spoiler-avoidant, this fic doesn't directly mention or depend on any of the S10 spoilers I've seen and I don't think I've given anything away, but I have seen them, so.
Sam’s taken to falling asleep all over the bunker - any hour of the day he’s finally run himself out of leads and into the ground, any room without too much silence where Dean should be.
Tonight - today - whatever - he will probably pass out at this library table, surrounded by the next batch of books that haven’t had a chance to let him down.
Surely, one of them, some clue, and even if not -
Something shaped like a man sits down next to him, propping one elbow on the table and leaning in, trying to catch him eye to eye.
Sam tosses salt water at its face. It shrugs and picks up a silver letter opener, presses the point against a middle finger. A drop of red blood wells up, nothing more. “Do not fear me, Samuel.”
“I don’t scare easy.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What are you?” There isn’t much that should be able to get through the bunker’s warding, the sigils and traps buried under every Cold War tile, the angel sigils Cas helped him draw, the devil’s traps he’d drawn himself…
“I am not entirely sure. A person, mostly, for our purposes.”
Sam succeeds at restraining an eyeroll. More or less. “Which are…?”
The man thinks for a moment. “Aligned.”
“Who are you?”
The man folds his lips and bows his head. “I think you know.”
Sam shakes his head.
The man nods and gives him a sad smile.
Sam bangs his wrist on the edge of the table as he startles awake.
*
Sam shakes out his hair and goes into his room, having taken yesterday’s weirdness in the library as a sign to start thinking slightly longer-term.
Weirdness, unsurprisingly, does not respect his attempt at post-shower calm. Yesterday’s apparition sits at his desk, legs crossed tight.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“You can call me Abel.” He closes Sam’s least useless occult reference and bites off a small smile. “Well, I suppose you can call me anything you’d like. Jacob or Paul. Or Vanessa. Or Pineapple. All the same, I’d prefer Abel.”
Sam waves his left hand.
“What do you know of me?”
“That you can’t possibly be here.” Sam rubs his eyes, but reality keeps its distance and Abel sticks around. He sighs. “Cain’s your brother. He killed you.”
“Your brother told you no more than this?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. Because he didn’t - doesn't - know anything.”
“I’m afraid that’s not true.”
“What the hell do you know about my brother?”
“Enough. Perhaps not as much as I know about mine, but I know that the Mark must be chosen freely. This means your brother knew my story, and he embraced my brother anyway.” Abel pauses. “I am sorry to tell you this.”
Sam frowns and shrugs and shakes his head. “Doesn’t change anything.”
“Not for me, it doesn’t.”
“Sorry.” Sam sighs. “I’m not saying you don’t deserve some justice. I’ll help you, even. But I have to help my brother first. So unless you have something to say about that, you need to leave.”
“A very gracious offer, but I am not looking for revenge.”
Sam folds his arms. “No, of course not.”
“If I were a vengeful spirit, could I have gotten in here uninvited? Or at all?”
Sam thinks of the iron bars laid under and around the bunker, of the saline solution in its humidifiers, and shakes his head. “What do you want?”
“To help you.”
“That’s great. Thank you. Do you know where Dean is? Or Crowley?”
“The salesman is a problem. He is not your problem.”
He wills himself not to get argumentative with a potentially useful non-spirit. “What can you give me?”
“A pro tip,” Abel says. “You try to look, but you need to see.”
“Cryptic ghost bullshit,” Sam tells no one in particular.
*
“So, what really happened? To you, I mean.”
Abel presses a hand underneath his ribcage. “My brother gutted me with a jawbone.”
“Which I’m not justifying under any circumstances, but that’s the kind of incident that tends to come with context.”
“Most do.” Abel looks past Sam’s ear as if reciting a speech. “When I lived, angels walked the Earth, even more freely than they do now.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve been out lately, but they’re pretty free.”
“In my day, they still flew, and could linger for days in their true forms.” Sam winces. “Some of us could understand some of their voices. My brother and I were the sons of Adam, and so the most powerful of the archangels chose us.”
Sam grits his teeth until his jaw aches.
“Michael preferred Cain, and Lucifer took to me.” Abel tactfully overlooks Sam counting his breathing, in for four, out for seven, in for four, out for seven. “At first they wanted us to run things for them, as they allegedly gave orders for the Almighty.”
Arrogant pricks.
“There was harmony, for a time, at least among humans, until Heaven’s orders started to become muddled. The archangels grew apart, and we could not know, because we could only hear from one at a time. So Cain and I fought. We blamed each other for our fights; we blamed ourselves more.”
“Yeah, that sounds like their M.O.”
“Cain said he hated Michael, but he always obeyed.”
“And you?”
Abel meets his gaze and then looks away. “I think I did the best I could.”
Sam arches his eyebrows.
“I tried to placate him. I tried to reason with him. I offered him everything I had. I prayed and prayed for God to save us.”
“Yeah, how’d that work out for you?”
“Sometimes it seemed to make a difference.”
Seemed to, indeed. “Why would you even think about dealing with Lucifer?”
“Why did you?”
Sam looks down.
“This is not recrimination, Sam. It is a question with an answer.”
“And that is ….?”
“That we were willing to admit we had no better choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
Abel turns his head toward a cluster of scrying bowls, one of them still faintly smoking. “If you believed that, would you be doing all this?”
Of course, Sam means to say, but it comes up too quickly and sticks in his throat.
*
“Dude, how do you even speak English?”
“I learned,” Abel says. “I have a lot of time to think.”
*
One day he finds Abel hovering by the coffeemaker, yogurt and muesli set out on the table.
As far as almost-hauntings go, this isn’t the worst Sam’s encountered.
“They wanted our children. My daughter. His son.”
“For what?”
“Does it matter?”
Abel waits. “I guess not.”
“Still, they had their reasons. The angels loved us little, but they needed us badly, or at least, a few of us.”
“For vessels?”
Abel nods. “Michael wanted to take them right away. Lucifer offered to wait until they were grown, to see if they were suitable, he said. I wanted to accept his terms.”
“Why bother, if it was going to happen anyway?”
“To buy time, I suppose. Maybe to give them a chance to get out of it. It seemed slightly less unconscionable.” Abel drops his gaze. “They were children.”
Sam’s gut twists the way it did when he was five and Dean was nine and their father slammed a motel door so hard the chain broke off and tinkled to the floor.
“And Cain wanted to just hand them over?”
“Of course not. My brother is no monster. At least, he was not then.” Abel rubs his left arm. “He thought Lucifer’s offer was a poison pill. He thought that making the archangels wait would antagonize them, and they would take it out on the children and on us. He thought it was wrong to give them false hope that they could escape. Perhaps he was right.”
“Or he didn’t like that they made the better offer to you and not him.”
“It is not impossible.” Abel indulges in a moment of affection for his killer. “I do not know why my brother chose as he did. All I know is, one morning at sunrise he went to Lucifer’s altar instead of Michael’s, and I did not live to see that sun set.”
Sam holds his tongue until Abel drops his gaze. “So that’s where it all started.”
“It always starts somewhere.”
“Does it ever end?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
*
“Why are you here?”
Abel unfolds his arms. “Because of Abraham.”
“Oh, good, is he coming too?”
“I am not expecting him, no.”
“So why?”
“Abraham believed he was commanded to sacrifice his son. Perhaps it was Isaac; perhaps it was Ishmael.” Abel pauses. “Few seem to have considered the possibility that he assaulted them both.”
“But God stopped him.”
“That does seem to be the popular story, even if God had been gone long before. It appears the scribe was misled.”
Sam scoffs.
“Abraham stayed his hand because he chose to build, rather than destroy. Because he knew holiness cannot be purchased with blood.”
“And is that why you’re still here? To show me the way out of the whole tragic mess?”
Abel shakes his head. “I am here because I have never found it.” He looks back at Sam. “Will you?”
Pairing: Sam/Abel (minor human character)
Type (friendship, romantic, other--please specify): conversational
Rating: G
Word Count (if applicable): ~1540
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any related character. Any additional disclaiming goes here as well.
Summary: A series of conversations about family history, of a sort.
Warnings: Biblical revisionism and other religious themes
Notes: For spnpairingbingo. Full disclosure for the spoiler-avoidant, this fic doesn't directly mention or depend on any of the S10 spoilers I've seen and I don't think I've given anything away, but I have seen them, so.
Sam’s taken to falling asleep all over the bunker - any hour of the day he’s finally run himself out of leads and into the ground, any room without too much silence where Dean should be.
Tonight - today - whatever - he will probably pass out at this library table, surrounded by the next batch of books that haven’t had a chance to let him down.
Surely, one of them, some clue, and even if not -
Something shaped like a man sits down next to him, propping one elbow on the table and leaning in, trying to catch him eye to eye.
Sam tosses salt water at its face. It shrugs and picks up a silver letter opener, presses the point against a middle finger. A drop of red blood wells up, nothing more. “Do not fear me, Samuel.”
“I don’t scare easy.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What are you?” There isn’t much that should be able to get through the bunker’s warding, the sigils and traps buried under every Cold War tile, the angel sigils Cas helped him draw, the devil’s traps he’d drawn himself…
“I am not entirely sure. A person, mostly, for our purposes.”
Sam succeeds at restraining an eyeroll. More or less. “Which are…?”
The man thinks for a moment. “Aligned.”
“Who are you?”
The man folds his lips and bows his head. “I think you know.”
Sam shakes his head.
The man nods and gives him a sad smile.
Sam bangs his wrist on the edge of the table as he startles awake.
*
Sam shakes out his hair and goes into his room, having taken yesterday’s weirdness in the library as a sign to start thinking slightly longer-term.
Weirdness, unsurprisingly, does not respect his attempt at post-shower calm. Yesterday’s apparition sits at his desk, legs crossed tight.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“You can call me Abel.” He closes Sam’s least useless occult reference and bites off a small smile. “Well, I suppose you can call me anything you’d like. Jacob or Paul. Or Vanessa. Or Pineapple. All the same, I’d prefer Abel.”
Sam waves his left hand.
“What do you know of me?”
“That you can’t possibly be here.” Sam rubs his eyes, but reality keeps its distance and Abel sticks around. He sighs. “Cain’s your brother. He killed you.”
“Your brother told you no more than this?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. Because he didn’t - doesn't - know anything.”
“I’m afraid that’s not true.”
“What the hell do you know about my brother?”
“Enough. Perhaps not as much as I know about mine, but I know that the Mark must be chosen freely. This means your brother knew my story, and he embraced my brother anyway.” Abel pauses. “I am sorry to tell you this.”
Sam frowns and shrugs and shakes his head. “Doesn’t change anything.”
“Not for me, it doesn’t.”
“Sorry.” Sam sighs. “I’m not saying you don’t deserve some justice. I’ll help you, even. But I have to help my brother first. So unless you have something to say about that, you need to leave.”
“A very gracious offer, but I am not looking for revenge.”
Sam folds his arms. “No, of course not.”
“If I were a vengeful spirit, could I have gotten in here uninvited? Or at all?”
Sam thinks of the iron bars laid under and around the bunker, of the saline solution in its humidifiers, and shakes his head. “What do you want?”
“To help you.”
“That’s great. Thank you. Do you know where Dean is? Or Crowley?”
“The salesman is a problem. He is not your problem.”
He wills himself not to get argumentative with a potentially useful non-spirit. “What can you give me?”
“A pro tip,” Abel says. “You try to look, but you need to see.”
“Cryptic ghost bullshit,” Sam tells no one in particular.
*
“So, what really happened? To you, I mean.”
Abel presses a hand underneath his ribcage. “My brother gutted me with a jawbone.”
“Which I’m not justifying under any circumstances, but that’s the kind of incident that tends to come with context.”
“Most do.” Abel looks past Sam’s ear as if reciting a speech. “When I lived, angels walked the Earth, even more freely than they do now.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve been out lately, but they’re pretty free.”
“In my day, they still flew, and could linger for days in their true forms.” Sam winces. “Some of us could understand some of their voices. My brother and I were the sons of Adam, and so the most powerful of the archangels chose us.”
Sam grits his teeth until his jaw aches.
“Michael preferred Cain, and Lucifer took to me.” Abel tactfully overlooks Sam counting his breathing, in for four, out for seven, in for four, out for seven. “At first they wanted us to run things for them, as they allegedly gave orders for the Almighty.”
Arrogant pricks.
“There was harmony, for a time, at least among humans, until Heaven’s orders started to become muddled. The archangels grew apart, and we could not know, because we could only hear from one at a time. So Cain and I fought. We blamed each other for our fights; we blamed ourselves more.”
“Yeah, that sounds like their M.O.”
“Cain said he hated Michael, but he always obeyed.”
“And you?”
Abel meets his gaze and then looks away. “I think I did the best I could.”
Sam arches his eyebrows.
“I tried to placate him. I tried to reason with him. I offered him everything I had. I prayed and prayed for God to save us.”
“Yeah, how’d that work out for you?”
“Sometimes it seemed to make a difference.”
Seemed to, indeed. “Why would you even think about dealing with Lucifer?”
“Why did you?”
Sam looks down.
“This is not recrimination, Sam. It is a question with an answer.”
“And that is ….?”
“That we were willing to admit we had no better choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
Abel turns his head toward a cluster of scrying bowls, one of them still faintly smoking. “If you believed that, would you be doing all this?”
Of course, Sam means to say, but it comes up too quickly and sticks in his throat.
*
“Dude, how do you even speak English?”
“I learned,” Abel says. “I have a lot of time to think.”
*
One day he finds Abel hovering by the coffeemaker, yogurt and muesli set out on the table.
As far as almost-hauntings go, this isn’t the worst Sam’s encountered.
“They wanted our children. My daughter. His son.”
“For what?”
“Does it matter?”
Abel waits. “I guess not.”
“Still, they had their reasons. The angels loved us little, but they needed us badly, or at least, a few of us.”
“For vessels?”
Abel nods. “Michael wanted to take them right away. Lucifer offered to wait until they were grown, to see if they were suitable, he said. I wanted to accept his terms.”
“Why bother, if it was going to happen anyway?”
“To buy time, I suppose. Maybe to give them a chance to get out of it. It seemed slightly less unconscionable.” Abel drops his gaze. “They were children.”
Sam’s gut twists the way it did when he was five and Dean was nine and their father slammed a motel door so hard the chain broke off and tinkled to the floor.
“And Cain wanted to just hand them over?”
“Of course not. My brother is no monster. At least, he was not then.” Abel rubs his left arm. “He thought Lucifer’s offer was a poison pill. He thought that making the archangels wait would antagonize them, and they would take it out on the children and on us. He thought it was wrong to give them false hope that they could escape. Perhaps he was right.”
“Or he didn’t like that they made the better offer to you and not him.”
“It is not impossible.” Abel indulges in a moment of affection for his killer. “I do not know why my brother chose as he did. All I know is, one morning at sunrise he went to Lucifer’s altar instead of Michael’s, and I did not live to see that sun set.”
Sam holds his tongue until Abel drops his gaze. “So that’s where it all started.”
“It always starts somewhere.”
“Does it ever end?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
*
“Why are you here?”
Abel unfolds his arms. “Because of Abraham.”
“Oh, good, is he coming too?”
“I am not expecting him, no.”
“So why?”
“Abraham believed he was commanded to sacrifice his son. Perhaps it was Isaac; perhaps it was Ishmael.” Abel pauses. “Few seem to have considered the possibility that he assaulted them both.”
“But God stopped him.”
“That does seem to be the popular story, even if God had been gone long before. It appears the scribe was misled.”
Sam scoffs.
“Abraham stayed his hand because he chose to build, rather than destroy. Because he knew holiness cannot be purchased with blood.”
“And is that why you’re still here? To show me the way out of the whole tragic mess?”
Abel shakes his head. “I am here because I have never found it.” He looks back at Sam. “Will you?”