(no subject)

[always_enduphere]

It’s still dark when Dean opens his eyes. He’s been drifting since Jane rolled off of him, content to lie next to another warm body, even if he finds no rest. She doesn’t stir when he does, and through the moonlight filtering through the cabin window, Dean retrieves his shirt and jeans from the floor.

Putting them on takes more time than he’d like. His exertions in bed have torn the stitches in his side, and Dean gives up on being careful, tugging his t-shirt over his head with only a grimace. He needs rest, and food, maybe another visit to the camp doctor, but he grabs the bottle of whiskey on Jane’s nightstand instead, tucking it under his arm on his way out the door.

Outside, the camp is still and quiet. Dean checks with the sentries on his way to his own cabin, shares some small talk and a few swallows from the bottle in his hands. Watching for Croats, whiskey settles the nerves, and every man on the wall has proven himself a good shot, inebriated or otherwise. Dean wouldn’t have put them there if they weren’t.

Perimeter check complete, Dean finds himself heading not home, but to the junkyard. Beneath the far corner trees, the Impala doesn’t rise up in the moonlight. It should hurt him to see her swallowed up by shadows, but Dean lost far worse to the darkness long ago. He looks at her, drinks his whiskey, and listens to himself breathe.

Cas would call it meditation, Dean thinks, the way he watches her decay. There are leaves on her roof. Rust on her door handle. It’s been years since he opened the hood, but he knows he’d find more inside. The leather on the seats is cracking. Dean never comes any closer than this, but tonight a glint of light against something in the mantle has him step forward. The i-Pod jack. Of all the stupid things to hang onto. The i-Pod itself is long gone, taking all of his brother’s music with it. The amulet is buried. The photographs are burnt.

He should wrench it out, should open the back door and pull out the army man that rests in the ashtray, too.

Maybe he will, when he finally puts that consecrated bullet in his brother’s heart.

Dizzy, Dean steps forward, spreading a steadying hand against the cool black roof. He shakes his head, but it doesn’t go away. Fucking stitches. He touches his side and finds it wet - he’s losing more blood than he thought. “Dammit.”

He turns for home, but it comes up like a wave, a blackness that crushes Dean against the Impala’s side. He’s falling, and he can’t make it stop. Dean’s own mumbled curse is the last thing he hears.

It feels like minutes later when he wakes, it feels like years.

Dean expects cool, wet grass beneath him, but finds cold concrete instead. The trees are gone, replaced by towering skyscrapers, but the shadow rising over him is the same.

Amazed, Dean touches fingers to the shiny gloss of the Impala door. “The fuck?”

Comments

[theprodigalson]

It's been over a month. Thirty-three days to be exact. He'd know it down to the minute if he had any idea when exactly he broke the invisible barrier between this world and the last. Not that it matters. Being aware of the time spent here brings him no closer to finding Lilith. No closer to freeing Dean from hell. No closer to fixing anything he's managed to fuck up in his twenty-five miserable years of existence.

And yet he still can't help counting the days.

He started drinking again twenty days ago and hasn't really stopped. Ruby knows. She disapproves.

And Sam really doesn't give a shit.

For what little it matters, he's still feeding on her. And he's still moving. He spends his days walking, trolling the streets in a haze, looking for clues he knows somehow aren't to be found. He keeps aware. He knows there are vampires here - more than one, in fact. And they're different from the ones he's spent his life hunting.

And there are people with other powers, too. And people from film and television, from other times and places.

Sam should care about getting to the root of it all, should break into the town's library and see what he can dig up on this place.

But he just doesn't care.

So he's walking again, a half a bottle of scotch in one hand as he moves from alley to alley. He's not so far gone to be stumbling, but he's definitely been steadier, limbs weighted.

When he sees an all too familiar figure walking the opposite side of the street, Sam thinks he must be hallucinating. Frowning, he steps into a shadow, his stomach lurching and chest aching. And watches. And the longer Sam stares, the more certain he is.

Dean.

He looks different from what Sam remembers, older and harder somehow. But it's been five months. Dean's been in hell for five months, so...

Swallowing hard, Sam comes to an uncomfortable certainty: That's not Dean.

[always_enduphere]

Dean's walked five blocks before he notices the fire licking up his side. The stitches are every bit as angry as before, and though he'd stared at the shiny trunk of the Impala for a long time, Dean couldn't bring himself to pop it and retrieve the med kit inside. Beautiful as she is, he doesn't trust her, doesn't trust this, anything about it.

He could almost hope it's another scheme of Zachariah's, but why romance him with the artifice when Dean's been screaming to the heavens for years? He's half a mile from the Impala, wandering and confused, when he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

Turning, Dean's eyes find the alley for no reason at all and linger. One step closer, and then two, and from the darkness a familiar face emerges.

Dean stops breathing.

He's seen his brother's body only once since Sam died. Far away, and through the lens of a telescope, too distant to see the fall of his hair, the whites of his eyes.

Dean had expected flame. Hell reflected in those tilted eyes, but all he sees is hazel and warmth, color in Sam's cheeks and a glint of sunlight in his brown hair. Sam's body is breathing. Lucifer's breathing.

"I should have known," he says, voice hollow like the fight's gone out of him, but it hasn't. Deep in his gut, it's gathering, his fists balled and the pain in his side forgotten.

He doesn't have the Colt. He doesn't even have Ruby's knife. He doesn't have a damn prayer, and Dean doesn't give a fuck.

"I should have known it'd be you."

[theprodigalson]

Sam knows the second the demon sees him, feels the weight of those eyes he knows so well falling on him despite the cover of shadow. And whatever hope he'd had that this could really be this brother, however small and delusional, is wiped out the second the thing speaks.

It's Dean's voice. Dean's eyes and face and gait, but everything is wrong.

Dropping the bottle, Sam has the gun pulled from the back of his pants in no time, trained straight at the demon. His heart is suddenly pounding, almost dizzy with how quickly he goes from faintly drunk to stark, cold sober.

"Don't fucking move," he orders, lips curled. It's not the Colt and the rounds are bullets, not salt pellets. Sam doesn't doubt the demon will know that, but it should at least be enough to slow it down.

[always_enduphere]

"Do I need to?" Dean asks, his voice as dead as his expression. God, he thought he'd be different. Stronger. He's angry but he thought he'd be furious. He thought he could look into this beloved face and do what he needs to do, but Dean can't kill the devil with his bare hands. Not when he's looking at him like a man starving, drinking in every dear and familiar twist of Sam's expressions, even if it's not him beneath.

"You could kill me with a thought. Right? Isn't that the line you're selling?" Dean's voice doesn't shake. He's holding on so hard it feels like every part of him will shatter if he wavers for even a moment. "Why bring me here? Are you going to make me watch you pull down a city, because I gotta tell you, man." Dean draws a breath. "I am done. With all of it. You might have your hand up my brother's ass, but I am not going to be your puppet, you hear me?"

[theprodigalson]

Sam's powers have hardly been a secret lately; word travels fast amongst demons, he's found out, so the first comment strike him as odd at all, just makes his trigger finger itch as he takes a few steps closer.

He stops when what the thing is say starts making less sense.

"What the hell are you talking about?" he says, trying hard to ignore the way his hand shakes a little. Because, demon or no, he's wearing Dean's face and Sam hasn't seen him in five months. It's everything he's wanted and everything he's feared wrapped up in a single package. "I didn't bring you here."

Unless he did? There's enough about this place Sam doesn't understand to make it possible.

Lips thinning, Sam takes another determined step forward, adjusts his aim. "Who are you?" he asks, voice gruffer this time. Demanding.

[always_enduphere]

Dean huffs out something that might once have made it to a laugh. "Michael," he says, not in answer but request. The Enochian etched into his ribs should make him invisible to the archangel, but why else would he be here? If Lucifer hasn't brought him here, if Lucifer is standing in front of him, speaking nonsense and brandishing a gun, then this must be it. Final Battle, Round Two.

Yes, Dean thinks as hard as he can. Yes, please, Michael. Do it now. Yes.

But the moment stretches, and no one comes. It's only Dean and the devil and their guns, and now there's nothing left to do.

"All right," says Dean, rolling his shoulders. He has no supernatural weapons, but he has his hands, and if he's come here to die he's at least fighting as a man.

With a roar, Dean surges forward, knocking Lucifer's gun out of his face and aiming a right hook for his temple with all his strength.

[theprodigalson]

Michael? It's not a name for a demon, and Sam can't help the way his face briefly twitches in confusion, though his aim doesn't falter for a second.

The demon continues staring at him, looking strangely expectant. Sam knows he should fire; his finger itches on the trigger. But, demon or no, all Sam can see is his brother standing in front of him, his eyes colder than Sam has ever seen and face lined, but it's still Dean and he can't- he can't.

The yell snaps him back to reality, but not quickly enough, pain exploding in his hand as his gun is knocked away. He manages to get his other hand in front of his face just before the demon's fist can connect, grunting harshly as he tightens his grip, wrenching it away and back behind the demon, his opposite fist landing hard in the thing's side.

"You think putting on his meatsuit would get to me?" he hisses, teeth bared. "I'll still kill you, you sonofabitch."

[always_enduphere]

Lucifer's fist connects, and Dean lights up like a star, pain streaking along every nerve until he feels he'll burst with it. For a scattered moment, he thinks Lucifer's punched right through his side - god knows he should be strong enough, but then Dean remembers. The stitches.

Wheeling away, he presses a hand to the warmth seeping over his ribs and laughs as ugly as he knows how. "Meatsuit," he mumbles, "s'good." Mindgames, Sam's words in Sam's mouth but the devil speaking them, trying to convince Dean that it's his own brother he's fighting. If he could feel anything, Dean thinks it'd hurt like hell.

"Leave the torture to Alistair, huh? You've got nothing on him, Lucifer." Spitting the last word, Dean lunges, catching Lucifer around the waist to bear him down.

[theprodigalson]

The demon crumples easier than Sam would have guessed, doubling over in pain that sure as hell looks genuine. But he's still speaking, words dripping with a disgust and abhorrence Sam can't imagine Dean - his Dean, the real Dean - ever hurling his direction.

Even if the words he's spouting don't make any fucking-

Sam stumbles backward as the demon barrels into him, not stopping until his back hits brick, breath whoosing out his lungs as he falls forward. It's only for a second though, gritting his teeth through the pain and sudden lack of oxygen to wrap his arm around the demon's neck and pivot, throwing him into the wall with a harsh grunt.

[always_enduphere]

Dean rides him like a wave into the wall, so dizzy with the descent that it's a surprise to feel himself hurtling backwards, but the brick makes itself known with a sharp crack against the back of his head. Stunned, Dean looks forward, Sam's shocked face filling up his vision.

It's wrong, he knows it's wrong, and still he feels his mouth shape the word. "Sammy." And he's falling, cold concrete catching him more tenderly than his conscious ever could.