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srs2012_r1Summary: This time, Dean breaks himself out of hell and meets his angel after.
Word Count: 3860
Characters: Dean Winchester, Victor Henriksen, Sam Winchester
Pairings: Dean/Victor
Tags: Mentions of potential non-con/dub-con; graphic described violence; suicide; NSFW; gruesome content; mentions of past torture
Note: Click on the preview image for the full size
Six days after he stabs the King of Hell in the back, literally, the gates of Hell deposit Dean Winchester in a graveyard on top of a hill in upstate New York.
It's summer. Nighttime. Full moon at twelve o'clock overhead, bigger than anything else in the sky. The shadows of headstones and granite angels stretch halfway down the hill, Dean's own shadow perfectly intact among them. They look like they're running away from him. Under his feet the ground is soft with sediment from decaying bodies, and the nearest phone is two miles south. When he concentrates, he can feel the beating heart of the meat puppet (girl, red hair, age thirteen) who owns it.
Another time.
For now he settles for a shower, a shave. At the no-tell motel off the highway, he turns the water hot as it goes, watching demon blood and dried viscera swirl down the drain.
It takes some doing to find a gas station that sells paper maps; it's all computerized these days, with little readers that scan everything from phones to key chain charms and deduct the money automatically. The guy in front of Dean takes forever deciding between electronic cigarettes and the real thing, and while he's hemming and hawing, Dean lifts his wallet and his keys, steals a road atlas from the rack by the door, and drives off with his car. Like old times almost, even if the electric engine runs silent and the dashboard demands a breathalyzer test before it shifts into drive.
It's good to be out on the road again, topside, in the meatsuit he was born in. He wasn't sure he'd get it back; the tablet hadn't been big on specifics.
There are little differences. He's faster and stronger than he'd been went he went down, even stuffed back into the body of a horny, gangly sixteen-year-old. He can pick out a taillight from miles away; he can hear the stop bar lowering at the railroad crossing in the next town over.
When the deejay on talk radio gets annoying, he flips the station with a thought. He doesn't need sleep. He doesn't get tired.
Dean drives all night without stopping, but that doesn't mean what it used to.
*
It's nightfall when he pulls to a stop at the end of a quiet street opposite a little yellow house.
There are seven humans inside, some young, some healthier than others. Their souls wander the house, gold lights that flare in bouts of anger or amusement. Someone plays music he doesn't recognize; someone sprints up and down the stairs before collapsing in the den (chasing the family dog; a little girl, maybe). They congregate for dinner, then disperse to all corners of the house, settling in for the night. The silhouettes on the curtains are uniformly tall, and the souls share a certain muzzy glow, soft and bright like halogen gas.
It's impossible to tell which one is Sam.
He's about to head over, try sneaking in through the back, when he sees it: a dark blur of motion between elm trees, preternaturally fast. Damn it.
And Dean might not be human, but he'll always be a hunter, and he doesn't hesitate. Never has, when Sam is involved.
The knife is still sticky with Michael's blood when he stabs the stranger in the heart.
Dean leans close and keeps his voice down. Doesn't want to wake anyone upstairs. "You tell Michael," he says, just about shaking with rage at the nerve, the sheer audacity to come for his brother, "I ever catch one of his lackeys around here again, I'll send myself back to Hell and finish what I started."
He twists the knife hard and waits for the sickly light, the black smoke fleeing the scene with a shriek only monsters can hear.
He's not expecting the demon to grip his wrist and hurl him clear across the yard.
He's not expecting the demon to seize the knife by the hilt and draw it out slowly, every rune on the blade soaked in blood. Like an exorcism spell's nothing; like he's enjoying the pulpy sound his sternum makes, the edges of the wound flapping together as the knife emerges.
Like he wants Dean to take in every second of just how badly he's managed to fuck this up. Like he wants to make damn sure Dean is listening.
"Dean Winchester," he says, in a voice like steel and ozone and saltpeter.
"You just missed him," Dean says, coughing. "Sorry."
Even he knows it's weak, but fuck him -- a demon that can withstand that spell, on that knife? Has to be some kind of fucked up bad-ass.
He's got a good-looking meatsuit, Dean's not going to lie, but by now he's learned not to judge a demon by the strings it's pulling. Castiel looks like an offshore tax accountant renting office space in a strip mall between the pretzel stand and the piercing parlor. Even the King of Hell keeps his hair brylcreemed like some kind of refugee from an Ivy League campus, circa 1955.
But all the guy does is frown and say, "You have an object in your possession that does not belong to you."
"You've got the knife."
In another situation, it would be hilarious how he lifts it to his face with a grimace, like he'd forgotten he was even holding it.
It stops being hilarious right around the time he snaps his fingers and the blade disintegrates to ash.
"Forget the knife," he snaps. "The knife is a non-entity."
"Well, it is now," Dean says, annoyed. Jesus, he'd cut off a finger with the tooth of a goat to help forge that knife, and even if it had grown back, it was the principle of the thing. "I don't know what it is you think I'm carrying, but in case you hadn't heard, I'm traveling a little light these days, comes with the whole 'turncoat' territory. So if you don't mind -- ?"
He doesn't wait for a response, just starts for the house grumbling and brushing grass off his jeans.
He's not expecting to be thrown against the side of the house or held there by the throat. It makes him feel helpless like in the old days, when he was newly turned and every demon with seniority, which was all of them, thought they could use him for target practice.
He struggles, sure, but the guy's built like a rock. Doesn't blink, doesn't react -- and there's something wrong about that too, the way his suit doesn't move an inch, like it's part of the whole stone statue thing he's got going on -- even when Dean fumbles for the flask tucked into his jacket and douses him with a pint of salted holy water.
Nothing. No smoking, no screaming. No reaction whatsoever.
"Jesus," Dean says, stilling.
He makes a face. "I'm not a demon, Dean."
"Yeah, that's what they all say." He blinks his eyes black, grinning with a levity he doesn't feel. "Pull the other one, it's still half-human."
Dean doesn't know why out of everything, that's what makes him let go.
"All right, so you're not a demon," he says, backpedaling out of reach. He's not retreating, just -- getting his bearings. "Still doesn't explain what you're doing hanging round my brother's house at eleven o'clock at night."
Dean isn't expecting the wings.
"My name is Lamechial," the not-a-demon says, drawing himself up bigger than should be possible, his shadow creeping up the house as it splits into -- shit, fucking feathers, wings, like some kind of freakish devil bird man. "I'm an angel of the Lord, sent on a mission of God to protect the prophet known as Sam Winchester -- "
Or that.
"Look," he says, gesturing vaguely at the angel's -- person, "this is all very enlightening, but I'm on a schedule, so if you'll excuse me -- "
"I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
"Watch me," Dean says, turning. He promptly bounces off an invisible wall. "Seriously? I'm his brother, you think I'm heading in there to gank him?"
The angel shrugs a little stiffly, like it's something he's observed but never done before. "Your motives have not yet been established."
Dean stares. "You're kidding. You never heard of," and he stops there, because the end of that sentence was going to be something horrible, like feelings and crap, "look, if you're really some kind of -- heavenly being -- "
"I am," he says promptly.
"Thanks," Dean says. "Look, Lamin -- llama lorax -- "
"Lamechial. My vessel bore the name Victor," he says. He doesn't quite sigh, but it's a close thing.
"Great. Victor, buddy, pal," Dean claps him on the shoulder, "I'll make a deal with you. You look the other way while I sneak a quick look at my brother, and I won't tell Dad you fell asleep on the job."
"Of course you won't. Your father is in hell."
"Wow, you don't pull any punches, do you," Dean says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I meant your dad. The big guy upstairs. The Father, the Son and -- is this ringing any bells?"
"God is missing," Victor says, visibly irritated. It's kind of fascinating; even his wings twitch. "Every angel in the garrison has spent the last four centuries searching for him, without success."
"Try looking the last place you left him," Dean says.
He looks rather shifty when he says, "We did. There was a...den of iniquity where the chapel had been."
"That old dog." Or -- wait. Dean raises an eyebrow. "You old dog?"
Victor glares. "The object of which you have come into improper possession burns hot in the presence of God. We hope to locate Him and convince him to return to Heaven."
Dean's eyes narrow. "Which explains why you've been hanging around Sam. What, you're hoping he'll sudden freak out, start speaking in tongues?" In his best Darth Vader: "Victor, this is your father. Have money, will travel."
"Do not mock the prophets," he says, warning. "Two angels have been assigned to read every word that issues from Sam Winchester's pen in hopes of uncovering hidden Revelations."
Dean is intrigued in spite of himself. "Yeah?" he says. "They find anything?"
"No," Victor admits, feathers ruffling in what looks like mild embarrassment. "The output of Sam Winchester has been confined mostly to contracts and legal briefs."
"No kidding," he says, grinning. So the kid made it to law school after all. He never wanted to be hunter, not the way Dean did. "He any good at it?"
"His legal services remain in demand to this day."
"Huh." Dean sneaks a look at the house, at the window in the northeast corner, second floor. "Hey, look, I'll make you a deal."
"You and your deals."
"For real this time," Dean says, talking over him. "The thing you're looking for, the your God GPS -- if I've got it, you can have it."
Relief washes over Victor's face.
"If you let me see Sam," Dean adds. "Alone."
He's already shaking his head. It's understandable, Dean supposes. Gods don't make deals with ants. Angels don't make deals with demons.
"No?" he says, reaching under his shirt for the leather cord he knows is there, the thing he bartered half his soul to keep even as they flayed the skin from his face -- the only thing he owns that Victor could possibly want. He yanks it off his neck and lets the silver amulet dangle from his fingers. "Then you can kiss this goodbye."
The metal is already smoking in his fist.
Victor doesn't even try to play it cool. "No!" he says, reaching for Dean with hands that glow soul-bright --
"Ready, set," Dean says.
And hurls the amulet with all his strength, over the trees and into the next street over.
Victor blinks out of existence before Dean can say "go."
*
He doesn't have much time.
He breaks the window (unsalted; it breaks his heart and makes him glad, all at once) and rounds onto the stairs. He takes the steps four at a time, his heart pumping in his chest out of some ancient habit, and turns right, toward the northeast corner of the house, toward the soul that rests there, half-submerged in sleep.
He pushes the bedroom door open with a steady hand, steps around the creaky spots in the floor.
In a bed pushed deep into the corner of the room, flanked by two walls, both windowless, an impossibly tall man lies on his side under the comforter, fast asleep.
He doesn't have to lift the covers to know that it's Sam. Sam, twelve years old and orphaned of his father and his brother in the span of a year; Sam, grown up tall and strong and normal, like he'd always wanted. Like they'd always wanted for him.
Dean lurches toward him, salt brimming in his eyes like an acid bath.
The rush of wings behind him makes him freeze.
"I'm sorry," Victor says, before he wraps his arms tight around Dean's chest and disappears them both.
*
It's not like traveling as a demon.
It's hard to explain, really. Maybe impossible. It moves outside words and pictures and sound, the wavelength that kicks them to the outer reaches of existence and drops them without ceremony. Victor bends the way light bends, and since he's holding onto Dean, clinging even, Dean bends too.
It isn't easy to find their way back. The wavelength is inefficient, doesn't move in any way Dean can draw on a piece of paper. They materialize in a desert of red dust and dematerialize just as quickly.
It isn't their planet. It isn't even their universe.
They move sideways through time. A billion years in the past, Dean witnesses the death of the first star.
A hundred years after Sam Winchester's death, with an army of angels at his back, Dean shuts the gates of Hell forever.
*
They draw closer to Earth.
In Sao Paulo, he and Victor find themselves seated naked on a stone wall overlooking the city.
Two seconds earlier, they blink into existence at a lobster bake in southern Maine. It smells mighty fine, not that they're there long enough to enjoy it.
"You really like taking the scenic route, huh," Dean says.
Victor glares. "I told you not to go inside the house!" he says. "You were about to trigger a rather nasty alarm, and I -- acted without thinking."
"No kidding."
*
It's not all fun and sightseeing. The year is 1996, and Dean is back in the last place he'd ever willingly visit: the woods behind the only motel in Sugartown, Louisiana, in the dead of winter, chasing the monster his father had created by accident.
Dean is fourteen years old. He's been hunting a long time.
This isn't anything like those hunts.
He can't breathe. It's stupid; he knows he's breathing, there are puffs of white condensation trailing him through the forest to prove it, but his chest hurts, and his head feels light, and nothing makes sense the way it should. He runs between trees, using them for cover to reload, the moon breaking apart through the naked branches of the trees. He can hear the agonized howls of the thing in the woods as it tries to walk on limbs that have been sewn together backwards, breathe with organs turned inside out.
The winter Dean turned fourteen and his father paid a demon to raise his mother from the dead; the winter Dean turned fourteen and he leveled a shotgun between his mother's eyes and pulled the trigger.
Dean figures that's the moment his name got added to the list of souls to be sent down to the burning place. Thou shalt not kill, honor thy father and mother and all.
He understands it, even if he doesn't like it. Rules are rules are rules.
"Do me a favor -- don't look," he says to Victor. "I don't -- it's not exactly my best moment."
"She would have killed you all."
"She was my mother."
"She would have killed Sam too," Victor says. "Think about that."
He does. Has. It was one of Michael's favorite tortures, showing him all the ways his mother would have ripped Sam open and pawed through his insides.
"I know," he says, watching as a boy, fourteen years old and clutching the first sawed off he ever made, loads a kill shot with shaking hands. "Still."
"No," Victor says.
After that, the hour they spend herding sheep at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro is somewhat anti-climactic.
*
"I want you to see something," Victor says.
In another world, close enough to touch but not enough to jump ship, Sam isn't a prophet but a vessel, and the King of Hell is instead God's fiercest warrior. There's some good in it: Bobby's still their friend, and their dad springs loose from Hell, and their mother stays dead, rest her soul.
And all right, Dean goes to Hell anyway, but Castiel of all people drags him out kicking and screaming. Victor isn't an angel, but he's still the man, an FBI agent who dogs their heels all over the country and does it with a razor-sharp smile. It's not a life anyone would choose, but it's something. They fight the good fight, and most of the time they win.
But when Victor offers to let him stay, Dean demands to see the amulet. Wants it back.
"Deal's a deal," he says. "You brother-blocked me, I'm not gonna let you keep that thing."
"That's not how it works," Victor says, sighing.
"Then take me back to Sam."
The world tilts sideways.
*
In a lake of pure ether, Victor tells him what he knows about Sam. That he was adopted quickly, by loving parents; that he was wise enough to let a child psychiatrist convince him that what happened had never happened. That the fire that killed their mother was an accident; that their father had been some kind of paramilitary survivalist, Dean his most loyal acolyte.
Sam never hunted again. Never knew it was possible. Forgot the years on the road, the books of witchcraft their father stole from former friends, the black spells practiced late at night. The crossroads and the fatal kiss. The night the hellhounds came for their father, how they dragged him to the ceiling by the throat and vivisected him while Dean covered Sam's eyes and tried not to scream.
One night in Victoria Harbour, Victor asks how Dean died.
"Crashed my dad's car," he says. Even just saying it gives him the chills.
Victor snorts. He's got a bit of an attitude, this one. Would have made a pretty sharp hunter, in another life. "You were not old enough to have a license."
Dean rolls his eyes. "I've been driving since I was seven years old." Had to, with the way some of their hunting expeditions went.
"Then how did you crash?"
Maybe he didn't. Maybe he wanted to. Sometimes Dean wonders if it was killing his mother that sent him to hell after all.
He's saved from answering by the tide rolling in. When it rolls out, it takes them with it.
*
For exactly 3.14 seconds, Dean stands in a sterile white lobby that Victor later assures him is the waiting room to Heaven.
"I have business to attend to. Remain here," he says, exiting the lobby.
"Our business is concluded," he says, entering the lobby.
"Okay then!" Dean says, and lets himself be taken.
*
Sam, Dean thinks, I want to see Sam.
*
Exactly seven hours after Victor snatched him out of Sam's room, he deposits Dean on his ass in the yard behind the house. It's morning, cool for the season, and the smell of dew and wet earth fills his nostrils, oddly familiar.
"For the record," Deans says, when his stomach's turned right side out again, "you're a terrible driver."
Victor hums. He'll never pass for human, but he's getting better at mirroring Dean, picking up cues in his body language and appropriating them for his own use. "Says the man who drove his car off a cliff."
Whatever Dean would have said in reply is lost as a door slides open and a familiar voice says, "But if they're really as smart as four-year-old kids, you have to consider the ethical implications, that's all I'm saying -- "
Sam. Before he can move, a hand clamps down on Dean's shoulder.
When an old man shuffles onto the deck, accompanied by a young girl (fifteen, grand-daughter, Dean's grand-niece) and eases into a wicker chair, he understands why.
"Can he see us?"
"No," Victor says. A pause. "Do you want him to?"
Sam looks -- not good, but full, somehow. A man at peace with himself, at the end of a long and complete life. He's tall even sitting down, his head nearly as high as the girl's. His smile is wide and eyes are sharp as they keep watch over the children who swarm the backyard. A few minutes later, a dog limps out of the house, trotting up to him with a grotty tennis ball that Sam plucks from its mouth without hesitation.
"He's safe," Dean says. He looks sharply at Victor when no answer is forthcoming.
"Sam is," Victor says. "His descendants..."
Dean holds in a sigh as the dog rests its head on Sam's feet. It's an old mutt, clearly been with Sam a long time.
Sam's old too. Dean's not sure why he thought he wouldn't be; why he thought it would be different.
Time moves differently in Hell. Dean lived millennia under Michael's rule, making plans, playing the loyal servant, before the chance to escape finally presented itself.
Still.
"You can visit them," Victor says. "Whenever you like, as long as you're wearing this."
The leather cord's been replaced with a slender gold chain, and when Dean closes a palm around the amulet, the warmth from Victor's hand lingers without fading.
"Your angel buddies don't need it?"
"Apparently, when God doesn't want to be found, He won't." Victor's gaze turns speculative. "You're staying?"
Dean slides the chain over his neck and tucks the amulet under his shirt. It feels right, he thinks, glancing at Victor out of the corner of his eye. For the first time in a long while.
"Yeah," Dean says, chewing his lip. "Less you can give me a reason why not."
He knows what Victor's going to do before he does it. Truth be told, he's been thinking about it too.
The mouth against his is firm and unyielding, the skin just a bit chapped. Warm hands, big enough to curve around Dean's jaw and cup the back of his head, slide up his neck to cradle his face. It's been centuries since someone kissed him as a prelude to anything but pain. He's not sure he remembers how it goes.
But this is a good start.
Word Count: 3860
Characters: Dean Winchester, Victor Henriksen, Sam Winchester
Pairings: Dean/Victor
Tags: Mentions of potential non-con/dub-con; graphic described violence; suicide; NSFW; gruesome content; mentions of past torture
Note: Click on the preview image for the full size
Six days after he stabs the King of Hell in the back, literally, the gates of Hell deposit Dean Winchester in a graveyard on top of a hill in upstate New York.
It's summer. Nighttime. Full moon at twelve o'clock overhead, bigger than anything else in the sky. The shadows of headstones and granite angels stretch halfway down the hill, Dean's own shadow perfectly intact among them. They look like they're running away from him. Under his feet the ground is soft with sediment from decaying bodies, and the nearest phone is two miles south. When he concentrates, he can feel the beating heart of the meat puppet (girl, red hair, age thirteen) who owns it.
Another time.
For now he settles for a shower, a shave. At the no-tell motel off the highway, he turns the water hot as it goes, watching demon blood and dried viscera swirl down the drain.
It takes some doing to find a gas station that sells paper maps; it's all computerized these days, with little readers that scan everything from phones to key chain charms and deduct the money automatically. The guy in front of Dean takes forever deciding between electronic cigarettes and the real thing, and while he's hemming and hawing, Dean lifts his wallet and his keys, steals a road atlas from the rack by the door, and drives off with his car. Like old times almost, even if the electric engine runs silent and the dashboard demands a breathalyzer test before it shifts into drive.
It's good to be out on the road again, topside, in the meatsuit he was born in. He wasn't sure he'd get it back; the tablet hadn't been big on specifics.
There are little differences. He's faster and stronger than he'd been went he went down, even stuffed back into the body of a horny, gangly sixteen-year-old. He can pick out a taillight from miles away; he can hear the stop bar lowering at the railroad crossing in the next town over.
When the deejay on talk radio gets annoying, he flips the station with a thought. He doesn't need sleep. He doesn't get tired.
Dean drives all night without stopping, but that doesn't mean what it used to.
*
It's nightfall when he pulls to a stop at the end of a quiet street opposite a little yellow house.
There are seven humans inside, some young, some healthier than others. Their souls wander the house, gold lights that flare in bouts of anger or amusement. Someone plays music he doesn't recognize; someone sprints up and down the stairs before collapsing in the den (chasing the family dog; a little girl, maybe). They congregate for dinner, then disperse to all corners of the house, settling in for the night. The silhouettes on the curtains are uniformly tall, and the souls share a certain muzzy glow, soft and bright like halogen gas.
It's impossible to tell which one is Sam.
He's about to head over, try sneaking in through the back, when he sees it: a dark blur of motion between elm trees, preternaturally fast. Damn it.
And Dean might not be human, but he'll always be a hunter, and he doesn't hesitate. Never has, when Sam is involved.
The knife is still sticky with Michael's blood when he stabs the stranger in the heart.
Dean leans close and keeps his voice down. Doesn't want to wake anyone upstairs. "You tell Michael," he says, just about shaking with rage at the nerve, the sheer audacity to come for his brother, "I ever catch one of his lackeys around here again, I'll send myself back to Hell and finish what I started."
He twists the knife hard and waits for the sickly light, the black smoke fleeing the scene with a shriek only monsters can hear.
He's not expecting the demon to grip his wrist and hurl him clear across the yard.
He's not expecting the demon to seize the knife by the hilt and draw it out slowly, every rune on the blade soaked in blood. Like an exorcism spell's nothing; like he's enjoying the pulpy sound his sternum makes, the edges of the wound flapping together as the knife emerges.
Like he wants Dean to take in every second of just how badly he's managed to fuck this up. Like he wants to make damn sure Dean is listening.
"Dean Winchester," he says, in a voice like steel and ozone and saltpeter.
"You just missed him," Dean says, coughing. "Sorry."
Even he knows it's weak, but fuck him -- a demon that can withstand that spell, on that knife? Has to be some kind of fucked up bad-ass.
He's got a good-looking meatsuit, Dean's not going to lie, but by now he's learned not to judge a demon by the strings it's pulling. Castiel looks like an offshore tax accountant renting office space in a strip mall between the pretzel stand and the piercing parlor. Even the King of Hell keeps his hair brylcreemed like some kind of refugee from an Ivy League campus, circa 1955.
But all the guy does is frown and say, "You have an object in your possession that does not belong to you."
"You've got the knife."
In another situation, it would be hilarious how he lifts it to his face with a grimace, like he'd forgotten he was even holding it.
It stops being hilarious right around the time he snaps his fingers and the blade disintegrates to ash.
"Forget the knife," he snaps. "The knife is a non-entity."
"Well, it is now," Dean says, annoyed. Jesus, he'd cut off a finger with the tooth of a goat to help forge that knife, and even if it had grown back, it was the principle of the thing. "I don't know what it is you think I'm carrying, but in case you hadn't heard, I'm traveling a little light these days, comes with the whole 'turncoat' territory. So if you don't mind -- ?"
He doesn't wait for a response, just starts for the house grumbling and brushing grass off his jeans.
He's not expecting to be thrown against the side of the house or held there by the throat. It makes him feel helpless like in the old days, when he was newly turned and every demon with seniority, which was all of them, thought they could use him for target practice.
He struggles, sure, but the guy's built like a rock. Doesn't blink, doesn't react -- and there's something wrong about that too, the way his suit doesn't move an inch, like it's part of the whole stone statue thing he's got going on -- even when Dean fumbles for the flask tucked into his jacket and douses him with a pint of salted holy water.
Nothing. No smoking, no screaming. No reaction whatsoever.
"Jesus," Dean says, stilling.
He makes a face. "I'm not a demon, Dean."
"Yeah, that's what they all say." He blinks his eyes black, grinning with a levity he doesn't feel. "Pull the other one, it's still half-human."
Dean doesn't know why out of everything, that's what makes him let go.
"All right, so you're not a demon," he says, backpedaling out of reach. He's not retreating, just -- getting his bearings. "Still doesn't explain what you're doing hanging round my brother's house at eleven o'clock at night."
Dean isn't expecting the wings.
"My name is Lamechial," the not-a-demon says, drawing himself up bigger than should be possible, his shadow creeping up the house as it splits into -- shit, fucking feathers, wings, like some kind of freakish devil bird man. "I'm an angel of the Lord, sent on a mission of God to protect the prophet known as Sam Winchester -- "
Or that.
"Look," he says, gesturing vaguely at the angel's -- person, "this is all very enlightening, but I'm on a schedule, so if you'll excuse me -- "
"I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
"Watch me," Dean says, turning. He promptly bounces off an invisible wall. "Seriously? I'm his brother, you think I'm heading in there to gank him?"
The angel shrugs a little stiffly, like it's something he's observed but never done before. "Your motives have not yet been established."
Dean stares. "You're kidding. You never heard of," and he stops there, because the end of that sentence was going to be something horrible, like feelings and crap, "look, if you're really some kind of -- heavenly being -- "
"I am," he says promptly.
"Thanks," Dean says. "Look, Lamin -- llama lorax -- "
"Lamechial. My vessel bore the name Victor," he says. He doesn't quite sigh, but it's a close thing.
"Great. Victor, buddy, pal," Dean claps him on the shoulder, "I'll make a deal with you. You look the other way while I sneak a quick look at my brother, and I won't tell Dad you fell asleep on the job."
"Of course you won't. Your father is in hell."
"Wow, you don't pull any punches, do you," Dean says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I meant your dad. The big guy upstairs. The Father, the Son and -- is this ringing any bells?"
"God is missing," Victor says, visibly irritated. It's kind of fascinating; even his wings twitch. "Every angel in the garrison has spent the last four centuries searching for him, without success."
"Try looking the last place you left him," Dean says.
He looks rather shifty when he says, "We did. There was a...den of iniquity where the chapel had been."
"That old dog." Or -- wait. Dean raises an eyebrow. "You old dog?"
Victor glares. "The object of which you have come into improper possession burns hot in the presence of God. We hope to locate Him and convince him to return to Heaven."
Dean's eyes narrow. "Which explains why you've been hanging around Sam. What, you're hoping he'll sudden freak out, start speaking in tongues?" In his best Darth Vader: "Victor, this is your father. Have money, will travel."
"Do not mock the prophets," he says, warning. "Two angels have been assigned to read every word that issues from Sam Winchester's pen in hopes of uncovering hidden Revelations."
Dean is intrigued in spite of himself. "Yeah?" he says. "They find anything?"
"No," Victor admits, feathers ruffling in what looks like mild embarrassment. "The output of Sam Winchester has been confined mostly to contracts and legal briefs."
"No kidding," he says, grinning. So the kid made it to law school after all. He never wanted to be hunter, not the way Dean did. "He any good at it?"
"His legal services remain in demand to this day."
"Huh." Dean sneaks a look at the house, at the window in the northeast corner, second floor. "Hey, look, I'll make you a deal."
"You and your deals."
"For real this time," Dean says, talking over him. "The thing you're looking for, the your God GPS -- if I've got it, you can have it."
Relief washes over Victor's face.
"If you let me see Sam," Dean adds. "Alone."
He's already shaking his head. It's understandable, Dean supposes. Gods don't make deals with ants. Angels don't make deals with demons.
"No?" he says, reaching under his shirt for the leather cord he knows is there, the thing he bartered half his soul to keep even as they flayed the skin from his face -- the only thing he owns that Victor could possibly want. He yanks it off his neck and lets the silver amulet dangle from his fingers. "Then you can kiss this goodbye."
The metal is already smoking in his fist.
Victor doesn't even try to play it cool. "No!" he says, reaching for Dean with hands that glow soul-bright --
"Ready, set," Dean says.
And hurls the amulet with all his strength, over the trees and into the next street over.
Victor blinks out of existence before Dean can say "go."
*
He doesn't have much time.
He breaks the window (unsalted; it breaks his heart and makes him glad, all at once) and rounds onto the stairs. He takes the steps four at a time, his heart pumping in his chest out of some ancient habit, and turns right, toward the northeast corner of the house, toward the soul that rests there, half-submerged in sleep.
He pushes the bedroom door open with a steady hand, steps around the creaky spots in the floor.
In a bed pushed deep into the corner of the room, flanked by two walls, both windowless, an impossibly tall man lies on his side under the comforter, fast asleep.
He doesn't have to lift the covers to know that it's Sam. Sam, twelve years old and orphaned of his father and his brother in the span of a year; Sam, grown up tall and strong and normal, like he'd always wanted. Like they'd always wanted for him.
Dean lurches toward him, salt brimming in his eyes like an acid bath.
The rush of wings behind him makes him freeze.
"I'm sorry," Victor says, before he wraps his arms tight around Dean's chest and disappears them both.
*
It's not like traveling as a demon.
It's hard to explain, really. Maybe impossible. It moves outside words and pictures and sound, the wavelength that kicks them to the outer reaches of existence and drops them without ceremony. Victor bends the way light bends, and since he's holding onto Dean, clinging even, Dean bends too.
It isn't easy to find their way back. The wavelength is inefficient, doesn't move in any way Dean can draw on a piece of paper. They materialize in a desert of red dust and dematerialize just as quickly.
It isn't their planet. It isn't even their universe.
They move sideways through time. A billion years in the past, Dean witnesses the death of the first star.
A hundred years after Sam Winchester's death, with an army of angels at his back, Dean shuts the gates of Hell forever.
*
They draw closer to Earth.
In Sao Paulo, he and Victor find themselves seated naked on a stone wall overlooking the city.
Two seconds earlier, they blink into existence at a lobster bake in southern Maine. It smells mighty fine, not that they're there long enough to enjoy it.
"You really like taking the scenic route, huh," Dean says.
Victor glares. "I told you not to go inside the house!" he says. "You were about to trigger a rather nasty alarm, and I -- acted without thinking."
"No kidding."
*
It's not all fun and sightseeing. The year is 1996, and Dean is back in the last place he'd ever willingly visit: the woods behind the only motel in Sugartown, Louisiana, in the dead of winter, chasing the monster his father had created by accident.
Dean is fourteen years old. He's been hunting a long time.
This isn't anything like those hunts.
He can't breathe. It's stupid; he knows he's breathing, there are puffs of white condensation trailing him through the forest to prove it, but his chest hurts, and his head feels light, and nothing makes sense the way it should. He runs between trees, using them for cover to reload, the moon breaking apart through the naked branches of the trees. He can hear the agonized howls of the thing in the woods as it tries to walk on limbs that have been sewn together backwards, breathe with organs turned inside out.
The winter Dean turned fourteen and his father paid a demon to raise his mother from the dead; the winter Dean turned fourteen and he leveled a shotgun between his mother's eyes and pulled the trigger.
Dean figures that's the moment his name got added to the list of souls to be sent down to the burning place. Thou shalt not kill, honor thy father and mother and all.
He understands it, even if he doesn't like it. Rules are rules are rules.
"Do me a favor -- don't look," he says to Victor. "I don't -- it's not exactly my best moment."
"She would have killed you all."
"She was my mother."
"She would have killed Sam too," Victor says. "Think about that."
He does. Has. It was one of Michael's favorite tortures, showing him all the ways his mother would have ripped Sam open and pawed through his insides.
"I know," he says, watching as a boy, fourteen years old and clutching the first sawed off he ever made, loads a kill shot with shaking hands. "Still."
"No," Victor says.
After that, the hour they spend herding sheep at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro is somewhat anti-climactic.
*
"I want you to see something," Victor says.
In another world, close enough to touch but not enough to jump ship, Sam isn't a prophet but a vessel, and the King of Hell is instead God's fiercest warrior. There's some good in it: Bobby's still their friend, and their dad springs loose from Hell, and their mother stays dead, rest her soul.
And all right, Dean goes to Hell anyway, but Castiel of all people drags him out kicking and screaming. Victor isn't an angel, but he's still the man, an FBI agent who dogs their heels all over the country and does it with a razor-sharp smile. It's not a life anyone would choose, but it's something. They fight the good fight, and most of the time they win.
But when Victor offers to let him stay, Dean demands to see the amulet. Wants it back.
"Deal's a deal," he says. "You brother-blocked me, I'm not gonna let you keep that thing."
"That's not how it works," Victor says, sighing.
"Then take me back to Sam."
The world tilts sideways.
*
In a lake of pure ether, Victor tells him what he knows about Sam. That he was adopted quickly, by loving parents; that he was wise enough to let a child psychiatrist convince him that what happened had never happened. That the fire that killed their mother was an accident; that their father had been some kind of paramilitary survivalist, Dean his most loyal acolyte.
Sam never hunted again. Never knew it was possible. Forgot the years on the road, the books of witchcraft their father stole from former friends, the black spells practiced late at night. The crossroads and the fatal kiss. The night the hellhounds came for their father, how they dragged him to the ceiling by the throat and vivisected him while Dean covered Sam's eyes and tried not to scream.
One night in Victoria Harbour, Victor asks how Dean died.
"Crashed my dad's car," he says. Even just saying it gives him the chills.
Victor snorts. He's got a bit of an attitude, this one. Would have made a pretty sharp hunter, in another life. "You were not old enough to have a license."
Dean rolls his eyes. "I've been driving since I was seven years old." Had to, with the way some of their hunting expeditions went.
"Then how did you crash?"
Maybe he didn't. Maybe he wanted to. Sometimes Dean wonders if it was killing his mother that sent him to hell after all.
He's saved from answering by the tide rolling in. When it rolls out, it takes them with it.
*
For exactly 3.14 seconds, Dean stands in a sterile white lobby that Victor later assures him is the waiting room to Heaven.
"I have business to attend to. Remain here," he says, exiting the lobby.
"Our business is concluded," he says, entering the lobby.
"Okay then!" Dean says, and lets himself be taken.
*
Sam, Dean thinks, I want to see Sam.
*
Exactly seven hours after Victor snatched him out of Sam's room, he deposits Dean on his ass in the yard behind the house. It's morning, cool for the season, and the smell of dew and wet earth fills his nostrils, oddly familiar.
"For the record," Deans says, when his stomach's turned right side out again, "you're a terrible driver."
Victor hums. He'll never pass for human, but he's getting better at mirroring Dean, picking up cues in his body language and appropriating them for his own use. "Says the man who drove his car off a cliff."
Whatever Dean would have said in reply is lost as a door slides open and a familiar voice says, "But if they're really as smart as four-year-old kids, you have to consider the ethical implications, that's all I'm saying -- "
Sam. Before he can move, a hand clamps down on Dean's shoulder.
When an old man shuffles onto the deck, accompanied by a young girl (fifteen, grand-daughter, Dean's grand-niece) and eases into a wicker chair, he understands why.
"Can he see us?"
"No," Victor says. A pause. "Do you want him to?"
Sam looks -- not good, but full, somehow. A man at peace with himself, at the end of a long and complete life. He's tall even sitting down, his head nearly as high as the girl's. His smile is wide and eyes are sharp as they keep watch over the children who swarm the backyard. A few minutes later, a dog limps out of the house, trotting up to him with a grotty tennis ball that Sam plucks from its mouth without hesitation.
"He's safe," Dean says. He looks sharply at Victor when no answer is forthcoming.
"Sam is," Victor says. "His descendants..."
Dean holds in a sigh as the dog rests its head on Sam's feet. It's an old mutt, clearly been with Sam a long time.
Sam's old too. Dean's not sure why he thought he wouldn't be; why he thought it would be different.
Time moves differently in Hell. Dean lived millennia under Michael's rule, making plans, playing the loyal servant, before the chance to escape finally presented itself.
Still.
"You can visit them," Victor says. "Whenever you like, as long as you're wearing this."
The leather cord's been replaced with a slender gold chain, and when Dean closes a palm around the amulet, the warmth from Victor's hand lingers without fading.
"Your angel buddies don't need it?"
"Apparently, when God doesn't want to be found, He won't." Victor's gaze turns speculative. "You're staying?"
Dean slides the chain over his neck and tucks the amulet under his shirt. It feels right, he thinks, glancing at Victor out of the corner of his eye. For the first time in a long while.
"Yeah," Dean says, chewing his lip. "Less you can give me a reason why not."
He knows what Victor's going to do before he does it. Truth be told, he's been thinking about it too.
The mouth against his is firm and unyielding, the skin just a bit chapped. Warm hands, big enough to curve around Dean's jaw and cup the back of his head, slide up his neck to cradle his face. It's been centuries since someone kissed him as a prelude to anything but pain. He's not sure he remembers how it goes.
But this is a good start.
