Chapter Text
Dean wakes to golden eyes peering down at him. The broad nose registers next, followed by a shaggy brown fringe of hair, and a familiar mole that puts it all in context. Everything’s upside down for some reason, though—everything’s the wrong way round, and the eyes are the wrong color, and for a moment Dean thinks he’s having a nightmare.
Then Sam’s mouth—above his nose, fuck, what is this?—twists into something that looks like a snarl and Sam’s voice says, “There you are.”
It’s the relief in his voice that really gets to Dean—that heartbreaking little quiver that Dean’s heard way too often over the last eleven months. Man, Sam must have been really worried about him this time. Whatever happened to get Dean here, and to fuck with his vision like this, it must have been bad.
Relief means that the worst of Sam’s distress is over with, but Dean has actually met his brother before, so he knows that Sam is still angsting over something. He moves to offer comfort without thinking, then stills again as new information floods in and has to be processed. He’s on something hard and unyielding, and his head is bracketed by cradling warmth. An uneven surface supports the back of his skull and neck, levering his head up at an angle.
After a couple seconds of intense concentration, Dean understands that he’s lying on the floor with his head in Sam’s lap, with Sam’s hands cupping his face while Sam leans over him and looks down. All of which accounts for the inverted line-up of Sam’s features, but does nothing to settle the question of his eyes—those unfamiliar, terrifying eyes that burn an unearthly amber color.
Like someone hollowed out Sam’s irises and poured molten gold into the cavities.
Dean thinks he should know what’s going on here. He thinks he should be more than clear on the subject, actually, but something’s getting in the way. He suspects, truth be told, that he’s getting in his own way, and as he tries to pull his thoughts together, only to have his mind immediately twist and scatter the threads of comprehension to the four winds, he has his confirmation.
Somewhere beyond the disorientation and mild shock, his brain is doing an acrobatic, convoluted dance to keep from remembering…
[rain, rain hitting his face and soaking through the gag and]
Dean sits up, maneuvering to one side to avoid knocking his forehead against Sam’s face. His breath is coming a little faster than he wants to admit as his eyes dart here and there around the room, noting the faded floral pattern of the wallpaper, and the fluorescent light overhead, and the dark brown rug pressing up against his palms—slightly stiff and scratchy, but clean. A single king-sized bed looms off to the left, and even from his angle on the floor, Dean can see that its covers (black, black and shiny) are thrown back and its sheets rumpled from use. Dresser. Desk. Armchair. Two doors—one latched with chain and deadbolt, the other opening onto a darkened bathroom. An oversized curtained window taking up most of one wall, cheesy paintings on the others.
Motel room, then. Slightly more upscale than Dean is used to.
[wide eyes staring into his, no color to the irises, in the moonlight he can’t see if they’re brown or green or blue, but there’s no mistaking the terror there, no mistaking the dark figure standing over her]
Dean lifts a hand to his head, shutting his eyes and trying to reconcile the need to know what the fuck is going on with the protective instinct keeping the crucial memories at bay.
“Hey,” Sam says from behind him. His hands land on Dean’s shoulders, gripping and massaging. “How are you doing?”
There’s something odd about the way Sam’s hands feel, and after a second or so Dean figures out what it is: no clothing getting in the way. He opens his eyes again, this time looking down at himself, and he’s not wearing a shirt. That in itself isn’t exactly weird. Not when he and Sam are alone here—when they don’t need to worry about Dad (gone, he’s dead) or Bobby (Bobby? Is he in trouble? Why the fuck does Dean feel like he’s in trouble) walking in on them.
What concerns Dean are the pants he’s wearing—loose and billowy and soft-looking and like nothing he’s ever seen before, let alone owned. When he brushes his fingertips against his thigh, the fabric feels like a cross between silk and cashmere. Decadent. Sensual.
That thought makes him look toward the bed again—toward the disarrayed fall of black sheets that might very well have been cut from the same fabric as his pants.
Someone got fucked in that bed. Or had one hell of a bad dream.
[‘Just a little taste, Azazel; I want to see what I’m missing out on.’]
The voice insinuates itself into Dean’s thoughts like an echo—both there and yet not—and he shakes his head, not liking the cold ripples it sends through him. Not liking the way it makes him think of chains on his wrists, and panic gnawing at his chest, and the stench of urine (his own) and shit (also his own). The sound of the television in the background. Black skies filled with smoke on the flat, pitiless screen. And in the room with him, in the room there’s another danger—a ring of white, pupil-less eyes…
Dean cuts his eyes away from the bed (not the same one, this one is too big; this room is too nice to belong to the place in his pleasegodletitbeadream) His breath comes too quickly as he stares ahead at the bland, innocuous motel room wall, and he realizes that, despite his continuing inability to piece together the clues, he’s riding the edge of panic. He’s a heartbeat away from terror, actually, shoved there by his awareness of how close the memories are coming: of how thin the barrier between rational thought and base instinct has grown.
Below the surface clarity of Dean’s mind, his body is clamoring at him to move, to go, to get the fuck out of here now.
Dean’s hand moves again against the fabric covering his thigh. His eyes slip back to the bed in a rolling, nervous motion that makes him think of terror-driven horses.
Fuck, he wants a weapon. He hasn’t seen their duffle, though, and that makes even less sense than everything else. Dean always brings that bag in first thing when he checks into a room. And even if he was apparently out of commission when they checked in here, he could have sworn he’d trained Sam into taking the same cautious approach.
So where the hell is the bag?
“Come on, man,” Sam urges from behind him (and why doesn’t having Sam in his blind spot make Dean feel at all safe?). “Say something. Dean.”
[“Dean,” Sam breathes, and the word is a prayer and a caress and a summons all at once. He’s standing in the doorway, wearing a ratty pair of jeans and a button-down shirt that Dean thinks might be blue. He can’t tell for sure, though, because the shirt is molded to his brother’s body, slicked black with the same blood that coats Sam’s hands and peppers his face. His eyes are yellow: brighter than the demon’s and burning with a faint, gold cast. In the sky behind his brother’s shoulders, Dean can see smoke rising, black and thick.]
Dean blinks and he’s back in this now. In this room.
“Dean,” Sam says again. His voice is still soft and unthreatening, but that was it, there’s no shutting out the memories that are pouring into him after that last jolt. Dean stares sightlessly down at himself as a series of nightmarish moments strobe through his brain in stark, too clear flashes of illumination.
Sam drugging him, the cemetery, the demon, that motherfucking hotel room and the weeks he spent chained to the bed, that little girl the demon killed—Christ, the girl Sam killed—Sam coming for him, Sam’s power crawling over him, the demon persuading Sam to wait, promising Dean wouldn’t be lonely, that he wouldn’t know, and then the demon reaching for him, followed by…
Dean woke up here, in this room, with his head in Sam’s lap and Sam’s hands gripping his head.
Dean realizes Sam’s hands are still on him—Sam is still massaging his shoulders—and he shoves up and away with a gut-wrenching jolt of betrayal and horror. His skin is crawling as he whirls around, scanning the room for a weapon, for something he can use to knock Sam out long enough to—to—
To what? Last time Dean saw him, Sam was exploding demons with the weight of his power. He was filling the streets with fire and death. He was tearing the world down around him and, thanks to the unrelenting coverage of NBC cable news, Dean got to watch it happen.
“What the fuck did you do?” he breathes, finally dismissing the rest of the room (and the bed, the bed with its rumpled sheets, and how long was Sam here before he woke Dean up, what did he do) and focusing on his brother.
From his casual, cross-legged position on the floor, Sam gazes up at Dean. His face is calm. If there’s any emotion in those alien, golden eyes, then Dean’s too upset to decipher it.
“What the fuck did you do, Sam?” he repeats, more loudly.
“I saved you.”
“You—” Dean starts, and then bites back on the rest of his words with a sharp-edged bark of laughter. “I don’t even know what the fuck to say to that,” he admits, not sure whether he’s speaking more to himself or to Sam.
He can’t take his eyes off of his brother—even if he had it in him to look away, it isn’t safe—but he can and does start backing toward the door. He has to get out of here, put some distance between himself and Sam and the power riding Sam’s body right now. He has to find Bobby, figure out what to—
“Don’t.”
Dean hasn’t ever heard Sam’s voice sound like that before: low and threatening. Commanding. He’s startled by how much Sam sounds like Dad. Dean has stopped moving before he’s conscious of making a decision.
Oh God. Oh God, did Sam make him do that? Did he?
Frantically, Dean turns his attention inward. There are no echoes ricocheting around in Dean’s head, like there were when Sam Obi Wanned him in the car. There’s no coppery tickle at the back of his throat either, although he tastes plenty of fear.
Which means that instinctive flutter of obedience was all Dean.
Horror drenches him—he can’t let himself respond to Sam like that. Not after what Sam did to the world.
What Sam did to him.
How the fuck could Sam ever have thought this would be okay?
Grappling to keep the complete and utter freak-out he wants to have at arm’s length, Dean forces his mind down more pragmatic paths.
No matter how satisfying yelling at Sam would be right now, they’ve moved way past shouting. From what Dean has seen and heard since that night in the graveyard, reasoning with Sam isn’t going to do shit. Dean doesn’t have any instant solutions up his sleeves, either—how can he, when he doesn’t even know what Sam is right now? He has his doubts as to whether there’s even any lore on this kind of thing.
After Sam spilled the beans on his unholy baptism, they spent almost a full week at Bobby’s researching the properties of demon blood and found diddly squat. Bobby burned through all of his old contacts and favors, Sam hacked every database that seemed even remotely useful, and Dean buried his nose so far into musty old tomes he was sure he’d still be sneezing when the hounds came to get him.
What Sam did in the graveyard—drinking the demon’s blood like a frat boy chugging his first beer of the night—might just be more of the same problem, in which case they’ve got bupkis. Or it could be some completely new monster, which would mean starting from square one all over again.
Either way, Dean needs more information. He needs time to regroup, to talk over the ritual in which he unwillingly participated with Bobby, to get some distance between himself and the sting of shocked betrayal.
Which means he needs to get out of here. With Sam’s unconscious and subdued body if possible, on his own if not.
One more look around the room is enough to convince Dean he’ll have a hard time knocking his brother out. The place is more or less bare; Dean’s best option at a weapon is the lamp on the nightstand, and Dean would have to get past Sam to get to it. He’s almost certain that Sam wouldn’t attack him, but he can’t really be sure what Sam would do anymore. Not when he so clearly and disastrously misjudged his brother’s desperation. Not when he’s been so thoroughly blindsided by how far Sam was willing to go to keep Dean here with him instead of playing whipping boy down below.
Which brings Dean right back to the door he was making for a moment ago. Dean doesn’t quite dare glance toward his destination, but he does angle his body in the door’s direction. The shift isn’t much—not more than an altered stance and a slight twist to his torso—but it’s enough for Sam’s eyes to narrow suspiciously.
Clearly, Dean’s going to have to distract his brother in order to get close enough to the door to make a run for it. Add to that his rising need to know where the yellow-eyed demon is, and Dean knows exactly what opening gambit to use.
Keeping his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, Dean asks in what he hopes is a casual tone, “Where’s Yellow Eyes?”
“Which one?” Sam replies.
It’s enough to stop Dean all over again, dragging his thoughts to a halt and drawing unpleasant conclusions in his head.
Black-eyed demons are bad enough—Meg was bad enough, although if Sam is here now and Dean’s memories are to be trusted, Meg at least isn’t a problem any longer. But the yellow-eyed demon was a different breed altogether—stronger, crueler, more resourceful. What Sam is hinting at—that there’s more than one of those sons of bitches, that they’re out and about alongside their lesser kin—is… Well, “disaster” isn’t a big enough word to cover it. Hell, Dean isn’t sure “catastrophe” comes close.
“How many are there to choose from?” he asks, carefully keeping his tone neutral.
Sam smiles in a way that makes Dean’s stomach move unpleasantly. “How many stars are there in the sky?”
That’s so not the response Dean was hoping for. Dean tells himself that Sam’s exaggerating—that he’s bluffing. But Sam doesn’t look like he’s bluffing. He’s sitting on the floor in one of the most relaxed, confident postures Dean has ever seen from him. The expression on his face indicates that he doesn’t care whether Dean believes him or not.
Before the graveyard, Dean would have said that Sam wasn’t that good a liar. He has to second guess himself now, because apparently Sam is good enough at deception to have arranged that little soiree without Dean suspecting anything. He could be lying now. He could.
Dean just doesn’t think he is.
His skin crawls at the thought of that many powerful, evil bastards running around. How many of them are loose? How many are standing right outside the motel room door, waiting to help themselves to Sam’s leftovers. If anything is leftover once Sam is done with him.
Dean remembers that sensation again—those grasping, unseen hands. The sensation of Sam inside him. A threat lurking beneath the pawing caresses—something sharp and hungry. The certainty that Sam was going to rip him apart.
The need for a weapon ripples through Dean once more—stronger this time, more urgent—and even though he already knows he won’t find anything, he can’t help looking around the room yet again. Tacky paintings on the walls with no protective glass to break; armchair and small table too heavy and awkward to lift. Lamp on the other side of Sam. The rumpled, clearly used bed.
Dean doesn’t feel like he’s been fucked, though. If Sam had… If he’d done something while Dean was out, Dean would feel it, right? But he can’t get the thought out of his head, and he doesn’t like how helpless his imaginary self is in that vision, when Sam lets himself into the room and slides under the covers and puts his hands all over Dean’s unresisting body.
This is his brother, the guy he’s been sleeping with on and off again for over ten years, but the feelings of violation and unease that accompany the thought of being touched like that are viscerally strong.
Dean catches movement at the edge of his vision and his eyes snap back to Sam as he rises smoothly to his feet and holds out a hand.
“Come here,” Sam says. His voice is full of the same casual insistence that Dean has gotten used to hearing over the years. Sam expecting to get his way, just like he always does. Sam has never been good at accepting ‘no’s, and Dean suspects that he’ll be even less gracious about them now, so Dean doesn’t offer him one.
Instead, he slips sideways around the not-quite command to ask, “Why?”
Sam smiles the same blinding way he’s always been able to—more of a grin than a smile, really. Open, bright and strangely innocent. It’s the expression Sam wears when he’s feeling particularly happy and content, and Dean doesn’t want to see it now. Not on this lying, betraying, murdering Sam’s face.
The expression tugs at a tangled knot of grieving, hurt love in Dean’s chest all the same.
Then Sam says, “Because I want a kiss.”
Oh, fuck that.
Like Dean’s going to kiss Sam with the memory of that poor girl (Maggie, her name was Maggie) fresh in his head. Like he’s going to kiss Sam after he drugged Dean, and mind-whammied him, and let that yellow-eyed bastard have him—for weeks. Weeks spent chained to that bed while the TV ran constantly and forced him to soak in all of Sam’s crimes.
No, not Sam’s. As hurt and angry as he is, Dean recognizes that this mess belongs to him. He should have seen what Sam was up to. He should have stopped him.
Fuck, Dad warned him about this. He told Dean to watch out for Sam. Too fucking bad Dean was too busy taking it up the ass from Sammy to keep a better eye on him.
Dean struggles with an overwhelming tsunami of guilt for a few seconds and then somehow manages to shove it away for the time being. With any luck, he can keep it away until he’s somewhere he can safely deal with what’s happened. With what he’s done and failed to do.
Right now, he has other things to deal with. Like the fact that Sam is still looking at him expectantly—like that was actually a serious answer he gave.
“Life’s full of little disappointments,” Dean says, and takes another step toward the door.
The smile on Sam’s face fades. His eyes narrow and something—some stray pulse of heat—shifts in the air. Dean can’t quantify the change, isn’t sure what’s causing it, but suddenly the hairs on the backs of his arms and neck are raised and his skin is prickling all over.
And is it just him, or is the golden gleam of Sam’s eyes shining even brighter than before?
Sam opens his mouth to say something and is interrupted by the noiseless pulse of light that blooms behind the curtains covering the window. The shockwave hits the room a heartbeat later, rattling the panes of glass in their frames but miraculously not shattering them. The walls and ground shake, forcing Dean to take a staggering step to keep his feet. Paintings slip their hooks and crash onto the carpet; the lamp on the nightstand falls over. The initial quake calms quickly to a lingering rumble, but the world is still overly bright through the curtains and Sam is still gazing in that direction with a displeased frown on his face.
It’s probably the best opportunity Dean is going to get.
He spins without further thought, sprinting for the door with his hand already outstretched for the chain. Something just exploded out there—bomb, maybe, as unlikely as he wants to believe that is—but it’s got to be an improvement on being shut in here with whatever Yellow Eyes’ blood has done to Sam. Besides, once Dean gets the door open, he’ll be able to assess the situation properly and make his move from there.
Dean has the chain unlatched and the bolt pulled back within moments, sweat beading on the back of his neck from the certainty that Sam must have turned around by now, that he must be approaching, and then he wrenches the door open and throws himself out into—
—Hell.
The sky overhead is red. Dean stares for a second before he realizes that’s because it’s covered with black, twisting smoke, and that the smoke is being lit up from below by fire. So much fire. It looms on the horizon, towering over the buildings across the street and the trees lining the sidewalks and slapping at the sky with twisting pillars of flame. On the corner, almost out of Dean’s line of sight, is a particularly bright inferno—there’s a metal sign rising from the flames, and Dean has time to read CIT- before the sign creaks and crashes down. Gas station, then; must have been what exploded a second before.
He registers the people next: a stream of humanity flowing down the street in a panicked rush. They’re pedestrians mostly, although there are some cars trying to weave through the masses—and one SUV plowing ahead full speed and mowing down people when they don’t get out of the way fast enough. Dean can’t hear the dull thunk of metal hitting bodies, not over the screaming and the roar of the fire, but his mind helpfully adds the sound effect in anyway.
As he stares, horrified, more fire spills into sight, moving along the street from the direction the people are fleeing. It’s even brighter than the rest: drawn out into an elongated serpent shape and blazing a whitish-gold color. The fire spills over the people, it roars through them, and the fleeing mass of humanity seems to boil as those further ahead in the crowd realize the nearness of the danger.
A man cuts away from the street to run for the glass door of the convenience mart across from the motel and a smaller tongue of golden flame lashes after him. It wraps around his waist before he has gone more than a few steps and drags him screaming into the middle of the inferno. More flames pour over one of the creeping cars—Dean sees a screaming family of four inside, and then they’re gone, buried beneath the fire with an almost insignificant sound of shattering glass as the heat blows in the windows.
Another man breaks from the pack to sprint across the relatively empty motel parking lot, directionless in his panic, and is knocked down by an inky, lightning-shot cloud streaming down from overhead. He rolls over onto his back, hands held up in self-defense, and the cloud thrusts past his lips and down his throat. The man is close enough for Dean to see his throat rippling with its passage, to see the black filling up his eyes—a demon, fuck, that’s what that was, and there are more of them shooting down now, moving in and out of the roaring flame.
Dean stares out into the inferno (night? day? no way to tell) and feels nothing more than dull, cold horror. There are kids out there, struggling to keep up with their parents, to keep from getting trampled, and he doesn’t move. His mind is too busy trying to process the nightmare.
An arm wraps around his midsection, yanking him backwards, and before Dean can think to resist, the door slams shut again. The sounds of the screams and the fire cut off in a way that should have been impossible in a place like this, with walls that Dean knows from experience are thin enough to hear each and every grunt as the next-door neighbors pound their bed against the wall. It isn’t even hot in here, although Dean can feel sweat drenching his front—the intense heat outside registering now only in its absence.
Dean’s still stunned enough to be unresisting as he’s turned and shoved back against the door. It’s Sam in front of him, of course, Sam looming over him with eyes the same color as that snake-like fire outside and a furious clenched jaw.
“I said, ‘don’t’,” Sam says, leaning in close with one hand braced on either side of Dean’s head. “It’s not safe.”
Not safe? People are being eaten alive by some sort of living, sentient fire monster out there, demons are whizzing around possessing people, and all Sam can say is ‘it’s not safe’?
Dean’s brain has taken a while to absorb all of that, but he’s getting a handle on it now and he pushes Sam back. Now there’s room to move—room to turn—and Dean does. Dean turns, reaching for the door knob again—he has to get out there, try and direct some of the fleeing refugees, maybe figure out if he can do anything to stop the fire—and something clamps over his body, locking him in place.
“No,” Sam says—snarls, really, and Jesus Christ, that’s Sam holding him still. It has to be Sam. There aren’t any demons in the room.
It isn’t that Dean doesn’t remember being felt up and invaded by his brother’s power when he was chained to the bed. Or that he’s forgotten how those demons literally exploded around him. Or even that Sam hasn’t immobilized him with a word before—hasn’t pulled Ansem’s Jedi mindtricks to keep him complacent while Sam cut him open and painted him with his own blood. But this—this freezing, implacable weight that goes right through Dean’s muscles and into his bones—is still something that he associates with that yellow-eyed son of a bitch.
To have it done to him by Sam is… Fuck, it’s beyond wrong.
And those people. Christ, all those people.
“Let me go,” Dean says, forcing the words out through clenched teeth as his mind races.
Sewers. There have to be sewers under the road out there, and if Dean can get out there, if he can pry up one of the manhole covers, he can maybe give some of those people a fighting chance.
“You promise you’ll stay in the room?”
It’s probably the stupidest thing Sam’s ever asked him, but Dean doesn’t have a moment to waste on a sarcastic response. Instead, he repeats, “Let me go.” He’s using his pissed off, ‘you’re in for it now’ voice this time—the one that’s always been enough to get Sam to back down, except that night in the graveyard, when it suddenly wasn’t.
The same, bitter taste of futility that Dean tasted then floods his mouth again now as Sam’s hand settles on his waist. Sam’s fingers stroke skin that Dean doesn’t even have enough control over right now to twitch.
“It’ll take a few hours for everything to settle down,” Sam says, bumping his nose against the corner of Dean’s jaw. “How about we pass the time together? You could give me that kiss… let me massage some of this tension out of your body.”
It’s too absurd for Dean to really believe. That the world is crumbling apart outside, that people—kids—are dying, and Sam actually thinks Dean is going to be okay with staying in here. That he’s going to make out with his murderer of a brother while the city burns.
It’s not Sam, he thinks distantly. It looks like him and it sounds like him, but no way in hell is that Sam.
But his memories of Sam—all those years of ingrained, instinctual recognition of the man behind him—are too strong for him to believe that. It’s Sam. Twisted and insane, yeah. Capable of only God knows what. But still Sammy. Somewhere.
“How about you let me go and we do our job?” he counters—not a lot of hope in the words getting through, but his mental struggles to free himself aren’t doing anything but exhausting and frustrating him.
Sam sighs, like Dean just disappointed him—like Dean disappointed him, Christ—and Dean feels something brush against his thoughts. Something that burns brighter than the sun and tastes like honeyed fire.
“This is for your own good,” Sam says, and before Dean can reply, everything goes dark.
He wakes up again to silence.
He’s lying on the bed with the rumpled sheets, still wearing nothing but those ridiculous pajama bottoms. This time, there’s no moment of confused disconnect. He knows where he is, he remembers everything, and he jerks upright in the bed with his heart suddenly lodged in his throat.
The lamp that fell over when the gas station exploded is gone. Sam must have cleaned it up before sitting in the armchair where he is now. He has his hands steepled under his chin as he watches Dean, and Dean has the unnerving impression that Sam spent most of the time when he was out doing that.
God, Dean hopes that’s all Sam did. He’s still wearing pants, which is a good sign, but Sam hasn’t exactly been opaque about just why he wants Dean around—asking for a fucking kiss, of all things. Unless… Dean swallows as a new thought occurs to him.
Unless he’s just playing with Dean. Waiting for him to let his guard down just a little bit so that he can laugh when he burns Dean alive the way he burned all those people out there.
The thought doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense, but Dean can’t decipher Sam’s behavior any other way. If Sam really does still want to fuck him, then why doesn’t he just hold Dean down and do it? He could, easily enough, and Dean finds it pretty damn unlikely that a guy can be fine with mass murder but stick at rape.
What the fuck do you want from me? The question trembles on Dean’s lips, then dies unspoken as he notices that the door to the room is open.
Dean can’t see much through it from this angle. It looks dark out there, though. Dark and still.
Maybe Dean imagined the inferno before. Maybe it was nothing but a nightmare. Maybe his year passed and the hounds came for him and this is Hell.
Please, please let this be Hell.
Dean shuts his eyes again—not to sleep, just to consider his options, to consider Sam—and tries not to think about how easily his brother subdued him. He tries not to think about the nightmare (hallucination please oh please) he saw before Sam knocked him out, and what might have happened since to leave such peaceful silence on the other side of the door.
“Go ahead,” Sam says, startling Dean’s eyes open again. “Take a look.”
Sam hasn’t moved, and his face and voice are giving absolutely nothing away, but suddenly Dean doesn’t want anything to do with whatever’s outside. He doesn’t want to fill the blank space in his mind in with reality. It’s like that thing with the cat in the box. Sam tried explaining the concept to Dean one night when they were both drunk off their asses, and while Dean didn’t get it then, suddenly it makes perfect sense.
As long as you don’t open the box up, the cat’s still alive. Even if you know in your leaden, sinking heart that it’s dead.
Dean doesn’t want to look. He doesn’t want to know.
Driven by the same masochistic compulsion that has always forced him to face his failures, he gets up from the bed anyway. He walks slowly, hyper aware of the slight scratch of the carpet against the soles of his bare feet. The pressure of silence against his ears creates the false impression of a roar that quiets only when Dean comes to a stop just inside the doorway.
From here, he can see that the sky is no longer red. It’s black, smoke-choked and charred. By the quality of the light, Dean thinks it might be dawn, although there’s too much smoke to be sure. Depending on how thick the cover is, it might be as late as midmorning. Hell, it might be noon.
At any rate, there’s sufficient illumination to see, and Dean looks across a wide swath of ruin at the gutted bones of the convenience store that used to stand on the opposite side of the street. The street itself and the motel parking lot are pitted with deep runnels that gleam sullenly in the dim light; like the ocean floor reflecting moonlight from miles above. The asphalt has actually melted and been refined to something like glass in the wake of the fire’s passage.
Ash drifts through the air like dirty snow, but the overwhelming smell isn’t of burnt tar or wood. Instead, burnt copper clogs the faint breeze. There shouldn’t be any of that scent, shouldn’t be any blood left to flavor the air after that much fire, but somehow there is. Somehow, there are drying stains everywhere Dean looks—splashes of arterial spray on the ruined crumble of a wall and thick clots stuck to the blackened frame of a hatchback sedan.
And there are demons. There are black-eyed men and women moving over the twisted wreckage of the world like ants on a carcass—picking up bones and melted chunks of metal. Moving bones and metal into separate piles, sometimes tearing fillings from a skull before tossing it in with the other remains.
The rushing roar returns as abruptly as it stopped. The world wavers, then swims upwards, and a moment later Dean’s body jars with the impact of knees hitting pavement. He realizes that he’s kneeling in the doorway, half in and half out of the room. His mouth is dry; his stomach is too knotted for nausea.
This isn’t real. This can’t be real.
But no matter how long he stares at the wasteland in front of him, it doesn’t fade.
The demons are becoming aware of him now, turning toward him and slowly allowing their scavenged spoils to fall from their arms. Dean registers their sluggish approach in a distant corner of his mind—all those beetle-dark eyes focused on him, all that hungry malice—but he can’t make himself move. Dozens—maybe hundreds—of demons are converging on him, and he…
Fuck, let them have him if it means he won’t have to process this horror any longer.
There’s a woman near him now—red hair, slightly overweight. She has a wedding band on one hand, which means she used to be someone’s wife—maybe used to be someone’s mother. Her homely face is twisted up in an enthralled, ravenous leer that makes her skin look like a mask. Her black eyes glitter as she reaches for him.
Fire licks forward over Dean’s shoulder, meeting her fingers and quickly winding up her arm. Her expression doesn’t shift at all as the fire eats through her body, flesh and bones charring to ash. Smoke bubbles out as her body flakes away—the demon within—and strains forward. It’s still reaching for Dean, will do God only knows what when it touches him, but Dean doesn’t even think of moving. The ash from the woman’s body is getting on his face, tangling in his lashes and finding its way between his slightly parted lips, and he can’t think past that fact.
“No.”
Sam’s command crackles through the air along with something heavy and hot, and the cloud reaching for Dean just… it just disintegrates.
Something about that—either the heavy, hot thing in the air, or the sight of a demon crumbling into nothingness—gets through to Dean’s shocked, numbed mind. His thoughts whir to life again just as another demon steps into the pile of ash that the woman left behind. This one is a man, somewhere in his early twenties. He’s staring at Dean like Dean is a whipped-cream bikini-clad stripper with a cherry on top, and Dean flinches back even before another lick of flame spills from the room behind him (from Sam) and attaches itself to the man’s reaching hand like a burr.
This time, it happens faster—fire burrowing into the man’s skin and consuming him from the inside out. No demon emerges from the crumbling ash. Likely because after that tightly contained burn, there wasn’t any demon left to emerge.
More hands reach for Dean, more demons near the open doorway, and Dean hears Sam make a frustrated, furious noise from behind him. A moment later the demons stop—every last one of them, for as far as Dean can see. An extended, frozen silence follows—long enough for Dean to note the same ravenous, greedy expression mirrored on each black-eyed face—and then the demons go up in instantaneous pillars of white fire.
The heat from the closest demons bakes Dean’s skin. The sound of their crackling flesh sears his ears. By now, his mind has caught up enough for his stomach to heave uncertainly at the sight of skin and muscle and bone peeling back into snakeskin-long flakes of ash.
He lifts a hand to his mouth, bending forward so that he doesn’t puke on himself, and is caught by a hand on his arm. The hand—Sam’s hand—lifts him, hauling Dean back inside and slamming the door on the ash and fire-choked world. Dean staggers, his mind only just starting to come back on line, and doesn’t struggle when Sam’s hands pat up and down his body with frantic speed.
“You’re okay,” Sam murmurs under his breath in an absent, self-directed tone. “They didn’t touch you. I stopped them. You’re safe. You’re okay.”
Belatedly, Dean understands that Sam is touching him. Then the fact that he doesn’t want to be touched by Sam right now registers, and he smacks Sam’s hands away.
“Don’t,” he says, and means to follow up with ‘touch me’, but never gets a chance.
His mouth snaps shut under an immense, invisible pressure. The air around his body thrums and hardens, freezing him in place. Some unknown force holding Dean still for Sam, who at least isn’t touching him anymore, although he’s sure as hell hovering close enough to. His eyes are narrowed, gold and glittering and filling Dean’s field of view.
“You’re mine,” Sam says. “I bought you. You belong to me.”
There’s nothing sane in Sam’s voice. There’s barely anything human in his expression, which is close enough to the hunger that Dean saw on the demons outside to make Dean’s skin crawl. He wonders again what Sam wants from him. He wonders how much Sam is going to take.
And there isn’t one damn thing Dean could do to stop him.
I have to get out of here, Dean thinks again, with an edge of panting desperation that he doesn’t care for. The whole situation is too surreal—the world outside, Dean’s own fear, the fact that it’s Sam doing this to him. Dean changed his diapers. Just a few weeks ago, he received a blowjob from Sam that was gentle and tender enough to melt stone—Sam blew him and then, afterward, he cried. Dean held Sam close while Sam kept on saying he was okay, it was just an eyelash.
But Dean didn’t sleep all that deeply that night, and every time he came awake again in the dark room, Sam was wakeful and watching him, like Dean was going to disappear if he looked away for even an instant. Once, Dean even woke to Sam’s hand on his throat—two fingers pressing lightly against his pulse, making sure his heartbeat was steady and even.
That Sam and this one aren’t the same person. They can’t be.
“Tell me,” Sam urges, seemingly oblivious to Dean’s inner struggle to understand everything that has happened. “Tell me who you belong to.”
The pressure on Dean’s jaw loosens and he uses the freedom to ignore Sam’s Crazy and say, “You killed those people.”
Sam looks surprised by the response. He takes a step back, giving Dean some much-needed room, and cocks his head with a frown. “Demons. Dean, you don’t—”
“Not them,” Dean interrupts, although he sort of wants to remind Sam that there were people burning up in those meatsuits alongside the demons. “Before. The—that was you. The fire. And I—I saw the news. Cleveland. Detroit. New Orleans.”
Sam’s expression brightens with comprehension, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t explain everything away like Dean wishes he would.
Dean’s throat tightens with a sudden ache, and he has to swallow before he can add, “You killed that girl.”
And just like that, it’s real. Everything is shatteringly, irrefutably real. Armageddon is here and Sam summoned it up. Hell, Sam is riding at the front on all four of the horsemen’s steeds.
There are no take backs on something like this. Not for Sam. Not for Dean. Not for anyone.
Pain shoots through Dean’s chest—worse, his eyes sting and his vision swims. He’s crying, which he hates to do at the best of times, but fucking loathes right now. Tears are such a useless response in the face of a disaster of this magnitude—there’s already been so much destruction and death, and all Dean can do is stand here wrapped up in what he’s beginning to recognize as his brother’s power and cry like a little girl.
Fucking pathetic.
“I needed a life,” Sam says, his voice pitched at a low, soothing level. “Dean, I needed to save you—”
“Not like this,” Dean insists, his voice choked with the weight of his grief and betrayal and the first faint, hot stirrings of anger. God damn Sam. God damn him for being stupid enough to think this was at all okay. “Not—you should have let them take me.”
Sam is there again, unexpectedly snarling in Dean’s face and gripping his throat with one oversized hand. It’s nothing like the tender, fearful touch Dean was remembering only moments before. No, this is all force and demand and bruising strength.
“Don’t you say that,” Sam growls. “Not ever again.”
“You should have let them take me,” Dean repeats without hesitation. The words come out choked and hoarse past the crush of Sam’s fingers, but Dean ignores the pain in his throat in an attempt to catch and hold Sam’s eyes. He has to make Sam see; he has to get through to him. It’s too late to take those deaths back, but it isn’t too late to stop Sam’s downward spiral. Dean can—he can pull Sam back from this. Sam can pull himself free from the madness, he can set aside his newfound powers, and they’ll—Dean will find some way to put it right.
But instead, Sam makes an inarticulate sound of fury, and his hand tightens around Dean’s throat, and the world blacks out.
Again.
Dean swims back into awareness for the third time with difficulty. It really is like forcing his way up through heavy water—some immense pressure on him, unfocused but relentless. Urging him to stay down in the dark.
It’s whispering to him with Sam’s voice.
When Dean opens his eyes, he’s on the bed once more—on those too soft black sheets that don’t belong with the rest of the motel room. When he swallows, his throat doesn’t seem bruised the way he thinks it should be. As the last lingering threads of darkness fall away from him, he realizes that he isn’t alone in the room.
He can’t be alone, because somewhere close, a woman is screaming.
Dean jerks upright, twisting around in the direction the sound. The instinctive urge to help has tensed his muscles, and his right hand shoves under the pillow for a knife that should be there, but isn’t. Just about the same moment his fingers close on nothing, the view in front of him clicks together like a Magic Eye picture. Dean makes a low, choked sound as his body locks up on him.
It’s the same motel room he already woke up in twice before, but everything is suddenly the wrong color. The entire left ride of the room has gone red and dripping, and there are—there are chunks all over the place. Even at a glance, Dean can tell there’s too much meat to belong to one person. Someone’s ribcage is on the dresser, a scalp is stuck to the far wall, and Sam is… Sam’s…
“Another,” Sam snarls as the screaming finally trails off into a gurgle. He straightens, turning around—turning toward the demon, where the yellow-eyed bastard is standing at attention with its back against the door. There’s a curved knife in Sam’s blood-slicked hand.
Dean gave Sam that blade. Dean gave it to him for his fourteenth birthday, Dean spent two years teaching him to use it in a fight, and Sam just—he—
Dean isn’t aware of having done so, but he must make some sort of noise because Sam’s head twists around. Sam’s golden eyes peer at Dean from beneath a mask of scarlet.
And then Sam takes a step forward, reaching, and Dean’s mind backpedals in horror. It jerks sideways—seeing Sam like this is too fucking much; he’s opting out. Jesus, he can actually feel himself losing it.
“No,” Sam says hastily.
Golden warmth loops around Dean’s mind and hauls him forward again. When his mind tries to slide sideways around the loops, they pull tighter, keeping him present in the room, and sane, and forcing him to comprehend that his baby brother, the love of his life, is standing in the middle of his butchery with the knife Dean gave him clenched in one hand.
Dean can’t be here. He can’t. He fucking can’t.
This time, his mind jerks at Sam’s hold, twisting and writhing in the direction of the insane abyss he senses yawning just out of reach. The sensation of being wrapped in gold redoubles. The gold smothers him, clinging to his thoughts and making them heavy. For a long moment, actually, there are no thoughts at all. Everything just stops. Dean’s brain stops, his lungs, his heart, and death sweeps near to take him.
“Too much,” the demon’s voice comes as the room fades—tinged with panic for some reason, now why would that be?
The gold immediately withdraws at the rebuke—not completely, but enough for the room to lighten, and for Dean to involuntarily gasp in a breath. His heart kicks in his chest, starting up again. The power suffocating his mind unravels somewhat, keeping a firm grasp on Dean’s sanity, but easing just enough for him to think through the golden glow.
“He was—he can’t go,” Sam says. He sounds young suddenly. Confused and scared and petulant with his own fear. He sounds the way he used to, back when he was just a kid insisting there were monsters in his closet and Dean had to stay the night. “Keep him here. I need him.”
I’m right here, Sammy, Dean thinks, before the situation reasserts itself and he remembers that he can’t protect Sam from what’s happening. He can’t protect him from himself.
“You’re doing fine,” the demon says. “You just need to learn a little more finesse, kiddo. You’re packing more of a punch than you’re used to.”
“He’s mine,” Sam insists, sounding just as confused but less frightened. The glow lessens again, giving Dean enough of his sight back to see that Sam’s attention is fixed on him. The knife is an afterthought in Sam’s hand; he seems to have forgotten he’s even holding it.
“Yeah, slugger,” the demon says in a soothing voice. “All yours.”
It moves away from the door a step, moving closer to Sam, and Sam’s eyes flick toward it. He moves, shifting his body closer to the bed—putting himself, Dean realizes muzzily, between Dean and the demon. Sam’s body is half turned away from him, but Dean can see enough of his brother’s face to note the defensive snarl on Sam’s mouth.
“He’s safe from me,” the demon says, keeping its hands in plain sight and its movements slow. “You know he’s safe from me. Come on, Sam. Use that noggin of yours.”
Sam’s head tilts to the side in a startlingly animalistic gesture and then, slowly, his lips uncurl. He gives himself a full-bodied shake, sending blood and—is that lightning?—off of his skin in a splattering shower. His hand moves on the knife with fresh awareness.
“What—” Sam says, and then stops. “What was that?”
“You’re still adjusting,” the demon tells him. “And you’ve been indulging yourself. There are bound to be a couple of rocky moments until you finish sorting everything out in that oversized brain of yours. It was better this time, though, wasn’t it?”
Sam shakes his head, like the answer to that question is ‘no’, but he doesn’t actually speak. He looks down at the knife in his hand, then over at the mess he made out of the left side of the room. As his attention wavers, his hold on Dean slips further, giving him enough control over his body to shift against the soft sheets.
“You want another one?” the demon asks as it sidles even closer to Sam. “I’ve got a waitress just outside. She looks like a real screamer.”
Oh, fuck.
“’am,” Dean manages, forcing his brother’s name out through numb lips. “No.”
Sam pivots with a smooth, graceful motion unlike anything Dean has seen from him before. His eyes seek Dean out, pinning him to the bed beneath their considering weight, and then Sam nods.
Not at Dean, though. Dean can tell that much even before his brother’s mouth curves in a terrifyingly bland smile.
“I need this, Dean,” Sam says as the demon unobtrusively lets itself out of the room. “You upset me, and I need this now.”
“That’s right,” Dean agrees. It’s easier to speak this time—Sam consciously easing up on the compulsion even more or Dean’s efforts working through it. “I upset you. Me. You want to tear into someone, I’m right here.”
Sam stares at him for a moment, expression unreadable beneath the blood, and then comes forward. Dean means to stay still and accepting—he asked for this, after all—but his survival instinct kicks in and he thrashes beneath Sam’s power. The weight on him immediately increases, a sensation that only prods him into more frantic attempts to escape. He strains violently enough that he feels one of the muscles in his shoulder tear with a horrible, sharp spasm of pain.
His body hasn’t moved at all. He hasn’t even shaken the mattress.
He’s trapped. Trapped and staked out in front of Sam’s advance like a rabbit before a ravenous wolf.
Dean’s breathing shifts into something harsh and low. He can smell himself sweating, an instinctive fear response to the bloody figure’s menacing approach—to the knife still dripping scarlet beads onto the floor. Part of him—a big part of him—can’t believe this is happening.
That’s Sam over there. That’s his little brother, Sammy, who couldn’t handle gutting deer on a simple hunting trip and had to go puke behind a tree while Dean and Caleb dressed the kill. That’s the kid who used to turn oversized, limpid eyes on Dean whenever they arrived on the scene a day late and a dollar short. That’s the guy who spent almost a solid night crying because he had to put down a doomed werewolf in Frisco.
But Sam killed that girl in the graveyard no sweat, and she was just a person. She wasn’t evil or infected or possessed. He’s killed more civilians since—thousands of innocents at a conservative estimate. The sheen of blood covering him makes for a pretty good argument that, whoever Sam may have been in the past, the demon’s blood has transformed him into a monster more than capable of turning a blade on his own brother.
Sam is standing over Dean now, extending the knife toward him. Dean’s helpless to do anything but watch as the dripping blade comes toward his face. He can’t even flinch as it comes to rest against his cheek. The metal is warmer than he thought it would be—from the blood coating it, of course, and more of that blood is dribbling down on Dean’s skin. It trickles along his jaw, down the side of his throat.
Dean squeezes his eyes shut and swallows carefully, trying to screw up his courage. He won’t scream. He isn’t going out like some panicked civilian.
But the vicious sting of parting flesh doesn’t come. Sam is just holding the blade there, resting the flat of it against Dean’s cheek. When it finally moves, it traces over his skin only lightly—a faint scrape that makes Dean’s arms and the back of his neck break out in goosebumps.
“You really think I could hurt you?” Sam asks in a quiet voice.
There’s heat riding the words—not anger, but something even more terrifying. Something low and intimate. Something Dean isn’t prepared to see in Sam when he’s like this, after he just finished butchering someone—several someones, from the amount of carnage splattering the room. It’s there anyway, though, and Dean can’t ignore it because Sam’s power is sliding over his chest and stomach in a warm, heavy caress that leaves no room for Dean to doubt his intentions.
Dean envisions the rumpled bed again in his mind, and his gut lurches. Fuck, is this what Sam wants him for?
It might not be the only thing—probably isn’t; even in the midst of his unsettled fear, he understands that this new Sam wouldn’t have any problem finding someone to get his rocks off with—but it’s at least some of what Sam wants from him. The only question, really, is how this Sam wants it. And how many pieces Dean’s going to be in when he’s done.
He swallows again, trying to keep still as his mind frantically searches for a way out of here. The knife on his face keeps getting in the way, though, and the heavy press of power over his front, and the ghost of Sam’s breath over Dean’s mouth.
Fuck, Dean thinks. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck—
“Look at me.”
Looking at Sam is pretty much the last thing Dean wants to do right now, but he also isn’t going to argue with the psychopath wielding the pointy object, so he forces his eyes open reluctantly.
Sam is bent close enough for Dean to discern features beneath the blood mask. Being able to recognize his brother so clearly makes everything worse, and Dean forgets to worry about himself as his insides knot into a tangle of rage and guilt and low, keening grief.
He should have noticed what his deal was doing to Sam. He should have stopped Sam before it got this far. He should have offed himself before Sam got within a thousand miles of that damned graveyard.
Why the fuck couldn’t that crossroads bitch have made it an even trade?
“I could never hurt you,” Sam says once he sees he has Dean’s attention. The knife tip trails down from Dean’s cheek onto his throat. “I’d cut out my own heart first.”
Dean blinks away the mental image of Sam doing just that and hurriedly replies, “You are hurting me. This—what you’re doing here—this is hurting me. You have to stop. Just—just put down the knife and let’s talk.”
Sam blinks and the pressure of the blade, already tentative, becomes feather light. Hope blooms in Dean’s chest with a deep, bruising ache—Sam’s listening; Dean got through—and loosens his muscles as Sam stands up.
“You’re right,” Sam says.
Oh thank God.
“Great,” Dean breathes. “Great, okay. So just let me up and we’ll talk this over.”
Sam nods, lifting the arm with the knife and wiping his forearm across the bridge of his nose. With his arms just as red as his face, the motion doesn’t do much to clean anything.
It takes Dean a few moments to get that the force holding him immobile hasn’t let up at all.
“You have a lot to absorb right now,” Sam says as Dean starts to lose his happy thoughts again. “This is—this is too much for you.”
Behind Sam, the door to the motel room opens to reveal the demon. The son of a bitch is gripping a girl by the arm. The girl is bound and gagged and wearing a waitress outfit—one of the old diner uniforms, with the skirts and the aprons. She has brown hair and mascara-smeared, wet eyes. She’s pretty.
And probably not a day over twenty.
Sam doesn’t turn to look at her, but he hasn’t put down the knife, either. He’s looking down at Dean, waiting for him to get it. Waiting for him to understand what’s about to happen.
“No,” Dean protests. As the demon drags the girl into the room, he fights to move—if he can just stand up, he can—he can do something. Anything. “Sam. Sam, don’t.”
“Next time,” Sam says coolly, “Maybe you’ll think twice before pissing me off.”
“No,” Dean blurts. “No no no no. Don’t. Sam—”
“Go to sleep, Dean,” Sam interrupts, wiping the flat of the knife as clean as he can get it with a corner of his shirt. “I’ll finish up here and then we can have that talk you wanted.”
The girl has gotten a good look at the room now, and she’s screaming loudly enough that Dean can hear her through the gag. His head spins. Helpless panic and horror stain the inside of his mouth with a metallic, coppery flavor.
“No,” he says, working his way up to a shout of his own. “You son of a bitch, don’t you do this. Sam. Sa—”
The black rolls up and sucks him under before he can say any more.