Chapter Text
The words hang in the air. Sam turns his face away. This is too much; his breath is already straining in his lungs, his hands starting to shake where he’s clenched them by his sides.
“Unless I missed something,” Azazel says, his voice sharp with a curiosity that almost approaches concern. “Did he?”
“No,” Sam says. “He didn’t.” Didn’t try himself. But had told Dean, save him or kill him— and Sam had thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, of course when he found out about the demon blood. When he thought that he was just tainted, monstrous, instead of essentially nonhuman. That would be justification enough—and if John had dug deeper, somehow figured out that Sam wasn’t even really his son, that he was the kind of creature that nobody had seen since fucking Biblical times—honestly, Sam would expect even more of a response then. Something he could clearly point at.
But he couldn’t know for sure, and that’s another glass-shard uncertainty he doesn’t need digging into his brain right now.
“I see,” Azazel says, clearly unconvinced. “Well, in the end what he did or didn’t know doesn’t matter. He’s out of the way now, and we have to move on.”
Sam bites his lip and tries to breathe, still staring at the distant stars. Heaven, he thinks, is the only silver lining so far. Fallen angels meant those that hadn’t fallen, implied God. There had to be some good out there, to counterbalance all this bad; even if Sam wasn’t part of it.
“Aren’t you expecting some kind of fight?” he says. “Now that the Devil’s Gate has been opened.”
“They’ll send a messenger soon, sure.”
Sam blinks, turning around. “Heaven will just… send a messenger?”
“Kiddo,” Azazel says, “I would love to give you the rundown of the current semi-peaceful state between Heaven and Hell, how we arrived at it and exactly what disruption is considered sufficient for a formal state of war, I really would, but I’m going to be honest here: You look like your head’s about to explode. I’m gonna call an end to questions tonight.”
Sam grits his teeth. “Fine. But,” he adds, as Azazel begins to turn away, “can I—” He grimaces, hating to do this but needing to. “Can I ask you for something?”
Azazel tilts his head. “Sure.”
“A journal. Something to write in. And a pen or something.”
Azazel smiles faintly. “You’re gonna start keeping hunter’s notes now?”
“Can I have it or not?”
“Of course you can,” Azazel says. “I’m just teasing, Sammy.”
There’s that unwanted, upsettingly genuine tenderness in his voice again, that brings to mind you’re my favorite and it always had to be you and in my mind, it was worth it. Like the greatest hits of everything Sam once wished he could hear, monkey’s-paw twisted into the one place he didn’t want to hear them from. Sam refuses to meet his eyes.
“I’m tired,” he says. “I’m gonna go back to the hotel.”
“Of course. Get plenty of rest,” Azazel says, “you’ll need your strength tomorrow.”
Sam’s too mentally fried to feel more than a mild sting of apprehension at that.
It’s only after he’s retreated to the room he’d woken up in that morning that he realized that he should have asked whether the outside world was getting destroyed right now—although with Azazel, who definitely seemed to be the guy in charge, here, that seemed unlikely. Unless there were other fallen angels out there, directing the rest of the demon army.
That was another unanswered question—where were the other fallen angels? Azazel was the only demon of his level that anyone had ever encountered, to Sam’s knowledge. John hadn’t mentioned traces of any others—although at this point Sam was beginning to think that John could have personally talked to God and he wouldn’t have filled Sam in on it.
Wherever they were, Sam couldn’t answer the question himself. Stranded out in the middle of nowhere with no laptop and no books, he felt like he was going to go crazy just from the need to do some research.
And despite how tired he was, he can’t make himself close his eyes. It’s the toss of a die whether when he does, he sees Cold Oak—Ava’s vicious expression, Lily and Andy’s dead faces, Ava’s neck snapping under Jake’s hands—or heard Dean’s voice echoing in his ears, he said I’d have to kill you.
But Dean hadn’t. And he hadn’t taken the perfect opportunity he had to just let Sam die; he’d had to bring him back, and bind himself to Hell in the process. And now Sam was the one left alone, and the Gate was open, and the Colt was in Azazel’s hands.
If John had known what Sam was, Sam thinks bitterly, he should have just let Dean know. Then maybe Dean would’ve decided he wasn’t worth saving.
When a tap comes on his door, he turns his head listlessly toward it. “What?”
He’s expecting Amy, but it’s Ruby who opens the door. “Hey again.” Coming inside, she hip-checks the door back into place; she’s carrying a thermos in one hand and a satchel under her arm.
“What are you doing up here?” Sam asks.
“Don’t sound so unhappy to see me, I come bearing gifts.” She hefted the items she was holding, then held the thermos out to Sam. “Amy thought you might turn down anything more substantial, so she made you some kind of protein shake thing. And I’ve got your journal.”
Sam takes the thermos; his stomach is clenching unhappily, but he knows he does need to eat something. “You got it already? That’s…”
“Quick service? Well, the king said to get it ‘soon’, but I already had a blank one to hand, so I thought I’d just see if it was what you needed.” Ruby opened the satchel and dug into it. “First thing I do when I’m topside—okay, first is that I usually get some french fries, because they are amazing and there are no french fries in Hell. One of the many reasons it’s Hell. But the second is getting myself a book or two, and the essential ingredients for a few spells. Feel naked without ‘em.” She gives Sam a little smile that makes him feel uncomfortably close to blushing, and holds out a leather-bound book. “Here, take a look.”
He takes it, surprised at how sturdy the leather feels, and opens it; it opens almost flat, and has creamy white, unlined pages. “This is good,” he says, surprised. “Uh, a lot nicer than the stuff I’m used to working with.” One of the words she’d used finally snags against his brain, makes him look up. “King? Is that—do you mean Azazel?”
Ruby shrugs, her face expressionless enough he can’t tell if he’s noticed something significant or utterly unimportant. “Higher-ups have a lot of different titles,” she says. “His name’s a little more significant than mine, Sam; I wouldn’t use it casually even if it didn’t burn my tongue.”
“Even—oh, because it’s an angelic name?”
“Got it in one,” Ruby says, and smiles again.“You really are smart.”
Sam closes the book. “What, have you heard a lot about me?”
“Oh, all good things. I’m one of the few privileged to know about what you are, for one.”
Sam snorts. “That counts as a good thing?”
Ruby arches an eyebrow, digging in her bag again. “What, you’re seriously going to have angst over the fact that you’re half angel? You’re living the dream life of every repressed fifteen-year-old who listens to too much symphonic metal.”
The laugh that jerks out of him is more about shock and reflex than humor. “You are aware that like… everyone around me has been killed, right? Not exactly a dream life.”
“Okay, but, ” Ruby says, finally finding what she’s looking for, “consider this: I also brought you pens.”
His snort of laughter is a little more genuine this time, much to his dismay. Meg had seemed sweet too, he tried to remind himself. Normal and funny, until she got what she wanted and turned into a fucking nightmare. On the other hand… if Ruby liked him, or was even pretending to, he might get more answers out of her. He clears his throat. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” She drops a couple of pens in his hand—again, higher quality than the ones he’s used to picking up from Wal-Marts and gas stations, and he wonders what stationary store she robbed on her way here—and glances at the door. “I should get back. The king has me on a big project.”
“Let me guess,” Sam says, “it’s secret and you can’t tell me details?”
Ruby scrunched her nose apologetically. “I mean, I can tell you that I’m looking for someone. And they are… ugh, they are really goddamn hard to find.” She winks at him. “You wanna dream up a vision about wherever they’ve gotten to, I’ll owe you one.”
So she also knew about his visions? How closely had demons been watching him, and for how long? He tries to conceal his unease. “I can’t have them on command.”
“And I can’t give you deets, so it would be useless anyway. It was a joke, oh my Prince. Is that all right?”
“Fine, I—don’t call me that.”
Ruby quirks an eyebrow. “Sure, but you should be prepared to hear it. Or—god, what’s that other nickname that’s been circulating. Boy King. Not everyone knows the details, but everyone knows you’re important, Sam. You’re going to have to deal with that.”
Sam swallows, looks down at the journal in his hands. It suddenly feels way too small for all of the things he needs to outline, figure out, compile. “Right. Yeah.”
Ruby hesitates, half-turns toward the door, than turns back. “Hey, sorry,” she finally says, her voice softer. “I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, Sam.”
The sympathy is more jarring than her jokes, but against his better judgement he finds himself relaxing a little under it. He nods without looking at her.
“You’re having trouble sleeping?”
Sam can’t help but laugh. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t sleep anymore,” Ruby says. “Well, I can… sort of, but it takes effort, and time. A luxury few can afford. But I can help you with it.”
He tenses reflexively, half expecting her to come on to him or something, but she just heads over to the breakfast-bar area where he’d talked with Azazel—God, that morning, whicb now felt like a few lifetimes ago. She drops her satchel, opens the top, and starts pulling out bottles and little plastic bags, which she lines up. Then a square of purple cloth. Sam cranes his head to the side and finally gets up, overcome by curiosity, but by the time he reaches Ruby’s side she’s already gotten her pile of leaves and dust into the center of the cloth, and is dumping her ingredients back in her bag.
“You’re a witch?” he asks. She’d said ingredients for spells, but he’d assumed they would look more… demon-y, somehow, not like average back-garden kill-your-husband witchcraft.
For some reason that makes Ruby’s shoulders tense. “Demon, Sam,” she says. “You can do magic without being a witch. A lot of witches borrow their power from demons.”
“Okay, sorry, didn’t mean to… offend you, for whatever reason that offended you…” Sam watches the pile disappear as Ruby bundles it up in the purple cloth, and without thinking finally takes a sip from the protein shake he was still holding on to. It was almost shockingly good; maybe he was more hungry than he’d realized. “So what is this?”
She ties off the bag and turns to him, holding it out. Sam awkwardly tucks the journal under his arm—thank god he’d at least left the pens behind—and accepts it, only wondering afterwards if he should have been more careful. Probably not; he could number on one hand the amount of ways his situation could get worse.
“When you’re ready to sleep, put that under your pillow,” Ruby says. “Should knock you right out.”
His skin crawls, instinctively, at having a hex bag in his palm, but he hides the reaction. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” She scoops her bag under her arm, smiling at him from under her lashes. It’s definitely flirtatious, but Sam chooses to ignore that for the moment. He doesn’t have time to deal with… that, even if he didn’t have to worry about whatever poor girl the demon had hijacked. Ruby’s smile slips just a little, like she’s not used to getting a reaction, but her tone is bright and unaffected. “Well, I gotta get back. Things to do, people to find.”
“Right.” He hesitates, then goes over to open the door for her. She might be trying to manipulate him, but he could make a stab at manipulating her right back, even if he’d never had much practice with it. She’d seemed genuinely charmed when he was polite to her earlier.
The chivalry gets him a small, surprised smile before she leaves, so he chalks that up as a possible win. In a weird way, the situation reminds him of his first weeks at Stanford—the overwhelming strangeness of everything, the way he’d abruptly traded in fighting monsters for trying to hold a conversation that passed as normal. How itching-out-of-his-skin wrong everything had felt until he’d settled down, rationalized life there as his new normal.
With a chill, he wonders if in a few weeks all this will seem like the new normal.
To chase away the thought, he turns to the journal. Some notes he makes easily—things to research, questions to ask, items he’s already learned—and some he lingers over, coming up with a simple code in his head before writing them down. He has no doubt that Azazel or someone else will look at the journal in time, and doesn’t want them to be able to read everything. He finishes the protein drink while writing, almost without thinking, and the nagging pain in his stomach eases.
When he’s got it all down on paper, the facts are still miserable, but he feels better for having them in neat lists and entries. It makes him feel like this is some kind of learning experience; something he’ll come out the other side of.
When he lies down, he still struggles to close his eyes, and after a minute he reaches for Ruby’s hex bag. It feels wrong, using it; like he’s some dumb civilian that’s going to wind up cursed. But it smells sweet and spicy under his pillow, and the moment he gingerly puts his head down his eyelids get heavy; and when he finally closes them, Cold Oak doesn’t wait behind his eyes, and neither does the crack of the Colt in that dark cemetery. Just blackness, warm and soft and welcoming.
When he opens his eyes, suddenly, in Bobby’s house, he knows immediately that he’s dreaming. One moment there was just the dark silence of deep sleep, the next he’s standing among familiar battered bookcases, sagging tables that he’d left fingerprints on as a kid. He can hear Bobby in the kitchen, talking to somebody on the phone. He takes a deep breath; he can’t smell anything, but his brain can fill in the faint stink of metal and gasoline that runs underneath everything, overlaid by the heady dust of herbs, the musty sweetness of old books, the strange ozone-chemical scent of salt spread again and again in doorways.
He turns his head, both hoping and fearing that he’d dreamed Dean as well, but there’s nobody there. Resigned, he walks toward the kitchen instead; even if it’s a dream, he wants to see Bobby alive and well. He hasn’t had many lucid dreams before, but he hopes his lucidity means it won’t turn sour. The least the world can give him right now is a lack of nightmares.
Bobby is facing away from him, on one of the numerous phones. “—omens, can’t separate ‘em from each other,” he’s saying, voice more tired than Sam’s ever heard before. “All we know is that nowhere’s safe, nobody’s safe.” He pauses for a minute, then hangs up the phone. Another one rings, and he picks it up. “What?” he says, and then something comes through that makes him flinch and hang up. “God damn it,” he mutters. “God fuckin’ damn it.”
“Bobby?” Sam says cautiously. God, this feels so real he’s starting to get unsettled.
Bobby jumps, turning around. “Sam?” He stares at Sam in the doorway for a moment, eyes wide; then his face falls, his shoulders relax. “I’m dreamin’,” he says quietly. “God fuckin’ damn it.”
“ You’re dreaming?” Sam says, confused. “But I’m—”
Bobby stares at him again, and Sam stares back, and Sam realizes, all at once. “I’m in your dream ,” he says, wondering. “How—”
He thinks first of the hex bag, but that makes no sense. The second explanation comes to him a moment later. Azazel had appeared in his dream to speak to him; was this something Sam had inherited, something that had lain dormant until he was stressed enough to use it, like the telekinesis? All in all, it didn’t matter right now. “Bobby,” Sam says urgently, “this is a dream, but I’m really talking to you, I’m still alive. I’m okay, just—stuck. Really stuck. I’m trying to find a way out. Are you and Ellen okay?”
“What the fuckin’ fuck, ” Bobby says quietly, which Sam can’t really blame him for, and then, “All right, nine out of ten chances this is all my imagination, but if it ain’t—we’re okay, Sam, we’re somewhere safe. Not here, I just keep dreamin’ I’m back.” He hesitates. “Considering what’s going on, there’s also a chance you ain’t you, so I’m not going to give any other hints as to location.”
“No, that’s fine. That’s smart.”
Bobby hesitates. “If you’re… is Dean still alive, Sam?”
Sam opens his mouth, stops. Yes but no. Yes but I’m going to fix it. Yes but I literally sold myself to a demon to bring him back, so it’s all gonna be okay, and by the way I’m not human.
“I think so,” he finally says. “I—I hope he is.”
“Sam,” Bobby says, “where the hell are you?”
Before Sam can answer, something jerks through his body, something that feels like a shockwave. His vision wavers. He wildly grasps at the dream, but it shreds into pieces; Bobby’s face, lined with worry, dissolving into the shadows of the old hotel room. Sam rolls his head sluggishly to the side, seeing in the blurred corner of his vision that something has jarred the pillow on his bed, pushing the hex bag out from under his. Doggedly, he squeezes his eyes shut again, trying to force his way back to the dream.
Pain spikes behind his left eye, and determination dissolves into fear.
No. But new images are already blooming into the darkness, each accompanied by a fresh wave of nauseating pain; not a dream, but a vision. Fragmented and scattered, like he’s grabbed at random and found a dozen broken pieces.
There’s somewhere dark, somewhere that gleams in places with a sickly red light, and then it’s all bathed suddenly in the most intense white light he’s ever seen—
There’s Azazel with the Colt in his hand, outstretched and pointed at someone, his face blank with cold, placid rage—
There’s a girl—Jo, he realizes as she looks up, Jo with her face oddly dreamy, sitting in the middle of a room full of corpses—
Metal scraping. White light again. Jo with her teeth bared. The report of a gun. Ruby kneeling on bloodstained ground, her hands folded as if in prayer.
A woman he doesn’t recognize, her stomach soaked in blood, propped up against a decrepit altar. She looks up, and her eyes are full of strange light, and she extends her hand.
He becomes dimly aware that he’s shaking, that he’s sitting up, and that somebody has an arm around him and a hand on his forehead. Their touch seems to be draining away the pain, and he pushes into it thoughtlessly, shivering at the cool emptiness left behind.
As his head clears, he realizes that it isn’t just him shaking; the room is, and there’s a conversation being held next to him.
“—two minutes, tops. Obviously we weren’t prepared for this level of—”
“Yeah, they didn’t need to send a fucking cherubim to carry a message,” Azazel says, and Sam is quickly, unpleasantly fully awakened by the realization that it’s him standing next to Sam, half-holding him with a hand on his forehead. “They’re throwing their weight around. Raphael’s probably behind it.”
“What should we tell them?”
Sam tries to extract himself from Azazel’s hold, which he seems somewhat reluctant to break. He finally does, however, taking a step back and looking at the other person in the room, who turns out to be Ruby. “Send ‘em to Lilith,” Azazel says. “Pick whoever looks most like cannon fodder to tell them, but they’ll have to accept that. If they ask where I am, just tell them I’m busy.” He glances at Sam, frowns. “First thing after this, we’re teaching you how to fly,” he says, then turns back to Ruby. “We’ll need a door, sweetheart.”
Ruby nods, like that makes sense. “Of course. Where to?”
“Ramiel.”
She nods again, and heads for the door, stopping in front of it.
“What the hell is going on?” Sam asks, pushing himself to his feet as another shock reverberates through the house.
“Heaven’s sending a more powerful messenger than I anticipated,” Azazel says, eyes on the window as if he expects to see something coming, “and I’d rather not risk them recognizing what you are just yet. The longer they think you’re just a seer, the easier this is going to be, and you could probably still fool the rank and file, but a cherubim… You and I are going to make ourselves scarce.”
Ruby coughs and says, “Almost done.” Her voice is thick, and when Sam looks at her he finds bile rising in his throat. The doorframe is smeared with blood now, a thick line around the perimeter and symbols around the outside of that, and Ruby is still fingerpainting more, hand going back again and again to her own throat; out of sight, but Sam knows what he’d see if she turned around. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, offers up a silent, bleak little prayer for the girl that had owned the body Ruby stole.
“Who’s Ramiel?” he asks, more to distract himself than anything else.
“Somebody I hadn’t planned to contact just yet,” Azazel says, and there’s an odd edge in his voice, almost like he’s… nervous? Sam opens his eyes and stares at him, but he can’t get a read on his expression in the semidark. “But if Heaven’s going to come out of the gate with the big guns, well. There’s nowhere safer to be at the moment, and we’ll have a chance to enlist his help going forward. Two birds, one stone.”
Ruby crouches to paint a last symbol, then stands up and puts her hand on the door, murmuring something.
“Is he another—”
“Yep.”
Another shockwave rattles through the building, and Ruby’s murmuring gets faster. The blood around the door lights up with a sickly glow.
“Why isn’t he already on your side, then?”
“Long story.” Azazel’s voice is definitely tense now, enough so that Sam bites his lip against further questions. “Ruby—”
“Done.” She steps back, turns around. Sam averts his eyes from the gash in her throat, the one she’s pinching closed with her fingers. “We’ll deal with the situation, sir. I’ll contact you when it’s resolved.”
“Good girl.” Azazel steps forward, lays his own hand against the door. Something shifts in the air, tugging at Sam’s skin with its wrongness. “Sam, come on.”
Sam hesitates, for just a brief moment. Angels had to be the good guys, he thinks. Maybe if he stays here—
But Azazel opens the door, which now leads to an early-dawn-dark patch of grass and sky, and says without looking at him, “That’s an order, son.”
Sam follows him across the threshold just as white light begins to pierce through the window. The last thing he sees before the door slams shut is Ruby shielding her eyes from it, wincing.
Then the door ceases to exist, leaving them both standing on a gravel road in yet another place Sam doesn’t recognize.