(no subject)

[wouldbeking]

It was a dark and stormy night.

Heavy wind whipped the black, roiling clouds into slow descending circles. Rain and hail drove down like knives, and lightning arced from cloud to cloud in furious tongues.

A garrison of angels stood in the road. They inhabited human vessels, men and women and even teenagers in sober business suits, slowly soaking in the rain. Lightning licked down to curl around their intangible wings, steam sizzling up around them, and the shadows they cast on the ground were massive and strange. Though they stood with perfect calmness, many of their faces were gray and lined as if from illness, their clothing torn and disheveled. A handful had wicked red lines of infection crawling from jagged puncture wounds, bleeding black. Snake bite, if a snake of such size ever existed.

Facing them was an equal number of demons, black eyes reflecting the lightning strikes. Their hosts were not as uniform, every variation of age and size, but they were fresher, no wounds, no drawn and exhausted faces. Several of them had silhouettes that shimmered like a heat mirage, rain sizzling off their skin and breath steaming unnaturally in the chill air. Their eyes were not black but gold, red, and white, and scarlet light spilled around their edges.

The angels stared their ancient enemies down, expressions cold to furious to challenging, looking past the trappings of the victimized human host to the true forms underneath. The demons smiled back knowingly and licked their fangs, flaunted coils and claws only visible in lightning shadow. The row in the front merely waited, radiating a satisfaction older than time, as any angels attempting to meet their gazes found themselves shifting back, flinching away from what they found.

Save one.

At the head of her garrison, Anael stood silent and without expression, sword in hand and red hair nearly black with rain. Her wings were mantled invisibly, extended to their widest span and forming a useless barrier between her subordinates and the creatures that leered at them all like so much fresh meat.

She did not want to be here. Her angels did not want to be here, and she could feel every subtle restless shift in their collective Grace. It was wrong, against every instinct in her being to stand still and not attack, to hold and wait for orders with a demon in sight. Summer was ending and they had been ordered back to this place again and again to defeat an enemy that could not be defeated, the son of Lucifer, who refused to fulfill his destiny, who could (and had) simply banished them back to Heaven with a snap of fingers when they tried to face him. The window of opportunity, if that was the correct word when applied to the impending end of the world, was closing swiftly, and some part of Anael could understand Michael's steadily increasing wrath. There had been war for eleven years, clashes over seals claiming angelic lives, and centuries of cold war before that, and this was to be their chance to unleash the full fury of Heaven on every creeping, crawling demonic entity clinging to the surface of the planet. Like any of the Seven Archangels and the Seven Princes of Hell, Michael was forbidden to descend to Earth with his full might and take part in battle until the destined moment, forced to delegate his campaigns to lesser angels and watch as they were hurt, tricked, and killed.

Anael understood the frustration of a general forced to stay behind the lines. She understood the promising lure of revenge, his eagerness to take up arms with his own hands again and finish a duel that had always been personal.

She lifted her chin higher and stared into the colored eyes of one of the Fallen, who smiled as if it knew her thoughts.



Behind her Uriel was trading teeth-baring smiles with one of the largest demons, stance battle-ready and his sword waiting just out of view. He didn't see the larger picture. He believed that they were awaiting the order to charge, that the demons they faced were had been sent here as a last .



and Balthazar fidgeted subtly under the rain, encouraging it to stream away from his bare skin where his vessel's clothing didn't protect. Sandwiched unwillingly between them was her garrison's youngest, blue-eyed and stoic and silently disagreeing with his placement, Uriel with a shoulder edged in front of him, Balthazar stationed at his flank.

He didn't understand the protective arrangement. Youth was relative amongst angels and he was battle-proven like the rest of her soldiers, had shown himself to be unflinching and reliable in combat. But a good soldier didn't question orders, and Anael had no wish to volunteer an explanation.

There were no explanations for this.

Lightning struck the pavement between the two groups, buckling it. Demons threw up hands to shield their eyes, flinched away and hissed, while the angels faced the flare of light without reaction.

Two archangels stood up from the ruin of the street. Not any of the Four, but two that had been elevated from the lower ranks to fill the gaps Gabriel and Lucifer's absences had created and take up the duties they had abandoned. The Messenger and the Tempter.

Djibril looked out sternly at the assembled supernatural entities. He wore no vessel, having no intention of taking part in the coming battle, but had shaped his insubstantial form into something vaguely humanoid for the occasion anyway.

"IT IS DECIDED," he declared in his true voice, a noise like a thousand bells and storms. Demons flinched back from it and blood ran from the ears of every vessel and host.

"TO SERVE THE DIVINE WILL OF HEAVEN, THERE WILL BE ALLIANCE BETWEEN ANGELS AND DEMONS ON THIS NIGHT. THE SON OF LUCIFER HAS REBELLED AGAINST ALL OF US. HE AND HIS CREATURES WILL





































































































It was a different dream this time. Same place, different day. A dark and stormy night. Thunderclouds gathered low and furious in the sky over a city in the distance, and he was simply there observing, floating high above the scene and in the middle of it at the same time.

He watched with detachment as the red glare of a fire lit up part of the city, sirens only just starting to shriek. On the ribbon of dark road, a vintage black car sped determinedly away from it. Despite the darkness the driver was wearing sunglasses and a furious expression, and kept glancing aside worriedly at his passenger, who wore tweed and stared fixedly at nothing. His face was a study in misery.

The pair did not speak.

The car hurtled through the night like a comet, breaking every speed limit twice over. No one stopped them. No one even seemed to notice them, other traffic obligingly pulling over, all surrounding eyes suddenly blank and oblivious for the few seconds the black car passed near.

It was silhouetted, very faintly, with red light, and headed steadily south.

The man in the passenger seat seemed to pull himself together a few miles outside of the city. He looked up as if for the first time, faintly astonished to find himself where he was, and blue eyes eventually worked their way over to his companion.

"Did you--"

"Yes," the driver cut him off, too quickly, gaze fixed on the road. "Don't mention it."

"But--"

"No, seriously, do not mention it. I don't want to think about any of the last twenty minutes."

The dreamer heard these exchanges as clearly as though he were in the vehicle with them. The voices were ones he'd never heard before and had at the same time, strangers and bosom friends both. They changed with every dream. They were the same in every dream. It wasn't a contradiction while he was asleep.

The man in tweed blinked, opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and closed his mouth again.

"Where are we?" he asked his companion instead.

"Still too far out for safety, Ezra, so you'd best stop broadcasting if you don't want them to pick up our trail."

"Cro-- Er." 'Ezra' stopped himself with an effort. "Anthony," he tried again, tongue shaping the name cautiously like a particularly difficult foreign word, "if they managed to track us in the city, hiding behind false Names isn't going to stop them for much longer. If it was ever in the first place."

"It makes me feel better," Cro-Er-Anthony hissed, well aware of that particular fact.

The man whose name was not Ezra looked out at the passing landscape miserably. "I never thought it would come to this," he said softly, after long moments had passed. "I never thought they would go so far."

"Angel," Anthony said patiently but not unkindly, "you knew exactly how far they were willing to go. Part of you always did. They're your people, after all."

Ezra bit his lip. "I really don't think they are, anymore."

They kept on in silence until the rain started. The driver ignored his windshield wipers as thoroughly as he ignored any notion that heavy torrential rain might impair his ability to see.

He also ignored the fact that the lightning strike in the middle of the road should have caused them to crash spectacularly.

His passenger's shout was lost in a storm of curses as the car did a 180, tires squealing uselessly on slick pavement, brake pedal slammed to the floor and not doing a bit of good. The red light around the car flared momentarily and then winked out, replaced by a blinding silver and blue flash.

The car shuddered to an implausible stop. Arms still clutched around the wheel, Anthony looked up, his glasses cracking right in half and falling away from his face to reveal yellow eyes with snake-slit pupils.

There was a man in a gray suit standing in the middle of the road, staring back at him wide-eyed through the rain and windshield glass. Steam rose around him from where the pavement had been superheated from the lightning, and his hand was outstretched. Silver flickered briefly across his palm before he let his arm fall.

In the passenger seat, Ezra guiltily let his own hand fall at the same moment, shaking a glimmer of blue out of his fingers.

"You lot," Anthony snarled, putting his head down on his forearms and trying to remember how to breathe, "have got to stop doing that to me."

The man-- boy, really, quite a bit younger than either of them-- was already making himself comfortable in the backseat, apologetic and pale in the light of the storm. He was tall, baby-faced and hazel eyed, with sideburns and nape length hair darkened and slicked back in the rain. He looked like a college kid in his first suit, shoulders hunched, uncomfortable in his charcoal tie and patent leather shoes and slate gray overcoat.

The dreamer wondered vaguely, and not for the first time, what his reflection was doing in these dreams as a different character. It wasn't him, because he was watching, still floating and still right in the middle of all of it like a witness, but it was his face, his voice.

"I'm so sorry," the newcomer was babbling, dripping all over the car's interior much to Anthony's poorly concealed irritation. "There wasn't any time to be more careful, I came as soon as I heard--" He cut off suddenly, furrowed his brow and tilted his head in an almost bird-like action. "...are you two using different Names? I can't quite feel--"

"Yes, yes," Anthony snapped without raising his head. "Incognito. Clandestine. Concepts you've clearly never heard of."

"What have you heard?" Ezra interrupted anxiously, twisted around in the passenger seat to face their guest.

Who bit his lip in an unconscious echo of Ezra's earlier performance, and spoke quietly. "They won't listen to reason. I've done everything I can to stall, but. They're mobilizing all the garrisons. Everything they've got."

Ezra and Anthony both absorbed that bit of bad news. It being expected didn't make things any better.

"Well." Ezra's hand had somehow found its way to one of Anthony's, and his bright tone was at odds with his crushing, desperate grip. "Nothing unexpected at this point, is it? We knew a stalemate couldn't be kept up forever."

"I'm sorry," the young man offered helplessly. "I just. I'm so sorry."

This should have been someone's cue to tell him it wasn't his fault, that he'd done everything he could, but no one did. Anthony had unwound himself from the steering wheel and was staring straight ahead, back ramrod straight, and he did not let go of Ezra's hand.

"When," he asked very calmly, for the both of them.

"Now." The young man in the backseat looked up as lightning forked across the sky with a dozen tongues, striking the earth in the distance in a dozen places.

Somehow, through the roof of the car, his gaze locked with the dreamer's, who watched all of this with the sinking feeling that this was about to turn into a nightmare, and he knew what was coming, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

"It's happening now," his reflection told him gently, desperately, sternly, all at once, and his voice was less like a voice than a peal of bells and a thunder crash all rolled together. "It's time."

"It's time."








*****








"It's time," Jessica whispered in his ear, and Sam woke up.

The sun wasn't up yet, their room still quiet and drawn with shadows. Sam's pillow was mashed down from his cheek and he knew he'd have a red mark on his face when he got up, that Jessica would trace it and snicker, run her fingers through his wild shock of bedhead. He'd kicked off the sheets sometime during the night, or Jess had. The air was cool on the bare skin of his arms.

"It's time for what," he muttered back sleepily, not bothering to open his eyes. He didn't want to look over at the clock on the bedside table and be reminded what time it was, on what day, forcing his brain to reorient itself to obligations and responsibilities and things he didn't want to think about when he was comfortable and lazy in bed. Instead he rolled over, reaching out so he could crush Jess against him, burrow into her warmth. She always laughed when he did, when he curled up small to press his face against her collarbones like a child, though he towered over her, and she would tuck his head under her chin and stroke the hair that curled at his nape.

She wasn't there. The sheets were cool under his spread fingers, and he was fully clothed, jeans and jacket and shoes, and it was a different day.

A drop of something warm and wet spattered against his cheek, just before Sam opened his eyes to the ceiling, knowing exactly what he'd find there (what he'd found there), and started screaming.








******








"It's time, Sammy-boy," Azazel crooned in his ear, and Sam woke up.

The restraints around his wrists jangled as he automatically tried to come off the bed, lunging forward, but Azazel smiled his shit-eating smile and simply stood back, waiting.

"And here I thought we were making progress. It's time for your medicine, kiddo."

He was holding a syringe full of bright red liquid.

Sam sank back against the iron bars of his bed, breathing hard and disoriented. He didn't recognize the room, white and spacious and nothing he'd ever seen before in his life. His clothes were white, soft undershirt and drawstring pajama pants. No socks. His wrists were bandaged and he was wearing hospital issue restraints, leather straps and silver buckles, and Azazel was looking down at him fondly, eyes human normal.

"Do you know where you are?" he asked, sounding honestly curious.

Sam gritted his teeth. His wrists ached fiercely, not from bruises from the restraints, but the sharp deep pain of a greater injury. He knew what it looked like. He looked like a suicide attempt.

"Where's Dean?" he snapped back, instinctive, fighting down panic. He couldn't trace his steps here. His brain was still fuzzy from sleep, he couldn't remember the last place he'd been before this except back in his room with Jessica, but that was a dream, and before that the storm and the car and the man in the gray suit who wore his face...

Azazel sighed. Sam had never heard him sigh before.

"Sammy, Sammy." His voice was chiding. "We've been through this. You don't have a brother named Dean. You're my son, you live here with me and your other adopted siblings, and this is where you've always been." His eyes flashed yellow. "You're in training for our very own Miss America pageant. Remember that?"

And that was the problem, Sam did remember, he remembered a sprawling mansion in California and a ridiculously wealthy man that wasn't a man raising twelve adopted children (eight now, only eight left), twelve very special children with unique powers, and there were images from it in his head, Ava-and-Jake-and-Andy-and-Ansem-and-Lily-and-Scott rolled up together into a hot mess labeled 'siblings,' because they weren't really siblings when they were competition. Ava controlled hellhounds now, and Jake could shatter concrete with his bare fists, and Ansem never had any blind spots to exploit because he kept his twin in his shadow like his own personal golem, unsleeping, and Lily's entire body was fatal to the touch now, not just her hands, and only when she wanted it to be, and Scott could call lightning down without being hurt by it.

None of that compared to what Sam could do, though. Not when he was juiced. What was in that syringe was medicine, the very best kind, the kind he couldn't live without anymore, and he'd been drinking it or shooting it or even snorting the dried powder version since he was old enough to shave. He had a girl, sometimes blonde, sometime dark haired and dark eyed, who existed simply to supply him. His empty stomach clenched in sudden yearning.

But buried underneath all that, there was another life. Dean and Sam Winchester, hunting, Stanford, Jessica, his brother, his human brother, yelling and cursing and murmuring his name for eighteen years.

Azazel watched him struggle with it, still smiling.

"Well," he said philosophically when it was made clear that Sam wasn't going to answer, "you know the score. You can choose not to get better and get your head back in the game. I told you that you would start to see time differently once you really got going, you're not built like the others. You've got a thoroughbred bloodline, Sammy. When you burn, you're gonna burn hot."

"Don't call me Sammy," Sam bit out. It was the only response he could manage.

His captor, his father, laughed. "You're not ready for your real Name yet, kiddo." He approached the bed again, only smiling wider when Sam instinctively flinched back, restraints chiming, and grabbed Sam's wrist with a grip like a steel vise, extending his arm enough to expose a vein.

He whispered a Name in Sam's ear at the same time the needle slid in, and Sam screamed like his lungs were being torn from his chest at the silver peal of it or from the rush of red sparks devouring his brain, or both.

The world went away for a little while.





























Dean was gray underneath his tan, eyes unfocused and leaning too heavily against Sam's side when they checked into the motel. The clerk gave them both a look that encompassed a thousand lectures about drunks and/or drug addicts, even started to open his mouth until Sam let his face close down and shifted his weight the right way and drew himself up to his full height. Doing so transform him from baby-faced college kid, shoulders unconsciously hunched when he walked into a room to camouflage his height, to six feet four of cold-eyed, game-faced and implacable Winchester. Specifically the kind that kicked doors down and didn't appreciate comments from strangers.

The clerk quickly re-assessed some life decisions and slid the keycard over without a word instead. Sam gave him a tight smile, something Dean would have done, just to watch his expression stutter, and then felt like a bastard for it. He hated the moments on the job when he got to see himself switch categories in someone else's eyes, from familiar and conventional to unknown and dangerous Other. Dean shifted gears between the two easily but Sam remembered their father sometimes, when he'd let that nice guy civilian mask slip right off and there'd be a soldier underneath, the kind still on the frontlines, not sure what he was still doing being polite to someone not part of their life when there was something somewhere that needed killing.

The clerk made some excuse about only having a king left on ground level, which was probably a lie, but one Sam didn't care enough about to dispute. He had the keycard in hand and was off down a hallway before the man had entirely finished his sentence.

Hanging off his side like a rag doll in a leather jacket, Dean muttered into his shoulder about how he was good to keep going, he'd even let Sam drive for a while, just needed a nap, while Sam tried to navigate keys, duffel bags, mysterious humps in the carpet and semi-conscious brothers. A woman at the vending machine in the corner gave them an alarmed look, at least until Dean inadvertently pushed his face into Sam's neck, eyes closed and lips parted. Her expression went carefully blank.

Sam ignored both of them. He bent down further and shouldered more of Dean's weight, counting doors in the watery hallway light. It felt more like a familiar routine than Sam ever wanted to admit to himself, the way Dean's hands caught and dragged at his jacket, the rasp of his breathing in Sam's ear. The obligatory Dean Winchester stupid protests.

"Sammy, 'm fine, I don't need--"

"What you need is a blood transfusion," Sam ground back, teeth clenched around the strap of a bag so he didn't have to let go of a badly listing Dean. He felt Dean shake his head but they were at the room, with Sam fiercely wishing for reliable telekinesis and flimsy keycard cheerfully resisting all attempts to jam it into the reader. The lock finally clicked and Sam shoved the door open with his foot, moving blindly forward into darkness until he hit the edge of the bed.

It's just bloodloss, Dean had argued, flippant like he'd just suffered a deep cut instead of having had his veins nearly sucked dry by a djinn. No hospitals, he'd said adamantly, no stopping, not while they were still on the run, except that they were always on the run. Dean was the first to fuss like a mother over Sam's injuries, even the ones that weren't really injuries at all like the migraines that accompanied his visions, but of course Dean had no goddamn self-preservation instincts for himself. Sam finally stopped sneaking sideways glances at Dean's pallor and put his foot down (actually his hand, closing over Dean's on the wheel) when the Impala's tires crossed over the dividing lines for the third time. It was a testament to how shitty Dean had been feeling that he'd even agreed to pull over with a minimum of bitching, let Sam drive long enough to find them a place to stop for the night, although he kept insisting in five minute intervals that they didn't have to, he was feeling so much better, etc etc.

Dean went face first onto the bed like a sack of potatoes, inspiring a muffled grunt. Dean's duffel hit the floor, and Sam's messenger bag, and then Sam's jacket before Sam groped his way to the wall and found a light switch.

Dean didn't look any better in the light. His skin was the color of ash against the dark green comforter and he lay exactly where he'd fallen, not even squirming into a more comfortable position. The place on his neck where the needle had gone in was still faintly red and swollen. A djinn lovebite. A tiny price for all the fantasies that might have kept him asleep forever. Healing, though, all of it healing just as quickly as anyone could hope for on a young, healthy body, but Sam had seen Dean in a coma, gunshot, stabbed, mauled, poisoned, sick with fevers ordinary and occult, and every time he looked at Dean it was like he could see the overlay of all those old injuries, every place that had become a scar.

Once upon a time he'd thought Dean was indestructible. Once upon a time he'd been so sure that Dean and his father were immovable objects in his life, absolute facts that everything else had to bend around.

He knew better now. Nothing was absolute, and Dean least of all.

The air conditioner was turned up too high, as it always was in places like these, the air in the room a good ten degrees colder than the outside hallway. The curtains were drawn across the far window that would have looked out on the parking lot, heavy things meant to block out headlights. The sound of traffic was faintly audible in the distance.

Sam sucked in a breath of too cool air and forced his mind blank, staring at the weave of the curtains. Then, very calmly, he began a mental checklist of what supplies he would go out and get tomorrow, because they were going to stay here until Dean could be awake for more than two hours at a time without a fit of vertigo, even if Sam had to hide the Impala keys from him. Iron-rich food. Vitamin C and E. Coconut milk, and he'd pour it down Dean's throat if he protested. Sam moved the bags to where they wouldn't be tripped over, rummaged for the weapons he wanted at hand. Knives under the pillows, silver and iron, handgun in the drawer of the bedside table on the side he'd be sleeping on. Dean usually took the side nearest the door, always the guardian, but he'd just have to deal with the role reversal this time. Salt lines. Flasks of holy water within reach. Everything was automatic pilot, little rituals from childhood, relearned until Sam could perform them half-conscious. And had.

He kicked off his own shoes and crossed to the bed to do the same for Dean, patiently unlacing his boots and tugging them loose, letting them drop to the floor before starting in on the rest of Dean's clothes. It said something about their lives that Sam was practiced by now at shucking his invalid brother out of what he was wearing, efficient as a hospital orderly and hating himself for the clinical relief that Dean wasn't bleeding everywhere this time. Forensic clean-up was a bitch and a half even when they weren't wanted by the FBI. He left his brother in t-shirt and socks and boxers, still on top of the covers, and Dean woke up enough to help him with the jeans, squinting muzzily against the soft light of the table lamp when he squirmed onto his back to lift his hips for Sam.

Sam could hear his own words echoing in his head, telling Dean how the job was worth it. That he was glad Dean had found the strength to dig himself out of the djinn's fantasy playland and come back to his real brother in the real world.

Yeah. So Dean could curl on his side and look tiny on the king size bed, dark circles under his eyes and skin drawn over his cheekbones, too dizzy to stand or walk straight or even drive his own car, not protesting someone manhandling him because he was so used to it by now. Because his paranoid survivalist instincts went completely out the window around Sam, whose psychic visions had oh so helpfully not shown him the danger his brother was in, as they had failed to do time and time again. Who had panicked unattractively when Dean didn't come back to the motel that night, imagining him cornered by the cops, shoved against the hood of a squad car, imagining him dead in an abandoned building somewhere, imagining him fighting for his life against another demon or even against a gang of hunters, men looking for Steve Wandell's killer. There were a thousand possible endings to Dean's story these days, and ever since the accident with the rawhead Sam had a crystal clear picture of each one. It was the sort of thing he used to not think about. Now, after all the shit they'd been through, it was all he could do to stop.

"Sammy," Dean said clearly, and Sam glanced over to see the Impala keys and the room card and the spare change from his pocket and one of the flasks of holy water all about to shiver their way right off the bedside table, which was rattling faintly. Dean's eyes were open, watching him.

They didn't talk about this. The visions weren't something Sam could hide, even if he wanted to, not when they struck him in broad daylight and cut his legs out from under him like a repeating heart attack, and Dean had gotten really good at coming up with various medical conditions on the fly that would explain fainting spells in a grown man. For a long while Sam hadn't even been allowed to drive the Impala except in emergencies, except he'd slowly acclimatized or something, and the visions that used to lay him out only brought on migraines instead of unconsciousness. But every now and then he'd still find himself jerking awake in a library, or on a sidewalk somewhere, his head pillowed on Dean's jacket or cradled in his lap and Dean's upside down face peering worriedly at him.

It was something they'd learned to live with over the course of two years. By now Sam knew that it was just one more thing Dean considered his older brother duty: watch out for Sammy, make sure Sammy doesn't crack his head open on concrete when he faints during his freaky ass psychic epilepsy fits, hide Sammy's mutant superpowers from paranoid hunters. Psychics were somewhere on the order of witches, in the opinions of the general hunting public, there were good ones and bad ones, and some people didn't believe in taking the risk of finding out which.

The visions and the premonition nightmares scared Dean, but only because the yellow-eyed demon and then John Winchester implied that their presence would somehow take Sam away from him. Missouri had been a psychic and Dean had never doubted her humanity. Dean would ask every now and then if Sam could tell the difference, if his abilities were somehow being induced artificially by a spell or something, like they could still simply go away if the right conditions were met. As if Sam had any idea what natural psychic abilities felt like versus artificial ones. He'd had nightmares as a child, the same horrible shit about monsters and his family in danger, but Dean had the same ones (and what children with their backgrounds wouldn't) and nothing specific from them had ever come true. Sam used to sleepwalk and say things that he wouldn't remember once awake, but all of that had been normal kid stuff. At least, no one had told him any different, and he'd grown out of all of it eventually.

But he'd finally told Dean that yeah, sometimes it felt like being cursed, which Sam had meant one way and Dean had taken another. If that gave Dean some comfort, fine. It left Sam in relative peace to practice the telekinesis that he absolutely did not want his brother knowing about. They'd yet to run into a 'natural' psychic that could move things with their mind, but every single demon they'd ever encountered had cheerfully and maliciously demonstrated the ability.

Keeping it a secret worked out just fine, since Sam was apparently really awful at bending spoons and 99% of the time there wasn't anything to actually keep secret from Dean. It wouldn't come to him. Not like the time with Max, when the vision had shown him Dean dead on the floor and he'd felt something rising in him like a tidal wave, pushing everything else aside, pushing his own self aside, somehow. Like what had moved that wardrobe wasn't even him or his own desire.

It had felt like something unfurling, something cold and alien and not him, and he hadn't been able to recreate the feeling since, not even the next time Dean was in danger, or the time after that, or the many and sundry times Sam's own life had been on the line. Part of him didn't actually mind that he was failing. He still woke in a cold sweat sometimes, remembering the feeling of being swept aside in his own body, making room for something else. After Meg he knew what possession felt like in intimate detail, and while that had been astoundingly unpleasant, it wasn't the same feeling. Demons didn't share headspace. They dominated, dug their claws in, and they didn't subside back into nothing when they were finished.

Meg had been strange with him, though. Using a binding link like she was worried about being forced out of him prematurely, although she knew damn well that experienced hunters would be able to recognize it, would see it as a sign of possession faster than anything Sam might do to give it away, and more to the point they'd know how to deactivate the lock. There wasn't much chance it would have actually deterred an exorcism once the element of surprise was gone. Sam had asked Bobby about it, but Bobby only had apologetic looks and speculation to offer. Dean's explanation was that Meg was a sadistic bitch and who knew why she did anything except to fuck with their family, and unfortunately that was actually pretty valid.

In any case, practicing secretly with the telekinesis had gotten him all of nowhere, until the day he'd woken up in the hospital after the car crash. Crammed into the chair in Dean's room despite the unsubtle hints of the nurses that he should find a hotel close by, that he'd be notified the moment Dean or his father woke up, Sam had jolted awake from a nightmare to find every object not nailed down scattered all over the linoleum floor. Coffee cups, pens, even the pages of Dean's chart. The bed and medical equipment had remained untouched, thank god, but Sam had quietly freaked the fuck out until he discovered that Dean was playing poltergeist and facing off with Reapers in the spirit dimension or whatever, and then logically and gratefully attributed the incident to him.

Then it happened again.

In a little no-name hotel in a little no-name town, Sam dreamed of Andy Gallagher and killer cell phones and woke with pain splitting his skull, and found himself at the epicenter of a small explosion. Books, clothes and tacky motel decorations all swept to the floor like a child had thrown a tantrum, one chair on its side, and Sam had tripped over the damn thing trying to make it to the bathroom before he puked up the nothing in his stomach.

His brother, fortunately, had been more concerned with Sam's insistence on heading to the Roadhouse than the state of the room. Dean didn't put it together until the next nightmare struck. It wasn't even a premonition, just a routine horror, Jess whispering Sam's name in the dark and then fire licking everywhere, and unseen hands holding him down to the bed so he could burn with her. Sam had woken up to Dean yelling his name and a bucket of cold water to the face because the windows were rattling and the lamp was on the floor, and with all the salt lines Dean knew it was coming from inside the room.

They'd stared at each other in silence, Sam in bed with the sheets twisted around him from where he'd struggled and Dean still holding the ice bucket, lips compressed thin and green eyes too wide.

They didn't talk about it. It came and went with the nightmares, never escalated to anything more than a chair knocked over or small objects on the floor or their piles of police reports getting shuffled around. It was more like leaving a window open to the wind and not being surprised in the morning when a few things had blown around, except that they were Winchesters and Dean didn't suffer motel windows to be left open for any reason.

They found out it didn't happen when they shared a bed, which probably said something about their lives.

Then, after the Trickster, it started happening when Sam was awake, just as the nightmares had escalated to the daytime visions. Things moved when he was upset, sometimes, except even with his practicing it never amounted to much more than a pencil rolling off a table when Sam got pissed enough. It wasn't strong enough to be useful. He could barely lift an empty paper cup and it gave him nosebleeds and dry heaves to try. Dean hadn't said a word, hadn't asked any questions. He wanted to, Sam could tell, but he was afraid to hear the answers, and Sam could tell that too. Dean just pretended not to see it going on under his nose, the way he always did with shit that he didn't like, and Sam didn't volunteer anything. He'd gotten good at that.

Dean still believed Sam's visions only numbered in the dozens, and that Sam told him about every single one.

In their single room just past the Illinois border, the bedside table continued to shake, rattling lamp and keys and spare change and flask, and Dean was still staring at him.

"It's alright," Sam managed, dragging in a lungful of air. "Just give me a second, it's alright--"

Dean rolled his eyes. Still on his side, he reached back to grope blindly in Sam's general direction, snagging his shirt and yanking him forward until Sam had to put one knee and a hand on the bed for balance. The fingers of Dean's free hand wrapped around his wrist, solid and warm.

The table stopped shaking. Sam exhaled carefully.

"What would you do without me," Dean grumbled into the pillow, back to half-asleep in the space of five seconds. Sam chose not to answer that out of pure self-preservation and gave in to the second yank on his shirt, sliding in behind Dean fully clothed, aching forehead pressed to the nape of Dean's neck. He smelled like the Impala and the leather of his jacket and a bit of gunpowder and mostly like Dean, like Sam's oldest memories. The feelings of uncomfortable self-consciousness and/or shame and embarrassment that he kept waiting for whenever they did this failed, yet again, to make an appearance.

Sam risked a bloody nose and a violent churn of nausea to shut off the air conditioner and the lights with a thought, putting his nerves to use. Then the room was cool and dark and safe, salt and silver at his back and Dean's even breathing slowly calming his own until they matched, until Sam's hand crept traitorously over Dean's hip and found bare skin like a security blanket.

He slept unwillingly.

Not even a week later, in a one room cafe on the side of a dirt road, he got his answer to Dean's question.










******









































































































































Sam woke up in chains, again.

The ceiling above his head was unfamiliar, or at least the particular thirteen sided sigil cut into the old wood was unfamiliar, but that was no surprise these days. His prison (their prison, he had to keep reminding himself), a ruined mansion in the middle of what looked like an old frontier ghost town, seemed to keep growing new rooms and passageways no matter how he and the other children explored.

Given the nature of their captors, the mansion probably was growing new rooms. Demons weren't exactly bound by architectural constraints.

The manacles around his wrists were ancient black iron, the chains flaking rust where they'd been wound around the thick posts of the old wooden bed. They protested noisily when Sam struggled experimentally and he stopped at once, listening as hard as he could in the silence.

No demon or ghost could have touched cold iron long enough to chain him up like this, and Sam had gone to sleep in another part of the mansion, the tiny corner he and the others had claimed for themselves, where the furnishings of certain rooms were inexplicably brand new and the gas lights worked and there was hot water. It had taken them a week to reluctantly settle in, get the escape attempts out of their systems and realize they had no choice but to congregate in the only building that somehow had a stocked pantry and an icebox full of perishables. Both refilled themselves when depleted. They never caught sight of what exactly was doing the restocking.

The forest surrounding the town would not let them leave. When they tried, no matter what direction they picked, they'd find themselves stumbling out of the thick vegetation a few hours later and looking at the town again.

Ava hated the mansion. Hated its sprawling silence and the occult sigils cut into every open surface and the ghosts that clearly inhabited the place, the flickering lights in dark corridors and the cargo elevator that ground to life in the middle of the night, ferrying nothing. Hated the doors that opened to brick walls, and staircases that went nowhere, the windows set into the floor and the daisy pattern everywhere and the clocks that were all set to 1:13. Ava had been here the longest, several months to Sam's five weeks, and the girl who had come to rescue him from her premonition had all but disappeared behind the new Ava's cynical and occasionally ruthless armor. There'd been other children like them, she said. Some tried to escape. Some instantly set on each other like rabid dogs, obeying the rules everyone received in their dreams on the first night. Use their powers. Prove their strength and capability. Please the Master, and be rewarded. Ava learned how to defend herself but half the time, she claimed, she didn't need to lift a finger against any of the strangers. They underestimated her, left her for last, and killed each other instead. She would win by default.

Sam's group was the first that knew each other, or at least knew each other via Sam. Andrew Gallagher, Ava Wilson, Jake Talley and Lily Baker. Scott Carey should have been with them. They were also the first group that chose to work together, also via Sam and his impassioned arguments for cooperation. Sam had his hunter background, Ava had experience with the terrain and with what would be thrown at them (demons, poltergeists, specially imported monsters, the occasional individual psychic child convinced that murder was an express ticket out of the arena), and Jake was soldier enough to keep a cool head under pressure and acclimatize to another shithole full of things trying to kill him.

Andy stuck close to Sam because he had no choice, his mental powers made him the weakest link around things that weren't vulnerable to mind control, and Lily wanted nothing to do with any of them but couldn't bear to be on her own. Together, somehow, they were surviving.

The silence outside the closed door to the room wasn't telling Sam anything. He could have been captured by a rival child or a rival team, there'd been signs of fresh arrivals a few days ago. He could have been brought here and chained by a monster, something immune to iron and intelligent enough to lay him out as bait. Or it could have been the work of a demon, pressing an ordinary human into service as Sam had since learned they did now and then. The mansion was covered with devil's traps and wards of a thousand varieties Sam had never seen, lines cut into the ceilings, the floors, the walls, woven into the rotting curtains and the rugs and even into the windows. Many had been broken by the advance of decay but many more were still perfectly functional, and Azazel wasn't about to let something like that get in his way. He'd sent ordinary humans in after them before, some hard-bitten mercenaries paid to play monster, some civilians apparently regularly employed by demons calmly relaying messages for their masters. The few completely clueless, innocent humans brought in by forces beyond their understanding didn't make good couriers, as they tended not to get past the mansion's natural defenses of trap doors and winding, labyrinthine hallways.

Azazel could, of course, communicate with any of them directly through their dreams, but he didn't or couldn't do it when they were inside the mansion, which was another reason they'd chosen to take up residence there.

Sam gritted his teeth and concentrated. He wanted his lockpick kit. Actually, he wanted a lot of things, specifically his brother and generally to not be here at all, at the mercy of Azazel's idea of gladiator training, but he would take his kit or a timely brotherly rescue over trying to work the rusted tumblers with his improved but still very limited telekinesis.