Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

MAY

Death stared at the scene before him with more interest than he’d given anything in the last millennia.

Before him, frozen in the space between time, the space where Death does his best work, are two archangels, finally in their vessels, the ones the angels and demons had been creating for generations.

Death knows these archangels because he was there before they were created.

Even he is unsure of whether Light and Darkness came before or after Death because Death could not exist without either, but he remembers being there when they came into being.

And as time stretched on, their creations became smaller and smaller in his sight.

Lucifer, like a mayfly in the breadth and depth of Death’s understanding and consciousness, was so small—and yet he had power over Death.

And Death, well, after all this time, it would be hard to say that he is petty, but more so that he has so little love for creation that every extra annoyance can be deemed an embarrassment and atrocity.

So, he gave the ring.

Bacterium. That’s what the Winchesters are to him.

And yet.

The bacterium is taking over the incessant, annoying mayflies.

Interest. Intrigue. Curiosity.

No longer familiar feelings. Still, as he looks upon the two archangels, wrapped in chains of souls and determination, his interest slowly, unfathomably, changes to admiration.

For eons, Heaven and Hell have fought, desperately, over souls. Over the fate of the humans that they both have detested.

Because the Light and Creation, when they knew that they would soon leave their angelic creations to themselves, had left behind a way for the angels (and consequently, the demons), to continue in perpetuity without their presence.

How else would heaven, the home of the angels, keep power? How would the angels hold sway or even avoid death without feeding on the energy and light of their creator day in and day out?

After all, everyone, even Death, needs to feed on something.

But the Creator made beings that were a nasty, awful mix of jealous, needy, and fully dependent. Perhaps the Creator thought that given a few millennia, the angels would finally learn to rule themselves, learn to think.

But they hadn’t made them that way.

And so began the millennia of work to fulfill the final words of the Creator—and to what purpose? To be able to decide which of the parties would have the joy of destroying God’s gift of life to them. Little did they know or understand that the destruction of the human race would also be the destruction of themselves.

Humanity could live, gladly and happily, without the presence of heaven or hell, but could not die simply and consistently without them. Heaven and Hell could not live without the souls of the humans they so detested, and thus would die a slow and painful death without them.

As Death gazes upon the bacterium and the mayfly, he considers the nature of symbiosis.

He walks to the body of Sam Winchester, follows his gaze to the car, to the body of his brother. Death peers through time, watches in slow motion as Dean Winchester wrestles back a force actively feeding on his soul and traps Michael in bonds of his own creation, sealing that which would, to a human mind, constitute a mouth, shut, sewing stitches of pure will to keep angelic lips closed.

He watches Sam Winchester, soul already battered and bruised (Lucifer never could be kind to of any of his Creator's favorite creation, after all), surge forward, a force of his own, battling back a sea of grace with bare hands and holding his own, pushing it back and back, until Lucifer has been subsumed, drowning in the power that is flowing through Sam Winchester.

And Death, who began and saw the universe become, smiles.

He walks forward, holds out a hand to take again his ring, united with its brothers. He separates the rings, returns his own to his finger, and steps away.

It’s about time that the power of human souls is realized by the heavens and earth and depths below.

Bobby was not supposed to be alive. Hell, neither was the entirety of earth. But the himself thing was a little bit more personal.

He sits silently in his study, attempting to take it all in, with some help from his liquor cabinet.

Michael and Lucifer, the greatest threats to humanity, are in his basement. They’re in Sam and Dean.

According to Dean, Michael is just there. In his head. Silenced, somehow. Bobby hasn’t even tried to research for this one—he knows there’s no point. They’re in unexplored, world-ending levels of new territory.

And damn if that doesn’t make it worse. If they had a clue what was going on, there’d be hope. As it is, all they have is a vague promise from Castiel that he’s ‘working on it’.

With another swig from a slowly emptying bottle, Bobby turns to look at the clock. A few hours past when lunch probably should’ve happened, but he’s been busy fielding calls from other hunters, trying to get the scoop on what the angels and demons are up to now that the apocalypse has stalled out, and adding the wards that Castiel had suggested to the walls of his house.

Getting upright takes more effort and old-man grunting than he’d like to admit, but he makes it to the kitchen and starts piecing together some sandwiches with the last of his lunch meat. He balances the two plates and a couple of plastic water bottles in his arms and starts a slow descent into the basement.

Bobby has to put the plates down to unlock the panic room (funny, he thinks, that he’s not used the lock in the direction he’d anticipated using it most). He takes a peek first, through the slat. Sam and Dean are in their usual spots. He feels a slight pang of relief run through him as he unbars the door and swings it open. Sam—Lucifer—had flown off again last night. Bobby had been woken up to the sound of Dean shouting for him, praying loudly to Castiel. Sam had come back blue in the face, shivering. Castiel had dropped him off with barely a pause to tell them that things in heaven are not going well before flying off again.

At least it seems like Sam’s recovered from the jaunt to the alps alright, although it’s hard to tell with him these days. He’s barely uttered a word since Stoll, when he looked at Michael-in-Dean, smiled, and said, “I’ve got him Dean. It’s okay. I’ve got him.”

When Bobby walks in, he can still see the remnants of the violence Michael had gotten in in the seconds it had taken Dean to wrestle him back. Sam’s got two black eyes, courtesy of his still-healing broken nose. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him though—or if it is, he’s just too far gone to do anything about it.

“Hey,” Dean says from his place on the cot next to Sam, tossing a magazine aside and sitting up as Bobby holds out the plates of sandwiches and chips. Dean takes his plate, sets it down, and grabs one of Sam’s hands, squeezing tight, “Sam. Sammy. C’mon, it’s lunchtime.”

Bobby watches Sam, almost like he’s resurfacing from a deep dive, taking in a deep breath, eyes widening. His head turns quickly, focusing on Dean, muscles tensed before he seems to recognize who he’s with. Another deep breath and he relaxes, blinking rapidly. Dean passes him a plate and Sam, without a word, robotically takes a bite.

Dean meets Bobby’s gaze, blinks tiredly, and shrugs, shaking his head. No improvement from Sam. If anything, it’s getting worse. They don’t know why it’s worse for Sam than it is for Dean—not that it’s been easy on Dean either.

“Thanks, Bobby,” Dean says, mouth half-full as he gestures toward his plate.

Bobby gives a nod, “No news from Cas. Demon signs are up but evidence of possession is down. Don’t know what the hell Hell’s up to.”

Sam drops his partially eaten sandwich to the plate in his lap and makes a face, bringing his hands up to his head and curling in on himself. Dean’s there almost before Bobby can even process what is happening.

“Easy Sam, I’ve gotcha.”

Dean’s own plate gets discarded without fanfare and he reaches for Sam’s hands where they’re digging into his scalp, peeling his fingers back and replacing them with his own, smoothing back greasy hair and pulling Sam closer to himself. For a moment, Sam resists, but then he drops heavily onto Dean’s shoulder, curling in. Bobby has to dive in to catch Sam’s plate before it can crash to the ground in pieces, but manages to save it in time.

“I gotcha, I gotcha Sammy,” Dean mutters. Bobby watches Sam come back to himself, slowly. Dean’s the only thing they’ve found that helps. Bobby has the feeling in his gut that Dean’s the only reason Sam’s holding on right now. The only way Lucifer could be defeated.

“Stack the plates by the door when you’re done,” Bobby says, getting a nod of acknowledgement back from Dean. He stands and starts walking toward the door, a firmer resolve to find a solution pounding in his head, cutting through the three-day alcohol-based daze he’s been in.

“Hey Bobby,” Dean says, just as he’s about to leave.

Bobby turns.

Dean opens his mouth, closes it, frowns, and opens it again, “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Bobby says.

He exits, locks the door, and starts the trek upstairs again.

There’s got to be something. There has to be. He can’t leave them down here forever. He sits down heavily in his chair, takes a small drink of whiskey with his own sandwich, and picks up the phone.

Sam is getting better at recognizing when Lucifer is messing with him. Either that, or Lucifer is becoming more and more apathetic, not putting as much effort into pretending.

Tonight (today? The days run together down here, the fan always overhead, sleep constantly disturbed), Lucifer is pretending to be Jess again. His hand molded in the image of hers, caressing Sam’s cheek.

Sam shudders, rolls away, but the edges of the dream are tenuous, all too ready to explode into another all-out war between himself and Lucifer. He can’t get far.

“Sam,” Lucifer says, in her voice, “you know you don’t need to fight this so hard.”

The phrasing is perhaps the worst part, pulled from Sam’s memories, ringing true as he recalls Jess, compassionate and understanding as she gently convinced him to sleep, to eat, to breathe, to take a break.

He wants to take a break, more than anything. But the second he checks out, Lucifer takes the stage. The second Lucifer takes over, everything is over. There’s been too many close calls already. Split seconds where Lucifer gained the higher ground, just enough, for long enough, to fly Sam away. Away from Dean.

“Sam,” and Lucifer’s voice has changed, taking on a deeper, familiar tone, “sometimes you need to take the loss and call it a day.”

Sam knows if he turned around, his dad, gruff and unshaven, would be in front of him. He knows if he let Lucifer gain any ground, that John Winchester would reach out, hug him, tell him he was proud of him. He knows if he lets that happen, he’ll drown again.

He stays still, turned away from Lucifer, ignoring his tugging on Sam’s memories, the hands filing through his brain like they own everything in it.

“Oh, but I do,” Lucifer says, and this time it’s a soft but mostly unfamiliar voice. Sam’s been through this enough times to know that if he looks, his mother will be staring back at him.

He can feel Lucifer, looming. He knows that Mary will next come up to him, tug on his arm, reach up and tilt his head so that she can hold his face.

He sidesteps the hold, tries to keep his thoughts in order enough to remember who it is who’s talking to him. The second he forgets is the second he loses the fight.

Lucifer, in his guise, still manages to grab hold, tugging on his hand. Sam slams his eyes shut, twists away, unable to shake his grip.

The hand holding him digs in deep, nails cutting into the fleshy part of his palm. Even here, he can feel the pain. He wonders if, like at other times, he is doing this to himself, outside of the dream. Wonders if he will wake in the panic room with blood spilling from his hand, wonders if it will stain his clothes, the sheets, the floor. Blood in the panic room, where it’s not supposed to be.

(The scent of it still gives him the Pavlovian response, his mouth waters when he sees blood, oozing. He feels the lurch in his stomach, urging him to reach out, paint it on his fingers—)

The pain grows more intense, but still Sam refuses to open his eyes, refuses to see Lucifer like this again. Refuses to let him have this power over him.

Something sparks behind his eyes, something in the distance, in the nebulous edges of this space that Lucifer has dragged him to for his nightly torture. Sam keeps his eyes shut, tunes out the quiet murmurs of please Sam, Sammy, don’t do this to me, and reaches out. For a moment, it’s like tv static, like the faint buzz of a CRT television that Sam had been sitting too close to, and in his mind, outside of Lucifer, he can hear the faint call from ages past in Dean’s voice: “If you sit that close you’ll ruin your eyes.”

And then with that, the grip Lucifer has on his hand fades away. Sam reaches out, blind, toward the spark, and tumbles into a memory.

“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”

“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”

“Ow! Dean, not that hard.”

“Don’t be a baby.”

“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”

“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”

Sam is small. Small enough that even Dean is riding in the backseat while their dad drives.

He curls his right hand back into a fist, left hand holding tight to Dean’s larger, freckled hand.

“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”

Dean plays scissors again, and this time Sam is ready with a rock. He grips tightly onto Dean’s left hand, rears back and slaps the back of it before Dean can draw back. Both of their hands are bright red, neither of them willing to call uncle on their house-rules version of the game.

Dean grimaces, but keeps it going.

“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”

Sam’s ready again this time. Dean’s been throwing scissors almost the whole game. He goes to slap, but loses his grip on Dean’s hand and just claps into his own palm.

“Ha!” Dean crows, a smug look on his face. He raises a triumphant fist and punches the ceiling.

“Careful,” comes the strict command from the front seat, their dad’s constant watch in the rearview catching the movement.

“Sorry dad,” Dean says, drawing back into himself, straightening up.

“Again!” Sam demands, wiggling his fingers, feeling the sting of the few slaps Dean has gotten in.

Dean rolls his eyes but holds out his hand, grasping onto Sam.

Sam jolts awake as the squeezing hold on his hand becomes suddenly real. Instinctively, he squeezes back. When his eyes finally decide to focus, in the dim light of the panic room, he can see Dean in the cot, directly next to him, one eye slanted open and looking at Sam. Sam slows his breathing and squeezes Dean’s hand again, where it lays on the pillow, next to Dean’s head. Dean squeezes back and closes his eye, evidently having been barely woken out of his sleep and finding it again easily. The pressure on Sam’s hand nearly disappears, but he keeps Dean’s hand in his grip.

It’s childish. It’s infantile, really.

(Their dad would’ve . . . Well, in this case, he doesn’t know what his dad would’ve done. Probably shoot them both point blank to see if that killed the angels.)

But it feels better—safer—when he knows Dean’s nearby. It makes him feel like he’s less likely to be flown away, to lose control, to be forced back and drowning.

Sam cautiously turns in the cot, looking above to the fan, rotating slowly above him. His heart jumps into his throat and he tightens his hold on Dean again. If he’s not careful, he can see them here again—Alistair, himself, his mother—like he’d never actually detoxed. He tries to swallow around the lump in his throat and finds it hard to breathe.

His grip on Dean’s hand gets tighter, and tighter, until someone would need pliers and a hacksaw to separate them. Dean stirs.

“S’mmy? Y’right?”

Sam pulls in a panicked breath through his nose. This isn’t like last time. Dean is here. He doesn’t have demon blood in him (just something, someone worse, so much worse).

Dean pushes himself upright, into a hovering plank position, pushing down on Sam’s hand through the motion.

“Sammy?”

Since the moment Sam had managed to grab control, to wrest Lucifer away from the driver’s seat, he’s been trying to hold it together. He has to. If not for himself or the world, then for Dean.

So when the tears start to prick at his eyes, he turns his head swiftly away. Not quick enough, even in the near-darkness.

“Sam, what’s wrong?”

Sam shakes his head.

Dean moves their joined hands over, crossing Sam’s arm over his own chest so that Dean can body his way onto the cot beside him.

And for a second, all Sam can see is the figment of Dean (Figment? Vision? Reality? He can’t parse his memories enough to remember if it was real) standing over him, telling him about how disappointed he is. And then, with a sinking twist in his stomach that Sam has started to recognize as Lucifer pulling strings, he hears only the words Dean had left him with before Sam had gone in to fight Lilith.

“A monster.”

It’s instinctive, almost, to suddenly drop his grip on Dean, to push his other hand up and shove Dean back, heart pounding as the words of Dean’s message echo in his mind. He has them memorized, down to the slightest inflections and pauses. His mind can replay it with perfect recall.

And Lucifer knows that too.

Sam goes toppling off the cot, landing badly on one of his wrists as he tries to catch himself, but the sharp pain does little to cut through the fog of “You’re not you anymore and there’s no going back.”

“Sam?”

His heart is pounding as he scrambles backward, trying to increase the space between them so he can force his brain to sort out the truth from the past.

More pain rockets up his arm as his hand scrapes along the ground, and Sam looks down, sees blood pooling in his palm and feels sick.

It’s a dry retch that comes through, but Sam still panics, grabs for a bucket. Nothing comes up, but Sam can’t stop his body from performing the motions. It’s only a moment later when he feels a warm hand on his face. He flinches back, but Dean persists, gathering Sam’s hair back and out of his face.

“Easy Sammy, deep breath, c’mon, you can do it.”

Sam clutches the bucket to his chest, twitching away as Dean lays a hand on his back.

“Whoa, easy, you’re just working yourself up, take a breath.”

Dean’s words cut through some of the chaos rattling through Sam, familiar enough for them to take place in his mind. He forces himself to take a deep breath and pushes down the pressure in his stomach, in his head, feels the resistance from Lucifer he’s come to expect, but gains enough ground to make his body stop heaving. For a second, all he can do is shudder.

Then he blinks and the remnants of his last visits to the panic room disappear.

“Just like that, you’ve got it.”

Dean’s hand is steady on his back. His other hand comes around to help Sam unclench his grip on the bucket, lowering it back to the ground.

“Alright, easy, you’re alright,” Dean continues, those muttered lines of comfort that take Sam back to a simpler time, to days spent sick with the flu or downed with a broken leg.

Even so, Sam can’t help but interrupt.

“Can we—” his voice is hoarse, whether from his queasy episode or from disuse, he’s unsure, “tomorrow. Can we go outside?”

It takes a span of two breaths for Dean to answer, and Sam keeps his face turned away but pictures first the look of surprise, then the moment of processing that Dean takes, knowing his brother’s reaction before it ever hits his ears.

“Yeah, yeah we can do that. For a couple of hours.”

Sam nods, dropping his head into his hands, propping his elbows on bent knees. He knows—because he’s felt the change, the charge in the air—that the panic room does something, helps at least a little bit. He knows Cas added some things, things to keep Michael and Lucifer hidden from prying eyes.

But he can’t—this place—

He needs out. They don’t stay places this long. Ever. They need out.

“We’ll tell Bobby in the morning, take a couple hours before it gets too hot out.”

“Okay,” Sam says.

“You ready to try and get some more sleep?”

Sam isn’t willing to try that again tonight, but he nods in agreement anyways, takes the hand Dean offers him, and stands, wincing as sharp pain travels up his arm. He can’t stop himself from making a quiet grunt of pain.

Too in-tune, as he so often is, Dean catches it.

“What’s—oh, damnit, you’re bleeding.”

Dean turns to grab at some loose bandages, left over from patching Sam’s face back together. Sam stares down at his hand. Sure enough, there are some deep gouge marks, as if someone had scraped away at his hand. Sam looks at his other hand, at his fingernails. Nothing.

For a sharp second, he’s sure the nausea is about to come back, and even more certain that Lucifer is about to steal him away (he feels the swooping in his stomach, the weight on his back), and then it’s gone as Dean returns and starts dabbing at the scratches with an alcohol pad.

Lucifer’s laughter echoes in his mind, but slowly fades as Dean keeps mumbling about this and that—”Gonna need to get you gloves to wear while you sleep at this rate,”—and Sam doesn’t have the heart to tell Dean that the cuts aren’t by his own hand. Sam’s wrist twinges as Dean rotates his hand around, but he keeps his mouth shut. Dean’s already lost enough sleep because of him tonight, let alone if they have to wake up Bobby to get an ace bandage for a sprained wrist.

“There we go,” Dean says, moving to rinse off his hands.

Sam stands and walks back to his cot, laying down and curling up as best he can on the thin mattress, cradling his bandaged hand close to his chest.

Tomorrow. He can make it to tomorrow, he decides, as he listens to the sound of Dean shuffling around on his cot, right next to Sam. A few more shifting sounds, and then a hand, warm even through Sam’s shirt, on his back. A couple of steadying pats, and then the hand curls so Sam can only feel the ridges of Dean’s knuckles if he’s concentrating.

Tomorrow. Things will be better tomorrow.

(That’s what he keeps telling himself.)

Dean feels like he’s being rattled from the inside out. Like there’s a constant conga line through each brain cell, making it all jolt about like Dean’s at the front of a concert with the bass turned up all the way, shaking his bones.

Michael doesn’t stop. But Dean doesn’t either.

When he looks over, finally acknowledging his own existence among the living after a night of sleep that could be considered the opposite of restful, it’s clear that Sam hasn’t even tried to sleep after his episode in the early hours of the morning. Sam is curled up, tense.

Dean reaches out, nudges him with an arm half-asleep from how it was draped across the small space in-between them. Sam twitches and rolls over.

“Hey,” Dean says, voice nearly all gravel.

“Hey,” Sam returns.

And that’s more than Sam’s usual number of words-per-day, and it hurts something deep inside Dean to witness that, witness Sam—chatterbox Sammy, all questions, no breathing—go silent. It’s more Dean’s move than Sam’s, but half the time it seems like Lucifer’s got a stranglehold on Sam’s voicebox.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s in control, at the helm. Dean doesn’t bother to ask these days, because Lucifer’s gotten better at lying about it. Good enough that Dean had let go, let him fly away with Sam without clutching tight and going with him.

Dean hates to admit that he’s scared of anything, let alone Lucifer, the same Lucifer that’s sharing a body with his brother right now, but he knows inside that he is. Lucifer has a different kind of presence in Sam than Michael does for Dean. Like Lucifer’s just boiling under Sam’s skin.

With as much of a smile as he can muster this early in the morning with this many dark thoughts drifting through his mind, Dean pats at Sam’s shoulder and then pushes himself upright, groaning with the struggle of it. Somehow, having an archangel tangled up in his soul (or something like that, Cas had tried to explain but it hadn’t made sense then and doesn’t make sense now) hasn’t afforded him any degree of relief from the aches and pains that come with the day-to-day.

And so begins another day. Another day of staring at the wall while the echoes of Michael’s wailing pound away at his sanity.

There’s a clattering at the door and then it shoves open. Bobby, with the welcome gift of breakfast in his arms.

“Mornin’,” Bobby says by way of greeting.

Surprising both Dean and Bobby, Sam replies, “Mornin’.”

Bobby turns to squint at Sam, probably following the same line of thought as Dean finds himself thinking—is this another play by Lucifer?—before walking further into the room and divvying up the breakfast plates between them. There’s scrambled eggs, just a little too far on the side of soft, and toast, a little too dark, but Dean gladly picks up a fork and starts chowing down. Beside him, Sam picks up a fork and plays with his food, fooling no one.

“Can—” Sam says, stopping to clear his throat, “Dean, you said we could go outside today.”

Dean looks up from his breakfast, chipmunking the food in his cheeks as he is reminded of his early-morning, half-awake promise, “Oh yeah.”

He quickly swallows half of his food so it’s easier to talk and turns to address Bobby.

“We’re gonna take a couple hours outside today.”

A couple of lightning-fast emotions cross Bobby’s face before he responds, “Alright. After breakfast? The yard could use some tidying up if you’re up to it.”

“You got it,” Dean says, between his next two bites of food. He isn’t taking the time to taste his breakfast, knowing all too well that something has been off about his taste buds ever since Michael set foot in his body. Of all the things to be stolen from him in the past weeks since Stoll, he is perhaps most irritated about that one.

Bobby shuffles around the room, picking up the occasional magazine and putting it back in its stack, adjusting the few books that he’d brought down here, anticipating Sam wanting to read. Dean’s the only one who’s touched them.

Sam’s still picking at his food, having taken only a couple bites, but that’s more than some days, so Dean finishes his plate and stands up.

“Ready to go?”

“Let me get my shoes,” Sam says, putting down the plate with a look of passing disgust at the food on it. Dean wonders if Sam’s having the same problem he is, or an entirely different one. Either way, he doesn’t know because they haven’t talked about it. They haven’t talked about much, to be fair. Sam hasn’t talked at all.

Dean walks over to the small pile of things they’d brought down here—changes of clothes, shaving cream, and shoes, but no weapons—and tosses Sam his pair of tennis shoes, stuffing his own feet into his boots.

They follow Bobby up the stairs with few words between them. The sunlight coming through the windows seems monstrously (angelically?) bright. Squinting, Dean moves past Bobby, clapping him on the shoulder in a gesture of thanks. Sam trails behind him. At the front door of the house, Dean takes a breath before opening it. Outside, the world looks the same as it always has. The dusty, reddish brown of the junkyard, the brilliantly green trees in the distance, the rusting metal.

For a moment, Dean recalls a memory, back when Sam was small enough to ride piggyback, weaving through the cars as Sam made blaster sounds with his fingers, shooting imaginary villains as Dean acted as spaceship. They must’ve just watched one of the Star Wars flicks or something—Return of the Jedi, maybe.

His chest twinges, painful. He’s not sure if it’s Michael pain or just the hurt of remembering simpler times.

Dean turns to Sam, ready to make some kind of joke about being out in the wild again, the kind that a few years ago would’ve led Sam to a rant about animal rehabilitation or zoos or something like that.

When he turns, he sees only Sam’s back as he walks steadily away from Dean.

“Sam?”

Sam doesn’t respond, and Dean holds his breath, suddenly certain that this has all been a Lucifer plot.

And then he sees where Sam’s going. His breath comes back.

The Impala still has bloody streaks down the side. Two of the windows are shattered, there’s a crack in the back windshield, and one of her mirrors is missing. That pang in Dean’s chest returns, and he grimaces. Under any other situation, he wouldn’t have let this stand.

Sam reaches the car first. Dean catches up with him just in time to watch Sam’s face as he crumples against the side of the car.

“Sam?” Dean reaches out and grabs on to him, feeling the all-too familiar worry crush around his shoulders again.

Under Dean’s hand, Sam’s shoulder heaves up, then down. Dean realizes, suddenly, that he hasn’t seen Sam cry since—before he said yes.

It’s disconcerting.

Sam makes—made—fun of him and his attachment to the car for years, but it had been easily shrugged off because Dean knew logically that Sam was just as attached. It was obvious in how anytime they had to leave the Impala behind, Sam would always put together the plans to circle back, how he’d spend mealtimes in cafes searching up and finding parts in case any needed replacing, in how he stopped complaining when Dean made them stop for maintenance or a car wash, how he’d smile brilliantly and toss a bucket of water over the hood to soak Dean’s pants on the other side when they were cleaning her up.

The Impala was all they had.

Watching Sam break in front of him, clinging mournfully to the dented roof of the car as he hides his face in his arms stirs something in Dean’s heart, makes emotion go racing through his body, and for just a moment, it’s silent in his head. Michael’s constant pounding stops, and Dean doesn’t know how to respond.

He just holds Sam’s shoulder and starts looking over the car as Sam cries—his crying getting louder, even as he’s visibly trying to stifle it.

Dean’ll need to hammer out the dents again. Touch up the paint. Find new windows.

Soon. As soon as Cas figures out a solution. As soon as they can know for certain that the apocalypse is stopped and not just sitting in a constantly rising elevator as they wait, dreading the opening of the doors. As soon as they can breathe.

Sam is quieter now, mostly sniffles, and he’s leaning more into Dean’s hand, so Dean moves closer and pulls him in, leaning both of their weight against the car. One hand goes to Sam’s head, tucking Sam under his chin, even though they’re both too old and Sam’s too tall for it.

Overhead, the sun continues to shine. A few clouds cast some shade on the ground. A squirrel runs past the fence line.

Dean’s head stays silent, and he can’t help but think that maybe being out here, near the car, is helping. That it’s reminding him how to ground himself and feel the comfortable weight of the world on his shoulders in a familiar way.

“Hey,” he says, once Sam’s breathing has evened out, “let’s go grab a trash bag, clean up the place for Bobby.”

There’s loose paper and other assorted garbage across the junkyard, probably from a windstorm. Bobby’s always been good about keeping it somewhat tidy, if not organized, out here. Something about appearances.

“Yeah,” Sam says, surprising Dean. He pushes away. His eyes are red and puffy. For a moment, Dean wishes Sammy were still small. Small enough for him to wrap up tight and hold to his chest. But, instead, he’s got Sam, tall and broad shouldered, with a scrappy little beard trying to take hold on his face.

And that’s okay too.

Chapter Text

JUNE

Cecilia Lynn Brady, of Twelve-Ghost-Haunting hunting fame, decided to back out of the game after losing a leg to a ghoul. She took over the failing family business, turned it profitable, and did her best to help the hunters who passed through her town.

Of course, not even five years later, the apocalypse starts, and she finds herself knee deep in the hunter network, trying to keep people alive out in the field. She hears the stories, of course, about the Winchesters. Cecilia Lynn, however, had never been, and probably would never be, the type of lady to listen to that kind of gossip. No, she went and got her information, direct from the source—one old codger she happened to know, named Bobby Singer.

She put the pieces together, as any wily old lady was inclined to do, and proceeded to slap 'round the head any hunter in her diner that bad-mouthed Singer's boys.

And right when she started to doubt her complicated stance on religious worship, the calamities calmed.

She locks up the diner for the day, tells the two employees who’d bothered to show up to go home, gets in her trusty old yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and makes the drive to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It isn’t that far, three-hour drive, when she pushes it.

She pulls into Singer’s lot, manages to pry her aching, old body out of the seat and readjust what she fondly refers to as her ‘peg leg.’ The grandkids like that, think it’s funny beyond belief.

There’s a black muscle car parked off to the side of the house, and she can’t help but smile because she’d run into John Winchester a few times, years ago, and the only good thing she could usually be found saying about him was that he had a good taste in transportation. She’s a classy beast, even with a couple of busted windows and what Cecilia Lynn suspects is a streak of blood, dried rust-color on the side.

Cecilia Lynn limps her way up to Bobby Singer’s door and knocks loudly. When there’s no answer, she knocks again. Then, fed up, she calls, “Bobby Singer, you’d best open this door right now if you don’t want it busted down.”

Finally, there’s some noise from inside, someone stepping up to the door. She waits, hands on her hips. The deadbolt clicks, and the big wooden door slides open just enough for Bobby’s face to peer through the door

“Cecillia Lynn,” he says in a rough voice, “how the hell are you?”.

Cecilia Lynn considers the man before her. She’s known Singer for years now, bonded over drinks with him too many times to count. She’s never seen him this worn out.

“Hell of a lot better than you look,” she says, walking through the door as Bobby opens it to allow her in. She takes the flask he hands her, downs the gulp of holy water and wishes it were something stronger.

“Thought you were in a wheelchair.”

“Yeah, well,” Bobby says, “things change.” It’s obvious from his tone that he doesn’t want to talk about it. She drops it.

“So,” she says, walking into Bobby’s office-slash-library, “what’s the status on the end of the world?”

“On pause,” Bobby replies, moving past her to collapse in his office chair, a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniels standing precariously on the edge of the desk. He points to an empty glass and raises his eyebrows. Cecilia Lynn nods and moves to sit in a nearby chair, shifting a stack of books and papers off of it to clear the seat. Bobby passes her a finger of whiskey and picks up his own glass, leaning back in his chair.

“The Winchesters?” Cecilia Lynn questions, knowing they’re at the center of this mess, somehow.

Bobby stares into his glass and sighs, “Out of commission.”

Cecilia Lynn just stares expectantly.

“They stopped the apocalypse,” Bobby says, still not looking her in the face. There’s a hint of sorrowful pride in his voice that has Cecilia Lynn suddenly terrified for her friend, the thought of him sitting bedside in a coma ward for the rest of his life cutting through the dulling effects of her drink.

She’s not a very careful kind of conversationalist. She’s been told too many times that she’s just too honest. Here though, she treads carefully. She knows those boys mean a lot to Bobby.

“Where are they?” She asks.

“Downstairs,” Bobby answers, making her blink in surprise, “Locked up tight in the panic room. Don’t know how much good it’ll do, but it’s not like there’s anywhere else for them to go.”

“Locked up?” She questions, the words putting images of straight jackets and padded cells in her mind.

Bobby sighs, finally looks up to meet her eyes. Bobby’s always had a weariness to his gaze, always been a downright grumpy son-of-a-gun, but there’s something even worse in his face now. He’s tired in a way Cecilia Lynn has never seen him before.

“How much have you heard?”

“‘Bout the end of the world? Not much in way of fact, just rumors about angels and demons and Biblical plagues. Seen the news plenty.”

“Biblical is right. It was supposed to be the great big battle between Lucifer and Michael and his armies.”

“And?”

“Sam and Dean stopped it.”

“How?”

“We don’t know. But they’ve got Lucifer and Michael tied down somehow. Holding the leaders hostage in a way.”

“Aren’t the other angels and demons upset about that?” Cecelia Lynn has a complicated relationship with religion, but she’s been on enough hunter calls and email chains to know that angels have popped up recently, alongside the surge in demonic possession.

“Our sources are saying that it’s just straight chaos. None of them know what happened to their leaders. Lots of in-fighting. On their end, it just seems like Lucifer and Michael disappeared. Can’t even sense them in Sam and Dean, so they’ve left us alone.”

“In Sam and Dean?”

Bobby takes another long sip of his drink before responding, “They’re the vessels that Michael and Lucifer were supposed to take for their big all-out fight. Kinda like a demon possession, only angels need the go-ahead.”

“They said yes to that?”

“There wasn’t another choice. Sam said yes, was going to throw the devil back in his cage, stop the apocalypse that way, but it didn’t turn out. He went to meet up with Michael, Dean and I went in to try and stop it. Michael showed up, in a different vessel, and Dean said yes to save my life.”

Here, Bobby’s voice cracks, and Cecilia Lynn can feel the agony that he must’ve felt.

“He’s a stupid son-of-a-bitch. Knew exactly what he was doing. But he went in anyways. Lucifer must’ve destroyed the only way to open the cage he was locked in or threw it away, ‘cause it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

“Thought that was the end of it, if I’m bein’ honest with you. Thought for sure that was when the world ended. But somethin’ happened when Lucifer and Michael started to fight. They got distracted or lost control or somethin’ and Sam and Dean took the pilot seats. They’ve been holding them back ever since.”

“Just sitting in your basement?”

“Well, we didn’t know what else to do with them. It’s all a shitshow. There’s an angel working on a solution, but no good answers so far. So it’s a waiting game.”

“They okay?”

“Far from it. But they have to be.”

The conversation fades for a long moment, both of them staring contemplatively into their drinks.

“What do you need, Bobby?” Cecelia Lynn is careful not to say ‘what do they need,’ the fact that there’s no answer to that one other than the obvious all too prominent.

Bobby places his glass on the desk, puts his head in his hands, and says, after a long pause, “I need them not to have to live this way. I know you haven’t met them, but I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” The pain and exhaustion on Singer’s face starts making more sense to Cecelia Lynn. It’s not normal worry. It’s the worry of a parent.

“Well.” Cecelia Lynn takes a moment to really contemplate her words, the situation, her life, then opens her mouth again. “Step one is getting them out of your basement.”

Bobby looks up at her, “Don’t you think I’ve been trying? They’re so damn stubborn, even though we know the wards down there do jackshit for archangels. Sam’s barely even functional—”

“Well, they haven’t met me yet. I’m gettin’ too old for this, Bobby. I can’t hunt anymore, the diner’s slowly dying, and I want to go live near my grandkids. Tell ‘em I’m offering them managing spots at Darla’s, and cheap rent on my old house there.”

Bobby Singer is not the kind of person who is surprised easily, which is why Cecelia Lynn takes such pride in his floored expression.`

“Cecelia Lynn—”

“Bobby Singer, I asked you what I could do, and I told you what I can give. I’ve been wanting out of the family business for a long time but couldn’t leave it alone. No one in Lageme wants it. There’s business there. Something to live for.”

“They can’t be around people—”

“And why not? Sounds to me like they’ll either explode or they won’t. Leaving ‘em to their own devices all day sounds like a recipe for lettin’ the devil or whoever out. You know better than anyone that you need things to do when you’re hurtin’ to keep your mind off things. Idle minds and all that.”

And Bobby Singer, notorious workaholic, sits back in his seat and keeps his mouth shut for the first time since Cecelia Lynn met him, some twenty odd years ago.

“They don’t have to say yes, but you do have to do a good job of convincing them. Your couch open tonight?”

“Only for stubborn hunters who don’t know when to quit.”

“Well shit, sounds like my kind of place.”

Cecelia Lynn retrieves her bag from the car, returns to the house, and finds Bobby carrying sheets up the stairs.

“Guest bed is open,” he says, “if you’re not too old to take the stairs.”

“The day I can’t take the stairs is the day my kids put me in a nursing home and forget about me.”

Castiel thinks that exhaustion is overrated.

And really, he shouldn’t feel exhausted. It’s a human emotion.

But these days, he’s started to feel more kinship with the humans than his siblings.

Raphael has been a thorn in his side in his quest to find a solution to the problem of the Winchesters vessel conundrum, and Castiel knows that in any other case, the thought of disobeying an archangel wouldn’t have even crossed his mind.

Angels aren’t supposed to change, not really. But he has. And he is. And he’s not sure he likes it.

It’s a panicked, startled, angered prayer from Dean that interrupts his research. He pulls away from his informants, seeks out Dean’s voice, and listens. Then, he waits.

And soon, it’s there. The prayer of Sam Winchester, shakingly giving him all the details he can about his location.

It’s difficult finding him, though it has been growing easier each time, as Castiel has learned to locate the disturbances Lucifer leaves in his wake.

They’re in a forest, somewhere near the Himalayas. He finds Sam, huddled against a tree. It’s loud with the buzzing of insects and the hum of the nighttime. Sam startles when he arrives, scrambles away like a wounded animal. Castiel thinks that’s not too far off of a description.

“Sam,” Castiel says, staring down at him. Sam stares back, and though he doesn’t speak out loud, Castiel hears his prayer conclude, thank you for finding me.

Samuel Winchester is a confusing being. The abomination. The apocalypse bringer.

And yet, he is somehow, a friend. Castiel tunes out Dean’s panicked prayer and moves his vessel, sitting beside Sam on the forest floor.

He says nothing. Sam is staring at him, eyes wide. He has grown quieter as his soul has grown louder. It’s near blinding, the embrace of grace and soul that Castiel can sense when he looks with his many eyes beyond the physical plane. Perhaps embrace is the wrong word. Wrestle, perhaps. Clash.

Castiel waits. Time, though nearly incomprehensible on some levels to him, has become a necessary commodity with war on the horizon. Yet, he has few regrets for giving this portion to Sam Winchester.

It’s a prayer that reaches his grace, jumbled ideas and thoughts that Sam likely is not conscious of communicating. Something like, I can’t do this, I did it again, Lucifer is so strong, I can’t keep fighting him, Dean, I need Dean, the car, Castiel, I need to go back, I don’t want to go back, I want him gone, I know we can’t.

Moments pass as Castiel tries to parse desire from thought, as Sam shudders beside him, fighting back a force from God, a being of intent. Castiel reaches out, clasps a shoulder, and with a flap of wings, they are back in Bobby Singer’s basement, just outside the door to the panic room, which is open so they can hear Dean loudly talking as Bobby tries to calm him.

Sam stumbles, leans against Castiel for a brief moment to catch his balance, and then walks back into the room.

“Sam!”

Castiel watches as Dean rushes forward, grabs hold of Sam, and takes his weight, letting Sam’s trembling legs find purchase.

For a moment, it’s clear that to Dean, nothing else in the world exists, except Sam. He’s holding, squeezing, calming, talking. Castiel exchanges a look with Bobby Singer, squints celestial eyes as the brightness of souls and grace attempts once again to blind him, and flies away. No rest in fighting this war. No rest until the Winchesters can rest too.

Serendipity is on the phone with her mother when two customers walk in.

“Hey mom, sorry, I gotta go . . . Yeah, talk to you soon. Love you too.”

She hangs up the phone, takes a look at the two guys who just walked in. They look vaguely familiar. Must’ve come in before. They’re taking a look around the shop, heading directly to the auto repair and maintenance section without giving her a second look.

It’s the niggling in the back of her mind, the curiosity about where she’s seen them before that makes her watch the cameras as they disappear behind the shelves. She watches in fuzzy, pixelated motion as one of them starts rifling through their veiling tape and replacement glass in a comfortable manner that means he’s done this a million times before. The other, taller one is hanging back. She can’t see his face on the cameras, but he’s hunched over, hovering over his friend’s shoulder.

She watches, makes sure they’re not trying to pocket anything, and then moves to tidy up the counter. She knows she’s seen them before, she just can’t remember where. It’s probably just that they’ve been in the store before, but they’re not regulars, like Mike and Vaughn, the car techs on this side of town, or Robbie and Max, the construction crew boys. It feels important. She doesn’t know why.

Keeping one eye on the cameras, she messes around with the stack of papers and special order forms on the counter, trying to pull them into order after Ethan from the morning shift had done his everyday work of causing chaos in the paperwork. Serendipity doesn’t know why she’s the only one who cares about the organization—not even Paul, her boss, gives a crap, even though he’s the one who deals with the mess when things don’t go right.

She takes a look at the clock. An hour before close. Soon she’ll be able to head back to her overcrowded apartment and eat leftover takeout. Yay.

She likes the store, enjoys her classes at the community college. Can’t handle her roommates, but she’s locked in a year contract. She’s been begging Paul for more hours, just to get out of the house.

Bobby Singer.

The connection pops into her brain, startling and unusual. She breaths in a surprised huff of air, feeling her mouth drop open in shock.

That’s who they are.

Her heart starts to race, she can feel panic start to pound through her veins.

She can’t believe she’d forgotten. More like tried to run from, she supposes. A hidden traumatic memory.

Her dad had been the one to come back. Her mom had gone on and on about miracles, they’d lived in bliss for all of a day. Serendipity had felt like she’d been caught away in a dreamworld, a world where her dad had never been hit by that truck.

And then, it had turned. He had turned.

Everyone on this end of town knows now. Singer’s not just the edge-of-town drunkard, he’s the zombie-fighting drunkard, with two guys by his side—kids or friends or coworkers, it was difficult to tell.

Sheriff Mills, after the funeral and her weeks of paid leave had passed by, had made attempts to talk to every family. To gauge where they were at.

Even now, it still feels like a fever dream.

Serendipity has always known there’s things out there. But to have it so close to home?

She shudders.

They’re not on the camera she’d focused on anymore. She looks up and watches them emerge from the aisle. It’s the falsest, most fake smile she’s ever smiled, but she throws it on her face anyways, tries not to betray how shaken she is.

“Find everything okay?”

For a second, the one guy, with the short hair, leans in and seems like he’s about to pull a sleazy move, like Mike always tries, a bad pickup line, or a gross comment on her appearance, but then something shutters in his eyes and he pulls back.

“Yep,” he says, placing down his purchases on the counter. Behind him, the other guy looms, still hovering, still slouched. His hair is in his face, greasy. From what Serendipity can see of him, his face is an outward portrayal of exhaustion, a fading bruise around his eyes making his circles all the more noticeable.

She nods, takes the first bottle—wiper fluid—and starts scanning. The tinny sound of the radio music in the background is the only thing decreasing the tension in the room.

Serendipity has never checked out somebody so fast. She piles the items into plastic bags, in the cardboard boxes they have for glass, totals the cost and waits impatiently, rocking on her toes as the dude directly in front of her counts out a series of twenty dollar bills and passes them over. Her hands shake as she returns his change, but she gives him his receipt with a smile and tells them both, “Have a nice day.”

She gets a nod from the shorter guy, nothing from the tall, long-haired guy. They leave the store, jangling the bell above the door. Serendipity sighs in relief.

There’s something wrong with them. She doesn’t know what, but her heart is telling her so. Her mom always tells her to trust her intuition.

Watching carefully, she sees them pile their purchases in a rickety pickup truck and drive out of the lot. She keeps an eye on the door until long after they’re gone.

She hopes they don’t come back.

Mack just wants to go home. He’s had enough of this shift. The customers have been on one today, complaining about prices, about not getting a receipt, about the bathrooms, about everything under the sun. As if he has any control over that.

The bell jingles, just as he’s bending down to restock the candy bars. He closes his eyes, tries to sigh quietly, and moves the boxes to the top of the shelf before walking back to the counter.

The dude is tall, but other than that, not much remarkable about him. Looks like a tired road tripper, maybe a trucker or bus driver. The part of Mack’s brain that appeared as soon as he started working swing shift in a middle-of-nowhere gas station clocks the details—blue jeans, brown jacket, blue plaid shirt underneath. Long hair, brown. Could probably send a dude out cold with a single punch, he’s built with some muscle.

There. If anything happens, he’s ready to file a police report.

Mack watches lazily as the guy walks to the back without so much as a friendly nod (which isn’t that unusual, but he’s used to the regulars showing a bit more respect). The ceiling mirrors show him grabbing a series of snacks and candy—Mack watches more closely at that, nothing goes into his pockets.

He moves to the drinks, stares at the selection. Mack gets bored watching and looks out the front window instead.

And boy, that car is nice. The kind of car old guys bust out for a sunday drive. Old, but classy looking, obviously well-kept.

As Mack’s eyes rake over the unusual car, he’s stopped suddenly as he makes eye contact with the driver, who’s leaning against the gas pump. Staring. Eyes narrowed.

Mack looks away, quickly. His hand goes to hover over the panic button out of pure terror. Then he breathes. Nothing wrong with this situation. Just two guys, bigger and stronger than him, stopping for gas. Sometimes he thinks he’s too nervous for this job. Either that or he watches too many cop shows late at night.

The guy in the store comes up to the checkout, drops an armful of snacks on the counter, and turns to look out the window.

Mack watches the guy outside drop the glare and give a meaningful nod. His paranoia decreases. Just two weirdos. Maybe they had a bad day.

"That everything for you?"

The guy nods, then swallows like it hurts and says, "Yeah, thanks."

Mack starts ringing him up.

"On a trip somewhere?" He asks, the oldies rock playing too quietly to ease the awkward nature of their interaction.

"Moving, actually."

Mack raises an eyebrow, "Dang, that’s a fun time. For work or something else?"

Again, that painful kind of swallow, "Work."

"That’s cool," Mack says, finishing his scanning and typing away at his screen."Alrighty, your total comes to twenty-five-oh-8."

A card swipe, a given receipt, and the guy is out the door before he can wish him luck with his move.

Mack watches him approach the guy with the fancy car. That guy is done pumping gas by now, just leaning against the car hood. Shopping guy walks right up to him, and in a weird movement, bumps his shoulder up against car guy's arm. Car guy reaches out, gives a friendly tap on his back, saying something indiscernible, and then they both get in the car.

Man, the weird people he meets. His grandma’s gonna get a kick out of this one.

Sam decides that it wouldn’t be as bad if it were consistent.

But it’s not. He’s not. Sometimes Lucifer is quiet as a mouse, simply a nearly non-existent weight in his lungs, a mere presence that Sam can ignore. A shadow in the corners of his dreams, watching from afar. Almost like the shame and guilt Sam carries on the daily—a presence he’s gotten so used to that he doesn’t even recognize any more.

And then he’ll be drowning, as if Lucifer is a tsunami that doesn’t make the water draw back as it crashes into the shore. Sudden. Surprising. He’ll be pushed under, gasping for control, wrestling against an earthquake, kickboxing a tornado. Pulled so far back from being present that the panic of being smothered takes over reason and sanity.

And it’s Lucifer, too big to even be considered a skyscraper, more like the core of a star—and Sam is the hydrogen being burned.

He goes under again, drowning in the wake of a force he couldn’t be compelled to describe, and for a split second, in the depths of the waves, in the nuclear fission happening in-between his body’s cells, like an eye in the storm of a hurricane, there’s a glimmer of light.

Sam reaches out, toppling like a redwood in a forest fire, and the glimmer grows stronger, just close enough for Sam to cling to as pointed barbs of ice slice into his soul.

He tumbles through something somehow, impossibly, finds something that exists outside of Lucifer, and the glimmer grows brightly, and Sam is suddenly strong, powerful, a force all of his own and he shoves twists pulls yanks—

And finds a memory, soft in a black cave in his mind.

“Damn kid, how’d your hair get this long?”

Dean is freshly fifteen and they’re locked up in a cabin while their dad is out fighting something—possibly the abominable snowman, if Dean is to be believed (which Sam knows he’s not).

A hand, pale from the fact that neither of them has really seen the sun in two months, flicks Sam’s bangs, then pushes his hair, damp from the sweat from the fireplace, into tall spikes that droop down as soon as Dean’s hand leaves his head. Sam, grumpy from the fact that school has started again but he’s not enrolled anywhere, stuck for days on end with a brother as bored as he is, swats, annoyed, at Dean’s hand.

“You haven’t cut it,” Sam says, petulant, poking a piece of kindling at the fire until it catches, tossing it in.

Dean snorts, “Dad hasn’t gotten a new shaving kit since he left that last one.” Dean takes a moment, runs his hand over his own hair. “Guess we’re both keeping it long, huh?” Dean’s hair grows slower than Sam’s, it’s just now starting to curl over his ears. Sam’s has been nearly to his chin for a while, the back longer than the front, almost a mullet of sorts. Dad had mentioned, the last time he’d seen them, that they needed haircuts, but then he spent the last of their cash on pawn-shop silver spoons for them to melt down, and the subject had been dropped.

Sam knows from watching Dean proudly shave his sparse few face hairs he’s sprouted in the past month that Dean’s razor won’t be enough for the job, too thin. Probably from the dollar store in Montpelier.

“Guess so,” Sam says, frowning into the flames. The heat of the fire makes his eyes water when he refuses to blink.

He becomes aware of the eyes watching him, confined behind bars in the walls of the cave. Sam ignores them, sinks deeper into the memory, letting it wash out the darkness.

Dean pokes his own stick at the fire, stamping it out on the tiles in front of the fireplace when it starts to smolder, putting it right back in until the flames catch again and repeating the movement, drawing charcoal lines across the dingy soapstone.

“He’ll be back soon, you know,” Dean says.

Sam’s almost eleven. He’s smart enough, knows his brother well enough, to know Dean’s trying to convince himself too.

“Yeah,” Sam says, noncommittal.

Dean’s hand is back again, this time running from the nape of Sam’s neck to his forehead, sending Sam’s hair into even more disarray.

“Wake up, Sammy,” Dean says.

Sam frowns. This is not how the memory goes. Sam had retaliated, tackling Dean, and tried to pull out some of Dean’s leg hair in retribution.

“Sam, wake up.”

Sam opens his eyes.

His chest is heaving, and he is covered in an icy sweat. Sam shivers. Blinks.

The hand that Dean has holding tightly to the collar of Sam’s shirt lessens its grip slightly, but the fingers combing through Sam’s hair continue their work. Sam closes his eyes again, tries to catch his breath. He takes stock of his body, surprised, as he has been for the past month, to find that he has control of his appendages. His hands are clenched tightly in the twisted sheets beneath him, so he works to let go, feeling the soreness of his muscles throughout his arms and shoulders.

“How long?” Sam questions, voice raspy from sleep.

“Ten, fifteen minutes,” Dean answers, moving one hand to rest on Sam’s chest, right where the pounding of his heart can be felt.

“Felt like longer,” Sam says, distantly. It had felt like an eternity of drowning, a forever of being buried.

“You did it though,” Dean says, and he sounds proud behind his obvious exhaustion, “you didn’t even fly away this time.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, too tired to even feel grateful. Other times Lucifer has done this, Sam hadn’t wrestled control back until Lucifer had a chance to spring away, landing somewhere else on earth, trying to get Sam away from Dean, away from help. Last time, two nights ago, he’d struggled back to consciousness, freezing atop a mountain that Castiel later told him was in Alaska.

Dean takes his hand off of Sam’s chest, dropping back to the bed, but keeping his other hand on Sam’s head. The bed creaks with the shifting weight, and a spring pokes Sam in the fleshy part of his side. He takes in a breath, again, then again, then gains enough presence of mind to open his eyes and twist and roll to avoid the spring. The bed is too small to really fit both of them, but they’re making it work, because they have to. It had been a silent accord when they’d walked into the two-queen motel room. From all of their nights on the hard-as-rocks cots in Bobby’s panic room, holding on desperately to each other, hoping to keep the other from being taken over, from being flown away.

Sam reaches out a hand, brushes his knuckles against Dean’s side, just a curled-up fist. It’s dark in the motel room, but there’s enough streetlight coming in through the windows for Sam to see the sheets of paper they’d pinned on the walls, in hopes that the Enochian would at least slow down any act of possession.

Dean’s hand cards once again through Sam’s hair, brushes sweaty strands off of his forehead, and Sam refocuses his attention. Dean is looking at him in the darkness. Sam tries to smile, thinks it mostly comes off as a grimace, but Dean’s face smooths out anyways, dropping some kind of tension. For a moment, Sam feels a swoop in his stomach, as he feels Dean’s hand move, an impulse, perhaps left from the remnants of their fights, the fact that Dean has once again been forced to his side without his input, before Dean’s hand settles on Sam’s chest, locking them in a curled yin-yang position. Dean’s feet shove between Sam’s leg, warm against the strip of skin beneath the cuffs of his pants and above the elastic top of his socks. Sam shivers. He’s been cold ever since Detroit. Dean is in shorts and a light undershirt. He’s been burning up since Stoll.

“Try to catch a few more hours,” Dean says, “big day tomorrow.”

“No promises,” Sam says with the closest thing to a laugh he can manage spluttering half-heartedly out of his mouth.

Dean’s eyes close with the weight of the exhausted, and he drums a short beat on Sam’s chest before his fingers still.

Sam listens to the easy rhythm of Dean’s breathing, hears the exact moment it tips into slow, sleep-deep breaths, and watches lights from passing cars move across the wall. He also hears the exact moment Dean’s sleep tips into the nightmares—although whether it’s fair to call them that is still up in the air, because a nightmare implies something that one’s own brain pieces together. These dreams come directly from Michael himself. The hand still resting against Sam’s chest clenches, holding tight his shirt. Sam places his free hand over it. They’ve both learned by now that it’s not worth waking the other for simple nightmares; sleep in any form would not be theirs if they did so.

“Ah, good old Mikey, he always was so good at torture.”

Sam keeps staring at the wall. Unbidden, the memory of Jessica, pinned to the ceiling flashes across his mind. He flinches, settles. That’s a particular favorite of Lucifer’s.

“But not as good as me.”

Sleep does not find him again that night, and Sam watches the sunrise, listens to the sound of his brother crying in his sleep, and feels the weight of an archangel inside in his chest.

In the morning, once Dean awakens to the sound of the motel room alarm clock, Sam stumbles to the shower, muscles screaming in pain as he does so, angry at him from the tension, the fight he’d gotten into with himself. The water is warm, but he is still freezing. He turns the knob as far as it will go, and his skin grows red under the heat of the shower, but he is still so cold.

“Aw, Sam, feeling like complaining now?”

Sam knows, inherently, that Lucifer is playing on his guilt, but it doesn’t stop him from shuddering, turning the knob back to a lackluster lukewarm to finish washing his hair. It’s greasy—they hadn’t showered for a couple of days before leaving, unable, unwilling to let each other out of sight. Separating at gas stations was a stretch for them. Even now, Sam can hear Dean gargling water at the sink, the bathroom door left open when Sam walked in.

Scrubbing his fingers, laden with shampoo suds, through his hair reminds Sam of the memory that had sparked his control in the early hours of the morning. He remembers, when he was shorter than Dean, how often his hair was ruffled, tugged at, mussed. Ever since that first day in the panic room, both of them barely hanging on to their sanity, their souls, their control, Dean has picked up the habit again. Cradled Sam’s head against his shoulder, his neck, his chest and started repeatedly pushing his fingers back and forth in his hair.

It settles something in Sam’s chest, pushing Lucifer further back.

The motel conditioner smells faintly of citrus, which makes Sam suspicious, but with no other options—they haven’t owned much more than their near-empty duffels and the contents of the Impala’s trunk for months, too busy fighting the apocalypse to worry about restocking bathroom supplies—he squeezes it out of the bottle and starts rubbing it through his hair.

“Almost done?” Dean asks, speaking above the sound of the running water.

“Yeah, just a minute.”

Sam runs his head under the water, does one last scrub down, then wraps the towel hanging over the shower curtain rod around his waist, leaving the water running. Sure enough, as soon as he exits, Dean slips behind him, and with the soft sound of boxers hitting the floor, hops into the shower.

Reaching out to wipe away the condensation from a small spot on the mirror, Sam takes a look at himself, perhaps, he realizes, for the first time in weeks.

He looks like he’s gone twelve rounds with a bulldozer, and barely lived to tell the tale. His cheeks have sunken in, his patchy beard is sprouting in all kinds of different directions, the bags under his eyes probably would stretch an airline capacity to its limit, and there are burst blood vessels in both of his eyes.

Sam sighs, quiet, all too aware of Dean, just behind the curtain, humming some tune as he showers. He looks at the pile of clothes he’d brought into the bathroom and grabs his boxers and pants, wrapping his towel around his neck and pulling his razor out of the (near-empty) toiletry bag Dean had haphazardly placed on the edge of the counter. Shaving is done quickly, in a rush. Sam doesn’t want to look at himself any more in the fogged mirror than necessary. He nicks a small spot on his cheek, swears under his breath, and starts digging through the bag. No shaving pencils left, so he balls up a small wad of toilet paper and goes to dab at it. The second he lifts the toilet paper the blood and cut are gone.

Sam stares into the mirror, reminded, viscerally, of the mirror that Lucifer had spoken to him in, just before Stoll, and as if the memory had summoned him, Sam’s reflection in the glass shifts, a smirk across his face.

“What, Sam, do you really think I would let you get hurt while I’m around? I’m the only one allowed to do that.”

Sam blinks and his reflection is back to normal. He looks down at the spot of blood on the paper and feels his lip wobble. He bites at it, stopping the trembling, and throws the paper in the trash. He does the rest of his shaving nearly by feel, taking only brief seconds to double check his work in the mirror. The whole time, his heart pounds away beneath his rib cage, in time with the chuckles echoing through his mind.

He's noticed, of course, that things are different now. Sometimes, when he moves his head just right, it’s like he can see through people straight to their souls. If he’s not careful, he frosts over metal and glass, if he touches them for too long. There’s a weight on his back, visceral enough to make him feel like he needs to slouch forward to compensate, which just sends him off balance, because it’s not a physical weight.

But something like this is a horror to its own. To know that Lucifer has enough power to heal even a small cut means that he has too much power over Sam’s body.

“Our body, Sam. Ours. Together. You were built for me, you know.”

He thinks about how exhausted he’s been, the lack of sleep. How he and Dean still need to eat, still grow sweaty and gross, still ache.

Sam realizes, then, that Lucifer, at least, if not Michael too, could make all of that go away if they wanted to.

But of course, they don’t, because for them it’s a waiting game, pure and simple. As soon as Sam or Dean let their guard down enough, grow tired enough, hate themselves enough, the apocalypse is back on. The fight, the world-ending battle, will start again.

And all Lucifer and Michael have to do is wear them down.

“Now you’re getting the picture.”

It’s a thick, molasses-like breath that Sam pulls into his lungs, but he manages to do it all the same. Then another, and another. Behind the shower curtain, Dean starts singing Stevie Nicks. That makes it easier, somehow.

They’re Winchesters. They’ll make it work.

He rinses his razor, dries it as best as he can, and places it back in the bag. The shower turns off, and Dean steps out in a towel. Sam finishes getting dressed, turning his back to give Dean privacy as he does the same.

“Well,” Dean says, the same maddeningly same Dean as always, “ready to go learn about some food handling?”

Sam rolls his eyes and tugs on his shoes, following Dean out the motel door.

Jerry Wilcox had been teaching food handling for twenty-seven years. Waves and waves of people had floated through his classes—teenagers getting ready for their first jobs, restaurant owners and employees only there to conform to regulations, a few odd people here and there who simply wanted to learn ‘just in case,’ and mothers going back into the workforce after they became empty nesters—he’s seen it all.

And most of the time, Jerry wouldn’t have been able to tell you the single name of any one of his students. His job was to get up, lecture for a few hours, take questions, supervise the exam, and then rinse and repeat.

But today, after class is over, he finds the short list of people who’d signed up for this week’s classes, and by powers of deduction (namely, ruling out the youngest and oldest age groups, and all the female names), he learns the names of two of his students.

Dean Landsem

Sam Peterson

Jerry sits back in his office chair, rolling back and bumping into the wall that is all too close because the county skipped heavily on the budget for the community center, and contemplates.

The whole class, they’d been sitting close to each other. Closer than the kind of business partner friendliness that could be waved away.

But then, Jerry’s dad had served in the war, and there was something awfully military vet with both of them as well.

Hard to place exactly what it was. Maybe it was how the one with the long hair stared off into space, and the other guy would, without fail, reach out and nudge or squeeze or bump into him. How awareness would flood back into his face and he’d immediately go back to taking notes, that from Jerry’s perspective looked incredibly comprehensive.

Or maybe the connection to his dad was the dramatic and visceral reaction they’d both had when another participant had accidently dropped a metal water bottle, sending it crashing to the floor with an echoing bang. Both of them had flinched, ducked their heads, and turned in sync. Jerry was fairly sure the one with the shorter hair had been about to pull a gun—not that it was uncommon to conceal carry here, but with that kind of reaction, fairly unnerving.

Thank goodness they’d selected the day-long course, rather than the weekly one. Jerry hopes he never has to have them in his class again, if only so he doesn’t have to worry about getting shot if he’s too loud one day.

Michael is silent for one purpose, and one purpose only. To startle Dean Winchester when he finally lets his guard down. It has nothing to do with the binding soul silencing him, nothing to do with the unusual, long-since-forgotten experience of being in a human body, nothing to do with how exhausted he is from fighting his chains.

Well, that’s what he’s been telling himself every time he goes quiet. He’s the battle warrior of heaven, here in his best weapon, forged through years of work by the forces of heaven and hell. He knows tactics. He knows lulling an enemy into a sense of security forces shock and surprise on them when you return.

Somehow, he’s starting to realize that it’s very difficult to startle Dean Winchester.

He was built for Michael, the Sword of Heaven, Father’s Chosen Head. It’s very difficult to startle him. It only stands to show how well Winchester was built for this moment.

If only Dean would see that.

It’s a fuzzy, grace-fueled picture that he gets of the world outside of his vessel, confined as he is in the rampant tendrils of a soul far stronger than it should’ve been. It’s all so very human out there. Dean Winchester and the Abomination appear to be doing absolutely nothing of worth. All he can gather from Dean’s intake is something about food and licensing and health department, all of which mean nothing to him.

All of it is such a human thing.

He has never understood the obsession his father had with them. Lucifer didn’t just not understand, he hated them. They’re only useful tools at times, nothing else.

For a moment, he thinks he understands just why Lucifer is so bitter. Being trapped, almost fallen from grace is driving him mad.

It’s the inanity of it all. The Winchesters, doing nothing. Just sitting, reading, watching, and now moving, somewhere for some reason Bobby Singer had trifled over with the Winchesters for weeks. And the other woman, crass and loud.

Monkeys. Michael swears they never moved past that phase.

Now here, a classroom, diagrams of numbers and temperatures and food groups, all unneeded, unnecessary.

The plan would’ve rendered this all even more meaningless. But somehow, they’re still here.

It’s hard to sense Lucifer beyond his human-created jail, but what little he’s seen through Dean Winchester’s eyes has led him to believe that Lucifer is even more upset than he is. Somehow, he holds more power over his vessel than Michael does.

The thought stirs his motivations, and he starts wrestling with his captor’s soul again, and immediately the bands grow tighter, the grace seeping through loses more perception, and Michael—light, energy, power—is in pain. He stops his wrestling and goes back to banging, knocking, scratching. It does little except annoy his captor. But perhaps, one day after another, he will whittle him down. He has time, after all. He is as endless as time itself.

But so is Lucifer. And if Lucifer gets free first, it will be all too easy for Lucifer to kill Michael, as vulnerable as he is.

The only advantage Michael can imagine Lucifer having, the only way for Lucifer to break through so much more often than himself, is the fact that Lucifer had spent precious personal time and power to connect with his vessel (unnecessary and frankly demeaning).

But Michael has been struggling for too long. He needs an advantage once again.

He needs to understand Dean Winchester.

Bobby thinks that the Winchesters never look as out of place as they do in a kitschy, family-photo kind of home.

Cecilia Lynn has that kind of house. Grandkids and their art plaster the walls and fridge, Knick-knacks abound, floral prints and an ugly shag rug. Sam and Dean are slumped on the couch, clearly exhausted from too little sleep.

Bobby doesn’t know why he really came. It’s move-out-move-in day, but it’s not like the Winchesters have much to move in, and Cecelia Lynn is just boxing up her unneeded things in boxes for the basement, ready for her to come to get them when she’s ready or wanting. She’s only moving five hours south, after all, to the grandkids.

Cecelia Lynn won’t let them touch anything. Bobby really, really doesn’t know why he’s here.

But as he watches Sam slump deeper and deeper into half-sleep, leaning precariously on Dean’s shoulder, he knows why.

He’s called every day since they left for their first motel, their first trip back into humanity. He’s messaged on an average of an hour.

It’s different, seeing them again, outside of the panic room.

The couple of weeks spent repairing the car while Bobby and Cecelia Lynn convinced them of the feasibility of their plan, of the importance of having something to do, of the crucial need for them to not hunt had put some life back into them. They’re a few shades darker than sickly pale now, and Sam has started eating a little more.

They still look dead tired though. No rest for the people holding the whole world together by force of will, after all.

Cecelia Lynn is bustling around still, and Bobby stays standing in the corner, ready to help if she finally allows for it.

Dean’s head bobs, making Sam’s head slip further into the space between Dean’s shoulder and the back of the couch that Dean has created by resting his face in his hands.

It’s a recipe for disaster. Bobby wouldn’t dare disturb them if a volcano was erupting.

Every ounce of rest is somehow more precious than before.

Cecelia Lynn is boxing up the china now, wrapping it carefully in newspaper and bubble wrap. The noises don’t change a thing with Sam and Dean.

He thinks about all that’s ahead. More required training that Ceceilia Lynn wouldn’t budge on. Repairs and changes and months of work to the diner, to the house. Then humans, interactions, not just brief but long-term.

Bobby wonders if this is something they needed even before the angels and apocalypse. Even if this leads to the end of the world, maybe it’s worth it, to give them a chance at breathing. After all, it’s only them holding back the end. Maybe they get to choose how to spend their time holding it back.

“Bobby, grab those boxes for me, would’ya?”

“What am I, your pack horse?”

“‘S what you signed up for.”

With a smile he tries to turn into good natured scowling, he takes a stack of boxes and starts the trip down the stairs.

Let them rest, he thinks. It’s not a prayer, because he knows those could be dangerous, but it’s as close to one as he’s gotten in years.

Let them rest.

Dean thought he was okay.

Now, thinking back on the day, he realizes he isn’t. Not even a Winchester level of okay.

His biggest clue was Sam. Sam, notorious since birth for never wanting to go to bed on time, for midday nap crashing because he doesn’t sleep at night, for up-reading ‘till the crack of dawn—that Sam had asked if they could go to bed at eight thirty.

Sam thinks he’s being so slick, Dean had seen that manipulative look in his eyes and been in on the game from the second Sam had made his request.

But this is how Dean knows he’s not okay—he said yes.

And the worst part is, it does make it better.

Sam is quiet, next to him, as they lay in the dark, the thick, dark curtains Cecilia Lynn left behind in her tiny, red-brick house, blocking out the lights from the street outside. It still smells like flowered perfume in here. Dean can hear Sam’s measured, consistent breaths, just a touch too fast for sleep. With the barest hint of light, he can see the profile of Sam’s face, turned toward him.

“Another day tomorrow,” Dean mumbles, soft in the quiet of the night, only the sounds of the house creaking and a few rumbling cars outside able to be heard. It's nonsense, really. But Sam gets it.

“I could come with you.”

Dean’s answer is instinctive, quick, “No. We need to—eventually, we’ll have to learn how to, y’know . . .”

It’s hard to say aloud, to admit just how wrapped up in each other they’ve become. Today marks the first day since Stoll that they’ve been apart for more than a few minutes. Dean had spent the entirety of his culinary tools class nervously fiddling with his phone, keeping an eye out for a call from Sam, a prayer at the tip of his tongue whenever that gut-tight worry in his chest grew to be too much, ready to call in Castiel, the reinforcements. Ready to sprint to Sam’s side at a moment’s notice.

He didn’t learn much today.

Sam is quiet. Dean can feel him nod.

“I know,” Sam says.

Sam sounds miserable. Not for the first time, Dean wonders if it would’ve just been better to stay there, in Bobby’s panic room, until Cas figured something out, until they could find the keys to Lucifer’s cage, until anything.

But they weren’t getting better. Michael and Lucifer aren’t the flu, they’re a terminal illness. No recovery, just living.

And Sam, Sam had been slowly losing.

It’s been better, since they left Bobby’s. Sam, left to his own devices, to his own thoughts, gets lost. Lost in that massive brain of his, in the depths of his thoughts that even Dean can’t begin to reach sometimes. And Lucifer has only made the problem worse. No. Not just worse. Compounded.

Dean has no more words, so he just reaches out. Back when Sam was near catatonic, trying to keep Lucifer back, before they learned how to pull each other back from the brink, Sam had resisted, every time Dean had tried to touch him, hold him, keep him from flying away. Now, Sam burrows in, the second Dean starts to pull, like Sam was just waiting for the go ahead.

And it’s times like these when Dean remembers his dad’s journal. The embarrassing parts, about them as children. How he’d apparently been unwilling to leave Sam’s side, climbing in his crib, trying to take him out of the car seat. He wonders if it’s some kind of weird psychological thing, why this helps so much.

He doesn’t know squat about psychology. But he does know that the second Sam rolls in toward him, curling in on the bed so he can push his head against Dean’s chest, the pounding in his head grows quiet.

Sam’s hands, so much larger than when they were children, grab onto Dean’s shirt in the same way they did when he was small, pulling it taunt against Dean’s stomach, like Sam is anchoring himself to Dean.

Sam is a giant now, but it still feels so natural to pull him in, to cradle the back of his head, reach out and hold onto him.

They settle like that, and Dean feels his heart calm, the tension that constantly aches in his head from holding back a nuclear explosion easing up.

Sam sighs aloud, like maybe he feels the same release of struggle that Dean is.

It takes Dean a long few minutes to find his words, to contemplate just how sincere he can be without inciting more teasing than he can handle from Sam’s wicked sense of humor, but he opens his mouth eventually.

“Thanks.”

Sam doesn’t say anything in return, just nods his head against Dean’s chest. Dean’s arm is going pins-and-needles from the awkward position he’s got it in, but he elects to ignore it.

Sleep comes sooner than he expected.

Chapter Text

JULY

Cecelia Lynn needs her sewing machine. The one room she’d let the boys pack up, and then unpacking at her daughter’s house there was no sewing machine in sight.

It’s a quick call to let the Winchesters know she’ll be by, a conversation just about as useful and personable as any she’d had with John Winchester back in the day (that is to say, not at all).

The drive’s not bad, Sunday driving on the freeway. Her leg’s got cramping and phantom pain the whole way through. Probably best if she stays the night to give it a break from the car. Hopefully at least one of the boys will be willing to give up a bedroom for her.

The lawn is still overgrown, the siding still worn. The brick path up to the door is still as unsteady and off center as ever.

She wonders if they’ll change it at all. From what she knows from Bobby, these two don’t even know the meaning of a house. Or that could’ve just been Singer’s drunken tongue spilling opinions that had no root.

Strangers are living in her house. She still wonders what possessed her to give it up.

She’d wanted to for a while. That’s her answer.

The diner is too much for her, and she’s not exactly in a safe business. She wants time with her grandkids before it’s too late. You never really get out of hunting, after all.

“Yellow Rose of Texas” plays as she rings the doorbell. The sky has turned dark with clouds overhead, and a couple of drops fall near the edge of the porch.

Sam opens the door. He looks a little better than the last time she saw him. She goes to say as much, but then decides to bite her tongue against her instinct.

“Hey, come on in,” Sam says after a brief moment of awkward eye contact.

Cecelia Lynn moves past him as he holds the screen door open for her.

She smiles upon entering. They haven’t changed much, but the shag rug is gone. A remnant of a different time, before these boys would’ve been around.

“Well, looks like you all still have some work to do, the neighbors are going to think I still live here.”

Sam gives a small near-laugh, and when she turns to look back at him, he’s shrugging.

He’s not wearing shoes. An odd fact to notice, but it warms her heart to think that maybe they’re actually settling in here.

There’s noise in the kitchen, the sound of a sudden crash, and a loud series of curses, no doubt from Dean.

“Dean’s making dinner,” Sam says mildly, with the first tinge of humor she’s ever heard from him.

“Well then,” Cecelia Lynn says, feeling her leg twinge again, “we wouldn’t want to interrupt that, would we?” She shares a conspiratorial look with Sam before easing down onto the sofa that sinks in far too deep.

“How have things been?”

“Alright,” Sam replies, sitting opposite her in the armchair, one hand moving up to his opposite arm to pluck at some bandages there, absentmindedly.

Absentminded. That’s a good word for Sam Winchester.

It’s like he’s half here. He’s staring at the fireplace, toying still with the fabric on his arm. There’s no attempt at conversation. She’s used to it though, those couple of weeks she spent going back and forth to Singer’s place to get logistics figured out—licenses, signing up for classes, transferring paperwork—and working to convince the Winchesters to leave the basement.

She just can’t parse why she cares. Maybe it’s because she cares about the world and Singer told her they’re the only thing stopping the end of it as she knows it.

She wants her grandkids to grow up in a happy world, without worrying about the monsters and demons and angels hiding around every corner.

Cecelia Lynn lets the silence sit, watches Sam watch nothing, eyes glazed over.

“Drove past the diner on the way in,” she says, after a few minutes. Sam jumps and focuses back in on her like it’s difficult to move his eyes in her direction.

“Yeah,” he says, shaking his head.

“Looks like there’s still a lot of work to do,” she says. The diner had fallen into disrepair as her motivation and desire to keep it running decreased every day.

“Yeah,” Sam repeats, nothing added. Outside there’s a clap of thunder and Sam flinches, looking to the window. The rain starts pouring down.

“You, uh,” Sam says, trailing off before picking up his thread once again, “you shouldn’t drive out in that.”

“I’d rather not,” Cecelia Lynn agrees, “you think you boys could come to an agreement so I could take a bedroom?”

At that, Sam looks back at her, puzzlement in his eyes for the shortest of moments before his face smooths over and he says, seemingly fully present for the first time since she’s gotten here, “Yeah, I can—I’ll go tidy up the spare bedroom. Me and Dean can share.”

He stands, towering over her, picks up her bag, and moves to the stairs, and Cecelia Lynn listens as they creak under foot.

She stretches back, listens to the sounds of various pots and pans and cooking utensils in the kitchen. Seems like Dean has taken his chef training to heart. Practicing.

Outside, another roll of thunder passes through, close and loud, making Cecelia Lynn’s bones ache.

Leaning back, she decides that she can just rest her eyes for a bit . . .

And then Dean is there, nudging her shoulder.

“Dinner’s ready.”

Dinner is quiet, although Cecelia Lynn does her best to keep conversation going. She’s learned over these past few weeks that the Winchesters are not great conversationalists. Funny that she’d heard so many rumors otherwise. Maybe it’s the situation in their brains.

She becomes aware, as she eats her home-cooked pasta and watches the Winchesters exchange looks that seem to convey entire messages, that she’s become a stranger in her own home. The hurt of it hits her suddenly, a pang in her heart. This place had been home for so many years. She’d had family Christmas here, Thanksgiving at this very table. Parties and Sunday naps in the living room.

Her food, though delicious at first, turns dusty in her mouth.

“Well,” she says, plate empty, “boys, thanks for letting me stop by for that machine. I’m too old to stay up past bedtime these days, I’ll see you in the morning.”

She receives two in-sync “goodnight” responses, and Sam takes her plate from her with a distant smile.

The walk up the stairs helps to soothe her heart as the ache of her body makes itself known. Her daughter’s place is single level—yet another reason for the move. Her leg gets more and more painful each day, not to mention her opposite hip. She’s been delaying hip surgery for over a year now. Now she doesn’t have an excuse.

Her old bedroom is on the right. A look in and she can see small things changed—several sheets of paper with a myriad of symbols taped across the walls, piles of clothing she would’ve never left on the ground, a change in where the bed is situated in the room. She turns instead to the smaller bedroom, the guest-room-slash-office-slash-sewing-room.

When she enters, she notices that not a single thing is out of place. The boxes are still there. Even the duvet she’d left behind still has a single corner untucked.

And well, that’s strange. But maybe not that strange. They’d been sleeping in cots in Bobby’s panic room after all, in sight and sound of each other.

There always were rumors about them anyways.

With a near physical effort, she ignores her questions and starts getting ready for bed. She says her prayers that night, repetitive and comforting as ever, even though Singer and half of the other hunters out there would ridicule her if they knew.

And the next thing she knows, she's hearing shouts and clattering next door. With hunter instincts never forgotten, she's up, strapping on her leg, and running with a gun in hand.

As she reaches the bedroom door, she finds it locked, and with a strength she'd long since thought gone, she rears back and, with a crunch, kicks it open.

In front of her, Sam has wrapped his hands around Dean’s neck, kneeling over him on the floor. Dean is struggling, gasping for air.

At the noise of her entrance, Sam looks up and she sees the glint of unnatural eyes.

This is the moment, she realizes, the moment when she thinks that Bobby really wasn't kidding about, well, everything.

Lucifer. The devil.

Her shock makes her drop her weapon down. Sam–Lucifer–grins up at her.

And apparently that's all Dean Winchester needs. Cecelia Lynn watches as the devil himself is taken down by a knee to the ribs, and then Dean takes the advantage.

"Sam, get yourself back here, right the hell now!"

And suddenly, something shifts. Sam goes limp on the floor, spasms once, then once again, and then lies still. Cecelia Lynn has a hand clutched to her heart, the other trembling as it holds her gun down and away from people (just like her dad always taught her).

It’s the fact that it’s angels.

Dean is breathing loudly in the quiet, painful inhales that suggest that there’s something wrong with his throat.

Then, a soft, "Dean?"

Another raggedy breath, and Dean leans back, placing a hand on his brother’s chest.

"How . . . how long?" Sam is still on the ground, looking half-dead, limbs sprawled on the carpet.

"Minute, maybe two," Dean replies, voice gravelly. He winces, pulls away even further and drops on the ground, leaning back against the bed frame. His hand pats blindly on the floor until he finds Sam's hand and grabs hold.

Cecelia Lynn can't stop the rush of air that escapes her as her heart finally seems to realize that the emergency has come to an end.

Dean's head lolls over to look at her and Sam twists enough to see her.

For a moment, they all just look at each other.

"Sorry," Sam says, finally breaking the silence, "I . . ."

He trails off. Cecelia Lynn takes a grounding breath then says, "That’s alright."

Dean nods at her, appreciation or respect in the motion.

And then, with the steel of all her years in hunting, she gives a nod back, and leaves the room. She walks back to the spare room (and no wonder it's never been used, no wonder any more). She sits on the edge of her bed, unloads her gun, and removes her prosthetic. Then she sits, staring at the wall.

Damn.

What has she brought here to Lageme? She's now understanding the reluctance, the dragging feet.

The end of the world is right next door. The end of the world is going to be working at her family's restaurant.

Sleep doesn't find her that night. The morning dawns and she picks up her sewing machine and her car keys, and heads out the front door.

Dean has a list.

Most of the time when he has a list, it’s just in his head. But right now, sitting in a pink and crème bedroom in a town in Iowa, watching Sam meticulously painting runes and symbols on the walls as he pulls off the wallpaper one bit at a time, Dean has made a list. A real physical one, on a battered yellow legal pad that Sam had (less than graciously) allowed him to use.

Straight down the middle, there’s a line, separating his two areas of focus: House and Diner.

House:

Get rid of wallpaper

Wards etc.

Buy paint

Sell old furniture

Shop new furniture

Set up extra bedroom as office

Stock fridge/pantry (Sam food)

Mow lawn? Lawnmower? Hire kid?

BUY GOOD BIG BED

Thrift store

Diner:

Paint Siding

Fix rain gutters

Fix plant boxes (Home Depot?)

Go over menu w/ Sam

Fix menu

New menu?

Get Sam to do menu stuff

Kid’s menu?

Better coffee

Reupholster booths and stools

New varnish on tables

Kitchen window

Turnstile for orders

Dishes inventory

Fix broken oven

Put up signs about being closed for renovations

Check new flooring pricing?

Better knives

PIE

Change hours

All the internet stuff (Sam)

Get website?

Take down art

Get gumball machine

Get claw machine

Get jukebox

Hire people?

Dinner mints

“Can you get more water?” Sam asks, diverting Dean’s attention away from his list. He’s holding out the small bucket he’s been using to wet the wallpaper, full now of the gooey, slimy remains of his work with the pallet knife they’d found in the garage. Cecelia Lynn had left almost everything, not wanting to bother with things that had no significance to her. It left them a lot of random, but useful, items.

“Yup,” Dean says, pushing himself to his feet and grabbing the bucket. He starts to head out of the room and pauses.

“You okay for a few minutes?”

Sam has the intent, focused look on his face that means he doesn’t want to talk about it. He keeps scraping away at the wallpaper.

“Yeah,” Sam says, brief and sharp.

Dean turns away, feeling the constant pounding in his head increase. He lets a grimace pass over his face when he turns away from Sam and starts walking to the kitchen.

The pounding is incessant. Annoying. Painful. But ultimately, it’s workable.

Down in the kitchen, he dumps the water and gathers up the clumps of limp wallpaper to throw in the trash. He watches out the window as another delivery truck rolls by. It’s loud outside, not too far off the highway. If things were normal—scratch that—if it were a few years ago, Sam would’ve turned up his nose, complained about the noise, but fallen asleep to the familiar lullaby of honking horns and speeding cars like he had since he was a baby. As it is, Sam has barely said a full sentence since they started settling in.

Pound, pound, pound.

Dean winces, braces himself against the counter, and closes his eyes, picturing the Impala. In the eye of his mind, he pulls the car over, exits, and starts banging on the trunk.

Shut the hell up, he thinks, directly addressing Michael, knowing how powerful he is and how angry Dean’s made him.

There’s no coherent answer, because Dean’s got him trussed up as tight as he can when the bonds are made of pure thought alone.

He opens his eyes, turns on the faucet, and fills the bucket.

Dean knows it’s different for Sam, not because he’s talked about it, but because he knows Sam. He knows that if Sam was the one who had an archangel locked up in an imaginary trunk, he’d be handling it just fine. Sam’s strong like that, stubborn like dad. Dean hates to admit it, but he’s not handling it. The constant pounding is making him twitchy, angry, sick to his stomach. The only thing that makes it better is Sam.

And Sam’s not handling his end of things well either.

When Dean walks back in, Sam’s tense shoulders drop in obvious relief, and the rapid pace he’d been scraping at the wall with slows to a more reasonable rhythm.

Dean places the bucket down near him, gets only a silent nod in return. Dean returns to the floor, to his list. He sits and stares at the notepad, fitfully plays with the corner of the page until it rips off and ends up just staring at the back of Sam’s head, watching him methodically dab, scrape, pull, read, paint.

He doesn’t dare write down the list that’s forming in his head, because Sam will see it and call Dean out on it, but it’s the most important list of all:

Help Sam

Get him to eat more

Give him things to do so he’s not stuck in his head

Make him go to bed on time

Make jokes to make him laugh

Get Lucifer out

Saul has been doing contract work in Lageme for twenty years, and he never thought he’d see the day where he got called in to work on Darla’s.

Darla’s is a Lageme staple. Everyone knows Darla’s. It being closed the past few months while Cecelia Lynn was away was one of the biggest stories around the church after services each week. Saul is ready for it to be back, for him and his work buddies to grab a stack of hotcakes on the way to their work site for the day.

So, he’s downright excited to talk to the new owners.

He knows Cecelia Lynn, was her neighbor for years until there were too many kids for the house. She’d told him to expect a call.

Dean Landsem is nothing like he expected. He’s younger than he first thought. Maybe early thirties. When Cecelia Lynn had mentioned they were some cousin’s kids, he’d thought at least mid forties.

He shakes hands like a military guy, greets him as gruffly as any that Saul’s ever met.

But there’s no forearm tattoo to betray his allegiances. No dog tags around his neck, no veteran hat on his head. He could only really be Afghanistan, he’s too young for anything else.

“So,” Dean Landsem says, gesturing to the diner, “we’ve got a list.”

“Well I sure hope you do,” Saul replies, getting out his clipboard. Appraisals are his strong suit, now that he’s more an office type than a repair guy after his back surgery. Art keeps sending him out before the younger guys, trusts his opinion more.

Dean Landsem unlocks the doors to Darla’s with a ring of keys almost as stuffed full as the ring will allow and walks Saul into Darla’s. It’s a rueful smile that crosses Saul’s face as he enters, eyeing the spot where he had his first kiss, the booth he and his buddies always sat at in the early mornings on the way to a gig.

“Sam!” Dean calls out, stepping over a lopsided mop to turn on the lights to the place.

“Here,” comes the returned voice, and Sam, (who must be the Sam Peterson on the paperwork they sent over), emerges from the kitchen. He’s young too, long hippie-style hair, the kind Saul’s ex-wife would’ve killed any of their boys for having.

Saul gets the military vibe from him too. Wonders if they served together or something. But then, Cecelia Lynn said they were related, so he's not sure.

Sam stays back behind the counter, giving space as he wipes his hands on a towel. He gives Saul a polite nod.

"The pilot light's definitely out in that far oven," Sam says.

"Dang. I'll see if we can get an HVAC guy in here."

Sam nods and then moves away again, disappearing through the door to the kitchen.

Dean gestures Saul over to a booth.

"Alright," Dean says, grabbing a yellow legal pad, "I got a list for ya'."

Saul sets down his binder and says, "Hit me with it."

They start talking business, and it becomes obvious that Dean knows what he's talking about when it comes to construction. He’s already got eyeball measurements for the changes, how many men it'll take to put new shingles up, and how many cans of paint they'll need.

"You work construction and maintenance before?" Saul asks.

"Too many times, mostly gig work."

"I can tell. How come you’re calling us in?”

Saul never did see the point in beating around the bush. Got him in trouble enough times, but mostly seemed to serve him well.

Dean looks up from his list for the first time since they’d sat down. Saul can see the intensity in his eyes, the focus. Then, a slight flinch, curling in.

“Just don’t quite feel like putting in all the labor when we’ve got the funds to pay someone else to do them,” Dean says, “me and my brother know our way around pretty much every tool you got though.”

It’s a dodging of the question and a warning, all in one. Saul accepts it silently—there’ll be no scamming these two for an extra few bucks.

“That your brother then?” Saul nods his head toward the kitchen door, “Could’ve sworn y’all had different last names.”

Saul is good at people. His mom liked to joke that he was a psychic, the way he read people. His dad, when he was alive, had always reminded him that if plans didn’t work out, he could always switch to fortune telling.

So, when Dean Landsem opens his mouth to reply, he knows from the very first word that it’s a lie.

“Yeah . . . half-brothers, but raised as siblings.”

It’s a story—a good one even, enough hinting at a troublesome family dynamic through his tone that people would be less likely to ask questions.

Together then. It’s no wonder Dean’s weaving the brother story, a town like this. It’s safer that way. Saul doesn’t have a problem with it the way most other people in the town would—his mom’s only got one sibling, but he has two uncles. Not the kind of talk Lageme would take in stride.

Saul just nods, professional to professional, and as the slightest relaxation of Dean’s shoulders informs him that Dean believes the lie to be sold, Saul tilts his head, just so.

Saul’s a people person. Good at people. His parents always joked. He never told them how right they were. Never told anyone, town like this. God-fearing and all that.

But he’s good at people, because he can see more than most.

And Dean Landsem, on the inside, is burning so hot and bright that it makes Saul want to flinch away. Something’s wrong with him.

Something big enough to make a guy call in a workforce to fix up something he could normally manage. Big enough to move to a brand new town, to take up a brand new job.

He wonders if it’s cancer. Another terminal-type illness. HPV. Or maybe just something huge and mental. PTSD. He did think that Dean gave off military vibes, that could be it.

He’s imprecise when it comes to his gut feelings, those nigglings in his brain, the things he sees beyond what is real and visible to everyone else. But he knows something is wrong.

“Well,” Saul says, “glad I can help you and your brother out. The boys can get this place shining up again like new in no time.”

“Glad to hear it,” Dean replies.

They return to their lists, their estimates, their mild professional haggling.

Saul is really good at people. He knows how to keep his tongue when it comes to secrets. He’s been doing it his whole life.

Becca has been running the stall solo at the farmer’s market for five years now. The Crawford Family Farm is a staple around here. People drive the half hour out of town all the time to pick up their produce and eggs from them.

But the farmer’s market gets to even more people.

It’s hot out, sweltering humid. She fans herself with the inventory clipboard she keeps up to date to make sure she’s got everything at the end of the day.

She gets her regulars coming through, the Welches and Janet Neuen and Dr. Blackwater, and the few folk from the next town over who she doesn’t know as well. Then some of the people who come half the time, the Gardners and all their kids, Nancy Quinn and her new out-of-town boyfriend everyone’s been gossiping about.

It’s an easy, humdrum day, fanning herself and chatting with people, catching up with them and refusing to haggle with a good sense of humor.

Bob Wilkerson at the next booth over makes conversation, they chat about things in town—the upcoming church service project, Darla’s re-opening date, Jackson Paulson’s run-in with the sheriff last week. Becca gets all of her news this way. She doesn’t go to church (despite Pastor Hopkin’s best efforts) and she and her parents are far enough out not to have many neighbors.

They’d be hermits, if only farming didn’t require them to work to sell their products. Homebodies.

Becca’s never known it any other way, and she doesn’t care to find out.

Bob’s at the other end of his stall, dealing with Joe Jacobson and his long, drawn-out stories, so Becca’s just at the right spot to overhear unfamiliar voices.

“I’m telling you, it’s not gonna take long to memorize the list.”

“Why do we even need a list in the first place?”

“It’s all a part of the mood, you know that.”

There’s a scoff, and Becca perks up in her camping chair to try and spot who it is.

Two tall guys she’s never seen before are standing in the middle of the grassy space the canopies are set up in, deeply involved in their conversation, staring each other down. Good looking, both of them. Wearing flannel and jeans and looking a little sweaty for it.

“You could memorize the list in about an hour.”

“Not if it’s that long.”

“Yeah you could. I’ve seen you do it before, you do it with research all the time. Plus, you know half of it already. And we can make shit up for the stuff that we don’t already have down. It’s our diner.”

Silence again, but Becca can see the taller of the two lean his head back and shake it at the sky. She wouldn’t be surprised if there was eye rolling involved.

“C’mon, it’s not a diner if there isn’t lingo and pie. They’re the staples for all of the top ten diners in the country.”

“Dean, you made the list. That doesn’t count.”

“Who says so?”

“Me, for one.”

Becca gets distracted by Mrs. Thomson, who’s coming by for her crates of apples she’d ordered last farmer’s market, and when she looks up, the two men are gone from her immediate sight. She can’t quite see around Luke Bartley’s signs, but she can see Luke talking to someone.

The new diner owners.

It’d been the talk of the town the past few weeks, in-between the news of Gina Marlow’s pregnancy and proposition eighty-three passing.

Everyone loved Darla’s. Even Becca loved it, if only for the after-closing night theater trips she’d taken in high school every time the quarterly play was over. Cecelia Lynn had opened up especially for them (closed for reserved event signs on both doors) and they’d eaten fries and greasy burgers and fake-cheese nachos until their stomachs hurt and they were almost passed out from exhaustion.

Becca thinks maybe she’ll convince her parents to come with her to the re-opening.

Dean can’t drink alcohol anymore.

Or rather, he can. It just doesn’t seem to do much.

Michael has stolen away everything he loves.

Dean stares at the beer in his hand, mourning the loss of a potential buzz. Not that he should be drinking with an archangel in his head, but he just can’t stand the pounding in his head any longer.

“Dean?”

Sam stumbles into the kitchen, silhouetted by the moonlight creeping through the windows and the light from the fridge that Dean hasn’t yet closed. Sam’s rubbing at his eyes, blinking slowly.

The pang of all that they’ve lost hits Dean so suddenly that it takes his breath away. He drops the beer can (crappy, gas station purchase, desperate for relief, grabbed, hidden, on the way back from the diner that day) on the countertop and balls his fists.

Dean Winchester doesn’t cry for no damn reason.

But Dean Winchester with an archangel pounding away at his head, with a tongue that no longer tastes food like it used to, with an intolerance of alcohol, with no coping mechanisms left, finds himself with tears forming in his eyes.

“Dean?” It’s softer this time, less the startled question of a sleepy Sam, more the stupid, caring brother that doesn’t let Dean rest until Sam’s picked away at him to understand him, piece by piece.

“Go back to bed, Sam” Dean says, turning to look away.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it Michael?”

Dean scoffs, “When is it not?” The thought makes the dampness around his eyes get a little more difficult to hold back.

There’s a hand on his forearm, and then Dean finds himself being manhandled into a hug.

Sam is wearing his oversized hoodie, the one that hangs off his skinny frame in a way it didn’t when he was juiced up, working out. It’s thick, way too warm at this time of year. Dean curls in, holds Sam close and fists his hands in the excess fabric at the back.

Dean Winchester is crumbling apart.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there, clutching on to Sam and trying to breath through the tears that refuse to go away. At some point, Sam loosens his grip and pulls him toward the stairs, kicking the fridge door closed behind them. They ascend the stairs and make it back into the bedroom. Dean sinks into the bed, exhausted from his late night outburst. He goes to lay down and finds Sam there. Without a word, Sam reaches out and pulls Dean in close, cradling him. It’s the reverse from what feels natural to Dean, but he’s so exhausted, so turned around, that he doesn’t complain. He just listens to Sam’s heart and fades away into restless sleep once again.

Chapter Text

AUGUST

Janna has never before seen the diner look this crisp and shiny.

First day back at work, meeting the new bosses, and she steps into the diner with the keys she’s had for the past few months dangling on the old key rack her son made for her in boy scouts. Her jaw nearly drops wide open. It looks like a brand new place, but there’s just enough of Darla’s left behind to make it feel just the same as usual.

“Janna?”

A tall man, long brunet hair. Cecelia Lynn had told her about the new owners on the phone, but she’d definitely downplayed the height. Janna’s just happy to be over five foot, and this guy would be towering over her if he wasn’t slouched against the counter with hunched shoulders.

“You must be Sam,” she replies, walking closer and extending a hand, “Cecelia Lynn said you’d be here.”

Sam nods and stares at her outstretched hand for a moment like he doesn’t know what it’s for, before grasping on—gentle, like he thinks he’s going to break her with a touch—and giving the briefest possible shake.

“Yeah,” he says, dropping her hand and immediately tucking his arm closer to his body, “Dean’s at his chef classes.”

“Left you here with the inventory?” Janna points to the spread of papers and the battered laptop on the counter.

Sam nods, brief, turns his head back to the counter.

Cecelia Lynn had warned her that he wasn’t much of a talker. Funny that, seeing as he’s supposed to help her wait tables, she thinks. At least until someone else gets hired. She’s the only one from the old crew who came back. The last few months have been nice, without the everyday stress of waiting tables, but the extra funds are gonna get her kids through college and it’s nice to not feel so stretched at the wallet everyday.

And well, when Cecelia Lynn told her the new management was interested in hiring her back on, she couldn’t say no. And no offense to Cecelia Lynn intended, but it would be difficult to be a worse boss-slash-manager than her. Cecelia Lynn is one of her dear friends. She couldn’t manage the diner worth a damn. Janna was used to doing more than her fair share of work, and opening the diner without any other help other than the ever-rotating series of short order cooks.

So, it’s natural to walk closer, making Sam shrink further in on himself, and look over the assorted paperwork.

She raises an eyebrow.

“You’re an organized type, I take it.”

Sam meets her eyes as she turns to look at him with a smile and he looks baffled, like he can’t quite figure out how the conversation landed here so fast. Janna is having a hard time keeping track herself—it was just business as usual to show up to Darla’s and find a new person there to train (sometimes without any warning or indication from Cecelia Lynn).

Sam shrugs with one shoulder, still huddled in on himself, a giant trying to be an ant.

“Better than anything I ever did with inventory. I’ll leave you to it. Am I good to get started on checking equipment?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah. That’s great.” Sam trails off with nothing else to add, like he’s gotten lost in his thoughts. In fact, as she looks at him, his eyes seem to have lost their focus. Quiet one indeed. She wonders if he’s one of Darla’s friends, the crew Janna’s tried her very hardest to not be associated with. The drifters that come through, that know Cecelia Lynn and ask for her by name while they bleed into a cloth napkin left over from the time Cecelia Lynn wanted to try catering.

Another look at Sam and she’s certain he’s that kind of relative. The one without blood relations, but the kind Cecelia Lynn would claim as her cousin the second they ended up needing bailing from jail.

Cecelia Lynn is an interesting person. Janna’d almost forgot just how much crap she’d put up with from her and her ‘friends’ over the years, but Sam—young, tired-looking Sam—is bringing it all back. She’s just met the man but she’s certain he’s going through something.

She shakes herself out of her stupor, says, “Fantastic,” and starts walking around the counter, admiring the new window into the kitchen area. When she enters the kitchen, she’s greeted with a brand new oven, a fresh countertop, and the remnants of what looks like a very complex attempt at making pie. There’s two misshapen lumps in pie tins on the counter, one nearly burnt to a crisp on top, and the other obviously underdone.

No wonder Cecelia Lynn was paying for the new guy to take lessons.

Looking in the back office-breakroom is a shocking sight—mostly because there is a breakroom to be seen, without shelves and shelves of filing cabinets and boxes filling the space. There’s a janky-looking water cooler in the corner and what is obviously Cecelia Lynn’s old couch against the wall. Janna’s locker is still there, a coupon to the Smith’s two towns over still hanging on a magnet on the front. When she opens it, her aprons greet her. She’d never bothered to bring them home, waiting on a call from Cecelia Lynn that the diner was going to be open that day for some reason or another. And then the months had passed and she’d gotten the call that Cecelia Lynn was holding over the reins to some cousin’s kids or something (and Janna’s not bitter, she swears), and she’d never come to get her work things.

And well, it’s worked out so far.

By the time she is done admiring all of the shiny new work in the building, there’s a new voice in the dining area that greets her as she rounds the corner out of the back area.

“What do you think about milkshakes on the menu—we gotta have them, you know. Multiple flavors or just stick to the regular three? Nah, we gotta have a peanut butter one.”

There’s a noncommittal sound, and when Janna finally peers out to see, she can see Sam, still hunched over his laptop and papers.

“And onion rings, man, we gotta have good onion rings. And tater tots. You know people’ll order burgers just to get the sides and not even realize it?”

The man talking looks around the same age as Sam, young but beaten down by the years nonetheless. He’s got shorter hair and already Janna can tell he has a larger personality, a larger presence than the guy who’d practically crawled into himself to get away from her when she first arrived.

Dean. Like James Dean—that was how Cecelia Lynn had introduced him. Said he was an overconfident son of a gun, but that he was a good guy, really. Just rough around the edges.

Janna walks closer, raises a hand in greeting.

“You Janna?” Dean says, looking up from where he’d been hovering over Sam’s work, one hand on Sam’s shoulder.

“Yep. You must be Dean.”

“You got me. Cecelia Lynn said you were our best bet for getting everything up and running again around here.”

“Been working at this place probably longer than you’ve been alive. You bet your ass I know how to get things done around here.”

Dean breaks into a smile and Janna thinks he’s sold. People either like her or they don’t, and first impressions lead to a lot of that decisiveness. Sam is still ignoring her. Hopefully he’ll come around.

“You got the chance to look around at the place now that the remodel’s done?”

Janna nods, “The window’s a nice touch, and the equipment looks nice. Can’t say the same for whatever you were trying to cook in there.”

Dean’s face falls, “Yeah. Just trying to figure out the pie. Gotta get it all good for when we’re back up and running.” His hand is still on Sam’s shoulder and Janna can see him squeezing at it, almost rocking Sam back and forth on his stool.

“We sellin’ pies now?”

“Hell yeah. Ain’t a diner if they don’t have good pie.”

“Well, in that case, you’d better go wash your hands and put an apron on. I’ll teach you how to make the best damn pies in the whole state.”

She’d gone to the state fairs with her pies as a teenager. Cecelia Lynn only ever had scoops of ice cream and milkshakes on the dessert menu.

Her tone and offer seem to take Dean aback and he raises his eyebrows and stares.

“We don’t got all day,” she says, turning back around to the kitchen to grab her own apron. She’s had to work double duty on the kitchen enough times to know where they’re kept.

Behind her, she hears a slight chuckle.

“Shut up, Sammy,” Dean says.

There’s a light whack sound, then an offended, “Hey!”

Janna smiles. Seems like Sam might be on his way to warming up to her.

Sam is sitting on the hood of the Impala.

He’s alone.

It’s raining.

The hood is growing slick. He hooks his boots in the grill. Dean would kill him for it.

He looks up and gets dizzy. The sky is full, so full of stars. The stars burn bright, pinpricks. They pulse in the sky.

Dean used to tell him when he was younger that stars were holes in the sky, like there was a curtain covering the universe with tiny rips in its fabric.

He’d believed him for a long time.

Now, he looks closer. The curtain is there, but it’s not wrapped around the universe, it’s wrapped around something inside of it, muffling it, trapping as much of the light as it can behind itself. But it’s got holes and the light, the light that is burning Sam’s eyes, is leaking out.

The Impala feels real beneath his hands, wet from the fat drops of rain that are growing steadily more rapid in their descent. The Impala is stabilizing him as the sky rattles above him.

Sam thinks that’s Lucifer, behind the curtain. He thinks the curtain is himself.

The holes and rips and tears are real. If he wanted to, he thinks he could reach up and touch them, but that would put him too close to what’s behind the sky.

He’s further away than he used to be, from the sky. A greater distance, like he’s learned to drive away from it.

The Impala beneath him is cradling him close. He leans back, feels the windshield against his head.

And slips into wakefulness.

The back of his head is squashed against the headboard of the bed. He thinks that might be what woke him.

It’s strange to wake so normally.

It’s been months since his last restful night of sleep. He wonders why Lucifer let him get away with it.

He wonders why it’s been easier recently.

There’s so many factors that he can’t figure out why. Can’t figure out why he’s been more present, more able to communicate, more able to exist outside of his war with Lucifer. Is it the diner? Time spent with people who aren’t Dean (mostly Janna, who’s put together their whole lives at the diner for them, helped Sam learn how to fold the cutlery, made jokes at Dean’s expense that made Dean laugh out loud)? The upcoming start date for running the diner with customers? The stress of the job? The late nights of working to get the new menu formatted? Hanging out with Dean in the kitchen as he makes Sam try every single dish (something about Dean’s taste buds being weird)? Staying so close to Dean?

It could really be anything. Maybe Lucifer is tired too. Or maybe he’s just gearing up for the biggest fight he can give.

Dean snorts, snuffles in his sleep. Dean’s got his back pressed against Sam’s, the two of them facing away from each other but stuck together from shoulder to middle back. Sam’s grateful for it, his legs still have bruises from two nights ago when Dean kicked him in his sleep.

There’s a small patch of light peeking in through the curtains that are opened just enough to let it in. Sam watches it.

It’s quiet in his head.

He’s worried.

Valerie can’t wait to format this for the front page of the paper this week.

The last time she had something this exciting to write about, it had been the fire at the McGovern house, and it had broken her heart at the same time.

A grand opening with a line out the door was way more exciting.

She frames the shot in her camera lens, trying to capture the magnitude of what is occurring at Darla’s at the very moment. She reviews the pictures, sees the Under New Management, reopening August 27th sign perfectly at an angle on the left, and smiles.

Valerie lets her camera hang on her neck as she pulls out her notepad, ready for more interviews. She’d already gotten to several people in line, but the more the merrier (and the more she has to pull for her piece).

Mr. Riding, one of the newer history teachers at the high school, is standing with his family just to the back of where she left off her interviews. She goes through the usual Lageme greeting, the how’s the folks, dog, leg, back, kids and then asks for Mr. Riding’s views on the re-opening for the paper.

“Well, I’ll tell you, I’m excited for it. Darla’s is a staple around here, it's good to see it up and running again. I just hope the line keeps moving!"

It's been a slow but steady trickle of people in and out. Fast service, apparently, just too many people. Lageme's excited for anything new.

Plus, the new people. The owners. It's only polite to try to get to know them and stick their noses in their business, at least in the Lageme way of things.

"Thanks, Mr. Riding!" She finishes jotting down her notes with a flourish, and seeing Ted move up to the spot closest to the door, she packs up and heads back to her spot next to him in line. It's too hot to be holding hands, but she reaches out anyways and he gives her hand a squeeze before releasing it, both of their palms hot and sweaty.

Peering in through the new, giant glass doors, she starts taking mental notes. It looks good. Classic, like she's about to head into the set of a goofy 80's teen movie. and get up to some shenanigans.

The Smiths (the ones on Center street) exit the diner, and after a couple of minutes, they move up in line to wait indoors. The air conditioning is on high, people are everywhere. It’s loud and crowded and happy. The clattering of dishes, the sound of kids excitedly doodling on their menus.

Ted leans over and, in quiet tones, says, “It’s all so normal.”

Valerie leans in too, to say her piece: “I know. Something weird’s going on though, Rich swears there’s something weird about the new owners, and you know it was weird when Cecelia Lynn was running the place too.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah, I hope so.”

She’s not a conspiracy theorist, not really. She just likes to find the inside story. The secrets. The reasons why.

Cecelia Lynn was someone everyone at least knew of. It would be hard to say anyone in town actually knew her though.

Valerie went to school with her kids. And there was always something weird about them, about their family. Something more than religious scrupulosity.

And now, some weird relatives taking over the family business? Something is definitely up.

Either way, she’ll have a good front page for the paper, so it’s really just about the fun of snooping, the annoyance of a year-long mystery. And a little bit of wanting something in town to be exciting.

Janna is there, the waitress who’s been waiting tables the whole time Valerie’s been alive to remember it. A boy she doesn’t know is seating people. When he turns around, she gets a good look at his face and realizes he must be one of the Anderson kids—they all have similar features, but there’s too many of them to keep track of.

“Hi,” he says, as they make it to the hostess station, “welcome to Darla’s. Booth okay with you?”

Looking around at the full, bustling diner, Valerie privately thinks they don’t really have a choice in the matter, but she gives a polite smile and nods.

The Anderson kid (Zach, his nametag says) looks harried. He nearly drops their menus and almost plows right into a taller guy carrying a platter of dishes, but they finally manage to snag a booth in the back, still slightly damp from being cleaned.

Zach hands them their menus and pulls out a notepad.

"Can I get you started with drinks? Our lemonade is made fresh."

Ted cocks an eyebrow, says, "Fresh, huh? Well I'll try it."

"Just a water for me," Valerie says, "and when you get a chance I'd love to interview you for the paper!"

Zach blinks, looks back to the front where the line is still spilling out the door, and looks back with a confused expression on his face.

"Just when you get a chance," Valerie repeats, with less enthusiasm. She might need to come back later in the week–but that would delay her story, so there's no way she's doing that. If she does, Bradley will get to write yet another front page piece, and she's tired of being relegated to page three.

Zach nods and turns away, disappearing.

Ted opens his menu, says, "Damn, they updated this."

Valerie opens her own menu. It's organized, clear, and full of options.

It might still be called Darla’s, but it’s clear it's a different place now.

Or, as she gazes at the menu, maybe not. It's all still classic diner food, with a few additions. The Darla’s favorites are still there–they even have their own place on the menu.

It's all put together neatly, but underneath the sheen is still the same place.

Which means there's still secrets to uncover.

Zach returns with their drinks, and for a split second, Valerie thinks he’s going to spill directly on Ted's lap, but he manages to rescue it just in time.

"Alright, Sam should be by in just a minute to take your order."

He leaves without another word and Valerie and Ted share a look, tinged with humor.

They wait a long few minutes, and Valerie passes the time by organizing her notes foe her piece.

Sam, apparently, is the tall guy they passed by earlier, with his hair long enough to be tied back.

"My name is Sam, I'll be taking your order today, what can I get you?" He rattles off, so fast it takes Valerie a moment to process his words.

"Can I get the turkey bacon club?" Ted asks, talking loud to be heard in the din of the busy restaurant.

"Fries, tots, or onion rings with that?"

"Fries."

"Regular or seasoned."

"Regular is fine."

"And for you?"

Sam turns to look at Valerie, and for the first time, she can look directly at his face. He doesn’t look like anybody in town and she's certain she's never seen him before.

"I'll have the Alabama burger," she says, "with onion rings."

"Alabama burger, onion rings," Sam repeats, jotting down something that just looks like scribbles to her on a notepad. "Anything else I can get you?"

"Are you one of the new owners?" Valerie asks.

The divergence from their order seems to startle Sam. He blinks a few times before nodding, silent.

"My name is Valerie, I write for the Lageme County Bulletin. I'd love to interview you sometime, for the paper."

Sam swallows hard, blinks again, and then oddly darts his eyes over to the kitchen.

"Ah, my . . . My brother might be better for that."

"Is he available for an interview?"

Sam shakes his head in the negative, "He’s cooking."

"Well if you get the chance, I'd really appreciate it."

Sam nods, flips his notepad over and leaves without another word.

"Weird dude," Ted comments, as soon as he’s out of earshot.

"No kidding," Valerie leans in even closer, "something is definitely going on here."

"I mean," Ted says, "you're probably right. But it's busy, maybe he just is busy."

"Ted, c’mon. You know there's something weird about this place!" Valerie can feel her heart drop. This has been their joint investigation for the last two years, ever since that time Cecelia Lynn had to close the diner for two weeks because of some kind of infestation. But Ted's dad was the only exterminator nearby, and he wasn't called in for anything.

"I know, Val, I'm just saying. You know me, I gotta play devil's advocate."

Valerie sighs, leans back in her seat, "Yeah, I know."

"We'll figure it out someday."

"Ted, this is the biggest development about Darla’s we've ever seen! Cecelia Lynn even left town. You know something has to be up with the new owners!"

"Yeah, well, we're gonna figure it out. It just might not be today."

"I know. I'm just . . . Frustrated." They'd tried to get the inside scoop while the repairs were happening, but Saul Thompson was on always on site, and he kept turning them away, telling them some story about construction and permits that didn't permit them to be on the property. Their only info over the past month was from Rich, Valerie’s cousin’s boyfriend, who worked with Saul on the remodel.

Ted reaches out and pats her hand. She recenters herself. She knows Ted knows how much this means to her.

She goes back to her notes and they wait. And wait. And wait.

And finally, the food arrives.Sam puts their plates down gingerly, says, "Sorry for that wait," and hands them rolls of utensils before rushing over to another table.

The food looks good. The plates are full. She just doesn't know if it was worth the wait.

But she takes a bite and is pleasantly surprised. The burger satisfies the carnal part of her that longs for grease and meat. The onion rings are nice. A little too crispy.

“How’s your sandwich?” She asks.

Ted’s, “Good,” is muffled around his bite of food.

Valerie rolls her eyes. She forgets that Ted’s a scarfing guy, even though they’ve been together so long. There won’t be any real conversation out of him until his plate is clean.

She eats slowly, keeps looking around Darla’s. She watches Sam closely. He’s sure footed, easily dodging Zach and other customers. As Valerie watches, she sees him move over to a small station and pull out a dish tray and cleaning spray. Huh.

He’s bussing tables too. Double duty.

Or just poor management.

Sam disappears behind the counter, and she finds herself just watching the other customers. Most have familiar faces, people who she went to highschool with, or the parents of those people. A few of the kids from the daycare she works at when she’s not writing articles.

It’s like the town decided to get together and welcome in the new people, the new Darla’s.

Suspicious.

She doesn’t know why, but it seems strange. Why would anyone in this town care to welcome a couple new move-ins who had completely changed the classic diner?

They’d never cared about her situation. Why would they care now?

Suddenly the burger doesn’t taste as good. She sets it down and starts picking at her onion rings.

And the diner keeps bustling.

Dean doesn’t know why the hell they’re so damn busy.

It’s a diner. Just like a million he’s passed through. They’re reopening, but it’s not like they’re having a sale.

His head’s about to explode.

Michael is pounding away as Dean attempts to keep every order straight, hollering at their new hire cook, Shauna, to do this or that and getting hollered back at. The dishes are stacking up because they don’t have a dishwasher yet, and he just can’t do it all.

The thought builds in his mind as puts together order after order—newport beach, frog sticks, throwing a hamster on the side. He hadn’t understood why Sam put up such a fight in cobbling together their diner lingo, these things stick in his head so much better than just, ‘hamburger,’ ‘fries,’ ‘side of bacon.’

Why did they ever let themselves get convinced of this?

“Throw a sloppy on the garden,” Sam calls through the window.

“Crystal,” Dean calls back, turning to Shauna who’s already in the fridge.

“Grab some more lettuce for me,” he says.

“On it,” Shauna replies.

Dean likes Shauna. Shauna is calm and collected under pressure. Apparently she’d managed the Subway in town for years before deciding she hated the owners enough to transfer over to help them out for Cecelia Lynn.

“More frog legs!” Sam calls.

And yeah. That’s why they let themselves get convinced. He’d almost forgotten.

Sam’s talking again. And moving. And around people.

He’d always needed people more than Dean did. Dean only needed a couple. Sam needed . . . more.

The pounding in his head suddenly grows louder, heavier, and he can almost see the imaginary trunk in his mind dent from the force. He finds the edge of the counter and squeezes his eyes shut, trying to breathe through the pain.

“Dean?” Shauna is by his side, suddenly. He shakes his head, trying to warn her away from distracting him. He needs to shove the trunk back in place, needs to keep Michael under lock and key.

“Dean.” This time it’s a more familiar voice.

Sam.

Dean startles as Sam suddenly grabs onto his shoulders, pulling him back and away from the counter. Dean stumbles back into Sam’s torso, feels arms around his chest.

“Dean, breathe.”

He realizes he’d stopped a few moments ago. He breathes in heavily, opens his eyes and blinks rapidly. He steadies his breathing again.

And the pounding slowly fades.

“I’m okay,” he says, finally. Sam loosens his grip and Dean pulls away, slowly. The noise of the diner filters in again and Dean shakes his head, refocusing.

“I’m okay,” he repeats, looking Sam in the eyes and nodding. Sam looks back, eyes darting over his face before he nods back and starts to exit the room.

Shauna is standing to the side, looking lost.

“Sorry,” Dean says. He opens his mouth to say more and then realizes he has nothing else to say.

“‘S’all right,” Shauna says, slowly putting a bag of lettuce on the counter. Dean picks it up and starts on the next order, using one hand to flip a burger patty and the other to start mixing the salad.

“My cousin served in Iraq,” Shauna says suddenly, still standing off to Dean’s side. Dean slows his movements.

“So, you know, I know what—I’m just saying it’s okay with me.”

“Thanks,” Dean says. He looks back at Shauna, takes in her sincerity, and gives her a nod of gratitude.

She nods back, respect, and turns to stir the pasta.

Shauna doesn’t understand, but no one really does. No one but Sam could really come close.

At least he has that.

Dean breathes in, the pounding now far away, and resumes his work in putting together the dishes that need to go out to customers.

Sam has hit a new level of exhaustion.

It feels a little like when he was studying for the LSAT, when his mind was so caught up in trying to study at all times while his body went to classes and worked at the coffee shop and did homework. He’d crashed so hard after taking the LSAT that he hadn’t gone to any classes for a week (and he spent the rest of the semester paying for that decision).

He wonders when his crash will come. He can’t let it, not really, because if he crashes, the world resumes its apocalyptic demise.

He’s so tired. And yet, he can’t sleep. He’s still wound up, still trying to process the day, the fact that he kept Lucifer back the whole time while keeping track of orders and solving crisis after crisis.

And the fact that the lights flickered so badly when Dean had his moment that there had been screams in the diner.

Dean isn’t sleeping either. Sam can tell because Dean is still rubbing at Sam’s back. The second they had gotten back (at two in the morning, after doing all the dishes), they’d both stumbled upstairs, thrown their work shirts to the ground, and collapsed into the bed. Dean had started running a hand over Sam’s shoulder blades, occasionally stopping to press into the knots that had formed in his muscles. He hasn’t stopped yet.

Sam doesn’t think he could move if he tried. He wants to shift, adjust how he’s situated on the bed, but he can’t even think about moving his limbs.

But he still has control. That’s the important part. He has control.

“You asleep yet?” Dean’s voice surprises him, and it’s only his exhaustion that keeps him from tensing up in surprise.

Sam vocalizes something in his throat in the negative, hears Dean give a short laugh.

“Alright.”

His hand keeps moving. Dean finds the spot in-between Sam’s neck and shoulder that always gets tight and presses down. Sam makes a sound of discomfort, almost involuntarily.

“You need to stop tensing up right here all the time.”

Sam goes to say something like, ‘fat chance of that,’ but his mouth doesn’t want to form the words. He just hums.

Dean gives a short exhale that means he finds that amusing.

“Go to sleep, Sammy.”

It’s a monumental effort, but Sam manages to nod a couple of times, face first in the pillow.

“Gotta go back in for work again tomorrow. Hopefully it won’t be as crazy.”

“Mmmhmm,” Sam agrees. Something about the reopening had gathered what felt like the whole town together. They’d run out of . . . well, everything. The line had never stopped.

And Sam doesn’t know how on earth they had kept it together.

A significant portion of the credit has to go to Janna and Shauna. Sam still doesn’t understand why Cecelia Lynn gave them control over the restaurant when Janna was right there. He and Dean want her on the paperwork, they’ve just got to figure that out with Cecelia Lynn. Janna’s been the only reason they’ve gotten the place up and running

Sam sighs onto his pillow. Lucifer is quiet right now. He has been quiet. Maybe Cecelia Lynn was right about idle minds.

Or maybe Lucifer is just waiting for the right time. For Sam to let down his guard. For the perfect moment to take over and kill Michael.

Either way, he needs to sleep. If his mind will let him.

Dean’s hand returns to his shoulder blade and comes to a stop.

They'll figure it out. That's what Sam has to tell himself.

Chapter Text

SEPTEMBER

Lucifer only knows how long it’s been because Sam keeps such careful track of it in his head.

Five months.

To him, that’s nothing. Normally it would pass by so quickly he wouldn’t have even registered the time.

But here, in a human body, fighting for existence, he’s felt every day of those five months.

In the cage, he’d learned to weave his grace in with his confines, had enough of a voice to call out to some of the more powerful demons, had some sway in how things looked, what he saw. It wasn’t much. He still seethes over it. Still hates his father for it.

Apparently it could’ve been worse, though.

Sam Winchester is perfectly built for him. Every cell geared toward housing him. Neural pathways carved to support the very shape of Lucifer’s thoughts and grace.

Which also makes him a perfect cage.

It’s somehow worse here. The cage he was so used to had simply held him, his grace, his form. This cage is biting him back.

And he thinks he is growing weaker for it.

He has never felt power leave him in such a consistent flow without some of it coming back in.

He is trapped. And Sam is learning to ignore him.

Lucifer doesn’t understand how he could possibly manage that. Sam is made for him. Sam is his.

Thousands of years of whispered thoughts, struggling to slip messages in between the bars of his cage. The work of the angels, so fastidious in following God’s word (sheep, all of them).

And what had stopped it? The very things created to bring it to pass.

Every moment he is trapped here, he is growing weaker. He can’t sense Michael when he’s so subsumed in something, in soul, in Sam, in stubbornness—but the times he’s broken free, he’s been able to tell that Michael too is struggling.

He is growing weaker.

Lucifer was built to be a lightbringer, a warrior, a general. He is his father’s strongest. Michael had needed all the angels in heaven to beat him back.

And yet. Sam.

Lucifer has never been wrong before. It is an awful occurrence. He thinks maybe he and the angels went wrong somewhere in making humans to hold beings such as the archangels.

How could they all have been wrong?

Kayla needed a job. Or at least, that's what her mother told her, day in and out. Because school alone was somehow not enough for her, not to mention coding club. Something about not having anything on her resume or activities section for college.

She'd wanted to move in with her grandparents for the school year, get a job closer to Chicago, make new friends outside of Lageme, have new experiences, but no, she's stuck here in Lageme, as usual. Lame Lageme, USA, her whole life. She can't wait to get out.

But to get out, she needs college. For college, she needs a job.

So, she's got her nice dress on, hair in neat plaits, waiting to talk to yet another sexist jerk of a boss, like all the ones she's interviewed with so far this week. She hates Lageme.

She wouldn't mind working here at Darla’s though, she thinks, for her first job. They've really cleaned up the place the last couple of months. It looks nice now, a classic diner with a clean feel. Just opened up a couple of weeks ago, grand opening. The line went out the door and everyone was raving about their milkshakes and pie.

But the bosses are dudes now.

Her mom had known Cecelia Lynn, which is why Kayla is here in the first place. If Cecilia Lynn was in charge, Kayla wouldn't have dragged her feet coming here or waited so long to try and get a job.

But there were new owners, apparently Cecilia Lynn's cousin's kids or something. They'd given her the interview, at the very least. Her mom had been so proud.

And now she’s here.

"Kayla?"

She looks up and the guy who'd greeted her is back, another guy behind him taking up a post at the front of the restaurant.

"Alright, ready for you, let's grab a seat in the back office." He gestures her back and she follows. They walk behind the counter, through a door, and down a hallway, where the guy fumbles for a moment with a ring of keys and unlocks another door.

The office is cramped, not because there's much in there, just because that’s the way it's built.

His name is Sam, according to his name tag. Her initial reaction–to think that the guy either needs a few straight days of sleep or some hard drugs–continues to be supported as she watches him blink slowly at the table in front of him for a long moment before he seems to remember what he's doing.

“Alright, so . . .” Sam shakes his head, takes a breath, “Sorry. My name’s Sam. Me and my brother are the new managers here.”

“Oh,” Kayla says, “I thought you were owners?” Her mom had said something or other about that.

Sam shakes his head, “Cecilia Lynn still owns the place. She’s just turned everything over to us. And we turned things over to Janna.”

Kayla smiles. She goes to school with Janna’s kids. Has since elementary school. She’s good friends with the girls.

“That’s cool,” Kayla says. This isn’t her first job interview, but it’s still nerve wracking. Somehow, Sam’s stilted, awkward way of going about things is helping.

"Do you want a water?" Sam is leaning over to a mini fridge she hadn’t noticed and pulling out a bottle of water.

"Sure," Kayla says. Her mom had told her that having a drink handy could buy some time to answer job interview questions if she needed to.

Sam hands her the bottle and opens his mouth to speak again.

“Yeah. So. We need more staff. Have you ever waited tables before?”

“No, but I’ve got practice managing and keeping track of things.”

Sam nods, pulls over a familiar piece of paper.

“You said on your resume that you’re president of the coding club and the wrestling team manager?”

“Yes.”

“Coding, huh.” Sam seems to think about that for a moment before adding more, “That’s cool.”

“Yeah,” Kayla says. She can feel the awkward start to descend again.

“So,” Sam says, “We want to hire you. If you want the job.”

Kayla blinks, stares at Sam who seems to be a little uncomfortable with it.

“I . . . You want to hire me that quickly? You haven’t even asked any questions!”

Sam shrugs and puts down her resume, “We need the help. As long as you’re willing, we’ll take you. I have . . .” He reaches down and opens a manilla file folder, pulling out a stapled stack of papers, “The top paper is the job responsibilities. You can look it over if you like. The rest is hiring paperwork and a contract. If you want the job.”

Kayla continues to stare. Sam holds the stack of paper out to her, and she reaches out, suddenly feeling out of place.

“I . . . Can I get back to you about the offer?”

“Of course. Here, let me give you our number so you can call and let us know . . .” Sam pulls a sticky note off the pad and jots down a phone number, handing it over once he’s done.

Kayla waits for more, but Sam seems to have finished his piece. She hesitantly stands and extends her hand (just like her mom had drilled into her). Sam, after half a beat, reaches out and shakes, just once, before letting go and standing. He moves to the door and opens it for Kayla. She nods and walks out, heels clicking on the floor.

She passes by the man at the front who gives her a distracted wave as she leaves.

Her car engine hasn’t even fully cooled. She’d rushed over here from school to get here in time. She goes to open her car door and another car pulls up nearby. She looks over and sees Zach Anderson, who she’s had classes with since seventh grade, getting out of his car.

“Hey Zach,” she says, waving, friendly.

“Kayla! What are you doing here?”

“Just had a job interview.”

“Here?”

“Yeah.”

“Dude! I just got my job here a few weeks ago. How’d the interview go?"

“Got the job. Just need to decide if I want it.”

“Oh, c’mon, do it! I need someone my age around here. Sam and Dean are nice and all, but they’re so flippin’ weird. And Shauna and Janna are super nice, but they’re like . . . Moms.”

Kayla is starting to feel a little more like she might want this job. Zach is nice, she’d have a friend around at work.

“Yeah, I just gotta talk to my mom about it.”

“Alright. Well, I gotta head in, my shift starts in two minutes.”

Kayla waves, “See ya’.”

She opens her car and buckles in, seeing Zach greet the guys as he goes in.

Well. Maybe she’ll take the job. It couldn’t hurt to try.

Gideon Hopkins liked to think he was a person with few vices. He was, after all, a pastor. He was, by definition, supposed to emulate the virtues of heaven.

But coffee? He had yet to find the strength to not drink a cup each morning. It’s made all the worse by the fact that the church serves coffee three days a week to anyone who comes in.

But it’s Monday, he has no weddings, no confirmations, and, because of the volunteer service group traveling to Pompasso Heights for the week, no staff meeting. His wife had left yesterday, driving the vans for the volunteers.

And they’re out of coffee.

He’s got bookkeeping to do today, a need to reconcile the tithes collected yesterday, and he needs to tidy up—he hadn’t gotten the chance after services were over.

So, he gathers his papers—a half-written sermon hastily jotted down when he’d been blessed with inspiration just before bed last night—and heads out the door. Darla’s is just around the corner from the church, he’ll grab a cup there before heading to his office, now that it's open again.

It’s not too hard to see, even from the parking lot, that Cecilia Lynn, who’d led the children’s classes in church for years had really followed through on her threat to sell the restaurant to new owners. The siding’s been freshly painted, there are shrubs in the planter boxes, and, even more obvious than those elements is the message on the sign outside—Under New Management. Kids Eat Free Tuesday Night.

Gideon isn’t sure how to feel about this. Realistically, there was no way Cecelia Lynn would be able to keep Darla’s running. He knows how may times it’s been closed early because she can’t keep servers and cooks, knows that her eyesight is going, knows she’s been wanting to spend more time with her grandkids—but another part of him, the part that has grown up in town, who’d spent his wild teenage years running these streets and hanging out at Darla’s with friends, mourns the loss of it all the same.

Nonetheless, he needs his coffee, so he exits his car, walks in the door.

There’s a small sign, a piece of printer paper with sharpie words Please Seat Yourself! We’ll be Right with You hanging off the front booth. Gideon walks past the booth to the counter, sitting on a stool, surprised to find new, freshly laminated menus helpfully placed in the condiment holders. He hasn’t been to Darla’s for quite a while, since before they closed, but he knows that the menu has changed. He takes a moment to flip through its pages, interested.

“Hello, welcome to Darla’s,” a slightly out-of-breath voice greets, making Gideon look up from the menu. The waiter is tall, long hair pulled back into a low ponytail. He’s not anyone Gideon knows, which is strange in this town. The metallic nametag on his shirt tells him that this is Sam.

“What can I get started for you?”

“I’ll have a cup of coffee to start, son” Gideon says with a gentle smile. He hadn’t anticipated ordering breakfast, planning to make do with the granola bars in his office, but the new menu has him intrigued.

“Light, American, or French?”

Gideon raises an eyebrow. The old Darla’s had one coffee option, and that was what you made your peace with.

“American, please.”

“Any sugar, half-and-half, or milk?”

“Sugar,” Gideon says, still surprised at his options.

“Alrighty, I’ll get that right out.”

Sam moves away, further down the counter on the serving side, where Gideon notices various drink machines have been placed. Yet another difference from the Darla’s of old.

Mind already made up on his order, convinced by the flashy picture on the menu, he simply watches Sam out of the corner of his eye while he pulls out his sermon notes, wondering and guessing at this new potential member of the fold. His is one of only two churches in Lageme, and unless Sam is Catholic or Atheist, and if he’s moved here to town and not elsewhere in the county, there’s a good chance Gideon can invite him to come by. The greeting committee would be thrilled.

Sam pours the coffee and returns, placing it on the counter and turning to place the coffee pot just behind him, grabbing a tall container of sugar and placing it nearby as well.

“Fantastic, free refills on that coffee, you just let me know when you need it,” Sam says, pulling out a small notepad, “Anything else for your order?”

“I’ll have the maple pancakes, hold the butter.”

“And how’d you like your eggs?”

“Over easy.”

“Maple pancakes, no butter, two over easy eggs, anything else?”

“That’ll be it.”

“Great, that’ll be just a few minutes,” Sam says, giving him a polite nod and a somewhat forced smile, moving to hook the order slip onto an old-fashioned rotating wheel through an opening to the kitchen that Gideon realizes is new as well.

“Vermont stack, eighty-six the axle grease, flop two,” Sam calls through the window. Spinning the wheel, he turns to walk to the other end of the counter, just as another voice calls back.

“Crystal,” says the cook, invisible to Gideon’s sight, but very obviously not Nolan James, the last person to work as a short order cook at Darla’s. He hadn’t been a particularly pleasant man, but that was why he worked in the kitchen.

For the first time, Gideon realizes these might be the new owners. Or, if not the new owners, new permanent staff at least. That'll be good for Darla’s, having permanent people. Cecelia Lynn had been gone half the time and hadn't ever had reliable help when she was out. It was always a guessing game as to if Darla’s would be open that day.

Gideon adds his sugar to his coffee, stirs it in, and takes a sip. It's good coffee. Great coffee, really.

A good change then.

The whole diner has been polished up. Gideon takes the time to look around. It's clear that the new owners were dedicated to giving Darla’s a classic feel to it. It's got the black and white tile now, booths with red upholstery, and the stools at the counter match.

There's art on the walls–road trip, route 66 style. All license plates and postcard views.

It even looks like there’s a jukebox in the corner, lit up with cycling colored lights.

The waiter, Sam, walks by him, through to the kitchen window, and calls out again to the cook.

"Strawberry biddy board, shingle with a shimmy and a shake."

"Full or smooth?"

"Smooth."

"Crystal."

Sam hangs the order on the spinning wheel and turns back around. This time, Gideon takes more notice of him. He looks tired, pulling an all-nighter kind of tired. Like his son Josh, during long summer nights when he finally came in from playing night games with his friends, back in the day.

"Just a little longer on those pancakes," Sam says as he passes by once more, the walk of a harried worker, quick steps. He starts bussing a table nearby.

“Sam,” Gideon says, speaking up to be heard, but not loud enough to disturb the other customers, “you’re new to town. Where are you coming from?”

Sam looks up, expression confused before he blinks and shrugs his shoulders, pulling plates and cups off of the table and into a tray, “All over. Most recently coming from Sioux Falls.”

“And how come Lageme? I know as well as any other that you don’t usually choose Lageme. Lageme chooses you.” Gideon smiles, taking another sip of his coffee. He’d never have thought, when he was in school, that he’d end up preaching here.

Sam smiles a little bit at that, genuine. It softens his features, makes Gideon realize that he really is young. The kind of young that makes Gideon feel old.

“I mean, Cecelia Lynn offered us the place. We . . . It was . . . We were wanting to move, so it was just good timing.”

“Ah,” Gideon says, nodding knowingly, “and Cecelia Lynn doesn’t know how to take no for an answer.”

A snort as Sam starts spraying the table down with a chemical cleaner lets Gideon know that Sam has gone through that specific experience before.

“So, you a religious kind of guy?”

Gideon watches Sam’s expression fade to blankness so quickly that Gideon almost thinks he might have changed into an entirely different person right in front of him.

Sam gives a half shrug, finishes wiping the table and then tosses the rag back to the cleaning cart, “Why do you ask?”

“I preach just down the road. Lagme Hope Fellowship. Love to have you come by and meet the congregation, a lot of people in town are there, could be good to help you get settled in.”

“Huh,” Sam says, picking up the tray of dirty dishes and moving to walk past Gideon, hefting the tray onto a shelf behind the counter. He turns back around and leans on the counter, casual.

“I’ll be honest with you, Pastor,” Sam says, “I used to be. Religious. Prayed every day of my life.”

Gideon leans in slightly, interested. He watches Sam, who isn’t looking him in the eye, but instead staring down at his hands, wrapped around each other on the countertop.

“And I don’t say this to brush off your invitation,” Sam continues, “but I can tell you right now that I am the actual last person any believer and God himself would want in a church. I couldn’t even promise I wouldn’t erupt into flames the moment I got through the door.”

Gideon blinks. A small part of him wants to chuckle at the thought, but Sam has looked back up at him and he can see sincerity and hurt on his face, so he chokes the humor down.

“Well, I’m not here to change your mind on anything. Just extending a hand of fellowship.”

Sam nods, acknowledging, and says, “I appreciate that.”

And with that, Sam is moving again, taking the tray of dirty dishes into the back room.

Gideon waits patiently for his order, thinking.

The younger generation. He still struggles to connect with them. Maybe if he can get Benji, the junior pastor, to stop by, they might be able to talk to Sam together. No one should feel like they wouldn’t be welcome in their church. They’re a fellowship, after all.

Shauna doesn’t know what to make of Sam and Dean.

They’re not the worst bosses she’s ever had—far from it, in fact. But they might just be the weirdest.

When she comes in for work at lunchtime, everyday, Dean greets her with a new movie quote. They’re all bad eighties movies she hasn’t seen since before she had kids. Sam will give her a wave if he sees her, but hardly talks to her, unless he has to.

And then there’s the whole language they have with each other. Literally. She’s caught onto a few things, but there’s so many phrases and slang and lingo that she can’t keep up. It seems like Janna knows it better than she does, but she still doesn’t speak in it like they do. They’ll spend the whole work shift hollering the most crass, strange, offensive sounding words at each other and Dean’ll turn around and tell her exactly what dish to make. According to Janna, the customers find it hilarious.

So maybe it’s a marketing strategy. But she really doesn’t think it is.

If it weren’t for a few key things, she would’ve never believed their claim to be brothers. They’re close, in a way grown adult siblings, in her experience, never are. But they’re just so similar in so many things while being very different people that she thinks they must’ve know each other their whole lives.

Sam, who’s a silent giant any time he doesn’t have customers to serve, can match Dean movie quote for movie quote, can read Dean’s mind by the way he says the word, ‘crystal,’ and can catch a flying item from the kitchen window at any angle without any apparent warning. Dean is touchy-feely, always a hand on Sam’s shoulder or elbowing his ribs, anytime Sam comes into the kitchen. Sam’s all he talks about, whenever they have downtime in the kitchen. ‘When Sammy was small,’ ‘back when Sam was a kid,’ and, ‘Sam’s favorite thing about this is,’ are all common topics of conversation.

They’re weird. But the pay is good and she’s not dealing with the owners of the Subway anymore, so she’s going to stick around and not ask too many questions.

It’s a late Thursday night and Sam locks the door behind them as he, Dean, Janna, and Shauna all head out after close. They still haven’t found a dishwasher, so Sam has been taking charge of it anytime there’s not a lot of customers, but there was still a sinkful left when the last group left, so he and Dean had been washing up while Shauna and Janna finished tidying up.

“‘Night,” Dean calls from across the lot, taking another bag of trash out to the dumpster. Sam is leaning against the car they drive in (and that’s the other common topic of conversation, if she can get Dean to stop talking about Sam), head leaning back, hands shoved in jacket pockets.

She’s never seen Sam look well-rested.

“Night,” she and Janna call, almost at the same time. Shauna goes to open her car door, but Janna waves her over. Shauna walks closer to her, hearing the loud sound of Sam and Dean’s car engine starting up. She looks up to wave at them as they pull away.

“What’s up?” She asks, walking over to Janna’s side of her car.

“Just wanted to check in. How’s work been going?”

“Alright,” Shauna draws it out, raising an eyebrow, “how about you?”

She’s known Janna for a few years, been on PTA with her before, but she can’t say she really knows her as a friend. Work naturally keeps them separated, unless the diner is empty (but it’s been fairly consistently at least somewhat busy these past few weeks, something about a website and google reviews that Sam and Kayla had put together one slow shift).

So, when Janna opens up, she’s a little surprised.

“Work is great, but those two are so damn weird I don’t even know what to do half the time.”

It’s a relief to get confirmation that it’s not just her. The kids, Kayla and Zach, seem to have some kind of hero worship going on, or maybe just a healthy fear of their bosses (although Janna seems to run more of the diner these days than the two of them).

“How the hell are they even functional as people?” Shauna says, the floodgates of complaints and worry starting to spill over.

Janna laughs, “Did you see Sam earlier today? He was straight up staring at a wall for four minutes straight. I timed him. Then Dean yelled something in the kitchen and he was back at it like nothing had happened.”

“Oh my word. I just . . . It’s gotta be PTSD, right?”

“PTSD or something. I always knew Cecelia Lynn hung out with wacky people, but it’s a whole other thing to experience it.”

“Have they done the creepy talking at the same time thing to you yet?”

“Swear it happens at least once a day. And Sam doesn’t even talk all that much to begin with.”

“Sometimes all I hear him say all day is orders in their damn diner lingo.”

“He talks with Pastor Hopkins alright, when he comes by.”

“Oh really?” Shauna raises an eyebrow, “What do they talk about?”

“The Bible I think. I guess Sam’s some kind of Bible scholar or something, because he keeps up with Pastor Hopkins better than anyone else could.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised. According to Dean, Sam’s a genius at everything.”

“Really?”

“It’s all Dean talks about. ‘Sam researched this,’ ‘Sam went to college for that,’ I swear I’m gonna go insane one of these days.”

Janna laughs and Shauna joins in. It feels good to commiserate with Janna and talk about how strange their lives have become working at Darla’s.

“Well, I gotta get going. Need to make sure the boys haven’t burned down the house,” Janna rolls her eyes.

“Yeah, me too. Take care!”

“See you tomorrow.”

“See ya’.”

Shauna goes back to her car and sits for a moment, headlights lighting up the restaurant front with the brand new green shrubbery that apparently Sam had insisted on (though Shauna hasn’t ever heard Sam insist on anything in the last month she’s been around him).

What a life.

But hey, it could be worse.

Chapter Text

OCTOBER

Wendy Marquez is on the run.

Hunters had caught their trail in Phoenix, a set-up gone wrong, too obviously monstrous. Their little band had broken up in fear, made plans, for a few months away, to reunite somewhere else.

They were efficient.

The first person Wendy had run into was Sylvia, who’d been a vampire for years. Longer than Wendy had been alive. She’d been good. She knew how to dodge hunters and the cops. She had a system.

And she was more than willing to let Wendy have the pituitary glands from her victims.

They’d met Aaron a year later. Well, it was more like Sylvia tracked him down before hunters could get to him.

She was all about using all the parts. Aaron took the hearts, once a month.

And then Kajal, who when they were all done, ate the flesh and wove a story, for anyone who came looking.

Wendy missed them. Almost three years together, perfecting a system, working the world to their favor, because nothing else was. It wasn’t a family. She hadn’t had one of those for a long time. But they lived.

And now she has nothing. Again.

She’d taken the first greyhound she could find, all the way out to Iowa. She’d never been. Nothing to write about, so far. Just highways and gas stations and run-down diners and drive-through hamburger places. She’d rented a car with the ID Aaron had figured out for her, and started motel-hopping through the state, hoping to throw anyone off her trail.

But she’s tired. She needs to feed soon. She doesn’t know this area like she knows Arizona. She doesn’t know who wouldn’t be missed. She doesn’t have Kajal to smooth things over. Doesn’t have Sylvia’s smarts and planning. Doesn’t have Aaron’s resources. She’s got an associate’s degree and a boatload of family trauma. Not very helpful here. She wishes her mom were still around. Wishes her dad still could just pick up a pituitary gland from the hospital morgue whenever she needed it.

Wishes she were anywhere but Lageme, Iowa, just another copy-paste town of all the others she’s been passing through.

At least the coffee at this diner is good. Better than anything the continental breakfast at her last motel could’ve scrounged up.

The waitress, a cute little high-school aged girl with glittery eyeshadow, comes back around.

“How’s everything tasting?”

Wendy is almost too distracted by the thought of how tasty her brain would be to respond.

She manages to stumble out to an answer, “It’s all good.” She needs to feed. She’s starving.

“That’s great! I’m at the end of my shift, so my manager, Sam, will be taking over. Let him know if you need anything!”

She moves away, gracefully in control of her body. For a moment, Wendy allows herself to wallow in her sorrow. Almost thirty, no desire to pass her curse on to any children. A dozen part-time jobs, a friend group whose main bond was about eating people, and some sketchy credit cards that might get her arrested.

She sighs and leans over her plate, picking at the rest of her fries. She doesn’t want potatoes. She needs to feed.

She blames her hunger for how sense-blind she is. When she looks back up from her half-eaten plate, her gut drops, her hair stands on end, and it’s all she can do to hold back her instinctive reaction to unsheath her claws.

Because there, bussing a table across the way, stands one of the most notorious hunters she’d ever heard of. If she wasn’t so very aware of everything around her, she would swear this was a nightmare, the kind that came about when her mother warned her about staying hidden from hunters, the kind that Sylvia had woven into her psyche when they first met. Everyone knew about the Winchesters. Wendy had grown up with a small book near the front door with mugshots in it, of known hunters. John Winchester had stared up at her from a newspaper cutting all throughout high school.

When her parents had been gone, Sylvia had taken over the mugshot book that Wendy had stuck, panicking, into her bag, and glued two new mugshots on top of John Winchester’s.

And now she’s looking right at Sam Winchester.

The chances are so slim, so wrong, that she knows it’s got to be a set up. The other hunters were looking for her, phoned a friend, now she’s going to die, here, in a diner called Darla’s, not even having finished her dinner plate.

Senses on high alert, she slowly sits up in her seat, an instinctive need to stay hidden, stay unseen resonating through her. She turns her head, finds the exit. Tries to map the path in her mind, readies her claws.

And Sam Winchester piles dishes into a plastic bin and walks right past her, giving her a distant, polite smile.

Wendy sits, stunned, in her seat. She watches him disappear into the kitchen, hears the sound of moving, clanking plates, and shivers.

Something is wrong.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she’s just on such high alert that a random guy working in a restaurant who happened to have similar features to a notorious hunter set her off.

But no. She’s pretty sure the girl from earlier had called him Sam.

But that’s not an uncommon name. It could just be coincidence.

But it can’t. It really can’t. Because he smelled. He smelled like something not human.

That was how Wendy and Sylvia had met in the first place. How monsters knew not to live near each other. How others like her avoided eating glands from non-humans.

Wendy had never met a demon, but Sylvia had told her how to identify them. There’d been rumors. Rumors that Kajal had passed down to their group. Rumors that said that John Winchester, obsessed and psychopathic, had done something. Something to his kids that made them different. That made them better. Fast and smart and strong and monstrous. Kajal had sworn that his cousin’s sister had seen Sam Winchester send a demon back to hell with just a look. That Dean Winchester could outsmart the greatest monsters with ease.

She thinks the rumors might be true.

She’s met shapeshifters before. They don’t smell like Sam Winchester does. Shapeshifters smell like fatty tissue and scaly skin.

Sam Winchester smells like rotten eggs blowing in a crisp winter breeze. She can taste the electricity on her tongue.

Sam Winchester is not human. And that means he knows she’s not either. And didn’t approach her anyways.

Which means he’s got something worse in mind.

With that thought, Wendy, with all of her possible vigor and need, limbs shaking from hunger and adrenaline, bolts out of the diner, the only thought in her head the idea of escape.

She hears the bell over the door jangle as she sprints, the bang as the door’s hinges hit the point as far as they can go.

But worse, she can hear someone running after her.

“Ma’am! Ma’am! You’ve got to pay first!”

She runs past her rental car—no time to try and fish the keys out of her pocket, adrenaline ruining her fine motor skills.

But hunger has made her weak, she can hear the footsteps growing closer. She readies her claws and turns around, coming face to face with—

It’s a high school boy, baby face, wearing a name tag that reads Zach. He skids to a stop, eyes going wide, mouth dropping open as he sees her glowing eyes, her readied claws.

But she’s too far gone now, half instinct, half hunger, she lunges, just the thought of digging into his brain to find that glorious small fruit of life making saliva drip from her mouth.

She goes for his throat, arm outstretched—

And crashes to the ground, a sudden weight on top of her.

“Zach! Run!”

She snarls and twists, getting just a glimpse of the face of Sam Winchester, eyes narrowed and focused. He’s got her pinned, but not enough.

It’s so simple. She gets an arm free and rears back, gets enough force behind her movement, and buries her claws into Sam Winchester’s skull. She can feel the flesh tear beneath her, hears the crack of bone, and the weight pinning her down becomes limp and heavy. Sam Winchester’s body sags down, mouth open in shock, a small stream of foamy red coughed up onto his lips and chin in the last moment of life.

The boy, who had frozen still in shock, suddenly finds his voice and screams, stumbling backward, his back hitting a car parked in the lot.

Wendy snarls, twists, and tries to throw the weight of a dead body off of her, pushing and turning every way she can, slowly working her way back to a position to attack, when she feels movement.

And Sam Winchester coughs once, blood splattering on the asphalt, blinks, pushes himself upward, and turns to look at her. All at once, his disfigured face snaps back into easy human perfection, a horrifying smirk crossing his face. He looks directly at her and chuckles.

“Oh, now Wendy, you should’ve known better. Only I get to hurt this body.”

Zach is still screaming, shrieking in the background, but Wendy feels a jolt of fear that passes through her hunger-crazed brain as she watches Sam Winchester turn his neck and pop his jaw into place, like she hadn’t just raked her claws through muscle and organ and bone just seconds before.

He looms over her, still smirking, and raises a hand to her face, cupping it. He clicks his tongue.

“Oh, you’ll wish you picked anyone else to mess with by the time I’m done with you.”

The pure shock of panic, the threat, the memory of horrifying boogeyman-like stories of the Winchesters all flood through Wendy’s brain in a series of snapshots, sending her heart skittering into an even faster rhythm. Sam Winchester tilts her head back and forth and his grin grows wider, blood still staining his teeth.

“Oh yes, this is going to be—”

And then something happens too fast for Wendy to keep track of. A force rushes over her, she’s sent spiraling backward, toppling head over heels. She lands, bruised, a streak of road rash across her body, and looks up to find a man holding Sam Winchester in a wrestling kind of pose, locked arms around his torso, legs trapping movement.

“Sam, get back here!”

The smell of burning rubber fills the air, that same electricity Wendy had smelt earlier flooding through her. It becomes obvious that the rumors must spread to Dean Winchester too. He smells like pure power.

The screaming intensifies as Sam Winchester reaches out and gets an arm free. There’s an awful crack and a howl of pain from Dean Winchester.

And then they disappear.

Wendy pushes herself upright, onto her feet, and looks to the left, where the boy is still screaming, then to the right, and then she turns heel and runs for her car, shaking hands barely managing to get the keys in the door. She peels out of the parking lot and starts gunning it.

She doesn’t stop shaking until she crosses into Missouri.

She needs to get the word out. She needs her friends to know.

The rumors about the Winchesters are true.

Zach is pinching the skin of his arm. Repeatedly. It's red now. Inflamed.

He’s rocking in place.

Janna and Shauna are on the other side of the office, talking rapidly in hushed tones, occasionally glancing over at Zach. Kayla is still out in the restaurant, helping the rest of the customers who were there before Janna flipped the Open For Business sign over to show the Closed side of it.

He thinks this might be what it’s like to go insane.

The last couple of months at the diner had been awesome. He was a pro now at sitting guests if they were busy enough to need restaurant-style seating, bussing tables quickly, and even washing dishes without splashing water everywhere. He’d gotten a raise (after being informed by Dean that they were turning a surprising profit, so there’s that), and his bosses were cool if he did his homework in-between helping customers if the diner wasn’t busy.

He’s not sure why his brain is jumping around like this. Nick, his brother, the EMT, would probably call it shock.

Zach’s just not sure what he’s shocked about.

He’s ninety percent sure the words he’d babbled when he found the strength to burst back into the diner and ask for the police had been totally incomprehensible. Janna had taken one look at him and ushered him to the back room, out of the view of the customers. She’d sat him down, given him a bottle of water, and then made him talk.

But it made no sense.

The woman, she’d had claws, Sam had twisted Dean’s arm, broken it. They’d disappeared, right in front of him.

None of it made sense.

But he’d seen it. He knows he saw it.

Unless he’s going insane.

But no. Sam and Dean have disappeared. Janna had tried calling both of their phones, but they’d gone straight to voicemail. Shauna had pulled up the security camera footage on the janky computer, squinted to try and see what happened, but the picture got fuzzy right around the time Dean tackled Sam and didn’t get clear again until it showed the car speeding out of the parking lot.

Zach doesn’t understand what happened.

The image of claws digging into Sam’s head pops into his mind yet again and he flinches, pinches harder.

Then he stares at the floor.

What were they going to do?

Officer Charles Mendoza has heard his fair share of stories.

Even here in Lageme, there’s stuff that people get up to that makes him shake his head and wonder why he even bothers.

But this story is a weird one. He never would’ve pegged any of the Anderson kids for drugs, but he’s seriously considering the idea that the kid might have been high.

He’s outside Darla’s, where he’d been, just that morning, to get coffee. He was on good terms with the cook, Dean, and now the Anderson boy is claiming that he up and disappeared. He scouts the area, walks back and forth. Burton, back at the station, is running the plates of the vehicle that left the parking lot after the alleged incident.

This is a weird one.

He paces back and forth, searching the ground. And there—

Blood. That’s definitely blood. A significant amount of it, on the ground.

Officer Mendoza reaches for his radio.

“Hey Burton. Get those plates for me quick. I’ve got blood at the scene.”

“Perp or one of the missing guys?”

“Don’t know. Get in touch with the sheriff’s office. We’re gonna need to take a sample, run it in the lab. Kid was claiming Sam got stabbed through the head, so this might be it. I’m cordoning it off right now.”

“Damn. Sam’s the long hair waiter guy, right?”

“Yep. And Dean’s the cook.”

“Hope we can find the guys. I need my weekly slice of pie.”

“And I need my coffee.”

“Alright, I’ll get the crime scene team down here.”

“Roger.”

Officer Mendoza shakes his head. His personal phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out and squints at the screen. It’s his wife, asking him if he’s heard about the earthquake. He slides the phone open to the keyboard.

Earthquake?

His wife is quick to reply.

Kansas. Never had earthquake this bad. Mom felt it.

His mother-in-law lives in Colorado. That’s bad news if he’s ever heard it.

She ok?

Yes. Shaken up.

Ok. On scene, have 2 go.

Love u. b safe.

Love u 2

Officer Mendoza puts his phone back and heads to his car. He’s got a parking lot to cordon off.

Sam is at the movie theaters. The people around tower over him, but Dean’s hand is in his, so he feels safe. He huddles in close and stomps on the patterns on the floor.

“Popcorn or licorice?”

Sam knows Dad gave Dean money for treats.

“Popcorn!”

“What about licorice?”

“It tastes like dirt.”

Dean sighs, rolls his eyes, and walks up to the counter, stretching up on his toes to be seen over it. Sam tries to copy him, putting his fingers on the counter and pulling himself up as much as he can.

“One small popcorn please,” Dean says. Sam laughs because Dean never says please and it sounds funny in his mouth, like he’s talking like the Sesame Street characters.

Dean hands over the money, gets a bag of popcorn in return. Sam reaches for it, but Dean holds it out of reach.

“Nuh-uh, not until we get in the movie.”

“De-e-ean,” Sam complains.

“Sammy, c’mon, we gotta go get our seats.”

Sam follows Dean, grumpy because Dean won’t let him hold the popcorn. They make it into the theater and Sam clambers up on the seat next to Dean, right on the front row so Sam doesn’t need a booster. Sam reaches out and grabs a handful of popcorn before Dean can pull it away. He stuffs his face and then grins at Dean.

Dean rolls his eyes.

“Dork,” Dean says, “we won’t have any popcorn for the movie if you eat it all now.”

Words are hard for Sam. In school, he gets to go to a special room to work on words. Dean always knows what he means though.

“Now.”

“No, later.”

“Now, now, now!”

“Fine. One more handful.”

Sam gleefully grabs more popcorn, spilling some in between the chairs.

The lights dim. Sam watches, enraptured, as the trailers for movies play. And then, finally.

Indiana Jones.

Dean has been talking about wanting to see the movie for two weeks now. And so Sam had been talking about wanting to see the movie for just as long. Finally, their dad relented, gave Dean some money, and dropped them off on his way to the library of the town they’re staying in. Sam doesn’t mind libraries, but the movies are even better.

Sam realizes, suddenly, that the theater is empty. And dark. He frowns.

“Sammy, popcorn.”

Dean is holding the bag under his nose as Indiana Jones starts on his adventure. Sam turns to look behind them.

“Nothing back there Sammy. C’mon watch the movie. It’s what we paid for.”

“Dean?”

There’s no response. Sam knows the gig is up.

And suddenly he’s spinning into the blackness, falling back into his seat, Indiana Jones fading away.

And he’s drowning again.

Castiel flies directly to the epicenter of the crash landing he’d been able to feel from all the way in a different part of the solar system.

He is nearly blinded by Lucifer and Michael. They are locked in, grappling in the bodies of Sam and Dean.

But though Castiel is nearly blinded, it is not the same as it used to be, when Michael and Raphael would visit the garrison to give commands. It is weaker. It has no grounding.

And the two are stuck in battle.

Castiel realizes that they are weak. If he were to see them without a knowledge of who they were, he’d think them to be any commonplace angels.

They haven’t noticed him yet, too engaged in a shouting, yelling, cursing match, screeching about father and heaven and humans and unfair cages.

Castiel pulls out his angel blade.

He could end it. He thinks he could. He thinks they have withered away just enough for their grace to not be able to absorb the blow.

And Castiel holds the blade aloft.

This would end the struggle.

It would end the fight.

With Lucifer and Michael confirmed dead, Raphael might see reason. The tense war preparations Castiel wishes he had no part in would be unnecessary.

Castiel takes a step forward.

And then he lowers his blade and tilts his head.

Sam and Dean are still in there. He can see their souls amidst the grace. And they are fighting back.

His blade disappears back into its intangible appendage form among the energy of his grace and he steps into the fray and reaches out, through, burning with the heat and chill of the archangels’ power. They are both startled by his presence, but cannot react quickly enough, not with the way they have entangled themselves, attempting to conquer the other.

Castiel has just enough time to touch both glowing souls and allow them to crawl through his grace toward each other.

The second they touch, Michael and Lucifer screech. The souls grow brighter, brighter, larger, greater, until Castiel has to close both his grace and physical eyes to avoid going blind.

The power builds in the air, and Castiel feels his own grace react, buzzing with the energy of heaven once again.

And then the souls grab. They grab hold of the archangels, crawl over their grace, and once again subsume them.

The light dies and Castiel opens his physical eyes to see Sam and Dean, clutching at each other. He carefully removes his hands from their chests as they both wince from the pain of it. They are both gasping for air, letting out small noises of pain, which are muffled into the shoulders of the opposite brother.

“Dean, Sam,” Castiel says, recentering himself once again, “We need to move.”

There will be hoards of angels and demons here any moment now.

No response from Sam and Dean, so Castiel just reaches out, holds tight, and flaps away, just in time. He sees dozens of angels land at their location.

The tiny home is one Castiel is not very familiar with, having only been there in brief stints the couple of times Lucifer has managed to tug Sam away. He flies them to the bedroom, upstairs. They are still clinging.

Castiel steps back, grace still buzzing, thrumming with power he hasn’t felt since the archangels were all in heaven.

Sam and Dean kneel on the carpet. Castiel keeps his true eyes shielded. They are too bright to look at.

He still is in wonder.

Heaven is full of souls. Yet, he’s never seen anything like this.

And for a moment, just one short moment, he wonders if this is always how it was meant to be.

Dean is sore. His whole body aches. He thinks this is Michael trying to punish him.

Sam is next to him on the downstairs couch. A full day in bed–fielding calls from Janna and Shauna and even, for some reason, the police department–hadn’t helped their exhaustion.

They've been drifting in and out of sleep for the past couple hours now. There’s a infomercial on the TV that Dean doesn't understand at all.

Sam is slumped at the end of the couch the way he would be in the passenger seat of the Impala.

It feels like any other time they'd just gotten back from a weeklong hunt that had totally wrecked their sleep.

But it’s worse. Way, way worse.

It had been so fast. That was the problem. One second he was in the kitchen, fixing up a plate, the next he was hearing a yell from Sam, and the next he was in the parking lot, fighting back Lucifer.

And then he'd been strapped to the nuclear reactor that was Michael, fighting for his life.

Cas didn't know why Dean was able to fly. He didn't know why they were able to take back control. All Cas had to say, the moment Dean and Sam were coherent was about the importance of staying in the wards, because some angels saw them.

(The earthquake was on the news, several times. Dean had caught Sam staring at it several times now.)

Sam shuffles around on the couch. Dean watches him readjust his head and slide further down, taking up more of the middle seat. It doesn't look comfortable, but Sam is ridiculously good at curling up in strange positions to sleep.

Dean reaches up, stretching, feeling the ache in his shoulders.

They have no visible injuries. Even Dean's arm is back in place (he felt it crack, in multiple places, the second before Michael took over).

Letting his arms fall back in place, Dean looks over at Sam again, watching his chest move up and down.

They're safe again. For how long, he doesn't know.

Chapter Text

NOVEMBER

Raphael knows where his brothers are now.

It was simple, really, in the end. Once he realized that they’d never left Sam and Dean Winchester, he simply had to search for them.

That part was more difficult, but Raphael was not an archangel for nothing—he was the one that adapted, changed. Him and Gabriel, the motion against Michael and Lucifer’s steady stance. All things equally balanced as his father intended.

In the end, it had been through human means. One of the angels was in a vessel with contacts to the human governance system. It had been easy for Aniela to make a connection.

Blood had been involved. Raphael did not understand nor cared to try. But it always came down to blood with humans.

Raphael has a conundrum in front of him though.

He respects his brother, Michael. But he respects God’s word and work more. Although, father hasn’t been around for so long that he almost wonders if that’s worth anything anymore.

His father had said that the end of the world would come when Michael and Lucifer faced each other, in vessels made especially for them, built to withstand and hold their power.

And that prophecy could still come to pass.

But now Raphael has a decision to make. Attack the vessels? Make them free the archangels through torture? How would he do so without harming Michael? Does he care enough to worry about that?

Time is becoming more and more important. Castiel has gathered a greater force of the host ever since the show of power that had made Michael and Lucifer’s presence known.

Raphael decides, as he watches the vessels bumble about in a building with the name Darla’s plastered over it, that it’s about time he coordinates his efforts with hell’s once again.

Sam feels demons approaching.

For a moment, he is rooted to the spot. Then he drops the tray he’s carrying, plates shattering and food spilling, and races to the kitchen.

“Dean!”

Dean meets him at the door, eyes wide.

“You feel that?”

“Demons,” Dean starts cursing, moving to the counter shelf and pulling down the jugs of holy water they keep on hand.

Sam starts yelling at the customers, who are all standing in their seats, craning necks around to see what the problem is.

“Everyone, get back behind the counter!”

“Sam, what the hell?” Janna is standing nearby.

Outside, it’s snowing softly, small flakes that are melting the second they hit the ground. It looks peaceful.

The pounding familiarity and surge of uncomfortable hell power rakes through Sam’s body again. They’re getting closer.

This was his worst fear. This is what has been coming, building for the last months. This is why Sam can’t ever sleep, even when Lucifer is quiet.

It’s a Tuesday. Just a Tuesday. It’s snowing outside and it’s a Tuesday.

Next to him, Dean flinches and puts his hands over his ears. The glass in the diner starts to shake and rattle, a few glasses shatter.

Angels.

Sam stumbles out in front of the counter, amidst the screams of the customers. The earth rumbles suddenly, and Sam watches as Pastor Hopkins falls into the glass shards. Mrs. Nicholson’s baby starts wailing. Zach turns to look at him, that wide-eyed horror he’d hoped never to see again after he’d soothed Zach’s worries, that day last month when they’d finally come back to work after the incident in the parking lot.

It’s a Tuesday night. Darla’s is full. Kids-eat-free-Tuesdays.

Sam’s airways constrict and he feels pure panic and deranged horror cycle through his chest.

Outside, the sky grows dark. Sam can see the smoke. He realizes, suddenly, that they’re in a town of people they’ve gotten to know, to recognize. Becca, the lady from the farmer’s market that Sam has gotten their honey from for the honey-butter they serve with their rolls that come with all of the dinner menu options, is screaming near him. Shauna is shouting something behind him that he can’t make out. The police officer that always tips well is helping Mrs. Lowell to her feet, the librarian that likes to give Sam recommendations on books to read based on what he’s checking out.

The demons will make them kill them to stop the demons. And it will be people whose faces Sam has greeted over the past six months. People who stopped to talk to Sam when he went on a run in the mornings before the diner opened. People who kept trying to convince him to go to church on Sundays. People who tipped him with rolls of quarters for no reason. Kids who’d doodled on the tables in Darla’s with the crayons Sam had bought too many of.

Sam’s bones rattle and he looks back at Dean. Dean looks up, nearly the same time, in-sync with each other, until they’re not.

And Sam burns.

He’s been freezing cold for six months, and the sudden heat in his bones startles him, making him flinch.

The heat builds, and builds, and builds until Sam could swear he could light something on fire by touching it.

“Dean,” he calls out, voice rasping.

Dean leaps the counter as he calls, racing to Sam’s side.

“Sam?”

“I don’t—”

And that’s when the wave of demons crashes into the diner.

Dusty blackness, sulfur smoke fills the air alongside the screams of the people in the diner.

And Sam reaches out, just managing to grab the sleeve of Dean’s shirt.

The heat burns hotter, hotter—

And then it explodes.

Crowley has been waiting for his moment for a long, long time. And this is it.

He’d never been a believer in Lucifer at least not until Lilith started playing her cards. Then, he had no choice but to consider it a real story.

Which meant there was the largest contender possible for the throne of hell out there the moment Sam Winchester freed him from the cage. So, when word starts filtering through his channels that Lucifer is trapped and vulnerable, it is only a matter of finding those demons who have no loyalty to the idea of Sam Winchester’s reign in hell and sending them to follow the angels who had organized a battalion—to rescue or destroy Michael, it was unclear, but Crowley was more than willing to shell over some of his followers to create a bridge between hell and heaven.

But the second the forces grew close, Crowley lost all contact. Radio silence.

And that was when he realized he’d made a tactical error in sending only those who showed loyalty to him out to battle.

Because the only ones left behind were those loyal to the boy king.

Crowley quickly determines that he’s going to need to take a different route to power.

Lucifer has never been in so much pain and confusion, not even in that first millennia in the cage.

He is simply an awareness, a consciousness with no ties. He tries to understand the shape of the world around him, but he has nothing. No power. He can’t even feel his wings.

A being with no senses, only awareness. He is blind and naked in an empty wilderness.

Which is why it’s so surprising to pump into another awareness. The moment they collide, Lucifer knows who it is.

Michael, he hisses, a sudden surge of anger making him flail wildly against Michael, hoping something, anything will do him harm.

Lucifer, how did you expel me from my vessel? Michael sounds dazed, confused. Michael is never confused.

I didn’t do anything. What did Dean Winchester do to us? I am going to destroy that vessel down to the molecules and scatter them in the sun.

It couldn’t have been Dean, he was too busy keeping me contained. It was your vessel that started soaking in the power around us.

Lucifer thinks back, to those brief moments where he felt Sam pulsating with power. His power.

Sam Winchester, his vessel, the creation of time and effort for millennia, the gift from the demons, the sacrifice, his abomination, has stolen his power.

Lucifer reaches out, seeking any other awarenesses, but it appears to only be him and Michael, here in the void of senseless matter.

Michael is the last person he wants to talk to. But he’s the only one there is. Equally as powerless. Equally as angered.

They’re going to need to discuss some things.

Gideon wakes with pain in his head and his hand.

He gets himself upright, trembling, hearing the sounds of others doing the same around him.

It was a Tuesday. It was a Tuesday and he thinks he just saw hell.

He doesn’t know why the Lord saw fit to allow him to see it, but he also think he might be in shock, shaking and staring at the fries that spilled on the floor when Sam had dropped a tray and—

Sam. He was—

Gideon looks over. Sam Peterson is standing with one arm over the shoulder of his brother, sagging in place, panting like he’d just ran a race and nearly collapsed.

He could’ve sworn—there was a shadow, right as the wave of evil that pierced Gideon’s soul came through. A shadow on the wall, a glow about his head.

The same kind of glow Gideon had sworn he’d seen when Dean Landsem had stepped momentarily into the church when he stopped by during the thanksgiving food drive.

Oh, Gideon thinks. Oh.

Dean turns, with Sam held tight against his side, and Gideon can see a steady confidence in his eyes. A look that says that a mass wall of evil was not anything new.

Oh.

Gideon knows the Christmas story by heart, and could quote Luke until his face turned blue.

As Sam and Dean, the two guys who made Gideon’s coffee and chatted with him about the Bible on slow days, who had funny anecdotes about the greek translation, who hired his niece at the diner, and who gave an entire car’s worth of food to the thanksgiving food drive—they stand before him and it’s now that GIdeon realizes why the angels told the shepherds not to fear.

It is terrifying.

“Mendoza,” Dean says, loud in the shuffling din that has Gideon’s ears ringing with the loss of sound, “can you get an ambulance here?”

“I . . . I . . . Yeah. Yeah, I’ll just . . .” Officer Mendoza starts talking on his radio. Gideon looks down at himself and faintly realizes that his nice blue shirt, the one his wife had ironed for him last night, is covered in blood. In fact, his hands are still bleeding profusely.

After that, the world goes fuzzy, and the next thing he knows, he’s waking up in a hospital room with his wife sitting bedside.

His throat is rough, coarse. He coughs when he tries to speak up. His wife gives him sips of water and he tries to let her know about the miracle.

“Angels . . . It was angels. There were angels in the diner.”

His wife pats at his shoulder and he finds himself fading once again.

Gideon doesn’t mind this. He has seen an angel. There is not much else to see in the world after that, he thinks.

Chapter Text

DECEMBER

Sam wakes up slowly. He rolls over, finds the warmth of Dean by his side and slips in and out of dreamy consciousness.

They’d closed the diner for the holidays. No place to be. No coffee machine to get warmed up. No customers lining up before open. No trying to get the Impala unstuck from a muddy bank that Dean had run into on the cruddy Iowa roads.

When he finally decides to be awake, he rolls out of bed, craning his neck as it tries to pop.

And then he sits on the edge of the bed, simply existing. It is silent in his head. He is grateful every day for that.

“What ‘re you doin’ up?” Dean grumbles, muffled by his pillow.

“Just woke up.”

“Go back to bed.”

“Not tired enough for that.”

“Sam, you gotta learn how to bask in the moment.”

“I’m basking plenty. You want french toast?”

“If I don’t have to make it.” Dean rolls over, hair mussed from sleep.

“Fine. Just remember, you asked for it.”

Sam pushes himself off the bed and heads down the stairs. Their kitchen is still fairly empty, just enough dishes to get by, because they usually eat at the diner. Once Dean had regained his taste though, he was all about eating everything at any time, so they’d finally stopped by the thrift store to pick up more than just the two bowls, three mugs, and the strange assortment of utensils that Cecelia Lynn had left behind.

Sam looks over their loaf of bread, checking for mold, and then pulls out their carton of eggs, half full. Outside, on the highway, he hears the blaring of horns, but it’s muffled just enough by the snow that Sam doesn’t mind as much as usual. He puts together the french toast, starts frying it in a pan atop the stove, and checks his phone. Three messages from Bobby. He’s been tracking the movements of Michael and Lucifer and sending updates.

It makes Sam’s heart drop into his stomach, the reminder that they’re still out there. That there’s still a battle to be fought.

Dean comes down the stairs and pulls out a chair at the kitchen table, beginning to lazily look through the papers of research and notes that Sam had left there last night when Dean finally told him to get to bed.

“There’s signs of them in Manitoba.”

“Yeah. Cas called. Said there was some shit going down with Raphael.”

Sam frowns, flipping over the toast. He stares out the window again, bracing himself against the counter.

“Do you think we should . . ?”

Dean sighs heavily, and then there’s the scraping of a chair as Dean comes to stand next to him, looking out the window. It’s wet and slushy outside, just enough dregs of snow left to be able to call it a white Christmas.

“‘S far as I’m concerned, we’re still recovering.”

“But Cas and Bobby—”

“I know.”

“Dean, they’re still out there.” Sam can’t express his horror at the thought, so he just takes the toast out of the pan and puts it on a plate, getting the next slice ready.

“And they’re weak and not doing anything. Heaven and hell are laying low to see what happens. We need a damn break, Sam.”

“We’ve had one.”

“No, we haven’t. We were fighting for the world for six months straight. There’s a difference.”

Sam sighs.

“You don’t actually want to go,” Dean says, nudging his arm against Sam’s, “I know you. You like this shitty town. You like work. You like fending off that weird news lady—”

“Definitely don’t like that.”

“And we can’t leave the diner. We’ve just got it fully on its feet again.”

Sam turns so that his back is to the window, making it so he can look at Dean. Dean is being sincere. Earnest even.

“Dean, what about hunting? That kitsune is still out there, and you know there’s other things out there that are—”

Dean interrupts again, moving to grab at Sam’s shoulder, pulling him to face more toward him, so they’re looking each other directly in the face.

“Haven’t we earned it?”

“You never would’ve said that before.”

“Yeah, well it’s not before, alright?” Dean’s voice has risen and Sam curls in slightly, ready for this to be the moment that Dean tells him to get out.

It’s silent for a moment, and then Dean gets a hand on the back of Sam’s head and bumps their foreheads together.

“Sam,” he says, calmer now, “we’ve got something here. And I can’t . . . I don’t want to let that go.”

“The people here know something is off about us, Dean. It’s only a matter of time before we get arrested or some shit like that.”

“Not if your Pastor friend has any say in the matter.”

Sam closes his eyes and exhales through his nose, a hint of amusement at the thought. He’s still not entirely sure what all Pastor Hopkins saw that day, but whatever he did had turned the man into an even more frequent customer who never stopped wanting to talk to Sam or Dean. He asked them questions that had Sam thinking he’d seen something more than the rest of the restaurant.

(Chemical spill, they said, mixed with a downpour of rain. That was the excuse, the reasoning. Janna had never looked at them the same since that day.)

“Sam,” Dean says, “you know us. The second something comes down the pipe, we can be out of here in twenty minutes. Let’s let other people handle it until that happens.” Dean pauses, and the hold on Sam’s head grows tighter, pressing them even more firmly together.

“Please.”

Sam isn’t used to hearing Dean ask for things like this. He swallows, then moving his head slightly, he says, “Okay.”

That’s when he smells the burning and swears, turning out of Dean’s grip to start scraping at the toast that has already burnt, sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Dean starts laughing. Sam can’t help but follow shortly after.