Fic: In Country, Chapter V of V, Part Two

[oselle]

V. This Pendent World, Part Two

Dean woke in a horror of thirst. His old cell had at least had running water, foul smelling and tasting though it was, and this chamber had nothing like it. The drain in the floor was for the blood of the damned and no water had ever touched this room. He was still concussed and whatever he'd ruptured in his shoulder while beating Lucifer was a constant throbbing pain and there was a wound in that shoulder that he'd had since the Palisades and it was sore and festering but above all this was thirst. Like the presence of some new demon worse than all the rest who never left his side. He would have drunk his own piss if he had any. He looked at the sharp tools on the wall and imagined cutting himself open and drinking his blood but the thought of it in his mouth hot and thick and salty made the thirst worse. He remembered some true story of the old west where prospectors lost in the desert had survived by sucking out the eyeballs of their horses and dying companions and now he could understand though his own eyes felt so shriveled that he doubted there was more than a drop of jelly in them. He thought of the tap in his old cell and its steady drip of yellow water and he could see the drops shimmering at the edge of the faucet and hear them sliding cool and wet down some unseen culvert and he shuddered with want.

Meanwhile all around him was the room where Alistair had tortured him and broken him. He was sure it was the same one or maybe there were many of them in hell and they all looked like this. It hardly mattered. In this place or one just like it he'd finally given up and opened the first seal without even knowing it and in a place like this he would finally have to try and end it, unless Cass came as he said he would. But for now Dean couldn't even think about that. There was only thirst and the dream of Cass had been days ago and even that had begun to fade.

The place was infested and there were insects on the floor and the walls and on him. He stood up brushed them off but he was so unsteady that he collapsed to his knees trembling and he bent his head to at least shake them out of his hair. He was in an appalling state of filth, his own and the gruesome slops he'd been lying in, and his clothes were stiff and stuck to him and he would have torn them off but couldn't stand the thought of sitting there naked among the bugs and the stink and the rotting gristle of this room's former guests. In this sorry state Lucifer at last found him and by then he was closer to death than life.

Lucifer took him under the arms and gently raised him to sitting and Dean felt as if he might crack into pieces. He made a dry and broken noise in his throat and Lucifer shushed him like a child. He felt something cool and smooth placed in his hands.

"Drink it," Lucifer said, and he held Dean's hands and raised them up. Dean took one long drink out of the glass and for a moment he just sat in amazement and let the water soak his tongue. Then he swallowed it and suddenly the thirst roared up into something beyond all reason and he clutched the glass and chugged the water and distantly he heard Lucifer telling him to slow down but he couldn't and then he doubled over and vomited, the water coming up just as clear and cool as it had gone down and the glass shattering on the floor.

"No matter," Lucifer said.

Dean lay on his side and looked up at Lucifer and Lucifer smiled and wiped Dean's mouth and then helped him sit up again and put a fresh glass of water in his hands.

"Slowly this time," he said and Dean nodded and lifted the glass and drank in small sips, letting each one trickle down his dry throat and into his gut and making sure it would stay down before he took another.

"That's it," Lucifer said. "That's it."

When he was done Dean sat against the wall with his eyes closed and the empty glass tilting in his lap and he slipped into a soft doze that was almost sleep. When he opened his eyes he saw Lucifer beside him but he also saw Sam. This Lucifer or Sam took the glass from Dean's hands and set it down on the floor and then reached up and cupped Dean's face in one warm hand and Dean stared at him.

At last he whispered, "Who are you?"

Lucifer or Sam smiled.

"I am your brother," he said and then he leaned forward and kissed Dean on the mouth. He drew back and looked at Dean and kissed him again and Dean thought, Whose brother? Whose?

When he broke the kiss there was blood on Lucifer's mouth because Dean's own lips were cracked and bleeding and Lucifer shook his head and smiled again, tenderly. He moved his hand and stroked his thumb over Dean's forehead and told him to go to sleep and no sooner had he said it than Dean obeyed.

He woke next to a sensation that had become so foreign he at first didn't know what it was. Then he realized it was comfort. He was not in pain or thirsty, he felt clean linens against him and felt himself clean as well. He was lying on his side with a pillow under his head and a warm blanket over him and these things had a laundry freshness to them that was so long forgotten he could only lie there with his eyes closed and breathe it in.

When he opened his eyes he thought he would see Lucifer but he didn't. He sat up slowly and cautiously and the blanket and sheet fell away into his lap. He felt the back of his head and the dried blood that had been there was gone. He touched his face and realized he was clean-shaven and he looked down at himself and saw that he was dressed in new white underclothes and the bed linens were also white and the room around him was crisply neat and bland as one in any interstate motel chain. Next to the bed was a pale wooden nightstand bearing a lamp and pitcher of water and a glass, already half full. In the corner, a small round table and two chairs and a shaded lamp on a brass chain above them. The walls were papered in beige stripes and above the bed was a framed picture of a pleasant street in some quiet country town. There was no window and only one door, white with a brass handle.

He sat up and swung his legs over the bed and put his bare feet down on the light blue carpet. He looked at the nightstand and picked up the glass and drank. The water was room-temperature and slightly sweet, as if there might be something in it. He'd tasted water like this in the hospital years ago when hospitals had still existed, and the torment of his recent thirst came back to him and he drained the glass and poured himself another and drank that too. Then he put the glass down. He opened the nightstand's drawer and was somehow unsurprised to find a pocketsized Gideon's Bible with Psalms and Proverbs. He picked it up and opened its false leather cover and looked at the name and the Nashville copyright address and then he closed it and put it back in the drawer and closed that too and stood up. He wavered but stayed on his feet. He crossed the room and opened the one door onto a small bathroom, also as clean and nondescript as a motel's. He turned on the light. He lifted the toilet and looked into it and saw only a toilet. He twisted the taps and clear water ran out of them and he shut them off. He studied himself pale and bony in the mirror over the sink. He turned on the shower and stood there mesmerized by the spray splashing down on his hand and then he turned off the shower and dried his hand on one of the white towels and when he walked out of the bathroom Lucifer was sitting at the foot of the bed.

"I thought you'd want some clothes," he said. He held a small stack of neatly folded garments out to Dean. Dean just stared at him.

"Why don't you sit down?" Lucifer said and he gestured to the table and Dean looked at it and now there was a meal there waiting for him. Breakfast. Bacon and eggs. Hashbrowns and toast. Coffee.

"Sit," Lucifer said. "Go ahead and eat."

"I know why I'm here," Dean said.

"Do you?"

"It's like you said about the rest of the world. It's too far gone, you can't just snap your fingers and fix it? I was too far gone, wasn't I?"

Lucifer set the clothes down on the bed next to him and put his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands and looked at Dean.

"You were nearly dead when I found you."

"When you found me?" Dean said. "You put me down there."

"You were nearly dead when I found you," Lucifer repeated. "You were almost past healing. You can't be my vessel in that condition, you would just shatter. And then where would I be?"

"So what, you park me in Motel 666 until I get some meat on my bones?"

"Something like that."

"What if I don't play along? Back to the dungeon?"

"If you don't play along I tie you to the bed and shove a funnel down your throat." He stood up and pointed to the table. "I think you'll prefer the food in solid form, but it's up to you." He turned away and then he turned back to Dean and said, "Sam isn't coming back, by the way. I've taken care of that."

"Taken care of it."

Lucifer nodded. "I know he told you something. I don't care what it was. It won't change anything. You have only two choices."

After a moment, Dean said, "I know it," and then he was alone.

He went to the table and looked at the food. He was hungry. Starving. Yet he didn't want to eat and he wished that he hadn't even drunk the water or allowed himself to be fascinated by the bathroom. He felt like a piece of livestock being fattened up for slaughter and he had a sudden impulse to dump all of the food on the floor and smash it and tear up the room besides and at least show Lucifer that he wasn't going to go down fighting but he didn't do any of that. Instead he turned around and looked at the picture over the bed. It was an ordinary house on a plain street in Anytown U.S.A. He stepped closer and studied it. It was his family's house on Indiana Street in Lawrence Kansas.

"Nice touch, you asshole," he said, but he stood there and kept looking at it. He thought about Sam and he thought about his father also. His father who had raised his sons up to hunt things that went bump in the night and who had probably never himself imagined what they would all come to in the end. His mind called up a sudden and ancient memory, one that was so common that it shouldn't have stood out more than any other and yet it did. He'd been about twenty and Sam sixteen and the two of them had botched some simple job that their father had let them work alone. Afterwards he had told Sam that while he didn't expect Dean to do more than go in there swinging he relied on Sam to think.

He heard, Think, but now it was Sam's voice, not his father's. Dean, think.

You can't be my vessel in that condition, Lucifer had said. You would just shatter. And then where would I be?

Dean thought about this. He hadn't considered what would happen if Lucifer left Sam without a new vessel at hand and now he thought, You'd be out in the open, wouldn't you, you son of a bitch? Exactly where I want you. Against his fingers he could feel Cass's chain. He could see it.

He looked at the food on the table. His mouth immediately watered and just as instantly he was afraid to eat. He put something in it. he thought. That's what he's going to do, drug me up so that I'll be so out of it I'll say yes without even knowing it, and he looked at the water by the bed and wanted to go in that bathroom and make himself puke it up and then he knew he wasn't making sense. He was here not just because Lucifer needed him well but because Lucifer needed him to acquiesce of his own free will. Only a man sound in body and mind has free will because only a man sound in body and mind can think and Dean realized it had been a very long time since he'd been in any condition to think at all.

He sat down at the table and ate. It was all delicious. He'd never had such a breakfast. He got up and went into the bathroom. He took a leisurely piss and flushed it and then although he didn't feel like he needed one he took a shower. He couldn't even remember when he'd last had the luxury of a hot shower. Possibly years ago. Before the virus and the refugee camps and all the cold nights spent in cars beneath overpasses and abandoned houses and moldering cabins. He got out and dried off. He wiped the steam off the mirror and checked himself out and aside from the old print of Castiel's hand on his shoulder there wasn't a mark on him. When he went back into the bedroom the breakfast dishes were gone from the table.

"Classy," he said out loud, and he actually laughed. He put on the clothes that Lucifer had left on the bed. Then he made the bed although he couldn't recall ever having made a bed by choice in his entire life. He looked at the picture on the wall. He thought of his father. He'd been going in swinging for so long but that was all behind him now. He sat down to think.

* * *

Mary took Cass back into the city by a different way through streets that steamed and hissed where ratlike devils stared at them out of doors and windows that were little more than holes in hovels. It was still day but the sky had grown dark as if a great brown fog had rolled in and here and there a gaslamp burned a sullen and oppressed flame but there was no other light. The walls were dripping with the damp.

They came at last to a vast railyard. In the center stood a roundhouse with a tangle of iron rails feeding into it and on the rails sat caged boxcars that were packed with souls. There was only one track leading out of the roundhouse and this pointed south. Mary wove her way among the teeming boxcars and the souls pleaded and wept and cursed and snatched at both of them. She ignored them but Cass looked up once and saw their faces against the bars and their arms outstretched in supplication and he thought that in such a multitude all could hardly deserve this fate. Dean had been here and he had not deserved it.

"Please," someone said near his knees and he looked down and saw a woman crushed at the bottom of the boxcar. Her hand was out between the bars and her fingers clutched at the air. "This is a mistake. Some kind of horrible mistake." Others took up the cry and now Cass turned in a circle and looked upon the innumerable horde of them and they were all begging him to listen and Cass wondered what God knew of this. What the other angels knew.

"Cass!"

"You can't do anything for them," she said and he knew that she was right. He set his eyes on the ground and followed her and the cries and curses of the damned rose up in futility all around him.

* * *

Dean ate twice more that day and then he went to bed and fell at once into a dreamless sleep. When he opened his eyes Lucifer was sitting in a chair at the side of the bed reading the Bible.

"Shouldn't that make you burst into flames or something?"

Lucifer smiled.

"Most of what's in here is bullshit, you know. Nasty fairy tales. My side's gotten more mileage out of it than God's most of the time." He threw it on the bed. "None of the good stuff is in there."

"Like what?"

"Like the truth about God. And angels and man. What happened between me and Michael."

"What did happen?"

"I asked him to stand with me and he wouldn't. I would have made him a king in his own right and he chose to sit at God's feet and take orders like a trained monkey. He knew he was God's favorite. What was the love of a brother compared to that?"

Dean sat up in the bed and watched Lucifer. Lucifer was staring out at some point on the wall where a window might have been. Then he looked at Dean and came up out of the chair and kissed him. He put his hand behind Dean's head and held him there until Dean opened his mouth for him. He could have bitten Lucifer's tongue in half but he didn't. Lucifer broke the kiss and told him to lie down.

"What if I don't?"

"You know I can make you."

"Then do that. Put a little effort into it."

He thought Lucifer was going to knock him out but instead he pushed Dean down on the bed and turned him over and fixed him there so that Dean couldn't even twitch. He had to lie still and listen to Lucifer undress.

"This isn't even what you want," Dean said calmly.

"I know," Lucifer said. He stripped Dean naked below the waist and lay on top of him. "But you haven't given me what I want."

Lucifer shoved into him and Dean closed his eyes. He could do that at least. He rode it out and when Lucifer was done he rolled off of Dean and lay down next to him, flushed and sweating. After a while he said, "In time, our intercourse will be much deeper."

"That felt pretty fuckin deep to me," Dean said. He could move now and pushed himself away but Lucifer raised up on one elbow and caught Dean's wrist.

"You'll see," he said. He sat up and with his other hand he got the Bible and flipped through it. Dean watched him and contemplated how fucking crazy he was. He wondered if he'd always been this crazy or if all those years down in the hole had done this to him. Probably the first one.

"Here," Lucifer said. He handed the book to Dean. "Read that."

Dean looked where he was pointing and took the book and Lucifer told him to read it out loud.

"For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face."

"You understand?"

"Not really."

"You will," Lucifer said. He leaned forward and kissed him again. Dean held his breath and rolled up his eyes and stared at the ceiling. When Lucifer was gone Dean went into the bathroom and took a hot and very long shower. Then he got dressed and sat on the bed. The Bible was open facedown on the bed and he picked it up and read that passage again and then once more and then he dogeared the page and sat there with the book in his lap. He thought about things seen through a glass, darkly. About things seen face to face. About Satan, out in the open, where Dean wanted him. But not yet.

* * *

Inside the roundhouse a black locomotive was being turned amidst a great iron screeching and a shower of sparks. Mary went up to a demon who stood there smoking and she spoke to him as if they knew each other and when she came back to Cass she said that they would ride in the locomotive.

He stood there and looked at her and then he said, "Do all of these demons know who you are?"

"Some of them."

"And you just walk among them?"

"What are they going to do to me?"

"Tell Lucifer what you're doing."

"What would they tell him?"

"That you're going to Sheol and you have someone with you."

"Lucifer's been in a hole for more years than most of these demons have been around. They hardly even believe he exists. As for me, most of them only know that I'm not a human soul and I'm not a demon like them."

"Clay knew who you were."

"Clay and I go a ways back." She raised an eyebrow. "Did he say something to you?"

Cass studied her and then looked at her pregnant belly and said, "This is Lucifer's?"

"Yes."

"When did he get this on you?"

"When he was set free."

"That was a long time ago."

"I've been brooding on it."

"And it's no concern of his?"

"He doesn't know about it."

In the smoky darkness of the roundhouse he could just make out her white face. The great squeal of the turntable went on and the demons bellowed and cursed at their work.

"Death was the last son you gave him."

"Yes it was."

"What will this one be?"

"I told you."

"Tell me again."

"It will be Vengeance. Mine."

"The angels believed that if Lucifer wasn't stopped he would bring forth a terrible beast to devour the world at the end of days."

They were hitching the boxcars to the locomotive. She looked at them and said, "Do you think Lucifer needs any beast to finish off the world?" She leaned towards him. "Without me you'll never get near Lucifer. Or Dean. You know that right?"

After a moment he nodded.

"Then stop fucking around," she said. She turned her back on him and made for the train, now steaming on its track, its ovens glowing red, its doomed freight writhing in despair.

* * *

The next time Lucifer came to him, he didn't have to put any spell on Dean to hold him still and Dean didn't fight him. Afterwards Lucifer turned him over and put his hand between Dean's legs.

"You didn't like it."

"Am I supposed to?"

"It'll be better if you stop resisting."

"I didn't resist."

"No, but..." He propped himself up on his elbow and wrapped his hand around Dean's cock and went to work on him. "Do you want me to stop?"

"Would you care if I did?"

Lucifer smiled and stroked him and bent down to whisper, "It feels like you don't."

Dean closed his eyes and tried to make his mind go to other things but Lucifer was deft and in a little time Dean came. He moaned in spite of himself and when he opened his eyes Lucifer was still smiling. He laid his wet hand on Dean's chest.

"That's better, isn't it?"

Dean looked up at him and Lucifer smiled and swirled his fingers in the come on Dean's stomach and then Dean said, "Tell me about Michael," and Lucifer went still.

"Tell you what?"

"I was supposed to be the guy's vessel and I don't know a goddamn thing about him. Except that you hate him. Or love him. Or were fucking him, I don't even know. What did he do to you anyway?"

"I told you."

"No you didn't."

Lucifer didn't say anything and it was very quiet. As if only this room existed and nothing else outside it. For all Dean knew, that was the case. He raised up suddenly and kissed Lucifer on his own. He reached down and took Lucifer in hand and stroked him. When he broke the kiss he said, "It'll be better if I know."

Lucifer grinned and pushed Dean down on his back and bent up his legs and fucked him and when he was done he lay down beside him and started to talk.

* * *
The train bore down through hell's night. The track before it burned molten in the locomotive's single headlamp and twisted creatures leapt out of its way or were crushed beneath its wheels and all around them was darkness and the locomotive was murderously hot and reeked of coal and sulfur. Two demons shoveled fuel into the stove and both of them wore iron collars around their necks that were chained to ringbolts in the floor. Cass huddled on the floor beside the coalbox and Mary sat up by the engineer and after a while she came back to where Cass was and told him that they would have to work or the engineer would put them off the train. So Cass lay down his machinegun and took off his coat and shoveled as they told him to do and when he paused once to wipe his streaming face he looked to the front of the locomotive and in the red haze and dust of the coalfire he saw Mary stark naked on her hands and knees with her distended breasts and belly swinging low beneath her and the engineer's claws around her hips as he fucked her and her hair hung in her sweaty face and she was grinning like a jackal and in the darkness behind them all the damned howled into the night, bound for the place of no return.

* * *

Dean's mind would wander. He'd let his eyes roll closed and drift out of himself and walk through his past life. He was teaching Sam to tie his shoes. Flirting with a waitress in a diner. Hustling some poor bastard out of his pool money. He was driving down a strip of empty road with the window wide open and the radio on and the summer sun baking his arm. He was lying in bed with Cass asleep next to him and the rain was falling on the roof and the curtain lifted into the room on soft autumn wind that smelled of woodsmoke and wet leaves.

He reined himself in and opened his eyes and looked up at Lucifer.

"I want to see you."

Lucifer went on with his business between Dean's legs.

"You see me."

"The real you. You told me everything about Michael, now I need to know you."

"You know me." He thrust hard and grinned, his hair in his eyes. "We know each other very well now, don't we?"

"I want to see you," Dean said. He closed his eyes and caught his breath and then opened his eyes and said, "Face to face. The way Michael did," and Lucifer paused and stared down at him.

"No man has seen me."

"I'm not just any man. I'm Michael's chosen. Your chosen."

"Are you saying yes?"

Dean was shaking. He wanted to put his legs down but he couldn't and his arms were pinned up over his head.

"Are you saying yes?"

Dean shook his head.

"Not yet."

Quietly, Lucifer said, "Does it serve you to play these games?"

Oh, it serves me, Dean thought. You better believe it serves me, you fucker.

Lucifer stared at him for another moment and then pulled out and threw him over facedown and fell on him and thrust back into him. When he came he bit Dean in the same shoulder where the other wound had been and Dean wrung the sheet in his fists and tried to stay quiet but at last it was so painful that he cried out until he was nearly sobbing. He could feel Lucifer grinning as he sucked blood out of him and spewed come into him and when he was finally spent he lay on top of Dean and slowly licked at the wound. Slowly ground his hips against him. Then he sighed and rolled off and got up from the bed.

"Look at me," he said and when Dean didn't move he grabbed Dean's arm and turned him over roughly. "You see me."

He was standing there naked and sweaty with his cock wet and still hard. His mouth and chin were bloody.

"I see my brother. I see you hiding in him. I want to see you..." He looked Lucifer up and down and now saw something he had missed or misunderstood. He was bleeding. From his right side, at his waist. It was not Dean's blood on him but his own. Oozing out of him. He looked up at Lucifer's face. "Where did Michael get you?"

"What?"

Dean raised up on his elbows and stared at Lucifer.

"In the right side, wasn't it?" He smiled. "That's what you told me. Skewered you like a pig with that...what did you call it? Sword of adamant? That was it, right?"

"Why are you asking me this?" Lucifer asked and then Dean looked down and Lucifer followed his gaze and saw. He stood there and stared. He raised his hand and touched the open wound and two of his fingertips sank into it and a rill of blood spilled out and ran over his bare hip. He looked at Dean.

"What did you do?"

"I didn't do shit. What did you do?"

"What did you do? Lucifer roared and he lunged at Dean and Dean scrabbled backwards and threw himself off the bed and Lucifer went after him and then suddenly Lucifer was gone and Dean was alone on the floor. He turned over and crouched there listening. Then he stood up. The room was quiet. The bedsheets were slick with semen and blood. There was blood on the carpet where Lucifer had been standing. Lucifer himself was nowhere.

* * *

Cass lay exhausted and the train lurched relentlessly under him. His hands were blistered and bleeding. The chain felt as if it were itself made of burning coals. Mary brought him something to drink.

"How much further?" he asked her. The only light was from the fire and she was lit up all red.

"A ways," she said. "It's very far."

"Will we get there in time?"

"We'll get there."

He closed his eyes. He heard her go. He fell into a stupor and then slept and in his sleep he dreamt of Dean and in the dream Dean said that soon they would see face to face and he was all bloody and Cass reached out to him but Dean stepped away and Cass couldn't see him anymore. Then suddenly Anna was with him and she told him the time was growing short, so short and then he woke up.

* * *

Dean sat on the edge of the bed. He would not sleep in it again. He thought he probably wouldn't sleep ever again, anywhere. He'd bandaged his shoulder with a strip of sheet but he could feel it still bleeding under his shirt. The Bible was on the nightstand and he leaned over and picked it up and began to page through it and then to flip through it as if he were searching for something and then he closed it and stared at it in his hands. He went to put it back on the nightstand but instead he stood up and put it in his back pocket and then he sat down to wait for Lucifer.

He thought about his life and it seemed like something that had happened to someone else. Someone not even real. As if he'd seen it on television. A few moments stood out clearer than others but even these he now felt greatly distanced from and at last he found himself just thinking about rain. Driving at night in the rain. There were places in the country where the rain would suddenly come down hard all at once and go on for hours and he'd loved to drive on those sorts of nights with the rain like a veil all around the car and the radio turned down low and the windshield wipers keeping the beat. Headlights on wet blacktop and the road lit up red behind him. Best on those lonely flat stretches of highway where he'd have the road to himself, like in the Dakotas or Wyoming or Texas. The endless expanse of Texas. He'd done a lot of driving in Texas and a lot of it on such rainy nights and now the rest of his life seemed to be fading away but he remembered this. How it would rain at night, in Texas.

* * *

The train stopped. Cass picked himself up. He could barely stand. He lifted the machinegun and put it on his shoulder and looked about himself. Mary was at his side and she took his arm.

"This way," she said.

He followed her down from the locomotive. It was not day and he knew there would be no day here. The ground beneath him was flinty and they were on an open plain and there was a burning stench on the air and the souls had been released from the boxcars and were trying to run in that fuming darkness and monstrous demons were herding them as if for sport.

"This way," she repeated and she led him away from the train and that awful scene and took him around a great brick wall that seemed only the uppermost of some structure all but buried underground and four brick smokestacks loomed above them. Her belly was huge and straining at her coat and she was panting and some fetid ichor was running thick and black down the insides of her legs. She squatted down beside the wall and began to dig with her hands and Cass got down beside her and dug as well.

"You're sick," he said.

"Dig," she said. She didn't look at him. "Just dig."

They dug until they uncovered a wooden door with an iron ring in it and it was not bolted and together they pulled it open and climbed inside and pulled it shut behind them. It was so dark.

"Come," she said and she grabbed Cass's hand.

"Where are we going?"

"To the Pit," she said. "Lucifer is there."

"You know this?" he asked. He stumbled blindly behind her. "You're sure?"

She stopped and in the darkness she put his hand on her stomach and he could feel beneath the taut flesh a violent squirming as if she were full of snakes.

"My time is almost come," she said. "My son knows his father." Then she went on.

* * *

Lucifer appeared as he always did with no warning and the two of them stared at each other and neither said a word. He was dressed the way Sam might have dressed when he was just Sam but the shirt he wore was bloody from his right armpit to his hip.

At last Lucifer said, "You did this to me."

Dean looked at him with his heart hammering so hard he was sure Lucifer could see him shaking and for a moment he almost said nothing but then he said, "Yes I did."

"How? You said no to him."

"It doesn't matter. I was his chosen. You said so yourself."

"Get up," Lucifer said, and so Dean did.

* * *

He followed her in pure darkness with one hand in hers and the other feeling against the wall. There was a terrible sound growing ahead of them and a stench and he knew they were coming to the Pit and then suddenly her hand slipped out of his.

"Mary?" he said. He groped for her in the dark. "Mary?"

He went forward with his hands on the wall calling out to her. He came up against some pile of debris and he began to clamber over it but it was mountainous and he couldn't see and he slipped and fell end over end to the ground scrabbling for purchase and he lost the machinegun and heard it thump to the ground somewhere and in a panic he went to his hands and knees to feel for it but it didn't seem to be anywhere and then her voice was in his ear.

"You go on alone from here."

"No!" he shouted. He felt her pull the knife from his belt but when he grabbed for her no one was there. "No!"

He crouched there with his eyes wide and sightless and knew she was gone and for a moment he was frozen in place. Then he turned and began to climb again over what was in his way.

"God help me," he whispered. "Anna, if you can hear me, help me, oh God, someone help me."

He made it to the other side of the pile and pushed forward and now there was some light. He saw something ahead like a crack in the wall and smoky light leaked through it and the walls around him shook from the screams and laughter and howls of the damned in the Pit. He stumbled and fell and the chain was so heavy that he couldn't get up and heavier still was the awful affliction of his own humanity. Earned through love. Through grace. Once lost and then found again, in a fallen world.

You think you were punished for this love. Anna's words at the church in Knoxville. But no angel chose you to go down to hell. God alone chose you, Castiel. And God does not make mistakes.

And Cass, Castiel once, got to his feet and went on, by the grace of God.

* * *

Dean found himself back on the gantry above the Pit just as he had known all this time that it would end here and Lucifer was at his side and he remembered Cass and the dream that had been no dream at all.

I tried to hold him off but it's too late. It was always too late. I hope it's quick for you and you can finally go home, Cass. Castiel.

He closed his eyes and Lucifer took hold of him and picked him up and threw him over. Dean's fingers struck the railing and he clutched at it and stared up at what remained of his brother for one hopeless second and then the railing slipped from his grasp and he fell.

* * *

Cass saw him fall. He'd come out through the crack in the wall onto a catwalk and at the other end of it he saw the gantry and Lucifer there and Dean and then Dean was lost to the Pit.

He shouted Dean's name but no one could hear him in that din and then he threw himself off the catwalk and down into the Pit himself and now he was among a crush of souls and demons and they were all surging against him like a tide and they took no notice of him because they were running in a wild panic. Even in this place something had made them run and they were clambering the walls like rats and breaking themselves upon the doors and Cass fought his way through them calling for Dean and then suddenly he had him. In his arms. He was torn and bleeding and he lashed out violently and Cass grabbed his face and made him look.

"Dean, it's me. It's me."

Dean stared at him and shook his head and Cass held onto him and nodded fiercely and said, "Yes," and then took Dean's hands and put them on his chest so that he would feel the chain and Dean looked at him and Cass nodded again and he knew Dean understood. And then Cass looked over Dean's shoulder and saw Lucifer standing there in an empty space because all that horde had fled at his coming.

"Storming the gates after all," Lucifer said to Cass and then he raised his hand to him and Dean said, "No," and Lucifer paused.

"Don't touch him," Dean said. "Michael's vessel is yours. Everything you want."

Lucifer lowered his hand. Then he smiled.

"Say what I told you to say."

"One thing first."

"What?"

"I need to see you the way Michael knew you. Face to face, like you said." Lucifer cocked his head at him and Dean said, "I am your real vessel. Let me know you." He paused then said, "Let me see you, brother."

Cass was behind Dean and Dean pushed him back and Cass stepped away. The silence in the Pit was immense. Lucifer stared at Dean and then slowly he turned his face up and closed his eyes.

He said, "Michael," and smiled. "Here I am."

Sam's body fell away from him like a husk and crumpled to the ground and Satan stood there. Corrupted with his sins and flayed from his years of imprisonment and his wings spread out all black and infested and rotting. Yellowed sinews showed through the charred pinions and tarry blood dripped from them and his right side was sheared open to the bone and he hardly knew it, so great was his pleasure in what he was about to have.

Cass seized the chain beneath his clothes and it came away from him simply as if he'd only been wearing it around his neck and it was light and cool as water, and then Dean was gone for Satan had him.

"Say it!" Satan bellowed. Dean was pinned beneath him with his head wrenched back as if Satan would tear open his throat and he said "Say the words!" and Dean rolled his eyes to Cass but Cass stood frozen because he couldn't chain one without the other and it was all as Asmodeus had said so long ago. He saw nothing but Dean. Satan looked up at him and saw the chain and Cass knew that all was lost in that one moment.

"What is that?" Satan hissed and Dean shouted, "Do it!" and then there was another voice.

"Satan!" she called out and her voice rang in that awful silence. Satan turned his head away from Cass and his daughter Sin stood there naked and grotesquely swollen for her time had come round at last. "See what you've made!" She ran a hand over her belly. "This is your last son! This is the beast!"

"The beast," Satan said and he was grinning.

"Who will devour the world." She was at Satan's side and he let go of Dean and put his hands on his daughter. "And I've brought you this enemy who thought he would imprison you."

She looked at Cass and Satan looked with her and Cass thought, Oh, God no... And then while Satan's head was turned in one sudden motion she slit herself open with Cass's knife from groin to breast and something hideous tumbled out of her in a great gush of black pollution. In size it already matched its father and for one moment Satan stared at it before it lunged at him and rode him to the ground and so Dean was free and at once Cass was on Satan with the chain. On both of them, father and son, and Satan threw back his head and roared.

The very foundations of hell quaked at the sound of it and in the Pit and the mines and factories and waystations and all the squalid slums of that underworld demons and souls alike fell to their knees and cowered. On earth the demons who had been at Satan's work in these late years turned and ran howling like wolves or disappeared leaving nothing behind but their sulfurous stink and the men and women who had sided with them knew what they'd done and were terrified as they should have been. In the dark hills of Kentucky a man who as a boy had sweated his way through many sweltering summer sermons suddenly thought of his grandmother and her great serene faith on those hot southern Sundays, and he remembered the prophet that he'd met in Detroit, while a girl named Tanya recalled him also and said a prayer that her friend Amy had taught her, one of many she had learned from that righteous woman. Amidst the ruins of Detroit an old devil who went by many names smiled and lit a cigar and sat back to smoke it with relish, for he had all the time in the world, as did a little spirit from a forgotten race who hated to be called trickster and yet had many tricks up her sleeve and now the whole earth on which to play them again. Finally even Sin's vast legion of offspring paused in their endeavors, and Death himself stood still to listen. Then there was silence over all this world which yet shone like a jewel, pendent from the hand of God.

The ground shuddered and split open and Cass was at one end of the chain and Dean at the other and together they bound Satan and the spawn who was already tearing at him in rage. The chasm gaped until it was at last wide enough for them both to be cast into it and Cass released the chain and Dean did also but at the last moment Satan stretched out his arm and seized Dean.

"This time," he said. "This time you come with me, brother."

Cass shouted "No!" and Dean stared at him in terror but he was on the other side of that gulf and Cass couldn't reach him and Dean fell headfirst into the abyss with nothing to stop him and Cass made to throw himself in after them. He would not lose Dean now. He could not.

Then suddenly Sam had Dean around the waist and he pulled his brother back to safety and the crater closed forever on the howling fury of Satan and Vengeance, his last son.

* * *

In the great quiet that followed Cass crouched stunned on his hands and knees. Then Satan's daughter who had called herself Mary after that other mother of a long-awaited son broke the silence.

She said, "See to your friends," and Cass looked at her and she was standing there belting her coat around her narrow waist. "Go on."

He half-ran and half-stumbled to where they lay. Sam's arms were still wrapped around Dean's waist and both were so still that Cass thought they had died. He knelt beside them and felt their throats and found a pulse, even and strong on Dean but Sam's was high and reedy. He heard footsteps approaching and thought it must be Mary but when he looked up he saw Asher as he'd last seen him in Detroit, still barefoot in his fusty suit with a stink of sulfur and sweat and cigars about him and he was clapping his hands.

"Good job," he said. "I was getting worried you didn't have it in you, but good job." He looked around at the emptiness of that chamber. "Cleaned out this joint too. Ah well, we'll fill it up again soon enough." He saw Mary and winked at her and said, "Won't we, princess?" and she smiled and said nothing.

"Get us out of here," Cass said to him.

"Don't want to hang around for the party?"

"Get us out of here now."

Asher shrugged and they were back in Detroit. In The Cairo's forecourt beside the dead garden with its twisted tree, all of them. The air was still, the sun hot and hazed. It was Mary who turned to go first and Cass called after her.

"Thank you," he said and she answered, "Don't thank me. You served your purpose."

He shook his head. "You protected me. At the waystation, from Clay, from the train engineer...I never even asked you to."

She smiled. "You don't have to ask for what should be offered." She looked at Dean and then back at Cass. "You do love him. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it."

"What will you do now?"

"I'll be very busy. I hear my boys have been running wild. I think they need a mother's hand."

"I'll bet they do," Asher leered and she glanced at him and again said nothing.

"I'll keep this, if you don't mind," she said, holding up the knife.

"Yes, please. Keep it."

She turned away without another word and she walked off and turned the corner and was gone.

Asher said, "Moody, these bitches, right? Sneaky too...who knew she had a bun in the oven?"

Cass ignored him. Dean was stirring under his hand and when he looked down Dean's eyes were open and he was gazing up at the sky and then Cass put his hand on Dean's face.

"Dean?"

"Is it over?"

"Yes."

"He's gone?"

"Yes."

"Sam..." he said and sat up suddenly and turned and Sam was coming around as well. "Sam...Sammy, hey..."

Sam stared at him in a daze and Dean and Cass helped raise him up to sitting and then Dean said, "Oh God," and looked at his hand and it was all bloody. He pushed up Sam's shirt and his right side was sheared open to the bone as Satan's had been.

Dean looked at Cass and then wildly at Asher and he stood up and grabbed Asher by the arm.

"Heal him. Now."

"He's way beyond my help."

"You fucking heal him now!"

Asher shook himself out of Dean's grip. "Even if I could fix that hole he wouldn't stand a chance. You know what he had in him all those years. It's fucking amazing there's anything left of him at all. Azazel must've juiced him up good."

"No..." Dean said. He turned back and knelt down beside Sam.

Sam said, "It's okay, Dean."

"No it's not." To Cass he said, "Help me get him in the shade."

"Dean..."

"Help me. Just help me, Cass."

Together they lifted Sam and Sam gasped in pain and they got him over to The Cairo and set him down in the shade with his back against the wall. Sam sat with his eyes closed taking quick, shallow breaths.

"Hey," Asher said and Cass and Dean both turned to look at him. He held up a shovel and then planted it spade-down in the dirt of the garden. "Don't say I didn't do anything for you."

"Go fuck yourself," Dean said and Asher only smiled and touched his fingers to his temple and then he turned away and went off whistling down the street. Well after he was gone they could hear his whistle echoing in the streets but neither of them cared.

Dean said, "Sammy, you just gotta hold on a little longer, okay? We'll get this fixed up."

"Sure, Dean," Sam said. "Sure. Hey could you...could you maybe get me some water?"

Dean looked at Cass. "Cass, would you..."

"No, you go ahead Dean. I want to talk to Castiel for a minute."

Dean stared at Sam as if he didn't know what he was saying and then he nodded and said, "All right. Okay, Sam." He spun around on his heels and stood up and went to find something for Sam to drink, though Cass was sure there was nothing to be found.

"I told him you were dead," Cass said. "I swear I thought you were."

"Of course you did. I should have been."

"How did you hold on all this time?"

"I wanted to see Dean again. I knew he'd show up eventually. And when he did, I'd be there to help him."

Cass nodded.

"I've made so many mistakes, Castiel. Am I going to hell?"

"No. I think this was your fate. This was the role you had to play."

"Well...that's good, I guess." He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked at Cass. "You'll have to look after him. Lucifer...we did terrible things to him. I thought if he wanted Dean for a vessel he'd treat him like he treated me...before I said yes. But he didn't. And I don't even know all of it. What I know is..." He shook his head. "It's unbearable."

"Don't worry. I'll take care of him."

"You love him, don't you?"

"Yes. I always have."

"Yeah," Sam said and smiled. "I knew that. I think everyone knew it but him. I hope he's figured it out."

"I think so."

"Good," Sam said and then Dean was back.

"I couldn't find a fuckin drop of anything but don't worry about it. We'll figure something out."

"That's okay."

"You did it, man," Dean said. "You fucked him up good." He glanced down at Sam's blood-drenched shirt. "Wish you hadn't fucked yourself up while you were at it."

"Hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking..." His eyes slipped shut and his head tipped to the side.

"Sam..." Dean took his face in his hands. "Hey, Sam, come on."

Sam opened his eyes.

"I'm so sorry for everything, Dean."

"No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't stop you..."

"You couldn't have. I wouldn't have listened. But it's okay. It's okay now." He closed his eyes again and Dean held onto him. His hands were shaking.

"Sammy?"

Sam opened his eyes.

"You know, Lucifer was right about one thing."

"Yeah? What was that?"

"You, Dean." He smiled. "You were the best big brother."

After a time, Cass touched Dean's arm.

"Dean."

Dean looked at him and shook his head and then he looked back at Sam.

"Dean, he's gone."

Dean put his hands down. He sat back on his heels.

"Can you do anything?"

"No, I can't."

"Could anyone? Someone...is there anyone you could call? Who might listen?"

"I don't think so."

Dean nodded. He looked at Sam.

"Do you think he'd want to be brought back, Dean?"

Dean didn't answer. Then he leaned forward and closed Sam's eyes.

"We have to bury him."

Cass looked up at the sky. It was very hot and the sun was blazing at high noon.

"A little later. When it's cooler."

"All right," Dean said and then he just sat there. The two of them sat helpless under the white summer sky.

* * *

Go ahead to the last part...