Don't Pick Our Destiny (You Don't Know Us)
Hell is just that – hell.
There is no word to describe it, other than itself; nothing can possibly take its place.
Sam knew this. Dean had made sure that he knew this. And in a vague, disconcerting way, Sam had almost known what he was getting himself into when Dean told him this.
Lucifer knew this all too well. Michael was a bit more ignorant.
Adam knew none of this. What he knew was this: John Winchester had tried to protect him from something, but it ended up finding him anyways. He watched his mother die, before he had died too. And he knew as soon as he let Michael in that Zachariah would find a way to break the promise that he had never intended to keep.
For them, Hell is a five-by-five foot cage, four souls together, burning and beginning again.
They can hardly move. The space they are in, while appearing to go on forever, is small. You would think, them being not much more than black smoke and a couple rotting corpses, that there would be plenty of room.
There are no bars on their cage. No walls, no doors, not even a goddamn floor. And what type of place doesn't have a floor?
Their world is black and white, hot and cold; a mess of things that should not coexist so seamlessly yet somehow do. They float in a vacuum of decay and despair, occasionally brushing up against each other as they flip and tumble by. Always, there are screams and laughter in the far away purgatory that must exist but doesn't for them.
Lucifer says there are many forms of Hell – different levels and intensities, like scattered cities across a map – each infamous for their own type of sinner, their own specialty of eternal torture, and that they, the four of them, exist only in the worst.
Hell is just that – hell.
For Sam, this means an onslaught of memories: moments of loss and family, of brotherhood and pranks, of stoic fathers and missing mothers and fire … always the fire.
Dean is with him, even when he's not, and it's a constant comfort, a lasting reminder. That he did it for him, and for them, and for peace when he was done.
On the outside he burns like a hot coal; he feels as if his skin must be shriveling, peeling, making space for something new. Inside, he is ice cold. He watches and he analyzes and remembers everything he's ever known.
It's Hell, but it's also redemption of the highest kind. Because he was changed, somewhere along the way, between Stanford and losing Dean and Ruby and finding Dean and falling into that hole; and very little of it was for the better.
There is no word to describe it, other than itself.
For Adam, this means redefining what he knows to be the truth, working it in between the mundane and pointless (and infinitely better) existence of before, and the world of angels and demons of now.
Who could have known that as that Ghoul literally ripped his heart right out of his chest for its afternoon snack – reaching between his ribs and lungs like a man gently carving around the bone and gristle on his steak – that those uttered, terrified screams would not be his last? Would, in fact, be his first?
He screams and screams and screams, because he can't do anything else. Cannot remember, really, what else there is to do.
Eventually, he forgets his mom (who this was for), his brothers (even though one is always near), and his life (whichever one that was).
He carries on in the uninterrupted darkness and waits – but for what, he's never sure.
It just was, wherever it was.
For Lucifer, this means coming home. To the place where he has ruled from afar for innumerable years – overseeing the slicing and the dicing and the cries … oh, those delicious cries.
It's something of a prize, too, that Michael has joined him, that petty, submissive older brother. It's amusing that for all of his time put into pleasing their Father, performing his duties, preaching his worthiness and greater power, some justice has finally been paid.
In here, he feels more alive than he ever did up There. Even if he doesn't like it, he knows this place; is the lord of this place; and he knows what it is to be trapped here and yearn for a better place.
Earth wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The duty of bringing the apocalypse was more draining, less gratifying, than he had imagined it would be.
He realizes he hasn't belonged anywhere else for a very, very long time.
Hell is just that – hell.
For Michael, this means a pain much more keen than it does for the others. Because nothing can take Hell's place, nothing is capable of taking its place, and nothing is capable of taking his place in it.
The hundreds of possible unbroken seals don't matter. The Horsemen's rings don't matter.
The first and the last – those had mattered. And once they'd broken once, they never could again. The cage could not open without the first demon's death and something like that could not be undone only to be done again.
No. He is stuck. In Here. With Him.
He listens to his vessel scream endlessly as the blindness that is their night and day curls around him. Ponders again and again why his Father has forsaken him; left him – alone – with the brother that it was supposed to be his Father's Will for him to destroy.
Maybe his brother was correct (although which one he means, he doesn't know); doesn't actually care to, either. But he thinks –
Hey, Assbutt! –
That maybe he shouldn't have put so much stock into that destiny crap after all.
Because, for them Hell is a five-by-five foot cage, four souls together, burning and beginning again.
They float and drift and dream and wish, sometimes angry and bickering, other times quiet and collected; and all the while the world keeps on spinning and they keep on drifting, occupying the same space and yet they have never been further apart.
It's different for each of them, and yet exactly the same.
Because that is Hell, what defines it the most: when everything that once meant something to you means nothing, and when nothing means everything because it's all you have left.
Michael. Adam. Lucifer. Sam.
Three hold on to nothing but the scraps that they've been given, to whatever remains of them that they may reassemble.
Only one lets go.
It's Hell, but it's also redemption of the highest kind. It's not peace or paradise … just more of the same. And instead of feeling the fire consume him … the ice freeze him until he might shatter into a million, tiny shards given one fell hit, Sam feels it cleanse him, purify him, as fresh and untainted as a newborn infant straight out of its mother's womb, until one day he feels a tight grip on his arm and finds himself no longer drifting, but flying upwards, into the crisp night air.
Under a flickering streetlight to where he's reborn.
To him, this is Heaven.
It isn't what he thought it was before: a wife, house, white picket fence life with two point five kids and a dog.
Not even what he thought it was later: a world void of monsters and demons and wendigoes and ghosts; without worries and responsibilities and the war that always amplified them both.
It is now: in the passenger seat of the Impala as Dean drives down a long, open road toward another job, the air cool on his hot face, his brother's voice singing along to the worn cassette tapes that fill the car with the familiar drum beats and guitar riffs of old.
It's just them, traveling their own course, and maybe saving a few good people along the way.
The End