THINE IS THE KINGDOM
Summary: Dean escapes three months after Sam reigns fire from the skies and burns a town to the ground to pull him out of hell. Because Sam is not Sammy anymore.
Warnings: Dark, violence, bad language (Dean's POV, so I really got to swear, which was fun).
Disclaimer: I don't own them. I wish I did, but I don't. Which means I don't make any money off of them, either. Please don't sue.
A/N: Hope you all like this. It's the sequel to my other Supernatural fic, Burn Away to Ashes. YOU SHOULD READ THAT BEFORE YOU READ THIS!!! I couldn't get the plotline out of my head, so I decided to write the repercussions of the events in that fic from Dean's POV.
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!!!!!IMPORTANT NOTE!!!!!
THIS IS A SEQUEL TO ANOTHER FIC OF MINE, CALLED BURN AWAY TO ASHES. YOU SHOULD HEAD OVER TO MY AUTHOR'S PAGE AND READ THAT BEFORE YOU READ THIS, THE PLOT WILL MAKE MORE SENSE THAT WAY. IT'S NOT MANDATORY, JUST A SUGGESTION.
ANYWAY, ENJOY!!!!
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Dean escapes three months after Sam reigns fire from the skies and burns a town to the ground to pull him out of Hell.
Dean doesn't think he ever will be worth the lives Sam sacrificed on that day.
It's the first time Sam has left him alone since, alone and unguarded. It has taken three months for the opportunity to arise, three horrible, adrenaline-pumping months of acting unruffled and content, and five minutes later Dean is out the window of the office building Sam has christened as his headquarters. So perhaps there is some validity to the whole Sam-never-letting-Dean-out-of-his-sight thing.
Sam left just as soon as he woke, just changed and walked out the door. Gone to slaughter more people. They still share a room, just like they always have, and Dean falls asleep to the sounds of his brother's breathing from the opposite bed. It's one of those little pockets of normal that almost makes Dean forget what he has seen these past few months. Sam is Sam and yet not Sam at the same time, and that's what makes this so fucking complicated.
If Dean does not look too closely, he can pretend it is only shadows, not blood, that lies crusted under Sam's fingernails every night.
Dean cannot stay sane like this, cannot continue balancing on this razor edge, torn between love for the brother he remembers and horror at what Sam is becoming.
Sam is very careful not to let his eyes slip-slide yellow around Dean.
It is the oh-so-carefully feigned normalcy that worries (scares) Dean the most.
The office building is old-fashioned architecture, all marble decorations and elaborate scrollwork, a throwback to the days when people actually cared about quality in the things they built. Its also one of the few buildings still standing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (The City of Brotherly Love, and Dean thinks he never has heard anything so fucking ironic). The others are all collapsed in jagged heaps of steel and glass, as ugly and striking as broken teeth in a blood-stained mouth.
Dean sometimes thinks that he might be going crazy, that he's spent so much time these past three months watching the apocalypse occur at his brother's hands that he's lost all perspective on normal, never mind what tentative claim on it he had to begin with.
He crawls through the window, and the first sensation that registers is that it's cold outside, autumn frosting over into winter.
It's such an innocuous observation, compared to all the other shit running rampant through the city, that Dean doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
The smell of ash and decay hangs heavy in the air. It makes Dean choke and gag, clinging ten stories off the ground like he's fucking Spiderman, only without the superpowers to ensure he cannot fall. Dean always thought Spiderman always was a pussy, anyway.
He flinches against the cool marble of the building as another skyscraper, designed to face a hurricane and come out smiling, crumples in a scream of twisted metal onto the ground.
Dean's pretty sure Sam's causing the destruction, because practically everywhere his brother walks things just wither and decay and rust and die, like Sammy carries death in the air around him like a poison.
The building Dean is climbing down is pristine, untouched. Sam's particular sense of humor, like the only pleasant building left for miles in this hellhole is the one in which the Antichrist resides.
Shit, he's cold, breath billowing out white in front of him before the wind whips it away. Thank God it's normal wind today, though, and not one of the days when the wind whips through the city barbed with acid and filled with screams, ripping concrete from the ground.
He looks down once, when he's about fifty feet from the ground, and Dean's never considered himself afraid of heights but fuck, it's different with sweat is plastering his shirt to his skin and fatigue is making his hands clumsy. Right about now, Dean wants to kiss whatever creepy-ass architect decided to cover this building in leering gargoyle statues, because disturbing-as-hell or not, the things make awesome handholds.
Dean slows his descent when he gets to the second floor, and pauses on a ledge to scan his surroundings for anything that might be a threat. And considering the demon-overrun condition of Philadelphia right now, Dean's classifying anything that moves as a threat.
There's nothing moving but the wind.
He jumps the last ten feet to the ground, to land in a fighter's crouch, and freezes as crimson liquid splatters everywhere. Dean stops breathing at the feel of the coagulating dark-red blood sliding thick and wet down his arms and his face, dripping past his eyes.
Deep breaths. Just breathe.
Dried and drying blood is everywhere, coloring everything rust-red. Dean wonders how he could not have remembered this, wonders how twisted he's become that the sight of blood coating the ground doesn't even register.
The blood itself an ugly remnant of a fight Dean had with Sam a week back, when Sam had been so angry blood had rained from the skies.
The whole world smells like copper and death, and Dean's suddenly shaking, folded over on himself, hands coated in a stranger's blood.
It reminds him of Hell, and Alastair, and Dean doesn't know if he can ever forgive Sammy for creating a world that drags up those memories over and over again.
Dean forces himself to calm down, draws on his training and buries the feelings deep. He needs to pay attention now, cannot afford not to.
He needs to find a car.
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Dean walks for four miles through a twisted maze of blood and glass, becoming increasingly more frantic, increasingly more desperate, before he finds a possibly-working car. It's a Honda Civic that's more rust than paint at this point, but Dean thinks it might just be far enough from Sam's headquarters for the decay not to have affected it too severely just yet.
And when he hotwires it, under a minute flat, the engine sputters and coughs but roars a moment later into idle.
Even better yet, the gas tank is almost full.
Dean points the car west and doesn't stop driving, ignores the carnage and the destruction and the misery lining the highway until he is four-hundred miles away.
He needs to keep driving.
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A/N: You all have my eternal love and devotion if you review!!