Silver for Charon
AN: The following story is a non-canon reimagining of Season Eight. Here and there it will go completely AU, in some parts it remains true to the dialogue and story of the episodes. It's an experimental look at the way things might have gone, realised due to a disappointment in the writing of the season to date. The story primarily covers Dean and Sam's separate views of the same events. Dean's year in Purgatory, as I've imagined it, can be found in Through the Never.
Chapter 1 Exit, Stage Right
Sucrocorp, May 2011
Sam straightened up slowly, looking around at the strings and splashes and patches of black over the walls and floor and ceiling of the bright white lab. Behind him, Kevin opened his eyes, and clutched at his arm.
"Sam, we should go," he said, nervousness threading his voice.
Sam heard him, a part of his brain agreeing wholeheartedly with the teenager's suggestion, another part still reeling. "What the hell?"
"More chompers, any second, Sam," Kevin pressed, his voice getting higher, turning to the door behind them as the King of Hell materialised in front of them.
Crowley smiled. "Not to worry. I have a small army of demons outside. Cut off the head, and the body will flounder, after all," the demon said comfortably, looking from the man to the boy. "Think, if you'd had just one king since before the first sunrise. You'd be in a kerfuffle, too."
Sam looked at him, feeling his heart sink at the appearance of the demon. Crowley had planned this. Down to the last detail. "Which is exactly what you wanted."
"So did you," Crowley countered mildly. "Without a master plan, the Levis are just another monster. Hard to stomp, sure, but you love a challenge. Your job is to keep them from organizing." He gestured vaguely around the room as Sam watched him narrowly.
"Where's Dean?"
"That bone... has a bit of a kick," Crowley winced apologetically. "God weapons often do. They should put a warning on the box."
"Where are they, Crowley?" Sam grated, not in the mood for the demon's round-about prevarications.
"Can't help you, Sam." He straightened slightly and looked past Sam to Kevin, snapping his fingers. Two demons appeared to either side of Kevin, hands curling around the young man's arms.
"What the hell, Crowley?" Sam looked from the men holding Kevin to the ex-crossroads demon.
"Sorry, Sam. Prophet's mine," Crowley said with a dismissive shrug. He snapped his fingers again and the demons, and Kevin, disappeared.
"You got what you wanted – Dick's dead, saved the world. So I want one little prophet," he explained, looking at his fingernails. "Sorry, moose. Wish I could help. You certainly got a lot on your plate right now. It looks like you are well and truly ... on your own."
The faint echo of the clicked fingers lingered. Sam stared at the wall where Crowley had been. The sonofabitch was right. He was well and truly on his own now.
You don't understand. Dick's got creamer in his lab. He's gonna kill all the skinny people.
Without a master plan, the Levis are just another monster. Hard to stomp, sure, but you love a challenge. Your job is to keep them from organizing.
We have to blow up the lab, Sam. Please.
The fragments of conversations looped through his mind.
Blow up the lab. Yeah.
He blinked and shook himself slightly, pushing away the thoughts of his brother, of Kevin and Crowley, and the demons and leviathans outside of the building. Ammonia, iodine, glycerine, nitric acid, sulphuric acid, acetone, hydrogen peroxide … the possible ingredients ran through his mind and his gaze scanned the lab, looking for any or all of them.
He needed pipe and wire as well, he thought, as he found and gathered the liquid chemicals one by one. And he'd have to figure a way to destroy the data … all of it. The levis might well have other centres, they could be dealt with later, if and when he got his brother back, but he thought that Roman would have consolidated the major parts of his research and planning here, where the additives were designed and created. He pushed aside the thought of the food already out there, on the shelves of stores and supermarkets, gas stations and in the vending machines. There was nothing he could do about those, now or in the future. Maybe the effects would wear off when no new additives were being produced. Maybe not.
He had the schematics of the building in his mind, and he started to build his bombs, mixing the liquids and crystals and powders, pouring them into the pipes, sealing them. The work was surprisingly soothing, giving him something to do other than think about things he really didn't want to think about.
The half dozen computers in the lab provided sufficient wire for his needs, and as soon as these were finished, he'd go to the servers. He didn't want to leave any recoverable trace of the data that Roman had developed. That would mean wiping the drives. There was only one thing he could think of that could do that, all at once and once and for all.
An hour later, Sam pulled the building's fire alarm and picked up the wires that daisy-chained the chemical bombs, placed strategically through the laboratories. He plugged them into the power socket beside him, turning and running as the live current detonated the first bomb across the hall from him, feeling the push of warm, expanding air behind him, and hearing the roar of the fire as it quickly set off more small explosions from the chemicals the lab contained.
He raced down the corridor and hit the fire stairs, heading up, taking the stairs three and four at a time, a long metal cylinder tucked under one arm. It was a simple device, with a small range, really. No more than a quarter mile in diameter he hoped, as he came to the floor he needed and hit the door. The entire floor was dedicated to data storage, quiet and cool, the humming of the machines audible over the distant explosions that continued beneath him.
He found a long length of wire in the supply room and ran it out to the centre of the room, stripping and twisting the ends around the shorter piece he'd inserted into the pipe as the detonator. Looking around the room, he nodded. It would do, he thought. He followed the wire back to its end and stripped the ends, separating the live and neutral wires. He fed the ends into the socket and turned it on.
The device in the middle of the room blew up with a loud bang and a short burst of flame. It barely scorched the carpet. But the pulse it delivered at the moment of the explosion took out the power and every electronic or electrical appliance, machine and device in the area. He pulled his cell from his pocket and looked at it. It was dead.
That ought to keep them from organising for a while anyway, he thought, turning and going to the fire stairs again. The fire alarm had stopped as well, the digital controls wiped clean by the electro-magnetic pulse that had been generated by his little bomb.
None of the emergency lighting was operative and he walked down the stairs cautiously in the blackness, moving a bit faster as he passed the laboratory floors where he could still hear the roar of the fire, and coming out into the darkened lobby. The buildings' employees were milling around, uncertain of what had happened. In the distance, he could hear fire engines approaching. It was definitely time to get out of Dodge.
He was relieved to find that the field hadn't been quite as big as he'd expected, and hadn't extended as far as the car park. The Impala still sat between the pillars of Sucrocorp's corporate sign, surrounded by black glass but otherwise undamaged, and the engine started as soon as he turned the key. There was no sign of Meg and he had a feeling that Crowley might have made good on his threat to her as soon as Cas had disappeared.
Another thing to be filed away and dealt with later, he thought tiredly, reversing the car out of the sign and turning around in the lot. List was getting long.
He needed information on Purgatory. The only problem was everyone that he knew of who'd known about it was either dead or incommunicado. His eyes watched the road, as he wracked his brain for any other possible way to find out. Books, references, lore and legend, there had to be something, something he and Dean and Bobby had missed out here in the world. But would Crowley have missed it? He wondered. Crowley had been the driving force behind the opening of the locked plane. He'd tortured the Alphas to get the secrets of its opening.
The Alpha Vampire?
Sam was sure that he knew, he was ancient and he'd implied more than once he'd been among the first of Eve's creatures, her special creations. Maybe as a last resort, he thought uneasily. The vampire had helped with ridding the earth of the leviathans, only because of the threat they'd posed to his own children. He didn't think that the Alpha would make an altruistic contribution just save his brother and an angel.
Every myth and legend, all the lore they'd ever learned had a basis in some fact or another, he thought. What he really needed was someone who'd studied the mythology around the other planes of reality. Someone who'd studied Heaven, and Hell and Purgatory academically, who'd done the research and may have found the answers he needed without even realising it. There were a lot of academics out there who had delved into those legends, he knew.
He blinked, seeing a sign by the side of the road that advised he was heading toward Indianapolis, and he started looking around. He needed a place to stop, to plug in the laptop and start searching.
He saw the motel a few miles later and checked the traffic, turning left into the driveway and pulling up in front of the office. The room was a single, the solitary bed reminding him anew of the time limit on him, his imagination throwing up a picture of what his brother might be facing even as he pulled the laptop from his bag and settled down at the table.
Running five separate searches, each with slightly different criteria, he looked for the expert he needed. Each search had returned the same four names, the consensus of the top four people in the field of anthropological mythology, the study of myth and legend from multiple fields including sociological, historical, anthropological, psychological. Each of the four specialised in a different area. He pulled up the information he could find on each, discarding two immediately when he realised that one professor's studies were more related to comparative study, and the other lived in London.
The third was a professor in Harvard, Boston, and Roman's headquarters was on the way. He listed the details of the fourth name, a female professor in UCLA. She was a lot closer, he thought, but he needed to get rid of as much of the leviathan infrastructure as he could as fast as he could. He'd head to Chicago, deal with that and then go onto to Boston.
He chewed on the end of the pen as he thought about what he'd need to take out Roman's building. Another EMP would do the job but getting in was going to be a bitch. He'd need at least two days to check out the place, see if he could manage to find some way.
It would be a week before he even got to Boston, he thought, resting his head on his hand. A week for Dean and Cas in Purgatory. Would they even be alive? Were they still alive now?
It's like the backside of your worst nightmares. It's all blood and bone and darkness. Filled with the bodies and souls of all things hungry, sharp, and nasty.
Bobby's words ran through his mind. How the hell were they going to survive in there?
Chicago, Illinois. May 2011
It had taken two days to drive to Illinois. He understood now why his brother listened to the hard rock that was the only music in the car. Five hours into the trip, his thoughts had been torturous, ripping him apart as he drove, too much time to think, the miles ticking over too slowly. He'd tried the radio but it wasn't consistent enough and the music he usually preferred was too quiet, too introspective to provide a decent distraction. In desperation he'd put one of Dean's tapes into the deck and turned up the volume. The steady insistent beat, the defiant lyrics and the soaring riffs of the guitars had blocked out his thoughts and feelings with remarkable efficiency, and for the rest of the drive he'd played tape after tape, sometimes feeling his brother's presence in the music so strongly that it had given him a sense of release.
He'd sat in the courtyard of the building opposite Roman Enterprises corporate headquarters, watching the building for a day and a half now. He knew the security measures that the Leviathan boss had put into place. What he needed to know was who could get in and out without needing the passes, which would take him too long to acquire, even if it were possible. He'd narrowed the possible options down to two. The company used an outside cleaning crew. And there was a second outside contract to a landscape gardening firm, who took care of the garden beds and trees planted around the outside of the building, and all the potted plants on the inside. The gardening team had access to the building through the day. The cleaning crews came in after ten at night, working until about two a.m.
Either would suit what he needed to do. There was no danger to any of the employees with an electro-magnetic pulse, it would take out the power and the phones and wipe the data clean, but it wouldn't harm a single person. The question was, which group would it be easier to infiltrate?
He'd noticed that the gardeners were the same group of people every day. The cleaning crews, on the other hand, seemed to be rotating; a different team had done the building the previous night. Their uniforms were standard white coveralls, easy to acquire. He folded up the newspaper he'd bought and nodded to himself.
At ten p.m. sharp he emerged from the shadows of the building's corner and joined the cleaning crew walking toward the building. A couple of them glanced at him curiously.
Sam smiled and nodded to them. "Just started tonight. I'm Sam."
"Pete." The man nodded, then gestured to the woman walking beside him. "This is Maria."
"Hi, Maria." Sam looked up at the building ahead of them. "Lot of floors."
She smiled and shrugged. "We only vacuum and empty the trash cans. No dusting, no wiping down. They're cheapskates here."
"Can I do that for you?" He looked at the cart she was pushing ahead of her. He'd had to modify the design of his bomb, making two shorter and thicker canisters instead of the single long one.
"Sure, thanks." He took over as they approached the front doors. "They tell you about the hourly rate?"
He shook his head, keeping his gaze fixed on her face as they walked past the security guards.
"They'll screw you if you don't keep on top of them," Maria said. "After hours, we get a higher rate."
"Okay, thanks." Sam nodded, and let out the breath he'd been holding. They were through, waiting for the elevators.
"Yeah, and make sure you put the full flat time on your timesheet. They try and make out you took a break otherwise," Pete added from behind him.
"Thanks. Where do we start?"
"Top floor, then work down." Maria looked up at him. "They really didn't tell you anything, did they?"
He gave her a rueful smile and shook his head. From the schematics of the building Charlie had gotten for them a couple of months ago, he remembered there'd been a general network, and Roman's personal server network, on the executive floor. He didn't think the general network was much of a threat, and the pulse would probably take out the whole building anyway. He needed the eleventh floor.
"Sam, you better come with me tonight, Pete knows what he's doing." Maria followed him into the elevator and hit the eleventh floor button.
"Sure, thanks. That would be great." He looked at the lit button and let out a sigh of relief. Maybe this would go right.
They started on the executive floor and Sam moved around quietly, tracking Maria unconsciously through the low-pitched hum of the vacuum cleaner as he emptied trash cans and wiped down desk tops, working his way closer to Roman's office. At eleven-thirty, he followed Maria back into the elevator, nodding at the security guard as the doors closed.
They met Pete and his partner on seven just past one a.m. The building had been cleaned. One of his devices was hidden in a kitchen cupboard on the executive floor. The other had been slipped in between two racks of servers on the network clean room on the ninth floor. The remotes were in his pocket.
Walking outside, Sam dragged in a deep breath. Perhaps he could go into industrial espionage after this, he thought with a reluctant smile.
"You wanna get a drink, Sam?" Maria looked up at him quizzically.
"I've got another job starting in the morning," he said apologetically. "Take a rain check?"
"Sure." She smiled and waved, turning away to follow Pete and the rest of the crew. Sam looked back at the building as his fingers found the remotes. He pressed the button for the first one, then the second and watched the lights go out.
And that concludes tonight's programming, he thought. Don't bother tuning into tomorrow. The next bit was going to be much harder.
Turning away, he started walking the four blocks to the car.
UCLA, Los Angeles, California. June 2011.
"I wish I could be of more help," Lauren looked over the top of the file at him and he nodded.
Dr Lauren Metcalfe, professor of Anthropological Studies, the name plate on her desk said in front of him. PhD in Anthropology, in Theology and a Master's degree in mythological studies. She'd known about Purgatory alright. Just … not enough.
"Uh, could I have a copy of everything you found?" he asked, looking around the ordered chaos of her office.
"Yeah, of course," she said, gathering up the files on the desk. "Look, there are a number of disparate myths about being able to enter the realm of Purgatory. I've checked them, but none of them have any basis in fact."
"Myths are fine," he said, leaning forward.
She smiled. "You fiction writers have it easy."
"Not so much," he said dryly.
"The thing with the mythology of the place is that it falls into two separate areas – there's the religious mythology which was created by the church, sometime in the fourth or fifth centuries. Then there's a contradictory and much less detailed mythological theory that's much older."
"Probably the older mythology is more interesting for what I'm trying to do."
"Yes, I can see that how that might work better for fiction." Lauren handed him a small stack of files. "Virgin sacrifice was always one of the more popular ways to get into a forbidden kingdom. And some cultures insist that if you kill a monster and are very close to it, you could be taken into the underworld along with the soul of the monster."
Now that sounded promising, Sam thought, watching her.
"Of course, there's a long-standing myth that humans can enter and leave Purgatory as well, but only if they're alive, I mean flesh and blood," she continued, picking up a book and handing it to him. "Some of the very old texts suggested that there was a spell for creating a doorway into the various parts of the underworld, even to open a gate into Hell itself."
He felt himself freeze and looked at her, uncomfortably aware that she was looking at him with a slight smile.
"Really?"
"I've included a copy in the file, along with the translation," she said, gesturing to it. "Not sure where you'd find the ingredients though."
She glanced at her watch. "I'm sorry, I have to go. I hope that helps."
"Thanks, thank you," Sam said, getting to his feet and extending his hand. "It's a huge help, for the, uh, story."
"Let me know if I can help with anything else."
Sam nodded and turned for the door, tucking the files under his arm, feeling more hopeful. He strode down the hallways and almost ran down the stairs, heart pounding as he wondered about getting whatever was needed. Killing a monster wasn't quite so cut and dried that he could just go out and do it. But the spell, that would be different. He thought of who was left, who might have the knowledge to help him obtain the ingredients he'd need. The realisation that there weren't many on that list sobered him as he crossed the campus for the parking lot.
Pocatello, Idaho. July, 2011
The motel room was dim, the curtains drawn tightly against the desert sunshine. Sam sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, wondering what the fuck he was going to try next.
He'd actually managed to find a werewolf three weeks ago, getting so close to the thing when he'd pushed the silver knife into its chest that it had taken two days to rid himself of the rank, canine smell in his hair and on his clothes. It hadn't helped. The creature had died in his arms and he'd remained stubbornly stuck on this plane.
Dr Metcalfe hadn't been kidding about the spell's ingredients either. No one he'd called had ever heard of half of them. And some had been impossible to begin with. A demon's tooth. Demons inhabited human vessels. They were spirits, corrupted souls, they had no teeth. How was he supposed to find something that didn't exist? He'd looked at the spell every which way, as a riddle, as a metaphor, as an analogy and it had all come down to the same thing. It was impossible.
He rubbed both hands over his face and fell backwards onto the bed. Two and a half months had gone by while he'd been fucking around trying to find a way to make the goddamned spell work and dealing with the last of the levis. Kevin was gone. Dean … his brother could be dead.
Sam closed his eyes. Dean and Cas probably were dead. Sucked into a world of monsters. His brother was the best hunter he'd ever seen but no one could take on a world of monsters and expect luck to last.
The tightness in his chest and throat forced him onto his side. What was he supposed to do now?
Whitefish, Montana. July 2011.
The cabin was musty and he opened the windows and left the door standing open, the warm breeze pushing through the rooms and taking the closed-cabin smells with it.
Bobby's library was still packed in boxes, stacked around the walls of the room. Dean's pinboard still held the pieces of the puzzle he'd been working on after Bobby's death. No matter where he looked he could see the old man, or his brother, or both … filling the cabin with their ghosts, filling his heart with an emptiness that was getting harder and harder to bear.
Kevin had vanished completely. He'd attempted to summon Crowley four times, each time failing. The King of Hell had figured out a way to get around the summoning, which wasn't exactly a surprise but had reduced his options even further.
He'd killed a vampire outside of Boise, a fledgling on its own. He'd been within kissing distance of the monster when it had died, its head taken off with razor wire. Still nothing. No magical entry to the land of the monsters. Nothing at all but a headless body in his hands.
He knew the feeling of despair. Knew it as intimately as a lover's touch. Knew the amnesia that could be sometimes found in a bottle. Knew the rage that lurked against the edges of his soul and could rise at any time. Knew that feeling of utter futility when every path had been explored, every dead-end checked and rechecked, every hope squashed and crumbling at his feet.
There was no hope here, he thought, looking around the cabin. He looked at the black car, gleaming in the sunshine outside. Driving it had at least given him some illusion of being close to Dean. Of being alive.
Sam packed his clothes into the green canvas duffel and threw his weapons on top, zipping the bag up. He looked at the half-dozen cell phones that lay on the bed beside the bag. Not one of them had brought a lead. He picked up the first and turned it off, tossing it into the small cardboard box. Then the second and third. When all the phones were in the box, he lifted it and set it on the desk, turning away from his ties to the past.
The duffel wasn't heavy, not as heavy as his heart, he thought. He walked out through the door and closed it behind him, locking it, and shoving the keys deep into his pocket.
The cabin, and all it contained, was the old way. That was when he had a family and friends and something to live for. He looked at the Impala. This would be all new, unexplored territory. He had no idea of where he thought he was going. Or what he would do if he ever got there. He just knew he couldn't keep sitting in one place, looking for answers that didn't exist, feeling the pull to the amnesia of alcohol or more powerful substances more and more strongly each day. He'd done that and it had been the wrong decision then.
This time he would do something else.