A/N: This is a really, really old fiction I wrote way back while the season with the Leviathans was airing. I lost track of this one and lost track of this show.
I own nothing.
Ash once said that heaven was a million little pockets of happy memories on endless repeat. It's taken me this long, but I finally figured it out. Those beer suds of happiness those poor saps destined for heaven spend the rest of eternity in? That's the third level underground basement of heaven.
There's more to this place than any human could ever fathom, more than even most angels know. This place is like an endless acid trip with too many vodka-induced nightmares. I've seen Hell. Hell, I spent years down there and a few dozen more remembering it – that is I used to until Death finally reaped my sorry ass and locked me up here, away from Sam.
They say that when you go to heaven, you relive the best memories of your life. Yeah, that never happened. Apparently, the big boss had other plans for me. Like that's something new. I used to count the years, kept a tally on the chord necklace Sammy gave me when we were kids. I stopped counting centuries ago. I ran out of room. The black chord is brown now, frayed from all the nicks I put in it trying to count my eternal vacation from breathing.
Brilliant lights white out everything, searing skin and flesh that was little more than a memory from a long-ended mortal life. Slowly from the all-consuming luminance, vague pillars of shadow begin to separate from the light. The spot light of heaven continues to fade and the pillars become shapes that solidify into a single silhouette.
Eyes lost in shades of green and hazel that changed like the tide with his mood blinked away stinging tears from the brilliance until he could once more see. Dean swallowed tightly, eyes, more suited to charming boyish smiles crinkled at the edges with the silent agonizing mix of grief, hope and despair as they lighted on the one figure that had defined his mortal life yet had been painfully absent in his immortal one.
"Sammy?" Brown eyes, kind, unsure and haunted looked up from where the figure crouched. Long limbed, and rangy, he stood, bare skin knitting over torn flesh and exposed bone. Dean knew what Sam had endured, but damn, still being cut on by daemons after so long boggled Dean's mind.
"Dean?" The old, crooked, thin-lipped smile spread over Sam's ravaged features.
"They let me go." The words were breathed, heavy with a grief Dean knew his brother still harbored from their mortal lives.
"Don't you think you've earned it? "Dean asked breathlessly, the memory of his heart hammering in his chest, "Sammy, after this long, this many centuries in Hell, haven't you earned your penance?"
"Eternity, Dean. I'm supposed to suffer for eternity. How is – however long it's been – anywhere near eternity?"
"I don't know Sam. Its been a pretty damn long time." Dean hesitated, then shook his head in aggravation. "Why the Hell were you down there in the first place?"
"Uh, I started Armageddon?"
"Yeah, and you finished it, Sammy. You, not Castiel, not me, not God. You pulled Lucifer into the cage." Dean rubbed his forehead tiredly with a frown. "Sam, I sold my soul, killed, fornicated, lusted after married women. I've killed angles, leviathans, supposedly holy creatures from the time of Eden, and I got to go up here." He left out his new duties as an angel killer, hunting the malcontents that threatened the stability of heaven. Dean didn't know who called the shots, but if having Sammy back meant getting to quit his day job being a hit man in heaven, he'd jump at the chance and damn the consequences.
"So why didn't I go up too?" Sam asked, his skin now once more whole covered in the memory of his old green jacket from his mortal life.
"You humans had a saying, 'you are what you eat.' Drinking demon's blood, tut tut, that was something that could not be allowed in heaven." A familiar gravelly voice echoed through the white expanse of heaven.
"Castiel?" Sam looked at the angle they had not seen since their final death's with a small grin.
"You always were hard to get through, Sam. Your soul has finally been cleansed of the blood you consumed." Castiel smiled weakly. Earth, and mortality had been hard with these two. Time after their deaths, watching them suffer each in their own ways, had been unbearably worse.
Dean scowled, "Wait, you mean, my baby brother, who fought demons, for you, was put through Hell, literally Hell, because he drank blood to use powers he was born with? Even after he was shoved in Hell who knows how many times before we finally died!" He was angry, livid. His arms moved, fists swinging – he couldn't budge.
"What the Hell?" Sam ran to his brother, but he couldn't lift a foot.
"Netzach, these are the Winchester brothers you requested." Castiel gestured at them as another angel appeared. As usual, in Heaven, the angels liked to play with their minds. Dean saw a tall, swarthy man, with long hair and deep blue eyes. Whatever Sam saw, it wasn't the same thing. Angles, they always played with human heads.
"What is going on Castiel?" Dean demanded.
"I put in a good word with the acting commander in chief. They have agreed to release you both, and send you back." Castiel smiled that same, unnerving, small smile.
"You mean, we can go home?" Sam asked, his eyes so painfully wide and desperate that Dean almost cried for him.
"No, not down there. Out there."
Netzach showed an image of the Earth, something still beautiful, but so much had changed. Dean felt the void in his chest where his heart should have been constricting with grief. The shorelines were different. Brown deserts stretched so far in so many areas, and the green, it wasn't as beautiful as he once remembered it to be. The small orb shrunk down, pulled in until it was a softball, a marble, a pea. The solar system with details no human image had ever presented pulled into view and faded as even the brilliant ball of their sun faded into one of many tiny specks in the twinkling arm of their galaxy.
"We're going into space?" Dean asked he blinked, mute at the sight. He never really wanted to go into space. He was a hunter! He hunted things. He didn't leap through the cosmos!
"Your kind left this world behind long ago, in the counting of your years, but not their gods, or their monsters. New monsters thrive on every planet that humans have made their own. Most of the hunters stayed behind. Humans still live below, hunters still hunt the ghosts and stray demon." Netzach looked down on the shimmering image of the stars with contempt and pity shining in his eyes. Dean wanted to punch him.
"So, you're going to send us to anther planet?" Sam asked eyebrows crinkled in that way that Dean missed like nothing else he could remember.
"Not exactly, but you'll only remember when you need to."
"Remember what?" Dean and Sam demanded in unison.
Deep breath, breathing, yeah, breathing was good. He breathed again, letting the air in, then out. It was almost euphoric, just breathing. As if he hadn't felt his lungs in a long, long time.
'Did I do something really stupid last night?' He sat up and looked around the beat up interior of their dad's old Topi. The small ship had only ever been big enough for two men, or a dad and his two little boys. Dean smiled at the old memories. It had been hard, going from space port to space port, jumping from one way-station school to another.
Sam had had it worse. He looked over to his brother, smiling at the long limbs thrown akimbo and the insanely long hair his kid brother had decided was cool recently. Who knew maybe the kid would go for a mohawk and get caught in a doorway. That would be an image. Dean snorted a silent laugh and got up from his bed.
Another day, it felt great. The smell of the old Topi, he loved waking up here. He knew when other vessels saw them they activated their shields. It was always a trip, seeing the shimmering rainbows of energy shields rising as they settled in to dock.
A groan sounded from the other bed as Dean washed his face in the bathroom. He looked up, terror jolted through his body. "Whoa!"
"Dean?" Sammy sat up blearily.
"Uh, it's nothing." Dean stared at his reflection, at the boy. Was he a little boy? He leaned against the sink, heart pounding. He didn't recognize the face in the mirror. He looked again, staring at the smooth skin, innocent face, and the – really, really short little boy in the mirror.
"What's the matter?" Sam asked.
Dean gulped hard. He looked from his ridiculously small hands to Sammy's crazy long fingers. "I just .."
Sam stepped into the bathroom, looking himself over. "Don't recognize yourself." Sam finished Dean's thought. He scratched his fingers against his scalp, face crinkling in the all too familiar confused grimace that did not jive with his memories.
"They screwed us over. I don't know who, or when, but I was not so – this – I'm pretty!" Sam stared in the mirror in horror.
Dean frowned and nodded, if he could put his brother in a dress, the not-girl Sam would be a knockout. He shuddered at the thought of his brother's hairy legs.
"God dammit! I don't shave my legs!" Sam had moved to the closet, long PJ bottoms discarded as he stared at his legs with revulsion below the hem of his boxers.
"You do have a dick, don't you? I don't want to find out my baby brother is my little sister.
"Go to Hell Dean."
"Been there."
Silence filled the cabin. They stared at each other unmoving as if seeing one another for the first time and finding this memory of Hell, of pain and anguish and suffering – and it did not jive with the memories of their parents dying in a fire when Dean was only eight. Of them running from place to place by whatever Dean could get to come up on the Tobi's autopilot.
"Get dressed Sammy," Dean moved from the bathroom. He looked at the table that came to his waist. Two notes lay on it, each written in different handwriting, one made out to Sam, the other to Dean.
Dean,
Okay, so this is crazy. I'm writing a letter to myself in case I don't wake up as, well, me in the morning. Here goes. Sammy and I found this book, its insanely old and has our names in it. There's even drawings that look like us, but not. I don't know what is going on, but promise me, Dean, that you'll take care of Sammy. He's all I've – we've? – got.
This is giving me a headache! Alright, the cupboard above the table holds all the books we've collected over the years. Our father was a hunter, our mother – well she was a monster, but we don't know what kind. We only know from other hunters that Sammy and I are half-bloods. We're not safe from monsters, and we're definitely not safe from other hunters.
Baby is in the lower bay, put your bed away, and the access hatch is below. I don't know what is going on. Only, last night Sam said this was important. He sees things, Dean, so listen to him. Bad things happen when I've ignored him.
Take care of my body for me.
'Yup, insane.' Dean lowered his note to glance at Sam.
"You got one too?" Dean asked as he looked at his brother sitting cross-legged on the floor. Dean whirled around, suddenly realizing there were no chairs.
Sam looked up, brown eyes showing a fear that made Dean's gut tie up in knots. "This says that you can do things. Move stuff without touching it, and that I see things. When I see it, its bad, and normally you get hurt. Badly."
"I know, Sam. Come on, I need to check on Baby." Dean grinned, Same smiled in return it felt normal, having Baby again.
Dean shoved his bed up into the wall. It folded easily. Where the bed had been was a single orange button glowing dimly against the dark floor. Dean pressed it nervously, nearly falling into the sudden hole that opened beneath his feet. Sam's fist held him in mid-air by the belt, Dean gulped, then reached his foot out to the ladder leading down into darkness.
"Watch your head, Sammy. I don't know if this bay was made for me." Dean warned as he slid down the metal railing to the floor below. Sam leaped through the hole, ignoring the ladder entirely.
The lights came on, illuminating a sleek black vehicle that evoked strong memories of playing on gray upholstery, and an old heater rattling on a cold night. Baby didn't match their memories, and yet it was as it had always been. The flitter had been modeled after old Earth cars, long ago when their Dad had been young, on a planet that still loved Earth when so many had just wanted to forget the planet that had destroyed so many dreams.
Dean looked around, being with Baby made something click. The strangeness of this morning, the sense of not recognizing his own reflection or Sam suddenly seemed to fade.
"I told you that drinking lycan-made marsh wine on an empty stomach was a bad idea." Sam looked over at Dean with a grin.
Dean nodded, "Yeah, one point Sam. Now shut up and get in. We're going to be late to meet with Bobby."
Sam laughed, grabbed a kit out of the racks behind the flitter. Dean sat behind the wheel and started the engine. He laughed, loving the electric hum of hover-capable gravity converters. Oh, he loved his Baby.
The ramp lowered, Dean slammed the throttle forward. They shot out of the Topi. Dean watched the energy shields rise around their ship and mobile home as they left. They rocketed across the rocky landscape beneath a star-strewn crimson sky. Another planet, another hunt. Dean wondered what their informant had for them this time.
The End