Disclaimer:Don't own
I posted this a few months back on my livejournal, I figured I shouldn't let this account go to waste.
Darkest Before the Dawn
The apocalypse is everything Dean expects it to be, only worse.
The world doesn't burn; it simmers. Chaos augments slowly, curls and tangles its way around unsuspecting souls. Lucifer is the epitome of evil, the master of death and destruction, and he works in subtleties. The apocalypse isn't crumbling buildings and carnage, demons roaming the streets in hungry packs. No, instead it's something different.
It's a group of demons wearing school children as suits, laughing while they rip their teacher to shreds, using her blood as finger paint.
It's nurses dropping babies from hospital rooftops, jumping themselves only after every crib on the PICU is empty and the pavement below is covered in blood and tiny piles of broken bodies.
It's crawling into bed at night and wondering how he's supposed to stop what he was the one to start.
-
He and Sam kill what they can find. And they find fewer fucking evil bastards then before. Without seals to break, demons have nothing to do, only innocents to possess and the pleasures of Earth to immerse themselves in. They run into two demons in a small diner in California, who aren't killing, aren't wreaking havoc, who are simply sitting in their new skin eating ice cream sundaes in the warm, afternoon sunlight.
He waits for the sky to start raining fire, for dark plumes of smoke to weave through the air, but all he ever sees is a vast expanse of blue and the occasional plane overhead.
-
"I don't get it Sam." He says while he makes a line of salt behind the closed motel door, pours a trail of white along the windowsill. "I thought the apocalypse would be more noticeable. You know, Lucifer riding the skeleton of a horse or something while he leads an army of demons across the globe."
"You watch too many movies." There's a bitter note to Sam's voice, something sharp and broken, dripping a puddle of guilt onto the carpet.
"Any idea where Lucifer is?" Sam sighs, shuts his laptop with a click.
"There are demonic omens in a few places." Dean opens another beer, swallows and swallows and swallows until his throat is cold and his fingers are warming the empty bottle in his hand.
"Closest?"
"Two states over." A hiss of escaping air; Sam opens a beer of his own. "It would be easier if the angels…" Sam swallows the words with his drink when Dean glares, flicks on the television in silence.
The last angel Dean saw was Castiel enveloped in blinding white light.
-
Caperton is a small town in Maine. The road that runs into it is surrounded by trees, thick, tall, and green with leaves that are changing colors, dancing from the treetops on the wind as they flutter to the ground. There's not a trace of demon activity, just children playing in the streets, white picket fences and families having barbeques in the back yard. But something doesn't feel right about the place, especially when the owner of the motel they check into gives them a room at the very end of the corridor and won't walk them down to it, glancing at the door with the number 37 every few minutes.
"Dean Winchester, I never thought I'd see you again." The door joining their room to the one beside it bursts open at three in the morning. His brain is thick with sleep, slow and groggy, but he knows that face, the soft blonde hair hanging down past slender shoulders.
"Julie." It's been a long, long time, and suddenly he's back in hell, watching blood trickle down Julie's skin, laughing while tears and blood mix salty on her cheeks.
"You remember me, how sweet." Her eyes aren't green any more, they're black, black as his favorite t-shirt, blacker than shadows in the night.
"Dean, who is she?"
"Someone I tortured in hell." He admits on an exhale, shaky, air caught in his throat; guilt a heavy lump that's hard to swallow.
Julie can't get past the line of salt, so she smiles at him and disappears.
-
"Dean?" Sam brings him breakfast the next morning, sits on the edge of the bed and stares at him. "Did you really torture that girl?" Girl. She was a fucking girl, fourteen years old and so young and so pretty and he'd hummed to himself, sick pleasure and heat in his belly and he'd carved her up, split her into thousands of pieces.
"Yeah Sam. I did." He can see it, smell it, the stale metallic scent of blood on his hands, beneath his fingernails, drying on his body in a crusty red pseudo-skin.
"But, why was she in hell? She's just a kid." Sam doesn't understand, he can't, and Dean prefers it that way. There are memories pushed back into the darkest corners of his mind that he represses every damn day of his life and they're of things he's done and that have been done to him and they're bad enough to destroy someone who hasn't already lived through them. Sam has demon blood in his veins and is responsible for the apocalypse, but he's never smelled his own flesh burning, never been hurt so deeply that his soul is cracked and broken.
"While she was on the phone with her boyfriend, the four year old she was babysitting drowned in the pool. She killed herself the next day." He remembers the day Julie arrived on the rack, deep cuts in her wrists, blonde hair done up in pig tails, sobbing for her mother, writhing against the hooks in her shoulders, in her thighs, holding her permanently in hell. "I did terrible things to her Sam. She was my first." He can feel Alastair's hand on his shoulder, fingers digging into his muscle; voice a low, hot growl in his ear, encouraging, soothing, tongue flicking out and licking away a bead of blood from his cheek, sliding across his jaw, against the corner of his mouth and in. Alastair's tongue slides in past his teeth, too hot and tasting of copper and death and sadistic excitement.
"It wasn't your fault Dean."
The egg sandwich in his hands is cold now; congealed cheese and glistening grease.
-
Julie catches him with his guard down. Blindsides him. One second he's debating between chocolate or glazed donuts and the next he's blinking himself awake, a throbbing behind his eyes, inside his skull.
"You're not so high and mighty outside of hell, are you Dean?" Julie taunts, cold black eyes, smiling at him with her white, white teeth.
He tries to answer; she kicks him in the stomach.
"Shut the fuck up." Another kick, blood pools hot and sour in his mouth. "I remember you Dean, I remember every little thing you did to me, and I'm going to do them all to you. Then, when I'm done, you're going right back to tell, where someone else will do them to you for eternity." He can't move. He's held down by demon mojo, utterly helpless and immobile and vulnerable as she leans down and tears his boots from his feet. Her nails dig into his foot, pull away his sock, and then her hand is in his pocket, sliding into the denim of his jeans and removing his lighter. "Here we go."
She brings the flame to his big toe and the pain hits him, white hot and blinding, agonizingly familiar, and he can't even bring himself to scream.
-
"Shit, are you okay Dean?" The question has to be rhetorical, because he's pretty damn far from okay as he soaks his right foot in a bucket of ice water, his burned toe throbbing.
"Peachy Sam. Could be better, you know, if you'd gotten there before the mutilation, but a singed toe is fun."
"At least I saved you and the rest of your foot."
It's little compensation, and for the next month he can't walk without a constant reminder of what he's done.
-
He gets himself sick on Twinkies and whiskey, lies on the cold bathroom floor, surrounded by empty plastic wrappers that crinkle when he moves, when he lurches to his knees to vomit into the toilet. Sam calls him an idiot, kicks away the half empty bottle of Jack before he can reach for it, and his eyes burn holes in the back of Dean's head. His body is hot and queasy, sickened by his junk food repast.
"Dean, what the hell? You ate three boxes of Twinkies?" He tastes the sickly sweet cream in his throat and that triggers more nausea; a soupcon of synthetic sponge cake and hard liquor.
"Ugh." He groans, clutching his stomach, feeling like shit, like a four year old who has eaten too many cupcakes at a birthday party but continues to eat more and lick the frosting off his fingertips.
"That's what you get. Why'd you do it Dean?" His mind is focused on Julie, on how every soul he's ever tortured may be walking on earth, inside fresh, perfect skin.
"It's the apocalypse Sam." He slurs, kneeling in a half eaten Twinkie, white squished into the denim of his jeans. "There's no better time to give it a shot."
What he doesn't tell Sam is that now the world is everything that terrifies him.
-
"Twinkie?" Sam holds one out to him, watches him groan, big, jackass smile on his face.
"I hate you." He mumbles, laughing, chest lighter than it has been in days, because it's been two months since Julie and he hasn't seen another soul he tortured in hell. He hasn't seen much of anything, not anymore, outside the air is quiet, too quiet, it trembles with the silence, quivers in his lungs. "I think Lucifer is up to something friggin' awful right now Sam."
"It's always quiet before the storm Dean." Sam's mouth is a perfect circle and he's staring over Dean's shoulder in complete surprise. Dean can't move, can barely breathe, because he knows that voice and he never thought he'd hear it again.
"Cas?" Castiel stands in the doorway to their motel room, his trench coat filthy with dirt and blood. "What happened to you?" Castiel walks inside, calmly shuts the door without disturbing their line of salt. "It's been months man."
"I've been looking for you. It was difficult to track you down." Castiel always knows where he is. Castiel is his angel stalker, Castiel knew of him before he was born, before the dawn of time, before the first amoeba on earth wriggled and divided to begin the cycle of life.
"What do you mean track me down?"
Castiel doesn't answer, just grabs a cup of water off the table and drinks.
-
Dean has difficulty seeing Castiel as relatively human. Every detail about him is the same, because Jimmy's body is still the same. Castiel is still Castiel, except now he eats and drinks and sleeps.
"So, Zachariah just turned you human?" He asks Castiel late one night, while they share a beer, waiting for Sam to return with dinner.
Castiel takes a swig of beer, winces, passes the cool bottle back.
"Yes."
He doesn't have a chance to ask more, because a demon crashes through the window in a shower of broken glass.
-
"I'm sorry." He says to Castiel as they pack their bags, step over the broken and battered body of some poor man to get out the door.
"For what?"
"For making you fall."
"That is not your fault." Castiel smiles at him, puts a hand on his shoulder, sits in the passenger seat of the Impala. "I will return to Heaven someday Dean. I have faith."
He wants to apologize again, he settles for kissing Castiel instead, tastes forgiveness and faith.
-
There's sin and there's salvation. But Dean doesn't know what to call it as he slides to his knees, curls his fingers in the waistband of Castiel's pants and brings them down too.
-
He tells Castiel about Alastair, about Julie, about hell. Bloody limbs and exposed bone, burning pain and crushing darkness. The sounds of sobbing and laughter, demons ravaging skin, breaking souls to pieces, carving away humanity with knives and pain and torture. Alastair's tongue shoved down his throat, tasting so strongly of blood he sucked it hard and relished in the taste, let Alastair part his thighs without resistance.
When he finishes, Castiel kisses him softly on the mouth, and tells him what it was like to fall.
-
"Are we planning to go after Lucifer anytime soon?" Sam turns off the television, rolls over onto his stomach and sighs in something that is a cross between responsibility and dread.
"We do stop the apocalypse, don't we?" He looks to Castiel for answers, but Castiel is busy holding a spider in his hands, setting it down on the window sill.
"Yes, you do Dean."
"Do we survive it?" In his dreams the apocalypse ends in four deaths. Lucifer's, Sam's, Castiel's, and his own.
"I don't know."
"Well." He tucks Ruby's knife into his belt. "I guess we'll find out soon enough."
Outside the sun begins to rise, casts rays of yellow light into the dark, early morning sky.