He tried to lose count but couldn't. One. Two. Three. His brain ticked out the seconds of the next minute of captivity.
Seconds had started to feel like hours. The melodrama of his own reaction embarrassed him — Hell, it was only silence — but the inside of his skin had started to itch two days ago and hadn't stopped. He felt like he had never stopped doing, banging, climbing, driving, running from the moment his dad had put Sammy in his arms and told him to get outside, and now he couldn't do anything except stare at concrete. The stillness swallowed him whole.
And Sam… Dean heard imaginary screams, saw the hundreds of bruises, burns, and breaks he had watched his little brother endure over a lifetime. Anything could be happening to Sam right now, though Dean recognized that what was happening was probably the same thing happening to him: nothing.
And nothing might hurt Sam worse than anything could. Over the years, Dean had lost his images of Hell. Every little touch from Cas that healed a wound, healed an old memory. They had never talked about it, but Dean had known it for years. Ever since the angels made him torture Alistair for them, Cas had been silently making up for that.
No one could do that for Sam. Lucifer's marks on his psyche were permanent, and Dean feared leaving Sam alone with them too long.
He told himself he only called the Reaper to save his brother, but the ticking clock across the underside of his skin, pulsing through his liver, made him wonder if that was true.
Sam had never called a Reaper before. He glanced over at his untouched tray of rubbery bologna and stale bread and wondered if Dean was eating it. He recognized the childhood hunger in his brother's food patterns, and it didn't take someone with a college degree to understand that he didn't have them because Dean had never once let him feel hungry.
They'd saved each other over and over, in countless ways, in self-sacrificing spades, but beneath all of the supernatural, Sam recognized that Dean had started that pattern from the first time he had chosen — as a kid too young to have to make that choice — to put his baby brother before himself.
The government ops could be doing anything to Dean right now. Every time they had entered police custody, Dean had been unable to keep his mouth shut, getting himself into trouble with snark or macho posturing. By now, he could have very well told them to go fuck themselves and landed himself on the dark side of Gitmo policies.
Sam wasn't going to let anything happen to Dean. He sat on the edge of the cot and closed his eyes.
"Billie?" He breathed in. "I need your help."
She came, red leather, hard lines on her pretty face, and he wondered if she hadn't found a soft spot for him after all. Their first meeting in the stricken hospital had been prickly, angry, but she listened to him now without that same grimness.
"Sam Winchester, that's a half-baked idea if I ever came across one. Why would I do that for you?" Her measured tone doled out each word individually.
Sam met her gaze. Framed by the concrete behind her, like a macabre aura, she looked almost angelic. He swallowed, the words he needed to say catching on the lump in his throat. He closed his eyes for an instant to recenter. The people he had loved and lost moved through his mind in a montage. He had to believe they were waiting for him somehow on the other side of everything. The only people missing from that place would be here on Earth together — if he could do this to reunite them. He found his voice.
"You told us you want cosmic balance, for the dead to stay dead. I've been dead. I'll help you restore that balance."
Billie didn't laugh, but she cracked a half-smile.
"Sorry, kid. I don't kill. I reap."
Sam's stomach fell. "There has to be some way to get you to help us."
"Oh, there is."
His stomach dropped lower.
Billie was good to her word, dropping their heartbeats down to nothing, holding them on the brink of death by a rubber band until she released, springing them back to their bodies. They escaped on their experience, taking on the woods with the ease Bobby Singer had taught them.
They did not talk about how they had gotten out, not until they found an old hunting cabin and created a plan. Only then did Dean explain to Sam how he had called Billie, surprising Sam who, of course, had assumed he had been the only one to call her.
Their synchronicity should not have been surprising after all these years, but when the quiet moment came to discuss the cost, both Winchester brothers stared at the other in staggered shock.
Billie had asked them both for the same thing in return for their freedom.
And they had both agreed.
"Come midnight, a Winchester goes bye-bye permanently."
Billie stood there with that damn smirk on her face, and Dean wanted nothing more than to punch her in her smug mouth. He could feel the stiffness of Sam standing beside him, close enough that they could have leaned into one another, but instead they stood stock still. Dean spared a glance toward Cas — the angel who would never leave them, the angel who might not forgive them the moral failing they were making.
Dean's heart tugged in his chest with a soft, sentimental fear of Cas knowing how dark he was willing to go.
Then he looked to his mom, standing in front of them, realization dawning on her face.
"No. You can't have one of my boys." She pulled out her pistol and trained it on Billie.
Dean clenched his teeth and fought against tears that wanted to form. Beside him, Sam made the smallest of sniffles, a sharp inhale of breath stalling in his lungs. Mary Winchester was ready to protect them. She didn't know. She had no way of understanding.
She hadn't been there to see them growing up — "Take care of your brother. Take care of Sammy." How could she know it was his only job, that there was no Dean Winchester without Sam Winchester, that he had sacrificed the whole world to save Sam and that he'd do it again? How could she ever really know that?
Mary didn't understand, but someone was going to have to tell her.
Sam rubbed his hand over his face, pulling at the tension all along his features. A cowardly part of him wanted Dean or Billie to speak first, but he knew Dean wouldn't be able to. Billie seemed to be enjoying the poetry of the wait; her eyes glinted coolly.
Where could he start to explain to his mother that Dean was all he had in the world? He had tried so many times to build other things for himself — friends who had turned out to be demons, women who had turned into kindling for Hellfires, freaks who had turned into monsters — and the one constant had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Sam needed Dean; he could not let his brother rot away to nothing in prison.
Not if he had a choice. Any choice.
"Mom…" He sounded so young when he tried to speak. Billie actually chuckled.
"I'm not taking one of your boys, Mary. I don't kill. Like I told you a few weeks ago, you have dead man's eyes. You're already dead." She had the cold audacity to pause, to look from each Winchester to the next before laying out her words like a full house in a poker game.
"Your boys sold you out."
Sam had just enough time to see his mother turn to them, horrified, haunted, before Billie extended her hand and both women vanished.
Castiel lunged forward and grabbed into nothingness, then looked to Sam and Dean.
"What have you done?" His gravelly voice bottomed lower, heavy with unnameable emotion.
Sam looked over at Dean whose eyes were on Cas as he swallowed shakily. Then Dean's face hardened again, and its steel galvanized Sam even as despair tingled over him.
Cas's question was going to haunt him for the rest of his life: What have you done?
"What we had to do." Dean walked around to the side of the car, opened the driver's door, and got inside.
Sam and Castiel stared at one another, and Sam said numbly,
"I wasn't going to let anything happen to my brother."
He got into the passenger seat and shut the door.