A crossover with the Jensen Ackles movie, Devour. Won't make much sense if you haven't seen it!
For Val
A Life in Passing
K Hanna Korossy
"Accept who you were born to be, or go back to the life you hate."
The last threads of Jake Grey's life unraveled as he sank to his knees and stared at her. Marisol, the woman he'd thought he loved, the woman who professed to love him: mother, friend, lover. Monster.
Blood dripped into the chalice next to him, the blood of everyone he loved. He didn't look up at the bodies anymore, earthbound, dying.
The life he hated was right here. It was the life he was living, the life left in his body.Accept who you were born to be. He'd been meant for something different.
"Will you be with me?" Jake asked, voice breaking.
She answered him. But he hadn't been talking to her. There was someone else…
Marisol leaned forward and kissed him.
Who you were born to be…
Choking on tears and her breath, he raised the sharpened bone by his knee and drove it into her body, lifting them both to their feet with the force of his thrust.
She staggered back, stunned, betrayed.
Changing.
The sight of the monster he knew her to be still shocked him. It drove him backwards, and he stumbled and fell as she advanced on him, bellowing her betrayal. But he had no place to flee anymore, no one left to turn to.
Her touch burned. She forced his head back, tilting the chalice against his lips, warm blood filling his mouth. Struggling weakly against her iron grip, Jake gagged as much from revulsion as from the viscous liquid sliding down his throat,.
Oh, God, help me.
Sam…
The world faded.
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Invisible strands tugged at him.
Not at his body, because he didn't seem to have one, but at his spirit, his soul. Drawing him with as much command as coaxing.
He resisted. He'd been played, tricked, forced into every step. No more. He would give them no more.
The gentle pull insisted, pleading.
Loving.
It confused him, briefly. But too many horrors had already been committed in the name of love for him. He wouldn't allow another. Maybe his body was as forfeit as those of whom he'd loved, but he wouldn't give up his soul, too.
Please. A whisper.
No, not even when he thought he knew that voice, some tiny still-innocent part of him longing to respond. It was the part she wanted, and he refused.
Sounds formed out of the gloom. The smell of pine. A cold and soft surface under him. A breeze across his face. He clung to his senses, turned away from the darkness and its inexplicably enticing draw.
Please, Dean, he thought he heard the echo.
And then it was gone.
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He opened his eyes, and woke into Hell.
He was back in the clearing, the sun warming his face. Trees swayed overhead, and the breeze tickled his skin. For a moment, his spirit exhaled in relief.
"You're a monster," came an icy voice from above, as hands jerked him upright. Jake blinked, tried to refocus on this world, past the badges and guns. And saw the bodies.
They were piled carelessly: bloody, mutilated, and abandoned. His parents, Marisol: their blood was on him, probably along with Connie's and Dakota's and his Uncle Ross's, soaking his shirt and flaking off his skin. The price for his wanting to be human, for rejecting her.
Murdered because of him. The horror was too deep to fathom, leaving him numb.
The police thought he'd killed them. The blood on him said as much, and Jake could find nothing inside him to fight that possibility.
Maybe he had killed them.
His sanity cracked.Maybe…this is all a fantasy I've created to live with the horrible things I've done. It made a lot more sense than being the Devil's child, of all this carnage being a gift for him. Maybe he was the monster. Reality was splintering wherever Jake looked, unable to bear the weight of all the blood.
His feet stumbled as they marched him to the car. The numbness was already starting to wear thin, and it would be all freefall after that.
Wake me from this nightmare.
His soul groaned in agony.
Please. Help me.
They put him in the car, shut the door after him.
Please.
He broke.
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…worst day of my life.
There's a higher power looking out for you.
Accept who you were born to be, or go back to the life you hate.
Accept who you were born to be…
"Dean?"
Despair paused.
"Dean, come on, man, don't do this. I need you to wake up."
…wake me…
"God, please, just snap out of it already!"
She'd never invoked God.
Jake opened his eyes, dully curious.
The face above him, red-nosed, bloodshot, and grey with fatigue, blinked and stared at him. Disbelieving, then unbearably bright with joy. "Dean?" it spoke uncertainly, voice wavering.
Another fantasy, this one peopled with strangers. He shrank away from it, the glimmer of rationality fading, darkness closing in over his head again.
"No!" Hands grabbed him, giving him a hard shake.
And the numbness vanished as if it had never been.
Unleashed fury and raw anguish poured through him, giving him strength. His first flail knocked the face above him out of his frame of vision; the second sent him tumbling off a bed, onto the floor.
"Dean!" That and the sound of scrambling was all the warning he had before the stranger descended on him again, pinning him bodily. Jake fought back, all elbows and knees and flats of hand and feet, exploding with the need to get away, to get back at, but too muddled to know how. Connie and he had sparred a lot but never with real attempts to do damage, although his dad had trained Sam and him to—
Realities collided and shattered, leaving him suddenly spent, shaky and panting.
The arms and legs that had been holding him down wrapped around him. The parody of love nearly made him cry, as did the frightened and soothing voice in his ear.
"I gotcha, take it easy. Shh."
He was rocked a little, like a baby. Like someone who was cared for.
There were no bodies here, no blood painting him. No creatures he could see, although she and others lingered in his mind. Nothing but this one person who loved him, whose name he thought he knew somewhere inside. It was Heaven compared to the Hell he'd left behind.
That was when Jake Gray gave up. Maybe this wasn't his reality, either, who he was born to be, but he didn't have it in him to fight Heaven as well as Hell.
A hand cautiously straightened his wobbly neck, cupped the back of his head. "Dean?"
Dean. He thought he knew that name, too. He let his eyes fall open, staring at the face inches from his own. A face he knew, even when it was pinched like this with fear. His Heaven's one occupant.
It took effort to find his tongue, to get past the crushing exhaustion, but the slurred result was worth it when he saw the shift of expression on the other's face.
"Sam."
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He slept a lot after that, but always woke to find Sam close by.
The story came out in halting pieces, slowed by Sam's pain and the clearing fog in Jake—Dean's—own head. The victims that had brought them to the small town in Washington, a sad-eyed blonde and a curly-haired college student of whom his childhood memories were already fading. The cultists who had sacrificed them to a pregnant beast he and Sam had fought and killed. The priestess who had managed to trap Dean and pour a cup of something, Sam still didn't know what, down his throat. The couple who'd been tracking her for years, who managed to subdue her and get Dean away, helping Sam get his unconscious brother back to the motel. The four days he'd then lain in bed, unresponsive, while Sam worked through every ritual, remedy, and idea he could find. The room around them looked like the Impala's trunk had exploded, weapons and books and plants everywhere.
But Sam was always right beside him.
The mental shift of memories was disconcerting, from a handicapped mother to a dead one, from a student's life to a hunter's. Single child to older brother. He grieved in the dark sometimes for family and friends he wasn't sure he'd ever had and a mother gained and lost all at once. If Sam knew, he didn't show it, but those sad-glad eyes followed him everywhere.
That was what finally sold him on Dean instead of Jake: Sam. Because while his twisted imagination might have conjured up the Devil's progeny, and he really didn't want to think about where that had come from, it wasn't creative or kind enough to craft someone for him like Sam. Unconditional love mixed with annoying habits and too much sensitivity; only God had that kind of sense of humor. The Devil certainly didn't.
He let go of Jake somewhere along the way without even noticing, unlamented, and didn't look back.
"So…what do you think?"
"Between a banshee haunting a sorority in San Diego and a couple of missing hunters in Wyoming?" He snorted. "What do you think?" He was more sarcastic now than he remembered being, his humor drier, but after everything that had happened, it seemed to fit.
A smile touched his brother's lips. "Is that the dedicated hunter talking, or the wanna-be chick magnet?"
He liked having a brother. "There's no 'wanna-be' to it, dude. You're just jealous."
"Riiight. The closest you've gotten to a woman in weeks is a cult priestess who tried to kill you."
It was sort of a conversation-ender. He sobered, saw his brother's face immediately fall.
"Dean—"
He shook his head. "It's good. I just…" still remember for a moment sometimes, he almost said, except that even though he'd tried to explain it to Sam, his brother still didn't get how real it had been. A lifetime in four days, a reverse vision of what might have been. Of what maybe had been, before Someone had heard his plea and woken him up. There's a higher power looking out for you. She'd gotten that right, at least.
Dean Winchester smiled at his brother, sliding from sincere to cocky without effort, and saw the resulting relaxation in Sam's face.
"…really want to go help out those poor sorority girls. Let's get out here, huh?"
The End