It's two minutes till midnight and the only sound that can be heard is the beating of his own heart. Sam's eyes jerk from the clock on the wall and rest on Dean's face for one last moment. The half-hearted smile on his older brother's face says it all. This is it, there is no more time to grasp at, no more hope left, no more of anything. There is nothing but this. This last moment together. The chimes of the grandfather clock sweep past Sam and surround him like a shroud of despair swallowing him whole. A tear escapes his defenses and runs the course of his cheek. This is it. Only another second left before he has to go on living in a world without Dean.
Time flashes out of his range and drags him forward against his will. He can't scream, can barely even breathe as he watches in horror as Dean is torn apart by hell hounds faster than he can blink. Dropping to his knees before his brother's corpse Sam's mind bends at the thought that just for a moment Dean is not in Hell. Terror tries to push itself inside his thoughts but Sam wills it away. This can't be it. Dean is a good person; God wouldn't allow this to happen to a good person. Reality kicks at Sam's defenses but fails to break them down. He clutches at his brothers lifeless body and bows his head over him slowly. His eyes drift closed and a sort of peace overcomes his mind. Here there is no reality; there is no death, no hounds to drag you to Hell, no tortured soul, no anguishing thoughts, and no bad memories. There is only one thing left here.
Peace.
And if fate ever claimed to be anything but cruel it was lying. For at that exact moment Sam Winchester's world turned itself upside down in a way he never asked for and certainly never wanted.
The sound of the window breaking was an afterthought of the broken glass shards scraping at his clothes and snagging in his disheveled hair. Shock barely had enough time to settle into his psyche before his body reacted to the possibility of a threat. Taking a defensive stance was for any other moment except for this one. He had just witnessed his brother's death at the hands of one demon with a pretty façade so the form of a small blonde girl crashing into the dining room to Sam only meant one thing. Lilith came back to finish off the other brother.
Forcing the slight girls frame into the further wall with all his strength only confirmed his suspicions. She barely blinked before throwing a right hook into his cheekbone, the pain resonating as if a man ten times his size had deal the blow and not this slip of a girl. He tossed off the thought of anything beyond this moment and the revenge that had now begun burning in his belly. Dean's face swan before his eyes, resting behind every blink that lasted too long, reminding him not to give himself up so easily to the demon in the beautiful body. With a cry that sounded more like a gasp for air he exploded forward pushing all his weight onto the demon before him bringing them both crashing to the dining room floor with a sickening sound. But his small victory was quickly turned on its head when he found himself continuing on after hitting the smooth surface of the floor and sliding up and over the demon girls body as if he weighed nothing at all. The cracking he felt in his ribs as he hit the wall behind them was merely a side note to what had just happened here as he struggled to regain his footing in this fight. His brain may have been merely following the train tracks it set itself on since she burst through the window but it seemed to have been heading in the right direction. Until now that is. He had fought what seemed like legion of demons in his lifetime yet he had never seen one use a move quite like the one he was witnessing now. Cradling his ribs he stumbled to a standing position just in time for her booted foot to make contact with the side of face. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth and white flashed before his eyes but his brain moved back and forth over the swiftness of her figure coming at him from what seemed like four feet above the ground, her small body rotating so fast even his exceptionally adept reaction times seemed helpless to stop it. This girl was no demon, unless Lilith now had a band of tiny unassuming females who know tae kwan do at her disposal now.
Pulling himself together he stood before the girl who had just a moment ago kicked his ass in under a minute and barely seemed to have gotten a single hair out of place. He tried to not look surprised, in case it inflated her ego even more than it had already seemed to, according to the smile on her perfectly untouched face.
"You are done now right?" She calculated, but from her tone Sam could tell she already knew the answer to that question. She was taunting him, of that he was sure.
"Who the hell are you?" He spat, a bit more under his breath than he had anticipated. He was probably serving himself up to her, but he didn't care now how he died, only that wherever he went it was where Dean was. Dean…He refused to look down at where he knew his brother still laid, eyes open and unblinking, seeing nothing.
"That isn't important right now. What's important is what chased me here and how we are going to get out of here alive, that is unless you want to end up like that one there." The girl didn't gestured towards Dean, but she didn't have to, there were only two bodies on the floor of the ever changing room they were in. And Ruby's old body had now vanished, leaving just one figure she could be refering to.
Sam's heart slammed into his ribs in a panic quite unlike anything he had ever felt before. Lilith was gone. Lilith was gone! Sometime in the last one hundred and eighty seconds of his life he had let the reason for his brother's death slip back into her meat suit and hightail it to the hills. He paced in a quick circle, hitching his breath trying to form a clear thought, "She gone-she's-just gone!" He advanced on the girl before him but she seemed unfazed by his panic, resting her hands gently on his jacket instead of using the force he knew she possessed. "Where did she go? Did you see her leave?"
The girl took a step back from him, her face softening for a moment before slipping back into that unreadable look he had first seen on her since crashing into his life a moment ago.
"We have her Sam, it's why I came. She is the only one who can help with what is coming next. Now are you going to help me fight our way out of this house or not?"
He blanched at her jealous tone. It sounded as if she thought he cared for the pounds of flesh Lilith had inhabited when she unleashed the hounds of hell on his brother's soul. But he didn't have time to dissect her thoughts or even her reasons for being here. But he could get one important question out in the open before he faced whatever lay beyond the walls of their temporary sanctuary.
"How do you know my name?" He asked, the question swimming out in the open in front of them for what seemed like a lifetime before she severed the tension with an abrupt answer that was left cutting through the air behind her as she opened the door to a street filled with black-eyed innocents trapped in a battle meant to end his life here, inside this house, forever beside his brother, and forever without his revenge.
"Survive this and you just might find out."