"Dean!" Sam yelled from inside the safe room. "Do it now! Now!"

Death looked in Sam's direction with confusion.

"What is he talking about, Dean?" Death asked calmly. "You don't have any tricks planned, do you? I came back here to tell you that I was planning on giving you Sam's soul back."

"Oh really? That's very nice of you," Dean said, and then threw a handful of powder directly into Death's face.

Surprised, Death stood up, coughing.

"What was that? You don't seriously think you did anything that can hurt me, do you?"

"Not yet," Sam said, from where he was locked inside of his prison.

Death frowned as he looked around the room.

"What? Really? That was it? He just threw powder in my face so he could escape the room?"

"Try to sense him," Sam said, with anticipation.

The entity paused briefly to give a suspicious look in the direction of the safe room, but then closed its eyes to sense where Dean had gone.

"What?" Death said. "Impossible. 7 billion people-"

"Now one shorter," Sam finished for him. "But he didn't die, and he didn't change dimensions."

"How?" Death said.

"It took some doing to find the recipe," Sam assured him. "And we had to cover sheets of paper with it in order to make our plans without you noticing. And since we only had so much, everything else we did-"

"A ruse?"

Sam nodded, knowing death was still powerful enough of an entity to sense him, even without his ring.

"But- your soul-"

"Please, I don't have one of those. No one does. Whatever was trying to alter my behavior, well I found a way to counter it," Sam held up a whirring gizmo he had in his pocket.

He walked out of the safe room, which was now unlocked, his bonds falling off of him.

"I don't know what kind of game you and the other powerful douchebag entities like the angels and demons are playing, but I suspect it's mostly just to screw with us humans for fun. Just like how you tried to convince Dean that little girls have to die in order to "keep the natural balance of things."

Sam laughed derisively as he walked out of the safe room to confront Death face to face.

"You're death! You could change how people die completely, you could make it so that it worked out, you just choose not to. You can't personally arrange for a bunch of people to die through your ring if Dean tries to save one girl and then claim the moral high ground. The natural order of things is just another way of saying what some entity, such as yourself, feels like making happen. You can't just try to cram fatalism down our throats and not expect us to notice."

"My ring." Death said, suddenly realizing what had happened. He turned his gaze on Sam. "Give me back my ring."

Sam heaved a sigh of relief.

"OK, good. So it seems like your ring does actually matter for the death mechanism, and it's not just another game. Whatever weird rules govern the universe, your ring seems to actually be at the heart of one of them. Thought it was really funny did you? Giving that power to a mere mortal?"

Death looked pissed.

"Give me back my ring Sam." He said evenly.

"No thanks," Sam said, determined to not let his nerves show. "I mean, what are you going to do, kill me?"

Dean looked down at the card Sam had given him after driving to this fancy lab from the airport.

"Oh-bree da Grey?" He said out loud. "Sounds like a Disney Supervillain," he said, glancing down at the picture Sam had given him. It was some professor who would be very interested in the ring he was currently wearing.

"Whoa, it's a dude? Look at that beard! More like Aubrey da-lame! Am I right? Eh?" He looked around for a possible high-five, but there was no one there.

"Classic," Dean said, mostly to himself. Then he knocked on the door. There was a pause, and no one answered.

"Hello? Hey- right, so listen. I've got a ring that makes me death. Long story. But my brother Sam said you might know people who can hide me and/or the ring? As long as I stay hidden, no one else should die, and you can study it to figure out how it works."

"Oh god," Dean said after a minute of silence. "I sound like a crazy person."

He pounded on the door again.

"Look, I got death in my pocket, or well- a ring of it. And he's gonna be so pissed when he realizes. You gotta hide me!"

Website:

Reality-zero (with the rest at the end.)

For more stuff like original fiction.