Pairing: Destiel, romance will be gradual so bear with me.
Setting: twist on the season 7 finale. Will commence onwards from there.
Note: So as some of you will know, this fic was originally published on an alternate account. For personal reasons, I have moved the fic here and the other account is now dormant. Updates will be posted here for this fic.
This chapter is just to peg down the foundation. More adventures and sexy times to come!
Act I: Purgatory For Dummies
Dean.
Dean, I must act quickly.
He was in reset mode. That soothing blank warmth that only exists in the moments between restful sleep and wakefulness, the kind of sleep that would cocoon him after the last drop of the roiling storm had been wrung from his last nerve. The kind of nirvana that took a week of schmoozing through booze and sex to get.
Static flared; then a thin, tinny whistle flossed between his ears, accompanied by deep, mutant reverberations. They muffled and morphed slowly into speech, and in that minute he realised that he was pinned down in a piercing white light like a bug. Did someone just call him?
"-end of the bloody world and you come up short once again, Puft. Your generation is so easily distracted by explosions and sparkly things. Personally, I'd blame the media if I didn't already own it-"
"He was just here. How do I know that you and your minions didn't-"
"Well if I'm lucky, they did. And if I'm still lucky, the levis did and my army of minions are plundering and pillaging as we speak, so either way, your loss. And very soon, my gain."
He knew those voices.
He managed to blink once before the agony boiled into his skull and kneaded his brain like the pasty dough it felt like. Burning blood and acrid lightning pulsed and blazed its way through the network of neurons, flaying his happy place. The blank bliss soured into sensations: burned retinas, sour bile, stiff joints, frying nerves, the stench of acid, and that fucking whistling -
His reflex system bypassed his blazing neurons. Gasping with new-found lungs, he surged to a sitting position and blinked, disoriented. Blindness gave way to shapes and colours - white walls, a grey shelving unit, black ink splatters everywhere, painting the white tiles like a Pollock. He was sitting, surrounded by a halo of it.
Immediate danger check: safe. Next check: "Sam?" he instinctively croaked.
There was a pause, then heavy footsteps echoing, and he could actually feel his gargantuan brother galloping towards him through vibrations in the tiles. A familiar knot loosened behind his sternum: Sammy. Sammy's okay.
His brother's high-alert expression swung into view, his signature chick-hair swinging behind him. "Dean! You- you're alive! You're still here!"
"Not so sure if I'm happy about it," Dean muttered, grasping Sam's offered hand and hauling himself up creakily. The disorientation and trying to squint with his ears to make out words through the opaque air were making it hard to string two thoughts together. What the fuck happened?
"And here I was, hoping you'd gone boom with Dick and Cas," drawled a hazy black figure. Crowley swam into focus, his black coat drawing the eye and his heavy voice easily dominating the sterile laboratory room. His tone was effortlessly wry and dry, but his dark eyes were hard and bright, crinkled at the corners with a barely-hidden grin.
Cas.
Dean whipped around, ignoring the wave of nausea as he focused on the biggest splatter of ectoplasm. Ground zero was suspiciously absent of a Dick and a broken angel. Dean's memory snapped back into place – The Plan – Cas bluffed, took the throw, Dean distracted, Cas yanked Dick's head back, and Dean boned him through the throat. Then Dick had started pulsating energy, vibrating, faster and faster while Dean had just watched like a friggin' idiot until Dick had exploded – which had knocked his lights out.
And there Crowley was, a smug grin scrawled across his face. "Where are they?" Dean snapped, balling his fists. Mentally he was taking inventory of his body: everything seemed to work, the throbbing pain was fading, the whistling was gone, his stomach was double-dutching but he could tough that out, some throbbing but that only meant bruises. Instinctively he knew that he had to keep Crowley talking - he and Sam were vulnerable, but Ruby's knife should still be tucked into his belt; half-formed emergency strategies started clocking in-
"That bone has a bit of a kick," Crowley replied gently, a smirk tucked into a whiskered corner of his thin lips. "God's weapons often do. Should've put a warning on the box."
"This is exactly what you wanted," Sam realized aloud, accusatory as he glowered down at the smaller man. "Dick out of the way, and revenge on Cas."
Dean froze, muscles locking down.
Crowley smiled and innocently shrugged, brushing Sam off as he turned to look at Dean. "Cut off the head, and the body will flounder, after all. If you had just one king since before the first sunrise you'd be in a kerfuffle too."
"And Cas?" Dean snarled.
The shorter man cocked his head and raised a derisive brow. "If he's lucky, he's ceased to exist. But I'm guessing the signature Winchester charm has rubbed off on him, and he's wandering around Purgatory for you as we speak."
The tinny whistling warped into a static buzzing in Dean's ears. "For me?" he echoed dumbly.
"Dean," Sam murmured softly, shooting him an apologetic look from the side. "I saw him push you out of the way just as Dick exploded."
Time splintered as fragments of memories raced through Dean's numb mind, and his eyes vacantly swung to the ooze-free spot he'd woken up in, picturing that flapping trench coat as his own words echoing mutely in his head.
"You've been chosen. And it sucks, believe me. There's no use asking 'why me?' cuz the angels – they don't care. I think they just don't have the equipment to care. Seems like when they try, it breaks them apart."
Hester, leader of the surviving members of the garrison snarling at him through a contorted mask of betrayal: "The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell he was lost!"
That hesitant, small and warm smile tugging at Cas's lips when the brothers had looked to him for help - just like in the old days. "Well, you know me. I'm always happy to bleed for the Winchesters."
He'd been wrong about him.
"Consider Cas's vacation in Purgatory on me. I did owe him one," Crowley gloated, the manic gleam in his eyes glimmering. "And without a master plan, the levis are just another monster. Hard to stomp, sure. But then, you love a challenge. Your job is to keep them from organizing."
"Not until-"
"Bring him back."
Sam and Crowley eyed Dean as the muscles in his jaw flexed, recognizing the building pressure in the hunter. He could hear all the shoulda-coulda-wouldas in his head building up a whirling storm; he had to keep a lid on it. "Bring him back now, you son of a bitch," Dean bit out.
Crowley huffed a laugh. "Did you actually forget the consequences already? I thought Cas had demonstrated well enough that opening the door to Monster Land isn't the smartest idea." The smile dropped from his lips as he turned a burning glare at Dean, all façade of humour vanished. "I'm sure this will zip in one ear and out the other, being a Winchester and all, but do. Not. Open. That door. No more sacrificing, deals, or trading places, at least not for your feathered boy toy. If, by some miracle, a human like you is able to open the portal, you'd be pulped by the hordes of monsters spewing out from the bowels of Purgatory into this reality, and it'll be the end of the world. For sure. Because a human like you doesn't have the juice to stay alive against the monsters, keep them at bay, and close the portal from either side."
Hope and wild plans tumbled through Dean's head as he stubbornly replied, "but demons – or Death –"
"No demon has ever willingly crossed into Purgatory since the birth of the idea of time," Crowley snapped, "reapers and even Death himself don't go closer to that hole than to kick the freaks into it. That is where their kind go to prey upon each other for the rest of eternity without ever dying, ergo no need for Death to get his shoes dirty."
It was possible then to see a shift behind Crowley's eyes, to almost palpably feel the hulking, malicious Demon with a capital D talking through the short British puppet. His black coat seemed to flicker at the edges, doubling the idea that the demon was looming just behind a thin slice of Old English ham.
And it was the sincerity from the King of Hell and liars that convinced him.
Crowley carefully watched Dean then rocked back from them, shrugging into a more casually human stance again. "I see we understand each other. Now, that's enough Purgatory For Dummies. You have, oh," he rolled back his suit sleeve to squint at his naked wrist, "five minutes to get out of here before I set this candy factory on fire."
He was gone with a snap of his fingers.
"Dean, let's go," Sam urged, heading to the door.
Dean was already following him when he paused, "where's the – uh – advanced kid – Kevin?"
Sam's shoulders tensed and he did that weird jut with his jaw in the way Dean knew meant that he was internalizing blame. "I don't know," he admitted, "I shielded him from Dick. I looked to see what had happened, but when I turned around again, he was gone."
They took a right into an emergency stairwell, their hurried footsteps echoing back at them. "So Crowley has him."
"He said he didn't yet," Sam replied bitterly between huffs, "but his minions probably got him already."
Dean gritted his teeth from interrogating Sam further, remembering the conversation he'd woken up to. They'd been talking about Kevin being taken by Crowley's demons, not about Dean. Mission Impossible: Kevin Tran had failed. Dean had promised - and he had also failed. He kept an eye on his brother, vowing to get the screechy prophet back if only for Sam to redeem himself.
He walled everything up to deal with later as they raced into a corridor, eyes darting around for enemies. They'd saved the world from the end, again. The faces of Kevin, Meg, Bobby, and Cas flashed through his mind as they dodged a cluster of leviathans fighting for their lives against demons, and he shoved the same ol' bittersweet blend of roiling guilt and relief down to concentrate on guarding their backs as they fled down the bubblegum-and-blood-scented hall.
Note: As any of you who write on know, reviews are the batteries to our bunnies. Gas to our Chevys. Dean to our Cas. YOU ARE MY SUN-SHIIIIIIINE, MY ONLY SUN-SHIIIINE, SOMETHING LONE-LYYYY, WHEN SKIES ARE PAAAAALE-*
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