CH 1: STUCK IN A RUT
Sam sighed into his pillowcase, bracing himself for the images sure to come roaring through his mind within moments. Discouraged by the enormity of the Darkness' threat, he had turned to the comfort and hope of previous years, the sense of help and support he gained from prayer.
Not the matter-of-fact prayers Dean sent to Castiel, always careful to include some "Smokey and the Bandit"-style trucker slang to separate himself from the intimacy of the call. Not even the prayers he himself had sent to the trenchcoated angel, when he was most worried about Dean. Despite the absence of G-d, not only from his life, but even from the perception of the angels he had come to know, he still called to his Creator almost nightly, at least when they were in the bunker or separated for a night. Dean gave him hell whenever he caught his little brother in prayer.
Maybe it was the severity of Dean's break from their father, coming so late in his life, that caused him to reject any figure too fatherly. He hadn't trusted their grandfather Campbell for a moment, either. Not that he was wrong about that, thought Sam, bitterly. But to any angel other than Cas, or to the absent G-d, Dean was adamantly resistant.
He closed his eyes, and reached a long arm behind his back to switch off the bedside light. As he relaxed into his bed, the reddish flashes of light inside his eyelids illuminated the unseen vision – Sam's face, straining in pain, eyelids wrenched open with metal hooks. Chains criss-crossing his naked skin, cutting his flesh as his entire weight hung against them in a void of flame and smoke and light so harsh it burned his never-closing eyes. The strobe effect prevented him from gleaning anything but memories of pain and despair and terror, as the roaring echoed around the Cage, rattling his bones, causing his body to be flung against one supporting chain, then another. Once dislocating his right shoulder as his body was pushed away from a bellow, the blinding pressure and tearing sensation never quite causing him to black out and escape. Then recoiling from a flash of white light which burned his entire left side, causing the chain to slice through his muscles, causing a hot stream of blood to cascade down his left side, trickling into the burns. And always the thundering noise, tossing him back and forth as the two angelic brothers relived their prehistoric argument through eternity.
He had learned the subtle differences between them. They circled each other around him, but one was fiery, his light tinged with a golden-red glow and subtle waves which licked the edges of his vision. The fiery one's shout was like a battering of drums and thunders, rolling turbulence interrupted by sharp cracks which shook Sam's every bone, again and again. The other responded with a pure, almost cold white light which left a ghost of blue-hot film across Sam's eyes as it retreated. His voice sounded like air rolling around metal, blasting out with a peal that pierced Sam's ears and made him wince with its sharpness.
Sam felt the softness of his bed beneath him, even as the sensations tore through his brain, and willed himself to hold on a moment longer to the vision, to try to ride through the memory to find what G-d was trying to tell him. He twisted his hands into the sheets, wrenching his fingers into fists so tight he felt his digits fighting the muscles which connected them.
He couldn't hold of for long, even against the memory of two archangels, venting their wrath on each other, and on him. His mind's reflection of G-d's two firstborn, the mightiest warriors of Heaven, tore him out of the vision with a scream that scratched his throat, as if the illusory chains and hooks and flames had escaped his mind through his mouth.
He held on to his flannel sheets, hearing a door slam open and the sound of his brother's bare feet slapping against the bunker's bare floor toward him. Another slam, and a cry of "Sammy!" reached his ears as the bed sank beside him, Dean's hands grabbing him and flipping him over.
Sam swallowed, and managed to croak out an unsufficient "Sorry", as Dean began interrogating him. He nodded and shook his head a few times, and pushed himself up on a forearm, coughing the dry lump out of his throat.
"Dean, I really am okay. It's just the memories. The Cage. The lights. The noise. The pain. It takes me a second to get them out of my head." She smiled weakly.
Dean barely heard his words, as he scanned his little brother's arms and face for any injury, grabbing his wrist to feel his rapidly slowing pulse, hazel eyes peering into brown ones.
"Pupils okay," he muttered, then snapped "Is this a nightmare, or some kind of hallucination? You never screamed before, but I know you're trying to get back there. Mentally, I mean."
"I just have to find what I'm supposed to in the visions. I can't understand what that," he shuddered slightly, even wrapped in the warmth of his sheets "has to do with the Darkness."
"Sammy, leave it. You're not going back there. Not your body, not your soul, not your mind going walkabout from meditation or drugs or ecstatic head-bang dancing. There's another way to deal with her. We always find another way." His voice softened from exasperation, to concern, to comfort.
"You know we'll find another way, Sam."
Sam's brow raised into the puppy-like position of concern, but he set his mouth into an uneven line which could be seen as a sad smile. It didn't admit Dean was right, but it ended the conversation.
Dean accepted the peace offering, at least for the moment, and chattered on about Cas' hilarious commentary on some of the series he'd been binge-watching on Netflix. Sam responded mechanically, eventually nodding off, and barely heard Dean pad softly out of the room.
Funny how Cas just rambles on about TV shows now, almost like Dean, he mused sleepily. Even his deep voice seems so familiar, now. Dean said he almost deafened him before he got a vessel. Breaking out windows and everything.
Sam's eyelid snapped open in the dimness, and he swung his legs over and off his bed to switch back on his bedside lamp.
Where the caged archangels trying to tell him something? The hunter remembered the noise from when he was down there with them, but if these visions really were meant to guide him, what if it just needed to be translated?
I don't need to get there. He realized, scrabbling in his bedside drawer for some paper and a pencil. I just need to hear what they're telling me.
He waited a while, glancing down the hall to see the glow under Dean's door wink out, before wrapping himself in a robe and slipping silently down the winding halls to the archives.
His search was long, but he had been through so much of the angel-lore that he already knew what to skip. Schmidt-Nielsen only mentioned physiology, the Scholastic philosophers got bogged down in choreography, and most of the other angelographers were interested in endless tables and hierarchies, counting wings, and describing ladders and chariots and wheels in breathless attempts to out-adjective each other. Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, lauded . . . the list went on and on.
Instead, he pushed his way through piles of yet-unsorted lore to a small filing cabinet in the back of the "Celestial" section. He pulled the dusty metal handle, only to discover it breaking off in his hand, the drawer rushing out to meet it. It slammed against his shin, and he barely stifled a cry as he caught the drawer awkwardly, before it could hit the floor and wake Dean. He looked down, twisting his mouth into a grimace that would have to stand in for an expletive. The drawer had no dividers or folders, but was stacked with small, tightly rolled scrolls, brown with age, tied with identical scraps of faded red and white silk. A plume of dust rose to his face, and he barely avoided sneezing into the trove. He limped over to the large central table and carefully deposited the scrolls before carefully washing his hands and retrieving all the tools for safely unrolling and reading the ancient papers.
As he unrolled the first scroll and saw the tiny, even characters, he sighed and padded up to the library to retrieve an English-Hebrew dictionary and grammar, his laptop, and a can of an energy drink Dean kept in the minifridge. Sam glanced at the ingredient list and grimaced, but shrugged. Coffee scent would wake Dean, and this would take a while.
A glance at his watch made him interrupt filling yet another page with garbled, faulty translation. The scrolls, as it turned out, were Aramaic, mostly, with plenty of quotes from older, Hebrew lore. Some were composed in alphabetic acrostics; some in plain prose, peppered with medical and astronomical references from Persian and Moorish sources; some in Psalm verse. One looked suspiciously like a limerick.
He carefully rewrapped each of the scrolls that didn't fit his needs, and attached tiny notes under the silk bindings, reading "Invocation against demon that haunts toilets", "Alternate blessing for brit milah of non-identical twins", "Recipes for midwives in the countryside around Seville ca. 1370(?)".
He'd need at least a few hours before Dean woke up and wanted to start looking for a new job. He could try to slip back down to continue later in the day,but his eyes were stinging and he could feel the caffeine, taurine, and G-d-knew-what-else-ine wearing off. This job was going to take his full attention, especially because he didn't want to ask for Cas' help, fearing the angel would ask questions, or tell Dean.
Two were kept out for future perusal. One was a ritual involving burying special bowls to ask for angelic intercession, and one a meditation regimen involving Torah study and a rigorous fasting-and-bathing schedule. Sam wasn't sure about the first one – it wasn't exactly intercession he needed, at least not from an angel, but he'd have a tough time hiding a sudden interest in Biblical ritual purity from Dean.
Just in case, we checked the garage and the internet before slipping back into his bed. And sure enough, there was a blowtorch in one and a small supplier of special Israeli clay in the other. His eyelids were drooping by the time he pressed "Checkout" and closed Google Translate, and he fell into the heavy, dreamless sleep of a man with a plan.