It started with a girl, who wasn't really a girl, and a boy who had never wanted anything more than to just be a boy.
No. It started with a Key made of energy, beautiful beyond imagining and ended with a girl, started with a vessel for the Great Adversary and ended with a boy.
No. It started with a girl and a boy and... no.
It started like this:
"Hey, stranger." Sam Winchester looked at the tall brunette who was sliding onto a barstool next to him, and frowned.
"Hi," he greeted shortly, not wanting to full-out ignore her, but also not really wanting to chat.
"You look like you're in a bit of a mood," the girl said huskily. She raised a finger to the bartender, who slid her an open bottle of Bud.
"Really?" Sam snapped irritably. It had been one hell of a day, that was for sure. Now that the trickster had turned out to be Gabriel, and Gabriel (who might've actually given them a chance, had he agreed to help them) seemed to think that there was no way that the apocalypse could be stopped, a part of him was rethinking Dean's plan. Maybe they would be better off saying yes. They could strike some kind of a deal with Michael, agree to say yes and let Michael and Lucifer have their battle as long as Michael promised to leave the inhabitants of the planet alone afterwards. It wasn't the best option, but it might just be the only one that they had.
"Yeah. And, see, I had a bad day too. And maybe I've been spending too much time with Faith, but I kinda want to have sex with a gorgeous hunk of flesh and then go our separate ways in the morning and never see each other again. Sound like your kind of deal?"
He broke away from his brooding to survey her. She was tall; dark-haired and blue eyed, and had a slender figure that seemed to go for miles under her tight jeans, black halter top with a short leather jacket and black boots that stopped just below her knees.
"Not usually," he confessed, meeting her eyes. "But right now..."
"Cool," she said. "Got a room?"
"My brother's in it," Sam said regretfully.
"That's fine. We can use mine. I'm Dawn, by the way."
"Sam," he responded, tacitly taking her introduction for a decision to leave their last names out of it, which was probably better for no-strings-attached sex, anyway. Dawn took a long draw of beer before abandoning the half-empty bottle on the bar and slapping down a ten dollar bill. Sam finished his own drink, and left a bill of his own before getting up to follow her.
He liked how tall she was—maybe 5'6 or 5'7, which was taller than some of the girls that he had dated. Her slender form, along with her heeled boots, made her seem even taller. Which, of course, meant that he didn't dwarf her as dramatically as he had Jess, for instance.
At 6'4, he kind of had to think about these things. It also meant that the sex would require less in the way of complicated acrobatics than with some of the girls that he had been with in the past.
She swayed in front of him on her way down the street. She didn't appear to have a car, which meant that her place wasn't far away, but she didn't seem to be heading for the latest crappy motel that he and Dean had holed up in for the night. He wasn't even one hundred percent sure where they were, to be honest—after they had gotten out of TV Land, and Gabriel had given him his opposable thumbs back (not that it hadn't been fun to be turned into a car—really—and obscenely flirted with by an archangel turned pagan god), he and Dean had hightailed it out of that town so fast they had probably left skid marks in the parking lot, and driven past several clusters of lights until they had skidded into a moderately sized city, rather than a one-street residential town.
He pulled out his phone, and quickly texted Dean a number 7, which was code for 'getting laid, don't worry or wait up'. Usually, it was Dean who was texting Sam that particular code, and Sam felt a momentary bit of petty triumph to finally get to throw it back into his brother's face. Usually, one-night stands weren't really his thing, but this time it seemed like the best idea that anyone had ever had. None of that emotional stuff that always broke him in half—none of the pain that would come when she got hurt because of his life. No last names, no emotions, nothing but pure, mutual pleasure and a perfectly amicable parting in the morning. It wasn't that he'd never done it before ever, just that he didn't often get the urge.
But after everything with Ruby, he wasn't especially eager to get into a relationship again, anyway. That didn't mean that he didn't want to get laid.
The hotel that she lead him to (hotel, not motel—there must've been a difference, but Sam didn't really know it, seeing as he could count on one hand his opportunities to stay in an actual hotel and still have fingers left over) wasn't a skyscraper, but it was considerably taller than most of the buildings in the vicinity. There was a single office tower that pierced the sky next to it, and couple of apartment buildings that were about the same height as the hotel, but other than that, the Marriot, Residence Inn was the tallest building around. She wandered into the lobby, snagged a cookie from a plate on the front desk (hotels that provided free cookies—now that was new), and led the way to the elevator. Sam also grabbed a cookie, because they looked good, damnit, and followed her to the elevator bay.
"So I'd ask what your story is, but it doesn't look like you really want to talk about it," Dawn said, leaning against the wall on one shoulder as they waited for the elevator.
Sam snorted. "Not really, no. You?"
"Oh, you know." She waved a hand unimportantly in the air, accidentally breaking what was left of the cookie, and sending a bit of it flinging into the wall. Sam couldn't help but snort as she looked mournfully at the large piece on the floor, before stooping, picking it up, and blowing on it quickly. "Five second rule," she said firmly, popping it into her mouth.
"Desperate, much?"
"Hey, you don't ever separate a girl from her chocolate," Dawn said. "Anyway—ran away from family expectations—my older sister, you know—she loves me, but she's kind of... pushy. And overprotective. One day I just said, enough, and hit the road. I'll wander on home when I'm ready. Besides, I don't delude myself into thinking that they don't know where I am. Spike knows how to find people when he wants to, and there isn't much that Giles can't manage these days. And even if their methods fail, there's always Willow. Quid-pro-quo?"
The elevator dinged as it arrived, the doors sliding open.
Sam bit his lip, and contemplated how much he could tell her without sending her running screaming into the night. "I grew up on the road," he decided. "We travelled a lot, me and my older brother, with our dad. Dad's dead, now, but Dean and I never stopped. We kind of... do freelance work. It's gotten kind of heavy lately. I'm just tired."
And he wasn't talking about physical exhaustion, either. He was tired of the blood and death. Tired of the fighting. Tired of watching his friends and family die. Tired of sacrificing everything to do what he thought was the right thing, only to discover that he'd accidentally started the apocalypse. Tired of travelling. Tired of nightmares. And this thing about being Lucifer's true vessel—it was just kind of the icing on the cake.
Dawn, though—Dawn looked like she got it—like she, too, had experienced the bone-deep, undefeatable exhaustion that he was talking about, this feeling of wanting to lay down and sleep for a year, or maybe forever. And that was why it was so tempting to say yes to Lucifer. Just one word, and it would all be over. He would be shoved to the side, a semi-aware passenger in his own body.
Chained to a comet, Jimmy Novak had said. Somehow, he thought that being an archangel's vessel would be even worse.
Dawn reached over to hit the button marked 14—the third highest floor in the hotel, and the doors slid closed behind them.
"That sounds like it sucks," Dawn said tactfully.
"Yeah. And believe me, I completely understand the whole 'overbearing and overprotective older sibling' thing," Sam added.
"You too, huh?"
"A bit. Yeah." Actually, more than a bit—Sam had taken Psych I at Standford—he knew that the relationship that he and Dean shared was codependent, unhealthy, borderline psychotic. That even if they were lovers instead of brothers, it would have been considered unhealthy to be that reliant on each other.
"Yeah..." Dawn trailed off. "Buffy means well, but she still hasn't figured out that I've been an adult for the better part of six years now, and I can make my own decisions. Even if they don't immediately involve Oxford."
"Oxford?" Sam gave her a Look. Oxford was in England, and they didn't let just any random American in. In fact, from what he remembered (not that he knew a whole ton about admissions at Oxford, because come on, but), to attend as an international student, one must have a 4.0 grade average, a lot of money, and usually connections to someone really, really important.
"Would you believe that my sister's high school librarian had connections with the British Museum, and he offered to get me in?"
"Your sister's high school librarian?" Sam asked incredulously.
"Buffy and her friends hung out there a lot in high school. Giles was always around and there for them, and kind of... you know, like a father to them. To me, too, if I'm being honest. Even though he was long gone by my time in that school."
"Hang on, back up," Sam said, pushing off the family expectations and heavy topic to ask her a far more pressing question. "Your sister's name is Buffy?"
Dawn snorted loudly. "I know, right? Mom must've been high—they shouldn't allow women to name children just out of labour. And Dad went along with it, for some reason. She sounds like some Hollywood starlet's toy Pomeranian or something. I definitely won that draw."
The elevator arrived on the fourteenth floor, and Dawn led the way out of it.
"So we're both trying to escape the expectations of overbearing older siblings?" Sam clarified.
"Sounds like it. Also, Buffy really doesn't approve of me having a sex life. Sometimes I think that she's still convinced that I'm fourteen." She arrived at whichever door was hers, and slid the key card into the lock, clicking it open smoothly and shoving her way inside. Sam followed her before it swung closed again, watching as she slid her leather jacket off of her arms and dropped it onto the chair in the corner of the room.
Then she turned to him. "I know it seems like I do this a lot, what with the way that I propositioned you, but I kinda don't," she said sheepishly. "So bear with me if it gets awkward, kay?"
"Yeah, I don't do this tons, either," Sam admitted, oddly emboldened by her nervousness.
"And usually if I do this, I'm a lot drunker than this. I figured, with the mood that I'm in, my choices were to get completely hammered and probably end up in bed with some moron who takes advantage of drunk girls, and have dubiously bad, possibly inadvisable and unsafe sex; or stay mostly sober and pick someone attractive who'll actually give me a good time, be safe and smart and avoid any accidents—give us both a good night, and any biting in the ass happens now, and consensually instead of later when I end up pregnant or with an STD."
"That sounds... smart," Sam agreed somewhat breathlessly, inexplicably turned on by her ability to babble without taking a breath. He wondered how long she'd be able to wrap her lips around his cock before she needed to pause for breath.
"So, I don't do this a lot," she continued, advancing towards him on unsteady feet. "But I'm pretty sure it starts something like this."
In the heeled boots, she was tall enough to curve her arms around his neck and pull him downwards. Sam didn't put up any resistance as their lips slotted together, just placed one hand on the back of her neck, leaning her head back and opening her up for a deeper kiss. Their tongues tangled, and Sam backed her towards the bed.
...
They had laid together for a while, covered in sweat and kissing lazily before Sam reluctantly sat up. "I should... go. My brother."
"You don't have to," Dawn offered. "No strings doesn't mean no comfort. Stick around, we can do that when we wake up."
It was tempting. But the possibility that Lucifer might visit his dreams, might see her in his mind somehow, nagged at him.
"I really don't think—"
Sam was cut off by the sound of wings in the room, just out of sight. Dawn sat up quickly. "What was that?"
"Cas?" Sam called, trying to see. "Is that you? I'm kind of busy."
"Not Cassie, Samsquatch." Sam swore loudly.
"Gabriel."
"Hey, kiddo."
"What are you doing here? We should've left you in the holy fire!" Sam snarled.
"Alright, who the hell are you, and what the hell are you doing in my hotel room?" Dawn demanded, swinging out of bed, pulling the sheet with her for modesty's sake. She tucked it deftly around her body, and then opened the bedside table and yanked out—a loaded crossbow.
"My dear Miss Summers," Gabriel greeted Dawn with a smirk firmly entrenched on his features. "The archangel Gabriel, at your service. I must say, it's something of an honor."
"How do you know my name? I didn't even tell him my last name," Dawn snapped.
"Dawn Marie Summers. And you're the Slayer's sister. One of the big players. Heaven keeps an eye on those, you know. Even when an archangel is busy playing pagan god, he overhears things."
Sam sat down, hard, on the end of the bed. He vaguely registered that he was still naked, but frankly, it was probably nothing that Gabriel hadn't seen before during his stint as a pagan trickster. "I thought that the Slayer was a myth."
Dawn's brow furrowed. "How do you even know what a Slayer is?" She demanded, swinging the crossbow in his direction.
Sam stared at it, alarmed. Being skewered on a crossbow bolt would probably hurt, even if Gabriel would be able to heal the damage—if he felt like it, which was debateable.
"Samuel Winchester, meet Dawn Summers. Sam's a hunter, Dawn," Gabriel drawled, sounding delighted. "Also, the idiot who happened to break the world, but we'll get into that one later."
"I thought that the Slayer was a myth," Sam repeated helplessly.
"Well, you were mythtaken," Dawn said, going back to pointing the crossbow at Gabriel, a move that Sam approved of most strenuously. "Oh, god, did I really just say that?" She raised her free hand to her mouth. "Damnit, Buffy," she muttered.
"The Slayer is one hundred percent real, Sammy," Gabriel said cheerfully. "And I must say, you really know how to pick your hookups, because this one made me change my mind."
"What?"
"I'll help you," Gabriel snapped. "Alright? I'll. Help. You. You and your idiot brother, and whatever your insane plan to put my brother down is. I'll help you, even though I think that it's a lost cause."
"Why?" Sam demanded, eyeing the archangel with a mixture of hope and trepidation.
"Because your little one-night stand with the Slayer's sister reminded me of something, Sammy."
"What?" Dawn demanded, inserting herself back into the conversation. "Is going on?"
"The apocalypse," Gabriel said. Dawn opened her mouth, but Gabriel interrupted her before she could speak. "I know, I know, you and your family have put down the end of the world more times than you can even count, but this is the actual apocalypse. The Christian, biblical apocalypse. Hell on earth, four horsemen ride, rivers of fire, Lucifer... all that jazz."
Dawn took this far better than Sam expected her to. She set the crossbow onto the bed and adjusted her sheet. "Okay. How do we stop it?"
"See, that's what I like about you people—no demon blood, no betraying each other, no lying through your teeth—no fucking around and releasing the devil," Gabriel said pointedly. Sam flinched with each remark. "Yet, you've thwarted destiny so many times it makes even me hope that maybe, you can do it again."
"I'm still not sure that I entirely understand who you are," Dawn said.
"I told you, the Archangel Gabriel. The holy messenger."
"And you're in my hotel room, because..." Dawn prompted.
"Because the other day, I told Sammy and his idiot of a brother that the apocalypse had started, and that it couldn't be stopped. Then, two nights later, the Slayer's baby sister is looking for a random hookup in a random bar, and she happens to waltz her way into Sam Winchester's bed. Talking about destiny? Because that's a pretty big portent. Buuuuttt, you seem kind of busy, Sammy," Gabriel said gleefully. "So I think I'll go and bother Dean-o and Castiel now. Maybe I can provoke them into doing more than eye-fucking."
"Trust me," Sam muttered, dragging a hand through his messy hair. "I've tried." Gabriel full-out laughed, at that, and disappeared with a snap of his fingers.
Dawn sat down on the other side of the bed, avoiding looking at him. "You're a hunter?"
"Yeah. Grew up on the road. A demon killed my mom when Dean was four and I was a baby, and our dad was obsessed with revenge. Spent our entire childhoods hunting for that demon from coast to coast, killing everything else that we ran across. What about you?"
"Grew up on a Hellmouth," Dawn sighed. "Buffy... well, she did her best, but she had Slaying to do, and I was kind of on my own after mom died when I was fourteen. Seriously, though, I have seen a lot of things in my life. But... is he really an angel?"
Sam huffed out an exhausted sigh. "Yes," he muttered.
"Like, from heaven?"
"Unfortunately," Sam half-snarled. "Well, not Gabriel. He ran away from home a couple of millennia ago, he's been playing pagan trickster ever since. I'm a bit sensitive on the subject of Gabriel, since the last time I saw him, he trapped my brother and I in TV Land and made us play ridiculous roles on a bunch of stupid shows. There was even one of those godawful infomercials for a genital herpes medication, and I had to do one of those..." Sam shuddered. "Confession things. Also, there was a Japanese game show called Nutcracker. I'm sure you can imagine..."
Dawn snorted. "Doesn't seem to have permanently damaged you at all," she said. Sam blushed, but also appreciated the compliment.
"And a procedural cop show. And this stupid sitcom, God, I wanted to claw my eyes out."
"Okay, that sounds... unpleasant, but—"
"And the last time I saw him before that, he trapped me in a Groundhog Day time loop and made me watch my brother die every day to teach me the lesson that I couldn't save him, because he had sold his soul to hell and I was trying to get him out of the deal."
"Your brother sold his soul!" Dawn yelled, horrified.
"Yeah," Sam grimaced. "I suppose, since you've been dragged into this mess, you need to hear the whole sordid tale. Please don't hate me after I'm done with it, okay?"
"Trust me," Dawn said darkly. "I've seen some bad things, and I've forgiven some ridiculous ones. I doubt that you can compare from when Willow absorbed a bunch of dark magic and decided that the world needed to end so that humanity's suffering no longer prevailed. Seriously, she was actually thinking of it like some kind of giant mercy killing."
"I released the devil from his cage," Sam announced flatly, figuring that it was best to get the big one out of the way. "I jumpstarted Armageddon like two-thousand years early, and I'm Lucifer's true vessel—which means that I'm basically the only thing that's standing between what's left of the planet and total destruction."
"Back up," Dawn ordered, eyeing him with scrutiny. "Vessel?"
"Angels—their true forms will burn a human's eyes out," Sam explained quickly. "They inhabit a human vessel while on earth, but only people from certain bloodlines can contain them. The humans need to give consent, explicit, understanding consent. Archangels are even more difficult to contain, so they need a specific vessel. I'm Lucifer's. Dean is Michael's. Gabriel... I'm not sure exactly what is going on with his vessel. Or Raphael, really."
"And Lucifer is the devil."
"Yeah," Sam sighed.
"And he wants to, what, possess you?"
"Pretty much, yeah."
Dawn whistled through her teeth. "That sounds rough, man. Seriously, that sucks."
"Sorry, did you miss the part where I'm the one that let him out?" Sam asked incredulously.
"Did you do it on purpose?" Dawn spoke to him as if he were a child, and despite the fact that this was a woman that he had just spent the last couple of hours having very adult, carnal relations with, he answered her by dropping his eyes down.
"No," he muttered petulantly, eyeing the blue-and-yellow checkered carpeting.
"What happened, then?"
"I guess I should start at the beginning, then," Sam sighed. He laid back on the bed—because this was a long, gut-wrenching story, and he might as well be comfortable while telling it. "It started because I was an idiot, and I got my ass killed."
...
"Wow," Dawn finally sighed, after about ten full minutes of stunned silence.
"Yeah."
"Okay, first of all, got to get this out of the way. It isn't your fault."
Sam stared at her. He had expected yelling, or anger, or at least sadness, but instead, she seemed vehement. He wasn't sure exactly what sort of experience that she had with the supernatural, only that he had Gabriel's word that she'd be able to help him.
"What? I let loose Satan, Dawn. Me dying is the reason that Dean sold his soul, and the first seal was broken in the first place. I killed Lilith. I drank demon blood."
"Okay, first of all, nobody made Dean sell his soul. That was his choice, and it's on him—along with whatever choices that he made in hell. I'm not saying that I blame him for that, because I'm sure that I would've broken, too—just like anyone else in that situation. But you can't wander through life blaming yourself for your brother's choices."
"But—"
"Sam. I have more than enough experience dealing with my older sibling dying for me. She didn't go to hell, but she died. For me. And for awhile, the guilt ate me up inside, before Spike finally smacked some sense into me. Buffy made the choice that she did so that I could live. She loved me enough to give up her life so that I could have one. And I owed it to her to get over it, and learn how to be happy again. Doing anything else would cheapen what she gave up for me. And the same is true for Dean, except even moreso, because Buffy went to heaven and Dean sold his soul knowing that he'd end up in hell. Forever. Being tortured."
Sam made a strangled noise in the back of his throat. "Thought you said that your sister is bugging you? If she's dead..."
"Buffy's not dead anymore," Dawn said, dismissing his comment with a wave of her hand.
Sam snorted. "Guess we're more alike than I thought."
"I know, right? Okay, secondly, you aren't to blame, either. You've basically been manipulated and groomed and treated like a damn chess piece for your entire life, leading up to this moment. The guys upstairs are douchebags. The guys downstairs are douchebags, but hey—at least they're honest about what they are, so I'm actually more inclined to appreciate them, at the moment. They've been pulling you between them like a puppet on a string for your entire life, and all you did was what you were manipulated to do."
"Wow," Sam said. "Thanks, I guess."
"Don't mention it. Like I said, Willow nearly ended the world, once. She would've, if Xand hadn't talked her down. And nobody made her summon Osiris and try to resurrect Tara."
"Sounds like you've been down the road and around the block a few times yourself," Sam offered, eyeing her speculatively.
"Well. You've had it worse. Much worse. But yeah, can't deny that I've seen a few things."
"We should get to Dean," Sam said finally, interested in her life story, but willing to wait to hear it. "If Gabriel's bugging him, I wouldn't want to be him right about now. But... Gabriel, actually helping us? I think we've got a chance."
"Oh, you've got more than a chance, honey," Dawn patted his shoulder. "Because now, you've got me. And my entire overprotective family, the International Watcher's Council. Professional Apocalypse Averters, really."
Somehow, that was really, really comforting.