Author's Notes: Back after a prolonged break, due to unexpected illness. This was written for the Summer of Evil 2013 at evilsam_spn on LJ. It makes me sad. Please review :)

South of Palo Alto, blood-milk tinged twilight, and a nameless, driftwood-strewn beach.

He started walking in San Gregorio, but this is a new place, quiet and desolate as dreamlessness. It might as well be another world, new geography; Wonderland-shore or an Innsmouth monster-beach, Sam doesn't care either way.

It's quiet; deliriously so. His mouth tastes like ash and the bitter wormwood taste of rage, but he won't spit. Can't disrupt the silence. There's a gleaming holiness in it.

Past cinnamon-colored slopes of pine-needle blankets are redwoods and douglas firs, murmuring in the way only trees do. And past that, somewhere far away, is a dark country road shining wet in memory of rain. Deep Cove Road, it's called. Or something like that. Maybe nothing like it. He's been a compulsive liar long enough that he can't distinguish his own lies. In 1936, someone cut a girl in half and interred her deep in the shadows of the redwoods, and there were silvered hollows in her slatted ribcage when they dug her out again. How does Sam know this is the question the voice of reason must ask, but then the voice of reason is buried beneath ghosts, a pile of ghosts limbs-a-tangle, and he looks for the blonde women in that mess—the two blonde women who were interred in fire—but they all scream for attention and his head hurts.

Close his eyes and he sees Jess: her eyes were never sunset-gold in life but now they smother.

Her eyes eat up the sky; twin dark suns betrayed of prophesy.

You knew, she says.

Close his eyes and he sees her on the ceiling. Close his eyes and he sees her in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford, paint-splattered, her face green as she smiles at him from behind a forest of swaying kelp and gleaming aquarium fishes.

Close his eyes and here she is, and he skims her bare shoulder with his fingertips, and she breathes a sigh against his lips.

Swallow; and he tastes fire.

The beach is not empty. There's a man on a cardboard box with a saxophone in his arms, making beautiful songs. Where did he come from? Not that Sam gives a damn.

The notes spill like drops of sunshine and scalds the air. "That's not a good idea, Sam," the man says.

Sam realizes that. Does this man not think he knows what he's doing, wading out into the choppy rough-dark sea?

He'd like to shatter cleanly on diamond-sharp rocks and forget the girl on the ceiling, the paramedics, the night coughing at the hospital and pushing at his mind because you knew, Sam, you knew; you knew she was going to die.

Coughing, tasting ash, grieving his girlfriend, and testing for breakwaters in his brain.

He'd looked up at that bright hospital ceiling and opened doors inside his head. His head had filled to the brim with cataclysmic voices, a choral of evil angels, a raw implosion of acid sound.

And then that insane kaleidoscopic explosion of windows and doors and the burning of that nurse's eyes and the screaming in his head, the screaming like falling, like losing hold on every crevice, every nook and cranny of his mind he's held onto since he was born.

Falling, falling into new places where he is not Sam Winchester, not him, not human.

And he'd stood up on shaky legs and walked past the screaming eyeless nurse, walked to a mirror and what did the reflection look like?

It looked just like him.

How will he then separate the two? The human and the supernatural; the innocent and the tainted? Unless there is nothing to separate and he is you, you are him; entangled forever, one beginning not where the other ended but pressed up against each other, cell by cell.

So, yes, issue at hand: the sea. The beach.

Consider clinically the temperature of the water. Cold, yes?

"Sam," says the saxophone man.

"Shut up," says Sam, and it occurs to him that he might be drunk. Irrational thoughts and all that, you know. His brain is coughing up Emily Dickinson quotes. That lady wrote a lot about death. Death kindly stopped for me. Does Death do pit-stops in nameless beaches? Death must work on a co-ordinate system, right? Like Dad and Dean, but hey, you idiot—don't fucking go there.

(Okay, definitely drunk.)

He shakes his head, keeps walking into the sea till he can't walk anymore and then he swims, until there's a tight, pulling pain in his leg. Done. He can't go back now, and anyway, the beach is a far blue stripe. He looks up and the stars are spinning maddeningly, coughing rainbow sparks.

The sea grabs at him and he gets a mouthful of saltwater. It strangles him. The water pushes him down. He gasps for air and there is no time to get a lungful when he bobs up, and the pain in his chest is intense. It drives out all thought. This is his life: a string of bubbles trailing from his lips and bounding desperately to the surface.

And you know, it would have ended there if he hadn't been looking at the bubbles. It would have ended there if instead, he were staring at the bottom, at the sedimentary rocks withering below, rocks as old as time or older still.

But he's looking at the bubbles, Sam is. With some childish wonder. He's looking at the bubbles and he's choking, floundering, and that's when he sees the angel.

Bright, brilliant seraph. It bobs up to him on a boat and it has a saxophone, and its orange-gold light burns the water and burns him and in that burning is a metempsychosis: a rebirth.

Dean finishes up his hoodoo thing in New Orleans, Louisiana, even managing to get a night in Bourbon Street (bendy blonde included) before he starts worrying, because worrying is always at the fringes of his consciousness. Like that unwanted friend you still greet. Hi, how are you, please go away.

There's a message the next day from Dad, saying only 'Stanford' and so he goes, worrying all the way. Looks at the husk of Sam's apartment building, asks around and finds nothing. He drives to the hospital with the burned-out-eyes nurse and checks out the broken glass, the surveillance camera. Then he sits for an hour in the hospital parking lot blaring AC/DC through the car speakers until someone raps on his window and asks him to please kindly leave or turn down the music, and so he leaves.

Bobby calls at noon the next day; something about crows. He hasn't seen Bobby in a long while. He hasn't slept either. Someone said something about Sam and San Gregorio and that's where he is, watching the surf break out. No panic yet. There should be. Instead he has question marks.

"What?"

"Carson City," Bobby says, breaking up.

"Kinda in the middle of something—"

" Just get here," says Bobby, and there's something in his tone and so Dean drives, and he doesn't get why the radio gets crazier and crazier as he does. There's something about a town dying, people just dropping like flies; something else about a whole graveyard ripped up and coffins burned; and near the Mojave Desert, people strung up along transmission lines like crows.

"Something's got major juju," Dean mutters to himself, and he laughs a bit, worries a bit more, sings a little tunelessly. There's always been gravity between Sam and Dean, a blood-and-soul puzzle, and they've pretended it didn't exist for the past four years but now Dean feels it.

Skewed and warped, but it is that channel that tells him what Bobby didn't.

"What the fuck, Sam."

The Seraph is too bright to look at, so Sam only peeks out from the corner of his eyes when he's starting to feel like it's not around him. It's like magic; like the reverse-charm of Orpheus and Eurydice. Keep looking back.

You're doing God's will, it tells him. You're chosen.

In his dreams, the world swirls to a mute blue crescendo, and there is peace in it. He lies on his back in a salty sea like a five-pointed star and the faces of the evil men and women the angel marks for him floats through the sky. That one doesn't look very evil, Sam says, and the Seraph laughs its thunderous laugh.

How would you know, it says. You don't see what they're capable of.

Look, says the Seraph, and the sky and the sea inverts so that he's over the world, looking down at it.

Sam looks. At the black-mouthed people and the garish bloody footprints they leave behind, at their leering red eyes. Their skins don't fit; tighten and tear around the sockets of their eyes, and they keep smiling to make it fit better. To hide from him. But they can't hide from Sam now. He likes that they can't hide anymore.

They're all monsters wearing skins, and he didn't see it before but he sees it now.

All right, Sam says, relieved.

His belief is a sandcastle that the waves sometimes washes down, but the Seraph builds it up for him again and again, and he is thankful that it does, for Sam forgets. In the midst of blood and ozone and the screaming, sometimes he's horribly dense, and he forgets.

Dean doesn't stay on in Carson City for too long. There's nothing to hunt there. Just corpses.

"Call me if you—" says Dean, and Bobby promises he will. Family and all that, you know.

In the next few months, he follows a breadcrumb trail of strangeness and blood, finding nothing, frustration mounting in him until he thinks he'll go crazy. He chases a trail of incredibly gruesome murders, finding the pattern with ease: all 1983 born, some with house-fires when they were six months old.

He lists down names and asks questions and everywhere there are reports of a tall, hazel-eyed stranger.

Dean blinks awake to the phone ringing, four months after Sam's disappearance.

Bobby says, "Waycross."

"Good. I'm in Atlanta."

"Now," says Bobby, and Dean blinks at the cell-phone until the light cuts out.

I want to stop, Sam tells the Seraph. He's sick of the blood, of the doubt, of the way the Seraph's eyes flicker a strange, awful all-black at times. He's sick of the way he feels more powerful everyday. He's sick of actually kind of liking it.

I'm tired. I want to stop.

He's in Waycross, GA.

A boy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt is gaping at him from the doorway of a roadhouse, shot glasses sliding against each other on the tray he holds in his shaking fingers. Sam can see the boy's green-gold eyes burning through the innocent brown cover, its sharp teeth, the black nothingness in its gut of shattered bone and twisted innards.

It feeds and feeds, the Seraph thunders. It destroys innocents. It corrupts. You would just let it go?

Please, Sam thinks, even as he crushes the boy's skull with a thought. He wonders when it'll all be over. If the Seraph will tell him you've done all you can, now you can go to sleep.

He's coming for you, the Seraph says instead as Sam raises his hand, blood dripping molasses-dark from his nose as he focuses on the other monsters in the roadhouse. One of them shoots at him, and the pain of it makes him reel back and clutch the door, but then he feels the Seraph's touch at the back of his mind, fluttering soft, almost caressing, and the pain ebbs away.

The one to make you doubt. He's coming for you.

Waycross, Georgia.

Through the metronome of the car wipers— a cypress-haunted, storm-darkened night.

There's no power anywhere except for Quaker's Roadhouse, and from Dean's vantage point, the building looks like something strung together before the Revolution, all antique fly-speckled glass panes and rain-swollen wood. A marshy path leads to a crooked catwalk. Beyond that is the electric-lamp glow of the roadhouse.

You in there, Sam? Dean wonders, and his fist clenches on his Berretta's barrel.

He gets out of the Impala and walks to the posse.

"I'm going in first. I want to talk to him."

"The fuck you are," curses a hunter whose name Dean doesn't even know. There are fifteen of them out in the rain. Fifteen veteran hunters gunning for his brother.

"It's dangerous, Dean," says Bobby, who has that shuttered, guarded look in his eyes like he doesn't really want to be here but sees no other choice, "He's dangerous."

"He's my brother," growls Dean, because it's been four months, he doesn't get any of it, and one way or the other this has to end today. "Give me half an hour."

"Your funeral, man," a dark hunter says, fixing Dean with a shrewd glance, "But whatever you say to him, whatever he says back, judgement's not gonna change. Kid's caused too much casualty. We're dropping him."

"Fair enough," grunts Dean, fixing eyes on the ground. What the fuck's he supposed to say?

" You only get thirty minutes, Dean. Then we're storming the place."

Twenty more steps, and Dean is at the catwalk. Yellow incandescence shines through the windows and bathes the front porch. Dean turns the handle: a rusted copper thing gone green with verdigris. The door creaks on its hinges as it opens, and Springsteen pours out into the windy night.

"Sam?"

Dean walks through blood and slow-settling dust, his heart a hammer. His permanent state of numb calmness following Sam's disappearance seems to have faded, and now he thinks, Where are you, Dad? Why aren't you here too? He thinks, I don't know what to do. He thinks, he needs to put down this gun. He thinks, it can't be Sammy. Something's probably possessing him. I can still get him back.

But then he gets to the table in the centre of the room, and that boy in the chair scratching lines into the table with his knife: that boy is just Sam. Just his brother. He looks up and smiles at Dean, flicks his wrist and shuts the door that Dean's left open. A beer mug is pushed towards Dean and he looks into it, golden froth and so many questions, and he wonders how come. How come Sam looks so tired, purple bruises beneath sleepless eyes. How come he's lost so much weight, become paler and sharper, cheekbones sharp enough in the golden light that they could have been turned out on a lathe.

"Hey, Dean," Sam says, calm and tired and hoarse. Dean's looking at him over the barrel of a gun still, and Sam locks eyes on the Berretta. "Are you gonna shoot me?"

"I don't know. You tell me if I have to."

"Sit down, Dean," Sam says, and Dean scoffs, kind of desperately, says, "You've got fifteen hunters waiting outside with your name on their bullets, and you wanna chat?"

"You're the one who wants to chat. That's why you came in first, genius."

A moment of silence, while Dean listens to Springsteen singing about darkness at the edge of town. The tune seems to bounce off the walls, forming soft soundtrack to this surreal tableaux.

A chair shoots towards him and Dean gives in, sits down, shoots the first question that comes to his mouth, "Why?"

"Why, what?"

"You want me to list it, Norman Bates? Fine. That whole town in Nevada. The people on the transmission lines in Arizona. Those kids, all over the map. I went and found them after you were done with them, Sam, and I've never seen anything worse. You ripped them apart, Sam," Dean has to grit it out, and now he's shaking, and Sam's eyes flicker with indignation, "I want to know why."

"You don't really see them, Dean," Sam says, patiently. "You don't see what they are—"

"What they are?"

"They're all monsters, Dean," Sam says, and Dean looks at the fire in his eyes, and despairs. "The Angel shows me."

A hysterical laugh rises up in Dean, like bubbles to the top of a champagne bottle. He clamps it down. "Angel. What angel?"

And so Sam tells him.

"It's a lie, Sammy," Dean says, when Sam finishes. "It's nothing but a fucking lie. That thing—whatever it is, it's lying to you."

"It told me you'd say that," Sam says, his eyes far away and glassy, and Dean grabs his wrists, forces open Sam's fingers, forces Sam to look at him instead.

"It's a monster, Sam. Those are innocent people you killed—"

"Stop it, Dean, I don't—"

"Why can't you see it? It's using you! Sam. Sammy," Dean stands up, knocking the beer mug to the floor, slamming his palms on the table. "I don't know why you can do the things you do, but we'll figure it out, we'll figure anything out, but you have to stop this, this isn't God's will, this is nothing but a lie—"

"Shut up!" Sam yells, and Dean feels his feet leave the floor; the next feeling is of intense pain as he slams into a wall, and Sam strides up to him, grabs the collar of his jacket, holding him off the floor so Dean chokes, splutters and grasps at Sam's wrist, uselessly, "You don't see what I see. You don't see the monsters. After what I did at the hospital, I thought I was the monster, Dean—"

And that, really—is the paradox here, the central point of the spinning wheel. The world moves on its wheels and axels, and being crushed to dust by what you are is worse than manning the wheel and mowing down the rest. Out of the corner of his eyes, Dean sees something move in the corner of the room, something with flickering black eyes—

"—and I couldn't—I didn't know what—but the Seraph saved me," belief blazes insanely in Sam's eyes and for the first time, Dean is not scared of what Sam has become and whether it is reversible but scared for him, for when he realizes the truth, and he tries to croak out, "Sam", but Sam is letting go, taking a step back, turning away, breathing harsh. There's dried blood on his clothes and Dean thinks of a smaller Sam, just as obstinate about the things he believed, just as stubborn, "I couldn't live with what I did, but it gave me a path. It saved me."

It saved me.

"It destroyed you," Dean whispers. His gaze finds the gun that clattered out of his hand, on the floor, but no quick movements, he thinks—

Sam whirls, furious. "What did you say?"

Piercing, incomprehensible screeching in his head; Dean drops to the ground, onto his knees, and thinks stupidly of that stupid Omen movie, of the foster-brother that dies with screeching in his head, and wonders if his brain is going to liquefy like that, from this choral screaming. His fingers scratch along the floor, scrabbling for the gun.

He spits out words he doesn't mean. "It destroyed you, Sam, look at you now. You're beyond saving. You know that. You see through this farce—"

He raises his head, tasting blood on his lips; the pain in his head is a vista, a landscape of pulsating reds that folds and unfolds; a kaleidoscope of torment.

"Shut up, Dean," Sam says, pale and angry, watching Dean, "Shut up, I don't know how to stop hurting you, so shut up!"

"You're not stupid. Do you like it then?Or maybe it's denial, huh, Sammy—"

"I'm not the monster!" Sam hisses, his eyes flashing, fists clenching. I don't want to be the monster, is what is unsaid, and that is what Dean hears; which is so Sammy, so in tune with the brother he knows, that Dean's heart breaks all over again. The room is a-whirl with flying things, tables and chairs and glasses, full bottles of whiskey that crash against walls and explodes in golden arcs, sparkling ruins. Through the breaking and shattering and Springsteen still singing about letting go of the darkness within you, with Sam still distracted and the black-eyed thing distracted watching him, Dean's fingers grab hold of the gun.

"No, you're not," Dean spits, viciously, and shoots at the thing in the back, the flickering black-eyed thing that's messed up his little brother, and the flying stuff drops to the ground with a crash as Sam turns, shocked. He watches it stumble out of the dark, eyes gleaming full of something unholy.

The screaming in his head goes silent, and Dean drops to the floor for a minute, presses his forehead to the rich dark woody scent of the floor and tries to tamp the nausea down. Through his peripheral vision, he sees the black-eyed thing's mouth open in a piercing scream, smoke pouring out of it, and he watches it swirl dark and malicious towards Sam. He's getting up without even realizing it, putting his arms around Sam and dragging him away from it. He shoots a few more bullets at the departing black cloud for good measure, and as it pours out through a broken window, Sam sags against him, and the two of them go down, on the ground, slow and entangled.

Sam says nothing, but turns his head so his face finds the space between Dean's neck and shoulder, where he's slept when he was just a baby.

"You're all right," Dean lies, and he doesn't want to think about how Sam feels so light against him, like he's made of nothing but bones. Sam's eyelashes flutter a bit and his lips are so pale, almost bluish, and there's blood darkening his shirt over his abdomen where without the demon's help, a bullet wound has become a bullet wound after all.

From outside, terrifyingly, comes the sound of a shotgun blast.

Dean's thirty minutes are over.

Some of this Sam makes up, but all of it is true.

At least the important bits where things happen to people and people happen to things. What's in his head, though, feelings if you will, he thinks he has the license to make that shit up now, doesn't he?

Like how at the end of it all, he's pretending to be calm and comprehending while Dean leans next to him and tells him strange stories about old flings and silly cases from their childhood, and now Doris Day is playing in the background. You Are My Sunshine, she sings. He pretends he understands, even tells himself he does, but truthfully, nothing makes much sense. They're in some tiny cube of a bathroom and there's blood all over the tiles, on Dean's fingers, and they leave florid red imprints against Sam's skin where Dean grips his hands zealously as he plays remember when.

"Remember when we were in Essex County? God, that waitress chick. You remember that, Sammy?"

Sam is not remembering that. Instead he thinks of some dark road in Georgia, of monsters wearing white beak masks to hide putrescence, of a fly-speckled roadhouse window. He thinks of boys in Sex Pistols T-shirts and men in cars with guns under the seats, knives in their sleeves, bullets that have Sam's name on them. He thinks of body trails and blood and belief and black-eyed angels.

He thinks of Dean and that dark lycanthropy of his brother that turns him from helpless to protective to vengeful in seconds, like a chrysalis popping open.

"Sam. Sammy, stay awake."

He can't; not through the lulling red and ebony light that pulses around him, dragging him away bit by bit.

Dean's eyes are very green and very deep. A reducing chamber of mirrors that could make you grow smaller and smaller, so small that your sins could be picked away like pomegranate seeds and scattered everywhere, where they'd do good by twisting beneath the earth; sprouting and bleeding juice as payment.

The world tilts, they're in a painting knocked askew, and there's blood pooling around his feet like the souls - the soles - of them are bleeding. Something is knocking against the door, tap tap, giant red-eyed crows with sickles for Sam's soul, and Dean's yelling, "The son of a bitch who breaks down the door is dead, no questions asked! Do you hear me?!"

And Sam looks at him, at the Beretta cocked and ready in Dean's hand, at Dean's resoluteness, at his fingers twisted in Dean's jacket, and he laughs.

-fin