Prologue
Smooth on his feet, the man entered the crowded pub and stood at the entrance with the door wide open behind him, letting in streaks of orange sunlight that broke through clouds of dust rising from the floorboards. His entrance made little impact: few of the building's occupants turned their heads, but those who did consciously stopped to take in the appearance of the stranger. Ruggedly shaven—something most men didn't bother with these days—his face was bruised and scarred. He wore a leather jacket that's large size should have dwarfed him but somehow strengthened his intimidating demeanor. It was tattered and torn with bullet holes, the worn material covered in dark blood stains. A bulge in the waist of his jeans told anyone who paid attention that he was carrying.
The stranger looked around, chin raised, as if appraising the place. The few who had noticed his arrival automatically swelled with distrust, hands going to the guns in their belts and the knives in their boots.
"Hey!" he called, voice rough and fierce, grating against the nerves of his alert observers, whose grips tightened on their weapons, but not loud enough to reach the attention of the rowdy drunks at the bar and the couples dancing wildly to the tinny music crawling out of the speakers of the bar's barely functioning jukebox.
In a flash, the stranger whipped out his pistol and with a shattering blast of noise unfamiliar to no living man's ears, blew a bullet through the splintering floorboard. Pieces of wood skidded across the room, and the walls trembled. In the same second, the bustling cacophony that filled the room like a glass of water ceased and every patron, man or woman, drunk or sober, was on his feet, weapon of choice braced in hand and aimed at the enemy in the doorway.
No one's grip relaxed when they heard the stranger's gun click to safety. He slipped the piece back into his waistband and raised both hands in a show of peace—or surrender.
"Woah," he said innocently, "I'm not here to hurt anyone. I'm lookin' for someone is all. One question; then I'm out of your hair."
He widened his eyes and regarded the room with genuine sincerity. Unprompted to elaborate, he continued, "Any o' you happen to know the where-a-bouts of one Sam Winchester?"
Audible unease gripped the room. The weapons shook in the patron's hands or dropped to their sides in their shock. The murmurs and obvious fear did not faze the man, whose gaze continued to pass from stranger to stranger, as if he expected any of them to respond to his insane request. He let his hands fall to his sides and faced over two dozen weapons without a quiver of fear in his eyes.
The old pub's owner slid over the bar top, the sharpened machete he kept hidden in a niche under the bar loosely gripped in his callused hand. The crowd parted to let him swagger toward the man in the doorway, who didn't falter at the sight of the enormous weapon; the steady rhythm of his boots thudding on the wooden floor competed only with the slow creaking of the ever-swaying, iron chandelier that hung from the ceiling and made the flickering shadows on the walls shift ominously as if the completely still room was full of dancing ghosts.
The bartender came face to face with the stranger, expression sharp but attitude visibly at ease, as if to prove that he had long lost the instinct to tremble in fear or turn his back from a threat; to show his enemy, with no more than the fire in his single, unscarred eye, the corners of Earth's Hell he'd seen. Still, the cocky stranger's bold manner didn't waver. Though several inches shorter than his opponent, there was no question he was an even match.
"Sam Winchester," the owner repeated with a cock of his head, puffing out his chest and flexing his impressive muscles—something that made the stranger snort without even attempting to hide the smirk that played at his lips. He raised his machete and braced the tip against the soft skin of the stranger's neck, "You mean the Anti-Christ—the one who did all this to our planet?"
Something stone cold, hard, and unfamiliar to the patrons who had been watching the man since his arrival came over his visage. Any sign of amusement was ripped right from his young face, which suddenly looked much older and wiser, the lines at his eyes and mouth deepening and the triad of jagged scars—that trailed directly under his left eye, down his cheek, and across his jaw—growing impossible more stark as his tan skin reddened.
"No," he countered, voice tight with repressed rage. He leaned against the sharp point under his chin until it drew a drop of blood, meeting the bartender's Armageddon-haunted eyes with a fire of his own. "I mean my little brother."
2004 – 5 years earlier
Stanford's guidance counselor office was an old, brick building on the edge of campus, filled with little women, their hair in tight buns, and overweight men in thick glasses, arrogance gleaming in their magnetized eyes. The stuffy air reeked of stale cleaning supplies and the stress sweat of troubled students.
Sam shifted on the itchy couch, nervous and twitchy with the prickling sensation of needles under him. His appointed counselor, Molly Something, sat across from him in her giant, green armchair, both legs hiked up Indian-style, her long, brown skirt draped over her lap. An untouched notepad rested on her knee. The bangles and beaded bracelets on her wrists noisily stirred the still air every time she moved, making Sam flinch.
He avoided her expectant eye, mentally tracing patterns in the quilt hung over her desk in the corner of the office. It seemed big for a building this size with the amount of counselors employed; besides the sofa, arm chair, and desk, there was a bookshelf, loose books scattered around it, a filing cabinet decorated with a fall-colored rug, and a large empty area behind the couch, various board and card games stacked against the wall. The room was designed to be a comfortable environment, but Sam was not.
"Why don't you tell me about your dream, Sam?" Molly prompted. She had a warm but professional air about her. "That is why you're here, isn't it?"
Sam nodded. Jess's relentless insistence had dragged him to the office to make an appointment, something that seemed minor at the time, but now that he was here, faced with the prospect of confiding in a stranger, his nerves had struck him silent.
"It's okay to be nervous," she assured him, her gesticulations jostling her bracelets, the noise rattling around in Sam's frenzied mind, "I just want to help you however I can."
"I know," Sam ground out, angry firecrackers bursting in his chest. He hated feeling like a child; though her tone was perfectly respectful and dignifying, her words made Sam feel small, like a wounded animal. "It's just… I'm fine, really."
"Then why are you here?" Molly asked seriously, like she wanted a genuine answer and not an existential one.
"Because my girlfriend wanted me to come," Sam admitted. If you don't want to tell me about these nightmares, that's fine, Jess had told him last week after waking him, thrashing and hysterical, from a nightmare, but you have to tell someone.
"You've told her about the nightmares?" Molly guessed, scribbling something down on her notepad.
"No, not really. She knows about them because she has to wake me from them sometimes."
"Has she asked you to share them with her?"
"Yeah." Sam broke eye contact, avoiding the scrutiny he felt under, gaze darting from the patterned quilt to his fingertips pulling the loose thread on his sweatshirt.
"Why is that?"
Her stubby paint-chipped fingernails tap-tap-tapped the edge of her notebook, a rhythm of four hollow thuds driving Sam mad. A plastic grocery bad holding a couple legal pads by the door crinkled every time a breeze from this drafty goddamn building slipped under the door, and Sam's teeth began to grind.
"Sam, are you alright?" Molly asked, jostling her fucking bracelets again.
"Yes!" Sam snapped, tersely, inappropriately hostile, making Molly jump. He took a slow, calming breath. "I just don't need Jess knowing what kind of severe crap I have goin' on up there, okay? She doesn't believe I can deal with my issues on my own."
"But you aren't, are you?" she retorted. Her bluntness threw Sam off; he should have known she'd see through his lies, and even more so that she would call him out on them. It was kind of her job, in a way.
"I don't need therapy," he stated, flattening out his nerve-wracked expression so he looked as sane and well-adjusted as a Stanford student could.
"Well, you're here," she shrugged, ignoring his deterrence, "So why don't you just tell me about that nightmare?"
Sam thought about lying, trussing up some lame nightmare with an obvious explanation, but he was positive now that she'd see through it. Besides, something about the recurring dream that drew him here actually terrified him in a way that nothing outside reality should be able to after the parts of it Sam had seen. Nightmares had always plagued him, but never before had they woken him night after night either screaming or paralyzed with fear; pale, sweating, and shaking at the images he'd just seen. Maybe she could help him.
So Sam conceded and told her the details of the nightmare, watching the tattered edge of her skirt caress the carpet, ignoring his anxious curiosity when he saw her writing in his periphery. It started with him and Jess on their bed, her screaming his name, watery and shrill. In her panic, she would grapple at him, cling to him like she was drowning, fingers dragging down the weak fabric of his t-shirt, sharp nails breaking his skin.
She'd shout curses and whimper pleas, and Sam wouldn't understand what the hell was happening until he began to see the dresser behind her through her head.
"You're vanishing," Sam would say into Jess's hair, her shivering body pressed against him. "Does it hurt?" Sam would ask her, petting her head and rubbing her back, unnerved by the clear view of his hand tangled in her curls. She wouldn't answer, weeping quietly into his chest.
Then the other screams would start, leaking crisply through the open window from the street below and muffled through their apartment walls, and Sam would tell Jess, "It's not just you," as if that knowledge would comfort her. He would try to count the sources of the screams, as if he could use the information to magically produce a cure.
He left out the part in his retelling where he'd tell Jess he could fix this; he knew about things that could fix this. It was a lie anyway, and Jess was too hysterical to ever hear him.
Eventually his hands would slip through the space Jess had been laying, the impression of her weight on his chest and lap would disappear as would the sensation of her warm fingers of his back, and her clothes would fall to the bed from midair. He would be left alone with the screams, flickering out like light bulbs down a long hallway, until only those from the people left behind remained.
A force beyond Sam's understanding would then draw him to the window so he could watch the Earth split open. With an ear-splitting, cracking roar that shook the floor under Sam's feet, an abyss would tear itself into the asphalt street below him. People near the scene would dart for shelter, running with piles of clothes clutched to their chests.
Out of the chasm would fly a swell of Hellish creatures, winged, horned, scaly monsters swarming the sky like flies in a neglected kitchen. They soared through the streets, snatching bystanders with their talons and tearing them apart, drenching the sidewalks in heavy pools of blood.
One of the creatures—no bigger than an eagle, sleek black skin glowing blindingly against the flaring sun, its wings lined with razor-sharp spikes—would fly up to Sam's window and meet his wide eyes with its own red, beady pair.
Its beak-like mouth would open and, adopting Sam's voice but darker, like it had a growl stuck in the back of its throat, would say, "The Rapture will come, and Satan will rise to find his son, who at the end of seven years' Hell, will fight the second coming of Christ." Then it would soar back to the storm of chaos that Sam stood watching until Jess or his hysteria woke him, and he found himself sweaty and thrashing in bed, Jessica, solid and alive, next to him.
"That's quite a dream." Molly commented a few minutes after he'd finished, which she'd spent bent over her notepad, pen scratching away. Sam snorted. "Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it? It's the same every time?"
"Yeah."
"How often do you have it?"
"A few times a week."
"And when did it start?"
"A few weeks ago."
Molly put on her thinking face and eyed him carefully. A hint of worry chilled his bones. Maybe he shouldn't have told her all that; Dad would go crazy if he knew Sam was honest with an everyday counselor.
"Are you religious?" she queried, tapping her pencil against the inside of her wrist.
"I mean, kind of. I believe in God, but I'm not a fanatic. I'm not afraid of Satan climbing out of Hell and giving me a hard time."
She nodded, but her eyebrows drew closer together and her appraising gaze tightened on Sam. "The dream clearly seems like a manifestation of your—perhaps repressed—fears. Maybe you're afraid Jess might slip through your fingers because you don't confide in her." Sam almost jumped to defend himself at the accusation, but his defiance broke under the full weight of her theory. Sam wasn't actively worried about losing Jess, but she did get frustrated with him when he refused to share details of his childhood, and maybe some deep part of him knew she might get fed up if he kept it up.
"But I can't discern any obvious meaning behind the rest of the dream," she continued, "You can't think of anything that would cause the religious aspect? No intimidating sermons that freaked you out as a kid?"
"My family didn't go to church," he corrected lightly.
She hummed and continued wiggling her pencil. "Well, I don't know you well enough to guess what fears could cause those fantastical horror in your dream. There's nothing off the top of your head you can think of? Something stressful in your life right now, some childhood fear or memory that seems relevant?"
"No," Sam lied.
She nodded like she hadn't expected another answer. "That's alright. We're out of time anyhow. If you want, you can make another appointment for next week. I'll crack open my book on symbolism in dreams this week, and we'll try to figure out what's bothering you then."
"Sounds good," Sam agreed, standing to shake her hand and leave. She opened the door for him, nodding her wild head of hair at him as he passed, cooing it was nice meeting you, see you soon, have a good week.
He eyed the secretary as he speed-walked past the reception desk, afraid if he didn't make another appointment she'd snap at him or jump over her desk, snarling with her bared teeth, and wrap her hands around his throat. He thought about it, but he'd only promised Jess one and it had proven itself nearly as unhelpful as he'd guessed it would. Molly was right about confiding in Jess more, though his reasons for not were both plenty and legitimate. It was also comforting to be able to convince himself the nightmare was just his fears, the trauma of his old life, leaking through the inevitable cracks of his safe life with Jess, the part of his mind that would always fear for her safety, knowing what he knows and having pissed off the kinds of dangerous creatures his family had pissed off.
This didn't mean the dream would stop haunting him—he hadn't solved any problems beyond identifying them, and while Molly probably could have helped him sort through the severe crap eating his grapefruit, she couldn't realistically help him that much without knowing the gory details, which Sam would never tell her. But it was a flutter of reassurance that the dream was nothing more or less than terrifying pictures in his head, and they'd eventually stop bothering him.
The aroma of tomato sauce greeted Sam when he got home. He entered the kitchen to Jess sweating over a pot of spaghetti, and he planted a kiss on her temple.
"So, how'd it go?" she asked, wasting no time, glaring at him through a billow of steam. Looking at her through its translucent mistiness struck him cold, reminding him of her vanishing in his arms.
"Alright. She said I should share more stuff with you."
"Smart lady," she remarked, "What about the nightmare?"
She replaced the pot's lid, and turned the stove's fire down to blue, match-sized flames. The noodles looked done, but Jess held up her index finger when he reached for the bowl cabinet. She led him to the kitchen table, the chairs screeched against the linoleum floor as they sat.
"She didn't know what it was about, other than the part about you, but that was just a guess."
"I'm in the dream?" Jess asked, surprised.
"Yeah. You die, kind of."
"And she decoded that to mean you should share with me more?"
"I guess."
"Hm. And doing that will make the nightmares stop?"
Bewilderment muddled Sam's overwhelmed mind. "What?" he sputtered, "No—I don't know. That's not what she said—that's not the only part of the dream."
"Then how do you get rid of it?"
"I don't know! We didn't get that far. Jesus, it was only an hour; did you expect us to cure cancer while we were in there, too?"
Jess rolled her eyes but the edges of a smirk teased her lips. "So you made another appointment then?"
"Uh, no—" he admitted awkwardly.
Her expression turned sharp, tight lips a straight, unsmiling line. "Why not?"
"I think it'll just go away on its own," he fought tiredly. A dull ache had begun to throb behind his eyes.
"It hasn't yet!" she countered.
Sam shrugged helplessly, feeling as if he'd already lost this fight, barely able to muck up the energy to keep it going. His head hurt. "I get that the dream is just shit that's bothering me and fucking with my head. I'll get over it."
"I can't believe you actually think—" Jess's explosive utterances were washed away by the pain in his head, suddenly hiking up to an unbearable level. He squeezed his eyes shut against the sickening light, which brightly shimmered against everything in the room, the gleaming, plastic tabletop, the white-blonde threads of Jess's silky hair, the reflection of the sun through the window in the sink's shiny faucet.
The roaring waves rushing through his ears blocked out all sound. Out of the blank slate behind his eyelids, blurs of color began to appear, nameless, faded splotches in the dark, transcendental plane Sam could see.
The crisp image of his mother came into shape, standing between the pools of color, looking exactly as she did in the only picture Sam had of her, young and alive, her heart pumping life through her veins.
"Mom," Sam murmured, trying to reach out to her, but he had no solidity in this empty dimension, nothing more than a colorful stream of consciousness.
She tilted her head and grinned fully at him; a motherly smile that held all the love Sam had never received from her, making up for all the years he had to live without her in a single expression of maternity.
The colorful smudges on either side of Mary solidified into the shapes of Jess and his father, their hands clasped in hers like they were attached, extensions of Mary's sentience, whatever power helped her exist in this dimension without dissolving into a million light particles.
"Sam," Mary said, intimately, like it was the most important thing he could tell her, "The Rapture will come, and Satan will rise to find his son, who at the end of seven years' Hell, will fight the second coming of Christ."
What does that mean? Sam tried to say, straining his throat to make sound and failing.
Wing-shaped silhouettes haloed in a white glow extended from her shoulders, their breadth stretching past Jess and John and reaching twenty feet over her head. They made no movement, but managed still to lift Mary into the void sky, higher and further from Sam's limited line of sight until she tugged the hands held in hers, and they, too, began to hover.
They disappeared into the transcendental nothing until Sam watched the tips of their toes slip out of his tunnel of vision. Without their presence, the darkness cloaked him, like a layer of liquid metal clinging to his skin, suffocating him. His skull began to crack under the pressure, his migraine returning, an excruciating pulse in his temples and behind his eyes. He became aware of his knees on the cold floor and gentle hands gripping his shoulders.
He opened his eyes to Jess in his face, eyebrows high on her forehead, a worried line crinkling the mole between them. "Sam, what the hell was that?" she demanded, her shrill voice like a crowbar shoving its pronged end in the crown of his skull. He shoved the heels of his hands against his forehead, trying to push down the hot lava filling his head fit to burst.
"I…," he groaned, "I have no idea. What did it look like?"
"It looked like you freaking collapsing out of nowhere!" Jess exploded, though at the desperate plea obvious in Sam's pained face, she took a calming breath and cradled his curled-up body in her arms. "I'm sorry," she whispered, strained. "You just—spaced out, and I thought you'd just stopped listening to me, but then… your eyes rolled back in your head, and you collapsed." She stopped to breathe long, hot breathes into Sam's hair, but he could tell from her rapidly beating heart that wasn't all she saw.
His headache still pulsed dully, and Jess's warm skin all over his made him nauseas, but he couldn't move, paralyzed by fear and pain and confusion, held down by the weight of what Jess saw happen to him.
"You said something just before you woke up," Jess continued. "It was…weird, I don't know what it meant, it didn't even sound like you."
"Jess, what was it?" he asked desperately, though he had a good idea what he'd said.
"It…I don't remember word for word, but it was something about…something about the Rapture a-and Satan. I-I don't know, Sam, I don't know." She began to ramble, words pouring out of trembling lips. She kept wrenching her fingers through the hair at the back of Sam's head, the sharp sting muted by a broken detachment from the present.
"Shit," Sam breathed.
"Sam, I'm scared for you," Jess told him, voice wrecked, as he worried the same for her.
Sam began to fear for Jess's safety. Somewhere between the never-ending nightmares and randomly keeling over to see his dead mother taking Jess away, he'd convinced himself the universe was trying to warn him about something. He rarely let Jessica out of his sight—he walked her to her classes, studied with her, hung out at the table in the corner of the coffee shop while she worked. It made Jess uneasy—not his presence, but his avid attentiveness to her and negligence of himself, his sudden drop in studies, his declining social life.
Jess kept begging him to get help, to make another appointment with Molly, with anyone, but he told her no. He told her he didn't need counseling, he couldn't tell her why, but there were more important things now than his sanity—but she didn't understand, of course she didn't, Sam didn't even understand what he was doing, why he was resting the fate of everything on a dream.
He could feel a tension birthing itself in the wet, sticky air between them, like a string attached to each of them growing tauter and tauter until it was bound to snap. Sam feared for the future of their relationship, that he was stripping apart everything they'd built with his bare, shaking hands. He could see it in the way Jess's eyes were constantly filled with worry and fear and even a hint of resentment, in the way she made her voice gentler now when she spoke to him, like she was afraid he would break under too much pressure.
He didn't delude himself with notions that the strength of their love would keep them together even as Sam spiraled into paranoia and neuroses, and he waited for the day when Jess had had enough and broke it off, hoped it would happen after he saved her from what he needed to save her from. Whatever that was—Satan, the Rapture, it didn't matter what the visions meant as long as he protected Jess.
Bottom line—he was losing. He knew it. Jess knew it. He was less balanced now than when he thought the nightmares were manifestations of his stress and fear, which seemed backwards. Terror froze him solid, stuck him inside this constant state of anxiety until he found himself wondering if maybe he had overreacted. If knowing what he knew about the world had finally driven him insane, his knowledge of the supernatural infecting this sense of normalcy that he'd created and ultimately, under the pretense of danger, destroyed.
And then two weeks later, they sat down for supper and Jess started screaming.