Disclaimer: Kripke's toys, my sandbox. Thanks for letting me play.

A/N: First, I would like to apologize to anyone that put this on alert or reviewed last week when I first posted. There was a problem with the link system, and while FFnet allows you to delete a chapter and repost it, you can't do that when it's the first chapter and the whole thing got toasted. So if there are any of you out there who've stumbled on this fic again, I'm sorry about the confusion.

Chapter 2

Present Day:

Dean Winchester was flying down the Kentucky back roads at a pace that would make anyone other than a fighter pilot sick. The radio was off for a change, the only sound was the growl of the Impala's engine as she ate up the blacktop at her owners demand. He was trying to block out the events of the past six weeks, he needed to block out the events of the last six weeks. But sometimes Winchester determination wasn't always enough and the gruesome travesties of the recent past took to the forefront of his mind like a sick movie.

Four Weeks Ago:

A week in the panic room, a week getting used to sunshine and air again, and Sam was itching to hit the road once more. Dean didn't blame him. If he had someone on his ass watching every miniscule move he made, he'd go bat-shit too. As well meaning as Bobby was, he was completely unwilling to give Sam any room to breathe. Dean would admit, that the first few days after they let Sam out, he was staying uncomfortably close to his little brother too. The way he hovered over him reminded him of Cas and his total lack of the concept of personal space. The brief memory of the dorky, trench-coated angel made him smile before the fact that Cas turned his back on them made the half-smile melt away like it had never been. He really could have used Cas's help during Sam's recovery. A little divine intervention on the whole demon-detox bit wouldn't have gone amiss. He would've kissed the fairy-winged bastard if he coulda saved Sam the trauma he suffered locked up in the panic room, waiting for the demon blood to burn its way outta his system.

Fuck you very much, Buddy.

But all that was neither here nor there. What counted was that Sam was on the mend, and eager to get back out there. They'd been out of the game for the last two weeks, and surely, there weren't too many seals left. And there weren't enough hunters out there to deal with the magnitude of problems cropping up all over the country, let alone the world, that both knew they couldn't afford any more convalescence time.

They had work to do.

Even though Dean knew that the end of the world was hanging in the balance, he couldn't help but feel his spirits lift with Sam in the passenger seat, studying a map, making marks and circling areas where suspected demon activity was going on. Being back on the job was what they both needed, but to be completely honest, he was worried about having Sammy around demons again. He'd made huge strides the last couple days, quickly ceasing to be the mindless zombie he was to the coherent hunter riding shotgun beside him. He wanted to take it slow, do a small case first, until Sam glared at him, telling him that they couldn't afford to take it slow, and that billions of people were counting on them getting their shit together, whether those billions knew it or not.

So they followed some demonic omens to Omaha, nice and close to Bobby's if they needed him, and they trapped the sonofabitch in a Key of Solomon after Dean's jaw was nearly dislocated when the fucker punched him. Asshole smiled at them when they demanded to know where Lilith was. Smiled at them, like they weren't holding a knife that would snuff him out permanently. He just paced around the perimeter of the Key, chanting to himself while looking for a chink in the armor.

It was when he started taunting Sam that Dean lost it.

"I bet you're thirsty, Sammy-boy," the black man in the circle said in a sickeningly seductive way.

"Shut the fuck up!" Dean bellowed at their captive. Sam was looking at the trapped man in a hungry, lustful way that made his skin crawl and brought to mind the image of a blood streaked face and a hand out-stretched…

"I bet you can't stop thinking about getting your lips on my neck." The demon tilted his head to the side, stroking his Adam's apple and grinning coquettishly at the giant. "You know I taste good, Boy."

Sam swallowed hard and grit his teeth. Jaw clenched tight, he said scathingly, "He doesn't know anything, Dean. Kill him."

He did so gladly. He stepped into the circle and swung hard for the bastard's chest. He ended up getting him just under the rib-cage when the demon tried to fight back. A gut shot. A painful and slow death. As the demon lay spluttering and gasping his last breaths, purple lightening flashing across his features, Dean saw Sam eyeing the blood pooling around the two of them with his fists clenched at his sides. And shit did he look like he wanted to beat the fuck outta him and lick it up off the floor.

Sam tore his eyes away from the blood pool and met his brother's worried, concerned gaze. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the building, fists still clenched and shoulders tight.

Dean pulled the knife out of the dude's gut with a sickening squelching sound. Wiping his hands and the blade on the demon's shirt, he stuffed Ruby's knife back into the inside pocket of his green canvas coat. Giving one forlorn look at the body of the poor bastard the demon had been riding, he followed his younger brother out of the building.

He found Sam leaning on the trunk of the Impala. He wasn't shaking or rocking back and forth, but he was white as death, and he was wringing his hands in a way that Dean believed Sam didn't even know he was doing it.

"You okay?" he asked gruffly, not daring to sit on the trunk with him incase Sam took a swing in a bid to run back to the buffet laid out on the concrete inside.

"Yeah… No… I don't know." Sam was shaking his head back and forth and he seemed to realize he was wringing his hands and forcibly pried them apart, resting them on the warm black metal of the Impala.

After a moment, Sam whispered, "I wanted it, man. I fucking wanted it bad."

"But you didn't," he encouraged him. "You didn't. You turned and left and you didn't touch it."

"I left you holding the bag." His voice was full of shame and bitter self-disgust.

"That guy?" Dean scoffed. "I coulda taken that scumbag with one hand tied behind my back."

"And what happens when we go up against more?" Sam glared reproachfully at him. "I lose it, or I run away and leave you stranded. I'm a fucking liability."

Dean scrubbed a hand over his face and through his hair before risking taking a seat next to his brother on the trunk. "Look, Sam. We both knew this wasn't gonna be easy, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think you'd do it. But you didn't. You held it together long enough to get out and that's as much as we can ask for right now."

Sam looked off into the distance. "Maybe I should go back to Bobby's. I could get you killed out here if I can't keep my shit together."

Dean cocked an eyebrow at him. "Is that what you want?" He'd support him whatever his choice would be.

"No." Sam looked down to his feet and shook his head. "No, I don't want that. Running back to Bobby's would be like giving up, and I can't let them get me like that." He ran a hand through his disheveled hair. "It would mean that the demons won, and I can't live with that."

"So we keep trying. We hold off crashing the big parties until you've gotten a better grip on yourself, but we keep fighting."

"We keep fighting," Sam repeated, looking at the warehouse door and likely envisioning the keg party he'd rather be having than the heart-to-heart with his brother. "You know what the kicker is, Dean?" he said softly, still staring at the door. "If I'd taken the blood from that guy… the host would still be alive. I coulda pulled him and he'd still be alive – going back to his family, wherever they are."

Dean knew the guilt from killing the hosts would eat at Sam, hell, it ate at him too – but they were running low on choices here. And what the hell was he supposed to say to Sam about that anyway? Your soul is more important to me than the life of some stranger? That was as true as anything got, but the words wouldn't make things any better for Sam, so instead he said, "I'll go get the body ready for a salt and burn."

"I should help you," Sam said, but didn't make a move to get off the trunk.

"I got it, Sam. One hurdle at a time, man."

In the span of a week, they killed four demons. The fuckers were everywhere and Dean felt as if they were being followed by the things. Or being herded – he couldn't really tell – they were pushing further and further east with every hunt. But Sam lasted longer each time before he left the scene. He even helped carry the body out for the salt and burn on the last one, standing beside him with a stony face, watching the flames devour the red-headed woman who tried to kill them. She had bled, and Sam grit his teeth and forced himself to stay in the room. Dean had told him that he could leave, but Sam just shook his head and stayed, digging deep into his self-will for the Herculean strength to resist the pull the blood had on him.

And damn didn't that sound like a good excuse to go out and get a celebratory drink.

(- - Roadhouse Blues, by The Doors - -)

They found a bar with a dartboard and a pool table, and while Dean took the table to hustle a few bucks, Sam took the dartboard and the overweight, drunken, former jocks that were loitering around it. By the end of the night, they were up two hundred bucks. Not bad for a couple of guys trying to get back in the swing of things.

They were heading back to the car when they both heard Sam's cell start to vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out, frowning at the display before giving Dean a peculiar look.

"What is it?" he asked briskly, thinking the worst.

"It's Ruby."

Yeah, that would be the worst.

"I told that bitch that if she contacted you again…" he growled, wishing the whore were here now so that he could ram her knife down her throat.

"That's probably why she sent a text," Sam smirked, that weird face tickling the back of his subconscience with a 'dude, something's up'.

"What does it say?" He didn't really want to ask, but couldn't stop himself.

"It says, 'Lilith,' and then some co-ordinates. 40 13 18N, 74 45 22W." Sam was still wearing this funny look, like someone who didn't believe they just won the jackpot on some crackpot slot machine. Suddenly, Sam started jogging down the rest of the block to where the Impala sat waiting for them – winking at them from under a streetlight.

"Sam! You can't believe her!" He jogged just behind him, reaching for his elbow and jerking him around mid-stride. "Sam! Stop!"

"This could be our chance, Dean!" he snarled.

"We can't go up against Lilith just yet, Sammy. We're not ready."

"You mean I'm not ready," Sam accused him.

"Neither of us are! Fuck, Sam! We can't run after her half-cocked! Besides – it's probably a trap Ruby's baiting for us!"

"Dean," Sam hissed with rapidly waning patience. "Ruby coulda killed me a thousand times in the past year. She's had every opportunity to off me you can imagine. Or she coulda just stopped saving my ass if she wanted me dead. Instead, she tried to help me. And I know that the blood thing was bad, but I don't think she did it to kill me. She thought it was the only way to make me strong enough to take out Lilith."

"You can't trust her, Sam. You just can't!"

The bitch wasn't even here, and still the demon whore was driving that fucking wedge in between them.

Sam pulled his key for the Impala out of his pocket and opened the passenger door. Rummaging around in the glove box, he stood up and walked to the back of the car, flipping through the road atlas they kept before spreading it out on the trunk. Running his finger along the edges, he kept flipping until he came to the one that matched the numbers Ruby had sent him. Stabbing a finger down on the map the next State over, "She's here. Trenton, New Jersey."

"Sam, no. We are not going up against her, even if she is there."

"So we just let her slip through our fingers? Dean – we can stop all of this. The seals, the Apocalypse… we can end it all."

"Or get killed off in the trap Ruby's laid for us, and then there's no one to stand in Lilith's way."

Sam was getting frustrated with the way the heated conversation was going. "Ruby wants Lilith dead as much as we do."

"What makes you so sure about that, huh?"

"Cuz Ruby has a grudge against Lilith. And as much as she'll say that she doesn't want hell on Earth and she still remembers being human and all the other crap she's fed us… she wants revenge. Pure and fucking simple revenge."

"Why?" he demanded. "What did Lilith do to Ruby?"

"Lilith is the one that got Ruby into witchcraft in the first place. Pulled her into it like that Tammy girl did to her friends last year."

"So Lilith tricked Ruby into selling her soul and Rubes wants her pound of flesh from the demon queen."

"It wasn't just that… Lilith wanted her for herself. Alastair might have been Hell's Grand Inquisitor, but he learned everything he knew from Lilith. It was Lilith that strapped Ruby to the rack, Lilith that broke her."

Flashes from his time in hell shot across his frontal lobe too fast to see anything clearly. Strapped to Alastair's table, hacked and carved and sliced in all ways beyond comprehension – never dying and never being free of the soul rending pain… And then the guilt of saying 'Yes' to the bastard, of giving into the weakness and the pain. He put souls on the rack, and he tortured them in ways that made Alastair applaud him. He shuddered, blinking back the images burned into his memory, and being thankful that Alastair was dead – even if it was by Sam's mind mojo.

"Dean, we may not get another chance. There can only be what? Two seals left? One? We need to stop her before she frees Lucifer, or its game over for all of us."

Everything Sam said made sense. Go in, ice the bitch and stop the Apocalypse. Simple right? But everything about this just smelled wrong. But the Apocalypse was ten shades of wrong worse. What if they didn't check it out? What if he tucked tail and ran like a coward, and then Lucy springs free of his box, and billions of people die? How would that haunt him? He looked into Sam's face. His jaw was tight, and his eyes hard. He wanted this. Bad. He wanted to stop this hell-hole carnival ride and get the fuck off.

But there was a question that had been nagging him since Alastair left him a bloodied pulp, hooked up to machines in a hospital with Cas next to him, telling him it was true that he broke the first seal. The burning question of self doubt and ineptitude that liked to kick him in the gut every time he locked eyes with a black-eyed sonofabitch.

Were they strong enough to stop this?

Was he?

He looked over the quiet street, dark but for streetlights. There were business's here. Lives. Homes full of families that didn't know the fate of the world rested on a razor's edge and that two brother's standing in their midst had the ability to shift that balance in their favor.

There was a play park down the street. Swings and jungle-jims and left-behind toys some faceless kid forgot to take home with him earlier. Only… they were never really faceless to him. They always bore a resemblance to the kid the six-foot-four missing link next to him had been. Big eyed and brown-haired and a smart little pain-in-the-ass that he just wanted to protect from the things in the dark that lurked in waiting for him.

And his conscience whispered to him, 'what about that kid? Huh?'

Sam continued to stare at him, waiting expectantly for an answer. And there was only one answer he would accept. So Dean gave it to him.

"Alright. We go and look around. If we find the bitch, and it looks like we can get in, we go for it. But we go in smart."

Sam nodded and climbed into the car. They had about two hours of driving to make up a plan.

Castiel stood on his mountainside, overlooking the serpentine curve of the glacial river in the Athabasca Valley below. He was troubled. His superiors had forcefully reminded him of where his allegiance lay, but it sat badly in his mind.

It had become apparent to those superiors how close he was to his human charge, and that couldn't be allowed. And when he learned angels were going missing – he had tried to warn the Winchesters of his suspicions. Something foul was happening in heaven, he could feel it. And if a security breach like that could happen there, Earth was in grave danger. If Uriel had changed sides, and had enlisted the help of others, then there were still angels fighting for the release of Lucifer, and there was no way to know how far up the hierarchy the treachery went. The hurt of Uriel turning on him still stung him deeply, and that was an emotion that was new to him as well – no doubt learned from his time with the humans. Emotions and doubt were two more marks against him, marks his brothers had sought to eradicate with heavenly-sanctioned torture. It was enough to stop him from telling the Winchesters about the missing angels and his fears of a host of compromised angels.

But he had spent the last weeks deep in the vaults of heaven. Searching, digging, and hiding from his superiors who would not tolerate more insubordination from him.

The final seals were breaking, and he was researching.

Nyan, the Keeper of the Vaults, had been one of the angels to go missing, and that sounded like the right place to begin searching for his missing brethren. Because, what would Nyan know, or what did Nyan find, that would cause him to either go into hiding, or be taken and held against his will? So he dug, and he searched through the Records of the Ages. But what he found in the vaults? What he had just learned? It was the final seal… and the Winchesters were on a collision course with it. And how few of his brothers knew what the final seal was? And which ones of those, had been behind pulling the strings to bring them all to the brink of disaster in the form of Lucifer's wrath once released from prison? Was it Michael? Raphael? Gabriel?

He would be dead the second he told them… but he had to warn the Winchesters that Lilith's death was the final seal. He had to make them understand that killing their enemy would break loose an even bigger threat to humanity. Lilith would have to be contained in a place that she would never be found. If only he could locate her, he would imprison her himself. Perhaps the Winchesters would help him to find her – they had means he didn't and the irony that a couple humans had resources he couldn't fathom was not wholly lost on him.

But he had to warn them.

His mind made up, he turned to leave when a hand clamped down on his shoulder. He whirled around, ready to attack, when the face before him blurred around the edges and everything went dark.

One last thought passed through him before oblivion took him.

Of course… Zachariah…

He awoke in a prison with the missing angels. Nyan was there, as was Anna who he knew had been on the run. Lozen, Ilithyia, Valdoro, Jediah, and a dozen more. So they weren't dead. Yet.

"Welcome back," Anna whispered when he sat up.

"Where are we?" he asked, looking left and right and not recognizing the cell from when he'd been incarcerated the other week.

Anna shrugged; a forlorn look on her tired face. "We do not know. Was it Torrin who took you?"

Torrin too? he anguished.

"No. It was Zachariah."

Anna nodded gravely at that bit of news. "Zachariah is the highest ranking angel involved so far then. Let us pray it goes no higher, because if the Arch Angels are in on this as well, there is no hope."

"What is going on, Anna? Do you know what is happening?"

"There is a restructuring going on in heaven… Earth too. They want to start the Apocalypse and to free Lucifer, killing the humans and taking Earth back for their own." She gestured to Nyan to come over.

"Nyan," she said, "you have to tell Castiel what you learned."

And while the wizened Keeper of Records told his story, a prayer reached Castiel's ears. He knew who it was. He was so finely attuned to the broken timbre of that soul that Dean would be able to reach him from anywhere in the world. He'd heard Dean mutter many curses directed at him the last two weeks, but what was reaching him now made him close his eyes in defeat.

"What is it, Castiel?" Nyan whispered.

"It is too late. It has started."

A/N: For anyone who hasn't noticed, Supernatural surpassed Buffy last weekend in the most popular TV Show fanfiction. Go SPN!