Author's Note: Flashbacks of important events prior to the story's setting will be in italics at the beginning of a chapter. Dreams are also in italics. The story begins quietly, but don't worry, it picks up soon!

Falcon-Rider - You're very much correct. :) Dean isn't exactly like other demons....that's something that plays a significant part in the story.

Shadow & Flame

Chapter One: The Ride

Sam walks into Hell with Dean's blood all over his clothes and a look of desperate determination in his eyes. He throws himself into the fight as black smoke surrounds him, threatens to consume him.

With each scream of a demon, Sam thinks of his brother. He thinks of Dean, who wouldn't want him to use his demonic gifts from Azazel. Yellow Eyes. But he doesn't stop, he continues to destroy demon after demon, using his abilities to put an end to this battle.

He finally reaches the one who holds Dean's contract, and as his nose bleeds and his head pounds, Sam feels the darkness within him spread through his body like poison and relishes the power it gives him.

And he tears the demon called Lilith apart, piece by piece.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

The neighborhood was completely dark save for street lamps and porch lights. A lone car, a dark green Jeep Wrangler to be specific, made its way down the street and turned into the driveway of a house on the left. Pulling the car all the way up to the side of the house, the driver stopped just in front of a detached two car garage and killed the engine.

For a moment, he sat there, staring out into the dark, searching the night.

Usually when a man had chills running down his spine and felt as though he were being watched he shrugged off the feeling as a part of an overactive imagination, assuming he'd seen one too many horror movies. This particular young man, however, knew better. He'd never been able to do that in his entire life, even during the times when he'd decided to try and pretend to.

But Sam Winchester saw nothing but shadows.

He wearily turned his attention to his girlfriend's house. His home; the home he and Sarah had made together three months ago when her father had passed away and it went into her possession. He'd been reluctant to move in at first; he'd barely been able to afford rent for the rundown apartment he'd been staying in since he'd arrived back in New York. He wasn't able to contribute as much as he should for the bills and upkeep of the house or pay her more than a meager sum for rent. It was hard to try for a decent job when he still hunted. He didn't travel as much these days - he usually only took jobs in New York and the states surrounding it- but that still put a large dent in his plans to make enough money to help Sarah out.

Not that Sarah cared. She always insisted that it didn't matter to her and that she didn't need the money. He knew that was true, but it was the principle of it for Sam. He hated the idea of taking advantage of her.

Sam double checked that all of the weapons were back in their proper place in the trunk behind the passenger seat, grabbed his father's journal, and, after making sure the Jeep was locked up, made his way into the house. He deposited the journal on an oak table in the foyer and headed in the direction of the stairs, the eerie sensation from earlier hastening his steps even though he wasn't even fully aware of its hold over him.

The small lamp on the nightstand next to their bed was on, as was the light in the bathroom, and he caught a glimpse of Sarah standing in front of the mirror above the sink, tying her long dark hair back for the night.

Sam dropped onto the bed in a tired heap and closed his eyes. The spirit he'd tangled with in New Jersey had been rough.

"I didn't hear you come in."

His eyes flew open; Sarah's quiet voice had managed to startle him. He stared up at her smiling face and a smile formed on his own. "Hey."

"Are you okay?"

That was the first question she always asked him when he returned from a hunt looking like hell. "How did it go?" usually took its place when he didn't look so worn out.

He nodded, moving over to one side of the bed to make room for her. She pulled a blanket over them and he wrapped an arm around her. Loose strands of her hair tickled his jaw when she leaned her head against his shoulder and he breathed in the peach scent of her shampoo.

"What was it?"

Another question she often asked him, partly out of genuine curiosity, but also, he suspected, to give him someone to open up to.

"A spirit. It was holding on to this world. I think it was afraid, you know? To move on." Sam swallowed, remembering Molly McNamara, and hope. "I told…… I told Dean once that hope was the point; that without knowing where the spirit ends up, the hope that they're in a better place is all we have."

Sam's eyes went to the nightstand next to his side of the bed, where a framed photograph of he and his brother rested next to the alarm clock. He knew that Sarah was staring in the direction of her dresser, where she kept a photo of her parents beside the jewelry box that had once belonged to her mother. Neither Sam nor Sarah could make out the faces of their families in the dark, but Sam knew it didn't matter.

If someone asked for a description of each picture and the setting when it was taken, Sam could tell them all about the official opening of Daniel Blake's Auction House on a sunny Saturday afternoon when Sarah insisted on getting her parents' picture together in front of the newly remodeled building. She'd shared the memory with him. And Sarah could describe the cloudy Sunday evening when Sam and Dean had been leaning side by side against the Impala, staring at the road that led away from her with troubled eyes, and she'd impulsively snapped a picture of them.

She'd presented it to Sam when they'd said goodbye for the second time.

A mere two weeks later, the Impala, a box of cassettes, a duffel bag of clothes, a trunk full of weapons, and the photograph were all Sam had left of his brother. And the memories. The memories that he held on to, clung to so desperately, were the same memories that were already beginning to fade around the edges - the laugh that he couldn't quite hear anymore, the teasing voice in his head that didn't visit him as frequently.

"Sometimes I wonder where he is."

Sam's admission came in not much more than a whisper, and he felt Sarah lace her fingers through his. "What got me through those months after was knowing that he wasn't suffering. Knowing that I'd managed to keep him from going to----"

He stopped, squeezed his eyes shut, and only opened them again once they'd quit burning. Took a breath. But he didn't have to continue. Sarah knew. Every secret. Every horror. He'd kept nothing from her.

"I hope he's with your parents," Sarah said, her voice soft. "Just like I hope Dad's with Mom. You were right, Sam; we just have to hold on to that hope."

Sam said nothing, he just kissed her. The kiss was a silent 'thank you' and an 'I love you' held together in one knotted and frayed rope. When he dangled at the edge of it, she pulled him back. And on the nights when the dreams threatened to unravel him and he woke up with his brother's name torn from his throat, she was there to keep him from losing it.

She was there to remind him of things worth living for.

He slipped into a dreamless slumber beside her, closing his eyes to the ever present shadows, and to the sudden flickering of a single lamp in the street - the one directly in front of their house.

It died completely, drowning the house in darkness.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

It was almost noon before Sam managed to get out of bed and the sheets next to him were cold. Sarah had probably been up for hours.

He showered and dressed quickly, remembering that they'd planned to spend the day painting the kitchen. Sarah had gotten tired of the murky brown shade that had been Daniel Blake's choice when he'd hired a painter to come in and paint the entire house. According to Sarah, that was right after her mom's death, and her father had had a brief obsession with changing things in the house to reflect his wife's absence; he didn't want to be reminded of her. Sarah had let it go at the time because she'd withdrawn too far into herself to care.

The paint fumes assaulted him as soon as he reached the bottom of the stairs, announcing that she'd started without him. When he walked into the kitchen, he was impressed by how much of it she'd finished - there was only one wall left to go.

He spotted her by the patio doors. She was kneeling down on the hardwood floor, paintbrush in hand and dark red stains on the old white shirt she was wearing. She must have heard his footsteps because she turned, and that was when he noticed the streak of "Red Wine" in her hair. He raised his eyebrows and grinned, and she rolled her eyes and tucked the stubborn lock of hair behind her ear where it would free itself from again in a matter of minutes.

"I wouldn't laugh, Sam," she warned as she stood, a playful smile at the corners of her mouth and her hands on her hips. "I bet you'll have paint in your bangs very soon."

He laughed anyway, even if she was probably right. Painting wasn't one of Sam's talents. He might have been able to hold a shotgun perfectly steady, or draw an awesome devil's trap on the floor or ceiling, but he'd always felt clumsy with a paintbrush in his hand. Sarah, despite her appearance, was faring far better than he would. She might not have been a good artist, but when it came to putting a solid color on a wall, she could have been a professional.

One of the things he loved about Sarah, even before he'd known he was in love with Sarah, was that if she could do something for herself, she did. Daniel Blake had never hurt for money, which meant that he could always hire someone to do a job for him. Things like painting, mowing the lawn, sweeping the floor, those were all things that he'd left to other people. When Sarah wanted something done, she simply did it herself. And though she liked wine and dining at nice restaurants, she was just as content with a can of beer and take-out. She enjoyed classical music, but could rock out to a few of the songs his brother had loved so much. She could read art history books cover to cover and still bury herself in his father's journal for hours, learning all she could about the things he and Dean had hunted.

She was a balance between the man that Sam could have become and the man that he was.

"I'm going to need the other gallon I have in the garage," she announced.

He snatched the keys from the countertop. "I'll get it. Go ahead and take a break."

It was a reasonably warm summer day and Sam was nearly blinded by the sun on his way out to the garage. He stepped around Sarah's blue Honda Civic and his Jeep and hit a button on the set of keys, watching as the door opened to reveal two more cars parked inside of it, hidden away from the sun.

He spied the can of paint on the right side of the garage next to her father's white Mercedes and quickly picked it up, then closed the garage door without looking back.

Sarah was sitting on top of the island with a bottle of water in her hand when he came back in. The radio was on, and a song that Sam probably would have recognized had he still been in college blared through the room.

"That was fast," she commented.

Sam just smiled at her and opened the lid on the can. He used a roller on the rest of the wall while Sarah finished the trim. The two of them worked in companionable silence for an hour and were finished before Sarah mentioned something that caught him by surprise.

"Jo called while you were in New Jersey. I forgot to tell you last night. She seemed okay. 'Said trying to juggle college classes and hunting was a bitch, though."

Sam shouldn't have been so surprised. Calls from Jo had been coming more frequently in the past month. Sam had begun the tradition of checking up on her, and she was starting to return that tradition.

She'd visited them a couple of times, and a friendship had formed between Jo and Sarah. They'd bonded over their shared knowledge of hunting. In Sarah, Jo had someone close to her age that could understand the life of a hunter - more than once, Sarah had sat next to Sam in his Jeep, scouring his Dad's journal for information that would help him on a hunt. She could handle the weapons he kept in the car, and of course knew the importance of salt and iron thanks to the spirit of little Melanie Merchant. As uneasy as Sam was about Sarah occasionally accompanying him, he was proud of her knowledge and the skill he'd helped her develop when he realized she was too stubborn to ever back down and gave into teaching her some tricks of the trade.

He wondered if Jo was really okay - last week had marked the one year anniversary of her mother's murder. Ellen had been killed by a demon during the final attempt to break Dean's deal.

Which meant that tomorrow was the one year anniversary of his brother's death.

"I'll call Jo tonight."

He really wouldn't mind hearing from her. Jo was the only other hunter that he spoke to these days besides Bobby Singer.

Bobby liked to check up on both Jo and Sam on a regular basis, always grumbling that Ellen and Dean would haunt him for the rest of his life if he didn't look out for them. It was just fine with Sam. Whenever he sought advice or help on a hunt Bobby was the first person he contacted. Sometimes he also called Bobby when Dean weighed heavily on his mind and he needed to talk because Bobby had been like a second father to his brother.

"I doubt she'll answer her phone. She said she's going to be on another hunt." Sarah shook her head at him. "I don't think she ever slows down when she's not in school."

Sam frowned, acknowledging that truth. Jo hadn't slowed down since her mother had breathed her final breath. One year later, that mournful determination was still visible in Jo's eyes; the determination to waste every evil thing out there to make up for the person she couldn't save.

Sam understood that desire, that need to keep going because of the fear of stopping and ending it all. For six months after he'd lost Dean he'd driven state to state, killing every supernatural creature in his path. He'd lived on adrenaline and pain, blocking out everything but the weight of Dean's body as he'd tried to drag his brother out of the cemetery, the cold corpse that he hadn't been able to properly lay to rest, the heat of the hellfire dancing around him as he'd walked towards the Devil's Gate and abandoned all that remained of his brother.

But Sam had saved Dean. Not in the way he'd wanted, but his brother wasn't suffering in Hell. He was at rest. Sam couldn't see him. He couldn't go to him. But he was safe from the pit. The demons couldn't hurt Dean, and that was what mattered.

It was the ghost of a little boy that had finally made Sam stop his quest for vengeance, that finally made him lay down his weapons and step back into the world as something other than a shadow.

The little boy had died and his spirit had remained on earth because he hadn't wanted to abandon his family. But Sam had helped him leave them behind and find rest, taught him how to let go. It was then, as he watched the boy disappear surrounded in a light that had reminded him of Molly McNamara, that Sam realized he had to let go, too.

He'd pulled a worn photo from the Impala's glove box, the last picture he had of Dean, and remembered who had given it to him.

"Hey." Sarah's voice sliced through his memories. "You still here with me?"

He met her concerned gaze and let the sight of her sweep the memories away. He set the roller down in its tray - he'd forgotten that he'd been holding it - and raised his hand to her face, placing the escaped lock of hair back behind her ear again.

"Yeah. I'm still here."

He was. And he wanted to be, a little more each day.

Things worth living for.

He pulled her into his arms and brought her lips to his, and he felt her smile against his mouth. Her hands began to slide up and under the loose t-shirt he'd thrown on after his shower, and her fingers moving playfully over his chest sent warmth rushing through him. He lifted her up, and she wrapped her legs around him.

The radio played on, and the paintbrushes and cans were soon forgotten. The empty gallon had been knocked over, and small droplets of crimson paint trickled out onto the floor, unnoticed.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Sarah wasn't sure what woke her. She wasn't sure if it was a sound or light from a car, or the air from the open window. Her hand skimmed over a cool sheet instead of a warm arm and she sat up in the bed.

Maybe it was the absence of Sam.

She gave her eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness, then threw the covers from her body, slipped into a pair of sweatpants and pulled one of Sam's t-shirts over her head. It took only a moment for her to deduce that Sam wasn't anywhere in the house, so she unlocked the back patio door and looked in the direction of the garage.

There was only one place Sam went when he'd had a nightmare.

Sure enough, the garage door was open, and though the light wasn't on inside she knew Sam was sitting in the passenger seat of the nineteen sixty-seven Chevy Impala that had belonged to his brother.

When Sam had first put it in her garage after he moved in with her he spent three of the seven nights a week sleeping slumped in the passenger seat with his head propped up by the window. She would go out to the garage with the intention of convincing him to come back inside with her but she'd almost never had the heart to disturb him. She'd usually watched him long enough to be certain he was comfortable, then left him be with the understanding that he needed to feel close to his brother and the hope that he knew he could turn to her if he wanted to.

It had been over a month since he'd had a dream so disturbing that it had driven him to the Impala - in fact, lately he seemed to be avoiding the car and pretending that it wasn't sitting next to her father's Mercedes in the garage. Sarah could still remember how much attention Sam had shown it once she'd given him permission to park it in her garage. He'd painstakingly cleaned it up and washed it until its black surface shined.

Though he'd driven it for months after his brother's death, Sam had still thought of it as Dean's car and always seemed hesitant behind the wheel. He'd gotten his Jeep from a friend of hers after he returned to New Paltz, but she knew she would sell her father's Mercedes before Sam ever sold the Impala. Her father had bought the damn thing just for show, simply because all of his friends and associates had expensive cars. The family history behind the Impala and Dean's love for it made it far important to Sam. And Sarah was fine with it residing in their garage of ghosts for however long Sam wanted to keep it there.

She hadn't gotten to know Dean Winchester very well the two times he'd been in New Paltz, but she privately thought he would be disappointed that Sam was hiding the car away.

Sarah tiptoed quietly into the garage and over to Sam's side of the car. The window was rolled all the way down and Sam's head was resting half outside of the door. She kissed the top of it and cautiously swept wayward strands of dark hair from his face. His hair had been so long when she'd seen him that first time since the portrait of the Merchant family had forever changed her life, and it wasn't until a week ago that he'd cut it shorter again. Now it looked as it did when they'd first met, occasionally disguising the difference in Sam that the past four years had wrought upon him.

But whenever Sarah gazed into his eyes, she could see that difference staring back at her; sometimes it was in the form of a lingering weariness and other times in the form of a deep sadness that haunted him.

She knew most of the details, like their fight with the demon who'd murdered their mother and Sam's first girlfriend. She knew of Sam's premonitions and how they'd frightened him. She knew their father had traded his life for Dean's. She knew how the demon had died at the cemetery in Wyoming - shot with the Colt in Dean's hand. She knew all about the deal Dean had made to bring Sam back from the dead when he'd been brutally stabbed in the back.

Sam had been dead.

It had taken Sarah some time to process that piece of terrible information, and if Sam hadn't been the one telling her about it, she might have freaked out. Okay. She definitely would have freaked out. Not that she'd taken it all that well, even with Sam's reassuring presence and voice as he'd sat next to her and helped her take it all in.

The only thing more terrifying than the knowledge that Sam had been dead, was the fact that he'd apparently walked into Hell. Even to this day, Sarah could swear that she'd stopped breathing in those moments that Sam had described the Devil's Gate in Wyoming and the flames surrounding it. And how he'd stepped through it.

But he'd said nothing of what happened after that, and when he confessed his dreams, his nightmares to her, they were always, always about his brother. The memory of how Dean had begun to hear the beckoning of the Hellhounds. How he'd gone without Sam to the Devil's Gate to face the fate that had awaited him. How Sam had followed him there in Bobby Singer's truck in spite of his wishes. How Sam had found him laying in the cemetery, his body torn and bleeding from the claws of the hounds. How he'd died in Sam's arms.

Sarah understood. For Sam, Hell had not been beyond that gate. Hell had been in the cemetery where his brother had lost his life.

When she found herself growing impatient with the way Sam would sometimes withdrawal from her, she closed her eyes and forced herself to remember that. The deaths of her mother and father were hard for her to move past, but Sam had it so much worse. His parents' deaths, his brother's death - all were so violent, so unnaturally horrifying…

As she walked across the backyard she noticed how much darker the street seemed and saw that no light was emanating from the lamp in front of her house. All of the others that lined her street were glowing brightly, night bugs swarming around them as they always did during the summer months. She could call someone out to fix it in the morning, but she suspected one of her neighbors had probably already done that.

As she opened the patio door and headed back inside, she glanced one last time at the Impala, affection and worry battling it out across her features.

"Sleep well, Sam," she whispered.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Mere moments after the patio door clicked shut, a figure strode silently into the opened garage. Fingers reached out and slid along the Impala's exterior until they reached the edge of the passenger window and fell away.

Black eyes studied Sam's features as he slept.

Then, an hour before sunrise, the figure fled back into the darkness from where it came.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Rain beat down on the Impala's windshield, creating a watery curtain between Sam and the run down old church in front of him, and what little he could see of the building was partially obscured by the woods it rested within.

Thunder sounded in the distance and lightening threatened to tear the sky into shards of empty atmosphere. The growling hum of the Impala's engine reminded Sam that he was waiting…

But what was he waiting for?

"I don't know, genius. You're the one with the college education, and this is your dream."

The voice was quiet, strained, but oh, so familiar, and he turned to see his brother sitting beside him. Sam couldn't see his face, and his body was hunched away from him.

"Dean…"

He reached out to touch the tense shoulder as a particularly vicious stab of lightening cut through the night and lit up the inside of the car. Dean turned to Sam suddenly, and in the harsh glare of the storm Sam saw the pale skin of Dean's face, the angry scratches embedded into his scarred cheeks, the blue of his lips, and the stains on his clothes where the blood had dried, stiff and unyielding.

But his eyes….

He had no eyes. Just empty sockets where his eyes used to be.

"I gotta tell you what I do know, Sammy……it's gonna be one hell of a ride."