Chapter 2 Fractures

Dean looked around as they came out of the elevator and walked down the hall. It wasn't the Plaza, he thought, but it was at least a couple of stars up from the very ordinary motel he and Sam were staying in. The walls were clean and the speckled beige carpet seemed to be as well.

Ellie unlocked the door marked Suite 3 and walked through, holding it open. He looked around as she flipped on the lights, following her in and stopping in the middle of the large living room while she closed the door and locked it behind them.

"Nice."

The rooms were large and comfortable, the living and sleeping areas separated by a pair of glass-paned sliding doors; a long bench providing reasonable kitchen facilities. The living area held a long, overstuffed sofa, and two matching armchairs facing it. The small dining table next to the kitchenette already held piles of books and pads, and Ellie's laptop sat open next to them. She was like Sam in that way, he thought. Researched the crap out of everything.

Tossing her bag onto one of the armchairs, Ellie walked to the kitchen bench, taking two glasses from the cupboard and pouring them each a measure from the bottle of Blue Label on the counter. Dean raised his brows as he noticed the bottle.

"Glad to see you weren't lying about the whiskey." He took the glass from her and sat on the sofa. "Alright, we're here. Drinking the good stuff. So tell me."

Sitting at the other end of the long sofa, Ellie looked at her glass for a moment.

"I don't know how accurate the information is, although I do trust the source," she said, looking up at him. "In Revelations, the Horsemen are released one by one, each one set free to do their jobs to sort the faithful from those who won't be saved –"

He shook his head impatiently. "Yeah, I saw the movie, get to the punchline."

"When Lucifer summoned Death in Carthage, he bound the entity with a spell," Ellie said. "He controls it now, like a – a servant."

"Okay. So?"

She made a face at him. "So … Death isn't doing the job he was supposed to be doing," she said. "He's under the personal control of the archangel, and Lucifer is going to use that to target areas he wants to get rid of – like big cities."

Dean let the whiskey roll around in his mouth, savouring the taste, as he considered the implications of that one.

"Didn't he do the same with Famine?" he asked after a moment. He wasn't sure that the devil controlling the Horsemen meant anything significant. "I mean that sonofabitch was looking for Sam – waiting for him."

"He might've," Ellie agreed. "How did you kill him?"

Looking away, Dean said, "I didn't. Not really."

"Sam?"

"We didn't know Famine was in town when we got there," Dean said slowly, hunching up over his glass as he remembered the wire report about the couple in Emporia. "Took us a while to figure it out. And then it was too late."

I think it got to me, Dean. I think I'm hungry for it ... you better ... you better lock me down – but good.

He closed his eyes. "Sam could feel the – uh – he could feel it coming back. He said he couldn't control himself. I 'cuffed him to the sink in the motel bathroom and me and Cas went after Famine."

Cas'd been lost as well. Raw meat. He felt his stomach turn over slowly at the memory of the angel kneeling on the floor, shovelling the half-frozen ground beef into his mouth.

"It was a set up, for Sam," he said, glancing at the woman at the other end of the sofa. Ellie's attention was locked on him and he looked away, not sure how much he wanted to tell her. He'd gone over the whole damned mess in his head a hundred times now.

"Famine knew we were there, and he sent two demons to get Sam," he continued, a little reluctantly, lifting his glass and swallowing down another mellow mouthful. "They were – they weren't supposed to survive. Sam drank both of them and then came after me."

He risked a glance at her face, relieved to see that she wasn't disgusted by what his brother had done. Seeing the small crease between her brows, he recognised the familiar tell. She was paying attention, thinking it through in high gear. He wondered vaguely if she would see more in his account than he had.

"Famine had – uh - bowled Cas over with hunger and he had about five or six demons with him. I –" Dean hesitated, his fingers tightening around the glass, the memory of walking into the restaurant bright in his mind. "It didn't affect me. At all."

"The hunger?" Ellie asked.

Nodding, he said, "Sam busted in and Famine told him to finish the rest of the demons there – told him Sam could have as much as he wanted. Sam, uh, he refused and Famine – he just sucked them down. But that's where he made his mistake."

"How?"

"Sam – uh, he could still affect the demons, even in the Horseman," he tried to explain what he'd seen, what he'd thought had happened. "He pulled them all out, breaking Famine as he did it. I – I –"

Stopping again, he swallowed as he remembered the way he'd just frozen, watching Sam rip the Horseman apart with his power, the demons Famine'd eaten burning up on the floor. Sam hadn't looked like Sam, at that moment.

"I cut off his ring and then it was over."

"Except it wasn't," Ellie guessed, her voice soft. "What happened to Sam?"

"Uh, me and Cas, we put him in Bobby's panic room," he said, looking back at his glass. "Till he was over the cravings."

He tossed back the last mouthful in the glass and got to his feet, not wanting to look at Ellie, or his memories of his brother's screams and pleading. Or the weakness that'd driven him out of the house and into the yard, to stare at the sky and ask an entity he couldn't really have faith in but had too much proof to deny, for help.

Walking to the kitchen counter, he poured himself another glass of the Blue, filling it to the top this time.

"Dean," Ellie said from behind him and he waited, his back to her.

"There weren't any other choices," she said and he turned around, wanting to believe that, knowing it wasn't the truth. At least, not the whole truth.

"I didn't do it for him," he grated. "I did it because I couldn't deal, Ellie. Not with seeing him like that. Not with knowing what he could do. I did it so's I wouldn't have to look at my brother and see a monster."

He dragged in a deep breath and lifted the glass, swallowing half in a series of gulps that lit up his throat. There wasn't enough whiskey in the world to give him a moment's peace from what he'd done or the memories that clung to his every waking minute, and most of his sleeping ones, of Sam in that room. Everything he'd believed, had still believed, about himself, and his brother, had begun to fracture.

"Neither of you are monsters," she said, letting out a soft sigh.

"Neither of us are people you want to invite into the family home, either," he countered, looking at the floor. He didn't want to get into this, he thought. The things he'd done, there was no getting rid of the stains on his soul. And Sam was the same. Those demons had been in meatsuits, innocent men and women, possessed and killed. Collateral damage, he tried to tell himself. But it didn't stick. They were killers. Not heroes.

"Where'd you get the intel on what Lucifer's doing?" he asked, seeing her quick glance at the change in subject. She seemed okay to let it go.

"Some friends in Richmond," she told him. "They, uh, specialise in keeping track of things like that."

"You're kidding."

"Would I kid about something like that?" she asked him dryly. "The devil isn't hiding his light under a bushel. He doesn't care who knows what he's up to."

"I thought he had to follow the blueprint, same as the other dicks?"

"No. There are some things that he'll have to follow absolutely, but he has a lot more freedom in what he does, and when, than the prophecies account for."

"There's a cheerful thought." Dean grimaced. "What kind of things are we talking about?"

"I don't know. He can personalise things, I guess, work on his issues," she said quietly, looking more closely at him. "Sam said it'd been a bad few months."

He looked over at her. "Understatement."

"Dean, what happened to you?"

"That obvious, huh?" He ducked his head, looking away. She was the only one he could say things straight out to. Maybe that was because she knew most of it. Not all of the details but the broad strokes. Maybe it was because she was the only one who asked him head-on. He didn't know how she seemed to know him, sometimes better than he knew himself. He didn't know how she'd gotten through his defences so easily. It wasn't that she comforted him, not really. It might've been that she was honest with him. She didn't tell him he'd done the right thing if he hadn't.

He still didn't want to talk about it. But he needed to. That recognition dawned slowly as he leaned back against the counter. He needed to tell someone because the screaming in his head had just about reached an unendurable level.

"I don't – I don't know what I'm doin', half the time," he admitted, his voice deepening and half-muffled against his chest. "Most of the time."

"Is this about Carthage?"

He walked back to the sofa, dropping onto it and looking down at his glass. Carthage. Lawrence. Emporia. Bobby's. Heaven.

"We listened to a demon. Again," he said, rubbing a hand over his face tiredly as he tried to sort out the big things. "Gave us the Colt, told us where Lucifer would be and we went in there like – like cowboys."

Leaning back against the sofa, he closed his eyes. "All I've done is lead people – good people – to their deaths."

"That's not true and you know it."

"Yeah, it is." He opened his eyes, turning his head to slightly to look at her.

"Ellen wouldn't have gone unless she'd thought that the cause was worth the risk, Dean," Ellie said, setting her glass on the low table in front of the sofa. "She would've moved heaven and earth to keep Jo out of it if she hadn't thought there was some chance of success. You knew them better than I did – are you saying that you somehow presented the case as being better than it was? Or did you force them along?"

"I asked them for help." In his mind's eye, he saw the street again. Meg. The splash of something invisible stepping through a puddle of water. The dim interior of the hardware store. That break in Ellen's voice as she'd tried to pretend that Jo's wounds were not fatal. The force of the explosion. "They were there because I asked."

Ellie slid along the sofa, her hand reaching out and covering his. The light contact sent a frisson through his skin, where hers touched his, and he straightened a little.

"C'mon, Dean. They knew the risks. Same as you did, and Bobby did, and Sam did. You're not going to convince me that Ellen Harvelle didn't know exactly what you would be facing."

She might've been right, he thought. It didn't change a thing. He'd asked. He'd asked because he hadn't wanted to do the job alone. Him and Sam. He hadn't thought they'd be able to do it alone. The others, they'd come along to set a few diversions, keep watch … handle the getting out of Dodge part.

"They died. For us. For this – stupid – fucking – thing we're caught in," he said, the taste of the whiskey disappearing under a bitter gall that seemed to flood his mouth. They'd never had a chance.

His gaze dropped to her hand as her fingers curled around his a little more tightly. Nicked and scarred, like his own, the wiry strength of her grip couldn't take away from the warmth and softness of her skin, or the odd sense of connection he could feel. He wondered how much more he'd have to drink before her touch didn't hurt quite so much. He didn't want to pull away.

"Dean, it's not up to you to shoulder the responsibility for everything and everyone. It's bad enough that you're still taking responsibility for Sam – he's a grown man, entitled to make his own choices, whether you like them or not. Your business is backing him in whatever choice it is that he does make."

Dean shook his head. "Even if he's making the wrong choice?"

She was looking at him, and he caught the faint frustration in her voice. "Yeah, even if it's the wrong choice – in your opinion. You're entitled to go through the logic of a decision with him; that's what friends and family do. But to try and control what he does? No."

She was right and he knew it. They'd talked about it, him and Sam, after that celebrity god thing. He wasn't sure when it'd started to change again, but he knew why.

"I've lost too many people," he told her, ducking his head so she wouldn't see the pain of that admission in his eyes. His mother. His father. Jim and Caleb and Ash and Pamela. He didn't need that many people, just a few. Just a couple to trust and put his back against. Their faces haunted his dreams. "I can't lose any more."

"Dean."

He felt her palm against his cheek, eyes opening wider as that gentle press turned him back to her. The light touch was somehow shockingly intimate, reverberating through his nerves as he stared at her for a long moment, his pulse thundering at the base of his throat, so loud that he thought she could hear it. What'd changed? Had something changed?

"You can't hold everything in a fixed position," Ellie said, her hand dropping as she met his eyes. "Life isn't like that. Change is the way it all works."

His skin was still tingling where her hand had rested and it took him a couple of seconds to register what she'd said. He'd wanted – needed – those people. Every mistake had cost him another friend.

"I think I've paid more than my fair share, Ellie."

"The people you've lost were in a risky business, Dean. And they knew it," she reminded him, her tone mild. "You used to say that you couldn't imagine living past thirty, being a hunter. When did that change?"

He ducked his head again, brows drawing together. "It's different."

"No, it's not." Her voice hardened a little. "The world hasn't changed."

"What do I do if I lose everyone, Ellie?" He lifted his head, bitterly aware that he couldn't hide that fear from her, any more than he could from himself, knowing it was written on his face. "What do I do then?"

"You start again. And then, again, if need be."

"Hell, don't sugar-coat it for me, will you." He rubbed his hand over his eyes. He could feel the whiskey, dulling down his reactions, blurring out the pain a little. He'd thought he'd be floating by now, but the liquor had barely numbed the pain.

"People make their own choices," Ellie pointed out. "And the responsibility for those choices is theirs. Not yours. Their deaths weren't on you."

She ducked her head a little, the light catching in her hair. "Like Bobby," she added, looking back at him, one brow slightly lifted. "Like your father."

He did pull back then, twisting away and getting to his feet. He heard her exhale behind him.

"My father left us when we needed him the most," he said, walking to the counter and grabbing the bottle. "How was that responsible?"

She didn't answer and he turned to look at her over his shoulder. She was holding her glass, sipping her whiskey, her face half-shadowed, and he felt a flash of irrational anger at her.

"C'mon, Ellie," he said, an edge to his voice. "You got all the answers. Tell me how my dad made a decision to leave us with a demon hunting us and Sam grieving for his girl and going out of his mind with visions?"

"If you're itching for a fight, go back to the bar," she said, her face expressionless as she looked at him.

His anger disappeared as fast as it'd come. She was right, he decided, turning back to the counter and pouring a couple of shots into his glass. He was in a corner and he wanted to fight. Wanted to do something. Something to feel like he wasn't failing.

"Sorry." He turned around, the word coming out grudgingly.

"No," Ellie said, her gaze on her glass. "I'm sorry. I was out of line."

The abrupt one-eighty stopped him cold. "I – uh –"

"Maybe we should call it a night," she cut him off lightly, putting her glass on the table and getting to her feet.

"What? No."

Shit.

In an eyeblink he saw the rest of the evening … leaving, going back to the bar, getting kicked out, Sam's face when he got back to the room, even if Sam didn't want ask twenty questions, he'd fall asleep and his armour would vanish and the dreams would come … he swallowed as he looked around the room, his brain trying to come up with a good – no, a vital – reason to stay. A reason she'd agreed with.

"No – wait a sec –" He walked across the room and put his glass on the table, blocking her way. "C'mon – I said I was sorry –"

"It's been a long day," Ellie said, looking past him to the door. "And you and Sam –"

Standing there, in front of her, he felt his throat jam up with what he wanted to say, what he knew was the right thing to say, the words refusing to come out. He stared at her profile, trying to think of anything that would get past that log-jam and make sense.

"You know me."

That hadn't been what he'd wanted to say, and he had no idea where it'd come from, but it got her attention. She looked at him.

"Not really."

He wasn't sure what to make of that. "Better than anyone else."

Ellie looked at the floor. It was, she thought, as close as he could come to admitting that he didn't want to leave.

He was vulnerable and, she thought, so was she. It wasn't a smart move to let this play on any longer. Turning away from him, she sat down on the sofa again and she heard his soft exhale as he followed her and sat down as well. When it came to the man beside her, when had she ever played it smart?

"What happened after Death warned Bobby?" she asked, picking up her glass and watching him as she swallowed a mouthful.

"We ran into a couple of hunters who thought the world'd be a better place without Sam," he said after a moment. "Walt Ryerson and Roy Bishop – you know 'em?"

"Only by reputation." Her nose wrinkled up. "They tried to kill him?"

The shotgun's blast filled his head again. In the confines of the motel room it'd been thunderously loud. Shocking. Final. He made us and we just snuffed his brother, you idiot. You want to spend the rest of your life knowing Dean Winchester's on your ass? 'Cause I don't. Shoot 'im.

Being shot at close range was a surprisingly okay way to die. It'd been fast. Too fast to register pain or worry about what happens next or anything else.

"Didn't try. Killed us both," he said, leaning back into the corner of the sofa, his eyes half-closed.

"You look pretty good for a month-old corpse?"

He grinned a little, aware that there wasn't much humour in the expression. "It was a set-up," he said to her, Zachariah's nasally voice coming back to him. Wow. Running from angels. On foot. In Heaven.

"Someone wanted us in Heaven," he told her. Joshua. Zachariah and the rest of the dicks had just wanted to grab them, torture the crap out of him until he'd agree to letting Michael in.

"We met this –" he hesitated, wondering if Joshua was an angel. He was just the gardener, he'd said. "Angel, I think. Some kind of angel. Said his name was Joshua –"

"You met the Gardener?" Ellie's voice rose a note or two and Dean turned to look at her in surprise.

"You know him?"

"Of him," she said, nodding. "He tends to Heaven's gardens. As above, so below. The real Garden of Eden."

Shaking his head a little, Dean said, "Yeah. We didn't know about it. Didn't have a clue. He said that God wanted to pass on a message."

He saw her brows lift and felt his mouth curl up derisively. "Told us to back off. Trying to find him. Joshua said he knew about it all and it wasn't his problem."

"Well, I guess he's right," Ellie said slowly.

"What?!"

She turned to him with a small smile. "He gave free will. The ability to choose a course of destiny for ourselves. If you have freedom of choice, you also have the responsibility for those choices. If we make a mess, we have to clean it up."

"We didn't make the mess," Dean argued, leaning forward. "His dick angels manipulated us from before we were born to free Lucifer! We wouldn't be in this mess if they hadn't –"

"You want God to save everyone, Dean?"

"Hell, yeah!"

"Somehow, I don't think any of this was just the angels and demons."

"You get religion or something?" he asked her, brows drawing together.

She snorted and shook her head. "No. Religion is just people trying to make sense of things, interpreting it all in whatever way fits their preconceived ideas – or axes to grind," she said. "But do I believe that God's watching? Yes."

"Not doing a great job of it," Dean muttered, picking up his glass and swallowing a mouthful.

"He's not as straightforward as you," she said. "And he promised Noah that he wouldn't intervene like that again."

"Fixing this wouldn't take a flood," Dean countered sourly. "Just grounding his kids."

She laughed, looking away. "I don't disagree, Dean. But I'm not looking to divine intervention. That's Cecil B. de Mille you're thinking of, and it's not going to happen."

"If this is a – a test of some kind," he said. "Who the hell's it for? We're the ones getting mashed, between Heaven and Hell."

"I don't know," Ellie admitted. The angels had been thwarted by the man sitting next to her just enough to make them realise they weren't as all-powerful as they'd thought. The inhabitants of Hell were finding the same thing. None of it seemed coincidental to her.

"God gave humanity free will and to those who are willing to ask and to listen, his strength, love, courage, fortitude. Those things that help people to have faith to get through the bad times and keep going," she said, thinking about that. Faith had gotten her home. A faith in herself. A faith in the man beside her. A faith in something that seemed to fill her with strength when she couldn't find the energy to keep going, that had diverted the bear, had kept her alive. "And people seem to do their best when things are going to hell, not when it's all easy."

He scowled at that. "Didn't really take you for a believer, Ellie."

"I didn't really see you as someone who would turn away from help when you needed it," she countered gently.

His eyes narrowed. "I've begged for help, time after time."

"And you got it. Sometimes not in the way you expected, but you still got it."

She got to her feet, crossing the room to pick up the bottle from the counter and walked back to the sofa with it. "How many times have you come up with a plan at the last minute that got you and Sam out of serious trouble? How many times have you dodged Fate? You think that all just luck? I'm sorry it wasn't all lightning bolts and wrath from Heaven, but it does seem like a lot of proof to me."

He looked up at her as she leaned over the table to fill his glass, and she saw his expression change, his gaze thoughtful.

"Who rescued you from Hell, Dean? Who pulled you and Sam from the convent when Lucifer rose?"

"Who didn't lift a finger when I was chucked into Hell?" he argued, taking the glass and waving a hand around at the room in general. "Who didn't step in to stop Sam from believing in Ruby? Or to save my mom when she walked in on the demon?"

Setting the bottle on the table, Ellie walked around to the sofa and sat down again. "You made a choice to sacrifice your soul for Sam's life," she said, her voice low and serious. "Sam made a choice to believe in Ruby. Your mother made a choice to save your father instead of letting him die."

His expression became stony and she wondered if it was such a good idea to push him on this, now.

"That's free will, Dean," she said. "You want someone to save you from the choices you make? Or to take away the ability to choose freely – and pay for the consequences?"

It wasn't like he didn't know all this, she thought. He'd faced up to every choice he'd ever made. Faced the consequences, accepted the responsibility and paid for every single one.

"I could'a used some help every now and then," he said unwillingly. "Making some of those choices."

Smiling, Ellie shook her head at him. "You wouldn't have given up your soul for Sam, if you got a chance to do it again?"

He looked away and she knew that he would make that choice the same way if it was presented to him another thousand times.

"I wouldn't've given up," he said, after a long moment of silence. "Gotten off."

From the underlying vehemence in his voice, she guessed that he wasn't sure about that, not a hundred percent. It was something he was afraid of, in himself. Weakness.

"No," she agreed quietly. "No, I don't think you would've, if you'd known."

The flickered sideways glance he gave her seem to hold a wealth of emotion, but his expression smoothed before she could work out what she'd seen in it.

"Why are you here, Ellie?"

"I told you. I came to tell you about Lucifer and the Horseman, Dean," she said, looking away at the almost-lie. It wasn't a lie, not really. It just wasn't the whole truth. Her stomach knotted up at the thought of telling him why she'd come, wondering if he would believe it.

In the months since she'd left Manhattan, through the hunt for the tskuareg and the injuries that'd brought and the long, long walk out of the Alaskan wilderness and back to the nearest civilisation, the one thing that had kept her on her feet and going had been the thought of seeing him again. It was harder to lie to yourself when any moment could bring death, she knew now. And pretending that she didn't feel what she'd been feeling had seemed futile at best, dangerously self-delusional at worst.

Dean watched her face, unable to read the shadowed expressions crossing it. When she turned back, he sensed she'd come to a decision, but it was something that worried her, something she felt uncertain about.

"What?" He put his glass down and waited, unaccountably nervous at the way her face seemed paler, drawn a little with strain.

"And I came because … I missed you too, Dean."