A/N: Er, so it kinda evolved again into four parts. Damn. Well, I am so bad at this fanfic stuff. I don't think I really have anyone's voices quite right, especially Sam, since apparently (as shown in Mystery Spot) goes OCD instead of angsty when Dean's gone.
Anyway, I hope you guys don't hate my OC too much. I get annoyed with them, myself, but this one wouldn't leave me alone (Calvin, I mean). He's based after my brother, because just a few weeks ago my bro really DID hitchhike across the country, which got me thinking "what if SamnDean ever picked up a hitchhiker?" As well as all the metaphysical stuff the show makes me think about, like the dynamics of Hell and souls and demons and stuff. So, yeah, fun times. The last part will be, ideally, be up tomorrow, if anyone's still reading this besides the amazing NefariousVestal (And NV, thank you very much for the kind words :) I hope the rest of the fic doesn't disappoint...)
Onward...
Let Me Die In My Footsteps
Part Three
Go out in your country where the land meets the sun
See the craters and the canyons where the waterfalls run
Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho
Let every state in this union seep in your souls.
And you'll die in your footsteps
Before you go down under the ground.
Bob Dylan "Let Me Die In My Footsteps"
Sam pulls up to Bobby's house late in the afternoon. Calvin's passed out in the backseat. He hasn't said a word since they left the cottage. He didn't want to stick around for the police, though Sam did call in an anonymous tip as they drove away.
Bobby's place hasn't changed. The same dog stands watching him, growling, as he gets out of the car. He leaves Calvin asleep. He stands next to his open door.
The front door opens and Bobby steps outside. He's holding a shotgun, but he isn't pointing it at Sam, just holding it.
They stare at each other. A bird caws in a tree behind the house.
Bobby sighs and adjusts the hat he's wearing.
"Well, git your ass inside, yeh idjit," says Bobby, and goes back into his house. Sam smiles a small smile and follows him.
Bobby heads right to the kitchen, where he gets two beers out from the fridge. He hands one to Sam, and downs half of his own before Sam can even twist off the cap. Bobby doesn't look older, but he does have some wear around his eyes. They look…tired.
Sam sits down at the table.
"I need your help, Bobby."
Bobby stares at him hard.
"'Course you do."
If Bobby just came out and slugged him Sam thinks it would be less awkward.
"There's been some, uh, it's been…."
"I hear you've been picking up hitchers," says Bobby. "You've got the retard gene after all, Sammy. Congratulations."
"How did you…?"
Bobby takes a swig and leans on his counter.
"Couple old acquaintances o' mine called me. Gaines, Rufus, the crazy travellin' holy man. What the Hell've you been thinkin'?"
Sam bows his head. "It was the silence," he says.
"Well shit, boy," says Bobby, raising his voice and stepping forward. "Try answering the phone, then. Or, hey, takin' me along like you said ya would."
"I did," says Sam.
"No, you used me while we killed Lilith, Sam. Then you left, with no word. No word for almost three years."
"I needed some time to…," Sam trails off. "It's not like that's never happened before though, right? Me just…leaving."
"This is different and you know it."
"I know." He leans his arms on his legs and bends forward. "I brought someone with me, Bobby."
"You what?" Bobby looks out the window at the car. Sam assumes Calvin's still sleeping in the back, because Bobby says, "You got 'em in the trunk?"
"He's asleep."
"And why in Satan's toe jam did ya bring him here?"
Bobby's finished his beer and is getting another.
"His family was killed today," says Sam. "By demons."
Bobby sits at the table across from Sam. "Really? Demons? I haven't even heard of a possession since the one you took care of, what, a year ago? Are you sure?"
Sam nods. "They left me a message. And that demon in Colorado? It was Meg."
"That was Meg? What, the bitch has a get-out-of-Hell-free card?
"Probably. But she was after someone, Bobby. And I found out who."
"He the one you got stashed it the car?"
Sam takes his first gulp of the beer, and wishes it were something stronger.
"Well, shit," says Bobby. "They still after him?"
"They left a message. They want me to kill him," says Sam. "He's…like me. He's 'special.'" Sam says the last word like it's the scorpion he's trying to spit out of his mouth.
Sam runs a hand through his hair. "He's…he wants to go after the demons that did it."
"Well, no shit."
"I want to leave him here with you. Just until I can kill the demons that're after him."
Bobby laughs. "You want to leave some kid with demonic gifts with me while you go off searching for the demons that killed his family, alone?"
"Yes?"
"You are much stupider than I ever gave you credit for."
"Thanks."
"No."
"What?"
"You heard me, Sam," says Bobby. "No. I ain't babysittin' some kid while you go off fightin' demons, no matter how good ye'are at it. I'm going with you."
"But what about Calvin? I can't just…."
Bobby finishes off his second beer and says, "Well then I guess he's comin' too, or you can just set him loose and let him go back where he came from."
"I can't just ditch him, not now."
"Since you found out he has about a three in five chance of turning homicidal-psycho and killing everyone he knows?"
Sam shrugs. "Fool me twice," he says.
"Yeah, shame on you. You know what this kid can do?"
"No, only that he lives in the town where Meg was searching for a 'special child,' he had dreams about the yellow eyed demon, and demons left me a message in blood at his family's cottage telling me so."
Bobby nods.
"So you don't know…." He trails off when they hear a squeaking car door open outside.
"Sounds like he's awake," says Sam. He stands to meet Calvin outside, but the kid's already coming up to the door.
"Hello?" calls Calvin. "Um, Sam?"
"You can come inside, Calvin," answers Sam. Bobby glowers at him. Sam shrugs.
Still outside Calvin says, "Yeah, about that, I can't."
Bobby stands up, reaches for the shotgun he still has in reach. He whispers, "can't get by the protective seals?"
Calvin says, "There's this, like, yeti-size dog out here and I don't think he likes me much."
Bobby's tensed shoulders drop a bit, but he doesn't set down the gun as he heads for the front door. Sam follows.
"Samson, cut it out," Bobby tells the dog as he goes outside.
Calvin's standing halfway between the car and the house. His face is blank, like he only barely registers that the dog, or Bobby, for that matter, is even there. His hair is stringy and wild, and his clothes are rumpled. Dark circles rest under his eyes. Sam recognizes the look. He's seen it on too many people to count. Mostly he sees it on himself.
Calvin looks at Bobby when Samson stops growling. He glances down at the shotgun in Bobby's hands and takes a small step backwards.
"Bobby," hisses Sam. To Calvin he says, "Calvin, this is Bobby. Bobby, Calvin."
"Hi," Calvin says. Bobby nods to him.
Bobby turns and walks back inside, saying, "Well, come on inside, then. Samson, stay."
Calvin stands where he is until Sam says, "It's okay. You can come in. Bobby's an old friend of my family's."
Calvin follows him inside and they all sit around the table in the kitchen. Bobby puts a beer in front of Calvin.
"No thanks," murmurs the kid.
"Drink it," says Bobby. Calvin looks up at him and frowns.
"No thanks," he says again.
"You'll drink it, kid," insists Bobby.
"Why?"
Sam rolls his eyes. "You can just take one drink, Calvin."
Calvin looks at Sam now, suspicious. "Why?"
"It's a precaution," says Bobby.
"A precaution for what? What the Hell, man? You got, like, arsenic in there or something?"
"No, just Holy water," says Bobby.
"Holy water," deadpans Calvin. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply out his nose, but then he grabs the beer and takes a large gulp of it. His face pinches, like he's drinking straight ethanol.
"That's terrible," he says, setting the bottle back on the table. He meets Bobby's eyes and backpedals. "I mean, uh, thanks for, er, yeah."
Bobby crosses his arms over his chest and leans back.
Calvin says, "So that, what, proves I'm not unholy? Do you need me to eat some garlic, too?
"Don't be an idjit, boy," says Bobby, "vampires don't care 'bout garlic 'cept for that godawful smell."
"Vampires," Calvin mutters. "Good to know."
Sam used to be good with platitudes. Or at least adequate, he thinks, but it's so much easier when he wasn't actually involved with the victims. He'd spoken to Calvin's mom. He knew what her voice had sounded like. She wasn't as faceless as he would have liked.
He thinks he should say, well, something. Anything.
He says, "I know how you feel," because he does, but when Calvin turns to him he wishes he'd stuck to silence.
Calvin says, "That's supposed to, what, make me feel better?"
"Well…."
"Your whole family is dead, too?"
Sam glances at Bobby. "Most of them, yeah."
"How?"
"Well…it's a long—"
Calvin interrupts, "Was it demons, too?"
"Yeah, it was demons."
"And is this how you got into this whole, what, hunting thing? Your family died?"
"My mom. My dad raised me and my brother to kill supernatural things, and they…."
"They got killed somewhere along the way."
"Basically."
"This sucks," says Calvin. Bobby and Sam can't help but agree.
They sit a moment in silence, a moment for the dead and the sacrificed, but mostly it's a moment of silence for the living because the dead, well, they're dead, Sam thinks. They're dead and they left us here to flounder in the wake of their absence.
Bobby's the first to break it when he says, "We haven't seen many demons in a long while. We been thinkin' they were dying out, staying in Hell where they belong. But it looks like they've just been waiting."
Sam adds, "Those dreams you had? I used to have dreams like them too. I would…see things, before they happen. Because when I was six months old a demon—the yellow-eyed man you saw—poisoned me with his blood. It's…."
"There was a war," says Bobby.
"I think I saw it," says Calvin. "It was like, three years ago? Two? I thought I was going insane."
"What did you see?"
Calvin slumps into his chair and watches his hands as he talks. "There was always this creepy-ass girl, with white eyes, and this guy plastered to a ceiling with glue or something because he's just hanging there with his stomach cut open and…." He stops and turns to Sam. "It was you. I remember, now. I don't really know what happened. You were bleeding and there was this…screaming, and black, black eyes. And then it…it was like the world ended, and for two weeks all my dreams were darkness, like it was just me floating in space and nothing else."
Bobby laughs like a man in the gallows, and says, "that was Sam, all right."
"I thought I was just crazy. Or, like, had some wicked bad food poisoning."
Calvin wraps his arms around himself, and looks momentarily like he's sixteen instead of twenty.
"So I'm like you, then. All demony."
"Welcome to the club," says Sam. "Therapy's every other day and twice on Thursdays."
Calvin barks a laugh that sounds like death, a bit, and Sam cringes.
"How do you kill demons? I mean, if they can just be let out of Hell like those dreams I had…."
Bobby sits forward. "Dreams? You been dreamin' about Hell breakin' loose?"
"He did," says Sam, "back when it actually happened."
"Oh," says Bobby. He frowns. "Oops."
"That was you, too?" Calvin asks, "You opened the gates of Hell?"
"It was an accident?"
Calvin says, "How do you do something like that accidentally?"
"Demons," says Sam.
Bobby says, "you know, this is great an' all, a real fun chat. But we got a problem if the demons out there are just lying in wait, and not gone like with thought."
"They're planning something," says Sam.
"How does no one notice that? A bunch of demons planning, I mean. I would think people would notice demons," says Calvin.
Sam shakes his head. "No, they look just like you or me, because they can be you or me. Well, not so much me anymore, but you. They possess people. It's more like The Exorcist than Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"Why not you?"
Sam pulls his shirt down and shows Calvin the tattoo on his chest.
"It's a ward from possessions. I got it a few years ago after a few, er, problems."
"Can I get one?"
"It would be advisable," says Bobby, "if you're gonna follow through on your plan to start huntin'."
"Right," says Calvin. "So how do we start, this whole demon killing thing?"
It takes two days to get find any sign of a demonic possession, and even then they're pushing it. A missing persons report they find from some nowhere town in Wyoming, and the only reason they look into it at all is because it's near the enormous Devil's Trap that surrounds the cemetery and the gate to Hell.
Those two days give Sam a lot of time to wonder a lot of things, which is not something he really likes to do, with all the anti-fun memories filed inside his head, but he can't help it.
The first thing he wonders about is Calvin, and then it's mostly why doesn't he have any powers beyond the dreams, like me? Followed by I wonder how he's taking it, because Calvin's barely speaking, barely doing anything besides reading and what looks like meditation. He finished the book Rufus gave Sam the night they got to Bobby's, and follows that with books from Bobby's library. Sam sticks to his computer, trying to find any sign of a demon anywhere, because he really doesn't want to summon one and he has Bobby's library practically memorized.
At night he sits on the ground with his legs crossed and his eyes closed.
Bobby just watches on. He's wary of Calvin, Sam notices, but it's more because he's Bobby and less because he thinks Calvin's a threat than anything else. Samson, actually, takes to Calvin and sleeps by the couch where Calvin took up residence.
It's the second night at Bobby's when Sam notices Calvin acting weird. He's about to hit the hay and happens to look out his window to see Calvin standing, back to the house, facing into the dark.
As Sam watches Calvin until the kid goes back inside, and Sam wonders what he was looking for out there.
In the morning they leave and even after three years Sam doesn't think it's weird that he's traveling with Bobby, again, but it is weird that he's driving, Bobby's riding shotgun and there's a third person in the car, because it was always him in the backseat or just him and Bobby, before.
They reach Gillette before noon, and Casper not long after. The man went missing from there, from a Wal-Mart in the middle of the day. His car and a shopping cart filled with all his stuff was left in the parking lot. He never made it home. There was no sign of a struggle, and it soon becomes apparent that there is absolutely no trail to follow from there, because the guy's just gone.
Calvin kicks the guy's car after Sam comes back from interviewing his family with no success, and Bobby's finagled no info from the police. As he's fuming Sam thinks he sees the kid's eyes flash black, again, and this time he knows he's not just seeing things. But still, he knows the kid's not possessed. He would know.
He doesn't quite get why Calvin would have demonic symptoms, but he's only worried about what Bobby would do if he noticed, so he doesn't say anything.
After all, Sam hasn't really had to worry that anything demonic could hurt him for years.
He wonders what it is that makes Calvin's eyes go black. He doesn't think it's ever happened to him.
It's unsettling, as much as anything is in the world, but Sam's not overly concerned yet.
Calvin's shaking. Bobby, being Bobby, grasps the kid's shoulder and says, "we'll get them, don't worry."
Sam, being Sam, says, "These things don't usually get solved right away."
Bobby says, "Let's get a room for the night and figure out where to go from there."
They get a room in a Motel 6 down I-25 from Casper. It has two beds and for the second time Sam finds himself in the bed closest the door, with Bobby on the other and Calvin on a cot. He still has Rufus' book, and Sam tells him he can just keep it because Sam doesn't need it.
They order in Chinese.
Bobby and Sam down their food in minutes, but Calvin just picks at his. His carton is still mostly full when Sam and Bobby go to sleep. He sits on his cot in the dark, staring into space.
Sam doesn't think the kid gets any sleep because he's still sitting there when Sam wakes up in the morning. Bobby rolls his eyes when Sam shoots him a plaintive look, and says, quietly, "this is normal grief, Sam."
Sam knows he's right, knows he's never really had an experience like this with normal grief. There's always been an end of a fantasy in fire, and deals with demons, and years picking up hitchhikers for Sam, not these normal stages, and Sam's not jealous. Not even a little, because, he realizes, Calvin's really got no one.
No one but some stranger that picked him up four days ago.
Sam wonders if he'd deal the same way.
Calvin, still staring into space, says, "I want to go to the Gate."
"What's that?" Says Sam.
"What in God's name would you want to go there for?" Asks Bobby.
"I want to see it in person," says Calvin.
Sam says, "No, we're not going that way. I thought you wanted to get the demons that killed your family?"
"I will get them. But I want to see the Gate to Hell, and I don't exactly have anything else going on, right now."
Bobby says, "You don't want to go there, kid. Nothing but ghosts and graves."
"I can get there on my own, then," Calvin says. "I know where it is."
Sam asks, "You do? How?"
"It's in that book you gave me, Gateways to Hell. Samuel Colt's book."
Bobby shakes his head and mutters something about youth and mental handicaps, paces the room, and Sam knows that they'll be going. They leave around noon. They aren't in any hurry. It only takes a couple hours, but dark storm clouds have moved it, and the absence of direct sunlight gives the world an eerie glow.
The cowboy cemetery is the same as Sam remembers. It's creepy, and dank, and old. The crypt that is the Gate is the same.
Jake's body isn't there anymore, or the man that the yellow-eyed demon possessed. Sam, Dean, Bobby and Ellen had burned their bodies after the fight. That's the only thing different, that and Ellen's not there, and Dean's in Hell, and while he feels sorry for the kid Calvin doesn't quite fit.
Sam knows, vaguely, that no one ever quite fits right away, but he also knows that he doesn't want Calvin to fit. He wants Calvin to go back to school and to his life once they find the demons. He doesn't want to grow used to his presence, or start to enjoy it, or to feel a connection.
He doesn't want to, but he thinks that once the demons are dead there's no way Calvin will go back to normal. No one ever does. He knows that there's a hole in the world where Dean used to fit, and for Calvin, the whole is the size of an entire family, and it's freshly dug.
Calvin walks up to the door. He places one hand on it.
"It's bigger than it looked in my dreams," he says.
Sam stands next to him. Bobby hangs back. He keeps looking around like he's expecting demons to crawl out of the ground or drop from the sky.
"I think I can help your brother, Sam," says Calvin.
Sam stops. His heart, his brain, everything stops.
"How do you know about Dean." Sam doesn't speak in a question. It's a demand. Because along with everything else, his sympathy stops, too. He thinks maybe he had Calvin pegged wrong. Calvin is an enemy.
Bobby approaches too, sensing the tension.
"I'm sorry, Sam," says Calvin. "I didn't mean to."
"Mean to what, boy?" asks Bobby.
"I sort of…remembered it, I think," says Calvin.
"Remembered it," says Sam, his voice cold, frozen like the rest of him.
Bobby's hand reaches back to his gun, but a sharp motion from Sam stops him.
"Remembered what," asks Sam.
"It was the dreams. You know, the ones that I thought were just me being insane? The first one was the town, with the bell. But the second one, the second one was…it was a guy, a tall guy with a jacket and that necklace"—Calvin points at Dean's amulet, around Sam's neck—"and he made…a deal, with someone? Another demon right?"
Sam nods.
"And four years ago, with all those freakin' bladder-releasing dreams with the white-eyed one, well, I saw him die. I saw you die, too, but he's really dead. He's in Hell."
"Get to the point, kid," growls Bobby. "We know all that already."
Calvin looks back to the Gate. "Yeah, well, I think I know how to fix it."
"Fix it. Just like that."
"Yeah, I've been thinking about it ever since…. For the last couple nights, anyway."
"You can't just fix this," says Bobby. "That's what Dean tried to do. And, apparently, we all know how that brilliant idea turned out."
"This is different," he says.
"Different how?" Bobby's voice is rising. He waves his arms in a jagged manner, emphasizing his words. "We're at the Gate to Hell and there ain't a single plan I can think of involving being here that can ever amount to anything resembling good!"
"We can get him out of there! He doesn't have to spend eternity in Hell," insists Calvin. "The door goes both ways."
"So what?"
"So I can get in there, and get Dean out. That's what," says Calvin.
Bobby snorts, like it's the dumbest thing he's ever heard, and it just might be.
"You want to go to Hell," says Sam.
"Well, it wouldn't be all of me. Just my soul," says Calvin.
"How?"
"Forget about how," says Bobby, "We can't even open the door without the colt. We don't have that, if you'll recall."
A new voice, an unwelcome voice says, "I do."
All three of them turn, and standing in front of them is Ellen, only not, because her eyes are the pitch black of Hell. She smirking and twirling the colt in her hand. There are two others, and one of them is the man who went missing from Casper, eyes also black.
Sam opens his mouth to send them on their way, but she raises the colt, pulls back the hammer, and points it at his chest.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Sammy," says the demon in Ellen.
She takes a step forward, black eyes zeroed in on Sam. She jerks the arm that isn't holding the colt, and all their weapons are pulled from their hands and flung into the cemetery. Sam glares at her. "Meg," he says.
Bobby growls, "How in Jesus Christ's body odor do you get out of Hell so damn easily?"
"It's a gift," she says. "And I've told you, Sammy, my name's not Meg."
Sam shrugs, cocky, and smirks at her. "What do you want now, Meg?"
"Oh, just a little Hell on earth, you know, the usual," she says, and the murky evil, lithe and fluid, that Meg embodies does not fit with Ellen. She seems like an odd caricature, a mask that doesn't quite fit.
Sam's really starting to wonder why they never fixed the iron Devil's Trap made by the railroad tracks around the cemetery, but he had much more on his mind back then. He doesn't think it ever even occurred to him.
"Well," amends Meg, "That's not all I want. I also want your little friend, there," she nods at Calvin, "and getting to kill you is a definite desire of mine."
Sam, stalling, trying to think of anything to do, because Meg's finger is tight on the trigger and if he starts using any mind-bending power on her she'll shoot, and dying is not exactly high on his to-do list.
He says, "Why do you want Calvin?"
"Oh, not for any special reason," says Meg, "It's just that I'm actually a very sentimental person, and he is one of Father's children, after all. He's like, my brother."
"Wouldn't that make us siblings too?" Sam can't help the shudder that ripples through him at that thought.
"Then I guess this makes me Cain," she says, and begins squeezes the trigger.
Sam flinches, throws out his hand to stop the bullet, but the gun never fires. A black fog, a demon cloud flies past him towards Meg in Ellen's body. Calvin's body, next to Sam, falls to the ground in a heap. Sam uses the distraction to fling himself at one of the demons flanking Meg, and sends it to Hell with three simple words. Bobby's got the other in a headlock and is reciting an exorcism as he dumps a flask of Holy water on it.
The black cloud startles Meg but she doesn't look surprised to see it. She shoots it with the colt, but the bullet passes harmlessly through it. Or, at least, Sam thinks it's harmless until he sees a scrape appear on Calvin's arm that looks like a bullet's graze.
Ideas start falling into place in Sam's head.
The black cloud, Calvin, flies at Meg and disappears into Ellen through her mouth. Sam watches the battle for her body, like a thousand little lightning storms happening all at once, in one person, and then she throws her head back and a blackness, like a snake and a mushroom cloud all in one, explodes out of her, and disappears into the sky. She collapses.
A small trickle of black leaks out of her relaxed mouth, and slithers along the ground, like it's blind and searching, and it makes its way towards Calvin's body. It enters through his ear.
Sam grabs the colt from where it lays in Ellen's limp hand, and he points it at Calvin. Bobby kneels and checks Ellen's pulse.
"What about those two," asks Sam, nodding his head at the two men, and Bobby shakes his head.
"Dead," he says.
"And Ellen?"
"Pulse is strong," says Bobby. He rises and stands next to Sam. "What just happened?"
"I'm not entirely sure, Bobby," says Sam. The colt is steady in his hand. Calvin stirs.
"Ugh," says the kid. "That is so disgusting." He drags himself to his knees and shakes. He rubs at his arms and legs as though there are spiders crawling all over him.
Sam doesn't move or speak or breathe. Bobby stays silent behind him, watching.
"You knew they would be here," says Sam.
Calvin looks up at him. Guilt is in his eyes, and perhaps a little shame. He bite his lip. Sam has the colt pointed at the kid's head. He waits for Calvin's eye to turn black, but they don't. They're as clear and blue as when Sam first picked him up outside Denver.
"Yeah," says Calvin. "I did."
"You had, what, a vision?" asks Sam.
"Just a dream. She was in it. Telling me to come here."
Bobby asks, "What did you do?"
"I got the idea from the book," says Calvin. "And, well, I lived all around Boulder for two years."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"That's my power, or whatever," says Calvin. "It says in the book, all a demon is is the soul, corrupted in Hell and leaked into the world, somehow."
"And that has to do with you becoming a demon how?"
Calvin's eyes flicker from the colt to Sam to Bobby, and he's got a sheen of sweat on his face.
"Well, that's where Boulder comes in. They're mondo into the whole new agey, meditation thing, and I had this girlfriend once who did it like, every morning, and she taught me how to, too, so I just…disconnected. From my self."
"You mean you, your soul, can leave you body?" Sam narrows his eyes, and says, "why is your soul black? Why have your eyes been turning black, like a demons? You—"
"That's it, though isn't it? We—you and I—we're part demon. It's like the X-men, only it wasn't just our genes that got mutated, right? I mean, you could do this too, I bet."
Sam shakes his head. "No, I can't." He pulls back the hammer on the colt.
"Whoa whoa wait a minute, Sam," pleads Calvin. He brings his hands up, surrender and placation. "What are you doing? You're gonna shoot me?"
"Sam, what're you doing?" Bobby asks, stepping closer to him.
"He's just like Ava, Bobby. And Anson."
"Who?" asks Bobby. Calvin's pale, eyes wide.
"Andy's brother," says Sam. "And like Jake. Bobby, his soul is black! Literally! How can he be good?"
"Sam I'm all for killing evil, but he ain't done anything wrong," says Bobby.
If it's supernatural, we kill it.
"He just is wrong, Bobby," says Sam. Like me. "We're…everything's all wrong."
Sam thinks of Ava, of Andy's brother, of Gordon, of Jake. He thinks of Andy, of the baby Rosie, of Lenore and of himself. And if he kills himself he's spitting on Dean's gift, on Dean's life, and if Dean thought he was worth it, believed that Sam could fight that darkness even without Dean there, then maybe Sam should believe in Calvin.
Calvin's looking him in the eyes, up the barrel of the colt. He looks resigned, like he knows this was coming. Maybe he did. Maybe he's seen months of Sam killing the supernatural, in dreams and meditation or whatever, maybe in the days since his family died he's had the same thoughts Sam has, everyday.
If it's supernatural we kill it.
Kill it.
He's not an it. There is no it. There's people and choices, thinks Sam.
"I'm not wrong, I'm just me," Calvin says, "I can't help who I am."
Sam lowers the colt. He's not shaking, and he doesn't think he ever would have pulled the trigger. This isn't the same as Madison. Calvin's not losing himself. He's not losing control. No more than Sam is.
Calvin says, "I just…everyone's gone, Sam, and there's just me."
There's a hole in the world where Dean used to be.
Sam drops his arm to his side, and lets the hammer on he gun up.
Calvin gets to his feet.
"So do you want to hear my plan to help your brother now?"
Sam laughs, mostly because he doesn't know what else to do. "Yeah," he says, and this time Bobby doesn't disagree.
"Well," says Calvin, "there's this gate, and we can open it, right? Now that we have that, er, gun. Thing. So we can get into Hell."
"We?" asks Bobby.
"Not 'we' so much as Sam, or me, because you can't just enter Hell. There's no physical, you have to be a soul. So we can do it."
"That's wonderful," says Bobby, sarcasm evident. "A one way ticket to Hell, without the complication of selling your soul to get there."
"It's not one way!" says Calvin. "There's a way out! It's all in Colt's book. There's a cemetery in Lawrence, Kansas where the barrier between this life and the afterlife is cracked. It's like a vase with a split in it, it still holds water but some of it leaks through."
"Lawrence," says Sam. Because of course it's in fuckin' Lawrence.
"Yep," affirms Calvin. "All I have to do is teach you how to disconnect yourself, and you can go into Hell and find Dean, and it shouldn't be a problem because you'll be there voluntarily. You'll, theoretically, be able to move around in there. It's all very abstract and philosophical, which is really more of my sister's strong point, but I think…." He trails off and looks at the ground.
Calvin sighs and says, "I haven't really been…thinking about it, you know?"
There's a beat. Not even the wind makes a noise.
"Anyway, all we have to do is open the door a crack, let you through, and then get your body to Lawrence for you when you come out. Assuming you can navigate through Hell, find your brother, free his soul, and drag him out with you.
"And that's the whole plan."
Another momentary silence occurs.
Bobby turns to Sam. "You Winchesters are stupidity magnets."
"It is one of the lamest, and most idiotic plans I've ever heard," says Sam. "Let's do it."