How do you propose and not look like an idiot?

Jimmy's still trying to figure it out. He feels like the 'down on one knee' thing is cheesy, the 'ring in the glass of champagne' trick is potentially dangerous, the casual 'wanna get married?' isn't significant enough and anything involving a baseball stadium or movie theatre is just asking to get embarrassed.

Time keeps moving on, and Amelia's been working as an English lecturer for nearly a year now. Jimmy's… still with his dad's company, but that's okay. He can handle that. It's a normal, everyman kind of job, and he's a normal, everyman kind of man. Sure, he'd like something a little more impressive, but it doesn't matter. Not really.

He doesn't like to think of himself as old-fashioned, but there's still something shaming about having a girlfriend earn that much more than you. Jimmy's currently pouring all of his money into a savings account for a ring. He's found a slim silver one that he can imagine on Amelia perfectly, the neat white gemstone glistening in the morning light when she heads off to work. It's going to take him several months to get there, but that's okay, because there's a good chance it's going to take that long for him to figure out how to ask the damn question.

"Just ask her," his best friend urges one day as they sit in a bar. "Say 'Amelia, will you marry me?"

"How do I lead up to it?" Jimmy asks. "I can't spring that on her without a warning."

"Amelia, what's for dinner? Also, marry me."

"That's hilarious, Mack."

"I try my best." He swigs from his beer. "Why don't you ask God? I'm sure he'd be able to help out."

Jimmy shoots him a quick glare. "Gee, I'm not sure that's an appropriate use of prayer."

All the same, that night, he does. After his usual prayers saying thank you for Amelia and his family and his life, and asking the Lord to protect Amelia and his family and his life, he pauses.

"Lord, I… I don't know how to ask her. I want her to say 'yes' so badly, and I'm afraid that if I do it wrong she'll… please, show me the way." He laughs quietly to himself. "I promise, I'll invite you to the wedding."

He finishes off and mutters his usual 'amen'. When he stands and turns, Amelia is waiting in the doorway.

"Praying without me?" she says, and he knows he's slipped up. They usually pray together, but they both tend to speak their words aloud and today he really did need the privacy.

"I was …" he says, and grins hopelessly. "Uh, impatient?"

"Impatient?" she laughs, delighted at his daring. "Are you saying I take a long time?"

"Too long," he agrees. "Come here."

He pulls her close and breathes her in. Her arms slide around his neck and she hums happily against his neck.

"Yes," she says softly. He freezes.

"What?"

"I wasn't trying to eavesdrop, honestly, but I overheard. Sorry." He stands speechless, thoughts tripping over each other as they race through his head. "So if you still want to ask, then my answer is yes."

"Are you sure?" he says stupidly. To his surprise, she starts to laugh.

"Really?"

"What?"

"Come on, Jimmy. With the amount I've been hinting-"

"Hinting?"

"The wedding magazines?" she says fondly, lacing her fingers with his. "The staring at rings?"

"Um." She just laughs harder. After a while, he starts to chuckle too.

"So it's a yes?"

"Definitely a yes," she says.

"Sure?"

"No doubt."

He grabs her in his arms, lifts her up and twirls her round and round, whooping in delight. She's beaming when he sets her down, and he knows he's grinning like an idiot but he couldn't actually care less. He wants to dance around the room, wants to knock on every door in the street and tell them the news. Jimmy tilts his head up to the sky. "Thank you!" he calls. Amelia giggles, but then tilts her head back too.

"Thank you," she agrees, leaning into Jimmy. He tucks his arms around her waist and they fold against each other, smiling up at the ceiling and feeling content and lucky and so, so grateful.

"I guess you'll wanna phone your mom, huh?" Jimmy says, to Amelia now.

"Later," Amelia says, turning to face him and very deliberately pushing one strap of her nightdress off her shoulder.

"Later," Jimmy agrees, nodding vigorously. "Later is good too."

The thought snaps into his head as he's about to bring the red-hot iron down to Nick's skin, the same kind of time it always seems to occur.

That's Nick. You know Nick, he's not your enemy. What are you doing?

Every single cell in Jimmy's body wants to keep on going, to keep on hurting, to make everything better- all except for a cluster somewhere deep in his brain, their whispers growing louder.

Don't do it. This is wrong. Don't do it!

Jimmy holds out for roughly half a second before panic overwhelms him and all logical thought is pushed aside. He brings the poker down.

"How's the skull?" Nick asks later on.

"Mostly healed now, thanks. Got a bitch of a headache, though."

"Mmm."

"How's your arm?"

"I'll live." On impulse, Jimmy forces himself to look at it. Nick's right arm is an utterly disgusting mass of muscle and flesh and bone, charred and destroyed beyond belief. I did that, he thinks, and guilt punches him somewhere deep in his gut.

"I tried," he says quietly. "I tried to fight it."

"And how'd that go?" Nick grunts.

"About as well as you'd expect."

Nick snorts; this is in no way news to him. "Fucking demons," he says.

"It's not all their fault though, is it?" Jimmy says, guilt surging up to pour from his mouth. "I'm still the one that hit you and I burned you- I mean, I actually branded you, for God's sake- and-"

"Don't," Nick says.

"But I-"

"I mean it, Jimmy. What's the point? You feel even worse? Fuck that."

"I can't…" Jimmy lets his voice trail off, frustrated. How is he supposed to just let it go? He's been justifying it with 'I can't help it', and 'it's out of our control', and 'this is Hell, the normal rules don't apply'. But if he can look at Nick and see a good man, he doesn't think he can look at himself and the things he's doing and see the same thing.

"Look, try and fight it if that's what you want," Nick sighs. "But don't go feeling bad about not holding out, 'cause you won't be able to."

"What do you mean, I won't be able to? You said it was worth a try," Jimmy accuses.

"I say a lot of things," Nick says wearily. "Demons are too strong, and this is their domain. If they don't want to lose, they won't."

"Wow, you always been this cynical?" Jimmy says touchily. He feels like a child, being rebuked for still believing in fairies and angels and happy endings.

"For a while now, yeah." Nick flexes his healing arm and sucks in a painful breath. He lets it out again and it's heavy, like just being in his body has dragged the life from it.

"I don't know about you, man, but I'm getting tired," Nick says. That's strange to hear, because Jimmy's the opposite of tired. He's anxious, filled with a fluttering energy that won't let him forget for a single second that what he's doing is wrong.

"What do you mean?"

"It's never-ending. Always the same. I keep on hoping they'll give up and let me die for real, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be on the cards."

Jimmy doesn't know how to reply to that. Tell Nick to keep hoping? What's the point? There's nothing to hope for. People don't get out of Hell.

"Hey, that's a point," he says instead, pretending that the rest of the sentence has just passed him by. "Like you said, it's the same thing every time. I don't know what they did to you before they brought you to demon Fight Club, but did it change much?"

"About as far from consistent as you can get," Nick says.

"Exactly," Jimmy says. "So why the change to- y'know, no more change?"

"You said you started feeling guilty?"

"Yeah, but-"

"I'd count that as 'change'."

"Oh," Jimmy says limply, all the air leaving him in one.

"And I'd hazard a guess it's going to get worse."

"Oh," Jimmy says. "That sounds… awful."

"Welcome to Hell," Nick says dryly. Jimmy can't really fault that.

"I'm gonna try and get some sleep," Nick says.

"You know you can't," Jimmy objects.

If either of them could sleep, healing would be much more pleasant. As things stand, Jimmy hasn't slept since the lead-up to the final battle, when Castiel's batteries started to run low. Granted, he spent a lot of those lost years lurking somewhere deep down inside himself- but he was always loosely conscious, could see the colours of what was going on if not the shapes that held them. It wasn't, he thinks, the same thing as sleep: at best, it was the liminal crush of sensation between dream and reality.

"All the same, I'd like to try." Nick closes his eyes. "So fuckin' tired," he mumbles.

"One thing," Jimmy says before Nick can slip out of reach. "How about you? Why aren't you being thrown on the guilt train?"

"Never really got off it," Nick murmurs. He doesn't manage to fall asleep, but he keeps on trying until the demons reappear.

"Nick Cohen, you love that dog more than you love me," Sarah accuses.

"Don't," he says immediately. "Don't even like the dog. He doesn't even like me."

"Nick, he's currently sat onyou."

This may be true.

"He's a very small dog," Nick tries.

"He's a German Shepherd."

"Well, yeah, but he's a small one."

Sarah smirks and sits down next to him. "I'm not complaining," she says, tucking her feet up on the sofa and easing the front half of Banjo onto her lap. The dog looks up at her through heavy-lidded eyes, gives a contended grumble and then returns to sleep, tail thumping lazily on the other side of Nick.

"He's a fierce creature," Nick says seriously.

"Oh, I can tell," Sarah hums, scratching Banjo's head.

"Brutal, absolutely brutal."

"Mmm."

"I seriously think you should have let me name him Ripper."

"I told you, I'm not shouting 'Ripper' in a crowded park."

"Cujo, then."

"Nick-"

"Lucifer?"

"Banjo is fine," she laughs, smacking his leg lightly. "You picked 'Banjo'."

"We picked 'Banjo'," he corrects. She considers this and inclines her head in a gesture of 'eh, fair enough'.

It's been nearly a year since Nick came home with the puppy, and between the two of them they've probably spent half of their wages on the dog. Banjo's the most spoiled Alsatian in existence, and he returns this favour by being the best behaved. Secretly, Nick was half-hoping he'd have the kind of wayward dog who destroys furniture and shits on the lawns of people you dislike, but mild-mannered, utterly adoring (if slightly dimmer than most) Banjo is a very fair trade.

Nick's left hand is still trapped by an admittedly not-really-that-small dog, but he throws his right around Sarah's shoulders to pull her in close. She lays her head on his chest. The TV is quietly burbling with some game show he's not paying much attention to and outside, snowflakes are drifting down. It's nearly Christmas again.

Nick doesn't think there's a way he could be physically happier.

"Nick," Sarah says softly after a few minutes. "There's something I need to tell you."

What is it they say about speaking too soon?

"Go on," he says cautiously, trying to act like he doesn't really care about what she's about to say, like he's barely paying attention.

"It's, um." Sarah straightens up and he pulls his arm away. Banjo stirs and Nick soothes him. I know how you feel, bud.

"I don't know how to say this," she says, with a nervous flutter of a laugh.

"Just phrase it straight," he says. She nods, makes eye contact, breaks it, makes it again and holds it this time.

"I'm pregnant," she says, and at first the words stubbornly refuse to be processed. They hang in his brain, a meaningless piece of information: I'm getting my hair cut next week, the football is on tonight, I'm pregnant. When it finally gets to him, it's not so much sinking in as it is slamming. The news breaks apart and shatters, splinters piercing a thousand parts of his brain all at once.

"How far gone are you?" he asks, voice sounding too strained.

"About nine weeks," she says quietly. "I wasn't sure at first, but I took the test today- twice- and it was definitely positive." He nods, showing he understands.

"We've talked about kids before, haven't we?" he says, trying to sound light.

"A bit," she replies cautiously. By 'a bit', she presumably means the following phrase:

'I don't think it would be a good idea'

- because that's all he's ever said on the matter. Nick nods again- he's nodding too much, too desperate to seem like this isn't freaking him out.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, right. Okay."

"Nick?" she says, laying a hand on his arm. The dog stirs on his lap and he lifts Banjo up, slides out from underneath him. The dog makes vaguely discontented muttering noises, but doesn't wake up.

"I need to get out for a little while," he says. "I need to think."

"You can think here," she says. "With me. Nick, please don't run away. We can sort this out. I mean, there's always-"

"Don't say it!" he says. "I don't- it's not- look, I'll be back soon, okay? I just need to clear my head. I'm sorry," he says desperately. Sarah swallows and blinks a few times.

"Sure," she says. "I'll see you soon." She smiles, but it's brittle and he thinks it might shatter when she drops it. He leaves before he has to find out.

"Ice or fire?"

"Fire," Nick replies. "Any day, fire."

"Really?" Jimmy says. For him, it's not that easy to call. Getting hurt by ice is awful, but healing injuries from fire is worse.

"Mmm," Nick says. "Ice brings back memories."

"Bad ones?"

"'course."

"Of what? I can't really imagine the Devil being into winter wonderlands."

"See, everyone thinks that, but he was cold," Nick says.

"Like how?"

"Everywhere we went, the temperature dropped. I once watched him- felt him- fuck it, something- freeze a glass of water just by picking it up."

They don't tend to talk all that much about their time as vessels. They joke about it sometimes because it helps to treat it all as haha, isn't it funny, we both had angels play us like marionettes- but they don't talk about it properly, because there's enough awful crap happening right now without bringing awful crap that's already happened into things.

That's Nick's view, at least. Jimmy kind of wants to talk, because if they don't talk about the awful crap, how are they supposed to get rid of it? He remembers what he did as Castiel, what he did as Jimmy, what he's doing down here, in Hell, and the guilt builds and builds until he has to talk to somebody to try and get it out.

But lately Nick keeps refusing to accept Jimmy's apologies and he's stopped listening to any talk about resisting, and he won't stop trying to sleep and he doesn't even seem to care when Jimmy turns his body into a burned-out shell or grinds his bones to powder anymore.

Jimmy doesn't know how Hell works. He doesn't know whether it's breaking him and Nick, or whether they were already broken and Hell's just cutting away the dead petals that hid it. All he knows is that, with each fight that passes, Nick is drifting further out of reach.

Jimmy can't let that happen. Nick's the only other human in this place, and Jimmy needs him to stay grounded so that Jimmy can stay grounded, because if all he looks at is demons he doesn't know how long it'll be before he starts to treat them as a mirror. And so, this time, he pushes the past.

"Were you cold?" he asks.

"Not physically," Nick says after a beat. "Wasn't anything physically, though. Felt cold in my mind. Kinda like when you drink something cold way too quick, but worse. Tendrils. Didn't go away. Got worse when he was pissed off. He was pissed off a lot."

"Castiel was warm," Jimmy muses. "Like a glow. It hurt to try and share headspace with him- it… vibrated or something, I don't know. It was much easier to, you know, slip away."

"Yeah," Nick says, in the kind of voice that means he's already shut off to the conversation. He tells Jimmy sometimes that thinking about everything that happened- that's happening now- just seems like so much effort.

"How much of it were you awake for?" Jimmy presses.

"Some."

"I think it freaked Castiel out when I woke up," Jimmy says. "He used to get really uncomfortable. Sometimes he'd pull some trick with his grace and knock me out completely."

Nick doesn't reply, and that makes panic creep in around Jimmy's edges.

"I only tried talking to him a few times," Jimmy says. "Asking about my family mostly. All he ever said was that he'd protect them." No reply. "Did Lucifer try talking to you?" No reply.

"Nick, you gotta give me something, man." Jimmy knows that he's begging but it's been so long, so many days of fighting and before that so many days of torture and before that so many days of Castiel and he can't help but feel himself slipping away. "I'm losing it here."

And then he sees movement, and when he turns his head (he's been trying to keep it mostly still; his neck was cracked earlier and he knows from experience he doesn't want it healing in the wrong position) he finds that Nick has turned to face him.

"Would you look at that?" Nick murmurs. "You are. I am too. Just in a different way."

"What do you mean?" Jimmy asks desperately. Nick ignores him.

"What did you ask before?" he says mildly. Irritation pulsates inside Jimmy, but it's still conversation, so he clings to it like a lifeline.

"Did Lucifer try talking to you?"

"Lucifer," Nick says slowly, "loved the sound of his own voice. He didn't let me answer much, but he made sure I heard every word. Even at the end, when I couldn't remember my own name- I couldn't remember my son's name- he still wouldn't shut up."

"You should have said something," Jimmy says limply. "I wouldn't have... I didn't know…"

Nick seems to find that funny.

"You wanna talk, Jimmy? I wanna be quiet. You want to know if I feel guilty? Of course I do. But how am I supposed to fight it? What's the point? I'm too t-"

"Don't say you're tired," Jimmy snaps. The words are angry and judgemental, sharp metal scratching his tongue, but they're all he's got.

"But I am," Nick says simply. "Don't you get it, Jim? You're a god-fearing man who had a god-fearing angel stapled to you, and then you ended up down here because some asshole messed up the paperwork. I'm not like that. I'm not like you."

"You were just a vessel," Jimmy tries. "That's all. It wasn't you."

"You think Castiel did bad, scary things?" Nick says in disbelief. "From what I picked up from Lucifer, Castiel was a kid with crayons. You think we can trade notes on being angel-skin? You think you can sympathise with the things I did? That I watched myself do? "

"Castiel tried to kill a little boy in his own home," Jimmy says, but it's like bringing a starting pistol to a gunfight.

"Lucifer made me kill a woman and drink her blood," Nick says, the casual tone broken when his voice cracks on 'drink'. "And I mean a woman. Not a demon, not an angel- a 100% human, flesh-and-blood woman. Her name was Katie, and he made me slit her throat and he pushed my lips to it and he made me drink, and he let me taste. He made me taste."

Nick seems to be taking some kind of broken pleasure in this, like he wants to tell someone everything and watch them run as bitter confirmation of what he already knows; of how fucked up and how far gone he really is.

"See, I had to drink demon blood," Nick says. "Maybe Castiel could keep your pieces together with good thoughts and Band-Aids or whatever, but Lucifer burned me out. I had to drink the demon blood just to stop my skin from flaking off. By the end, I was drinking litres. He used to do it sat in front of a mirror so that I had to watch."

"Nick…" Jimmy begins.

"He wanted me to taste human so I could tell them apart," he says easily, the words rolling from his mouth like hot blood down his throat. "He kept going on and on about the difference, and I eventually snapped that I wouldn't fucking well know, would I, and he told me he could fix that. And you know what? He was right. Demon blood, see, it's got this kind of… life to it. It twitches on your tongue. You can feel it almost fizz on the way down, like it doesn't want to be inside you- like it's angry at you."

"It wasn't your fault," Jimmy says, the only words he has, and he means them. Despite how horrific it is and how disgusting it is and how broken Nick sounds- not even like he's fragmented but like every fragment is gone, all lost or shattered or ground into dust and he's just the glue that once held himself together, an empty framework left standing alone- Jimmy can hang onto this. Vessels, they were just vessels, that was all. You cannot blame the gun for the finger that pulls the trigger.

"Maybe, maybe not," Nick says. "Either way, it's happening again. We're still vessels, Jimmy, only this time it's for some demon's rage. Tell me, you ever try fighting Castiel off?"

"No," he says honestly.

"I tried with Lucifer," Nick says, "and it made him laugh."

"What are you saying?" Jimmy asks. Nick's hinting at something that Jimmy doesn't like the sound of, but he can't quite grasp what.

"I'm telling you that you can keep freaking out and trying to fight off the nasty demons, but I fought with everything I had and it didn't work. So excuse me if I'm not jumping on the 'free will is the bestest' train that your angel and his buddies so loved to push."

"You don't think there's free will?"

"I don't know and, more importantly, I don't care. If there is, I'm not taking it. I'm done, Jimmy." He pauses to let that sink in. "They can do what they want to me. And I'm really sorry, 'cause it's you that has to bear the brunt, but the sooner you give up and and accept that we can't do a fucking thing, the better."

How could Jimmy do that?

"I can't," he says. "I can't, Nick. I need to stop it. If I try hard enough, I know I can stop it-"

"Good for you," Nick says indifferently. He turns his head to stare back up the ceiling. It's still the same cavern as it was the first time. The demons seem fond of it. "It's funny, isn't it? How you got the good angel and I got the bad. I guess God likes things to match up."

"What do you mean?" Jimmy asks.

"I deserve this place," Nick says from somewhere far away. It's a statement, like nobody could possibly disagree. "This is where I belong. Even without Lucifer, this is where I'd end up. S'where I deserve to be."

"That's bull," Jimmy says, and he means what he says every bit as much as Nick does. "No way, Nick. No way."

"How did Castiel persuade you to say 'yes'?" Nick asks, closing his eyes. Jimmy blinks at the sudden change of topic, but he can't risk Nick stopping talking, so he cautiously goes with it.

"He talked to me mostly. He asked me to prove my faith- putting my hand in boiling water, that sort of thing- but mostly it was talking."

Nick nods, taking it in. "Lucifer made me hallucinate the ghost of my dead son," he tells the ceiling. "And he didn't threaten, and he didn't lie. Castiel talked to you? Jesus. Lucifer turned up wearing the skin of my dead wife, and that's what made me say yes. Maybe that should tell you something about me."

"Or about Lucifer," Jimmy counters. "Okay, so you couldn't fight it then, but things are different now. If you can do it, maybe I can do it, and if-"

"I'm gonna try and sleep again," Nick says, yawning. "I've got a good feeling about this time."

"No, don't-"

"G'night, Jim." He doesn't sleep, but he won't reply to anything else Jimmy says.

Later, when the curved blade in Nick's hand rips through the tendons in Jimmy's shoulder, he catches Nick's eyes for a second and for that one second, the cloud of savagery clears and leaves the man behind them exposed.

Jimmy thinks he sees guilt- not the frantic desperation to make things better that buzzes in his own skull, but a deep-seated self-loathing. Jimmy thinks he sees exhaustion. He thinks that, somewhere in it all, he sees an apology, and then the knife is at Jimmy's eyes and he doesn't see anything at all.