"Sam!" Adam cried, and Sam's grip on Dean's arm involuntarily tightened.
Dean's jaw was set in a hard line. "We'll call an ambulance," he said.
"He won't make it."
"Well, what do you want to do, Sam? Tell me!" Dean's voice was raised, on-edge. Go. Let's go, his eyes said, but Sam hesitated.
"I can't leave him, Dean," he said earnestly. " He's our brother. You wouldn't leave me."
"Sam." This isn't Adam, some part of him still insisted. The cold voice behind the knife couldn't be the same kid he'd tried and failed to pull away from Michael and Zachariah. This was something darker. If not demon, then damn close. Maybe there was still enough left of Adam that hadn't been twisted and ruined by the cage for Sam to see, but Dean couldn't see it. Didn't want to see it. Not now.
Exhaustion and pain needled through him with every movement, but he gritted his teeth and moved to help as Sam bent down and started trying to lift Adam to his feet.
He wouldn't do this for Adam. Not for Adam, but for Sam. Adam was a piece of Sam's soul that had never truly been released from the cage.
Adam cried out and coughed painfully, pulling away from Sam's touch.
Crowley, standing with his hands clasped behind his back, made a tsk-ing noise and shook his head.
Sam spun on him with a glare. "Can you help him?" he demanded.
"Sorry. Not my area."
"Well then why are you still here?"
Crowley shrugged. "Personal reasons."
Sam narrowed his eyes, and Crowley smiled, holding up his hands in an expression of mock innocence. "Well, don't look like that! I'm not the one who wanted to drag you back downstairs, moose. If anything, you owe me a debt of thanks."
Adam let out a gasping half-sob. Sam turned again, his expression pained at the too-familiar sight of his bleeding and pale younger brother. "Adam, help is coming, okay? I'm gonna call for help. I promise. It's—" He stopped, cringing. It's okay. The words died in his throat.
It wasn't okay. None of this was.
Adam dropped his eyes away from Sam's. Then cried out and convulsed in a spasm of agony, clutching the knife in his stomach. "Please!" he whispered. "I'm sorry. Oh God. I'm sorry. Please!"
Sam turned his back on Adam, turning back toward Dean, hating himself for doing it, but he couldn't tell Adam it was all right when it wasn't. He couldn't make himself say the words.
He kept hearing Dean screaming. What had Adam done to make Dean scream like that? After everything Dean had been through in his own Purgatory and Hell, what had Adam brought back from Sam's Hell to inflict on Dean, and how dare he?
It wasn't okay at all.
In the next moment, there was a rush of displaced air and the sound of wings, and Sam realized Adam hadn't even been talking to him.
He'd been praying.
The angel appeared as an older, African American woman with graying hair pulled back sharply into a neat bun at the nape of her neck, wearing a black polyester suit with a skirt that cut sharply below her knees. Her hands were folded primly at her waist, and her lips were pressed together in a firm line, but she looked down at Adam with something not unlike kindness.
"Adam," she said, her voice rich, warm, and husky in a way that reminded Sam of Castiel. "I need to let you know that Heaven has heard you."
Adam's eyes widened hopefully. "Please," he breathed. "Please help me. I didn't… I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I'm so, so sorry."
"Please understand," she said sadly. "I only wish we could have helped you, Adam. You've played such a very important role, and we owe you a great debt for your sacrifice. But your sins have made it impossible for you to enter Heaven."
Adam drew in a breath, his eyes bright with tears, and he looked at Dean and Sam, understanding. He bit his lip and nodded. "I'm going back," he said quietly, his face twisting with pain on the words. "They were right. Michael said... He told me… I don't belong in Heaven."
Sam felt short of breath. "He can't go back," he said angrily. "Not to the cage, it's not fair. He never had a choice. I had a choice, I chose that, not Adam. There's got to be some other… something else. Heaven took advantage of him. You need to be asking him for forgiveness!"
The angel had the decency to look regretful. "We cannot save one who is damned by his own sin."
Crowley chuckled. Everyone, including the angel, turned to look at him.
"Oh, can't you?" he challenged.
The angel frowned at Crowley.
"Seems to me there's rather a precedent for that sort of thing," Crowley went on.
"I do not know what you—"
"Oh, I mean really. Look at the boy. Remind you of anyone? Aren't any of you even asking yourselves if he's suffered enough? I mean, it's not often we have time for bedtime stories down in Hell, but the parallels are a bit obvious."
The angel shifted her weight. "You're talking about Azrael," she said at length.
Dean looked impatient. "Are we supposed to know who that is?" he demanded.
The angel cast a sideways glance at him before reluctantly explaining. "One of our own, Azrael, had been condemned to Purgatory to atone for his sins. We begged our father to forgive him, but he refused, so we… We were able to raise him to heaven despite the weight of his sins by combining the strength of our grace."
"Isn't that interesting," Crowley remarked.
The angel glared at him. "Azrael had more than atoned! In our opinion, his suffering far outweighed…"
On the ground beside Crowley, Adam writhed and a thin trickle of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. Her gaze softened.
She looked around the room distractedly. "We…" she said. "I must… confer with my garrison." In a rustle of sound, she was gone.
Crowley rocked back on his heels. "Well, there's one more good deed for the logs. Till next time, boys."
"Crowley, wait!" Sam said. "Why are you helping us?"
He held up a hand, suddenly looking annoyed. "All right, let's be clear. I'm not helping you. I'm helping me. Lucifer's cage was a custom build, made to hold angels, not the likes of you. Evidently, you leave humans in the cage and you start to get cracks. If the cage cracks, Lucifer slips out. Odds are he'd want the old job back, and quite frankly I'm not inclined to give it up." He grinned. "I like the perks. So you can frame it any way you like, but bottom line, I need Adam to stay the hell out … of Hell. You, I've got other uses for."
"What does that mean, other uses?" Dean growled.
"You'll find out." He glanced down at Adam. "Good luck with that, now."
Without another word, Crowley vanished.
Adam rocked forward, despair crowding his voice to a whisper. "Should have stayed. Sh-should have just stayed. They were right. They always t-told me. Lucifer… Michael..."
"They weren't right," Sam told him. He couldn't help it. Protecting Adam was like a reflex.
"Sam," Dean urged softly, "hospital. Now, man. Come on. Let the angels take it from here." Or not, he thought to himself, willing to let it go either way for Adam but not if it meant letting Sam watch Adam die. Not after everything else Sam had just been through.
Sam felt Dean's hand on the small of his back, and he nodded, breaking eye contact with Adam.
The flutter of wings sounded again. Then again. They seemed to be surrounded by the soft sound of wings rustling and settling into place, and out of nowhere the stern, stoic faces of men and women appeared in the room all around them.
The older woman who had first spoken to Adam took a step toward him and held out both hands to him. "It's time to come home, Adam," she said with a kind smile.
Adam's grip eased on the knife in his stomach, but then he paused. He looked anxiously at Sam and Dean, and then back at the angel. "M-my brothers, too. Y-you have to promise me."
The angel looked taken aback. "They have their own Heaven. Yours is waiting. Come see."
Adam closed his eyes and reached out, letting her take hold of his hands, and a warm light began to glow from her touch. An expression of calm overtook the pain in Adam's face. Then suddenly, his eyes opened in surprise. He looked up, obviously seeing something in front of him that no one else could see.
"Mom?" he whispered, tears springing to his eyes.
The angel holding his hands blinked out of sight, taking Adam with him, carried to Heaven by an escort of angels.
Sam and Dean both seemed to exhale at the same time, apparently having both been unconsciously holding their breath.
"Can you make it to the car?" Sam asked.
"I'm driving."
"Bullshit." Sam took Dean's arm and kept a hand on him as he led him out of the building to the car despite Dean's repeated attempts to wave him off.
Adrenaline flagging, Dean leaned against the Impala and watched the world spin through a haze of pain and nausea as Sam got the passenger door open and helped him avoid hitting his head as he eased down onto the seat.
"Fuck," he said, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to make himself be coherent. "I'm… sorry."
Sam gave a small laugh. "Why?" he said, one arm hooked over the open door. Then his face wrinkled in concern and he reached out and brushed the back of his fingers over Dean's face. "Don't talk, okay. Just take it easy."
"Sam. Dammit." He reached up and caught Sam's hand. "You're hurt."
"You're worse."
Dean shook his head, biting the inside of his lip and pulling Sam's hand down so that his brother stayed close in the space carved out by the open door of the car. "No. No, I don't really think so."
"Dean…"
In a whisper of admission, he said, "I… I know what they did to you, Sammy. I do. I know." He looked down at Sam's hand and squeezed it, swallowing back tears, and Sam felt something inside him go cold.
"Aw, Dean." Alistair… "No."
All Sam could do was squeeze Dean's hand back.
Dean went on, "It's different, I know. I'm sure it's – pain's different up here."
"Pain is," Sam said blankly, staring at his hand, at Dean's hand.
"Sam, I am so sorry."
"I should have known, Dean. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you, why? Would we have talked about it?" He looked at Sam, meeting his eyes. "You want to talk about down there? With Lucifer?"
Dean found himself wishing for a moment that Sam would contradict him and insist on talking things out, like he used to, like his old self. He didn't, of course. Sam's mouth drew in at the corners, and he shook his head slowly, deliberately. He recognized that faraway look, the way Sam had looked when he'd come out of his seizures, after he'd had his Hell wall broken down. Broken. Hell had broken them both, in different ways.
But this wasn't Hell, and enough was enough. Dean brought a hand up to Sam's chin, keeping Sam's gaze locked on his. "This is different, though. This happened here, Sam. We deal with it. Like a bruise or a busted rib."
Sam let out a shaky breath. "Dean. I just. I want to go lay down for a while. Someplace, anywhere, I don't care."
Dean smiled. "Hospitals have beds."
He looked up at Dean with a wide-eyed, pleading look he'd been using to try and get out of things ever since Dean could remember.
"Sam."
"I really don't want to, Dean. I'll be fine. Please."
"Sam, this isn't something I know how to patch up! You need a–"
Rape kit.
Dean felt sick, suddenly faced with calling it what it was. Possessed or not, three different men had raped his baby brother. Sam had to deal with the real physical and psychological fact that he'd been gang-raped. And that meant Dean had to deal with it, too. Neither of them could run away from this, and they most likely couldn't heal it in a hotel room with a first-aid kit from the trunk of the car.
He carefully brought his own fear back under control, seeing Sam watching him. "They need to check you out, Sam," he said evenly, authoritatively. "See if you need stitches, okay? And… and probably put you on antibiotics or something, just in case, I don't know. I don't even know how this works."
Sam nodded. "I-I don't either. I don't want to do this," he admitted.
"Yeah well… I'll help."
Sam's mouth crooked into a half smile for Dean's benefit. "You'll help? You're barely conscious."
Dean smirked back. "Well then, we better get a move on before I pass out on you."
Sam hesitated a fraction of a second, his face hidden by his long hair, and then reached down and laid a hand on Dean's knee in a silent gesture of thanks before straightening and slamming the passenger door closed and making his way around to the driver's side.
End.
