Ok, here's the climax to the story! It's a little longer than normal for me because I had to pack in so much action. And, as you may see the pattern in my stories, its loaded with a bunch of badass!Sam, limp!Dean. :)
As always, I appreciate any feedback you have.
Chapter 14
Honed in on Dean's location, Sam had done the impossible and stepped out of his personal hell and into the one created for his brother. And although the two brothers' bodies still lay seemingly lifeless in a forgotten basement, Sam was fully prepared to war inside this realm of chaos and decay.
Taking careful steps forward in the void, a nightmarish vision unfolded before him. Lucid now, clearer than any vision he ever had, Sam witnessed what he thought he'd never see first hand.
Before him lay an unending wasteland. Fires blazed wherever skin appeared, from a single lost soul crawling on red-stained rock to the hundreds of bodies that clawed futilely against the walls, reaching upward for saving grace. The rotting smell of blood and bile invaded his nostrils, and Sam did all he could to cover his face from the rising heat and smell around him. From the charred visage of the thundering sky above him, a torrent of salt water fell.
"Embrace the tears of the first Fallen," a thousand voices echoed and wailed, "entrapped in ice above." Sam covered his ears and fell to his knees, gnashing his teeth and fighting with everything he could against the pain around him. But nothing he did could stifle the sounds.
"It's not real!" he screamed to the air around him, still covering his ears, eyes barely staying open from the dry heat that rushed everywhere.
"Show yourself, Dontallion!" Sam shouted to the chaos. Pushing himself to his feet, Sam grabbed a rock beside a lake of damned souls and heaved it with all his strength to the sky. "Where are you?!" he cried out. He felt frustrated, scared, and despite what he'd already been able to do, he felt ultimately powerless.
This was not his world anymore. This was the invented world of that demon, Dontallion, and it looked like he would never see his brother again. Running his fingers through his hair and scouring the area around him for his enemy one last time, Sam almost gave up. In a voice barely above a whisper, Sam said the only thing that made sense at the time, "F***in coward."
Just like that, the entire hellish illusion went dead. The thunder and rain stopped. The demonic moans ceased and the landscape changed to pure darkness. Nothing remained. No sound, no bodies, no damned. All but Sam existed, along with a solitary voice that hissed out from the distance.
"SSSSSam…I'm no coward. But your brother is," and as quickly as the words were created, Sam felt his entire body thrust backwards a thousand miles through space and time. Suddenly, there was Dean. Strapped, hooked, beaten… and still screaming.
"Dean!" Sam cried and attempted to run towards him, but found himself trapped.
Somehow, Sam was tied down into a chair that was oddly shaped like it had come out of a movie theater. Wrists and legs manacled to the seat, the only thing Sam could move was his head, just enough to see the demon standing to the right of him. No longer donning the goth-persona of the real world, now the demon had chosen what Sam realized was his true form. Despite standing on two legs, the demon looked more beast-like than anything else. His muscular body hunched over while his wings beat triumphantly behind him. His face was surrounded by fur and his fangs, all four of them, dripped hungrily with venom. His whole body was drowning in sweat and he seemed to be growing.
Staring into Sam with his red eyes, the creature roared, "Behold, my poor pathetic Sammy, what you have only been able to glimpse in your wildest nightmares! Time to have a little fun." With a laugh, the demon leaped into the air, and beating his wings powerfully, he hovered over Sam's brother whose cries had ceased for the moment.
Landing next to the small prison that held Dean, the demon opened its claws and appearing inside of it was a sharpened dagger.
"Look familiar, Sammy?" the demon hissed. Sam watched in horror as the demon brought up an exact replica of Ruby's knife and stabbed Dean in the leg with it.
"Stop it!" Sam screamed. He still couldn't move, but once again, he felt the familiar rage rising up inside of him.
"You're in my world, now, Sammy. You can't do anything," the creature howled. "Get used to it!" and pausing for just a moment, he continued, "although I am impressed. How did you break out of the hell I created for you anyway?" And with that, he brought the knife up again, and stabbed Dean in the other leg.
Dean screamed in agony, unable to find any words, and throwing his head back, screamed through his clenched teeth. The demon laughed maniacally, his form growing even larger because of Dean's terror.
"You twisted piece of sh**! I'll kill you!" Sam screamed, wishing he could leap out of the confines of his chair and tear out the demon's neck with his hands. He wanted to feel his blood on his hands, to twist his heart out and shove it back in the demon's mouth. Sam's white hot fury rose to the point that he felt his skin would burst into flames. For a split second, the demon caught wind of this emotion in Sam's eyes and hesitated, ever so briefly, before shoving the knife into Dean's left side.
"You can't kill me, here, Sam!" the demon laughed. "The boy wonder can do a lot of tricks upstairs, but down here, you're powerless, and you and your brother's fear is the best I've tasted in centuries!"
With lightning speed, the demon slithered across the floor, placing his face just inches away from Sam so that his hot breath fired against his skin.
"But I've dug deep into your brain, Sam. It seems, I chose the wrong nightmare for you. You see, maybe the trauma of seeing that little bitch girlfriend die wasn't your biggest fear." The demon nearly hopped in excitement at this epiphany.
"No, that wasn't it, was it? Which is why you were able to break free from my nightmare!"
Sam squeezed his eyes shut, attempting to block out the demon's unholy facial expressions from his line of sight.
"You're no boy wonder at all. All this talk of good ol' Sammy Winchester, the boy who would be king of the demons, and all it takes to trap you is…your brother?"
Sam could feel the excitement radiating off of this demon's body as it cackled and cried. And his own blood continued to boil.
The demon slowly turned his head around to face Dean's broken body on the altar, hooks delving deep into his flesh.
Returning his gaze to meet Sam, the demon whispered, "Well, now I know your fear, Sammy." The demon paused to lick his lips, "and trust me, I won't make this quick."
Rising up into the air, the demon unsheathed a new weapon of carnage, his own fangs that doubled in size. He fell next to Dean with tremendous force and opened his mouth wide, revealing rows and rows of additional teeth that glistened with saliva. Releasing an ear-splitting sound that combined a lion's roar with an apelike shriek, the demon brought its jaws down onto Dean's neck and ripped out the tenuous tissue.
"No!" Sam yelled and he could feel the fires inside him suddenly igniting into something real, something he could use here, something he could control.
Watching the image of his brother die again before his eyes flipped the switch that he had previously felt outside at the party, but this time it was one hundred times greater. Again, time seemed to freeze as it had outside. Somewhere at the end of a dark tunnel, Sam could still see the monster leering over his brother's body, slowly ripping his vital organs out, frame by brutal frame. The sounds were muffled, but Sam could faintly make out the cries of his brother's plea for the terror to stop.
Slowly looking down at his hands, Sam opened and closed them to test that he indeed existed. The power, however, teetered just beneath his skin, scratching at his every being to be let out, to see the lights in the demon's red eyes and to destroy the thing that had killed his brother.
Noticing the change in the air around him, the demon instantly stopped his feast.
Sam ignored him. The feeling inside of him was too great. Lifting his head back, Sam clenched his teeth as he felt his muscles harden at the power coursing through his veins.
Entranced by this show, the demon dropped Dean's lifeless body to fall limp on the hooks once more, curiously stepping towards Sam who still remained tied in the chair.
"What do you think you're doing, Sam?" the demon inquired, nervously. "You can't do anything here. Give up!"
Laughing more out of apprehension at this impossibility in his world, the demon came even closer to Sam's face to observe him.
"You're, you're…powerless here! You can't…you can't do anything!" the demon assured himself, fearing what might actually be true. The monster, then, reached up with his claw around Sam's neck and decided not to chance it, attempting to squeeze the life itself out of this pathetic human – the meal that was rightly his.
Finally bringing his head down once more to meet the demon face to face, Sam narrowed his now fire-white eyes. "I'll show you what I can do."
In an explosion of light, Dontallion found himself hurtled backwards into hooks that suddenly appeared around him. I didn't cast those! he thought. How is he doing this? Taking on a sinister life of their own, the chains wrapped themselves around the demon's exposed neck, twisting slowly and tightening menacingly all around his body.
Gripping the chains that held him around his neck, gasping for breath that would never come, the demon's vision began to fade. As he snarled and writhed, he watched a lone figure walk towards him, a halo of relentless fury surrounding his body.
Sam could no longer see or hear the horrific illusion around him. Instead, he could sense things as he never could before. Listening to the creature cry against his metal captors, Sam's anger was momentarily soothed. Raising his hand in front of him, he willed the chains to loosen around Dontallion's neck, allowing enough breath to escape for him to speak.
As he came nearer, the monster whose fangs still brandished his brother's blood widened his eyes in utter terror.
"This isn't possible!" it shrieked. "I am God in this world!" he breathed rapidly, attempting breath. His wings flapped helplessly against the chains that held him, but it was no use. He felt impotent against the power of this abomination before him. Who could do such a thing? How could this human exist? How could Dontallion, god and eater of fear, actually feel terror?
With a speed that defied human ability, Sam forced himself directly in Dontallion's face just as the demon had done with him. With a very human smile and medium-cut hair falling in front of his unnaturally piercing white eyes, Sam said exactly what the demon, in all his immortality, had never heard before.
"Get used to it."
Instantly, the serpentine chains glided through the air, the ends curving ever so delicately like snakes about to attack their prey. They changed, sharpened to points, and became the very hooks and spears that had scarred Sam's brother so deeply for so many decades.
This Dontallion now stood for the evil that had torn at Sam's older brother. He was the yellow-eyed arbiter of evil in their household. He had murdered his mother, his father, and his girlfriend. He had sent the hellhounds to Dean's doorstep and removed his brother from his life. No longer would he be powerless and watch these demonic creatures steal the things that he loved. Today, Sam would have revenge.
The demon choked and screamed as Sam controlled the rusty spears to tear through his hardened flesh. Fighting through thousands of years of layered skin, they eventually found their target. Deep within the creature's internal structure that likened more to steel than bone, the blades foraged for his blackened heart and spooned it out, holding it at the tip of a bloody spear.
Raising their prize to Sam's eye level as if in offering, the spears and hooks immediately dropped lifelessly as soon as he removed the heart from the spear's tip.
"How…how…can…you?" the demon sputtered as his life seeped out of him.
With eyes that no longer bled white, but had returned to their hazel hue, Sam took one look at the demon that now shriveled at his feet. Letting out an inhuman smile, Sam inspected the heart in his hands closely. With a small laugh that added to the demon's increasing horror, Sam shrugged, quietly adding the last words that the demon would ever hear.
"How can you still be alive?" Sam said, crushing the blackened heart in his fist.