Title: This Thing of Darkness
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Dean; several implied/unrequited relationships
Word Count: 58,057
Verse: Haven/Heartless World
Warnings: gore and violence; codependency; dubcon-esque issues; language; darkness; torture; evil!Sam
Summary: Sam doesn't end the world in a day; he takes his time. He wants Dean and is getting tired of waiting. And playing nice.

Please head the warnings.


Prologue

The world doesn't end in a day. Sam takes his time.

The government calls them terrorist attacks. It's easy to pretend at first, but as Sam and his demons get more creative it's harder and harder to hide the truth. People start leaving the major cities, moving into smaller communities where everyone knows your name and strangers are guilty until proven innocent.

The Old Ways start creeping back, meshing with new technologies to create new weapons, protections, and ways of utilizing magic. They meet shamans protecting the trucking routes and way stations; traders disseminating occult supplies; priestesses sanctifying radio towers and factories; psychics who can relay communications from around the world. Boundary Wardens reawakening and maintaining the old wards of town and cities, hedge witches who spark with power as people remember to believe.Everyone wears protective amulets and gris-gris, and an unwarded house is a sure sign of trouble.

People no longer talk of the Things that Go Bump in the Night in hushed voices. You can buy silver bullets in the corner store.

The world is changing, preparing for the end.

Sam sets up shop in Philadelphia. The city of Brotherly Love.

Six months after they lose Sam, after seeing him surrounded by demons, receiving reports of increasingly depraved acts, searching for an answer or a cure but finding nothing, Dean shuts himself in an abandoned hotel room for three days, warded against angels and demons and prying psychic eyes alike. It would have been longer, except Mer breaks into the room on the seventh day. The room reeks of alcohol and stale air. The walls are covered with printouts and photocopies. Recent reports of supernatural attacks of various scales laid side-by-side with excerpts from the Journal and handwritten post its. It takes a few incidents to make out the pattern because Dean didn't always have the names and some of the details were lost to time. But it's there, with every body and wanton act of destruction.

Her father doesn't move from where he's slumped on the floor, braced against the bed, eyes bloodshot and face drawn, a week's worth of beard on his face. She feels tears prickling at her eyes and fights them because that's what she does.

"Oh my God," Mer breathes. Dean laughs, a dry, brittle sound that speaks to just how he feels about God.She sits down on the bed, staring at the walls in mute horror. Numbly she slides down the edge of the bed beside him. Dean mutely hands her a bottle of whiskey.

"When..." She has no idea where to go with her question.

"Reno," her father says hoarsely, a printout crumpled in his hand. She pries it out of his hand, has to trade the bottle for it, and Mer reads about some guy who was found crucified in his apartment beside his tongue, flayed but still alive. He'd lived for days longer than he should. Police and doctors still baffled...

"Guy called me a fag," Dean chokes out. He lets out a drunken, humorless laugh. "Years ago. Jesus, Sam's been leaving me presents." For every attack there's a corresponding story. And in every case, Dean experienced...unpleasantness at the hands of humanity's lesser members.

"There's a symbol-"

"Mine," Dean says, and drinks straight out of the bottle. "'s San-Sanskrit. Means mine." It's Sam's favorite ancient language, he used to spend hours drawing the symbols when he was little, enjoying the way they looped and moved. Later-later Dean would wake up, Sam's hands tracing words over his skin, the delicate Sanskrit letters flowing down his spine.

"He wants you back," Mer says, sounding lost.

That's not the message, but Dean will die before he tells her that. He's still got some sense in his head. Because it's not that Sam wants him back-it's that Sam never let him go in the first place. Dean can only run so long.

Mer pours them each a shot and keeps on through the second bottle, where they abandon pretense and each claim a bottle for themselves. Dean tells Mer this is a Winchester right of passage, drinking to the lost with your Dad. In the end, Bobby comes looking for them and Castiel and Anna have to step in to keep them both from dying of alcohol poisoning.

The next morning Dean lets Anna carve symbols into his ribs that make him invisible to all forms of supernatural tracking. He'll need every advantage he can get to save Sam.