Time goes by.

After weeks of rotting on the couch, Sam gradually begins to regain the ability to get around on his own. It takes months, and it sucks, but he can feel his legs improving. Meanwhile Cas is slowly rebuilding his strength, and sometimes Sam sees him looking perfectly normal and whole, just a little worn, and he has to bite back the request Can't you try to heal me?

They're in for a fight. Who knows when, but it's coming. And Cas needs to be on top of his game. His damn legs will heal on their own, in time.

They keep trying to get in contact with Crowley. He has most of the phone numbers they usually cycle through, so Sam gets a hold of a new phone and tries with that. The person who picks up is not Crowley—he says his name is Guthrie and that he is responsible for organizing the King's messages, but as soon as Sam identifies himself, the voice on the other end informs him the King is not taking messages from him or the angel Castiel, and promptly hangs up. After weeks of this, of all the tricks he can think of failing to get Crowley on the other end, Sam finally stops trying.

Sometimes Eloise comes around, to check on them. She's always unbreakably stoic, but Sam finds himself warming up to her. He ends up having several long post-midnight conversations with her on the nature of demons and of humanity, and he catches snippets of evidence that Cas has had some long talks with her too.

It's the three-month mark when Cas performs a quick examination of his legs, and tells him the cast on the right can go. Seems the fracture in the left was more serious, but Sam feels better than he has in a long time as he frees his right leg and tests his weight on it.

He takes a short walk that day. It's the first time he's gone outside in almost half a year.

And just two weeks later, the other cast goes as well.

With his new freedom of movement, Sam quickly takes to often wandering into Dean's bedroom to sit in the chair across from the bed where his body still lies and just stare at it. Watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall. He constructs a scenario in his head wherein this really is Dean, soul and all, just trapped in a supernatural coma of some kind, while they're off trying to find the only creature with the ability to wake him up. Sometimes, he approaches the bedside and kneels down, bringing his own eyes inches from Dean's face, watching him breathe. But he never touches him, no matter how often he wants to.

In the meantime, he gets back to hunting. He tries not to wander too far from the bunker, or take on cases that sound too challenging, but he needs a new case at least every two weeks so he can feel useful. Even if it's to strangers instead of the one person who has done more for him than anyone else his entire life. Oftentimes Cas accompanies him, even though at times he proves to be more of a liability than anything else—particularly when he's questioning witnesses and involved parties. Even Eloise acts as a consultant once or twice.

Sometimes it turns out a case involves something demonic. Sam always makes sure Cas stays far away from those. And he always catches the demon alive, straps it to a chair, and cuts it almost to pieces with no expression upon his face, until it's screaming that it doesn't know anything about where Dean Winchester is, that nobody does. And when Sam is sure it's telling the truth, he frees it from the pain. Even though that's a luxury he can't give himself. A luxury that Dean will never know again.


Time goes by.

Crowley is obviously thrilled to be working with him, and it's honestly pathetic. Emery tries his best to act like he sort of cares about the partnership, and really, it doesn't take much. The best parts are when it's clear that Crowley is afraid of him. Happens on the regular, though he tries to hide it.

He frequently meets up with Rowena so he can check on her progress and she can tell him what she thinks of his methods. Apparently, Crowley has stopped talking to her almost entirely. She tries to spark conversation, to tell him that she'll always be there for him, to express concern over his partnership with Emery. By her report, at one point he said, verbatim, "Spare me, Mother. He and I have something you will never understand."

Though he's under no obligation to, often he also tells her about how Operation: Perfect Hell is going. Her eyes fill with excitement as she hears of the progress made in advancing Crowley's plans, but her expression turns sour when Emery talks of his own involvement in them. She's an open book, really. But every once in a while—though none too often—he'll catch a flicker of pride in her eyes too. The first time he sees it, he has to second guess her motivations. Suddenly, he's not sure how she really feels about her son—whether she really cares for him, or if he's just a means to power for her. Once he outright asks her, but her answer is an unhelpfully sarcastic "Oh, I just want to cuddle him close to me as I did when he was a wee bairn."

Emery doesn't sleep. Doesn't need to. It makes it difficult to tell how much time is passing, but at least he starts making trips upstairs with Crowley—if he didn't, it would be nearly impossible. These forays are generally for business meetings and Emery tends to say very little, not paying much attention. Just waiting for the moment the formalities are over with and he can move on to the second phase of the trip: the kill. He missed it while he was wandering around the corridors of hell, he missed it so much. He wishes Crowley weren't involved at all, and he really isn't, though he tries to be. But Emery pretty uncompromisingly just leaves him in his penthouse or wherever he's chosen to hole up for this particular visit aboveground so he can head to the nearest bar or club and find a skull to crack. Crowley imposes a pretty strict time limit, but agreeing to such a limit is the only way Emery can appease him enough that he'll agree not to try to come along.

On the first such trip upstairs, of course, Emery has to secure a host. This new one's name is Paul, but he sticks with the name he's already taken for himself. Paul is his usual—nice and tall, fit, healthy. The most significant divergence is his dirty blond hair. Emery cuts it short on day one. On that same day, he also learns that bringing his host down into hell with him is a trifle. Apparently it should be impossible for such a new demon to have such an easy time of it. Upon being informed of this, he only grins.

Sometimes he thinks about those kids. The ones who put him down here. Now, he's made it work very much to his advantage, but just thinking about how unfathomably higher than them he is… they're like insects. They didn't even have the barest trace of an idea of who he was, of what he was. And they, through sheer dumb luck, managed to rip him from the world and hurl him downwards, to quite honestly the worst place somebody can end up. The mere thought of it is humiliating.

The second his work here is done, he's gonna find those three and drag them all straight to hell.

In exchange for a small, specific favor requested by Rowena—to sneak above and get her some useful ingredients she's been running low on—the witch spends half a day or so in the wing of the archives specifically dedicated to types of sigils, and manages to find something called a "binding link." Emery recognizes it from the time Meg locked herself inside Sam's body all those years ago. After verifying how it's supposed to be manifested, he proceeds to pull a branding rod out of storage and sear the sigil into Paul's flesh—effectively making himself immune to future exorcisms.

When he gets his Blade back, he'll be ready for anything.

He'll be unstoppable.