Chapter 55: This Is Not Our Fate
Sophie had no destination in mind until three hours into her drive. And once she decided where to go, she wondered if maybe she had subconsciously been driving there the whole time anyway.
Asheville, North Carolina.
The city she grew up in. The city where she learned to ride a bike, where she had her first piano lesson, where she got her first broken bone, where she'd gotten her puppy Olly back when she was four years old.
The city where her mother was buried.
She still had about thirteen hours left to go in the trip, but her tank was full of gas and her body was full of enough anger to get her all the way there.
She turned on her radio to the only station that it could receive on the highway in the middle of nowhere that she was traveling down, which was, to her annoyance, a classic rock station. "Of course," she muttered angrily, but she didn't turn it off. She gripped the steering wheel tightly, destination in mind, as "All Along the Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix blasted out of her stereo. "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, but you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate."
She hadn't realized that she was singing along at first. She didn't even know how she knew the words, but apparently she'd been in the car with Dean one too many times, because she was jamming along to it in a fury, like her life depended on her singing the song.
The song tapered off to a finish, and she was breathing hard from her jam session, when she heard someone say, "Well, I guess you can cross professional singer off of your list of potential careers."
She jerked her head to the side to see Remy sitting in the passenger seat next to her, and she screamed at his sudden appearance, swerving in the other lane. Remy lurched over and grabbed the steering wheel, pulling the car back over into its proper lane. "You're very lucky this road is practically deserted," he informed her.
"Remy!" she screamed. "What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm pretty sure I just saved your life," he noted, motioning to the car that was passing by them at that moment.
"Yeah, right before almost killing me!" she snapped.
"Well, you probably would've done that for me if you'd kept driving as angrily as you were. Driving pissed off is almost as bad as driving drunk," he noted, staring at her with those green-grey eyes of his.
"You know what, Remy?" Sophie said, glaring at the road ahead. "Why don't you just go away?"
"I would," he said, adjusting his seat so that it leaned backwards, "except I'm sort of your guardian angel, and you're sort of putting yourself in a stupid situation because you're emotional, and it's sort of part of my job description to do everything in my heavenly power to make sure you don't kill yourself."
"Just leave me alone," she said, staring carefully at the license plate of the car thirty feet ahead of her. "I'm really not in the mood."
"Look, I take it you found out about Beelzebub."
At that, she turned to glare at him. "You knew?"
He nodded, leaning back in his seat, tucking his hands behind his head. "I did. And before you yell at me, I did advise your father to tell you about the whole thing. But he's blinded by his desire to create a world of normalcy for you."
She turned back to focus on the road. "That's a really weak excuse."
"Maybe," Remy admitted. "But either way, he never wanted to hurt you."
"Well, he did," Sophie snapped. "And if you're going to spend the next thirteen hours lecturing me about how I should let my dad off the hook for not telling me he sold is freaking soul to Hell's biggest douchebag, then I'd really prefer if you just poof away from here."
"Thirteen hours?" Remy asked, straightening up. "Where are we going?"
"I am going to Asheville, North Carolina," she said without explanation. Remy didn't seem to need one.
"Don't you have school tomorrow?" he tried instead.
"Don't you?" she shot back.
He chuckled. "Okay, fine. I guess we're roadtripping then."
Sophie shook her head. "No way, buster. There is no we in this. Leave me the hell alone."
"No can do," he told her. "The boss man up in the sky would not be happy with me about that."
"God," Sophie deadpanned. "You're going to use God as your excuse for being a clingy jerk?"
Remy grinned, and out of the corner of her eye she realized that he had a slight dimple on his left cheek when he smiled. How had she not noticed that before? "Actually, I report to an angel named Jophiel, and she really brings down the hammer, let me tell you."
Sophie groaned. "I need alone time, Remy, can't you understand that?"
"Why else do you think I afforded you the last three hours?" he asked her calmly. "I felt your rage the moment you left the bunker, and I could tell you needed some time to cool off. But now, you're getting a roadtrip buddy, so you better get used to it."
She narrowed her eyes. "Fine," she replied shortly, seeing there was no way she was going to win this fight, and then she turned the volume up to its loudest caliber, some ZZ Top song that she hated blaring out of her speakers.
Remy just shrugged, and then he tossed his feet onto her dashboard.
"No!" Sophie yelled over her music, shooting him a death glare. "Get your big ugly feet off of my car!"
"Then stop driving eighty-five miles per hour in a seventy zone," Remy yelled back at her, eyes glinting with amusement.
Grudgingly, Sophie stepped on her breaks until she reached a safer speed. "Happy?"
Remy took his feet off the dashboard and shot her a dazzling smile. "I'll be happy when you stop making stupid decisions that make my job very, very difficult, Sophie."
"Then you better get good and comfortable with being unhappy."
He just laughed, leaned back, and let Sophie drive ahead.
Dean was sitting in the bunker, a glass of whiskey practically glued to his lips, a newspaper in his hand. He'd read the title of the headline about eight times, but he still wasn't sure what it said. He just couldn't bring himself to care any about the many problems going on in the world when he had just watched his daughter's heart break in two right in front of his eyes.
It had been nearly twelve hours since she had stormed out of the bunker, and she still wasn't back yet. He was worried, he was upset, and more than anything, he was sad.
Because he knew the fragile but happy little family that he had somehow managed to build up over the course of the past year had just irrevocably changed. There was no way they could come back from this, or at least not the same as they had been before. And that was a bitter pill to swallow.
It didn't register in his mind that someone was calling him until the fourth ring of his cell phone. When he saw it glowing, though, and vaguely acknowledged that it was Sam calling, he grabbed it and flipped it open. "Yeah," he said despondently.
"This stuff Dr. Thompson has could really, really help us out, Dean, like this is some big—wait, woah, are you okay? You sound awful."
Dean was quiet for a moment, taking another long drink of whiskey. "Sophie's gone," he said monotonously.
There was static on the other end. "Gone?" Sam finally repeated. "What do you mean, gone?"
"When I got back I found her talking with Taylor," Dean said, staring down at his alcohol. "Demon bitch told her everything about Beelzebub. She got pissed at me and she started crying and…she just left."
There was another long stretch of silence. "How long has she been gone?"
"I don't know, man," Dean said, shaking his head. "Maybe since eleven this morning."
"Eleven?" Sam yelled, and Dean was taken aback by the force in his brother's voice. "Dean, it's almost midnight!"
"I know."
"You…. Dammit, Dean, how much have you been drinking?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know," Sam repeated, the frustration audible in his tone. "That's Dean Winchester for too damn much."
Dean was silent for a moment, finishing off his glass of whiskey and feeling like the lowest of the low. Then he cleared his throat. "I don't know what to do, Sammy," he finally said, his voice low and choked.
There was shuffling on the other end of the phone. "Have you tried calling her?"
"Yeah. She's not answering. And she disabled the GPS on her phone."
"What about Cas?" Sam tried. "Maybe he could get into contact with Eremiel, try to figure out where she is."
"I tried him, too," Dean said. "He must be busy."
"Well…the fact that we haven't heard from Eremiel is probably good," Sam tried to reason. "That means he's with her and watching out for her. If something was wrong, he'd have come here and told us. It's one of those no news is good news situations."
"Either way, she hates me now, Sam. She probably hates you too. And honestly, I don't blame her."
Sam's voice changed to scolding. "Get over yourself, Dean. She doesn't hate us, she's just pissed. And the only reason she's pissed is because she loves you and she's scared. She just needs to burn off some steam."
"She's been gone twelve hours, Sam," Dean said dejectedly. "That's a lot of steam to burn off."
Dean could hear Sam step on the accelerator. "Look, I'm about an hour from the bunker. When I get back we'll figure out how to find her and see if she's okay, which I'm sure she is. Just…try to sober up a bit, okay?"
"Sure thing, Sammy," Dean said listlessly.
He hung up, tossed the phone on the table, and poured himself another glass of whiskey.
Sophie and Remy pulled up to a motel in Asheville around three in the morning.
Sophie had to admit, roadtripping with Remy hadn't been the worst thing in the world. He'd been disarmingly easy to talk to, once she had gotten into the talking mood, and he'd surprised her with a lot of the information he'd given about himself.
He told her about his preference for country music, which had just made her laugh almost uncontrollably, because Remy seemed like the last creature on Heaven, Hell, or earth to enjoy the genre of country music. He told her that the kids he hung out with at school were nice, but they were just that—kids. But he wanted to give her space at school, and he understood that that was something that she needed, so he didn't mind.
He also told her about the angel that he was closest to in Heaven, a simple angel with the heavenly equivalent of a desk job, named Ariel. He described their relationship as that between an older brother and a younger sister, and he said he cared very deeply for her. She was his only family, and he talked about her for nearly an hour, and Sophie got the first hint that there were many more layers to the angel Eremiel than she had once thought.
It was interesting for Sophie to see this side of Remy. All she had seen before was the brooding, intense side of him when he acted all guardian angel-y, and then the blasé, borderline egotistical side of him that came out whenever he put on his whole smooth, charming façade that Sophie wasn't entirely convinced was all fake. But this side of him, the genuine side, the side that was almost—dare she say it—human, made her that much more confident in the person who was Heaven-ordained to protect her life.
The motel that she'd chosen was no five-star resort, but it was still a little better than the dives that Sam and Dean usually holed up in. She couldn't care less about forking up some of the emergency money Dean had given her to stowe in her car; after all, it's not like she was going to stay there a very long time, and besides, she needed a place to sleep.
After she'd parked her car, she and Remy walked up to the front desk, where a scrawny young man with greasy dark hair and a full upper body tattoo peeking out from the collar of his T-shirt stood manning the computer. He glanced up at the two of them as they walked in. "Can I help you?" he asked in a surprisingly deep voice.
Sophie pulled out a wad of cash from her backpack. "I need a room with two beds, please."
"Can I see some ID?" the man asked.
"Excuse me?" Sophie replied, confused.
"Well, you need to be twenty-one to rent a room here," he explained. "Kind of standard. So can I see some ID?"
"Twenty-one? What kind of dumb bullsh—"
"Here," Remy interrupted, a small grin on his face, grabbing his wallet out of his front jacket pocket and sliding his fake ID across the counter. Sophie glanced at it. Remy Wallace, age twenty-two, from Seattle, Washington. "Will that do it for you?"
The man grabbed the ID, glanced at it for all of one second, and then slid it back to Remy. "Looks good to me," he said, pocketing the cash Sophie had coughed up and sliding them a key. "You're in room 114."
"Thanks," Remy said, putting a hand on Sophie's back and gently leading her away from the desk. She was still annoyed, and once they were out of earshot she started complaining.
"Twenty-one," she snapped. "That's ridiculous. It's a room with a bed, not a bottle of liquor."
Remy grinned down at her, and her heart jumped straight up into her throat as his forest eyes met hers. "Maybe you should stop sweating the small stuff, Ace. You're going to give yourself a heart attack."
She whipped her head around to glare at him. "Ace? Really? A cheesy, overused term of endearment? Be a little original."
"What can I say?" he said. "You're endearing."
"Quit being so charming, I like you better as an annoying ass," Sophie grumbled as they got to their room. She stuck the key in the door and turned the lock.
"That could be arranged," Remy replied as she opened the door.
He squeezed in before her and claimed the bed closest to the window. "Hey!" she exclaimed. "That one's mine! I always take the window bed!"
"I'm reverting back to my annoying ass self, remember?" Remy teased, leaning back on the bed.
"This is so dumb," Sophie snapped, throwing her bag onto the other bed. "You don't even sleep."
"I can if I want to," he said. "I kind of like sleep. Dreams are pretty cool."
Reluctantly, Sophie felt the corner of her lip get pulled upward into a tiny smile by an invisible force. "Yeah, dreams are pretty cool, I guess." She unzipped her bag and then looked up at Remy. "Seriously, I'm paying for this crappy room, so why shouldn't I get the bed near the window?"
"Because I'm the first line of defense in case something decides to come at us through the window," he declared, and she could've sworn she saw him intentionally puff out his chest.
She gave him a look. "Well, what if they come through the door?" Remy was briefly stumped. "See, exactly. You just want the bed with the view."
"You got me," Remy admitted, walking over to the window and peeking out of the curtains. "Although our view is just a sketchy empty parking lot, so really, I'm not winning much."
Sophie sighed, shrugging out of her jacket and grabbing a pair of athletic shorts to sleep in as well as a toothbrush. She made her way to the bathroom, quickly changed and brushed her teeth, and then made her way back into the room. Remy was already lounging on his bed, flipping through the Book of Mormon that he'd found in the bedside table. She didn't even ask him about it. She just tucked her backpack under the bed, plugged her phone in to charge, and said, "We're getting up early."
Before he could reply, she turned off the lights and crawled into bed. If he ever did say anything back to her, she never heard it, because she was out like a light just seconds after her head hit the pillow.
When Sam arrived back at the bunker that night, he was sure that he'd find Dean on the phone or searching something on his laptop, trying to figure out where on earth Sophie could've gone off to.
Instead, when he walked into the main room, he saw Dean slumped in his chair in defeat, a glass of whiskey in his hand as he stared off into the stacks of books surrounding him in a daze.
Sam approached him slowly. "Dean?"
Dean turned at the sound of his voice. "Hey, Sammy," he said, sounding exhausted.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm…," Dean started, not really sure what to say. "I'm thinking."
Sam tossed his backpack onto the table. "Thinking about what?"
Something seemed to flicker in his expression, and Sam saw something on his brother's face that he hadn't seen in a while. "Hell," Dean responded.
That was not what Sam had been expecting. He sat down and grabbed the bottle of whiskey that Dean had nearly drained, taking a drink straight from the bottle. He thought about yelling at his brother, telling him that going down that road was a colossal waste of time, but he decided against it. "Why?" he asked instead.
"Hell was…well, hell, Sam," Dean started. "But you know that."
Sam nodded, running his finger absentmindedly over the scar on his hand that still managed to calm him down every time he thought about his time spent with Lucifer and Michael in the Cage. "I do," Sam allowed. "What about it?"
"I used to think that me going to Hell was the worst thing that could ever happen to me," he started. "And maybe it is. But today I think I've come to a new understanding of it."
"And what's that?" Sam asked, taking another drink of whiskey.
"It hurts more to know that she's in pain knowing that I'm going to Hell, and that her knowing is going to make all of the time I have left with her so much different," he replied gruffly. "And, I mean, I know we don't actually know what good old Bubby meant by saying he needed my soul for a ritual. Maybe I won't even go to Hell. Maybe he'll just rip my soul from my body and then obliterate it, make it so that I just…cease to exist."
"Dean—"
"No, Sam, don't," Dean cut in harshly. "We need to face realities here. I'm not saying I'm giving up on my soul. I'm not doing that. But it scares the hell out of me, what might happen to Soph if I'm gone and she's left alone in the world, and it kills me that there's a chance that I could die knowing that she's pissed at me."
At that, Sam found himself getting angry. "Dean, you're so stupid sometimes it amazes me."
His brother glanced at him in surprise. "I'm spilling all my guts out to you and you're calling me stupid? That's the last time I try to talk about my—"
"Dean," Sam snapped loudly. "Do you really think, that if we somehow failed and you were gone, that I would just let Sophie go off on her own? Do you really think I wouldn't take care of her and do everything that I can to make sure she's okay?"
Dean looked taken aback. Clearly, he hadn't thought about that.
"You know that I love her," Sam continued. "She's my family, and if you think for one second that I would just toss her to the side if you were gone, then you're an idiot, and you don't know me at all." Sam took another drink from the whiskey bottle, slamming it back down onto the table when he was done. "And you know, Sophie's pissed because she loves you. That's a big difference from her just being angry, and you know it. So man up, get over it, and start figuring out how to fix all of this before you go down a road you can't come back from!"
He finished off the whiskey and then dropped the bottle away from Dean, staring at his brother with hard eyes. Finally, Dean just nodded.
"You're right," he finally admitted. "I just…I don't know, I think I've been wallowing for too long. And maybe drinking too long, too."
"You got that right," Sam said, but his voice was a little less sharp. "So, neither Sophie nor Cas are answering my calls either, so for now we need to just assume that Eremiel is with her and that she is safe with him."
"I'm not comfortable making that assumption," Dean grumbled.
"Me neither," Sam admitted, "but for now, we need to. And for future reference, we also need to put a tracker in her car."
"Damn right we do," Dean replied.
Sam opened his backpack and pulled out his laptop and a file full of papers. "Right now," he said, opening up his laptop, "we need to worry about all of this info that Dr. Thompson gave us on Beelzebub and the First Hierarchy."
Dean snatched the file from him, flipping it open. "Anything new?"
"Oh yeah," Sam said, pulling up a file on his computer. "I think we might have the ritual that Beelzebub's planning on using to bust open Lucifer's Cage."
Dean's eyes widened. He had been expecting a few pieces of lore on the bastard, not the very chunk of information that could help them actually win this fight with him. "Wait, really?"
Sam nodded, clicking on one of the documents Dr. Thompson had let him download and turning the laptop to face Dean. "It's called the Ritual of the Stars. Dr. Thompson got a hold of a translated copy of the original," he said, eyes bright with excitement. "And if it's done properly, it's supposed to channel all the energy of the stars into setting free the purest evil in the universe."
"Awesome. Well, I guess our pal the Devil would qualify as the purest evil in the universe. Bet that gets Bubby's panties in a jealous wad," Dean muttered under his breath, studying the text describing the ritual. "Jesus, this looks absolutely disgusting."
"Yeah," Sam agreed, cringing a little. "The wings of Heaven's most cherished, the blood of fifty innocents, the bone of an unborn king, and a willing soul that has been tested by Hell, touched by Heaven, and has defeated Lucifer once before. And the ritual needs to be done during a significant celestial event."
"The blood of fifty innocents," Dean repeated, his voice filled with revulsion. "I hate this son of a bitch."
"You're preaching to the choir," Sam said. "That ingredient seems easy enough to decipher. Same with the soul, because obviously that's you. But the other two? Who the hell is Heaven's most cherished?"
"If Cas ever answers his damn phone or any of the three hundred prayers I've sent to him, maybe we can find out," Dean griped. "What about the whole bone of an unborn king thing? That seems pretty impossible, too."
"Yeah, well, Beelzebub didn't seem to think any of this was impossible," Sam replied darkly. "So we shouldn't either."
Dean looked closely at the ritual again. "There's nothing here about how to stop this ritual from happening," he pointed out.
"That's where this comes in," Sam said, grabbing the laptop back from Dean, pulling up another file, and then handing it back to him.
Dean studied the screen, and then shot Sam a look. "Sam, if I couldn't pass eighth grade Spanish, there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to decipher this foreign language that looks like it was scratched onto these pieces of rock with a butter knife." He gestured to the pictures Sam had pulled up onto the screen of giant slabs of stone with crude markings on it, resembling Egyptian hieroglyphs.
"I don't know what it means, either," Sam admitted. "But we're going to find a way to translate it."
"Why?" Dean asked, studying the pictures more closely. "What is it?"
There was a light in Sam's hazel eyes, and Dean was painfully aware of what that light was. The tiniest flicker, just a hint of a glimmer, of hope. Dangerous, reckless, life-giving hope. "According to the little that Dr. Thompson could decipher, this is the Ritual of Fire. It purifies a person's soul, kind of like restoring it to factory settings, and makes it completely untouchable. If we do this ritual...we wipe away the claim Beelzebub has on your soul, and we make it so that he can never use it for anything."
The disbelief on Dean's face was plain as day. He was starting to wonder if maybe he was actually way more drunk than he thought he was. Surely he had to be imagining this entire conversation. "There's no way a ritual like that exists, Sam," he said, shaking his head. "Somebody would have found it over the course of history. Do you know how many people who sold their souls to crossroads demons would have killed to have their hands on something like that?"
Sam shook his head. "These rituals are scary ancient, Dean, both of them. They were just unearthed in an archaeological dig in Israel a few months ago, and honestly, that can't be a coincidence. My guess is the angels have something to do with it, because Beelzebub trying to kill Lucifer and take over the world…that sounds like something they'd get involved in. Either way... someone wanted us to find this. Someone wanted us to fight back."
"It's like the damn apocalypse all over again," Dean said, shaking his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. His head was pounding.
"But Dean, this is really good news," Sam said, unable to contain his excitement. "We have a lead now. We try to get this Ritual of Fire translated, and while we do that, we search for the ingredients for the Ritual of the Stars and try to stop Beelzebub from getting everything that he needs to bust open Lucifer's Cage. It doesn't matter if he has your soul if he doesn't have everything else, too."
"Sam…," Dean started, staring at all of this info, his voice trailing. Then he looked up at his brother, and for the first time in God knew how long, he felt the familiar ache of hope. Every word he'd been about to say, about how this was a ridiculous mission with a laughably low possibility of success, fell from his mind.
Instead, with his resolve strengthened, he nodded at his brother. "Let's get to work."
As you can see, my rusty trusty laptop has survived, thanks to the technological prowess of my genius engineer mother. Updates for dayz.
Until Saturday! ~ Lacey :)
