Dean teleported. They touched down in Green's empty office, dark with the storm outside. The plants were all dead, creeping brown skeletons. Sam had to snap brittle tendrils of ivy free of the cross so he wouldn't pull the whole plant to the floor when he took it off the wall.
Where'd you find the files? Dean asked. Sam had briefed him on everything, from the murders to how he'd found out, on their way to the church.
"There's a wall safe behind the painting," Sam told him. Then, when his head turned to look without him moving it, "Dean."
Sorry, sorry. Really not used to sharing here.
Having Dean inside him like this was similar, in a lot of ways, to what Sam remembered from the single time they'd done this before, years ago. Beyond the fact Dean had been specifically trying to fuck with him then, see if he could fight off a possession. There was still the heightened senses, insane strength, the feeling of every molecule of him being safely sheathed in the emerald black of Dean's essence.
The main difference was that last time, all that power had felt something like an unstable reactor, only kept this side of critical through sheer willpower and constant attention. It wasn't like that anymore. The reactor was meeting all its safety checks, cooling pool working correctly, and still powering an entire city. Sam wondered whether that was because Dean was pumping so much energy right now into literally keeping him from falling apart, or if he'd figured out how to control it better. Put a leash on the cataclysm inside him. Given the little pulse of happy pride from Dean when that thought reached him, he figured it was at least partly the latter.
"Thought you were tapped out," Sam said out loud, thinking about Dean barely able to stand in the church.
I know you, was Dean's only explanation.
Sam lifted the cross off the wall. It was the same pale honey as the cross on the wall of the church had been, shot with black knots and polished to a glowing sheen. When the door opened, he automatically looked.
It was Bernard. She stared back at him with flaming eyes, steam rising off her damp clothes. She stood there, hand on the doorknob, and Sam didn't do anything either. All the way up until Dean lifted his hand for him and threw her out into the hall.
Even with the power ringing along his bones, Sam stared at his hand in shock for a second afterwards, flooded suddenly with unpleasant memories of Messiah training with Castiel.
You just check out when I was explaining how this was gonna work, or what? Dean asked him.
"When all this is over, we're gonna practice," Sam promised. The necessity of physical movement to direct Dean's power was fascinating, especially the way it felt. "Lots."
Moloch was coming. It was a hell of a thing, to sense him through Dean. Sickness in the air, corruption on the tongue. Sam put an arm out and the office door swung closed. He twisted his hand, and it locked, Dean reading what he wanted to do and obliging. He didn't know how much good it would do, but one more obstacle couldn't be bad.
The stench of burning meat filled the room. With Dean in him, Sam could identify separate bodily fluids boiling, different organs roasting, could tell what he was smelling was a young child roasting alive. And there was a noise gathering around them, getting steadily louder, and it was so fully and offensively out of place Sam couldn't identify it for a second.
Outside the office, Moloch's fire zombies were laughing, loud and raw and half-insane.
"What will you do?" Moloch called to them from right outside the window. Sam could see the shape of him, tried to focus on the human form. After all, that one had the easiest access to the last two chambers. "You've run yourself dry, demon. Here you are in yet another alien body, one you must hold together by force. I expected you to run, and yet I keep underestimating the depth of your foolishness."
Sam snapped the cross easily into two pieces, one arms and head, the other body, each ending in the sharp taper of a splintered point.
"Do you really mean to try again to kill me?" Moloch called with obvious delight at the idea. "Gatekeeper. Demon. You get a single attempt to kill a god, and for me, you'd need seven."
Sam reached out with Dean's senses, found Moloch's exact whereabouts, the fragile human bodies they were surrounded by. He wasn't about to pick and choose innocent from guilty right now. Out there, in the rain, he could see the web of flames thin as spider silk that bound them all to Moloch. They were pumped pretty full of his power from the feel of things, should be mostly invulnerable. He hoped.
"You can't hope for a quick death anymore. Not after all you've done. But if you surrender now, maybe at least one of you will get to choose the means by which he - "
Sam flung a hand up palm-out, and the wall in front of him exploded. Directly where Moloch was standing. The force of it scattered a few human bodies, but for the most part, Moloch took the brunt. It threw him fifteen or twenty yards across the grass, directly into a dead tree his impact nearly uprooted. As it was, he slumped to the ground against the dangerously-tilted trunk, expression slack. His flames lost a very good portion of their oomph, leaving him with chicken wings and baby horns, and his flock sagged like puppets with loose strings.
Oh, Dean purred, that felt good.
A cross fragment in each hand, Sam stepped out into the rain. It didn't feel so much like a hurricane anymore. More like the kind of cold drizzle you normally got in late March, and the wind had died down to the point he could hear sirens in the distance. Dean thrumming inside him, Sam headed for Moloch.
It figured Moloch didn't stay down for long. He rose, flames bursting back to their full brilliance, tree catching on very violent fire behind him, and the zombies snapped instantly back to attention and threw themselves at Sam and Dean.
They whirled, trying to protect the cross pieces in Sam's hands. Moloch's flock were intent on prying them free, along with most parts of Sam's body. He began to steadily fight his way free, headbutting and shoulder-checking and kicking and knocking to the ground. Dean tried to stomp on faces, stab throats, cave in skulls, but Sam firmly wrested power from him each time. Maybe Dean let him, maybe he had to in order to keep all the bleeding and dying at bay.
Are you trying not to kill them?! Dean demanded, incredulous. When Sam answered by driving the crown of his head into the delicate bones of Father Rosen's nose, Dean ordered, Sam, fucking stop, you've got a concussion.
"Just wanna put 'em down," Sam growled out through gritted teeth.
You're hanging on by a thread here, Sasquatch, and even if you weren't. Think about what these people did.
Dean reached out, spun Green's head around backwards on his shoulders with the noise of massively-abused flesh. A second later, it spun back with an even worse noise, flesh and bone crackling loudly as Moloch healed the break.
"Already a system in place for dealing with the kindsa monsters they are." Sam put an elderly priest down with a double-fisted blow to the back of the head, and him dropping brought Moloch back into clear view. "But not for him."
Sam charged. Moloch poured fire from hands and wings, the way he had in the church when he'd burned the cross. This time, Sam just dodged, letting Dean handle the teleportation. He landed close enough to see Moloch's burnt-out sockets widen before he vanished.
"Ooh, whatsamatter there, John Wayne?" Dean yelled with Sam's mouth, so excited Sam could feel him frothing between his veins. "Thought you were a god and I was all used up! What you running for?"
Inside, cooling down slightly, Dean told Sam, He's in the wind. I can't feel him. Where you thinking?
He'll stay here, Sam replied. Let's check the patient building.
They headed there, Moloch's zombies hot on their heels. Dean tried teleporting a few times as they ripped a path across the campus, staying as far ahead of them as possible, but he eventually stuck to running. He didn't say it, but Sam knew it was because he wanted to conserve power.
Sam wished he hadn't let him heal the rug burn on his face earlier.
They reached the patient building. This close, Sam could feel him inside it, a coal burning low. Suddenly, it got much, much brighter, and Sam was just about to warn Dean when green spread through the dead ivy on the front, the way steam spread on glass when someone breathed on it. The mat of vegetation rippled, leaves twitching like antennae. Sam skidded to a halt in the icy mud, glancing automatically over his shoulder, seeing all the zombies standing in a placid cluster a good ways back. Like Moloch couldn't pilot them and this at the same time.
The zombies sagged. At the same time, the ivy began to rip itself free of the building in thick tentacles, bringing dangerously-large sections of brick and stone with it.
"Dean," Sam said warningly, aware even as he did it how useless it was. The plants were already rocketing towards them.
Sam ducked the first projectile. The chunk of brickwork flew by over his head, its weight pulling the tangled strip of ivy with it. The entire green section of that particular tendril had torn itself off the wall soon enough, reaching fragile brown stems that snapped and sent it falling lifelessly to the grass. Dozens more replaced it.
Sam slid to the side. He jumped. He brought his arms in close to his body, crossing them over his chest and clutching the cypress pieces close. Twisting, he realized distantly that he was starting to sweat even with everything Dean was doing to regulate him. He couldn't do this forever. If he could get to the side, out of their range, cut around, get to where Moloch must be completely absorbed in the -
He'd taken just a second too long to think and Dean, letting him call the shots, didn't take over in time. An ivy-wielded piece of cement roughly the size of an apple clipped Sam on the temple, impact fragmenting his thoughts and sending the pieces ricocheting around his head. He gasped, stumbled, caught a piece of brick in the shin that weakened that whole leg and dropped him to a knee with a cry. Then what felt like a hammer blow fell between his shoulder blades and almost put him on the ground, just an overextended arm of ivy dropping in a lucky place.
But next was a very deliberate rock clocking his solar plexus with a vengeance.
Sam flipped over onto his back, breathless and paralyzed. He was half-convinced it was only Dean that kept the cross in his hands. He stared up as a tentacle swung almost lazily into view, studded all along its length with healthy portions of the wall it had sent its roots into. He blinked, and it was falling.
When he blinked again, he was feet to the left, the ivy's impact shuddering through him when it hit the ground. There was another now coming straight for his head, only one much-smaller chunk of concrete that would still be more than enough to crack his skull, and Sam rolled. Apparently right into the path of danger he hadn't even noticed, because Dean teleported him again, and then again, and again. Jumps of inches that Sam couldn't imagine would eat up all that much power individually.
But Dean was pulling off dozens, grimly chanting Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck in Sam's head as Sam pulled his feet under him after one skip, straightened after another, stepped to the side before another one. He was trying, but there was no way in hell he'd be able to dodge all this shit on his own.
It was like the entire massive building had come alive, and there was no end in sight.
Sam didn't want to draw Dean's attention away from him not winding up with a brick embedded in his face, but they needed a plan. He didn't waste his breath. Can we wait it out? There was only so much ivy.
Maybe, but I don't know how much longer I can keep this up 'til we're not gonna have anything left to throw at Moloch, and even if I hop off to the side they're just gonna throw this shit at us, and if we get too far away he's gonna be able to drop the Biollante bullshit and rabbit -
The answer came out so fast and tense Sam wasn't sure he would have been able to understand it if it hadn't been a thought. Before he could respond, Dean seemed to latch onto his half-formed thought, repurposed it.
Get rid of the ivy.
He took them further on the next jump, way off to the side of the building, still within range of debris. Sam shoved the cross pieces in his belt and put up his hands, Dean screaming furiously with his voice.
"Goddamn cowboy Lovecraft piece-of-shit bastard, gotta be god of fire and plants, makes zero fucking sense, flaming asshole baby-eating bitch, thought you could get away with laying hands on my - "
Sam wouldn't have known what Dean was doing if he'd been watching from outside. As it was, Dean focused more coherently on the effect than the process, but it came easily to Sam. Dean concentrated his power on an area in the middle of the ivy vines, which had noticed their change in position and just begun to turn towards them. And in that spot, the air temperature spiked, flying into triple digits and then likely quadruple, until even with the humidity level, even with the rain, the oxygen caught and caught hard.
The ivy burned. A thin wall of flame nearing white-hot tore into being, sliced neatly through the center of every tendril, scorched the grass living and dead. The front halves of the ivy tendrils trailed limp and dead to the ground, some still carrying enough momentum they needed to be dodged, and the back halves crisped instantly in the heat, curling back in towards the building. Steam and smoke rolled through the air, dissipating slowly, and by the time it cleared, the ivy left on the building was hanging useless where it hadn't been burnt stiff and black, and the rest was tangled lifeless on the ground among the littered brick and cement.
Dean whooped, pumping Sam's fists in the air and whirling towards the patient building. "Yeah, how's that, jackass?" he crowed. "Suck it! Gonna send your pansy-ass plant life after a demon, you're not the only one who's got a handle on the fireworks, you…" He trailed off suddenly.
"Dean?" Sam asked in his own voice after a second.
Ooh, I shouldn't have done that.
Sam realized what he meant a second later as pain, deep, sciatic, lanced suddenly up the back of one hip. He swallowed, a copper tang climbing his throat. He felt a slight grinding as something shifted just a little in his collarbone.
Okay, I can fix this, Dean said rapidly, but we gotta move.
For more reasons than one. From the looks of things, what the ivy had torn free had been more structural than decorative, and the front of the building was issuing some grinding of its own. Sam glanced behind them as he picked his way through the debris and then jogged up the steps, ignoring the creeping pain, and saw the fire-zombies starting to move again.
"Gotta deal with that."
Fine, Dean grunted, and once they were through the doorway, Sam turned, raised a hand, swiped it down. It didn't require more than the lightest touch from Dean before most of the front of the building sloughed free and crashed down, shaking it into the foundation and forcing out an enormous cloud of plaster dust. Sam coughed, backing up and covering his nose and mouth with one arm, until he reached free air.
Concrete, rebar, drywall, brick, glass, wiring, and pipes all crushed together in an impenetrable mound. No one was getting past that anytime soon, so Sam spent a precious second taking stock of himself.
He was still hurting, but not bad. More like a day into a flu recovery, just some minor aches and complaints. Everything moved that should, nothing moved that shouldn't. The only issue was that he could feel what Dean was doing. Like he'd been carrying an entire stack of papers, and some from the middle had started slipping down, so now he was squeezing the entire thing more tightly and had contorted himself into an awkward position to keep hold of them, and was having to work twice as hard as before as a result.
"Are you okay?" he asked quietly.
Uh huh, Dean assured with the mental equivalent of a shoulder pat.
"'Cause if you need to let it all go, start over, if that'd be - "
No. Dean cut him off firmly. Not doing that to you. I can handle it, trust me. When Sam didn't reply, his left hand moved on its own, lacing its fingers with his right and squeezing fondly. I gotcha, Sammy. Let's just focus on tying this bastard off.
Sam nodded. He didn't know where Moloch would be for sure, but he had a hunch. He headed for the hallway that led down to Dean's old room, then stopped as he turned the corner, seeing someone only a couple yards away. Hair like wet sand on an Atlantic beach, dream of a mouth, freckles. But the eyes Sam was used to seeing either green or black were full of solid fire.
You have gotta be kidding me, Dean stated.
"I got it."
Dean's body tilted its head. Then started to laugh, quiet, Dean's voice but softer, higher than he usually sounded. Sam waited a second, taking in the way Moloch filled and held his body, then bolted forwards using a little of Dean's speed. It tried to grab him, tried to get the cross, but he went low. He threw an arm around the legs, sweeping them together and then up so it hit the ground hard, head smacking off the linoleum in a way that made Sam's stomach lurch with guilt even though he knew Dean wasn't inside. Still holding the legs, Sam dragged it to the nearest room, opened the door, shoved it in with a foot, then slammed the door and let Dean lock it.
...huh, Dean said as his body began to bang on the door and Sam backed away.
"You're off-balance." Sam started down the hallway. "Your legs are bowed."
Dean's response was just a feeling Sam could only describe as disgruntled.
Sam stopped when he reached Heather's room. He sucked in a deep breath through his nose, rolled his shoulders once, then pulled the cross out of his belt and nudged the door open where it had been hanging slightly ajar.
The window had broken, a large beam crushing through it when part of the building collapsed. Glass was scattered on the floor, and a few pieces had begun to melt, looking gooey and soft where Moloch's heat had blacked the linoleum.
Standing in the doorway, Sam looked at him. The room wasn't all that big, so his wings were folded in almost demurely, head bowed so his horns had just blistered the ceiling instead of setting fire to it. He really was massive, and staring deadly back at Sam. His empty chambers had begun to weep ash in five crawling trickles.
"It's repulsive," he said calmly, "how comfortably it wears you."
The entire room was suddenly all but a cube of fire. Dean pulled Sam clear, and Sam backed up further, cross held out in front of him. He was momentarily worried Moloch was just going to keep everything around him too hot for them to get close enough to stab him, but no, a second later he blew the wall out and came walking slowly after them, trailing flames behind him until they resolved into the shapes of his wings.
"After I end you," he started. "After your bones have cracked and twisted in my heat, and your demon has screamed itself dead inside your ashen flesh. When I punish my servants, when I burn this entire town to glass down to the bedrock, I want you to know it was all your fault."
There was a net of fire around them suddenly, closing in fast. Dean blinked away. Then a burst of flame, one Dean couldn't dodge in time, had to divert into the wall to char the paint.
Sam's collarbone creaked.
"Innocents!" Moloch flapped all four wings, feathers shooting off them like flaming arrows. Too many to dodge, Sam put his fists up and Dean laid down an invisible wall, shaking inside Sam as he held it long enough for them to splat against it and fall to the floor, fire oozing like jelly. "All murdered, by you!"
"Only murderers here are most of the people outside this building," Sam panted out. His next breath bubbled in his chest.
"You brought a demon here," Moloch countered. "You tainted this place with it and the unspeakable things it does with you. Its poison leached into the ground, the air. You've forced me into things I never wanted to do. You made this place sick."
"Nobody here ever got forced to do anything." Flames leaped out of the ground around Sam. Dean teleported, but they followed, so had to tamp them down as Sam panted raggedly, spine teetering, legs shifting. "Not even by you. Everybody made a choice." He wasn't sure why it was so important to him to say it out loud. To make sure at least one person, or thing, heard it. Even if it didn't care. "I didn't make this place sick. Neither did you, did you? It just pulled you here. To feed on it." Sam spat out an unexpected mouthful of very dark blood. It sizzled on the floor. "They did it all on their own. Normal, vanilla humans." He looked up at Moloch. "Sorry if that scares me a lot more than you do."
Sammy, Dean warned. There was a break in his mental voices, every single one, which couldn't be good. Kinda running on fumes here. You want me to keep you going, gotta wrap this up in the next few minutes.
Uh huh. Okay. Okay. Think I just need one last push. Sam's eyes darted around the hall, scraped over Moloch, landed on the cross fragments in his hands. Or pull.
"It doesn't matter at all to me whether or not you're afraid yet. You will be." Moloch's wings spread, filling the hallway behind him. "You still believe you can kill me, don't you? All the cypress in the world won't help you. Not while your demon's moving you."
"He's not," Sam replied.
He lifted his hands, yanked his fists in. Dean hooked into Moloch, ripped him down the hall towards them with his boots scudding over the floor. Sam was ready, cross up. He felt Dean falter when Moloch was halfway to them, a muscle that had been pushed to its furthest limit by necessity weakening, and then he gave. But momentum had Moloch by then, kept him coming, and he hit right as Dean howled in frustration, losing his handle on blocking Sam's pain.
Stapled to consciousness with infernal power, frayed nerves still laced together with demon smoke, the agony of it was universal. Vast and complicated in a way Sam's brain literally was not built to process, a bloody, shattered galaxy spinning nauseous in his head, tearing into him and Dean both. As Moloch's own weight speared him on the ends of the cross halves, as it forced Sam to his knees with a god bearing down on him, all he could do was scream himself mute. Like he was trying to somehow carve the flavor of his own lacerated organs and mangled nerves and splintered bones out of his mouth, where it had just uncontrollably splattered itself across his tongue.
He was only aware of Dean because of how tangled together they were right now. He had dropped the papers and they had exploded across the floor, and he was down there now, trying desperately to claw them back together into a pile he could pick up again, but his arms were numb and rubbery with exhaustion and he could barely move his hands. Then there was the fact he was still focused on maintaining the basic structural integrity of every system in Sam's body, on keeping him at least barely alive. Distractions he couldn't afford to look away from.
Either blood or tears were running freely out of Sam's eyes. Feeling in his abdomen shut down. Then it oozed back in, and the twisted tissue around the bones of his legs flickered away. As his body glittered with sensation and the lack of it piece-by-piece, blinking Christmas lights set to Dean's desperate melody, enough clarity drifted back into view for Sam to haul himself up on it and look at Moloch. Who was still on top of him, sagging on his own knees and held up only by Sam.
Maybe oughta knock him out, can't make him feel this, can't keep it back, gotta call Cas right now and -
Dean was mumbling to himself, less words than miserable, shuddering feelings. Sam interrupted him.
Dean. Dean.
Dean paused. Reluctantly wrenched himself away from failing systems to take a peek through Sam's eyes. Saw one of the two chambers on Moloch's shoulder, his right, fallen empty, ash and bones having poured out of it onto them, body of the cross burnt away to nothing and left Sam's hand, apparently still protected by Dean, mostly okay. Just coated in soot.
The left chamber was intact. The fragment was buried in it all the way up to Sam's fist, but there was no ash, no bones, no burning. And Moloch was staring alive down into the endless well of pain and fear they were very rapidly becoming.
What the fuck? Dean whispered brokenly in Sam's head.
"Only part of it," Sam rasped out, "was cypress."
Moloch began to laugh. Just a chuckle at first, but it steadily got louder and louder, more and more raucous, and he was joined by dozens of voices from behind Sam and Dean, laughing in perfect harmony. Sam didn't want to risk the movement of looking, but knew he'd see fire-zombies coming up the hallway, having tunneled through the rubble or maybe just come in the back.
"The priest lied," Moloch said as he rose slowly to his feet. Sam's hand slipped off the cross, and it burned where it was embedded in Moloch's shoulder, leaving his final chamber flawless and full. "About many, many things."
The flock was gathering in a circle around them, closed by Moloch. Sam tried to get up, and his thigh twisted, a spiral fracture going bad and making him retch. He felt Dean spike fury at him that soured quickly to guilt.
"You've burned yourself out, demon," Moloch noted, staring down at them. "A candle, something like you. But I am an eternal inferno."
He didn't look all that eternal at the moment. His flames had died down significantly, wings and horns very small, flock sort of swaying on their feet. This must be what six out of seven empty chambers did to him. Not that it did them any good with all their cypress gone, and Dean's power used fully up.
Moloch reached down. Sam couldn't lean away from him, after what had happened the last time he'd tried to move. Huge fingers ran through his burned hair, curled against his blistered scalp. Then Moloch's hand drew back, and there was a sudden and violatingly deep tug, like he was pulling Sam's soul out by the root. And he almost was, Sam realized with horror, when it became obvious he was drawing Dean out of him.
"What did you hope to accomplish?" Moloch asked. Sam saw struggling tendrils of wispy black around his fingers when they came into view, felt Dean snarling and thrashing inside of him, digging in, hanging on, and Sam did his best to keep a tight grip on him, but they were both worn so thin. "Even if you did cleanse this particular corner of the world of what you see as evil. There would be so many more to take my place." He nodded to the surrounding staff. "To take their place."
Sammy - Sam's left hand grabbed his right again, desperate, smearing ash over knuckles and palm.
No. Sam arched backwards, away from Moloch's hand, didn't care that it felt like something had just exploded low in his back, but it didn't accomplish anything but pull Dean out of him faster. If he could still scream, he would have wailed. No, no, no no nonono.
"You closed the Gates of Hell," Moloch told Sam. "Likely, you think of that as a victory. All demons are gone, save the one you allow to use you, but you know there are worse things in the world. Don't you? Do you really think you did anything at all in the long run but free what you consider unclean souls, souls such as the ones who conceived of this place in the beginning, of the righteous punishment their god intended for them?" He tugged. "Do you think there is any choice you can make, broken Gatekeeper, any blow you can strike, that won't have flowing effects that pour mostly to evil? Towards outcomes you would have hoped never to see. You could kill and curse and burn your way through the entire world with your demon on your back, if I did not kill you here, and it would make no difference at all."
"Wrong," Sam gasped out, and Dean said it with him.
"Am I? Tell me everything I've said isn't a thought you've had yourself. Tell me you don't know, deep down, that what you define as evil, in your narrow modern scope - " Moloch's hand jerked. Dean screamed. " - isn't just the natural way of things. The order that has always existed, a path always towards decay and death. Look at me, and tell me you don't know that. That you aren't aware the war you are fighting is one you've always been losing."
Under Moloch, Sam bled and broke. Things shuddered and halted in him. He and Dean were tearing holes in each other trying to hang on, and he didn't care. He was going to die here, he knew, and he'd so much rather do it with Dean inside him than out.
Moloch had paused, like he was considering. Holding Dean halfway out of Sam, like thrashing black intestines drawn from his head, he looked down. It felt like the longest year of Sam's life before he spoke again.
"Perhaps you don't have to die here," he stated matter-of-factly. "Perhaps you don't have to be so futile. You could free this place, these people. I will let you live. I will heal you, I will restore your divine strength - instantly, there will be no waiting lifetimes as you must do now...I will let you carry on with your war." He smiled. "And I will follow you, to feed on the sacrifices you make. The innocents you will inevitably kill. You will know me more than any has in three thousand years, so perhaps you will even burn a few alive."
Sam stared up at him, heart murmuring, bones sagging. Moloch tilted his head.
"You've been made offers much like this before," he guessed. "Perhaps this time you will have the sense to accept. I am, after all, the best master you could ever have the hope to serve."
Sam pulled on Dean. Dean crawled against him. Neither of them went anywhere, Moloch holding firm.
"But first I must burn the taint out of you." Fire suddenly gathered in Moloch's hand. "I cannot allow Hell's filth to pollute an acolyte."
Fire began to thread along Dean's length, and everything behind Sam's eyes was just screaming then, and pulsing Hell, and Sam knew suddenly that nothing had hurt Dean like this since Alastair, and pain and panic and desperation and loss and grief and the sheer existence-level horror of their separation filled his soul all the way to the bottom until it struck and woke something he hadn't known he still had.
It turned out Sam could still scream, so long as he was doing it in protective rage that burned like dry ice on wet bone, and it didn't even hurt as he sucked Dean back into him with the force of a newborn black hole at the same moment he stood and drove his right hand, covered in cypress ash, through Moloch's last chamber so hard he felt his knuckles burst through his shoulder blade.
Moloch's hand released. Dean bungied back into Sam, pain gone, drifting dazed past all his damage. Sam stared at Moloch, bleeding teeth gritted, burning alive with hatred, feeling tiny bones pour past his wrist. For a second, Moloch had very human eyes in his empty sockets. They were brown, and afraid.
"You haven't won," he whispered, and then he rotted, body collapsing, damp putrescence sped up a billionfold to the point where nothing but a pair of Wranglers hit the floor, and there wasn't even anything left on Sam's hand.
Yes I did, Sam knew more than said, feeling Dean in him. And then he dropped, and it was very cold all around them, and he hurt very much.
There were sirens outside, people shouting, and surrounding them the residents of the center had passed out or were doubled over, screaming and clutching their heads. Sam wasn't paying too much attention to them, mostly focused on Dean where they lay slumped fetal on the cracked and buckled linoleum. He could feel him keeping him going, less powering his bodily functions than just pinning his soul in his liquified meat, and Sam dug into him, babbling and begging.
Call Cas, gotta call Cas, please, don't lemme die, not gonna lose you, lemme - De -
I gotcha, Dean soothed him between prayers that were pretty much just screaming at the top of his nonexistent lungs. Maybe Sam heard flapping in answer. Gotcha, baby boy, don't worry, not going anywhere without me, gonna stay right here, nothing to worry about, all gonna be okay.
And Sam believed that, fully, all the way up until everything rolled unstoppably out from under him.
Even Dean.