AN: So, I've tried my best to revive the story something fierce to make up for the five and a half-month silence, and the response has been… well, underwhelming. Pretty discouraging, honestly. If you are still reading, let me know, but otherwise I'll go back to posting when inspiration strikes, and I can't make any promises as to how often that will happen.
Inside an hour, Eloise delivers the Impala back to her usual place outside the bunker and tells them she's found Harper Grace Quinn, a 31-year-old bartender who turned up after a four-day disappearance sporting various wounds and some obvious psychological trauma. Eloise offers to take one or both of them to see her, and Sam instantly agrees, with Cas following shortly after.
Their appearance between cars in the West Virginia hospital parking lot marks the first time Sam has been outside in weeks. Almost instinctively, he draws in a deep breath of the fresh air, and in turn wobbles dangerously on his crutches, and Cas immediately grasps his arm. With his help Sam manages to steady himself, and looks around. Eloise is nowhere to be seen. He can only assume she'll be ready to take them back home when they're done here.
They manage to make it inside the building without mishap, the receptionist gives them the room number, they head for the elevator, and presently they reach their destination and find the door shut tight.
Cas knocks three times and stands back, waiting. After a long pause, a woman opens the door. She's beautiful, or at least it's obvious that she usually is—right now her long blonde hair is in disarray and dark shadows weigh down the skin under her eyes. She's thoroughly covered in scratches and bruises and bandages.
Sam balks at the sight, and has to stop himself from covering his mouth—not that that would even be easy with crutches.
"Harper Quinn?" Cas asks.
The woman glances warily back and forth between them. "Who are you?" she whispers.
"My name is Sam, and this is Cas," Sam says. There's no space here for lies, no time to mess things up if she catches on or even gets a little suspicious. "We've been chasing the guy—" He swallows. "—the thing that did this to you. We have some questions, and we're offering answers in exchange."
Her face drops, expression becoming strangely blank. "You… you don't think I'm crazy?"
"We know you're not," Sam assures her. He looks down, and pointedly waves one of his crutches in a slight motion. "We've encountered him before."
Hope lights her eyes, and she stands aside, though the movement leads her to wince. "Please, come in."
He wishes he could teleport. He's been getting pretty good at it, but not good enough to land somewhere he's never seen and doesn't even know the location of in relation to where he's coming from. Hell, that might not even be possible.
The walk is endless. He never spots anyone else out and about. Occasionally he stops and pulls out souls whose clothing indicates that they died a long, long time ago, and interrogates them. He never garners any new information.
Fairly frequently he stops in random cells to practice his abilities on their occupants, and then seals them back up on leaving. He's always proud to hear the whimpering he leaves behind him.
He tries to keep track of where he's been by making scratches at regular intervals on the walls, but after quite some time passes without him ever passing by such marks again, he gives up. It takes too much time, with little chance of payoff. His best bet is just to find somebody who does know where they're going.
Weeks pass like this. Then months, or at least that's what he'd guess. He's not sure, and there's no way to track the passage of time. The itch burns more and more in the back of his mind as he goes longer and longer without killing, but he has no way to, down here. Fortunately, not having a body offsets the symptoms significantly. It's more a distraction than a detriment.
He steadily improves on the latest ability he's been working on, and probably the most complex thus far: mind reading. For the first several months, he can't see past their current emotions if they're too strong, and then when he does manage to break through them he can only read the thoughts currently going through their heads. But hey, it's a hell of a lot more than he used to be able to do.
He also always leaves his victims severely shaken after the experience. That, he doesn't mind.
After a while, though, he starts figuring out how to root through minds. How to observe a mangled ball of thoughts and feelings and memories from the outside and zero in on what he wants to know. As soon as this ability is moderately usable, he starts trying to find paths through hell in the minds of the prisoners he stops in to practice on. But none of them seem to know anything. They've been in their respective cells for longer than they can recall.
Considering the fact that he hasn't come across a single soul roaming the halls apart from himself, this shouldn't be surprising. But once he finally does find someone, at least he has a plan to immediately start on the path to finding Crowley from there.
"So you're saying I was kidnapped by… by a demon," Harper says, her voice shaking, wringing her hands in her lap like she was the entire time they were talking. "And… now it's back in hell."
They're seated in the two chairs by her bedside, and Sam got uncomfortable a while ago with his legs spread out like this, but with the many wounds of a perfectly innocent woman on full display right in front of him, he doesn't complain, not even to himself.
"That about sums it up," he affirms.
She looks up. "A demon," she repeats, dazed, and pauses. "Which one?"
They glance at each other. "A new one," Cas answers. "He hasn't been around long enough for his exploits to be known to you. His name is… Emery."
Sam looks away. He keeps doing that.
"Harper," and Cas finally says the words Sam has been putting off the whole time, even though it's the reason they're here: "Tell us what happened. What did he do to you?"
She shakes her head, biting her lip for a moment. "I thought he was just a guy in a bar," she says, voice wobbling. A tear runs down her face and she wipes it away with the back of her hand.
Sam fixes his gaze on the corner of the room.
"The bar where you work?" Cas asks. She nods. A moment of silence, and he presses, "You got in a car with him?'
She shakes her head vigorously. "No, I… I met him outside the bar after my shift ended. The parking lot was pretty deserted… We talked for a few minutes. I thought we'd arrange to meet up another time, it was late. But he wanted me to come home with him. And when I wouldn't bite he knocked me over the head. Next thing I knew I was…" She wraps her arms around herself, shuddering.
"It's okay," Cas encourages gently. Sam is so glad he's here, because he feels even less able to talk than Harper is. "Next thing you knew?"
Eventually she's able to complete the sentence: "I was tied up in a chair in a shed. He was sitting across the room… sharpening a knife… and…" She shakes her head, pressing her hand against her mouth. "I thought he would… But he didn't. He left me there for the next two days, hardly even touching me, but when he got frustrated he'd…" Tears stream down her face steadily now.
"Would you excuse me for a moment?" Sam says abruptly, his voice shuddering, as he lurches forward into his crutches, narrowly avoiding falling as he quickly stands and begins hobbling towards the door. He can't do this. He just can't. He'll be even worse than useless if he starts breaking down in front of this woman.
The only sound left in his wake is Harper's soft whimpering. Cas doesn't try to stop him. With some effort, he pushes the door open. It slams shut behind him louder than he expected, but he's too wrapped up in trying to breathe properly to be bothered.
He drops himself into one of the chairs right outside the room and brushes away a nurse who approaches to ask him how he's doing, and then just sits there with his eyes shut for a long moment, trying to clear out his head.
"You wish you could tell them," comes a voice from next to him, and almost in the same moment he jumps out of his skin, sees who it is, and bites back an expletive.
Sitting calmly in the chair beside his, staring off into the middle distance, Eloise continues, "You wish you could say, 'He is not what you think he is.' But then, you realize, you'd be taking the side of a monster. And maybe he wasn't always a monster, and maybe it isn't his fault that he is now. But it doesn't matter, not really."
Sam has never felt heavier, or weaker. "I just want him back," he whispers.
"I'm sorry," she says, and her voice is somehow perfectly neutral and deeply sad at once.
Sam leans over and buries his face in his hands.
They stay like this for several minutes, stretching out into an eternity. Sam just tries to block out all the voices in his head. More and more of them have slipped into hopelessness in recent weeks.
He can't even hear Dean's voice anymore, telling him to keep trucking.
If Dean could talk to him right now, he'd be telling him to switch gears from trying to cure him to trying to end him.
"If we do cure Cain," he finally says, still not lifting his head, "what… what do you think he'll do?"
She is silent for several moments. He sneaks a glance at her, but her expression is impassive. Finally she says frankly, "If we do revive the mortal man within him, that man will be profoundly disturbed. He may never recover from the many ages he spent as a monster. I expect he will spend many years, perhaps all his life, in solitude."
Dean's time as a demon hasn't been anywhere near comparable to Cain's, but the response is like a punch in the gut.
He feels Eloise look at him, for the first time. "Sam," she says, "he is deeply fortunate to have you."
He looks up, but at the same moment, the door opens, and Sam almost tries jumping to his feet, but he remembers just in time that that's not the safest option. Cas steps outside, looking extremely grave.
"Give it to me straight," Sam says, trying to keep his voice even. Trying to pretend he's in better shape than he was when he left the room.
"He was testing his powers on her," Cas says flatly, clinically. "Trying to learn to control her, to read her, to move her. Lying dormant within him is practically every ability you've ever seen a demon use. It seems he struggled greatly for the first two days, at which point he made some kind of breakthrough. Most of her wounds are from those two days, though. From when he became… angry."
Sam breathes out shakily. The farther Dean gets from what he was—in terms of power, morality, and everything in between—the more of an adjustment becoming himself again will be… the less like himself he'll ever be able to be again.
The more he'll need them.
"Let's go home," he says tiredly.