Scene From An Alt!Dimension
Chapter 3: From Frying Pan to Fire
Summary: In that alternate universe, the boys' rescue of their mom and the nephilim doesn't go as planned. At least the Winchesters have all been reunited. There's only one thing left to do now: save the world from Michael. And then, from Jack. Alternative Season 13 finale the fandom and characters deserved. Third chapter of Scene From An Alt!Dimension.
In the all-encompassing darkness of night in a world fallen into an apocalyptic dystopia, Dean stood on the flattened plateau above a valley, and surveyed the army below him.
The angel encampment lay in silence. Burning stakes offered dim points of light across the pot-marked earth, that uncomfortably familiar wasteland of towering spikes and desolation. Scattered, still figures stood as if in suspension, though Dean had been around enough angels to know the hum across his skin was the keen vibration of expectation generated by the horde below.
In the center of the wastes slouched a church, all clapboard and desiccation, its exterior painted with sigils illegible in the dark. From between the slats, candlelight flickered.
"Dean," asked a youthful voice from out of the dark. "May I join you?"
"Course, kid," Dean replied softly, feeling more than seeing Jack take position beside him on the ridge. The nephilim's presence seemed to reverberate in the weight of the night surrounding them, with a raw power just a little too eager to be unleashed.
It set Dean's teeth on edge. Just about everything here did that.
Like everything else in his life, this alternative reality had turned out to be more complicated than he'd been hoping. Last Dean had seen of it – that splintered, ashen landscape with its towering spikes and impervious horizon – had seemed pretty straightforward. He had imagined this world to be another Purgatory. Simplistic and most likely fatal. Where the earth had been scorched, nothing grew, almost nothing lived, and it was a veritable free for all in the fight to survive.
Dean could have dealt with that world. He wasn't sure what that said about him – nothing good, most likely.
Instead, turned out that wasteland was just a blast zone, where the worst of the battles during the apocalypse had touched down on earth. The rest of the world? Riddled with complications, just like back home.
Dean's plan to rescue his mom and the nephilim had been shot all to hell once they'd actually found them. Because in Dean's mind, they were going to bust in, grab Mary and the kid, and drag them back to the relative safety of their own world. And if they had to hack their way through some monsters and – horned? how the hell had that happened, exactly? – demons along the way, then all the better. Blow off a little steam. But this?
They'd barreled into the war-torn remnants of their own world, populated by complicated, traumatized people with full agency, living out a hardscrabble existence, loosely jointed into a federation with barebones aspirations. Sectarian interests and disparate concepts of causes and consequential futures refuted any possibly of a world simplified in the aftermath of the apocalypse.
No one here was a civilian, not by the standards by which the Winchesters normally defined them – people living comfortable lives, unaffected by conflict or scarcity or the supernatural. Most of the people they'd met since coming here had been born into this regime of terror. They weren't fighters, not by a long shot. Because how do you fight against celestial beings that could bend time and space, and make a human being go pop with a snap of their fingers or even an errant thought? But they had the same sort of resilience Dean imagined kids raised in warzones develop. These people were hard kernels, clinging resiliently to the shreds of life they'd retained. They might as well have been an alien species, as far as Dean was concerned. Even Bobby.
No one here needed saving, not the way the Winchesters were used to saving people. Not even Mary and Jack.
Because his reunion with his mom hadn't gone anything like Dean had expected either. Sure, she'd been pleased to see them, and anxious about seeing them here. But she hadn't been as grateful as either he or Sam had been expecting. And she hadn't wanted to leave. The last thing Dean wanted was to get embroiled in the Mad Max nightmare of this place, the convoluted reality of this massive humanitarian crisis, the well-functioning resistance hierarchy that apparently involved this world's Castiel and an assortment of familiar, fallen angels.
He and Sam had looked around themselves and had recognized how deeply out of their depth they really were.
And then there was Jack.
"It's time we attack." The nephilim's breathed, almost aglow in the dark with youth and heroism and naiveté.
"Attack?!" Dean barked softly, something twisting in his gut. Not about going up against the angels. About the one standing next to him. "You looked down there, kid?"
"We don't have any choice," Jack replied steadily. Almost eagerly. "Our army may be small, but it will distract them while we rescue Lucifer."
At a distance behind them, there was a muffled cough, and the shuffling of gear from one shoulder to another. Jack's hodgepodge resistance waited in the dark, barely breathing.
That these men and women, wearing scavenged military armor and carrying weapons useless against non-human combatants, were willing to follow Jack into the maw of an almost certain massacre was a testament to the nephilim's messiah-like influence.
Dean had never gone in for the whole awe and worship thing. Beware false prophets, and all that. Even when the prophets – or angels – turned out to be the real McCoy. When he and Cas had first meant, in an explosion of sparks and solemnity, even after witnessing the unveiling of wings and believing the angel to be everything Castiel claimed, Dean still hadn't felt reverence for his holy tax accountant of a deliverer. Innate resistance to such misplaced veneration had kicked in immediately. Good things do happen, Cas had posited.
Not in my experience, Dean spat then.
Not in these people's experience, he thought now.
Why the hell most of them grew starry-eyed at the sight of the impish Beiber-wannabe was beyond Dean. Sure, maybe for some it was the mere prospective of deliverance, however feeble. Hell, everyone needs something or someone to believe in, after all. Still, it unnerved him, the way Jack seemed to intentionally encourage and subsist on these poor wraiths' exaltations.
The dissenters, Dean got. The ones who were wondering just what the hell they were doing out here, in the wastelands, going up against a whole army of angels to rescue another angel, because this half-angel asked it of them. From their perspective, why shouldn't they let Michael slit Lucifer's throat – that part, Dean was totally on board with – and waltz off into some other dimension – which was where Dean had to draw the line. In the end, they were here for the same reason he was – there didn't seem to be a Door #2.
And in the Winchesters' case, when there was, it usually just opened up onto more bad.
He'd tried to tell Sam as much back in Jack's sorry excuse for a base of operations.
"How much longer we going to keep doing this, man?" Dean had demanded, dragging his brother aside. "Solving one problem by rushing headlong into another? I mean, making deals with demons, and-and Lucifer and everything else before this?! You'd think we'd have learned by now, but here we are. And if you think that the apocalypse, or the Leviathans, or the Darkness was bad, this –" he waved around at Jack and the camp and the entire messed up world "–this is going to go really, really bad."
Sam had shook his head in that mournful way of his, and shrugged his massive shoulders. "I hear you, Dean. But I don't see what other choice we have, you know?"
"You know how this ends, Sammy." Dean had stared at his brother, every muscle taunt with desperation and fury and the premonition of loss. "It ends with one of us, or both of us, or all of us dead."
But Dean knew he'd already lost the argument, lost it the moment Jack had declared it was time his ragtag army move against Michael. Maybe they could have talked the others out of it. Maybe back in their own world, the word of the Winchesters counted for something. But here, they were just two more men amongst the multitude of the resolute, the desperate, the barely sane.
They had sent word to Castiel and to Crowley, and set off for the wastelands.
"You're not going to guess who else is here." Amidst all the reunions in camp – or in Lucifer's case, introductions, and subsequent capture by Michael – and the marshalling for war, Mary had found a quiet moment to tell her boys that Crowley was alive, and human, and working with the rebellion.
Of course he is, Dean had thought, relief slackening his shoulders and for just a moment, making the last year and their current situation slightly more endurable. The part of Dean that had quietly come to consider the demon his friend, and blamed himself for Crowley's death, had never really believed him to be dead. Not Crowley, not like that. No, Dean had always imagined Crowley was simply plotting his grand, dramatic entrance, or fighting his way back from wherever demons go when they burn out, or simply sulking somewhere. The fourth core member of Team Free Will, as flawed and unrepentant as the rest of them.
Everything Dean had prayed for that bright, wretched dawn – the rising of the sun an apostasy after the closing of the rift and the night of numbing grief that had followed – had come true. Standing behind that lake-side shack, his hand a mess of ribboned skin and bloody splinters, his heart in not much better shape, Dean hadn't so much as swallowed his pride and prayed as demanded restitution. Hadn't they all suffered enough? Hadn't they sacrificed enough?
Dean's prayer had been answered, but typical for him, it had come true in an impossibly complicated and even twisted way. He had gotten back everyone he had lost – Cas, Mary, Crowley – and now might lose them again.
"I can't believe we're doing this." Dean muttered to himself now, scrutinizing the light shining from the ramshackle church nestled in the dustbowl. "Risking everything, for Lucifer."
"He's my father," Jack replied peevishly. Bands of golds gleamed at Dean with frustrated intensity. The air fizzled.
Yeah, he was, though until recently, Dean would have been willing to admit that the kid didn't seem all that worse off for it. The boy was proof that it wasn't about where you came from, but what you learned along the way. Nurture beat out nature. Dean liked to think that Sammy proved that too, compassionate to a fault despite the demon blood in his veins. And Cas, rejecting the rigidity and ultimate morality of the angels. And Crowley, who might, once upon a very long time ago, been something resembling a decent human being, only to have been twisted into that salacious viper under Hell's influence. And somehow, slowly, begun to untwist himself, despite the unfulfilled cure. Sure, nature played its part, but when Dean looked at the people around him – at himself – what he saw most was how people could change.
Even those he least expected.
Because as much as Dean had wanted to keep the archangel away from Jack, Dean had also seen just how much his son meant to Lucifer. Which was one of the craziest things in this whole nightmare of crazy. There had been a brief period of time, the lot of them fumbling around in that camp together – Dean and Sam trying to get Mary to just leave, Lucifer trying to get Jack to see him as something more than a cardboard cutout of villainy – when Dean had wondered if maybe Jack wasn't capable of stirring something good in the archangel.
Dean realized that they'd all been so apprehensive about Jack possessing any of his father's qualities, about Lucifer rousing something dark and ugly in the boy, they'd entirely missed that Lucifer, in his own warped way, possessed some of Jack's.
To serve his own self-interests and trounce his brother as much as to impress his son and prove himself the good guy, Lucifer had gone off to face Michael alone. And gotten himself captured.
So desperate to be the hero, to prove he wasn't innately evil. And about to get them all killed in the process.
Just like his son.
"A lot of people are gonna die," Dean pointed out, a weight settling in his stomach. Because Jack had already made his decision.
"I know. But – " the nephilim paused, as if considering. That pair of eyes like firebrands in the dark swept over the scene below, as if casting judgement and finding the obstacles – insurmountable by Dean's estimate – entirely wanting. As if nothing could stand against him. "I will make it up to them."
That bad feeling grew exponentially. "And just how are you gonna do that, huh?"
If there was one thing Dean knew, it was that there was no making apologies to the dead. There was no settling the score with people who sacrificed their lives for yours. Just a lifetime of make-believe memories, in which Dean lived up to everyone's expectations, said all the right things, never let affection be trampled down by frustration or dread or apathy. Never failed to say that he cared, or that he was sorry.
Dean had gotten the chance to say that to Cas, and now Mary. Couldn't count the times with Sam. In a roundabout way that did nothing to alleviate his guilt, he'd offered up the same to Bobby and Charlie, trying without success to convey to the avuncular mentor and redheaded little sister in this dimension the magnitude of their bond in that other, increasingly distant, reality. Considering the former demon had survived an angel blade to the gut, the restoration of his soul, and an entire year of bombardment by angelic armies in a dystopian nightmare, Dean didn't think it too much to ask that he survive long enough to say the same to Crowley.
"After we defeat Michael, I'm staying here." Jack replied nonchalantly. "I am going to help these people, rebuild this world."
Dean wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe that Michael and his forces would fall before the nephilim like the tops of daisies whacked down by a child's wooden sword. Wanted to believe that good intentions and pure determination could restore, however full of its own failings, a world better off without angels or demons or divine intervention.
Dean wasn't sure what Jack's promised utopia would look like. Only that it would never exist. Not through any fault of the kid's. Just because that wasn't the way the world worked, this one or any other.
What Dean was sure of was that people who sought or promised that sort of paradise often led the world in the entirely opposite direction.
Jack – with his budding arrogance, the smug confidence he had developed from easy victories allowed him by Michael, the credulousness with which he had lapped up Lucifer's guile, the sheer calm the boy was displaying now, with hundreds of lives clutched precariously in his hands – was on the verge of becoming everything Dean had ever feared the kid could be. He had the power to remake reality with a mere shrug of his shoulders, and Dean could see how carelessly Jack might shrug.
If there was a moment to pull the kid back from that, it was now.
He reached out a hand for the boy's shoulder.
The light from the church suddenly twisted, and broke the night. What had previously been mere candlelight, with shadows shuffling along the walls and occasionally winking through the shuttered boards, lost its rich, buttery warmth in favor of a steel glint. In a world largely lacking in electricity, the sudden searing radiance of what was undeniably angel grace struck like a blow and temporarily blinded Dean, despite his distance from the church.
"Now!" Jack shouted, his enthusiasm and burst of power rebounding off the explosion of grace, lighting up the ridge and the wasteland and all of humanity's hopes. He raised an arm to signal his forces, and then was off, down the slope.
"Damn it, Jack!" Dean roared, stunned and stuck to the dirt in his disorientation.
There were shouts from behind him, a rumble as hundreds of would-be warriors clamored up and over the ridge to pour down into the basin. He could hear Sam calling after the nephilim, could feel his skin fraying as the hum of the angels sharpened in pitch and intensity, a shriek of glass and sunlight centered on the small scattering of ants scuttling towards them.
Half blind, the fugue of adrenaline already smothering his panic, Dean ripped his numbed feet from the ridge and tore off after the boy. Or towards the battle. Or the church. He wasn't sure.
Around him, all was mad decimation.
The world broke apart in the night's carnage. It was too dark and then too bright and then too dark again to see anything. Someone ahead roared in battle-born ecstasy, then screamed in sudden, brief torment. There was a wet sound, lost in the night, in the hurtling thrust of battle. More shrieking, more bursts of light and agony. Muffled gasps. Something heavy collapsed just behind him. Dirt and copper mist exploded in the air. Dark, indistinct shapes flew past in a sharp flutter.
A man's body twisted in on itself. Another's burst like a tire. The earth was anointed with bowels. Dean's boot struck the ground. There was a pink squeak and then a pop. He slid, and raced on.
Dean outstripped the imperceptible forms around him. They could have been Sam, or Bobby, broken and lifeless a moment later. Harsh breathing and pounding blood filled his ears. The earth, blind to every sense except his feet, rushed underneath Dean. He was a fragment of intent hurtling onwards, towards the cracked shaft of light that was the doorframe of the church.
There was the solid, blue-black thump of body against wood – his own, as he careened into the door. Then the stinging rasp of the splintered glass and gravel against Dean's hands as he crashed into the church, the floor rising up to snap his head back. For a moment, everything was a smash of crimson and fury, consciousness warning with the delirium of pain. Slither into oblivion, or force broken knuckles to curl around an angel blade and rise his rickety, raw body.
The sound of other bodies – other souls having lived through that maelstrom of butchery, collapsing against the ground and walls – roared like deliverance around him.
Dean coughed, groaned. Cursed. Forced himself onto his knees, then lifted his head.
The interior of the church was cast in a contrast of light and shadow, the discarded pews and roughshod walls scratching out vague outlines along the peripheral, the searing scar of a rift emanating from behind the altar. Twisting and flickering, its highest reaches caressing the rafters with lace fingertips, the rift beckoned with an eerie, malevolent quality.
Lucifer lay prostrate on the altar. A tendril of grace glimmered against the ragged skin of his throat.
There was a hand on his arm, and Dean turned frantic eyes on his brother. Sam's mouth was a single line cut across his face. Behind him, Cas had landed on his knees, coat spread like crestfallen wings, a swirl of disbelief and despair on his face. Mary leaned against the doorframe, angel blade clutched against her chest, breathing hard and staring out into the slaughter beyond.
"Hey, guys," Lucifer blinked surprisingly blue eyes, his rasp barely audible over the death taking place beyond the church walls. "Kinda…late to the party." He choked on a dry hiccup of self-pitying, dispirited laughter.
Dean started towards the archangel, clenching the blade in his hand so tightly, his already battered knuckles cracked and began to bleed. He wasn't sure if he intended to release Lucifer, or end what Michael had started with a single stroke of the blade, or simply pummel the archangel until he was just another black, bloody smear, indiscernible from the countless puddles of meat now splattered across the wasteland. Any sympathy for the devil that might, possibly, have accumulated, evaporated now like mist in the heat of this bloodbath.
He was brought up short by a low-pitched whine from a crumbled form leaning against the dais. The plagued, dirty face of Kevin Tran ran with crocodile tears as the prophet heaved and sniffled.
"Gone," he blundered through the words, luminous black eyes spinning madly in his ravaged face. The bottomless pupils dilated with madness and imploration were like blackened, empty sockets. "Gone. Michael's gone. And he-he left me here! He promised! He – "
"Michael is gone?!"
The very air in the church snapped to attention. Dust molts and human ash were pasted in place. The piercing screech of slaughter diminished to a tinny din in one great well of sudden almost-silence. Human heartbeats and pounding breaths battered against its weight.
Everything dropped out of Dean's body into his shoes – his stomach, his heart, his lingering hope that this might turn out any other way.
"Jack – " Sam's choked entreaty was laced with the same desperate resignation. His brother had spun on his heel to face the blistering figure of Jack, standing alight in the center of the clapboard church. The nephilim's furious visage seared through the back of Dean's skull to scour the inside of his eyelids.
He turned to meet Jack's eyes, two perfect halos of fire set in a once youthful face now contorted into something indescribably other.
"He can't be gone. He can't!" The celestial force of that voice, with its atomic boom and wrath, slammed with the weight of the universe against the humans. Dean thought for a moment he might be smattered into individual molecules.
Cas was the only one capable of remaining upright. "Jack!" He reached out, attempting to grasp some part of the nephilim, some part of the boy he loved.
But Jack was already gone. He had stretched out a hand, towards the unmarred space above the altar. Where moments before, an interdimensional rift had spat and winked, reality warped and ruptured. A great, serrated gash opened like a maw. Time tumbled about like upended puzzle pieces: The rift opening, Jack charging towards the altar, Cas fumbling then falling, Sam and Mary and Dean shouting and scrambling after a human-shaped solar flare, the angel blade like an unearned accusation in his hand, Dean's own words from months before ringing in the set of Jack's shoulders as he leapt over Lucifer, if it comes to killing you, I'll be the one to do it, all of it tumbling with the boy through the rift.
The rippling maw converged like the ocean, and was gone.
No.
No, Dean prayed, pressing his body against the concrete comfort of the altar and willing the rift back open. No, no, no! He breathed in the smallest pocket of time and space, left in the wake of the nephilium's power run amok. Between two breaths, denial reigned.
Then the world recoiled, like a spring.
Shrill whistles and a pitched wailing rent the manufactured inertia within the church. From beyond the slatted walls, an aerial percussion pounded out a salvo of rocket fire and explosions. The grotesque tenor of the slaughter had shifted, no longer a primordial nightmare of wet death in the dark. Now shimmering blue flames erupted in punctuated pockets, each preceded by mechanical whine, then crowned with the crackling thunder of angelic demise.
With a whirling peal of mechanics and smoldering divinity, one of the sky-bound burning bodies streaked across the remains of the church rafters and careened beyond the mortared cell behind the altar. Blue, ethereal flames consumed the meteor's death throes.
The roof the church gave a grating shriek before erupting in a fireless blast. Nails and supports ripped free of the beams in a massive explosion of splintered wood, lifting Sam and Mary up off their feet and throwing them across the church. Dean was crushed against the altar.
He heard the whump of bodies against the ground, heard Sam groaning over the roar of the battle. Felt the tingling trickle of blood down the side of his face. He reached to wipe it away and glanced up in astonishment.
Above, in the night sky, angels fluttered and burned.
Dean lazily watched them for a moment, trying to connect their graceless, wobbling shapes with the slice of pain carving into his forehead, their sudden lack of shelter from the battle, the absence or loss of almost everyone Dean had ever loved. How did it keep coming back to this, he wanted to ask the wingless embers and shattered rafters of the church. How was it that each time they tried to put the world back together, they ended up right back where they started?
You know how this is gonna end, he'd told Sam. Except that it never seemed to actually end.
Dean forced himself to his feet.
The rift was closed. Jack was gone. What the hell were they supposed to do now?
"In case anyone's interested," came a familiar voice from the blasted doorway of the church, "we're being slaughtered out here."
Dean closed his eyes, sighed with battered, grateful frustration.
Crowley always did know how to make an entrance.
The former demon stood on the threshold, breathing hard and already half turned back out into the fray. Looking leaner, worn, resolute – in a pair of dusty boots and a faded canvas coat worthy of a Winchester. The stretch of colorless days in this alternative universe of strife and sacrificed second chances had scrubbed a distinctly human quality into the lines and shadows of Crowley's face and form. If not for the snark, Dean wasn't even sure he would have recognized him.
Crowley glanced towards Sam, crumbled against the wall, and Mary, bending over him. To Cas, who was only now looking away from where Jack had disappeared through the rift. Then Crowley looked again at Dean.
And with weary irony, he smiled.
Dean felt a small, poignant smile forming in return. Because where the hell else would two old friends meet, but in the midst of war?
Dean felt the dragging weight of fatigue's grip release his limbs. Felt the rising tide of shrill panic and helplessness in the face of almost certain, universal collapse fade away. Over the pitch and shriek of battle, Dean could almost hear Baby's engine roar, and the first chords of classic rock, grinding out a celebratory guitar solo.
Dean couldn't reopen the rift. He couldn't stop Michael from charging full-throttle into their world, or pull rash, nearly-omnipotent Jack back from the precarious edge over which the kid leaned. He couldn't resurrect the men and women who had followed him or fought for him – who had believed in him – and died as a consequence.
What he could do, in this moment, was the one thing Dean was absolutely certain the Winchester family was good at.
He could kick it in the ass.
"So if you're done lying around," Crowley drawled, still with that half-smile curled at the corner of his mouth, a slight raise of his brows and a brief nod to the chaos beyond, "there's a world in need of saving."
Then he turned, battered boots scrunching in the dirt, and disappeared back into the black and red of the night.
It never ended, Dean thought, fueled by a resounding determination seeping into his very bones from the people around him. His family, rising and gathering around him in the ruins of the little church. It never ended, because they would never stop fighting. Not when it counted. Not when the world – and the lives of the people they loved – hung in the balance.
With a nod first at Sam and his mom, and then to Castiel, always by his side, Dean braced himself, and followed the former demon into battle.
Thank you for reading, and to those who left kudos or comments after the last chapter. Kudos from guests are also very much appreciated. This chapter was much belated, due to all the usual summer distractions, plus real life events, coupled with an inability to find the right words to describe Dean's reaction to Crowley's dramatic entrance.
The final chapter will hopefully be posted by the end of September, and will serve as the "season finale" for what should have been Season 13.