Chapter title is from song by Billy Squier.

4

In the Dark – Billy Squier

The barn was a nightmare.

Dean fumbled in his pocket for the key to the bunker.

Come on, Come on.

The sticky gore on his hand made holding onto the key difficult, and the shaking of his hand made it worse. He tasted death in his mouth, oozing down from his hair. He had to get inside. Get safe.

The vamps standing guard he'd taken out easily enough. Too easily. They had looked at him, and backed up, and he knew he had rep, but not that much of one. He'd swung the machete, one quick swing, and it was one vamp down, and the other was running, making this god-awful whistling noise, high up in the upper registers somewhere, and he took another swing, just to make the noise stop.

But it was too late.

The nest was back.

He didn't know why Sam didn't hear them, making the racket that they were, practically stomping their feet and making that weird sub-vocal hiss before they extended their fangs. He shifted the machete in his grip, feeling like he was holding a Nerf toy. A brute of a vamp charged him, lightening fast, lank hair brushing his arm as the vamp went in for the bite. As he swung the little limp excuse for a knife, he could feel a second set of teeth sinking into his shoulder, and then they were on him, pushing him to the ground, raking their sharp nails down his arms, kicking at his shins. Worse, he felt them, icy bodies pressing down on him, a mass of darkness and thirst, sucking at him, sucking, sucking until he was dry and withered and dust. When they got done with him they would move on to Sam, to the girl, to the next warm fleshy body, and drain that and keep going. And this interminable road they were on, him and Sam, taking their turns in hell, dancing to the tune of an unseen puppet master, would keep going on and on, one dark death filled night after another. He needed not just to gank them. He needed to burn through the darkness and clean house. He needed fire. He needed a weapon to make that white hot blaze that would sear the sickness from the world. Obliterate it.

He'd had that weapon before.

He could feel it humming in his blood, resonating in his mind when he closed his eyes, and he called for it.

The First Blade.

It appeared in his hand, consolidating out of thin air. He realized now, the First Blade would always come to him. It was right. The fit to his hand was like a hot glove, zinging a spark all the way to the Mark on his forearm, making his vision ... better. He could see every detail in the night like it was day, see into all the deep shadows and around all the murky corners.

He went to work. He vaguely remembered moving, each stroke automatic, forceful, joyous. Each swing hit a mark, sank into something soft and yielding, cleaving it, kicking up a spray of metallic tasting death. At about 12 he stopped counting.

He got a little creative, because lopping off heads was getting tedious.

And he was angry. Angry that killing vamps was so easy; someone should've dusted them all long ago. Angry at the cosmic joke of making humans claw their way to be hunters, when you just needed a little juice and the things of the night fell over like newly mown blades. He knew there would be no more scrambling and searching for that special weapon to kill whatever. No more silver bullets, no more exotic woods dipped in weird-of-the-day blood. The Blade would do it all, and it was glorious.

He seized the last vampire by the hair, forcing him to his knees with his grip, and slowly sawed his head off, coldly watching the creature's terrified expression freeze on his face as the Blade chewed its way through his neck. It seemed only fitting that their last moments before Purgatory should be one of utter terror and pain.

A scream cut the night. He'd thought he'd gotten all the vamps, but maybe he missed one. He swung around toward where Sam was cutting the girl loose, the head of the vamp still in his hand, the First Blade in the other. The flickering light cast bright flashes on the hay, and he saw two little things huddled in the far corner. Little gray presences, transient and fragile in the awkward bodies that the dark things fed upon. The bigger of the two stumbled backward, staring at him in stark frozen horror, with eyes that looked...familiar.

Sam.

Sam was looking at him in horror. He could see the rapid pulse beating at the base of Sam's throat, hear the panicked pounding of his heart, and the quick short gasps of air as Sam tried to get himself under control. Slowly Dean became aware of the stink of vampire blood around him, heavy and thick in the air. His clothes were sticking to him, tacky, warm, and gooey. The head in his hand made ploppy dripping noises as blood and little chunks of brain drained from it. At the edges of his vision, he could see still quivering hunks of flesh clustered around him, oozing and making a lake of tarry blood around his feet.

His feet felt rooted to the floor. He kept his eyes on Sam, as Sam cut through the last ropes and hustled the girl out of the barn.

Making his escape, never looking back.

The arm holding the First Blade twitched, and a whisper of thought floated through his head.

They are still ...things. Gray things. Impure things.

The job is not done.

He gagged, then retched. He dropped the vampire head, but his fingers were locked around the First Blade as if they had been glued to it. He had to get out of there. He wouldn't finish the job. If he had a choice. If he was still him.

He needed to go. To get safe.

He didn't remember how he had gotten here, to the bunker. One minute he was at the barn, the next he was standing outside the heavy metal door under the automatic floodlight. He was gasping like he had run a mile. He needed to empty his mind and keep thoughts from forming. His fingers were still paralyzed around the First Blade, so he fumbled for his key with his left hand, the slickness of the blood on it making the process clumsy and slow. He tumbled down the stairs and ran, ran for the only safe place he knew of that existed in this world.

He must have blinked again, because the next thing he was aware of was being ... stuck. He looked around him. At least it was true dark here, not the weird night-vision dark he'd had in the barn. There was a faint light coming in along one edge of the room. Straining, his eyes slowly adjusted.

The outlines of the bunker's devil trap were all around him.

His legs gave way as he sank to the floor, and his hand finally unclenched, dropping the demon blade to the ground with a clatter. He was safe. For now. There was no getting out.

"Dean?" Sammy's voice echoed back to him hollowly in the room, a rising question.

He croaked out a sound that was neither greeting nor cough. He wasn't sure how long he had been sitting here in the dark, hunched over, viciously not thinking not thinking not thinking, until he'd heard Sam moving around outside and called out to him before he could stop himself.

There was the creak and scrape of more shelves being moved aside, then Sam's footsteps heavy and careful, thudding on the floor. A sudden flare of panic shot through him as he turned to peer intently at the dark corner of the room while Sam fumbled for the light switch. Could he see could he see could he see in the dark still?

The dark remained dark.

He wanted desperately to feel his face, his head – to make sure his outer covering was still skin, his head still shaped like a head. Hell, and all the faces of the tormented beasts that dwelt within, clawed its way out of the locks he had put on his memory, and punched him with possibilities. Demons were smoke in meat suits on Earth, but how they looked there in the pit, and how they really appeared to the insane and the angels… He wanted to feel his face.

He hadn't, because his hands were crusted with vampire blood. His face felt stiff with it too, but he didn't want to touch one to the other because it felt like it would be making matters worse. Like he was bathing in the gore of slaughter. The parts of himself he could dimly see in the faint light looked and felt like hands he knew, feet he was familiar with. But feeling was deceptive—he had felt his hands and feet in the pit, too.

The harsh white of the fluorescent light flickered on overhead and he blinked against the sudden glare. He heard Sam approach the edge of the devil's trap and the rustling of clothes as Sam squatted down at the edge of the circle. Left eye squinting against the light, he turned towards Sam, controlling his expression by pulling his lips taut in a frown.

"You look like crap."

He tried to get his voice to settle. It came out a little too rough, a little too edgy. Sam was still wearing the same clothes he had been in the barn, the wrinkles and creases in them looking like they might now be baked into the cloth. It had been a two day drive to Pasco, and Sam had the haggard look of someone who'd done it in one long run.

Ignoring his opening gambit, Sam looked at the ground and picked at a spot on the floor. "Dean," He began, low and serious.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Look, I get that, but we kind of have to, don't you think?"

Dean tightened his lips. "What we need to do is to summon Crowley."

"Agreed." Sam responded immediately, relief saturating his voice that they had at least that bit of common ground to work with. Sam was looking him over with the careful look of someone checking for injuries. Or horns. Dean's hands twitched in the direction of his face again. He tracked Sam's eyes, Sam's expressions, and let out a hidden breath when Sam didn't pull back or flinch as he finished his once over.

Sam still had that careful tone when he spoke again. Hesitant. "How long have you been … here?"

For the first time, Dean shifted his legs experimentally. They didn't feel as stiff or as numb as he'd half expected, having held still for countless hours. He cleared his throat, getting rid of the rusty feeling that had crept back in when Sam looked him over.

"I don't know. Since the barn." He glanced at Sam, hating the admission. "How long has it been?"

Sam was trying to keep his expression blank, but he could see Sam was about a stitch away from losing it, having driven straight here from the barn, straight to the place Sam thought was safe.

Safe, from him.

The cacophony of thoughts racing through his head came to a screeching halt like the lead car had suddenly braked, and everything crashed into a pile. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. He was so damn slow. He should've been quicker on the uptake and teleported himself to any other devil's trap in the world.

Anywhere but here.

He knew what Sam was thinking. Or not thinking.

Or what Sam should be thinking.

His right hand twitched towards the First Blade before he could stop himself.

Sam shifted his weight to his back foot, the movement reflexive and automatic—as it should be—Sam's fingers dipping into his jacket for Ruby's knife—like he should do—except the Sam stopped and said:

"Dean?"

He blinked. He looked at his hand inching towards the First Blade sitting clean on the ground beside him, and then back at Sam again. He curled his errant fingers into a fist, and shoved the fist into his pocket, Sam's eyes tracking his every move.

"How long?" He demanded again, his voice a low growl.

"Two days." Sam said at last. "I drove straight through."

Then, as if the dam had broken with those words, Sam hurried on. "I went back in." Dean glanced at him again. "You were gone, Dean. I didn't know where to. Just gone." Sam stammered to a stop awkwardly. "I wasn't sure what I saw. It was dark. I couldn't be sure what I was looking at." Carefully, again, Sam asked. "Have you been here … this whole time?"

He tilted his head in acknowledgement. He didn't want to talk about it, to admit to not being in control of what was happening. To admit to not even really knowing what happened. He thought he knew, but if Sam told him he'd blazed a path of death and destruction between here and Washington, he'd believe that too. Hell was like that on the mind. Time bent. Reality bent. Your hands were still your hands even though they were claws. Your feet still felt and looked like feet to you, even though they were hooves.

"I came to—found myself just outside. Used my key." His voice was scratchy. His finger tapped the key to his left, glued to the floor with vampire blood. His way of telling Sam the bunker wards were still good. "Then here." He shook himself to clear the cobwebby feeling of time/space bending.

They both stared at the key in a strained silence for the space of seconds.

"Do you remember what happened in the barn? Do you know?" the question sounded like it had been dragged out of Sam.

He took his time replying, though he remembered all too vividly. The evidence of what had happened was plastered to him in various stinking chunks. The passage of the two days since, however, had a wholly unreal feeling to it. He should have been stiff and cramped sitting there. Felt thirst. Needed to take a piss. He felt none of those things. He was aware he'd spent most of that time concentrating on not thinking. He didn't know if that was enough to put him in some kind of catatonic trance that would make all the other things, the normal human things, irrelevant. He didn't think so – and with that thought came the dread feeling that there was another shoe hanging over his head, waiting to drop.

"Yeah. Sorta."

"We didn't have the First Blade with us when we went there."

He glanced sharply at Sam.

"I called for it." He said brusquely, as if keeping his answers short would make the fact less noticeable.

"Called for it?" Sam made the question a statement.

"It came-appeared in my hand."

Sam took a moment to digest that. He could see Sam rummaging through his choices, circle through them again, then steel himself to speak.

"Think you can kick it over here?" Sam indicated the First Blade, lying next to him, the only thing in the devil's trap free and clean of blood. The look Sam gave him was carefully unchallenging.

Dean resisted the urge to laugh, because if he started he would probably not stop. It would sound crazed, because things were crazed. Maybe Sam thought the bunker's warding would prevent him from calling the First Blade to hand if he needed it again. He highly doubted it. And then he realized that Cain could have summoned the Blade anytime he damn well pleased, but Cain had chosen not to. Cain had deliberately sent them on an extravagant scavenger hunt to the deepest part of the deepest ocean.

And now he knew why.

He grunted, standing up, Sam rising with him. Hunks of crud peeled and flaked off him as he did so, but he ignored them. He walked the three steps towards the First Blade, and sent it scooting with his boot towards the edge of the circle where Sam stood. It slid with a rattle across the uneven paint lines of the devil's trap. Sam bent down and snagged it up by the hilt, holding it gingerly with the air of someone trying to de-fang a cobra. "Be back." He said hurriedly.

Sam's footsteps faded down the corridor. He would probably choose the safe room and draw a second devil's trap, then salt line and booby trap the room for good measure. It wouldn't matter one whit, but he couldn't bring himself to tell Sam that just now.

He secured the First Blade in a vat of holy water centered in a devil's trap, dumped a salt trench around the both and set up booby traps. Then he'd gone back to Dean.

Dean hadn't moved. He appeared to be staring at the toe of his boot, frozen mid-step.

"Dean!"

Dean looked up slowly. Sam took one step backwards when he met Dean's eyes—a flash of black there and gone again, demon, before something seemed to snap back in place, and Dean's eyes, his human eyes, focused on him.

Sam huffed. The room reeked of three-day-old vampire blood, crusted heavy and thick onto Dean's clothing. He could see bits of it still on Dean's hands, and the strange way Dean was holding his hands, stiffly away from himself, not touching anything. It had to be driving Dean nuts, not being able to wash up.

"You should get cleaned up, man."

He said it before really thinking about the consequences of what he was saying. The moment the words were out of his mouth, and he heard them with his ears, he stopped. It was as if there was a vacancy in his head where his brain used to live.

Dean raised an eyebrow, clearly questioning his choices before turning his gaze stonily back down to the floor.

A demon would have been trying to convince him to let it out. A demon would not have handed him the First Blade.

Fuck it. Sam took a deep breath, and threw caution to the winds.

"Dean, c'mon. We'll figure this out. But you've gotta come out, and wash up. That can't be comfortable."

Nothing.

"Dean, you can't stay in there forever."

Silence.

He went in for the jugular.

"Dean, I can't do this by myself."

Dean squinched his eyes tight shut. A long trapped sigh worked its way up from the bottom of Dean's lungs, and a look of resignation crossed Dean's face.

"You got Ruby's knife?"

Sam froze. His blood congealed as he grasped the direction that Dean's thoughts had taken, standing there in the devil's trap he had put himself in.

No. Just no.

Dean gave a strange humorless chortle and looked over at him from the corner of his eye. There was a little bit of the thing in that look, contemptuous and mocking, as the glance slid over where Dean knew he kept the blade holstered. "It won't work, you know. Didn't do a damned thing to Abaddon."

Dean's gaze settled on his shoe again. The silence stretched, taut and brittle.

His brother's voice was rough when at long last Dean spoke again.

"Go get the .38. Devil's trap bullets."

Sam's mouth dropped open a second before he snapped it shut. Clamping his lips together to keep his stuffing inside, he nodded curtly in acknowledgement of Dean's order, turning away as he did so Dean would not see the moisture that jumped into his eyes.

"And Sammy."

He half turned back. From the corner of his vision, he could see Dean looking straight at him, eyes alive with expression both tender and fierce now that he had his back to him. Sam inclined his head slightly to indicate he'd heard, and waited for what Dean was going to say.

"Best keep them on you."