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Chapter title is from song by Green Day.
65
Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day
She spent the week at the coast house. A whole week, between jobs, stubbornly refusing to look at the job staring her in the eye, green eyes to black but not really black at all, and she couldn't do it. She knew what he was asking, and it was the right thing, an impossible thing, and she had hesitated. Full out stopped. Because.
She couldn't do it.
She went on walks. Miles and miles along the edge of cliffs, braving a stiff ocean breeze, hoping the wind could scour thoughts from her mind and feeling from her skin—the ghost of a touch, a thumb smoothing softly against her wrist, a kiss against her hair. Being out here was foolish in the extreme. She was un-warded, unshielded, bright as a beacon for anyone to find. But her feet carried her out of the house every morning without fail, trying to escape the angel blade in her garage, sitting accusingly on the front seat of the Durango where she'd dropped it, a job left undone.
So she walked.
On bright days when the sea was a brilliant blue, she got all the way out to the Point, wending her way through cypress hedgerows sculpted by wind. The meadows were thick with lupines and millipedes, and the clouds drifted by lazily, all fluffy and white. She found a large rock to climb onto at the end of the promontory, and just sat there, watching the waves fling themselves futilely at the shore, watching the pull of the tide out to sea.
She could just run. The long line of the horizon beckoned, and she could keep going, over that distant line of blue on the next day's flight, and never look back. It could be done. There would be other jobs, other continents, and she could do that. She could just run, and it wouldn't matter if Sam eventually managed to track her down, because she'd be a thousand miles and an ocean away, safe, far from the job she'd failed to do.
She pulled her phone from her pocket abruptly, staring out at the water. She'd turned it off somewhere between Rawlins and Ogden. She shouldn't even have it. She should have chucked it way back when, or slipped in onto a passing 18 wheeler with the signal running three truck stops ago. As long as she had it, Sam would find her. Sam was stubborn that way.
Please. Save Sam.
She slid down the craggy boulder she had been sitting on, and walked deliberately to the edge of the cliff, the phone held loosely in her hand. She could throw it now, and be done with it.
She raised her arm. Stopped. Stared at the pieces of sunlight glittering off the waves, crests of white dashing themselves into foam against the rocks. She had trained a lifetime to see the truth, to know the shadows that lurked in darkness. She had fought a lifetime, running, because the shadows were always there. They would always be.
But they were not this.
Saving people, hunting things, the desperate plea in his eyes, what he needed her to do.
How did she run from that?
The tumbler of whiskey he held between his palms should have made things better. It should have burned warm down his throat and taken the edge off, blurred the future and the past into a comfortable haze, instead of looking back at him with amber clarity, stripping him naked, right down to his tarred soul. It was always going to be this way, darkness and doom gathering around him like the eye of a storm, no light in the end, and it was about damned time she ran.
"Dean."
The backlit map of the world glowed warmly in the bunker's bleak gray anteroom. He stared at it blankly, not even thinking about it really, and he knew where they were. Where they all were. Lisa. Ben. Cassie. Robin. Sonny. Jody. Beth and Garth. A mere thought away, and he could be there in the next second, dark murderous eyes in this world gone mad, the First Blade in his hand because they were all gray things, and he had to be careful what he thought about.
"Hey."
The chair across from him squeaked when Sam settled into it.
He couldn't find her. Wherever she was. Yet his imagination held on to figments—the warmth of her in his arms, the ghost of a kiss, maddeningly there and gone again—double the torment because it wasn't ever real. He couldn't see Toby or Xavier or Kim either, and that was just as well.
"Dean."
He looked up slowly to see a shadowy blur of gray. This happened more and more now. He blinked hard to clear his vision, so he could see Sam, Sammy, Sam's brows furrowed together into a knot, trying to get his attention.
There was a hiccup in Sam's breathing before Sam unfurled a map onto the table. A road map of the lower 48, red magic marker dots on it where Sam had been plotting something.
He jerked away from the crinkle of stiff paper, search incantations and spells flooding unbidden into his head. He could burn the map down to a cinder with a single look, and he would know where she was. He could whiskey spritz the Rand-McNally, say two words, and he would know. God, he wanted to know. His hands shook with the effort of keeping them locked around the tumbler, his hands of blood and fire and doom, and he had no right to be touching anything, no right at all.
There was more sympathy in Sam's glance towards his abrupt motion than he wanted. But Sam kept the feelings to himself, smoothing the map out so it lay more evenly, and pointed to one of the red X's.
"El Santurio de Chimayo, a couple of priests found mutilated. Eyes burned out, the whole nine." Sam tapped the X in New Mexico with a finger. "The place was tossed but nothing stolen. And same here." Sam's finger traveled northeast on the map up to Utah. "The Bountiful Tabernacle. Then here. South Baptist Church in Lincoln. I think they're looking for something, the Fallen. Maybe the Book?"
He forced himself to look at the colored lines that were highways and shaded splotches that were cities. Sam's definition of a distraction, a consolation prize, in the form of the job. Sam's finger tapped across to the next spot circled in red on the interstate. He squinted at it.
"Detroit? What's in Detroit?"
"St Anne's."
He stared at Sam's earnest Labrador expression, detecting subterfuge. There was no way, no way, the Fallen were leaving a trail of bodies clear across the country's oldest churches, looking for the Book, held open by the unbound grace of an angel—Cas' grace—as bright as a falling meteor, the stuff of miracles. There was no way that was sitting in someone's basement like a glow stick bookmark, just waiting to be found.
"No. They're looking for something else."
Sam's eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"Beside the Book of Life? What would they be looking for beside the Book of Life? I mean…"
Sam stopped dead, his mouth rounding on an "Oh." followed by a "Crap." followed by "You think they're looking for Crowley? In a church?"
He shrugged, because it was Crowley. It was the kind of twisted logic Crowley'd get a kick out of, last place anyone would look for the King of Hell and all.
"It'd make sense; they've got Heaven. If they get the keys out of Crowley, then they've got it all."
One world. No Heaven. No Hell.
"But…" Sam stuttered. "What the hell would they want with, you know, Hell?"
He looked at Sam. The face of his brother, harder and leaner now than when Sam had stood on the edge of that howling pit at Stull, saying "I've got him, Dean. I've got him." The fate of the world on his shoulders and Sam had jumped, the puny will of a kid pitted against the towering will of an archangel, because pumping Sam's veins full of demon blood hadn't been enough. The arrogance of Lucifer versus the bright spark that had always been Sam, and Sam had won. Ramiel would know that. To squash that, it would take sin. Real, deep, sin-without-repentance sin, before everything could be made the same murky shade of gray.
It was insane, to resurrect Hell's dungeon masters, the kin of Alastair and Abaddon, to lock them into rotting corpses against their wills, crazed and vicious and eternally hungry—he set the tumbler down on the table and stood. They would eat the world and each other and Sam with it, tearing it all apart until there was nothing left, no way to distinguish one flavor of crazy from another, and that, that was what Ramiel wanted.
Everything the same. No way to pass judgment.
Those dark threads in Arkas' grace—darker than the grayness of the vampires, darker than the sooty smoke of demons, widening cracks in the light, increasingly impossible to hide. They were Fallen, and falling. So they came up with a newer model—Suriel. Hiding tainted grace behind the brightness of a human soul, using a demon to sidestep the need for consent, everything put through the blender to become a single coil of white smoke, elusive and insubstantial and burningly bright in the otherwise gray murk, the only way to rise up through the angel-made fog, to become the new light in the darkness.
No judgment, his ass.
"No." Sam breathed. "Even fallen, they're still angels, Dean. I can't imagine them agreeing to that. Even if joining with demons to possess humans gives them more power, they're too stuck up. It'd be crazy. They'd have to be so afraid, and I can't think of anything the angels would be afraid of except…"
Sam's words died, staring at him, also remembering Arkas. A single twist of his Blade to pull the darkness out explosively through the cracks in the Fallen's grace, and the mist fall of ash that was all that remained of an angel. That was what he did. Something he had done.
Sammy stopped breathing.
He watched the understanding settle onto Sam like lead weights, and it should have been enough to crush the Labrador out of Sam's eyes, except Sam's mouth firmed up into a line, chin setting and hands starting to wave around in a way Dean recognized, because yes, jumping Satan into the pit was a totally sane idea.
"Sam." He said warningly.
"So, St. Anne's." Sam pulled a second map out of his stack, blithely and deliberately ignoring him, way too innocent and wide-eyed in a way that would have made Toby pull up sharp. "The original burned down in 1806, so they built a new one here in 1871. I think we should check out both locations. I mean, does it matter what they're after, Dean? We need to get our hands on it before they do, no matter what it is, right?"
He stared at Sam for a long second, because it was a logic box, and Sam was good at those. He narrowed his eyes and Sam just somehow managed to look even more sincere, because, as he had taught Sammy once before—half the trick to pulling off a lie was to believe in it. He knew Sam was bullshitting him, but he didn't have Toby's unforgiving superpower to make Sam 'fess up, and he couldn't find a hole in Sam's argument to get out of it. I'm dangerous didn't cut it, because he was sitting right here and Sam was sitting right here with him, within arm's reach, the first domino to fall if they were tipping dominos.
He stood up so abruptly that the map on the table fluttered.
On his way to the door he reached into his pocket and tossed the Impala's keys at Sam.
"Fine. You're driving."