One of two codas I wrote the night No Rest for the Wicked aired. This one is more cracky, with mentions of purple eyed demons and a hellhound named Bon Jovi.
Sam keeps the hellhound that kills Dean.
At first, it's just because he can see it. Lilith has knocked something loose in his skull, and there's the hound, panting by Dean's head, watching him. It's big and black with a single white spot over one of its red eyes and it has claws like a lion and jaws like an unholy mixture of a pit bull and an alligator.
Sam cradles Dean's skull in his palms and blankly stares at the hellhound. He shouldn't be seeing it. It shouldn't still be here, it should be running after its master, ready to kill more people who've sold their souls like Dean; his breath hitches and he starts crying again, leans his head against Dean's forehead and tries not to inhale the smell of blood and voided bowels.
When his eyes are dry again, he looks up, expecting it to be gone, but it's still there. It stares back, red eyes narrow and hateful with Dean's blood splattered all over its hide.
He hates it.
He takes it with him anyway.
It has nothing to do with the fucked up notion that if it has something of Dean's inside it somewhere. Really. And Sam is completely and utterly balanced in the head when he carries Dean's body out, past the demons who shy away from the hound trotting behind him.
With the hellhound slinking behind him, Sam can see what Dean was talking about, all the hate and ugliness and foul what the fuck are those staring out of the possessed faces around him. The hellhound gives a low, mournful sounding howl when one of them eases a little closer to him, sinks its razor teeth into a demonic leg and shakes hard enough that Sam can hear flesh and bone separating.
He doesn't tell Bobby about it and Bobby can't see it anyway. It jumps into the front seat of the Impala, settles down next to Sam because Sam had sent it one foul glare when it sniffed at Dean's boots and tried to climb into the backseat with him.
"You touch him again and I'll find out whether demon killing knives kill hellhounds too," he tells it.
It whines low in its throat and drops its head onto Sam's thigh. Sam's so far past his emotional threshold that he finds it comforting, hellhound's affection with his dead brother in the backseat of the only thing his brother left him. He scratches at the hound's head with his fingers, doesn't pay attention to the fact that he's smearing more of Dean's blood along its muzzle.
When the hellhound doesn't disappear after two days, a motel room, and Missouri reluctantly telling him how to knit a dead body back together and keep it in stasis, Sam turns to look at it. "Don't you have places to be?" he asks.
He knows he looks like he's talking to empty space. He doesn't care. It's easier for crazy people to get information than it is for floppy haired nice boys.
The hellhound stares at him with its red eyes and lolls a black tongue out of the side of its mouth. It follows behind him on foot if he tries to leave it, running fast enough that it can keep up with the Impala like a mini Terminator (Dean would have loved it), so Sam stops trying to ditch it.
It comes in handy when he goes after demons, working his way from black eyed lackeys to red eyed deal makers to purple eyed elites. The demons, it turns out, are just as scared of hellhounds as people are.
Sam takes to banishing the ones he can, with either the knife or an exorcism, and letting the hellhound handle anything that tries to sneak up on him. It's surprisingly good at it, and sometimes, just for a second, Sam can forget it's an evil creature watching his back and not his brother.
After a while, he starts calling it Bon Jovi. He thinks Dean would appreciate it. Bobby catches him talking to it once or twice and gives him the kind of half-pitying look that Sam imagines he gets a lot from people who thinks he's a lunatic on the streets.
They catch up to Lilith two months after Dean's gone to hell. Bon Jovi howls when they get close, whimpers and whines when they get closer still, and finally falls silent when they find a playground with a little girl on the swing, slowly pushing herself with one dainty, white shoe clad foot.
Her face splits into a wide grin as soon as she sees him. "Hi, Sam," she calls.
"Lilith," Sam says back, neutrally. He's got fire crawling under his skin, the barest hint of what he wants to do to this demon. The hellhound sits at his feet with a sigh not that different from a regular dog's, if you discounted the sulfur smell.
Sam's gotten used to it.
Lilith keeps smiling. She turns her head to look at the shaking woman behind her and trills, "That's my Sam. He's really tall, huh? You can leave us alone now, I don't think I need you anymore, auntie."
The woman behind Lilith suddenly goes stiff and then limp, neck turned at an impossible angle. Sam can't even find it in himself to flinch, a trail of dead bodies behind him miles wide while he searched for this particular demon, hiding from him since that day.
"You have a hellhound!" Lilith murmurs when Sam doesn't say anything. She tilts her head to the side, both small hands clutching the chain of the swing, and pouts. "That's not really fair, Sam."
Sam drops a hand onto Bon Jovi's head and doesn't flinch when it nets him a lick. It feels like fire on his skin, too hot and eating away at it, sulfur grinding into the wounds. "A lot of things aren't fair."
"That's mine," Lilith says with the petulance of a small child. She lets go of the swing chain long enough to crook a hand at the hellhound. "Come back to mommy."
Bon Jovi yawns and shows off two perfect rows of razor teeth, like a shark. It looks up into Sam's face, red eyes fawning, before it lets its tongue fall over its teeth and just stares at Lilith.
"Doesn't look like it wants to belong to you anymore." Bon Jovi turns to scratch suddenly at his side, and Lilith jumps about a mile on her swing.
Sam says, "I want Dean back."
"Impossible," Lilith declares. She pushes herself on the swing, smiling down at her shoes. "Would you like to kiss me again before I kill you, Sam?"
"I wasn't asking," Sam says. "I have a weapon that can kill you. And a dog that can keep your 'soul,'" he sneers when he says it, because regardless of what Ruby had once claimed, he's never believed demons have souls, "From escaping. You should probably do what I say."
Bon Jovi heaves itself to its feet and takes a few quick, liquid steps towards Lilith. Its eyes are bright, glowing; Sam can see the reflection of them in the way the grass has turned a strange color and in the way that Lilith blanches.
"For a little while," she concedes gracefully. Her eyes roll white.
He gets back into the Impala, Bon Jovi scrabbling over him to sit in the passenger seat and thrust his head out of the window. Sam lets him. He carefully doesn't look at the body in the backseat, the one he's been carting around like a lunatic for two months.
The body stirs. Sam's hands go white around the steering wheel and Bon Jovi's whine sends up goosebumps and makes his stomach turn over in his belly. The body in his backseat goes right on moving around, sitting up, cursing and whining.
"Sam?"
Sam loosens his fingers, feels tears prick the back of his eyes. "Yeah?"
"Hellhound?"
"Mine."
There's a lengthy pause. Bon Jovi stops watching the man outside like it wants to eat him and turns to give Sam a puzzled, red glare.
"Dude," Dean says. He sounds completely and utterly weirded out. Sam flicks a glance into the rearview mirror and finds that he's looking at Bon Jovi. "Is that the fucker that killed me?"
Bon Jovi tilts his massive head over the back of the seat. "Bon Jovi says it's sorry," Sam translates numbly.
There's a considering silence from the backseat. "You named a hellhound Bon Jovi?"
Sam nods. He can't say, "I missed you, dammit," and he can't say, "He's been keeping me company while you were getting tortured in hell."
He lets his head fall on the steering wheel and starts crying. He figures he's earned it.