Author's Note: Isaac passed my home without damage, but please keep in your thoughts the people who did lose their homes...there were a lot of them. I'm taking a moment to be grateful for what I have and what I've kept through this storm.
On a happier note, I managed to get this chapter out pretty quickly and the next should practically write itself. And in the meantime, I am chomping at the bit because I've written this delightfully terrible angsty sequence of snippets that will fit eventually into story featuring Eleven set in SPN S6. It'll be a little bit before we get there but oh, when we do.
I hope you enjoy this chapter, and thanks for all the feedback! It's really encouraging that people are invested in this story and this universe.
Despite his brother's fears, Sam Winchester was not being hurt by Harold Saxon.
In fact, quite the opposite. Sam was sitting at a large mahogany table across from Saxon, faced with the first real meal that he'd seen in months (steak, green beans, potatoes, and a glass of wine), and his mouth was watering but he wouldn't lift a hand to touch the food or drink. Instead he kept his hands clenched into fists, his back ramrod straight, and his eyes fixed on Saxon, waiting for any threatening move, any indication that this dinner was taking a turn for the worse. He still felt woozy, a little drunk, almost, but his head was clear enough to know that you don't take candy from strangers, and you don't take anything from your enemies.
Saxon, for his part, seemed extremely amused by Sam's distrust as he tucked into his own meal with a hearty-bordering-on-voracious appetite. His young wife, introduced to Sam at the beginning of the meal as Lucy, sat next to him, eyes cast down, picking at her food listlessly while sending anxious glances her husband's way at regular intervals. A slinky red dress hung limply on her thin frame, her blonde hair piled on her head, but no make-up and no shoes. She hadn't looked at Sam, not even once.
"Come on, my boy, eat!" Saxon cried, lifting his own wine glass as though in a toast. Sam ignored him but to intensify his glare. "I'm sure it's been long enough since you've had anything good to eat. It's not poisoned, if that's what you're worried about. Look." Saxon leaned over the table, and Sam stiffened in his seat, leaning away from the table. But all Saxon did was spear a piece of meat and shove it into his mouth, chewing in a way that was practically triumphant. "See?" he said, after swallowing loudly to make his point. "No poison."
"Not to you," Sam retorted through gritted teeth. "Not sure I'm gonna believe that everything that's poisonous to humans is poisonous to Time Lords."
Saxon's pale eyebrows shot up, and he laughed, looking over to Lucy to share in his amusement. The woman's eyes flickered up to her husband for a brief moment, and she gave a watery smile, then looked back down at the table. "So we figured it out!" he crowed. "And fast. Good boy, very clever. I see what he sees in you."
"What who sees in me?" Sam demanded, although he knew the answer.
"Your precious Doctor," Saxon replied, his voice light and dismissive. "He's got quite the obsession with you, Sam. Thinks you're something special."
"Wouldn't be the first time he's been wrong, would it?" Sam shot back, eliciting another peal of laughter from Saxon. Lucy flinched this time at the sound, and Sam shot her a sympathetic look. She responded with the expression of a deer in the headlights, and looked down, moving her food around on her plate with her fork.
"Now, now," Saxon said, making a tsk sound, "I'm sure he'd be hurt if he heard you talking like that."
"The rest of us have had to learn to live with disappointment," Sam said shortly. "So can he."
That earned him a narrowing of Saxon's eyes, a long, studying stare. "You know," Saxon said casually, "days gone by, I would have dismissed you as nothing more than a distasteful aberration of Time Lord genetics."
Sam tried to pretend that it didn't hurt to hear that, regardless of how little he cared about Saxon's opinion of him. One more person who saw him as a freak. Humans didn't want him, demons were done with him, and now aliens didn't want him. Great.
"But," Saxon was saying, "desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say, and while your lineage may not be ideal, you are the closest thing to a Time Lord that exists outside of myself and the Doctor."
A response seemed to be expected of Sam, but he had nothing to say. He glowered down at the nearly-untouched food on his plate, his nails digging painfully into his palms as he clenched his hands tighter to avoid doing anything stupid.
Although with Dean gone, with Bobby probably dead, he didn't know why he bothered to be smart. What was there to survive for?
"Your time in the camps wasn't pleasant, was it, Sam?" Saxon asked, and his voice was so damn sympathetic that it made Sam want to hit him. "I expect not. They exist for a purpose, and that purpose is not recreation. But answer me. Have you enjoyed the past few months?"
His voice was tightly controlled as Sam answered, "You know the answer to that."
"I suppose I do," Saxon admitted. "But you're out now, Sam! You're out, and if you'd like, you can stay out. Aren't you grateful?" His smile didn't fade, but his eyes darkened subtly as he said, "I feel as though you ought to be grateful, Sam."
A faint shiver ran down Sam's spine, but he didn't shift in his seat, didn't move, just said, "All I want is for you to tell me why you brought me here."
Saxon looked disappointed as he leaned back in his seat. "Really thought that'd be glaringly obvious by this point," he said. "If I knew the answer to my question, Sam, then you know the answer to that one, so let's do each other a favor and stop asking rhetorical questions. You tell me why you're here."
"My blood," Sam said dully. "It's because of my blood. But what do you want? I'm not...I don't even have visions anymore. Whatever it is that the Doctor's blood did to me, it's done."
Ruby's blood, on the other hand...Sam resisted the urge to rub his arm. He was starting to ache. He knew he had a good twenty-four hours before it got bad, before what could really fairly be known as withdrawal started to hit, but he was starting to ache, and Saxon wasn't letting him go any time soon.
When Sam looked up, Saxon was shaking his head. "That's not true, Sam, and you know it." The Time Lord sounded patient but let down, like a parent who'd just heard from his chocolate-covered child that he hadn't taken a cookie, he promised. "The Doctor even told you it wasn't, didn't he? That your brain was rewired. Permanently."
"Doesn't mean anything," Sam argued. "So my brain's rewired. I can't do anything. Whatever you want done, you can do it better than I can."
"Probably," Saxon agreed. Then he leaned forward, elbows on the table, and Sam shrank away. "But this isn't about wanting something from you, Sam. For once, somebody's not asking you to give and give and give without getting anything in return. I don't want anything from you. All I want is for you to join me. I want to give you a seat next to me in the new Time Lord Empire. I want you beside me, Sam Winchester."
It was unexpected. Sam sat frozen in his chair for a long moment, watching Saxon's manic eyes as the Time Lord eagerly awaited his answer, hearing the sound of his own breathing loud in his ears again. "You want me to join you," Sam echoed.
"Yes," Saxon said. "I want you beside me. We are the last of our kind, Sam, you and me and the Doctor. The Doctor won't join me—you know him. He's never been willing to do what must be done in order to achieve a goal."
The billions dead in the Time War would disagree ran through Sam's mind, but he was prudent enough not to say it out loud. Saxon was continuing, anyway. "We could build something new, something beautiful, something this planet has never seen before," he said. "And you could be beside me for all of it. Creating it with me. Ruling over it, as we were intended."
"In this new vision, there's not a lot of room for humans, is there?" Sam asked.
Saxon waved a hand dismissively. "They will serve their purpose. But once it is served...they have had their way with this planet long enough."
"I'm not like you," Sam said through his teeth. "I'm not a Time Lord. I'm human. So if you want to get rid of the whole human race, you might as well start with me."
"He did a number on you, didn't he?" Saxon asked, his voice gentle, but with a harsh, bright undertone that made the hair on the back of Sam's neck stand on end. "Probably went at you with all his embrace your humanity bit. But you've seen humanity, Sam; the dark, dirty, pathetic underbelly of it, all your life, in prostitutes and petty thieves in seedy motel rooms, in ungrateful humans your father and your brother and you yourself saved. What is there to embrace? A broken, pathetic little people."
Sam inhaled raggedly, and said, "You know, this whole come to the dark side talk might have worked better before you slaughtered a tenth of my species."
"Not your species," Saxon corrected, and his tone was harsh.
"My brother's species, then," Sam snapped.
Saxon laughed, shoving his now-empty plate aside hard enough that it hit with a clink against Lucy's. She startled, but said nothing, gazing at her plate with wide, disoriented eyes. "That's what it all comes down to, isn't it?" he said. "Always. Your brother. Your poor, dead brother."
"Shut up," Sam hissed.
"The anchor around your ankle, the weight on your shoulders, the albatross around your neck," Saxon said, his voice growing sharper, crueler.
"I said shut. Up," Sam growled, standing, shoving his chair away from the wall and sending it crashing to the ground. Distantly, he heard Lucy gasp, and out the corner of his eye he saw her hands fly to her mouth. She looked like she might be ill.
He wondered if she'd ever seen her husband crossed before.
But Saxon seemed less angry, and more thrilled, as he applauded Sam's show and laughed. "There we are!" he cried. "That's more like it. I appreciate the show of spirit, Sam, really, I do. So the Doctor wasn't wrong. It's all about your brother. Poor, lonely, stoic Dean Winchester, condemned by himself to Hell to save his baby brother."
Sam's hands clenched and unclenched as he tried to convince himself that decking the supreme leader of the planet he was stuck on was probably not a winning scenario, with no back-up and no escape. "Stop talking about him," he murmured, and Saxon grew quiet to hear him. "You don't deserve to talk about him."
"The Doctor couldn't save him," Saxon pressed, and Sam turned his face away, gritting his teeth together until it hurt. "Couldn't stop his deal. All that power, all those promises, all those years of knowledge and wisdom and when it mattered, he couldn't save your brother."
"He did what he could," Sam said. "The Doctor did what he could. Dean made his deal, and nobody could break it without the whole thing coming undone. Dean wouldn't let me die, not again."
"Are you sure?" Saxon asked, and Sam turned back to him. "Are you sure the Doctor did all he could? That there was nothing else in his power he could have tried to save your brother, no other favors he could call, no other tricks up his sleeve? Have you considered, maybe, that he just didn't care?"
Sam felt the laugh bubble in his throat, and tried to suppress it, but it rose of its own accord, and he let it out. Saxon looked surprised. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the Doctor did what he could. I know the Doctor. I've been in his head. He did what he could. He cared."
Instead of anger, which is what Sam was expecting, Saxon's face showed only intense focus. He stood, too, and walked around the table to Sam. He pressed a hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam sat back down in his chair, startled enough to obey. "What if I told you that I could do more?" he asked quietly.
No.
"What if I told you," Saxon continued, "that I could give your brother back to you?"
No no no.
"As he was," Saxon said, "no worse for wear, alive and whole."
"You can't do that," Sam whispered. "You can't. Hell wouldn't let him out."
"Hell is full of pathetic rejects from a war that my people dominated," Saxon said, his voice light and quiet, belying his harsh words. "Barely worth my kind's notice before the War, only worth it during the War because of their foolish alliance with the Daleks that required their eradication. Unlike the Doctor, who gave himself up to them without a fight because of his idiotic dedication to non-violence, I can command them. I could take your brother back."
Dean. Dean Dean Dean. Sam's mind cried out for him to give Saxon whatever he wanted, to pledge his allegiance to whatever Saxon required, because Dean. He could end Dean's suffering, he could bring his brother back, he could make up for the deal that Dean made to save his life—he could make it worth the price.
But he wasn't sure Dean would see it the same way.
Align himself with Harold Saxon, the man who'd already killed a tenth of the human race? Harold Saxon, who'd thrown every able-bodied man and woman into work camps to make some sort of terrible weapon? Harold Saxon, who'd captured the Doctor, who'd tortured Jack Harkness for months, killing him over and over? The only two people, outside of his own family, who'd ever given a damn about him and his brother were being held and tortured by this man. And he was supposed to stand beside him?
Was it better than a deal with a demon? He'd promised Dean he wouldn't make one. He'd promised.
"You're lying," is what Sam settled on as a response, and his voice didn't tremble quite so much as he was afraid it would. "You can't bring him back. You're lying to me."
"Am I, Sam?" Saxon asked, crouching down and putting a hand on Sam's arm. He didn't pull away, only because he was too numb to really register Saxon's touch.
Dean. You can save Dean. You can bring Dean back.
No. He would never forgive you. There's another way.
There's no other way and you know it.
Saxon sighed, a long-suffering sound, and Sam looked down at him. Saxon met his eyes, his mouth screwed up in a well, I tried sort of expression, and he shrugged. "I wish you'd trust me," he said. "But if you can't, well...perhaps I ought to sweeten the pot, as they say." He stood and walked off for a moment, then glanced back at Sam. "That is what you humans say, isn't it? Sweeten the pot? Does that sound right?" When Sam didn't reply, he turned to Lucy. "Darling? Sweeten the pot?"
"Yes," Lucy whispered, keeping her eyes down. "That's right."
Saxon strode up to the large, wall-length window that led only to blue sky and clouds, and placed his hand on a console. Sam watched as the print reader lit up beneath Saxon's hand, and the window became covered by a black screen.
"Computer," Saxon said, his voice loud and authoritative. A prompt appeared at the left-hand side of the screen, waiting for instruction. "Show me the last known whereabouts of Dean Winchester."
Dean's name, along with some code that wasn't in a coding language that Sam recognized, flashed across the screen. The screen then switched into a map of the Earth, and narrowed its focus again and again until it finally centered in on Illinois.
Illinois.
How did Saxon know that Dean had died in Illinois? The Doctor didn't even know that Dean died in Illinois. Jack didn't know. Nobody knew but Sam and Bobby.
Nobody knew where Dean Winchester died except for his brother and his foster-father. The thought stung Sam like it hadn't in months, like it hadn't since he'd been taken to the camp. Dean deserved better than that. After all he'd done, Dean deserved better than a hastily-marked grave and two mourners to carry his memory.
The computer continued to focus what was now a satellite picture on that town in Illinois, until the picture resolved into a field that was entirely too familiar to Sam.
Except that it hadn't been a field, when they buried Dean there four months ago.
The trees were blown down like a bomb had gone off, and in the epicenter of that apparent explosion was the rough-hewn cross that had served as Dean's headstone, untouched by the chaos around it. The grave, though, was not untouched, and was caved in and ruined.
Sam's heart raced, and his mouth tasted sour as he forced back nausea. Someone had desecrated his brother's grave. Someone had dared to touch Dean's grave. He suddenly knew that he was going to get off of this...ship, or whatever it was, because he was going to kill the person who'd done this. He knew it in his bones. Whoever had done this to Dean was going to pay for it.
But the satellite image didn't linger on the grave, moving instead several yards away, where a lone figure sat on the ground. Sam narrowed his eyes—the perpetrator, surely. The person whose face he would memorize, so that when he got out of this, he wouldn't mistake him once he found him. The person that he was going to—
No.
"I've taken the liberty," Saxon said, "of having your reward already available for your receipt."
Sam's mouth worked uselessly for a long moment, and he didn't have the presence of mind to be ashamed to feel a single tear roll down his cheek. "Dean?" he breathed.
He felt himself standing up and walking to the screen, hardly knowing what he was doing. He pressed trembling fingers delicately against the screen, which wavered at his touch. He pulled away quickly, not wanting to disturb the image of his brother. On the screen, Dean stretched out on the ground, staring up at the sky and, by that action, at the satellite that was recording him. It was too far away to actually make out the details, but Sam could see his eyes, see the clouds reflected in them, the clarity that came with the reprieve from pain. Dean was out of Hell.
He was alive. He was whole.
Just like Saxon had promised.
Sam looked around the screen until he found what he was looking for: a time-stamp. "This was just yesterday," he said. Saxon nodded, a small smile on his face. "He came back yesterday. Is he still in Illinois? Where is he? God, he must be so confused. He hasn't been hurt, has he?"
"The Toclaphane are under orders not to harm him," Saxon replied. "Unfortunately, your brother is...talented at evading notice. We haven't been able to pick him up on satellite again since he left this field. But with your help, I'm sure we'd be able to find him again." Saxon walked over to Sam and folded his arms across his chest, watching Dean watch the sky alongside Sam. "What do you say, Sam? I've already given you more than the Doctor ever did; more than anyone else could. Will you join me?"
Sam studied the image of his brother, dressed in the clothes he was buried in, his over-shirt tied around his waist, and suppressed a smile, suppressed further tears. Dean was alive. It was all he could do to not be overcome with joy, with relief, with gratitude. But he was still a Winchester, and he knew that nothing like this came without a price. It hadn't for their father, and it hadn't for Dean. There was no reason to believe it wouldn't for Sam, even if he hadn't agreed to anything.
"How did you do it?" he asked, and Saxon turned to face him, frowning. "How did you bring him back? Who are you working with?"
"I'm not working with anyone," Saxon replied.
"You're lying," Sam said, and it killed him to say it, killed him to do anything but whatever it took to get to Dean. "This is too good to be true. You're lying to me. What aren't you telling me?"
Saxon watched him for a moment, then sighed indulgently. "You need time to process this," he said. "I'll give you that time. Why don't you rest, and we'll revisit this discussion later." He patted Sam on the shoulder, and nodded to Lucy, who stood quickly and clumsily and hurried over to him. He held an arm out for her, beaming, and she wrapped her hands around it. "The boys will show you to your quarters," he continued. "Sleep well, Samuel. And do consider my offer. It is the best you'll get."
Sam watched him leave, and, once again, he didn't fight as he was taken away by black-clad men.
Because no matter what else happened, Dean was alive.
He just wondered, in a dark part of his mind, how he would be able to keep himself from joining the man who'd given everything that mattered back to him, no matter who or what that man was.