Sorry, guys. No new excuses for you, but I'll try to do better.
This is a very introspective chapter; I'm trying to set up the final themes. I think we finally get to the root of some of Sam's issues here, as well as some of Dean's, and we learn a little more about the messenger and his relationship to the creature.
The next chapter will bring us to the climax. I think you'll find the twists intriguing.
Thanks for your patience, and enjoy Chapter 12,
Kohadril
Chapter 12: Control
It was almost 6:00 AM. Sam had passed out a few hours before. The kid's head had slid down the headboard and onto Dean's arm, and at any other time, Dean would have shoved him off. Right now, though, he didn't want to risk waking him.
Dean hadn't slept, and from how he felt, he knew he wouldn't. Last night had been bad. Really, really bad. Sam had been on the razor's edge of losing it completely, and even with Dean doing everything he could think of, the hallucination hadn't gone away.
The nature of Sam's hallucinations, the character of his psychotic behavior, was very revealing. One of the things Dean found most disturbing about this disease was that it forced subconscious feelings and insecurities to the surface. He couldn't blame Sam for feeling like shit 24/7; he didn't want to imagine what it would be like if their roles were reversed, and Sam was seeing Dean's deepest fears and insecurities.
That was water under the bridge, though. Sam's privacy was already gone. The question was, where did they go from here? If they defeated this thing and Sam returned to normal, could Dean really pretend none of it had happened? That he hadn't seen the dark things that lived just outside his brother's conscious thought? Some part of Sam—some big part of Sam—absolutely hated himself.
Dean had to think about that for a moment. Sam hated himself. It just didn't sound right, even as a thought, even as a hypothetical. But the thing that was tormenting him was a creature of fear, and it certainly wouldn't have been so powerful if it hadn't picked Sam's worst fears to exploit. And what he feared most, it seemed, was that the world would be a better place without him in it.
But how could Sam even suspect that? Why was this Sam's vulnerability?
The answer came like a bolt of lightning. Because it always had been.
Sam's whole life, Dean had been better at everything that mattered to their father. They'd competed early and often, but the game had been rigged, their father had made sure of it. School, traditional sports, social skills: none of those had appeared to matter to John Winchester.
Sam made more mistakes hunting, too, because he wasn't the natural Dean was, and that led him to get talked down to and yelled at, over and over again. And with how sensitive he was—another flaw their father had tried to ground out of him—Sam took every injury someone else suffered because of his failure deeply to heart. The psychological endgame was simple: at some point the punishment and self-flagellation stopped motivating him and started making him think he couldn't do anything right. Sam reached that point at age 17, right at the time people were talking to him about college and his future.
In Dean's mind, even that wasn't a good enough reason for Sam to abandon them. Dean had gone to Sam's soccer games. Dean had seen Sam's high school play. Even if their father hadn't been proud of Sam, Dean had been. That this hadn't been enough for Sam still hurt.
But whatever confidence Sam had built up at college had been wiped away with his girlfriend's murder. Finding out her death, as well as their mother's, had been because of him, however indirectly, only fed Sam's self-hatred. Every little inkling of the demon's plan for him, every single death vision and every gifted child gone dark…how the hell had Dean not noticed this?
Dean's story wasn't much better than Sam's, he'd admit. In fact, Dean felt the same way Sam did. They might not have come by their feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing by the same road, they might not express them the same way, but when he got down to it, their wounds were the same. Right now, Sam couldn't hide any of it, couldn't suppress it. If anything good came of this, maybe it was that Dean understood his brother a little better. And maybe by helping Sam with his problems, Dean could heal too.
After all, that was what Sam didn't get. Dean didn't resent having to take care of him. In reality, that duty was all that was keeping his head above water. A safe, healthy, and relatively happy Sam was Dean's proof of self-worth.
The only question remaining was: what was Sam's?
Beside the fire again, the proceedings had taken on a mournful character. The fire was dimming, the drumbeat slowing, and there were tears.
There were embraces, also, and as loving as these were, so were they also wrenching. Sam knew now for certain he was among the Anasazi, at the end of their civilization. He knew this gathering, this group of dozens, was all that was left of a great people that had been destroyed by a power beyond them. And for the first time, it was all made clear, and the dreams made sense. These visions came not from the creature that was tormenting him, but from the ancient people that had long ago entombed it.
The women and children were being sent away, that they might bring the Anasazi way of life to a new home, that their ways, that their sacrifice, that their histories, that who they were might not be forgotten. Sam embraced a woman, his wife, and another, his sister, a boy and a girl, his children, and now their faces were as clear as day. He had a beautiful family, and he was seeing them for the first time as they said their last goodbyes, and that was a pain he hadn't known. It wasn't the horrible, sickening, angry pain of being robbed of a loved one. Nor was it the dark, fearful pain of being left alone. It was just pain—honest pain—and it was how he knew he should feel, how he wanted to feel, and he was unashamed to feel it. So he wept with them, his family whom he had only just met, as the fire flickered and died.
Time flashed forward, and the hilltop was lit by torches. The last of their families had just disappeared over the eastern horizon, and from the southwest, they could almost feel it coming. At the old man's direction, they gathered together great stones and began to stack them over the blackened remains of the fire pit.
Sam was whimpering again in his sleep, but he didn't seem afraid. After the last time, Dean had resolved not to wake Sam up from his nightmares anymore. It was hard to feel his brother there, against his arm, crying, and not do something to help him, but it was better than hurting him. He just wished it would end, and Sam would wake up.
Sam stirred a little, and opened his eyes. Dean turned his wishing power to summoning scantily-clad supermodels, without success. He looked down at his brother, who was already embarrassedly withdrawing from his arm.
"Bad dream?" Dean asked.
"No," Sam responded, and Dean wondered whether Sam was really going to start lying to him again. "Not a bad dream."
"You were crying," Dean said incredulously. He poked at Sam's cheek, where a tear had just broken free. "You still kind of are."
"Quit it!" Sam bitched, slapping Dean's hand away. "It was…sad. But I think I get it now."
"Get what?"
"The dreams. All of them. Something is trying to show me how to stop this creature."
Dean wanted to believe that, but it wasn't exactly easy. Sam had still been hallucinating when he'd passed out, and it didn't make sense to Dean that his brother would be crazy while awake and sane while asleep.
"That's great, man," Dean said noncommittally. "What about the demon? He gone?"
Sam looked around the room, and Dean saw a genuinely heartening thing: an elated smile from his younger brother. "Yeah," Sam replied hopefully. "It remitted again, I guess."
"Good. Maybe we can kill this thing before it comes back," Dean said, his mind already working through how hard this was going to be even with a semi-functional Sam. "Okay, so, tell me about your dream."
"I saw them building the altar," Sam answered.
"And that made you cry?"
"No, man. I saw…it's like I was one of them, and I had to let my family leave so they'd be safe—look, the important thing is the altar, I know it." Sam almost sounded like his usual self, excited and impassioned.
"The one you dreamed about killing somebody over?" Dean asked.
"Yeah. Maybe that's the way to stop the thing; spill somebody's blood on the altar," Sam said, a look of disgust spreading across his face.
"I don't know. Dynamite seems like a better bet. Don't have to worry about making sure the guy you bleed is the right one. Usually, with stuff like this, it can't be just anybody." Dean was engaging this only because he wasn't sure Sam was wrong about it. That didn't mean he wanted to encourage Sam to suggest it as a course of action.
"What if the dynamite doesn't work?"
"That's the thing about dynamite, Sammy. If you've got enough of it, and the thing you're trying to kill has a physical body, it always works."
"I guess," Sam said thoughtfully.
Dean's brain was in overdrive as he began to put together his strategy. It was a few seconds before he noticed Sam's silence. As soon as he did, though, he found Sam's eyes were on him, and he could feel the kid was trying to work up the courage to say something. He decided to force the issue. "What is it?"
"…uh, ha," Sam chortled, clearly trying to cover some real anguish. He paused to collect himself. "About last night. I thought I was losing it. I thought it was over."
"Hey, dude, it's all right," Dean tried to soothe.
"Yeah, well…I needed my big brother," Sam said meaningfully. "I don't know how you do it. I mean, if I had half the strength—" Sam's eyes went glassy and he looked away. "Just…thanks, man."
Dean wanted to reach out to Sam, but he understood he couldn't. Not now. It would just make Sam feel weaker, more dependent, and that would only play further into his psychoses. So he gave his brother a misleadingly confident smirk. "Don't worry about it."
Aphorael knew the messenger was watching him, even as he waited by the altar for the brothers to arrive. He couldn't sense it, and he had no proof, but his was a paranoia born out of fear. He was a demon of great power, but he understood there were things more fearful than evil. Beyond pain and suffering, anger and hate, jealousy and selfishness, there was the dark, hungry void. Men feared it more than anything, and demons were no different.
He did not know what would happen when the creature awakened. He could feel reality beginning to weaken, and though this meant that many demons would find their way into the world in the next few hours, this did not comfort him. More was going on here than a battle between good and evil.
But he had picked his side and would not change it. The power the messenger had over him was too great to ignore. And the chaos caused by the creature upon its awakening would be an excellent environment for a demonic invasion. Whatever havoc the messenger wished to wreak, Aphorael would not begrudge him, so long as there was world enough for his kind to fight over when the void's hunger was slaked.
They come.
The messenger sensed it, even before the brothers set off. In the roiling chaos, the pieces moved with predestined precision. Like the universe itself, the confluence of random events yet yielded predictable outcomes.
The older one was no threat; he lacked the sight or power to affect the creature or the messenger. And while failing to kill the younger one, the messenger had at least poisoned his mind. The boy now feared the evil within himself more than the darkness looming above him, and the very gifts that might have given him the strength to stop the creature were tied to those fears. When the time came, he would be too afraid to do what was necessary.
The messenger's servant, the demon, feared him, but would not betray him. It was powerful, certainly, or at least it had been. Its manipulation of the insanity the creature wrought and the messenger directed had nearly unraveled the messenger's designs, for the demon had introduced order into the expanding catastrophe. Yet here he was now, serving the messenger's goals, no longer any threat. He had seen the demon's paths, and all of them ended this day.
The creature below stirred. It was his brother, as if by blood, for it was forged from the same primordial substance. But where the messenger was beyond time and space, the creature was chaos made material, shaped by human fears, loathing, dread, and thus tied inextricably to the very creatures whose subconscious darkness gave it form. Its purity thus was tainted, as anything material must be; for entropy can have no true form.
He remembered when the creature was defeated last. He had watched it destroy the Anasazi, and as it did, his power had grown. Its rise, its destruction of a static civilization, had empowered the messenger to weaken the walls of reality. So many things—evil, good, neutral, but universally unnatural—had come into being, before the creature had been entombed. It would be thus again, but this time they would not be stopped.
Dean drove the car numbly, barely attached to the outside world. Sam was still good, it seemed, but this wasn't going to be easy. In fact, it didn't even seem possible.
So much lately carried this aura of inevitability. The death of their father had felt almost predestined, even if it had been—as they suspected—his own choice. And Sam's gifts, and the unfolding mysteries relating thereto, were laden with dark portent.
But Dean didn't believe in fate. He believed in choice and action. However bleak things seemed, he knew better than to allow himself even a moment of hopelessness.
That was his strength, he knew. That was what Sam had always seen in him but had never been able to understand. It wasn't just that Dean didn't give up—Sam didn't give up, either—it was that Dean didn't believe things were ever out of his control. Experience had taught him that perseverance paid off, that fighting hard enough could win the day, and that if he ever let his guard down, bad things would happen. It wasn't a healthy lesson, but it was a useful one.
All the things he'd fought, all the supernatural creatures he'd slain, not one had been weaker than he. Every single one had powers beyond the scope of mortal men, but he'd beaten them all. Yet the ones that were capable of thought still underestimated him. That was a grievous mistake.
That wasn't even the worst mistake, though. The worst was attacking his brother.
These things didn't know what they were in for.
Sam was afraid. He could barely remember feeling any other way.
His head was clear. He wasn't hearing things, seeing things. He could recall his dreams now with perfect clarity, and was beginning to see what they were telling him.
But to tell the truth, he doubted them. Couldn't they be fake? Couldn't they just be hallucinations or delusions, like everything else? Maybe they were just normal dreams, their sensations heightened by his condition. How could he trust the things he saw in sleep when he could barely trust what he saw while awake?
He thought about his destiny again—Dean would smack him if he knew—and wondered whether all this proved it wrong. If he died here, today, then his "destiny" was just an empty prediction made by a demon with no greater control over the universe than Sam himself possessed. If he was just a pawn, just a vessel for fulfilling another's agenda, this was not the logical end.
Unless, of course, there were players mightier than the yellow-eyed demon. Sam remembered—bizarrely enough—The Odyssey. Odysseus was condemned by Poseidon never to return to his home, but his will was countermanded by the prophecy of Zeus. Was Sam stuck between two powerful beings, dueling for control over his fate? And if so, what could he do?
He'd lived his life without any control. Even when he'd tried to take it, it had been rudely ripped away from him again. Why should this be any different?
So he was afraid. Not that he would die, but that his death wouldn't mean anything. That his life would end because something bigger than he decided it must. Worse, Sam was afraid Dean would die that way too, swept up in the wake of his curse.