Chapter 4

They don't have time to explore Dean's confession or his angel conspiracy theory because the police arrive. Sam repeats the story he'd spun to get Dean admitted, trying to keep it simple, innocent, but fears he's failing miserably. Interviews, he decides, are a lot harder from this side. Especially when he knows he's guilty. Maybe the cops wouldn't have bought it, but when Sam talks about his brother's self-sacrificing need to play hero, his voice rings with absolute truth. It's filled with his fear for Dean's life. When he says he hadn't seen the danger, hadn't realized what was going on, he means that too. Ruby had been so supportive and he'd been so crazed with grief; he should have known Dean would never accept her as part of the team.

Dean's mostly quiet but obviously upset that he hadn't saved the girl (at least, they let the cops think that). He's sad and pale, and the perfect tragic hero. Just from looking at him, the detectives' aggressiveness softens and neither of them push their questions as hard as they could. The interview concludes with a lecture about using 911 instead of trying to be heroes, and an order to call if they remember anything further. Those are followed by Sam's false assurances that they would, of course they would and firm nothing-to-hide handshakes.

He decides to wait until he can't hear their footsteps anymore before going back to their previous conversation, but the doctor comes in with the charge nurse. Short, round, dark skin pale after thirty-six hours on duty, he examines Dean's chart. Both of them check his wound and his stats and even peer into his eyes.

Sam stands in the hall, watching them move around his brother, manipulating his body, judging Dean's responses: clinical, efficient, cold—breathing meat. Sam wonders if this is one of the ways Dean had been treated in Hell. He certainly looks like he's being tortured.

"Mr. Micklewhite?"

It takes Sam a moment to remember that's the name on the insurance card. He looks down at the owner of the voice. A tiny woman, barely reaching his sternum, she wears the white lab coat, stethoscope and badge that proclaim her to be Dr. Yvette Ladouceur. He hasn't seen her before because between the name and the size, Sam would've remembered her.

"I'm Doctor Ladouceur. I work in the labs." Her voice is softly accented but not local. "I analyzed your brother's blood and something came up that I want to talk to you about."

Sam's mind stops. HIV or hepatitis. Maybe it's sickle-cell anemia, because if anyone was going to get a rare blood disease outside his ethnic group, it would be his hard-luck brother. On the other hand, the angels surely would've fixed something like that. Wouldn't they?

"… very rare genetic variation," she's saying. "It only occurs in one in 400,000 Americans."

"He's not sick?" Sam interrupts.

She blinks up at him. "No, not at all. In fact Dagg-Himmelsaat Syndrome helps the body combat illness and disease. People who have it often heal faster and with fewer complications than other people." She goes on about how it runs in families so he probably has it as well, and Sam thinks it explains why neither of them are crippled or horribly disfigured despite their lives. Then she asks to take blood samples from them and jolts Sam out of his reminiscent haze.

"No. I'm sorry, but no," he states firmly, trying not to feel like the evil giant terrorizing the noble child heroine when the doctor's face falls. He has to suffer through several more minutes of her enthusiastic sales pitch—"think of the applications if we could duplicate it"—before Dean's doctor waves him into the room and frees him from being polite.

"We're going to be moving your brother out of ICU tomorrow," he says and Sam slumps in relief he hadn't known he'd feel.

The doctor's explaining what to expect although Sam already knows since he's been here before. They'll take the tubes out of Dean's nose and his stomach before shifting him to a new ward. They'll be changing his drugs, and maybe, finally, they'll allow the guy some coffee so that he'll stop bugging Sam to sneak some in, which always makes him feel guilty when he brings in a cup for himself.

But that's for tomorrow.

For now the doctors and the nurses have finished fussing and giving instructions and Dean, emotionally wrung and physically tired, waves Sam out the door when he mentions making a few calls. It's actually an excuse, because Dean's eyes are blurred and his skin is pale, and he looks like talking too hard will make him pass out. Sam's already had one doctor explain how close Dean had come to dying and, despite the Dagg-Himmelwhatsit, Dean hasn't been looking good. Sam can't help wondering if this will be the time his brother doesn't bounce back.

Looking at his brother after another long day healing, Sam doesn't need the words. His own guilt is there for him to read as easily as opening a book. Forget coffee, he thinks. He needs a beer.

Dean hates this healing stuff. It seems to take him longer and longer each time. He especially hates healing in hospitals with their bland, industrial empathy. The professional caregivers that treat him like sentient meat, able to control his body but unable to do anything—like move from the bed into a wheelchair on his own.

He'd been moved out of the ICU and it was, as always, a humiliating process. They'd drained the tubes and removed them, and then they'd unplugged him, tucked him in, and rolled him around. All the while talking about what they were doing, what would happen, how he was healing, and what he should be feeling, but none of those words were actually directed to him. They were said to fill up space, to make the intimate process less impersonal. It didn't work. It rarely did. Now, however, the nurses and the doctors have left, and Sam's gone to do Sam stuff, which can no longer involve Ruby—hallelujah for that, at least—so that Dean can rest after 'his ordeal'.

The sucky thing is, he needs it. He's freaking exhausted just from lying around.

He hates healing.

The shared room is over-warm and relatively quiet since the only other person in the room is some old guy who's working his way through a book of crossword puzzles. His monitors still beep, but softly, and there's still people in the hall, but they're distant, so Dean lets himself drift out of consciousness…

Blankness, the Void. No memories, no regrets. Peace.

Colors first. Flashes of light. Then images, foggy and blurred to start, but sharpening, developing knives to cut him with. Anna. Alistair. Pamela. Sam… Adam. Lilith. Zachariah. Chuck. Bobby. Ellen and Jo… It's the future as it was. Sam, Not-Sam. Famine. Lucifer. Michael. Gabriel. Death… Castiel. Lisa. Adam. Sam. Not-Sam. Lisa and Ben. Grandpa Samuel. Not-Sam.

Sam…

His eyes drift open as he remembers that he's in a hospital bed. IVs and stitches and having no energy tie him down, weight his body and his spirit. It's all very familiar—too fucking familiar now that he remembers more of his future memories. However, being visited by a ghost of himself is relatively new.

"So this happened," his spirit says easily. He—it?—flickers and Dean knows that it's not the drugs causing him to hallucinate (more's the pity) but that he's dead… again.

"How long?" he asks.

"A month, I guess." Dead Dean II's voice is rueful and amused—and oddly relaxed—but Dean's stunned. One month?

"That's worse…than last time." Christ, his throat hurts. "What happened?"

"Let's just say, I highly recommend stopping Sam Hain from rising. He's fucking brutal," His ghost self chuckles. It's jarringly inappropriate, Dean thinks.

"He's a demon," his ghost explains. "Nearly impossible to stop once he's fully risen and the shit he pulls up with him? Zombies, ghouls, ghosts, demons—the worst kind of freaky ass shit… Even the angels had a hard time. Sam tried, but all he did was make his own brain explode or something." His ghost sighs sadly. "It was really, really bad." He bobs his head and it wobbles so much it's giving real Dean a sympathetic neck ache.

"So Sam was killed?" Dean can barely force out the question.

"Shit no! Hain turned him," his ghost said in cheerful tones. "Just touched him when he was reeling, and Sam went all evil, soulless robot and his eyes were all white and freaky, just like Hain's. When I tried to shoot the bastard, Sam stopped me and tossed me into a crowd of zombies as a snack—thankfully I was mostly dead already."

"That's…" Dean's voice trails away. "That's not good."

"No kidding," Zombie Lunch agrees easily.

"So stop Sam Hain. Got it," he murmurs and gets more head bobbing in return. "Do you remember where he rose or who did the spell or the ritual or whatever called—calls—him up?"

"I can remember a playground, a, umm, tomb thingy. Oh, and a kid in an astronaut suit who messed with my car. 'Bout it," he shrugs. "Sorry, man. They kinda munched on my brains." He tilts what's left of his head—Zombie Lunch indeed—and is either looking at or listening to something only he can sense.

"How did you know to do the spell then?" Dean asks. The spirit just raises his eyebrow in confusion, goofy smile still in place. "The one to bring you back to me," he explains. "You—we—don't know it."

"Ohh," his ghost says. "Sure we do. Dead Dean the First told us. Remember?"

Dean searches through his memories, sharp but somehow slipstreaming one into another, and finds the ritual. It was surprisingly simple—if you'd once been raised from the dead by angels and then got Death pissed off at you. "I remember now."

"Good, great." His spirit grins at him as if he's Einstein and Gates rolled into one. Then he ducks his head and points at the wall behind him. "So I should probably get going, I guess."

"Hey," Dean scratches out before his ghost can vanish, "where do we go?"

"After we die?" He nods and Zombie Lunch laughs, unconcerned. "Fucked if I know."

"Not back to Hell?" He knows the question sounds scared and weak, but now that he remembers the Pit, he'd rather be thrust into the void as an atheist than go back there.

"I don't know. I wish I could tell you, but I can't." His ghost's voice is finally solemn. "I gotta go, man. Good luck, okay?"

"Thanks," he says. "Good luck to you, too." He tries watching but he blinks and when his lids lift, his ghost is gone.

"What do you know about Sam Hain?"

It's after supper and Sam's feeling full after enjoying a sandwich combo and a beer… and a decent cup of coffee. He looks at the remains of Dean's soup and Jell-O and feels guilty about the coffee.

"Sam Hain? You mean Samhain." He gives it the proper pronunciation of 'souwin'.

"Actually," Dean repeats with a bit more force, "I'm talking about the demon Sam Hain." But Sam's already shaking his head.

"It's a common mistake, but Samhain was never evil. It was just a Celtic harvest festival. Samhain was misidentified as a death god sometime in the 1700s—" He stops because Dean is staring at him. "What?"

"Walking encyclopedia of weird," his brother says and Sam tries not to feel insulted. "There's a demon, called Sam Hain, who may or may not have been named after the Celtic festival, or whatever." Dean waves it away. "The point is he's a bad mofo and we need to stop him."

It's Sam's turn to stare. "Where are you getting this stuff? You're stuck in a hospital bed."

Dean shifts, bites his lips and Sam knows he doesn't want to say anything. Dean flicks an embarrassed glance his way—a silent plea to let it drop. Sam ignores it. He continues to stare until his brother coughs it up.

"Visions?" Dean says tentatively

"Visions?" He laughs because he knows Dean'll hate having visions. "When did you start having visions?" Dean does that shifty-eyed, not-going-to-answer thing again, so Sam theorizes on his own. "They say that trauma, physical or emotional, can trigger the start of psychic or paranormal abilities. Could…could what happened to you have done something like that?"

"Jesus, Sam," Dean snorts in surprise, looking at him in genuine amusement. "I don't think there's a survivor's guide for this stuff."

"But it's possible."

Dean tilts his head away, smile dropping off his face. "It's as good an explanation as any."

"Huh," Sam responds. He's still smiling, a little, because he's not the only one suffering from weirdo supernatural shit. "I wonder if you can bend spoons."

"Shut up."

Sam's smiling broadly now. "I'll find you one and you can try. Maybe you'll do better than me." Dean scowls at him, looking fiercely petulant, like his brother from years and eons ago.

"Yeah, well…" Dean shrugs

Sam waits but Dean just resettles his head and closes his eyes as if he's tired, and doesn't say anything more. Sam realizes he's waiting for Dean to call him a bitch and then he'd call Dean a jerk and it would be like it was two years ago. But Dean's not going to. It seems significant somehow, as if Dean doesn't want to go back to what they had.

Dean's got his eyes closed again, and it occurs to Sam, that Dean's barely looked at him since he got hurt—since you stabbed him, Sam's brain reminds him. He'd sliced open his brother, and if Dean hadn't turned when he did, hadn't grabbed his arm and managed to slow him just that little bit, then he might have actually killed him.

He feels sick.

"Dean, look—"

"Don't say anything." Dean doesn't even look at him.

"I'm sorry. Really sorry, man." He clears his throat because this isn't easy. "I don't know what came over me. I wasn't thinking." At least now Dean's looking at him.

"Yeah, I get it. You were angry."

"Well, yeah," Sam shrugs. He hates it, but he feels the need to justify Ruby, justify letting her into his life. "Ruby was my ally, Dean. She was a tool. It's not like I trusted her so you didn't have to… you know."

"Whatever." Dean's rubbing a hand over his face, tugging his lip down.

Dean's eyes are closed again, shutting him out, so Sam rushes to explain more, better; to get Dean to see. "I mean, I understand why you felt you had to—"

"Because she was a demon?" Dean points out, "and she was lying to you?"

Sam swallows down his automatic protest. He's not sure all the stuff Dean's been spouting is absolutely true… but he's not sure it's completely wrong either. "I suppose," he finally concedes, "but I talked to Bobby and the Seals are still falling."

"I figured." Dean pulls in a deep breath, wincing slightly as it tugs on his stitches. "But I was also thinking; if we can send Lilith back to Hell without killing her, hopefully it'll take the next team of demonic go-getters another millennium or two to get her back out again."

"Huh? What?" Sam's sure he heard wrong. "Banish Lilith?"

"Yup."

"Then she'll just be someone else's problem," Sam says in disbelief. "Why don't we just kill her and have done with it?"

"I've told you why not, Sam," Dean answers impatiently. "Because Lilith is the last Seal."

"Okay, yeah, you said that," Sam agrees, "but it doesn't make any sense. How is Lilith the last Seal?"

"Prophecies, Sam." Dean wipes a weary hand across his face. "'And it is Written that the First Demon shall be the last Seal. And the Chosen will become the Vessel and He shall walk free.' Kill Lilith and Satan's out of the box."

"You're saying Lilith would sacrifice herself to free Lucifer?" Sam asks. When Dean nods Sam snorts in disbelief. "Why would she do that?"

"Because she's a fanatic and she wants her lord to be free," Dean answers with a casual shrug. Sam tries to understand but that just doesn't make sense: demons don't believe in God. They're demons. Dean must see Sam's confused look because he sighs. "You think us humans have an exclusive on faith and a belief in a higher power?"

"Demons have religion?"

Dean nods once sharply and Sam knows Dean believes it but when Sam tries to wrap his head around it, he really can't.

"So why a vessel? I thought demons just needed to possess somebody." Even as the words leave his mouth Sam knows they're stupid. "Lucifer's an angel," he says just a beat or two after his brother. Dean blinks, a long blink. Then he blinks again and his eyelids stay down.

"Yeah, fucking angels. 'Bout as trustworthy as demons." Dean sounds tired and he's looking exhausted, and Sam is slammed with guilt once again. Him and his stupid fucking temper! Dean made it easy though, he argues, didn't even try to stop him from grabbing the knife. Probably because he never thought you would stab him, you dumbass, Sam berates himself, and feels guiltier than ever.

God, he's tired of feeling guilty.

"Look, um, you seem tired, so I'm just going to, you know, go phone Bobby," he says, randomly. "Maybe look for info about Sam Hain. Let you get your rest." Because if he has to spend another minute watching Dean wince every time he breathes, he's going to put his fist through the wall.

"You do that, Sam." Dean's voice is slurred as his healing body drags him back into sleep. He doesn't even notice when Sam slips out of the room.

Sam goes outside to make the phone call, needing the space, wanting to stretch his legs and, yes, okay, just escape for a bit. The phone rings and rings before switching over to voice mail. His message is short, just that Bobby should call him back when he can. By the time he's finished speaking, he's feeling twitchy. He doesn't know what's going on and he hates it. Before he'd had a plan: he and Ruby would take down Lilith and save the world. The year before that, it had been saving Dean from his deal—not that it had worked, but it had been a tangible goal, something real, something he could focus on. Before that? He'd been focused on finding the creature that had killed Jess.

Now he's got nothing.

Banish Lilith? Puh-lease, he thinks, the whole idea is a joke and it's a fucking insult to the memory of all the people she killed, starting with his brother and running right on through Agent Henrikson. Banish her? He wants to rip her apart.

Yet, if that prophecy of Dean's is correct, killing her is the worst thing he could do, so he's back to feeling without purpose and useless and worse, like a monster, because he let his temper take control. Not the first time it's happened since Dean got pulled into Hell but the first time he'd hurt a human being because of it. Of course, because he's a Winchester, the first person he hurts like that would be his brother. His big brother, who's always got to be better and strong and right.

It's only as he slows down, lungs heaving, sweat dripping, that Sam realizes that he's been running—not jogging—flat-out running, in the Memphis heat. He's so hot he feels like he's going to puke. He's got no water and he's wearing jeans, for Christ's sake. What the hell was he thinking?

His only answer is, he isn't thinking. He's panicking and he doesn't know why.

The next day Sam arrives while Dean is shuffling, painfully slow, back to his bed.

"Whoa, dude. Should you be up?" He rushes to Dean's side but at least he doesn't grab him, which would be both useless and humiliating.

"Doc said it was a good idea then Nurse Ratched nagged until I actually did it," Dean answers, dragging the IV pole along or maybe hanging on to it, Dean can't really tell. What Alistair had done to him in Hell… had been beyond imagining, and yet when Alistair had healed him it was over, done, and none of this dragging, aching soreness that forces him to think about every move before he makes it.

"Not going to go chasing any wendigos but," Dean shrugs, "ambling around a hospital is okay. Still not allowed coffee though." He's reached the bed and works his way onto it. "What'd you find out?"

Sam drags in a breath. "You were right about him." His brother offers him print-outs that Dean lays on his lap. "He's old, way older than the Irish death god myth. In fact, he was just some low-level Celtic godling that barely made it into the pantheon. Forty-four days after the fall equinox, the one night of the year when the veil was the thinnest between the living and the dead, was his night. It didn't mean much—just another day—until the Christians arrived in Ireland. Then something happened and this minor god became the thing that's the basis for most of our Halloween traditions. We wear masks to hide from him, give out gifts to appease him, and make jack o'lanterns to keep him away."

"But he's been gone a while, right?"

Sam nods. "He was exorcised centuries ago but the traditions stuck and eventually got mixed up with the pagan harvest festivals and then everything got rolled up into All Hallows Eve, the day before All Saints Day, one of the most sacred days in the Catholic calendar." He pulls out a page for Dean to look at. "However, there's a ritual that can be used to raise him. It only works once every six hundred years, and guess what this year is?"

Dean's response is weary, "Year six hundred?"

"Yahtzee," Sam responds. "Three blood sacrifices over three days, the last before midnight on the final day of the final harvest. In the Celtic calendar this year, the final day of the final harvest is October 31st."

"Of course," he sighs.

"We need to stop this guy," Sam says, giving Dean a serious look and tapping the sheet of paper Dean's holding.

Dean looks down at the picture obediently and sees the typical horned demon standing on a heap of bodies and holding a severed head in his hand while other things crawl out of a crack in the ground. It's odd, he thinks, but he never saw a horned demon while he was downstairs. Tentacles and claws, yes. Goat horns, no.

"He likes company," Sam's explaining when Dean tunes back in. "Once he's raised, Sam Hain can do some raising of his own, and what he brings up is dark, evil crap and lots of it. They follow him around like he's the friggin' Pied Piper." Sam clenches his jaw in determination. "It starts with ghosts and ghouls, but this sucker keeps on going. By the end of the night, he'll have raised every awful thing we have ever seen. Everything we fight, all in one place."

"It'll be a slaughterhouse," Dean says. Unnecessarily, as far as he's concerned. He doesn't have to imagine it, he remembers it. The zombies, the ghouls, the angry spirits; all of them, heading toward him. He'd done okay until Sam…

He's not going to think about that. It's not going to happen anymore.

"Any idea where he's going to come up?" Sam's question cuts off Dean's unhappy thoughts. Unfortunately, he has to shake his head. He's been trying, but he can't bring forward the name of the town, or the first victim or the names of the witches out of the murky not-his-own memories of the event. He remembers one victim died from razor-blade infested cookies… or was it candy? He also remembers one witch was a guy, an art teacher with faceless screaming masks hanging from his ceiling. The other was a hot blonde cheerleader, and they went to the same school and pretended not to know each other.

He almost has a picture… a school name…

Sam snorts and the image disappears. "Unfortunately, anybody with the know-how and the materials could do it and we won't know if it's the right spell until the first person is dead. Even then…" he trails off.

"Even then, how do we separate a sacrifice for an evil spell from a regular weird death?" Dean finishes.

"Yeah. Unless or until you have another creepy-ass vision," Sam says, "we're searching for a needle in a stack of needles."

"Razor blades," Dean says. "It's Halloween, right? Razor blades in apples is one of Halloween's enduring urban legends."

"That's… that makes sense," Sam agrees. "I was also thinking that, if you tell me everything you saw in your vision, I could set up a web-crawler to search out any news story that matches."

Dean's sigh is audible this time. "I could really use some coffee for this."

It takes another day for Dean to finally talk one of the nurses into giving him coffee and that's only because he's healing abnormally fast. It's decaf and weak and Dean bitches loudly about it. Sam barely listens to him. For one, he's busy on the laptop trying to find the unusually weird death that will tell them where the witches—Dean insists there'll be at least two—are going to do the ritual to raise Sam Hain. Two, Dean's clutching the cup containing the too-awful-to-drink coffee as if it's gold and he's Yosemite Sam. And three, Sam's trying very hard to not shake like a drunk with the DTs.

He's also trying very hard to convince himself that he's twitching because he wants to be on the road and not because he's craving Ruby's blood.

He's not an addict.

He tells himself that. He knows it because he'd asked Ruby, flat out, if he would become addicted and she'd said no.

Yeah, okay, demons lie, but he'd told her—in graphic, bloody detail—exactly what he'd do to her if she lied to him about this. And he'd threatened her: holding her by her hair and making it hurt, his other hand tight around her throat, making sure she knew he could do what he'd said. He'd scared her. And she told him that he wouldn't become addicted.

But his hand is twitching…

"Christ, I hate stitches," Dean mutters forcefully.

Sam looks over and his brother is rubbing the blanket over his wound. "Hey, don't scratch that," he says and bumps Dean's foot in emphasis.

"Hello, Dean; Sam."

Sam tries to cover the nervous jump he'd made by twisting to look at the newcomer. "Castiel," he says and tucks his arm close to his chest to cover the trembling.

"Hey, Cas," Dean's greeting is much more casual and it makes Sam wonder just how many times they've met for his brother to be so relaxed in the angel's presence. "You come to heal me?" Green eyes peer into the dregs of light gold liquid. "Then maybe I could get some decent coffee… And some pie."

"You're already healing much faster than most humans. To do more would occasion comment among the staff," the angel answers solemnly.

"Wait…" Sam frowns. "Does that mean you have been healing Dean?"

Bright blue eyes, oddly innocent and yet weary with ancient knowledge, look at him—into him. "Of course. Seals are falling. Angels are dying. Dean is…" His rough voice fades.

"Dean is… what?" Dean asks. "Do I get a straight answer this time?"

It's the angel's turn to frown as his gaze switches to the man he'd saved. "You are a vessel." Dean snorts but not in disbelief.

"Wait," Sam interrupts, "Dean's a vessel? Like… for an angel?"

Castiel looks at him, head tilted, "Yes, but not just any vessel or my superior would not have told us that we are to obey Dean as if his orders come from him."

Holy shit, Sam thinks. He looks at his brother knowing he'll see his look of bewilderment echoed on Dean's face.

It isn't there. Instead Dean's face is shuttered and hard.

Castiel isn't finished. He steps closer to the bed. "Zachariah said that we must get you used to leading us, but he did not explain why a human would be anointed our general."

"Did he tell you how?" Dean asks. His voice isn't hopeful.

"He did not," Castiel confirms. "And… and he seemed evasive when the question was asked."

"He lied," Sam translates. "I didn't think angels could lie."

"We cannot," Castiel answers.

Dean makes another one of those snorting laughs. "There are a thousand different shades of truth that aren't technically lying," the hunter says. "Some angels know all of them." Castiel's eyes drop and Sam knows that what Dean said was true, and that Castiel didn't want to know that truth.

"So why do you think the angels were told to obey you?" he asks his brother. He fully expects to get one of those 'thousand shades' so he's a little surprised when Dean looks at him full on.

"Ruby was supposed to get you all set to be Lucifer's vessel, right?" Dean pauses, waiting for Sam to agree. Sam's still not sure he does agree.

"We can run with that for now, sure." It's a shade of truth.

Dean's acknowledging smile is bittersweet. "So Hell's forces would have a general here on Earth. Heaven's forces would need one too or else there'd be no climactic battle to determine the fate of the world."

"The Apocalypse," Castiel interjects as if Sam needs the clarification.

Sam rolls his eyes. "And you're going to be the general?" He knows his tone is sarcastic but, c'mon! This is Dean they're talking about. "Dean, your strategies consist of 'jump right in and start shooting'."

"Oh, it wouldn't be me, just my body." His brother waves his hand over his frame, "Michael needs a vessel and this bod is it."

"Michael," Sam repeats. "The archangel. Flaming sword, fighter of demons, holy force against evil. That Michael?"

"Yup."

"It makes sense," Castiel comments and Sam stares at him.

"How does that make sense?" he asks.

"Think about it, Sam," Dean says. "This isn't some big religious battle. It's sibling rivalry and family squabbling. It's about two brothers that loved each other but still betrayed each other. Sounds familiar right?" Sam stays uncomfortably quiet. "So I'm the big brother, kick-ass fighter, loyal to Dad beyond what you think he deserved, right?" Sam nods because, yeah, it fits. "That's Michael."

"And that makes me—"

"Lucifer, the little brother, teenage rebellion and self-righteous stubbornness personified," Dean confirms, twisting his coffee cup around in his hands. "They take over our bodies and then we—they—fight until one brother kills the other. Concluding a grudge match started eons ago and destroying half the world in the process."

"That's…" stupid is what he was going to say, but Sam can't because it's not. "So, we're supposed to, like, let ourselves be possessed–"

"It is not possession," Castiel corrects pedantically. "The vessel must give his or her consent to the angel."

"Some guy said yes to having you ride around in his skin?" Castiel says nothing. Sam laughs in disbelief. "This is what you guys have planned for us? Life as angel condoms? Thanks, I think we'll pass."

Castiel turns his steady regard on the younger Winchester. "It is ordained."

"Not a chance," Sam crosses his arms belligerently.

"I am sorry, Sam Winchester," Castiel says in this über-gentle voice, "but no matter what choice you make or actions you take, you will say yes eventually."

Sam just stares at the angel because, yeah, really not what he wants to hear. He half expects Dean to jump to his defense—because Dean always jumps to his defense—but his brother stays silent. "Don't tell me you believe him," he growls at his injured brother.

"It is not your fault, Sam," Castiel interrupts. "Destiny cannot be changed."

"Screw destiny," he declares and is surprised to hear Dean's voice echoing his.

"Destiny is crap, Cas," Dean continues. "It's a bunch of lies and a way for your bosses to keep me and you and Sam in line! If we do that, if we let them have their way, it's all going to burn. Heaven, Hell, and everything in between, consumed by chaos and evil and civil war."

Jesus, Sam thinks, that must have been one scary-ass vision. No wonder his brother seems so determined.

"Sam and I," Dean continues, "we have a chance—slim but real—to change things, to save everyone."

Castiel turns to Dean and, for the first time Sam's ever seen, he's not completely calm. "What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You will be at peace."

Sam snorts without humour. "You can take your peace and shove it up your lily-white ass," he murmurs.

Dean flicks him a glance and a smile flirts over his lips, "I agree with Sam. I'll take the pain and the guilt. I'll even take Sam as is. It's a lot better than being some Stepford bitch in paradise or endlessly reliving Memorexed versions of our greatest hits in Heaven."

"I don't understand. Why would you not want that?" There's a little dip in the middle of the angel's brow and Sam has to concede that he really is trying.

"It's simple, Cas," Dean answers. "There's right and there's wrong. Letting demons kill our family—Mom, Dad, Sam's girlfriend, our grandparents? Wrong. Making it so that Azazel set his sights on Mom in the first place? Wrong. Setting us up so that your frat brothers can continue a fight—one that should've been over before the Bible was written, by the way. Wrong again. Now they're planning to just stand back while they kill millions of people, God's creations. It's all wrong, Cas, and you know it."

The angel is silent. He can't hold the green-eyed hunter's gaze for long. He turns away from them, moving to the window and looking up into the sky, looking toward a Heaven where God's not been heard from since the Rockies formed.

Sam looks at his brother, wondering what Dean has planned—if anything—and gets a half shrug in return, which means Dean was essentially performing a random keyword search and has no idea what results he's going to get. As if to reinforce the analogy, Dean's monitor beeps quietly and footsteps tap-tap-tap in the hall. Inside the room is the heavy stillness of anticipation.

Finally the angel sighs and turns back to them. "What would you have me do?"

"Do you know where Sam Hain is going to rise?"