If I'd been smart I would have walked out that door.
It's not like I even believed anything they were saying. It all sounded like jibber-jabber to me. More than anything else it made me suspicious of Sam, who—with his apparent long-standing association with the king of hell—suddenly seemed a lot less harmless then he had at first.
It was easier to think of him as being crazy or something. It might sound funny, the fact that I believed that the demon was the king of hell, but I didn't believe anything he was saying about angels and god and all that.
Well, demons have been known to lie.
And when you'd been practically born a hunter like me, it was a lot easier to believe there were bad things in the basement than good things watching over us upstairs. If there was a god, where was he when my mother died? Where was he when I had to drop out of school at thirteen? Where was he when choices I made on a hunt got my father killed? When my uncle had to make the choice to jump in front of a blade aimed at my heart?
So I ignored all the crap about angels because I didn't want to hear it. I chose to think of it as Crowley running a scam on Sam and Sam being too bone deep dumb to realize it.
So why the hell didn't I leave Sam to this tablet business and go on my merry way? Well, I guess when it comes down to it there was a reason we were all together: Sam, Jason, Brad, Cody, Mike, the General, and me. It was because sometimes the loneliness gets to be too much. Sometimes the road and the mind-numbing weariness of doing a job that no one appreciates, because you're driven, because you want revenge, just gets to be too much.
We all want a place to call home, no matter how hard we pretend to be. And even though most of us thought Sam was batshit crazy when he started this crusade to rescue the tablets from the confines of the earth or whatever, we had to accept his craziness if we wanted to stay a family.
In a way, even though he was the youngest, Sam was sort of the one who brought us together. He was the central figure of our mythology. We couldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if the bathwater in question happened to involve a bunch of crazy crap we couldn't care less about. It mattered to Sam, so it mattered to us.
The only people, if you could call them that, who had successfully found a tablet, were the Leviathan, or so Sam said. He wanted us to break into Sucracorp to find out how they'd found it.
I don't know what he wanted us to do—break in and search the browser history on their computers or something, I guess—but we wouldn't let him do it. Even though the Leviathan had lost their leader, there was still a Dick Roman in charge of all that and he still had a bunch of his cronies in all the businesses that mattered. The conspiracy wasn't growing, like it had been with the original Dick, but we hadn't torn the structure of what Dick had built to shreds yet. It was an unnecessary risk.
I told Sam I had a contact that could help us.
I knew a university professor from Iowa. He'd helped me out on a hunt, and then I'd been able to help him out with a problem of the supernatural persuasion myself. He was an expert on biblical lore—not the bible itself, but all the other texts about god that were written around the same time. The Apocrypha, the Dead Sea scrolls, shit like that.
So we went to see Professor Clarke. Sam was seemed surprisingly adept at getting around a university. I thought maybe he'd sought out lots of advice from experts on hunts, but when Dean came back he called Sam college boy enough times we all figured out Sam hadn't always been like us.
Back in the day he'd been somebody.
We found Clarke in the pub surrounded by his notes. He greeted me warmly; I'd let him know I was coming and he'd already found a lot of information.
Sam, as always, took the lead on the conversation. "So how is it that the Bible doesn't mention these other tablets containing the word of god? I mean, before all of this I always thought the only word of god that existed was the Ten Commandments."
"Obviously those were the most important. Imbued with the power of God himself, or so Indiana Jones would have you believe," Clarke said.
"The tablet I saw didn't melt our faces," Sam said, raising his eyebrows a bit at the reference to Raiders.
Clarke paused, and suddenly the comfortable shroud of academic arrogance fell away from him and he almost pounced on Sam with questions. "You actually saw a tablet? What did it say? Could you read it? How could you read it? What did it look like? Where did you find it?"
That's when I first heard the story of the rock that Dean had opened with a sledgehammer and for miles around pregnant ladies gave birth. I heard about how some smart kid got roped into being a prophet. How the tablet had been dropped and the kid fused it together again without even trying. And I actually saw the words he wrote.
Sam freely gave Clarke the notebook the kid had written the word of god in in his childish, girly script. Clarke was beside himself.
He read it avidly and then got back to telling us all about the tablets of god. He said that there were stories that suggested that in the early days—before man had walked the earth and bit the apple and all that, god had been a lot more involved with creation. He had left all these notes around in places of great power to deal with pitfalls that his creation might step into as he created them. Like warning signs beside a volcano. Most of them had been buried under thousands of layers of sand and silt over the years.
"Is there any way we can find some of these tablets? Are there any ancient writings that talk about where they are or how to find them?" Sam asked.
"This is all I could find," Clarke said, holding up a photocopy of an ancient looking book. "I have a translation about halfway finished, but I'll need a few more days to finish it."
"Anything else you can tell us?" Sam asked.
"All I know is they are buried under places of great holiness. I don't know how to recognize these places. Hopefully the rest of the passage will have some clues," he said.
"Thank you," Sam said.
"Do you think it'll pan out?" I asked Sam as we walked back to the impala.
"I know if there was any information about this in any of the sources we have I would have already found it—or Crowley would have."
"What's the story with you and Crowley?" I asked. He brought the demon up, after all.
Sam was silent for a moment, and then smiled grimly. "You ever had an enemy for so long they almost seem like a friend?"
"I try not to let my enemies walk away from me still breathing," I said.
"It must be nice, having the luxury of seeing the world in black and white the way you do," Sam said.
We got in the car and I mulled over what he'd said. I guess I sounded naïve to him—I know now I was. I'd never had to make the choices he'd made. But back then I did see the world in black and white.
"He's a demon," I said flatly.
"That demon, and when I say this, bear in mind that that demon is a total dick and I hate the guy, but that demon saved the lives of basically everyone on earth. Without him the world would have ended. He did it for his own selfish reasons, and we'll probably be fighting him next, god knows, but he has done great things. I've seen him work miracles, just because he can. Not every demon is all out evil every second of the day. Just like every hero I've ever met. In the right light, on the right day, in the right situation, a hero can be a villain every time," he said.
"Does that go for you, too?" I asked.
"I'm not a hero," Sam said.
"All the people you've saved might beg to differ," I said.
"If I was a hero, then what I said would go double for me. Everyone has done things they're not proud of," Sam said.
"What about your brother?" I asked.
"I don't want to talk about my brother," he said.
And that was that.