Chapter 12

I turned around.

I was in a house, but it was weird because it was almost blurry, as if I stood in a photograph that had been taken while the camera was moving slightly – or, I thought slowly, turning around, as if I was in a memory that wasn't really a memory so much as what a person had been told was a memory, an idea that had been passed along. It was hard to focus on anything and after a minute or two, my eyes started to ache a bit.

The room was a bedroom, bright blue with white trim. A boy's bedroom, I thought, seeing the cowboy and car themes here and there. The heat was coming from the door that led into the rest of the house. Light flickered and glowed around the door's edges.

The house in Lawrence, I wondered? I backed away from the door, and turned and looked out the window. There was the dead tree in the front yard. And parked alongside the kerb, the Impala was waiting for whoever had brought it here. Not Dean, I was guessing.

"Sam?"

I swear they hadn't been there five minutes before, but now the walls were covered in pictures – photographs – some large, some small, all framed and hanging close together. Walking over to the wall, the first one I looked at was a photograph of a young boy, maybe eight or nine years old, holding a slender rifle and grinning at the camera, dark hair mostly hidden beneath a red baseball cap. The next one was of a man, unmistakably John Winchester, his expression uncharacteristically gentle as he looked out of the frame, his face younger, jaw shadowed in stubble. Not photographs, not really, I thought.

Sam's memories.

"Sam!" I called out louder, turning back to the door. Bad enough I was intruding in the guy's head, I told myself, he didn't need me to be looking through his most personal moments as well.

I couldn't see the light around the edges of the door anymore and I reached out for the doorknob cautiously. It felt cool.

Opening it, I could see a hall, and I stepped through.

The house tilted and went dark and I found myself on my butt, sliding down a long, slippery slope without being able to see or hear a thing. And yes, okay, I admit it. I screamed. I screamed my head off, and when the lights came back on and I was standing in a grassy area, sunlight streaming through the leaves of the trees around me, my scream trailed away to a hoarse croak, thankfully unnoticed by the people walking around the area, armfuls of books and minding their own business.

I haven't been to the Stanford campus in California, but I had the feeling that's where I was, a sense that was only strengthened when I saw a tall, athletic-looking blonde girl walking fast toward me. I didn't even time to see for certain if it was who I thought it was, before it all went dark again and this time I was thrown, upside-down and whipped around until I thought I was going to heave from the violent motion. Now you know how a shirt feels in a tumble-dryer, I thought, somewhat incoherently and totally irrelevantly, as I tried to reach out for anything to grab onto.

The flames were bright and hot and her face was contorted by such agony I wanted to close my eyes and never open them again. I couldn't. They remained fixed open, out of my control, staring up and my throat was reverberating with what might have been a scream or a shout but what felt like something hard and sharp and rough, reaching in and pulling out my heart. I know how that sounds, believe me, I do, but that is as close as I can possibly come to describing that second, before hard hands grabbed my shoulders and dragged me off the bed and out of the room.

Dread and horror spread like sticky honey through my insides as I stared at Dean, his forehead bloody from a long cut, his expression begging me not to ask anything, not to ask anything else, mouth twisted up in a half-smile that told me he knew that plea was already too late. It hadn't been a dream, when I'd woken on the old mattress.

The acrid bite of whiskey on my tongue and down my throat, the heat of the liquid failing to do anything to drown out the deep-seated pain that seemed to be in my blood somehow, pumping around my body. Dean's face, shuttered and turning away as I asked him how he could care so little about himself, the expression wiped away by relief when his phone shrilled.

A light blinded me, pure white and heatless, but piercing through my screwed-shut eyes and the arm I'd lifted over my face. I turned my head away from it and saw Dean, torn up and bloody and horribly still, lying on the floor. The light disappeared and I felt a rage like a tornado, filling me up with pure hatred. Looking across the room and seeing a familiar-looking woman with blonde hair and a red leather jacket backing away.

God, I'm in Sam's memories, I thought, seeing his life the way he had. Knowing that didn't help with getting out of it, and I struggled frantically against moving as he got to his feet and advanced us both closer to Ruby's body, possessed by now by Lilith. I looked down and saw the bone-handled knife in my hand, shuddering at the feel of it. As Sam lifted the knife and Ruby's mouth opened, I was plucked free and tossed aside.

Agonising pain filled me and I shrieked out, one arm swinging wide and feeling my hand knocking things down, hearing the sounds of breaking glass and smelling the sharp, sweet-sour scent of spilled bourbon rising around me, then I was falling, landing on a bed that was crumpled and stained, sour with the scent of dried sweat and catching the whiff further away of old vomit.

Step away, I kept telling myself, pitched headfirst into darkness again. Step away from him, and just freaking watch, don't participate. Like most advice you give to yourself in the middle of a crisis, it sounded good but I had no idea of how to do it.

I felt as if I were being stretched and pummelled, pushed and thrown and shoved and pulled through scenes I could barely register before the next appeared. All of them had a single thing in common. They were filled with such a torturous pain I could hardly get a breath in past it.

I haven't had the easiest of lives. My parents were killed, years ago, in a collision with a truck that had passed the state inspection with faulty brake lines and a worn-through clutch. It hadn't mattered all that much to me that the company that owned the truck was fined for its negligence. At the time, I'd been moved from my home and everything I knew, parked with my uncle and aunt in California and from then on, pretty much left to myself. Don't get me wrong, they're good people, and they tried hard but I was nine and it wasn't a good time to lose everything. When is?

But my pain literally disappeared with what I was…seeing? Feeling? Experiencing in every flavour of virtual reality possible?... in comparison to this, my life had been a cake-walk. Nothing I'd experienced in my short life could've prepared me for what Sam had gone through, had felt, done, seen and lived.

What?! No, say it! Fear that pounded like the world's worst migraine, eyes full of tears – I know how sorry you are. I do. But, man...you were the one that I depended on the most. And you let me down in ways that I can't even... So much shame, I wanted to die right along with him, wanted to take it all back, take it all back and never look at it again– I'm in no shape to be hunting. I need to step back, 'cause I'm dangerous. Maybe it's best we just...go our separate ways. A decision that felt half responsible, half relief, and no way of knowing if it was the right thing or running or what his brother would say– I do know that no one has ever done anything so bad that they can't be forgiven. Struggling to swallow down the hysterical laughter that had burst up and the sudden urge to tell someone, someone not Dean, exactly how it'd been, what he'd done and the zero chance of ever being forgiven for it…

It went on and on and some of the things that had happened, that he thought and said and did, I knew about, had seen in the slightly distorted view the writers – or whichever of the writers it was who seemed to be tapping into the brothers – had given the audience on the show, but some things I hadn't seen and they were a lot darker and a lot more terrifying; things Sam had done with Ruby, things he'd done trying to bargain Dean out of Hell, things he'd done without a soul to guide him.

"Sam! SAM!" I kept calling out, kept trying to hold on, but it was like shouting in a hurricane, and I was getting so tired I could hardly stay upright when I landed, for want of a better word, in each memory, each moment.

A road, the Impala stopped in the middle, a dark-haired woman getting out. Black. A forest, open spaces between the trees. Black.

BANG! I hit the floor on my hands and knees, and lifted my head, looking around at the peace and quiet of the room around me. Bobby's place. I was in the living room of Bobby's place.

"Sam?"

"Terry?"

My throat closed up tightly at the sound of his voice, so close and actually answering me. Getting to my feet, I nearly tripped with my first step, my legs were wobbling so much.

"Terry, stay away," he called out, and his voice was deep, holding a warning.

Kitchen, I thought, forcing myself across the hall and through the dining room doors, stopping in shock when I saw him. And the other him.

Sam stood near the small table in the kitchen, and he also leaned against the counter holding the sink. That one, the second Sam, looked weary and old, beaten and broken.

"Sam…"

"Terry, you have to get out," Sam said, taking a step closer to himself. "I have to do this. You can't be here."

"Sam, don't…wait…" I grabbed the back of a dining room chair as he took another step. I don't know why I was so worried about him, getting closer to that other Sam, the knife in his hand winking as the light caught the edge, but the sense of danger, of alarm and just wrongess was overpowering, driving me forward.

"GET OUT OF HERE!" Sam turned and shouted at me suddenly, and I flinched back from the despair in that roar. He meant to kill the other Sam, I could see, and with a much-needed flash of understanding, I knew what that meant, what happened, what would happen.

"NO!"

I lurched forward across the floor at the same time he strode toward his other self, watching helplessly as he plunged the blade in. There was a burst of light and heat and flames and his head tipped back, the other Sam disappearing as I reached out desperately.

"Sam, hold on!"

I grabbed his arm, shocked at the rigidity of it, then everything disappeared in a throbbing sulphur-yellow light and the crackle of fire.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Lucifer's Cage, the prison he'd been thrown into way back whenever, was made of ice but that didn't stop the pits and wells of fire from burning, light everywhere as the flames were reflected in the translucent pillars and frozen walls. Blue and gold were the only colours I could register, and red. There was a lot of red. I had a hold of Sam's wrist, I could feel it, solid under my fingers, but where I was standing, to one side of the inverted bowl of ice and fire, Sam wasn't there, he was in front of me, fighting with his brother. Adam didn't look like Adam at all. Taller and broader, his eyes had changed colour, a fierce electric blue, and they were narrowed in the ferocious expression on his face.

"Sam, hold onto me, we can get out," I shouted at them, my heart hammering somewhere in my throat with fear. I could feel my sweat trickling down the back of my neck, down my sides and I couldn't move my feet at all. "Sam!"

Neither of them paid me the slightest attention and it took me a few minutes to realise that this wasn't happening, this had happened, it was another memory. You must be thinking by now that I'm pretty stupid, but I have to tell you, it's hard to keep logical and sane when you're in someone else's head.

I could hear screaming, but not with my ears. My ears were just hearing the grunts and hard, thudding impacts of the angels as they grappled and gouged at each other, opening holes in Sam's body, in Adam's, their fists driving inside and tearing out organs and bone and spraying blood over everything. The screaming was deeper, further away, and I thought it might have been Sam and Adam, feeling those wounds, feeling themselves being ripped apart from the inside out.

As a kid, I'd seen a dog-fight, two dump yard dogs going at each other, both ready to kill. That was what watching this fight was like. They didn't care if they tore each apart. Maybe that was the point, the maximum damage to the souls that were trapped in there with them, I don't know. It was sickening to see, but the hatred between them was worse.

You were weak, Daddy's little soldier, no mind or will of your own, weak, cowardly, hiding behind orders, doing what you what you were told, spineless, mindless – Arrogant, self-centred, child! Never any thought for anyone else, just what you wanted, what you thought was your right, you ruined everything, brought down his wrath and drove him away, for pride, little brother, just for your childish pride –

I tried to shut out their poisonous words, and the feelings behind them which were far worse.

"Sam! It's just a memory, it's not real –"

"It's so real I can't find my way out," Sam said, beside me again, but not whole, not himself, not really. He turned his head to look at me, and he was blistered and burned over the whole of his body, lacerated by deep gouges that flowed with blood. He arched backward, as if someone had stabbed him from behind, though no one was there, his teeth were clenched together tightly and my fingers slid from his wrist, locking around his fingers which just about crushed my whole hand inside of them. The pain helped, shocking me out of the memory for a second and I caught a glimpse of Bobby's kitchen.

"SAM!" I shouted at him and he burst into flame. I nearly let go then, the heat and the awful smell surrounding me and I could feel the fire licking over my skin, could feel and taste, at the back of my throat, my hand and arm cooking. "SAM!"

"Get out Terry, let me go and get out!"

"NO! You have to come with me," I screamed at him and tightened my hold on his hand, pulling him with me as I took a step back. "Come on!"

"I can't!"

"Yes, you can!"

The flames were reaching higher up my arm, and I had a horrible feeling that if they overwhelmed me, I'd be as lost in here as he was. I started back again, jerking him after me, my paltry weight not having much effect on him but he was moving, a little bit at a time. "COME ON!"

"I deserved this…"

And I suddenly realised what he was doing. Again, you must think I'm slow, but honestly, it hadn't occurred to me before, that he might welcome the pain, the memory of the pain, welcome it to try and redeem himself.

I ignored the fire as best as I could, stepping back toward him, feeling it crisp my face, smelling the ends of my hair smouldering in that vicious heat.

"Sam, you don't deserve this, you put him back, you paid," I said to him as clearly as I could. "You saved the world, you saved your brother, it's over. Come back with me, please!"

"No, I –" He looked confused, his expression almost melting in the flames that burned through him.

"Yes, you paid, Sam," I said, wondering what else I could say that would get through. "Dean needs you, Sam. He-he-he's forgiven you, for what happened, for everything," I kept going, hoping like hell that was completely true. I didn't know exactly what else had happened between them, I was just going off what I'd seen on the show, but I knew for certain that Dean didn't want his brother lost to him. "He and Bobby, they're alone, trying to keep Purgatory closed, he needs you, Bobby needs you!"

"I…"

"Sam!" I could see his doubts, filling up that melting face. It was taking every bit of bravery I had to keep from running from that sight, and even now, I have no idea how I did it.

"Terry?"

We were standing in Bobby's kitchen, flames roaring around us, burning up the cupboards and boiling over the ceiling.

"Sam, please, come on, let it go," I said, pulling at his hand. He wasn't burning up anymore but he looked terrible, his skin all blackened and charred and fissured, clear liquid seeping out of the cracks. "Let it go."

"He…forgives…me?"

"Yes." I told him, forcing certainty into my voice. I swallowed against the heaving of my stomach and stepped close to him, putting my arms around him and trying to ignore the smell. "Yes, he does. Let it go, Sam and come home."

He let out a deep breath, the tension sliding from him as his arms lifted and enclosed me slowly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I woke up abruptly, my head pounding and throbbing, nausea swirling in my stomach. There was a crackle against my hand and I looked down at the paper in my hand. The note gave an address, in Dean's handwriting. Beside me, on the cot, Sam was sitting up, holding his head gingerly.

The reassuring dark walls and Bobby's poster of Bo Derek were the most welcoming sight I'd ever seen.

"What happened?" Sam asked softly, turning his head slowly to look at me.

"Castiel broke your wall," I said, feeling an icepick stab through my brain behind my eye. No one had mentioned the hangover of the freaking dream root on the show.

"Painkillers?" I asked, looking at him through squinted eyes.

He pressed a hand against his forehead and waved a hand in the general direction of Bobby's desk and I got up, walking slowly over to the desks, feeling as if I might shatter into a million pieces if I put my feet down too hard. Unlike the Winchesters, my pain threshold is not high. In fact, I usually cry if I stub my toe. This was a whole new lesson in dealing with things I never thought I'd have to.

The bottle was on the shelf behind the desk and I shook two out, dry-swallowing them with a lot of difficulty as I handed another two to Sam. He seemed to take them without any trouble at all.

"Where's Dean?" Sam grated at me, and I smoothed out the paper.

"221 Piermont Ave, Bootbock, Kansas," I told him, reading the address on the paper again then closing my eyes. The Tylenol would take at least ten minutes to work, I thought, and we should have something to eat before we went after them.

"I'll drive," Sam said, getting to his feet and following me as I walked toward the door.

"No way," I told him over my shoulder. "What you just did, Sam…you're going to get flashbacks and disconnects until it settles down properly, I'm driving."

It wasn't bravado and it wasn't some misplaced hero-complex. I just figured that once the pain of my headache went, and I had something solid in my stomach, I'd be okay for the drive, which was going to take at least five hours. Sam, on the other hand, had just done some kind of mental reintegration and I thought if he could sleep for a part of the way, it would help with smoothing whatever rough edges that had caused.

"Can you eat?" I asked him as we walked into the kitchen. I looked around surreptitiously, glad to see no scorch marks on the cupboards or smoke stains on the ceiling. I knew it'd been a dream, a hallucination almost, but it had felt so real at the time that I couldn't stop myself from rubbing my hand over my arm, feeling over the smooth skin there for the blisters and charred skin.

"A little, maybe," Sam said cautiously, looking around. His memories of seeing himself here were also disorientating him, I realised, watching his wariness.

"Sandwich," I decided, pointing to the table. "Sit down."

I got him a bottle of water from the fridge and went to the counter to get bread. The headache was beginning to get fuzzy, the pain receding slowly. I didn't feel all there, really, but it was a relief to be able to see clearly again without the light hurting.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I cranked the engine again and it tried, it really did, but there was no follow-through. Leaning toward me, Sam tapped the dash and I looked at the fuel gauge.

Empty.

I groaned. I couldn't help it. What else could go wrong, I wondered, probably unwisely.

"The truck," Sam said, looking through the window beside him. "We'll take that."

Bobby's tow-truck had a few more bits and pieces than I was used to seeing in a car, but Sam pointed out the usual things. "Don't touch anything else," he added, leaning back between the seat and the door. I nodded, turning the key and starting the engine and to my relief it rumbled straight away and the gears and pedals did what I expected them to.

The I-29 led almost due south from Sioux Falls to Bootbock and there wasn't much traffic on it. I kept the speed at a steady sixty-five, checking the mirrors for the highway patrol cars and hoping that we wouldn't get pulled over. I'd been shocked to find that Sam and I had been out for almost five hours, and I was hoping that Dean and Bobby were still alive, and would still be in one piece when we got there.

On the seat between us, the small cooler held a jar of Eleanor's blood, another jar of blood that had been in Bobby's fridge and which I was trying not to think about too much, and bags and small boxes of herbs, rocks and powders that I'd found in the panic room. Bobby had done a copy of Eleanor's ritual to open the doors for them before they'd left, and I made another before we took off. The eclipse had started, the radio told us in vapidly cheery tones, the moon would be totally occluded in another couple of hours and the eclipse would be over in a bit over five hours. It did not give us much time.

Glancing sideways at Sam, I was relieved to see his eyes closed. Random images kept popping into my mind and I was having a lot of trouble keeping them out, and my attention on the road. It was hard to believe that Sam had been able to stay on his feet, given all that he'd been through, let alone walk and function as well as he was. John had made his sons tough, I knew. Just hadn't realised how tough they really were.

You can talk about Hell and up here, in the real world, it's just another concept, you know. Just an idea, there's nothing to really judge it or measure it against in normal life. I'd thought, before all this, that people mostly made their own hells, with their choices and denials and doing things that were self-destructive but not seeing it. That probably held true, but Hell was a lot worse.

The physical things had been terrible but they didn't really hold a candle to what the mental torture was like. The angels had shredded every part of Sam that he'd been proud of, every part that he'd liked about himself and had left him with all the things he'd been ashamed of instead. I'd done a couple of things I'd been ashamed of in my life and I knew how it felt to go over and over them, not knowing how to make up for them, finally understanding that I had to do something about them, or go crazy. But for Sam, the things he'd been left with, the things he'd done, even with good intentions and trying to make it right, I wasn't sure he'd ever be able to find a way to do something about them. He felt every death that he was sure lay on him. He felt every bit of the destruction Lucifer had swept over the planet as if it was his personal responsibility. And he felt every moment of his brother's pain, in the moments when he'd chosen Ruby and what he thought was the end of it all, instead of listening to Dean.

"Terry," Sam said, and I startled a little, thinking he was asleep.

"Yes?"

"Thanks," he said, his voice so quiet I hardly heard the word. "For coming to get me."

I looked at the road. There hadn't been a choice in the matter. I couldn't have let him drown in his head alone.

"Dean wanted to go in and find you, Sam," I told him, trying to see him from the corner of my eye. "The only reason he didn't was that Bobby needed him."

"I know," he said, shifting up in the seat. "And I don't think I could've stood it, him being there, seeing…everything…like that."

I didn't know what to say to that. "He loves you, Sam."

"I know he does," Sam agreed, turning to look at me. "I know, but…he's everything I tried to be, growing up, and we don't – we're not like each other, practically at all. I…"

I waited for him to figure out what he wanted to say, wondering if he knew that he needed to be saying these things to his brother. They needed to be saying these things to each other, not a stranger from another dimension.

"I love him too, but I let him down," he continued finally. "I didn't…I wasn't…I thought he was…but he wasn't. He's never been. He's a lot stronger than I am."

The heart-break in his voice filled my eyes with tears and I blinked hard, trying to see the road through them.

"I understand why he couldn't tell me about Hell, now," he said a moment later, clearing his throat and looking away, out through the window. "I can't keep letting him down, can't let him see what happened to me, how-how bad it is."

I thought of them both, leaning on each other, needing someone to trust, someone to hold onto in the mess of their lives. In the show, Dean had come closest to telling Sam the truth of how badly he'd been broken in Hell, when he'd said that he wished he couldn't feel anything. I wondered now if he really had said to Sam, wondered if he'd really been that vulnerable with his brother.

"Sam," I said, my voice coming out cracked and raw because my throat felt as if it was full of broken glass. "You're both in the same place, and you can't keep trying to hide it from each other. No one is strong because they don't feel anything," I added, trying to work out what I was trying to say as the words were coming out. "They're strong because they keep fighting, keep trying, through those feelings. You kept going, he's still going, and you need to do it together, somehow."

He didn't answer that, one shoulder hunching up higher than the other as he turned a little more away.

I looked at my watch. Another two hours. I couldn't think of a way to convince him that both he and Dean would be stronger if they would just acknowledge that they were afraid, both of them, afraid of being left alone with no one.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"God, what happened?" Sam breathed as I pulled the truck up beside the overturned Impala.

"I don't know," I said, turning off the engine and opening the door. The stench of sulphur hit us both immediately and Sam's face hardened to stone.

I grabbed the cooler and followed him around the crushed black car, ducking down to look in the back seat as he did the same for the front. "Not here."

Sam nodded and turned for the building, a massive thing of concrete and brick that was like a great, hulking behemoth in the dim light. The moon had been totally covered and now it was showing a sliver again, but the light was faint.

We heard them before we got to the room, Sam stopping dead near the door, holding up his hand sharply.

"You're full of nuke. It's not safe. So, before the eclipse ends, let's get those souls back to where they belong," Dean said. His voice was deep and it echoed in the room past the door.

"Oh no, they belong with me."

Sam looked at me as we heard the angel's voice, gravelly but somehow not the same. Too late. The thought crossed both our minds and Sam gestured to the right, moving silently to the edge of the door frame and looking inside.

"No, Cas, it's it-it's scrambling your brain."

"I have not finished yet. Raphael had many followers, and I must punish them all severely," Castiel intoned, his voice devoid of emotion, and completely creepy. I didn't want to see what his face looked like.

"Listen to me," Dean said, and I heard him change his position slightly, boots scraping over the concrete floor. "Listen, I know there's a lot of bad water under the bridge, but we were family once. I'd have died for you. I almost did a few times. So if that means anything to you..." He hesitated and Sam slipped into the room. I inched my way to the door frame and knelt down, looking in at about knee-level. "Please. I've lost Lisa, I've lost Ben, and now I've lost Sam. Don't make me lose you too. You don't need this kind of juice anymore, Cas. Get rid of it before it kills us all."

Castiel stared at him, and I'd been right. His expression was cold and blank and completely creepy. "You're just saying that because I won. Because you're afraid."

Sam snuck up close behind him, picking up a short, silver angel sword from the floor.

"You're not my family, Dean. I have no family," Cas said, and I saw Dean's face twitch, the finality of the angel's words hitting him, the hurt of them showing in the way his eyes got darker.

Sam lifted the sword and plunged it into Cas' back, his face twisting up in pain as the blade went in, staggering backward from whatever had passed from angel through the sword and into him.

Cas reached behind him and pulled the blade out, looking at it without curiosity. The sword was clean and bright and he put it down. "I'm glad you made it, Sam. But the angel blade won't work, because I'm not an angel anymore," he said, his voice as eerily expressionless as ever, taking a step back so that he could see both brothers. "I am your new God. A better one. So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your Lord. Or I shall destroy you."

That was enough for me, to be honest. I couldn't get into the room now, Cas could see the doorway I was hiding behind. I moved away from it and opened the cooler, pulling out the jars of blood and the drawing and instructions and biting my lip as I mixed the powders, crystals and herbs together.

"Well, all right then. Is this good, or you want the whole "forehead to the carpet" thing?" I heard Bobby's voice say, his breath whistling slightly in his throat. "Guys?"

"Stop," Cas said. It wasn't exactly anger in his voice, I thought, hurriedly pouring the blood over the mixture and stirring it with one finger. More like frustration or irritation. "What's the point if you don't mean it? You fear me. Not love, not respect, just fear."

"Cas..." Sam started to say, but the angel cut him off.

"Sam, you have nothing to say to me; you stabbed me in the back. You all betrayed me, everything I did for you." There was a pause and then he said, "Get up."

"Cas, come on, this isn't you." That was Dean again.

"The Castiel you knew is gone."

"So what, then? Kill us?" I could hear the desperation in Dean's voice, could hear him shifting his feet slightly as if he was thinking about attacking the angel.

"What a brave little ant you are. You know you're powerless, you wouldn't dare move against me again. That would be pointless. So I have no need to kill you. Not now," Castiel said, and I winced. He didn't sound like himself at all and I wondered about the Leviathan that had been in Purgatory along with the monster souls. Were they controlling him? Possessing him? How much was really left of Cas?

"Besides...once you were my favorite pets before you turned and bit me."

"Who are you?" Dean said disbelievingly.

"I am God. And if you stay in your place, you may live in my kingdom. If you rise up, I will strike you down," the angel answered him. I couldn't imagine what effect that had on Dean. There was another scrape on the floor of a shoe sole. "Not doing so well, are you Sam?"

Risking a peek around the door, I saw Sam stagger a little, shaking his head. "I'm fine..." he said, clearing his throat as he tried to stand straight. "I'm...fine."

Dean was looking at Sam and his gaze slid over the doorway I was crouched behind, checking as he noticed me and then moving back to Cas.

"You said you would fix him - you promised!" Dean grated at the angel.

"If you stood down, which you hardly did," Cas said, and this time there was definite emotion in his voice. "Be thankful for my mercy. I could have cast you back into the pit."

"Cas, come on, this is nuts! You can turn this around. Please!" Dean moved around the angel, and Cas moved to follow him, both a lot closer to the door. Dean looked at Sam and I saw Sam's slight nod.

I moved back to the ritual drawing on the wall, and picked up the incantation. I hadn't done Latin at school, and aside from the odd bits of Latin used in the show I had no idea of what I saying, but I tried to read it as clearly as possible.

Ianua Magna Purgatorii
Clausa Est Ob Nos
Lumine Euius Ab Oculis
Nostris Retento

Sed Nunc Stamus Ad Limen Huius
Ianuae Magnae Et Demisse
Fideliter Perhonorifice
Paramus Aperire Eam

Creaturae Terrificae Quarum Ungulae
Et Dentes Nunquam Tetigerunt
Carnem Humanam Aperit Fauces
Eius Ad Mundum Nostrum Nunc
Ianua Magna
Aperta Tandem!

It wasn't subtle. The building began to shake and light outlined the edges of the circle I'd drawn on the wall. From the other room I heard Dean's voice shout out.

"Now!"

I was backing away when Sam shoved Cas through the doorway, arms wrapped around him, the angel's face twisting in rage as Dean grabbed his arm and swung him toward the searing light that was now pouring from the hole in the wall where the circle had been.

"NO!" The angel roared and his voice shattered the glass in the windows high on the walls, showering us in broken glass. The light poured out of the wall and through the angel and Sam, still holding him, and then it seemed to pull and stretch them both, and Dean and I recognised the danger at the same time.

Cas' face got longer and longer as he was drawn into the doorway, and Sam tried to let go. The angel's hand flashed out and grabbed his arm, holding him tight as Dean reached out and grabbed Sam's other hand, pulling back as hard as he could.

The angel saw me and his eyes widened. "YOU!"

I ducked away from that wild glare as Cas disappeared into the light and Sam's arm went with him. Dean was leaning back, hanging onto Sam's wrist and forearm in a death-grip, and Sam's face screwed up in pain as he was stretched between the angel and his brother, but he was being pulled inexorably into the light after Cas and Dean's boots were slipping on the floor, dragging him closer and closer to the light as well.

"BOBBY!" Dean yelled, struggling to find a grip on the floor as more of Sam disappeared into the portal.

Bobby appeared around the door frame and lunged forward, grabbing Dean's shoulder and heaving backwards and I ran for them both, reaching Dean as Sam disappeared, the arm Dean was still holding the only thing visible of him.

I don't know what it was, if it was me, or if the eclipse ended at that point, or if Sam's wrist just slipped through his brother's hold. But my hand closed around Dean's arm, and I pulled back and there was a blast from the portal, a wave of cold grey light and air that loosened Dean's grip.

Dean, Bobby and I were thrown backwards across the corridor and landed in a heap on the floor, the light brightening unbearably and disappearing completely, leaving the red drawing on the wall and nothing else.

And Sam was gone.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~