Disclaimer: Still not mine.

Yup. Both at once. :-)

Chapter IV: Deep into That Darkness Peering

Sam woke to darkness.

As soon as he woke up, he knew that he was alone. Or, at least, that Dean wasn't with him, so he was probably alone. His headache was gone – completely gone – and it felt like his fever was, too.

He was lying on something hard, cold and smooth. Marble, or polished granite, maybe – he couldn't really tell in the dark.

He was on some kind of platform, a few inches from the edge. He sat up and swung his legs down. His feet found the ground without difficulty, and he stood.

"Hello?" he tried. His voice echoed in the darkness, but no one answered. "Awesome. Alone in the dark. This is like some B-grade horror movie."

Sam took a tentative step forward, and then another. His outstretched fingers encountered a ledge made of the same cold, hard thing he'd been lying on. He decided to call it marble until he knew better; it was silly to keep thinking of it as a cold, hard thing.

He ran his hands along the ledge. It curved sharply upwards. Sam followed the line of the marble until he came to something jutting out. His fingers found what was unmistakeably a face – nose, lips, eyes.

A tomb.

It was a marble tomb. Judging by the darkness, he was in a crypt.

Was he still in the hotel? He racked his brain, trying to remember if Lou had said anything about the old house he'd reconstructed having had a crypt. He couldn't think of anything, but it was possible. He couldn't be sure.

Crap.

He didn't even know where he was.

But he was alive, and it seemed like he had plenty of air, so there was no need to panic. He just needed to wait until Dean found him. Dean would notice he was missing soon, if he hadn't already – Sam had no idea how long he'd been in the crypt – and Dean would track him down.

He felt in his pockets for his phone. He didn't have his main one, but his number three cell was in his pocket. Thank God he'd fallen asleep in his jeans. (Partly because of the phone, but also because it would have been incredibly embarrassing to stumble out of a crypt in his sweats.)

He pulled the phone out. As expected, he had no signal – he was probably underground – but the screen gave off enough light for him to get a look at his surroundings.

The tomb in front of him was marble, white marble, as far as he could see in the faint light. The face he'd found belonged to a carved angel that was hovering protectively over the name engraved near the top edge.

Geoffrey Unwin.

Sam shone the light around. The crypt was huge. He could see at least five marble monuments around him, and there were more lining the walls. The ceiling was high – he wouldn't be able to reach it even if he climbed up onto one of the slabs and stretched.

He couldn't see a door, but if he followed the wall he'd probably get to one eventually.

Sam used the light to guide him to the nearest wall and started walking along it. He'd barely taken a couple of steps when he felt the temperature in the room drop by a couple of degrees.

Sam sighed. He wasn't surprised – this was his life, after all, naturally all he had to do was be awake in a crypt for ghosts to start manifesting – but he was annoyed. You'd think they'd have the common courtesy to wait until he had a shotgun. Or even a salt-shaker.

He was pretty sure there wasn't anything here the ghost could use to choke him, which was good, because being choked by supernatural things was really getting old. On the other hand, the lack of rope, lamp cord or iron chain meant that he was probably going to end up being flung into those marble things, and they looked like they'd hurt.

Sam tightened his fingers around his phone (mainly out of instinct; he didn't have his Taurus so his phone would have to do) and waited.

"Sam," a soft, light woman's voice said. "Saaaamm."

"That would be me," Sam responded. If it was talking to him, maybe it would just tell him what it wanted and get out. "What's your name?"

"Sam. Oh, Sam. You wait for him." There was a glimmer in front of him, and then the ghost manifested. She was a young woman, long, dark hair, eyes so brown they were almost black, fringed with lashes that stood out starkly against her pale skin. "You wait. You wait, but he will not come."

"What are you talking about?"

"They abandon you." She took a step forward. Sam took a step back. She shook her head impatiently, like she thought he was being dense. "They always abandon you. They lock you living in your tomb and leave you there to die." Her eyes glimmered in the darkness. "Alone. Alone as your air runs out. Alone as your blood runs cold. All alone. They leave you there."

"What the hell do you mean you don't know?" Dean bellowed. "I was out of the room for ten minutes. Ten minutes!"

"Dean, please," Lou said. "I know you're worried –"

"Do you? Do you have any idea how worried I am right now? I left Sam asleep in bed while I went downstairs to find the creep who told me he was dead and tell him to lay off. I came back and he was missing. Gone. Vanished without a trace."

"Dean –"

"Did you take him? Is that why you're so calm about this?"

"Dean! I assure you I didn't –"

"You were full of all that Satan crap, upsetting Sam when you spoke to him. Any of your hunter friends tell you anything? If you have any idea where my brother is you tell me now or so help me –"

"Dean –"

"You did something, didn't you? You took Sam." Dean grabbed the front of Lou's shirt and shook him. "You tell me where he is right the hell now."

"Dean, I don't know where your brother is."

"You tell me or I'll make you." Dean's eyes narrowed. "Believe me, pal, you don't want me to make you. Talk."

"Dean, I swear to you, I don't know what happened to your brother."

"Fine." Dean released Lou, who fell back against the wall, gasping for breath and clutching his chest. Dean rolled his eyes. "Drama queen. You think I was asking hard questions, that's nothing to the kind of questions I'm going to ask if Sam tells me you kidnapped him." He pointed at Lou. "I'm going to look for my brother now. And I promise you, there is no place he could be where I won't find him. And if he tells me you so much as looked at him wrong…"

He let the words trail off.

He glared at Lou until he looked satisfactorily terrified and then stalked out of the room.

Something had taken Sam.

Dean Winchester was on the warpath.

He started by searching the hotel. Thoroughly. He started in the lobby and worked his way up. He finished up in their room.

He was looking around, biting his lip helplessly, when, on impulse, he went to the non-weapons equipment duffel (Sam's idea; he was the organized one – Dean would just have put all their hunting stuff in one bag, dropped it in the backseat, and called it good) and pulled out an EMF meter.

As soon as he turned it on, it went crazy.

Dean caught his breath.

There had been a ghost here. A ghost had taken Sam.

The knowledge made him feel calmer. More settled. It sucked that Sam was missing, but now that he knew something supernatural had him… Well, hunting down supernatural fuglies was what Dean Winchester did best.

Dean took the elevator back downstairs. Lou had told him he'd be with a friend in Conference Room B, which in Lou-speak apparently meant 'place where I'll meet the people I've conned into helping me for free'. He was about to burst in, because discussing how many gallons of beer they needed to have on tap for opening night could wait, but Sam was missing now.

Then he heard a noise.

It was a horrible, screeching, groaning, ripping, tearing, juddering noise that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth.

Or, Dean thought, from the basement of the building.

He considered checking with Lou, but decided against it. Every instinct told him that sound was connected to Sam's disappearance, and he'd learnt long ago that big-brother radar was far more reliable that witness statements, especially when the witness was Lou West. Sam was missing, missing, and the guy was sitting around discussing his opening night.

He didn't bother with the elevator. He hurtled down the stairs, taking them four at a time. When he opened the door at the other end, he found himself in the gym. A sign a few feet away indicated that the squash courts were to his left and the sauna and showers to his right.

The noise came again, louder, shrieking through the walls.

Dean ducked back inside the stairwell. The stairs further down were boarded up. Dean scoffed, half amusement and half derision – they thought a few wooden planks were going to stand in the way of a pissed-off hunter – and smashed through them with one sharp kick.

The level below was pitch-dark, and he had to slow down or risk breaking his ankle and being unable to help Sam. The walls were uneven, crumbling bricks.

As soon as he reached the sub-basement, the air turned cold. Ghost cold. Dean was sure he'd see his breath fogging in front of him if he could actually see anything at all.

There was a soft scraping sound, and then a crash.

"Sammy!" Dean yelled.

"Dean?"

Dean almost sobbed in relief. "Sammy, where are you?"

"Right here – wait." Dean heard footsteps, and then a faint light flashed on a few yards to his right. It was Sam's cell phone, and by the glow of its screen he could see Sam – a little banged-up, maybe, but not really the worse for wear. "Dean."

"Right here. What –"

The rest of Dean's question was lost as over two hundred pounds of hunter slammed into him.

"Oh, thank God," Sam breathed.

"Hey." Dean patted Sam's back. "Neither of us is dying. Right?"

"Yeah," Sam said, but he didn't seem eager to move. "Yeah, just… She said you wouldn't come for me."

"Who? There someone else in here?"

"A ghost. A woman. I don't know her name."

"And you believed her?" Dean tried not to let his hurt show. After everything that had happened, it did hurt that Sam would think Dean would just abandon him. "Really, Sam?"

Sam backed away. "Dean, you don't even get –"

"I don't get what? You left me in Purgatory –"

"I didn't know you were in Purgatory!"

"Did you even try to find out?"

"You think that was the problem?" Sam demanded furiously. "That I didn't want to find you?"

"If that wasn't, then why don't you tell me what the problem was, Sam!"

"I thought you were dead!" Sam yelled. "What, you think you disappeared and I moved in with Amelia the next day? It was months before I met her, Dean. I thought you were dead and I was this close – this close – to finding a demon and draining it. I would have – I would have done it all again, I would have done anything. The things I would have done to get you back – they scared me, Dean. If I'd had any idea you were in Purgatory, I would have done everything I could, but I didn't know. I thought you were dead and all I could think of was – was finding a way to bring you back, but every way I could think of was going to make you hate me forever. And he kept telling me you wouldn't even want to look at me –"

"He? Who the hell is he?"

"Lucifer," Sam said, like it should have been the most obvious thing in the world.

"What?" Dean yelled. "Lucifer's back? You didn't think that was something I should know, moron?"

"He's not back!" Sam snapped. "He was back, OK? He was gone, I thought Cas had fixed it. But when you and Cas disappeared –"

"He came back?" Dean asked incredulously.

"I didn't have Stone Number One."

Just like that, the fight went out of Dean. Who was he kidding? At some level he got it. The only way he'd hung on to his sanity that year Sam had been in the Cage had been by getting out altogether, by putting everything that reminded him of Sam in the Impala, putting her under a tarp, and pretending desperately that his heart was whole.

"OK," he said softly. "I understand."

"Do you?"

"I may not understand everything about it. But I understand that you did the best you could."

"I don't know how to be a hunter without you, Dean." Sam's voice was tiny, and Dean could tell he thought it was a shameful admission. "I was so lost – and so furious at the world – if I'd let myself hunt, I wouldn't have had control."

They were back in total darkness now, Sam's cell phone screen shutting down after the requisite thirty seconds of inactivity, so Dean was relying solely on instinct when he reached out.

His hand found Sam's shoulder.

"I'm back, Sammy."

"I know."

"We're back."

"I know."

"So how about we blow this popsicle stand and hunt us down some restless spirits?"

Dean could sense Sam's grin. "Lead the way."

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