My heart felt like it was jack hammering against my lungs, my breaths were these short, hiccuping, uncontrolled gasps and I could barely hold myself up on all fours. Everything in my entire life was built on the guilt that Azazel had shoved down my throat. Obeying Dad without question, hunting, running to demons when Sam had died, the Mark, putting anything I ever wanted on hold to hunt that damned yellow eyed bastard, losing Lisa, staying away from Coyote. Each time I thought I failed in some way it had built on what he did, my original sin which hadn't been mine at all. I felt like I should be screaming at someone or something but I didn't know who or what that would be.

The worst part was that anger had always been my go to emotion to deal with the guilt but I couldn't find any to use. My whole existence was a result of a demon's manipulations, all the years I'd been fighting against them had been pointless. They'd owned me, played me and I didn't even know. How the hell was I going to deal with that?

I stopped trying to keep myself upright and just dropped onto the ground, every muscle I had was knotted up and I couldn't stop shaking. "S..Sam..."

The coyote nuzzled my cheek and disappeared. Next thing I knew the sliding glass door opened.

"Dean! Hey!"

"Sa..Sam, Azazel...he..." I couldn't get it out, just couldn't. The Mark had kept everything but hate and anger away for over a year and before that I'd gone pretty much numb after losing Kevin. Between seeing my wolf and the memories everything felt raw and fresh again.

Sam got his arm around my shoulders, "Azazel? What happened?"

"He...he..."

"All right, don't worry about talking. Try to breathe."

"Can't..." The night of the vision came back to me again, laying next to Coyote as she sang, stretching her already raw vocal chords to the limit, calming me. I tried to remember that song and how it felt. My heart started feeling less like a jack hammer and more like a guy pounding nails. I focused on that and things started to settle down.

"Everything's a lie Sam, everything. He made me like this, twisted me, they've always owned me, I lost years ago. I..I"

He pulled me upright, braced me against his chest so I wouldn't fall back over and wrapped his arm around me. "Back up. What set this off?"

"Coyote, not Coyote, Coyote but The Coyote, the guide one. Her guide." My brain was starting to function again even though nothing else was yet. "It was here, it showed me. Said that she asked it to talk to me."

"Okay."

I sounded insane, even to myself but he let me keep going, "It asked me why I carried all these deaths with me, why I don't let them go. Then it showed me, or maybe reminded me of something that..." I still didn't want to say it, even though I knew the reason why I didn't wasn't real. I was fucking four! What the hell was I supposed to do?

"Was it something that happened the night Mom died?"

"Yeah. He...I saw him, he came into my room."

Sam just waited.

"I..."

"You saw him before the fire?"

"Yeah. God Sam, I'm so sorry." It wasn't my fault, but it didn't matter. Why was I apologizing? I finally managed to get my head to move enough so I could see his face. He looked confused, which made sense but what didn't make sense was how calm he looked. He didn't seem the least bit worried about what I was going to say. I'm talking about the worst night of our lives and he was simply waiting for me to keep talking. How could he not be upset? Had he really let go of all that? I know he didn't actually remember it but still.

"I saw him before, I never told Dad or anyone. I thought it was a dream at first. Then Dad started talking about the yellow eyed demon and I knew what I'd seen was real but that's not all of it. Azazel blocked the rest. The Coyote broke through it somehow."

"What happened?"

"He...he told me that I was Michael's perfect vessel and that I'd already been programmed for the job. All the love, the loyalty, the whole obey at all costs thing it was all there. Then he said he couldn't lay a finger on me because the angels would show up so he...he gave me, as he called it, an Original Sin. Guilt."

His eyes got huge and he went from calm to straight up pissed off in a flash, "He what? How?"

"Twisted my emotions. He told me it would always be my fault, that night was my fault, everything would always be my fault and made it feel like it was. Said that he loved guilt because it was so easily warped. Then he walked out, reset the scene so I would see him walk by and blocked the whole conversation. Sam...I...everything..." I lost it again.

"Son of a bitch! He got to both of us."

"I fell for it, fell for them. That...all of that...they owned me from day one."

"You were four Dean! You'd just been traumatized by a frigging demon, lost your Mom and were scared shitless! No, they did not own you, they did not own either of us. We ripped their entire plan to shreds! This guilt that everyone has tried to tell you wasn't something you should feel, wasn't you. Don't you get it? It was him!"

"It doesn't matter, everything I've done, my whole life was based off that. So.."

"So you killed Abaddon, helped me defeat Lucifer, blew apart the Leviathans, sent hundreds of demons back to Hell because Azazel wanted you to? Do you realize how insane that sounds? If they owned you, you would be a Knight of Hell right now, not sitting here after saving the world again. If they owned you, you would have stepped aside when I let out Lucifer and let him take over. Did you do any of those things?"

"No..." Maybe it wasn't my fault. Maybe...

"Yes, okay maybe you wouldn't have run to a demon and ended up in Hell if it hadn't been for this guilt but that's not what matters. What matters is what you did after you found out what was going on. That's what's important. Azazel gave you that guilt to throw you off, throw us off. Screw with Heaven. In the end though we did the right thing. Me with the demon blood and you with your Original Sin as he called it, stopped the Apocalypse. We were supposed to be the pawns of Heaven and Hell and we threw it back in their faces. Do you see how that guilt didn't run your life? That even with that you pulled through. That you have never had anything to feel guilty for?"

"I don't?"

"No. Well maybe breaking a few hearts and committing some low level crimes here and there."

He was trying, I had to give him that, "It's not that simple Sam."

"I know, but you know what I'm getting at here. It's not like we haven't covered this ground before. But now? With this? Dean, he made you feel guilty for everything before you could even make decisions."

I managed to sit up under my own strength finally but he kept his arm around me, "What do I do with this? I don't even know where to start."

"Maybe try to forgive yourself."

"Sam, my whole world, all my life I did what I did because I felt I owed Dad and you something because I hadn't stopped him. I never questioned Dad because I was the reason he lost his wife, I protected you because I failed to protect her. I hunted, I..." It was getting hard to breathe again and I had to stop.

He looked away from me, then down, then back at me, "Remember what I told you about Amelia? How I had no road map for the first time in my life? How I was alone? How since I had nothing connecting me to hunting I decided to stop?"

"Yeah."

"Well, you're not exactly alone, I'm still here but you're kind of in the same place. Think about it. You've spent your whole life living for us because you thought you had to. What if you don't? You were four Dean, there was nothing you could have done. Nothing. Just like when we save little kids from ghosts and evil spirits. There is nothing they can do, they aren't physically or emotionally capable to stop what is going on. You were just like them back then."

He was right. There was nothing I could have done, nothing Dad could have done. Michael wiped the whole deal from Mom's mind when we went back in time so she didn't even know Azazel was coming for Sam till it was too late. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't. If that wasn't my fault, what really was?

"How is she?" I wasn't avoiding the topic, I just needed to know.

"That's the reason I came out here actually. We got her and Cougar all set up in the downstairs bedroom. Cougar got incense and all that going, he had a small drum in his car that he gave Roy and showed him what rhythm to play. I got the impression I was pretty much useless so I, well, I didn't exactly think your idea about researching was wrong."

I managed to smile a little at that, "We do like to get ourselves in trouble don't we?"

"Well Cougar was busy, so..." He shrugged.

"Find anything?"

"Not on the net, no. Natives never really wrote down anything related to their shamanic practices. Most of the Shamans say they are guided what to do by their spirits when the time comes. There's same basic herb lore but nothing related to this. I was about to quit when a rather large coyote showed up."

"Really? Guess it can do more than one thing at a time."

"Yeah, it said that a spirit sickness is just that, like a flu or something. That all we can do is support her, keep her in a safe place and wait. That it was doing all it could to keep Coyote from succumbing but it has to run it's course. Then it told me to get out here, because I could do more here than sitting in front of a computer."

"So we wait."

He nodded. "Not something we do all that well, I know."

The door opened. "Dean?" It was Roy, "I think you need to come inside. She's kind of awake, I think, but she's talking about that Mark and Cougar doesn't really know what's going on."

"What?" I bolted, Roy barely moved out of my way in time.

As soon as I saw her I knew what was wrong, her right arm was tight against her body, hand clenched into a fist, her left hand was over the exact spot where the Mark used to be and tears were running down her face. Her eyes were closed tight and she was breathing fast.

"Dean! Don't take it. Don't! Stop! You don't have to!"

Shit, "Coyote, honey. Listen. It's a dream darlin', you're not there. I'm fine. I'm right here."

Cougar looked up at me, "I told you..."

"Back off Cougar. I know, I won't touch her and I won't get closer than this. My corruption as you call it is already in her head anyway, that's why she's dreaming about it. I fucked up, I get it, but it was her damn choice not to tell me that she was picking up on all that. I tried to give her that pouch back, she told me to keep it, that she wanted me to. So instead of picking fights with me, accept that fact that she knew what she was doing and wanted to help. It's who she is. No matter how much I wished she'd done something different I'm not going to take the blame for this." Wow, that felt really damn weird to say.

There was this shimmering coming from the pendant around her neck, the one that had some writing on it I could barely see. "What's that necklace?"

Cougar took a minute to calm down, I think my reply caught him off guard as much as it had me, "She made that after Rising Dove died. It's in memory of him."

I heard that Healing Song she sang again, but not just in my head. It was just floating through the air, it wasn't her voice singing it either. It was Rising Dove's. Cougar went from angry to surprised to a bit awestruck in a matter of seconds. He closed his eyes and started singing along.

I can't sing for shit, I didn't know the words, or so I thought, but they seemed to come to me. I knew how to pronounce them and I don't speak a word of Lakota. It's a hard ass language to learn, the pronunciations are all different but that didn't seem to matter. Somehow Cougar's voice, mine and the ghost voice of Rising Dove meshed well enough and we worked our way through it three times. At the end of the third run through she relaxed and her eyes opened.

"Coyote?"

"Dean? Cougar? Where am I?"

Cougar reached down, took her in his arms and squeezed so hard I was pretty damn sure she couldn't breathe for a minute. "You're safe, you're safe."

"Hi darlin', we're at Jim's house. You got tagged by a demon snake thing, went down and we got you back here. Leaping Deer's taken care of."

Cougar set her back down, she held his hand for a minute then looked up at me. She'd told me years ago that if I kept making the same choices over and over I'd end up alone. We'd always kept each other at arm's length deep down but I didn't see the need anymore. I didn't really know how things stood with us, but I wasn't going to be that guy again, so I leaned down and kissed her. At first she didn't really respond but it didn't take long before I got an answer as to how things stood between us. I pulled back before things got really out of hand.

"Rest up, we'll talk later. I'm not going anywhere, promise."

I saw her face shift into that shaman look of concentration, "What happened? You look different."

"Later," then I took a deep breath, "Love ya. Get some rest."

If she wasn't already laying down I think she would have fallen over. I turned around and Sam was right there. He waited till I stepped out of the room before tackle hugging me. "About damn time!"

By the time he let me go I was pretty sure I was grinning like an idiot.