Summary: Cas pulled his broken body over the grass-covered graves beneath them. The buried dead that he and Sam would soon be among. But Dean was alive and only a few feet away. Only a few feet and he could fix this. He would fix it. There was still time: time to send him back, time to make the other choice, time to choose a different road. TIMELINE AU

Chapter Warnings: Azazel's turn! Our favorite Prince and Princess of Hell are up to no good as we see the first of Hell's big change of plans.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

The Road So Far (This Time Around)

Season 1: Interlude II

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

For the first time in the forty eight years he had spent on Earth, the last thirty four of which he had searched tirelessly and often fruitlessly for Lucifer's true vessel, Azazel wished he could be back in Hell. The pit was not a pleasant place, that was certain, and the Prince of Hell was no true fan of it. Not the darkness of its deepest layers, or the heat of hellfire, or the screams of the damned. Azazel held no love of his birthplace, only a love for Lucifer.

It was for his true Father, the angel who had given him a second birth, that he clawed his way through the depths of the damned to rise on Earth in search of him. He had tried the harder way – to burrow through level after level of Hell's infinite reaches in search of the cage. But he had wasted centuries looking and never come close.

Now, staring at his ruined arm, he wished to be surrounded by hellfire once more. Hell had a way of both amplifying and nulling pain. It was a land of paradoxes, and Azazel desired that most right now. Lilith could possibly heal the wretched limb without the power of a soul deal, or at the least lessen the annoying hindrance it had become. Crowley, at the very least least, would be able to coerce some human sucker into a deal strong enough to fix the blasted thing.

Azazel had considered summoning him for just such a purpose several times since he had let the Winchesters out of his grasp.

It would have to wait, however. He would not waste the time and effort spent capturing the boys or luring John in just to ease a nuisance. The arm could wait. His demon had done as commanded, landing all three Winchesters in the nearest hospital almost the moment they'd fled from his grasp. The eldest son was lying in a coma on life support, unlikely to live much longer.

John would sell his soul to save him, Azazel was sure of it. He just needed to be patient. And, in case the hunter did not summon him directly, Crowley and his crossroad demons needed to be free to make the deal.

So, here Azazel was, forced to communicate with Lucifer's Firstborn through a chalice of blood once more. The situation may be sparing him some unpleasantness, actually, given Lilith's ungodly shrieks coming through the blood. Hers were not the only screams either, hence the unpleasantness he was likely being spared. She was pissed, and rightly so, given Azazel had just relayed that Dean Winchester was walking around with a little chunk of angel in his chest.

He was somewhat remiss to not be witness to the expression on her face, though. Lilith threw a bitch fit like no other, and it could be quite entertaining if you were not one of her intended targets. Another demon screamed for mercy through the blood, an unfortunate causality of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Is he a vessel already?" Once the cries had died out, leaving the blood silent but for her heavy breaths of exertion and rage, she managed to calm enough to speak with him.

"Nope," Azazel popped the last consonant. "Just a sliver of grace snuggled right up to that righteous soul of his."

No wonder his daughter had been ousted when she kissed him. His blood had been foul: completely unbearable, tainted with that righteous poison, created by the smallest of angelic influences. With an angel's grace sitting pretty in his chest, Azazel had no doubt Dean truly had tasted sulfur on her tongue.

"How the hell does an angel's grace get in a human?"

The words were spat with such disgust and fury it brought a lazy smile to Azazel's face. He shrugged regardless, not that Hell's Princess could see the gesture. She'd probably hear it in his words, though. "Not easily, that's for sure. I didn't think the cloud hoppers were that creative. They've been monitoring their vessel this whole time without ever leaving the pearly gates. Feeding him information. It's ingenious, really."

It was also damn close to what they had been planning for Sam. Which was infuriating, even if one could respect an opponent's cleverness.

"And pumping him up while they're at it!" Lilith screamed, pointing out that other tidbit Heaven was copying them on. Azazel wasn't sure if who in the lead, though. If he'd gotten Sammy to drink that last container of blood, they'd surely be winning the mini game.

It rankled him that he hadn't managed it, but the Prince of Hell was nothing if not patient, and he knew they had time yet.

But if the angels were introducing bits of grace into Dean Winchester over time, he was going to be just as powerful an archangel vessel as Sam would be once he reached his peak on demon blood. So much for their little one-upper plan. Heaven and Hell were back on even footing for now.

"It doesn't seem to be doing much in the way of protecting him," Azazel reasoned out loud. A little silver lining, perhaps. "It's not enough grace to heal him when injured or shield him from attack. But if they start doing some more cloud-seeding before we can get to him…"

"They'll interfere with our plans, and we'll be fucked." Lilith always did have a way with words. "We're going to have to change it. All of it. From now on, our backup plans will need backup plans."

"What of the prophet?" The Prince of Hell idly picked at the dead flesh on his arm, peeling away a chunk of blackened skin like a discarded scale. "Did Crowley do as I asked?"

"Yes. For a demon who never shuts up about his numerous connections, he sure is slow at getting the simplest of information." The young voice was pouting and seething at the same time now. "He has a man watching the prophet, but there's an archangel tied to his ass. So even if he is helping the Winchesters, there's nothing we can do to stop it."

"For now." Azazel filed the information away, intent to speak more in depth with Crowley once John was secure in Alistair's capable hands. ""We'll start with the Hell Gate. We can't move forward with the plan until we get you topside, anyway."

The silence of the slowly bubbling blood was agreement enough from the Princess. After a moment, she asked, much more reasonably than any previous tone so far in the conversation, "What are we going to do about the angels?"

"Angel," Azazel corrected, eyes going unfocused as he thought back to that explosive power that activated the second his twisted essence made contact with the celestial purity. Angels and demons really weren't meant to mix. It had hurt like hell, for them both he figured. The boy was lucky to have survived it at all, but those were angels for you. Holier than thou, self-righteous bags of dicks. No better than demons; they just thought they were. Which, in the Prince of Hell's humble opinion, made them far worse. "It's only the one, and not even that. An infinitesimal percentage of an angel."

"If it's guarding Dean Winchester, one percent or one hundred doesn't make a difference. We'll never get his soul in Hell."

"Oh yes, we will." He was not prepared to give up all their years of planning and careful execution because one unpredicted chunk of grace now stood in their path. "One angel can be dealt with; we'll find a way. Until then…I think if Heaven wants to play dirty, it's only fair we join their game."

The silence was a curious one this time, and though Lilith's response was drawled, it was also full of the scaling malice that was their birthright. "What did you have in mind?"

"I think we need to get Sam a little guardian of his own. Turnabout is fair play, and all that."

"A demon?" Lilith sounded thrilled, the excitement in her voice already suggesting she had the perfect one in mind. "I have a girl for the job. I've been grooming her for this for decades."

"No," Azazel interrupted before she could get going. Lilith was excellent at cultivating the cream of the crop of demonhood. Truly, she had a gift for it, which is likely what Lucifer had first seen in her thousands of years ago. But hell-spawn was not what they needed to win this game. Not yet, anyway. "The grace in Dean's chest will spot a demon a mile away. Save your girl, we'll need her still."

"If not a demon, then what? A human? They'll never stay loyal. Even a soul deal won't be enough leverage to assure their cooperation."

By the disgust in her tone, Azazel could already tell that anything other than human or demon would be immediately nixed. She didn't much care for the pagans or their monsters, and trusted them even less. But Azazel thought he had good odds of persuading her to see things his way this time around.

"No. Not a human." The Prince thought back to a conversation they'd had long, long ago. "For this, we need to go with something less…biblical. Something Heaven isn't prepared to deal with."

Now Hell's Princess was clearly frowning so sharply it came through every word. "We are not opening Purgatory. We're having enough trouble with one Hell Gate!"

Azazel barked out a laugh, though it curled into a purr at its tail end. "Now that is an interesting thought. Not the one I was thinking, but veryinteresting…"

Oh, the things the Leviathans could do to upset an Apocalypse… Very interesting indeed.

On the other end of the conversation, Lilith growled low in her throat, tiring of this game. The blood rippled and spat with her growing impatience, and Azazel didn't need his Hell-born sixth sense to know he was wearing thin his tolerated presence.

"There are still things on this Earth yet that can give even Heaven's finest trouble. You told me once you thought you'd found where one of them was buried."

The blood went so still that the Prince of Hell, had he not known Lucifer's firstborn so well, might have thought their conversation cut short. Then it began bubbling ecstatically. Lilith didn't even have to say anything for the crimson liquid to relay her malicious grin as she caught on to his train of thought.

"You don't happen to remember where that was…?"

-o-o-o-

Azazel picked his way through the long-settled dust and dirt of the forgotten city. Occasionally, a solid crunch beneath his boot signaled a stray human remain, one of the few bones that hadn't disintegrated completely in the thousands of years since this settlement had been buried deep beneath the earth's crust by the wrath of a God.

It took time, working his way through crumbling structures, barely recognizable for the ancient things they once were. Most were gone completely. Only the edges of this city had survived annihilation by fire and brimstone. But the edges were all he needed, and eventually Azazel found his way to one of the few buildings still standing above the others, built with solid foundations and thick walls, meant to last through the ages. A tomb. A burial place for the kings and nobles and priests that once oversaw this great city.

The Prince of Hell entered through the half-collapsed doorway, a malicious grin on his face. Stairs led him down, down, down into the darkness until even his Hell-spawned eyes struggled to see the depths. He pulled out and twisted on a flashlight, amused at the modern technology lighting his way in such an old place. He ought to have brought a wooden stick and an oil-slicked rag. Done this Indiana Jones style.

Hey, even demons were entitled to their flights of fancy.

The flashlight lit his way down, level after level of buried, honored dead. Tombs lined the high-arching hallways he passed, some entombed in the walls, others built in the centers and sides of the rooms as stone coffins, impressive and ageless.

Finally, Azazel's feet touched the stone depths of the final floor. The deepest that the burial tomb went; the oldest of the kings concealed here. He shone his light throughout the circular room that stretched beyond the reach of the flashlight. Massive stone pillars supported the underground cavern, and the demon weaved his way between them, checking each erected tomb and sarcophagus.

It was on the twelfth stone entombment that the Prince of Hell found the first signs of what he was looking for. Etched in a ring about the walls of the sarcophagus, just beneath the lip of the heavy stone lid, were ancient symbols of a language long dead to the likes of Azazel. His face split with a grin as he reached out a hand, running calloused fingertips across the warding. The ancient spells lit faintly blue to his touch, glimmering in the castoff of his flashlight.

"This is it." He nodded to himself, agreeing out loud in a room filled with nothing but the dead and what he had come for. The demon dug a knife from his hip, tracing slow steps around the perimeter of the stone coffin, eyes scanning the carved symbols. "Ah-ha. There you are."

He reached out with the tip of his blade and made a careless, insignificant little flick to one of the heavier lines dug into the stone. The knife ate at the old work, catching on the stone and adding a thin little scratch of his own to the existing warding.

It flamed blue for a second before fizzling out with a pathetic pop. The words did not light again, and Azazel grinned, putting the knife and the flashlight on the lid of another tomb just behind him. He turned back to the sarcophagus and, now with the warding dismantled, dug the full weight of his demon-enhanced body into the stone lid. The Prince of Hell pushed with his mind as well as his hands, and the thing groaned and grumbled inch for inch as it slid and stuttered to the side until, finally, it toppled off of its stone walls and hit the floor with a thunderous crack.

The bits of dust and old death things that clung about the place, stirred by more movement than it had seen in millennia, subsided with minimal affair. The demon paused by the side of the sarcophagus, eyebrows raised as he stared at the lip of the stone and the dark, cavernous depths beyond. Nothing moved.

With a frown, Azazel hauled himself up onto the base step of the coffin, forgoing caution and any scrap of decency or decorum that he'd never had to begin with. He hoisted himself with a groan, swinging a leg up and over the erect stone wall to straddle the top of it and peer down into the tomb.

His eyes lit yellow, glowing in the unnatural light of the flashlight in that very dark place. He grinned down at the body that lay, unmoving at the bottom of the stone grave, staring up at him with distrustful, angry, unnaturally green eyes.

"Well hello, Beautiful."

Azazel reached into the tomb, clasping at the lithe, feminine hand that reached back.