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Title: Children of the Wanderers (Rock of Ages translation) (1/2)
Title: Children of the Wanderers (Rock of Ages translation)
Author: Hannah
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Gen
Rating: R
Notes: Written for Remix Redux 9 from the story Rock of Ages by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rivkat. Thanks to pwcorgigirl and topaz_eyes for beta-reading and asking the right questions, ayalesca for cheerleading, and the New York Public Library for letting me check out more books than I needed.
A gorgeous a capella version of "Rock of Ages" can be heard here.
Dean and Sam had learned early on how to keep the truth to themselves. Dad had sat each of them down when they was old enough to listen, and explained it wasn’t anyone’s fault, just that not everyone understood what they did or who they were, and it was best to not give out too much. What they did, who they were, it was important, and they had to remember that.
It took Dean years to figure out what Dad meant by that talk. He thought he knew – salting the doors and windows at every hotel and target practice every free Sunday way out past the edge of whatever town needed something killed inside it weren’t things most kids did. That stuff, he knew not talk about it. When he did figure it out, he was eight, and had someone to help him: his teacher, who’d asked everyone what their favorite Christmas songs were, and Dean said he didn’t have one because his family didn’t do Christmas. Even that wouldn’t have been too bad – hey, different people do different things, great, let’s all learn about Ragnarok and Ramadan – but then she pulled him up in front of the class and asked him to tell the story of Hanukkah.
When he thought back on it, maybe he shouldn’t have gone into so much detail about the Maccabees taking the Temple back, but he’d thought everyone knew the story so he wanted to get to the good parts fast. By the time she got back from the principal’s office he was trying to organize the class into Romans and Maccabees, with paper swords for everyone.
Maybe it was because there were Jews all over that Dean didn’t think there was anything different about what his family did. There was always a shul somewhere, and maybe some of them didn’t have the men sitting with the women or had a someone playing the guitar or everything was in Hebrew or everything was in English but it was always the same prayers with the same words wherever they went. If they were everywhere, then people should know about them.
He told Dad that when he was done in the principal’s office, and Dad laughed his this-is-funny-sad laugh, and told Dean it didn’t work like that.
“Like hunting?”
Dad laughed again. “Yeah. Kind of like hunting.”
-
There were hunters everywhere, too. It wasn’t like they were in every town and city – if they were, Dean knew they could handle stuff in their own backyards, the way Uncle Rufus kept his town poltergeist-free – but they were all over the place. Dad could make a call from a gas station while Sammy picked out another coloring book and Dean kept an eye on him and by the time they got to their hotel there’d be someone waiting for Dad, ready to start tracking the bad guys down then and there.
If it was Friday night, Dean would skip the junk food at the gift shop and walk to a grocery store, get some grape juice, a couple of rolls, real chicken even if it came in a bucket. He’d push a chair onto a table and take out the smoke alarm’s batteries so the candles wouldn’t set anything off. He and Sammy would have their Sabbath dinner sitting on the floor, eating with their hands because it tasted better that way, and Dean wouldn’t even turn the TV on all day, not until it got dark.
When they were at Uncle Rufus’ they didn’t need to bother with all of that, just went through everything the way it was supposed to go, no fussing with the candles or anything. It was even better there because they could go out for target practice too, stay sharp and alert when Dad wasn’t around, and Sammy could eat real food cooked in a kitchen. Rufus had a mezuzah on the front door and another by the front gate, blue glass eyes and metal hands hung around the house keeping watch, and stories of how his grandfather watched Houdini’s escapes whenever the escapist came to Chicago. Rufus’ family had come to America in chains and became Jews like their owners, and stayed with their religion even after they were free.
They didn’t go to anyone else’s houses, even if they were one of the staying-put hunters and not the traveling kind like Dean’s family was. Hunters kept to themselves, kept things private, to keep everyone else around them safe. Sam argued with Dad and Rufus about it – if everyone knew, then couldn’t everyone keep themselves safe? Wouldn’t everyone paint the right sigils onto the doors and keep herbs in the walls and then they wouldn’t need so many hunters?
The only answers Sam got were that it wasn’t that simple and it wasn’t that easy, and that just made him turn around and look for better arguments to prepare for the next time he could bring up the subject.
He didn’t argue with anyone when they said there’d always be hunters. That was something none of them touched. When he’d found out monsters were real, it was Dean’s twelfth birthday and Dad had left them alone for longer than usual, three days moving to five and then six.
“If he’s alive.”
Dean had gotten his hands on some pie – nobody around to say he couldn’t have birthday pie if he wanted, who wanted to have cake on your birthday when pie was so much better – and he’d cut Sam his piece and was trying to talk around a mouthful of pumpkin. “Don’t say that. Of course he’s alive. He’s Dad.”
Sam picked at his slice, leaving the rest to Dean, and it didn’t taste good anymore the way Sammy was looking at it. He ended up throwing the rest of it away in the dumpster at the end of the parking lot. At least he hadn’t paid for it. When he got back to the room, Sam was sitting on the edge of his bed, something in his hands.
“Here.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a birthday present. Uncle Rufus gave it to me for Dad –”
“Dad’s birthday isn’t for months. Keep it for him.”
“Dad lied to me. I want you to have it,” Sam said in the same voice he argued with. “And Uncle Rufus told me we don’t see him enough so he should give it to me now. Take it.” Sam held his arm out and Dean took the little package wrapped up in old comics from a newspaper. “He told me it was real special.”
It was a little kimiyah, tiny, shiny coppery metal, ‘life’ in Hebrew on the front, hanging on black string. Something to carry with him. “Thank you, Sam.” He put it on, held it in his hand, felt its cold weight on his palm, “I love it.”
“Happy birthday, Dean.”
-
Dean got his GED when he was sixteen, fourteen months shy of when he’d have graduated if his life was a little more normal. Sammy stuck it out for the whole twelve years, already worn to the stuttering and stopping pace of moving around every time Dad got a new job. The only time they were close to tethered was the year of his Bar Mitzvah, and even then Dad wasn’t able to stick around for the whole stretch or even the big event. He didn’t really care for the religion or the rituals anymore, but didn’t make a fuss when Sam started to wear his kippah everywhere and took the time to pray every day. Neither did Dean. He knew if there was anyone with a problem with that, it wasn’t Sam.
“Your mother wasn’t very religious when we met,” Dad said when he and Dean were watching a werewolf burn while Sammy waited back in the car. Dean kept his mouth shut and Dad went on, “After we were married, she went – she started baking challah every Friday, skirts and scarves all the time. Every blessing. She thrived on it. You remember how happy she was.” He stared into the fire, turning his hand to cup his fingers in his palm to catch the fire’s reflection, and Dean did the same: it was an hour past sunset and time for havdalah. “If she knew.”
If she was here, Dad meant. If it hadn’t come into the bedroom, she’d be here. If she was here we wouldn’t be. Dean stared at the fire shining on his nails, “We’ll get it someday.”
-
They usually ignored anything that anyone called “God’s will,” especially those standard Bible-thumping preachers doing their damn best to justify their cause of the moment. It was when someone got stabbed in cold blood over it and didn’t try to justify it as anything but, and was the second person in one town to do it in three weeks, that it was time to call in the professionals.
“So Gloria’s just your standard issue wacko?”
“If it was just her.” Sam shucked off his jacket, flopped down on his bed. “Probably a demon or spirit, something that wants to see its idea of justice done, possessing people who can’t say no and won’t move on unless we give it a push.”
“Great, point me at it.”
“It’s just weird – I was at her place and no sulfur, no EMF.”
“Whatever it was, it was telling those poor bastards to hunt down evildoers, right?”
“Well, Carl Gully, I couldn’t find any dirt on him. Lots of friends, regular churchgoer –”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not there. We should check out his place.” Sam didn’t look up. “Come on, man, I’m going stir-crazy in here.”
“Yeah. It’s that…” he trailed off, moving to stare at the other side of the room.
“Is it the holy water? That stuff works, man. Look, maybe it’s just a ghost, we won’t even need any.”
Sam shook his head before looking up at Dean. “She seemed happy.”
“Gloria?”
“Yeah. She’ll be spending the rest of her life in a locked ward unless someone gets her off on insanity and good behavior, but she’s happy. She thinks she’s done God’s work.”
“And you’re jealous because she’s, what, she’s got faith in what she did.” Sam kept looking at him. “Oh, knock off the puppy-dog eyes. Anyone who can get pushed over like that would be happy about anything anyone tells them. Dollars to doughnuts she’d have believed this thing if it said it was, a, a fairy, or a unicorn, Martian, whatever. And maybe these randoms are evil, doesn’t matter, we’ve got our own job to do.”
“You think so? Angels descending to Earth, that’s one thing you can believe, but an angel that can’t get its hands dirty isn’t?”
Dean crossed his arms over his chest. “An angel that can’t get its hands dirty is no messenger of God.”
-
In a kitchen made of Thomas Kinkade vomit mixed with Claymation specials, bound to a chair all wreathed up to be sacrificed to some freaking Pagans, getting fucking sliced up, and Dean knew the thing that pissed Sam off the most was that his hat was still in the basement.
“Leave him alone, you son of a bitch!”
“Hear how they talk to us? To gods?” Edward laughed. “Listen, pal, back in the day we were worshipped by millions.”
Sam was hissing, panting, fuck. Dean gritted his teeth. “Times have changed!”
“Tell me about it. All of a sudden, this Jesus character is the hot new thing in town. All of a sudden, our altars are being burned down and we’re being hunted down like common monsters.” He took a suck on his pipe and grinned at Dean and were those fangs in his mouth? “I’d think you two could sympathize. Tell me, what did those Christians do to your temples? Your tribes?”
“This is not the same thing!” Dean shouted.
“I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to you, dear,” Madge said. She patted his arm with the flat of the blade, Sam’s blood wet on his skin. “But I think if we could have a chat with your man upstairs he’d say something different.” She smiled and nope, no fangs in her mouth, just regular teeth too good to be true. “It’s too bad about you people, it really is. But look on the bright side! You’ll finally have yourselves a real Christmas.”
“You’re not really selling it, lady.”
She kept on smiling as she cut him, pulled out Sam’s goddamn nail and almost getting one of his teeth, so goddamn psychotic Dean knew he’d want to kill her even if she wasn’t evil through-and-through. He got his chance with Edward, staking him a couple more times than he probably needed to get him good and dead.
Sam wiped off his forehead, ran his fingers through his hair. Dean shook his head. “Fucking goyim.”
“Gentiles, Dean. Be polite.”
And maybe it was because gods were normally way over their pay grade or maybe it was he had just over five months left or maybe it was the way Sam said it all throaty and tired, that Dean couldn’t help but laugh.
-
Getting to say ‘I told you so’ never felt as good as it was supposed to. Henrickssen didn’t look too happy with it, either, and Dean couldn’t blame him a bit. He’d heard about Lilith months ago, when Richie tipped him off about that town and Casey went on and on about the first wife of Adam. If something of her caliber was gunning for him and Sam, there probably wasn’t much that could get in her way. No use sugar-coating it for the guy. There was something really freeing in knowing he was going out and could say whatever the hell he wanted in the meantime.
“Honestly, I think the world’s gonna end bloody,” Dean said. “But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight. We do have choices.” That was what it all came down to: the choices he made. He smiled as best he could. “I choose to go down swinging.”
-
There was only one thing Dean didn’t remember about his time downstairs. He didn’t stop to think about it when he was digging his way out of his grave, when the air screamed and the windows shattered, when Rufus hung up on him in the phone booth and then attacked him before he got two steps in the door and didn’t believe him until after he cut himself with the knife. There wasn’t any time.
He promised Rufus and Sam he didn’t remember, and it was true, it was that last, that one thing he didn’t. Everything else was perfect, the sort of perfect he knew he’d have forever, forty extra years battering around in his skull. Forty years in exile, in the desert, long enough that there wouldn’t be anyone left who remembered slavery to enter the promised land. The slave mentality had to be gone, but the history and memory would remain forever. And by God, Dean remembered.
He laughed when Sam passed him his first beer topside. “Just because we don’t believe in Hell doesn’t mean Hell doesn’t believe in us.”
“You have no idea how comforting that is.” Sam took a long pull from his own bottle, staring at Dean like he’d evaporate in the sun or flicker away at any moment. There was something hard to his face that hadn’t been there the last – just a few months ago, right, just a few months, not years for Sam. Dean didn’t like it: Sammy just didn’t look like Sammy without his hat.
“All right, then” Rufus said, snapping them out of it. “I’ve gone through everyone I know, everyone they know, everyone they think they know, and I think I found someone the next state over. You two up for a drive?”
They ended up in the kitchen of the only strict kabbalist in New Hampshire. Ken Gershon had moved up to the mountains to retire from busy city life, raise a few chickens, and scrape a minyan together on the major holidays if he was lucky. He sat everyone down at the table with glasses of scotch and fresh cookies all around and listened long and hard before saying anything.
“There’s no chance this was a demon.”
Sam rolled his eyes.
Ken went on, “Dean, from what you’re telling me, they wanted you downstairs. They wouldn’t be canny enough to let you up since there isn’t anything you could do for them up here.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Double-bluff gambits aren’t demon style. They’ve been coming after you two how long?” He drained his glass and poured himself another. “No, it’d be better for them to keep you down there. Something broke you out and dragged you up.”
“Any idea what that might be?” Rufus held his own glass out.
“Nothing nice.”
When Castiel brought down the house, parting the doors like the goddamn Red Sea and striding past everything like it was nothing, Dean swore there wasn’t anything flashing over his vision along with the flying sparks. When Castiel proclaimed, “I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,” it still wasn’t enough to bring back anything stronger than a half-remembered dream.
If there was anyone on earth who could look less like an angel, it was the Columbo lookalike standing before him; if there was anything that felt more like an angel, power and dread and glory ripping through the air when he spread the shadows of his wings, Dean didn’t know what that could be.
“Why’d you do it?” Dean demanded.
“Because God commanded it. Because He has work for you.”
It took falling asleep and dreaming to remember everything about the end, all of it coming back right away all at once too jumbled and fast: the chains, the screams, then the light and the cries coming in like the tide, and something great and terrifying roaring like the sound of the sun. Breaking him free from the rack, the great and terrifying thing looked right to the very essence of Dean and drew its head back to command him to fear not.
Dean woke up cold, shivering, and sick. He padded to the bathroom, flicked on the light and rolled up his sleeve to look at the handprint again. It didn’t feel any different from either side; it just felt like a scar. One that’d be impossible to explain away as a camping accident or car repairs gone wrong or a vicious dog two towns over – even falling face-down into a gravel driveway or nicking himself in the kitchen. He’d used them all. This was time for something completely different, in way more ways than he wanted.
Him, specifically, Dean Winchester him. What the hell – okay, bad choice of words. Why for the love of pie and all that was holy would the Lord Himself want Dean for anything? At all. Ever. At some point, maybe before Sam died and Dean sold his soul to that crossroads demon. That sort of divine attention would’ve come in handy right about then. Or right before Dad died. Or fuck, pulling Mom out of the goddamn fire.
Castiel was waiting for him in the kitchen when he went to get some water. Or maybe he was keeping watch for Lord-knows-what reason, or he might have been preening his feathers and hid them away as soon as Dean approached. He could’ve been cross-stitching for all Dean knew. But. Angel in the kitchen. Just standing there. His shoulder suddenly ached.
“Hello, Dean.”
He was too angry to be awed. “You mind telling me what’s going on?”
“You’ll have to be more precise.”
“You, me, the pit, the pulling, the saving. Why?”
“Those were my orders.”
“Yeah, you’re a freaking warrior of heaven and messenger of the Lord. You and everyone else up there. Who gave the orders?”
“Why do you insist you don’t deserve this?”
“Because if there was someone upstairs, if there was a God gunning for me to stay topside, He’d have shown His back to me a long time ago.”
“There’s a God.” Castiel didn’t even blink.
“I’m not convinced. Because if there is a God, what’s He waiting for? Why not pull me out Himself?”
Castiel looked away. “Many angels laid siege to Hell to rescue you. I was the one –”
“He’s not here, is He.”
“He’s here.”
“Oh, no, He’s not. So if He’s not here, who told you to get me out? Why get me out?”
“There is work for you, Dean.” His voice stayed low and steady, like he didn’t know how to use it except as a weapon.
“What’s there for me to do that nobody else can? Why me?”
Castiel didn’t blink, didn’t look away, just gave the news flat-out. “Because you showed yourself to be righteous.”
-
“What?” Sam asked, still wet from the shower, towel clinging to his legs as Dean stared at him. The anti-possession tattoo on his chest looked pretty new, the lines sharp and clean like on the one Dean had. It was professional, quality work, and nothing like the crude one he’d sketched on Sam when he was drugged out cold and in no position to protest.
“Where’d that come from?”
Sam shrugged and grabbed a pair of briefs from the suitcase. “I had it redone when you were gone. No offense, but you’re a pretty crappy tattoo artist.”
-
The Winchesters made their name by killing demons. Anything nasty that crossed their path once didn’t get a chance to it again – a hunter who couldn’t put down a simple ghost wasn’t any use to anyone – but every hunter had their own specialty, maybe vampires or shapeshifters. For the Winchesters, it was demons. Dybbuks, shedim, jinn, lilim, rakshasas, velatas, asuras, fiends, oni, succubi, incubi, imps, haakai, John and Dean and Sam smoked them all. They delivered death any and every way they possibly could: banishing, binding, shooting, slicing, dicing, splashing, salting, ironing, stabbing, exorcisms, mercy killings. For years Dean knew it was because Dad was gunning for revenge against the one that killed Mom, and killing the rest of them along the way was just the best possible way to make sure nobody else’s mother died like that. It helped him get to sleep at night and out of bed in the morning.
So when Cas zapped Dean back to 1973, he didn’t expect to learn it wasn’t a new tradition with his generation or a new line of work for his family. The demon hadn’t even been after Mom; it’d be coming for him and Sam. It didn’t know Mom would throw herself in its path to give them time to get out of there. Her very last hunt. Dean didn’t know if that made it better or worse, just that it made him hate it more, that it didn’t know what was coming and wouldn’t care if it did.
“You still don’t get it,” the demon said. “All the fuss, all the attention, and for what, any old hunter that’s twelve for ten cents? Wrong, future boy.”
It didn’t know. It wouldn’t know if Dean didn’t tell it anything, he could still warn Mom.
“There’s little princes like you all over, all the time, every generation, but things are moving faster now and we don’t have time to waste,” it added, almost purring. “Gotta cut this off at the pass, gotta keep things nice and steady and make sure it doesn’t get here on schedule.”
What the hell was it going on about? Princes? “Make sure what doesn’t get here?”
It acted like it hadn’t heard him. “It’d be nice to fix it so we don’t have to worry, but you’re like weeds, always creeping through no matter how many times we cut you off, and even when we try to pull out the roots you’re still around.”
“Do what you like, but I’m still going to kill you.” Keep it here, keep it talking, Dean thought. Let Mom get away. It wasn’t even making sense anymore.
“Right, now that I’d like to see.”
“You’ll see it all right. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but one day soon I’ll be there, so look into my eyes, you son-of-a-bitch, because I’m the one who kills you.”
The yellow-eyed demon Dean would kill in 2007 chuckled with his grandmother’s mouth in 1973. “So you’re going to kill me and save everyone, that’s your plan.”
“It’s a lot better than what you’ve cooked up downstairs.”
It kept laughing. “You think we don’t know what we’re doing? We’re five steps ahead of your little buddies, they’re not telling you anything you need to know, you don’t have a clue. Tell you what, I send you upstairs right now, you ask them when you get there.”
-
This case was exactly the kind they’d started hunting together on, and this whole wench-filled Oktoberfest-lite should’ve gotten Sam’s spirits up, at least to where he could relax around Dean and stop checking to see if he was present. Nothing much seemed to be working, not information about their grandparents, not the promise he wasn’t going back downstairs, not even teasing him in front of the beer wenches to prove he was still all there. There wasn’t much more Dean could do than keep talking and let Sam know he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I came back from the furnace without any of my old scars, right? You know, bullet wounds, knife cuts, none of the off-angled fingers from the breaks.” Dean grinned. “Except the one.”
Sam drew back to look at Dean from the corner of his eyes. “Are you saying…?”
“Cut by an angel. And I’ve got to say he’s a heck of a mohel – real quality work down there. Clean, no flab.”
“He didn’t just leave it off?”
“You think I wouldn’t recognize the difference?”
“Sorry I asked.” But he was smiling around the corners of his eyes, and looked more like the Sammy Dean remembered than he had in weeks.
-
When they finally had ten minutes to take a piss, Rufus dug through his rolodex, fished through his contacts, and came up with one Robert Singer. Dean remembered the guy pretty well: he’d known Dad through the usual networks, and he’d helped track down Bela forty-one – last year. He’d helped track Bela down last year right before his time was up. Singer said he didn’t need anything this time around, but accepted the first edition Houdini hardback with a gruff thanks and an offer of beer. Dean tried not to gulp it down.
Singer and Sam hit it off like burning, thousands of pages piled onto the kitchen table with annotations and footnotes galore, leaving Dean to his own devices, which translated to target practice out back. When he got back inside, they were still going at it, except Sam had pulled his laptop out and was busy scrolling through something-or-other that turned out to be newspaper death notices.
“Was it in sleep mode?”
Sam didn’t even roll his eyes at Dean’s old joke. Singer gave him a look, and Sam shrugged. “It’s considered work to turn it on. Anyway, I thought it was funny how the demons were gunning for Mom’s family and not Dad’s, but it’s not just that. See,” Sam pointed to a set of columns and didn’t wait for Dean to wipe the gunpowder off his hands. “It’s not just her relatives, it’s this specific line of them. It went for our grandmother, right?”
“Right.” Dean pulled up a chair, trying not to think of her dead on the floor.
Sam jabbered faster now, the way he did when he figured something out. “Well, these don’t say it was demons, but the papers never do. Some of these go really far back. The attacks went through to her, and the rest of our relatives here, but not anyone from –” And he started to paint a picture Dean didn’t want to think about, that it was never random chance, that there was something out beyond the edges of the map gunning for him and his family. And of course it was passed down to him through his mother. And somehow it was all his relatives on the thinnest of bloodlines going back and back, people he’d never met, and their cousins and those cousins, spreading out exponentially through the ages.
Where was Ash when they needed him?
Dean looked back to Sam. “What was Dad’s family before they came over?”
“Not much. It breaks down a couple of generations before Ellis, but nothing special. Mom’s dad, too.” Grandpa. Singer pushed a book over and Sam flipped it open, someone’s hunter genealogy project. “His side of the family, there’s not much there but it’s all pretty normal, and the records for him go back to the original colonies. But our grandmother, there’s really not much to go on.”
“So we find out what’s up with her, we find out why it’s up with us too.”
“Seems that way,” Singer put in. “These things don’t take interest like this just ’cause they’re bored. This is long-term planning like I’ve never seen.”
Dean put on another pot of coffee for the two of them and went back outside. There was an open hood near the south corner, perfect for stargazing, and he wrapped his arms around his legs and watched the Milky Way go by. There was so much more to the universe, there were people out there better than he’d ever be, he’d done plenty to make him deserve his forty years downstairs. There wasn’t a good reason why for him, and lots of reasons why not.
-
Getting everything together for their little demon picnic took less time than finding the right sort of place to have it. Dean wanted it in the middle of an open field so they’d have more escape routes, shooting down barns because that’d worked so well with Cas. Sam suggested a discarded fallout shelter to keep whatever they got trapped, reminding him demons weren’t angels and they knew how to kill those things pretty well by now.
They ended up in a church basement, Rufus and Sam teaming up to argue for the extra mojo it’d give and how they could use every bit. Dean threw up his hands and went along with it, trying to focus on the herbs and candles instead of Sam’s sudden pragmatism and lack of concern over being down there, and the news that he’d done this sort of thing at least three times a week the first two months Dean was downstairs.
“You’re pretty good at that.”
Sam shook the paint can and finished another sigil in the devil’s trap. “I got a lot of practice.”
“Making the traps, or the whole shebang, the calling and everything?”
“The whole shebang.” He stood back, glanced at Rufus, and took out the book and started reading. Didn’t stumble over the Latin, didn’t hesitate at the Christos and the Dominuses and Patruses coming out of his mouth, hair whipping around his face as the ritual slapped up the air and started to flick the lights on and off. Four months away could be a long time, if you did it right. Dean bristled; long ago, he’d have been the one to do the readings. But he knew even if Sam offered, right now, he might not have said yes. Maybe.
But having a demon appear ten feet away kind of put a hold on any personal crisis of faith anyone might be having.
In all the fairy tales Rufus had in his house for entertaining two visiting kids, demons were always congenial, friendly bastards. Sure, they might steal your kingdom and zap you into slavery, but they were nice about it, and maybe you could even have tea with some of them or explore magic kingdoms on flying carpets as long as everybody stayed polite. Dean always hoped there was some grain of truth to that, and turned out there was: demons were congenial and friendly as all-get-out.
“Well, well, what’ve I got here,” it purred at Rufus. “Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure yet.”
“Well, we’ve only just met,” Dean smiled. “I’m sure we’ll get around to it.”
“Right.” It dropped the girl’s smile, tossing its hair over its shoulder. “Be that way. I’m just trying to have a bit of fun.”
“No, that’s not what we’ve heard.” Sam snapped the book shut. “You’re pretty busy, aren’t you?”
“I was until you bozos shot me up here.”
“Lay off,” Rufus said, crossed his arms over his chest. “We just want a few answers.”
“Forty-two, pi over two, Nineveh, Kirsten Shepard, Richard Nixon, Lee Harvey Oswald, the higgs-bosun.”
“Cute. Not what we’re after.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.” It grinned at Dean. “Your mother?”
“You know about our mother?” Fuck, shouldn’t tip a hand like that, but Dean couldn’t help it.
“Baby, baby, baby,” it crooned, “everyone knows about your mother.”
“Tell us, then,” Sam said.
“I’d prefer not to.”
Rufus shook his head. “You’re not in a position to have a say in the matter. See, we could just leave you here and let you miss out on all the fun. And I’ve been talking, and there’s a lot of fun going on out there, and my guess is you’re missing some right now.” He always looked terrifying when he grinned like that. “And my guess is you really don’t want to be missing out.”
It glared at them.
“Start talking,” Dean barked.
“If we had our way you two princes wouldn’t be here right now.” It spat out the word, looking at Dean, then Sam, then back again. “Your mother was one of the last we had to deal with, but she managed to keep herself on the down-low long enough to have you two. And with the family business being what it is, we wouldn’t have needed to worry about you if the guys upstairs hadn’t forced our hand. But they just aren’t as patient as they used to be. They really want to make that deadline.”
“How long have they got?” Rufus asked, going along with the near-nonsense.
“Thirty-one years.”
“What do you mean by princes?” Dean cut in. “Our parents weren’t anything –” He stopped when it started laughing.
“It’s so cute when you don’t know everything.”
“Tell me about my mother,” Sam said. And there was that sharp Sam voice, the one that he didn’t use unless he had to, the one that told people he was someone with whom not to be fucked. It stopped laughing, and Sam said again, “Tell me about my mother.”
“Be that way.” It stood with its arms akimbo. “Your mother was a two-bit whore that sucks Lilith’s big fat one every day.”
Sam said something in Latin and the demon convulsed, falling to its knees.
“She hated you and your brother, she never loved your father.”
Hebrew this time, and it looked like it was having a seizure.
“She’d hate you even more if she knew what you were doing.”
Another word, another language – Aramaic, from the sound of it – and the demon was shaking like a frog with electric current running through it.
“She was a princess. No –” It took a deep breath when it saw Sam start to speak. “ – Really. She was a princess, would’ve been a queen in another time and place, but she had to be born in America where you only ever had the one emperor. Princess.” It sucked in more air. “Direct descendant.”
“Of who?” Dean crouched down to look it in the eye.
“Your great, great, great, great to the power of great granddaddy.”
“Names, sweetheart.”
“He only ever needed the one.”
“Name, sweetheart.”
It smiled. “I’d prefer not to say.”
Sam spoke again, and it took the demon almost a minute to come down from the pain.
“What was that one?” Rufus asked.
“Spanish. Not really an exorcism, but you know, Catholic purification rites and all that. Ken dug it up – something for dealing with a condenado. Condemned one.”
“Good word,” Dean said without looking away from the demon, which was still panting. He crouched down to look it in the eye. “You feeling better?”
“Fuck you.”
“Baby, there’s things I’d love to do to you that you can’t even buy in Vegas, but we’re kind of on the clock here, so if you don’t mind, just tell us who begat our mother way back at the beginning and then I’ll see what I can do.”
It rolled over onto its back and started to laugh. “Baby, I’m fucked already.”
“Might as well enjoy your way down. Name.”
“I’d prefer –”
“Sam?”
Sam let loose with whole paragraph this time, and the screams echoed from the ceiling right next to the two-syllable answer the demon cried out over and over again.
Sam let Dean do the final exorcism, but there wasn’t any victory in it this time. More like putting a rabbit in a trap out of its misery. He sighed, “Dean, one joke about the big ‘D’ and I swear I’ll hurt you.”
“No problem.” He didn’t feel like making one anyway.
-
Part two.
Author: Hannah
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Gen
Rating: R
Notes: Written for Remix Redux 9 from the story Rock of Ages by
rivkat. Thanks to pwcorgigirl and topaz_eyes for beta-reading and asking the right questions, ayalesca for cheerleading, and the New York Public Library for letting me check out more books than I needed.A gorgeous a capella version of "Rock of Ages" can be heard here.
Dean and Sam had learned early on how to keep the truth to themselves. Dad had sat each of them down when they was old enough to listen, and explained it wasn’t anyone’s fault, just that not everyone understood what they did or who they were, and it was best to not give out too much. What they did, who they were, it was important, and they had to remember that.
It took Dean years to figure out what Dad meant by that talk. He thought he knew – salting the doors and windows at every hotel and target practice every free Sunday way out past the edge of whatever town needed something killed inside it weren’t things most kids did. That stuff, he knew not talk about it. When he did figure it out, he was eight, and had someone to help him: his teacher, who’d asked everyone what their favorite Christmas songs were, and Dean said he didn’t have one because his family didn’t do Christmas. Even that wouldn’t have been too bad – hey, different people do different things, great, let’s all learn about Ragnarok and Ramadan – but then she pulled him up in front of the class and asked him to tell the story of Hanukkah.
When he thought back on it, maybe he shouldn’t have gone into so much detail about the Maccabees taking the Temple back, but he’d thought everyone knew the story so he wanted to get to the good parts fast. By the time she got back from the principal’s office he was trying to organize the class into Romans and Maccabees, with paper swords for everyone.
Maybe it was because there were Jews all over that Dean didn’t think there was anything different about what his family did. There was always a shul somewhere, and maybe some of them didn’t have the men sitting with the women or had a someone playing the guitar or everything was in Hebrew or everything was in English but it was always the same prayers with the same words wherever they went. If they were everywhere, then people should know about them.
He told Dad that when he was done in the principal’s office, and Dad laughed his this-is-funny-sad laugh, and told Dean it didn’t work like that.
“Like hunting?”
Dad laughed again. “Yeah. Kind of like hunting.”
-
There were hunters everywhere, too. It wasn’t like they were in every town and city – if they were, Dean knew they could handle stuff in their own backyards, the way Uncle Rufus kept his town poltergeist-free – but they were all over the place. Dad could make a call from a gas station while Sammy picked out another coloring book and Dean kept an eye on him and by the time they got to their hotel there’d be someone waiting for Dad, ready to start tracking the bad guys down then and there.
If it was Friday night, Dean would skip the junk food at the gift shop and walk to a grocery store, get some grape juice, a couple of rolls, real chicken even if it came in a bucket. He’d push a chair onto a table and take out the smoke alarm’s batteries so the candles wouldn’t set anything off. He and Sammy would have their Sabbath dinner sitting on the floor, eating with their hands because it tasted better that way, and Dean wouldn’t even turn the TV on all day, not until it got dark.
When they were at Uncle Rufus’ they didn’t need to bother with all of that, just went through everything the way it was supposed to go, no fussing with the candles or anything. It was even better there because they could go out for target practice too, stay sharp and alert when Dad wasn’t around, and Sammy could eat real food cooked in a kitchen. Rufus had a mezuzah on the front door and another by the front gate, blue glass eyes and metal hands hung around the house keeping watch, and stories of how his grandfather watched Houdini’s escapes whenever the escapist came to Chicago. Rufus’ family had come to America in chains and became Jews like their owners, and stayed with their religion even after they were free.
They didn’t go to anyone else’s houses, even if they were one of the staying-put hunters and not the traveling kind like Dean’s family was. Hunters kept to themselves, kept things private, to keep everyone else around them safe. Sam argued with Dad and Rufus about it – if everyone knew, then couldn’t everyone keep themselves safe? Wouldn’t everyone paint the right sigils onto the doors and keep herbs in the walls and then they wouldn’t need so many hunters?
The only answers Sam got were that it wasn’t that simple and it wasn’t that easy, and that just made him turn around and look for better arguments to prepare for the next time he could bring up the subject.
He didn’t argue with anyone when they said there’d always be hunters. That was something none of them touched. When he’d found out monsters were real, it was Dean’s twelfth birthday and Dad had left them alone for longer than usual, three days moving to five and then six.
“If he’s alive.”
Dean had gotten his hands on some pie – nobody around to say he couldn’t have birthday pie if he wanted, who wanted to have cake on your birthday when pie was so much better – and he’d cut Sam his piece and was trying to talk around a mouthful of pumpkin. “Don’t say that. Of course he’s alive. He’s Dad.”
Sam picked at his slice, leaving the rest to Dean, and it didn’t taste good anymore the way Sammy was looking at it. He ended up throwing the rest of it away in the dumpster at the end of the parking lot. At least he hadn’t paid for it. When he got back to the room, Sam was sitting on the edge of his bed, something in his hands.
“Here.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a birthday present. Uncle Rufus gave it to me for Dad –”
“Dad’s birthday isn’t for months. Keep it for him.”
“Dad lied to me. I want you to have it,” Sam said in the same voice he argued with. “And Uncle Rufus told me we don’t see him enough so he should give it to me now. Take it.” Sam held his arm out and Dean took the little package wrapped up in old comics from a newspaper. “He told me it was real special.”
It was a little kimiyah, tiny, shiny coppery metal, ‘life’ in Hebrew on the front, hanging on black string. Something to carry with him. “Thank you, Sam.” He put it on, held it in his hand, felt its cold weight on his palm, “I love it.”
“Happy birthday, Dean.”
-
Dean got his GED when he was sixteen, fourteen months shy of when he’d have graduated if his life was a little more normal. Sammy stuck it out for the whole twelve years, already worn to the stuttering and stopping pace of moving around every time Dad got a new job. The only time they were close to tethered was the year of his Bar Mitzvah, and even then Dad wasn’t able to stick around for the whole stretch or even the big event. He didn’t really care for the religion or the rituals anymore, but didn’t make a fuss when Sam started to wear his kippah everywhere and took the time to pray every day. Neither did Dean. He knew if there was anyone with a problem with that, it wasn’t Sam.
“Your mother wasn’t very religious when we met,” Dad said when he and Dean were watching a werewolf burn while Sammy waited back in the car. Dean kept his mouth shut and Dad went on, “After we were married, she went – she started baking challah every Friday, skirts and scarves all the time. Every blessing. She thrived on it. You remember how happy she was.” He stared into the fire, turning his hand to cup his fingers in his palm to catch the fire’s reflection, and Dean did the same: it was an hour past sunset and time for havdalah. “If she knew.”
If she was here, Dad meant. If it hadn’t come into the bedroom, she’d be here. If she was here we wouldn’t be. Dean stared at the fire shining on his nails, “We’ll get it someday.”
-
They usually ignored anything that anyone called “God’s will,” especially those standard Bible-thumping preachers doing their damn best to justify their cause of the moment. It was when someone got stabbed in cold blood over it and didn’t try to justify it as anything but, and was the second person in one town to do it in three weeks, that it was time to call in the professionals.
“So Gloria’s just your standard issue wacko?”
“If it was just her.” Sam shucked off his jacket, flopped down on his bed. “Probably a demon or spirit, something that wants to see its idea of justice done, possessing people who can’t say no and won’t move on unless we give it a push.”
“Great, point me at it.”
“It’s just weird – I was at her place and no sulfur, no EMF.”
“Whatever it was, it was telling those poor bastards to hunt down evildoers, right?”
“Well, Carl Gully, I couldn’t find any dirt on him. Lots of friends, regular churchgoer –”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not there. We should check out his place.” Sam didn’t look up. “Come on, man, I’m going stir-crazy in here.”
“Yeah. It’s that…” he trailed off, moving to stare at the other side of the room.
“Is it the holy water? That stuff works, man. Look, maybe it’s just a ghost, we won’t even need any.”
Sam shook his head before looking up at Dean. “She seemed happy.”
“Gloria?”
“Yeah. She’ll be spending the rest of her life in a locked ward unless someone gets her off on insanity and good behavior, but she’s happy. She thinks she’s done God’s work.”
“And you’re jealous because she’s, what, she’s got faith in what she did.” Sam kept looking at him. “Oh, knock off the puppy-dog eyes. Anyone who can get pushed over like that would be happy about anything anyone tells them. Dollars to doughnuts she’d have believed this thing if it said it was, a, a fairy, or a unicorn, Martian, whatever. And maybe these randoms are evil, doesn’t matter, we’ve got our own job to do.”
“You think so? Angels descending to Earth, that’s one thing you can believe, but an angel that can’t get its hands dirty isn’t?”
Dean crossed his arms over his chest. “An angel that can’t get its hands dirty is no messenger of God.”
-
In a kitchen made of Thomas Kinkade vomit mixed with Claymation specials, bound to a chair all wreathed up to be sacrificed to some freaking Pagans, getting fucking sliced up, and Dean knew the thing that pissed Sam off the most was that his hat was still in the basement.
“Leave him alone, you son of a bitch!”
“Hear how they talk to us? To gods?” Edward laughed. “Listen, pal, back in the day we were worshipped by millions.”
Sam was hissing, panting, fuck. Dean gritted his teeth. “Times have changed!”
“Tell me about it. All of a sudden, this Jesus character is the hot new thing in town. All of a sudden, our altars are being burned down and we’re being hunted down like common monsters.” He took a suck on his pipe and grinned at Dean and were those fangs in his mouth? “I’d think you two could sympathize. Tell me, what did those Christians do to your temples? Your tribes?”
“This is not the same thing!” Dean shouted.
“I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to you, dear,” Madge said. She patted his arm with the flat of the blade, Sam’s blood wet on his skin. “But I think if we could have a chat with your man upstairs he’d say something different.” She smiled and nope, no fangs in her mouth, just regular teeth too good to be true. “It’s too bad about you people, it really is. But look on the bright side! You’ll finally have yourselves a real Christmas.”
“You’re not really selling it, lady.”
She kept on smiling as she cut him, pulled out Sam’s goddamn nail and almost getting one of his teeth, so goddamn psychotic Dean knew he’d want to kill her even if she wasn’t evil through-and-through. He got his chance with Edward, staking him a couple more times than he probably needed to get him good and dead.
Sam wiped off his forehead, ran his fingers through his hair. Dean shook his head. “Fucking goyim.”
“Gentiles, Dean. Be polite.”
And maybe it was because gods were normally way over their pay grade or maybe it was he had just over five months left or maybe it was the way Sam said it all throaty and tired, that Dean couldn’t help but laugh.
-
Getting to say ‘I told you so’ never felt as good as it was supposed to. Henrickssen didn’t look too happy with it, either, and Dean couldn’t blame him a bit. He’d heard about Lilith months ago, when Richie tipped him off about that town and Casey went on and on about the first wife of Adam. If something of her caliber was gunning for him and Sam, there probably wasn’t much that could get in her way. No use sugar-coating it for the guy. There was something really freeing in knowing he was going out and could say whatever the hell he wanted in the meantime.
“Honestly, I think the world’s gonna end bloody,” Dean said. “But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight. We do have choices.” That was what it all came down to: the choices he made. He smiled as best he could. “I choose to go down swinging.”
-
There was only one thing Dean didn’t remember about his time downstairs. He didn’t stop to think about it when he was digging his way out of his grave, when the air screamed and the windows shattered, when Rufus hung up on him in the phone booth and then attacked him before he got two steps in the door and didn’t believe him until after he cut himself with the knife. There wasn’t any time.
He promised Rufus and Sam he didn’t remember, and it was true, it was that last, that one thing he didn’t. Everything else was perfect, the sort of perfect he knew he’d have forever, forty extra years battering around in his skull. Forty years in exile, in the desert, long enough that there wouldn’t be anyone left who remembered slavery to enter the promised land. The slave mentality had to be gone, but the history and memory would remain forever. And by God, Dean remembered.
He laughed when Sam passed him his first beer topside. “Just because we don’t believe in Hell doesn’t mean Hell doesn’t believe in us.”
“You have no idea how comforting that is.” Sam took a long pull from his own bottle, staring at Dean like he’d evaporate in the sun or flicker away at any moment. There was something hard to his face that hadn’t been there the last – just a few months ago, right, just a few months, not years for Sam. Dean didn’t like it: Sammy just didn’t look like Sammy without his hat.
“All right, then” Rufus said, snapping them out of it. “I’ve gone through everyone I know, everyone they know, everyone they think they know, and I think I found someone the next state over. You two up for a drive?”
They ended up in the kitchen of the only strict kabbalist in New Hampshire. Ken Gershon had moved up to the mountains to retire from busy city life, raise a few chickens, and scrape a minyan together on the major holidays if he was lucky. He sat everyone down at the table with glasses of scotch and fresh cookies all around and listened long and hard before saying anything.
“There’s no chance this was a demon.”
Sam rolled his eyes.
Ken went on, “Dean, from what you’re telling me, they wanted you downstairs. They wouldn’t be canny enough to let you up since there isn’t anything you could do for them up here.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Double-bluff gambits aren’t demon style. They’ve been coming after you two how long?” He drained his glass and poured himself another. “No, it’d be better for them to keep you down there. Something broke you out and dragged you up.”
“Any idea what that might be?” Rufus held his own glass out.
“Nothing nice.”
When Castiel brought down the house, parting the doors like the goddamn Red Sea and striding past everything like it was nothing, Dean swore there wasn’t anything flashing over his vision along with the flying sparks. When Castiel proclaimed, “I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,” it still wasn’t enough to bring back anything stronger than a half-remembered dream.
If there was anyone on earth who could look less like an angel, it was the Columbo lookalike standing before him; if there was anything that felt more like an angel, power and dread and glory ripping through the air when he spread the shadows of his wings, Dean didn’t know what that could be.
“Why’d you do it?” Dean demanded.
“Because God commanded it. Because He has work for you.”
It took falling asleep and dreaming to remember everything about the end, all of it coming back right away all at once too jumbled and fast: the chains, the screams, then the light and the cries coming in like the tide, and something great and terrifying roaring like the sound of the sun. Breaking him free from the rack, the great and terrifying thing looked right to the very essence of Dean and drew its head back to command him to fear not.
Dean woke up cold, shivering, and sick. He padded to the bathroom, flicked on the light and rolled up his sleeve to look at the handprint again. It didn’t feel any different from either side; it just felt like a scar. One that’d be impossible to explain away as a camping accident or car repairs gone wrong or a vicious dog two towns over – even falling face-down into a gravel driveway or nicking himself in the kitchen. He’d used them all. This was time for something completely different, in way more ways than he wanted.
Him, specifically, Dean Winchester him. What the hell – okay, bad choice of words. Why for the love of pie and all that was holy would the Lord Himself want Dean for anything? At all. Ever. At some point, maybe before Sam died and Dean sold his soul to that crossroads demon. That sort of divine attention would’ve come in handy right about then. Or right before Dad died. Or fuck, pulling Mom out of the goddamn fire.
Castiel was waiting for him in the kitchen when he went to get some water. Or maybe he was keeping watch for Lord-knows-what reason, or he might have been preening his feathers and hid them away as soon as Dean approached. He could’ve been cross-stitching for all Dean knew. But. Angel in the kitchen. Just standing there. His shoulder suddenly ached.
“Hello, Dean.”
He was too angry to be awed. “You mind telling me what’s going on?”
“You’ll have to be more precise.”
“You, me, the pit, the pulling, the saving. Why?”
“Those were my orders.”
“Yeah, you’re a freaking warrior of heaven and messenger of the Lord. You and everyone else up there. Who gave the orders?”
“Why do you insist you don’t deserve this?”
“Because if there was someone upstairs, if there was a God gunning for me to stay topside, He’d have shown His back to me a long time ago.”
“There’s a God.” Castiel didn’t even blink.
“I’m not convinced. Because if there is a God, what’s He waiting for? Why not pull me out Himself?”
Castiel looked away. “Many angels laid siege to Hell to rescue you. I was the one –”
“He’s not here, is He.”
“He’s here.”
“Oh, no, He’s not. So if He’s not here, who told you to get me out? Why get me out?”
“There is work for you, Dean.” His voice stayed low and steady, like he didn’t know how to use it except as a weapon.
“What’s there for me to do that nobody else can? Why me?”
Castiel didn’t blink, didn’t look away, just gave the news flat-out. “Because you showed yourself to be righteous.”
-
“What?” Sam asked, still wet from the shower, towel clinging to his legs as Dean stared at him. The anti-possession tattoo on his chest looked pretty new, the lines sharp and clean like on the one Dean had. It was professional, quality work, and nothing like the crude one he’d sketched on Sam when he was drugged out cold and in no position to protest.
“Where’d that come from?”
Sam shrugged and grabbed a pair of briefs from the suitcase. “I had it redone when you were gone. No offense, but you’re a pretty crappy tattoo artist.”
-
The Winchesters made their name by killing demons. Anything nasty that crossed their path once didn’t get a chance to it again – a hunter who couldn’t put down a simple ghost wasn’t any use to anyone – but every hunter had their own specialty, maybe vampires or shapeshifters. For the Winchesters, it was demons. Dybbuks, shedim, jinn, lilim, rakshasas, velatas, asuras, fiends, oni, succubi, incubi, imps, haakai, John and Dean and Sam smoked them all. They delivered death any and every way they possibly could: banishing, binding, shooting, slicing, dicing, splashing, salting, ironing, stabbing, exorcisms, mercy killings. For years Dean knew it was because Dad was gunning for revenge against the one that killed Mom, and killing the rest of them along the way was just the best possible way to make sure nobody else’s mother died like that. It helped him get to sleep at night and out of bed in the morning.
So when Cas zapped Dean back to 1973, he didn’t expect to learn it wasn’t a new tradition with his generation or a new line of work for his family. The demon hadn’t even been after Mom; it’d be coming for him and Sam. It didn’t know Mom would throw herself in its path to give them time to get out of there. Her very last hunt. Dean didn’t know if that made it better or worse, just that it made him hate it more, that it didn’t know what was coming and wouldn’t care if it did.
“You still don’t get it,” the demon said. “All the fuss, all the attention, and for what, any old hunter that’s twelve for ten cents? Wrong, future boy.”
It didn’t know. It wouldn’t know if Dean didn’t tell it anything, he could still warn Mom.
“There’s little princes like you all over, all the time, every generation, but things are moving faster now and we don’t have time to waste,” it added, almost purring. “Gotta cut this off at the pass, gotta keep things nice and steady and make sure it doesn’t get here on schedule.”
What the hell was it going on about? Princes? “Make sure what doesn’t get here?”
It acted like it hadn’t heard him. “It’d be nice to fix it so we don’t have to worry, but you’re like weeds, always creeping through no matter how many times we cut you off, and even when we try to pull out the roots you’re still around.”
“Do what you like, but I’m still going to kill you.” Keep it here, keep it talking, Dean thought. Let Mom get away. It wasn’t even making sense anymore.
“Right, now that I’d like to see.”
“You’ll see it all right. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but one day soon I’ll be there, so look into my eyes, you son-of-a-bitch, because I’m the one who kills you.”
The yellow-eyed demon Dean would kill in 2007 chuckled with his grandmother’s mouth in 1973. “So you’re going to kill me and save everyone, that’s your plan.”
“It’s a lot better than what you’ve cooked up downstairs.”
It kept laughing. “You think we don’t know what we’re doing? We’re five steps ahead of your little buddies, they’re not telling you anything you need to know, you don’t have a clue. Tell you what, I send you upstairs right now, you ask them when you get there.”
-
This case was exactly the kind they’d started hunting together on, and this whole wench-filled Oktoberfest-lite should’ve gotten Sam’s spirits up, at least to where he could relax around Dean and stop checking to see if he was present. Nothing much seemed to be working, not information about their grandparents, not the promise he wasn’t going back downstairs, not even teasing him in front of the beer wenches to prove he was still all there. There wasn’t much more Dean could do than keep talking and let Sam know he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I came back from the furnace without any of my old scars, right? You know, bullet wounds, knife cuts, none of the off-angled fingers from the breaks.” Dean grinned. “Except the one.”
Sam drew back to look at Dean from the corner of his eyes. “Are you saying…?”
“Cut by an angel. And I’ve got to say he’s a heck of a mohel – real quality work down there. Clean, no flab.”
“He didn’t just leave it off?”
“You think I wouldn’t recognize the difference?”
“Sorry I asked.” But he was smiling around the corners of his eyes, and looked more like the Sammy Dean remembered than he had in weeks.
-
When they finally had ten minutes to take a piss, Rufus dug through his rolodex, fished through his contacts, and came up with one Robert Singer. Dean remembered the guy pretty well: he’d known Dad through the usual networks, and he’d helped track down Bela forty-one – last year. He’d helped track Bela down last year right before his time was up. Singer said he didn’t need anything this time around, but accepted the first edition Houdini hardback with a gruff thanks and an offer of beer. Dean tried not to gulp it down.
Singer and Sam hit it off like burning, thousands of pages piled onto the kitchen table with annotations and footnotes galore, leaving Dean to his own devices, which translated to target practice out back. When he got back inside, they were still going at it, except Sam had pulled his laptop out and was busy scrolling through something-or-other that turned out to be newspaper death notices.
“Was it in sleep mode?”
Sam didn’t even roll his eyes at Dean’s old joke. Singer gave him a look, and Sam shrugged. “It’s considered work to turn it on. Anyway, I thought it was funny how the demons were gunning for Mom’s family and not Dad’s, but it’s not just that. See,” Sam pointed to a set of columns and didn’t wait for Dean to wipe the gunpowder off his hands. “It’s not just her relatives, it’s this specific line of them. It went for our grandmother, right?”
“Right.” Dean pulled up a chair, trying not to think of her dead on the floor.
Sam jabbered faster now, the way he did when he figured something out. “Well, these don’t say it was demons, but the papers never do. Some of these go really far back. The attacks went through to her, and the rest of our relatives here, but not anyone from –” And he started to paint a picture Dean didn’t want to think about, that it was never random chance, that there was something out beyond the edges of the map gunning for him and his family. And of course it was passed down to him through his mother. And somehow it was all his relatives on the thinnest of bloodlines going back and back, people he’d never met, and their cousins and those cousins, spreading out exponentially through the ages.
Where was Ash when they needed him?
Dean looked back to Sam. “What was Dad’s family before they came over?”
“Not much. It breaks down a couple of generations before Ellis, but nothing special. Mom’s dad, too.” Grandpa. Singer pushed a book over and Sam flipped it open, someone’s hunter genealogy project. “His side of the family, there’s not much there but it’s all pretty normal, and the records for him go back to the original colonies. But our grandmother, there’s really not much to go on.”
“So we find out what’s up with her, we find out why it’s up with us too.”
“Seems that way,” Singer put in. “These things don’t take interest like this just ’cause they’re bored. This is long-term planning like I’ve never seen.”
Dean put on another pot of coffee for the two of them and went back outside. There was an open hood near the south corner, perfect for stargazing, and he wrapped his arms around his legs and watched the Milky Way go by. There was so much more to the universe, there were people out there better than he’d ever be, he’d done plenty to make him deserve his forty years downstairs. There wasn’t a good reason why for him, and lots of reasons why not.
-
Getting everything together for their little demon picnic took less time than finding the right sort of place to have it. Dean wanted it in the middle of an open field so they’d have more escape routes, shooting down barns because that’d worked so well with Cas. Sam suggested a discarded fallout shelter to keep whatever they got trapped, reminding him demons weren’t angels and they knew how to kill those things pretty well by now.
They ended up in a church basement, Rufus and Sam teaming up to argue for the extra mojo it’d give and how they could use every bit. Dean threw up his hands and went along with it, trying to focus on the herbs and candles instead of Sam’s sudden pragmatism and lack of concern over being down there, and the news that he’d done this sort of thing at least three times a week the first two months Dean was downstairs.
“You’re pretty good at that.”
Sam shook the paint can and finished another sigil in the devil’s trap. “I got a lot of practice.”
“Making the traps, or the whole shebang, the calling and everything?”
“The whole shebang.” He stood back, glanced at Rufus, and took out the book and started reading. Didn’t stumble over the Latin, didn’t hesitate at the Christos and the Dominuses and Patruses coming out of his mouth, hair whipping around his face as the ritual slapped up the air and started to flick the lights on and off. Four months away could be a long time, if you did it right. Dean bristled; long ago, he’d have been the one to do the readings. But he knew even if Sam offered, right now, he might not have said yes. Maybe.
But having a demon appear ten feet away kind of put a hold on any personal crisis of faith anyone might be having.
In all the fairy tales Rufus had in his house for entertaining two visiting kids, demons were always congenial, friendly bastards. Sure, they might steal your kingdom and zap you into slavery, but they were nice about it, and maybe you could even have tea with some of them or explore magic kingdoms on flying carpets as long as everybody stayed polite. Dean always hoped there was some grain of truth to that, and turned out there was: demons were congenial and friendly as all-get-out.
“Well, well, what’ve I got here,” it purred at Rufus. “Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure yet.”
“Well, we’ve only just met,” Dean smiled. “I’m sure we’ll get around to it.”
“Right.” It dropped the girl’s smile, tossing its hair over its shoulder. “Be that way. I’m just trying to have a bit of fun.”
“No, that’s not what we’ve heard.” Sam snapped the book shut. “You’re pretty busy, aren’t you?”
“I was until you bozos shot me up here.”
“Lay off,” Rufus said, crossed his arms over his chest. “We just want a few answers.”
“Forty-two, pi over two, Nineveh, Kirsten Shepard, Richard Nixon, Lee Harvey Oswald, the higgs-bosun.”
“Cute. Not what we’re after.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.” It grinned at Dean. “Your mother?”
“You know about our mother?” Fuck, shouldn’t tip a hand like that, but Dean couldn’t help it.
“Baby, baby, baby,” it crooned, “everyone knows about your mother.”
“Tell us, then,” Sam said.
“I’d prefer not to.”
Rufus shook his head. “You’re not in a position to have a say in the matter. See, we could just leave you here and let you miss out on all the fun. And I’ve been talking, and there’s a lot of fun going on out there, and my guess is you’re missing some right now.” He always looked terrifying when he grinned like that. “And my guess is you really don’t want to be missing out.”
It glared at them.
“Start talking,” Dean barked.
“If we had our way you two princes wouldn’t be here right now.” It spat out the word, looking at Dean, then Sam, then back again. “Your mother was one of the last we had to deal with, but she managed to keep herself on the down-low long enough to have you two. And with the family business being what it is, we wouldn’t have needed to worry about you if the guys upstairs hadn’t forced our hand. But they just aren’t as patient as they used to be. They really want to make that deadline.”
“How long have they got?” Rufus asked, going along with the near-nonsense.
“Thirty-one years.”
“What do you mean by princes?” Dean cut in. “Our parents weren’t anything –” He stopped when it started laughing.
“It’s so cute when you don’t know everything.”
“Tell me about my mother,” Sam said. And there was that sharp Sam voice, the one that he didn’t use unless he had to, the one that told people he was someone with whom not to be fucked. It stopped laughing, and Sam said again, “Tell me about my mother.”
“Be that way.” It stood with its arms akimbo. “Your mother was a two-bit whore that sucks Lilith’s big fat one every day.”
Sam said something in Latin and the demon convulsed, falling to its knees.
“She hated you and your brother, she never loved your father.”
Hebrew this time, and it looked like it was having a seizure.
“She’d hate you even more if she knew what you were doing.”
Another word, another language – Aramaic, from the sound of it – and the demon was shaking like a frog with electric current running through it.
“She was a princess. No –” It took a deep breath when it saw Sam start to speak. “ – Really. She was a princess, would’ve been a queen in another time and place, but she had to be born in America where you only ever had the one emperor. Princess.” It sucked in more air. “Direct descendant.”
“Of who?” Dean crouched down to look it in the eye.
“Your great, great, great, great to the power of great granddaddy.”
“Names, sweetheart.”
“He only ever needed the one.”
“Name, sweetheart.”
It smiled. “I’d prefer not to say.”
Sam spoke again, and it took the demon almost a minute to come down from the pain.
“What was that one?” Rufus asked.
“Spanish. Not really an exorcism, but you know, Catholic purification rites and all that. Ken dug it up – something for dealing with a condenado. Condemned one.”
“Good word,” Dean said without looking away from the demon, which was still panting. He crouched down to look it in the eye. “You feeling better?”
“Fuck you.”
“Baby, there’s things I’d love to do to you that you can’t even buy in Vegas, but we’re kind of on the clock here, so if you don’t mind, just tell us who begat our mother way back at the beginning and then I’ll see what I can do.”
It rolled over onto its back and started to laugh. “Baby, I’m fucked already.”
“Might as well enjoy your way down. Name.”
“I’d prefer –”
“Sam?”
Sam let loose with whole paragraph this time, and the screams echoed from the ceiling right next to the two-syllable answer the demon cried out over and over again.
Sam let Dean do the final exorcism, but there wasn’t any victory in it this time. More like putting a rabbit in a trap out of its misery. He sighed, “Dean, one joke about the big ‘D’ and I swear I’ll hurt you.”
“No problem.” He didn’t feel like making one anyway.
-
Part two.