![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alchemyaliceAuthor: Alchemy Alice
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel
Spoilers: Season 5
Warnings: Epic Apocalypse, Part Two: Electric Boogaloo. Holy crap, guys, this chapter is super long, but apparently the muses bit me in the ass last night, so here y'are. I really hope it works for everyone, because I'm actually pretty excited about this one. Also, I made up a ton of crap not even remotely based in common lore or legend. Hopefully it's internal logic will still be okay though.
Disclaimer: Riffing on stuff that isn’t mine.
XI.
Even in his crumbling vessel, Lucifer’s reflexes are lightning fast; Dean pulls all of Michael’s battle training and all of his own bar brawl knowledge into the dance, itching to get close enough to land a punch. But instinctively, he also knows that he can’t even risk a scratch from Lucifer’s rapier—any further route under his skin to get to Michael would be too much of a temptation for him to simply reach in and pull the archangel right out. So he wields with both hands, limbs tucked close, muscles bunched and straining, his attacks short and abortive.
Lucifer has no such hang ups. He is careful with his vessel, but not overly so. It was flaking off like the feathers on a molting bird anyway. His wrist is loose as he handles his blade with all the elegance of a Victorian gentleman. But he remains irredeemably quick.
“You know,” he says, between blows. “I have to hand it to Sam. I knew I liked him for a reason. His lies were almost as believable as mine.”
“I thought you didn’t tell lies,” Dean says, landing a strike that should have shattered the devil’s sword, had it been a mortal instrument. Instead, the two weapons just slide off each other with the shriek of grinding steel.
“I don’t. Neither did Sam, really. It was why he managed to keep me here. Like I said, I more impressed with him than displeased. He won’t die by my hand, I think. At least, not yet.”
“Thanks, then,” Dean replies. He nearly loses his grip on his sword as Lucifer executes a grand gesture, but he manages to hold on.
“No need to thank me. It will cause him far more pain to see you die first.”
“Oh. Well, awesome. At least he has practice with that.”
Lucifer laughs, and it’s genuine with pleasure. It’s a bizarre contrast to the way he’s engaging in battle, but that seems to be his natural state—docile in mind, and savage in body. Dean’s growing accustomed to it, and he doesn’t really have time to think about what precisely that says about him. All he knows is that weirdly, the devil likes him, even though they’re locked in a death match, and it’s a fact both disarming and understandable.
It all comes down to family, after all. Family at war.
***
Sam looks up at the sky between shots. His ammo’s running low, but he’s managed to snag some useful weaponry from the fallen, including a set of brass knuckles[1] inscribed with a level of holy vengeance that he really wishes he could have gotten his hands on sooner. He’s sticky with soot and blood and sulfur, and so are most of the soldiers on the ground. Up above their heads, though, darkness is beginning to overwhelm the flashes of angelic light, the sun dimming behind the growing demonic presence.
Gabriel is close at his side, but Sam can tell that he’s tiring. He can’t think of a sight more disturbing than an archangel faltering, and now Gabriel is covered in blood, and some of it is his. He grins though, when Sam glances at him.
“Haven’t done this in a while,” he says, and Sam knows a part of him is wishing to be anywhere but here. So he just raises an eyebrow, and puts his fist directly through a weakened demon’s solar plexus.
“Just rusty, then?” he inquires.
Gabriel shrugs. “Guess so.” It’s better than admitting the truth.
Come on, Dean, Sam thinks, because his arms started feeling like lead long before Gabriel’s ever did. Give us his head on a platter.
***
Jefferson doesn’t even flinch when Raphael appears at his side. Just empties rock salt rounds into the next bad motherfucker that takes a swing at him and says, “If you’re not gonna help, you’d better fuck off because I ain’t got time for you right now.”
Raphael regards him, expression wavering between aversion and thin amusement. He doesn’t even look away as he presses a palm flat to a demon’s head and illuminates the darkening day with a flash of burning sulfur.
“I have little choice, do I not?” he says, after a beat.
“Yup, can’t leave I hear, sorry about that.”
“It’s not that.” Jefferson feels the sudden parting of air, and then a choking sound as a demon that apparently had been breathing down his neck suddenly ceases to breathe at all under the archangel’s ministrations. He whirls around, and catches raised eyebrows.
“When the cause is righteous, do you think I have a choice to do anything but support it?” Raphael inquires.
Jefferson snorts.
“Well all right, then. Carry on.” He pumps his shotgun.
***
The demons are beginning to figure out the game. Kalaziel can feel it; more are breaking off from the circuit of the sigil. She would call to more of her brethren to strengthen the passage, but she knows they cannot spare anymore. She looks at Anna, whose eyes are set with determination.
“How many can we afford to lose?” she asks, the words almost getting lost in the slipstream.
“After the demons? Not many,” Anna answers. “Go faster. If we lose them, we’ll need to trace it faster, more.”
Kalaziel nods. But then she feels it. Her wings strain suddenly.
Meg grins savagely, her grip on the angel’s ankle vice-like. “I tire of this wild goose chase,” she snarls. “Let’s play, you and I.”
Kalaziel can spare only one last desperate look at Anna before Meg tears her down to the ground.
***
When Dean finally sees an opening he throws himself into it bodily, because he knows that already it’s taken too much time—the smothered sun is high in the sky now, and Michael cries out every time another angel dies, and it’s happened too many times now, and Dean is perversely thankful that he can’t feel it every time a hunter falls because his heart would have failed him long ago if he could. So he throws himself into the gap in Lucifer’s defenses, opening an almost surgical incision in the fallen angel’s sword hand and flinging the rapier out of his grasp.
Lucifer recoils, but only for a moment. Then he’s lunging for the roof’s edge.
“Fuckin’ A, I hate heights,” Dean mutters, but he’s already in motion, feeling the marks of the trumpeter on his back shifting with Michael’s intent, propelling them forward.
As Lucifer swan dives off the MGM Grand, Dean launches himself after him, feeling Michael’s wings propelling him impossibly past the velocity of gravity to wrap bodily around Lucifer’s departing form.
“No, you don’t!” Dean hisses, and then silently, Now, Castiel, now! We’re on our way!
Then, locked in their falling embrace, the most righteous and most fallen angels are bending space and time together, and the city shudders in response.
***
Out of the corner of his eye, Sam sees it—the plummeting figures of his brother and Lucifer, the shadows of their wings pressed close like those of diving ospreys reflecting in the glass, and then suddenly tumbling away into nothingness. He grabs Gabriel’s shoulder.
“They’re going! Come on!” he shouts. He empties the Colt into the demons in front of him as Gabriel whips around and slaps a hand to his forehead. Then they’re hurtling towards the Luxor.
***
Lucifer is too close, and their flight is too frantic. Dean tries to pin down his wings, but it’s like trying to bind an electrical current with copper. So he just grips with all the force he can muster around Nick’s body and propels them across the strip.
“Where could you possibly take me where this will matter?” Lucifer asks over his shoulder as dimensions are reduced to molecules and shoved aside, face craning close to Dean’s enough for his breath to heat his skin. “You can leave this city no more than I can.”
Dean grits his teeth and doesn’t answer. Just aims and presses forward and prays for Cas like he never has in his life.
***
Sam staggers as he lands; Gabriel is already taking the hit from Alistair that was meant for the flinching form of one of the younger hunters. Tom is his name, Sam thinks disjointedly. He lurches towards him, staving off a hellhound with an abandoned sawed-off as he goes.
“Start it up!” he yells. “Do it now!”
The guy’s leg is in shreds—Sam can see its crooked wrongness from yards away. But he goes anyway, broken hand holding the handheld radio to his mouth and yelling into it as he presses his still whole palm into the hieroglyphics laid out in blood on the wall of the Luxor pyramid.
With a screech like screaming hoard of scarab beetles, light shoots up the slanting wall.
***
Cas has his fist upraised, Jimmy’s nose bleeding freely when the call comes. Without pause or a sound he withdraws, leaving a demon cringing from nothing, stilled long enough for Barachiel to slit it open fore and aft. But by then, Castiel is long gone.
He comes to a stop in the Luxor basement just as it begins to fall into tremors, the glasses and furniture in the upper floors shattering and fragmenting in tiny bursts of fractured light and sound. He hears it like echoes of the larger heaves of the earth beneath him that shifts and moves to accommodate one of the most powerful spells mankind has ever conceived.
As he opens yet another vein for the cause he believes in, Castiel feels a vague sort of pride that he had been there to guide those priests so many thousands of years ago.
Pride in his work. Yet another thing Dean has taught him. He begins painting the final sigils on the network of pipes above his head, following that essential junction that the architects of this den of decadence and vice could never have known was the perfect proportion of the crucifix. Another sign that Father is not gone from us, Castiel thinks.
He drags his fingers across the gash on his arm, and writes.
***
Sam sprints, his lungs heaving and burning, watching the ever dwindling guard of hunters on each side of the Luxor press their hands to the walls, seeing the light following them, spreading up to the peak of the pyramid like plague and fire.
At the fourth wall, he sees the one hunter left falter, hellhounds dragging him away from the wall, and without a thought he dives for the hieroglyphs, drawing his pocketknife from his ripped jeans and slashing across his palm.
He slams his hand into the gore-painted eye of Isis. Light follows, hurtling up to join with its brothers at the apex. And as they join, the whole pyramid quakes.
Sam pulls back, nursing his sliced hand. He thinks briefly that he should turn and guard his back, but he doesn’t need to. All eyes are on the Luxor as its walls go from white flame to nothing. The antithesis of light.
There’s a tremble in the ground. Sam thinks nonsensically that surely the Egyptians would have warned people about this, if they’d actually tested out this stupid thing before mapping it out on long forgotten papyrus. Then he thinks aloud.
“Oh shit.”
The Luxor pyramid shakes, and sinks into the ground like a tectonic plate decided to break directly beneath its foundations. Sam’s still watching the earth crack in shock when Gabriel hits him like a linebacker, sweeping him out of ground zero.
“Dean—“ Sam says automatically, abortively flailing.
“He’s in there,” Gabriel answers, flinging them both towards the Bellagio once more. “So’s Lucifer. It’s his show now, buddy, but it’s time for us to fuckin’ go.”
“We should help him—“
“You think there’s any getting in there at this point? Believe me, Pepy II knew what he was doing. When he made a lock-down spell, he meant it.”
Gabriel catches him as they stop in the lobby of the Bellagio. Sam sags against him, pressing his nose into the archangel’s shoulder. Gabriel looks out at the demons beyond the doors who’ve now turned hungrily to their sudden appearance. He grimaces, but keeps his voice light.
“Their show now,” he murmurs, lips against Sam’s neck. “Have faith in your brother. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Dean never knows what he’s doing,” Sam laughs weakly. “He just knows what’s right.”
***
The landing is rough, a tumble that would have broken their wings had they been corporeal in any way at all. Lucifer shakes off their grip in the struggle, and takes in his surrounds far quicker than Dean would like.
“Castiel. Brother. What an unexpected pleasure.”
Castiel barely looks up, just rests his hand with finality on the juncture of two pipes, his blood dripping slowly into the sleeve of his suit jacket. His trench coat had gotten lost along the way, apparently, which Dean takes in with surprising trepidation. Of course he knew that Castiel was hardly the most powerful angel at this point, but to see him without that final layer of armor—
Lucifer saunters over to the wall of the Luxor, and presses gently. He sucks in a breath as he withdraws his hand.
“I like it,” he says, eventually. “You’re using your battleground well, Michael. Such a large step up from the usual straightforward smiting. Almost devious, really. I commend you.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t take the Luxor into account,” Dean says, cocking his head as he stumbles to his feet. Holding and directing Lucifer to where he wanted him had been more of a chore than he’d counted on. His joints feel watery, and Michael isn’t much help. They’re both exhausted now, and Dean can only hope that Lucifer is too.
But Lucifer’s the spry younger brother. And Dean can’t forget that either. He has a sickening flash of Sam leaving him on the floor of a shitty motel room, and suppresses it as soon as he can.
“Yes, I really should have thought of it,” Lucifer agrees. “But what need did I have of it, really? I wasn’t going to bind anything around here. I mean really, my hopes were really stemming from unleashing a great many things. And trapping you, brother? Hardly the end I would have liked for you.”
Dean can feel Michael make the equivalent of a deep, shaky exhale inside him, and lets him come forward. “You’ve always been considerate, Morningstar. No need to remind me of it, really.”
“Even as you lock me inside a mockery of the prisms of Old?” Lucifer counters. “Spare me. I forgive you; I truly do, but you must admit that your plans are always a bit more…base, than mine.”
Michael shakes his head. “You always misunderstand me, Morningstar. What you call base, I call honest.”
“To-may-to, to-mah-to,” Lucifer shrugs. His gaze as he turns is laser-sharp, however, as he assesses his surrounds, regarding the arcing patterns of goat blood.
“What is this, brother?” he inquires. “What has your overactive imagination birthed?”
“Even some of the oldest of us cannot tell,” Michael answers.
“But you know,” Lucifer spits. “Father granted this knowledge to you, but not to his other children, is that it?”
Michael regards him levelly. “Yes.”
“Unbelievable. Father’s favoritism was always unbearable.”
“Are you forgetting that you were once Father’s favored son?”
“Once. Before He found smaller, more petty toys to play with.” Lucifer looks upon Dean’s body with distaste. “Corporeal and incomplete, like broken dolls, the lot of them. And yet loved, cherished. How can you stand it, Michael? How can you stand sharing space with a lowly creature like that?”
“Do not speak of Dean that way,” Castiel cuts in, before Michael can answer.
Lucifer shifts his attention, the small movement of his head serpentine and slow.
“Oh? You would request that, little brother?” he asks lowly.
Castiel looks down, stays silent. Lucifer looks between him and Michael.
“Look at you both. Brought low by these creatures of clay. I would place you among the stars as this world burns. You don’t know how much you hurt me with your choices.”
Michael bows his head, closing his eyes for a brief moment. His recession into Dean is almost unnoticeable.
And Dean moves.
But Lucifer is too quick.
***
Sam ends up shoulder to shoulder with Gabriel and Raphael, and goddamn that is some weird shit. As he steps back to reload in the shadow of their wings, he shouts, “Where the hell is Zachariah anyway?”
“Doing his duty as a soldier, I hope,” Raphael growls. His knife makes elaborate work of the oncoming demons, but the sky is still growing darker.
They’re still in the lobby of the Bellagio, but they’ve been overrun. Sam throws some altogether-too-heavy couches together as a front line, and now he and the two archangels crouch low to gain just a moment to breathe. Or whatever the breathing equivalent is for angels, Sam thinks.
He has no idea how many of them are left. It’s a weird sort of comfort that at least the din of battle is still close outside, and doesn’t ring with the despair of slaughter just yet. He can only hope there will remain enough, and that when the time comes they’ll have enough energy to power the madness.
He’s not really sure whether he’ll live to find out, though. Neither of his companions have the mojo left to bamf very far, and even if they did, there weren’t many places to go within the confines of Las Vegas where they would get any sort of cover. One very annoying flaw in Michael’s plan.
He looks at Gabriel, who shrugs tiredly. Then he looks back at Raphael. “You’re a bit cooler than we probably gave you credit for,” he says, shoving cartridges into place. He notices belatedly that his pinky and ring finger are broken. He waves them at Gabriel, who sighs and rights them with a small grunt of effort. Sam winces violently but continues, “So if we all die, then I’m sorry Dean called you a douchebag.”
“I suppose I’ll have to accept your apology in his stead,” Raphael replies snidely, but even as his wings judder with his effort to pull himself back into the fray, his eyes sparkle slightly.
Hell, Sam thinks. If we’re going out, we might as well go out in a good mood.
***
Dean has about a millisecond to freeze, but he seizes it so hard he can feel his entire abdomen almost lock into a charley horse. Even so, his sword is a bit overzealous, and the flames shoot forward. “Cas!” he shouts, involuntarily.
Castiel doesn’t move, just winces slightly as the fire scorches the side of his face before withdrawing. But any larger reaction would have ended with his head rolling on the floor.
Lucifer’s grip on him is crushing, unyielding, and Castiel can already feel a trickle of blood running from the pressure wound at his throat where a thin blade holds tight to his skin.
“Yes, Dean,” Lucifer says, altogether too calm, his clasp on Castiel sharp and growing sharper. “Slay the one that raised you from my prison.”
“Do it,” Castiel hisses. He clamps his hand over Lucifer’s, marking it with his own blood. And then, Do it now, do not think of me.
Michael shudders inside him. I can't do this for you, Dean. I cannot kill my brethren.
Lucifer just watches him, in tune with the hum of his brother even now. “Yes, no foisting these dirty deeds on Michael. There are only two murderers in this room, and they are you and I.”
And he looks directly at Michael, surpassing the bounds of Dean’s body completely. “You couldn’t do a single thing with that avenging sword of yours, I know it,” he says, his earnestness too sincere to be disbelieved. “You’re my brother. I love you too well for that. That is why Heaven is going to lose this war.”
Tell me you can gank this son of a bitch, Dean growls.
Can you kill Castiel? Michael counters fiercely.
No, Dean answers, even though it shatters him, But I’m the one who kills the ones he loves.
Dean can’t think. The marks on his back are burning with Michael’s despair and he can’t move, he just can’t. Cas is watching him, murmuring in his head I’m not worth it, just do this, Dean, this is what we fought for but he just can’t.
We can sound the last trumpet, Michael says desperately inside him. We can do that, when we’ve already lost so much—
We’ve lost. The rest of the world hasn’t yet, Dean snaps, silencing the archangel.
Lucifer cocks his head, and the blood flows more freely from Castiel’s throat. “Your move, Dean,” he says softly.
“Cas,” Dean whispers, his voice a wreck. “How’s Jimmy?”
Castiel looks at him without fear. “Jimmy left this world as I was returned to it.”
Dean nods. Notices that even now, Cas has done right by him and this suicidal plan, the blood marking Lucifer putting the last link to the sigils in place.
“Dean,” Castiel says, even as Lucifer pulls his blade closer along his throat. “I trust you.”
You can’t kill your brother, but I can, he says to Michael. So be the defender. And I’ll be the sword.
“Castiel, you’ve learned to say the sweetest things,” Lucifer croons, watching Dean struggle with Michael. “Isn’t that right, Dean? I had no idea you two were so close.”
Dean ignores him. He can feel Michael’s dread shaking in his ribcage. No, Dean, you’ll—
Shut. Up. My call. Just…save him, okay?
He doesn’t give Michael a chance to respond. Just unlocks his body even as all of his overworked muscles scream protest, and lunges.
Castiel just watches him as he bears down. Dean can barely stand to look at him.
I’m sorry, Cas.
A thought like a freight train hits him, with the angel’s trademark growl.
Dean, don’t you fucking apologize.
More than light, more than anything, he feels the departure of Michael like his lungs being ripped from his chest. Michael unfurls from his back like wheels and wings and supernovae. And then it’s just Dean, just Dean with sword aflame and the terrible conviction of choice.
The last things he sees are impossible lights, and the grip of Michael’s incomprehensible hand reaching into Jimmy Novak and pulling, pulling back and away as flame and iron in Dean’s hands drive straight through Cas and into Lucifer’s crippled vessel.
After that there is white, endless white, and the feel of the hilt of his sword thudding slickly against Cas’s ribcage.
And Dean can only think, Please God let him live.
***
Gabriel feels it like a thunderclap. “Christ, it’s happening,” he murmurs, blaspheming without a thought.
“He did it?” Sam asks, coughing. Raphael’s gone, he doesn’t know where. They’ve made it to the fourth floor landing, and won’t make it farther, if the blood in his lungs has anything to say about it. Gabriel holds him tighter, sitting with his back against the fire door, wings pulled tight around them both.
“Yeah. You’re bro’s done good.”
Sam smiles weakly. “You gotta power up now?”
“Not if it means leaving you.”
“You fucker. Do it or I’m withholding sex for the next millennium.”
Gabriel laughs weakly. “Got it.”
He feels his grace swell like it hasn’t in centuries, and feels it ring with the echoes of his brethren.
***
Castiel struggles blindly in Michael’s grip, wings outstretched.
You have to let me go back, I have to shield him from what is to come—
You go back into that impaled body and you die! Michael shouts.
Then remove it! Do something! You left him there to die!
He did this for you!
Castiel gives an almighty wrench, pulling the last of his waning grace out of Michael’s grasp. Help me, now, he beseeches.
Michael wavers.
***
Lucifer is screaming.
That much Dean can tell.
That, and the world is shaking to pieces around him.
He suspects his eyes are shut, but he really can’t tell.
He feels a pull, a disembodied clutch, and then suddenly he’s falling further, the sword sinking farther and Lucifer is shrieking, calling desperately to his brothers.
And then low in his battered ears, a gravelly voice so blessedly familiar Dean is pretty sure he cries.
“Let go, Dean. Let go.”
Dean peels his hands off the hilt, like his hands don’t actually know how anymore. He closes them over fabric. Whole, gloriously present trench coat fabric.
“Keep your eyes closed, Dean. I’ve got you.”
“Cas? Castiel?” he manages. “Is it--?”
“It’s started. Hold on.”
***
From the sky down to the ground, from everywhere an angel still lives, light explodes, connects, burns. Makes crackling passage to the apex of the sunken Luxor pyramid.
Sam holds tightly to Gabriel even as the archangel heaves, his grace spilling forward like lightning.
“Gabriel?” Sam puts a hand to his cheek, lifts his face. The light recedes, and Gabriel’s eyes slowly swim into focus.
“Stay close,” he says hoarsely.
***
All the light dies at once. And then explodes.
The force of three thousand angels and the most powerful spell known to the eldest of them all, condensed into a column firing from the top of the pyramid up into the Heavens. And in its wake, the shock waves.
God in heaven, the shock waves.
They are made of hurricanes and holocaust, and Castiel doesn’t have time to think, he just throws himself around Dean just as Gabriel does for Sam, and miles apart the brothers Winchester crouch within the protective walls of angelic embrace. And Dean shouldn’t open his eyes, he knows he shouldn’t…but he needs to see. Even if it’s the last thing.
He cracks his eyes open against the glare and thinks…fire and ice.
Cas’s wings are like the ice of an ancient glacier, blue in ways incomprehensible, crackling against the onslaught of Lucifer’s shrieking demise, folding and bending in around angel and man both like the trunks of palms in a hurricane. Dean bows his head and Castiel brings him close, cradling his head like he is a child looking for solace, and at any other time he would be pushing away, reasserting his masculinity, but this is just too big, too terrifying, and his relief that Cas is still alive is too palpable.
The angel is curving himself into Dean like a mother to her child, like the goddamn Pieta and it’s all Dean can do not to sob. He buries his head in Castiel’s chest and holds firm. He feels the angel’s lips against the top of his head and fingers curling in his hair. “It’s almost over now,” Castiel murmurs into his hair. “It’s almost done. Keep your eyes closed, Dean.”
“Cas…”
“Hush. It’s our turn to take care of things. You’ve done enough.”
The feathers of his wings, burning cold blue like the flames from a Bunsen burner and searing at the edges where the blast hits them, brush against Dean’s cheeks, along his shoulders, against his bent knees. They feel at once like silk and iron, holding him steady, creating an eye in the storm.
Dean closes his eyes and leans into it.
[1] Why yes, I’m totally talking about this guy’s brass knuckles. I figure Kripke’s already made Constantine references…my turn!
