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alchemyaliceAuthor: Alchemy Alice
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel
Spoilers: Season 5
Warnings: Uh...nothing anymore, I don't think. If you've made it this far, I doubt you have anything to worry about. Although today you get a bonus artwork included in your chapter! Hurrah! ...I was really bored today, and photoshop was calling me.
Disclaimer: Riffing on stuff that isn’t mine.
XII.
The shockwaves die out after what seems an age of echoing blasts of heat and light. When they finally recede, Sam almost can’t bring himself to move. Gabriel is the one to shift, sliding a palm along his back.
“It’s done,” he says, and it takes Sam a moment to identify the emotions in his voice. Relief, awe, and fathomless grief.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Blood trickles out the side of his mouth.
Gabriel looks down at him, and when he wipes it away Sam can feel his lungs clear, but the pain doesn’t fade. Sam doubts any angel in a hundred mile radius has any more than the vestiges healing strength left to them. Gabriel himself looks utterly drained, his eyes dull and face gray. They stagger together as they rise.
“We have to get to Dean,” Sam says automatically.
“Yeah well, that may take some time,” Gabriel grumbles. “Either way, we’re taking the elevator.”
Sam laughs, his breath hitching high.
By the time they make it down to the strip, others have managed to pick themselves up. The sky has begun to clear, but the sun only manages to illuminate the fact that there are bodies everywhere, along with blood, bile, and sulfur in ashy pools. Several buildings are on fire as well, though most were fitted with sprinklers, so mainly they’re blackened and damp. Las Vegas is…well, it doesn’t really exist any longer. No map could possibly identify it as such. It is a self-contained circuit board of destruction, and it makes Sam want to retch.
He would too, except he knows just how pleasant doing that is with recently-ceased internal bleeding.
The demons who managed to escape the blast immediately sense the absence of their general, and erupt from their hosts as soon as they’re able, black smoke disappearing into the sky that Sam’s sure they’ll have to deal with sooner or later. Angels within hosts are brushing themselves off gingerly, suddenly having to cope with having no power left to heal immediately. Many are sitting down on blackened sidewalks next to the few hunters left who aren’t in complete shellshock. They look down on imprint upon imprint of broken wings.
Jefferson is standing next to Raphael, who is looking impatient. “Will you simply get it over with?” he asks through gritted teeth.
“Son, your mojo’s all used up so you’re gonna feel this like a human does. You’ve gotta loosen up or its just gonna hurt more.”
Raphael grumbles, but seems to comply. Jefferson braces himself.
“Right, I’m gonna count to three. One—“
Jefferson shoves the archangel’s shoulder back into its socket. Raphael curses a blue streak. “You are a liar. You did not count to three.”
“That’s the point. You can’t tense up for it, so I gotta catch you off guard.”
Raphael doesn’t appear to believe him, but then tilts his head. “It doesn’t hurt nearly as much anymore,” he notes. “Fascinating.”
Jefferson claps him on the back tiredly. “Welcome to the wonders of dislocations.”
Anna is curled in a blackened doorway. For a second Sam thinks she’s dead, but as he limps over she opens her eyes. She smiles weakly.
“Hey Sam,” she says, unmoving.
“You all right, there?” Sam asks, crouching gingerly, feeling joints pop.
“I’ve just flown approximately seven billion miles over the course of a day,” she replies. “I need a nap.”
Sam grasps her hand briefly, and leaves her to sleep. Rejoining Gabriel, they stumble towards the crater where the Luxor once stood.
***
Dean’s pretty sure he’s seeing sunspots. Which means that somehow, he’s not blind. Wahey.
His angel is still wrapped around him like an octopus, and no, he’s not thinking about that particular possessive pronoun. He’s also not making any effort to pull himself away. He just blinks, and waits (prays) for his vision to clear as he looks over Castiel’s shoulder.
When it does, his throat closes.
He can still see Cas’s wings. No longer sparking and glowing with the intense heat of the blast, they seem solid but altogether un-birdlike. Hell, they don’t even look organic. Halfway between biological and technological, the feathers are gunmetal gray, and they’re like leaves of platinum more than anything softer. They look almost mechanical, fanning out from structures as intricate as clockwork, folding and straining and winding as Cas breathes. Small electrical sparks run over the smooth surfaces, rolling blue and yellow and white. Dean finds himself tightening his hold on the angel’s lapels as he takes them in. Then he looks beyond the wings, and exhales suddenly.
Michael is still there. Or rather, a vague impression of him is there, drowned in light. He is nothing like Cas—they could well have been different species, though Dean’s certain that has a lot to do with Cas being in his vessel, and Michael being…well, himself. There are faint outlines of his hands, the profile of a Roman nose and brow ridges. Everything else is aflame, overwhelmed with white luminescence and the blue of electrical currents and sharp shards of metallic feathers curved from vast wings.
But that isn’t what gives Dean pause.
Even looking like a vaguely human-sized version of the sun, Dean can tell that the archangel is kneeling in the central binding seal, which now is smoking faintly. One crystalline hand rests flat and heavily on the ground. His head is bowed.
At his feet, are the only traces left of Lucifer.
Dean tears his gaze a way for a moment to lift a hand to Cas’s cheek. Castiel blinks and looks up at him.
“Dean,” he says quietly, “Please desist in sacrificing your life for mine. I do not like it.”
Dean tries to laugh, but it sounds a bit like a hacking cough. “No guarantees, buddy.”
They stand unsteadily, and Dean walks over to Michael. He looks down.
The dark burn of massive wings stretch their span across the seal, and something about the sooty silhouette immediately tells Dean that they had been once been of the most beautiful things in existence. But the body of Nick is entirely gone—vaporized, reduced to ash, atomized; it’s impossible to say. Michael’s sword is embedded deep in the concrete where he landed, but that is all. And instead of an outline, or even an impression of any sort of shape, is a single, blackened sigil at the center of the blood-soaked seal.
“What does it mean?” he asks, after a long moment.
The flame-like apparitions that seem to be Michael’s wings shudder. When the archangel speaks, it’s the sonorous roar of waves crashing, but all Dean can hear is anguish.
“It means that he did not die as Lucifer. He…Father let him die as he had begun. This,” his hand hovers, trembling, over the sigil, “is the sign of Sammael. His name is redeemed in death.”
Dean says slowly, “You mean…”
“Our Father was here,” Castiel says from behind him. When Dean turns, tears are running down his face.
Dean works his jaw, and looks down at the ground. “He isn’t going to be showing himself anytime soon, though.”
“He doesn’t need to,” Michael says. And then, whispered, “Sammael…”
And Dean realizes after about a minute of silent, directionless rage that he just…doesn’t give a shit. He can’t. For all he knows, when archangels die they leave their original names behind, even when they’ve turned into evil sons of bitches, and that’s just the way things are. All that matters right now is that it’s done. It’s done, and he needs to get the hell out of this damned pyramid.
When he walks back towards Cas, though, and looks up at his shifting and whirring wingspan, he smiles crookedly.
“So…I can see you,” he says.
Castiel cocks his head in a moment of confusion, and then looks awed.
“That would be because I…left a bit of myself behind,” Michael says absently, and Dean feels him like a brush of fire against his back. “I had to, given that you bear the mark of the trumpeter. Those sigils hold ties to my grace, and will for as long as the mark remains.”
Dean looks back into the glare of him. “How long will that be?”
Out of the light, even the shakiest of Michael’s smiles registers like a solar flare. “You can return it to me when you come home.”
It takes Dean a second to get it. And then suddenly his knees feel like water. Castiel cocks an eyebrow at him.
“Did you think you would be going anywhere else, if you saw this through, Dean?” he inquires.
Dean scrubs at his face, and says roughly, “Didn’t actually think that far.” He looks at Michael. “And Sam?”
“Something tells me you’ll dragging him bodily up yourself even if I said no,” the archangel says wryly. Dryness is tinged green, apparently—Dean sees a flicker of it crackle along the approximation of Michael’s throat to spark away from his arm.
Michael says, “I must go, now that I no longer have a vessel. I would not wish to blind anyone unnecessarily.”
“You can ride with me, if you want,” Dean offers. But Michael shakes his head.
“I have been away from the Host for a century, and clearly things were not run well in my absence. I must attend to the wounded among our brethren.” He looks around, lingering on the sword and the sigil beneath it. Then he murmurs, “This place is a tomb now. Let us go. I’ll take you both as far as I can.”
He turns to Dean just as he raises fiery wings. “It has been an honor, Dean,” he murmurs. “All your life, it has been an honor. I will see you again.”
Then he looks at Castiel, and they seem to have a silent discussion. Then Castiel bows his head.
And then they’re standing at the edge of the chasm in which the Luxor nestles, its apex now parallel with the buckled pavement.
Michael is gone.
Dean lets out a breath he doesn’t realize he was holding, and swallows.
“Dean? Dean!”
He turns, and he’s pretty sure relief is about to make a sap out of him. “Hey Sammy.”
He’s enveloped in a bear hug before his knees can give out, which he’s pretty happy about. Sam is sniffling into his shoulder, but then he says wetly, “Don’t hug me too hard, I’m pretty sure there was a shattered rib in my lung about an hour ago.”
“You’re hugging me hard enough for the both of us,” Dean chuckles, but fuck it, he’s willing to roll with the chick flick moments at this point. Sam’s right here, he’s whole and alive and Dean can’t quite believe it, so he holds on tightly but carefully and takes a second to listen to his baby brother breathe.
When Sam finally pulls away, Dean looks curiously past him at Gabriel. Once again, he’s different from Castiel—his eyes have a thin ring of fire around the irises, and while Dean can see through the incandescence of his wings to the metallic surfaces beneath, the currents look and feel different. Gabriel quirks an eyebrow at him.
“Whatcha lookin’ at, big shot?”
“Your wings,” Dean says matter-of-factly. Sam stares at him.
“Dude.”
Dean smirks at him. “Apparently I get a you-survived-the-Apocalypse parting gift from Michael.”
Sam makes a bitchface. “Dude, the world didn’t actually end. So technically, not an Apocalypse.”
“Yeah but…it was still apocalyptic.”
“Sure thing, but not actually an Apocalypse.”
“Right. Whatever. I get to see angels and shit.”
“Speaking of, where’s Michael?” Sam asks.
“Gone,” Gabriel fills in. He looks at Dean. “It’s his style, really. He always did cut and run in the aftermath. And I imagine he didn’t really want to stay where he was.”
Castiel takes a step forward at that. “Gabriel, there is something I must tell you.”
He draws the archangel aside, and Sam and Dean watch them speak quietly.
“What’s he saying?” Sam asks.
Dean explains as best and as briefly as he can. Sam bites his lip, shaking his head. “Do you think he asked for forgiveness, in the end?” he says lowly.
“I think if he had, he would have been Sammael again, and lived,” Dean replies. “But instead, he’s just a name. The right name, but still…nothing.”
They turn away as Castiel grasps Gabriel’s shoulder as the archangel closes his eyes tightly and a tremor of grief goes through his wings.
Sam says, “So that’s it? God’s just never gonna show?”
Dean gets another flare of bitterness, and he knows Sam’s feeling it too, probably ten-fold. “You said it yourself, Sammy,” he says, looking up at the sky, which still flashes with lightening every few minutes. “This wasn’t the real Apocalypse. Things probably went to plan, if you’re gonna believe in this predestination bullshit. Which I still don’t, by the way,” he adds. Then he sighs. “Hell, we always knew he was a hands-off sort of son of a bitch. But Mike seemed satisfied, at least. And considering he’s actually met the bastard, I guess that’s gotta be good enough for us.”
Sam works his jaw for a second, and then says fervently, “That is such bullshit.”
“Tell me about it, dude. But what are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna have a hell of a time trying to pray, is what,” Sam mutters.
Dean snorts. “At least now you can be sure that he probably doesn’t give a shit if you cuss him out.”
Sam looks at him, studying. “You’re kinda different,” he says, after a moment. “Does it feel weird, having Michael out of you?”
Dean shrugs. “Dunno. I mean, for all intents and purposes, he wasn’t really there most of my life—or rather, he was, but he was tucked away so good it didn’t really count. So I guess…no?”
Dean is surprised that he doesn’t feel more bereft. Michael had been occupying his body his entire life, a constant of which he hadn’t even been conscious. But the faint warmth on his back from the writing following his ribs and shoulders makes him weirdly close, in a way. Maybe that’s why he’s been feeling so zen. Having an angel literally at your back can be comforting, if not also vaguely creepy.
He punches Sam (very lightly) on the arm. “Dude, we gotta find the Impala. If something bad’s happened to my baby, heads are gonna roll.”
***
The living leave the city fast on whatever wheels or wings will carry them. Most of them don’t really talk to the Winchesters—there’s not much to say, really. What’s the protocol for celebrating hamstringing an Apocalypse when the battlefield just seems to stretch for miles and miles? There aren’t that many actual people left to talk to anyway—the angels are mostly shaken but anxious to get off the ground and away from earth, particularly the ones who’d been pulled into Zachariah’s schemes. Those who can put the dead on pyres, but there are just so many. Too many vessels and hijacked bodies. Eventually the young hunter, Tom, pulls Sam aside.
“Listen,” he says, leaning heavily on a crutch that Dean had managed to rustle up from the abandoned ER, “This is a mess, and with the angels either incapacitated or gone and only eight of us really able to do anything…I don’t think any of us can take it much longer. But, I know a guy in the Defense Department.”
“The Defense Department?” Sam echoes.
“Yeah. Saved him and his wife from a vampire a couple years ago, so he knows that shit goes down. He can call this a terrorist attack or something. Get the government to clear this out.”
“I don’t think there’s any possible rational way we can explain the Luxor,” Sam says warily. “Or, you know, the giant sigil made out of the major roads.”
Tom shakes his head, eyes weary and too old for his gangly frame. “D’you think they can explain the plagues in Africa, or the rivers of blood in Taiwan? Strange shit has been going on for months now, and they’ve been spinning it fine. And listen—we don’t know who most of these people are. They’re just stolen husks of strangers. We get the government to do it, and they’ll do identifications, send out alerts. Because these people,” he waves at the broken corpses across the strip. “Their families should know. Not the truth, but at least that they’re gone.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right,” Sam says, after a pause. “Make the call, then. I’ll tell people to start heading off before authorities start heading in.”
After that, things move faster, though more silently too. Without a social motivator like working to clean up, everyone’s instinct is to scatter, and Dean doesn’t begrudge them that. He raids the refrigerator and cupboards in the Bellagio penthouse one last time (pointedly not thinking about who had supplied them with said full refrigerator) and packs all the non-perishables into the Impala. The Impala herself, parked in the lower level of a garage beneath the Bellagio, had emerged unscathed except for a busted tail light from where the building had shaken enough to dislodge one of the hanging pipes from the ceiling. Dean had fretted, but not too much.
In the late evening, Tom announces to everyone still around that crews from the FBI would be arriving in five hours, and that they’d better be far away at that point if they didn’t want to answer some seriously awkward questions. Dean claps him on the back as he steps down.
“You gonna be all right, kid?” he asks.
Tom shrugs. “There’s a hospital in Mesquite that’ll take care of my leg and hand. Other than that, who will be?”
So they drive out of Las Vegas a week and a half after arriving, and only seventeen hours after the dawn had broken with the sound of a trumpet. When they pass that ubiquitous sign that proclaims, “Come Back Soon!” Sam starts to laugh. It becomes infectious and then hysterical, and Dean has to pull over to the side of the road before he has a full-on girly mascara-running breakdown at the wheel.
Sam and Castiel end up switching places in the car after that so that Sam can lie with his head in Gabriel’s lap in the back. Dean gives him shit about it. Gabriel gives him the finger in the rear view mirror.
Dean catches him several hours later combing fingers lightly through Sam’s hair. He doesn’t say anything.
Sam watches the news and tracks reports on the flooding of hospitals in California and Nevada, but nothing much comes up. The last tally they’d taken, only about twenty hunters were alive by the end, not that they’d started out with so many to begin with. Gabriel starts to fill in the angelic casualties, but Dean stops him. He already knows.
Las Vegas isn’t mentioned online or on the television, except in a passing report about an apparent spontaneous tornado that touched down. Dean scoffs, and blames the Smoking Man for silencing Mulder and Scully. Sam makes a mental note to call Tom and check up on him, and thank him for making what had to be the most awkward phone call in the history of telecommunications.
They drive until they can’t anymore, until the air smells different the weather feels crisp and cool and deserts give way to farmland. In two days they’re pulling into Bobby’s yard.
Bobby’s outside by the time they open the doors to the Impala, and there are tears in his eyes.
“Y’all did it right, then?” he says, his hands shaking.
Chapter Thirteen.
no subject
Date: 31 Jan 2010 02:05 (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Feb 2010 05:11 (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 Jan 2010 02:09 (UTC)Raphael’s dislocated shoulder! I shouldn’t find that nearly as amusing as I do. And a couple chapters ago I came to the conclusion that Jefferson kicks ass! Anyone who can call an archangel “son” and get away with it is definitely kickass.
“I’ve just flown approximately seven billion miles over the course of a day,” she replies. “I need a nap.” *giggles*
Oh, God, poor Michael. Although the description of that scene is awesome!
“Dean,” he says quietly, “Please desist in sacrificing your life for mine. I do not like it.” *giggles again*
“It means that he did not die as Lucifer. He…Father let him die as he had begun. This,” his hand hovers, trembling, over the sigil, “is the sign of Sammael. His name is redeemed in death.” *BAAAW* Also, awesome artwork!
“Something tells me you’ll dragging him bodily up yourself even if I said no,” the archangel says wryly. Hee! He knows Dean well!
And eee, brother!hug! They need to have more of those in the series! And then the snarking! And Dean being worried about his car! *♥s* X-Files reference FTW! Although it’s practically obligatory, given the show.
no subject
Date: 1 Feb 2010 05:15 (UTC)Jefferson apparently presented himself to me as a younger version of Bobby, so clearly he is going to be awesome!
And yeah, Michael gets the short end of the stick sort of a lot. I have a feeling it's his job as head archangel extraordinaire. Or, you know, just being a big brother to everyone.
Thanks for reading, as always!
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Date: 31 Jan 2010 02:56 (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Feb 2010 05:15 (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 Jan 2010 07:42 (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Feb 2010 05:15 (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 Jan 2010 10:44 (UTC)What a great thing to wake up to :)
Due to said just waking up, am a bit incoherent, but... awesome, loved it, more plz :D
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Date: 1 Feb 2010 05:15 (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 Jan 2010 22:02 (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Feb 2010 05:16 (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Feb 2010 00:14 (UTC)Dean gives him shit about it. Gabriel gives him the finger in the rear view mirror.
That's Dean and Gabriel's interactions in a nutshell :D Sam is going to have an interesting life, trying to keep his brother and his boyfriend from killing each other.
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Date: 1 Feb 2010 05:19 (UTC)And yeah...good thing Sam's already used to being exasperated. That's basically his lot in life.
Thanks for reading!
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Date: 8 Feb 2010 08:24 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Feb 2010 02:22 (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 Mar 2011 20:53 (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 Oct 2012 21:00 (UTC)*holds two thumbs up*
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Date: 6 Oct 2012 11:18 (UTC)