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alchemyaliceTitle: On the Wings of War
Author: Alchemy Alice
Genre and/or Pairing: Action/Adventure/Horror, possibly Dean/Castiel
Rating: R for violence
Warnings/Spoilers: Up to 5.14-ish? It goes AWOL from there.
Word Count: No idea yet, but probably long.
Disclaimer: Entirely not mine. Just playin'.
Summary: The Horsemen are not just people with fancy rings. They aren’t even demons with fancy rings. They are another species entirely, a force unto themselves, and Lucifer is kidding himself if he thinks that they are at his beck and call. They are separate. They are discreet. They are neutral. Dean Winchester is not built like them.
A/N: Okay, there might actually be a game plan now. Took me long enough, am I right? And since there is a game plan, then it should be obvious that it is time for Revelations to get mightily abused again! Seriously, that whole book of the Bible is so tripped out, it's like the best source of creative inspiration ever.
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Bobby’s waiting for them when they land. He takes one look at Dean’s hand and says, “If that’s what I think it is, you’re gonna need a damn sight more than some battlefield first aid on it.”
“Yeah, stitches probably,” Dean agreed, looking at his mutilated hand in distaste.
“I’ll do them, you’re crap at it,” Sam said. “But you gotta tell us what the hell happened over there.”
“Yeah, yeah. Come on.”
They trooped inside, where Bobby ordered Dean not to bleed on anything except the kitchen table, and Castiel carefully shed his coat and hung it up inside the door, as he’d gotten into the habit of lately. Dean was torn between being glad to see the ugly thing off once in a while, and hating what it meant for Castiel. The angel looked slight without it, the cheap black suit loose around his shoulders, slightly too short at the wrists.
In familiar tandem, Dean plonked himself down into one of the chairs while Sam slung into the one across from him with the assembly of needle, thread, antiseptic and gauze. He swatted Dean’s good hand away and took to winding the silk away from the injured one in tacky strands after tying a tourniquet around. Dean grimaced, but didn’t say anything. Instead he reached for the bottle of prescription-strength aspirin Sam had set down on the table along with the medical supplies, popped the top one-handed, and knocked back several of the tablets. Bobby offered him a beer to wash it down, which Sam eyed with disapproval.
“So who the hell was calling you from across state lines?” Bobby said impatiently.
“Death,” Castiel said. “He was interested in a meeting.”
“And he couldn’t have used a damn telephone?”
“She said death was her language,” Dean said, watching as Sam wrinkled his nose in concentration and dabbed at the stump with disinfectant. Dean hissed before continuing, “Plus, she was following Lucifer’s orders. This was probably the only way she could contact me without arousing his suspicions.”
“So she just kills 6,000 people,” Sam said, as if he still can’t believe it. Dean leveled a look at him.
“She’s Death,” he said again. He didn’t really know why he was taking her side at the moment. She’d just cut off his finger, for Chrissakes.
But what she’d given in return. Well.
“What else did she wish to speak to you about, Dean?” Castiel asked.
Sam threaded the needle. Dean looked at it grimly, and then turned back to Cas.
“She wanted to cut a deal. For her freedom.”
He told them what she’d said. Most of it, at least.
“So, did she actually give you a game plan?” Sam asked, when Dean wound down. He’d finished with stitching the stump of Dean’s finger long before, and now he was a picture of disbelief, and Dean couldn’t blame him—this kind of shit didn’t happen to them. It just didn’t.
And it hadn’t. But Dean wasn’t about to say that just yet. He plucked at the gauze around his hand absently.
“Yeah,” he said. “For Pestilence and Lucifer. The whole package.”
“What’s the catch?”
Dean considered telling them what the first proposed one had been. But he said, “That we hand the rings over, with the promise that they won’t be used for the Apocalypse anymore. And that I have to pass on a message.”
Sam scrunched his nose in confusion, but Castiel sat forward, his gaze narrowing into icy sharpness. “A message to whom?” he asked.
Dean met his eyes. “For Gabriel.”
“You called?”
They all looked up. Gabriel leaned against the kitchen cabinets, Cadbury’s bar dangling loosely from his fingers. His entire frame was conspicuously loose, to the point where Dean started to wonder how much of it was affected. He said roughly, “Yeah. Death had something to say to you.”
The shift was almost imperceptible—a slight tightening around the archangel’s eyes, and a twitch of fingers around the candy bar. “Oh yeah?” he said lightly. “What was that?”
“She said that Azrael did as you asked, and he’s wondering what the hell you think you’re doing.”
Gabriel snorted softly. “Dean, Death is Azrael. But whatever. I suppose that’s about what I expected.”
“You asked Death for a favor?” Sam asked, sitting forward in disbelief, eyes narrowing. “Are you nuts?”
“Azrael and I used to be pals,” Gabriel shrugged. “Seemed silly not to, now that apparently I’m back on the playing field because of you idiots.”
“What the hell kind of favor do you ask from Death?”
Gabriel looked at the group of them, gaze flicking back and forth between their faces, his lips pursed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It didn’t work, anyway.”
“Seriously?” Sam said. “That’s all you’re going to tell us?”
“Yup,” Gabriel said, with disconcerting simplicity. He turned back to Dean, as if there was nothing more to say. “So Dean-o, you were saying something about saving the world?”
Dean stared at him for a moment, and then said, “Yeah. We need to find something called John’s Sword.”
Castiel exhaled harshly. “That’s the way we can end this? With the tools of its beginning?”
“They’re not tools of beginning or ending,” Gabriel said quietly. “Just tools. Okay. What else?”
“There are seven churches,” Dean said readily. “We need to find which ones, and set up the gate between them.”
“Those will be across the globe,” Castiel said, and Dean could tell the angel was already drawing from that fathomless memory, estimating angles and taking measurements. “And at the center—“
“—the crypt,” Gabriel finished. He nodded. “It’s a good solution. It’s an old one. Azrael always did remember the classics best.”
“You think it is adaptable enough to be the cage we need?” Castiel asked.
“I think if Azrael came up with it, then we can swing it,” Gabriel answered. “Though there will be a number of difficulties, I’m guessing.”
“Like the legions of Heaven and Hell coming after us?” Sam asked dryly. Then he stopped when he saw the expression on Dean’s face. “What?”
“From what I got from Azrael, or whatever he calls himself,” Dean said, “Hell will be the only ones after us. But that’s mostly because Heaven won’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole.”
Sam looked at Gabriel for confirmation. Gabriel waggled his head back and forth. “You could say that,” he said eventually. “It’s not hugely surprising. Considering what the Lamb has turned into.”
Sam stared at him for a moment, brain clearly working overtime. “The Lamb,” he repeated. “The Lamb of God?”
“Well, sort of,” Gabriel said. “The Lamb was destined to break the Seals.”
Dean spluttered. “Sam’s a lamb? What the fuck?”
“You and Sam are each one half of the Lamb. And you, Dean, are the righteous man,” Castiel said, turning to him. “But there are no regulations for what happens when the righteous blend with the powers of the Neutral, namely the Horsemen.”
“If you thought you were off book before, just wait for what we’re gonna do next,” Gabriel nodded.
Dean knew. Or at least, he did somewhat. “The army of 200 million,” he said.
“The army of the Horsemen,” Castiel clarified. “And with Azrael agreeing to give up his and the other Horsemens’ influence, his captaincy will fall to you.”
“Dean’s gonna lead an army?” Sam said blankly.
“He’d better,” Gabriel said. “It’s either that, or it kills a third of the Earth’s population.”
“No pressure,” Dean muttered.
“Lemme get this straight,” Bobby cut in with impatience. “We set up this massive global gate with the seven churches, and then Dean leads an army of millions to, what, drive Lucifer back into the Pit?”
“That’s the gist,” Gabriel said. “Like I said, it’s old school. Not something Heaven really wants to touch since Azrael’s refusing, under the terms of his deal with Dean, to take charge. They won’t be happy, and they might try and protest, but it’s likely they’ll just hope to hell that Dean fucks up and brings the Apocalypse anyway.”
Sam looked at Dean. “You seriously thought this was a good plan?”
“I never said, that,” Dean snapped. “I said that I asked Azrael for a plan, and this was what she—he—whatever, gave me.”
“It is one of the few options which involve enough power under our command to actually even the score against Heaven and Hell,” Castiel reasoned.
“Yeah, dependent on Dean’s ability to control an army whose horses have the heads of lions and the tails of snakes and breathe fire and brimstone,” Bobby said. He looked at the perplexed Winchesters and rolled his eyes. “Read Revelations, for Chrissakes.”
“John wrote Revelations on some serious old time hallucinogens,” Gabriel said. “Nobody knows what the Horseman army looks like, because they’ve never been used. Not on this planet, not on any other. They could look like anything.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Dean said.
“Ditto,” Sam said firmly.
Dean viciously tamped down any reaction the fact that Sam had just about as much faith in him as he had in himself. “We also still have to get Pestilence,” he said. “But we’ve got a lead on that. A clinic outside of Portland is reporting an outbreak of three different strains of flu at once. Death said that’d be the best place to start.”
“So, project for tomorrow?” Sam said.
Dean nodded. “Seems so.”
***
The group broke for the evening, though the air seemed to be a bit less charged with War’s ring now off the premises. Of course, now it was charged with an entirely different sort of tension, of the sort that Dean could never abide in the best of times—a general scrutiny as to whether he was up to the task that had just been set in front of him.
Jesus, all he needed was for John Winchester to show up with a judgmental frown on his face and it’d be just like the entirety of his early adolescence.
To take his mind off of it, he decided to go after the one thing that was still bothering him.
“Gabriel. A word?”
Gabriel cast him a look akin to ‘what could you possibly have to say to me?’, and said, “Why?”
“I want to know something. And neither of us want it overheard.”
Gabriel blinked at him, and then said, “Fine.”
They walked out into the scrap yard. Dean decided to cut straight to the point. “The favor you asked from Death. Azrael.”
“None of your business,” Gabriel chirped unconcernedly.
Dean grabbed his collar and swung him around. “It was about Sam, wasn’t it? You asked him to make Sam put on Famine’s ring as part of the deal.”
“What’d make you say that?” Gabriel asked, but Dean was getting good at reading him.
“I know you. And if Death really wanted to make that a part of our deal, he wouldn’t have given up on it so easily. But he just let it slide when I said no. It was too easy. ‘Cause he didn’t want that—you did.”
Gabriel snorted, but looked away. “I should have known his definition of ‘I’ll try’ was going to be half-assed,” he muttered. “Semantics in Enochian are bad enough, but English—“
“Listen up, you fuck,” Dean hissed, cutting him off. “What the hell is your game? Why did you want Sam to become a monster too?”
The archangel glared at him, unbowed. “Insurance, dickwad,” he snarled. “To keep your ass in line. You think I really believe you’re capable of leading the Horsemen’s armies alone? Hell no. You need someone to keep you in control, someone like you who you trust. And that someone’s gotta be just as strong as you. So yeah, of course I’m gonna want your brother to be all juiced up on Horseman. Because the way I see it, he’s the only buffer we’re gonna get if you get all War-ish and decide the end of the world’s peachy ‘cause it makes you feel good.”
Dean let him go, abruptly.
Gabriel continued blithely, “But you know, if that happens I guess it’s all right with me, too. I was waiting for paradise anyway. Except, oh wait, Michael won’t have a vessel for the time when things get hairy. So we’ll all end up in Hell on Earth. So forgive me for being a little invested in this new plan.”
Dean swallowed. “Why didn’t you just say that? Why not tell us the plan from the beginning, if you knew so much about it?”
“I didn’t,” Gabriel said, suddenly looking tired. He pushed a hand through his hair. “I didn’t know what plan Azrael would come up with. I just knew that you were becoming War whether we wanted that or not, and that Death wanted to deal when I saw what kind of calling card he left you. And do you really think you’d let Sam put on a Horseman’s ring just to keep you under control? Your martyr complex runs way too deep, kiddo. So I had to see if I could build some leverage. Not that it matters, anyway, seeing as not only are you a martyr, but you’re willing to martyr several hundred thousand other people in the process. Which, by the way, nice morals. Classy.”
“Shut up. Just shut up. That’s not what I.” Dean turned away. “Christ.”
“Yeah. I’m glad we had this chat,” Gabriel said. When Dean looked over his shoulder, he was gone.
***
Dean was still outside when Castiel found him. The angel held a beer out to him, and he managed an amused half-smile while taking it. “We’ll train you yet,” he said, popping the cap with his ring and taking a long pull.
Castiel said eventually, “You appear to be taking your changed destiny well.”
“I think we’re past destiny at this point, Cas,” Dean replied. He tried not to think about what Death had said to him, as she’d neatly bandaged his hand with the torn sleeve of her blouse. Gabriel had brought that little chat spinning back to punch him in the face, though, so now it just echoed over and over like a broken record in his head.
“You’re missing out, you know,” she’d said, slim fingers knotting the silk into a tourniquet with ease. “If you’d let me kill this city, you would have felt it. And it would have felt like coming home.”
“Sorry if I’m not too comfortable with that idea,” Dean had replied, voice still rough with pain. It had taken more than one blow to get the finger off. He’d felt worse in Hell, but that didn’t really make it any better. The nerve endings were still fresh and screaming.
“You’ll have to, eventually,” she said, stepping away and placing her ring along with Dean’s in her desk drawer, bloody and wrapped in a silk handkerchief. “It’s a part of you now, whether you like it or not. Even if you hack off those wings, you’ll still be able to fly. And you’ll still feel the call of a duty that isn’t yours.”
Yeah, Dean was just about done with duty, and destiny, and all that other shit. Give him some pointers, and face him in the right direction, but goddamn.
He took another long pull from his beer, draining half of it, before he let himself speak.
“Everybody we see, everybody who knows anything, talks about me like I’m either about to turn and kill everyone, or that I’m just wasted potential now,” he said, slowly, like he was still trying to process even though it was clear that he had already or he wouldn’t be talking at all. “They keep saying I should just…give in. That I’ve become something bigger. But if I’m certain of anything, Cas, it’s that—that any bigger, and I’ll be one of the monsters we hunt. I will become one, demon or not, Horseman or not. I just. Don’t ever let me get there.”
Castiel regarded him, as solid as granite. He said, “When I found you in hell, you were half demon, half man.”
Dean closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about that time. Couldn’t, in many ways.
Castiel continued, “When I reached for you, I knew it would burn. It would be more painful than you had ever known, even at Alistair’s hands. But you saw me, and still held on. You held on as I carried you out, and as your blackened soul seared from the ascent. Dean,” and then he reached abortively for Dean, and then seemed to think better of it before dropping his hand. Dean didn’t have time to wish he hadn’t. “Dean, even in the depths of Hell, even on the precipice of becoming the evil Alistair intended you to be, you saw my light, and accepted it. If there are beings out there who believe that you will become a dark force, then they do not know you. That is a promise.”
It took all of Dean’s self-control not to flinch. Instead he breathed noisily through his nose, exhaling heavily, before he said, “Thanks, Cas. You’re probably the only one who thinks that.”
“I will probably be the only one to suggest this as well,” Castiel said, finding Dean’s gaze as Dean reopens his eyes and locking into it. “You should test your strength. Without the ring’s influence, your development into a Horseman should be stymied. You’ll get no ‘bigger’, as you say. You should see how far you can get with the exposure you’ve been given. You’ll need all the help you can get to control the army, if we are to raise them.”
“You’re saying I should embrace what I’ve gotten. Take it and use it.”
“You’ll use it to save lives,” Castiel said simply. “Why should you refrain?”
“Because I might decide I like war better,” Dean murmured.
“You won’t,” Castiel said, with such painful certainty.
“Christ, Cas.”
“Don’t blaspheme.”
***
Sam folded himself into the couch, large moldering volume of Revelations in his lap. He read the lines over.
9:16 And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
Frankly, he was more disturbed by the previous army that apparently involved locusts the size of horses. Gross.
He flicked back up the page, and his eyes narrowed.
9:6 And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
“This sounds suspiciously like we’re still playing by the book,” he said aloud.
Bobby grunted. “Depends on what book you’re reading out of, I suppose. Haven’t got a copy of whatever proper Bible the featherbrains have upstairs.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, unconvinced. He stared down at the book for several more minutes, and then snapped it shut. “I’m gonna…I’ll be back soon,” he said uncertainly, rising from the couch.
“Where’re you off to?” Bobby asked.
“Not sure yet, but I’m wondering if I can find some more information on the Horsemen,” Sam said, grabbing his jacket. “I shouldn’t be long.”
Bobby gave him an appraising look, and then nodded. “If you think you can.”
“Tell Dean I’m taking the Impala, but I’ll be back by tomorrow so we can start in on Pestilence.”
“Sure. Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Sam grimaced. “I won’t.”
He headed out the door to where the Impala was parked. He still had a few hours of daylight, and not long to go. He really, really hoped he wasn’t making a mistake.
He pulled out his phone and punched in a number that he hadn’t ever dared actually putting in his contact list. One that he found slipped into his pocket after Death had risen and everything seemed just that much more shitty. He still had the scrap of paper, now worn through but still legible in what no doubt was fountain pen ink.
He hit ‘send’ and waited. The answering machine picked up almost immediately.
“Hi, it’s Sam,” he said after the tone. “I think you’re gonna want to help us with something. So, um. Meet me where you said we should if anything happened. Because it has. You’ve probably noticed. Okay.
“See you later, Crowley.”
Chapter Seven.
Author: Alchemy Alice
Genre and/or Pairing: Action/Adventure/Horror, possibly Dean/Castiel
Rating: R for violence
Warnings/Spoilers: Up to 5.14-ish? It goes AWOL from there.
Word Count: No idea yet, but probably long.
Disclaimer: Entirely not mine. Just playin'.
Summary: The Horsemen are not just people with fancy rings. They aren’t even demons with fancy rings. They are another species entirely, a force unto themselves, and Lucifer is kidding himself if he thinks that they are at his beck and call. They are separate. They are discreet. They are neutral. Dean Winchester is not built like them.
A/N: Okay, there might actually be a game plan now. Took me long enough, am I right? And since there is a game plan, then it should be obvious that it is time for Revelations to get mightily abused again! Seriously, that whole book of the Bible is so tripped out, it's like the best source of creative inspiration ever.
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Bobby’s waiting for them when they land. He takes one look at Dean’s hand and says, “If that’s what I think it is, you’re gonna need a damn sight more than some battlefield first aid on it.”
“Yeah, stitches probably,” Dean agreed, looking at his mutilated hand in distaste.
“I’ll do them, you’re crap at it,” Sam said. “But you gotta tell us what the hell happened over there.”
“Yeah, yeah. Come on.”
They trooped inside, where Bobby ordered Dean not to bleed on anything except the kitchen table, and Castiel carefully shed his coat and hung it up inside the door, as he’d gotten into the habit of lately. Dean was torn between being glad to see the ugly thing off once in a while, and hating what it meant for Castiel. The angel looked slight without it, the cheap black suit loose around his shoulders, slightly too short at the wrists.
In familiar tandem, Dean plonked himself down into one of the chairs while Sam slung into the one across from him with the assembly of needle, thread, antiseptic and gauze. He swatted Dean’s good hand away and took to winding the silk away from the injured one in tacky strands after tying a tourniquet around. Dean grimaced, but didn’t say anything. Instead he reached for the bottle of prescription-strength aspirin Sam had set down on the table along with the medical supplies, popped the top one-handed, and knocked back several of the tablets. Bobby offered him a beer to wash it down, which Sam eyed with disapproval.
“So who the hell was calling you from across state lines?” Bobby said impatiently.
“Death,” Castiel said. “He was interested in a meeting.”
“And he couldn’t have used a damn telephone?”
“She said death was her language,” Dean said, watching as Sam wrinkled his nose in concentration and dabbed at the stump with disinfectant. Dean hissed before continuing, “Plus, she was following Lucifer’s orders. This was probably the only way she could contact me without arousing his suspicions.”
“So she just kills 6,000 people,” Sam said, as if he still can’t believe it. Dean leveled a look at him.
“She’s Death,” he said again. He didn’t really know why he was taking her side at the moment. She’d just cut off his finger, for Chrissakes.
But what she’d given in return. Well.
“What else did she wish to speak to you about, Dean?” Castiel asked.
Sam threaded the needle. Dean looked at it grimly, and then turned back to Cas.
“She wanted to cut a deal. For her freedom.”
He told them what she’d said. Most of it, at least.
“So, did she actually give you a game plan?” Sam asked, when Dean wound down. He’d finished with stitching the stump of Dean’s finger long before, and now he was a picture of disbelief, and Dean couldn’t blame him—this kind of shit didn’t happen to them. It just didn’t.
And it hadn’t. But Dean wasn’t about to say that just yet. He plucked at the gauze around his hand absently.
“Yeah,” he said. “For Pestilence and Lucifer. The whole package.”
“What’s the catch?”
Dean considered telling them what the first proposed one had been. But he said, “That we hand the rings over, with the promise that they won’t be used for the Apocalypse anymore. And that I have to pass on a message.”
Sam scrunched his nose in confusion, but Castiel sat forward, his gaze narrowing into icy sharpness. “A message to whom?” he asked.
Dean met his eyes. “For Gabriel.”
“You called?”
They all looked up. Gabriel leaned against the kitchen cabinets, Cadbury’s bar dangling loosely from his fingers. His entire frame was conspicuously loose, to the point where Dean started to wonder how much of it was affected. He said roughly, “Yeah. Death had something to say to you.”
The shift was almost imperceptible—a slight tightening around the archangel’s eyes, and a twitch of fingers around the candy bar. “Oh yeah?” he said lightly. “What was that?”
“She said that Azrael did as you asked, and he’s wondering what the hell you think you’re doing.”
Gabriel snorted softly. “Dean, Death is Azrael. But whatever. I suppose that’s about what I expected.”
“You asked Death for a favor?” Sam asked, sitting forward in disbelief, eyes narrowing. “Are you nuts?”
“Azrael and I used to be pals,” Gabriel shrugged. “Seemed silly not to, now that apparently I’m back on the playing field because of you idiots.”
“What the hell kind of favor do you ask from Death?”
Gabriel looked at the group of them, gaze flicking back and forth between their faces, his lips pursed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It didn’t work, anyway.”
“Seriously?” Sam said. “That’s all you’re going to tell us?”
“Yup,” Gabriel said, with disconcerting simplicity. He turned back to Dean, as if there was nothing more to say. “So Dean-o, you were saying something about saving the world?”
Dean stared at him for a moment, and then said, “Yeah. We need to find something called John’s Sword.”
Castiel exhaled harshly. “That’s the way we can end this? With the tools of its beginning?”
“They’re not tools of beginning or ending,” Gabriel said quietly. “Just tools. Okay. What else?”
“There are seven churches,” Dean said readily. “We need to find which ones, and set up the gate between them.”
“Those will be across the globe,” Castiel said, and Dean could tell the angel was already drawing from that fathomless memory, estimating angles and taking measurements. “And at the center—“
“—the crypt,” Gabriel finished. He nodded. “It’s a good solution. It’s an old one. Azrael always did remember the classics best.”
“You think it is adaptable enough to be the cage we need?” Castiel asked.
“I think if Azrael came up with it, then we can swing it,” Gabriel answered. “Though there will be a number of difficulties, I’m guessing.”
“Like the legions of Heaven and Hell coming after us?” Sam asked dryly. Then he stopped when he saw the expression on Dean’s face. “What?”
“From what I got from Azrael, or whatever he calls himself,” Dean said, “Hell will be the only ones after us. But that’s mostly because Heaven won’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole.”
Sam looked at Gabriel for confirmation. Gabriel waggled his head back and forth. “You could say that,” he said eventually. “It’s not hugely surprising. Considering what the Lamb has turned into.”
Sam stared at him for a moment, brain clearly working overtime. “The Lamb,” he repeated. “The Lamb of God?”
“Well, sort of,” Gabriel said. “The Lamb was destined to break the Seals.”
Dean spluttered. “Sam’s a lamb? What the fuck?”
“You and Sam are each one half of the Lamb. And you, Dean, are the righteous man,” Castiel said, turning to him. “But there are no regulations for what happens when the righteous blend with the powers of the Neutral, namely the Horsemen.”
“If you thought you were off book before, just wait for what we’re gonna do next,” Gabriel nodded.
Dean knew. Or at least, he did somewhat. “The army of 200 million,” he said.
“The army of the Horsemen,” Castiel clarified. “And with Azrael agreeing to give up his and the other Horsemens’ influence, his captaincy will fall to you.”
“Dean’s gonna lead an army?” Sam said blankly.
“He’d better,” Gabriel said. “It’s either that, or it kills a third of the Earth’s population.”
“No pressure,” Dean muttered.
“Lemme get this straight,” Bobby cut in with impatience. “We set up this massive global gate with the seven churches, and then Dean leads an army of millions to, what, drive Lucifer back into the Pit?”
“That’s the gist,” Gabriel said. “Like I said, it’s old school. Not something Heaven really wants to touch since Azrael’s refusing, under the terms of his deal with Dean, to take charge. They won’t be happy, and they might try and protest, but it’s likely they’ll just hope to hell that Dean fucks up and brings the Apocalypse anyway.”
Sam looked at Dean. “You seriously thought this was a good plan?”
“I never said, that,” Dean snapped. “I said that I asked Azrael for a plan, and this was what she—he—whatever, gave me.”
“It is one of the few options which involve enough power under our command to actually even the score against Heaven and Hell,” Castiel reasoned.
“Yeah, dependent on Dean’s ability to control an army whose horses have the heads of lions and the tails of snakes and breathe fire and brimstone,” Bobby said. He looked at the perplexed Winchesters and rolled his eyes. “Read Revelations, for Chrissakes.”
“John wrote Revelations on some serious old time hallucinogens,” Gabriel said. “Nobody knows what the Horseman army looks like, because they’ve never been used. Not on this planet, not on any other. They could look like anything.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Dean said.
“Ditto,” Sam said firmly.
Dean viciously tamped down any reaction the fact that Sam had just about as much faith in him as he had in himself. “We also still have to get Pestilence,” he said. “But we’ve got a lead on that. A clinic outside of Portland is reporting an outbreak of three different strains of flu at once. Death said that’d be the best place to start.”
“So, project for tomorrow?” Sam said.
Dean nodded. “Seems so.”
***
The group broke for the evening, though the air seemed to be a bit less charged with War’s ring now off the premises. Of course, now it was charged with an entirely different sort of tension, of the sort that Dean could never abide in the best of times—a general scrutiny as to whether he was up to the task that had just been set in front of him.
Jesus, all he needed was for John Winchester to show up with a judgmental frown on his face and it’d be just like the entirety of his early adolescence.
To take his mind off of it, he decided to go after the one thing that was still bothering him.
“Gabriel. A word?”
Gabriel cast him a look akin to ‘what could you possibly have to say to me?’, and said, “Why?”
“I want to know something. And neither of us want it overheard.”
Gabriel blinked at him, and then said, “Fine.”
They walked out into the scrap yard. Dean decided to cut straight to the point. “The favor you asked from Death. Azrael.”
“None of your business,” Gabriel chirped unconcernedly.
Dean grabbed his collar and swung him around. “It was about Sam, wasn’t it? You asked him to make Sam put on Famine’s ring as part of the deal.”
“What’d make you say that?” Gabriel asked, but Dean was getting good at reading him.
“I know you. And if Death really wanted to make that a part of our deal, he wouldn’t have given up on it so easily. But he just let it slide when I said no. It was too easy. ‘Cause he didn’t want that—you did.”
Gabriel snorted, but looked away. “I should have known his definition of ‘I’ll try’ was going to be half-assed,” he muttered. “Semantics in Enochian are bad enough, but English—“
“Listen up, you fuck,” Dean hissed, cutting him off. “What the hell is your game? Why did you want Sam to become a monster too?”
The archangel glared at him, unbowed. “Insurance, dickwad,” he snarled. “To keep your ass in line. You think I really believe you’re capable of leading the Horsemen’s armies alone? Hell no. You need someone to keep you in control, someone like you who you trust. And that someone’s gotta be just as strong as you. So yeah, of course I’m gonna want your brother to be all juiced up on Horseman. Because the way I see it, he’s the only buffer we’re gonna get if you get all War-ish and decide the end of the world’s peachy ‘cause it makes you feel good.”
Dean let him go, abruptly.
Gabriel continued blithely, “But you know, if that happens I guess it’s all right with me, too. I was waiting for paradise anyway. Except, oh wait, Michael won’t have a vessel for the time when things get hairy. So we’ll all end up in Hell on Earth. So forgive me for being a little invested in this new plan.”
Dean swallowed. “Why didn’t you just say that? Why not tell us the plan from the beginning, if you knew so much about it?”
“I didn’t,” Gabriel said, suddenly looking tired. He pushed a hand through his hair. “I didn’t know what plan Azrael would come up with. I just knew that you were becoming War whether we wanted that or not, and that Death wanted to deal when I saw what kind of calling card he left you. And do you really think you’d let Sam put on a Horseman’s ring just to keep you under control? Your martyr complex runs way too deep, kiddo. So I had to see if I could build some leverage. Not that it matters, anyway, seeing as not only are you a martyr, but you’re willing to martyr several hundred thousand other people in the process. Which, by the way, nice morals. Classy.”
“Shut up. Just shut up. That’s not what I.” Dean turned away. “Christ.”
“Yeah. I’m glad we had this chat,” Gabriel said. When Dean looked over his shoulder, he was gone.
***
Dean was still outside when Castiel found him. The angel held a beer out to him, and he managed an amused half-smile while taking it. “We’ll train you yet,” he said, popping the cap with his ring and taking a long pull.
Castiel said eventually, “You appear to be taking your changed destiny well.”
“I think we’re past destiny at this point, Cas,” Dean replied. He tried not to think about what Death had said to him, as she’d neatly bandaged his hand with the torn sleeve of her blouse. Gabriel had brought that little chat spinning back to punch him in the face, though, so now it just echoed over and over like a broken record in his head.
“You’re missing out, you know,” she’d said, slim fingers knotting the silk into a tourniquet with ease. “If you’d let me kill this city, you would have felt it. And it would have felt like coming home.”
“Sorry if I’m not too comfortable with that idea,” Dean had replied, voice still rough with pain. It had taken more than one blow to get the finger off. He’d felt worse in Hell, but that didn’t really make it any better. The nerve endings were still fresh and screaming.
“You’ll have to, eventually,” she said, stepping away and placing her ring along with Dean’s in her desk drawer, bloody and wrapped in a silk handkerchief. “It’s a part of you now, whether you like it or not. Even if you hack off those wings, you’ll still be able to fly. And you’ll still feel the call of a duty that isn’t yours.”
Yeah, Dean was just about done with duty, and destiny, and all that other shit. Give him some pointers, and face him in the right direction, but goddamn.
He took another long pull from his beer, draining half of it, before he let himself speak.
“Everybody we see, everybody who knows anything, talks about me like I’m either about to turn and kill everyone, or that I’m just wasted potential now,” he said, slowly, like he was still trying to process even though it was clear that he had already or he wouldn’t be talking at all. “They keep saying I should just…give in. That I’ve become something bigger. But if I’m certain of anything, Cas, it’s that—that any bigger, and I’ll be one of the monsters we hunt. I will become one, demon or not, Horseman or not. I just. Don’t ever let me get there.”
Castiel regarded him, as solid as granite. He said, “When I found you in hell, you were half demon, half man.”
Dean closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about that time. Couldn’t, in many ways.
Castiel continued, “When I reached for you, I knew it would burn. It would be more painful than you had ever known, even at Alistair’s hands. But you saw me, and still held on. You held on as I carried you out, and as your blackened soul seared from the ascent. Dean,” and then he reached abortively for Dean, and then seemed to think better of it before dropping his hand. Dean didn’t have time to wish he hadn’t. “Dean, even in the depths of Hell, even on the precipice of becoming the evil Alistair intended you to be, you saw my light, and accepted it. If there are beings out there who believe that you will become a dark force, then they do not know you. That is a promise.”
It took all of Dean’s self-control not to flinch. Instead he breathed noisily through his nose, exhaling heavily, before he said, “Thanks, Cas. You’re probably the only one who thinks that.”
“I will probably be the only one to suggest this as well,” Castiel said, finding Dean’s gaze as Dean reopens his eyes and locking into it. “You should test your strength. Without the ring’s influence, your development into a Horseman should be stymied. You’ll get no ‘bigger’, as you say. You should see how far you can get with the exposure you’ve been given. You’ll need all the help you can get to control the army, if we are to raise them.”
“You’re saying I should embrace what I’ve gotten. Take it and use it.”
“You’ll use it to save lives,” Castiel said simply. “Why should you refrain?”
“Because I might decide I like war better,” Dean murmured.
“You won’t,” Castiel said, with such painful certainty.
“Christ, Cas.”
“Don’t blaspheme.”
***
Sam folded himself into the couch, large moldering volume of Revelations in his lap. He read the lines over.
9:16 And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
Frankly, he was more disturbed by the previous army that apparently involved locusts the size of horses. Gross.
He flicked back up the page, and his eyes narrowed.
9:6 And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
“This sounds suspiciously like we’re still playing by the book,” he said aloud.
Bobby grunted. “Depends on what book you’re reading out of, I suppose. Haven’t got a copy of whatever proper Bible the featherbrains have upstairs.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, unconvinced. He stared down at the book for several more minutes, and then snapped it shut. “I’m gonna…I’ll be back soon,” he said uncertainly, rising from the couch.
“Where’re you off to?” Bobby asked.
“Not sure yet, but I’m wondering if I can find some more information on the Horsemen,” Sam said, grabbing his jacket. “I shouldn’t be long.”
Bobby gave him an appraising look, and then nodded. “If you think you can.”
“Tell Dean I’m taking the Impala, but I’ll be back by tomorrow so we can start in on Pestilence.”
“Sure. Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Sam grimaced. “I won’t.”
He headed out the door to where the Impala was parked. He still had a few hours of daylight, and not long to go. He really, really hoped he wasn’t making a mistake.
He pulled out his phone and punched in a number that he hadn’t ever dared actually putting in his contact list. One that he found slipped into his pocket after Death had risen and everything seemed just that much more shitty. He still had the scrap of paper, now worn through but still legible in what no doubt was fountain pen ink.
He hit ‘send’ and waited. The answering machine picked up almost immediately.
“Hi, it’s Sam,” he said after the tone. “I think you’re gonna want to help us with something. So, um. Meet me where you said we should if anything happened. Because it has. You’ve probably noticed. Okay.
“See you later, Crowley.”
Chapter Seven.
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Date: 14 Jun 2010 10:07 (UTC)Agh, I hope that Sam won't be doing anything stupid after being told not to. Then again, if he doesn't, he's not a Winchester.
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Date: 14 Jun 2010 18:58 (UTC)Revelations is seriously the best inspiration a writer can ask for. So many ridiculous fantastical things in one place!
Thanks for reading as always :)
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Date: 14 Jun 2010 12:24 (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 Jun 2010 18:58 (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 Jun 2010 16:33 (UTC)Hopefully Gabriel won't still try and turn Sam into Famine or has Dean already given the ring back to Death?
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Date: 14 Jun 2010 18:59 (UTC)The ring is still at Bobby's, so we'll see how that works out :)
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Date: 14 Jun 2010 21:40 (UTC)This is becoming truly epic my friend and I love every minute of it!
I love that he'll have a freaking army to help him kick Lucy's ass back to his sweet home!
(And Cas unwavering faith in Dean? So beautiful, so hot! :D)
I can't wait to see what will happen next!!
Winged Golden Tiger
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Date: 15 Jun 2010 13:12 (UTC)no subject
Date: 19 Jun 2010 21:58 (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jul 2011 18:48 (UTC)Please let them look like Stormtroopers riding My Little Ponies. :)