That Hellbound Train, Sam/Dean, R.

[mirabella]

Title: That Hellbound Train
Fandom: Supernatural, Sam/Dean, R for violence, AU after the end of S3.
Summary: "It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase 'It’s a small world'. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone." — Clive Barker (Books of Blood 2)
Warnings: This is very gory. I don't think I've really written gore before, but yeah, here it is.



Suicides go to Hell. It's something to think about.

Sam thinks he's probably seen more suicide scenes, either in crime scene photos or up close, than most coroners have. And it's no wonder suicides go to Hell, because they leave a little room full of hell on Earth behind them. Blood pooling like spilled paint. Brain matter splashed on the floorboards. Skull fragments embedded in drywall. Bloody, frothy vomit in beds and toilets and sinks. Shit and piss dripping from bodies swaying under good strong beams. It used to be, back when Sam was young and knew everything there was to know about everything, that he couldn't imagine being willing to leave that kind of undignified fucking mess behind.

Now his brother's burning in Hell, Sam hasn't come up from the bottom of a whiskey bottle in weeks, and now he understands.

It's something to think about, but Sam's not far enough gone not to remember that the reason he's seen so many suicide scenes is that so many suicides never leave. And as far as Sam can tell, nine times out of ten when you become a ghost your sentience level plummets until you might as well be an old movie reel, stuck in a projector and playing over and over. With the weight of his sins, Sam's pretty sure that someone will show up to drag him to Hell if he so much as bumps his head; but he's not completely sure, and that holds him back. With his luck he'll get stuck shooting himself over and over, forever, the pain of losing Dean still like an animal eating his gut away from the inside.

Dean was the love of his life. The alcohol has stripped away any illusions he might have had on that front. He never touched Dean like that, never really even thought about it except in passing and it's too late to start now, but it doesn't matter. There was Dean, and then there was without-Dean, and everything that made Sam whole is on the other side of that line now.

Suicides go to Hell, but not always. Sam thinks about it anyway, weighing the odds.



"I told you I needed you sober," Ruby says, picking up an empty gin bottle and wrinkling someone else's nose.

Sam just looks at her, steady over the lip of a bottle of tequila. It annoys the hell out of her when he just looks at her like that. Sometimes he thinks that's why he does it, and doesn't that make him feel just wonderful, petty and powerless like he's fifteen years old again and glaring at the back of Dad's head. "Hey, Ruby, you notice something?" he says finally, pronouncing his words carefully. "Take your time. Look around. I'll wait."

"Sam –"

"Shh," he says, holding up a forefinger. "Listen."

Ruby looks martyred. "Stop screwing around, damn it. If you –"

Sam's on his feet and looming over her so fast that she takes a step back. He doesn't care. There's nothing from the other side of that line that's worth saving now, not when that Sam Winchester let his brother's soul slip through his fingers. "That, Ruby, is the sound of no fucking Dean. That, that thing where there's no stupid movie with things blowing up, no arguing over pizza toppings, no earnest conversations with scared kids who just saw a ghost, no snoring after lights-out, that is the sound of my brother being dead after you told me you could help save him."

Ruby's brow knits into a poor imitation of caring and regret. "Sam," she says gently. "I tried. But we can still –"

"I'm finding a hunt," Sam says, turning away from her. The room spins a little, back and forth. "I need something to kill."

The hint is obvious: leave now before it's you. Prudently, Ruby goes.



He doesn't just look for a hunt. He's wound too tight inside, and he can't. He does what he did after an eternity of Tuesdays and one too many Wednesdays: he looks for something he can damn near rip apart with his bare hands. There's no thinking when he does that, no feeling, no looking ahead to all the endless days to go before there's nothing left of the rest of his life; just cold assessment of how best to use his body to, for instance, tear a vampire's head off its shoulders. It's nothing more than what Dad taught them to do. Saving people, hunting things. And if Sam cares more about the hunting than about the saving right now… well, he's pretty sure Dad would understand.

He wishes Gordon were still alive. Undead. Whatever. The things Sam wants to do to Gordon now for daring to lay hands on Dean almost disturbs even him.

He finds a vampire hiding out in a run-down factory just outside of Chicago, alone, new-made and sloppy. He gets the drop on it before sunset, handcuffs it to a steel girder with silver handcuffs, raises the machete… and then lowers it.

"We're going to play a game," he says.



When he's done, the vampire doesn't have eyes anymore.

Well, that's a little misleading. There are a lot of things the vampire doesn't have, in the sense that they're no longer attached to him. Or inside him. Most of it, though, is still recognizable, even if it's no longer quite in context. But the thing had looked just enough like Gordon, and it took Sam just long enough to find one that did look like Gordon, that once he got started he couldn't seem to stop; and now there's nothing on this concrete floor that even looks like eyes, or hands. The hands he incinerated with the powers Ruby's been goading him toward. He doesn't remember what happened to the eyes, but eyes are fragile. There's no telling.

He goes to take another drink from his flask and his hand slips on it a little. He doesn't look down to see why. His hair is dripping down the back of his neck; he's got a pretty good idea.

"See," he says to the head that's sitting on a cardboard box, "Dad had me and Dean. I don't think he wanted us, but he had us. Fuck him, he had something left. He knew… knew Mom wasn't burning in Hell because he was too fucking. Because he didn't kill something that needed killing when he had the chance. You think I'm gonna make that mistake again? You killed a little girl, motherfucker. You."

You looked at him like you thought you had the right to lay eyes on my brother, he thinks, and tries to pretend he didn't.

The vampire's dead. If the cops walk in here right now, Sam won't live long enough to go to trial. He knows that, but instead of clearing out he draws up a chair and sits down. Gonna have a nice conversation, just him and the head. Maybe it'll be therapeutic.

"So tell me the truth, man," he says, waving the flask. He thinks something in him just broke that would have been better whole, but he's too drunk to care. "I mean, we shared something here, right? Even though, ha, dude, I gotta tell you, you don't look too real anymore. You look like a bad mockup of Jason's mother. No offense."

There's a large pane of glass behind the box the head was on. It looks like it used to belong to a window. It's dark now, but there's just enough light from the flashlight at Sam's feet that he can see himself in the reflection. Himself, the head in front of him and the factory floor behind him.

"Dean," he says, fingers clenching on the flask until it slips right out of his hand. "Dean. Dean."

He counts the seconds until there are too many of them and he can't keep hold. "I said it three times," he whispers then, and his voice sounds so much like his voice at six years old that it scares him where nothing else has tonight. "Dean? Please?"

Something moves behind his reflection. Sam whirls, knocking the chair over to see the factory folding back onto endless dark.

"Dean?" he whispers around the ache in his throat.

He can hear wind, distantly keening. And there's no light but what's spilling into the void from the reflected flashlight beam, but he can see anyway – Dean, upright but limp, held up by meathooks that stretch his skin grotesquely. His body is open from belly to chin, ribs and flesh spread apart by hooks, viscera glittering like carnival glass, and his heart isn't beating.

The breath Sam takes in sounds like an animal dying. He wants to move, wants to wrap himself around Dean meathooks and all and never let go, never again, never again I swear just let me MOVE –

It takes him a minute to notice that the blood splashed over the walls and floor is disappearing, patch by patch, as if something were sucking it up. And it is, it is, the blood is disappearing into the void, pooling at Dean's feet and climbing up him and sinking in like a lover's touch until the factory is as clean as if the vampire had never been.

When the last of the blood disappears Dean's heart shudders into life, beating as frantically as the wings of a caged bird. His eyes fly open, dazed and so green, and he starts to lift his head.

The second Sam shakes off his paralysis and steps forward, the void closes and Dean is gone.



"What the hell is this, Sam?" Ruby grinds out.

"You badmouthing my décor?" Sam asks, barely bothering to look up from the guns he's cleaning.

Behind him, Ruby is standing stock still, as if she's afraid she's standing on a land mine. When she speaks, though, her voice has a pale echo of that same hard sneer it had when they first met. Sam has to applaud her determination, he supposes. "You hoping that if you have enough mirrors set up it'll remind you to wash off the whiskey sweat once a week or so?"

Sam drops the Desert Eagle onto the table and stands up. All around him, every wall reflecting back into itself, his image turns with him toward Ruby's. She swallows convulsively but doesn't step back.

She's all he has anymore, he supposes, but it's easier right now to remember that Dean never trusted her. The mirrors aren't working so far, but maybe if he's good, if he makes Dean want to come back as badly as Sam wants him back, they will. Magical thinking, he hears his intro psych professor say – but his intro psych professor wasn't a hunter, didn't know how powerful magical thinking can be.

"So. You're my resident expert on the flames of Hell," he says, all false cheer.

"I'm going to ask this one more time," she says. "What the fuck is all this?"

Sam cocks his head. "Good. I'm glad that was the last time. So tell me – how does blood plus mirrors equal a portal to Hell opening for a few seconds in the fabric of reality?"

"It doesn't," she snaps. But there's a flicker in her eyes when she says it, something worried and evasive. Sam might not know all her tells, but he knows enough.

Behind him, the Desert Eagle cocks by itself, loud ratchet in the smothering quiet.

"Gonna shoot me?" Ruby sneers.

"If you don't start talking. That's a big gun back there, Ruby. It's loaded with salt-rubbed cop-killers that could rip through a Kevlar vest; it'll blow a hole in that empty little Barbie doll you're possessing big enough to watch TV through. Then you'll have to find another body. It'll be a pain in the ass and take you god knows how long, you know how picky you are, and in the meantime I'll be here all by myself, not doing whatever it is you want me to do. Tell. Me. The. Truth."

Sam is bigger than just about any other human being he's ever met. He can bench-press more than Ruby could move with a forklift, and he's as fast as a rattlesnake. The great thing about those facts is how very seldom he has to actually draw anyone's attention to them. All he has to do is stop pretending he doesn’t know them, and that always seems to be enough.

"I don't know," she says sullenly, resentful at having to admit it.

"Ruby."

"Shut up and let me think," she snaps, moving back a couple of steps. "Did this happen?"

"Let's assume we're speaking in the hypothetical."

"You want to know if you can bring Dean back by dumping pig's blood all over the prom? No. If it were that easy, Hell would be emptier than the matinee of an Uwe Boll movie. But…"

"But?"

Ruby chews on her lip; still wary, but drawn in in spite of herself. "There's a ritual, but it wouldn't work for you. There have to be demons, powerful ones, on both ends."

Candles flash in Sam's memory, light and shadow on pale hair, and he mentally kicks himself for forgetting. "Meg. She used a chalice full of blood to communicate with Azazel."

"But it still doesn't open a portal. It's like using a cell phone, but gorier. More blood won't make it more effective." Ruby narrows her eyes, looking at him like she doesn't quite like what she sees. "And it has to be someone's lifeblood, Sam. Someone who died to fill that chalice. How much blood are we talking about here?"

He'd had to get rid of his clothes. "How much is there in the human body?"

"You killed someone?" Ruby's voice hits a volume and pitch that makes Sam's ears throb.

Irritated, he flings up his hands and goes to sit back down. She doesn't know anything, not that he really expected her to. "There are a lot of things out there that used to be people, Ruby. Or things that are person-sized. How the fuck you can stand there wearing someone else's corpse and forget that is beyond me, but then you never were all that bright, were you?"

The silence from behind him goes on as long as it takes for Ruby to swallow down whatever obscenities she wants to hurl at him; which is to say, a long time. Sam keeps cleaning the guns.

"You don't listen to me very often," she says finally, strained. "You pretend you do, and you pat yourself on the back for cherry-picking the things that will be useful for you and ignoring the rest, but what you're really doing is tuning out anything you don't want to hear. But you'd better listen to this, Sam, because you're going to ruin everything, everything, and everything you want is going to get salted and burned at your feet."

Sam keeps cleaning the guns, listening more out of idle curiosity than anything else.

"There is nothing good at the intersection of blood and Hell, Sam. It's crossing the streams in a big fucking way. Not only will it not get your brother back, but if you show up in front of Lilith with that stain on your soul? She's not even going to have to snap her fingers to destroy you. You'll be her goddamn cabana boy before you've even gotten out of the car. "

"Are you done?" Sam interrupts. The gypsy's warning is running a little long, here, and Sam can only go so long before the urge to hurt something with his teeth starts turning the whole world around him red. He doesn't quite have the patience he used to.

"I guess I am," Ruby snaps.

"Good decision. I need you to find out if there's another ritual you don't know about. Blood and mirrors. There has to be something."

"You didn't listen."

"You want to help, or do you want to watch me stumble around in the dark trying to do this myself? You really don't have any other options," Sam says, lifting a Glock to sight down the barrel. "I'd rather you helped, but if you want to sit this one out, be my guest."

There's a minute of silence, then footsteps, and then the door closing behind Ruby. Idly, he wonders which one she chose. He's sort of hoping she chooses Door Number Two. He sets down the Glock and stands, stepping into a sea of reflections that make him sick and unsteady with their constant motion.

"Dean," he whispers, and says it over and over until the light fails.



The next one is a werewolf, and Sam sits cross-legged on the floor of an abattoir of a motel room, surrounded by candles and all the mirrors he could loot from a nearby antique store, aimlessly circling a planchette through the smears of blood on a Ouija board.

The hunt was two states over from the house he's squatting in, and for two states Sam tried to remember how to mourn Madison. He remembers feeling such a sense of connection with her, remembers letting himself fall a little in love with her while she did her laundry and watched TV and let them both pretend there was nothing in the dark, both of them in a conspiracy to shut out a life they hadn't asked for for just a little while longer. But he tried to recapture the grief, the loss, and only managed to remember that he barely knew her.

What he remembers, as clear as day, is how much it hurt Dean to see Sam hurting. Remembers that Madison, however indirectly, made Dean cry. Sam might not be far enough gone yet not to realize that resenting her for it is irrational; but the passenger seat beside him was empty and Madison is long dead, and he's not going to be forgiving her – or himself – any time soon.

Something's making him feel sick – alcohol, or lack of food, or the heavy stink of blood, or the low drone of flies. Maybe the gouts of red, or worse, everywhere he looks. He didn't mean to do that much damage, but it's been a week now since he saw Dean's ghost in that warehouse and every hour flays away a little more of his heart. He doesn't know what it was that called Dean, whether it was the blood or the dismemberment, and he doesn't want to take any chances. He's replicated the conditions of Dean's last appearance as best he can. Control all the variables and you can reproduce just about any result, his professors had told him.

"Remember when you talked to me like this?" he whispers.

The planchette moves – D, E, A, N – but it's only Sam's hand behind it.

"Remember when I was thirteen and we went to that stupid party in Hopewell? You were –"

Seventeen years old and the only perfect thing God had ever made.

" – so mad about having to babysit a bunch of kids that you didn't care what we did. Then somebody brought out a Ouija board, remember, and the girls were so scared. That one girl, what was her name…"

Sam cocks his head for a moment, listening. Dean always remembers names, even when he pretends not to.

"…she actually started crying because she was convinced that Ouija boards were tools of Satan and just having one in your house meant the devil could come through and steal your soul. She made you take it out back and throw it in the trash."

Sam's not unaware that he's sitting in a room with a mutilated body, arms covered in blood to the shoulder, talking to a Ouija board. If he'd ever had a vision of this he'd probably have shot himself, convinced that was going to go darkside. But he hasn't. This werewolf killed a dozen people and would have killed more. It's no different than putting Madison down; just messier, and with a higher goal.

He wonders if that would have made any difference to the Sam who would have come out of this dream screaming loud enough to wake the neighbors and scare the hell out of Jess.

"Dean," he whispers, and wonders if blood is enough, if it needs tears too.

DEAN, the planchette spells out again, slow as Louisiana summer, slipping through blood like bayou water.

He feels the wind before he hears it this time, icy and rank, brushing against the backs of his arms like a draft from a window with a gale blowing outside. Sam clamps a hand over his mouth and fights his gag reflex, his eyes fixed on the mirror in front of him while down in his peripheral vision the blood on the Ouija board drains into the NO in the corner and disappears.

The room ripples in the mirror, dark and blurry, and when it resolves again Dean is standing behind him, bare feet smeared with blood from the carpet. He's brought the hooks with him this time, wound on chains around him and buried in skin that's as white as new snow compared to the dark shine of the viscera they leave exposed. Dean looks a little puzzled to be where he is; looks at Sam like he can't quite decide what species Sam is. There might not be anything sane left in his eyes, but they're still brilliant green, and Sam's breath catches in his throat.

He doesn't move, not yet. Not even to look back. He's not taking any chances, and Dean is still just out of reach.

Finally, Dean moves half a step forward. The chains stretch behind him, anchored somewhere Sam's eyes can't track in the mirror. Tentatively, still with that puzzled expression, Dean reaches out. Blood streams up from the carpet to his hand like a tap running up toward the ceiling, winding around his skin and vanishing. There's a fish hook embedded in the webbing of his hand between thumb and forefinger, attached to a slender chain that runs back along his arm.

Sam holds his breath.

"Sammy," Dean says in a voice like grave dirt, and when he slides his hand onto Sam's shoulder, Sam grabs it and rips out the hook.

He can't hold on. There's a burst of something that batters him like invisible wings, the wind fills his lungs with a fetor he can't breathe through, and when he lashes out with his powers it breaks out the mirrors and windows in a fountain of shattered glass. Dean's hand melts out of his, and when the glass stops raining down, Sam is alone in the room and there are alarmed voices starting outside.

But when he opens his hand there's a fish hook embedded in it, trailing a length of broken silver chain behind it, and Sam can work with that for now.



When he dangles the hook in front of Ruby, she barely has time to stumble backward before her head snaps back reflexively and her mouth gapes open, ready to belch out smoke. Sam reaches out a hand and stuffs her back down into the body she's riding – not without difficulty, but she's been training him, after all. She's probably sorry for that at the moment.

"Got it under control now?" he asks.

Ruby's not looking at him, hiding behind her hair as she brings up a shaky hand to wipe her mouth. "You son of a bitch," she says thinly. "You arrogant fuck. I should leave you to find out what Hell really is. You aren't worth saving."

Sam brings the hook back into a sunbeam pushing valiantly through the house's filthy windows and watches it turn slowly back and forth on its chain. "You don't want to save me, Ruby. You and I both know it's too late for that. You just want me to kill myself effectively."

"Where did you get that?" she demands. "You stupid, spoiled little boy, hasn't it ever occurred to you that phrases like 'a little piece of Hell on Earth' mean something bad for a reason?"

"Jesus, your mouth. I thought you were supposed to be the kinder, gentler version of Ruby." Sam moves around her, letting the chain catch the light again and watching with interest when she flinches. "You want to know where I got it? I pulled it out of Dean's hand last night."

"That's impossible." But she doesn't really believe he's lying; he can see that when she looks up at him, carefully fixing her gaze past the hook.

"This was just one. There must be a dozen in him." Sam's voice cracks and he has to look away. Somehow, thinking about Dean's ruined body is worse here in this sunlit kitchen than it was in the dark. "They're holding him there. I touched him, Ruby, I had his hand in mine, if I can just get him out of those hooks I can keep him here with me. I know it."

"You don't know that," Ruby corrects him, very quietly.

"I –"

"No, Sam. When you saw him, what did he look like? Did he know where he was? Did he know you?"

"Yes. He said my name."

Ruby's silent, as if she knows he isn't going to answer the rest of her question and is just waiting for him to realize it himself.

"Can he feel what they're doing to him?" Sam asks, his throat closing on the words, silently pleading with her to say no.

"Yes," she says instead, looking away. Probably, Sam thinks, because she knows that if he sees the tiniest spark of spiteful satisfaction in her eyes he'll make her beg for an exorcism. "Sam, that kind of pain… it does things to you. It hurts until all you want to do is rip apart anything in front of you. Did you think Dean came all the way from Hell to hold hands with you? If you hadn't lost hold of him he'd probably have ripped your arm off at the shoulder. He's a brand-new baby demon, for fuck's sake, he's still got the impulse control of a two-year-old."

"He's not a demon," Sam says. Around them, the kitchen darkens until it's nothing but shadow.

"He's –"

"I'm not going to argue this with you," Sam tells her. "I want you to tell me everything you can about these chains and hooks."

"They hurt," Ruby snaps.

"They're going to."

For a minute he thinks she's going to turn around and leave; it's a long and visible struggle not to, but she stays where she is. "I don't know anything about them," she says finally, sounding wearier than he's ever heard her. "Sam, Hell is endless. Endless. In time, in space, and in creativity, and nothing in it has any other purpose than causing suffering. You can't even imagine how many ways there are, ways you couldn't imagine if you didn't do anything for the rest of your life but sit there and try. I don't know how the hooks work. I was never curious enough about them to ask. Okay?"

"He's there because of me," Sam whispers. "I have to get him back. I had him, Ruby. I touched him. If I can just figure out how to get through those chains before he can disappear…"

"What about Lilith?"

"Fuck Lilith," Sam answers bluntly. "Do you think she was ever more important than Dean?"

"I have to go. I have to – to think about this."

"Ruby!"

"Not now, Sam," she says, backing up. Sam's tempted to make her stay, but he can see it wouldn't do any good. "Just… don't do anything until I get back. And take those damned mirrors down."

Sam watches her go, twirling the hook absently on its chain.



Ironically, Sam is pretty sure that there is now no area of batshit obsessiveness in which he hasn't surpassed his dad. He doesn't really think Dad would be proud.

He has, except for the occasional hour or so of sobriety first thing in the morning, been drunk since Dean died. He's started a new journal dedicated solely to getting Dean out of Hell and it's half full already. He's fairly sure Dad never tracked down hunts with the kind of single-minded obsessiveness with which Sam has been going after them – except that Dad never picked and chose. Where there were people in trouble, he went. Sam, on the other hand, doesn't care about people in trouble right now; he bypasses vengeful spirits, poltergeists, black dogs, women in white, even something he thinks might be a zombie, no matter what kind of body count they've racked up. He needs things that bleed.

Disturbingly enough, he'd be willing to bet that Dad didn't spend as much time thinking about holding his wife in his arms as Sam spends thinking about the way Dean's hand slipped onto his shoulder and opened up clothes and skin in a bloody line bright with pain.

"You have to come back to me," he whispers, leaning his head against the bathroom mirror, his mouth warming the glass beneath it with a thin layer of fog.



"Kinky," the demon sneers, staring around at the mirrors that Ruby has been scrupulously avoiding looking at all evening. It's bound to a chair in the middle of the room, sitting in a devil's trap painted on the floor, and Sam has already given himself a nosebleed trying to send it back to Hell. He's not going to succeed, he can tell that already – too much coffee and alcohol, too little food, and frankly he doesn't really give a damn whether he sends the demon back or not. Pointedly, he clues Ruby in on this.

"Don't be a child, Sam," she snaps. "You're just going to let that demon ride that poor bastard it's in?"

The demon laughs, harsh and hacking. "That's good. That's rich. Hey, Sammy boy, want to know a secret?"

"Don't call me that," Sam says between his teeth, bringing just enough of his power to bear to cause pain.

The demon arches off the chair and curses a blue streak, then sags back down into it, snickering in a way that grates on Sam's last nerve. "Fuck you, I'll tell you anyway. Turns out this meatsuit was a little defective."

Ruby steps forward and opens her mouth. Sam holds up a hand, freezing her in her tracks. "What do you mean, defective?" he asks.

"I mean," the demon says, looking petulant, "that his heart wasn't up to getting whammied and stuffed into the trunk of a car. You two retards killed him. I can hold the suit together for a while, but –"

Sam walks into the devil's trap and lays his fingers along the body's pulse point. "How long ago? Right when Ruby put you in the car?"

"Pretty close. Before we got here, anyway."

"Ruby, go away," Sam says.

"What?"

"You heard me. All the way away. Go wherever you go when you're nowhere near here."

"What the hell are you doing, Sam?" she hisses.

"Ruby, I'm going to count to three and then it's going to be you in this trap. One."

"You idiot, you're not strong enough to take on –"

"Two," he says, and turns to look at her over his shoulder.

Ruby takes a step back, and then another. In a minute, the front door closes behind her. Sam turns back to the demon and pulls out a bowie knife.

"What the fuck?" the demon says nervously.

Sam pushes the knife blade through denim and into the demon's femoral artery. The blood is a little sluggish, a little cooler than it should be, but it spills.

"Ow, asshole," says the demon. "What is this, the Amateur Torture Hour?"

Sam steps back, bends down, and scrapes a line through the paint on the floor. "Get lost," he orders curtly.

The demon blinks at him, somewhere between wary and incredulous. "And, um. Am I taking the meatsuit with me or leaving it here?"

"You're leaving it. And you owe me a favor for letting you walk."

"I think we're supposed to kiss on that, but hey, what's some tongue between friends?" The demon roars out of the body and disappears, leaving Sam with a corpse.

Carefully, he redraws the devil's trap. There's a bucket and a small metal washtub outside in a storage shed; working fast, Sam clears the spiders out of them and brings them back into the house. Telekinesis is better than another pair of hands, and he lifts the body, slides the tub under it, and sets it back down. Cuts off the clothes first so that they don't trap any of the blood, tosses them into the fire, then switches to a smaller knife and starts slicing open arteries as if he were bleeding the body out to embalm it.

The tub starts filling, slow droplets at first, then streams, then a steady flow that sheets off the sides of the chair with a sound like a rainstorm on a tin roof.

When nothing more can be wrung out of the cadaver, Sam stows it and the chair in a corner and grabs the bucket. Collected like this, the blood doesn't seem like much, but the bucket is heavier when he pulls it out and steps outside the devil's trap. Not wanting to contaminate the trap, he splashes it on the walls instead of the floor, splattering the mirrors. He's gotten it all over himself now, so he doesn't bother trying to stay clean, just pulls his sleeve down over his hand and wipes one of the full-length mirrors down, leaving red streaks on the glass.

"Dean," he says, walking backward toward the trap. "Dean. De-"

He almost backs right into his brother, hooks and all.

"Jes –" Sam starts, then bites his tongue so hard it bleeds. Dean's eyes narrow, fixed on Sam's mouth. The blood on Sam's clothes is already flecking onto Dean like high-velocity backsplatter, but Dean is leaning in, so close that Sam can smell leather and sulfur on him, so close he can almost hear the slick motion of the organs the chains leave exposed. Understanding hits him in a sudden flash, and he opens his mouth, touching his tongue to his front teeth.

Dean's lips part. There's a strange, cold tugging sensation in Sam's tongue, and then the blood from his mouth spills out in a fine red mist that Dean inhales through too-sharp teeth. "Sammy," he whispers, esophagus and ravaged muscles in his throat flexing with the movement. "Sam."

There's no hook in his right hand, not even a scar where it once was. But face to face with his brother, Sam can see that Dean's not quite all in this plane; he wavers around the edges, stutters in and out like ghosts do. He looks solid in the mirrors, Sam can see that over Dean's shoulder, but he's not, and the blood flowing up over his skin dips and whirls like it's fighting for purchase.

"You're doing good, Dean," Sam breathes, moving slowly around him. Dean moves with him, rotating around his chains, and Sam steps backward into the devil's trap.

Dean stops dead, looking at the trap with a mixture of longing and terror. His form wavers hard around the edges, and in the mirrors is nothing but blackness and the wings of birds.

"It's okay," Sam says. Moving slowly, he lifts the washtub and sets it back down just on the inside of the trap. The blood keeps splashing longer than it should, pulled toward Dean like a weak tide. "Dean, it's okay. You need this. Nobody died for it, I swear, it was a possession, the guy was dead already. Just… come here and get it. Just a step closer, okay?"

"…not what I am, Sammy," Dean whispers, but his eyes are fixed on the blood.

"Dean," Sam says. "I will give you any absolution you want."

Somewhere there's a bell tolling, deep and unsettling. Dean shifts his weight back, almost imperceptibly.

Sam is about to cry like an exhausted toddler from frustration and sheer need. Out of desperation, he sticks his hand into the tub and brings it up streaming red, blood cupped in the palm, and holds it out past the edge of the trap.

Dean moves forward, one unwilling step and then another, until Sam can reach out and take hold of his leg. Gripping the dark, too-slick leather of his pants, Sam reaches up and spills blood over the skin of Dean's stomach like a libation, where there's skin left. Then, holding his breath, he scoops up another handful and spills it into Dean's abdominal cavity, watering organs that bloom like nightshade when the blood touches them. Dean shivers and tilts his head back; Sam looks up just long enough to make sure he's not hurting his brother, then returns his attention to what he's doing.

He's on his knees, and blood spilled over Dean's esophagus narrows the wound until bright new scar tissue knits together under Dean's chin. For all that Dean's form is still flickering in front of Sam's eyes, the skin under his hands feels solid and cold. He wants to close his eyes, and doesn't; instead he keeps scooping blood over Dean, over his arms and the sides of his neck and even his feet, careful for right now to avoid the hooks. By the time he pulls back, his arms are aching and there's only a little blood left in the basin, but Dean looks for the first time like he might not be in such blinding pain that he can't even keep hold of his sanity.

"Good, Dean, so proud of you," Sam breathes, drawing his hands back slowly. "My arms are tired, though, man. I want to give you the rest of this. Come here, okay?"

Looking drugged, Dean edges forward until the tips of his toes almost touch the trap. For the first time the chains go taut behind him, holding him back away from the trap, and the sound he makes is so agonized and defeated that tears finally fall almost unnoticed down Sam's face. He stands with a double handful of blood, reaching forward to smooth it over Dean's shoulders.

"I know, man," he whispers, inching forward. "Doing so good for me, Dean, just stand there, okay? Just… give me another minute with you."

"…have to go," Dean rasps.

"I know, it's okay," Sam tells him, wraps his arms around Dean as tight as he can, closes his eyes, and throws himself backward into the devil's trap.

For an endless second it feels like Dean has come with him. He can feel the resistance of the hooks and chains, feel the kind of damage they're doing to Dean's skin and muscles, and Dean's scream sends cracks running crazily through the glass around the room. Then everything melts away, Sam hits the ground hard, and there's nothing in the room but the stench of blood, the sound of the fire, and the corpse spoiling in the corner.

And the hooks Sam's gripping one in each hand, not tiny ones this time but ones that had dug in around Dean's spine and ribs. It's not nothing, but it's not enough. Sam had his brother in his arms, almost had him in the devil's trap, and now Dean's gone again.

This time he breaks the mirrors the old-fashioned way, with his fists.



Ruby's saying something. Sam can't quite tell what it is and he cares even less, but she sounds beside herself. The sun's too bright in his eyes, though, so he tries to turn and bury his face in the back of the decrepit couch. He turns the wrong way, lands on the floor in a graceless heap, and vomits gin and bile all over the hardwood.

" – I swear on my bitch of a mother's grave, Sam, if I ever walk in on anything like this again I'm calling fucking Bobby Singer to come out here and straighten you out, because clearly you're not –"

"You know the rules," Sam rasps out, resenting her mightily for making him talk right now. He wonders what exactly it is she walked in on. He has a vague memory of washing out the tub and bucket, then digging a grave and salting and burning the corpse chair and all. In a minute he'll open his eyes and find out.

"You're covered in blood," she says. "I don't even know how much of it is yours. Your hands are sliced to shreds. There's no demon, no body, you salted and burned something in the backyard that I assume was the body but who the hell knows at this point, and this whole house stinks of Hell and holy water. Not to mention booze and now puke. I don't think the rules cover this, Sam!"

Oh, right. He said every purification ritual he knew over the hooks and then dumped them into a sink full of holy water because he couldn't stand the sight of them. They dissolved like origami under a blowtorch. He hopes to God he didn't send them right back down to Dean.

"That rule that says 'no contact with Bobby'? That covers everything," he tells her, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. This is where Dean would say something about how what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas, but right now it's a toss-up what's going to hit the floor first, the rest of Sam's stomach or the brain matter when his head explodes.

"Sam," she says, and he can tell by the sound of her voice that she has the Caring Face on. "What are you doing? You're going to kill yourself if you keep going like this. Whatever this is, let me help you."

Suicides go to Hell. Sam hasn't entirely abandoned that line of thought.

The smell of vomit is really getting intolerable. Sam braces himself and eases up onto his knees with considerable help from the couch. "I don't trust you with this," he says bluntly. "No, shut up. For fuck's sake don't argue with me right now. I need to get cleaned up."

Miraculously, she obeys, and Sam finds his way more or less blindly to the bathroom. He gropes for the knobs and turns the shower on hot, then strips off his foul-smelling clothes and shoves his shirt and flannel into the sink.

While the sink fills, he leans forward and rests his forehead on the mirror. He doesn't even want to know what he looks like, or think about how long it's been since his last shower. Dean would kick his ass black and blue.

"Dean," he whispers, hoping against hope. "Dean, Dean."

Nothing. Not a waver in the glass, not a breath of that wind that smells like a mass grave buried in snow. Sam sighs and gets into the shower.

Ruby's right, his hands are a mess, and the water stings them. Hands, head, stomach, knees, back, heart, there doesn't seem to be a part of Sam's body that doesn't hate him right now. For a minute he's almost tempted to let Ruby call Bobby. The things he'd call Sam couldn't be broadcast on late-night cable, and there isn't a single thing Sam has done since the hellhounds got Dean that Bobby would approve of; but he'd be there, solid and no-nonsense.

There, another presence in this private thing between Sam and his brother. Not understanding that blood is only blood and the Winchesters have shed plenty in the cause of righteousness, and Sam will turn every motel room in North America into a slaughterhouse if it brings Dean back to him. Sam's not unrealistic enough to think that Bobby will let this go on without a fight, because Dean was a bad loss for him but Bobby can still imagine worse. Sam resents that a little.

The water's cooling down and he still has dried blood on him, stinging where it tugs at his skin. Mechanically, Sam scrubs himself down, shuts off the water, and opens the shower curtain to reach for the towel.

There's a bloody handprint in the steam on the mirror. When Sam touches it, it doesn't wipe away. It's on the other side of the glass.



The next time it's a monster Sam's never even heard of, who hides in cornfields and lays its eggs in paralyzed human bodies. It's as big as Sam, and in spite of all the blood Dean doesn't come.

Sam clamps down on the panic rising in his throat like bile. This was the first (sacrifice) kill he's made that wasn't human at some point. If he were Dean, he might turn up his nose at alien bug blood too. It doesn't mean anything. He just has to look again, find a vampire or a werewolf.

He doesn't bother doing more than washing off his forearms before he's sitting at the computer again, blinking against the glow in the dark of the motel room. It's occurred to him that those hooks didn't grow in Dean like a cancer; someone put them there, someone did that to him, and at some point whoever did it might well come back to check their work. Sam's only gotten three hooks out of him, and those barely, and he hasn't found anything that might tell him how to get rid of all of them at once. If he has to tear them out one by one then by Christ he will, but it's going to be damn hard if someone comes along behind him and puts them back.

He doesn't actually think about the fact that whoever put in the hooks could do something worse, something that could prevent Dean from coming through the void; but he knows it anyway, and it's making his hands shake as he feeds phrase after phrase into search engines and news feeds. He's had one failure, he can't afford more.

Another thing he doesn't think about: how long it's going to take Dean's eyes to go black.



The motel room smells faintly of smoke and charred flesh, and Jess is sitting on the end of the bed, looking somberly at him. Sam wants to make some smartass remark about having seen this movie, but it won't quite come out. Instead he just says her name, soft and wistful.

"Do you remember dying, baby?" she asks.

Sam shakes his head. He's been trying to, lately, but the memories won't come. He wonders if that was part of the deal Dean made.

"Then you don't know anything," Jess says. "But you will."

Sam wakes with a jolt. The room is dark and silent and spinning around him, and when he stumbles out of bed to throw up a fifth of Jim Beam he can still taste ash in the back of his throat.



Four days pass then, and as much as Sam loved Jess, as much as he still loves the idea of her, he wishes she'd let him sleep a little longer, because it's starting to look like he might never sleep again. He hasn't eaten since the thing in the cornfield, only remembers to drink because he gets the shakes if he doesn't, and the time passes in long blurs of black words running together on white and highways unrolling a hundred glowing yards at a time in the Impala's headlights.

He's still thinking about what Jess said, but only as an occasional diversion from the endless loop of What the fuck am I going to do? Rawhead blood won't summon Dean, neither will ghouls, and Sam can't get the stink of copper out of his clothes. Somehow in the last couple of years he managed to forget that werewolves are scarce and vampires so rare that for twenty-odd years even the Winchesters thought they were extinct. He has to know, has to find out if it's just the blood he's using or if something's happened to Dean, and by the fourth day since his first failed attempt to call his brother he's so frantic that it summons Ruby out of thin air.

"Talk to me!" she orders, planting her knee on the couch beside him and grabbing the bottle away from him. "What the fuck is the matter with you, Sam? What did this? You were fine, we were doing great, and now all of a sudden –"

Sam blinks up at her, then suddenly wants to beat the living shit out of himself for not paying attention to what's been literally sitting in front of him. "You need to find another body, Ruby."

"After all the trouble I went through to find one that suits your pissy specifications? Forget it."

"You found this one fast enough, find another one. Faster. If you're not back here tomorrow night, we're done with this."

"What is the matter with you?" Ruby cries, and Sam's hand is snarled in her hair so fast that even he didn't see it move.

"Ow! Fuck, Sam, you're hurting me!"

He's going to do more than that in a minute. Sam levers himself to his feet and drags her across the floor, not listening to her blistering curses. It's not like he's really hurting her, after all; this isn't even her body, isn't anyone's body anymore. "Sorry, Ruby. Get a new meatsuit. I need this one."

"For what?" she shrieks.

Sam hauls her in front of the washtub, kicks her legs out from under her, and bends her over, reaching for the butcher knife he left on the floor the night before. It's daylight now, sun streaming golden through clouds of dust. He hopes Dean's strong enough that the light won't hurt him.

"Last call," he says. "Vacate now, or this is going to sting."

In the position she's in, she can't throw her head back. Demon smoke pours into the washtub, dark and twisting; Sam slits the meatsuit's throat, and blood fountains through the smoke in a surreal tumble of red and black.

She's furious. He can feel it even after the meatsuit is empty. Even discorporated she hangs around, hovering around him and smelling like a charnel-house. "Go away, Ruby. This is none of your business," he says absently. "Find a new body and be back tomorrow night."

Her form twists, casting shadows on the mirrors that look almost like a daeva, long claws reaching out of darkness. But Sam's faced real daeva and Ruby isn't one, and when she's smoke like this it doesn't take much pressure of his will to make her disappear.

All it takes is the hint of brimstone, not hard to conjure at all.



Sam starts crying when he hears bird wings and smells that fetid wind. He isn't proud of it, but he's so goddamned tired and he's been so scared, and his knees just don't want to hold him up at this point. He sits down in the devil's trap and leans his forehead against his knees and keens out exhaustion and grief. If something besides Dean is coming through that portal, Sam doesn't care.

"Sammy," Dean whispers.

He's kneeling just outside the trap, looking at Sam with an odd expression that holds none of the guilty misery that was always Dean's knee-jerk reaction to Sam's tears. He looks calculating and he looks hungry, feral in the way his eyes track the path of tears down Sam's face as if they were something precious. The blood he's kneeling in crawls up his skin in an upside-down mirror of Sam's tears, leaving red tracks behind until the droplets spill into Dean's eyes and disappear when he blinks. There's just enough sun left in the room to light his eyes like stained glass.

"You're here," Sam breathes, wiping his eyes. His face is streaked with red, he can tell that much just from the stickiness against his skin. "I couldn't get you back for days. I had to kill Ruby's meatsuit."

For a moment the expression on Dean's face is one hundred percent big-brother exasperation, that look that says Dean has twenty things he wants to tell Sam to do and they're all getting logjammed behind his teeth as he tries to figure out what order to send them out in. It's so familiar that Sam chokes a little. "Come out," Dean rasps finally.

Sam scrambles to obey, crawling out of the trap and almost into Dean's lap, nudging his head against his brother's shoulder. This close to the hooks and that gaping flesh, Dean should smell like a gut wound, like blood and corruption. He doesn't. He smells like leather and human ash, and enough like wormwood to make Sam's gorge rise uneasily. Shamefully, Sam wants Dean to hold him, but the hooks crawl closer and tighten around Dean's skin, digging in until muscle gapes around them down to white bone and holding his arms pinned to his side. Dean makes a small, pained sound in his throat.

Sam moves away just long enough to grab the washtub and pull it close. The blood in it slips up the side, cresting out toward Dean, but Sam scoops out a double handful anyway, spilling it all over both of them as he pours it onto the hooks keeping Dean away from him. He doesn't realize he's crying again until Dean leans close and runs the tip of his nose up Sam's cheeks, gathering tears and flicking his tongue up over his nose to pull them into his mouth. He's all but ignoring the blood, chasing after Sam's tears like an addict saved at the last minute from the long fall into withdrawal.

When it feels like he's about to stop crying, Sam reaches out and scrapes his hand over the sharp protruding edge of a hook, opening up his palm almost to the bone. For a moment, pain cues training, so many years of little-brother Can't be a crybaby can't let Dean see Dean never cries almost cutting the waterworks off at the main, but Sam's stronger than his training now. He's stronger, and he'll give Dean anything, blood or tears or fucking pomegranate seeds if it will keep Dean with him.

"You can't leave me again, Dean," he whispers, running his bloody hand up into Dean's hair. There's a hook lodged in Dean's cerebellum. Sam twists it out, deft and gentle as if he were removing a bee stinger, making shh noises as Dean howls in agony. The washtub clatters once and then slams over hard enough to leave a dent in the wood floor, pooling blood underneath both of them. The blood should be cooling by now, but it isn't. He can feel the heat of it through his jeans.

"…have to," Dean chokes out, his eyes meeting Sam's in mute supplication. He's still Dean under there, still trying to keep hold of himself, to be good; Sam can see it. But he can see too that the blood soaking into Dean's skin is healing him, closing that horrible gash along his torso millimeter by millimeter, and that the smallest surcease of pain hits Dean now in a drugged rush too powerful to turn away from on mere moral grounds.

Slowly, he finds himself thinking that as a demon Dean is beautiful, all white and emerald and flowing Titian reds; and something foul in him whispers that it would be a shame to destroy such a work of art when all Sam has to do is claim the ownership of those chains for himself. Whispers that all Sam's life he's been fighting the desire to just crawl inside of his big brother and be warm and protected and adored, and here Dean is, hooks holding him open and vulnerable, nothing held back from Sam anymore, not ever again.

For a moment, the thought makes him sick and dizzy. But that's all the time he can spare, because the blood on the floor is almost gone and Dean never stays. Sam flexes his hand, making sure the blood stays flowing, pooling in his palm. He's not sure there's enough, so he runs his arm over the hook through Dean's bicep, opening it up down the long path of his veins. Dean watches him, head tilted quizzically to the side, curiously intent, as if nothing in the world could be more important than memorizing the way the shadows fall on Sam's face.

"Don't be mad," Sam begs, sliding up to kneel over Dean's leg. "Dean, promise."

Dean slants a glance sideways to where Ruby's meatsuit is crumpled in the corner like a broken doll, head twisted at a grotesque angle. The movement pulls at the hooks in his neck, slender flashes of trachea like a fan dancer's hip, and it strikes Sam with a nauseating jolt that anyone could walk in and see. Before he can think, he's caught hold of the hooks in Dean's neck with too-slick hands and pulled them out, ripping them out of his own skin where they stick and smoothing his bloody hands over Dean's throat until the wound closes as if it had never been.

When Dean stops screaming, his form is wavering dangerously around the edges, staticky as a ghost's. He leans his forehead against Sam's anyway. "Sammy, what did you do?"

"I can take all these hooks out of you and feed you blood and you stay here a little longer every time, but I couldn't be sure it was enough," Sam whispers. "I had to be able to keep you here and make sure nothing could ever take you back."

He's seen that dawning suspicion before. It's the look on the face of every demon that has ever just realized it's caught in a devil's trap, and seeing it on Dean breaks his heart. Sam's not stupid; he knows that one of these days he might well push beyond even Dean's boundless ability to forgive. He just has to hope that it won't be today.

"Sam, what the fuck did you do?" Dean growls. Somewhere a bell is tolling, harsh and deep, and Sam doesn't think he has much time left.

He clamps his wounded hand over Dean's mouth. Dean makes a low sound in his throat and tries to move back, but only manages to open his mouth and dart the tip of his tongue against the edges of the cut like a kitten lapping at milk. "Nothing bad, Dean, I swear," Sam pleads.

Ruby hasn't bothered training his telekinesis much. Sam, knowing for a fact how useful it can be, has been more diligent. When the closet door opens soundlessly behind Dean, Dean doesn't even notice.

"Jess said I didn't know anything because I couldn't remember dying," he whispers against Dean's ear. "So I started thinking – you live, you die, you go to Hell. Tinker to Evers to Chance."

Behind Dean, a large mirror is sliding along the floor. There are more like it, but this one is the one he needs first.

"And then I thought, no, it's more like rock, paper, scissors. And I don't think Hell beats Death, Dean."

He's still bleeding, light-headed with it, blood streaking Dean's torso and slowly but surely closing his internal organs behind a veil of skin and muscle.

Sam doesn't think he's kissed Dean since he was a little boy. He kisses him now, lightly on the ear, a promise and an apology. "Dean? This is going to hurt."

This time even Dean's reflexes can't keep them from tumbling into the center of the incomplete devil's trap Sam etched into the mirror with some long-dead woman's diamond wedding ring while Ruby's meatsuit grew cold and stiff where he'd tossed it. Sam closes the trap with lines drawn in his own blood, wrapping his legs around Dean to hold him close, then pins him down and yanks out the hooks that are tearing him apart. Dean's still screaming, arched off the mirror in agony, when Sam brings out the rest of the mirrors and slams them together. There are five more, and when the last one comes down overhead and shuts out every flicker of light from the room outside, Dean's cries cut off with a strangled noise like a death rattle.

For a few minutes, the only sound is the quick gasps of their breath, out of synch. Sam draws his hand down Dean's chest to his stomach over and over, touching until he's sure no more blood is needed, until Dean's viscera are hidden away where no one will ever see them again. When Dean is quiet, heart pounding under Sam's hand, Sam sits up, pulls the lighter out of his pocket, and flicks it on.

It's a tiny light, even reflected endlessly in the mirrors; but it's enough to see when Dean eyes flutter open and fix on the devil's trap drawn in blood above him.

In the mirror, an endless number of Deans sit up and look around them at the devil's traps, blood on glass trailing droplets downward. Sam's Dean, the one whose skin is warming under his hands, sits up as well, looking not at the traps but at Sam.

"Almost all folklore has an association between mirrors and death," Sam says quietly, afraid to talk too loudly. Afraid, with that atavistic little-brother despair that he's tried so hard to get rid of, that Dean will be mad at him after all. "Mirrors are containers for souls, like photographs. But the dead trapped in mirrors still have the power to affect the living world. They have the power to drag the living in after them, or to come out themselves. And they're like vampires in folklore – once you've called them, once you've invited them in, you can never get rid of them until they want to go. I called you, Dean."

For a minute Dean is silent, thinking. Then he cocks his head, looking at Sam with that unnerving cold appraisal. "You brought back a soul out of Hell and bound him to mirrors, little brother. That sound to you like something that's gonna end well?"

"My definition of 'ending well' isn't quite what it used to be."

Dean winces a little, and it's all him, this stubborn, infuriating man who won't be convinced that Sam doesn't want a Volvo and a white picket fence anymore. "And if it doesn't stick? If I need more blood to stay here in the real world like this?"

Sam closes his eyes and flexes. The mirrors shatter outward, far enough to embed glass in the walls and ceiling. When he opens his eyes, Dean is still there. "Then you'll have it. We're hunters, Dean. It's a bloody business."

It's only half a lie. There'll be time to tell Dean later, if and when it becomes an issue. Or not to tell him at all; he thinks maybe this Dean can be persuaded to take the blood offering and not to ask.

Dean stands up, rolling muscles that must still be healing from the hooks. "I'm fucking starving," he says, and flashes Sam a grin full of teeth like needles. "You got pizza in this place?"

He's here. After so much grief and terror, he's here, and he wants fucking pizza, and it's too much. Sam wraps his arms around his brother's waist and presses his face into Dean's stomach, letting hurt tears flow down over smooth skin and ridges of muscle until they slide under the waistband of Dean's pants and vanish.

"Hey, Sammy," Dean whispers, combing his fingers through Sam's hair. "Hey. It's okay."

Sam holds him tighter, breathes in the warm smell of his brother's skin, and everything is going to be all right now, everything, everything.

Behind him, a woman's voice with Ruby's cadence says, "Oh my god, Sam. What the fuck have you done?"

Busy mouthing damp kisses along skin that's as white and scarless now as the day Dean was born, Sam doesn't answer, and eventually Ruby goes away.