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amberdreamsSnow White, Rose Red
title: Snow White, Rose Red
author: Amber1960
recipient: blythechild
word-count: 12,038 (dunno how it got this long…)
characters: Sam, Dean, Abaddon, Hel
genre: Gen
warnings: Probably a hard R for violence and swearing. Unbetat’d! Liberties taken with Norse mythology.
story/art summary: Abaddon possesses Dean and thinks she has broken both the Mark and the Blade. But she wasn’t counting on Sam, who will go to every length that Dean doesn’t believe he will in order to get his brother back, plumbing depths Sam didn’t even know existed before Gadreel’s deceitful occupation of his body. Art shows Dean as the Mark and Sam with angel powers.
Sammessiah Anti Christmas Exchange for blythechild who wanted Sam with various hellish creatures. I’ve managed to mention Crowley but mainly feature Abaddon and a Norse goddess. I’ve attempted to go some way towards filling a few of your wishes, namely - unholy powers, epic battle (ish), the boys being badasses, non-Judeo-Christian mythology or gods/goddesses. Sorry I never quite got to the pie.
The prompt that is closest to this fic was - Dean is snatched back to Hell by [insert bad guy/girl of choice here] but Hell hath no fury like Unholy Demon Jesus!Sam...
Oh and there is bonus art at the end.
Teaser
Does space to compass-points conform,
And can we say a star stands high or low?)
Not more complex the millions of the stars
Than are the hearts of mortal brothers
Wilfred Owen 1913
Someone should have warned Abaddon that stealing Dean was a bad idea. Crowley could have told her, but the erstwhile King of Hell was currently at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, being held (literally) by a primeval giant squid at Abaddon’s behest, so it was therefore questionable whether he’d have been inclined to do her any favours. Besides. It was hard to say anything much when every orifice was being invaded and plugged by a slimy tentacle.
See, Abaddon might win in terms of being a badass, evil bitch queen, full of that ruthless edge you need to get on in Hell, but Crowley’s stint as King of the Crossroads, before climbing up to the virtual top of the diabolical political ladder, meant he knew a lot about the nature of souls. And Crowley was well aware that the Winchesters’ souls were different from most humans.
As it was, with Crowley out of the picture, there was nobody to dare say her nay when Abaddon finally cornered the elder Winchester in Ilchester, of all places, and no one to stop her when she sliced a bright red fingernail through the tattoo on his perfect chest. She’d known about the Mark of Cain, of course she had. She wasn’t stupid, and there were plenty of demons willing to spill all of Crowley’s secrets either under the knife, or simply for the right incentive.
She’d sent in over two hundred minor demons to capture Crowley when he emerged from the Atlantic with the precious First Blade, seized the prize and sent Crowley screaming back down into the cold dark depths.
Setting the trap for Dean Winchester had been easy in comparison, the Blade itself being the bait. She’d revelled in the glorious sight of Dean bound and bloody. His arm was a shredded mess, the Mark obliterated as per her orders. Her stupid demon henchmen had gotten carried away and both Dean’s legs were broken. You just couldn’t get the staff these days. Dean was propped up against some crates, his breathing harsh and laboured. Some might have questioned the need for the extra ropes binding his arms to bared torso, but Abaddon wasn’t taking any chances. The First Blade lay in two pieces next to the fallen hunter, a symbol of his failure. The poor, foolish boy had never even managed to lay a hand on that ancient deadly bone.
Abaddon smiled, a bright red slash. She had taken the risk and won the best prize of all.
The extensive damage to Dean’s body was more than she’d anticipated, which was unfortunate, but it didn’t really matter, as Abaddon was more than capable of carrying out some repairs once she was in possession of that handsome form. The additional time she’d have to put aside for that was an irritation, though the blazing defiance in those pained green eyes was some consolation. Dean Winchester was doomed to be endlessly amusing to her, hopeless as he was.
Forcing those lovely lips wide and sliding herself inside was every bit the wonderfully satisfying experience that Abaddon had anticipated. Dean’s psyche was deliciously damaged, but his soul still burned brighter than the heart of the sun as the Knight of Hell chased it into hiding.
By the time anyone found out what had happened, Dean was long gone, securely locked away inside Abaddon’s new oh-so-pretty meat suit.
0x0x0x0
Dean was overdue. Which was one tiny step away from missing, lost, gone.
“Fuck.”
Sam didn’t want to be worried. He really didn’t want to care, just like Dean believed that he didn’t care. He knew he’d been hurting Dean by keeping his distance, but Sam had to. It was self-preservation as much as anything, building a wall between them, a veneer of professionalism that allowed Sam to keep functioning. It seemed to Sam that this was better than just walking away again, though sometimes he wondered what it was doing to them both to live this way.
In the olden days, Sam had had deep reserves of anger to draw on, but those had long since been drained – leeched away by the consequences of wrong decisions, too many deaths, two hundred years sharing a cage with the Devil and the loss of too much of himself. After Castiel reeled out the last essence of Gadreel, Sam realised he didn’t know who Sam Winchester was any more. Telling Dean he was willing to work with him as a hunting partner and nothing more made perfect sense to Sam at the time.
Even though Sam was the first to acknowledge that it wasn’t working. He should have known it wouldn’t. Even when he’d been soulless he’d been Dean’s brother. Sam needed Dean in too many ways, right and wrong, and it wasn’t something he could switch off.
Now Dean was overdue, Crowley was still AWOL, Cas had done one of his disappearing acts again and yes, fuck it all, Sam was concerned. So when Castiel turned up on the bunker’s metaphorical doorstep looking even more flustered and rumpled than usual, Sam’s anxiety ramped up into Def. Con 1.
“Sam! It’s Dean.” Castiel’s first words, delivered without the formality of a greeting, set Sam’s heart racing. Sure enough, Castiel’s news was even more dire than Sam had anticipated. “That job was a trap. Abaddon was there waiting with a troop of demons, and now she has taken him.”
“Where? Is he hurt?” Sam demanded. He clenched his fists, a litany of self-recrimination starting up inside his head that nearly drowned out Castiel’s next words. He should never have let Dean take that case alone.
“Not hurt any more , no. It’s worse than that. Abaddon is possessing him. She destroyed his protection and …”
Sam turned away, no longer listening. Dean, possessed. A tiny part of Sam could see the irony in that, but the larger part was consumed with a welcome growing rage. That demon bitch was violating his brother, and Sam was not going to stand for it. He didn’t know how he was going to kill her without the First Blade, and with Abaddon now effectively wearing the Mark of Cain, but Sam would find a way.
He had to.
0x0x0x0
Castiel hadn’t stayed long at the Bunker after delivering his bad news. Possibly because Sam had been insupportably rude to him when the angel had admitted there was nothing he could do to help Sam rescue Dean. After suffering the following few hours of being ignored, Cas had given up on Sam and fled, presumably to continue his quest for allies amongst the Fallen to join him in the battle against Metatron. Sam neither knew nor cared. The angel was as much use to him as a wooden stake against a vampire.
Sam’s head ached viciously after nine hours pouring over tome after tome, each one dustier than the last, and coming up with precisely nothing. He couldn’t believe that the Men of Letters’ library didn’t have something somewhere that would tell him how to tackle a Knight of Hell without damaging its meat-suit and without the First Blade, but if there was something, Sam couldn’t find it. The only thing all the texts agreed upon was that the power required to take out a Knight was considerable and rare. In the hierarchy of Hell, the knights ranked so high only Lucifer stood above them. And as Sam well knew, Lucifer was safely locked away, no longer a player in this great game.
Sam rolled his shoulders back, wincing as the vertebrae in his neck crunched audibly. He’d grown stiff from hunching over the table for so long. He couldn’t remember when he last ate or drank anything, and now the thought was in his head, his stomach protested loudly. He got up and headed for the kitchen, only to stop dead in the doorway.
Thinking about empty spaces inside of him in juxtaposition with the uncomfortable memories of Lucifer, Sam was suddenly reminded of Castiel’s removal of the last of Gadreel’s grace from Sam’s body. Castiel had been pretty adamant it was Gadreel, not anyone else, but now Sam was wondering. What if Gadreel’s wasn’t the only angelic remnant tucked away inside of Sam? What if there was some tiny scrap of a much more powerful grace nestled deep down, being nurtured by Sam’s darkness? What if Lucifer had left Sam a parting gift from his time as the vessel of an archangel?
And what if Sam could use that gift - how powerful would Sam be with even a mere spark of the Morning Star at his fingertips?
The thought made him feel simultaneously weak at the knees and full of excitement. He was sure he’d seen a passage in one of the books he’d been studying a couple of hours back, a snippet that had mentioned the possibility of humans tapping into angelic grace. He’d skimmed over it at the time because it hadn’t seemed relevant or even feasible…oh shit. He needed to find that book and check the text again.
All thoughts of mundane sustenance forgotten, Sam almost ran back into the library, rummaging through the haphazard piles of leather bound books he’d left scattered on and around the reading desk. It took him nearly an hour, but he finally located the right volume and the passage he was looking for. It was an obscure eighteenth century treatise on angelic lore, with a commentary on the Book of Enoch and the Jewish Kabbalah, and when Sam had picked it up earlier, he’d dismissed it as being merely pretentious mysticism. He supposed he should have known better. After all, if it had no credibility, why would the Men of Letters have kept a copy?
He ran a finger over the tiny print, reading the text twice to make sure he’d understood the meaning correctly. Now he knew what he was looking for, it seemed pretty clear.
Sam sat back in the wooden chair, rocking it onto its back legs. He ignored the ominous creaking of the wood under the pressure as he thought this through.
If Dean had been here, he’d be telling Sam this was dumb, crazy even, and it wasn’t worth the risk. We all know where too much power leads, Sammy, and it’s nowhere good. But if Dean had been here, Sam wouldn’t need to even contemplate trying this, so fuck that. Besides, Dean was the one who’d stuffed Sam full of another angel without asking, and thus inadvertently given Sam the information he needed now to make this plan work.
“So how about that, Dean? I can’t forget what you did, but it looks like the consequences are going to just keep rolling…but this time it might actually work to our benefit.”
He stood up, decision made. He had work to do.
0x0x0x0
Abaddon was enjoying her new body. She had put her empty Josie meat suit into cold storage in a rare moment of sentimentality; after all, Josie had served her well over a good many years, and was a pretty carcass to boot, it would be a shame to waste it. She certainly wouldn’t allow some lesser demon to casually walk around in Josie, that’s for sure. So it was store or destroy.
She moved her court to the west coast, eventually settling in Los Angeles. Partly because she liked the irony inherent in the name, and partly because it really was a demon’s paradise of a place, chock full of abject poverty alongside obscene wealth, vanity, greed and every other vice known to man and demon.
Abaddon healed Dean’s legs and his arm, and let scabs form over the wrecked tattoo. Whenever the opportunity arose, she would pause to admire his naked form in the full-length mirror in her penthouse suite. She liked to trace the path of his new scars, see the marks that bore witness to her occupation of that smooth pale skin. She loved to hear Dean’s wordless protests and feel his disgust when she ran her fingers down his almost hairless chest to stroke his flaccid penis into arousal, and she would always allow Dean to feel the overwhelming pleasure orgasm brought his body, so he could appreciate what he was missing.
She had Dean’s nipples pierced, because playing with the new silver rings was such fun. She was contemplating adding a Prince Albert when the first news filtered through from Kansas to disturb her equilibrium. Someone was killing her foot soldiers in droves, burning the dead life out of them with holy fire, and whoever or whatever it was seemed to be headed her way. At the same time, information reached her that Sam Winchester had announced his intention of hunting her down and taking his brother back.
“Good luck with that, Sammy,” she said, grinning at Dean’s muted howl of outrage. I’m the only one who gets to call him that. “But I am you, Dean, darling. So suck it up.”
At first, Abaddon wasn’t concerned. Sam Winchester was no threat to her without Blade or Mark at his disposal. And this mysterious angel or angels would be dealt with, like all the other flightless, featherless, pathetic excuses for seraphim that crossed her path. That was her thinking, when she bothered to consider it at all, until the day the mystery demon-slayer sent her a message she couldn’t ignore.
The demon knelt before her, blood dripping in a slow counterpoint to his frantic words.
“Then he…Winchester, he lit up like St Elmo’s fire and smote everyone in the room, angel and demon alike, he just didn’t care. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Abaddon tapped Dean’s short fingernails on the arms of her chair. It was at times like this when she missed Josie’s red talons.
She mused. This was like nothing this minor demon had ever seen, maybe, but he was only four, maybe five centuries old. Abaddon, on the other hand, had a few millennia under her belt and she had seen something like this before, in the good old days, when their lord and master walked amongst them, creating them, corrupting them. The Star of Morning, beautiful and terrible as the heart of the sun.
Somehow, Sam Winchester must have harnessed some of Lucifer’s power. How was largely irrelevant. Right now Abaddon was more concerned with the fact that the attention of this new, improved and highly dangerous weapon was being focussed on her, and that was highly inconvenient.
“I haven’t spent all this time and effort getting Crowley out of the way, marshalling my troops in order to return Hell to its proper state, and beginning to make a true Hell on earth, just to have some overinvested human mess everything up because I took his brother away.”
She paused to think. Then she nodded, decision made.
“Very well. It’s a shame, but this body will have to go. You, vacate that meat suit you are in, and fetch me Josie out of the fridge. We are going to pay a visit to an old friend.”
0x0x0x0
It was cold.
That was the first conscious thought Dean had before he opened his eyes. The second was the jolting realisation that he had managed that action himself – he had motor control of his eyelids again.
He sat up, thus demonstrating that it wasn’t just his eyelids that were his own again, but he didn’t have much chance to fully appreciate his freedom from Abaddon’s domination. His body objected to his sitting up too quickly and he was rewarded with a wave of dizziness that sent him falling backwards, his head smacking into what felt like concrete or stone with a crack that had him seeing sparks.
“Fuck!”
When he moved again, he did so with a lot more caution, taking his time. He surveyed his surroundings with growing wariness as he slowly rose into a crouch, and then stood up, holding onto the rough stone wall to steady himself as he did so. So, stone not concrete, and it was no wonder he was feeling the chill, as he was stark naked. He threw up a hand and yelled a protest at the blank walls.
“Man. What is it with the clothes? Would it kill you to give a guy something to fucking wear?”
He didn’t know who he was complaining to, but his sense of outrage needed to be expressed. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get a response. Silence surrounded him as thoroughly as the stone walls of the cave he seemed to have ended up in. Which brought him to the crux of the matter. Where the hell was he, where had Abaddon disappeared to, and how did he get here? And more importantly, how was he going to get out when there didn’t seem to be any exits or entrances to this roughly spherical-shaped chamber?
He put up a hand to rub at the sore patch on the back of his skull where he’d whacked it against the floor and started when it brushed up against something unexpected round his neck on its way up to his head. The alien something felt like leather. It was supple and smooth under his questing fingers, a broad band maybe four inches wide circling his throat. A collar.
“What the…?”
As items of clothing went, it was worse than useless. He tugged and picked at it but there was no fastening or seam that he could discover. It had less than a finger’s worth of give between it and his skin, and the only interruptions to the smooth surface were four metal rings embedded into the leather set at equidistant intervals round the circumference. Dean did not like the implications one little bit.
“So, what, you brought me here to be some sort of slave, is that it?”
Dean waited, but there was still no sign that anyone was listening, or that anyone was even remotely interested in him. The cave was dimly lit, though he couldn’t work out the source of the light, and the damp walls seemed to absorb his words as soon as they were spoken.
There must be something he was missing, some reason he’d been brought here and left so completely alone.
He remembered Abaddon possessing him. Then there had been a lot of very unpleasant and uncomfortable days watching, trapped and helpless, as she used his body to maim and kill for pleasure, and Dean remembered far too much of that. Something had happened after a few more days of this though, and he wasn’t sure what it was, because after receiving news about a massacre of demons, Abaddon had walled him up so tight, he’d effectively been deaf and blind as well as dumb for who knew how long.
Until he’d woken up here. He wasn’t sure this was an improvement. At least while trapped inside his head he hadn’t been cold. And hungry. As if to confirm the latter, his stomach gave a gurgle that was so loud it echoed. Something or someone snorted a laugh from behind him. He spun around so fast it re-awoke the dizziness of earlier, and instead of smoothly dropping into the planned fighting crouch, Dean nearly face-planted onto the floor. Flushing with embarrassed anger, Dean found himself on his hands and knees, nose to nose with a very large wolf. Which wasn’t at all worrying.
The wolf huffed at him, its breath warm and moist and strangely sweet-smelling. Dean skittered backwards still on all fours, wishing he had a weapon. He’d never felt so naked. He rose to his feet, resisting the urge to cup his junk. As if a hand would be any protection in these circumstances. The wolf was nearly as tall as Dean from paw to shoulder, which meant that its head was around Sam’s height, and that Dean had to tilt his head to look it in the eye. Its fur was thick and lush, strangely marked in extremes of white and black, while its eyes were the colour of glaciers.
“Whoa, back up there, Dog Breath,” he said. The wolf bared its formidable teeth at that, and growled, a deep rumble that Dean could feel vibrating through the earthen floor into the soles of his feet. He swallowed but held his ground, trying to stand tall and pretend he wasn’t scared shitless. He was shaking because of the cold, that was all.
“Okay, you ain’t a dog, I get it. So, what are you then? And how’d you get in here?”
The wolf just stared, transfixing Dean with that icy blue gaze that reminded him a little of Cas. And there was a thought that he should have had earlier. Maybe Angel Radio worked down here and Cas could…but then he hesitated. After all, look what happened last time he tried calling for angelic help. He couldn’t help the shiver that ran through him at the memory of Gadreel staring out of Sam’s eyes, and once he started remembering he found it impossible to stop. He flung a hand out to grab the wall. His whole body was trembling so violently he was hard put to stay upright.
“F..f..fuck, must look like a plate of j..jello in an earthquake, hey?”
The wolf made a questioning whining noise, more doglike than wolf, and then it was pushing up into Dean’s space and he was too weak to do anything to defend himself. Luckily all it seemed interested in doing was - well - snuggling was the only word that sprang to mind. Not that he wasn’t grateful for the warmth being offered, as his legs finally gave out from under him. He slid gracelessly to the floor half propped up on the wolf’s back. Too weary to maintain his usual innate caution, Dean allowed the giant wolf to wrap itself around him like a giant, fanged, fur stole. He didn’t even notice when he drifted from waking into a deep sleep, warm at last.
0x0x0x0
What had Jimmy said? That having Castiel inside him had been like riding a comet. Sam should have taken heed of that before setting off on this journey, because this wasn’t merely riding a comet, this was being one.
Lucifer’s grace was a song of ice and fire.
Dude, you’ve been watching way too much Game of Thones, came Dean’s voice inside Sam’s head; and if Sam hadn’t been in so much agony at the time, he’d have laughed. The worst thing wasn’t the pain. No. The worst thing was that it was a pain that he knew. He remembered this.
Bone deep, flesh eating, brain numbing cold that burned from the inside out.
Sam didn’t want to recall what had inevitably accompanied that cold back then – the eternal lack of privacy, the boredom interspersed with torture when one or the other of the archangels had turned their searing attention onto either Sam or Adam or both at once, the constant lingering guilt when he’d been unable to save his little brother from torn apart one too many times and Sam had been left embracing a gibbering wreck of a body whose soul had simply faded away like a shadow in fog.
He especially didn’t want to remember how much he had longed for his own soul to be able to find the same escape.
Sam wasn’t sure how long it was before the cold subsided into a mere chill and the memories of the Cage began to abate with it. However long, it was too long.
The ritual itself had been suspiciously easy, there hadn’t even been any bleeding required, either from him or from anyone else. So that was already a step up from Ruby’s demon blood fix, and made Sam feel a little better about trying the whole procedure. Just a few simple herbal ingredients mixed and burnt in a sliver bowl and a short passage of Enochian, and Sam had felt the grace begin to unfurl immediately.
None of the texts he’d found had described how it would feel, perhaps because nobody really knew. After all, Sam doubted that many humans had ever survived an angel inhabitation, let alone wanted to relive the sensation. Yet at least one person had tried and succeeded, and lived long enough afterwards to write down this ritual, and that had been enough for Sam.
When he finally opened his eyes, hours, maybe days later, Sam’s throat was raw and he wondered if he’d been screaming. Just as well the bunker was empty and shielded, if so, or any passer by might have called the cops.
His stomach rumbled loudly.
“Guess angel grace without an actual angel isn’t enough to stop me getting hungry, then.”
Or stop him talking to himself like a regular crazy person either, it would seem. He stood up slowly, expecting more pain, maybe a wave of weakness. It didn’t come. Apart from the pretty severe hunger pangs, he felt good. Very good in fact.
In the kitchen, he couldn’t wait long enough to cook anything, just raided the giant 1950s SMEG fridge for whatever was to hand and spent the next half hour stuffing his face. Man, he was ravenous. He was eating like twenty-year old Dean after a sex marathon. He felt one hundred per cent like himself, though, which was a relief. Even though there was nothing to indicate that a remnant of Lucifer’s grace would contain anything of Lucifer’s personality, Sam had been afraid that awakening the grace might lead to him losing something. Losing himself again.
Stupid risk, Sammy, the Dean in his head was saying.
“Shut up, jerk. At least it was my choice this time, hey?”
Even inside Sam’s head, Dean’s silence held a world of hurt.
He didn’t like to admit how very scared he had been, because that would have made the Dean in his head right and turn this into such a stupid, dick move. But now it had worked, so clearly it had been the right thing to do. If it helped him find and free Dean.
And there was the kicker. Two days later and having this thin coating of remaindered grace wasn’t helping. It gave Sam something extra, yes, but so far it wasn’t enough. It was like eating but never feeling full; Dean would probably have said it was a burger bun with relish but no actual meat. Having grace did come with perks, though. For instance, Sam’s initial feeling of physical well-being didn’t fade, in fact it got stronger. This was the best physical shape he’d been in since he’d been all juiced up on demon blood but, thankfully, this felt cleaner.
Sam was starting to appreciate how Castiel must have felt walking round without his own grace, naked and powerless, or must be feeling now perhaps, fuelled as he was with a borrowed grace.
It was that last thought that made Sam pause, angel blade in hand.
He’d been hunting for several days, testing his limits. Lucifer’s grace had opened his eyes and he could spot a demon or a fallen angel in a crowd now. He had been making good use of that ability by capturing stray demons and questioning them. Sam had learned to be ruthless under Ruby’s tutelage and it wasn’t something easily forgotten. Sam without his soul had done things too, and Sam knew that just because his soul had been trapped in the Cage and his body walking round without it, Sam Winchester had still done those things, nobody else, no matter what Dean said about it. He was well aware that Dean liked to cling to the idea that his little brother was the innocent, compassionate one, but Dean had always been a little delusional when it came to his family, and a lot blind when it came to Sam.
The angel currently under Sam’s blade dripped light onto the dull concrete floor. The still air inside the warehouse smelled of ozone and spilt gasoline and it reminded Sam a little of the Impala. Sam had been using his newfound abilities to avoid angels, but this one had sought him out, he still didn’t know why. She’d come at him full of righteous rage with her angel blade flashing, and it had been sheer luck that Sam had a small vial of holy oil in one of his pockets – it had been enough to distract her for long enough to allow Sam to bind her. It had Sam speculating whether a faction of the Fallen was somehow allied with the Knight of Hell. Angel politics was crazy enough for anything.
The angel moaned, bringing Sam’s attention back to the matter in hand. Namely, that this angel clearly knew nothing about where Abaddon was, or how Sam would be able to extract Dean from her clutches, and Sam had been inches away from sticking the useless creature with the pointy end and finishing it off, when that thought about borrowed grace had stuck in his head and refused to go away.
Sam watched as the wounds he’d carved into this angel’s vessel sluggishly bled human blood mixed with grace, and wondered how Castiel had done it. How had he stolen that other angel’s grace?
“What are you waiting for, human? I didn’t think you cared for our vessels, from what I’ve heard…”
Sam cut off the angel’s taunting by grabbing the vessel’s hair and pulling her head backwards, exposing the long line of vulnerable throat. Experimentally, Sam drew a thin line across the taut skin near the base of her neck, smiling as the flesh parted easily as silk under the silver blade. White light began to bleed out as wound widened like a mouth, and Sam leaned down to seal his lips over the gaping slit in an obscene parody of a kiss.
Her grace entered his body like breath, burned its way inside him like cold fire and he gasped as the new grace met with his own, two branches of lightning meeting and merging, firing every neuron in his brain in a massive surge of electricity. It was everything and nothing like the demon blood hits. It was everything and nothing like dying. It was falling off a cliff and finding you can fly.
Sam woke up flat on his back staring at the naked iron girders that form the warehouse ceiling. Someone was sobbing. He didn’t think it was him.
He sat up in one easy motion. The joined graces writhed around each other then settled, smooth and strong. He could feel how his own self was woven together with the grace; filaments of light threaded through him, making him feel gravity had lessened, just a little, just enough to allow him to float for a moment or two. Not quite flying, not this time, more like allowing seawater to buoy him up, take some of the load.
The angel was crying. No, Sam thought. Not the angel any more, but its vessel. Holy crap, she was still alive.
“Shit, I’m sorry!” Sam was galvanised into action, quickly untying the girl while trying to assess the damage he’d inflicted on her. Miraculously, her wounds were not bleeding too badly. It seems he hadn’t cut so deeply. Either that, or her angelic resident had already begin the healing process before Sam so rudely interrupted it by extracting the grace. In fact, the only cut that was still bleeding was the last, the one in her throat.
Without thinking, Sam pressed his palm over the cut in her skin and allowed the grace to flow.
He didn’t linger to see if the girl was grateful for her healing.
0x0x0x0
Part 2 this way
title: Snow White, Rose Red
author: Amber1960
recipient: blythechild
word-count: 12,038 (dunno how it got this long…)
characters: Sam, Dean, Abaddon, Hel
genre: Gen
warnings: Probably a hard R for violence and swearing. Unbetat’d! Liberties taken with Norse mythology.
story/art summary: Abaddon possesses Dean and thinks she has broken both the Mark and the Blade. But she wasn’t counting on Sam, who will go to every length that Dean doesn’t believe he will in order to get his brother back, plumbing depths Sam didn’t even know existed before Gadreel’s deceitful occupation of his body. Art shows Dean as the Mark and Sam with angel powers.
Sammessiah Anti Christmas Exchange for blythechild who wanted Sam with various hellish creatures. I’ve managed to mention Crowley but mainly feature Abaddon and a Norse goddess. I’ve attempted to go some way towards filling a few of your wishes, namely - unholy powers, epic battle (ish), the boys being badasses, non-Judeo-Christian mythology or gods/goddesses. Sorry I never quite got to the pie.
The prompt that is closest to this fic was - Dean is snatched back to Hell by [insert bad guy/girl of choice here] but Hell hath no fury like Unholy Demon Jesus!Sam...
Oh and there is bonus art at the end.
Teaser
Does space to compass-points conform,
And can we say a star stands high or low?)
Not more complex the millions of the stars
Than are the hearts of mortal brothers
Wilfred Owen 1913
Someone should have warned Abaddon that stealing Dean was a bad idea. Crowley could have told her, but the erstwhile King of Hell was currently at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, being held (literally) by a primeval giant squid at Abaddon’s behest, so it was therefore questionable whether he’d have been inclined to do her any favours. Besides. It was hard to say anything much when every orifice was being invaded and plugged by a slimy tentacle.
See, Abaddon might win in terms of being a badass, evil bitch queen, full of that ruthless edge you need to get on in Hell, but Crowley’s stint as King of the Crossroads, before climbing up to the virtual top of the diabolical political ladder, meant he knew a lot about the nature of souls. And Crowley was well aware that the Winchesters’ souls were different from most humans.
As it was, with Crowley out of the picture, there was nobody to dare say her nay when Abaddon finally cornered the elder Winchester in Ilchester, of all places, and no one to stop her when she sliced a bright red fingernail through the tattoo on his perfect chest. She’d known about the Mark of Cain, of course she had. She wasn’t stupid, and there were plenty of demons willing to spill all of Crowley’s secrets either under the knife, or simply for the right incentive.
She’d sent in over two hundred minor demons to capture Crowley when he emerged from the Atlantic with the precious First Blade, seized the prize and sent Crowley screaming back down into the cold dark depths.
Setting the trap for Dean Winchester had been easy in comparison, the Blade itself being the bait. She’d revelled in the glorious sight of Dean bound and bloody. His arm was a shredded mess, the Mark obliterated as per her orders. Her stupid demon henchmen had gotten carried away and both Dean’s legs were broken. You just couldn’t get the staff these days. Dean was propped up against some crates, his breathing harsh and laboured. Some might have questioned the need for the extra ropes binding his arms to bared torso, but Abaddon wasn’t taking any chances. The First Blade lay in two pieces next to the fallen hunter, a symbol of his failure. The poor, foolish boy had never even managed to lay a hand on that ancient deadly bone.
Abaddon smiled, a bright red slash. She had taken the risk and won the best prize of all.
The extensive damage to Dean’s body was more than she’d anticipated, which was unfortunate, but it didn’t really matter, as Abaddon was more than capable of carrying out some repairs once she was in possession of that handsome form. The additional time she’d have to put aside for that was an irritation, though the blazing defiance in those pained green eyes was some consolation. Dean Winchester was doomed to be endlessly amusing to her, hopeless as he was.
Forcing those lovely lips wide and sliding herself inside was every bit the wonderfully satisfying experience that Abaddon had anticipated. Dean’s psyche was deliciously damaged, but his soul still burned brighter than the heart of the sun as the Knight of Hell chased it into hiding.
By the time anyone found out what had happened, Dean was long gone, securely locked away inside Abaddon’s new oh-so-pretty meat suit.
0x0x0x0
Dean was overdue. Which was one tiny step away from missing, lost, gone.
“Fuck.”
Sam didn’t want to be worried. He really didn’t want to care, just like Dean believed that he didn’t care. He knew he’d been hurting Dean by keeping his distance, but Sam had to. It was self-preservation as much as anything, building a wall between them, a veneer of professionalism that allowed Sam to keep functioning. It seemed to Sam that this was better than just walking away again, though sometimes he wondered what it was doing to them both to live this way.
In the olden days, Sam had had deep reserves of anger to draw on, but those had long since been drained – leeched away by the consequences of wrong decisions, too many deaths, two hundred years sharing a cage with the Devil and the loss of too much of himself. After Castiel reeled out the last essence of Gadreel, Sam realised he didn’t know who Sam Winchester was any more. Telling Dean he was willing to work with him as a hunting partner and nothing more made perfect sense to Sam at the time.
Even though Sam was the first to acknowledge that it wasn’t working. He should have known it wouldn’t. Even when he’d been soulless he’d been Dean’s brother. Sam needed Dean in too many ways, right and wrong, and it wasn’t something he could switch off.
Now Dean was overdue, Crowley was still AWOL, Cas had done one of his disappearing acts again and yes, fuck it all, Sam was concerned. So when Castiel turned up on the bunker’s metaphorical doorstep looking even more flustered and rumpled than usual, Sam’s anxiety ramped up into Def. Con 1.
“Sam! It’s Dean.” Castiel’s first words, delivered without the formality of a greeting, set Sam’s heart racing. Sure enough, Castiel’s news was even more dire than Sam had anticipated. “That job was a trap. Abaddon was there waiting with a troop of demons, and now she has taken him.”
“Where? Is he hurt?” Sam demanded. He clenched his fists, a litany of self-recrimination starting up inside his head that nearly drowned out Castiel’s next words. He should never have let Dean take that case alone.
“Not hurt any more , no. It’s worse than that. Abaddon is possessing him. She destroyed his protection and …”
Sam turned away, no longer listening. Dean, possessed. A tiny part of Sam could see the irony in that, but the larger part was consumed with a welcome growing rage. That demon bitch was violating his brother, and Sam was not going to stand for it. He didn’t know how he was going to kill her without the First Blade, and with Abaddon now effectively wearing the Mark of Cain, but Sam would find a way.
He had to.
0x0x0x0
Castiel hadn’t stayed long at the Bunker after delivering his bad news. Possibly because Sam had been insupportably rude to him when the angel had admitted there was nothing he could do to help Sam rescue Dean. After suffering the following few hours of being ignored, Cas had given up on Sam and fled, presumably to continue his quest for allies amongst the Fallen to join him in the battle against Metatron. Sam neither knew nor cared. The angel was as much use to him as a wooden stake against a vampire.
Sam’s head ached viciously after nine hours pouring over tome after tome, each one dustier than the last, and coming up with precisely nothing. He couldn’t believe that the Men of Letters’ library didn’t have something somewhere that would tell him how to tackle a Knight of Hell without damaging its meat-suit and without the First Blade, but if there was something, Sam couldn’t find it. The only thing all the texts agreed upon was that the power required to take out a Knight was considerable and rare. In the hierarchy of Hell, the knights ranked so high only Lucifer stood above them. And as Sam well knew, Lucifer was safely locked away, no longer a player in this great game.
Sam rolled his shoulders back, wincing as the vertebrae in his neck crunched audibly. He’d grown stiff from hunching over the table for so long. He couldn’t remember when he last ate or drank anything, and now the thought was in his head, his stomach protested loudly. He got up and headed for the kitchen, only to stop dead in the doorway.
Thinking about empty spaces inside of him in juxtaposition with the uncomfortable memories of Lucifer, Sam was suddenly reminded of Castiel’s removal of the last of Gadreel’s grace from Sam’s body. Castiel had been pretty adamant it was Gadreel, not anyone else, but now Sam was wondering. What if Gadreel’s wasn’t the only angelic remnant tucked away inside of Sam? What if there was some tiny scrap of a much more powerful grace nestled deep down, being nurtured by Sam’s darkness? What if Lucifer had left Sam a parting gift from his time as the vessel of an archangel?
And what if Sam could use that gift - how powerful would Sam be with even a mere spark of the Morning Star at his fingertips?
The thought made him feel simultaneously weak at the knees and full of excitement. He was sure he’d seen a passage in one of the books he’d been studying a couple of hours back, a snippet that had mentioned the possibility of humans tapping into angelic grace. He’d skimmed over it at the time because it hadn’t seemed relevant or even feasible…oh shit. He needed to find that book and check the text again.
All thoughts of mundane sustenance forgotten, Sam almost ran back into the library, rummaging through the haphazard piles of leather bound books he’d left scattered on and around the reading desk. It took him nearly an hour, but he finally located the right volume and the passage he was looking for. It was an obscure eighteenth century treatise on angelic lore, with a commentary on the Book of Enoch and the Jewish Kabbalah, and when Sam had picked it up earlier, he’d dismissed it as being merely pretentious mysticism. He supposed he should have known better. After all, if it had no credibility, why would the Men of Letters have kept a copy?
He ran a finger over the tiny print, reading the text twice to make sure he’d understood the meaning correctly. Now he knew what he was looking for, it seemed pretty clear.
Sam sat back in the wooden chair, rocking it onto its back legs. He ignored the ominous creaking of the wood under the pressure as he thought this through.
If Dean had been here, he’d be telling Sam this was dumb, crazy even, and it wasn’t worth the risk. We all know where too much power leads, Sammy, and it’s nowhere good. But if Dean had been here, Sam wouldn’t need to even contemplate trying this, so fuck that. Besides, Dean was the one who’d stuffed Sam full of another angel without asking, and thus inadvertently given Sam the information he needed now to make this plan work.
“So how about that, Dean? I can’t forget what you did, but it looks like the consequences are going to just keep rolling…but this time it might actually work to our benefit.”
He stood up, decision made. He had work to do.
0x0x0x0
Abaddon was enjoying her new body. She had put her empty Josie meat suit into cold storage in a rare moment of sentimentality; after all, Josie had served her well over a good many years, and was a pretty carcass to boot, it would be a shame to waste it. She certainly wouldn’t allow some lesser demon to casually walk around in Josie, that’s for sure. So it was store or destroy.
She moved her court to the west coast, eventually settling in Los Angeles. Partly because she liked the irony inherent in the name, and partly because it really was a demon’s paradise of a place, chock full of abject poverty alongside obscene wealth, vanity, greed and every other vice known to man and demon.
Abaddon healed Dean’s legs and his arm, and let scabs form over the wrecked tattoo. Whenever the opportunity arose, she would pause to admire his naked form in the full-length mirror in her penthouse suite. She liked to trace the path of his new scars, see the marks that bore witness to her occupation of that smooth pale skin. She loved to hear Dean’s wordless protests and feel his disgust when she ran her fingers down his almost hairless chest to stroke his flaccid penis into arousal, and she would always allow Dean to feel the overwhelming pleasure orgasm brought his body, so he could appreciate what he was missing.
She had Dean’s nipples pierced, because playing with the new silver rings was such fun. She was contemplating adding a Prince Albert when the first news filtered through from Kansas to disturb her equilibrium. Someone was killing her foot soldiers in droves, burning the dead life out of them with holy fire, and whoever or whatever it was seemed to be headed her way. At the same time, information reached her that Sam Winchester had announced his intention of hunting her down and taking his brother back.
“Good luck with that, Sammy,” she said, grinning at Dean’s muted howl of outrage. I’m the only one who gets to call him that. “But I am you, Dean, darling. So suck it up.”
At first, Abaddon wasn’t concerned. Sam Winchester was no threat to her without Blade or Mark at his disposal. And this mysterious angel or angels would be dealt with, like all the other flightless, featherless, pathetic excuses for seraphim that crossed her path. That was her thinking, when she bothered to consider it at all, until the day the mystery demon-slayer sent her a message she couldn’t ignore.
The demon knelt before her, blood dripping in a slow counterpoint to his frantic words.
“Then he…Winchester, he lit up like St Elmo’s fire and smote everyone in the room, angel and demon alike, he just didn’t care. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Abaddon tapped Dean’s short fingernails on the arms of her chair. It was at times like this when she missed Josie’s red talons.
She mused. This was like nothing this minor demon had ever seen, maybe, but he was only four, maybe five centuries old. Abaddon, on the other hand, had a few millennia under her belt and she had seen something like this before, in the good old days, when their lord and master walked amongst them, creating them, corrupting them. The Star of Morning, beautiful and terrible as the heart of the sun.
Somehow, Sam Winchester must have harnessed some of Lucifer’s power. How was largely irrelevant. Right now Abaddon was more concerned with the fact that the attention of this new, improved and highly dangerous weapon was being focussed on her, and that was highly inconvenient.
“I haven’t spent all this time and effort getting Crowley out of the way, marshalling my troops in order to return Hell to its proper state, and beginning to make a true Hell on earth, just to have some overinvested human mess everything up because I took his brother away.”
She paused to think. Then she nodded, decision made.
“Very well. It’s a shame, but this body will have to go. You, vacate that meat suit you are in, and fetch me Josie out of the fridge. We are going to pay a visit to an old friend.”
0x0x0x0
It was cold.
That was the first conscious thought Dean had before he opened his eyes. The second was the jolting realisation that he had managed that action himself – he had motor control of his eyelids again.
He sat up, thus demonstrating that it wasn’t just his eyelids that were his own again, but he didn’t have much chance to fully appreciate his freedom from Abaddon’s domination. His body objected to his sitting up too quickly and he was rewarded with a wave of dizziness that sent him falling backwards, his head smacking into what felt like concrete or stone with a crack that had him seeing sparks.
“Fuck!”
When he moved again, he did so with a lot more caution, taking his time. He surveyed his surroundings with growing wariness as he slowly rose into a crouch, and then stood up, holding onto the rough stone wall to steady himself as he did so. So, stone not concrete, and it was no wonder he was feeling the chill, as he was stark naked. He threw up a hand and yelled a protest at the blank walls.
“Man. What is it with the clothes? Would it kill you to give a guy something to fucking wear?”
He didn’t know who he was complaining to, but his sense of outrage needed to be expressed. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get a response. Silence surrounded him as thoroughly as the stone walls of the cave he seemed to have ended up in. Which brought him to the crux of the matter. Where the hell was he, where had Abaddon disappeared to, and how did he get here? And more importantly, how was he going to get out when there didn’t seem to be any exits or entrances to this roughly spherical-shaped chamber?
He put up a hand to rub at the sore patch on the back of his skull where he’d whacked it against the floor and started when it brushed up against something unexpected round his neck on its way up to his head. The alien something felt like leather. It was supple and smooth under his questing fingers, a broad band maybe four inches wide circling his throat. A collar.
“What the…?”
As items of clothing went, it was worse than useless. He tugged and picked at it but there was no fastening or seam that he could discover. It had less than a finger’s worth of give between it and his skin, and the only interruptions to the smooth surface were four metal rings embedded into the leather set at equidistant intervals round the circumference. Dean did not like the implications one little bit.
“So, what, you brought me here to be some sort of slave, is that it?”
Dean waited, but there was still no sign that anyone was listening, or that anyone was even remotely interested in him. The cave was dimly lit, though he couldn’t work out the source of the light, and the damp walls seemed to absorb his words as soon as they were spoken.
There must be something he was missing, some reason he’d been brought here and left so completely alone.
He remembered Abaddon possessing him. Then there had been a lot of very unpleasant and uncomfortable days watching, trapped and helpless, as she used his body to maim and kill for pleasure, and Dean remembered far too much of that. Something had happened after a few more days of this though, and he wasn’t sure what it was, because after receiving news about a massacre of demons, Abaddon had walled him up so tight, he’d effectively been deaf and blind as well as dumb for who knew how long.
Until he’d woken up here. He wasn’t sure this was an improvement. At least while trapped inside his head he hadn’t been cold. And hungry. As if to confirm the latter, his stomach gave a gurgle that was so loud it echoed. Something or someone snorted a laugh from behind him. He spun around so fast it re-awoke the dizziness of earlier, and instead of smoothly dropping into the planned fighting crouch, Dean nearly face-planted onto the floor. Flushing with embarrassed anger, Dean found himself on his hands and knees, nose to nose with a very large wolf. Which wasn’t at all worrying.
The wolf huffed at him, its breath warm and moist and strangely sweet-smelling. Dean skittered backwards still on all fours, wishing he had a weapon. He’d never felt so naked. He rose to his feet, resisting the urge to cup his junk. As if a hand would be any protection in these circumstances. The wolf was nearly as tall as Dean from paw to shoulder, which meant that its head was around Sam’s height, and that Dean had to tilt his head to look it in the eye. Its fur was thick and lush, strangely marked in extremes of white and black, while its eyes were the colour of glaciers.
“Whoa, back up there, Dog Breath,” he said. The wolf bared its formidable teeth at that, and growled, a deep rumble that Dean could feel vibrating through the earthen floor into the soles of his feet. He swallowed but held his ground, trying to stand tall and pretend he wasn’t scared shitless. He was shaking because of the cold, that was all.
“Okay, you ain’t a dog, I get it. So, what are you then? And how’d you get in here?”
The wolf just stared, transfixing Dean with that icy blue gaze that reminded him a little of Cas. And there was a thought that he should have had earlier. Maybe Angel Radio worked down here and Cas could…but then he hesitated. After all, look what happened last time he tried calling for angelic help. He couldn’t help the shiver that ran through him at the memory of Gadreel staring out of Sam’s eyes, and once he started remembering he found it impossible to stop. He flung a hand out to grab the wall. His whole body was trembling so violently he was hard put to stay upright.
“F..f..fuck, must look like a plate of j..jello in an earthquake, hey?”
The wolf made a questioning whining noise, more doglike than wolf, and then it was pushing up into Dean’s space and he was too weak to do anything to defend himself. Luckily all it seemed interested in doing was - well - snuggling was the only word that sprang to mind. Not that he wasn’t grateful for the warmth being offered, as his legs finally gave out from under him. He slid gracelessly to the floor half propped up on the wolf’s back. Too weary to maintain his usual innate caution, Dean allowed the giant wolf to wrap itself around him like a giant, fanged, fur stole. He didn’t even notice when he drifted from waking into a deep sleep, warm at last.
0x0x0x0
What had Jimmy said? That having Castiel inside him had been like riding a comet. Sam should have taken heed of that before setting off on this journey, because this wasn’t merely riding a comet, this was being one.
Lucifer’s grace was a song of ice and fire.
Dude, you’ve been watching way too much Game of Thones, came Dean’s voice inside Sam’s head; and if Sam hadn’t been in so much agony at the time, he’d have laughed. The worst thing wasn’t the pain. No. The worst thing was that it was a pain that he knew. He remembered this.
Bone deep, flesh eating, brain numbing cold that burned from the inside out.
Sam didn’t want to recall what had inevitably accompanied that cold back then – the eternal lack of privacy, the boredom interspersed with torture when one or the other of the archangels had turned their searing attention onto either Sam or Adam or both at once, the constant lingering guilt when he’d been unable to save his little brother from torn apart one too many times and Sam had been left embracing a gibbering wreck of a body whose soul had simply faded away like a shadow in fog.
He especially didn’t want to remember how much he had longed for his own soul to be able to find the same escape.
Sam wasn’t sure how long it was before the cold subsided into a mere chill and the memories of the Cage began to abate with it. However long, it was too long.
The ritual itself had been suspiciously easy, there hadn’t even been any bleeding required, either from him or from anyone else. So that was already a step up from Ruby’s demon blood fix, and made Sam feel a little better about trying the whole procedure. Just a few simple herbal ingredients mixed and burnt in a sliver bowl and a short passage of Enochian, and Sam had felt the grace begin to unfurl immediately.
None of the texts he’d found had described how it would feel, perhaps because nobody really knew. After all, Sam doubted that many humans had ever survived an angel inhabitation, let alone wanted to relive the sensation. Yet at least one person had tried and succeeded, and lived long enough afterwards to write down this ritual, and that had been enough for Sam.
When he finally opened his eyes, hours, maybe days later, Sam’s throat was raw and he wondered if he’d been screaming. Just as well the bunker was empty and shielded, if so, or any passer by might have called the cops.
His stomach rumbled loudly.
“Guess angel grace without an actual angel isn’t enough to stop me getting hungry, then.”
Or stop him talking to himself like a regular crazy person either, it would seem. He stood up slowly, expecting more pain, maybe a wave of weakness. It didn’t come. Apart from the pretty severe hunger pangs, he felt good. Very good in fact.
In the kitchen, he couldn’t wait long enough to cook anything, just raided the giant 1950s SMEG fridge for whatever was to hand and spent the next half hour stuffing his face. Man, he was ravenous. He was eating like twenty-year old Dean after a sex marathon. He felt one hundred per cent like himself, though, which was a relief. Even though there was nothing to indicate that a remnant of Lucifer’s grace would contain anything of Lucifer’s personality, Sam had been afraid that awakening the grace might lead to him losing something. Losing himself again.
Stupid risk, Sammy, the Dean in his head was saying.
“Shut up, jerk. At least it was my choice this time, hey?”
Even inside Sam’s head, Dean’s silence held a world of hurt.
He didn’t like to admit how very scared he had been, because that would have made the Dean in his head right and turn this into such a stupid, dick move. But now it had worked, so clearly it had been the right thing to do. If it helped him find and free Dean.
And there was the kicker. Two days later and having this thin coating of remaindered grace wasn’t helping. It gave Sam something extra, yes, but so far it wasn’t enough. It was like eating but never feeling full; Dean would probably have said it was a burger bun with relish but no actual meat. Having grace did come with perks, though. For instance, Sam’s initial feeling of physical well-being didn’t fade, in fact it got stronger. This was the best physical shape he’d been in since he’d been all juiced up on demon blood but, thankfully, this felt cleaner.
Sam was starting to appreciate how Castiel must have felt walking round without his own grace, naked and powerless, or must be feeling now perhaps, fuelled as he was with a borrowed grace.
It was that last thought that made Sam pause, angel blade in hand.
He’d been hunting for several days, testing his limits. Lucifer’s grace had opened his eyes and he could spot a demon or a fallen angel in a crowd now. He had been making good use of that ability by capturing stray demons and questioning them. Sam had learned to be ruthless under Ruby’s tutelage and it wasn’t something easily forgotten. Sam without his soul had done things too, and Sam knew that just because his soul had been trapped in the Cage and his body walking round without it, Sam Winchester had still done those things, nobody else, no matter what Dean said about it. He was well aware that Dean liked to cling to the idea that his little brother was the innocent, compassionate one, but Dean had always been a little delusional when it came to his family, and a lot blind when it came to Sam.
The angel currently under Sam’s blade dripped light onto the dull concrete floor. The still air inside the warehouse smelled of ozone and spilt gasoline and it reminded Sam a little of the Impala. Sam had been using his newfound abilities to avoid angels, but this one had sought him out, he still didn’t know why. She’d come at him full of righteous rage with her angel blade flashing, and it had been sheer luck that Sam had a small vial of holy oil in one of his pockets – it had been enough to distract her for long enough to allow Sam to bind her. It had Sam speculating whether a faction of the Fallen was somehow allied with the Knight of Hell. Angel politics was crazy enough for anything.
The angel moaned, bringing Sam’s attention back to the matter in hand. Namely, that this angel clearly knew nothing about where Abaddon was, or how Sam would be able to extract Dean from her clutches, and Sam had been inches away from sticking the useless creature with the pointy end and finishing it off, when that thought about borrowed grace had stuck in his head and refused to go away.
Sam watched as the wounds he’d carved into this angel’s vessel sluggishly bled human blood mixed with grace, and wondered how Castiel had done it. How had he stolen that other angel’s grace?
“What are you waiting for, human? I didn’t think you cared for our vessels, from what I’ve heard…”
Sam cut off the angel’s taunting by grabbing the vessel’s hair and pulling her head backwards, exposing the long line of vulnerable throat. Experimentally, Sam drew a thin line across the taut skin near the base of her neck, smiling as the flesh parted easily as silk under the silver blade. White light began to bleed out as wound widened like a mouth, and Sam leaned down to seal his lips over the gaping slit in an obscene parody of a kiss.
Her grace entered his body like breath, burned its way inside him like cold fire and he gasped as the new grace met with his own, two branches of lightning meeting and merging, firing every neuron in his brain in a massive surge of electricity. It was everything and nothing like the demon blood hits. It was everything and nothing like dying. It was falling off a cliff and finding you can fly.
Sam woke up flat on his back staring at the naked iron girders that form the warehouse ceiling. Someone was sobbing. He didn’t think it was him.
He sat up in one easy motion. The joined graces writhed around each other then settled, smooth and strong. He could feel how his own self was woven together with the grace; filaments of light threaded through him, making him feel gravity had lessened, just a little, just enough to allow him to float for a moment or two. Not quite flying, not this time, more like allowing seawater to buoy him up, take some of the load.
The angel was crying. No, Sam thought. Not the angel any more, but its vessel. Holy crap, she was still alive.
“Shit, I’m sorry!” Sam was galvanised into action, quickly untying the girl while trying to assess the damage he’d inflicted on her. Miraculously, her wounds were not bleeding too badly. It seems he hadn’t cut so deeply. Either that, or her angelic resident had already begin the healing process before Sam so rudely interrupted it by extracting the grace. In fact, the only cut that was still bleeding was the last, the one in her throat.
Without thinking, Sam pressed his palm over the cut in her skin and allowed the grace to flow.
He didn’t linger to see if the girl was grateful for her healing.
0x0x0x0
Part 2 this way
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2014-05-06 12:22 am (UTC)"She had Dean’s nipples pierced, because playing with the new silver rings was such fun" Oh, you go, girl. Yes.
All kidding aside, Amber, this beginning is fantastic. Abbadon is just perfect and her disposition of Crowley. LOL, epic. And Sam. And Lucifer's grace. Scary stuff. Oh, and Dean's collar. ROWR. Also,the wolf. I wasn't expecting whatever was in the room to be a wolf. Can't wait to see what happens next!
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Date: 2014-05-06 10:15 am (UTC)And thanks by the way, it's awesome you felt like commenting part way through!
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Date: 2014-05-06 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 03:36 am (UTC)(And Sam drinking angel grace is always a good read ;)
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Date: 2014-05-09 08:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 01:17 pm (UTC)