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rageprufrock · 10 days ago

Note

A director's cut on Wayfinding would be amazing. I'm living in eternal hope, that it will be updated some day.

I literally say this all the time and literally nobody believes me, so you know what, here, let's all have a little treat -- 3/4 of Ch 2 of Wayfinding, some of which has been posted before during the LIVEJOURNAL days and a lot of which has never been posted at all.

Happy reading!

Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand.

—Deuteronomy 28:41

JOHN

Dee, at three, is the most beautiful girl alive. She has dark blond hair and mossy green eyes, and when she laughs John feels his knees go weak, like he wants to drop down and pick her up and clutch her in his arms, like that's why little girls laugh to begin with: to get out of walking to the playground.

Mary's out talking to adults, people who converse in full and complete sentences, she says, but John likes Deanna better. They get each other, they always have, and they talk in the secret language of favored fathers and daughters, instantly fluent in each other. She talks by waving her chubby hands, by tugging at his jeans, by crawling up into his lap in their living room, by touching his face, and when he smiles at her, she beams back and John feels his heart clutch in his chest because he loves her so much. She babbles at him about her day, and what sandwiches she and Mommy made, about the songs they sang, and how much she missed Daddy.

John never know he could love anyone this much. It scares him how much he loves her.

He takes her to the playground, pushes her on the swings, wants her to go as high as she wants, as fast as she likes, anywhere she seeks. At night, he thinks about when she gets older, about having to share her with the teachers at school, with the little brother or sister he and Mary have been thinking about having one day. He worries she might fall down, that people will disappoint her, that her life will be hard. He worries that nobody will understand how amazing she is, about if she'll know how to do her own taxes, and if she'll get mad if he tries to do them for her. He worries about her SAT scores, and if she'll be embarrassed that he's a mechanic and not a doctor or lawyer; he looks up law schools. He thinks about what he'll do if she ever stops loving him the way she does, if she stops looking at him like he's a giant who can fix anything, the way it makes him feel shit-scared and like Superman all at once. He gets sick thinking about boys making her cry, about one day when he has to let go of her hand in a church and give her over to someone else, and how he might not live through it, giving up his perfect girl.

John knows it's a dream, because it's been a long time since Deanna's hair curled like that, since she wore green t-shirts and pink shorts, tiny yellow sneakers and looped her arms around Dad's shoulders.

More than that, he remembers, like the first burn of Alistair's knife into the flesh of his thigh in hell, the day Deanna stopped looking at him like that, when he'd looked at her heartbreakingly beautiful face and all he'd seen was how tired and hurt she was, and knew he couldn't do fucking shit about it. For all the boys he'd been scared would hurt her feelings, John knows he's done the worst, that he's left the deepest scars. Sometimes he thinks that if only his handlers in hell had known how much that had hurt him, and how long, how deep, they wouldn't have bothered with knives, with fire, with peeling off the individual fibers of his muscles at all.

But right now, right here, in this haze of sleep he doesn't deserve, it's Lawrence and Dee's three; they are walking home from the playground at six o'clock. He hasn't failed her yet, and all Dee knows is that he's her daddy, and that her momma's waiting at home, and that when she wakes up tomorrow there will be pancake men on the griddle and that life is good. It's all John's ever wanted her to know, and the one fucking thing he couldn't leave her. Even this is all his. He doubts Deanna remembers.

"John."

He blinks. It's Lawrence. It's 1982.

"John. You must wake up."

He gasps, and his heart roars into his throat.

John blinks again, and it's Chapel Hill. It's 2008.

"John. Wake up."

"Jesus fucking Christ," he chokes out, and pushes himself up. His whole body hurts. He's 54 years-old and he feels every fucking year; he's 54 years-old plus 200-odd years in hell, and feels those, too, the memory of pain, too fierce for all the human words he knows, and too small, now, for all the demonology he learned in the pit.

At the foot of his fucking bed, Castiel is staring at him, crazy-eyed.

"What the fuck do you want?" he growls, and rolls over onto his side, swinging his legs off the edge of the mattress. He hears his spine creak, his knees protest. He's too old for this, and it's still raining, the wetness seeping into his joints and making them hurt.

"Deanna is gone," Castiel tells him, short like a gunshot.

John freezes. "What do you — ?"

"I cannot find her," Castiel says, and he looks away from John, stares out the window into the rain. "She's not here."

John already feels sick, nauseated, but he says, "Hell, look, she might like you, but that doesn't give you leave to follow her around, you feathery fuck."

"She's not here," Cas says again, precise, and this time, when he meet's John's gaze, his eyes are blazing.

John swallows. "Maybe she's at work," he says.

"Her car is here," Cas rejoins. "She told her coworkers yesterday she was quitting her job. I heard her on her telephone. I didn't know what it meant, at the time."

John hears himself say, "Fuck," and then he's out of bed, all the pain subsumed into something bigger, dizzying fear that claws at him like the hellhounds had, and he barrels out of his room and down the hall, shouting for Sam.

In Deanna's bedroom, they find letters. She wrote one to Sam, one to Bobby, to Missouri and Ellen and Jo and hell, Ash. There's a letter to John, one to fucking Castiel. On the dresser, near her piles of unworn earrings and an origami crane, there are her car keys, and a Post-It saying: FOR SAM. DAD, DON'T LET HIM FUCK UP MY BABY.

"God damn it," John yells, and whirls around on Castiel. "How can you not find her? You're — you're a fucking angel."

"I recognize souls," Castiel growls. "And Deanna's is — "

He cuts himself off, looking away again, and John's grateful for that, at least. He's already busted his hands on Castiel's face once, he doesn't need to do it again.

" — And I cannot find Deanna's," Castiel finishes, selecting his words carefully.

They toss the house. They search it from the corners of the attic into the basement, and Castiel flits from corner to corner, there and gone again in a heartbeat, and John almost drives Sam's fucking car into a tree when Castiel pops up in the God damn passenger seat as John's driving through campus, looking for any sign of her.

"You're wasting time," Castiel grinds out.

"She can't have gotten far by foot," John snarls. He fucking hates angels.

"She's not a child," Castiel retorts. "She didn't run away."

"It's been eight hours — she could be entire states away," John says, clutching at the steering wheel, because she could be, and he has to believe it.

"She's not in any state," Castiel says, impatient. "She is not in North America. She is not in the Western Hemisphere and she is not on Earth. I looked for her from the top of Everest and I dove past the continental shelf and there's no sign of her — not a trace."

John would throw up if there was anything in his belly to throw up.

"Well, what the hell does that mean?" he asks, his voice is breaking and pitchy with panic. "What — does that mean she's dead?"

Castiel is quiet for a long time, too long, before he murmurs, "It means someone, or something, strong enough to disguise her from me has her."

John slants him a look. "Maybe you're not looking hard enough."

And when Castiel's eyes meet John's, John thinks he remembers — against the unrelenting red of hell, like a gash mid-putrefaction, endlessly dying — beyond the blue irises and black pupils and all the human trappings that John sees now, something terrible and beautiful and so huge John can never know it in complete.

"I have always known where Deanna is — I did not lose her, she was taken," Castiel tells him — the "from me" is silent. His voice sounds like the endless, hollow spaces of a library, the air filling up a basilica: old and huge and knowing.

"Jesus fucking Christ," John says, and turns back toward the house, where the car pulls into the driveway just in time for to hear Sam screaming, for John to throw the car into park, tear out of the side door.

He follows the sound of Sam shouting — for help, for anyone, oh God, please, no, no — his voice getting hoarser and thinner, and when John gets into the barn, Castiel's already there, filling the air with something that sounds like a fucking siren on mute, just the press and urgency and terror of it, getting louder by the fucking minute.

John's about to ask, "Sam, what — ?" when he sees it.

***

In hell, there are stages.

In the early days, John was too busy reeling from the horribleness, the sheer and terrible evil of the place to process anything, and the soul is strangely cerebral in the way it shuts down for preservation, he thought, watching demons scrape his skin from his muscle, peel him apart like an onion oozing blood.

The nerves wear away and at some point it's just nausea, awareness, that hurts, and not the way the guts of you feel any physical pain. It's when they run out of skin to cut and things to rape and nerves to twist and blood to drain and the agony of your physical body vanishes into nerveless oblivion that it all gets dicey, that it gets worse, that it gets into the territory of things John Winchester doesn't know how to describe, can barely remember accurately, just feels like a physical lurch through spaces his body occupies that he doesn't know how to name. But he knows this: for the first year after the pain stopped terrifying him, when the easy kick of horror wore off, a demon named Alistair had dragged Deanna onto the rack.

It wasn't Deanna, but it was, and John will never forget her shaking lower lip, her cheeks, dirty and wet with tears, what Alistair did to her, or how the last breaths of her rattled out of her chest over and over again, every day, and how he always screamed, even when his lungs had been clawed out of his chest. They brought her in when she was a grown woman, beautiful like his last clear memories of her; they dragged her down as a gangly limbed girl; they strapped her onto the rack when she was ten and screaming, turning her face toward him and shouting for help; they carried her over, frozen, green eyes swimming with tears, when she was five, when she was brand new.

When he was numb to that, too, to watching his baby girl die over and over again, when he was too tired of being ripped up — and that had been terrible in its own way — they'd brought out Sam.

***

Sam's hunched over, on the floor, making hurt, animal noises in the dirt, his body a broken arch over where Deanna's on the floor, her hair a dark gold spill across the floor.

Her eyes are glassy and open and dead, one hand flung out, fingers curled delicately, and from the neck down she's been ripped to pieces. There're long gashes down her chest and belly, blood soaking dark and day-old into the dirt, a messy spatter of gore on her bleached and blue-white skin, on the curve of her chin. Her UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA-CHAPEL HILL SCHOOL OF NURSING t-shirt is shredded, and John can see the ghastly white of a bone in all the blood and he thinks, no, no.

Her hair is dirty, matted, and getting worse from where Sam is brushing her bangs back away from her face, he keeps gasping, "No, Dee, no, please, no, Deanna." John doesn't know it until he hits the dirt that his knees are giving out, that he's falling to them, and then he's crawling forward on all fours to Sam, to Deanna, to where Sam's face is slick-wet with tears and he's run out of words.

John pulls Deanna's head into his lap — hands shaking — and when he tries to suck in a breath it hurts like a knife in the gut. He palms her cheeks. He touches Deanna's mouth. He brushes the corners of her eyes, her throat — the white skin of it, too still — and he strokes her arm, the long muscle and the dip of her elbow, down to her wrist and John closes his fingers there, ignores the way blood is slicking his palm. He thinks about the first time he ever touched Deanna's wrist, when it was small and chubby and the first time she closed her fingers around his thumb; he thinks about holding her hand when she was a baby, when she was small, when she got so big, and then he has to stop thinking about it before he throws up. He's looking for a pulse even though he knows there's no way there is one — the ground underneath her is soaked dark red, soaking into John's pants now, too, too much for one person, for one girl, and John knows, he knows, he knows but — but he can't stop looking, can't stop running his hands over her.

"No," he's saying, "no," because he died for her, he sold his soul for her, he went to hell for her, and whenever he'd watched her die there, he'd known it was bullshit, that Deanna was upstairs calling Sam a motherfucker and taking care of him and breathing and — he turns to Castiel.

"Fix her," he says. "Fix her."

Castiel doesn't look at John, can't take his eyes away from Deanna — her body, what's left of her, Jesus Christ — and he just says, "I don't know how this happened."

"Fuck how, who cares about how?" Sam snarls, and he gets to his feet, he grabs at Castiel's trench, hands smearing dirt and Deanna's blood, and when Sam shakes Castiel, Castiel actually shakes. "Just fix her — bring her back — "

"I can't," Castiel tells him, distracted, and he's not looking at Sam, he's looking over Sam's shoulder, looking at Deanna like something stuck a fist into his chest.

Sam's face crumbles again, like even his muscles and bones hurt to much to hold it up, to keep it together, and he just keeps clawing at Castiel's coat, keeps saying, "Please — please, it's — she's my sister, please."

"I can't," Castiel says again, a crack of lightning in the heavy air. And softer, creaking, hurt in a way John would have sworn the unbending edifice of Castiel, angel of the Lord, couldn't be, he closes his eyes, he murmurs, "It's beyond my powers."

"You — you pulled Dad out of hell," Sam says, wild. "You're an angel."

"And I knew then where your father was," Castiel hisses at Sam, eyes blazing, "where his soul was, who had it, and I had heaven's fiercest garrisons at my back when we stormed the gates of hell for him — for Deanna, I know none of these things, and — " and his voice cracks here, his voice a whisper " — and I know no one, no demon, who could have taken her, stolen her from under my protection."

And that's when Sam starts yelling, starts hollering, that familiar note of total batshit crazy-would-do-anything-no-questions-asked that John knows has led to at least one dead body before.

"No!" Sam's screaming, "no! She's — no! You bring her back, you fix this, you — " with Castiel growling over him, and Sam's voice getting pitchier and more desperate and less coherent, guttural and begging, with all the syllables and words melting away.

John loses track of the argument, he stops listening, and he runs his fingers over Deanna's face, closes her eyes, puts his hands over her ears, because he knows she hates it when they fight, when Sam's yelling. He curls over her, he pulls her up, he presses her face into his neck and he breathes through the gold floss of her hair and he tries to wake up. He rocks himself back and forth, he threads his fingers into Deanna's, he pulls her hand up to his mouth, and he kisses the unbroken pink skin of her knuckles, sobs into her fist and prays, and prays, and prays.

***

They put her in the library.

John doesn't bother suggesting a pyre. He thinks about picking her up, about carrying her inside, but when he tries to move her, Sam goes postal. John gets the blanket from the hayloft instead and hands it to Sam, lets him wrap it around her, face gray and terrifyingly blank. He doesn't fight it. John's always known that Sam and Deanna orbited each other, that he's always watched from a distance. Sam wraps her up like a baby, picks her up like one, like she weighs nothing, and he carries her into the house, her head against his shoulder, and he hushes her like she can hear him when he puts her down, lays her across the rug in front of the fireplace.

Castiel has followed them like a ghost, just flashes from the corner of John's eyes, but John can feel him, the hugeness of Castiel's presence like an electrified blanket, muting out all the ambient noise. It kills the sound of cars on the road, the rustle of the trees, the silence is so complete and unbroken it's swallowing, it eats up everything, and John just sits in the armchair in the library and lets it eat him, too.

He watches Sam kneel over his sister, over their shared heart, and John's still because he doesn't know what else to be, what else to feel, anything to do, and Castiel flutters like a shadow, flickering in and out, and nobody says anything, everything in slow motion.

The sky goes from the swollen, overcast morning to dense heat by mid-day, and John just sits and sweats ice, hurts. God apparently hates a vacuum, and in the absence of Deanna — Jesus Christ — to lock it down and get shit done, apparently it's Sam's job, and John ain't moving anywhere, doing anything, anytime soon. So Sam gets a wet cloth, washes the blood off of Deanna's face and fingers, pats her hair clean and brushes it out. He calls Bobby and says, "Bobby, we need your help," and "Deanna's — Bobby, something got her." He calls Ellen. He calls Missouri, and John can hear her already crying when she picks up the phone, murmuring, "Oh Jesus, that poor girl, oh Jesus," and Sam just tells her, something brittle in his voice, "Don't worry, we'll get her back."

Sam stays long after it gets dark and cool, long after Deanna's gone stiff, and John wants to ask what the hell they're doing here, what the hell either of them are doing there, but then Castiel appears, a darker shadow among many, and says, looming over Sam and looming over Deanna:

"It's hellhounds."

John freezes.

Sam croaks, "What?"

Castiel drops down on his haunches, balancing on the balls of his feet, the trenchcoat pooling around him, and he reaches one hand over, hovering it over Deanna's body. Sam goes to snatch it away, but his fingers freeze midair, suspended like he can't move, and Castiel ignores him, just says, "Hellhounds — I knew I recognized her wounds."

John has never seen a hellhound. Not even in hell did he see one with his eyes, but he knows them, the way they fill up empty spaces, the way their teeth rip on his skin, through his bones, into the matter of the soul, tore at the viscera of what made him, seen their victims littering the long basalt walkways of hell. Alistair had kept a pack of them, and when hell was particularly busy, and he was particularly occupied with trying to break John, he would dispatch the dogs to do his business on the other souls in his charge.

"Why would hellhounds — " Sam starts.

"It's also why I haven't been able to locate her soul," Cas murmurs. "My sight doesn't extend to hell when its gates are sealed."

"Oh my God," Sam croaks. "Deanna's in hell."

Castiel's eyes shutter, and his palm drops, tired, closing over the wings of her collar bones, his thumb in the divot between, like he, too, is looking for a pulse but he doesn't know how.

"Most likely," Castiel rasps. "I'm sorry."

And it surprises John more than anybody, probably, when he asks, "Why?"

Castiel's eyes, when John catches them, are cold fire.

"I don't know," he admits. Unfolding himself, Castiel says, "But I will find out," and before he's fully standing, the space he occupied is empty again — and when John looks down, Deanna's wounds are closed over, the skin closed and unbroken, just blood smeared across white, all knitted together.

***

It's horribly fitting, in a way, that it's Sam and John who bury her.

They pick a spot behind the house, away from the barn, where it's green and lush and the trees bow into a heart across the Carolina blue sky and dig in unbroken silence. Deanna never got to be a little girl or a young lady or anything other than the fulcrum on which Sam and John tilted, and she'd loved them anyway for it, and John feels sick, and selfish, and numb, and when they put her down into the earth — in a pine box, dressed in a pale yellow sundress she swore she didn't like that much — Sam cries the entire time, hurt, his voice cracking so badly and his knees so weak John finishes the job himself, hiding his baby girl away under six feet of reddish-brown dirt.

The next three days John drinks a lot and remembers very little. He thinks there's a fight, somewhere in the middle, where he calls Sam an ungrateful, selfish little shit and where Sam yells back that he wished Castiel was Deanna's angel, that Dad being dead was a fucking blessing and his coming back was the curse. It's shortly after that that Bobby arrives, and hell, John barely remembers any of this, just has the vague impression of Bobby dumping him into his bed, saying, "You poor, sorry son of a bitch," and taking off his boots.

He dreams about hell, dreams about Deanna on the rack, and when he wakes up to go hug the toilet he doesn't know if it's the bourbon or the fear.

It's almost a week later by the time he comes out of it, shaken awake by Bobby, who slaps him — furious — across the face, and when John's cussing, "Jesus fucking Christ, you — " he cuts in, saying:

"Fuck your self pity, Winchester."

"Jesus, Singer," John gasps, dazed, tasting blood on the corner of his mouth. Bobby looks red-eyed, tired, and John doesn't remember him staying. He'll add it to the list with all the other things.

He points toward the bathroom door.

"Go get showered and brush up. It's past noon."

He does, but only because the prospect of fighting with him is more energy than it's worth, and when he staggers out of the shower, Bobby's sitting at the foot of his bed whittling a fucking stick. He tilts his head toward a stack of clothes.

"Get dressed," Bobby tells him. "Work to do."

"Bobby, get the fuck out of my bedroom," John tells him. "If you wanna baby someone, Sam's down the hall and — "

"Sam," Bobby snarls, "has been doing some fucked up shit in your cellar, and is not down the hall." He picks up John's pants and throws them at him. "Now, as I said: get dressed — there's work to do."

***

The cellar, when John gets down there, is covered in runes, in Enochian, in sanskrit, in Latin. It's covered in Gaelic and there are, John recognizes, symbols, painstakingly copied from the old tortoise shell relics of pre-dynastic China. There're candles burning, a gas lamp humming, flashlights all over the place, a scrying dish. John tastes brittany and lavender and witch hazel burning, the smoke from rosemary, and he sees bone ash in a bowl and says, "Jesus, Sam, what the hell are you doing down here?"

"Something," Sam growls at him, and when he looks up, his face is thin with grief. None of it's in his eyes. He's always been able to shut it down, lock it away, close the door on it better than Deanna, in a way John couldn't do it at all. "Anything to figure out what did this to her."

John picks up the scrying dish. There's dredges of what he bets is grave dirt and blood in there, and he sets it back down. Somewhere in Lawrence, Missouri Moseley is writing his ass a pissed off as shit letter, John just knows it.

"That angel said it was hellhounds," John says, and he can't keep himself from remembering the way Deanna looked, dead on the barn floor, a flash before his eyes and gut-wrenching, unforgiving, as sharp and nauseating a pain today as it was before.

Sam turns back to his book, hands preternaturally calm, but John sees the way all the knives on the tables are shifting, uneasy, and he presses his hand down on the handle of one to still its rattling.

"Hellhounds don't act of their own volition," Sam lectures. "They always move on orders, and they don't just wander out of hell, either, someone — "

"Someone sent them after her," Castiel interrupts, there suddenly and leaning over Sam's book, his fingers trailing across the page. "This is the right summoning."

Sam swallows hard. "Yeah?" he croaks.

Castiel tilts his head, and John can't see the look that's exchanged, but hell, he can guess. The angel says, "It's not necessarily going to yield results, but it's worth a try."

"Good to know," Sam says, mostly to himself.

"Is that why you prayed for me?" Castiel asks, brisk and barely civil, like he wants to be anywhere but this house, and John can understand that feeling, he knows it in his gut. "To check your spellwork?"

"And to see if you found anything," Sam says, hasty.

Castiel's face darkens. "I haven't."

"And to give you this," Sam says, voice strange. For a beat, John wants to ask what the hell Sam thinks he's doing, but then he sees the letter, Deanna's familiar handwriting tiny across the front, spelling out, Cas, and Sam says, "She — she left it for you."

Before John has an opportunity process whatever the fuck that means, Cas is taking the letter, and John doesn't know that he's ever seen a solemn hand before now, but Castiel's hands are solemn, and he and stares and stares at the envelope, his mouth going slack with something John knows intimately is loss.

"Thank you, Sam," Castiel says, finally, tracing a thumb over his name.

Sam's flat-lipped smile is brittle and he nods. "Let us know if you find something."

Cas doesn't look away from the letter, but he does say, "I will," the last syllable of his words still lingering long after he's gone.

John clears his throat. "What summoning was he talking about?"

Sam shows him a book. "Here," he says.

***

John hears Sam and Bobby on the phone with Rufus, with Ellen, with a half-dozen other hunters scattered around the country. There are signs, they're saying; something's not right, something making the sky heavier and everyone nervous. Ellen says she's got a kid named Ash — "Hell of a haircut to go with that brain of his." — is finding the beginnings of a pattern in supernatural events. They've got compounding questions and no answers, and Bobby and Sam take notes and keep digging and John spends hours sitting in Deanna's room. The first time he lost one of his girls he'd been so busy trying to avenge her he hadn't grieved; this time, it's all he can do.

His letter had said:

Daddy —

I'm sure by now you're all trying to figure out what happened, or why I did it, or how, and I know telling you all to leave well enough alone is pointless. But I do want to say that I'm sorry for upsetting you, probably upsetting Sam. I know you probably won't believe me (and that's okay, too) but I had to do this; it was my problem, I caused it, it's my responsibility to deal with the consequences.

I know you and Sam will fight like idiots, but please take care of each other for me.

Love, Deanna.

John's read it so many times, folded and unfolded it until the paper was soft. He keeps it tucked in his wallet, he folds it up in the pocket of his shirt. He keeps it nearby all the time. He keeps trying to find if there's a message in the words, some clue left behind, but it's just blue ballpoint pen ink and yellow legal pad paper, Deanna's familiar, crushed-tight handwriting crawling across the lines like a line of ants. He wonders what she wrote Sam, if his letter was longer, if she told him any more than she'd written to John — and Jesus Christ, John knows he's a jealous shit when he comes to Deanna — and he wonders what she had to say to Bobby, to Ellen — to fucking Castiel.

It's better than the other stuff he thinks about.

But he still thinks about it, the memory of Sam begging, his ugly, desperate crying, and Deanna small and bloody in his arms, guts spilling out, vivid and hypsersaturated. It's worse than the dreams of hell because the only thing that had kept him going, for time that seemed to arc out into eternity, was knowing that Deanna was aboveground, that she'd forget him, forgive him, eventually, because that's what Deanna does.

He can barely close his eyes before he starts remember: the rack, the screams, the peeling skin, the fire and the way after a while the coppery warm smell of blood had been good and rich, and luxurious in his mouth. But it always circles back around to Sam's face, Deanna's slack and bloody mouth, and he wakes up gasping, heart trying to tear its way out of his chest. He's back to drinking himself to sleep, and without Deanna to shuffle everything under any convenient rugs, there're empty bottles of fuck knows what bottom-shelf liquor littering his bedroom floor, hiding away in the corners of the library, where the rug now wears a dark-red stain, too, like the rest of them.

***

The forensics of the supernatural are complicated, arcane, rooted in gossip and ashes, and it takes a week and a half to get everything just right. They gather a sage stick and a dozen white candles; Sam breaks a thermometer, mixes mercury and acid and a scrap of Sam's t-shirt, stiff with Deanna's blood, in the silver cup with its grotesques along the base rolling forked tongues at John like a threat.

When they do, they do the ritual in the library, because he can't go into the fucking barn without being wrenched by it, without still smelling the blood, feeling the dizzying vertigo.

"You're sure this will work?" he asks, but there's no fire behind it, he can barely keep himself standing, leaning against a wall and hoping it's enough to keep him upright.

Sam, across the room, nods. "Yeah — it should summon whatever demon..." he trails off, because Sam can't bear to say it either, say, dragged her off, stole her from us.

"Most demons would leave some residue," Castiel growls, there suddenly and occupying a once-empty space by the fireplace, comprehensive in his stillness.

John asks, "Most?"

Castiel looks wrecked, wild, and he has dark circles under his eyes, like he's losing his veneer of angelic distance. Castiel is an asshole and useless but he's an angel, for fuck's sake, he shouldn't look thinner and crazy and like he's falling apart, like he's been pulled inside out, but he does, and when he turns to look at John, he says:

"Ones that won't would be beyond summoning, anyway."

"Nice of you to finally fucking show up," Bobby spits at him, and the glance Castiel gives him could flay a man.

"Did you find anything?" Sam asks, before Castiel can do it, rip Bobby from stem to sternum, and John thinks Castiel would do it, too, just to get it out from underneath his skin. They're all particularly dangerous recently, and John tries not to think about how it might have been for his baby girl, always being everybody's emergency handbrake.

Castiel shakes his head and looks toward the windows of the library, where the leaves are rustling, lazy, on the summer-heavy trees, blanketing the ground in pale green light.

"The gates of hell are still closed to me, and my superiors haven't answered any of my questions," he says, and he runs his hand along the edge of a bookshelf, fingers touching the spines of Deanna's Little House on the Prairie books. "I have felt no indication of her on Earth, either, in the course of my other duties."

John barks out, "Other duties? What the hell other duties do you have that — " are more important than getting Deanna out of hell, John means to say, but Castiel cuts him off, interrupts and grinds out:

"We're wasting time." He nods at Sam. "Do the ritual."

Sam does.

They stand, all of them, in a half-moon around the arc of a devil's trap, and Bobby and John hold shotguns and holy water and Sam is holding a book — old vellum, rumored to be human skin — chanting Latin until the walls shake, the lights flicker, the daylight goes prematurely gray outside the windows.

The space inside the house and around it shake, overfull, filled up to the brim with the heavy, dusty sweep of magic, and it always feels like someone's tickling fingers up John's spine when it happens: invasive, unexpected, unwanted, cold. Castiel just leans against the bookshelf — still tracing a copy of Little House in the Big Woods with his fingertip — and watches, utterly untouched by it, his trenchcoat and hair and everything perfectly still, the moving eye to a coming storm.

The wind kicks up, and all the papers in the room are swirling like a hurricane, pens and glasses rattling off desks, and it's like a storm trapped inside a house except that all of a sudden everything goes quiet, goes still, and John has just enough time to ask, "Was that it?" before a sonic boom swallows all the questions in the room in a column of blue flame and something ugly and skeletal gets spat into the room, sucked out of nowhere and sprawled in the devil's trap now.

Bobby says, "What in the hell — ?"

"Stay still," Castiel hisses at all of them. "Don't move — any of you."

And they don't, any of them, because John doesn't believe in Castiel's God or any of the work that Castiel says they have for him, but there is something in his voice that is old like water in stone, like the darkest, oldest parts of a forest, the black corners of oceans no one has ever seen. When he talks, the room shakes, too, and John watches Sam freeze and Bobby freeze and watches whatever the hell it is they've summoned freeze, watches Castiel take easy, unhurried steps closer to it, his long legs eating up the length of the library floor.

John looks at the thing instead, and he stares and stares and stares until it resolves into something that looks human, a little. Hell is vivid, but hell is vast, and he doesn't remember this, whatever it was, that is bringing itself onto spindly knees, with cracking wrists and razor-sharp shoulders, skin that wraps possessively around the bone and green-gray with rot, dark, tired blood in the deep hollows between the ribs, in the well of its throat, where there should be stomach and muscle or sinew. But reflexive, John still freezes, he still feels his spine curl, he wants to look away when it looks up. He thinks, do it for Deanna, and meets its eyes only to find it doesn't have any: just black holes in a dried-out skull that seems to glow. In the yellowy light of late afternoon it looks small, unremarkable, and the whispery voice that comes out of its rattling throat hisses:

"Angel."

Castiel crosses into the devil's trap, and the thing flinches away, shuffles back on its creaking knees. The Daddy Long Legs fingers of it clicking across the library floor, nails scraping wood, catching the cheap rug fibers, dragging as it moved to get away.

"Deanna Winchester," Castiel spits at him, still advancing. "I can smell her on you."

The demon — it has to be a demon — grins, wavering, and it's a mouthful of rotted out teeth that John sees behind his shriveled lips.

"Oh, her. She came to me special delivery, all I had to do was pick her up." He makes a wheezing noise, like a whine of regret. "Didn't even get to keep her long."

"Who?" Castiel asks, and his voice sounds like the first tremor of an earthquake. "Who sent her to you?"

"Above my pay grade," the thing hisses back.

"Where is she now?" Castiel says.

The thing laughs. "Sweetheart, I think that's above your pay grade, but oh — " it shudders, the hollows of its eyes crunching together in delight, shivers rattling its bones " — oh she's so good, angel, all the guts of her are good, and her skin, that delicious, white, wet silk on the inside of her thigh — "

The only thing that keeps John from leaping into the devil's trap, too, is Bobby's hand like an iron vice on his arm, holding him in place, hissing, "Don't you fucking think about it, Winchester."

" — and when they took her away, they took her even deeper," it hisses. "Somebody else's turn, I guess."

Castiel is unblinking, his eyes as still as the locked-tight angles of his shoulders.

"Did she make a deal?" he asks. "Did she sell her soul?"

The thing makes s spitting noise, like a cat gone feral. "Why should I — " the rest of its protest is swallowed up in a shriek, unearthly, and John can't see what Castiel did, but he's done something, because the demon on the ground has folded even more tightly into himself, its body like origami, and it huffs for breath like it needs oxygen, gasps in between saying, "No — no."

"Then how," Castiel asks, very quiet and very dangerous, advancing again, just half-steps, the creak of his cheap shoes on the floorboards and carpet a menace like John's never known something made up of so many ordinary sounds could be, "did she end up on your rack?"

The demon stops, just a beat, and in an outward gush of suicidal delight, it shrieks, its bones rattle, its skin tears, it shouts, "Oh, it was you — it's your sticky fingerprints I recognized all over her, isn't it? I knew there was something familiar about you, angel."

John freezes.

"How?" Castiel demands again. "Answer the question."

"Your little princess was a gift, angel," the demon coos at him, still rapturous. "Someone cracked the Gate. I just followed the hounds up, found her soul wandering around, beaming like a lighthouse." It rasps a laugh, and asks, commiserating, "She's awfully skittish, isn't she?"

Castiel is reaching a hand to it, eyes blazing — and John's never seen a demon scared, before, but he's seen it now, watching it shake and look like it wants to plead — when Sam cuts in, shouts out:

"Wait — how do we get her out?"

The thing on the floor flicks its eyes over, to Sam, to the source of the sound — John could beat Sam to death for being completely unable to follow simple God damn directions, ever — except the demon's mouth is going manic with a smile, and like it forgets who's in front of him, what it's stuck inside, it sways, wanting, purring:

"Oh, Allistair loves her, he'd never give her up without a fight."

John feels something hemorrhage and break in two in his chest.

He'd spent 200 hundred years in the Pit, 100 on the rack, unbroken, because he had people to live for upstairs, something to clutch at.

But John had also spent 100 years at Allistair's side, stringing people up when he'd just gotten tired of fighting, when he'd climbed off the rack and picked up the knife, and the honey sweetness of it, the dizzying pleasure of it, the memory of Allistair as he'd picked up a blade is bright and visceral and inescapable in his mind.

"You're Castiel, right?" the thing hisses, turning back to the angel, tongue curling out of its withered mouth, and John watches Castiel tense up, his arm stretch outward and fingers freeze, just long enough for the demon to add, "She dreamt about you."

And then Castiel closes the heel of his palm over the thing's forehead and turns it to dust in a blaze of light.

***

After that, there's nothing.

There's nothing long into that night, after Sam's exhausted himself trying to discern answers in the ashes. Nothing after they all go through all the lore again. Nothing after Sam goes hoarse and terrifies the neighbors standing in the backyard, yelling at the sky for Castiel, who doesn't darken their doorstep for days that stretch into weeks.

There're no signs, there's nothing. Everything's quiet, so quiet it doesn't make sense, and there're no answers, still, nothing to cling to and no one to ask and John's collection of newspaper clippings turns psychotic while Sam's stack of spellbooks gets darker and blacker at the edges.

After a month, Bobby goes back to South Dakota, hushing something into Sam's ear when he hugs the boy goodbye, as Sam clutches at him too closely, hollow eyed. Two days later, Jo and Ellen roll into town, and John could kill Singer, for being a crazy old fucker, yes, but for dispatching the Harvelles, too. Ellen's hated John ever since he got her husband killed, and he understands that, but maybe she doesn't hate him that much after all, because she picks her way up the stairs and sits next to him on his bed late the first night they're at the house.

"Ellen," John says to her.

She plucks the SoCo out of his hands and looks at it, assessing. "This doesn't work."

He laughs. "No. Sure doesn't."

Ellen puts it down, far away from their feet, closes one of John's hands into her own — and his fingers feel stiff, numb, the skin wrapped around them papery and strange against his own touch — and she puts the other on John's neck. She says, "John — I'm so sorry." He tries to shove her away, but he's too God damn drunk; he hasn't slept in weeks; he's half dead, all sick, completely spent, he's got nothing left, flat out and run down, and he can't even move fucking Ellen Harvelle when she drags him into a hug.

"We'll get her back," he tries to tell her, but he's not sure all the words come out right, because Ellen just ignores him, cards her fingers in his hair, and chokes out:

"John, I'm so sorry."

He tries to blubber something at her, about how Deanna's strong, how she'll make it, how she'll be okay until they figure out how to break her out. But he doesn't mean any of it. He doesn't even really believe any of it, and at its heart none of it matters, because his baby girl is six feet under and a million miles away; her Dad and her brother can't save her; hell, an angel can't save her, and she's strapped down on a rack under Allistair's knife, and it doesn't matter if John gets her out, it doesn't matter if they do it tomorrow, in the next minute, five hours ago — it will never be okay. She will never be fine. John will never be able to save her when she's already lost, and he's not sure how it happens, but he's thinking this and thinking this and ends up on his knees in front of the upstairs toilet, sobbing and throwing up and letting it all hit him, Ellen rubbing his back.

The next morning John packs up his truck.

"Where the hell are you going?" Sam asks. "We haven't — "

John closes his eyes. "I can't just sit here," he says, and it feels funny to be talking again after so long being silent. "I've gotta do something — maybe I'll pick something up along the way."

Sam stares at him, and John knows that look on his face. That's his, Don't You Dare Make Us Move Again face. That's his, I'm Gonna Be A Lawyer face. That's his, I Hate You Because Deanna Listens To You face.

"So you're just leaving," Sam says, dully.

"I'll have my phone," John tells him. "I'll check in — "

"Fuck you," Sam interrupts, and John can tell he's been dismissed. "Just — go. Leave."

He clutches at the truck, tries to dredge up any patience, or hell, any of the anger Sam used to light in him, how the way his son tilted his head and rolled his eyes could make him furious, incandescent. He can't find any of it. John just says, "Sam, I'll call."

"Forget it, Dad," Sam tells him, flat and already disengaged. "You never did anything to deserve her before, I don't know why I thought you'd shape the fuck up now."

That doesn't stop hurting until John's already back in Kansas, parking the car in front of Missouri's house. He calls Bobby to let him know he's back on the grid, dials the first digits of Sam's number a half-dozen times before he throws the phone into the backseat.

"He doesn't mean it," John mumbles, when Missouri makes him a coffee and sits him down at the kitchen table, frowning at him.

"Oh sweetheart, you know he did," she confides, and gives him a cookie. "That's okay, we both know it's not true."

Since John doesn't know it's not true, he'll let Missouri know it for both of them, and he eats the cookie and sleeps for 12 hours before he gets back on the road.

The hunting community at large responds to John's miraculous resurfacing on the circuit with disdain and suspicion; he hadn't expected anything less, but it does make him wonder about the number of times someone sneers at him and says, "I fucking knew it," like he'd called in stuck in hell to get out of God damn work or something.

He stays in Kansas for two weeks, hoovering up three small-fry ghosts and offing one poltergeist, rapidly becoming a hazard at the local bar, before he goes west, into California, where he loiters around Napa exorcising minor demons out of winery basements and drives in the cool early mornings. When he calls Bobby, all he gets is that they haven't found anything; when he calls Sam, Sam doesn't pick up the phone. So basically, everything is pretty much the same as always, with Sam righteously furious and Bobby barely tolerant and Deanna dead and John good for fuck-all.

John's never been good at taking care of Deanna, not the way he should have been. He taught her to shoot a gun and throw a punch, how to salt and burn a ghost and take out a witch, but none of it ever helped. All the people who've really hurt her are immune to rock salt and prayer.

Sam hates the fact that John thinks they're doing the right thing, that he won't bend enough to consider there's another way; John's never fucking thought he was doing the right thing — he's always just been doing whatever he can to try and keep his family safe, to protect Deanna, to teach Sam how to protect himself, to look after his sister the way she always looked after him: unwavering.

He's in some nowhere town in Washington state when fate comes for him again.

John's packed it in at a run-down Motel 6 with a faulty air conditioning unit, sleeping hot and having nightmares about Deanna, four years-old, tears streaking her smokey face and their house in Kansas ever-burning. He's driven across so many states and for so many days; no matter where he goes there he is, waking up with a silent scream filling the space behind his gritted, grinding teeth.

It's through a hot sting of tears, gathering in his eyes, that he sees Castiel in the corner of the motel room, pacing the space in supernatural silence — barely disturbing the air.

“They are making plans,” Castiel says, his voice raked gravel.

John just blinks at him, tries to get his bearings. He feels the fibers of the shitty motel coverlet under his bruised knuckles, can taste sour mash in his mouth. “Jesus — what? Who?” he asks once he can.

Castiel stares the way John thinks cemetery statues would, if they had real eyes: accusing, unblinking, fucking terrifying.

“The host,” he says, and without waiting for another dumb question, he adds, “I sought and was denied revelation for a second time, after I left you. I…resorted to alternative channels for information.”

John scrubs at his face. “The hell does that mean?”

“It means I believe that the host are making plans,” comes the retort. “And from the signs and wonders I believe they are trying to trigger the last battle.”

John hears himself repeat, “Last battle.”

“The apocalypse,” Castiel goes on, freezing now at the laminate table in the room, where John had thrown his keys and his EMF meter, dumped his wallet late last night, when the liquor had started dragging him into sleep and his hands were shaking.

“What does that have to do with Deanna?” John asks. He remembers justifying to himself that this ghost, or this striga, or this poltergeist was more important than his daughter long ago. Now Castiel says “apocalypse” and all he can think of his little girl.

Castiel doesn’t look up at John, he keeps staring at the table — and it takes a beat before John realizes Castiel is staring at the photo in John's wallet, spilled open: yellowed plastic over an image of Deanna at 4 years old, in jean shorts and a green t-shirt the color of her eyes. Her hair's nearly white blonde from the sun, her eyes squeezed shut from her laughter, barefoot in the grass, happy and safe and new. It's the last photo Mary had taken, a lazy afternoon picnic in the impatient days before she went into labor with Sam. In the hazy light of the room, John can see Castiel skim his fingers over the wallet, over the little plastic photo sleeve, as if he can absorb the moment by touch.

“Over the years, our Father has anointed prophets among humankind,” Castiel tells him, never looking away from John's history, from all that they've both lost. “And a portion of their words have been collected into your holy texts — the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gathas, among many others. But they are not comprehensive of the full prophecy of the end of the days.”

John rolls himself off the couch, more or less onto his feet. He swears some, and once his back and all his joints stop cracking, he asks, “And, what? She’s tied to this prophecy?”

Castiel looks away from the photograph now. He looks back up at John, and whatever tenderness had been on his face is gone.

“You know the story of the four horsemen and the tribulation days, and your human storytellers elaborated on it with visions of resurrection and peace at the other end,” Castiel says. “The version I hear whispered among the host goes differently — it ends with the peace of all humanity wiped off of the face of Earth, and it begins when the righteous man, sent unjustly to hell, gets off the rack and picks up the knife.”

John’s stomach roils, his blood rushes, and he remembers Alistair and his hounds, the endlessness of hell, the way it breathed and throbbed like an exposed organ, gore seeping into every chamber — dripping off the ceilings and into John’s flayed-open guts.

“If it was you, the apocalypse would have started already. There are 666 seals, each monitored by one of my brethren, and we would have seen them begin to break,” Cas says, impatient, interrupting. “But there's been nothing, no movement, no change — and I believe now that’s why Deanna was taken.”

“To — lure the righteous man?” John asks.

Since his resurrection, John's guardian angel has spent shockingly little time perched on his shoulder. Castiel lacks the forgiveness, the soft edges of what John's been taught about mercy, been told about faith. He's terrifying, infinite in a way that's as alien as hell had been; John's literal demons had feared Castiel — John can do no better.

So it's no shock that he finds himself shaking, finds himself cold through, when Castiel turns to pin him with his borrowed eyes, stars burning from behind the thin bone mask.

The size and shape of Castiel's anger fills the room like it had filled that barn so many weeks ago: cosmic and limitless — the ceaseless consuming at the heart of a black hole.

“She is the righteous man,” Castiel replies, disgusted.

He comes away from the dresser, he comes toward John, and it's with two fingers outstretched and a gutted, gutting voice, that Castiel says, "It's only her — her goodness, that once broken is a deep enough sin to trigger the end — "

The bare touch of the angel's fingers land with the weight of an asteroid between John's eyes as Castiel tells him, voice bending the way time is bending, the way light is bending, the way fate is shattering around them:

" — it was folly for anyone to ever believe your soul could serve as substitute."

***

John screams and he's in hell. He breathes and he's in Chapel Hill. He blinks, and he's in Bobby's basement, his molecules still out of alignment, none of his synapses fully reconnected. It smells like sweetgrass; it's smokey like a prairie fire, and gaunt, hunched over a silver bowl filled with the deep red of old blood, Sam sits on the floor at the edge of a summoning, eyes wide as silver dollars as he stares up at John.

"I — was not trying to call you," Sam tells him, slow.

From over his shoulder, Castiel says, "Your Enochian pronunciation called for no one," and appears from nowhere with a gleaming blade in his hand, luminous and otherworldly, and says, "Move — I'll do it."

#meme #spn

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