semirahrose:

Aftermath (13.23 Coda)

Sam’s breath goes ragged and he crumples to his knees in the too-perfect silence.

“He’s gone,” is all he can say, and Jack kneels beside him, fluttering hands tracing the shape of Sam in the air but not touching. 

His mouth opens twice before words come out. “We’ll find him, Sam. We’ll get Dean back.” (But Sam knows what it sounds like when you’re making promises to keep yourself alive.)

And God, Sam remembers. The relentless, overwhelming fire of possession, the flaying agony of fighting against it, the hold on himself so tenuous that it was everything he could do to just fall. 

Dean standing with that inhuman stillness that not even breath intruded upon. Dean gone. He’s shaking, bad enough that his knees can’t hold him and he falls back onto his ass, but it doesn’t matter. His supporting hand smears at the rough, ashy warmth of an archangel’s death shadow seared into the floor. His body doesn’t know what to do with itself. A deep, deep part of him (centuries deep, and old) breathes for the first time since he fell, and it breathes free. The only thing in the world he truly learned to fear, other than his brother’s death, is gone. The rest of him is torn in every direction. Dean is gone. He’s possessed, and Michael is free, and—

Shit. “Oh, shit. Jack. You’re hurt.” Sam reaches out a shaking hand to press to Jack’s belly where his shirt has grown sticky with blood. He focuses past the hollow ringing in his ears, blinks in the semi-darkness of the church. “We’ve gotta—”

Jack puts a hand over his, and Sam feels the fine tremors of Jack’s fear, too. For some reason, it makes him want to cry. They’re afraid, but they’re together. There’s something in that, something powerful. “I’m fine. It’s shallow, Sam. It’ll heal. I’m…” His eyes flash a sick, dull yellow with whatever drops of his power remain inside him. “I’ll get better.”

The hollowness is in his skull, in his bones. Shock. Sam knows it too well. Jack does, too, he imagines. He forces his slowing mind to focus. “We need to treat it. In—infection. Can’t let it get infected.”

Lucifer is gone. It hits him with a force that steals the breath from his lungs, forces it out in a sob. He crumples forward onto his elbows, letting his hair hide his face. Never again will Lucifer’s hands be on him or the people he loves. Perhaps he can put ancient nightmares to rest.

Sam curls into himself, fighting for breath.

Fuck, he should be happy. He should be dancing. He has no excuse for how hard this is hitting him. He can’t be weak like this. They need to treat Jack, find Dean, figure out a way to get Bobby and his people back home—

But he has to know.

He sits upright, finally registering the weight of Jack’s hand on his shoulder and a litany of Sam, Sam, Sam.

“I’m okay,” he whispers, and for the first time there’s a part of it that rings true.

He follows the scorches from Lucifer’s wings with his fingers, relishing the places where sharp edges cut him and and dying embers singe his skin, because this is real, and the pain makes it so. He follows the scorch marks to the still-warm body the Archangel no longer lives in. He touches Lucifer’s cheek, watches his head tip to the side, lifeless and not yet gripped by rigor.

“He’s gone,” he says. “He… you can’t imagine.” For the longest time, Sam has run on fear. It ran through his dreams and woke him gasping. It kept him alive and moving. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when it goes away. If it does. (Part of it, he imagines, will linger like a phantom limb, glimpsed shadows.) His bones remember the sharp edges of a knife and clawed fingers scooping out marrow, his body opened like a raw, red feast—

Jack’s hand falls on his shoulders and he flinches away just as quickly, apologizing and backing up across the floor on his knees, hands outstretched in surrender or supplication. “I didn’t mean to…. I’m sorry, Sam. He said…”

When Sam turns, he sees that dull glow fading from Jack’s wide eyes, and he realizes what must have happened. “Oh God, Jack.”

Jack shakes his head, looking pale and sick. “No. I—” He takes a deep breath. “He can’t hurt you anymore. Can’t hurt any of us.” He crawls back over the ashy evidence of his birth father’s death until he gets to Sam’s side. He puts both hands on Sam’s shoulder and turns him away from the corpse in front of him, and he nestles in against Sam’s side. The warm weight of him calms the trembling in Sam’s body, and he feels Jack calming, too. They breathe.

Sam inhabits his body again, slowly. The ringing fades.

“We’ll get him back, Jack.” A promise given and returned. Mutual. He wraps both arms around the boy beside him. Jack is far too young to know this sort of pain. He holds on tight, like he can make any of it better. “We’ll get Dean back.”

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