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“Papa?” Jack gently shook Sam as he lay on the floor. “Papa, are you all right? What’s wrong?”
Sam sat up slowly, one hand to his head as he focused on holding down the bile threatening to come out. “I’m fine, Jack. Or I will be. Where’s your father?”
“He’s not here, Papa, remember?” Jack looked into Sam’s eyes, worry practically glowing. “It’s his month to look after Uncle Gabriel, so he had to go to Massachusetts. I wanted to go but you said it wouldn’t be any fun and I’d miss school.”
Sam squeezed his eyes shut. Maybe he should have let Jack go. Then again, Jack was old enough to understand now – and before long, based on Sam’s experience and the little he’d heard from his grandfather about family experience, Jack might have to know anyway. “Jack, there’s something you need to know. Help me to the couch, then sit with me for a bit while I explain?”
“Of course.” Sam did as much of the work getting himself up as he could, but he was still leaning on Jack more than he wanted to admit as they made their way to the couch. Jack ran off, coming back with a cup of tea. “I wanted to bring you a beer, like Uncle Dean always wants when he’s not feeling well, but Uncle Bobby said no.”
“That’s okay, Jack, the tea’s exactly what I need anyway. Uncle Bobby’s known that long enough to know how to take care of me after one of these spells.” Sam took a sip – soothing, perfect temperature, and not a drop spilled as Jack carried it. “Okay. You know how sometimes I get dizzy spells, and then some of us have to go away for a while and won’t take you along?” Jack nodded. “Those dizzy spells are visions. I see something, usually someone dying, and then we go investigate to see if we can stop that person from dying or find a way to protect others who might be in danger from the same thing that caused that death. You know that a lot of the things your teachers tell you are just stories are actually real, like ghosts and werewolves and vampires, right?”
“Of course. And everyone here, and me too when I’m old enough, protect innocent people from them. Uncle Dean wants me to start full training when I turn thirteen next May, but you and Father aren’t so sure about it.” Jack smiled, and Sam tried to hide the flinch. The idea of his only child going into battle bothered him. He couldn’t protect Jack forever, but at twelve, he was still a child. It was bad enough that he was learning the lore and behind-the-scenes work that went into being a Man of Letters; Sam wanted Jack to be able to hold on to normal as much as he could.
“Sometime in the next few years, you might start getting the visions like I do, like my grandfather did. It skipped Mom, and we don’t know why. It’s not related to gender – our cousin Gwen has visions sometimes. It might skip you, too, or it might not.” Sam put an arm around Jack. “As useful as the visions can be, I hope it does skip you, so you never have to deal with the pain and disorientation. That’s what happened just now – I had a vision, and you caught me at the very end of it.”
Jack leaned into him. “But Father’s in Massachusetts, and Uncle Dean and Aunt Cassie and Aunt Anna and Aunt Ruby are away on missions already, and Uncle Bobby can’t do field missions anymore because of his legs. Are you going to go deal with it alone?”
“No. For one thing, I’m taking you with me…” Jack gasped, lighting up, and Sam regretted saying that already. He needed Jack for this one, but that didn’t mean he had to like it, and he hated the excitement. At least this one wouldn’t be too terrible, although there were drawbacks. “This one’s special, Jack, I need you for it. It has to be you. No one else could do the job. This doesn’t change the general rule that you are too young for this.”
“We’re Men of Letters, not Boys of Letters,” Jack said, quoting Dean, John, Bobby, and others. “I understand, Papa, but I’m still eager to go.”
That was about the best Sam could hope for. “For another thing, we’re going to Massachusetts. My vision showed me how to wake up your Uncle Gabriel.”
Jack had never met his uncle Gabriel. His fathers would never talk about the reason he was in a coma, trapped in an endless sleep needing constant tending by his family. He didn’t expect that to have changed, but as soon as the carriage was underway, Sam started talking. “Your Uncle Gabriel was once part of something like the Men of Letters, the Guardian Angels. Your father was part of the group too, until he met Dean and Dean introduced him to me. The Angels and Men of Letters kept their own territory and council, but occasionally, we would work together if something big enough to threaten both our domains. Fifteen years ago, something like that came up – both the Angels and the Men of Letters started seeing signs that the Devil was about to rise and walk the Earth. We agreed to work together to stop it, or if we couldn’t, to at least send the Devil back before he could destroy everything.”
“The Devil is real?” Jack whispered. Ghouls, shapeshifters, poltergeists… those, he’d known about. He could accept those easily enough. The Devil, though, he’d always assumed was a myth or his family would know something and tell him about it.
Sam’s eyes were haunted as he answered, “Real enough. Bear with me, Jack, this is incredibly difficult to talk about.” Jack nodded while Sam paused. It was the only way to get through a difficult conversation like this. “You see, the Devil isn’t like a corporeal monster, like a werewolf or a trickster, or even like a spectral creature like a ghost or phantasm. In order to work on the Earth, he needed a host, and at any given time there’s only one person in the whole world who can be that host. When his servants here on the Earth managed to break the seals on his Cage… that person was me.”
Now Jack thought he understood why this was the first he was hearing about any of this. It explained a lot, really – why so many of the Men of Letters who came to visit avoided Sam, why Sam kept to himself so much instead of being a respected leader like Dean, why despite all the good Sam did in the world, he had the self-image of himself as cursed, wrong, or unworthy. “So when the Devil was free, he took you as his host?”
“Eventually. He could take others on a temporary basis, and he had to convince me to allow it.” Sam bit his lip and stared at the floor of the carriage. “Which I did, eventually, because we had no other plan to stop him. It wasn’t a great plan, but we had no chance without it so even the small chance it gave us was better than nothing. I let Satan possess me, and then took back control of myself while Dean, Bobby, and the others opened the Cage so that I could walk in.”
“But… you’re here,” Jack said. “You’re not in the Devil’s Cage, so what happened?”
“Gabriel did a ritual. He knew how much it would cost him, but he said it was better than letting me end up trapped with a pissed-off Devil with no one else to take it out on. Ever since, both the Men of Letters and the Angels have been looking for a way to heal him, but until today the only ideas anyone had been able to come up with meant that I would either die or be sent immediately to the Devil’s Cage. I would be willing, but two things have stopped me – Gabriel knew the price of the ritual and chose to pay it, and I refuse to let his choice be for naught, and then there’s you. Gabriel has no children. I have you.”
Jack tilted his head, staring up at Sam. He didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to know. Something inside him, though, needed to know. He’d always shared in Sam’s sense of wrongness and uncleanness. This might explain it. “Papa, you said this started fifteen years ago. Who were you when I was conceived?”
“Of course you’re that smart,” Sam whispered, and Jack wasn’t sure if he was meant to hear. Louder, Sam continued, “I was possessed by the Devil at the time. The Angels, and some of the Men of Letters, wanted you killed as soon as we learned of your mother’s pregnancy. I refused, and that’s when your father officially left the Angels. He took your mother and ran to Kentucky, where Dean and I took them in. You’re my son in every way that matters to anyone, but if I didn’t need you for this ritual, I would never take you anywhere near the Angels. You are not likely to be accepted there. Your father and I will protect you, but you’ll need all your strength while we’re there.”
Jack shivered – this was not how he’d expected finally getting to meet Father’s family going. Old family secrets, including one about him – how he was never supposed to have been born, his papa didn’t mean to have him, and in some ways his real father was the actual Devil? How was a boy supposed to cope with that? At least he had Papa, and Father must have known all of this and still loved him, and aside from him knowing now it didn’t really change anything… but he could easily understand why his papa had never told him any of this before.
This was the life. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Gabriel was aware that this was all a dream world, that he had a real life out there. Thankfully, he could ignore that. What could be better than being here, his family around him and all getting along, all kinds of things that didn’t exist out there… yet, anyway. Someday, humans would figure out a way to make artificial hot springs with bubble jets, and get over themselves and let the people wear just enough to add allure to the nudity, and don’t even get him started on the abundance of the candy. Life here was perfect.
Every now and then, he could feel a tug on his mind, a call back to the real world. Probably one of the Angels trying some ritual or other to get him to wake up. Thankfully, he was an Angel himself, and one of the strongest. No one else could have saved Sam. That meant he knew the tricks to resist the rituals they were using on him, and used them because he was not letting Sam suffer for his brothers’ selfishness.
This one was different. Instead of feeling a call out, this time, someone had come in. He stared at the boy, trying to understand. There hadn’t ever been a kid in his dreams before, which meant this kid had to be a real person somehow. “My idiot brothers getting desperate enough to recruit a baby Angel to come drag me out…?” It was all he could think of.
“No. My name is Jack Kline Winchester. You didn’t know my mother, but you know my father and my papa. My father is your baby brother, Castiel.”
Gabriel’s mouth hung open, and the candy he was about to pop into it hovered a few inches away. If little Cassie was this boy’s father, his papa must be Sam Winchester. How had that happened? At least it explained why the kid was here. “How’s ol’ Sammy doing? Recovering well from his ordeal?” Not knowing how much the kid knew, he didn’t want to be specific.
“It’s hard for me to say. I didn’t know him before everything happened, so I don’t know how much of him is different now than it was before. I asked Father, before I came in, but all Father would say is that time changes everyone and Papa doesn’t seem to be different in a way that can’t be attributed to getting older and becoming a papa.” Jack tilted his head, staring at Gabriel in a way that reminded him so much of Castiel. “Papa wants you to come home.”
Well, this one was different, anyway. If it was Sam asking, and what’s more sending his kid to do the actual asking, chances were good that him waking up wouldn’t zap Sam off to a fate worse than Hell. Otherwise, Castiel would never have agreed to this, and Sam wasn’t his brother Dean. He wouldn’t go behind Castiel’s back on something like that. “Why?”
He was prepared to argue against Sam feeling bad that Gabriel wasn’t able to live his life. He was not prepared for what Jack actually said. “Because he hates that his husband and siblings-in-law each have to give up over a month of their lives every year that they could be with their families to look after you, because of him. He knows it’s selfish, but he doesn’t want Father to be gone for so long because it’s his turn to tend to you.”
“Wow.” What else was there for him to say?
Jack bit his lip, kicking at a stone on the ground. “I know it sounds selfish, him asking so much more of you after you gave up everything for him – no matter how good you have it in here, you had no way to know that before you did it – but he’s not the only one. I want my Father home. Aunt Ruby wants Aunt Anna to stick around.”
“Wait, Aunt Ruby? The De… Anna married Ruby? After everything?” Gabriel burst into shocked laughter, bending over double. Ruby had been part of the cult that freed the Devil from his Cage. She’d expected to die, and when she didn’t die and saw the truth of what she’d helped unleash, she came to the Men of Letters to try to help. Anna was the only one who accepted her. Gabriel hadn’t heard the story of how Ruby had manipulated Sam, but there was bad blood with the Men of Letters. And now she was one of them, apparently? “I’m impressed, kid. Your papa knew just what to have you say.”
“There’s one more thing.” Jack met Gabriel’s curious gaze. “He knew what to say because he had a vision.”
Well, shit. Gabriel had planned on saying no – he could be selfish if he wanted – but if Sam was having visions of how to get him out, he wasn’t just wanted out there. He was needed. He took one more look around at the dream. He was really going to miss the hot springs. “All right, kid. Let’s wake up.”