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“He’s gonna feel the snap of your bones,” Lucifer taunts. “Every single one. We’re gonna take our time.”
The sun glances across the face of the Devil. Dean braces for the killing blow.
It never comes.
He watches through the one eye that isn’t swollen shut as Lucifer (SAM) unclenches his fist, lowers his (SAM’S) shaking hand. And it is unmistakably Sam’s (SAM’S) words in Sam’s voice: “Enough. Enough.” He meets Dean’s eyes. “It’s okay, Dean. It’s gonna be okay.” And he takes the rings out of his pocket.
Wind rushes from the gaping maw of the Cage. Michael picks the worst moment to return, angry and desperate. “It’s not gonna end like this, Sam!” he shouts, because he came here to kill his brother and he hasn’t given up.
But Sam just smiles (SAM) and puts his hands on Michael’s back (SAM?) and shoves him into the chasm below.
Dean watches and waits for Sam (SAM?) to follow him down.
He never does.
Sam’s (NOT SAM’S) back is to Dean, but he can tell from the set of his shoulders that the thing standing in front of him is no longer his brother. And he’s not going anywhere.
A few recited words, and the Cage seals shut with Michael inside.
Lucifer turns around to look at him with a serene smile on his stolen face, and Dean wants to be dead. The Devil approaches and extends his (Sam’s) hand toward Dean’s face. “No,” Dean pleads, flinching away, “no, don’t—” Lucifer’s touch heals him, mends his fractured collarbone and broken nose. He can see through both eyes again, and the taste of his own blood no longer tinges his teeth.
“It’s okay, Dean,” the Devil promises. “It’s going to be okay.” Michael is caged. The fight is over, and Lucifer won. He won. He won. “It’s going to be perfect .”
With a snap of Lucifer’s fingers, Dean feels himself whooshed away, away from Stull Cemetery and the Impala, away from Bobby’s body and whatever bloody bits of Castiel litter the ground. For a moment, he isn’t sure where Lucifer has taken him. It’s another cemetery, nicer and newer than Stull.
And then Dean recognizes where they are. Illinois.
Mom’s grave.
No. “Sammy,” Dean tries, pleads, but Lucifer makes a choking motion with his (SAM’S) hand. Dean can still breathe, but he can’t talk.
“Your brother gave me a great privilege in saying Yes,” Lucifer says, kneeling to place a hand on Mary Winchester’s headstone. It feels possessive, corrupted— Dean thinks about the way Zachariah had pawed at the Fake Mary in Fake Heaven. “I want to give him a gift in return. I want to give you both a gift.”
He places a hand on the ground, a look of peace coming over his (SAM’S) face. Dean thinks about every time he’s looked past Jimmy Novak to see Cas, thinks about Adam standing in Stull Cemetery, thinks about whatever poor son of a bitch Zachariah was possessing. Seeing Sam like this is like having a fist clutched around his heart, squeezing. A tear streaks down his face, then more. Without his voice, he can’t even sob.
Light emanates from Lucifer’s hand, seeps into the dirt and the grass. When Lucifer stands back up, there is a woman standing beside him. She’s wearing a white nightgown and she looks afraid. “Wha— who are you?”
Dean wants to scream, but no sound comes out.
“Oh, that’s right,” Lucifer muses, “Michael must’ve Magic Erasered your brain. Here,” he says, and touches her forehead. Her expression shifts, and Dean realizes that Lucifer is returning her memories of that night in 1978. Anna. Michael. Sam and Dean.
Mary squints up at the archangel standing in front of her grave. “Sammy?”
“Yeah, Mom, it’s me,” Lucifer says brightly. Mary looks from him to Dean, weeping silently a few feet away. She refocuses on the Devil with a cold stare.
“You aren’t my son.”
“Yeah, fine,” Lucifer says. He grabs her arm and shoves her toward Dean, who scrambles to catch her, hold her. “But he is. Go ahead and get reacquainted.”
Lucifer returns his attention to the ground. He plunges his hand beneath the earth and pulls out the dogtags Sam buried there over three years ago. Dean grips Mary’s hand.
“Those are John’s,” she mumbles. “What’s happening?”
Dean’s trying to tell her what’s wrong, trying to explain it. He mouths the words, strains, but still no sound comes. He tries tracing something into her palm, but he’s too scattered and scared for it to make much sense. Mary whispers, “Sam’s possessed. Is it a demon?” and Dean shakes his head. He mouths, Worse . “What?”
Lucifer speaks up. “I believe what Dean is trying to say is that darling Sammy is possessed by Satan.” He turns around to wink before going back to his resurrection.
Dean has imagined seeing his father again— had it happen for real back when he killed Azazel. But to see him human again, alive and solid, is something else. John Winchester stands tall beside his wife’s empty grave. When his eyes land on Sam’s body, there is no confusion like with Mary.
Only fear.
He says, “Sammy.”
Dean can practically see the man’s hand itching for the Colt. All at once, his voice returns to him. “Dad, that’s not Sam.”
“What?”
“It’s not Sam,” Dean repeats, desperate for his father to understand. Sam was— is — good. He wanted to do the right thing. He was trying to save the world.
They came so damn close.
“Might as well restore your memories, too,” Lucifer says, raising his fingers to John’s forehead. He stumbles back, braces himself with a hand against Mary’s gravestone. Blinks. Dean watches as he relives it all in an instant— his sons traveling back in time, Anna’s attack, saying Yes to Michael.
“Mary,” John says, reaching for her. Lucifer puts a hand on his shoulder and another on Mary’s, looking between them with a terrible smile.
“Good to have the family together again,” the Devil says, grinning with Sam’s teeth. “This is good. This is right. How it should be.” Dean’s jaw keeps tensing. He thinks he can see his father doing the same thing.
This is everything’s Dean wanted since he was five years old, twisted and repackaged as a waking nightmare. Dean turns to Mary, seems to realize she’s shivering in just her nightgown, and then he shrugs off his jacket and wraps it around her shoulders. Mary wears the jacket, but she doesn’t stop shivering.
“Sam was right,” Mary says, breathes. “When he came to the past, when you both came back. He said it was all going to go rotten, and… and it did. It has. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Sammy, Dean, I’m so—”
“Sammy’s going to be fine,” Lucifer promises, voice unsettlingly gentle. “He’s got his parents back.”
After their unsettling reunion in the cemetery, Lucifer decides to split the party. He vanishes John and Dean with a snap of his fingers. When Mary calls out for them, he shushes her and assures them that they’re perfectly fine. “They’re my family now,” he tells her, placing a hand possessively on the crook of her arm. “Wouldn’t harm a hair on their heads.”
And then he whisks her away, away from her gravestone, away from Dean’s boot treads in the dirt. When the vertigo fades, Mary realizes they’re somewhere in the woods, sun lancing through the tall trees.
“When’s the last time you went on a hunt?” Lucifer says, beginning to walk.
Mary realizes fast that if she doesn’t keep up, he’s just going to yank her along. “’83.”
Lucifer looks at her in surprise. “’83,” he repeats, and whistles. “Career girl and a mother. Who says women can’t have it all?” He tosses her a silver blade, seemingly conjured from thin air. “Why don’t you take care of this one then?” He points to the cottage up ahead. “There’s a Grigori in there. Very grumpy old angel. I need him dead.”
Mary thrusts the blade back at him. “I’m not doing your dirty work.”
“Azazel was right about you,” he says appreciatively, “you are feisty.”
“Azazel?”
“You called him the Yellow Eyed Demon.”
Mary stares. “That’s the demon bastard that put me six feet under.”
“More like 20,000 leagues up,” Lucifer says. “You were in Heaven, Blondie. You really don’t remember?”
“... No.”
“Probably for the best.” Lucifer rolls his stolen shoulders. “Anyway, you’re probably going to want to do what I ask.” He snaps his fingers, and immediately she feels the vicelike grip on her lungs, crushing her ribs, her throat. She sputters and then coughs, seeing droplets of blood land on the packed dirt beneath her feet. Lucifer eases up. “Don’t forget,” he says in a low voice, “I pulled you out of the ground. I can put you back in.”
Mary lifts the blade and goes inside.
The place Lucifer sends them is beautiful and impenetrable. Dean recognizes it immediately— the gilded furnishings, the gleaming statuettes. Even the trim and crown molding looks the same as the last time he was trapped here.
Behind him, John’s disoriented. “You wanna tell me what the hell is going on here, son?”
“The end of the world,” Dean says. He brings his fist down on the barren table. “There’s usually fucking beer in here.” He’s spiraling, terrified of what Lucifer can do with Mom in his clutches. With Sammy . “I… Dad, I’m sorry.”
John comes to stand beside him, looking down the long table before looking back at Dean. “I told you,” he says after a long silence. “I told you if you couldn’t save him, you’d have to kill him. I told you, Dean, and now he’s gone and let the goddamn Devil in.”
“He was trying to save the world,” Dean says bleakly, unable to meet his father’s gaze. As much shit as he’d given Sam about his master plan… he’d really believed there for a moment. Really thought Sam was going to shut Lucifer back in the Cage. Really thought his little brother was going to beat the Devil.
“You believe that?”
“He was ,” Dean says, looking at John now. Defiant. He’s four years out now from being daddy’s blunt little instrument, and he doesn’t need to be sliding back into old habits. Not now. Not now after everything, not now when Lucifer is parading around wearing Sam like a suit. “He was close, Dad, he was so …” He thinks about Michael, about Adam, now locked in the Cage. Wants to ask about Adam but isn’t sure he can deal with all that right now.
Maybe they’ll have time. Maybe he and his father will be stuck here for years.
“I didn’t want this,” John says finally, pressing his fingers against the wood of the table like he might be able to scratch his way out. “I didn’t want to live to see this.”
“I know,” Dean says. Thinks, Me neither .
Mary dispatches the man inside— a Grigori, Lucifer had called it. She’s trying to ignore the familiar rush of adrenaline, the way it feels right to be hunting, fighting. She watches as Lucifer begins to ransack the cottage.
He pulls out some kind of intricate box that had been stowed away in a wooden chest. Mary watches him fiddling with the mechanism that keeps the box latched. His movements are so foreign and yet so familiar. She thinks about the man who came to her from the future, the visitor who landed on her doorstep in 1978. She thinks about the baby she cradled in her arms her last night on Earth.
“I want to talk to my son.”
“Dean’s all the way in California—”
“I want,” she says, “to talk to my son .”
Lucifer puts his (Sam’s) hands up in placation. “Alright, alright,” he says. “One second.” He reaches into his (Sam’s) jacket and draws out some kind of configuration of rings, four of them stuck together in a Y-shape as if welded. Lucifer goes back over to the mysterious box, apparently the whole reason for their mission here.
He leans close and speaks a few words in a language she can’t understand, and then Mary watches as all the locks on the box slide open. Lucifer puts the rings in the box and closes it once again, using that same strange language.
Then he turns back around. “You want to talk to him? Here.” And Sam’s body sags forward like a broken marionette.
Mary lurches, acting fast to catch Sam before he hits the floor. He’s so much taller than her, and heavy, and it takes her a moment to realize that he’s not actually dead weight in her arms.
Sam is trembling.
“I’m sor-sorry,” he coughs out, voice shaking with the rest of him. His hands move upward to clutch at her (Dean’s) jacket. “I’m sorry, Momma, please, I’m… I’m s-so s-s-sorry—”
“It’s okay, Sammy,” she whispers as this stranger who is her son clings to her. It occurs to her in some distant, compartmentalized sector of her mind that this should feel weirder than it does. She met this man only once, one chaotic night in 1978.
But he is her baby, still. And it’s so obvious to her, even with the Devil rotting him from the inside out. It’s like she can see the straight line between the child whose nursery she sprinted into and the man currently pleadingsobbingshaking in her arms.
“S-sword,” Sam says suddenly, letting go of her like he’s been electrified. “Sword. H-he said Grigori, so… and they, they carry these… I mean, according to the lore—” His eyes dart feverishly around the room, looking for some sign of it, some hiding place or carrying case.
“Sam,” Mary says, unsure how much time she has, “Dean said that you were able to get control. Before, at Stull Cemetery. Do you think—”
“It’s here,” Sam says, falling to his knees to pull a long leather case out from under the table in the corner. Mary watches as he clicks open the latches, revealing a brutal-looking piece of weaponry. “It’s, it can,” Sam mumbles. He jumps back to his feet, holding the sword point-down with one unsteady hand. And then he thrusts the hilt toward her. “Momma,” he says weakly, “Mom, if you… you can…”
Mary reaches for the sword, carefully takes it from him.
He smiles in a way that makes her feel dead all over again.
“Yeah,” Sam says, seeing the sword in her hands. “I think maybe it can— you can do it. Yeah. Kill me.”
She almost drops the sword. “ What ?”
“Just do it, it’s okay,” he reassures her, hands on her shoulders, then her elbows. “You can stop him, Mom. It’s okay. It’s okay.” He kneels down at her feet, looking up at her with eyes full of tears. “Momma, it’s okay. You can do it. It’s okay, please. Kill me. Please. It’s okay.”
“Sam, I… I can’t —”
“No, you have to, it’s okay,” he says, nodding. “And then he’ll be gone. And I’ll— please. Please, Momma.”
This time she does drop the sword. “I can’t.”
“ Please ,” he says, and it comes out a desperate wail, and then all at once Sammy stops crying. The expression wiped clean from his face. He looks up serenely and says in someone else’s voice, “Such a drama queen, isn’t he?”
John spins on his heel, eyes sweeping over the expanse of the Beautiful Room. Dean’s watching him, on edge, still not able to relax into the inevitability and helplessness of their situation.
For all Lucifer was going on about family, Dean’s pretty sure he might just leave them here to rot. Entombed forever with his father. He thinks, suddenly, Who’s going to burn Bobby’s body if I’m stuck in here?
“Lucifer needs his true vessel to carry out all his big plans, right?” John says abruptly, as though this is what he’s been puzzling over for the past half hour. “Then Sam should’ve killed himself instead of saying Yes.”
Dean gapes, doesn’t know how to respond to that. Wishes he’d never heard it.
The Devil chooses that moment to reappear. “Oh, he tried,” Lucifer says, smirking with Sam’s mouth. “I just brought him right back. He did it in the bathtub, which, you know, isn’t that funny? He was calling it quits, you wouldn’t think he’d care about getting blood all over the motel bedspread. But maybe, you know, maybe he knew he’d be the one who had to clean it up.”
Dean’s hands are shaking. The image rises in his mind unbidden— Sam alone in a motel room, trying to end his life rather than let the Devil in. Having even the right to die yanked out from under him. Waking up alone, terrified, covered in blood—
“See you later,” Lucifer says, “can’t keep Mom waiting.” And then he’s gone again, leaving Dean alone with his father once again.
John’s eyes are damp. “I didn’t know,” he says lowly. “I didn’t… I wouldn’t have—”
“I know,” Dean says. “I’m. I didn’t know either.” Sam had called him after he found out he was Lucifer’s vessel, had called him and told him. Was that before or after he killed himself?
“So,” John is saying now, “so. He couldn’t do it.”
“No.”
“So what can?” John asks, shifting into hunting mode. Looking for the answers. What is it? How do we kill it ? “What can kill S— Lucifer?”
“I don’t know,” Dean snaps. “You think if I knew I wouldn’t have done it? We tried the Colt already. It didn’t work . And— and— Jesus Christ, Dad, it’s Sam . We’re gonna sit here and brainstorm what we might be able to use to kill Sam ?”
“It’s not Sam anymore,” John asserts. “He’s gone.”
“He’s in there ,” Dean cries. “Goddamn it. Why do we always have to fight you about the other one? When I was dying in the hospital, Sam had to scream at you just to get you to act like you cared.”
“I gave my soul for your life.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Dean says. “Great example you set there. See I did the same a year later, for Sammy. And he hated me for it, and he was right to. You don’t do that to your kid, you don’t… just so they can have that hanging over their head for the rest of their lives. You don’t do that.” And the way his dad looks at him… maybe Dean shouldn’t have said a damn thing.
Maybe he should have said something sooner.
Mary hasn't prayed since she was 13 and her mother was late coming back from clearing out a vamp nest. She prays now, in between crying quietly. Not to God.
She prays, pleads. I'm sorry, Sam. I'm sorry, Sam.
I'm sorry, Sam.
Mary read "Rosemary's Baby" after the movie came out. It was recommended to her by a friend— not something she would have picked to read herself. Based on the synopsis alone, she'd thought it might hit a little too close to home.
The part that stuck with her for years was the very end. Rosemary, confronted with the Devil spawn she had unwittingly incubated, looks at her baby with his monstrous eyes… and she can't help but love him.
When she read this at the age of 15, Mary thought it meant Rosemary had finally cracked. If it were me , she had thought to herself, still thinking over the book while making salt rounds beside her father, I'd have used an iron poker or maybe a dagger, put the thing to death immediately.
She thought about the book again after Dean was born, and wondered whether Rosemary had been right after all. Dean's her baby. He could have horns or hooves or three heads, he'd still be her baby. Same when Sammy comes along.
She gets it now. She's pretty sure she gets it even more than Ira Levin did.
The Devil is vicious and uncaring. His eyes burn red and he tortures for fun. His cruel laughter grates against her ears.
But Mary looks at him and still sees her baby, still sees Sam somewhere in there, trapped beneath Lucifer's ruthlessness. And she can't help but love him.
Lucifer takes her to hell. She thinks it’s hell, anyway, some corner of it, all brimstone and bone. The Devil has a throne ready for him, ivory white, and hordes of obedient demons bustling around as servants. Mary stands at his side, unnoticed and unimportant. She wonders idly if she and her parents ever sent any of these demons back downstairs.
One of them brings Lucifer some sort of garment, and Lucifer puts a hand on his servant’s face, thanks him, and takes the offering. His gentleness with his followers surprises Mary, but she can also tell there’s an edge to it. A breaking point. He would just as easily pat them on the back as snap their necks.
“Put this on,” Lucifer says, thrusting the dress at her. “Can’t have you running around in those old duds.”
Her nightgown. Dean’s jacket. Remnants of home, and of her family. “I’m fine,” Mary says.
His eyes narrow, and his mouth thins into a line before he pastes on a smile. “Change your clothes,” he says slowly, “or I’ll burn them off.”
And, well, she knows what it feels like. Skin bubbling, melting… she doesn’t need to relive it. It’s just clothes. It’s just a dress. If this is what the Devil wants, then… fine. It’s a small thing, and she can bide her time. Until she can find a way out, or cut a deal. Something. Anything.
There is a room divider propped in a corner. She ducks behind it, changing into the dress as fast as possible.
The sleeves are too tight and the fabric scratches at her legs. “Should appreciate it,” Lucifer tells her when she steps out from behind the divider. “That dress once belonged to Mary Magdalene.” Her eyes widen, and he shrugs. “Just kidding. I don’t know whose it was. Some dead whore.”
He terrifies and enrages her. And he is her son, somewhere, buried beneath. “Let him go,” Mary says. She tugs the skirt of the dress up so she can walk forward. “You said I was in Heaven before, and it was nice, right? Just… just, you can keep the body… can keep using his body and let his soul go, can’t you?”
“Wow,” Lucifer says. “I’ve heard of begging for your son’s life, but begging for his death… You never fail to surprise, Mary Winchester.”
“ Please .”
“Enough,“ Lucifer says, clapping his hands together. He settles back against his throne, the picture of ease. “We’re tired. We want a bedtime story, Mom. Why don’t you tell us the one about Albany?”
Mary flinches. “I’m sorry?”
“Your hunt,” Lucifer elaborates, “your last hunt. The one in 1983. Right before you cranked out baby Sammy here.” He motions with his hand, Go on . And she doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t want to put words to the guilty rotten memory of the case she worked in Albany.
But you can’t say no to the Devil. Not in this family.
“It was February,” she says. “’83. I was… was practically in my third trimester, shouldn’t have even been traveling.” It’s not like he’s forcing her to talk. She knows that he can, though, and she’d rather get the words out of her own volition. “But a friend in New York needed help and there was no one else. So I went. Worked the case. We got the thing, but… I got hurt. Bad. Woke up in the hospital, and… and when the doctor came to tell me what happened, I asked him… I asked him if my baby was going to be okay.” She swallows. “And I so badly wanted him to say no. To tell me that I lost the baby.”
“Lost Sammy ,” Lucifer clarifies pointlessly, smiling like a shark. “You wanted Sammy dead before he was even born.” He rolls his shoulders, cracks his knuckles. Adjusting. Luxuriating. “You know, it feels like I’m the only one who even wants Sammy alive! John tries to kill him, you try to kill him, Dean tries to kill him—”
“He wouldn’t,” Mary snaps immediately. “Can’t. It’s not in him.” What little she knows of Dean, she knows this to be true— he’ll do anything to protect Sam. He could never kill his brother.
“Oh really?” Lucifer reaches into the depths of Sam’s pockets and pulls out a cell phone. “He used to be better about switching these out more often,” he comments, flipping through the menu screens. “Guess he got sidetracked, what with the apocalypse and all. Lucky me.” Once he finds what he’s looking for, he hits play and hands the phone to Mary.
She holds it up to her ear and listens in horror as Dean’s voice calls Sam a monster, a vampire, tells Sam he’ll kill him the next time they see each other. She thinks, This is what you did. You made that demon deal and this is where it led: your children want to kill each other .
Dean bangs his fist fruitlessly against one wall of the room, desperate for anything. A way out. Bloody knuckles, even. Just, anything. He glances over to see what his father’s doing.
John is staring at one of the paintings on the wall. In it, the archangel Michael gazes down at a writhing serpent as he drives his angelic lance into the beast. Finally, John walks up to the artwork and presses a finger against the lance, as if he could reach into the painting and grab it. “This is what we need.”
“What?” Dean says.
“I remember. I’m remembering things, now,” John tries to explain. “From ’78. When I was possessed by Michael.” Dean remembers it too, finally coming face to face with the archangel who’d staked a claim on his body. You can’t fight City Hall . “He knew my thoughts, and I knew his. And I remember this— Michael’s lance.”
“What about it?”
“It can kill the Devil,” John says.
Find the monster, kill the monster. The family business. “It’s Sam ,” Dean says desperately. Like it changes anything. “You’re talking about killing Sam.”
“Son,” John says, “do you honestly think he wants to live like this? Satan’s meatsuit?”
“ Don’t .”
Before John can continue, a door appears in the Beautiful Room, only for someone to force it open from the outside.
Dean braces for the worst. He’s expecting either Lucifer or demons under his orders. Not like his gun will do anything against either, but he reaches for it anyway.
And then the door opens all the way.
“Cas?” Dean chokes out. Because there he is, alive and intact, bewildered as he stares into the room. Dean can still see his body bursting into molecules and blood and bones, the afterimage burned into his eyelids. “You were dead.”
Castiel points at John. “So was he.”
“Yeah. Big day,” Dean says, and then he crosses the room to pull Cas into a hug. “Cas, he…” He passes a hand over his face, still reeling from the way things have spun out of control. “He brought Mom and Dad back. Lucifer brought them back.”
“Oh,” Cas says, looking immeasurably sad for Sam. He’s still out there, trapped in a body that no longer belongs to him, forced to be his parents’ salvation and their damnation. “Oh, Dean.”
“I know.”
“Okay, uh,” John says, marching over to stand between the two of them, “who’s this then?”
“Right,” Dean says. “Dad, this is Castiel. Cas. He’s, uh, he’s a friend of ours.”
“How’d he get in here?”
“I’m an angel,” Cas says. “I think… I think God brought me back to life to help you.”
“I gotta sit down,” John says, sinking into a chair at the head of the table. “Angels. Sammy, the Devil, I… I can’t. I can’t.”
“How do you think I’ve been dealing?” Dean snaps, hand closed in a fist as he leans against the wall. Cas watches him, eyebrows drawn up in sorrow. “It’s too much. It’s— Cas, man, I thought once the world ended it just. Ended . I…” He doesn’t say I planned to be dead by now , but he’s thinking it.
Knowing that Sam is awake, alive, watching his own hands do God-knows-what to Mom. Knowing that his father is standing just a few feet away, watching, here to pass judgment on how badly Dean has fucked up the world. It’s too much.
“I’m here,” Cas reminds him, voice firm. “I must be here for a reason.”
“You’re an angel?” John says, confirming.
“I am.”
John pushes himself away from the table and strides back to the painting of Michael. Points to the lance. “Do you know where we can find this?”
Mary Winchester watches the Devil on his throne. His cruel eyes, his sneer, speak of a being unspeakably old and immeasurably cruel. Here is an archangel who plotted to lead humanity to its own demise. Here, also, is the infant son she held in her arms what feels like just yesterday.
She loves him the way you love a stranger in a car wreck dying on the side of the road, someone unfamiliar but precious nonetheless. She will hold his hand and keep talking to him while the lights go out and the sirens get closer.
“It’s difficult for you, isn’t it?” Lucifer muses, looking up at her. “Talking to me in this form.”
“You know that it is.”
He’s almost smiling, almost mirthful. “ Why ?” He plucks at Sam’s clothes with Sam’s fingertips. “What is this body to you? My vessel. One that you so graciously arranged to be primed and oiled with Azazel’s blood. I could never have done all this without you, kid.”
“Screw you.”
Lucifer laughs. She wishes she had a baseline, wishes she knew what Sam’s laughter might really sound like without Lucifer behind the curtain. “Seriously? Why should you care? Sammy spent his whole life wishing he could know you. What do you think, Momma? Think you measure up?”
“Don’t call me that.” He laughs again. “Sam, I’m sorry,” Mary starts, but the Devil’s laughter drowns her out. She waits, hands aching to hold a gun, a hatchet, a silver dagger. Hunting is what comes naturally to her. But right now the only monster is smiling at her from her baby’s face. “Sam,” Mary tries again, “I love you. I’ll love you even if I never get to know you. You don’t deserve this.”
“It’s his destiny,” Lucifer reminds her. “And he does deserve it. He deserves this and more— he deserves the world. And you and I, we’re going to give it to him.”
When Castiel returns from Heaven— because he can do that now, go back and forth, his angel mojo fully restored by whatever force or being brought him back— the lance of Michael is gleaming in his hands. “We should move fast,” Cas says. “Any minute now, Virgil will realize what I’ve stolen.”
Dean stares. “All this time,” he says, “when we were hassling Crowley for the Colt, when we were getting the Horsemen’s rings… and all we needed was a pointy stick?”
“I didn’t know,” Cas says. “No one knew it could kill Lucifer. Only Michael. And, I suppose Lucifer himself.”
“And the guy whose body Michael used,” John says sourly, looking at the lance. “That’ll do it. That’s what can stop the Devil.”
And kill Sam . Dean doesn’t say it. In many ways, this is an upgrade. A quick death, instead of eternity being tortured in the Cage.
If I ever turn into something that I’m not, Sam had said, you have to kill me . He’d made Dean promise.
Well Sammy , Dean thinks, staring at Michael’s holy weapon. I did promise . And so Castiel leads them into Hell.
When Dean, John and a man Mary doesn’t recognize come storming into the throne room, she’s not even that surprised. Of course Dean would come here. Of course.
Lucifer clicks his tongue, looking at John and Dean. “Two Michael vessels, no Michael,” he notes. “What exactly do you think you’re going to be able to do with that little jousting spear of yours?”
“Mary,” John says, tearing his gaze away from Sam’s face. “Did he— ?”
“I’m fine,” she assures him.
John nods and looks back at Lucifer with cold determination. This is the Devil, shining out from every corner of the boy John loved, and raised, and feared. He knew from the start there was something rotten in Sam. Now it’s overtaken him. He says, “I’m sorry, Sammy,” and he drives the lance forward.
It never meets its mark. Lucifer snaps his fingers and John explodes into dust and ash, nothing left of him. The lance clatters to the floor. Dean and Mary both scream at the same time, mingled cries of Dad! and John!
Lucifer just smiles sadly. “I didn’t want to do that,” he says, stepping around the pile of ashes that was once John Winchester. He looks like he doesn’t want to get Sam’s shoes dirty. “He made me. I didn’t want to. I wanted us to be a family. But he tried to kill me. To kill Sam .”
“Bastard,” Dean says, chokes out. It is Sam’s voice, Sam’s hands, Sam’s face. Sam’s body that has been used now to kill both Bobby and John, and Dean is left with no fathers and no clue what his next move is meant to be.
“My Father punished me, locked me away for millennia,” Lucifer says. “Seeing Sammy’s father being just as cruel, just as ruthless… Well, I suppose it struck a nerve. I am sorry.”
“Sammy.” Dean’s mouth feels dry. He has the creeping sensation the Devil is moments away from killing him, too, and he at least needs to say goodbye. He owes his brother that. “It wasn’t you. It isn’t your fault.”
“What makes you so sure he’s miserable in here? Drowning in guilt?” Lucifer says. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe Sammy’s happy? Happy I brought his family all together? You know, your dad doesn’t even have to stay dead. I can bring him back again, make sure he behaves himself this time.”
Dean sees it all spool out in front of him— Lucifer using Sam’s body to reign over the earth, with Mary and John and Dean by his side. His loyal court. And somewhere, beneath the skin of the Devil, Sam will be screaming.
He was warned. He saw this coming. We will always end up here .
Behind Lucifer, Mary picks up the lance.
“You still don’t get what you want,” Dean calls out to Lucifer, eyes filling with tears.
Lucifer tilts his head slightly. “I don’t know what you mean. Sam said Yes.”
“I know. But what you wanted ? You’re not getting it,” Dean says. “Michael wanted daddy’s approval. But you only ever wanted his respect. Now neither of you win.”
“You don’t know anything about what I want,” Lucifer claims, striding forward. “You don’t know anything about my father.”
Dean looks at the ashes on the floor. “I know more than you think.”
“You think so highly of yourself,” Lucifer spits. “You and Sam. I’m in part to blame for that, I think. I did mean it when I said that Sam here… he’s everything to me. But he’s also nothing without me.”
Dean’s breath comes out in a choking gasp, but he doesn’t look away from his brother’s face. “You’re wrong,” he says. And then— “I love you, Sammy.”
“What—” There is the wet and visceral squelch of metal being driven through flesh and muscle. The tip of the lance protrudes from somewhere just below Sam’s ribs. Lucifer looks down, surprised, and then a second later the light pulses through his entire being, lighting up Sam’s arms and legs before flashing to show the whole of Lucifer’s wings. He keels over and coughs, spattering black bile on the floor.
Behind him, Mary watches, her face pale white, her hands tight on the lance.
“Go to hell,” Dean rasps as Mary yanks the lance back out of her child’s chest.
Lucifer (SAM?) falls to his knees, bile dripping from his mouth as light continues to spiderweb through his body. His eyes burn brilliantly red, there is a furious scream that seems to reverberate through the whole room, through all of Hell, and then silence.
For one pristine moment, the only sound is Mary sobbing as Sam’s body collapses motionless on the floor.
Dean kneels beside his brother, seeing past the husk of Lucifer’s shell. He reaches out to push the hair back from Sam’s face and sees only the boy he raised. “Sammy,” he says, an empty dirge. The heel of his boot slips against something, and he looks back to find that he’s disturbed the pile of ash John was reduced to. A shudder wracks through Dean. “Sammy. Oh, God.”
“Is he… ?” Mary asks, crouching down alongside Dean. She’s dropped the lance, and now she uses both hands to cradle Sam’s face. Only yesterday she was setting him down in his crib. Only yesterday she was burning on the ceiling of his nursery.
Dean places a hand beneath Sam’s mouth and feels, miraculously, a puff of air. “Sammy? Hey, Sammy, c’mon,” he says, propping Sam up, hands on his neck, his shoulders. “Sammy. Sam.”
Sam lets out a soft wheeze, eyes squinted shut like he’s in pain. He says, with his own voice, his own mouth— “Dean.”
“Hey,” Dean says, “hey,” like he’s picking up Sam from soccer practice or waking him after he’s fallen asleep in the car. “Hey.”
Sam smiles at him, actually goddamn smiles. He says, “Hey,” right back, and then he shrinks in on himself and lets out several hacking coughs, spewing even more of that same tar-like substance. Dean and Mary can see it now, the black veins creeping up his neck, like they branch out from the site of the lance wound.
“Get it out,” Dean says helplessly, rubbing Sam’s back in small circles. “Just get it out.” He cranes his neck around, eyes searching for the angel. “Cas? What’s… what do we do?” He’s remembering kneeling over Meg Masters, the real Meg Masters, as she bled out in Bobby’s house. He’s remembering the vessel Raphael left behind, slack-jawed and dead-eyed.
Cas looks from the lance to Sam, his face pinched and panicked. “I don’t… the lance wasn’t designed to kill humans,” he reasons. “Lucifer is dead, but Sam… with the amount of demon blood he consumed before being possessed, I don’t know—”
“What do we do ,” Dean demands.
Sam looks up, bleary eyes moving from Dean to Cas to Mary. “I’m sorry,” he cries, tears mixing with the black bile on his lips and chin. “I’m s-sorry, Mom… Dean… I couldn’t stop him. I could— I wanted to stop him. I wanted to stop him .”
“I know, baby,” Mary says, wiping his chin and not caring that her hand comes away inky-black. “I know. It’s okay.”
“I tried…”
“You did. You were so brave,” Mary says, trying not to think about the way he’d begged to die. And now he’s been forced to kill his father, forced to watch his own hand obliterate John. She thinks about possession, red and yellow eyes, thinks about a monster with her own father’s face making a deal with her. “Sam, I’m so sorry.”
“S’okay,” Sam says, even though nothing is. He coughs again. “I’m glad I got to meet you before I—”
“Before nothing, Sam, you’re not dying,” Dean snaps. “Cas?”
“Theoretically, I should be able to heal him,” Cas says. “My grace is restored and I’m at full power. But even then… to heal Sam completely, I may need more than what I have to give.”
“Like?” Dean says.
“Like siphoning off a soul.”
“Done,” Mary says, cool and crisp.
“What? Mom—”
“Take it,” Mary says, rolling up her sleeves like she’s about to give blood. “Take the whole thing, I don’t care.”
The angel squints at her. “You don’t even know me.”
She looks down at the way Sam is watching Castiel, the way his glassy eyes seem focused only on the angel. Looks at the way Dean is depending on him, her headstrong older son looking to the angel for answers. “No,” she agrees, “but my sons do. And they trust you, and I trust them.”
“You hardly know them either,” he points out.
“I know. And I’d like to,” she says, clutching Sam close. “So save him— please.”
Dean argues, and Mary argues right back, and in the meantime Sam watches, eyes wide, while Cas keeps a hand on his shoulder to hold him upright. “Cas,” Sam mumbles at one point, dazed, “you were dead.”
“I was,” Cas acknowledges. “I’m not now.”
“I wish I could’ve…” Sam mumbles, looking down at his hand. The hand that snapped, and exploded Castiel into a thousand shards of bones and globules of blood. “Did it hurt?”
When Cas looks at him, it’s the same look he gave Sam when trying to humor him before— Uh, sure. They’ll be fine . “It didn’t hurt… too bad.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Sam says, tensing up as whatever’s running through his veins right now sends out another pulse of pain. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
Mary is kneeling beside him again, reaching for Castiel’s hand. “Use my soul,” she says. “Do whatever it is you do. Save my son.”
Sam tries to tell her no, but Dean’s sitting down behind him and bracing Sam against his chest. “No arguing with her when she gets like this,” he says. “Dad knew that.”
Cas asks Mary if she wants something to bite down on. She grips the hem of the dress the Devil gave her and tears, ripping off a strip of fabric, and then she wedges that between her teeth. She nods. Castiel reaches for the space beneath her heart.
It’s remarkable to watch, horrifying as it is. Even though most of the energy is coming from Cas and his grace, it still looks to Dean as if Cas is just a conduit between Mary and Sam. He becomes the channel through which Mary’s soul flows to heal Sam’s wounds.
The black web across Sam’s neck begins to fade, like it’s melting away. Light diffuses across his body, not harsh like when Lucifer was dying but gentle, rays of dawn, a lamp in a window. His mother’s soul and his best friend’s grace work together to heal Sam of the spreading infection.
When every last bit of black has faded from Sam’s veins, he slumps back in Dean’s arms. His breathing settles. Cas draws his hands away from Sam and Mary, looking exhausted. “He’s okay,” he says, to Dean and Mary, to himself. A promise. “He’s going to be okay.”
Lucifer is dead and Sam isn’t. There is no gaping wound in his chest, just a ragged tear in the fabric of his shirt. Sam wipes at the black bile clinging to his chin, hand trembling as he does so.
“I got you,” Dean says, “I got you.” Every part of Sam is shaking. He keeps picking at the jacket he has on, the one he’s been wearing since he said Yes. There are bullet holes in it, places he was shot that won’t show up on the skin. There’s gravedirt and other people’s blood smeared into the fabric. Sam claws at the thing, like he would shed his own skin if he could.
Dean helps him take the jacket off, and he tosses it into a shadowy corner of the room. But Sam’s still trembling in just his flannel. Mary glances over at the room divider where Lucifer made her change, knowing Dean’s jacket is folded up on the floor behind it.
Castiel is quicker, though. He shrugs off his wrinkled trench coat and drapes it around Sam’s shoulders, tucking it around him like a quilt. Sam nods his thanks, leaning into the warmth. “Cas,” he says, swathed now in the coat and his brother’s arms, “Cas, I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Cas swears.
Still, he can’t stop saying it. “I’m sorry,” Sam says again, a great hiccupping sob. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” like it’s all he remembers how to say. He’s alive. He’s going to live. In so many ways, it feels like a sentence. Like he needs to atone.
“Shh, it’s okay,” Mary tells him, coming up to wrap her arms around his shoulders, to let him lean his head against her. She smooths over his hair with her hand, letting him cling to her with hands that belong to nobody but him. “None of it was your fault. He’s gone, he’s dead. It’s just you, Sam.” She rocks him back and forth. “You’re just you.” She whispers shh and it’s okay and I’m here .
Dean, Cas and Mary crowd around Sam, a tangled heap of limbs on the dusty dungeon floor. The demons have scattered, sensing the demise of their king, and there is no one to interrupt this family locked in their moment of reunion, of victory, of grief.
In the days and weeks that follow, there will be uncomfortable conversations and tearful recollections. Sam won’t sleep a full night without nightmares for years to come. Castiel will resurrect Bobby but decide, on Mary’s urging, to allow John to rest. The angels will scatter, unsure who to turn to with Lucifer dead and Michael in the Cage. Dean and Sam will finally get to know their mother outside of the myth John Winchester painted for them.
Now, though, they huddle together in the Devil’s throne room, pieces of a family stitched haphazardly together. Finally, Mary stands, helping her boys to their feet. She looks at them— her war-weathered oldest son, her brave and selfless baby boy, and the angel she’s just met but trusts with her soul.
She says, with a tight and tired smile, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”