Archive of Our Own ^beta

The snow that brought Sam into the church had come as a surprise the day he and Dean first swept into New Haven, Connecticut on their way to Atlantic City. For once there was no monster to fight, no supernatural deaths to investigate—not even a lead for he and Ruby to pursue. It was just a pit stop. Dean was still cradling their ten grand like a newborn baby as they checked into one of the swankiest places in the city, an ornate nineteen-story building that ran over two hundred dollars a night and was literal steps from Yale. (His brother wasn't concerned about the price, explaining that he'd make it up in craps winnings, and Sam had to admit that Dean had a preternatural ability to come out on top in games of chance. Not that Sam wanted to deny Dean anything these days.)

But the snow had been a surprise. New England still saw flurries and flakes in the middle of November, but the blankets of white and miserable driving conditions most non-Yankees imagined didn't come until the end of the month, or even later. Even so, Sam was thankful for the thermal jacket he was wearing (Dean had bought it for him in the lobby gift shop, some high-end label with the words NEW HAVEN CHARGERS emblazoned across the back, and Sam had to smile when he received it; he'd submitted letters to Yale as well as Stanford) as he stepped out of the coffee shop onto Temple Street, a trek made precarious by the fleecy newfallen snow that ate up his legs almost past the ankle. Dean had still been fast asleep when he first left for the coffee shop that morning to grab breakfast, the long night's drive having ensured that he wouldn't be stirring until at least one o'clock; Sam had made sure to leave a do not disturb sign on the door.

The way back to the hotel was short, but the young hunter banked right and headed in a different direction. Despite the warmth the coat afforded him, he still shivered when the church came into view. Maybe it wasn't the cold that had brought him there today. Not really.

Because Dean's death was half a year away. Sam had only half a year to find a way to save him, when his brother wanted nothing more than to play craps and blackjack and maybe get laid. In an effort to compensate for working with a demon—for stripping off his morals like they were the heavy jacket on his back—he'd stepped up his prayers to two, three times a day. But God must have had it out for him, because there were still no good solutions to Dean's damna—to the problem. The only salvation hovering in sight now was the church, a dark shape raised like a supplicating finger to Heaven, silhouetted against the bright white of the morning.

He made his way up the icy steps, pulling his hat low over his ears to protect his head from the drops of frigid water that slipped from the church's eaves. The large wooden doors eased open at his touch, bringing him forward into the darkness of the vestibule. He allowed his eyes a few moments to adjust to the loss of light; usually not being able to account for everything in his surroundings put Sam on edge, but he never felt that way in a church.

Sam was in better spirits as he hung up his hat in the nursery room off the vestibule. The church was empty but warm; shadows cascaded across the half lowest to the floor, while the windows, high above, permitted light on either side to steal through the delicate panes of stained glass and kiss. Two stone angels bearing bowls of holy water flocked the pews, which occupied the length of the church in two straight lines, terminating at the sanctuary. Looking at it all, breathing in the wax-scented air, renewed in him the feeling that he was exactly where he needed to be.

Until his gaze traveled down the aisle, and he saw the woman who had funded the entire Jersey enterprise.

Bela Talbot stood before an altar within an enclave—not quite in it, not quite out of it. The altar was on the sanctuary side, next to the pulpit, so her back was turned. For a second he entertained the hope that he was mistaken, this was some other woman; but no, there was the peacoat she'd been wearing in Massachusetts, the perfect, feathered hair that made his stomach do stupid flip-flops whenever he thought about it too long (read: ten seconds). He could have picked that hair out in a sea of brown.

Sam's first, shameful thought was that Bela was there to rob the place. Golden icons and intricate paintings and a lamp with a fierce red light were in evidence all over the sanctuary, and he didn't even want to think about how much some of the statues in here must cost. But she was just... standing there.

How the hell does this keep happening? he thought. What was it about fate that saw fit to throw the world's most materialistic woman and poorest pair of brothers together? As if Sam didn't have enough problems.

Her back was still to him. She probably hadn't heard him come in. At first he turned to leave; running by happenstance into the woman who'd put a bullet in your shoulder with a smile on her face was more than a little awkward. But he hadn't taken one step when he suddenly paused, his foot hovering over the threshold of the vestibule. Damn it, he'd come here to pray—was he really going to run away with his tail between his legs just because an unabashed cat burglar happened to be standing under the same roof? Now, more than ever, he needed to talk with God; and if being in a church made the Almighty more amenable to saving Dean, he would stay here to do it.

He slunk towards a pew in the very back, thankful for the carpeting that muffled his steps. It was on the right side of the church, in front of the stairwell that led to the top of the belltower, and just a stone's throw away from the confessional. The light above the confessional box was dark. The sign posted in front of the church had said confessions were only on Wednesday and Saturday, and even though he wasn't Catholic and didn't know much about the sacrament beyond the cliff notes Pastor Jim had given him as a kid, he thought he just might be crazy enough to sit here until a priest came and beg him to take his confession—anything to unload the sin of being responsible for Dean's upcoming death, to appease a God who probably already hated him for the crime of being impure, a potential lord of hell.

Of course, these thoughts were not exactly conducive to prayer. Sam closed his eyes, tried to settle his mind. He sensed the faint smell of oil and the sound of a heater running somewhere, but was determined not to let it tug him away from his purpose. Dear God, he began, it's me again...

The thought grew wings and flapped away from him before he could finish it. It was no use. Trying to pray in here now was like trying to sleep through a tornado. He opened his eyes.

She was still standing there, like she was one of the statues. She hadn't even budged to fidget with her coat, or look around and notice him.

The idea that fate had brought them together crept into his mind once more, but this time it felt less foolish. Was this... an opportunity of some sort? Could he talk to her, make her see there was a better way to live her life? She'd given them the money, after all. She'd proved she wasn't completely heartless.

No, he decided. That was crazy. He was crazy—thinking that he had any responsibilities towards her. He didn't. Bela had shot him, she stole people's money without a shred of remorse, and—and—

And there was just something there. Something that he was missing—maybe in the cold mask her face had become when Dean said your daddy not give you enough hugs or something? Back then it was easy enough to get angry at her, shoved off balance, especially when she'd immediately rejoindered that his brother was two steps away from being a serial killer. But later, in the cold light of day...

He'd recognized selfishly that he had seen his own face in hers. What, you just wanna stay inside and do homework? You gonna let civilians die because an A in algebra is more important? Look at me when I'm talking to you, son.

Sam's face burned hot.

It was probably none of his damn business.

You wouldn't understand, she'd said. No one did—

He had no idea what was happening until his feet had already borne him halfway down the aisle, past the offering box, the cold morning sunlight falling like a beam of wood across his shoulders through the high slanted windows as he passed beneath them. As he came closer, he realized that she was standing in front of a Marian altar, upon which rested a small bouquet of flowers and a painting of the Virgin. She wasn't praying or whispering a chant while fingering a rosary or whatever people did when they stood in front of one of these altars (Sam usually had the good sense to leave people standing in front of altars alone). She held her arms stiffly at her sides and her head was raised to meet Mary's eyes, which were painted in flecked gold in a style that Sam identified as maybe Byzantine.

Still feeling strange and uncertain, Sam cleared his throat to announce his presence.

For the first time she moved. Her head turned slowly on her neck towards the source of the sound, and Sam had just enough time to wonder if she felt the same way he did in churches before their eyes met.

He nearly fell over at what he saw. For one instant—one unimaginable, unbelievable instant—her face was as soft and open as a child's. The color in her eyes, a not-quite-blue-not-quite-grey color, swept over him with the mildness of clouds on an overcast morning. The sight brought him into aching contact with a memory he hadn't thought about in years; a memory of a day he had once spent in a sleepy seaside village, sitting on the bluffs and watching bodies of gloom move through the distant dark waters.

Then she opened her mouth.

"Can I help you?"

The words snapped him back into reality. There was the sarcasm again, the thinly veiled contempt. He blinked and the expression he thought he'd see on her face—a sneer of pure antipathy—was slotted firmly back in place, like it had always been there. Sam gave a disbelieving shake of his head as his mouth fell open, seeking words as if they would somehow bridge the gaps in his understanding.

"Very articulate," she said when no words came. "Any reason you're stalking me, Winchester?" she added, sliding her hands into her pockets and tilting her head up at him, although Bela Talbot was plenty tall herself, even without the benefit of heels.

"I just happened to be here," he returned fiercely, once he had his bearings. "Like I'd want to stalk you." He was vaguely aware of how much of a twelve-year-old that made him sound, but eloquence was never one of his strong points around Bela.

Unfortunately for him, Bela knew it. "You should try listening to yourself talk some day," she said with a nasty smile. "It'd be a real revelation, I'm sure." She threw a lock of hair back over her shoulder, musing. "Strange how I keep running into you boys. If I didn't know better, I'd say someone up there was trying to punish me. Where is that reprobate brother of yours, anyway?"

Also unfortunate: she had turned to face him fully as she spoke, exposing the wispy blue blouse she wore beneath her peacoat. Sam's eyes flew about in an attempt to look anywhere but down her shirt. "It's just me," he muttered.

She gave him a cool expression that he could feel but not see. "How is Dean?" she suddenly asked, brightly. "Did he blow all that money I gave him?"

"He's fine. He's at the Omni," Sam said. He found a small Greek inscription on the altar to stare at and hoped she would just mistake the blush in his face for reflected candlelight.

"At the Omni? Oh wow, he really is blowing it. I was joking. My God, you two are a regular Jeeves and Wooster. Or maybe you're both Hugh Laurie. I don't know," and she sniggered at her own joke.

Sam tried harder to read the Greek. He recognized the word theotokos—theo meant "God," tokos meant "birthing," so "mother of God," basically—but he couldn't make sense of the word following it—maybe it was hagios—

Bela interjected, sounding supremely unimpressed. "Look, Winchester. I don't care if you stare at my breasts. I've checked out your arse enough times, I figure I actually owe you an opportunity to balance the scales."

Sam choked and almost collapsed headfirst into the altar. As it was, the only thing that saved him from completely humiliating himself and disgracing a house of God in the process was anchoring himself to the floor by his two legs, pretending they were ancient tree roots planted deep beneath the building's foundations. When he came to his senses, he saw that Bela was laughing at him.

"That's not a funny joke," he grit out through his teeth.

Her face changed into one of utmost guiltlessness. "I didn't say I was joking," she replied. "Anyway, you invited it, being so obvious. Next time try applying a little more guile. How do you think you never noticed me—"

"I didn't come here to be insulted by you," Sam snapped. He was suddenly sick of the game that Bela always seemed to play—the one where he and Dean had zero points while she somehow racked up over a thousand sight unseen. What had possessed him to think this was a good idea? "I just didn't want to surprise you," he continued, trying to ignore the redness in his face that probably made it look like the wintry air was still whipping it raw. For an instant he nearly pointed at where he'd been sitting and said look, just forget you even saw me—

"I wasn't trying to insult you," Bela said. For the first time ever, she looked troubled.

He dropped his hand where he had started to raise it, shocked all over again. "What?" he said.

She met his stare. "I was having a bit of fun," she said, and then she shrugged her shoulders, her hair falling across her eyes in a sweeping movement. "And... sometimes my idea of fun leaves bruises. I can leave well enough alone if I have to."

There was an astonishing lack of cunning on her face as she said that. Sam studied her, trying to understand. Was it because they'd saved her life? Because they were standing in a church? Or maybe because—for whatever reason—he had somehow been right about Bela Talbot?

He didn't want to think too hard about it. Instead he crossed his arms and briefly examined the rest of the enclave, which held a stand of votive candles, most of which were unlit. He could still feel Bela's presence, hovering uncomfortably close at his side. But the young thief, for her part, seemed to have moved on from the conversation—maybe from his very presence, because she was already looking at the altar again, ignoring him. Sam stood where he was, undecided. When it came to Bela, anything that wasn't sniping and barbs about how stupid he and Dean were was new and uncharted territory.

"Um," he said when another moment elapsed, when the silence had stretched on too long. And then, maybe to offer an olive branch (or fill the silence with stupid, pointless conversation): "How come there's flowers here? Was there a funeral?" He pointed to the day-old bouquet of what looked like black-eyed Susan and a couple of other varieties of flowers he didn't know, all of them tied together with a sprig of delicate white ribbon—he wasn't that well-versed in plant genuses beyond knowing what was required for hexes or hoodoo. He thought that was kind of messed up.

She gave him a look, as if to say you don't know anything at all, do you? But apparently she elected to have pity on him, because all she said was: "They're probably from a wedding. That's what they do at these affairs, you know. Leave flowers for the Blessed Virgin, close their eyes and pretend to think holy thoughts while some opera floozy sings 'Ave Maria' off key."

Her tone could not have been less reverent; but Sam still noted that she said the Blessed Virgin, not Mary or even just the Virgin. "Are you Catholic?" the young hunter asked, and then he looked down at his shoes, wondering if that was somehow offensive.

He felt her appraising stare on him, and he stopped shuffling his feet long enough to meet her eyes. "Not anymore," she said after a moment, but immediately she looked pained. It nearly transformed her. "No," she amended. "That's not really true. Once you're baptized, you always are one. You can't make it go away any more than you could change eye color. Of course," she added haughtily, "I always change my eye color. You could call me a Catholic atheist."

"A Catholic who doesn't believe in God? How does that work?"

Her tone ran testy. "Why so interested, Winchester?"

He tried out the words in his head before he replied. "Because," he said slowly, gesturing all around them, "you're in here. It just... doesn't add up, is all."

That did not appease her. "I didn't know you were my handler," she said, venomously. "I'll make sure to ask your permission next time I go into a place of worship without a belief system to your satisfaction."

Sam caught the inside of his cheek with his teeth—just in time to halt his smile. Somehow, when Dean wasn't there to be eternally outraged by everything Bela did (or for Sam to eternally fret over), the young thief did seem markedly less caustic. Bela's eyes flickered with amusement at the expression on his face and she draped a hand over her hip. He probably hadn't fooled her for a second.

"Anyway, I could ask what you're doing here," she said, drawing the words out lazily in her posh British accent. Sam didn't like to think about how that accent, so commanding, affected the quality of his dreams. "Don't you have some virginal young girl to deflower after gallantly rescuing her from a werewolf? Or have I mistaken you for your brother?"

Any talk of sex coming out of her mouth made him blush again, but he noticed that she had seen it—the addition by subtraction. Maybe she found him less annoying when it was just the two of them. Sam breathed out a laugh, the sound of it falling low across the polished wooden pews.

"Dean doesn't always do that." He shook his head. "He's more about saving the girl."

"Sure. So does he save her a month later, when she gets cancer or murdered or hit by a car? It's a lot of trouble to go to for someone who's just going to die anyway."

Her tone was mild—like she was discussing the weather, not some Nietzschean construction of existence; God is dead, now where's my latte—but Sam swallowed hard anyway, running his tongue over his teeth at the cynicism. "It's still worth it," he insisted. When she looked at him doubtfully, he said, "Look, no one knows what the future will bring. But it's gotta be better than being ripped to shreds by some monster."

Her silent assessment lasted only for a moment. "Perhaps," she allowed. "But now they have to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders. Knowing that monsters are real. Knowing that—at any moment—they could be ripped to shreds, in your oh-so-silver-tongued parlance. Is it really better to live breathlessly in the cold light of experience than to die in innocence?"

Now her eyes were colder than the water he'd tried to swim in that day in the village.

"Really, Sam. How often do you try to convince yourself that what you do makes the world better?" She held up a halting hand when he made an attempt to demur. "Don't think you can fool me. I know you're not your brother. Otherwise, what are you doing here? It's not people who are healthy that come to God."

Sam vibrated where he stood at her words—but not with anger. Rather, with concession. Because she was right. It was his brother and father's need for him, a destiny a yellow-eyed demon had thrust upon his family—Jess's death—that had even brought him back from college in the first place. At some point in his twentysomething years on earth, he'd stopped buying what John was selling him. What even Dean, his believer brother, had begun to return unopened. And he'd left them. His default orientation was not to engage in the covert guerilla war his father perpetuated like he'd never come back from Vietnam; it was to long for a life of stability and normalcy and love.

But Sam wasn't stable or normal or loveable. So he didn't even understand why the conversation. It all seemed so far behind him anyway—when he was about to lose Dean forever.

(And even at Stanford, he'd still hunted. The strange ugly instinct lived on even when he tried so hard to make it die, replicating itself like a virus every time he killed something else in its place. He failed his first pre-law test in freshman year stalking a kappa and had shook so hard all night that Jess asked him why he didn't just cry, if he felt that bad about failing. He almost told her everything and instead huddled in her arms for three hours until the tears finally came.)

Bela's face shone with understanding like one of the few lights burning on the votive candle stand. For a moment he thought she'd shrug and turn away, ultimately unaffected, but she kept her face trained on him, observing his reaction. He forced his jaw to unclench, forced his hands to unclasp where they'd been holding nothing at his sides. His upset wouldn't have been detectable to the untrained eye; but very, very few things got past Bela.

All he could manage to say beneath the weight of her gaze was: "I didn't used to have to think about it. I... cared about hunting because my dad cared. There was nothing else for him. But after a while I—couldn't make myself believe that anymore. That Dean and I didn't deserve a better life than that." He moistened his lips, his throat tight like something was trapped in it. "Now... I mean, I hunt, but it's like..." He trailed off, drained of all desire to complete the thought aloud.

His shoulders slumped when he imagined what she would say next. Nice daddy issues on display there—need a tissue? But he started when her only words were: "Let me guess. Ran off to Yale?"

She was looking at his jacket. Sam nearly squirmed to read the lettering on the back, stopped himself just in time with a brief laugh. "Yeah, no—Stanford. But how'd you—"

Bela was expressionless as she said, "You don't seem a complete dolt, Sam. And you would be about the right age to have gone." As if they were facts as objective as the law of gravity or the course of the earth around the sun. "But you didn't finish, did you," she added—another bald statement of fact, another data point for the inevitability of his return to the hunting grounds.

"No." Sam's head inclined slightly. "What about you?"

"I had a world-class education beneath the tutelage of nuns. Ironically, it's where I learned about some of the world's juiciest occult effects. I never saw a need to waste a second on so-called higher education."

It was hard to imagine someone as sophisticated as Bela purposefully spurning university—Sam wouldn't have been at all surprised if she'd said she had degrees in history or archives. But more than that, the person in him that yearned to know the person in her—not the hunter, but the boy—suddenly knew her words for a lie. He did not know how, or why, but it was a lie.

But already she seemed to tire of the digression. Her eyebrows drew together, and she grew silent.

"It's not as if I never wished to go back to what I thought I once knew about the world," she finally said, pensively. "It's not as if I... hm." Now she did shrug, and look away, and say nothing. Sam held his own silence for a beat longer before he said:

"I still want to believe that what my brother and I do is worth it. I mean—I really do believe that. Even if I have to accept"—hunting—"it, I don't have to live in despair. I can have hope."

"How nice for you." Bela's voice was flat. She sounded, suddenly, as if she was ready to leave; and her arms actually drew the edges of her coat tighter around her body. "So what gives you hope, then?" she asked instead, surprising him so much that for a moment he didn't answer.

Fortunately, once his brain had caught up to the fact that she actually wanted this conversation, wouldn't be beating a hasty retreat, he didn't have to cudgel his brains on the point. "My brother," he said, almost immediately, trying to ignore the pangs in his heart of what was hovering just on the other side of spring. "And, um... God," he added sheepishly, like he expected her to retch or something.

Bela did not retch, but neither did she fall to her knees in rapturous concurrence. "God," she repeated thoughtfully, tapping a finger to her chin. "Someone you've never seen or heard or talked to. At least with that brother of yours, you can see him chewing gum with his mouth open, you can talk to him about whatever inane nonsense you two enjoy discussing. But God? That doesn't make sense."

"I don't know how to explain it," Sam said. "But it just—does. Make sense to me. There has to be a why for all the—all the pain." He was stumbling in his words, but not because he was without conviction; he sensed that it was more because what he was trying to say was something bigger than he could articulate.

Bela seemed to consider his words for a long time without speaking, her brows knitting together again.

"People foolish enough to be religious call this world a vale of soul-making," she said. Her eyes moved to the crucifix at the very top of the sanctuary. Sam's gaze trailed after hers uncertainly. Three women, carved from marble, were weeping in various poses of mourning on a ledge at the bottom of the cross; one of them clung to Jesus's nailed feet in a gesture of such miserable passion that her head nearly touched the ledge's floor. "I don't see that. All I see is a vale of misery and tears. A world of endless and random and pointless suffering, and then you die and there's—nothing." The full pout in which she carried her lips twisted, as if she'd heard a dirty joke. "Well. It would be more comforting if there was nothing."

Sam wished for the first time that the churches displayed something other than a cross. It was just too easy to forget what happened three days later—a more appropriate scene would have had the weeping women dancing, their faces transformed in laughter and joy. But then Bela was right, too; the present time was just too black to ever escape that dark legacy. And the look in her face now was not far removed from those women's.

"Your hunting," she said. The bite in her voice cut deep, burrowed an unfathomable distance into his chest. "Only rips the scales from people's eyes. Snatches away the only comfort they have—the delusion that this world cares anything for them. It doesn't." 

Sam bent his head. "I'm sorry," he said, for a reason his heart probably knew but his head still didn't.

"I didn't ask you to be sorry," she said with a sneer. But of course it wasn't a sneer at all; it never had been. It was his own overprotectiveness of Dean that had put that expression on her face. Now he saw only the immeasurable pain in the twisting of her lips, the darkness edging the grey in her pupils, like malevolent black clouds consuming the sky.

"I know," he said. And then he gathered all of his remaining strength, praying that whatever he said next would not sound like some come to Jesus pitch, something so easy and insipid and utterly beneath what Bela Talbot deserved. Something that would harm instead of help. "Look... this couldn't have been an easy life for you, either, and—"

She didn't even give him the chance to draw another breath before he dashed himself upon her armor like a bug on a windshield. "An easy life? You and your brother sleep in a rubbish heap on wheels. You survive on stolen credit cards and the kindness of fools. That jacket's probably the most expensive thing you've ever owned. My life? Was the definition of easy. I suffered for nothing."

She was telling him to stop, to turn back while he still could. Maybe he should.

He pushed. "That's not what I meant," he said, his heart pushing blood through his veins, pumping it in his ears, "and you—"

"What? You think you're going to come riding in on your white charger and save me?" The carpet thudded beneath her heel as she took a step towards him and those grey eyes—now fully tilting towards a storm—bored into his, lancing his skull with shafts of electricity. She waited the space of a heartbeat and then she said, "You're a fool. You know nothing about me."

"I know that you're hurting," Sam said slowly. "I know you don't really want to hurt anyone else."

Once again, he had said the wrong thing. It galvanized her, angered her. "You know exactly where you can shove that," she snarled. And then a bright, obscene lilt entered her voice. "My God, you're pitiful. Who do you even think you're talking to? You can't have forgotten that I spilled my own family's blood. Do you even know why that sailor's ghost wanted me in the first place? Who I killed?"

He opened his mouth to say it didn't matter, she didn't have to tell him—anyone—anything, but already the words were pouring out of her, a maelstrom of pain and fury and wild, ruthless joy.

"It was my parents. I killed my own parents. You saved a murderer's life when you saved me, Sam—that's right, it wasn't an accident, I did it on purpose. I killed them and I took their money. Just like I'd hurt you if you gave me half the chance."

A cloud moved across the windows. For just one moment, her face was awash in lightlessness. Sam drew a breath, held it. 

The moment moved on. And when he could see her again, looking up at him, defiance and distress leaching out of her face in equal measures, like lime weeping from bedrock, his lungs let go with it, exhaling long and slow, releasing the very last breath he'd taken before learning of his brother's deal with hell to save him. 

Bela watched him. Waited for him to run, or attack her. 

"I'm glad I killed them," she said when he did nothing. She spoke as if she were testing the weight of her words: testing him. "I'm not sorry at all."

His response was automatic. "I don't think it's my place to say if you should be sorry or not."

"How could you possibly say that?"

She didn't say it like she was seeking an answer from him; she was only waiting for him to take some kind of action. Her hands hovered over her pockets. But even if the young hunter had no idea what to do, or say, or think at this juncture, he knew the one thing he could not do now—he could not run from this.

The seconds ticked by, and her eyes flickered with some great emotion. At length she turned away, and they moved to linger on her hands, which had drifted away from her coat, grasping at empty air. "I can't be forgiven," she murmured. And then, hesitantly: "I'm... going somewhere bad."

"No," Sam said. The sound of it was so fierce in the church that she actually reacted, her shoulders lifting as if a puppeteer's strings were tugging on them. "Come on," he continued, in a lower voice. "Doesn't the Bible say that God forgives everyone?"

He had to. He had to. Even someone like Bela Talbot. Even a boy who'd been fed demon blood and who Dean was told he might have to kill someday, who couldn't even fucking save his own brother—the most innocent of them all—from an eternity in the pit.

"He forgives people who repent," Bela said. Her voice was almost gentle. "And I don't."

She looked up at Mary then. The painting with the loving golden eyes had never looked so much like a real woman, so much like both their mother. "That's not what I meant, anyway. I was... not good... when I was young. I think that's why they..." Her breath terminated in a shaky laugh—like she could not believe she was telling him any of this. "Ha," she finally said when she was breathing again, the inhales jagged and the exhales sharp. The silence in the space was complete but for that noise, piercing it as a needle pierces a cloak—he couldn't even hear his own breathing anymore through the holes. "Maybe that's why I'm not a good person now," she said finally, forcing the words out of a trembling mouth. "Why I enjoy screwing with you boys so much. The disease is congenital, doctor." She laughed again.

"You're not a bad person, Bela," Sam whispered. He was not surprised at how easily the sentence sprang to his lips.

Her mouth continued to laugh, but the humor never touched her eyes. And then he recognized them—Max Miller's eyes, staring out at him from a wounded face. That had been one of the most terrible things Sam had ever seen—worse than any monster or even Azazel—the tortured boy's face alive with anguish, his cheeks stained with tears as he raised the knife to kill the woman who was supposed to protect him.

(you wouldn't understand you wouldn't understand you wouldn't understand)

His eyes widened. How could he have never seen it before? He—

It was at that moment that Bela crashed into him and kissed him.

He surrendered at once. He could do nothing else. The smell of her was upon him, a heady cocktail of sandalwood soap and her own womanly scent—no perfume—and it filled up his head, filled up him, until he wasn't even a body anymore, just a nose and a mouth, breathing her in and kissing her back as fiercely as she was kissing him now. He'd had shameful dreams and fantasies and here they were, materializing in the shape that pressed upon him now, in the lips that were devouring him like the body and blood they took in church and were in turn devoured by him, a greater body into which the smaller was sublimated with every bite it consumed. He was taking her into himself even as she took him in, and—

Some part of him understood what was happening. What she was doing, and where this would go. It sounded in his head like a clarion call—reminding him that he had a head, drawing him back into awareness of the form that had left him. He felt her fingers buried deep in his hair, gripping each strand so hard that it should have hurt but didn't.

He could see exactly how it would happen. He knew, because he'd done before what she was about to do now—in the hours and days and weeks before reaching Stanford and meeting Jess. In the hours and days and weeks after John had said get the hell out of here, you want to be a college boy so bad and Dean had said nothing, just stared at his hands and cleaned his rifle like he was an only child, like Sam didn't exist. He remembered the countless strangers in whose homes he'd stayed, retreating into their beds at night, where he wouldn't have to think about things like rejection or being made wrong—maybe even in the womb, as he'd suspected long before he ever knew the name Azazel. He no longer remembered the faces of those men and women, indistinct like smoke, only their hands: stroking his hair, offering at least the appearance if not the reality of love.

The future unfolded before him like one of his visions. She'd walk away assured in the knowledge that she would never have to suffer another moment of tension in his presence, another question that got too close, and he in his arrogance would believe that he'd helped her somehow. She would steal his wallet and leave a cheeky note about what an easy lay he was. They'd never have to have a real conversation the next time fate conspired to bring the Winchesters and Bela Talbot together.

He could completely fail her with a clear conscience.

His lips continued to move against hers, begging to deepen the kiss, complete it. Complete her. But he would not do it.

Not just for Jess, and not just for himself. But for this girl that had descended upon him and his brother like a cataclysm in heels, who was smarter than him and Dean put together, who he was beginning to grasp had been harmed in ways he simply could not grasp.

With an aborted gasp he broke off the kiss, pushing gently against her stomach with one hand while slowly extricating himself from her grasp with the other. Her nails brushed down his neck as he peeled her hand off his head, each tip electrifying his nerves as he made the short but agonizing work of separating his body from hers.

Even so, Bela's face still hung inches from his as she said, in disgust:

"Really, Sam? You're going to be the love and marriage type right now?"

Sam spoke without breathing. Her soap and scent were too intoxicating, and he didn't trust himself not to crush his lips against hers again if he did otherwise. "I can't, Bela," was all he managed. Maybe it was all he needed to say.

"We're not going to do it in the church, you idiot." But her voice was already resigned, like she knew there was no winning him over. They had exceeded escape velocity.

"You sound surprised."

Her eyes shimmered. "I'm not." She reached out and pressed her palms to his chest, probably to shove him ass-first into a pew—but instead her hands lingered there, and she looked down at them as if she did not know who or where she was.

She was lost, Sam realized. They were both so lost.

And they wanted so much to be found.

His heart thudding so hard he was sure that Bela must feel it in her fingertips, Sam lifted his hands carefully and placed them on hers. The heat of them, small as they were, was so pronounced that his palms were at once bathed in a fever; he felt the pulse of her own heart spring from her tiny bones into both his wrists. The young hunter reminded himself to be gentle, to not do anything that would frighten or unnerve, as he righted the length of her hair where it had gone unkempt across the shoulders of her coat, each strand twisting between his fingers in golden locks that warmed the morning light pouring from the vaulted windows. All the while, he watched her face carefully for any sign that he should stop.

She let him. Her eyes were fixed on his now, grey storms easing into calmer but more uncertain skies; and her lips were lightly parted where he had applied his ungenerous, nearly bruising force. She was waiting for him to finish what he started. She was waiting for a betrayal.

Sam attended to her hair with deliberate slowness. When he was done, he moved to the collar of her coat, smoothing it with the backs of his fingers. Bela closed her eyes. Her soap and smell remained, but had retreated into the background, itself transformed into a panoply of moody reds and joyous golds: like a curtain that had only been drawn back in part. Sam's nostrils filled with the sudden scent of incense, the ghost of a previous Mass, where the candles had no doubt been fully ablaze, sending prayers fluttering to Heaven on angels' wings. In an instant he saw the young girl who used to come to church—who still came—and he understood why she had come.

He drew her carefully into his arms. She made no move to reach out for him, but she did not run, and at length her breaths slowed to match his as his hands found their resting place on her back. He fell into the sense of being a candle flame, just a flicker of light, united to hers in an undying flare of hope, rising above the darkness in their jointly shared heart. They stood before Mary and her flowers and her altar, swallowed up in elongated, wordless solitude.

Sam felt as if nothing would ever happen again.

.

.

"I never asked you," she said.

Sam made a small noise of surprise.

"What you were."

"What I... oh, u-um." Her breath on his chest was warm, and her voice was different—the clear bell-like quality of it remained, along with the accent, but all sardonic traces of the master thief had departed. It was like listening to a different person. He was still holding her, and her eyes had not opened as she huddled close to him. He was aware again of a girl in his arms. "I'm not anything," he said finally. "I mean, I wasn't baptized or anything like that."

"But you came here anyway."

Sam nodded, his cheek moving against the feathered spread of her hair.

"I won't presume to understand what your problems are. Given your insane profession, they're probably without number. But if you're here to pray..."

She made a slow movement of her head towards the pews, and Sam took his cue to drop his arms. "Dean's... in trouble," he said, hesitating, knowing that if any hint of this got back to his brother—that he'd dumped even a suggestion of his predicament right into an antagonist's lap—he was a dead man walking. "I don't know how else to help him," he added, and it almost sounded like a rebuke to his own thoughts.

Bela made a clucking noise with her tongue and seated herself in the pew before the altar. She linked her hands together, staring pensively in front of her—but not as if she was ignoring what he'd said. Not knowing what else to do, Sam joined her.

"There's a saying," she said once he was sitting next to her. "A trite and stupid one, but there is a saying. Pray as if everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you. Augustine. Or Ignatius. Who knows." She turned an eye on him. "I imagine you've worked as hard as you could on your end. There probably isn't a way to help him, if that's the case. So all that leaves is the praying."

Sam stared at his hands. "Are you going to tell me it won't help?"

"I'm not going to tell you anything," she said. "What I think about it shouldn't be any concern of yours, anyway. No—I just think if you're going to do it, you ought to do it properly."

"What am I doing wrong?"

Bela closed her eyes, breathed out through her nose. "Let me guess," she said, and there was not a trace of amusement in her voice. "You were going to sit there and think righteous thoughts."

Sam shrugged.

"Yeah. That's no way to pray."

"No?"

"No."

She shook her head. "People don't even know what they want when they pray, or how to phrase it." Her voice was so confident that she almost sounded like she believed it. "They need intercessors—people who will send the prayers on, talk to God on their behalf."

Intercessors. That sounded good. Safe. Sam wasn't even sure God picked up his calls anymore; maybe that was why he prayed to angels half the time, telling them everything and nothing. "Who are these intercessors?" he asked.

Her smile was broad. It was beautiful. "Saints," she said. "And Mary." She nodded at the altar. "Here. I'll give you an easy one. But this isn't catechism class. I'm only going to say it once."

"Wait, hang on. Don't I need—like—a rosary, or something?"

"Wow, you really don't know anything. Hail Mary, full of grace..."

"Wait—wait—"

She showed him the prayer, and many others. There were prayers to saints and angels. There were prayers for health, safety, and the salvation of souls (Sam silently mouthed Dean's name where he was he supposed to state an intention). Bela raced through them all like they were her first language—even the Latin ones—while he stumbled along blindly, catching his feet on the railroad tracks of names like Aloysius and Emerentiana and Glaphyra.

But each name was a light, a spark of heat that might at any moment be borne up into a great pillar of flame, inviolable against the cold and the dark. A light that would guide his steps out of the slough of despond, free him from the cursed ground on which he'd been treading his whole life. He felt the heaviness lift a little more from his shoulders with each name he uttered. As he watched Bela's face seeking the eyes of Mary, her mouth saying the words, he prayed secretly that those same lights might govern her path like the constellations in the sky.

When he walked out of here, Sam knew, he would return to Ruby. He would go back to finding a way to rescue his brother—possibly by any means necessary. He wouldn't technically be any more saved than when he first walked in here. He knew that.

His heart still burned as he returned to the hotel that afternoon, finding the do not disturb sign still on the door—his older brother exactly as he'd left him, body splayed across the sheets and face shoved into a pillow. The warmth in him was the church, and it was Bela, and it was God. He regarded his brother for one moment—grateful for the wholeness of him, the fact that he was still here to watch sleep and laugh and eat apple pie and call Sam a bitch and drive them all over the country—remembering Bela's last words to him.

There. Now you have all the company of the church leaping to your aid. You're a naive idiot, but maybe— maybe—it will solve your problem.

Sam recognized a thank you when he heard it.

He waited at his brother's side until Dean stirred and came awake, his fingers unconsciously reaching for his own. Sam grasped them, rested them on their backs in his palm. He felt the slide of Bela's hair through his fingers, the shining expression of hope. They were not doomed; he understood that now. They were not any of them doomed to hell—not by circumstance, or upbringing, or even how they'd been born.

It was a simple truth, but it would be enough.