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“You’re praying to the wrong angel.” The woman Michael possesses is blonde and beautiful, and in the shape of her, Sam sees first Ruby as they’d first met, then Jess, then his mother.
The strain of containing an archangel has already begun to overcome her, and though Sam hates himself for it, he sees Ruby and Jess and his mother even more clearly in her dripping blood.
“I have a proposition for you,” Sam says. He is shaky and weak, in no form to defend against an archangel so soon after drying out in Bobby’s panic room. Hell, they’re still on Bobby’s property, and the only reason this isn’t the worst tactical decision Sam has ever made is because he’s set that bar pretty damn high.
“You?” Michael steps closer, until she is merely a half-step from Sam’s body. In this vessel, Michael must tip her entire head back to meet his eyes, and it is as unexpected as always to see how little some angels understand human concepts like power plays.
“I share his blood. His family line. It could be me.”
“You dare suggest that I take a tainted vessel? That rather than a righteous man, I accept something corrupted? Something less than human?” Thunder crashes, and ozone sparks in the air, stinging Sam’s nose and raising the hairs on the back of his neck. In the gathering clouds, lightning flashes back and forth across the heavens but does not strike the earth, not yet.
“I get it, okay?” Sam yells over the rising storm. “We can’t beat you all. Horsemen, Lucifer, archangels—there are too many of you trying to start the apocalypse. If you take me as a vessel—”
Michael’s punch hits like a freight train. Sam crashes into one of the junkyard cars, and all the glass left in it shatters. A window’s worth rains down upon him, and then Michael is hoisting him into the air and slamming him again into the door.
Sam coughs and wheezes, failing to escape Michael’s grip. There’s blood between his teeth, but Michael is too close for Sam to twist and spit it out. “It was you who replaced Isaac with the ram, right?” Sam wheezes. “Sometimes the planned sacrifice isn’t the right one.”
Michael digs her fingers into Sam’s shoulder, throwing him forward. “Using God’s word to lie is the worst form of blasphemy,” she spits. “If you are so intent to act like my brother, then you will crawl on your belly as he does.”
The force shoving Sam into the dust hardly allows him to breathe. He curls one hand to a fist, blood dribbling from his lips. Michael towers above, beautiful, unreachable, and bleeding big drops into the dirt. The sun casts a fiery halo around her broken vessel.
“If you take me, Lucifer can’t have me. He doesn’t have another option, not like you do. All you need to do to win is take me off the board. No fighting necessary.”
Michael cups Sam’s jaw, and the pressure lightens. He allows her to guide him onto his knees. Michael is too warm, burning like the metal of the cars on this terrible summer afternoon, distorting the shape of the air nearest her. The blood on Sam’s face stiffens and cracks.
“You are so like my brother, Sam Winchester,” Michael says. She strokes his face, her small, soft palm grazing his stubble. “You are wasting your time. I will not turn my back on my father’s plan. Not for you.”
“I might be like Lucifer, but Dean isn’t like you. He’ll never say yes. He’ll never give up on me.”
Michael’s thumb brushes his cheekbone, and her eyes bore into him, and maybe she’s right that Sam is also the great deceiver, because even though he’s thoroughly lost Dean’s trust, even though he’s lying, Michael believes him. She grips his hair but not hard, not to hurt. “And yet you betray him anyway, calling me here like this.”
“I have to protect him. I have to end this.”
"You will. You will say yes and so will your brother, as is your destiny," Michael says. She stands. "Do not call on me again."
“Wait!” Sam begs. He’s on his knees before a beautiful, burning, bleeding woman, and maybe the angels have gotten something right about destiny, because Sam’s been here before. Helpless in his crib beneath his mom. Helpless in his bed beneath Jess. Or even worse: more helpless than he’s ever been and not even aware of it, beneath Ruby, beside Lilith.
Impossibly, Michael obeys. She turns back to face him, dark and unknowable with the falling sun behind her. “This is a bad idea, Sam. If I were to take you as a vessel, Lucifer would approach Dean. You’d have the same situation.”
“What?” That can’t be right. Their family line was fit for Michael, not Lucifer. It’s only Sam who can be Lucifer’s vessel, only Sam who is tarnished and stained and corrupted enough to fit the devil beneath his skin. “Dean doesn’t have demon blood in him.”
“Yes,” Michael says. “It would destroy him to host Lucifer, even if his body could last some time. The same way hosting me would destroy you. You may think I am a monster, Sam Winchester, but I would not wish that fate on either of you, and I will not be the one to cause it.”
In the space of a blink, Michael is gone.