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Sam wakes up.
He jolts upright with a gasp, his eyes flying open, some caricature of emerging from sleep. Something is cold. Everything is cold. The air settles on his skin in frigid layers of mist, and the ground beneath him would feel downright frozen if the rain hadn’t lent it a gentle muddy give. His bare arms are already mapped in goosebumps, but that doesn’t compare to the chill weighing him down from the inside. Blood from demons and bones made of ice, he thinks hysterically, should’ve died human when I had the chance. But his first death at Cold Oak hadn’t worked out, and anyway it doesn’t look like this one has either.
He briefly considers the possibility that he’s in Hell, or maybe even whatever Purgatory might be out there; but he knows Hell, if only through Dean’s nightmares and half-hearted attempts at explanation when Sam has pushed him for it, and he knows this isn’t it.
He reaches to touch his forehead. His skin is whole. Cold, like a dead body, but Sam’s felt like a walking corpse for the last three years of his life, and it’s never stopped him from being alive before. He can feel his heart beating, buh-bump in his chest and pulse points. And dead bodies don’t get goosebumps, not outside of rigor mortis anyway.
He’s so cold.
Looking around reveals more mist, more rain, more mud. He stands, doesn’t bother an attempt at brushing the dirt from his clothes or hair, however gross it makes him feel. There’s no phone in his pocket–he’d last set it on the motel nightstand in place of the gun–so with nothing else to do, he starts to walk.
It doesn’t take long to figure out where he is. Here, a worn wooden fence sagging into the mist-drenched ground. There, old bones of buildings abandoned long ago, much better at playing corpse than he’s ever succeeded at. Here, a silent town bell engraved with an oak tree; there, a water tower where a dead girl hung. He can almost see the remnants of the noose through the mist.
Sam briefly wonders if he’s traveled back in time. It’s possible. Time isn’t nearly as impenetrable as he used to think, the angels taught him that much.
I’m an angel–
He turns around, letting out a breath of air with the water tower watching from behind. He starts to walk again. It’ll be a long hike, but he’s sure that John’s had Dean and him run for longer distances than that between Cold Oak and the nearest payphone. He’ll call Bobby and ask for a pick-up, or just look for a bus station and hope the next route goes vaguely southeast. Either way, Sam will make it back to Oklahoma. He’ll hope the motel hasn’t lent out his room in lieu of his presence. He’ll grab his stuff if it’s still there, stop by a gas station if it’s not. He’ll find a new motel, maybe in Garber again, maybe not, just as long as it doesn’t ask too many questions. And then he’ll try again.
Sam wakes up.
Ironically, the part of all of this that’s hardest to believe is that it is yet again raining in the middle of Wyoming. He pushes himself up to his elbows, trying and failing to blink his wet bangs out of his eyes–he’d use his hands but they’re still shaking from tying the knot. What can he say? The water tower had been an inspiration.
I’m an angel, Sam.
His neck is smooth.
It had taken him longer than he’d thought to find his way out last time. The mud and rain had weighed him down, and the chill in his limbs hadn’t gone away after even an hour of walking, nor the several it took him to get to the nearest living town. Now, the sun’s already nearly set in the sky, and the darkening of the world around him is more frightening than it should be.
The gloom of the ghost town isn’t helping. Even as he thinks it, he catches movement from the top of the water tower that makes him catch a startled breath–a group of black-billed magpies has taken silently into the air, disappearing as one beneath the heady shadow of dusk. There’s an old superstition about magpies. Something about the Devil. There was a magpie on the cross of Jesus when he was crucified, Sam thinks, and something about blood. Or was it tears? He starts, again, to walk.
Last time, he’d found his way to a bus station. This time around, he’d had the wary foresight to leave his phone in his pocket before stepping onto the chair. He gives himself an hour and a half to get as far from Cold Oak as he can before he gives Bobby a call.
“I haven’t heard from you in weeks,” Bobby growls. “And now you’re in goddamn Wyoming?”
Sam is tired. Cold and tired and, really, he wouldn’t have minded Hell so much. “I think I’m close to a road. Could you–”
“You think you’re close to–yeah. Yeah, son, I’ll get ya. But you’re gonna have to give me more to go off of than that.”
That’s okay. He can do that without mentioning Cold Oak. He can even probably survive a car ride with Bobby once he gets found. All he has to do to avoid a complete breakdown is avoid eye contact with the man. And he doesn’t have a choice, he needs to get back to–well. Anywhere that’s not here, really, as long as it gives him access to gasoline.
Sam wakes up.
It’s taken him three deaths to realize just how he’s been waking up. He’s straight on his back, his legs unbent, with his arms stretched out flat to either side of him. Jesus probably wasn’t this cold on the cross, was he? Goddamn, he doesn’t even get a jacket. He’d had one on, but it had probably burned up right before he did the same. He doesn’t really remember the details.
He doesn’t even remember the heat.
Sam’s ready to cross this method off his mental list of to-try’s, but as he picks himself up from the ground and starts to walk yet again–honestly, the hiking’s getting old–the fire still clinging to the corners of his mind triggers a childhood memory of a book from Bobby’s study. One of the older tomes he hadn’t technically been allowed to read yet, with images of souls choking in flames every other page. Hell’s fire burns outside the passage of time, the book had read, for its sole purpose is not to burn at all but to eternally cleanse. Only the Holy Fires of Hell could burn for so long and so fiercely. To exorcise a Demon back to Hell is to condemn it to those Holy Fires–he can’t remember everything, the words are all jumbled in his head, he’d only been eleven at the time and Bobby had snapped it shut as soon as he’d caught him reading it. If it had detailed exactly what holy fire was, he never got the chance to find out. But to be cleansed like that–to burn in flames that can’t be disturbed by demons–
I’m an angel, Sam.
It takes him half the day to sludge his way back to civilization. It takes him three weeks, five summoning rituals, two witch hunts, and a fair amount of his own blood to learn about holy oil and then get his hands on it. It takes him seventy-one minutes to work up the nerve to light the match.
He thinks he might have been crying by the time it finally lit.
He doesn’t really remember the details.
“You’ve been passing through here an awful lot, Sam. Most people only die once, you know.”
Sam wakes up.
Maybe simpler is better. Occam’s razor in reverse, or something like that. His–nonconsensually borrowed car should still be in Garber. The trunk is locked with a Master and a hasty hex bag to boot, so even if the car’s been towed, the knives should still be there.
Maybe a bit crude, but if it’s good enough for Julius Caesar.
“I do believe it’s time we properly met.” Someone is peering at Sam over slender, folded fingers. Its body is a facade but its eyes are warm.
“Who are you?” Sam manages, with all the false bravado of a desperate Winchester.
“I’d think you would know,” it says mildly, “considering what you’ve been aiming for.”
There is a Heaven; there is a Hell. There is even, somewhere, a God. Sam had never once considered there might be a Death.
“How–” He pauses, and then reconsiders. The questions he most dearly wants to ask are the ones he’s least likely to get answers to, so he settles. “Why do I keep waking up in Cold Oak?”
“Ah,” Death says. “Interesting topic. Something to do with destiny, I think. You have quite the fate woven for you, Sam Winchester, but it runs both ways, you know. Those pesky golden threads that bind you to the Devil in your future will also tug you back when given the chance. One’s first death is not so easily forgotten. Not by the body, not by the soul, not by the universe, and certainly not by the place where it happened.”
“The universe?” Sam feels stupid for asking. It’s just that a sentient universe isn’t a very Christian concept.
“Another name for it might be, well, me." It taps the fingers of one hand contemplatively against the other, then rests them still. "Oh dear,” it continues dryly, “it looks like our time is up.”
"What–”
“By the way, Sam, your brother will be looking for you,” says Death, as something grasps him with freezing hands–one tight around his wrist, one splayed on his chest—and pulls , and carries him away from that place of Death, and twists and shoves until he settles into a body laid out in false crucifixion, and whispers in his ear, “I thought you’d appreciate the irony of the pose. Say hello to my brother’s vessel for me, darling.” And then he is alone and torn apart and put back together again and pondering the fact that the first time he’d felt warm in weeks was when he was dead.
I’m an angel, Sam. I’ll just bring you back.
The rain falls in gentle droplets. The mist clings to the muddy ground. In an in-between place and everywhere and nowhere at all, the thing that is Death muses on destiny; in a cheap motel in the northwest corner of Missouri, Dean Winchester jolts out of a future that scares him more than anything he’s seen in years. And eight hundred and nineteen miles away in the rain-sodden ghost town of Cold Oak, Wyoming–
Sam wakes up.