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He burns through the last dregs of power in his veins, reaching with his new otherworldly senses towards his goal, so difficult to contain, to bend, to direct in any orderly fashion. He's half afraid he's going to burn right through the scaffolding of his own flesh, that's how much it hurts, and threatens to tear him asunder, and then what will become of his brother? Who will be left to search for him and bring him back? But it works. Better than any demon blood he's ever tasted, more powerful than a thousand black holes wrought together - the essence of God's first sentient creation, the first draft of a project that would later become the human soul.
Sam guesses there are a few perks to being the Morningstar's haute couture prom suit. His flesh - apart maybe from Dean's, who was designed to be Michael's Sword - is probably the only human vessel able to contain the full power of an angel's stolen grace without immediately turning to dust. Funny, they always said Winchesters had thicker skin than most.
It was easy enough to summon the angel - a quick prayer to whomever was listening at the time, and sure enough, the thing, one of the rogues who had escaped Cas' rampage in Heaven two years ago when he'd been playing God, showed right up to exact some indirect retribution. And it was even simpler to capture it while it was busy spewing the usual pompous, self-righteous speech of every evil sucker who thinks he has the upper hand, then incapacitate it by setting it aflame in Holy Oil. Sam won't think of it as a 'he', won't let his mind recall the inhuman screech of agony, or the way its vessel's plain, middle aged face melted into gruesome shapes as it slid off its bones. Sam's seen worse, suffered worse under Satan's careful tutelage downstairs, and he would do it a dozen times over if it would lead him to the other half of his soul. Luckily, Sam had enough time to cut its throat open and capture the grace, before the creature dissolved, and he then drank down every last drop. And with it came the knowledge and the power to make things right.
Next time he opens his eyes, he's standing outside a dilapidated bungalow deep in the Louisiana swamps, 50 years back in time, and he can hear the night around him, see-taste-feel every creature crawling under the earth, skittering through the grass or fumbling in the leaves overhead. It's night, but he can smell the day that has just passed and the next one that will follow, and a hundred days and nights, each different and the same, that have been or will come to pass. But most of all he can feel them, the nest of vampires trespassing where they do not belong in search of mindless carnage. Already blood has been spilled, Sam can tell, innocent human blood, a woman's.
Her fanged, sunlight challenged paramour has no idea he's going to walk into a trap. He doesn't yet know that the woman for whom he has betrayed his own maker and abandoned his own kind is already dead. This is the one Sam's looking for, this lost soul caught between two worlds, trying so hard to change his destiny but instead sullying and damning every pure thing he's ever touched. It's him that will carry the message across, because, if getting in and out of Purgatory were that simple, Sam would have already gotten his brother back by himself.
He doesn't waste any time on introductions, he just steps into the vampire's path and touches his fingers to his forehead, implanting the instructions for the spell directly inside his brain. The vampire won't remember meeting him, but once he crosses over to the other side, he will be privy to one specific backdoor out of Purgatory, courtesy of olden times when the different spacetime dimensions were still linked, and God hadn't yet severed the gateways between Heaven, Purgatory, Earth and Hell. Some of these secret paths have been forgotten, others have been reopened throughout time, like most of the devil's gates to Hell, but this one can only be opened from the inside, by a righteous man who has spilled blood in Purgatory and embraced the primal spirit of its great hunting grounds. Ironic how that particular requirement always comes back to bite them in the ass.
After he makes sure the details are in place, Sam steps back and lets Benny Lafitte walk on, towards the house where in precisely ten minutes and seventeen seconds he will find death at the hands of his former clan.
Sam is still watching his silhouette disappear between the tall reeds of the swamp, when he feels the pull of his own timeline dragging him back, now that the last of the stolen grace has burned out of his body.
He rematerializes back in the present, next to the still smoldering corpse of his angel casualty, then passes out for a day and a night to allow his abused body to recuperate.
After that, he just climbs into his hotwired car and keeps driving, because if he stops, if he allows himself to rest, he might blink and wake up and realize that all of this has been a dream, that he hasn't actually put things to rights and that his brother is still lost to him, forever.
He hits a dog, and then he meets a girl. And then he stops, finally, because he won't be any good to Dean dead, when he comes back. He buries himself in flesh that doesn't taste quite right, swallowing her moans that aren't the right pitch, and for a time she stitches together the broken parts of his soul while he waits. He shouldn't need this, shouldn't feel so hollowed out by his brother's absence that he would turn like a sunflower towards the nearest source of warmth. At least this time he didn't fuck a demon, Dean would be proud. And even if he wakes up in the middle of the night with tears on his face from memories of strong, callused fingers taking him apart, he tells himself it won't be long, and drinks from the skin of the woman next to him enough warmth to let himself forget his pain, at least for a little while.
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