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You’re standing on the precipice—
You’re on the floor of a dirty hotel room with the man destined to kill you, and he pops open a bottle of beer and passes it to you before doing the same for his brother. And the taste is bitter, and the company is bad. You’re on the floor with the man who is going to kill you, and you can’t help but love him just a little for it. Your insurance. Your contingency plan. It’s nice to know how it ends.
You stop trying to kill reapers. You mourn your son. You come to terms with the fact that, even when you die your final death, he won’t be there. He’ll be in the Empty, and you’ll be (almost definitely) in Hell. And you hate him, and you love him, and you can’t fit it all inside you at once. Bits of it spill out, overflow and leak into your daily life.
You’ve outlived your child, twice now. (And outkilled him. And died more times than him. And plotted to destroy him. And loved him, and grieved him, with your ugly little hollowed-out soul.)
You’ve heard too many times (mostly from the Winchesters) how destiny can trap you, can make you feel like a rat running a maze. The boys hate the idea that everything is predetermined.
Not you. For you, fate gives you freedom. Knowing the way you’ll die makes you invincible. Lucifer will return, you know this, and the weight of it can leave you spiraling. But he won’t kill you. Whatever else he does, whatever he threatens, you won’t be killed by the Devil again. Only one man can lay a finger on you.
(And maybe that’s a poor choice of words, you think, as Gabriel pushes you back against the bookcase and pushes up the hem of your dress, his hands skating across your bare thighs with ease, skillful as he moves higher, moves in closer. It’s solace and it’s smut, and the both of you revel in it.)
You could leave.
Lucifer’s vanished through the rift and into the other world. You have no more Archangel grace, no way of holding the rift open indefinitely. Most likely, it will seal shut, trapping Lucifer and Gabriel and Dean and Sam on the other side. But you’d be here, in this world, safe and free. And alone.
“Bollocks.”
As it turns out, the Winchesters don’t need spells or sigils to trap you. They’ve got you stuck here, stuck like a seed wedged between teeth. So you stay. You do whatever it takes to keep the rift open.
You save a lot of people.
Whoop-de-fucking-do.
You’re in a car with a beautiful girl, and so far you like her a lot better than your world’s version. The Charlie Bradbury who came through the rift is hardened and cold, fierce and solitary in a way the one you briefly knew never was.
You’ve both done terrible things to save your own skins, and it’s something she can talk to you about that she can’t share with the strangers who see her as a sister. You talk about war, and selfishness, and falling in love. You teach her some minor hexes. She shoplifts a bottle of wine from a Kroger and presses you against the wall of your hotel room, all tongue and teeth and fire.
You’re standing on the precipice—
Charlie is wild and vibrant and morally gray, and maybe everything you’ve been needing. You feel a little like a mentor to her, at least when it comes to witchcraft and life experience. But she is so war-worn, so weathered, that she ends up teaching you a few things herself.
Things like how to move on after you’ve lost someone you cared about. Things like how to be hurt, in all the deepest and most cutting and most intimate ways, and keep waking up in the morning and living your life.
Sam Winchester calls to tell you that Lucifer is dead. And you expect it to be a relief, you expect a weight to be lifted from your shoulders.
But what he said that day in the car, about always feeling helpless— it holds true. Lucifer is dead, everything that he is and was rotting in the Empty. (With your son. You try not to think about that.) He is dead. But his actions, everything he did, they live on.
They live on in your skin and in your skull. They live on in the way you get twitchy around the stupidest things, mall Santas and firepits and certain colognes. They live on in the way Sam Winchester flinches at certain noises and can’t eat certain foods.
(He’s always so quick to follow your orders, your drink requests. And you wonder if it’s entirely to do with you, or if it’s because he knows what disobedience can lead to. You will never hurt him. He will someday kill you.)
You’re standing on the precipice—
Charlie sits in the living room of her new apartment and her new life. You share a pizza and she says she thinks she’s falling in love. (Not with you. That would be absurd. Of course not with you.) And she tells you the sex has to stop, probably, but the hijinks can continue, probably.
It’s a better deal than you’ve been offered in awhile.
“I’ll live either way,” you tell Michael, gloating, all bravado and bravery you can’t actually feel. Like your fingers and toes are numb. (If you tore out your own heart, right now, right this second, would he still be able to inhabit your body?) You are fated to be killed by Sam Winchester. This leftover from a forgotten world can’t do shit to you.
(He can tear apart everyone else in this bunker, though. You both know it. And if you say yes, if you let him in, maybe you can do some good. Maybe you can bargain with another Archangel. Stop him from destroying everyone in your orbit.)
It’s a lie, because of course it is. And you’re stupid. And you’re weak. And Lucifer’s brother uses your body to obliterate every Hunter in the place, sparing the Winchesters only because he wants to linger over their destruction.
Jack is a good boy. His power scares you, sometimes, but he is a good kid. You know this. You’re proud of him, relieved, when he draws Michael’s grace from you and kills him dead. (You only wish that maybe he’d killed the vessel as well. But that’s not in the cards, is it?)
“It wasn’t your fault.”
This isn’t the first or even the second time Sam’s said this to you. It doesn’t matter. You said yes, and now there’s blood on your hands. “You could kill me now, if you like,” you tell him, tilting your head back as if he might jam a knife in your throat. People are dead. You said yes to Michael, and now people are dead.
And you still can’t even feel it, not really. Like there’s a layer of gauze between you and the feelings you’re frightened to feel.
“It might actually help you to talk to Dean,” Sam says, desperate to help you because he can’t do a damn thing for all the dead bodies at the Bunker. The people who looked up to him, and trusted him, and died because of him. And because of you. “He was possessed by Michael for so many months. He… he gets it.”
Sam’s broad hand on your shoulder. His brow scrunched in sympathy. You want to curse him, to destroy him, to bury every bit of pity anyone on Earth has ever felt for the wretched creature that you are. You let Sam Winchester hug you. Your heart is a blistered piece of coal in your chest.
“I can’t...” Sam says, biting his lip as he works up to something. “When I was possessed by Lucifer. He made me hurt people. Hurt Dean. He made me kill people I barely knew, and he made me kill the people I loved.”
“Bastard,” you say, like that’s going to help anything.
Sam Winchester tells you about that day in Stull Cemetery. He tells you about the grip that the Devil had on him, and how he fought it. How he seized control of his body, how he tossed down the rings and recited the incantation and cast himself and the Devil and his half-brother and Michael all down into the Cage.
(You wonder what he felt more, standing above that hole into Hell— fear or relief. You don’t ask him.)
You can’t bring Mary back. You know you can’t bring Mary back, not all of her, anyway. Jack won’t listen. He’s desperate and running on the fumes of his soul, bare traces that cling stubbornly to his very being.
You’re trying to stall, trying to buy time so that Sam and Dean and Castiel can track down their boy and talk some sense into him.
From what you can glean, Jack went off on Lucifer’s old vessel. Boiled him where he stood. And Mary was scared, and she let it show. And Jack killed her for it.
You want to mourn Mary Winchester. You want to comfort Jack. You want to help Sam and Dean and Castiel.
But the only thing in you is cold relief that Lucifer has not returned from the dead.
When the boys need help, you come running. It’s embarrassing, but it’s better than being alone. The doors to Hell have burst open, and souls are streaming out. (You find yourself thinking about how enraged Fergus would be.)
And when everything falls apart, Sam Winchester is beside you with his brother’s flask and his compassion and his grief. He is beside you to cushion to fear and helplessness and anger trembling within you.
More embarrassing, you keep on thinking of your son. The ways in which Hell belonged to him. The ways in which you belong to Hell. The dead walk the Earth, and somebody has to do something about it.
You arrive at a decision stupid enough to be worthy of a Winchester.
You are dying with a million regrets, and top of the list is that you haven’t had Arthur Ketch to yourself for a weekend.
“No,” Sam argues. “Screw the books,” Sam argues. You know this— Samuel and his brother see fate as a ball and chain around their necks. To them prophecy is just God laughing at them.
You’ve never seen eye to eye with them on this point. Now perhaps you never will. “I believe in prophecy,” you tell him, gripping his hand around the hilt of the blade pointed at your own abdomen. “I believe in magic.”
Strange as it sounds, knowing this moment was coming is the only thing that’s kept you going these past couple of years. The knowledge that no other being can hurt you this permanently, that you will keep going and going until Sam Winchester pulls the plug.
This is the greatest betrayal and the greatest gift you have ever been given.
Samuel cries, and hugs you, and pushes the blade in.
Souls flood into you through the wound in your stomach. You totter across the graveyard, hands and feet growing numb as blood seeps out, staining your dress.
You’re standing on the precipice.
You’re standing on the precipice. Sulfurous air blows up from the hole to Hell, blowing your hair out of your face. You look back at the boys, think about Castiel’s hands snapping your neck, think about Sam shoving the knife in with tears in his eyes. (If you ever have a chance to do all this again, perhaps Dean will get a turn.)
“Goodbye, boys,” you tell them, and you’re standing on the precipice until you aren’t anymore. You hold your arms out and when you fall, you think about Sam Winchester in another cemetery, casting himself into the Pit for the people he loves.
(Your last breath tastes of smoke and rotten eggs, and your soul sloughs off toward your next new adventure.)