Warnings at the end
—Interlude—
He stumbles when the knife is jerked out of his hand, and a slap to his ass with something hard does the rest; he hits the church floor hard enough to rattle his teeth. Rolling over on the worn carpet, he looks up to see Amieyl standing in front of the half-open doors, then follows her appalled gaze across the bloody footsteps staining the gleaming wood to himself.
He’s covered in blood, scraps of flesh and entrails clinging to his too-tight shirt, trapped under his fingernails, screaming filling his ears, Jesus, he can taste…
“Alistair,” he whispers in horror. Of course. Of course.
“Oh no you don’t,” she snarls, dropping to her knees and planting a palm in the middle of the gore on his chest. “No, he’s not you, not now and never again. That’s past; you carry it, no help for it, but you don’t wear it as your skin. It’s not yours anymore; it’s too small now, it doesn’t fit.” She throws the knife toward the doors, the sharp blade burying itself to the hilt. To his horror, he sees her clean wool dress is splattered with blood, dripping with it. “Take it off!”
The collar of his shirt tightens, strangling the words filling his mouth, chest tight and aching for air it can’t get. “I’m—”
“Past tense, Dean Winchester, and I don’t have time for this.” Reaching down, she pulls him upright, grabbing his shirt collar, stiff with blood, intestines and slivers of liver sliding obscenely wetly between her fingers, and rips down the front, buttons flying everywhere. “Got a thousand miles to go and your heart just stopped. Stop fucking with me and get this done!”
Numb, he reaches down, wincing at the slick feeling of shredded organs against the pads of his fingers, bone shrapnel sharp as a new blade tearing at his skin as strips of fresh skin litter the floor around them, still dripping blood, and he remembers familiar blue eyes with a start of horror.
“Cas. That was Cas.” He put his best friend on the rack; you don’t come back from that. He never left. “Stop, no, I’m—”
“Shut up! Could I get some help here?” she asks desperately, voice shaking as she grabs for his head before he can pull away, fingers sticky as they press into his cheeks like she wants to leave fingerprints behind. “I’ll help you, any way I can,” she whispers, staring into his eyes. “But first, you gotta want to save yourself. If you can’t believe in yourself, believe in me, and I can believe enough for us both. Now help me. Take. It. Off.”
Slowly, he reaches to pull off his shirt; it’s like being skinned alive, peeling away with a sickening tearing he can feel in every nerve. To his surprise, another pair of hands join in, ripping away the remains of the overshirt in bloody strips and tossing them aside before going for the t-shirt, manicured nails scraping into his chest as she rips it from collar to hem with a shock like being slammed headfirst into the floor.
He gasps a breath, a burst of heat crackling along the surface of his skin, and the tightness in his chest eases by increments as he finally shrugs out of the scraps that she gathers in delicate, olive-skinned hands before tossing away. He only has a moment to take her in—black hair coiled away from her face and held with jeweled clips, olive skin flushed, full mouth a tight, thin line, dark robes and glittering rings splattered with blood…and surveying him with the most skeptical look he’s ever seen on anyone’s face in his life.
“I thought,” she says before reaching for his belt and ripping it through all the belt loops in a single effortless tug, “that he’d be taller.”
Before he can process that—or stop her—sharp nails scrape against his stomach as she grasps the waist of his jeans and takes them, boxers, socks, and shoes in a single go, throwing the entire blood- and gore-soaked mess on the floor behind him before subjecting him to a critical survey, head to foot.
Belatedly, he realizes that he’s naked. In front of her and Amieyl. In a church.
“Uh.” Clothes would be good here. Knowing where to get them would be great. “Maybe if I stand up?”
“Maybe,” she answers dubiously, looking over his shoulder. Twisting around, he watches incredulously as Amieyl beats the pile of ruined clothes with her crook as if they personally insulted her and all her friends. It seems to be working; when she steps back with a viciously satisfied look, there’s nothing left but a faint stain on the wooden floor and even that’s vanishing into nothing.
Returning, she stops at his hip and stares down at him resentfully, as if he’s doing this on purpose to make her (after?) life more difficult.
“Standing up helps, yeah.” Amieyl extends him a hand, not bothered by the entire naked thing at all, and God, he wishes that was true for him.
“On your feet, soldier. You just got a fuck of a hit; the beat’s regular again. Good job.”
“I didn’t…” He stares up at her, dress once again pristine, then at the place where the clothes were piled, the peaceful church around them, and puts it all together. “You’re kidding. You’re dreamwalking me again?”
“You keep creating your own hell,” she answers irritably. “Can’t fight when you’re trying to torture yourself to death every time you close your eyes.” She snaps her fingers, making him jump and look worriedly for that goddamn crook. “Stand up, Dean Winchester. You kneel to no one and nothing. That was your right from the moment of your birth, and you took it back. All of it.”
Licking his lips—no blood this time—he tentatively reaches for her hand, startled to see his skin is perfectly clean, a worn, comfortable flannel overshirt hugging his arm. She jerks him up, looking briefly satisfied at his stumble before pulling him into a hug that squeezes all the breath out of him.
“Don’t,” she whispers in his ear, voice shaking, “make it so hard, okay?”
“Sorry,” he whispers back, squeezing her before she lets him go, wiping her eyes impatiently. “I’ll do better.”
“It’s like you think miracles are easy,” she mutters before her eyes flicker to the other woman, and something in her expression tells him she’s more than just surprised. “Thanks, Lia.”
Lia doesn’t move, clean, manicured hands resting neatly in her lap. Wide, thick-lashed brown eyes shift from Amieyl to him, and he can feel it like a touch, cool and impersonal, almost hostile but not quite. “You called for help. I answered.”
“Yeah, I did.” Amieyl crosses the space between them and extends her hand, mouth curving in a small smile. “Thank you.”
“He is better standing,” Lia says reluctantly after spearing Dean with another long look. Gathering up her skirts, she accepts Amieyl’s assistance, straightening her immaculate dress meticulously around her once she’s standing. “You’re welcome, of course.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Dean tells her belatedly at the pointedness of her response. This feels like the wrong time to ask what the hell is going on. “Uh—”
“It’s not as if I had anything better to do,” she continues, ignoring him. “I’ve been in the grove for a very long time.”
Amieyl’s eyes widen, and Dean blinks as the ghosts of trees closing around them, a suggestion of grass beneath their feet. Looking up, he studies the night sky superimposed over the ceiling between outlines of branches and hints of leaves, then looks at Lia again.
“I keep watching him die,” she says, staring at some spot over his shoulder. “It doesn’t change, no matter how much I want it to. I’ve never been that strong.”
Turning around, Dean sees a dark-haired man kneeling in a nearby clearing, a torn, filthy toga draped over a plain tunic, a knife clutched in one hand. Faintly, he hears the echoing sound of voices, lots of them, and while they don’t sound friendly—context says they’re really, really not—they never seem to get any closer.
“We can’t do anything,” Amieyl murmurs, coming up beside him, fingers twining reassuringly through his. “This was, is, and will always be. All we can do is bear witness.”
Another man emerges from among the trunks like he just materialized, crossing to kneel beside the first man. Slighter, with long black hair and brown eyes, he waits for the first man to lift his head. Dean blinks, frowning at the incongruity; his tunic is impossibly pristine, the white hyperreal in the gloom.
“How long until they find me?” the first man asks roughly.
“They won’t, not until it’s over. Take all the time you need.”
The first man’s head jerks up in surprise, searching the second guy’s expressionless face suspiciously before his eyes widen. “You aren’t…who are you?”
“This grove is sacred to the Furies,” Lia says with the man, voice echoing eerily. Dean feels the hairs on the back of his neck rising at the quality of the sound, not quite something he can just hear. “We have privileges here. Diana of the Grove heard your supplication in her temple, and I carry her answer. The punishment you requested is just; it will be done. It has begun, and it cannot, will not be stopped. All it needs is time.”
The first man licks his lips. “You’re certain?”
“I have seen it,” Lia and the man answer tonelessly. “Does that bring you peace, Gaius?”
“Justice is rarely peaceful; it simply is,” he whispers, sitting back on his heels in the thick grass, exhaustion written into every line of his body. “Thank you for your message.”
A familiar expression crosses the second man’s face, and Dean bites his lip against a surprised grin; glancing at Amieyl, he sees her mouth twitch as well. Interesting. “You are welcome.”
“How long have you been watching this?” Dean asks Lia.
“Always.” Lia swallows, unhealed grief twisting her features into a caricature of ugliness, hatred and loss so strong even Dean can feel it. “Forever. This is all I ever see.”
Still kneeling in the grass, Gaius studies the other man for a long moment. “I can’t imagine Diana employing you to carry out her will, much less you deigning to obey her.” The other man blinks slowly, and Dean didn’t realize how much progress he made by the time they met if right now this is his best interpretation of ‘startled’. “You think my mother was so lax in my education that I wouldn’t recognize a Messenger when one stoops to manifest before me?”
From the corner of his eye, he sees Lia flinch. Oh.
He hesitates. “As I’ve met her, I shouldn’t.”
Gaius’ eyes soften. “You know my mother?” The second man nods shortly. “Why are you truly here, Messenger?”
“My superior assigned me to assist the Pantheon in this matter,” he answers obliquely. “My orders were to help them in any way they deemed necessary.”
Gaius raises a skeptical eyebrow, and Dean can see an echo of Lia in his expression. “Really.”
“She believes—humanity is an idea,” he says slowly, almost as if he’s testing an idea he doesn’t entirely understand. “It’s not static, however; it changes as it defines itself. It is easy to forget our service is to all that it is and will ever be, not to what we—believe—it should always be.”
Dean raises an eyebrow. “His superior was playing a hell of a long game.”
“You know her?” Amieyl murmurs close to his ear.
“Yeah, I did.” He glances at Amieyl, feeling his cheeks flushing at her knowing look. “She was…like that.”
“A lesson,” Gaius says in satisfaction, beginning to smile, and Dean thinks he may get why this guy is getting this kind of personal attention. Despite the tension, suffering drawing sharp lines on a handsome face, easy humor is reflected in the curve of his mouth, the warmth in the wide brown eyes, and even in the darkened grove, he’s bright right now. He could light the world if he wanted to. “You don’t believe it, do you?”
Not surprisingly, the question is ignored, though Dean suspects it’s because he’s not sure how to answer.
“How do you know my mother?” Gaius asks finally.
“She summoned me by name this night and instructed me in my first duty—”
“That’s something she’d do,” Gaius murmurs ruefully, pride and affection softening his expression further. “Surprised you, did she?”
The other man hesitates, looking at Gaius directly with a heart-stopping tilt of his head. “After meeting her, not at all.”
Gaius’s smile fades into uncertainty. “My mother: after this, will she…”
“Her journey is longer than yours,” he answers, almost gently. “She will endure, and at her death her name will define the word for generations to come.”
Gaius nods shortly, and Dean watches his eyes flicker in the direction of those distant voices.
“That is the worst of us,” he breathes, expression hardening into determination. Turning to face the man beside him, he lifts his chin.
“Qafsiel, Kaziel, Cassiel, Messenger, by whatever name, with whatever rite, in whatever appearance it is right to invoke thee, I entreat you to grant me a single request.”
“If it is within my power to grant—” Gaius abruptly reaches out, grasping his wrist, and he stills, eyes widening incrementally at the determined clasp. “What would you ask of me?”
“What you will see tonight is the worst of us,” Gaius says urgently, brown eyes boring into the other man’s. “Promise me you will never believe that’s all that we are. We’re so much more.”
Rising to his feet, Gaius turns toward the sound of the voices. The other man follows him, but his eyes never leave Gaius, and Dean’s mouth goes dry at the sudden sweep of darkness behind him, an impression of something vast stretching through the grove. Almost tentatively, he rests a hand on Gaius’ shoulder, and Gaius looks at him in surprise.
“You are unique,” he says slowly. “What you are will never be again.”
“What I am is what we all are,” Gaius answers firmly. “The worst of us can be the best; we all deserve the chance to discover that, even if we fall short.”
“What I see tonight is the best of you.”
“There will be better,” Gaius says. “If you doubt me, it’s easy to rectify; grant my request and you’ll see it for yourself.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
Gaius grins at him, and that feeling of brightness is nearly overwhelming; it’s like he’s standing in the sun. “I’m not.”
The other man studies him for a long time, head tilt and everything. “Your request is granted,” he says finally, and not entirely reluctantly. Dean sends a quiet, profound thank-you to wherever his superior is these days. “I won’t forget.”
Gaius lets out a breath, shoulders loosening; it’s not just anyone who in the moments before his own death is worrying about how an angel sees the entire human race. “Thank you, Messenger.”
“Castiel.” Gaius’s eyes widen at the offered name. “My true name is Castiel.”
“Thank you, Castiel.” Turning back to the sound of voices, he takes a deep breath. “It’s time to end this.”
Cas follows Gaius’s gaze, and abruptly, the muffled voices grow louder, more raucous, screams of terror interspersed with satisfied shouts, the sound of metal screaming on metal. The worst of humanity, Dean thinks sickly, but Gaius straightens, mouth curving in an unexpected smile, brown eyes lit from within with something brighter than mere light. Abruptly, the shadows of wings sweep through the grove again, striping the trees in something between light and darkness and controlled chaos before closing around Gaius, protective and comforting.
“It is my privilege to be with you,” Cas says, and Dean feels himself matching Gaius’s smile. Turning his head toward the growing roar, the dark eyes narrow, vengeance peppered with righteousness, before turning back to Gaius. “Are you ready?”
“Let them come,” Gaius murmurs as he raises the dagger, the point resting against his chest as he faces Castiel. “I’m ready now.”
Cas hesitates, then steps closer and reaches up, two fingers a breath from his forehead, and abruptly, his eyes are the blue of the ocean, infinite. “Only men die, Gaius,” he says suddenly, looking surprised at himself. “You made yourself an idea, and that will never die, not as long as men exist. It will spread farther than you can imagine now.”
“You looked?” Gaius’s smile widens at Cas’s jerky nod, a faint hint of smugness playing along the edges. “Not wrong yet.”
“Apparently not.” Slowly, almost hesitantly, Cas smiles back, small and awkward, but there. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll be with you.”
Gaius is still smiling as he slides the blade into his heart, as Cas’s fingers touch his forehead. “I’m not.”
The grove fades back into the walls of the church, the two men slowly vanishing before their eyes, along with that sense of brightness and warmth and exultation.
“I taught him that,” Lia whispers, a ripple of bitterness echoing through her voice. “Don’t forget in the worst of humanity that there is also the best of it, and all that exists between. He believed that even then.”
“That was what he was. He couldn’t be less than that.” Amieyl takes a hesitant step toward her. “He built his life around it.”
“They killed him for it, like his brother before him,” she whispers. “Hunted him like a dog for what he was. How could something so bright end as easily as gutting a candle? Tell me how I was supposed to believe in anything after that? Crawling on the surface of the world like maggots, petty, brutish, small, worthless…what value could there be in them when they took so much from me? How could I stand to be one of them?”
Dean stills as the brown eyes turn on him, frozen vastness, a coldness that goes on forever. It’s all he can do not to shiver faced with it; Castiel looked a little like that when he told him to kneel. Love and worship, all for his greater glory, but he never hated them for it, not like she does.
“They made offerings in my name; I took them,” she continues, revulsion filling her voice. “Their supplication, I heard it; their worship, I accepted it. I endured, to see them destroyed, until nothing of them was left but a memory. My burnt offering was all that I was; it was nothing.”
“It wasn’t,” Dean breathes, mouth dry. “It was everything.”
She raises her chin. “I don’t remember.”
“You wouldn’t watch that if you didn’t,” Amieyl says, and Lia turns on her. “You remember enough to know what you gave up wasn’t worth what you lost.”
“I remember grief,” Lia says savagely. “I remember rage, for what they did to my sons, their bodies defiled, their work destroyed, their names disgraced. You tell me—”
“Starts at birth, ends in death, always does,” Amieyl answers. “But in between a life was lived, and they were bright, Lia. They changed the world.”
“You think that means something?” Lia demands. “That it makes it worth it?”
“Do you think that the grove was all there was?” Amieyl demands, moving toward her, and to his surprise, Lia takes a step back. “There was more, Lia; you were more. You lived a lifetime before and after, but you made this,” she points at the place Gaius died, “all you are and would ever be. And for what? Revenge? It wasn’t yours to give!”
“You don’t understand—”
“Do you even remember how much you loved them?”
Lia sucks in a breath, color draining from her face.
“That’s what you gave up,” Amieyl says. “Your burnt offering was everything.”
“I don’t remember anymore,” Lia whispers, and this time, there’s pain in it. “You don’t get that back.”
“No, you don’t. You gotta take it,” Dean answers her, and she looks at him in surprise. “So do it. Try again, see if this time, you can get it right.” He thinks he knows how to do this. “A war’s going on, in case you didn’t notice.”
“I noticed,” she says reluctantly.
All right, then. “You know the stakes.”
“You don’t even know the stakes, Dean Winchester.” There’s a brief flare of something dark in her eyes, like she’s watching humanity burn and wants to pour more gasoline on the fire. “You’re going to lose.”
Yeah, just what he needs to hear right now. “We haven’t lost yet.”
“You will,” she starts, the darkness deepening. “What does humanity think it is, to—”
“Crawling, maggots, worthless, I heard you the first time,” he drones impatiently. “Like your son?”
“You dare—” She starts toward him, the church floor cracking under each dainty step as she starts to grow; by the time she reaches him, her head’s almost brushing the bare beams of the ceiling. Her voice echoes through the church. “Kneel.”
Dean stares up at her incredulously. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“Dean,” Amieyl says, sounding worried. “You should know—”
“Not now,” he interrupts before she can tell him how shitty an idea it is to fuck with a god. “Kneel in worship or die: I’ve heard it before. Cas was right; you all need to get some new material. The answer’s always gonna be no.”
Lia looks down at him, brown eyes vast, but infinity doesn’t scare him. Infinity sleeps thirty feet away from him, wakes up with spectacular bedhead, and drinks half a fucking pot of coffee before Dean’s even awake these days. Infinity has a drinking and a drug problem, won’t let him drive, can’t cook, eats under protest, doesn’t like to sleep, and hates his entire goddamn life. Infinity still gets up every goddamn morning to keep living it, and he still can’t figure out why.
“So kill me, get with the program, or get the fuck out of my way,” he tells her. “I got a war to fight, a world to save, and an ex-angel to teach about chocolate and how life can be fun because he got the shit deal when it comes to mortality. You became a god because you couldn’t hack being human when you were born to it; he didn’t even get to do that, and he’s still trying. What the fuck is your excuse?”
Infinity, he reflects uncomfortably, is also gonna be pissed if he gets himself killed taunting a god.
Lia hesitates, confusion and curiosity surrounding him. Before he can start to wonder what that means, everything goes still; it’s impossible to move, even to think, as images of his life flicker past in disjoined, too-fast images, and he can’t stop it or even remember how.
“Oh hell no.” Dean draws in a startled breath, head clearing almost immediately, and Amieyl’s standing in front of him, looking pissed. Reaching out, she pulls her crook out of nowhere, and Lia starts to shrink, folding up into person-size before their eyes. “Consent’s not just a word, not anymore. Try that again, I bust your ass straight to Limbo.”
Lia stumbles back, projecting startled rage. “You can’t—”
“Try me.”
“Amieyl,” he hisses, trying to get between her and Lia and failing; it’s like the floor’s moving or something. “What are you doing?”
“Freely given with whole heart and mind in full knowledge: those are the requirements of consent. We will accept nothing less.” Shoving her crook into the floor, the wood cracks open with a muted grunt, dull grey not-light rising sluggishly out of it, thick and heavy like fog, seeking tendrils slowly crawling across the floor and curling around Amieyl’s feet like a cat wanting to be pet. Lia draws back, eyes wide with shocked horror. “The rules are ours to enforce, and our decision is final.”
“‘We?’” Dean echoes incredulously as he slides helplessly back again; the floor really needs to stay still already. Lia may be smaller now, but gods are tricky like that. “You and what army?”
“I am an army. Anyway, it’s just a figure of speech,” Amieyl murmurs, gesturing vaguely at him with her free hand. “Sort of. Just go with it.”
“Who are you to pass judgment on me?” Lia demands, but her eyes never leave those dead-grey ribbons curving around Amieyl.
“We are the scales and the weight and that which weighs all things,” Amieyl answers. “What you want must be asked for, and his consent given in full. Or I, singular, will enforce the penalty here and now. Got it?”
“Ask what?” Dean says into the ensuing silence. “Catch me up here: what does she want?”
Lia licks her lips, tearing her eyes away from Amieyl and those grey ribbons to look at him. “I want to know why.”
“Why what?”
“Why did he do it?” she asks in a rush. “What made it worth it?”
He swallows; he asks himself that question every morning. “I don’t know.”
She hesitates, looking at Amieyl warily, then at him, bleak and endless, an empty stretch of eternity. It must be lonely to exist with nothing but what’s in that grove, he thinks: grief and rage and loss forever in repeat, never ending. She forgot everything else. “Anything you would ask of us we will give you, if you will—”
“You have nothing I want,” Dean interrupts, and Lia visibly flinches. “What do you want, Lia?”
She searches his face. “I don’t remember what I was. I want to see what it is that I forgot.”
Startled, he frowns; that’s easy. He’s done it before, though right now, he can’t quite remember when. “Go for it. Uh—freely given and everything.” He glances at Amieyl, who nods encouragingly, smiling bright enough to light the whole church. Facing a startled Lia, he closes his eyes. “You want to know what makes it worth it? Check it out.”
Deliberately, he forms his life for her: a picture of Sam as a baby, a toddler stumbling after him, a thousand different motel rooms, on the edge of an endless ocean, warm and inviting them in to play, infusing the memories with everything he ever felt for his brother. Annoyance and irritation and frustration, admiration and amusement and pleasure, the horrific loss that shattered him when he died, grief and rage and the stupid shit you do when you can’t think of anything else. They’re all part of the one thing, the only thing, the thing he never wants to give up again: how much he loved his brother, how loving him was worth all of it. Nothing was worth losing that.
Oh. Lia closes her eyes. That’s how it felt.
He gives her everything of his life: Mom and her death, the heat of the fire as he held Sam and the screaming that never stopped; Dad and the vengeance that ruled his life and created the foundation of his and Sam’s; Bobby’s gruff warmth and kindness, Jo and Ellen, the hunters he met and worked with and watched die; Cassie and Lisa and Ben, friendship and love, blighted hope almost before it had a chance to take root, shriveling before his eyes; he wasn’t enough.
Castiel and Anna, Zachariah and Lucifer, the Host; the room where he challenged Cas for his brothers’ life and the decision Cas made that day; being shoved up against an alley wall by a Falling angel who didn’t know how to give up even when Dean almost did; the war that wasn’t fought, that they won, paid in full, bitter measure with Sam’s life and soul; and the one here that they haven’t lost, not yet, and all it took was Dean trading one life for another.
They got a shitty deal, no argument there: save the world, as if. He never measured up to what anyone needed him to be—Dad, Sam, Cassie, Ellen and Jo, Bobby, Lisa and Ben, Cas—even by accident he never got it right. Every time he’s tested, he’s failed.
Lia draws back: Then why…
That doesn’t mean he’s ever gonna stop trying; when he loses, it won’t be because he didn’t step on the goddamn field.
It’s not quite a memory, but something else pushes through, dragged up from somewhere impossibly deep: a place so dark it never knew light, screams and blood and nothing but horror until even horror was mundane, cut with a shock of light, and the moment he was given a choice, in a place where he forgot the meaning of the word. Where he remembered just enough to say…
“You said yes,” Lia whispers, snapping them both back into the church. “You stood up.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, startled: how’d he forget that? “I did.”
He starts to move and almost staggers, catching himself before he tumbles to the floor in front of them and adds that to public nudity and being a demon in his lexicon of embarrassment today. “So what’s it gonna be? You in or what?”
Lia looks surprised. “Here, at the end of all things?”
“It hasn’t even started,” Dean says, meeting her eyes. “We got a war to fight, Lia, so come home and help us fight it. What, you got something better to do?”
“No,” she says slowly. “I don’t.”
“Then let’s get this done,” he says impatiently. “What are you waiting for?”
“What you did…” She swallows. “I’ve never been that strong.”
Amieyl grins. “Yeah, you are. You just don’t know it yet.” Tossing her crook toward one of the pews, she reaches out a hand, palm up. “You can have my strength until you do.”
“Mine, too,” Dean offers uncertainly; his heart’s beating, after all. Lia looks at him, eyes wild and afraid. “I didn’t think I was, either. I had help until I realized I was wrong.”
Lia looks between them before she takes Amieyl’s hand, letting herself be drawn down onto the threadbare red carpet covering the hardwood floor, skirts settling haphazardly around her. Joining them, Dean reaches for her other hand as her head snaps back, spine stiffening as a sickly glow surrounds her; long red streaks cut across her cheeks as if the bones beneath are trying to split them apart, and the soft robes seem to become tighter with a flare of sullen light that burns out before their eyes.
With a gasp, she slumps over, panting, and only belatedly is Dean aware of the tight grip of her fingers, nails cutting into his skin. All you need, Dean thinks in determination, tightening his own grip so they sink in further, blood welling up in sparks of pain, chest tightening sympathetically: all I got, everything, you can have it. You can do this.
“I—” She jerks again, skin beginning to tighten over bone and muscle. Clinging to his hand, she gasps through it before looking at him again, terrified. “Does it always hurt like this?”
“Always,” he says helplessly, because he can’t lie—possibly literally—and it’s only gonna get worse from here on out. “You can do it.”
She shudders again, fingers closing brutally over his hand again, and he winces at the crack of bone, her skin thinning before his eyes and beginning to strain against what it can’t hope to hold. Remembering how it felt to get those goddamn clothes off, he tries to give her more. She’ll have to take it all off, down to her bones; it’s too small to hold all of what she’s taking back, and it’s gonna hurt like hell to get it off.
“You can,” Amieyl confirms, bracing Lia with her own body at the next convulsive shudder, the sickening sound of bones splintering under the thin skin, ignoring the nauseating rip of muscle and flesh under her hands to hold Lia tighter. “You can do it, Lia. Don’t be afraid.”
Lia opens her eyes, blood trickling like tears down the splitting skin of her cheek. Reaching out, Dean wipes them away, hand shaking so hard he almost pokes her in the eye. Licking her cracking lips, she smiles at them both, long fingers squeezing his. “I’m not.”