ETA: Crap! I accidentally posted this at spn_gen for a couple of hours by mistake when this is really not quite gen. Oops :|

Title: I've been travelling, but I don't know where

Author: mithborien

Fandom: Supernatural

Word Count: 6386 words

Rating: R (maybe? I'm not too good with ratings)

Spoilers: From 1x01 Pilot all the way to 2x21 All Hell Breaks Loose Part 1

Summary: The nightmares never stop for Sam.

Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to Eric Kripke and the CW network. No profit is being made or intended to be.

Author's Notes: Okay, so I started writing this before I watched 2x21 but I had only written the ending as a vague couple of scenes. But watching 2x21 gave me a couple of ideas on how I could end this properly and now I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I also have no idea about what's going to happen in 2x22 so the way this ends is just pure speculation. And that is also why I wanted to get this posted before the finale ends, because this is probably all going to get contradicted.

I also shamelessly admit that most of my research came from Wikipedia. If I got anything from folklore wrong then let's just say the myth herself has changed over the years.

And I also have no idea whether anyone has used this little bit of folklore either. So, if someone has, apologies.

But with all said and done, this is my first longish fic for Supernatural and I am quite happy with the way it turned out, both the writing and the plot-like aspects of it so I hope you all enjoy it.

~

She dies in fire and white and silence.

Sam wakes with a shout he only just manages to hold back. Always wake up in silence, Dad had told them. Never give away your position. So Sam wakes in silence, heart thudding, air burning in his lungs and his mind filled with blurry images of blood and flames that he couldn't seem to focus enough to make sense of.

Jess twitches beside him and rolls over, probably in response to his shifting weight. The sheets slip down from her shoulder and Sam smoothes his palm over her bare skin, fingers sliding down to feel the gentle beat of her heart.

Just a bad dream, he tells himself, lying back down and letting the panic and adrenaline drain out of his limbs. Just a stupid dream.

The second time it happens, he wakes up with his arms stretched towards the ceiling and he knows without a doubt that he's dreaming of someone burning up there. He didn't see the face but he knows there's blood and white and he doesn't want to know anything else after that.

It's only three months later, after countless assertions of it's just a dream, when the blood on his face is too warm and the fire roaring in his ears is too loud to be anything other than real, that the blurry images of his dreams coalesce into one vividly clear vision and he realises that it wasn't Mom he had been dreaming about after all.

~

The funeral is short and Sam doesn't look at anyone or anything except the coffin. It's empty, of course, but the pristine cushioning inside is now dirty with ash.

He mumbles something to Jess' parents who don't want to talk anyway and he avoids his friends until Dean takes his arm and leads him away. He'll come back later, he thinks, he'll come back later and say goodbye to a cold tombstone.

They spend a week looking through the apartment, researching possibilities and Sam keeps putting off the visit until he knows there is nothing left here to do but say goodbye. But the air in Palo Alto smells of nothing but ash and he can't close his eyes without seeing flames so he tells Dean he just wants to leave and it's only after two hours on the road that Sam realises he forgot to visit Jess and he feels both sick and glad for it.

He tries to sleep in the car, the seats of the Impala familiar if not comfortable but he dreams of the gravestone in the cemetery and wakes with shaking hands and the feel of ghastly fingers gripping his bones and pulling him down.

~

Dean figures the nightmares are just part of Sam's grief and because in a way he's right, Dean doesn't suspect anything else. He just wakes Sam up at night when Sam's thrashing threatens to throw him off the bed, when his shouts of Jess become too loud and when he forgets to breathe.

Sam just thinks he's grieving for Jess as well. Trying to live with the overwhelming guilt of why he didn't do something, say something, when the dreams first started. Why didn't he put the fucking facts together and realise that he wasn't seeing his mother burning above him but his girlfriend instead.

He tries not to sleep and he tries not to dream.

~

He's lying beside Jess on the bed they shared for over a year, wrapped up in sweet smelling sheets but the scent isn't as half as intoxicating as hers. She's smiling at him, wide and easy, lips shining as she leans in to kiss his shoulder. She works along his collarbone, sucking the skin up his neck until she's at the corner of his mouth.

Sam smiles and kisses her back. He pulls her into his arms, settling limbs into familiar positions as they lay side by side on the bed.

He sees a figure at the side of the room, dark cloaked and shadowed, and Sam turns his head in surprise just for an instant but it's long enough for Jess to start to burn in his arms and Sam wakes up covered with sweat.

~

He has three types of nightmares: the good, the bad and the ugly for lack of better terms.

The good is simply the hazard of a hunting lifestyle. The threat of the monsters they kill during the day working its way into his dreams at night. Glowing eyes in the shadows, reflexes too late, one bullet too short.

The bad is when he sees Jess burning again on the ceiling, in flames of red or blue or black, dripping blood across his face. But he can deal with them because they aren't so much a nightmare as a kind of horrific remembrance. He wakes up with the sensation of blood dripping across his face and his skin peeling and cracking because that's exactly what he felt the day she died.

The ugly is when he dreams of Jess first, of the good times they had together. Their first meeting, first kiss, first time they stripped off each others clothes and made love in a bed that was too short for him. The first coffee they shared, the first laugh, first smile, first dance. The first time he said ëI love you' and she said ëGood'. Then the dreams turn into a nightmare. There's a car accident and Jess is trapped in a burning wreck, a gas leak and an explosion she can't outrun, a monster made of flame snatches her from the safety of his arms. They always involve Jess dying in a hundred different ways and Sam hates himself for wanting to forget all his memories simply so they can't lead into these horrors.

~

He sees Jess standing at the side of the road and the rest of world seems darker. She's wearing this long white dress he's never seen before, sunlight making her hair glow and she's just staring at him. Not with sadness or longing or even anger, just this blank expression. He would have welcomed anger, he would have deserved it but she just stares at him as if she recognises him but has nothing else to say.

He wonders if he's hallucinating, day-dreaming or maybe he's asleep and having nightmares again but when he turns his head Dean is still staring at him and Dean has always been such a solid presence in his life that whenever he's there, Sam feels unaccountably alive.

So the Jess in the white dress and solemn expression, who disappeared behind a light pole, was real or at least as real as anything could be in the world of the supernatural, which unfortunately left a whole range of options.

~

He lets himself into the apartment as quietly as possible. It's not that late but Jess might have gone to bed early and he doesn't want to wake her. There's a plate of cookies on the kitchen table and he takes one smiling, the homemade smell alone is absolutely delicious after a weekend of diner and junk food.

The bed's empty when he enters the room but it looks so inviting that he can't help but sit down and fall backwards. The soft mattress is warm beneath his back so that must mean Jess is close, probably in the bathroom. He smiles, happy to be home, glad to have someplace to call a home.

He hears the swish of fabric, the faint creak of a door and someone else's breathing. "Jess," he says as he sits up but there's only a shadowy figure in the doorway.

Sam, he hears, not through his ears but through his mind and the figure steps forward. He can't see details, just shadow and fog that keep drifting around the human shape.

"Who-" Sam starts the ask but the figure tilts back it's head and it's then that Sam can feel the heat of the flames, feels the blood dripping down his face, the rush of air as fire consumes the apartment.

He can't help but look up and he jerks awake in a motel room bed, staring at a ceiling that is empty but for cracks. He has the taste of chocolate chip in his mouth and he's kicked the blankets off his bed from the heat.

~

He knows he recognises the tree but it takes him a whole morning to realise it was from his parent's house as opposed to the half second it took him to realise that the blonde woman screaming and banging on the window wasn't Jess.

Just like it takes him but a moment to realise that the flaming spirit isn't the poltergeist but his mother. The warmth of the flames isn't as painful or destructive as fire normally is for him but safe and comforting, like the way he felt when wrapped up in Jess' arms or when he was younger and sitting beside his brother as Dean talked about a mom he never knew.

But he can see his mother now, looking absolutely beautiful with flowing hair and a caring smile. It's such a perfect moment but then she turns away and she bursts into fire, just like everything else in his life.

The next morning, he's sitting on the steps of the house, trying to concentrate because if he doesn't pay attention he smells smoke and see flames flickering out of the corner of his eyes. His head is still pounding; both from being thrown across the room by the poltergeist and the lingering feel of someone's invisible fingers squeezing his brain during the vision.

He hears Missouri sigh beside him, unable to give any answers but Sam has discovered something for himself. Discovered something beyond a childhood home he never knew and a mother he'd just met for the first time.

The woman in his dreams, who for once had not been Jess or Mom, had been real.

His dreams are real.

~

Sam now experiences three things when he sleeps.

He knows he has visions like in some kind of bad sci-fi movie, visions of people dying and hurting, who need him to rush in like a hero in the nick of time. But all too often he's too late and he has to watch them die a second time. The visions are always accompanied by pain, by raw, visceral pain that he can't ease because it's not his physical body that's hurting and he's too dazed by the images that flash by too fast.

Then there are the dreams, normal, simple dreams or at least normal by Winchester standards, which means Sam dreams of fire and glowing eyes. He dreams of monsters and the supernatural, and the last bad movie he and his brother watched on TV. He dreams of hunting when he was younger and the classes he liked at Stanford. He dreams of Jess and Dean and Dad and Mom, happy in a way that never happened.

Then there are the nightmares which are like the dreams and the visions combined into one in which he sees all the horrors he can imagine except they feel real in the way the visions do. When someone burns, he can feel the flames licking at his body and he wakes up with red, painful skin. When he screams in his mind, he wakes up with a raw throat and spits out blood when he brushes his teeth. He'll have a nightmare of running to save his family and in the morning his legs will be full of cramps. His nightmares are real and not-real, truths and untruths.

~

Jess pulls him down onto the bed, her skin still damp from her shower. Her white night dress sticks to her curves, riding up one thigh and she laughs when Sam drags the hem up to her hip.

She bites her lip, a sweet, seductive smile on her face as she tugs him over her. Her long legs stretch out on either side of his, her arms draw his hands above their heads and there isn't anything else he can do except kiss her, to lick that smile on her face into something a little more breathless.

He feels his skin start to sweat, his t-shirt sticking to his back so he pulls it off, Jess enthusiastically helping. She smooths her hands down his back, then up to his neck and nudges with her hips to roll him over. He does so with a groan, her body pressing delightfully down and she laughs again, kisses his closed eyes.

Sam, Jess whispers but her voice is like unseen dust in the wind, choking and blinding and not Jess.

He opens his eyes and it's not Jess that's draped over his body but a girl who is nothing more than shadow and mystery, darkness and fear. He can't see her features, her face hidden by hair but he knows it's not Jess. That warm, normal feeling he always had with her is gone and the indistinct limbs covering him feel like a straight jacket filled with ice.

He gasps and wakes up in a different bed, his arms pinned to his sides and shivering under the blankets. He can't breathe and when he tries to move he feels ghostly fingertips digging into his skin. The pressure lasts for a moment before fading away and he's left breathing in tandem with Dean, asleep in the bed across the room.

~

He knows she's real and not a hallucination though. You don't live the life that he has without being able to recognise the supernatural when it flaunts itself in front of you. She's real and she wants him.

He researches her because that's what you do. He spends nights scrolling through websites on the bright screen of his laptop while Dean is asleep and can't tell him off. He checks out extra books from local libraries when researching other hunts and forgets to return them until the next town.

He researches demons and fires, dreams and nightmares, shadows and things that go bump in the night but finds nothing that's helpful and everything that isn't until he stumbles across a single name: Mara.

She has a dozen different forms, appearing in half a dozen beliefs from Scandinavian folklore to Hindu mythology. She's a goddess and demon, goblin and wraith; a patron of death and darkness and temptation. But most of all, and this is the sentence that makes his throat go dry and his heart beat a painful thump in his chest, whatever form she appears in, she always causes nightmares.

He holds his breath as he continues reading. The Mara in Scandinavian folklore, he discovers, can appear as a female wraith that can slip through keyholes and under doors. They twist tree branches together and tangle the hair of their victims. He reads about how they ride the chest of their sleeping victims to inflict nightmares and he only manages to take another breath when he thinks about how Dean would interpret that ëride' statement.

But the laugh dies in his throat when he remembers cold hands in the darkness.

Her name is Mara.

~

She comes to him the next night as if she knows he's figured things out and wants to meet him properly. The flames of which he's gotten so familiar with fade within minutes and she slips out from behind the sunspots that burn his eyes.

She's standing at the foot of his bed, lost in the shadows in the dark motel room. He can hear Dean breathing quietly beside him, the hum of the air conditioner and the muffled sound of wind in the trees. He opens his mouth but in an instant she's astride the bed and there's an intense weight upon his chest, far heavier than a human woman her size could weigh. Ghostly thighs squeeze his torso and there's a breathy laugh in his ears.

She doesn't say anything, just looks at him with smoky eyes and a wicked curve to her mouth. He thinks he sees her eyes spark golden, teeth lengthen into fangs but they're only flashes and are gone from one moment to the next. He can feel her hands sliding into his hair, pulling and twisting until his eyes start to water. His arms and legs are dead weights, the faintest hint of pins and needles and there's an insistent rubbing against his chest. He can't breath and everywhere she touches him, the heat evaporates from his body.

He manages to gasp out, "Please." Barely loud enough to his ears and she tilts her head at him before leaning down to brush her lips against his cheek. Then she's gone and he's left alone, shivering in twisted sheets and watching the white handprints on his arm fade to red.

In the morning, Dean laughs when Sam has to spend an hour brushing out his tangled hair.

~

He always expects her now.

Sometimes she shows up and sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she's standing in the corner, just a silhouette that doesn't brighten when the flames spread around her and burn the bed that Sam can't get out of.

Sometimes she's pushing him back as he struggles to rise, pressing his arms and legs down, stealing the breath from his lungs as he tries to shout. He struggles and curses but he can never get free long enough to pull Jess down from the ceiling.

Other times it's just her in his dreams, no flames and no nightmares, just her. As if she doesn't want to hide behind dreams and delusions. He doesn't need to admit that just her touching him is horrific enough. He knows she knows; it's who she is.

But there are always the nightmares. He knows she's behind them, coaxing the images out of his mind even if he can't always see her. He sees Jess burning in a hundred different ways, pinned to the ceiling or tangled in blankets. There's blood and flames and Sam is always helpless.

And he always wakes up with raw skin, the taste of blood in his throat and muscles cramped from struggling to save her.

~

The first thing Sam sees when he opens his eyes is shadow and flame. He can feel the Impala twisted around him, the sound of his father struggling to breathe beside him and Dean absolutely silent in the back seat.

He turns his head and sees a shadow out the window and for a moment he's absurdly grateful. It's just her, this is just a nightmare, this isn't real but then the shadow steps forward and the only darkness is the ones in his eyes.

The blood on his face is real and the heaviness in his arms is just shock but he has the Colt in his hands when the door is pulled off the car because waking up isn't going to end this.

She finally turns up the night after they burn Dad's body. Sam knows he's sleeping in Bobby's spare room but when he opens his eyes he's in the blood stained back seat of the Impala and she's sitting on his chest, legs crossed daintily.

Miss me? she asks and Sam screams.

What he misses is nothing more than ash now. Just like Jess. Just like Mom. He doesn't need nightmares tonight; his life has just turned into one.

He screams again, but it could have only have been in his mind because it wasn't nearly satisfying enough to have been out loud. Mara just smiles and shadows gather around her until she disappears and Sam is left with the echo of his heart beat like unseen footsteps dying away.

~

He's stuck to the ceiling, limbs stretched out too tightly. He can see Jess below him on the bed, mirroring his pose with lazy movements. The expression on her face doesn't change as flames crawl up the sides of the bed, no pain, no panic, no sadness.

He can't move, can't speak, can only watch as the bed collapses in ash and cinders and then the pressure holding him up disappears and he falls to the floor, crashing into the charcoal remains of the bed frame. Dust and burnt debris rise up and chokes his mouth and nose, stinging his eyes.

He coughs, chokes again and braces a hand against the floor to push himself to his feet but his fingers slip in blood and he crashes to the ground again, unable to breathe.

~

He tries to stay awake for her one night and he's just on the verge of sleep when she appears in the corner of the room, forming out of half-noticed shadows. It's still the motel room Dean checked them into that evening, the same horrible dÈcor and not some convoluted imagining of his mind.

"Are you working for the Demon with the yellow eyes?" he asks before she has a chance to do anything.

She laughs, and it's a laugh of ages, of dusty, air tight rooms where every breath is your last, of tight ropes and inescapable bindings, of your darkest thoughts and imaginings and Sam thinks he can actually feel his blood go cold.

Now why would you think that? she says, turning and walking towards him. He can never remember what she wears or even what she looks like but his mind supplies adjectives like dark and shadow and horror and the colour red. She climbs onto the bed, their surroundings nothing but flame and fog now. She sweeps up his body, presses his arms and throat into the mattress.

"You could be part of his plans," he gasps, determined to finish this conversation. "Drive me insane or something."

She laughs again and his struggles to get his lungs full of air shudder to a stop. Maybe I just like you, she says and presses a kiss to his throat. Her lips are ice cold, the touch of graves, screaming winds and unexpected fingers in the night. She takes the breath quite literally out of his lungs, draws the air right out of him and his chest is burning but he can't move.

She pulls herself high up his body and starts to move against him, thrusting her groin against his chest. She doesn't touch his dick, not even a brush of a hand but only satisfies herself, rubs herself to completion as she steals the heat from his body.

"You're going to kill me," he whispers when she finishes and he can feel wetness across his chest.

She just laughs again. Now where would the fun in that be? She leans down to kiss him and his mouth fills with blood. When she pulls back, Jess is staring down at him instead, blood dripping from her mouth, from her eyes. He can still feel the wetness between her legs on his chest and it smells just like Jess, she smells just like Jess. He tries to swallow and chokes on the blood in his mouth.

When he wakes up, his chest is damp with sweat and nothing else and the only blood in his mouth is from where he bit his lip in his sleep.

~

The days pass normally. He and Dean continue saving people, hunting things and argue and fail to talk like normal people.

Any strange behaviour is passed off as them struggling to deal with their Dad's death and if either of them isn't sleeping well at night, well, all things considered, it's kind of expected.

When he gets the chance, Sam researches her some more. Trying to find a way to get rid of her because he's damn sure having some chick invade your dreams and nightmares isn't the healthiest way to live your life.

He finds reports of dozens of victims. Half of them, Sam figures, suffered from sleep paralysis and the rest were either visited by the Mara only a couple of times or they died from it. He can't find anything about anyone being constantly haunted by one.

The only thing he finds is the commonly held belief that the spirit of a sleeping woman could become a Mara, either because she was wicked or she was cursed. To stop such a Mara, it was said you had to find the woman and repeat ëyou are a Mara' three times to release her.

Sam thinks of all the roads they have travelled, back and forth across the country hundred of times. If such a woman exists, the chance of finding her is close to nil and the only women he knows who might possibly be cursed are both dead.

There's salt for ghosts and silver for werewolves, a sharp knife for vampires and exorcisms for demons. But there is nothing for dream wraiths, origins in lands across oceans and for all he knows she's learned some new tricks over the centuries.

~

What would you like to dream about tonight, Sam?

"Nothing," he mumbles into his pillow, face pressed into the coarse material. If he breathes hard enough he can draw in just enough air through the thin fleece. He feels fingers trailing up his back to settle on his neck, stroking back and forth, combing and twisting through his hair.

He turns his head and opens his eyes to a different room than the one he went to sleep in. He rolls onto his back and sees a plush baseball mobile turning above him. There are shelves of toys and plush animals and calm, pale blue walls. A clock with planes and trucks and boats for the numbers stops ticking and a crescent moon shaped nightlight flickers out.

He closes his eyes and whispers, "You are a Mara. You are a Mara. You are a Mara."

He hears a laugh and cold air stuttering around his legs, then pressure on his thighs and stomach and chest as she crawls up his body.

Nice try, honey, she says and Sam opens his eyes to see his mother explode into fire above their heads.

He tries to scream but she presses her lips to his, sucking the terror and distress out of his body. The room around them fades into fog and when she pulls away from him the outlines of her body focus from wispy shadows into definite curves.

"What do you want from me?" he asks and she smiles.

Just you. Her hands are so cold on his arms that it feels like they're burning. He tries to breathe and chokes when the air in his lungs freezes.

She starts to ride up and down on his chest and the flames explode in front of his eyes again.

~

He doesn't tell Dean about her. He should, he knows he should but they have enough shit to deal with in their lives so starting a conversation with "So there's this chick that gives me nightmares and brings herself off on my chest every night" doesn't seem the best option.

She isn't hurting him, at least as far as he can tell. He's pretty sure his life will drive him insane eventually with or without her help. Besides, since Sam's own research hasn't revealed anything to get rid of her, telling Dean would just add another point on his list of things to worry about Sam.

Dean thinks Sam's gotten over the nightmares because he doesn't wake up in the night anymore, he doesn't throw his blankets off or gasp for breath. Sam doesn't do anything else during the night except close his eyes and lie exactly still.

Besides, she doesn't give him actual nightmares as often now. His normal life takes care of that, full of demon eyes and silver bullets, lost brothers and jail cells slamming shut.

~

He's always cold now.

Even when the heater is turned all the up and extra blankets are piled on his bed, he's always cold. A permanent shiver down his back that he can't shake and a freezing feeling of anticipation that makes goose bumps stand out on his neck and has him looking behind him all the time.

Her hands are even colder, burning ice as she trails them over his body. His only relief is when his limbs become too heavy and too numb to feel anything at all. He doesn't talk to her and she doesn't talk to him anymore, she just rides his chest, brings herself off and Sam manages to block the worst of the nightmare images from his mind.

He can hear her breathing, short and sharp like each breath is getting choked out of her, feels puffs of air that blow and tangle his hair across his forehead.

He opens his eyes and over her shoulder, over a shoulder that disappears into shadow he sees Dean burning above him. His brother is pinned to the ceiling, limbs outstretched, a stricken look on his face and Sam recognises the striped shirt his brother is wearing as one left behind, soaked in blood.

Sam doesn't feel so cold now. He can see flames growing at the sides of the room and Dean's face glows orange.

He stretches up a hand without thinking, knowing he probably won't be able to move but he can't help but try anyway. To his surprise his hand moves up smoothly, pointed straight towards the ceiling and there's a gun in his hand, Dean's gun, ivory smooth and metal glare.

He didn't pull the trigger, Sam knows he didn't pull the trigger but it's hard to see whether the gun is smoking or not when the room is filling with dark fog.

There's a round circle of blood on Dean's chest now, quickly spreading and staining his shirt. There are rivers of blood, draining from Dean's neck and chest and stomach and Sam's drowning in it.

~

The first thing he notices is his arms and legs becoming numb. He's weighted down and dizzy with lack of air, and he relaxes into whatever gruesome dream Mara has planned.

He feels a cool breeze flow over his skin, like a curtain fluttering and he closes his eyes, tries to breathe.

Someone screams in a voice he doesn't recognise, but it's high and choking, a scream out of the darkness that's cut off in sudden silence. Sam opens his eyes and sees a shadow looming over him. Golden devil eyes open and a Cheshire cat grin appear.

He hears the scream again and feels sensitivity flow back into his limbs, needle sharp and spreading pain. He doesn't even think before rolling off the bed and starting to run, he can't see where and he doesn't care as long as he's running away.

He hears noises behind him and for a brief morbid moment he wishes he had stayed behind to watch a showdown between a demon and a nightmare inducing wraith because seeing Mara bitch slap the demon down would be awesome indeed.

But when he stops running for a moment, he realises he's ended up in a nondescript room with no doors and no windows. The question of how he got in here in the first place has no place in this dream land but the walls feel far too solid when he moves his hands over them, searching for a crack or a hollow in their insanity-inducing monotonous.

He can hear nothing but the sound of his own breathing, lungs rattling like a dead man and his heart pounding an irregular rhythm against his ribs. He slams a fist against one wall and that's when he wakes up, flat on his back and one hand aching.

The town around him is just as desolate as the room in his mind and instead of smoke, all he can smell is sulphur.

~

The salt lines don't keep her out. She flows in with the shadows into the room like a demon, billowing curves and flowing lines.

"Do you know what the Demon's plans are?" Sam asks when she doesn't speak, doesn't make a move towards him. "Do you know why we're here?"

I can't save you from him, she says quietly.

"I'm not asking you to." Sam takes a deep breath, waiting for her to do something, say something but all she does is stand there, looking small and lost against the backdrop of the dark night. "Why are you here then?"

She smiles, a tilt of shadow and a flash of teeth. To say goodbye. After all, what's the point of giving someone nightmares when their waking life is so much worse?

Sam feels the air around him grow cold and thin. He's having trouble breathing and his hands feel too numb to clutch the knife. "Why did you do it?" he says. "Why do it to me?"

She seems to be fading. Her legs drifting apart into blackness and her outline, barely seen in the faint light starts to become blurry.

I just do what I'm meant to do, she says and even her voice is barely above a whisper, words just barely overheard.

"And what exactly were you meant to do?" Sam asks, too cold and too tired to muster the anger and fury he should hold for her.

Tell me, Sam, she says as she looks out the window, as if she isn't even talking to him. What were you meant to do?

She reaches out one hand then and brushes the back of his neck. Her fingers are just as cold as they always are and they suck the warmth and strength out of his muscles. His head slumps towards his chest and in between blinks of eyelids too heavy, he sees movement in the corner. He shouts out a warning but no one hears him, no one ever hears his warnings.

"Howdy, Sam," the Demon says with a grin.

~

She's standing in front of him, just staring.

He can still feel Dean against him, his brother's arms wrapped tight, pressing against his back. It doesn't hurt so much anymore.

It's like he's trapped between waking and sleep, between dream and reality, except reality is now a nightmare and he knows he isn't going to be waking up anytime soon.

Dean's face is getting blurrier, hard to see through eyes that he can't manage to keep open. His limbs feel heavy and the only way he's staying upright is with his brother's arms around him. His mouth is filled with blood.

Dean's saying something, shouting something but he can't hear. He can't see. He can't move. The only thing that remains clear is her. He can finally see what she looks like now.

She looks like Jess and Sarah and Madison and a dozen other women he once knew. She looks like Mom and she looks like Dad. She looks like Dean.

Come on, she whispers and reaches out a hand.

He tries to grasp it but it turns to smoke as his fingers pass through it and she huffs in irritation. She reaches down again, wraps her fingers around his wrist and this time she stays solid, pulling him to his feet.

He looks around. The haunted town is gone, leaving only shadows but they don't look threatening. He doesn't feel cold anymore.

He can't see Dean anywhere.

"Wait-" he says, turns around and then it's Demon's standing there, his golden eyes the only point of colour in the landscape.

"Well, hey there, kiddo."

The landscape around them changes, from shadows to flickerings of red and orange and a deep ugly purple. Sam can smell smoke and sulphur and burning flesh and he can feel sweat begin to drip off his fingers. He lifts up his hand and watches the sweat turn to blood.

"I thought you only wanted a-" Sam tries to speak but his throat feels like it's closing up, cutting of his air supply.

"A soldier?" the Demon says, not noticing or more likely not caring about Sam's discomfort. "Yes, and Jake will do mighty fine."

"Then what-" Sam takes a step backwards and nearly stumbles.

The Demon takes one step forward. "Am I doing here? With you? Well, I did say you're my favourite, Sammy."

Sam's spine gives a painful lurch and he feels the back of his shirt start to get wet. He presses a hand there and feels the blood flowing out of the wound again.

"This isn't... you said you only needed one.. the master plan..." It feels like his head is in a vice, his skull getting crushed smaller and smaller. He stumbles again and falls to his knees.

"Demons lie, Sam."

The landscape around them is getting clearer now. Dark shapes of chains and spikes and destruction, backlit by flames and thousands of glowing eyes.

"Where are we?" Sam gasps, choking on the thick smoke and burning air.

The Demon kneels down and reaches out for Sam's shoulder just before Sam slumps to the ground. "I've got you, Sammy," the Demon whispers and brushes the hair back from Sam's forehead. "Welcome home. Just so you know, this is going to be worse than seeing your mommy die, worse than seeing your daddy dead, your girlfriend burn and your brother failing to come back to life."

Sam thinks of seas of blood and oceans of fire as his eyes begin to blur shut. He thinks of suffocation and being unable to move as his hands start to shake and cramp. He thinks of seeing countless people burn above him as the flames around him grow hotter and brighter.

He thinks of her and laughs, and it's a laugh of ages, of a blade scraping against skin and fingers closing slowly around a neck. He realises that a guardian angel doesn't always have to be on the side of so-called good.

He takes a deep breath full of sulphur and smoke and the taste of blood and thinks of saving people and hunting things, the family business. He thinks of Mom and Dad and Jess. He thinks of Dean.

"Like I said," Sam says to the Demon's face as his mouth twists into a wicked smile. "I'm going to tear you apart."

~