Act 10 - In Which The Trap Is Sprung

It felt like a million years had passed. The thing did a grotesque kind of striptease, peeling off the human skin covering its insectoid form, and it was slightly worse than Dean had allowed himself to imagine.

It didn't look like a spider. Yes, it had many limbs, and a gaping maw that seemed to take over more than half of its face, but it seemed more beetle like. Cockroach? Not a terrestrial insect he'd ever seen, but close to a couple. And he focused on this to ignore the gibbering inside his own skull. He was so terrified he thought he could feel his sanity cracking like ice, sifting through his fingers like slivers. He didn't know if it was part of the thing the god dragged with him, or it was his own fear making this happen. The worst part, as always, was down to the fact that he couldn't move. If he could fight and fail, that was one thing. But to never be able to do anything except wait for it to kill you? It was the fucking worst.

After shedding skin, most of it still wet with blood, it took a step towards him, but paused, and looked towards the gaping hole where the cell door used to be. "How dare you come into my presence, parasite."

For a moment, Dean wondered if gods could go crazy. And then Crowley's voice, as smooth as silk, said, "Only my friends call me parasite." Crowley now came into his vision, outside the cell. His eyes widened slightly and briefly when he saw what they were dealing with. "Oh dear. You're the god with the good personality, I take it?"

Crowley was flung against the wall by an invisible force, and the god finally rotated its head all the way towards him. Rotated it like a fucking owl, like it didn't have a neck, only a socket. God, the more Dean thought about this thing, the more he wanted to go insane. This thing wasn't Lovecraftian, was it? That would explain a lot. "You're not a typical parasite, are you? You should be dead."

"It's shocking how much I hear that," Crowley said, sliding off the wall. He straightened his tie, even though he didn't need to.

"What are you?" the bug god demanded.

Crowley looked at it with a sort of detached contempt, a look only he seemed able to pull off. "If you must know, I'm the King of Hell. I thought we could make a deal."

"I don't deal with lessers."

"Of course you do. You're a god. Everything else is your lesser, yes?"

The bug was quiet for a long moment, and Dean noticed it had long hairs spring from the joints of its limbs, and they were moving slightly. Was that what it did when it had no idea how to react? Because Dean was pretty sure Crowley had knocked it off balance for a second. Dean never wanted to give Crowley a compliment, and he never would, but he did seem to know how to unsettle people - and things - with a single sentence. That was a weird but handy talent. "Yes. But ... leave before I kill you."

"And miss the show? I'd never forgive myself."

"There's no show here."

"Of course there is. I believe chestbursters were referenced? I want to see your ovapositor, just for reference. I'm sure that would be an excellent torture in Hell, and new ones rarely come along." Dean couldn't tell if Crowley was serious or not, but he bet the bug couldn't either, so at least they were in the same boat.

A couple of the bug's mandible's moved, but they made nothing but a low, nightmarish scritching sound. "What happened to Lucifer? I thought he was King of Hell."

"I caged him." Oh, did he? That would be news to Sam.

The bug made an odd, abbreviated buzz, and Dean assumed, in retrospect, it was a kind of a laugh. "You couldn't cage a cat, you butterfly. Leave my sight or I will remove you."

Crowley shook his head, and slipped his hand in his pocket. "It's a shame. If we reached a deal, I would have let you have these two, but now I can't allow it."

The bug turned towards Crowley, something flaring on its back, growing wider. Were those wings? Or more limbs? Dean wasn't sure. Could have been a combination of the two. "Allow it? I take, you officious little tick."

"And I'm no one's butterfly, Gregor Samsa." Crowley had something in his hand, it looked like a dark glass globe, and he threw it to the floor while shouting a word in old Latin. The globe shattered, sending inky black liquid splattering on the floor - it smelled, nauseatingly, like bile. The floor seemed to absorb it, and a hole opened up, expanding in front of the bug god. The bug saw it, and quickly tried to back away, but the hole opened too fast, and it dropped down into a whirling, squirming darkness. There was a noise coming from the hole too, but it was weird - like a whole bunch of people screaming into an electric fan, with an occasional burst of thunder behind them.

Crowley leaned over the hole and gave a sarcastic wave as the hole suddenly irised shut, a closing eye.

Dean surged forward, suddenly able to move again, as Sam jolted, and looked around him, as if he wasn't sure where he was. Probably true. "You motherfucker," Dean said to Crowley. He had jumped to his feet, and his body was almost vibrating with all the adrenaline that had poured into his system. Dean's heart was thundering in his chest, like he'd just run a marathon. A physical fight would make him feel a whole lot better. "You were gonna sell us out?"

Crowley tried to give him an innocent look, but it never set well on his face. "I had to have some reason for being here, or it would have seemed suspicious."

"Wait, it's over?" Sam asked, standing up. He seemed unsteady, which made Dean wonder what the bug had been showing him. Nothing good. "I missed it?"

"Yeah. Trust me, you're better off not knowing what it was. It was like a giant cockroach. Kind of like Mimic, but taller and less appealing."

It seemed to take Sam a minute to realize Mimic was a movie reference, and then it took a few more seconds for him to clock it. Yeah, he didn't look great. Did Dean want to know what trauma the bug was forcing Sam to relive inside his own head? It could have only been the cage, right? His time playing Caged Heat with Satan. It was probably a shock he wasn't constantly in a catatonic state.

Sam's eyes widened as he looked at the floor. "Is that a face?" He was looking at what the bug had been wearing and cast aside. It was partially flipped, so you could see an eye hole, but the lips were inside out. That was a remarkably disgusting detail.

"Are you all right?" Cas asked, joining the party. His tie was partially askew, and spattered with dark drops that Dean assumed was blood. He had no idea what the ritual was exactly, but it sounded as gross and messy as hell. It would also figure that Crowley would walk away without a stain on him.

Dean nodded. "As much as we can be. Is anyone alive out there?"

Cas nodded. "The possessed officers are unconscious, but alive. The same goes for the other prisoners. It really wasn't here long enough to kill."

"It was probably saving the snacks for after it infected you," Crowley said. Comforting thought.

"Infected us?" Sam asked, wide eyed.

Yeah, okay, he was going to have to think of something to tell him. Somehow, telling Sam the ugly truth seemed unfair. He shared a commiserating look with Cas, and realized he could actually look away from him now. So the television rules were over.

Hooray. No more laugh track. He was never going to watch a sitcom again.

After several stiff drinks to settle their nerves, and forget the horrors they'd been through, both he and Sam caught up on sleep. They were exhausted, and the crash after an adrenaline overload was only part of it. There were times when it felt like they'd been hunted for a hundred years. Never mind that they weren't that old - Dean would swear he was a hundred, some days.

As for Crowley, he left after saying, "We're even." Dean felt that could be argued, but in all honesty, after saving him from getting Alien-ed? He would have been okay if Crowley said he owed him. That was one nightmare he had no wish to experience.

Cas stuck around, to make sure the demons released the cops - they did - and just to make sure they were okay, which was kind of him. Did they still have their weird connection? Dean honestly wasn't sure, since they'd both technically died

and come back since Cas rescued him from Hell, but Dean thought maybe. If so, he must have known had shaken up he was by this. He'd probably been mentally screaming the whole damn time.

Before gladly leaving town, they dropped by the loud sports bar from the night before, only to find that Kiran had fled town without leaving a forwarding address, which made sense. He said he was trying to avoid hunters, and they had completely blown his cover. If he turned out to be a killer, they'd probably find him again.

Sam did a bit of research on the Delacourt mansion, on the off chance it was haunted, but it quickly revealed itself to be one of those near impossible cases. Neither the matriarch or the patriarch were buried anywhere near here - the matriarch was buried at her family's crypt in Newfoundland (!), and the patriarch had been cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Atlantic. If there was a piece of them in the house that allowed them to haunt it, Sam had no idea what it could possibly be. It would have been a needle in a haystack search. Since his research had turned up no violent incidents in or around the house, they decided to leave it. If any story about the mansion popped up again, they'd come back, but right now, they were more than happy to get this fucking town in their rearview.

Sam had been weirdly quiet since the cell, and Dean had mentally gone back and forth on whether he should make Sam talk about it or not. On the one hand, it was his choice, and if he didn't want to talk about it, fine. But on the other, who else was Sam going to talk to about this? And bug god had implied the trauma hadn't exactly healed.

When they were driving back, Dean gave Sam all the space he needed to say something, but he didn't. Damn it. Dean was gonna have to do this, wasn't he? "You okay?" Dean began lamely.

Sam was looking at his phone, which he'd been doing since they left the motel. He was probably already looking for another case, which Dean recognized as a common symptom of denial. Sam probably figured, if he kept busy, he wouldn't have to think about shit. That almost never worked, but that was the well they both kept going back to, as if monster hunting could ever really save them. A while ago, Dean had come to the conclusion they were damned no matter what, and had probably been damned since they were kids. This was all they were good for, and all they could do. They were living ghosts that haunted the world, until someone somewhere finally put them out of their misery.

Not that he was going to tell him that.

Sam shrugged. "Fine. I never even saw the thing."

"No, you were just back with Lucifer."

Sam stiffened, like Dean had hit him with a taser. "It was just an illusion. Something it put in my head."

"Based on real memories. You know I'm here if you ever want to talk."

Sam lowered his phone, and sighed. Dean kept him in the corner of his eye, but Sam was looking straight ahead, nowhere near him. "To talk about it would be like reliving it again, and I'd just ... rather not. I'm okay, I promise you. It's just ... I prefer pretending that never happened. I know that isn't healthy, but I also know this is the only way I can live my life."

Dean knew he had no room to comment, as that was pretty much how he lived his life after returning from Hell. The bug god was right about one thing - Dean had a hell of a lot more practice compartmentalizing things than Sam did. Dean had been doing it since he was a kid. Once Mom died, he had to figure out his own ways to go on and get through the day. Dad was such a mess in the early days, he was no help at all.

Dean flexed his fingers on the steering wheel, glad to have something solid to hold onto. That was always his first rule. Find an anchor, and use that. Pull yourself up and go until you could see daylight. Again, not healthy, but neither of them knew how else to live anymore.

In retrospect, maybe living in a sitcom wouldn't be so bad. Assuming there was no laugh track.