Mnemosyne

Demons didn't feel the heat the way the victims of the Pit did. Not that it was pleasant, even for them; there was the stench of burning flesh and boiling blood, the screams of the damned, the coals underfoot, and the knowledge that even they, the Keepers of the Pit, could not take one step out of it into the rest of Hell without being properly summoned. It was a prison for those who had not yet earned the right to leave. The more vicious they were, the more torment they dished out to the souls they ruled over, the quicker they could get out, but it still took centuries, even for the greatest.

He was deftly peeling the skin off some cocky son-of-a-bitch who was going to take forever to break (just his luck, because he'd never be sprung from here as long as he was in the middle of a job) when the chatter of working demons suddenly fell quiet, leaving only the screams. It startled him so much that he jerked on a strip of skin instead of pulling it properly and it broke. That triggered a strangled cry from Mister There's Nothing You Can Do To Me, and he gave his job a backhanded smack to shut him up.

Through the madness—the seething of the Pit was madness embodied, as much as it was flame and sweat and pain and blood—walked a Messenger. The crowds of demons scrambled out of its way, pushing and shoving mangled souls before them, as much to reach a safe distance as to clear a respectful path. Messengers were the voice of the Master, His personal servants and guardians of the Manor, so far up the hierarchy that they were beyond the mortal confines of male or female but were neither; they dirtied themselves with neither the Pit nor Earth but carried the Master's tidings directly to the Enemy. One here, now, could only mean the greatest thing a Keeper could hope for: promotion.

Unless, of course, it meant the worst thing: demotion.

Promotion meant service, being assigned to work for a higher-up, but chances were that the work was way more interesting, involved travel outside Hell, and it was a lot easier to climb the ladder. Earth wasn't much, but it wasn't the Pit. Demotion meant having all the hard-earned powers of demonkind stripped away, possibly being reverted all the way back to the state of the average newly-arrived soul, facing a thousand years of torture before becoming demonworthy again.

It wasn't likely, especially since he didn't remember hearing about disasters lately, and the Keepers of the Pit were Hell's worst gossips. Nobody had escaped, nobody had left. So it should be a promotion. He wondered who the lucky bastard was. He glared at his current job, who had had half his skin peeled off today and was still giving him that cocky grin, only slightly stained by the blood from his scorched lungs, and sighed. Wasn't going to be him, that was for sure. Just his luck to get saddled with a moron with no sense and a high pain tolerance. Bastard had probably sold his soul on top of that; those were always the hardest to break, since they spent their first hundred years insisting they didn't belong here, that they deserved better for coming here willingly. More likely to hallucinate their own Hell, too, which might personalize the experience but made it that much harder to break them, since the demons couldn't see into it to play on their fears.

"You," came a thunderous rumble that silenced even the screams. He peered through the smoke of the nearby firepit, trying to see who was being summoned.

To his horror, the Messenger's finger was pointed at him.

"But—sir—I—"

"He wants to see you. Now. Someone else will take over here."

There was no arguing with a Messenger, especially one bearing a directive from the Master. They got particularly touchy when they were sent into the Pit, where they risked getting blood on their feet. He could only nod and trudge along in the Messenger's wake, painfully aware of the way his fellow Keepers quickly turned their backs and concentrated on their jobs. A shadow scampered out of the darkness to take over the overly-chipper, half-skinned job he'd been handling. An imp. A fucking imp. If he wasn't getting promoted, if he had to come back here, he was going to be a laughingstock for centuries.

He had better be getting promoted.

The rim of the Pit was a high, shiny wall of solid black obsidian, polished so smoothly that nothing could find purchase there, not even the allergen bushes that could grow anywhere in Hell where there was blood to feed them. Only demons who had real power, granted by the Master, or who had wings, could travel to the Plains above. Keepers who dared touch the wall uninvited usually wound up fried.

But the Messenger only waved its hand, and carved stairs emerged from the rock face. The Messenger glided lightly up them, unconcerned by the barriers that kept lesser demons confined. He hesitated, but the thought of the Master's fury if He were kept waiting spurred him to climb the stairs. His knees shook with weariness and fear by the time he reached the top, daring his first glimpse of the Plains. Hell was capricious, and who was to say that it wouldn't decide that he didn't deserve to glimpse the Plains?

He set foot on sandy red dirt, a vast desert stretching out to the horizon, pockmarked with allergen bushes and patches of scrubby grass, and no magic struck him. The stairs behind him disappeared. He heaved a sigh of relief, and walked faster, less afraid now. It was strange to walk on dirt and grass, not crunchy hot coals; the air here, while hardly fresh, did not stink so much of sulfur smoke, and he could actually see the scarlet sky. There were buildings off in the distance: the blocky sandstone prisons and torture chambers reserved for the spectacularly evil, the tenement warehouses of Purgatory, the barracks of the ranked soldiers, the mansions of the greatest demons. Off to the west, where the sky was bloodiest and brightest in a permanent sunset, stood the Manor, all by itself, in black-and-blood grandeur so magnificent it made the lesser mansions look like mere shacks.

He expected to be taken to the Hall, where the Master conducted business; He was seldom seen outside it. Instead, the Messenger led him through a maze of darkened corridors, into the depths of the Hall itself, where no one went but the Master, the Messengers, and the maintenance workers. He wasn't sure what this meant, but he suspected it was bad. In all the worst ways.

The Manor—which should be a permanent celebration of every vice known to Hell, where demons who earned the Master's favor should be able to act like demons—was dark and lifeless. No light shone through the black obsidian, lit the basalt and marble and blood-red granite. Here and there was a glimpse of gold or silver, of a fine painting or statue or tapestry, but nothing that could be fully appreciated in the gloom. Was the Master depressed? Could a demon even be depressed? The key to becoming a demon was learning to take joy in things that would shatter the undamned. The day you watched another pathetic soul be shredded while he screamed and you laughed, that was the day you were ready to become a Keeper.

The room to which he was led was even darker and gloomier, with only a single light—an actual candle—to light the place. A window looked out over the red glow of Hell, but that wasn't the kind of light that actually lit much. Against it was a silhouette.

"Master," he whispered, and threw himself onto the scarlet jade floor, in as much terror as worship.

"Leave us." The voice was soft, tired. Not at all royal or commanding. The Messengers obeyed immediately, of course; no demon defied the Master and survived, even if he did sound like a weary mortal. "Your name."

He didn't look up. He did not dare. "Keepers do not have names, Master."

"Right. I forgot." He didn't dare ask how the Master could forget. The Master was not only the ruler of Hell, the only law, He was Hell; He could pick out a specific damned soul in the Pit from here, without even looking. No demon could hide so much as a stray thought from Him. "Get up," He added, irritably, and he scrambled to his feet, never looking up. "Look at Me."

He fought centuries of conditioning and every ounce of instinct, but he obeyed. The Master had taken human form, a tall, gaunt boy with shaggy hair, not at all intimidating, except for the power that crackled in the air around Him. Now He pushed Himself away from the window and walked across the room to His subject. "You don't remember a thing, do you?"

"Master?" he whispered. Had he done something and forgotten about it? He remembered every day, every job, every scream. He couldn't have transgressed that badly!

"It's all right," the Master said, "you don't have to." He held out His hand.

He stared at the Master, dumbfounded. Touch the Master? No one touched the Master! It was death to even consider it!

"For the love of—" The Master grabbed his hand. "I will be so happy when you get your memory back," he muttered, and dark magic wrapped around them like a fog. When it cleared, they were no longer in the Manor, nor were they in Hell. As far as he could tell, they weren't anywhere. It was all light, blinding white, and they seemed to be standing on a very firm nothing.

"Where—"

"The Between," the Master said flatly, letting go of his hand. "We're here!" He shouted at the—well, it wasn't an actual sky, but it was skyward. "Get your ass down here and keep your part of the bargain!"

Golden light sparkled and danced and coalesced into another young-looking man, as tall as the Master and reeking of power, hatefully bright and clean power—the power of angels, of the Enemy. "Hello, Satan," he said, pleasantly enough; his blue eyes twinkled a bit. "I see you found him."

"I did what you asked," the Master growled. "I ruled Hell and I got them all off Earth and I played by your rules. Now give me what you promised."

What? He was thoroughly confused. Had the Master completely forgotten his presence, after going to all the trouble of bringing him here?

"So blunt, Satan." The Enemy smiled. "I remember when you were one of the faithful. When you prayed to me every day. When you invoked me to help make the world better."

"That was before I knew anything about you," the Master snarled, "and learned who was really responsible for the crappy state of the world. Now give me the damn water."

The Enemy handed the Master a canteen. "Half for you, half for him. You must both drink." He smiled, and if it weren't that he were the Enemy, the demon would have called it evil. The whole point of the Enemy was that he was anti-evil. "Wouldn't do to have you forget."

The Master made a noise that was not quite a bestial snarl. "And the time?"

"Our time is not mortal time, Satan. You know that." The Master glared at him. "It will have been ten days, at most. Surely you can find an excuse for that long."

"I've covered longer," the Master said.

"You don't have to leave," the Enemy said. "You're the best Satan I've had in centuries. Mortal centuries." The Master did not answer. "You came to me, Satan," the Enemy snarled, suddenly, for no reason that he could see. "You begged for my help to get him back. You could at least act—"

"Act what?" the Master retorted. "Grateful? For making me into a damned zookeeper? For making me watch? Fuck off. You didn't do me any favors and we both know it."

"Fine. Do try to behave, Sata—excuse me. Sam. I doubt your successor will be as gentle as you are." With that parting shot, the Enemy disappeared.

"I hate that—" The Master stopped, as if He didn't quite know what to call the Enemy, and sighed. "Never mind." He unscrewed the top from the canteen and drank from it, then handed it to him. "Drink."

Drink? Keepers were beyond the need or desire for food and drink. "Master," he began, hesitantly, daring that bit of questioning.

"Drink!" the Master snapped, shoving the canteen into his hand. "Drink it all." There was no point fighting, nothing he could do but obey, and wonder what the canteen held.

It turned out to be water, cold against his teeth and tasting faintly of metal—tasting like gold, if such a thing was possible, gold and sky and chocolate chip cookies, all the things never seen in the Pit. The world jerked, the whiteness contracted, and he found himself slumped in the—

In the back seat of a car?

He struggled to sit up, every joint and muscle protesting, like he'd been lying here for a week. His clothes were shredded to the point of indecency, the shreds dark and stiff with dried blood, but there weren't any injuries to match up with the cuts. He looked out the window first, but saw only a ragged yard and encroaching trees around an old farmhouse with the neglected-but-lived-in look of a place whose owners ran short of money long before they ran out of pride. No sign of anybody around, though, except for a porch light burning brightly against the twilight.

Someone in the front seat groaned. The Master's head appeared as He sat up, in the same guise He had been wearing. He pushed His hair out of His eyes, looking around, obviously confused. "What the fuck are we doing in the car?"

The world did not shake in response to the Master's anger—

No. Not Master. Sammy.

Pain clamped around his brain, prying loose memories long since lost. "Sam," he managed, and the words were rough and alien in his throat. "What—"

Sam jerked around. "Dean?" He reached across the back of the seat and grabbed Dean by the head. "Is that you, Dean? Do you remember?"

"I—I don't— What happened?"

"Out of the car." Sam scrambled out of the car and helped Dean out of the back seat. His legs were unsteady, like they hadn't been used in weeks, and he grabbed for the car for support. His fingers knew the metal; the Impala. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Just tell me what happened." He'd died, he remembered that much, a hellhound attack was not something you forgot, and he remembered Hell, so he'd gone there, the way he was supposed to— "Sammy. Tell me you didn't make a deal."

"Not with a demon. I— We can talk about this later, Dean, you need some—"

"Sam, why do I remember being a demon?" He couldn't keep the panic out of his voice. What if Sam had brought him back wrong? What if he was still a demon? What—

"Because you were," Sam said softly. "I couldn't keep you out of Hell, Dean. Don't you remember that?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Demons aren't the only ones who make deals."

Dean gave him a look. "Just what the hell did you do, Sammy?"

"I—" Sam tried a weak smile, but Dean just crossed his arms. He wasn't going to be distracted now. "It seems that when I pray—well, when I used to pray—I was loud. I got somebody's attention."

"Whose?"

"Jehovah."

"You struck a deal with God?"

Sam winced. "That's one way of putting it. He—he showed up after you died and made an offer."

"Which was?"

"I agreed to kill Lilith, round up all the demons that weren't supposed to be on Earth, and play Satan until you—well, until I could legally get you out of the Pit."

That was too much for Dean's knees; he slid down the side of the Impala until he hit dirt. Sam was kneeling beside him immediately, saying nonsense things like breathe and talk to me. "How long?" he finally managed.

"A day on this side is a thousand years on the other," Sam said. "It's been about ten days since I made the deal. You died three days before that."

Thirteen days.

Thirteen thousand years.

"It wasn't supposed to take that long," Sam added. "But even Satan can't interfere with the rules of the Pit. It'd be like trying to repeal gravity. And it took you the better part of eight thousand years to finally break, and after that, three or four thousand is what it usually takes Keepers to get old enough to get out of the Pit."

No wonder his head felt like it was going to explode. Thirteen thousand years. In Hell. And Sam—

"Dean, please," Sam said, his voice cracking, "don't—"

"What did you do?"

"Nothing, Dean, I swear—"

"You were Satan! You had to—"

Sam shook his head. "Satan's nothing but Jehovah's pet, Dean. Nothing goes on in Hell—or Earth, for that matter—that wasn't Jehovah's idea somewhere along the line." There was anger in his voice, anger and bitterness and a lack of reverence that was distinctly un-Sammy. "Jehovah's a sadistic little control freak who plays favorites in everything. You were right not to believe in him." Dean stared at him. "Never mind that. C'mon, get up."

"I don't—"

"It'll be dark soon. It gets cold out here, even this late."

"But—" He looked at the house. "Won't they—"

"Nobody's there. It's been abandoned for months. Bobby hooked up the power for us."

He wanted to ask why here? and why not Bobby's?, but undoubtedly Sam had his reasons and Dean wasn't sure he wanted to know. "Right." A thought occurred to him. "Shouldn't we be inside?"

"You'd think." Sam sounded grumpy, and just as confused as he was, which made him feel a little better. "That's where we were. He must've thought this would be funny."

"Funny?" The Enemy—no, not the Enemy, God—must have a bizarre sense of humor. More than giraffes and platypuses indicated.

"Who knows with him?" Sam pulled Dean to his feet. "He could at least have cleaned you up."

"No shit." There was so much blood dried on his hands that, now that he was moving, it was starting to flake off. "I get the shower first," he added, finally getting his legs to work.

Sam chuckled. "Not arguing," he said, helping him up the porch steps. "You kinda stink."

"I smell damn good for a two-week-old corpse," Dean retorted, "and you know it."

He waited for an annoyed retort, a heaving Sammy sigh, but Sam just opened the door.

The dried blood came off easily enough, but Dean stayed in the shower until the water started to run cold, trying to scrub off the memory of Hell. Even when he finally gave up and turned the water off, he still felt like he was grimed with soot and sweat, though he couldn't find a trace of dirt, and he could swear he could smell sulfur and boiling blood. It was going to take forever to feel clean again.

His memory was not knitting together the way he had expected. He remembered everything up to the hellhounds, remembered the agony of dying, but between then and waking up in the back seat of the Impala, there was almost nothing. Bits and pieces, but fuzzy, like a dream, distant and unreal: pain suffered and inflicted, the faces of torturers and tortured, screams and screamers. He half hoped they wouldn't come back.

The world felt strange around him, everything from the dripping shower head to the water on his skin, like he wasn't actually here—dissociation? Was that the word? Something like that, anyway. The face in the mirror was as alien as it was familiar. His nails felt too short, like they should be claws. Had he had claws as a demon? Was that why they felt weird now? Would Sam know?

No. He couldn't ask Sam about that. Not until he knew more about what Sam had been doing these last two weeks. Thirteen thousand years. Whatever.

Dean pulled on his clothes, and found his necklace and ring bundled up in the T-shirt. Sam was supposed to have taken them. He'd never said it, but he'd figured— Well, obviously he was wrong and Sammy had no common sense at all. He had to admit, though, he felt better with them on, even better than he did clean and dressed, as if they warded off some of the weirdness. Maybe they did.

Dean stuffed the ragged remains of his old jeans and shirt into a trash bag, twisted it closed to keep the stink inside, and went into the living room. Sam had lit a fire and was sitting on the couch staring into the flames. There were blankets and a pillow behind him, like the couch had been made into a bed; this must have been where he'd slept those nights between Dean's death and the deal.

There was another sheet on the floor, kicked into the corner, covered with dark splotches. My shroud. He didn't remember, and it felt weird that he didn't when Sam did—

How much did Sam remember? All of it? Had he watched the Pit all that time, wondering which screams were Dean's, just waiting for today? "You okay?" Sam nodded. "I thought you'd be asleep. Or did you catch up while—"

Sam smiled, but it was grim, not amused. "I haven't slept for ten thousand years. Perk of the job. Guess it takes a while to work out of your system." He thought a minute. "Ten thousand years and four days, that is."

"Ten thousand." Dean whistled; that number seemed bigger every time it came up in conversation. And he had an extra three thousand years on his clock. "Some of it's coming back, I think. I—"

"Don't push it," Sam said sharply. "You don't want to remember."

"Why not?"

"You weren't yourself for most of it. You broke. Everybody breaks in Hell," he added quickly, before Dean could argue. "And once you broke—" He stopped, as if he'd almost said something else, and then went on. "People who come back from it, the way you did, they don't remember much. Flashes, here and there. Not a lot more. If they did, they'd torment themselves about everything they'd done. It's better this way."

"But you didn't break, and you weren't a demon."

"No."

He hesitated, wondering if he should say it, bring it out in the open. "So you're going to remember all of it."

Sam managed not to flinch, but Dean could tell it was a close thing. "There was no other way to bring you back," Sam said. "Not as anything other than a demon. The crossroads demons wouldn't even answer when I tried to summon them. Even after— Violations require intercession by him, and he never gives it."

"God."

Sam's whole body flinched. "Don't call him that. God is— Jehovah's nothing like God." Dean bit his lip; he didn't get the distinction, but clearly it was important to Sam. "Angels don't fall, you know. Sometimes they leave, but no angel has ever fallen, not even Lucifer. He throws them." There was that bitterness again. "And then makes it so they can't even remember what happened. Makes them into monsters."

"Sam—"

"Demons make deals for souls," Sam whispered. "Jehovah makes deals for kicks. He—" His voice cracked. "We're all pawns to him, Dean. He just sits back and enjoys the show."

Dean bit back another remark. That wasn't a lot different from what he'd believed since Mom died—but Sam hadn't. Sam had believed, believed and prayed so much and so desperately that he'd managed to get Jehovah's attention, but somewhere in the last ten days—ten thousand years—he'd had that faith torn away from him. The last thing he wanted to do right now was make Sam feel worse. "So," he said, trying to change the subject, "that water you gave me—"

He might as well have asked Sam how it felt to be Satan, because he hadn't seen the boy look that miserable since he had to kill Madison. "The rest of the deal," Sam finally answered. "The part that made sure you came back as you, not as a demon. Not—not wrong."

Like I did. Those words hung in the air unsaid. "You didn't," Dean snapped.

Sam wasn't listening. "The Greeks believed there were two rivers in Hades. They were almost right. They're not rivers, they're springs, and they're both in Heaven. One—the Greeks would have called it Lethe—makes you forget. But it's not total, the way they thought. It just gets rid of the memories that keep you from being happy. Can't be Heaven if people are depressed, you know."

Something about the way Sam said that sent a chill up Dean's spine. Was he trying to say that Mom didn't remember them? That Dad wouldn't? "Everybody?"

"No. Just the ones he thinks needs it. Angels, too, sometimes. Every now and then one falls for a mortal, and they can only leave if they forget everything they knew before." He sighed. "The second spring—it lets you remember what you were before. People who remember past lives, who really remember and aren't just making shit up, they drank before reincarnation. With demons, it makes the mortal reassert itself. You forget all the torture that turned you into a demon in the first place. It's the only way to bring somebody back as himself. It—" Another deep breath. "He controls access to both of them. That was what he offered me. Water from the spring of memory and permission to take you out of Hell in exchange for killing Lilith and serving as Satan until you graduated from the Pit."

"About time I graduated from something," Dean said, trying to lighten the mood, but Sam didn't smile, didn't even roll his eyes. "How did you get rid of—"

"I don't want to talk about it."

Dean sat down beside Sam, shoving pillows out of the way. "That bad."

"I—" Sam's voice caught. "I—I don't want to hunt anymore."

The announcement hardly surprised him. Those words Sam had hurled at Jehovah, about "keeping them in line" and playing "zookeeper"—well, ten thousand years was probably too much to ask of anybody. "It's—"

Sam didn't let him finish. "It's not that I don't want to help people, I still do, and I will, but I can't go out looking for trouble anymore, Dean, I just can't, it's too goddamned much—"

"Sammy." Sam finally looked at him. "It's okay."

"What?"

"You've died, I've died, we've been in Hell, you've been Satan. It's enough."

He'd judged right. The calm that Sam was so desperately clinging to cracked, and he crumpled against Dean's shoulder, sobbing.

Ten thousand years (and four days) without sleep caught up to Sam before the tears ran out; he conked out, right there on Dean's shoulder. Dean had to smile, remembering all the times when they were little and Sam had wound up falling asleep after a crying jag. Granted, for most of those, Sam had still been in diapers...

He fixed Sam's makeshift bed and tucked him in, and just stood there, watching, for a few minutes. He looked ridiculously young, even with his feet hanging off the end of the couch, hardly more than sixteen.

Habit kicked in, and he pried the shoes off Sam's feet, then found another blanket to cover him up with. "Someday you're gonna—" he began, and stopped.

Ten thousand years. You stupid son of a—

No. If he let himself think about that, he was going to get pissed, and then he was going to want to take that out on somebody, and then—

Huh. Hell must have taught him patience, even if he couldn't remember it. Go figure.

But he couldn't just stand here and do nothing but watch Sam sleep. Finally he walked out to the car and opened the trunk, and stared at the arsenal inside.

No more hunting. He'd promised. Okay, he hadn't used the words, but he'd meant it. Which left them—them, not him, not Sam—with a trunk full of weapons to get rid of.

They'd keep a few guns and some ammo, for defense; the rest they'd hand off to Bobby, along with the fancier and blessed knives. Same with the wackier herbs—hm. Maybe not. A protective garden, in the ground or a window box, never hurt anybody, and if anything ever decided to come after them... Dean silently put those in the defense pile, with the salt, of course, and the dreamcatcher, and the rosaries and holy water. There was nothing special about the candles, they'd burn just as well in case of power outage as they did for spellwork. All the books belonged to Bobby anyway—

Except for that one.

Dean picked up the journal, weighed it reverently in his hands. Everything Dad knew. Everything Dad had become. Everything they knew. Their whole lives were in this overstuffed little book.

He slammed the Impala's trunk shut and went back inside. Sam hadn't moved. Probably wouldn't for hours, even though one arm was twisted painfully under him. The fire was starting to die down.

He opened the journal to the first page—I went to Missouri and learned the truth—and carefully, precisely, tore it out.

"I'm sorry, Dad," he said softly, "but we've paid too much."

Page by page, he fed the journal to the fire.

the end