Disclaimer: Supernatural ain't mine.

Warnings: Swearing, violence, Season 5 au

A/N: Alright, so I'm really feeling this story and I'm hoping you guys will too. T

Also, I don't have a real clear idea on who all is going to be in this story, so the characters listed in the description will be updated accordingly within the next few chapters.

here's not much else to say at this point except...

Read, enjoy, review! :)

Dean is circling him, hands held behind him and standing up straight and proper. Posed like that, Dean looks all the more impressive, looks like what everyone would see him as if Dean didn't pretend to be such a joke. He looks a little bit like Dad.

"You're such a disappointment. I raised you, learned everything the hard way just so that you could grow up slower. Grow up safer. But face it, I'm better and faster and stronger than you even when you took everything I had to offer."

"I'm sorry." It's all Sam can say. It's never enough.

Dean just shakes his head and goes for the door.

"Wait!" Sam says, jerking in place. Stopping, slowly looking back at Sam, Dean's face wars between disdain and patience.

Sam says, "I would do anything to change it. I wish that I could, believe me. God, I would do anything."

Dean's eyes soften, before turning to a hollowed out sort of look. Bleak and real and back to disappointed.

He says, "I know," and Sam gets that nothing he can do is worth a damn thing. Not after everything that's gone down. Then, Dean walks out the door.

Sam is alone.

He's stuck in this room with only the whirring of the overhead fan as a constant and it's like an echo of pain is throbbing through his veins.

Time is passing- dragging, if Sam were to be poetic about it- slowly and then even slower.

The only thing that could be considered good about this is that he's not hearing whispers anymore. He's not seeing the room fill up with the ghosts of everyone he has wronged- his family, Jess, the ones he didn't save, the ones that were means to an end. Even without all that though, the silence presses in on him like a death sentence and he really doesn't like being alone.

Thing is, he's kind of starting to think that this is a death sentence. Everything hurts and his body is racked with bone breaking shudders. His pulse is racing. His mind is foggy, fearful.

The charged silence melts away when the door opens. His head jerks up and he's hoping it's Dean coming back to tell him they'll make it right and maybe even tell Sam it's not all his fault.

It's not Dean.

"Dad?"

And Dad smiles, a haunted, watery grin. Just like the one from when he was alive.

"How are you even here?"

The smile is wiped from Dad's face and he opens his mouth.

Nothing comes out.

It's just Sam and him, staring at each other. Sam is hunched over, pathetically withered and power draining out of him like water from a broken pool. Waiting for Dad to say anything, to do something, Sam instead has to watch as Dad stands there with his mouth open and his body shaking, like he's restrained. Then he jolts forward, just once, and starts to make choking sounds.

"Dad!"

He falls to his knees, blood spreading from his gut and then he's fully on the ground, soundless still, but writhing.

"Dad!' Sam sobs out the name.

"Sam," he mouths back.

And then he's being torn apart.

Sam wants to turn away. He saw Dean die this way and things were never the same. He can't watch it happen again, but he can't not watch it either. He deserves this.

All the pain in the world, that's the only thing Sam should ever have. He's wretched, he knows, and he wishes for the one small mercy of not having his loved ones paraded in front of him, to not watch his father gutted. But that just brings him back to Point A again: he deserves this.

His infinity track mind is herded back to a linear, not jumbled path, when he hears the laughter. It's high pitched, like a female's voice and his father fades away, almost violently in its suddenness.

He's alone in the room again with just a single bloodied handprint from where his father was just a moment ago. Then, footsteps make their way to his room; leisurely and clicking.

The door opens- annoyingly slow and even if Sam's going through something right now, burying himself in guilt, a rising doubt of himself, and self-made tortures, he's still present enough to roll his eyes at the B-grade horror movie lead in.

Except, he has to mentally up his initial rating to A-grade, because it's Ruby and she's got a shitload of 'dirty laundry' she can dump on him. Also, the walls are starting to bleed and that's pretty freaky.

"Hey there, Dumbo," she greets him warmly, face lighting up with a softness he hasn't seen since before Dean came up topside.

"Ruby?" Sam asks, almost not hesitating and trying to hold back any hope that it really is her.

"You got it one, kiddo," she says, light and breezy.

A glob of blood falls onto her shoulder. She doesn't even really seem all that bothered by it, just brushes it off her shoulder with the flick of her hand.

"No, I'm still hallucinating," Sam argues. Because, really, Sam has known all along that this is all a byproduct of his crazy psychosis and detoxing (not that knowing that little fact has made any of this easier, because it's all based on truth and nightmares).

She smirks a little, more teasing than anything else, "You were hallucinating, I'll give you that. But now? Not so much. I'm real." She says 'real' like that makes her the most awesome person ever, the word formed by mouth and tongue, exaggerated in each part.

Not saying anything, Sam just stares sadly at her and the bloody walls.

She sighs, exasperated.

"How is it that fake Dean and fake Daddy got more of a reaction out of you than knowing that your ever loyal sidekick wasn't ganked by your psycho brother and his loyal angel pet?" She pauses, thoughtfully and then adds on, "Well, sort of ganked. I guess technically I'm already dead. You know, being a demon and all."

Sam looks at her, focuses all his guilt and pain and everything on her as he repeats, "You're not real." The blood starts to trickle down faster, pooling around the corners of the room.

She squints at him, like she's trying to see passed him and all that stupid in his noggin, but then just sighs and rolls her eyes like she doesn't see anything else in there.

"Whatever, Sammy." The blood spreads out from the corners, crawling closer.

"Sam." He feels several drips of blood fall on his head.

"Okay, don't care. I'm just here to warn you."

Sam just scoffs. She shoots him a glare and scoffs right back. The handprint starts to move, drags itself into the swarm of closing in blood.

"Seriously babe, you might wanna get over all of that delicious guilt and those hurt feelings of yours and get the hell out of dodge."

Curiosity being a majorly overriding characteristic of his personality, Sam relents, saying, "What?"

She walks up to him, bends down to eye level (because, as stated before, Sam has been hallucinating and that's pretty exhausting, so of course he's sitting down), and knocks on his head.

"Helloooo? Anyone in there?"

Sam leans away from her tiny, demonic fist. He catches a glimpse of the blood rising up from behind her, like a wave.

He studiously fixes his gaze back on Ruby and, feeling like a broken record because he's really not being a winner in this conversation at all, exasperatingly asks, "What?!"

Leveling him with a look, she pretty decently conveys, even more than she has already been doing, how stupid she thinks he is.

She claps her hands together and says in a condescending voice, "Okay! You know how there's an imminent threat of the apocalypse starting? Well, that kind of started like, oh I don't know, an hour ago! So yeah, I'm trying to warn you that that's a sure thing now and you're reeeeal close to the starting point of it."

The blood is several inches deep now, reaching Ruby's ankle.

She looks at him a little more seriously, says, "You might want to get out of here."

The blood rises another inch.

Not even a couple of hours ago, Bobby and Dean had been discussing Sam's fate as either Dean's human brother or apocalypse bait. Apparently, Sam's demon blood addiction was an asset. Not that that really matters right now.

Right now, Dean and Bobby are trying to survive the massive monster attack they went barreling headfirst into (in retrospect, they really didn't think this through) after having left the house to help out with the seriously alarming monster outbreaks Bobby kept getting phone calls from other hunters about. Dean heard about it on the news too, but what he heard was more along the lines of, "Massive power failure due to the fallen tree right behi- AHHHH!" and then the camera blacked out.

More specifically, Bobby is several feet away from Dean, but the distance seems even longer when there is an armament of monsters between them. The ground is slippery with monster and human guts alike, the surviving few continuing to fall to stronger opponents- because it's not just Dean and Bobby in this mess, but a whole lot of people and Dean can't help but think that, all in all, this is a pretty shitty day.

"We have to- Bobby, we have to go back!" Dean yells, entrenched in all out war and all the worse off for it.

Bobby gets in a swing, axe grinding against the skull of something that leapt at him from the right. It makes him scowl, a visual showing as to how affronted he is that the thing thought it could get the jump on him.

He yells back to Dean, "How the hell are we going to do that ya idgit?"

There is another long pause between intervals as Dean slays his own slew of adversaries. He is mildly more gung ho about letting 'em die bloody and painful and it shows. He's surrounded by live, kicking, and screaming (like a battle cry, but distinctly not human and pretty offsetting) monsters, but he's even more surrounded by dead monsters, smashed up and oozing bone.

"I don't care! Make way for me or I'm going alone!"

Dean does clue Bobby in on what he's planning, but he doesn't really give Bobby any time to react. Even as Dean yells the warning to Bobby, he's already headed back towards the Impala. The fact is that they totally had to abandon her or be swarmed by even more monsters than they're dealing with now. Dean's the kind of guy who doesn't let a little fact like that discourage him.

"Dean!" Bobby pulls that holler from the pit of his belly, incredulous and resonating through their newly adopted battle ground. Of course, Dean doesn't listen, not even a little bit, so Bobby has no choice but to back up the idgit's damned fool plan.

"Dammit Dean," he mutters- one curse among many as he slaughters a path back to the hot rod and his car. Bobby hacks himself a cleared path, ignoring all the poor bastards stuck in this mess, because they've been fighting for too long with too many new monsters popping up for their presence to mean a damn thing anyways.

Dean is already leaning against the car when Bobby gets there and he says, "About time. Seriously Bobby, did you even eat your Wheaties today?"

He looks super relaxed, like they aren't on a time crunch, but he's not. He's tensed and scanning the area for a clear driving path as Bobby sits his geezer rear down in the passenger seat. When the act of Bobby-butt to Impala-seat connection is complete, Dean thrusts the Impala into gear all while swinging himself into the driver's seat.

Bobby just huffs, crosses his arms a little bit, and says, "We gonna drive or am I gonna have to listen to you cobble some words together in hopes that something that comes out of your mouth makes sense?"

Dean does think of an array of things he could say to respond, but then he hears screeching from behind them and really doesn't want to know what it is. So instead, he hauls major ass to get them out of there.

Knowing that something's going down and there's gonna be a lot of death at hand, he can't help but wince. Even so, the priority right now, the 'this is the only thing we can do because if not I'm gonna pull all of my hair out until I ugly myself to death' course of action, is to go save Sam- his unfortunately locked up, damsel in distressed little brother.

Sam doesn't know when Ruby left, or when the silence became a roar of white noise, but that's what happened.

Being alone, isolated within the ironed confines of one's own hick version of a detox clinic would have been preferable. As it is, Sam can only squeeze his eyes shut and remind himself that all the noise, the screeching and the blood that's going to drown him soon, is not actually real.

He gives an experimental, "It's not real," but chokes on the "not" because the not real blood is at mouth level. Of course, Sam is still sitting down (so sue him, Sam would wager that most people don't think well in the midst of sweating out their demon blood habit and seeing dead people), so that does give him a little hope that standing up will stop him from drowning in hallucination blood.

Unfortunately, the blood is not the only problem. There is also the little problem of some sort of monster pile up going on outside the panic room. He can tell because the house is quaking, the monsters are making monster like noises, and Sam is a hunter.

The other thing that is unfortunate is that Sam is a sitting duck. He can't run, hide, escape, or do any other proactive activities to protect himself from the threat of horrible self-destructive brain activity.

When the door opens again, he hopes maybe it's fake Moses, here to part the red sea. It's not.

Standing in front of the doorway is this strange… monster? He's never seen anything like it, but it looks a little bit dead, like it's decaying, but it also looks a little bit on fire, like it's on fire. It rushes Sam and bowls him over. That's when Sam starts to think that not everything he's seeing is a hallucination. That's also when the panic room breaks out into chaos, blood and flame monsters and blood again.

Sam can't but think that maybe he's in a little over his head.

Then, the blood bursts forward, one final knockout, flooding what might just be the entire house.

"Dammit Dean, watch the road!" This is Bobby's sensible response to Dean's swerving, curving driving job.

"Can it Bobby!" This is Dean's less than stellar and completely not helpful response.

They have been driving towards Bobby's house, Dean constantly jerking the car to avoid potholes and creepy things, except for when he does not avoid the creepy things. Those times, Dean gets this crazed grin on his face as he pumps the gas to better head on collide with monsters that Bobby can only speculate Dean doesn't like the looks of. Apparently, Bobby is a close personal friend to a select few, namely nut jobs.

Bobby has made his peace with this little fact, up until the point when Dean drives off the road, across a patch of not so good looking dead body parts, and onto another road.

"Would you quit sticking me with your death wish and drive?"

"We've got to get there faster. Bobby, we're gonna save him!" Dean argues, but he sticks to wheeling along on actual road. For now.

A few more insults, offered driving concerns, and suggestions as to what to do with oneself (such as, put a sock in it) later and Bobby can see his house.

Shit.

The restrained tension that they buried with banter, the delayed fear for Sam, all of that is back, because Bobby can only tentatively call what he sees now his home.

It's more of the remains of a massacre than it is a place to keep coming back to. As with most things horrible, there is blood. Plenty of it. But there's also flames eating away at the walls, at Bobby's front door and the first line of cars in his car dump.

"SAM!" Dean roars, louder and somehow more everything.

Dean's speed walking, then he's jogging, then he's running and Bobby watches each transition in slow motion. Each beat of his heart matches the next step Dean takes until all Bobby can see is red.

Then Bobby goes after Dean.

Dean is trying to get into Bobby's not home, dig his way through fallen beams and pounds of ashen, mushed up books, but he can't. Heat and sparks just keep growing, blocking off all things living. But, that's not quite right, because Sam's inside. He'll just wait out disaster, sitting pretty and waiting for Bobby and Dean to let him out. Nothing can break down the panic room, so he's got to still be alive.

Bobby can't let Dean go prove that fact though, because he would incinerate himself before he reached the panic room.

"Dean. Dean!" Bobby calls Dean a few times, but nothing stops the bodily pull of 'must save Sam.' Only Bobby can do that, and he does. He reaches for Dean, wrapping an arm around the corded muscle, the solid adrenalized form of Dean and drags him back as far as Bobby's strength allows.

In a matter of seconds, Bobby has knocked Dean out, because, at this point, Dean is just a senseless wind up doll of 'go to Sam', 'go to Sam', 'go…

All Bobby can do is put Dean in the back of the Impala and sit on the hood, loaded gun at the ready by his side and a knife held tight in his hand.

He watches his house get eaten away by the end of the world, waiting for flames to die out so he can go get Sam from the single safest damn place Bobby knows.