Disclaimer/Spoilers: Everything up to and including season 11. Also don't own Supernatural. Just playing in a great little sandbox created by Kripke and company.

A/N: Causality is part two of the Providence verse. This story may not make any sense at all, unless you read Providence first. So if you haven't read it already go "MMMbop" your way over there. For those of you coming here from Providence, I hope you enjoy the story and don't forget to review.

Causality - 1. The relationship between cause and effect. 2 The principle that everything has a cause.

Hymn for the Missing

The night was growing dark
Thought you were beside me
But I reached and you were gone
Sometimes I hear you calling
From some lost and distant shore
I hear you crying softly for the way it was before

Where are you now?
Are you lost?
Will I find you again?
Are you alone?
Are you afraid?
Are you searching for me?
Why did you go? I had to stay
Now I'm reaching for you
Will you wait?
Will I see you again?

Month 1

Sam didn't save his brother.

He didn't save Dean from dying, didn't even know it was an imminent threat. A possibility. His brother's injuries from the fall had been bad, but every medical professional he crossed paths with – from the paramedics who responded to the initial 911 call to the doctors who took possession of an unconscious, battered Dean when they came slamming into the bustling emergency room – made it sound like he was going to make a full recovery. Was going to be fine.

He'd only been away from his brother's side for a couple of hours, and in that time, something had happened to Dean.

Cerebral edema, the doctor said, with some patented somber expression that Sam wanted to punch right off his face. We didn't realize the severity of his head trauma until . . .

Until it was too late.

Until there was no hope.

Until Dean didn't stand a chance.

He nodded, thanked the son of a bitch, for whatever reason. Out of that autopilot of politeness that always had Dean standing on his foot and making gagging noises behind his back.

The first twenty-four hours afterward were a blur. Sam felt numb and distant, like he was dream-walking, struggling to find his breath beneath a rushing, violent flood of stimuli that was simply the result of the rest of the world continuing on like it didn't even care – didn't even notice – that Dean was dead. Bobby was always there; his one constant, providing a strong presence to lean on and taking care of him in a way that had only ever been Dean's job. Sam was listless, and dead on his feet, and at some point, the man shoved him into a bed and told him to sleep, assured him they'd decide what to do after he got some rest.

Sam was exhausted, mentally and emotionally wrung out, but sleep eluded him. He needed a better answer than a goddamned cerebral edema. That was too pedestrian to have taken out the larger-than-life Dean Winchester. There'd been so much more going on with his brother than the doctors had known: time travel, for one, and dual souls co-habiting Dean's body.

Maybe they'd gotten it wrong, the spell. Maybe it was never meant to work out. Dean's two souls had been literally tearing him apart from the inside, and maybe he was never meant to survive in such a state. Maybe, even after everything Bobby had made him believe in that too-bright, too-sterile hospital waiting room, this was just Fate intervening.

There was just no way to know for sure.

After a restless night spent tossing and turning and reliving those last few hours with his brother, he and Bobby talked about what to do with Dean . . . with his body. They argued, then they yelled; a glass was broken at some point during the conversation, thrown across the kitchen in an explosion of glass and cheap liquor.

Then they drank a bottle of Bobby's good whiskey, and they talked again.

In the end, it came down to what Dean would have wanted, what he asked them to do.

Sam's heart twisted painfully as he watched the fire climb the pyre, snapping and popping as it chewed away at the wood as it reached toward the body wrapped in white cloth. His brother's body. He felt like a piece of him had been ripped out with brutal, ragged claws that cut deep trenches in his chest, leaving him broken and bleeding in a way that would never truly heal.

"Bobby . . . do you—" Sam swallowed thickly, his voice cracking against the lump lodged in his throat. "Do you think Dean . . . that he's with Mom and Dad?"

With wet eyes, Bobby laid his hand on Sam's shoulder and gave it a soft squeeze. "Yeah, son. I do."

oooooo

Year 20

A raw scream ripped from Dean's throat as the knife slid like butter through the skin below his ribcage, serrated blade grinding against bone. He forced air through his tightly clenched teeth, struggled to keep breathing despite the constant agony of a dozen knives turning his body into a human pin cushion. There was some irony, he supposed, to be found in the fact he didn't have a body here, that he was just another tortured soul stranded in Hell, and yet he still needed to breath. It was something the demon, Alistair, never failed to take advantage of, every day coming up with new and creative ways to reduce or altogether cut off his air supply as an addition to the scheduled torture.

Dean's phantom muscles locked up, his back arching away from the rack as another knife slide too easily through his skin, wedged itself between the ribs on his right side.

"You can make this stop, Dean." Alistair stood next to him, another long blade held loosely in his hand. "All of it."

Dean squeezed his eyes shut, breathing through the pain, and bit down on his initial retort of "Eat me." He'd told Alistair that once before, and the demon did. Not personally, but Dean quickly became intimately familiar with how it felt to have a pack of hellhounds snack on your internal organs without the benefit of dying from the trauma.

It wasn't an experience he'd recommend to the average thrill-seeker.

He steeled himself, swallowed against the warm blood pooling in his mouth. He knew what Alistair really wanted: for Dean to break the first seal, to knock down the first domino. But he wouldn't, not this time. He refused to be their puppet. Last time around, it had taken the angels forty goddamned years to reach him in Hell and pull him out. By that time, he'd already broken the seal and was torturing souls for the fun of it.

This time, Dean could visualize the entire board. All the pieces. He knew the end game. Knew all he had to do was wait the demons out.

oooooo

Month 3

When Bobby woke, he knew that the house the empty. It was gut feeling, honed by decades of experience learning the hard way to take immediate, careful note of his surroundings.

Sam was an early riser, early enough to put even Bobby to shame. The kid always put coffee on first thing, drained most of a pot going through the morning's papers but would start a second, fresh one to be ready when Bobby woke. Sometimes he'd play soft music on his phone, his father's music. His brother's music. Sometimes he's make breakfast, egg white omelets or whole wheat pancakes because he just couldn't help himself, but always bacon, for Bobby. For Dean. He'd flip through some of the older lore books, or prowl the junkyard, or tidy up around the house. Anything to keep his hands busy and his mind preoccupied.

And he was gone.

oooooo

Year 40

He spent decades telling himself it would get easier. With every slice, every stab, every white-hot blade carving into his bones, he told himself that he'd already survived the worst things that the darkest, cruelest minds could think up.

He was wrong.

oooooo

Month 5

Bobby was slouched behind a mess of papers, nursing a glass of Johnny Walker, when there was a knock at the door.

Rain beat against the windows and a harsh wind howled, snatched the door right from his hand and slammed it back against the siding. That same gust of wind blew in a pale, disheveled, and utterly rain-drenched Sam Winchester.

Any anger Bobby may have been – had been – harboring since the kid took off without a word or a note of explanation died as he stared into those dark, desolate eyes. "Good to have you home, kid," is all he managed, wrapping the boy in a fierce bearhug that left him just as soaked as Sam.

One night, after just the right amount of whiskey, Bobby stared into the bottom of his glass, swirled the liquid there. "You try to make a deal?" he asked without looking at the kid, knowing full-well if a deal had been offered, Sam would have taken it.

"No," Sam replied hollowly.

Bobby believed him.

oooooo

Year 60

He counted the days, the weeks, the months, the years on the marks notched in his ribs. Felt each passing hour as a strip of flayed skin. Each minute, a blade down his back. Each second, another scrap of his confidence, his bravado, his hope, stolen away with the sharpened edge of a meat hook.

The angels hadn't come to pull him out like last time. He wasn't sure they would come at all. Maybe they no longer needed him. Who was to say just how much of the future he'd changed when he came back. He could very well be staring down an eternity in Hell.

oooooo

Month 7

Without Dean, they didn't know what was coming. Didn't know what to expect. So, they expected the worst.

Dean had left notes, careful scrawls that filled an entire journal, most of it gibberish to Sam but there were names and dates. Some of them weren't too far off.

Neither of them drank coffee for breakfast anymore, and one morning, Bobby dropped sketches he'd made for a panic room.

Sam chuckled, washed his cereal down with the rest of a beer. Then pounced on the idea.

oooooo

Year 80

Sam's screams echoed through the small chamber as the demon cut into him, over and over.

"Sam!" Dean tugged and pulled at the bonds securing him to the rack, struggling fiercely until he rubbed the skin of his wrists raw. He didn't know how the demon had gotten to his brother, could only assume it was the same person – or thing – that had thrown him into Hell himself.

He jerked roughly against the straps, a faint echo of hope shooting through him as he felt the bindings give. He gave another wrench, and one bloodied wrist pulling free of the restraint. With his right arm loose, Dean made quick work of the rest of the straps that had held him to the rack for so long.

The demon torturer had his back to Dean, was too preoccupied with ripping another scream from his little brother that he didn't notice the other occupant now free. Dean's eyes roamed the space and he grabbed the nearest sharp object, a machete-like knife, its tip already stained with blood. Probably his. Within moments, the demon lay slain on the ground, its severed head rolling a to a stuttered stop a few feet away.

Dean looked up, finding a moment's peace as he met his brother's grateful gaze, before the image of Sam shuttered once, twice, then disappeared completely.

He stumbled back, nearly tripping over the body of the demon he'd just killed. It was just a trick; he should have known. No one escaped the racks – no one. He'd spent enough time down here to know that, but he'd accomplished the impossible so many times before that Dean had allowed himself to believe that maybe, just this once, he'd be free.

"You don't have to go back on the rack."

Dean spun on his heel to find Alistair standing only a few feet away, watching with some form of twisted amusement.

The demon took a step forward. "The offer I made still stands."

Dean dropped his gaze to the knife in his hand, saw the scene playing out like he was watching it from above. He stood next to the rack, not strapped to it. Blood slicked the edge of the blade he gripped, trickled warmly down his hand. Tricked or not, he had spilled blood in Hell. He'd broken the first seal, and now there was nothing he could do to fix it.

He glanced over his shoulder, to the rack where he'd been strapped just moments before. For the first time in roughly eighty years, he wasn't in pain. He wasn't being tortured.

Dean looked back down at the knife in his hand, ran his thumb across its bloodied edge. Alistair was offering him a reprieve, just like last time. To be kept off the rack if he put souls on, if he ripped them apart like his own had been ripped apart for decades. The first seal was broken; the choice he made now wouldn't make a difference to anyone. Not really. Every soul down here had been damned, one way or another, by their own hand. They would be tortured, ripped apart repeatedly. It made no difference by whose hand.

"What's your choice, Dean?"

Dean raised his eyes to the demon awaiting his answer.

Did it really matter?

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