Disclaimer - own nothing and no-one.

Slightly AU from from after 'When the Leeve breaks'. (okay majorly alternate - as thought this up before I saw the finale)

Thanks for mayalean for looking at it - any mistakes you find are from me tinkering after she did her thing.

Hope people enjoy it.

It had been ten months. Ten months since he escaped their "special intervention." Ten months since he had found her and drank so much demon blood that he had finally become something else. Ten months since his brother had witnessed what he had become, and it had been ten months since Dean had shut the door on Bobby's panic room on him for a second time, leaving him only Bobby's voice on the other side of the door for company.

Ten months since Sam's plan to make sure that no demon, starting with Lilith, but ending with himself and Ruby, made it out, had gone awry. Ten months since Ruby's true motives became clear, ten months since the spilling of Lilith's life blood by his hand had broken the final seal, ten months since Lucifer rose copying Sam's own form, ten months since Sam's actions had forced his brother to willingly become something else, to become the only thing to stand in Satan's way. Ten months since he had been brought to this place battered and broken for Bobby to tend to his wounds while the being that once had been his brother performed that task that he had believed should be his.

Ten months – it was hard to believe that much time had passed; all the while there he was, stuck in that small room.

He had been so angry that he, who had been so strong and powerful, he who had snapped Lilith in two without breaking a sweat, was tucked up safe and sound as he healed from the wounds that Lucifer had inflicted on him as punishment for trying to fight back, for not obeying the throbbing blood in his veins automatically, when his new master called.

He who had effectively replaced Lilith as Lucifer's first real triumph, the corrupted human soul, the true living demon, locked away in a small room as all the action went down.

Ten months and the only anchor he had was Bobby's apologies of why he couldn't open the door as he pounded the iron walls until his hands bled, walls that had made his skin burn as he refused to beg to be let out even though all he wanted was to make amends for the sins he had committed while he thought his way had been the only way. A path he had taken because he thought that with her help, he'd be the only one who would be able to do what was needed, that this was the only way to make something good come out of the curse that had destroyed his family's lives, to pay them back for all the sacrifices they had to make because of what had been done to him.

Though forty days after the door had been closed, he stopped beating the walls. Forty days after he had been stuck in that little room the ground started to quake and the skies darken as the rest of creation held its breath. Three hours after the birds started to sing again, Bobby had opened the slot and simply said, "It's done, son, and they got her, too."

"Where is he, Bobby!" he yelled. "Where is he?"

"I don't know. It was Cas that brought the message," Bobby admitted. "He just wanted to keep you and me out of it, boy. But now you should get away from the door."

"Why the hell should I?" he spat out in anger as his veins pulsed with the power he had taken as again he fruitlessly tried to pass the demon-proof barriers of the panic room.

How he went from that to being out cold on the floor, he will never be sure. The light, the pain, the emptiness of the moment after he came to as he became something different, something he hadn't been since he had been six months old.

"Sam?" Bobby asked from his position behind the door, staring intently until he stirred.

"You're going to stay in there. I don't know for how long. Just until you got the cravings under control," Bobby said. "He asked for that poison to be stripped out of your system, but your head is going to be telling you that you want it for a long while."

"Bobby, please…," he cried from the middle of his little cell. "Please tell me where he is. Where's Dean?"

Bobby sighed, "I don't know, son. I honest to God don't know."

He didn't know what was worse – the real withdrawal or the psychological one. He still saw Alistair and Lilith grinning down at him, his mother's crying, his father's utter disappointment and Jess's utter bewilderment while asking him why, why had he been so blind. All of the voices continually telling him how he had been played into becoming something else, into betraying his family and all they held dear and for what? Revenge? To prevent the apocalypse? To get justice? Or was it so a demon wrapped up in a cute little package would stroke his ego, open a vein and spread her legs for him on a regular basis?

Sure, when he first wound up in her embrace, it was because he wanted to cling onto anything that made him feel a little less empty, to find comfort in someone who wouldn't leave, who couldn't die on him, who wouldn't make some stupid sacrificial gesture saying they were doing it for him, but after Dean had come back? He had continued to drink her blood to get strong enough, to continue the process that the Yellow Eyed Demon had started years before, sure at the time he had believed it was the only way to get pay back for all the pain Lilith had caused, to stop her breaking the seals but to become Ruby's bitch every time she opened a vein for him though sometimes she hadn't needed to bleed for him to crawl into her bed – if they made to the bed.

He had thrown his relationship with his brother away for that? For a demon he had known he couldn't really trust in the first place, a demon that he must have known had a hidden agenda. Thinking on it now he couldn't think why he had done it, why he had listened to her, had he really trusted her or was it because some small part of him had thought that he could actually play her rather than the other way around, that he could have kept control of the situation – yeah right, like he could make that one fly.

Had he really believed that his brother hadn't been strong enough to do what had been required. Had he really listened to Ruby's words of how Dean would eventually understand and how it would all turn out all right as the blood ran free, as she wrapped her legs around him as he felt the energy of the blood he had drank throb inside him. Boy, had he been wrong.

It had only ended because his brother had done what he had always done and stepped up to the plate when the time called and had not cared about the cost. His brother had sacrificed it all, his life, his hopes, and in the end his humanity, while he had gotten his kicks tearing Lilith limb from limb thinking that he had prevented the apocalypse, not noticing Ruby's reaction of glee as the last seal opened in that room and Lucifer himself rose while wearing a damn near identical copy of the meat suit that housed the now damned soul of Samuel Winchester until it was too late.

Sure he had tried to fight back. He'd winged Ruby as she moved to Lucifer's side, taken out a couple of the others that had risen with the devil himself as she called for him to join them, but he hadn't seen the whole truth until it was too late, of what the choices that she had given him had lead to. That he wasn't the only one keeping things secrets, although in his heart he knew what she had been up to all along, to free Lucifer himself, by ensuring Lilith was killed by the right hand, the hand of the one that was to replace Lilith as Lucifer's corrupted soul.

Had that been Azazel's plan all along when he had first tainted Sam? To create a special "child" that was strong enough to kill Lilith, to break the final seal? To twist a human soul in a similar fashion as Lucifer had twisted hers all those millennia ago? To make Sam become the Omega to the Alpha of Dean's Righteous Man?

Then, just as Sam had weakened to the point where he had started to beg for it all to end, as Lucifer mocked how he had only lasted meer moments compared to the decades it had taken for his brother to ask to be taken off of the rack, Dean had appeared in a ball of light and calm, the ground shaking with each step he took, swinging the sword of Michael with such surety it was as if he had been armed with it since the dawn of time.

Had the angels known that this was going to happen from the beginning? What he and Dean would become? Had they been watching his family as all of this counted down? Had they sat and waited instead of preventing it? Could they have stopped it at any time? They could have taken him before Ruby had gotten to him, prevented Dean's deal, got to Yellow eyes before Dean had put a bullet in his brain. They could have stopped it all from going down.

Had they instead decided to watch it all unfurl, while they polished their burning swords waiting for the day when the Winchester boys would become the opposite ends of the spectrum?

Had they decided that his and Dean's lives were the prefect excuse for the ultimate cosmic rematch?

Had his mother any idea of it when she as she tucked his brother into bed at night, as she told Dean that "angels are watching over you." All the while had she waited for Yellow Eyes to make good on his deal by taking her second son? He knew where Lucifer had been in all that time, but where the hell was God during all of this?

The irony of it was that Azazel hadn't needed to feed blood to Sam as a baby to prepare him. The demon could have just waited and he would have seen Sam lap it up willingly. For it seemed, for all Sam's mocking of his brother over the years and even with all the other bullshit on top it; that it was the youngest Winchester that could be led around by his dick, even though at the time he had justified as keeping her on side to make sure her blood was on tap while she supposedly searched for Lilith. Because after all that time sitting in that room with nothing to do apart from think, all Sam could conclude was he honestly could not say things wouldn't have worked out very differently if Ruby had turned up in his life wearing the skin of a greasy biker named Larry.

Ten months had passed since then. It had been eight months and twenty days since… the angels or God himself had purged his system of the poison in his veins, and it had been fifty minutes since Bobby had opened the door to finally let him out.

"What's been happening…you know since?" Sam asked as he came down to breakfast after having a long overdue shower and shave. Ten months of using a basin was more than long enough.

Bobby shrugged as he started to make lunch. "Don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"What do you expect me to say?" Bobby asked, "World didn't end and I been here with you. As for anything else, not much to say."

"Right," Sam said as he bowed his head in shame.

"I ain't heard from him, son," Bobby sadly admitted. "Not one word. Not even sure he made it out alive or as alive as he would be now."

Sam nodded as he understood what Bobby meant; because his brother had refused to put a bullet in him before the seal had broken, because Dean had refused to go down the Cain and Abel route, not that Sam wouldn't have thought Dean wouldn't have been justified at that point. Heaven had only one choice – to change Dean's fate – to give him the same one as Enoch's – to make Dean an Angel, more magnificent and terrifying than anything that Sam had witnessed before.

It had been days after the purging that he had finally begun to understand Bobby's words that the only way for Heaven to win after the breaking of the last seal was for the Righteous Man who broke the first to put aside earthly things and lead the battle as one of the ranks of the archangels themselves.

Sam had screamed so hard that day. The embarrassment of being thrown in that room, of being played so badly, not to mention the anger he felt that while he had prayed so hard all those years as his brother had festered against the faith, it was Dean that had joined the armies of Heaven while Sam had sunk to levels that he would never have thought he would ever reach. And while Dean had conversed with the messengers of Heaven, Sam had opened the gates of hell itself.

It hadn't been until after his anger at his brother had subsided that Sam had begun to really understand the last part of what Bobby had told him about what really had happened.

Dean had done a deal, another one, as he hadn't trusted those winged bastards as far as he could throw them without a contract – told Castiel that he would only surrender to the word of God under certain conditions – he wouldn't stand in the Angels' way. In fact, if Sam came before him during the battle, he would do the deed himself this time, but if Dean could stop his brother participating in the final fight, keep Lucifer's potentially greatest weapon out of the battle, then they would wipe Sam's slate clean, prevent him becoming a seal as Lilith had been. That if Dean helped them to win that they would let Sam live the rest of his life free of the demon blood in his veins.

His brother had given himself up to servitude to allow him to live out the rest of his mortal existence as a normal human.

Yet again Dean had saved Sam's ass by putting his own on the line. Not to mention the whole of the world. Typical Dean; act first and damn how everybody else is going to feel after it is all done.

Things from then on were strained. Sam not sure if Bobby blamed him for what had happened or if he was still in mourning for the man that had left a huge gapping hole in both his and Sam's hearts.

Sam tried to make himself useful around the yard – though there had been only so many tires a man could carry until he finally picks up a socket wrench and learns how to strip an engine. It hadn't been out of some need to connect with Bobby or even a need to create rather than destroy.

Hell, it hadn't been through a need to feel close in some small way with his brother or his dad that had caused him to finally learn how to rebuild what had remained of the Impala, which had been more or less destroyed in the confrontation with Lilith – hunting had simply lost its appeal, he couldn't bring himself to hit the road – not without Dean. Not that there had been much to hunt. Demonic omens had dwindled since the averted apocalypse like they had crawled into a corner to lick their wounds.

"I can see you are focusing your efforts on new activities," Castiel said as he watched Sam bent over the block.

Sam slowly straightened, grabbing hold of a rag to wipe his hands as he turned around.

"Is this it?" Sam asked. "You here to take me to where you take guys like me, guys who let Lucifer out of his cage?"

Castiel cocked his head to the side, "No. I am not here to inflict your punishment."

"Then what?" Sam asked. "I listened to Ruby, lied to my family, and brought the world to the edge, and it wasn't like I didn't know what was on the line. Are you saying that I get away scot free?"

Castiel stood there silently for a few moments. "It was what he wanted, and Ruby has been dealt with."

Sam took a second, "What happened to her? Did Dean…?"

"She will not return," Castiel stated coldly.

Sam bit his lip. "Can you tell me if he is alive? Is he okay?"

Castiel didn't answer.

"Talk to me, please. Tell me he is still alive."

"It is noticeable that you requested Ruby's status before your brother's," Castiel replied matter of factly.

"What do you want me to say or do?" Sam asked. "Can you take a message to him?"

"To what end?"

"To what end?" Sam asked in disbelief. "To tell him that I miss him that I'm sorry that I need him."

"I cannot do that. It would not be the best thing for him."

"Who says that you get to decide what is best for him!" Sam yelled.

"As you decided that your brother was not capable when you returned to the path you had began to travel with Ruby when he paid the price he had promised if hell returned you to life? Or when your father decided that your brother should put his hopes and dreams aside while he followed his cause?" Castiel asked. "You made your choice, Sam. You were told that using your abilities was a dark path. You were told that, if you walked away from him, not to come back to him. You should accept the consequences of your actions."

Sam looked away ashamed. "At least tell me that he survived."

"He did," Castiel replied. "He fulfilled his duty as it had been written."

"Is he… on Earth?" Sam asked

"I cannot tell you that," Castiel admitted.

"Why not?"

"I do it to protect him," Castiel said firmly.

"Can you tell me?" Bobby asked as he appeared behind them.

"No, Bobby Singer," Castiel said as Bobby took off his cap and began to wring it in his hands.

"Please…," Bobby muttered quietly. "I know he brought Sam here as much to dry him out as to make sure I wouldn't get involved, but please can you let me know he is all right."

Castiel sighed.

"I know I'm just an old man who ain't good for much these days," Bobby started to say. "But Dean… I love that a boy as if he had been my own. Is there anyway you can let me know if he is okay. I won't ask anything else as long as I know that."

Castiel nodded, taking a step forward and putting a hand on Bobby's shoulder. "Of course."

A second later Sam found himself alone in the yard.