Song Remains the Same

Chapter 128: The Soldier

"We are our choices."
- Jean-Paul Sartre

Alex found her brothers in the library fiddling around with the old film projector—the two of them had just gotten back from their excursion and seemed pretty intensely interested in watching the new reel they'd procured along the way. Apparently, the priest who they'd gone to see claimed that he and Father Thompson (now deceased) had experimented with some sort of demon-curing ritual. The reel the guys were interested in watching was the one that had been made two days before Father Thompson had died. They had a couple of boxes of his things, too—journals, notebooks, some weird odds and ends from his study.

The brothers greeted Alex amicably enough, asking where Cas was and then expressing slight suspicion about Metatron—then proceeding to share some information from their trip in brief, terse sentences. They were visibly tired and they definitely weren't the only ones. Bobby was nowhere to be found, but he'd left a note on the table that said zonked—gonna sleep about twelve hours. Only wake me up if someone's dying. Dad's condition remained the same: comatose.

As the boys got the reel going, Alex settled in with her snacks (even though her appetite was dwindling in favor of an onset of nausea). As they made the final preparations to get the movie going, she watched Dean and Sam in turn discreetly, chewing the inside of her mouth repeatedly and worrying over everyone and everything. Things were high stakes. Yes, she was alive and not in Hell, but this was looking really dire. A wave of stomach-turning nausea made her grimace slightly and press her palm to her abdomen in a futile attempt to make it stop. Alex gazed intensely at her ill-looking twin as the feeling slowly subsided. She was sort of starting to wonder if she were resonating with him or something.

As in on cue, Sam dissolved into a fit of loud, wet coughs. Alex and Dean exchanged a tense glance. It was very much like old times—the communication between oldest brother and silent sister was completely wordless and they understood each other immediately: They were both very worried about their brother who was currently humiliated by his uncontrollable coughing fit. Trying in vain to stifle his hacks, Sam pushed the button on the projector to get things going. The reel started. Alex and Dean reluctantly turned their attention to the screen.

Grainy black and white footage showed a priest interrogating a demon who had possessed a man who had once been a vanilla, suburban father of two. Narrating as he went, the priest began to dose the demon with purified blood, using a needle that he stabbed into the neck to do so—the father noted aloud how it was his own blood which had been 'purified' previously by going into confession. The first few doses of the human blood into the demon's veins seemed to do nothing—the demon just thrashed and roared and cursed, promising death and pain and the usual blah blah blah. However... after the fifth dose, the demon began to change—grow more and more pliable and affected, more emotional. After the eighth dose, the demon was a crying mess, begging for mercy and kindness—then the priest performed some kind of exorcism the Winchesters had never heard before—and the demon—or man—appeared to have lost all the demonic qualities he'd possessed before. And then the reel cut off.

In stunned silence, the Winchesters took a long moment before they said anything. Sam was the first one to find his voice. "Okay. Uh—what the hell did we just watch?"

Blank gazes exchanged. "Did he just... cure a demon... of being a demon?" Alex asked, too dumbstruck to really know what to say or do.

"You can't undemon a demon..." Dean reasoned, although his tone suggested he wasn't so sure.

Sam looked at his brother with eyebrows that were crawling up a wrinkled brow. "Or can you?"