Song Remains the Same

Chapter 134: Heaven On Earth

"The treachery of demons is nothing compared to the betrayal of an angel."
- Brenna Yovanoff

It was a grim scene in that hospital room.

Sam Winchester laid lifelessly on a bed that looked small underneath his hulking figure. His skin was clammy and discolored, marred by injuries. With a maze of tubes and IVs snaking around him, he looked like he could have already been dead. The steady beeping of his heart rate monitor was the only evidence that he still breathed.

Beside his brother Dean sat anxiously, rubbing his hands together over and over endlessly as he drowned in powerless worry. On the other side of the bed at the window, Alex paced a small back and forth, alternated between searching the sky with desperate eyes and sending her twin distraught glances. Barely having said anything to each other since getting to the emergency room, Dean and Alex remained in terrible limbo, waiting for the inevitable. That's what it felt like anyway.

Dean yet again studied Sam's deathly wan face with a churning stomach. It didn't look good. It didn't look good at all.

Pull through little brother. I'm begging you.

The medical team that had rushed Sam in hadn't looked optimistic as they'd worked quickly to get him stable. The steady stream of doctors and specialists had been vague at Dean's badgering questions, just saying they didn't know anything yet, let us run these tests first—etc. But there was a sinking feeling. And every time Dean's eyes met Alex's, he knew she felt it too.

The high-speed, panicked drive here in the Impala had been the most terrifying shit Dean had experienced in recent memory. Sam screaming and seizing out of his mind in pain and begging his siblings for help neither could give. Alex in the back seat, trying valiantly to hold her twin steady as she freaked out, unable to do anything. Then the terrible ominous silence when Sam lost consciousness. Alex begging him to wake up. Dean shouting, "he still breathing?!"

All while above and around them soft streaks of plummeting light rained. The falling angels.

Dean briefly glanced at the muted television in the room and his stomach sank anew. Coverage of what the media was calling a 'global meteor shower' was playing. It made his thoughts turn to Cas again. Their calls for help to the angel had gone unanswered for the past eight or so hours since this all happened. The radio silence might have pissed Dean off on a different day. But today, knowing what he knew... it scared him shitless instead.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Dean dragged his despairing eyes back to Sam and pushed down another huge wave of all-consuming hopelessness. He'd been running it on the line too long and hard now without rest, without a break, without wins to equal out the losses. It was too much. It was all too fucking much. Every failure he'd ever caused sat square on his shoulders, crushing him. Was the universe out to destroy him? It felt that way more than ever, like some personal vendetta.

A quick gallery of his most recent round of trauma played:

Jamie's miscarriage of their child while Dean was trapped in Purgatory—then her death, the one Dean had promised to stop. Her soul cast down into the eternal damnation of Hell where he was helpless to rescue her no matter how much he wanted to.

Alex thought dead (when she'd actually been Naomi's hostage). Mourning her with his entire heart and soul. Her unexpected reappearance, followed directly by her being taken straight to Hell.

Dean's mistake of thinking Sam had abandoned his family, treating him like shit for it, then finding out only yesterday that Sam had never done such a thing.