Hell's Greatest Weapon

Chapter 22: Back to the Beginning, the Third

You had heard the whispers while you hunted down Lilith, had heard the demons telling you that something was very wrong in the pit, but you didn’t think much of the fact.  There were always complaints, always threats of an uprising, always something going awry down there and while you were known for being one of the big dogs of Hell, you weren’t about to go out of your way to fix whatever was happening.

It wasn’t until the King of Hell, a bloke that went by the name Asmodeus to anyone at equal or higher standing than him (of course if you were below him, he demanded “your majesty,” lest the lower demon have a head removed), sent you an angry prayer that there had been the presence of an angel in some of the mid-levels.  Naturally this caught your attention because you hadn’t even heard of angels having left Heaven for centuries, since Jesus walked the earth, and the only reason Asmodeus knew it was an angel was because of the mass demon deaths caused in the process.

There were so many deaths, so many charred demons that it was impossible to tell who was dead; demons were in the wrong places, their faces were gone, full-out pandemonium seemed to have broken out and, try though you did, you couldn’t manage to figure out what had happened.

Why would there have been an angel in the pit in the first place?

You had spent a good couple days after that incident cleaning up, reorganizing Hell, and putting demons back into their respective locations.  Not thinking much of the mishap, brushing it off as an angel bringing a soul to Heaven after having deemed it worthy (rare, but not unheard of), you were quick to get back to normal life.

Three days later you got the call from Bobby (a physical call on an actual phone, as he didn’t know your identity at that point), telling you that he needed your help with something.  While you normally would have brushed the request off—you had, over the last few months, tried to break your habit of helping humans—you found that you had taken a liking to the old drunk and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

When you pulled up his driveway, the sleek, black motorcycle kicking up rocks as you drove over the gravel, you were quick to park, to walk up to the doorway with a gun in your beltline just in case he had something planned against you.  Could never be too careful, of course.

When you reached a hand up and knocked on the door, however, you had never expected to see a creature answer that was wearing Dean’s face, had his eyes, his smile that lit up when he saw you; you especially didn’t expect to view him as a human rather than a creature. Shapeshifters, anything that could pull off a body of something that had once been living, you could smell, see, notice that they were monsters.  They had specifically assigned odors and hidden frequencies you picked up that sent your hair on edge, made it obvious to you that they were not what they appeared to be when seen through normal eyes.  But the odd thing was that the creature that looked back at you, the creature standing in front of you that wore Dean’s meat suit, looked exactly like him, smelledexactly like him, didn’t give off any telltale signs of being anything except… Dean.

But Dean was in Hell, of course, so this couldn’t be him. You had never heard of a soul being brought back from Hell and put into their own, original, earthly body, had never even considered it to be possible.

Naturally you swung at the creature, watching as its smile disappeared from its face and it stumbled backward, barely able to avoid your fist.  You pursued it, stepping over the threshold and into the old house, pulling the gun from your back beltline and holding it up toward the creature.  The thing’s eyes widened and it held its hands up, shaking its head from side to side while insisting that it was, indeed, Dean.

“Hey, Y/N,” The creature held a hand out toward you, impressively mocking Dean’s pleading perfectly.  “It’s me, okay?  It’s really me, I’m Dean Winchester, we’ve been—“