Chapter Text
With two of his brothers dead, it was time for Pestilence to deteriorate humanity from the inside out. He was creeping through the world as an aggressive strain of swine flu. The hunters feared it would snowball into the Croatoan virus Dean encountered when Zachariah sent him back in time. As such, they decided that one of the young, capable hunters should remain as far away from the infected as possible. This placed Jude comfortably in Bobby’s home while the Winchesters went to investigate an influx of cases in Nevada.
To add a twist to their already winding plot, they had formed a reluctant alliance with an enemy of their enemy. Despite how the old proverb went, none of them were ready to call the demon Crowley their friend, least of all Jude. She had already had quite enough of him by association. It was this demon that Bael had worked under, though Crowley had no memory of him. Angels and demons seemed to have this—not caring about their grunts—in common.
The intel Becky had given them at that horrid convention was accurate. Crowley did have the Colt. He gave it to them as a bargaining chip; fitting, considering that he was the leader of the deal-making crossroads demons. He also told them that—allegedly—the rings of the Four Horsemen were the key to opening Lucifer’s cage. Crowley’s reasons for helping them were entirely self-serving. He believed that, if Lucifer succeeded in exterminating mankind, the demons would be next. It stood to reason that if the Colt would kill everything, it might be able to kill Lucifer. But even the most conniving of demons get things wrong. This was discovered at the grave cost of Ellen and Jo Harvelle. Jude wished she could have said goodbye; she had not been among the suicide runners in this mission to kill the Devil. She had been called back to work for an urgent case involving child abductions. Without those two women, rarely seen but always a phone call away, their list of allies was thinning.
“Do we know if Adam’s alive?” Jude asked, curled up on Bobby’s couch. As it turned out, there were more than two of John Winchester’s sons roaming around in his memory. Adam was his youngest with a woman that Sam and Dean had no knowledge of after Mary died. He’d sought them out after not hearing from John for a while. The deceased hunter had been a far better father to him than he ever had with his two legitimate sons. But bastard son or not, he was John’s blood, which made him a target for the angels that were fixated on the Winchester line. After several failed attempts to get in touch with him, the hunters were beginning to suspect that the angels had given up on Dean and abducted the only other viable option for Michael’s vessel.
Bobby shrugged at his desk. “I’d assume so, considering the angels probably need him to host their fighter. Whatever they’re putting him through might be worse than death, though. I certainly don’t envy him.”
“Not to be an inconsiderate asshole, but I’m glad they let Dean go. The angels are pretty certain they’ll win. That would mean Dean killing his little brother.”
“Sure, but that could land us in the Croatoan timeline.”
“Well, no,” Jude shrugged, tapping a pencil against her thigh. She was giving herself a break from research by filling out a crossword puzzle in Bobby’s hoarded stacks of newspapers. It was slow going without Spencer in her ear, pointing out the puzzle’s theme before she even made it through the Across column. “Sam and Dean were separated in that one. They’re back together now.”
“Yeah, as two halves of a whole self-sacrificial idiot.” Bobby wasn’t wrong. The brothers’ tendency to throw themselves in front of the gun to save each other made them a dangerous duo. “Speaking of, have you heard from Cas lately?”
“No. I’m not giving up on him, though. If anyone’s earned my faith, it’s him.” The angel had sacrificed himself to eliminate a band of angels going after Dean when he was still a wanted man. He’d carved the banishing sigil into his own chest. “I’ve been praying to him every night, and I plan to keep it up.”
“I can’t believe my staunch little atheist is praying again.”
Jude countered with a soft protest. To her, religion was still based on blind belief. The existence of angels was a solid, tangible fact for her to put her faith in. “I see it more as checking in on a friend.” Her phone buzzed on the coffee table. She put it on speaker. “How’d it go at the hospital?”
“Another steaming-hot pile of swine flu,” Dean griped. They could hear the Impala purring in the background. She was being routinely disinfected after each hospital visit. “Seventy cases in a day and a half. I just don’t get why it’s the regular flu. Shouldn’t he be going all in on Croatoan infections?”
“It doesn’t matter what his method is. What matters is that this is the fourth town he’s hit and we’re still eating his dust,” Bobby called as he wheeled over. The four of them had already decided that it was okay to let Jude alert her team to the rise in cases. When they reminded her that this was against the FBI’s confidentiality protocol for biological warfare, she pushed back that this was not an FBI matter. Hotch and JJ had small kids. They deserved to know what symptoms to look out for. “Did you get anything? Even a snowball of the next probable target?”
“There’s no pattern we can see.”
Bobby sighed. “Okay. Jude?” She was already up and reaching for the map on his desk. He opened it in his lap. “Alright, as far as we can tell, he’s still heading East, so…head East, I guess.”
“East?” the Winchesters repeated.
“Bobby,” Dean continued. “We’re in West Nevada. East is practically all there is.”
“Well, then you’d better get to drivin’.”
Sam scoffed. “Thanks, Bobby. How’re you two holding up? Jude?”
“We’re both catching some cabin fever, but that’s about it. I just miss work.”
“I know, baby. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Except that it literally is.”
“Well, I forgave you, so it doesn’t count.”
“That’s not how—”
“Okay, bye. Be safe. Love you guys.” Jude hung up. Bobby shook his head, slowly wheeling himself into the kitchen for a drink.
***
After dinner, Jude retreated to her room to read. Steam curled from a mug of chamomile tea on the nightstand. It wasn’t there to drink so much as it was there to keep her company. Her phone began to vibrate next to it, shuddering the still surface of the tea. Sam’s contact photo, still marked as Mulder, glowed on the screen. “Hey, honey. Gimme a second. I’ll get Bobby.”
Jude plopped her book upside down on the blanket to hold her place, then started sliding off the bed. “Actually, I was hoping to just talk to you. I mean, you can tell him what I said later, but…yeah, for now, I just want you.”
“Oh.” She scooted back against her pillows. His tone suggested a long conversation, so she tucked a bookmark into her book. It was a photobooth strip from a bygone aquarium girls’ day with Penelope and Elle. Jude had gotten back in touch with the retired agent recently. With the world nearing its possible end, it seemed the right thing to do. Elle was working at a women’s shelter in New York as a counselor. The shift from putting away the abusers to working with the abused directly was serving her well. If only Jude had the same courage to run away and start fresh. “Okay. Shoot.”
“Alright, um…well, I’m alone right now.”
Jude’s brows shot up. “This is not going where I thought it was going.”
“No! No-no-no, not like that. Not right now. Sorry. I just mean that Dean went with Crowley to find Pestilence’s errand boy and left me here. Crowley doesn’t trust me.”
“Dean did say you kept trying to knife him.” Sam’s muffled groan came through the speaker. He was probably covering his face in shame, something he’d done since childhood. He used to believe that if he couldn’t see someone, they couldn’t see him, either. This made him awful at hide-and-seek. “Yeah, he texted me a bit ago. I’m a little shocked he just left with Crowley, though.”
“I can see where he’s coming from. Crowley trying to help us put a target on his back, and I’m Lucifer’s vessel, so being around me is a risk. I’m a liability. Don’t say I’m not.”
Jude smiled sadly at the wall. “You caught me.”
“I figured. Listen, I was thinking about a year ago, when this all started. The night demons broke into our motel and possessed Bobby.”
“I don’t really want to talk about that.”
“I know, but just hear me out.” Sam waited for a protest. She gave none. “Okay. When Bobby was possessed and Meg told him to kill Dean, he didn’t. He took his body back.”
“Just long enough to stab himself, yeah. I remember it vividly.” For a time, Jude’s sleep paralysis demon had been her uncle bleeding out on the motel floor. He slowly faded away until all that remained was his ratty old baseball cap. It was soaked in blood that seeped from Jude’s subconscious to her reality. She jolted awake to find that the blood was real, and it was her own. Her menstrual cycle had allied with her mind’s psychological torture. Jude spent the rest of that night awake on the couch. She let the blood dry on the sheets and threw them out the next day. “Where are you taking this?”
“Say we can open the cage. Great. But then what? We just lead the Devil to the edge and get him to jump in?”
“It’s got logistical problems, sure, but that’s the general plan.”
“Right. But what if you guys lead the Devil to the edge, and I jump in?” Jude lurched off the bed. She threw her door open and stormed down the stairs, hearing the door crack against the wall when she reached the bottom. Sam must not have heard, because he kept talking. “It’ll be just like when Bobby turned the knife on himself. One leap, and it’s all over.”
Jude plowed into the living room, put her phone on speaker, and shoved it in Bobby’s face. He was half awake at the desk, but roused himself easily at the mix of hot anger and cold fear on her face. “Say it again.”
“Um, okay. I let Lucifer possess me and take back my body long enough to jump into the cage.”
Bobby slammed his worn hands against the desk. Jude had lived with him long enough to know that he wanted to stand, facing this absurdity upright, but he was paralyzed because of the exact incident they were discussing. “Are you idjits trying to kill us?!”
“Wait, Bobby, I—”
“We barely got your brother off the ledge, and now you’re lining up to say ‘yes’? Are you even thinking about the aftershocks of this bullshit plan? Do you know what this would do to us? To Jude?”
“It’s not about me.”
“Like fuck it isn’t! Y’all have been dating for a year! You’re supposed to be talking about moving in together, not sacrificing one of you to Hell!”
“Bobby, it’s not like that. I won’t do it unless we all agree. I’m just saying we gotta look at our options.”
“This isn’t an option, Sam! You can’t do it. What I did was a million-to-one, and that was some pissant demon I was brain-wrestling. You’re talking about taking back control from Satan himself!” Jude put her phone on the desk. She leaned against it, bowing her head through a therapist-recommended deep breathing technique. “Listen, kid. It’s called ‘possession’ for a reason. It takes all of you.”
“I’m strong enough.”
Jude snatched up the phone again. She pushed through the squeaky screen door into the cool night and wove through the salvage yard to release her tension without smashing her phone. “Sam, I say this with love, but you’re not. Lucifer’s gonna find every chink in your armor. My memories from my possession are foggy, but I remember that. My demon almost killed me. Yours will obliterate you. He’ll take your grief, your fear, and your anger, and repackage them to show you a reflection of all of your sins. When Lucifer fell, he suffered. For centuries in that cage, he suffered. He’ll know exactly how to turn that suffering onto you.”
“Jude, you’re not hearing me. All I’d need is a second. One moment of clarity, one jump, and I’d save the whole world. You’re too sweet to admit that I broke it, but I did. Let me put it back together, then all of you can live in peace.”
“Not without you.”
“You had years without me. Without hunting. You built a career, a second family. You can go back to that. I can do that for you.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“But I would, Jude, because I love you.” She stopped walking. Cold sweat trickled down the back of her neck. “I love you, and I’m sorry you fell in love with me.”
“Don’t say that to me,” she pleaded. “You don’t get to say that to me right now.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know when else I’d get the chance.”
“Every day, for the rest of our lives, because you are not going through with this.”
“We can call it Plan Z, but we have to be prepared if we blaze through Plans A through Y.”
“I’ll make Spencer help me invent new letters to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I’m sure you would,” Sam sighed. He sounded tired, of her or of their rotten luck, it was hard to tell over the phone. “Listen, Dean and Crowley just got back. I need to go.”
“Seriously? Now?”
“I know it’s a bad time.”
“Colossally bad. Tell them to wait. We’re not finished here.”
“We are for now. Bye, Jude.”
Sam ended the call. The ghost of his voice caressed Jude’s ear as she lowered the phone. She opened the door of the nearest car, halfway off its rusty hinges, and slid into the backseat. Her phone fell into her lap as she stared straight ahead through the cracked windshield. Night pushed in around the car. Its darkness formed cell bars around the car, trapping Jude inside. She stayed like this until she realized that Bobby would come looking; he should not be wheeling himself through the scrapyard, especially not in the dark. Back at the house, her uncle still sat at his desk. Bobby watched her trudge up the stairs. He listened to the floor creak as she lay on the bed with Sam’s sweater, tumbling through the motions of anticipatory mourning until the old house’s settling noises lulled her to sleep.
The sun rose on sounds of bickering from downstairs. Jude shrouded the noise with her headphones and The Cranberries. She took her time brushing her teeth and picking crust from the corners of her tired eyes. Sam’s profession was still swirling in her crowded mind. It had been hard enough to absorb in the dark. She was not ready to face it in the daylight.
But alas, she had no choice. Jude left her musical refuge and trudged downstairs. She waited for Sam or Dean’s voice, gruff with exhaustion and weighed down by the wicked world. Instead, there was the cocking of a shotgun and Bobby saying, “Now, beat it before I shoot you so full of rock salt you’ll crap margaritas.”
Jude ran the rest of the way, nearly tripping down the last step. She stumbled into a standoff between her uncle and a corrupt Scotsman whom she had no desire to see at such an early hour. “Good morning,” Crowley waved, unfazed by the shotgun aimed at his chest. His black suit was more rumpled than their last encounter, needing a fair bit of washing and patching up. Though this was likely low on his list of priorities at the moment, he would need to find a new tailor to fix this mess. Lucifer’s cronies had eaten his old one and burned down his mansion. “Your uncle and I were just having a little chat.”
“About what, you slimy fuck?”
“Still bitter about Missouri, I see.”
“You mean when the Devil didn’t die and two of our friends did? Yeah, just a bit. Excuse me.” The demon stepped aside to allow her access to the kitchen. He and Bobby waited while Jude poured herself a mug of coffee. She stirred in some sugar, tossed the spoon in the sink, and hopped up onto the counter. Bobby watched perplexed, shotgun in hand, while his niece took a long, slow sip of coffee as she held a demon’s placid gaze. “So, what are we talking about?”
“Better question: Why are you two being so civil?”
Jude cocked a brow at Bobby. “I called him a slimy fuck.”
“Which is a fair assessment,” Crowley conceded. “Anyway, I was told that she suffered enough at the hands of one of my low-ranking employees, so she’s done her nickel at my expense. And if I lay a single finger on her, Sam really will kill me, leaving her and me at an impasse for the moment.” He turned now to Jude. “As for my business with Bobby, the two of us were just discussing a rather mutually beneficial deal.”
Jude narrowed her eyes, thinking of the invisible hellhound tearing Dean to shreds. He had been fortunate enough to be God’s golden boy at the time. She doubted they would be so lucky again. “Because those have historically gone well for us.”
“He says he’s got a foolproof spell to track down Death. Only catch is, the last ingredient is a human soul, and he’s a soulless sack of shit just like all the other demons.”
“Now, let’s not be cruel. Shall I go through the ‘pros’ again?”
“No.” Bobby fired. A salt round hit Crowley square in the chest, sending him stumbling back into the kitchen. He vanished before he hit the tile floor and reappeared in front of Bobby’s desk. The old hunter wheeled around to aim again.
“That hurt,” the demon hissed, straightening out his purple paisley tie.
“Good. Get out.”
“Oh, come on. I’ll give it right back. Consider it a temporary loan for a good cause.”
“This isn’t cash. It’s my soul.”
“Well…” Crowley’s eyes drifted up to Jude. “It doesn’t have to be your soul.”
“Absolutely not!”
Jude joined them in the living room. “Bobby—”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Shut up!” both hunters barked. Crowley raised his hands, leaning back against the desk. Jude came to stand by Bobby.
“I’m not letting you sell your soul to a demon.”
“You heard him. Temporarily loan it.”
“And you believe him?”
“Course not. Hold this.” She handed her mug to Crowley. He politely took it while Jude squatted in front of Bobby’s chair. She took the shotgun and replaced it with her hands. “I believe that it’s up to us to save the world. I believe that we need all the help we can get to do that, and I don’t know how much longer I can go on praying. This at least gives us a way to collect all the rings. If we have the keys to the cage, we can spend more time figuring out how to get Lucifer in it without losing Sam, too.”
“They’re on their way back, by the way.” Crowley put Jude’s coffee on the desk and stepped closer to the chance-made family. “I slipped a wee tracking device in their car. It overrides those hex bags they’re so proud of. So, speak now, or forever hold your peace.” Jude rose to meet him. She stuck out her hand. “Lovely.” Crowley shook it. “Now, you do know how we typically sign these sorts of deals, yes?”
Jude tried to withdraw her hand. Crowley held tight. “I was hoping we could skip that part.” That part being the dreaded kiss. A loss of dignity with the loss of a soul.
“Rules are rules, I’m afraid. But, as I said, I’m already on your dear Samuel’s bad side. I’ll leave it at this.” The King of the Crossroads pressed his lips to the back of her hand. As he did, an unknown but innate something was siphoned from deep within Jude. It shot through her body, collecting in her chest before bursting out of her like the alien in the movie of the same name. It was the loss of something so familiar but never seen. Now, feeling the lack of it, Jude’s knees buckled. Crowley, afraid enough of Sam’s wrath to save her from any physical injuries, caught her by the elbows. “That’ll be the soul. You won’t feel this way for long, I promise. I’ll be in touch.” His grasp was suddenly gone. So was he, leaving Jude to brace herself on the arms of Bobby’s wheelchair.
Bobby stared warily up at her. “How do you feel?”
His niece rubbed her chest. She realized she was searching for a heartbeat. Losing one’s soul must be a kind of death, but there was no fear in her. There was nothing at all. Three decades of suffering were gone, taken away with the soul that felt all of that pain so deeply every day. Jude probably should have cared. Instead, as she looked down at Bobby, a giggle bubbled out of the cavity in her chest. “Lighter.”