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Nick wakes up curled in a ball on a hard stone floor. His nose is full of blood—his mouth is full of blood—the stench of decay is all around him, and it hurts to move. It hurts to be.
His head is killing him and he can barely open his eyes, let alone stand, and so he lies there motionless, trying to breathe (in through the nose out through the mouth in through the nose out through the mouth) and really trying to not look at the bodies that he’s sure litter the room.
He feels—or rather, doesn’t feel—Lucifer in his skull. He doesn’t feel the constant, aching, burning presence, and tries to savor the feeling of being able to control his own body, but he’s in so much pain that it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Lucifer’s memories replay themselves over and over on the back of his eyelids, and his hands twitch at the memories of necks snapping, bones breaking. He wants to throw up, doesn’t want to be sick, instead just curls himself into a tighter ball and sobs into the back of his hand, dry heaves until he feels like passing out, and does.
Nick wakes up less sore, less dazed, but his throat and mouth are dry and cracked, his face is stiff from blood and tears and sweat. The sun is shining through the windows, illuminating the room with golden light. He manages to sit up and rub some of the dirt from his face; his skin burns at the touch.
He needs water. Water, food, a hospital visit, by the feel of it. A hot shower.
Gingerly, Nick stands, expecting pain as soon as he pulls himself to his knees, but there’s nothing. He’s sore, bruised, aching to the core, but there doesn’t seem to be any broken bones. Not even any sprains.
The Devil was kind enough to leave without permanent damage, Nick thinks, and wants to laugh, wants to cry. Now that he’s standing, he can see the room around him: dried blood, scorch marks, ash. No bodies, somehow. Did he do this? Nick wracks his memory, but the last few hours of his Possession are a blur, if they’re there at all. He remembers bodies, though—he needs to get out of here, get out of here before the cops—
The door behind him opens. He reels around, arms coming up to defend himself, to surrender. He doesn’t have it in him to run. But whoever opened the door isn’t a cop.
“Christ,” the man says, and Nick struggles to place the voice with a face with a name, he knows this man—or he knew him—and his memories get tangled up with one another and he stops thinking, and the world goes black again.
———
When Nick comes to, he’s lying on a bed. A motel bed, he guesses by the stained, stucco ceiling and lumpy mattress. Dully, he wonders where he is, and realizes he doesn’t care. As long as he doesn’t have to do anything for a while, as long as he can just rest awhile—
“Christ, you scared me,” someone says. Nick picks his head up and sees the man from before. Black hair, piercing blue eyes. A name slips into his head, finally.
“Castiel,” he says, his voice cracked from thirst and disuse.
“No,” the man says. “I’m no angel.” He smiles sadly and offers Nick a cup of water. Nick drinks it greedily, his throat crying out in pain. “My name’s Jimmy. I’m—I was—Castiel’s vessel.”
Now Nick looks at him. “Guess you know who I am.”
Jimmy shakes his head. “You were Lucifer’s vessel. That’s all I know. That’s—well, that’s all anyone knew, I think,” he says, and his voice is sad, like he knows what his words do to Nick. Nobody even gave a shit about him after he started hosting the Devil. Nobody even cared to find out his goddamn name. Can he blame them? It was all his fault, after all—he was the one who said yes. Can he blame them for not caring about the man who facilitated the apocalypse?
Abso-fucking-lutely, he thinks, and scowls at the floor. Jimmy is silent.
Finally, Nick sighs. “Nick,” he says by way of introduction, his voice still cracked and hoarse. He glances around the room. “Where are we?”
“Just outside of Detroit. I didn’t think—well, I didn’t want to move you too much.” Jimmy looks nervous. Maybe that’s just how he always looks. Maybe that’s how Nick looks now, too. “How do you feel?”
Nick stands up, still sore, brushes his jeans off. Caked dirt and dried blood and black ash. “I wish I were dead,” he says, by way of an answer. “Gonna take a shower. Burn these clothes, or something. Who knows.”
“Okay. Hang on, here.” Jimmy grabs a duffel bag and rummages around in it, tosses Nick a new change of clothes. “They’re probably a bit small. I’ve got food, takeout, if you want it. Wasn’t—I wasn’t sure when you’d wake up. Hey, uhh, Nick?”
“Hmm.”
“You look—well, you look pretty bad. I just want to warn you.”
“Uhh, thanks?” Nick pulls the bathroom door shut behind him, shakes his head, kicks his clothes off. He turns the water as hot as he can stand it, and then some, and is about to step into the spray when he catches sight of himself in the mirror.
The holes, the frays, the burns (like from a divine cigarette, like an angelic road rash) that Lucifer had left in his skin are still there, just scarred over. Dark red, angry-looking, across his temples, his cheeks, his neck, his chest, his arms. Ugly, purplish raised contusions like—he looks like a burn victim. He looks like a fucking murder victim.
Nick stares at himself in the mirror until it fogs over. His mind is numb, and for some reason the scars have driven it home for him: he’s alive. He’s alive, and Lucifer isn’t with him, and now he’s got to live with himself, alone. He digs his fingernails into his palms until they sting and steps into the shower.
He gradually remembers how to move his limbs, gradually gets used to the feeling of his limbs actually responding to him again, and he’s slowly able to move without pain. He scrubs his skin pink four times over; memories keep surfacing, without warning, of himself, covered in blood, covered in gore. The worst of these sends him to his knees, biting the back of his hand to keep from yelling out, bile rising in the back of his throat.
Eventually Nick runs out of hot water, and his head starts to ache even more with hunger. He rinses his mouth out, turns the water off and grabs a towel from the rack, drying himself off and dressing without looking into the mirror. He does catch his reflection, once, as he’s leaving the bathroom; with the grime washed off, and ignoring the scars, his face is hard, set, permanently angry, and his eyes stare out at himself as if from a great distance.
He scowls further and shuts the light off.
Jimmy is sitting on one of the beds, watching the news with his head tilted slightly to the side; on the other bed is a cooling box of takeout Chinese. Nick sits and eats, wolfing it down, hungrier than he had thought. Jimmy keeps his eyes trained on the TV.
“I feel like I’m missing something,” Nick says finally. “Catch me up.”
Jimmy looks at him, turns the TV off. “Afraid I don’t know much more than you,” he says, frowning slightly. “I woke up in a field in Kansas yesterday with a Detroit address and the keys to the Winchesters’ Impala in my pocket.That’s how I found you.”
“Wait, the—the Winchesters?” Nick’s brow furrows as he digs through his—Lucifer’s—memories of the Winchesters. Sam, in particular. They send a shiver down his spine.
“Yeah. I think—I think they’re…I think they’re gone now. I don’t know. Figured after all the shit they put Cas through I was pretty deserving of that car.” Jimmy shrugs, his eyes on the floor. “At least, what I remember of it.” Nick doesn’t press the issue, but Jimmy continues. “I was out of it for most of the past few years, I guess. I remember Lucifer, I remember the Apocalypse That Wasn’t. After that?” He shrugs. “Bits and pieces of everything. I think Cas was God for a while.”
“Wait.” Nick shakes his head. “How—how long has it been since…?”
“Four years.” Jimmy watches Nick’s face. “It’s 2014, Nick.”
“Christ.” Nick rubs his eyes, cringes when his fingertips brush raised scars. Four years, four fucking years, gone. He slumps back against the pillows and closes his eyes. “Wait, so—where the hell have I been? Assuming you were just Dispossessed…”
“No clue. Honestly. What I’ve just told you is as much as I know.” Nick hears Jimmy shifting around on his bed. “I mean, unless you remember anything else?”
“No,” Nick says quietly. And he doesn’t. The last thing he remembers being aware of before his Dispossession was Sam telling Lucifer “yes”, a blinding halogen light—and nothing.
Which, if he’s being honest, is probably for the best.
“I’m…” Jimmy trails off, hesitant. Nick hears him stand up. “I’m gonna go for a pack of cigarettes.” Nick doesn’t think he smokes. He doesn’t offer to get Nick anything, and Nick doesn’t ask.
“Okay,” Nick says, and as Jimmy pulls the motel door shut behind him, Nick reaches over, turns the light off, and curls up on his side, seeking out elusive relief.
———
Sarah’s eyes are incredibly blue, bright like the summer sky, and they crinkle around the edges when she smiles, and she smiles when she looks at Nick. He feels himself flushing and bites back a nervous laugh.
“You’re cute when you smile,” she says to him, leaning in confidentially, and he can count the freckles on her nose, see the stray eyelash stuck to her cheek, smell her flowery shampoo, and he is grinning now, trying to pull away while staying this close to her forever, and she laughs—
He reaches up with one hand to her throat—it’s easy at this close of a distance—and sque-e-e-e-e-e-ezes. She gasps, claws at the back of his hand, leaving angry red scratches, and he reaches up with his other hand, feels the pulse beating ever slower beneath her skin, sees her blue eyes roll back up into her head, her face purple and mottled now—
He takes his hands off her throat long enough for her to mouth his name, then
(hate white hot hate and rage and execration and the icy tendrils of original sin and you deserve this you deserve every bit of this)
snaps her neck with a single fluid movement. Her body crumples to the floor, the dull thud reverberating in Nick’s ears, and he feels himself smile—
“You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay you’re okay—“
Nick wakes to Jimmy pinning his arms to his sides, his shoulders to the mattress, something hot and wet running down his face. His mind is racing, images flickering through too rapidly for him to process; he hears, feels, sees bones cracking, feels his soul burning cold with blinding white light—
“Nick—Nick—“ Jimmy shakes him once, twice, and Nick breathes.
“What happened,” he wheezes more than says. A migraine is beginning behind his temples and his shirt is soaked through with sweat. His heart is beating hard in his throat. Jimmy hesitates, then lets go of Nick’s arms.
“You were—you were scratching at your face. You’re bleeding.”
Nick looks down at his fingernails, stained scarlet with his own blood. He clenches his fists and sits up, still struggling for breath. The room is lit a dull yellow by the lamp on the nightstand, and outside the window cars drive by, neon streaks in the heavy darkness. Jimmy is watching him closely, face concerned; he hands Nick a towel to clean himself off with, and busies himself in his bag to give Nick a moment.
The towel comes away red when Nick shakily wipes his left temple and right cheek. (Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll have even more scars, he thinks.)
He goes into the bathroom, strips his shirt off, rinses his face off with warm water. The water helps wake him up, helps ground him, and the scratches aren’t as bad as he thought; he thinks he remembers someone telling him how head wounds bleed, someone from a lifetime ago. He stares at his reflection, at how the scars stand out against his skin underneath the harsh incandescent lights. He sees himself, but he sees Lucifer, and he doesn’t know which one is staring back at him.
“Nick?” Jimmy calls. “You okay?”
“As I’ll ever be,” Nick mutters. He pulls his shirt back on, steps into the room, and sits on the edge of his bed. His head is throbbing and he still hasn’t quite caught his breath. Every time he blinks, Sarah’s dying face is imprinted on his eyelids and his heart freezes in his chest.
Jimmy hands him a bottle of Excedrin and sits on the edge of his own bed. “Do you want to—“
“No.”
Jimmy nods. “If you do…”
“I won’t. But thanks.” Nick dry-swallows a couple of pills and puts the bottle onto the nightstand. The taste is bitter in the back of his throat and it helps him focus.
Jimmy looks at him like he wants to ask something, but doesn’t, and Nick is thankful for that, at least. Instead, he just furrows his brow and says, “Leave the light on.” He lies back on his bed, pulling the sheets around himself.
Nick stays motionless for a few minutes, taking deep, measured breaths and focusing all of his attention on the stinging in his face, on the taste in his throat (adrenaline and acetaminophen and straight-up fear), on the quiet hum of the highway outside. You’re here you’re alive you’re okay you’re alone, he tells himself. Here alive okay alone, here alive okay alone.
He repeats this even as he lies back down on the bed, staring at the bottle of pills and wondering how many it would take to kill himself. In the end, he decides it’s not worth the effort to find out, and stares instead at the ceiling.
Sleep doesn’t come again that night.
———
When the morning comes, the sunrise creeps, cold and grey, into the room, and Nick stirs. He’s sore from lying in one position for so long, his head is still killing him—but he’s alive. As the room fills with light, Nick stretches and slips out of the room silently. Outside, the world is waking up; cars pass the motel, birds chirp in the distance, and the entire landscape has a cold look to it. The sky turns from a deep greyish-blue to pale blue streaked with pink and orange and gold to a bright, stunning golden red in the east. Red sky at morn, sailors be warned…
Nick hasn’t seen a sunrise, really seen one, in years, and loathe as he is to admit to himself, to become one of the people who watch sunrises and wax lyrical, he doesn’t really want it to end. Nick sits on the curb and watches the sunrise and traces the scars on his arms and doesn’t think about the Devil.
Jimmy comes out some time later and sits next to him. “I thought you left,” he says simply.
“Nah.” Nick looks down at himself, at his still-bloody fingernails, bitten down to the quick, his arms covered in pockmarked scars. “Where would I go?”
Jimmy shrugs, half-smiles at him, the sadness never leaving his eyes. “Good question.”
Nick realizes, then, that they’re in this together; they’d both been used like angelic marionettes, only to be tossed aside, left to clean up the pieces of their own broken psyches. He doesn't know anything about Jimmy, and Jimmy doesn’t know anything about him, but here they are, sitting outside of a shitty motel room just outside of Detroit, nothing to their names but a maybe-stolen car and enough trauma to make any psychotherapist weep. They’re alive, and, for the first time in a long time, they’re in control.
“Hey,” he says, holding his hand out to Jimmy. Jimmy looks at it, hesitates, shakes his hand. “Nick Campbell.”
“Jimmy Novak.”
“I just wanna say…thanks. For, you know, getting my sorry ass out of there.”
“Don’t mention it.”
———
In the end, they do stay together, Nick and Jimmy. Nick doesn’t have a family to go back to—and Jimmy doesn’t want to uproot his own family’s life. They start hunting things, slowly, using the Winchester’s journal as a guide and practicing fighting each other; they’re not bad at it, really. Nick has a knack for sensing demonic possession (and if that’s the one good thing to come out of his own Possession, well, neither of them point it out) and Jimmy turns out to be quite a good shot. What’s more, they’ve yet to kill anyone possessed, which is a bit of a point of pride for both of them.
But Nick feels fragile anymore, falling apart at the seams. He looks in the mirror and sees the scars, sees the memory of blood dripping from his pores and flesh ripping down to the bone. He wakes up in the middle of the night, drowning in his own body, clutching for the light. He dreams of handcuffs and fire and wings ripping out from beneath the skin on his back.
He sleeps with the lights on because he can’t stand the darkness.
Jimmy puts up with him. Nick thinks about this one day. Jimmy puts up with him, and as much as Nick expects that sentence to one day end with “for a while”, it doesn’t. Jimmy puts up with him, and seems to genuinely enjoy his company, and doesn’t judge him, doesn’t say anything when Nick wakes up choking on his own breath and crawls out of bed and stumbles against the wall, chest heaving, just kneels next to him and puts a steady hand on Nick’s shoulder until the dry sobbing stops, and neither of them ever mention it in the morning.
“What’s the worst part for you?” he does ask one night, when Nick is sitting on his bed, untying his shoes.
Nick just looks up at him and kicks his shoes off.
“I mean, about being back.”
Nick still just looks at him. Their resurrection is a topic that they had broached months before, at first hesitantly, then not at all. It makes Jimmy uncomfortable and Nick frustrated, angry, indignant. Hopeless and hapless.
“I mean, for me, it’s probably everyone else. Dealing with other people. I have to face them—after doing what I’ve done—it, well.”
Nick cocks his head slightly to the side, stops himself. That’s Lucifer. That’s not you. He’s spent the past five months trying to break himself out of the Devil’s mannerisms, out of the head tilts, the slight eyebrow raises. Instead, he frowns at Jimmy. “What you’ve done?” he asks quietly, and before the words even leave his mouth that it’s a shitty thing to say, that he should stop trying to distance himself from literally the only person left in the world who gives a damn about him, and as he watches Jimmy’s face recoil he feels a twinge of remorse and savors the feeling of the feeling. He adds “remorse” to the (small, but growing) list of reasons he’s different from Lucifer, and sighs. “Sorry. Force of habit.”
Jimmy shrugs it off. “It’s fine.”
(It’s not fine, Nick thinks. It’s not fine that I use your guilt against you and act like I have it so much worse when I know you wake up with nightmares almost as often as me and it’s not fine that I hate you for not being the one that Lucifer sunk his teeth into—)
He forgoes undressing and instead just lies back on the bed, staring up at the dingy ceiling. Jimmy looks at him for a moment, then stands and heads into the bathroom. The water starts running for a shower, and Nick doesn’t move.
Twenty minutes later, Jimmy comes out of the bathroom in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and Nick still hasn’t moved.
“Sleeping,” he says, eyes still trained on a small water stain on the ceiling.
“I’m sorry?” Jimmy asks, his head tilted slightly. He looks so much like Castiel, Nick thinks, emotions that he can’t quite place welling up inside him.
“Sleeping is the worst.”
“Oh.”
“It reminds me of him.”
Jimmy sits on the other bed. “Is it the nightmares?”
Nick looks at him for a second, then sits up. “No. Well, yeah. But it’s mostly…it’s dark. It’s…stifling. I don’t feel…in control.”
Jimmy nods. “I can understand that.”
They sit in silence for a few moments, pointedly avoiding the other’s eyes. Nick finally gives up and kicks off his jeans, throws them with his coat onto the floor at the foot of the bed. He’s crawling under the covers when Jimmy asks, “Hey, Nick?”
“Hmmm.”
“Did he…I mean, were you…aware? Of everything?”
Nick tenses up. It’s a question he’s struggled with himself. He has memories of most everything Lucifer did while in his body, but whether he was really, truly aware of it at the time….
“I don’t know.” It’s a shit answer to a shit question about a shit situation. He tries again. “Some of it, yeah. I knew what he was doing. Some of it I had no clue about until after the fact. I’d just…have new memories. I think he liked it when I knew what he was doing. He liked it when I squirmed.”
“Oh.” Jimmy doesn’t seem to know what to say, but this is the most he’s heard Nick say about the topic, so he presses on. “Which did you prefer?”
“I…” Nick picks at his fingernails as he thinks. “I think when I knew what he was doing. That way, at least I was sure what to hate myself for later.” It was a sad, half-assed attempt at a joke, and they both knew it. “But anything was better than when he put me in control.”
“What do you mean?” Jimmy looks at him, genuinely curious.
“Oh, shit, that’s right, your angel wasn’t a fucking sadist. Let’s see.” Nick chews on his bottom lip. Thinking about this hurts, like ripping the skin off a barely healing wound. But it feels cathartic, too, like letting the poison bleed out of said wound. “The itch is how you know it’s healing,” someone is saying to him, calling from a past life. “I could see everything, feel everything, hear everything. It was like I was in control, but I wasn’t. He used to do it when he made me drink demon blood. He liked the way I gagged on it.”
“Christ.” Jimmy sounds slightly sick.
“Yeah.” Nick rolls onto his back, stares back at the ceiling. He doesn’t tell Jimmy about the times Lucifer had released his death grip on Nick’s soul, and laughed when he tried to claw his way out, tried to climb to the light, tried to fight back against the Devil. It was one of his favorite forms of entertainment; it wasn’t so much that he hated Nick specifically, just that he had nothing better to do. Nick traces the raised scars on his forearm and frowns. “What about you? What was it like sharing a body with Castiel?” He’s never really expressed interest in this line of discussion with Jimmy before, and Jimmy seems somewhat surprised.
“Most of the time, I wasn’t really aware of it,” Jimmy says. “He was—I hate to say it, but somewhat kind. For the most part he kept me out of the way, hidden away somewhere. Didn’t want me to suffer too much.” He trails off.
“But?”
“When I was aware of it, it was because he had lost control. And that hurt. Like I was being ripped in two.” Jimmy looks at Nick, laughs hesitantly. “I mean, I really don’t have room to talk about that, I guess.”
Nick shrugs. “It’s fine,” he says. “No big deal.”
———
They fight—they’re too inherently different not to, Nick thinks. They fight about nothing, about everything. Never really truly malicious, and he suspects that it’s something they do just to pass the time.
Sometimes, though, sometimes Nick gets an overwhelming bloodthirst in the curve of his skull, out of nowhere, they’re just sitting there and his vision goes red and his fists clench and he sees himself driving a blade into Jimmy’s throat—
He’ll stand up, walk out without saying anything. He walks until he’s in the middle of nowhere, and then walks until his fingers go numb with cold. Jimmy never comes to find him, but looks at him with restrained sympathy when he—inevitably—comes back.
But one night—
They’re yelling at each other, car pulled over and their feet crunching in the gravel along the side of the road, and words like “coward” and “traitor” and “selfish” are getting thrown around, and they’re both aware of the precipitous turn of this confrontation, yet neither of them pull back
(This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to the root issue and the root issue is that you don’t fucking forgive me and you never will)
until Nick’s better judgment gives way to blind rage, and he sinks his fist into Jimmy’s jaw, reveling in the contact, the solid crunch of bone on bone—
Jimmy swings back like he was expecting it, a sucker punch to Nick’s gut, and Nick falls, scraping his hands on the gravel, cracking his head off the asphalt, driving away the rage for a split second, only for it to return, even stronger than before, a voice that he recognizes all too well—
(kill him make him bleed make him pay let him know he doesn’t know the first thing about suffering)
He knocks Jimmy’s feet out from under him, scrambles into a kneeling position, manages to drive his knee into Jimmy’s ribs, but slips and lands on his shoulder—
Jimmy grabs his wrists, twists them until Nick yelps in pain, presses his knee to the small of Nick’s back. The rage pounds in his skull with his pulse—
and subsides.
Jimmy lets go of Nick’s arms, but keeps him pinned to the ground. They’re both panting, Nick’s breath catching in his throat with a sob that won’t come.
“Did you get it out of your system?” Jimmy asks quietly, his voice low and rough (with pain or anger, Nick can’t quite tell). He releases Nick and sits back on the ground. Nick sits up, wincing as his shoulder pops back into place.
“Not sure,” he says, somewhat uncomfortably. “It comes and goes.”
Jimmy looks at him, his face pale and blue; the blood on his jaw looks pitch black in the moonlight. “I knew you’d act on it eventually. You can’t keep things bottled up like that, Nick, Christ.”
Nick frowns, his throat still stinging with angry, hopeless tears. He never used to cry, not Before.
“You don’t forgive me,” he says simply.
Jimmy blinks. “No. I don’t.”
“I mean, I don’t expect you to.”
“Neither do I.” Now Jimmy’s frowning, and Nick wishes he would stare at the sky, at his shoes, anywhere but at him. “I care about you, Nick. I want you to be okay. I want us to be okay. But I don’t forgive you. Fair or unfair of me, I don’t forgive you for letting the Devil start the apocalypse. But I don’t forgive Lucifer for the apocalypse or Castiel for dragging me all the way to kingdom come or myself for abandoning my family.”
Nick feels somewhat insulted, for half a second—Jimmy wasn’t the one with the dead wife and the dead daughter and the anger and sorrow that kept him from seeing the light, Jimmy wasn’t at the end of his rope and promised revenge against an uncaring universe, what does Jimmy know about any of this—and it passes. He shrugs, nods, shrugs.
“That’s fair,” he says, and it is.
Jimmy puts a hand on his shoulder—(no hard feelings, man?)—and helps him up, and Nick sees him try not to wince and press a hand to his ribs.
That night, Nick sleeps in the car, Jimmy’s blood drying on his knuckles, and for the first time, he dreams of absolution.
———
Nick jerks awake from a night terror, one full of bright, bright light and searing pain, to find Jimmy doing the same. Jimmy clutches his face and curls up into a ball, illuminated by the small lamp on the nightstand; Nick, rattled as he is, knees shaking with adrenaline, heart pounding in his ears and lungs too tight for his chest, stumbles over to Jimmy’s bed, collapses next to him.
They seek each other in the near darkness, neither yet capable of speaking; Nick wraps his arms around Jimmy’s trembling shoulders and Jimmy buries his face against Nick’s chest. The contact is warm and reassuring and solid, and Nick sinks into the embrace as Jimmy digs shaking fingers into his back. The fear still hangs heavy in Nick’s chest, his heart, but with Jimmy’s heartbeat pressed against his, it doesn’t feel so bad.
(We’re fucked, Nick thinks. Completely, absolutely fucked up to the core.)
The silence stays steady as night passes to morning, and Nick wakes up with his face pressed to Jimmy’s shoulder. He slips away before Jimmy wakes, but feels that something has passed between them, a sort of implicit understanding, a trust.
Neither of them say anything about it, but two nights later, Nick thrashes about in his sleep hard enough to wake Jimmy, and Jimmy wordlessly shakes his shoulder to wake him up, gets a hold on his wrists
(Jimmy doesn’t flinch when he touches the scars so why do I, Nick thinks hysterically) lets Nick gasp and cry and yell into his chest. Fear subsides into anger, into impotent rage, and Jimmy is as steady as Nick is unstable.
And so it goes.
———
Nick dreams about falling.
Memories slip into his mind, memories that aren’t his, and he dreams about falling. He dreams about wings fluttering uselessly against his back, about his soul ripping itself into pieces, about Grace seeping from gashes in his ribs, through his fingers and down his sides.
Nick doesn’t know what it is to be an angel, but he knows what it is to fall, and he feels a fleeting twinge of sympathy for the Devil.
———
He tries to kill himself one night, tries pressing a razor to the vein jumping in his throat, tries putting the barrel of his gun to his temple. Tries half a dozen things, thinks about a hundred more.
He can’t do it. He doesn’t know what this says about his character, what any of this says about him, but he can’t do it.
Less and less does he see Sarah’s face when he shuts his eyes.
———
Nick dreams about wrapping his hands around Jimmy’s throat, and doesn’t sleep for six days.
———
Two men sitting in a diner, in Ohio, in Maine, in wherever seedy roadside diners thrive, both tall, both quiet. One, with scars covering his face, flinching away from eye contact; the other, dark-haired and clean-shaven, friendly, polite, smiling. Both wear wedding rings, but with the subdued moroseness of recent widowers.
They are there, in the corner, engrossed in a quiet but intense conversation, they are there, but—not. Your eyes pass over them, forgetting them almost as soon as you see them; they are, after all, completely unremarkable.
You see them, ignore them, and that’s just the way they like it.
———
A year passes, then two. Neither of them feel like settling down, so they don’t. They drive across the country once, twice, half a dozen times, sometimes on a case, sometimes not. Nobody seems to notice them, and if the Winchesters, if anyone, is out there, they make no attempt to get in contact with the discarded vessels.
Jimmy cajoles Nick’s birthday out of him, and insists on a small celebration every year; Nick shrugs this off as one of his idiosyncrasies—Nick’s never been much for birthdays, Nick’s never been much for anything, really—but still keeps Jimmy distracted on his anniversary, his wife and daughter’s birthdays.
It’s the normal things, Nick thinks, that keep him sane; when he can barely show his face in public because of the scars that cover his skin, when he goes days without sleeping because the constant nightmares make him yell in his sleep, when every day is a struggle between what’s real and what’s not, between himself and the Devil and the fear that any second he will lose his own autonomy, then remembering birthdays and doing the crossword and arguing over sports teams are the only spots of certainty in his life. He used to not notice the everyday, not care about it; now, it’s all he can focus on, if he doesn’t want to lose his mind.
He thinks Jimmy feels the same way, although neither of them ever say it out loud.
Jimmy still never forgives him—but he learns to forgive himself.
Nick’s nightmares get worse, get better, get even worse than before, then gradually decrease from several times a night to once a night to once a week. His scars, once so dark against his pallid skin, fade and smooth; still there, but not as bad. He learns how to smile again, learns how to control his emotions so he’s not constantly turned up to 11, learns how to pass the time with small talk and stupid jokes. Jimmy gets better, too, the sadness slowly leeching from his eyes, and the improvement is so drastic in the two of them that they hardly feel like the same people.
So the miles roll past, the years go on, Nick’s list of ways he’s different from Lucifer gets long enough that he can barely remember it all, and that’s okay with him.
The fear is manageable, the pain is manageable, life is manageable, and he actually catches himself whistling one day.
They are healing, Nick thinks, and ob-la-di ob-la-da, life goes on.