Blank Cards and Infinite Stakes (1/3)

[dime_liora]

Author: dimeliora
Fic Title: Blank Cards and Infinite Stakes
Mix Title: Driver’s Choice
Fandom(s)/Pairings: Sam/Dean , slight Castiel/Aziraphale
Length: 14,870
Summary: It begins as all legendary things begin; with ice cream. Once again the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley are left to save the human world they’re so enamored with.
Rating/Warning(s): NC-17/ Expletives, Graphic Sexual Interactions, Bad Humor
Notes: A crossover between Supernatural and Good Omens.
Disclaimer: I don’t own what I built on but I won what I built.
Beta: candygramme, who was patient, and kind, and all to generous.
Art: forhimxx , an incredible artist who did amazing work!  Link to Gorgeous Art: http://forhimxx.livejournal.com/12581.html
Mixer: sobota Link to Mix:

Prologue:
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens


What Follows Are The True Events That Would Have Led To A Second Apocalypse As Recorded By The Former Apostles Bartholomew, Thomas, and Alphaeus, Who Had Nothing Better To Do.


There are a plethora of opinions on what the cause was. Many scholars and prophets blame history’s cyclical nature. They point to the relationship of Michael and Lucifer, and how that went on to influence Cain and Abel and many other tales of brothers turning against brothers with disastrous results. There is a very dedicated and serious group of prophets that claim the destiny of Dean and Samuel Winchester can be pinned to a very obscure passage in the Book of Enoch that is not worth recounting here as its grasp of proper plot structure is very weak and unpleasant for most readers.

All of these sources are wrong though. In fact before this accounting only one person ever really understood the beginning of the end, and that was simply because God told him.

It began as all legendary things begin; with ice cream. Gabriel, the third of the Lord’s greatest archangels is notorious for not only his sweet tooth, but his innate ability to gain his goals and wishes through a combination of manipulation and wheedling. After two centuries of bothering his father for a treat better than honey or manna God had finally had enough. The result of this was the first ice cream cone, humans would later title the flavor Moose Tracks, and a rather pleased Gabriel. Too pleased as history would later prove, since the next words out of his mouth were, “This is good enough to end Creation over.”

Why this became the Lord’s reasoning for ending the world, or how Gabriel felt about that, has been lost to time. All that we know for certain is that Gabriel was sent to tell the prophecy to an ox cart driver named Uzzah, son of Abinadab, and a Levite who took his job very seriously.

If you know the story of Uzzah, please don’t ruin it for the rest of the audience. Uzzah was well-known as a very responsible and meticulous cart driver. His oxen were well-cared for, his carts in peak condition, and he was always on time. In those days cart drivers with that sort of attention to detail were few and far between. Maybe it was this set of qualities that made Uzzah God’s choice for receiving such an important prophecy, or maybe He just liked Uzzah, but whatever the reason Uzzah’s devotion to his job ultimately made him a terrible prophet.

Shortly after Gabriel had delivered the prophecy Uzzah was tasked with taking the Ark of the Covenant, and in the process Uzzah’s oxen stumbled, and his meticulous care for cargo gained him a rather nasty smiting. Why would God smite His prophet you ask? We asked that too, but no one really knows and that’s the way of things. What we do know is that when Uzzah was supposed to be writing down his prophecy he was instead oiling the axles of his cart.

Luckily for Uzzah, and unluckily for us, this oversight went unnoticed by the majority of Heaven for thousands of years, until the day that a young woman named Mary Campbell decided that it was too hot to be training with her father and went for ice cream.







Part 1:

“That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you. The Great War, the Last Battle. Heaven versus Hell, three rounds, one Fall, no submission. And that'd be that. No more world. That's what the end of the world meant. No more world. Just endless Heaven or, depending who won, endless Hell. Crowley didn't know which was worse.”
-Terry Pratchett Good Omens

Crowley was on top of the world. His prospects in Hell were looking up, he was gaining favor and power, and most importantly he no longer had to deal with the more bothersome and stupid demons he had once been required to communicate with. After the events of the near-Apocalypse Crowley’s following became somewhat devoted. As it turned out, a good number of the demons in Hell had no interest in the world ending.

His promotion to Vice President in Charge of North American Crossroads was a coup of epic proportions, and in some bizarre twist his rise in power meant that the tapes in his car avoided their inevitable Queen conversion for an extra month. The only thing he was missing, not that he would admit to it under any circumstances, was the presence of Aziraphale.

America had its perks, the increase in guns and decrease in boiled foodstuffs being chief among them, but he found himself missing the stuffy angel more than he thought he would. Sure they still got together every third Sunday for a chat, but there was a loss in easy camaraderie that Crowley really hadn’t expected.

That aside life was good, and Crowley roamed the highways and streets of American cities collecting souls and glory as he found new and exciting ways to pervert mankind. The stress of the Summer of Adam, as he had begun to call it, melted away and left him with a pervasive sense of ease.

All of that came crashing to a halt the day he visited his superior and learned of the Winchester prophecy. How it had slipped their attention for so long he didn’t know, but it wasn’t just them. Word was that Heaven was scrambling just as frantically to catch up. The second boy was about to be born, and a demon Crowley vaguely knew had some overly complicated and pretentious plot to speed along their roles in the Apocalypse.

And that was not something Crowley was willing to allow. After all the work they had done, the idea that two human boys would screw it up just because they happened to have a passing resemblance to that prick Michael and the whiny Lucifer was just a step too far in Crowley’s opinion.

Thusly Crowley found himself once more in the musty little shop Aziraphale called home as he stared at his tea and considered their options.

“What could you possibly mean there’s another Apocalypse? The very meaning of the word makes such a thing impossible. One world, one ending, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Aziraphale sipped his tea imperiously, and Crowley wondered, not for the first time, how they had managed to be friends for so very long.

“Semantics aside, my friend, that is what is happening. You’re telling me that with all your connections you haven’t heard a single thing about it? Not even whispers?” Crowley waited for the angel to put down his tea and turn a baleful glare towards a potential customer before pouring a shot of whiskey in both their glasses. Aziraphale was notoriously easier to deal with drunk.

 “Nothing. Then again, lately I haven’t heard anything else either. I imagine no one is quite sure what to make of me after that summer.” The angel finally succeeding in running the matronly woman off, and as soon as she was gone he plucked up the book she had been eyeing and moved it across the store before returning to the table.

“Aziraphale, listen to me carefully. This is happening. Both boys have been born, and their mother is going to be taken out of the picture soon. We have to do something.”

The angel’s eyes narrowed as he sipped his tea obliviously. “I don’t suppose that simply killing this demon would solve our problem?”

“Oh well. No. Probably not. Azazel had supporters, and they’d carry the work on afterwards. Although…maybe…” Crowley looked out the dirty shop window and considered the bustling street. “Maybe if they weren’t so close to one another. If they were strangers then they wouldn’t be so willing to end the world to save each other. Right?”

“That’s brilliant. Yes. We could split them up. Then we’ll each monitor our own brother and make sure that they’re not raised in a fashion that would put them in danger of ending the world. But we’ll still need to kill the demon to confuse your side. Make it harder for them to track Samuel.”

“And we’ll need someone who’s active in Heaven to tell us their plans and then help us keep the halos off of Dean.” It was a perfect plan. Simply, easy to execute, and easy to uphold. All they had to do was make sure that the Winchester brothers never met each other again.

“I think I know someone.” Aziraphale put down his teacup and adjusted his spectacles. “Just the right someone.”

----

Angels, as a general rule, are supposed to be good. In the general sense of good of course, because it must always be remembered that when you say good you are using a term that is highly subjective, and any angel will remind you that, since Heaven is the final arbitrator of the term, they have the right to change the definition without notification or full explanation.

In that sense what Aziraphale did next may seem less than angelic or good to the general audience but in reality was the very definition of good as he was applying it that day. The angel he chose to speak to was one that had a common interest with him; namely the fate of humanity. He found himself sitting across from the younger angel in a café in Paris as  the streets teemed with confused tourists and superior feeling locals.

“So you see if we allow them to continue on the path they’re on it will end in the Apocalypse. Obviously the only course is to make sure that they never know each other, and therefore cannot start the end times. Don’t you agree, Castiel?”

Sharp blue eyes studied him for a long time before the gravelly voice responded. “I do not – I am not sure I understand. What you are suggesting is that we subvert the plan of allowing them to approach disaster before intervening. This seems like rebelling, Aziraphale.”

He sipped his tea and frowned. “Rebelling? No, no, never that. It’s simply a – reinterpretation of the plan. A simple alteration meant only to help stop Lucifer. After all, remember Babel and the Plagues? God is very interested in the long game you know. This is the long game. It seems irresponsible to wait until the last second, doesn’t it?”

Castiel frowned slightly and looked over the crowd around them. “And you are sure it is alright to hide them from Heaven as well? That this will not upset the balance of good and evil?”

“Well that’s the beauty of the plan, Castiel. You see, you watch the older brother and make sure that he is growing up as a fine and upstanding young man, and there will be a demon overseeing the younger brother. The balance is perfectly upheld, and everything else falls in line. So will you help us?”

For a moment Aziraphale was honestly worried that Thursday’s angel was going to say no. That this would end before it had even begun, because of the rigorous programming they had begun to apply to the younger angels after the rash of falls in the beginning. Instead Castiel nodded seriously and stood.

“Let us begin then.”

---

It’s important to give a small amount of space here to the death of Azazel. When this record was first being compiled some thought that this was simply indulgence in revenge fantasies, but it has since been proven that the relatively quick and unnoticed death of the demon who had played a small, albeit important, role in the original destiny of the Winchesters is relevant to the rest of the story. Suck on that one, Alphaeus.

In traditional Biblical exegesis, Azazel is a name attached to specific goats, and translates to something along the lines of “to be sent away” or “outcast”. This is an unfortunate bit of translation. When the writers stated that the goats that would not be sacrificed to the Lord were “for Azazel” what he was recording was a bit of an inside joke amongst his people. Azazel was a small village that had a reputation much like parts of the deep South. To be specific, without becoming too vulgar, the village was infamous for its questionable mating rituals with four-legged creatures.

The Hebrews, and many cultures afterwards, have spoken strongly against these types of practices. The animals, despite certainly having no complicit guilt in the crime, were typically labeled as unclean. They were not allowed to be eaten and were considered an unfit sacrifice to the Lord.

Thusly, Azazel, was synonymous with goat violations, and the origin of the demon gaining this name can go without explicit explanation. Alphaeus rightly points out that this clarification was not necessary to the rest of this tale, but the other authors feel that learning is always a good thing.

The death of the demon Azazel was nothing legendary or impressive. It would be summarily cut from any Michael Bay movie, and has no glorious one-liners or epic showdowns. In fact Azazel’s death consisted of him opening a door and being stabbed once, but very thoroughly, with a Kurdish demon-killing knife.

Afterwards Crowley dumped Azazel near an infamous Hunter’s bar and let someone else find him and draw their own conclusions.

With the only man that knew his own plan out of the way, (demon paranoia could be so useful some times) Crowley went to work on Sam. He found the most middle-of-the-road, childless parents he possibly could and cut a deal that would have been shameful under different circumstances. The woman took Sam, sobbing and thanking him, and Crowley rushed off to balance his karma and wash the good taste out of his mouth.

---

Aziraphale’s job was admittedly harder. In the course of his existence the angel had presided over the exile from the Garden, faced the punishment of “losing” his flaming sword, befriended one of Hell’s more likable demons, and successfully run a shop for forty-eight years without selling more than two books.

All of that paled in comparison to talking a Winchester into anything.

It should have been relatively easy to push a little Grace into John and have him believing in the story Crowley and Aziraphale had concocted, but for some reason it took seven tries before John would even believe that Mary’s death was an accident. After that it was another nineteen tries to get John to believe he only had one son.

It took both Aziraphale and Castiel to reprogram Dean, and even then there were lingering emotions for his little brother that neither angel could understand or erase. When all was said and done, John Winchester was left still broken over the death of his wife, but with a renewed sense of purpose to caring for his son.

Afterwards Aziraphale released the Winchesters into Castiel’s care and devoted himself to the unpleasant task of moving his shop overseas.

---

Here the authors must request that the readers show a little patience with the explanation of what happened next that caused Crowley and Aziraphale’s original plan to go awry. Plans, even very good ones, created by very wise and old beings, are never a sure thing. While Crowley and Aziraphale’s age cannot be contested, their respective levels of wisdom widely differ.

The two conspirators had not taken into account several very important details in both the original destiny, and the tendency for their plans to go horribly awry.

Samuel Winchester was raised with great devotion and love by the Sloans and wanted for very little. He was a bright, inquisitive boy, who rarely gave his parents much trouble beyond a habit of getting injured while exploring his environment and testing his theories. By age five Sam was smarter than any of his peers, fond of reading, and had a rather testy imaginary friend named Crowley. His parents made no connection between this, and the man who had originally given them the baby.

Not once did Sam question that his life was good, and despite how often his imaginary friend suggested being more troublesome for his parents, Sam was insistent on not being a hassle for them. A part of it was his natural inclination towards sweetness, something that was often noticed and remarked upon by other adults as being both precocious and charming. Another part was that Sam secretly harbored a belief that there was something more. Something inherently special that Sam was meant for, and that the only way to achieve it was to be the best he could be.

Now many children in this day and age are raised to believe that they are unique and beautiful snowflakes, an idea that is often horribly incorrect, but in Sam’s case it was completely applicable. So, much to Crowley’s disgust. Sam was a volunteer for both the local homeless shelter and the animal shelter by the time he was thirteen. He was the top of his class, two grades ahead of schedule, and the darling of every adult’s eyes.

Crowley’s involvement with Sam’s life began to wane as he got older and more inquisitive. Sam understood that, at his age, it was odd that he was still seeing his imaginary friend, and that said imaginary friend thought so differently from him. He had considered several mental health issues before dismissing each one in favor of the more obvious answer: Crowley was a part of his special destiny.

So Sam did what any other overly intelligent youth was wont to do. He started to ask questions.

“Crowley, why do you always want me to do bad things?”

The demon squinted across the soccer field Sam was on the sidelines of and then sipped his whiskey.

“Bad is such a relative term, Moose. For example it may seem bad to perpetuate a flood, but the fish love it.”

Sam bit his lip and laced his shoes a little more tightly. “Okay. So you’re telling me things that are subjectively bad to me and good to you. Which means you have a different moral compass than I do.”

“Everyone has a different moral compass than you. Look at your life, Sam. You’re fourteen, and you can’t stop helping people. You don’t surf the web for porn, you’ve never smoked a cigarette, and you refuse to go to a party that doesn’t have parental supervision. You’re an over-sized saint. It’s not natural.”

“Maybe it should be.” Sam grumbled as he finished his laces. Cody Johnston, bane of Sam’s existence, barked a laugh from behind him.

“Talking to your invisible friend again, Sammy? Jesus you’re so sad.”

Despite being labeled a saint, Sam did not warn Cody that Crowley’s foot was stuck out when the boy went to run past them onto the field. He also did not laugh too loudly when the bully face-planted into the grass. The authors agree no one will blame him for that.

“All I’m saying, kid, is that it wouldn’t hurt you to branch out a little bit. Try some rebellion. Maybe curse once in a while. What do you say?” Crowley finished off his drink and looked out over the field where Cody was limping to join the team with tears on his face, and a wailing accusation pointed at Sam.

“I don’t need that. After this game I want to ask you another thing or two about-“ But Sam was cut off just in time to preserve Crowley’s secrets as his coach shouted for him.

After the game Sam headed home with Crowley listing all the places in the course of the match that he could have cheated to have won by a larger margin. It didn’t matter to Sam though because his stable and happy life was just fine the way it was. He didn’t need to win by more points, and he didn’t need to be publicly admired or adored the way Crowley seemed to want him to be.

In fact, what his imaginary friend wasn’t aware of, was that Sam was flying high not just on his achievements, but on the fact that the classmate he had been enamored with for over two years had finally agreed to a date. In just one short week Sam believed he would be on his first date, and from there he was assured a boyfriend before prom.

The Sloans were waiting for Sam when he came through the door, and Mrs. Sloan smiled broadly at her son before kissing his forehead.

“Honey, your dad I need to talk to you.”

Sam poured himself a glass of milk and drank deeply before smiling at his nervous looking father and mother. “What’s up?”

“Well Sammy I – uh I’ve been transferred. We’re moving.”

“Fuck.”

Crowley clapped happily.

----

Dean Winchester was not quite the same story. Despite Aziraphale and Castiel’s best intentions John Winchester’s life trajectory was not quite as upwardly mobile as they would have preferred. To be specific the man fell into a rut quite quickly.

It wasn’t that John didn’t love his son, or that he didn’t try his best, but without Mary John was anchorless and alone. Castiel and Aziraphale had no way of predicting this, because, as Seraphs, they’d had little training in the complicated interactions and connections between human beings. Especially those directly affected by a Cupid.

So yes, John loved his son, but in the end Dean was often left to care for himself. Between his father’s long hours at whatever garage he was working at and the monthly benders John was prone to going on, Dean was independent by age six. He was capable of making perfectly passable meals, cleaning up the house, and generally caring for himself in every way that was necessary.

John would have periods of clarity where he was there, and in those times he and Dean would watch old Westerns or TV shows and chat about nothing. John was always grateful that his son was so capable and understanding, and Dean was always loyal to his father.

The first time Castiel was required to step in was Dean’s second day of first grade. A classmate accused Dean of having poor people’s clothing, and Dean smartly responded by punching him in the nose. It was Castiel that sat beside the boy and soothed him as he cried his heart out on the bench outside of the school, while he and the principal waited on his father to pick him up. John was three hours late.

By third grade Dean no longer cried, and by fifth grade he had found his niche. It was easy to be the town bad boy, netted Dean a ridiculous number of favors and gifts from admirers, and scared off potential bullies. He was known to be hard, callous, and a lothario.

The angel would have been concerned, were it not for how much he understood Dean’s motivations. The boy was missing his brother without understanding that the hunger he could never satisfy had nothing to do with random hook-ups, food, or alcohol. It helped that Castiel was able to recognize Dean’s better qualities buried underneath the rebel façade.

When Aziraphale finally finished relocating his shop to Lebanon, Missouri, he helped Castiel with the careful viewing of Dean and his situation. Aziraphale agreed that the boy was good at heart, and that this would make the rest of his behavior forgivable.

The angels’ intervention had to remain subtle, but it was with their help that Dean managed to stay focused long enough to finish high school. One year later they had just barely talked him into introductory courses at the local college through a combination of dalliances with slutty co-eds and subliminal messages.

Dean’s life consisted of his part-time work at his father’s shop, courses, sexual escapades, and his band. Luckily for this story, and the world, even Dean was beginning to see that his hedonism could only fill so much of the void, and that was the revelation that would lead him to make the single most important decision of his life one sunny August afternoon.

And now, the authors would like to remind the readers that, while what happens next will seem like a huge oversight on the parts of both Crowley and the two angels, there is no telling how much was their own ineptitude and how much was the Lord’s ineffability.


Next Part
Masterpost

Comments

[sassangel.livejournal.com]

I really should not be reading this at work. My coworkers keep asking why I'm giggling.

You are awesome. I've often thought this fandom had a serious lack of Douglas Adams-esque stories.

Just know I will spend the remainder of my day side eyeing this behind the reports I am supposed to compiling.

You are so cool :)

[dimeliora.livejournal.com]

Comparing me to Douglas Adams is the nicest thing anybody can ever say about this ever.

Excuse me, there's something in me eye. :D