The Wheels On The Bus Chapter 19

 “The Empty said yes?!”

“It took it a while, but yeah,” Jack says, sounding smug as he eats his breakfast.

Dean sits down across him, in disbelief. Adam slides him and Sam their plates, Sam giving their youngest brother a thankful nod. 

“I can’t believe it. That guy gave Cas shit about being woken up and everything,” Dean says.

“I think it’s temperamental, but ultimately helpful when it counts,” Jack says. “And it just wants to go back to sleep.”

“Can’t blame it there,” Dean says. He starts digging into his food.

“So,” Rowena says, sitting down at the head of the table with her own food. “You’re positive you have the Empty’s cooperation?”

“Yes,” Jack says. “It swore on a lot of things, and I don’t really understand all of it, but the shockwave from it felt powerful, when it finished promising.”

“What did it swear on?”

Jack tries to remember. “Its responsibility as the Empty, the abyss, the laws of the universe that - uh, I think it meant like, the way reality functions?”

“Like the universe being a machine?” Adam asks. 

“Yes. I think it swore by its place in it,” Jack says, “And being the last remnant of the Darkness in this universe.”

Sam and Dean pause. Castiel, sitting beside Jack even though he isn’t eating, shares a knowing look with the brothers.

Rowena hums thoughtfully. “If it goes back on its oath,” she says. “The universe itself will punish it, since it’s invoking the rules of reality. Well done, Jack.”

Jack beams. 

“So we got the angels good to go,” Belphegor says.

“If I convince the Empty that we have a good plan to convince the angels to fight on our side,” Jack says.

“Do you?”

“Well,” Jack says. “I thought having the Empty resurrect everyone in the Cage and having Michael try to talk to them there would be good.”

Adam pauses. Then, “Jack.”

“I know,” Jack says, looking down guiltily. “I know, but time doesn’t move right there.”

Adam hesitates.

“There’s gotta be someplace else,” Belphegor asks. “Or a way to get them on our side quickly.”

“We can try the angel tablets,” Sam says. “Have Donatello read them for us.”

“Okay, let’s get on that,” Belphegor says. 

“What about Chuck?” Castiel asks. 

“I thought we should get Chuck into the Cage too,” Jack says. “That way he can’t just grab everyone out.”

“No.” Belphegor is shaking his head. “Absolutely not. Bad idea.”

“Wait,” Adam says.

Belphegor and Sam immediately look concerned. “Adam.”

“The Cage is vast,” he says. “It’s endless. It doesn’t work the way space works here on Earth. You can run for as long as you want in there.”

“Still,” Dean says. “Locking the angels in there to duke it out with Chuck would probably result in more angels siding with Chuck and killing everyone.”

“You know you don’t have to resurrect all the angels,” Rowena says. “Only your allies.”

“We need as much power as we can have on our side,” Jack says.

“What good is that going to do you if you can’t even guarantee your side’s safety due to a mutiny?” Rowena says, disapproving. “If we want to win, then we’re going to have to get as many people as we can who we know won’t stab us in the back and then do our best with it. That’s how all wars go.”

Jack looks down at his food. 

“Would it be enough?” Adam asks. 

“Well,” Castiel says. “It took all four archangels and Chuck himself to defeat the Darkness, his sister. I imagine about the same amount of power would take to defeat him, even if he is weak.”

“And we cannot count Michael until we are in the middle of it,” Rowena says.

“Gabriel,” Dean says. “We can resurrect that cheeky fucker.”

“There’s a long list of angels we can resurrect,” Sam says. “You said the Empty can resurrect angels as long as it’s not too much that it would cause problems, right?”

“Right,” Jack says.

“Then we resurrect who we can resurrect,” Rowena says. “The rest of the power we need, we get from Hell.”

“There’s also the problem that we don’t know whose side Amara is going to be,” Castiel says. “That’s why we need as much firepower as we can get.”

“Hey, wait,” Dean says. “The Shedim.”

Belphegor winces. He’s still nursing a headache that hasn’t stopped since he’d assumed control of Hell. “What is it?”

“They’re said to be powerful enough that Chuck had them locked in an unknown pocket in Hell. Could they be enough of a stand in for archangels?”

Belphegor’s face screws up as he thinks, and then slowly, like he’s unravelling the idea, his expression relaxes, eyes lighting up. “Actually,” he says. “They could be close. There’s a lot of them.”

“So we stand some semblance of a chance,” Dean says. “It’s not enough but it’s there.”

“Do we know where this Darkness is, though?” Rowena asks.

“Uh no,” Dean says. “Why?”

“Chuck was alone when he showed up in Hell, wasn’t he?” she asks, turning to Belphegor.

“Yeah,” Belphegor says.

“And the Darkness has yet to make her presence known.”

“She’s been quiet for years, actually,” Sam says. “Actually - when we last saw her, she sort of - she fell in love with this universe.”

“And now...her brother wants to destroy it,” Rowena says. “Curious.”

“What are you thinking?” Castiel asks. 

“I’m thinking,” Rowena says. “That someone doesn’t go from zero to a hundred without much explanation.” She steeples her hands together, smiling the way she does whenever she’s thought up something good. “I think we need to retrace a few things, and I think we need to know what the Darkness thinks about all of this.”

-

Sam and Dean bring all of the hunters in for briefing, leaving Castiel in charge of the school’s security and Belphegor to direct his new minions to patrol the area around it. Adam and Jack sit in the meeting to vouch for their ends of the plan, and Rowena sits in just in case someone argues a little too long about it. Adam’s glad she’s on their side - he hasn’t been topside long enough to know her well, but he knows enough that she’s been causing his brothers grief for years and is a formidable pain in the ass when she really wants to be, so it’s good that she’s helping them now. 

The meeting goes about as well as they expect it to - which is to say that it doesn’t. The second that it’s mentioned that Jack is a nephilim and Michael is The Archangel Michael, because it would be hard to dodge questions about where they’re going to get enough firepower to take down Chuck himself if they lied about it, the room erupts into chaos, people shouting in opposition that they can’t seriously trust these guys to not turn against them.

Jack shrinks a little in his seat at the noise, but Adam puts a hand on his arm reassuringly. 

After a few minutes or so, the others finally let the Winchesters talk again and explain that yes, they know Jack’s a one-in-seven-billion rarity and a lore wildcard, but they’d raised him, and they know him well, his lineage be damned; Michael himself had no need to essentially paint a target on himself to save everyone else in this school, but he did anyway and they owe their lives to him, and why the fuck would he do that if he wasn’t on their side?

They argue for another while, but in the end, they acquise that okay, maybe they are working together toward the same goal. 

The news of Belphegor being a demon doesn’t go down as well, but they’re quicker to stand down since he had been with Michael when they’d retrieved the crook after all, and it’s that crook that’s keeping the entirety of Hell from slaughtering the world right now. That, and the demon isn’t in the room to shoot point blank.

The Winchesters outline what they have so far, after a brief summary of Jack’s past death and experience with the Empty - they talk about gathering as much firepower as they can, finding a place where they can duke it out with Chuck since that’s sure to be explosive, and ganking the guy. They talk about how Jack has struck a deal with the Empty to resurrect angels, and how they have the entirety of Hell on their side. 

Adam steps in to talk about the rifts, the instability of the universe, and how they need to be careful since absorbing Hell would collapse reality itself, and Jack pipes in that they also plan to seal the rifts and stitch back the fabric of existence, and that it would be best if they can fix the structural integrity of the universe along the way so they don’t have any other problems in the future.

There’s a bit of back and forth on that topic. The both of them have to give everyone a rundown on the whole composition of the universe thing (and they’ve been having this conversation over and over with so many people even Adam is getting tired of it), but at least everyone understands the gravity of the situation afterwards. They need to stabilize the universe, in addition to defeating Chuck. If they don’t, they’re all as good as dead anyway. 

“Which is why, if we need to,” Adam says. “We might be able to talk monsters, or covens, into helping.”

“Enemy of an enemy?” someone asks with a tired, world-weary scoff. These poor fucking people. 

“Sorta,” Adam says. “It’s more like they have to help, if they wanna keep existing.”

“If you’re planning to fight Chuck - the Big Man himself - whomever the fuck,” someone - Les or Leslie, Adam thinks? He vaguely remembers from the fight outside - says, “You know you’re going to have to lure him in. How the fuck’re you gonna manage that?”

Dean thinks for a moment, going over their options. “If he’s hunting down Michael, we can grab the guy. Apparently Belphegor knows a way,” he says. “If we get Jack to close the rifts, he might be pissed enough about him interfering that he might show up. That’s another possibility. Another option - which, if we can pull off might be the best…” He hesitates. Then, “We can get his sister to find him for us.”

Leslie blinks. “I wasn’t briefed on this. He has a sister?”

Dean nods. 

Sam looks like he’s just had a revelation in the midst of Dean explaining things. Adam leans forward slightly to look at him. 

“Apparently, in the beginning, there was the darkness and the light.” Dean waves a hand. “Well, she’s the darkness.”

“Well, fuck me,” Leslie breathes out, incredibly tired, and leans back into his seat, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“And we already need to know what she thinks about this anyway,” Rowena says. “She loves this world.”

“She’s an ally?” someone else asks.

“She could be,” Rowena says. “Chuck was alone when he went to interfere with Michael and Belphegor. He was also alone when he killed Jack. Which begs the question that if he and his sister were catching up a few years back, what happened that he’s now okay with destroying something she likes, and where is she now?”

“Okay, well,” another hunter says. “How do we find her?”

“Dean,” Sam says.

“Yeah?” Dean asks.

“No, no,” Sam says, turning his chair so he can face his brother better. “No, we can find her through you. You have a connection to her.”

“Come again?” Rowena leans forward as well to look at Sam.

“This I also did not know,” the same hunter who’d spoken earlier says, raising an eyebrow. 

Dean lets out a small, nervous laugh that ends with a frown. “How do we know that’s still around?”

Sam does that thing where he looks up rapidly, tries to smile through his annoyance before settling on pressing his lips to a thin line. “Are you really going to say no when the world is ending?”

“She’s a little  weird!”

“She might be on our side!”

“Oh my,” Rowena mutters. She holds a hand out to Adam, who slips a juice packet out of his jacket to toss to her waiting hand. She rips the edge open. “This is fun.”

Sam and Dean bicker for about two minutes while the rest of the room waits for them to be done. 

“Look, the point is - “ Sam points an accusing finger at his brother. “She loves this world. And she admitted that the reason why she was so angry was because of selfish reasons. Amara is reasonable. Amara has a good head on her shoulders. Amara might listen.”

“Motherfucker really gonna say her name thrice,” Adam hears Leslie mutter, to which the other hunters around him shake their heads in disapproval. Adam snickers, Jack following. 

“Or, she’s on his side,” Dean says. “We don’t know.”

“All I’m hearing is we have to talk to her,” Rowena says. “If she’s reasonable, she might help. If she doesn’t, well.” She shrugs. “We’re all dead either way, aren’t we, boys?”

Both Winchesters quiet down.

“You can pray to her, Dean?” Jack asks.

“I can try to,” Dean says, eventually, but not without a sigh. “I can try to pray to her. I don’t know, schedule a meeting or something.”

“Good,” Rowena says. “In the meantime, let’s get back to the real world, shall we? Find out how everything’s been faring with all this business.”

“I’ll get on it,” Sam says. He nods to two other hunters across the table. “Anita, Bryan. We’ll be on research.” 

They nod back.

“We still have to decide which angels to resurrect,” Dean says.

“We can decide that with Sam,” Adam says, pointing to himself, Jack and Rowena.

Dean nods as well, and then, lets out another small sigh. “Alright,” he says. “We’re gonna need the rest of you to contact every hunter in your networks. We need people to spread the news about the rifts. Make sure nobody goes diving into the damn things.’

He stands, already assigning who contacts who. Adam leans back in his seat.

In the corner of his eye, he notices Sam wincing, putting one hand to his head as he screws his eyes shut. After a minute, he opens his eyes, his hand moving to his shoulder. He’d been shot, Adam remembers.

With that stupid fucking equalizer gun or something. 

Adam frowns. Right. They’ve still got to take care of that too.