Chapter Text
It had been like lightning.
Sam hadn’t thought about his own natural psychic abilities in years, not since he’d gotten back from the Cage and hadn’t dared try to use them. He hadn’t had a vision anyway, not since Azazel. But exorcizing demons, killing them, the abilities that had enabled him to jumpstart the Apocalypse? No, he kept them far from his thoughts, because of what they meant. What they had made him. So he never once tried to use them, and he tried desperately to forget they were a part of him.
But Magda Peterson. A kid, really. A bruised, tortured, flayed kid---had repeated things he’d told himself for years. Phrases about ‘unholiness’, ‘abomination’, and ‘unclean’. Simply because she had a part of her that others didn’t understand.
It had been like being struck by lightning. The realization that it wasn’t true.
And if it wasn’t true about Magda, it wasn’t true about Sam.
Sam’s powers hadn’t been inherently evil. He wasn’t inherently evil just because he had been made to host Lucifer. His powers weren’t what made him, him.
Magda believed things about herself that weren’t true because the people around her vilified her for things that she didn’t ask for, that weren’t her fault, and blamed her for things she hadn’t meant to do.
Sam had started the Apocalypse, but after all these years, seeing himself in the bleeding teenager in front of him, he finally realized it hadn’t been just his fault. He pulled the trigger, but so many other things had been in place to make sure the gun was in front of him.
Magda told him I’m the Devil because the people around her told her she was. Sam had so trained himself never to mention what he used to be, but seeing Magda stare at him wide-eyed and numb, it’s easy to spill it all out. Tell her about his powers. Things he hadn’t let himself touch in years, centuries if he counted Hell time.
Magda called him evil in response. He told her she wasn’t. He promised she wouldn’t have to hurt anyone, ever again, and she’d smiled. He wasn’t sure how much she believed him, but that faint smile lit up her gaunt, bony face like a sunrise over snow. Up until the moment when the people she called her family came down into the basement and brought the two of them upstairs to a demented version of a family dinner in which Sam was tied to a chair at the head opposite Abraham, Magda’s father.
Which led to this.
“Pain purges sin,” Gail, Magda’s vile excuse of a mother insisted with an empty, uncaring smile as though she believed Sam were a child throwing a fit.
“No, it doesn’t!” Sam snapped.
Sam thought of devouring blood because it made him powerful, even though he knew it was making him worse.
He thought of jumping into the Cage, volunteering himself for an eternity of pain because it was the only way he could think to atone for what he’d caused.
He thought of Galahad and the pain of believing, even when he was a child, that he was too unclean and impure to complete such a quest.
He thought of the Trials, how it had stripped him down to his bones with pain only comparable to the Cage, and how he hadn’t cared because of how sure he had been that it was purifying him, cleansing him of the filth in his blood that had plagued him for his entire life.
He thought of Magda. Flaying herself to purge a sin that didn’t exist, and never had.
“You’re wrong,” Sam insisted, begged for them to hear, but Gail just blinked at him. Elijah, Magda’s brother, continued to stare at his bowl of food, and Abraham’s eyes flicked down around the table in nervous fidgeting.
“Abraham,” Sam pleaded. The man’s eyes snapped up to meet his, and for a moment Sam was sure he would say something. But Gail reached across the table and laid her hand on Abraham’s arm, smiling placatingly at him.
“It’s time,” she said, reaching for Madga. The family joined hands, and Sam felt a spike of revulsion run through him when Magda gingerly took her mother’s fingers in her own. As Abraham led them through a rehearsed prayer, Sam pulled at the ropes around his wrists, but they didn’t give and all it accomplished was tightening the ropes against his sleeves and cutting off circulation for a moment until he forced himself to relax again.
The family released each other’s hands with chorused Amens that Magda didn’t participate in, just slowly withdrew her hands when her mother snatched her fingers away from Magda. Abraham was the first to eat a bite, giving a strained smile to Gail when she looked expectantly at him.
Satisfied, she turned to her children. “Dig in, everyone.” Her gaze narrowed at her son in specific. “Elijah.”
Magda was the only one who didn’t reach for her spoon. She simply stared around the table. She did not look at Sam, no matter how much he wished she would. Since Magda may as well have been invisible, Sam watched Gail, her spoon hovering over the meal, her eyes fixed on her husband. Like she was waiting for something.
A bolt of realization ran through Sam at the same time Abraham dropped his spoon, a hand reaching uselessly toward his throat as something started foaming from his mouth, splattering on the pressed tablecloth and into the bowl as the man coughed, his eyes wild.
“Dad?” Elijah asked slowly. Gail reached for her husband’s shoulder.
“Abraham?” Sam said in horror, his body going cold as he looked at Gail’s pleased expression.
Abraham began to choke in earnest, his face turning a strained red in the flickering candlelight. Elijah stood so fast his chair scraped against the floor, staring at his father in terror.
“Dad?” he demanded.
“Shh!” Gail commanded, standing as well. None of the occupants of the table moved, simply watched in useless horror as Abraham gagged out one final choked wheeze then face planted into his still mostly-full bowl. He didn’t move again.
Sam’s heart pounded in the sudden silence that descended on the room. No one moved, but Sam saw the gleam of pride in Gail’s eyes as she regarded her husband’s corpse.
“What did you do?” Sam demanded. Gail’s eyes snapped to his, and the satisfaction in them made Sam’s stomach heave. His heart beat inside his head, painful pressure building behind his eyes. There was a ringing in his ears, a buzzing under his skin he didn’t understand.
Gail sat back down primly, staring with a saccharine smile at the table around her. “Eat,” she commanded.
“What did you do?!” Sam demanded again, leaning forward and pulling fruitlessly against the ropes. Elijah and Magda continued to stare at their father, but Gail simply smiled.
“This is how we will stay together,” Gail said with an air of frigid kindness. “We will enter Heaven as a family.”
Magda’s gaze slowly slipped in horror from her father down to the innocent bowl of stew in front of her. Sam noted with sick realization that even the tainted food had been doled out unfairly---Magda’s bowl had much less than the others, even the one in front of Sam.
“Eat!” Gail snapped at her son, who flinched.
“Elijah, do not eat that!” Sam said desperately. Elijah’s pale, shaking hands picked his spoon up and scooped a spoonful of poisoned food up. “Elijah!” Sam insisted.
Gail stood up sharply, and Sam couldn’t help the flinch backward as he watched helplessly when she rounded the table to stand beside her son.
“Mom?” Elijah said in a trembling, confused voice. Magda still wouldn’t look up from her bowl.
“Eat!” Gail said sharply. The buzzing under Sam’s skin grew, spread, from his fingers into his arms and up his shoulders.
“Elijah, do not do it,” Sam tried, but the boy wouldn’t look at him and the spoonful was drawing closer to his mouth by the second.
Magda finally looked up.
“NO!” Magda shrieked, the sound ringing through the empty house like the crack of a firework. Elijah’s spoon flew across the room, and Magda lurched to her feet, facing her mother with a terrified, stubborn set of her jaw.
“Devil,” Gail spat at her daughter with a righteous fury Sam didn’t know could exist in someone looking at their own child.
Magda didn’t move. But every bowl on the table besides Abraham and Gail’s went flying, shattering and splattering its contents on the walls and on a crucifix mounted next to the table.
Gail turned slowly to look at Magda, a kind of hate in her eyes that made Sam’s heart drop. Gail seized the steak knife on the table and lunged for her daughter. Sam cried out because Magda didn’t move, but it was too late. Between one blink and the next, Magda’s brother was between them, the knife buried into his stomach.
Gail’s furious mask broke, her face contorting in grief that Sam knew would haunt her until the day she died. She yanked the knife back out before Sam could stop her, staring in paralyzed horror as her son’s body fell to the ground with a dull thud. Gail fell backward for only a moment, then her gaze traveled back up to Magda.
Sam’s heart leapt into his throat at the loathing he saw in her gaze, the pressure behind his eyes growing in strength until his vision began to swim in front of him. But he could still see it when Gail drew the knife back with a gleam of triumph in her eyes, and Magda didn’t move, and the pressure inside of Sam’s head snapped.
“NO!” he roared, a blinding, burning surge of something he hadn’t felt in years rushing through his veins. The buzzing overtook his entire body, and his head exploded in excruciating, familiar pain. Gail went flying backward, crashing into the wall with a yelp of surprise.
Magda’s head whipped toward Sam in shock, her eyes wide and something close to hope shining in them.
“You---You just---” she stammered, her blank expression breaking.
Sam’s headache ebbed down to manageable levels, and he blinked a few times at her before his mind caught up to what had just happened.
Magda hadn’t thrown Gail.
Sam had.
He could feel it, now---The return of something else inside of him that had been shoved down and locked away for so long it felt unbelievably wrong and right at the same time to have it back.
Sam’s chest constricted painfully at Gail’s horrified form staring at him from where she was sprawled on the floor. For a moment, all of his old disgust with himself reared its ugly head. Dean’s voice chanting it means you’re a monster, a vampire, and I’m done trying to save you---
But then he forced himself to look at Magda. At the trembling, frail form of the teenager staring at him in the dying candlelight.
He believed she wasn’t evil. He believed he wasn’t evil.
“Magda,” Sam said, his voice cracking.
“Demon,” came Gail’s shaking, snarling whisper. Both Magda and Sam’s attention snapped back to the woman. She stood, trembling so hard the knife wavered in her hand, and she rounded the table advancing on Sam. “You’re a demon, just like her.”
Sam couldn’t find the words to argue, all of his focus on the knife clutched in her whitened knuckles. His heart pounded wildly the closer she got, until she stopped a few feet from him.
“You are just like her,” Gail spit in such violent disgust that Sam flinched. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Magda recoiled as well.
“Unnatural, sinful, unworthy of His light,” Gail seethed. “I have tried, and tried, and tried to cleanse her---”
“There’s nothing in her to cleanse!” Sam shouted, his heart pounding frantically when Gail simply smiled, all her anger replaced with a cold incline of her head.
“I suppose it was only a matter of time before she fell so far that she corrupted others,” Gail conceded. “The Devil works in underhanded, manipulative ways, but only those who are open to his filth can be infected.”
“I was born this way,” Sam snapped, trying desperately to believe it when he remembered the image of Azazel’s slit wrist trickling ruby-red droplets into his mouth as an infant. “Magda didn’t do a damn thing to me, and neither one of us is as sick and demented as you are!”
Gail raised an eyebrow, the knife in her hand lifting an inch or two. The vicious glint of satisfaction in her eye was enough to make Sam try in vain to reel in his fury, because she was clearly getting off on the fact that he was reacting while she held the high horse of emotionless self-righteousness.
“I am holy and will be welcomed into His arms,” Gail intoned, glancing once at her daughter and smirking. “This vessel of Satan will be welcomed by her cohorts, and you will join her to eternally atone for your sins.”
Sam almost laughed at the absurdity of the accusation, feeling lightheaded with the amount of desperation pounding through his skull with the leftover threads of his long-dormant abilities. Little did this psychotic woman know that she was facing the true vessel of Satan.
Sam cast a glance at Magda, who was watching her mother with a glazed, distant stare. A fresh wave of resolve came over Sam, and he slid his gaze back to Gail.
“She has nothing to atone for,” Sam said clearly as he could, his vision swimming in front of him with the pain in his head. “And neither do I. You, though?” He grinned, savoring the surprise on Gail’s otherwise vacant smile. “You won’t go to Heaven. You’ll go to Hell, and you’ll have to atone for all the abuse, the violence, and the damage you’ve caused to your own daughter.”
“I love my daughter,” Gail said with a cold glare. “She punishes herself because she chooses to.”
“You don’t know what love is.” Sam shook his head, trying to clear his staticky thoughts. “And it may have been her hand, but it was you shoving the whip at her, the one who put all the thoughts of sin into her head. None of it is true, and you know it, but it doesn’t matter to you, does it? You like the power you have over her, making her believe things about herself that aren’t true and never were. She is good.”
“How could you know that?” Gail scoffed, trying to regain her composure and failing, if the vein jumping on her forehead meant anything. “You only met her today, and it was in relation to two murders she committed!”
Magda flinched, and Sam was overcome with such an extreme hatred of the woman in front of him that he nearly thought he couldn’t breathe. The buzzing under his skin swirled in reaction, but nothing came of it this time. Sam grit his teeth together and glared at Gail with everything he could muster in his expression. There wasn’t a point in hiding his revulsion of her at this point.
“They were an accident, and you damn well know it,” Sam growled. “And they wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t locked a scared, lonely teenager in a fucking basement where she was forced to mutilate herself by the people who were supposed to protect her!”
The universe (Read: Chuck) evidently had a truly sadistic sense of irony, because the crucifix on the wall suddenly cracked in half, the bottom part of it falling to the ground with an echoing thud that drew all three of their attention. Sam’s heart pounded in his chest, but Gail’s gaze slid back to him.
“It’s true, then,” Gail whispered, her hushed tone hissing through the stunned silence of the dining area. Magda still didn’t move, and Sam couldn’t tear his gaze away from the cracked crucifix.
Part of him wondered for one delirious, horrifying moment if that meant some sort of sign to do with Sam, with his soul.
Gail snapped him out of it. “You’re a spawn of the Devil’s desires.” Her eyes were wide, triumphant, like all her beliefs had been confirmed with one pathetic example of Sam’s powers reacting to his emotions.
Sam ground his teeth together. He knew better. There was no sign, no condemned part about him that wasn’t his own. He wasn’t demonic. He wasn’t unclean. He was just Sam, and no stupid crucifix on a wall could change that. Just like no amount of forced self-mutilation could change the fact that Magda was an innocent child with a disgusting excuse for a mother.
“She’s summoned you to aid in her foul purpose!” Gail shrieked in adrenaline-fueled fury, this time lunging for Sam. Sam cried out, but his powers didn’t respond to him this time.
But the knife stopped before it reached its target, hovering an inch away from Sam’s chest.
Gail’s eyes widened, and both she and Sam slowly turned to look at Magda. The teenager was staring at her mother with cold indifference, her hands clenched in fists at her side.
“Devil,” Gail hissed, her veins bulging in her neck and arm as she strained to push the knife further. Sam just barely felt it brush against his shirt. His breath stalled in his throat, trying not to move his chest.
“I’m not the devil,” Magda said with a controlled, quiet wrath Sam couldn’t believe came from the pale girl in front of him. “You are.”
The house had been stuffy and uncomfortably warm from the moment Sam had entered, but suddenly it was like a cold snap blasted through. Gail’s furious expression melted away, replaced with sheer terror that Sam didn’t understand until he saw the trembling knife begin to slowly turn toward Gail instead of him.
Sam watched in paralyzed horror as the blood-covered blade inched toward Gail, and suddenly all he could think about was Max Miller, another psychic whose abusive family created their own downfall, a boy who killed himself rather than face the guilt that came with purposefully taking another person’s life.
Sam wasn’t going to let that happen. Not again.
“Magda, stop!” Sam pleaded. “You don’t have to do this! You could control it!”
Gail whimpered, but Magda’s expression didn’t falter.
“Magda, nobody else has to die!” Sam insisted, yanking harder and harder at ropes he knew wouldn’t break, his mind flashing between Max, Abraham, and Elijah. Andy, Ava, Lily, and Jake. The social worker Olivia, the delivery boy Ricky.
“Please!” Sam cried, his headache from earlier returning with a vengeance, but nothing changed and his powers wouldn’t come. Gail began to cry, heaving gasps of choked breaths that had no effect on Magda’s stony expression.
Please, Sam pleaded, though the words didn’t come. Blood began to run down Gail’s floral dress, the knife just digging into her skin. Please, don’t do this, Sam begged. Not again. Don’t do this to yourself, don’t do something you can’t come back from.
Magda’s face twitched, and for a moment, the only thing Sam could hear was Gail’s whimpers. And then Magda’s stiff body sagged, a soft sob escaping her throat. Gail’s fingers released the knife instantly, dropping it to the floor as she collapsed backward, sobbing heavily.
“Magda,” Sam said, his voice cracking. “Magda. My arms---”
Magda moved instantly, darting forward to where her mother had dropped the knife, grabbing it then fluttering behind him. He felt her thin fingers on his arm, sawing awkwardly through the ropes until they burst and he pulled his arms free, shaking circulation back into them.
“You’re like me,” she said when he stood, looking up at him in awe. “You weren’t lying. I thought you said…You couldn’t do it anymore.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Sam confirmed quietly. “And…I didn’t know that I could. I never tried.”
“But…” Magda’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. “But this power---I’m---”
Sam knelt slowly, reaching out with his hands open wide so he wouldn’t startle her. She didn’t stop him when he placed his hands on her shoulders.
“You aren’t the Devil,” Sam told her firmly. “You never were, Magda. I know the Devil, and he isn’t capable of being someone as good as you.”
Magda blinked at him owlishly. “You don’t know me.”
“I know you well enough,” Sam said gently, “to know that you are the furthest thing from the Devil in this room. None of this was your fault, Magda. You didn’t deserve this.”
Magda’s eyes slowly slid shut, one small hand coming up to wrap around his wrist. Her lips parted, her eyes squeezing tight.
“I can hear you,” she murmured. Sam remembered earlier, when she had told him she could hear people’s thoughts. He had no idea what she heard ricocheting around inside his mind, but whatever it was must’ve been enough, because her eyes were open again and she had a trembling smile like the one in the basement.
“Then you know I’m telling the truth,” Sam said. “You heard me before, too, didn’t you?”
Magda nodded, then hesitated. Before Sam could try to stand, she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. He caught her easily, keeping an eye on Gail still dry heaving on the floor as he held Magda as tightly as she held him. She was so thin, Sam realized with a pang, he could feel her ribs and was worried for a moment that she might snap under his grip. But she was trembling so violently and clutching his jacket, he couldn’t imagine pushing her away.
“Magda,” he whispered, hating that he had to. “I’m going to tie your mom up, and then we’re calling the cops, okay?”
Magda’s breath hitched, but she didn’t let go of him. “They’ll take me away somewhere. Lock me up. They’ll think I’m cursed, just like she does.”
“No, they won’t,” Sam assured her gently. “We’ve got her on kidnapping, murder, abuse, and not to mention anyone who hears her ranting about a devil is going to think she’s clinically insane. You’re not going to be blamed for any of this, I swear.”
Madga’s grip on the back of his jacket tightened, then released. Just as she was about to step away, the front door flung open as if kicked. Sam stood, wrenching Magda behind him just before he recognized the familiar form of his brother bursting in with his gun raised.
“Sammy!” Dean barked with relief. “What the---”
“Get her,” Sam ordered, pointing to Gail while still keeping Magda behind him. “Magda, hey---” He turned back to her as Dean started for Gail without question. “Magda, this is my brother Dean. I don’t know if you saw him when we were here earlier.”
She shook her head, her gaze darting between Sam and his brother. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw that Gail didn’t even try to fight Dean when he began zip-tying her wrists together.
“He’s here to help, I promise,” Sam said gently. “I’m going to call the cops, and everything’s going to be fine. Okay?”
“Okay,” Magda whispered. Her gaze stayed fixed on Gail as Dean hauled her to her feet and shoved her into the nearest chair---Elijah’s---where she stayed without a fight, staring with glazed eyes at her son’s corpse by her feet.
Sam wondered why there had been so much victory in her husband’s murder and so much grief in her son’s. Sam wondered why it mattered so much to her that the death she’d wanted would’ve been slow and painful, but the stabbing looked like it had been quick. So why had she been pushing the poisoned food so hard yet grieving the death by knife?
Then again, this was also the woman who had been gleefully forcing her own daughter to whip herself, so Sam supposed it didn’t matter.
Dean’s eyes took stock of everything in the room, but he didn’t comment on any of it. He just crossed the room to put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Want me to call them instead?”
Magda answered the question for him. She collapsed forward into Sam’s shoulder again, balling Sam’s jacket in her fists and burying her face in his neck. Dean scoffed and made the call.