Work Text:
[ID: Digital art. A put-upon Sam Winchester looks off to the side of a two-panel piece, the second panel of which displays the steps leading up and into a castle of ice. Sam wears a headband with moose antlers and has two pens tucked into a top pocket. The ice castle is grand, seen from below, and a cavernous room with reception desk and a chandelier can be seen through the open entryway. The entire piece is done solely in blue hues, and it is framed in paired swan and heart detailing.][Text: Slothserpent. 1-28-2026] [Artist Stamp: A quartz crystal housing the name ‘Quartz.’]
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Sam shouldn’t be surprised when a shockwave shatters several sheets of ice—what’s a vacation to the Winchesters *without* a little chaos? Decades of experience with this sort of chicanery save his life in the moments that follow. It happens like this:
Sam is reading in the library, fabric antlers drooping under their own weight enough to enter his periphery. It hits him, how the hotel functions, the reason for all these deaths—the percussive blast interrupts his next thought. A swooping sensation pushes air through his lungs and chest, something like dread licking a stripe up the inside wall of his sternum. He’s up before he can think to move.
The book dives for the floor from Sam’s fingers as his heart drums a march of adrenaline through muscle and bone, and Sam springs forward away from the windows. As shards of glass rip through the dense fabric of his sleeves, the chandelier above him—and come on, seriously? Who the hell puts a chandelier in a *library*?—plunges all three feet of sharp shapes from above. The book decorporealizes and a good chunk of the floor swallows itself in the impact.
Sam feels the crack before he sees it, and he scrambles up and out as fast as his legs can carry him. He’s taking the stairs down two or three at a time, endlessly grateful for whatever magic is keeping him from figure-skating down with all the elegance of a newborn. He scans his internal map of the place and navigates to the main lobby, hoping Dean and Cas won’t have gotten trapped in the chaos. Deeper rumbles can be heard sporadically as Sam skids into the open space.
It’s worse in here. The lobby chandeliers—plural, *five* of them—have all been sent to the afterlife save for one. By the looks of it, they’ve taken a few passengers for the ride, and if Sam doesn’t think quickly there are about to be several more. The next bit is familiar enough, but it still kicks his heart up against his uvula—will he make it?—twists his throat like a wet towel as he moves. There’s a voice shouting instructions that reverberate from his core, and all six foot four inches carry rapid strides close enough to knock the others to the side.
Bits of ice gouge his back, but otherwise Sam fares well enough. He shouts at the gawking patrons and staff to get out, instantly irritated when one of them tries to go back to their room despite the staircase being pulverized. They insist they’ll use the elevator—“You’re joking, right?”—and finally it’s empty enough he can leave. When Sam sees the path to the honeymoon suite, he almost blanches. The walls are ribbed with cracks that shake and shudder forth at an alarming rate, and there’s no way he’s getting up the avalanche that used to be the primary way up.
It takes an additional five minutes to navigate around the debris to the back entrance—the speed made possible by the crater created in the back walls—and Sam is flying up the stairs. When he gets to the top, it’s eerily quiet, and the door to the suits is hanging on with the last dregs of life. Sam shouts for Dean, then for Cas, and that’s when he hears it. A shuffle.
Castiel appears first, followed quickly by Dean, and both stare in stunned amazement at the wreckage in the hall. Cas looks mildly bedraggled, hair askew (well, more than usual) and clothes rumpled. His tie is absent, buttons misaligned, and one cuff is open and missing a button. Dean doesn’t look much better off—but unhurt, and it starts to make sense. Then Sam notices the cracked artifact above the bed.
All worry bleaches from Sam’s face and leaves behind an expression of both amazement and disdain. He pieces it together fairly quickly. What he had realized in the library was the reason for the deaths—husks of creatures left behind, all high profile, all sent into the honeymoon suite. Sam had been so distracted by the raisin-like quality of the corpses that he hadn’t thought to connect it before.
Then he had seen the old photo—some political figure photographed in the honeymoon suite, that object in the background. A Heart of Ice, a *literal* heart of the hotel. The original runework had been bastardized with the shoddy work of the new owner when the changing climate stopped maintaining the magic of the location enough to sustain the hotel. High-powered guests would be sent to the honeymoon suite, their life essence sucked dry the second they activated their powers.
The problem here, as much as Sam can figure, is that the improvised adjustments didn’t throttle the intake enough to account for anything more powerful than a dryad. So when a Seraphim entered the hotel and became activated—and Sam is *really* trying very hard not to think too deeply about how absolutely ridiculous this is—the Heart acted like any overloaded powerstrip without proper grounding, and… well.
Dean slants a self-satisfied grin at him, and with all the cheek of someone caught out without a care he says, “Hey, you think anyone noticed?”