Chapter Text
For almost a year when he was eight-going-on-nine, Sam slept with the lights on. Dean must have hated it but never said a word. His brother knew lights didn’t banish monsters, under the bed or otherwise, but light dispelled shadows and that was enough. Safety was an illusion Sam clung to as tightly as he did his brother that year. If the lights were on, they were safe.
Dad didn’t realize for a long time, coming in at all hours of the night, that the light switches in the wrong direction were left that way on purpose. When the truth came out (several truths; truths about monsters, hunting, and why the man was gone so often), he wanted to put an end to the practice immediately: He needed his rest. They were running up the electric bill. Sam wasn’t a baby.
It took only a few soft words from Dean for their father to give in, just a bit, all without mentioning once that Sam had wet the bed, multiple times (at least, Sam hoped that was the case). Lights on for now. Then graduating to a single light on in the hallway or bathroom. Then the tableside lamp. Then nothing at all.
(Except Dean would click on the flashlight under the covers, to read comic books, he always claimed. They read the same Spider-Man issue, Spidey battling Venom on a tropical island, Peter escaping using his wit, over and over, cover to cover. There was just enough light, and he was just close enough to Dean to make it more than enough. It was perfect.)1
At twenty-going-on-twenty-one, Sam no longer spent every waking moment avoiding sleep and jumping at shadows. But he still sometimes fell asleep with the lights on when he studied too late. He wasn’t the only one, but his roommate called him a nerd for it anyway because Friday nights are not meant for studying. Because it was a Friday night Luis wasn’t around to complain, so the disorienting deja vu strikes him hard when the knock comes on the door: Dad come ‘round telling him it’s late; turn off the light.
Sam jolted upright, half in shame, half in annoyance, and wiped the drool from his left cheek. The draft for his final Galileo paper was damp. Sam frowned, dabbing it with his t-shirt. Salvageable, if he set it under the lamp. The knocking on the door persisted. If Luis forgot his key again at--Sam’s eyes wandered to the clock-radio--two in the morning, he was going to throw a bitchfit.
The knocking, even and measured, didn’t sound like Luis. Unease clenched at Sam’s center, which he promptly crushed. Monsters rarely knocked. And if they did, then there was no telling if they were a monster anyhow. Not before it was too late.
Sam opened the door. There stood John Winchester, jacket, scruff, and all, fist raised, ready to continue his tell-tale pounding on Sam’s dorm room door.
For a moment, Sam was sure he must be dreaming. If he looked down at himself he’d be eight or nine, barely up to his father’s knee, and begging for his forgiveness. Instead, Sam was twenty, they saw forehead-to-eye, and he was not in a forgiving mood.
“Dad,” Sam said. The word felt odd coming out of his mouth. For a time, he was sure that he would never see his old man again. Since he’d left, “Dad” was a fiction to anyone who asked: neglectful traveling salesman, drank too much, they didn’t talk. Half-truths mixed with half-lies that together weren’t wholly incorrect. Dad was the one who told him to take a hike, after all. Told him to get and stay lost.
His dad dropped his hand slowly, looking Sam up and down like he didn’t expect that his son would be the one to answer the door, startled almost. “Sam,” his father replied in a low gravel, the same one Dean strived to imitate the minute his voice broke. “You look--” he started then cut himself off. “Can I come in?”
Sam scoffed. “Do I have a choice?” He left the door open then returned to his desk, straightening it with false fervor. Never turn your back. An old lesson drilled into himself and Dean a thousand times. Surely his father got the message: I don’t care what you do.
But his father didn’t react to the snub or rise to the bait. In fact, he didn’t move at all, remaining at the threshold. “Sam--” he repeated and his breath hitched. “We need to talk, son.”
Sam risked a glance over his shoulder. His father looked tired, but that wasn’t new. There was something off, though. Something about the look in his eye. It disturbed him. Frightened him, almost. No choice, then, but to go on the attack.
“If you’re looking for an apology, you’re not getting one,” Sam tossed out, banging drawers closed perhaps a bit louder than necessary considering the late hour. “I earned this and deserve this, okay?”
“Sam--”
“I know you figured I’d come crawling back but I’m doing fine on my own. Great, actually. Four-point-oh GPA, thinking of picking up a second major. Not that any of that matters to you.” Sam snorted. “Has ever mattered to you.”
“Sam, I need to--”
Desk cleared, Sam busied himself with meaningless tasks, fueled by self-righteousness and a sudden, desperate need to keep his hands busy. “Even have a few friends. Turns out? Staying in one place for more than a month allows for that sort of thing. It’s normal, actually. I’m normal. Normal, safe, and, what do you know, zero monster sightings.”
His dad still hadn’t moved, even with the careless dropping of the m-word. Sam spared another look and saw the man’s expression was pinched and pained. “I need you to just--”
“I don’t need to do anything,” Sam snapped. He tugged the bedsheets down, fluffed the pillow. The tiny dorm room felt smaller than usual. “I’m twenty years old. You can’t control me anymore.” There--he’d left his calculator in his bag. He retrieved and slapped it down next to his open notebook with a satisfying clunk. “Besides, you’re the one who told me to stay gone, remember?”
His dad said nothing. Sam bit out a laugh. “What do you need me for anyway? You got Dean. He loves ‘the job,’” he dragged the words out with every ounce of derision he could muster. “Where is Dean anyway? Making him do research while you bother me? Or is he scoping out the Palo Alto nightlife?” Friday night, college town? Dean would love it.
“Sam. ”
Sam froze. His father’s breathing had gone ragged like he’d been shot. Sam would know. He’d heard that sound more than once. He hesitantly turned around. The man was pale, sickly. He wasn’t just tired, he was exhausted, that bone-deep tired that meant more than one sleepless night. It meant cracked ribs and messy kills and answers that hadn’t come quickly enough.
Or something worse. But there couldn’t be anything worse. That didn’t exist.
“Where’s Dean?” Sam asked again.
His dad said nothing.
He must not have heard him correctly. Misunderstood him, maybe. There was a reason he wasn’t answering. A perfectly rational reason he just stared at him so blankly. “Where’s Dean?” he repeated. His father shook his head. What was that supposed to mean? “Where is he?”
The man inhaled like sucking air through a straw. “I tried to call,” he whispered. “But you, uh, you changed your number. And there was a note, or something, in your file, so the office wouldn’t--”
The world dipped and swooped like it did when you nearly fell out of bed waking up from a dream, stomach and brain yanking in opposite directions. Something wasn’t right. The world wasn’t making sense. He must still be asleep.
“Where’s Dean, Dad?” Sam pressed. He took one shaky step, then another. Was walking always this hard? “Is he--is he hurt? How bad is it?”
John Winchester didn’t cry. Maybe once, but Sam was just a baby then. But now his eyes, against all laws of nature, were wet. Nothing made sense. “Sammy,” he said. Sam’s hands reached out, grabbed that ancient leather jacket, feeling for something real, something stabilizing. Impossibly, his father continued speaking. “Dean. Dean, he’s--”
“No,” Sam interrupted, cutting off his father’s... madness. “No.”
“Sam, please.” His dad reached up to--hug him? touch his face?--something, and Sam batted the offending hands away.
“Where’s Dean?” Sam demanded and shook the man, trying to shake loose the truth. “Where is he? ”
He was distantly aware of how his voice climbed, of the sound of doors down the hallway opening, and the accompanying disgruntled complaints. It didn’t matter. Not when faced with the absurdity of whatever his father was trying to say.
“Sam--” Broad hands clamped down on his own, trying to pull him away, or maybe pull him closer. Sam wasn’t sure and suddenly they were grappling, or some weak parody of it. Sam beat against his father’s chest, five or six years old once more, wanting answers, wanting to know why they were moving again, why couldn’t they stay longer, why does it have to be like this? And overcome with impatience and weariness, and his dad’s answer to every question eventually became the singular and all-encompassing: go ask your brother.
How could he ask his brother if he didn’t know where he was?
“Where is he? Where’s my brother?” Sam might have been babbling. He might have gone as crazy as the world around him. “Where’s my brother? Where’s my brother?”
Seven and eight and nine and ten, waiting with a third-hand backpack for his brother to pick him up at the front of the school, positive he’d be forgotten (he never was). Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sleepless with bated breath and gnawed-down nails in dingy hotel rooms, sure this would be the time Dean didn’t come back (he always did). Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, hating the world and hating his life and wanting to run and sure his brother hated him back when he had to drag Sam along again (he never hated him, never, even when he should have, and he always came for him).
“He’s gone, Sammy. Dean’s gone.”
He’s gone. An inadequate, colorless euphemism suitable only for civilians and children--and he had never been either one of those things.
Sam’s head filled with rushing water. His heart thudded just below the surface. The rest of the world was a silence that needed to be destroyed.
“You’re a liar!” Sam screamed, tugging and pulling and wrathful and weak. He would kill him. He was going to kill his father. He would. He wanted to. “I’d know if--you’re lying, you’re always lying!”
His legs gave out. His dad caught him, eased him to the ground even as Sam continued to wail on him with inept fists. He clutched feebly at the murder in his heart. Any other emotion now was unthinkable. “Liar. Where’s my brother? Where is he? Where is he?”
Somewhere outside the void closing in around him, he felt more than heard his voice shrivel down to desperate gasps, repeating the question with an answer that for some reason wouldn’t change. He vaguely recognized the voice of the RA but didn’t actually see him, vision cast over with a watery haze. His throat and eyes and everything burned. Silence overtook him.
He heard quite clearly, however, his father’s voice explaining: I’m sorry, I’m his father, his brother died.
I’m sorry.
Sam Winchester clung to his father, who stroked his hair, and wept for his dead brother. Not one of the onlookers, gazes pitying and distant, seemed to realize that the world had ended.
*~*
Sam didn’t remember the rest of the night beyond his father insisting with a gentleness he didn’t know the man possessed that they could leave tomorrow morning. Get some rest.
Leave so they could... take care of the body. The body. His brother, transfigured from a person--a living, breathing, whole person--into a thing to be processed. The notion of it remained incorporeal, elusive. Something that could happen but wasn’t quite yet real.
The sooner he left, the sooner he could prove that what his father said was just a nightmare.
He didn’t pack much. Though he’d been moored in California for almost two years now, leeriness of accumulating stuff still remained from the days where every day was potentially the last day in any given location. Once when he was in second grade, he was gifted a Sebastian plushie by a generous classmate who also happened to have a deep hatred of crabs. He loved that sea creature, and when he left it in one of a thousand motel rooms they’d stayed at in his short life, no amount of crying got Dad to turn the car around to save his crustacean friend. He learned then--don’t get attached. Not to things, at least.
Family, though. Family was everything.
His dad waited outside in some black monster truck he didn’t recognize while he folded his last t-shirt. His arms shook the whole time and he had already dropped this shirt three times like all the others. When a delicate touch brushed his knuckles, Sam started violently. He didn’t even hear anyone come in. Those gentle hands caught the shirt as it fell from his numb fingers. Sam, disturbed in his own skin, didn’t look up.
“Hey, Sam,” a voice said and Sam swallowed. Right. Early breakfast date. He forgot. “Why don’t I take care of that, huh?”
“Jess,” Sam murmured as Jessica busied herself folding with sharp precision. She worked in a department store one summer and there was in fact a right and wrong way to fold clothes. “I’m--I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“It’s okay, Sam,” she brushed off. Apparently, his brisk, indifferent packing wasn’t to her satisfaction. She removed each article of clothing and refolded them with exquisite care, even his underwear. Sam finally lifted his eyes and she paused her task. “Are you okay?”
Yes. He couldn’t really feel anything, so he was okay. “It’s, um. It’s my, uh, brother--”
But he couldn’t say it.
“You have to go. For the funeral,” she guessed. The word made him want to vomit. He’d seen people die but never been to a funeral. He still didn’t trust his mouth. He nodded. She resumed her folding. “Do you know when you’ll be back?”
Somehow, her plain, matter-of-fact questioning helped. “I don’t--I’m not sure.”
She bobbed her head, as if his response were expected, and resumed her folding. “I’ll email your teachers and advisor for you, get all the leave of absence forms ready. Here--” She went to his desk, helping herself to a piece of paper and a pen. She made no comment on the fact none of his books or school supplies, aside from his laptop, were packed away. “Sign this. I can copy your signature if I need to.”
Sam stared. He and Jess had been dating, officially, for three months. He’d never had a relationship in his life, but the gesture seemed like too much for such a short time. The generosity choked him high in his chest.
“I part-time in RO, remember?” she reminded him, misinterpreting, perhaps deliberately, his silence. “It’s not a problem.”
Sam wondered if he’d cry again. Some of his doubt must have shown in his face because she set the pen and paper aside and touched his face. He could have had something with this girl, he realized as she examined him, eyes dark and searching. He could have really had something.
“That okay, Sam?” she asked.
“Thank you,” he said. She let her hand drop, nodded again, and finished packing his clothes. Lost in the surreality of the moment, he let her. When she pressed the handle of his duffel into his hand, he closed his hands over hers. “Thank you,” he repeated, trying to put all his lost words into just those two.
She kissed him once, on the cheek, and smoothed back his hair. “You’re welcome, Sam.”
Sam still felt very little, wrapped in a fog of unreality. But as his father pulled away from his almost-home and that kind, beautiful girl, he thought he might have truly loved them both, girl and place, in a small, quiet way. Leaving them now really was a shame.
*~*
The drive from California to Wyoming was spent in absolute silence. It didn’t occur to Sam to ask where they were going and his dad didn’t bring it up until they pulled up into some rundown motel near the Nevada-Utah border, mentioning softly they were making good time and they should be there by tomorrow night. The new information didn’t matter none, and they maintained the silence through the night and the next morning. If Sam woke up in the middle of the night choking on dream smoke and terror, it wasn’t mentioned.
The quiet only broke once when the ring of a cellphone made them both jump in the small cabin. It was his father’s phone and he didn’t answer it. It went on ringing for an uncomfortably long time and Sam almost asked if he was gonna get that. Then it stopped and they resumed pretending the other didn’t exist.
Sam was content with his nonexistence until they stopped in a hospital in Casper. Dad parked, shot him a gruff, “Wait here,” and disappeared through a backdoor. He didn’t understand what was happening until his father returned with a large rectangular container on a dolly.
His brother was in that box.
Sam fought his way out of the truck cabin, hit the pavement knees first, and threw up. A minute or so later he felt hands on his back and he batted them away blindly, cursing, “Get off me, get the fuck off--”
Dad let him go and Sam retched a little bit longer, but nothing came up but water. He wiped his mouth with a shaking hand and didn’t help load up Dean in the back like spare parts.
They drove. They ended up at some small cabin in the middle of nowhere where the truck headlights illuminated a half-finished pyre a little ways off. His father almost burned Dean without him and Sam was almost sick again, but this time with outrage. He’d gone so long without speaking though that he couldn’t find the words when the realization hit. He ignored his dad directing him toward the woodpile in the back, instead following him and the box inside the cabin. They hauled the container onto a table. Dad looked at him just once before cracking the thing open.
Dean didn’t look like he was sleeping. Sam didn’t realize until that moment that’s what he assumed his brother would look like: the slightly furrowed brow, the twitching mouth, flickering eyelids. But he just looked dead. Torn up. Cold.
Sam touched Dean’s mouth, wanting absurdly to kiss it, and found it as stiff and unyielding as the rest of him. He spun away and went outside to finish the pyre.
By the time Dad came out with the body (it wasn’t Dean, it wasn’t ) wrapped in white and rendered anonymous, the pyre was ready to be lit. Sam had helped build a hunter’s pyre only once before and was sent away shortly after. He was young then, and didn’t know what the big bonfire was for. The solemn faces of the men around him, men he didn’t recall ever seeing again, offered no clues and no one spoke to him (neither Dad nor Dean allowed it). He remembered the smoke, though, and the smell of cooking meat. Dean didn’t explain until years later: you burn them so they don’t come back. It’s the hunters’ way.
Dean wasn’t coming ba--
His father placed the body. Sam lit the matches. The thing once called Dean Winchester burned.
In the hell-orange firelight, Sam spoke directly to his father for the first time in twenty-four hours: “Where the hell were you?”
His dad didn’t answer at first as he watched his eldest burn. Sam held no sympathy. Feeling was returning to his body and it clawed at his insides painfully. He wanted it to hurt. All the better if everyone else hurts too.
“Belfast,” he said finally. “Nebraska. Cattle mutilations.”
Signs and portents. In other words, Dean died for nothing.
“Why wasn’t he with you?” Sam demanded. “Why was he--”
“Sam,” Dad said, hands shoved deep into his pockets, looking all the world like he was ready to climb on the fire any moment, “I don’t want to fight.”
Sam did. He was wrath and ruin, an angry storm needing something to batter against. “You were supposed to stay together.” In those early Stanford days with nothing but flimsy locked doors and green roommates on his six, a small comfort remained--at least Dean had Dad. Sam didn’t have to feel guilty because they were together.
“I thought he could handle it,” Dad said and Sam almost laughed at the absurdity of that statement.
“You were supposed to protect him,” Sam accused.
“Yeah,” Dad agreed. “I was.”
Dean kept on burning so Sam did too. “He always had your back. Always. Even when--” Even when he didn’t have mine, he wanted to say, but it hurt too much. “Maybe if you treated him like a son instead of a soldier just once--”
“Sam. ” Their eyes met in the flickering firelight and the shadows made the lines in his father’s face look deeper, aged him a decade in seconds. His father had been over this a hundred times in his head already, Sam realized. And now he was begging in a way he never had in his life. “Please.”
Sam looked away. “You left him,” he muttered, vengeful and petty.
“So did you,” Dad countered. Sam’s fire went out with a snap and he curled in on himself, far too late to shield himself from the wound inflicted. The man sighed, ran a hand through his hair. He reached out but almost immediately thought better of it, shoving the sympathetic hand back in his pocket.
Blows dealt, they retreated back into silence. Sam looked at the remains of his brother and wondered how long it would take until there was nothing left. It wasn’t fair. What could Dean Winchester, nomad-raised, leave behind? Sam fled so he’d have a future, but Dean never had a chance to plant roots, make a legacy. Everything he was would vanish in the atmosphere like the smoke from his funeral pyre.
“Did you get it?” Sam asked. A spark smarted on his cheek, a belated scolding from Dean. “The thing that killed him. Did you get it?”
His father didn’t hesitate before answering. “Yeah. Yeah, I got it.” Didn’t matter what it was. All that mattered was it was dead.
“Good,” Sam said shortly, but the information didn’t please him in the way he hoped it would. Dad, at least, got vengeance, if not for his wife then at least for his son. What did Sam get? What was left for him?
It would take a long time, as it turned out, for the fire to burn itself out. They remained at vigil, two soldiers at stand-by, until the red heart of the wood went black. Dad walked away first, then Sam. His father had a glass of whisky waiting for him inside the cabin, an olive branch of sorts that Sam took, but not gratefully. They drank until the sun came up and the morning light brought no comfort, only the reality that the days would keep coming even with one less Winchester in the world. In that, father and son were united in hating all the world.
*~*
As Sam guessed, Dean left almost nothing behind. Sam cared about none of it besides the bull-headed pendant that he slipped over his crown with a hitched sob and a kiss to the cold metal. He was sure Dean would have thrown it away after he left. But it sat on top of the pile of assorted odds and ends as if waiting for him.
He left the wallet, as the only thing real inside it was the cash. The silver ring he slipped into his pocket, thinking he might add it to the necklace later, and also grabbed the lighter, out of habit. The rest remained untouched. He was completely unprepared when the keyring dropped on the table. Its omission now seemed glaringly obvious. Sam warily meets his father’s eyes.
“It’s your car,” he said, but Dad shook his head.
“Dean’s car,” Dad corrected gruffly. “I got the truck. And he--” He swallowed. “He woulda wanted you to have it.”
Sam almost screamed. What the hell did Dad know about what Dean wanted? What the hell did he know? Did he ever even bother asking?
Did Sam?
Sam picked up the keys as if they were a rabid animal and squeezed them in his hand, the teeth biting into his palm like accusatory fangs. The last time he held these, Dean was dropping them and a condom in his palm and telling him to be back by midnight or he’d be in for an ass-kicking.
“I know it’s your prom and you wanna go nuts, but no glove, no love,” Dean had teased. Sam had blushed and punched him in the shoulder. Sam couldn’t even remember the name of his date. Six months later, Dean was dropping him off at the bus station and wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
That was the last time they spoke face-to-face. There were a few phone calls, but Sam had stopped answering, fed up with Dean’s coaxing, his unsubtle hints that he was wearing Dad down, Dad didn’t really mean what he said--
Oh, God. He couldn’t remember the last thing he said to him.
“Where are you going?” Sam asked, staring at the car key.
“I don’t know.” The admission shocked Sam into looking up. His father didn’t look at him but out the window at something Sam couldn’t see. Or maybe he wasn’t looking at anything at all. Maybe he was just as lost and confused as Sam was. That thought, more than any other, unnerved him. “Are you going back to school?”
Was he? Jessica (beautiful, kind-eyed, maybe-waiting Jessica), would have submitted the leave of absence papers by now. No one would expect him back this quarter. Maybe not even this year.
“I don’t know,” Sam echoed. “Not--not right away, at least. I... I dunno.”
His dad nodded like that made sense. “You should go back,” he said, though seemingly to himself. “It’s safer there.”
Nowhere is safe. The thought rang inside him, ominous and foreboding. Sam was safer at Stanford but he’d never be safe. His father was right about that, then and now. The fact that his father was right about anything disgusted him. A world without Dean was not a safer world.
“Sam.”
Sam knew what was coming before it happened and he let it happen. His dad hugged him and Sam didn’t stop him. Sam allowed himself to cling, but only for a moment. He didn’t want to look or feel needy.
“Take care of yourself,” Dad murmured.
You’re supposed to take care of me, came the petulant thought. It was summarily dismissed. Clearly, the man couldn’t be trusted with taking care of his children. It was an unreliable notion at best. That was something he’d always known. Dean didn’t need to die to prove that to him.
“You too,” he whispered back in a moment of weakness. His father squeezed harder, Sam’s weakness reflected, and let go. He nodded once, order restored between them, and was gone, leaving Sam with ashes and memories. They weren’t enough.
*~*
The Impala smelled like Dean.
The sense-memory hit him like a punch to the head and within seconds his eyes were wet and he couldn’t even begin attempting to fumble the key into the ignition.
Gun oil. Leather. Cheap motel soap. All those things and a thousand little others that came together and spelled Dean. Dean couldn’t be dead--he was in this car, his car, only moments ago. How else could the smell be so strong? There was no other explanation.
Sam wept in the driver’s seat and the smell, cruelly, did not go away.
When he could breathe again, he wrapped his hands around the creaking vinyl of the steering wheel half-hoping and half-fearing another rush of Dean-ness overtaking him. Instead, he just felt wrong; an imposter behind the wheel or, worse, a thief, clutching onto something that never should have been his to begin with. I’m not yours, the car seemed to say. Get out.
“I can’t,” he whispered, then jumped at the sound of his own voice, not realizing he’d spoken aloud. He felt foolish and raw but continued speaking. “I’m sorry.”
Of course, nobody was around to hear his apologies. It was far too late for that.
Some suspicious part of his mind believed the car wouldn’t start, as if the engine and Dean’s life were intrinsically linked. But the Impala rumbled to life with the first turn of the key. It was a bitter victory. He touched his forehead to the wheel once, drew in a rattling breath, and put his foot to the gas.
He drove.
Sam didn’t have any particular feelings about driving beyond its necessity and utility--Point A, Point B, done. His brother always romanticized the road. And the road becomes my bride, he’d croon, and more than any lyric of Dean’s beloved Zeppelin, that Metallica song made Sam think of his brother. The car, wheels on the road, was Dean’s home. Sam never accepted it--homes were permanent, had foundations. Homes didn’t move.
Sam was an idiot.
Sam could read and ride the road but he didn’t understand it. When he began his drive he went with no intent and simple instructions: find the highway, drive. His father and brother always had a weird sixth sense for all the perils of the road, foretelling bad traffic, detours, and rough weather which Sam never found strange until that moment. Forever a passenger, the ability never manifested within himself. The fact that he was never meant to be in this seat was never more obvious.
He let the Impala guide him best he could and tried not to think too hard about where he wasn’t going. That first day (the first of too many days, days of no Dean, Dean gone, an empty world without Dean), Sam stopped only to urinate and sleep. His stomach was a shallow, irrelevant hole to which he paid no mind. He pissed on the side of the highway in the tall grass and slept in the car, the vehicle sprawled over two spots in a truck stop parking lot. Clouds hid the stars and it was the only thing Sam was thankful for in the last forty-eight hours.
And so it went. Days weren’t marked by the sun but by cruel calendar reminders intruding upon him in violent fits and bursts: Dean burned three days ago. Dean’s missing the Metallica tour. Dean’s been dead a week. Dean’s never having another Saint Patrick’s Day. Dean’s been gone a month.
Dean’s missing my birthday.
Sam turned twenty-one alone in a rundown hostel in a midwestern state (he wasn’t sure which one). He took his first legal drink the minute the clock flipped from 12:00 to 12:01 and threw up that same drink, along with several others, eight hours later. He spent most of the day (when he was conscious anyhow) crying, not an unusual occurrence. When he checked his phone so late in the day that it was almost the next, there were two messages: one from Jessica, one from his father. He didn’t delete them, but he also didn’t read or answer them. It didn’t occur to him how cruel that was until he awoke the next afternoon and saw dozens of missed messages from his dad. Those also went unread, though he managed to shoot off a groggy, unenthused im fine before he could talk himself out of it. They kicked him out of the hostel shortly after.
“Dad blames me,” Sam whispered, curled up in the backseat that night. He tried not to do this too much, talk to Dean. Even if he wasn’t so good at saying anything important, Dean always liked to talk and getting nothing in reply but empty air hurt something fierce. Sometimes though he couldn’t help but twist the knife a little deeper. Hurt himself so much that maybe someday it would stop hurting at all. It hadn’t worked so far. “He won’t say it but I know he does.” He traced nonsense on the vinyl and snuffled into his hoodie. “He’s probably right.”
The Top 20 station he had on low fuzzed out--the radio had been blitzing in and out for hours, he thought he finally found a station that would stick--so Sam squirmed up to the front and clicked it off. He thought about grabbing another sweatshirt from his bag but decided the cold was kind of nice. Pleasantly brisk, for May. He fell asleep to his own wet sniffling. When he dreamed, Dean was in the front seat and berating his taste in music. The exchange, so bizarre in its mundanity, made him forget that he missed his brother so much he could hardly breathe because for the thousandth time he had to defend Bed of Roses as “one of the good” Bon Jovi songs.
He awoke Too Damn Early to a roaring tractor, a grumpy farmhand knocking on the window, and Adam Levine’s vocals spitting out of the speakers in tempestuous spurts. The week after that, the car broke down for the first time.
*~*
When the car refused to start outside some rundown motel in Nowhere, Nebraska, Sam thought, stupidly, for a moment that he’d forgotten to get gas. Ridiculous, really. Sometimes Sam forgot to eat or he’d go just a little too long without sleeping in a real bed but if he wanted to get from Point A to Point B the car needed gas (never mind that A and B could be anywhere and nowhere, constantly shifting, undefined variables). He stared dumbly at the unlit gas indicator, uncomprehending, and twisted the key over and over like an automaton, waiting for the engine to start. When the engine refused to turn over for the tenth time, he began to panic.
“No,” he said, and it was so much like those months ago in his dorm room that he almost vomited. “No, no, no, you can’t. You can’t do this.”
The Impala replied with a sputtering whine and Sam swallowed back a sob. “Come on, come on, come on-- ”
The car roared to life and Sam nearly jumped out of his skin. He threw the car in reverse with shaking hands and screamed out of the parking lot like the devil was on his heels, just to prove he could. He laughed hysterically for the first few miles. It was an old car. Of course it would seize up sometimes. Of course.
It was an old car. That didn’t explain why Sam had a heart attack every single time the thing refused to start. Problems mounting, that air blasting freezing cold the radio transforming into a finicky beast, changing stations at random if it picked up music at all. A body in peril.
Sam changed the oil. Looked under the hood. Tightened bolts. He felt like a nurse at a hospice--nothing to be done but wait.
But something had to be done. But the idea of taking the car, his brother’s car, into a garage for strangers to touch repulsed him. Dad would know what was wrong but for reasons obvious yet ineffable that option was out. After the sixth breakdown and half an hour of shallow breathing Sam refused to call a panic attack, he made his way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Uncle Bobby’s place hadn’t changed since the mid-nineties: same crooked Singer Auto Salvage sign, same sad gray house, same maze of junkers stacked like Jenga blocks all over the property. Something ached in Sam’s chest and it took a moment for him to recognize it as nostalgia, an emotion with very little opportunity to manifest in a lifetime of nomadic living. There were games of hide-and-seek here. Filling meals. Warm beds. When he’d stormed out on his family two years ago, the bad days fueled him. They fueled him every time he thought about maybe picking up the phone, maybe trying to remember how to form the words, “I’m sorry,” stopping him in his tracks. But there were good days, too. He’d forgotten that.
The rottweiler chained in the front lifted his head when he approached and gave a bark that sounded more greeting than warning but Sam kept a wide berth anyhow. When he knocked on the door he half expected Bobby Singer to answer with a shotgun in his hand, considering how his family last left the place, but Bobby opened the same annoyed suspicion he always had and that brand new feeling of nostalgia swamped him again.
Bobby squinted at him for a long while, looking him up and down. Sam wasn’t offended. It had been years, and he’d grown since then. “Sam?” he asked gruffly. “That you, boy?”
“Yeah, Bobby. It’s me,” Sam confirmed. The door swung open wider and they stared at each other. Bobby was a little grayer than he remembered, and of course, a lot shorter from where he stood, but basically the same, like a living snapshot. Sam wished he could say the same.
“You look like shit,” Bobby said finally. Sam laughed and the sound felt alien in his throat. He’d forgotten what a real laugh felt like, even if the one wrangled out of him was short and strangled. Trust Bobby not to mince words. “Well, don’t just stand there,” Bobby grumbled. “Get inside, stop lettin’ the flies in.”
Sam stepped inside and they shut out the flies. His house was still a book lover’s paradise, titles in English and Spanish and Latin overflowing from stuffed shelves and stacked in every available corner. Sam always loved Bobby’s library, even in his most vehement moods when towards the supernatural. Dean never showed much interest, though he’d study now and again at Dad’s insistence when the man dumped them there. Dean would watch him read, making faces over the tops of books--
Sam swallowed. He thought he’d cried himself out by now but his eyes frequently argued against that notion. He’d like to keep it together in front of Bobby if he could help it.
Bobby didn’t ask too many questions or interrogate him. Just poured them both drinks without asking, mentioned he was “real sorry about your brother” (Sam didn’t say anything in reply; what was there to say?), and they shot the shit. Sam must have looked worse than he thought if Bobby was treating him that fragile. He wanted to mind, but couldn’t. He still felt fragile, fragile as glass, the slightest touch ready to shatter him. It was easier when he was angry.
“So, what brings you ‘round these parts?” Bobby finally asked, setting aside his scotch. Sam followed suit, though reluctantly. “Awful long way from California. Or... anywhere.”
Sam shrugged and cleared his throat. “I was, uh, actually hoping for a favor.”
Bobby cocked an unimpressed eyebrow. “You get into something?”
Sam offered a weak chuckle and shook his head. “No, no. It’s just the car. It’s been acting up lately. Could use a little TLC. I had a look myself but I couldn’t figure it out. Never really had the head for it.”
He tried to keep his voice casual but was sure Bobby could see right through him. The car was the only thing he had left. If that old gas-guzzler went he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t follow.
Bobby squinted at him hard. “That old Chevy?”
“That’s the one.”
Bobby snorted and got to his feet with an exaggerated huff. “I’ll take a look. Lord knows you’ve been doing to that poor thing.”
Sam hid a smile. “I’m not that bad.”
“You are. You never paid a damn bit of attention to anything I said in the yard. Not like Dean. Absorbed it all like a sponge.”
Sam picked at his jeans. “He should’ve been a mechanic,” he said and it came out much rougher than he intended. It was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging aloud that Dean was... gone.
He expected some kind of berating about what-ifs and too-lates but it never came. When he glanced up Bobby’s gaze was distant and regretful. A spiteful part of him noted that Bobby could’ve prevented all of this. He had the opportunity. He knew what the hunting life was like, what it would do to them. But Sam squashed the unfair thought as soon as it manifested. Bobby also knew what John Winchester was like. If he’d made anything stronger than mild suggestions about the Winchester lifestyle, he wouldn’t have seen hide nor hair of Sam or his brother long before that final fight that almost completely burned that bridge.
“I’ll take a look,” Bobby repeated.
“I’ll come--” Sam began, starting to his feet.
“Sit your ass down, boy,” Bobby ordered and Sam plunked back down in his chair. “I’ll give you a walkthrough later, but right now I need you to rest, eat up. Make yourself a damn sandwich. How many days straight have you been driving? Two days? Three?”
“Just about,” Sam admitted softly.
“That’s what I thought. I don’t need you mucking about with heavy machinery. Stay put, you hear?”
Sam heard. Per Bobby’s instructions, he put his feet up, curling up on a couch that could barely hold him, staring blankly around the room. For this first time, his aimlessness felt wasteful. He couldn’t keep this up for much longer. Bobby would tolerate him for a time, but Sam wouldn’t play parasite. For the last few months, he’d been steadily draining the bank account so carefully curated during his time at Stanford. He hadn’t reached his limit yet but he would soon, and then he would have to stop running. Go back to school or get a job somewhere.
He buried his face into the cushions. He hadn’t run long or far enough yet. Everything still hurt. Regret was still raw. The well of his tears had yet to run dry.
The shrill ring of a telephone knocked him from his melancholy. If had been one of the many cover phones (the aliases made him smile a little; Frank Castle, really?), he might have run out to get Bobby so as not to surprise anyone on the other end. As it was, it was still a work phone ringing and Sam stared at it for a few uncomfortable moments unsure as to what to do. Someone might hang up if they heard anyone other than Bobby on the other end. His dad would’ve. Then, he wondered if someone was dying while he tried to make up his mind.
He wondered if Dean had a chance to call anyone.
He picked up the phone, hesitating just a second before settling on, “Singer Salvage.”
The hunter was unbothered by Sam answering the phone as soon as he confirmed he knew a ghost wasn’t just an eighties movie. Bobby came back inside just as he scribbled the last details on a notepad, promising to pass the info along. He hung up and Bobby raised an eyebrow as he scrubbed his hands with a dirty cloth. “Wrong number?” he asked dryly.
“Ah, um. Hunter, actually. Guy named Carl? Caught wind of a werewolf thing in Pittsburgh.”
“Carl? Wasn’t he on a--”
“A haunting? Yeah. That’s why he called. Had to haul ass to beat the moon. Wanted to pass the hunt along.”
Bobby sighed and dragged the cap off his head. “Figures. Well, time to play phone tag, I guess. Grab the black book on my desk, would ya?”
But Sam didn’t move. He clenched the notepad, felt the paper crumble in his suddenly damp hands. “I could do it.”
He didn’t realize what had come out of his mouth until he registered Bobby’s incredulous stare. But Sam meant it, he realized, and didn’t want to take it back.
“Wanna run that by me one more time?” Bobby demanded.
Sam made himself breathe. “It’s just a haunting, Bobby. Carl did most of the groundwork already. All that’s left is to salt and burn the bones.” Seeing Bobby’s frown deepen, he continued, “I can handle it.”
Bobby argued with him. Of course he did. You got out. You got a future. You’re only doing this because of what happened to De--
Sam cut him off, pointing out that already had the info. There was nothing Bobby could do to stop him... unless he didn’t fix the Impala. At that, Bobby shrugged.
“Nothing to fix,” he admitted. “Damndest thing. That car’s in the best shape of its life. But--” the man hesitated. “If you think I’m letting you go out there until I watch you change a tire you’re outta your mind. And I’ll be damned if I let you outta my sight with the state of that trunk. Guns are half rusted.”
Bobby was right about the state of the trunk. Sam’d been tempted, once or twice, to open it up, but feared what he’d see in all the tools of the trade that failed his brother. But when he looked inside it was like a switch went off in his brain--a rusted switch, but still functional. He numbly cataloged the ammo and guns noted with distant amusement that the throwing stars and grenade launcher remained, both as new and untouched as the day they were added to the arsenal. He saw his brother’s Colt, wondered if Dad had to pry it out of Dean’s hands and if it was the last thing his brother held or felt, and reached for the Taurus instead.
Sam changed a tire twice under Bobby’s judging gaze and the man still wouldn’t let him leave until he’d slept a full eight hours. Sam faked sleep reasonably well and felt somewhat rested because of it. Bobby sent him off with a hug just this side of painful and fifty dollars he didn’t find until he was paying for coffee three hours later. “You call me, understand?” he ordered.
“After it’s done,” Sam promised, not entirely sure if he would.
“Call me whatever, ” Bobby corrected. “Idjit.” The affection that swelled inside him left him breathless.
And then Sam went on a ghost hunt.
*~*
True to Carl’s word, the job was half done by the time Sam rolls into Greer, South Carolina. The tormented family in question, the Addisons, had already vacated their haunted abode (a newly renovated historical home) two days prior on the advice of a very concerned private detective tracking a prowler. He didn’t even bother visiting the house until after his visit to the graveyard. He prepared himself for a rush of emotion, spreading the salt and gas over the bones of one Chester A. Milford (1911-1936; young forever, young like Dean), but ultimately the experience was disappointing. He felt the heat of the fire and not much else. He didn’t even see the actual ghost.
Sam dutifully called Bobby after the salt and burn but didn’t return to Sioux Falls. The next time he stopped for coffee he picked up the local paper along with it. He did that for the next five stops until he read about a mortician missing organs and limbs in Akron. He headed to Idaho with something vaguely resembling a sense of purpose.
Killing the ghoul left him shaking and vomiting for an hour afterward. It was not the first time he’d killed something but it was the first in a very long while and it was the first time without his brother rubbing his back and giving him water afterward. So sensitive, Dean would grumble but he always talked Dad into getting them Slushies or ice cream the next day; little treats of childhood that should have tasted different with blood on his hands but never did. Sam bought himself a brain freeze in a cup for old times sake but ended up throwing it away after a few tentative bites. He slept in the Impala that night and felt better the next morning.
Sam never wanted to be a hunter. Even in that brief period in his tweens where he begged to be brought along on hunts was more an attempt to fight the indignities of childhood than genuine desire; they left him behind because he was a kid, and that was intolerable. He also wanted to spend more time with Dean, whom he was already losing to girls (that part of the story did not require further examination or reflection). After recovering from the ghoul ordeal he still didn’t want to be a hunter. But he still wanted to be closer to Dean. Maybe this was how.
So he hunted. It didn’t make him feel good but he was feeling something other than bottomless, black sadness, which was an improvement. Despite Bobby’s claims, the Impala continued to act up, seemingly at random. He had a heart attack every time and the Impala remorselessly continued giving him trouble, very much like Dean.
Looking back, it was truly laughable how long it took for him to figure it out. Sam ultimately blamed grief, though willful ignorance was also a likely (a more likely, if he was honest) culprit. He wasn’t even working a haunting, but a black dog, when the pieces finally started to come together.
The one black dog was actually two. He was bleeding. Not scrapes or bumps or bruises or kind of roughed up but really bleeding, a genuine horror show. The thought made him laugh. That was probably the blood loss turning everything to black humor. Black like the two dead dogs he left burning in an open grave. Some poor gravedigger was in for a hell of surprise tomorrow. Sam laughed harder, the needle shaking between his fingers as he sewed up his thigh. The bitch (haha) hadn’t bit down to the artery, he thought, but it was close. He could have died.
He could have died like Dean.
Sam didn’t remember driving back to the hotel. He remembered getting in the car, starting it up, and driving maybe a mile or two. Soundgarden was on the radio which then flipped inexplicably over to a familiar Led Zeppelin hook halfway through the song. He recalled yelling... something, something profane, because he was clearly being mocked. Black Dog? Now? Mockery. He might have cried a little bit, fumbled with the radio. He remembered thinking it was very dark and very cold and that he felt very close to Dean. And then...
He was at the hotel. He didn’t remember the drive back. Not any of it after those first few miles.
Sam paused mid-stitch. “That’s not good,” he whispered. Of course, neither was talking to yourself, but Sam already knew he wasn’t well in the mental sense. That much was obvious. But sleep-driving was a bit much, even for him. Something was wrong.
The passing thought came: I should call Dad.
He dismissed it and finished patching up his leg. It stung like a sonnova bitch and he was running low on painkillers. He took one instead of two, downing it with a finger of whisky like he’d seen his dad do a hundred times (like Dean must’ve done), and tucked the uncertainty away for tomorrow when pain didn’t have a crushing hold over his rational thinking.
The sensation of wrongness lingered into the following morning. The Impala was parked neatly between the lines and the doors closed and locked. He didn’t remember closing them, though he must have, and wondered how he’d remembered to lock the doors when even getting out of the car was such a struggle at the time. He ran his hand over the blocky sweep of the hood, across the frame of the window, and the metal was cold in the early June sun.
Something was wrong. His heart sped up and Sam didn’t examine why he didn’t feel afraid.
*~*
Sam didn’t look too closely at what he might have been hoping for, yet took a dangerously methodical approach. He left the radio on pop stations, kept the air conditioning off even as the temperature spiked towards into the nineties, didn’t bother locking the doors whenever he exited the car (which was even more infrequent these days). Little things. Things Dean would have hated.
The radio crapped out. The air conditioner blew freezing air. Doors locked themselves. The headlights flashed: flick-flick-flick flick-flare flare-flare , flick-flick-flick flick-flare flare-flare2, over and over and over--
But it was an old car. It could have meant everything. More likely it meant nothing at all. Resignation and disappointment warred with anxiety and desperation. Sleep became elusive. He didn’t sleep in the Impala, driving straight on until he hit a motel, no matter how dingy. Anxiety climbed.
He avoided hauntings for as long as he could. Most weren’t exactly pressing concerns compared to genuine monster attacks anyway--missing items, broken dishes, spooked teenagers--hardly deadly encounters. But then forty-two-year-old Dan Petterson broke his neck going up the stairs at the warehouse where he worked--the fifth such accident in two weeks and the first fatality--and Sam couldn’t avoid it any longer. He turned the wheel towards Lakewood, Colorado with depressed resignation. The Impala didn’t act out once the whole trip.
OSHA ID cards didn’t have pictures so Sam ended up using one of Dean’s old cards, hoping no one at the Lakewood Ship & Pack Co. was a big fan of Road House. The warehouse manager was more than happy to escort Mr. James Dalton around the property--they met and exceeded compliance guidelines, after all. They had nothing to hide.
From what Sam could tell, that was accurate. Of course, that wasn’t the case twenty years ago. Different owners back then, the manager (Dave? David? One of the two) claimed. Liked to cut corners, skirt safety regulations. There was... an accident. But the whole thing was wrapped up, easy-breezy, lemon-squeezy (Sam cringed). No one even got sued, so there wasn’t really much paperwork. Sorry. But everything was hunky-dory now, right, Mr. Dalton?
Thumbing through old file cabinets after-hours unearthed the nonexistent paperwork. Getting impaled by a forklift was one hell of an accident. No wonder he came back mad.
The ghost, one Jackson Ellis, had every right to be pissed. “New owners,” as it turned out, was more euphemism than fact, something Dan Patterson, shift-manager-cum-floor-manager would be more than aware of, just like the other vics. Smelled like a conspiracy, but Sam wasn’t all that interested. Jackson Ellis’s name was what he was after and he found. The guy was buried in a plot only a few blocks over. Sam speculated morbidly that Ellis might have helped deliver his own coffin.
Sam broke the lock on the cemetery gate with ease, even driving the Impala through the grounds as he hunted for Ellis’s grave. The cemetery wasn’t particularly large and it didn’t take long to find the correct gravestone. The case, as far as cases go, was open and shut.
Then he actually opened the coffin. And things went to shit.
Funny thing, the thing that angered Ellis most was that Sam was with OSHA. No point in explaining he, of course, wasn’t with OSHA, (who didn’t condone grave desecration, as far as he knew) as ghosts at the height of their fury tended to have little grasp of logic. What made it funny was that in a way this was all Dean’s fault; Dean and his stupid secret love for Patrick Swayze.
He got gasoline and half a can of salt on the body when he was shoved, hard, away from the open grave. He wasn’t tossed far but he lost his grip on the lighter and his head cracked good against the next headstone over and the world turned into a dark, melted mess. He left the shotgun in the car. Stupid. He could see the car. He just needed to get to the car.
Cold hands wrapped around his throat and suddenly Sam couldn’t breathe. He flailed uselessly against the impossible strength. How could someone without a body be so strong? If he could reach the lighter, he could toss it into the grave. He could end this.
The zippo was about six inches away from his feet, well out of arm’s reach. He opened his mouth, tried one last time to reason with Ellis, but his tongue had already gone dumb in his mouth. He couldn’t breathe. He could barely think.
Who was gonna tell Dad what happened?
The corners of his vision turned dark.
The lighter slid across the grass and into his twitching fingers.
There was no time to wonder. He clicked it once, twice. The flame caught and held and Sam tossed it into the grave: two points, all net. The body of Jackson Ellis caught fire immediately and his ghostly form, still dressed in the same work overalls he died in, turned black and sizzled like burning newspaper. The ghost released him and Sam sucked in an ambrosial gasp of air. Ellis screamed, stared in horror at his smoldering form, at his vanishing fingertips--then was gone.
Sam stood, brushing the dirt away from his jeans. He touched the back of his head and his fingers came back bloody. No surprise there. He should stay, make sure Ellis burned down to ash, but he walked in a daze to the Impala. Got in, pulled out of the cemetery, and drove, drove, drove until he was well out of town. Drove until civilization was a memory and there was nothing but grass and asphalt. He shook with an emotion he couldn’t name. Eventually, he pulled off on the side of the highway, putting the car in idle. Rested his head on the steering wheel.
“Dean,” he whispered. “Dean, is that you?”
The Impala roared. The engine rumbled, headlights blared. The console went mad with blinking lights.
“Ramble on,” Robert Plant screamed out of the speakers, “And now's the time, the time is now to sing my song. I'm goin' 'round the world, I got to find my girl--”
Sam screamed with the guitar. He laughed, pressed his hand to his mouth in a futile attempt to smother the noises. Sam Winchester wept for his brother on the side of the road, again, and believed in miracles for the first time.
*~*
Sam unearthed his brother in stages. The speakers were Dean’s preferred form of communication but he was limited by what was on the radio or in the cassette player. An unfortunate handicap, but it merely provided more evidence that the previous night fleeing the Lakewood cemetery was, in fact, a miracle. Nevertheless, Sam bought a Ouija board at the first Walmart he came across.
Dean mocked him for the board, of course. Sat in the backseat with the cheap cardboard balanced on his knees, the planchet started moving almost immediately: Y-O-U-R-E-A-G-I-R-L --
And then Sam had to step away because it was Dean. It really was Dean. His brother. His big brother.
His dead big brother.
The dead part was important. He should care about that. He was raised to care. But he didn’t. Moreover, he couldn’t. It was Dean and he’d keep any part of Dean he could.
(Again, though, came that intrusive thought: I should call Dad. Again, he didn’t.)
“Dean. Are you... are you okay?” Sam asked after he got control of himself. The planchet didn’t move for a long time. Then:
I-M-D-E-A-D
“I know,” Sam whispered. “I know. I’m sorry.” He swallowed hard and the pointer inched once again toward G-I-R... “I mean, are you in pain?”
The planchet slid decisively towards the top right corner: NO.
“That’s... that’s good. That’s good, Dean.” Sam imagined the responding shrug. “Why... why can’t I see you?”
H-A-R-D
“Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.” Most ghosts didn’t manifest for years, even decades. In a way, Dean was ahead of the curve. “Dean, I know this is all kinds of messed up, but...” Jesus, he really couldn’t stop crying. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
The pointer didn’t move for a long time. Then: M-E-T-O-O
Glad he hadn’t gone wherever people go when they died? Glad he was in the Impala? Glad Sam was here?
Sam didn’t ask. The answer didn’t matter.
Sam talked to Dean now. Sometimes with the Oujia board, but more often just out loud when he drove. He’d done it before, of course. Quietly, like he was in a confessional. It was different now, expecting answers. And answers he got: he read them all: in the flicker of the headlights, the twisting dials of the radio, in windshield wipers coming to life. The conversations were a little one-sided at first, obviously. But to Sam, they were symposiums.
When Dean finally manifested it was more mirage than photo. Sam picked his way through a crappy McDonald’s salad, flipping through a local paper, looking for a hunt in the half-assed way he’d been doing most things since he realized Dean was still around. He mused idly about what might have been a werewolf, wondering aloud if he should check it. He hadn’t taken on anything more deadly than a chupacabra since the black dogs. Probably time to get back on the saddle.
He missed the aggravated growl of the engine, the fuzzing of the stereo. Didn’t notice anything until he saw his breath, curling like mist in front of his face.
“I said no!” Dean shouted.
Sam snapped his head towards the passenger seat, heart in his throat. Dean looked back, equally taken aback. Sam reached out unthinkingly.
“Dean--”
Dean vanished. Cut out like a TV with a bent antenna.
“Dean? Dean!”
Sam screamed and screamed for his brother but received no reply. Terror pulsed through him and yet--
Dean was real. He wasn’t crazy.
*~*
Unsurprisingly, Sam didn’t go after the potential werewolf. Like a seeing-eye illusion that vanished if you looked too hard at it, Sam hadn’t dared to focus too hard on the puzzle of his brother’s spirit, should he cause the miraculous resurrection to reverse. But with such direct contact made and then lost, he threw himself into the mystery head first.
In many ways, Dean wasn’t such an unusual case. Cold spots? Check. Electronic interference? Obviously (no need to break out the janky EMF reader, obviously cobbled together by his brother out of Radio Shack castoffs, to confirm that one). Violent death--
Well, he knew the answer to that too. The real questions were: 1), what had Dean latched himself onto (even as Sam fingered the bull-head pendant around his neck he knew the answer to that one too; the Impala, obviously, the Impala, though the necklace remained a potential culprit); and 2), what was preventing him from moving on?
(His heart thudded overly loud in his chest when he thought about that second question. Just the shock of a traumatic death was enough to keep many ghosts lingering, but he knew, somehow, that couldn’t be it. Unfinished business, the favorite phrase of movies and television the world over, echoed in his head. If Dean had nothing, what had he left behind?)
He could just ask Dean, of course. But Dean wasn’t a vengeful spirit (as far as he could tell), whose motivations were made obvious by the violence left in their wake. He might not even know himself. This, Sam told himself, was why he didn’t ask outright.
Getting Dean to manifest at will became a priority. His motivation was purely selfish--the radio and Ouija board quickly became not enough. That glimpse of his brother, cruelly brief, was not enough to restore the image of Dean he’d been desperately clinging to in his mind’s eye for months. He didn’t fear forgetting what Dean looked like. He was afraid he’d forget the way he smiled or scowled or sang along to his favorite songs. The details of a painting. The most Dean parts of Dean.
“When you appeared before,” Sam asked, “how did you feel?”
They were somewhere off I-90. Dean liked to stop in the little nowhere spots between existence, out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, it was like they were the only two people in the whole world who existed.
A-N-G-R-Y
Sam grimaced. Not surprising. Most ghosts weren’t exactly Casper. “Let’s not go that route.” The planchet performed a little wriggle Sam had come to associate with nodding. “Maybe just try focusing?” Sam suggested. The pointer immediately began to slide:
S-C-R-E-W-Y-O--
Sam lifted his hands in surrender. “I know, I know you’ve been trying. I meant something specific.”
W-H-A-T
“I dunno. Anything. Just pick one thing and think about that. And think about yourself interacting with that thing you would when you were--” Sam cut himself off, took a breath. “The way you would normally,” he finished firmly.
D-U-M-B
“Dude, just try it,” Sam groused. “I’ll do it too. We’ll look like idiots together.”
A-L-R-E-A-D-Y-L-O-O-K-L-I-K-E--
“Yeah, yeah, you’re hilarious,” Sam huffed. “Just... focus, okay?”
Sam closed his eyes. Focusing on Dean so directly seemed counterproductive and soul-crushing. Instead, he thought about the car; their initials carved in the back, the army man stuck in the ashtray. He felt the vinyl seats beneath his fingertips, rubbed them back and forth as if he could print the sensation onto his brain. The sounds the Impala made when it started up, the click when he fed a cassette in the tape deck. The thrum of the engine was a heartbeat. A metal home.
He’d failed in not thinking about it brother, naturally. The car was Dean.
Frustrated at botching his own exercise, Sam opened his eyes, readying to reground himself and try again.
Across from him sat his brother, mirroring Sam’s monk-like crossed legs, staring back at him. Sam hardly dared to breathe.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Dean parroted back. Dean hadn’t changed much since Sam last saw him in person. Hair still swept up in the front and those pretty-boy looks that had him knocking around more than one bystander dumb enough to comment on it. His eyes... God, Dean’s eyes. For a moment, it could be his real-life flesh-and-blood brother sitting across from him.
Then Dean flickered like an old TV set and Sam noticed the ugly scars from shoulder to hip, the chunk of flesh missing from his neck. Sam exhaled slow, breath misting in front of him, and clamped down hard on his urge to cry out. And yet, the strangest thing about it all was Dean wore an old leather jacket, one Sam knew for a fact was with their father probably a hundred miles away. Sam squeezed the pendant and Dean did the same; that little detail too had been duplicated.
“Copying my style,” Dean noted.
“Hey, I gave this to you,” Sam protested. “If you have any style at all, it’s thanks to me.”
“Oh, sure, you’re a real Ryan Gosling.”
They smirked at one another and it suddenly didn’t matter that Dean was transparent. They were the same as they had ever been: the distance of three years and death vanished like smoke. All was well.
*~*
Now that Dean could talk to him--really talk to him, not the one-sided parody of conversations with the Ouija board--he, of course, used every opportunity to voice his opinion. Loudly.
“You need to go back to school,” Dean insisted, not for the first time. Sam gritted his teeth and tried to ignore him, also not for the first time. “Are you listening to me? Am I fading? Am I invisible again? Sam--”
“I am starting to regret this,” Sam muttered. He absolutely did not regret this. “Dean, I told you, I’m not sure if I want to go back to school.”
“Why the hell not?” Dean demanded. “You think I want to see you end up like--” Out of the corner of Sam’s eye, Dean gestured at himself.
Sam grimaced. Dean had been on his tirade since Sam found what he thought might be a case. They’d been driving around pretty aimlessly for almost two weeks. On the road, things were normal, almost eerily so--far too laid back considering the person sitting in the passenger seat was dead. At night though, things inevitably tensed. Sam was still human and needed real rest. Dean always went quiet when he turned off into a motel parking lot, vanishing before Sam could get a word in. It wasn’t like Sam was a fan of leaving his brother alone either, but he couldn’t sleep in the car every night. He needed to shower, sleep in a real bed.
Funny thing, it felt more like he was convincing himself more than Dean.
“Maybe I just don’t want anyone else to end up like that,” Sam countered. “Isn’t that what you and Dad were always going on about? Saving people, hunting things? I thought me going to school was selfish.”
Sam was hitting below the belt and he knew it. A lot of crap was tossed around the night he left for Stanford, but that line was what kicked off the screaming match in the first place. Wanting to be normal wasn’t selfish. Wanting to be safe wasn’t selfish.
He glanced at Dean, flickering and quiet, and wondered what the hell he had been thinking.
“You haven’t called Dad,” Dean said and Sam flinched. “Why not?”
Sam swallowed and wrapped a hand around the pendant around his neck, squeezing. “Should I have?” he asked, throat tight.
“Answer the question, Sam.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Sam whispered. “You know why.”
Dean stared at him, his hand around his echo of a necklace, and flickered out of existence.
That knee-jerk panic hit him just for a moment, before Sam forced himself to relax. He sighed. Conversation over, looked like. “I’m not calling Dad,” he said to the air, just to be contrary. But when Sam finally headed out he turned west.
*~*
He didn’t go to Stanford straight away. Sam knew how to play dirty and he knew how to play the long game. He took a long, winding scenic route past Ripley roadside attractions and Cadillac graveyards. They detoured to the Grand Canyon and Dean quit his bitch-fit long enough to really take a look, leaning back on the hood of the car like some black-and-white greaser hero. Sam didn’t look too hard at his brother’s cellophane face. He didn’t want to know if ghosts could cry.
When they finally crawled into Palo Alto it was the tail-end of August. Dean had been dead six months.
For Sam, it was an eternity and a lifetime ago. He couldn’t imagine how it felt for Dean. If he even felt it at all.
Sam didn’t drive to campus proper, just cruised on by the palm trees and signs that pointed the way. He thought it would ache at least a little bit but it didn’t really bother him much at all. He thought of Jessica for the first time in weeks and wondered if she was waiting for him. It didn’t matter if she was, of course, but a clean break would have been kinder. Her unassuming, unbearable kindness would remain forever unreturned and that, if nothing else, made him feel a little bad.
Stanford looked and felt like an alien planet. Why Sam thought he could escape here was an elusive delusion he was no longer capable of grasping.
“Doesn’t look like a school,” Dean murmured and Sam jumped out of his skin. Even when they were on speaking terms Dean usually didn’t come out during daylight hours when they were in more populated areas. At a glance, a stranger wouldn’t notice anything was amiss; but staring harder, the breeze left Dean’s hair undisturbed, sunlight passing through him like water, and--
Sam swallowed and looked away. “It’s not supposed to,” he replied.
“It’s nice,” Dean said and Sam had no idea what that was supposed to mean. It couldn’t possibly be genuine admiration, but it didn’t quite sound like sarcastic condemnation either. It didn’t sound like anything at all, empty like small talk. Sam’s brother didn’t do small talk.
Well, he didn’t back when Sam knew him. Back when he was alive. Was this a ghost thing or a Sam being gone thing? He didn’t want to know.
“I had a girlfriend,” Sam said. “Well, I think I had a girlfriend.”
Dean smirked. “If you have to think about it you probably didn’t, dude.”
Sam ignored him. “Her name’s Jessica. Jess. She helped me pack, you know, when I left.”
Nothing to snark at there. Unlike the rest of him, the color of Dean’s eyes remained bright, unmuted by death. Sam felt them on him all the time, both comforting and probing, all the time. He did it casually, burrowing away at Sam’s core. Dean was always watching him. Jess, with her kind eyes, never once made him feel like that. It wasn’t a bad thing. But it wasn’t Dean.
“I don’t care about her, Dean.” The air briefly went cold-snap sharp. “She was great. Sweet, but didn’t take any shit. Smart, smarter than me. She reminded me of you.” Sam didn’t mean to say that last part.
“Sounds out of your league,” Dean murmured, thankfully ignoring Sam’s slip. What Dean’d say if he learned that he and Jess shared a birthday and that knowledge pushed Sam to take the dive and ask her out made him queasy.
“But I don’t care about her, Dean,” he continued. “I don’t care about any of it. Not grades or girlfriends. Being normal. Not even sticking it to Dad. It’s like... it wasn’t real. None of it feels real, now.” Sam gathered his courage and met Dean’s piercing eyes. Dean’s expression was like stone. “But you’re real, Dean. And I’m not letting go again. I won't--” He swallowed hard. “I won’t forget what’s important.”
Dean granted Sam the smallest reprieve, looking back out at the green lawn of the Oval where Sam idled. The sun was starting to drop out of the sky; the fading light would hide his brother’s insubstantial nature. But for Sam, it only made him look more unearthly.
“I never thought you forgot, Sam,” Dean said. He must have been lying but it felt good, hearing Dean say it. Sam never forgot his brother, not for a second. If he forgot anything it was what it was to be a brother; an essential piece of his identity completing the puzzle making up Sam Winchester. He was Dean Winchester’s younger brother. Without that fact, something would invariably be missing. He would not forget again.
“I can’t go back, Dean,” Sam said. “Even if I wanted to--”
“Don’t you? Want to?”
Sam shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I can’t go back to that. Back to... pretending. That’s all it was.”
The Impala went cold again. Sam wondered if it was from anger or something else.
“No more pretending, Sam?” Dean asked.
“No more pretending,” Sam confirmed. “I’m here now. I know it’s--” too late, “not a lot, but I’m here now. And I’m not going anywhere.”
The knobs on the console twisted and the radio spat out something unintelligible before dying.
“No more bullshit,” Dean said. Sam looked back and Dean was grabbing at his torn and bloody jeans, eyes raking over his face, searching for something. It was more honest than his brother had ever been in life. “If you’re in this, you’re in this.”
“Dean, I--”
“You have to promise me something.”
“Name it.”
“When I’m not... when I’m not myself anymore. You gotta do what needs to be done.” Sam opened his mouth but Dean barrelled over him, not allowing him to speak. “I mean it. I’ll stick around for a while because you’ve been outta the game too long and you need backup.” Sam’s indignation was small but apparently obvious, and Dean offered a weak grin. “The mess with the black dog and that spirit proved as much. And since you won’t call Dad, I’m all you got. But we both know this ain’t gonna last forever, Sam. That ain’t how it works.”
Sam thought about Jackson Ellis, enraged by OSHA workers, and dismissed it. His brother was no Jackson Ellis.
“If,” Sam countered. “If you go bad, I’ll do what I gotta do.”
“Sam, c’mon.”
“You c’mon, Dean! How many ghosts know that they’re ghosts, understand what’s happened to them?” Sam argued. “We know what to look for. It usually takes spirits years to manifest and you did it in months. You’re a unique case. We don’t know it’ll go bad.”
Dean’s mouth twisted. “This isn’t a game. I could hurt you.”
“Hurt me? You already saved my ass. Twice. That’s pretty far from hurting me.”
Dean went quiet. Sam didn’t think he had won, not by a longshot, but his brother was wavering. Literally, in fact--the edges of his form blurred and flickered as he sat in thought.
“The minute, Sammy,” Dean said finally, “the minute I try something, you break out the salt and kerosene. You hear me?”
“If you try something,” Sam corrected.
Dean wasn’t distracted. “Sam. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
It wasn’t quite a lie. Dean wouldn’t hurt him, Sam was sure of it. And if Dean started to slip up then Sam would be there to course correct, keep him on the straight and narrow. They’d be fine.
They’d have to be fine.
Sam wouldn’t return to Palo Alto again. As they hit the interstate, Dean, now out of sight but never out of mind, twisted the dial away from Sam’s Top 20 station, the knobs only settling once they found Bad Company. Sam smiled and knew he’d made a good trade.