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Sam decides fighting off Lucifer’s grasp on his mind feels a little like pushing through a sheet of cheap cellophane. He would like to record this – hell of a book he’d get to write, considering – except somewhere not very far off Lucifer is screaming and thrashing and he knows this isn’t going to last, can’t, not with all of the Light Bringer’s power tucked away inside his skull and fighting to escape. He doesn’t know how much time he has left.
He wants to cling to this stupid, fragile earth forever, drink in the grass and the trees and the sky and the people he loves, burn everything that makes this worth it into his brain and never, ever let go, and there isn’t enough time. There are a thousand things he needs to say and he can’t do this, he can’t do this. He has to do this.
He meets his brother’s eyes for the last time and thinks, this is for you. It was always for you. Be good.
And he falls.
He doesn’t remember landing, or even slowing down, but he’s on his back and still, feet dangling off into open air. Well, it’s Hell, he figures, so sequence and causality need not apply.
It doesn’t make him a coward, probably, to possum out just a while longer, considering where he is and what’s about to follow. There’s a gap in his head where Lucifer used to be, so most likely he’s walking around free with his brother, the two of them angry, so angry, their apocalypse thwarted, their asses stuck down here with him for the rest of ever. They’re waiting out of sight, he imagines, toying with him, letting him think he’ll be okay, so that when they do strap him down and tear him open it’s that much worse.
Fear burns up his chest and into his throat. This is his afterlife. This is his forever. There’d been a Sam-and-Dean shaped heaven waiting for him, just the two of them and their memories and all the time to say what he should’ve said years ago, but now that’s gone and this is it, this is what he chose, an eternity stuffed in a shoebox with two of the worst angels God had to offer. Hell. Centuries and centuries of Hell.
He’s shaking. Fuck. Fuck. This wasn’t supposed to – he was supposed to be stoic about this, like Dean, he was the hero – he’s walked into this on his own, willingly, and he wasn’t going to panic, he wasn’t, he –
Calm down, boy, his Dad’s voice growls into his ear. Use your senses. Figure out where you are. Don’t let ‘em disorient you.
Right. Yeah. He can do that. He can. He has to, just, pull himself out of his thoughts. Listen. Listen.
Above him, the steady, pendulous pass of an industrial fan. Farther away, metal hitting metal, hollow and raucous – God, knives? Batons? Some kind of torture implement, but shh. Hush. There’s more. Water gurgling through pipes. An appliance beeping and the ka-chunk of a microwave door closing. And, farthest away by far, faint and muffled but so familiar as to be unmistakable – Robert Plant singing in concert with the guitar line for Ramble On – ?
He opens his eyes. He is lying on a small cot in the middle of Bobby’s panic room.
He blinks. Reorients himself. Okay, so. Two options here.
The first: he’s being fucked with. Considering the way his previous encounters with angels have gone, it seems pretty plausible. The assholes love playing mind games and it stands to reason that they’d want to continue the tradition even when they’re buried in the bowels of Hell. They must be able to manipulate the cage, make it look the way they’d like, and of course they’d take advantage of that, screw with his head a little.
It’s strange, though, that they’d start with these sorts of tricks. They’d been spitting mad the last time he’d seen them, apocalypse averted, plans foiled, et cetera, so he’d think they’d want to tear into him as soon as they could, maybe ease into the manipulative stuff once they’ve gotten bored of force-feeding him his own organs, but instead he’s staring up at the intricate demon’s trap worked into the metal of the grate, itchy fabric of the cot irritating his bared arms.
Has he lost time? Have they wiped his memory? He tries to think back but it’s like grasping for an unfamiliar word, anabiosis, redivivus, thanatoid, there but only in feeling, in theory, edging back each time he gets at all close. There is his brother’s battered face, the fall, and then a slippery suggestion of memory that slides sideways whenever he reaches for it. He feels sick and sicker the more he tries, frustrated and nauseous, the impending trickling threat of a nosebleed high up in his soft palate.
It’s clear that someone has screwed with his brain. Someone has partitioned off a section, closed it to him, and he’s aimlessly, pointlessly angry, upset at the violation of his privacy and powerless to set it to rights. He could blame Lucifer, maybe, Michael, God, he doesn’t know. Or – and he hates to think it but he knows his family, knows his friends – it was someone closer to home.
That’s the second, and far more dangerous possibility: Dean’s gone and done something idiotic. It’d take a helluva deal to yank Sam out, but Dean’s a tenacious jerk, self-sacrificing and reckless, too, anything for his Sammy, and it wouldn’t be half surprising to learn his brother’d sold the sun and stars to get him back. Disappointing, sure, but not surprising – not that he’s in much of a spot to pass judgement, since he couldn’t deny he wouldn’t do the same, were their positions swapped. They’ve always been too wrapped-up in each other, too greedy, and the haunted obsession of their relationship follows him everywhere he goes, every choice he makes, heart thrumming Dean-Dean-Dean.
He sits up, gets his bare feet on the floor. The concrete’s shockingly cold, but it’s bracing, too, makes him feel more real, so he doesn’t mind much. The blood rush to his head leaves him dizzy, sore all over like he hasn’t been on his feet for days, a telling Sam-shaped impression entrenched into the cot. He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember. He thinks he’d done something in between (Dean’s wrecked face, falling, basement, a useless mantra) but he doesn’t. Remember.
He stands and the ache in his joints is tremendous. He’s wearing a t-shirt he doesn’t think he’s seen before, certainly not one of his, and a pair of too-short sweatpants he recognizes immediately as Dean’s thanks to the weird kinda-cat-shaped blue stain on the thigh that he’s teased his brother about for probably near a thousand times. He kinda doubts the archangels would go so far as to familiarize themselves with and then replicate Dean’s wardrobe, so – option B, then. Dean’s found a spell or a trinket or a benevolent creature and it’s catapulted him right into the slipstream of whatever mess has been left in its wake (a renewed apocalypse, Dean’s death throes, a sulfuric, boiling ocean). They always must give to take.
It would be too much to hope that he’s out of the Cage with nothing to show for it. Winchester luck dictates that there’s no way. His memories have something to do with it, he knows, their suspicious seeping unreachability, but that couldn’t be the full price. There’s got to be more. There’s always more.
He’s struck with the need to see what he looks like. He knows already it’s his body that he’s operating, recognizes the reach of his arms and feet, the sinewy, scarred skin across his knuckles, but it gives him no supposition of the passage of time. There’s a cracked, filmy mirror on the desk in the corner, ostensibly for shaving, and he gets it, holds it up to his face.
His hair’s a little shorter than before and badly in need of a wash. He’s got a few days’ worth of prickly, bristly stubble lining his jaw and chin, and – wow, those are some sharp sideburns he’s sporting, way more dramatic than the ones he’d had – an hour ago? A year ago? In any case, he kinda likes them.
Maybe his cheekbones are sharper, the furrows in his mouth more defined. Maybe he’s lost weight. He can’t tell. His face had lost its boyish roundness a long time ago and now his looks are plateauing, the change too gradual now to place on a timeline. He isn’t going to get any answers out of himself.
The door’s unlocked. He goes upstairs.
The house looks like it always has, dusty and unkempt, books stacked waist-high on the floor and in the seats of chairs. Someone’s fumbling around in the kitchen and the smell of hot chili hits him hard in the gut, nearly makes him stumble. He’s starving, he realizes, shaky and desperate like he hasn’t eaten for days, familiar hunger-rush clouding up his head and tightening his stomach. He doesn’t even like chili that much and he’s salivating anyways.
He follows the spicy, meaty smell into the kitchen, nose turned up like a dog’s, and there, at the oven, his back turned away from the door, is Bobby Singer.
Sam must make a noise, a little gasp or sharp oh, because Bobby’s whirling around with his gun drawn before Sam’s got time to process what he’s seeing.
“Bobby,” he says. He’s tearing up a little. The last time he’d seen Bobby it’d been at Stull, and he’d been crumpled on the ground like a doll, empty-eyed and still, and now – he’s standing in the kitchen, hands steady as they’ve ever been, yellowed grease stains on his linty sleeves and grimy old hat jammed down on his head where it belongs.
“Sam,” he allows, lowering the gun but still keeping it in hand. “Looks like you’re up.”
“I thought – you were dead,” Sam says, staggering forward, unperturbed by the gun. “Your neck – .”
“Didn’t take,” Bobby says, eying him dubiously. “Turns out we got someone watching over us after all.”
“Did He – was there – ?”
“Naw, just us. Our Father of the year didn’t make a guest appearance – ‘least, not in person. But Cas says it was his Daddy, and I’m inclined to believe him.”
“Cas is okay, too?” Sam says, and the starburst of relief in his chest takes him by surprise. He hadn’t thought he’d been that concerned about their rebellious, dorky angel, but he is. He’s glad. “That’s – that’s incredible, it’s – .”
In a distant, suspicious part of his mind, he’s thinking, too good to be true. But there isn’t any proof for it, not yet, and maybe. Maybe for once in his cursed goddamn life, things had gone well for a change.
“Yup,” is all Bobby says. He’s scowling beardily, hasn’t stopped since he’d turned around, and Sam knows Bobby isn’t the touchy-feely type, but this is – it’s weird. Not Hell-weird, he thinks, but family-weird, uncomfortable-weird, like he’d broken something valuable, or ruined a set of notes, and Bobby’s shutting him out because of it. He doesn’t like it.
“Bobby, it’s – real good to see you, man,” he tries, edging closer.
Bobby’s fingers flex around his gun. “Look,” he begins, and Sam watches him closely, ready for some answers, some closure, where the hell he is, why the hell he is, what’s up with the soapy, slippery bundle of memories kicking around in his head that he can’t seem to pin down, but then the screen door bangs open – music leaks in through the moment before it slams shut, Robert Plant swelling a little louder – and his brother stomps in on heavy boots.
He’s wiping his arm across his sweat-streaked, dirty face, yelling something about goddamned Corvette C3s, waste of a fucking V8, so he doesn’t realize Sam’s even there until he’s halfway out of his shoes.
He gives a full-bodied, defensive jerk, eyes huge and frightened, and then he’s Dean again, cocky smirk and casual swagger, fear melted away so quick Sam thinks he might have imagined it. He’s browner than Sam remembers him being, freckles dark across the bridge of his nose, and he seems hale, well-rested, his face bearing none of the evidence Sam’d pounded into it at Stull. His image of Dean on his knees – his upturned, bloodied cheeks, eye swollen shut and already purpling, hands raised in supplication – is warring with the Dean he’s seeing now, and the conflicting images are making him dizzy, the beaten face he’d tried to entrench into his head before he left and the tanned whole skin he’s seeing now. Bobby’s saying something, a warning, maybe, but all Sam can see is Dean, the oil smudged on his jaw, the pulse of his Adam’s apple above his ragged collar. He’s there.
“Sammy?” he says, and his voice is dust. He clears his throat, tries again. “You – how y’feeling?”
“Sore?” Sam says, his momentary joy overridden by panic. “Hungry? Dean, the hell’s – what’s going on? What did you do?”
He takes a step forward and Dean edges back in response, crosses his arms over his midsection.
“Woah, hey, I didn’t do anything,” he says, nervous laughter bubbling out of his throat. “It was all, it wasn’t – . How much do you remember?”
“Opening The Cage. Jumping in with Lucifer,” Sam says. “And then waking up in the panic room.”
“That it? Nothing in between?”
“Not a damn thing.”
Dean seems to deflate several inches in relief. “Good,” he says emphatically. His arms fall limp and casual at his sides.
“Good?”
“Well, yeah. You shouldn’t have to remember that shit. It’s no cakewalk, huh?”
Bobby snorts. “Not like we’d know,” he grumbles.
Dean glares at him. “Don’t need the audience, thanks. How ‘bout you go play peanut gallery somewhere else?”
“Yeah, all right, I’ll get outta your hair,” Bobby grumps. He flicks the stove off and drags the enormous chili pot onto the counter, where it sizzles and smokes. “Not like I ain’t happy to see him, too.”
“What’s he mean, he doesn’t know?” Sam says, as soon as he’s gone. “Why am I here? How’d this – what happened, Dean?”
“Slow it down, dude. Let me getcha a sandwich or something first, okay? Sit.”
“Dean, don’t try to – ”
“I ain’t tryin’ nothing, Sammy. You keep eying that chili like you’re gonna dunk your whole head in it, and I don’t think Bobby’d appreciate that much, so sit your ass down and let me feed you.”
The bribe of a meal is enough to keep him quiet while Dean goes rummaging through Bobby’s refrigerator, though he ignores his brother’s mother henning and chooses to stay on his feet. He feels like he’s been sitting still for days, and it’s made him restless. He wants to go running, wants to wrestle Dean to the ground. He wants to move.
“Hey, here we go,” Dean says, extracting a tupperware of something greenish and sludgy from the fridge. “Casserole! Bacon ‘n broccoli, you’ll love it.”
“Are those – is that a tater tot?”
“Well, yeah, it’s a casserole,” Dean says. “Duh. You want me to warm it up, or – ?”
“Nah, give it here, I’ll – .”
It’s clammy and salty and the best thing Sam has ever tasted in his life. “Ungh,” he says.
“Told you,” Dean says, settling against the counter. “Not so picky now, are you. Bet those potatoes aren’t even free-range.”
“Not my fault, ‘m starving,” Sam mumbles, cradling the plastic container in the crook of his arm. “How long – ?”
“You’ve been out a coupla days,” Dean says, picking at his jeans. “Little longer and we’da put you on a drip. You got good timing, man.”
The space between them is filled with everything unsaid, things Sam wants to know – needs to know, if they’re going to get through whatever disaster’s been pulled down on them.
“Dean,” he says, through a cheekful of tater tot. “Whatever you did to get me up here – ”
“I didn’t – I told you, it wasn’t me,” Dean says, voice gone growly-frustrated for a moment and then schooled back to gentle, persuasive, please, Sammy. Sam’s struck again with the image of his brother on his knees, begging for the world. “Trust me on this one, all right? I looked into some shit – some real shady shit – but I couldn’t find anything. Promise.”
They’ve had this conversation before, Sam realizes, except at the time they’d been at opposite ends, Dean furious at the imaginary risk of his resurrection, Sam insisting his innocence. I tried, okay! I tried.
“Yeah, okay,” he says. “I believe you, I – . Sorry.”
Dean shrugs. “Be weird if you weren’t suspicious, dude. S’cool.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. He fishes out a slimy piece of broccoli with his fingers and pops it into his mouth. “D’you know who did do it?”
“Uh. Cas, actually,” Dean says.
Sam snorts. Of course it was. Again. “How’d he swing that?”
“Guess God juiced him up,” Dean says, shrugging. “Didn’t even break a sweat, just grabbed your ass and airlifted you out. Makes you wonder the fuck took ‘em so long the first time, huh?”
“Yeah, hey,” Sam says, jumping on the observation. “Don’t you think it’s all, like – real convenient? Too easy, even, ‘specially with my memory gone. We don’t get passes like this, not for free.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Dean says bitterly.
Sam squints at him. “What’s that mean?”
“Nothing, Sam, I’m – it hasn’t all been easy going, okay? Shit happens.”
He’s trying to be patient, but God damn. “Like what kinda shit, Dean – ”
“Cas tried to get you out ‘bout five months ago, okay? And he kinda… fucked up.”
“He dragged something else out, didn’t he,” Sam breathes, mind awash with nightmare scenarios. “Fuck, was it – did he grab Lucifer, instead? Is he walking around again – ?”
“No! No, not Lucifer, nothing like that. He, uh – he did get you, that first time. Sorta.”
“Sorta?”
“It’s – uh, how do I – . He brought back your body, but not, not your soul.”
“My body, and not my – ? So he grabbed, what, an empty vessel? I thought you said – ”
“It wasn’t empty! It wasn’t, you were just. Soulless. Walking and talking and shit, just minus all those squishy girly feelings you got.”
Sam snorts. “You must’ve appreciated that, huh? No chick-flick moments?”
Dean’s mouth tightens. “Yeah. Right. It was awesome.”
“So up until now, I was – soulless? What was I doing?”
“Well – the usual, I guess,” Dean says, rubbing at his neck. “You hunted, mostly, for – a coupla months or so? Met up with some other guys and killed a bunch of minor shit, I dunno exactly what.”
“Other guys? Like – other hunters?” He tries to wrack his brain for their faces, maybe a name or two, but he’s coming up blank.
“No, Sam, Girl Scouts.”
Sam flicks greasy, congealed cheese at him. “I was gonna ask why I wasn’t hunting with you, but obviously it’s ‘cuz soulless me wasn’t willing to put up with your bullshit. Smart guy.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t much for sentiment,” Dean says, gaze wandering down to the yellowed linoleum. He looks, suddenly, very weary, and Sam’s heart gives a little pained jump. He’s been selfish, caught up in everything that’s happened to him and not considering whatever his brother’s gone through, which obviously hasn’t been much fun either.
“How’re you?” he asks, and Dean looks up at him, startled.
“Uh,” he says, and laughs. “Guess I wasn’t expecting that. Um – fine? Good as ever, you know? Ain’t nothing can keep me down.”
There really isn’t, Sam thinks, and smiles.
Night falls and Bobby sets up a crackling fire in the hearth, something he hasn’t done since they were kids, scared-shitless waiting for their Daddy to come home from a hunt. Sam suspects he thinks they need the comfort, and it’s not such a bad idea. The sense of wrong hasn’t diminished since the afternoon; rather, it’s hovered conspicuously through his reorientation and settling in, and he can’t cite any exact moment that’s made him feel so uncomfortably out-of-sorts but it’s there, silent and overbearing, Bobby’s pinched glances, and Dean’s incomplete smiles, the silent conversations they’re having when he turns his back. Maybe they aren’t sure, yet, that it’s really him, and if that’s the case then he’s determined to prove his identity somehow, even if it takes reenacting childhood rituals he still hasn’t quite outgrown.
Dean takes one end of Bobby’s giant desk and Sam the other, and together they rearrange the room so that there’s a cleared space in front of the squat fireplace. They drag the sofa forward so they can lean against it on the floor, and they sit side-by-side with it cozied up to their backs, quiet in their separate spheres of space, Bobby reclining behind them in his armchair with a bottle of Old Crow.
Dean’s beautiful and cat-lazy in the firelight, eyes lidded low and lips parted to taste the heat, and Sam’s tempted to reach over and take his hand, pet over his knuckles like he could when they were young. He hasn’t touched his brother like that in a long time, and he doesn’t think Dean’d be open to it, but he craves the reassurance of the gesture, wants to link the two of them together and reclaim whatever closeness they’d lost between Sam’s departure to Stanford and now. More than anything he’d like to climb into Dean’s lap like a toddler, snuggle his heavy head into his chest, but he’s definitely too big for that.
“Tell me about him,” Sam says. “Soulless me, I mean.”
“Uh. Not much to tell,” Dean says, staring into the fluttering flames. “Mostly, he was a dick. And – ! He didn’t sleep, like, at all. Fuckin’ creepy.”
“Weird,” Sam says.
“No kidding. ‘Course, he spent the night researching, so. We got a lotta shit done, I guess.”
“Oh,” Sam says, and marvels at the tendrils of senseless jealousy branching through his sternum. He knows it’s pointless to ask, a meaningless provocation, but he does it anyway. “You miss him?”
Dean flinches, full-bodied and sudden. “No,” he says adamantly. “Absolutely – no, Sam, never. I’m friggin’ thrilled to have you back, okay?”
Wouldn’t know it, Sam thinks, and jerks, surprised at himself. Dean’s been nothing but caring to him since he’s woken up, feeding him and looking after him and all those other Dean-things he’s always done. He shakes the thought out of his head.
“I know,” he says. “Me too.”
They watch the fire eat itself down to embers, and then Dean stretches until his back pops, announces he’s going to go pass out in the guest room.
“Yeah, I’ll – me too,” Sam says. For some reason he finds himself readied for a rebuke, but Dean smiles and shrugs his assent. Of course they’ll share the guest room, they’ve done it for years. He doesn’t know why he’d think that’d change now.
He follows his brother upstairs and they both tuck themselves into their respective beds. The room’s small enough that there’s no more than a foot of space between the frames, but he doesn’t think it’s ever bothered him, doesn’t think he’s been anything but content to share space with Dean. If anything he’d like to be closer, like to curl around Dean and reassure him, this is me, we’re going to be all right. We’re going to be all right.
He falls asleep to Dean’s steady, even breathing, relaxed and as whole as he’s felt for years.
He’s allowed some moments of precious, unmoving dark, and then he’s on top of someone, his vision tunneled down to their broad upper back, the helpless, panicked rise of their shoulder blades. Their coupling’s claustrophobic, too closed in, and yet he’s greedy for the body beneath him, never too close, never too much, even as its skin heats past the point of comfort and they both begin to blister. He bites down and takes a mouthful of coppery fire, gathers hot coals underneath his nails. They burn together.
He wakes up drenched in sweat and achingly hard, his pillow knocked off the bed and on the floor, a quilt tangled around his legs. The other bed’s empty and re-made with military precision, save for the pair of sweats draped unceremoniously over the slatted footboard.
Fuck. Fuck. Dean must’ve heard him, must’ve known. He hasn’t had a dream like this for years, not since he was – fourteen? Fifteen? Dean’d teased him ruthlessly then, and he’s sure he’ll do the same now. Goddammit.
He takes care of himself in the shower, tries to think about tits and soft thighs and nothing at all but he keeps coming back to Dean, supine in front of the fire, his lips bowed open with unconscious sensuality. Dean, leaning over into his lap and tucking down Sam’s sweatpants, bowing his head gracefully – Sam’s hand at the back of his skull to guide his eager mouth, the pull of his throat, yeah, God, Dean, so good – so good for me, only for me, fuck. Dean keeping Sam’s come on his tongue, opening his mouth enough to let it run out over his plump lips, his chin, show him how much he loves it – fuck –
Sam enters the kitchen sated but more than a little ashamed. Dean and Bobby are eating cereal at the table, already dressed and washed. They both look up as he enters.
“Took your time, didn’tcha?” Bobby says, scowling.
Against his better judgement Sam catches Dean’s eye over the table and steels himself for his salacious, crude grin, hell yeah he did, huh, Sammy, except Dean just passes him a tired smile, doesn’t say a word. Sam’s – disappointed? Huh.
“Um. Sorry,” he offers, grabbing a clean bowl from the counter. He’s got a choice between the toxic-colored marshmallowy chemical spill Dean’s shoveling down, or Bobby’s off-brand Wheaties, the kind that come in a bag instead of a box. He’d prefer Raisin Bran, really, something fibrous and not sugar-glazed, but it looks like Dean’s done the shopping this time around, so he resignedly goes for the Wheaties. He wonders offhandedly what his diet’d been like while he was soulless. Probably, like, veal. And lobster, and live octopi, like in Oldboy. And balut.
“Not like there’s much t’be hurrying for,” Bobby says. “Been pretty dead out there.”
“Oh – really?” Sam says. “There’s nothing?” He tries to keep the disappointment out of his voice and does, he thinks, an acceptable job at it.
“Well,” Bobby says, shifty-eyed. “There’s been the usual – ghosts an’ werewolves an’ what have you. But nothing big.”
“Hey, that’s something, right?” Sam says, sitting up straight. He wants to sink his knife into something evil, shoot it dead. He wants to tear it apart. “There anything close by?”
“Don’t think so. I’ll check, but like I said – been quiet.”
“How about farther afield, then? We’re good to travel, you know that – ”
“Awful eager, ain’tcha,” Bobby says. “I’ll check.”
“Um. Okay,” Sam says. “Let me know, I guess.”
“I’ll do that. As a matterafact – if you’re so desperate to make yourself useful, why don’tchya help me with a coupla translations? Preston needs ‘em for a hunt he’s got in Alaska.”
“Alaska?” Sam and Dean say in stereo.
“Ain’t no place a monster won’t call home,” Bobby says, leaning back in his chair. “Long as there’s people, there’s evil.”
“There are people in Alaska?” Dean says quietly. Bobby ignores him.
"How 'bout I go get those books that need translating?" he says. "Sam, you come help, since you're not busy clearing out my cabinets."
"'M hungry," Dean argues, through a mouthful of garishly colored slop.
"You're disgusting," Sam informs him, and follows Bobby into the main room. "You could've just said you wanted to talk alone," he says, once they're out of earshot.
“Don’t want Dean knowing,” Bobby says. “At all, you hear?”
“Um. Yeah, I – sure,” Sam says.
“Good. ‘Cuz I’m only gonna say this once: you gotta quit.”
“Uh. Quit what?” Sam says, and a horrible thought occurs to him. That Bobby could trust him so little, after everything – . “I haven’t – Jesus, Bobby, I’m not – using again, I haven’t even left the house – ”
“I ain’t talking about the demon blood, idjit,” Bobby growls, and Sam flinches back. “I’m talking ‘bout your harping on about jumping into a case. Now, I know you’re feelin’ cooped up, and I don’t blame you. But I ain’t letting you and your fool brother go out hunting in this shape.”
“Wait – what?” Sam says, momentarily blindsided. “I could handle a case no problem. I’m fine, seriously. I haven’t felt this good in forever.”
Bobby sighs. “That’s good to hear, son, but it ain’t about you. Dean’s been – Dean needs some time.”
“You think?” Sam says, and frowns. Dean hadn’t said anything about an injury. Of course he hadn’t said anything about an injury, the stubborn asshole. He feels his familiar, God-what’s-Dean-done-now worry rear its head. “He looks okay, but – . S’not like he’d complain.”
“Yeah. The kid ain’t gonna ask for help when he’s hurting. Which is why we gotta take care of him, understand? Even when he says he don’t need rest.”
Sam bristles. “You don’t have to tell me that. I just wish – .” Wish I’d figured it out sooner, he thinks. He’s disappointed in himself, and Bobby’s disappointed in him, too, judging by the stern, sad look he’s giving.
“I know,” he says, and claps Sam on the shoulder, a solid, heavy, don’t-fuck-with-me strike. “Give him a few days, all right? Let him rest. Now, c’mon. I really do need you to get this done.”
He turns to his desk and rifles around, then heaves an enormous water-stained tome at Sam’s chest.
“Oof,” Sam says. “That Latin?”
“Close. Greek. You can do Greek, right?”
“Uh,” Sam says. “Probably.”
“And – aha! – here’s the other one,” Bobby says, and another, equally huge book goes sailing into Sam’s midsection. “That’s Hebrew, in case you couldn’t tell. Pick your poison.”
“All right. I’ll just – .” He slinks out of the room, Bobby at his heels.
Back in the kitchen he unloads the Greek book in front of Dean, narrowly missing his refilled cereal bowl. The table bounces and resettles under its strain.
Dean looks at it in disgust. “Aw, hell, really? Do we gotta translate all that?”
"Unless you want my friend to get ate, yeah," Bobby says.
"This sucks. You suck," Dean says, shoving his bowl out of the way. "Someone get me a goddamn pencil."
They eat lunch on the patio, fat rye sandwiches stuffed with roast beef and liberally mustarded. It’s dry and clear outside, not a cloud to be seen, sun hot and high and well-fed. The junkyard smells overwhelmingly like pressed pennies, heat and scent shimmering up from the exposed meat of the shelled car frames, ground baked to cracking. They’ve spent winters at Bobby’s but Sam’ll always remember it like this, an unchangeable summer landscape, its junk familiar as an old friend – there, where he’d sat and read while Bobby and his Dad had a raging argument in the house; there, where he and his brother’d been playing tag, and Dean’d tripped and landed arm-first on a rusty nail – and he appreciates the quaint, solid consistency of it all, the odd wonted nature of the place.
But familiar as it is, Bobby’s house has never been home. Nor, even, was his room at Stanford, its cheap pine furniture and thin mattress, the bald carpet in the hallway and the three flights of stairs to his floor. He’d never stayed in one place for so long, but he’d never settled. His home has always been a who, not a where.
“Fuckin’ hot,” Dean says, licking mustard off the tips of his fingers. Sam looks away.
“S’not so bad,” he says. In his mind’s eye, someone is burning. His muscles twitch under the skin. “Hey,” he says, spontaneously. “You wanna spar?”
Dean wipes his fingers on his jeans. “Too. Fuckin’ hot,” he says.
“Oh, c’mon – it’s barely eighty, man. You’re getting old. You’re an old, old, old man – ”
“Okay, fuck’s sake, I’ll spar,” Dean grumbles.
Sam grins and bounces to his feet. He feels breathless and alive and clean.
“Yeah, all right,” Dean says, pulling himself up. “I can do this.”
Bobby’d said to go easy, but he’s kept a close eye on his brother the entire morning and he hasn’t been limping, hasn’t been favoring one side over the other. The fight’s mostly diagnostic, Sam tells himself. An opportunity to see where he’s too slow or too clumsy, which places he’s guarding more carefully than others.
Sam takes it easy at first, for his brother’s sake, throwing a handful of cautious punches, trying some of the holds they’ve been practicing since they were able to walk straight. But, as they circle each other, dart in and away and back again, it becomes clear that Dean’s more than capable of holding his own. He’s as quick and steady as ever and Sam decides, fuck it, no need to be gentle. He throws himself forward.
He knows he’s been out of commission for a while but his body feels honed despite it, well-trained and quick, and fighting Dean feels like coming home, old dust kicked up at their boots, mud under their nails and tongues. Sam’s giddy with the easy synchronicity, light on his feet and laughing, and Dean’s mirroring him every step of the way, proud smile and glittering eyes, healthy sweat dripping down his neck. It’s been too long since they’ve sparred for fun, too long since they’ve moved together like this outside a battlefield, and it’s joyous. They’ll always have this, each other, Sam is sure.
The fight’s good as over once he gets Dean on the ground. Dean’s always had him for speed, for flexibility, but Sam’s got the upper hand when it comes down to straight wrestling, all that exceptional reach he’s got as binding as a net, so when Dean goes down, he’s down. Sam flips him easy, plants a knee in his lower back and bars one leg across his thighs. His hands go to Dean’s wrists and pin them against the ground.
Usually this is the point where Dean falls into relaxed defeat, swears at him with pretend viciousness – but instead he’s flailing like a child, no finesse, just trapped, burrowing panic. Sam doesn’t realize at first, thinks they’re still playing, and he grinds his knee down hard, crushes his brother’s soft belly into the gravel.
“Surrender, jerk,” he crows, triumphant, and underneath him Dean twists his neck into a painful curl, until Sam can see the white in his cheeks, the side of one glassy, lost eye.
“Off!” he’s saying, in a choppy, breathless voice. “Get off – you have to – please, Sammy, please, I, I don’t – ”
“Oh, shit,” Sam says, and he springs away, gravel tearing at his palms.
Dean’s curled up small on his side, gasping like he’s trying to breathe through smoke, and Sam thinks, Jesus, he’s dying, doesn’t know if he should back off or come in close, if it’ll get exacerbated by contact or if he needs – what, the Heimlich? A chiropractor? He doesn’t know and that’s the terrifying thing about it, that his brother’s hurt and he can’t fix it. He doesn’t know how to fix it.
He hovers, uncertain. “Dean, are you – ” he says. “You okay? What did I – ? Did I hurt you?”
Dean’s begun to shake, violently, and it’s only when he’s flopped over onto his back that Sam can tell he isn’t sobbing, not seizing, but laughing.
“Well, fuck me,” he says, rubbing his hands down his face. “That’s real pathetic.”
Some of his color’s come back, though he’s still unnaturally pale about the cheeks. He’s got a manic, untamed look to him, gelled hair full of dirt and rock, his fingers clawed into his own cheeks.
“Hey!” Sam says, skidding over on his knees. He reaches out to touch and thinks better of it at the last second, holds his hands anxious over his brother’s body. “You okay, man? What happened?”
“I’m fine. Seriously, just let me – I’m good,” Dean says, and pushes himself to his feet, panting. He tries to force a grin and it falls painfully flat. “’S my back,” he says. “Got fucked up on a hunt, and it’s been, y’know. Sore.”
“Jesus,” Sam says. “Sorry, I didn’t – .”
“Not your fault,” Dean says easily. Below the harsh jag of his cheekbone, right where his nails had been digging in, he’s got four round pinkish crescent marks impressed into his skin. “Now, if it’s all right with you, I’m gonna go shower. I got dirt up my ass crack.”
“Ugh – gross, Dean, c’mon,” Sam says.
Dean laughs. It almost sounds natural. Over his shoulder, Sam sees Bobby at the window. Told you so, his face is saying. Told you.
It takes him a long time to fall asleep. The clock turns over to three, and then four, and he’s still restless in his bed, pillow grown warm beneath him. He shoves his face into it and sinks into the dark.
In his dreams, first, he burns.
The transition is abrupt – one moment he’s watching his skin bubble, and the next he’s fucking into a stiff, resistant body, heat still present and scalding but now he’s controlling it, now he’s leading it. Every time he touches the body beneath him his hands burn the skin like a brand, its back mottled with weeping finger-shaped abscesses from neck to tailbone, and it’s whimpering and pleading in a broken male voice but he’s still screwing into it, still petting its flanks as if he’s trying to be a kind, giving lover.
“Good,” he’s saying, “good,” and the body’s crying now, intense, wracking sobs that shake the both of them, and Sam closes his teeth around skin and bites until he tastes pressed pennies. He scratches lines of fire down its firm biceps and the flesh sloughs away like lemon peelings, sticks under his nails, and he thinks, mark every inch of you.
--
He wakes up overheated and panting, his face wet with tears. He claws the quilt off from where it’d wrapped around his chest and tosses it over the side of the bed.
Across the room, Dean stirs testily. “Dude,” he says, and then, “shit, Sammy – you okay?”
“I,” Sam says, and that’s all he can manage before the afterimages of melted, burning bodies overwhelm him, snuff out his voice. He doesn’t dare close his eyes.
There are footsteps, and then the side of the bed dips down next to his head with weight. He glances sideways at his brother and away, suddenly, inexplicably guilty.
“Think I’m remembering, Dean,” he chokes. “I think – . I think it’s coming back – .”
Dean lets out an explosive puff of air. He’s radiating anxiety. “Oh, fuck. Fuck, okay, it’s – . We can fix this. We can stop it.”
“It’s not bad,” Sam lies. He doesn’t want to worry his brother. “Just glimpses, I. It’s. I can’t even remember, anymore.”
“Okay,” Dean says. “That’s good, it’s – . Good.”
He comes off as unsure, still uneasy, but he doesn’t ask for specifics, and Sam’s thankful for it. The details of the dream are raw and sinewy in his mind and if that was his Hell – no wonder Dean hadn’t wanted to talk much after his four-month tour. His dream the night before, then, had that been Hell too? How much is he going to see? How much can he manage before he loses his mind?
He turns and burrows his face into the side of his brother’s firm thigh, breathes in sweet, cottony detergent, the heavy, muddied smell of deep sleep. Dean flinches back and then, embarrassed, shuffles in closer.
“Aw, hell, Sammy,” he says. “C’mere. I gotcha.”
Sam falls asleep with Dean’s hand petting through his hair. He doesn’t dream.
The next morning he wakes cramped and restless and alone, Dean already gone downstairs to chat with Bobby. He skips breakfast and goes for a run on his own, three miles out and three miles back, and at the end he’s glowingly sore and tired, his dreams of Hell overwritten with hard, jarring footsteps on packed earth, sweat pooled salty on his upper lip, the burn of the sun on his neck and arms. He limps back into the junkyard dusty and parched and genuinely, vibrantly happy.
His good mood lasts through lunch, after hours of translation and cross-referencing and double-checking. Not so long ago he’d been able to sit and read for days, study texts for nights on end, but now he’s just as fidgety and bored as Dean. He can’t focus on the text, misreading and skipping over and generally confusing everything. By four he's thoroughly frustrated and the buzz from the run’s long ago been lost.
Spending time with Dean seems to make the restlessness better, if only a little. It makes Bobby’s house less constricting, at least, gives him room enough to breathe. It isn’t enough, though, not when he’s bursting at the seams to drag Dean out by the collar and take to the road, leave Bobby and his silent judgement behind. He’s not sure when exactly the house transitioned from a home into a shoebox but he can’t spend another goddamned minute in it. He slams his book shut and stands.
“You want anything from town?” he says.
Dean squints up at him. “What? Hell no, you’re not gonna ditch me. I’m coming with.”
They fuck around at the general store, buy a fat bag of penny candy and eat it all on the steps outside the library. Sam wonders how Jodi Mills is doing, and Dean tells him that she’s still one tough motherfucker. Dean gets his sticky fingers all over the glass displays at the library and Sam makes him wash up in the restroom.
It is almost normal, almost good, until they’re driving back and it is not. Sam has to go into the house and eat at the table with Bobby. He has to get into that small, creaky bed and sleep. He can’t he can’t he has to. He does.
He’s back in the red dark again, pumping slick skin and pressure so tight as to hurt. His hair’s falling lank into his eyes and huh, Sam thinks, that’s annoying, but whatever force is driving him forward won’t let him adjust it, keeps him moving like a machine. The man under him – and yes, it’s a man, his brain’s finally able to process – has finally gone pain-pliant and submissive and yet Sam’s still holding him down like he hasn’t stopped fighting, like he’s got anything left in his body but weary horror. They are both elsewhere, Sam realizes, their minds detached and clinical, and he hears everything and smells everything and feels it, too, but he is hovering above.
He thinks he’s speaking, but he can’t understand what he’s saying, like it’s coming out backwards and underwater, bubbles of aborted thought-action spilling from his lips. He doesn’t mind. There isn’t much worth saying. He shoves the man upward, digs his nails into his flesh. Bind. Weld. Own.
He feels the fire first at his heels, nipping and teasing and then it grows, eats up his calves and thighs and lower back, singes the hair on his arms. He is losing control. He can no longer move. The fire flares hotter until his entire body’s a huge white spot of agony, flayed nerves and leaking bone, cracked fingernails.
His partner remains untouched, skin pristine and human save for the four half-circles Sam pressed into his back. He turns his head to watch, slow and inexorable, neck folding and shifting in a long, deliberate drive. The side of an eye peeps over his shoulder and Sam
wakes up gasping and sweating.
His heart’s beating and beating and he surges upright, fingers clenched bloodless, chest heaving. He has to do something. It’s too small – everything’s too small, the hallway, the bed, his own goddamn skin, and he can’t – breathe, he’s struggling like an asthmatic, it’s the dust and the low ceiling and Bobby in his bedroom downstairs, and it’s all closing in on him too fast. The house is a venus flytrap and it’s closing over his head, jaw easing shut, thorns like teeth –
He’s out of bed and pulling on his shirt before he’s even finished the thought. He laces on his running shoes haphazardly and he’s halfway out the door when Dean snorts loud behind him and rolls onto his front, and his bed wheezes a pained creak.
A note. He’ll do that, first, leave a note, and then he can go. Soon. It’ll be fast. Paper – there’s an envelope, good enough, and he scribbles GONE RUNNING DON’T WORRY on its front in large letters and, after some deliberation, tapes it to the bathroom mirror. And then he is gone into the night.
Seven miles and his throat tastes like dry ice and he still hasn’t outran his need to get away. His skin feels too tight and he’s itchy all over, thin muscles in his calves stretched to breaking, and he still pushes himself onward, one more mile – one more mile.
He throws up outside of the gate into the junkyard, still maddeningly jittery. His brain’s telling him to go, go, fight, more, and he knows he’s reached his limit and he’s only going to hurt himself if he does but the idea of going back into the house is nauseating. Dean, he tells himself, gotta let him know you’re okay, and he wipes the bitter mess out of the corners of his mouth and drags himself through the maze of cars and up onto the porch.
Dean’s in the living room, annotating a thin leather-bound notebook. He looks up when Sam comes in. “Finally,” he says. He’s nonchalant but there’s a suggestion of nail-biting worry in his voice that Sam’s able to pick up on, where were you, don’t run off like that. I was afraid.
“’M fine,” Sam says out of reflex. “I just had to – run.”
“You’re a freak, dude,” Dean tells him. “A gross freak. Go get your ass cleaned up.”
“Just my ass?”
“All of you, dickwipe, I can smell you from over here. Get. Go.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam says, and dodges the pencil Dean flings his way. He snickers his way up the stairs, chest lighter than it’d been minutes before, head a little clearer. He still needs to get out of this house but it’s a calculated need, controlled, instead of the biting frenzy he’d felt after waking up. He can think. He can plan.
As soon as he’s clean, he takes a trip downtown to hijack the wi-fi at a small coffee shop. He parks himself, his laptop, and a large cinnamon latte in the back corner of the store, and scours the internet for suspicious happenings. Nothing local, but there’s something of a kerfuffle down in Georgia: four young women chopped up and displayed in a manner suspiciously identical to a local, deceased serial axe murderer. The police are worried about a copycat; Sam’d put his money on a nutty spirit.
It’d be better if it were closer, but in all other respects, it’s close to perfect. It’s easy – salt and burn, nothing they haven’t done a million times already – so Bobby can’t insist they stay without looking like he’s up to something, and it’s novel enough that Dean’ll be excited. Hell, he’s excited; looking at the mug shots of the dead murderer is enough to rev him up. Usually that’s Dean’s wheelhouse, getting all pumped up over a case before they’ve even begun, but that his enthusiasm’s been transferred over is just – normal, he figures, after all the rest he’s gotten. That has to be it.
He’s pumped up the entire drive back, humming along with the radio and speeding the Impala through the slender dirt road that links Bobby’s house to civilization. He parks cockeyed in front of the porch and dashes up the stairs with purpose, determined to propose the job come hell or high water.
He finds Bobby and Dean eating chili in the kitchen. Dean’s got it on his cheeks and all down the front of his shirt and Sam hasn’t got it in him to tell him. The chili’s thick and steaming, swimming with healthy hunks of meat and tender, oily beans, but Sam’s got no appetite for it – maybe it’s the sour, scummy bile still clinging to his teeth, his sore tongue and throat, or maybe it’s nerves. It’s intimidating, after all, introducing his escape plan to the both of them at once.
But. It could work to his advantage. If Bobby gets mad enough to push back, tell Dean he thinks he’s too weak to hunt, it’ll make Dean want to skip town more than ever, and that’s an opportunity he can’t pass up. He doesn’t want to pit them against each other, necessarily, but it’s something to fall back on if he has to, get Dean moving faster. However Bobby chooses to play it, he’ll be giving Sam the upper hand. He’ll be fine.
He scoots in across from them and smiles, small and dry. Dean waves his spoon as a tiny, distracted hello.
“Out again?” Bobby says, with no small dose of suspicion.
“Yeah, actually,” Sam says. “I needed to use the internet, and since you’re stuck in the Stone Age, I went down to the town.”
“’Course you did,” Dean grunts. He wipes his mouth with his wrist and leaves behind a long, sticky, reddish streak. “What’d you need the internet for so bad?”
Sam passes him a napkin. “I found some stuff for us,” he says, and it’s now or never, do or die. “A case. If you wanna.”
“Oh, yeah? You ready to set out again?”
“Sam,” Bobby says darkly. He’s put down his spoon.
“Yeah, I am,” Sam says. Take the bait, c’mon, take the bait, he begs silently. Fight me on this. “Think we should get back in the game. This one’s important, too – we’ve already got four girls dead, and there’ll definitely be more.”
“Bloodsuckers, then?” Dean says, his lip curling. “Changelings? Jesus fuck, please don’t tell me it’s more changelings.”
“No – ghost of a serial killer, actually,” Sam says, and Dean’s eyes light up. Bingo.
“Aw, cool,” he says. “Anyone famous?”
“Don’t think so. He’s no H.H. Holmes.”
“That’s great an’ all, very thrilling,” Bobby cuts in, “but maybe you boys oughta consider waiting a little longer.”
Good. “We can’t wait,” Sam says. “It’s been four bodies over two weeks. That’s bad. We can’t let that sit.”
Dean’s nodding his agreement. “Sounds pretty rough, Bobby. We should take a look.”
Bobby shakes his head, mouth drawn in small and severe. “I can’t stop you,” he says. “Not if you wanna go. But I’m tellin’ you boys – you oughta take some more time, first. Maybe call in someone else.”
“Woah, no,” Dean says. “Sam’s fine, I’m great – why bring in a stranger when we can get shit done on our own? Ain’t that right, Sammy?”
“Yeah,” Sam says, and he meets Bobby eye-to-eye, challenging. “We can take care of it.”
But Bobby just sighs, resigned, shakes his head slow. There’s deep disappointment in his tired eyes. He’s not going to push it.
“That’s settled, then,” Dean says, banging his hands palms-down on the table. “I’ll clear up lunch, and then we’ll take off. Hey – you hungry, Sam, or – ?”
“Ate at the coffee shop,” Sam says. He doesn’t want to waste any more time. Forget cleaning and packing and eating, the Impala’s right there and they could leave right now, race away and never look back.
“Go grab our shit, then,” Dean commands. “I’ll do the dishes.”
Sam’s heart sinks. He doesn’t want to leave his brother alone with Bobby. “Nah, hey,” he improvises. “I’ll do them for you, and you can pack. You don’t like me screwing with your shower stuff, anyway.”
“You always put it in upside-down,” Dean says. “Who does that? Who looks at a bottle of shampoo and thinks, hey, I’ll balance it on the open part! Makes no sense.”
“Yeah, okay, tell me when you’re done,” Sam says, kicking off from the table, bowls in hand. They’re deceivingly light, thin and tinny, the kind designed for camping. He turns on the faucet.
Behind him, Bobby heaves a great sigh. “You’re off, then,” he says. He sounds about a hundred years old.
“Yup,” Sam says, scrubbing at a spoon. “Down to Georgia. I’ll pick you up a couple peaches.”
He means it as a joke, but it falls callously flat.
“Sam,” Bobby says. “This is a mistake.”
“It really isn’t. Dean’s tougher than you think he is.”
“For his sake, I hope you’re right.”
“I am,” Sam says, with absolute conviction. He wipes the dishware dry with an unraveling pink hand-towel and sets everything bottoms-up next to the sink. “He’s the strongest person I know.”
Bobby is quiet for a moment. “Watch out for him,” he says softly.
Sam gives him a short, sincere nod.
“Sam!” Dean hollers from upstairs, and the pair of them jump. “I can’t find my toothbrush! Where the fuck’d you put my toothbrush?”
Bobby’s lips curl into a fond smile. “Well? Go help out your brother, boy,” he says.
It’s as much of a blessing as Sam could hope to get. “I will,” he says, and turns away.
They drive and drive and drive until they’re aching and bloody-eyed from staying awake but Sam’s never been so happy or relaxed in his life. Watching the country whiz by is satisfying, fulfilling as good sex or a round meal, and he keeps his eyes on the windshield the whole way. He’s on his way to somewhere. He’s about to find his fight.
They book a motel room in Pidgeon Creek, Georgia, the tiny backwater town the serial ghost’s hanging out at, and fall asleep as soon as they get horizontal. Sam dreams about bodies and flames and when he wakes up he hardly remembers any of it, just the vague impression of naked skin, an unbearable heat. Nothing lost, he figures. He’s able to tell Dean that, in all honesty, he’d slept quite well.
They wait until nightfall to head to the cemetery. The research went easy – the lore’s not exactly hard to find in cases like these, the big, sensationalized ones – and they’ve got the grave dug up and everything before the ghost decides, finally, to join the party.
It takes a swing at them and Sam grabs for Dean to pull them down together. It’s a move he’s pulled off a million times before, swords and bullets and arrows gone whistling inches over their heads, except this time when his fingers go around Dean’s forearm his brother jerks wildly away, face twisted in a snarl, body jackknifing left and into the arching path of the axe.
Sam doesn’t think, he dives. He plows into Dean’s waist and sends the two of them skidding out across the wet grass, Dean fighting him the whole way, jabs to his sides and neck, punches meant to disable. Sam flings himself off as soon as they’re out of cleaving range and scrambles to retrieve his shotgun.
“Dean!” he hollers, ducking around another blow. “Burn it!”
But Dean’s still on the ground where Sam’d left him, insensate and stunned frozen, his wild, frightened eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance. He doesn’t react to the ghost knocking a nearby tombstone into rubble or the following blast from Sam’s shotgun.
“Dean!” Sam yells, and finally Dean starts, gets back up on his feet. He’s pale and ill in the dim moonlight, face shimmery with fear-sweat, and it takes him an eternity to lurch over to the grave, fumble out his lighter, and set the bones alight.
The ghost goes up in a curl of smoke and Sam falls back onto his haunches, winded.
“Dean,” he says quietly.
Dean doesn’t look up from the burning corpse. The flames are lending him an unearthly pallor, casting his eyes into deep shadow. “Shit,” he says, and wipes his brow. “Shit, Sam.”
Sam doesn’t want to give him a dressing-down, doesn’t want to turn into his father, but, God, if they’re going to work through this – . “What was that,” he forces himself to say.
Dean laughs, low and dark, entirely without humor. “I fucked up,” he says. “I thought I could do it, but – . Course not. Course I couldn’t.” He’s got a morbid, self-deprecating smile pasted on his lips, bitter and exasperated.
“Dean – do what, man? You’re scaring me, here,” Sam says. He doesn’t know how to comfort this creature, this shell of a brother he’s come back to.
“’M sorry, Sammy. It’s not your fault. I tried, but we can’t – . I can’t. Hunt with you.”
“What?” Sam says. “Why? Why are you – ?”
“I can’t,” Dean says. “ hunt with you. Not after – . It can’t happen again.” now.”
“If you don’t want to hunt with me anymore, just say it,” Sam says.
“No, fuck, I – . I do. I don’t wanna leave. But if I’m gonna – if I don’t have your back, what good am I, right?”
“You’re my brother,” Sam says, sticks enough heartfelt adoration into it that he’s sure it goes through, it’s got to. “No matter what, it’s me and you, man. You could be a goddamn paraplegic and I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t love you any less.”
Dean flinches. “Sam – ”
“You’re the only guy I want at my six, Dean,” Sam says. “You’re it. And if you’re not hunting – neither am I.”
“Didn’t seem that way when you were soulless,” Dean says with another sardonic laugh. Sam’s getting goddamned sick of it.
“Soulless me was a stupid asshole,” he yells. “And I’m not him, Dean – I’m not!”
“You aren’t,” Dean agrees. “But it’s – easy. To forget.”
“I’m not him,” Sam says again, and takes a few steps closer. Dean inches back.
“I can’t, Sam,” he says. “Look. We’ll talk about this later, all right? ‘M sore and tired an’ there’s dirt in my boots. All I want’s a bed.”
He does look miserable, beaten-up and swaying with fatigue like he might go and keel over again any moment now. He’s got mud spattered on his face and arms, all over the backs of his jeans, and, come to think of it, so does Sam, though mostly around the knees.
“Okay,” he says. “Yeah. Let’s get cleaned up.”
“Good man,” Dean says. “Here – take the keys. You can drive.”
Sam accepts them. “Uh. You sure?” he says.
“Positive,” Dean says, and starts off toward the car. Sam trails behind him, confused and misplaced.
He slides into the driver’s seat and it feels, as it always does, wrong, like he’s wearing borrowed shoes, eating at a stranger’s table. It’s the feeling, he imagines, that most kids would get sleeping in an unfamiliar bed. Not that he’d know – his entire life’s been a parade of different sleeping bags and rugs and sofas and twin beds with the springs poking through.
As accustomed as he is to change, to moving, some things are meant to stay static, and this isn’t – it’s not how they’re supposed to be. He’s driven the Impala plenty, running for food and chauffeuring his brother back from bars and terrifying emergency visits to hospitals, but through all of those Dean had been either incapacitated or simply waiting, impatiently, back at whatever dump they’d chosen. Dean, awake, aware, watching from the passenger seat – it’s too much. It’s wrong. He feels like he’s learning how to drive all over again, small and awkward behind the wheel on a pile of stolen phonebooks, Dean’s hypervigilant commentary guiding him through steep turns, messy parking jobs, there you go, buddy, watch for the trash can – slow, now, easy, that’s it. Good job.
Only now he’s unnaturally quiet, staring out the windshield with blank, unmoving eyes, face cold and empty. He’s elsewhere, Sam thinks, and shudders inwardly at the connection, keeps his hands steady on the wheel. He’d been elsewhere in the cemetery, too, and when they’d been wrestling.
But why, is the question Sam’s asking. He’s almost positive it isn’t a physical thing anymore, so – Hell memories, then? Fragments of paralyzing, icy images, flashes of pain and blood and hooks and Dean’d never described his ordeal in much detail but Sam can well imagine. It would make sense. You don’t walk away from something like that without scars, not even if you’re Dean Winchester. Maybe he sees or hears something that reminds him of his vacation downstairs and he’s there again, dragged down wrist-deep in filth and muck and death, and it’s too much.
Why it’s gotten so acute now, though, Sam can’t imagine. Maybe it was the stress of losing his brother. Maybe he’d run across a case that shook a couple memories loose. Whatever it is, though, it doesn’t mean he has to stop hunting. It doesn’t.
They pull into the dimly lit parking lot of their motel and Dean’s out the door before the car’s fully stopped. Sam follows him in.
“Gonna,” Dean says pointlessly, shoving a thumb at the bathroom, and Sam waves him away. He’s grimy and sweaty and there’s gunpowder residue all over his hands but he’s beyond caring. Dean can take an hour-long shower for all he cares, use up all the watery hotel conditioner and pare the soap down to a pearly nub . He’s not totally disgusting and this motel’s a shitheap anyway, so he climbs into bed unwashed and bare down to his boxers. These sheets have probably seen worse.
He needs to talk to Dean, the sooner the better. He needs to convince him that this thing, it doesn’t make him useless. He’ll ambush him after he’s done with his shower. He just needs to stay awake until then. Just needs to stay awake.
Dark, close walls, pulsing red and white like the inside of a stomach. A man pinned underneath him. He’s in Hell, again.
His body is moving without him, pulling out sensations that he doesn’t want, and he thinks, again, elsewhere. We are elsewhere. He detaches and detaches and waits for the fire to save them both.
But it doesn’t come. He’s shoving into his partner, rough and possessive, and it goes on, and on, and the fire doesn’t come, and they are locked together and he’s speaking, he can understand his own words at last.
He wishes he still couldn’t. He’s spewing delicious filth from his mouth, things he’d never say in real life, but his dreamself’s ruthless, unafraid to hurt, impossible to shame, and it knows what it wants.
“Such a good little bitch for me,” he hears his voice say, dark and hungry. “Taking it like that. Good boy. Guess you’d be the expert, though, huh? This what you did when Daddy fucked you? You lie still for him, too?”
Fuck you, says the other person, and bucks.
Sam rolls right with it and keeps his seating easily. He feels it now, the fire, growing up from his pelvis and licking at his insides, urging him forward. It is frightening and irresistible and he clings, bites, drapes himself across his partner. Harder. Deeper. He has to stoke it, has to incite it to burn hotter.
He worms his hand underneath the both of them and drags it down the guy’s chest, laughs when his fingers find hard, dripping flesh.
“You fucking love it,” he pants, closing his fingers around the other man’s erection. “I knew you would, knew you’d be a fucking slut – ”
Don’t, he says, please, and tries to crawl up the bed, but Sam pulls him down firm and jerks him off relentlessly in time with his own thrusts.
“You want this,” he says. “Don’t pretend you don’t. You wanted me to fuck you nice and hard, the way you deserve – such a pretty little bitch – ”
The body shivers and cries like a wounded animal, insides tightening and shuddering, and spills over Sam’s fist.
“Fucking – came for me, I knew it,” Sam gasps. In his gut fire howls joyfully and grows, spiraling upward, igniting his spine and hips and neck and oh, fuck.
“Dean,” he chokes, and comes.
“Sam? Hey, Sam, man, c’mon – ”
There’s a hand on his shoulder, and he tries to beat it off with heavy, uncoordinated swipes of his arms. “Dean,” he gasps.
“Yeah, I’m here,” Dean says. “You’re okay. Wake up for me, c’mon. Lemmee see those baby blues – yeah, there we go.”
The dream. Dean.
“Oh fuck,” Sam says, flailing upright. “Oh, fuck, I can’t, I – move,” he says, scrambling forward off the bed. He barely gets his head over the lip of the room’s small trash bin before he’s gagging up his stew, landing it mostly in the can, partially on the floor, and he’s too disgusted with himself to care. His stomach is cramping and heaving, shuddery, repulsive waves of nausea and pain and horror forcing him to crouch small and desperate around the bin, unable to move or speak or hear. Distantly he thinks Dean’s rubbing his back with one warm, gentle hand, and he can hardly feel it through the contractions of his gut– and he shouldn’t be touching him, he shouldn’t, not when he’s carrying this putrid, corrosive thing around inside him, get it out – he has to get it out, even if it tears him apart –
“You’re okay, Sammy, breathe through it,” Dean’s saying, and now Sam’s crying, too, tears and sick slimy on his face. Dean – stolid, loyal, steadfast Dean, and he’d – .
“’M sorry ‘m sorry so so sorry – ” he’s chanting into the bottom of the bin between messy, ragged gulps of air. His stomach roils. Dean’s murmuring nonsense platitudes into his ear, trying to shush him, and Sam’s too weak to nudge him away so he takes it and takes it and drools bile into the can. He shouldn’t be touched. Not after. That.
Sam spits one final, pathetic cough, heaves himself upright. He wipes a forearm across his snotty, crusty face. He keeps his eyes on the floor.
“Done?” Dean says. He wrinkles his nose at the bin. “Eugh. You got horrible aim, kid. Hang tight – I’m gonna get you a wet towel.”
It was a dream, the rational segment of Sam's mind’s trying to tell him. Don’t be melodramatic. It was fucked up, but it was only a dream.
But Dean’s coming back over with his damp towel and kind, careful hands, and Sam knows, he knows. He can’t stop seeing it, Dean’s face superimposed over the person’s in the dream, the taste and feel of teeth through human flesh. Pennies on his tongue. A pleading, dead eye.
Dean dabs at the bruises underneath his eyes and sets the towel side. “Bad one, huh,” he says. “Maybe we should think about investin’ in some sleeping pills.”
“Dean,” Sam says, and his voice is wrecked, ground down to nothing in his throat.
“Woah, okay – I’ll grab some water. Don’t try and – ”
“No,” Sam says, grabbing at Dean’s wrist, and Dean jerks back, trips and falls on his ass. In any other situation Sam’d be laughing but here, now, it’s awful, horrific, his brother fighting to get away from him because, because –
“Dude,” Dean’s saying, faking indignation over his fear. “It’s just water.”
“No,” he croaks. He wants to crawl forward, keep them close, but he doesn’t, he can’t. “Stay. I. Please, stay.”
“Uh,” Dean says. “Okay. If that’s what you – okay.”
“It,” he says, and swallows, chokes, tries again. “The dreams. They’re memories.”
“Yeaah? We’ve established that,” Dean says.
“Of Hell. But, also – of when I was soulless,” he says, and Dean’s face is already closing in, losing its color. “Is it true?” he asks. “Did I – ?”
He is a coward. He can’t say it. It doesn’t matter anyway, because the way Dean goes still and cold says it all.
“Dunno what you’re talking about,” he says, and it’s a bad, bad lie, stiff and awkward, and Dean’s a good liar by trade but this disaster's busting through every defense he has. Sam’s smashed him to rubble. Sam’s cracked him apart. Sam – .
“Fuck,” he says, falling back. He presses a shaking palm against his mouth. “Oh, fuck.”
It hurts to talk and that feels right, feels like he shouldn’t be able to speak ever again without nails scoring the inside of his mouth, barbed wire in his windpipe. To the one person he loves most in the world, more than goddamn anything, he did this. He did this. He did this.
Dean’s given up the pretense of ignorance; now his head hangs heavy with disgust, illness in the shamed pinch of his mouth. “Sorry, Sammy – Sam, I’m sorry,” he says.
“You’re sorry,” Sam says distantly. He feels like his organs have gone untethered inside of him, lifting up and out, and he is breathing them, he’s choking on his intestines every time he tries to inhale. He isn’t sure he’s awake or even alive because everything feels floaty and surreal and he’s living in an unreality where he’d given in and touched his brother, forcibly, made it into a punishment, but impossibly everything looks the same, the empty parking lot outside and the dingy smoke-stained walls, even though the earth cannot, should not, be turning.
“I should’ve – let you go. I wanted, I had to try, but – I fucked up, Sam. Everything.”
“We,” says Sam, his brain still stuttering and attempting to drift away. “I. I did, that.”
“Fuck. Fuck. You shouldn’t have to – I didn’t want to tell you, I. I’m so fucking sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Bobby knew.”
“No! No, he – suspected, I guess, something, ‘cuz of – . Whatever. He doesn’t know, I promise, he’s – . Nobody does. You don’t gotta worry about it.”
“I can’t – Jesus, Dean. How can I – how,” he says, and he’s not sure where the question’s even going. How did I do that to you? How do I help you? How am I supposed to live with myself?
Mostly, he was a dick, he hears Dean explain in his joking, carefree voice. God. God.
“You don’t have to,” Dean says, and Sam has to stop, paddle backwards to recatch the thread of the conversation. “I’ll pack up my shit – you can keep the credit cards, an’ whatever else – ‘cept Baby. Unless you want her, but. I’ll be outta your hair, either way.”
Sam blinks, processes that, blinks again. “I don’t want you – out of my hair,” he says slowly. “Why would I – ? If you wanna leave, I won’t – stop you. If that’s what you gotta do. But, Dean.”
“Don’t,” Dean says. “Don’t let me, don’t – don’t pretend you forgive me, I can’t – .”
“Forgive you?” Sam says. “Why – ? I’m the one who – you can’t honestly think, Dean – .”
“You were my responsibility,” Dean says. “I was your rudder. You remember that yet? And I. I didn’t, Sam, I should’ve – . I let you down.”
Sam’s at a loss for words. “Jesus Christ, Dean,” he says instead. His head is swimming with guilt and brimstone and Dean’s the one who thinks he’s at fault, Dean’s making himself the target here. Sam doesn’t – it doesn’t make sense. How could it have grown so twisted, so turned back on itself in his brother’s brain, that he’d come to blame his own rape on himself. Dean’s gone from point A to point Z with a whole lot of backpedaling and panicking and swerving along the way and Sam hasn’t got the fortitude to follow the line to the end.
“I’m sorry,” Dean says.
“Dean!” Sam says. “Whatever happened, that was my choice! My decision, not yours.”
“I let you,” Dean says brokenly. “I let you, and now I can’t even help you, I – . Sometimes I can’t look at you, and I know you aren’t the same, but – I, I’m fucked up, Sam, and you don’t need me. You don’t want me, not like this.”
He’s shaking and crying at the end of it and Sam aches all over with the need to touch. It feels almost like the way he’d needed to run, earlier, only deeper, more persistent, and it’s killing him, it’s burning him up. He fights it. He has to fight it.
“I meant what I said at the cemetery,” he rasps, digs his nails into his palm to keep himself still. “I will always need you. I know you don’t believe me but I won’t, I won’t let you blame this on yourself, you asshole, and you’ll – you’re gonna stay with me,” he shouts, means it in every sense of the word. “You aren’t gonna give up, you hear me? I won’t let you. I need you.”
“What are we gonna do?” Dean says.
Don’t ask me, Sam wants to say, but his brother’s looking at him like he’s the strong one now, the tough, steadfast older brother, like he’s worth anything at all.
“We live,” he says. “We just – we live.”
From everywhere and nowhere, the room lights up like a shop display, blinding and white and impossible. He’s lost sight of his brother and he tries to get up and grab for him but there are cold fingers clamped at the nape of his neck and he can only flail uselessly, yell, Dean, Dean. Hope he’s okay. After all this, God, please let him be okay.
And then he is rising and rising and the sky is rushing towards him – not overcast and threatening but crystalline, now, jellied like an aspic – and he passes through it and everything is blue, blue, blue, and he bursts through the other side and he knows nothing and he is nothing and he stills.
He opens his eyes. He remembers – falling. Dean’s face, and darkness, and then a place where time spent ought to be, and isn’t. There’s a barrier in his head, vast and miserable, and beyond it places he’s been, and he throws himself against it hard but it doesn’t budge.
He goes upstairs, instead.
If Dean flinches away from him when he goes to clasp him on the shoulder, he doesn’t notice. There’s a hunt in Georgia. He’ll bring back a couple peaches.