Fic: The Thirteenth Door
Title: The Thirteenth Door
Author: britomart_is
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG
Words: 3700
Spoilers: For all aired episodes.
Summary: Sam never did have an itch he didn't scratch.
The house of mysteries sprawls, ungainly, across acres of dead brown lawn, the grass all dried up in the California sun. The house endured thirty-eight years of the unceasing clash of hammers and nails, the hungry teeth of saws. After all that, there's simply too much of the old, weary house. They built for too long. Sam remembers a puberty of elbows smacking into door frames, knees knocking into desks, and sympathizes. He pats the many doors affectionately, caresses the abrupt walls that crown staircases-to-nowhere. It's a patchwork house with no master plan, cobbled together from paranoia and adrenaline. Sam sympathizes with that, too.
Sam basks in the sunshine streaming through the parlor window, boots kicked out in front of him, slumped low in the well-worn armchair. Dean snores, stretched on the couch.
Outside, a three year-old on a leash toddles slowly down the sidewalk, trailing his mother. Speaking rapidly into her cell phone, she tugs on the leash when her son strays too close to traffic or prickly rosebushes or friendly nipping golden retrievers.
The bass beat from a passing car resonates in Sam's bones. The song must be new, he's never heard it before. New enough. Sam's not sure how long it's been since he was on the other side of these windows. But then, he has no reason to leave this sprawling house. He's happy here. That's all Dean asks of him, that he be happy.
"Sam." Harsh as a bullet being chambered. Dean is leaned up on his elbows, wide awake and glaring. "Hands where I can see 'em."
Sam looks down, surprised to see his hand raised to his chest. The barest hint of blood above the neat white bandages, beading on the skin of his sternum. Red beneath his fingernails.
Sam digs his fingers into the armchair's upholstery, sits heavy on his hands to stop from scratching.
That's one of two things that Dean asks of him, that he be happy.
While Dean is out buying groceries, Sam stands frozen in the grand foyer, torn in all directions at once. He has forgotten something important - his keys, maybe - his wallet - his phone. Sam pats his pockets and feels the shapes of his meager possessions, all in place. His watch? No, on his wrist. His hat? Sam doesn't wear a hat. But he's certain that he's left something behind, tucked on a side table in another room and promptly forgotten. Something that Sam ought to be keeping with him.
There's movement at the edge of Sam's vision. He blinks it away. There are no ghosts in this house, not really. They checked.
Sam zeroes in on his wayward hands, no longer patting his pockets. The fingers of his right hand curl at the border of the bandages on his chest, nails digging in. Stop that. He puts his hand in his pocket.
Sam never did have an itch he didn't scratch. Never let a niggling thought stay in the back of his mind, pulled them to the forefront, to the light of day. He never did leave well enough alone.
Footsteps heavy in the quiet house, Sam picks the room to his left. He checks the mantelpiece, the credenza. He'll know what he's forgotten when he sees it.
The walls shake when Dean comes home and slams the door.
This is, Sam is aware, what is commonly known as the little spoon. Sam doesn't know why he's always the little spoon. But Dean likes it. And Sam likes Dean's breath on his neck. Likes feeling Dean's fond gaze on him.
Sam shifts, sleepless, and envies Dean's whuffling, unselfconscious sleep-breath. A goose feather from the duvet pokes his skin, itches.
Sam tries to free a hand to brush the feather away, but Dean has him wrapped up tight. Arms crossed in front of him, hands caught in Dean's own. Sam squirms. Dean grumbles in his sleep and draws Sam closer into the affectionate straitjacket.
On a cloudy, temperate Thursday, as Sam passes through the foyer looking for the pen that he has tucked behind his ear, the butler pauses in eating his nachos to give Sam a ring with thirteen keys. "You can open the first twelve doors, Sam. I advise you not to open the last."
Sam is halfway across the mansion, clenching the keys till they cut his hand, before he wonders whether there was ever a butler before. He really should investigate that, but he has the keys to thirteen new rooms, and maybe what he's misplaced is gathering dust in one of them.
The corridor stretches thirteen doors long and windowless dark, but Sam proceeds safely with the snick of a match and the sputter of a kerosene lamp.
Sam sets the lamp on the floorboards and eases the key into the disused lock of the first door. He opens it, and inside is hell.
Oh, Sam thinks. He was right. He's found what he'd forgotten. There's warmth running down Sam's leg, a salty shaming smell in the air.
The first door swings shut and silences the grinding of gears. Behind the second door, Sam finds the hell that sounds like the groaning of ancient tree trunks, rotted inside and ready to fall.
On and on down the line, Sam finds a different hell - remembers a different hell - behind each of twelve doors. He stands before the thirteenth door and thinks Death can go fuck himself, him and his nachos and the pale horse he rode in on. He jams the key in the lock and kicks the door in.
Behind the thirteenth door, Sam sees the face of God, and that's what breaks him.
God tells Sam to unwind his bandages and fuck, the itching becomes burning and the burning becomes a searing pain Sam can't believe he didn't notice before. Fool that he is, Sam's been scratching at his bandages, fretting over what he thought was an itchy, ill-healed festering wound. But this wound is mortal, it must be. This pain is not survivable.
With tentative, fearful fingers, Sam pulls aside Dean's careful gauze from the hole in his chest. The moment the bandages are gone, Sam's heart falls out on the floor. He watches it beat and blood squirts him in the face as he leans over it, which seems undignified and unfair.
Damage done, Sam slams the door on God and staggers to lean back against the far wall. He hears an echoing slam from the front of the house and jumps, panicked, because Dean is back. Wetness prickles in Sam's eyes and guilt heats his cheeks. In the flickering dark of the gaslamp, he searches the hallway floor for his heart. It's dirty, but Sam brushes it off and stuffs it back in his body.
Sam's trying to get the bandages back in place as he hurries down the hallway, but he makes a mess of Dean's neat work. When he gets into the sunlight he sees that his hands are coated in thick slick blood right up to the elbows. Sam instinctively wipes his hands on his pants, then curses himself, because that hardly helps the situation.
Dean finds Sam lingering on the servants' staircase, trying to compose himself. Sam plasters on a smile as if nothing is wrong, but as soon as Dean gets a good look at him, his eyes go sad. Sam remembers the expression from when a third-grade Sam got Social Services called on them by telling his teacher they didn't have enough to eat at home. Sam remembers the slope of Dean's shoulders, the grave steadiness of his voice. Not angry, just disappointed.
"Show me," Dean says. "Do it." He crosses his arms. "If you'll just go opening up your bandages for anyone, then you can spread 'em for me."
Okay, maybe a little angry.
Sam lets air wash over the raw wound in his chest again.
Dean's biting his lip, eyes wet as he reaches inside. He trails a finger over the grit and dust and mouse droppings that coat Sam's heart. "Oh, Sam." Dean's voice is nothing, it's a whisper. "You trashed it, man. After all the work I did getting it back for you." Dean pulls his hand out of Sam's chest.
Somewhere between Dean walking out of the room and Sam coming to his senses while eating a box of stale Girl Scout cookies next to the dumpster where he scavenged them, Sam goes a little crazy.
This pain is not survivable.
Sam eats a smashed-up Thin Mint and surveys his circumstances. There are plastic bags on his feet. The wall is rubble in his mind, and his head aches. There's too much hell in it. The repetitive rumbling noise is annoying, so Sam stops hitting his head against the dumpster.
Walking down the street, watching pedestrians cross the street to avoid him, Sam tries to mentally retrace his steps. Sam remembers trying to stagger off into the deepest darkest woods, which is traditionally where you go when you go mad, but since the house had been smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, it didn't really work out. He made it to Fresno and caught a Greyhound east. It's when he was buying his bus ticket that Sam discovered that his voice had run away. There were no forests in the town where the bus driver kicked him out for scaring the other passengers with his silent shoulder-heaving sobs, either. Just endless fields of soy beans, irrigation ditches, a Wal-Mart, and an Elks Lodge. The wilds Sam wanders have a dense canopy of power lines, foot-tangling undergrowth of shopping bags and soda cans. Sometimes the predators look like teenagers with tire irons and something to prove, and sometimes they look like coyotes that blink slyly at him, their smiles saying that even one so tall must sleep sometime.
Mad and mute, Sam wanders. At least his chest doesn't itch anymore.
On the day that Sam becomes aware that he's eating cookies and desperately in need of a shower, three birds come down from the sky and perch on the edge of the rusty green dumpster, eying him. Sam eyes them right back. He doesn't like the look of them.
The first and smallest, a redwinged blackbird, clears its throat with a delicate hem-hem. "My, aren't you a handsome one," it says. Its neighbor nudges it sharply with a wing. "Oh, fine, all business. Sam, if a time comes when all is well and you are happy, you can send me flying off to your brother. I'll tell him and he'll rest easy."
The middle bird raps its talons against the dumpster-edge, adjusting its stance. "As for me, Sam, if there comes a time when you have a sneaking suspicion that your life is passing you by, when you're complacent and disappointed and filled with existential discontent, then you are normal. I'll fly to your brother and tell him, and he'll sigh wearily."
The final bird, the largest of the three, is a vulture. Its beady eyes never leave Sam's wasted frame. "I'm going to eat you bit by bit," it says. "You're nearly ready for me." The middle bird pecks it. The vulture rolls its eyes. "Yeah, yeah. If a time comes when you're in terrible danger and you despair, send me to your brother. I'll tell him, and he will come for you."
He will come for you. Those words were once the bedrock on which Sam built his entire life. Everything Sam ever built is broken now.
He has no voice to thank the birds, so he bows to them. In a flutter of wings they're gone, and Sam is alone in the alley.
When footsteps approach Sam as he reclines on a park bench and then stop over him for far too long, he thinks for fuck's sake, not again. As if because Sam lives in public he's a public asset, available to all. Not that Sam couldn't use the money, but he and his ruined heart will be faithful till the day they die.
He squints up at the figure and it's blotting out the glare of noon, haloed in sunlight.
Sam has no voice to greet or curse Balthazar, so the angel puts an arm around his skinny shoulders and hauls him halfway across town to a vertical ghost-town, a high-rise of empty office space and unsellable condos. In the mirrored elevator to the penthouse, Sam shifts uncomfortably, avoiding his own image.
All the tables and chairs, the windowsills and bookshelves, even the top of the refrigerator, are crowded with mason jars, each with a heart. Names scribbled on yellowing labels identify the contents, or rather, the former owners of the contents. Some are shiny and red, some marred by ragged remnants of pericardium. "Business is booming," the angel says.
The bar is well-stocked and Sam's bed has room for all his limbs and something like million thread-count sheets. The television gets all the channels and the library always seems to have the book he's looking for. And every night the angel comes to him and offers to take his heart. "It's caused you nothing but trouble anyway, Sam." The angel lounges, relaxed, in the doorway. Sam crosses his arms protectively over his chest. "It's not like you're using it."
Every night Sam shakes his head vehemently, even as he sees the glint of the blade in the angel's hand. He grits his teeth and can't scream when every night, the angel cuts away a little piece of him. A chunk of flesh here, a bit of marrow there. There's less and less of Sam every day.
Sam bleeds and festers as he roams the penthouse, and when he answers the door the FedEx guy takes one look at him, drops the package and runs.
He takes to waiting by the open window, crumpled in his chair by exhaustion. He'll be running out of parts soon, running out of himself. The angel smiles smugly because he thinks that Sam wants to jump. But that's not something Sam would or could do, so he doesn't. He waits and waits, until one day he sees a frazzled biologist interviewed on the news, explaining how it is that an entire flock of redwinged blackbirds fell out of the sky in a single day, dead as doornails.
Unable to shout out the window, Sam sprinkles stale bread crumbs on the ledge. He wakes from an afternoon nap and the raggedy crow and vulture are there watching him.
"Oh, very close now, very soon," the vulture says, surveying the wreckage of Sam's body. "But so little left for me."
The raggedy crow swallows down a hunk of bread crust. "Tell me, Sam, are you in terrible danger? Do you despair?"
Sam blinks, head heavy on his neck. He can't sit upright in the chair, slumps against its cushions.
"I think that's a yes," the crow says. It pecks at its vulture neighbor. "Get moving. Shoo."
"Such a waste," the vulture says, and off it flies.
The trait Sam would most happily be rid of is his capacity to cling to hope up to and beyond his very last breath, to hope when his grave's halfway filled-in. But he can't be rid of it and the sun is going down, and Sam knows somehow that this last refusal will be the end of him, that the next piece of flesh Balthazar cuts away will be the last. So Sam pulls himself out of the chair and with a paring knife, spills blood he can't afford to lose.
The angel walks through the penthouse door with a heart-jar in his clutches. It shatters on the floor when Sam slams his hand against the bloody sigil, and again he's alone in the room.
Not quite alone, he remembers when he hears the click of talons. Sam settles into the chair by the window with a gusty exhale, and thinks that he won't get up again. He lets the chair cradle him comfortably, watches the sky go pink and orange, and waits to see who gets here first.
Sam's eyelids mimic the descent of the sun, and when he can no longer see, the raggedy crow keeps him updated. "No one is coming," the bird says. "The road is empty."
Shallow breaths keep Sam dizzy, not enough oxygen going to his brain. "There's a squashed possum in the gutter," the crow informs him.
A ding sounds, and Sam slits his eyes open, looks to the numbers by the door that show when the elevator is coming up to the Penthouse. The angel is coming.
"I see a dust cloud coming down the road," the crow says.
The elevator stops on the third floor, long enough for a harried mother to get on, drag on her chocolate-smeared children, realize the elevator isn't going down to the lobby, and disembark.
"I hear the thrum of engines," the crow says excitedly, and Sam tries to hear it too. "I see the twinned glow of headlights."
The elevator blinks again on the third floor, long enough for a howling chocolate-smeared six year-old to be extracted from the elevator door and lectured about never sticking a hand in there.
"I see sunset gleaming on a dusky metal flank," the bird says, talons rap-tap-tapping anxiously. "I see it very close now!"
The elevator stops between floors ten and eleven, just five floors shy of the penthouse. And maybe Sam can faintly hear the faint buzzing of an emergency-stop coming up the shaft, new wiring in a new building, always getting stuck between floors.
And then, faintly. Ever so quietly, but building. Sam hears the rhythmic thud of feet in the stairwell. Someone else is coming up. Up and up, pace never flagging.
The buzzing stops and the elevator begins to move again, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The footsteps on metal stairs are deafening now, the stairwell an echo chamber. The elevator door dings and glides smoothly open at the same moment that the door from the stairs flies open, rebounding against the wall. Dean strides forward, knife in hand, and the angel is dying in a burst of light.
Dean shoves the angel's body back in the elevator and presses the down button. Then he drops the knife, bends at the waist, and vomits all over the expensive hardwood floor. "Jesus fucking Christ." He wipes his mouth with a sleeve. "I oughta win a medal. Fifteen flights of stairs."
"Dean," Sam says, too far gone to be surprised by his voice's return. "Dean. You came."
And Sam must look awful, really bad, because Sam just left that wide open and Dean didn't even make a dirty joke. He's on his knees at the side of Sam's chair, one hand on Sam's kneecap and the other hovering where Sam's other kneecap used to be. "You left, dumbass. You left and I couldn't find you."
"I missed you," Sam says, realizing that it's true. He's got a head full of hell and still the worst part of all this has been missing his brother's stupid face.
Dean presses his mouth against Sam's and Sam thinks oh don't, you'll get blood on you. Sam's heart pounds, and the grit and grime coating it scrapes up Sam's insides. Dean does get blood on his mouth, his mouth that Sam missed. Dean stands and slaps palms to thighs. "All right. Let's get you fixed up."
Dean rattles and bangs around the penthouse. He checks the fridge and the freezer and the medicine cabinet. He checks an ornate cigar box near the bar, and a shoebox under the bed. When he's done, all of Sam's missing parts are gathered on the kitchen counter. "Don't look at them," Sam croaks. He doesn't want Dean to see how dirty and messy he is.
"Up you go," Dean says, ignoring him. He gets an arm under Sam's shoulders and all but drags him to the kitchen, where he lays Sam out on the center island where the angel used to chop garlic. Sam's feet and hands dangle over the edges. "This is probably really unsanitary. You would totally be bitching about it if you weren't halfway to the hereafter." Dean's fingers clench around the med kit.
Sam's always been a little in love with Dean's face when he's stitching Sam up, the calm and focus. Like Dean is doing exactly what he's meant to do, at peace with the universe and himself until he has Sam righted again, insides on the inside and outsides on the out.
When Sam's put back together like a rag doll, he tries to sit up, but Dean pushes him back down. "One last thing." He unwinds the tattered cloth around Sam's midsection, and Sam shivers as Dean reaches into his chest. Dean's fingers wrap around his filthy heart so gently, cradle it. "Just gonna borrow this for a sec. Sit tight."
Sam stares at the ceiling and listens to water rushing in the pipes as Dean splashes in the sink. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry I wrecked it."
Dean turns with Sam's heart in his hands. It gleams in the light, clean and perfect. "Coulda done this ages ago," Dean grumps, but he's careful, reverent as he lowers the heart back where it belongs.
A crow takes flight from the hood when the Impala's engine rumbles to life. It caws as it flies a circle around the car, then departs. As the tires hit the smooth pavement of the highway, Sam's hand is pressed against his chest, feeling its beat. But this time so is Dean's, fingers laced with his. Dean's other hand taps a tha-thump on the steering wheel, and as he guns it out of town, they could be chasing the last rays of light on the horizon.
Author: britomart_is
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG
Words: 3700
Spoilers: For all aired episodes.
Summary: Sam never did have an itch he didn't scratch.
The house of mysteries sprawls, ungainly, across acres of dead brown lawn, the grass all dried up in the California sun. The house endured thirty-eight years of the unceasing clash of hammers and nails, the hungry teeth of saws. After all that, there's simply too much of the old, weary house. They built for too long. Sam remembers a puberty of elbows smacking into door frames, knees knocking into desks, and sympathizes. He pats the many doors affectionately, caresses the abrupt walls that crown staircases-to-nowhere. It's a patchwork house with no master plan, cobbled together from paranoia and adrenaline. Sam sympathizes with that, too.
Sam basks in the sunshine streaming through the parlor window, boots kicked out in front of him, slumped low in the well-worn armchair. Dean snores, stretched on the couch.
Outside, a three year-old on a leash toddles slowly down the sidewalk, trailing his mother. Speaking rapidly into her cell phone, she tugs on the leash when her son strays too close to traffic or prickly rosebushes or friendly nipping golden retrievers.
The bass beat from a passing car resonates in Sam's bones. The song must be new, he's never heard it before. New enough. Sam's not sure how long it's been since he was on the other side of these windows. But then, he has no reason to leave this sprawling house. He's happy here. That's all Dean asks of him, that he be happy.
"Sam." Harsh as a bullet being chambered. Dean is leaned up on his elbows, wide awake and glaring. "Hands where I can see 'em."
Sam looks down, surprised to see his hand raised to his chest. The barest hint of blood above the neat white bandages, beading on the skin of his sternum. Red beneath his fingernails.
Sam digs his fingers into the armchair's upholstery, sits heavy on his hands to stop from scratching.
That's one of two things that Dean asks of him, that he be happy.
While Dean is out buying groceries, Sam stands frozen in the grand foyer, torn in all directions at once. He has forgotten something important - his keys, maybe - his wallet - his phone. Sam pats his pockets and feels the shapes of his meager possessions, all in place. His watch? No, on his wrist. His hat? Sam doesn't wear a hat. But he's certain that he's left something behind, tucked on a side table in another room and promptly forgotten. Something that Sam ought to be keeping with him.
There's movement at the edge of Sam's vision. He blinks it away. There are no ghosts in this house, not really. They checked.
Sam zeroes in on his wayward hands, no longer patting his pockets. The fingers of his right hand curl at the border of the bandages on his chest, nails digging in. Stop that. He puts his hand in his pocket.
Sam never did have an itch he didn't scratch. Never let a niggling thought stay in the back of his mind, pulled them to the forefront, to the light of day. He never did leave well enough alone.
Footsteps heavy in the quiet house, Sam picks the room to his left. He checks the mantelpiece, the credenza. He'll know what he's forgotten when he sees it.
The walls shake when Dean comes home and slams the door.
This is, Sam is aware, what is commonly known as the little spoon. Sam doesn't know why he's always the little spoon. But Dean likes it. And Sam likes Dean's breath on his neck. Likes feeling Dean's fond gaze on him.
Sam shifts, sleepless, and envies Dean's whuffling, unselfconscious sleep-breath. A goose feather from the duvet pokes his skin, itches.
Sam tries to free a hand to brush the feather away, but Dean has him wrapped up tight. Arms crossed in front of him, hands caught in Dean's own. Sam squirms. Dean grumbles in his sleep and draws Sam closer into the affectionate straitjacket.
On a cloudy, temperate Thursday, as Sam passes through the foyer looking for the pen that he has tucked behind his ear, the butler pauses in eating his nachos to give Sam a ring with thirteen keys. "You can open the first twelve doors, Sam. I advise you not to open the last."
Sam is halfway across the mansion, clenching the keys till they cut his hand, before he wonders whether there was ever a butler before. He really should investigate that, but he has the keys to thirteen new rooms, and maybe what he's misplaced is gathering dust in one of them.
The corridor stretches thirteen doors long and windowless dark, but Sam proceeds safely with the snick of a match and the sputter of a kerosene lamp.
Sam sets the lamp on the floorboards and eases the key into the disused lock of the first door. He opens it, and inside is hell.
Oh, Sam thinks. He was right. He's found what he'd forgotten. There's warmth running down Sam's leg, a salty shaming smell in the air.
The first door swings shut and silences the grinding of gears. Behind the second door, Sam finds the hell that sounds like the groaning of ancient tree trunks, rotted inside and ready to fall.
On and on down the line, Sam finds a different hell - remembers a different hell - behind each of twelve doors. He stands before the thirteenth door and thinks Death can go fuck himself, him and his nachos and the pale horse he rode in on. He jams the key in the lock and kicks the door in.
Behind the thirteenth door, Sam sees the face of God, and that's what breaks him.
God tells Sam to unwind his bandages and fuck, the itching becomes burning and the burning becomes a searing pain Sam can't believe he didn't notice before. Fool that he is, Sam's been scratching at his bandages, fretting over what he thought was an itchy, ill-healed festering wound. But this wound is mortal, it must be. This pain is not survivable.
With tentative, fearful fingers, Sam pulls aside Dean's careful gauze from the hole in his chest. The moment the bandages are gone, Sam's heart falls out on the floor. He watches it beat and blood squirts him in the face as he leans over it, which seems undignified and unfair.
Damage done, Sam slams the door on God and staggers to lean back against the far wall. He hears an echoing slam from the front of the house and jumps, panicked, because Dean is back. Wetness prickles in Sam's eyes and guilt heats his cheeks. In the flickering dark of the gaslamp, he searches the hallway floor for his heart. It's dirty, but Sam brushes it off and stuffs it back in his body.
Sam's trying to get the bandages back in place as he hurries down the hallway, but he makes a mess of Dean's neat work. When he gets into the sunlight he sees that his hands are coated in thick slick blood right up to the elbows. Sam instinctively wipes his hands on his pants, then curses himself, because that hardly helps the situation.
Dean finds Sam lingering on the servants' staircase, trying to compose himself. Sam plasters on a smile as if nothing is wrong, but as soon as Dean gets a good look at him, his eyes go sad. Sam remembers the expression from when a third-grade Sam got Social Services called on them by telling his teacher they didn't have enough to eat at home. Sam remembers the slope of Dean's shoulders, the grave steadiness of his voice. Not angry, just disappointed.
"Show me," Dean says. "Do it." He crosses his arms. "If you'll just go opening up your bandages for anyone, then you can spread 'em for me."
Okay, maybe a little angry.
Sam lets air wash over the raw wound in his chest again.
Dean's biting his lip, eyes wet as he reaches inside. He trails a finger over the grit and dust and mouse droppings that coat Sam's heart. "Oh, Sam." Dean's voice is nothing, it's a whisper. "You trashed it, man. After all the work I did getting it back for you." Dean pulls his hand out of Sam's chest.
Somewhere between Dean walking out of the room and Sam coming to his senses while eating a box of stale Girl Scout cookies next to the dumpster where he scavenged them, Sam goes a little crazy.
This pain is not survivable.
Sam eats a smashed-up Thin Mint and surveys his circumstances. There are plastic bags on his feet. The wall is rubble in his mind, and his head aches. There's too much hell in it. The repetitive rumbling noise is annoying, so Sam stops hitting his head against the dumpster.
Walking down the street, watching pedestrians cross the street to avoid him, Sam tries to mentally retrace his steps. Sam remembers trying to stagger off into the deepest darkest woods, which is traditionally where you go when you go mad, but since the house had been smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, it didn't really work out. He made it to Fresno and caught a Greyhound east. It's when he was buying his bus ticket that Sam discovered that his voice had run away. There were no forests in the town where the bus driver kicked him out for scaring the other passengers with his silent shoulder-heaving sobs, either. Just endless fields of soy beans, irrigation ditches, a Wal-Mart, and an Elks Lodge. The wilds Sam wanders have a dense canopy of power lines, foot-tangling undergrowth of shopping bags and soda cans. Sometimes the predators look like teenagers with tire irons and something to prove, and sometimes they look like coyotes that blink slyly at him, their smiles saying that even one so tall must sleep sometime.
Mad and mute, Sam wanders. At least his chest doesn't itch anymore.
On the day that Sam becomes aware that he's eating cookies and desperately in need of a shower, three birds come down from the sky and perch on the edge of the rusty green dumpster, eying him. Sam eyes them right back. He doesn't like the look of them.
The first and smallest, a redwinged blackbird, clears its throat with a delicate hem-hem. "My, aren't you a handsome one," it says. Its neighbor nudges it sharply with a wing. "Oh, fine, all business. Sam, if a time comes when all is well and you are happy, you can send me flying off to your brother. I'll tell him and he'll rest easy."
The middle bird raps its talons against the dumpster-edge, adjusting its stance. "As for me, Sam, if there comes a time when you have a sneaking suspicion that your life is passing you by, when you're complacent and disappointed and filled with existential discontent, then you are normal. I'll fly to your brother and tell him, and he'll sigh wearily."
The final bird, the largest of the three, is a vulture. Its beady eyes never leave Sam's wasted frame. "I'm going to eat you bit by bit," it says. "You're nearly ready for me." The middle bird pecks it. The vulture rolls its eyes. "Yeah, yeah. If a time comes when you're in terrible danger and you despair, send me to your brother. I'll tell him, and he will come for you."
He will come for you. Those words were once the bedrock on which Sam built his entire life. Everything Sam ever built is broken now.
He has no voice to thank the birds, so he bows to them. In a flutter of wings they're gone, and Sam is alone in the alley.
When footsteps approach Sam as he reclines on a park bench and then stop over him for far too long, he thinks for fuck's sake, not again. As if because Sam lives in public he's a public asset, available to all. Not that Sam couldn't use the money, but he and his ruined heart will be faithful till the day they die.
He squints up at the figure and it's blotting out the glare of noon, haloed in sunlight.
Sam has no voice to greet or curse Balthazar, so the angel puts an arm around his skinny shoulders and hauls him halfway across town to a vertical ghost-town, a high-rise of empty office space and unsellable condos. In the mirrored elevator to the penthouse, Sam shifts uncomfortably, avoiding his own image.
All the tables and chairs, the windowsills and bookshelves, even the top of the refrigerator, are crowded with mason jars, each with a heart. Names scribbled on yellowing labels identify the contents, or rather, the former owners of the contents. Some are shiny and red, some marred by ragged remnants of pericardium. "Business is booming," the angel says.
The bar is well-stocked and Sam's bed has room for all his limbs and something like million thread-count sheets. The television gets all the channels and the library always seems to have the book he's looking for. And every night the angel comes to him and offers to take his heart. "It's caused you nothing but trouble anyway, Sam." The angel lounges, relaxed, in the doorway. Sam crosses his arms protectively over his chest. "It's not like you're using it."
Every night Sam shakes his head vehemently, even as he sees the glint of the blade in the angel's hand. He grits his teeth and can't scream when every night, the angel cuts away a little piece of him. A chunk of flesh here, a bit of marrow there. There's less and less of Sam every day.
Sam bleeds and festers as he roams the penthouse, and when he answers the door the FedEx guy takes one look at him, drops the package and runs.
He takes to waiting by the open window, crumpled in his chair by exhaustion. He'll be running out of parts soon, running out of himself. The angel smiles smugly because he thinks that Sam wants to jump. But that's not something Sam would or could do, so he doesn't. He waits and waits, until one day he sees a frazzled biologist interviewed on the news, explaining how it is that an entire flock of redwinged blackbirds fell out of the sky in a single day, dead as doornails.
Unable to shout out the window, Sam sprinkles stale bread crumbs on the ledge. He wakes from an afternoon nap and the raggedy crow and vulture are there watching him.
"Oh, very close now, very soon," the vulture says, surveying the wreckage of Sam's body. "But so little left for me."
The raggedy crow swallows down a hunk of bread crust. "Tell me, Sam, are you in terrible danger? Do you despair?"
Sam blinks, head heavy on his neck. He can't sit upright in the chair, slumps against its cushions.
"I think that's a yes," the crow says. It pecks at its vulture neighbor. "Get moving. Shoo."
"Such a waste," the vulture says, and off it flies.
The trait Sam would most happily be rid of is his capacity to cling to hope up to and beyond his very last breath, to hope when his grave's halfway filled-in. But he can't be rid of it and the sun is going down, and Sam knows somehow that this last refusal will be the end of him, that the next piece of flesh Balthazar cuts away will be the last. So Sam pulls himself out of the chair and with a paring knife, spills blood he can't afford to lose.
The angel walks through the penthouse door with a heart-jar in his clutches. It shatters on the floor when Sam slams his hand against the bloody sigil, and again he's alone in the room.
Not quite alone, he remembers when he hears the click of talons. Sam settles into the chair by the window with a gusty exhale, and thinks that he won't get up again. He lets the chair cradle him comfortably, watches the sky go pink and orange, and waits to see who gets here first.
Sam's eyelids mimic the descent of the sun, and when he can no longer see, the raggedy crow keeps him updated. "No one is coming," the bird says. "The road is empty."
Shallow breaths keep Sam dizzy, not enough oxygen going to his brain. "There's a squashed possum in the gutter," the crow informs him.
A ding sounds, and Sam slits his eyes open, looks to the numbers by the door that show when the elevator is coming up to the Penthouse. The angel is coming.
"I see a dust cloud coming down the road," the crow says.
The elevator stops on the third floor, long enough for a harried mother to get on, drag on her chocolate-smeared children, realize the elevator isn't going down to the lobby, and disembark.
"I hear the thrum of engines," the crow says excitedly, and Sam tries to hear it too. "I see the twinned glow of headlights."
The elevator blinks again on the third floor, long enough for a howling chocolate-smeared six year-old to be extracted from the elevator door and lectured about never sticking a hand in there.
"I see sunset gleaming on a dusky metal flank," the bird says, talons rap-tap-tapping anxiously. "I see it very close now!"
The elevator stops between floors ten and eleven, just five floors shy of the penthouse. And maybe Sam can faintly hear the faint buzzing of an emergency-stop coming up the shaft, new wiring in a new building, always getting stuck between floors.
And then, faintly. Ever so quietly, but building. Sam hears the rhythmic thud of feet in the stairwell. Someone else is coming up. Up and up, pace never flagging.
The buzzing stops and the elevator begins to move again, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The footsteps on metal stairs are deafening now, the stairwell an echo chamber. The elevator door dings and glides smoothly open at the same moment that the door from the stairs flies open, rebounding against the wall. Dean strides forward, knife in hand, and the angel is dying in a burst of light.
Dean shoves the angel's body back in the elevator and presses the down button. Then he drops the knife, bends at the waist, and vomits all over the expensive hardwood floor. "Jesus fucking Christ." He wipes his mouth with a sleeve. "I oughta win a medal. Fifteen flights of stairs."
"Dean," Sam says, too far gone to be surprised by his voice's return. "Dean. You came."
And Sam must look awful, really bad, because Sam just left that wide open and Dean didn't even make a dirty joke. He's on his knees at the side of Sam's chair, one hand on Sam's kneecap and the other hovering where Sam's other kneecap used to be. "You left, dumbass. You left and I couldn't find you."
"I missed you," Sam says, realizing that it's true. He's got a head full of hell and still the worst part of all this has been missing his brother's stupid face.
Dean presses his mouth against Sam's and Sam thinks oh don't, you'll get blood on you. Sam's heart pounds, and the grit and grime coating it scrapes up Sam's insides. Dean does get blood on his mouth, his mouth that Sam missed. Dean stands and slaps palms to thighs. "All right. Let's get you fixed up."
Dean rattles and bangs around the penthouse. He checks the fridge and the freezer and the medicine cabinet. He checks an ornate cigar box near the bar, and a shoebox under the bed. When he's done, all of Sam's missing parts are gathered on the kitchen counter. "Don't look at them," Sam croaks. He doesn't want Dean to see how dirty and messy he is.
"Up you go," Dean says, ignoring him. He gets an arm under Sam's shoulders and all but drags him to the kitchen, where he lays Sam out on the center island where the angel used to chop garlic. Sam's feet and hands dangle over the edges. "This is probably really unsanitary. You would totally be bitching about it if you weren't halfway to the hereafter." Dean's fingers clench around the med kit.
Sam's always been a little in love with Dean's face when he's stitching Sam up, the calm and focus. Like Dean is doing exactly what he's meant to do, at peace with the universe and himself until he has Sam righted again, insides on the inside and outsides on the out.
When Sam's put back together like a rag doll, he tries to sit up, but Dean pushes him back down. "One last thing." He unwinds the tattered cloth around Sam's midsection, and Sam shivers as Dean reaches into his chest. Dean's fingers wrap around his filthy heart so gently, cradle it. "Just gonna borrow this for a sec. Sit tight."
Sam stares at the ceiling and listens to water rushing in the pipes as Dean splashes in the sink. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry I wrecked it."
Dean turns with Sam's heart in his hands. It gleams in the light, clean and perfect. "Coulda done this ages ago," Dean grumps, but he's careful, reverent as he lowers the heart back where it belongs.
A crow takes flight from the hood when the Impala's engine rumbles to life. It caws as it flies a circle around the car, then departs. As the tires hit the smooth pavement of the highway, Sam's hand is pressed against his chest, feeling its beat. But this time so is Dean's, fingers laced with his. Dean's other hand taps a tha-thump on the steering wheel, and as he guns it out of town, they could be chasing the last rays of light on the horizon.