SPN FIC: The Devil and Samuel Winchester (Part 1 of 2)
Break out the Kleenex.
The story is complete -- the link to Part 2 is at the end of Part 1. And if the subject matter makes you afraid to read this -- trust me. Really. Trust me.
Characters: Sam and Dean and two others (naming them would be a spoiler)
Pairings: none
Rating: PG for language
Spoilers: AHBL Part 2
Length: 7,830 words
Dean's year is up.
The demon won, Sam thinks with an ache in his chest. The yellow-eyed son of a bitch who murdered their mother ended up killing all of them. The fifty years Dean bought for Sam at such a terrible price look bleak and empty, composed of nothing but the same aimless wandering from place to place that Dean would have done if Sam had stayed dead. So the bastard won. Wherever he is, if he’s anywhere, he must be laughing.
The Devil and Samuel Winchester
By Carol Davis
Really, there’s nothing left to be done.
Dad left them a year ago: left them in each other’s hands, the way he did so many times when the hunt was more important than staying with his sons. His hunt is over now, and Sam likes to think that Dad’s with Mom. Even if he’s not, he’s not coming back. He’s not going to hang around like Obi-Wan Kenobi, offering advice when it’s needed and sometimes when it’s not. He’s gone, and they’re alone, the two of them, he and Dean, just like it was when they were kids.
It used to be Dad who dragged them from place to place, in search of clues, in search of people to help. Now it’s Dean who’s almost frantic in his need to keep moving, keep hunting, keep cleaning up the mess they helped to make by not getting rid of Jake before he opened the devil’s gate. He’s run on pure adrenaline for almost a year, dropping back behind the wheel of the Impala the instant a job is over, ready to find the next chapter, the next target.
That was true until a couple of weeks ago.
Dean started to run down then. Not visibly so, at first. If Sam didn’t know his brother better than he knows his own heart, he wouldn’t have noticed the signs; they were that subtle. Eyes that closed for a moment as if the light was difficult to bear. The hand that drifted through Dean’s close-cropped hair, lingering against his skull for a second as if Dean was making sure he was still solid, still here. The furtive looks he stole to make sure Sam, too, was still here.
What really has caught Sam’s attention, what’s been less than subtle, is the change in what Dean eats. No more chili fries, no more hot dogs. No more handfuls of beer nuts gulped down in lieu of a real meal. What Dean has chosen without fail for the last couple of weeks is comfort food. Soup. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Oatmeal. Pudding.
He hasn’t had a beer - let alone anything harder - in almost two weeks. Instead, he drinks milk.
Milk, like when they were kids. He asks the waitresses for it with a beaming smile, as if he’s telling them he has some weird medical condition that requires a lot of calcium.
He hasn’t had a drink in two weeks. Hasn’t been drunk for over a month.
Hasn’t argued with Sam since…
Who knows. Sam can’t remember.
Eight nights ago, Sam got out of the car first when they pulled in to stop for some rest. Dean didn’t object; they’ve always taken turns going into the motel office to book a room. Without over-thinking it, Sam asked for a room with one bed, and he’s done the same thing at every stop since then. One bed, so there’s no chasm between them at night, so he can reach out to Dean if he needs to.
Three nights ago, he closed the space between them completely and spooned silently up against his brother the way Dean used to do when they were kids. He makes the space between them go away, wraps his left arm around Dean and rests his forehead against the back of Dean’s head. They’ve slept that way every night since then.
Last night was the last one.
Last night brought them into Minnesota.
This night has brought them back to Pastor Jim’s.
Jim Murphy has been gone for two years, murdered in his own church by a demon masquerading as a pretty girl. All his faith, all his study, all his confidence in his ability as a leader and a hunter and in the sigils and charms with which he decorated the house of God over which he presided, did him no good in the end. The church sat unused for a long time while the members of his flock wandered around stunned by the violent death of their pastor. More than one of them ventured the opinion that the place was cursed.
Of course, there’s no such thing as a curse. Not really. Jim Murphy was murdered by an intruder looking for…what? Money? Revenge?
The church is back in use now, but it’s Wednesday and there’s no one here. Sam checked: the new pastor is out of town at a conference. No one will be coming in to ask if they need advice, need help, need someone to listen.
The door is unlocked, because this is a small town, and it’s a house of God. All are welcome.
All, it seems, no matter what their intentions are.
A long time ago, when Sam and Dean were children, Jim Murphy told them about God and about demons; about kindness to your fellow man and about killing evil with silver. He fed them scrambled eggs and taught them to play gin rummy and explained to Dean that sex was really, really good when you truly loved the person you were with. He told them what “on the rag” meant and that saying that was rude; told them stories about the Vikings; sang an endless version of “American Pie” while he cleaned and stitched the gaping wound below John Winchester’s left arm.
He believed in God and Goodness, in the power of faith and trust, and in the end it did him no good.
But he believed.
And Sam believes. Sam wants very, very badly to believe.
It’s all he has left.
Dean went along with coming here, he told Sam, because it’s as good a place as any to wait. His original choice was the crossroads in South Dakota where he made the deal, but he gave that up when Sam refused to go there. When Sam told him that if Dean went to the crossroads by himself, Sam’s next destination would be the Grand Canyon.
Sam has a map. Sam loves maps.
Sam found a place where he could get a good running start in the Impala. Could get enough momentum built up that he’d get halfway across the canyon before gravity took over.
Dean gave in.
So they’re here now, in the church where they spent so many hours when they were kids. Almost all the pews have their names carved on the underside, courtesy of Dean’s pocketknife.
They’re here, and there’s nothing left to be done.
This is the last night.
Sam isn’t sure how these things work - whether the year is up at midnight, when the clock slips over into tomorrow, or if they’ve got until the exact time Dean sealed the deal. Either way, it’s not much time.
He’s made a nuisance of himself for a whole year, in libraries and old archives, on the phone with everyone he knew who might have a suggestion. He’s made new connections, a long list of them. A few of them he wishes he had never met, because they insisted on telling him things he didn’t want to hear. Didn’t need to hear. He doesn’t care that he upset the balance of things by taking Dean to Roy LeGrange to be healed a year and a half ago, doesn’t care that Dad upset it further by trading his soul for Dean’s life. He does care that Dean made this hideous deal in exchange for him - but Dean loves him and made him promise he wouldn’t be angry.
Dean loves him. Has always loved him.
He’s known that his whole life, even during the three years he spent trying to wall himself off at Stanford.
He hopes Dean knows how much Sam loves him in return.
No, more than that: hopes Dean believes it.
Dean won’t let him lay salt lines or goofer dust. Won’t let him draw sigils. That’s just postponing the inevitable. It wouldn’t buy them more than an hour or two anyway, and at this point there’s no solution left to try. Sam’s turned over every stone, the way Dad said he would when Dean lay dying after what Sam thinks of as “the accident.” He’s turned over every last stone, broken down every door, bullied information out of everyone who tried to withhold it.
There’s nothing left to be done.
And there’s no way to tell Dean that what he’s gone through for the last three hundred and sixty-five days, let alone what lies ahead, is a ridiculous overpayment for what he’s bought. Going to Hell so Sam can live another fifty years?
A part of Sam used to resent what he meant to his brother. He wants to think that’s no longer true, but he’s afraid it is. Now, though, he has a different motivation: he used to want a life for himself, and now he wants one for Dean. Not that acid trip Dean put together when the djinn got him, but a real, complete life. A home. Friends. Children, because Dean would kick ass as a father.
He wants Dean not to have been so completely tied to him that the only path open to him when Sam lay dead was to make that terrible deal.
The demon won, Sam thinks with an ache in his chest. The yellow-eyed son of a bitch who murdered their mother ended up killing all of them. The fifty years Dean bought for Sam at such a terrible price look bleak and empty, composed of nothing but the same aimless wandering from place to place that Dean would have done if Sam had stayed dead. So the bastard won.
Wherever he is, if he’s anywhere, he must be laughing.
Sam thinks of Jim Murphy standing beside him, in this room, in this church. Resting a warm hand on his shoulder. Saying “You have to trust, Sam.”
Trust what?
There’s nothing left to trust, very little left to believe.
Except that Dean loves him.
And that Dean, his big brother, his protector, the very, very badass Dean Winchester, is scared.
He’s sitting beside his brother now, on one of the pews that has their names carved underneath. They each have their hands folded as if it’s Sunday, as if they’re part of a crowd of people listening to Jim Murphy’s sermon. As if they’re neatly dressed, hair combed, teeth brushed, sitting in God’s house smelling like soap and fabric softener.
He can smell the fear all over his brother, smell it like an animal would.
Dean looks over at him and manages to work his mouth into a smile. He told Sam he would wait here by himself so that Sam wouldn’t have to watch.
Sam told him, very softly, “Fuck that.”
Their mother believed in angels. Jim Murphy believed in God’s mercy.
Their father believed in results.
They don’t know how much time they have. They know it isn’t much.
They both listen. Hear nothing. No scratching, no howling.
Sam reaches over and lays the palm of his hand against the back of Dean’s neck, skin against skin, curling his fingers to match the curve of Dean’s body. Dean leans into his touch and closes his eyes. He’s trembling, just a little.
Dean told his brother almost right away what the fine print of the deal was: that if Dean tried to welsh, Sam would drop dead. It made looking for the answer a lot more complicated; Sam had no idea how deep he could dig without flipping that switch. Or if the demon meant only that Dean himself couldn’t look for a way out, that someone else doing it for him would be fair play.
Either way, Sam found nothing. No answer. No way out.
Dean tries for another smile and Sam can barely see it through the tears that are welling up in his eyes. “I’ll go with you,” Sam says.
“What?” Dean squeaks. “No.”
“I mean it. I’ll go with you. They’ll take us both.”
“No,” Dean says again, and now there’s horror layered on top of his fear. “Sammy, no.” His eyes are wide as he pushes Sam away, backing into the corner of the pew as if that would make any difference when the hellhounds show up.
“You can’t -“
“Sarah,” Dean blurts out. “She likes you. She’s nice. You could -“
And that just snaps everything that’s in Sam. He explodes up from the bench like a jack in the box popping loose, stumbling, grabbing at the back of the pew in front of them to keep from falling right the hell over it. It takes him what seems like a long time to find his balance, to be able to stand up and look down at his brother.
“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?” Sam roars.
His voice bounces off the walls, echoes, pounds back at him. Dean gapes up at him, but he’s not yelling at Dean. He’s yelling at the One whose house this is: the One their mother believed in, that Jim Murphy believed in, and as near as Sam can tell did not one fucking thing to help either of them when push came to shove.
Dean doesn’t believe, says he doesn’t, but Sam doesn’t believe that. He believes Dean yearns for the angels their mother told him would watch over him as he slept.
Sam stumbles out of the pew and nearly faceplants himself on the scuffed carpet that runs along the center aisle. He wants to tear this church apart with his bare hands. It’s a lie, he thinks - all of it is a monumental lie. A scam. A tiny campfire built by savages afraid of the dark.
“You son of a BITCH,” he screams. “How much do you WANT?”
There is good, Jim Murphy told him. A balance in all things. He heard the same thing from his teachers, so many of them in so many places he couldn’t hope to connect names and faces, come up with a list of who they were. They’ve all begun to blend into each other, except for a few. It hurts him to think that the ones he remembers best are the ones who criticized, who found fault, that the kind and loving have begun to fade into an amorphous mass.
They taught him math, science, history. About positive and negative, in mathematics, in electrical charges. Black and white. Yin and yang. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Good and evil. Black and white.
He has seen no good. No real evidence of a Heavenly Father who might or might not be less flawed than John Winchester. In twenty-five years on this earth Sam has seen only the human heart.
And evil.
Evil that, more often than not, walks around wearing a human face.
“Show yourself, you bastard,” he snarls. “Or is it all just a lie? Are you there, at all? Do you just sit there and watch what’s going on like it’s a fucking football game? Is this interesting for you? Okay, I get that there’s a lot for you to keep an eye on - but we’ve been working for you our whole lives! Trying to save people, to make things better. They say you don’t hand out more than we can bear, so you sure must think we can carry the whole fucking world. We gave up our mother and our father, I gave up Jess. We gave up our home. Any chance we had for a decent life. We’ve got nothing. And, you know, maybe I asked for more than I deserved. Maybe I made demands. But him?”
He turns and jabs a finger in Dean’s direction like it’s a sword. “What about him? Huh? What about him?”
Dean’s head turns a little. There’s noise outside, but it might be the wind in the trees.
“I walked away,” Sam says. “I said ‘screw you’ to all of it and walked away. I didn’t care about helping people - I just wanted to be like everybody else. But him? He stayed. He did what he was told. And what does he get for that? He’s got nothing. He’s never asked for anything in his whole life - not really. He asked me to stay and I called him names. He wanted me to stay because all he had was me and Dad, and he ended up losing both of us. So he made a bad deal. Do you get that? He made a bad deal. He didn’t ask to be rich. He didn’t ask for things. He wanted me. He signed away everything he has for me.”
His vision streaks and shimmers again and he swipes hard at his eyes with his sleeve. “He made a mistake, damn you. He made a mistake.”
No one answers. Of course no one answers.
“Can’t you help him?” Sam howls, his voice breaking. “Can’t you stop this?”
No one answers.
He sits in a pew near the front of the church and cries for almost an hour.
There’s a pattering on the roof, but it’s only rain. They’ve been in this church a dozen times when it was raining and they both know what it sounds like. It’s a comforting sound, usually. Healing, in a way.
Sam and Dean have talked a lot this past year, mostly at night when the lights are off. It’s still Dean’s way of talking: using movies and music and women as metaphors for what he’s really thinking, but it’s easy to understand. He talks for hours, until it exhausts him. It’s like now, with time running so very short, he wants Sam to hear it all, wants nothing to be left unsaid.
He says, buried in Dean-speak, that he’s okay with this, that he’d do it again. That’s what he says, and it might be true on the face of it, but not underneath. While he’s working, he’s been badass Dean Winchester this whole last year. But when the work is done, when the lights are out, he doesn’t know where he’s going.
He’s afraid that it won’t be “lights out.”
He’s afraid of suffering.
Buried in Dean-speak, he says maybe he’s earned some of it. That he’s crapped things up somehow.
That’s bullshit, Sam thinks. It’s just bullshit. If Dean’s earned anything, it’s a chance to rest, to find peace. But does anyone get that? Or do the good just get screwed?
Maybe that’s what it all boils down to: the core of how very much this sucks. There’s evil, or there’s nothing. You can stop fighting and it’s lights out. For good, forever. Dad fought his way out of Hell, but he might not be with Mom now; both of them might be nowhere.
From the time he was old enough to understand cause and effect, Sam has wanted things to make sense. He has wanted to pound them into shape: not force a square peg into a round hole, but by sheer force of will turn the square peg into a round peg. He has insisted that one plus one equal two, that an action have an equal and opposite reaction.
He has said no fucking way to chaos.
To Dad. To Dad’s blind hunt for Moby-Dick, and to Dean’s slavish devotion to Dad.
It made no sense. It earned them nothing. For the longest time, he saw it that way. Called his father a drunk and his brother a drifter.
And at the same time he prayed for things to be right.
Every day, he has prayed.
Into a void, apparently.
The good get screwed and the bad just go on being bad. The useless and the selfish and the feckless drift along and accumulate what ought to belong to someone else, while the ones who ought to have earned something get nothing.
There’s no balance there.
No one who can set things right.
No one who’ll even listen.
But Jim Murphy asked him to have faith, and a scrap of faith is all he has left. Faith in yin and yang, in mathematics, in black and white.
And what the hell. It’s worth a try. He wanted to be an attorney, after all. Wanted the privilege of standing in front of a courtroom with the fate of someone, or something, resting in his hands. Thought he might be eloquent enough not to fail miserably. He glances over his shoulder at Dean, who is again sitting quietly in the pew halfway back, his hands folded in his lap, staring down at his boots, waiting. Sam wipes his eyes with his sleeve one more time, knits his fingers together, and rests his hands on the back of the pew in front of him.
“When we were little,” he says softly, “he would wash my face for me. I remember sitting on the edge of the tub, or on the toilet seat. He’d get the washcloth wet and put a lot of soap on it. It took him a while to figure out how much water was enough, because I remember the water dripping all over my pajamas. And sometimes he’d get soap in my eyes.” He pauses, then goes on. It’s hard to turn the memories into words, hard to turn his brother’s love into language when so much of it was silent. “I remember the time he worked raking leaves and mowing lawns to make some extra money, and he went around to garage sales to buy Christmas decorations because we were someplace warm. There was no snow, and Dad forgot it was December. So we wouldn’t have had Christmas, and Dean didn’t want it to be that way. I…I remember him holding me and saying, ‘It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay,’ when I…I don’t know. Fell down. Something. And I remember -“
He has to stop. “I remember the look on his face when I left.”
He can hear the rain stuttering against the roof. Hear a soft scratching that must be a branch rubbing against the shingles.
“Those other people,” he sighs. “The ones we found, who made the deal. That doctor, and the architect. They wanted things they didn’t earn. They got greedy. Dean didn’t do that. He’s never asked for anything.”
Dean is still looking at the floor. Maybe he’s praying. Maybe he figures it won’t hurt.
Maybe he’s reciting heavy metal lyrics in his head.
“Why?” Sam asks, barely above a whisper. “Why does he deserve to suffer for eternity because he loves me?”
There’s no answer. Just rain.
“Why?” Sam asks again. “Please, just tell me why.”
He thinks you heartless son of a bitch, but it’s fleeting, and he has to give in to thinking no one is listening, that no one has ever listened.
Long ago, on a rainy day, he and Dean crawled around on the floor in this church. He remembers lying on his back, stifling his giggles with both hands as Dean scratched their names into the wood on the bottoms of the pews.
Take me instead, he thinks, but cannot say it, because Dean didn’t survive the loss of him the first time.
They have so little time left.
His legs have no strength in them as he walks down the aisle to the pew halfway back and sits down beside his brother. He’s a messy cryer, always has been, and he knows there’s snot mixed in with the tears all over his chin; he’s smeared it all around his mouth, and his sinuses have plugged up so much he can barely breathe. Dean looks at him like Sam is the funniest thing he’s ever seen right before Sam embraces him the way he should have the day he left for Stanford.
He hasn’t looked at his watch for hours, but he knows it’s almost midnight. Dean made the deal around quarter to one, so maybe they’ve got a few minutes and maybe they’ve got an hour. Either way it’s not enough.
It’s not enough.
Take us both, Sam thinks. I can’t stay here. I can’t.
He won’t be alone. Bobby and Ellen are a couple of towns away, waiting. He’ll have a family of sorts.
But that’s not enough. It could never be enough.
From far away they hear something that sounds like howling.
Maybe it’s somebody’s dog.
Sam could say he’ll try to earn what Dean has given him, but there’s no way to achieve that kind of pinnacle; he’d have to be Mother Teresa a thousand times over. He’s just a man, flawed in as many ways as his father.
Flawed in so many more ways than his brother.
“Flawed in different ways, Sam.”
He looks past Dean’s shoulder. There, sitting at the far end of the pew, is Pastor Jim. He looks no older than he did the last time Sam saw him, which had to be almost ten years ago, and none the worse for wear. He’s smiling the way he did every time he set up a joke: him and the boys on one side, John Winchester on the other.
Funny how Dad never minded being the butt of one of Jim’s jokes.
The last time Sam had a dream he remembers, the demon was a part of it. He figures he must be dreaming now, because Jim is there. Not a spirit, not a vision; he’s there at the end of the pew. Jim smiles again, and it’s fond and wistful and teasing and…
And a goodbye.
Part 2 is here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/27170.html#cutid1
The story is complete -- the link to Part 2 is at the end of Part 1. And if the subject matter makes you afraid to read this -- trust me. Really. Trust me.
Characters: Sam and Dean and two others (naming them would be a spoiler)
Pairings: none
Rating: PG for language
Spoilers: AHBL Part 2
Length: 7,830 words
Dean's year is up.
The demon won, Sam thinks with an ache in his chest. The yellow-eyed son of a bitch who murdered their mother ended up killing all of them. The fifty years Dean bought for Sam at such a terrible price look bleak and empty, composed of nothing but the same aimless wandering from place to place that Dean would have done if Sam had stayed dead. So the bastard won. Wherever he is, if he’s anywhere, he must be laughing.
The Devil and Samuel Winchester
By Carol Davis
Really, there’s nothing left to be done.
Dad left them a year ago: left them in each other’s hands, the way he did so many times when the hunt was more important than staying with his sons. His hunt is over now, and Sam likes to think that Dad’s with Mom. Even if he’s not, he’s not coming back. He’s not going to hang around like Obi-Wan Kenobi, offering advice when it’s needed and sometimes when it’s not. He’s gone, and they’re alone, the two of them, he and Dean, just like it was when they were kids.
It used to be Dad who dragged them from place to place, in search of clues, in search of people to help. Now it’s Dean who’s almost frantic in his need to keep moving, keep hunting, keep cleaning up the mess they helped to make by not getting rid of Jake before he opened the devil’s gate. He’s run on pure adrenaline for almost a year, dropping back behind the wheel of the Impala the instant a job is over, ready to find the next chapter, the next target.
That was true until a couple of weeks ago.
Dean started to run down then. Not visibly so, at first. If Sam didn’t know his brother better than he knows his own heart, he wouldn’t have noticed the signs; they were that subtle. Eyes that closed for a moment as if the light was difficult to bear. The hand that drifted through Dean’s close-cropped hair, lingering against his skull for a second as if Dean was making sure he was still solid, still here. The furtive looks he stole to make sure Sam, too, was still here.
What really has caught Sam’s attention, what’s been less than subtle, is the change in what Dean eats. No more chili fries, no more hot dogs. No more handfuls of beer nuts gulped down in lieu of a real meal. What Dean has chosen without fail for the last couple of weeks is comfort food. Soup. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Oatmeal. Pudding.
He hasn’t had a beer - let alone anything harder - in almost two weeks. Instead, he drinks milk.
Milk, like when they were kids. He asks the waitresses for it with a beaming smile, as if he’s telling them he has some weird medical condition that requires a lot of calcium.
He hasn’t had a drink in two weeks. Hasn’t been drunk for over a month.
Hasn’t argued with Sam since…
Who knows. Sam can’t remember.
Eight nights ago, Sam got out of the car first when they pulled in to stop for some rest. Dean didn’t object; they’ve always taken turns going into the motel office to book a room. Without over-thinking it, Sam asked for a room with one bed, and he’s done the same thing at every stop since then. One bed, so there’s no chasm between them at night, so he can reach out to Dean if he needs to.
Three nights ago, he closed the space between them completely and spooned silently up against his brother the way Dean used to do when they were kids. He makes the space between them go away, wraps his left arm around Dean and rests his forehead against the back of Dean’s head. They’ve slept that way every night since then.
Last night was the last one.
Last night brought them into Minnesota.
This night has brought them back to Pastor Jim’s.
Jim Murphy has been gone for two years, murdered in his own church by a demon masquerading as a pretty girl. All his faith, all his study, all his confidence in his ability as a leader and a hunter and in the sigils and charms with which he decorated the house of God over which he presided, did him no good in the end. The church sat unused for a long time while the members of his flock wandered around stunned by the violent death of their pastor. More than one of them ventured the opinion that the place was cursed.
Of course, there’s no such thing as a curse. Not really. Jim Murphy was murdered by an intruder looking for…what? Money? Revenge?
The church is back in use now, but it’s Wednesday and there’s no one here. Sam checked: the new pastor is out of town at a conference. No one will be coming in to ask if they need advice, need help, need someone to listen.
The door is unlocked, because this is a small town, and it’s a house of God. All are welcome.
All, it seems, no matter what their intentions are.
A long time ago, when Sam and Dean were children, Jim Murphy told them about God and about demons; about kindness to your fellow man and about killing evil with silver. He fed them scrambled eggs and taught them to play gin rummy and explained to Dean that sex was really, really good when you truly loved the person you were with. He told them what “on the rag” meant and that saying that was rude; told them stories about the Vikings; sang an endless version of “American Pie” while he cleaned and stitched the gaping wound below John Winchester’s left arm.
He believed in God and Goodness, in the power of faith and trust, and in the end it did him no good.
But he believed.
And Sam believes. Sam wants very, very badly to believe.
It’s all he has left.
Dean went along with coming here, he told Sam, because it’s as good a place as any to wait. His original choice was the crossroads in South Dakota where he made the deal, but he gave that up when Sam refused to go there. When Sam told him that if Dean went to the crossroads by himself, Sam’s next destination would be the Grand Canyon.
Sam has a map. Sam loves maps.
Sam found a place where he could get a good running start in the Impala. Could get enough momentum built up that he’d get halfway across the canyon before gravity took over.
Dean gave in.
So they’re here now, in the church where they spent so many hours when they were kids. Almost all the pews have their names carved on the underside, courtesy of Dean’s pocketknife.
They’re here, and there’s nothing left to be done.
This is the last night.
Sam isn’t sure how these things work - whether the year is up at midnight, when the clock slips over into tomorrow, or if they’ve got until the exact time Dean sealed the deal. Either way, it’s not much time.
He’s made a nuisance of himself for a whole year, in libraries and old archives, on the phone with everyone he knew who might have a suggestion. He’s made new connections, a long list of them. A few of them he wishes he had never met, because they insisted on telling him things he didn’t want to hear. Didn’t need to hear. He doesn’t care that he upset the balance of things by taking Dean to Roy LeGrange to be healed a year and a half ago, doesn’t care that Dad upset it further by trading his soul for Dean’s life. He does care that Dean made this hideous deal in exchange for him - but Dean loves him and made him promise he wouldn’t be angry.
Dean loves him. Has always loved him.
He’s known that his whole life, even during the three years he spent trying to wall himself off at Stanford.
He hopes Dean knows how much Sam loves him in return.
No, more than that: hopes Dean believes it.
Dean won’t let him lay salt lines or goofer dust. Won’t let him draw sigils. That’s just postponing the inevitable. It wouldn’t buy them more than an hour or two anyway, and at this point there’s no solution left to try. Sam’s turned over every stone, the way Dad said he would when Dean lay dying after what Sam thinks of as “the accident.” He’s turned over every last stone, broken down every door, bullied information out of everyone who tried to withhold it.
There’s nothing left to be done.
And there’s no way to tell Dean that what he’s gone through for the last three hundred and sixty-five days, let alone what lies ahead, is a ridiculous overpayment for what he’s bought. Going to Hell so Sam can live another fifty years?
A part of Sam used to resent what he meant to his brother. He wants to think that’s no longer true, but he’s afraid it is. Now, though, he has a different motivation: he used to want a life for himself, and now he wants one for Dean. Not that acid trip Dean put together when the djinn got him, but a real, complete life. A home. Friends. Children, because Dean would kick ass as a father.
He wants Dean not to have been so completely tied to him that the only path open to him when Sam lay dead was to make that terrible deal.
The demon won, Sam thinks with an ache in his chest. The yellow-eyed son of a bitch who murdered their mother ended up killing all of them. The fifty years Dean bought for Sam at such a terrible price look bleak and empty, composed of nothing but the same aimless wandering from place to place that Dean would have done if Sam had stayed dead. So the bastard won.
Wherever he is, if he’s anywhere, he must be laughing.
Sam thinks of Jim Murphy standing beside him, in this room, in this church. Resting a warm hand on his shoulder. Saying “You have to trust, Sam.”
Trust what?
There’s nothing left to trust, very little left to believe.
Except that Dean loves him.
And that Dean, his big brother, his protector, the very, very badass Dean Winchester, is scared.
He’s sitting beside his brother now, on one of the pews that has their names carved underneath. They each have their hands folded as if it’s Sunday, as if they’re part of a crowd of people listening to Jim Murphy’s sermon. As if they’re neatly dressed, hair combed, teeth brushed, sitting in God’s house smelling like soap and fabric softener.
He can smell the fear all over his brother, smell it like an animal would.
Dean looks over at him and manages to work his mouth into a smile. He told Sam he would wait here by himself so that Sam wouldn’t have to watch.
Sam told him, very softly, “Fuck that.”
Their mother believed in angels. Jim Murphy believed in God’s mercy.
Their father believed in results.
They don’t know how much time they have. They know it isn’t much.
They both listen. Hear nothing. No scratching, no howling.
Sam reaches over and lays the palm of his hand against the back of Dean’s neck, skin against skin, curling his fingers to match the curve of Dean’s body. Dean leans into his touch and closes his eyes. He’s trembling, just a little.
Dean told his brother almost right away what the fine print of the deal was: that if Dean tried to welsh, Sam would drop dead. It made looking for the answer a lot more complicated; Sam had no idea how deep he could dig without flipping that switch. Or if the demon meant only that Dean himself couldn’t look for a way out, that someone else doing it for him would be fair play.
Either way, Sam found nothing. No answer. No way out.
Dean tries for another smile and Sam can barely see it through the tears that are welling up in his eyes. “I’ll go with you,” Sam says.
“What?” Dean squeaks. “No.”
“I mean it. I’ll go with you. They’ll take us both.”
“No,” Dean says again, and now there’s horror layered on top of his fear. “Sammy, no.” His eyes are wide as he pushes Sam away, backing into the corner of the pew as if that would make any difference when the hellhounds show up.
“You can’t -“
“Sarah,” Dean blurts out. “She likes you. She’s nice. You could -“
And that just snaps everything that’s in Sam. He explodes up from the bench like a jack in the box popping loose, stumbling, grabbing at the back of the pew in front of them to keep from falling right the hell over it. It takes him what seems like a long time to find his balance, to be able to stand up and look down at his brother.
“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?” Sam roars.
His voice bounces off the walls, echoes, pounds back at him. Dean gapes up at him, but he’s not yelling at Dean. He’s yelling at the One whose house this is: the One their mother believed in, that Jim Murphy believed in, and as near as Sam can tell did not one fucking thing to help either of them when push came to shove.
Dean doesn’t believe, says he doesn’t, but Sam doesn’t believe that. He believes Dean yearns for the angels their mother told him would watch over him as he slept.
Sam stumbles out of the pew and nearly faceplants himself on the scuffed carpet that runs along the center aisle. He wants to tear this church apart with his bare hands. It’s a lie, he thinks - all of it is a monumental lie. A scam. A tiny campfire built by savages afraid of the dark.
“You son of a BITCH,” he screams. “How much do you WANT?”
There is good, Jim Murphy told him. A balance in all things. He heard the same thing from his teachers, so many of them in so many places he couldn’t hope to connect names and faces, come up with a list of who they were. They’ve all begun to blend into each other, except for a few. It hurts him to think that the ones he remembers best are the ones who criticized, who found fault, that the kind and loving have begun to fade into an amorphous mass.
They taught him math, science, history. About positive and negative, in mathematics, in electrical charges. Black and white. Yin and yang. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Good and evil. Black and white.
He has seen no good. No real evidence of a Heavenly Father who might or might not be less flawed than John Winchester. In twenty-five years on this earth Sam has seen only the human heart.
And evil.
Evil that, more often than not, walks around wearing a human face.
“Show yourself, you bastard,” he snarls. “Or is it all just a lie? Are you there, at all? Do you just sit there and watch what’s going on like it’s a fucking football game? Is this interesting for you? Okay, I get that there’s a lot for you to keep an eye on - but we’ve been working for you our whole lives! Trying to save people, to make things better. They say you don’t hand out more than we can bear, so you sure must think we can carry the whole fucking world. We gave up our mother and our father, I gave up Jess. We gave up our home. Any chance we had for a decent life. We’ve got nothing. And, you know, maybe I asked for more than I deserved. Maybe I made demands. But him?”
He turns and jabs a finger in Dean’s direction like it’s a sword. “What about him? Huh? What about him?”
Dean’s head turns a little. There’s noise outside, but it might be the wind in the trees.
“I walked away,” Sam says. “I said ‘screw you’ to all of it and walked away. I didn’t care about helping people - I just wanted to be like everybody else. But him? He stayed. He did what he was told. And what does he get for that? He’s got nothing. He’s never asked for anything in his whole life - not really. He asked me to stay and I called him names. He wanted me to stay because all he had was me and Dad, and he ended up losing both of us. So he made a bad deal. Do you get that? He made a bad deal. He didn’t ask to be rich. He didn’t ask for things. He wanted me. He signed away everything he has for me.”
His vision streaks and shimmers again and he swipes hard at his eyes with his sleeve. “He made a mistake, damn you. He made a mistake.”
No one answers. Of course no one answers.
“Can’t you help him?” Sam howls, his voice breaking. “Can’t you stop this?”
No one answers.
He sits in a pew near the front of the church and cries for almost an hour.
There’s a pattering on the roof, but it’s only rain. They’ve been in this church a dozen times when it was raining and they both know what it sounds like. It’s a comforting sound, usually. Healing, in a way.
Sam and Dean have talked a lot this past year, mostly at night when the lights are off. It’s still Dean’s way of talking: using movies and music and women as metaphors for what he’s really thinking, but it’s easy to understand. He talks for hours, until it exhausts him. It’s like now, with time running so very short, he wants Sam to hear it all, wants nothing to be left unsaid.
He says, buried in Dean-speak, that he’s okay with this, that he’d do it again. That’s what he says, and it might be true on the face of it, but not underneath. While he’s working, he’s been badass Dean Winchester this whole last year. But when the work is done, when the lights are out, he doesn’t know where he’s going.
He’s afraid that it won’t be “lights out.”
He’s afraid of suffering.
Buried in Dean-speak, he says maybe he’s earned some of it. That he’s crapped things up somehow.
That’s bullshit, Sam thinks. It’s just bullshit. If Dean’s earned anything, it’s a chance to rest, to find peace. But does anyone get that? Or do the good just get screwed?
Maybe that’s what it all boils down to: the core of how very much this sucks. There’s evil, or there’s nothing. You can stop fighting and it’s lights out. For good, forever. Dad fought his way out of Hell, but he might not be with Mom now; both of them might be nowhere.
From the time he was old enough to understand cause and effect, Sam has wanted things to make sense. He has wanted to pound them into shape: not force a square peg into a round hole, but by sheer force of will turn the square peg into a round peg. He has insisted that one plus one equal two, that an action have an equal and opposite reaction.
He has said no fucking way to chaos.
To Dad. To Dad’s blind hunt for Moby-Dick, and to Dean’s slavish devotion to Dad.
It made no sense. It earned them nothing. For the longest time, he saw it that way. Called his father a drunk and his brother a drifter.
And at the same time he prayed for things to be right.
Every day, he has prayed.
Into a void, apparently.
The good get screwed and the bad just go on being bad. The useless and the selfish and the feckless drift along and accumulate what ought to belong to someone else, while the ones who ought to have earned something get nothing.
There’s no balance there.
No one who can set things right.
No one who’ll even listen.
But Jim Murphy asked him to have faith, and a scrap of faith is all he has left. Faith in yin and yang, in mathematics, in black and white.
And what the hell. It’s worth a try. He wanted to be an attorney, after all. Wanted the privilege of standing in front of a courtroom with the fate of someone, or something, resting in his hands. Thought he might be eloquent enough not to fail miserably. He glances over his shoulder at Dean, who is again sitting quietly in the pew halfway back, his hands folded in his lap, staring down at his boots, waiting. Sam wipes his eyes with his sleeve one more time, knits his fingers together, and rests his hands on the back of the pew in front of him.
“When we were little,” he says softly, “he would wash my face for me. I remember sitting on the edge of the tub, or on the toilet seat. He’d get the washcloth wet and put a lot of soap on it. It took him a while to figure out how much water was enough, because I remember the water dripping all over my pajamas. And sometimes he’d get soap in my eyes.” He pauses, then goes on. It’s hard to turn the memories into words, hard to turn his brother’s love into language when so much of it was silent. “I remember the time he worked raking leaves and mowing lawns to make some extra money, and he went around to garage sales to buy Christmas decorations because we were someplace warm. There was no snow, and Dad forgot it was December. So we wouldn’t have had Christmas, and Dean didn’t want it to be that way. I…I remember him holding me and saying, ‘It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay,’ when I…I don’t know. Fell down. Something. And I remember -“
He has to stop. “I remember the look on his face when I left.”
He can hear the rain stuttering against the roof. Hear a soft scratching that must be a branch rubbing against the shingles.
“Those other people,” he sighs. “The ones we found, who made the deal. That doctor, and the architect. They wanted things they didn’t earn. They got greedy. Dean didn’t do that. He’s never asked for anything.”
Dean is still looking at the floor. Maybe he’s praying. Maybe he figures it won’t hurt.
Maybe he’s reciting heavy metal lyrics in his head.
“Why?” Sam asks, barely above a whisper. “Why does he deserve to suffer for eternity because he loves me?”
There’s no answer. Just rain.
“Why?” Sam asks again. “Please, just tell me why.”
He thinks you heartless son of a bitch, but it’s fleeting, and he has to give in to thinking no one is listening, that no one has ever listened.
Long ago, on a rainy day, he and Dean crawled around on the floor in this church. He remembers lying on his back, stifling his giggles with both hands as Dean scratched their names into the wood on the bottoms of the pews.
Take me instead, he thinks, but cannot say it, because Dean didn’t survive the loss of him the first time.
They have so little time left.
His legs have no strength in them as he walks down the aisle to the pew halfway back and sits down beside his brother. He’s a messy cryer, always has been, and he knows there’s snot mixed in with the tears all over his chin; he’s smeared it all around his mouth, and his sinuses have plugged up so much he can barely breathe. Dean looks at him like Sam is the funniest thing he’s ever seen right before Sam embraces him the way he should have the day he left for Stanford.
He hasn’t looked at his watch for hours, but he knows it’s almost midnight. Dean made the deal around quarter to one, so maybe they’ve got a few minutes and maybe they’ve got an hour. Either way it’s not enough.
It’s not enough.
Take us both, Sam thinks. I can’t stay here. I can’t.
He won’t be alone. Bobby and Ellen are a couple of towns away, waiting. He’ll have a family of sorts.
But that’s not enough. It could never be enough.
From far away they hear something that sounds like howling.
Maybe it’s somebody’s dog.
Sam could say he’ll try to earn what Dean has given him, but there’s no way to achieve that kind of pinnacle; he’d have to be Mother Teresa a thousand times over. He’s just a man, flawed in as many ways as his father.
Flawed in so many more ways than his brother.
“Flawed in different ways, Sam.”
He looks past Dean’s shoulder. There, sitting at the far end of the pew, is Pastor Jim. He looks no older than he did the last time Sam saw him, which had to be almost ten years ago, and none the worse for wear. He’s smiling the way he did every time he set up a joke: him and the boys on one side, John Winchester on the other.
Funny how Dad never minded being the butt of one of Jim’s jokes.
The last time Sam had a dream he remembers, the demon was a part of it. He figures he must be dreaming now, because Jim is there. Not a spirit, not a vision; he’s there at the end of the pew. Jim smiles again, and it’s fond and wistful and teasing and…
And a goodbye.
Part 2 is here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/27170.html#cutid1