FIC POST: "Dear Darkness" part 2/6 (Supernatural)
Title: Dear Darkness
[ PART I]
Author: Sara (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Sam/Dean, Castiel, Balthazar (briefly), Bobby
Rating: hard R (eventually)
Summary: With a little support from Cas that comes in a strange form, Sam may be able to keep his memories of the cage suppressed. But everything his soulless self lived through are memories he's now stuck with, including some things Dean wasn't prepared for him to have to find out about.
Dean and his dad happened to be working a case in California around Sam's twentieth birthday. If John realized this and thought at all about the coming date-which, of course he did-he didn't say anything about it, naturally.
On the day before, Dean was wiping an encrusting of rock salt off his boots after they'd just finished the job and made it back to their motel room when his dad got a call from a friend in New Mexico. He was hunting something that John had a lot more experience with and thought he could probably use some help taking care of it. It was sure to be nothing more than a two-man job and to only take a couple days once John got there, so he took off on his own later that night, telling Dean he might as well stick around there in Vallejo and catch some R&R until they met up again later.
Once he was left alone in the motel room, the question scratched in the back of his mind of whether or not his dad expected he would probably try to visit Sam. But he didn't know why he should care what he thought about it, if he thought about it. He didn't care. Right?
He called Sam at midnight. Said "Hey, happy birthday, man" and he'd had no idea what to expect but it was only somewhat awkward, and only at first. Sam said he'd just come back from a night out with a couple friends and he sounded like he was in a good mood.
"Some friends, huh?" he asked. "How hot is she?"
Sam's laughter was a softly brushing thing against his ear, miles away yet so palpable and near in its familiarity to him. "You are so predictable," he answered, nothing in his voice but fondness and a smile Dean wished he could see.
So then he mentioned he was in the state not far from him, possibly exaggerating just a little how conveniently close to Stanford he was, and before he knew how it happened they'd made some vague and spontaneous plans for him to come see him the next evening.
He had expected he would have to call Sam once he reached his building and when he got there, laxly approaching the latest time he'd said he would probably make it, he was a little surprised to find him actually waiting outside for him. He was just standing out on the steps with his hands dug in his pockets, without even a book bag or anything with him. When Dean approached, he smiled at him in a slowly relaxing and warming way, like he must have had time since their conversation on the phone to have some nervous doubts about whether this was such a good idea but couldn't have realized how good it would be just to see him again until they were actually face-to-face. Dean figured his own face was showing the same kind of relief as he found he literally couldn't not grin back in response.
If he had to describe it, he couldn't have put his finger on exactly how Sam had changed in the past couple years, but almost everything about him was just slightly off somehow and not quite like he remembered. He'd grown even taller, filled out more in frame, and somehow just had a bigger presence literally and figuratively that seemed to fill and overwhelm Dean's view at every moment. He seemed less intense and constantly focused, softened some around the edges and generally more at ease. When Dean gave him a brief and loose hug, it even seemed that he smelled a little different. He was so of this place, settled comfortably with the innocent civilians and collecting a layer of the local dust.
As they hung out in his dorm room and then walked around town talking about what was new, which was everything, Sam would speak in this so casually certain and hopeful way about things like some crazy-sophisticated biology class with a professor everyone loved that he'd wanted to take this year but couldn't get into. Hearing all of this stuff firing off his tongue, Dean could only think of how ridiculously in charge of everything in life he sounded and how weird and unknown to him that was. He'd never made any kind of big and specific decisions like that in his life and would never even know where to start looking at a course catalog, and how the hell was it anyway that Sammy was so different he'd had the perspective to wake up one day and think about not just sausage-or-bacon but I want to leave where I am and see palm trees instead, I want to go to this college, I want pre-law, I want this kind of salary, to feed this kind of dog one day.
The more Sam talked this way, it made him sound kind of self-important and full of himself, honestly, but Dean knew that could only be how it seemed to him as the dumb outsider. Yeah, he was an outsider looking in on his brother's life now and he could tell Sam was just trying to find things to talk about that wouldn't be too awkward, that was all. The irony.
Maybe it stung a little to see all of it right in front of him. His brother's new life he was making for himself, the whole strange otherness about him because of the time he'd spent out of the hunting world and the differences in him that were hard to adjust to. But he'd been quietly nursing some bitterness about this for a long time without even seeing him, and now that he was here and it looked like Sam really was a lot happier, it actually kind of made it okay. He could accept it enough for now to just enjoy being here today, at least. Dean couldn't help still feeling a sense of loss for the brother he'd once had always by his side before Sam got his own life. But Sam had built all of this for himself out of fucking nothing, pursued his own path with no encouragement from anyone and only his own stubborn determination, and now he was this almost entirely new person with a dorm filled with only his own stuff and lots of friends despite never having been taught how to make them. Sam was his own man now, and a part of him knew that was reason to feel proud of him, not something to regret.
"My God you're rusty," he remarked later as they were shooting pool at a bar and Sam had just missed his third pocket in a row. "You aren't even making it any fun for me to kick your ass."
"I was never as good as you," Sam said with a shrug, watching him smoothly hit a ball into a corner pocket.
"Yeah, but you were better than this," he said as Sam leaned over and aimed for the solid yellow. "I taught you better than this."
"Quit distracting me. It's my birthday, you better let me win."
"How, by just missing? At the rate you're putting them in, we'd be here all night."
"Bite me," Sam said, though he seemed unable to stop grinning a little, just as he'd started acting kind of silly with him all night. Unfocused, distracted, high on nothing.
Dean was feeling it, too. Somehow in this place that had become Sam's escape from their family freak show, it actually felt like all the monsters were far away. He wasn't even thinking about hunting.
After they went to sit at the bar for a while, Sam was on the second beer Dean had bought him when he finally had to ask. In a quiet and delicately approaching kind of voice he said, "Does Dad know you're here?"
He ran a thumb up and down his glass, making lines in the condensation. "I'm sure he'll put it together," he answered simply. "You know Dad. He knows everything I do, sooner or later."
"Yeah...I can't say I miss that." Sam seemed to be taking care not to sound too disdainful.
He shrugged. "Whatever, with Dad it kinda beats having to talk about everything, so I guess it suits us fine that he can assume almost everything on his own. And it's not like he actively stalks me, he can't help it."
"Uh-huh," Sam said doubtfully with a raised eyebrow.
"Seriously! It's his job to know how to put things together and read people. He just doesn't miss anything."
Sam shook his head slowly with that in mind, actually smiling a bit. A faint and dry kind of smile, but still. "I remember how freaky it used to be sometimes, how easily he could tell if you were lying."
Dean let out a single light laugh, grinning lazily at specific memories the comment drew up. The moment seemed to perceptibly pass, and he knew they wouldn't mention him again.
Later in the night they'd moved on to a different bar where they could still get a bite to eat past 11:00. They were picking at the last remains of food in the grease-polished bottoms of their meal baskets, Dean bobbing his head lightly in approval of the Animals song pouring out of the jukebox.
"What were you up to in the area anyway?" Sam asked, reaching across the table to take some of Dean's fries. He'd actually been convinced to have a couple shots with him by then and was on his sixth beer, seeming to sag more and more heavily in his seat by the minute.
"Just a routine haunting, you know," Dean said, thinking it might not be best to elaborate.
"Did you meet the spirit of a Zodiac victim or something?"
"Nah, nothing that exciting. Just a teenager who threw himself in front of a car in '66 and kept showing up as a death echo on the same road the same day every year. Caused at least eight crashes over the years from freaking out drivers."
"Yeah, I can imagine. Shit. Easy enough to get rid of?"
Dean nodded. "Nice clean burial. The hardest part was just getting detailed accounts. People will tell the police or the papers one thing, you know, and then start doubting themselves later and decide they must have been seeing things or just got a prank played on them. We nearly turned around and left the town assuming there was either nothing there or nothing we could dig up..."
Sam's expression was attentive and impassive as he listened, but he started feeling a little ridiculous and shook his head.
"Whatever, I know this can't really be the kind of thing you want to talk about or...think about," he dismissed with a wave of his hand.
Sam shrugged, draining the last inch of gold in the bottom of his glass. "Hell, I don't care...That was my life, too, wasn't it? And I can't talk about it with anyone here."
Something halfway clicked in Dean's head then, an inelegantly whittled-out fragment of realization. How Sam had sounded on the phone the night before, how noticeably laid-back and content he seemed now. He considered, just fleetingly, if it wasn't just the changes of this new life molding around him so agreeably that he was seeing, but also in part just the way Sam was doing at this isolated point in time. If his unexpected call last night hadn't simply caught Sam at a good time but was actually the reason he'd sounded happy on the phone. If he was so relaxed and comfortable today because it was the first time in two years he'd been in the company of someone he didn't have to constantly pretend with. The only someone he didn't have to pretend with and apparently didn't resent too much to even think about talking to again...
Sam was now looking down at Dean's also empty glass in thought. He smiled a little and broke the seasoning silence asking, "Dude...where you planning to crash anyway?"
He was obviously recognizing that Dean wasn't in any condition to go anywhere else tonight. He hadn't really thought about it yet. "The car, I guess," he said with a shrug.
"Hm. 'Kay..."
"...What?"
Sam, always the damn overachiever, was still using school housing because he was staying there over the summer taking some extra classes. The whole campus was sleepy and quiet, most of the students gone back to families they'd missed and places they called home, and there were so few residents in Sam's building that they saw nobody at all this time they went in and back up to his room. He had his whole half of the floor to himself, in fact. Dean wondered if that got kind of depressing, but they were now feeling all the drinks they'd had pretty heavily and had fallen into a tired silence, so he stayed quiet and didn't ask.
Because Sam wasn't sharing his room, he'd moved both of the tiny dorm beds together to form one that was probably just big enough to fit his whole length if he lied across it diagonally. As soon as they came in, Sam tossed his keys onto the desk with an exhausted sigh and didn't bother to turn on the light before immediately sinking down onto the bed. Dean followed and sat down next to him, just automatically gravitating toward the nearest place he could get off his feet for a moment. He leaned back on his elbows and gave a lazy look around the room.
"Home sweet home, huh?" he murmured softly.
"Heh," Sam said, a short and dark-sounding laugh. "Well. Beats the car..."
Or motel rooms, Dean heard.
They both lied back, shifting around awkwardly until they were both more or less stretched across the block of two mattresses. When Sam settled down to stay, brushing his hair out of his face as he put his head down on a pillow, he was lying on his side facing Dean. Then, like he still couldn't quite relax and not move, he reached his hand around to the back of Dean's neck. He felt the brush of his fingers against his skin as he tucked in the tag of his shirt that had been sticking out. Sam's hand heavily dragged over his shoulder as he drew it back away, then lowered back down to the mattress where it sat still closer to Dean than himself.
Dean didn't know or even think about why he'd started breathing harder than he should have been while just lying still. Or why something was holding him back from looking Sam in the eye right then. But then he did look up, couldn't help it, and they did meet eyes. The look in Sam's was so tired and soft and resigned, yet sharp somehow in the way they were fixed on the point near enough to be just visible that was him.
Sam licked his top lip absently and then his lips parted open, drawing in a slow breath as if in anticipation, which pulled Dean's eyes down to the faint outline of his mouth in the covering dimness. When Dean turned his body closer into his, the simple but world-shifting movement toward him was like the automatic answer to a question Sam hadn't asked. He hadn't even meant to move but it was done, their faces nuzzling tentatively a moment as they found the angle almost blindly in the darkness, like silently stirring animals in the night following just scent and instinct. And as if he was grabbing a slippery fish right out of water as it brushed by, getting a dart pinned down at the right split second in the dead-center of impossible, Dean closed his eyes and kissed him.
Sam pressed against him even closer and then Dean felt him gently touching his neck again, fingers brushing so lightly over the sensitive skin in a way that sent a tiny shiver through him. They were kissing languidly and sloppily, breathing loudly, breathing into each other. Sam gave a deep satisfied hum in his throat, the sound a reverberating and softly beckoning grind against Dean's chest where his heart was starting to get worked up enough he could feel his own pulse.
He reached under Sam's shirt and smoothed his fingers over tight muscle and warm skin, exploring the planes of his back with his hands and holding him as tightly as ever as Sam started trailing warm kisses down his neck. Meanwhile Sam's hands were creeping downward and then working at the fly of Dean's jeans.
Sam. Sam smelled like sun, like neat green lawns flushing bright with color under its rays, and like something else that couldn't be identified at all. His voice didn't sound like it had when he was sixteen and this room where they were was like no place at all, not known to him so just indistinct darkness all around.
So there was nothing familiar to focus on and sharpen around, nothing near enough to make his skin raise and bring him out of it, as if this could all be some dream. Sam had never answered the phone, as if he would, as if this could ever, them, like this. And when Sam reached down into his boxers and his hand closed around him in a first light tug, Dean just breathed in sharply and snapped still for an instant, his whole body jerking in the first reaction. Then he closed his eyes again with a low moan as Sam kept stroking him slowly, an obstructive black curtain falling over his mind.
Their mouths met again, opening and wet and warm, melding first with relaxed and coaxing movements of their tongues and then a more fervent and insatiable pressure. After a blur of time passing Dean was shuddering, all the indistinct shapes trembling, and his final weak groan came out buried against the mouth still covering his as he was delivered with a last firm stroke that made his vision bloom into utter blankness. He went loose and still, a puppet cut from its strings, and knew nothing more.
Before he opened his eyes in the morning, he remembered where he was because he could hear Sam's breathing and knew the sound instantly. That one thing about him was still recognizable, and it sounded much too close, and oh...
He made himself open his eyes. Sam was curled in close to him, his head tucked under his chin. His hand was still in Dean's pants, partially at least, a few of his fingers hooked inside the open zipper where they'd just dropped heavily as they both passed out.
Dean drew in a deep, tense breath. He turned away from Sam, rolling out of the bed, and stood up on clumsy and weak feet. Facing away from the sight of him, he zipped up his jeans, closed his eyes and rubbed them with the balls of his hands until he saw spots. Then he went to the door and walked out, got away, dragging himself down the hall barefoot to get to the bathroom.
His hands were shaking as he went to a sink and turned on the faucet. He splashed his face repeatedly with cold water and then pulled his shirt up to dab himself dry. For a few seconds he stood there leaning over with his hands gripping the sink, and then something started collapsing in him so heavily it was like he couldn't move at first...
"You're with me, you're safe."
It all settled and registered unavoidably, a sharp twist in his stomach. He turned fast to dart into the nearest stall, throwing the door open with a bang that echoed desolately in the too-empty and too-quiet building, and he practically fell to the floor by the toilet just before he threw up.
Hey happy birthday, listen I'm not far from you right now see I can be happy for you can act normal too. Like some jackass. Then grab back on too tight or whatever the hell it was, so much he might as well have shoved him back away, then remind him...
You made this happen, a voice pounded through his pulse as he went back to the room to grab his stuff. Let them get twisted up all wrong somehow, he didn't know. His head was burning white-hot with the effort of pushing it away and trying to understand it all at once. He'd made Sam think he wanted it somehow, not acted right with him, never had, or something. Maybe needed some new kind of claim on him now that he was not even like part of his family anymore, slipping farther from reach all the time, but God he hadn't wanted...
He wanted things to go back to the way they used to be. He just wanted Sam to be thirteen again instead of this new thing that was deep-voiced and broad-shouldered and confusing.
But Sam had left, and things weren't going to go back to like before. The night he and John had had that fight about college and he'd left, for Dean it hadn't really sunk in right away that he was gone. For a while he kept thinking it had to just be Sam's ridiculous and extreme way of rebelling and it couldn't be what he really wanted, that he'd change his mind soon enough and come back. Then the months had gradually gnawed away at that hope until Fuck him anyway was a raw and stinging tattoo of repeating words in the back of his mind that stayed stuck there to block access to any other thoughts of him, which almost never worked.
This was different. It felt final. It felt like he had to keep himself physically moving or else the shock would completely control him and he might get sick again.
So he kept his hands busy and moving as he looked at Sam one last time, still asleep just as he'd left him. He took Sam's shoes off his feet and drew his blanket up over him because it was what he should have been doing last night, taking care of him, and that was what he would be doing here in the last few minutes he spent breathing the same air as his brother for what he knew would be a very long time.
He still looked happy somehow, even while asleep. How was that possible?
It was a three-block walk to the spot where Dean had parked the Impala. The bright summer sun slowly burned the memory off of his skin as he steadily made his way there, and by the time he was driving away with the loud radio stimulating him into finer consciousness, it was easier to feel as if it hadn't actually been real.
He drove straight back to Vallejo and checked back into the same motel. He requested the same room he and his dad had been staying in before even though it was just him now. When John finished his hunt in New Mexico and called to ask where he was, he'd be watching TV with a beer in hand and his shirt collecting crumbs, planted firmly on one of the beds as if he never left.
Sam sleeps in for most of the morning again and Dean spends it outside helping Bobby work on a truck he's fixing up for somebody. Later after Sam gets up, Bobby makes them grilled cheese and potato wedges like he used to sometimes when they were kids. He puts on his stupid apron and everything. There must be some vague and perhaps not completely intentional meaning in the gesture of him fixing them comfort food and something they all remember from a long time ago now that they're all back together and it's still kind of impossible to believe, but Dean and Sam both know better than to acknowledge it.
Smelling the food cooking makes Dean so hungry that he holds off on taking a shower and changing out of the shirt he was working in so he can wait in the kitchen with the others and dig in the moment it's ready. Sam sits across from him yawning wide about once every minute, seeming strangely unable to sit still for someone who's still a little tired. He keeps shifting position in his chair and accidentally kicking Dean under the table as he moves around. At one point Dean feels like kicking him back just to play around and annoy him, but he's not totally sure Sam is even aware that he's doing it. As they've been sitting mostly in silence, he's gone back to looking the way he does so often now, like his mind is somewhere very far away and out of reach.
He acts a lot more responsive while they're all eating, following the conversation after Dean brings up the research Bobby spent all of yesterday doing for a hunter who's looking into a very vicious and suspicious-sounding killing spree that just happened aboard a ship coming here from Australia. Then after Dean has gone silent a while, drifting into his own speculations about all the monsters native to other countries that keep popping up, he notices that Sam is staring at his shoulder.
The T-shirt he grabbed before going to work outside is the one that's ripped there. Sam's eyes are drawn to the patch of skin pressing through the torn gap in the seam only briefly and surreptitiously enough, but with a slightly intense look that is what grabs Dean's attention. Sam looks back down at his food without catching Dean looking back at him, and there's something nervous and uneasy about his expression and the way he seems to make a point of keeping his eyes away from anyone else for a while. Like he's off in that other place again, remembering.
Like he's remembering staring at him there before.
In the couple weeks following his last conversation with Lisa and the unsettling discovery of what was wrong with Sam, Dean could feel himself always close to unraveling. There was a silent clock ticking now, a pounding need to get to the bottom of what had happened to Sam and fix it. The clock numbered the minutes, days and months that his brother, his real brother, continued to be tortured in the cage when there may still be something that could save him. It measured the distance growing between him and the home he'd found against all odds during the year he spent learning to walk around with the open bleeding wound, as he was aware all the time that the life he'd left behind when Sam showed up alive probably became harder to ever return to the longer it took him to settle all this unfinished business.
His head was overcrowded with loose ends and responsibilities, constantly distracted. It was the last thing on his mind. Or should have been. But Sam's presence, in light of what he now understood, was a disturbing and also morbidly entrancing thing. He couldn't stop himself from watching him like the object of curiosity he was, and he also sometimes just wished he could ignore him altogether. He always felt an immediate relief whenever he was left alone after being with him a long time. He knew in part it had to just be a natural fear of what he didn't understand. He'd seen a lot of crazy things but nothing to let him know what to expect with a person with no soul, and this was his brother, not just a case he could approach like any other without it getting to him a bit.
He also knew it might be more than that, though. He knew it one time when they came into their room out of some heavy rainfall and Sam immediately peeled off his soaked shirt, when Dean stiffened up and swallowed, momentarily looking down to avoid the sight without even knowing why. It wasn't like there was anything unusual or un-Sam-like in the action itself, but there was always something so potently physical about this Sam and the way he moved and carried himself, especially because of how he'd bulked up his body. Or maybe the difference was mostly in his head, with all the things that couldn't possibly be on his mind but were too close and present not to be, Sam who wasn't Sam, who was all body and raw desire with no inhibitions.
No, the uneasiness he felt around him wasn't just fear of what this person was. It was a little more than that. The vague overhanging sense that anything could happen.
And when he caught Sam looking at him that certain way a second time, he snapped a little.
They had stopped for gas. While the tank filled up, Dean leaned against the car drinking from a bottle of water. Sam had just come back out after buying a drink inside as he was taking a long last swig. Then he wiped his mouth and his lightly sweating forehead with the back of his wrist, closing his eyes a moment and sighing through the assault of the peaking afternoon heat. When he opened his eyes again, Sam hadn't moved from where he'd last noticed him standing. He had leaned his hip against the side of the car, at the opposite end from where Dean was, turned slightly toward him. Dean looked directly over at him and found his eyes rested on him absently while his hands idly picked at the label on his soda bottle. He was gazing out of the corner of his eye more than staring at him directly, but it was with an intensity that was unmistakable, leaving no question of what he was thinking and making Dean's skin crawl.
"Why don't you take a damn picture, huh?" he said.
Sam took the hint from his not-the-least-bit-amused tone. He put his hands up and raised his eyebrows in a way that seemed to mean "Fine, suit yourself" before turning to go get back in the passenger seat.
After they'd been back on the road for just a few minutes, he wouldn't quite let it slide away.
"To be honest, I don't really get why you don't want to," he said.
Dean's mouth was a hard line of complete silence. He kept looking ahead as if he hadn't heard him say anything, or as if there wasn't even anyone else in the car.
"So, what, you're the only one who can look?" he complained mildly, his tone staying so light and easy. "As long as that's all we're doing. I mean sure, it's not like there's any harm in shamelessly objectifying the soulless guy, but that's kind of-"
"I don't." Dean's voice was stiff and quiet, so completely different from his almost joking tone. "You're...I don't know what you think, but I haven't been."
There was a pause before Sam spoke again, his voice chillingly certain and unwavering. "I know what I know."
Dean's eyes burned into the road ahead more severely than ever.
"You said yourself I'm not really your brother anyway," Sam pressed on. "Not as long as I'm walking around without a soul. So..."
"Right," Dean said gruffly, "and if you did have a soul then you'd understand why I can't. Not ever."
"Well, I do understand why you couldn't before. You know, more or less. Maybe I even understand a little more about the whole thing than you."
Dean's eyes finally flicked over at him, shooting out a hot warning.
Sam just shrugged. "Hey, same melon, remember? And he knew why you never would, beyond the obvious problem, I mean. It's not rocket science."
"Shut up." The low, tense demand shot out of him almost against his will. It was a much too delicate detail that Sam never would have disclosed, maybe nothing he hadn't known already but still opening up more than should ever be said.
"Okay, never mind about him," Sam said, in poor imitation of having the tact to avoid a certain subject. "But I'm just saying the usual rules don't apply here. There's no reason to worry about making me ashamed, or that this is only our way-beyond-normal dependance on each other making us confused-just confused for so much of our lives it's lasted longer than most marriages-oh, and that that's somehow your fault or whatever, I'm sure. All that doesn't matter because I'm not him and I really couldn't give a crap."
The completely casual and detached nonchalance with which he could talk about this was making Dean's blood run cold. "I said shut the fuck up," he muttered sharply, and then turned up his music loud enough that their ears would be ringing later. Sam shrugged again, calm as ever, and leaned slightly toward the window to settle in comfortably for the ride.
On the fourth day Sam has been walking the earth again, Bobby starts moving back and forth around the house, bringing a bunch of recently delivered packages into the study from where they've been accumulating by the bottom of the stairs. By the time Dean comes out of the kitchen unrolling his sleeves after doing some dishes, Bobby has moved all of them to the desk. Sam looks up from his laptop and then they're both staring at the collection of unknown items with the same vague question on their faces.
"You boys need a job?" Bobby asks.
They're all shipments of books, of course. Some brand new, some ancient-looking, some not even in English. Now that so many hunters are encountering supernatural creatures that have never even been seen on this continent before, Bobby's library needs a little expanding so he can be better equipped to deal with what he has no experience dealing with.
He gives them a rundown on how he keeps his library organized and catalogued, with such thorough detail that Sam gets the impression this is something he thinks the two of them ought to know for future reference and he is partly using the need to give them something to do right now as an opportunity to show them all this. It kind of reminds him of when Dean suddenly felt the need to teach Sam a few things about looking after the car after he made his deal, except Bobby shouldn't be dying any time soon so there's nothing necessarily grim about it.
While Bobby finishes up some work outside, he and Dean sit on the floor opening up all the packages and then going through each book to record and categorize the subjects they cover. After he's been feeling helplessly restless all day, it does surprisingly much for Sam's mood just to be able to work on something pertaining to their current crisis, however indirectly. He's still about as good as stoned all the time with how rusty his coordination and reflexes are and how easily overwhelming everything can be to his senses, and he probably isn't quite ready to survive driving a vehicle anywhere, much less any of the armed-and-ready leg work of hunting that might help him regain a strong sense of himself right now. But whether it's doing the research or getting updated fake IDs or applying for new credit cards under bogus names, he's used to this job always involving quite a lot of mundane work in between the points of action, so it's not like this feels significantly different from what he would usually be doing.
He chooses not to think too much about how strange it is that he'd find it kind of disheartening when he has nothing to do as a hunter, that this kind of activity is where he can find motivation and affirmation of who he is now. The way Bobby instructed them on this was a subtle but unquestionable demonstration of his reliance on them and that he feels he can invest some kind of hopes in them for the future, the way normal fathers can accept that they'll be gone one day because they can always be optimistic about their children, and Sam is finding that strangely uplifting and ironic only in a truly funny way, so he's not about to ruin the moment by thinking too hard about the hopeless freak this means he's become.
Dean has other ideas. When Sam has been going through the same Italian text for twenty minutes, translating chapter titles and illustration captions by checking everything on his computer that isn't close enough to Latin for him to figure out, Dean looks over at him so hard at work and says, "If I didn't know any better I'd think you've missed this research crap."
He rolls his eyes and replies sarcastically, "I thought I loved doing research. You've always tried to convince me of that because you never want to do it."
"If I offered, you'd just do it anyway to make sure I didn't miss anything."
"Yeah, I probably would. What the hell, it's making me so nervous seeing you try to crack a book open that I'll probably end up going over all your work you do today just in case."
"Fuck you very much. When was the last time you did anyway? Just for fun, I mean."
"What, open a book?" Sam says with a short laugh. He thinks and can't really give a certain answer, but just shakes his head and shrugs it off. "Still more recent than it was for you, I'm sure. If you've ever done such a thing."
"You kidding me? I've got to lend you this one Lisa's sister got her to read, about the Elizabeth Short murder. I think I've still got it buried in my glove compartment. One of those hard-boiled crime novels, freakin' filthy though, not like some lame Humphrey Bogart movie. It's got some hot lesbian action and everything."
Sam, initially distracted by taking note of how easily Dean seems able to mention Lisa now, then actually starts taking in what Dean is saying and looks up at him slowly. "You've read The Black Dahlia?" he says in complete disbelief.
Dean looks slightly annoyed. "You have?"
He shrugs. "Didn't finish it. Kind of intense."
He scoffs kind of mockingly, as if this conversation has turned merely competitive and he's satisfied there's one book in the whole world he has read all of which Sam hasn't. It is a pretty monumental accomplishment for him, he has to admit.
"Tried reading a couple other things but I got bored with them too fast," Dean then admits. "I think me liking that one book was just a fluke."
"I'm not gonna comment on what that probably says about you," Sam says, his tone only teasing.
Dean smirks dryly. "Yeah...Maybe I've been more of a simple man now, but I guess it still takes a lot to shock me or even hold my attention."
The words sound a little strange to Sam. Now that he has his soul back, he appreciates more than he was able to before the small ways that Dean seems changed, observing all of it with more interest. And he's pretty sure even once he adjusts to being back he's not going to be quite the same person he was back when he brought down Lucifer, either. In just the past few days their interaction has held a sense that they're re-learning each other, like everything is both old and new territory between them. Dean is still very much Dean, made of the same stuff, just with more facets cut out of him. The time he's spent living an ordinary life after knowing nothing else but the hunting world for so long hasn't made him simple or even more predisposed to simple ways, as far as Sam can tell. It's only made him a more complicated man.
After Sam finally finishes cataloging the book in Italian and finds the appropriate place to put it away, he gives a close glance over the spines of the whole library while he's standing at the shelves. As he goes to sit back down on the floor, he says, "What do you imagine his whole collection is worth?"
Dean widens his eyes at the thought. "Oh, hell. A lot. You wouldn't know it seeing how often he'll use one as a coaster for a glass of whisky, but Dad used to say some of these are so rare and valuable he didn't even want to know how he got his hands on them."
"You don't think he ever stooped to doing business with Bela, do you?" Sam wonders.
Reserving comment, he just says, "I wouldn't think of suggesting such a thing in his house."
As if on cue, his words are closely followed by the sound of the back door opening as Bobby comes back inside, which makes Sam laugh softly. His footsteps then go up the stairs, and a moment later Sam notices Dean smiling to himself about something.
"What?" he asks.
Dean shakes his head. "That just kind of reminds me of something...You remember the Ironsons? You would have been pretty young the last time Dad saw them."
"Uh, Louie and Janie Ironson? I remember Dad talking about them. Their names are too cute to forget."
"Yeah. Dad told me this story once about their wedding that I guess he heard from someone else. Half the people at that wedding were hunters, because they both came from that kind of family, and-"
"Wait, and his were named Ironson? Did they change it as an inside joke or something?"
"I know, right? But hey, Winchester isn't much better."
Sam shrugs. "Heh. That's true."
"But get this, their friends who got them flatware as a wedding gift made a point of buying them all gold-plated stuff instead of silver."
Sam automatically bursts out laughing, guessing where this was going.
"All the other hunters there laughed as soon as they saw this while everyone else didn't get what was so funny."
"Because they knew anything silver they gave them would just end up getting melted down for bullets sooner or later," Sam assumed, still laughing a little. "Oh man. I think I remember Dad telling me about that before, I forgot...I wonder what happened to those guys. He never mentioned still being in touch with them much anymore by the time I left."
"Yeah. Same old story, I'd assume," Dean says with a shrug, meaning of course that John must have done something sooner or later to get on their bad side.
In the following relaxed silence, Sam puts aside the book he has open on his lap and leans back against the couch, stretching his arms over his head. He finds Dean watching him idly for a moment, looking very calm for once, and for barely more than the blink of an eye they exchange small, barely-there smiles before lowering their eyes again. It's an odd thing, the kind of look that passes between strangers, but nice somehow. It feels good for them to have an easy time working on something, to be able to laugh just a little over something; Sam knows they're both thinking that now in the trail of the moment as it sinks in, an odd and delicately suspended feeling that they get to be different people right now.
Late that night Bobby finds them watching TV while recovering from a heavy dinner and says, "Sam. You all bright 'n' bushy-tailed yet?"
Lazily rolling his head to the side to look over at him in the doorway, Sam raises an eyebrow. "Depends what I have to do," he says.
"Get messed up again," Bobby answers, revealing a bottle of whisky he's carrying. "Are we ever gonna celebrate that I trapped your stupid ass in my basement before you could go Jack Nicholson on me and you've busted out of Satan's bitch prison, or what?"
Their faces both crack into smiles. "Since when do hunters drink to celebrate anything?" Dean asks.
"If it were the rule, we'd never drink. C'mon." Bobby takes a wad of bills out of his shirt pocket and goes over to slap them into Sam's hand. "That's all the money you lost to me way too easily because you were planning to kill me by the end of the night anyway-which is how I expected something was up, by the way, so thanks for that. Enjoy it, 'cause I'm about to win it back."
"Is that right?" Sam says, challenge clearly accepted.
While they sit around the kitchen table playing cards, Sam eventually has to ask, "Bobby, since when do you have a trap door anyway?" and that gets a laugh from Dean. This leads to Bobby telling them a story that's probably only so funny because it's far enough in the past, about a time he trapped Rufus through that door just to break up a fight between him and Billy Harvelle because he happened to walk right over it at an opportune moment and they were both getting so pissed Bobby thought one of them was going to put the other in the hospital.
"Hey, Bobby...," Dean says while pouring himself a third drink. "You know whatever happened to Louie and Janie? You know, that couple from Arkansas. Did my dad just lose their number or did they bite it somewhere?"
"Oh no, they're still around," Bobby says.
Sam gives a look of slight surprise. "Still hunting?"
"Yeah, every once in a while. Last I heard. They finally caught their Moby Dick about eight years ago and then settled down a bit, went mostly off the radar in the hunter community. They got a fourteen-year-old son who don't even know what they do."
Freezing in the middle of raising his glass to his face, Dean says, "You're kidding."
Bobby shakes his head. "The Ironsons still have just enough sense and sanity in 'em to have a happy ending, I guess. Which is something you only hold onto in this job by being damn lucky. Human beings got their limits, that's all there is to it."
"You're doing okay," Sam points out. "All things considered."
"Yeah, well somebody has to keep it together and look after you two idgits," he says, getting a nudge from Sam's elbow and a lazy smile.
Sam and Dean stay up in the dark house playing a while longer after Bobby goes to bed, falling into a comfortable silence most of the time. It isn't until Sam gets up from his chair to go to bed that he feels the full effect of how tipsy he is, which isn't helped by the fact that he's already all thumbs and two left feet these days. He doesn't even notice himself swaying on his feet until Dean is at his side catching him with an arm around his waist.
"Woah, easy," he says with a light laugh.
He stood up and moved too fast, but now everything is going more still again. "I think I got it," he says, continuing forward. Dean lets go of him, but then he follows him kind of closely until he makes it to the couch.
"Where'd that other blanket go?" Sam says, looking around after he sits down and sees only one there.
Sitting down next to him, Dean observes how he's sitting kind of hunched in. "Don't tell me you're too cold again. Here it is," he says, spotting the extra blanket wadded up and kicked halfway under the sofa. He bends over to pick it up and tosses it in Sam's lap.
"It's not...too cold, I guess, it's just...It feels weird. I think I'm cold and then I think I'm hot. Temperature feels weird, Dean, my God, what is my fucking life now?"
Dean shakes with a silent laugh and leans into his side, nudging him lightly. Sam looks to the side at his face and for a lingering moment, they just meet eyes contentedly, the moment in a strange kind of limbo. Sam lowers his gaze first, bends his head down, and lightly kisses Dean's shoulder.
Dean stays still where he is as he then pulls away, scooting a few feet down the length of the couch so he can put his legs up onto it. Once he has completely lied down with his legs stretched out behind Dean as far as they'll fit, he looks back up at his face. Dean's expression is completely frozen, making him look caught off guard and impassive at the same time, but not troubled. He only lets his eyes stay locked with Sam's for one more brief instant, though, before turning away biting his lip and then getting up, moving off like someone who was caught in the still distraction of a daydream and then just remembered himself.
After Sam curls up in one of the less awkward positions that are possible for him sleeping here, his face turned in toward the couch, he hears Dean going around the house turning off the last of the lights.
He closes his eyes, and there is the wall.
He imagines smoothing his hands along it and feeling the jagged yet lucid texture, the heat behind it coming through like the fire in a closed-up room making the door feel hot, feeling the thrumming vibration of a sound he can't hear, screaming maybe. He touches, he wonders, he wants to know, wants to reach that poor forgotten person in pain on the other side.
It's an exercise, just like counting sheep, just enough to soothe the itch a little and let himself relax. He touches but doesn't scratch.
Go to part III.
.
[ PART I]
Author: Sara (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Sam/Dean, Castiel, Balthazar (briefly), Bobby
Rating: hard R (eventually)
Summary: With a little support from Cas that comes in a strange form, Sam may be able to keep his memories of the cage suppressed. But everything his soulless self lived through are memories he's now stuck with, including some things Dean wasn't prepared for him to have to find out about.
Dean and his dad happened to be working a case in California around Sam's twentieth birthday. If John realized this and thought at all about the coming date-which, of course he did-he didn't say anything about it, naturally.
On the day before, Dean was wiping an encrusting of rock salt off his boots after they'd just finished the job and made it back to their motel room when his dad got a call from a friend in New Mexico. He was hunting something that John had a lot more experience with and thought he could probably use some help taking care of it. It was sure to be nothing more than a two-man job and to only take a couple days once John got there, so he took off on his own later that night, telling Dean he might as well stick around there in Vallejo and catch some R&R until they met up again later.
Once he was left alone in the motel room, the question scratched in the back of his mind of whether or not his dad expected he would probably try to visit Sam. But he didn't know why he should care what he thought about it, if he thought about it. He didn't care. Right?
He called Sam at midnight. Said "Hey, happy birthday, man" and he'd had no idea what to expect but it was only somewhat awkward, and only at first. Sam said he'd just come back from a night out with a couple friends and he sounded like he was in a good mood.
"Some friends, huh?" he asked. "How hot is she?"
Sam's laughter was a softly brushing thing against his ear, miles away yet so palpable and near in its familiarity to him. "You are so predictable," he answered, nothing in his voice but fondness and a smile Dean wished he could see.
So then he mentioned he was in the state not far from him, possibly exaggerating just a little how conveniently close to Stanford he was, and before he knew how it happened they'd made some vague and spontaneous plans for him to come see him the next evening.
He had expected he would have to call Sam once he reached his building and when he got there, laxly approaching the latest time he'd said he would probably make it, he was a little surprised to find him actually waiting outside for him. He was just standing out on the steps with his hands dug in his pockets, without even a book bag or anything with him. When Dean approached, he smiled at him in a slowly relaxing and warming way, like he must have had time since their conversation on the phone to have some nervous doubts about whether this was such a good idea but couldn't have realized how good it would be just to see him again until they were actually face-to-face. Dean figured his own face was showing the same kind of relief as he found he literally couldn't not grin back in response.
If he had to describe it, he couldn't have put his finger on exactly how Sam had changed in the past couple years, but almost everything about him was just slightly off somehow and not quite like he remembered. He'd grown even taller, filled out more in frame, and somehow just had a bigger presence literally and figuratively that seemed to fill and overwhelm Dean's view at every moment. He seemed less intense and constantly focused, softened some around the edges and generally more at ease. When Dean gave him a brief and loose hug, it even seemed that he smelled a little different. He was so of this place, settled comfortably with the innocent civilians and collecting a layer of the local dust.
As they hung out in his dorm room and then walked around town talking about what was new, which was everything, Sam would speak in this so casually certain and hopeful way about things like some crazy-sophisticated biology class with a professor everyone loved that he'd wanted to take this year but couldn't get into. Hearing all of this stuff firing off his tongue, Dean could only think of how ridiculously in charge of everything in life he sounded and how weird and unknown to him that was. He'd never made any kind of big and specific decisions like that in his life and would never even know where to start looking at a course catalog, and how the hell was it anyway that Sammy was so different he'd had the perspective to wake up one day and think about not just sausage-or-bacon but I want to leave where I am and see palm trees instead, I want to go to this college, I want pre-law, I want this kind of salary, to feed this kind of dog one day.
The more Sam talked this way, it made him sound kind of self-important and full of himself, honestly, but Dean knew that could only be how it seemed to him as the dumb outsider. Yeah, he was an outsider looking in on his brother's life now and he could tell Sam was just trying to find things to talk about that wouldn't be too awkward, that was all. The irony.
Maybe it stung a little to see all of it right in front of him. His brother's new life he was making for himself, the whole strange otherness about him because of the time he'd spent out of the hunting world and the differences in him that were hard to adjust to. But he'd been quietly nursing some bitterness about this for a long time without even seeing him, and now that he was here and it looked like Sam really was a lot happier, it actually kind of made it okay. He could accept it enough for now to just enjoy being here today, at least. Dean couldn't help still feeling a sense of loss for the brother he'd once had always by his side before Sam got his own life. But Sam had built all of this for himself out of fucking nothing, pursued his own path with no encouragement from anyone and only his own stubborn determination, and now he was this almost entirely new person with a dorm filled with only his own stuff and lots of friends despite never having been taught how to make them. Sam was his own man now, and a part of him knew that was reason to feel proud of him, not something to regret.
"My God you're rusty," he remarked later as they were shooting pool at a bar and Sam had just missed his third pocket in a row. "You aren't even making it any fun for me to kick your ass."
"I was never as good as you," Sam said with a shrug, watching him smoothly hit a ball into a corner pocket.
"Yeah, but you were better than this," he said as Sam leaned over and aimed for the solid yellow. "I taught you better than this."
"Quit distracting me. It's my birthday, you better let me win."
"How, by just missing? At the rate you're putting them in, we'd be here all night."
"Bite me," Sam said, though he seemed unable to stop grinning a little, just as he'd started acting kind of silly with him all night. Unfocused, distracted, high on nothing.
Dean was feeling it, too. Somehow in this place that had become Sam's escape from their family freak show, it actually felt like all the monsters were far away. He wasn't even thinking about hunting.
After they went to sit at the bar for a while, Sam was on the second beer Dean had bought him when he finally had to ask. In a quiet and delicately approaching kind of voice he said, "Does Dad know you're here?"
He ran a thumb up and down his glass, making lines in the condensation. "I'm sure he'll put it together," he answered simply. "You know Dad. He knows everything I do, sooner or later."
"Yeah...I can't say I miss that." Sam seemed to be taking care not to sound too disdainful.
He shrugged. "Whatever, with Dad it kinda beats having to talk about everything, so I guess it suits us fine that he can assume almost everything on his own. And it's not like he actively stalks me, he can't help it."
"Uh-huh," Sam said doubtfully with a raised eyebrow.
"Seriously! It's his job to know how to put things together and read people. He just doesn't miss anything."
Sam shook his head slowly with that in mind, actually smiling a bit. A faint and dry kind of smile, but still. "I remember how freaky it used to be sometimes, how easily he could tell if you were lying."
Dean let out a single light laugh, grinning lazily at specific memories the comment drew up. The moment seemed to perceptibly pass, and he knew they wouldn't mention him again.
Later in the night they'd moved on to a different bar where they could still get a bite to eat past 11:00. They were picking at the last remains of food in the grease-polished bottoms of their meal baskets, Dean bobbing his head lightly in approval of the Animals song pouring out of the jukebox.
"What were you up to in the area anyway?" Sam asked, reaching across the table to take some of Dean's fries. He'd actually been convinced to have a couple shots with him by then and was on his sixth beer, seeming to sag more and more heavily in his seat by the minute.
"Just a routine haunting, you know," Dean said, thinking it might not be best to elaborate.
"Did you meet the spirit of a Zodiac victim or something?"
"Nah, nothing that exciting. Just a teenager who threw himself in front of a car in '66 and kept showing up as a death echo on the same road the same day every year. Caused at least eight crashes over the years from freaking out drivers."
"Yeah, I can imagine. Shit. Easy enough to get rid of?"
Dean nodded. "Nice clean burial. The hardest part was just getting detailed accounts. People will tell the police or the papers one thing, you know, and then start doubting themselves later and decide they must have been seeing things or just got a prank played on them. We nearly turned around and left the town assuming there was either nothing there or nothing we could dig up..."
Sam's expression was attentive and impassive as he listened, but he started feeling a little ridiculous and shook his head.
"Whatever, I know this can't really be the kind of thing you want to talk about or...think about," he dismissed with a wave of his hand.
Sam shrugged, draining the last inch of gold in the bottom of his glass. "Hell, I don't care...That was my life, too, wasn't it? And I can't talk about it with anyone here."
Something halfway clicked in Dean's head then, an inelegantly whittled-out fragment of realization. How Sam had sounded on the phone the night before, how noticeably laid-back and content he seemed now. He considered, just fleetingly, if it wasn't just the changes of this new life molding around him so agreeably that he was seeing, but also in part just the way Sam was doing at this isolated point in time. If his unexpected call last night hadn't simply caught Sam at a good time but was actually the reason he'd sounded happy on the phone. If he was so relaxed and comfortable today because it was the first time in two years he'd been in the company of someone he didn't have to constantly pretend with. The only someone he didn't have to pretend with and apparently didn't resent too much to even think about talking to again...
Sam was now looking down at Dean's also empty glass in thought. He smiled a little and broke the seasoning silence asking, "Dude...where you planning to crash anyway?"
He was obviously recognizing that Dean wasn't in any condition to go anywhere else tonight. He hadn't really thought about it yet. "The car, I guess," he said with a shrug.
"Hm. 'Kay..."
"...What?"
Sam, always the damn overachiever, was still using school housing because he was staying there over the summer taking some extra classes. The whole campus was sleepy and quiet, most of the students gone back to families they'd missed and places they called home, and there were so few residents in Sam's building that they saw nobody at all this time they went in and back up to his room. He had his whole half of the floor to himself, in fact. Dean wondered if that got kind of depressing, but they were now feeling all the drinks they'd had pretty heavily and had fallen into a tired silence, so he stayed quiet and didn't ask.
Because Sam wasn't sharing his room, he'd moved both of the tiny dorm beds together to form one that was probably just big enough to fit his whole length if he lied across it diagonally. As soon as they came in, Sam tossed his keys onto the desk with an exhausted sigh and didn't bother to turn on the light before immediately sinking down onto the bed. Dean followed and sat down next to him, just automatically gravitating toward the nearest place he could get off his feet for a moment. He leaned back on his elbows and gave a lazy look around the room.
"Home sweet home, huh?" he murmured softly.
"Heh," Sam said, a short and dark-sounding laugh. "Well. Beats the car..."
Or motel rooms, Dean heard.
They both lied back, shifting around awkwardly until they were both more or less stretched across the block of two mattresses. When Sam settled down to stay, brushing his hair out of his face as he put his head down on a pillow, he was lying on his side facing Dean. Then, like he still couldn't quite relax and not move, he reached his hand around to the back of Dean's neck. He felt the brush of his fingers against his skin as he tucked in the tag of his shirt that had been sticking out. Sam's hand heavily dragged over his shoulder as he drew it back away, then lowered back down to the mattress where it sat still closer to Dean than himself.
Dean didn't know or even think about why he'd started breathing harder than he should have been while just lying still. Or why something was holding him back from looking Sam in the eye right then. But then he did look up, couldn't help it, and they did meet eyes. The look in Sam's was so tired and soft and resigned, yet sharp somehow in the way they were fixed on the point near enough to be just visible that was him.
Sam licked his top lip absently and then his lips parted open, drawing in a slow breath as if in anticipation, which pulled Dean's eyes down to the faint outline of his mouth in the covering dimness. When Dean turned his body closer into his, the simple but world-shifting movement toward him was like the automatic answer to a question Sam hadn't asked. He hadn't even meant to move but it was done, their faces nuzzling tentatively a moment as they found the angle almost blindly in the darkness, like silently stirring animals in the night following just scent and instinct. And as if he was grabbing a slippery fish right out of water as it brushed by, getting a dart pinned down at the right split second in the dead-center of impossible, Dean closed his eyes and kissed him.
Sam pressed against him even closer and then Dean felt him gently touching his neck again, fingers brushing so lightly over the sensitive skin in a way that sent a tiny shiver through him. They were kissing languidly and sloppily, breathing loudly, breathing into each other. Sam gave a deep satisfied hum in his throat, the sound a reverberating and softly beckoning grind against Dean's chest where his heart was starting to get worked up enough he could feel his own pulse.
He reached under Sam's shirt and smoothed his fingers over tight muscle and warm skin, exploring the planes of his back with his hands and holding him as tightly as ever as Sam started trailing warm kisses down his neck. Meanwhile Sam's hands were creeping downward and then working at the fly of Dean's jeans.
Sam. Sam smelled like sun, like neat green lawns flushing bright with color under its rays, and like something else that couldn't be identified at all. His voice didn't sound like it had when he was sixteen and this room where they were was like no place at all, not known to him so just indistinct darkness all around.
So there was nothing familiar to focus on and sharpen around, nothing near enough to make his skin raise and bring him out of it, as if this could all be some dream. Sam had never answered the phone, as if he would, as if this could ever, them, like this. And when Sam reached down into his boxers and his hand closed around him in a first light tug, Dean just breathed in sharply and snapped still for an instant, his whole body jerking in the first reaction. Then he closed his eyes again with a low moan as Sam kept stroking him slowly, an obstructive black curtain falling over his mind.
Their mouths met again, opening and wet and warm, melding first with relaxed and coaxing movements of their tongues and then a more fervent and insatiable pressure. After a blur of time passing Dean was shuddering, all the indistinct shapes trembling, and his final weak groan came out buried against the mouth still covering his as he was delivered with a last firm stroke that made his vision bloom into utter blankness. He went loose and still, a puppet cut from its strings, and knew nothing more.
Before he opened his eyes in the morning, he remembered where he was because he could hear Sam's breathing and knew the sound instantly. That one thing about him was still recognizable, and it sounded much too close, and oh...
He made himself open his eyes. Sam was curled in close to him, his head tucked under his chin. His hand was still in Dean's pants, partially at least, a few of his fingers hooked inside the open zipper where they'd just dropped heavily as they both passed out.
Dean drew in a deep, tense breath. He turned away from Sam, rolling out of the bed, and stood up on clumsy and weak feet. Facing away from the sight of him, he zipped up his jeans, closed his eyes and rubbed them with the balls of his hands until he saw spots. Then he went to the door and walked out, got away, dragging himself down the hall barefoot to get to the bathroom.
His hands were shaking as he went to a sink and turned on the faucet. He splashed his face repeatedly with cold water and then pulled his shirt up to dab himself dry. For a few seconds he stood there leaning over with his hands gripping the sink, and then something started collapsing in him so heavily it was like he couldn't move at first...
"You're with me, you're safe."
It all settled and registered unavoidably, a sharp twist in his stomach. He turned fast to dart into the nearest stall, throwing the door open with a bang that echoed desolately in the too-empty and too-quiet building, and he practically fell to the floor by the toilet just before he threw up.
Hey happy birthday, listen I'm not far from you right now see I can be happy for you can act normal too. Like some jackass. Then grab back on too tight or whatever the hell it was, so much he might as well have shoved him back away, then remind him...
You made this happen, a voice pounded through his pulse as he went back to the room to grab his stuff. Let them get twisted up all wrong somehow, he didn't know. His head was burning white-hot with the effort of pushing it away and trying to understand it all at once. He'd made Sam think he wanted it somehow, not acted right with him, never had, or something. Maybe needed some new kind of claim on him now that he was not even like part of his family anymore, slipping farther from reach all the time, but God he hadn't wanted...
He wanted things to go back to the way they used to be. He just wanted Sam to be thirteen again instead of this new thing that was deep-voiced and broad-shouldered and confusing.
But Sam had left, and things weren't going to go back to like before. The night he and John had had that fight about college and he'd left, for Dean it hadn't really sunk in right away that he was gone. For a while he kept thinking it had to just be Sam's ridiculous and extreme way of rebelling and it couldn't be what he really wanted, that he'd change his mind soon enough and come back. Then the months had gradually gnawed away at that hope until Fuck him anyway was a raw and stinging tattoo of repeating words in the back of his mind that stayed stuck there to block access to any other thoughts of him, which almost never worked.
This was different. It felt final. It felt like he had to keep himself physically moving or else the shock would completely control him and he might get sick again.
So he kept his hands busy and moving as he looked at Sam one last time, still asleep just as he'd left him. He took Sam's shoes off his feet and drew his blanket up over him because it was what he should have been doing last night, taking care of him, and that was what he would be doing here in the last few minutes he spent breathing the same air as his brother for what he knew would be a very long time.
He still looked happy somehow, even while asleep. How was that possible?
It was a three-block walk to the spot where Dean had parked the Impala. The bright summer sun slowly burned the memory off of his skin as he steadily made his way there, and by the time he was driving away with the loud radio stimulating him into finer consciousness, it was easier to feel as if it hadn't actually been real.
He drove straight back to Vallejo and checked back into the same motel. He requested the same room he and his dad had been staying in before even though it was just him now. When John finished his hunt in New Mexico and called to ask where he was, he'd be watching TV with a beer in hand and his shirt collecting crumbs, planted firmly on one of the beds as if he never left.
Sam sleeps in for most of the morning again and Dean spends it outside helping Bobby work on a truck he's fixing up for somebody. Later after Sam gets up, Bobby makes them grilled cheese and potato wedges like he used to sometimes when they were kids. He puts on his stupid apron and everything. There must be some vague and perhaps not completely intentional meaning in the gesture of him fixing them comfort food and something they all remember from a long time ago now that they're all back together and it's still kind of impossible to believe, but Dean and Sam both know better than to acknowledge it.
Smelling the food cooking makes Dean so hungry that he holds off on taking a shower and changing out of the shirt he was working in so he can wait in the kitchen with the others and dig in the moment it's ready. Sam sits across from him yawning wide about once every minute, seeming strangely unable to sit still for someone who's still a little tired. He keeps shifting position in his chair and accidentally kicking Dean under the table as he moves around. At one point Dean feels like kicking him back just to play around and annoy him, but he's not totally sure Sam is even aware that he's doing it. As they've been sitting mostly in silence, he's gone back to looking the way he does so often now, like his mind is somewhere very far away and out of reach.
He acts a lot more responsive while they're all eating, following the conversation after Dean brings up the research Bobby spent all of yesterday doing for a hunter who's looking into a very vicious and suspicious-sounding killing spree that just happened aboard a ship coming here from Australia. Then after Dean has gone silent a while, drifting into his own speculations about all the monsters native to other countries that keep popping up, he notices that Sam is staring at his shoulder.
The T-shirt he grabbed before going to work outside is the one that's ripped there. Sam's eyes are drawn to the patch of skin pressing through the torn gap in the seam only briefly and surreptitiously enough, but with a slightly intense look that is what grabs Dean's attention. Sam looks back down at his food without catching Dean looking back at him, and there's something nervous and uneasy about his expression and the way he seems to make a point of keeping his eyes away from anyone else for a while. Like he's off in that other place again, remembering.
Like he's remembering staring at him there before.
In the couple weeks following his last conversation with Lisa and the unsettling discovery of what was wrong with Sam, Dean could feel himself always close to unraveling. There was a silent clock ticking now, a pounding need to get to the bottom of what had happened to Sam and fix it. The clock numbered the minutes, days and months that his brother, his real brother, continued to be tortured in the cage when there may still be something that could save him. It measured the distance growing between him and the home he'd found against all odds during the year he spent learning to walk around with the open bleeding wound, as he was aware all the time that the life he'd left behind when Sam showed up alive probably became harder to ever return to the longer it took him to settle all this unfinished business.
His head was overcrowded with loose ends and responsibilities, constantly distracted. It was the last thing on his mind. Or should have been. But Sam's presence, in light of what he now understood, was a disturbing and also morbidly entrancing thing. He couldn't stop himself from watching him like the object of curiosity he was, and he also sometimes just wished he could ignore him altogether. He always felt an immediate relief whenever he was left alone after being with him a long time. He knew in part it had to just be a natural fear of what he didn't understand. He'd seen a lot of crazy things but nothing to let him know what to expect with a person with no soul, and this was his brother, not just a case he could approach like any other without it getting to him a bit.
He also knew it might be more than that, though. He knew it one time when they came into their room out of some heavy rainfall and Sam immediately peeled off his soaked shirt, when Dean stiffened up and swallowed, momentarily looking down to avoid the sight without even knowing why. It wasn't like there was anything unusual or un-Sam-like in the action itself, but there was always something so potently physical about this Sam and the way he moved and carried himself, especially because of how he'd bulked up his body. Or maybe the difference was mostly in his head, with all the things that couldn't possibly be on his mind but were too close and present not to be, Sam who wasn't Sam, who was all body and raw desire with no inhibitions.
No, the uneasiness he felt around him wasn't just fear of what this person was. It was a little more than that. The vague overhanging sense that anything could happen.
And when he caught Sam looking at him that certain way a second time, he snapped a little.
They had stopped for gas. While the tank filled up, Dean leaned against the car drinking from a bottle of water. Sam had just come back out after buying a drink inside as he was taking a long last swig. Then he wiped his mouth and his lightly sweating forehead with the back of his wrist, closing his eyes a moment and sighing through the assault of the peaking afternoon heat. When he opened his eyes again, Sam hadn't moved from where he'd last noticed him standing. He had leaned his hip against the side of the car, at the opposite end from where Dean was, turned slightly toward him. Dean looked directly over at him and found his eyes rested on him absently while his hands idly picked at the label on his soda bottle. He was gazing out of the corner of his eye more than staring at him directly, but it was with an intensity that was unmistakable, leaving no question of what he was thinking and making Dean's skin crawl.
"Why don't you take a damn picture, huh?" he said.
Sam took the hint from his not-the-least-bit-amused tone. He put his hands up and raised his eyebrows in a way that seemed to mean "Fine, suit yourself" before turning to go get back in the passenger seat.
After they'd been back on the road for just a few minutes, he wouldn't quite let it slide away.
"To be honest, I don't really get why you don't want to," he said.
Dean's mouth was a hard line of complete silence. He kept looking ahead as if he hadn't heard him say anything, or as if there wasn't even anyone else in the car.
"So, what, you're the only one who can look?" he complained mildly, his tone staying so light and easy. "As long as that's all we're doing. I mean sure, it's not like there's any harm in shamelessly objectifying the soulless guy, but that's kind of-"
"I don't." Dean's voice was stiff and quiet, so completely different from his almost joking tone. "You're...I don't know what you think, but I haven't been."
There was a pause before Sam spoke again, his voice chillingly certain and unwavering. "I know what I know."
Dean's eyes burned into the road ahead more severely than ever.
"You said yourself I'm not really your brother anyway," Sam pressed on. "Not as long as I'm walking around without a soul. So..."
"Right," Dean said gruffly, "and if you did have a soul then you'd understand why I can't. Not ever."
"Well, I do understand why you couldn't before. You know, more or less. Maybe I even understand a little more about the whole thing than you."
Dean's eyes finally flicked over at him, shooting out a hot warning.
Sam just shrugged. "Hey, same melon, remember? And he knew why you never would, beyond the obvious problem, I mean. It's not rocket science."
"Shut up." The low, tense demand shot out of him almost against his will. It was a much too delicate detail that Sam never would have disclosed, maybe nothing he hadn't known already but still opening up more than should ever be said.
"Okay, never mind about him," Sam said, in poor imitation of having the tact to avoid a certain subject. "But I'm just saying the usual rules don't apply here. There's no reason to worry about making me ashamed, or that this is only our way-beyond-normal dependance on each other making us confused-just confused for so much of our lives it's lasted longer than most marriages-oh, and that that's somehow your fault or whatever, I'm sure. All that doesn't matter because I'm not him and I really couldn't give a crap."
The completely casual and detached nonchalance with which he could talk about this was making Dean's blood run cold. "I said shut the fuck up," he muttered sharply, and then turned up his music loud enough that their ears would be ringing later. Sam shrugged again, calm as ever, and leaned slightly toward the window to settle in comfortably for the ride.
On the fourth day Sam has been walking the earth again, Bobby starts moving back and forth around the house, bringing a bunch of recently delivered packages into the study from where they've been accumulating by the bottom of the stairs. By the time Dean comes out of the kitchen unrolling his sleeves after doing some dishes, Bobby has moved all of them to the desk. Sam looks up from his laptop and then they're both staring at the collection of unknown items with the same vague question on their faces.
"You boys need a job?" Bobby asks.
They're all shipments of books, of course. Some brand new, some ancient-looking, some not even in English. Now that so many hunters are encountering supernatural creatures that have never even been seen on this continent before, Bobby's library needs a little expanding so he can be better equipped to deal with what he has no experience dealing with.
He gives them a rundown on how he keeps his library organized and catalogued, with such thorough detail that Sam gets the impression this is something he thinks the two of them ought to know for future reference and he is partly using the need to give them something to do right now as an opportunity to show them all this. It kind of reminds him of when Dean suddenly felt the need to teach Sam a few things about looking after the car after he made his deal, except Bobby shouldn't be dying any time soon so there's nothing necessarily grim about it.
While Bobby finishes up some work outside, he and Dean sit on the floor opening up all the packages and then going through each book to record and categorize the subjects they cover. After he's been feeling helplessly restless all day, it does surprisingly much for Sam's mood just to be able to work on something pertaining to their current crisis, however indirectly. He's still about as good as stoned all the time with how rusty his coordination and reflexes are and how easily overwhelming everything can be to his senses, and he probably isn't quite ready to survive driving a vehicle anywhere, much less any of the armed-and-ready leg work of hunting that might help him regain a strong sense of himself right now. But whether it's doing the research or getting updated fake IDs or applying for new credit cards under bogus names, he's used to this job always involving quite a lot of mundane work in between the points of action, so it's not like this feels significantly different from what he would usually be doing.
He chooses not to think too much about how strange it is that he'd find it kind of disheartening when he has nothing to do as a hunter, that this kind of activity is where he can find motivation and affirmation of who he is now. The way Bobby instructed them on this was a subtle but unquestionable demonstration of his reliance on them and that he feels he can invest some kind of hopes in them for the future, the way normal fathers can accept that they'll be gone one day because they can always be optimistic about their children, and Sam is finding that strangely uplifting and ironic only in a truly funny way, so he's not about to ruin the moment by thinking too hard about the hopeless freak this means he's become.
Dean has other ideas. When Sam has been going through the same Italian text for twenty minutes, translating chapter titles and illustration captions by checking everything on his computer that isn't close enough to Latin for him to figure out, Dean looks over at him so hard at work and says, "If I didn't know any better I'd think you've missed this research crap."
He rolls his eyes and replies sarcastically, "I thought I loved doing research. You've always tried to convince me of that because you never want to do it."
"If I offered, you'd just do it anyway to make sure I didn't miss anything."
"Yeah, I probably would. What the hell, it's making me so nervous seeing you try to crack a book open that I'll probably end up going over all your work you do today just in case."
"Fuck you very much. When was the last time you did anyway? Just for fun, I mean."
"What, open a book?" Sam says with a short laugh. He thinks and can't really give a certain answer, but just shakes his head and shrugs it off. "Still more recent than it was for you, I'm sure. If you've ever done such a thing."
"You kidding me? I've got to lend you this one Lisa's sister got her to read, about the Elizabeth Short murder. I think I've still got it buried in my glove compartment. One of those hard-boiled crime novels, freakin' filthy though, not like some lame Humphrey Bogart movie. It's got some hot lesbian action and everything."
Sam, initially distracted by taking note of how easily Dean seems able to mention Lisa now, then actually starts taking in what Dean is saying and looks up at him slowly. "You've read The Black Dahlia?" he says in complete disbelief.
Dean looks slightly annoyed. "You have?"
He shrugs. "Didn't finish it. Kind of intense."
He scoffs kind of mockingly, as if this conversation has turned merely competitive and he's satisfied there's one book in the whole world he has read all of which Sam hasn't. It is a pretty monumental accomplishment for him, he has to admit.
"Tried reading a couple other things but I got bored with them too fast," Dean then admits. "I think me liking that one book was just a fluke."
"I'm not gonna comment on what that probably says about you," Sam says, his tone only teasing.
Dean smirks dryly. "Yeah...Maybe I've been more of a simple man now, but I guess it still takes a lot to shock me or even hold my attention."
The words sound a little strange to Sam. Now that he has his soul back, he appreciates more than he was able to before the small ways that Dean seems changed, observing all of it with more interest. And he's pretty sure even once he adjusts to being back he's not going to be quite the same person he was back when he brought down Lucifer, either. In just the past few days their interaction has held a sense that they're re-learning each other, like everything is both old and new territory between them. Dean is still very much Dean, made of the same stuff, just with more facets cut out of him. The time he's spent living an ordinary life after knowing nothing else but the hunting world for so long hasn't made him simple or even more predisposed to simple ways, as far as Sam can tell. It's only made him a more complicated man.
After Sam finally finishes cataloging the book in Italian and finds the appropriate place to put it away, he gives a close glance over the spines of the whole library while he's standing at the shelves. As he goes to sit back down on the floor, he says, "What do you imagine his whole collection is worth?"
Dean widens his eyes at the thought. "Oh, hell. A lot. You wouldn't know it seeing how often he'll use one as a coaster for a glass of whisky, but Dad used to say some of these are so rare and valuable he didn't even want to know how he got his hands on them."
"You don't think he ever stooped to doing business with Bela, do you?" Sam wonders.
Reserving comment, he just says, "I wouldn't think of suggesting such a thing in his house."
As if on cue, his words are closely followed by the sound of the back door opening as Bobby comes back inside, which makes Sam laugh softly. His footsteps then go up the stairs, and a moment later Sam notices Dean smiling to himself about something.
"What?" he asks.
Dean shakes his head. "That just kind of reminds me of something...You remember the Ironsons? You would have been pretty young the last time Dad saw them."
"Uh, Louie and Janie Ironson? I remember Dad talking about them. Their names are too cute to forget."
"Yeah. Dad told me this story once about their wedding that I guess he heard from someone else. Half the people at that wedding were hunters, because they both came from that kind of family, and-"
"Wait, and his were named Ironson? Did they change it as an inside joke or something?"
"I know, right? But hey, Winchester isn't much better."
Sam shrugs. "Heh. That's true."
"But get this, their friends who got them flatware as a wedding gift made a point of buying them all gold-plated stuff instead of silver."
Sam automatically bursts out laughing, guessing where this was going.
"All the other hunters there laughed as soon as they saw this while everyone else didn't get what was so funny."
"Because they knew anything silver they gave them would just end up getting melted down for bullets sooner or later," Sam assumed, still laughing a little. "Oh man. I think I remember Dad telling me about that before, I forgot...I wonder what happened to those guys. He never mentioned still being in touch with them much anymore by the time I left."
"Yeah. Same old story, I'd assume," Dean says with a shrug, meaning of course that John must have done something sooner or later to get on their bad side.
In the following relaxed silence, Sam puts aside the book he has open on his lap and leans back against the couch, stretching his arms over his head. He finds Dean watching him idly for a moment, looking very calm for once, and for barely more than the blink of an eye they exchange small, barely-there smiles before lowering their eyes again. It's an odd thing, the kind of look that passes between strangers, but nice somehow. It feels good for them to have an easy time working on something, to be able to laugh just a little over something; Sam knows they're both thinking that now in the trail of the moment as it sinks in, an odd and delicately suspended feeling that they get to be different people right now.
Late that night Bobby finds them watching TV while recovering from a heavy dinner and says, "Sam. You all bright 'n' bushy-tailed yet?"
Lazily rolling his head to the side to look over at him in the doorway, Sam raises an eyebrow. "Depends what I have to do," he says.
"Get messed up again," Bobby answers, revealing a bottle of whisky he's carrying. "Are we ever gonna celebrate that I trapped your stupid ass in my basement before you could go Jack Nicholson on me and you've busted out of Satan's bitch prison, or what?"
Their faces both crack into smiles. "Since when do hunters drink to celebrate anything?" Dean asks.
"If it were the rule, we'd never drink. C'mon." Bobby takes a wad of bills out of his shirt pocket and goes over to slap them into Sam's hand. "That's all the money you lost to me way too easily because you were planning to kill me by the end of the night anyway-which is how I expected something was up, by the way, so thanks for that. Enjoy it, 'cause I'm about to win it back."
"Is that right?" Sam says, challenge clearly accepted.
While they sit around the kitchen table playing cards, Sam eventually has to ask, "Bobby, since when do you have a trap door anyway?" and that gets a laugh from Dean. This leads to Bobby telling them a story that's probably only so funny because it's far enough in the past, about a time he trapped Rufus through that door just to break up a fight between him and Billy Harvelle because he happened to walk right over it at an opportune moment and they were both getting so pissed Bobby thought one of them was going to put the other in the hospital.
"Hey, Bobby...," Dean says while pouring himself a third drink. "You know whatever happened to Louie and Janie? You know, that couple from Arkansas. Did my dad just lose their number or did they bite it somewhere?"
"Oh no, they're still around," Bobby says.
Sam gives a look of slight surprise. "Still hunting?"
"Yeah, every once in a while. Last I heard. They finally caught their Moby Dick about eight years ago and then settled down a bit, went mostly off the radar in the hunter community. They got a fourteen-year-old son who don't even know what they do."
Freezing in the middle of raising his glass to his face, Dean says, "You're kidding."
Bobby shakes his head. "The Ironsons still have just enough sense and sanity in 'em to have a happy ending, I guess. Which is something you only hold onto in this job by being damn lucky. Human beings got their limits, that's all there is to it."
"You're doing okay," Sam points out. "All things considered."
"Yeah, well somebody has to keep it together and look after you two idgits," he says, getting a nudge from Sam's elbow and a lazy smile.
Sam and Dean stay up in the dark house playing a while longer after Bobby goes to bed, falling into a comfortable silence most of the time. It isn't until Sam gets up from his chair to go to bed that he feels the full effect of how tipsy he is, which isn't helped by the fact that he's already all thumbs and two left feet these days. He doesn't even notice himself swaying on his feet until Dean is at his side catching him with an arm around his waist.
"Woah, easy," he says with a light laugh.
He stood up and moved too fast, but now everything is going more still again. "I think I got it," he says, continuing forward. Dean lets go of him, but then he follows him kind of closely until he makes it to the couch.
"Where'd that other blanket go?" Sam says, looking around after he sits down and sees only one there.
Sitting down next to him, Dean observes how he's sitting kind of hunched in. "Don't tell me you're too cold again. Here it is," he says, spotting the extra blanket wadded up and kicked halfway under the sofa. He bends over to pick it up and tosses it in Sam's lap.
"It's not...too cold, I guess, it's just...It feels weird. I think I'm cold and then I think I'm hot. Temperature feels weird, Dean, my God, what is my fucking life now?"
Dean shakes with a silent laugh and leans into his side, nudging him lightly. Sam looks to the side at his face and for a lingering moment, they just meet eyes contentedly, the moment in a strange kind of limbo. Sam lowers his gaze first, bends his head down, and lightly kisses Dean's shoulder.
Dean stays still where he is as he then pulls away, scooting a few feet down the length of the couch so he can put his legs up onto it. Once he has completely lied down with his legs stretched out behind Dean as far as they'll fit, he looks back up at his face. Dean's expression is completely frozen, making him look caught off guard and impassive at the same time, but not troubled. He only lets his eyes stay locked with Sam's for one more brief instant, though, before turning away biting his lip and then getting up, moving off like someone who was caught in the still distraction of a daydream and then just remembered himself.
After Sam curls up in one of the less awkward positions that are possible for him sleeping here, his face turned in toward the couch, he hears Dean going around the house turning off the last of the lights.
He closes his eyes, and there is the wall.
He imagines smoothing his hands along it and feeling the jagged yet lucid texture, the heat behind it coming through like the fire in a closed-up room making the door feel hot, feeling the thrumming vibration of a sound he can't hear, screaming maybe. He touches, he wonders, he wants to know, wants to reach that poor forgotten person in pain on the other side.
It's an exercise, just like counting sheep, just enough to soothe the itch a little and let himself relax. He touches but doesn't scratch.
Go to part III.
.