(no subject)
This has been Kripke’d six ways from Sunday by pretty much all of S3. Also, there’s no sex. Also, it’s deathfic. Wakka wakka!
Title: woke up new
Author: guns_and_butter
Pairing: Gen with a dash of canon. (Read: references to Sam/Jess; also contains the “heterosexual” brothers/life partners/mutual ass-checker-outers who even my mother thinks are doing it.)
Rating: Adult
Word count: 5,281
Warning: Deathfic
Disclaimer: Nothing here is mine, except the brain damage. Title shamelessly stolen from the Mountain Goats song of the same name.
Summary: The first day Dean is dead, Sam’s pretty sure, is the worst day of his life.
Thanks to veronamay for the beta! ♥
The first day Dean is dead, Sam’s pretty sure, is the worst day of his life.
It should go without saying - even Hallmark doesn’t make a card for this kind of thing - but, to be fair, Sam has had a lot of worst days of his life, and at some point you start losing track of rank. Noticing the splash of blood leaking from your girlfriend’s exposed viscera versus sloshing an extra kick of accelerant on your dad to make sure he incinerates thoroughly - that’s a tough call by anyone’s standards.
He might be a little out of it, a little crazy, maybe. He hasn’t slept since Dean died - but then, who can blame him. He’s just killed his brother.
Not just in some figurative sense (he’s dead because Sam couldn’t make himself hit some asshole with a tire iron) or even the whole, you know, the deal - but literally pushed a gun into Dean’s chest and pulled the trigger. He would’ve done it in the head, point blank shot with a hollow-point, just to make absolutely one hundred percent sure
(because, seriously, Dean is just the type of contrary fucker to not die when Sam is trying to save his immortal soul)
but at the very last second he thought about the explosion of blood and gore, clumps of Dean’s brain splattering on his face and nestling in his hair, and he lost his nerve.
It didn’t matter, in the end. Dean died pretty much instantly, even though Sam’s aim was a little off and his hands were slippery-wet and shaking. Some lucky break.
He’s supposed to call Bobby. Dean made him promise, made him swear on everything he could think of, as if Sam gave a shit when Dean had eleven minutes to live. It was one of the last things Dean said, right around the time he started hearing the hounds in the distance - remember to call Bobby, like Sam had lost his Palm Pilot and couldn’t recall his to-do list. (1) Buy premium. (2) Clean the guns. (3) Call Bobby to help get rid of Dean’s corpse. Sam shuddered all over, so intense it made his ears ring, with the urge to punch his almost-dead brother in the face. He hated Dean, wanted him to hurt, wanted to throw himself at Dean’s feet and press his face into Dean’s thigh and beg him not to do this. He wanted to make Dean live up to a few fucking promises of his own, but it was too late for that, so he just said, “Okay.” Maybe he even meant it, ten minutes and twenty-six seconds before he shot Dean in the heart.
The thing is, Sam should be happy. He should be fucking ecstatic. He won, after all. Score one for humanity. Sure, it wasn’t an easy job, but what matters is that Dean’s not rotting in Hell the way he and Bobby and everyone but Sam thought he would. Sam literally saved his brother’s soul - snatched it out of the demon’s hands and sent it straight up to…wherever.
(Sam’s always been good with loopholes. He thinks he probably would have been a pretty great lawyer.)
What matters is that Dean is saved, home free, out of harm’s way, and Sam will never, ever see him again.
Sam’s not headed anywhere in particular. Away. Going nowhere at 100 mph, hurtling through state after state like he’s got someplace to be. No state troopers screeching after him to arrest him for speeding or fratricide or being a Winchester; no traffic to dodge, just a scattering of eighteen-wheelers dozing on the exit ramps. Just Sam Winchester and the open road, proof of his victory cooling in the backseat, sun rising gray and sickly on the worst day of his life.
+++
Sam was fourteen the first time he ever drove the car.
Dean hadn’t let anyone else near the wheel since Dad handed him the keys, but he was kind of busy just then. They’d tangled with a bunyip and its unexpected mate at the edge of the nastiest swamp Sam had ever smelled, and afterward he and Dean both had their hands full - Sam salting and burning and squaring things away, Dean with a solid grip on their dad’s insides.
Dad was pretty out of it by the time they managed to carry him back to the car and maneuver him into the backseat. As soon as they got him situated, Sam quickly went and slid into the front, fully expecting Dean to do the same. If they’d ever needed to make a quick getaway, it was now.
“Catch,” Dean said instead, and tossed the keys over the seatback. They were slick with clots and smears of blood; Sam caught them without thinking. Dean jerked his head toward the driver’s seat, then refocused his attention on holding Dad’s guts in place. “There’s a clinic a few miles back. Go left once we hit the main road. It’ll be about two miles on your right.”
Sam froze, keys warm and sticky in his hand. He said, stupidly, “But I don’t know how,” and Dean gave him this look like he had three heads or something. It wasn’t an unfamiliar look, not since Sam had started growing and talking back and reading Moby-Dick at the kitchen table, but that didn’t mean Sam had to like it.
“Bullshit, you don’t know how,” Dean said. He was slick up to the elbows in their dad’s blood, which wasn’t really new either. “You’ve been watching me and Dad drive your whole life. If you can handle a crossbow, you can drive the car. Move.”
Sam took a second - just one brief, fleeting second - to consider how profoundly this sucked. In the grand scheme of things, it was totally unfair. He was a straight-A student, a decent soccer player, an all-around good guy. He held doors open for people. He didn’t even jaywalk.
He really didn’t deserve this crap - but then, if he’d learned anything from the last fourteen years, besides how to handle a crossbow, it was that people didn’t often get what they deserved.
And then Dad made this horrible noise and mumbled something about fucking field medics taking their sweet-ass time, and Dean said, kind of desperate-sounding, “Jesus Christ, Sammy, just drive,” and Sam slid over into the driver’s seat and jammed the key into the ignition and drove. It wasn’t like he had a lot of options.
+++
Sam calls Bobby late that afternoon.
He still hasn’t slept, hasn’t done anything but drive and drive and drive with the corpse folded up stiff and cold in the back. He feels crazy and lightheaded, feels like he’s a half-breath from screaming and sobbing and throwing up all at once. His eyes ache in his head, burning-hot, throbbing in their sockets. Also, he’s out of gas.
He’s been zigging and zagging across three states, taking random exits and looping back on himself more often than not, and it only takes Bobby a few hours to catch up. His pick-up pulls in next to the Impala just after dark, rumbling low and steady in the abandoned clearing. Sam’s spent the last four hours sitting on the hood, picking slowly and with infinite patience at the crust of gore on his hands. His fingernails are still caked with it, diseased-looking; his palms are stained, blood worn down into every tiny crack and fissure.
He stands up as Bobby climbs down from his truck. His ass hurts. He doesn’t look at the body in the backseat.
(He’s spent the last four hours not looking at it, not worrying about how they’ll ever get it out of the car. Not wondering how this is going to work.)
Bobby doesn’t give him shit for running off, doesn’t even mention it. Sam guesses he must have built up a tolerance for crazy, dealing with the Winchesters as long as he has.
Between the two of them, they manage to wrestle the body out of the car. Sam gets the head and shoulders, the exploded chest cavity. Bobby handles the legs, the frozen steel contortions of knees and hips, his own knees squeaking on the old leather.
They lay the body on the ground and stand back. Sam’s breath is coming heavy, ragged, like he’s just run a mile. He wants to ask if Bobby and Dean had this much trouble with his body, if they had a hard time fitting him in the car in the first place. Sam’s a big guy, and the backseat’s never as long as he’d swear it used to be. He hates sleeping in the car. If it’s warm enough and they find an okay spot, he and Dean will usually grab the blankets from the back and stretch out on the ground instead, bunched-up jackets under their heads. Sam’s never gone camping, exactly, but that’s what he thinks of when people talk about it - shrill crickets and the rustle of tall grass, starchy motel scent and a hint of motor oil, murky bands of light streaked across a purple-black sky. He always wakes up wet with dew and a little cold, a little sore, aching for coffee like he’s never wanted for anything else in his life.
The corpse is as pale as any Sam’s ever seen. One side of the face is blotchy and stained, dark with settled blood. Postmortem lividity, it’s called. Sam googled it once.
“We’re out of accelerant,” he says.
Bobby looks at him for a while. Just looks. “I’ve got some,” he says, finally. “Do we need it?”
“Well, I mean - I just thought.” Sam’s eyes hurt. “Don’t you think we should burn it?”
Bobby is still looking at him. Sam wonders if he looked at Dean like this, thinks he probably did. “It’s up to you, son,” he says, a lot gentler than Sam remembers Bobby ever being. “Is that what you want?”
Sam wants a lot of things. He wants to stop feeling like he’s choking, like the pressure in his chest is clawing up into his throat, lead-heavy, too big to fit. He wants to lie down next to his brother’s twisted-up body and die. He wants Dean and he wants his daddy and he wants to be anywhere but here.
He shakes his head.
Bobby squeezes his shoulder, strong but careful, like he thinks Sam might crack apart, and they get the shovels out of the trunk and set about burying Dean Winchester.
+++
Bobby says he shouldn’t hunt alone. He’s probably right. Bobby’s right about a lot of things.
He invites Sam to come back with him to South Dakota. “I could use another set of eyes,” he says. He’s probably even telling the truth. There are still demons to hunt, legions of hellspawn and escaped souls to send packing, and the piles of unexamined texts on Bobby’s floor are near endless, growing by the day.
Truth is, there’s a part of him that wants to go with Bobby - to hole up in one of the only places besides the Impala that’s ever felt anything like home, work in the salvage yard and translate forgotten spells and let the hurt ease out of him day by day, like the ebb of the tide. Spend some sleepless nights staring at the ceiling of the room he and Dean used to share, wondering how he could have changed things. Drink a lot of bitter black coffee and sit up late into the night exchanging stories with Bobby, maybe even laughing some.
“I can’t,” he says. “I have to - I have to go. For a while.”
Bobby nods, like he was expecting as much. He looks tired, older than his years, in a way Sam’s never really noticed before. It’s a look most hunters pick up after a while. “You call me any time,” he says. “Soon. I mean that, Sam.”
“I will,” Sam says. There’s no question Bobby knows he’s lying. He’s been dealing with the Winchesters a long, long time.
+++
The second day Dean is dead, Sam wakes up crying.
The motel only had doubles left, which was just Sam’s luck. All those times Dean made him arm-wrestle for the bed, most of which he ended up sleeping on the floor
(Dean claimed it was because of Sam’s long arms. “Screws with your center of gravity,” he’d say, making a show of stretching out long and comfortable on the bed. Sam was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked, but there was no point in arguing. Besides, Dean always managed to lose when Sam had a headache.)
and now, the first time in his entire life he’d ever asked for a single, there was suddenly an abundance of beds.
Sam ended up taking the double for three nights. The room looked familiar, but so did most places. He stripped down in the middle of the room, turned the shower on as hot as it would go, scrubbed Dean’s blood from his skin until he ached, then crawled naked into the bed farthest from the door and stared at the wall until the whole world blurred away. He slept hard, no dreams, and when he woke up it was a new day and a ragged, pathetic sob was ripping its way out of his throat.
Now that he’s started, he can’t stop. He cries until his throat is swollen and shredded, until his lungs heave and spasm, until he can’t breathe or think or stand up. His head hurts - pulsing, gnawing pain like after a string of bad visions. Every part of him is stinging and prickling with discomfort, hypersensitive, like some raw, tender thing ripped open before its time.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he says, over and over again, as if it matters. He can and he will, probably sooner than later. Miserably, maybe - isolated and heartsick and broken in some way that can’t be fixed - but he will. Dean knew that, demanded it of him; it’s not impossible that his knowing it made it so. Right this minute, panicking deaf and blind on only the second of an eternity of days without his brother, it doesn’t much matter.
He cries so hard he makes himself sick, coughing and gagging over the side of the bed. It’s nothing new. None of this is new. In the last three years, Sam has lost everything - Jess, his dad, any hope of a normal life. Dean. He knows this process backward and forward. It hurts, and it hurts, and it hurts, and then one day you wake up and it’s better. It hurts a little less, feels a little less fresh. It’s all still there, just below the surface, ready to boil over at the slightest provocation, but it’s better.
(Out of all the really, really crappy things, the worst thing of all is that some tiny, stupid part of him keeps expecting Dean to be there - to push Sam’s hair out of his face and call him a girl, lay a warm hand on his neck, make him drink water and rag on him for getting snot all over himself.)
Sam pushes his slick face into the stale cotton sheets, whole body shaking wild out of control, and waits for it to get better.
+++
There was never any question that Sam would keep hunting. The whole thing with Henricksen pretty much put an end to whatever vague thoughts Sam might have had on the subject, and Dean stopped dropping his unsubtle hints about Sam going back to school long before Cold Oak. It wasn’t so much that Sam stopped wanting that life - the college degree, the steady job, the wife and home and children. It wasn’t even that he thought of it as something he couldn’t have anymore. It was just a different world - one he no longer belonged to, if he ever really had.
So, yeah, maybe Sam was sheltered for too long or not long enough, and maybe he’ll never be as good a shot as his dad, and maybe this isn’t what he wanted from his life, but he’s a hunter. Now more than ever, maybe, with nothing left to lose, he’s a hunter.
+++
The fourth day Dean is dead, Sam is still waiting.
He gets up early, showers and checks out of the motel before the sun is more than a hint of lightness in the eastern sky. No point hanging around.
The car looks just the same as she always has. A little dusty, maybe. Dean polished her all the time, practically spit-shined her, lingering fondly over every flare and indentation. Sometimes he’d whistle or sing snatches of whatever was stuck in his head; other times he talked to the car as if she were an old friend, admiring her, like someone praising a particularly beloved pet. It was weird. Sam misses it already.
He’s a little worried that the car will smell different, but if anything it smells too familiar - fast food and leather, herbs and iron, a hint of old blood that’s clung to the interior as long as Sam can remember. It smells like Dean and their dad and too many long years on the road, and even as he’s aching right down to his fingernails, Sam can’t help but feel a burst of gratitude for this one reliable thing in the middle of whatever his life is now. He pats the dashboard.
“Sorry, girl,” he says. His voice sounds strange in the unnatural quiet, forced out scratchy and reluctant from someplace way down deep. “I’ll do what I can.”
+++
He’s not really sure what to do with Dean’s stuff. It’s never been an issue before. Everything he and Jess owned burned up with the apartment, and his dad squirreled away his spellbooks and cursed artifacts all over the country, never to be seen again. But Dean’s things are in the car, mixed and mingled with his own. The guns are Sam’s now, obviously, but the clothes would never fit, and anyway he’d feel kind of strange, wearing his dead brother’s clothes. And there are other things - Dean’s phone, his stupid cassettes, a thousand scraps of paper with drunk-scrawled phone numbers.
For the time being, he leaves everything where it is. It’s not for the sentimental value, or because he’s afraid to let go, or anything. He just doesn’t know what to do with the things Dean left behind.
+++
The twelfth day Dean is dead, Sam reads in the newspaper about a string of disappearances in a nearby town. He’s in the area, so he figures he might as well go and take a look. Not like he has anything better planned for the day.
Fourteen hours later, he’s blood-spattered and winded, hacking the head off something that looks like a cross between a black dog, a griffin, and a creature made entirely out of mucus. It doesn’t feel good, exactly, but it’s better than sitting alone in a motel room, waiting for his life to change.
He falls back into hunting sort of without meaning to. By the time it dawns on him, he’s waist-deep in ectoplasm and grave dirt, scanning the papers every morning for his next destination. The hunt itself hasn’t changed much; Sam gets sliced up and gnawed on and hurled out of his fair share of second-story windows, same as always. Sometimes he catches himself wishing for another set of eyes, another gun, but that’s to be expected. Dean has always had Sam’s back, as long as he can remember. It’s only natural Sam should miss that now, striking out alone into the dark world.
+++
The forty-second day Dean is dead, Sam goes to see Jess.
It’s been years since he’s been here. He tries to feel guilty about that, but there’s just no room. He’s full up with missing Dean, still can’t really think of anything else.
Jess’s grave is nice enough, all things considered. It’s grown over with thick, soft grass, and there are flowers by the stone, wilted but pretty. Her parents or someone must have been by recently. The place is well-kept and tidy. Sam stands there for a long time, just looking.
He thought once that if he’d known what was coming, really known what was coming, he would have done things differently. He would have held on tighter, paid more attention to the little things. He’s forgotten the exact shade of Jess’s eyes and the precise curve of her mouth. The memory of her skin has faded from his fingers.
(On an academic level, Sam knows that he’s going to lose Dean. It might take a little longer than it did with Jess, but there’s no avoiding it. In a few months or maybe years, he won’t remember the sound of Dean’s voice. He’ll forget the roll of his shoulders when he walked, the line of his jaw, the smattering of freckles on his left shoulder blade. He’ll forget the way Dean smelled and the idiot grin he got when he was drunk and cheerful.)
Sam touches the small picture of Jess, pretty and happy. It doesn’t mean anything - being here, touching her photograph. He loved her, still does, but she’s gone. She’s dead, and she’s not coming back, and one day he’ll forget her completely.
+++
After the visions stopped, Sam had fewer and fewer nightmares about Jess, and more regular dreams. Eventually the nightmares stopped completely, and he started dreaming about the two of them doing silly, unimportant things - napping on the quad, buying textbooks, eating ice cream while watching Law and Order reruns. It’s kind of nice. He still does love Jess, misses the hell out of her. It’s nice to feel like he still has her, a little, even though he knows it’s all in his head.
A few nights after he visits her grave, he dreams of her for the first time in months. They’re in a kitchen - not the crowded, familiar space Sam remembers from their apartment, but somehow still theirs all the same. Mid-morning sunlight glows through the kitschy curtains above the sink. Sam is sitting at the table, studying a demonology text hidden inside a book on the Chinese economy; Jess is making grilled cheese. He loved her grilled cheese. She always made it just like this, standing at the counter in a tank top and sweatpants, one hand on her hip, hair loose and uncombed down her back.
Sam traces idle fingers over the words of the text. Every time he looks down, they say something different. “You know what’s funny?”
Jess glances at him, blonde hair twitching over her bare shoulders. Sam is struck by the urge to bite a trail up her spine. “Hmm?”
“If I had just shot my dad when he told me to, none of this would’ve happened.”
Jess slides the sizzling sandwich onto a plate, which she brings over to the table. “That’s not really that funny.”
It’s not.
Sam takes the proffered sandwich, and almost immediately burns his fingers on it. Jess rolls her eyes. “It’s still hot, dummy.”
“I know,” Sam says. “Jess?”
“What now?” She’s smiling. She smiled a lot. God, he misses her so much.
He meant to apologize, but the words won’t come to him. Sorry for not telling you. Sorry for getting you killed. Sorry for never going to see your grave.
“I love your grilled cheese,” he says.
She reaches over and ruffles his hair. “I know, Sam.” In the lazy Sunday light, she almost looks like she’s glowing.
+++
This is how it works:
He drives a lot, covers more ground in less time than he and Dean used to. When there’s no job to research, he might go through five or six towns in a week. He hustles pool some nights, and poker when he has to. He buys premium.
(The long, quiet drives are the worst. He’ll go crazy in more ways than one if he listens to Dean’s tapes, so instead he buys one of those adapters for his iPod and plays it on shuffle, leaving the song selection to random chance. He never really listens to the music, but it covers up the silence.)
He researches, hunts, saves some lives and ends a few. He does his job. He doesn’t go looking for trouble, and for the most part it doesn’t search him out.
He takes decent care of himself. He eats and drinks. He salts doors and windowsills. He brushes his teeth. He even works out sometimes, though he doesn’t run anymore - it’s boring without Dean, even though they never talked much, and besides it gives him too much time to think.
He calls Bobby, eventually. Bobby tells him that his offer still stands, and Sam says he’ll think about it.
He sleeps okay most nights. Sometimes he dreams, sometimes not. Sometimes he wakes up screaming or sweating or wondering when Dean will be back with the coffee. Sometimes he wakes up and can’t bring himself to get out of bed, so he just lies there all day, staring at the ceiling or watching infomercials for power juicers and cornballers.
The one thing that’s certain is that any powers he might have had once are well and truly gone. He hasn’t had a vision in a year and a half. Nothing is ever floating around the room when he wakes up; everything is just as he left it.
He doesn’t know what he expected.
+++
The one hundred eighty-third day Dean is dead, Sam loses his shit in a diner.
He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. It’s not like there’s anything in particular that sets him off - no Metallica on the radio, no kind word from a middle-aged waitress - unless you count the diner itself, which Sam doesn’t. Diners remind him of Dean, yeah, but so do truck stops and motel rooms, and he sees those every day. So do haunted attics and grungy bars and gas stations and supermarkets and the Pennsylvania Turnpike; so do pretty girls and black coffee and radio static and fake ID cards and dogs and stop signs and the fucking air he breathes every minute of every one of the one hundred eighty-three days he’s been alive and Dean’s body has been rotting in the ground. Dean is everywhere as much as he is nowhere, and unless Bobby decides to let Sam crawl into a hole and die one of these days, Sam is going to have to suck it up and deal.
None of which explains why he breaks down during the lunch rush in a diner in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, IL.
(He’s been here before, or anyway to a thousand others just like it. He used to be so good with names.)
He’s picking without real interest at his sandwich, listening with half an ear to the grunts and giggles of conversation around him. There are three teenagers in the booth behind him, a family with young children on the other side. Sam is in town to take care of a particularly nasty vengeful spirit, but she won’t surface until the new moon tomorrow. He already planned out his strategy, so for now he’s at loose ends, bored and tired. He hasn’t slept well the past few nights. His fries are soggy.
“Finish your hamburger,” says the mother in the next booth.
“Ding dang,” says an old man at the counter, and Sam carefully pushes his plate to the side and puts his head down and starts to cry.
No one notices for a while, but pretty soon he can feel the stares of every person in the place. People are whispering. The girls behind him are giggling uncomfortably. It doesn't matter. In a few minutes he’ll get up and walk out, drive away and leave the ghost to some other hunter. He’ll never come back to this run-down diner in this nowhere town. He’ll never see these people again.
It hurts, and it hurts, and it hurts.
+++
Every once in a while, he dreams about Yellow Eyes.
They’re just dreams - not visions, no demonic interventions - nothing supernatural about it. Just a regular fuck-up of his human subconscious. Azazel is dead as dead can be; there’s no coming back from where he’s gone.
The bar in his dream is dark and smoky, no cleaner or filthier than Sam is used to. Yellow Eyes is the barkeep. He leans on the bar as Sam toys with his beer bottle, mouth twisted in that familiar smirk. “You know, kid,” he says, “I can’t keep taking credit for your handiwork.”
The beer is bitter and sharp, metallic, like a copper penny on Sam’s tongue. Yellow Eyes shakes his head, eyes glinting gold through the smoke, and says, “I mean, I’ve got to hand it to you, Sammy. Looks to me like you’ve killed everyone you’ve ever loved.”
He slides two coins across the bar. Pennies. “Keep the change.”
+++
The two hundred fifty-seventh day Dean is dead, Sam wakes up to find him sitting at the foot of the bed, cleaning the weapons.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Sam says.
“Tell me about it,” Dean says, squinting down the barrel of a .45. “Man, you store these in a deep fryer or what? I know I told you what happens to little boys who don’t keep their guns clean.”
“Their hands explode,” Sam says automatically, not thinking. Instinct.
“That’s right. And then the clowns come.”
“Dean,” he says. His heart is hammering in his chest, rapid-fire, making him tremble. “Dean.”
The asshole doesn’t even look up. “Uh huh.”
He feels like an idiot, mincing words with a trickster or a shapeshifter or whatever. He doesn’t want to say it. He hates this thing that is not Dean for making him say it. “You’re dead.”
The thing that is not Dean glances up at him, eyebrows arched like that’s the stupidest thing Sam’s ever said. “Uh, yeah, no kidding,” he says. “You shot me, genius. Where’s the solvent?”
Sam sits up, scoots back against the headboard. He eyes the guns laid out on the ugly floral bedspread. At least three of them are loaded with salt, two with silver. He can’t stop staring.
Dean - the thing that is almost definitely not Dean - looks annoyed. Grease-smeared. Alive. “Yes, okay, Sam, I’m dead. It’s been, what, eight months?”
“Two hundred fifty-seven days.”
“Two hundred fifty-seven days, but who’s counting - ”
“I am.” Sam feels lightheaded. He feels like his heart is going to rattle its way up into his throat and get stuck.
“That’s very sweet, Haley Joel. The point is, I’m dead.”
“But you’re here,” Sam says.
Dean shifts his attention back to the gun. “Connect the dots, Sammy.”
“You can’t stay.”
Dean shrugs.
“I could shoot you,” Sam says. His voice is a little stronger now, more conversational, like maybe he’s just brainstorming, running the idea past Dean for appraisal. “Again, I mean.”
Dean chuckles, eyes squinting just exactly the way Sam remembers. “Come on, Sammy. Unfinished business. You know how it works.”
(Sam’s not stupid, okay? He’s not. He gets it. He’s been around the block enough times to recognize his own fucked-up desires at play. If he’s honest with himself, he knows he’s been waiting for this since the day he put his brother in the ground.
The thing is, these two hundred fifty-seven days - they’ve been the longest of Sam’s fucking life.)
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I guess I do.”
Title: woke up new
Author: guns_and_butter
Pairing: Gen with a dash of canon. (Read: references to Sam/Jess; also contains the “heterosexual” brothers/life partners/mutual ass-checker-outers who even my mother thinks are doing it.)
Rating: Adult
Word count: 5,281
Warning: Deathfic
Disclaimer: Nothing here is mine, except the brain damage. Title shamelessly stolen from the Mountain Goats song of the same name.
Summary: The first day Dean is dead, Sam’s pretty sure, is the worst day of his life.
Thanks to veronamay for the beta! ♥
The first day Dean is dead, Sam’s pretty sure, is the worst day of his life.
It should go without saying - even Hallmark doesn’t make a card for this kind of thing - but, to be fair, Sam has had a lot of worst days of his life, and at some point you start losing track of rank. Noticing the splash of blood leaking from your girlfriend’s exposed viscera versus sloshing an extra kick of accelerant on your dad to make sure he incinerates thoroughly - that’s a tough call by anyone’s standards.
He might be a little out of it, a little crazy, maybe. He hasn’t slept since Dean died - but then, who can blame him. He’s just killed his brother.
Not just in some figurative sense (he’s dead because Sam couldn’t make himself hit some asshole with a tire iron) or even the whole, you know, the deal - but literally pushed a gun into Dean’s chest and pulled the trigger. He would’ve done it in the head, point blank shot with a hollow-point, just to make absolutely one hundred percent sure
(because, seriously, Dean is just the type of contrary fucker to not die when Sam is trying to save his immortal soul)
but at the very last second he thought about the explosion of blood and gore, clumps of Dean’s brain splattering on his face and nestling in his hair, and he lost his nerve.
It didn’t matter, in the end. Dean died pretty much instantly, even though Sam’s aim was a little off and his hands were slippery-wet and shaking. Some lucky break.
He’s supposed to call Bobby. Dean made him promise, made him swear on everything he could think of, as if Sam gave a shit when Dean had eleven minutes to live. It was one of the last things Dean said, right around the time he started hearing the hounds in the distance - remember to call Bobby, like Sam had lost his Palm Pilot and couldn’t recall his to-do list. (1) Buy premium. (2) Clean the guns. (3) Call Bobby to help get rid of Dean’s corpse. Sam shuddered all over, so intense it made his ears ring, with the urge to punch his almost-dead brother in the face. He hated Dean, wanted him to hurt, wanted to throw himself at Dean’s feet and press his face into Dean’s thigh and beg him not to do this. He wanted to make Dean live up to a few fucking promises of his own, but it was too late for that, so he just said, “Okay.” Maybe he even meant it, ten minutes and twenty-six seconds before he shot Dean in the heart.
The thing is, Sam should be happy. He should be fucking ecstatic. He won, after all. Score one for humanity. Sure, it wasn’t an easy job, but what matters is that Dean’s not rotting in Hell the way he and Bobby and everyone but Sam thought he would. Sam literally saved his brother’s soul - snatched it out of the demon’s hands and sent it straight up to…wherever.
(Sam’s always been good with loopholes. He thinks he probably would have been a pretty great lawyer.)
What matters is that Dean is saved, home free, out of harm’s way, and Sam will never, ever see him again.
Sam’s not headed anywhere in particular. Away. Going nowhere at 100 mph, hurtling through state after state like he’s got someplace to be. No state troopers screeching after him to arrest him for speeding or fratricide or being a Winchester; no traffic to dodge, just a scattering of eighteen-wheelers dozing on the exit ramps. Just Sam Winchester and the open road, proof of his victory cooling in the backseat, sun rising gray and sickly on the worst day of his life.
+++
Sam was fourteen the first time he ever drove the car.
Dean hadn’t let anyone else near the wheel since Dad handed him the keys, but he was kind of busy just then. They’d tangled with a bunyip and its unexpected mate at the edge of the nastiest swamp Sam had ever smelled, and afterward he and Dean both had their hands full - Sam salting and burning and squaring things away, Dean with a solid grip on their dad’s insides.
Dad was pretty out of it by the time they managed to carry him back to the car and maneuver him into the backseat. As soon as they got him situated, Sam quickly went and slid into the front, fully expecting Dean to do the same. If they’d ever needed to make a quick getaway, it was now.
“Catch,” Dean said instead, and tossed the keys over the seatback. They were slick with clots and smears of blood; Sam caught them without thinking. Dean jerked his head toward the driver’s seat, then refocused his attention on holding Dad’s guts in place. “There’s a clinic a few miles back. Go left once we hit the main road. It’ll be about two miles on your right.”
Sam froze, keys warm and sticky in his hand. He said, stupidly, “But I don’t know how,” and Dean gave him this look like he had three heads or something. It wasn’t an unfamiliar look, not since Sam had started growing and talking back and reading Moby-Dick at the kitchen table, but that didn’t mean Sam had to like it.
“Bullshit, you don’t know how,” Dean said. He was slick up to the elbows in their dad’s blood, which wasn’t really new either. “You’ve been watching me and Dad drive your whole life. If you can handle a crossbow, you can drive the car. Move.”
Sam took a second - just one brief, fleeting second - to consider how profoundly this sucked. In the grand scheme of things, it was totally unfair. He was a straight-A student, a decent soccer player, an all-around good guy. He held doors open for people. He didn’t even jaywalk.
He really didn’t deserve this crap - but then, if he’d learned anything from the last fourteen years, besides how to handle a crossbow, it was that people didn’t often get what they deserved.
And then Dad made this horrible noise and mumbled something about fucking field medics taking their sweet-ass time, and Dean said, kind of desperate-sounding, “Jesus Christ, Sammy, just drive,” and Sam slid over into the driver’s seat and jammed the key into the ignition and drove. It wasn’t like he had a lot of options.
+++
Sam calls Bobby late that afternoon.
He still hasn’t slept, hasn’t done anything but drive and drive and drive with the corpse folded up stiff and cold in the back. He feels crazy and lightheaded, feels like he’s a half-breath from screaming and sobbing and throwing up all at once. His eyes ache in his head, burning-hot, throbbing in their sockets. Also, he’s out of gas.
He’s been zigging and zagging across three states, taking random exits and looping back on himself more often than not, and it only takes Bobby a few hours to catch up. His pick-up pulls in next to the Impala just after dark, rumbling low and steady in the abandoned clearing. Sam’s spent the last four hours sitting on the hood, picking slowly and with infinite patience at the crust of gore on his hands. His fingernails are still caked with it, diseased-looking; his palms are stained, blood worn down into every tiny crack and fissure.
He stands up as Bobby climbs down from his truck. His ass hurts. He doesn’t look at the body in the backseat.
(He’s spent the last four hours not looking at it, not worrying about how they’ll ever get it out of the car. Not wondering how this is going to work.)
Bobby doesn’t give him shit for running off, doesn’t even mention it. Sam guesses he must have built up a tolerance for crazy, dealing with the Winchesters as long as he has.
Between the two of them, they manage to wrestle the body out of the car. Sam gets the head and shoulders, the exploded chest cavity. Bobby handles the legs, the frozen steel contortions of knees and hips, his own knees squeaking on the old leather.
They lay the body on the ground and stand back. Sam’s breath is coming heavy, ragged, like he’s just run a mile. He wants to ask if Bobby and Dean had this much trouble with his body, if they had a hard time fitting him in the car in the first place. Sam’s a big guy, and the backseat’s never as long as he’d swear it used to be. He hates sleeping in the car. If it’s warm enough and they find an okay spot, he and Dean will usually grab the blankets from the back and stretch out on the ground instead, bunched-up jackets under their heads. Sam’s never gone camping, exactly, but that’s what he thinks of when people talk about it - shrill crickets and the rustle of tall grass, starchy motel scent and a hint of motor oil, murky bands of light streaked across a purple-black sky. He always wakes up wet with dew and a little cold, a little sore, aching for coffee like he’s never wanted for anything else in his life.
The corpse is as pale as any Sam’s ever seen. One side of the face is blotchy and stained, dark with settled blood. Postmortem lividity, it’s called. Sam googled it once.
“We’re out of accelerant,” he says.
Bobby looks at him for a while. Just looks. “I’ve got some,” he says, finally. “Do we need it?”
“Well, I mean - I just thought.” Sam’s eyes hurt. “Don’t you think we should burn it?”
Bobby is still looking at him. Sam wonders if he looked at Dean like this, thinks he probably did. “It’s up to you, son,” he says, a lot gentler than Sam remembers Bobby ever being. “Is that what you want?”
Sam wants a lot of things. He wants to stop feeling like he’s choking, like the pressure in his chest is clawing up into his throat, lead-heavy, too big to fit. He wants to lie down next to his brother’s twisted-up body and die. He wants Dean and he wants his daddy and he wants to be anywhere but here.
He shakes his head.
Bobby squeezes his shoulder, strong but careful, like he thinks Sam might crack apart, and they get the shovels out of the trunk and set about burying Dean Winchester.
+++
Bobby says he shouldn’t hunt alone. He’s probably right. Bobby’s right about a lot of things.
He invites Sam to come back with him to South Dakota. “I could use another set of eyes,” he says. He’s probably even telling the truth. There are still demons to hunt, legions of hellspawn and escaped souls to send packing, and the piles of unexamined texts on Bobby’s floor are near endless, growing by the day.
Truth is, there’s a part of him that wants to go with Bobby - to hole up in one of the only places besides the Impala that’s ever felt anything like home, work in the salvage yard and translate forgotten spells and let the hurt ease out of him day by day, like the ebb of the tide. Spend some sleepless nights staring at the ceiling of the room he and Dean used to share, wondering how he could have changed things. Drink a lot of bitter black coffee and sit up late into the night exchanging stories with Bobby, maybe even laughing some.
“I can’t,” he says. “I have to - I have to go. For a while.”
Bobby nods, like he was expecting as much. He looks tired, older than his years, in a way Sam’s never really noticed before. It’s a look most hunters pick up after a while. “You call me any time,” he says. “Soon. I mean that, Sam.”
“I will,” Sam says. There’s no question Bobby knows he’s lying. He’s been dealing with the Winchesters a long, long time.
+++
The second day Dean is dead, Sam wakes up crying.
The motel only had doubles left, which was just Sam’s luck. All those times Dean made him arm-wrestle for the bed, most of which he ended up sleeping on the floor
(Dean claimed it was because of Sam’s long arms. “Screws with your center of gravity,” he’d say, making a show of stretching out long and comfortable on the bed. Sam was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked, but there was no point in arguing. Besides, Dean always managed to lose when Sam had a headache.)
and now, the first time in his entire life he’d ever asked for a single, there was suddenly an abundance of beds.
Sam ended up taking the double for three nights. The room looked familiar, but so did most places. He stripped down in the middle of the room, turned the shower on as hot as it would go, scrubbed Dean’s blood from his skin until he ached, then crawled naked into the bed farthest from the door and stared at the wall until the whole world blurred away. He slept hard, no dreams, and when he woke up it was a new day and a ragged, pathetic sob was ripping its way out of his throat.
Now that he’s started, he can’t stop. He cries until his throat is swollen and shredded, until his lungs heave and spasm, until he can’t breathe or think or stand up. His head hurts - pulsing, gnawing pain like after a string of bad visions. Every part of him is stinging and prickling with discomfort, hypersensitive, like some raw, tender thing ripped open before its time.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he says, over and over again, as if it matters. He can and he will, probably sooner than later. Miserably, maybe - isolated and heartsick and broken in some way that can’t be fixed - but he will. Dean knew that, demanded it of him; it’s not impossible that his knowing it made it so. Right this minute, panicking deaf and blind on only the second of an eternity of days without his brother, it doesn’t much matter.
He cries so hard he makes himself sick, coughing and gagging over the side of the bed. It’s nothing new. None of this is new. In the last three years, Sam has lost everything - Jess, his dad, any hope of a normal life. Dean. He knows this process backward and forward. It hurts, and it hurts, and it hurts, and then one day you wake up and it’s better. It hurts a little less, feels a little less fresh. It’s all still there, just below the surface, ready to boil over at the slightest provocation, but it’s better.
(Out of all the really, really crappy things, the worst thing of all is that some tiny, stupid part of him keeps expecting Dean to be there - to push Sam’s hair out of his face and call him a girl, lay a warm hand on his neck, make him drink water and rag on him for getting snot all over himself.)
Sam pushes his slick face into the stale cotton sheets, whole body shaking wild out of control, and waits for it to get better.
+++
There was never any question that Sam would keep hunting. The whole thing with Henricksen pretty much put an end to whatever vague thoughts Sam might have had on the subject, and Dean stopped dropping his unsubtle hints about Sam going back to school long before Cold Oak. It wasn’t so much that Sam stopped wanting that life - the college degree, the steady job, the wife and home and children. It wasn’t even that he thought of it as something he couldn’t have anymore. It was just a different world - one he no longer belonged to, if he ever really had.
So, yeah, maybe Sam was sheltered for too long or not long enough, and maybe he’ll never be as good a shot as his dad, and maybe this isn’t what he wanted from his life, but he’s a hunter. Now more than ever, maybe, with nothing left to lose, he’s a hunter.
+++
The fourth day Dean is dead, Sam is still waiting.
He gets up early, showers and checks out of the motel before the sun is more than a hint of lightness in the eastern sky. No point hanging around.
The car looks just the same as she always has. A little dusty, maybe. Dean polished her all the time, practically spit-shined her, lingering fondly over every flare and indentation. Sometimes he’d whistle or sing snatches of whatever was stuck in his head; other times he talked to the car as if she were an old friend, admiring her, like someone praising a particularly beloved pet. It was weird. Sam misses it already.
He’s a little worried that the car will smell different, but if anything it smells too familiar - fast food and leather, herbs and iron, a hint of old blood that’s clung to the interior as long as Sam can remember. It smells like Dean and their dad and too many long years on the road, and even as he’s aching right down to his fingernails, Sam can’t help but feel a burst of gratitude for this one reliable thing in the middle of whatever his life is now. He pats the dashboard.
“Sorry, girl,” he says. His voice sounds strange in the unnatural quiet, forced out scratchy and reluctant from someplace way down deep. “I’ll do what I can.”
+++
He’s not really sure what to do with Dean’s stuff. It’s never been an issue before. Everything he and Jess owned burned up with the apartment, and his dad squirreled away his spellbooks and cursed artifacts all over the country, never to be seen again. But Dean’s things are in the car, mixed and mingled with his own. The guns are Sam’s now, obviously, but the clothes would never fit, and anyway he’d feel kind of strange, wearing his dead brother’s clothes. And there are other things - Dean’s phone, his stupid cassettes, a thousand scraps of paper with drunk-scrawled phone numbers.
For the time being, he leaves everything where it is. It’s not for the sentimental value, or because he’s afraid to let go, or anything. He just doesn’t know what to do with the things Dean left behind.
+++
The twelfth day Dean is dead, Sam reads in the newspaper about a string of disappearances in a nearby town. He’s in the area, so he figures he might as well go and take a look. Not like he has anything better planned for the day.
Fourteen hours later, he’s blood-spattered and winded, hacking the head off something that looks like a cross between a black dog, a griffin, and a creature made entirely out of mucus. It doesn’t feel good, exactly, but it’s better than sitting alone in a motel room, waiting for his life to change.
He falls back into hunting sort of without meaning to. By the time it dawns on him, he’s waist-deep in ectoplasm and grave dirt, scanning the papers every morning for his next destination. The hunt itself hasn’t changed much; Sam gets sliced up and gnawed on and hurled out of his fair share of second-story windows, same as always. Sometimes he catches himself wishing for another set of eyes, another gun, but that’s to be expected. Dean has always had Sam’s back, as long as he can remember. It’s only natural Sam should miss that now, striking out alone into the dark world.
+++
The forty-second day Dean is dead, Sam goes to see Jess.
It’s been years since he’s been here. He tries to feel guilty about that, but there’s just no room. He’s full up with missing Dean, still can’t really think of anything else.
Jess’s grave is nice enough, all things considered. It’s grown over with thick, soft grass, and there are flowers by the stone, wilted but pretty. Her parents or someone must have been by recently. The place is well-kept and tidy. Sam stands there for a long time, just looking.
He thought once that if he’d known what was coming, really known what was coming, he would have done things differently. He would have held on tighter, paid more attention to the little things. He’s forgotten the exact shade of Jess’s eyes and the precise curve of her mouth. The memory of her skin has faded from his fingers.
(On an academic level, Sam knows that he’s going to lose Dean. It might take a little longer than it did with Jess, but there’s no avoiding it. In a few months or maybe years, he won’t remember the sound of Dean’s voice. He’ll forget the roll of his shoulders when he walked, the line of his jaw, the smattering of freckles on his left shoulder blade. He’ll forget the way Dean smelled and the idiot grin he got when he was drunk and cheerful.)
Sam touches the small picture of Jess, pretty and happy. It doesn’t mean anything - being here, touching her photograph. He loved her, still does, but she’s gone. She’s dead, and she’s not coming back, and one day he’ll forget her completely.
+++
After the visions stopped, Sam had fewer and fewer nightmares about Jess, and more regular dreams. Eventually the nightmares stopped completely, and he started dreaming about the two of them doing silly, unimportant things - napping on the quad, buying textbooks, eating ice cream while watching Law and Order reruns. It’s kind of nice. He still does love Jess, misses the hell out of her. It’s nice to feel like he still has her, a little, even though he knows it’s all in his head.
A few nights after he visits her grave, he dreams of her for the first time in months. They’re in a kitchen - not the crowded, familiar space Sam remembers from their apartment, but somehow still theirs all the same. Mid-morning sunlight glows through the kitschy curtains above the sink. Sam is sitting at the table, studying a demonology text hidden inside a book on the Chinese economy; Jess is making grilled cheese. He loved her grilled cheese. She always made it just like this, standing at the counter in a tank top and sweatpants, one hand on her hip, hair loose and uncombed down her back.
Sam traces idle fingers over the words of the text. Every time he looks down, they say something different. “You know what’s funny?”
Jess glances at him, blonde hair twitching over her bare shoulders. Sam is struck by the urge to bite a trail up her spine. “Hmm?”
“If I had just shot my dad when he told me to, none of this would’ve happened.”
Jess slides the sizzling sandwich onto a plate, which she brings over to the table. “That’s not really that funny.”
It’s not.
Sam takes the proffered sandwich, and almost immediately burns his fingers on it. Jess rolls her eyes. “It’s still hot, dummy.”
“I know,” Sam says. “Jess?”
“What now?” She’s smiling. She smiled a lot. God, he misses her so much.
He meant to apologize, but the words won’t come to him. Sorry for not telling you. Sorry for getting you killed. Sorry for never going to see your grave.
“I love your grilled cheese,” he says.
She reaches over and ruffles his hair. “I know, Sam.” In the lazy Sunday light, she almost looks like she’s glowing.
+++
This is how it works:
He drives a lot, covers more ground in less time than he and Dean used to. When there’s no job to research, he might go through five or six towns in a week. He hustles pool some nights, and poker when he has to. He buys premium.
(The long, quiet drives are the worst. He’ll go crazy in more ways than one if he listens to Dean’s tapes, so instead he buys one of those adapters for his iPod and plays it on shuffle, leaving the song selection to random chance. He never really listens to the music, but it covers up the silence.)
He researches, hunts, saves some lives and ends a few. He does his job. He doesn’t go looking for trouble, and for the most part it doesn’t search him out.
He takes decent care of himself. He eats and drinks. He salts doors and windowsills. He brushes his teeth. He even works out sometimes, though he doesn’t run anymore - it’s boring without Dean, even though they never talked much, and besides it gives him too much time to think.
He calls Bobby, eventually. Bobby tells him that his offer still stands, and Sam says he’ll think about it.
He sleeps okay most nights. Sometimes he dreams, sometimes not. Sometimes he wakes up screaming or sweating or wondering when Dean will be back with the coffee. Sometimes he wakes up and can’t bring himself to get out of bed, so he just lies there all day, staring at the ceiling or watching infomercials for power juicers and cornballers.
The one thing that’s certain is that any powers he might have had once are well and truly gone. He hasn’t had a vision in a year and a half. Nothing is ever floating around the room when he wakes up; everything is just as he left it.
He doesn’t know what he expected.
+++
The one hundred eighty-third day Dean is dead, Sam loses his shit in a diner.
He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. It’s not like there’s anything in particular that sets him off - no Metallica on the radio, no kind word from a middle-aged waitress - unless you count the diner itself, which Sam doesn’t. Diners remind him of Dean, yeah, but so do truck stops and motel rooms, and he sees those every day. So do haunted attics and grungy bars and gas stations and supermarkets and the Pennsylvania Turnpike; so do pretty girls and black coffee and radio static and fake ID cards and dogs and stop signs and the fucking air he breathes every minute of every one of the one hundred eighty-three days he’s been alive and Dean’s body has been rotting in the ground. Dean is everywhere as much as he is nowhere, and unless Bobby decides to let Sam crawl into a hole and die one of these days, Sam is going to have to suck it up and deal.
None of which explains why he breaks down during the lunch rush in a diner in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, IL.
(He’s been here before, or anyway to a thousand others just like it. He used to be so good with names.)
He’s picking without real interest at his sandwich, listening with half an ear to the grunts and giggles of conversation around him. There are three teenagers in the booth behind him, a family with young children on the other side. Sam is in town to take care of a particularly nasty vengeful spirit, but she won’t surface until the new moon tomorrow. He already planned out his strategy, so for now he’s at loose ends, bored and tired. He hasn’t slept well the past few nights. His fries are soggy.
“Finish your hamburger,” says the mother in the next booth.
“Ding dang,” says an old man at the counter, and Sam carefully pushes his plate to the side and puts his head down and starts to cry.
No one notices for a while, but pretty soon he can feel the stares of every person in the place. People are whispering. The girls behind him are giggling uncomfortably. It doesn't matter. In a few minutes he’ll get up and walk out, drive away and leave the ghost to some other hunter. He’ll never come back to this run-down diner in this nowhere town. He’ll never see these people again.
It hurts, and it hurts, and it hurts.
+++
Every once in a while, he dreams about Yellow Eyes.
They’re just dreams - not visions, no demonic interventions - nothing supernatural about it. Just a regular fuck-up of his human subconscious. Azazel is dead as dead can be; there’s no coming back from where he’s gone.
The bar in his dream is dark and smoky, no cleaner or filthier than Sam is used to. Yellow Eyes is the barkeep. He leans on the bar as Sam toys with his beer bottle, mouth twisted in that familiar smirk. “You know, kid,” he says, “I can’t keep taking credit for your handiwork.”
The beer is bitter and sharp, metallic, like a copper penny on Sam’s tongue. Yellow Eyes shakes his head, eyes glinting gold through the smoke, and says, “I mean, I’ve got to hand it to you, Sammy. Looks to me like you’ve killed everyone you’ve ever loved.”
He slides two coins across the bar. Pennies. “Keep the change.”
+++
The two hundred fifty-seventh day Dean is dead, Sam wakes up to find him sitting at the foot of the bed, cleaning the weapons.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Sam says.
“Tell me about it,” Dean says, squinting down the barrel of a .45. “Man, you store these in a deep fryer or what? I know I told you what happens to little boys who don’t keep their guns clean.”
“Their hands explode,” Sam says automatically, not thinking. Instinct.
“That’s right. And then the clowns come.”
“Dean,” he says. His heart is hammering in his chest, rapid-fire, making him tremble. “Dean.”
The asshole doesn’t even look up. “Uh huh.”
He feels like an idiot, mincing words with a trickster or a shapeshifter or whatever. He doesn’t want to say it. He hates this thing that is not Dean for making him say it. “You’re dead.”
The thing that is not Dean glances up at him, eyebrows arched like that’s the stupidest thing Sam’s ever said. “Uh, yeah, no kidding,” he says. “You shot me, genius. Where’s the solvent?”
Sam sits up, scoots back against the headboard. He eyes the guns laid out on the ugly floral bedspread. At least three of them are loaded with salt, two with silver. He can’t stop staring.
Dean - the thing that is almost definitely not Dean - looks annoyed. Grease-smeared. Alive. “Yes, okay, Sam, I’m dead. It’s been, what, eight months?”
“Two hundred fifty-seven days.”
“Two hundred fifty-seven days, but who’s counting - ”
“I am.” Sam feels lightheaded. He feels like his heart is going to rattle its way up into his throat and get stuck.
“That’s very sweet, Haley Joel. The point is, I’m dead.”
“But you’re here,” Sam says.
Dean shifts his attention back to the gun. “Connect the dots, Sammy.”
“You can’t stay.”
Dean shrugs.
“I could shoot you,” Sam says. His voice is a little stronger now, more conversational, like maybe he’s just brainstorming, running the idea past Dean for appraisal. “Again, I mean.”
Dean chuckles, eyes squinting just exactly the way Sam remembers. “Come on, Sammy. Unfinished business. You know how it works.”
(Sam’s not stupid, okay? He’s not. He gets it. He’s been around the block enough times to recognize his own fucked-up desires at play. If he’s honest with himself, he knows he’s been waiting for this since the day he put his brother in the ground.
The thing is, these two hundred fifty-seven days - they’ve been the longest of Sam’s fucking life.)
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I guess I do.”