Tracces >> Three
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The doctors made Dean stay in the hospital for another three days for observation. Unlike any other time when they were hospitalized, Sam didn’t sign Dean out early, but every day when Sam came to visit him, Dean would beg him to do exactly that.
“It’s not fair, Sam,” he whined when Sam told him ‘no’ yet again. “I can’t sign myself out anymore. Why can’t you just do it? Just this once?”
“I always sign you out early,” he reminded him. “And what’s so bad about being so well taken care of for a few more days? I thought you’d like staying here. Free food and board.”
“It’s not really free,” Dean reminded him. “They just think we have insurance.”
Sam glanced around to make sure no one overheard them. His brother was speaking a little too loud for his liking and the minute they found out their insurance was fake, he’d have no choice, but to book it out of there with Dean thrown over his shoulder. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that might be exactly what Dean was trying to do, so he changed the subject.
“I’ve been camping out in the impala in a field the last few days, watching the stars at night when I can’t sleep.”
A look of pain crossed Dean’s features and Sam realized too late he’d said the wrong thing. One of Dean’s favorite things to do was look up at the stars and now, because of Sam, he couldn’t do that anymore. Sam winced and pretended he hadn’t noticed Dean’s expression and amended quickly, “But it’s been overcast almost every night, so I can’t see much.”
Still the look of pain didn’t go away. The damage had already been done. Sam cursed himself, while Lucifer laughed in the corner. He was currently tearing apart what Sam thought was a napkin. He ignored him. After all, the devil could be doing something a lot worse.
-
During Dean’s hospital stay, Sam had been searching for a place where they could potentially live indefinitely. He didn’t know how long it would take Dean to adjust to his loss of eyesight and he also didn’t know what he would do before or after his brother had done so. He wanted to think that maybe they’d be able to continue their search for Dick Roman - he knew Dean would want to - and eventually avenge Bobby and save the world (again) at the same time, but the more he thought about what had happened to Dean and how it could potentially be irreversible, he wasn’t sure this was something they could do anymore.
So, when Sam wasn’t with Dean, he was looking at cheap apartments abandoned houses, trying to find them a place to live. Finally, the day of Dean’s discharge from the hospital, he found them a suitable house near the city, but also in the suburbs. It was abandoned, but the people who’d abandoned it, seemed to have left in hurry. Some of the furniture was still there: a couch in the living room, two twin sized beds in one of the bedrooms, a king sized bed in another, a few empty bookshelves, a coffee table, an old television set, and a small oak table with two matching chairs. There were also a few personal belongings that hadn’t made it into the rushed get away the previous owners clearly were in: some boxes full of magazines and books in a closet, a few baby blankets, some breakables placed here and there, a few magnets on the refrigerator.
Sam knew it wasn’t an ideal living space. Not by a long shot, but beds were made, the couch was comfortable enough and all of the appliances that had been left behind worked. He figured it would be a good place for them to stay. At least for a little while. Besides, the Leviathan wouldn’t expect to find them there. No one would, really. This was the most inconspicuous they’d ever been.
When Sam picked up Dean at the hospital only a few hours after discovering the place and took him there, he had to remind himself repeatedly that Dean couldn’t see how spacious the house was and how convenient of a place this would be for them. In fact, the first thing Dean said when Sam led him through the front door was, “Where are we? This doesn’t smell like a dirty motel room.”
“It’s a house,” Sam told him tentatively. “Not very big. Only two stories. But it’s abandoned. It has all of its appliances working, three made beds, and a washer and drier.” Sam glanced towards the broken TV and decided not to mention it. Dean couldn’t watch TV anymore anyway. It would only depress him further to be reminded of this fact. However, he would need to know where everything was so he could, in time, get around the house himself. Taking his brother’s arm, Sam led him through the rooms, showing him where the refrigerator, the couch, the beds, and the bathrooms were. After he’d pointed out the essentials, he let Dean tell him what else he wanted to know the location of before he sat him down on the couch, got him a beer, and sat down beside him.
“So,” Sam said, opening their beer bottles, “what do you think?”
“I can’t see it, Sammy,” Dean reminded him, sounding bitter.
Sam sighed. “I know,” he replied, “but what do you think of staying here for a while, until you…adjust?” He was tentative, still unsure as to what could set Dean off and make him even more upset about his lost eyesight.
Dean was silent for a while after Sam finished speaking. In fact, Sam wasn’t sure he was going to answer him. He wanted desperately to turn on the TV, fill the silence that permeated the air around them with something other than the occasional sips they took from their beer bottles, but he didn’t know if the TV worked - it looked broken - and he didn’t want to upset Dean by doing something he couldn’t participate in.
Finally, after Sam was about to decide he didn’t care and try turning on the TV anyway, Dean said, “Why are we staying here instead of going to look for Dick Roman?”
Sam sighed heavily. “You know why,” he said firmly, not wanting to listen to his brother sulk some more about his blindness. “I just told you why. You have to adjust before we can do anything.” He didn’t mention that Dean wasn’t fit to hunt as it was.
“Why do I have to adjust?” Dean asked, sounding angry now. “Why can’t I just go back out into the fucking field?”
“Do you want to get yourself killed?” Sam burst out, feeling his own temper rising. But the instant he said this, he regretted it. He knew immediately what Dean’s response would be.
“Maybe I do! Why the fuck should I have to live my life like this?! Why are we always the ones that get punished, Sam?! All we do is save the fucking world and all it does is make us miserable! Why should we keep trying to save it?!”
Sam swallowed. He didn’t have a good response to that. Why should they keep saving the world when it never seemed grateful? Why should they risk their lives and their happiness to keep others safe? It didn’t seem fair. It had never seemed fair. Sam understood Dean’s argument, but still, he said, “Because there are good people in this world, Dean. People that don’t know what’s going on and that’s not their fault. They deserve to be saved.”
“Do they?” Dean half-yelled. “Do people who don’t even acknowledge we’ve saved their sorry asses over and over again really deserve to be saved again?”
“Because they don’t know we’re the ones that saved them, Dean!” Sam shouted emphatically, struggling to get his brother to understand. This wasn’t Dean. The Dean Sam knew would never be saying these things, but his brother was motivated by grief and bitterness and, after all they’d been through, who wouldn’t be? It seemed that Dean losing his eyesight was just the final straw. Now all bets were off and he was finished with the world.
“Why don’t they know?” Dean growled. “Why aren’t we treated like the heroes we fucking are for saving their miserable lives? Why don’t we just go out and say, ‘Hey, we saved the world. Twice. You should be bowing at our feet.’”
“You know why we can’t do that,” Sam retorted. “If we told anyone who wasn’t a hunter about what we’ve seen and what we’ve done, we’d be locked in a padded cell for the rest of our lives! The majority of the world doesn’t believe in angels or demons or any of the creatures we’ve dealt with in our lives! Let alone have seen them and had to kill them!” Sam picked at a hole that was steadily growing larger in his current pair of jeans. “It’s not their fault that they don’t know what’s going on.”
“They should know,” Dean hissed. “How could they not? With all the shit that’s happened in the past seven years, how could they not think that wasn’t some sort of apocalyptic crap? There has to be at least one normal person out there that has an inkling of what’s happening around them.”
“One person can’t convince everyone that angels and demons exist, Dean,” Sam reminded him.
“One person convinced almost everyone in Europe that Jewish people weren’t loved by God,” his brother retorted.
“That’s not the same thing and you know it,” Sam said. “Everyone knew that Jewish people existed. Not everyone knows about the existence of angels and demons and Wendigos and vampires. Those only exist in legends to most people. We just happen to be part of a select group of individuals that knows they’re actually real.”
Dean shut his mouth and said nothing else, but Sam knew the argument wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. In fact, he was pretty sure this argument was just getting started.
-
The next few days were spent getting used to their new home. Dean rarely left his room and when he did, he always was pressed up against the wall, his hands held out in front of him as he felt with both his feet and his fingers for what was in front of him. It seemed to work well for the most part. However, more often than not, Sam heard a large object crashing into the walls, followed by a string of curses that got more colorful each time it happened. Sam pretended not to notice, knowing that this was what Dean preferred. The last thing Dean would want was for Sam to acknowledge his weakness, how vulnerable he was and Sam didn’t want to make Dean feel worse than he already did, so he sat on his laptop, researched anything and everything that could heal a person that wasn’t an angel, a faith healer, or some ordinary doctor, and came up with a whole lot of nothing.
Then, one day, Dean crashed into the wall and Sam didn’t hear any curses. In fact, he heard nothing. For a long time he heard nothing. He listened for the sound of Dean getting up, going about his business, but that sound never came and, immediately, Sam began to panic. What if Dean had run into the wall and hit his head badly? What if the crash hadn’t been a crash at all? What if it was a gunshot and Dean had killed himself?
This last thought was what had Sam shoving back the chair as he bolted from the table and up the stairs. He expected to find his brother unconscious or worse, but, instead, he found him sitting in front of the wall, his shoulders shaking, his head hung, his hands in his lap, droplets shining the backs of his palms and he immediately knew Dean was crying.
To be honest, though Dean put up a good front, he cried a lot, though never without good reason and Sam really couldn’t think of a person who deserved a good cry more at the moment than Dean.
He moved tentatively towards him, trying not to make the floorboards creak, trying not to make it seem like he was there or listening or wanting to help him, but the moment he stepped forwards, Dean’s head jerked towards him and he let out a heavy sigh, saying in a jerky voice, “I know you’re there, Sam. I can hear you.”
Sam stopped moving. Vaguely he remembered when once upon a time they’d gone to a faith healer in Nebraska because Dean was dying of a heart condition that he’d contracted after being electrocuted when trying to get rid of a rawhead. It had been eight years ago that that happened, but Sam remembered the tent, the smell of wet grass, the chill of the air, and sound of the old upright piano behind him as clear as day. He remembered an old reverent telling his dying brother, “Be careful what you say around a blind man, son, we’ve got real sharp ears.” And now Sam wondered if this wasn’t some sort of retribution. They’d trusted someone to heal Dean, to give him back a life, but they’d taken everything away from this person instead and now, just like that man, Dean was blind.
Without another word, Sam dropped to his knees beside his brother. He took his damp hand in his own and opened his mouth to say something, but, without a word, Dean slumped against him, knotting his free hand in the fabric of his hoody, as he began to sob into his shoulder with complete utter abandon.
For a moment, Sam was frozen in shock. Dean never did this. Not when he was brought back from Hell and the memories hurt him, not when he lost Lisa because Sam was soulless and hadn’t been thinking, not even when he told Sam of the night he died in his arms in a ghost town. Never had Dean ever cried like this and yet now he was. Sam tried to come up with an explanation other than the fact that he was blind, but he couldn’t and, for the first time, Sam realized just how badly his brother had been hurt by his loss of sight.
“It’s your fault, Sam,” Lucifer reminded him. He didn’t have his pinwheel today. He was just crouching down next to them, watching as Sam wrapped his arms around his broken brother, trying to put the pieces back together again as best he could. “If you’d thrown the bleach just a few seconds earlier then Dean wouldn’t be blind right now. He wouldn’t be running into walls. You wouldn’t be living in this dump. And you wouldn’t have let Dean down. Again.”
Sam ignored the devil as best he could, reminding himself over and over again that he was only a hallucination, no more than a figment of his imagination, but that didn’t change the fact that what he said was one-hundred percent true.
It’s your fault, Sam, the voice of the devil now whispered inside his head. It’s your fault and there is nothing you can do to change it.
-
It was almost a month before Dean reverted to his somewhat regular self and, instead of holing up in his room and sulking, he went down the stairs and chose to stay as close to Sam as possible. Of course, Sam didn’t mind. He was certain if their roles were reversed, he would be doing the same thing.
“You find anything?” Dean asked, trying to sound nonchalant as he plopped himself down in the chair beside Sam.
He was colliding with the wall less now. It seemed that ever since the day he’d broken down in Sam’s arms, he’d been trying to do better, but he still cursed every time he did so. However, even this small accomplishment had put him in better spirits and Sam noticed that his brother had brought over a couple of beers for them before he sat down. He smiled, though Dean couldn’t see it and replied, “Not so far. I don’t know if any of these faith healers will work and even if they do I don’t think you want someone to switch places with you again if they have a reaper working for them, so that’s out. The only other option seems to be demon deals and angels and I don’t think we even need to discuss why those aren’t on the table.” He glanced at Dean and swallowed, adding almost tentatively, “There’s witchcraft, but that’s…unreliable, too.”
“How so?” Dean asked popping open his beer bottle and taking a swig that a healthy person wouldn’t have been able to.
Sam sighed. “Do I really have to explain it to you?”
Dean turned in the direction he thought Sam was. He was only a couple inches off, so he didn’t have the effect he wanted to when he replied, “Yes.”
Sam sighed again. “Well, one, it’s dangerous. We could accidentally kill someone if we try and if we hire a witch they could purposefully kill someone without telling us. Not to mention that we don’t even know if it would work because we’re not witches and, since witches use darker magic, they get demons to do their dirty work and even if we managed to find a witch that wasn’t going to kill people to save you, the last thing I want is to have some smartass demon telling me that they won’t heal you because it’s you.”
There was a short silence where Dean stared at his beer bottle in what Sam thought was quiet defeat, but then he said, “I guess those are all good reasons, but we could still try it.”
“Who are you and what have you done with Dean Winchester?” Sam responded, sounding angrier than he meant to. He couldn’t believe Dean was actually suggesting they try witchcraft to heal him. It seemed like a bad idea on so many levels.
“Of course it’s a bad idea, Sammy,” Lucifer told him. He was sitting in the chair on Sam’s other side. “The last time you trusted something you hunt, you ended up accidentally opening the Gates of Hell and releasing me.”
The devil laughed.
“Shut up,” Sam said without thinking.
“I didn’t say anything,” Dean said, looking up from his beer bottle again. There was another short silence before his brother caught on. This time it was Dean’s turn to sigh as he asked, “You’re still seeing Lucifer, aren’t you?”
“No,” Sam lied, trying to sound convincing, but he only ended up succeeding in sounding like a three year old who’d just gotten caught stealing cookies.
“Don’t bullshit me, man,” Dean said, sounding far more tired than angry. “I know you’re…trying to take care of me, but I need to know what’s going on with you too.”
“No, you don’t,” Sam said firmly.
“Yeah, I do,” Dean countered.
“No, you don’t,” Sam said again.
“Yeah, I d -” But Sam cut him off.
“No, you don’t because you need to take care of yourself! It may have escaped your notice, but you can’t see, Dean!” Sam was shouting now. “You can’t see and that means that if we go anywhere or do anything, I have to watch out for both of us and you can hear better than me, which means you need to be…listening for both of us! I can’t have you distracted by what’s going on with me, which is why me seeing Lucifer isn’t that big of a deal right now!”
Silence.
Finally, Dean pushed himself up from the table and said, “Sam, if you honestly think I keep forgetting I’m blind when I’m reminded every time I blink, then you’re a lot more dense than I thought.”
He didn’t say anything else, but his words had a double meaning, Sam knew. It was Dean’s way of saying, “Fuck you,” without the expletives. He watched as his brother felt his way back to the stairs and went up them. He listened as his brother shut the door behind him when he got to his room. He expected to hear some sort of outburst. Maybe punching the wall, yelling into a pillow. Something.
But instead there was silence and, for Sam, this was almost worse.
On to Ch. 4
The doctors made Dean stay in the hospital for another three days for observation. Unlike any other time when they were hospitalized, Sam didn’t sign Dean out early, but every day when Sam came to visit him, Dean would beg him to do exactly that.
“It’s not fair, Sam,” he whined when Sam told him ‘no’ yet again. “I can’t sign myself out anymore. Why can’t you just do it? Just this once?”
“I always sign you out early,” he reminded him. “And what’s so bad about being so well taken care of for a few more days? I thought you’d like staying here. Free food and board.”
“It’s not really free,” Dean reminded him. “They just think we have insurance.”
Sam glanced around to make sure no one overheard them. His brother was speaking a little too loud for his liking and the minute they found out their insurance was fake, he’d have no choice, but to book it out of there with Dean thrown over his shoulder. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that might be exactly what Dean was trying to do, so he changed the subject.
“I’ve been camping out in the impala in a field the last few days, watching the stars at night when I can’t sleep.”
A look of pain crossed Dean’s features and Sam realized too late he’d said the wrong thing. One of Dean’s favorite things to do was look up at the stars and now, because of Sam, he couldn’t do that anymore. Sam winced and pretended he hadn’t noticed Dean’s expression and amended quickly, “But it’s been overcast almost every night, so I can’t see much.”
Still the look of pain didn’t go away. The damage had already been done. Sam cursed himself, while Lucifer laughed in the corner. He was currently tearing apart what Sam thought was a napkin. He ignored him. After all, the devil could be doing something a lot worse.
-
During Dean’s hospital stay, Sam had been searching for a place where they could potentially live indefinitely. He didn’t know how long it would take Dean to adjust to his loss of eyesight and he also didn’t know what he would do before or after his brother had done so. He wanted to think that maybe they’d be able to continue their search for Dick Roman - he knew Dean would want to - and eventually avenge Bobby and save the world (again) at the same time, but the more he thought about what had happened to Dean and how it could potentially be irreversible, he wasn’t sure this was something they could do anymore.
So, when Sam wasn’t with Dean, he was looking at cheap apartments abandoned houses, trying to find them a place to live. Finally, the day of Dean’s discharge from the hospital, he found them a suitable house near the city, but also in the suburbs. It was abandoned, but the people who’d abandoned it, seemed to have left in hurry. Some of the furniture was still there: a couch in the living room, two twin sized beds in one of the bedrooms, a king sized bed in another, a few empty bookshelves, a coffee table, an old television set, and a small oak table with two matching chairs. There were also a few personal belongings that hadn’t made it into the rushed get away the previous owners clearly were in: some boxes full of magazines and books in a closet, a few baby blankets, some breakables placed here and there, a few magnets on the refrigerator.
Sam knew it wasn’t an ideal living space. Not by a long shot, but beds were made, the couch was comfortable enough and all of the appliances that had been left behind worked. He figured it would be a good place for them to stay. At least for a little while. Besides, the Leviathan wouldn’t expect to find them there. No one would, really. This was the most inconspicuous they’d ever been.
When Sam picked up Dean at the hospital only a few hours after discovering the place and took him there, he had to remind himself repeatedly that Dean couldn’t see how spacious the house was and how convenient of a place this would be for them. In fact, the first thing Dean said when Sam led him through the front door was, “Where are we? This doesn’t smell like a dirty motel room.”
“It’s a house,” Sam told him tentatively. “Not very big. Only two stories. But it’s abandoned. It has all of its appliances working, three made beds, and a washer and drier.” Sam glanced towards the broken TV and decided not to mention it. Dean couldn’t watch TV anymore anyway. It would only depress him further to be reminded of this fact. However, he would need to know where everything was so he could, in time, get around the house himself. Taking his brother’s arm, Sam led him through the rooms, showing him where the refrigerator, the couch, the beds, and the bathrooms were. After he’d pointed out the essentials, he let Dean tell him what else he wanted to know the location of before he sat him down on the couch, got him a beer, and sat down beside him.
“So,” Sam said, opening their beer bottles, “what do you think?”
“I can’t see it, Sammy,” Dean reminded him, sounding bitter.
Sam sighed. “I know,” he replied, “but what do you think of staying here for a while, until you…adjust?” He was tentative, still unsure as to what could set Dean off and make him even more upset about his lost eyesight.
Dean was silent for a while after Sam finished speaking. In fact, Sam wasn’t sure he was going to answer him. He wanted desperately to turn on the TV, fill the silence that permeated the air around them with something other than the occasional sips they took from their beer bottles, but he didn’t know if the TV worked - it looked broken - and he didn’t want to upset Dean by doing something he couldn’t participate in.
Finally, after Sam was about to decide he didn’t care and try turning on the TV anyway, Dean said, “Why are we staying here instead of going to look for Dick Roman?”
Sam sighed heavily. “You know why,” he said firmly, not wanting to listen to his brother sulk some more about his blindness. “I just told you why. You have to adjust before we can do anything.” He didn’t mention that Dean wasn’t fit to hunt as it was.
“Why do I have to adjust?” Dean asked, sounding angry now. “Why can’t I just go back out into the fucking field?”
“Do you want to get yourself killed?” Sam burst out, feeling his own temper rising. But the instant he said this, he regretted it. He knew immediately what Dean’s response would be.
“Maybe I do! Why the fuck should I have to live my life like this?! Why are we always the ones that get punished, Sam?! All we do is save the fucking world and all it does is make us miserable! Why should we keep trying to save it?!”
Sam swallowed. He didn’t have a good response to that. Why should they keep saving the world when it never seemed grateful? Why should they risk their lives and their happiness to keep others safe? It didn’t seem fair. It had never seemed fair. Sam understood Dean’s argument, but still, he said, “Because there are good people in this world, Dean. People that don’t know what’s going on and that’s not their fault. They deserve to be saved.”
“Do they?” Dean half-yelled. “Do people who don’t even acknowledge we’ve saved their sorry asses over and over again really deserve to be saved again?”
“Because they don’t know we’re the ones that saved them, Dean!” Sam shouted emphatically, struggling to get his brother to understand. This wasn’t Dean. The Dean Sam knew would never be saying these things, but his brother was motivated by grief and bitterness and, after all they’d been through, who wouldn’t be? It seemed that Dean losing his eyesight was just the final straw. Now all bets were off and he was finished with the world.
“Why don’t they know?” Dean growled. “Why aren’t we treated like the heroes we fucking are for saving their miserable lives? Why don’t we just go out and say, ‘Hey, we saved the world. Twice. You should be bowing at our feet.’”
“You know why we can’t do that,” Sam retorted. “If we told anyone who wasn’t a hunter about what we’ve seen and what we’ve done, we’d be locked in a padded cell for the rest of our lives! The majority of the world doesn’t believe in angels or demons or any of the creatures we’ve dealt with in our lives! Let alone have seen them and had to kill them!” Sam picked at a hole that was steadily growing larger in his current pair of jeans. “It’s not their fault that they don’t know what’s going on.”
“They should know,” Dean hissed. “How could they not? With all the shit that’s happened in the past seven years, how could they not think that wasn’t some sort of apocalyptic crap? There has to be at least one normal person out there that has an inkling of what’s happening around them.”
“One person can’t convince everyone that angels and demons exist, Dean,” Sam reminded him.
“One person convinced almost everyone in Europe that Jewish people weren’t loved by God,” his brother retorted.
“That’s not the same thing and you know it,” Sam said. “Everyone knew that Jewish people existed. Not everyone knows about the existence of angels and demons and Wendigos and vampires. Those only exist in legends to most people. We just happen to be part of a select group of individuals that knows they’re actually real.”
Dean shut his mouth and said nothing else, but Sam knew the argument wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. In fact, he was pretty sure this argument was just getting started.
-
The next few days were spent getting used to their new home. Dean rarely left his room and when he did, he always was pressed up against the wall, his hands held out in front of him as he felt with both his feet and his fingers for what was in front of him. It seemed to work well for the most part. However, more often than not, Sam heard a large object crashing into the walls, followed by a string of curses that got more colorful each time it happened. Sam pretended not to notice, knowing that this was what Dean preferred. The last thing Dean would want was for Sam to acknowledge his weakness, how vulnerable he was and Sam didn’t want to make Dean feel worse than he already did, so he sat on his laptop, researched anything and everything that could heal a person that wasn’t an angel, a faith healer, or some ordinary doctor, and came up with a whole lot of nothing.
Then, one day, Dean crashed into the wall and Sam didn’t hear any curses. In fact, he heard nothing. For a long time he heard nothing. He listened for the sound of Dean getting up, going about his business, but that sound never came and, immediately, Sam began to panic. What if Dean had run into the wall and hit his head badly? What if the crash hadn’t been a crash at all? What if it was a gunshot and Dean had killed himself?
This last thought was what had Sam shoving back the chair as he bolted from the table and up the stairs. He expected to find his brother unconscious or worse, but, instead, he found him sitting in front of the wall, his shoulders shaking, his head hung, his hands in his lap, droplets shining the backs of his palms and he immediately knew Dean was crying.
To be honest, though Dean put up a good front, he cried a lot, though never without good reason and Sam really couldn’t think of a person who deserved a good cry more at the moment than Dean.
He moved tentatively towards him, trying not to make the floorboards creak, trying not to make it seem like he was there or listening or wanting to help him, but the moment he stepped forwards, Dean’s head jerked towards him and he let out a heavy sigh, saying in a jerky voice, “I know you’re there, Sam. I can hear you.”
Sam stopped moving. Vaguely he remembered when once upon a time they’d gone to a faith healer in Nebraska because Dean was dying of a heart condition that he’d contracted after being electrocuted when trying to get rid of a rawhead. It had been eight years ago that that happened, but Sam remembered the tent, the smell of wet grass, the chill of the air, and sound of the old upright piano behind him as clear as day. He remembered an old reverent telling his dying brother, “Be careful what you say around a blind man, son, we’ve got real sharp ears.” And now Sam wondered if this wasn’t some sort of retribution. They’d trusted someone to heal Dean, to give him back a life, but they’d taken everything away from this person instead and now, just like that man, Dean was blind.
Without another word, Sam dropped to his knees beside his brother. He took his damp hand in his own and opened his mouth to say something, but, without a word, Dean slumped against him, knotting his free hand in the fabric of his hoody, as he began to sob into his shoulder with complete utter abandon.
For a moment, Sam was frozen in shock. Dean never did this. Not when he was brought back from Hell and the memories hurt him, not when he lost Lisa because Sam was soulless and hadn’t been thinking, not even when he told Sam of the night he died in his arms in a ghost town. Never had Dean ever cried like this and yet now he was. Sam tried to come up with an explanation other than the fact that he was blind, but he couldn’t and, for the first time, Sam realized just how badly his brother had been hurt by his loss of sight.
“It’s your fault, Sam,” Lucifer reminded him. He didn’t have his pinwheel today. He was just crouching down next to them, watching as Sam wrapped his arms around his broken brother, trying to put the pieces back together again as best he could. “If you’d thrown the bleach just a few seconds earlier then Dean wouldn’t be blind right now. He wouldn’t be running into walls. You wouldn’t be living in this dump. And you wouldn’t have let Dean down. Again.”
Sam ignored the devil as best he could, reminding himself over and over again that he was only a hallucination, no more than a figment of his imagination, but that didn’t change the fact that what he said was one-hundred percent true.
It’s your fault, Sam, the voice of the devil now whispered inside his head. It’s your fault and there is nothing you can do to change it.
-
It was almost a month before Dean reverted to his somewhat regular self and, instead of holing up in his room and sulking, he went down the stairs and chose to stay as close to Sam as possible. Of course, Sam didn’t mind. He was certain if their roles were reversed, he would be doing the same thing.
“You find anything?” Dean asked, trying to sound nonchalant as he plopped himself down in the chair beside Sam.
He was colliding with the wall less now. It seemed that ever since the day he’d broken down in Sam’s arms, he’d been trying to do better, but he still cursed every time he did so. However, even this small accomplishment had put him in better spirits and Sam noticed that his brother had brought over a couple of beers for them before he sat down. He smiled, though Dean couldn’t see it and replied, “Not so far. I don’t know if any of these faith healers will work and even if they do I don’t think you want someone to switch places with you again if they have a reaper working for them, so that’s out. The only other option seems to be demon deals and angels and I don’t think we even need to discuss why those aren’t on the table.” He glanced at Dean and swallowed, adding almost tentatively, “There’s witchcraft, but that’s…unreliable, too.”
“How so?” Dean asked popping open his beer bottle and taking a swig that a healthy person wouldn’t have been able to.
Sam sighed. “Do I really have to explain it to you?”
Dean turned in the direction he thought Sam was. He was only a couple inches off, so he didn’t have the effect he wanted to when he replied, “Yes.”
Sam sighed again. “Well, one, it’s dangerous. We could accidentally kill someone if we try and if we hire a witch they could purposefully kill someone without telling us. Not to mention that we don’t even know if it would work because we’re not witches and, since witches use darker magic, they get demons to do their dirty work and even if we managed to find a witch that wasn’t going to kill people to save you, the last thing I want is to have some smartass demon telling me that they won’t heal you because it’s you.”
There was a short silence where Dean stared at his beer bottle in what Sam thought was quiet defeat, but then he said, “I guess those are all good reasons, but we could still try it.”
“Who are you and what have you done with Dean Winchester?” Sam responded, sounding angrier than he meant to. He couldn’t believe Dean was actually suggesting they try witchcraft to heal him. It seemed like a bad idea on so many levels.
“Of course it’s a bad idea, Sammy,” Lucifer told him. He was sitting in the chair on Sam’s other side. “The last time you trusted something you hunt, you ended up accidentally opening the Gates of Hell and releasing me.”
The devil laughed.
“Shut up,” Sam said without thinking.
“I didn’t say anything,” Dean said, looking up from his beer bottle again. There was another short silence before his brother caught on. This time it was Dean’s turn to sigh as he asked, “You’re still seeing Lucifer, aren’t you?”
“No,” Sam lied, trying to sound convincing, but he only ended up succeeding in sounding like a three year old who’d just gotten caught stealing cookies.
“Don’t bullshit me, man,” Dean said, sounding far more tired than angry. “I know you’re…trying to take care of me, but I need to know what’s going on with you too.”
“No, you don’t,” Sam said firmly.
“Yeah, I do,” Dean countered.
“No, you don’t,” Sam said again.
“Yeah, I d -” But Sam cut him off.
“No, you don’t because you need to take care of yourself! It may have escaped your notice, but you can’t see, Dean!” Sam was shouting now. “You can’t see and that means that if we go anywhere or do anything, I have to watch out for both of us and you can hear better than me, which means you need to be…listening for both of us! I can’t have you distracted by what’s going on with me, which is why me seeing Lucifer isn’t that big of a deal right now!”
Silence.
Finally, Dean pushed himself up from the table and said, “Sam, if you honestly think I keep forgetting I’m blind when I’m reminded every time I blink, then you’re a lot more dense than I thought.”
He didn’t say anything else, but his words had a double meaning, Sam knew. It was Dean’s way of saying, “Fuck you,” without the expletives. He watched as his brother felt his way back to the stairs and went up them. He listened as his brother shut the door behind him when he got to his room. He expected to hear some sort of outburst. Maybe punching the wall, yelling into a pillow. Something.
But instead there was silence and, for Sam, this was almost worse.
On to Ch. 4