Fic: A Raw Deal
Our conscience takes no notice of pain inflicted on others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us. In all cases without exception we are absolutely indifferent to another person's pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable.
-Mark Twain
It was in the fall of 2008, a time of unrest in the realms of Angels and Men, a time of uncertainty for our heroes, Sam and Dean Winchester. Dean had just spilled the beans to Sam about his time in the pit, back on the side of that country road in Northern Kentucky. Remember? Yeah… poor Dean, crying his guts out, and I just left him there. Always felt kind of bad about that, to be honest. At the time, it seemed like the right place to end it. But things change, certain facts come to light. And as the author, I have the distinct privilege of fucking things up by going back and changing the ending. Even if I’m the only one who knows any different. This is for peace of mind, people. Work with me.
Right, so where were we? Ah, yes. Dean had been in Hell for what felt like forty years, even though only four months had passed on earth. And he’d been broken, forced to inflict the same unspeakable torture that he himself had endured for three decades. It was incredibly hard for Dean to tell his brother this, to speak the words aloud, almost as if he had to physically rip the truth from his body. Not only because Dean firmly believed in a negative correlation between his masculinity and the amount of productive conversations he had regarding his feelings, but because it just hurt so damn much.
Dean leaned on the side of the Impala, facing away from his brother. It didn’t matter. Sam could hear his voice break like brittle kindling, could practically smell the salty tears that he knew were streaming down Dean’s cheeks. And when Dean was finished, when the only thing left was to catch his breath and pull himself together, Sam thought about it. He at least thought about lifting his hand and moving it the few inches required in order to rest it on Dean’s shoulder. I have to give him credit for that.
But he thought about it for just a little too long, because suddenly, after one last rubbing of his eyes and clearing of his throat, Dean slipped into the Impala’s passenger seat, still too rattled, too distant to trust himself with the steering wheel. Sam sat there still on the hood, unsure of what to do, what to say, wondering if he was the worst brother on the face of the planet for not knowing how to proceed. For being scared to. Unaware that this was exactly what made him an awesome brother: he gave a crap.
He muddled through, the way Winchesters always did: steel-faced and determined, facing this like he would any other challenge. And with a deep breath, Sam took the driver’s seat and started along the road, keeping an eye on Dean, who was slumped down with his forehead pressed hard against the window, his arms crossed and shoulders hunched as if he were trying to keep warm.
Sam knew he had to say something eventually, knew it was his job to break the silence. And Dean’s vacant glare out at the passing scenery was beginning to look so distant that Sam was worried he might never return. He needed to pull Dean back, and the sooner the better.
“You wanna keep going?” Sam asked carefully. “Cause we can stop, call it an early night…”
Dean kept his eyes pinned to some distant invisible horizon. “It’s 6 o’clock. Just drive,” he replied, his voice flat and hoarse.
Sam nodded, and did just that. He drove long and hard because Dean had asked for that, and it was at least something he could do, even if it was something he did all the time anyways. He drove west through Kentucky, out along I64, through Indiana and Southern Illinois. He drove past St Louis and then veered north, along the mighty Mississippi.
Dean leaned wearily against the door the entire time, awake, but not. His blood-shot eyes squeezing shut from time to time, in a fruitless attempt to push away the images etched into his brain that he had no way of distracting himself from, no way of ignoring when he knew it was all Sam was thinking about too.
The confession had drained him more than he’d imagined it would, left him with little more than enough strength to hold his head up. Waves of emotions still threatened to hit him in uncertain moments when he let his thoughts stray for too long. Like trying to catch a plate before it shattered, he tried to get a grip before it was too late and he was a bawling mess once again. It was exhausting. But he didn’t dare sleep.
And then it was midnight, and they were in the great little city of Hannibal. A place where boys sailed down the river on wooden rafts and escaped all their troubles. Man, if only it were that easy. The Winchesters would have to settle for cold showers and lumpy mattresses at the Mark Twain Motor Inn (and also a pretty bad mildew problem, but they never really noticed that kind of thing anyway).
If I were Sam Clemens, let me tell you, would their lives have been so much simpler...
Sam checked in to the joint and returned to the parking lot, where Dean was crouched in the back seat of the car, rifling through his duffle. The lot was almost empty, bright floodlights making it look like a deserted movie set, and a cold November wind blowing in from the river that would soon bring the first frost. Sam shivered.
“I got the key. You coming?” he asked, his bag already swung over his shoulder.
“Fuck…” Dean muttered, ignoring Sam’s question, his meager belongings now spilling out onto the seat and floor.
Sam let his bag fall to the pavement. “What’s up, man?”
“Can’t find it… should be here…” Dean said, his forehead pinched, his hands rummaging frantically now through his things. “Where the hell is it?”
“What, Dean?”
“The picture, goddamn it! I can’t find the picture!”
Sam knew instantly what picture Dean was referring to. There was really only one that meant something to him: the one of the four of them, outside their house in Lawrence. There had been other family photos, none of which still existed. Although if you dug a little deeper through that storage locker in upstate New York, you would find a Kodak Instamatic camera with an unfinished roll of film inside that Mary had left in the Impala on their last trip to the lake. And if that film were to be developed, you would see a 4 year old boy, swimming for the first time, with a little help from his Dad. But John, well he’d never found the nerve to bring that roll of film in. So there it sits.
But I digress.
The boys only had this one picture, sure. And while Sam couldn’t fathom why Dean needed it at this exact moment, it didn’t matter. What mattered was making it okay. So Sam reached into his bag and pulled out their father’s journal, flipped through the pages until it peeked out at him. He rounded the car, and stood behind his brother with the ragged photograph pinched between his fingers.
“Hey,” he said softly, and for the first time since Dean’s confession, Sam touched his brother, a few fingers on the side of Dean’s shoulder. Startled, Dean turned quickly.
“What?” he asked, eyes at half-mast as if he were sleepwalking, his voice harsh and used.
Sam took his wrist and pressed the picture into the palm of his hand.
“We put it in Dad’s journal, remember?”
Dean looked down at the picture, then he looked up at Sam, his eyes wide now, shocked, like he’d just been shot in the gut.
“Dean?”
The picture fluttered as Dean’s hand started to tremble. “I just need to look at something… at something… good,” he said, and slid down the side of the car until he was on the ground with his legs crooked and bent and the photograph held tenuously over his knees. And in that moment, nothing in the world would have been exiting or frightening or wonderful enough to tear his attention away from his Mom and Dad, him and baby Sammy posing happily outside their home in Kansas. Nothing.
Sam knelt next to his brother. “He’d be proud of you, you know. He’d be damn proud.”
Dean shook his head, rubbed at the back of his neck. That wasn’t what he wanted. Sam was missing the point. “Don’t…” He stared at the picture, not really knowing why he thought it would make him feel better, waiting for it to do something, fix something inside of him regardless. But it was just a bent-up old photo; he couldn’t escape into it. They were in there and he was out here, and that wouldn’t change no matter how long he looked at it.
“Alright, man,” said Sam, standing and then reaching into the back seat. “But we should get inside. It’s freakin’ cold out here.”
He crammed Dean’s clothes and gun and holy water and razor and half-empty bottle of Old Overholt back in his duffle, tossed it to the ground, and locked the doors.
But Dean wasn’t ready yet, wasn’t ready to get up, move forward. So Sam waited, leaned on the car and looked out across the highway at the massive river, a black blur of liquid history.
He thought about a science project he’d done on pollution in the Mississippi in sixth grade. Eating meatball subs at a deli in Providence, he’d asked his father why the bosses of the companies that polluted didn’t feel bad about it. John had wiped some tomato sauce off his chin and told him, I tell you what, kiddo, it’s not the men in charge who actually get their hands dirty. It’s the guy with four kids and a double mortgage, who gets $6.50 an hour. And, yeah, he probably feels like shit about it. But he has to feed his family somehow. Has to survive. It’s a damn raw deal. Jut like goddamn Nixon… Bastards are all the same…
There had been a bitterness to John’s voice that Sam had never forgotten, even though, at 11 years old he hadn’t been too clear on what any of it had to do with Dick Nixon. But now Sam knew too well, knew that he was talking about the people he’d killed in Nam. That John got a pretty raw deal too. And now, so had Dean.
Raw as anything. Every nerve humming with guilt that shouldn’t, in any just world, be his to carry.
“Right,” Dean said, up and grabbing his duffle. “What room we in?”
The room was frilly and be-dappled with rosebuds, seemingly decorated by someone’s grandmother. Sam made a gagging sound as they made their way inside, but Dean passed up the opportunity to comment, sat heavily on the end of the bed closest to the door, and slowly started unlacing his boots.
Sam mirrored his position, taking a seat on the bed right next to him.
“Are you…. angry at all?” he asked. Dean pulled off his boots and looked at him like he was crazy.
“Why the hell would I be angry at you?”
“Not at me, man. At… them,” Sam explained, looking around, lost as to where he should direct the reference. “At fate. Hell. Alastair…. “
“Why should I be?” Dean asked, not really curious in the least.
“Because, Dean. Who decided that there should be a Hell in the first place? Who decided that souls should be tortured? Not the ones doing the actual torturing. No way. And they took you, and broke you, man, like a god damn pit-bull. Made you do their goddamn job for them. And it’s not fucking fair!”
“It’s not about what’s fair, Sam.”
“It is. And you should be angry,” Sam told him, losing some momentum, gaining some composure. “I… I think it would help.”
Dean laughed bitterly. “Yeah. ‘Cause it’s really worked wonders before.” Specifically, Dean was referring to the violent, borderline-homicidal behavior which had overtaken him after John’s death. It hadn’t been pretty. Dean rubbed his hands over his face for the 150th time that day, and reminded himself to deal with one life-trauma at a time.
Sam sat on the corner of the bed, leaning on his knees with his hands clasped together, focused on his brother. He shook his head. “I don’t know man. It’s better than this… this guilt that’s eating you inside out.”
“Would you just leave it? I… I can’t be angry, alright. I just can’t. Not when…”
“Not when what?”
Where to start? Well, how about when he’d taken pleasure in the tasks they’d handed him. How about when he’d relished every soul he’d ripped to shreds like notches on a bedpost. So, sure, maybe Hell had turned him into something he wasn’t. But he’d embraced it. And in Dean’s eyes, it seemed pretty damn hypocritical to get pissed off about it. Not that he was about to tell Sam any of that. Obviously.
“Forget it. I can’t… I’ve done enough sharing for one day. For a fucking lifetime,” Dean sighed, letting out a world-worn deep breath, falling back onto the bed, his legs still hanging off the end. “Can we just crash, dude?” he pleaded.
And didn’t that make Sam feel like a dick-which Dean was unwittingly skilled at. Sam slapped a hand to his thigh and rubbed it like a mistake. “Jesus. I’m sorry, man. I… yeah, we can crash.”
Lying in bed, they could hear semi’s rumbling down the highway and the late fall winds moaning against the leaks in the windows. Neither of these things were what kept them from falling asleep. And when three am finally rolled around, and exhaustion finally bested him, Dean was the first soldier down.
Not long after, Sam, just falling into that fragile space between awake and asleep, was jolted back to reality. Dean was having a nightmare, and he was letting the world know with a rolling, feral moan straight from the bottom of his gut.
There had been plenty of nightmares before this one. But Before had been different. Before, all Sam had was a vague idea. Now, there were specifics, and his imagination was running wild with them. His brother had said there’d been ‘nothing left’ of him… and the visuals that conjured? Well, they were brutal and horrific, and making Sam extremely nauseous. He couldn’t ignore them.
So Sam got up and stood at the foot of Dean’s bed. He hesitated… and hesitated some more.
Now, as awful as it may seem to stand there and watch your brother suffer through brutal nightmares of Damnation, we have to go easy on Sam. I mean, there’s definitely no online forums discussing how to deal with loved ones recently returned from the pits of hellfire. And God knows how dependent Sam is on online forums for, well, pretty much everything. Besides, Dean was known for punching people’s lights out when his sleep was disturbed, and Sam wasn’t in the mood for a concussion.
So he paced the four foot wide space as Dean tossed and turned, chewed on his lip as Dean mumbled incoherently and scratched the back of his head as Dean sweated into the pink rosebud-dotted sheets. Until finally he made out one of those mumbles.
“Sammy.”
Think of a door to a maze opening, the little rat smelling the cheese and suddenly having a way at it. This was how Sam fell to his knees beside his brother and grabbed him by the shoulders. Like he’d been waiting this whole time for the light to turn green.
“Hey, I’m here Dean. Wake up, bro. Wake up,” he begged, rubbing Dean’s chest, touching his cheek, his forehead. All the physical barriers that had kept them so distant all day had suddenly stripped away to nothing.
Dean’s eyes flew open, and the terror they held made Sam’s heart stop.
“Sam?”
“You okay?”
It was the wrong question. And this time the wave that hit Dean was tidal, and there was no way to stop it. It surged inside him from the pit of his stomach, and took hold of his entire body. And his little brother watched helplessly, a hand still hooked around his neck, as Dean’s face started to crumple.
“Dean…” Sam pulled his brother towards him, wrapped an arm around his stiff shoulders and pressed another to the back of his head. And Dean let him, against everything that was written in his DNA, he let him. Because he didn’t know what else he could possibly do.
He cried into the crook of Sam’s shoulder, desperate to find some kind of peace.
“Take it out, Sammy,” he rasped, his fingers clenched around a handful of Sam’s t-shirt, the heat from his tears and heavy breaths trapped in the tiny spaces between them. “Please…”
“Take what out, Dean?” Sam asked, only dimly hopeful that it would be something tangible that could actually be removed. Like a splinter, or an aching tooth. Such things seemed like luxuries in the lives they now inhabited.
Breathing through the quakes that had seized control of his body, Dean gasped, “God, it hurts so fucking much… just rip it out of me… somehow… please…”
Dean was begging him for help, and Sam’s only wish in that moment was to know how to give it. His eyes searched the dark room behind them for an answer, pulled his brother tighter to him, desperate to keep him together, if only physically. “Dean…”
“Jiminy… fucking Cricket…” Dean whispered.
Sam nodded, but there was nothing to be said. Dean had always had a conscience to rival the United Nations, and it was as much a part of him as his loyalty to his family. As much a part of him as his love for pie and the brunette diner waitresses that served them. As much a part of him as the stupid way he walked and the way he always tapped his hands on the steering wheel and always ate the last French fry.
And as much as it was eating him inside out, he and his brother would eventually learn that Dean’s conscience was in fact the one thing they really needed to save them both.
Okay, one of the things. A super important thing.
But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.
-Huckelberry Finn
-
-Mark Twain
It was in the fall of 2008, a time of unrest in the realms of Angels and Men, a time of uncertainty for our heroes, Sam and Dean Winchester. Dean had just spilled the beans to Sam about his time in the pit, back on the side of that country road in Northern Kentucky. Remember? Yeah… poor Dean, crying his guts out, and I just left him there. Always felt kind of bad about that, to be honest. At the time, it seemed like the right place to end it. But things change, certain facts come to light. And as the author, I have the distinct privilege of fucking things up by going back and changing the ending. Even if I’m the only one who knows any different. This is for peace of mind, people. Work with me.
Right, so where were we? Ah, yes. Dean had been in Hell for what felt like forty years, even though only four months had passed on earth. And he’d been broken, forced to inflict the same unspeakable torture that he himself had endured for three decades. It was incredibly hard for Dean to tell his brother this, to speak the words aloud, almost as if he had to physically rip the truth from his body. Not only because Dean firmly believed in a negative correlation between his masculinity and the amount of productive conversations he had regarding his feelings, but because it just hurt so damn much.
Dean leaned on the side of the Impala, facing away from his brother. It didn’t matter. Sam could hear his voice break like brittle kindling, could practically smell the salty tears that he knew were streaming down Dean’s cheeks. And when Dean was finished, when the only thing left was to catch his breath and pull himself together, Sam thought about it. He at least thought about lifting his hand and moving it the few inches required in order to rest it on Dean’s shoulder. I have to give him credit for that.
But he thought about it for just a little too long, because suddenly, after one last rubbing of his eyes and clearing of his throat, Dean slipped into the Impala’s passenger seat, still too rattled, too distant to trust himself with the steering wheel. Sam sat there still on the hood, unsure of what to do, what to say, wondering if he was the worst brother on the face of the planet for not knowing how to proceed. For being scared to. Unaware that this was exactly what made him an awesome brother: he gave a crap.
He muddled through, the way Winchesters always did: steel-faced and determined, facing this like he would any other challenge. And with a deep breath, Sam took the driver’s seat and started along the road, keeping an eye on Dean, who was slumped down with his forehead pressed hard against the window, his arms crossed and shoulders hunched as if he were trying to keep warm.
Sam knew he had to say something eventually, knew it was his job to break the silence. And Dean’s vacant glare out at the passing scenery was beginning to look so distant that Sam was worried he might never return. He needed to pull Dean back, and the sooner the better.
“You wanna keep going?” Sam asked carefully. “Cause we can stop, call it an early night…”
Dean kept his eyes pinned to some distant invisible horizon. “It’s 6 o’clock. Just drive,” he replied, his voice flat and hoarse.
Sam nodded, and did just that. He drove long and hard because Dean had asked for that, and it was at least something he could do, even if it was something he did all the time anyways. He drove west through Kentucky, out along I64, through Indiana and Southern Illinois. He drove past St Louis and then veered north, along the mighty Mississippi.
Dean leaned wearily against the door the entire time, awake, but not. His blood-shot eyes squeezing shut from time to time, in a fruitless attempt to push away the images etched into his brain that he had no way of distracting himself from, no way of ignoring when he knew it was all Sam was thinking about too.
The confession had drained him more than he’d imagined it would, left him with little more than enough strength to hold his head up. Waves of emotions still threatened to hit him in uncertain moments when he let his thoughts stray for too long. Like trying to catch a plate before it shattered, he tried to get a grip before it was too late and he was a bawling mess once again. It was exhausting. But he didn’t dare sleep.
And then it was midnight, and they were in the great little city of Hannibal. A place where boys sailed down the river on wooden rafts and escaped all their troubles. Man, if only it were that easy. The Winchesters would have to settle for cold showers and lumpy mattresses at the Mark Twain Motor Inn (and also a pretty bad mildew problem, but they never really noticed that kind of thing anyway).
If I were Sam Clemens, let me tell you, would their lives have been so much simpler...
Sam checked in to the joint and returned to the parking lot, where Dean was crouched in the back seat of the car, rifling through his duffle. The lot was almost empty, bright floodlights making it look like a deserted movie set, and a cold November wind blowing in from the river that would soon bring the first frost. Sam shivered.
“I got the key. You coming?” he asked, his bag already swung over his shoulder.
“Fuck…” Dean muttered, ignoring Sam’s question, his meager belongings now spilling out onto the seat and floor.
Sam let his bag fall to the pavement. “What’s up, man?”
“Can’t find it… should be here…” Dean said, his forehead pinched, his hands rummaging frantically now through his things. “Where the hell is it?”
“What, Dean?”
“The picture, goddamn it! I can’t find the picture!”
Sam knew instantly what picture Dean was referring to. There was really only one that meant something to him: the one of the four of them, outside their house in Lawrence. There had been other family photos, none of which still existed. Although if you dug a little deeper through that storage locker in upstate New York, you would find a Kodak Instamatic camera with an unfinished roll of film inside that Mary had left in the Impala on their last trip to the lake. And if that film were to be developed, you would see a 4 year old boy, swimming for the first time, with a little help from his Dad. But John, well he’d never found the nerve to bring that roll of film in. So there it sits.
But I digress.
The boys only had this one picture, sure. And while Sam couldn’t fathom why Dean needed it at this exact moment, it didn’t matter. What mattered was making it okay. So Sam reached into his bag and pulled out their father’s journal, flipped through the pages until it peeked out at him. He rounded the car, and stood behind his brother with the ragged photograph pinched between his fingers.
“Hey,” he said softly, and for the first time since Dean’s confession, Sam touched his brother, a few fingers on the side of Dean’s shoulder. Startled, Dean turned quickly.
“What?” he asked, eyes at half-mast as if he were sleepwalking, his voice harsh and used.
Sam took his wrist and pressed the picture into the palm of his hand.
“We put it in Dad’s journal, remember?”
Dean looked down at the picture, then he looked up at Sam, his eyes wide now, shocked, like he’d just been shot in the gut.
“Dean?”
The picture fluttered as Dean’s hand started to tremble. “I just need to look at something… at something… good,” he said, and slid down the side of the car until he was on the ground with his legs crooked and bent and the photograph held tenuously over his knees. And in that moment, nothing in the world would have been exiting or frightening or wonderful enough to tear his attention away from his Mom and Dad, him and baby Sammy posing happily outside their home in Kansas. Nothing.
Sam knelt next to his brother. “He’d be proud of you, you know. He’d be damn proud.”
Dean shook his head, rubbed at the back of his neck. That wasn’t what he wanted. Sam was missing the point. “Don’t…” He stared at the picture, not really knowing why he thought it would make him feel better, waiting for it to do something, fix something inside of him regardless. But it was just a bent-up old photo; he couldn’t escape into it. They were in there and he was out here, and that wouldn’t change no matter how long he looked at it.
“Alright, man,” said Sam, standing and then reaching into the back seat. “But we should get inside. It’s freakin’ cold out here.”
He crammed Dean’s clothes and gun and holy water and razor and half-empty bottle of Old Overholt back in his duffle, tossed it to the ground, and locked the doors.
But Dean wasn’t ready yet, wasn’t ready to get up, move forward. So Sam waited, leaned on the car and looked out across the highway at the massive river, a black blur of liquid history.
He thought about a science project he’d done on pollution in the Mississippi in sixth grade. Eating meatball subs at a deli in Providence, he’d asked his father why the bosses of the companies that polluted didn’t feel bad about it. John had wiped some tomato sauce off his chin and told him, I tell you what, kiddo, it’s not the men in charge who actually get their hands dirty. It’s the guy with four kids and a double mortgage, who gets $6.50 an hour. And, yeah, he probably feels like shit about it. But he has to feed his family somehow. Has to survive. It’s a damn raw deal. Jut like goddamn Nixon… Bastards are all the same…
There had been a bitterness to John’s voice that Sam had never forgotten, even though, at 11 years old he hadn’t been too clear on what any of it had to do with Dick Nixon. But now Sam knew too well, knew that he was talking about the people he’d killed in Nam. That John got a pretty raw deal too. And now, so had Dean.
Raw as anything. Every nerve humming with guilt that shouldn’t, in any just world, be his to carry.
“Right,” Dean said, up and grabbing his duffle. “What room we in?”
The room was frilly and be-dappled with rosebuds, seemingly decorated by someone’s grandmother. Sam made a gagging sound as they made their way inside, but Dean passed up the opportunity to comment, sat heavily on the end of the bed closest to the door, and slowly started unlacing his boots.
Sam mirrored his position, taking a seat on the bed right next to him.
“Are you…. angry at all?” he asked. Dean pulled off his boots and looked at him like he was crazy.
“Why the hell would I be angry at you?”
“Not at me, man. At… them,” Sam explained, looking around, lost as to where he should direct the reference. “At fate. Hell. Alastair…. “
“Why should I be?” Dean asked, not really curious in the least.
“Because, Dean. Who decided that there should be a Hell in the first place? Who decided that souls should be tortured? Not the ones doing the actual torturing. No way. And they took you, and broke you, man, like a god damn pit-bull. Made you do their goddamn job for them. And it’s not fucking fair!”
“It’s not about what’s fair, Sam.”
“It is. And you should be angry,” Sam told him, losing some momentum, gaining some composure. “I… I think it would help.”
Dean laughed bitterly. “Yeah. ‘Cause it’s really worked wonders before.” Specifically, Dean was referring to the violent, borderline-homicidal behavior which had overtaken him after John’s death. It hadn’t been pretty. Dean rubbed his hands over his face for the 150th time that day, and reminded himself to deal with one life-trauma at a time.
Sam sat on the corner of the bed, leaning on his knees with his hands clasped together, focused on his brother. He shook his head. “I don’t know man. It’s better than this… this guilt that’s eating you inside out.”
“Would you just leave it? I… I can’t be angry, alright. I just can’t. Not when…”
“Not when what?”
Where to start? Well, how about when he’d taken pleasure in the tasks they’d handed him. How about when he’d relished every soul he’d ripped to shreds like notches on a bedpost. So, sure, maybe Hell had turned him into something he wasn’t. But he’d embraced it. And in Dean’s eyes, it seemed pretty damn hypocritical to get pissed off about it. Not that he was about to tell Sam any of that. Obviously.
“Forget it. I can’t… I’ve done enough sharing for one day. For a fucking lifetime,” Dean sighed, letting out a world-worn deep breath, falling back onto the bed, his legs still hanging off the end. “Can we just crash, dude?” he pleaded.
And didn’t that make Sam feel like a dick-which Dean was unwittingly skilled at. Sam slapped a hand to his thigh and rubbed it like a mistake. “Jesus. I’m sorry, man. I… yeah, we can crash.”
Lying in bed, they could hear semi’s rumbling down the highway and the late fall winds moaning against the leaks in the windows. Neither of these things were what kept them from falling asleep. And when three am finally rolled around, and exhaustion finally bested him, Dean was the first soldier down.
Not long after, Sam, just falling into that fragile space between awake and asleep, was jolted back to reality. Dean was having a nightmare, and he was letting the world know with a rolling, feral moan straight from the bottom of his gut.
There had been plenty of nightmares before this one. But Before had been different. Before, all Sam had was a vague idea. Now, there were specifics, and his imagination was running wild with them. His brother had said there’d been ‘nothing left’ of him… and the visuals that conjured? Well, they were brutal and horrific, and making Sam extremely nauseous. He couldn’t ignore them.
So Sam got up and stood at the foot of Dean’s bed. He hesitated… and hesitated some more.
Now, as awful as it may seem to stand there and watch your brother suffer through brutal nightmares of Damnation, we have to go easy on Sam. I mean, there’s definitely no online forums discussing how to deal with loved ones recently returned from the pits of hellfire. And God knows how dependent Sam is on online forums for, well, pretty much everything. Besides, Dean was known for punching people’s lights out when his sleep was disturbed, and Sam wasn’t in the mood for a concussion.
So he paced the four foot wide space as Dean tossed and turned, chewed on his lip as Dean mumbled incoherently and scratched the back of his head as Dean sweated into the pink rosebud-dotted sheets. Until finally he made out one of those mumbles.
“Sammy.”
Think of a door to a maze opening, the little rat smelling the cheese and suddenly having a way at it. This was how Sam fell to his knees beside his brother and grabbed him by the shoulders. Like he’d been waiting this whole time for the light to turn green.
“Hey, I’m here Dean. Wake up, bro. Wake up,” he begged, rubbing Dean’s chest, touching his cheek, his forehead. All the physical barriers that had kept them so distant all day had suddenly stripped away to nothing.
Dean’s eyes flew open, and the terror they held made Sam’s heart stop.
“Sam?”
“You okay?”
It was the wrong question. And this time the wave that hit Dean was tidal, and there was no way to stop it. It surged inside him from the pit of his stomach, and took hold of his entire body. And his little brother watched helplessly, a hand still hooked around his neck, as Dean’s face started to crumple.
“Dean…” Sam pulled his brother towards him, wrapped an arm around his stiff shoulders and pressed another to the back of his head. And Dean let him, against everything that was written in his DNA, he let him. Because he didn’t know what else he could possibly do.
He cried into the crook of Sam’s shoulder, desperate to find some kind of peace.
“Take it out, Sammy,” he rasped, his fingers clenched around a handful of Sam’s t-shirt, the heat from his tears and heavy breaths trapped in the tiny spaces between them. “Please…”
“Take what out, Dean?” Sam asked, only dimly hopeful that it would be something tangible that could actually be removed. Like a splinter, or an aching tooth. Such things seemed like luxuries in the lives they now inhabited.
Breathing through the quakes that had seized control of his body, Dean gasped, “God, it hurts so fucking much… just rip it out of me… somehow… please…”
Dean was begging him for help, and Sam’s only wish in that moment was to know how to give it. His eyes searched the dark room behind them for an answer, pulled his brother tighter to him, desperate to keep him together, if only physically. “Dean…”
“Jiminy… fucking Cricket…” Dean whispered.
Sam nodded, but there was nothing to be said. Dean had always had a conscience to rival the United Nations, and it was as much a part of him as his loyalty to his family. As much a part of him as his love for pie and the brunette diner waitresses that served them. As much a part of him as the stupid way he walked and the way he always tapped his hands on the steering wheel and always ate the last French fry.
And as much as it was eating him inside out, he and his brother would eventually learn that Dean’s conscience was in fact the one thing they really needed to save them both.
Okay, one of the things. A super important thing.
But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.
-Huckelberry Finn
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