Supernatural: Tear Apart (His Fairytale World)
Title: Tear Apart (His Fairytale World)
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Gen. (Weechesters)
Genre: Schmoop
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,082
Author’s Note: I guess I was feeling nostalgic about my childhood-this is based on a story my sister told me when I was a kid. Title is taken from Let’s Keep It That Way by Anne Murray. Oh, and this is for the “Christmas - baking cookies” square on my schmoop_bingo.
Summary: Attempting to console a terrified Sam, Dean tells him a story. Sam takes it a little too seriously.
Now that he knows about the Monsters, Sam isn’t scared to sleep as much as he’s scared of waking up.
His dreams aren’t so bad, which is kind of weird at first. Maybe, he reasons, it’s because he knows better than to be scared of nightmares now. Nightmares are made up and, whatever he sees in them, it can’t be worse than all the things that are real. Sam wishes he’d never gone poking around, never made Dean tell him the truth.
Sam cries a lot now.
He cries and cries and cries and by the time he falls asleep, his pillow is soaked. He doesn’t mind that so much, Dean says salt will keep him safe. But he knows he’s not supposed to cry anymore, Dad wouldn’t like it. Dean never does, which means it’s the wrong thing to do. He can’t help it, though, so he waits until it’s dark. There’s no stopping the tears, the best Sam can hope for is that Dean’s asleep.
Dean has always been a light sleeper, so Sam isn’t surprised that Dean almost always hears him. He usually doesn’t have to wait long before his brother is crawling under his blankets, hugging his arms around Sam and trying to calm him. Dean wasn’t scared like this when he was 8. Dean knew about the monsters long before Sam did. Sam doesn’t know how Dean does it.
“Hey, Sammy, don’t cry. Don’t, okay? Nothing’s gonna come in here. Dad’s taking care of us.”
Sam keeps going anyway, because by this point he’s worked up and hysterical and however comforting it may be for Dean to tell himself that Dad will save them, Sam doesn’t see how he can do it from three states away.
“Please don’t cry, Sam. Come on, you’re acting like a baby.” Dean’s words are warm and gentle and much more tired than they should be-which is Sam’s fault and he knows it.
“Stop it. I know you can do it. I know you can be brave for me, can’t you?” It’s when Dean’s voice goes shaky that Sam always gets himself under control. He doesn’t want to make Dean cry, too, and for some reason seeing Sam scared makes Dean more nervous than ghosts and demons. Sam learns to make himself stop crying pretty quickly for Dean’s sake, but he doesn’t stop being scared, not really.
There isn’t much comfort in the daytime. The way Sam sees it, they’re just as likely to get eaten while the sun is shining, maybe more so. Sam can dream at night, can take comfort in salted doors and his big brother’s protection lying in the next bed over. During the day, they go out in the open, Dean leaves him to go to his classes, Sam sees threats in every shadow he walks by and there’s no one to say “don’t worry, I’ve got you” or point out how carefully sheltered he is. Sam is bait on a hook during the day.
Which is why, one month after reading the journal and making Dean finally admit what he’d tried so hard to hide, Dean finds Sam waiting to get picked up in the same place as always: sitting on the ground, sobbing like, well, if you asked Dean, like a girl.
Dean doesn’t ask what’s wrong; he just picks Sam up off the ground and gives him a quick inspection, making sure he’s not hurt. Then he grabs Sam by the arm and drags them out of the school.
He doesn’t say anything until they’re back at their motel alone. Dean slams the door shut and turns sharply.
“Who hurt you, Sammy? What’d they do?”
Sam shakes his head.
“Don’t worry; they won’t hurt you if you tell me. They won’t hurt anyone.”
Sam laughs at his brother. “No one hurt me, Dean.”
Dean looks at him probingly for a few seconds and then sits on the bed next to Sam’s backpack.
“Why the waterworks, then?”
“I…I thought I saw something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t there when I looked again. I guess it was just a shadow.” Sam kicks at the floor, doesn’t let himself see if Dean’s annoyed at him for scaring him over nothing.
“Oh, it wasn’t a shadow,” Dean says, his tone so light Sam looks up.
“It wasn’t?”
“No. It was a dragon.”
Sam frowns. “Haha, you’re hilarious.”
“No, really! It was a dragon.”
“It didn’t look like a dragon.”
“How do you know what dragons look like? Because I see them all the time and I’m telling you that’s what it was.”
Sam bites his lip. Dean sounds genuine, but Sam doesn’t want to look stupid. He’s pretty sure dragons aren’t real and that, if they are, they don’t hang around schools scaring kids all day.
“No, you’re lying to make me look stupid.”
Dean smiles. “See, you’re just thinking of dragons wrong. They don’t look like giant flame breathing lizards, not at first, at least.”
“Well, what do they look like?”
“You. Me. A cat. Anything. They look like whatever you expect them to look like.”
“I expected mine to look like a ten foot tall werewolf and when I turned to look there was nothing. Explain that one.”
“That’s how I knew it was a dragon.”
“I don’t want a dragon anymore than I want a werewolf,” Sam cries.
“Sammy, dragons are awesome.”
“According to you, everything that wants to eat us is awesome.”
“But dragons don’t want to eat you.”
“They don’t?”
“Nuh uh. They’re good. You didn’t think there could be so many nasty things out there and nothing good, right?”
Sam shakes his head so that his big brother doesn’t know that yes, he had thought that. Because the way Dean says it, it sounds like the most obvious thing in the world and Sam can’t let Dean know it hadn’t even occurred to him.
“What do dragons do?”
“Usually nothing, because usually what happened to you happens. Someone will see them, get shocked, turn too quickly, and they’re gone. Dragons are really shy. They get scared if you move too quickly like that, but they try appearing to people anyway, because they want to make friends.”
“How do you make friends with a dragon?”
“It’s easy, Sammy. You just can’t let yourself get scared if you see one. If you jump and turn to look, they’ll run away, but if you turn really slowly, then you can follow them.”
“Follow them where?”
“Umm…to their magical dragon world.”
“You’re making this up, Dean.”
“No! I swear! I swear on pie.”
Sam giggles and Dean knocks his knees against Sam’s and smiles.
“Alright, fine. What’s the magical dragon world like?”
“It’s perfect,” Dean says gently. “There’s nothing bad there to scare you. And everybody lives in a castle. And, and the streets are all made of dragon’s tears. See, when dragons cry, their tears freeze into little glass pebbles of all different colors. So everything is beautiful there and nobody has to cry because the dragons do it for them.”
Sam feels his eyebrows draw together and his lips turn down. “Why are they so sad?”
“Because they don’t have anyone to play with.”
“So my dragon from today is crying now?”
“Probably. But now you know better, right? You won’t get nervous if you see another one?”
Sam shakes his head.
“Good. You just turn nice and slow to see him and he’ll take you home and you can always be safe and happy.”
Dean pats Sam on the leg and gets up, but Sam pulls him back before he can head for the kitchen or the television or whatever he’s planning to do.
“Dean, if you see so many of them, why didn’t you go with one?”
“I had to stay and make sure you knew, too, right?” Dean smiles wide and ruffles Sam’s hair as he leaves.
Sam dreams about the magical world Dean told him about that night and every night for weeks. He builds it up and makes it grander and grander and knowing a world like that exists somewhere makes Sam’s world less scary.
When he wakes up, he always reminds himself that it was just a story. He gets what Dean was trying to do, knows it was all cooked up to keep Sam from jumping at shadows, but deep down, a part of him gets annoyed every time he gets excited and turns too quickly to check on what something he saw in the corner of his eye is.
Sam believes it for so long that it eventually fades into the back of his memory. He stays unafraid of the things that used to terrify him, but he only thinks about the story when something jogs the memory. He thinks of it fondly, but as a silly notion he’d believed in for a few months and then outgrown.
At least, he feels that way until one night about a year later when he’s getting ready for bed and he swears he sees a chicken in the doorway behind him. Sam turns slowly to check out of habit, expecting to see nothing when he turns.
What he sees is a dragon. A cute, friendly one, but an oversized lizard all the same.
Sam thinks maybe he’s dreaming, so he approaches it out of curiosity. It waits until he gets close enough to touch it, but as Sam is reaching out to stroke it, it turns and begins to stumble along-half carried by wings, half by stump-like legs. Sam stays anchored in place, surprised and delighted, until the dragon stops in its path and turns to look at him, tilting its head.
“What…what do you want?” he asks it. The dragon just inclines its head forward, like it wants Sam to follow. Sam does gladly; he reaches the wall of his and Dean’s bedroom and then the dragon breathes out against the wall.
There are no flames, just a refreshing mist. Some of it blows back into Sam’s face and some of it stays on the wall, which shimmers and trembles until the plaster opens up and there’s a hole just big enough for the dragon to fit through. Through the hole, Sam can see a beach lined with colored sand-glass pebbles the sparkle under a bright sun. The shore is lined with tall castles, pink and yellow, and one that’s blue and made just for Sam. It’s exactly like he imagined and his heart speeds up.
The dragon steps through and looks at Sam expectantly. Sam steps forward, ready to jump in, but stops with one foot still planted in his room. He pulls the other one back and looks down the hall. He can see the light from the television and hear the muted noise of whatever Dean is watching.
“Hold on,” Sam says. “I have to go get my brother. He’ll want to see this.”
The dragon shakes its head and again indicates that Sam should follow. Sam wants to, more than anything. But he thinks of Dean, imagines the face Dean would make when he comes back and finds Sam missing. Maybe Dean would know where he went, even be glad Sam finally got to go to the world he’d dreamed of for so long. But Sam knows Dean would be miserable.
Sam tries to picture what it would be like to have his own castle, to swim in bright water, and ride on a dragon’s back for fun. But if Dean isn’t there, no one will teach him how to ride a bike, or bake him cookies on Christmas, or laugh at him when he makes a bad joke. And really, how much fun can flying be without someone constantly stressing how stupid Sam looks when the wind blows his hair around?
He takes a step back. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t be your friend. I have to stay here. My brother will be lonely if I go. I…I don’t want him to be lonely.”
The dragon’s eyes go wide and his lip trembles. Sam feels sorry, because the dragon has to be lonely now instead. A round tear forms in the dragon’s eye-bright green-and falls onto the bedroom floor.
“I could go with you for a little while,” Sam offers. “But you have to promise I’ll come back soon.”
The dragon nods its head excitedly, but Sam sees something glint in its eye and it suddenly doesn’t look so friendly anymore.
“You’re not telling the truth,” Sam accuses. “You just want me to leave him. I’m not coming with you.”
The dragon snarls, his eyes go red and Sam cries out. It can’t seem to come back into the room now, which is probably why he needed Sam to follow him, but it turns its attention to the leg Sam had placed on the ground across the wall earlier and lunges for it. Sam falls back and screams again and he hears Dean come into the room at the same time the dragon’s teeth begin to close around his foot. Sam kicks off his sneaker and crawls backwards on his hands and there’s a loud bang-the sound of a shot gun firing.
The dragon makes a furious face and its body falls down, back onto the floor where it breaks like a wave and dissolves. There’s no body, no blood, Sam didn’t even see a wound, but somehow he knows it’s dead. He begins to let out loud relieved sobs just as Dean sinks to his knees and warms his arms around him.
“Sammy, what’s wrong?”
“What do you mean what’s wrong, Dean? The dragon! It was going to-”
“What dragon, Sam? There was nothing here. I just shot through a wall for no reason-Dad’s gonna kick my ass.”
“No, no, I saw it. I felt it. It was going to kill me!”
“Nothing is going to-Sam, don’t ever say that. You were probably just having a nightmare.”
Sam shakes his head because, okay, it doesn’t make sense if Dean didn’t see it, but Sam knows he didn’t imagine this. “No, Dean. It was real. You have to believe me. You do, don’t you? I swear, it was real.”
“I do, okay? I believe you. Just calm down. We’ll…we’ll call Bobby. He can come check and make sure the room is secure, he’s only a few hours away. You can watch whatever you want until he gets here, and I’ll make you spaghetti-Os for dinner. You….you want that, Sammy?”
Sam nods into his embrace, just because that’s what Dean needs him to do, and Dean calls Bobby like he said he would.
Bobby makes Sam run through the entire story, even though Dean keeps insisting he just had a nightmare, until suddenly Dean seems to get what exactly happened and he jumps, frowns like Sam’s never seen.
“You had a nightmare about that stupid story I told you?”
“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.”
“No, it wasn’t real. Dragons aren’t real. It was a story, Sam. It was just a story. God, I made it up. I just,” Dean bites his lip, “I wanted you to feel safe and I just made it worse.”
“What are you two chuckleheads going on about?”
Dean explains about how he’d told Sam the fairytale months ago and by the end of it, Bobby is shaking his head.
Sam assumes Bobby thinks he was imagining it, too, so Sam stands, hands balled into fists at his side. “It was real! I can prove it.”
He stands and walks to the wall he’d seen the dragon go through and, sure enough, there’s a bright green glass teardrop on the ground. “See? He cried that!”
Dean gasps as Sam drops it into his hand, but Bobby actually laughs. “Yeah, I know it was real, kid. You made it real.”
“How could he?” Dean asks defensively.
“Boogeyman,” Bobby replies, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “Finds kids who will follow it by pretending to be something else. They can only step into our world once every decade or so and they can’t take a kid until it’s touched their land. That’s why he could only go after your foot, Sam. They’re rare because they’re easy to kill, but a few of ‘em are still around.”
“Did I…I mean, how do we know if it’s…?” Dean swallows hard. He sounds like he’s equal parts terrified that he did kill it and that he didn’t. On the one hand, Dean won’t stop worrying it’ll come back for Sam if it’s alive, but Sam realizes from the tremor in his voice that he’s never killed something before. This was his first time and he did it to save Sam.
“You took care of it alright. As soon as someone else knows it’s in the room, it’s done for, even if you couldn’t see it. You boys’ll be alright. You just gotta be more careful.”
Bobby doesn’t stay long once he sees that the situation is under control and double checks to make sure all of the other protection-salt lines and devil’s traps-are still in order. Dean escorts him to the door, making a face like he’s ready for a lecture, and even though he tells Sam to stay put, Sam follows to the bedroom door, not entirely ready to have both Dean and Bobby out of his sight just yet.
“You gotta watch what you tell that kid,” Bobby says, patting Dean on the shoulder as he’s leaving. “He’ll believe anything you say.”
Bobby is laughing as he says it and even Sam can’t help smiling at how seriously he’d taken Dean’s fib. Dean doesn’t smile, though. He’s still got a sour, guilty expression on his face when he comes back to the room, and he never tells Sam a story again. Sam expects to have a nightmare after that, or for his old worries to resurface now that the shield he’d used against them has been torn down, but Sam feels safer than he even thought he could.
He still believes just as much ever, but this time it’s in something he knows for a fact instead of a daydream. Dean saved him, will always save him, and Sam finally realizes that it was never really the story that comforted him, just the fact that his big brother was there to tell it to him.
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Gen. (Weechesters)
Genre: Schmoop
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,082
Author’s Note: I guess I was feeling nostalgic about my childhood-this is based on a story my sister told me when I was a kid. Title is taken from Let’s Keep It That Way by Anne Murray. Oh, and this is for the “Christmas - baking cookies” square on my schmoop_bingo.
Summary: Attempting to console a terrified Sam, Dean tells him a story. Sam takes it a little too seriously.
Now that he knows about the Monsters, Sam isn’t scared to sleep as much as he’s scared of waking up.
His dreams aren’t so bad, which is kind of weird at first. Maybe, he reasons, it’s because he knows better than to be scared of nightmares now. Nightmares are made up and, whatever he sees in them, it can’t be worse than all the things that are real. Sam wishes he’d never gone poking around, never made Dean tell him the truth.
Sam cries a lot now.
He cries and cries and cries and by the time he falls asleep, his pillow is soaked. He doesn’t mind that so much, Dean says salt will keep him safe. But he knows he’s not supposed to cry anymore, Dad wouldn’t like it. Dean never does, which means it’s the wrong thing to do. He can’t help it, though, so he waits until it’s dark. There’s no stopping the tears, the best Sam can hope for is that Dean’s asleep.
Dean has always been a light sleeper, so Sam isn’t surprised that Dean almost always hears him. He usually doesn’t have to wait long before his brother is crawling under his blankets, hugging his arms around Sam and trying to calm him. Dean wasn’t scared like this when he was 8. Dean knew about the monsters long before Sam did. Sam doesn’t know how Dean does it.
“Hey, Sammy, don’t cry. Don’t, okay? Nothing’s gonna come in here. Dad’s taking care of us.”
Sam keeps going anyway, because by this point he’s worked up and hysterical and however comforting it may be for Dean to tell himself that Dad will save them, Sam doesn’t see how he can do it from three states away.
“Please don’t cry, Sam. Come on, you’re acting like a baby.” Dean’s words are warm and gentle and much more tired than they should be-which is Sam’s fault and he knows it.
“Stop it. I know you can do it. I know you can be brave for me, can’t you?” It’s when Dean’s voice goes shaky that Sam always gets himself under control. He doesn’t want to make Dean cry, too, and for some reason seeing Sam scared makes Dean more nervous than ghosts and demons. Sam learns to make himself stop crying pretty quickly for Dean’s sake, but he doesn’t stop being scared, not really.
There isn’t much comfort in the daytime. The way Sam sees it, they’re just as likely to get eaten while the sun is shining, maybe more so. Sam can dream at night, can take comfort in salted doors and his big brother’s protection lying in the next bed over. During the day, they go out in the open, Dean leaves him to go to his classes, Sam sees threats in every shadow he walks by and there’s no one to say “don’t worry, I’ve got you” or point out how carefully sheltered he is. Sam is bait on a hook during the day.
Which is why, one month after reading the journal and making Dean finally admit what he’d tried so hard to hide, Dean finds Sam waiting to get picked up in the same place as always: sitting on the ground, sobbing like, well, if you asked Dean, like a girl.
Dean doesn’t ask what’s wrong; he just picks Sam up off the ground and gives him a quick inspection, making sure he’s not hurt. Then he grabs Sam by the arm and drags them out of the school.
He doesn’t say anything until they’re back at their motel alone. Dean slams the door shut and turns sharply.
“Who hurt you, Sammy? What’d they do?”
Sam shakes his head.
“Don’t worry; they won’t hurt you if you tell me. They won’t hurt anyone.”
Sam laughs at his brother. “No one hurt me, Dean.”
Dean looks at him probingly for a few seconds and then sits on the bed next to Sam’s backpack.
“Why the waterworks, then?”
“I…I thought I saw something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t there when I looked again. I guess it was just a shadow.” Sam kicks at the floor, doesn’t let himself see if Dean’s annoyed at him for scaring him over nothing.
“Oh, it wasn’t a shadow,” Dean says, his tone so light Sam looks up.
“It wasn’t?”
“No. It was a dragon.”
Sam frowns. “Haha, you’re hilarious.”
“No, really! It was a dragon.”
“It didn’t look like a dragon.”
“How do you know what dragons look like? Because I see them all the time and I’m telling you that’s what it was.”
Sam bites his lip. Dean sounds genuine, but Sam doesn’t want to look stupid. He’s pretty sure dragons aren’t real and that, if they are, they don’t hang around schools scaring kids all day.
“No, you’re lying to make me look stupid.”
Dean smiles. “See, you’re just thinking of dragons wrong. They don’t look like giant flame breathing lizards, not at first, at least.”
“Well, what do they look like?”
“You. Me. A cat. Anything. They look like whatever you expect them to look like.”
“I expected mine to look like a ten foot tall werewolf and when I turned to look there was nothing. Explain that one.”
“That’s how I knew it was a dragon.”
“I don’t want a dragon anymore than I want a werewolf,” Sam cries.
“Sammy, dragons are awesome.”
“According to you, everything that wants to eat us is awesome.”
“But dragons don’t want to eat you.”
“They don’t?”
“Nuh uh. They’re good. You didn’t think there could be so many nasty things out there and nothing good, right?”
Sam shakes his head so that his big brother doesn’t know that yes, he had thought that. Because the way Dean says it, it sounds like the most obvious thing in the world and Sam can’t let Dean know it hadn’t even occurred to him.
“What do dragons do?”
“Usually nothing, because usually what happened to you happens. Someone will see them, get shocked, turn too quickly, and they’re gone. Dragons are really shy. They get scared if you move too quickly like that, but they try appearing to people anyway, because they want to make friends.”
“How do you make friends with a dragon?”
“It’s easy, Sammy. You just can’t let yourself get scared if you see one. If you jump and turn to look, they’ll run away, but if you turn really slowly, then you can follow them.”
“Follow them where?”
“Umm…to their magical dragon world.”
“You’re making this up, Dean.”
“No! I swear! I swear on pie.”
Sam giggles and Dean knocks his knees against Sam’s and smiles.
“Alright, fine. What’s the magical dragon world like?”
“It’s perfect,” Dean says gently. “There’s nothing bad there to scare you. And everybody lives in a castle. And, and the streets are all made of dragon’s tears. See, when dragons cry, their tears freeze into little glass pebbles of all different colors. So everything is beautiful there and nobody has to cry because the dragons do it for them.”
Sam feels his eyebrows draw together and his lips turn down. “Why are they so sad?”
“Because they don’t have anyone to play with.”
“So my dragon from today is crying now?”
“Probably. But now you know better, right? You won’t get nervous if you see another one?”
Sam shakes his head.
“Good. You just turn nice and slow to see him and he’ll take you home and you can always be safe and happy.”
Dean pats Sam on the leg and gets up, but Sam pulls him back before he can head for the kitchen or the television or whatever he’s planning to do.
“Dean, if you see so many of them, why didn’t you go with one?”
“I had to stay and make sure you knew, too, right?” Dean smiles wide and ruffles Sam’s hair as he leaves.
Sam dreams about the magical world Dean told him about that night and every night for weeks. He builds it up and makes it grander and grander and knowing a world like that exists somewhere makes Sam’s world less scary.
When he wakes up, he always reminds himself that it was just a story. He gets what Dean was trying to do, knows it was all cooked up to keep Sam from jumping at shadows, but deep down, a part of him gets annoyed every time he gets excited and turns too quickly to check on what something he saw in the corner of his eye is.
Sam believes it for so long that it eventually fades into the back of his memory. He stays unafraid of the things that used to terrify him, but he only thinks about the story when something jogs the memory. He thinks of it fondly, but as a silly notion he’d believed in for a few months and then outgrown.
At least, he feels that way until one night about a year later when he’s getting ready for bed and he swears he sees a chicken in the doorway behind him. Sam turns slowly to check out of habit, expecting to see nothing when he turns.
What he sees is a dragon. A cute, friendly one, but an oversized lizard all the same.
Sam thinks maybe he’s dreaming, so he approaches it out of curiosity. It waits until he gets close enough to touch it, but as Sam is reaching out to stroke it, it turns and begins to stumble along-half carried by wings, half by stump-like legs. Sam stays anchored in place, surprised and delighted, until the dragon stops in its path and turns to look at him, tilting its head.
“What…what do you want?” he asks it. The dragon just inclines its head forward, like it wants Sam to follow. Sam does gladly; he reaches the wall of his and Dean’s bedroom and then the dragon breathes out against the wall.
There are no flames, just a refreshing mist. Some of it blows back into Sam’s face and some of it stays on the wall, which shimmers and trembles until the plaster opens up and there’s a hole just big enough for the dragon to fit through. Through the hole, Sam can see a beach lined with colored sand-glass pebbles the sparkle under a bright sun. The shore is lined with tall castles, pink and yellow, and one that’s blue and made just for Sam. It’s exactly like he imagined and his heart speeds up.
The dragon steps through and looks at Sam expectantly. Sam steps forward, ready to jump in, but stops with one foot still planted in his room. He pulls the other one back and looks down the hall. He can see the light from the television and hear the muted noise of whatever Dean is watching.
“Hold on,” Sam says. “I have to go get my brother. He’ll want to see this.”
The dragon shakes its head and again indicates that Sam should follow. Sam wants to, more than anything. But he thinks of Dean, imagines the face Dean would make when he comes back and finds Sam missing. Maybe Dean would know where he went, even be glad Sam finally got to go to the world he’d dreamed of for so long. But Sam knows Dean would be miserable.
Sam tries to picture what it would be like to have his own castle, to swim in bright water, and ride on a dragon’s back for fun. But if Dean isn’t there, no one will teach him how to ride a bike, or bake him cookies on Christmas, or laugh at him when he makes a bad joke. And really, how much fun can flying be without someone constantly stressing how stupid Sam looks when the wind blows his hair around?
He takes a step back. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t be your friend. I have to stay here. My brother will be lonely if I go. I…I don’t want him to be lonely.”
The dragon’s eyes go wide and his lip trembles. Sam feels sorry, because the dragon has to be lonely now instead. A round tear forms in the dragon’s eye-bright green-and falls onto the bedroom floor.
“I could go with you for a little while,” Sam offers. “But you have to promise I’ll come back soon.”
The dragon nods its head excitedly, but Sam sees something glint in its eye and it suddenly doesn’t look so friendly anymore.
“You’re not telling the truth,” Sam accuses. “You just want me to leave him. I’m not coming with you.”
The dragon snarls, his eyes go red and Sam cries out. It can’t seem to come back into the room now, which is probably why he needed Sam to follow him, but it turns its attention to the leg Sam had placed on the ground across the wall earlier and lunges for it. Sam falls back and screams again and he hears Dean come into the room at the same time the dragon’s teeth begin to close around his foot. Sam kicks off his sneaker and crawls backwards on his hands and there’s a loud bang-the sound of a shot gun firing.
The dragon makes a furious face and its body falls down, back onto the floor where it breaks like a wave and dissolves. There’s no body, no blood, Sam didn’t even see a wound, but somehow he knows it’s dead. He begins to let out loud relieved sobs just as Dean sinks to his knees and warms his arms around him.
“Sammy, what’s wrong?”
“What do you mean what’s wrong, Dean? The dragon! It was going to-”
“What dragon, Sam? There was nothing here. I just shot through a wall for no reason-Dad’s gonna kick my ass.”
“No, no, I saw it. I felt it. It was going to kill me!”
“Nothing is going to-Sam, don’t ever say that. You were probably just having a nightmare.”
Sam shakes his head because, okay, it doesn’t make sense if Dean didn’t see it, but Sam knows he didn’t imagine this. “No, Dean. It was real. You have to believe me. You do, don’t you? I swear, it was real.”
“I do, okay? I believe you. Just calm down. We’ll…we’ll call Bobby. He can come check and make sure the room is secure, he’s only a few hours away. You can watch whatever you want until he gets here, and I’ll make you spaghetti-Os for dinner. You….you want that, Sammy?”
Sam nods into his embrace, just because that’s what Dean needs him to do, and Dean calls Bobby like he said he would.
Bobby makes Sam run through the entire story, even though Dean keeps insisting he just had a nightmare, until suddenly Dean seems to get what exactly happened and he jumps, frowns like Sam’s never seen.
“You had a nightmare about that stupid story I told you?”
“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.”
“No, it wasn’t real. Dragons aren’t real. It was a story, Sam. It was just a story. God, I made it up. I just,” Dean bites his lip, “I wanted you to feel safe and I just made it worse.”
“What are you two chuckleheads going on about?”
Dean explains about how he’d told Sam the fairytale months ago and by the end of it, Bobby is shaking his head.
Sam assumes Bobby thinks he was imagining it, too, so Sam stands, hands balled into fists at his side. “It was real! I can prove it.”
He stands and walks to the wall he’d seen the dragon go through and, sure enough, there’s a bright green glass teardrop on the ground. “See? He cried that!”
Dean gasps as Sam drops it into his hand, but Bobby actually laughs. “Yeah, I know it was real, kid. You made it real.”
“How could he?” Dean asks defensively.
“Boogeyman,” Bobby replies, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “Finds kids who will follow it by pretending to be something else. They can only step into our world once every decade or so and they can’t take a kid until it’s touched their land. That’s why he could only go after your foot, Sam. They’re rare because they’re easy to kill, but a few of ‘em are still around.”
“Did I…I mean, how do we know if it’s…?” Dean swallows hard. He sounds like he’s equal parts terrified that he did kill it and that he didn’t. On the one hand, Dean won’t stop worrying it’ll come back for Sam if it’s alive, but Sam realizes from the tremor in his voice that he’s never killed something before. This was his first time and he did it to save Sam.
“You took care of it alright. As soon as someone else knows it’s in the room, it’s done for, even if you couldn’t see it. You boys’ll be alright. You just gotta be more careful.”
Bobby doesn’t stay long once he sees that the situation is under control and double checks to make sure all of the other protection-salt lines and devil’s traps-are still in order. Dean escorts him to the door, making a face like he’s ready for a lecture, and even though he tells Sam to stay put, Sam follows to the bedroom door, not entirely ready to have both Dean and Bobby out of his sight just yet.
“You gotta watch what you tell that kid,” Bobby says, patting Dean on the shoulder as he’s leaving. “He’ll believe anything you say.”
Bobby is laughing as he says it and even Sam can’t help smiling at how seriously he’d taken Dean’s fib. Dean doesn’t smile, though. He’s still got a sour, guilty expression on his face when he comes back to the room, and he never tells Sam a story again. Sam expects to have a nightmare after that, or for his old worries to resurface now that the shield he’d used against them has been torn down, but Sam feels safer than he even thought he could.
He still believes just as much ever, but this time it’s in something he knows for a fact instead of a daydream. Dean saved him, will always save him, and Sam finally realizes that it was never really the story that comforted him, just the fact that his big brother was there to tell it to him.