SPN fic: Timor Dei
Title: Timor Dei
Category: Gen; PG-13
Words: ~4900
Warnings: swearing, violence. Unbeta'd.
Summary: Sam wanders the wasteland, alone with the wooing of the devil and the beat of his own heart. 5.04 AU.
AN: Written for the ohsam wishlist fic thingy for minviendha's request for 5.04 AUs. Title from JV Cunningham's poem Timor Dei.
Sam turns his phone over and over in one hand as he drives, waiting for a call that never comes. Dean had been serious, then. The darkness of the road blinds him, and it stretches forever on, curving gently with the earth as it reaches the horizon. Fleeing forever--Sam is going to run, run and he can’t stop, because if he does then he will betray them all. Didn’t take much for Ruby to break him, so how quickly would Sam fold for the Devil? Sam will run, and he will run without purpose or direction, because if Lucifer finds him, it’s game over. Dean knows it, Castiel too, so it makes sense, to stay away from them, so they can fight without the worry of him.
The phone doesn’t ring, and that’s maybe for the best. After all, Sam himself proved beyond even the shadow of any doubt which of the Winchesters is trustworthy, and he could rest his case even without the incontrovertible evidence of the darkness he welcomed deep into his heart. Here, Sam allows himself a small (hysterical) laugh--the only two witnesses to his worst crime are dead: Ruby, and the nurse he murdered in the coldest of blood. Because that’s what bloodsucking freaks do, isn’t it. Murder and cannibalize and invite the Devil to the party.
That last charge might have been the only one that stuck, but it isn’t the only one to matter. Dean might not know the details, but he knows Sam well enough anyway, to see the murder in his eyes. And that’s okay, that’s okay, he is a monster, he could never be saved, because as much as Dean tried, Sam was hell-bent on, well, Hell.
The sun, just now rising at his left--that makes his direction south, and shut up, don’t remember, you can’t know--spews the fire that is caught and spread by the oil of the ripe wheat fields, golden and rippling; soon the whole world will be consumed.
Sam wants to laugh, but if he starts, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop. Fire and oil, fire and oil. But then, Dean had been referring to Armageddon.
Cold leaches into his hand from the steering wheel, and did he forget to turn the heat on? Sam drives and thinks and drives, not looking at the road markings, or the signs, or the names that crown the towns he passes, as the sun rises higher and higher in the sky.
The sun has gutted itself on the edge of the horizon, bleeding as it slips back under, before Sam pulls to the side of an unmarked section of road, tired, weak, so fucking tired. John sits beside him, stares with Sam out the windshield, watching a thresher working up and down a crop of wheat, or barley, or what-the-fuck-ever.
“Don’t blame your brother, Sam. He’s really trying to protect you most of all, in this mess.”
Sam doesn’t say a word back, just sits with his father and tries to pretend and fails. Watching the season’s reap.
“After all, we both know that if he ever sees you again, he’ll have to follow my last order. He won’t see it as a choice.”
They both stare at Sam’s phone as it sits, silent, in the second cupholder. One saved message, it blinks.
“He told you that himself, and we know which of you two Winchesters is the liar, don’t we. If you can’t do ‘family first,’ Sammy, then what can you do? But I understand. I can help you, Sam.”
When Sam wakes up, he is alone again, but that’s okay. That’s okay. He shivers, wraps stiff fingers around the wheel, and takes the next left, just because.
Sam pulls his phone out.
“You have one saved message. To listen to your saved messages, press one-one.
This is your lesson, Sam. Pay attention.
“Message received: Listen to me, you bloodsucking freak...”
Sam leans back as he drives and listens to Dean’s voice. Pays very close attention, because this he needs to remember. The Why.
He replays that message until the phone’s battery dies, and then he drives on in silence.
-----
So the thing is, Sam’s weak. He knows this, and he knows Dean knows this. But the most important thing he ever does, the only way he might be able to find redemption, is to just let Dean be. His brother will have enough on his plate--taking on Lucifer and Michael and the whole host of angles and demons--without helping Sam hold his own shit together.
The solution to his greatest temptation--find Bobby, find Dean, beg to get back in--is, in the end, quite simple. Sam hooks his phone up to his laptop, pulls off of it the only file he’ll need, and then tosses it out the window as he drives through the mountains on his way to nowhere. Dean and Bobby can’t call him, and he’ll have to go the extra mile of finding a phone before he can call them. And Sam proved, with blood and glut and weakness, how much he hates going the extra mile.
If Sam has to listen to that one saved message a thousand times until it sinks in--Dean saying I’m done trying to save you and you’re a vampire, a monster--he will. Even in his dreams, he can hear it, straight from Dean’s mouth. Saying, brother, you are nothing; you are worse than nothing, before melting into the Devil’s soft face.
“Remember, Sam,” he’ll say at that point, after a poignant pause, “that family is more than blood. That’s a lesson I learned too late, but it’s not too late for you.”
-----
It isn’t long before simply running isn’t enough for Sam anymore. It isn’t long before he’s hunting again, trying through the rush of gore and danger to feel something, anything at all, besides an anger he can’t channel: pride, relief--hell, even fear. It doesn’t work, though. Of course it doesn’t--how could it? From the inside out, anger born of a demon’s veins burned him into something completely monstrous. But still Sam tries, hunting things much like himself, things that slay for their own glory and vindication. Country roads glide under the wheels of his shitty car, from place to place to hunt, and he introduces the fabric upholstery of the seats to the warm drip of blood.
Interviewing witnesses is harder than it used to be. They shy away from his bruised skin--can’t take a break, can’t let up, can’t let the Devil catch up--and ignore his voice for the twisted scars he gathers along his face.
And maybe he just sucks at connecting to them, now. Civilians. Innocents. Normal people with pedestrian worries.
“They are afraid, Sam,” Jess whispers beside him. “They are afraid of the power and the glory you hold naked before them. Just as I would have been.”
“No,” Sam says back. The only thing that’s (maybe) safe to say. “No. Never. No.”
Jessica smiles and says, “Don’t worry, Sam. You can’t chase me away so easily. I will always be here for you. And I will always trust you, just as you will always be able to trust me.”
Sam closes his eyes and remembers Jessica, her guileless eyes and the flick of her lashes, the way she smiled. He remembers her speared to the ceiling by Hell’s General.
“No,” Sam says. “No.”
The room is cold and he is alone, when he wakes up. The cold is not a surprise--they shut the power to this house off shortly after Sam found it abandoned. Maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe he’s been too complacent; too eager to pretend that he has a home, and that maybe Dean is making coffee just around the corner.
The rough wood of the floor keeps giving him splinters, anyway.
He doesn’t leave a single scrap behind him, when he leaves. He’s gotten good at that--the cleaning up part. What he’s best at, anyway. The making of messes and trying to cover them up, pretend they never were. Or maybe that’s what he’s worst at.
It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t.
Sam drives along the path set out by the sun, turns left, and pretends that... No. No more pretending.
-----
It’s through a hunt picked up somewhere in the south--no names, Sam, you can’t remember, you can’t know-- that he finds his first Infected, in a town ripped brutal and bloody; but in the end, it’s over quick. Must’ve all torn each other to shreds in the dim light of dawn. There’s only one left, by the time Sam gets there; throws his car into park. Steps out.
It’s strange, but he still expects the car doors to shut in tandem, on both sides. He still listens for the echoing thunk that doesn’t come.
She’s standing at the end of the narrow dirt road posted with a sign declaring ‘Main Street.’ Blood wrapped around her forearms and dripping from her fingertips. She stands, she smiles, she balances one legged on those she had left littered behind her. Sam pulls out his nine mil, and then she runs at him, screaming, screaming, so close to tumbling over her own feet, and waving the small knife she digs out of her gorey thigh.
Sam wraps her in a blanket he finds in one of the quiet, creaking houses, after he shoots her down. Because there was just something about her that reminds him about a town miles away, and a time years ago, before he murdered his way out of Dean’s life. A time when he was starting to learn just how much of a freak he is, but still didn’t know how deep it ran. So he packs her in the trunk and drives to the nearest hospital. Borrows--steals--a microscope and huddles in the parking lot, in his clunker of a car, scanning her blood for the sulphur he knows he’ll find, and he does find it.
In a curl of smoke and rust, he drives off, microscope left on the pot of a giant fern beside the main doors.
The Croatoan virus, leeching out into the world. Sam taps his thumb on the wheel, takes the next right, drives and drives and--stops.
For some reason Sam doesn’t quite understand himself, he’s desperate to cool his toes, wet his mouth--but not with that, you’re done with that, the rush and the power spilling from their veins-- in a bar with lighting so dim he might pretend that Dean’s flirting just around the corner. Turns out to be a mistake, though--it’s a hunters’ bar.
They still recognize him, though it’s been at least a couple years and now more than a couple scars tug his face into something worn and weary. Whispers slink under the knocking sound of his boots on the wooden floor. Antichrist, they say. Killer, they say. How dare he, they can’t stop saying.
Sam turns around before he reaches the bar. Hunters talk, after all, and He that haunts every dream can’t ever know where Sam is. Smoke stings Sam’s eyes.
“He’s looking for you, you know.” Sam hears this, but doesn’t stop dramatically; doesn’t half-cock his head like he (kind of) wants to. That’s something Dean would have done, anyway--he’s the one to dream of Westerns, after all. Just before Sam pushes through the heavy wooden door and into the night, he hears, “Your brother. He’s been looking a while.”
Sam moves faster, away and away like always, because he’s not ready, hasn’t had the time, hasn’t earned his way back yet, not yet. And Dean, he shouldn’t be following, he should be fighting.
Country border protections have tightened in recent years, strange violence and unexpected wholesale slaughter of towns sending governments into self-protectionist panics, otherwise Sam might have tried getting into Canada. Ends up in a slanted barn, maybe once red, but the paint is so peeled it might have been anything. The rafters creak over his head, but it’s big enough to hold and hide his car. Tired; so tired. (But at least a little bit safe.)
Enough battery powers is still on his laptop to replay the voicemail a few times through, as he lies and tries to sleep. Reminding him why.
Dean is waiting inside his sleeping mind, but no, no, not Dean, no. The words wait on his tongue.
-----
Those hunters in that bar had the spark of humanity that Sam doesn’t see again. Not for a very long while. Those Infected can’t be called people, after all.
And neither can Lucifer, though he sounds so.... In his dreams, Lucifer sounds so very human.
Wheat fields run wild, sewing saplings while former crop goes to seed. There is no one. The land is empty and Sam is alone with for the birds and the beasts and the wind that whistles through his ears, until the moon rises and his head falls to his shivering chest and he is greeted by the fond voice of his only company.
A small, terrifying piece of him is glad for that.
-----
Sometimes, Sam thinks maybe he’ll come across real people again, after months, years, of silence and screaming, but he won’t remember how to say anything that isn’t no.
-----
The streets are dark--of course they are, the town is dead--and Sam’s footsteps echo in a lonely one-two one-two back at him. Moonlight pools in the water, spreads along the gutters, and silence ekes out from the alleys that yawn along his right. It had been the sudden darkness that had drawn him here--one minute, lights burned brightly just off the highway he had been driving along, and the next they all snapped off. A darkness that hadn’t been there before.
It would be eerie, the great emptiness pressing in on Sam as he walks through what might have been downtown, but it isn’t. It’s just fucking lonely.
He attacks Sam from behind, raw hands scrabble at his face and arms with iron strength band across his neck--squeezing--gun clatters to the ground--panic--with blackness blurring vision’s edge, crawls inward--fighting, fight, relax. Sam’s going limp, burn in his lungs, peace (almost) curled up inside his soul, but.
Lucifer appears, hovers near the edge of consciousness.
“Now, Sam,” he says, watching Sam relaxing forward, watching something that was (maybe, probably) once a man bite at Sam’s neck, rub blood to blood. “Now, Sam, I can’t have this happen. I just can’t let it.”
Pain lances through Sam’s brain, explodes behind his eyes, and then the world is wider and he can breathe. Sam crumbles to the asphalt, gasping, bleeding, and then--
-----
Sunrise slinks along the tops of the empty buildings and Sam wakes up with an aching throat and a pulsing head. The Infected that had attacked him hangs pinned to the post office, speared on the jutting flagpole, and how did he get there?
(a flash, a deafening roar of light, sam with a gun in his hand and a mantra on his tongue, saying brother i have found you; brother i will make you pay with a white scarf floating across his eyes and an eternity thrumming through his veins, but--
another flash, another bang, sam with an etched revolver in his hand and pity strewn across his face, saying brother what have you done; dean how could you do this to him that turns and smiles and burns with the fire of the righteous, but--
another flash, another scream, and sam is lying still on the road; is crawling on his torn hands across a desert; is reclining in a leather armchair; is fighting, fucking, fleeing, but--)
An echo, a silence, and Sam is sprawled on a dirt road in a backwater ghost town, knowing and not knowing, missing his big brother who, once upon a time, said I will save you, though they both had known that lie for what it was.
Yes, Sam knows, but it still hits him like a sucker punch Lucifer brings a mirror into his dreams. Shoves it in front of Sam’s face. Makes him look at the yellow that spills over and across his eyes.
“We are the black sheep, Sam,” he says from the foot of the bed. A guardian angel. “We found wrong in the world, and we neither of us could rest while it lived. We are the ones who find ourselves compromised for our need to fix what is broken. We are gifted and cursed; used and abused by our family of blood and choice. We are forced to choose: You, Sam, need to make a choice. Will you keep beating at your dead horse? Or will you fight for what is right?”
Part of Sam doesn’t want to know his own answer.
-----
The power fails across the country on a Wednesday--wiring torn out, plants sabotaged, and no one left to give a fuck--and Sam chucks his laptop. Well, just leaves it behind, really. The last thing he owns that ties him to any other life than the one he leads right now, with the voicemail lying dormant in its circuitry. Dean’s voice lives in Lucifer’s mouth, now.
Lucifer keeps him grounded in his dreams, reminding Sam of Dean’s final message to him whenever he thinks Sam has forgotten. Saying, “The hypocrisy, it rolls of him in waves. It wasn’t you that unleashed this biblical plague. It wasn’t me. This is the work of Heaven. Of my dear brother Michael. Dean’s best man.”
Sam has seen it, too. Has seen the wheeling of possibility and truth, where (dean says yes, where dean says no, where michael burns the world and where lucifer joins right in--) but through all of that, he has seen one constant: (michael says, dean, it was sam he said yes. michael says, dean this disease it’s your fault sam unleashed it. michael, with his hands behind his back, pulling strings and cursing the world with Plague.)
-----
Here’s the thing: America is pretty damn big. It’s just Sam’s bad luck that his car finally breaks down near the edge of Detroit. He hadn’t even realized he was anywhere near there.
There are people here. Near Detroit. Here, and so scarce everywhere else. Sam shutters his mind and doesn’t think of what that might mean. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe this is all an accident.
(in another world, it is.)
-----
Dust chokes around Sam’s ankles. Sometimes, it feels like that’s all the world is anymore--dust. But that’s not true: Green forests still strap across the northwest in thick bands, or so he’s heard. Far enough from the epicentre to maybe be saved. Or maybe that’s just something they tell themselves, each other as they huddle around campfires, completely anonymous in the night, not asking for names they’ll have to remember for eulogy. If that’s not a godsend, then nothing is. Sam is just another nameless, faceless martyr, unremembered and unremarkable, noted only for his voice that fails so spectacularly at sharing stories of comfort.
The sun is eroding a hole in the sky and it’s time to move on. The strap of his rifle pulls at the thin skin of his shoulder as he wraps his hand more firmly around the worn handle, and heat sinks its teeth deep into the black fastness of its metal. The wire rims of his sunglasses are burning against his cheeks, and Sam shivers inside his thick jacket.
There had been a kid following him, not long ago. Or maybe it was long ago. Hard to remember, hard to keep time straight and narrow when so many worlds spin in and out of focus, possibilities infinite and yet only one destination (of Detroit, this city of ash). But there had been a kid following him. They do that sometimes--those that haven’t seen him without his sunglasses. They just pick up and follow him, blind and desperate faith a sheen over their young eyes. Never last long, though. Sam doesn’t take the care that they do, to avoid contact with the Infected.
Maybe he shot this one (this kid, jesus, sam, says a piece of him, a part of him that lives not in this world, maybe the next--) and maybe he didn’t. Both possibilities, where the kid became a monster and where the kid was just torn to shreds, both (mostly) just as likely. Both just as real. Both a spiral of cause and effect before Sam’s eyes.
Sunlight spreads out in thick patterns along the city’s barren streets, heat pressing heavily; rising from the cracked cement in hazy waves that Sam can’t feel.
“Now Sam,” his shadow says, and this is a new one. “Now Sam. I hope you know exactly how I admire you. Used to working as part of a whole, a team of family and love that you didn’t always know was treacherous, but here you are, fighting even when abandoned. I admire you, and I see myself in you. We are the same,” his shadow says, slinks along his side.
Sam shakes his head, and tries not to wonder if this is a dream in which there can be no consequence, raises his gun (fires up, fires in, gives up, hunts and hunts and dies--) and peels open his mind in search of evil. Blood of his veins calling to the foul disease in theirs.
Worlds splayed and flayed across his mind, (in which he wanders forever, walks forever alone, never meets another soul, but--he finds his brother, but--he says yes, but--he says no, no, no, and adam screams out yes, but--a deluge of screamers, infected, a mob of demons, but--a desert of silence--) it’s so hard to see his hand that wraps around his gun without seeing the phantoms of where his hand might be.
That must be how he doesn’t notice them, the hoard that pours from what might have once been a school. Because they are there, or maybe they are not, and in that crucial moment when Sam makes his choice (of which world is real and which is a might-have-been and which a might-yet-be) he decides he is alone and so does nothing until they close around him and the advantage of the gun vapourizes into the other worlds where Sam is not quite so much an idiot.
So it comes down to simple numbers. Hilarious. Fitting, that in a world of rebellion and choice and consequence, that in the end, the very end of all things (for Sam, at least), there is no factor that more determines his fate than simple numbers. So many Infected divided amongst exactly one who stands to fight them, and too many, there are too many, but not before--
Bullets run out too soon, he picks up a short scrap of iron, rough and dirty dogfight, screaming in his ear and one of them has a gun, how did they get a gun, and the pressure builds behind his eyes, squeezes through his arm and vices around his head, he reaches through doors blown wide and grabs them, those that scream and tear at his skin, at their skin, and Sam rends them apart.
Sam falls to the ground, vision greying out, spotting away, a spray of blood that can’t be his sticking to his face. He falls to the ground and is alone again.
-----
There is red, over the asphalt and scraped across shards of glass and rust. Sam can’t get up, can’t even lift his head, can’t lift his cheek away from the scraping screaming ground. He shakes with the effort to turn himself over, but it’s worth it--the sky is bright today; yellow and blue and bright, the colours stolen from a child’s drawing and spread across the world so Sam might see what he fought for, as he lies and as he waits.
The tack of blood holds his hand to the warm hole in his belly. Eyelids slip, slide. Lucifer was right--he was always going to end up here. (never a question, never an option, every road and every possibility mapped inside his head, all of them leading here.) Detroit festers its way underneath his skin. Dean will have to clear the rest of the way himself.
(dean has and hasn’t; is and isn’t; lives and dies and cries and smiles, and in one he shoots sam without a shudder, and in another holds his cold, waxy hand and says goodbye, and in another they stand together against the rise of a weak and thready sun, but--)
Dean. I’m sorry. Mouth falling open, but the words caught behind the lump in his throat.
The yellow of the sun meets the yellow in his eyes. I’m sorry, Dean. Slipping, sliding, his eyelids glue themselves together and every future fades and fuses together until Sam sees nothing but the dull, pulsing red of his own blood, slowing, slowing.
Glass crunches under steel toed boots--someone here to find the path he laid out. Good. Good.
“Wait, stop.” The crunching stops. The sounds of weapons check snap in Sam’s ear. His head falls sideways.
“We haven’t been here yet, Dean,” says a woman’s voice, and it is demanding. “How the fuck did all the corpses get here?”
“Guess we’re not the only ones with a bone to pick with the Lucy dear.” Crunching, munching, crunching closer. “Jesus, it’s like they exploded from the inside. How the fuck--Wait... Is that...?” That’s a voice Sam knows, knew better than. Than
There’s a train looping around his brain, but there’s no one left at the station to
There’s no one, is all.
“Sammy?” A voice Sam knows, but it is long past time. “Sammy. I never thought--I never--Sam?” A hand catches, cradles the back of his (warm, wet, sticky) head; an arm squeezes across his leaking chest. “But you’re--I mean, I thought you were. We all thought.”
“Dean! We can’t trust him. It’s a trap, it’s gotta be. This is Detroit.”
“I know, I know, but if this is a trap we’d’ve sprung it already. So maybe... it’s not.” This is Dean that’s talking, so he’s got to listen, listen up, Sammy, but there’s something important he has to
Sam thinks, says, “I’m not gonna die--”
“Course you won’t, Sammy, course I’d never let you--” breaks off, voice tight and high and broken. “Shut up!” Dean says to the crowd of voices, buzzing and hemming and hawing about falling right into it, Dean, and why can’t you see, we gotta leave, we gotta go.
“I don’t want to die a monster. Dean. Tell me.” Sam pauses, swallows back the leak in his throat, licks at the cracks in his lips. Blinks, thinks, says, “Tell me I’m not gonna die a monster.”
“What? That’s--you’re not gonna--we’re gonna patch you up. It’s not even that bad,” Dean says--face filling up the sky above him, clouding over the whole world, green eyes, hair cut to a military standard. Sam pins him with his own eyes. Yellow, broken, freak eyes.
“Please, Dean. Tell me I’m not going to die a monster.” Dean’s eyes don’t even stutter as they sweep over his own. And then--then there’s something blocking--
Oh. His eyes have closed again, and he can’t
It’s raining on Sam’s face. He shouldn’t open his eyes anyway, because it’s raining.
“Can we get a medic over here!?” Tinny sounds, from far away; over the hills and so far away. “Medic!” Crackling in his ear. The reception’s so bad in this room, Dean. Let’s ask for a new one.
“He’s been bleeding heavily, pulse is thready; he’s gone into shock.”
His shirt ripped open, he shivers, the wind tickling at his belly and whistling between his skin; tugging at the hole that tunnels through him.
“We need to get him stabilized, get him transport ready, I can’t--” Dean, it’s okay. This is okay. Sam’s head is smothered and covered and his eyes won’t open.
It’s raining.
-----
A bird that wakes Sam up, chirps filling up the whole world, and if that isn’t weird enough, Dean’s face is the first he sees. The bed he’s in is hard, the mattress thin and worn and the sheets scratchy with loose threads. There is an ache pulsing just under his ribs and another that tugs along his heart, because this is Dean.
The room is warm with sour air and his throat is dry, his swallow clicking in his ears.
“Dean,” he say, just because he can. “Dean.”
“Hey, Sammy.” Just like that.
(a sunset in the distance, a moon rising over a desert wasteland, the cool air of spring’s lush afternoon, and in all of them in each and every one of them his brother at his side.)
-.
Category: Gen; PG-13
Words: ~4900
Warnings: swearing, violence. Unbeta'd.
Summary: Sam wanders the wasteland, alone with the wooing of the devil and the beat of his own heart. 5.04 AU.
AN: Written for the ohsam wishlist fic thingy for minviendha's request for 5.04 AUs. Title from JV Cunningham's poem Timor Dei.
Sam turns his phone over and over in one hand as he drives, waiting for a call that never comes. Dean had been serious, then. The darkness of the road blinds him, and it stretches forever on, curving gently with the earth as it reaches the horizon. Fleeing forever--Sam is going to run, run and he can’t stop, because if he does then he will betray them all. Didn’t take much for Ruby to break him, so how quickly would Sam fold for the Devil? Sam will run, and he will run without purpose or direction, because if Lucifer finds him, it’s game over. Dean knows it, Castiel too, so it makes sense, to stay away from them, so they can fight without the worry of him.
The phone doesn’t ring, and that’s maybe for the best. After all, Sam himself proved beyond even the shadow of any doubt which of the Winchesters is trustworthy, and he could rest his case even without the incontrovertible evidence of the darkness he welcomed deep into his heart. Here, Sam allows himself a small (hysterical) laugh--the only two witnesses to his worst crime are dead: Ruby, and the nurse he murdered in the coldest of blood. Because that’s what bloodsucking freaks do, isn’t it. Murder and cannibalize and invite the Devil to the party.
That last charge might have been the only one that stuck, but it isn’t the only one to matter. Dean might not know the details, but he knows Sam well enough anyway, to see the murder in his eyes. And that’s okay, that’s okay, he is a monster, he could never be saved, because as much as Dean tried, Sam was hell-bent on, well, Hell.
The sun, just now rising at his left--that makes his direction south, and shut up, don’t remember, you can’t know--spews the fire that is caught and spread by the oil of the ripe wheat fields, golden and rippling; soon the whole world will be consumed.
Sam wants to laugh, but if he starts, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop. Fire and oil, fire and oil. But then, Dean had been referring to Armageddon.
Cold leaches into his hand from the steering wheel, and did he forget to turn the heat on? Sam drives and thinks and drives, not looking at the road markings, or the signs, or the names that crown the towns he passes, as the sun rises higher and higher in the sky.
The sun has gutted itself on the edge of the horizon, bleeding as it slips back under, before Sam pulls to the side of an unmarked section of road, tired, weak, so fucking tired. John sits beside him, stares with Sam out the windshield, watching a thresher working up and down a crop of wheat, or barley, or what-the-fuck-ever.
“Don’t blame your brother, Sam. He’s really trying to protect you most of all, in this mess.”
Sam doesn’t say a word back, just sits with his father and tries to pretend and fails. Watching the season’s reap.
“After all, we both know that if he ever sees you again, he’ll have to follow my last order. He won’t see it as a choice.”
They both stare at Sam’s phone as it sits, silent, in the second cupholder. One saved message, it blinks.
“He told you that himself, and we know which of you two Winchesters is the liar, don’t we. If you can’t do ‘family first,’ Sammy, then what can you do? But I understand. I can help you, Sam.”
When Sam wakes up, he is alone again, but that’s okay. That’s okay. He shivers, wraps stiff fingers around the wheel, and takes the next left, just because.
Sam pulls his phone out.
“You have one saved message. To listen to your saved messages, press one-one.
This is your lesson, Sam. Pay attention.
“Message received: Listen to me, you bloodsucking freak...”
Sam leans back as he drives and listens to Dean’s voice. Pays very close attention, because this he needs to remember. The Why.
He replays that message until the phone’s battery dies, and then he drives on in silence.
-----
So the thing is, Sam’s weak. He knows this, and he knows Dean knows this. But the most important thing he ever does, the only way he might be able to find redemption, is to just let Dean be. His brother will have enough on his plate--taking on Lucifer and Michael and the whole host of angles and demons--without helping Sam hold his own shit together.
The solution to his greatest temptation--find Bobby, find Dean, beg to get back in--is, in the end, quite simple. Sam hooks his phone up to his laptop, pulls off of it the only file he’ll need, and then tosses it out the window as he drives through the mountains on his way to nowhere. Dean and Bobby can’t call him, and he’ll have to go the extra mile of finding a phone before he can call them. And Sam proved, with blood and glut and weakness, how much he hates going the extra mile.
If Sam has to listen to that one saved message a thousand times until it sinks in--Dean saying I’m done trying to save you and you’re a vampire, a monster--he will. Even in his dreams, he can hear it, straight from Dean’s mouth. Saying, brother, you are nothing; you are worse than nothing, before melting into the Devil’s soft face.
“Remember, Sam,” he’ll say at that point, after a poignant pause, “that family is more than blood. That’s a lesson I learned too late, but it’s not too late for you.”
-----
It isn’t long before simply running isn’t enough for Sam anymore. It isn’t long before he’s hunting again, trying through the rush of gore and danger to feel something, anything at all, besides an anger he can’t channel: pride, relief--hell, even fear. It doesn’t work, though. Of course it doesn’t--how could it? From the inside out, anger born of a demon’s veins burned him into something completely monstrous. But still Sam tries, hunting things much like himself, things that slay for their own glory and vindication. Country roads glide under the wheels of his shitty car, from place to place to hunt, and he introduces the fabric upholstery of the seats to the warm drip of blood.
Interviewing witnesses is harder than it used to be. They shy away from his bruised skin--can’t take a break, can’t let up, can’t let the Devil catch up--and ignore his voice for the twisted scars he gathers along his face.
And maybe he just sucks at connecting to them, now. Civilians. Innocents. Normal people with pedestrian worries.
“They are afraid, Sam,” Jess whispers beside him. “They are afraid of the power and the glory you hold naked before them. Just as I would have been.”
“No,” Sam says back. The only thing that’s (maybe) safe to say. “No. Never. No.”
Jessica smiles and says, “Don’t worry, Sam. You can’t chase me away so easily. I will always be here for you. And I will always trust you, just as you will always be able to trust me.”
Sam closes his eyes and remembers Jessica, her guileless eyes and the flick of her lashes, the way she smiled. He remembers her speared to the ceiling by Hell’s General.
“No,” Sam says. “No.”
The room is cold and he is alone, when he wakes up. The cold is not a surprise--they shut the power to this house off shortly after Sam found it abandoned. Maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe he’s been too complacent; too eager to pretend that he has a home, and that maybe Dean is making coffee just around the corner.
The rough wood of the floor keeps giving him splinters, anyway.
He doesn’t leave a single scrap behind him, when he leaves. He’s gotten good at that--the cleaning up part. What he’s best at, anyway. The making of messes and trying to cover them up, pretend they never were. Or maybe that’s what he’s worst at.
It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t.
Sam drives along the path set out by the sun, turns left, and pretends that... No. No more pretending.
-----
It’s through a hunt picked up somewhere in the south--no names, Sam, you can’t remember, you can’t know-- that he finds his first Infected, in a town ripped brutal and bloody; but in the end, it’s over quick. Must’ve all torn each other to shreds in the dim light of dawn. There’s only one left, by the time Sam gets there; throws his car into park. Steps out.
It’s strange, but he still expects the car doors to shut in tandem, on both sides. He still listens for the echoing thunk that doesn’t come.
She’s standing at the end of the narrow dirt road posted with a sign declaring ‘Main Street.’ Blood wrapped around her forearms and dripping from her fingertips. She stands, she smiles, she balances one legged on those she had left littered behind her. Sam pulls out his nine mil, and then she runs at him, screaming, screaming, so close to tumbling over her own feet, and waving the small knife she digs out of her gorey thigh.
Sam wraps her in a blanket he finds in one of the quiet, creaking houses, after he shoots her down. Because there was just something about her that reminds him about a town miles away, and a time years ago, before he murdered his way out of Dean’s life. A time when he was starting to learn just how much of a freak he is, but still didn’t know how deep it ran. So he packs her in the trunk and drives to the nearest hospital. Borrows--steals--a microscope and huddles in the parking lot, in his clunker of a car, scanning her blood for the sulphur he knows he’ll find, and he does find it.
In a curl of smoke and rust, he drives off, microscope left on the pot of a giant fern beside the main doors.
The Croatoan virus, leeching out into the world. Sam taps his thumb on the wheel, takes the next right, drives and drives and--stops.
For some reason Sam doesn’t quite understand himself, he’s desperate to cool his toes, wet his mouth--but not with that, you’re done with that, the rush and the power spilling from their veins-- in a bar with lighting so dim he might pretend that Dean’s flirting just around the corner. Turns out to be a mistake, though--it’s a hunters’ bar.
They still recognize him, though it’s been at least a couple years and now more than a couple scars tug his face into something worn and weary. Whispers slink under the knocking sound of his boots on the wooden floor. Antichrist, they say. Killer, they say. How dare he, they can’t stop saying.
Sam turns around before he reaches the bar. Hunters talk, after all, and He that haunts every dream can’t ever know where Sam is. Smoke stings Sam’s eyes.
“He’s looking for you, you know.” Sam hears this, but doesn’t stop dramatically; doesn’t half-cock his head like he (kind of) wants to. That’s something Dean would have done, anyway--he’s the one to dream of Westerns, after all. Just before Sam pushes through the heavy wooden door and into the night, he hears, “Your brother. He’s been looking a while.”
Sam moves faster, away and away like always, because he’s not ready, hasn’t had the time, hasn’t earned his way back yet, not yet. And Dean, he shouldn’t be following, he should be fighting.
Country border protections have tightened in recent years, strange violence and unexpected wholesale slaughter of towns sending governments into self-protectionist panics, otherwise Sam might have tried getting into Canada. Ends up in a slanted barn, maybe once red, but the paint is so peeled it might have been anything. The rafters creak over his head, but it’s big enough to hold and hide his car. Tired; so tired. (But at least a little bit safe.)
Enough battery powers is still on his laptop to replay the voicemail a few times through, as he lies and tries to sleep. Reminding him why.
Dean is waiting inside his sleeping mind, but no, no, not Dean, no. The words wait on his tongue.
-----
Those hunters in that bar had the spark of humanity that Sam doesn’t see again. Not for a very long while. Those Infected can’t be called people, after all.
And neither can Lucifer, though he sounds so.... In his dreams, Lucifer sounds so very human.
Wheat fields run wild, sewing saplings while former crop goes to seed. There is no one. The land is empty and Sam is alone with for the birds and the beasts and the wind that whistles through his ears, until the moon rises and his head falls to his shivering chest and he is greeted by the fond voice of his only company.
A small, terrifying piece of him is glad for that.
-----
Sometimes, Sam thinks maybe he’ll come across real people again, after months, years, of silence and screaming, but he won’t remember how to say anything that isn’t no.
-----
The streets are dark--of course they are, the town is dead--and Sam’s footsteps echo in a lonely one-two one-two back at him. Moonlight pools in the water, spreads along the gutters, and silence ekes out from the alleys that yawn along his right. It had been the sudden darkness that had drawn him here--one minute, lights burned brightly just off the highway he had been driving along, and the next they all snapped off. A darkness that hadn’t been there before.
It would be eerie, the great emptiness pressing in on Sam as he walks through what might have been downtown, but it isn’t. It’s just fucking lonely.
He attacks Sam from behind, raw hands scrabble at his face and arms with iron strength band across his neck--squeezing--gun clatters to the ground--panic--with blackness blurring vision’s edge, crawls inward--fighting, fight, relax. Sam’s going limp, burn in his lungs, peace (almost) curled up inside his soul, but.
Lucifer appears, hovers near the edge of consciousness.
“Now, Sam,” he says, watching Sam relaxing forward, watching something that was (maybe, probably) once a man bite at Sam’s neck, rub blood to blood. “Now, Sam, I can’t have this happen. I just can’t let it.”
Pain lances through Sam’s brain, explodes behind his eyes, and then the world is wider and he can breathe. Sam crumbles to the asphalt, gasping, bleeding, and then--
-----
Sunrise slinks along the tops of the empty buildings and Sam wakes up with an aching throat and a pulsing head. The Infected that had attacked him hangs pinned to the post office, speared on the jutting flagpole, and how did he get there?
(a flash, a deafening roar of light, sam with a gun in his hand and a mantra on his tongue, saying brother i have found you; brother i will make you pay with a white scarf floating across his eyes and an eternity thrumming through his veins, but--
another flash, another bang, sam with an etched revolver in his hand and pity strewn across his face, saying brother what have you done; dean how could you do this to him that turns and smiles and burns with the fire of the righteous, but--
another flash, another scream, and sam is lying still on the road; is crawling on his torn hands across a desert; is reclining in a leather armchair; is fighting, fucking, fleeing, but--)
An echo, a silence, and Sam is sprawled on a dirt road in a backwater ghost town, knowing and not knowing, missing his big brother who, once upon a time, said I will save you, though they both had known that lie for what it was.
Yes, Sam knows, but it still hits him like a sucker punch Lucifer brings a mirror into his dreams. Shoves it in front of Sam’s face. Makes him look at the yellow that spills over and across his eyes.
“We are the black sheep, Sam,” he says from the foot of the bed. A guardian angel. “We found wrong in the world, and we neither of us could rest while it lived. We are the ones who find ourselves compromised for our need to fix what is broken. We are gifted and cursed; used and abused by our family of blood and choice. We are forced to choose: You, Sam, need to make a choice. Will you keep beating at your dead horse? Or will you fight for what is right?”
Part of Sam doesn’t want to know his own answer.
-----
The power fails across the country on a Wednesday--wiring torn out, plants sabotaged, and no one left to give a fuck--and Sam chucks his laptop. Well, just leaves it behind, really. The last thing he owns that ties him to any other life than the one he leads right now, with the voicemail lying dormant in its circuitry. Dean’s voice lives in Lucifer’s mouth, now.
Lucifer keeps him grounded in his dreams, reminding Sam of Dean’s final message to him whenever he thinks Sam has forgotten. Saying, “The hypocrisy, it rolls of him in waves. It wasn’t you that unleashed this biblical plague. It wasn’t me. This is the work of Heaven. Of my dear brother Michael. Dean’s best man.”
Sam has seen it, too. Has seen the wheeling of possibility and truth, where (dean says yes, where dean says no, where michael burns the world and where lucifer joins right in--) but through all of that, he has seen one constant: (michael says, dean, it was sam he said yes. michael says, dean this disease it’s your fault sam unleashed it. michael, with his hands behind his back, pulling strings and cursing the world with Plague.)
-----
Here’s the thing: America is pretty damn big. It’s just Sam’s bad luck that his car finally breaks down near the edge of Detroit. He hadn’t even realized he was anywhere near there.
There are people here. Near Detroit. Here, and so scarce everywhere else. Sam shutters his mind and doesn’t think of what that might mean. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe this is all an accident.
(in another world, it is.)
-----
Dust chokes around Sam’s ankles. Sometimes, it feels like that’s all the world is anymore--dust. But that’s not true: Green forests still strap across the northwest in thick bands, or so he’s heard. Far enough from the epicentre to maybe be saved. Or maybe that’s just something they tell themselves, each other as they huddle around campfires, completely anonymous in the night, not asking for names they’ll have to remember for eulogy. If that’s not a godsend, then nothing is. Sam is just another nameless, faceless martyr, unremembered and unremarkable, noted only for his voice that fails so spectacularly at sharing stories of comfort.
The sun is eroding a hole in the sky and it’s time to move on. The strap of his rifle pulls at the thin skin of his shoulder as he wraps his hand more firmly around the worn handle, and heat sinks its teeth deep into the black fastness of its metal. The wire rims of his sunglasses are burning against his cheeks, and Sam shivers inside his thick jacket.
There had been a kid following him, not long ago. Or maybe it was long ago. Hard to remember, hard to keep time straight and narrow when so many worlds spin in and out of focus, possibilities infinite and yet only one destination (of Detroit, this city of ash). But there had been a kid following him. They do that sometimes--those that haven’t seen him without his sunglasses. They just pick up and follow him, blind and desperate faith a sheen over their young eyes. Never last long, though. Sam doesn’t take the care that they do, to avoid contact with the Infected.
Maybe he shot this one (this kid, jesus, sam, says a piece of him, a part of him that lives not in this world, maybe the next--) and maybe he didn’t. Both possibilities, where the kid became a monster and where the kid was just torn to shreds, both (mostly) just as likely. Both just as real. Both a spiral of cause and effect before Sam’s eyes.
Sunlight spreads out in thick patterns along the city’s barren streets, heat pressing heavily; rising from the cracked cement in hazy waves that Sam can’t feel.
“Now Sam,” his shadow says, and this is a new one. “Now Sam. I hope you know exactly how I admire you. Used to working as part of a whole, a team of family and love that you didn’t always know was treacherous, but here you are, fighting even when abandoned. I admire you, and I see myself in you. We are the same,” his shadow says, slinks along his side.
Sam shakes his head, and tries not to wonder if this is a dream in which there can be no consequence, raises his gun (fires up, fires in, gives up, hunts and hunts and dies--) and peels open his mind in search of evil. Blood of his veins calling to the foul disease in theirs.
Worlds splayed and flayed across his mind, (in which he wanders forever, walks forever alone, never meets another soul, but--he finds his brother, but--he says yes, but--he says no, no, no, and adam screams out yes, but--a deluge of screamers, infected, a mob of demons, but--a desert of silence--) it’s so hard to see his hand that wraps around his gun without seeing the phantoms of where his hand might be.
That must be how he doesn’t notice them, the hoard that pours from what might have once been a school. Because they are there, or maybe they are not, and in that crucial moment when Sam makes his choice (of which world is real and which is a might-have-been and which a might-yet-be) he decides he is alone and so does nothing until they close around him and the advantage of the gun vapourizes into the other worlds where Sam is not quite so much an idiot.
So it comes down to simple numbers. Hilarious. Fitting, that in a world of rebellion and choice and consequence, that in the end, the very end of all things (for Sam, at least), there is no factor that more determines his fate than simple numbers. So many Infected divided amongst exactly one who stands to fight them, and too many, there are too many, but not before--
Bullets run out too soon, he picks up a short scrap of iron, rough and dirty dogfight, screaming in his ear and one of them has a gun, how did they get a gun, and the pressure builds behind his eyes, squeezes through his arm and vices around his head, he reaches through doors blown wide and grabs them, those that scream and tear at his skin, at their skin, and Sam rends them apart.
Sam falls to the ground, vision greying out, spotting away, a spray of blood that can’t be his sticking to his face. He falls to the ground and is alone again.
-----
There is red, over the asphalt and scraped across shards of glass and rust. Sam can’t get up, can’t even lift his head, can’t lift his cheek away from the scraping screaming ground. He shakes with the effort to turn himself over, but it’s worth it--the sky is bright today; yellow and blue and bright, the colours stolen from a child’s drawing and spread across the world so Sam might see what he fought for, as he lies and as he waits.
The tack of blood holds his hand to the warm hole in his belly. Eyelids slip, slide. Lucifer was right--he was always going to end up here. (never a question, never an option, every road and every possibility mapped inside his head, all of them leading here.) Detroit festers its way underneath his skin. Dean will have to clear the rest of the way himself.
(dean has and hasn’t; is and isn’t; lives and dies and cries and smiles, and in one he shoots sam without a shudder, and in another holds his cold, waxy hand and says goodbye, and in another they stand together against the rise of a weak and thready sun, but--)
Dean. I’m sorry. Mouth falling open, but the words caught behind the lump in his throat.
The yellow of the sun meets the yellow in his eyes. I’m sorry, Dean. Slipping, sliding, his eyelids glue themselves together and every future fades and fuses together until Sam sees nothing but the dull, pulsing red of his own blood, slowing, slowing.
Glass crunches under steel toed boots--someone here to find the path he laid out. Good. Good.
“Wait, stop.” The crunching stops. The sounds of weapons check snap in Sam’s ear. His head falls sideways.
“We haven’t been here yet, Dean,” says a woman’s voice, and it is demanding. “How the fuck did all the corpses get here?”
“Guess we’re not the only ones with a bone to pick with the Lucy dear.” Crunching, munching, crunching closer. “Jesus, it’s like they exploded from the inside. How the fuck--Wait... Is that...?” That’s a voice Sam knows, knew better than. Than
There’s a train looping around his brain, but there’s no one left at the station to
There’s no one, is all.
“Sammy?” A voice Sam knows, but it is long past time. “Sammy. I never thought--I never--Sam?” A hand catches, cradles the back of his (warm, wet, sticky) head; an arm squeezes across his leaking chest. “But you’re--I mean, I thought you were. We all thought.”
“Dean! We can’t trust him. It’s a trap, it’s gotta be. This is Detroit.”
“I know, I know, but if this is a trap we’d’ve sprung it already. So maybe... it’s not.” This is Dean that’s talking, so he’s got to listen, listen up, Sammy, but there’s something important he has to
Sam thinks, says, “I’m not gonna die--”
“Course you won’t, Sammy, course I’d never let you--” breaks off, voice tight and high and broken. “Shut up!” Dean says to the crowd of voices, buzzing and hemming and hawing about falling right into it, Dean, and why can’t you see, we gotta leave, we gotta go.
“I don’t want to die a monster. Dean. Tell me.” Sam pauses, swallows back the leak in his throat, licks at the cracks in his lips. Blinks, thinks, says, “Tell me I’m not gonna die a monster.”
“What? That’s--you’re not gonna--we’re gonna patch you up. It’s not even that bad,” Dean says--face filling up the sky above him, clouding over the whole world, green eyes, hair cut to a military standard. Sam pins him with his own eyes. Yellow, broken, freak eyes.
“Please, Dean. Tell me I’m not going to die a monster.” Dean’s eyes don’t even stutter as they sweep over his own. And then--then there’s something blocking--
Oh. His eyes have closed again, and he can’t
It’s raining on Sam’s face. He shouldn’t open his eyes anyway, because it’s raining.
“Can we get a medic over here!?” Tinny sounds, from far away; over the hills and so far away. “Medic!” Crackling in his ear. The reception’s so bad in this room, Dean. Let’s ask for a new one.
“He’s been bleeding heavily, pulse is thready; he’s gone into shock.”
His shirt ripped open, he shivers, the wind tickling at his belly and whistling between his skin; tugging at the hole that tunnels through him.
“We need to get him stabilized, get him transport ready, I can’t--” Dean, it’s okay. This is okay. Sam’s head is smothered and covered and his eyes won’t open.
It’s raining.
-----
A bird that wakes Sam up, chirps filling up the whole world, and if that isn’t weird enough, Dean’s face is the first he sees. The bed he’s in is hard, the mattress thin and worn and the sheets scratchy with loose threads. There is an ache pulsing just under his ribs and another that tugs along his heart, because this is Dean.
The room is warm with sour air and his throat is dry, his swallow clicking in his ears.
“Dean,” he say, just because he can. “Dean.”
“Hey, Sammy.” Just like that.
(a sunset in the distance, a moon rising over a desert wasteland, the cool air of spring’s lush afternoon, and in all of them in each and every one of them his brother at his side.)
-.