Big Bang 2010 Supernatural Fanfic: I Touch the Place Where I'd Find Your Face (1/3)
Title: I Touch the Place Where I’d Find Your Face (1/3)
Author name: lotsayaoi
Artist name: madhatterpan
Genre: Wincest
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 24,846
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for all of season 2, main and minor character death
Summary: AU of season 2, starting with 2.01 In My Time of Dying. When Tessa asks Dean whether he’s ready to move on or if he wants to stay, Dean does what he must to protect his brother. Dean follows Sam as he hunts, taking care of him and learning how to be a spirit, and they both learn just how strong love that crosses the veil can be. And how weak.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
:::
Reapers don’t play games with demons, and Death certainly has nothing to fear from humans.
Except that, perhaps, the Winchesters don’t really count.
:::
Dean ran down the halls of the hospital, dodging passersby out of habit even though he knew he could pass right through them - spirits didn’t have to deal with such semantics as mass or matter - seeking the lying bitch out.
Sweet little Tessa, with her big earnest eyes and unthreatening body, was a reaper. It made a lot of sense once he thought about it, which only added to how completely pissed off he was that he fell for something so stupid in the first place. But at least the thing knew him: what better way to get Dean Winchester to agree to something than to take the form of someone in need (and, let’s face it, pretty damn fuckable)?
But right now, Dean couldn’t think too much about having been duped, couldn’t think about how predictable this proved him or how much danger that predictability put him and his family into - he knew what the thing was now, and that automatically meant he had an advantage.
Know thine enemy, and all that noise.
He rounded a corner and saw her sitting there - all cropped hair and trim waist and big, big eyes - just waiting for him. Like she knew he knew. It only made it worse.
“Hi Dean,” she said, voice toneless yet somehow so stupidly calm and collected. Who had a right to sound like that when Dean was fuming and stupid and dying?
Breathing heavily and trying his best not to lash out - mostly because he knew he was a spirit and almost anything he did would be ineffectual at best - he snarled,
“You know, you read the most interesting things. For example, did you know that reapers can alter human perception?” She just stared, with those big, stupid eyes. “I sure didn’t. Basically they can make themselves appear however they want. Like, say, a…a pretty girl.”
He waited for a response, maybe for her to own up to having played him, but she just stared and stared. Dean noticed that she was dressed differently now, in something stylish and dark - she’d thought to change her appearance now that she didn’t have to keep wearing the hospital-patients’ attire to fool him.
“You’re much prettier than the last reaper I met,” he added venomously, knowing it was childish and not caring.
“I was wondering when you would figure it out.” Still calm and just staring staring staring.
Dean’s upper lip curled in a sneer. “I should have known,” he said. “That whole ‘accepting fate’ rap of yours is far too laid back for a dead chick.” And it was. No one just accepts death; everyone has some fight left in them at the bitter end, no matter how they might have approached it in life. Such an obvious tell, and goddamn it, he’d still eaten it up.
Still searching her face for expression - blink or something, damn it! - he continued, “But the mother, and the body, I’m still trying to figure that one out.”
And finally, a sign of contrition - her head dropped down and to the side, her eyes lowered for a moment before trying to explain, as if to a child. “It’s my sandbox. I can make you see whatever I want.”
“What is this, like, a turn-on for you? Huh, toying with me?” Dean spat.
“You didn’t give me much choice,” she replied, and Dean’s stomach clenched as he realized she was probably right. “You saw my true form and you flipped out.” A coy, nearly girlish smile: “Kinda hurts a girl’s feelings. This was the only way I could get you to talk to me.”
“Okay, fine. We’re talking.” His voice was the one he used with Sammy when he really didn’t feel like talking. “What the hell do you want to talk about?”
“How death is nothing to fear,” Tessa deadpanned, and Dean’s clenched stomach seemed to drop out completely. This is so not a talk he wants to have right now. Probably ever.
Tessa stepped forward then, reaching out and laying a miraculous hand on his cheek, his first human contact since before the accident. Though he flinched from the wrongness of Death’s hand upon his face, Dean figured he could hardly be berated for leaning into the touch a little. When Tessa spoke again, her voice was soft, consoling, but unyielding in what he knew she had to say.
“It’s your time to go, Dean. And you’re living on borrowed time already.”
:::
John stood beside the summoning sigil he’d created, chanting the Latin he knew so well as he sliced open his right palm and let the blood drip into the bowl below. He lit a match and dropped it in too so the contents sparked and flared, and he stopped speaking, staring around the empty boiler room. His stomach was tangled, not so much from fear as he would have expected, but with guilt - he had promised Sam he wouldn’t hunt the demon until Dean was better, and he told himself this didn’t count, but it didn’t change the fact that he was betraying his sons’ trust by being here. Both of them.
A firm hand grabbed his right shoulder - his broken arm, of course, Jesus - and he turned around, startled.
“What the hell are you doing down here, buddy?” the man demanded. He was a utility worker of some kind, someone who had probably been nearby and heard the noise or seen the fire.
John sputtered, “I can explain - ”
But as the guy turned, telling him about how he’d have to explain it to security, John cocked the Colt.
“Hey,” he asked, a smirk pulling at his lips despite himself. “How stupid do you think I am?”
And the guy turned back and stared at him, staying in character until his eyes glowed cruelly yellow and he smiled.
“You really want an answer to that?” the demon asked, mirth dripping from his voice.
John held his ground with the Colt as he heard the two men - more demons - take their places behind him. Bodyguards.
“You conjuring me, John, I’m surprised,” the demon sing-songed as he began to pace. “I took you for a lot of things, but suicidally reckless wasn’t one of them.”
John tightened his grip on the gun. “I could always shoot you.”
“You could always miss.” The demon moved, hands waving in a caricature of movement, but stayed in place, watching him. “And you’ve only got one try, don’t ya?” It narrowed its eyes and John felt his skin crawl with how much he reviled the evil son of a bitch. “Did you really think you could trap me?”
And John held his head high, pushed the guilt aside, and said, “Oh, I don’t wanna trap you.” He lowered the Colt to his side, a show of faith. “I want to make a deal.”
:::
Sam stood at the window side of Dean’s bed, hands in his pockets and staring down at his brother - still somehow so beautiful despite all the tubes and tape trying their best to distort and hide him. He looked around a little, not sure what he was looking for - or rather, knowing he wouldn’t actually see what he was looking for.
“Dean? Are you here?”
Still looking, Sam sees nothing, so he talks to Dean’s lifeless - no, not lifeless - body, praying he can hear him.
“I couldn’t find anything in the book…I don’t know how to help you,” he admitted, wishing above all things that he didn’t have to say it. “But I’ll keep trying, all right? As long as you keep fighting.
“I mean, come on you can’t…you can’t leave me here alone with Dad, we’ll kill each other, you know that.” He tried to laugh, his smile feeling cold and wrong on his face with Dean’s closed eyes the only ones there to see. His throat was full of feeling and his voice cracked, but he’d never cared so little about anything in his life.
“Dean, you’ve got to hold on. You can’t go, man, not now. We were just starting to be brothers again.”
No witty remark about Sam being a girl. Chick-flick moments allowed for a moment by default. Sam just stared at his brother, wishing and praying and hoping against hope.
“Can you hear me?”
:::
Staring out the window into the darkness of outside, only his inexplicably present reflection (though he knew no one else would see it if they came in), Dean silently panicked as he searched his brain for something to say. Something that would get rid of Tessa and get him back to his dad and his brother.
Sammy…
“Look, I’m sure you've heard this before, but… You’ve gotta make an exception, you…you’ve gotta cut me a break,” Dean stammered, hoping Tessa would hear his desperation and give in to him.
“Stage three: bargaining.” Still so unaffected. Dean couldn’t even find it in him to be angry: he was too scared for that.
“I’m serious,” he said, voice shaking. “My family’s in danger. See, we’re kind of in the middle of this, um…war…and they need me.” The thought of Dad and Sammy trying to hunt down the demon together, everyday a battle or a contest over who was more obsessed. They’d kill each other, he knew it. They needed Dean, as a buffer and a soldier and…
They don’t need you.
“The fight’s over,” Tessa said, so quiet, like the gravity of her words could be avoided if her voice was just soft enough.
“No, it isn’t,” Dean insisted immediately. It can’t be. They need me.
“It is for you,” she assured him, eyes big and pleading, and Dean could almost see a type of desperation in her. Like she needed him to understand something very important and Dean just wasn’t listening. “Dean, you’re not the first soldier I’ve plucked from the field. They all feel the same. They can’t leave. Victory hangs in the balance. But they’re wrong.” That imploring look, asking him to know what she knew. “The battle goes on without them.”
Dean couldn’t hear her, as much as her big eyes screamed for him to listen. “My brother,” he said, like that was all the explanation he needed. And it was. “He could die without me.”
“Maybe he will…maybe he won’t. Nothing you can do about it.”
And Dean’s heart nearly stopped at how blunt and mean it was, so badly he had to turn away. Of course there was something he could do about it, he could live. He could protect Sammy from the things out there in the dark, from the demon, from himself. Sam needed him, he…
Not like you need them.
“It’s an honorable death. A warrior’s death.”
“There’s no such thing as an honorable death,” Dean croaked, emotion barely contained as he pleaded with her to hear him. “My corpse is going to rot in the ground and my family is going to die!”
Just those big eyes, staring and so sad, trying to make him hear something too ludicrous to ever know. Maybe there had been a chance for her once, maybe there was a chance her message would penetrate; but now just the thought of Sam’s dead and decaying body his answer was so simple: “No.” He stood up straighter, resolution piled high. “No, I’m not going with you, I don’t care what you do.”
Dean watched her body deflate and felt a moment’s victorious glow - he had a chance, he knew it! - but then she looked back up and the tension rose again in his shoulders.
“Well, like you said. There’s always a choice.” Her face was set, though a sadness played beneath the coldness that made Dean uneasy. “I can’t make you come with me.
“But you’re not getting back in your body. And that’s just facts.”
Dean felt his eyes widen, felt his nonexistent insides clench, but the extraordinary coldness that spread throughout him was too overwhelming to care. He thought of his body, far away and breathing by machines and felt suddenly very alone without it. He wanted his dad…needed to see him and Sam.
“So yes, you can stay,” Tessa continued. “You’ll stay here for years - disembodied, scared - and over the decades it’ll probably drive you mad. Maybe you'll even get violent.”
Dean started at her last statement, leaning in and asking, “What are you saying?” praying to nothingness that it didn’t mean what he thought it did - although really, what else could it mean?
“Dean,” she said, smiling and patronizing again, though Dean hardly cared at this point. “How do you think angry spirits are born? They can’t let go and they can’t move on. And you’re about to become one.” It hit him at the same moment she said it: “The same thing you hunt.”
:::
Azazel looked down his nose at John Winchester, standing as tall as he could with his arm in a sling next to his little altar. “It’s very unseemly, making deals with devils,” he teased, loving how John stood firm in the face of the one thing he hated more than anything. Humans were so much fun. “How do I know this isn’t just another trick?”
“It’s no trick. I will give you the Colt and the bullet, but you’ve got to help Dean.” John breathed, keeping calm and trying to stay menacing. “You’ve got to bring him back.”
“Why, John, you're a sentimentalist!” Azazel crowed, smiling with glee. “If only your boys knew how much their daddy loved them.”
John never budged. “It's a good trade. You care a hell of a lot more about this gun than you do Dean.”
“Don’t be so sure. He killed some people very special to me.” He let his obvious strength and advantage bleed into the tension in the room. “But still, you’re right, he isn’t much of a threat. And neither is your other son.”
He eyed John for a moment, smirking as he asked, “You know the truth, right? About Sammy? And the other children?”
John smirked too now, less with mirth as with disgust. “Yeah. I've known for a while.”
“But Sam doesn't, does he? You've been playing dumb.” If the boy only knew his destiny…
“Can you bring Dean back, yes or no?” John persisted.
“No,” Azazel said with levity. When John tensed and looked for a moment like he might just shit a brick, he added, “But I know someone who can. It’s not a problem.”
A smile now. It was a shame really - John had been a worthy opponent, as they say. It was unfortunate his run as a hunter had to end so anticlimactically.
John’s face relaxed and he tried a smile again. “Good.” He took a breath and said, “So we have a deal.”
“No, John, not yet. You still need to sweeten the pot,” Azazel growled, yellow eyes flashing as he came forward.
“With what?” John asked, and through his victory Azazel could feel the irony that John Winchester - dealer in death of all shapes, sizes, and trades - couldn’t figure this one out.
“There's something else I want as much as that gun,” he teased. “Maybe more.”
:::
Dean sat on the bed, Tessa behind him stroking his hair tenderly. Funny how he hadn’t noticed before that they were in the same room she’d shown him earlier, where her supposed mother and comatose body had been posed for him. He wondered idly if there was ever actually someone in the room, and whether Tessa was just making it look empty now. He wondered if the hospital was actually this cold or if that was just the dread pooling in his stomach.
He thought about anything but this. Anything but the choice he had to make.
How could anyone choose? How could anyone know whether it was right to abandon their family rather than become a monster? How many hunters before him faced this choice? How many spirits had he killed that had once been the Bobby or John of that decade? How many mothers who wanted to stay and watch their children grow, children who’d wanted to watch over their parents or siblings, lovers who couldn’t face eternity without their other?
Tessa’s voice was going for soothing, but to him it was nearly grating and - for unfathomable reasons - he fought the urge to flinch. It hardly mattered now whether she knew how weak he was, but he felt like he needed to hold tight to whatever pieces of his protective walls he had left.
“It’s time to put the pain behind you,” she said, hand never leaving his head, so relaxed while everything was so inconceivably fucked.
It was a valid point -he’d joked before, with Sammy, that hunting wasn’t exactly a pro-ball career - and he figured he should try to weigh that option. Whispering like she had, mostly because he couldn’t believe what he was considering, Dean asked, “And go where?”
“Sorry,” she answered, and Dean had expected as much. “I can't give away the big punch line.” The same kind of dumb joke he’d make. His jokes had always been so stupid.
She stopped touching him, though Dean could almost feel her stare. He still forced his eyes down in front of him, trying to wish away the inevitable question. Stay and become a monster, or go and…not. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to leave Sam and Dad. But he couldn’t bear the idea of becoming an angry spirit either. What if he hurt someone? What if he was the next thing Dad and Sam hunted? Would he let them? Did it matter?
“Moment of truth. No changing your mind later.” A moment of quiet before she asked the back of his head, “So what’s it going to be?”
Not like you need them.
Dean turned and looked at her. He knew his expiration date was long past due, and he had no right to continue forcing people to keep hunting by becoming the next monster of the week. But he also knew he needed to hold onto his family. He knew he needed to keep fighting. He fought with himself as he searched her face, looking for the answer. Which was selfish? Which was selfless? All his definitions were getting mixed up, things he’d held all his life as true looking less and less infallible.
In that moment, Dean thought of black, billowing smoke, of yellow eyes and sneering mouths. He thought of how it had commandeered his father and killed his mother, how it had doomed all of them to misery and, he had no doubt, untimely death. He thought of Sam, probably arguing with Dad because he was so damn scared about losing Dean. He thought of Dad, and the Colt, and everything they had been working for, and he knew what he had to say.
Maybe it was wrong to enlist some future hunter in his inevitable salt-and-burn. Maybe he was being selfish. But as he opened his mouth and said a clear and simple, “No,” he knew it was, for once in his insignificant little life, exactly what he wanted.
Tessa’s eyes were full of grief, but there was a kind of resignation there too, like she had known all along that she probably wouldn’t win this one, and she opened her mouth to speak - possibly to talk him out of it, maybe just to ask why - but before any sound came out the fluorescent lights overhead flickered and buzzed, and she and Dean looked up and around, seeking a reason.
Dean tore his eyes from the supernatural signs he’d learned to read all his life and asked, “What are you doing that for?”
Tessa looked at him and said simply, “I’m not doing it.”
A bang and crash and Tessa spun to stare at a vent that had burst open, and Dean watched with wide green eyes as demonic smoke billowed out and into the room, into her. But there was no screaming, no fear - she didn’t even flinch.
When she turned around, Dean caught but a moment’s glimpse of yellow eyes before they gave way to her normal grey-green. The smoke burst from her once more, seeming to simply appear several feet from her body before disappearing with a violent scream. Eyes still wide and heart beating fast and hard in his chest, Dean searched her face for answers. She smiled.
“Reapers are of a higher, much more natural order than demons. There was nothing to fear.” Her eyes turned sad once more, and she added solemnly, “One deal cannot break another, after all.” She held out her hand, and Dean eyed it warily, unable to shake the resemblance he felt to a spooked dog. “Come, Dean. It’s time to see yourself die.”
:::
Sam heard the rush of footsteps before he allowed himself to register the long, high-pitched beep of the heart monitor, and he was being shoved out of the way before his brain had caught up with what the hell that meant. Then suddenly he was crying, huge tears falling down his face as doctors and nurses readied the defibrillator for the second time, paddles pressing into Dean’s soft white flesh for only an instant before his back arched then fell.
“Please,” Sam pleaded, “Dean, please…don’t leave me…please…”
But the heart monitor held its shrill tone for only so much longer before it was abruptly silenced, and all Sam could hear above the rushing in his ears was someone saying, “Time of death, 9:37am.”
“Dean!” Sam cried, his knees going weak as all six feet of him sank down the doorframe to the cold, tiled floor. “Dean, no…Dean!”
He felt a firm weight rest on his shoulder as the medical staff filed out and he shrugged it away, striking out with his huge, useless hands. “Get your fucking hands off - !”
His hands didn’t connect, didn’t hit anything, but the hand held on so he turned, itching to hit something, someone, to try to expel the building pain and hopelessness in his chest. No one was standing near him, but he could still feel the press of fingers, freezing and burning hot all at once on his shoulder, with no one close enough to be touching.
Slanted eyes huge and wet and staring around like a wild man, Sam called softly, “Dean?”
The fingers clenched in reassuring pressure before disappearing in the wake of tingling coldness. And through all the horror and pain, Sam smiled.
:::
A little over an hour later, they found Dad. He was just down the hall from Dean’s room, and the nursing staff claimed that he was shouting something about a cheat as he collapsed. They tried to resuscitate him, but finally called it at 10:41am.
Heart attack, they said.
Sam and Dean knew it was the demon.
Dean’s more and more conspicuously silent chest felt heavy with guilt, and while he wasn’t quite sure why yet, he knew it was real and well-deserved.
:::
After losing his father and brother in the same day, Sam had been asked to meet with the on-call hospital psychologist, in order to determine whether he was mentally fit to reenter the world without them.
When the tiny young woman asked how he felt about Dad’s death, Sam answered coolly, “I’m sure he knew what he was doing.”
Then she asked about Dean. “Were you and your brother close?” she asked.
Sam smiled and said, “As close as you can be with a person, and then closer.”
She asked, “And now that he’s gone, how do you feel?”
Sam looked down at his hand, where Dean’s amulet lay cupped in his palm, the black chord twisted and tangled through his long, crooked fingers. They’d given it to him in a box with Dean’s and Dad’s clothes, shoes, and wallets, the necklace and Dean’s ring fallen to the bottom. It still shined, glinted with light that wasn’t quite reflected.
He then looked over his shoulder at the door, and in that moment he thought he could see just how Dean would have looked, leaning against the doorframe with one leg tossed over the other and arms crossed, bored as hell and letting everyone know it.
Sam answered, “Like he’s still here.” He looked back at the woman and just kept smiling. “Looking out for me, like always.”
:::
This whole spirit thing was seriously weird.
Dean’s world was full of contradictions: he couldn’t touch things consciously, it seemed, to pick them up or move them, but he could sit on a bed or a chair and not fall through the cushions like a cartoon character. If he wanted to move from one room to another, he could just as easily fall through a wall as walk through a door if he was concentrating, but he could also lean against doorways and objects as he did with a body. And while people passing in hallways or on the street passed through him with hardly a sensation in Dean’s stomach, not being able to touch Sammy anymore killed him every time he failed, that one touch in the hospital apparently his last.
He remembered having worn hospital clothes while he was in the hospital, those weird whitish-blue patients’ scrubs, but at some point had woken up in jeans and Dad’s leather jacket, same as he’d been wearing the night of the accident. Probably, considering he didn’t have an actual body to see, everything he looked at was his own mental projection of himself, Dean through Dean’s eyes. Sometimes, as he gazed down at his amulet where it rested against his chest, or his boots or all the layers of shirts he wore, he wondered why he looked human at all.
His emotions were all out of whack for the first few days. He’d fly from high and happy to sad or angry in a heartbeat before flipping around and back again. He’d get mad and hit things, crashing plates from walls or glasses from tables - just like the glass of water in Dad’s room at the hospital - then feel so sorry for himself he’d literally curl up into a ball and hide. His protective barriers seemed to have died with his body, so while his spirit or soul or whatever tried to gather itself into an independent being, he was helpless and out of control and he hated it.
And the flickering lights and sudden gusts of wind he seemed to cause every time he got frustrated only made him feel worse, scream louder, sob harder.
Dean tried practicing interacting with the world when he was stable enough to do so, but he found he couldn’t touch anything unless he was volatile and angry. His body would reverberate with a kind of high-frequency surge of power, and he could move anything he wanted, sometimes even more controlled than just knocking things over. But the whole sensation left his head echoing with accusations (maybe you’ll even get violent) and he would have to go away and hide again.
Everything around him was a mystery now, too. He’d seen Sam and Bobby and Bobby’s house all his life, yet for some reason walking Bobby’s house as a spirit made everything seem completely different. The floral wallpaper seemed alive, the piles of books and papers definitely moved around him, and just as his emotions fluctuated at will, so did his physical senses in this new place. The tether of his body in the hospital before had made everything clear and normal for his spirit to roam, but now he could barely make out the stairs as he descended them.
Dean took each step ridiculously slowly as he tried to relearn how to walk - not that he could really fall, but maybe he’d get used to that, too - and listened carefully every time Bobby tried to say something consoling to Sam, though Dean couldn’t be sure if Bobby was actually whispering or whether it was his hearing these days.
So everything sucked out loud, from moving to feeling to being, and Dean was spinning without any control.
He always thought he’d needed Dad’s approval, Dad’s orders to keep himself reined in, to control whatever burning fires he was always trying to control; but now that he was gone, Dean realized he hadn’t needed Dad there to keep him tame - he’d needed him there to give him purpose.
All Dean had left was Sammy, and Dean couldn’t do anything for him. Neither sensation felt very new, but at least before he could mask his fear and confusion and stupidity with beer and smirking and getting laid. Now, though, his body was too fragile, his intentions too vague and his fear too insurmountable to do much more than just try to lay a hand on his shoulder as an occasional reminder that he was here. And while Sam always responded to the touch - a little shiver or glance over his shoulder at where he must have estimated Dean’s face to be - Dean’s heart would ache as he watched his hand fall through him, because all he’d become to his brother was cold, useless air.
:::
Sam poured over Bobby’s books about lost spirits and reapers, trying to find something - anything - to work with. He read about ghost possession and sickness, about resurrection and rituals, and nothing sounded like anything he wanted to work with. He knew Dean would refuse to cooperate with any kind of witchcraft or other supernatural alternatives - he’d always hated what they’d hunted, bought into Dad’s black-and-white dogma without so much as an eyelash-flutter of protest - and frankly, Sam was afraid to let himself consider the costs of what some of the rituals required.
But that left Sam wondering how Dean had managed to become a spirit in the first place. From what he had read thus far, reapers collected souls and moved them to the next world…how had Dean escaped if the reaper was actually after him? Surely something as powerful as Death itself couldn’t have been outsmarted, even by someone as charismatic and clever as Dean.
The hardest part of all of this was that Sam couldn’t figure out whether to talk to Bobby about it. Surely Dean would have gone to Bobby for a problem like this, but Bobby was too smart to allow Sam to keep Dean around. Bobby knew too much, had seen too much in all his years as a hunter to just let a spirit wander loose. He’d insist Dean’s body be burned and Dean’s spirit would be banished, just like every other angry spirit they’d ever hunted.
But Dean wasn’t every other angry spirit they’d ever hunted. He was Sam’s brother, the only other carrier of John and Mary Winchester’s blood and legacy in the world. He was Dean.
One night Sam decided to ask Dean directly.
:::
Dean was in the guest room upstairs trying to calmly pick up an (ugly and unsentimental) urn when Sam walked into the room and shut the door. He looked around, seemed to meet Dean’s eyes once before looking down. He had the damn Ouija board again, and as much as the sight of it still made Dean feel like a little girl, he was decidedly happy that his stupid brother had finally remembered it and would be able to talk to Sammy again.
Sam sat on the floor, too-long legs folded together as well as he could make them and back hunched over as he set up the board.
“I know you still think this is dumb,” he was murmuring, and Dean was glad to hear his voice and know it was directed at him. “But it worked before, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t work again, right?” He didn’t sound completely convinced himself, but Dean complied and sat across from him anyway, trying to show his support even though Sam couldn’t see his effort.
Sam laid his fingers gently on the little wooden triangle and looked up and around nervously, like maybe he felt silly. Dean’s heart yearned to reach out for him, to tell him he was right here, Sam wasn’t imagining things. But he just placed his fingers on, too, and prayed this would work again.
That resonating power was in his fingertips in a way it hadn’t the time in the hospital. Dean didn’t know if this was also related to the absence of his body or if this was some spirit-world prize for sticking around so long, but he bit his lip and tried to move the thing. It was hard, but he managed to slide the indicator over the letters S-A-M-Y. He wasn’t sure how to show double letters, but he figured Sammy was smart enough to figure it out.
Sam’s face split like it had been cut into a huge smile, bigger than any Dean had seen since before Dad had come back. Dean grinned in response, but Sam’s eyes were transfixed on the board and he couldn’t see.
Oh yeah, and Dean was invisible. Shit.
“Dean,” Sammy breathed, shoulders relaxing as he sighed and laughed a little in relief, still-bruised eye crinkling in a way Dean knew must have been a little painful, though he doubted Sammy noticed at that moment. “I knew you were here. You keep showing me, but I just…”
The broken stuff. Sam had seen. Dean felt inexplicably embarrassed.
Sam studied the board for a moment and Dean stayed very still, waiting to hear a question. His hearing was sharper now that they were hunched together around the Ouija board, but he still listened carefully, knowing everything was unsure in this delicate new form.
Sam took a breath, bracing himself before speaking again.
“Dean, how are you here? You said before that there was a reaper after you, so how are you still here if your body’s…”
Sam choked then and stared even harder at his fingers, blinking rapidly. Dean pressed hard on the little wooden heart and spelled, C-H-O-S-E. He knew one-word answers wouldn’t be enough for Sammy (although paragraphs had never seemed to satisfy him either), but it took such effort to push the damn thing right now that it would have to do.
Dean Winchester, never enough.
Sam stared at the letters (and Dean could almost see him spelling them into a word in his head), then looked up, Dean would have sworn, right into his eyes.
“You had a choice, and you stayed here?” Sam asked, voice quavering between angry and incredulous. “But Dean, you…you should have…” He swallowed and puppy-eyed Dean’s invisible body. “Why would you stay? When you had a chance to rest, why…why stay?”
Dean made a face that Sam couldn’t see and pushed the wood again. His genius little brother was so stupid sometimes.
S-A-M-Y.
Like it was even a question.
And Sammy smiled sadly and shook his head. “I should’ve known.”
“Damn straight you should’ve,” Dean muttered , his own voice startling and loud to him in the silence.
He spelled, D-U-H.
:::
Sam sighed and pondered what to ask next.
“Dean, what do I tell Bobby?” he asked, looking at his fingers instead of the inescapably empty air around him. It felt strange talking to what seemed like nothing, but the planchette kept moving, and if that wasn’t reason enough for Sam to believe Dean was there, the comforting warmth in his stomach certainly was. “I mean, if I say you’re here, you know he’ll make me go to the hospital and claim your body so we can burn it. I barely talked him out of it already, and - ”
But the planchette was moving again, slowly and painstakingly sliding in a straight line, pulling Sam’s fingers along behind it toward “No.”
Sam’s lips pressed together until his mouth was just a line. “But Dean, I…I don’t know if I can keep hiding it. He keeps giving me all this room, like he wants to let me grieve, and I - ”
But the planchette - and the whole board - suddenly shook as Dean slammed down on it. The indicator was still focused on “No.”
Heart thumping from the hostility of the response, Sam whispered, “Okay. Okay, Dean, just calm down.”
He waited for a moment, looking for any sign that Dean was still angry, but there was nothing. He took a breath and asked, “So what can I do to help you?”
Sam watched the planchette move, little round glass highlighting letters as it moved, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
I-M-P-A-L-A.
“Dean…” He couldn’t have this conversation, he couldn’t tell Dean that his baby was, for all intents and purposes, dead. “Dean, it’s…”
S-H-E.
And Sam laughed. “Okay,” he said, knowing he couldn’t win.
:::
Bobby brought up burning the bodies the next day, as it turned out.
“You know it’s the right thing, Sam,” he said, gruff voice soft and knowing. “It ain’t easy, and I know you don’t want to. But we gotta do right by them.”
“No,” Sam said, back turned as he leafed through books. “I’m not burning them. If they come back, they need bodies to return to.”
“They ain’t comin’ back, Sam,” Bobby said, voice incredulous. “You know as well as I do that people just don’t come back.” He narrowed his eyes and added, “And if they do, you know it’s never good news.”
Sam didn’t respond for a long time, and Dean wondered if he heard anything Bobby was saying. Dean wasn’t too excited about this whole ghost thing, but he didn’t want Sammy getting involved in heavy shit for him either. Finally Sam responded, “I know more than most people.”
“Which means you know how dangerous it is,” Bobby countered immediately. “I’m not about to watch you get yourself killed just because you don’t think you can hack it without your brother.”
“And my dad,” Sam said, turning and raising his eyes to Bobby’s over his own shoulder, a little line between his eyebrows like Bobby had made a stupid mistake. Dean just shook his head and looked out the window at the husks of cars in the yard, spotting a piece of the Impala’s hood where she glinted in the sun behind a van.
“Right.” Bobby’s voice was downright scathing now. He turned and walked to the door, yanked open the screen and walked through into the yard. “Coz you’re really thinking about your daddy right now.”
:::
Dean was getting better at interacting with the physical world around him, and the more he learned, the less terrifying the idea of being a spirit became.
He’d learned how to make noise, but only a kind of dull, moaning yell so far. He knew how to project the sound, but hadn’t quite translated that into making words yet, and the lack of progress was discouraging. It took a lot out of him to practice, too, and getting ghost-tired sucked ass: he couldn’t move for hours, and kind of blacked out if he really overdid it. It also meant going outside so Sam and Bobby wouldn’t hear, and he didn’t like letting Sam out of his sight if he could help it. But he wasn’t about to alert Bobby to his presence by doing something as stupid as making loud, disembodied, angry-spirit noises in the middle of the night.
He had wanted to try becoming visible, but the sound practice took so much out of him that he wasn’t sure he was ready. That one also required being away from Sam, since he wasn’t about to start flickering in front of his brother - he was probably already damaging him enough without the momentary hallucination factor.
The worst part of all was that, as he got more and more accustomed to the way he worked as a spirit, the more he realized how much he had taken his body for granted.
Dean had no physical mass, made no sound, didn’t need to eat or piss or sleep - not counting the horrible moments of nothing he’d experience if he pushed himself too far during sound practice - and had no physical body from which to draw cues. He found himself still thinking in terms of “my stomach” or “my leg” and kept having to remind himself that he had neither. That sinking feeling in the space formerly occupied by his stomach, that was him feeling guilty or sad or worried; those cold shivers he felt up his back weren’t chills up his spine, it was just fear or nervousness or maybe anger.
It was fucking weird, not having to act human anymore. No wonder so many spirits went crazy - anyone would, if they were suddenly subjected to shit like this. But Dean, lucky fucker that he was, already knew some of what was coming, so he thought he’d be able to handle it. And so far, he had.
But even as the mystery and helplessness of ghosthood were reduced, the settling understanding of eternity was starting to eat at him.
He’d only been…dead…for about three weeks, he had all this learning and practicing to keep him occupied, and Sam was with him. As far out of his comfort zone he had been thus far thrown, at least Dean hadn’t gotten bored. The main thing he would eventually have to fear was boredom, idle hands.
And he had no idea what eternity would be like once Sam left.
Because if there was one thing Dean knew for sure, even now, it was that as much as he would try to protect him, Sammy would eventually leave again.
:::
“Dean, I can’t fix your car,” Sam said, voice pained like this was the hardest thing he’d ever had to say. He’d been looking through some of the different manuals scattered throughout Bobby’s house in between researching spirit lore, and it was like reading Greek (which, actually, he’d studied a little once, so it was actually kind of worse). None of it meant anything to him, and it was the one thing Dean had actually asked of him.
There was no answer on the Ouija board for a long time, and Sam thought for a moment that Dean had left. But then the planchette moved and Dean said, M-E.
Sam coughed a little laugh of remorse and said, “Dean…you can’t fix the car. Even if you were here, it’s…she’s too badly broken. No one could ever fix her.”
Dean said again, M-E.
Sam shook his head and asked, “How?”
And Dean said, T-R-U-S-T-M-E-S-A-M-Y.
:::
Dean was already outside and waiting when Sam lay on the gravel of the salvage yard and used his long legs to propel himself horizontally beneath the undercarriage of the Impala. He was trying to keep his mind busy by categorizing the shrinking, cringing feeling in his lower middle area - he once might have called it a heavy pain in his gut, but he wasn’t quite sure anymore.
The entire frame of the car was destroyed, twisted and bent so it was barely recognizable. The engine, all the car’s inner components, really, were mangled or in pieces. Dean had been driving this car for over ten years, living in the backseat for longer than that, and now here it lay, barely an echo of what it used to be.
It’s scary how inanimate objects can make you think about yourself.
Dean watched Sam reach out a hand and run his fingers gently over the undercarriage, not quite touching the jagged pieces of metal, as if trying to assess the damage but seeing only the broken mess Dean’s gorgeous car had once been.
Yeah, that cold curl of wet heat swirling up from just above his navel and into the space between his shoulders? That was mourning.
Mourning happens when it’s over.
Dean settled his hand over Sammy’s where it was almost touching the car, tried his best to wrap his fingers around Sammy’s, thread through and still them. Stop, he tried to whisper, It’s pointless, Sammy. We both have to let her go.
Sammy’s shoulder twitched. High-pitched buzzing next to your ear tended to bug, after all.
Better than moaning, Dean supposed.
:::
Sam refused to give up on the car for another three weeks. Every day he’d wake up, eat a stiff and silent breakfast with Bobby, then walk out into the piercing early-morning sun to slide under the car. He had all Bobby’s Chevy manuals and muscle car magazines, plus the biggest and most complicated toolbox he could drag out, and he knew there had to be a way. He started to learn the car’s components and pieces, but he couldn’t figure out how to fix them, only discover newer and more gut-wrenching ways in which they were now broken.
He had felt Dean with him under the car, and he felt like he knew Dean had tried to speak to him, but there was just no way for him to accept what he thought Dean had said. Sam knew Dean would never have given up on the Impala, would have been out here every day for however many weeks, months, years it took to fix the damn thing and get her on the road again. She was theirs, their one and only irremovable foundation, and Dean would have died rather than jeopardize that.
Sam’s stomach clenched tightly and a lump formed in his throat for the first time in weeks. He kind of had, hadn’t he? Died before leaving the Impala…
Sam shook his head and concentrated on the part he was diagnosing (and trying to identify). He’d been driving the night of the crash, and regardless of what Dean had said, he had to fix the car. He couldn’t give up. He had to fight for her.
Sam remembered his apartment with Jess at Stanford, and he was sure Dean remembered their old house in Lawrence before the fire. Home made you feel safe, made you warm when you were cold and comforted you when you were alone. Dean needed a home. The Impala had been their home. And Sam just couldn’t leave her.
:::
Sam was fascinating to watch now that Dean didn’t ever have to look away. Besides being able to look out for him in ways he’d never been afforded alive, Dean also had the chance now to see and catalogue everything Sam did, like he felt he hadn’t been able to since they were kids.
Back then, Sammy had cried and laughed and raged indiscriminately, and Dean was right there with him to hold him close or calm him down. Sammy was his to protect, and he felt like there was nothing that could ever break them apart.
But Sammy had grown into Sam, with all his pumping hormones and resentment of Dad, and he’d drawn himself inward and away from Dean, into a shell of teenage angst Dean could rarely penetrate. And when Stanford happened, and then Jess and hunting all over again, Dean had been amazed at how his brother’s walls had grown, high and strong enough to rival his own.
Only now, instead of just internalizing everything he was feeling to keep for himself, that shell had been refortified to keep others out.
Dean knew that shell well - it was too hard to get close, to give in to the need for affection and comfort, with the kind of lives they led. His time spent with Cassie proved just how impossible it really was, how no one else would ever understand them, and even when he found her again and she believed, the damage was done and so was he.
Losing Jessica must have been even harder on Sam - he hadn’t shared his past with her, the past that had gotten her killed. Though Dean wholeheartedly believed it was none of Sam’s fault, the kind of guilt he knew Sam still carried…Dean didn’t know how his brother shouldered it. He knew he’d never be able to bear a burden anything like that.
But now, after all the time spent learning Sam’s triggers and how those walls worked, Dean found himself overrun with opportunities to peek in on Sam’s emotions. Whenever Bobby came too close to the truth, he could watch the muscles in Sam’s jaw tense as he lied and stalled and covered, color rising a little in his cheeks along with guilt and shame. He could catch him in the moments of laughter he occasionally found, could watch with a hollow pang in his chest how he almost always stopped himself and schooled his face and body back into one of frustration and mourning (and not always when Bobby was around).
And once, he had walked into the guest room after successfully sweeping up the stairs in one go and spotted Sam standing at the mirror, staring at himself with a perplexing combination of joy and sorrow on his face. When Dean had sidled up behind him, he had realized that Sam was wearing his necklace. Dean had looked down at his own chest, where the phantom image of the amulet lay nestled against his breastbone, then up to where the real thing was straining against Sam’s rippling pectoral.
Sam’s lips had been pressed together hard, like he really had no idea what to do with his face. His hand had sneaked its way up to brush it with his fingers, holding it delicately and turning it to catch the light differently.
Dean had knitted his brows as he watched, feeling strangely forlorn, but he’d looked up into the mirror, into the reflection Sam couldn’t see, and just stared for a while, little pieces of him breaking apart as he looked at the brothers Winchester, side by side in the piece of dusty glass like they couldn’t be in real life anymore, wishing that Sam might, just for a moment, catch his eye in their reflection.
But Sam hadn’t seen him, had simply ripped the necklace over his head and tossed it back into his duffel, muttering something that sounded something like no and Dean’s.
So Dean got to relearn his brother, too, all his quirks and looks and moves, without having to ever look away. It was a whirlwind, but Dean wouldn’t have had it any different.
Except at night.
It hurt too much to watch Sam cry himself to sleep. It wasn’t every night, wasn’t even particularly often, but every time he did, Dean could catch his own name or their father’s on Sam’s grief-soaked tongue, murmured apologies wet with sincerity, desperate pleas for forgiveness he didn’t need. It was nights like these that had inspired Dean to try learning to touch, but unless he wanted to strike out and hit Sam with his hand or some object he could throw, there was nothing he could do for him. Dean just sat at the edge of the bed, never shifting the mattress, never touching…just staring and whispering to him.
It’s okay, Sammy, he’d try to say. Mom used to say that angels were watching over us. I don’t know if she was right, but… He tried to run his fingers through his little brother’s unruly hair, but they only disappeared through his scalp and made him squirm and shiver as he cried. Dean pursed his lips (still no clue how to reclassify that one - determination? denial? ) and continued, But I am. He looked at Sammy and tried with all his might to project how much he meant his words.
I’m here, Sammy. I’m here.
:::
Sam rolled over in Bobby’s guest bed, tears smudged all the way down his face unapologetically in the gloom, and looked up into what should have been an empty corner. If he saw a flash of green, a moment of full lips and cheekbones, it was only mourning and remembrance, echoes of his nightmare. Nothing there.
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