A Womb of His Own - 7/21
Masterpost
They laid siege to Monster Gitmo, where Crowley was holding all the monsters they’d hunted for him. After he suggested to Sam that he shouldn’t take his soul back, Crowley got barbecued by Cas, which didn’t satisfy Dean nearly as much as killing him with his own two hands would have.
And that was pretty much the only upside to the whole mission. Samuel had sold them out, which just upgraded number one on Dean’s list of things to do after Sam got his soul back from take care of Samuel to shoot Samuel right between the eyes. Meg disappeared, and so did Cas, though he at least promised to kill all the monsters first. And they’d learned that, as suspected, Crowley had neither the means nor the intention of helping Sam recover his soul. They’d wasted weeks working with him for nothing.
As the icing on the cake, Sam announced that he didn’t want his soul back anyway. “You heard what Crowley said, and I heard what Cas said. Putting this thing back in would smash me to bits. When angels and demons agree on something, call me nuts, but I pay attention. How many times do we risk our asses for this?”
“As many as it takes,” Dean replied without hesitation.
“Enough’s enough. I don’t think I want it back.” Sam shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest.
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“No, I’m saying something you don’t like. You obviously care a lot, and you’re worried I don’t care at all -”
“You don’t,” Dean interrupted.
“I do. About this, I do. I think maybe I’m better off without it.”
“You’re wrong. You don’t know how wrong you are.”
“I’m not sure about that.” Sam shook his head. “But there’s not really anything I can say, because you always just argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about since I don’t have a soul, you know? It’s a catch-22 for me.” He put his palms on the top of the car and leaned over, like getting closer to Dean would make Dean understand better. “I know you don’t trust me, and I know you think I’m a monster, but, Dean, things are different. I’m changing. Maybe it’s being around for so long now, I don’t know. But I do have feelings. I know what I want. And I don’t want that soul back in me. But you’re gonna do what you always do - take charge of the situation and not listen to anybody else. So I’m begging you. Please. Please. Just let it go.”
“I’m sorry, Sammy,” Dean said earnestly. He could see how serious Sam’s plea was. “You don’t get a choice here. By definition, you can’t have a choice here. It’s my call. And I’m telling you, I will find a way. I will get your soul back, and then I will do whatever it takes to make sure that nothing happens to you.”
“Fine,” Sam said, but instead of coming out unconcerned or petulant, Dean could hear the slight break in his voice. Then Sam turned and hurried away before Dean could ask if he was okay.
Three days later, Dean summoned Death and cut a deal. He put on Death’s ring - one of four collectibles - and tried to kill people for a whole day, and in exchange Death agreed to spring Sam’s soul. Dean’s part of the deal didn’t go very well, since, as previously established, he was the king of stupid decisions. He pulled the ring off early in order to save someone’s life, putting the needs of a stranger before his own brother. He was angry and frustrated at himself.
And very surprised when Death showed up instead of Tessa, the reaper who’d been helping him all day.
“I lost,” Dean said feebly.
Death was eating a hot dog. “I brought you one,” he said, offering a lump of warm foil, “from a little stand in Los Angeles known for their bacon dogs. Eat. I thought we’d have a treat before I put the ring back on.”
Dean tentatively unwrapped the hot dog. It smelled delicious, but he wasn’t sure he could get any food down. Failing to recover Sam’s soul when they were working for Crowley had been bad enough, but this had been his Hail Mary play. Flatlining, cutting a deal with Death, helping reap people - it had been, hands down, the worst mission Dean had ever been on, and failing meant there were no alternatives. There was no higher authority in the supernatural order that Dean could appeal to. Sam was going to be without his soul forever.
Dean looked at the tiny ring in his palm. It looked so innocuous for something that wielded so much power. He held it out for Death. “Look, I think you know I flunked, so take it. Oh, and by the way, I suck at being you.”
Death asked him a few questions about the choices he’d made throughout the day with patience Dean hadn’t anticipated. He sounded more like a sympathetic teacher than, you know, someone whose primary job was death. He seemed a little pleased with Dean’s answers, too.
“Today you got a hard look behind the curtain,” Death said. “Wrecking the natural order is not quite such fun when you have to mop up the mess, is it? This is hard for you, Dean. You throw away your life because you’ve come to assume it will bounce right back.” He gestured for Dean to eat his hot dog, and Dean took a bite, not wanting to piss him off. “The human soul is not a rubber ball. It’s vulnerable, impermanent, but stronger than you know, and more valuable than you can imagine. I think you’ve learned something today.”
Dean had learned that you should always kill little girls when it was their time to go, but otherwise he knew precisely jack squat about souls. But if he didn’t want fourth grade Mrs. Evers to know he didn’t understand how to divide fractions by multiplying by the reciprocal, he certainly wasn’t going to tell Death that he hadn’t gotten much out of the lesson.
“We’re done here,” Death declared. “It’s been lovely.”
They were immediately transported back to Bobby’s house.
Dean felt his heart sink once more as it registered that his last hope was about to walk away. Tears stung his eyes. “Please, I -”
Death held up a crooked finger to shush him. “Now I’m going to go to hell to get your brother’s soul back.”
“You would do that for me?”
“I wouldn’t do it for you,” Death corrected. He stood well within Dean’s personal space. Must have been a thing for supernatural creatures. “You and your brother keep coming back. You’re an affront to the balance of the universe, and you cause disruption on a global scale.”
“I apologize for that,” Dean mumbled, looking down at the floor.
“But you have use. Right now you’re on the cusp of something. The impossible made possible. And no one else could have done except for you and Sam, because no one else could defy the order of things so spectacularly.”
“You just gonna be cryptic or -”
“It’s about the souls. You’ll understand when you need to.” Death put his ring back on and vanished.
That’s when Dean heard sounds of a struggle and scream.
He raced toward the garage, in the direction of the noise. “Bobby? Bobby!” When he got there, Sam was leaning over Bobby’s prone form with a knife raised up in one hand. Blood was gurgling out of Bobby’s stomach. Dean heard himself demanding Sam to tell him what the hell was going on, but he was so focused on pressing his shirt into the open wound that he didn’t really hear Sam’s answer.
“Hospital, you’re driving!” he barked, getting a hold of Bobby underneath the arms.
“I don’t want that soul back in me, Dean. This is the only way.”
“You’re fucking driving to the hospital, Sam, or I’ll kill you my goddamn self!”
“Good.” Sam shrugged, reminding Dean of that delightful era known as Sam Winchester: the High School Years. “Fine.”
“Fucking drive the car, Sam!”
It wasn’t reasonable to expect someone without a soul to care about the guy he was trying to kill, but Sam actually helped him lug Bobby to the backseat of the Impala and got behind the wheel. Dean climbed in around Bobby, still using his shirt as a compress and gently tapping Bobby’s face to keep him awake. Bobby was white as ghost when they arrived at Sioux Falls General, but his heart was still beating.
An hour later a doctor came out to the waiting room to tell him that Bobby was in surgery. It was bad, but he was stable. They wouldn’t know much more for several hours. Dean closed his eyes and breathed a tiny sigh of relief. He turned around to share the news with Sam, but Sam wasn’t there.
He found his brother back at the house, dutifully cleaning up the bloody mess with bleach and a scrub brush. “Are you going to tell me what the fuck you were thinking?” he asked. Sam didn’t look up from the floor. “Just because you don’t have a soul doesn’t mean you can run around trying to kill people, Sam. Jesus Christ, should I be worried you’re gonna plug me in my sleep?”
“Interesting choice of words.”
“Man, I don’t get you,” Dean said, choosing not to let Sam affect him. He squatted down next to him. “Can you honestly tell me you like living this way? You’re off the charts, man. You’re so far gone you tried to kill Bobby.”
“Balthazar said I needed to, to keep the soul out,” Sam explained, as if it were totally logical. “The spell calls for the blood of the father.”
On the one hand, there was the fact that soulless douchebag had just confessed a deep enough love for Bobby to consider him a father. Not Samuel. Bobby. On the other hand, spellwork to kill him. Dean scrubbed a hand over his face. “Why didn’t you talk to me first?”
“I’ve talked to you, over and over, but you refuse to listen to me. Balthazar knows about souls. I thought he could help.”
Dean wondered if that’s what Death had meant - that he and Sam were destined to learn how to keep souls out of bodies. But that didn’t seem very extraordinary, if Balthazar was going around sharing the news with anybody who asked.
“Dean, I’m sorry about Bobby, I am,” Sam said. “But I’m doing fine.”
“Your definition of fine makes Iraq look like Candyland.”
Sam tossed the scrub brush into the bucket of bleach and water, causing little drops to splatter across his jacket. The old Sam would have been upset if it gave him bleach stains.
“Everything was fine until you came back.”
It was remarkable to Dean how certain phrases, certain faces Sam made looked and sounded just like the real Sam’s, reminded him of Sam at different phases of his life. But if there was any residual doubt in his mind as to who this guy was, Bobby nearly dying cemented the fact that this was not the real Sam. This was someone in dire need of an intervention. But maybe because he sounded like the Sammy Dean missed so much, he put a comforting hand on his back. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Sam turned so he could sit cross-legged amidst the mess. “It’s, like, I knew I wanted you back to hunt with me, and then I got you, and I knew I wanted you, and I got you that way too, and now…I don’t. It’s just not as good as I thought it was going to be.”
It isn’t Sam, Dean chanted in his mind. It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He tried to speak around the lump in his throat. “Do you remember feeling that way about me before? That it wasn’t good to be around me?”
Sam frowned. “No,” he determined.
Dean felt his lip turn up slightly in relief. “That’s why we have to put your soul back in you.”
“I’m scared.”
His thighs demanding release, Dean dropped onto his knees in front of Sam and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll take care of you. Don’t I always?”
“You’ll take care of him,” Sam corrected, and it sounded like jealousy and sadness all rolled together.
“Sam,” he breathed, because he didn’t know what else to say. He wanted Sammy back, yes, but he’d grown to care about this guy who seemed so callous and turned out to be so human. He brushed a lock of Sam’s hair behind his ear. “I never did this with him.”
“You always wanted to.”
Maybe, Dean thought, but he really didn’t know for sure. “But I didn’t.” He leaned forward, and Sam kissed him, needy and wet, and it was hard to tell whose desperate whimpers were whose.
“Do you trust me?” Dean asked as he slid Sam’s jeans down his legs.
“Yeah,” Sam whispered, holding his gaze. “Yeah, I trust you.”
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