Chapter Three - May 2005
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III
May, 2005 - Sam
New York City bustles around him and under his feet in the subway. The entire city seems to hum with the sort of preternatural energy that all cities have but that New York gives off in excess, like cheap perfume or cologne. Sam doesn’t know how long he’s been able to feel the heartbeat of cities, only that he thinks it’s slowly driving him mad.
He’s been in New York twice: once when he was sixteen and still fresh out on his own, and once just a few months ago, sitting in this same subway car with this same baseball cap slung low over his eyes. Both times, he tracked Dean down successfully but was unable to bring himself to say anything to the man he didn’t really think of as his older brother-mostly because Dean never really acted like much of an older brother. But, as he sits in that subway car on his twenty-second birthday, he knows that he needs to build up that courage, because he knows he’s been here more than twice.
Not many more times. The exact number haunts him like the opening lyrics to a song you know but can never quite remember. When it all began, he thought it had something to do with moving when he was little. But he knows the exact places to-and-from and dates of each move they’ve made in his lifetime. And anyway, it’s a different sort of feeling.
Like knowing exactly which stop Dean will get on at every day he works, at around eleven in the morning, like clockwork. Like knowing Dean’s number without ever having to look it up.
Like remembering things he can’t possibly know: his father, a yellow-eyed demon, feeling sick to his stomach with nightmares and knowing his brother is going to die for him.
Sam rides the train now, silent as always, and occasionally checks his watch. It isn’t really his, but when he saw it in a store window, he felt that same drip of memory he did when he was in any small town he passed through that he knew somewhere else in his lifetime-or someone else’s lifetime. It’s early afternoon, so the car is as empty as it’s going to get until late at night, and Sam takes advantage of the situation to sprawl out his long legs, close his eyes, and count the stops from the one where Dean gets on in the morning to the one he gets off at in the Bronx.
It is the tail-end of lunch in the Bronx-it always impresses him how long lunch lasts for people leading such busy lives-and Sam passes the diner he’s seen Dean eating at a handful of times. Luck is on his side, and Dean is finishing up a soup and salad and flirting with a waitress intermittently. Sam continues on the street until he tracks down the building with Dean’s “firm” in it.
A part of him says that breaking into the office of a private investigator is a bad plan, but it isn’t as if he’s breaking in to steal anything. He just wants to get the appropriate rise out of his older brother. So when the door gives under his lock picks, he stands and shuffles inside, keeps the lights off, and latches the door before going to the desk and settling into Dean’s overly comfortable chair.
He picks up one of Dean’s books-The Hunter, this one is called, a slightly older one that pissed off most of the Hunting community when it detailed the lives they led as criminals and vigilantes and the real saviors of the Western World-and waits for the sound of the bolt sliding out of the lock with his back turned to the door.
Dean takes his sweet time getting back to the office, and Sam is starting to get a little impatient. He keeps reminding himself that Dean has the money needed to be self-employed and will work whatever hours he feels like because he doesn’t have to panhandle and fix poker and pool games.
When the door does open, Sam stays still in the seat for a whole three-Mississippi. When he turns, Dean is staring at his bookshelf on the north-side wall. Sam smiles when those eyes he remembers from his childhood-now alighted in a fully grown face-turn slowly to where he sits.
“Hey, Dean. It’s good to see you.”
Dean stares gape-jawed for several moments, before he starts across the space, hissing, “Sam!?” Sam chuckles a little, leaning back in the chair, and taps his fingers against the headrest of the chair. Dean stands before the desk, staring at him, and whispers, “Samuel. Holy fuck, man.”
There’s another bout of silence, before Dean says, “I have to call Momma.”
Sam grabs Dean’s hand and crashes it and the phone receiver back to the cradle. He stares at Sam incredulously, but Sam just smiles a little and says, “Don’t.”
Dean is quiet for a second. His hand is warm under Sam’s. He asks, “What are you doing here?” Sam pulls his hand away and sighs, swiveling in Dean’s chair; he knows he looks childish, and he doesn’t really care at all.
Finally, he says, “There’s something wrong with the world, Dean.” Dean scoffs a little, and looks ready to say something scathing, except Sam hurries to the punchline: “Mary’s missing.”
-----
For a best selling author and well-paid dick, Dean’s apartment is tiny and cramped, and Sam supposes that’s expected for someone living in New York. It’s on the top floor of a tiny five-story building in Manhattan, and the first thing Sam does after Dean has fallen asleep is climb out the window and up onto the roof of the building.
He cannot see for miles, or even for very many blocks. But the sky is clear, and they’re in a neighborhood that’s surprisingly dark and quiet, so he can see the stars. He sits in an abandoned lawn chair, bare foot and relishing the balminess of the Spring day, listening to his internal clock tick away at the hours.
Dean finds him later, looking a little harassed, and Sam doesn’t look at him when he says, “Today-Yesterday, I guess. It was my birthday. Do you remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Dean says softly. “It’s on my calender.”
“That’s awful sweet of you, Dean,” Sam acknowledges, and knows he’s being a little patronizing. But it’s been eight years, and there’s really no love lost between them when you get down to it. He picks at a wear in his jeans. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“Woke up when you opened the window.”
“You sleep lighter than you used to,” Sam points out. He can practically hear Dean’s shrug, and leans his head backward to stare at him. “You learn that with your roommates? Learn to wake up whenever somebody opened a door so you could make an escape before they started to fuck one another? Or just to wake up whenever somebody did something that made a noise, so you could watch ‘em fuck?”
“Were you always this much of an abrasive bastard?”
“Eight years, Dean,” Sam reminds. “I’ve been out there,”-he gestures over the world, vaguely to the west-“for eight years.”
“It’s your own damn fault,” Dean snaps. “Momma and I, we looked for you. Pastor Jim, Uncle Bobby, Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bill. Even Uncle Joe helped for a while.”
“I didn’t want to be found.” He stares up at the stars just barely visible against the city glare and slides bonelessly, snake-like, off the lawn chair.
Dean is quiet, and a puff of breeze almost carries away his words when he asks, “Why did you leave?”
“Because,” Sam tells Dean, looking up at him from the tar-mat of the roof, “something’s not right.”
-----
The insomnia caused by New York-it’s always like this-is dragging on his shoulders and eyelids when one morning he wakes up on the couch not remembering falling asleep. He can smell toast and eggs, and when he gets into the kitchenette, there’s Dean. It’s like a flashback to childhood, days and weeks when Mary would be out of the apartment after they moved out of Richmond and she didn’t have people to pawn them off on: Dean was always the surrogate mother. It resonates in another way Sam still doesn’t entirely understand.
He sits at the tiny breakfast table, flipping through Dean’s mail. He finds an opened letter from their cousin Jonah and fishes out the three pages of folded notebook paper. It’s old-ish-not very old, but old enough that Sam can feel the weight of that on his fingers. He skims over it quickly, then reads more slowly.
Dean snatches it out of his hands and slaps a plate of eggs, toast, sausage and strawberries onto the table. “Mind your own goddamn business, Samuel.”
“Harsh,” Sam grumbles, and picks at the toast and sausage with his fingers rather than his fork. He ends up picking up a strawberry and biting into it lasciviously when he knows Dean is looking his way. “How long’ve you been fucking him?”
“I haven’t been-”
“How long’s he been fucking you?”
“Nobody’s fucking anybody,” Dean hisses, but his ears and the bridge of his nose are pink. Sam smirks and eats another strawberry like he wants to tease rather than taste-maybe he does; the whole fiasco of his life has messed him up more than a little. “Not that it would be any of your business if we were, since you saw fit to remove yourself from family life for-oh, what was it again? That’s right: eight years.”
“I had to,” Sam mutters, and sucks berry juice off his fingers. Dean stares at him in annoyance and incredulity, knife in hand, and Sam just grins a little around his fingers.
“You’ve completely lost your mind, haven’t you? Great. Nice to know I got the anti-crazy gene from Dad.”
Sam lets it drop.
-----
Sam’s going stir crazy and it’s not the first time. He contemplates running away, but that would entirely defeat the purpose of getting Dean on his side to try and fix everything that’s wrong with the world, and so he allows Dean to tell him, “Just listen to somebody else for the first time in your goddamn life and stay here, okay?” and doesn’t even act like as much of an asshole as he would for anybody else who left him locked up in an apartment like a kept boy.
When Dean is home, Sam cannot look at him without the terrible vertigo of things being out of place. He spends a lot of time sitting in the lawn chair on the roof, staring at the barely visible stars and wondering when Dean will give up playing hard to get and just bend and break already; he’s much harder than he was as a child.
When Dean is out of the house, Sam cleans, or watches television, or sleeps in Dean’s bed like he used to when they were little, after Mary got rid of his crib. Sometimes, when he sleeps, he sees a beautiful blond girl in California who isn’t their mother; he sees fire and heat that he remembers from being a baby; he sees things he’s never seen before and people he’s never met and places he’s never been. And he wakes and, more often than not, finds Dean standing over him wearing a torn and terrible expression.
May in New York is alternating blinding heat and rain storms, and on one of the nights when it’s pouring rain and miserable humidity, Sam tells Dean about one of his more vivid dreams as they watch Jeopardy. Dean sits silently after Sam’s finished talking, digs his spoon into the tub of ice cream they’ve been sharing, and finally says, “Where do we need to go?”
-----
“Do you remember that rams-head amulet I had as a kid?”
Sam is packed into the backseat of Dean’s sedan, sprawled across the seats, feet on the window and book held over his head. He lowers the book and stares at the stains on the roof of the car, wondering where they came from. He closes his eyes and can see the amulet but can’t remember where it’s from.
“I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t remember it.”
“Another dream?”
Sam thinks about that, balances the book over his nose. “No. It’s like New Orleans.”
“Deja vu,” Dean corrects.
“Yeah.”
“Momma remembers it. She had it when she went and killed the demon that killed Dad. She gave it back to me, she says. I don’t remember it, but I remember getting it. Can’t remember who gave it to me. Momma said it was a friend of Aunt Ellen’s.”
“I think Mary’s a little sick in the head,” Sam mutters into the book pages.
Dean snorts in the front seat, and Sam can practically see him clenching the steering wheel too tight. He can hear him tap out a drumbeat to a song that isn’t being played, and can almost but not quite tell what song it is. “You’re one to talk.”
Sam smiles into the book pages and inhales the musk of it. After a moment, he sits up and drapes between the front seats, staring out onto the highway. He can smell Dean’s aftershave. Exhaust from other cars seeps in through the windows. It feels like running away and running home all at once.
“Where are we going?” Dean asks, and Sam can almost feel the words on his skin. He lies back in the back seat and covers his face with the book. “Samuel?”
“Give me time, Dean,” he urges. “I need a little more time.”
-----
He dreams in Technicolor of Mary Cohen, but has no idea where she is, so the first place he tells Dean to go is Virginia. Uncle Joe is still living in Richmond, now with his new wife, and there’s the very small potential that he has half a notion where Mary might be holing up.
They arrive in Richmond at half-passed five on the day they left New York City, and Sam sits in the backseat staring sullenly at Uncle Joe’s house while Dean parallel parks his stupid sedan. When they’re parked and the engine is dead, Dean swivels and stares at Sam and they don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. After a moment of silence, they get out of the car and walk toward the house.
“I haven’t seen Uncle Joe since I graduated from undergraduate studies,” Dean confesses.
Sam snorts. “I haven’t seen him since I was a year old.”
They stand at the door not saying anything, before Dean helplessly supplies, “New wife’s name is Jana, and they’ve got three girls, last anybody checked up on them: Isabelle, Jamison and Lea. They should be about fourteen now.”
“God, Uncle Joe just loves to throw multiples, doesn’t he?”
They ring the bell-or Sam does, because he’s closest to it-and stand and wait for what feels like forever before the door opens and there stands a girl who looks like she could be their kid sister as much as Jonah’s. Dean smiles a little. “Hey there. Is Joseph home? We’re his nephews.”
She screams for her dad over her shoulder and just stands there staring at them. Sam internally chastises their uncle for letting his daughters turn into such devil children, but doesn’t get a chance to think the thought all the way through, because there is Joseph-looking a little gone to seed from the man he remembers from one or two pictures, but otherwise hale and whole.
“Dean. Sam?”
“Hey, Uncle Joe,” Dean murmurs, smiling a little. “We need to ask you a few questions.”
III
May, 2005 - Sam
New York City bustles around him and under his feet in the subway. The entire city seems to hum with the sort of preternatural energy that all cities have but that New York gives off in excess, like cheap perfume or cologne. Sam doesn’t know how long he’s been able to feel the heartbeat of cities, only that he thinks it’s slowly driving him mad.
He’s been in New York twice: once when he was sixteen and still fresh out on his own, and once just a few months ago, sitting in this same subway car with this same baseball cap slung low over his eyes. Both times, he tracked Dean down successfully but was unable to bring himself to say anything to the man he didn’t really think of as his older brother-mostly because Dean never really acted like much of an older brother. But, as he sits in that subway car on his twenty-second birthday, he knows that he needs to build up that courage, because he knows he’s been here more than twice.
Not many more times. The exact number haunts him like the opening lyrics to a song you know but can never quite remember. When it all began, he thought it had something to do with moving when he was little. But he knows the exact places to-and-from and dates of each move they’ve made in his lifetime. And anyway, it’s a different sort of feeling.
Like knowing exactly which stop Dean will get on at every day he works, at around eleven in the morning, like clockwork. Like knowing Dean’s number without ever having to look it up.
Like remembering things he can’t possibly know: his father, a yellow-eyed demon, feeling sick to his stomach with nightmares and knowing his brother is going to die for him.
Sam rides the train now, silent as always, and occasionally checks his watch. It isn’t really his, but when he saw it in a store window, he felt that same drip of memory he did when he was in any small town he passed through that he knew somewhere else in his lifetime-or someone else’s lifetime. It’s early afternoon, so the car is as empty as it’s going to get until late at night, and Sam takes advantage of the situation to sprawl out his long legs, close his eyes, and count the stops from the one where Dean gets on in the morning to the one he gets off at in the Bronx.
It is the tail-end of lunch in the Bronx-it always impresses him how long lunch lasts for people leading such busy lives-and Sam passes the diner he’s seen Dean eating at a handful of times. Luck is on his side, and Dean is finishing up a soup and salad and flirting with a waitress intermittently. Sam continues on the street until he tracks down the building with Dean’s “firm” in it.
A part of him says that breaking into the office of a private investigator is a bad plan, but it isn’t as if he’s breaking in to steal anything. He just wants to get the appropriate rise out of his older brother. So when the door gives under his lock picks, he stands and shuffles inside, keeps the lights off, and latches the door before going to the desk and settling into Dean’s overly comfortable chair.
He picks up one of Dean’s books-The Hunter, this one is called, a slightly older one that pissed off most of the Hunting community when it detailed the lives they led as criminals and vigilantes and the real saviors of the Western World-and waits for the sound of the bolt sliding out of the lock with his back turned to the door.
Dean takes his sweet time getting back to the office, and Sam is starting to get a little impatient. He keeps reminding himself that Dean has the money needed to be self-employed and will work whatever hours he feels like because he doesn’t have to panhandle and fix poker and pool games.
When the door does open, Sam stays still in the seat for a whole three-Mississippi. When he turns, Dean is staring at his bookshelf on the north-side wall. Sam smiles when those eyes he remembers from his childhood-now alighted in a fully grown face-turn slowly to where he sits.
“Hey, Dean. It’s good to see you.”
Dean stares gape-jawed for several moments, before he starts across the space, hissing, “Sam!?” Sam chuckles a little, leaning back in the chair, and taps his fingers against the headrest of the chair. Dean stands before the desk, staring at him, and whispers, “Samuel. Holy fuck, man.”
There’s another bout of silence, before Dean says, “I have to call Momma.”
Sam grabs Dean’s hand and crashes it and the phone receiver back to the cradle. He stares at Sam incredulously, but Sam just smiles a little and says, “Don’t.”
Dean is quiet for a second. His hand is warm under Sam’s. He asks, “What are you doing here?” Sam pulls his hand away and sighs, swiveling in Dean’s chair; he knows he looks childish, and he doesn’t really care at all.
Finally, he says, “There’s something wrong with the world, Dean.” Dean scoffs a little, and looks ready to say something scathing, except Sam hurries to the punchline: “Mary’s missing.”
-----
For a best selling author and well-paid dick, Dean’s apartment is tiny and cramped, and Sam supposes that’s expected for someone living in New York. It’s on the top floor of a tiny five-story building in Manhattan, and the first thing Sam does after Dean has fallen asleep is climb out the window and up onto the roof of the building.
He cannot see for miles, or even for very many blocks. But the sky is clear, and they’re in a neighborhood that’s surprisingly dark and quiet, so he can see the stars. He sits in an abandoned lawn chair, bare foot and relishing the balminess of the Spring day, listening to his internal clock tick away at the hours.
Dean finds him later, looking a little harassed, and Sam doesn’t look at him when he says, “Today-Yesterday, I guess. It was my birthday. Do you remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Dean says softly. “It’s on my calender.”
“That’s awful sweet of you, Dean,” Sam acknowledges, and knows he’s being a little patronizing. But it’s been eight years, and there’s really no love lost between them when you get down to it. He picks at a wear in his jeans. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“Woke up when you opened the window.”
“You sleep lighter than you used to,” Sam points out. He can practically hear Dean’s shrug, and leans his head backward to stare at him. “You learn that with your roommates? Learn to wake up whenever somebody opened a door so you could make an escape before they started to fuck one another? Or just to wake up whenever somebody did something that made a noise, so you could watch ‘em fuck?”
“Were you always this much of an abrasive bastard?”
“Eight years, Dean,” Sam reminds. “I’ve been out there,”-he gestures over the world, vaguely to the west-“for eight years.”
“It’s your own damn fault,” Dean snaps. “Momma and I, we looked for you. Pastor Jim, Uncle Bobby, Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bill. Even Uncle Joe helped for a while.”
“I didn’t want to be found.” He stares up at the stars just barely visible against the city glare and slides bonelessly, snake-like, off the lawn chair.
Dean is quiet, and a puff of breeze almost carries away his words when he asks, “Why did you leave?”
“Because,” Sam tells Dean, looking up at him from the tar-mat of the roof, “something’s not right.”
-----
The insomnia caused by New York-it’s always like this-is dragging on his shoulders and eyelids when one morning he wakes up on the couch not remembering falling asleep. He can smell toast and eggs, and when he gets into the kitchenette, there’s Dean. It’s like a flashback to childhood, days and weeks when Mary would be out of the apartment after they moved out of Richmond and she didn’t have people to pawn them off on: Dean was always the surrogate mother. It resonates in another way Sam still doesn’t entirely understand.
He sits at the tiny breakfast table, flipping through Dean’s mail. He finds an opened letter from their cousin Jonah and fishes out the three pages of folded notebook paper. It’s old-ish-not very old, but old enough that Sam can feel the weight of that on his fingers. He skims over it quickly, then reads more slowly.
Dean snatches it out of his hands and slaps a plate of eggs, toast, sausage and strawberries onto the table. “Mind your own goddamn business, Samuel.”
“Harsh,” Sam grumbles, and picks at the toast and sausage with his fingers rather than his fork. He ends up picking up a strawberry and biting into it lasciviously when he knows Dean is looking his way. “How long’ve you been fucking him?”
“I haven’t been-”
“How long’s he been fucking you?”
“Nobody’s fucking anybody,” Dean hisses, but his ears and the bridge of his nose are pink. Sam smirks and eats another strawberry like he wants to tease rather than taste-maybe he does; the whole fiasco of his life has messed him up more than a little. “Not that it would be any of your business if we were, since you saw fit to remove yourself from family life for-oh, what was it again? That’s right: eight years.”
“I had to,” Sam mutters, and sucks berry juice off his fingers. Dean stares at him in annoyance and incredulity, knife in hand, and Sam just grins a little around his fingers.
“You’ve completely lost your mind, haven’t you? Great. Nice to know I got the anti-crazy gene from Dad.”
Sam lets it drop.
-----
Sam’s going stir crazy and it’s not the first time. He contemplates running away, but that would entirely defeat the purpose of getting Dean on his side to try and fix everything that’s wrong with the world, and so he allows Dean to tell him, “Just listen to somebody else for the first time in your goddamn life and stay here, okay?” and doesn’t even act like as much of an asshole as he would for anybody else who left him locked up in an apartment like a kept boy.
When Dean is home, Sam cannot look at him without the terrible vertigo of things being out of place. He spends a lot of time sitting in the lawn chair on the roof, staring at the barely visible stars and wondering when Dean will give up playing hard to get and just bend and break already; he’s much harder than he was as a child.
When Dean is out of the house, Sam cleans, or watches television, or sleeps in Dean’s bed like he used to when they were little, after Mary got rid of his crib. Sometimes, when he sleeps, he sees a beautiful blond girl in California who isn’t their mother; he sees fire and heat that he remembers from being a baby; he sees things he’s never seen before and people he’s never met and places he’s never been. And he wakes and, more often than not, finds Dean standing over him wearing a torn and terrible expression.
May in New York is alternating blinding heat and rain storms, and on one of the nights when it’s pouring rain and miserable humidity, Sam tells Dean about one of his more vivid dreams as they watch Jeopardy. Dean sits silently after Sam’s finished talking, digs his spoon into the tub of ice cream they’ve been sharing, and finally says, “Where do we need to go?”
-----
“Do you remember that rams-head amulet I had as a kid?”
Sam is packed into the backseat of Dean’s sedan, sprawled across the seats, feet on the window and book held over his head. He lowers the book and stares at the stains on the roof of the car, wondering where they came from. He closes his eyes and can see the amulet but can’t remember where it’s from.
“I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t remember it.”
“Another dream?”
Sam thinks about that, balances the book over his nose. “No. It’s like New Orleans.”
“Deja vu,” Dean corrects.
“Yeah.”
“Momma remembers it. She had it when she went and killed the demon that killed Dad. She gave it back to me, she says. I don’t remember it, but I remember getting it. Can’t remember who gave it to me. Momma said it was a friend of Aunt Ellen’s.”
“I think Mary’s a little sick in the head,” Sam mutters into the book pages.
Dean snorts in the front seat, and Sam can practically see him clenching the steering wheel too tight. He can hear him tap out a drumbeat to a song that isn’t being played, and can almost but not quite tell what song it is. “You’re one to talk.”
Sam smiles into the book pages and inhales the musk of it. After a moment, he sits up and drapes between the front seats, staring out onto the highway. He can smell Dean’s aftershave. Exhaust from other cars seeps in through the windows. It feels like running away and running home all at once.
“Where are we going?” Dean asks, and Sam can almost feel the words on his skin. He lies back in the back seat and covers his face with the book. “Samuel?”
“Give me time, Dean,” he urges. “I need a little more time.”
-----
He dreams in Technicolor of Mary Cohen, but has no idea where she is, so the first place he tells Dean to go is Virginia. Uncle Joe is still living in Richmond, now with his new wife, and there’s the very small potential that he has half a notion where Mary might be holing up.
They arrive in Richmond at half-passed five on the day they left New York City, and Sam sits in the backseat staring sullenly at Uncle Joe’s house while Dean parallel parks his stupid sedan. When they’re parked and the engine is dead, Dean swivels and stares at Sam and they don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. After a moment of silence, they get out of the car and walk toward the house.
“I haven’t seen Uncle Joe since I graduated from undergraduate studies,” Dean confesses.
Sam snorts. “I haven’t seen him since I was a year old.”
They stand at the door not saying anything, before Dean helplessly supplies, “New wife’s name is Jana, and they’ve got three girls, last anybody checked up on them: Isabelle, Jamison and Lea. They should be about fourteen now.”
“God, Uncle Joe just loves to throw multiples, doesn’t he?”
They ring the bell-or Sam does, because he’s closest to it-and stand and wait for what feels like forever before the door opens and there stands a girl who looks like she could be their kid sister as much as Jonah’s. Dean smiles a little. “Hey there. Is Joseph home? We’re his nephews.”
She screams for her dad over her shoulder and just stands there staring at them. Sam internally chastises their uncle for letting his daughters turn into such devil children, but doesn’t get a chance to think the thought all the way through, because there is Joseph-looking a little gone to seed from the man he remembers from one or two pictures, but otherwise hale and whole.
“Dean. Sam?”
“Hey, Uncle Joe,” Dean murmurs, smiling a little. “We need to ask you a few questions.”