SPN FIC: Don't Listen to the Wind

[thatgirlsix]

Summary: Sam has one last thing to do before he hunts down Lilith.

Disclaimer: I couldn't afford the copyright, and even if I could, I would still want to share. This one is rated R for language and nothing more, as always. This one is set in the summer between seasons three and four, so no real spoilers after No Rest for the Wicked, although there is an assumed knowledge of events in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Author's Notes: I don't have anything in particular to add to this one except that it was something that I couldn't get out of my head. I've been on a Sam and Jess kick lately, and I have no idea why. Then again, I think it's good to go back to where we started once in a while. We'll see how it goes. ENJOY! Six

Don't Listen to the Wind
by That Girl Six

There was something Sam needed to do. He couldn't explain it, not that there was anyone left to explain it to. Ruby could look at him like he was crazy all she wanted; she wasn't getting an explanation. Most of his life had been about sacrificing so that the oblivious of the world could have their normal, could have their peace, could have all those things he'd so desperately wanted. If he was going march himself into assured suicide by demon, he was damn well going to give himself this one last thing first.

Ruby kept protesting the entire way there. This was stupid. Lilith was over on the other side of the country, and he was only putting more distance between them. He was wasting energy better spent hunting the bitch down. Dean was down there screaming his lungs out while Sam was doing what again?

That was the argument that caught his attention. He yanked the car over to the shoulder, shut off her engine, and let his eyes burn holes into Ruby's until she finally looked away. He didn't say a word until almost seven hours later when she finally changed the subject to whether or not he wanted to go see the new Indiana Jones.

He did, he said bluntly, but not with her. What he didn't say after was that when he saw it, if he saw it, it would be alone and in the safety of the dark theatre where he could watch it where no one would see him crying the entire way through it, because the one person who should be there to watch it with him wasn't there. She was there, and he appreciated the help with Lilith, but she wasn't him. She was maybe figuring out what to say to get the right rise from him, but she still wasn't even close to a substitute.

When they got to town, Sam dropped Ruby off at the movie theater so she could have at it. She stomped her boots a few times and reminded him how they had things they needed to be doing, but all he told her was "I know" before he pulled her door shut and eased the car back into the street.

It took him awhile to find it, but when he found Jessica's grave, it didn't look much like he remembered. He supposed it was the dreams - well, nightmares. They'd had a way of twisting everything he'd touched for a long time. He sometimes wondered, if he could see her again, if she would look the same as he remembered her. He knew Dean and Dad saw an angel when they remembered his mother, her beautiful face becoming something they might not even be able to look at anymore from the beauty and brightness their memories had given her. Would Jessica be that way now?

There were fresh flowers, maybe only a day old, in the pop up vase thing next to her headstone. Whether that was from a visitor or because the cemetery had done it, he couldn't be sure. With Memorial Day so close, there were flowers and flags on nearly every headstone under seventy years old. The grounds had been mowed that afternoon. He could still smell it.

Sam gave the stone a lopsided grin before sitting down cross-legged in front of it. He brushed the cut grass shavings from the base and picked the spikes out of the lettering in the granite.

"Hey, baby," he said softly. "Sorry I didn't bring flowers, but I didn't want to scare your parents with unmarked flowers if they come by before they get picked up again. I guess I doubt you care anyway. You aren't exactly that girl. You probably would rather ask me why I haven't been here since I left, right?"

He smiled wide so that his teeth practically glowed in the dark. He spread his arms wide and closed his eyes.

"Let me have it," he urged her.

He could have sworn he felt the breeze kiss him.

The smile fell right from his face. "I mean it. Let me have it. You know you want to." He felt the warmth again and growled. "You're supposed to be pissed, Jess. Tell me how much you hate me. Tell me you'll never forgive me. Tell me that you would've been better off if you'd never met me. I - damn it! - Tell me what I can do."

Okay, so that hadn't gone as planned. He'd thought he could at least make it ten minutes before he lost it. She must be so disappointed already.

Irritation colored his voice gray as he went on. "Please? I am so . . . God, I'm so fucking sorry. For all of it. Even if I can't change what happened, I still should've come here. I should have seen you. At least be mad at me for that. I mean, if he hadn't - well, a year ago, I might've lost my only chance, and it still took me another year to get here. I should have been here for you."

You are now, he could have sworn he heard her say.

"Jess?"

No answer. He looked around the blackened cemetery, seeing nothing hiding between or in the shadows. A car drove by that illuminated the far west end, but the lights came nowhere near to giving away his presence. There were no footsteps on the gravel to indicate anything corporeal around him either.

After awhile he let himself relax and stop looking over his shoulder. He kept his senses open like he should, but he put his focus back on Jessica. She had been his reason for so many things the last few years, but he needed her to know that before he wouldn't have a chance to tell her again.

He didn't exactly mean to start it out the way he did, though.

"You're supposed to be here." It wasn't angry or rough, just quiet. "And I know it's my fault you're gone. I should . . . I don't know. This, you, us - it seems so far away now. I think about you every day. Until the day I died, I thought of you first thing when I woke up. No matter what. You were the first thing to come to my mind. I still roll over in the middle of the night so sure you're in bed with me. When I need to talk to someone besides him, you're the one I pick up the phone to call. And I can't shake this feeling. I can't move past it. I can't feel like I should look for anything else because, except for him, I've never felt anyone on my side before. And I really need someone on my side right now. I tried once, but it only turned out badly for her, and she wasn't you. But then, everything I touch ends up that way, doesn't it?"

Sam studied his dirty fingernails for a while. "I still think about you every day. You have to know that. I do. God, Jess, I think about you every single day. But things happened, you know?" He bowed his head and choked. He hadn't said the name before. "Dean, he . . . "

Again the breeze touched him deep, warm air instead of cold feathering his face. Instead of questioning it, he let his eyes close again to feel her, even if it wasn't really her.

"I lost him, Jess. I screwed up and I lost him. That's what always happens, though, isn't it? I screw up and people die. You, Mom, Dad, D-dean. I got up every morning for a year - if I went to bed at all - and the first thing I did was try to find another way to save him. And I knew . . . I knew there was no fucking way. Things don't work out for us. Never have. But I had to try. I had to believe that just this once someone up there was going to give a damn about all the things he . . . the people he . . . "

Sam pulled in a shuddering breath, held it the best he could, then shook it back out. He could feel that pressure behind his eyes now, the pressure of crying too much. His throat was hard, nearly impossible to swallow with. His body was doing its best to betray him as the little boy he still felt like he was and always would be, little boy lost.

"I-I have no illusions about who Dean is. He's not the guy you bring home to meet the family. You knew that the minute you met him, I think. Sometimes I think he hit on the girls in the bars with boyfriends just to get in the fights after. And I won't say he is the nicest guy in the world. He isn't. He isn't a saint. On paper he's a thieving, grave robbing, bank robbing serial killer. The only people he's really good for is us - me and Dad. And Bobby. But that's it. The rest of the world can fuck itself if it hurts us in any way. And a lot of the time, that's all it takes for him. But that doesn't mean he deserves this. He . . . "

He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. The further he pulled into himself, the more he started to look the part. God, how he was lost.

"I swear, Jess, I can hear him screaming. I know he's down there, and he's bleeding, and he's hurting, and there isn't a fucking thing I can do about it. I close my eyes, and all I can see is him screaming while that thing is tearing him apart. He isn't perfect, but he's my brother. No one in the world got a better brother than me. And what does he get? I can't even begin to tell you what he's - the screaming and - I . . . I have you above me and him below me, and you both scream at me all the time. I can't turn it off. I can't."

The breeze picked up into a warm summer wind too early for the season that wrapped around him, touching every piece of bare flesh like the truly human contact he had been without for too long. He closed his eyes so that he could almost believe that it was real. He wanted so badly to believe even for an instant that it was real.

Sam cried until he was pretty sure he would have a dehydration headache in the morning. The entire time the wind curled around him, stirring only around him and the immediate trees and grass.

"Stop," he said after awhile and knuckled the tears away from his eyes. "Stop trying to make me feel better."

He knew it was silly. It wasn't like he could control the weather. But at the moment he needed comfort to come from somewhere, anywhere, and his imagination was trying too hard to make that happen for him. He needed it so damn badly, but he didn't deserve it. He'd failed them all. The last crossroads demon he'd summoned had told him as much. He'd failed, and now Hell had them all exactly where it wanted them. He'd let Hell have its way with them all. He didn't deserve comfort. He didn't deserve forgiveness.

All Sam wanted was his goodbye.

"Stop," he said again when the breeze only blew in closer. "Please, don't."

He could have sworn the breeze laughed at him.

Make me.

He sniffed back a smile.

Jess.

It wasn't real, but he could pretend one last time.

"I miss you, baby. God, I miss you. No one smiles like you. No one can laugh like you, and let's face it, no one could laugh at me more than you did. You didn't put up with anything from me. Even when you knew I was lying to you, you still found a way to give me shit without trying to find out what I was lying about. I loved that, by the way, that you didn't push and let me keep my secrets. Not everyone would. I miss - I miss just holding you at the end of the day. Nobody will ever feel like you. I would give anything for one more night with you. After I left home, you were the only time I ever knew safe. I know, I know - I couldn't have felt that safe if I was lying all the time about who I was, but I was. I was safe. You made me safe."

Sam's mood immediately fell again.

"I just wish I could've done the same for you. But then, you didn't know you weren't safe, did you?"

No, and I was happy. We were happy.

"Not the same thing."

Says who?

"I do."

You aren't always right, Sam.

"You think I don't know that?" he asked, then started at the sound of his own voice. "Sorry, I didn't mean for it to come out like that. It's just that my whole life is a lesson in how not always right I am. I don't need reminding. I can't ever forget. People get killed when I forget that."

The breeze didn't have anything to say to that, which Sam thought was a fairly appropriate answer. Jess couldn't exactly argue with that. She was one of the dead ones, after all.

"You need to know, though, that I didn't want to leave you that night. But when he said - you know how I always had nightmares and woke you up screaming? I used to dream all the time that Dad would leave Dean alone on a hunt and that Dean was hurt and alone. I'd dream there was no one to look for him. He'd die alone and not be found, because even if I could just pick up and go after him, I wouldn't know where to go. One of the first things Dad taught us was how to disappear. If anything happened, no one would even know to look or have a clue how. Every night, my brother died crying and alone. So when he said to me that he didn't want to look for Dad alone, I knew I couldn't let him drive away, or he wouldn't be coming back. And the dreams I was having about you, I thought they were because I was scared that I wanted to marry you. I thought that if I did, you'd end up just like my mother, and I was scared to take it any further. I really thought they were just dreams. But you have to know, I never would've left you alone if I thought . . . At the time, I don't know that we would've ended up any better off than my parents did, but at least I could've been there to try. Yellow Eyes would've had to kill me long before I ever let him get to you. I could have tried."

Sam wiped at the tears tickling his chin enough to itch. He started to breathe through his mouth to get by the stuffiness in his nose now coming from trying to talk around tears.

"I've been trying every day since, though. Every damn day, I get closer to ending this. Dean got Yellow Eyes for you. Well, maybe not so much for you as Mom and Dad, but he did it anyway. I think it was for you, too, but Dean doesn't like to talk about you. He tries sometimes, but I think he thinks I can't handle it. And he's probably right. I've tried. Once in a while I'd find something to tell him that didn't hurt too much to remember. It doesn't hurt to remember you - you don't hurt - but thinking you're gone does. It hurts so damn much. But I really did try. I wanted him to know you, even if it was too late. But that's me, isn't it? Always too late."

Not your fault, the wind whispered, and he barked out a laugh.

"You would say that, wouldn't you? You're so damn forgiving. I loved that about you."

Until it was your turn to need forgiveness. Forgiveness for something that wasn't even your fault.

"Stop it," he argued quietly.

There are a lot of things you need forgiveness for, Sam, but my death is not one of them.

"You say that now," he whispered. He'd had far too many dreams accuse him otherwise. "Dean tries to tell me the same thing. This won't be your fault, Sammy, he says. I chose this for us, Sammy, he says. I'm okay with this, Sammy, he says. Fucking jackass. It may have taken a year, but I got my brother killed just as much as I got you killed. And my dad. I mean, yeah, I know it was a fucked up situation, and there was no right answer from either point of view, but my dad died thinking it was my fault because I was too chickenshit to follow orders. My father spent six months in Hell because I couldn't kill him to save us. He wanted to go out fighting the demon. Maybe I should've given him that. Fucked up, right? Those were my choices: kill my father or . . . Maybe he should've just done it years ago. He knew something was wrong with me. He wouldn't have told Dean to kill me if he didn't. There wouldn't have been any hard choices after that. They would have been okay."

Sam stopped again, not sure how he'd ended up thinking about his father and brother like this. And yet, he knew he was right. He didn't need to be forgiven; he needed to be dead.

He laughed, but it came out mean and bitter. "And Dean thought I was going to be okay. If this is his idea of okay? He left me, Jess. And I don't know which way to go now. Nothing will deal with me. Ruby keeps telling me she knows how I can at least get payback, but I don't know. I guess I never thought I'd be in a position in my life where the only person I had left to trust in the whole world was a damn demon."

He lay back in the ground so he saw the stars before he realized how he was laying. He was sure he could feel her blood on his forehead as soon as he hit the ground. He sat back up, shivering.

The tears came again, unbidden, although he shouldn't have expected any different. He sighed. "I wanted better for us, Jess. That picture on the dresser of my parents? I wanted that for us. A life without demons and danger. Trees and fences and houses and all those things I never had. I wanted happy and safe. I wanted you safe. I wanted all of us - he didn't let me save him. Just this once, I could've made him safe instead of the other way around. Why wouldn't he let me?"

The anger festered up again, and even as he thought he heard his brother scream, Sam felt his jaw clench around the sobs. "I hate him so much right now. It isn't the same. It's not. I left him to go to college; I didn't leave him forever. And we're not just talking the rest of our lives - it's forever. I am never going to see him again, and he did it on purpose. If he had just left me dead, it would all have been okay. This isn't the way any of this was supposed to go. And after all that bullshit he gave me about how he hated it that Dad died for him and how he knew he was the one who was supposed to be dead in the first place - I'm supposed to be dead. I was okay with that. No more fighting, no more worrying if I'm going to go Darkside, no more nightmares that I kill him or Bobby or - damn it! I was safe. Okay, maybe not exactly safe, but I wasn't here anymore. He didn't have the right to leave me like this. And neither did you! How could you leave me? This was supposed to be our life! We were going to - "

Sam felt the screams in his soul shake him back to his senses, shake him back to his reality. Supposed to couldn't do him any good. Never had.

With that remembered, he wiped his shirtsleeve across his eyes and nose like a toddler, ran his hands through his hair, and nodded to himself. It was time to buck up, cowboy, whether he was ready for it or not.

"Listen, I just wanted to see you. I needed you to know how much I miss you. I can't fix this. I wish to God I could, but I don't think God has listened to a word I've said for a long, long time, if ever. I have to try to do it on my own then. And I think I can do it. At least, I think I can do the hard part. If Dean can take out Yellow Eyes, I can take out Lilith. I'm starting with her, but I'm going until I go out fighting, and I'm taking as many of those bastards down with me as I can. There's a demon - I think I mentioned her, Ruby - who's going to help me. I don't necessarily trust her, and I definitely don't get her, but right now I need her. She says things sometimes that sound like something Dean would say to me. I need that right now. I need it so bad. I know it isn't real and that there is never going to be anything that could replace him in any way, but even the approximation right now is all I have. I'm afraid if I don't hear him in something, I am going to lose it. I am. She's the only thing holding me together right now."

The breeze seemed to chill a little bit, but it still tried to circle around him. That set his jaw, hard. "I am losing it, Jess. You haven't been here. You don't know what it's like. I have nothing left. So I'm doing this-this kamikaze thing, and I'm going to use her as long as she can get me to where I need to go. Hell has to pay for this. Hell is never taking anything from me again."

Sam was pretty sure the breeze stopped then, like Jess was giving him the silent treatment she had a tendency to give him when she knew she couldn't change his mind. He waited for a while for the breeze to pick back up, but it never came back. It was probably a good thing. It wasn't like she was there anyway. It had been nice to imagine, but it was time to move on.

He dug into his pocket for the crumpled chain of silver he'd brought with him and swirled it around his finger a few times. He caught it hard when he was done, held it one last time, then buried it in a hole right along the base of the stone. He would've put it right there next to her picture - forever frozen at twenty-two - but he didn't trust that someone wouldn't take it from her. He'd bought the bracelet for her twenty-first. It wasn't anything special, but she'd liked it enough that when she'd lost it she moped enough he bought an identical one. Sam had kept it in the inside pocket of his bag since the day they'd left campus. It was time she got it back.

"Anyway, I should get going or I'll end up going on all night. I just needed you to know that I'm doing this. I don't know how it's going to end. Of course I couldn't have a vision about that, right? And I don't know how it's going to go. You probably won't be very proud of me by the time I'm done. These kinds of things don't happen when you're the white hat, you know?"

Sam hated admitting that. But then, he didn't exactly care about the pure good anymore. It hadn't exactly got him anywhere in this world, had it? Jess would either understand or she wouldn't. Dean might have understood, once upon a time anyway. Dad, well, Dad would've led the fucking charge up the hill, Colt swinging.

None of it was a comforting thought.

"When this is all over, I, um, I don't know if there'll even be any of me left to send upstairs or down. I guess it would be okay with me if there isn't anything. Maybe then I can, well, just - just in case there is anything left, wait for me, okay? I know it's not fair to ask, but wait for me? My family is gone; Mom destroyed herself for us, Dad burst into something and we have no idea where he is, and Dean is somewhere I know I can't ever get to him again, not with the shortage of miracles going around for me these days. You're my only family."

He rested his hand on the stone that announced to any visitors how the woman he'd wanted to make his wife was laying there and would only exist in the memories of a few people for the next fifty years. He had to agree with his father: cemeteries were for normal people, just like everything else about the world that wasn't for John Winchester and his sons. All of this had been useless, and Sam knew it. And yet, there he was.

"I love you," he told her anyway. "Wish me luck?"

The breeze didn't return. Whether that meant the weather sucked or that Jess couldn't wish him luck on a suicide mission, he didn't know. It probably wasn't a good idea to guess.

Sam hauled himself back to his feet and dusted the dewy grass shavings from his backside. "I'll come home to you as soon as I can," he whispered.

He left her then, the first and last time he could bear to look at that headstone and know he'd put that beautiful woman there. He had no problem leaving her, though. He had his job to do now. As he walked out, he felt like he was that lone cowboy at the end of the second act of the western setting out to get his revenge on the bastards who had taken his love from him - only he knew that if he were around, Dean would tell him he wasn't nearly that cool. Ennio Morricone wasn't going to score him out of the graveyard.

But apparently Elton John would because the bitch was back. Ruby stood leaning against a tree, watching him make his gallows walk around the headstones.

"I've been waiting for two hours," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"None of your business."

"Who is she? She's cute, you know, except for the hair. I thought hair that big went out in the eighties?"

Sam canted his head at her, unsure. "Excuse me?"

"I'm just sayin'." Ruby shrugged. "You could do better. So who is she?"

As curious as the demon made him, Sam couldn't turn around to see for himself. He knew that if he did, he wouldn't be walking out of there at all. Instead he only smiled.

She's the light at the end of the tunnel.

"As long as it's out of your system." She reached into the back pocket of his jeans and produced the hankie he kept back there for those occasions when either he or Dean got themselves cut up. She threw it at him and sarcastically mimed dabbing at her own weeping eyes. She then smacked him in the gut and charged ahead. Over her shoulder she ordered, "Get me out of here. These places give me the heebie-jeebies, and you owe me fries before we get out of this dead end town."

His light, and no one else's.

"Sure," he said amicably enough, but he wasn't taking it as an order. He'd never take orders again. "There's a place on the edge of town some friends of mine like."

(June 2009)

(Edited, May 2014)