SPN FIC: We're Only Changing Drugs

[thatgirlsix]

Summary:  Dean can't exactly blame Sam for all of it. He did up and die on the guy. But Sam died first, and Dad died first, and Mom before that. If only taking a shower could fix this whole mess.

Disclaimer: No infringement intended; just spreading of creative happiness. This one is rated R for lots of language, but that's it. This is a tag/missing scene between The Rapture and When the Levee Breaks, so apply your appropriate spoiler warnings through there.

Author's Notes: Well, I usually don't separate the team in this fandom, so when I ended up writing a solely Sam story (although it was mostly about Dean), I had to turn around and do the same for Dean. Thanks for taking the time whether you comment or not. Enjoy! Six


We're Only Changing Drugs
by That Girl Six

Dean had planned a show of solidarity for his brother, even if things were so far from together that they felt worlds apart. He had decided that he was going to wait Sam out and not take a shower or shave until the guy got first dibs when this was all over. He'd try not to sleep, too, if it didn't go on too long. It would be a sign of forgiveness? good will? normality? . . . something. It was the least he could do for locking what was left of Sam in the basement like an animal with nothing but a set of springs and a bucket.

Thinking of it like that was a bitch, and yet, he knew that was exactly what he had done. Helping sounded so much better. Saving his brother as he'd promised sounded better. It would probably be a long time before Sam could think of it like that, though. He knew he wouldn't think of it that way if he'd just been locked in an iron death trap.

After all, he was the one who got to walk away-not that he was going all that far. He would wait this out, however it turned out. It couldn't take that long to detox, right? People did it in hospitals and drunk tanks all the time. That's all this was. The rest of it they could work out. The detox would be the hard part. Detox with a bucket and a medieval-looking door and ceiling . . .

Yeah, sucked didn't quite cover.

Long as I'm around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you.

Unless that thing was him. Fuck.

Support for Team Winchester, however, didn't last that long. Bobby sent him upstairs to the shower about ten minutes into the thing. The old man gave him a look that said he had better take him up on the offer because it would be gone by the time Bobby could count to three in three different languages. It also said that their friend knew all too well that this might be the only time Dean would have to sort himself out before things got truly ugly. If he thought the curses coming from Sam's hell in the basement were bad now, it was going to be unbearable all too soon. Dean had better get his game face together. Fast.

By the time Dean had yanked his bag heavily from the trunk and dragged his sorry ass back into the house, Bobby had either lost the staring contest with his glass or poured himself a second shot. Dean's taunt about Bobby's parents being out of town suddenly didn't seem so funny. Without making eye contact, he booked it right on up the stairs to the bathroom at the end of the hall where he and Sam kept a regular supply of everything they'd need, the one place where they had that chance. He even found a spare toothbrush, and the way his mouth tasted like flambéed dog shit, he was going to need it. All he needed was a fresh pair of jeans and he'd be ready to get down to business.

The shower felt good for a while, hot, until it started to push down on the muscles in his tired shoulders. That spot in his shoulder that never seemed to heal was aching and threatening to pull him right into a sleep he didn't want until he leaned his head against the tiles. Those were fucking cold, even with the steam building up. He turned his cheek against them, rotating up to his forehead then to the other cheek to get the full effect. If he hadn't had a constant headache since being pulled from Hell, he probably would have felt one from the temperature extremes. And he would have welcomed it, because feeling the throb of that kind of headache would have been better than feeling the throb-throb-thump of his own heart at the moment.

He hated the headache. It seemed like such a simple thing: pop a Tylenol, chase it with one of the Js (Jim, Jack, or José), and be done with it. Sleep it off if you have to, but it should be history by then. It didn't want to die, though. He thought about asking Castiel about it-you know, if the traitor were still on their side, the fucking Benedict Arnold-the idea that it was a side effect from being throttled around in Hell a little too long not entirely unreasonable. And yeah, he'd take a headache because it meant that he was back up here amongst the living, but it made things different. He knew he was always cranky; who wouldn't be when it felt like there was a rusty rebar stuck in your brain all the time? And he knew that he spent most of his time taking it out on Sam, but it wasn't like his brother wasn't giving him the same treatment. Of course, now he knew it was a whole other kind of headache that Sam had, but still . . . They had probably piled on to each other's headaches along the way, too. The fighting probably hadn't helped either. Or the silent treatment they had been occasionally adding in there. Or the sucker punches. Or the barely hidden anger or resentment or lack of sympathy or understanding. Who needed a damn siren when they were doing a fine job of busting each other up on their own?

Being strangers after four months had left more wounds than being separated four years had even come close to doing. How in the world was that even possible? It made his head hurt worse just trying to find his way around that particular vicious circle.

You died on me.

Yeah, well, you died on me first, bucko.

The thing was he didn't see how things could have gone any other way. Not really. They had both changed too much in those four months for things not to have changed with them. Dean had figured out all too painfully sometime along the time they were dealing with that bully Sam had fought off in school that they really weren't ever going to understand each other over this one. It was too big and their experiences too different. Sam had never been to Hell, and Dean admittedly hadn't lasted longer than those godforsaken twenty-five hours his brother had been dead without him. He had no real point of reference for what it was like to be the last one standing for more than a few hours, after the shock was gone and the body was gone and the reality of the rest of your life alone hit. He got that, sometimes; really, he did. While Sam hadn't exactly come out of those four months alive, he'd come out of them breathing. Sometimes Dean wondered what would have happened to himself if he'd even tried.

He knew Sam thought it was all different-he could still read the guy well enough to know that-and he was probably right. Even when Sam was at school, there was that safety net of knowing perfectly well that his little brother was safely packed off to the life of books, booze, and boobs (not necessarily in that order). If he could have provided the same safety for his brother, he would have. The truth was, though, that there was no fixing that. It wasn't the same, and it was making all the difference right now. Four years of safety nets and open phone lines was nowhere near four months of dead.

He got that. He just didn't know what that meant, and Sam wasn't sharing what that meant, not really. Even when the guy had told him the down and dirty details, Dean could see Sam was leaving things out. And after four months, he couldn't read into the holes to figure out what those things were.

They just didn't know each other like that anymore.

And yet, he couldn't stop being angry at Sam for it anyway. It was four months, not four years. And he was back. How it was still an issue was . . . How could them both alive and together not be okay? How could they not feel their way back when they had fought back so much already? They were both alive; how could this have been the straw?

Part of Dean was ridiculously pissed off at himself for not seeing any of this coming. Really, how could he? Now, granted, he never saw himself getting out of Hell in the first place so it had been a non-issue, but Sam falling apart like this? Sam becoming their father like this? No way. All Sam had wanted from the moment he found out about the promise their father had extracted from him was for Dean to help him, keep him from going Darkside. This-that downstairs-wasn't supposed to be a problem. Ruby was supposed to be out of the picture; Lilith had said as much, lying little demonic bitch that she was. No powers, no problem; it should have been so easy. So how in the hell had he missed all of this?

What really sucked? He was grateful the powers had got his brother out of there. How's that for irony, huh? Yeah, grateful for the yellow eyed bastard's blood poisoning the baby he had pulled out of fire and fear so that he could live to face a life alone. He was grateful because that poison had let them save people, like Jenny and her kids, like Andy (even if only for a few months), like Max's step-mother. The visions, as much as they hurt Sam, he could live with . . . But powers. And blood. And fucking Lilith.

The funny thing was he knew he hadn't moved on to thinking he was that grateful for them. That had been written all over Sam's face when Chuck had told them about him and Lilith and bed. Sam had known then. And before. Sam had thrown back that word at him-freak-like it was a four letter monstrosity when it had always been a joke between them. Well, between him. He'd always been able to call his brother a freak. They were a family of freaks. It was okay; it made them who they were. But Sam . . . Dean would never be able to use that word again.

Four months had taken too much from them this time. It was too much when it took a damn joke.

The water was starting to get cold.

He was pretty sure he could hear his brother screaming from the basement.

Whatever Sam was saying and thinking, it probably wasn't I love you. Not that they had ever put those words out there before as anything other than sarcasm (Yeah, I love you, too, asshole), not even on Dean's last day, but he was willing to take them now. He'd put up with anything but what he could guess was being said otherwise at the moment.

God, he felt like such a freak. A greased over, grab your ankles, you got us into this mess kind of freak. He should have listened. He should have heard the anger behind the lies instead of the irritating smile that came with I'm going for a walk. Maybe then . . . Maybe if he'd worried more about why Sam was lying in the first place instead of caring that he was lying, he might have seen some of this. It was such a fine line, he realized now. Someone needed to find a way to make hindsight foresight. Of course, that was part of why they were in this mess, wasn't it?

Fucking visions.

Fucking demons.

Fucking Dad and Mom for his dying and her getting this ball rolling-and yeah, okay, that probably wasn't fair, but at the moment he didn't give a shit. They should have given him some sort of warning besides angels watching over them and you might have to kill your brother. If they had given him even a hint, he might have been able to avoid this. Maybe he would have known . . . something.

Fucking Sam and his safe and normal.

Fucking Jessica for dying in the first place and getting this ball rolling.

Sometimes he wondered, if he hadn't gone to get Sam that weekend (fucking Dad for up and leaving him and getting this ball rolling) and the kid had been there when the demon had showed up, would they have made it out of there? Would the demon have just taken Sam right then and there instead of this drawn out game that didn't seem to have an end or a playbook whatsoever?

Fuck himself for going to Stanford. He should have left well enough alone. Sam had been right: he could very easily have started the search by himself. He didn't need Sam in Jericho (no, that was a show about an apocalypse, which really, should be a hint-but whatever the name of Podunk had been); the idea of spending some time with his brother had been the only reason he had done it. When he thought about it on that drive to get Sam, he had realized that the two of them never just spent time together. It had to be work-related or him protecting Sam from whatever thing the world was trying to throw at them. They never did something to do it. It had been one of Sam's arguments-This isn't a family, it's a unit-from the time his brother had grown a mouth. So as guilty as it had made him feel, he'd pulled the alone card because he had known damn well that Sammy would take the bait. Always gotta have backup, right?

Fuck himself for all of it, that whole weekend.

Fuck Sam for agreeing to go. Fuck him for leaving in the first place. It wasn't a family, bullshit.

The highlight of this lovely little thought process? They were all fucked and had screwed with each other for long enough-oh, and he was another notch up in his headache meter.

If it didn't mean something big and bad, Dean would probably leave Sam to his own idiocy right then and there. Screw it. If Bobby wanted to fight the guy, go for it, but this? There comes a time when a guy has to just cut the cord, you know? This wasn't going to fix any of it. It wasn't going to erase the last four years of beating each other and themselves up beyond recognition. That person-if he was still a person-down in that basement had nothing to do with the sweet kid Dean had spent four years worrying himself near to death over while Sam hid from the world in Stanford.

Nothing was worth this. He was killing himself all over again for a guy who couldn't give a rat's ass anyway. What the fuck was the point? Family? Nope. They were a unit. It worked for Dad, if you asked Sam. Maybe Sam was right; maybe it was about time Dean started listening to him. Screw it. It just wasn't worth this.

And yet, it was.

Headache be damned, Dean banged his head on the cold tiles at the back of the shower, moving out of the spray to knock some sense back into his head. This mopey anger wasn't going to do him or Sam any good. Because the truth was that he needed to save his brother right now just as much as his brother needed Dean to save him. Freakish as their lives were, they needed to stick together. Fish swim with fish, ducks swim with ducks, and freaks needed to get their freak on with other freaks. That's how it works.

Sooner or later you're going to have to face up to what you really are.

And who's that?

One of us.

Of course, that would mean getting Sam back first. He had a lot of things he wanted to take back, and he couldn't do that if he didn't get his brother back.

He wondered what his brother was thinking downstairs right now.

The water was getting colder.

This one time when they had a particularly brutal fight before his death, Sam had lost the censor he usually kept on his mouth and accused Dean of committing suicide by hellhound. He'd accused Dean of bringing him back because he'd failed at his job, not because he actually gave a damn about Sam. He threw it in Dean's face that he hadn't asked beyond the once what Sam remembered; and of course when Dean had then interrupted and tried to ask, Sam had blown up even further. That wasn't the point, they were talking about Dean's deal, and it wasn't going to fix anything. By the time they were done, Sam was a puddle of slurring words that made no sense while Dean had sat on the other side of the room, unable to penetrate the anger circling his brother, which only had made Sam madder. It was the first time Dean had realized just how angry his brother was over The Deal and its impending consequences. The idea that Sam wouldn't want to be alive and with him had never occurred to him, certainly not to that degree. But Sam had lost it, had gone rock star on their motel room enough that they'd had to sneak out and ditch the card that had rented the room. There had only been a few weeks left at the time, but even then he hadn't seen what was going to happen.

This thing downstairs that looked like his brother? He never could have seen that coming. Never.

Because suicide by demon blood? That wasn't any better than suicide by hellhound, not by his standards.

One of us.

I'm a whole new level of freak.

All Dean wanted was his geek brother back. He wanted Stanford Sam back. He wanted the egghead back, even if it meant that they were separated by a wall of school. It would still be better than a wall of demon blood and fear. He wanted his brother back, the one who still dreamed of something for himself besides a dead Lilith.

That was the whole problem, though, wasn't it? That kid didn't exist anymore. Sam had said as much how many different times in however many different ways since he'd died on that dirt road. He said he didn't want that life anymore. It was too far away. And damn, if Dean's heart hadn't crumbled just a little bit when he'd heard it all slip away like that, every single time. He'd never meant to take that away-and yes, he knew, logically, that he hadn't been the one to take it away, but he never meant it all the same. After Sam's first year of hunting when they were kids, Dean had stopped imagining them hunting as a family forever; he'd started to see college and a girl who could make him an uncle. (It was a secret wish, of course, and one that he never said out loud to anyone but some demon in Hell who cut it out of him with a cleaver, but that didn't count.) While it hurt like hell to imagine it, it wasn't supposed to be an impossibility. He wasn't such a selfish bastard that he didn't want everything for Sam, everything that Sam would want for himself. He hated that Sam had stopped wanting.

Except for this damn obsession with Lilith. God. Why was it so damn hard for the kid to see him? He was standing right there, whole-okay, maybe not whole, but in a body and alive-and fighting side by side with him. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out. Alive brother equals no more revenge. Simple third grade math. And yet Sam was just going on and on, no line of sight with the real world anymore. Yeah, there were days when Dean would love to get his licks in on the world now, punish it for everything it had put him and his brother through, but that was a fleeting instant on a crap day, not every single second of every day. It had to stop.

Okay, yeah, taking a shower was a bad idea.

The fact was that this wasn't going to solve anything. Sam was still locked up in the basement, Bobby was downstairs getting blitzed, and he was going to have to go down there and face them both. No one was going to do it for him. No one was going to get his brother back to him but him.

So why did he want to just stay in the shower?

He wished like hell he could. He wished he could whisk them all away to someplace safe, somewhere they couldn't be touched by demons or angels. Sam had accused him once of not having any dreams of his own, but that was the big one right there. The funny thing was, for all the thoughts he'd had lately of his father and how Sam had spiraled into becoming the cold bastard their father had been, that was the one thing that still made him just as much his father as Sam. All the nastiness aside, that was all any of them wanted. They wanted to be safe. He wanted that for him and Sam more than anything.

Dean banged his head on the tiles one last time, grimaced when the tile knocked itself loose and cracked to the tub floor, and kicked it off with a muttered "Screw it". He turned the water off, toweled off, and braced his hands on the vanity counter. He stretched a little, then got right to it. There was no point in putting it off anyway.

Of course, he had no fucking clue how he was supposed to do any of this.

It was just awesome to be a Winchester, wasn't it?

One of us.

One of them.

They were so screwed.

When he found Bobby still where he'd been at the desk downstairs, Dean didn't say anything. He caught a sniff from the man, like he wasn't sure Dean had actually taken the shower he'd been ordered to take. He supposed that was warranted; it hadn't exactly been a purpose-driven shower. He was pretty sure he never even picked up the soap. There would probably be a joke in there somewhere if he didn't feel so wasted.

Dean grunted back, then headed to the kitchen. He took his time making the coffee. He really took his time making the coffee. He would have had time to redecorate if he'd wanted. He needed to wait it out, let the water from the shower chill him a little longer. The cold made sense. The cold was . . . he could do the cold. It was what happened after he warmed back up that he was worrying about now. Warm meant loose and pliable. It meant he wouldn't be as in control of things as he'd like. The last thing he needed right now was to feel out of control.

He brought two mugs out to the library when the coffee was done, but he doubted Bobby would take it. He was too happy with his happy juice. He sat down, still without saying anything. They both stared out different windows, Dean wondering whether or not any of the light was getting through to Sam through the fan vent. He wondered what it was going to be like in there once the sun went down. Would it freeze tonight? It was still the Midwest in spring; the weather could change on a dime. He doubted Bobby had ducted the place for forced heat. He hadn't noticed if Bobby had left a lamp down there when he'd set the joint up. The sun would be setting in three hours, give or take. Guess he'd find out then . . .

If the lights went out when the sun went down, if there was a mid-spring frost, would he forgive him?

Would he forgive himself for any of this?

Then again, what did he have to forgive himself for? This was the right thing. He was going to exhaust every single option out there to get his brother the help he needed. What was to forgive about that?

They sat quietly as the hollering ratcheted up a notch downstairs. Bobby sank further into his desk chair, squeaking the spring under the seat in time with some music in his head that Dean was pretty sure was Johnny Cash. Dean looked harder out the window than was probably necessary. He wished he could see something move out there in the shadows, something that he could go out there and chase and fight and kill. He needed at least something to fight. The inside of his cheek wasn't going to last much longer.

Dean checked the clock a few times as the time passed, as he heard Sam's voice grow hoarse. Forty-seven minutes went by before Bobby choked down a shot of Johnnie Walker (Blue Label-he was settling in for the hard stuff apparently) and grunted.

"Well, this is fun."

"Six flags," Dean agreed.

It was another half an hour before they dug out a deck of cards. That lasted all of two hands. Considering that Bobby knew exactly on whose lap Dean had learned his poker game, it wasn't as much a contest as it was a draw over and over. For all the help the cards were, they should have left them down in the basement with Sam.

The sun went down. Sam had a few choice words to bellow up to them about that.

Bobby met Dean's eyes for the first time in about an hour, asking him the same thing Dean was wondering: what do we do if this doesn't work?

Not having an answer to the question any better than Bobby did, Dean sat on the top stair of the flight down to the basement listening. Under different circumstances (and if he were still twelve), he'd be proud of the colorful language pounding up the steps at him. The cussing out he was getting was worthy of John Winchester on his most horrible nights. It rivaled The Fight, no doubt. He flinched a few times without realizing it. He sat there like a kid listening to his parents fight downstairs, hands hugging his head and feet hugging his beer.

Petulantly, he wondered if Sam would call this weak, too. After all, he was sitting there on the stairs with the safety of a solid iron door between them to hold off the real confrontation that this probably deserved. There were times when he started thinking he deserved it, to be called weak, and it all made sense now in Sam's search for Lilith and the blood and everything. He could hear the word singeing Sam's veins now every time he thought back to when his brother had said it. The thing was he knew Sam had never said he was scared. There was a difference between weak and scared. He knew Sam knew the difference, too. He wasn't scared of Lilith or anything demonic anymore. He was scared of the world. He hadn't said as much out loud, but he knew that was the problem. And really, how was he supposed to feel about it? Forty years had beaten this world out of him. Slow and steady wins the race, after all; he'd have to get back into things eventually. But not like this, not Sam's way.

He had been the little kid sitting on the stairs with his hands over his ears since the day he was yanked out of The Pit. Ugly words or not, Sam knew that. Dean knew it.

Maybe this would finally be the thing to get him to unplug his ears and get back to living. Stranger things had happened. He done stranger for Sam, and apparently, in his own weird way, all of this had been Sam's way. See what happens when Big Brother isn't around to kick Little Brother's ass around the playground? You get vampire brothers and all kinds of scary shit. He wasn't too weak to deal with that part of it. No, siree.

All the same, when this was over he was scratching that word off the list, too. Weak and Freak were now officially out of their vocabulary. They were just going to have to find some other way to beat the snot out of each other.

Screams started coming out of the basement that sounded more like something from The Pit than from a guy coming off a high. It was all he could do to not run down those steps like their lives depended on it. But he couldn't be weak; he had to wait it out.

This had to be the right thing to do, right? Sam would-had to- get over this. Because what comes after this, what promises are made of, was a price he didn't think he could pay. He'd go back to Hell first. He would.

No one would let him go that far, he liked to think. He'd heard enough over the last months about how hard it had been for them, how scared they were. He'd seen both Bobby and Sam wake from nightmares screaming his name. He usually rolled over and let them think he was asleep like people who hadn't been to Hell usually are at that time of day or night, but it didn't take away their screams. Crazy as it sounded, those screams were worse than the ones from Hell. For the most part, Hell was still nameless, faceless, except for those souls he knew in their most intimate forms. But he could put a reason and a name to his family's screams.

Family don't end with blood, boy.

It would be easier if it did. Then maybe he wouldn't be hurting anyone but him and Sam now. Bobby wouldn't be sniffing and hiding drunk-shot eyes, and at least Sam wouldn't be any worse off than he was right now. He'd have more than a bucket anyway.

It got quiet again after awhile. He heard Bobby come up behind him a few times from the creak in the floorboards, but the man didn't offer any other comfort than that. He knew better. He knew that Dean was just as alone up there on top of those stairs as Sam was below them. And that, more than anything else, was why they were in this mess. They'd left each other alone.

Dean could fix that. He'd been fixing that one for eight damn years now. What was one more Band-Aid on the wound, right? It wasn't like they were bleeding out yet.

He would fix it.

Right after he took another shower.

(July 2009)