Fic: Me, You, and the Devil Makes Two [SPN Sam/Dean PG]
Title: Me, you, and the devil makes two
Pairings/Characters: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG
Category:One-shot, complete
Word Count: 2900
Spoilers: Seasons one to seven in general
Summary: This is what it’s like to hallucinate the devil.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not even a little.
There is a perfect way to explain what it’s like in Sam’s head, but Sam can’t remember it.
When Sam was ten he had an allergic reaction to something. He can’t remember what it was a reaction to, but his left eye swelled close and Dean freaked out because he’d just heard about some neighbourhood kid dying of a bee sting. The kid’s name was Emmett James.
Dean could probably dredge up the memory if he was given enough to go off. He might remember Emmett’s name. He might remember the kid was the year below Sam in school, that he was skinny and loud. He probably had ADD, not that anyone was getting that sort of diagnosis in that Podunk town. Dean might be able to name the town. No doubt he’d be able to remember how he boosted a car, put Sam in the backseat, practically hyperventilating the whole break-neck drive there, and just about threw Sam at the doctors, terrified Sam was going to die.
Sam doesn’t remember this because he doesn’t remember anything about being ten. He thinks he does, but there are holes where the memories of that year should be, and they’re filled up with Hell. He doesn’t remember the way Rachel Lennel’s (len-El, not leNle, like bottle) watch caught the light in social studies and painted tiny circular sunspots on the chalkboard. The way Dean started growing by leaps and bounds, voice never in the same register twice. The way John drank mostly Johnny Walker that year, because Jim Beam wasn’t working out so good; the moonshine Dean tried when they were neighbours with honest-to-god hillbillies, the day Dean spent puking his guts out.
Sam certainly doesn’t remember being insulted that they put him in the kids’ room at the hospital. There was a jungle animal mural peeling off the wall, chipped paint and notices taped to the plaster. Sam sat on a wooden chair with a thin plastic seat, and they put an IV with adrenaline in his left arm. This is the moment in Sam’s past best able to explain what it’s like in his present state of mind.
Sam knew then that there was nothing happening. The adrenaline was from the IV, not any incident. But the chemicals in his body left his brain scrambling trying to put together a reason he was sweaty, shaking, heart pounding…
This is what it’s like to hallucinate the devil.
But Sam doesn’t remember being ten years old, so he doesn’t have any way to explain what it’s like to Dean.
# # #
Sam wakes up in a motel room in Ohio with a headache and his intestines piled up on the skin of his chest. His brain is telling him that it hurts, that he’s dying, that he’s in hell. But he isn’t. It sure as shit feels real though.
Sam bites down on his tongue and listens to Dean snore in the way he only does when he’s been in bars that still allow smoking, despite the laws. Dean doesn’t trust him, Lucifer says. Dean thinks he’s out of his gourd.
Sam reminds himself that Dean loves him.
“Every inch,” Lucifer says, from where he’s sitting on the bed next to Dean. “Every mile of skin and thread of muscle. Loves you, sure. Love to see you over his table. Just like I did.”
Sam’s mouth is full of blood now but his intestines are back where they’re supposed to be. He gets out of bed while he still can. None of it is real.
He thinks about what Lucifer is saying. The idea of Dean torturing him is surprisingly unaffecting. It doesn’t bother him the way he thinks it should. He closes the bathroom door before he turns on the light. Lucifer is in the shower, hogging all the hot water, the whole room is steamed and Sam can’t see his face in the mirror. So much for shaving.
“If Dean was going to torture me because he hated me,” Sam says to Lucifer, pushing him out from under the spray so he can wash his hair, “he wouldn’t do it like that. That’s too much attention to detail for someone he doesn’t care about.”
He thinks of Dean’s face when he’s working on the Impala, when he rebuilt her; the concentration, the love. He could stand to see that look on Dean’s face directed at him. Pain hurts, but it isn’t frightening. If he’s going to be hurt, there’s nothing he can do about it.
Sam can imagine being tortured without any difficulty at all, and he can imagine being tortured by Dean. Dean would take his time, stripping away everything about Sam that was broken, and rotten, taking him apart until there was nothing left of him but the grimed core of him and wash it clean in blood until Dean could put his hands on the tiny, pure part of Sam that belonged only to him and take it back.
Then Lucifer is crowding into Sam’s space, wearing Dean’s face, sneering up at him. The details are off. He’s a little too tall, eyes a little too green. He’s Dean as Sam sees him, not as he is. Sam is starting to get very particular about details.
The hallucination in the shower with Sam smells like his brother though. The hand it puts on Sam’s hip feels like Dean’s hand. Sam pushes it away and scrubs quickly.
“You think I care about you, Sam?” Lucifer says in Dean’s voice. “You think you’re not just a burden? I’ve been carrying you for years. At least when you didn’t have a soul you weren’t a drooling mess. Bringing you back was a mistake. I want nothing of you. You think after all this time you’d know that by now.”
Sam holds on to the weirdly comforting image of Dean looking down at him with a knife in his hand and the concentration and the love on his face. He holds on to it, and pretends he can’t hear Lucifer, as he gets out of the shower and grabs a towel, heading into the main room.
Dean, the real Dean, is stretching next to the bed. “Dude,” he says. “You were in there for a hundred years and you didn’t shower? What the hell?”
Sam touches his hair. It’s dry. He’s dry. “Weak sauce,” he mutters to Lucifer. “An imaginary shower? That’s lame even for you.”
When he looks over at Dean, Dean’s shirt is ripped, he’s been torn open and his face is spattered with his own blood. Sam can hear Hellhounds panting. He can’t see Lucifer, but he can hear him saying, “How about some greatest hits then?”
Dean isn’t doing anything other than stand there with his chest gaping open, looking at Sam with a concerned crease between his eyebrows. His eyes dart down to where Sam is pushing on his hand, worrying the sore, healing skin. “You okay?” he asks.
Sam looks away, where outside the window the earth is scorched and demons crawl over the wreckage at the end of the world. “I’m starving,” Sam says, “let’s get some breakfast.”
There’s nothing he can do about the horror and terror that floods his body, same way there’s nothing he can do about the imaginary hurts his brain convinces him he is suffering. None of it is real, but his heart is in his throat that Dean is dying in front of him, he is cold with fear, sweaty and ready to run or fight. There’s nothing to fight, and he can’t run from himself.
Dean claps him on the back, hand lingering warm and rough between his shoulder-blades. “Don’t zone out on me now, Space Cadet,” Dean says. “Tell Satan to screw himself and let’s get you fed.”
# # #
Sam ditches his brother on a routine salt and burn. Dean’s interviewing witnesses and Sam said he’d be in the library, researching local histories, but he isn’t. He’s sitting in a walk-in clinic with a fake ID. The paper under his ass crinkles and rustles annoyingly, he can’t stop twisting his fingers into his sore hand, and Lucifer is laughing at him.
The doctor is not.
“I know what I’m hearing and seeing isn’t real,” Sam says. “But it feels real, and it’s…” he glances over at Lucifer. “Distressing.”
“Son,” the doctor tells him, “you’re having auditory, visual, and tactile hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and fits of catatonia. I imagine distressing is an understatement.”
Sam shrugs. “I know it’s not curable, but I was hoping there was something I could do to help control it.”
The doctor takes off his glasses. “You seem remarkably calm.”
“I know what’s real,” Sam insists. “My brother. He helps. Look, doctor, I woke up this morning thinking I’d been gutted, and then Satan tricked me into thinking I’d showered, and I hadn’t, and I smelled kind of funky all day. I have other things to worry about. Beating myself up about my brain chemistry is stupid.”
Sam hides the prescription for Risperidone in his duffle before Dean gets back.
It makes him constantly hungry which sucks because he’s also constantly constipated. He suffers from insomnia which he knows freaks Dean out, he’s got chronic dry mouth, and he’s horny. All the time. His sex drive is seriously off the hook. Pretty waitresses, witnesses. Some random guy. Not-so-pretty waitresses, people who are age-inappropriate. Dean.
All this would be fine, if the drugs also got rid of Lucifer and the Hell-o-vision. But they don’t. He flushes the pills down the toilet while Lucifer perches on the counter and tells him all the reasons why Dean should leave him behind.
# # #
Dean is talking to the guy behind the check-in at some rinky-dink little motel in Colorado. Sam is watching the world as it’s swallowed by darkness, Dean’s soul ripped out by angels, Sam’s body flayed apart by demons. Sam is standing very still, and he doesn’t reply when Dean says his name, jangling the keys to their room in one hand.
He snaps back to his body, to reality. Dean is holding Sam’s arm at the elbow joint, digging his thumb in hard enough to make Sam’s entire forearm light up with pain. He doesn’t say anything to Sam, just lets go and walks away. Sam trails after him, his own hand over the ache, pressing it in deeper.
# # #
Sam, honestly, is kind of used to Lucifer’s bitchy side. They’re hurtful, the things he says, but they’re an old hurt, playing on Sam’s insecurities. He starts reading self-help books.
Anything worth having is worth fighting for.
This too shall pass.
Progress, not perfection.
It could be worse.
A good man is hard to find.
# # #
“You seem better,” Dean says, cutting into Lucifer’s monologue about how Sam destroys everything he loves. He looks suspicious. “Are you better or are you just faking better better?”
Sam shrugs. His chicken ceasar is disappointing, the lettuce is seriously wilted. He steals a few of Dean’s sweet-potato fries because Dean prefers regular fries, so they were for him anyway. “You know that nagging voice in your head? The self-doubt, the guilt, that sort of shit?”
Dean looks stricken, then guilty, then he puts his game face on. “We’re not talking about me,” he says.
Sam thinks of their shared heaven, of Dean’s happiest memories. Of Dean as a little kid, already taking on the burdens of his fucked up family. He wants, abruptly, to hug his brother. He doesn’t.
Lucifer carries on in the background.
“Yeah, no,” Sam says. “I was talking about me. All that stuff just has a voice and a face now, and after a while you kind of learn to tune it out.” He smirks at Dean because he needs to make sure this moment goes down right. “Got enough practice tuning out annoying voices,” he says, and kicks his brother gently under the table.
Dean kicks him back. “Bitch,” he says.
“Worthless, broken, sack of problems,” Lucifer says.
“Jerk,” says Sam.
# # #
Sometimes though, it’s not just Lucifer taunting him with psych 101 bullshit.
Dean is hiccoughing, that’s how scared he is. “Wake up, Sammy,” he begs. “Sammy. Don’t you check out on me now.”
Sam’s entire mouth and neck hurt from clenching his teeth. He’s pulled a muscle in his shoulder, it feels like. He is on the ground by the side of the two-lane highway. They’d stopped so he could piss, he remembers that. Sam is lying on his side in the grass next to the two-lane highway with his brother spooned up behind him, holding him like Sam is six years old and scared of the dark.
“What?” Sam says. He hurts all over. The ratty blanket from the trunk of the car is draped over him and Dean’s jacket has been stuffed under his head.
Dean scrambles into a sitting position, nearly kneeing Sam in the face in his rush to scramble to where Sam can see him. “You had a fucking seizure,” he says. “You’ve been out for a half hour.” His hands are steady as he helps Sam sit up, slowly, carefully. “What happened?”
Sam brain floods his body with signals that are lies. They make him believe he’s in Hell. They stress his system until he seizes. That is what happened and they both know it. “I don’t remember,” Sam says, because he has no way to explain to Dean what it’s like.
# # #
They’re sitting in the Impala outside a bar they haven’t gone into yet. Dean has his hands on the wheel and the engine is running like they’re ready to make a getaway. “The thing about angels,” Dean says, out of nowhere. “The thing is that they don’t understand love. They talk a good game, but they don’t get it. Demons, sure, they were human, but angels aren’t made for it.”
Sam doesn’t say anything. Out of the corner of his eye Dean’s face is awash in the glow of hellfire. His eyes are black and his face is spattered with blood.
“If you don’t understand love, you can’t destroy it. That’s how you know it’s shit you’re making up yourself,” Dean says. “Lucifer doesn’t know how to hurt you like a human would, like a demon.”
He doesn’t say, like I know how to. Sam isn’t sure what Dean is asking, or offering, or sharing. He knows his brother has his fair share of PTSD from his time down under, but good luck getting him to talk about that.
“Christo,” Sam says, turning to look at his black-eyed brother.
Dean flinches. Then he gets the joke.
“Oh shut up,” he says.
“Sure you haven’t been possessed by a little girl?” Sam asks. “Because that sounded like you just said you love me.”
Dean groans and turns the car off. “I swear I will end you,” he says. He grins at Sam. Dean, the foundation, the cornerstone of Sam’s reality.
Know thyself, say Sam’s self-help books.
More importantly, Sam knows Dean. He’s beaten the devil in the real world, he’s beaten him in his own head. He can figure out this Hell bullshit.
“Wuv,” Sam says. “Twue wuv.”
“Soulmate,” Dean fires back.
“Gay,” Sam says in his best valley-girl impression.
“So’s your face,” Dean says. His eyes are very green when he leans over and kisses Sam.
# # #
“I’m not going to die,” Sam tells Dean in the bar, over a truly mediocre micro brew. “Or leave. Or whatever.” He lines up a shot. “Yellow ball, corner pocket.”
Dean hasn’t been able to stop smiling. Every time he looks at Sam his ears go red. It’s fucking adorable. Sam can’t wait to tease him forever. “Uh, okay, Francis,” Dean says.
Lucifer makes Sam mess up his shot. That’s what he tells Dean anyway.
Later, on their way to the motel, Sam has another catatonic episode where he’s back in Hell and Dean freaks out. Weirdly Sam calms himself down by calming Dean down and while they’re arguing, and Dean is acting like a total suck about the whole thing, Sam gets them a room with a single bed. Dean bitches and moans and he hogs all the covers and kicks Sam in his sleep but they both manage to get through the night without any nightmares.
“Hey,” Dean says, the next morning, through a mouthful of toothpaste. “Remember when you had that weird eye-swelling thing? You freaked out when they gave you that adrenaline shot even though there wasn’t anything wrong.” He spits, flecks of white on the mirror.
“Not really,” Sam says. “Why?” He considers growing a moustache, decides against it.
“I just remembered that,” Dean says. “Wondered if that’s what the whole Hell thing was like. Crossed wires, you know?”
Sam doesn’t remember, but it sounds about right. Anyway, he doesn’t need to remember; he knows Dean. Dean knows him. “Sure,” Sam says, and digs his elbow into Dean’s ribs. “Could you move over already?” There’s not enough room for him and Dean in front of the sink, but with the both of them crammed in so tightly, there’s no space for Lucifer either.
End.
Pairings/Characters: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG
Category:One-shot, complete
Word Count: 2900
Spoilers: Seasons one to seven in general
Summary: This is what it’s like to hallucinate the devil.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not even a little.
There is a perfect way to explain what it’s like in Sam’s head, but Sam can’t remember it.
When Sam was ten he had an allergic reaction to something. He can’t remember what it was a reaction to, but his left eye swelled close and Dean freaked out because he’d just heard about some neighbourhood kid dying of a bee sting. The kid’s name was Emmett James.
Dean could probably dredge up the memory if he was given enough to go off. He might remember Emmett’s name. He might remember the kid was the year below Sam in school, that he was skinny and loud. He probably had ADD, not that anyone was getting that sort of diagnosis in that Podunk town. Dean might be able to name the town. No doubt he’d be able to remember how he boosted a car, put Sam in the backseat, practically hyperventilating the whole break-neck drive there, and just about threw Sam at the doctors, terrified Sam was going to die.
Sam doesn’t remember this because he doesn’t remember anything about being ten. He thinks he does, but there are holes where the memories of that year should be, and they’re filled up with Hell. He doesn’t remember the way Rachel Lennel’s (len-El, not leNle, like bottle) watch caught the light in social studies and painted tiny circular sunspots on the chalkboard. The way Dean started growing by leaps and bounds, voice never in the same register twice. The way John drank mostly Johnny Walker that year, because Jim Beam wasn’t working out so good; the moonshine Dean tried when they were neighbours with honest-to-god hillbillies, the day Dean spent puking his guts out.
Sam certainly doesn’t remember being insulted that they put him in the kids’ room at the hospital. There was a jungle animal mural peeling off the wall, chipped paint and notices taped to the plaster. Sam sat on a wooden chair with a thin plastic seat, and they put an IV with adrenaline in his left arm. This is the moment in Sam’s past best able to explain what it’s like in his present state of mind.
Sam knew then that there was nothing happening. The adrenaline was from the IV, not any incident. But the chemicals in his body left his brain scrambling trying to put together a reason he was sweaty, shaking, heart pounding…
This is what it’s like to hallucinate the devil.
But Sam doesn’t remember being ten years old, so he doesn’t have any way to explain what it’s like to Dean.
# # #
Sam wakes up in a motel room in Ohio with a headache and his intestines piled up on the skin of his chest. His brain is telling him that it hurts, that he’s dying, that he’s in hell. But he isn’t. It sure as shit feels real though.
Sam bites down on his tongue and listens to Dean snore in the way he only does when he’s been in bars that still allow smoking, despite the laws. Dean doesn’t trust him, Lucifer says. Dean thinks he’s out of his gourd.
Sam reminds himself that Dean loves him.
“Every inch,” Lucifer says, from where he’s sitting on the bed next to Dean. “Every mile of skin and thread of muscle. Loves you, sure. Love to see you over his table. Just like I did.”
Sam’s mouth is full of blood now but his intestines are back where they’re supposed to be. He gets out of bed while he still can. None of it is real.
He thinks about what Lucifer is saying. The idea of Dean torturing him is surprisingly unaffecting. It doesn’t bother him the way he thinks it should. He closes the bathroom door before he turns on the light. Lucifer is in the shower, hogging all the hot water, the whole room is steamed and Sam can’t see his face in the mirror. So much for shaving.
“If Dean was going to torture me because he hated me,” Sam says to Lucifer, pushing him out from under the spray so he can wash his hair, “he wouldn’t do it like that. That’s too much attention to detail for someone he doesn’t care about.”
He thinks of Dean’s face when he’s working on the Impala, when he rebuilt her; the concentration, the love. He could stand to see that look on Dean’s face directed at him. Pain hurts, but it isn’t frightening. If he’s going to be hurt, there’s nothing he can do about it.
Sam can imagine being tortured without any difficulty at all, and he can imagine being tortured by Dean. Dean would take his time, stripping away everything about Sam that was broken, and rotten, taking him apart until there was nothing left of him but the grimed core of him and wash it clean in blood until Dean could put his hands on the tiny, pure part of Sam that belonged only to him and take it back.
Then Lucifer is crowding into Sam’s space, wearing Dean’s face, sneering up at him. The details are off. He’s a little too tall, eyes a little too green. He’s Dean as Sam sees him, not as he is. Sam is starting to get very particular about details.
The hallucination in the shower with Sam smells like his brother though. The hand it puts on Sam’s hip feels like Dean’s hand. Sam pushes it away and scrubs quickly.
“You think I care about you, Sam?” Lucifer says in Dean’s voice. “You think you’re not just a burden? I’ve been carrying you for years. At least when you didn’t have a soul you weren’t a drooling mess. Bringing you back was a mistake. I want nothing of you. You think after all this time you’d know that by now.”
Sam holds on to the weirdly comforting image of Dean looking down at him with a knife in his hand and the concentration and the love on his face. He holds on to it, and pretends he can’t hear Lucifer, as he gets out of the shower and grabs a towel, heading into the main room.
Dean, the real Dean, is stretching next to the bed. “Dude,” he says. “You were in there for a hundred years and you didn’t shower? What the hell?”
Sam touches his hair. It’s dry. He’s dry. “Weak sauce,” he mutters to Lucifer. “An imaginary shower? That’s lame even for you.”
When he looks over at Dean, Dean’s shirt is ripped, he’s been torn open and his face is spattered with his own blood. Sam can hear Hellhounds panting. He can’t see Lucifer, but he can hear him saying, “How about some greatest hits then?”
Dean isn’t doing anything other than stand there with his chest gaping open, looking at Sam with a concerned crease between his eyebrows. His eyes dart down to where Sam is pushing on his hand, worrying the sore, healing skin. “You okay?” he asks.
Sam looks away, where outside the window the earth is scorched and demons crawl over the wreckage at the end of the world. “I’m starving,” Sam says, “let’s get some breakfast.”
There’s nothing he can do about the horror and terror that floods his body, same way there’s nothing he can do about the imaginary hurts his brain convinces him he is suffering. None of it is real, but his heart is in his throat that Dean is dying in front of him, he is cold with fear, sweaty and ready to run or fight. There’s nothing to fight, and he can’t run from himself.
Dean claps him on the back, hand lingering warm and rough between his shoulder-blades. “Don’t zone out on me now, Space Cadet,” Dean says. “Tell Satan to screw himself and let’s get you fed.”
# # #
Sam ditches his brother on a routine salt and burn. Dean’s interviewing witnesses and Sam said he’d be in the library, researching local histories, but he isn’t. He’s sitting in a walk-in clinic with a fake ID. The paper under his ass crinkles and rustles annoyingly, he can’t stop twisting his fingers into his sore hand, and Lucifer is laughing at him.
The doctor is not.
“I know what I’m hearing and seeing isn’t real,” Sam says. “But it feels real, and it’s…” he glances over at Lucifer. “Distressing.”
“Son,” the doctor tells him, “you’re having auditory, visual, and tactile hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and fits of catatonia. I imagine distressing is an understatement.”
Sam shrugs. “I know it’s not curable, but I was hoping there was something I could do to help control it.”
The doctor takes off his glasses. “You seem remarkably calm.”
“I know what’s real,” Sam insists. “My brother. He helps. Look, doctor, I woke up this morning thinking I’d been gutted, and then Satan tricked me into thinking I’d showered, and I hadn’t, and I smelled kind of funky all day. I have other things to worry about. Beating myself up about my brain chemistry is stupid.”
Sam hides the prescription for Risperidone in his duffle before Dean gets back.
It makes him constantly hungry which sucks because he’s also constantly constipated. He suffers from insomnia which he knows freaks Dean out, he’s got chronic dry mouth, and he’s horny. All the time. His sex drive is seriously off the hook. Pretty waitresses, witnesses. Some random guy. Not-so-pretty waitresses, people who are age-inappropriate. Dean.
All this would be fine, if the drugs also got rid of Lucifer and the Hell-o-vision. But they don’t. He flushes the pills down the toilet while Lucifer perches on the counter and tells him all the reasons why Dean should leave him behind.
# # #
Dean is talking to the guy behind the check-in at some rinky-dink little motel in Colorado. Sam is watching the world as it’s swallowed by darkness, Dean’s soul ripped out by angels, Sam’s body flayed apart by demons. Sam is standing very still, and he doesn’t reply when Dean says his name, jangling the keys to their room in one hand.
He snaps back to his body, to reality. Dean is holding Sam’s arm at the elbow joint, digging his thumb in hard enough to make Sam’s entire forearm light up with pain. He doesn’t say anything to Sam, just lets go and walks away. Sam trails after him, his own hand over the ache, pressing it in deeper.
# # #
Sam, honestly, is kind of used to Lucifer’s bitchy side. They’re hurtful, the things he says, but they’re an old hurt, playing on Sam’s insecurities. He starts reading self-help books.
Anything worth having is worth fighting for.
This too shall pass.
Progress, not perfection.
It could be worse.
A good man is hard to find.
# # #
“You seem better,” Dean says, cutting into Lucifer’s monologue about how Sam destroys everything he loves. He looks suspicious. “Are you better or are you just faking better better?”
Sam shrugs. His chicken ceasar is disappointing, the lettuce is seriously wilted. He steals a few of Dean’s sweet-potato fries because Dean prefers regular fries, so they were for him anyway. “You know that nagging voice in your head? The self-doubt, the guilt, that sort of shit?”
Dean looks stricken, then guilty, then he puts his game face on. “We’re not talking about me,” he says.
Sam thinks of their shared heaven, of Dean’s happiest memories. Of Dean as a little kid, already taking on the burdens of his fucked up family. He wants, abruptly, to hug his brother. He doesn’t.
Lucifer carries on in the background.
“Yeah, no,” Sam says. “I was talking about me. All that stuff just has a voice and a face now, and after a while you kind of learn to tune it out.” He smirks at Dean because he needs to make sure this moment goes down right. “Got enough practice tuning out annoying voices,” he says, and kicks his brother gently under the table.
Dean kicks him back. “Bitch,” he says.
“Worthless, broken, sack of problems,” Lucifer says.
“Jerk,” says Sam.
# # #
Sometimes though, it’s not just Lucifer taunting him with psych 101 bullshit.
Dean is hiccoughing, that’s how scared he is. “Wake up, Sammy,” he begs. “Sammy. Don’t you check out on me now.”
Sam’s entire mouth and neck hurt from clenching his teeth. He’s pulled a muscle in his shoulder, it feels like. He is on the ground by the side of the two-lane highway. They’d stopped so he could piss, he remembers that. Sam is lying on his side in the grass next to the two-lane highway with his brother spooned up behind him, holding him like Sam is six years old and scared of the dark.
“What?” Sam says. He hurts all over. The ratty blanket from the trunk of the car is draped over him and Dean’s jacket has been stuffed under his head.
Dean scrambles into a sitting position, nearly kneeing Sam in the face in his rush to scramble to where Sam can see him. “You had a fucking seizure,” he says. “You’ve been out for a half hour.” His hands are steady as he helps Sam sit up, slowly, carefully. “What happened?”
Sam brain floods his body with signals that are lies. They make him believe he’s in Hell. They stress his system until he seizes. That is what happened and they both know it. “I don’t remember,” Sam says, because he has no way to explain to Dean what it’s like.
# # #
They’re sitting in the Impala outside a bar they haven’t gone into yet. Dean has his hands on the wheel and the engine is running like they’re ready to make a getaway. “The thing about angels,” Dean says, out of nowhere. “The thing is that they don’t understand love. They talk a good game, but they don’t get it. Demons, sure, they were human, but angels aren’t made for it.”
Sam doesn’t say anything. Out of the corner of his eye Dean’s face is awash in the glow of hellfire. His eyes are black and his face is spattered with blood.
“If you don’t understand love, you can’t destroy it. That’s how you know it’s shit you’re making up yourself,” Dean says. “Lucifer doesn’t know how to hurt you like a human would, like a demon.”
He doesn’t say, like I know how to. Sam isn’t sure what Dean is asking, or offering, or sharing. He knows his brother has his fair share of PTSD from his time down under, but good luck getting him to talk about that.
“Christo,” Sam says, turning to look at his black-eyed brother.
Dean flinches. Then he gets the joke.
“Oh shut up,” he says.
“Sure you haven’t been possessed by a little girl?” Sam asks. “Because that sounded like you just said you love me.”
Dean groans and turns the car off. “I swear I will end you,” he says. He grins at Sam. Dean, the foundation, the cornerstone of Sam’s reality.
Know thyself, say Sam’s self-help books.
More importantly, Sam knows Dean. He’s beaten the devil in the real world, he’s beaten him in his own head. He can figure out this Hell bullshit.
“Wuv,” Sam says. “Twue wuv.”
“Soulmate,” Dean fires back.
“Gay,” Sam says in his best valley-girl impression.
“So’s your face,” Dean says. His eyes are very green when he leans over and kisses Sam.
# # #
“I’m not going to die,” Sam tells Dean in the bar, over a truly mediocre micro brew. “Or leave. Or whatever.” He lines up a shot. “Yellow ball, corner pocket.”
Dean hasn’t been able to stop smiling. Every time he looks at Sam his ears go red. It’s fucking adorable. Sam can’t wait to tease him forever. “Uh, okay, Francis,” Dean says.
Lucifer makes Sam mess up his shot. That’s what he tells Dean anyway.
Later, on their way to the motel, Sam has another catatonic episode where he’s back in Hell and Dean freaks out. Weirdly Sam calms himself down by calming Dean down and while they’re arguing, and Dean is acting like a total suck about the whole thing, Sam gets them a room with a single bed. Dean bitches and moans and he hogs all the covers and kicks Sam in his sleep but they both manage to get through the night without any nightmares.
“Hey,” Dean says, the next morning, through a mouthful of toothpaste. “Remember when you had that weird eye-swelling thing? You freaked out when they gave you that adrenaline shot even though there wasn’t anything wrong.” He spits, flecks of white on the mirror.
“Not really,” Sam says. “Why?” He considers growing a moustache, decides against it.
“I just remembered that,” Dean says. “Wondered if that’s what the whole Hell thing was like. Crossed wires, you know?”
Sam doesn’t remember, but it sounds about right. Anyway, he doesn’t need to remember; he knows Dean. Dean knows him. “Sure,” Sam says, and digs his elbow into Dean’s ribs. “Could you move over already?” There’s not enough room for him and Dean in front of the sink, but with the both of them crammed in so tightly, there’s no space for Lucifer either.
End.