Fic: Hey Pretty (I built the growl in the voice I fear)
Title: Hey Pretty (I built the growl in the voice I fear)
Author: tawg
Word count: ~3,200
Rating: PG
Pairings/characters: Sam, Dean, Bobby, Castiel, Anael, Ruby (gen fic)
Notes: Written for the ohsam commentfic meme. Title is from the song "Hey Pretty" by Poe.
Summary: When the hell hounds drag Dean off, they take a swipe at Sam too. Sam is still the same person underneath the scars, but it's hard to act the same when everything is so different. Season four AU.
“That was damn stupid,” Bobby says as they drive to the emergency room. Well, Bobby drives. Sam has his shirt pressed to his face in the hopes of keeping the flesh in place.
“That was really, really goddamn stupid,” Bobby continues. He’s not yelling, because Bobby has never been one to yell after the fact, just talking levelly and driving the Impala and pausing every now and then so Sam can grunt, can let him know that he hasn’t suffocated on blood and flannel. Dean would be yelling, and the absent chiding only adds to Sam’s unease.
“Wrestling with a hell hound? Definitely one of the stupidest things I have ever seen one of you boys do.” There’s a long, heavy pause then. But there are things to do, and faces to put back together, and Sam is in too much pain to have the energy to start grieving. “You can’t follow him everywhere,” Bobby says quietly. The car is slowing down and Sam takes a deep, shuddering breath. “World ain’t right without at least one Winchester giving me hell.”
And that’s the last they talk for a long while. Bobby leads him into the emergency, and Sam feels a hard and painful twist in his chest when Bobby says, “My boy and I were walking back from the bar and this monster of a dog just leaps out of nowhere. He’s meant to be heading back to college in a few days-”
There are injections, and antiseptics, and Bobby’s concerned narration in the back ground. He’s a good actor, Sam realises as he fields awkward questions and observations. “There’s a chunk of bone taken out of the bridge of his nose. What kind of a dog was this?” But Bobby has an answer for everything.
There are talks of reconstructive surgery and skin grafts, and Sam has to grab someone (he thinks it’s a nurse, but his eyes have been closed since claws bit into skin) and rasps out, “I don’t have health insurance. Just…” I just want my brother. “Just put me back together, okay?”
But Sam will see Dean soon enough. His body is shoved in the trunk of the Impala. Sam fails miserably at biting back a hysterical laugh, and the doctors put him under.
*
It’s not too bad. That’s what Sam tells himself over and over. Scars fade, and some of them might even fill out over the years. And in his line of work a pretty face can be as much of a hindrance as it is a help. Both of his eyes still work, though there was some initial concern with the right one. His eyelid was torn up pretty bad, and he’d had gauze over it for a week. He’d hated that feeling - stitches pressing against his eyeball. There’s a gap in his eyelashes now where the line of red cuts through his eyelid. It’s what he fixates on when he has to stare at his reflection, that little lane cut through the even line.
It’s easier to look at than the thick line cut across his cheek, biting deep into his nose. Those stitches are still in place, the skin still pulled tight and uneasy. It’s easier to look at than his temple, the bald stripe cutting up from the top of his ear and then petering out somewhere in the middle of his forehead. Like there hadn’t been enough to stare at before the decoration. There are stitches in his shoulder, too, some deep wounds carved into the top of his chest. But those can be covered up and worked around and lied about with ease when a woman presses her fingers against them as Sam runs his hands over the smooth skin of her sides in return. Sam is used to lying about his body, about the tally of jobs gone wrong that decorate it, but his face… that had always been his.
“You got ugly quick without me to watch your back,” Ruby says when she finds him again. Sam makes a face at her, but it’s shallow and awkward. His face won’t be his own until the skin finishes knitting together, and until then he’s overly conscious of every torn muscle and the risk of skin tearing if he bitchfaces too hard.
Dean would be having a field day with this, if he weren’t in hell. Sam wonders if he can get a demon to pass a message on to Dean. Even with all of the torture and fire and brimstone, Sam figures Dean would probably still be able to laugh at his fuckup of a little brother.
It’s not too bad. Really.
*
Sam is getting better at hiding in plain sight. He can smile at waitresses in diners and say “Hunting accident,” before they push through their pause. He can act like a normal guy who just happened to get his face torn up and stitched back together. He can be so friendly and sweet that the wariness fades away and is replaced by pity. And pity isn’t… it’s not something that he wants, but it’s better.
But he prefers the night. The darkness is good for moving, good for stalking. The night is for hunting, and Sam has wasted too much time in his life with being distracted by the sun.
Bobby had insisted that Sam stayed put until his face was mostly-healed, and Sam got out of there fast when the stitches came out. Bobby knows about scars, about healing, and Sam is grateful for the care. He hasn’t really had that before, someone telling him to sit the damn hell down and just wait. And if Sam is going to get Dean back, Bobby’s books are an asset. But Sam couldn’t stay long. Because Bobby only ever looks at his scars - objective assessing stares, making sure the stitches stay clean and the massive tube of scar reduction cream at least pretends to do its job. All that focus and Sam just wants to wave his hand in front of Bobby’s face and say, hey, I’m still here under all of this mess. Remember me?
Ruby tells him that there might be a way to speed up the healing, that demon blood would fix him right up. Sam pushes her away when she tries to kiss him, pushes away the bloody palm she holds under his nose. He’s lost a month of his life to his stupid face and those stupid scars. Dean has lost a more than that and Sam doesn’t have the time any more to feel sorry for himself.
“You won’t ever get laid again with a face like that,” Ruby tells him.
“Really not the goal here,” Sam replies. Ruby would probably be up for it, but Sam has never let her kiss him. The playthings of hell have had enough fun with his face as it is. He doesn’t like anyone getting too close. He doesn’t even like the stares, the children pointing, but it’s still so much better than cool, gloved fingertips on his face and sad eyes breaking that expression of professional interest. Sam is okay with never having sex again, he just wishes he could escape that curious pity. Wishes he could escape the world that he was once so desperate to be part of. He doesn’t fit there, and that is more obvious now than ever before.
He holds his head high when he meets hunters, too high for eye contact. All hunters have scars. It makes him more recognisable, but also more formidable. Hunters are scared of him now, this crazy boy who took on a hell hound, who talks about ripping the ground open to get his brother back. Ruby likes it, likes the power that comes from fear, but it makes Sam’s skin crawl. He remembers Ellen talking about hunters who go wrong inside. He doesn’t want to be one of them, doesn’t want to turn into a monster himself just because he looks like one on the outside and feels like one on the inside. There’s a distinction there somewhere, a line that he can’t quite see.
But demons, those he stares right in the eye. They tease and they taunt - Sam is hell’s very own dog-faced boy. They tell him that the hound who got him so good is getting fed well, growing plump off Dean’s flesh. And Sam stares those demons right in the eye as he slams the knife home, watching them light up and fade out. The pull of the scars feels good then, feels reassuring and real. It’s not an act, snarling into those twisted faces. It’s a relief.
*
“So what the hell happened to you?” Dean asks when they’re finally sitting down across from one another. Four months and forty demonic years from that pretty little house in the suburbs where a stupid plan had lived up to its reputation.
Sam tilts his head forward, hiding behind his bangs, and laughs. Because, seriously? Dean’s spent however long in hell and he’s worried about Sam? He looks up at his brother with his new, lopsided smile, and waits for Dean to finish taking him in. It’s an act; Sam isn’t really comfortable smiling anymore. But it’s an important act and Sam puts his all into it for Dean. Anyone else, and Sam would keep his head ducked down to avoid attention. But this is Dean, and if he wants to look he’s going to.
“Did you know that you can pick a hell hound up by the scruff of its neck?” he asks. “They don’t like it.”
“You took on a hell hound?”
Sam shrugs. “I got one off you. What about you?” Sam asks, keen to move on. “Don’t tell me you got out of hell looking as pretty as when you went in.”
There’s a pause, and then Dean pushes one sleeve up. Sam raises his good eyebrow. “Wow,” he says. “That’s different.”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “The whole ‘coming back’ thing has been pretty different.” There’s a pause, and Sam wonders if Dean wants to ask Sam if it was like this the one time he died, that one stupid awful time when Dean did everything and anything and the one thing he shouldn’t have to get him back.
“I tried,” Sam says, surprising himself. “I tried everything.” He smiles his lopsided smile and looks down at the table, because Dean being gone still hurts in a way that the itch of healing skin had never been able to distract him from. Even Dean sitting across from him with that same easy sprawl of his doesn’t ease the pain. Because Dean is different; there’s something different in his gaze and different in his face. And he’s looking at Sam like he’s trying to find his brother under those slashes and the changed line of Sam’s nose and he just keeps looking, keeps missing the fact that Sam is right there in front of him. “We went through so many demons. They started coming to the crossroads with bodyguards. I was getting ready to bust down there and get you.”
Dean snorts. “I would have kicked your ass if you ever set foot there. You and Bobby kicking ass for me up here? That’s cool.”
Sam worries at his bottom lip for a moment. “Me and Ruby,” he finally corrects, and fully anticipates the look Dean gives him. “She had the contacts.”
“I thought she was dead?”
Sam shrugs. “So were you.”
*
Sam finds it horribly ironic that Dean tells people off for staring. “Haven’t you ever seen someone who cut themself shaving before?” he snaps at motel receptionists who pause in making a booking when Sam steps through the doors. “My brother got something on his face?” he’ll ask icily when a waitress sucks a breath through her teeth when Sam looks up at her to give his order.
Dean’s still looking at the gash of red across Sam’s face instead of meeting his eyes. But compared to before, compared to no Dean at all… It’s better. It’s not so bad.
*
Sam isn’t good with people any more, and Dean struggles to fill Sam’s ‘good guy with the puppy dog eyes’ role. Dean has to talk to the high schoolers; Dean has to fake being a police officer on his own; Dean has to talk to doctors and teachers and find some kind of credibility deep inside himself. Sam is too recognisable. Sam is too impatient. Sam makes people uneasy. Dean may be wrecked and ruined inside after his time in hell - and he is, he tries to hide it from Sam but while Dean is staring at Sam’s mess of a face Sam is looking right down deep into Dean’s soul - but at least it’s a kind of fucked up that is easy to hide.
When Sam had first tumbled back into hunting, when he’d first finally understood that angry constant burn for revenge, he’d needed that connection with ordinary people. He’d needed that idle conversation about the weather and how a stranger’s day was going. He’d needed moments of being normal, keeping the skills of small talk fresh and easy. He realises now that he’d needed it because he’d assumed that he would go back one day. But each year is taking him further away; he can’t even see that good path he was on through the brambles and tangles he’s been caught up in. Psychic powers, devil’s gate, Dean dying, and now the seals breaking all over the place. Sam can only slip into the role of the normal guy for short moments now; a costume that doesn’t fit and his face is no longer suited to acting.
He likes the messy history of Halloween, the ghosts and demons and the odd comfort in having a ‘peak season’ for hunting, but the holiday has always rubbed him the wrong way. Monsters in plain sight and somehow people can laugh at that, can think that it’s all just so much fun. But this mauled face of his casts the holiday in a new light. It’s the old, unblemished Sam that would feel like a mask now and Sam is sick of the awkward jokes that the people in this town are making about him getting into costume early. But he listens to Dean bitch about witches, and he does the kinds of research that don’t involve talking to people, and he looks up with a wry expression of irritation when he hears something fluttering in the non-existent breeze of the motel room.
And a pair of hard blue eyes look back. Two hands clasp his own large paw, and he hears a rough and tumble voice say, “Sam Winchester, the boy with the demon blood. It is good to see that you are well.” And there’s no irony in there, none at all. There is no pause or horror, no gaze flitting all over his face like a bug unable to settle. It’s the first time someone has looked in his eyes first and foremost since the day that Dean died, and it makes something deep in Sam ache.
“I don’t know how you handle that stare,” Dean remarks later. “I always feel like he’s poking around in my brain or something.”
“It’s a nice change to what I usually get,” Sam replies. Dean gives him a sideways look, and doesn’t answer.
*
Sam finds it impossibly frustrating that of all of the people in his life at the moment, Castiel is the only one to look him in the eyes and stare at Sam instead of the scars. Castiel is also the only person in Sam’s life who apparently has no interest whatsoever in Sam, beyond the cursory link between Sam and Dean’s general wellbeing.
During the search for Anna’s grace, she shies away from Sam. Looks anywhere but directly at him until Dean snaps at her and Anna snaps back with just as much legitimacy and the two of them sulk and smoulder at each other. Sam is largely unsurprised when they sleep together. But Anael is a different creature and she stares right into Sam with the same intensity Castiel holds, though her view is perhaps angrier. That’s how Sam equates Castiel to the good little solider and Anael to the role of deserter, the child who left. While he’s sure no angel would appreciate the sentiment, Sam feels an affinity with her. Envy, too, as she had so many years of a normal life while even at his very best Sam had never been able to hide the reality from himself.
“You’re not afraid to look at me anymore,” he comments shortly after she has reclaimed her wings. He has a string of voicemails on his phone from Ruby, but he’s not interested in arguing with the demon about her blood and why he won’t drink it. He was looking to be alone, and it is only when Anael joins him that he realises that no, that’s never been what he has wanted.
Anael is beautiful, and ethereal, and her presence speaks of more years than Sam can comprehend. The two of them could not be more different by design.
“Bodies are impermanent,” Anael replies. “It’s the soul that is important.”
Sam looks out at the gravel of the parking lot, and doesn’t mind at all when Anael keeps staring at him. “And how does my soul look?”
Anael looks at him then, looks deep into him and Sam can feel the prickle of her presence under his skin, the burn of her in places that are broken. “You have not taken the paths that were expected of you,” she replies. Angels, Sam is learning, do not like answering questions.
“I don’t think I’m very good at following paths,” Sam admits. He strayed off the path his father had laid out for him, the path to law school that he had determined for himself. He’d even strayed from whatever path the yellow-eyed bastard had set him on, judging by the lack of psychic powers of late. “I think I’m better at screwing things up.”
Anael reaches out and wraps her hand around three of Sam’s fingers, as much of his hand that her own can embrace. She smiles at Sam (a ghost of her human smile, but confident and beautiful all the same) and Sam smiles back, making the scars on the right side of his face crinkle stiffly. “You are,” she replies. “But it’s not so bad.”
*
Time may heal a wound, but it does nothing to erase the scar left behind. Sam is never going to be free of the cruel lines of red on his face, of the stares and the pauses, the wrought iron fence keeping him locked away from the world. But Dean will never be free of his time in hell, of the sick need to sacrifice himself for others. The angels by their sides will never be free of their respective betrayals, of the decisions they have made and the plans they have disrupted. The world will never be free of the slow and steady creep, creep, creep of demons out of hell.
But Dean is looking him in the eyes, and shocked stares soften when Sam smiles. It’s not so bad, and - for this one thing at the very least - it’s getting better.
Author: tawg
Word count: ~3,200
Rating: PG
Pairings/characters: Sam, Dean, Bobby, Castiel, Anael, Ruby (gen fic)
Notes: Written for the ohsam commentfic meme. Title is from the song "Hey Pretty" by Poe.
Summary: When the hell hounds drag Dean off, they take a swipe at Sam too. Sam is still the same person underneath the scars, but it's hard to act the same when everything is so different. Season four AU.
“That was damn stupid,” Bobby says as they drive to the emergency room. Well, Bobby drives. Sam has his shirt pressed to his face in the hopes of keeping the flesh in place.
“That was really, really goddamn stupid,” Bobby continues. He’s not yelling, because Bobby has never been one to yell after the fact, just talking levelly and driving the Impala and pausing every now and then so Sam can grunt, can let him know that he hasn’t suffocated on blood and flannel. Dean would be yelling, and the absent chiding only adds to Sam’s unease.
“Wrestling with a hell hound? Definitely one of the stupidest things I have ever seen one of you boys do.” There’s a long, heavy pause then. But there are things to do, and faces to put back together, and Sam is in too much pain to have the energy to start grieving. “You can’t follow him everywhere,” Bobby says quietly. The car is slowing down and Sam takes a deep, shuddering breath. “World ain’t right without at least one Winchester giving me hell.”
And that’s the last they talk for a long while. Bobby leads him into the emergency, and Sam feels a hard and painful twist in his chest when Bobby says, “My boy and I were walking back from the bar and this monster of a dog just leaps out of nowhere. He’s meant to be heading back to college in a few days-”
There are injections, and antiseptics, and Bobby’s concerned narration in the back ground. He’s a good actor, Sam realises as he fields awkward questions and observations. “There’s a chunk of bone taken out of the bridge of his nose. What kind of a dog was this?” But Bobby has an answer for everything.
There are talks of reconstructive surgery and skin grafts, and Sam has to grab someone (he thinks it’s a nurse, but his eyes have been closed since claws bit into skin) and rasps out, “I don’t have health insurance. Just…” I just want my brother. “Just put me back together, okay?”
But Sam will see Dean soon enough. His body is shoved in the trunk of the Impala. Sam fails miserably at biting back a hysterical laugh, and the doctors put him under.
*
It’s not too bad. That’s what Sam tells himself over and over. Scars fade, and some of them might even fill out over the years. And in his line of work a pretty face can be as much of a hindrance as it is a help. Both of his eyes still work, though there was some initial concern with the right one. His eyelid was torn up pretty bad, and he’d had gauze over it for a week. He’d hated that feeling - stitches pressing against his eyeball. There’s a gap in his eyelashes now where the line of red cuts through his eyelid. It’s what he fixates on when he has to stare at his reflection, that little lane cut through the even line.
It’s easier to look at than the thick line cut across his cheek, biting deep into his nose. Those stitches are still in place, the skin still pulled tight and uneasy. It’s easier to look at than his temple, the bald stripe cutting up from the top of his ear and then petering out somewhere in the middle of his forehead. Like there hadn’t been enough to stare at before the decoration. There are stitches in his shoulder, too, some deep wounds carved into the top of his chest. But those can be covered up and worked around and lied about with ease when a woman presses her fingers against them as Sam runs his hands over the smooth skin of her sides in return. Sam is used to lying about his body, about the tally of jobs gone wrong that decorate it, but his face… that had always been his.
“You got ugly quick without me to watch your back,” Ruby says when she finds him again. Sam makes a face at her, but it’s shallow and awkward. His face won’t be his own until the skin finishes knitting together, and until then he’s overly conscious of every torn muscle and the risk of skin tearing if he bitchfaces too hard.
Dean would be having a field day with this, if he weren’t in hell. Sam wonders if he can get a demon to pass a message on to Dean. Even with all of the torture and fire and brimstone, Sam figures Dean would probably still be able to laugh at his fuckup of a little brother.
It’s not too bad. Really.
*
Sam is getting better at hiding in plain sight. He can smile at waitresses in diners and say “Hunting accident,” before they push through their pause. He can act like a normal guy who just happened to get his face torn up and stitched back together. He can be so friendly and sweet that the wariness fades away and is replaced by pity. And pity isn’t… it’s not something that he wants, but it’s better.
But he prefers the night. The darkness is good for moving, good for stalking. The night is for hunting, and Sam has wasted too much time in his life with being distracted by the sun.
Bobby had insisted that Sam stayed put until his face was mostly-healed, and Sam got out of there fast when the stitches came out. Bobby knows about scars, about healing, and Sam is grateful for the care. He hasn’t really had that before, someone telling him to sit the damn hell down and just wait. And if Sam is going to get Dean back, Bobby’s books are an asset. But Sam couldn’t stay long. Because Bobby only ever looks at his scars - objective assessing stares, making sure the stitches stay clean and the massive tube of scar reduction cream at least pretends to do its job. All that focus and Sam just wants to wave his hand in front of Bobby’s face and say, hey, I’m still here under all of this mess. Remember me?
Ruby tells him that there might be a way to speed up the healing, that demon blood would fix him right up. Sam pushes her away when she tries to kiss him, pushes away the bloody palm she holds under his nose. He’s lost a month of his life to his stupid face and those stupid scars. Dean has lost a more than that and Sam doesn’t have the time any more to feel sorry for himself.
“You won’t ever get laid again with a face like that,” Ruby tells him.
“Really not the goal here,” Sam replies. Ruby would probably be up for it, but Sam has never let her kiss him. The playthings of hell have had enough fun with his face as it is. He doesn’t like anyone getting too close. He doesn’t even like the stares, the children pointing, but it’s still so much better than cool, gloved fingertips on his face and sad eyes breaking that expression of professional interest. Sam is okay with never having sex again, he just wishes he could escape that curious pity. Wishes he could escape the world that he was once so desperate to be part of. He doesn’t fit there, and that is more obvious now than ever before.
He holds his head high when he meets hunters, too high for eye contact. All hunters have scars. It makes him more recognisable, but also more formidable. Hunters are scared of him now, this crazy boy who took on a hell hound, who talks about ripping the ground open to get his brother back. Ruby likes it, likes the power that comes from fear, but it makes Sam’s skin crawl. He remembers Ellen talking about hunters who go wrong inside. He doesn’t want to be one of them, doesn’t want to turn into a monster himself just because he looks like one on the outside and feels like one on the inside. There’s a distinction there somewhere, a line that he can’t quite see.
But demons, those he stares right in the eye. They tease and they taunt - Sam is hell’s very own dog-faced boy. They tell him that the hound who got him so good is getting fed well, growing plump off Dean’s flesh. And Sam stares those demons right in the eye as he slams the knife home, watching them light up and fade out. The pull of the scars feels good then, feels reassuring and real. It’s not an act, snarling into those twisted faces. It’s a relief.
*
“So what the hell happened to you?” Dean asks when they’re finally sitting down across from one another. Four months and forty demonic years from that pretty little house in the suburbs where a stupid plan had lived up to its reputation.
Sam tilts his head forward, hiding behind his bangs, and laughs. Because, seriously? Dean’s spent however long in hell and he’s worried about Sam? He looks up at his brother with his new, lopsided smile, and waits for Dean to finish taking him in. It’s an act; Sam isn’t really comfortable smiling anymore. But it’s an important act and Sam puts his all into it for Dean. Anyone else, and Sam would keep his head ducked down to avoid attention. But this is Dean, and if he wants to look he’s going to.
“Did you know that you can pick a hell hound up by the scruff of its neck?” he asks. “They don’t like it.”
“You took on a hell hound?”
Sam shrugs. “I got one off you. What about you?” Sam asks, keen to move on. “Don’t tell me you got out of hell looking as pretty as when you went in.”
There’s a pause, and then Dean pushes one sleeve up. Sam raises his good eyebrow. “Wow,” he says. “That’s different.”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “The whole ‘coming back’ thing has been pretty different.” There’s a pause, and Sam wonders if Dean wants to ask Sam if it was like this the one time he died, that one stupid awful time when Dean did everything and anything and the one thing he shouldn’t have to get him back.
“I tried,” Sam says, surprising himself. “I tried everything.” He smiles his lopsided smile and looks down at the table, because Dean being gone still hurts in a way that the itch of healing skin had never been able to distract him from. Even Dean sitting across from him with that same easy sprawl of his doesn’t ease the pain. Because Dean is different; there’s something different in his gaze and different in his face. And he’s looking at Sam like he’s trying to find his brother under those slashes and the changed line of Sam’s nose and he just keeps looking, keeps missing the fact that Sam is right there in front of him. “We went through so many demons. They started coming to the crossroads with bodyguards. I was getting ready to bust down there and get you.”
Dean snorts. “I would have kicked your ass if you ever set foot there. You and Bobby kicking ass for me up here? That’s cool.”
Sam worries at his bottom lip for a moment. “Me and Ruby,” he finally corrects, and fully anticipates the look Dean gives him. “She had the contacts.”
“I thought she was dead?”
Sam shrugs. “So were you.”
*
Sam finds it horribly ironic that Dean tells people off for staring. “Haven’t you ever seen someone who cut themself shaving before?” he snaps at motel receptionists who pause in making a booking when Sam steps through the doors. “My brother got something on his face?” he’ll ask icily when a waitress sucks a breath through her teeth when Sam looks up at her to give his order.
Dean’s still looking at the gash of red across Sam’s face instead of meeting his eyes. But compared to before, compared to no Dean at all… It’s better. It’s not so bad.
*
Sam isn’t good with people any more, and Dean struggles to fill Sam’s ‘good guy with the puppy dog eyes’ role. Dean has to talk to the high schoolers; Dean has to fake being a police officer on his own; Dean has to talk to doctors and teachers and find some kind of credibility deep inside himself. Sam is too recognisable. Sam is too impatient. Sam makes people uneasy. Dean may be wrecked and ruined inside after his time in hell - and he is, he tries to hide it from Sam but while Dean is staring at Sam’s mess of a face Sam is looking right down deep into Dean’s soul - but at least it’s a kind of fucked up that is easy to hide.
When Sam had first tumbled back into hunting, when he’d first finally understood that angry constant burn for revenge, he’d needed that connection with ordinary people. He’d needed that idle conversation about the weather and how a stranger’s day was going. He’d needed moments of being normal, keeping the skills of small talk fresh and easy. He realises now that he’d needed it because he’d assumed that he would go back one day. But each year is taking him further away; he can’t even see that good path he was on through the brambles and tangles he’s been caught up in. Psychic powers, devil’s gate, Dean dying, and now the seals breaking all over the place. Sam can only slip into the role of the normal guy for short moments now; a costume that doesn’t fit and his face is no longer suited to acting.
He likes the messy history of Halloween, the ghosts and demons and the odd comfort in having a ‘peak season’ for hunting, but the holiday has always rubbed him the wrong way. Monsters in plain sight and somehow people can laugh at that, can think that it’s all just so much fun. But this mauled face of his casts the holiday in a new light. It’s the old, unblemished Sam that would feel like a mask now and Sam is sick of the awkward jokes that the people in this town are making about him getting into costume early. But he listens to Dean bitch about witches, and he does the kinds of research that don’t involve talking to people, and he looks up with a wry expression of irritation when he hears something fluttering in the non-existent breeze of the motel room.
And a pair of hard blue eyes look back. Two hands clasp his own large paw, and he hears a rough and tumble voice say, “Sam Winchester, the boy with the demon blood. It is good to see that you are well.” And there’s no irony in there, none at all. There is no pause or horror, no gaze flitting all over his face like a bug unable to settle. It’s the first time someone has looked in his eyes first and foremost since the day that Dean died, and it makes something deep in Sam ache.
“I don’t know how you handle that stare,” Dean remarks later. “I always feel like he’s poking around in my brain or something.”
“It’s a nice change to what I usually get,” Sam replies. Dean gives him a sideways look, and doesn’t answer.
*
Sam finds it impossibly frustrating that of all of the people in his life at the moment, Castiel is the only one to look him in the eyes and stare at Sam instead of the scars. Castiel is also the only person in Sam’s life who apparently has no interest whatsoever in Sam, beyond the cursory link between Sam and Dean’s general wellbeing.
During the search for Anna’s grace, she shies away from Sam. Looks anywhere but directly at him until Dean snaps at her and Anna snaps back with just as much legitimacy and the two of them sulk and smoulder at each other. Sam is largely unsurprised when they sleep together. But Anael is a different creature and she stares right into Sam with the same intensity Castiel holds, though her view is perhaps angrier. That’s how Sam equates Castiel to the good little solider and Anael to the role of deserter, the child who left. While he’s sure no angel would appreciate the sentiment, Sam feels an affinity with her. Envy, too, as she had so many years of a normal life while even at his very best Sam had never been able to hide the reality from himself.
“You’re not afraid to look at me anymore,” he comments shortly after she has reclaimed her wings. He has a string of voicemails on his phone from Ruby, but he’s not interested in arguing with the demon about her blood and why he won’t drink it. He was looking to be alone, and it is only when Anael joins him that he realises that no, that’s never been what he has wanted.
Anael is beautiful, and ethereal, and her presence speaks of more years than Sam can comprehend. The two of them could not be more different by design.
“Bodies are impermanent,” Anael replies. “It’s the soul that is important.”
Sam looks out at the gravel of the parking lot, and doesn’t mind at all when Anael keeps staring at him. “And how does my soul look?”
Anael looks at him then, looks deep into him and Sam can feel the prickle of her presence under his skin, the burn of her in places that are broken. “You have not taken the paths that were expected of you,” she replies. Angels, Sam is learning, do not like answering questions.
“I don’t think I’m very good at following paths,” Sam admits. He strayed off the path his father had laid out for him, the path to law school that he had determined for himself. He’d even strayed from whatever path the yellow-eyed bastard had set him on, judging by the lack of psychic powers of late. “I think I’m better at screwing things up.”
Anael reaches out and wraps her hand around three of Sam’s fingers, as much of his hand that her own can embrace. She smiles at Sam (a ghost of her human smile, but confident and beautiful all the same) and Sam smiles back, making the scars on the right side of his face crinkle stiffly. “You are,” she replies. “But it’s not so bad.”
*
Time may heal a wound, but it does nothing to erase the scar left behind. Sam is never going to be free of the cruel lines of red on his face, of the stares and the pauses, the wrought iron fence keeping him locked away from the world. But Dean will never be free of his time in hell, of the sick need to sacrifice himself for others. The angels by their sides will never be free of their respective betrayals, of the decisions they have made and the plans they have disrupted. The world will never be free of the slow and steady creep, creep, creep of demons out of hell.
But Dean is looking him in the eyes, and shocked stares soften when Sam smiles. It’s not so bad, and - for this one thing at the very least - it’s getting better.