Atonement Part Eleven
It’s four days before they’re ready to go back into the Darkness and by that time there are more places covered in the same blankness.
Castiel has not answered their calls. Sam is…Dean doesn’t know what Sam is. Dean buys a Ford Explorer that he names The Full OJ and at a local mechanic’s place, mounts his lightbars on the roof and the front bumper. Sam helps-hands him tools, holds things, fetches beers. He talks less and less. He does the quiet smile thing a lot. It’s the New Sam expression. When Dean gets irritated at Sam or does something that should irritate Sam, he gets an ‘Okay,’ or the quiet smile back at him. It drives him crazy.
It’s the opposite of when he dislocated his shoulder in the fight with the ELO. That was full on Sam. From the way Sam ordered him into the car to the not waiting until the count of three to the checking him for other injuries. It was as familiar as Sam’s hair.
Crowley calls. On his phone.
“What,” Dean says.
“Dean,” Crowley says. “Don’t you miss me? You used to love when I called.”
“Fuck off,” Dean says and hangs up.
The phone rings again and he almost doesn’t answer.
“Look,” Crowley says, “I just wanted you to know that they’ve got Lucy occupied so there won’t be surprise dates with your brother.”
Dean grits his teeth. He is not going to say thank you for the news of Lucifer.
“No love for that tidbit?” Crowley asks. “How is the Holy Sam?”
“I’m going to hang up,” Dean says.
“Word on the street is that you’re tracking my mother.”
How does Crowley know that? Dean is at a garage working on the car.
He can’t help but look around even though there’s no way to tell if there’s a demon around short of walking up to everybody and saying Christo.
“We’ve formed an alliance with Heaven,” Crowley says. “Enemy of my enemy and all that. If you’d like to maybe share some information…”
Dean hangs up. Then he shuts the phone off.
Mounting the actual lightbars on the car hasn’t taken long, the hardest part has been rounding up everything he needed.
It’s when he’s finally finishing up the whole attack of the light brigade thing on the car that he figures out what is it about the Quiet Smile that is driving him nuts. It’s Crowley’s comment, ‘The Holy Sam’ that makes it click. Sam’s smile, his soft ‘okays’, they’re saintly. Positively martyred. It’s ‘I don’t deserve to be pissed at you.’ It’s not martyred the way some people do martyred, that holier-than-thou passive aggressive shit of moral superiority. The problem with Sam being martyred is that Sam has a history of really doing it. Jumping into Hell or The Trials or offering to let Dean take his head off with Death’s scythe.
Dean is crouching in front of the bumper when this hits him. The realization stops him. Scares him.
Sam is sitting in the waiting room with a book, having run out of things to be helpful about. The book, Dean notices, is in Spanish, something called El Castillo Interior, by St. TeresaofÁvila. He is reading with a Spanish/English dictionary beside him.
“Sam,” Dean says. “Lunch.”
Sam looks up. “It’s 3:30 and we ate lunch.”
“Whatever,” Dean says and grabs his brother and hauls him out the door.
“Is this about eating?” Sam asks.
“Get in the Impala,” Dean says. He drives them to a little hole in the wall bar. It’s trying to be a pub and failing. The food is burgers and bratwurst which is distinctly un-English and no one has ever used the dartboard on the back wall. There’s a juke box but it’s off and the place is depressingly silent. Dean points to a booth and gets them two draft beers. He sets one in front of Sam.
Sam is looking at him like he has lost his mind. Normally Sam would know that Dean is on a tear about something and would already be on defense. One more reason Dean thinks Sam shouldn’t get his memory back but it’s an admittedly self-serving one. “What are you planning?” Dean says.
“Planning?” Sam says. He looks genuinely bewildered.
“Yeah, planning,” Dean says.
“I’m not planning anything,” Sam says. “Except what we’ve talked about. Finding Rowena.”
“Look,” Dean says, “I know this mood, Saint Samantha. This is your ‘I have to throw myself on the pyre’ mood.”
“What?” Sam says. Now he really looks confused.
“This is your ‘I’ve really fucked up and now I have to punish myself’ thing,” Dean says.
That’s a silver bullet. Sam takes a hit with that one.
“So what’s the deal?” Dean asks.
Sam decides to take a sip of his beer, stalling. Then he says, “I’m not planning anything, Dean. Swear to God.”
“Don’t bullshit a con man. You don’t remember shit, but I remember everything. I know when you feel bad because you remember when you locked yourself out in sixth grade and I got fired for leaving my job to go let you in. What’s going on?”
“Nothing, man,” Sam says, but he can’t quite look at Dean. “Did you get fired because I locked myself out?”
Dean ignores the attempt to derail the conversation. “So what is it? ‘Cause if you do something stupid I am going to kick your ass.” Dean isn’t quite sure what stupid thing Sam is concocting but that’s the problem with Sam. He is amazingly clever about the stupid ideas he gets. They can come out of far left field. “You can’t do a crossroads deal for something. As far as I can tell, you haven’t been researching a spell or something.”
“I’m not doing anything!” Sam says. “I don’t even know what to do!”
“Do about what?” Dean bores down.
“Fix my mess!” Sam says. “Fix the Darkness!” Sam is loud enough that the bartender is looking at them. She’s not nice looking; more of the hard blond, middle-aged ‘don’t try anything in my bar’ type. The conversation is definitely weird. Not quite ‘let’s gank a werewolf’ weird, but weird.
“He plays a lot of video games,” Dean says to her.
She doesn’t even bother to nod. Just gives them the eye.
Dean was thinking that Sam had something unexpected up his sleeve. But it’s really the oldest and simplest of Sam’s problems, ‘it’s my fault.’ Dean thinks he’s kind of a moron not to have realized that with no memory, Sam would go back to basics. “Look,” he says, “It’s not your mess.”
“I know,” Sam says quietly.
Bullshit. That’s a meaningless ‘I know.’ “I’m the one who got the mark,” Dean points out.
“When most people screw up,” Sam says, “they do something like drive drunk and get in a car accident on the way home and kill one person. When I screw up, thousands-”
“Shut up,” Dean snaps. “I’m not doing this again. Okay? We’re not, we can’t do this stuff anymore.” Sam nods but Dean knows, knows he isn’t getting through. “Little brother,” he says. “Look at me.”
Sam looks up, unwilling but unable not to.
He doesn’t know what he’s going to say until the words come out of his mouth. “Don’t hurt me,” Dean says.
“Hurt you,” Sam says. “I’d never want to hurt you.”
Dean doesn’t know what to say to that because of course Sam doesn’t want to hurt him. That’s how it gets fucked up every time.
“You hate all this,” Sam says. “All this talking.”
Dean does. God he does. He isn’t getting through and it’s just making everything worse. “You think you’re the only one, Sammy. Like you up and invented all the world’s problems all by yourself. Give the rest of us a little credit too.”
Sam looks as if he’s about to argue and then he gets this funny smile and starts to laugh.
“What’s funny,” Dean says, suspicious.
“You’re right. It is a little arrogant on my part.”
Why this makes Sam happy is hard to tell but it clearly does.
#
The next morning they eat breakfast. Sam is eating without fuss which is a good sign for whatever is going on in Sam’s head. Then they are in the Explorer and in no time, in front of the wall of roiling darkness. They have lots of extra gas stashed in the back. They have replacement lights. They have protein bars and Red Bull. They figure they will be in the cloud overnight.
“This still sucks,” Dean says.
“I miss the Impala,” Sam says.
Dean does, too. He rolls forward. The lights work great. He gets twice as much of that clear space in front of the car and about three feet on either side, enough to allow him to see some sense of road. Last time he was following Sam’s blue flannel shirt, the top of Sam’s head almost disappearing into the stuff. Sam has a map spread on his lap. Navigating is going to be strange.
“First turn off is going to be on the right,” Sam says. Dean edges the car to the right side of the road. The plan is to try to see street signs so they have some idea where they are. If they have to, they plan to use the spotlight.
In a way it’s like being underwater. Dean hums “Yellow Submarine” to himself as he drives.
Sam makes an amused sound.
They pass their first body after about two hours of driving. It’s pretty slashed up, crumpled on the edge of the road, a sudden clump of dark dried blood and rags. It’s impossible to tell the gender. Dean has to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting it and Sam gasps out loud.
Dean backs a bit and maneuvers around it. He doesn’t look at Sam.
It takes them about seven hours to go a hundred miles and let’s just say having to stop to pee is…fraught with tension. Dean can’t help thinking, standing with his pants open, pissing into the darkness while Sam stands guard with an angel sword, that this would be a lousy way to die. He has sworn Sam to secrecy if in fact he goes this way.
Dean’s shoulders ache like a mother from tension and he’s thinking of caving in and asking Sam to take over driving when almost out of their clear zone on the left side of the road (the next turn off is a left) he catches a glimpse of a child’s leg. A child walking. And as he does he hears a very little girl-like shriek. Dean slams on the brakes so hard that if he was going more than twenty miles an hour, Sam would be through the windshield. Instead Sam is out of the passenger door with an angel blade in one hand and reaching onto the roof to direct the spotlight. It can only cut through about fifteen or twenty feet of the dark crude but it picks out one, two, three, four, five, six people; a man, a couple of women, and three kids.
“Hey!” Sam shouts.
One of the women and the kids break into a run. Sam shouts, “Wait! We’re not monsters!” And then for good measure, “No somos monstruos!” Sam’s Spanish is mostly menu and tourist stuff but figures that’s something he could whip out in an emergency.
The man calls to the woman who ran and she comes back into the light. Dean can see now that the two kids are tied to her. Everyone has a long length of what looks like clothesline tied around their waist and the kids are tied to the women. Smart thinking.
Sam must wave at them to come over because the man moves warily towards the Explorer. He looks like he’s in his fifties or sixties and has a hard, square, weathered face that makes Dean think of old Texas.
“I’m Sam, this is my brother Dean,” Sam says. Dean can’t see anything but Sam’s legs, he’s standing on the edge of the passenger side so he can reach the spotlight on the roof. “You need to get out of here.”
“Yeah,” the man says. “That’s some rig you’ve got.”
“My brother figured it out,” Sam says. “He’s good with cars.”
“I’m Fritz,” the man says. “That there’s Maria and Evie.” He raises his voice. “Bring the kids over.”
Sam pulls the spotlight off the roof and slams the car door shut with his hip. He’s standing guard with the angel blade and the spotlight, searching the darkness.
Dean opens his door and grabs his angel blade. He opens the back door and the kids climb in and then back to the third seat. “I’m afraid it’s going to be crowded,” he says.
“Beats dying,” Fritz says. “Teagan,” he calls to the older girl; she looks about thirteen, still boyish, “watch your sister. Cary, get in the middle.” Cary is a boy about eight with dark hair and eyes and baggy purple shorts.
Sam is shining the spotlight in long slow sweeps around the car. They’re making a fair amount of noise and that worries Dean.
“Have you seen anything?” Dean asks.
“Just bodies,” Fritz says.
From the backseat Cary says, “Something ate Washington.”
“Who’s Washington?” Dean asks.
“Our cat,” says Teagan.
The women, Maria and Evie, climb into the middle row of seats and Fritz follows them. Dean slams the door just as Sam says calmly, “Incoming.”
Dean says, “Stay here.” He slams the driver’s side door.
The things frozen in the spotlight are a lot like spiders. Pasty pale spiders the size of dogs. They have legs that arch up higher than their bodies and way more eyes than they should, three larger black ones all in a row and then above those a circle of tiny red ones almost like a little crown. They don’t have necks so they turn their whole bodies to look from Sam to Dean. What should be their front legs are actually arms that shade to leathery brown skin ending in almost human hands with black nails.
Sam reaches for the door handle to open the passenger door and climb into the Explorer and the things scuttle forward. He turns to face them and they scuttle a bit back.
“Sam?” Dean asks, coming carefully around the car to stand next to his brother. “Know anything about spider anatomy?”
“No,” Sam says, without taking his eyes off of them. “Any guesses?”
“I’m thinking that circle of eyes is like a target.”
One of them flips a hand out and it’s got a lipless mouth in it’s palm that keeps moving and moving. Like it was mumbling or chewing or God knows what. Isn’t that just charming. A spider with a mouth in the palm of it’s hand. These things are the gift that just keeps on giving.
“Fuck me, I hate my life,” Sam says.
Dean can smell something. A sickly sweet, sour odor like rot and an undercurrent of almost vinegar. Who knew spiders smelled. Who cared?
“Do you think they jump?” Sam asks.
“Jeez, Sammy,” Dean says. “Did you have to ask that? Well, only one way to find out.” He pulls his .45 out left handed. Dad used to make them practice shooting with either hand. Neither of them is very good with their left but the damn things are only twenty feet away and he has all the time in the world to line up a shot. Straight for the big black eye in the middle-
He hits slightly above it but solidly in the head but it doesn’t seem like it makes any difference. The spider things are fast, scuttling forward (but not jumping, thank god for small favors).
Then they are using angel blades as the spider things leap at them. “Don’t get bit!” Dean yells, thinking of venom. Sam’s long arms are an advantage but the things are so fast, they move sideways and backwards as easily as they move forwards and it’s hard to get a sense of how they are going to go. He takes a leg off of the one he’s fighting, and then another. That becomes his plan, a steady battle of attrition. It oozes greenish fluid. Beside him, out of the corner of his eye he sees Sam raise his blade and come straight down right in the center of the circle of red eyes, the target, except at that moment his spider makes a suicide move to slash Sammy open.
Dean, not expecting the thing to drop it’s guard that way, to let him cut off it’s arm and all the legs on that side, is caught on his back foot. He realizes that Sam’s blade is stuck in the other spider.
Dean throws himself forward and feels a razor edged leg rip across his chest as his weight throws the thing on it’s back.
An instant later Sam is lifting him up by his jacket and ramming the angel blade through the abdomen of the beast.
Sam yanks the passenger door open and drags Dean into the seat. “Pull in your legs,” he gasps to Dean, and Dean manages to pull his legs in although he’s seeing black from the pain.
He’s half across the seat when Sammy slams the door. He hears Sam get in the driver’s side and then feels hands on his shirt.
“There’s a green tool box behind the kid’s seat,” Sam says. “It’s first aid.” Then quietly, calmly, “Let go, Dean. Let go of my hands, let me see.” Dean realizes he’s grabbed Sammy’s hands to keep him from touching Dean’s chest because it hurts.
One of the girls says in a small voice, “He’s bleeding.”
“Hand me the tool box,” one of the women says.
Dean’s vision is starting to come back a little. He can see the inside roof of the car now. It’s light blue.
Sam is ripping open his t-shirt.
“I like this t-shirt,” Dean growls.
“Then you shouldn’t have gotten spider guts on it,” Sam says. “Pressure,” he says. Then he puts a handtowel (stolen from motel) against Dean’s chest and it hurts like a “Motherfucker,” Dean says.
“Don’t swear in front of the kids,” Sam says. “You’re bleeding a lot. This one’s gonna scar.”
“Tell Cary chicks dig scars,” Dean says.
“You hear that Cary?” Sam says.
“Yeah,” Dean hears Cary say.
“I don’t know if you should pay too much attention to a guy with spider guts all over his shirt,” Sam says. He’s sounding loose and cool but his hands are telling a bit of a tenser story.
“Is he going to be all right?” one of the girls asks. Dean can’t tell their voices apart. Also, he is starting to feel sick from the blood loss and pain so it’s getting a little less important to pay attention. And the shifter knob is in his back and his head is on Sam’s lap, not the most comfortable position.
One of the women says, “He’ll be all right, baby.”
“Why is there whiskey in the first aid?”
“Sometimes it can help with the pain,” Sam says. “Irrigating,” he says quietly to Dean. The towel lifts and someone in the back seat makes a disturbed kind of noise and then Dean makes an unhappy noise when Sam starts squirting water against the cut. “The solution to pollution is dilution,” Sam quotes. “Dude, you’re bleeding a lot. Gonna have to tie off some of these. I’m going to try some epinephrine. Hold pressure for me?”
Dean thinks the hold pressure is to him but it turns out its to one of the women. She leans between the seats and pushes on the towel. Dean tries to smile at her and looks up at Sam who is upside-down from the way he is laying. Epinephrine is a local anesthetic that also reduces bleeding. They get it through a guy in Canada. He watches Sam load a syringe. When their Dad taught them field medicine it was mostly just pressure and stitch but Sam reads everything and could probably pass an EMT exam by now. Okay, maybe not, because Sam doesn’t give a rat’s ass about things like heart attacks and drug overdoses. Also, Sam has amnesia, which is getting harder and harder to remember. “You remember all this okay?” Dean asks.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Facts and procedural knowledge. You want me to call Cas?”
“Try,” Dean whispers. He is feeling very sketchy about now.
Sam closes his eyes. Dean wonders where Cas could fit in the car.
“Who is Cas?” Fritz asks.
Sam opens his eyes. “Castiel is an Angel of the Lord,” he says. “He raised Dean from perdition and has taken a special interest in him ever since.”
This is met with silence.
After a moment Fritz says, “You’re shittin’ me, boy.”
“Not so much,” Dean says. “Feeling sick, Sam.”
“Tell me if you’re going to throw up and I’ll roll you on your side,” Sam says. “Maria, is there a plastic bag back there?” Sam strokes his hair. “You’re going to be okay, dude. I don’t think Cas can hear.”
“Okay, Doctor Oz, do your thing.”
“Maria,” Sam says, “I’m going to tie off a couple of blood vessels and put some stitches in. Would you do me a favor and keep Dean talking? I want him to stay conscious if he can. You can ask him questions about Led Zeppelin. Who the members of the band are, what instruments they play, what his favorite songs are, things like that.”
“Okay,” Maria says. “Which band is that? I mean, I’ve heard of them, they are like the ones that did that song,” and she starts singing, “The gig is up, the news is out, da-da da-da da da.”
“That’s Styx,” Dean says. “Led Zeppelin is ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”
“Gonna burn a little.” Sam starts giving little injections of the local.
“Oh, they didn’t do like a criminal song?”
Dean tries to think of a criminal song that Led Zeppelin did. “They did a song called ‘Hangman’,” he manages.
“Yeah,” she says, “That one. I always mix that one and the renegade one up. So what’s the big difference between Styx and Led Zeppelin?”
“Blues,” Dean hisses.
By the time Sam has Maria open up the Vicryl suture and the suture needle and starts stitches, Dean is fighting to keep from blacking out and incoherently trying to explain John Bottom’s double pedal on the kick drum which to be honest he never really understood when he wasn’t in pain. Sam finally stops and he lets Dean just be there for awhile.
“That’s cool,” one of the girls says from the back seat.
Sam laughs quietly.
Maria says, “You gonna be a doctor, Teagan?”
“Okay,” Sam says, “Sit up?” Dean allows Sam to help him up and they have Teagan find a bottle of Pedialyte in the back. Sam explains to Teagan that when someone loses blood it’s important to hydrate and Pedialyte and Gatorade both have electrolytes but even water is good.
“Pedialyte isn’t as good as the blue Gatorade,” Dean says.
“Frost,” Cary corrects from the back.
Dean sips Pedialyte while Sam is driving and Fritz is giving Sam directions.
“Dean,” Sam says. “We’re going to carry you.”
“I can walk,” Dean says. “You just help.”
“I can sing,” Sam says, “but it’s not pretty and neither is your walking. We’re going to do the old chair carry, okay? Put your good arm across Fritz’ shoulder.”
“Why not yours?”
“Because I’m taller,” Sam says. “Fritz will be better.” They haul him out of the passenger seat and through the swirling darkness into a building. They sit him in…a pew?
“What is this? Another church?” Dean says.
“What’s wrong with churches?” Maria says.
“I’ve had some strange experiences in churches,” Dean says. He refuses to be carried to a pallet of sleeping bag and blanket.
“He needs an ER,” says Maria.
Dean opens his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says. “Sammy’s great.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “He needs to stop saving my ass. I’m going to help you sit up. Drink your Pedialyte.”
Dean prefers Gatorade.
“It's mostly blood loss,” Sam says to Maria as he lets himself drift. “He’ll really be in a lot better shape in a few hours.”
“Salt the windows,” Dean says.
“Go to sleep, Dean,” Sam says. Dean feels Sam’s fingers in his hair again so he does. Sam is there. So familiar to be woken and given fluids and eased back into sleep.
He wakes in darkness. It’s a church, very small. Built of cinder block. He’s thirsty and his chest hurts but he’s not feverish and he’s not dizzy when he sits up. The people they picked up are all asleep, the kids in sleeping bags on pews, the adults in the aisles.
He stands up, carefully. Checks to see if everything is place. They’ll have to take these people back and then make another try for Rowena. He wonders if kerosene would be a better weapon than angel blades against the spider critters.
He looks for Sam and sees him in front of the alter. There’s a lantern on the alter which makes sense for lighting the church. It leaves the spaces between the pews in deep shadow. Sam is standing there with his head bowed. Sam used to pray but somewhere along the line he stopped. Finding out God has just left without telling anyone and isn’t answering anymore can do that for you. He wonders if having lost his memory, Sam is praying now.
He walks to the front of the church. Sam is just going to tell him to go lay down again but honestly, he can’t sleep any more so he might as well keep his brother company.
He’s about to say ‘Sam’ before he startles his brother because startling Sam can get you punched.
Still facing the alter, Sam suddenly stiffens and reaches for his forehead. It’s a gesture that Dean hasn’t seen in years but he knows it even before Sam staggers and goes to his knees. It’s a vision.
He’s got Sam’s arm. “Sammy,” he says, quietly so as not to wake anyone. “Sammy, look at me, what do you see?”
Sam looks at Dean for just a moment, opens his mouth but then his eyes roll back in his head and a line of blood runs from his nose as he sags against Dean.
Dean lowers Sam to the floor. He wants to hold him up but he can feel the pull against his chest, against his stitches and he's still weak kneed. Sam’s face softens and even as the blood runs black in the lantern light there is a feeling that begins to pervade the room like a scent. It’s a feeling of, for lack of a better term, holiness.
It’s not normal. It’s not like anything that has happened before. Dean has spent some serious time around angels and he should know holy but really, angels have rarely struck him that way. This is something else. Sam’s face is marble white and smoothed of care. Transformed. Like the carvings of knights on tombs.
God cannot have his brother. Fucking God has abandoned the world, he cannot now decide to take Dean’s little brother.
#
It seems strange to Sam that the inside of buildings would be clear of the Darkness. Why would the Darkness respect inside and outside? But it does.
Sam had salted the doors and windows, drawn a Devil’s Trap at the door, drawn what wards he could. Fritz had taken first watch and Evie had taken second. He’d given them Dean’s angel blade and cautioned them not to touch the business end, explaining that it didn’t look sharp and then cutting a piece of paper to show that it was. He’d laid down next to Dean and woken him every so often to drink more Pedialyte.
He checks the wound under the dressing. It looks okay. Doesn’t look inflamed or weird. Dean stirred a little when he checked for fever but didn’t wake. He wonders what he’s forgotten because he’s doing it by rote. He knew a couple of different kinds of stitches-some that were figure eights, some that were at a ninety degree angle, and some that were deep circles into the wound. He’d done the deep ones on this wound. It was not so deep, no organs involved or anything like that, but it was a little jagged and that had seemed right.
The kids had been scared at first but then had been fascinated.
He walks the perimeter. He checks the salt.
He ends up in front of the alter.
He knows he’s stood watch before. He knows that it’s hard to stay awake that he needs to keep himself going.
Latin. Canticum David Dominus pascit me nihil mihi deerit… A psalm of David, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He lets the words run through him like water. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… sed et si ambulavero in valle mortis…
God is not listening. They are Team Free Will; Dean and Castiel and him. God wanted them to prove something and they did, he thinks. But he’s feeling lost and while he doesn’t want people to make decisions for him, he wouldn’t mind a little guidance. He looks at the lantern on the alter, at the light, and he thinks, God, I go to a doctor when I’m sick because I don’t know everything. I’d really like if you’d stop asking me to be an expert here because I’m making a total fucking mess of it.
He says an act of contrition. Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum… My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. He’s supposed to be sorry for the pain he’s caused God but he’s mostly sorry for the pain he’s caused everybody. Especially Dean. As best he can figure out, Dean was all but programmed to take care of him and while he’s been wandering around on some sort of screwed up hero’s journey of trying and failing and then saving the world from the apocalypse and then screwing up again, Dean has been bearing the brunt of it. (Oh and all those people who died, mustn’t forget them.)
The lantern brightens. It’s a propane camping lantern and he isn’t sure how much propane is left. Maybe they get brighter right before they run out? That doesn’t make any sense. The light gets stronger. The world is going white. He feels a pressure in his head, he doesn’t have any idea what it is, a kind of white darkness, and he is swallowed into it.
His memories are in the whiteness. He remembers a little over thirty years of life on Earth. Not all of it, but the normal human round of childhood and adolescence. Stanford and hunting and all the things he had lost.
In the whiteness he also finds the longer part of his life, almost two centuries in Hell. When he fell into the pit, Lucifer discarded Sam and his body almost immediately. The Cage was built to hold an angel, a creature of multiple dimensions, not a human. The Cage was non-Euclidian, non-relative. Time was not necessarily sequential. Space and mass did not behave. Sam had only the senses of a mortal and as he fell, the Morningstar ripped him open into a space where moving forward might mean he ended up somewhere else or not moving at all. Time might go forward or backward or stop. Sam could suddenly taste molecules except he had neither the receptors nor the places in his brain to make sense of what was happening and in the next instance those molecules might be the size of ham sandwiches and as impervious as stone and the very electrons circling the nucleus of the atoms in them might slow.
He was psychotic within an instant. Shattered to fragments, eyes burned out, eardrums ruptured. The whole concept of ‘breaking’ was meaningless in the Cage. Lucifer rarely ‘tortured’ Sam. Lucifer despised humans because they were so limited. He had Michael, and Michael was multidimensional, and Lucifer’s relationship with Michael spanned millennia and was so complex it made Sam and Dean’s relationship seem simple. There was so much to argue in dimensions so improbable.
It didn’t mean that Lucifer ignored Sam. The Morningstar had about the same relationship with Sam that a person would have with a game on their phone. Periodically in the roughly 180 years that Sam’s soul spent in the Cage, Lucifer would pick it up and play with it.
Sam’s brain could only remember it all in metaphors of torture. Of insanity. Of wrongness. It all washed through him. Shook him like a terrier shakes a rat.
His memories settle into him. There is something else.
There is a vast and comforting presence in the whiteness and it speaks in a voice that feels familiar.
Lucifer ran cold. This is…since Sam returned there has been some part of his soul that has never been warm. It is one of those things that is so constant that he has long stopped noticing it. He doesn’t even know it until now, when the whiteness warms him. He’s been aching for so long and that ache stops.
He feels himself expand in a different way. He has a sense of himself, feeling himself having this experience, as if he can sense his Samness and yet he is also aware that everything is bigger than that. He feels himself opening up. In one way he can no longer identify the boundaries of himself, of his body. That should be terrifying. But for so long this body has controlled him, has been invaded, has been a vessel, has been possessed and violated and now it no longer defines him. But he is still himself, still Sam.
All the thoughts and all the dears, all the chatter of his brain is momentarily silent and he feels euphoria.
It sounds terribly banal, but he feels…love? Can he say that? Oneness? That maybe instead of everything being wrong there is a way that he can connect? He feels himself open up. He feels himself lose a grip on time and become timeless but in a way that feels right. As if he can feel himself as a small part of the alpha and omega, the beginning and then end.
(Some small part of him is a little embarrassed at this. It’s kind of hippy-dippy. Whatever is in the whiteness is allowing this, is tolerant and doesn’t mind that Sam is who he is. And the part of him that is watching doesn’t mind either. When has Sam ever not felt loathing for Samness? But right now he sees that Samness and he thinks it is complicated and interesting and not all that bad.)
He feels himself as a small part of the world. He sees the proverbial movement of a butterfly’s wings in China causing a storm in the United States and it makes him understand that he was the tip of the pressure and what he did mattered but that what a thousand, ten thousand, a million people did mattered.
Really, it’s not all his fault. And it was kind of silly to think he was that important.
And at the same time he was that important. Everybody is.
This is heaven, Sam thinks. To be happy and to feel absolution and to feel connected. Not that thing the angels run. This is real heaven.
Which is okay because you know, Dean. He can’t leave Dean.
He feels it, that God is with him. God is speaking to him. Has chosen him. The boy with the demon blood.
#
Dean sitting with his over-sized brother, holding Sam’s head against his chest, whispering to him. He’s terrified that Sam will start to seize.
“Come back to me,” he whispers. “Sammy,” he calls. Sam’s face is open, his lips are slack. He almost looks as if he’s post-orgasm. Or dying.
Sam’s eyelashes flutter.
“Sam?” Dean says. “Sammy? I’m right here. I’ve got you.”
Sam opens his eyes and unexpectedly he smiles. Not just a little, but a huge, happy full-dimple smile like Dean hasn’t seen in years. It’s joyful. Dean can’t remember when he’s seen Sam look so happy to see him, so happy to be alive.
“Dean,” he says.
Fin
Part Ten |