Fic: Light the Length of August (Supernatural) 9/?

[broken_cinders]

Title: Light the Length of August - Chapter 9: Nothing Tainted
Fandom: Supernatural
Character(s): Sam, Cas, Dean
Pairing(s): Gen
Word Count: 3677
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it’s not mine. If you don’t recognize it, it still might not be mine. Any recognizable places or people have been fictionalized. I am not blind. I do not have any immediate acquaintances that are blind. Any mistakes on that front are entirely my own. If you spot an error, let me know. Research can only take me so far.
Summary: Sam thinks of himself as an intelligent guy. He knows life isn’t usually fair. He knows the job they do is dangerous. He knows for them there are no guarantees or ironclad promises. He also knows that time is running out to find his possibly demonic brother and help Cas. He doesn’t have time for another sucker punch from whatever higher power likes toying with him. He still wakes up in the hospital alone and blind.



“So what do you think so far,” Sam asked. They were ambling down the hallway towards Kevin’s office. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to check in with Cas and maybe delay the inevitable a little longer. Sam was intensely aware of the fact that he had laid some very personal things bare last session, and he wasn’t sure what was waiting for him.

“I am impressed.”

Sam quirked his eyebrow. “Really? With which part?”

“You, Sam. I knew you were working hard and that the point was to learn to adapt, but I wasn’t sure what shape that would take.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just glad to see the progress you’ve made. Thank you for inviting me today.”

“Of course, Cas. I wanted you here.”

As they drew closer to Kevin’s door, Sam’s steps slowed. He paused just outside the door. “So, I think I mentioned that Kevin knows what we do. I haven’t shared the whole story yet, but he’s pretty good at rolling with just about anything I tell him.”

“Is there something I should know?”

“Not really.”

“Then why are you stalling?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said as he fingered his cane in his hand. He let it tap on the ground in a mindless gesture as he thought about the question. “Just nervous I guess.”

Cas laid a tentative hand on his elbow. The touch was light, just a small point of warmth against his skin. “Would you like me to sit this one out? I understand if this is personal.”

Sam straightened and shook his head. “No, let’s do this.” Before he could chicken out, he reach up and knocked. Kevin’s muffled call for him to enter filtered through the wood. Sam opened the door and slipped in, letting Cas follow him.

“Hello, Sam. And this must be Cas! Don’t trip. I’ve pulled up a second chair beside the normal one. The couch is still along the wall if that would be more comfortable since we have an extra person.”

Sam strode into the room. He took a moment to search out the second chair with his cane, then sank into the comfortable leather that he’d become accustomed to. The sofa always reminded him of daytime soap operas where rich people lounged on settees in expensive clothing and talked about their mothers. He had no idea what the couch in Kevin’s office looked like, but something about it felt too melodramatic for the work they were doing. Besides, sitting on a couch left him with a lot of open space. He liked the closed in feeling of the wrap around back on the chair.

Kevin’s chair creaked as he sat back. It seemed like the kind of thing he might leave so that his patients could follow his movements better. “We’re going to approach this a little differently. Since I’m sure this is odd for you both, I’m going to direct us a little bit to start.”

Sam nodded. He felt the shift in the air as Cas came to sit beside him. There was another long pause as he situated himself before Kevin asked, “So, Cas. Have you ever been to therapy?”

“No.” Cas’s deep voice gave the word a bit of extra gravity. “I understand the concept of counselling, but I’ve never seen any of it in practice.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“I’ve never sought out a therapist myself, but I understand that they are doctors for the mind. Sam and Dean have both explained what’s involved a little.”

Sam was content to let them talk for the moment. The longer he went without drawing attention to himself the better. Kevin’s voice took on the same tone he used when Sam had said something, usually about hunting, that he didn’t quite follow and he was trying to fit together the pieces. He could imagine Kevin frowning a little. “Haven’t you ever seen a therapist on TV?”

“No,” Cas said. “I don’t really watch TV, although I’ve had a lot of that downloaded if you will.”

Sam smiled as Kevin made a questioning noise. Sam jumped in to keep the conversation from circling. Cas could be maddeningly opaque sometimes. “Kevin, Cas is short for Castiel. He’s an angel, and well, he’s millennia old. He speaks every language on earth except Dean’s native pop culture references.”

“Ah. And the two of you are close?”

“He’s family.”

“Well then, Cas,” Kevin said, reorienting the conversation in light of the new information. “My job here is to help Sam work through whatever it is he needs to work through. My ultimate goal to make the transition easier and to help with processing everything that is happening, but I’m here for anything that Sam, or the two of you in this case, want to work through.”

“Ok,” Cas sounded a little uncertain.

“Hey, it’s okay. This can be a confusing time. Sam, is there anything in particular you want to address while Cas is here?”

Sam shrugged. “Not in particular. I guess this was a little bit of a surprise for me too.”

“That’s fine. Why don’t we do this; let’s start with the obvious and go from there. Cas, how are you feeling about all this?”

“All this,” Cas asked. His confusion colored his response. Sam pictured him studying Kevin with his head cocked to the side like he did when he didn’t quite understand something about humans.

“About Sam’s blindness,” Kevin clarified.

Cas shifted in his seat. His elbow brushed against Sam’s, and Sam realized just how close the chairs were for the first time. “It just is.”

“True, but when you first heard the news, what was your reaction?”

“Surprise.”

“Okay, and why was that?”

“Sam had failed to mention it.”

Sam couldn’t help but be a little amused at the spiraling conversation. It felt like he was watching a ping-pong match. It was times like this that made him forget how old Cas really was. In some ways he seemed younger than Sam.

“Time out. Cas, Kevin is looking for you to elaborate a little. Remember when Dean started having you talk things out after the leviathan? That’s what Kevin is asking for here.

“Kevin, remember Cas is not fully human. He understands more and more every day and he is one of the best people you’ll ever meet, but sometimes you have to explain what you’re getting at because he doesn’t have the same frame of reference we do.”

The room fell quiet. Finally Cas said, “Sam called me and said he was in the hospital. My first thought was that it was serious and he needed healing. He claimed that wasn’t it. He just needed to ‘hear a friendly voice.’ Our conversation ended abruptly and I was both worried and curious, so I decided to go and see if there was anything I could do.”

“You sound a little unsure of that conversation. Was there something unsettling about it?”

“No. I’ve just never really been someone people call for emotional support.”

“That’s not true.” Sam shifted in his chair so he could speak more directly to Cas. “Dean and I both turn to you for that sort of thing.”

“And I’ve only known you for a brief moment of time compared to the rest of my life.”

“Sometimes,” Sam said, slowly. He wanted to find the right words for this. “Sometimes it’s just nice to know that there are people out there in the world that know you and care about you and your problems. I know Dean and I are not always great at reciprocating. It’s something I’m trying to get better at.”

“I know. I think you give yourself too little credit.”

Sam shrugged, but he didn’t really have a response. They had failed Cas a lot. He wanted to be able to say it would never happen again, but he also knew that their lives were more complex than that. He wouldn’t make a promise he couldn’t keep.

“So, Sam,” Kevin said. “Tell me what was going on for you during that call.”

“The doctor had just been in with me and told me that this could very well be permanent. It took me those three days to work up the courage to make the call. I knew couldn’t dump one more burden in Cas’s lap, so I decided I would just do it the old fashioned Winchester way. I told Cas I’d call him when I was out of the hospital. I wasn’t expecting him to come.”

“So, wait. You didn’t mention that you were blind?”

“No,” Sam said, his cheeks heating. “I planned to get out of the hospital and get back on my feet, then explain what had happened. I didn’t want to be a liability or a burden any more than I had to be.”

“Why do you think you would have been a burden?”

“I’m a hunter. I make enemies. Our job requires us to be in full possession of all our faculties. Like this I’m less than useless. When it first happened, I could barely feed myself and get dressed, much less cross the street. Anyone who stepped in to help was going to be stuck taking care of me until I could figure some of it out. Plus Cas isn’t doing so well. I couldn’t add to his problems.”

“And Cas? What’s your reaction to that?”

Cas was already talking before Kevin even finished. “Sam, you are not a problem or a burden to me. You and your brother may make me I believe the phrase is bat shit crazy sometimes, but I care about you both deeply. I want to be there when something happens. I may not be able to heal you, but I can help.”

Sam felt something swell in his chest. Statements of unwavering support were not things he got very often. “Thanks, man.”

“It’s nothing to thank me for.”

“So what happened next?” When neither of them answered, Kevin prompted, “Cas? What was your initial reaction, beyond surprise?”

“I was,” Cas drew out the moment as though he were looking for the right word. “Sad. I believe that’s right.”

“Sad,” Kevin asked.

“Yes,” Cas said with more confidence. “Sam is strong and independent. He has overcome so much. It seemed extremely unfair that yet another hurdle had been placed in his path. And I understood that he hadn’t wanted me to know and that made me sad as well. I know that I have struggled recently, but that is no reason that I wouldn’t want to be present.”

“Cas, I’m sorry. I know you would want to know. I was just worried about adding one more thing to your plate.”

“Sam,” Kevin interjected. “If your roles had been reversed. If you found out Cas was in the hospital somewhere and then discovered that he had been injured in a life altering way, what would you do?”

“Haul ass,” Sam said without hesitation.

“Why?”

“Because Cas is part of our small family and he’s important. I want to be there for him, even if all I can really do is sit with him.”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“Remember when I said we were going to focus on stepping back and seeing if your expectations and thoughts matched reality? This is one of those times. You are looking at it like you’re value lies in hunting and being able bodied, but you just told me that wouldn’t have been the case if your places had been swapped. That’s not how you think of Cas is it?”

“No!”

“Why do you assume that’s how Cas thinks of you?”

Sam let that thought settle with him. Cas had never implied that Sam’s worth was tied to his usefulness. Just the opposite. He had been there when Sam had been at some of his lowest points and had been supportive each time. “I don’t think that’s how Cas sees me. Not really.”

“Then where does that belief come from?”

“I guess that’s just how I’ve always seen myself.”

“What do you mean?” When Sam bit his lip, debating whether he could just not answer, Kevin hurried to add, “Remember what I said yesterday about trust. You can think of this as today’s one thing.”

Sam pushed himself back into the chair, folding his arms across his chest. How did he explain years of conditioning and family expectations? How did he condense down decades of experience into a coherent answer? It felt like striking out into the hallway that first time after he’d been blinded. He was searching for the right thing to say as he went.

“My father raised us in this life,” Sam said at last. “Even when I tried to run from it, I knew that my worth in the family was based on what I could do and how well I could do it. One fuck up and Dad or Dean could be killed or horribly injured. One slip up in school and then there were concerned teachers and potentially CPS. When I decided I couldn’t live like that, I got out the only way I knew how. I studied. I got a full ride to Stanford, but that was by merit of what I had proven I was capable of. My one ticket out depended entirely on how hard I worked and how good I could be.

“When I lost that, I was back in hunting.” Sam gripped his own arms tightly. Even years later, he could still smell the smoke as his entire monster-free future went up in flames. “My relationship with Dean was rocky at best. Between being three years out of practice and grieving for Jessica, I was a liability for most of that first year, but I never forgot that both our safety rested on how well I could do this job.

“Then the stakes got bigger and the consequences for messing up multiplied. If you trust the wrong person on a vampire hunt, a good hunter could die or be turned. If you trust the wrong person when the devil himself is in play, entire towns get wiped from the map. There’s not a lot of room for fucking up in that. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve screwed up a lot along the way, and I have to bear the burden of all of those consequences. Every single one of them.”

Sam huffed. A laugh that wasn’t a laugh scraped at his throat at the thought of everything he’d done through the years. “You know, I thought I had been absolved. After the cage and the trials, I felt like I had finally served my time for all those wrongs and been purified, but the more I’ve seen and done the more I believe there is no absolution. There’s just a list of hurts. There’s the things that I’ve done to hurt others and the things that have hurt me and they aren’t like some kind of cosmic ledger book. Nothing cancels anything else out. It just is.”

His words were met with silence. Even he needed a moment to absorb what he had just said. The quiet in the room didn’t feel clean or healing. It felt oppressive, as though he’d just spoken a weight on his shoulders into existence.

Cas broke the unbearable heaviness. “I think you forget that we’ve all made mistakes. I know you carry the weight of yours and some of them were heavy, but not one of us is perfect. For every mistake you’ve made, I can name one of my own that rivals it. I can name one of Dean’s. Somehow you are so quick to forgive both of us but you never forgive yourself. I still don’t understand that.”

“I set Lucifer free.” Sam offered up the fact partly as justification and partly as a reminder. It was the simplest and heaviest of his sins.

“No,” Cas said, firmly. “You broke the final seal, which you were tricked into doing. You forget that Dean broke the first and there were sixty four others. Worse still you forget that everything about that was manipulated by both heaven and hell to come to pass.”

“But in the end I was the one that broke the last one, and it ended in so many lives lost.”

“You’re assuming that no one would have gone after Lilith. If it hadn’t been you that night, it would have been one of us. And if we are comparing unleashed evils, I believe you forget it was I who set free the leviathan.”

Sam frowned. “I wish you had listened to us, but you did everything in your power to make it right. You helped put that back in the box. You survived purgatory and Naomi’s mind-fuck.”

“And you dove headfirst into the cage. Willingly. I had no idea what was going to happen. You also neglect the fact that some of the worst harms were done to you by my hand.”

Sam scowled. “What are you even talking about?”

“Don’t try to spare me in this. I saw the look you gave me when I first shook your hand, I could feel your awe and your hurt. I was the one who set you loose as you were detoxing. I was the one who pulled you back from the cage soulless. I was the one who tore down the wall in your mind. I was the one who nearly killed you after purgatory.”

“Okay, the wall was a dick move even I admit, but you were still on the Michael train at that point. You were trying to save me when you pulled my body from the cage. That place was built to hold souls not bodies, at least not human ones. The fact that you risked your life means more than you probably know. And you took on that tattered piece of grace that had lodged itself in my mind. You’ve made mistakes, sure, but you always made it right as best you could.”

“So have you.”

Sam had no response to that. He liked that Cas felt that way, but it didn't change the fact that his hands were far from clean.

“Sam,” Kevin said. Sam jerked his head towards him. He had completely forgotten Kevin was even in the room. “Why don’t you believe you can be forgiven for any of these things?”

“Because I’m wrong,” Sam said quietly. “I’m the rot at the center of the apple. There’s something dark and tainted about me. There always has been.”

Kevin drew in a breath as if to speak. Instead, Cas reached out and laid a hand on his arm. “Did I tell you that I held your soul once?”

Sam sat up. “No. You did?”

“I held it in my hands. You have to understand, a soul is a person laid bare. It is their entire being. I never said anything, because I was afraid I had overstepped.

“Your brother’s soul is bright, like a beacon. I never lost sight of it when I was sent to pull him from hell. It can burn so bright, but there’s something hard to bear about looking directly at it for too long. It’s like staring into oncoming headlights. Yours is softer. It glows more like an ember. Where Dean’s can be harsh, yours is gentle. Where Dean’s burns everything in its path, yours warms everything around it. I could see everything in it, from your stubbornness to your kindness. There was nothing tainted about it.”

“But you said I was an abomination,” Sam said desperately. He blinked hard. He could feel the sting of tears in eyes. His entire life he’d believed he was marked right down to his very core. He had been the curse that kept coming back to chip away at their family.

“In the eyes of heaven, you are. So am I. In some ways so is Dean.”

“I have demon blood inside me.”

“That affects you physically it’s true, but has no bearing on your soul.” Cas’s tone was so serious it hurt to hear.

Sam fell quiet, digesting what Cas has said. Cas claimed to have seen the essence of his entire being and not found anything twisted or evil. Sam wanted to believe that Cas had simply told him what he wanted to hear, but he knew from experience that Cas didn’t lie about things like this. He wasn’t able to.

Cas’s hand jerked when the alarm chimed from Kevin’s desk, but he didn’t break the contact. The warmth of the touch was reassuring. It meant Cas was there with him. Despite himself, Sam laid his own hand over Cas’s.

“That’s the five minute warning and a good place to stop for today,” Kevin said, his voice soft in deference to the turn the session had taken. “I know this was a lot, but it was a good beginning. How would you like to close out the session?”

Sam felt like someone had scoured his nerves with steel wool. He needed a moment to breathe and catch up with everything that had happened today. He needed to retreat for a minute. “Could we do another chapter?”

“Chapter,” Cas asked.

“Kevin started reading The Great Gatsby yesterday.”

“Ah. Would you like me to read?”

Sam nodded, offering Cas a small smile. “Sure, if that’s okay with Kevin.”

“Be my guest. I’m going to work through some paperwork. Take all the time you need.”

There was a shuffle, and Cas rearranged himself. “I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few invited...”

Sam relaxed into Cas’s reading. It was soothing in a way Kevin’s hadn’t been. Cas’s deep voice lulled him into a quiet calm. It was familiar and comforting, like wrapping up in a blanket on a cold evening. When they left, Sam wasn’t sure what he thought of everything Cas had said in the session. He focused instead on Cas’s steady presence at his elbow as they walked back towards his room.

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