SPN - Your Version of Fine
Title: Your Version of Fine
Author: bythedamned
Rating: R for gore and violence
Word Count: 2500
Warning: descriptions of disturbing violence and imagery. Also: SPOILERS up to 6x08, All Dogs Go to Heaven, in the fic, summary, and even the A/N. Seriously, stop now.
A/N: I wrote this as a coda to 6x08, which ends with Sam and Dean sitting at a picnic table on the side of the road and Sam explaining (with all the charisma and believability of a stone crypt) that he wants his soul back. I wanted more. This was written in about a week and a half - no idea why it took so long to post. Title taken from 6x09.
Beta: elveys_stuff
Summary: Sam says he wants his soul back. Dean wants to know why.
Dean drops a beer on the table, just one, and rolls his shoulders before looking Sam in the eye. He’s got that look on - that I’d rather donate a kidney than talk look. The responsibility and loyalty and if Dad hadn’t put you in my arms and told me to run look - like he’s doing Sam a favor by letting him talk about his feelings.
Except, Sam thought he already made this point clear. He doesn’t have feelings anymore. There are no more moral grey areas slowing him up, sticking to his feet like drying cement. No regrets either, and jesus but those used to weigh him down. He should have known it was too easy, though, to get away with nothing but a stoic nod and a touch of optimism. Dean didn’t even take a swing at him, so when Dean clears his throat now, Sam knows what’s coming.
“Got some question need answering.”
Sam hesitates before nodding, because there are some things he knows he just shouldn’t tell. Dean’s more uppity than ever about protecting the innocent, or at least he harps on it loads more than he used to, and soul or no Sam’s done some things that will make Dean throw him back in Luci’s cage and never look back. Well, if he manages to catch him first.
He hopes Dean doesn’t ask about the worse than you know bits, the judgment calls he didn’t spend time judging and the innocent people he mowed down. The children.
Just the week before he followed the djinns to Dean’s suburban fantasy, he was tracking a run of the mill possession case. With some blessed Sparkletts in his pocket and latin drivel in his head, it was pretty much a one man job. He tracked the demon to a faded yellow fixer-upper on the edge of Peoria and was pretty sure he’d narrowed it down to a school teacher in yoga pants when she propped an infant over her shoulder and started burping it. Sam sank lower into the hedges around the house, reevaluating what he’d seen so far, because not once had he ever come across hellspawn with maternal instincts.
And just then, as the mother bounced on her heels and turned away from the window, Sam found a new pair of eyes watching him. Blacked out, reflective, and blinking over chubby baby cheeks. If infants could look malicious, this one was downright murderous. He had no idea why the hell a demon would pick an undeveloped child when there was a perfectly able body right there, but he’d learned not to question these things. Sometimes there was a reason, sometimes they were just fucking with him.
Because they knew him now, the demons that had shaken loose from Hell’s clutches, and they knew what he’d become. They’d lured him into a game of cat and mouse, testing him, except it wasn’t always clear who was chasing whom.
The mother was hysterical, refusing to let a man with an eight-inch serrated knife into her house, so he killed her. She went down easily, dropping the cherubic demon neatly into Sam’s hands, but her spurting jugular made a mess of the carpet. He paid it no mind and pressed the tip of the knife to the demon’s bellybutton, just above the cotton elastic of its diaper, and dangled the baby by its arm so he wouldn’t risk nicking himself when he sliced straight through the tiny rib cage.
It was too obvious an attack, though, and the cooing demon grinned up at him with a gummy, toothless mouth. Just before Sam could thrust into the rounded stomach, the demon gushed out of it in a whirling hurricane bigger than the baby three times over. Though Ruby's old knife slid home, carving through cartilaginous bone more easily than he’d expected, that evil son of a bitch was already free and incorporeal. Of course, it promptly reanimated the corpse of the mother, which he then had to kill again with a swift slice across the neck.
He wiped the knife on the edge of her shirt, and stood to leave. It wasn’t until he spied the lace curtains blocking the front windows, gauzy little things that let him see the bush he’d been hiding in and would certainly show any passersby their gutted and beheaded neighbor, that he decided he’d better make them look natural. He maneuvered a dark rug under the woman to catch the blood and dragged her over to a chair, taking extra care to balance her expressionless head atop the stump of her neck, and then propped the baby in her lap, swaddled in a dark jacket he’d found to hide the red stains like jam making a mess of the kid’s diaper.
It wasn’t until Sam flipped on the rabbit-eared TV in his motel that night, when he heard the newscaster lamenting the newest psychotic killer ravaging their town, did it occur to him that that might have been in poor taste.
Oh well.
Sam huffs out a breath, thinking he should definitely keep that story to himself. The dilemma is that he can’t just give Dean some ambiguous story with a no way to know moral, because he’ll know that’s not the worst of it. He has to make Dean think he’s divulging his darkest secret so that he won’t pry deeper. He needs to find some hunt just bad enough to trigger Dean’s alarms, but not send him scrambling for his own knife. He could always tell him about that time he had to kill a whole boy scout troop in a church. People’d gotten all sorts of uppity about that one.
Of course, he could fake the emotions too, the doubt, regret, and the sleepless nights - actually, maybe it’s best if he didn’t mention the sleep thing again, or lack of it. He remembers the emotions, thinking Why does this hurt so much and All I want is for him to be okay and Thank God we made it. He remembers the way fear and grief used to coil in his chest, squeezing his lungs like a boa, until he begged silently for oblivion. He can recall the memories easily, but can’t physically conjure them, can’t call back that suffocating tightness even if he tries. It’s like watching a 3D movie with no glasses - he doesn’t know where to focus and he’s missing all the cues.
Until Dean actually bothers to voice his question, though, Sam’s in no hurry to supply details he doesn’t need or want. Instead, Dean has peeled half the beer label straight off the bottle without a single snag, and Sam is idly impressed. Dean clears his throat, like he’s waiting for Sam to say the first word, like he’s hoping he’ll put on his real-Sam face and start in with the I’m sorrys and the No, really, tell me about Lisas, but they both know he’s SOL on that.
Finally, when the label is three quarters off, Dean focuses in laser-tight on the paper between his fingertips and asks, “What is it? That, that you wanna get re-souled for?”
Sam lets out a surprised breath. Oh. Oh. That. That’s… harder to explain. Still, though, he flips through the rolodex of his memories and tries to recollect what he thought was worth going back for.
“You were dead.”
Dean yanks a hand from the bottle to rub it down his face. “Jesus, man.”
Sam barely spares him a glance. “Shut up, Dean.”
Dean eyes him, clearly trying to size up whether Sam’s just being a dick or really has lost all touch with reality, but eventually settles back into his bottle-peeling, eye contact-avoiding routine.
“Well don’t let me stop you.”
“You were dead and I ended up in the hospital.”
Dean’s eyes flicker up, but only briefly.
“We got you back to Bobby’s and I parked my ass by your bed for three days with a shotgun to the door. I remember,” he pauses, because it’s difficult the dredge up the panic and dread that made his thoughts seem reasonable and he doesn’t know what the fuck he was doing then, “I remember thinking there’s no way they’d let me keep your body. They were hell bent on destroying everything, and I told Bobby I would hang on to what I had left until they killed me. And I did, wouldn’t even get up to piss so I skipped meals altogether, but that bit me in the ass when I woke up with an IV in my arm for dehydration.”
“God damnit, Sammy,” Dean whispers, but Sam knows he’s not talking to him.
“That’s when I let Bobby bury you, so long as there was no fire, and I refused to get out of bed for a week. But after that, everything I remember is in tunnel vision.”
He holds up two massive hands, curved like parentheses, and Dean glances up again. He’s momentarily forgotten to be aloof.
“It’s like, when I try to picture it, what I did that summer you were gone, the edges are all dark and blurry. Everything I did was for you, how to get you back and what you’d want me to do in the meantime, and nothing else really stuck. And I had all these thoughts, ideas on how to get you back that I knew I couldn’t tell Bobby about because he’d just try to stop me. I’m pretty sure I killed a bunch of evil shit, too.”
Sam waves a hand around, uselessly. It’s hard, describing things as he felt them then and not now, but Dean is obviously looking for something, and maybe this all means more to Dean than it does to him.
“I thought about killing myself,” he continues, “a lot. I wondered, hoped even, whether I’d at least get to see you in Hell.”
Dean’s hand slips, pulling on the label where he almost had the edge off completely, and leaves a half-ripped city name behind on the colored glass.
“You’re not really one for sugar-coating, are you?”
“I’m just trying to explain. I was a mess. Nothing,” he closes his eyes to remember, “nothing felt right anymore. The tunnel vision was getting tighter and tighter and I was getting more careless by the day. I swear, I nearly let a troll get the best of me.”
Dean snorts humorlessly. “Trolls’re dumber than grave dirt.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t too sharp at the time,” Sam shrugs, and then Dean shifts himself back, still reaching out to tear the remaining paper into the smallest bits possible with his fingernails, but he’s finally looking at Sam straight on. His eyebrows are high with that unimpressed look he used to sport when Sam suggested they pick out a movie instead of a hunt.
“This all got a point, Sam?”
Sam rolls his shoulders, annoyed, and he has a harder time hiding it these days. “Of course it has a point. The point is, you came back.”
“Yeah? And?”
“And, everything. Dean, I can’t even tell you how fast it all changed once you walked in the door.”
“You kiddin’ me? You tried to stab me.”
“And I should have. There was no way you could be back, and I should have put you through every damn test I could think of. Salt, water, silver, the works. Bobby too, for spouting such crap that I should have known better than to just believe, but I didn’t care. I had you back and, I swear to God, the only thing I could think was everything’s okay now.”
He pauses, waiting for more pointless berating from Dean over how, even with a soul, Sam was always missing the point. Dean doesn’t say a thing, though, just twists his face up tight and studies Sam, searching his face like the memories are reflected behind his eyes.
Sam drops an open palm on to the table, making Dean’s debris hover in the air for a half-breath. “Do you even know how ridiculous that is, Dean? You were tortured in hell, we had no idea who brought you back, I had a drinking problem no AA could ever cure, but I was more relieved than I’d ever been in my life. I swear to god, I was happier. We were still locked into a tail spin, man, but I genuinely believed we were about to ride off into the sunset. I don’t know what kind of mojo that is, but I think I want it.”
The closest thing Sam can liken it to is drugs, but not like his old habit. Go-juice made him feel alive, capable, powerful, but never like that. Never calm, like if he closed his eyes he could still count on the world not to jam a gear or swing on its axis. It never told him everything was alright, that he was at…
Peace. That’s the word he’s looking for. For no good reason that Sam can figure, Dean brought him peace.
That wasn’t the only time, either. The longer Sam thought about it, the more he could tie together the memories. Collapsing into Dean’s arms, his back on fire, finally knowing he didn’t have to fight anymore. Dean dragging him from a burning bedroom, shielding his eyes from the ceiling. Dean’s hands pressing a wet towel to his fevered forehead, or cleaning out the deep punctures of an unexpected bite. Turning Sam’s head this way and that, inspecting bruises in the light, and demanding to know who’d done it. Letting Sam sleep under the warmth of Dean’s arm while Dad drove them past yet another blacked-out motel, or smoothing a band-aid over Sam’s very first scraped knee.
All memories. All times when he knew he could stop fighting and just rest. All Dean.
And as much as his new existence is easy, is carefree and straightforward, there’s no end in sight. There’s no place to lay his head down, no one to say have a lie-down, you deserve it, and it’s all too clear that Dean can’t fix a goddamn thing. He’ll be fighting long past his death; he’s tried it once and even that hadn’t brought relief. Only one thing ever has but now, like this, he can’t even feel it.
Without his soul, there will never be peace for Sam.