SPN fic: Sam, Resumed
Sam, Resumed
Sam and Dean, Bobby | R (for references to past torture) | 4,200 words
a/n: Set after SPN 6x11. Many thanks to smilla02 for the beta.
Sam had spent most of his life with fire. He had used it as a weapon and a tool, known it both as a comfort and a source of grief. At least, Sam knew he'd felt comfort and grief once, as a faint echo.
Having his soul shoved back into his body was like fire eating him from the inside out. Sam screamed, pain and rage and protest while the heat swept from his ribs and heart outwards, until his whole body might have been made of flame. With the heat came the memory of being torn apart and put back together, pulled open, teased with visions of familiar faces and too much kindness followed by blood and a repeat of old losses and pain, and the unwanted push of hands and brush of wings.
The sound of a snap-click, like a cartridge sliding into a gun, ended it. The heat subsided into warmth, while something shifted and settled inside of him, sliding into place with a sense of relief so intense it hurt almost as sharply as grief.
He slumped back against the flimsy mattress of the cot, muscles no longer pulling against the cuffs around his wrists. Sam's hazy vision caught a thin man in a dark suit walking away, while Bobby stared at Sam, mouth open a little. He saw Dean slide down into a crouch with his back against the wall, exhaustion in every movement, like his muscles had given out. Dean put his hand over his face a moment before he lifted his gaze to Sam, held there as the blackness filled Sam's vision.
Sam opened his eyes and blinked. He recognized the flickering of daylight through the exhaust fan, high above his head, then turned his head to see the metal walls that were partially covered in a patchwork of article clippings and maps.
He was alone in the panic room, Lucifer walked free, they had to stop it somehow, Sam had swallowed demon blood and was coming down from the power rush, sweating and shaking, Dean had been drinking too much, and even having an angel on their side wasn't giving them an edge.
When turned his head and saw he wasn't alone, his head cleared, and Sam remembered when it was and what had happened. It wasn't a year ago. Lucifer was back in his cage, and Dean was asleep with a blanket around his shoulders, his head resting on the cot's mattress near Sam's legs. His knees were drawn up, one arm stretched out across the base of the mattress, curled, relaxed fingers almost but not quite brushing the cuff of Sam's jeans.
Sam had noted details about his brother for months now, the changes from the year Sam had been away. When he'd first found Dean at Lisa's, he'd seen how Dean's sharp edges had gone smoother, his reflexes a shade slower, yet the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes had deepened and he looked more than a year older. Once they were back on the road, Dean's face had gone lean again, tension in his jaw, tiredness growing in his eyes. With reflexes good as ever, Dean moved even more efficiently than he ever had, seeming more solid than he had during the year when Michael and Lucifer and the apocalypse had been draining both of them bit by bit.
It had all been information -- how effective Dean still was as a hunter, could he do what was needed, how soft had he gone.
He watched his brother sleep and it hurt now, a hollow ache in his chest seeing all the same details. His body had wear on it that looked beyond his thirty-one years.
Yet Dean asleep looked strangely young. He made Sam think of Dean at twelve, waiting with his sawed-off shotgun at easy reach for Dad to come back, falling asleep and pretending later like he hadn't.
"Hey," Sam said softly, and twitched his leg so the denim of his jeans brushed Dean's cheek.
Dean had always been a slow waker. He raised his head and rubbed the corners of his eyes with thumb and index finger, blinked, and then his focus snapped in fast.
"Sam?" His voice was uncertain, a little rough with sleep and exhaustion as he got to his feet.
"Yeah," Sam said, thinking of the age of his brother's soul. Sam had never really been able to wrap his head around it, but in the past few years, he'd thought he'd seen the weight of it showing on Dean, something beyond the obvious causes of wear. Maybe it would show on Sam too.
There were sounds from upstairs, water running, the bang of a pot on the stove. Dean gave Sam a long stare. Then he bent over and unlocked the cuff around Sam's left wrist, his fingers moving fast, fumbling. He freed Sam's other wrist, with a rattle of metal, and helped Sam sit up. Something tickled and murmured at the back of Sam's mind, then went quiet. Dean's hand stayed warm on his shoulder a moment before he went over to the table and poured water into a cup. He handed it to Sam, who drank it slowly. The cold liquid soothed his raw throat.
His legs were a little shaky when he stood up, but Sam managed without swaying too visibly on his feet. "No, it's okay," he said, when Dean reached for him, and Dean pulled his hand back. Sam thought of a hundred things he needed to say, but they caught in his throat.
Dean followed him out of the panic room. The place had served as a prison cell more than a safe haven, and the stale, metallic smell of it was stifling. Sam hoped he'd never see the inside of it ever again for any reason.
At the foot of the wooden steps, Sam grabbed Dean's sleeve, and Dean stopped. It was impossible to know where to even begin. It'd been a long time since he'd been aware like this, as if he'd been living in black and white before and now everything was back in color, even sounds and smells gone louder and sharper.
As Dean watched him, wary and a little puzzled, Sam reached out with his other hand, grabbed Dean's shoulder, pulled until Dean had no choice but to stumble forward. Sam wrapped his arms around his brother and held him tight. Dean let out a startled breath against Sam's shirt before he hugged him back.
Then Dean shoved him away and made a face. "Dude, you need a shower."
Bobby glanced up from the stove when Sam walked into the kitchen. Sam hovered in the doorway, remembered holding the knife high, ready to plunge it into Bobby's chest.
"Bobby..." Sam took a step forward.
"Save it, kid," Bobby said, his voice gone soft and gruff. "Good to see you're in one piece."
The tightness in Sam's throat eased as Bobby turned back to sizzling pans full of scrambled eggs and enough bacon Sam thought maybe he was going for revenge by cholesterol.
Dean went right over to sit at the table, comfortable and careless in a way that said "home." Sam remembered feeling that way in Bobby's kitchen once. Familiar territory, something that felt a tiny part his, but now it was hard to know where to put himself. As if he might break something if he didn't watch his feet, where he put his body -- and Bobby's home was far from a pristine, fragile kind of space.
For a while, Bobby's house had become just another place, familiar enough, but he'd felt no sense of either connection or alienation.
The thick scent of eggs and smoky-sweet smell of the bacon surrounded him, and for a second Sam wanted to get away, get out of the warm kitchen and be outside, give more room to his own thoughts and his own senses if he could manage it.
He sat down across from Dean, and still had no idea what to say. Dean's hands rested on the table, and Sam's gaze went to the new, long scar at the base of Dean's thumb. Cuts and scars and bruises weren't exactly big news, and Sam had already observed the scar, and asked about it. Dean had said kitchen knife accident, and he'd wanted to stitch it up himself but Lisa had made him go to the ER. Sam hadn't given it any further thought, once he knew its cause, filed it away as information. But now his brain worried at it, the idea of his brother's hands, always so sure with a knife, slipping up cutting onions or carrots or whatever it'd been. Enough blood that it had frightened Lisa, who Sam knew was well aware of more frightening wounds than that, along with the hunter habit of self-treatment.
Sam thought about his brother going to the ER for a cut from a kitchen knife. He thought about Dean, drinking too much whiskey and going through book after book and having bad dreams.
Sam hadn't slept or dreamed in over a year.
He had a nightmare that night, so vivid he could smell the grass and mud at Stull, felt the roughness of the cloth of Adam's jacket in his grip, the lurch in his stomach as he fell into the darkness of that impossible hole, and then the jolt that shook his body as he thudded to the ground in a muddy field, a piece of himself gone.
The thing at the back of Sam's mind tickled, trembled with pressure. It was almost like a living thing. It subsided as Sam jerked awake in a panicked tangle of sheets and blankets and sweat. He scrambled out of bed and stood in his sweats and t-shirt, bare feet against the cold wood floor. He could swear he still felt the rain hitting his face for a moment until he got his bearings and the dream retreated.
Sam lowered himself to the floor and sat with his back against the side of the bed.
Adam was still down there, in the place where Sam couldn't remember. Sam hoped he'd been a comfort to him while they'd been in the cage. For a while at least, until each of them must have cracked and folded and broken beneath Lucifer and Michael, until Sam had to leave Adam behind.
A report about a couple of chimeras up by Watertown came in over one of Bobby's many phone lines.
"Your arm...how long?" Bobby said irritably into the phone. "Well, who told you to go after two of them by yourself, Julie?...Don't give me that. Jesus H. Christ, you're just like your old man...all right, you stay where you are...no...don't be an idiot...I'll send someone." Bobby lowered the phone.
Dean said, "On it," before Bobby could ask.
The past few weeks, since he'd lost the Dodge, Sam had ridden in the Impala knowing the familiar smell and sound of her, but she'd become only a car. A way to get from point A to point B.
As Dean slid in behind the wheel, Sam hesitated with his hand on the door handle.
When Sam settled onto the bench on the driver's side, his legs knew instinctively how to fit, and the dip of the seat molded to his body as if it'd been waiting for him. The rumble of her engine, as Dean turned on the ignition, was forgiving.
In the poorly-lit cellars of the local library, they lured one of the beasts halfway onto the elevator and closed the door into its body. Chimera guts oozed out of the crack, down the walls. Sam looked away.
The other one doubled back on them. When it sprang at Dean, Sam raised his shotgun with hands gone sweaty and arms a little shaky, like he was seventeen. Dean flung himself aside into a bookcase to avoid the claws and snapping teeth and Sam fired, got the chimera in a single killshot to the head. The thing thudded to the crumbling cement floor and Sam ran over to his brother, who was half-buried in dusty books.
"Shit," Sam kept saying. "Shit, Dean." He pulled the books off him, and patted Dean's arm and chest, checking for injuries. Dean only winced a little and coughed before Sam slung Dean's arm across his shoulders and pulled him up.
Dean brushed the dust off his jacket, and Sam started walking fast towards the stairs -- no one would be using the elevator for a while. He needed to get out of there, out of that cold, smelly cellar with the smell of blood, and stop replaying in his head Dean throwing himself into the bookshelf with the chimera snapping at air inches from his body.
"Sam." Dean caught up with him. "Sam, stop." He grabbed his arm.
"I was a better hunter before," Sam said, meaning it as a wry, self-deprecating joke, only somehow it didn't come out as at all funny.
"What?" Dean said.
"I was too slow just now."
"No, you weren't," Dean said, bitter and hard and quick, and that was the end of the discussion.
The beasts were heavy, but they managed the cleanup, taking them one at a time in the Impala's trunk, all their gear stashed in their motel room, and dumping them into Lake Kampeska. Someday a fisherman was going to get a real thrill. Sam tried to take the bulk of the weight when they lifted, insisted on moving their gear himself, kept trying to get Dean to ease up without directly saying something but Dean shook it all off. By the time they were done with the work, Dean couldn't hide his limp or the way he was favoring his left side, wincing.
"You should probably let me drive," Sam said.
"I'm good." Dean's voice held a well-known blunt note.
Without meaning to, Sam let his sigh out audibly. "Okay, you're good, I get that." He didn't move closer, hung back with his hands at his sides, knowing that if he insisted too hard, this argument would be over before it began. "But you're not one hundred percent."
For a moment he expected Dean to say I'm fine or some bullshit like that, and maybe they should be beyond this. Dean looked like he was thinking it over.
Finally Sam blurted, "Dean," and he must've sounded so desperate or irritated or pleading that Dean pursed his lips in a resigned way before he silently handed over the keys.
Dean sat in a kitchen chair, holding up his t-shirt, while Sam swabbed antiseptic over the scrapes on the side of Dean's ribs.
"Ow," Dean muttered, but his tone was mild, almost like he was complaining just to complain, part of the family ritual of patching up wounds.
"Just be glad it ain't chimera scratches," Bobby said tartly, when Dean hissed through his teeth, part pain, Sam thought, and part protest.
Sam taped on a layer of gauze. "Okay, we're done," he said. The bruises on Dean's skin were darkening into purple, but nothing was cracked or broken, his breathing normal.
It was a relief when Dean tugged down his shirt and Sam couldn't see the bruises any more.
It took Sam a long time to fall asleep that night, and when he did he had the same dream again, Adam and falling into the hole and Sam landing in the field, rain on his face. Over and over, with an itch at the back of his brain when he woke up.
The light of pre-dawn stained the sky, so Sam pulled on a long-sleeved shirt over his sweat pants, and his sneakers, and went out for a run. A mist hung in the air, curling around the old junkers in Bobby's yard. Sam started jogging, his breath joining the mist in the air, then slowed and stopped when he saw the outline of a figure emerging from the fog ahead of him, leaning against the Impala.
"Dean?" Sam stopped.
"You're up early," Dean said, arms folded. His jacket was a smudge of faded blue in the mist. He didn't seem to be doing much of anything. It seemed like he'd been there a while, beads of moisture clinging to his sleeves.
"Couldn't get back to sleep," Sam said.
Dean scuffed the toe of his boot into the gravel. "You having nightmares?"
"Yeah, but...not about Hell. Because whatever Death did, it's working, and I don't remember any of it. Not exactly."
"What, then?"
Sam walked closer, and stood facing to Dean. "That damn hole in the ground. In Stull. I dream about falling in and waking up in the field."
"Pretty fucking scary, that hole." Dean's gaze kept towards the horizon, the maze of the junkyard and open sky beyond it. "And what you did..." He shifted, pushing his hands into the pockets of his jacket, hunching his shoulders against the chill. "That's the bravest thing I've ever seen anybody do."
It was a good thing Dean didn't look at him right then. Sam bit the inside of his cheek as the junkyard blurred a little. He took a deep breath and let it out. "I didn't do it alone," he said, his voice steady. It sounded kind of lame and inadequate but Sam needed to say something and that was the rightest thing he could find.
Sam saw Dean swallow hard, and then he pushed off from the Impala. "I'm going in for coffee. You still going for that run?"
"Yeah," said Sam. As Dean started to walk away, Sam called after him. "Hey, Dean," and Dean stopped and turned. "I don't know how you did it," Sam said. "After Castiel pulled you out of Hell. You remembered everything. I don't know how you kept going the way you did."
"I wasn't down there as long as you were..." Dean started.
"Shut up, that's not the point." Sometimes his brother was so damned irritating, and then Sam felt guilty for being irritated at him, especially now. "I'm glad I can't remember."
"Are you sorry you have your soul back?"
It would be easy to lie -- it wouldn't even be a lie, really. But he couldn't. "It's harder this way," Sam said.
"Welcome to the human race, Sammy," Dean said.
"But I'd rather be me," Sam added. "The answer's no."
Dean's jawline went a little less tense.
Running along the silent road, sound of his sneakers pounding on the pavement and his own breath and heartbeat in his ears, Sam knew this served as an escape.
Dean usually ran with headphones on, while Sam used to prefer the quieter time inside his own head. But being inside his own head hadn't been ideal for a few years now, and he wished he'd thought to bring his iPod. But it had seemed too important to get out in a hurry, get his body moving, chase off the dreams.
A big eighteen wheeler roared by him, the first vehicle Sam had seen that morning and it brought, as trucks sometimes did, the ghost echo of a jolt and the sound of twisting metal and breaking glass and blood. Sam ran a little faster and the quick impression was gone with the debris stirred up in the truck's path.
There were too many messes in his wake. Some couldn't be undone. Some maybe he could fix. He'd figure out a way.
By the time he got back to Bobby's, his shirt was stained dark with sweat and his calf muscles were shouting at him.
Sam saw the way Dean eased himself carefully down into a chair. Before he went to take a shower, Sam found the bottle of painkillers.
"Here." Sam put the pills and a glass of water down on the table in front of Dean, among the messy piles of papers.
Dean glanced up at him, then down at the pills, like Sam had never handed him painkillers before, but they'd been through this a hundred times. Then Dean took two pills, swallowing them using the water, and Sam knew it was a sign of how much pain he was in that he hadn't refused or put up a protest first. Dean liked to conserve their drug stores.
Then Sam poured a glass of water for himself, drank it in slow gulps while he stared out through the kitchen window, sweat cooling on his skin.
Dean opened the bottle of beer with a snap-hiss, reached down into the cooler, and held out another bottle to Sam, who accepted it.
The Impala dipped a little under their weight as they settled onto the hood.
"Are you okay?" Sam asked. "No, I mean, really. Because even though you haven't needed any painkillers the past two days, you're still wincing when you move, and I think you maybe cracked a rib. You've also taken out your cell phone and almost called someone about three times today. I'm guessing Lisa."
"I didn't crack a rib. It's the bruising is all. Hurts a little, but it's better." Dean took a few slow gulps of beer. "And yes, I almost called Lisa. I doubt she would talk to me."
It was hard to know how to start this. Sam took a swallow of beer first. "Dean, a lot of the things I did...I want to..."
"It wasn't you, Sam."
"It kind of was, though. Sort of." Sam turned the bottle in his fingers, touching the letters and picture on the label without truly seeing them. "I mean, I wouldn't do any of those things now, I definitely wouldn't. But it wasn't like when Meg or Lucifer possessed me, when I had no say in what was going on, and I could see my body, my hands, doing things."
"Sam --"
"Let me finish. I remember making decisions. No one forced me to do anything. Whatever I've been for the past year, okay, it wasn't...I wasn't all there. But it was a part of me." He took another few swallows and discovered he'd drained three quarters of the bottle already.
Dean kept his gaze down on his beer bottle. "It wasn't your fault."
"I guess." Except he'd done a lot of shit even before he'd lost his soul, had been willing to do all kinds of things, no matter what burned in his path, for a while.
He couldn't say it to Dean, and see the hurt that would come into his eyes, but this was finding the brakes again on something that had always been there. It hadn't ever gone at top speed, not until his body had landed in that rainy field with no idea how he'd stopped falling.
For that year, it hadn't hurt -- nothing had hurt. It had been almost exhilarating, while a part of him wondered where the brakes had gone, and he'd almost missed the hurting.
He finished the bottle and dropped it into the cooler before he slid off the car to grab another. He popped the cap and took a deep swallow before leaning against the hood. "Can I ask you something?"
Dean peeled at the corners of the label on his bottle, which he'd drained. He shrugged. "That depends." He squinted in the sunlight, then slid down off the hood, tossed his empty, and opened another bottle for himself before he leaned next to Sam, their shoulders almost touching.
"Why?" Sam asked. "Why didn't you give up on me? We don't do deals any more, and still...you bent over for Crowley and you yelled at a lot of people, including Castiel. I know you begged him for help. And then you died for seven minutes so you could talk with Death and work something out. You fucking died. Again." Sam wanted to finally take his raincheck for that, kick Dean's ass from one end of Bobby's yard to the other, and yet he couldn't really feel pissed. Terrified was more like it. "I want to know why. And don't you dare say 'because you're my brother.'"
There was only a short hesitation before Dean said, "Because I missed you. Whoever you are when you're being all...you. Because you're a stubborn, tunnel-visioned asshole who cares too much and you're kind of insane, but hey, that gallops in this family anyway, and your stupid teary-eyed chick flick crap is...it's annoying and you're so godamned serious all the time, it's fun to tease you. And you're a scary smart geekboy genius. And your hair is stupid. Get a haircut, Cousin It." Dean gulped down more beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "And because you'd do it for me."
Dean reached down for another bottle of beer.
"My hair is stupid?" Sam felt something he hadn't in over a year, a lightness in his chest. He had to struggle not to grin.
"Also," Dean held up an index finger, teacher-like. "Your taste is music sucks."
"You cried during Titanic."
"I told you, we're never mentioning that again."
"Hey, Bobby," Sam shouted. "Guess what, Dean --"
Dean leg-swept him so Sam thudded to the ground next to the cooler, spilling his half-finished bottle of beer. He lay on his back, liquid pooling into dark amber on the dirt beside him, and started laughing. Dean shook his head, his lips curling into a smile around the mouth of his beer bottle as he took another drink, his shadow half-blocking the sun.
When Dean reached down to help him up, Sam felt the strength in his brother's grip, and he let Dean pull him to his feet.
~end
Sam and Dean, Bobby | R (for references to past torture) | 4,200 words
a/n: Set after SPN 6x11. Many thanks to smilla02 for the beta.
Sam had spent most of his life with fire. He had used it as a weapon and a tool, known it both as a comfort and a source of grief. At least, Sam knew he'd felt comfort and grief once, as a faint echo.
Having his soul shoved back into his body was like fire eating him from the inside out. Sam screamed, pain and rage and protest while the heat swept from his ribs and heart outwards, until his whole body might have been made of flame. With the heat came the memory of being torn apart and put back together, pulled open, teased with visions of familiar faces and too much kindness followed by blood and a repeat of old losses and pain, and the unwanted push of hands and brush of wings.
The sound of a snap-click, like a cartridge sliding into a gun, ended it. The heat subsided into warmth, while something shifted and settled inside of him, sliding into place with a sense of relief so intense it hurt almost as sharply as grief.
He slumped back against the flimsy mattress of the cot, muscles no longer pulling against the cuffs around his wrists. Sam's hazy vision caught a thin man in a dark suit walking away, while Bobby stared at Sam, mouth open a little. He saw Dean slide down into a crouch with his back against the wall, exhaustion in every movement, like his muscles had given out. Dean put his hand over his face a moment before he lifted his gaze to Sam, held there as the blackness filled Sam's vision.
Sam opened his eyes and blinked. He recognized the flickering of daylight through the exhaust fan, high above his head, then turned his head to see the metal walls that were partially covered in a patchwork of article clippings and maps.
He was alone in the panic room, Lucifer walked free, they had to stop it somehow, Sam had swallowed demon blood and was coming down from the power rush, sweating and shaking, Dean had been drinking too much, and even having an angel on their side wasn't giving them an edge.
When turned his head and saw he wasn't alone, his head cleared, and Sam remembered when it was and what had happened. It wasn't a year ago. Lucifer was back in his cage, and Dean was asleep with a blanket around his shoulders, his head resting on the cot's mattress near Sam's legs. His knees were drawn up, one arm stretched out across the base of the mattress, curled, relaxed fingers almost but not quite brushing the cuff of Sam's jeans.
Sam had noted details about his brother for months now, the changes from the year Sam had been away. When he'd first found Dean at Lisa's, he'd seen how Dean's sharp edges had gone smoother, his reflexes a shade slower, yet the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes had deepened and he looked more than a year older. Once they were back on the road, Dean's face had gone lean again, tension in his jaw, tiredness growing in his eyes. With reflexes good as ever, Dean moved even more efficiently than he ever had, seeming more solid than he had during the year when Michael and Lucifer and the apocalypse had been draining both of them bit by bit.
It had all been information -- how effective Dean still was as a hunter, could he do what was needed, how soft had he gone.
He watched his brother sleep and it hurt now, a hollow ache in his chest seeing all the same details. His body had wear on it that looked beyond his thirty-one years.
Yet Dean asleep looked strangely young. He made Sam think of Dean at twelve, waiting with his sawed-off shotgun at easy reach for Dad to come back, falling asleep and pretending later like he hadn't.
"Hey," Sam said softly, and twitched his leg so the denim of his jeans brushed Dean's cheek.
Dean had always been a slow waker. He raised his head and rubbed the corners of his eyes with thumb and index finger, blinked, and then his focus snapped in fast.
"Sam?" His voice was uncertain, a little rough with sleep and exhaustion as he got to his feet.
"Yeah," Sam said, thinking of the age of his brother's soul. Sam had never really been able to wrap his head around it, but in the past few years, he'd thought he'd seen the weight of it showing on Dean, something beyond the obvious causes of wear. Maybe it would show on Sam too.
There were sounds from upstairs, water running, the bang of a pot on the stove. Dean gave Sam a long stare. Then he bent over and unlocked the cuff around Sam's left wrist, his fingers moving fast, fumbling. He freed Sam's other wrist, with a rattle of metal, and helped Sam sit up. Something tickled and murmured at the back of Sam's mind, then went quiet. Dean's hand stayed warm on his shoulder a moment before he went over to the table and poured water into a cup. He handed it to Sam, who drank it slowly. The cold liquid soothed his raw throat.
His legs were a little shaky when he stood up, but Sam managed without swaying too visibly on his feet. "No, it's okay," he said, when Dean reached for him, and Dean pulled his hand back. Sam thought of a hundred things he needed to say, but they caught in his throat.
Dean followed him out of the panic room. The place had served as a prison cell more than a safe haven, and the stale, metallic smell of it was stifling. Sam hoped he'd never see the inside of it ever again for any reason.
At the foot of the wooden steps, Sam grabbed Dean's sleeve, and Dean stopped. It was impossible to know where to even begin. It'd been a long time since he'd been aware like this, as if he'd been living in black and white before and now everything was back in color, even sounds and smells gone louder and sharper.
As Dean watched him, wary and a little puzzled, Sam reached out with his other hand, grabbed Dean's shoulder, pulled until Dean had no choice but to stumble forward. Sam wrapped his arms around his brother and held him tight. Dean let out a startled breath against Sam's shirt before he hugged him back.
Then Dean shoved him away and made a face. "Dude, you need a shower."
Bobby glanced up from the stove when Sam walked into the kitchen. Sam hovered in the doorway, remembered holding the knife high, ready to plunge it into Bobby's chest.
"Bobby..." Sam took a step forward.
"Save it, kid," Bobby said, his voice gone soft and gruff. "Good to see you're in one piece."
The tightness in Sam's throat eased as Bobby turned back to sizzling pans full of scrambled eggs and enough bacon Sam thought maybe he was going for revenge by cholesterol.
Dean went right over to sit at the table, comfortable and careless in a way that said "home." Sam remembered feeling that way in Bobby's kitchen once. Familiar territory, something that felt a tiny part his, but now it was hard to know where to put himself. As if he might break something if he didn't watch his feet, where he put his body -- and Bobby's home was far from a pristine, fragile kind of space.
For a while, Bobby's house had become just another place, familiar enough, but he'd felt no sense of either connection or alienation.
The thick scent of eggs and smoky-sweet smell of the bacon surrounded him, and for a second Sam wanted to get away, get out of the warm kitchen and be outside, give more room to his own thoughts and his own senses if he could manage it.
He sat down across from Dean, and still had no idea what to say. Dean's hands rested on the table, and Sam's gaze went to the new, long scar at the base of Dean's thumb. Cuts and scars and bruises weren't exactly big news, and Sam had already observed the scar, and asked about it. Dean had said kitchen knife accident, and he'd wanted to stitch it up himself but Lisa had made him go to the ER. Sam hadn't given it any further thought, once he knew its cause, filed it away as information. But now his brain worried at it, the idea of his brother's hands, always so sure with a knife, slipping up cutting onions or carrots or whatever it'd been. Enough blood that it had frightened Lisa, who Sam knew was well aware of more frightening wounds than that, along with the hunter habit of self-treatment.
Sam thought about his brother going to the ER for a cut from a kitchen knife. He thought about Dean, drinking too much whiskey and going through book after book and having bad dreams.
Sam hadn't slept or dreamed in over a year.
He had a nightmare that night, so vivid he could smell the grass and mud at Stull, felt the roughness of the cloth of Adam's jacket in his grip, the lurch in his stomach as he fell into the darkness of that impossible hole, and then the jolt that shook his body as he thudded to the ground in a muddy field, a piece of himself gone.
The thing at the back of Sam's mind tickled, trembled with pressure. It was almost like a living thing. It subsided as Sam jerked awake in a panicked tangle of sheets and blankets and sweat. He scrambled out of bed and stood in his sweats and t-shirt, bare feet against the cold wood floor. He could swear he still felt the rain hitting his face for a moment until he got his bearings and the dream retreated.
Sam lowered himself to the floor and sat with his back against the side of the bed.
Adam was still down there, in the place where Sam couldn't remember. Sam hoped he'd been a comfort to him while they'd been in the cage. For a while at least, until each of them must have cracked and folded and broken beneath Lucifer and Michael, until Sam had to leave Adam behind.
A report about a couple of chimeras up by Watertown came in over one of Bobby's many phone lines.
"Your arm...how long?" Bobby said irritably into the phone. "Well, who told you to go after two of them by yourself, Julie?...Don't give me that. Jesus H. Christ, you're just like your old man...all right, you stay where you are...no...don't be an idiot...I'll send someone." Bobby lowered the phone.
Dean said, "On it," before Bobby could ask.
The past few weeks, since he'd lost the Dodge, Sam had ridden in the Impala knowing the familiar smell and sound of her, but she'd become only a car. A way to get from point A to point B.
As Dean slid in behind the wheel, Sam hesitated with his hand on the door handle.
When Sam settled onto the bench on the driver's side, his legs knew instinctively how to fit, and the dip of the seat molded to his body as if it'd been waiting for him. The rumble of her engine, as Dean turned on the ignition, was forgiving.
In the poorly-lit cellars of the local library, they lured one of the beasts halfway onto the elevator and closed the door into its body. Chimera guts oozed out of the crack, down the walls. Sam looked away.
The other one doubled back on them. When it sprang at Dean, Sam raised his shotgun with hands gone sweaty and arms a little shaky, like he was seventeen. Dean flung himself aside into a bookcase to avoid the claws and snapping teeth and Sam fired, got the chimera in a single killshot to the head. The thing thudded to the crumbling cement floor and Sam ran over to his brother, who was half-buried in dusty books.
"Shit," Sam kept saying. "Shit, Dean." He pulled the books off him, and patted Dean's arm and chest, checking for injuries. Dean only winced a little and coughed before Sam slung Dean's arm across his shoulders and pulled him up.
Dean brushed the dust off his jacket, and Sam started walking fast towards the stairs -- no one would be using the elevator for a while. He needed to get out of there, out of that cold, smelly cellar with the smell of blood, and stop replaying in his head Dean throwing himself into the bookshelf with the chimera snapping at air inches from his body.
"Sam." Dean caught up with him. "Sam, stop." He grabbed his arm.
"I was a better hunter before," Sam said, meaning it as a wry, self-deprecating joke, only somehow it didn't come out as at all funny.
"What?" Dean said.
"I was too slow just now."
"No, you weren't," Dean said, bitter and hard and quick, and that was the end of the discussion.
The beasts were heavy, but they managed the cleanup, taking them one at a time in the Impala's trunk, all their gear stashed in their motel room, and dumping them into Lake Kampeska. Someday a fisherman was going to get a real thrill. Sam tried to take the bulk of the weight when they lifted, insisted on moving their gear himself, kept trying to get Dean to ease up without directly saying something but Dean shook it all off. By the time they were done with the work, Dean couldn't hide his limp or the way he was favoring his left side, wincing.
"You should probably let me drive," Sam said.
"I'm good." Dean's voice held a well-known blunt note.
Without meaning to, Sam let his sigh out audibly. "Okay, you're good, I get that." He didn't move closer, hung back with his hands at his sides, knowing that if he insisted too hard, this argument would be over before it began. "But you're not one hundred percent."
For a moment he expected Dean to say I'm fine or some bullshit like that, and maybe they should be beyond this. Dean looked like he was thinking it over.
Finally Sam blurted, "Dean," and he must've sounded so desperate or irritated or pleading that Dean pursed his lips in a resigned way before he silently handed over the keys.
Dean sat in a kitchen chair, holding up his t-shirt, while Sam swabbed antiseptic over the scrapes on the side of Dean's ribs.
"Ow," Dean muttered, but his tone was mild, almost like he was complaining just to complain, part of the family ritual of patching up wounds.
"Just be glad it ain't chimera scratches," Bobby said tartly, when Dean hissed through his teeth, part pain, Sam thought, and part protest.
Sam taped on a layer of gauze. "Okay, we're done," he said. The bruises on Dean's skin were darkening into purple, but nothing was cracked or broken, his breathing normal.
It was a relief when Dean tugged down his shirt and Sam couldn't see the bruises any more.
It took Sam a long time to fall asleep that night, and when he did he had the same dream again, Adam and falling into the hole and Sam landing in the field, rain on his face. Over and over, with an itch at the back of his brain when he woke up.
The light of pre-dawn stained the sky, so Sam pulled on a long-sleeved shirt over his sweat pants, and his sneakers, and went out for a run. A mist hung in the air, curling around the old junkers in Bobby's yard. Sam started jogging, his breath joining the mist in the air, then slowed and stopped when he saw the outline of a figure emerging from the fog ahead of him, leaning against the Impala.
"Dean?" Sam stopped.
"You're up early," Dean said, arms folded. His jacket was a smudge of faded blue in the mist. He didn't seem to be doing much of anything. It seemed like he'd been there a while, beads of moisture clinging to his sleeves.
"Couldn't get back to sleep," Sam said.
Dean scuffed the toe of his boot into the gravel. "You having nightmares?"
"Yeah, but...not about Hell. Because whatever Death did, it's working, and I don't remember any of it. Not exactly."
"What, then?"
Sam walked closer, and stood facing to Dean. "That damn hole in the ground. In Stull. I dream about falling in and waking up in the field."
"Pretty fucking scary, that hole." Dean's gaze kept towards the horizon, the maze of the junkyard and open sky beyond it. "And what you did..." He shifted, pushing his hands into the pockets of his jacket, hunching his shoulders against the chill. "That's the bravest thing I've ever seen anybody do."
It was a good thing Dean didn't look at him right then. Sam bit the inside of his cheek as the junkyard blurred a little. He took a deep breath and let it out. "I didn't do it alone," he said, his voice steady. It sounded kind of lame and inadequate but Sam needed to say something and that was the rightest thing he could find.
Sam saw Dean swallow hard, and then he pushed off from the Impala. "I'm going in for coffee. You still going for that run?"
"Yeah," said Sam. As Dean started to walk away, Sam called after him. "Hey, Dean," and Dean stopped and turned. "I don't know how you did it," Sam said. "After Castiel pulled you out of Hell. You remembered everything. I don't know how you kept going the way you did."
"I wasn't down there as long as you were..." Dean started.
"Shut up, that's not the point." Sometimes his brother was so damned irritating, and then Sam felt guilty for being irritated at him, especially now. "I'm glad I can't remember."
"Are you sorry you have your soul back?"
It would be easy to lie -- it wouldn't even be a lie, really. But he couldn't. "It's harder this way," Sam said.
"Welcome to the human race, Sammy," Dean said.
"But I'd rather be me," Sam added. "The answer's no."
Dean's jawline went a little less tense.
Running along the silent road, sound of his sneakers pounding on the pavement and his own breath and heartbeat in his ears, Sam knew this served as an escape.
Dean usually ran with headphones on, while Sam used to prefer the quieter time inside his own head. But being inside his own head hadn't been ideal for a few years now, and he wished he'd thought to bring his iPod. But it had seemed too important to get out in a hurry, get his body moving, chase off the dreams.
A big eighteen wheeler roared by him, the first vehicle Sam had seen that morning and it brought, as trucks sometimes did, the ghost echo of a jolt and the sound of twisting metal and breaking glass and blood. Sam ran a little faster and the quick impression was gone with the debris stirred up in the truck's path.
There were too many messes in his wake. Some couldn't be undone. Some maybe he could fix. He'd figure out a way.
By the time he got back to Bobby's, his shirt was stained dark with sweat and his calf muscles were shouting at him.
Sam saw the way Dean eased himself carefully down into a chair. Before he went to take a shower, Sam found the bottle of painkillers.
"Here." Sam put the pills and a glass of water down on the table in front of Dean, among the messy piles of papers.
Dean glanced up at him, then down at the pills, like Sam had never handed him painkillers before, but they'd been through this a hundred times. Then Dean took two pills, swallowing them using the water, and Sam knew it was a sign of how much pain he was in that he hadn't refused or put up a protest first. Dean liked to conserve their drug stores.
Then Sam poured a glass of water for himself, drank it in slow gulps while he stared out through the kitchen window, sweat cooling on his skin.
Dean opened the bottle of beer with a snap-hiss, reached down into the cooler, and held out another bottle to Sam, who accepted it.
The Impala dipped a little under their weight as they settled onto the hood.
"Are you okay?" Sam asked. "No, I mean, really. Because even though you haven't needed any painkillers the past two days, you're still wincing when you move, and I think you maybe cracked a rib. You've also taken out your cell phone and almost called someone about three times today. I'm guessing Lisa."
"I didn't crack a rib. It's the bruising is all. Hurts a little, but it's better." Dean took a few slow gulps of beer. "And yes, I almost called Lisa. I doubt she would talk to me."
It was hard to know how to start this. Sam took a swallow of beer first. "Dean, a lot of the things I did...I want to..."
"It wasn't you, Sam."
"It kind of was, though. Sort of." Sam turned the bottle in his fingers, touching the letters and picture on the label without truly seeing them. "I mean, I wouldn't do any of those things now, I definitely wouldn't. But it wasn't like when Meg or Lucifer possessed me, when I had no say in what was going on, and I could see my body, my hands, doing things."
"Sam --"
"Let me finish. I remember making decisions. No one forced me to do anything. Whatever I've been for the past year, okay, it wasn't...I wasn't all there. But it was a part of me." He took another few swallows and discovered he'd drained three quarters of the bottle already.
Dean kept his gaze down on his beer bottle. "It wasn't your fault."
"I guess." Except he'd done a lot of shit even before he'd lost his soul, had been willing to do all kinds of things, no matter what burned in his path, for a while.
He couldn't say it to Dean, and see the hurt that would come into his eyes, but this was finding the brakes again on something that had always been there. It hadn't ever gone at top speed, not until his body had landed in that rainy field with no idea how he'd stopped falling.
For that year, it hadn't hurt -- nothing had hurt. It had been almost exhilarating, while a part of him wondered where the brakes had gone, and he'd almost missed the hurting.
He finished the bottle and dropped it into the cooler before he slid off the car to grab another. He popped the cap and took a deep swallow before leaning against the hood. "Can I ask you something?"
Dean peeled at the corners of the label on his bottle, which he'd drained. He shrugged. "That depends." He squinted in the sunlight, then slid down off the hood, tossed his empty, and opened another bottle for himself before he leaned next to Sam, their shoulders almost touching.
"Why?" Sam asked. "Why didn't you give up on me? We don't do deals any more, and still...you bent over for Crowley and you yelled at a lot of people, including Castiel. I know you begged him for help. And then you died for seven minutes so you could talk with Death and work something out. You fucking died. Again." Sam wanted to finally take his raincheck for that, kick Dean's ass from one end of Bobby's yard to the other, and yet he couldn't really feel pissed. Terrified was more like it. "I want to know why. And don't you dare say 'because you're my brother.'"
There was only a short hesitation before Dean said, "Because I missed you. Whoever you are when you're being all...you. Because you're a stubborn, tunnel-visioned asshole who cares too much and you're kind of insane, but hey, that gallops in this family anyway, and your stupid teary-eyed chick flick crap is...it's annoying and you're so godamned serious all the time, it's fun to tease you. And you're a scary smart geekboy genius. And your hair is stupid. Get a haircut, Cousin It." Dean gulped down more beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "And because you'd do it for me."
Dean reached down for another bottle of beer.
"My hair is stupid?" Sam felt something he hadn't in over a year, a lightness in his chest. He had to struggle not to grin.
"Also," Dean held up an index finger, teacher-like. "Your taste is music sucks."
"You cried during Titanic."
"I told you, we're never mentioning that again."
"Hey, Bobby," Sam shouted. "Guess what, Dean --"
Dean leg-swept him so Sam thudded to the ground next to the cooler, spilling his half-finished bottle of beer. He lay on his back, liquid pooling into dark amber on the dirt beside him, and started laughing. Dean shook his head, his lips curling into a smile around the mouth of his beer bottle as he took another drink, his shadow half-blocking the sun.
When Dean reached down to help him up, Sam felt the strength in his brother's grip, and he let Dean pull him to his feet.
~end