Flying Weight - 1/5
masterpost
Sam wakes.
He has the impression that someone else was in the room just a moment ago, that they walked out in the very second Sam opened his eyes. Someone just left.
The room is empty now. He's on a bed, and the bed is warm, except at the edges where his body isn't and the sheets are so very cold. A block of dim, gray light from the open door sets the time at nothing at all - could be dusk, could be dawn, could be a rainy afternoon. On the wall, there's a poster of Ursula Andress in a white bikini. The picture's in grainy black and off-white, and its corners are coyly curled up with age. Sam stares at it, then remembers. This is Bobby's panic room.
Panic is built in to the room. Sam's heart beats faster as the need to figure out what he's doing here takes on sudden urgency. Has he been drinking demon blood? Can he taste it, is it sticky and dark in his mouth? Is his body temperature higher than it should be? Does he feel human?
He reaches back, for the first memory he can catch.
The sky is screaming overhead, stormclouds and sun. Sam's bones are shrink-wrapped in cold, bladed light. The light is prickling all over his skin, in his eyes and his ears and his nose, but through it he can still see Dean. Dean's sagging on his knees by the Impala, and he's battered half to death. His face is lumpy with swelling, colorful bruises. There's fresh red blood on his shirt, and on the hood of the Impala too.
It's the last time Sam's ever going to see Dean. It ends here. They end here.
Maybe nobody had left the room. Maybe Sam had only just arrived.
"It's okay, Dean. It's gonna be okay. I've got him."
The ground opens up in front of Sam, dropping straight through Hell and deeper yet, and everything's going to be okay. Adam and his archangel come at Sam, lit up blue with righteous anger, and he's shouting about destiny and he’s getting in the way of Sam's goodbye to his brother.
And they fall. And there's nothing afterwards.
Somewhere else in the house, a door closes. Sam's face jerks to the direction of the noise.
Gradually, his disorientation recedes. He's increasingly sure that it was just him in this room when he woke, and that he's been here for a while. He's in Bobby's house, so he's probably safe. There's someone else here, so that's probably Dean.
He's safe, and he's going to see Dean. He starts smiling and can't stop. He tries to be careful in easing the drip-needle out of the thick white vein in his arm but he's impatient and his fingers won't move quickly enough. The needle stings him as he draws it out.
He leaves the panic room, passes through to the stairs, and Castiel is waiting for him at the top, framed in a watery green square of light.
Sam smiles even more widely. "Cas! You're alive!"
"Yes," says Castiel. He frowns, at a loss, before adding, "As are you."
His hands flex, he makes a move towards Sam. Curious and confused, Sam falters at the bottom step. Then Castiel turns away and moves out of sight, and Sam follows him up into the kitchen.
It feels new to Sam, though nothing in Bobby's house is. There are particles of dust floating through the air that are older than Sam, cars rusting in the junkyard outside that Sam remembers passing running laps around when he and Dean were kids.
Castiel is standing by the sink. He’s wearing his clean but slightly disreputable trenchcoat, looking like he's just stepped in for a moment and doesn't intend to stay, perpetually passing through. He was wearing that trenchcoat when he burst into blood, Sam remembers.
"Where's Dean?" Sam says.
"Elsewhere," says Castiel. "And Bobby's not here currently, he's hunting a rugaru in Mississippi, but he says you can stay as long as you need to. He’s left a car for you, some supplies too."
Sam nods. "And where's Dean?"
"Elsewhere," says Castiel again. He abandons his apparent scrutiny of Bobby's vintage microwave, a block of chipped cream plastic, and turns to Sam. His expression is intent.
"This is very important so please listen. You've been living without your soul for the last three years, Sam. I was able to retrieve it for you, but it's very damaged. It's a miracle you've survived, in fact. It's important you don't try to remember anything. It could bring everything back, which could result in your death, or worse."
"What's worse than death?" Sam blurts out.
Castiel gives him a look. "Don't try to remember."
"I've been asleep for three years?" Sam says. He handles the words with care because they might explode in his hands and shake him apart.
"You've been asleep two days," Castiel corrects him.
Sam crosses to the window, and, reflected in the pane's freckled skin of dust and dirt, he sees his future-ghost looking back at him.
"But soulless for three years," Castiel says.
There aren’t any new lines on Sam’s face. There’s no gray in his hair. It’s only three years, after all. If he’s aged, it’s in more subtle ways. His eyes are no longer so wide and there’s a less forgiving set to his mouth.
"And you gave me my soul back?" says Sam.
"You needed it."
The house ticks on silently around them. Castiel waits without seeming impatient. Sam’s gaze slips beyond his own reflection to the dirty Fall evening laying down over the junkyard. He can’t see the Impala out there.
"Cas. C’mon, tell me. Where’s Dean? Is he with Lisa?"
After a moment’s silence, in which Sam fails to amend his mistake, Castiel sighs and leaves in a fleeting whisper of wings.
Sam considers the empty house. He looks from the soggy remains of food in the sink’s plughole to the black mold gathering the corner of the window to the cracked, peeling labels on Bobby’s bank of phones, and he finds no help, no sense of direction.
But on the tabletop, there’s a single glass with a last mouthful of whiskey in the bottom. Sam cocks his head and thinks about it. Picking the glass up and holding it into the dregs of light, Sam sees the curved smear of someone’s lower lip on the rim.
He touches the mark and his fingertip comes away wet.
:::
When he calls Dean's cellphone, Sam gets voicemail. He leaves a message, saying, "Hey, it's me-" Stops himself before he can add something painful and stupid like your brother. "I'm at Bobby's. Cas told me what happened. Can you- can you call me back?"
He hangs up and waits.
He runs through busy and ultimately unimportant activity, like a television left playing with nobody there to watch it.
He showers and shaves. His duffel bag is waiting for him by the door, and he finds fresh clothes in it. He flips through his wallet, through a series of business cards he knows he's never seen before. There are FBI cards with aliases he's never used, and addresses for storage units he's never been to. He keeps the cards in the order he found them and tucks them back into place with the diligent respect reserved for someone else's property.
Hunger surprises him so he helps himself to a plate of greasy leftover beef from the fridge. He checks out the car Bobby's left him. It's a dark red Ford, like cheap cherry soda, old but in good condition. Its tank is full and the engine starts without protest.
He calls Bobby, gets voicemail, and after that, Sam calls Dean again. He doesn't leave a message this time, but instead calls him once more straight after, to have his recorded voice play through as company in the prickling silence of Bobby's empty house.
"This is Dean. I can't get to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I'll call you back."
Except he doesn't.
:::
The morning sky is smooth and bleached white by sunshine when Sam sets out for Cicero, Indiana. While he’s packing the trunk with a few guns and knives scavenged from Bobby’s stock, Sam’s planning on dropping down into Tennessee. He’s found a couple of reports on the internet that are worth checking out: three people waking up at their own funerals in Hendersonville, the body of a recently missing child found wrapped in the roots of a century old tree. He’s going to Tennessee.
Sam scuffs through brittle red-black leaves and spreads the map out on the hood, sternly flattening in down again when a breeze ruffles beneath it. He plans a route that skims the edge of Kansas while taking best advantage of highways and backroads. He plans it out, gets in the car and drives.
To Cicero, Indiana.
Sam’s known exactly where Lisa lives since he realized the position she occupied in Dean’s subconscious. For years, Lisa could have been either one of Dean’s best-kept secrets or simply not important enough to warrant a mention; Sam doesn’t know which it is. It was only after Dean sold his soul that she appeared on the horizon, like a sighting of dry land. And she grew and grew in Dean’s wanting, until Sam knew for sure that, without other direction to guide him, Dean would be heading for her.
Parked on the street outside the house, Sam looks for signs that this is where Dean lives. But the only clue he’d expect, the Impala, is nowhere in sight.
It’s probably in the garage, Sam decides. Can't keep a car like that out in plain view, any more than Dean could wander around with his knives and guns for anyone to see.
He climbs out of the car and walks to the front door. He chews his lip, heart thrumming in his chest as impatient as a child, and tries to catch his breath. The neighborhood’s nice, he notices while he waits. Summer barbecue, beer-and-football at the weekend territory, no doubt. The idea of Dean trying to fit in with this cookie cutter normality is deeply entertaining.
The door opens and Sam turns to meet Dean’s fluttering hesitation, to catch it before Dean is grinning and bright-eyed and dragging him into a hug.
"Can I help you?" says the woman. She’s not unfriendly, not at all, but she’s not Dean. She's not even Lisa.
Sam’s brain takes a second to reboot. "Uh, I was looking for, uh, Lisa Braeden."
He pauses and the inflection at the end poses it as a question. He’s looking for Lisa because she is more tangible, less likely to have slipped off her own name to try on a new one.
The woman cocks her head at him, her expression softening to sympathy. "Oh no, honey, I’m sorry. She’s gone. She and her boyfriend moved to Michigan a couple of years ago."
"They moved," Sam repeats. It’s the punchline to a worn-out joke, not funny at all.
She bobs her head. Her eyes have gone a little wide with uncertainty. "That’s right. To Michigan." Because ‘Michigan’ is the detail that will make all this clear to Sam, of course.
Sam stares at her, and she stares back at him, willing him to say okay then and goodbye and to move on without making a fuss. Sam is a stranger here and he doesn’t fit. His face and his stance and his carefully practiced politeness don’t fit with the neighborhood’s nicely mown lawns.
The woman gets a faintly desperate smile on her face when Sam continues to be tall and unfamiliar on her doorstep. "I have a forwarding address?" she offers.
So Sam leaves Cicero and drives into a bluer north, into Michigan, to Battle Creek.
There are explanations for all of it. Explanations for not being there when Sam woke in the panic room, for not returning any of the escalating number of calls Sam makes. For moving house and leaving Sam no idea where he’s gone.
Sam stops at a diner because he’s hungry again - and Dean’s going to find that so fucking funny when Sam tells him, make some joke about Sam finally developing an appetite. He wolfs down gritty, overcooked burger and oversalted fries so fast he gives himself indigestion, and he’s watching the sky roll by while he tries to breathe around the food he’s shoveling in. It’ll be afternoon by the time he gets to Battle Creek. Maybe Dean will have a job to still be at, and what kind of job will that be? Sam can’t wait to find out.
Once he reaches Battle Creek, he drives more slowly to scope out street signs. He’s searched the depths of suburbia hundreds of times before looking for a victim’s house or a witness’s, distinct from all the others by nothing but a number or the color of the paintwork. It’s a disconnect to pull up outside a regular house and expect to find Dean inside.
The Impala’s still nowhere to be seen, but there’s a green kid’s bike propped up against the garage door. Sam tries to estimate the size of the kid that’d be riding a bike like that, and then how old Ben must be now. Seems about right.
He cards his fingers through his hair, checks his reflection in the mirror, and feels pretty ridiculous for doing it. He climbs out of the car and heads to the door. He rings the bell and waits.
It takes Lisa a couple of moments to answer the door and the first thing Sam notices about her is her hair. She’s had it cut. Last time he saw her, it was long and loose around her shoulders. Now it’s a bob, but the ends are feathery not blunt. It’s not a recent change. Sam is reminded that there are three years that he’s forgotten.
Lisa doesn’t smile when she sees him. Sam smiles anyway.
"Hi, Lisa, it’s been a while, right?" She’s still not smiling, which is all the encouragement Sam needs to abandon any attempt at acting like they’ve ever had anything to talk about that isn’t Dean. "Is Dean here?"
Lisa stares at him, her hand still gripping the side of the door to swing it shut as soon as she’s had enough. "No. Of course he's not," she says.
She says it like it’s a personal insult for Sam to even ask. Sam didn't mean it to be, which leaves him unsure how to navigate the conversation from there. Lisa watches him with a dangerous expression that’s just daring him to piss her off a little more with another question he doesn't realize is wildly offensive.
"Uh, you know where I might find him?" Sam tries.
"He left, Sam. With you." She raises her eyebrows pointedly. "You don’t know where he is?"
Sam shakes his head. The world is growing huge and complicated around him and he doesn’t want to risk looking away from Lisa’s face because she's where Dean is supposed to be.
Something flickers in Lisa’s eyes. Her grip on the door loosens slightly. The tip of her tongue touches the top row of her teeth as she considers him. She sighs, visibly relents. Sam has a confused idea that this is what being mothered is.
"Well, where did you last see him?" she says. Like Dean’s a misplaced set of car keys, a few cents slid down the back of the couch. Like Dean can be put down someplace and walked away from.
"I don’t remember," says Sam. It's such a stupid thing to say. What kind of idiot forgets where they left their brother? Especially a brother as big and significant as Dean, who's the recurring theme in Sam's life, who has his own musical motif and visual cues of rattling old rock and empty whisky bottles.
Losing a soul might be unlucky, but losing a brother as well is plain careless.
Lisa shrugs, her patience exhausted already. Sam's not her kid, not her problem. "I don't know what to tell you then, Sam. But he's not here, so you're gonna have to look for him someplace else."
She's polite enough to wait for Sam to back up a few steps before she closes the door on him. Sam retreats to the car.
It's not his car. It doesn't smell like the Impala. There's no quiet, black-beetle clicking in the engine warmed in the sun, the way there is with the Impala. Its rearview mirror has a different reflection of the world than the one he'd find in the Impala's. His hands must bend into new shapes to grip the steering wheel, thumbs crooked just slightly out.
There has been a massive misunderstanding. Sam is sure of it.
Something raps against the window. It's Ben standing there, peering in at Sam.
Sam lifts his hand from the gun at his side and winds the window down, glass pane creaking against rubber like an old man's grumbling.
"Is Dean okay?" says Ben.
"Yeah," Sam says, on instinct, because Dean has to be. Sam glances at Lisa's house over Ben's shoulder and he frowns. "Uh, does your mom know you're talking to me?"
Ben shakes his head. He's hunched up against the car but Sam's got no intention of letting him in. Ben came out here without Lisa's knowledge because he'd never get her approval, Ben and Sam both know it.
"You know where he is?" says Ben. "He stopped answering his phone months ago. He wouldn't even pick up when Mom called."
Sam's surprised by the depth of glassy hurt in Ben's voice. He doesn't understand why Ben would be calling Dean anyway, what he'd have to say to him. Someone should explain it to Ben, Sam thinks. Someone should explain to Ben that the Dean he knows is not the real one, that he does not know that man and that he shouldn't get attached.
"He's not answering my calls either," Sam says gently. "Do you know what happened?"
Again, Ben shakes his head. "You came back for him, about two years ago, and he went with you."
Sam came back. Just like he's come back now. He's haunting his own life.
"Went where?" Sam presses.
"I don't know. He wouldn't say. Then, then he came back again. In the night. He was… different."
There are all kinds of 'different'. Hurt different. Possessed different. Sold your soul different. Each of them comes with the suggestion of 'wrong'.
"And?"
Ben folds in on himself. His gaze slips away like oil. There's something he's not telling, slyly sidestepping it. "And then he left again. And he didn't come back."
Sam thinks about that little secret Ben's keeping. He's obliviously transparent the way most kids are when they've never had to lie over anything bigger than a broken window or a missed curfew. The secret's nested in something dark and uncertain, like Ben hasn't figured out what he thinks of it yet.
The afternoon is already reddening at its edges as evening closes in. An insistent breeze is moving in through the trees, setting the last leaves fluttering in alarm on the branches like the wings of trapped birds.
"You still put salt at your windows and doors every night?" Sam says.
Ben nods, and Sam mirrors it, approving. "Good, make sure you keep doing that."
As Sam winds the car window back up, Ben says, "You want me to call if I hear from Dean?"
Sam searches his face for some sign that Ben knows that's not going to happen. Someone should let the kid down easy. He's not going to hear from Dean again.
:::
The diner is lit up like a Spielberg spacecraft. Its neon lights have a glow that hazes the starry night sky far above the dark line of treetops. The road is black on the other side of the windows. Sometimes a car sweeps by, tugged along by the tide of the highway, and its white headlights turn to red tail-lights with the sound of a sigh.
On the table in front of Sam, there's a plate with half a chicken Caesar salad on it. He was in the middle of eating it when he looked up and noticed that he was the only one sitting alone in the diner. A subtle fingerwidth of distance is present between him and everyone else in their couples and groups.
The chicken is cold now, bloodless and white and even less appetizing than it was before. Sam isn't hungry anymore. Just very fed up.
He takes out his cellphone and scrolls through the names, always coming back to D.
Mouth setting tight, feeling like he's breaking some rule he can't even cite, Sam stabs his finger at the phone and listens to the dial tone. It rings once, rings twice, rings three times -
"Look, Sam, no offense, but would you take the damn hint already?" says Dean.
And Sam is so surprised that Dean's answered that he just sits there a moment, tongue dry in his mouth.
"Sam?" Dean demands.
It doesn't fully register with Sam that Dean sounds impatient and unfriendly. Sam's aware of it but it doesn't mean anything to him. "Where are you?" he says.
"Doesn't matter," says Dean, and Sam knows him so well that he knows a single shake of Dean's head goes with that tone, eyes closing just a second longer than a blink. He can see Dean doing it. "Stop looking, okay? I'm fine. I don't wanna be found."
"Dean, what's happened? What's going on?"
"Nothing's going on, Sam," he says, and Sam recognizes that too. He's been hearing it from Dean since he was a kid and Dean was still trying to build a normal life for him out of old bones and rocksalt. "Just think it's time we went our separate ways."
"But I've got my soul back," says Sam. He lays it down for Dean timidly, like an offering, appeasement for the unspecified conflict between them.
"Yeah, Cas told me he was gonna do it. Good for you. I'm glad it worked out."
Sam scrunches his eyes up tight against the indifference in Dean's voice, bright and rough as the diner lights. He pinches the bridge of his nose as he talks. "Listen, Dean… I don't remember what happened, and -"
"You're not s'posed to remember," Dean tells him sharply. "Okay? So don't try. You hear me? Stop trying to remember. Stop looking for me, and stop calling me. Start over, Sammy."
Dean hangs up, abrupt as a slap.
:::
It's tempting to sit and rust in the diner. Refuse to move. Hold his breath until Dean relents and comes for him.
It's also tempting to do exactly as Dean said: bury his old life alongside the three years slowly decomposing at the back of his mind and start over.
But three years is a long time, time enough for plenty of things to happen. At least one of those things made Dean decide to leave. Nobody will tell Sam what it was, and they don't want Sam finding out for himself. It's a new verse in an old song: Sam is so well taken care of that even the responsibility of making any decision for himself has been lifted from him.
There is part of his head that is cut off, anaesthetized. It doesn't feel like it belongs to him. Sam imagines that's where those amputated memories are, wrapped to twitching, shapeless bundles in white gauze.
Three years and a cage in Hell are in there.
Sam sits on his motel room bed and prods at the memories with the blind touch of a tongue to a tooth to see if it still aches. A television plays the trills and buzzes of a gameshow too loud in the room next door, and outside two truckers argue in the parking lot. Sam touches the sterilized place in his head to see if anything's alive back there.
The medical report says the cop turned to blood. There's a lot of prevarication and ambiguous wording because whoever wrote the report is trying really hard to find a scientific way of saying a guy turned into a big red puddle.
The Impala rumbles into view, and Sam straightens up from his own car, which is big and black and shiny but cannot be mistaken for Dean's. Dean parks the car nose to nose with Sam's, and climbs out, talking on the phone he's got wedged between his cheek and his shoulder.
"Ben...I know you're lying. Because I lie professionally, that's how. Now tell your mom that you broke the damn thing and take it like a man. Okay? Okay."
He hangs up, looks over at Sam who's been watching, with an expression somewhere between amusement and incredulity.
"Wow," says Sam.
A flicker of defensive irritability registers on Dean's face. "What?" he demands.
Sam shrugs. The folder holding the police report is still open in his hand. "You, molding the minds of tomorrow." He laughs, half-shakes his head. "Who knew?"
"Yeah, tell me about it," Dean mutters. He tugs at the collar of his ill-fitting suit, while his gaze scans the city street restlessly.
Sam studies him a moment, then he flips the folder shut and asks the obvious question. "How'd it go?"
Dean's gaze snaps to him. "With?"
"You and Lisa," Sam says. "How'd she take it when you bailed?"
"Shockingly cool, actually."
Sam claps him on the shoulder and uses the gesture to get Dean moving. "Better for everybody," he tells him.
The movie's over. Sam has no idea what it means. It tells him only what he already knew: at some point, Dean left Lisa and Ben to come away with Sam. There's more in his head but it's like bobbing for apples, dodging away the harder Sam strains for it.
Sam will have to find his answers somewhere else. There will be other clues about what Sam's wayward body was doing while Sam's soul was not there to direct it.
The first clue is the wallet full of business cards. There are names on the cards, and those names will surely appear in police reports, which might at least tell Sam where he's been and what he's been hunting. There are the storage units as well, and those units must have things in them that were of interest to the Sam who was here.
Of the three cards for storage units, two are in with the other cards while one's tucked in on its own. This last one bears the unimaginative logo of a shield, in red, and is situated in Hamilton, Ohio. Sam turns it over in his hands, but the back is blank.
Hamilton seems like a good place to start.
:::
Outside the storage unit building, on a square patch of thinning grass, is a single tree. Its branches are naked and bony, but Sam remembers it in a different time. When he looks at the tree, it's summer, not Fall. The tree is in bloom, each blossom a fat, rounded, rotten-pink babydoll head. They quiver and twitch in the warm breeze.
Sam shivers and looks away.
He doesn't have much of a plan for getting into whichever storage unit was his. He has no idea which name he used or what details he gave. In the end, it doesn't matter. Sam walks in, and the balding guy at the desk sees him and shrinks back, eyes flaring wide for just a second. He hastily gulps down his mouthful of coffee and sets his mug down, china clunking hard against the desk's surface.
"Well, hi," he says. "This is a surprise. Haven't seen you in a while." His smile is hearty but all the while he's looking at Sam he's wringing his hands, over and over.
Whatever bad impression Sam has inherited from his other self, he goes with it. "I've been busy," he says curtly. "Let me into my unit."
"Sure, sure, just let me get the key." The guy doesn't so much as pause. He wants Sam out.
Taking a ring of keys from his waist, the guy unlocks a metal cabinet on the wall, rattles through it, before handing a single small key to Sam. Sam takes it, tries to remember if the shape of it feels like it's been in his hand before. It's nothing but dead metal to him.
He starts towards the door, then looks back. "Remind me, what number?"
For just a second, the guy hesitates. His desire to have Sam gone wars with his instinct that something is not quite right. Self-preservation wins. "Lucky 21," he says, and Sam's sure he can hear him giving a sigh of relief as Sam leaves.
The units are little more than lockboxes. They sit in row upon row like the chilled shelves of a morgue. Sam walks along slowly until he gets to 21. He stands in the spot, looks around - single bulb overhead shedding a light so raw it skins you, deeper shadow of a spiderweb in the top left corner of the room - and tries to recall being here before.
He fits the key into the lock, twists, and pulls out the drawer. It's not full, not three years' worth. The largest items are a blunt knife with a rusted blade and a bottle of oil that's overpoweringly scented of myrrh. But there's also a small silver coin, embossed with the crude iconography of a faceless saint. In a scrap of black silk are a few bone shards, small enough to be a cat's, and beside that, a vial of dark red liquid that slip-slides sluggishly along the glass when Sam tips it on its side.
More usefully, there's a fat roll of bills.
Tucked against the side of the box are a few books and papers. As he flips through a tattered copy of Dante's Inferno, Sam finds a slim pamphlet on the subject of falconry. It's outdated, probably from the sixties or seventies; if the yellowing paper hadn't told him so the style of the grainy photos would.
Sam stares at it. He frowns and slowly turns the pages. The pamphlet is cracked open on the section regarding training. Sam reads through a few paragraphs but gives up before he can figure out why he might be holding onto this. Maybe a hunt involving birds of prey? Sam's been on weirder hunts in his life.
He examines the Dante again as he replaces it in the box. One corner of the cover is blackened, as if burned at some point, but the only other damage is the usual degradation of age. Sam pulls a face and chucks the book back in; Dante's never been a favorite of his. Perhaps the other Sam had different taste in reading material.
Sam pockets the roll of bills. Everything else gets returned to the box. None of it means anything to Sam. It would have been too easy, he supposes, to have found a journal, full of names and places and dates.
His other self has left no map for Sam to follow.
:::
Most of the money Sam found in the lockbox goes toward a brand new laptop. He doesn't know where the other one was lost. If his other self managed to lose Dean, Sam shouldn't be surprised he couldn't hold on to a laptop.
One by one, Sam searches the internet for the names on the business cards he found in his wallet. He lays them out like a fortune teller's deck and tries to read the past from them.
There is a name that connects to a spate of child disappearances, and the subsequent discovery of two bloodied survivors and a heap of tiny corpses. Another name has a partner mentioned, FBI Agent Kirke, and though that's the only detail it gives him, it makes Sam smile, makes him favor the name on that card a little more than the all brotherless names. Other names give him deaths and abductions and fits of temporary (murderous) insanity. He draws a timeline for himself by fitting the dates to the names to the places, and he watches his past self hurtle across the states and back again like a wasp in a jar.
Then Sam discovers US Marshal Rand.
Too much staring at the screen in a dimly lit room has left his eyes swollen and hot in his head. The text is wetly blurred by his sight. But he doesn't need text, because this report is illustrated. Six glorious Technicolor photos of the crime scene.
Sam's looking at a room. There's so much blood splatter the walls appear to be one vast field of stars. Long-tailed comets are sprayed across the expanse, dribbling red to the sodden carpet. Patches of the white wall are visible like bare bone beneath the blood. But there's no corpse that Sam can see, no human remains except the blood from a body wrung-dry.
The other photos are much the same, until the fifth. The angle of the picture shows the room's doorway, a huddle of cops and CSI techs - and Sam and Dean. Sam and Dean are there, right there in the picture. They're both wearing suits, and Dean's is buckled into wrinkles at the knees where he's dropped to a crouch by the edge of the pool of blood. Dean's face is half-turned away, pinched and pale, and Sam wonders if there's something else he's not seeing in the picture.
Standing just behind Dean is Sam himself. He's holding a notepad in his hand but his gaze is raised to the photographer's: brow tight, lips tighter. He looks displeased to be included in the photo.
You can't see, in the picture, that Sam doesn't have a soul. Not really. There's no appearance of spirit-photography, no hint of transparency. It's only because Sam knows what's not there that he can see it. Sam is a tall, dark post in the room. He is solid and inanimate. The chambers of his heart are stone-dry.
It seems to Sam that a lot of people died while he was hunting soulless. People were shot in the knees or beaten. More than once, a single person was attacked in a remote location, in which they had no business being, and after that, the deaths stopped. To Sam's mind, facts like that make that person either the culprit, or bait.
The most recent report he can find is from only a month and a half ago, in Arkansas. The killings read like the work of a handful of different bad things Sam's hunted in the past, there's no obvious suggestion of one in particular.
The chief investigating officer's name is on the report and it's not much work to get a phone number for him. Sam starts to type his number into his phone, then he catches sight of the time and he realizes just how late it is, just how long he's spent looking.
Sam rocks back on the bed. His shoulders ache suddenly at the change in a position he's not sure how long he's been holding. He wipes his hand over his prickling, dry eyes. But it's okay, because he can rest at last. He won't wake in the morning, staring at the ceiling, frightened by the wide-open day. He'll start the drive to Arkansas tomorrow. He might even be able to find which motel he stayed at with Dean there, maybe even the precise room where they lived and slept and talked.
Dean won’t be there now, of course. Dean was there, past tense. Sam wonders how long he'll be able to stay on this pilgrimage to places his brother once could be found. A little longer yet, he thinks. Dean is still out there somewhere, and there's a reason for that distance.
People don't just disappear. Other people just stop looking for them.
:::
One hundred and fifty miles out from Plainview. Arkansas, the needle in the gauge of Bobby's creaking old Ford gives an arthritic click and lurches from half-full to nearing empty.
Sam pulls into a truckstop town, climbs out of the car and stands under the stripped sky, considering his options. There are a few bills left in his wallet, but he'd like a place to stay tonight, and maybe something to eat as well, if he's going to be spoiled about it.
There's a gas station, and right next to that, there's a bar. Pickings are going to be slim in a place like this, more wind and dust than people, but Sam should be able to hustle a tank's worth of gas at least.
He scuffs through the dirt, looking over the couple of trucks in the lot as he passes. The door to the bar is set back under the shade of a wooden cover and Sam's grateful for it as soon as he steps into the blackness, the growing sweat on the back of his neck and between his shoulder-blades cooling almost instantly.
The bar's quiet, though Sam guesses not particularly so by its own measure and for this late in the afternoon. Just a little louder than the dull whine of the song on the radio is the cascading tap of a pool shot. Sam looks to the source of the sound, where three guys are gathered around a pool table. They lift their heads, prop themselves up on their pool sticks, and look right back at him.
It's a little too good an opening, Sam figures. So he tips his head to them and carries on to the bar. He takes a stool, orders a beer from the work-worn bartender, and doesn't need to look back at the guys to know they're still watching him.
Seems like a game of pool is looking less likely than getting jumped by three unfriendly assholes. With any luck they'll be assholes with money in their wallets for Sam to take after he's beat the shit out of them.
They saunter towards him, spread out in a loose pack of three, and Sam continues drinking and lets them come. Their approach is reflected by the bartender's gradual slowing as she watches. Her gaze flickers nervously to Sam, and Sam smiles back at her.
"Of all the bars in all the world, you walk into this one. How about that?"
Sam turns on his stool to look at the guy who's addressing him. He looks the guy over and upgrades him from asshole to asshole with combat training. The guy's in a flannel shirt and jeans, and there's a hitch in the way he leans his body against the bar due, Sam guesses, to the knife or the gun shoved down his waistband.
"How about that?" Sam echoes amiably.
"You wanna talk a walk outside with us, Winchester?" one of the other guys says.
The world turns a degree and Sam adjusts. He sets his glass down on the bar. "You know me?" he says.
He's met with laughter, a look exchanged between the three of them. They know him.
The bartender catches his eye and she glances towards the phone hung up on the wall, a question in the tiniest lift of her heavily plucked eyebrow. Sam gives a single shake of his head. It's a nice offer but police involvement is not going to help.
He unfolds himself from the stool and his shadow travels up the length of the floor like an oil spill. The guys tense a little, just at that, and Sam wonders if the version of him that was running around for three years would pull a move on them right now, if that's what they're expecting.
Instead, he strolls outside, screwing his eyes up as his vision burns out briefly in the sunshine. He stands in the center of the parking lot and works out everything he can do that'll compensate for what he can't: change the odds into anything better than three against one.
They make a loose circle around him, and Sam doesn't bother turning to face the one who's moving behind him. There's no way he can turn that won't put one of them at his back.
"Now, tell me this, Winchester," says the guy who spoke to him first. "What are you doing down here, when I hear your brother's up in New York?"
Sam's eyes widen but he catches himself before words can betray him. Dean's in New York. For the first time since he woke, Sam knows where Dean is now, not where he used to be. His heart beats faster because it's very important that Sam gets to New York before Dean can disappear from view again.
"Don’t tell me he's slipped his leash," the guy behind him says.
"You need to keep a tighter hold on your animal," says the third guy. "Someone could get hurt."
What's Dean done? What's been done to Dean? The language doesn't belong when the subject is Dean. Dean is annoying, frustrating, drives you crazy, but he's not an animal. Sam's the one everyone's got their doubts about.
There's movement behind Sam, the slightest sound, and the guy who's facing Sam, the leader, telegraphs it by the flick of his eyes.
"So you know what that makes you, Winchester?" he says. "Bait. You understand 'bait', don't you?" His grin is sudden and thunderous. "Sure you do, s'what you used poor Jimmy Kendrick as. You remember poor Jimmy Kendrick, remember his ripped out lungs?"
"Not a thing you'd forget," says the guy at Sam's side.
Sam holds up his hands in a placatory gesture, saying, "Look, c'mon, can't we talk about this?" And before the words are even settled on the air, Sam swings around and slams his fist into the face of the guy behind him and the impact jars the bones of his wrist, explodes hotly along his knuckles.
They're on him in seconds and Sam grunts as the breath is driven out of his body under the weight of them. Gravel skins his palms as he's knocked off his feet, but he closes his fingers around a handful of it and flings it into the eyes of the first guy coming for him. It gives him enough time to lunge for the other guy, meeting his face with his fist over and over, forcing him backwards, all the while remembering that there's a third guy somewhere, just out of sight.
Someone grabs him from behind, tries to pin Sam's arms backwards, but Sam jerks free. He spins around to punch the guy who's just tried it, and, as he does, he realizes the mistake he's making: he's putting his back to the third guy who's come out of nowhere.
A heavy blow catches Sam on the temple. His vision goes watery, narrowed to a slanted shard of the parking lot as blackness descends. His legs wobble and break beneath him.
For a second, Sam wavers there, on his knees in the dirt. Wind rises up behind him and Sam falls, again.
:::
When Sam opens his eyes, he sees a shiny silver nickel sitting amongst dust and lint tumbleweeds, against the baseboard, between the squat bow-legs of a piece of furniture. The nickel must have been dropped and rolled there, though how long ago is impossible to tell. It could have been there for years and years, cultivating its own little territory, or just since yesterday and it's still waiting for rescue.
Sam looks at the nickel a little while longer, before he considers his wider surroundings.
His cheek is pressed to wooden floorboards and he follows the flaking cracks in the oily varnish, that come together like parched river tributaries, to two pairs of boots, which are attached to legs, attached to the guys from the bar: one sitting, one standing.
He's feeling enough hot pulses of pain to know that the beating didn't stop just because he lost consciousness. His palms hurt the most. They're probably the most minor of his injuries, something he could have done with the stupidest of slips after one too many drinks at the bar, but he can't stop thinking about his red-grazed palms. The tightness of the knots around his wrists, tied behind his back, makes his hands feel hot and bloated.
One of the guys walks to the window and a minor earthquake travels through the floor and vibrates in Sam's ear.
"It's getting dark. Kent should be back by now."
"Relax," says the other guy. "We've got time."
Sam's ankles are tied too. His nose is crusty with dried blood. He can smell it, taste it in his mouth when he breathes in. He rubs his wrist against the rope, to see how much give there is, and the pain in his hands flares and falls like the wail of an air-raid siren. But Sam's pretty sure, if he can just pop his thumb out of its socket, he can work a hand free. And one hand leads to the other hand, leads to his feet, leads to the rest of him.
The guy at the window turns, and says, "You're not gonna make the call 'til he's back, though, right?"
A snort, the thick clatter of a gun being set down. "I look like an idiot to you? 'Course I'm not gonna call 'til we've got it. Would'ya just sit down and relax?"
The guy sits down, doesn't relax.
It is getting dark. The light in the lodge is barely a layer over the gloom. It's quiet outside too. Sam can't hear traffic or voices. Slowly, the atmosphere in the lodge is cutting them off from the rest of the world. The silence and the shadow are fixing them in place, slicing through the tendons that connect them to civilization, until they'll be as lost and forgotten as that shiny silver nickel down the back of the bureau.
"Goddamn this," someone mutters, rumbles across the floor and snaps a lamp on, then the radio.
The other guy laughs. "You're getting jumpy in your old age, Benny." Then he leans across and turns the radio up louder.
They listen to the music, bubbly pop songs from decades gone, cut with crappy advertisements for local car dealerships and diners, which tell Sam they haven't taken him all that far.
At last, the guy finishes with his gun and rises to his feet. He stretches his back, groaning, then crosses to the window himself. He peers out for just a little too long.
"Kent should'a been back by now," says the guy in the chair, Benny, quiet and stubborn.
"Nah, probably just got held up by security." He comes away from the window like he knows he can't keep on standing there and argue that everything's fine.
"We got a plan B?"
The other guy moves away, boots disappearing right off the edge of Sam's circle of vision.
He doesn't answer the question. "There anything to eat in this place?" Closets open and slam shut, one after another. "Christ, we should'a told him to pick up pizza."
Benny leans forwards in his chair. "Hey, Wazowski, I'm asking you if we got a plan B!"
"Kill Sam and wait for Dean to come to us. Works either way." He fishes his cellphone out of his pocket and flips it open. "I'm calling Kent and telling him to pick us up a fucking pizza."
He gets a sigh and a pause, then Benny grudgingly says, "No pepperoni on mine."
Madonna's on the radio, life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone, but there's a tinny muzak tune competing with her all of a sudden. It repeats, over and over, under the music, and nobody moves for a moment.
"That's Kent's phone," says Benny. "That's Kent's fucking phone."
"Where's it coming from?"
Benny's on his feet now, and Sam recognizes the click of a gun being loaded. "Right outside the fucking door. Jesus, Wazowski, it's right outside the-"
"Would you shut the fuck up!"
One covering the other, they converge on the door. When they swing the door open, it blocks Sam's view, but he doesn't need to see, not when Benny's cursing like a crazy man, going, where's the fucking rest of him? what's he done with the fucking rest of him, Wazowski? that fucking animal, I'm gonna fucking kill him, gonna fucking tear his goddamned head off-
The lights go out, the radio cuts off. They're in thick, black silence. Sam hears the scuffle of their boots as they retreat into the lodge, the door creaks as they move to shut it, and then something happens.
It's too dark for Sam to see exactly what but he's pretty sure something just came in. Someone.
He wrenches harder at his wrists, not sure if it's sweat or blood slipping against the ropes.
Benny screams, high like a child, and the floor thunders as Wazowski runs right at Sam. He grabs Sam by the hair, hauling him half off the floor, and there's a blade's thin line of cold suddenly pressed into Sam's throat.
"You take a step closer and I'll slit him open!" Wazowski shouts.
"Nah," says Dean. "You're not gonna have time."
And while Sam is still celebrating Dean's presence, his nearness - because that's Dean, that's Dean's voice, Sam knows it in the dark, knows it over the phone, knows it in his own head - Wazowski jerks his wrist, the blade stings, and then Dean is crashing down on top of them like a weight of water, and in the middle of it all, Sam's knocked out again.
:::
"I had a crazy dream," Sam says.
The smell of the Impala is immediate and comforting: gun oil and alcohol and leather. To Sam, it smells like Dean and still a little bit like John too, though it shouldn't, the years should have grown over the last traces of him. Maybe to Dean it smells like Sam.
Sam's on the backseat and there's a funny taste in his mouth. He smacks his lips to clear it and tries to sit up. His head feels swimmy.
"A nightmare," Sam clarifies, to the back of Dean's head. He frowns, says, "Where are we going anyway?"
Dean looks back over his shoulder at him, a face of black hollows, painted red and white by the garish night, and Sam shrinks away from him before he can help himself.
"Go back to sleep," says Dean.
The road ahead is lit up like it's on fire. They're going to Hell.
:::
The next time Sam wakes, he's on a bed. His head still hurts and night-time lurches around him, suggesting movement with no distinct detail. The bed is not particularly comfortable, and when he smoothes his hand over the covers, he finds they're stiff polyester. It's a motel bed.
Sam sits up. The shadow in front of the lighter square of the drapes shifts.
"Good morning, sunshine," says Dean.
"Dean!" Sam fumbles for the lamp that should be on the bedside table, but there's nothing there. "Dean, what the hell's going on? Where've you been? Who were those guys?"
He searches the darkness, strains to put together Dean's face in it. He watches Dean stand in the way his darkness stretches up against the neon back-lit drapes.
"Hunters," says Dean. "We pissed 'em off last year. Guess they're not ones for forgive and forget."
He paces a few steps then turns back again, and the urgency leaves Sam's body as he realizes Dean has no immediate plans to leave. Instead, Sam sits on the bed and watches the shadow-play of the darkness of where Dean is pacing and prowling like a bored cat.
He wets his lips and says quietly, "What's going on, Dean?"
Dean waves a dismissive hand. "I told you, nothing's going on." He's stubborn as a god and just as resistant to questioning.
"Like hell! Why wouldn't you meet up with me? Why weren't you there when I woke up? I've got no clue what the fuck's been happening in the past three years-"
Dean laughs and Sam's sure he can make out the shiny glint of his smile. "We hunted stuff. Drank some beers. Think I might'a got laid a couple of times along the way. It was great."
Sam can feel his breath getting away from him. The easily amiable tone of Dean's voice is designed to rile him up, to work him up so that he's not capable of hanging onto the thread of the argument, just the rage that's stiff in his bones and flooding his blood.
He forces himself to calm down. He concentrates on the beating of his heart, breath shuddering out of him, and waits for each throb to linger a little longer before the next.
Across the room, Dean cocks his head like a hunting dog, and Sam catches the whisper of his indrawn breath.
"No," Sam says. "No. Something's going on, and either you can tell me yourself, or I'll figure it out, you know I will, I'll keep looking until-"
When Dean comes at him, Sam expects to get punched. When Dean moves that fast in Sam's direction, he's either looking to shield Sam from a threat or wanting to do some violence himself. And Sam's pissed off enough to be ready to meet him swinging.
But Dean stops right in front of his face, propped up on the bed, leaning over Sam, and Sam's not sure what to do about it when Dean's so close, doing nothing at all except existing in the same space as Sam's skin.
Even the dark can't hide Dean's face from Sam at this proximity. And Dean looks good, Sam thinks. He looks different too, and Sam can't place it until he sees that there's something alive behind Dean's eyes for the first time in years. There's something looking back out at him that's flushed and healthy and bloody. That boy who Sam idolized and hated, who set the bar impossibly high in their father's eyes, who was stuck together with bravado and faith and a handed-down leather jacket, has come back.
And he's angry.
They hang like that: Sam half-stretched back on the bed, while Dean's arms bracket his shoulders. Sam's pinned down by Dean's unexpected intrusion into his personal space, and how he does nothing with it.
"No, you won't," Dean says. His voice is a whisper but it's cold and grim as old age. "Why don't you get a job, Sam? Get a job, get a girlfriend, get a fucking mortgage. Or carry on hunting, fight the good fight. But not with me."
Sam jumps on it. "Why not with you?"
So Dean tells him why not.
Sam has always felt slightly embarrassed by Dean's mouth. He's embarrassed by the things that come out of it, he's embarrassed by the sheer fact of it, its shape, its color, the things it suggests. He's looked on it as an unmanageable third brother. It gets them into trouble. It causes too much attention. It never knows when to shut the hell up, or it shuts up like it's stitched that way when all Sam wants it to do is give him one straight answer.
And that oh-so-pretty mouth is filling up with teeth.
Tiny white knives slice through Dean's pink gums, curving through the flesh like cat's claws. The teeth keep on coming. It's not like it hurts at all, so easy and smooth, natural, as though Dean is supposed to have a fresh crop of murder in his mouth.
Sam stares, horrified, and Dean, still leaning over him, holds in place and lets him. Sam's never seen anything as clearly in his life as he's seeing those teeth.
Finally, Dean eases back and away, slinking back into the unknowable night. His head turns towards the window, where the neon flash seems less pronounced than before.
"It's getting light," he says. "I gotta go." His voice is too soft to come from such a slaughterhouse.
He moves to the door, and Sam doesn't call after him.
"Things are different. I don't wanna hunt with you anymore, Sam, not how you are. And if you come after me, I'll stop you."
He doesn't explain how Sam is now, what it is about Sam that makes him a bad fit for Dean. Sam's pretty sure he means now you've got a soul. He's so struck by how weird it is that getting his soul back makes him an unmatched pair for Dean, that he doesn't stop Dean from walking out the door.
:::
This could be the cage. Because, of course, there's no way Sam would know, is there? Bored and angry archangels are clever and creative torturers. They could have built a whole, horrible world for him and be entertaining themselves watching him bash his head bloody against its bricks. There is no reality check that can't be subverted by the will of angels.
Alternatively, this could be how it is now. This could be it. If Sam has learned anything, it's that nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse.
Dean is a vampire.
Also, Dean doesn't want Sam around. The last time that happened, Dean was fifteen and going through a phase of badly wanting to be James Dean, which lasted until John flatly refused to let Dean have a motorcycle, now or at any time in the future. The day after that edict was passed, Dean showed up in the library, sat next to him while Sam did his homework, and flipped paper pellets at the wall.
Sam can't write off this life and start a new one. This could be James Dean all over again. This could be vampire James Dean.
The motel room that Dean has left Sam in is dated and depressing. On the wall, there's a print of abstract art, a tumble of red and yellow polygons, in a cheap and shiny silver frame. The bedcover is a repeating geometric design in black and purple of the kind Sam remembers from the very early nineties.
Sam's duffle bag is on the floor by the chair where Dean sat and watched Sam sleep.
He picks up his bag and walks out into the parking lot. It's morning already, and Sam guesses Dean must be sleeping somewhere. That's not so bad; he never was a morning person, after all.
Bobby's old red Ford is waiting for him, keys visible on the dash. Dean's left Sam with everything he needs to start out fresh.
Sam climbs in behind the wheel, starts the engine and turns the car out onto the road.
There's a moment he remembers very clearly, one of the last he does remember: He's in the graveyard at Stull, and his arm is drawn back, fist clenched with the force of mountains, and the sun catches his eye, and just for a heartbeat, Lucifer is blind, can't see a damned or blessed thing. That's when Sam sees Dean.
That's the moment Sam hangs his humanity on.
part two
Sam wakes.
He has the impression that someone else was in the room just a moment ago, that they walked out in the very second Sam opened his eyes. Someone just left.
The room is empty now. He's on a bed, and the bed is warm, except at the edges where his body isn't and the sheets are so very cold. A block of dim, gray light from the open door sets the time at nothing at all - could be dusk, could be dawn, could be a rainy afternoon. On the wall, there's a poster of Ursula Andress in a white bikini. The picture's in grainy black and off-white, and its corners are coyly curled up with age. Sam stares at it, then remembers. This is Bobby's panic room.
Panic is built in to the room. Sam's heart beats faster as the need to figure out what he's doing here takes on sudden urgency. Has he been drinking demon blood? Can he taste it, is it sticky and dark in his mouth? Is his body temperature higher than it should be? Does he feel human?
He reaches back, for the first memory he can catch.
The sky is screaming overhead, stormclouds and sun. Sam's bones are shrink-wrapped in cold, bladed light. The light is prickling all over his skin, in his eyes and his ears and his nose, but through it he can still see Dean. Dean's sagging on his knees by the Impala, and he's battered half to death. His face is lumpy with swelling, colorful bruises. There's fresh red blood on his shirt, and on the hood of the Impala too.
It's the last time Sam's ever going to see Dean. It ends here. They end here.
Maybe nobody had left the room. Maybe Sam had only just arrived.
"It's okay, Dean. It's gonna be okay. I've got him."
The ground opens up in front of Sam, dropping straight through Hell and deeper yet, and everything's going to be okay. Adam and his archangel come at Sam, lit up blue with righteous anger, and he's shouting about destiny and he’s getting in the way of Sam's goodbye to his brother.
And they fall. And there's nothing afterwards.
Somewhere else in the house, a door closes. Sam's face jerks to the direction of the noise.
Gradually, his disorientation recedes. He's increasingly sure that it was just him in this room when he woke, and that he's been here for a while. He's in Bobby's house, so he's probably safe. There's someone else here, so that's probably Dean.
He's safe, and he's going to see Dean. He starts smiling and can't stop. He tries to be careful in easing the drip-needle out of the thick white vein in his arm but he's impatient and his fingers won't move quickly enough. The needle stings him as he draws it out.
He leaves the panic room, passes through to the stairs, and Castiel is waiting for him at the top, framed in a watery green square of light.
Sam smiles even more widely. "Cas! You're alive!"
"Yes," says Castiel. He frowns, at a loss, before adding, "As are you."
His hands flex, he makes a move towards Sam. Curious and confused, Sam falters at the bottom step. Then Castiel turns away and moves out of sight, and Sam follows him up into the kitchen.
It feels new to Sam, though nothing in Bobby's house is. There are particles of dust floating through the air that are older than Sam, cars rusting in the junkyard outside that Sam remembers passing running laps around when he and Dean were kids.
Castiel is standing by the sink. He’s wearing his clean but slightly disreputable trenchcoat, looking like he's just stepped in for a moment and doesn't intend to stay, perpetually passing through. He was wearing that trenchcoat when he burst into blood, Sam remembers.
"Where's Dean?" Sam says.
"Elsewhere," says Castiel. "And Bobby's not here currently, he's hunting a rugaru in Mississippi, but he says you can stay as long as you need to. He’s left a car for you, some supplies too."
Sam nods. "And where's Dean?"
"Elsewhere," says Castiel again. He abandons his apparent scrutiny of Bobby's vintage microwave, a block of chipped cream plastic, and turns to Sam. His expression is intent.
"This is very important so please listen. You've been living without your soul for the last three years, Sam. I was able to retrieve it for you, but it's very damaged. It's a miracle you've survived, in fact. It's important you don't try to remember anything. It could bring everything back, which could result in your death, or worse."
"What's worse than death?" Sam blurts out.
Castiel gives him a look. "Don't try to remember."
"I've been asleep for three years?" Sam says. He handles the words with care because they might explode in his hands and shake him apart.
"You've been asleep two days," Castiel corrects him.
Sam crosses to the window, and, reflected in the pane's freckled skin of dust and dirt, he sees his future-ghost looking back at him.
"But soulless for three years," Castiel says.
There aren’t any new lines on Sam’s face. There’s no gray in his hair. It’s only three years, after all. If he’s aged, it’s in more subtle ways. His eyes are no longer so wide and there’s a less forgiving set to his mouth.
"And you gave me my soul back?" says Sam.
"You needed it."
The house ticks on silently around them. Castiel waits without seeming impatient. Sam’s gaze slips beyond his own reflection to the dirty Fall evening laying down over the junkyard. He can’t see the Impala out there.
"Cas. C’mon, tell me. Where’s Dean? Is he with Lisa?"
After a moment’s silence, in which Sam fails to amend his mistake, Castiel sighs and leaves in a fleeting whisper of wings.
Sam considers the empty house. He looks from the soggy remains of food in the sink’s plughole to the black mold gathering the corner of the window to the cracked, peeling labels on Bobby’s bank of phones, and he finds no help, no sense of direction.
But on the tabletop, there’s a single glass with a last mouthful of whiskey in the bottom. Sam cocks his head and thinks about it. Picking the glass up and holding it into the dregs of light, Sam sees the curved smear of someone’s lower lip on the rim.
He touches the mark and his fingertip comes away wet.
:::
When he calls Dean's cellphone, Sam gets voicemail. He leaves a message, saying, "Hey, it's me-" Stops himself before he can add something painful and stupid like your brother. "I'm at Bobby's. Cas told me what happened. Can you- can you call me back?"
He hangs up and waits.
He runs through busy and ultimately unimportant activity, like a television left playing with nobody there to watch it.
He showers and shaves. His duffel bag is waiting for him by the door, and he finds fresh clothes in it. He flips through his wallet, through a series of business cards he knows he's never seen before. There are FBI cards with aliases he's never used, and addresses for storage units he's never been to. He keeps the cards in the order he found them and tucks them back into place with the diligent respect reserved for someone else's property.
Hunger surprises him so he helps himself to a plate of greasy leftover beef from the fridge. He checks out the car Bobby's left him. It's a dark red Ford, like cheap cherry soda, old but in good condition. Its tank is full and the engine starts without protest.
He calls Bobby, gets voicemail, and after that, Sam calls Dean again. He doesn't leave a message this time, but instead calls him once more straight after, to have his recorded voice play through as company in the prickling silence of Bobby's empty house.
"This is Dean. I can't get to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I'll call you back."
Except he doesn't.
:::
The morning sky is smooth and bleached white by sunshine when Sam sets out for Cicero, Indiana. While he’s packing the trunk with a few guns and knives scavenged from Bobby’s stock, Sam’s planning on dropping down into Tennessee. He’s found a couple of reports on the internet that are worth checking out: three people waking up at their own funerals in Hendersonville, the body of a recently missing child found wrapped in the roots of a century old tree. He’s going to Tennessee.
Sam scuffs through brittle red-black leaves and spreads the map out on the hood, sternly flattening in down again when a breeze ruffles beneath it. He plans a route that skims the edge of Kansas while taking best advantage of highways and backroads. He plans it out, gets in the car and drives.
To Cicero, Indiana.
Sam’s known exactly where Lisa lives since he realized the position she occupied in Dean’s subconscious. For years, Lisa could have been either one of Dean’s best-kept secrets or simply not important enough to warrant a mention; Sam doesn’t know which it is. It was only after Dean sold his soul that she appeared on the horizon, like a sighting of dry land. And she grew and grew in Dean’s wanting, until Sam knew for sure that, without other direction to guide him, Dean would be heading for her.
Parked on the street outside the house, Sam looks for signs that this is where Dean lives. But the only clue he’d expect, the Impala, is nowhere in sight.
It’s probably in the garage, Sam decides. Can't keep a car like that out in plain view, any more than Dean could wander around with his knives and guns for anyone to see.
He climbs out of the car and walks to the front door. He chews his lip, heart thrumming in his chest as impatient as a child, and tries to catch his breath. The neighborhood’s nice, he notices while he waits. Summer barbecue, beer-and-football at the weekend territory, no doubt. The idea of Dean trying to fit in with this cookie cutter normality is deeply entertaining.
The door opens and Sam turns to meet Dean’s fluttering hesitation, to catch it before Dean is grinning and bright-eyed and dragging him into a hug.
"Can I help you?" says the woman. She’s not unfriendly, not at all, but she’s not Dean. She's not even Lisa.
Sam’s brain takes a second to reboot. "Uh, I was looking for, uh, Lisa Braeden."
He pauses and the inflection at the end poses it as a question. He’s looking for Lisa because she is more tangible, less likely to have slipped off her own name to try on a new one.
The woman cocks her head at him, her expression softening to sympathy. "Oh no, honey, I’m sorry. She’s gone. She and her boyfriend moved to Michigan a couple of years ago."
"They moved," Sam repeats. It’s the punchline to a worn-out joke, not funny at all.
She bobs her head. Her eyes have gone a little wide with uncertainty. "That’s right. To Michigan." Because ‘Michigan’ is the detail that will make all this clear to Sam, of course.
Sam stares at her, and she stares back at him, willing him to say okay then and goodbye and to move on without making a fuss. Sam is a stranger here and he doesn’t fit. His face and his stance and his carefully practiced politeness don’t fit with the neighborhood’s nicely mown lawns.
The woman gets a faintly desperate smile on her face when Sam continues to be tall and unfamiliar on her doorstep. "I have a forwarding address?" she offers.
So Sam leaves Cicero and drives into a bluer north, into Michigan, to Battle Creek.
There are explanations for all of it. Explanations for not being there when Sam woke in the panic room, for not returning any of the escalating number of calls Sam makes. For moving house and leaving Sam no idea where he’s gone.
Sam stops at a diner because he’s hungry again - and Dean’s going to find that so fucking funny when Sam tells him, make some joke about Sam finally developing an appetite. He wolfs down gritty, overcooked burger and oversalted fries so fast he gives himself indigestion, and he’s watching the sky roll by while he tries to breathe around the food he’s shoveling in. It’ll be afternoon by the time he gets to Battle Creek. Maybe Dean will have a job to still be at, and what kind of job will that be? Sam can’t wait to find out.
Once he reaches Battle Creek, he drives more slowly to scope out street signs. He’s searched the depths of suburbia hundreds of times before looking for a victim’s house or a witness’s, distinct from all the others by nothing but a number or the color of the paintwork. It’s a disconnect to pull up outside a regular house and expect to find Dean inside.
The Impala’s still nowhere to be seen, but there’s a green kid’s bike propped up against the garage door. Sam tries to estimate the size of the kid that’d be riding a bike like that, and then how old Ben must be now. Seems about right.
He cards his fingers through his hair, checks his reflection in the mirror, and feels pretty ridiculous for doing it. He climbs out of the car and heads to the door. He rings the bell and waits.
It takes Lisa a couple of moments to answer the door and the first thing Sam notices about her is her hair. She’s had it cut. Last time he saw her, it was long and loose around her shoulders. Now it’s a bob, but the ends are feathery not blunt. It’s not a recent change. Sam is reminded that there are three years that he’s forgotten.
Lisa doesn’t smile when she sees him. Sam smiles anyway.
"Hi, Lisa, it’s been a while, right?" She’s still not smiling, which is all the encouragement Sam needs to abandon any attempt at acting like they’ve ever had anything to talk about that isn’t Dean. "Is Dean here?"
Lisa stares at him, her hand still gripping the side of the door to swing it shut as soon as she’s had enough. "No. Of course he's not," she says.
She says it like it’s a personal insult for Sam to even ask. Sam didn't mean it to be, which leaves him unsure how to navigate the conversation from there. Lisa watches him with a dangerous expression that’s just daring him to piss her off a little more with another question he doesn't realize is wildly offensive.
"Uh, you know where I might find him?" Sam tries.
"He left, Sam. With you." She raises her eyebrows pointedly. "You don’t know where he is?"
Sam shakes his head. The world is growing huge and complicated around him and he doesn’t want to risk looking away from Lisa’s face because she's where Dean is supposed to be.
Something flickers in Lisa’s eyes. Her grip on the door loosens slightly. The tip of her tongue touches the top row of her teeth as she considers him. She sighs, visibly relents. Sam has a confused idea that this is what being mothered is.
"Well, where did you last see him?" she says. Like Dean’s a misplaced set of car keys, a few cents slid down the back of the couch. Like Dean can be put down someplace and walked away from.
"I don’t remember," says Sam. It's such a stupid thing to say. What kind of idiot forgets where they left their brother? Especially a brother as big and significant as Dean, who's the recurring theme in Sam's life, who has his own musical motif and visual cues of rattling old rock and empty whisky bottles.
Losing a soul might be unlucky, but losing a brother as well is plain careless.
Lisa shrugs, her patience exhausted already. Sam's not her kid, not her problem. "I don't know what to tell you then, Sam. But he's not here, so you're gonna have to look for him someplace else."
She's polite enough to wait for Sam to back up a few steps before she closes the door on him. Sam retreats to the car.
It's not his car. It doesn't smell like the Impala. There's no quiet, black-beetle clicking in the engine warmed in the sun, the way there is with the Impala. Its rearview mirror has a different reflection of the world than the one he'd find in the Impala's. His hands must bend into new shapes to grip the steering wheel, thumbs crooked just slightly out.
There has been a massive misunderstanding. Sam is sure of it.
Something raps against the window. It's Ben standing there, peering in at Sam.
Sam lifts his hand from the gun at his side and winds the window down, glass pane creaking against rubber like an old man's grumbling.
"Is Dean okay?" says Ben.
"Yeah," Sam says, on instinct, because Dean has to be. Sam glances at Lisa's house over Ben's shoulder and he frowns. "Uh, does your mom know you're talking to me?"
Ben shakes his head. He's hunched up against the car but Sam's got no intention of letting him in. Ben came out here without Lisa's knowledge because he'd never get her approval, Ben and Sam both know it.
"You know where he is?" says Ben. "He stopped answering his phone months ago. He wouldn't even pick up when Mom called."
Sam's surprised by the depth of glassy hurt in Ben's voice. He doesn't understand why Ben would be calling Dean anyway, what he'd have to say to him. Someone should explain it to Ben, Sam thinks. Someone should explain to Ben that the Dean he knows is not the real one, that he does not know that man and that he shouldn't get attached.
"He's not answering my calls either," Sam says gently. "Do you know what happened?"
Again, Ben shakes his head. "You came back for him, about two years ago, and he went with you."
Sam came back. Just like he's come back now. He's haunting his own life.
"Went where?" Sam presses.
"I don't know. He wouldn't say. Then, then he came back again. In the night. He was… different."
There are all kinds of 'different'. Hurt different. Possessed different. Sold your soul different. Each of them comes with the suggestion of 'wrong'.
"And?"
Ben folds in on himself. His gaze slips away like oil. There's something he's not telling, slyly sidestepping it. "And then he left again. And he didn't come back."
Sam thinks about that little secret Ben's keeping. He's obliviously transparent the way most kids are when they've never had to lie over anything bigger than a broken window or a missed curfew. The secret's nested in something dark and uncertain, like Ben hasn't figured out what he thinks of it yet.
The afternoon is already reddening at its edges as evening closes in. An insistent breeze is moving in through the trees, setting the last leaves fluttering in alarm on the branches like the wings of trapped birds.
"You still put salt at your windows and doors every night?" Sam says.
Ben nods, and Sam mirrors it, approving. "Good, make sure you keep doing that."
As Sam winds the car window back up, Ben says, "You want me to call if I hear from Dean?"
Sam searches his face for some sign that Ben knows that's not going to happen. Someone should let the kid down easy. He's not going to hear from Dean again.
:::
The diner is lit up like a Spielberg spacecraft. Its neon lights have a glow that hazes the starry night sky far above the dark line of treetops. The road is black on the other side of the windows. Sometimes a car sweeps by, tugged along by the tide of the highway, and its white headlights turn to red tail-lights with the sound of a sigh.
On the table in front of Sam, there's a plate with half a chicken Caesar salad on it. He was in the middle of eating it when he looked up and noticed that he was the only one sitting alone in the diner. A subtle fingerwidth of distance is present between him and everyone else in their couples and groups.
The chicken is cold now, bloodless and white and even less appetizing than it was before. Sam isn't hungry anymore. Just very fed up.
He takes out his cellphone and scrolls through the names, always coming back to D.
Mouth setting tight, feeling like he's breaking some rule he can't even cite, Sam stabs his finger at the phone and listens to the dial tone. It rings once, rings twice, rings three times -
"Look, Sam, no offense, but would you take the damn hint already?" says Dean.
And Sam is so surprised that Dean's answered that he just sits there a moment, tongue dry in his mouth.
"Sam?" Dean demands.
It doesn't fully register with Sam that Dean sounds impatient and unfriendly. Sam's aware of it but it doesn't mean anything to him. "Where are you?" he says.
"Doesn't matter," says Dean, and Sam knows him so well that he knows a single shake of Dean's head goes with that tone, eyes closing just a second longer than a blink. He can see Dean doing it. "Stop looking, okay? I'm fine. I don't wanna be found."
"Dean, what's happened? What's going on?"
"Nothing's going on, Sam," he says, and Sam recognizes that too. He's been hearing it from Dean since he was a kid and Dean was still trying to build a normal life for him out of old bones and rocksalt. "Just think it's time we went our separate ways."
"But I've got my soul back," says Sam. He lays it down for Dean timidly, like an offering, appeasement for the unspecified conflict between them.
"Yeah, Cas told me he was gonna do it. Good for you. I'm glad it worked out."
Sam scrunches his eyes up tight against the indifference in Dean's voice, bright and rough as the diner lights. He pinches the bridge of his nose as he talks. "Listen, Dean… I don't remember what happened, and -"
"You're not s'posed to remember," Dean tells him sharply. "Okay? So don't try. You hear me? Stop trying to remember. Stop looking for me, and stop calling me. Start over, Sammy."
Dean hangs up, abrupt as a slap.
:::
It's tempting to sit and rust in the diner. Refuse to move. Hold his breath until Dean relents and comes for him.
It's also tempting to do exactly as Dean said: bury his old life alongside the three years slowly decomposing at the back of his mind and start over.
But three years is a long time, time enough for plenty of things to happen. At least one of those things made Dean decide to leave. Nobody will tell Sam what it was, and they don't want Sam finding out for himself. It's a new verse in an old song: Sam is so well taken care of that even the responsibility of making any decision for himself has been lifted from him.
There is part of his head that is cut off, anaesthetized. It doesn't feel like it belongs to him. Sam imagines that's where those amputated memories are, wrapped to twitching, shapeless bundles in white gauze.
Three years and a cage in Hell are in there.
Sam sits on his motel room bed and prods at the memories with the blind touch of a tongue to a tooth to see if it still aches. A television plays the trills and buzzes of a gameshow too loud in the room next door, and outside two truckers argue in the parking lot. Sam touches the sterilized place in his head to see if anything's alive back there.
The medical report says the cop turned to blood. There's a lot of prevarication and ambiguous wording because whoever wrote the report is trying really hard to find a scientific way of saying a guy turned into a big red puddle.
The Impala rumbles into view, and Sam straightens up from his own car, which is big and black and shiny but cannot be mistaken for Dean's. Dean parks the car nose to nose with Sam's, and climbs out, talking on the phone he's got wedged between his cheek and his shoulder.
"Ben...I know you're lying. Because I lie professionally, that's how. Now tell your mom that you broke the damn thing and take it like a man. Okay? Okay."
He hangs up, looks over at Sam who's been watching, with an expression somewhere between amusement and incredulity.
"Wow," says Sam.
A flicker of defensive irritability registers on Dean's face. "What?" he demands.
Sam shrugs. The folder holding the police report is still open in his hand. "You, molding the minds of tomorrow." He laughs, half-shakes his head. "Who knew?"
"Yeah, tell me about it," Dean mutters. He tugs at the collar of his ill-fitting suit, while his gaze scans the city street restlessly.
Sam studies him a moment, then he flips the folder shut and asks the obvious question. "How'd it go?"
Dean's gaze snaps to him. "With?"
"You and Lisa," Sam says. "How'd she take it when you bailed?"
"Shockingly cool, actually."
Sam claps him on the shoulder and uses the gesture to get Dean moving. "Better for everybody," he tells him.
The movie's over. Sam has no idea what it means. It tells him only what he already knew: at some point, Dean left Lisa and Ben to come away with Sam. There's more in his head but it's like bobbing for apples, dodging away the harder Sam strains for it.
Sam will have to find his answers somewhere else. There will be other clues about what Sam's wayward body was doing while Sam's soul was not there to direct it.
The first clue is the wallet full of business cards. There are names on the cards, and those names will surely appear in police reports, which might at least tell Sam where he's been and what he's been hunting. There are the storage units as well, and those units must have things in them that were of interest to the Sam who was here.
Of the three cards for storage units, two are in with the other cards while one's tucked in on its own. This last one bears the unimaginative logo of a shield, in red, and is situated in Hamilton, Ohio. Sam turns it over in his hands, but the back is blank.
Hamilton seems like a good place to start.
:::
Outside the storage unit building, on a square patch of thinning grass, is a single tree. Its branches are naked and bony, but Sam remembers it in a different time. When he looks at the tree, it's summer, not Fall. The tree is in bloom, each blossom a fat, rounded, rotten-pink babydoll head. They quiver and twitch in the warm breeze.
Sam shivers and looks away.
He doesn't have much of a plan for getting into whichever storage unit was his. He has no idea which name he used or what details he gave. In the end, it doesn't matter. Sam walks in, and the balding guy at the desk sees him and shrinks back, eyes flaring wide for just a second. He hastily gulps down his mouthful of coffee and sets his mug down, china clunking hard against the desk's surface.
"Well, hi," he says. "This is a surprise. Haven't seen you in a while." His smile is hearty but all the while he's looking at Sam he's wringing his hands, over and over.
Whatever bad impression Sam has inherited from his other self, he goes with it. "I've been busy," he says curtly. "Let me into my unit."
"Sure, sure, just let me get the key." The guy doesn't so much as pause. He wants Sam out.
Taking a ring of keys from his waist, the guy unlocks a metal cabinet on the wall, rattles through it, before handing a single small key to Sam. Sam takes it, tries to remember if the shape of it feels like it's been in his hand before. It's nothing but dead metal to him.
He starts towards the door, then looks back. "Remind me, what number?"
For just a second, the guy hesitates. His desire to have Sam gone wars with his instinct that something is not quite right. Self-preservation wins. "Lucky 21," he says, and Sam's sure he can hear him giving a sigh of relief as Sam leaves.
The units are little more than lockboxes. They sit in row upon row like the chilled shelves of a morgue. Sam walks along slowly until he gets to 21. He stands in the spot, looks around - single bulb overhead shedding a light so raw it skins you, deeper shadow of a spiderweb in the top left corner of the room - and tries to recall being here before.
He fits the key into the lock, twists, and pulls out the drawer. It's not full, not three years' worth. The largest items are a blunt knife with a rusted blade and a bottle of oil that's overpoweringly scented of myrrh. But there's also a small silver coin, embossed with the crude iconography of a faceless saint. In a scrap of black silk are a few bone shards, small enough to be a cat's, and beside that, a vial of dark red liquid that slip-slides sluggishly along the glass when Sam tips it on its side.
More usefully, there's a fat roll of bills.
Tucked against the side of the box are a few books and papers. As he flips through a tattered copy of Dante's Inferno, Sam finds a slim pamphlet on the subject of falconry. It's outdated, probably from the sixties or seventies; if the yellowing paper hadn't told him so the style of the grainy photos would.
Sam stares at it. He frowns and slowly turns the pages. The pamphlet is cracked open on the section regarding training. Sam reads through a few paragraphs but gives up before he can figure out why he might be holding onto this. Maybe a hunt involving birds of prey? Sam's been on weirder hunts in his life.
He examines the Dante again as he replaces it in the box. One corner of the cover is blackened, as if burned at some point, but the only other damage is the usual degradation of age. Sam pulls a face and chucks the book back in; Dante's never been a favorite of his. Perhaps the other Sam had different taste in reading material.
Sam pockets the roll of bills. Everything else gets returned to the box. None of it means anything to Sam. It would have been too easy, he supposes, to have found a journal, full of names and places and dates.
His other self has left no map for Sam to follow.
:::
Most of the money Sam found in the lockbox goes toward a brand new laptop. He doesn't know where the other one was lost. If his other self managed to lose Dean, Sam shouldn't be surprised he couldn't hold on to a laptop.
One by one, Sam searches the internet for the names on the business cards he found in his wallet. He lays them out like a fortune teller's deck and tries to read the past from them.
There is a name that connects to a spate of child disappearances, and the subsequent discovery of two bloodied survivors and a heap of tiny corpses. Another name has a partner mentioned, FBI Agent Kirke, and though that's the only detail it gives him, it makes Sam smile, makes him favor the name on that card a little more than the all brotherless names. Other names give him deaths and abductions and fits of temporary (murderous) insanity. He draws a timeline for himself by fitting the dates to the names to the places, and he watches his past self hurtle across the states and back again like a wasp in a jar.
Then Sam discovers US Marshal Rand.
Too much staring at the screen in a dimly lit room has left his eyes swollen and hot in his head. The text is wetly blurred by his sight. But he doesn't need text, because this report is illustrated. Six glorious Technicolor photos of the crime scene.
Sam's looking at a room. There's so much blood splatter the walls appear to be one vast field of stars. Long-tailed comets are sprayed across the expanse, dribbling red to the sodden carpet. Patches of the white wall are visible like bare bone beneath the blood. But there's no corpse that Sam can see, no human remains except the blood from a body wrung-dry.
The other photos are much the same, until the fifth. The angle of the picture shows the room's doorway, a huddle of cops and CSI techs - and Sam and Dean. Sam and Dean are there, right there in the picture. They're both wearing suits, and Dean's is buckled into wrinkles at the knees where he's dropped to a crouch by the edge of the pool of blood. Dean's face is half-turned away, pinched and pale, and Sam wonders if there's something else he's not seeing in the picture.
Standing just behind Dean is Sam himself. He's holding a notepad in his hand but his gaze is raised to the photographer's: brow tight, lips tighter. He looks displeased to be included in the photo.
You can't see, in the picture, that Sam doesn't have a soul. Not really. There's no appearance of spirit-photography, no hint of transparency. It's only because Sam knows what's not there that he can see it. Sam is a tall, dark post in the room. He is solid and inanimate. The chambers of his heart are stone-dry.
It seems to Sam that a lot of people died while he was hunting soulless. People were shot in the knees or beaten. More than once, a single person was attacked in a remote location, in which they had no business being, and after that, the deaths stopped. To Sam's mind, facts like that make that person either the culprit, or bait.
The most recent report he can find is from only a month and a half ago, in Arkansas. The killings read like the work of a handful of different bad things Sam's hunted in the past, there's no obvious suggestion of one in particular.
The chief investigating officer's name is on the report and it's not much work to get a phone number for him. Sam starts to type his number into his phone, then he catches sight of the time and he realizes just how late it is, just how long he's spent looking.
Sam rocks back on the bed. His shoulders ache suddenly at the change in a position he's not sure how long he's been holding. He wipes his hand over his prickling, dry eyes. But it's okay, because he can rest at last. He won't wake in the morning, staring at the ceiling, frightened by the wide-open day. He'll start the drive to Arkansas tomorrow. He might even be able to find which motel he stayed at with Dean there, maybe even the precise room where they lived and slept and talked.
Dean won’t be there now, of course. Dean was there, past tense. Sam wonders how long he'll be able to stay on this pilgrimage to places his brother once could be found. A little longer yet, he thinks. Dean is still out there somewhere, and there's a reason for that distance.
People don't just disappear. Other people just stop looking for them.
:::
One hundred and fifty miles out from Plainview. Arkansas, the needle in the gauge of Bobby's creaking old Ford gives an arthritic click and lurches from half-full to nearing empty.
Sam pulls into a truckstop town, climbs out of the car and stands under the stripped sky, considering his options. There are a few bills left in his wallet, but he'd like a place to stay tonight, and maybe something to eat as well, if he's going to be spoiled about it.
There's a gas station, and right next to that, there's a bar. Pickings are going to be slim in a place like this, more wind and dust than people, but Sam should be able to hustle a tank's worth of gas at least.
He scuffs through the dirt, looking over the couple of trucks in the lot as he passes. The door to the bar is set back under the shade of a wooden cover and Sam's grateful for it as soon as he steps into the blackness, the growing sweat on the back of his neck and between his shoulder-blades cooling almost instantly.
The bar's quiet, though Sam guesses not particularly so by its own measure and for this late in the afternoon. Just a little louder than the dull whine of the song on the radio is the cascading tap of a pool shot. Sam looks to the source of the sound, where three guys are gathered around a pool table. They lift their heads, prop themselves up on their pool sticks, and look right back at him.
It's a little too good an opening, Sam figures. So he tips his head to them and carries on to the bar. He takes a stool, orders a beer from the work-worn bartender, and doesn't need to look back at the guys to know they're still watching him.
Seems like a game of pool is looking less likely than getting jumped by three unfriendly assholes. With any luck they'll be assholes with money in their wallets for Sam to take after he's beat the shit out of them.
They saunter towards him, spread out in a loose pack of three, and Sam continues drinking and lets them come. Their approach is reflected by the bartender's gradual slowing as she watches. Her gaze flickers nervously to Sam, and Sam smiles back at her.
"Of all the bars in all the world, you walk into this one. How about that?"
Sam turns on his stool to look at the guy who's addressing him. He looks the guy over and upgrades him from asshole to asshole with combat training. The guy's in a flannel shirt and jeans, and there's a hitch in the way he leans his body against the bar due, Sam guesses, to the knife or the gun shoved down his waistband.
"How about that?" Sam echoes amiably.
"You wanna talk a walk outside with us, Winchester?" one of the other guys says.
The world turns a degree and Sam adjusts. He sets his glass down on the bar. "You know me?" he says.
He's met with laughter, a look exchanged between the three of them. They know him.
The bartender catches his eye and she glances towards the phone hung up on the wall, a question in the tiniest lift of her heavily plucked eyebrow. Sam gives a single shake of his head. It's a nice offer but police involvement is not going to help.
He unfolds himself from the stool and his shadow travels up the length of the floor like an oil spill. The guys tense a little, just at that, and Sam wonders if the version of him that was running around for three years would pull a move on them right now, if that's what they're expecting.
Instead, he strolls outside, screwing his eyes up as his vision burns out briefly in the sunshine. He stands in the center of the parking lot and works out everything he can do that'll compensate for what he can't: change the odds into anything better than three against one.
They make a loose circle around him, and Sam doesn't bother turning to face the one who's moving behind him. There's no way he can turn that won't put one of them at his back.
"Now, tell me this, Winchester," says the guy who spoke to him first. "What are you doing down here, when I hear your brother's up in New York?"
Sam's eyes widen but he catches himself before words can betray him. Dean's in New York. For the first time since he woke, Sam knows where Dean is now, not where he used to be. His heart beats faster because it's very important that Sam gets to New York before Dean can disappear from view again.
"Don’t tell me he's slipped his leash," the guy behind him says.
"You need to keep a tighter hold on your animal," says the third guy. "Someone could get hurt."
What's Dean done? What's been done to Dean? The language doesn't belong when the subject is Dean. Dean is annoying, frustrating, drives you crazy, but he's not an animal. Sam's the one everyone's got their doubts about.
There's movement behind Sam, the slightest sound, and the guy who's facing Sam, the leader, telegraphs it by the flick of his eyes.
"So you know what that makes you, Winchester?" he says. "Bait. You understand 'bait', don't you?" His grin is sudden and thunderous. "Sure you do, s'what you used poor Jimmy Kendrick as. You remember poor Jimmy Kendrick, remember his ripped out lungs?"
"Not a thing you'd forget," says the guy at Sam's side.
Sam holds up his hands in a placatory gesture, saying, "Look, c'mon, can't we talk about this?" And before the words are even settled on the air, Sam swings around and slams his fist into the face of the guy behind him and the impact jars the bones of his wrist, explodes hotly along his knuckles.
They're on him in seconds and Sam grunts as the breath is driven out of his body under the weight of them. Gravel skins his palms as he's knocked off his feet, but he closes his fingers around a handful of it and flings it into the eyes of the first guy coming for him. It gives him enough time to lunge for the other guy, meeting his face with his fist over and over, forcing him backwards, all the while remembering that there's a third guy somewhere, just out of sight.
Someone grabs him from behind, tries to pin Sam's arms backwards, but Sam jerks free. He spins around to punch the guy who's just tried it, and, as he does, he realizes the mistake he's making: he's putting his back to the third guy who's come out of nowhere.
A heavy blow catches Sam on the temple. His vision goes watery, narrowed to a slanted shard of the parking lot as blackness descends. His legs wobble and break beneath him.
For a second, Sam wavers there, on his knees in the dirt. Wind rises up behind him and Sam falls, again.
:::
When Sam opens his eyes, he sees a shiny silver nickel sitting amongst dust and lint tumbleweeds, against the baseboard, between the squat bow-legs of a piece of furniture. The nickel must have been dropped and rolled there, though how long ago is impossible to tell. It could have been there for years and years, cultivating its own little territory, or just since yesterday and it's still waiting for rescue.
Sam looks at the nickel a little while longer, before he considers his wider surroundings.
His cheek is pressed to wooden floorboards and he follows the flaking cracks in the oily varnish, that come together like parched river tributaries, to two pairs of boots, which are attached to legs, attached to the guys from the bar: one sitting, one standing.
He's feeling enough hot pulses of pain to know that the beating didn't stop just because he lost consciousness. His palms hurt the most. They're probably the most minor of his injuries, something he could have done with the stupidest of slips after one too many drinks at the bar, but he can't stop thinking about his red-grazed palms. The tightness of the knots around his wrists, tied behind his back, makes his hands feel hot and bloated.
One of the guys walks to the window and a minor earthquake travels through the floor and vibrates in Sam's ear.
"It's getting dark. Kent should be back by now."
"Relax," says the other guy. "We've got time."
Sam's ankles are tied too. His nose is crusty with dried blood. He can smell it, taste it in his mouth when he breathes in. He rubs his wrist against the rope, to see how much give there is, and the pain in his hands flares and falls like the wail of an air-raid siren. But Sam's pretty sure, if he can just pop his thumb out of its socket, he can work a hand free. And one hand leads to the other hand, leads to his feet, leads to the rest of him.
The guy at the window turns, and says, "You're not gonna make the call 'til he's back, though, right?"
A snort, the thick clatter of a gun being set down. "I look like an idiot to you? 'Course I'm not gonna call 'til we've got it. Would'ya just sit down and relax?"
The guy sits down, doesn't relax.
It is getting dark. The light in the lodge is barely a layer over the gloom. It's quiet outside too. Sam can't hear traffic or voices. Slowly, the atmosphere in the lodge is cutting them off from the rest of the world. The silence and the shadow are fixing them in place, slicing through the tendons that connect them to civilization, until they'll be as lost and forgotten as that shiny silver nickel down the back of the bureau.
"Goddamn this," someone mutters, rumbles across the floor and snaps a lamp on, then the radio.
The other guy laughs. "You're getting jumpy in your old age, Benny." Then he leans across and turns the radio up louder.
They listen to the music, bubbly pop songs from decades gone, cut with crappy advertisements for local car dealerships and diners, which tell Sam they haven't taken him all that far.
At last, the guy finishes with his gun and rises to his feet. He stretches his back, groaning, then crosses to the window himself. He peers out for just a little too long.
"Kent should'a been back by now," says the guy in the chair, Benny, quiet and stubborn.
"Nah, probably just got held up by security." He comes away from the window like he knows he can't keep on standing there and argue that everything's fine.
"We got a plan B?"
The other guy moves away, boots disappearing right off the edge of Sam's circle of vision.
He doesn't answer the question. "There anything to eat in this place?" Closets open and slam shut, one after another. "Christ, we should'a told him to pick up pizza."
Benny leans forwards in his chair. "Hey, Wazowski, I'm asking you if we got a plan B!"
"Kill Sam and wait for Dean to come to us. Works either way." He fishes his cellphone out of his pocket and flips it open. "I'm calling Kent and telling him to pick us up a fucking pizza."
He gets a sigh and a pause, then Benny grudgingly says, "No pepperoni on mine."
Madonna's on the radio, life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone, but there's a tinny muzak tune competing with her all of a sudden. It repeats, over and over, under the music, and nobody moves for a moment.
"That's Kent's phone," says Benny. "That's Kent's fucking phone."
"Where's it coming from?"
Benny's on his feet now, and Sam recognizes the click of a gun being loaded. "Right outside the fucking door. Jesus, Wazowski, it's right outside the-"
"Would you shut the fuck up!"
One covering the other, they converge on the door. When they swing the door open, it blocks Sam's view, but he doesn't need to see, not when Benny's cursing like a crazy man, going, where's the fucking rest of him? what's he done with the fucking rest of him, Wazowski? that fucking animal, I'm gonna fucking kill him, gonna fucking tear his goddamned head off-
The lights go out, the radio cuts off. They're in thick, black silence. Sam hears the scuffle of their boots as they retreat into the lodge, the door creaks as they move to shut it, and then something happens.
It's too dark for Sam to see exactly what but he's pretty sure something just came in. Someone.
He wrenches harder at his wrists, not sure if it's sweat or blood slipping against the ropes.
Benny screams, high like a child, and the floor thunders as Wazowski runs right at Sam. He grabs Sam by the hair, hauling him half off the floor, and there's a blade's thin line of cold suddenly pressed into Sam's throat.
"You take a step closer and I'll slit him open!" Wazowski shouts.
"Nah," says Dean. "You're not gonna have time."
And while Sam is still celebrating Dean's presence, his nearness - because that's Dean, that's Dean's voice, Sam knows it in the dark, knows it over the phone, knows it in his own head - Wazowski jerks his wrist, the blade stings, and then Dean is crashing down on top of them like a weight of water, and in the middle of it all, Sam's knocked out again.
:::
"I had a crazy dream," Sam says.
The smell of the Impala is immediate and comforting: gun oil and alcohol and leather. To Sam, it smells like Dean and still a little bit like John too, though it shouldn't, the years should have grown over the last traces of him. Maybe to Dean it smells like Sam.
Sam's on the backseat and there's a funny taste in his mouth. He smacks his lips to clear it and tries to sit up. His head feels swimmy.
"A nightmare," Sam clarifies, to the back of Dean's head. He frowns, says, "Where are we going anyway?"
Dean looks back over his shoulder at him, a face of black hollows, painted red and white by the garish night, and Sam shrinks away from him before he can help himself.
"Go back to sleep," says Dean.
The road ahead is lit up like it's on fire. They're going to Hell.
:::
The next time Sam wakes, he's on a bed. His head still hurts and night-time lurches around him, suggesting movement with no distinct detail. The bed is not particularly comfortable, and when he smoothes his hand over the covers, he finds they're stiff polyester. It's a motel bed.
Sam sits up. The shadow in front of the lighter square of the drapes shifts.
"Good morning, sunshine," says Dean.
"Dean!" Sam fumbles for the lamp that should be on the bedside table, but there's nothing there. "Dean, what the hell's going on? Where've you been? Who were those guys?"
He searches the darkness, strains to put together Dean's face in it. He watches Dean stand in the way his darkness stretches up against the neon back-lit drapes.
"Hunters," says Dean. "We pissed 'em off last year. Guess they're not ones for forgive and forget."
He paces a few steps then turns back again, and the urgency leaves Sam's body as he realizes Dean has no immediate plans to leave. Instead, Sam sits on the bed and watches the shadow-play of the darkness of where Dean is pacing and prowling like a bored cat.
He wets his lips and says quietly, "What's going on, Dean?"
Dean waves a dismissive hand. "I told you, nothing's going on." He's stubborn as a god and just as resistant to questioning.
"Like hell! Why wouldn't you meet up with me? Why weren't you there when I woke up? I've got no clue what the fuck's been happening in the past three years-"
Dean laughs and Sam's sure he can make out the shiny glint of his smile. "We hunted stuff. Drank some beers. Think I might'a got laid a couple of times along the way. It was great."
Sam can feel his breath getting away from him. The easily amiable tone of Dean's voice is designed to rile him up, to work him up so that he's not capable of hanging onto the thread of the argument, just the rage that's stiff in his bones and flooding his blood.
He forces himself to calm down. He concentrates on the beating of his heart, breath shuddering out of him, and waits for each throb to linger a little longer before the next.
Across the room, Dean cocks his head like a hunting dog, and Sam catches the whisper of his indrawn breath.
"No," Sam says. "No. Something's going on, and either you can tell me yourself, or I'll figure it out, you know I will, I'll keep looking until-"
When Dean comes at him, Sam expects to get punched. When Dean moves that fast in Sam's direction, he's either looking to shield Sam from a threat or wanting to do some violence himself. And Sam's pissed off enough to be ready to meet him swinging.
But Dean stops right in front of his face, propped up on the bed, leaning over Sam, and Sam's not sure what to do about it when Dean's so close, doing nothing at all except existing in the same space as Sam's skin.
Even the dark can't hide Dean's face from Sam at this proximity. And Dean looks good, Sam thinks. He looks different too, and Sam can't place it until he sees that there's something alive behind Dean's eyes for the first time in years. There's something looking back out at him that's flushed and healthy and bloody. That boy who Sam idolized and hated, who set the bar impossibly high in their father's eyes, who was stuck together with bravado and faith and a handed-down leather jacket, has come back.
And he's angry.
They hang like that: Sam half-stretched back on the bed, while Dean's arms bracket his shoulders. Sam's pinned down by Dean's unexpected intrusion into his personal space, and how he does nothing with it.
"No, you won't," Dean says. His voice is a whisper but it's cold and grim as old age. "Why don't you get a job, Sam? Get a job, get a girlfriend, get a fucking mortgage. Or carry on hunting, fight the good fight. But not with me."
Sam jumps on it. "Why not with you?"
So Dean tells him why not.
Sam has always felt slightly embarrassed by Dean's mouth. He's embarrassed by the things that come out of it, he's embarrassed by the sheer fact of it, its shape, its color, the things it suggests. He's looked on it as an unmanageable third brother. It gets them into trouble. It causes too much attention. It never knows when to shut the hell up, or it shuts up like it's stitched that way when all Sam wants it to do is give him one straight answer.
And that oh-so-pretty mouth is filling up with teeth.
Tiny white knives slice through Dean's pink gums, curving through the flesh like cat's claws. The teeth keep on coming. It's not like it hurts at all, so easy and smooth, natural, as though Dean is supposed to have a fresh crop of murder in his mouth.
Sam stares, horrified, and Dean, still leaning over him, holds in place and lets him. Sam's never seen anything as clearly in his life as he's seeing those teeth.
Finally, Dean eases back and away, slinking back into the unknowable night. His head turns towards the window, where the neon flash seems less pronounced than before.
"It's getting light," he says. "I gotta go." His voice is too soft to come from such a slaughterhouse.
He moves to the door, and Sam doesn't call after him.
"Things are different. I don't wanna hunt with you anymore, Sam, not how you are. And if you come after me, I'll stop you."
He doesn't explain how Sam is now, what it is about Sam that makes him a bad fit for Dean. Sam's pretty sure he means now you've got a soul. He's so struck by how weird it is that getting his soul back makes him an unmatched pair for Dean, that he doesn't stop Dean from walking out the door.
:::
This could be the cage. Because, of course, there's no way Sam would know, is there? Bored and angry archangels are clever and creative torturers. They could have built a whole, horrible world for him and be entertaining themselves watching him bash his head bloody against its bricks. There is no reality check that can't be subverted by the will of angels.
Alternatively, this could be how it is now. This could be it. If Sam has learned anything, it's that nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse.
Dean is a vampire.
Also, Dean doesn't want Sam around. The last time that happened, Dean was fifteen and going through a phase of badly wanting to be James Dean, which lasted until John flatly refused to let Dean have a motorcycle, now or at any time in the future. The day after that edict was passed, Dean showed up in the library, sat next to him while Sam did his homework, and flipped paper pellets at the wall.
Sam can't write off this life and start a new one. This could be James Dean all over again. This could be vampire James Dean.
The motel room that Dean has left Sam in is dated and depressing. On the wall, there's a print of abstract art, a tumble of red and yellow polygons, in a cheap and shiny silver frame. The bedcover is a repeating geometric design in black and purple of the kind Sam remembers from the very early nineties.
Sam's duffle bag is on the floor by the chair where Dean sat and watched Sam sleep.
He picks up his bag and walks out into the parking lot. It's morning already, and Sam guesses Dean must be sleeping somewhere. That's not so bad; he never was a morning person, after all.
Bobby's old red Ford is waiting for him, keys visible on the dash. Dean's left Sam with everything he needs to start out fresh.
Sam climbs in behind the wheel, starts the engine and turns the car out onto the road.
There's a moment he remembers very clearly, one of the last he does remember: He's in the graveyard at Stull, and his arm is drawn back, fist clenched with the force of mountains, and the sun catches his eye, and just for a heartbeat, Lucifer is blind, can't see a damned or blessed thing. That's when Sam sees Dean.
That's the moment Sam hangs his humanity on.
part two