Shoah
Title: Shoah
Author:shangrilada (Kira)
Word Count: 5,580
Summary: One time Jess burned on the ceiling. Sam didn't.
Author's Note: For this one it helps to have some background in Sammyverse, but pretty much all you need to know is that Jess and Sam are established soulmates, as are Sam and dean, and they know that when they die they're all going to where she is now. Cas is bound to go wherever Sam does. That's kind of the issue here.
He was feeling a little better today. He'd been working through ear infections for the past week and a half, but they woke up this morning and their pillowcase wasn't wet, and then he rolled her onto her back and dropped kiss after kiss in the hollow of her throat. She wished she could swallow him up like hot chocolate.
“I'll make cookies today,” she said. They were graduating in May, and she was already working on her cooking school applications. She was going to be a baker. It was what she'd wanted since she was so small.
“Stay in bed with me.” He kissed her nose, then across her cheekbone to her temple.
So she didn't make cookies that day.
She'd make them tomorrow instead.
**
Jude is sick, but his twin Emmy is healthy but she is so, so small. Dean and Christa run back and forth to the hospital, giving Kylie her baths, tucking her into bed, sitting by Jude's incubator and crying.
Sam is healthy too, a handful of months after his heart transplant, softly wheezy most days from the spring. He gives rides back and forth to the hospital when he's needed and sleeps with Cas every night and during the day he lies here, flat on his back, tiny Emmy curled up asleep on his healed chest.
Four and a half pounds of beautiful, healthy baby. She sleeps on her stomach with her limbs tucked under her, snoring softly, fiercely.
He knows he should be more connected to Jude. Jude looks like him, hazel eyes and soft hair, light skin and dimples. He wheezes like he does and lies in wires and hospital air like he does. He has surgery to try to open up bronchial tubes, like Sam did.
But Emmy, this lump of dark skin and half her body weight in hair and this clear, determined breathing, is the one he watches and wraps his arms around and rocks when she wakes up and cries.
He can quiet her down the fastest, and that makes Christa upset, and Sam wraps his sister-in-law in blankets and tells her don't worry, she loves you best. A baby doesn't love anyone how she loves her mother.
Emmy, on her back, figures out how to bend her toes to her mouth. She pushes air through her throat like a laugh.
This tiny little baby, and she's not psychic-that's Jude, he already knows, he hasn't told them yet, and he lies still and feels his surgery-and yet this four and half pounds of too young to laugh is holding on to that brand new heart.
He doesn't know why.
They've figured out how to go to heaven now. Cas and Balthazar get them in. Dean goes to visit his mother and to cry, presumably, about how a baby will never love anyone how he loves his mother.
Sam doesn't go up to see her.
Sam doesn't doesn't go up to see anyone.
Sam stays here and sings Emmy French lullabies from someone else's mother.
**
She kissed Sam goodbye and watched him pull off with Dean-she adored Dean and was kind of sad she didn't get to come, but she had a midterm tomorrow and cookies to bake-and early the next morning Brady came around and she realized this was a dream about the time she started bleeding-Sam's best friend besides that boy in the car with him, come back come back come back-and she held onto this when she was on the ceiling and her cookies were burning and it felt so, so real.
Sam came home and didn't smell the burning cookies because Sam had allergies and a chronic stuffy nose that made him snore and sneeze and fuss over her when she caught a cold (a cold that would then go straight to his lungs because his nose wouldn't notice-there was a pun in there somewhere but she was too on fire to find it).
Her first language was French and she heard it hard in her head, (maman maman maman). The last thing she heard was him screaming.
She woke up in her apartment, the same one she just dreamed. Sam wasn't here. She felt sore and her skin felt dry and she shook herself off and dressed and headed out for her midterm and opened the door and outside, instead of the dingy hallway and the quiet of a hundred college students still asleep was a kind of bone-quiet she's never heard, a stillness so deep that it took her a minute to break out of it and realize that was outside.
This isn't a hallway. This was motherfucking outside, a wet gray day, her favorite.
She shut her door tight and went to hands and knees on the floor and somehow managed to cough in French and in Hebrew prayers.
**
“You need sleep,” Castiel says. He's curled loosely around Sam, one arm over his chest, like he doesn't even realize he's there, like he doesn't realize he's touching Sam in the one place he will never like. He kisses the hollow of Sam's throat and yes, Sam likes that part, that part is good.
But Emmy is crying. It's 3 AM and she's crying.
“Christa will get her,” Cas says. “You shouldn't go all the way up the stairs, you're wheezing.”
Yeah, he is. He breathes into a wheeze that sounds like water.
“What's...bothering you tonight?” He almost said bugging. Sam could hear it.
He kisses Castiel's temple and loves him.
“I want one,” he says.
“What? Neb?” Cas sits up, ready.
“Uh-uh, come back.”
Immediately, he's back down, curled around Sam's cheek. “You can do wings,” Sam says, and in a secon they're around him, tickling his cheek. He sneezes a few times and Castiel mumbles in concern, asks if he's sure, kisses him when he says yes.
“I want one,” Sam says, again.
“One what, Sam?”
“One of those.”
“A wing? You can have one. I'll make you one.”
He shakes his head. “A baby.”
“What?”
“Can you make me a baby?”
“I don't think I want a baby, though.”
It's so fast, so careless, and Sam cries into his pillow, and Castiel murmurs shit and calls him baby and Sam imagines a blonde baby and long fingers he can't even place anymore, and chubby baby hands, and Emmy's skin.
She stops crying. Maybe she's dead.
Cas sets up the nebulizer and Sam clings to the hem of his shirt. He apologizes.
He doesn't know what baby he would want, anyway. Emmy has a mother already.
He thinks about himself, so sick still with his new half-empty (how do you measure empty, how do you measure years or fire) heart, and Castiel's eyes, half-full (more than half full, I am so sorry, Dean, I am so glad you have three children.) Sam likes threes. He thinks about baby Emmy. She already has a mother.
His baby would not.
“No,” he says. “I don't want a baby.”
**
He wakes up to Kylie in his bed. She does that sometimes, now, when she's too sad to talk to anyone. Kylie's getting tortured-Sam does not use that word lightly (Sam uses it for Kylie and one other person, one soulmate who has an apartment locked away who was never meant to be alone and has a boyfriend who is too much of a coward to go see her-because seeing her means he will have to leave her) and Kylie is getting tortured by the girls at her school. They've decided they hate her for no reason any of them can suss out from anyone and they trip her and call her names and touch her with hands she's allergic to. Christa might be her favorite, and Dean may be the closest of close seconds, but Sam is her safe spot.
“Hi, baby.”
She tucks under his chin. “Is the ceiling moving today?”
Sam looks away from her, up. “Yeah.”
“You gotta tell someone, Sammy.”
“I tell you.”
“Yeah 'cause you know I won't make you do anything.”
“You make me do shit all the time. Get me some juice, Sammy. You know I'm very frail and sickly, right? You should be getting me shit. Fetch me a backup heart, Kylie.”
“No, this is heart is gonna last super long.”
“Allison heart.” He watches her run her fingers over the tattoo on his wrist. Allison was seven. She fell off her bike. Her helmet was too loose. Sam once met and hugged her father.
“How come you don't have a Dead Jess tattoo?” Kylie says.
“Because I'd cry every time I saw it and that would be unseemly.”
“What's unseemly?”
“Inappropriate.”
“Sammy you are inappropriate a lot though 'cause like what about when you cry at cartoons and what about when you eat dinner in your underwear.”
“One of those is because I'm crazy and one of those is just because I'm a brat who can get away with it. You can choose which is which.”
“I just think that crying about Dead Jess is pretty normal.”
That's the problem, though.
Sam has a million excuses not to be normal anymore. Not to hurt in these old (overcooked) ways.
So what if he's milking them.
So what.
He kisses the top of Kylie's head. He deserves to get to do this.
Maybe he'll go see her tomorrow.
Instead he wakes up the next morning and quietly, so as not to wake Cas, carves her name into the inside of his ankle and doesn't cry.
He sucks in a breath through a wheeze and realizes what he accidentally carved out is EMMY.
Judaism doesn't allow tattoos, is the thing.
**
It's an old Jewish tradition. Naming a child after someone dead.
Emilia Jess, see. That's all this is. That's all.
**
Not a lot of French Jews made it out, but Jess's grandparents were two of them. Jess always imagined them holding hands, jumping a fence, gas chambers growling behind them.
She used to wonder what it would feel like, to be smoked alive.
Her mother was born in New York not long after the war. She was old when she had Jess and her big brother. Jess's dad would always tease, say she didn't want children, and she would hit him and say encore un fois, il ment and Jess and Tyler would giggle at their Dad who didn't speak French.
Her first three words were in French, her second three in English, and it went from there. She would go to her brother's apartment for dinner and they would speak only in French, but they were like two thirsty sponges feeding back and forth from each other and trying to ignore that there just wasn't enough water for two, or for one. They'd forget words.
Because Jess's mother found two lumps in her breasts when Jess was twelve, turned into a raging bitch on chemo when she was thirteen, made Jess cry because she should not be hating her dying mother when she was fourteen, had her believing maybe she would not die when she was fifteen, died when she was sixteen.
It's an old Jewish tradition. Dying.
**
Jess had asthma, which people (including her) tended to forget. She was mild, inhaler-as-needed asthma, whereas Sam was handle with goddamn care asthma and Jess loved, loved taking care of him. She really did.
She spent a year and a half lying in this fake apartment, alone in this what the fuck is this world, tightening her hands around her ribs.
That wasn't all she did. She baked. And baked. Her fridge was never empty. Her fridge never ran out of space to store pans and pans of eclairs and macarons and canales and madeleines. She didn't eat them. She used all the substitutions for nuts. There would be no fucking nuts in this house.
Except one day she dreamed up a bag of peanuts and ate them in bed and smeared them over the covers because fuck this motherfucking fuck of a bed that nobody ever comes home to, fuck staring up at this goddamn ceiling, fuck the very small holocaust of one girl.
She tried to go to sleep and ending up washing the whole house and sobbing.
**
Sam wakes up to a flutter of wings on his cheek, a kiss, a soft voice. “Hi.”
He opens his eyes and smiles some. “Hi.”
“How are you feeling?”
He squirms underneath the covers, getting warmer. “Not sick.”
“So I don't get to ask? Mean.”
Beautiful angel. Sam scoots over and lets Cas curl into his neck, and Sam hums a little, happy. He stretches down to his toes. “Where's that no good brother of mine?”
“I'm making your lazy ass breakfast!” Dean calls from the kitchen.
“I guess I can't call you no good then.”
“Come on, unsicky, get up and help me.”
Sam swallows his pills because “unsick” only means so much when it comes to him and takes hits of his inhalers and yawns his way into the kitchen. He's still getting used to the way his inhaler doesn't make his heart race out of control anymore. He's still getting used to being, relatively, unsick. It's late spring and his allergies are horrendous, in case he felt like getting comfortable. He sneezes on Dean's shoulder just to be an asshole, but Dean really could not give less of a shit.
Especially today. He's fucking beaming. “Jude's coming home today.”
“You're kidding.”
“Nope.”
Sam puts his hands under Dean's elbows and spins him around, and Dean laughs and kicks him. Cas comes in and pretends to yank them apart by their hair, and they pretend it hurts.
“Christa's there now getting prepped on everything,” Dean says. “I told them I knew everything about asthmatic baby but apparently they don't trust four-year-old Dean's memory. Bastards.”
Sam is tired and sits down on the floor. “Where's Kylie?”
“Where the fuck is Kylie, I called her for breakfast like twenty hours ago. Kylie Michelle!”
“WHAT!” she calls from somewhere upstairs. She sounds exasperated.
“If you don't mind, we request the pleasure of your company for breakfast.”
“LOOK, Dean, I have had it ABOUT UP TO HERE with being BOSSED.”
“'Up to here' doesn't work when we can't see you.”
She charges down the stairs and holds her hand up as high as it will go, then frowns, climbs on top of the couch, stand on her tiptoes, and holds it up again. “Up to HERE!”
“Tricked you! So nice of you to stop by. Come eat breakfast.”
“If I were a dinosaur I would have YOU for breakfast,” she grumbles, sliding into her chair.
“Aw, what's wrong, Kylie?” Sam gives her her juice.
“How come Sandy Miranda gets to be a dinosaur but not me?”
“Who the fuck is Sandy Miranda?”
“THAT'S WHAT I'D LIKE TO KNOW, MISTER WINCHESTER.”
“Well, eat her, then you'll become a dinosaur.”
“Oh!”
“But first eat your toast.”
She does.
“Are you going to see Jess today?” Dean says, casually, like it's nothing (because it is nothing, now, getting up there, just a matter of snapping your fingers, for all intents and purposes-really it's some angel shit he doesn't care to understand), but Sam quietly watches Cas quietly get a bottle of juice from the refrigerator.
He clears his throat and turns back to Dean. “I should, right?”
“How long has it been?”
Twenty-three days. Sam rubs the back of his neck. “A couple of weeks. Maybe I should wait until tomorrow.”
“What's tomorrow?”
“It's a multiple of three.” It's not today.
“Big crazy little brother,” Dean says, affectionately, and Sam lets his hand rest on Dean's shoulder for a second as Dean crosses over to the table to steal a bite of Kylie's toast and kiss the top of her head. “I'm dropping you off before work, sweetheart, you gotta scamper.”
“LAST ONE OUT THE DOOR IS WENDIGO LUNCH!”
Dean says, “Munch munch munch” and Kylie shrieks and runs up the stairs. Sam hears Emmy wake up, whine, start crying, and Dean laughs and rolls his eyes and says, “Great.” He's so happy. Sam feels lovely inside.
But now Dean's gone up to get the baby and it's just Sam and Cas, standing here, forced to talk and not just cuddle, sleep, kiss.
“We should go see her,” Cas says.
“I know.”
“Do you want to go alone?”
He does.
But how the hell do you tell your boyfriend you want to go fuck your girlfriend without hearing him trying not to sulk in her kitchen.
How the hell do you tell him that you're going to fuck your girlfriend and then the two of you are going to sob, forehead to the bed, that you can't have a baby.
How the hell.
**
And then one day, he was there.
She was making herself a sandwich (because at this point she was eating, because what the fuck else was she supposed to do, she couldn't turn this over in her head anymore, she couldn't-physically could not, she had tried-go any crazier than she already had) and she turned around and there he was, wincing, rubbing the small of his back. He looked around with a silent what the hell before his eyes got to her.
He was worn to all fuck, squeezed out, and he was so fucking beautiful.
“Jess?”
It should have been a tearful reunion. It should have needed pacing, talking, shaking, tentatively figuring out what was going on, discussing how they got there, discussing where the fuck they were.
It shouldn't have immediately been their mouths against each other and their bodies thrown into the glass of the shower wall, their fingernails digging each other, one of her feet curled around his hip and over the wound on his back to protect it from the spray.
He was whispering words she can't hear, and it wasn't until after she was moaning against his hand that she made out what they are--thank you, God. Thank you. Thank you.
**
They held each other and fell asleep, and he was still there when he woke up. This wasn't a dream. (This was finally a dream.)
He woke up after her, wheezy and disheveled. He frowned like he was confused but kissed her like he did it everyday, then sat up a little and pulled the sheet up around his waist. “Dean?”
She pulled on his t-shirt (backwards, so she could twist her hand in the crusted blood) and smelled the collar and said,“Dean's here?”
“He was...he was calling me...”
“Sam? Hey. Look at me.”
He turned to her, and he looked feverish and quiet, and then he grabbed the front of his (her) shirt and said, “Jess, fuck!”
“No no, hey. I'm okay.”
“Baby, what happened?”
“Sam. It's yours.”
“What?”
“This is your shirt. It's your blood.”
She expected him to protest, to demand something, to be fucking baffled, but instead he sat there and pulled his lip between his teeth and she knew her damn boy, and she could see him thinking, realizing. Remembering.
“Stabbed me,” he whispered.
He was shaking. She balled him up and pulled her into him and remembered how he used to feel so big. What happened, Sam? What the fuck is the world out there?
What had it always goddamn been? This place that stabbed. This place that pinned to ceilings.
“I thought it was a dream,” he said.
She swept him up. “So did I.”
He lay down facing her and wheezed and braided her hair and set, “Let me tell you what happened.”
And that was when she found out how the fuck she got on that ceiling.
**
He told her everything.
His mom. His life. His dad. His demon.
He cried for his brother and he cried how much he missed her and he cried that it was his birthday and then he climbed on top of her and fucked her slowly, forehead to forehead, and she closed her eyes and reached her arms around him and then...
and then she was lying there, every good feeling stopped cold, every inch of her too light and and empty and her arms shook like falling and her feet shook like pain and all around her was empty space and bed and sheets that smelled like him and he was gone.
She had fucked a ghost or he had left in the middle of fucking his and she screamed HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY and tore the mattress to shreds.
In the morning there was a new mattress and the old, wretched silence.
**
Sam decides to be a man of his word because today he just wants to be a man of his something and he goes up to see her on day 24, like he promised. She's lying on the floor of the living room with her legs up on the couch, smoking a bowl. He coughs at the smoke and she looks up, laughs a little, sets it down. “It won't hurt you,” she says. “Not real.” She's been on this kick for a while, shaking off everything that's up here: this couch isn't real, this food isn't real, my fevers aren't real, I'm not real. But it's real enough to make him cough, and he lies down next to her and kisses her cheek and muffles a few into her shoulder.
“Want a hit?” she says.
“Yeah.” She's right, is the thing. It won't hurt him.
Sam just doesn't worry so much anymore about what's real, and Jess has to deal with this version of him.
Jess has to just sit here and lie on the floor and wait to see what kind of battered Sam will come back to her and what kind of (worse, worse, worse) shape he'll be in every time he comes back (home) and don't think that doesn't break Sam's heart.
It's a phrase he shouldn't throw around, but not being with her literally breaks Sam's fucking heart.
(The thing is that this isn't his heart anymore, and Allison wasn't even born until after Jess died. Thoughts like that make him wish he believed in reincarnation, that it's somehow possible that Jess came back to be a concussed seven-year-old to give him an organ. Instead he's sitting here looking at the goddamn mortality of his girlfriend's immortal soul and he wants to bundle her up and take her somewhere with warmth, with music, with people.)
He tugs the blanket off the couch and drapes it over them like a tent. She lights the bowl for him and he takes a hit, holds his breath, coughs and coughs and coughs. His chest hurts, and his heart pounds, and he tucks himself under her chin.
Jess plays with his ear. “Just one for you today.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I missed you.”
“Being without you shakes and hurts and nobody sees it but me.”
He didn't talk like this until after she died.
She shouldn't have to deal with his goddamn hell issues when she was already dead, when he died and then died and then crawled into a hole instead of a bed with her.
But she gathers him into her and says, “How have the nightmares been?”
“Shitty.”
“How's your heart?”
“Not shitty.” He's being petulant because he doesn't make sense.
“Don't get an attitude.”
“Sorry.”
“Why haven't you been here in fucking ages?”
He feels himself shrink. “I get caught up.”
“Yeah. Lots to do, I guess.”
“Don't do this, Jess.”
“Just fuck me already.”
“In a minute. I want to just be with you.”
“No you don't. So get what you came here for, all right?” She takes another hit.
“Jess.”
She breathes out the smoke, coughs. She has asthma.
“Why don't you come up?” she says.
“Scares me.”
“What does?”
“Feeling this much.” Everything's spinning. “Being this different.”
“All right, let's get you out of here, you're gonna get an asthma attack.” She kicks the blanket off of them and hauls him off the floor. “To bed with us.”
He curls up in the sheets and watches her straighten up. When he was here a few years ago, before the Cage, he fell into a memory of this apartment and sobbed at Cas (who was just Dean's angel, then) because why wasn't she there, if this was for soulmates where was the love of his fucking life, and then she found him in another memory and kissed him through to his bones and brought him back here, to his real heaven apartment, to this real home, and he showed her the back of the cabinet where he'd hidden the engagement ring, and she showed him the bloody shirt he left here the first time he came, the time he will never remember.
She wears the bloody shirt most of the time, but all the time she wears the ring on her left hand and Sam hooks the diamond with his finger and tugs her to bed. She lets herself be tugged.
Her hair's in a messy bun on the back of her head. It hits him, sometimes, how fucking twenty-one this girl is.
When she knew him, they were drunk and making out in closets. They were cuddling through ear infections. They were watching football games and setting up a bed on the couch for Dean and making macaroni and cheese and leaving each other stupid notes in their textbooks.
She shouldn't have to deal with him now. She shouldn't even know how.
She tucks his lips against his temple. “Sam?”
“Y-yeah?”
“What's bad today?”
And he just says it. He tells her. “The ceiling's moving.”
She holds him close and rubs his back and whispers close your eyes, pretend it's gold and still and big like Dean and nobody else in the world (in ever) will ever tell him these things.
She bundles him in blankets and he plays with the blood on her shirt and this is what soulmate means.
Heaven was him, Dean, Jess.
This was the way it was supposed to be.
No. The way it was supposed to be was him and Jess and their fucking picket fence and their bassinet and Uncle Dean who visited every weekend and now Sam and Jess fuck slowly and sob because they can sleep together all day, Sam can come up as often as he wants, Jess can scream and kiss and help him as hard as he can and nothing will ever, ever give them that.
Afterwards, she lies on his chest and begs to see pictures of Emmy and Jude.
She can't say Emmy's name without swallowing.
Emilia Jess.
It's an old Jewish tradition. Naming after someone dead.
He kisses Jess's cheek and thinks about dead mothers.
**
Cas is out by the porch swing when he gets home. Sam pulls on his jacket and goes to sit next to him. Cas is in his broody pose. He learned it from Christa, which means he holds his hand like he has a cigarette. Christa, less than a month un-pregnant, hasn't done this in ages. Cas does it all the time.
“Did you have fun?” Cas says. He's not looking at Sam.
“You know.”
“Why didn't you tell me you were going?”
“Because every time I ask you if you want to come you do this.”
“I like being asked.”
“Then you've got a damn weird way of showing it.” Sam snatches the imaginary cigarette and stamps it out on the bench and Cas has no idea what he's doing. Sam's a fucking asthmatic, Cas. Forget the cigarette. This is real goddamn life and Sam is here with you. He came back, for you.
“How is she?” Cas says. He means it.
“Still too thin. I don't think she's eating. Just bakes.”
“You should talk to her.”
“And tell her what.”
“That you're worried.”
“She sits around up there without nothing else to do but worry about me. I don't think knowing we're fretting about her weight loss when we happen to have a spare moment is going to soothe her much.”
“It's not about soothing her.”
“Then what the fuck is it about, Cas? Saving her? Taking care of her?”
“Loving her.”
“Don't tell me how to love her.”
“I love her too, Sam.”
He deflates. “I know.”
“Are you angry with me?”
“I don't know.”
“We were fine yesterday.”
“No we weren't, come on.”
Cas is quiet.
Sam kind of wishes he had that imaginary cigarette back.
Cas says, “Is this about the conversation we had?”
“It wasn't a conversation.”
“But you know which one I mean. You thought of it right away.”
Yeah.
“The baby one,” Cas fills in.
“Yeah, Cas, I know.”
“You're angry with me.”
“I'm not.”
“Sam...we can talk about this. If it's something you really want.”
“I don't. I told you. I don't want one.” He stands up. “Can we just go to bed?”
“We can't do that every time you don't want to talk about something.”
“God, fuck off, Cas, I'm tired.”
“So you'll go to sleep and wake up still mad at me.”
“Jesus, Cas, I'm not fucking mad at you!”
“If you want a baby...”
“Can you fucking listen to me? I don't want a baby.”
Cas stands, swallows, stops. “You don't want a baby, or you don't want a baby with me?”
“What does it matter?”
“That's it, isn't it?”
“Why the fuck do you care about my motivation for not wanting a fucking baby when you don't want a fucking baby!”
“She wants one.”
“So what.”
“So you want one with her.”
“Can you fucking listen to what I'm saying?”
“You just don't want one with me.”
“What the fucking fuck is the matter with you, Castiel?”
“What?”
“You tell me you don't want a baby like it's fucking nothing, like it's something you don't want for dinner or some fucking bullshit, and then you're here yelling at me because I let it drop? I didn't tell her I wanted a baby, I told YOU.”
“And you'd never told her that.”
It sears through Sam and he closes his eyes. “Stop.”
“Sam. If you want one.”
“I don't want a baby!”
“Then what do you want?”
“I WANT MY FUCKING LIFE BACK!”
The problem with screaming in a house full of people is that babies start crying and cats hiss and Christa's here Sam do you need something to calm you down and Dean what the fuck do you mean your fucking life, do you know where you are, baby and Kylie what's wrong with Sammy what did you do to Sammy Castiel?? and Castiel talking under all of them, quiet Enochian to calm Sam down...
He goes to his bathroom and curls up in the tub with his hands over his ears and wills himself to sleep.
**
He wakes up to the tap being turned on, soft warm water pooling underneath him.
Cas eases him out of his clothes and leans his head back to wash his hair.
“I went to see her,” Cas says.
Sam opens his eyes.
“I told her to eat. I told her we know she's fighting so hard so she needs to keep her strength up. That we know how hard she's working.”
“Sh-she wants to come home so much.”
“I know, Sam.”
“It's not fair.”
“I know.”
“She feels like everybody else died too.”
All these dead people and no babies to name after them.
Cas cleans him off and tucks him to bed. He shuffles around for a little and Sam feels the soft weight of Emmy placed on his stomach.
**
It's an old Jewish tradition. Naming a child after someone dead.
A hundred years ago, Hanukkah, a pregnancy scare, he and Jess lay on their bed and ate candy and flipped through magazines and talked about baby names.
Jess's mom's name was Emilie.
Author:shangrilada (Kira)
Word Count: 5,580
Summary: One time Jess burned on the ceiling. Sam didn't.
Author's Note: For this one it helps to have some background in Sammyverse, but pretty much all you need to know is that Jess and Sam are established soulmates, as are Sam and dean, and they know that when they die they're all going to where she is now. Cas is bound to go wherever Sam does. That's kind of the issue here.
He was feeling a little better today. He'd been working through ear infections for the past week and a half, but they woke up this morning and their pillowcase wasn't wet, and then he rolled her onto her back and dropped kiss after kiss in the hollow of her throat. She wished she could swallow him up like hot chocolate.
“I'll make cookies today,” she said. They were graduating in May, and she was already working on her cooking school applications. She was going to be a baker. It was what she'd wanted since she was so small.
“Stay in bed with me.” He kissed her nose, then across her cheekbone to her temple.
So she didn't make cookies that day.
She'd make them tomorrow instead.
**
Jude is sick, but his twin Emmy is healthy but she is so, so small. Dean and Christa run back and forth to the hospital, giving Kylie her baths, tucking her into bed, sitting by Jude's incubator and crying.
Sam is healthy too, a handful of months after his heart transplant, softly wheezy most days from the spring. He gives rides back and forth to the hospital when he's needed and sleeps with Cas every night and during the day he lies here, flat on his back, tiny Emmy curled up asleep on his healed chest.
Four and a half pounds of beautiful, healthy baby. She sleeps on her stomach with her limbs tucked under her, snoring softly, fiercely.
He knows he should be more connected to Jude. Jude looks like him, hazel eyes and soft hair, light skin and dimples. He wheezes like he does and lies in wires and hospital air like he does. He has surgery to try to open up bronchial tubes, like Sam did.
But Emmy, this lump of dark skin and half her body weight in hair and this clear, determined breathing, is the one he watches and wraps his arms around and rocks when she wakes up and cries.
He can quiet her down the fastest, and that makes Christa upset, and Sam wraps his sister-in-law in blankets and tells her don't worry, she loves you best. A baby doesn't love anyone how she loves her mother.
Emmy, on her back, figures out how to bend her toes to her mouth. She pushes air through her throat like a laugh.
This tiny little baby, and she's not psychic-that's Jude, he already knows, he hasn't told them yet, and he lies still and feels his surgery-and yet this four and half pounds of too young to laugh is holding on to that brand new heart.
He doesn't know why.
They've figured out how to go to heaven now. Cas and Balthazar get them in. Dean goes to visit his mother and to cry, presumably, about how a baby will never love anyone how he loves his mother.
Sam doesn't go up to see her.
Sam doesn't doesn't go up to see anyone.
Sam stays here and sings Emmy French lullabies from someone else's mother.
**
She kissed Sam goodbye and watched him pull off with Dean-she adored Dean and was kind of sad she didn't get to come, but she had a midterm tomorrow and cookies to bake-and early the next morning Brady came around and she realized this was a dream about the time she started bleeding-Sam's best friend besides that boy in the car with him, come back come back come back-and she held onto this when she was on the ceiling and her cookies were burning and it felt so, so real.
Sam came home and didn't smell the burning cookies because Sam had allergies and a chronic stuffy nose that made him snore and sneeze and fuss over her when she caught a cold (a cold that would then go straight to his lungs because his nose wouldn't notice-there was a pun in there somewhere but she was too on fire to find it).
Her first language was French and she heard it hard in her head, (maman maman maman). The last thing she heard was him screaming.
She woke up in her apartment, the same one she just dreamed. Sam wasn't here. She felt sore and her skin felt dry and she shook herself off and dressed and headed out for her midterm and opened the door and outside, instead of the dingy hallway and the quiet of a hundred college students still asleep was a kind of bone-quiet she's never heard, a stillness so deep that it took her a minute to break out of it and realize that was outside.
This isn't a hallway. This was motherfucking outside, a wet gray day, her favorite.
She shut her door tight and went to hands and knees on the floor and somehow managed to cough in French and in Hebrew prayers.
**
“You need sleep,” Castiel says. He's curled loosely around Sam, one arm over his chest, like he doesn't even realize he's there, like he doesn't realize he's touching Sam in the one place he will never like. He kisses the hollow of Sam's throat and yes, Sam likes that part, that part is good.
But Emmy is crying. It's 3 AM and she's crying.
“Christa will get her,” Cas says. “You shouldn't go all the way up the stairs, you're wheezing.”
Yeah, he is. He breathes into a wheeze that sounds like water.
“What's...bothering you tonight?” He almost said bugging. Sam could hear it.
He kisses Castiel's temple and loves him.
“I want one,” he says.
“What? Neb?” Cas sits up, ready.
“Uh-uh, come back.”
Immediately, he's back down, curled around Sam's cheek. “You can do wings,” Sam says, and in a secon they're around him, tickling his cheek. He sneezes a few times and Castiel mumbles in concern, asks if he's sure, kisses him when he says yes.
“I want one,” Sam says, again.
“One what, Sam?”
“One of those.”
“A wing? You can have one. I'll make you one.”
He shakes his head. “A baby.”
“What?”
“Can you make me a baby?”
“I don't think I want a baby, though.”
It's so fast, so careless, and Sam cries into his pillow, and Castiel murmurs shit and calls him baby and Sam imagines a blonde baby and long fingers he can't even place anymore, and chubby baby hands, and Emmy's skin.
She stops crying. Maybe she's dead.
Cas sets up the nebulizer and Sam clings to the hem of his shirt. He apologizes.
He doesn't know what baby he would want, anyway. Emmy has a mother already.
He thinks about himself, so sick still with his new half-empty (how do you measure empty, how do you measure years or fire) heart, and Castiel's eyes, half-full (more than half full, I am so sorry, Dean, I am so glad you have three children.) Sam likes threes. He thinks about baby Emmy. She already has a mother.
His baby would not.
“No,” he says. “I don't want a baby.”
**
He wakes up to Kylie in his bed. She does that sometimes, now, when she's too sad to talk to anyone. Kylie's getting tortured-Sam does not use that word lightly (Sam uses it for Kylie and one other person, one soulmate who has an apartment locked away who was never meant to be alone and has a boyfriend who is too much of a coward to go see her-because seeing her means he will have to leave her) and Kylie is getting tortured by the girls at her school. They've decided they hate her for no reason any of them can suss out from anyone and they trip her and call her names and touch her with hands she's allergic to. Christa might be her favorite, and Dean may be the closest of close seconds, but Sam is her safe spot.
“Hi, baby.”
She tucks under his chin. “Is the ceiling moving today?”
Sam looks away from her, up. “Yeah.”
“You gotta tell someone, Sammy.”
“I tell you.”
“Yeah 'cause you know I won't make you do anything.”
“You make me do shit all the time. Get me some juice, Sammy. You know I'm very frail and sickly, right? You should be getting me shit. Fetch me a backup heart, Kylie.”
“No, this is heart is gonna last super long.”
“Allison heart.” He watches her run her fingers over the tattoo on his wrist. Allison was seven. She fell off her bike. Her helmet was too loose. Sam once met and hugged her father.
“How come you don't have a Dead Jess tattoo?” Kylie says.
“Because I'd cry every time I saw it and that would be unseemly.”
“What's unseemly?”
“Inappropriate.”
“Sammy you are inappropriate a lot though 'cause like what about when you cry at cartoons and what about when you eat dinner in your underwear.”
“One of those is because I'm crazy and one of those is just because I'm a brat who can get away with it. You can choose which is which.”
“I just think that crying about Dead Jess is pretty normal.”
That's the problem, though.
Sam has a million excuses not to be normal anymore. Not to hurt in these old (overcooked) ways.
So what if he's milking them.
So what.
He kisses the top of Kylie's head. He deserves to get to do this.
Maybe he'll go see her tomorrow.
Instead he wakes up the next morning and quietly, so as not to wake Cas, carves her name into the inside of his ankle and doesn't cry.
He sucks in a breath through a wheeze and realizes what he accidentally carved out is EMMY.
Judaism doesn't allow tattoos, is the thing.
**
It's an old Jewish tradition. Naming a child after someone dead.
Emilia Jess, see. That's all this is. That's all.
**
Not a lot of French Jews made it out, but Jess's grandparents were two of them. Jess always imagined them holding hands, jumping a fence, gas chambers growling behind them.
She used to wonder what it would feel like, to be smoked alive.
Her mother was born in New York not long after the war. She was old when she had Jess and her big brother. Jess's dad would always tease, say she didn't want children, and she would hit him and say encore un fois, il ment and Jess and Tyler would giggle at their Dad who didn't speak French.
Her first three words were in French, her second three in English, and it went from there. She would go to her brother's apartment for dinner and they would speak only in French, but they were like two thirsty sponges feeding back and forth from each other and trying to ignore that there just wasn't enough water for two, or for one. They'd forget words.
Because Jess's mother found two lumps in her breasts when Jess was twelve, turned into a raging bitch on chemo when she was thirteen, made Jess cry because she should not be hating her dying mother when she was fourteen, had her believing maybe she would not die when she was fifteen, died when she was sixteen.
It's an old Jewish tradition. Dying.
**
Jess had asthma, which people (including her) tended to forget. She was mild, inhaler-as-needed asthma, whereas Sam was handle with goddamn care asthma and Jess loved, loved taking care of him. She really did.
She spent a year and a half lying in this fake apartment, alone in this what the fuck is this world, tightening her hands around her ribs.
That wasn't all she did. She baked. And baked. Her fridge was never empty. Her fridge never ran out of space to store pans and pans of eclairs and macarons and canales and madeleines. She didn't eat them. She used all the substitutions for nuts. There would be no fucking nuts in this house.
Except one day she dreamed up a bag of peanuts and ate them in bed and smeared them over the covers because fuck this motherfucking fuck of a bed that nobody ever comes home to, fuck staring up at this goddamn ceiling, fuck the very small holocaust of one girl.
She tried to go to sleep and ending up washing the whole house and sobbing.
**
Sam wakes up to a flutter of wings on his cheek, a kiss, a soft voice. “Hi.”
He opens his eyes and smiles some. “Hi.”
“How are you feeling?”
He squirms underneath the covers, getting warmer. “Not sick.”
“So I don't get to ask? Mean.”
Beautiful angel. Sam scoots over and lets Cas curl into his neck, and Sam hums a little, happy. He stretches down to his toes. “Where's that no good brother of mine?”
“I'm making your lazy ass breakfast!” Dean calls from the kitchen.
“I guess I can't call you no good then.”
“Come on, unsicky, get up and help me.”
Sam swallows his pills because “unsick” only means so much when it comes to him and takes hits of his inhalers and yawns his way into the kitchen. He's still getting used to the way his inhaler doesn't make his heart race out of control anymore. He's still getting used to being, relatively, unsick. It's late spring and his allergies are horrendous, in case he felt like getting comfortable. He sneezes on Dean's shoulder just to be an asshole, but Dean really could not give less of a shit.
Especially today. He's fucking beaming. “Jude's coming home today.”
“You're kidding.”
“Nope.”
Sam puts his hands under Dean's elbows and spins him around, and Dean laughs and kicks him. Cas comes in and pretends to yank them apart by their hair, and they pretend it hurts.
“Christa's there now getting prepped on everything,” Dean says. “I told them I knew everything about asthmatic baby but apparently they don't trust four-year-old Dean's memory. Bastards.”
Sam is tired and sits down on the floor. “Where's Kylie?”
“Where the fuck is Kylie, I called her for breakfast like twenty hours ago. Kylie Michelle!”
“WHAT!” she calls from somewhere upstairs. She sounds exasperated.
“If you don't mind, we request the pleasure of your company for breakfast.”
“LOOK, Dean, I have had it ABOUT UP TO HERE with being BOSSED.”
“'Up to here' doesn't work when we can't see you.”
She charges down the stairs and holds her hand up as high as it will go, then frowns, climbs on top of the couch, stand on her tiptoes, and holds it up again. “Up to HERE!”
“Tricked you! So nice of you to stop by. Come eat breakfast.”
“If I were a dinosaur I would have YOU for breakfast,” she grumbles, sliding into her chair.
“Aw, what's wrong, Kylie?” Sam gives her her juice.
“How come Sandy Miranda gets to be a dinosaur but not me?”
“Who the fuck is Sandy Miranda?”
“THAT'S WHAT I'D LIKE TO KNOW, MISTER WINCHESTER.”
“Well, eat her, then you'll become a dinosaur.”
“Oh!”
“But first eat your toast.”
She does.
“Are you going to see Jess today?” Dean says, casually, like it's nothing (because it is nothing, now, getting up there, just a matter of snapping your fingers, for all intents and purposes-really it's some angel shit he doesn't care to understand), but Sam quietly watches Cas quietly get a bottle of juice from the refrigerator.
He clears his throat and turns back to Dean. “I should, right?”
“How long has it been?”
Twenty-three days. Sam rubs the back of his neck. “A couple of weeks. Maybe I should wait until tomorrow.”
“What's tomorrow?”
“It's a multiple of three.” It's not today.
“Big crazy little brother,” Dean says, affectionately, and Sam lets his hand rest on Dean's shoulder for a second as Dean crosses over to the table to steal a bite of Kylie's toast and kiss the top of her head. “I'm dropping you off before work, sweetheart, you gotta scamper.”
“LAST ONE OUT THE DOOR IS WENDIGO LUNCH!”
Dean says, “Munch munch munch” and Kylie shrieks and runs up the stairs. Sam hears Emmy wake up, whine, start crying, and Dean laughs and rolls his eyes and says, “Great.” He's so happy. Sam feels lovely inside.
But now Dean's gone up to get the baby and it's just Sam and Cas, standing here, forced to talk and not just cuddle, sleep, kiss.
“We should go see her,” Cas says.
“I know.”
“Do you want to go alone?”
He does.
But how the hell do you tell your boyfriend you want to go fuck your girlfriend without hearing him trying not to sulk in her kitchen.
How the hell do you tell him that you're going to fuck your girlfriend and then the two of you are going to sob, forehead to the bed, that you can't have a baby.
How the hell.
**
And then one day, he was there.
She was making herself a sandwich (because at this point she was eating, because what the fuck else was she supposed to do, she couldn't turn this over in her head anymore, she couldn't-physically could not, she had tried-go any crazier than she already had) and she turned around and there he was, wincing, rubbing the small of his back. He looked around with a silent what the hell before his eyes got to her.
He was worn to all fuck, squeezed out, and he was so fucking beautiful.
“Jess?”
It should have been a tearful reunion. It should have needed pacing, talking, shaking, tentatively figuring out what was going on, discussing how they got there, discussing where the fuck they were.
It shouldn't have immediately been their mouths against each other and their bodies thrown into the glass of the shower wall, their fingernails digging each other, one of her feet curled around his hip and over the wound on his back to protect it from the spray.
He was whispering words she can't hear, and it wasn't until after she was moaning against his hand that she made out what they are--thank you, God. Thank you. Thank you.
**
They held each other and fell asleep, and he was still there when he woke up. This wasn't a dream. (This was finally a dream.)
He woke up after her, wheezy and disheveled. He frowned like he was confused but kissed her like he did it everyday, then sat up a little and pulled the sheet up around his waist. “Dean?”
She pulled on his t-shirt (backwards, so she could twist her hand in the crusted blood) and smelled the collar and said,“Dean's here?”
“He was...he was calling me...”
“Sam? Hey. Look at me.”
He turned to her, and he looked feverish and quiet, and then he grabbed the front of his (her) shirt and said, “Jess, fuck!”
“No no, hey. I'm okay.”
“Baby, what happened?”
“Sam. It's yours.”
“What?”
“This is your shirt. It's your blood.”
She expected him to protest, to demand something, to be fucking baffled, but instead he sat there and pulled his lip between his teeth and she knew her damn boy, and she could see him thinking, realizing. Remembering.
“Stabbed me,” he whispered.
He was shaking. She balled him up and pulled her into him and remembered how he used to feel so big. What happened, Sam? What the fuck is the world out there?
What had it always goddamn been? This place that stabbed. This place that pinned to ceilings.
“I thought it was a dream,” he said.
She swept him up. “So did I.”
He lay down facing her and wheezed and braided her hair and set, “Let me tell you what happened.”
And that was when she found out how the fuck she got on that ceiling.
**
He told her everything.
His mom. His life. His dad. His demon.
He cried for his brother and he cried how much he missed her and he cried that it was his birthday and then he climbed on top of her and fucked her slowly, forehead to forehead, and she closed her eyes and reached her arms around him and then...
and then she was lying there, every good feeling stopped cold, every inch of her too light and and empty and her arms shook like falling and her feet shook like pain and all around her was empty space and bed and sheets that smelled like him and he was gone.
She had fucked a ghost or he had left in the middle of fucking his and she screamed HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY and tore the mattress to shreds.
In the morning there was a new mattress and the old, wretched silence.
**
Sam decides to be a man of his word because today he just wants to be a man of his something and he goes up to see her on day 24, like he promised. She's lying on the floor of the living room with her legs up on the couch, smoking a bowl. He coughs at the smoke and she looks up, laughs a little, sets it down. “It won't hurt you,” she says. “Not real.” She's been on this kick for a while, shaking off everything that's up here: this couch isn't real, this food isn't real, my fevers aren't real, I'm not real. But it's real enough to make him cough, and he lies down next to her and kisses her cheek and muffles a few into her shoulder.
“Want a hit?” she says.
“Yeah.” She's right, is the thing. It won't hurt him.
Sam just doesn't worry so much anymore about what's real, and Jess has to deal with this version of him.
Jess has to just sit here and lie on the floor and wait to see what kind of battered Sam will come back to her and what kind of (worse, worse, worse) shape he'll be in every time he comes back (home) and don't think that doesn't break Sam's heart.
It's a phrase he shouldn't throw around, but not being with her literally breaks Sam's fucking heart.
(The thing is that this isn't his heart anymore, and Allison wasn't even born until after Jess died. Thoughts like that make him wish he believed in reincarnation, that it's somehow possible that Jess came back to be a concussed seven-year-old to give him an organ. Instead he's sitting here looking at the goddamn mortality of his girlfriend's immortal soul and he wants to bundle her up and take her somewhere with warmth, with music, with people.)
He tugs the blanket off the couch and drapes it over them like a tent. She lights the bowl for him and he takes a hit, holds his breath, coughs and coughs and coughs. His chest hurts, and his heart pounds, and he tucks himself under her chin.
Jess plays with his ear. “Just one for you today.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I missed you.”
“Being without you shakes and hurts and nobody sees it but me.”
He didn't talk like this until after she died.
She shouldn't have to deal with his goddamn hell issues when she was already dead, when he died and then died and then crawled into a hole instead of a bed with her.
But she gathers him into her and says, “How have the nightmares been?”
“Shitty.”
“How's your heart?”
“Not shitty.” He's being petulant because he doesn't make sense.
“Don't get an attitude.”
“Sorry.”
“Why haven't you been here in fucking ages?”
He feels himself shrink. “I get caught up.”
“Yeah. Lots to do, I guess.”
“Don't do this, Jess.”
“Just fuck me already.”
“In a minute. I want to just be with you.”
“No you don't. So get what you came here for, all right?” She takes another hit.
“Jess.”
She breathes out the smoke, coughs. She has asthma.
“Why don't you come up?” she says.
“Scares me.”
“What does?”
“Feeling this much.” Everything's spinning. “Being this different.”
“All right, let's get you out of here, you're gonna get an asthma attack.” She kicks the blanket off of them and hauls him off the floor. “To bed with us.”
He curls up in the sheets and watches her straighten up. When he was here a few years ago, before the Cage, he fell into a memory of this apartment and sobbed at Cas (who was just Dean's angel, then) because why wasn't she there, if this was for soulmates where was the love of his fucking life, and then she found him in another memory and kissed him through to his bones and brought him back here, to his real heaven apartment, to this real home, and he showed her the back of the cabinet where he'd hidden the engagement ring, and she showed him the bloody shirt he left here the first time he came, the time he will never remember.
She wears the bloody shirt most of the time, but all the time she wears the ring on her left hand and Sam hooks the diamond with his finger and tugs her to bed. She lets herself be tugged.
Her hair's in a messy bun on the back of her head. It hits him, sometimes, how fucking twenty-one this girl is.
When she knew him, they were drunk and making out in closets. They were cuddling through ear infections. They were watching football games and setting up a bed on the couch for Dean and making macaroni and cheese and leaving each other stupid notes in their textbooks.
She shouldn't have to deal with him now. She shouldn't even know how.
She tucks his lips against his temple. “Sam?”
“Y-yeah?”
“What's bad today?”
And he just says it. He tells her. “The ceiling's moving.”
She holds him close and rubs his back and whispers close your eyes, pretend it's gold and still and big like Dean and nobody else in the world (in ever) will ever tell him these things.
She bundles him in blankets and he plays with the blood on her shirt and this is what soulmate means.
Heaven was him, Dean, Jess.
This was the way it was supposed to be.
No. The way it was supposed to be was him and Jess and their fucking picket fence and their bassinet and Uncle Dean who visited every weekend and now Sam and Jess fuck slowly and sob because they can sleep together all day, Sam can come up as often as he wants, Jess can scream and kiss and help him as hard as he can and nothing will ever, ever give them that.
Afterwards, she lies on his chest and begs to see pictures of Emmy and Jude.
She can't say Emmy's name without swallowing.
Emilia Jess.
It's an old Jewish tradition. Naming after someone dead.
He kisses Jess's cheek and thinks about dead mothers.
**
Cas is out by the porch swing when he gets home. Sam pulls on his jacket and goes to sit next to him. Cas is in his broody pose. He learned it from Christa, which means he holds his hand like he has a cigarette. Christa, less than a month un-pregnant, hasn't done this in ages. Cas does it all the time.
“Did you have fun?” Cas says. He's not looking at Sam.
“You know.”
“Why didn't you tell me you were going?”
“Because every time I ask you if you want to come you do this.”
“I like being asked.”
“Then you've got a damn weird way of showing it.” Sam snatches the imaginary cigarette and stamps it out on the bench and Cas has no idea what he's doing. Sam's a fucking asthmatic, Cas. Forget the cigarette. This is real goddamn life and Sam is here with you. He came back, for you.
“How is she?” Cas says. He means it.
“Still too thin. I don't think she's eating. Just bakes.”
“You should talk to her.”
“And tell her what.”
“That you're worried.”
“She sits around up there without nothing else to do but worry about me. I don't think knowing we're fretting about her weight loss when we happen to have a spare moment is going to soothe her much.”
“It's not about soothing her.”
“Then what the fuck is it about, Cas? Saving her? Taking care of her?”
“Loving her.”
“Don't tell me how to love her.”
“I love her too, Sam.”
He deflates. “I know.”
“Are you angry with me?”
“I don't know.”
“We were fine yesterday.”
“No we weren't, come on.”
Cas is quiet.
Sam kind of wishes he had that imaginary cigarette back.
Cas says, “Is this about the conversation we had?”
“It wasn't a conversation.”
“But you know which one I mean. You thought of it right away.”
Yeah.
“The baby one,” Cas fills in.
“Yeah, Cas, I know.”
“You're angry with me.”
“I'm not.”
“Sam...we can talk about this. If it's something you really want.”
“I don't. I told you. I don't want one.” He stands up. “Can we just go to bed?”
“We can't do that every time you don't want to talk about something.”
“God, fuck off, Cas, I'm tired.”
“So you'll go to sleep and wake up still mad at me.”
“Jesus, Cas, I'm not fucking mad at you!”
“If you want a baby...”
“Can you fucking listen to me? I don't want a baby.”
Cas stands, swallows, stops. “You don't want a baby, or you don't want a baby with me?”
“What does it matter?”
“That's it, isn't it?”
“Why the fuck do you care about my motivation for not wanting a fucking baby when you don't want a fucking baby!”
“She wants one.”
“So what.”
“So you want one with her.”
“Can you fucking listen to what I'm saying?”
“You just don't want one with me.”
“What the fucking fuck is the matter with you, Castiel?”
“What?”
“You tell me you don't want a baby like it's fucking nothing, like it's something you don't want for dinner or some fucking bullshit, and then you're here yelling at me because I let it drop? I didn't tell her I wanted a baby, I told YOU.”
“And you'd never told her that.”
It sears through Sam and he closes his eyes. “Stop.”
“Sam. If you want one.”
“I don't want a baby!”
“Then what do you want?”
“I WANT MY FUCKING LIFE BACK!”
The problem with screaming in a house full of people is that babies start crying and cats hiss and Christa's here Sam do you need something to calm you down and Dean what the fuck do you mean your fucking life, do you know where you are, baby and Kylie what's wrong with Sammy what did you do to Sammy Castiel?? and Castiel talking under all of them, quiet Enochian to calm Sam down...
He goes to his bathroom and curls up in the tub with his hands over his ears and wills himself to sleep.
**
He wakes up to the tap being turned on, soft warm water pooling underneath him.
Cas eases him out of his clothes and leans his head back to wash his hair.
“I went to see her,” Cas says.
Sam opens his eyes.
“I told her to eat. I told her we know she's fighting so hard so she needs to keep her strength up. That we know how hard she's working.”
“Sh-she wants to come home so much.”
“I know, Sam.”
“It's not fair.”
“I know.”
“She feels like everybody else died too.”
All these dead people and no babies to name after them.
Cas cleans him off and tucks him to bed. He shuffles around for a little and Sam feels the soft weight of Emmy placed on his stomach.
**
It's an old Jewish tradition. Naming a child after someone dead.
A hundred years ago, Hanukkah, a pregnancy scare, he and Jess lay on their bed and ate candy and flipped through magazines and talked about baby names.
Jess's mom's name was Emilie.