Supernatural fic: "Periphery" 1b/1; R; gen-and-het (Sam/Jess); angstorama
Title: Periphery 1b/1 (divided for posting purposes only)
Author: hiyacynth
Genre: Angst, Het, Quasi!AU
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, John, Mary, Jess; Sam/Jess
Rating and Warnings: R for language, sexual imagery, and mature themes. Set after 3x04 and contains general backstory spoilers to that point.
Continued from part 1a/1.
***
After the cop cuffs Sam and puts him in the back of the squad car, he and Jess stand outside for a few minutes, talking in low voices. Jess must've convinced the cop that she, at least, isn't crazy, because he doesn't cuff her, and she rides in the front seat.
When they get to the station, they put Sam in a quiet room without printing him or taking mug shots and take the cuffs off. A bored-looking desk cop sits in the corner, studying his nails. Sam ignores the second chair and slumps in the opposite corner, rests his head against his knees, and dozes.
The snick of a lock sliding back wakes him, and Sam looks up to see his father easing through the door. Before it closes, Sam sees Jess in the hallway, wiping her still-dirty face on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
Dad hangs near the door for a second or two, then drags his hand down his grizzled face and comes over to Sam's corner. He sinks to the floor, and Sam can see everything in his father's eyes-concern, anger, fear, confusion, revulsion, and, underpinning it all, grief as raw and brutal as Sam's own.
"I'm sorry, Dad," Sam starts, and his throat constricts because he knows his dad doesn't understand the true nature of his apology.
"Can you tell me why, son?" Dad's voice slides and scratches like wet gravel.
Sam shakes his head. "Not that you'll understand," he says. "But I promise, I wasn't going to do anything bad." He knows it sounds lame, weak, untrue. Distance from the grave has cleared his head, and Sam can see that from any normal person's perspective, he couldn't have been planning to do anything that wasn't horrifically unnatural. "I just wanted to help Dean rest."
His eyes fill and overflow, because he failed. Dean's spirit is still tethered to this world, and Sam knows he won't get another chance to salt and burn Dean the way he'd want.
Dad's hand comes down on Sam's knee and gives it a tug. "Dean is at rest, Sammy."
Sam wants to believe his father; he sounds so sure. Lifting his head to look for the matching conviction in his Dad's face, Sam gasps and quickly looks away from the corner, where Dean is glimmering and idly making rabbit ears over the cop's head.
Strong arms close around Sam's shoulders, and he lets his father pull him tight against his chest. Sam presses his face into the hard curve of Dad's collarbone, his whole body heaving with frustrating, dry sobs. The neck of his own shirt, where his father's head is leaning, grows warm and wet.
"I miss him, too, Sam," Dad says. "We all do. But you can't … You've gotta hold on. You're all we've got."
After a few minutes, Dad's hands run over Sam's hair then settle on his biceps, gently pushing him away. Sam risks a look at the corner, and is relieved to see that Dean's gone.
"Listen, we gotta talk about this, okay?" Dad tips his head in a way that Sam understands to mean the police station in general. "No one's pressing any charges. Jess talked to the officer who brought you in, explained the situation. The cops and firemen all know each other-everybody here knew your brother, respected him. Half the force was at the funeral. Nobody wants this to turn into a circus."
Sam thinks he's probably supposed to feel relief at that. No arrest, no charges filed-that means he hasn't fucked up his chances with the Bar Association. He finds he doesn't care.
"Jess and I agreed," his father continues, "we're not saying anything to your mother. Just that you couldn't sleep and went to visit Dean, got worked up, and the caretaker saw you, got panicky, and…" He lets the explanation trail off to its obvious ending. "She doesn't need to know any more than that. You understand me, Sam? She couldn't bear it."
Sam swallows hard, thinking about how broken and hollow his mother looks, how brittle. He doesn’t want to make it worse. She doesn’t deserve that. Sam nods.
"Good. Okay. One last thing." Dad shifts to reach into the back pocket of his jeans. "Jess asked me to give this to you." He holds a folded sheet of yellow legal paper but makes Sam wait before handing it over. "She's going back to California this morning."
Panic surges through Sam, and he snatches at the note, but Dad catches his arm.
"She's not leaving you, Sam. She's just leaving Kansas." Dad's eyes are somber, but Sam hears the same conviction he wanted to believe in earlier. "You scared the crap out of her tonight, but she loves you, and she knows how bad you're hurting right now. Get yourself together so you can go home to her."
Dad releases the folded sheet, slightly wrinkled from the brief struggle, and waits as Sam reads it. It's short and simple, and Sam loathes himself more with every word he reads.
"Sam,
Please don't think this means I don't love you, because I do. I love you so much. I want to help you through this, but I need a few days to deal with everything, and I think your family can help you more than I can right now. I hope you'll forgive me for going, and for telling you in a letter. I feel like such a coward, but I know it would be harder for both of us in person.
I miss you already, and I miss Dean, too. I know it's not the same as what you're going through, but try to remember that you're not the only one who lost him. Be good to your parents. They need their son-they need YOU-as much as you need them. Please come home to me as soon as you can. I'll be waiting, I promise.
All my love forever,
Jess"
He reads it twice more before folding it into neat squares and tucking it into his breast pocket. Sam thinks about what she said, what his father said-that his parents need him. He's their only son now. He'll find another way to help Dean. He'll never try to explain to Dad what he was doing at Dean's grave. His mother will never know he did more at the cemetery than break down loudly enough to rouse the caretaker.
Sam lifts his head and wipes his face dry, looks directly and earnestly into his father's grief-worn face.
"I'm so sorry, Dad," he says, and he means it. Sam widens the apology so it includes the old world's John Winchester, who would understand the full meaning. "I'm sorry I let you down."
His father seems to need to forgive Sam as much as Sam needs to be forgiven. Dad gets his feet under him, clasps Sam's forearms, and pulls them both to their feet. He envelops Sam in a rib-straining hug, and sniffs as he steps back, keeping one hand firmly on Sam's arm.
"Let's go home, son."
***
Dean's on the couch when Sam and Dad get back to the house. Sam bites the insides of his cheeks and ignores his brother's ghost as he hurries through the room and into the kitchen, where he finds Mom and wraps his arms around her. He leans against a counter, draws her in tight-she feels so tiny-and holds her as she weeps against his chest.
Her tears run out after a half hour, and she stumbles back into her maternal role, sending Sam upstairs to get some rest. She doesn't say anything directly about where he's been all night, just that he must be worn out.
He is. Sam is tired to the bone, though he dreads the dreams his brain is sure to serve him if he sleeps.
The briny tang of sex clings to the sheets of his childhood bed, and Jess's perfume lingers on the pillowcase. As he lies down, he takes comfort in her scents and presses his hand over his heart, feeling her note crinkle through the fabric of his pocket, and vows that he'll make it up to her. He'll make it up to all of them.
The familiar crackling sound draws him into awareness, and Sam opens his eyes and recognizes the cheap, ugly décor that's like a uniform worn by any motel offering hourly rates. This one is dim and layered in deep reds. Sam instinctively looks for the other bed and finds a comforting array of weapons spread neatly across it, ready for the regular, attentive cleaning Dean gives them. The stain-resistant comforter skids off the bed as Sam sits up, and the synthetic sliding noise it makes draws Dean's attention from the book he's reading at the tiny table in the room's corner.
"Tough job to do solo, huh?" he observes. His tone is too casual; what he really means is it's a tough job for Sam to do solo. Dean ran one-man salt-and-burns all the time and never got caught.
"I tried. I'm sorry I fucked it up. You deserve better."
Dean's eyes flash as he buzzes and sparks like an angry bug zapper. "Wouldn'ta worked anyway," he snaps. He drags his foot off the seat of the second chair and kicks it back from the table, gives his head an exasperated shake, and grumbles, "Waste of time."
Frustration flares in Sam's chest. He slams himself into the chair and throws his hands up. "Then what? I don't know how to help you, Dean."
Dean lifts his own hands in an impatient reflection of Sam's gesture. "Maybe I'm not the one who needs help."
"What do you mean?" Sam demands, but Dean's only response is to curve his eyebrows into an annoyed arc and shove the book he was reading across the table.
It's Dad's journal. Sam stares at it for a few seconds before reaching out to run his fingertips over the worn leather. He picks it up, threading the beaded bookmark around his knuckles in the comfortable, hypnotic rhythm he used to fall into while puzzling over the research end of a hunt. The cover falls open, and there are Dad's Marine Corps ribbons, there's the picture of the three of them on the hood of the Impala-family portrait from a life that no longer exists.
"First page, first sentence." Dean's voice cuts in and out like a badly wired speaker, and by the time Sam's raised his head from the photograph to frown a question, his brother's faded away again. But Sam knows the words by heart-doesn't need Dean to recite them, doesn't even need to read them himself.
"I went to Missouri, and I learned the truth."
***
The parlor is darker than he remembers. Rich red curtains cover the windows, and the air is thick with the woody, floral scent of potpourri or incense. Missouri waves him to the couch and settles into the overstuffed chair on the other side of the coffee table. The ghost of a smile flutters at the corner of Sam's mouth as he remembers Dean's face when she threatened to whap him with a spoon.
"What was that all about, then?" Missouri claps her hands against her wide thighs, an expression of exasperation on her face. "Didn't you hear me when I told you your brother isn't in that grave?"
Sam studies the pattern on the oriental rug at his feet-it looks like a maze to him, but he can't see the way out.
"Sam," she prompts. The way she says his name drops a second syllable into it.
"I know. That's why I was-" he starts, and risks a glance at her. "He's haunting me."
Missouri's eyes widen, but it doesn't seem to be a reaction of shock.
"To release a spirit," Sam continues, "you salt and burn their remains. I was trying to help Dean move on-to release him from this world so he can rest."
Her head bobs in a thoughtful five seconds of nodding before she changes the motion's direction, clicking her tongue.
"He doesn't belong here anymore," Sam insists. "There's something keeping him here." His eyes sting, remembering how his brother defined himself in both worlds-watch out for Sammy. "Maybe he thinks he still has to take care of me. Maybe I'm holding him here, when he should be in heaven. I have to find a way to help him."
"Lemme ask you a coupla questions, Sam," Missouri requests. Her voice is softer, smoother, and Sam has the distinct impression that she already knows the answer to every single question she'll pose. "You say Dean's haunting you?"
Sam nods, watching her face carefully.
She taps her fingers together a few times and then tips her head. "You know a lot about spirits?"
He nods again.
"You understand how they work? The rules they follow?"
Another confirming dip of his chin.
"And you know this how?"
Sam considers his response carefully. "My father taught me," he answers honestly. "Dad and Dean."
"And in all the time you spent dealin' with spirits-you ever known a person to start hauntin' folk before they died?"
Sam blinks. "What do you mean?"
"I mean," Missouri explains, each word weighted, "that you know full well Dean was dropping in on you long before he died last week."
Sam's throat tightens. "Those were just dreams," he insists, defensiveness roughening his voice. This summer, that was just his psyche recovering from the horrible ways his loved ones died in the old world, getting over the fear of Dean's averted damnation.
But then he thinks of that last week of Jess's old life-dreaming her death over and over and not knowing enough, not wanting to know, to realize it was anything but a natural expression of fear for someone whose mother died the way his did. Thinks of the fiery death he'd dreamed for his brother just a couple of weeks ago.
"I used to-sometimes I have dreams that come true. You, of all people-you should understand that."
"I know, Sam. That's how we met, isn't it? Your dreams led you to me before."
Sweat leaps to the surface of his skin, wicking into the armpits of his T-shirt, beading on his upper lip. "How do you-?" How can she know that? How can she know about how the world used to be?
"What happened to you in June? How'd you wind up in that hospital?"
"How do you know about that?" Sam feels his voice deepen with his fear.
Missouri leans over her knees, fingers spread, palms up. "Just tell me what it was put you in that hospital bed."
Sam pulls in a short breath. "A guy in an alley." The explanation comes out in short, choppy sentences. "I heard a girl scream. I went to help. Tried to take his gun. He clubbed me with it, bounced me off a dumpster. Ran. The girl called an ambulance."
Missouri's shaking her head before Sam gets halfway through the story. "No, Sam. That's what they told you. Now you tell me what really happened. How did you get here?"
He has to take two deep breaths before he can speak. "The djinn," he whispers.
Missouri's eyebrows perk, and she cups her fingers around her ear. "Come again?"
"The djinn. It grabbed me. Touched me. It said it saw my heart."
"And what did your heart show it?"
Sam drops his head when he feels the hot burn of tears on his face. He's such a fucking baby in this world. Missouri doesn't seem to notice, just answers the question herself.
"This, Sam. You had this whole world in your heart, didn't you? "
"Not like this!" Sam exclaims, arms slapping the air around him. "Dean wasn't supposed to-" He sucks in another ragged breath. "I just wanted us to be normal. That's all I've ever wanted, since I can remember. Happy. Together. We deserve that! We deserve not to be hunted and manipulated and tortured and murdered by demons." He stabs a finger toward the parlor's doorway, as if the old world lies in the foyer. "They're all dead back there! Mom, Dad, Jess. I died there, and because he saved me, Dean was going to die, too, and go to hell. Why wouldn't I want this instead of that? I saved Dean! I wished, and it came true, and that's how I saved him."
Sam drops his head into his hands. After a few seconds the couch shifts, and Missouri's warm hand drifts over his shoulders.
"But even if he has to die here…" Sam pushes the words through his hands. "Even if, then at least he won't go to hell. I just have to figure out how to help him move on to where he's supposed to be. Then I'll have saved him."
"Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam." Missouri sounds tired. "Have you ever considered the possibility that this isn't about Dean? That maybe he's tryin' to help you?"
Sam remembers the last time Dean visited him, hears the words that led him here. "Maybe I'm not the one who needs help."
He feels the cushions move again and lifts his head to see Missouri stepping around her coffee table, walking slowly to the window, where she stops and gestures to Sam to join her. Sam's ribs ache with phantom pain as he stands and crosses the room.
Missouri's plump fingers curl around the edge of the velvet drapes; her other hand hovers at his elbow, the lightest touch urging him closer. Sam jerks against her staying hand as she draws back the curtain, and she holds him there-solid and real-while a dank, dingy, red-papered room flickers dimly on the other side of her window, where Delaware Street should be.
Dean's there, straight-backed chair pulled between two full beds. Their arsenal is in pieces on one, and Sam's own face-pasty-pale skin broken with startling bruises-peeks from under the blood-red comforter of the other. Dean has the barrel of one of the shotguns across his knees. His hands glide over the weapon in practiced, nearly autonomic movements; Sam can practically smell the oil on the cloths. The distinctive odor clashes with the musty floral scent of Missouri's parlor, making his stomach heave and his head spin.
Sam closes his eyes against the vertigo, and when he reopens them the leafy green trees lining Delaware Street-speckled with the first gold of autumn-wave peacefully at him, and the sunlight bounces off the gleaming black roof of Dean's car. Sam searches the window carefully, thoroughly, but all he finds of the other world is a glint of shotgun shine that the rational part of his brain tries to convince him is a reflection from the bottom border of a silver picture frame on the opposite wall.
Missouri drops the curtain.
"What's happening to me?"
"That's up to you, Sam," Missouri replies. She slides her hand briefly over his arm, squeezing his wrist.
***
Sam always thought a psychotic break would be sudden, violent-shattering the mind like an exploded windshield. In reality, it's a slow process. He can see his sanity cracking at the edges, fissures of irrationality and doubt spidering out, weakening the overall structure and instilling in him a fundamental distrust of everything he perceives.
As soon as he leaves Missouri's house, the motel room starts flashing at him like three foreign frames spliced into the film reel of his new life: when he opens a cupboard, a curtain, a door. After two days he opens the medicine cabinet to get his toothbrush, blinking several times to prepare himself, and finds nothing there but the sparsely populated shelves. But when he looks up after spitting out his used toothpaste, Sam yelps and stumbles back, banging his heel into the foot of the toilet.
The mirror looks tarnished and cracked, casting a sepia tone over the scene reflected there: the ugly wallpaper, the weird lamps, Dean on his chair, the weapons spread on one bed and Sam tucked into the other.
Sam lets the vision of his brother bathe and soothe his eyes like clear, cold water after a week in a sandstorm. As he watches, Dean snaps the slide of the disassembled nine mil onto the body. The pistol's mother-of-pearl grips gleam softly when he lays it back on the bed. Dean turns his head and stares at the inert figure in the other bed, drags his open hand over his eyes, down and across his mouth, and around to scruff through the short hair at the back of his head. Sam jumps again when his brother's boot slams into side of the mattress where Sam's other body lies. He can almost hear the frustrated curse he sees shaped by Dean's mouth: "Damnit, Sammy!"
"I'm here, Dean," Sam says, and lifts his own hand to touch his brother's shoulder, but the instant his fingers meet the mirror, its surface fractures and crumbles. A thousand tiny shards tinkle into the sink and leave Sam staring at his own startled reflection in the clear, undamaged glass-five unblinking seconds before pain and the tickling slide of blood registers. Sam puts his sliced fingertip into his mouth and backs away.
Once he knows to look for it, the other world is everywhere. Sam sees it best in the periphery, and he finds he can lose hours staring straight ahead and watching it glimmer dimly in the reflective surfaces at the edges of his vision. His parents-wading through the mire of their own grief-say nothing at first, but when his mother moves the pot in which he was watching Dean bluster into his cell phone and Sam cries out at the disruption, he sees them exchange a worried glance and knows they can see him breaking.
It dumps down rain the next day, but Sam ignores the weather and goes to the university. He spends the morning scouring the library, rehashing the research he did in June, and then he hunts down the school's expert on Islam and spends the last twenty minutes of her three-thirty lecture pacing outside the classroom.
In her office, the woman talks to Sam about legends surrounding the djinn and answers his questions with increasing skepticism and unease. Outside the door, the department secretary pretends not to eavesdrop. After Sam's ignored the professor's third uncomfortable insistence that the djinn-"They're mythical creatures, you understand. They're not real."-don't have a motivation for granting wishes, the secretary leans in and reminds her boss of a meeting Sam knows is fake. Two campus security guards are waiting outside the building, but Sam's work is done, and he leaves without making a scene.
Back at the house, Sam sits at the too-small desk in his old bedroom and starts writing, trying to clarify the ideas ricocheting around his mind. He sees two major possibilities. He can assume that the djinn does-as the lore says-have the power and will to grant wishes and change the entire world accordingly. Or he can assume that the djinn's power is just as personal but narrower in scope, and that all that's changed is Sam's perception of the world.
Seeing it on paper sets Sam shaking. He thinks of the disappearances that brought them to Joliet, the girl whose screams drew him into the warehouse before Dean arrived to back him up, the hungry, satisfied look in the creature's eyes as it laid its hand on Sam's face, the almost electrical sting of its touch. It's so simple an answer-so simple a trick-that Sam is ashamed of how willing he was to accept it, how quickly and deeply he believed that his heart's wish had been granted.
He tries again, but the words he puts on the paper don't lead him anywhere new-except now he thinks losing his mind would be an easier answer. Eventually he puts his pen down and stretches out flat on his old bed, feet and ankles dangling off the end. Squeezing his eyes shut so he won't see the gleam of the world where she's dead, Sam calls Jess.
"Sam."
Her voice, even a single note of it, simultaneously washes the doubt from his heart and floods it anew.
"Sam? How are you?" Jess asks against Sam's silence. "Are you okay?"
"I'm…" He doesn't know how to answer. "I'm sorry about the other night. I'm sorry I scared you."
"I know. It's okay. I love you."
"I miss my brother." The statement comes out heavy, weighted down by an inelegant mix of grief and love, sincerity and duplicity, desperation and devotion.
Jess seems to hear only the words. "Of course you do."
"But I miss you, too. And Mom and Dad are…" He has to stop, regroup. Sam swallows and tries again. "I'm scared, Jess. I'm so scared I'm gonna do the wrong thing. I can't… Anything I do is gonna… I'm gonna lose…"
"I think you're thinking too much, Sam." The compassion in her voice makes the observation an endearment rather than a criticism. "What does your heart tell you?"
Sam hears static creep into the line, fuzzing her voice at the edges. For a moment, the sound turns into a purring thrum that reminds him of the Impala's engine. He wonders if it is-if in the other world, Dean is driving. He tries to ignore the noise, to focus on this world, where Jess is.
"That I can't have it all. That I have to choose." He wants to ask her what he should do, but he knows she won't understand the real question, will tell him to mourn Dean and move ahead with their life together.
"Everybody has choices to make. You have to trust yourself. You'll do the right thing, I know it."
"How?" he asks, the single word rattling in his throat.
"Because I know you."
The static gets louder, cutting sharp breaks into her voice. He wants to tell himself it's just the rain, but it stopped hours ago. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?" Jess asks, and Sam listens hard for a message in the hissing and popping between them, knowing before she says anything that she hears only their breath. "There's nothing, Sam," she tells him, and he knows. With a surety that hardens his guts, Sam knows.
"You're right," he answers flatly. "There's nothing here. It's all back with Dean."
"What is?" Worry creeps into her voice alongside the crackle, and he can hear her frown, can almost see the little vertical line that must be creasing the skin between her brows.
"Everything."
"Sam?"
Sam opens his eyes and sits cross-legged on the narrow mattress. He remembers how they felt folded around each other in this tiny bed. How it felt to make love to her, to love her. He has to make sure she knows; he didn't get to tell her before she died.
"I love you, Jess. I love you so much."
She still sounds confused and worried, but she doesn't push, just gives back to him. "I love you, too."
"Jess." Sam's voice is stronger now. "Thank you. You're the happiest thing that ever happened to me." He can't tell her he loves her best-it's not true, or he'd be making a different choice-but he can give her that simple, powerful truth.
"My Sam." There are tears in her voice now. "Come home."
Concentrating as hard as he can to tattoo her into his memory, Sam promises-truth wrapped in a lie. "I will. I'll be home soon."
His room is quiet when he hangs up, the ambient crackle and hiss cut off with the end of his call. Sam lies back on his bed and trains his ears on the muffled domestic noises that filter up through the floorboards. His mother's clogs on the wooden floors, a pot or pan hitting the burner, the slap of the refrigerator door, the clack of a cupboard. The front door opens and shuts, and Sam hears the low bass rumble of his dad's voice. His mom's is higher, doesn't carry as well, but Sam can hear a note or two and imagines them embracing.
He gets up and checks the mirror. Its beveled edges frame his face with reflected red wallpaper, but Sam can't see the whole room, can't see his brother, though he knows Dean's in there. He leans closer and frowns at the bruises on his reflection's face-the black eye that spreads into the swollen, blue-tinged bone of his left cheek. He touches his eyebrow and licks his lip, but can't feel the splits he sees in the mirror. Sam blinks at his other self for a few more seconds and then goes downstairs.
From the doorway of the kitchen he watches his parents move sluggishly about the preparation of the evening's meal.
"Hey."
Sam's simple greeting jolts them both into startled, hesitant smiles.
"Hey, kiddo." Dad's voice is thick and weary. The last week has made mourning canyons out of what used to be laugh lines. He looks and sounds old. "Your mom said you were gone most of the day."
"Yeah," Sam answers. "Just trying to sort something out."
"Any luck?" Dad goes over to Mom, and Sam's mouth curves into a faint smile. It's so good to see them together.
"Yeah, I think so."
Rather than elaborate, Sam crosses the room and kisses his mother soundly on the cheek before folding his arms around her. He turns his head, feeling her hair slide softly on his neck, and sees his father's smile return as he watches them. Sam holds Mom tight with one arm and stretches the other out for Dad. The three of them stand in a tight huddle for nearly a minute until Mom starts giggling and crying at the same time. Sam and Dad pull back to check on her, and she wipes her eyes and manages a less hysterical-sounding laugh.
"God, Dean would be so embarrassed by us," she says as Sam sniffs and drags the back of his hand under his nose and catches Dad mopping his face with his plaid sleeve. "C'mon, you gigantic babies. Help me with dinner."
***
It's late when they finally go to bed. Sam opens the window as soon as hears his parents' bedroom door close, lets in the night. He toes out of his shoes and socks and moves quietly around the room where everything went wrong, tries to memorize what it was like right. He snoops through his own bookshelves until he hears the water shut off in the master bath, then moves on to the desk. In a bottom drawer he finds a stack of old report cards and a few class and team pictures. They stir something in his mind, and he goes over to the dresser and picks up an old framed snapshot sitting atop it.
His family grins at the camera while the Grand Canyon cracks the earth wide open behind them. Sam remembers the trip, but the recollection is slippery, and the details elude him. Dean looks about sixteen, which matches the amount of pudge rounding Sam's cheeks. Dean's got an elbow propped on one of Sam's shoulders and shades his eyes with his free hand. Behind Sam and Dean, Mom is tucked neatly into the curl of Dad's arm, head tilted against his jaw.
Sam carefully extracts the photo from its frame and tucks it into his breast pocket, slips it into the fold of Jess's note. Then he sits at the desk again, digs out an old notebook, and writes brief letters that he hopes his loved ones will never read. Their intent is a lie, but the content is true: he can't stay in this world without Dean.
The windowsill is wide, and Sam sits there comfortably, bare heels knocking against the siding, surveying the path Dean laid for him. Paths, really. The route down and back up the drainpipe fixed sturdily to the flat expanse of the house next to the gabled window was payment for Sam's silence when he caught a seventeen-year-old Dean shinnying down the trellis next to his own bedroom window. The way up to the roof, though, that was a bonus-one of those fraternal gifts that were rare during those years when Sam's adolescence was clumsy and new and Dean's was at its height. They'd hauled themselves onto the narrow peak of the gable, Dean flattening himself against the larger plane of the roof to make room for his little brother, and then scrambled up the shingled slope, where they'd stretched out on their backs and spent half the night watching the stars circle above them.
Sam scoots to the very edge of the windowsill and braces one foot against the drainpipe for balance and leverage, curling his toes for purchase. The foothold Dean set in place-a narrow slice of two-by-four nailed onto the outside of the gable-helps distribute his weight and establish his center of gravity while Sam plants his hands on either side of the angle made by the join of the gable and the main roof and shifts his weight onto his arms. He presses up until his arms are fully extended and he can swing a leg onto the roof and pull himself up. His muscles shake and burn, but in the end they remember the work they were trained for. When he's got his whole body on the roof, Sam breathes deeply, pushing air into his bloodstream to counter some of the adrenaline rushing there, pleased with himself for taking his first step home.
The self-satisfaction is short lived. As he's resting he sees a slanting parallelogram of light illuminate the lawn beneath his bedroom, and then from directly below him he hears his father's voice. Sam crab walks up the slope but skids on a slimy, mossed-over shingle and lands heavily on his ass, foot throbbing around a new splinter. Dad calls out again, his voice louder now. The dark shape of his head emerges as he leans out the window.
"Sam? What're you doing?"
Sam bites his lip, hopes his father will just assume he snuck out like a stealth-impaired teenager.
"I know you're up there, Sam."
Sam swears under his breath. "It's nothing, Dad," he calls back as quietly as possible. "Just getting some air. Stars are nice."
There's fear in Dad's voice, full levels. "It rained all day, Sam. That roof's gotta be slippery as hell. Lemme go get the ladder, then you come on back in, okay?"
"No, I'm good. Don't worry about me."
His father's head disappears back through the window, and Sam gets his feet under him, supporting himself with his hands as he picks a careful path up the slope of the roof. Dad's right, it's slick up there. Another cry-louder this time and sharp with alarm-sounds in the room below, and Sam knows Dad found the notes.
"Oh, Jesus. Mary! Mary!" There's a scramble at the window, and then Dad's on the ledge, calling desperately to him. "Sam! Sammy, just stop where you are, son. Just sit tight, please, Sam. I'm coming up. I just want to talk to you."
"John?" Mom's in the bedroom, and Sam knows his easy getaway is shot. "John! What're you-where's Sam?"
Sam strains his ears, but all he can hear is the sibilant hiss and buzz of urgent whispering, followed by a cry of pain from his mother and the bang of his bedroom door being knocked against the wallboard as she bursts out of the room.
Dad reemerges. Sam can see him hesitate as he squats in the window, assessing the path to the roof.
"Sammy," he calls, and his voice rises in volume as he stands up and turns toward the house. "You don't have to do this, okay? Just hang on a second…"
His hands appear on the lip of the roof, and Sam can tell he's found the foothold. The white spread of his father's T-shirted shoulders rises in the corner; Sam can hear his breath coming in strained huffs.
Sam rises from his hunkered stance and picks his way along the peak of the roof toward his target at the far end, above the driveway. He has to be careful-the roof's not that high, and if he slips and falls wrong, he'll probably only break a lot of bones.
The front door bangs open. Sam hears his mother's bare feet slap the steps, then her panicked voice calling out. He can see her on the lawn now, her white nightgown billowing around her calves. This isn't going how he planned.
The wooden shingles shiver under his feet as his father hauls himself onto the mossy roof, and Sam tears his eyes away from his mother.
"Come on, now, Sam," Dad wheedles, joining Sam on the roof's ridge. "Talk to me, kiddo."
"John!" Mom's voice is sharp and high. "Oh, God, John. Be careful! Sam, please! Please come down, sweetheart. John, help him! Make him come down!"
"Listen to your mother, Sam. She loves you. We both do."
"I can't stay," Sam says in a weaker voice than he intended.
"Sammy, please. Please just come down."
Sam waits for his father to make it an order, wonders if he'll be able to disobey this time, but John Winchester never played drill sergeant to his sons in this world and doesn't know how foreign his coaxing and pleading sounds.
"I read your note. I know how hard this is, Sam. I know how hard it is to live without him."
"You don't understand," Sam starts, but the thunder that bursts over his father's face stops him.
"You don't think I understand?" His voice is a quiet roar. "I buried my firstborn son last week. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Don't you make me bury another child. Don't let that fire take both my boys." Tears roll down his father's grizzled cheeks.
"Dad, please. It's not what you think. Dean is waiting for me. He needs me."
"We need you, Sam! Your mother and I, we need you. Don't you walk away."
"I have to." Sam swallows hard and presses on toward his goal, inching his way to the edge of the roof. "It's not real-none of this. I've been living in a wish-in a lie-" He remembers the accusation Dean once flung at him on the side of a dead-of-night road in the middle of nowhere and has to agree with his brother's assessment. "I'm selfish," he confesses. "I wanted it to be real, but it isn't. I've been here for months, while Dean…"
"Dean is dead, Sam. You have to accept that." Dad's voice is iron, enough of order to make Sam stop moving.
"Here he's dead," Sam concedes, but he shakes his head. "Here he's gone. But back there he's dying, and when he does, he's going to hell. For me. He's going to hell because of me. And it's my job to stop it-to save him." He feels the purpose swelling in his chest, straightening him, pushing his shoulders back.
His father steps closer, into a rounded slice of light cast from the streetlamp. "There's nothing you can do for Dean now," he whispers. "You can only stay here and let your mother and me help you. And Jess-think about Jessica, Sam. Stay and let us help you. You can't save Dean."
"No!" The anger in that word surprises Sam as much as it does his father, judging from the way they both cringe at the outburst. He forces his voice into evenness. "He's not gone. Not yet. And if there's even the smallest chance that I can save him-I have to do it, Dad. If you were really you, you'd understand that. You, out of everyone…" Sam whips his fingers across his burning eyes as they threaten to spill over. "I love you. I love you all. But I have to do this. I'm not gonna leave him again. I just won't."
Sam pulls his stare away from his father, shuts out the pleas being thrown at him, and strides sure-footedly to the roof's edge, resting his hand on the cool, damp brick of the chimney. Its wide mouth is level with his elbows, and Sam makes a quick survey of it and nimbly boosts himself into a crouch on its top, toes gripping the edges with simian security.
He hears his mother scream below him, sees his father lurch desperately forward. Dad's body doesn't remember its hunter's grace, though, and he stumbles-slips, hits the roof hard on his left hip, and slides several feet before stopping his descent with fingers that clutch at the peaked ridge of shingle he tripped on-tearing another agonized cry from his wife.
Sam is calm, sure again in his body's strength and agility, instilled over a lifetime of John Winchester's drills. He rises from his squat without a wobble and cautions his father.
"Be careful, Dad. You can't come with me. You don't belong there anymore." Dad's on his feet again, terror on his face. "It's okay. You're with Mom now. Dean and I will be fine, I promise. I promise I'll save him."
Sam turns on the balls of his feet and addresses his mother-who's sobbing into horror-crimped fingers-in the same, steady voice, volume turned up to make sure she hears.
"It's okay, Mom," he calls. "I love you. Dean-he does, too. I know he'd want me to tell you. He misses you so much." He thinks he should say something more, something to sum up twenty-five years of never having known her, but what comes out is so simple it's almost nonsensical. "Thanks for my brother."
A breeze stirs Sam's hair, carrying a not-so-distant siren with it. Turning his face toward the north, Sam sees the lights coming-eight, maybe ten blocks away. He has to hurry. He closes his eyes and concentrates to block his parents' cries as much as possible, sinks and rises into a few deepening knee-bends, then lets his arms swing free to add their mass to his momentum.
Picturing his body's path, Sam thrusts all of his strength into his feet and feels it spring back in equal and opposite reaction, lifting him into the air. He forces his eyes open and whips his knees and head into a tight tuck to turn his jump into a dive. The world shifts around him, and he straightens his legs and clasps his arms across his stomach to fight the instinct to use them to break his fall. The driveway rushes up at him, the air screaming with his speed, and Sam whispers fiercely and with more faith than he's felt in his life.
"I wish I was back with Dean."
***
He's wrenched, beyond broken. Every bone crushed, every joint screaming at the impact. His ears shatter against the roar of the world crashing around him. His lungs burn as if they're petrifying within him, until something seizes him and shakes, coaxing a ragged groan of protest from his throat and unblocking the passage. His chest heaves painfully, and he sucks in a spasm of air that hits his lungs like a hammer and sends the oxygen into his system with a force he can almost feel, as if the molecules are attaching themselves to his blood with tiny pick-axes.
"Sammy!"
The voice separates itself from the din, and Sam fixes his attention on it, uses it to guide himself out of the chaos. Something's holding him down, and he struggles against the weight.
"Hey, hey-c'mon, man. Exhale, okay? Just try to breathe normally."
The pressure on his shoulders lightens but doesn't depart. Sam keeps his eyes closed, afraid to look-their voices fooled him before.
"Dean?" he asks on the painful exhale, pulling in a shallow replacement breath that allows him to ask again. "Dean?"
"Yeah, Sam. Jesus. You scared the shit out of me, flailing around like that." His brother's hand tightens on Sam's arm, a quick squeeze. "Don't move, okay? I'm gonna get you some water."
"Wait." Sam cracks his eyes, squinting against the dim reddish light, and grabs at Dean's wrist. It's solid. "Wait." He blinks and nearly chokes with relief when his brother doesn't flicker. Sam presses his eyes shut and breathes quickly through his nose until some of the panic disperses. When he checks again, Dean is still there, still corporeal, still looking freaked.
"Where…" It's not the question he means to ask, so he tries again. "When is it? What month?"
Dean's brow pinches. "October, same as when you checked out."
Sam's throat is so dry it feels like it's cracking as it tightens. "How long?"
"Three days," Dean says. The bruise-colored bags under his eyes testify to how slowly that time passed for him. "Shut up a minute and lemme get you some water."
Sam drags himself into a shallow lean against the headboard, swallowing a groan at the pain the movement inspires, as Dean fills a chipped coffee mug with water from the bathroom tap.
The room looks different from this angle, though the wallpaper and comforters are just as ugly as Sam remembers. At the foot of the other bed is a duffle bulging with what Sam knows are the weapons he watched his brother clean. He shivers and wipes a shaky hand over his face, trying to push away the vertigo his new, corrected perspective is causing, but the sharp stab of protest from his cheek and eye make it worse. When he yelps, Dean shakes his head and tsks at him as he returns to the chair between the beds.
"Dude, don't poke at it." Dean hooks a couple of fingers around Sam's forearm and draws his hand away from his face. "Trust me, you don't wanna fuck up the needlework. Here, drink. Careful of your lip." He shakes his head mournfully. "Damn, man. You got your ass handed to you on a platter."
"The djinn?" Sam asks, mostly rhetorically, after he's swallowed a few mouthfuls of the tepid water.
Dean nods.
"Did I get it?"
The skeptical arc of Dean's eyebrows answers that question.
Sam rolls his eyes, which pulls at the stitches in his eyebrow. "Did you get it?"
His brother's cheeks round out in that smug, self-satisfied smirk Sam loves to loathe. "Your research was dead on, Geek Boy. Silver knife dipped in lamb's blood'll do the trick. 'Specially when you dip it straight into the son of a bitch's heart."
"There was a girl," Sam says. "She was screaming. 'S why I went in without you."
"Which you're never gonna do again," Dean orders sternly, but relents under Sam's impatient huff. "She was still alive when I got there. Barely. But the hospital says she's gonna pull through."
Sam considers his next question while finishing his water. Dean refills it before Sam can ask him to and perches on the edge of the bed, tossing one foot onto the chair.
"What'd it do to me?"
"Other than kick your ass into next week?" Dean asks lightly, but his eyes are hooded and troubled. "I dunno, man. I was gonna ask you."
It's hard to say it out loud, but Sam has to. "It… I think it gave me a wish. Or made me think it did."
Dean sucks his lips into his mouth. "That girl, she was trussed up, stuck full of needles. The djinn was putting the finishing touches on you when I got there. The ER doc-before I bailed you out on account of our extreme case of Wanted by the FBI-he said there were hallucinogens in both your systems. What do you remember?"
"Everything," Sam says quietly, looking into the mug and scanning the surface for a reflection of the other world. Mom and Dad and Jess aren't there. They never were. He stretches out his free hand to grasp his brother's arm and hold on tight. "It's really good to see you, man," he says in a voice thick enough to draw a mildly distasteful expression onto Dean's face.
"I shoulda known," Dean complains. "You fuckin' wished yourself into a girl, didn't you?"
Sam shakes his head, a nearly silent laugh shaking his shoulders and catching in his throat.
Dean folds his leg under himself and leans forward, drawing his arm away from Sam but staying within reach. "Tell me," he offers, and Sam does-tells his brother almost everything. When he's done, Dean sits quietly for a long, contemplative bunch of seconds before asking, "How'd you get back?"
The easy answer, Sam knows, is probably that the djinn's dope wore off. As he considers his response, Sam presses his finger into the fabric over his breast pocket. He knows the picture and note didn't come back with him-didn't really believe they would, just wanted his family with him for the trip. He thinks about his leap of faith but offers Dean the simpler answer.
"I wished."
***
Sam spends too long in the bathroom, staring at his battered-black-and-blue face in the mirror while the water washes over his hands.
He has to get on the ball. He may not have been gone for all of the months that passed in his mind, but Dean's time is still running out. Sam knows he can't wait around for the answer to fall into his lap. Ruby talks a big game, but he's starting to doubt whether there's anything attached to the carrot she keeps dangling in front of him. She's a demon, and demons lie; even when they don't, they never do anything altruistically. He can't count on her, needs to come up with some solutions of his own.
His hands are puckered when Dean knocks. Sam shuts off the faucet and opens the door.
"Dude, I was about to piss out the window," Dean complains in a feeble attempt to cover for the obvious checkup-he's wearing the same worried, how-far-'round-the-bend-is-Sam expression that their father wore after the failed salt and burn.
"I'm fine," Sam says automatically, wiping his hands on his sweats. "Just thinking."
"Hurts the first time, huh?" Dean jokes, but Sam doesn't laugh.
Dean steps back to clear the way, and Sam trudges over to his bed, settles against the headboard while Dean takes a face-saving leak. He leaves the door half open, and while Sam would normally complain, he's fine with it tonight. He'd rather not let Dean too far out of sight, just in case, and it's obvious his brother's feeling just as twitchy.
When Dean comes back out he calls Bobby to announce Sam's return from his djinn-induced acid trip. Sam has trouble following the conversation-his attention keeps drifting to the antique pistol lying on the table at Dean's elbow. The Colt's aged barrel gleams against the dark blue, oil-stained scrap cushioning it.
"I want to get going," he announces when Dean flips his phone shut and slumps onto his own bed.
"Going where?"
"I dunno." Sam doesn't have a destination in mind, but the urge to move, to get out on the hunt again, is strong. "Anywhere."
He gives it some thought, wondering where he might run into Ruby so he can try to wrangle some answers out of her. But maybe he's wrangling the wrong demon. Maybe he should be aiming at someplace with a nice, back-country crossroad. Dean'll fight him on that, though, and Sam doesn't have a plan yet. Having a plan to present is essential to wheedling Dean into something he doesn't want to do, or out of something he does.
"You're not ready," Dean informs him. "You got lost in the bathroom."
"I'm fine. I've been out of it too long."
"You've been out of it for three days, Sam," Dean reminds him sternly. "And if it weren't for fuckin' Henriksen and his freaky-ass jones for us, you'd've spent more'n six hours of them in the hospital. We're not going anywhere."
Sam tries to shift gears. "Bobby have anything?"
"Other than another chorus of 'Take care of yer brother, ya idjit'? Nope."
"No hunts? Nothing on… you know." Sam lets his lifted eyebrows, tilted head, and spread hands fill in the blanks. "Anything?"
"Sam." Dean stretches his name out in a clear warning-DO NOT ENTER-and Sam is surprised by how hard it pushes his buttons, how eager he is to challenge it. He's missed fighting with his brother, he realizes. How fucked-up is that?
He backs himself down, though. He can tell Dean's still tweaked by the close call. Sam can hardly blame him. He remembers standing over his brother's dying body last year-remembers the funeral last week-and reminds himself that Dean got the grand-slam, real-world version of that nightmare. He should cut his brother some slack.
"You're in no kinda shape to be on the job," Dean reasons. "Let's just… We'll get outta here tomorrow-keep heading east, huh? Just chill out and rest up. Something'll come up eventually, if we don't run into it straight on. But you gotta heal up. Get back to normal."
Turns out Sam's short on slack. "Get back to normal?" he huffs with a humorless laugh. "I just got back from Normal. You died there. That's not going to happen here."
Dean's hackles rise abruptly, predictably. "Sam, I am not having this conversation with you right now. I had my choice, I'd never have this conversation with you again."
Sam's face heats up, the tissue aching with the influx of blood. How can Dean willfully ignore hell gaping in wait for him? How can he not want to find a way out of the deal? Doesn't he know Sam would rather die than let it happen?
A selfish, angry thought flashes through Sam's mind: if he's going to lose his brother either way-if he can't live with that-maybe he should have died in the djinn's warehouse, where at least he could wish himself his parents and Jess, where at least he wouldn't be alone.
He yanks the bitter thought off its pointless path. It wasn't real, Sam reminds himself, though he can practically smell Mom's fancy fabric softener on the worn shirt he dug out of a duffle when he got out of bed. He won't allow himself to miss them, won't regret leaving them behind. He sure as hell won't let Dean think he does. Sam banishes their faces and voices, replaces them with the surety he felt in his dive from the chimney.
He can save Dean. Here-in this real world-he can save his brother's life, his soul. Sam breathes in deeply, remembering how the rushing air cleansed him of his doubt and replaced it with faith.
"Sorry," he says, keeping his tone light to try to diffuse the tension he's injected into the room's atmosphere. "You don't have a choice in this one."
Dean shoots him a dark look as he swings his legs up onto his bed but doesn't offer a challenge beyond a grumbled "We'll see about that."
Sam relaxes, slides his legs under the covers, and stretches out in bed. He's not going to argue about it tonight. Dean's right-he's not in any condition for a fight. Besides, they have some time. They have the Colt. And Sam has the beginnings of an idea swirling around the periphery of his brain. He needs to bring it front and center, block out the extraneous.
He can wait Dean out. He can fix this.
*** end ***
Author: hiyacynth
Genre: Angst, Het, Quasi!AU
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, John, Mary, Jess; Sam/Jess
Rating and Warnings: R for language, sexual imagery, and mature themes. Set after 3x04 and contains general backstory spoilers to that point.
Continued from part 1a/1.
***
After the cop cuffs Sam and puts him in the back of the squad car, he and Jess stand outside for a few minutes, talking in low voices. Jess must've convinced the cop that she, at least, isn't crazy, because he doesn't cuff her, and she rides in the front seat.
When they get to the station, they put Sam in a quiet room without printing him or taking mug shots and take the cuffs off. A bored-looking desk cop sits in the corner, studying his nails. Sam ignores the second chair and slumps in the opposite corner, rests his head against his knees, and dozes.
The snick of a lock sliding back wakes him, and Sam looks up to see his father easing through the door. Before it closes, Sam sees Jess in the hallway, wiping her still-dirty face on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
Dad hangs near the door for a second or two, then drags his hand down his grizzled face and comes over to Sam's corner. He sinks to the floor, and Sam can see everything in his father's eyes-concern, anger, fear, confusion, revulsion, and, underpinning it all, grief as raw and brutal as Sam's own.
"I'm sorry, Dad," Sam starts, and his throat constricts because he knows his dad doesn't understand the true nature of his apology.
"Can you tell me why, son?" Dad's voice slides and scratches like wet gravel.
Sam shakes his head. "Not that you'll understand," he says. "But I promise, I wasn't going to do anything bad." He knows it sounds lame, weak, untrue. Distance from the grave has cleared his head, and Sam can see that from any normal person's perspective, he couldn't have been planning to do anything that wasn't horrifically unnatural. "I just wanted to help Dean rest."
His eyes fill and overflow, because he failed. Dean's spirit is still tethered to this world, and Sam knows he won't get another chance to salt and burn Dean the way he'd want.
Dad's hand comes down on Sam's knee and gives it a tug. "Dean is at rest, Sammy."
Sam wants to believe his father; he sounds so sure. Lifting his head to look for the matching conviction in his Dad's face, Sam gasps and quickly looks away from the corner, where Dean is glimmering and idly making rabbit ears over the cop's head.
Strong arms close around Sam's shoulders, and he lets his father pull him tight against his chest. Sam presses his face into the hard curve of Dad's collarbone, his whole body heaving with frustrating, dry sobs. The neck of his own shirt, where his father's head is leaning, grows warm and wet.
"I miss him, too, Sam," Dad says. "We all do. But you can't … You've gotta hold on. You're all we've got."
After a few minutes, Dad's hands run over Sam's hair then settle on his biceps, gently pushing him away. Sam risks a look at the corner, and is relieved to see that Dean's gone.
"Listen, we gotta talk about this, okay?" Dad tips his head in a way that Sam understands to mean the police station in general. "No one's pressing any charges. Jess talked to the officer who brought you in, explained the situation. The cops and firemen all know each other-everybody here knew your brother, respected him. Half the force was at the funeral. Nobody wants this to turn into a circus."
Sam thinks he's probably supposed to feel relief at that. No arrest, no charges filed-that means he hasn't fucked up his chances with the Bar Association. He finds he doesn't care.
"Jess and I agreed," his father continues, "we're not saying anything to your mother. Just that you couldn't sleep and went to visit Dean, got worked up, and the caretaker saw you, got panicky, and…" He lets the explanation trail off to its obvious ending. "She doesn't need to know any more than that. You understand me, Sam? She couldn't bear it."
Sam swallows hard, thinking about how broken and hollow his mother looks, how brittle. He doesn’t want to make it worse. She doesn’t deserve that. Sam nods.
"Good. Okay. One last thing." Dad shifts to reach into the back pocket of his jeans. "Jess asked me to give this to you." He holds a folded sheet of yellow legal paper but makes Sam wait before handing it over. "She's going back to California this morning."
Panic surges through Sam, and he snatches at the note, but Dad catches his arm.
"She's not leaving you, Sam. She's just leaving Kansas." Dad's eyes are somber, but Sam hears the same conviction he wanted to believe in earlier. "You scared the crap out of her tonight, but she loves you, and she knows how bad you're hurting right now. Get yourself together so you can go home to her."
Dad releases the folded sheet, slightly wrinkled from the brief struggle, and waits as Sam reads it. It's short and simple, and Sam loathes himself more with every word he reads.
"Sam,
Please don't think this means I don't love you, because I do. I love you so much. I want to help you through this, but I need a few days to deal with everything, and I think your family can help you more than I can right now. I hope you'll forgive me for going, and for telling you in a letter. I feel like such a coward, but I know it would be harder for both of us in person.
I miss you already, and I miss Dean, too. I know it's not the same as what you're going through, but try to remember that you're not the only one who lost him. Be good to your parents. They need their son-they need YOU-as much as you need them. Please come home to me as soon as you can. I'll be waiting, I promise.
All my love forever,
Jess"
He reads it twice more before folding it into neat squares and tucking it into his breast pocket. Sam thinks about what she said, what his father said-that his parents need him. He's their only son now. He'll find another way to help Dean. He'll never try to explain to Dad what he was doing at Dean's grave. His mother will never know he did more at the cemetery than break down loudly enough to rouse the caretaker.
Sam lifts his head and wipes his face dry, looks directly and earnestly into his father's grief-worn face.
"I'm so sorry, Dad," he says, and he means it. Sam widens the apology so it includes the old world's John Winchester, who would understand the full meaning. "I'm sorry I let you down."
His father seems to need to forgive Sam as much as Sam needs to be forgiven. Dad gets his feet under him, clasps Sam's forearms, and pulls them both to their feet. He envelops Sam in a rib-straining hug, and sniffs as he steps back, keeping one hand firmly on Sam's arm.
"Let's go home, son."
***
Dean's on the couch when Sam and Dad get back to the house. Sam bites the insides of his cheeks and ignores his brother's ghost as he hurries through the room and into the kitchen, where he finds Mom and wraps his arms around her. He leans against a counter, draws her in tight-she feels so tiny-and holds her as she weeps against his chest.
Her tears run out after a half hour, and she stumbles back into her maternal role, sending Sam upstairs to get some rest. She doesn't say anything directly about where he's been all night, just that he must be worn out.
He is. Sam is tired to the bone, though he dreads the dreams his brain is sure to serve him if he sleeps.
The briny tang of sex clings to the sheets of his childhood bed, and Jess's perfume lingers on the pillowcase. As he lies down, he takes comfort in her scents and presses his hand over his heart, feeling her note crinkle through the fabric of his pocket, and vows that he'll make it up to her. He'll make it up to all of them.
The familiar crackling sound draws him into awareness, and Sam opens his eyes and recognizes the cheap, ugly décor that's like a uniform worn by any motel offering hourly rates. This one is dim and layered in deep reds. Sam instinctively looks for the other bed and finds a comforting array of weapons spread neatly across it, ready for the regular, attentive cleaning Dean gives them. The stain-resistant comforter skids off the bed as Sam sits up, and the synthetic sliding noise it makes draws Dean's attention from the book he's reading at the tiny table in the room's corner.
"Tough job to do solo, huh?" he observes. His tone is too casual; what he really means is it's a tough job for Sam to do solo. Dean ran one-man salt-and-burns all the time and never got caught.
"I tried. I'm sorry I fucked it up. You deserve better."
Dean's eyes flash as he buzzes and sparks like an angry bug zapper. "Wouldn'ta worked anyway," he snaps. He drags his foot off the seat of the second chair and kicks it back from the table, gives his head an exasperated shake, and grumbles, "Waste of time."
Frustration flares in Sam's chest. He slams himself into the chair and throws his hands up. "Then what? I don't know how to help you, Dean."
Dean lifts his own hands in an impatient reflection of Sam's gesture. "Maybe I'm not the one who needs help."
"What do you mean?" Sam demands, but Dean's only response is to curve his eyebrows into an annoyed arc and shove the book he was reading across the table.
It's Dad's journal. Sam stares at it for a few seconds before reaching out to run his fingertips over the worn leather. He picks it up, threading the beaded bookmark around his knuckles in the comfortable, hypnotic rhythm he used to fall into while puzzling over the research end of a hunt. The cover falls open, and there are Dad's Marine Corps ribbons, there's the picture of the three of them on the hood of the Impala-family portrait from a life that no longer exists.
"First page, first sentence." Dean's voice cuts in and out like a badly wired speaker, and by the time Sam's raised his head from the photograph to frown a question, his brother's faded away again. But Sam knows the words by heart-doesn't need Dean to recite them, doesn't even need to read them himself.
"I went to Missouri, and I learned the truth."
***
The parlor is darker than he remembers. Rich red curtains cover the windows, and the air is thick with the woody, floral scent of potpourri or incense. Missouri waves him to the couch and settles into the overstuffed chair on the other side of the coffee table. The ghost of a smile flutters at the corner of Sam's mouth as he remembers Dean's face when she threatened to whap him with a spoon.
"What was that all about, then?" Missouri claps her hands against her wide thighs, an expression of exasperation on her face. "Didn't you hear me when I told you your brother isn't in that grave?"
Sam studies the pattern on the oriental rug at his feet-it looks like a maze to him, but he can't see the way out.
"Sam," she prompts. The way she says his name drops a second syllable into it.
"I know. That's why I was-" he starts, and risks a glance at her. "He's haunting me."
Missouri's eyes widen, but it doesn't seem to be a reaction of shock.
"To release a spirit," Sam continues, "you salt and burn their remains. I was trying to help Dean move on-to release him from this world so he can rest."
Her head bobs in a thoughtful five seconds of nodding before she changes the motion's direction, clicking her tongue.
"He doesn't belong here anymore," Sam insists. "There's something keeping him here." His eyes sting, remembering how his brother defined himself in both worlds-watch out for Sammy. "Maybe he thinks he still has to take care of me. Maybe I'm holding him here, when he should be in heaven. I have to find a way to help him."
"Lemme ask you a coupla questions, Sam," Missouri requests. Her voice is softer, smoother, and Sam has the distinct impression that she already knows the answer to every single question she'll pose. "You say Dean's haunting you?"
Sam nods, watching her face carefully.
She taps her fingers together a few times and then tips her head. "You know a lot about spirits?"
He nods again.
"You understand how they work? The rules they follow?"
Another confirming dip of his chin.
"And you know this how?"
Sam considers his response carefully. "My father taught me," he answers honestly. "Dad and Dean."
"And in all the time you spent dealin' with spirits-you ever known a person to start hauntin' folk before they died?"
Sam blinks. "What do you mean?"
"I mean," Missouri explains, each word weighted, "that you know full well Dean was dropping in on you long before he died last week."
Sam's throat tightens. "Those were just dreams," he insists, defensiveness roughening his voice. This summer, that was just his psyche recovering from the horrible ways his loved ones died in the old world, getting over the fear of Dean's averted damnation.
But then he thinks of that last week of Jess's old life-dreaming her death over and over and not knowing enough, not wanting to know, to realize it was anything but a natural expression of fear for someone whose mother died the way his did. Thinks of the fiery death he'd dreamed for his brother just a couple of weeks ago.
"I used to-sometimes I have dreams that come true. You, of all people-you should understand that."
"I know, Sam. That's how we met, isn't it? Your dreams led you to me before."
Sweat leaps to the surface of his skin, wicking into the armpits of his T-shirt, beading on his upper lip. "How do you-?" How can she know that? How can she know about how the world used to be?
"What happened to you in June? How'd you wind up in that hospital?"
"How do you know about that?" Sam feels his voice deepen with his fear.
Missouri leans over her knees, fingers spread, palms up. "Just tell me what it was put you in that hospital bed."
Sam pulls in a short breath. "A guy in an alley." The explanation comes out in short, choppy sentences. "I heard a girl scream. I went to help. Tried to take his gun. He clubbed me with it, bounced me off a dumpster. Ran. The girl called an ambulance."
Missouri's shaking her head before Sam gets halfway through the story. "No, Sam. That's what they told you. Now you tell me what really happened. How did you get here?"
He has to take two deep breaths before he can speak. "The djinn," he whispers.
Missouri's eyebrows perk, and she cups her fingers around her ear. "Come again?"
"The djinn. It grabbed me. Touched me. It said it saw my heart."
"And what did your heart show it?"
Sam drops his head when he feels the hot burn of tears on his face. He's such a fucking baby in this world. Missouri doesn't seem to notice, just answers the question herself.
"This, Sam. You had this whole world in your heart, didn't you? "
"Not like this!" Sam exclaims, arms slapping the air around him. "Dean wasn't supposed to-" He sucks in another ragged breath. "I just wanted us to be normal. That's all I've ever wanted, since I can remember. Happy. Together. We deserve that! We deserve not to be hunted and manipulated and tortured and murdered by demons." He stabs a finger toward the parlor's doorway, as if the old world lies in the foyer. "They're all dead back there! Mom, Dad, Jess. I died there, and because he saved me, Dean was going to die, too, and go to hell. Why wouldn't I want this instead of that? I saved Dean! I wished, and it came true, and that's how I saved him."
Sam drops his head into his hands. After a few seconds the couch shifts, and Missouri's warm hand drifts over his shoulders.
"But even if he has to die here…" Sam pushes the words through his hands. "Even if, then at least he won't go to hell. I just have to figure out how to help him move on to where he's supposed to be. Then I'll have saved him."
"Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam." Missouri sounds tired. "Have you ever considered the possibility that this isn't about Dean? That maybe he's tryin' to help you?"
Sam remembers the last time Dean visited him, hears the words that led him here. "Maybe I'm not the one who needs help."
He feels the cushions move again and lifts his head to see Missouri stepping around her coffee table, walking slowly to the window, where she stops and gestures to Sam to join her. Sam's ribs ache with phantom pain as he stands and crosses the room.
Missouri's plump fingers curl around the edge of the velvet drapes; her other hand hovers at his elbow, the lightest touch urging him closer. Sam jerks against her staying hand as she draws back the curtain, and she holds him there-solid and real-while a dank, dingy, red-papered room flickers dimly on the other side of her window, where Delaware Street should be.
Dean's there, straight-backed chair pulled between two full beds. Their arsenal is in pieces on one, and Sam's own face-pasty-pale skin broken with startling bruises-peeks from under the blood-red comforter of the other. Dean has the barrel of one of the shotguns across his knees. His hands glide over the weapon in practiced, nearly autonomic movements; Sam can practically smell the oil on the cloths. The distinctive odor clashes with the musty floral scent of Missouri's parlor, making his stomach heave and his head spin.
Sam closes his eyes against the vertigo, and when he reopens them the leafy green trees lining Delaware Street-speckled with the first gold of autumn-wave peacefully at him, and the sunlight bounces off the gleaming black roof of Dean's car. Sam searches the window carefully, thoroughly, but all he finds of the other world is a glint of shotgun shine that the rational part of his brain tries to convince him is a reflection from the bottom border of a silver picture frame on the opposite wall.
Missouri drops the curtain.
"What's happening to me?"
"That's up to you, Sam," Missouri replies. She slides her hand briefly over his arm, squeezing his wrist.
***
Sam always thought a psychotic break would be sudden, violent-shattering the mind like an exploded windshield. In reality, it's a slow process. He can see his sanity cracking at the edges, fissures of irrationality and doubt spidering out, weakening the overall structure and instilling in him a fundamental distrust of everything he perceives.
As soon as he leaves Missouri's house, the motel room starts flashing at him like three foreign frames spliced into the film reel of his new life: when he opens a cupboard, a curtain, a door. After two days he opens the medicine cabinet to get his toothbrush, blinking several times to prepare himself, and finds nothing there but the sparsely populated shelves. But when he looks up after spitting out his used toothpaste, Sam yelps and stumbles back, banging his heel into the foot of the toilet.
The mirror looks tarnished and cracked, casting a sepia tone over the scene reflected there: the ugly wallpaper, the weird lamps, Dean on his chair, the weapons spread on one bed and Sam tucked into the other.
Sam lets the vision of his brother bathe and soothe his eyes like clear, cold water after a week in a sandstorm. As he watches, Dean snaps the slide of the disassembled nine mil onto the body. The pistol's mother-of-pearl grips gleam softly when he lays it back on the bed. Dean turns his head and stares at the inert figure in the other bed, drags his open hand over his eyes, down and across his mouth, and around to scruff through the short hair at the back of his head. Sam jumps again when his brother's boot slams into side of the mattress where Sam's other body lies. He can almost hear the frustrated curse he sees shaped by Dean's mouth: "Damnit, Sammy!"
"I'm here, Dean," Sam says, and lifts his own hand to touch his brother's shoulder, but the instant his fingers meet the mirror, its surface fractures and crumbles. A thousand tiny shards tinkle into the sink and leave Sam staring at his own startled reflection in the clear, undamaged glass-five unblinking seconds before pain and the tickling slide of blood registers. Sam puts his sliced fingertip into his mouth and backs away.
Once he knows to look for it, the other world is everywhere. Sam sees it best in the periphery, and he finds he can lose hours staring straight ahead and watching it glimmer dimly in the reflective surfaces at the edges of his vision. His parents-wading through the mire of their own grief-say nothing at first, but when his mother moves the pot in which he was watching Dean bluster into his cell phone and Sam cries out at the disruption, he sees them exchange a worried glance and knows they can see him breaking.
It dumps down rain the next day, but Sam ignores the weather and goes to the university. He spends the morning scouring the library, rehashing the research he did in June, and then he hunts down the school's expert on Islam and spends the last twenty minutes of her three-thirty lecture pacing outside the classroom.
In her office, the woman talks to Sam about legends surrounding the djinn and answers his questions with increasing skepticism and unease. Outside the door, the department secretary pretends not to eavesdrop. After Sam's ignored the professor's third uncomfortable insistence that the djinn-"They're mythical creatures, you understand. They're not real."-don't have a motivation for granting wishes, the secretary leans in and reminds her boss of a meeting Sam knows is fake. Two campus security guards are waiting outside the building, but Sam's work is done, and he leaves without making a scene.
Back at the house, Sam sits at the too-small desk in his old bedroom and starts writing, trying to clarify the ideas ricocheting around his mind. He sees two major possibilities. He can assume that the djinn does-as the lore says-have the power and will to grant wishes and change the entire world accordingly. Or he can assume that the djinn's power is just as personal but narrower in scope, and that all that's changed is Sam's perception of the world.
Seeing it on paper sets Sam shaking. He thinks of the disappearances that brought them to Joliet, the girl whose screams drew him into the warehouse before Dean arrived to back him up, the hungry, satisfied look in the creature's eyes as it laid its hand on Sam's face, the almost electrical sting of its touch. It's so simple an answer-so simple a trick-that Sam is ashamed of how willing he was to accept it, how quickly and deeply he believed that his heart's wish had been granted.
He tries again, but the words he puts on the paper don't lead him anywhere new-except now he thinks losing his mind would be an easier answer. Eventually he puts his pen down and stretches out flat on his old bed, feet and ankles dangling off the end. Squeezing his eyes shut so he won't see the gleam of the world where she's dead, Sam calls Jess.
"Sam."
Her voice, even a single note of it, simultaneously washes the doubt from his heart and floods it anew.
"Sam? How are you?" Jess asks against Sam's silence. "Are you okay?"
"I'm…" He doesn't know how to answer. "I'm sorry about the other night. I'm sorry I scared you."
"I know. It's okay. I love you."
"I miss my brother." The statement comes out heavy, weighted down by an inelegant mix of grief and love, sincerity and duplicity, desperation and devotion.
Jess seems to hear only the words. "Of course you do."
"But I miss you, too. And Mom and Dad are…" He has to stop, regroup. Sam swallows and tries again. "I'm scared, Jess. I'm so scared I'm gonna do the wrong thing. I can't… Anything I do is gonna… I'm gonna lose…"
"I think you're thinking too much, Sam." The compassion in her voice makes the observation an endearment rather than a criticism. "What does your heart tell you?"
Sam hears static creep into the line, fuzzing her voice at the edges. For a moment, the sound turns into a purring thrum that reminds him of the Impala's engine. He wonders if it is-if in the other world, Dean is driving. He tries to ignore the noise, to focus on this world, where Jess is.
"That I can't have it all. That I have to choose." He wants to ask her what he should do, but he knows she won't understand the real question, will tell him to mourn Dean and move ahead with their life together.
"Everybody has choices to make. You have to trust yourself. You'll do the right thing, I know it."
"How?" he asks, the single word rattling in his throat.
"Because I know you."
The static gets louder, cutting sharp breaks into her voice. He wants to tell himself it's just the rain, but it stopped hours ago. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?" Jess asks, and Sam listens hard for a message in the hissing and popping between them, knowing before she says anything that she hears only their breath. "There's nothing, Sam," she tells him, and he knows. With a surety that hardens his guts, Sam knows.
"You're right," he answers flatly. "There's nothing here. It's all back with Dean."
"What is?" Worry creeps into her voice alongside the crackle, and he can hear her frown, can almost see the little vertical line that must be creasing the skin between her brows.
"Everything."
"Sam?"
Sam opens his eyes and sits cross-legged on the narrow mattress. He remembers how they felt folded around each other in this tiny bed. How it felt to make love to her, to love her. He has to make sure she knows; he didn't get to tell her before she died.
"I love you, Jess. I love you so much."
She still sounds confused and worried, but she doesn't push, just gives back to him. "I love you, too."
"Jess." Sam's voice is stronger now. "Thank you. You're the happiest thing that ever happened to me." He can't tell her he loves her best-it's not true, or he'd be making a different choice-but he can give her that simple, powerful truth.
"My Sam." There are tears in her voice now. "Come home."
Concentrating as hard as he can to tattoo her into his memory, Sam promises-truth wrapped in a lie. "I will. I'll be home soon."
His room is quiet when he hangs up, the ambient crackle and hiss cut off with the end of his call. Sam lies back on his bed and trains his ears on the muffled domestic noises that filter up through the floorboards. His mother's clogs on the wooden floors, a pot or pan hitting the burner, the slap of the refrigerator door, the clack of a cupboard. The front door opens and shuts, and Sam hears the low bass rumble of his dad's voice. His mom's is higher, doesn't carry as well, but Sam can hear a note or two and imagines them embracing.
He gets up and checks the mirror. Its beveled edges frame his face with reflected red wallpaper, but Sam can't see the whole room, can't see his brother, though he knows Dean's in there. He leans closer and frowns at the bruises on his reflection's face-the black eye that spreads into the swollen, blue-tinged bone of his left cheek. He touches his eyebrow and licks his lip, but can't feel the splits he sees in the mirror. Sam blinks at his other self for a few more seconds and then goes downstairs.
From the doorway of the kitchen he watches his parents move sluggishly about the preparation of the evening's meal.
"Hey."
Sam's simple greeting jolts them both into startled, hesitant smiles.
"Hey, kiddo." Dad's voice is thick and weary. The last week has made mourning canyons out of what used to be laugh lines. He looks and sounds old. "Your mom said you were gone most of the day."
"Yeah," Sam answers. "Just trying to sort something out."
"Any luck?" Dad goes over to Mom, and Sam's mouth curves into a faint smile. It's so good to see them together.
"Yeah, I think so."
Rather than elaborate, Sam crosses the room and kisses his mother soundly on the cheek before folding his arms around her. He turns his head, feeling her hair slide softly on his neck, and sees his father's smile return as he watches them. Sam holds Mom tight with one arm and stretches the other out for Dad. The three of them stand in a tight huddle for nearly a minute until Mom starts giggling and crying at the same time. Sam and Dad pull back to check on her, and she wipes her eyes and manages a less hysterical-sounding laugh.
"God, Dean would be so embarrassed by us," she says as Sam sniffs and drags the back of his hand under his nose and catches Dad mopping his face with his plaid sleeve. "C'mon, you gigantic babies. Help me with dinner."
***
It's late when they finally go to bed. Sam opens the window as soon as hears his parents' bedroom door close, lets in the night. He toes out of his shoes and socks and moves quietly around the room where everything went wrong, tries to memorize what it was like right. He snoops through his own bookshelves until he hears the water shut off in the master bath, then moves on to the desk. In a bottom drawer he finds a stack of old report cards and a few class and team pictures. They stir something in his mind, and he goes over to the dresser and picks up an old framed snapshot sitting atop it.
His family grins at the camera while the Grand Canyon cracks the earth wide open behind them. Sam remembers the trip, but the recollection is slippery, and the details elude him. Dean looks about sixteen, which matches the amount of pudge rounding Sam's cheeks. Dean's got an elbow propped on one of Sam's shoulders and shades his eyes with his free hand. Behind Sam and Dean, Mom is tucked neatly into the curl of Dad's arm, head tilted against his jaw.
Sam carefully extracts the photo from its frame and tucks it into his breast pocket, slips it into the fold of Jess's note. Then he sits at the desk again, digs out an old notebook, and writes brief letters that he hopes his loved ones will never read. Their intent is a lie, but the content is true: he can't stay in this world without Dean.
The windowsill is wide, and Sam sits there comfortably, bare heels knocking against the siding, surveying the path Dean laid for him. Paths, really. The route down and back up the drainpipe fixed sturdily to the flat expanse of the house next to the gabled window was payment for Sam's silence when he caught a seventeen-year-old Dean shinnying down the trellis next to his own bedroom window. The way up to the roof, though, that was a bonus-one of those fraternal gifts that were rare during those years when Sam's adolescence was clumsy and new and Dean's was at its height. They'd hauled themselves onto the narrow peak of the gable, Dean flattening himself against the larger plane of the roof to make room for his little brother, and then scrambled up the shingled slope, where they'd stretched out on their backs and spent half the night watching the stars circle above them.
Sam scoots to the very edge of the windowsill and braces one foot against the drainpipe for balance and leverage, curling his toes for purchase. The foothold Dean set in place-a narrow slice of two-by-four nailed onto the outside of the gable-helps distribute his weight and establish his center of gravity while Sam plants his hands on either side of the angle made by the join of the gable and the main roof and shifts his weight onto his arms. He presses up until his arms are fully extended and he can swing a leg onto the roof and pull himself up. His muscles shake and burn, but in the end they remember the work they were trained for. When he's got his whole body on the roof, Sam breathes deeply, pushing air into his bloodstream to counter some of the adrenaline rushing there, pleased with himself for taking his first step home.
The self-satisfaction is short lived. As he's resting he sees a slanting parallelogram of light illuminate the lawn beneath his bedroom, and then from directly below him he hears his father's voice. Sam crab walks up the slope but skids on a slimy, mossed-over shingle and lands heavily on his ass, foot throbbing around a new splinter. Dad calls out again, his voice louder now. The dark shape of his head emerges as he leans out the window.
"Sam? What're you doing?"
Sam bites his lip, hopes his father will just assume he snuck out like a stealth-impaired teenager.
"I know you're up there, Sam."
Sam swears under his breath. "It's nothing, Dad," he calls back as quietly as possible. "Just getting some air. Stars are nice."
There's fear in Dad's voice, full levels. "It rained all day, Sam. That roof's gotta be slippery as hell. Lemme go get the ladder, then you come on back in, okay?"
"No, I'm good. Don't worry about me."
His father's head disappears back through the window, and Sam gets his feet under him, supporting himself with his hands as he picks a careful path up the slope of the roof. Dad's right, it's slick up there. Another cry-louder this time and sharp with alarm-sounds in the room below, and Sam knows Dad found the notes.
"Oh, Jesus. Mary! Mary!" There's a scramble at the window, and then Dad's on the ledge, calling desperately to him. "Sam! Sammy, just stop where you are, son. Just sit tight, please, Sam. I'm coming up. I just want to talk to you."
"John?" Mom's in the bedroom, and Sam knows his easy getaway is shot. "John! What're you-where's Sam?"
Sam strains his ears, but all he can hear is the sibilant hiss and buzz of urgent whispering, followed by a cry of pain from his mother and the bang of his bedroom door being knocked against the wallboard as she bursts out of the room.
Dad reemerges. Sam can see him hesitate as he squats in the window, assessing the path to the roof.
"Sammy," he calls, and his voice rises in volume as he stands up and turns toward the house. "You don't have to do this, okay? Just hang on a second…"
His hands appear on the lip of the roof, and Sam can tell he's found the foothold. The white spread of his father's T-shirted shoulders rises in the corner; Sam can hear his breath coming in strained huffs.
Sam rises from his hunkered stance and picks his way along the peak of the roof toward his target at the far end, above the driveway. He has to be careful-the roof's not that high, and if he slips and falls wrong, he'll probably only break a lot of bones.
The front door bangs open. Sam hears his mother's bare feet slap the steps, then her panicked voice calling out. He can see her on the lawn now, her white nightgown billowing around her calves. This isn't going how he planned.
The wooden shingles shiver under his feet as his father hauls himself onto the mossy roof, and Sam tears his eyes away from his mother.
"Come on, now, Sam," Dad wheedles, joining Sam on the roof's ridge. "Talk to me, kiddo."
"John!" Mom's voice is sharp and high. "Oh, God, John. Be careful! Sam, please! Please come down, sweetheart. John, help him! Make him come down!"
"Listen to your mother, Sam. She loves you. We both do."
"I can't stay," Sam says in a weaker voice than he intended.
"Sammy, please. Please just come down."
Sam waits for his father to make it an order, wonders if he'll be able to disobey this time, but John Winchester never played drill sergeant to his sons in this world and doesn't know how foreign his coaxing and pleading sounds.
"I read your note. I know how hard this is, Sam. I know how hard it is to live without him."
"You don't understand," Sam starts, but the thunder that bursts over his father's face stops him.
"You don't think I understand?" His voice is a quiet roar. "I buried my firstborn son last week. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Don't you make me bury another child. Don't let that fire take both my boys." Tears roll down his father's grizzled cheeks.
"Dad, please. It's not what you think. Dean is waiting for me. He needs me."
"We need you, Sam! Your mother and I, we need you. Don't you walk away."
"I have to." Sam swallows hard and presses on toward his goal, inching his way to the edge of the roof. "It's not real-none of this. I've been living in a wish-in a lie-" He remembers the accusation Dean once flung at him on the side of a dead-of-night road in the middle of nowhere and has to agree with his brother's assessment. "I'm selfish," he confesses. "I wanted it to be real, but it isn't. I've been here for months, while Dean…"
"Dean is dead, Sam. You have to accept that." Dad's voice is iron, enough of order to make Sam stop moving.
"Here he's dead," Sam concedes, but he shakes his head. "Here he's gone. But back there he's dying, and when he does, he's going to hell. For me. He's going to hell because of me. And it's my job to stop it-to save him." He feels the purpose swelling in his chest, straightening him, pushing his shoulders back.
His father steps closer, into a rounded slice of light cast from the streetlamp. "There's nothing you can do for Dean now," he whispers. "You can only stay here and let your mother and me help you. And Jess-think about Jessica, Sam. Stay and let us help you. You can't save Dean."
"No!" The anger in that word surprises Sam as much as it does his father, judging from the way they both cringe at the outburst. He forces his voice into evenness. "He's not gone. Not yet. And if there's even the smallest chance that I can save him-I have to do it, Dad. If you were really you, you'd understand that. You, out of everyone…" Sam whips his fingers across his burning eyes as they threaten to spill over. "I love you. I love you all. But I have to do this. I'm not gonna leave him again. I just won't."
Sam pulls his stare away from his father, shuts out the pleas being thrown at him, and strides sure-footedly to the roof's edge, resting his hand on the cool, damp brick of the chimney. Its wide mouth is level with his elbows, and Sam makes a quick survey of it and nimbly boosts himself into a crouch on its top, toes gripping the edges with simian security.
He hears his mother scream below him, sees his father lurch desperately forward. Dad's body doesn't remember its hunter's grace, though, and he stumbles-slips, hits the roof hard on his left hip, and slides several feet before stopping his descent with fingers that clutch at the peaked ridge of shingle he tripped on-tearing another agonized cry from his wife.
Sam is calm, sure again in his body's strength and agility, instilled over a lifetime of John Winchester's drills. He rises from his squat without a wobble and cautions his father.
"Be careful, Dad. You can't come with me. You don't belong there anymore." Dad's on his feet again, terror on his face. "It's okay. You're with Mom now. Dean and I will be fine, I promise. I promise I'll save him."
Sam turns on the balls of his feet and addresses his mother-who's sobbing into horror-crimped fingers-in the same, steady voice, volume turned up to make sure she hears.
"It's okay, Mom," he calls. "I love you. Dean-he does, too. I know he'd want me to tell you. He misses you so much." He thinks he should say something more, something to sum up twenty-five years of never having known her, but what comes out is so simple it's almost nonsensical. "Thanks for my brother."
A breeze stirs Sam's hair, carrying a not-so-distant siren with it. Turning his face toward the north, Sam sees the lights coming-eight, maybe ten blocks away. He has to hurry. He closes his eyes and concentrates to block his parents' cries as much as possible, sinks and rises into a few deepening knee-bends, then lets his arms swing free to add their mass to his momentum.
Picturing his body's path, Sam thrusts all of his strength into his feet and feels it spring back in equal and opposite reaction, lifting him into the air. He forces his eyes open and whips his knees and head into a tight tuck to turn his jump into a dive. The world shifts around him, and he straightens his legs and clasps his arms across his stomach to fight the instinct to use them to break his fall. The driveway rushes up at him, the air screaming with his speed, and Sam whispers fiercely and with more faith than he's felt in his life.
"I wish I was back with Dean."
***
He's wrenched, beyond broken. Every bone crushed, every joint screaming at the impact. His ears shatter against the roar of the world crashing around him. His lungs burn as if they're petrifying within him, until something seizes him and shakes, coaxing a ragged groan of protest from his throat and unblocking the passage. His chest heaves painfully, and he sucks in a spasm of air that hits his lungs like a hammer and sends the oxygen into his system with a force he can almost feel, as if the molecules are attaching themselves to his blood with tiny pick-axes.
"Sammy!"
The voice separates itself from the din, and Sam fixes his attention on it, uses it to guide himself out of the chaos. Something's holding him down, and he struggles against the weight.
"Hey, hey-c'mon, man. Exhale, okay? Just try to breathe normally."
The pressure on his shoulders lightens but doesn't depart. Sam keeps his eyes closed, afraid to look-their voices fooled him before.
"Dean?" he asks on the painful exhale, pulling in a shallow replacement breath that allows him to ask again. "Dean?"
"Yeah, Sam. Jesus. You scared the shit out of me, flailing around like that." His brother's hand tightens on Sam's arm, a quick squeeze. "Don't move, okay? I'm gonna get you some water."
"Wait." Sam cracks his eyes, squinting against the dim reddish light, and grabs at Dean's wrist. It's solid. "Wait." He blinks and nearly chokes with relief when his brother doesn't flicker. Sam presses his eyes shut and breathes quickly through his nose until some of the panic disperses. When he checks again, Dean is still there, still corporeal, still looking freaked.
"Where…" It's not the question he means to ask, so he tries again. "When is it? What month?"
Dean's brow pinches. "October, same as when you checked out."
Sam's throat is so dry it feels like it's cracking as it tightens. "How long?"
"Three days," Dean says. The bruise-colored bags under his eyes testify to how slowly that time passed for him. "Shut up a minute and lemme get you some water."
Sam drags himself into a shallow lean against the headboard, swallowing a groan at the pain the movement inspires, as Dean fills a chipped coffee mug with water from the bathroom tap.
The room looks different from this angle, though the wallpaper and comforters are just as ugly as Sam remembers. At the foot of the other bed is a duffle bulging with what Sam knows are the weapons he watched his brother clean. He shivers and wipes a shaky hand over his face, trying to push away the vertigo his new, corrected perspective is causing, but the sharp stab of protest from his cheek and eye make it worse. When he yelps, Dean shakes his head and tsks at him as he returns to the chair between the beds.
"Dude, don't poke at it." Dean hooks a couple of fingers around Sam's forearm and draws his hand away from his face. "Trust me, you don't wanna fuck up the needlework. Here, drink. Careful of your lip." He shakes his head mournfully. "Damn, man. You got your ass handed to you on a platter."
"The djinn?" Sam asks, mostly rhetorically, after he's swallowed a few mouthfuls of the tepid water.
Dean nods.
"Did I get it?"
The skeptical arc of Dean's eyebrows answers that question.
Sam rolls his eyes, which pulls at the stitches in his eyebrow. "Did you get it?"
His brother's cheeks round out in that smug, self-satisfied smirk Sam loves to loathe. "Your research was dead on, Geek Boy. Silver knife dipped in lamb's blood'll do the trick. 'Specially when you dip it straight into the son of a bitch's heart."
"There was a girl," Sam says. "She was screaming. 'S why I went in without you."
"Which you're never gonna do again," Dean orders sternly, but relents under Sam's impatient huff. "She was still alive when I got there. Barely. But the hospital says she's gonna pull through."
Sam considers his next question while finishing his water. Dean refills it before Sam can ask him to and perches on the edge of the bed, tossing one foot onto the chair.
"What'd it do to me?"
"Other than kick your ass into next week?" Dean asks lightly, but his eyes are hooded and troubled. "I dunno, man. I was gonna ask you."
It's hard to say it out loud, but Sam has to. "It… I think it gave me a wish. Or made me think it did."
Dean sucks his lips into his mouth. "That girl, she was trussed up, stuck full of needles. The djinn was putting the finishing touches on you when I got there. The ER doc-before I bailed you out on account of our extreme case of Wanted by the FBI-he said there were hallucinogens in both your systems. What do you remember?"
"Everything," Sam says quietly, looking into the mug and scanning the surface for a reflection of the other world. Mom and Dad and Jess aren't there. They never were. He stretches out his free hand to grasp his brother's arm and hold on tight. "It's really good to see you, man," he says in a voice thick enough to draw a mildly distasteful expression onto Dean's face.
"I shoulda known," Dean complains. "You fuckin' wished yourself into a girl, didn't you?"
Sam shakes his head, a nearly silent laugh shaking his shoulders and catching in his throat.
Dean folds his leg under himself and leans forward, drawing his arm away from Sam but staying within reach. "Tell me," he offers, and Sam does-tells his brother almost everything. When he's done, Dean sits quietly for a long, contemplative bunch of seconds before asking, "How'd you get back?"
The easy answer, Sam knows, is probably that the djinn's dope wore off. As he considers his response, Sam presses his finger into the fabric over his breast pocket. He knows the picture and note didn't come back with him-didn't really believe they would, just wanted his family with him for the trip. He thinks about his leap of faith but offers Dean the simpler answer.
"I wished."
***
Sam spends too long in the bathroom, staring at his battered-black-and-blue face in the mirror while the water washes over his hands.
He has to get on the ball. He may not have been gone for all of the months that passed in his mind, but Dean's time is still running out. Sam knows he can't wait around for the answer to fall into his lap. Ruby talks a big game, but he's starting to doubt whether there's anything attached to the carrot she keeps dangling in front of him. She's a demon, and demons lie; even when they don't, they never do anything altruistically. He can't count on her, needs to come up with some solutions of his own.
His hands are puckered when Dean knocks. Sam shuts off the faucet and opens the door.
"Dude, I was about to piss out the window," Dean complains in a feeble attempt to cover for the obvious checkup-he's wearing the same worried, how-far-'round-the-bend-is-Sam expression that their father wore after the failed salt and burn.
"I'm fine," Sam says automatically, wiping his hands on his sweats. "Just thinking."
"Hurts the first time, huh?" Dean jokes, but Sam doesn't laugh.
Dean steps back to clear the way, and Sam trudges over to his bed, settles against the headboard while Dean takes a face-saving leak. He leaves the door half open, and while Sam would normally complain, he's fine with it tonight. He'd rather not let Dean too far out of sight, just in case, and it's obvious his brother's feeling just as twitchy.
When Dean comes back out he calls Bobby to announce Sam's return from his djinn-induced acid trip. Sam has trouble following the conversation-his attention keeps drifting to the antique pistol lying on the table at Dean's elbow. The Colt's aged barrel gleams against the dark blue, oil-stained scrap cushioning it.
"I want to get going," he announces when Dean flips his phone shut and slumps onto his own bed.
"Going where?"
"I dunno." Sam doesn't have a destination in mind, but the urge to move, to get out on the hunt again, is strong. "Anywhere."
He gives it some thought, wondering where he might run into Ruby so he can try to wrangle some answers out of her. But maybe he's wrangling the wrong demon. Maybe he should be aiming at someplace with a nice, back-country crossroad. Dean'll fight him on that, though, and Sam doesn't have a plan yet. Having a plan to present is essential to wheedling Dean into something he doesn't want to do, or out of something he does.
"You're not ready," Dean informs him. "You got lost in the bathroom."
"I'm fine. I've been out of it too long."
"You've been out of it for three days, Sam," Dean reminds him sternly. "And if it weren't for fuckin' Henriksen and his freaky-ass jones for us, you'd've spent more'n six hours of them in the hospital. We're not going anywhere."
Sam tries to shift gears. "Bobby have anything?"
"Other than another chorus of 'Take care of yer brother, ya idjit'? Nope."
"No hunts? Nothing on… you know." Sam lets his lifted eyebrows, tilted head, and spread hands fill in the blanks. "Anything?"
"Sam." Dean stretches his name out in a clear warning-DO NOT ENTER-and Sam is surprised by how hard it pushes his buttons, how eager he is to challenge it. He's missed fighting with his brother, he realizes. How fucked-up is that?
He backs himself down, though. He can tell Dean's still tweaked by the close call. Sam can hardly blame him. He remembers standing over his brother's dying body last year-remembers the funeral last week-and reminds himself that Dean got the grand-slam, real-world version of that nightmare. He should cut his brother some slack.
"You're in no kinda shape to be on the job," Dean reasons. "Let's just… We'll get outta here tomorrow-keep heading east, huh? Just chill out and rest up. Something'll come up eventually, if we don't run into it straight on. But you gotta heal up. Get back to normal."
Turns out Sam's short on slack. "Get back to normal?" he huffs with a humorless laugh. "I just got back from Normal. You died there. That's not going to happen here."
Dean's hackles rise abruptly, predictably. "Sam, I am not having this conversation with you right now. I had my choice, I'd never have this conversation with you again."
Sam's face heats up, the tissue aching with the influx of blood. How can Dean willfully ignore hell gaping in wait for him? How can he not want to find a way out of the deal? Doesn't he know Sam would rather die than let it happen?
A selfish, angry thought flashes through Sam's mind: if he's going to lose his brother either way-if he can't live with that-maybe he should have died in the djinn's warehouse, where at least he could wish himself his parents and Jess, where at least he wouldn't be alone.
He yanks the bitter thought off its pointless path. It wasn't real, Sam reminds himself, though he can practically smell Mom's fancy fabric softener on the worn shirt he dug out of a duffle when he got out of bed. He won't allow himself to miss them, won't regret leaving them behind. He sure as hell won't let Dean think he does. Sam banishes their faces and voices, replaces them with the surety he felt in his dive from the chimney.
He can save Dean. Here-in this real world-he can save his brother's life, his soul. Sam breathes in deeply, remembering how the rushing air cleansed him of his doubt and replaced it with faith.
"Sorry," he says, keeping his tone light to try to diffuse the tension he's injected into the room's atmosphere. "You don't have a choice in this one."
Dean shoots him a dark look as he swings his legs up onto his bed but doesn't offer a challenge beyond a grumbled "We'll see about that."
Sam relaxes, slides his legs under the covers, and stretches out in bed. He's not going to argue about it tonight. Dean's right-he's not in any condition for a fight. Besides, they have some time. They have the Colt. And Sam has the beginnings of an idea swirling around the periphery of his brain. He needs to bring it front and center, block out the extraneous.
He can wait Dean out. He can fix this.
*** end ***