SPN fic: Between Potency and Existence
Title: Between Potency and Existence
Category: Gen, au
Warnings: Gore, language, suicidal thoughts, death and dying of minor characters
Summary: Sam's hallucinations become something more. Something real. And no one is prepared for that. Post 6.22 AU.
A/N: Written for a prompt on
ohsam's fic challenge. I have procrastinated horribly on it.
As nothing with them ever does, it starts out small; nearly unnoticeable. The day is clean and smells of smoke, the good kind that comes from campfires and roasted marshmallows. Sam and Dean had left the sluggish corpse-smoke a mile or so back, in a shallow grave recently exhumed. A simple salt and burn, and Sam would have called that a blessing if he didn’t know any better. His muscles are aching with a pleasant burn, fingers cramped from the hours they spent wrapped around a shovel’s handle, back trying to pull down into the curl he had made it accustomed to. Daylight bends between the thin forest trees, and Dean is a warmth just beside his shoulder.
Summer rain falls in airy waves, still warmed by a sun that hadn’t wanted to hide its face.
“Sam,” whispers the voice of frost; the rain freezes into sleet.
“Huh,” Dean says. The day had started hot and had only gotten hotter, and the season is still high with June, in the pressing closeness of Arizona air.
Dean turns around and smiles through the veil of light sleet, but Sam is listening to something else. Something that says, “Sam.”
“Sam. Sam.”
Says it more intimately than a lover’s touch.
Water freezes into ice and leaves fall from branches in white crystalline bunches.
“Sammy?” Dean’s eyes are wide, and he flinches along with Sam when the frost replies, “He’s mine.”
-----
It baffles meteorologists, the way cold follows Sam around. Nervous smiles crowd well-lit faces on network news shows; jokes are bandied about like weapons against the strange unknown, as the weather folk say, “Maybe this time, maybe I’ll tell it true.” There is no reason behind the sudden frosts, the midsummer’s chills that devastate farmland and family plans involving the beach, and no one has real answers. It’s only all the more puzzling the way the indecisive weather shifts around the country, heedless of mother nature’s every rule, ignoring the paths the wind scythes across from north to south to north; just roaming. Aimless, for all that they can tell.
Of course, after the first cry of “Global warming freak side effect,” everyone calms down, for this is a crisis they know already, and already are they versed in ignoring it. It becomes another tragedy to mark upon the log of Man’s Crime Against Nature, and another excuse to rack up voter sympathy by pledging action in by-elections across the nation. It becomes just another cause for heroes and hypocrites alike to rally around.
Except for Sam. He watches, sometimes, the local news, scouting for jobs and searching stories of miracles and righteous justice for a clue of Castiel’s location. After seeing just a few weather reports, it doesn’t take Sam long to fill in the blanks for himself-the frost has followed him; the chill of Hell nips greedily at his heels.
-----
That’s all it is, for months. Nothing but a grasping chill that squeezes Sam tight and won’t allow him the comfort of warmth. But this is how they know it’s bad:
The black dog sinks into the black fastness of the night and both Sam and Dean are panting. It was an easy shot-at any other time at all, one he could have made without thought-but for that all-important moment, Sam couldn’t see his target for the frost that rimmed his eyes and Dean’s fierce “Sam, down!” he heard as only though from across a vast distance. Water clogs his ears, and flash-freezes to sharp ice, and then he can’t hear at all.
“That’s the distance between worlds, Sam.” Sandy hair over a sad frown. “From up above to down below. It’s not your fault. It’s just too far to fathom.”
Pinch yourself, Sam. And then you’ll know what’s real.
“Sammy? Think I saw something, just outta the corner of my eye,” Dean says. “Think it went that way. Let’s go round that bastard up.” Dean slaps him in the shoulder. “Ready?”
Sam shakes himself loose and throws Dean a nod. Guns cocked, they split apart.
The woods are quiet, but through them, Sam can hear wet panting. Bracken cracks under his feet as he runs, low to the ground, but the black dog has gone. White puffs of breath, and Sam should go back, should really go back, to find Dean.
Quiet spreads through the woods, and isn’t that so wrong. Sam runs.
This is how Sam finds him. Flat on his back in a damp clearing, moon lighting a pale (too pale, so pale) face.
“Dean?! Dean!” Sam shakes him, but it isn’t working, he isn’t doing his damn job, he’s going to save Dean, he will, because Dean saved him.
-come on, Sam don’t let this be-
Lilith laughs beside him, and trails her finger along the tear tracks on his face as-
-”Dean, no, no...”-
Green eyes lock onto his face and Dean’s mouth opens (gently, slowly), but he can only gurgle, wet and red, through his clawed throat-he’s blowing bubbles.
Sam laughs and laughs, Lilith cooing as she kneels beside him, and then he cries in silence.
“Dude, what the fuck?” But Sam can’t let go of his brother, just can’t, so he doesn’t respond at all.
Lilith does. She stands up, with her hand pressed on Sam’s shoulder, looks at Dean (both of them) and says, “Well, isn’t that interesting.”
Sam looks up, and then back down. A balding, middle-aged man is lying dead in his arms, and Dean is staring at him from just beyond the clearing’s edge.
-----
In Indiana, they ask questions. In Tennessee, they think they’ve found answers. It isn’t anything demonic or other worldly, following them and giving them a headache they hadn’t had before-it’s Sam.
A man with a knife rushes Dean just outside a bar. Sam remembers endless Tuesdays and the year of Wednesday (or almost year-six and four only add up to ten, after all) and this time, Bobby and Ruby won’t be there to grab him tight like they had before, when he had wanted to give in so bad he could see his own end like a beacon of hope tattooed across his eyelids.
These are the facts: a man with a knife rushes Dean, and Sam stops him.
Stops him cold and dead and rendered harmless, from clear across the alley. Dean stares at Sam’s outstretched arm, and the darkness that flickers up and down his skin. Neither of them know what to say. (But Sam really wishes that Dean would call him Skywalker, would joke and slap him on the back.) Dean flinches (just a very little bit) when Sam reaches out for his shoulder. Wanting to make sure he’s okay.
It’s not okay, though.
-----
Early in the third night of the full moon, in Illinois, they lay to rest a werewolf who hadn’t known his own secret-Dean looked so uneasy after the werewolf had shifted back, in his dying still so bewildered. There is no talk, in the car, as they drive Darren to his funeral pyre; there is not one word said as they watch the fire bend the night air around a thin sheen of heat. The drive back into town is thick with regret, for the monster who didn’t choose his path. Under the car’s heavy tires, asphalt is devoured.
Sam doesn’t even take off his shoes (feet so cold, can’t take off his shoes) before he piles blankets, and pillow after pillow, on top of his lumpy motel bed and tries so hard to sleep through his shivering.
Morning fog is still hanging low in the grass when Dean shakes Sam awake.
“What-”Sam pauses to cough away the sleep in his voice. “What’s wrong?”
“Something hinky’s hiding out in an office building just south of here,” Dean says as he shoves a sawed-off into Sam’s black duffle. “Looks like a nest.”
Sam shivers and scratches at the goosebumps that are crawling up his arms. Says, “Nest of what?”
“Vampires.”
Sam nods, scratches at the stubble crawling down his chin, and yawns as he follows Dean’s ice-encrusted footprints outside. While Dean drives, he nearly falls right back asleep, the car humming like a lullaby.
The lot Dean pulls into is empty but for a single rusted sedan lingering at the building’s side, and dimly lit, the few working streetlights shining out a yellow dark with age. The office building itself is short and stout, shouldered on either side by lean warehouses, and very very dark. There’s one room that Sam can see with the lights on, and in it, he can see shadows pacing.
Sam turns to Dean. “You sure about this?” But Dean just resettles the dufflebag over his shoulder.
The doors catches at first, locked and maybe hooked to an alarm, but before Sam can start thinking about alternate approaches, Dean says, “No, wait-it’s fine, it’s open,” like it was never any problem at all. Morningstar Industries, the door says as it swings open. Swings easy and free, and then they’re inside, following the smell of blood down the hallway, trapped in a wide smear upon the floor.
“See, Sam? Now do you wanna ask if I’m sure?”
Sam shakes his head, just a little bit, before stopping just outside the lit room. The both of them ready their long knives, glistening with dead man’s blood. There isn’t going to be much time, ten or fifteen seconds tops, before the vampires collect themselves to fight back, but if they take out at least one or two before they realize what’s happening, they might turn wild and impotent with grief. Or maybe just wild.
“One. Two. Three.” They burst into the room at the same time, machetes raised high, but they immediately start screaming (fangs thrust out, malice glittering in beetle’s eyes) and thrashing about the room-so fast, they’re running and writhing and screaming, and Sam doesn’t have the chance to get any of them.
“Come on, Sam!” Dean says. He’s blocking the door, but the room is large and the vampires are few.
“Just wait,” Sam says. Just wait. No door, only one other way out: The windows. The honey pot to lure in the wasps.
Dean laughs. “Always were good at this, weren’t you, Sammy. Might just be the only thing you ever could do right.”
And Sam is very good at this, the hunt, where instincts never lead him wrong and his own destructive whims can’t betray him.
Five screaming monsters flail ineffectually at the three windows set into the wall. A grimace pulls Sam’s face down and why don’t they attack? Why run without any fight at all?
“Fear of you, Sammy boy.” The words are quiet, but sharp enough to cut through the noise. “Now do your damn job, for once.”
They scramble away, hissing between their fangs in fear and frustration as the windows fail to open, and (backed into a corner, packed into the corner, no escape from the shine, the white light of retribution and justice; endless, painful justice) Sam has caught in his trap; they’ve fallen into it, his carefully set hole in the ground.
This is the part where they reap what they have sown-with the fall comes the punishment, or don’t you remember?
“Sam!” He’s broadsided even as he raises his blade-
-cull the fold, Sam. Don’t you remember how we culled our fold? Adam, first to burn away, consumed by Michael entirely, as they strove with us; consumed until he was nothing but dust. They were never meant for each other as we are.
Raw anger burns through Sam, and he’s going to do his job, because none can escape their judgement, but-
-”Sam, stop it! Have you lost your fucking mind?”
He knows that voice, better than his own. “Dean?” Sam says, and he stops struggling.
Dean-yes, it’s Dean, it is- pins his arms to his side, carefully prising the machete from Sam’s hand.
“Yes, it’s me. You’re just damn lucky I heard the screams on my way back to our room. What the hell are you doing?”
What is he... But “It’s a nest,” Sam says as people, just people, run crying out the now-empty door. “You told me it was a nest. of monsters”
The room is empty, now, but Sam can still hear screams in his ears. Hissing.
“That’s because it was, Sam.” Both Sam and Dean look up and stare at him, the Morningstar, dressed up as Dean, but not Dean, because Dean was warmth at Sam’s side, everything the Devil isn’t. “They just happened to be human. Like you.”
“Sammy?”
But Sam doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand.
That night, they watch the news together. The teary interviews and the pleas for the public to keep their eyes open, because the Winchesters are back.
-----
Dean (the real one this time, he’s sure, he’s positive, because the otherDean is slouched down in the backseat) drives them halfway through Missouri before the sun has a chance to rise again. His fingers are turning white on the steering wheel and his mouth is pinched small and his eyes are narrowed against the hazy sunlight bouncing off the highway before them.
“Think we’re far enough yet?”
“Well, good morning, sunshine. Have a nice little beauty sleep?” There’s this funny tension to Dean’s voice, like he’s stretched it thin through the barrel of a nine mil.
“We can’t stop yet. I... I scared them way too much.”
“I know, Sam. Look-clouds. Think we’ll catch up with them?”
-----
Thursday is a wet day, until Sam wakes up-then it is an icy day.
-----
When they reach Tulsa, they rest. Peggy’s Corner lies in the middle of a long street just along the edge of downtown. Frost snakes across the window panes, and people start putting their coats on where they sit. The waitress seats them as three.
“What can I get for you gentlemen?” Her smile is wide, but skitters off her face too quickly to admire.
“Jack and bacon burger for me, side of fries and coffee,” Dean says, not looking at her soft face at all.
“Just coffee,” Sam says.
She smiles at him as she jots his order down. “Right. And anything for you?” She asks, turning to the one thing Sam and Dean are both trying so hard to ignore.
“Steak sandwich,” Lucifer says. “Rare as you can manage.” And he winks at Sam, and Sam knows exactly why.
“Sure thing.” She stops, considers, then adds, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen identical twins before. I don’t think I can tell a single difference, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Lucifer grins in the lascivious way Dean had once had wont to, sending her off blushing.
He’s smiling in exactly the same way when he turns his head to Sam.
“Do you remember, way back to our century or two of fun?” (Sam is fine, Sam is fine, but Dean looks ill.) “Of all the things we did together, I think I treasure most our little picnics.”
(Sam is fine, he’s fine, he remembers and that’s one hundred percent okay, because he will be strong for once, just one damn time, in his life.)
“We even each had our own little jobs. Kind of like your life with Dean; almost exactly like it. I would set the table, and you would spread out the feast.”
(Red filters down from the ceiling and lights flicker overhead; the waitress, startled, sets their plates down with shaking hands; there is a humming, lowly and terrible, the thrum of damnation; Sam is fine, he is fine and fine.)
“And that feast, it was always oh, so perfect,” Dean (notDean) says as he lifts his bleeding sandwich to his mouth. “It was perfect because it was made for me. Because you were made for me.”
Made for him, you were made for him, Sam, don’t you remember? Oh, he does remember, the taste rising in his mouth until all he can feel is the slime of entrails, still warm and still bleeding, everywhere, and everywhere is screaming, Dean is screaming (he’s screaming Sam! We gotta go, we need to leave, right the fuck now!), and Sam can’t breathe at all, but, “It’s not real, you’re not real, none of this is,” he says, digging his hand into his palm to pinch himself awake, grinding nerves and fragile bone, trying so hard to Wake up, now, right now.
Dean pulls him away, through the thickness of screaming and hysteria, into the open air of outside, but that doesn’t wash the taste (he knows so well) away.
Inside, people are retching and crying, trying to rub the blood off their hands and watching as their food changes before their eyes.
“Don’t worry, you’ll all get used to it,” Sam says to them, those little figurines in the window. “It won’t take long,” his voice tailing off. “It didn’t for me.”
Then Dean is retching, too.
-----
The constant chill they now live in (Lucifer, tapping so gently the glass and ice is spreading fast from pane to wall; a white ivy hanging from the ceiling) is driving Sam mad.
“No, Sam. I’m doing what I always do-nothing more than bring out your very best.”
Dean, huddled up like a pig-in-a-blanket in the corner, is staring wide-eyed at his mother (who is not), mouth pinched and forehead so slightly creased.
“Sam,” Dean says, voice tight. “Make her-him-go away.”
Mary sits down next to Dean, and Sam can’t-he can only shiver and try (and fail) to ignore the puffing up of his breath and the way the dry cold lances a spike through his lungs.
(Maybe he can pretend, pretend, that mother Mary dear is here, is home, and she will make it better.) But that’s fantasy.
“Is it really, Sam? I’m here. Just ask Dean.” Her voice (his-his voice) is soft, and lithe-a snake, remember, Sam?
(Remember, Sam, and don’t forget, and don’t be tricked. Not again.)
“Go away.” Sam hears the naked fear in his own voice and can’t feel embarrassed. “You’re from my head. And I want you to go away.”
“Aw, Sammy, doesn’t work like that.” Mary looks so sympathetic, so understanding that Sam-that he-
“GO,” he says and the lights (burst and shatter into a million stars) and his right arm (squeezed with pressure that runs through it like a shockwave) stretched out before him, and the end table flies at her (at Mary mother dear)-
She smiles.
“Now isn’t that interesting.”
And vanishes.
-----
“I don’t know what the hell is happening. Do you think you could maybe clue me in?”
“I’m remembering, I think. These are mostly memories. Maybe something, I don’t know, flipped a switch-” Ava smiles at him from just behind Dean, waves one of her bloodied hands- “and I’m... making all this happen.”
“Cas really did a number on you, when he went pawing around in there. Do you think he could...?”
“We haven’t even heard of him in weeks. I don’t think he’s going to help us.”
“Well, can you, I don’t know, stop it? Just-we can’t keep doing this, Sam.”
“I know. I’m trying.”
“Yeah, Dean. We’re trying.” Lucifer smiles at the both of them. “We’re trying our very best.”
Sam sees Dean flinch and thanks everything he ever once believed in that Alistair had never been a part of his private Hell-Dean living with his own doppelganger is bad enough.
-----
The first official morning of winter, Sam wakes up dying. He is suspended from the ceiling by hooks of bone, speared through his hands, the blood that should be pouring out of him slowed to a cold, congealed slide down his arms.
It’s nice, Sam thinks as he feels his flesh tear ever so slowly, that this is a memory. He knows how it ends. His hands, unable to bear alone the weight of a full grown man, will rip in two, he will fall to the ground, and the jagged icy spikes below him will punch a few holes too many through his lungs. Sam knows that in due course, he will drown, but then (and this is the important part) he will rise again.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you he says, and John, crouched down with hands (folded) hanging between his knees, smiles and says, Anything for my baby boy. Anything at all and isn’t that so John, so (unlike) John it makes him want to laugh and laugh and (never) stop his trembling
-screaming-
his throat is torn (just like his legs) and he hopes (but nothing more than that) that he is dead and cold before Dean gets back
(Dean doesn’t need to see this, see Sam hanging like a limpet, so pathetic,
-but Sam, Dean knows this of you already. He knows, and you couldn’t ever hide that anyway, he figured it out so long ago-)
so Sam hopes he’s cold and gone and back again before Dean gets back with coffee.
Relief, Sam begs, give me relief.
John shakes his head and shakes his head and smiles with only half his mouth (and see, Sam, that’s not like Dad-it’s not like him at all) and says, That’s the one thing I can’t just give you. Gotta work for that, Sam. Where will you get in life if I just hand you what you want forever?
So Sammy boy, he works and works, and thinks and plots away (how to get down, how to fall and rise again), for if one thing is for certain, Sam knows this: he will never stay dead.
-----
Sam is gone before he finds a way to fall to the floor all on his own, but he’s back again just as Dean steps back into the room.
He would like to think it was Dean’s completely unfettered panic that woke him, but he knows (deep down, where truth lies unmolested) it was nothing more than Lucifer’s unholy power.
The Devil lived inside his skin, after all-before, and now again-and that has to leave a mark.
“And I am the only one who is here for you, Sam. For now and always, just as I was before.”
“Sam?! Sammy, don’t you listen to him. I’m here. I’m right here.”
Sam can’t think (can’t breathe, can’t even fucking lie there), can’t remember which Dean is his Dean-but then again, are any of them ever Dean? Have any of them ever been his Dean-
-----
“Sammy-Sammy, I’m here, it’s me, I’m here.”
He wakes again (brain fixing its own bruises, like a big boy, right Sammy) to Dean shaking his shoulder and promising-
(But he’s said that before, and Sam learns, he’s smart, went to Stanford and everything on his own merit-and I’ll never forgive you for that one, brother no, not his brother, neither and both are his brother.)
Dean (Dean?) dribbles water between his lips and Sam can feel his brother’s hand tremble (like a paper lost in the wind) where it catches the back of his head.
“You are Dean,” Sam says through his ragged and healing throat, pausing to cough up clotted blood (Dean frets and tries to hide it and shut him up all at the same time, saying, “it’s me, of course it is, I’m the only one on this whole planet willing to look after your crazy ass-”) and rambling straight on while Dean wipes the blood off of the corner of his mouth, “because you have to be Dean. Because you can’t be him, the one who s-stalks in the starlight of morning... and strikes from the cl-clearest, the brightest light; you can’t. You can’t.”
“Yeah, Sammy, it’s me,” Dean says, voice just as broken as Sam’s, “so you can shut up with the poetry and shit. It’s me.”
And Sam just might believe him.
Dean (Dean?) presses a palm to his cheek and neither of them say another word, while they wait for Sam’s flesh to knit itself back together.
Behind them, the sun rises and sets over the broken jaw of their lost kingdom.
-----
They leave before the maid finds the blood splaying its greedy fingers across the wall, but they hear she fainted, when they watch the six o’clock news the next day.
It takes a few border crossings before Sam and Dean feel the FBI’s most recent noose loosen enough to check into any more motels.
One call is all it takes, from any of the number of people that see Sam stumble over Jess’s mutilated corpse (middle of the day, he doesn’t care, he holds her tights enough that her blood and his tears mingle into something more than either), to get that noose to tighten all over again.
It’s all over YouTube within the day, and before long a few news stations pick it up-the brothers Winchester struck again, but one of them seems to feel remorse, they say as they post that shaky handheld clip of Sam screaming in the street, holding a tall and lovely and very dead blonde. Then they wonder and wonder what twisted brutality keeps him in line.
Perfume (flowers brightened by the damp of spring) is mingled with the blood on Sam’s shirt, but he can’t bring himself to wash it, even though. He totes it around until Dean steals it away while he’s sleeping. Sometimes, Sam feels badly for screaming at Dean for so long, after that. Mostly, though, Sam just feels badly.
-----
“Shit,” Dean says. There is no mistaking the blare of sirens huddling up right behind them. “Fuck. Fuck, fucking shit.” The Impala’s cabin floods with the flashing of red and blue lights.
“Dean. Pull over.”
“No, Sam. I don’t particularly feel like testing how trigger-happy the average trooper is. We gotta lose them.”
The farmlands of Idaho stretch on and on, an endless press of emptiness bordered by a cuff of mountains, blue and distant. The road before them is straight and forever.
“Dean. Pull over.”
“I’m not going where they’re going to take us. They’ll take you-” Dean stops short and takes a breath. The sirens get louder and louder. “They’ll lock us up for good, Sam.”
“Trust me. I can make them stop.”
“Yes, Dean. Trust us.”
Neither react to the voice from behind them. Dean drifts the Impala to a slow stop at the side of the highway and presses his knuckle to his mouth, humming an indistinct melody that Sam can’t quite place while the trooper (waiting for a moment of tense anticipation) walks up to the car, hand hovering over her holster. She stops just short of the trunk, reaching for her radio. (It’s blaring, it’s blaring, someone trying so hard to stop her, call her back.)
Her partner runs out after her, and then everything goes to shit-
-because he’s reaching for his gun, and she’s scrambling to pull out handcuffs, and Sam doesn’t want to fear, to be afraid, but he is and does-
Lucifer (my friend, my brother, closer to me than myself, save me) smiles and says, “Don’t worry. I’m always going to save you, Sam. And I’ll even save Dean, too.”
Dean is yelling, is screaming at them to, “Run! Get back, go back, I’m armed and I will shoot, so get back!” but they don’t listen, or at least don’t respond, and then there is ice and blood (flying so high, so far up above or deep down below) and Sam shakes.
He shakes and shakes, and when he wakes up, there is nothing left but the cold and the red of dawn spilled across the ground. Dean is kneeling in the road, and he is crying.
“I do this for you,” Lucifer says, and for that Sam will never forgive himself. Maybe that was the point.
“No,” Sam says. “Not anymore.”
The glass of every window drips with melting ice, and in the backseat, the Devil fades away, saying, “Are you sure about that, Sam?”
He is. He has to be.
-----
There is one thing that is absolutely certain to Sam’s (crazy) mind-that this is never going to go away. Sam brings danger forth, from the darkest and brightest recesses of the Cage, to Dean most of all, considering what Sam’s deepest fear was and is, and fear leads to reality in the terror that is the Cage. But he can learn.
And he will use this. He will.
Sam takes a deep breath, sits down, presses out his palm, and concentrates on the pencil he set on the table.
From the corner, Dean watches and John smiles with both sides of his mouth.
-.
Category: Gen, au
Warnings: Gore, language, suicidal thoughts, death and dying of minor characters
Summary: Sam's hallucinations become something more. Something real. And no one is prepared for that. Post 6.22 AU.
A/N: Written for a prompt on
ohsam's fic challenge. I have procrastinated horribly on it.
As nothing with them ever does, it starts out small; nearly unnoticeable. The day is clean and smells of smoke, the good kind that comes from campfires and roasted marshmallows. Sam and Dean had left the sluggish corpse-smoke a mile or so back, in a shallow grave recently exhumed. A simple salt and burn, and Sam would have called that a blessing if he didn’t know any better. His muscles are aching with a pleasant burn, fingers cramped from the hours they spent wrapped around a shovel’s handle, back trying to pull down into the curl he had made it accustomed to. Daylight bends between the thin forest trees, and Dean is a warmth just beside his shoulder.
Summer rain falls in airy waves, still warmed by a sun that hadn’t wanted to hide its face.
“Sam,” whispers the voice of frost; the rain freezes into sleet.
“Huh,” Dean says. The day had started hot and had only gotten hotter, and the season is still high with June, in the pressing closeness of Arizona air.
Dean turns around and smiles through the veil of light sleet, but Sam is listening to something else. Something that says, “Sam.”
“Sam. Sam.”
Says it more intimately than a lover’s touch.
Water freezes into ice and leaves fall from branches in white crystalline bunches.
“Sammy?” Dean’s eyes are wide, and he flinches along with Sam when the frost replies, “He’s mine.”
-----
It baffles meteorologists, the way cold follows Sam around. Nervous smiles crowd well-lit faces on network news shows; jokes are bandied about like weapons against the strange unknown, as the weather folk say, “Maybe this time, maybe I’ll tell it true.” There is no reason behind the sudden frosts, the midsummer’s chills that devastate farmland and family plans involving the beach, and no one has real answers. It’s only all the more puzzling the way the indecisive weather shifts around the country, heedless of mother nature’s every rule, ignoring the paths the wind scythes across from north to south to north; just roaming. Aimless, for all that they can tell.
Of course, after the first cry of “Global warming freak side effect,” everyone calms down, for this is a crisis they know already, and already are they versed in ignoring it. It becomes another tragedy to mark upon the log of Man’s Crime Against Nature, and another excuse to rack up voter sympathy by pledging action in by-elections across the nation. It becomes just another cause for heroes and hypocrites alike to rally around.
Except for Sam. He watches, sometimes, the local news, scouting for jobs and searching stories of miracles and righteous justice for a clue of Castiel’s location. After seeing just a few weather reports, it doesn’t take Sam long to fill in the blanks for himself-the frost has followed him; the chill of Hell nips greedily at his heels.
-----
That’s all it is, for months. Nothing but a grasping chill that squeezes Sam tight and won’t allow him the comfort of warmth. But this is how they know it’s bad:
The black dog sinks into the black fastness of the night and both Sam and Dean are panting. It was an easy shot-at any other time at all, one he could have made without thought-but for that all-important moment, Sam couldn’t see his target for the frost that rimmed his eyes and Dean’s fierce “Sam, down!” he heard as only though from across a vast distance. Water clogs his ears, and flash-freezes to sharp ice, and then he can’t hear at all.
“That’s the distance between worlds, Sam.” Sandy hair over a sad frown. “From up above to down below. It’s not your fault. It’s just too far to fathom.”
Pinch yourself, Sam. And then you’ll know what’s real.
“Sammy? Think I saw something, just outta the corner of my eye,” Dean says. “Think it went that way. Let’s go round that bastard up.” Dean slaps him in the shoulder. “Ready?”
Sam shakes himself loose and throws Dean a nod. Guns cocked, they split apart.
The woods are quiet, but through them, Sam can hear wet panting. Bracken cracks under his feet as he runs, low to the ground, but the black dog has gone. White puffs of breath, and Sam should go back, should really go back, to find Dean.
Quiet spreads through the woods, and isn’t that so wrong. Sam runs.
This is how Sam finds him. Flat on his back in a damp clearing, moon lighting a pale (too pale, so pale) face.
“Dean?! Dean!” Sam shakes him, but it isn’t working, he isn’t doing his damn job, he’s going to save Dean, he will, because Dean saved him.
-come on, Sam don’t let this be-
Lilith laughs beside him, and trails her finger along the tear tracks on his face as-
-”Dean, no, no...”-
Green eyes lock onto his face and Dean’s mouth opens (gently, slowly), but he can only gurgle, wet and red, through his clawed throat-he’s blowing bubbles.
Sam laughs and laughs, Lilith cooing as she kneels beside him, and then he cries in silence.
“Dude, what the fuck?” But Sam can’t let go of his brother, just can’t, so he doesn’t respond at all.
Lilith does. She stands up, with her hand pressed on Sam’s shoulder, looks at Dean (both of them) and says, “Well, isn’t that interesting.”
Sam looks up, and then back down. A balding, middle-aged man is lying dead in his arms, and Dean is staring at him from just beyond the clearing’s edge.
-----
In Indiana, they ask questions. In Tennessee, they think they’ve found answers. It isn’t anything demonic or other worldly, following them and giving them a headache they hadn’t had before-it’s Sam.
A man with a knife rushes Dean just outside a bar. Sam remembers endless Tuesdays and the year of Wednesday (or almost year-six and four only add up to ten, after all) and this time, Bobby and Ruby won’t be there to grab him tight like they had before, when he had wanted to give in so bad he could see his own end like a beacon of hope tattooed across his eyelids.
These are the facts: a man with a knife rushes Dean, and Sam stops him.
Stops him cold and dead and rendered harmless, from clear across the alley. Dean stares at Sam’s outstretched arm, and the darkness that flickers up and down his skin. Neither of them know what to say. (But Sam really wishes that Dean would call him Skywalker, would joke and slap him on the back.) Dean flinches (just a very little bit) when Sam reaches out for his shoulder. Wanting to make sure he’s okay.
It’s not okay, though.
-----
Early in the third night of the full moon, in Illinois, they lay to rest a werewolf who hadn’t known his own secret-Dean looked so uneasy after the werewolf had shifted back, in his dying still so bewildered. There is no talk, in the car, as they drive Darren to his funeral pyre; there is not one word said as they watch the fire bend the night air around a thin sheen of heat. The drive back into town is thick with regret, for the monster who didn’t choose his path. Under the car’s heavy tires, asphalt is devoured.
Sam doesn’t even take off his shoes (feet so cold, can’t take off his shoes) before he piles blankets, and pillow after pillow, on top of his lumpy motel bed and tries so hard to sleep through his shivering.
Morning fog is still hanging low in the grass when Dean shakes Sam awake.
“What-”Sam pauses to cough away the sleep in his voice. “What’s wrong?”
“Something hinky’s hiding out in an office building just south of here,” Dean says as he shoves a sawed-off into Sam’s black duffle. “Looks like a nest.”
Sam shivers and scratches at the goosebumps that are crawling up his arms. Says, “Nest of what?”
“Vampires.”
Sam nods, scratches at the stubble crawling down his chin, and yawns as he follows Dean’s ice-encrusted footprints outside. While Dean drives, he nearly falls right back asleep, the car humming like a lullaby.
The lot Dean pulls into is empty but for a single rusted sedan lingering at the building’s side, and dimly lit, the few working streetlights shining out a yellow dark with age. The office building itself is short and stout, shouldered on either side by lean warehouses, and very very dark. There’s one room that Sam can see with the lights on, and in it, he can see shadows pacing.
Sam turns to Dean. “You sure about this?” But Dean just resettles the dufflebag over his shoulder.
The doors catches at first, locked and maybe hooked to an alarm, but before Sam can start thinking about alternate approaches, Dean says, “No, wait-it’s fine, it’s open,” like it was never any problem at all. Morningstar Industries, the door says as it swings open. Swings easy and free, and then they’re inside, following the smell of blood down the hallway, trapped in a wide smear upon the floor.
“See, Sam? Now do you wanna ask if I’m sure?”
Sam shakes his head, just a little bit, before stopping just outside the lit room. The both of them ready their long knives, glistening with dead man’s blood. There isn’t going to be much time, ten or fifteen seconds tops, before the vampires collect themselves to fight back, but if they take out at least one or two before they realize what’s happening, they might turn wild and impotent with grief. Or maybe just wild.
“One. Two. Three.” They burst into the room at the same time, machetes raised high, but they immediately start screaming (fangs thrust out, malice glittering in beetle’s eyes) and thrashing about the room-so fast, they’re running and writhing and screaming, and Sam doesn’t have the chance to get any of them.
“Come on, Sam!” Dean says. He’s blocking the door, but the room is large and the vampires are few.
“Just wait,” Sam says. Just wait. No door, only one other way out: The windows. The honey pot to lure in the wasps.
Dean laughs. “Always were good at this, weren’t you, Sammy. Might just be the only thing you ever could do right.”
And Sam is very good at this, the hunt, where instincts never lead him wrong and his own destructive whims can’t betray him.
Five screaming monsters flail ineffectually at the three windows set into the wall. A grimace pulls Sam’s face down and why don’t they attack? Why run without any fight at all?
“Fear of you, Sammy boy.” The words are quiet, but sharp enough to cut through the noise. “Now do your damn job, for once.”
They scramble away, hissing between their fangs in fear and frustration as the windows fail to open, and (backed into a corner, packed into the corner, no escape from the shine, the white light of retribution and justice; endless, painful justice) Sam has caught in his trap; they’ve fallen into it, his carefully set hole in the ground.
This is the part where they reap what they have sown-with the fall comes the punishment, or don’t you remember?
“Sam!” He’s broadsided even as he raises his blade-
-cull the fold, Sam. Don’t you remember how we culled our fold? Adam, first to burn away, consumed by Michael entirely, as they strove with us; consumed until he was nothing but dust. They were never meant for each other as we are.
Raw anger burns through Sam, and he’s going to do his job, because none can escape their judgement, but-
-”Sam, stop it! Have you lost your fucking mind?”
He knows that voice, better than his own. “Dean?” Sam says, and he stops struggling.
Dean-yes, it’s Dean, it is- pins his arms to his side, carefully prising the machete from Sam’s hand.
“Yes, it’s me. You’re just damn lucky I heard the screams on my way back to our room. What the hell are you doing?”
What is he... But “It’s a nest,” Sam says as people, just people, run crying out the now-empty door. “You told me it was a nest. of monsters”
The room is empty, now, but Sam can still hear screams in his ears. Hissing.
“That’s because it was, Sam.” Both Sam and Dean look up and stare at him, the Morningstar, dressed up as Dean, but not Dean, because Dean was warmth at Sam’s side, everything the Devil isn’t. “They just happened to be human. Like you.”
“Sammy?”
But Sam doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand.
That night, they watch the news together. The teary interviews and the pleas for the public to keep their eyes open, because the Winchesters are back.
-----
Dean (the real one this time, he’s sure, he’s positive, because the otherDean is slouched down in the backseat) drives them halfway through Missouri before the sun has a chance to rise again. His fingers are turning white on the steering wheel and his mouth is pinched small and his eyes are narrowed against the hazy sunlight bouncing off the highway before them.
“Think we’re far enough yet?”
“Well, good morning, sunshine. Have a nice little beauty sleep?” There’s this funny tension to Dean’s voice, like he’s stretched it thin through the barrel of a nine mil.
“We can’t stop yet. I... I scared them way too much.”
“I know, Sam. Look-clouds. Think we’ll catch up with them?”
-----
Thursday is a wet day, until Sam wakes up-then it is an icy day.
-----
When they reach Tulsa, they rest. Peggy’s Corner lies in the middle of a long street just along the edge of downtown. Frost snakes across the window panes, and people start putting their coats on where they sit. The waitress seats them as three.
“What can I get for you gentlemen?” Her smile is wide, but skitters off her face too quickly to admire.
“Jack and bacon burger for me, side of fries and coffee,” Dean says, not looking at her soft face at all.
“Just coffee,” Sam says.
She smiles at him as she jots his order down. “Right. And anything for you?” She asks, turning to the one thing Sam and Dean are both trying so hard to ignore.
“Steak sandwich,” Lucifer says. “Rare as you can manage.” And he winks at Sam, and Sam knows exactly why.
“Sure thing.” She stops, considers, then adds, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen identical twins before. I don’t think I can tell a single difference, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Lucifer grins in the lascivious way Dean had once had wont to, sending her off blushing.
He’s smiling in exactly the same way when he turns his head to Sam.
“Do you remember, way back to our century or two of fun?” (Sam is fine, Sam is fine, but Dean looks ill.) “Of all the things we did together, I think I treasure most our little picnics.”
(Sam is fine, he’s fine, he remembers and that’s one hundred percent okay, because he will be strong for once, just one damn time, in his life.)
“We even each had our own little jobs. Kind of like your life with Dean; almost exactly like it. I would set the table, and you would spread out the feast.”
(Red filters down from the ceiling and lights flicker overhead; the waitress, startled, sets their plates down with shaking hands; there is a humming, lowly and terrible, the thrum of damnation; Sam is fine, he is fine and fine.)
“And that feast, it was always oh, so perfect,” Dean (notDean) says as he lifts his bleeding sandwich to his mouth. “It was perfect because it was made for me. Because you were made for me.”
Made for him, you were made for him, Sam, don’t you remember? Oh, he does remember, the taste rising in his mouth until all he can feel is the slime of entrails, still warm and still bleeding, everywhere, and everywhere is screaming, Dean is screaming (he’s screaming Sam! We gotta go, we need to leave, right the fuck now!), and Sam can’t breathe at all, but, “It’s not real, you’re not real, none of this is,” he says, digging his hand into his palm to pinch himself awake, grinding nerves and fragile bone, trying so hard to Wake up, now, right now.
Dean pulls him away, through the thickness of screaming and hysteria, into the open air of outside, but that doesn’t wash the taste (he knows so well) away.
Inside, people are retching and crying, trying to rub the blood off their hands and watching as their food changes before their eyes.
“Don’t worry, you’ll all get used to it,” Sam says to them, those little figurines in the window. “It won’t take long,” his voice tailing off. “It didn’t for me.”
Then Dean is retching, too.
-----
The constant chill they now live in (Lucifer, tapping so gently the glass and ice is spreading fast from pane to wall; a white ivy hanging from the ceiling) is driving Sam mad.
“No, Sam. I’m doing what I always do-nothing more than bring out your very best.”
Dean, huddled up like a pig-in-a-blanket in the corner, is staring wide-eyed at his mother (who is not), mouth pinched and forehead so slightly creased.
“Sam,” Dean says, voice tight. “Make her-him-go away.”
Mary sits down next to Dean, and Sam can’t-he can only shiver and try (and fail) to ignore the puffing up of his breath and the way the dry cold lances a spike through his lungs.
(Maybe he can pretend, pretend, that mother Mary dear is here, is home, and she will make it better.) But that’s fantasy.
“Is it really, Sam? I’m here. Just ask Dean.” Her voice (his-his voice) is soft, and lithe-a snake, remember, Sam?
(Remember, Sam, and don’t forget, and don’t be tricked. Not again.)
“Go away.” Sam hears the naked fear in his own voice and can’t feel embarrassed. “You’re from my head. And I want you to go away.”
“Aw, Sammy, doesn’t work like that.” Mary looks so sympathetic, so understanding that Sam-that he-
“GO,” he says and the lights (burst and shatter into a million stars) and his right arm (squeezed with pressure that runs through it like a shockwave) stretched out before him, and the end table flies at her (at Mary mother dear)-
She smiles.
“Now isn’t that interesting.”
And vanishes.
-----
“I don’t know what the hell is happening. Do you think you could maybe clue me in?”
“I’m remembering, I think. These are mostly memories. Maybe something, I don’t know, flipped a switch-” Ava smiles at him from just behind Dean, waves one of her bloodied hands- “and I’m... making all this happen.”
“Cas really did a number on you, when he went pawing around in there. Do you think he could...?”
“We haven’t even heard of him in weeks. I don’t think he’s going to help us.”
“Well, can you, I don’t know, stop it? Just-we can’t keep doing this, Sam.”
“I know. I’m trying.”
“Yeah, Dean. We’re trying.” Lucifer smiles at the both of them. “We’re trying our very best.”
Sam sees Dean flinch and thanks everything he ever once believed in that Alistair had never been a part of his private Hell-Dean living with his own doppelganger is bad enough.
-----
The first official morning of winter, Sam wakes up dying. He is suspended from the ceiling by hooks of bone, speared through his hands, the blood that should be pouring out of him slowed to a cold, congealed slide down his arms.
It’s nice, Sam thinks as he feels his flesh tear ever so slowly, that this is a memory. He knows how it ends. His hands, unable to bear alone the weight of a full grown man, will rip in two, he will fall to the ground, and the jagged icy spikes below him will punch a few holes too many through his lungs. Sam knows that in due course, he will drown, but then (and this is the important part) he will rise again.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you he says, and John, crouched down with hands (folded) hanging between his knees, smiles and says, Anything for my baby boy. Anything at all and isn’t that so John, so (unlike) John it makes him want to laugh and laugh and (never) stop his trembling
-screaming-
his throat is torn (just like his legs) and he hopes (but nothing more than that) that he is dead and cold before Dean gets back
(Dean doesn’t need to see this, see Sam hanging like a limpet, so pathetic,
-but Sam, Dean knows this of you already. He knows, and you couldn’t ever hide that anyway, he figured it out so long ago-)
so Sam hopes he’s cold and gone and back again before Dean gets back with coffee.
Relief, Sam begs, give me relief.
John shakes his head and shakes his head and smiles with only half his mouth (and see, Sam, that’s not like Dad-it’s not like him at all) and says, That’s the one thing I can’t just give you. Gotta work for that, Sam. Where will you get in life if I just hand you what you want forever?
So Sammy boy, he works and works, and thinks and plots away (how to get down, how to fall and rise again), for if one thing is for certain, Sam knows this: he will never stay dead.
-----
Sam is gone before he finds a way to fall to the floor all on his own, but he’s back again just as Dean steps back into the room.
He would like to think it was Dean’s completely unfettered panic that woke him, but he knows (deep down, where truth lies unmolested) it was nothing more than Lucifer’s unholy power.
The Devil lived inside his skin, after all-before, and now again-and that has to leave a mark.
“And I am the only one who is here for you, Sam. For now and always, just as I was before.”
“Sam?! Sammy, don’t you listen to him. I’m here. I’m right here.”
Sam can’t think (can’t breathe, can’t even fucking lie there), can’t remember which Dean is his Dean-but then again, are any of them ever Dean? Have any of them ever been his Dean-
-----
“Sammy-Sammy, I’m here, it’s me, I’m here.”
He wakes again (brain fixing its own bruises, like a big boy, right Sammy) to Dean shaking his shoulder and promising-
(But he’s said that before, and Sam learns, he’s smart, went to Stanford and everything on his own merit-and I’ll never forgive you for that one, brother no, not his brother, neither and both are his brother.)
Dean (Dean?) dribbles water between his lips and Sam can feel his brother’s hand tremble (like a paper lost in the wind) where it catches the back of his head.
“You are Dean,” Sam says through his ragged and healing throat, pausing to cough up clotted blood (Dean frets and tries to hide it and shut him up all at the same time, saying, “it’s me, of course it is, I’m the only one on this whole planet willing to look after your crazy ass-”) and rambling straight on while Dean wipes the blood off of the corner of his mouth, “because you have to be Dean. Because you can’t be him, the one who s-stalks in the starlight of morning... and strikes from the cl-clearest, the brightest light; you can’t. You can’t.”
“Yeah, Sammy, it’s me,” Dean says, voice just as broken as Sam’s, “so you can shut up with the poetry and shit. It’s me.”
And Sam just might believe him.
Dean (Dean?) presses a palm to his cheek and neither of them say another word, while they wait for Sam’s flesh to knit itself back together.
Behind them, the sun rises and sets over the broken jaw of their lost kingdom.
-----
They leave before the maid finds the blood splaying its greedy fingers across the wall, but they hear she fainted, when they watch the six o’clock news the next day.
It takes a few border crossings before Sam and Dean feel the FBI’s most recent noose loosen enough to check into any more motels.
One call is all it takes, from any of the number of people that see Sam stumble over Jess’s mutilated corpse (middle of the day, he doesn’t care, he holds her tights enough that her blood and his tears mingle into something more than either), to get that noose to tighten all over again.
It’s all over YouTube within the day, and before long a few news stations pick it up-the brothers Winchester struck again, but one of them seems to feel remorse, they say as they post that shaky handheld clip of Sam screaming in the street, holding a tall and lovely and very dead blonde. Then they wonder and wonder what twisted brutality keeps him in line.
Perfume (flowers brightened by the damp of spring) is mingled with the blood on Sam’s shirt, but he can’t bring himself to wash it, even though. He totes it around until Dean steals it away while he’s sleeping. Sometimes, Sam feels badly for screaming at Dean for so long, after that. Mostly, though, Sam just feels badly.
-----
“Shit,” Dean says. There is no mistaking the blare of sirens huddling up right behind them. “Fuck. Fuck, fucking shit.” The Impala’s cabin floods with the flashing of red and blue lights.
“Dean. Pull over.”
“No, Sam. I don’t particularly feel like testing how trigger-happy the average trooper is. We gotta lose them.”
The farmlands of Idaho stretch on and on, an endless press of emptiness bordered by a cuff of mountains, blue and distant. The road before them is straight and forever.
“Dean. Pull over.”
“I’m not going where they’re going to take us. They’ll take you-” Dean stops short and takes a breath. The sirens get louder and louder. “They’ll lock us up for good, Sam.”
“Trust me. I can make them stop.”
“Yes, Dean. Trust us.”
Neither react to the voice from behind them. Dean drifts the Impala to a slow stop at the side of the highway and presses his knuckle to his mouth, humming an indistinct melody that Sam can’t quite place while the trooper (waiting for a moment of tense anticipation) walks up to the car, hand hovering over her holster. She stops just short of the trunk, reaching for her radio. (It’s blaring, it’s blaring, someone trying so hard to stop her, call her back.)
Her partner runs out after her, and then everything goes to shit-
-because he’s reaching for his gun, and she’s scrambling to pull out handcuffs, and Sam doesn’t want to fear, to be afraid, but he is and does-
Lucifer (my friend, my brother, closer to me than myself, save me) smiles and says, “Don’t worry. I’m always going to save you, Sam. And I’ll even save Dean, too.”
Dean is yelling, is screaming at them to, “Run! Get back, go back, I’m armed and I will shoot, so get back!” but they don’t listen, or at least don’t respond, and then there is ice and blood (flying so high, so far up above or deep down below) and Sam shakes.
He shakes and shakes, and when he wakes up, there is nothing left but the cold and the red of dawn spilled across the ground. Dean is kneeling in the road, and he is crying.
“I do this for you,” Lucifer says, and for that Sam will never forgive himself. Maybe that was the point.
“No,” Sam says. “Not anymore.”
The glass of every window drips with melting ice, and in the backseat, the Devil fades away, saying, “Are you sure about that, Sam?”
He is. He has to be.
-----
There is one thing that is absolutely certain to Sam’s (crazy) mind-that this is never going to go away. Sam brings danger forth, from the darkest and brightest recesses of the Cage, to Dean most of all, considering what Sam’s deepest fear was and is, and fear leads to reality in the terror that is the Cage. But he can learn.
And he will use this. He will.
Sam takes a deep breath, sits down, presses out his palm, and concentrates on the pencil he set on the table.
From the corner, Dean watches and John smiles with both sides of his mouth.
-.