SPN FIC: He Tore Its Chords Asunder
Title: He Tore Its Chords Asunder
Summary: It's always bad when they separate. It's worse when they don't get a choice.
Characters: Sam, Dean, Jody Mills, a little bit of Frank, implied Castiel
Genre: h/c, season 7, probably AU after 7.16-17
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox
Wordcount: 2,931
Warnings: Super major spoilers for the rest of season 7. I couldn't help myself. They're too delicious. But if you're a spoilerphobe, you might want to wait a few weeks. I understand. Kisses!
Author's Note: The title comes from the song "The Minstrel Boy." It's such a pretty song. So so so lovely and melancholy. I first heard it at the end of Black Hawk Down. I went to the same high school as one of the soldiers that the movie is based on so it was kind've a big deal when it came out. I actually worked with his sister at the time and had no freaking idea who she was until she came in to talk to the class about her brother. Anyway, I'm slightly drunk and rambling. For your listening pleasure...clicky.
You haven’t seen Sam in just over a week-- nine days-- he broke nine days ago in a library in Arkansas while you were in the Wendy’s drive-thru. You were trying stretch your legs in the cramped space beneath the battered (stolen) Camry’s dashboard when something delicate and precious in Sam’s head snapped like a cheap string tasked with holding too much weight. You remember the genealogy room as small and dignified, with overstuffed chairs and crumbling tomes beneath glass and air so silent and still and Sam’s nose shoved in a thick registar.
They have him strapped to the gurney when you pull up to the curb (same space, still some time on the meter, booyah) a greasy bag in the passenger foot well holding the triple with cheese for you and the plain salad and baked potato for him, “Something simple” he’d said, because his stomach had been off since that stupid Chuck E. Cheese ripoff and maybe that was a sign, maybe it was a sign and you missed it. You stuff your heart back down in the recesses of your chest and you’re about to jump in the ambulance with him when you hear a voice in the crowd of rubberneckers, just one, but that’s all it takes before someone is uploading grainy cell phone video to the local news affiliate, “Holy shit, that’s Sam Winchester! That’s that crazy serial killer! Holy shit.”
And it’s all over because one of the EMTs leans down and asks, “What’s your name, kiddo?” while his partner digs for Sam’s wallet, pulls out three different drivers licenses while Sam mutters, “Sam, I think...I think I need my brother...get my brother.”
“What’s your brother’s name, Sam?”
Sam pauses, he fucking pauses like he’s considering a couple of different answers, considering maybe this isn’t a conversation he should be having with a man in a uniform (and then a state trooper car pulls in behind the ambulance) before settling on, “Dean. Where’s Dean?” and pulling hard on the straps across his chest, arms, and legs.
“Son of a bitch.” You keep your head down. One of the cops jumps in the back of the ambulance. In the (fucking piece of shit) Camry you slam your hands against the steering wheel and pull your hair until your scalp goes numb. Back at the Midnight Motel you grab your shit as fast as you can, wipe fingerprints off of the doorknobs, the television remote, the shower faucets. You leave the key on the table next to the door and you call Frank like, seven times before slipping into one of Sam’s old hoodies, hiding your muscle, your frame, your face; making yourself look younger and smaller and less dangerous so you can sneak into a bar and (get plastered) see if your mug shots are on the evening news yet.
They are. (Of course.)
Jody Mills calls you and it’s such a relief, to listen to someone else map out an escape route for just a minute, until you realize that she’s not talking escape, she’s talking, “I’m gonna get clearance to come down there, pick a fight over who has jurisdiction and buy some time. You just lay low and don’t be stupid.”
“I need to see him, Jody.”
She says she knows, but it takes her nine fucking days to get the backdoor open just after twelve on a Sunday morning. Nine days of poring over the files Frank eventually gets a hold of, Sam’s (real) medical files-- paranoid schizophrenia, religious psychosis (not surprising), suicidal ideation (shit, Sam), history of attempts (let them be looking at those scars from the ghouls, oh please) and the feed from Sam’s little room, because there’s no such thing as privacy when you’re criminally insane. You watched Sam mumble at the air and flinch away from Jody when she slipped inside with the other end of the cell phone tether you constructed, humming Zep’s Rain Song over tinny speakers with no success. Sometimes he was tied down and sometimes he was drugged (too much) glassy eyed and listless and (scared) quiet. You still aren’t sure which option upsets you the most.
Five days ago, you pulled up the feed on Sam’s laptop and he wasn’t there. Jody wouldn’t pick up the phone. It took Frank nearly an hour of legwork to find him, “He’s in solitary.”
“Is he okay?”
(Say something.)
“Send me the feed. Now.”
“You don’t need to see that.”
“The hell I d--”
He hung up and Jody called later, voice thin and shaky, “He broke a nurse’s jaw, kicked an orderly hard enough to send him to the ER.”
“Well, what’d they do to him?”
“Nothing, Dean--” (muffled sobbing in the background, muffled pounding on a well-insulated wall)
“Is that him? Is that him in the background? Jody?”
“I got myself put on guard detail. There’s another officer here, from town, I think he knows about hunting. Covers for me a lot--”
“You can’t just go around telling anyone you want about--”
“He seems trustworthy.”
“You better make damn sure he’s trustworthy if he’s anywhere near my brother.” You start in about salt and silver and Jody is all “I know, I know, Dean, I said I’d do everything I can--”
“I’m coming over. Now.”
(You can’t.) “You can’t.”
They’re tryng to determine if Sam’s fit to stand trial. When you start to protest, Jody says they won’t, they can’t possibly consider it. “He doesn’t know his own name half the time.”
That’s why you need to be there.
Sam manages to keep himself out of solitary. He spends the first day back on Frank’s feed limp and drugged. Jody slips into the room with a bowl of Cheerios and he turns his head away from her. Later, you watch him pick food off of a plastic tray and when Jody finally meets you, leads you down a service corridor and up two flights of steps to a series of locked doors that she breezes through with a card key on a chord, you’re relieved that there are no feeding tubes, no IVs. It’s just Sam in loose scrubs, curled tight on the bed, sharp elbows resting on drawn up knees. There’s a yellow blanket pooled beneath his feet among other details that the grainy, blurry feed helpfully omitted: plastic bracelet on his left wrist “Winchester” clearly visible, fresh stitches over the old wound on his hand, nails filed down to the quick, and tired hazel eyes above a thick, dark beard. You always knew that between the two of you, you resembled your mother the most, but you never realized how much he looks like your father, albeit a very very lost version of him.
Jody nudges you the rest of the way across the threshold, “Rounds are in half an hour. Be ready to go before then.”
You swallow as the door clicks shut behind you and Sam very blatantly doesn’t look up. His eyes track something (nothing) on the other side of the room. You say, “Sammy?” and his gaze shifts slowly, fingertips on his unmarred hand linger over the new stitches in his left, “I’m real, Sammy.”
“You always say that.” He digs his fingers into the injured palm, flinches slightly, and when he looks at you again, his breath hitches, “Dean?”
He’s reaching for you with that maligned hand and before you realize that you’ve crossed the tiny room, Sam is shaking and sobbing and pressing his face into the thin material of your t-shirt. You don’t know where to put your hands because you don’t want to upset whatever fucked up semblance of balance this is. He lets you stroke his hair, awkwardly, and you’re both surprised and thankful that no one thought to cut it. You murmur, “Shhh. Sammy, you gotta shut up, okay? You gotta calm down. I can’t get caught here, bro.”
It takes him an immense effort to stop. He pulls back, curls back up with his elbows on his knees, face all sharp and pale and wet. Sam is such a messy fucking crier. He bites his bottom lip and you see the indentations where he’s bitten before.
“The fuck happened, Sam?”
You didn’t really expect an answer, let alone something that makes sense, “It’s all the same now. I close my eyes and the scenery changes, and the people. I always know where I am, just not how I got there.” His gaze lingers in the empty corner again. He flinches.
“It’s not real, Sammy. I don’t understand, you were...you were fine.”
“It was only a matter of time. I knew it all along and I didn't...” He’s drifting again, tears caught in his father’s beard like stars snagged in some god’s butterfly net, “I’m His favorite.”
“Well, you’re my favorite too and I had you first, so I get dibs.”
Sam whimpers and looks at his hands ( long, lovely piano hands) and you see faded cuffs in purple, green, and yellow encircling his wrists, skin like paper stretched over sharp bones and there should be more here, you think, more to him.
"What'd you do to yourself, bro?"
"I--" Sam's eyes go wide, "I need to pull Him out of me. I need you to…" He makes a motion, like carving a turkey, if the turkey was his forearm. You swallow bile and glance at the clock above the door, well fortified behind a cage made out of mesh and metal. Time is falling away like the smoldering embers of a spent pyre and you think that there's never enough of it. Or always too much of it. The supply never accomodates demand.
"He's not inside you, Sammy. Please just…you beat the real deal. Why can't you beat a figment of your imagination, huh?" Its more thinking out loud than the posing of an actual question, and Sam is very clearly unclear about where and what he is at the moment, but when he says "He's inside," in a voice that seems to diminish like his body, eroded by a lifetime of bad ideas, you think about an idea you had earlier, surprisingly sober and trembling with excitement and relief and (Sam Sam Sammy) determination that shined like something warmer than patented Winchester vengeance. You thought you would walk in here tonight and scoop him up like a baby (brother), carry him (out of the flames) and tuck him into a bed a hundred miles and one state line over.
Jody taps on the glass again, holds up five fingers.
(You can't.)
"I have to go soon." You force your voice to be steady and it breaks under the strain. Sam doesn't look up when he sobs, "Don't go. I'm sorry. Don't leave me with Him."
You wipe your nose with one sleeve of your flannel overshirt and carefully tilt Sam's face toward the light. You wipe the old tears and the the new and the snot pooling beneath his nose with your other sleeve with an obligatory and insincere, "Gross, dude."
Sam stares at something behind you, forces his eyes to meet yours when you gently command, "Look at me," and you both flinch, but he melts into your hold when you palm both sides of his face.
"Warm." Sam says like the thought is a red balloon that's slipped out of his grip, now headed skyward, long out of reach.
"I have to go soon. I don't want to, Sammy. Believe me, I don't. But I'm gonna fix this--"
"It's okay if you can't."
"Shut up, Sammy. Just shut the fuck up."
"I want you to be happy again."
"It's been a rough year, Sam--"
"No. No I mean" (flinch) "Happy like you were before" He pulls away from you again, back into himself (don’t go) "Happy like you were before you went to Hell and I went and everything...."
You bite your lip and tug the yellow blanket over his shoulders, guiding him down to the pillow where he coils into something impossibly small.
"I'm happy," you insist.
Sam snorts (liar) turns away and presses his face into the pillow. Jody raps on the window again, cracks the door open, "Dean--"
"I'm almost ready."
"Dean---"
"Just a little longer." (Just forever)
She looks between you and Sam, back and forth and back, nods shortly and tugs the door shut.
"I'll be back, Sammy."
He turns his head lethargically, looks at something beneath the barred window on the far wall and carefully makes his way back to you. You smile tight and painfully and you know he can tell that you're lying but you hope he can see that you're also trying, "I'll come back for you. Angels and demons can't keep us apart and that's just common knowledge."
You dig in your jacket pocket. Jody said not to bring anything, that it would get lost or confiscated, that it might hurt Sam more than help him. Sam watches, a little mistrusting, but then he looks at everything like that. He has for a long time. You think maybe he always did and you just never noticed. Or maybe he always looked at everything like that…except you, and that's why it's so jarring in its newness.
You hold the plastic green army man out, poised perfectly ready for a fight on your palm and Sam doesn't take it. He blinks and his face crumbles and he hides it in the pillow. You touch his head again with your other hand, trail it down his shoulder, his arm, to his gently curled hand. You wrap his fingers around the plastic talisman and press your forehead against his, "You beat him once."
"What if I can't do it this time?"
You swallow down the protestations because the first time around was just destiny. This is…Sam is fundamentally changed. You won't say broken because that's your word and maybe you're a little bit selfish sometimes and Sam can't be broken. Sam has never been broken. He's been taken away from you, lost, and he' s been damaged by the elements, eroded away to nothing but the framework, but you found him again and you built him again. You know for a fact that things that are broken can't be repaired, not really. You can fix them, sure, but they're never what they used to be. You've rebuilt the Impala more times than you like to think about and every time, she looks good as new, almost perfect. But she's not, and sometimes you think about how the initials carved in the trunk aren't the initials you and Sam scratched into the paint when you were kids, but replacements, mere imitations, added after you were long grown up and finally orphaned for good. To look at her, your baby, no one would know how destroyed she once was. But you know where to look to find the scars and Sam knows where to find yours and you refuse to look for his because he isn't broken. He isn't broken, he isn't--
"Then I'll take care of you."
Sam nods against you and when you take your hand away from his, his fingers remain firm around the little army man.
You don't look back as you walk down the dim, after-hours hallway. There are five doors between Sam's and the locked ward doors. Then there's a sitting room and the stairs. Jody buzzes you out and says, "That officer passed the tests. I didn't tell him everything, but I told him enough. There are enough wards hidden in that room to fend off the armies of Heaven and Hell."
"That's not as unlikely as you think." you mumble, glancing skyward and counting the windows until you see Sam's. There's a tree close enough to the building that the boughs press against the glass. When Jody wraps you in a tight hug, you keep your arms down and consider
swiping her key card, but you can always come back for it later.
"I'm gonna head back to Sioux Falls, " you say, "Get my fucking car."
"I don't know if that’s a good idea."
It's a terrible idea with all the renewed interest in those crazy killer Winchesters, but you'll be careful. You can only lock so much away for so long before something gives and you think that you have enough locked away right now.
"You let anything happen to him and I'll--"
"I know, Dean."
You nod and get in the shitty little Camry. You’ll ditch it in Kansas and drive a noisy old Ford truck the rest of the way to Sioux Falls and one of Frank’s safe lock-ups where the Impala is stashed beneath a brown tarp, behind boxes of old 45s and water-stained paperbacks and things that you think must have been in a house that Frank lived in before he was paranoid and broken like you.
But not like Sam, because Sam isn’t broken like the two of you. Sam just needs to rest. To sleep. To get his shit back together.
“I’ll call.”
Jody nods too, “I’ll call.”
“If anything--”
“I’ll call, Dean. I'll even call when the shit isn't hitting the fan. I know that's probably a foreign concept for you. ”
You press your lips together and look back up at the little barred window, “I should be with him.”
“No,” Jody thumps her fist on the hood of the Camry and steps back into the shadows of the Gothic fortress, “He should be out here with you.”
You keep your gaze on Sam’s window as you back the Camry out of the space, slowly circle the lot, the well manicured lawn. In the window beneath your brothers’, a light flickers on and a silhouette stands in the yellow light. You aren’t paying very close attention, but something flickers before the light blinks out again.
You swear it looks like angels wings.
You know for a fact that things that are broken can't be repaired.
You also know that things once thought to be lost (forever) have a way of turning up again.
Summary: It's always bad when they separate. It's worse when they don't get a choice.
Characters: Sam, Dean, Jody Mills, a little bit of Frank, implied Castiel
Genre: h/c, season 7, probably AU after 7.16-17
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox
Wordcount: 2,931
Warnings: Super major spoilers for the rest of season 7. I couldn't help myself. They're too delicious. But if you're a spoilerphobe, you might want to wait a few weeks. I understand. Kisses!
Author's Note: The title comes from the song "The Minstrel Boy." It's such a pretty song. So so so lovely and melancholy. I first heard it at the end of Black Hawk Down. I went to the same high school as one of the soldiers that the movie is based on so it was kind've a big deal when it came out. I actually worked with his sister at the time and had no freaking idea who she was until she came in to talk to the class about her brother. Anyway, I'm slightly drunk and rambling. For your listening pleasure...clicky.
You haven’t seen Sam in just over a week-- nine days-- he broke nine days ago in a library in Arkansas while you were in the Wendy’s drive-thru. You were trying stretch your legs in the cramped space beneath the battered (stolen) Camry’s dashboard when something delicate and precious in Sam’s head snapped like a cheap string tasked with holding too much weight. You remember the genealogy room as small and dignified, with overstuffed chairs and crumbling tomes beneath glass and air so silent and still and Sam’s nose shoved in a thick registar.
They have him strapped to the gurney when you pull up to the curb (same space, still some time on the meter, booyah) a greasy bag in the passenger foot well holding the triple with cheese for you and the plain salad and baked potato for him, “Something simple” he’d said, because his stomach had been off since that stupid Chuck E. Cheese ripoff and maybe that was a sign, maybe it was a sign and you missed it. You stuff your heart back down in the recesses of your chest and you’re about to jump in the ambulance with him when you hear a voice in the crowd of rubberneckers, just one, but that’s all it takes before someone is uploading grainy cell phone video to the local news affiliate, “Holy shit, that’s Sam Winchester! That’s that crazy serial killer! Holy shit.”
And it’s all over because one of the EMTs leans down and asks, “What’s your name, kiddo?” while his partner digs for Sam’s wallet, pulls out three different drivers licenses while Sam mutters, “Sam, I think...I think I need my brother...get my brother.”
“What’s your brother’s name, Sam?”
Sam pauses, he fucking pauses like he’s considering a couple of different answers, considering maybe this isn’t a conversation he should be having with a man in a uniform (and then a state trooper car pulls in behind the ambulance) before settling on, “Dean. Where’s Dean?” and pulling hard on the straps across his chest, arms, and legs.
“Son of a bitch.” You keep your head down. One of the cops jumps in the back of the ambulance. In the (fucking piece of shit) Camry you slam your hands against the steering wheel and pull your hair until your scalp goes numb. Back at the Midnight Motel you grab your shit as fast as you can, wipe fingerprints off of the doorknobs, the television remote, the shower faucets. You leave the key on the table next to the door and you call Frank like, seven times before slipping into one of Sam’s old hoodies, hiding your muscle, your frame, your face; making yourself look younger and smaller and less dangerous so you can sneak into a bar and (get plastered) see if your mug shots are on the evening news yet.
They are. (Of course.)
Jody Mills calls you and it’s such a relief, to listen to someone else map out an escape route for just a minute, until you realize that she’s not talking escape, she’s talking, “I’m gonna get clearance to come down there, pick a fight over who has jurisdiction and buy some time. You just lay low and don’t be stupid.”
“I need to see him, Jody.”
She says she knows, but it takes her nine fucking days to get the backdoor open just after twelve on a Sunday morning. Nine days of poring over the files Frank eventually gets a hold of, Sam’s (real) medical files-- paranoid schizophrenia, religious psychosis (not surprising), suicidal ideation (shit, Sam), history of attempts (let them be looking at those scars from the ghouls, oh please) and the feed from Sam’s little room, because there’s no such thing as privacy when you’re criminally insane. You watched Sam mumble at the air and flinch away from Jody when she slipped inside with the other end of the cell phone tether you constructed, humming Zep’s Rain Song over tinny speakers with no success. Sometimes he was tied down and sometimes he was drugged (too much) glassy eyed and listless and (scared) quiet. You still aren’t sure which option upsets you the most.
Five days ago, you pulled up the feed on Sam’s laptop and he wasn’t there. Jody wouldn’t pick up the phone. It took Frank nearly an hour of legwork to find him, “He’s in solitary.”
“Is he okay?”
(Say something.)
“Send me the feed. Now.”
“You don’t need to see that.”
“The hell I d--”
He hung up and Jody called later, voice thin and shaky, “He broke a nurse’s jaw, kicked an orderly hard enough to send him to the ER.”
“Well, what’d they do to him?”
“Nothing, Dean--” (muffled sobbing in the background, muffled pounding on a well-insulated wall)
“Is that him? Is that him in the background? Jody?”
“I got myself put on guard detail. There’s another officer here, from town, I think he knows about hunting. Covers for me a lot--”
“You can’t just go around telling anyone you want about--”
“He seems trustworthy.”
“You better make damn sure he’s trustworthy if he’s anywhere near my brother.” You start in about salt and silver and Jody is all “I know, I know, Dean, I said I’d do everything I can--”
“I’m coming over. Now.”
(You can’t.) “You can’t.”
They’re tryng to determine if Sam’s fit to stand trial. When you start to protest, Jody says they won’t, they can’t possibly consider it. “He doesn’t know his own name half the time.”
That’s why you need to be there.
Sam manages to keep himself out of solitary. He spends the first day back on Frank’s feed limp and drugged. Jody slips into the room with a bowl of Cheerios and he turns his head away from her. Later, you watch him pick food off of a plastic tray and when Jody finally meets you, leads you down a service corridor and up two flights of steps to a series of locked doors that she breezes through with a card key on a chord, you’re relieved that there are no feeding tubes, no IVs. It’s just Sam in loose scrubs, curled tight on the bed, sharp elbows resting on drawn up knees. There’s a yellow blanket pooled beneath his feet among other details that the grainy, blurry feed helpfully omitted: plastic bracelet on his left wrist “Winchester” clearly visible, fresh stitches over the old wound on his hand, nails filed down to the quick, and tired hazel eyes above a thick, dark beard. You always knew that between the two of you, you resembled your mother the most, but you never realized how much he looks like your father, albeit a very very lost version of him.
Jody nudges you the rest of the way across the threshold, “Rounds are in half an hour. Be ready to go before then.”
You swallow as the door clicks shut behind you and Sam very blatantly doesn’t look up. His eyes track something (nothing) on the other side of the room. You say, “Sammy?” and his gaze shifts slowly, fingertips on his unmarred hand linger over the new stitches in his left, “I’m real, Sammy.”
“You always say that.” He digs his fingers into the injured palm, flinches slightly, and when he looks at you again, his breath hitches, “Dean?”
He’s reaching for you with that maligned hand and before you realize that you’ve crossed the tiny room, Sam is shaking and sobbing and pressing his face into the thin material of your t-shirt. You don’t know where to put your hands because you don’t want to upset whatever fucked up semblance of balance this is. He lets you stroke his hair, awkwardly, and you’re both surprised and thankful that no one thought to cut it. You murmur, “Shhh. Sammy, you gotta shut up, okay? You gotta calm down. I can’t get caught here, bro.”
It takes him an immense effort to stop. He pulls back, curls back up with his elbows on his knees, face all sharp and pale and wet. Sam is such a messy fucking crier. He bites his bottom lip and you see the indentations where he’s bitten before.
“The fuck happened, Sam?”
You didn’t really expect an answer, let alone something that makes sense, “It’s all the same now. I close my eyes and the scenery changes, and the people. I always know where I am, just not how I got there.” His gaze lingers in the empty corner again. He flinches.
“It’s not real, Sammy. I don’t understand, you were...you were fine.”
“It was only a matter of time. I knew it all along and I didn't...” He’s drifting again, tears caught in his father’s beard like stars snagged in some god’s butterfly net, “I’m His favorite.”
“Well, you’re my favorite too and I had you first, so I get dibs.”
Sam whimpers and looks at his hands ( long, lovely piano hands) and you see faded cuffs in purple, green, and yellow encircling his wrists, skin like paper stretched over sharp bones and there should be more here, you think, more to him.
"What'd you do to yourself, bro?"
"I--" Sam's eyes go wide, "I need to pull Him out of me. I need you to…" He makes a motion, like carving a turkey, if the turkey was his forearm. You swallow bile and glance at the clock above the door, well fortified behind a cage made out of mesh and metal. Time is falling away like the smoldering embers of a spent pyre and you think that there's never enough of it. Or always too much of it. The supply never accomodates demand.
"He's not inside you, Sammy. Please just…you beat the real deal. Why can't you beat a figment of your imagination, huh?" Its more thinking out loud than the posing of an actual question, and Sam is very clearly unclear about where and what he is at the moment, but when he says "He's inside," in a voice that seems to diminish like his body, eroded by a lifetime of bad ideas, you think about an idea you had earlier, surprisingly sober and trembling with excitement and relief and (Sam Sam Sammy) determination that shined like something warmer than patented Winchester vengeance. You thought you would walk in here tonight and scoop him up like a baby (brother), carry him (out of the flames) and tuck him into a bed a hundred miles and one state line over.
Jody taps on the glass again, holds up five fingers.
(You can't.)
"I have to go soon." You force your voice to be steady and it breaks under the strain. Sam doesn't look up when he sobs, "Don't go. I'm sorry. Don't leave me with Him."
You wipe your nose with one sleeve of your flannel overshirt and carefully tilt Sam's face toward the light. You wipe the old tears and the the new and the snot pooling beneath his nose with your other sleeve with an obligatory and insincere, "Gross, dude."
Sam stares at something behind you, forces his eyes to meet yours when you gently command, "Look at me," and you both flinch, but he melts into your hold when you palm both sides of his face.
"Warm." Sam says like the thought is a red balloon that's slipped out of his grip, now headed skyward, long out of reach.
"I have to go soon. I don't want to, Sammy. Believe me, I don't. But I'm gonna fix this--"
"It's okay if you can't."
"Shut up, Sammy. Just shut the fuck up."
"I want you to be happy again."
"It's been a rough year, Sam--"
"No. No I mean" (flinch) "Happy like you were before" He pulls away from you again, back into himself (don’t go) "Happy like you were before you went to Hell and I went and everything...."
You bite your lip and tug the yellow blanket over his shoulders, guiding him down to the pillow where he coils into something impossibly small.
"I'm happy," you insist.
Sam snorts (liar) turns away and presses his face into the pillow. Jody raps on the window again, cracks the door open, "Dean--"
"I'm almost ready."
"Dean---"
"Just a little longer." (Just forever)
She looks between you and Sam, back and forth and back, nods shortly and tugs the door shut.
"I'll be back, Sammy."
He turns his head lethargically, looks at something beneath the barred window on the far wall and carefully makes his way back to you. You smile tight and painfully and you know he can tell that you're lying but you hope he can see that you're also trying, "I'll come back for you. Angels and demons can't keep us apart and that's just common knowledge."
You dig in your jacket pocket. Jody said not to bring anything, that it would get lost or confiscated, that it might hurt Sam more than help him. Sam watches, a little mistrusting, but then he looks at everything like that. He has for a long time. You think maybe he always did and you just never noticed. Or maybe he always looked at everything like that…except you, and that's why it's so jarring in its newness.
You hold the plastic green army man out, poised perfectly ready for a fight on your palm and Sam doesn't take it. He blinks and his face crumbles and he hides it in the pillow. You touch his head again with your other hand, trail it down his shoulder, his arm, to his gently curled hand. You wrap his fingers around the plastic talisman and press your forehead against his, "You beat him once."
"What if I can't do it this time?"
You swallow down the protestations because the first time around was just destiny. This is…Sam is fundamentally changed. You won't say broken because that's your word and maybe you're a little bit selfish sometimes and Sam can't be broken. Sam has never been broken. He's been taken away from you, lost, and he' s been damaged by the elements, eroded away to nothing but the framework, but you found him again and you built him again. You know for a fact that things that are broken can't be repaired, not really. You can fix them, sure, but they're never what they used to be. You've rebuilt the Impala more times than you like to think about and every time, she looks good as new, almost perfect. But she's not, and sometimes you think about how the initials carved in the trunk aren't the initials you and Sam scratched into the paint when you were kids, but replacements, mere imitations, added after you were long grown up and finally orphaned for good. To look at her, your baby, no one would know how destroyed she once was. But you know where to look to find the scars and Sam knows where to find yours and you refuse to look for his because he isn't broken. He isn't broken, he isn't--
"Then I'll take care of you."
Sam nods against you and when you take your hand away from his, his fingers remain firm around the little army man.
You don't look back as you walk down the dim, after-hours hallway. There are five doors between Sam's and the locked ward doors. Then there's a sitting room and the stairs. Jody buzzes you out and says, "That officer passed the tests. I didn't tell him everything, but I told him enough. There are enough wards hidden in that room to fend off the armies of Heaven and Hell."
"That's not as unlikely as you think." you mumble, glancing skyward and counting the windows until you see Sam's. There's a tree close enough to the building that the boughs press against the glass. When Jody wraps you in a tight hug, you keep your arms down and consider
swiping her key card, but you can always come back for it later.
"I'm gonna head back to Sioux Falls, " you say, "Get my fucking car."
"I don't know if that’s a good idea."
It's a terrible idea with all the renewed interest in those crazy killer Winchesters, but you'll be careful. You can only lock so much away for so long before something gives and you think that you have enough locked away right now.
"You let anything happen to him and I'll--"
"I know, Dean."
You nod and get in the shitty little Camry. You’ll ditch it in Kansas and drive a noisy old Ford truck the rest of the way to Sioux Falls and one of Frank’s safe lock-ups where the Impala is stashed beneath a brown tarp, behind boxes of old 45s and water-stained paperbacks and things that you think must have been in a house that Frank lived in before he was paranoid and broken like you.
But not like Sam, because Sam isn’t broken like the two of you. Sam just needs to rest. To sleep. To get his shit back together.
“I’ll call.”
Jody nods too, “I’ll call.”
“If anything--”
“I’ll call, Dean. I'll even call when the shit isn't hitting the fan. I know that's probably a foreign concept for you. ”
You press your lips together and look back up at the little barred window, “I should be with him.”
“No,” Jody thumps her fist on the hood of the Camry and steps back into the shadows of the Gothic fortress, “He should be out here with you.”
You keep your gaze on Sam’s window as you back the Camry out of the space, slowly circle the lot, the well manicured lawn. In the window beneath your brothers’, a light flickers on and a silhouette stands in the yellow light. You aren’t paying very close attention, but something flickers before the light blinks out again.
You swear it looks like angels wings.
You know for a fact that things that are broken can't be repaired.
You also know that things once thought to be lost (forever) have a way of turning up again.