SPN FIC: The Lucky Ones
Title: The Lucky Ones
Characters: Sam and Dean, a touch of Charlie and Kevin
Word Count:~ 2,100
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Swearing, temporary character death, not-quite-suicidal-ideation-but-not-exactly-healthy-thinking-either
Summary: Dean always thought John Winchester was the lucky one.
Notes: Written for quickreaver's Men of Letters challenge at her journal. Unbeta'd and whipped up mid-hangover on an iPad, so all mistakes are mine. Concrit always welcome. I think this accidentally ended up more Dean-centric than Sam, but I also think it works. So. Enjoy, kids!
Sam doesn’t work in the field much anymore. He’s better at turning his freaky psychic shit off, but not perfect, and God forbid you run into a traumatized witness with even a wink of something resembling psychic ability. Sam will be on his ass with a migraine if he’s lucky and all fucked up with the shit you still don’t entirely understand if he’s not. There was a woman in Arkansas whose sorrow was so great that you had to cross the state line before Sam stopped sobbing uncontrollably and dry-heaving in the backseat. He stopped going on hunts soon after that. You understood. He also stopped leaving the bunker in general around the same time, which you found harder to understand, because even though Sam said he was happy and Sam said he was fine, and he always had Charlie and Kevin coming and going at all hours, you don’t like to be reminded of how much was lost when Sam woke up two days after he died--again-- and sat up, choking on thick clots of dead blood as the color of life slowly blossomed back in his cheeks, gasping, “It’s done. It’s done.” It was supposed to be better after that. You were supposed to be free and safe. You were supposed to grow old and boring and have mundane lives full of blissful little nothings.
Your memory is rife with new Sams rising from the ashes of ruined predecessors. Its what the feather on his forearm symbolizes. He said he saw a glowing feather and followed it back to you after the last trial. He thinks that he wasn't supposed to. He also says that he doesn't regret doing it, even on bad days. On bad days, you catch him running his fingers over the silvery lines etched into his skin and it reminds you of the way he used to press on his hand back when the devil in his mind was a regular problem. Sam’s turned into quite the canvas in his solitude, done most of the work himself-- tattoo shops are surprisingly emotional places, you’ve learned. You spotted the Latin on his hip years ago and he grumbled, “It was spring break. I was drunk,” but there are others now, small seals and symbols he pulls out of books and scrolls. You have a few yourself-- a ward against ghost possession and a few good luck symbols that Sam claims aren’t bullshit but actually tangibly bring the carrier good fortune. Whatever. There’s the “Andromedan word for peace” on your shoulder.
“Like the Andromeda galaxy? Like aliens?” you asked and Sam shrugged, “Apparently? Whatever, better safe than sorry.”
Aliens. Like the fucked up post-hell monster migrations aren’t enough of a headache.
Finally, there’s the binding rune on the small of your back, complimenting the one on Sam’s back, just beneath the raised skin from Cold Oak. Sam said it was good protection in the event the Fairies ever came back to collect you, binding you to him and him to you. They couldn’t take you anywhere without him and they didn’t have the rights to his soul, so you are effectively off-limits by extension. Neither of you talks about the fact that the binding also applies to things like Heaven and Hell and everything in between, that wherever one goes, the other will irretrievably follow. Sam is human and Sam will die--once more-- even still-- but no one knows what will happen after that. Not even Castiel. You hope it sticks this time. You both do.
Just...not yet.
You’re stuck on the sofa with a wrenched knee. You didn’t even try to make up some kind of bullshit story to make it sound better than tripping on a damn branch after you torched the wendigo down in Ellsworth. Sam doesn’t have to be a supercharged psychic to see that you’ve gotten slower and softer in recent years. Underground bunkers get damn cold in the dead of winter, even magical ones, and this winter saw you canceling more than a few meet-ups with Garth or the new kid he took in-- Bryan or Ryan or something-- because you weren’t fully mobile until almost afternoon. Sam is still a mountain of muscle, but he started wearing glasses a few years back and his hair is streaked gray, his whiskers gone salt and pepper like your father’s did around that age. You cut your hair shorter than ever hoping it’ll hide the way it’s thinned lately, but Charlie made a crack about it the last time she was here, and it figures-- you always took more after the Campbell side of the family tree, apparently even in this.
Sam doesn’t work cases on the outside anymore, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t work them. “Directory assistance,” Sam sounds tired when he answers the phone. He leaves the chair and wanders into the next room. You hear a cabinet door slam and you’d go to help, but you’re kind of stuck.
Sam comes back with his phone in one hand and a fresh ice pack in the other. You gingerly place it over your knee. He flops in the chair at your feet and groans, rubbing at his eyes beneath the glasses. You rise up on your elbows and ask, “What? You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Who was that?”
“Kevin.”
“What’d he want?”
“Cross reference some stuff. Easy stuff. I think he just wanted an excuse to check in, really.”
“Well, Kevin has proven to not do so well on his own. Dunno why he doesn’t just quit. Or get a girlfriend. Or something.”
“You know why,” Sam fishes a neatly rolled joint out of his breast pocket, lights it, inhales, and exhales slowly with his head thrown over the back of the chair. He passes it to you and it’s a stretch, but you manage to grab it. Sam grows it in the greenhouse with the rest of his herbs and shit, turns out to be a common ingredient in a lot of the healing elixirs Sam whips up for the other hunters who pass through, but most of the time hands it off to you to pass along on the road. You’re still careful about who is allowed in the clubhouse and other hunters have a way of making Sam jumpy, mostly due to the fact that he makes them jumpy right back. It’s a new world than the one you grew up hunting in though. The rules aren’t quite so rigid. Sometimes you wonder how the old timers would have done in this brave new world, where the demons are locked up tight and the angels are on a rather short leash and fewer new faces pick up the fight because of tragic pasts-- a lot of them just stumbled across an online hunter journal or heard through the grapevine that the monster in their closet is real. They remind you of you when this was still fun. None of them remind you of any of the Sam's you've known.
You asked Sammy what he thought Dad would be up to these days, what he’d think of this less isolated community, these wide-eyed new hunters who don’t have to force a smile and don’t have to be reminded that they’re heroes in order to believe it. Sam snorted and said, “Do you realize how old he’d be today?”
You did the math and said, “Wow,” and you thought about how a long time ago, in your darkest and drunkest days, you sometimes thought John was the lucky one, to have been struck down before everything changed. You can’t picture a wizened John Winchester bent over a spellbook with thick coke-bottle glasses, cranking the TV to it’s loudest setting and still asking your brother, “What’d he just say? Fuckin’ mumblin’ the lines, am I right?”
Sam shrugged, “It wasn’t meant for him.”
Sam is very zen. You aren't sure if it's the pot or the trauma. The older hunters still don't entirely trust Sammy, but the younger ones think he's "cool."
You used to think John was lucky. When you kept Sam’s body company for those two days, when you spent the months before that watching him deteriorate with each trial, when you reluctantly called Charlie for help those few days leading up to the last one when he was delirious with fever and kept imploring you not to burn him, “Please, I’ll come back, I promise I’ll come back,” between faltering breaths-- you thought John was lucky. Just the other night, as you made the drive back to Lebanon with your jacked knee slowly swelling beneath the denim, you fleetingly had the thought that John was lucky to miss out on outliving his usefulness. You used to think you’d go nuts if you had nothing to do but futz around the cave all day. Sam had his research, his potions, his spells, and his apprentices-- Charlie and Kevin and some werewolf woman who only ate vegetables, beans, and tofu and locked herself away each full moon.
Then, the day after you got back, Garth’s new kid, Bryan/Ryan/whatever, came upon you in the shooting range. Sam insisted that you use the wheelchair if you wouldn’t stay in bed, and you could barely see over the counter to fire on the targets, but whatever, it just added to the challenge, made for a better practice. Bryan/Ryan reminds you a lot of a younger Garth with the whole deceptively dopey demeanor masking a perfectly capable hunter underneath. The kid is a fucking appalling shot though.
“Dude, does Garth teach you anything?”
Bryan/Ryan shrugged. He was wearing a faded Star Wars t-shirt beneath his flannel. One of the original movies. At least he has good taste. You lost track of how many episodes they’re up to now, but they haven’t been good in years, “We try not to use guns, you know?”
“Uh. No. Jesus, c’mere.”
You still wouldn’t trust him to back you up on a bigfoot hunt, but at least he no longer makes you nervous just holding a gun in your shooting range. You told him to hit you up the next time he and Garth pass through. He said, "Sure thing, man. But you ain't here half the time."
You lean across the sofa and hand Sam his joint back. Sam grins and asks, "How's the knee? Charlie wanted to know if it was worth her coming to visit or if you'd be back on the road by the time she got here." Like last time, going unspoken.
"Tell her to swing by."
Sam nods, "You sure?"
"I'm sure!"
"Okay. And I was going to order a pizza for dinner..."
"Sammy, I'm not really feelin' up to driving just yet."
"I'll go get it."
"In town?"
"That's where the pizza is, yes."
It's your turn to ask, "You sure?"
Sam knows what you're thinking. Sam usually knows what everyone is thinking, but that's not the point. He nods, takes another hit off his joint, "Yeah. It's a good day."
"Really? Dude, you haven't even been inside the 7-11 in years."
Sam's cheeks turn red with embarrassment and he shrugs, "Been working on it."
You don't want to tell him that you always thought he was broken forever after the gates and everything, so instead you say, "That's good. That's really good, Sammy." And then, "I was actually thinkin' of taking some time off, hang around here...shit, if you're feelin' up to it maybe we can take a real vacation or something. When's the last time we just...went to the beach or..."
Sam nods, "Years? Before."
"Yeah."
In your younger and far darker days, you envied your father for getting the death that stuck right the first time and freeing him from the days of drunk vigils for dead brothers and others, the night terrors and the days spent bleeding out both literally and figuratively. He was the lucky one, who missed out on failing joints, failing eyesight, and waning ability, but lately you've noticed how Sam smiles easier and you sleep easier, and when other hunters and scholars visit, their stories are more often lighthearted and even sometimes funny instead of tragic and they tend to look more like humans than the walking dead they put down. You you think about how you and Sammy did that, made this world-- after the years of falling apart and taking the earth with you over and over again-- you think that you are heroes after all, and this is what Sam was talking about when he promised to survive, and life is mostly good.
When you think about Charlie Bradbury, you don't think about her reading The Hobbit to her dying mother or the way her hands shook when she pulled the sheet over Sam's colorless face-- you think about her shoving cake in her wife's hair on their wedding day and how they both wore fairy wings and princess gowns and their girl, Gertie, calls you and Sam her favorite uncles even though she's almost a teenager. Sometimes you even think of your mom and Bobby, Jo, Ellen, Lisa and Benny, and you're surprised that it doesn't feel like a raw wound every time, that sometimes those thoughts are even pleasant and welcome. You talk to Cas, and you know that even though he can't come around anymore, he's listening, and you know that deep down in the parts that you've both managed to keep whole this entire time, you know that you and Sam are the lucky ones after all.