Lights Will Guide You Home 3/4
Right now he had a job to do…watch over his little brother.
Feelings slowly started to return…
He felt the slightly dulled throb run through his body. The sense of comfort soon followed. Then, the soft glow of lights across his face registered.
He still did not wake.
A feeble shiver ran through him, bringing forth a surplus of unwanted memories…Lucifer had been right. The cage burned cold, excruciatingly cold.
For a moment, Lucifer wavered in front of his eyes…Taunting him…Toying with him…Torturing him…Until his body was a ragged, shivering form desperately needing to seek relief from the pain engulfing it. He twisted and curled in on himself in search of a reprieve. He felt a shift then a blinding pain exploded through him forcing an involuntary scream to escape from between his lips.
“Sammy!”
He knew the voice…
“Sammy!”
Lucifer had been using it to bring forth a whole other level of pain…
“Damn it Sam! Wake up!”
Sam let out a gasp then tried to bolt into a sitting position. Pain shot through his ribcage once again, but this time a hand on his shoulder brought him back to reality.
“Dean?” he breathed out.
“The one and only,” Dean smiled.
Sam sighed in relief, wincing at the movement. He glanced around him, realizing he was sprawled across the floor, blankets twisted in his long legs.
The confusion must have been evident on his face, because Dean carefully started to untangle the blankets. “You were on the couch when I left the room a minute ago. Went to put on another pot of coffee. Was about to pour it when I heard you start to moan and then a loud crash.” Dean succeeded in freeing Sam’s legs from the blankets and threw them back on the couch. Sam shivered from the lack of extra warmth they had offered. “Let’s get you back up there.”
Sam nodded, putting his hands on the floor to push himself up to the couch. But the burns on his hand made themselves known, forcing Sam to nearly fall back to the floor.
Gentle hands slid underneath him, catching him on his descent. “Easy Sam. Let me do most of the work here.” With Dean’s help, Sam soon found himself lying out on the couch with the pile of blankets across his body. He snuggled down into the warmth and comfort, letting out a contented sigh and briefly closing his eyes.
Dean chuckled at his brother. “Better?”
“Yeah, thanks man.” He opened his eyes to see Dean’s amused and worried face. “Um…so…”
“Yeah…”
“Guess I owe you an explanation…”
“You think?” Dean huffed. “I mean come on Sammy, you think that finding you collapsed on my porch doesn’t give me the right to want an explanation? Especially since the last I checked you were still trapped in hell!”
Sam flinched. “I know.” The words came out broken. Sam looked all of the hurt little five-year-old Dean had once comforted after falling off his bicycle and hurting his leg. “I’m sorry Dean.” And damn if those weren’t the same words he had said all those years ago.
“So am I,” Dean sighed. He moved and sat down near his brother’s head. “Look, just help me out here. What the hell happened?”
“Last night or for the past couple months?”
“Both…”
“Ok, well,” Sam sighed, “I, uh, don’t know really anything about how I got out of hell. From what I could tell, I was only there for a couple of days, but you know how hell is…”
“Makes it seem like weeks.”
“Yeah. All I know is one minute I have Lucifer and Michael coming at me again and the next I’m flat on my back in the middle of the cemetery.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. Took me a while to get my bearings. Once I did, I got the hell out of there. Found an old junker abandoned in the parking lot. Managed to get it hot-wired and running. Just drove in no real direction. I needed to get away from there. Finally got my head on straight a couple of hours later. I started panicking about you, Bobby, and Cas. I remembered what I…”
“What Lucifer…”
Sam allowed a grateful and sad smile. “What Lucifer had me to do you guys. So I drove here. Saw you sitting over there, at the table with Lisa and Ben.”
“Why didn’t you come in? I mean, hell, Sam that was months ago. I’ve been thinking you were dead since May!”
“I know. But I couldn’t drag you away from here.” Dean started to interrupt him again. “Just hear me out. I had zero answers, and I needed them. Just like you did. And I knew you would want them with this too. I didn’t want to drag you back down that path. You got out man. You deserved it for once. Bobby agreed with me.”
“Bobby?” Dean stood from the couch, anger flooding through him. “You mean Bobby has known all this time that you were alive and didn’t tell me?!?”
Sam tried to push himself up on the couch. But all he succeeded in doing was causing excruciating pain to wrack his injured body. Spots danced across his vision, and his breath was stolen from him. A few minutes must have passed. The next thing Sam was aware of was Dean’s hand on his shoulder and his face inches from his.
“You back with me.”
“I think so…”
“I’m sorry Sam.”
“Me too.” Sam blinked away the tears the pain had allowed to form. “I know I should’ve came to you. But I was really confused and wanted you to have a shot at normal.”
“Ok…I don’t like it, but I get why you did it. So why last night? Why come to me now after all these months, Sammy?
“It’s kind of a long story.”
Dean glanced out the window, looking at the still falling snow. “Don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.
Sam took in the ongoing blizzard before sighing and nodding his head. “Alright, here it goes….” Sam shifted a under the blankets before settling in to tell his story.
“Went to Bobby’s place, after I checked on you. I must’ve parked that freaking junker three blocks away from the salvage yard. I was freaking out man. Part of me was scared I’d find the place abandoned since Bobby was dead….other part of me was scared he’d be there. I ended up trying to sneak around the place. I couldn’t find him, but I saw some lights on inside. Moved to the side of the house but was about to give up. I turned to go back to the car when I came face to face with the end of Bobby’s rifle.”
Dean barked out a laugh. “Sounds about right. Let me guess, he put you through all the standard tests?”
“Yep. Then started searching me for a handprint like yours, except I didn’t have one. He really wanted me to go back to Lisa’s and confront you. But I managed to get him to see it my way. He gave me a better car…”
“That thing that crashed into mailbox?”
“It isn’t a thing. It’s a really nice car, Dean!”
“Well, my car could kick its ass any day, bitch.”
“Whatever, jerk.” There was no animosity or argument really behind the words, only the hint of amusement and a smile. “Anyway, Bobby gave me that and some weapons. I started getting back into hunting. Figured I’d eventually come across something to get me on the trail of whatever got me out of hell.”
“Any luck? Find anything that helped?”
“Not anything…But more like someone,” Sam said. Dean flashed his brother a confused glance. “I was hunting a nest of vampires in California. I came across some hunters. I’d heard a lot about them…well one of them at least…from you.”
“From me? Who?”
“Samuel,” Sam gulped, “Samuel Campbell.”
Dean shot off the couch. “Like as in Mom’s dad??” Sam nodded. “That’s not possible Sam. He died! Hell, I saw him die when Cas went all Back to the Future on my ass.”
“I know, man. All we could figure is that whatever brought me back brought him back too. It shocked the hell out of me to see him there. But he didn’t seem that shocked by me. Was pretty weird. He gave a big hug and started talking about how I should work with him and the rest of his, well our, family.”
“You weren’t the even the tiniest bit suspicious of his ass?”
“I was at first. I made him go through all the normal tests, and he passed with no real hitches. So I went with him back to this compound he had set up with a few other people, well other Campbells.” Confusion and hurt flashed across Dean’s face. “Look man, I was missing you like hell. And they were sorta family. They weren’t you…but at the time it helped….some…sort of…”
Dean sat back down and placed his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “I know how that feels.”
A few tears pooled in Sam’s eyes, but he quickly blinked them away. “It, uh, worked for awhile at least. We did our own thing, but gave each other back up when we needed it. At least we had been. But last night…Things had started to seem weird, well weirder, not too long before Christmas. At first I thought it was just me being all depressed and annoyed. But then I started noticing more…Samuel just seemed off to me. So I started taking on more solo jobs away from the Campbells, ones that I wouldn’t need back up on.”
“But last night…”
Sam nodded. “I read about these odd deaths in the forest about an hour south of here. Police said it was most likely attacks caused by a wild animal. But they kept happening…kids out playing in the snow…families searching for a Christmas tree. I decided to check it out. Didn’t take me long to figure out it was a Wendigo attacking people. I had the car all loaded up last night and was about to leave the motel to go take care of it, when the Campbells van pulled in beside my car. Samuel jumped out and started spitting out all this crap about how I needed to forget about this case and come with him. Wouldn’t really give me a reason why. Just said that it had something to do with what brought us back.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“Just didn’t feel right. I mean, for months, he claimed he didn’t want to check into it. He didn’t want ‘to screw up a good thing.’ Then all of sudden he’s acting like that’s the only thing to do. I asked him to just give me a couple of hours to smoke the Wendigo. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept yelling about how this couldn’t wait. You know me, I started yelling right back at him. He finally said that he wasn’t leaving until I got in the van with him. The thing he was going to meet up with apparently wasn’t going to give him any information unless I was there too. It didn’t feel right to me…”
“Can’t say I blame you there.”
“Yeah. Well he grabbed at my arm to pull me towards the van. I wrenched out of his grip pretty easily, and it pissed him off. Next thing I know, he’s punching me…”
“The bruise on your cheek…”
“Yeah,” Sam gently traced along the bruise with his uninjured hand. “I just jumped in my car and took off down the road. He didn’t follow me. I was the only car on the road.”
“So you have no idea where he went?”
“No. I never made it back to the motel. I got out in the woods to find the Wendigo when I heard a bunch of voices. Some family decided the woods were the perfect place to go sledding. The Wendigo came out of nowhere. I managed to draw him away from the family, not sure if they even caught a glimpse of it. I started running through the woods; I just wanted to get it as far away from the family as possible. Didn’t really even pay attention to wear I was running. My foot got caught on tree roots; the snow covered it up so I couldn’t see them. I went down hard onto my ankle. The Wendigo came at me then. I couldn’t put weight on my ankle yet, and flare gun in my hand malfunctioned. All it did was burn my hands. The bastard got a few hits in on me before I could get to the other flare gun in my jacket.”
“How’d you manage to get here after all that?”
“Hell if I know. Guess I was running on adrenaline. I rested in the snow for a while so that I didn’t put too much weight on my ankle too quickly and to make sure the thing was dead. The snow kind of helped with the swelling some. But it got too cold after a while. Took me some time to find my way back, and it hurt like hell, but I dragged myself back to the car. I don’t know if I was or wasn’t thinking clearly at the time....either way…I started driving here…”
“And a couple of hours later you crash into my mailbox and pass out on my porch,” Dean’s voice held nothing but concern and pride for his brother.
“Yeah. Couldn’t see,” Sam said around a yawn. “The blizzard started back up on the way here.” Sam’s eyes were starting to droop again. Dean was amazed that the kid had lasted this long without crashing.
“Glad you came man.” Dean patted his shoulder then pulled the blankets back up to Sam’s chest. “Get some more sleep kiddo.”
Sam nodded and adjusted his head on the pillows. With his eyes barely open, he finally noticed the glowing colored lights of the Christmas tree. “You know Christmas was over a week ago?” The words were slurred and made Dean laugh. “Looks good though man.” With that, he succumbed to the exhaustion plaguing his body.
For reasons Dean couldn’t explain, tears welled up in eyes and a broad grin graced his face. He gently brushed a few errant hairs away from Sam’s face. “Good to have you back kiddo.”
Next Chapter
Feelings slowly started to return…
He felt the slightly dulled throb run through his body. The sense of comfort soon followed. Then, the soft glow of lights across his face registered.
He still did not wake.
A feeble shiver ran through him, bringing forth a surplus of unwanted memories…Lucifer had been right. The cage burned cold, excruciatingly cold.
For a moment, Lucifer wavered in front of his eyes…Taunting him…Toying with him…Torturing him…Until his body was a ragged, shivering form desperately needing to seek relief from the pain engulfing it. He twisted and curled in on himself in search of a reprieve. He felt a shift then a blinding pain exploded through him forcing an involuntary scream to escape from between his lips.
“Sammy!”
He knew the voice…
“Sammy!”
Lucifer had been using it to bring forth a whole other level of pain…
“Damn it Sam! Wake up!”
Sam let out a gasp then tried to bolt into a sitting position. Pain shot through his ribcage once again, but this time a hand on his shoulder brought him back to reality.
“Dean?” he breathed out.
“The one and only,” Dean smiled.
Sam sighed in relief, wincing at the movement. He glanced around him, realizing he was sprawled across the floor, blankets twisted in his long legs.
The confusion must have been evident on his face, because Dean carefully started to untangle the blankets. “You were on the couch when I left the room a minute ago. Went to put on another pot of coffee. Was about to pour it when I heard you start to moan and then a loud crash.” Dean succeeded in freeing Sam’s legs from the blankets and threw them back on the couch. Sam shivered from the lack of extra warmth they had offered. “Let’s get you back up there.”
Sam nodded, putting his hands on the floor to push himself up to the couch. But the burns on his hand made themselves known, forcing Sam to nearly fall back to the floor.
Gentle hands slid underneath him, catching him on his descent. “Easy Sam. Let me do most of the work here.” With Dean’s help, Sam soon found himself lying out on the couch with the pile of blankets across his body. He snuggled down into the warmth and comfort, letting out a contented sigh and briefly closing his eyes.
Dean chuckled at his brother. “Better?”
“Yeah, thanks man.” He opened his eyes to see Dean’s amused and worried face. “Um…so…”
“Yeah…”
“Guess I owe you an explanation…”
“You think?” Dean huffed. “I mean come on Sammy, you think that finding you collapsed on my porch doesn’t give me the right to want an explanation? Especially since the last I checked you were still trapped in hell!”
Sam flinched. “I know.” The words came out broken. Sam looked all of the hurt little five-year-old Dean had once comforted after falling off his bicycle and hurting his leg. “I’m sorry Dean.” And damn if those weren’t the same words he had said all those years ago.
“So am I,” Dean sighed. He moved and sat down near his brother’s head. “Look, just help me out here. What the hell happened?”
“Last night or for the past couple months?”
“Both…”
“Ok, well,” Sam sighed, “I, uh, don’t know really anything about how I got out of hell. From what I could tell, I was only there for a couple of days, but you know how hell is…”
“Makes it seem like weeks.”
“Yeah. All I know is one minute I have Lucifer and Michael coming at me again and the next I’m flat on my back in the middle of the cemetery.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. Took me a while to get my bearings. Once I did, I got the hell out of there. Found an old junker abandoned in the parking lot. Managed to get it hot-wired and running. Just drove in no real direction. I needed to get away from there. Finally got my head on straight a couple of hours later. I started panicking about you, Bobby, and Cas. I remembered what I…”
“What Lucifer…”
Sam allowed a grateful and sad smile. “What Lucifer had me to do you guys. So I drove here. Saw you sitting over there, at the table with Lisa and Ben.”
“Why didn’t you come in? I mean, hell, Sam that was months ago. I’ve been thinking you were dead since May!”
“I know. But I couldn’t drag you away from here.” Dean started to interrupt him again. “Just hear me out. I had zero answers, and I needed them. Just like you did. And I knew you would want them with this too. I didn’t want to drag you back down that path. You got out man. You deserved it for once. Bobby agreed with me.”
“Bobby?” Dean stood from the couch, anger flooding through him. “You mean Bobby has known all this time that you were alive and didn’t tell me?!?”
Sam tried to push himself up on the couch. But all he succeeded in doing was causing excruciating pain to wrack his injured body. Spots danced across his vision, and his breath was stolen from him. A few minutes must have passed. The next thing Sam was aware of was Dean’s hand on his shoulder and his face inches from his.
“You back with me.”
“I think so…”
“I’m sorry Sam.”
“Me too.” Sam blinked away the tears the pain had allowed to form. “I know I should’ve came to you. But I was really confused and wanted you to have a shot at normal.”
“Ok…I don’t like it, but I get why you did it. So why last night? Why come to me now after all these months, Sammy?
“It’s kind of a long story.”
Dean glanced out the window, looking at the still falling snow. “Don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.
Sam took in the ongoing blizzard before sighing and nodding his head. “Alright, here it goes….” Sam shifted a under the blankets before settling in to tell his story.
“Went to Bobby’s place, after I checked on you. I must’ve parked that freaking junker three blocks away from the salvage yard. I was freaking out man. Part of me was scared I’d find the place abandoned since Bobby was dead….other part of me was scared he’d be there. I ended up trying to sneak around the place. I couldn’t find him, but I saw some lights on inside. Moved to the side of the house but was about to give up. I turned to go back to the car when I came face to face with the end of Bobby’s rifle.”
Dean barked out a laugh. “Sounds about right. Let me guess, he put you through all the standard tests?”
“Yep. Then started searching me for a handprint like yours, except I didn’t have one. He really wanted me to go back to Lisa’s and confront you. But I managed to get him to see it my way. He gave me a better car…”
“That thing that crashed into mailbox?”
“It isn’t a thing. It’s a really nice car, Dean!”
“Well, my car could kick its ass any day, bitch.”
“Whatever, jerk.” There was no animosity or argument really behind the words, only the hint of amusement and a smile. “Anyway, Bobby gave me that and some weapons. I started getting back into hunting. Figured I’d eventually come across something to get me on the trail of whatever got me out of hell.”
“Any luck? Find anything that helped?”
“Not anything…But more like someone,” Sam said. Dean flashed his brother a confused glance. “I was hunting a nest of vampires in California. I came across some hunters. I’d heard a lot about them…well one of them at least…from you.”
“From me? Who?”
“Samuel,” Sam gulped, “Samuel Campbell.”
Dean shot off the couch. “Like as in Mom’s dad??” Sam nodded. “That’s not possible Sam. He died! Hell, I saw him die when Cas went all Back to the Future on my ass.”
“I know, man. All we could figure is that whatever brought me back brought him back too. It shocked the hell out of me to see him there. But he didn’t seem that shocked by me. Was pretty weird. He gave a big hug and started talking about how I should work with him and the rest of his, well our, family.”
“You weren’t the even the tiniest bit suspicious of his ass?”
“I was at first. I made him go through all the normal tests, and he passed with no real hitches. So I went with him back to this compound he had set up with a few other people, well other Campbells.” Confusion and hurt flashed across Dean’s face. “Look man, I was missing you like hell. And they were sorta family. They weren’t you…but at the time it helped….some…sort of…”
Dean sat back down and placed his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “I know how that feels.”
A few tears pooled in Sam’s eyes, but he quickly blinked them away. “It, uh, worked for awhile at least. We did our own thing, but gave each other back up when we needed it. At least we had been. But last night…Things had started to seem weird, well weirder, not too long before Christmas. At first I thought it was just me being all depressed and annoyed. But then I started noticing more…Samuel just seemed off to me. So I started taking on more solo jobs away from the Campbells, ones that I wouldn’t need back up on.”
“But last night…”
Sam nodded. “I read about these odd deaths in the forest about an hour south of here. Police said it was most likely attacks caused by a wild animal. But they kept happening…kids out playing in the snow…families searching for a Christmas tree. I decided to check it out. Didn’t take me long to figure out it was a Wendigo attacking people. I had the car all loaded up last night and was about to leave the motel to go take care of it, when the Campbells van pulled in beside my car. Samuel jumped out and started spitting out all this crap about how I needed to forget about this case and come with him. Wouldn’t really give me a reason why. Just said that it had something to do with what brought us back.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“Just didn’t feel right. I mean, for months, he claimed he didn’t want to check into it. He didn’t want ‘to screw up a good thing.’ Then all of sudden he’s acting like that’s the only thing to do. I asked him to just give me a couple of hours to smoke the Wendigo. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept yelling about how this couldn’t wait. You know me, I started yelling right back at him. He finally said that he wasn’t leaving until I got in the van with him. The thing he was going to meet up with apparently wasn’t going to give him any information unless I was there too. It didn’t feel right to me…”
“Can’t say I blame you there.”
“Yeah. Well he grabbed at my arm to pull me towards the van. I wrenched out of his grip pretty easily, and it pissed him off. Next thing I know, he’s punching me…”
“The bruise on your cheek…”
“Yeah,” Sam gently traced along the bruise with his uninjured hand. “I just jumped in my car and took off down the road. He didn’t follow me. I was the only car on the road.”
“So you have no idea where he went?”
“No. I never made it back to the motel. I got out in the woods to find the Wendigo when I heard a bunch of voices. Some family decided the woods were the perfect place to go sledding. The Wendigo came out of nowhere. I managed to draw him away from the family, not sure if they even caught a glimpse of it. I started running through the woods; I just wanted to get it as far away from the family as possible. Didn’t really even pay attention to wear I was running. My foot got caught on tree roots; the snow covered it up so I couldn’t see them. I went down hard onto my ankle. The Wendigo came at me then. I couldn’t put weight on my ankle yet, and flare gun in my hand malfunctioned. All it did was burn my hands. The bastard got a few hits in on me before I could get to the other flare gun in my jacket.”
“How’d you manage to get here after all that?”
“Hell if I know. Guess I was running on adrenaline. I rested in the snow for a while so that I didn’t put too much weight on my ankle too quickly and to make sure the thing was dead. The snow kind of helped with the swelling some. But it got too cold after a while. Took me some time to find my way back, and it hurt like hell, but I dragged myself back to the car. I don’t know if I was or wasn’t thinking clearly at the time....either way…I started driving here…”
“And a couple of hours later you crash into my mailbox and pass out on my porch,” Dean’s voice held nothing but concern and pride for his brother.
“Yeah. Couldn’t see,” Sam said around a yawn. “The blizzard started back up on the way here.” Sam’s eyes were starting to droop again. Dean was amazed that the kid had lasted this long without crashing.
“Glad you came man.” Dean patted his shoulder then pulled the blankets back up to Sam’s chest. “Get some more sleep kiddo.”
Sam nodded and adjusted his head on the pillows. With his eyes barely open, he finally noticed the glowing colored lights of the Christmas tree. “You know Christmas was over a week ago?” The words were slurred and made Dean laugh. “Looks good though man.” With that, he succumbed to the exhaustion plaguing his body.
For reasons Dean couldn’t explain, tears welled up in eyes and a broad grin graced his face. He gently brushed a few errant hairs away from Sam’s face. “Good to have you back kiddo.”
Next Chapter