OhSam Triple Play 2016!
It's November 2, an auspicious (if ominous) day for our darling Sam, so to herald his introduction to The Red Stuff, let's revisit an annual tradition. Welcome to the OhSam Triple Play 2016! This year, we're offering a focus on a reoccurring theme in Sam's life: blood"Blood" could be interpreted in many ways. Family don't end with blood. The demon
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Anna could cut Sam Winchester down to the very quarks of his body and scatter him, blood and all, across the centuries of time. She can pixilate his soul, along with his body, but not destroy it.
She’s imaginative-Cas will give her that-but she’s still bound by His laws.
Cas stands in the bathroom. Sam’s phone and shaving razor are still on the sink. There’s a bit of blood, smeared into one-half of a sigil: whether it is to banish or to summon, Cas can’t tell.
He breathes in smoke.
And then he scrapes a bit of the blood from the rock onto his nails, and is somewhere else.
*
He doesn’t find Sam in Heaven, nor in Hell. He tries other places, before he remembers that quiet realm of Death’s, that other place for which angels have no name. Souls go there when they do not fit anywhere else. Reapers call it by many words, most of which mean vacuum, nothing, empty. An angel guards it: the angel of undoing, staring out at the world unraveling from a bloody rock that serves as her outpost. It is a bit dramatic. Like those cowboy movies Sam and Dean like.
Castiel sifts through souls. He calls out in his True voice, whale-like, using the blood on the rock and his memories of Sam. Most are memories that are not kind to either of them, and he wonders if this is why Sam reached out to Anna.
He shouts across the soup of souls, starting to feel desperate.
Hi, something replies to him, shyly.
Castiel latches onto that sonic thread. He follows it to thick sunlight, bright room, finds Sam Winchester’s soul quietly lying on the bed, hands clasped against his chest, bent inward like little claws.
“Is it because of Lucifer?” Castiel asks. “Did some other angel help her find you?”
Sam opens his eyes and looks at him but doesn’t answer. He looks brand-new: no scars, unready bones, limbs as soft and useless as plant stems. Hi, says Sam, but his mouth doesn’t move. It’s like he had to work hard to dredge up that word. Probably the only word he knows. His eyes are bright and curious and it is obvious that he does not know Castiel.
This soul knows nothing, because this soul has been stripped down to its very existence.
All it can do, in this moment, is exist.
Sam, Cas tells himself. All Sam can do, at the moment, is exist.
Castiel sighs. He brings the fossil-rock out of his pocket, and says, “I found this.”
Sam looks at it, and a bit of a startled expression crosses his face. The thick, solid sunlight dapples his hair dark and gold.
“Blood,” he says, a long time later, finally imitating the movement of speech. First word. Castiel nods, oddly proud.
You are what you bleed, after all.
*
What are you doing, Dean texts him.
Castiel is curating for the museum themed Sam Winchester. The items are varied: a leaf, a sign, a parking ticket. When his phone pings with this particular text, he’s chasing down bits of Sam in Colorado. It’s not very hard work, but he has to be meticulous.
Sam says hi, he texts Dean back. He doesn’t say that that’s one of the only two things Sam can say. You have to wait.
Dean calls, immediately. “Wait for what? What’s going on?”
The basis of reversing any process is that you reverse the conditions that caused it to happen in the first place. If he is going to get Sam back, he needs to rebuild the soul, the body, the blood.
“Everything,” says Cas.
“Is it…difficult?”
Cas inhales, slowly. “Very.”
“But you’ll-you’ll get him back, right?”
Dean doesn’t sound very convinced. Maybe he wonders why Cas would do this for Sam, after the things he’s said.
“Yes, of course,” Cas says. Sam Winchester is my
friend, he thinks, solemnly, like making a promise. He is my friend.
*
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Sometimes Sam doesn’t eat all of it. He has to refuse Cold Oak at first; although he soldiers through demon blood with his whole new body quaking and tears running silently down his face. Castiel thinks of headstrong, stubborn Sam and wishes that he had not opened the door to Bobby’s panic room, so many weesks ago. That conclave of labels that follows Sam barely features any that Sam had brought upon himself: in the cosmic lay of things, here is somebody who was only expected to follow preset movements on a chessboard he couldn’t even see.
Free will is something-Castiel decides-that when he finds for his museum, he will bake into a cake. It will be a towering, wonderful sponge, the kind that he sees in the most expensive human bakeries, the kind with berries and chocolate and layers of fluffed pastry, and he will make sure that Sam eats all of it.
*
He has to go back to that fire-eaten motel room for a few things.
Cas has been putting it off, but in the white room, in some concept of yesterday, Sam had stood up, wobbly and afraid. Cas watched him, quietly, at his hands opening and closing with a sort of strange helplessness that he still seemed to cringe from, as expected from a Winchester. He took a step, then another. And then he came to look at Castiel’s kitchen, though he wouldn’t touch anything. He’d started talking in sentences recently, but always disconnected things. Stars, the road, the Impala. Half-remembered jokes that Dean’s told him. A list of restaurants that Dean loves, remembered in rhyme. Laws and equations.
Sam and Castiel looked together at the mountain of raw material that went into the cooking, the curation-the leaf, the sign, the parking ticket, and so many, many other things-and Castiel thought sullenly about how difficult it would be, once he built the soul, to build the body, and Sam looked at him and seemed to wonder something similar.
“You’re my friend,” Cas told Sam, or at least this version of Sam, this strange
just-add-water person. He’d pressed his fingers into Sam’s soft, clean fingers, and said it again, slowly. “You’re my friend. I’m going to fix this.”
Dean comes with him to the motel. His questions are incessant. Where is Sam? Why can’t I see him? Is he okay? Did he say why he did it?
“He didn’t do it,” says Cas. “Anna’s resourceful. She must have found some other way.”
“But you heard him, when he came to know of Anna’s plan. He was willing to do it, if that stopped this-mess. He was giving up.”
There are two ways to know all about a thing: by being there, or by being the one who creates a recorded history of it. Castiel is putting together the recorded history of Sam Winchester, piece by piece.
This much, at least, he knows for sure.
“He didn’t do it.” Cas says, firmly.
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Castiel divides all the white plates from the red plates. He hums quietly, an old song that was harmonized from one corner of Heaven to the other, and figures out that there are chords and tempos his vessel cannot comprehend. He settles for a sailing ditty instead, picked up from Ur long ago. He doesn’t look at Sam, swaddled in a quilt and staring darkly at his half-eaten plate, memories and being draining in and out of himself. It looks like this is physically hurting him. He curls against the side of the couch, one fist clenched, biting down on the pain.
Castiel had almost put these things aside. They congealed in the process of their transformation, thick and black in his hands, and he felt in his heart like a poisoner. He held the worst fragments of Sam’s soul, and looked at Sam, and considered throwing it all away.
It could be better, for Sam, not to have these things. He could be a happier person. No one in this world, or in any world, would ever go looking for these fragments. Not even Lucifer.
But just as quickly, he throws it all in.
These are things that make Sam who he is. Taking them away is murder.
Castiel picks up a mug. He is suddenly afraid that this, what he’s done, could also be murder. How was Cas to know? But Sam is strong, he tells himself. He’s fast and dangerous and messy and strong, just like his brother. That’s why Cas had chosen them-the both of them. Their histories bolstered them. They followed only their own rules.
He cannot reduce Sam to being content on someone else’s chessboard.
His humming grows louder, turns loud and bright. He feels stupid, but also afraid of looking. He divides the plates again: white and round, white and square. He wonders if Dean would have asked him to set aside the bad stuff. He tells himself no, he wouldn’t.
“Cas?” says Sam, suddenly. It’s the first time since this place that Sam has said his name.
Castiel drops his mug. It shatters on the ground, loud as the Big Bang, many fragments skittering across the black like the start of a baby universe.
“Are you alright, Sam?”
Sam is very, very quiet. Cas steels himself, and goes to sit next to him.
“I can’t do it,” Sam says, pushing the plate towards Cas. He’s curled into himself as much as he can, hurt like all of his life is crashing into him at once. It probably is. There are fingernail marks on his skin, and the space beneath his eyes look bruised. He doesn’t meet Castiel’s gaze.
“Sam.”
“I can’t do it myself,” Sam says, in a great, shuddering breath, “so you have to help me.”
“If you’re not ready-” says Cas, but he’s already spooning the fruit from the plate.
“I’m fine,” says Sam. His eyes are haunted, but his gaze is clearer and sharper than they’ve ever been in this place.
“It’s good to have you back,” says Cas. “Dean missed you. We missed you.”
Sam flinches, visibly. “You have to know something. And you have to tell Dean-”
“What?”
Sam shudders, and grabs hold of Cas’s elbow. “I wasn’t giving up,” he says. He looks down at the plate in Cas’s hand, and cringes again.
“Sam-”
“I didn’t-I didn’t make her do this. I didn’t make Anna do this.”
“Sam, I-”
“You have to tell Dean.”
Cas looks at him and notices scars for the first time. A pale ladder on the side of his neck, many nicks on the side of his wrist, a scar like a withered star on the back of his palm. All the little things that make a body a person with a history.
Sam breathes in, convulsively, and takes the spoon from Cas. There are tears trembling on his lashes, and he wipes them away, furiously.
Castiel is quiet for a moment as he takes in this Sam, labels and bad blood and all.
“He already knows,” says Cas. “We already know.”
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Your writing is always so uniquely descriptive. You took this prompt in a completely different direction than I ever could have imagined, so clever and heartfelt. I really enjoyed Cas and how deeply he cared for Sam in this, it made him very human.
Lovely!
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Thank you so much for writing this!
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Excellent work, as always! Thank you so much for sharing :)
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