[fic] Who Here Would Choose (To Walk in Those Shoes) (1/2)
Title: Who Here Would Choose (To Walk in Those Shoes)
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 17,872
Notes: This takes place during S3, but I started it before the premiere and nothing will make it perfectly compatible with 3.02 or 3.03. Also, this fic was heavily influenced by the X-Files episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."
Summary: "I want to know how my brother dies," Sam says. To the wrong person.
Sam's drunk. Or maybe just incredibly buzzed. He doesn't get drunk or buzzed often enough these days to remember what the difference is, to see the line and know when he's crossed it.
He's in Peoria, Illinois, where he and Dean wasted a poltergeist several hours earlier. Sam remembers very clearly what happened the last time he was in Peoria, how he found Ava missing and her fiancé in bed with his throat slashed, and the memories aren't helping his mood too much.
Dean's fucking a woman in their room. In Sam's bed, maybe, since Dean keeps making jokes about it and Dean doesn't joke lightly. She's older than the women Dean normally goes for, maybe with a strand or two of gray hidden in her brunette curls but not quite old enough yet to go looking for them. "Been a while since I had me a little MILF action," Dean told Sam with a wink when she smiled at him in the motel lobby.
So Sam drove himself to a bar nearby and drank until he stopped wondering what the hell Dean expects him to do on his own for the rest of his life. Until he stopped wondering if the hellhound'll leave him with his brother's body to bury or if he'll get nothing.
There's a woman in the bar-too old for the place, with maybe a strand or two of brown hidden in her head of gray-who takes an interest in Sam somewhere around his fifth shot. She has the air of someone attracted to loneliness and melancholy, like she's on that road herself and just wants to find someone willing to walk with her for a few miles. Sam's met dozens of people like her, so he's almost glad she approaches him; it's familiar.
Her name is Miranda, she says. Her husband died last month, and her life's too quiet without him. She just wants to hear someone talk.
So Sam talks. About nothing in particular. His tongue's too loose by that point, so he mentions a thing or two he shouldn't. Nothing big, nothing dangerous, just a stumble or two when he mentions Jess or tries to feed her the line about being on a roadtrip with his brother. She raises her eyebrows a few times but doesn't comment on his slips.
"What do you want?" Miranda asks, when Sam runs out of things to tell her. "If you could have anything. What would it be?"
Sam thinks about the djinn, about Dean's wish and how his expression alternated between wistful and crushed when he told Sam about it.
"It changes by the day," he says.
"Then right now, at this very minute."
Sam can't say that he wants his brother free of the deal, not to her. He's sober enough to realize that, at least. But not sober enough to stray too far from it.
"I want to know how my brother dies," Sam says. He realizes too late what a weird answer it is, how it must sound to someone who doesn't know the story, but Miranda only looks at him like she understands completely.
Dean calls not long after, shouts, "Dude, where the hell are you?" in Sam's ear, and Sam tells Miranda goodbye and stumbles a little on his way back to the Impala, thinking of all the statistics he's ever heard about the effects of drunk driving but reminding himself he's driven in far worse states.
He almost forgets about Miranda entirely.
*
When it first happens, they're stopped for gas in a small town about twenty miles outside of Frankfort, on their way to Louisville for what sounds like it'll be a pretty standard salt-and-burn.
Dean's been driving for the last six hours but showing no sign of getting tired of it. His energy these days seems endless. But so does Sam's, probably, he supposes. To other people who can't feel the exhaustion piling up in his bones, threatening to break free. Maybe the exhaustion's hiding in Dean's bones, too, down where Sam can't see. Sam hates himself a little for hoping Dean's bones crack and spill before his own.
"Do you want me to take over?" Sam asks. He leans across the car to look at Dean through the open driver's side window.
They've only got about another hour to go until they reach Louisville so there's not much point to switching now, but Sam's back hurts from slouching, his legs ache from being bent so long, and his ass is asleep. The driver's seat isn't much different from the passenger's seat, but just to have his foot moving on the pedal for an hour, he thinks, would make a world of difference.
Dean looks offended, like Sam's insulted him personally, implied some sort of weakness. He's been in a mood for days, more touchy than usual, and Sam doesn't even bother pretending to know why. "The hell would I want you to do that for?" he asks, and turns his attention back to the gas pump without waiting for an answer.
Sam sighs a little, opens his own door, and steps out of the car. He figures he can at least walk around, stretch his legs for a few minutes. He doesn't really have to pee, but maybe he can get a drop or two out; just the walk to and from the bathroom, standing in front of a urinal for a few seconds, sounds inexplicably pleasant right now.
There's a kid-high school age, no older than seventeen-with an old, beat up Taurus at the pump behind them, staring slack-jawed at the Impala like it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. Sam spares him half a glance as he gets out of the car, smirks a little to think how Dean must be glowing at the attention.
Then suddenly Sam sees the kid, older. Much, much older. Dead of prostate cancer at the age of seventy-two. Afraid to get regular check-ups, so the doctors don't catch it until late. He's terrified of death, has too many regrets, but he knows it's coming. He dies at Frankfort Regional Medical Center while his wife prays in the waiting room. Sam gets a clear flash of his body the second before his heart stops, and the rest of the details just come to him. From where, he doesn't know, and it scares the shit out of him.
The next thing Sam knows, he's on the ground, back against the Impala's front tire. Dean's hands are on his face, moving down to his neck, fingers finding his pulse and then trailing back to his cheek.
"Sammy," he's saying. "Goddammit, Sam."
Sam doesn't see Dean terrified very often. Not like this, not where he's not even bothering to hide it, where it's all there in the edge to his voice and the strange shine in his wide eyes and the grip on Sam's face that's so strong it's starting to hurt. For a second, Sam's too caught up in being shocked to remember to respond.
"Yeah," he says eventually. "Yeah, Dean, I'm here."
The kid's still there by his Taurus, still young, still healthy. When Sam looks at him again, he only sees him as he is, not how he'll become. He stares back at Sam, a little freaked out, maybe, but mostly curious. Sam has no idea what just happened or what to do about it.
"What the hell was that, Sam?" Dean's saying, anger overtaking fear, like this is some joke Sam pulled just to piss him off. He's still touching him, one hand on his cheek turning Sam's face away from the kid and back to Dean, the other hand down on his neck finding his pulse again. "Jesus Christ, the fuck did you just do, scared the shit out of me."
"Think I stood up too fast," Sam says, mumbling more than speaking. He tries to stand but puts too much force into it and falls forward halfway up onto Dean, mouths a little at Dean's shoulder while he gets his balance again and then straightens himself.
He shoots another glance at the kid, but he's getting back into his Taurus and pulling away. Sam almost wants to yell at him to watch out for his prostate, that a checkup could buy him a few more years at least, but that'd get him weird looks from everyone and he'd never get taken seriously.
"Stood up too fast," Dean repeats, hands on Sam's shoulders now, holding on like Sam'll fall if he lets go. "Right. You sure it wasn't-"
"No. Not a vision."
Sam hasn't had a vision in weeks. Hasn't had a reason to, since his visions were all related to the yellow-eyed demon and the yellow-eyed demon's dead. And it didn't feel like a vision, didn't hurt like a vision, just scared like one.
"I'm fine," he tells Dean. "Really."
He tells himself he has no reason to tell Dean. Dean's got a lot on his plate right now, is preoccupied with living his life to the fullest, doesn't need any reason to worry about Sam, not before Sam's had the chance to worry over it himself first.
*
It's well over a week before it happens again, and Sam's convinced himself that first time was a hallucination, brought on by a mixture of stress and fatigue and standing up too quick. When he's been living in a sea of thoughts about his brother dying, he figures it makes sense. His only concern is that it's too early for him to be cracking up in the head; he hasn't gotten anywhere on figuring out the deal yet.
The second time it happens, they're in a tiny town near Seattle, chasing omens but running into a little trouble when the demons they're dealing with are subtle and know how to lay low. Bobby's on his way, and all Sam and Dean are really doing until he gets there is sitting on their asses and waiting.
They get lunch at JJ's Country Diner, because it serves breakfast all day and Dean feels passionately about diner hash browns. The waitress is pretty far from what Sam would call attractive, but Dean flirts shamelessly with her anyway while Sam flips through the local newspaper.
"Dude," Dean says, when the waitress scuttles away to refill his drink. "What's your problem? You keep sighing."
"I do?" Sam doesn't remember sighing, but that's not really something you notice yourself doing unless you're doing it on purpose.
The waitress is ignoring everyone else in the diner except Dean, which means Sam's been waiting on his refill for the last six minutes, and Sam has a lot to say to Dean about this town and why it doesn't seem like any place demons would choose to spend their time but the waitress keeps hovering around Dean so Sam never gets the chance to say any of it. That might be enough to get a few sighs out of him.
"Yeah." Dean shovels a forkful of hash browns into his mouth and talks while he chews. "So what, got something going on in that freaky head of yours you need to be telling me?"
"No." Sam stares down at his scrambled eggs, wishes he'd gotten hash browns instead because even slathered in ketchup and half-chewed in Dean's mouth they look better than his eggs. "It'd be nice if our waitress could get me the soda I asked for seven minutes ago though."
"Hey," Dean says the moment the waitress returns with his glass, grinning wide, teeth on full display. "You think my brother could get a refill there, sweetheart?"
She giggles, says, "Of course!" and reaches for Sam's glass.
It hits Sam then. She has a stroke and never fully recovers from it. Her family puts her in a nursing home when they can't take care of her anymore, and she dies there. It's quiet, peaceful. Sam sees her lie down for a mid-afternoon nap and never wake up, and everything leading up to that moment just finds its place in his head like it was always there.
It doesn’t pack quite the punch that the first one did, but Sam still reacts roughly the same. He nearly falls out of his chair and somehow manages to knock his glass over. Ice covers the table, splashes his eggs, pools in his lap. Dean's next to him almost instantly, grabbing his face the same way he did the first time. Except this time he doesn't bother checking Sam's pulse. Sam must look alive enough that it isn't an issue.
"Can someone get me some water and a towel or something?" Dean says, an edge sharp like a machete in his voice, not taking his eyes away from Sam's. "Jesus, Sam, again? You in there? C'mon, Sam, talk to me."
"Yeah." Sam's voice sounds off even to his own ears, heavier, rougher. Dean's proximity is making him uncomfortable, the thumb rubbing at his cheek making him jittery, the ice in his lap and the eyes of every person in the diner on him making him feel stupid. "I'm fine," he says, and tries to pull away.
Dean doesn't let him go far, gets a hand on Sam's bicep and keeps him within reach. "Uh huh. Don't think you stood up too fast this time. You want to tell me what the hell that was?"
The waitress gets back then with a glass of water and a small stack of towels, looking distinctly concerned and like she really wishes she knew what to do. Sam sympathizes a lot with that. He sees her only as she looks now and not decades down the road, and he has no idea what to do about that second where he watched her die.
"I don't know what happened," he says, taking the glass of water and drinking about half of it in one gulp. "I just got really dizzy all of a sudden."
Bobby's coming, Sam tells himself. Bobby's coming, and if anyone knows what this is and what to do about it, it'll be Bobby.
*
Sam holds off until after they exorcise the demons-two of them, evil fuckers who haven't been topside in centuries and are too high on fresh air to put up a fight Sam, Dean, and Bobby can't handle-and after that, it's near impossible to get Bobby alone. Dean's really good at disappearing when you need him there and hanging around when you'd rather he were elsewhere. He does his best to plaster himself to Sam's side, either because he's afraid Sam'll have another spell or because he knows what Sam's trying to do or for some other reason entirely known only to him.
Sam manages, though. He suggests they all get Taco Bell for dinner to celebrate, which always does a number on Dean's stomach the second he swallows it, and then he and Bobby have plenty of time alone while Dean's holed up in the Taco Bell restroom.
"You think the visions are starting again?" Bobby asks.
"No," Sam answers. "They don't feel like visions. Not the ones I had before, anyway. With those, I saw whole scenes playing out, and I only knew what I saw. With these, I get flashes, and then it's just like information is being…I don't know, downloaded into my head."
Sam abruptly remembers the shapeshifter in St. Louis, how it pulled Dean's thoughts and memories from nothing, and he feels kind of ill thinking he has something in common with that.
"Unless," he continues, "they've just morphed into something a little different. I mean, I used to watch people die, or nearly die, and now I'm watching people die again. It kind of makes sense they'd be related, right?"
"I don't have much experience with psychic abilities," Bobby says, leaning back in the booth, folding his arms, and considering Sam, "but I'm pretty sure they don't morph. Gain power, sure, but not change like that. Could be a curse. You boys-and you in particular-pissed anyone off lately?"
Sam thinks of everyone he's met recently, every person he's talked to in the last couple weeks, and that's when he remembers Miranda, remembers how he told her what he wanted most was to know how his brother dies and how she looked at him like it wasn't a weird or unreasonable desire at all.
Bobby looks unimpressed when Sam tells him about it. "The hell did you go saying that for? And here I thought you were smarter than that. If a strange old woman comes up to you in a bar, you be polite but keep to yourself, you don't go telling her your whole life story!"
"I didn't tell her my life story. I didn't tell her anything important. And she wasn't strange. She asked me what I wanted-which is a common question, you know, especially when you're drinking and have a lot on your mind-and I told her. That's it."
"And look where it got you!"
Sam thinks for a moment that Bobby's going to really give it to him, start roaring about how careless he is in the middle of Taco Bell, but then Bobby closes his mouth, stares hard at Sam for a few seconds, and sighs, relaxes his shoulders.
"Well," Bobby says, leaning his elbows onto the table. "Sounds like she might've thought she was doing you a favor. She might think you're supposed to see it as a gift."
Maybe that's what Miranda thought, but Sam definitely thinks it's more of a curse. He doesn't want to watch Dean die; he just wants to know that it's not slightly less than a year from now, that it's not in the jaws of a hellhound come to drag him to hell. And that doesn't explain why he's seeing total strangers die when the only person he cares about is his brother.
"Maybe you're working up to it," Bobby says, when Sam tells him, and then takes a bite out of his burrito. Somehow watching Bobby of all people eat a burrito at Taco Bell almost makes Sam feel better, just a little bit. "What I want to know is, why aren't you telling Dean? You don't think he deserves to know what's going on with you?"
He does. Of course he does. Just not now, not when Sam's still trying to figure it out for himself. Not when Sam's not totally sure Dean won't hunt Miranda down and make her take it back before Sam can see how Dean dies.
"I will," Sam tells Bobby. "Eventually."
Bobby says he'll look into it, call a few people, and let Sam know when he's found something. It'll have to be enough.
*
The third time is four days later. They pass a semi on the interstate, and when Sam gets a glimpse of the driver, he knows he'll suffer a heart attack at fifty-two. He'll die at the hospital. Sam gets a flash of doctors and nurses trying to save him and his daughter crying into her palms in the hallway.
Sam's knee jerks and he drops the book in his hands. Dean shoots him a curious look but doesn't say anything.
The fourth time is two days later, and Sam's been waiting for it. They stop at a decent-sized but slightly run-down gas station for gas and food in Twin Falls, Idaho. Sam's fixing himself a hot dog, Dean's microwaving a chicken sandwich, and the woman working there is leaning over an open magazine on the counter.
She'll die of breast cancer in a few years. She has the lump in her breast now, but she doesn't know it, doesn't bother to get checked or check herself for lumps and won't for a long time. It'll be a hard struggle and she'll almost be glad to be done with it. Almost, except she won't be able to stop thinking of all the people she'll leave behind. She'll fall into a coma and never wake up. Sam sees her body motionless on a hospital bed and hears the machines start screaming when her lungs finally collapse.
Sam barely even flinches. Another cancer, he thinks. Another one who catches it too late, who doesn't pay enough attention to their own body.
Sam can't quote very many statistics about breast cancer off the top of his head, so he makes up a few and says them to Dean, loudly, along with what he does know to be true. He tells Dean that breast cancer kills more women than any other cancer, that early detection can save your life, that women should examine themselves regularly and, if they're at risk, get a mammogram once a year. Dean stares at him like he's gone completely stark raving, but that's fine because now the woman's staring at him too and he thinks some of what he's saying might just be sinking in.
"You should check yourself," Sam tells her as he pays. "It only takes a few minutes and it could save your life."
If it doesn't save her then it could at least give her more time, and that's worth Sam making an idiot of himself.
"Dude, I hate to break it to you," Dean says, as they both climb into the car. "I mean, there's nothing wrong with being obsessed with tits and I'm glad to see you finally showing an interest. But you're doing it wrong."
The fifth time is the next day, at a coffee shop in St. George, Utah. Sam picks them up a couple newspapers while Dean orders coffee for them both at the counter.
There's a kid sitting alone at a table in the corner with his laptop. He's sixteen. He's gay and he's known it for years. His parents wouldn't be okay with it; they'd disown him or maybe try to beat it out of him. He's pining after his best friend, who doesn't hate gays but isn't really comfortable with the idea of them either, and he thinks both his parents and his friend are starting to suspect. He'll slit his wrists with his mother's sharpest kitchen knife one night after his parents go to bed and bleed to death on the bathroom floor. Sam watches his hands shake as he makes the first cut. It happens less than two months from now, and he's already planning it.
As a general rule, Sam and Dean always pick the table that's farthest from everyone else. So when Sam throws the newspapers and his bag down on a table right next to the boy, Dean raises his eyebrows and sends Sam a look that says clearly, 'What the hell are you doing?'
Sam doesn't care. The kid's too young to die, and he can totally do this.
"You know, about 5% of Americans will admit to being sexually involved with a member of the same sex," Sam tells Dean, raising his voice enough that the kid will have to hear. And sure enough, Sam sees him freeze out of the corner of his eye and glance over.
Dean freezes too, his cup in his hand and halfway to his mouth, and stares at Sam, expression completely blank. "Really," he says.
Sam nods. "And there are probably a lot more who just refuse to admit to it."
It's harder coming up with things to say about this than it was with breast cancer, because you're a lot less likely to find statistics and facts about homosexuality without specifically looking for them than you are with breast cancer. And Sam's never had any reason to go looking for statistics about homosexuality before, but he manages anyway.
"And some studies," Sam says, "have found that, say, a man with a gay or bisexual sibling is more likely to be gay or bisexual himself. Which shows the possibility that homosexuality could be the result of genetics, which would prove that being gay is not a choice."
Dean's eyebrows are inching up his forehead, but his lips are still pressed in a straight and inexpressive line. "Huh," he says.
"And," Sam continues, "it's definitely true that homosexuality now is way more socially acceptable than it was in the past, and one can only assume that it'll keep getting more and more socially acceptable until, one day, maybe a long way in the future but one day, homophobia will be a thing of the past."
Sam's got the kid's full attention, and he can feel it. It fills him with a weird sort of energy-knowing that at this moment, this kid's life is more or less in his hands. He's saved a lot of people in his life, but never like this; Sam doesn't have much experience convincing people that their lives are worth living, that dying isn't the answer.
"But the fact is," Sam says, pausing to take a sip of his coffee. "The fact is, you can't make someone see what they don't want to see. There are people right now, maybe someone close to you, that will look at you differently, may even hate you, if you tell them you're gay, but you can't let those people rule you, you know? There are people out there who won't hate you for it, who won't look at you differently, who will accept you as you are and never ask you to pretend to be what you're not, and you have to surround yourself with those people. And sometimes you just have to be patient; you have to go through hell before you can be happy, but it'll come. And you can't give up until you at least try."
Dean looks completely stunned, which is an expression that looks ridiculously unnatural on him and would probably be enough to get a good laugh out of Sam in any other situation. Sam shoots a glance at the kid, finds him staring back with about the same expression as Dean. Sam grins wide at him, and he turns pink, ducks his head, and then responds with a shy smile. Which Sam takes as a good sign and makes him feel very light and proud of himself.
Dean follows Sam's gaze and then glances back and forth between the kid and Sam, and Sam knows what it looks like, what Dean's thinking, and he'll laugh his ass off over it later.
"C'mon, Sam," Dean says, scooting his chair back from the table. "It's about time we get going."
"Yeah," Sam says, standing up. "Okay."
Dean rests one hand on the small of Sam's back as they leave, which is sort of weird but not overly so. Sam raises an eyebrow at Dean, but Dean isn't looking at him.
So instead he turns and gives the kid a little wave and gets another blush and smile in response. Sam thinks if nothing else he's pretty sure he made the kid rethink his decision, reminded him there's still hope. Sam's almost okay with this new ability right then.
Almost.
*
Sam spends a lot of his spare time staring at Dean. He doesn't really know what else to do.
It happens regularly now, multiple times a day. Sam's seen accidents and diseases and all the ways old age and nature can take you down. While talking to a family in Montana with a haunted antique clock in their house, Sam glances at their newborn asleep in her swing in the living room and then sees her in her bassinet three months later, not breathing, victim of SIDS.
But nothing on Dean.
It's starting to drive Sam crazy. He watches strangers die and imagines Dean in their places. Dean in the middle of a heart attack, Dean dying slowly of prostate cancer, Dean flying through the windshield of the Impala, neck snapped and dead instantly. He thinks about the crossroad demon, about the deal. He thinks if that's how Dean's going to go, then maybe watching it will give Sam a clue. Maybe the information he's been desperate for-the one thing that'll get Dean out of the deal without killing Sam-will just slip into his mind, and he can use that to save Dean. It could be right there, if only it would just come to him already.
So Sam stares at Dean all the time, because he always gets his flashes of death when he's looking at someone, and he doesn't want to miss it. Dean notices-of course he does, because Sam's not exactly being subtle and Dean's not exactly stupid-and first he acts like an asshole, poking Sam in the eye and throwing whatever's in reach at his face when he catches Sam staring. Then he acts like he's creeped out, keeping his eyes off Sam at all times and driving with his right hand up by his eye, blocking Sam from his peripheral vision.
Then Dean starts staring back. All the time. When it's Sam's turn to drive and Dean's turn to nap, Dean leans his head back against the seat and stares at Sam's cheek until he falls asleep. When Sam pulls out his computer in a motel room, Dean sits on his bed cleaning their guns and watches Sam's fingers move over the keyboard. Sam wakes up every morning to an itch between his shoulder blades, Dean's gaze on his back. Sam gets the message: 'See, not so fun on the other side, is it?' But he doesn't let that deter him. Because this is important. If Sam could save the sixteen year old at the coffee shop with this curse-gift-thing, then he can either save Dean with it too or use it to learn that he doesn't need it to save Dean. He puts all his energy into finding out how to make it work.
The only thing is, if there's any pattern to whose deaths he can see, when, or how, Sam can't find it. As far as he can tell, it's totally random. The only thing that gives him hope is that it's happening more and more frequently. Like Bobby was right and he is working up to it. Soon he'll look at Dean and see something, and Sam just has to be ready for it.
In the meantime, he starts trying to track down Miranda. Bobby's done his own research and all but told Sam he has no idea what it was she did to him or what can be done about it, that she holds all the answers and Sam'll have to find her again to get them. Sam finds the phone number for the bar where he met her, and he calls one night when Dean's in the shower. That Sam's memory is vague, made fuzzy by both the alcohol and the time that's passed since then, is hurting his search considerably.
"We get a lot of customers here," the bartender tells him coolly. "Too many to keep track of names and you haven't given me much in the way of a face."
Sam remembers what expressions she made, but he doesn't remember what she actually looked like when she made them. Not enough to describe her to anyone, anyway.
Dean comes out of the bathroom, towel around his waist, shaking water out of his hair, just as Sam is hanging up. He stops when he notices the phone in Sam's hand. "Thought I heard you talking out here. Who called?"
"Bobby," Sam says, but he hesitates just a second too long and he knows Dean notices.
"Really," Dean says, voice flat. "Huh." He grabs the clothes sitting out on his bed and takes them back into the bathroom to get dressed. He comes back out soon after and leans back against the wall across from Sam's bed, folds his arms across his chest, and does his best to stare Sam down. "You're not doing anything stupid, are you? Because I told you, Sam, you do anything stupid and I'll stop you myself-"
"No, Dean," Sam says. He meets Dean's gaze, makes his expression as open and honest as possible, shapes his mouth in a way he knows hits Dean right where it counts, right in his memories of Sam young and vulnerable and innocent. "It's not that."
Dean doesn't relax, not completely. But his scowl does fall from his face, and he drops his arms to his sides, pushes away from the wall, and comes to sit next to Sam on the bed, close enough that his elbow knocks Sam's and then rests comfortably against it.
"You got something we need to talk about, Sammy?" he asks, voice calm in a way that Sam knows right away is forced. In a way that means he knows Sam has something he's keeping from Dean and the moment he gets confirmation of it he's doing his best to pry Sam's lips apart. "Don't look at me like that. You think I don't know you enough to tell when you're acting weirder than usual?"
Sam laughs, even though Dean hasn't said anything funny. Dean sold his soul and Sam's acting weirder than usual, and Dean can latch onto that second part and ignore the first even when one doesn't exist without the other. It's not really funny, but somehow it is.
"I've just got something I need to figure out for myself," Sam tells him, glad to be laughing because him laughing always makes at least a little tension fall out of Dean's shoulders.
And a little does, but only a little. Dean's never really relaxed when he knows there are things in front of him he can't see. "Sure," he says. "But pass it on when you're done, all right? It's not nice to hog all the fun."
Dean raises a hand to the top of Sam's head, ruffles his hair in a way he hasn't done since they were kids, and then rubs his knuckles playfully against Sam's cheekbones in a way Sam can't remember Dean ever doing before. It makes something spike in Sam's chest, and for about half a second Sam's sure this is it: he's finally going to get that flash he's been waiting for.
Nothing comes, but it gives Sam an idea anyway. He hasn't seen any evidence that touching has an effect on whose death he sees and whose he doesn't, but he doesn't exactly go around touching total strangers so it hasn't been properly tested. So he'll just have to touch Dean more often to test it. It can't hurt, Sam figures, and there's nothing he isn't willing to try.
*
There are a series of murders in Minneapolis. Men and women all living in one apartment complex found in their apartments, ripped open, entrails strung out across the floor. Dean doesn't think it's their kind of gig and neither does Sam, really, until it gets out that the bodies were found with all the doors and windows in the apartment locked, the authorities left with no idea how the murderer is getting in and out. So they check it out.
The worst of the mess in the apartment of the latest victim is cleaned up by the time Sam and Dean get there, posing as the employees of an alarm company since they still have the outfits from the case with Meg in Chicago a couple years back. The bodies, the landlord tells them, weren't mutilated or torn to shreds. They were strangled first then sliced open, right down the belly, a neat, clean cut that police say look almost professional. No signs of a struggle. The only mess is the blood and guts all over the floor.
When Dean pulls out his EMF meter and waves it around near the red spatters on the carpet, it goes crazy and he whoops. "Ha, knew it!"
"Dude, no you didn't," Sam says, running his fingers over the window panes, checking for anything amiss. "You were ready to call this one a bust before we even started looking into it. I was the one who said we should stick around to be sure."
"Details." Dean drags himself up from the floor and stares down at the blood, trying to find some pattern, some symbol in it. "Guess it was too much to hope they'd leave us the guts too, huh? So what do you think, we're dealing with an angry spirit or what?"
"Could be. We should check the building's history, see if anything happened here that'd spur a haunting."
On their way out they run into a woman in the hallway, leaving her apartment carrying a medium-sized cardboard box. She's probably in her late twenties, and wearing sweats and a tank top, and her hair's a mess.
"You're from the alarm company, huh? Guess what, your alarms don't work for shit," she tells them when they stop her.
"Well," Sam starts, "that's why we're here-"
"Going somewhere?" Dean asks, eyeing the box in her arms, or maybe what he can see of her breasts over the top of it.
She laughs. It's not a pretty or cheerful laugh. "You honestly think I'm gonna stay here when my neighbors are getting slaughtered? Yeah right. That asshole of a landlord won't let me out of my contract, so I'm moving in with my boyfriend and his roommate until I come up with a better plan. Now if you'll excuse me-"
Her shoulder rubs against Sam's chest as she shoves past them, and then it hits Sam like a shot of rock salt to the head.
She'll die tonight. Her last night in the apartment, finishing up packing what she needs before she leaves permanently tomorrow. She's in the bathroom going through her medicine cabinet when the hand closes around her throat and forces her to the floor on her back. She's pregnant. It's still way too early for her to tell, only about a week since it happened, but somehow she can sense it. Her last thought will be of the baby she won't have. She sees her killer, and Sam sees it too, the grip on her throat loosening the moment she stops struggling.
Suddenly Sam knows everything. About the spirit, its story, what it's trying to do. Which doesn't really fit with what Sam knows about this curse, but it happens all the same. He figures maybe the rules are different when the supernatural is involved.
He stumbles on the stairs on the way out and has to lean against the wall and grab the handrail to keep himself standing. Dean's next to him instantly, one hand on his shoulder and the other on his waist, steadying him.
"Man," Dean says, laughing. "Walk much?" Then he actually gets a look at Sam's expression, and everything Sam's thinking must be showing on his face because Dean stops laughing and his lips turn down into a frown. "Sam, what is it? What happened?"
"Anthropomancy," Sam says, pulling away from Dean and continuing down the stairs.
"Come again?"
"Anthropomancy. It's a form of divination where you study the entrails of a freshly killed human. It's what she's doing."
"What who's doing? The spirit?"
"Yeah." When they reach the bottom of the staircase, Sam holds the front door open and watches Dean walk through it, looking slightly spooked but trying to pretend he's not.
Sam has to tell him. There isn't enough time for Dean to figure it out on his own-even with Sam subtly leading him in the right direction-and get back here in time to save the woman.
"When she was alive, she was an amateur tasseographer," Sam says. "She read tea leaves for people in her apartment. About ten years ago, one of her customers turned out to be a, well, homicidal maniac. He went around killing fortune tellers. Cut out their entrails trying to read his own future and gouged out their eyes. He killed her, and now she's doing the same thing. Except I guess she doesn't want to gouge out anyone's eyes."
They're at the Impala now, Sam with his hand on the car door handle, waiting for Dean to go around to his side and unlock the doors. But Dean's just standing next to him, staring at him wide-eyed and slack-jawed, not even bothering to hide how freaked out he is.
"You want to tell me how the hell you know all that?"
"I don't really know how I know it, okay?" Sam tells him, trying to keep his voice calm in hopes that Dean'll follow his lead and stay calm too. "I just. I know things, sometimes, about people. I look at them and I see things. But we don't have time now, okay, because that woman back there? She'll die tonight if we don't find out where the body's buried and burn it. So come on, we need to hurry."
Sam jiggles the handle a little to emphasize his point, but Dean just keeps staring, less freaked out now and more pissed off. Sam knows what he's thinking, what words are just behind his teeth ready to get spit free, but they don't have time to hash this out.
"Dean."
But Dean's not paying attention. Sam knows he doesn't feel the urgency; he didn’t watch a woman nine months from motherhood get strangled on her bathroom floor thinking about how her child can't live with her dead. "Goddammit, Sam, how long has this been going on, and when the fuck were you gonna tell me about it? Have I not made it perfectly fucking clear that I want to know everything that's going on with you and your screwed up little sixth sense? Jesus Christ, Sam-"
Sam puts his hands on Dean's shoulders, grips them hard, and that shuts Dean up quick. He glances at one of Sam's hands, back at Sam's face, and then just gives him a deer-in-headlights stare, like he has no idea how to deal with any of this.
"Look, Dean," Sam says, slowing his speech down and emphasizing every word. "We don't have time to talk about this right now. Our job is to save that woman. I'll tell you everything you want to know. Later. Right now, you just need to trust me and do what I say."
Dean blinks, twice, and then swallows hard enough it looks almost painful. He raises his hands to Sam's face, gets one palm on Sam's jaw, fingers covering his ear, and the other against Sam's pulse, fingers curving around the back of his neck. It surprises the hell out of Sam, but not quite as much as the desire to just lean forward into Dean and stay there.
"Later," Dean says, tone harsh but not angry. "We're talking when this case is done, and don't even think for a second you're getting out of it. You hear me?"
Sam swallows and then nods. "Yeah," he says. "Okay."
*
It's not the smoothest case they've ever solved, but it's not the roughest either. It takes them too long to find the tasseographer's name and where she's buried. By the time they've finally come up with both, time is dangerously close to being up. Dean goes back to the apartment complex to keep an eye on the woman and leaves Sam to salt-and-burn the bones.
He's almost too late. By the end of the night, when he's finally finished, the woman-whose name is Ally-has a nasty gash on her forehead and Dean has ugly red-purple bruises all over his throat. But they're both alive, Ally crying so hard she's got snot and tears all over her face and Dean looking relieved Sam's there to handle that for him.
Sam has no idea if the baby's okay, if there's even anything that can be done if it's not, when it's so small and still too early for her to know for certain she's pregnant. He makes Dean drop her off at the hospital and hopes if something's wrong the doctors there can help. He tells himself that's all he can do.
"So this is what it's like to be you, huh," Dean says when they're back at the motel, bent over the bathroom sink and head twisted to the right so he can examine the bruises on his neck. His voice is more of a rasping whisper than anything, like his vocal cords have been stripped raw.
Sam's sitting on the closed toilet seat, picking graveyard dirt out from under his nails. Part of him wants desperately to take a shower, clean the dirt from the rest of his body where it's gotten lodged in places he doesn't want to think about, but the rest of him just wants to fall into bed and worry about it in the morning. The part that's all for sleeping is winning.
"What?"
"You're always the one getting choked," Dean says.
"I am?" Sam racks his brain for the last time he had something's hands around his throat on a hunt. Then he remembers it was their last hunt, actually. He tries to remember the time before that and thinks of an incident that happened on a case two weeks ago. He guesses Dean has a point.
"What, you didn't notice?"
"It's not like I keep a tally of all the injuries I get."
Dean raises a hand to his throat, rubs at the bruises and then covers them with his palm, curling his fingers like he's about to choke himself. Sam stops everything he's doing to watch, feels dirty for the way it makes his stomach muscles clench and his fingers twitch like they'd like to curl around something too.
"So," Dean says, dropping his hand. "Seeing as how this case is over, I think it's time you told me about this thing you've apparently been keeping from me."
It's the middle of the night. Sam's got dirt smeared in the wrinkles on his elbow and exhaustion tugging down on his eyelids. Tonight Dean got closer to being strangled to death than he's ever been before, he's got a whole collar of bruises to show for it, and it's a miracle all the important parts of his neck still work right. The last thing either of them needs right now is to have this conversation.
"Tomorrow," Sam says. "We can talk about it tomorrow."
"The hell we can." Dean raises himself to his full height and glares down at Sam. He's got the same body language he gets seconds before he punches someone, but he's not close enough to Sam right then to get a good hit in and he isn't stepping closer. "What, you think if you put it off long enough I'll just let it go?"
"No," Sam answers. "I'm just saying, it's been a long night, and I'd rather it not get any longer. I'm tired, Dean, and you are too. Let's just sleep now and worry about it in the morning. It doesn't make any difference when we talk about it."
Sam spent a good portion of his childhood working on his 'Please Dean, just let me do this' expression. The secret to it lies in knowing you'll never get everything you want in life. He had it perfected at an early age.
"Tomorrow," Dean says, eyes narrowing even more, like he knows he just got played. "But so help me, Sam, if you don't talk, I swear I'll beat it out of you."
Dean thinks it's more serious than it is. He probably thinks it's a return of Sam's psychic abilities, something to do with the demon, something to do with the war they're right in the middle of. Sam's not sure what the best way is to tell him that no, it's just that he got drunk and started talking to the wrong person about the wrong thing, and he's not ready for it to stop. Not yet.
*
The things Dean lets himself forget are few and far between. He still remembers the song Sam made up when he was two and can sing it perfectly, mimicking Sam's barely-understandable toddler voice and everything. So Sam doesn't expect Dean to just forget they're due to have a serious talk the moment they both wake up.
But that's exactly what happens. Or so it seems, anyway. Dean nudges Sam awake the next morning and says, in a voice that's still hoarse but sounds a lot more normal and healthy than it did the previous day, "C'mon, checkout time's 10:30. They're gonna be coming to kick us out soon," and they get ready and pack up their stuff in total silence.
In the car, Dean turns the volume of his music down so low it sounds more like it's coming from someone else's car than their own. Sam's sure this is it, this is when Dean makes him spill everything and then yells at him for keeping quiet so long and for not keeping his mouth shut in the first place. But Dean doesn't. He rubs the stubble on his chin, tilts his head from side to side like he's trying to crack his neck, and doesn't say a word.
So Sam leans his temple against the window and watches the road disappear under the tires.
There's a man pulled off onto the shoulder with a broken down pickup. He's got the hood popped and is scowling down at whatever he sees there. He turns his eyes to the Impala when they pass him, and for half a second his gaze meets Sam's.
The man'll die of colon cancer at sixty-eight. He finds religion a week before he dies, when he wakes up one morning to see Jesus standing at the edge of his hospital bed. The experience makes him accept his own end, and he goes quietly, without a fight. Sam watches the doctor call the time of death. 11:43 p.m.
Sam whips his head around toward Dean, thinking maybe he's in some kind of death vision zone now and if he looks at Dean he'll be able to finally see.
He only sees Dean as he is now, alive and sitting in the driver's seat, a finger up one nostril. When he notices Sam staring, Dean flicks a booger at him and laughs when Sam yelps and swats it off his arm.
"Dude," Sam says. "Gross."
"Thought you were asleep," Dean replies, still smirking, completely unembarrassed. He reaches over to wipe his finger on Sam's jeans and only barely manages to jerk his hand back in time before Sam smacks it.
"God, Dean, could you be any more disgusting?"
"Aw, what are you talking about, Sammy, 'course I could." Dean lifts his hand again, holds it in the air for a second like he's about to wipe his finger on Sam's face this time or maybe in his hair. Sam prepares to dodge, but then Dean seems to rethink that thought and puts his hand back on the steering wheel. "Don't worry, you're safe. You can go back to sleep now."
"I wasn't sleeping in the first place. I was just thinking."
"Oh. Huh. Well, in that case-" Dean flips the music off completely. "Let's talk."
It made it a pretty long way, Sam thinks. Not many of Sam's secrets stay secret this long anymore, with the two of them living like they do and grown as close as they have.
"Okay," he says, slowly.
"So. These visions."
"They're not visions. I mean, they are visions, but they're not like the ones I used to have. Sometimes I just look at people, and I can-" Sam pauses, tries to figure out if he should just come out and say it or see if Dean'll try and get there on his own. "-I can see things."
"See things," Dean echoes, voice flat, eyes forward and not looking at Sam at all. "Uh huh. And exactly how long has this been going on?"
"About a month, more or less. Remember back in Peoria, when you had your little-" Sam waves his hand vaguely. "-fling in my bed, and I went to that bar?"
"And came back toasted. Drove my car back completely toasted like a friggin' moron, and don't think I've forgotten about that either."
"Yeah. Then. There was this older woman there. Her husband had just died, and she just wanted someone to talk to. So I talked to her, and she was really nice, but. Uh. I think she cursed me."
Dean shoots a sharp look at Sam and quirks one side of his lips down into a half-scowl. "You think she cursed you?"
"Well, this all started happening after that. And when I talked to Bobby, he seemed to think-"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you kidding me? Bobby."
The car is slowing down. It's a sure sign that things are about to get ugly, when Dean starts easing up on the gas without realizing it.
Sam pauses and raises his eyebrows at Dean. "Yeah. Bobby. What's wrong with Bobby?"
"Nothing. Nothing's wrong with Bobby." Dean shrugs, and it'd look a lot more nonchalant if he wasn't also suddenly gripping the steering wheel tightly in his fists. "Just, you know, can't believe you'd go to him first when you've got me right here."
"It's not like you're a stranger to keeping secrets, Dean," Sam says. He manages to rein in the urge to raise his voice a little with each word. "I seem to recall a couple really big things you tried to keep from me."
Dean's expression twists into one of faint disgust. "That was different and you know it," he says. "But anyway it's all in the past now, right, so let's just focus on the part where you went and pissed off some bitch in a bar and got yourself cursed for it."
Sam's been sure for a while now that Miranda did this to help him, because she liked him enough to give him what he said he wanted. So Sam feels almost fondly towards her because of it, and hearing Dean call her a bitch is enough to make him bristle. "I didn't piss her off-"
"Witches don't curse you 'cause they like you, Sam. I don't blame her, really, there've been plenty of times I've been pissed off enough I'd like to curse you too. 'Course, I would've gone for something a little more embarrassing and a little less ESP, but to each his own. So you pissed her off, and now you can see things. Which reminds me, see things like what, exactly?"
They're not hard words to say. They're right there on the tip of Sam's tongue, but somehow they just don't want to walk those last few steps to get out of his mouth. He clears his throat and gets ready to give them a strong shove.
But he doesn't get the chance to. Dean glances at Sam and then freezes, visibly tightens his grip on the steering wheel and stares like the look on Sam's face is telling him everything he doesn't want to hear.
"Shit," Dean says. He pulls the car off to the shoulder and stops it so quickly Sam's body lunges forward and he has to put both hands on the dash to keep the rest of himself from flying into it. "Goddammit."
Dean yanks the car door open, steps out, and slams it shut behind him. He walks around to the front of the Impala and then just stands, rubbing his palm over his face and watching the cars on the highway pass them by. Sam's out of the car the moment he sees which way he needs to go to follow.
Dean doesn't freak out lightly. He waits until you put no less than three things in front of him worth freaking out over, and only then will he let you have it. Even if Sam had looked him straight in the eye and said, "I see how people are going to die, and I think she meant it to be a gift because I want to see how you're supposed to die so I can stop it," it wouldn't be enough to incite a reaction like this. Maybe if he added, "And last night I went out and made a deal to get you out of yours," then that'd be enough to warrant Dean storming out of the car. But Sam didn't, so he has no idea what's going on.
"Dean," he says. "Dean, talk to me. What-"
"Dammit, Sam." Dean growls Sam's name like he does when he's pissed off, puts both hands on the hood of the Impala, fingers spread and curling a little like he'd dig his nails in if it wouldn't hurt the paint, and leans on them like he does when he's pissed off, but Dean's not pissed off. His eyes are too wide, and when they meet Sam's, the gaze is intense, but not in the way that automatically makes anger boil up in Sam's gut; instead it makes something shrink back in his chest. "You moron. You can't just-you should've told me, Sam. Jesus. What did you see?"
Then Sam gets it. Dean thinks he saw something he didn't.
"I didn't-" he starts, but Dean doesn't let him get any farther.
"I knew it. Knew you weren't acting right. Spouting off all that crap back in Utah about gay siblings and all the touching you've been doing lately, and I fucking knew." Dean shakes his head almost violently and looks away from Sam, back toward the highway. "Look, it doesn't-I don't-don't want you to go thinking I'm expecting something, 'cause I'm not. You don't-you have no idea what you're fucking with here, Sam, okay. So just don't. Leave it the hell alone."
Sam stares. There's nothing else he can think to do, and even if there was he wouldn't be able to move himself to do it. Sam's used to putting pieces in their place himself, not having someone else do it for him, and this is a puzzle he's never even seen the box for.
Dean glances at him, probably trying to gage his reaction, and whatever look is in Sam's eyes, it's apparently not something Dean wants to see. His face twists like it hurts, and his hands tighten into fists. For a moment, Sam thinks he's going to raise them up and bring them down on the Impala's hood, but he doesn't. Instead he pushes himself up and stalks back to the driver's side door.
"C'mon," he says, voice quiet and rough. "Daylight's burning."
Sam watches him climb into the car, waits a second, then another, and then follows.
"Dean," he starts, when he gets in the car, but Dean just makes a 'zip it' motion with his hands that's so emphatic Sam obeys without question.
Dean grabs a map out of the backseat and hands it to Sam. "Find me the quickest route to Peoria," he says, and looks grim when Sam opens his mouth to argue. "You don't get a say in this. I'm not hanging around with someone who's cursed. We'll find that witch and make her take it off, and it'll be done."
Taking off the curse won't make Sam forget what he knows, and it won't make Dean forget that Sam knows. Sam almost wants to point this out, but he doesn't.
He traces the lines on the map with one finger and comes up with a long and slightly convoluted route. If Dean realizes, he doesn't say, just starts the car and pulls them off the shoulder without a word.
It's still only eight hours or so until they'll reach Peoria. It's not like Sam hasn't come up with a dozen theories on how to get Dean out of the deal, dived headfirst into them, and then found some reason none of them would work. Still, the disappointment is crushing every time.
Sam presses his cheek against the window, hears Dean saying, "Goddammit," again and again in his head, and eventually falls asleep. He dreams that Dean is taller than him and tries to hug him, but Sam's forehead smashes into Dean's chin, and Dean says, "Goddammit," but in the same voice Jess always used just before she came all over Sam's face.
Part 2
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 17,872
Notes: This takes place during S3, but I started it before the premiere and nothing will make it perfectly compatible with 3.02 or 3.03. Also, this fic was heavily influenced by the X-Files episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."
Summary: "I want to know how my brother dies," Sam says. To the wrong person.
Sam's drunk. Or maybe just incredibly buzzed. He doesn't get drunk or buzzed often enough these days to remember what the difference is, to see the line and know when he's crossed it.
He's in Peoria, Illinois, where he and Dean wasted a poltergeist several hours earlier. Sam remembers very clearly what happened the last time he was in Peoria, how he found Ava missing and her fiancé in bed with his throat slashed, and the memories aren't helping his mood too much.
Dean's fucking a woman in their room. In Sam's bed, maybe, since Dean keeps making jokes about it and Dean doesn't joke lightly. She's older than the women Dean normally goes for, maybe with a strand or two of gray hidden in her brunette curls but not quite old enough yet to go looking for them. "Been a while since I had me a little MILF action," Dean told Sam with a wink when she smiled at him in the motel lobby.
So Sam drove himself to a bar nearby and drank until he stopped wondering what the hell Dean expects him to do on his own for the rest of his life. Until he stopped wondering if the hellhound'll leave him with his brother's body to bury or if he'll get nothing.
There's a woman in the bar-too old for the place, with maybe a strand or two of brown hidden in her head of gray-who takes an interest in Sam somewhere around his fifth shot. She has the air of someone attracted to loneliness and melancholy, like she's on that road herself and just wants to find someone willing to walk with her for a few miles. Sam's met dozens of people like her, so he's almost glad she approaches him; it's familiar.
Her name is Miranda, she says. Her husband died last month, and her life's too quiet without him. She just wants to hear someone talk.
So Sam talks. About nothing in particular. His tongue's too loose by that point, so he mentions a thing or two he shouldn't. Nothing big, nothing dangerous, just a stumble or two when he mentions Jess or tries to feed her the line about being on a roadtrip with his brother. She raises her eyebrows a few times but doesn't comment on his slips.
"What do you want?" Miranda asks, when Sam runs out of things to tell her. "If you could have anything. What would it be?"
Sam thinks about the djinn, about Dean's wish and how his expression alternated between wistful and crushed when he told Sam about it.
"It changes by the day," he says.
"Then right now, at this very minute."
Sam can't say that he wants his brother free of the deal, not to her. He's sober enough to realize that, at least. But not sober enough to stray too far from it.
"I want to know how my brother dies," Sam says. He realizes too late what a weird answer it is, how it must sound to someone who doesn't know the story, but Miranda only looks at him like she understands completely.
Dean calls not long after, shouts, "Dude, where the hell are you?" in Sam's ear, and Sam tells Miranda goodbye and stumbles a little on his way back to the Impala, thinking of all the statistics he's ever heard about the effects of drunk driving but reminding himself he's driven in far worse states.
He almost forgets about Miranda entirely.
*
When it first happens, they're stopped for gas in a small town about twenty miles outside of Frankfort, on their way to Louisville for what sounds like it'll be a pretty standard salt-and-burn.
Dean's been driving for the last six hours but showing no sign of getting tired of it. His energy these days seems endless. But so does Sam's, probably, he supposes. To other people who can't feel the exhaustion piling up in his bones, threatening to break free. Maybe the exhaustion's hiding in Dean's bones, too, down where Sam can't see. Sam hates himself a little for hoping Dean's bones crack and spill before his own.
"Do you want me to take over?" Sam asks. He leans across the car to look at Dean through the open driver's side window.
They've only got about another hour to go until they reach Louisville so there's not much point to switching now, but Sam's back hurts from slouching, his legs ache from being bent so long, and his ass is asleep. The driver's seat isn't much different from the passenger's seat, but just to have his foot moving on the pedal for an hour, he thinks, would make a world of difference.
Dean looks offended, like Sam's insulted him personally, implied some sort of weakness. He's been in a mood for days, more touchy than usual, and Sam doesn't even bother pretending to know why. "The hell would I want you to do that for?" he asks, and turns his attention back to the gas pump without waiting for an answer.
Sam sighs a little, opens his own door, and steps out of the car. He figures he can at least walk around, stretch his legs for a few minutes. He doesn't really have to pee, but maybe he can get a drop or two out; just the walk to and from the bathroom, standing in front of a urinal for a few seconds, sounds inexplicably pleasant right now.
There's a kid-high school age, no older than seventeen-with an old, beat up Taurus at the pump behind them, staring slack-jawed at the Impala like it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. Sam spares him half a glance as he gets out of the car, smirks a little to think how Dean must be glowing at the attention.
Then suddenly Sam sees the kid, older. Much, much older. Dead of prostate cancer at the age of seventy-two. Afraid to get regular check-ups, so the doctors don't catch it until late. He's terrified of death, has too many regrets, but he knows it's coming. He dies at Frankfort Regional Medical Center while his wife prays in the waiting room. Sam gets a clear flash of his body the second before his heart stops, and the rest of the details just come to him. From where, he doesn't know, and it scares the shit out of him.
The next thing Sam knows, he's on the ground, back against the Impala's front tire. Dean's hands are on his face, moving down to his neck, fingers finding his pulse and then trailing back to his cheek.
"Sammy," he's saying. "Goddammit, Sam."
Sam doesn't see Dean terrified very often. Not like this, not where he's not even bothering to hide it, where it's all there in the edge to his voice and the strange shine in his wide eyes and the grip on Sam's face that's so strong it's starting to hurt. For a second, Sam's too caught up in being shocked to remember to respond.
"Yeah," he says eventually. "Yeah, Dean, I'm here."
The kid's still there by his Taurus, still young, still healthy. When Sam looks at him again, he only sees him as he is, not how he'll become. He stares back at Sam, a little freaked out, maybe, but mostly curious. Sam has no idea what just happened or what to do about it.
"What the hell was that, Sam?" Dean's saying, anger overtaking fear, like this is some joke Sam pulled just to piss him off. He's still touching him, one hand on his cheek turning Sam's face away from the kid and back to Dean, the other hand down on his neck finding his pulse again. "Jesus Christ, the fuck did you just do, scared the shit out of me."
"Think I stood up too fast," Sam says, mumbling more than speaking. He tries to stand but puts too much force into it and falls forward halfway up onto Dean, mouths a little at Dean's shoulder while he gets his balance again and then straightens himself.
He shoots another glance at the kid, but he's getting back into his Taurus and pulling away. Sam almost wants to yell at him to watch out for his prostate, that a checkup could buy him a few more years at least, but that'd get him weird looks from everyone and he'd never get taken seriously.
"Stood up too fast," Dean repeats, hands on Sam's shoulders now, holding on like Sam'll fall if he lets go. "Right. You sure it wasn't-"
"No. Not a vision."
Sam hasn't had a vision in weeks. Hasn't had a reason to, since his visions were all related to the yellow-eyed demon and the yellow-eyed demon's dead. And it didn't feel like a vision, didn't hurt like a vision, just scared like one.
"I'm fine," he tells Dean. "Really."
He tells himself he has no reason to tell Dean. Dean's got a lot on his plate right now, is preoccupied with living his life to the fullest, doesn't need any reason to worry about Sam, not before Sam's had the chance to worry over it himself first.
*
It's well over a week before it happens again, and Sam's convinced himself that first time was a hallucination, brought on by a mixture of stress and fatigue and standing up too quick. When he's been living in a sea of thoughts about his brother dying, he figures it makes sense. His only concern is that it's too early for him to be cracking up in the head; he hasn't gotten anywhere on figuring out the deal yet.
The second time it happens, they're in a tiny town near Seattle, chasing omens but running into a little trouble when the demons they're dealing with are subtle and know how to lay low. Bobby's on his way, and all Sam and Dean are really doing until he gets there is sitting on their asses and waiting.
They get lunch at JJ's Country Diner, because it serves breakfast all day and Dean feels passionately about diner hash browns. The waitress is pretty far from what Sam would call attractive, but Dean flirts shamelessly with her anyway while Sam flips through the local newspaper.
"Dude," Dean says, when the waitress scuttles away to refill his drink. "What's your problem? You keep sighing."
"I do?" Sam doesn't remember sighing, but that's not really something you notice yourself doing unless you're doing it on purpose.
The waitress is ignoring everyone else in the diner except Dean, which means Sam's been waiting on his refill for the last six minutes, and Sam has a lot to say to Dean about this town and why it doesn't seem like any place demons would choose to spend their time but the waitress keeps hovering around Dean so Sam never gets the chance to say any of it. That might be enough to get a few sighs out of him.
"Yeah." Dean shovels a forkful of hash browns into his mouth and talks while he chews. "So what, got something going on in that freaky head of yours you need to be telling me?"
"No." Sam stares down at his scrambled eggs, wishes he'd gotten hash browns instead because even slathered in ketchup and half-chewed in Dean's mouth they look better than his eggs. "It'd be nice if our waitress could get me the soda I asked for seven minutes ago though."
"Hey," Dean says the moment the waitress returns with his glass, grinning wide, teeth on full display. "You think my brother could get a refill there, sweetheart?"
She giggles, says, "Of course!" and reaches for Sam's glass.
It hits Sam then. She has a stroke and never fully recovers from it. Her family puts her in a nursing home when they can't take care of her anymore, and she dies there. It's quiet, peaceful. Sam sees her lie down for a mid-afternoon nap and never wake up, and everything leading up to that moment just finds its place in his head like it was always there.
It doesn’t pack quite the punch that the first one did, but Sam still reacts roughly the same. He nearly falls out of his chair and somehow manages to knock his glass over. Ice covers the table, splashes his eggs, pools in his lap. Dean's next to him almost instantly, grabbing his face the same way he did the first time. Except this time he doesn't bother checking Sam's pulse. Sam must look alive enough that it isn't an issue.
"Can someone get me some water and a towel or something?" Dean says, an edge sharp like a machete in his voice, not taking his eyes away from Sam's. "Jesus, Sam, again? You in there? C'mon, Sam, talk to me."
"Yeah." Sam's voice sounds off even to his own ears, heavier, rougher. Dean's proximity is making him uncomfortable, the thumb rubbing at his cheek making him jittery, the ice in his lap and the eyes of every person in the diner on him making him feel stupid. "I'm fine," he says, and tries to pull away.
Dean doesn't let him go far, gets a hand on Sam's bicep and keeps him within reach. "Uh huh. Don't think you stood up too fast this time. You want to tell me what the hell that was?"
The waitress gets back then with a glass of water and a small stack of towels, looking distinctly concerned and like she really wishes she knew what to do. Sam sympathizes a lot with that. He sees her only as she looks now and not decades down the road, and he has no idea what to do about that second where he watched her die.
"I don't know what happened," he says, taking the glass of water and drinking about half of it in one gulp. "I just got really dizzy all of a sudden."
Bobby's coming, Sam tells himself. Bobby's coming, and if anyone knows what this is and what to do about it, it'll be Bobby.
*
Sam holds off until after they exorcise the demons-two of them, evil fuckers who haven't been topside in centuries and are too high on fresh air to put up a fight Sam, Dean, and Bobby can't handle-and after that, it's near impossible to get Bobby alone. Dean's really good at disappearing when you need him there and hanging around when you'd rather he were elsewhere. He does his best to plaster himself to Sam's side, either because he's afraid Sam'll have another spell or because he knows what Sam's trying to do or for some other reason entirely known only to him.
Sam manages, though. He suggests they all get Taco Bell for dinner to celebrate, which always does a number on Dean's stomach the second he swallows it, and then he and Bobby have plenty of time alone while Dean's holed up in the Taco Bell restroom.
"You think the visions are starting again?" Bobby asks.
"No," Sam answers. "They don't feel like visions. Not the ones I had before, anyway. With those, I saw whole scenes playing out, and I only knew what I saw. With these, I get flashes, and then it's just like information is being…I don't know, downloaded into my head."
Sam abruptly remembers the shapeshifter in St. Louis, how it pulled Dean's thoughts and memories from nothing, and he feels kind of ill thinking he has something in common with that.
"Unless," he continues, "they've just morphed into something a little different. I mean, I used to watch people die, or nearly die, and now I'm watching people die again. It kind of makes sense they'd be related, right?"
"I don't have much experience with psychic abilities," Bobby says, leaning back in the booth, folding his arms, and considering Sam, "but I'm pretty sure they don't morph. Gain power, sure, but not change like that. Could be a curse. You boys-and you in particular-pissed anyone off lately?"
Sam thinks of everyone he's met recently, every person he's talked to in the last couple weeks, and that's when he remembers Miranda, remembers how he told her what he wanted most was to know how his brother dies and how she looked at him like it wasn't a weird or unreasonable desire at all.
Bobby looks unimpressed when Sam tells him about it. "The hell did you go saying that for? And here I thought you were smarter than that. If a strange old woman comes up to you in a bar, you be polite but keep to yourself, you don't go telling her your whole life story!"
"I didn't tell her my life story. I didn't tell her anything important. And she wasn't strange. She asked me what I wanted-which is a common question, you know, especially when you're drinking and have a lot on your mind-and I told her. That's it."
"And look where it got you!"
Sam thinks for a moment that Bobby's going to really give it to him, start roaring about how careless he is in the middle of Taco Bell, but then Bobby closes his mouth, stares hard at Sam for a few seconds, and sighs, relaxes his shoulders.
"Well," Bobby says, leaning his elbows onto the table. "Sounds like she might've thought she was doing you a favor. She might think you're supposed to see it as a gift."
Maybe that's what Miranda thought, but Sam definitely thinks it's more of a curse. He doesn't want to watch Dean die; he just wants to know that it's not slightly less than a year from now, that it's not in the jaws of a hellhound come to drag him to hell. And that doesn't explain why he's seeing total strangers die when the only person he cares about is his brother.
"Maybe you're working up to it," Bobby says, when Sam tells him, and then takes a bite out of his burrito. Somehow watching Bobby of all people eat a burrito at Taco Bell almost makes Sam feel better, just a little bit. "What I want to know is, why aren't you telling Dean? You don't think he deserves to know what's going on with you?"
He does. Of course he does. Just not now, not when Sam's still trying to figure it out for himself. Not when Sam's not totally sure Dean won't hunt Miranda down and make her take it back before Sam can see how Dean dies.
"I will," Sam tells Bobby. "Eventually."
Bobby says he'll look into it, call a few people, and let Sam know when he's found something. It'll have to be enough.
*
The third time is four days later. They pass a semi on the interstate, and when Sam gets a glimpse of the driver, he knows he'll suffer a heart attack at fifty-two. He'll die at the hospital. Sam gets a flash of doctors and nurses trying to save him and his daughter crying into her palms in the hallway.
Sam's knee jerks and he drops the book in his hands. Dean shoots him a curious look but doesn't say anything.
The fourth time is two days later, and Sam's been waiting for it. They stop at a decent-sized but slightly run-down gas station for gas and food in Twin Falls, Idaho. Sam's fixing himself a hot dog, Dean's microwaving a chicken sandwich, and the woman working there is leaning over an open magazine on the counter.
She'll die of breast cancer in a few years. She has the lump in her breast now, but she doesn't know it, doesn't bother to get checked or check herself for lumps and won't for a long time. It'll be a hard struggle and she'll almost be glad to be done with it. Almost, except she won't be able to stop thinking of all the people she'll leave behind. She'll fall into a coma and never wake up. Sam sees her body motionless on a hospital bed and hears the machines start screaming when her lungs finally collapse.
Sam barely even flinches. Another cancer, he thinks. Another one who catches it too late, who doesn't pay enough attention to their own body.
Sam can't quote very many statistics about breast cancer off the top of his head, so he makes up a few and says them to Dean, loudly, along with what he does know to be true. He tells Dean that breast cancer kills more women than any other cancer, that early detection can save your life, that women should examine themselves regularly and, if they're at risk, get a mammogram once a year. Dean stares at him like he's gone completely stark raving, but that's fine because now the woman's staring at him too and he thinks some of what he's saying might just be sinking in.
"You should check yourself," Sam tells her as he pays. "It only takes a few minutes and it could save your life."
If it doesn't save her then it could at least give her more time, and that's worth Sam making an idiot of himself.
"Dude, I hate to break it to you," Dean says, as they both climb into the car. "I mean, there's nothing wrong with being obsessed with tits and I'm glad to see you finally showing an interest. But you're doing it wrong."
The fifth time is the next day, at a coffee shop in St. George, Utah. Sam picks them up a couple newspapers while Dean orders coffee for them both at the counter.
There's a kid sitting alone at a table in the corner with his laptop. He's sixteen. He's gay and he's known it for years. His parents wouldn't be okay with it; they'd disown him or maybe try to beat it out of him. He's pining after his best friend, who doesn't hate gays but isn't really comfortable with the idea of them either, and he thinks both his parents and his friend are starting to suspect. He'll slit his wrists with his mother's sharpest kitchen knife one night after his parents go to bed and bleed to death on the bathroom floor. Sam watches his hands shake as he makes the first cut. It happens less than two months from now, and he's already planning it.
As a general rule, Sam and Dean always pick the table that's farthest from everyone else. So when Sam throws the newspapers and his bag down on a table right next to the boy, Dean raises his eyebrows and sends Sam a look that says clearly, 'What the hell are you doing?'
Sam doesn't care. The kid's too young to die, and he can totally do this.
"You know, about 5% of Americans will admit to being sexually involved with a member of the same sex," Sam tells Dean, raising his voice enough that the kid will have to hear. And sure enough, Sam sees him freeze out of the corner of his eye and glance over.
Dean freezes too, his cup in his hand and halfway to his mouth, and stares at Sam, expression completely blank. "Really," he says.
Sam nods. "And there are probably a lot more who just refuse to admit to it."
It's harder coming up with things to say about this than it was with breast cancer, because you're a lot less likely to find statistics and facts about homosexuality without specifically looking for them than you are with breast cancer. And Sam's never had any reason to go looking for statistics about homosexuality before, but he manages anyway.
"And some studies," Sam says, "have found that, say, a man with a gay or bisexual sibling is more likely to be gay or bisexual himself. Which shows the possibility that homosexuality could be the result of genetics, which would prove that being gay is not a choice."
Dean's eyebrows are inching up his forehead, but his lips are still pressed in a straight and inexpressive line. "Huh," he says.
"And," Sam continues, "it's definitely true that homosexuality now is way more socially acceptable than it was in the past, and one can only assume that it'll keep getting more and more socially acceptable until, one day, maybe a long way in the future but one day, homophobia will be a thing of the past."
Sam's got the kid's full attention, and he can feel it. It fills him with a weird sort of energy-knowing that at this moment, this kid's life is more or less in his hands. He's saved a lot of people in his life, but never like this; Sam doesn't have much experience convincing people that their lives are worth living, that dying isn't the answer.
"But the fact is," Sam says, pausing to take a sip of his coffee. "The fact is, you can't make someone see what they don't want to see. There are people right now, maybe someone close to you, that will look at you differently, may even hate you, if you tell them you're gay, but you can't let those people rule you, you know? There are people out there who won't hate you for it, who won't look at you differently, who will accept you as you are and never ask you to pretend to be what you're not, and you have to surround yourself with those people. And sometimes you just have to be patient; you have to go through hell before you can be happy, but it'll come. And you can't give up until you at least try."
Dean looks completely stunned, which is an expression that looks ridiculously unnatural on him and would probably be enough to get a good laugh out of Sam in any other situation. Sam shoots a glance at the kid, finds him staring back with about the same expression as Dean. Sam grins wide at him, and he turns pink, ducks his head, and then responds with a shy smile. Which Sam takes as a good sign and makes him feel very light and proud of himself.
Dean follows Sam's gaze and then glances back and forth between the kid and Sam, and Sam knows what it looks like, what Dean's thinking, and he'll laugh his ass off over it later.
"C'mon, Sam," Dean says, scooting his chair back from the table. "It's about time we get going."
"Yeah," Sam says, standing up. "Okay."
Dean rests one hand on the small of Sam's back as they leave, which is sort of weird but not overly so. Sam raises an eyebrow at Dean, but Dean isn't looking at him.
So instead he turns and gives the kid a little wave and gets another blush and smile in response. Sam thinks if nothing else he's pretty sure he made the kid rethink his decision, reminded him there's still hope. Sam's almost okay with this new ability right then.
Almost.
*
Sam spends a lot of his spare time staring at Dean. He doesn't really know what else to do.
It happens regularly now, multiple times a day. Sam's seen accidents and diseases and all the ways old age and nature can take you down. While talking to a family in Montana with a haunted antique clock in their house, Sam glances at their newborn asleep in her swing in the living room and then sees her in her bassinet three months later, not breathing, victim of SIDS.
But nothing on Dean.
It's starting to drive Sam crazy. He watches strangers die and imagines Dean in their places. Dean in the middle of a heart attack, Dean dying slowly of prostate cancer, Dean flying through the windshield of the Impala, neck snapped and dead instantly. He thinks about the crossroad demon, about the deal. He thinks if that's how Dean's going to go, then maybe watching it will give Sam a clue. Maybe the information he's been desperate for-the one thing that'll get Dean out of the deal without killing Sam-will just slip into his mind, and he can use that to save Dean. It could be right there, if only it would just come to him already.
So Sam stares at Dean all the time, because he always gets his flashes of death when he's looking at someone, and he doesn't want to miss it. Dean notices-of course he does, because Sam's not exactly being subtle and Dean's not exactly stupid-and first he acts like an asshole, poking Sam in the eye and throwing whatever's in reach at his face when he catches Sam staring. Then he acts like he's creeped out, keeping his eyes off Sam at all times and driving with his right hand up by his eye, blocking Sam from his peripheral vision.
Then Dean starts staring back. All the time. When it's Sam's turn to drive and Dean's turn to nap, Dean leans his head back against the seat and stares at Sam's cheek until he falls asleep. When Sam pulls out his computer in a motel room, Dean sits on his bed cleaning their guns and watches Sam's fingers move over the keyboard. Sam wakes up every morning to an itch between his shoulder blades, Dean's gaze on his back. Sam gets the message: 'See, not so fun on the other side, is it?' But he doesn't let that deter him. Because this is important. If Sam could save the sixteen year old at the coffee shop with this curse-gift-thing, then he can either save Dean with it too or use it to learn that he doesn't need it to save Dean. He puts all his energy into finding out how to make it work.
The only thing is, if there's any pattern to whose deaths he can see, when, or how, Sam can't find it. As far as he can tell, it's totally random. The only thing that gives him hope is that it's happening more and more frequently. Like Bobby was right and he is working up to it. Soon he'll look at Dean and see something, and Sam just has to be ready for it.
In the meantime, he starts trying to track down Miranda. Bobby's done his own research and all but told Sam he has no idea what it was she did to him or what can be done about it, that she holds all the answers and Sam'll have to find her again to get them. Sam finds the phone number for the bar where he met her, and he calls one night when Dean's in the shower. That Sam's memory is vague, made fuzzy by both the alcohol and the time that's passed since then, is hurting his search considerably.
"We get a lot of customers here," the bartender tells him coolly. "Too many to keep track of names and you haven't given me much in the way of a face."
Sam remembers what expressions she made, but he doesn't remember what she actually looked like when she made them. Not enough to describe her to anyone, anyway.
Dean comes out of the bathroom, towel around his waist, shaking water out of his hair, just as Sam is hanging up. He stops when he notices the phone in Sam's hand. "Thought I heard you talking out here. Who called?"
"Bobby," Sam says, but he hesitates just a second too long and he knows Dean notices.
"Really," Dean says, voice flat. "Huh." He grabs the clothes sitting out on his bed and takes them back into the bathroom to get dressed. He comes back out soon after and leans back against the wall across from Sam's bed, folds his arms across his chest, and does his best to stare Sam down. "You're not doing anything stupid, are you? Because I told you, Sam, you do anything stupid and I'll stop you myself-"
"No, Dean," Sam says. He meets Dean's gaze, makes his expression as open and honest as possible, shapes his mouth in a way he knows hits Dean right where it counts, right in his memories of Sam young and vulnerable and innocent. "It's not that."
Dean doesn't relax, not completely. But his scowl does fall from his face, and he drops his arms to his sides, pushes away from the wall, and comes to sit next to Sam on the bed, close enough that his elbow knocks Sam's and then rests comfortably against it.
"You got something we need to talk about, Sammy?" he asks, voice calm in a way that Sam knows right away is forced. In a way that means he knows Sam has something he's keeping from Dean and the moment he gets confirmation of it he's doing his best to pry Sam's lips apart. "Don't look at me like that. You think I don't know you enough to tell when you're acting weirder than usual?"
Sam laughs, even though Dean hasn't said anything funny. Dean sold his soul and Sam's acting weirder than usual, and Dean can latch onto that second part and ignore the first even when one doesn't exist without the other. It's not really funny, but somehow it is.
"I've just got something I need to figure out for myself," Sam tells him, glad to be laughing because him laughing always makes at least a little tension fall out of Dean's shoulders.
And a little does, but only a little. Dean's never really relaxed when he knows there are things in front of him he can't see. "Sure," he says. "But pass it on when you're done, all right? It's not nice to hog all the fun."
Dean raises a hand to the top of Sam's head, ruffles his hair in a way he hasn't done since they were kids, and then rubs his knuckles playfully against Sam's cheekbones in a way Sam can't remember Dean ever doing before. It makes something spike in Sam's chest, and for about half a second Sam's sure this is it: he's finally going to get that flash he's been waiting for.
Nothing comes, but it gives Sam an idea anyway. He hasn't seen any evidence that touching has an effect on whose death he sees and whose he doesn't, but he doesn't exactly go around touching total strangers so it hasn't been properly tested. So he'll just have to touch Dean more often to test it. It can't hurt, Sam figures, and there's nothing he isn't willing to try.
*
There are a series of murders in Minneapolis. Men and women all living in one apartment complex found in their apartments, ripped open, entrails strung out across the floor. Dean doesn't think it's their kind of gig and neither does Sam, really, until it gets out that the bodies were found with all the doors and windows in the apartment locked, the authorities left with no idea how the murderer is getting in and out. So they check it out.
The worst of the mess in the apartment of the latest victim is cleaned up by the time Sam and Dean get there, posing as the employees of an alarm company since they still have the outfits from the case with Meg in Chicago a couple years back. The bodies, the landlord tells them, weren't mutilated or torn to shreds. They were strangled first then sliced open, right down the belly, a neat, clean cut that police say look almost professional. No signs of a struggle. The only mess is the blood and guts all over the floor.
When Dean pulls out his EMF meter and waves it around near the red spatters on the carpet, it goes crazy and he whoops. "Ha, knew it!"
"Dude, no you didn't," Sam says, running his fingers over the window panes, checking for anything amiss. "You were ready to call this one a bust before we even started looking into it. I was the one who said we should stick around to be sure."
"Details." Dean drags himself up from the floor and stares down at the blood, trying to find some pattern, some symbol in it. "Guess it was too much to hope they'd leave us the guts too, huh? So what do you think, we're dealing with an angry spirit or what?"
"Could be. We should check the building's history, see if anything happened here that'd spur a haunting."
On their way out they run into a woman in the hallway, leaving her apartment carrying a medium-sized cardboard box. She's probably in her late twenties, and wearing sweats and a tank top, and her hair's a mess.
"You're from the alarm company, huh? Guess what, your alarms don't work for shit," she tells them when they stop her.
"Well," Sam starts, "that's why we're here-"
"Going somewhere?" Dean asks, eyeing the box in her arms, or maybe what he can see of her breasts over the top of it.
She laughs. It's not a pretty or cheerful laugh. "You honestly think I'm gonna stay here when my neighbors are getting slaughtered? Yeah right. That asshole of a landlord won't let me out of my contract, so I'm moving in with my boyfriend and his roommate until I come up with a better plan. Now if you'll excuse me-"
Her shoulder rubs against Sam's chest as she shoves past them, and then it hits Sam like a shot of rock salt to the head.
She'll die tonight. Her last night in the apartment, finishing up packing what she needs before she leaves permanently tomorrow. She's in the bathroom going through her medicine cabinet when the hand closes around her throat and forces her to the floor on her back. She's pregnant. It's still way too early for her to tell, only about a week since it happened, but somehow she can sense it. Her last thought will be of the baby she won't have. She sees her killer, and Sam sees it too, the grip on her throat loosening the moment she stops struggling.
Suddenly Sam knows everything. About the spirit, its story, what it's trying to do. Which doesn't really fit with what Sam knows about this curse, but it happens all the same. He figures maybe the rules are different when the supernatural is involved.
He stumbles on the stairs on the way out and has to lean against the wall and grab the handrail to keep himself standing. Dean's next to him instantly, one hand on his shoulder and the other on his waist, steadying him.
"Man," Dean says, laughing. "Walk much?" Then he actually gets a look at Sam's expression, and everything Sam's thinking must be showing on his face because Dean stops laughing and his lips turn down into a frown. "Sam, what is it? What happened?"
"Anthropomancy," Sam says, pulling away from Dean and continuing down the stairs.
"Come again?"
"Anthropomancy. It's a form of divination where you study the entrails of a freshly killed human. It's what she's doing."
"What who's doing? The spirit?"
"Yeah." When they reach the bottom of the staircase, Sam holds the front door open and watches Dean walk through it, looking slightly spooked but trying to pretend he's not.
Sam has to tell him. There isn't enough time for Dean to figure it out on his own-even with Sam subtly leading him in the right direction-and get back here in time to save the woman.
"When she was alive, she was an amateur tasseographer," Sam says. "She read tea leaves for people in her apartment. About ten years ago, one of her customers turned out to be a, well, homicidal maniac. He went around killing fortune tellers. Cut out their entrails trying to read his own future and gouged out their eyes. He killed her, and now she's doing the same thing. Except I guess she doesn't want to gouge out anyone's eyes."
They're at the Impala now, Sam with his hand on the car door handle, waiting for Dean to go around to his side and unlock the doors. But Dean's just standing next to him, staring at him wide-eyed and slack-jawed, not even bothering to hide how freaked out he is.
"You want to tell me how the hell you know all that?"
"I don't really know how I know it, okay?" Sam tells him, trying to keep his voice calm in hopes that Dean'll follow his lead and stay calm too. "I just. I know things, sometimes, about people. I look at them and I see things. But we don't have time now, okay, because that woman back there? She'll die tonight if we don't find out where the body's buried and burn it. So come on, we need to hurry."
Sam jiggles the handle a little to emphasize his point, but Dean just keeps staring, less freaked out now and more pissed off. Sam knows what he's thinking, what words are just behind his teeth ready to get spit free, but they don't have time to hash this out.
"Dean."
But Dean's not paying attention. Sam knows he doesn't feel the urgency; he didn’t watch a woman nine months from motherhood get strangled on her bathroom floor thinking about how her child can't live with her dead. "Goddammit, Sam, how long has this been going on, and when the fuck were you gonna tell me about it? Have I not made it perfectly fucking clear that I want to know everything that's going on with you and your screwed up little sixth sense? Jesus Christ, Sam-"
Sam puts his hands on Dean's shoulders, grips them hard, and that shuts Dean up quick. He glances at one of Sam's hands, back at Sam's face, and then just gives him a deer-in-headlights stare, like he has no idea how to deal with any of this.
"Look, Dean," Sam says, slowing his speech down and emphasizing every word. "We don't have time to talk about this right now. Our job is to save that woman. I'll tell you everything you want to know. Later. Right now, you just need to trust me and do what I say."
Dean blinks, twice, and then swallows hard enough it looks almost painful. He raises his hands to Sam's face, gets one palm on Sam's jaw, fingers covering his ear, and the other against Sam's pulse, fingers curving around the back of his neck. It surprises the hell out of Sam, but not quite as much as the desire to just lean forward into Dean and stay there.
"Later," Dean says, tone harsh but not angry. "We're talking when this case is done, and don't even think for a second you're getting out of it. You hear me?"
Sam swallows and then nods. "Yeah," he says. "Okay."
*
It's not the smoothest case they've ever solved, but it's not the roughest either. It takes them too long to find the tasseographer's name and where she's buried. By the time they've finally come up with both, time is dangerously close to being up. Dean goes back to the apartment complex to keep an eye on the woman and leaves Sam to salt-and-burn the bones.
He's almost too late. By the end of the night, when he's finally finished, the woman-whose name is Ally-has a nasty gash on her forehead and Dean has ugly red-purple bruises all over his throat. But they're both alive, Ally crying so hard she's got snot and tears all over her face and Dean looking relieved Sam's there to handle that for him.
Sam has no idea if the baby's okay, if there's even anything that can be done if it's not, when it's so small and still too early for her to know for certain she's pregnant. He makes Dean drop her off at the hospital and hopes if something's wrong the doctors there can help. He tells himself that's all he can do.
"So this is what it's like to be you, huh," Dean says when they're back at the motel, bent over the bathroom sink and head twisted to the right so he can examine the bruises on his neck. His voice is more of a rasping whisper than anything, like his vocal cords have been stripped raw.
Sam's sitting on the closed toilet seat, picking graveyard dirt out from under his nails. Part of him wants desperately to take a shower, clean the dirt from the rest of his body where it's gotten lodged in places he doesn't want to think about, but the rest of him just wants to fall into bed and worry about it in the morning. The part that's all for sleeping is winning.
"What?"
"You're always the one getting choked," Dean says.
"I am?" Sam racks his brain for the last time he had something's hands around his throat on a hunt. Then he remembers it was their last hunt, actually. He tries to remember the time before that and thinks of an incident that happened on a case two weeks ago. He guesses Dean has a point.
"What, you didn't notice?"
"It's not like I keep a tally of all the injuries I get."
Dean raises a hand to his throat, rubs at the bruises and then covers them with his palm, curling his fingers like he's about to choke himself. Sam stops everything he's doing to watch, feels dirty for the way it makes his stomach muscles clench and his fingers twitch like they'd like to curl around something too.
"So," Dean says, dropping his hand. "Seeing as how this case is over, I think it's time you told me about this thing you've apparently been keeping from me."
It's the middle of the night. Sam's got dirt smeared in the wrinkles on his elbow and exhaustion tugging down on his eyelids. Tonight Dean got closer to being strangled to death than he's ever been before, he's got a whole collar of bruises to show for it, and it's a miracle all the important parts of his neck still work right. The last thing either of them needs right now is to have this conversation.
"Tomorrow," Sam says. "We can talk about it tomorrow."
"The hell we can." Dean raises himself to his full height and glares down at Sam. He's got the same body language he gets seconds before he punches someone, but he's not close enough to Sam right then to get a good hit in and he isn't stepping closer. "What, you think if you put it off long enough I'll just let it go?"
"No," Sam answers. "I'm just saying, it's been a long night, and I'd rather it not get any longer. I'm tired, Dean, and you are too. Let's just sleep now and worry about it in the morning. It doesn't make any difference when we talk about it."
Sam spent a good portion of his childhood working on his 'Please Dean, just let me do this' expression. The secret to it lies in knowing you'll never get everything you want in life. He had it perfected at an early age.
"Tomorrow," Dean says, eyes narrowing even more, like he knows he just got played. "But so help me, Sam, if you don't talk, I swear I'll beat it out of you."
Dean thinks it's more serious than it is. He probably thinks it's a return of Sam's psychic abilities, something to do with the demon, something to do with the war they're right in the middle of. Sam's not sure what the best way is to tell him that no, it's just that he got drunk and started talking to the wrong person about the wrong thing, and he's not ready for it to stop. Not yet.
*
The things Dean lets himself forget are few and far between. He still remembers the song Sam made up when he was two and can sing it perfectly, mimicking Sam's barely-understandable toddler voice and everything. So Sam doesn't expect Dean to just forget they're due to have a serious talk the moment they both wake up.
But that's exactly what happens. Or so it seems, anyway. Dean nudges Sam awake the next morning and says, in a voice that's still hoarse but sounds a lot more normal and healthy than it did the previous day, "C'mon, checkout time's 10:30. They're gonna be coming to kick us out soon," and they get ready and pack up their stuff in total silence.
In the car, Dean turns the volume of his music down so low it sounds more like it's coming from someone else's car than their own. Sam's sure this is it, this is when Dean makes him spill everything and then yells at him for keeping quiet so long and for not keeping his mouth shut in the first place. But Dean doesn't. He rubs the stubble on his chin, tilts his head from side to side like he's trying to crack his neck, and doesn't say a word.
So Sam leans his temple against the window and watches the road disappear under the tires.
There's a man pulled off onto the shoulder with a broken down pickup. He's got the hood popped and is scowling down at whatever he sees there. He turns his eyes to the Impala when they pass him, and for half a second his gaze meets Sam's.
The man'll die of colon cancer at sixty-eight. He finds religion a week before he dies, when he wakes up one morning to see Jesus standing at the edge of his hospital bed. The experience makes him accept his own end, and he goes quietly, without a fight. Sam watches the doctor call the time of death. 11:43 p.m.
Sam whips his head around toward Dean, thinking maybe he's in some kind of death vision zone now and if he looks at Dean he'll be able to finally see.
He only sees Dean as he is now, alive and sitting in the driver's seat, a finger up one nostril. When he notices Sam staring, Dean flicks a booger at him and laughs when Sam yelps and swats it off his arm.
"Dude," Sam says. "Gross."
"Thought you were asleep," Dean replies, still smirking, completely unembarrassed. He reaches over to wipe his finger on Sam's jeans and only barely manages to jerk his hand back in time before Sam smacks it.
"God, Dean, could you be any more disgusting?"
"Aw, what are you talking about, Sammy, 'course I could." Dean lifts his hand again, holds it in the air for a second like he's about to wipe his finger on Sam's face this time or maybe in his hair. Sam prepares to dodge, but then Dean seems to rethink that thought and puts his hand back on the steering wheel. "Don't worry, you're safe. You can go back to sleep now."
"I wasn't sleeping in the first place. I was just thinking."
"Oh. Huh. Well, in that case-" Dean flips the music off completely. "Let's talk."
It made it a pretty long way, Sam thinks. Not many of Sam's secrets stay secret this long anymore, with the two of them living like they do and grown as close as they have.
"Okay," he says, slowly.
"So. These visions."
"They're not visions. I mean, they are visions, but they're not like the ones I used to have. Sometimes I just look at people, and I can-" Sam pauses, tries to figure out if he should just come out and say it or see if Dean'll try and get there on his own. "-I can see things."
"See things," Dean echoes, voice flat, eyes forward and not looking at Sam at all. "Uh huh. And exactly how long has this been going on?"
"About a month, more or less. Remember back in Peoria, when you had your little-" Sam waves his hand vaguely. "-fling in my bed, and I went to that bar?"
"And came back toasted. Drove my car back completely toasted like a friggin' moron, and don't think I've forgotten about that either."
"Yeah. Then. There was this older woman there. Her husband had just died, and she just wanted someone to talk to. So I talked to her, and she was really nice, but. Uh. I think she cursed me."
Dean shoots a sharp look at Sam and quirks one side of his lips down into a half-scowl. "You think she cursed you?"
"Well, this all started happening after that. And when I talked to Bobby, he seemed to think-"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you kidding me? Bobby."
The car is slowing down. It's a sure sign that things are about to get ugly, when Dean starts easing up on the gas without realizing it.
Sam pauses and raises his eyebrows at Dean. "Yeah. Bobby. What's wrong with Bobby?"
"Nothing. Nothing's wrong with Bobby." Dean shrugs, and it'd look a lot more nonchalant if he wasn't also suddenly gripping the steering wheel tightly in his fists. "Just, you know, can't believe you'd go to him first when you've got me right here."
"It's not like you're a stranger to keeping secrets, Dean," Sam says. He manages to rein in the urge to raise his voice a little with each word. "I seem to recall a couple really big things you tried to keep from me."
Dean's expression twists into one of faint disgust. "That was different and you know it," he says. "But anyway it's all in the past now, right, so let's just focus on the part where you went and pissed off some bitch in a bar and got yourself cursed for it."
Sam's been sure for a while now that Miranda did this to help him, because she liked him enough to give him what he said he wanted. So Sam feels almost fondly towards her because of it, and hearing Dean call her a bitch is enough to make him bristle. "I didn't piss her off-"
"Witches don't curse you 'cause they like you, Sam. I don't blame her, really, there've been plenty of times I've been pissed off enough I'd like to curse you too. 'Course, I would've gone for something a little more embarrassing and a little less ESP, but to each his own. So you pissed her off, and now you can see things. Which reminds me, see things like what, exactly?"
They're not hard words to say. They're right there on the tip of Sam's tongue, but somehow they just don't want to walk those last few steps to get out of his mouth. He clears his throat and gets ready to give them a strong shove.
But he doesn't get the chance to. Dean glances at Sam and then freezes, visibly tightens his grip on the steering wheel and stares like the look on Sam's face is telling him everything he doesn't want to hear.
"Shit," Dean says. He pulls the car off to the shoulder and stops it so quickly Sam's body lunges forward and he has to put both hands on the dash to keep the rest of himself from flying into it. "Goddammit."
Dean yanks the car door open, steps out, and slams it shut behind him. He walks around to the front of the Impala and then just stands, rubbing his palm over his face and watching the cars on the highway pass them by. Sam's out of the car the moment he sees which way he needs to go to follow.
Dean doesn't freak out lightly. He waits until you put no less than three things in front of him worth freaking out over, and only then will he let you have it. Even if Sam had looked him straight in the eye and said, "I see how people are going to die, and I think she meant it to be a gift because I want to see how you're supposed to die so I can stop it," it wouldn't be enough to incite a reaction like this. Maybe if he added, "And last night I went out and made a deal to get you out of yours," then that'd be enough to warrant Dean storming out of the car. But Sam didn't, so he has no idea what's going on.
"Dean," he says. "Dean, talk to me. What-"
"Dammit, Sam." Dean growls Sam's name like he does when he's pissed off, puts both hands on the hood of the Impala, fingers spread and curling a little like he'd dig his nails in if it wouldn't hurt the paint, and leans on them like he does when he's pissed off, but Dean's not pissed off. His eyes are too wide, and when they meet Sam's, the gaze is intense, but not in the way that automatically makes anger boil up in Sam's gut; instead it makes something shrink back in his chest. "You moron. You can't just-you should've told me, Sam. Jesus. What did you see?"
Then Sam gets it. Dean thinks he saw something he didn't.
"I didn't-" he starts, but Dean doesn't let him get any farther.
"I knew it. Knew you weren't acting right. Spouting off all that crap back in Utah about gay siblings and all the touching you've been doing lately, and I fucking knew." Dean shakes his head almost violently and looks away from Sam, back toward the highway. "Look, it doesn't-I don't-don't want you to go thinking I'm expecting something, 'cause I'm not. You don't-you have no idea what you're fucking with here, Sam, okay. So just don't. Leave it the hell alone."
Sam stares. There's nothing else he can think to do, and even if there was he wouldn't be able to move himself to do it. Sam's used to putting pieces in their place himself, not having someone else do it for him, and this is a puzzle he's never even seen the box for.
Dean glances at him, probably trying to gage his reaction, and whatever look is in Sam's eyes, it's apparently not something Dean wants to see. His face twists like it hurts, and his hands tighten into fists. For a moment, Sam thinks he's going to raise them up and bring them down on the Impala's hood, but he doesn't. Instead he pushes himself up and stalks back to the driver's side door.
"C'mon," he says, voice quiet and rough. "Daylight's burning."
Sam watches him climb into the car, waits a second, then another, and then follows.
"Dean," he starts, when he gets in the car, but Dean just makes a 'zip it' motion with his hands that's so emphatic Sam obeys without question.
Dean grabs a map out of the backseat and hands it to Sam. "Find me the quickest route to Peoria," he says, and looks grim when Sam opens his mouth to argue. "You don't get a say in this. I'm not hanging around with someone who's cursed. We'll find that witch and make her take it off, and it'll be done."
Taking off the curse won't make Sam forget what he knows, and it won't make Dean forget that Sam knows. Sam almost wants to point this out, but he doesn't.
He traces the lines on the map with one finger and comes up with a long and slightly convoluted route. If Dean realizes, he doesn't say, just starts the car and pulls them off the shoulder without a word.
It's still only eight hours or so until they'll reach Peoria. It's not like Sam hasn't come up with a dozen theories on how to get Dean out of the deal, dived headfirst into them, and then found some reason none of them would work. Still, the disappointment is crushing every time.
Sam presses his cheek against the window, hears Dean saying, "Goddammit," again and again in his head, and eventually falls asleep. He dreams that Dean is taller than him and tries to hug him, but Sam's forehead smashes into Dean's chin, and Dean says, "Goddammit," but in the same voice Jess always used just before she came all over Sam's face.
Part 2