This Kid's Not Alright 4/4
Title: This Kid's Not Alright
Author(s): safiyabat
Artist: m14mouse
Beta: tumblr user angstyteenagesam
Characters: Sam winchester, Bobby Singer, John Winchester
Rating: T
Word Count: 22,961 words over 4 chapters
Warning(s): Show-level violence, implied past child sexual abuse, depression, fire
Summary: What exactly did Sam get up to at Bobby's while Dean was at Sonny's? When John makes a very odd request of the older hunter, Bobby takes the boy into his home for a few months. It isn't an easy time for either of them.
Honestly, Bobby had expected that the impossible task of saving the salamander’s putative humanity would force the boy to admit defeat and just let Bobby work on killing the sucker. He’d done well in finding a possible solution to what the critter was; the idea would never have even occurred to Bobby without Sam’s suggestion, and Bobby knew damn well that there was no better mind when it came to research. Sam could afford to focus on school and on that girl who’d been chasing him, and who he’d almost admitted to liking back. He could let the expert focus on things like patterns and victimology and figuring out who the thing was and how to trap it.
That’s not what Sam did, though. He still got his schoolwork done. He still did his training. He just cut some things out, and apparently those things included sleep. The salamander - if that was what it was - set three more fires over the time between when Sam made his hypothesis and the time that Danita’s party rolled around. Two were in abandoned buildings and had no casualties at all. One resulted in the death of Mildred Oster, aged 97. Apparently she’d died of smoke inhalation in her sleep, never waking up. This didn’t offer a lot of comfort to Bobby, but Sam looked a little less pale when he heard that small detail. Like it mattered to Mildred.
Sam’s grades didn’t suffer, but his teachers noticed his exhaustion nevertheless. Bobby fobbed them off with a very stripped-down variant of the truth. “Sammy’s a little anxious about the fires that’ve been cropping up around town,” he told them. “His momma died in a fire when he was a baby, and I guess it’s got him a little worked up. He’s been having trouble sleeping, but he’s been trying to channel that into something productive. Once the authorities get the situation under control I’m sure he’ll sleep for a week!”
He considered Sam’s evidence for the culprit being a salamander, and he had to admit that it looked good. Sheriff Gerry showed him some of the trace evidence from the scenes and it turned out that there was skin found at every scene, a good amount of it. The lab didn’t seem to think that the skin belonged to a human - the coloring was right, but the texture more closely resembled scales. That was consistent with a mythical salamander, at least according to DaVinci. Bobby told his comrade about the creature he thought they were hunting, and the sheriff winced. “I have to say that sounds farfetched, Singer, but so did a poltergeist before you saved me from one. And that skin - well, I can’t exactly explain that one away unless we start getting into lizard-human hybrids and that makes even less sense than salamanders.”
“It was the kid that figured it out,” Bobby told him. “Took him a few days, but he figured it out alright. Figured out how to kill it too, which I’m probably going to need your help with.” He explained about sealing the thing up and making it breathe in its own poison. “I don’t know if you’ve got anyplace to do that. I’ve got bays for body work, but the thing can burn through the paint curtains in about five seconds flat.”
“Yeah. I think we’ve got a place the bomb squad uses. It shouldn’t be a problem if you can get the critter over here. So things are working out with the kid, then?”
Bobby shifted, bones suddenly not quite aligned right. “I don’t know. He’s smart as hell, Bob. Too smart, if you know what I mean. And I know that the kid’s hurting, but it’s like he doesn’t want me to do anything about it, you know? He won’t let me in.”
“You can’t fix that kind of… that kind of hurt in a few weeks, Singer. Or, hell, even in months. You can make some progress, maybe. Has he tried to take off since that one time?”
“Nah. I ain’t even cuffing him to the chair at meal times anymore.”
Gerry gave him a look of unfathomable disgust. “Really, Singer? That’s how you handle a runaway?”
“Well what else was I supposed to do? He just took off! I couldn’t trust him to stay where he needed to be, and I couldn’t watch him every minute.” Bobby squirmed. “The kid didn’t even struggle.”
“All that means is that it probably ain’t the first time. Jeez, Singer. And you wonder why he won’t let you in!” Gerry shook his head again. “Come on, let’s get this site ready for your salamander thing. So tell me.”
“Yeah?” God, it might have broken Karen’s pure heart but it had been a damn good thing they hadn’t had children. He’d have been a terrible parent. Maybe not John Winchester levels of terrible - he didn’t think he’d have let Sam get to this point to start with - but he’d clearly screwed up with Sam too.
“What are you going to do with the boy long term?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, clearly his daddy’s not doing right by him. I ain’t saying that there ain’t some other things going on there, don’t get me wrong. Some people are always going to have problems. But the way the family responds to those problems can make things worse. You think you could keep the kid with you?” He led the way to his squad car.
“Who, me? Sammy doesn’t much like me and you already pointed out that I screwed things up pretty good with him.” He took the shotgun position.
“Yeah, and I’ve talked to the teachers at his school, too. They’ve all said how involved you’ve been, how encouraging of him. How much of a change they’ve seen in him since he started here. I think it could be good for him.” He shrugged.
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t exactly tell the sheriff that the boy’s father thought he might be a monster and need to be put down, could he?
The facility turned out to be perfect for what they had in mind. Now all Bobby needed to do was to be sure that he could figure out who the salamander was and how he could get him back to the bomb squad facility.
Sam, of course, wasn’t willing to let Bobby do the work by himself. Part of Bobby thought that it was because he wanted to help, to prove himself. Another part of Bobby thought that it was because he didn’t trust Bobby to do it right. He’d noticed that about Sam over the past few weeks - he had his ways of doing things, precise little things that had to be done exactly so. The blanket had to be folded with the corners and edges lined up precisely, the shoes had to be exactly in line with each other and facing the door (never the wall), laundry had to be washed a certain way and could only be put away in the duffel (never the drawers - he’d thought Sam might burst a vessel the one time that had happened). Sam checking the research and doing it again and having to do it his way was like that - not trusting Bobby to get it done “the right way.”
And Bobby couldn’t help resenting it slightly, though he tried. He told himself that Sam was a screwed-up kid, high strung and more than a little neurotic. There was a word for that kind of behavior, that kind of ritualism, and there was probably medication for it too -medication that Sam’s ass of a father would never spring for. But Bobby knew damn well how to do his job and it wasn’t for some snot-nosed little punk who’d never needed to shave to come in and tell him he wasn’t doing it right.
But then Sammy actually found things that Bobby had missed. He found little patterns that Bobby never noticed, and that chafed against the hunter’s pride. The kid hunched over the files until two or three in the morning every night until he finally turned to Bobby and said, “Ranch houses.”
Bobby looked up from his own books. “Come again?”
“Every building that the salamander has burned has been a ranch-style house. Every last one.”
“Okay,” Bobby admitted. “You’re right. But they built a lot of those for returning GIs after the war, kid. That don’t really narrow it down.”
“Do you have a map?” Sam asked. “One I can write on, not a fancy atlas?”
Bobby huffed and went out to his truck. He had a road atlas; he could replace it at the gas station if the kid marked it up too badly. “What you got in mind, kid?” he demanded, handing it over.
Sam grabbed a pencil. “Okay. The first fire was out here, on the edge of the county, right?” He placed an x on the location of the first fire. “And then the second was here. And the third here…” He continued plotting fires. Then he connected the points with a soft, sweeping arc. “He’s spiraling, Bobby. Literally. He’s spiraling toward some kind of a point right in here. There’s something he wants in this area here.” He drew a circle in a six-block area. “I don’t know what it is that he wants. But it’s somewhere in here.”
Bobby bit his lip. “Okay,” he said slowly. “That narrows it down. But how do we figure out who it is? I mean, that’s a pretty densely packed area. Lots of ranch houses, kid.”
“Yeah. But if we can figure out who in that area might have a connection to someone who’s been in an area with an active coal seam fire it might help.”
“Balls,” Bobby swore, taking off his hat. “I knew I’d regret becoming an old hermit. It could be almost anyone.”
“Almost anyone having a relative disappear for at least seven years into coal country or the Northwest Territories?” Sam raised an eyebrow. Too damn smart, that kid.
“That does kind of narrow it down,” he had to admit with a grin. “Lemme talk to Sheriff Gerry and I’ll see what I can come up with. In the meantime, off to bed with you. You need your sleep, kid, or you’re never gonna grow.”
He shrugged, but obeyed.
The next day they went into town instead of doing physical training to buy Danita her birthday present. Sam knew exactly what he wanted to buy her; she liked history best and he wanted to get her a book about the English Civil War because she’d been curious about it. Bobby let the kid browse the bookshop for a while. This wasn’t some big-box chain store; it was independently owned and Bobby knew the owner stocked a very eclectic mix of material. He noticed the kid lingering over a book about the history of South Dakota and made a point of buying it when the kid wasn’t looking. It would make a good going-away present when John finally came for the boy.
After the bookstore they did a little more shopping - Sam needed something new to wear to the party, something that wasn’t repaired and permanently stained. John might be annoyed that Bobby was “spoiling the boy,” but Bobby didn’t want Sam to feel hugely out of place. Then they went to dinner - nothing fancy, but not Bobby’s cooking and not Sam’s fussing. Sam even ate half of his dinner, which Bobby found nothing short of miraculous.
They went home and did some more research, and Bobby had to admit that it didn’t feel quite as tense in the house as it had for the past several weeks. The next day Sam went to school and Bobby got back to researching.
And the day after that was Danita Myers’ birthday party. Sam did his training before the party, making sure he was scrubbed clean and perfectly dressed before Bobby drove him over. The hunter noticed with a sinking sensation that the place was within the six-block spiral in which the salamander was likely to strike, and he could see by the look on Sam’s face that the thought had occurred to the boy too.
“Don’t you worry, boy,” he told Sam gruffly. “I’m pretty sure your friend’s house ain’t a target.”
Sam swallowed and nodded. “He’s scared,” the boy said. “He’s scared, and he’s traumatized. He’s probably not going to seek out a party full of twelve-year-olds, right?”
“No, he’s not,” Bobby agreed. “But you know how to get hold of me if you need to.”
“Yes, sir.” He got out of the truck. “I’ll see you later, Bobby.” He smiled shyly, just for a fleeting second before his face returned to normal and he disappeared up the walkway. Bobby sat back and let the pride wash over him; he’d accomplished something special.
Bobby drove over to the sheriff’s office. Gerry met him there. “What do you think, sheriff?” he asked. “Any clues about the people in that area? My boy’s in that zone right now and I’m a little antsy.”
“Your boy now?” Gerry smirked. “That’s good to hear. Well, I’ve got about ten candidates.”
“That’s all?” Bobby made a sour face.
“Well, let’s talk about them, shall we?” The young deputy Mills brought them some coffee and they started poring over files.
There was one man from the area who had disappeared with no explanation about ten years ago. They ruled him out - provisionally, of course - fairly quickly. He’d had no real connections - his parents had died before he disappeared, he had no close friends or lovers in the area, there was nothing that could possibly penetrate the trauma of burning constantly for seven years and pull him back to this area. There were two more who had left home for mining jobs in the western part of the state and never returned. Both had been declared dead, but no one knew better than Bobby that that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
There were three more men, and two women, who had gone to prison. Sam had referred to the salamander by male pronouns but that didn’t have to be the case. The salamander might have been a woman. Quick checks proved that both of the formerly incarcerated women were accounted for, though, as were all three men.
That left four possibilities. Two families had moved into the area without their menfolk over the past fifteen years. One had lost their father figure in a car accident down in Florida, which was tragic and might make for trouble down in Tallahassee sometime but probably wasn’t part of the problem that they were dealing with in the here and now. The other had ejected their father figure because of a domestic violence situation maybe nine years ago - Bobby remembered that case, now that he thought about it. Jane Wilson had been in terrible shape when she and her three children had fled their home. The community had rallied around her, essentially forcing her husband out. He’d slunk off for parts unknown not long after; perhaps a mine had taken him on. Maybe he’d taken his anger out on the wrong person and gotten himself into trouble. Bobby could certainly imagine wanting to toss the son of a bitch into a coal seam.
Another father had gone off looking for work when the meat packing plant had downsized and never been heard from again. It wasn’t out of the question that he could have tried his hand at coal mining. And the last family’s son had headed west, up and into Canada, for what was supposed to be the mountain climbing adventure of a lifetime and never been heard from again.
“Geez,” Bobby observed. “You’d think the whole ‘ten people just up and disappearing’ over the past decade and a half’ from the same six block radius would have stood out to someone.”
“I’m a sheriff, Singer. I’m not a babysitter. Most of them weren’t even reported missing or at least weren’t reported missing here.”
The hunter held up his hands, trying to soothe his friend a little. “Hey - I ain’t saying you did anything wrong. I didn’t notice either, and it’s my job to notice things like this. The one who did think of it was the kid.” He made a face. “I’m telling you, Bob, he’s too damn smart. Anyways, I like one of these four for the salamander. The one we know went somewhere with a coal fire is the Hudson boy.” He thumped the hiker’s file.
“Yeah, but that’s only because he actually went toward Canada. He could have shacked up with a girl in Vancouver and just be stoned out of his mind for all we know. This whole circling around thing… it’s kind of troubling. It makes me think…” He logged into his computer. “I’m wondering if there’s anything we’re missing. All of these guys would be missing their families obviously, but is there anything about their old lives that would draw them back beyond that? Something that might narrow down a target for them.” He started typing.
“What do you mean?” Bobby frowned.
“Well, I mean, did any of them have any outstanding complaints against them? Any, uh, any strong issues that might break through that kind of pain that you’re talking about from the seven years of burning?” He grimaced. “I can’t remember every single case myself, but that’s what this damn thing is for.” He thumped the monitor screen.
Deputy Mills came running into the room. “Sheriff, there’s been another fire. The Myers resi-“
Bobby rose to his feet. “What?” His hands and arms felt numb; his legs like they were disconnected from his body. “Did you say -“
“There was apparently a middle-school birthday party?” she hazarded with a wince. “Fire crews are already on the scene -“
He approached her. “You need to take me there. Now!”
She shifted her weight to better distribute it for a fight and tilted her head a little to one side. “Excuse me?”
“It’s okay, Jody. He doesn’t mean… His ward is one of the kids at the party. Give him a lift, if you don’t mind,” Bob added with a wave of his hand. He was already drawing his jacket on. “He’s mostly harmless.”
Jody glowered at her boss for a moment before turning on her heel and racing for her squad car. Bobby slid into the shotgun position, barely getting his door closed before she peeled out of the parking lot with the sirens blazing.
Fire crews were already on the scene by the time they got there, as were multiple ambulances. Debbie Myers sobbed on the neighbor’s lawn, with the neighbor lady holding onto her like it was taking all she could do to either hold her up or hold her back, it was hard to tell. There were about ten kids around her, a mix of boys and girls. All of their clothes bore traces of smoke damage, and all of their faces were smudged with soot. None of them were Sam. Bobby grabbed the nearest kid. “Where’s Sam?” he roared.
The kid gasped. “He’s -“ He pointed at the house, which had flames billowing from the picture window in the front.
The air left Bobby’s lungs like he’d been tackled. Sam was trapped in the house. He couldn’t lose him. Not like this. “What happened?” he demanded.
“Carl Staley came over,” said the neighbor lady holding Debbie up. “He used to live two doors down on the other side. He just walked into the house like he owned the place and the place started burning all around him.”
The name sounded familiar. He’d been one of the four, Bobby recalled. His hands shook. “And then?”
“We couldn’t get out the front door,” one of the girls insisted. “Three of us were in the kitchen and we got out through the garage, but the fire moved fast.” She started to cry. “Mrs. Myers got us out through the kitchen, but Danita -“
Debbie sobbed louder, beyond the neighbor lady’s ability to hold her up. Bobby took over for her and the nurse collapsed into his arms. “Danita?”
“Danita was still in the living room with the rest of them,” another kid responded. “There were sixteen of us.”
“So if only three of you got out with Mrs. Myers, how did the rest of you get out?”
“Oh, Sam Winchester,” a boy told him. “We kind of scattered - everyone was looking for an escape route. I went into the bathroom, but I couldn’t reach the window. It was up too high. Sam came in and took out the screen and helped me through it, then he went and looked for some others.”
“Me too,” added a girl. “Me and Katie Murray.” She pointed at the ambulance. “He helped her - her sleeve caught on fire, but he put it out. Then he helped us get out the window in the master bedroom.”
Each child told the same story. Sam had appeared at their side and helped them escape the fire, but hadn’t followed them, even though they’d expected him to be right behind them. Bobby shook his head. What the hell was that kid thinking? The fire had already spread so fast that the fire department was hanging back - the house was in danger of collapse. All anyone could do was stand and wait for the inevitable.
Every once in a while they would hear a scream punching through the roar of the flames and the whoosh of the fire hoses as they tried to contain the fire to the one building. The scream indicated another child being ejected from the building. Medics would race to the site, but they would only find another child that Bobby didn’t know; no Sam and no Danita.
Finally, the front half of the house collapsed in on itself. It felt like it had been hours, but it really hadn’t taken long at all. The salamander must have fueled the fire with its own energy somehow. On the one hand it was terrifying; the monster had managed to completely destroy a home in under fifteen minutes. On the other hand, it gave Bobby what he most desperately wanted to see.
It gave him Sam.
The boy stood in the little girl’s bedroom or what remained of it. The place had once been pink; now it was gray and sooty. Danita herself had huddled down between the bed and the wall in a kind of fetal position. Sam - his shirt wrapped around his nose and mouth as a kind of mask - crouched down and picked her up in his arms. He looked around himself, assessing the situation, and found a path. Even though it clearly pained him - even at this distance Bobby could see the agony on his expressive face - he raced toward the front of the house.
A firefighter ran toward them, arms out to take Danita from the boy. Sam gave the girl up willingly enough, but then he turned around and went back into the building.
“Now what the hell is he doing?” Bobby demanded without thinking.
Sammy walked slowly toward a lick of flame that seemed to hover in place, hands up. It was hard to tell from this angle, but it almost looked like he was speaking to it. After a moment - punctuated by wild coughing fits from Sam - the flame solidified into the form of a man. The man’s white skin seemed unnaturally clean for the circumstances - everything around him was smoke and ash but here he stood in gleaming, albescent glory.
Sam walked out of the burning wreckage, hands up and coughing like there was no tomorrow. Sheriff Gerry raced forward, gun drawn, and Sam paused in his coughing long enough to give him an epic bitchface. “He knows what has to happen,” Sam gasped. “He says he’ll go quietly. He can control it long enough for you to drive him there.”
Then Sam collapsed. A paramedic raced forward to tend to him, and Bobby lost track of time as he watched strangers struggling to revive his charge.
The next few days passed in a blur. Sam’s most severe injury turned out to be smoke inhalation, which surprised precisely no one. He had some pretty extensive second-degree burns but the hospital had a good burn unit and they were able to get those under control; chances were that he wouldn’t even scar. He spent just over a week and a half in the hospital for the smoke inhalation, which Bobby found that he was okay with.
There was absolutely no question of Sam or Bobby paying for anything. The parents of the children Sam had rescued came together and firmly insisted that they were taking on all of his medical costs. Bobby wasn’t going to argue - John hadn’t given him cash for an extended hospital stay, never mind that kind of intense oxygen therapy, and while wanted what was best for the kid, he honestly couldn’t have afforded it on his own. Part of him hoped Sam didn’t get used to it.
The salamander, Carl Staley, managed to talk, before being sealed into the bomb squad’s chamber. He had lived in the neighborhood, just as the woman had said. He’d started eyeing Danita when she’d been just a tiny girl. Neighbors had noticed. Her mother had noticed, and Carl had been “subtly encouraged” to seek employment elsewhere. His own wife had reported him missing, but more for insurance reasons than because she regretted his loss - she knew what he was. He’d found employment in a mine but had slipped up again, gotten caught going after a miner’s kid. He’d been tossed into a coal fire and found himself changed into a new kind of monster. He’d been out of control, acting only on impulse until Sam had talked to him, convinced him that evil was in fact a choice. It had been enough for Carl to stop himself and let Sam and Danita out safely. The problem, of course, was that evil had been part of his soul long before he’d transformed. He couldn’t rely on his newfound, fragile self-control. The chamber was the only solution.
Naturally, John Winchester showed up about five days into Sam’s ten-day hospital stay. Bobby cursed his luck. “Where’s the boy?” John demanded.
“Hospital,” Bobby admitted. He wasn’t afraid of John Winchester; he wasn’t intimidated by the other hunter. He wasn’t.
John looked genuinely curious. “Why?”
“Fire.”
“The place looks fine to me.”
He considered the full truth. He truly did. Why shouldn’t John know that his son needed to socialize, needed to meet other human beings and needed to know how other people lived? Needed friends? “It was a hunt, actually. Salamander.”
“We don’t go to hospitals, Singer. Too risky. Too much of a paper trail.”
“Oh, you mean too much of a record of you having two sons if you decide you need to rub out the younger one?” he sneered. “There were tons of witnesses, Johnny. It wasn’t like I could stop them. Anyway, he saved fifteen kids besides himself, and one of the mothers besides. Oh - and he’s the one who figured out what we were dealing with and how to kill it.”
John was silent for a moment. “Really.”
“Yeah. Really.”
“All by himself?”
He almost responded and then he realized what was happening in the parent’s head. “Christ, no wonder that kid’s so screwed up. I’m the one who told him what the parameters were. I showed him the case files. I told him about the fires, I told him what was happening. It took him time. He didn’t just… conjure up a salamander. That’s not how it works.”
“It’s not?”
“No. He’d have had to drop one into a fire seven years ago and kept it there. Since the poor kid has no idea what it’s like to stay in one place for seven weeks, never mind seven years.” He rolled his eyes.
“But you do think something’s wrong with him.” John pressed.
He sighed. “Yeah. I do. But not because he’s not human. He’s a human boy. A very human boy. Who, by the way, is very much aware of your real opinion of him.”
“He needs to take orders. He’s a soldier.”
“He’s not a soldier. He’s a boy. A scared and traumatized boy. He’s afraid to eat because you call him fat. He doesn’t know how to form normal relationships with other people because you’ve never allowed him to socialize. He broke out of here to go rescue his brother because he doesn’t trust you to take care of Dean. And he didn’t care that you want him dead because he doesn’t see life as worth living.”
“He told you all this?” John snarled.
“Not in one piece. I had to put it together because he didn’t trust me either. Because he figured out real quick that you didn’t leave him here just for babysittin’.” He fought against the urge to tell him the truth - that Sam was on to John’s tricks - but knew that would make Sam even less safe. “Johnny, your boy didn’t even care as long as Dean was safe. Don’t you see how screwed up that is? How damaged that boy is?”
“I do what I have to do, Bobby. I left him here because I had to know.”
“No. You didn’t want the truth, you wanted confirmation. You wanted to know that it was okay to kill your youngest son - that he was already too far gone to be saved. And the thing is, Johnny, he already believes it’s true.”
John shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. If he’s not… you know, if he is human, then there’s no reason he can’t buckle down and learn to be just as good as Dean.”
Bobby sighed. “When’s the last time Dean ran into a burning building and rescued sixteen people, John?”
“Dean does what he’s told when he’s told to do it!” the elder Winchester snapped. “He would never have run off on a damn fool’s errand. If I told him to leave Sammy where he was he’d have damn well done it. That’s the problem. Sammy doesn’t follow orders. Dean trusts me.”
“And you think this is a problem with Sam.”
“You’re damn right I do.”
Bobby sat down at the table again. “Look. John. Why don’t you just… leave him here? He’ll be safe, you know I can train him, and it would be good to have someone around here that’s got a head for the research. I’ve never seen a kid who likes it that much. He’ll be better off, you’ll be happier and -“
“Not happening, Singer. You’re besotted with him, just like Jim. You’ll both just coddle him. He needs discipline, not coddling. He needs a firm hand, not someone who’s going to let him bury his nose in a book. No - as soon as he’s done pampering himself in the hospital I’m taking him to go get his brother. Can’t have him getting soft.”
“He’s got a girl here, you know.”
Bobby knew as soon as he said it that it was absolutely the wrong thing to say. John looked like someone had thrown an entire bucket of cold water over him. “I want him out of here tomorrow.”
The doctors weren’t having any part of that, and neither were Sam’s singed lungs. But the same day that he was allowed to leave the hospital Bobby drove him back to the scrapyard and he was transferred to his father’s car without even being allowed back into the house. Bobby had packed up his things and taken a moment to admire Sam’s foresight in never allowing himself to unpack. He did take a moment to slip the book he’d bought for Sam into his bag.
He didn’t think he’d miss the kid’s sometimes-sullen, usually silent presence. He did, though. He couldn’t even put his finger on why, but it would hit him sometimes, suddenly, over the years. Dean was the easier Winchester to love, the one that Bobby maintained a relationship with as the boys grew older. He didn’t make any attempt to reach out to Sam when he went off to Stanford and didn’t try to stay in contact after Dean died.
When Sam brought up his plan of jumping, Bobby couldn’t help but think of the salamander - Carl, he reminded himself forcefully, Sam would want him to remember the man’s name. Bobby could do that much for him. And he could back Sam’s play, if only because it was the only game in town. At least, he thought to himself, it wasn’t Dean.
But when he found himself brought back to life just in time to see the ground close up over Sam, all he could remember was the boy who had wanted to help someone who had been changed and manipulated by forces outside his control. What lesson had Sam carried away from that incident? What lesson had he taken with him into Lucifer’s Cage? And how much of the lesson had come from Bobby? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He let Castiel bring him back to Sioux Falls, and buried himself in his books.
This way to Part Three -- This way to Masterpost
Author(s): safiyabat
Artist: m14mouse
Beta: tumblr user angstyteenagesam
Characters: Sam winchester, Bobby Singer, John Winchester
Rating: T
Word Count: 22,961 words over 4 chapters
Warning(s): Show-level violence, implied past child sexual abuse, depression, fire
Summary: What exactly did Sam get up to at Bobby's while Dean was at Sonny's? When John makes a very odd request of the older hunter, Bobby takes the boy into his home for a few months. It isn't an easy time for either of them.
Honestly, Bobby had expected that the impossible task of saving the salamander’s putative humanity would force the boy to admit defeat and just let Bobby work on killing the sucker. He’d done well in finding a possible solution to what the critter was; the idea would never have even occurred to Bobby without Sam’s suggestion, and Bobby knew damn well that there was no better mind when it came to research. Sam could afford to focus on school and on that girl who’d been chasing him, and who he’d almost admitted to liking back. He could let the expert focus on things like patterns and victimology and figuring out who the thing was and how to trap it.
That’s not what Sam did, though. He still got his schoolwork done. He still did his training. He just cut some things out, and apparently those things included sleep. The salamander - if that was what it was - set three more fires over the time between when Sam made his hypothesis and the time that Danita’s party rolled around. Two were in abandoned buildings and had no casualties at all. One resulted in the death of Mildred Oster, aged 97. Apparently she’d died of smoke inhalation in her sleep, never waking up. This didn’t offer a lot of comfort to Bobby, but Sam looked a little less pale when he heard that small detail. Like it mattered to Mildred.
Sam’s grades didn’t suffer, but his teachers noticed his exhaustion nevertheless. Bobby fobbed them off with a very stripped-down variant of the truth. “Sammy’s a little anxious about the fires that’ve been cropping up around town,” he told them. “His momma died in a fire when he was a baby, and I guess it’s got him a little worked up. He’s been having trouble sleeping, but he’s been trying to channel that into something productive. Once the authorities get the situation under control I’m sure he’ll sleep for a week!”
He considered Sam’s evidence for the culprit being a salamander, and he had to admit that it looked good. Sheriff Gerry showed him some of the trace evidence from the scenes and it turned out that there was skin found at every scene, a good amount of it. The lab didn’t seem to think that the skin belonged to a human - the coloring was right, but the texture more closely resembled scales. That was consistent with a mythical salamander, at least according to DaVinci. Bobby told his comrade about the creature he thought they were hunting, and the sheriff winced. “I have to say that sounds farfetched, Singer, but so did a poltergeist before you saved me from one. And that skin - well, I can’t exactly explain that one away unless we start getting into lizard-human hybrids and that makes even less sense than salamanders.”
“It was the kid that figured it out,” Bobby told him. “Took him a few days, but he figured it out alright. Figured out how to kill it too, which I’m probably going to need your help with.” He explained about sealing the thing up and making it breathe in its own poison. “I don’t know if you’ve got anyplace to do that. I’ve got bays for body work, but the thing can burn through the paint curtains in about five seconds flat.”
“Yeah. I think we’ve got a place the bomb squad uses. It shouldn’t be a problem if you can get the critter over here. So things are working out with the kid, then?”
Bobby shifted, bones suddenly not quite aligned right. “I don’t know. He’s smart as hell, Bob. Too smart, if you know what I mean. And I know that the kid’s hurting, but it’s like he doesn’t want me to do anything about it, you know? He won’t let me in.”
“You can’t fix that kind of… that kind of hurt in a few weeks, Singer. Or, hell, even in months. You can make some progress, maybe. Has he tried to take off since that one time?”
“Nah. I ain’t even cuffing him to the chair at meal times anymore.”
Gerry gave him a look of unfathomable disgust. “Really, Singer? That’s how you handle a runaway?”
“Well what else was I supposed to do? He just took off! I couldn’t trust him to stay where he needed to be, and I couldn’t watch him every minute.” Bobby squirmed. “The kid didn’t even struggle.”
“All that means is that it probably ain’t the first time. Jeez, Singer. And you wonder why he won’t let you in!” Gerry shook his head again. “Come on, let’s get this site ready for your salamander thing. So tell me.”
“Yeah?” God, it might have broken Karen’s pure heart but it had been a damn good thing they hadn’t had children. He’d have been a terrible parent. Maybe not John Winchester levels of terrible - he didn’t think he’d have let Sam get to this point to start with - but he’d clearly screwed up with Sam too.
“What are you going to do with the boy long term?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, clearly his daddy’s not doing right by him. I ain’t saying that there ain’t some other things going on there, don’t get me wrong. Some people are always going to have problems. But the way the family responds to those problems can make things worse. You think you could keep the kid with you?” He led the way to his squad car.
“Who, me? Sammy doesn’t much like me and you already pointed out that I screwed things up pretty good with him.” He took the shotgun position.
“Yeah, and I’ve talked to the teachers at his school, too. They’ve all said how involved you’ve been, how encouraging of him. How much of a change they’ve seen in him since he started here. I think it could be good for him.” He shrugged.
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t exactly tell the sheriff that the boy’s father thought he might be a monster and need to be put down, could he?
The facility turned out to be perfect for what they had in mind. Now all Bobby needed to do was to be sure that he could figure out who the salamander was and how he could get him back to the bomb squad facility.
Sam, of course, wasn’t willing to let Bobby do the work by himself. Part of Bobby thought that it was because he wanted to help, to prove himself. Another part of Bobby thought that it was because he didn’t trust Bobby to do it right. He’d noticed that about Sam over the past few weeks - he had his ways of doing things, precise little things that had to be done exactly so. The blanket had to be folded with the corners and edges lined up precisely, the shoes had to be exactly in line with each other and facing the door (never the wall), laundry had to be washed a certain way and could only be put away in the duffel (never the drawers - he’d thought Sam might burst a vessel the one time that had happened). Sam checking the research and doing it again and having to do it his way was like that - not trusting Bobby to get it done “the right way.”
And Bobby couldn’t help resenting it slightly, though he tried. He told himself that Sam was a screwed-up kid, high strung and more than a little neurotic. There was a word for that kind of behavior, that kind of ritualism, and there was probably medication for it too -medication that Sam’s ass of a father would never spring for. But Bobby knew damn well how to do his job and it wasn’t for some snot-nosed little punk who’d never needed to shave to come in and tell him he wasn’t doing it right.
But then Sammy actually found things that Bobby had missed. He found little patterns that Bobby never noticed, and that chafed against the hunter’s pride. The kid hunched over the files until two or three in the morning every night until he finally turned to Bobby and said, “Ranch houses.”
Bobby looked up from his own books. “Come again?”
“Every building that the salamander has burned has been a ranch-style house. Every last one.”
“Okay,” Bobby admitted. “You’re right. But they built a lot of those for returning GIs after the war, kid. That don’t really narrow it down.”
“Do you have a map?” Sam asked. “One I can write on, not a fancy atlas?”
Bobby huffed and went out to his truck. He had a road atlas; he could replace it at the gas station if the kid marked it up too badly. “What you got in mind, kid?” he demanded, handing it over.
Sam grabbed a pencil. “Okay. The first fire was out here, on the edge of the county, right?” He placed an x on the location of the first fire. “And then the second was here. And the third here…” He continued plotting fires. Then he connected the points with a soft, sweeping arc. “He’s spiraling, Bobby. Literally. He’s spiraling toward some kind of a point right in here. There’s something he wants in this area here.” He drew a circle in a six-block area. “I don’t know what it is that he wants. But it’s somewhere in here.”
Bobby bit his lip. “Okay,” he said slowly. “That narrows it down. But how do we figure out who it is? I mean, that’s a pretty densely packed area. Lots of ranch houses, kid.”
“Yeah. But if we can figure out who in that area might have a connection to someone who’s been in an area with an active coal seam fire it might help.”
“Balls,” Bobby swore, taking off his hat. “I knew I’d regret becoming an old hermit. It could be almost anyone.”
“Almost anyone having a relative disappear for at least seven years into coal country or the Northwest Territories?” Sam raised an eyebrow. Too damn smart, that kid.
“That does kind of narrow it down,” he had to admit with a grin. “Lemme talk to Sheriff Gerry and I’ll see what I can come up with. In the meantime, off to bed with you. You need your sleep, kid, or you’re never gonna grow.”
He shrugged, but obeyed.
The next day they went into town instead of doing physical training to buy Danita her birthday present. Sam knew exactly what he wanted to buy her; she liked history best and he wanted to get her a book about the English Civil War because she’d been curious about it. Bobby let the kid browse the bookshop for a while. This wasn’t some big-box chain store; it was independently owned and Bobby knew the owner stocked a very eclectic mix of material. He noticed the kid lingering over a book about the history of South Dakota and made a point of buying it when the kid wasn’t looking. It would make a good going-away present when John finally came for the boy.
After the bookstore they did a little more shopping - Sam needed something new to wear to the party, something that wasn’t repaired and permanently stained. John might be annoyed that Bobby was “spoiling the boy,” but Bobby didn’t want Sam to feel hugely out of place. Then they went to dinner - nothing fancy, but not Bobby’s cooking and not Sam’s fussing. Sam even ate half of his dinner, which Bobby found nothing short of miraculous.
They went home and did some more research, and Bobby had to admit that it didn’t feel quite as tense in the house as it had for the past several weeks. The next day Sam went to school and Bobby got back to researching.
And the day after that was Danita Myers’ birthday party. Sam did his training before the party, making sure he was scrubbed clean and perfectly dressed before Bobby drove him over. The hunter noticed with a sinking sensation that the place was within the six-block spiral in which the salamander was likely to strike, and he could see by the look on Sam’s face that the thought had occurred to the boy too.
“Don’t you worry, boy,” he told Sam gruffly. “I’m pretty sure your friend’s house ain’t a target.”
Sam swallowed and nodded. “He’s scared,” the boy said. “He’s scared, and he’s traumatized. He’s probably not going to seek out a party full of twelve-year-olds, right?”
“No, he’s not,” Bobby agreed. “But you know how to get hold of me if you need to.”
“Yes, sir.” He got out of the truck. “I’ll see you later, Bobby.” He smiled shyly, just for a fleeting second before his face returned to normal and he disappeared up the walkway. Bobby sat back and let the pride wash over him; he’d accomplished something special.
Bobby drove over to the sheriff’s office. Gerry met him there. “What do you think, sheriff?” he asked. “Any clues about the people in that area? My boy’s in that zone right now and I’m a little antsy.”
“Your boy now?” Gerry smirked. “That’s good to hear. Well, I’ve got about ten candidates.”
“That’s all?” Bobby made a sour face.
“Well, let’s talk about them, shall we?” The young deputy Mills brought them some coffee and they started poring over files.
There was one man from the area who had disappeared with no explanation about ten years ago. They ruled him out - provisionally, of course - fairly quickly. He’d had no real connections - his parents had died before he disappeared, he had no close friends or lovers in the area, there was nothing that could possibly penetrate the trauma of burning constantly for seven years and pull him back to this area. There were two more who had left home for mining jobs in the western part of the state and never returned. Both had been declared dead, but no one knew better than Bobby that that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
There were three more men, and two women, who had gone to prison. Sam had referred to the salamander by male pronouns but that didn’t have to be the case. The salamander might have been a woman. Quick checks proved that both of the formerly incarcerated women were accounted for, though, as were all three men.
That left four possibilities. Two families had moved into the area without their menfolk over the past fifteen years. One had lost their father figure in a car accident down in Florida, which was tragic and might make for trouble down in Tallahassee sometime but probably wasn’t part of the problem that they were dealing with in the here and now. The other had ejected their father figure because of a domestic violence situation maybe nine years ago - Bobby remembered that case, now that he thought about it. Jane Wilson had been in terrible shape when she and her three children had fled their home. The community had rallied around her, essentially forcing her husband out. He’d slunk off for parts unknown not long after; perhaps a mine had taken him on. Maybe he’d taken his anger out on the wrong person and gotten himself into trouble. Bobby could certainly imagine wanting to toss the son of a bitch into a coal seam.
Another father had gone off looking for work when the meat packing plant had downsized and never been heard from again. It wasn’t out of the question that he could have tried his hand at coal mining. And the last family’s son had headed west, up and into Canada, for what was supposed to be the mountain climbing adventure of a lifetime and never been heard from again.
“Geez,” Bobby observed. “You’d think the whole ‘ten people just up and disappearing’ over the past decade and a half’ from the same six block radius would have stood out to someone.”
“I’m a sheriff, Singer. I’m not a babysitter. Most of them weren’t even reported missing or at least weren’t reported missing here.”
The hunter held up his hands, trying to soothe his friend a little. “Hey - I ain’t saying you did anything wrong. I didn’t notice either, and it’s my job to notice things like this. The one who did think of it was the kid.” He made a face. “I’m telling you, Bob, he’s too damn smart. Anyways, I like one of these four for the salamander. The one we know went somewhere with a coal fire is the Hudson boy.” He thumped the hiker’s file.
“Yeah, but that’s only because he actually went toward Canada. He could have shacked up with a girl in Vancouver and just be stoned out of his mind for all we know. This whole circling around thing… it’s kind of troubling. It makes me think…” He logged into his computer. “I’m wondering if there’s anything we’re missing. All of these guys would be missing their families obviously, but is there anything about their old lives that would draw them back beyond that? Something that might narrow down a target for them.” He started typing.
“What do you mean?” Bobby frowned.
“Well, I mean, did any of them have any outstanding complaints against them? Any, uh, any strong issues that might break through that kind of pain that you’re talking about from the seven years of burning?” He grimaced. “I can’t remember every single case myself, but that’s what this damn thing is for.” He thumped the monitor screen.
Deputy Mills came running into the room. “Sheriff, there’s been another fire. The Myers resi-“
Bobby rose to his feet. “What?” His hands and arms felt numb; his legs like they were disconnected from his body. “Did you say -“
“There was apparently a middle-school birthday party?” she hazarded with a wince. “Fire crews are already on the scene -“
He approached her. “You need to take me there. Now!”
She shifted her weight to better distribute it for a fight and tilted her head a little to one side. “Excuse me?”
“It’s okay, Jody. He doesn’t mean… His ward is one of the kids at the party. Give him a lift, if you don’t mind,” Bob added with a wave of his hand. He was already drawing his jacket on. “He’s mostly harmless.”
Jody glowered at her boss for a moment before turning on her heel and racing for her squad car. Bobby slid into the shotgun position, barely getting his door closed before she peeled out of the parking lot with the sirens blazing.
Fire crews were already on the scene by the time they got there, as were multiple ambulances. Debbie Myers sobbed on the neighbor’s lawn, with the neighbor lady holding onto her like it was taking all she could do to either hold her up or hold her back, it was hard to tell. There were about ten kids around her, a mix of boys and girls. All of their clothes bore traces of smoke damage, and all of their faces were smudged with soot. None of them were Sam. Bobby grabbed the nearest kid. “Where’s Sam?” he roared.
The kid gasped. “He’s -“ He pointed at the house, which had flames billowing from the picture window in the front.
The air left Bobby’s lungs like he’d been tackled. Sam was trapped in the house. He couldn’t lose him. Not like this. “What happened?” he demanded.
“Carl Staley came over,” said the neighbor lady holding Debbie up. “He used to live two doors down on the other side. He just walked into the house like he owned the place and the place started burning all around him.”
The name sounded familiar. He’d been one of the four, Bobby recalled. His hands shook. “And then?”
“We couldn’t get out the front door,” one of the girls insisted. “Three of us were in the kitchen and we got out through the garage, but the fire moved fast.” She started to cry. “Mrs. Myers got us out through the kitchen, but Danita -“
Debbie sobbed louder, beyond the neighbor lady’s ability to hold her up. Bobby took over for her and the nurse collapsed into his arms. “Danita?”
“Danita was still in the living room with the rest of them,” another kid responded. “There were sixteen of us.”
“So if only three of you got out with Mrs. Myers, how did the rest of you get out?”
“Oh, Sam Winchester,” a boy told him. “We kind of scattered - everyone was looking for an escape route. I went into the bathroom, but I couldn’t reach the window. It was up too high. Sam came in and took out the screen and helped me through it, then he went and looked for some others.”
“Me too,” added a girl. “Me and Katie Murray.” She pointed at the ambulance. “He helped her - her sleeve caught on fire, but he put it out. Then he helped us get out the window in the master bedroom.”
Each child told the same story. Sam had appeared at their side and helped them escape the fire, but hadn’t followed them, even though they’d expected him to be right behind them. Bobby shook his head. What the hell was that kid thinking? The fire had already spread so fast that the fire department was hanging back - the house was in danger of collapse. All anyone could do was stand and wait for the inevitable.
Every once in a while they would hear a scream punching through the roar of the flames and the whoosh of the fire hoses as they tried to contain the fire to the one building. The scream indicated another child being ejected from the building. Medics would race to the site, but they would only find another child that Bobby didn’t know; no Sam and no Danita.
Finally, the front half of the house collapsed in on itself. It felt like it had been hours, but it really hadn’t taken long at all. The salamander must have fueled the fire with its own energy somehow. On the one hand it was terrifying; the monster had managed to completely destroy a home in under fifteen minutes. On the other hand, it gave Bobby what he most desperately wanted to see.
It gave him Sam.
The boy stood in the little girl’s bedroom or what remained of it. The place had once been pink; now it was gray and sooty. Danita herself had huddled down between the bed and the wall in a kind of fetal position. Sam - his shirt wrapped around his nose and mouth as a kind of mask - crouched down and picked her up in his arms. He looked around himself, assessing the situation, and found a path. Even though it clearly pained him - even at this distance Bobby could see the agony on his expressive face - he raced toward the front of the house.
A firefighter ran toward them, arms out to take Danita from the boy. Sam gave the girl up willingly enough, but then he turned around and went back into the building.
“Now what the hell is he doing?” Bobby demanded without thinking.
Sammy walked slowly toward a lick of flame that seemed to hover in place, hands up. It was hard to tell from this angle, but it almost looked like he was speaking to it. After a moment - punctuated by wild coughing fits from Sam - the flame solidified into the form of a man. The man’s white skin seemed unnaturally clean for the circumstances - everything around him was smoke and ash but here he stood in gleaming, albescent glory.
Sam walked out of the burning wreckage, hands up and coughing like there was no tomorrow. Sheriff Gerry raced forward, gun drawn, and Sam paused in his coughing long enough to give him an epic bitchface. “He knows what has to happen,” Sam gasped. “He says he’ll go quietly. He can control it long enough for you to drive him there.”
Then Sam collapsed. A paramedic raced forward to tend to him, and Bobby lost track of time as he watched strangers struggling to revive his charge.
The next few days passed in a blur. Sam’s most severe injury turned out to be smoke inhalation, which surprised precisely no one. He had some pretty extensive second-degree burns but the hospital had a good burn unit and they were able to get those under control; chances were that he wouldn’t even scar. He spent just over a week and a half in the hospital for the smoke inhalation, which Bobby found that he was okay with.
There was absolutely no question of Sam or Bobby paying for anything. The parents of the children Sam had rescued came together and firmly insisted that they were taking on all of his medical costs. Bobby wasn’t going to argue - John hadn’t given him cash for an extended hospital stay, never mind that kind of intense oxygen therapy, and while wanted what was best for the kid, he honestly couldn’t have afforded it on his own. Part of him hoped Sam didn’t get used to it.
The salamander, Carl Staley, managed to talk, before being sealed into the bomb squad’s chamber. He had lived in the neighborhood, just as the woman had said. He’d started eyeing Danita when she’d been just a tiny girl. Neighbors had noticed. Her mother had noticed, and Carl had been “subtly encouraged” to seek employment elsewhere. His own wife had reported him missing, but more for insurance reasons than because she regretted his loss - she knew what he was. He’d found employment in a mine but had slipped up again, gotten caught going after a miner’s kid. He’d been tossed into a coal fire and found himself changed into a new kind of monster. He’d been out of control, acting only on impulse until Sam had talked to him, convinced him that evil was in fact a choice. It had been enough for Carl to stop himself and let Sam and Danita out safely. The problem, of course, was that evil had been part of his soul long before he’d transformed. He couldn’t rely on his newfound, fragile self-control. The chamber was the only solution.
Naturally, John Winchester showed up about five days into Sam’s ten-day hospital stay. Bobby cursed his luck. “Where’s the boy?” John demanded.
“Hospital,” Bobby admitted. He wasn’t afraid of John Winchester; he wasn’t intimidated by the other hunter. He wasn’t.
John looked genuinely curious. “Why?”
“Fire.”
“The place looks fine to me.”
He considered the full truth. He truly did. Why shouldn’t John know that his son needed to socialize, needed to meet other human beings and needed to know how other people lived? Needed friends? “It was a hunt, actually. Salamander.”
“We don’t go to hospitals, Singer. Too risky. Too much of a paper trail.”
“Oh, you mean too much of a record of you having two sons if you decide you need to rub out the younger one?” he sneered. “There were tons of witnesses, Johnny. It wasn’t like I could stop them. Anyway, he saved fifteen kids besides himself, and one of the mothers besides. Oh - and he’s the one who figured out what we were dealing with and how to kill it.”
John was silent for a moment. “Really.”
“Yeah. Really.”
“All by himself?”
He almost responded and then he realized what was happening in the parent’s head. “Christ, no wonder that kid’s so screwed up. I’m the one who told him what the parameters were. I showed him the case files. I told him about the fires, I told him what was happening. It took him time. He didn’t just… conjure up a salamander. That’s not how it works.”
“It’s not?”
“No. He’d have had to drop one into a fire seven years ago and kept it there. Since the poor kid has no idea what it’s like to stay in one place for seven weeks, never mind seven years.” He rolled his eyes.
“But you do think something’s wrong with him.” John pressed.
He sighed. “Yeah. I do. But not because he’s not human. He’s a human boy. A very human boy. Who, by the way, is very much aware of your real opinion of him.”
“He needs to take orders. He’s a soldier.”
“He’s not a soldier. He’s a boy. A scared and traumatized boy. He’s afraid to eat because you call him fat. He doesn’t know how to form normal relationships with other people because you’ve never allowed him to socialize. He broke out of here to go rescue his brother because he doesn’t trust you to take care of Dean. And he didn’t care that you want him dead because he doesn’t see life as worth living.”
“He told you all this?” John snarled.
“Not in one piece. I had to put it together because he didn’t trust me either. Because he figured out real quick that you didn’t leave him here just for babysittin’.” He fought against the urge to tell him the truth - that Sam was on to John’s tricks - but knew that would make Sam even less safe. “Johnny, your boy didn’t even care as long as Dean was safe. Don’t you see how screwed up that is? How damaged that boy is?”
“I do what I have to do, Bobby. I left him here because I had to know.”
“No. You didn’t want the truth, you wanted confirmation. You wanted to know that it was okay to kill your youngest son - that he was already too far gone to be saved. And the thing is, Johnny, he already believes it’s true.”
John shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. If he’s not… you know, if he is human, then there’s no reason he can’t buckle down and learn to be just as good as Dean.”
Bobby sighed. “When’s the last time Dean ran into a burning building and rescued sixteen people, John?”
“Dean does what he’s told when he’s told to do it!” the elder Winchester snapped. “He would never have run off on a damn fool’s errand. If I told him to leave Sammy where he was he’d have damn well done it. That’s the problem. Sammy doesn’t follow orders. Dean trusts me.”
“And you think this is a problem with Sam.”
“You’re damn right I do.”
Bobby sat down at the table again. “Look. John. Why don’t you just… leave him here? He’ll be safe, you know I can train him, and it would be good to have someone around here that’s got a head for the research. I’ve never seen a kid who likes it that much. He’ll be better off, you’ll be happier and -“
“Not happening, Singer. You’re besotted with him, just like Jim. You’ll both just coddle him. He needs discipline, not coddling. He needs a firm hand, not someone who’s going to let him bury his nose in a book. No - as soon as he’s done pampering himself in the hospital I’m taking him to go get his brother. Can’t have him getting soft.”
“He’s got a girl here, you know.”
Bobby knew as soon as he said it that it was absolutely the wrong thing to say. John looked like someone had thrown an entire bucket of cold water over him. “I want him out of here tomorrow.”
The doctors weren’t having any part of that, and neither were Sam’s singed lungs. But the same day that he was allowed to leave the hospital Bobby drove him back to the scrapyard and he was transferred to his father’s car without even being allowed back into the house. Bobby had packed up his things and taken a moment to admire Sam’s foresight in never allowing himself to unpack. He did take a moment to slip the book he’d bought for Sam into his bag.
He didn’t think he’d miss the kid’s sometimes-sullen, usually silent presence. He did, though. He couldn’t even put his finger on why, but it would hit him sometimes, suddenly, over the years. Dean was the easier Winchester to love, the one that Bobby maintained a relationship with as the boys grew older. He didn’t make any attempt to reach out to Sam when he went off to Stanford and didn’t try to stay in contact after Dean died.
When Sam brought up his plan of jumping, Bobby couldn’t help but think of the salamander - Carl, he reminded himself forcefully, Sam would want him to remember the man’s name. Bobby could do that much for him. And he could back Sam’s play, if only because it was the only game in town. At least, he thought to himself, it wasn’t Dean.
But when he found himself brought back to life just in time to see the ground close up over Sam, all he could remember was the boy who had wanted to help someone who had been changed and manipulated by forces outside his control. What lesson had Sam carried away from that incident? What lesson had he taken with him into Lucifer’s Cage? And how much of the lesson had come from Bobby? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He let Castiel bring him back to Sioux Falls, and buried himself in his books.
This way to Part Three -- This way to Masterpost