Fic: Carry That Weight (Coda to 10.15)
Title: Carry That Weight
Author: safiyabat
Pairing: None (gen)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Suicidal thoughts, Mark of Cain, mentions of past torture, mentions of past rape
Spoilers: Through 10.15 "The Things They Left Behind"
Word count: ~ 2100
Beta: tumblr user sunflowerchester
Summary: After they leave Fayetteville, Sam considers his role in the case and what's to come in the future.
The ride from Fayetteville back to Lebanon took twenty-two hours. Dean drove the whole way, breaking only for coffee throughput. That was fine by Sam; he and sleep had never had the best relationship anyway and nothing about the case inclined him to put head to pillow. He’d wanted to save Kit. He wanted to save them all. But it hadn’t worked out that way; he hadn’t come up with the dehydration theory and instead poor Gemma had to bury her husband and Sam had to listen to yet another “you can’t save everyone” speech before settling in for yet another stretch of endless road in the passenger seat beside his brother. Sometimes it seemed like he’d never saved anyone at all. Those girls Rowena had ensnared. Dean. The people in Hibbing, menaced by those vampires. Kate’s sister. Dean. Hell, even the people that they’d saved back in the day had only gotten a couple of extra years out of the deal before their very association with them, with Sam, had gotten them killed. Sometimes it seemed like he was stuck in another time loop, like all he did was stand there and stare at corpses in some room or another. But that had been years ago, Gabriel was dead (someone else I couldn’t save) and this was just the way things were now.
They didn’t speak. There wasn’t much to say. Instead Dean turned up Metallica, singing along in his off-key voice to the same five tapes (it’s not like they made anything good after the “Black” album, Sammy) until they finally pulled into the garage. He thought that maybe now, possibly, he would get some solitude, but no.
“Have a drink with me, Sammy,” Dean demanded, grabbing a bottle of Jack from the kitchen.
Sam thought they’d gotten rid of all of that stuff. “Aren’t you tired?” he sighed. “You’ve been driving for an awfully long time.”
His brother shrugged. “Need to wind down. Grab a seat. Unless you want to go watch some more porn. Give Little Sammy some attention.” His full, pink lips twisted into a leer.
Sam’s stomach twisted. The ghost of a memory of icy fingers trailing along the curve of his spine reared its head; he couldn’t hold back a shiver. “Gross. No.”
“Sit down, then.” He held out a tumbler of whiskey. His tone was calm and his face pleasant enough, but this was not a request. This is a dictatorship.
Dad used to do this, sometimes. He’d send Dean off on these solo hunts or off to back up other more experienced hunters like Caleb or Joshua and then drag Sam out on a case. They’d hunt, Sam would find the experience miserable and traumatic and then John would dump some whiskey into one of those paper cups motels provided and shove it into Sam’s hand and call that parenting. Saying no wasn’t on the table then, and it wasn’t on the table now.
He moved slowly toward the table and sat in a chair. He’d spent the last twenty-two hours sitting. Now he was going to sit again. At least in the car he’d been spared the indignity of conversation, of interrogation. His back protested, his knees protested, his shoulder sounded like a rally loud enough to shut down an entire interstate. “What’s on your mind, Dean?”
Dean grinned, tight and clean and brittle. “That Cole guy.”
Sam huffed out a laugh. “Yeah.”
“He’s a good guy, Sammy.”
Sam flinched. “Okay.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing,” Sam lied. “You’re right. He’s, uh. A good guy.” He turned his glass around in his hands, watched the dark amber liquid hesitate on the walls before it settled back into the bottom of the vessel. Cole was a war hero, just out to protect his friends and his friends’ family. It was awful of Sam to resent him for the past. It was wrong, so typical of him.
Dean put his own glass down on the table. He didn’t quite slam it down, but it was loud and Sam almost jumped. Michael had liked to slam things around too. “You don’t think so?”
“No, I do. He’s fantastic.”
“He’s loyal to his buddies. That’s what’s struck me about him, Sammy.” Sam managed to hold back any reaction to the nickname this time. He could see bottle-green eyes on them and tried not to imagine them going black. Dean was cured now. “He’s loyal. He dedicated his life to being loyal to his father, and he was being loyal to his buddies today.”
Sam let his breath out slowly and carefully. He didn’t want to antagonize Dean, didn’t want to pick a fight. For a Winchester, loyalty was supposed to place a higher premium on revenge than on anything else. How long before Cole’s ideas of “loyalty” had him beating down Sam’s door and how much did he care? “I’m sure he was. I mean, you were there. I wasn’t, so I’ll have to take your word for it. But he’s one determined son of a -“
“That’s right. I was there.”
“It’s not like we haven’t spent any time together, Dean.” The words spilled out of Sam’s mouth without his brain’s conscious control, and for a second he wondered if he’d been possessed again. No, though, the thoughts were legitimately his. He just wasn’t the type to say them out loud anymore. He’d learned his lesson; nothing good came from it and no one was interested anyway. Besides, they were counterproductive. He needed to focus less on his own grievances and more on Dean’s problem. The Mark, and what was coming, needed to be the priority. Not who had done what to Sam. That didn’t matter.
“Oh, right. Didn’t he hold you hostage or something, rough you up a little?” Dean picked his glass up and gulped the contents down, draining it.
“Yeah. Something like that.” Sam looked away. If he didn’t look Dean in the eye it wouldn’t come off as quite so much of a challenge, right? The important thing was to keep Dean calm.
“He did what he had to, Sammy. I mean, he was gunning for me. And everyone knows the way to me is through you.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t personal.”
It had sure felt personal when Cole had broken out the blowtorch. It had felt personal when Cole had knocked his still-healing shoulder back out of its socket. Then again, Sam had certainly had worse. “Not like we haven’t resorted to torture a time or two ourselves,” he said, forcing himself to speak in an even tone. He could remember the demon’s screams as he carved into her, looking for his brother.
“I mean, hell, you let him call you Sammy,” Dean continued. “What’s a little torture between buddies if you let him call you Sammy?”
Sam blinked, put his drink down. “What?” That couldn’t seriously be what was causing Dean’s mood, was it?
“Dude, you knocked out six of some guy’s teeth in a bar once for calling you Sammy!” He laughed as Sam shook his head in confusion, shallow and sharp. “Yeah, you don’t remember? You must have been maybe sixteen? We were in a bar in Texas somewhere and you told him to call you Sam, not Sammy. He slipped up like five times and you finally lost your shit and decked him. It was awesome.” Dean chuckled.
Sam found that his foot was tapping on the floor. He forced it to be still. “Yeah. I remember.” He remembered trying to convince Dean and Dad to address him as Sam too, not that either of them would ever condescend to acknowledge that he had an identity outside the one they assigned him. He remembered Dean’s quiet pride (or had it been smug satisfaction?) when he’d backed Gordon Walker down, forcing him to acknowledge that only Dean had the right to call him “Sammy.” “Yeah, well,” he sighed finally. “I guess there’s a lot of time between sixteen and thirty-one.” He’d had a lot of anger, as a teenager. Some might say that he’d had a lot to be angry about. He’d believed it to be justified at the time, although maybe not that specific incident. Now he understood that his anger was not the proper response to his family’s control, that he should have simply accepted their dominance and been grateful. He’d always been a freak.
“Yeah. I hear that.” Dean poured himself another drink. “I guess it just seemed weird. Friendly. I mean, you apologized to him.”
“I’d just killed his best friend.”
“You haven’t apologized to me.”
Sam saw red and immediately hated himself for it. This wasn’t supposed to be about him. It wasn’t supposed to be about him, but he still couldn’t find a way to not be angry about what Dean had done to him. “I’ve done nothing but apologize to you, Dean.” Sam stood up. “I’m beat. I need to lie down. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t turn around to see the look on Dean’s face as he retreated to his room, his little monk’s cell. He was pretty sure it would be the same look he’d seen a thousand times on his father’s face, on his brother’s more recently. Disappointment, disapproval, resentment, blank incomprehension. The story of his life, really, only it hurt more now. You’ve been sucking the life out of my life since the day you were born. And it was true, he had. I want you right here with me. Which was true? The answer, of course, was both.
Like Sam didn’t know where this was going. Dean hadn’t told him anything that Cain had said to him, tried to pretend that the demon had just fought him in silence. Because Sam hadn’t been able to hear the rumbling sounds of Cain’s voice on the other side of the door. He hadn’t been able to hear details, but he’d heard words. And the story of Cain wasn’t exactly a state secret. They’d come upon Cain slaughtering his own descendants, for crying out loud. Did Dean really think Sam was that stupid?
Then again, Sam hadn’t thought of the dehydration cure. Once upon a time he’d have come up with that one, but lately it seemed like his mind had just taken leave of his body. Maybe that was the tradeoff - he could have his mind, or his soul, but not both. Or maybe Gadreel had been the final straw, or Crowley. After all, most people didn’t really recover entirely from one possession. He’d had four intensely powerful beings just make themselves at home in his mind and body; that had to take a few chunks out of the plaster, right?
No, he couldn’t blame his failure to save Kit on the possessions or on anything else. He just wasn’t good enough, wasn’t thinking fast enough or well enough. He’d been distracted by the Mark, by thoughts of what was to come and that was wrong. It was selfish of him.
He hated those “you can’t save everybody” speeches, he’d been hearing them since he’d been about eight, but maybe this time it was one he’d needed to hear. He couldn’t save Dean from himself, from the Mark. And he couldn’t save himself from Dean.
Nor, if he thought about it properly, should he. He’d been ready to go when he’d met with Death after the Trials, and honestly there wasn’t much else to stick around for. He wasn’t effective as a hunter anymore, he couldn’t save Dean, and there was literally no one who would even notice that Sam was gone. The only benefit - literally the only one - to sparing Dean from taking Sam’s life was the fact that Dean would be devastated when he came back to himself. At least, Dean would have been devastated, back in the pre-Purgatory days, or maybe the pre-Hell days. Who knew? Dad’s instruction to kill Sam if he couldn’t save him had almost destroyed Dean. Now, though, a little torture between friends was nothing to Dean. He hadn’t cared what Cole had done to Sam; he didn’t think that Sam should care what Cole had done to him.
All that Dean had cared about was that Cole had usurped Dean’s prerogative with Sam’s name.
It didn’t matter what Cole called Sam. If he didn’t have the right to his own body he didn’t have the right to decide who called him anything. And pretty soon, no one was going to call him anything anyway. Sometimes you can do everything right and the guy still dies, Sammy.
Author: safiyabat
Pairing: None (gen)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Suicidal thoughts, Mark of Cain, mentions of past torture, mentions of past rape
Spoilers: Through 10.15 "The Things They Left Behind"
Word count: ~ 2100
Beta: tumblr user sunflowerchester
Summary: After they leave Fayetteville, Sam considers his role in the case and what's to come in the future.
The ride from Fayetteville back to Lebanon took twenty-two hours. Dean drove the whole way, breaking only for coffee throughput. That was fine by Sam; he and sleep had never had the best relationship anyway and nothing about the case inclined him to put head to pillow. He’d wanted to save Kit. He wanted to save them all. But it hadn’t worked out that way; he hadn’t come up with the dehydration theory and instead poor Gemma had to bury her husband and Sam had to listen to yet another “you can’t save everyone” speech before settling in for yet another stretch of endless road in the passenger seat beside his brother. Sometimes it seemed like he’d never saved anyone at all. Those girls Rowena had ensnared. Dean. The people in Hibbing, menaced by those vampires. Kate’s sister. Dean. Hell, even the people that they’d saved back in the day had only gotten a couple of extra years out of the deal before their very association with them, with Sam, had gotten them killed. Sometimes it seemed like he was stuck in another time loop, like all he did was stand there and stare at corpses in some room or another. But that had been years ago, Gabriel was dead (someone else I couldn’t save) and this was just the way things were now.
They didn’t speak. There wasn’t much to say. Instead Dean turned up Metallica, singing along in his off-key voice to the same five tapes (it’s not like they made anything good after the “Black” album, Sammy) until they finally pulled into the garage. He thought that maybe now, possibly, he would get some solitude, but no.
“Have a drink with me, Sammy,” Dean demanded, grabbing a bottle of Jack from the kitchen.
Sam thought they’d gotten rid of all of that stuff. “Aren’t you tired?” he sighed. “You’ve been driving for an awfully long time.”
His brother shrugged. “Need to wind down. Grab a seat. Unless you want to go watch some more porn. Give Little Sammy some attention.” His full, pink lips twisted into a leer.
Sam’s stomach twisted. The ghost of a memory of icy fingers trailing along the curve of his spine reared its head; he couldn’t hold back a shiver. “Gross. No.”
“Sit down, then.” He held out a tumbler of whiskey. His tone was calm and his face pleasant enough, but this was not a request. This is a dictatorship.
Dad used to do this, sometimes. He’d send Dean off on these solo hunts or off to back up other more experienced hunters like Caleb or Joshua and then drag Sam out on a case. They’d hunt, Sam would find the experience miserable and traumatic and then John would dump some whiskey into one of those paper cups motels provided and shove it into Sam’s hand and call that parenting. Saying no wasn’t on the table then, and it wasn’t on the table now.
He moved slowly toward the table and sat in a chair. He’d spent the last twenty-two hours sitting. Now he was going to sit again. At least in the car he’d been spared the indignity of conversation, of interrogation. His back protested, his knees protested, his shoulder sounded like a rally loud enough to shut down an entire interstate. “What’s on your mind, Dean?”
Dean grinned, tight and clean and brittle. “That Cole guy.”
Sam huffed out a laugh. “Yeah.”
“He’s a good guy, Sammy.”
Sam flinched. “Okay.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing,” Sam lied. “You’re right. He’s, uh. A good guy.” He turned his glass around in his hands, watched the dark amber liquid hesitate on the walls before it settled back into the bottom of the vessel. Cole was a war hero, just out to protect his friends and his friends’ family. It was awful of Sam to resent him for the past. It was wrong, so typical of him.
Dean put his own glass down on the table. He didn’t quite slam it down, but it was loud and Sam almost jumped. Michael had liked to slam things around too. “You don’t think so?”
“No, I do. He’s fantastic.”
“He’s loyal to his buddies. That’s what’s struck me about him, Sammy.” Sam managed to hold back any reaction to the nickname this time. He could see bottle-green eyes on them and tried not to imagine them going black. Dean was cured now. “He’s loyal. He dedicated his life to being loyal to his father, and he was being loyal to his buddies today.”
Sam let his breath out slowly and carefully. He didn’t want to antagonize Dean, didn’t want to pick a fight. For a Winchester, loyalty was supposed to place a higher premium on revenge than on anything else. How long before Cole’s ideas of “loyalty” had him beating down Sam’s door and how much did he care? “I’m sure he was. I mean, you were there. I wasn’t, so I’ll have to take your word for it. But he’s one determined son of a -“
“That’s right. I was there.”
“It’s not like we haven’t spent any time together, Dean.” The words spilled out of Sam’s mouth without his brain’s conscious control, and for a second he wondered if he’d been possessed again. No, though, the thoughts were legitimately his. He just wasn’t the type to say them out loud anymore. He’d learned his lesson; nothing good came from it and no one was interested anyway. Besides, they were counterproductive. He needed to focus less on his own grievances and more on Dean’s problem. The Mark, and what was coming, needed to be the priority. Not who had done what to Sam. That didn’t matter.
“Oh, right. Didn’t he hold you hostage or something, rough you up a little?” Dean picked his glass up and gulped the contents down, draining it.
“Yeah. Something like that.” Sam looked away. If he didn’t look Dean in the eye it wouldn’t come off as quite so much of a challenge, right? The important thing was to keep Dean calm.
“He did what he had to, Sammy. I mean, he was gunning for me. And everyone knows the way to me is through you.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t personal.”
It had sure felt personal when Cole had broken out the blowtorch. It had felt personal when Cole had knocked his still-healing shoulder back out of its socket. Then again, Sam had certainly had worse. “Not like we haven’t resorted to torture a time or two ourselves,” he said, forcing himself to speak in an even tone. He could remember the demon’s screams as he carved into her, looking for his brother.
“I mean, hell, you let him call you Sammy,” Dean continued. “What’s a little torture between buddies if you let him call you Sammy?”
Sam blinked, put his drink down. “What?” That couldn’t seriously be what was causing Dean’s mood, was it?
“Dude, you knocked out six of some guy’s teeth in a bar once for calling you Sammy!” He laughed as Sam shook his head in confusion, shallow and sharp. “Yeah, you don’t remember? You must have been maybe sixteen? We were in a bar in Texas somewhere and you told him to call you Sam, not Sammy. He slipped up like five times and you finally lost your shit and decked him. It was awesome.” Dean chuckled.
Sam found that his foot was tapping on the floor. He forced it to be still. “Yeah. I remember.” He remembered trying to convince Dean and Dad to address him as Sam too, not that either of them would ever condescend to acknowledge that he had an identity outside the one they assigned him. He remembered Dean’s quiet pride (or had it been smug satisfaction?) when he’d backed Gordon Walker down, forcing him to acknowledge that only Dean had the right to call him “Sammy.” “Yeah, well,” he sighed finally. “I guess there’s a lot of time between sixteen and thirty-one.” He’d had a lot of anger, as a teenager. Some might say that he’d had a lot to be angry about. He’d believed it to be justified at the time, although maybe not that specific incident. Now he understood that his anger was not the proper response to his family’s control, that he should have simply accepted their dominance and been grateful. He’d always been a freak.
“Yeah. I hear that.” Dean poured himself another drink. “I guess it just seemed weird. Friendly. I mean, you apologized to him.”
“I’d just killed his best friend.”
“You haven’t apologized to me.”
Sam saw red and immediately hated himself for it. This wasn’t supposed to be about him. It wasn’t supposed to be about him, but he still couldn’t find a way to not be angry about what Dean had done to him. “I’ve done nothing but apologize to you, Dean.” Sam stood up. “I’m beat. I need to lie down. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t turn around to see the look on Dean’s face as he retreated to his room, his little monk’s cell. He was pretty sure it would be the same look he’d seen a thousand times on his father’s face, on his brother’s more recently. Disappointment, disapproval, resentment, blank incomprehension. The story of his life, really, only it hurt more now. You’ve been sucking the life out of my life since the day you were born. And it was true, he had. I want you right here with me. Which was true? The answer, of course, was both.
Like Sam didn’t know where this was going. Dean hadn’t told him anything that Cain had said to him, tried to pretend that the demon had just fought him in silence. Because Sam hadn’t been able to hear the rumbling sounds of Cain’s voice on the other side of the door. He hadn’t been able to hear details, but he’d heard words. And the story of Cain wasn’t exactly a state secret. They’d come upon Cain slaughtering his own descendants, for crying out loud. Did Dean really think Sam was that stupid?
Then again, Sam hadn’t thought of the dehydration cure. Once upon a time he’d have come up with that one, but lately it seemed like his mind had just taken leave of his body. Maybe that was the tradeoff - he could have his mind, or his soul, but not both. Or maybe Gadreel had been the final straw, or Crowley. After all, most people didn’t really recover entirely from one possession. He’d had four intensely powerful beings just make themselves at home in his mind and body; that had to take a few chunks out of the plaster, right?
No, he couldn’t blame his failure to save Kit on the possessions or on anything else. He just wasn’t good enough, wasn’t thinking fast enough or well enough. He’d been distracted by the Mark, by thoughts of what was to come and that was wrong. It was selfish of him.
He hated those “you can’t save everybody” speeches, he’d been hearing them since he’d been about eight, but maybe this time it was one he’d needed to hear. He couldn’t save Dean from himself, from the Mark. And he couldn’t save himself from Dean.
Nor, if he thought about it properly, should he. He’d been ready to go when he’d met with Death after the Trials, and honestly there wasn’t much else to stick around for. He wasn’t effective as a hunter anymore, he couldn’t save Dean, and there was literally no one who would even notice that Sam was gone. The only benefit - literally the only one - to sparing Dean from taking Sam’s life was the fact that Dean would be devastated when he came back to himself. At least, Dean would have been devastated, back in the pre-Purgatory days, or maybe the pre-Hell days. Who knew? Dad’s instruction to kill Sam if he couldn’t save him had almost destroyed Dean. Now, though, a little torture between friends was nothing to Dean. He hadn’t cared what Cole had done to Sam; he didn’t think that Sam should care what Cole had done to him.
All that Dean had cared about was that Cole had usurped Dean’s prerogative with Sam’s name.
It didn’t matter what Cole called Sam. If he didn’t have the right to his own body he didn’t have the right to decide who called him anything. And pretty soon, no one was going to call him anything anyway. Sometimes you can do everything right and the guy still dies, Sammy.