(no subject)
I woke up with this really horrible idea, and then, um, I wrote it. This isn't really a coda, but it does contain spoilers for last night's episode and S6 so far. Also, I want to disclaim that I actually found robo!Sam charming and kind of missed him a little. But let's be honest: who hasn't wondered what he was up to before Dean found him.
Blackout, R, Sam+Dean, 1400 words.
It's R for violence, serial killing*, and lots of dead bodies.
*And not in the friendly, Dexter sort of way.
Dean wakes up to Sam standing over his bed with the keys to the Impala and a shovel. The dull red glow of the motel alarm clock reads a little past two in the morning.
"I have to get to Bethlehem," Sam says.
"Okay, Joseph," Dean mutters, rolling over, and reburies his face in the pillow. "In the morning."
"Pennsylvania," Sam says, and then, in a tone that Dean's only heard him use once or twice in his life, "We need to leave now."
Everything's in the car aside from Dean's boots and a pair of jeans, and Sam takes the wheel without asking, white-knuckled in the dashboard glow. Dean's got a plastic cup of cheap motel coffee and a three-hour ride in front of him, but when he reaches for the radio, Sam shakes his head.
"No," he says, and Dean drops his hand on instinct, working with rules that felt set in stone at age sixteen.
Sam doesn't say anything for the next three hours and seven minutes, until they pull off the highway and stop next to a church graveyard.
"Get the gate," Sam says. Dean's lucky, it's a padlock, one of the dime-a-dozen ace hardware brand he's been cracking for years, and it takes him under thirty seconds with a bobby pin. He pulls it open, and Sam drives through without stopping, leaving Dean to follow him down the winding cemetery path.
When he finds him, Sam's rolling back the sod on top of a grave: Anthony Carpenter, April 2nd, 1995. Dean sits on top of a gravestone and waits, listening to the hollow thunk of Sam's shovel against mostly frozen ground, and half an hour later, when Dean's starting to think about the sun coming up, Sam emerges, shoulder deep and silent. He stands at the edge of the hole until Dean comes over, shining his flashlight down, and notices, a little amused by the irony, that a year in hell hasn't taken Sam's talent for digging out pits.
There's a woman in the bottom of the grave, maybe in her mid-twenties, pretty, in a next-door-neighbor kind of way. The cold has mostly slowed the decomp, although there's blue mold growing over the curve of one cheek, and nobody would mistake her for the living. There are cold, stark bruises all along her neck, livid under Dean's flashlight, and he checks her teeth, under her nails. They're normal, and her eyes are cloudy but human; there's no reflection, just an emptiness that, a long time ago, might have made Dean's skin crawl.
Dean climbs out, wiping his hands on the grass to get rid of the worst of the grave-dirt, long-dead smell, and finds Sam on his knees behind the car.
"Neuri?" Dean says. "Jé-rouge?" It's not his kill, which means it came from between, and he's not entirely sure why they're here, why Sam's digging up a past he doesn't remember.
"I had a dream," Sam says, taking a long, slow breath. "I liked hunting."
"You were good," Dean says. There was a time when he thought you couldn't get the bone-deep satisfaction out of anything else.
"No, Dean," Sam says, flatly. "I liked hunting."
Sam, before, had always been ruthless, bloodthirsty, more of a machine than a person, but going through the motions, Dean had come to accept it. He still took his coffee black, two sugars. Still took the inside bed. Still talked like he knew what having a soul was like, like feeling out the edges of an emptiness was the same as knowing what was missing.
Dean had slept beside him for months, and the thought makes his stomach roll.
Still, Sam had been all id, no super-ego, and even at the base of it, predatory satisfaction required forethought. Sam was all instinct, responding to stimuli, taking what he wanted.
"You must have had a reason," Dean says, grasping at straws. "She saw too much, got possessed, she -"
"She brought me a cold cup of coffee," Sam says, wryly, "so I killed her."
The motel room coffee burns coming up.
After, Dean finds a can of kerosene and a bic lighter in the trunk, and he takes care of things while Sam sits in the passenger seat, staring at the dashboard as the sun comes up. When Dean rolls the grass back over, it's like no one was here at all, and he thinks that maybe they could forget about it. Just seal shut the slow leak in Sam's brain and move on like it never happened. For a minute, he thinks it could be possible, and then the engine turns over. They're just alone in the grey pre-dawn light of an east coast winter, and everything's still fucked up.
There's a skeleton at the bottom of a lake in Vermont, a shallow grave in the forest in Ohio. When Dean pries open the trunk of a car in a Virginia junk yard and sees the silver bullets in the rotting flesh, it's almost a relief.
"I grabbed the wrong gun on my way out of the motel room," Sam says, dispassionately, and goes back to sit in the car.
Dean sets a lot of fires and pulls a lot of teeth, taking a sledgehammer approach to evidence, not that it seems likely that anyone will connect Sam to any of these unfound bodies. And even if they did - Sam Winchester has a death certificate, carte blanche to exorcise demons and put down ghosts. To kill women in the north woods and leave them to rot in unmarked graves.
Sam barely says anything, head down and quiet, just pointing the car in the right direction every goddamn night, and Dean's angry and tired and numb. He misses his brother, misses sleeping through the night, misses hunting, misses normalcy.
He finds Tessa in a Wal-mart in Atlanta, while he's stocking up on socks and beef jerky and butane torches for burning off fingerprints.
"You tell your boss he's a selfish, sorry son-of-a-bitch," Dean says, because they knew.
"You got what you asked for, Dean," Tessa says, with a shrug of her shoulders, and buys a pack of cigarettes from the cashier, like reapers enjoy nicotine.
The next night, Dean wakes up at eight in the morning. Sam's reading the paper, doing a crossword, and in the hard line of the back of his neck and the set of his shoulders, Dean realizes what he's been carrying.
"I dreamed about what I did to you," Sam says, flatly, and fills in four across, attu, the westernmost Aleutian.
Dean's been angry since hell, so flat-out furious that sometimes it feels burned into his bones, an inescapable burden. Sam's lied and stolen and made every wrong decision it was possible to make, left for Stanford and fucked Ruby and abandoned him every goddamn time push came to shove, but forgiving Sam is hardwired. Their relationship is north for a compass needle, so ingrained Dean doesn't know how to live without it. Sam charred himself clean in a cage in hell, the kind of thing Dean thinks should count as absolution if there is such a thing, and it's only the after Dean's been holding against him, the repeated betrayal, like Sam knew better.
Even without a soul, Sam took the left-hand bed. Dean thought it meant something, that deep down, the thing tying them together had more to do with blood than some intangible grace.
But the truth of it is, the bodies Dean's been cleaning up didn't happen at his little brother's hands, and he's been living with a stranger, tricking himself into loving something that wasn't just because a substitute was better than nothing at all. Acknowledging it means admitting the loss, and letting himself believe that, against all odds, Sam might be home again, without deals or demons standing between them.
"You dreamed about what he did to me," Dean says, finally. "You weren't here."
"I pulled the trigger," Sam says.
"It wasn't you," Dean says, and for the first time, he believes himself.
"I -" Sam says.
"Sammy," Dean says. Sam gives him space to breathe.
"There's an IHOP a couple of blocks down," Dean says, finally. "I want pancakes. With chocolate chips. None of that fucking fruit."
"Jerk," Sam says, after a pause, ducking his head, but the corner of his mouth is pulling up.
"Bitch," Dean says, and starts to lace up his boots.
Blackout, R, Sam+Dean, 1400 words.
It's R for violence, serial killing*, and lots of dead bodies.
*And not in the friendly, Dexter sort of way.
Dean wakes up to Sam standing over his bed with the keys to the Impala and a shovel. The dull red glow of the motel alarm clock reads a little past two in the morning.
"I have to get to Bethlehem," Sam says.
"Okay, Joseph," Dean mutters, rolling over, and reburies his face in the pillow. "In the morning."
"Pennsylvania," Sam says, and then, in a tone that Dean's only heard him use once or twice in his life, "We need to leave now."
Everything's in the car aside from Dean's boots and a pair of jeans, and Sam takes the wheel without asking, white-knuckled in the dashboard glow. Dean's got a plastic cup of cheap motel coffee and a three-hour ride in front of him, but when he reaches for the radio, Sam shakes his head.
"No," he says, and Dean drops his hand on instinct, working with rules that felt set in stone at age sixteen.
Sam doesn't say anything for the next three hours and seven minutes, until they pull off the highway and stop next to a church graveyard.
"Get the gate," Sam says. Dean's lucky, it's a padlock, one of the dime-a-dozen ace hardware brand he's been cracking for years, and it takes him under thirty seconds with a bobby pin. He pulls it open, and Sam drives through without stopping, leaving Dean to follow him down the winding cemetery path.
When he finds him, Sam's rolling back the sod on top of a grave: Anthony Carpenter, April 2nd, 1995. Dean sits on top of a gravestone and waits, listening to the hollow thunk of Sam's shovel against mostly frozen ground, and half an hour later, when Dean's starting to think about the sun coming up, Sam emerges, shoulder deep and silent. He stands at the edge of the hole until Dean comes over, shining his flashlight down, and notices, a little amused by the irony, that a year in hell hasn't taken Sam's talent for digging out pits.
There's a woman in the bottom of the grave, maybe in her mid-twenties, pretty, in a next-door-neighbor kind of way. The cold has mostly slowed the decomp, although there's blue mold growing over the curve of one cheek, and nobody would mistake her for the living. There are cold, stark bruises all along her neck, livid under Dean's flashlight, and he checks her teeth, under her nails. They're normal, and her eyes are cloudy but human; there's no reflection, just an emptiness that, a long time ago, might have made Dean's skin crawl.
Dean climbs out, wiping his hands on the grass to get rid of the worst of the grave-dirt, long-dead smell, and finds Sam on his knees behind the car.
"Neuri?" Dean says. "Jé-rouge?" It's not his kill, which means it came from between, and he's not entirely sure why they're here, why Sam's digging up a past he doesn't remember.
"I had a dream," Sam says, taking a long, slow breath. "I liked hunting."
"You were good," Dean says. There was a time when he thought you couldn't get the bone-deep satisfaction out of anything else.
"No, Dean," Sam says, flatly. "I liked hunting."
Sam, before, had always been ruthless, bloodthirsty, more of a machine than a person, but going through the motions, Dean had come to accept it. He still took his coffee black, two sugars. Still took the inside bed. Still talked like he knew what having a soul was like, like feeling out the edges of an emptiness was the same as knowing what was missing.
Dean had slept beside him for months, and the thought makes his stomach roll.
Still, Sam had been all id, no super-ego, and even at the base of it, predatory satisfaction required forethought. Sam was all instinct, responding to stimuli, taking what he wanted.
"You must have had a reason," Dean says, grasping at straws. "She saw too much, got possessed, she -"
"She brought me a cold cup of coffee," Sam says, wryly, "so I killed her."
The motel room coffee burns coming up.
After, Dean finds a can of kerosene and a bic lighter in the trunk, and he takes care of things while Sam sits in the passenger seat, staring at the dashboard as the sun comes up. When Dean rolls the grass back over, it's like no one was here at all, and he thinks that maybe they could forget about it. Just seal shut the slow leak in Sam's brain and move on like it never happened. For a minute, he thinks it could be possible, and then the engine turns over. They're just alone in the grey pre-dawn light of an east coast winter, and everything's still fucked up.
There's a skeleton at the bottom of a lake in Vermont, a shallow grave in the forest in Ohio. When Dean pries open the trunk of a car in a Virginia junk yard and sees the silver bullets in the rotting flesh, it's almost a relief.
"I grabbed the wrong gun on my way out of the motel room," Sam says, dispassionately, and goes back to sit in the car.
Dean sets a lot of fires and pulls a lot of teeth, taking a sledgehammer approach to evidence, not that it seems likely that anyone will connect Sam to any of these unfound bodies. And even if they did - Sam Winchester has a death certificate, carte blanche to exorcise demons and put down ghosts. To kill women in the north woods and leave them to rot in unmarked graves.
Sam barely says anything, head down and quiet, just pointing the car in the right direction every goddamn night, and Dean's angry and tired and numb. He misses his brother, misses sleeping through the night, misses hunting, misses normalcy.
He finds Tessa in a Wal-mart in Atlanta, while he's stocking up on socks and beef jerky and butane torches for burning off fingerprints.
"You tell your boss he's a selfish, sorry son-of-a-bitch," Dean says, because they knew.
"You got what you asked for, Dean," Tessa says, with a shrug of her shoulders, and buys a pack of cigarettes from the cashier, like reapers enjoy nicotine.
The next night, Dean wakes up at eight in the morning. Sam's reading the paper, doing a crossword, and in the hard line of the back of his neck and the set of his shoulders, Dean realizes what he's been carrying.
"I dreamed about what I did to you," Sam says, flatly, and fills in four across, attu, the westernmost Aleutian.
Dean's been angry since hell, so flat-out furious that sometimes it feels burned into his bones, an inescapable burden. Sam's lied and stolen and made every wrong decision it was possible to make, left for Stanford and fucked Ruby and abandoned him every goddamn time push came to shove, but forgiving Sam is hardwired. Their relationship is north for a compass needle, so ingrained Dean doesn't know how to live without it. Sam charred himself clean in a cage in hell, the kind of thing Dean thinks should count as absolution if there is such a thing, and it's only the after Dean's been holding against him, the repeated betrayal, like Sam knew better.
Even without a soul, Sam took the left-hand bed. Dean thought it meant something, that deep down, the thing tying them together had more to do with blood than some intangible grace.
But the truth of it is, the bodies Dean's been cleaning up didn't happen at his little brother's hands, and he's been living with a stranger, tricking himself into loving something that wasn't just because a substitute was better than nothing at all. Acknowledging it means admitting the loss, and letting himself believe that, against all odds, Sam might be home again, without deals or demons standing between them.
"You dreamed about what he did to me," Dean says, finally. "You weren't here."
"I pulled the trigger," Sam says.
"It wasn't you," Dean says, and for the first time, he believes himself.
"I -" Sam says.
"Sammy," Dean says. Sam gives him space to breathe.
"There's an IHOP a couple of blocks down," Dean says, finally. "I want pancakes. With chocolate chips. None of that fucking fruit."
"Jerk," Sam says, after a pause, ducking his head, but the corner of his mouth is pulling up.
"Bitch," Dean says, and starts to lace up his boots.