Shangri-La
Title: Shangri-La
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~3,000
Spoilers: AU. Spoilers only through "It's a Terrible Life."
Warnings: Implied psychosis, brief self-harm, general misery.
Summary: If Zachariah never freed Sam Wesson and Dean Smith from the claustrophobic contrivance that was Sandover Bride & Iron Inc., what might have become of them?
Neurotic author's notes: Oh, Lord, I don't love this, but I haven't posted fic in forever and it's as good as it's gonna get. Inspired by a friend who, after seeing "It's a Terrible Life" for the first time, shrugged and said, "So Dean got Stanford and Bobby and Ellen and Jo. Did Sam get John then?" And hence this fic was born, even if it didn't end up involving John much at all. Happy summer, everybody! The cut text is from the Kinks song "Shangri-La."
More notes: This fic is dedicated to the amazing seeing_ghosts, who wrote me fic today* and who loves her some crazy!Dean. <3
*oh god it's so perfect and lovely and sad and amazing and perfect and please go tell S. she's perfect because she is omfg I love you S.
There’s weeks, and then there’s weeks.
Sam Wesson has had a week.
And mostly, when Sam’s had a big week, it involves fantasy football or Ian’s pot brownies in the parking lot at lunchtime or something interesting on NPR. Normally the bulk of what he can report back to any friend who cares to enquire-and they’re few and far between these days, it seems, though he could swear he had people to listen once-is, in a word, boring. Not so. Not this week.
This week, my new best friend killed himself, I quit my job, became best friends with my boss, and killed a ghost! With fire!
He wants to call Madison so badly it hurts.
He tries, twice, from his shabby apartment couch. Nothing. The animal hospital.
What a bitch, he thinks, then snorts, abruptly.
He calls his father too, and is unsurprisingly ignored.
He tries Dean, finally. Dean Smith. It rings and rings but no one answers, and after a minute Sam gets embarrassed and slams the phone shut.
“Ghosts are real,” Sam whispers to the empty room, lit only by the soft flicker of the TV-a Columbo rerun, and something in the rumbled sloping shoulders beneath the trench coat, the skewed tie and messy hair, makes Sam smile, but he can’t think what.
“They’re real, and I fought one.”
Dean wakes from a dream of a man he’s never seen before, grizzled and smelling of whiskey, pressing him against a wall, shouting something about his brother, you were supposed to look out for him, and it’s hot and the room is far more rundown even than his father’s salvage yard got in hard times, and he’s pressing back tears and saying I’m sorry, Dad, I’m so sorry I’m sorry I’ll find him and it’s not good enough, the guilt is going to squeeze his lungs flat and shred his heard and kill him, and then he blinks and the stranger’s eyes are a curious yellow and his insides are dribbling out onto a dirty cabin floor, and someone-Sam? Wesson?-is yelling his name.
His heart is going like a jackhammer, but it’s a better dream than Dean has gotten used to, lately. He’s not strung up or torn apart or violated or shredded or taunted by a faceless-many-faced terrifying something that croons his name like some broken parody of a love song, and he’ll take that.
His phone is showing a missed call from Sam Wesson, and only when he calls back it goes straight to voicemail does Dean realize it’s 4:30 in the morning. Sam’s voice is younger on the recording, and the higher pitch fills Dean’s heart with an inexplicable and overwhelming yearning.
“Sammy,” he says into the receiver, and realizing how strange that is, hangs up in an instant. He falls back asleep, feeling lonely.
Sam about jumps out of his skin when he sees Ian sitting at his desk like nothing strange is going on. Distantly, he considers checking the side of Ian’s neck for a wound-he stuck a pencil in his neck, he killed himself, Dean found him-but he’s too busy frozen, staring at Ian.
“What are you doing here?” Ian asks him, which makes Sam’s temples throb because he should definitely be asking Ian that question.
“I-you’re-Ian,” stutters Sam, his tongue useless. Lots of people are staring at him now.
“Ian I am,” Ian agrees, smiling a little, looking up at Sam with a modified version of his weird-dreams look, one tinged with legitimate alarm.
“You’re dead,” Sam says bluntly. “You-killed yourself. The-Sandover made you-Dean and I…”
He trails off, feeling suddenly too big in the cramped office. “Sam,” says Ian, “are you okay?”
“I’m not the one who stuck a pencil in my neck!”
“Sam, what are you doing here?” Ian is standing, putting a hand on his arm, and Sam doesn’t like that, don’t touch me, since when is that an issue?
“I work here,” says Sam dumbly, automatically, and it doesn’t sound right, and the room is very small. Where is Dean?
“Sam, you quit,” says Ian, and he gestures awkwardly to the smashed-up phone on the desk across from his. “I’m surprised they even let you back here.”
Where else would I go?
“Where’s Dean,” mumbles Sam.
“Who’s Dean?” asks Ian.
Dean makes plans to get coffee with Sam Wesson, because he sounded like he was going to cry when they finally talked on the phone. Then, without anything better to do, he calls Jo.
“I’m thinking about maybe quitting,” he says, in answer to her perky hi Dean!
“What? You just got there,” says Jo, and he can hear the gentle clatter of dishwashing. She’s at-work. The bar. Oh, right. The one she works at. With Mom. Who owns it. The Roadhouse, where he grew up.
How could he forget a thing like that?
“Yeah, but is it really-what I want to do?” he asks, and he can hear Jo stop, can perfectly picture her pulling the phone out of its secure position between her shoulder and ear, holding it firm, standing up straight, having this conversation properly. For Dean. She always did fall all over herself to make Dean happy. He can’t remember a thing about growing up with her, just now, but of that he is sure.
“I don’t think of you corporate drones as all that prone to soul-searching,” says Jo lightly. “Just, you know, up and up and up.”
Dean swallows. “Am I a corporate drone?”
Jo laughs. It’s high and twinkly and sweet and somehow makes him want to vomit, because it’s like she knows something he doesn’t. “These days,” she says. “God knows you gave Mom trouble in her day.”
“Is my mom there?” Dean asks suddenly, unsure why his heart is thudding and his breath coming in short, terrible gasps. He can’t think why he needs to see his mother, hear her, hold her firm-not the sweet-eyed brunette he’s thinking of when he thinks my mother’s name is Ellen, but someone else, someone different, someone lost who he needs to find.
“I-Mom is out just now, Dean. Did you need to ask her something?”
“I-no. Just. Tell her I love her. Please.”
“I-alright. Everything okay?”
“Dad too. Tell Dad too.” There’s someone behind his father, too, someone taller and darker and it’s going to swallow him whole, these people lurking just out of sight.
“I will, Dean. Honey, are you okay?”
“Yes. I have to go now, Jo.”
“Okay. Call me if you need anything, Dean-o.”
Nobody ever calls me that.
“Okay, Josie.”
I never called you that.
“Bye, hon. Tell Cas hi for me.”
Dean has agreed and said goodbye before he realizes he has no idea who Cas is.
Coffee with Dean Smith is awkward, but it is somehow the least weird and disconnected he’s felt in a long time. They don’t talk about the ghost. Dean seems to be sticking to his party line-you don’t want to go fighting ghosts without any health insurance!-and Sam is terrified he made the whole thing up, unsure how to ask Dean about the suicide-that-wasn’t.
“So, yeah,” Dean is saying, “Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Not exactly a metropolis, but home. My dad has a salvage yard and my mom’s got a bar. My sister works there now. What about you?”
Sam swallows. “Just me and my dad, see. My mom died when I was a baby.” Something in Dean’s face twists, momentarily, in powerful pain. “And John, my dad, he kinda-he was depressed, I guess. Real hardcore alcoholic. I lived all over. Three schools between September and November, once.”
“Jesus,” said Dean. “I’m all about stability.” There was something subtly wry in the way he said it, but Sam couldn’t think what.
“I mean, he spoiled me, in his way,” Sam amended quickly, thinking of his father’s protective streak, his indulgent one, his mean one. “He didn’t ever want me to go, you know, so he spoiled me rotten. Everything about taking care of Sammy.” He snorted, couldn’t think why his father’s affection seemed so warped and painful now. “He was pissed as hell when I lit out on my own, but hey. He did what he could, I guess.”
“And Madison?” Dean asks.
Something in Sam’s stomach rebels and he suddenly wants to sob, but he bats it down, tries to think in practical terms how to answer Dean’s question. Madison. He can feel her breath on his neck and her lips on his jaw and her hands on his shoulders, but when he tries to think of their apartment, their engagement, their break-up, he can’t. He can remember loving her in a mad and desperate way, like he was running out of time or options, but never in a day-to-day way. Maybe that had been the problem.
“She got me hooked on a soap opera,” he tells Dean, “and she made me laugh. I loved her.”
“Why’d you break it off?”
Sam swallows. “I don’t know,” he says after a minute. “I think we brought out the worst in each other.”
Cas, as it turns out, is Dean’s neighbor. He is rumpled and awkward and, to Dean’s estimation, somewhere on the autism spectrum. It takes Dean four days digging around his own apartment to remember that Cas pulled him out of a totaled rental car his second day in Ohio, and when he racks his brains he can sort of remember a terrible crushing pain and desperation and someone tugging him free. Cas. Cas tugging him free.
And they’re kind of friends now, he guesses.
Sam would judge Dean for the fact that, the awkward squinty neighbor guy aside, he appears to be Dean’s only friend, but he doesn’t appear to have any at all. Ian won’t talk to him. Madison has vanished. His father’s phone has been disconnected. He tries calling a few other numbers, connects them with familiar names-Jess, Brady, Caleb, Jim, Meg, Ruby-and comes up empty every time.
Where did everybody go?
Why can’t I remember?
Where’s Dean?
Dean’s nightmares are worse, and he wakes up one Monday too sick and shaky for work. He makes it through three rounds of retching before getting it together enough to call Mr. Adler, who says he understands.
You get well now, Dean.
He retches some more and calls Sam, who doesn’t want to come over or else can’t say why he won’t, and he wants Sam so badly it hurts, which is sort of silly, because he doesn’t really know the guy.
Something in Dean’s desperation repulses Sam.
He’s weak, he thinks, he’s holding you back.
That doesn’t make any sense.
He calls Madison one more time.
He’s itching for something, way down in his bones and blood, like an addict for a fix but he can’t can’t can’t think of what even when he needs it so bad he feels like he’s coming apart.
“Maddy,” he whispers to his empty apartment, and then, quite inexplicably, “Ruby.”
Dean hasn’t talked to anyone in days when Bobby-Bob-his father arrives, flanked by Cas who holds his emergency key apologetically. They find Dean in his bedroom, shoved up against the corner next to the bed, inspecting his body with trembling awe, wondering how it is so whole and unscarred when he remembers-he remembers-it being so thoroughly torn and broken and pulled apart. It happened. He’s sure. He knows.
He flinches away from Bobby-Dad, damn it-and Cas, actually whimpers, doesn’t want to be touched, can’t stand it, no, no, it’ll hurt, no more, please.
“Son, what happened to you?” rasps the man above him, the one who is not his father. He wants his father. His father is dead.
“You’re not my dad,” he says, and when Bobby’s face contorts in hurt and shock Dean mumbles, “I killed my dad.”
“You didn’t kill nobody,” says his father.
“I didn’t mean to,” insists Dean feebly.
“You didn’t do anything,” says Bobby firmly. “Dean. Son, listen, just-”
“Where’s Sam?” calls Dean. It’s all he wants. Sam will save him. He has to.
“Who the fuck is Sam?” Bobby asks Cas.
“A friend from work,” says Cas mechanically, his eyes on Dean.
“M’brother,” mumbles Dean, and then he’s out.
Sam almost hangs up when the person calling him from Dean’s landline introduces himself as Bob Smith, but then he remembers-my father’s name is Bob, my mother’s name is Ellen, and my sister’s name is Jo-and he listens.
Something is wrong with Dean. He’s asking after Sam. He’s going crazy, he doesn’t know Bob, his own father, he’s babbling about Cas’s wings and asking for Sam.
“Something about a ghost,” says Bob Smith.
“The ghost was real,” Sam hears himself say.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” says Bob Smith.
Dean dreams, like he’s been doing for as long as he can remember, and he sees a fire and a thousand fires, and he comes apart as he yells and yells and yells for a brother who doesn’t ever come.
You don’t have a brother, Dean Smith, he thinks, and then fills his lungs as far as they will go, chokes on the wretched smell and taste of intestines and sulfur, and yells for Sam one more time.
Dean is whimpering in his sleep, clutching Cas-the-neighbor’s lapels-and who wears a trench coat inside, in the springtime?-and calling for him, for Sammy, and Sam wants to slap him and beg him and hold him, and when Dean’s father looks at him worriedly he sort of wants to hug him, too, which is probably far better proof than the ghost thing that Sam’s inner life is falling right the fuck apart.
But for Dean, he doesn’t care.
Dean comes to leaning against Cas, Bobby-his father-watching wearily and his Sammy crouched in front of him, shaking him, none too gently.
“Dean. Wake up. Look at me. It’s me. Sam. You wanted me for some reason?”
“Sammy,” he whispers. Sam’s big sweet face is all he wanted and now it makes him sick, here, in this-this-place, and it’s just behind like his real parents are, just out of sight, shadowy and terrifying and the real thing, the real and horrible thing that will swallow him whole. “You gotta go. Don’t stay here, please, I never wanted you here, oh, God, no, no, no, not you, no, please, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, anything, please-”
Sam shushes him and pats his head clumsily. He can’t help leaning into the touch. “It’s not real, Dean,” he says.
“It’s all real,” Dean chokes, and it is, and the fire is realer than real and licking his heels, and Cas tightens his grip around his shoulders.
Sam falls asleep on Dean Smith’s couch at one point and wakes to rummaging in the kitchen. He’s blearily looking around when something snaps into place-where is Dean?-and he’s bounding, wide awake, towards the place where Dean is determinedly poking the tip of a sharp, expensive German kitchen knife into his temple, face set, and when Sam seizes Dean’s wrist and wrenches his hand away a small splash of blood runs down Dean’s face.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Sam hollers, heart pounding in his ears, limbs trembling a bit as he uses his free hand to work the knife from Dean’s. Dean is mostly unresisting.
“I had to,” says Dean, blankly. “It’s still in there.”
“What is,” gasps Sam.
“Exactly,” says Dean.
Dean goes to the hospital. Bob Smith drives him. Sam sits in the back with Dean, and they both listen to Dean’s father as he tries to soothe him, get some answers, something. Dean sits with his hastily bandaged head in Sam’s lap and tries to soak up all of Sammy that he can, because it’s really just them in this car right now, safe and warm, and that’s all he ever really wanted.
This is how he always fell asleep, so he does.
Sam makes his exit when they’re settled in the ER, visits two days later-unable to stay away, and plagued by dreams wherein Dean caught him doing something repulsive, hurting people, consuming them-to find Cas perched, still in his goddamn Columbo outfit, by Dean’s bed. Sam wants to say a lot but something is forbidding in the cool, crisp hospital air, and Dean’s sedated anyways.
Then Bob Smith appears, flanked by a pretty woman with soft, kind brown eyes and a stringy blonde who looks like a teenager. Ellen. Jo. Mother and sister.
Sam makes his exit yet again, skin still alive with want, and for what?
It’s quiet here. Cas stays. Mom and Dad are illusions. Josie loves him. Sam is gone. He didn’t get it all out.
There’s weeks, and then there’s weeks.
Sam Wesson has had a week.
This week, my boss who I fought ghosts with went crazy, and his neighbor became an angel, and I discovered I have this insatiable-literally, I don’t have a way to sate it-taste for blood!
He wants to call his father so badly it hurts.
He tries, twice, from his shabby apartment couch. Nothing. The line is dead.
What a bastard, he thinks, then snorts, abruptly.
He calls Madison too, and is unsurprisingly ignored.
He tries Dean, finally. Dean Smith. It rings and rings but no one answers, and after a minute Sam gets embarrassed and slams the phone shut.
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~3,000
Spoilers: AU. Spoilers only through "It's a Terrible Life."
Warnings: Implied psychosis, brief self-harm, general misery.
Summary: If Zachariah never freed Sam Wesson and Dean Smith from the claustrophobic contrivance that was Sandover Bride & Iron Inc., what might have become of them?
Neurotic author's notes: Oh, Lord, I don't love this, but I haven't posted fic in forever and it's as good as it's gonna get. Inspired by a friend who, after seeing "It's a Terrible Life" for the first time, shrugged and said, "So Dean got Stanford and Bobby and Ellen and Jo. Did Sam get John then?" And hence this fic was born, even if it didn't end up involving John much at all. Happy summer, everybody! The cut text is from the Kinks song "Shangri-La."
More notes: This fic is dedicated to the amazing seeing_ghosts, who wrote me fic today* and who loves her some crazy!Dean. <3
*oh god it's so perfect and lovely and sad and amazing and perfect and please go tell S. she's perfect because she is omfg I love you S.
There’s weeks, and then there’s weeks.
Sam Wesson has had a week.
And mostly, when Sam’s had a big week, it involves fantasy football or Ian’s pot brownies in the parking lot at lunchtime or something interesting on NPR. Normally the bulk of what he can report back to any friend who cares to enquire-and they’re few and far between these days, it seems, though he could swear he had people to listen once-is, in a word, boring. Not so. Not this week.
This week, my new best friend killed himself, I quit my job, became best friends with my boss, and killed a ghost! With fire!
He wants to call Madison so badly it hurts.
He tries, twice, from his shabby apartment couch. Nothing. The animal hospital.
What a bitch, he thinks, then snorts, abruptly.
He calls his father too, and is unsurprisingly ignored.
He tries Dean, finally. Dean Smith. It rings and rings but no one answers, and after a minute Sam gets embarrassed and slams the phone shut.
“Ghosts are real,” Sam whispers to the empty room, lit only by the soft flicker of the TV-a Columbo rerun, and something in the rumbled sloping shoulders beneath the trench coat, the skewed tie and messy hair, makes Sam smile, but he can’t think what.
“They’re real, and I fought one.”
Dean wakes from a dream of a man he’s never seen before, grizzled and smelling of whiskey, pressing him against a wall, shouting something about his brother, you were supposed to look out for him, and it’s hot and the room is far more rundown even than his father’s salvage yard got in hard times, and he’s pressing back tears and saying I’m sorry, Dad, I’m so sorry I’m sorry I’ll find him and it’s not good enough, the guilt is going to squeeze his lungs flat and shred his heard and kill him, and then he blinks and the stranger’s eyes are a curious yellow and his insides are dribbling out onto a dirty cabin floor, and someone-Sam? Wesson?-is yelling his name.
His heart is going like a jackhammer, but it’s a better dream than Dean has gotten used to, lately. He’s not strung up or torn apart or violated or shredded or taunted by a faceless-many-faced terrifying something that croons his name like some broken parody of a love song, and he’ll take that.
His phone is showing a missed call from Sam Wesson, and only when he calls back it goes straight to voicemail does Dean realize it’s 4:30 in the morning. Sam’s voice is younger on the recording, and the higher pitch fills Dean’s heart with an inexplicable and overwhelming yearning.
“Sammy,” he says into the receiver, and realizing how strange that is, hangs up in an instant. He falls back asleep, feeling lonely.
Sam about jumps out of his skin when he sees Ian sitting at his desk like nothing strange is going on. Distantly, he considers checking the side of Ian’s neck for a wound-he stuck a pencil in his neck, he killed himself, Dean found him-but he’s too busy frozen, staring at Ian.
“What are you doing here?” Ian asks him, which makes Sam’s temples throb because he should definitely be asking Ian that question.
“I-you’re-Ian,” stutters Sam, his tongue useless. Lots of people are staring at him now.
“Ian I am,” Ian agrees, smiling a little, looking up at Sam with a modified version of his weird-dreams look, one tinged with legitimate alarm.
“You’re dead,” Sam says bluntly. “You-killed yourself. The-Sandover made you-Dean and I…”
He trails off, feeling suddenly too big in the cramped office. “Sam,” says Ian, “are you okay?”
“I’m not the one who stuck a pencil in my neck!”
“Sam, what are you doing here?” Ian is standing, putting a hand on his arm, and Sam doesn’t like that, don’t touch me, since when is that an issue?
“I work here,” says Sam dumbly, automatically, and it doesn’t sound right, and the room is very small. Where is Dean?
“Sam, you quit,” says Ian, and he gestures awkwardly to the smashed-up phone on the desk across from his. “I’m surprised they even let you back here.”
Where else would I go?
“Where’s Dean,” mumbles Sam.
“Who’s Dean?” asks Ian.
Dean makes plans to get coffee with Sam Wesson, because he sounded like he was going to cry when they finally talked on the phone. Then, without anything better to do, he calls Jo.
“I’m thinking about maybe quitting,” he says, in answer to her perky hi Dean!
“What? You just got there,” says Jo, and he can hear the gentle clatter of dishwashing. She’s at-work. The bar. Oh, right. The one she works at. With Mom. Who owns it. The Roadhouse, where he grew up.
How could he forget a thing like that?
“Yeah, but is it really-what I want to do?” he asks, and he can hear Jo stop, can perfectly picture her pulling the phone out of its secure position between her shoulder and ear, holding it firm, standing up straight, having this conversation properly. For Dean. She always did fall all over herself to make Dean happy. He can’t remember a thing about growing up with her, just now, but of that he is sure.
“I don’t think of you corporate drones as all that prone to soul-searching,” says Jo lightly. “Just, you know, up and up and up.”
Dean swallows. “Am I a corporate drone?”
Jo laughs. It’s high and twinkly and sweet and somehow makes him want to vomit, because it’s like she knows something he doesn’t. “These days,” she says. “God knows you gave Mom trouble in her day.”
“Is my mom there?” Dean asks suddenly, unsure why his heart is thudding and his breath coming in short, terrible gasps. He can’t think why he needs to see his mother, hear her, hold her firm-not the sweet-eyed brunette he’s thinking of when he thinks my mother’s name is Ellen, but someone else, someone different, someone lost who he needs to find.
“I-Mom is out just now, Dean. Did you need to ask her something?”
“I-no. Just. Tell her I love her. Please.”
“I-alright. Everything okay?”
“Dad too. Tell Dad too.” There’s someone behind his father, too, someone taller and darker and it’s going to swallow him whole, these people lurking just out of sight.
“I will, Dean. Honey, are you okay?”
“Yes. I have to go now, Jo.”
“Okay. Call me if you need anything, Dean-o.”
Nobody ever calls me that.
“Okay, Josie.”
I never called you that.
“Bye, hon. Tell Cas hi for me.”
Dean has agreed and said goodbye before he realizes he has no idea who Cas is.
Coffee with Dean Smith is awkward, but it is somehow the least weird and disconnected he’s felt in a long time. They don’t talk about the ghost. Dean seems to be sticking to his party line-you don’t want to go fighting ghosts without any health insurance!-and Sam is terrified he made the whole thing up, unsure how to ask Dean about the suicide-that-wasn’t.
“So, yeah,” Dean is saying, “Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Not exactly a metropolis, but home. My dad has a salvage yard and my mom’s got a bar. My sister works there now. What about you?”
Sam swallows. “Just me and my dad, see. My mom died when I was a baby.” Something in Dean’s face twists, momentarily, in powerful pain. “And John, my dad, he kinda-he was depressed, I guess. Real hardcore alcoholic. I lived all over. Three schools between September and November, once.”
“Jesus,” said Dean. “I’m all about stability.” There was something subtly wry in the way he said it, but Sam couldn’t think what.
“I mean, he spoiled me, in his way,” Sam amended quickly, thinking of his father’s protective streak, his indulgent one, his mean one. “He didn’t ever want me to go, you know, so he spoiled me rotten. Everything about taking care of Sammy.” He snorted, couldn’t think why his father’s affection seemed so warped and painful now. “He was pissed as hell when I lit out on my own, but hey. He did what he could, I guess.”
“And Madison?” Dean asks.
Something in Sam’s stomach rebels and he suddenly wants to sob, but he bats it down, tries to think in practical terms how to answer Dean’s question. Madison. He can feel her breath on his neck and her lips on his jaw and her hands on his shoulders, but when he tries to think of their apartment, their engagement, their break-up, he can’t. He can remember loving her in a mad and desperate way, like he was running out of time or options, but never in a day-to-day way. Maybe that had been the problem.
“She got me hooked on a soap opera,” he tells Dean, “and she made me laugh. I loved her.”
“Why’d you break it off?”
Sam swallows. “I don’t know,” he says after a minute. “I think we brought out the worst in each other.”
Cas, as it turns out, is Dean’s neighbor. He is rumpled and awkward and, to Dean’s estimation, somewhere on the autism spectrum. It takes Dean four days digging around his own apartment to remember that Cas pulled him out of a totaled rental car his second day in Ohio, and when he racks his brains he can sort of remember a terrible crushing pain and desperation and someone tugging him free. Cas. Cas tugging him free.
And they’re kind of friends now, he guesses.
Sam would judge Dean for the fact that, the awkward squinty neighbor guy aside, he appears to be Dean’s only friend, but he doesn’t appear to have any at all. Ian won’t talk to him. Madison has vanished. His father’s phone has been disconnected. He tries calling a few other numbers, connects them with familiar names-Jess, Brady, Caleb, Jim, Meg, Ruby-and comes up empty every time.
Where did everybody go?
Why can’t I remember?
Where’s Dean?
Dean’s nightmares are worse, and he wakes up one Monday too sick and shaky for work. He makes it through three rounds of retching before getting it together enough to call Mr. Adler, who says he understands.
You get well now, Dean.
He retches some more and calls Sam, who doesn’t want to come over or else can’t say why he won’t, and he wants Sam so badly it hurts, which is sort of silly, because he doesn’t really know the guy.
Something in Dean’s desperation repulses Sam.
He’s weak, he thinks, he’s holding you back.
That doesn’t make any sense.
He calls Madison one more time.
He’s itching for something, way down in his bones and blood, like an addict for a fix but he can’t can’t can’t think of what even when he needs it so bad he feels like he’s coming apart.
“Maddy,” he whispers to his empty apartment, and then, quite inexplicably, “Ruby.”
Dean hasn’t talked to anyone in days when Bobby-Bob-his father arrives, flanked by Cas who holds his emergency key apologetically. They find Dean in his bedroom, shoved up against the corner next to the bed, inspecting his body with trembling awe, wondering how it is so whole and unscarred when he remembers-he remembers-it being so thoroughly torn and broken and pulled apart. It happened. He’s sure. He knows.
He flinches away from Bobby-Dad, damn it-and Cas, actually whimpers, doesn’t want to be touched, can’t stand it, no, no, it’ll hurt, no more, please.
“Son, what happened to you?” rasps the man above him, the one who is not his father. He wants his father. His father is dead.
“You’re not my dad,” he says, and when Bobby’s face contorts in hurt and shock Dean mumbles, “I killed my dad.”
“You didn’t kill nobody,” says his father.
“I didn’t mean to,” insists Dean feebly.
“You didn’t do anything,” says Bobby firmly. “Dean. Son, listen, just-”
“Where’s Sam?” calls Dean. It’s all he wants. Sam will save him. He has to.
“Who the fuck is Sam?” Bobby asks Cas.
“A friend from work,” says Cas mechanically, his eyes on Dean.
“M’brother,” mumbles Dean, and then he’s out.
Sam almost hangs up when the person calling him from Dean’s landline introduces himself as Bob Smith, but then he remembers-my father’s name is Bob, my mother’s name is Ellen, and my sister’s name is Jo-and he listens.
Something is wrong with Dean. He’s asking after Sam. He’s going crazy, he doesn’t know Bob, his own father, he’s babbling about Cas’s wings and asking for Sam.
“Something about a ghost,” says Bob Smith.
“The ghost was real,” Sam hears himself say.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” says Bob Smith.
Dean dreams, like he’s been doing for as long as he can remember, and he sees a fire and a thousand fires, and he comes apart as he yells and yells and yells for a brother who doesn’t ever come.
You don’t have a brother, Dean Smith, he thinks, and then fills his lungs as far as they will go, chokes on the wretched smell and taste of intestines and sulfur, and yells for Sam one more time.
Dean is whimpering in his sleep, clutching Cas-the-neighbor’s lapels-and who wears a trench coat inside, in the springtime?-and calling for him, for Sammy, and Sam wants to slap him and beg him and hold him, and when Dean’s father looks at him worriedly he sort of wants to hug him, too, which is probably far better proof than the ghost thing that Sam’s inner life is falling right the fuck apart.
But for Dean, he doesn’t care.
Dean comes to leaning against Cas, Bobby-his father-watching wearily and his Sammy crouched in front of him, shaking him, none too gently.
“Dean. Wake up. Look at me. It’s me. Sam. You wanted me for some reason?”
“Sammy,” he whispers. Sam’s big sweet face is all he wanted and now it makes him sick, here, in this-this-place, and it’s just behind like his real parents are, just out of sight, shadowy and terrifying and the real thing, the real and horrible thing that will swallow him whole. “You gotta go. Don’t stay here, please, I never wanted you here, oh, God, no, no, no, not you, no, please, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, anything, please-”
Sam shushes him and pats his head clumsily. He can’t help leaning into the touch. “It’s not real, Dean,” he says.
“It’s all real,” Dean chokes, and it is, and the fire is realer than real and licking his heels, and Cas tightens his grip around his shoulders.
Sam falls asleep on Dean Smith’s couch at one point and wakes to rummaging in the kitchen. He’s blearily looking around when something snaps into place-where is Dean?-and he’s bounding, wide awake, towards the place where Dean is determinedly poking the tip of a sharp, expensive German kitchen knife into his temple, face set, and when Sam seizes Dean’s wrist and wrenches his hand away a small splash of blood runs down Dean’s face.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Sam hollers, heart pounding in his ears, limbs trembling a bit as he uses his free hand to work the knife from Dean’s. Dean is mostly unresisting.
“I had to,” says Dean, blankly. “It’s still in there.”
“What is,” gasps Sam.
“Exactly,” says Dean.
Dean goes to the hospital. Bob Smith drives him. Sam sits in the back with Dean, and they both listen to Dean’s father as he tries to soothe him, get some answers, something. Dean sits with his hastily bandaged head in Sam’s lap and tries to soak up all of Sammy that he can, because it’s really just them in this car right now, safe and warm, and that’s all he ever really wanted.
This is how he always fell asleep, so he does.
Sam makes his exit when they’re settled in the ER, visits two days later-unable to stay away, and plagued by dreams wherein Dean caught him doing something repulsive, hurting people, consuming them-to find Cas perched, still in his goddamn Columbo outfit, by Dean’s bed. Sam wants to say a lot but something is forbidding in the cool, crisp hospital air, and Dean’s sedated anyways.
Then Bob Smith appears, flanked by a pretty woman with soft, kind brown eyes and a stringy blonde who looks like a teenager. Ellen. Jo. Mother and sister.
Sam makes his exit yet again, skin still alive with want, and for what?
It’s quiet here. Cas stays. Mom and Dad are illusions. Josie loves him. Sam is gone. He didn’t get it all out.
There’s weeks, and then there’s weeks.
Sam Wesson has had a week.
This week, my boss who I fought ghosts with went crazy, and his neighbor became an angel, and I discovered I have this insatiable-literally, I don’t have a way to sate it-taste for blood!
He wants to call his father so badly it hurts.
He tries, twice, from his shabby apartment couch. Nothing. The line is dead.
What a bastard, he thinks, then snorts, abruptly.
He calls Madison too, and is unsurprisingly ignored.
He tries Dean, finally. Dean Smith. It rings and rings but no one answers, and after a minute Sam gets embarrassed and slams the phone shut.