Starving in the Belly of the Whale
Title: Starving in the Belly of the Whale
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~9,600
Spoilers: Through about the end of season four.
Warnings: Lots and lots and lots of talk of suicide, language, brief references to physical child abuse, very, very brief references to something approaching sexual abuse, some pretty severe familial dysfunction, brief discussions of torture, lots of none-too-healthy mental states.
Summary: Dean goes under. Written for this prompt.
Neurotic author's notes: Oh lordy it's four am. Okay, well, I loved this prompt. I really did. And this story...mostly fits it? I mean, yes, it does, but it's also just a sort of broad look at the Winchesters and the state of their union circa the end of season four (and kind of beyond), and how they got to be there. Blargh. It's long and strange and sort of stream of consciousness-y.
Also: The title and cut text are both from Tom Waits's "Starving in the Belly of the Whale."
Day One
For years now, Sam’s had this recurring nightmare. In it, he is answering a door, and his brother is there, somewhat unexpectedly-a holdover from the Stanford days-but happy, at ease. Sam invites him in, and it’s usually his freshman year dorm room, and then he turns away from Dean and when he looks back it’s to find Dean crumpled, collapsed, bleeding and keening and near-delirious, flinching away and biting back a sob when Sam dives to his side. There’s a prolonged, suspended moment of utter terror, and then Sam wakes up.
Worrying about Dean is nothing new or strange-it is and and for a long time has been one of the fundamental facts that makes up Sam's life-but there’s something about this particular dream that shakes him, still, even now when Dean has given him so many other terrifying images to dwell on. His brother climbed out of Hell, and what leaves Sam shaking and sweating under the covers is a decade old imagined moment of total weakness. It’s fitting, and like so many elements of Sam’s life seems like something akin to a sick joke. It shouldn’t surprise Sam, now he’s seen his brother return from the good-as-dead and never with a shred of triumph or peace to keep him company, but it does.
:::
They’re just over the Wisconsin state line and speeding southeast when Sam begins to suspect something has gone very wrong, which is just one more sickeningly unsurprising item on the ever-growing list he’s keeping in his head. It begins with Dean’s silence, which in and of itself is not such a rarity as it used to be-since Hell Dean has been a little more subdued, a little skittish. But there’s a strange heaviness that’s settled between them, and it sort of spooks Sam, so he tries to engage his brother. Engage the subject, there’s relic from a life he’s forgotten how to live, a phrase he picked up from Jess, who was a psych major, who wanted to be a child psychologist, do social work. Wanted to plug up people’s holes with the right words at the right moment, and she probably could have done it, too. She’s certainly the only person Sam’s ever known who might have. He has no words, of course-that he could ever say something to genuinely make Dean better is an illusion he abandoned sometime between his death and his brother’s. But the radio is as good a conversation starter as any.
The song is “Ramble On,” and that ought to coax at least the smallest grin from Dean, but instead it looks like he’s going to be sick, and that’s when Sam knows he’s well and truly fucked. Naturally.
:::
You don’t know what it is to hate yourself until you really, really hate yourself. Stress, self-doubt, and a firm conviction that his needs were secondary to his father’s and brother’s had been Dean’s constant companion for as long as he could remember, but to really hate yourself, that’s something else entirely. But that night in Fort Douglas, speeding towards the dawn and Pastor Jim’s-Dean wanted to crawl out of his body, his stupid body with his stupid head on top, abandon it forever, be free of this useless boy, this lagging burden of a pathetic soldier, whose own selfishness and irresponsibility had ruined his father’s hunt, had ruined everything, had almost gotten Sammy killed-and if Sam was lying deathly still in a hospital right now, that sweet bright spirit sucked right out of him, that would be on Dean, all on Dean, and he couldn’t-
He gave a violent twitch in the backseat, trying to physically dispel the thought, the image of his brother helpless and still on the motel bed. Sammy gave a sleepy little sigh-he’d barely woken up at all, and Dean’s whole world had changed-and Dad met Dean’s eyes in the rearview, just for an instant, and Dean thought he might shrivel up and die right there for the shame of it.
:::
Dean’s eyes are shiny and over bright, and he’s sort of sniffling periodically by the time Sam starts scanning for motels that won’t look too long in their faces-or at their credit cards. Sam’s attempts to pull some conversation out of him are met only with thick, snotty grunts of acknowledgement and the occasional muttered complaint of the cold. Sam isn’t cold at all, and it’s only just the beginning of the fall. Finally, Sam sucks in his breath and asks, “Dean, you feeling okay?”
He takes the time to reflect, with the sort of bitterness that makes him feel old and miserable, that most people can ask a question like that without weighing a thousand possible implications, potential offenses, unforeseen danger zones. Most people aren’t so littered with traumas and sore spots like land mines.
And, he reminds himself, most half-decent brothers wouldn’t resent them for it.
Dean gives a noncommittal shrug and clears his throat, then starts to cough. Because of course he’s sick. And suddenly Sam can’t quite stifle the roar of pure frustration, of exhaustion and fury and something approaching incredulity because can’t they ever just be done-
Jess, in his memory, the fragmented, constructed Jess that he clings to only in his moments of utmost desperation-for fear he might impose too much of himself and his distinctly un-Jess-like life onto her-reminds him that it’s okay to be overwhelmed. That it’s never easy to be loved by someone damaged.
Give it a rest, he tells the Jessica in his head.
:::
The first time Sam ever gave his brother stitches he was twelve years old. The details have faded with time-something about the pissy spirit of a seamstress, a condemned building, it didn’t matter anymore-but the moment when Sam steadied his trembling hand and first pushed the needle into his brother’s skin-and he’d nearly stuck it too close to the cut, needed Dean’s gasping “Wait, wait, not there, Sammy, wait” to break through his blind, panicked fumbling-remains as bright and stark as ever.
Later, when he was justifying to himself his decision to run away to Stanford (and he can’t remember when it became “run away” and not simply “go”), he would dredge up this incident again and again, try to focus on how young he had been, how in over his head, how unforgivably fucked-up the whole thing had been. But it never worked, because all he could remember was Dean’s pale, blood-flecked face, the way his eyes had traced Sam’s movements while he ground out encouragement through grit teeth. At the time, eighteen and selfish and stupid, he’d managed to turn that on its head, insist to himself that Dean was only a child himself, that none of it was right or okay and that was the ultimate meaning of the moment.
Sam’s stopped believing in moments with definitive meanings, stopped imagining his life is a story that pulls together in such a satisfactory way, but he’s pretty sure he felt more pride than fear that night. Twelve years old and sweaty and bloody and trembling and exactly where he was supposed to be.
:::
Dean was eleven years old the first time he kissed a girl. It was the summer, up in New England where the heat turns the air sticky and impossibly thick. Dean’s knowledge of sex came primarily from dirty magazines he’d stolen from the bottom of his father’s duffle, schoolyard chatter and the times in motels and sometimes bars bars when he saw and heard things he knew he shouldn’t-men and women writhing against one another, glimpsed for an instant before he turned red and ducked away; drunks who leaned too close and breathed out complaints about frigid bitches or suggestions as to how he might more productively use his pretty little mouth.
He wanted to be kissed, and she kissed him. She was twelve. Their mouths were closed and it was simple and sweet in a way Dean had never really experienced before. Two months later a woman with runs in her stockings would call him a sweet baby boy after he gave her quarters to get a Pepsi from the machine and she’d lean close, breath hot and smelling heavy and strong like a drunk’s, and he’d wrinkle his nose as she nibbled ineffectively at his mouth for a few moments, which was about the moment he gave up on the idea of sex being anything particularly innocent or sacred.
:::
Dean is coughing and feverish by the time they stagger into a motel room in northern Illinois, which is just fucking perfect. He’s withdrawn, too, staring at his hands and looking so utterly wrecked Sam briefly scrambles to recall the last person they saw die, and how, and what it might have meant to Dean, but gives up quickly, his head aching. It’s late and he just wants to go to bed, but Dean’s eyes are watering now, and this is not something Winchesters do, sit and stare at their hands with tears in their eyes. Sam is a bastard but he’s not cruel, and he gives Dean a moment to compose himself, takes a shower he desperately doesn’t want to bother with but ends up lingering in, brushes his teeth. He can hear Dean’s hacking, miserable coughs through the door, and when he finally emerges it’s to find his brother sitting with his back against the bed, knees up, head in his arms, a small plastic trash can by his side, reeking of vomit.
“Dean,” he sort of yelps, and he crouches down beside his brother who is shaking his head, moaning very faintly into his elbow.
“Don’t, Sammy,” he grates out, sounding so totally low and awful Sam feels his earlier irritation drain out of him in an instant. “I just-I don’t-just leave it. Just leave me here.”
“That’s the fever talking,” says Sam, automatically, even though it probably isn’t.
:::
At school Sam had made a concentrated effort not to think about Dean, and it had taken him until the end of his sophomore year to really shake the constant weight of worry. Even then, the thought of his brother-alone with their father, alone at all, wearing that look he’d had out on the road that night when Sam made it clear he was leaving for good-would occasionally intrude on his thoughts, always catching him like a blow, leaving him temporarily reeling. Sometimes he’d drift during lectures, see his brother stumbling into a motel bed all beat to hell and wincing, gasping maybe as the rough sheets made contact with some fresh, sloppily treated injury, and though Sam knew Dean was entirely capable of looking after himself, always had been-hell, Sam had learned to look after himself by watching Dean-it would still sting, for a second, like a paper cut or a shaving nick, because even though he is strong and smart and capable and unflinching and brave, Dean was really not built to live alone, and this knowledge has accompanied Sam for as long as he can remember.
He’d tried to push this knowledge aside, sworn off guilt, because Dad was a crazed, obsessed bastard and Dean was more than capable of living on his own, but all the while he’d known that wiser men than him had long ago figured out that just because someone can do something doesn’t mean they should.
:::
Dean throws up several times more, and then sits folded between the filthy toilet and the wall and holds his head in his hands and squeezes his eyes tight shut. Sam stands awkwardly in the doorway, unsure of what to do, and eventually decides to get Dean up from the floor as gently as possible, and somehow without implying that Dean couldn’t get off the ground himself if that’s what he wanted.
Dean flinches away from his touch and Sam wants to scream. Things can’t be this bad right now. They cannot be in such bad shape right now, there isn’t time. There is so much still that Sam has to do, and he might be able to do it without Dean-he doubts it-but he certainly can’t do it with Dean a wreck on the floor.
He eventually gets a hand up to Dean’s forehead and almost flinches back, the fever is so bad. Dean lets out a little noise of distress, and Sam tries once again to coax him off the floor. He succeeds only in dragging Dean a little further away from the foul-smelling toilet before Dean presses his warm forehead to Sam’s shoulder and whimpers that he wants to die.
Sam decides to call Bobby.
:::
Dean smoked his first cigarette-and, as it turned out, almost last-a few days before fifteenth birthday, out in the biting cold in Michigan. It had been given to him by a senior boy after he’d spectacularly lost a drag-out fight with some prick with a big mouth who’d called him an idiot and a faggot and a dickhead one too many times. Dean had lost so thoroughly he was actually glad Dad wasn’t due home for days, because crawling home thoroughly beat by some Neanderthal he started a fight with when he should have been keeping his fucking head down was entirely too much.
The smoke was bitter and calming in his mouth, and it took him a few tries to work out how to let it out right, and when he tried to push it out his nose like he was in a movie he had a coughing fit instead.
Sammy wrinkled his nose at the smell when Dean came to get him, frowned at Dean’s split lip and scuffed knuckles. “That’s no good, Dean,” he said, firmly but without malice, and turned to his worn library chapter book, leaving Dean standing in the doorway, all ragged and roughed-up, feeling impossibly small.
:::
The drive to Sioux Falls is long, maybe eight hours even speeding, and it’s made worse by Dean, who is near incoherent and apparently in pain, clutching at his head and mostly unaware of Sam, who was expecting fevered recollections of Hell or the maybe months following, and is now wishing that was what he had, because the words coming out of Dean’s mouth are scaring him.
“All those people,” he’s saying now, and this has come up a lot, all those people, and Sam isn’t sure if it’s all the people he didn’t save or all the people he tortured in Hell or something else entirely. He’s just guessing, here, and he ought to be pretty good at guessing Dean by now but somehow he’s still so unsure, Dean is still supposed to be big and strong and impenetrable.
“And, and, and who am I, to, to, to be-” Dean is mumbling, shakily, and then, clearly, “I should be dead.”
“Dean,” says Sam, his mouth very dry, “no. You-don’t say that. I know you’re miserable, right now, I know, but it’s just a fever.”
“I-I don’t-they were screaming, and I was dead. I should be still, I’m supposed to be. Sam, I should be dead.”
“Shut up,” says Sam, not caring how he sounds, “shut up, Dean, shut up. Go to sleep, you’re sick. Shut up.”
“I should be dead,” says Dean, more quietly, and Sam is roaring northwest, pushing 95.
:::
Day Two
When Dean first came for Sam at Stanford he’d been surprised to learn Dean was hunting by himself. Not because he wasn’t capable, he was, but just because Dean and Dad had always been such a unit. Sam had envied it, briefly, when he was eight or nine, the way Dad and Dean spoke to one another in low voices, out of Sam’s earshot, after Sam’s bedtime, the way Dean was privy to some part of their father’s inner life that Sam wasn’t allowed to see, the way they traded understanding looks and mirrored one another’s poses and expressions without even meaning to.
Of course, now Sam knows those secret conversations he’d been so jealous of were all about monsters and money and hospital bills and CPS, cons and scams and adulthood worries. Just Dad forcing Dean to be a grownup, just Dean molding himself into Dad. It had sort of broken his heart, later, to see Dean’s need for his father blow up in his face in the time leading up to-and following-his death, and he’d hated to admit it, but it had been validating as well. That reliance on their father, that blind faith, it was all wrong. It scared him for a reason he couldn’t explain for a long time. He only began to understand it when he worked out that he was far more like his father than Dean would ever be.
:::
By the time they get to Bobby’s, Dean is hot as a furnace and barely coherent, sounding tearful and professing to crimes Sam can barely make out, coming back always to the absolute certainty that he should be dead. Bobby’s face is set and grim as he helps Sam drag Dean-who appears to have lost the will even to flinch from their hands-into the house and onto the couch. He and Sam head to the kitchen, confer in low voices, discuss the possibilities that this is a curse or a parasite or something else awful while all Sam can really hear is Dean whimpering behind them, so utterly distraught.
Bobby is making noise about lore and legend and witches and what to look up and what to stab to make this stop, and Sam’s fingers are twitching to do something, fight somebody, rip something’s fucking lungs out if it means they can just have five minutes of peace, just a moment, if it means he can sleep without unsettling, guilt-warped dreams, if it means Dean will just stop with this litany of crimes he never had a choice in committing, if it means they can just stop for a second.
He realizes Bobby is staring at him and nods once, jerkily, then stands to follow Bobby wherever it is that he’s going, as long as it isn’t here, restless and miserable in this warm little kitchen.
:::
Sam had his first ever beer, of course, with Dean. He nineteen and Sam was fifteen and it was the sweet, sticky end of August, late dusk cicada weather, and he’d just recently shot up to Dean’s height. They were several thousand miles from the girl Sam had spent all summer haltingly romancing, and Sam was pissed and frustrated and still just young and unsure and Dean had felt for the kid, taken him outside into the warm swell of evening and they’d split a six pack, talked for hours, about girls, old hunts, rehashed their best funny stories, even if they both knew them by heart, even if they had very few stories the other hadn’t been a part of. They were easily affectionate, companionable and teasing and just together in a way they really hadn’t been in a long time, since Sam became edgy and resentful and derisive about all the simple things that made Dean happy-girls, guns, hamburgers, a good car and a good hunt-becoming so dismissive Dean felt nearly pitiful.
But this was simple and warm, and Dean couldn’t remember being happier. As the darkness began to dilute, they fell into contemplative silence, sensing the approaching dawn. Sam let his head fall onto Dean’s shoulder like he had in the back of the car when they were children, and it was all Dean could do to keep from beaming down at him, affection for his brother swelling in him like a balloon.
Then Sam said, like he was confessing a secret meant only for brother’s ears, “I have to get away,” and Dean felt his chest rip in two.
:::
Sam loved every piece of Jess, but the fact that she was a psych major was taken, both at the time and, far more seriously, years later, to be a sign that the universe was fucking with him. She tried her hardest not to analyze him, but no psych major worth her salt could really ignore a boy like Sam, scarred up and silent on the subject on his childhood and family, with his stunted social skills and spotty education, his wonderment at perfectly ordinary things like having the same address for more than a year, his nightmares and weird hang-ups. Sam knew he was a puzzle to her and didn’t even care, found it kind of sexy.
“You are not,” she told him the day he fell in love with her, “the sum total of your experiences. Nobody is.”
“So, I’m more than the sum of my parts,” he’d said, thinking of his father, of Dean, of the Impala and grubby hotel rooms and the seedy bastards they’d grown up around, thinking of the knives Pastor Jim kept in a hidden panel in the rectory and bazooka he and Dean used to beg Caleb to let them see, of missed meals and dumb cartoons at Bobby’s house and playing war games in the salvage yard and the way violence and Dean saturated almost every single one of his memories. Of his parts.
“That you are,” she’d said, and at the time it had been a fucking benediction.
:::
Sam falls asleep without meaning to and wakes not long after because Dean has gotten up and is lurching around, staggering into the kitchen, sniffling and mumbling to himself, pulling open the drawers and the cabinets, rummaging, and with a jolt that actually hurts Sam realizes he’s going for the knives.
“No. No, no, no-no-no-no-no,” he’s practically chanting as he bounds across the room, slams the drawer shut, yanking Dean’s grasping fingers away, “no, Dean, Jesus, Jesus, what, what is this. No.” He spins his brother around, takes him by the shoulders. Dean just blinks back, looking lost, then gives a little shutter and tries to pull himself away, mumbling so softly Sam has to lean in to hear him, catches “shouldn’t” and “can’t” and “please” and “die” and wrenches himself back up to his full height, takes Dean’s chin in his hand and forces him to make eye contact. His eyes are too clear and his face is pinched miserably, shiny with sweat. He’s shivery and far too hot, and he just went digging around Bobby’s kitchen for knives-
“Dean, enough. Come on. Enough,” he says, and without knowing what else to do, pulls Dean back to the couch.
:::
Dean only ever considered leaving once, and it wasn’t after anything had tried to maul him, and it wasn’t after dropped out of high school and it wasn’t after his father, too drunk to reign himself in, broke his rib. It wasn’t even after Sammy took a brush to the butt and launched himself, howling, at Dean, like Dad had whipped him raw. It was a few days after Sam turned seventeen. They’d gone a precious few days without any arguments or even particular tension-Dad had, for the first time in years, managed to spend an entire birthday with the boys, and they’d all been riding the wave of good vibes that had resulted, falling into an easy, companionable rhythm they’d never really had before. It was almost like when Sam was just little still, but somehow more adult, more shared, now Sam was a hunter himself.
They’d been in the kitchenette of the reasonably nice motel that was their home that month, Dad and Sam at the table, Dean making coffee, watching his father and brother. Dad was cleaning his guns, Sam was looking up from his book to point something out to their dad, and they were nodding and talking excitedly, their eyebrows furrowing and jumping in perfect unison. It occurred to Dean, for the first time in his entire life, that maybe they might not both need him. That wasn’t a bad thing, but in a moment of terrible selfishness Dean felt the urge to pitch a fit and storm out right then and there. Nobody needed him, he didn’t do much good, and he didn’t see why the hell he should stay.
:::
Around midnight Bobby helps Sam drag Dean down to the panic room after he starts trying to bash his head into the wall. Sam has spent the past two hours trying to talk him down, separating him from the astonishing number of things Bobby owns that Dean can try to use to hurt himself, trying to calm him down, placate him, convince him he doesn’t deserve to die.
“Fucking ghost sickness,” he huffs as he and Bobby deposit Dean on the bed, “of course.”
Sam wants to go back to Wisconsin and waste the responsible party himself, but Dean’s got a grip on his sleeve and starts whimpering and keening when Sam tries to tug free. Bobby puts a hand on his shoulder and tells Sam to stay put. “I’ll go,” he says. “Just tell me what you were doing.”
It doesn’t take long, and soon Bobby is gone with only a grave “Don’t let him kill himself, Sam,” and not for the first time that night Sam suspects he isn’t entirely forgiven. They’re left with only the sickeningly familiar whoosh of the giant overhead fan and Dean’s muted sounds of distress.
“If you can forgive me, Dean,” Sam says suddenly, “then trust me, anybody can forgive you anything.”
“No,” Dean moans, and Sam puts a hand to his forehead, prays that it was random. He’s pretty sure it isn’t, but he takes comfort in the heat still radiating from Dean’s face.
“Just the fever talking, man,” he says, and he’s proud his voice is so steady.
:::
Day Three
The whole thing with Ruby had made a great deal of sense at the time-famous last words, right? Sam knows he’ll never be able to explain it adequately, the overwhelming, unceasing panic in his head, the scrambling, scratching, miserably repeating loop: save Dean, save Dean, save Dean, no matter what it takes, save Dean. Bobby could never understand it, but he’d hoped Dean might, because Dean surely knew what it was to forget everything in the face of the gaping black hole that was the loss of a brother.
But an angel had done Sam’s job for him, and Dean had been too righteous-or too far gone, or too well-trained, or too clever-to see what Sam was doing, or why. That had hurt more than he cared to admit, and some part of him had wanted to stand in front of Dean, lay himself bare, be plaintive and pleading, tell him, “I did it all for you.” Dean ought to have been able to understand that, but all he’d understood was betrayal.
Sam was never able to properly explain himself, and he’d given up trying pretty quickly, decided to do it like Dean would have: never mind what it looks like, never mind what they say. Do what needs to be done, and do it right.
:::
Dean sleeps for a few hours, then sits bolt upright with a strangled cry and lies still, panting, sort of spaced out, for a long moment. Sam, who had been engrossed, exhausted and trancelike, by the shadows on the giant ceiling fan’s blades, their familiar sounds, and his memories of this place, jumps to attention, tries to gauge Dean’s awareness.
“You alright, man?” he ventures, trying to be casual. Supportive, even, without being condescending.
“I don’t want to be here,” whispers Dean, looking at the ceiling, eyes still glazed and over bright.
“The panic room?” Sam prompts him, even though he knows that’s not what Dean meant, encouraged by this direct response.
“No,” Dean replies, miserably, and turns onto his side. It takes Sam a moment to realize he’s pressing his face determinedly into the worn, thin pillow, not breathing.
“Dean!” he barks, grabs his brother by the shoulders and wrenches him upwards, gripping him tightly, resisting the urge to shake him. “Look, man, whatever it is that you-you’re sick, okay, listen to me. You can’t go. You can’t die. You don’t belong in hell, man. Even the freaking angels think so.”
“I’m always gonna go back there, end up back with him, Sam, you don’t know Alistair, you don’t know, you don’t know, okay, you don’t know, why don’t I just go now.” Dean is forcing his words out between spasmodic, hiccuping little breathes, and Sam realizes belatedly that there are tears coming down his brother’s face.
“You’re staying right here,” he says, far more confident than he feels, “because this is where you’re supposed to be.”
:::
When Dad found out Dean had lost Sam in Flagstaff he hit him squarely in the face, then the stomach. Kicked his ribs and snarled, “You selfish prick, you selfish fuck, you useless little bastard.” He’d been incredibly drunk, hauled Dean up by the collar and flung him out the door, told him not to come back without Sam if he knew what was good for him. Dean took him at his word, even though he knew that with the morning and the hangover Dad would recant. Sam wasn’t exactly five years old anymore, and Dean could not be entirely to blame for losing him.
Dean didn’t give his father that opportunity, and did not come back to the dilapidated house they were squatting in until he had a scowling and sheepish Sam by the elbow. It had taken four days of frantic searching, all the while holding back the tidal wave of guilt and misery and insecurity that Sam’s disappearance had brought on. There was no avoiding that he was the brother who had been unable to convince Sam to stay, unable to find him, he was the brother Sam was so ashamed of and sickened by, and all his years of efforts to ensure Sam was happy and safe and loved and had a childhood had come to absolutely nothing.
When he finally did find him, he boxed his ears in, pulled him into an awkward, one-armed hug, and dragged him home. Dad didn’t apologize, and Dean didn’t expect him to. He had been, after all, exactly correct.
:::
For a while when they were kids, Sam went through this phase with mothers. Well, motherly women, teachers mostly, the odd librarian or doting, middle-aged grandmother. He actively sought them out, charmed them with his dimples and sweet seriousness, with his puppy-dog eyes and oversized hand-me-downs. He let them all call him “honey” and ruffle his hair, cup his cheek, sometimes fuss over his uncut hair or his thinness. Sam played right into it, all big eyes and shy smiles, leaning into their hands and sometimes letting the speech impediment Dean-Dean!-had trained him out of slip back out.
It had kind of pissed Dean off at first, and then made him profoundly sad. He wanted to tell Sam about his real mom, who was soft and warm and perfect, who would scoop him up and hold him close and kiss his nose while he prodded gently at her glistening earring or toyed gently with her beautiful hair. He wanted to tell Sam that she sang “Hey Jude” at night and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” when she was cooking, that she made hot cocoa with milk and cream both so it filled him up with sleepy warmth. That she smelled like cinnamon and oranges and something else, but his memories of Mom seemed weaker every day, more and more like a dream, and somehow he was afraid he would lose them if he didn’t keep them close, and so, to his eternal shame, he did.
:::
Bobby isn’t answering his phone and Dean has tried twice more now to actually suffocate himself with a pillow. Sam is growing desperate in a way that feels alarmingly familiar, that feels like those weeks and days and hours before Dean died, before everything fell to pieces, and this only serves to increase his panic. He’s just hauled Dean off the pillow and into a slumped sitting position for the third time when Dean mumbles, “Why’re you doing this, Sam?”
Sam blinks, distantly pleased with Dean’s coherency, and the answer falls from his lips before he even has to think. “You’re my brother,” he says, and isn’t that obvious by now? The justification for the wild and the impossible and the monumentally stupid and the incredibly patient is brotherhood and it always has been. Surely Dean can’t be that far gone.
Dean shakes his head, looking pained, and won’t meet Sam’s eyes. “You’d be better off, if I-I don’t want to-you don’t know, Sam, what I, how I, you don’t understand-”
“Dean.” He’s working himself back up to hyperventilating, and Sam has already had to dodge Dean’s vomit twice. “Listen to me, please, Dean, I wouldn’t be, okay? I wasn’t. If you-if nothing else-God, Dean, I wasn’t better off without you and I never will be, alright? You’re-you-you’re a better person than me, Dean, okay, a way better person.”
“No,” Dean gasps, flinching like Sam tried to hit him, and Sam thinks he might have choked on his heart.
:::
Sam used to ask Dean about everything, why the sky was blue and why planes stayed up and why they were called butterflies when they didn’t have anything to do with butter, why they had to move and why they couldn’t have a pet, how to clean a gun and how to divide with fractions and how to use a semi-colon. It had become a point of tension in high school, as Sam’s continued interest in school began to contrast all the more sharply with Dean’s complete lack thereof, and Sam started asking questions Dean couldn’t answer-what year was the February Revolution again, how do you find the limit on this one, what looks good on a college application, what do ephemeral and impute and spurious mean, Dean, these are SAT words. But there was one thing Sam could rely on Dean for always, and that was girls.
At various times-nine, thirteen, sixteen-Sam had awkwardly approached Dean, looking for initiation into some new level of this particular strand of adulthood, and Dean delivered, crassly but never unkindly. Long past a time when Sam would dream of asking Dean about insects or hypotenuses or how to clean a gun, he still depended on Dean to decode the mystical language of girls, to elevate Sam a little from the gruff, greasy, distinctly masculine world they both occupied.
The two times Sam came the closest to calling Dean from Stanford had been when he had realized he wanted to sleep with Jessica Moore, and then that he wanted to marry her.
:::
He has no idea what time it is-no daylight down in the panic room, and he took his watch off several states ago and forgot about it entirely when Dean started puking and begging to die-but he’s exhausted and finds himself crawling onto the rickety bed behind Dean, propping his pliant brother up against him. Dean’s still fever hot and shivering in a sweatshirt and pressed up against Sam, breathing heavily as Sam awkwardly runs a hand through Dean’s hair in a poor imitation of the way he imagines people comfort each other in moments like this. He strains to recall the way Dean used to bring him down after nightmares-even as a little boy he’d had a brain too active for the night-and can come up with only vague, fleeting memories of physical closeness and Dean’s soft, rumbling voice in a dozen dimly lit motel rooms.
“Please,” Dean says to no one, and Sam cups his head all the more firmly, drags up a memory of Dean gripping his head gently in both hands, saying, “It’s okay, Sammy, I’m gonna pull the nightmares out.”
“Dean, it’s alright,” he says, pointlessly, because he can’t extract Dean’s nightmares, can’t even begin to understand them.
“It’s not,” moans Dean, into Sam’s collar, and Sam almost laughs, because when has it ever been?
:::
The last time Sam and Dean ever shared a bed they were nine and thirteen, and it had been about a year since they’d stayed at Caleb’s and it hadn’t occurred to him that they would need two beds. Caleb’s place at the time was small and utilitarian, and so they were left with only the same cot they’d been sharing since they were tiny enough that there was room left over.
Sammy didn’t really mind, still small and quick to crave physical affection when he was tired, still prone to falling asleep on Dean’s shoulder in the car on those increasingly rare occasions when they were both in the back seat. Dean, thirteen and officially no longer a child, had been a little uncomfortable with it, but seeing no other option had slid good-naturedly in beside Sam, who wasted very little time in burrowing up against him. Old habits die hard, Dean had supposed, and slept stiff and unhappily, jumped out of bed with the sun, leaving Sam curled round his abandoned pillow.
Years and years later, he’d regret his haste in that moment, recognizing it retroactively as the end of something kind of important, something he’d spend a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to reclaim. It’s a small regret in a pile of big ones, but its hurt seems to grow more acute with each passing year.
:::
“I wanna be done, Sam,” Dean grates out at one point, breath very hot and fast against Sam’s skin. His nose is pressed to Sam’s shoulder and he’s squirming miserably, having worn himself out detailing, with tears falling freely down his face, the first soul he tortured in Hell. Sam’s feeling more than a little rung out.
“I know you do,” says Sam dully, watching the fan, trying to push back thoughts of his withdrawal, of Dean’s face every time he was forced to consider the possibility that his brother was a monster.
“Please,” says Dean, and Sam can tell from the way his voice constricts that he’s screwing up his face against whatever wave of pain and misery is crashing through his head, and he wonders when he developed the ability to disconnect from this. Knows with damning certainty that were their positions reversed, Dean would be feeling Sam’s pain just as wholly as Sam, would not resign himself to looking at the ceiling and physically separating him from the pillow he was trying to suffocate himself with.
He almost tells Dean as much, but the words are stuck in his throat, so what he says instead is, “I need you, Dean, you know I do,” and when Dean begins to shake his head against him Sam continues, fighting exhaustion and a rising despair,“Yes, you know it, I need you to show me how to be good.”
:::
Day Four
Sometimes he’d shared bits of his childhood in pieces, wanting so badly to give some part of himself to Jess even if he couldn’t give it all like she could. So he dropped little crumbs, details without the larger picture. Showed her the half-orphanhood, poverty, the loneliness, the seedy bars and motels, the sense of fear and abandonment, sometimes even the closeness with Dean, which he reserved himself from sharing more frequently only because he was afraid of what might happen if he picked at that poorly-healed wound too much.
“To be honest, sounds like you dodged a lot of bullets,” Jess said once, some lazy morning under the sheets but not the covers, trading stories. “I mean, two kids alone as often as you guys were?”
Sam cracked his neck, looked at the ceiling, thought of the strange, suspended moments wherein he’d known something terrible was happening, or about to-the time there was a gunshot in the room next to theirs and he knew it wasn’t a salt round, the time he’d been drawing with chalk in a motel parking lot and a bleary-eyed man had come over and crouched down next to him, asked him about his drawing, run a possessive arm over his back and round his shoulders before Dean reappeared and told the guy to get going before he started screaming.
“What did that guy want?” Sam had asked, probably six or so.
“Nothing,” Dean had replied, shepherding him inside.
:::
When he was small, Sammy thought Dean was invincible, and had found comfort in that, the idea that Dean was safety. As they got older Sam stopped believing as much, no matter how much Dean tried to maintain Sam’s sense of security, if not his admiration. Sam was Dean’s job, and he knew that didn’t just mean food and laundry and bedtime and not letting his fucking spinal cord get severed in some kind of demented demon Olympics-it meant that Sammy was protected and knew it, that Sammy could be a kid, could fall in love with a girl. That Sam knew he was a special kid, smart and funny and sweet and wonderful, even when he wasn’t; that Dean would always take care of him.
Of course, Dean had failed in that somewhat spectacularly, but what was unforgivable was how thoroughly he’d allowed himself to fall apart in the aftermath. How was Sam supposed to feel protected now, supposed to feel anything even approaching admiration, let alone love, now he’d seen his towering big brother crumble, cry like a baby and confess to horrible crimes, to being no better than the monsters they hunted?
Well, clearly he didn’t, if he’d run to the arms of a demon over Dean. And as mad-as shaken and terrified and furious-as he was, Dean forgave it, because he couldn’t really blame Sam, in the end.
:::
Sam fell back asleep and woke up what felt like a very short time later to find Dean with his wrist pressed up against his face, blood moving sluggishly down his arm, and-
“Jesus fucking Christ, Dean, are you BITING yourself?!”
He’s up in an instant, keeping Dean from falling only with a firm arm on his shoulder, the other hand pulling Dean’s arm away from his mouth. Dean’s lips and teeth are red. Sam’s stomach jolts horribly.
“Dean, what the fuck, Dean, no, stop this, please just stop this.” Sam is pitching forward without meaning to now, his forehead pressed to the top of Dean’s head, and he can hear Dean whispering to himself, feverish and frantic, “gonna die again need to again shouldn’t be here need to go back down with you, I know it I know it I know it,” and for the first time all night Sam almost really cries, and somewhat shamefully, it’s from frustration more than grief for his brother’s broken state of mind.
“Dean, God, please, enough,” he croaks, knowing Dean can’t hear him, “enough, man, please, you have to stop.” He’s reluctant to let go of Dean even long enough to cross the room to get bandages, but he does, skittering like a nervous animal, never taking his eyes off Dean, who is staring at the stark, congealing blood on his arm, whispering still, rocking slightly.
Sam continues to beg half-heartedly as he wraps Dean’s arm and clumsily swipes his own sleeve over Dean’s face, trying to get some of the blood off.
:::
“Once when I was maybe ten, I was getting something from a vending machine at this motel, and the machine was by the reception desk, right? And the owner of the place comes out of the bathroom while I’m getting my soda and he just swats me right on the ass as he walks by. Kind of raises his eyebrows at me, too, like I was supposed to get it. Dean wouldn’t let me out after that, not till Dad came back, maybe a week later.”
It was three am, and they both had class in the morning, but the stories were spilling out of them so easily now there was no stopping it.
“Christ,” said Jess, carding a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs up off his forehead. “What did you eat?” she added, after a moment.
“In those days, almost all junk,” Sam replied, somewhat thrown by the question.
“From where?”
“Dean would go and get it.”
“At the vending machine?”
He sat up then, found her shape in the darkness, debated turning on the light. “What are you getting at?” he asked her, face folded up into a deep frown.
“I’m just thinking,” she said, and he knew she really was, was just processing what she heard aloud, but it had left him so shaken he didn’t lie back down right away, kept his eyes on her. Sensing this, she let out a little breath and said, “Just think you’re lucky you had him, is all.”
“Of course I am,” said Sam immediately. “I’d have been screwed without him,” he added, alarmed to realize he’d sort of forgotten.
:::
Sam slips upstairs to call Bobby the minute Dean seems to have calmed down even a little bit, is relieved beyond expression when he picks up on the fourth ring.
“Please tell me you’re close,” he says, before Bobby can even say a word.
“Hello to you too,” Bobby grumbles, then says, “Yes, I am close, but this bitch is tricky. How’s Dean holding up?”
Sam pauses, wants to be delicate in his answer. Knows Dean means something particular to Bobby that Sam can’t quite parse out, knows Bobby is going to be measuring his every word against the knowledge that when Dean was gone, Sam abandoned Bobby too, and ran around with a demon who tricked him with astonishing ease (and when Sam was dead Dean stuck with Bobby, it would seem, except when he was doing something stupid and irreversible that landed him where he is right now).
He swallows. His resentment of Bobby is, he knows, wildly misplaced. If anyone has earned his patience, it’s Bobby, but right now, Sam’s brain is fried and his limbs are lead-heavy and his brother is downstairs, very possibly severing a major artery with his teeth and babbling about Hell.
“He’s going to be okay,” says Sam, with the kind of firmness that Bobby will be able to see through in an instant, the blustery confidence that betrays real fear beneath it. “Just please hurry.”
:::
The truly remarkable thing about Cas-the thing that floors him long after he’s gotten over the angel part-is that Cas knows exactly what he is, saw him in Hell, broken beyond repair, and seems to sort of like him anyways. It fills him with a strange, floaty feeling, something close to pride that isn’t, and a deep shame, because he knows he’s failed Cas more than once now, knows Cas has gone out on a limb for him and gotten very little back.
But he keeps coming back, keeps seeing Dean as a person worthy of grace, worth saving, even after he saw, must have seen, the way Dean had smiled, feral, as he tore and dug and broke and shred those twisted, mangled souls down in the Pit. Cas had seen, in that depraved shadow of a man, something worthy of redeeming.
Of course, it hadn’t been that simple. Dean is part of some great and terrible plan, and Cas’s faith in him is likely wearing thin these days. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Dean is a letdown even to God-a God he didn’t even really believe in-but he remembers what Sam said about praying, and the knowledge that he’s failed them all-Cas and Sam and the great freaking man in the sky-threatens to swallow him whole. Dean in the belly of the whale of his own making.
:::
Sam gets downstairs to find Dean curled in the corner, fingers digging into the cut he’d made before, rocking again. When he sees Sam his eyes go wide and blank with terror, and he begins to shout, or try to, his voice hoarse and mucus-thick, “No, no, please no, Alistair, you promised, you promised, I’ll be better I swear, you promised-”
He’s applying still more pressure to the cut and it’s begun seeping blood again, and Sam dashes to his side, crouches down, takes his brother’s face in his hands. “Dean. Dean, it’s me, okay, you’re safe. It’s not-it’s Sam, Dean. Sam.”
“No, no, no-no-no,” Dean moans, trying to scramble away, “oh God, please no, don’t. You fucking promised, please take him away, please, I’ll do anything, I mean it, please.” Sam pulls his hands away, snatches the bloody arm out from under Dean’s digging fingernails. “Please,” Dean sobs, “not him, not him, you promised. Anything, I’ll do anything, just not him, stop it please please please-”
He’s hyperventilating again, and something has just clicked in Sam’s head and he’s staring at Dean, his words finally registered. Not him, you promised. Dean didn’t think he was Alistair, he thought he was an illusion, some shadow of Sam cast down in the Pit to make it worse on Dean.
For a full thirty seconds Sam had to bite down on his fist to keep himself from screaming.
:::
Day Five
It had taken some time, after Jess and Stanford and the fights and the discomfort, for Sam to remember that to be in the car with Dean, chasing a monster or a horizon, was really an unparalleled joy. Sam did not delude himself, knew some part of it was just the same instinct that kept even the most fiercely independent of his classmates crawling back into their childhood beds and mothers’ arms at Christmas, but so what? He never had a childhood bed, he had an Impala, and he never had a mother, he had Dean, who when the dust settled loved him with something more than the requisite brotherly affection or the loyalty and devotion John had passed onto his boys as gospel. Dean really did love Sam, every part of him, would probably have taken a shine to him even if they’d been strangers at any point in their lives. It made Sam feel a twinge of guilt sometimes, because he wasn’t sure how much of his love and devotion for Dean was just learned behavior as opposed to that open, honest, total love Dean felt-a bear hug personified in a brother who loved Sam so totally it would be his own undoing. But far more often than he felt guilty Sam allowed himself to simply bask in it, in that rare and sunny delight of being unconditionally loved, and-to be fair-of being home.
:::
Dean tried not to think of Sam in Hell, tried to keep the two totally separate in his mind, but there was nothing for it, once the pain got to be beyond anything he knew how to handle or even comprehend, once he found himself trying to sink back into some kind of peaceful memory, and soon enough Alistair got wise to this and found ways to fuck it all up, tear it apart, turn it upside down, mutilate it. All but one memory, one dim, distant recollection of the hum and gentle rocking of a moving car, of Sam, maybe four, curled almost all the way into his lap, his high sweet baby breath coming in warm puffs against Dean’s upper arm, his small fingers grasping at Dean’s jacket, the smell of their father, cigarettes and whisky and grease and gunpowder, filling the car, the boy in his lap smelling only of soap and something scrubbed clean and the tiniest bit sour, the Sam-smell that had clung to him since he was a newborn and clung to him now, under layers of motel soap and metallic blood and the clinging smell of gasoline, persistent, unyielding, the ultimate comfort-the last lingering traces of an innocent Sam.
:::
Bobby leaves a voicemail to say it can’t be long now, he’s closing in, and Sam can’t really focus on the words, drifts back downstairs as if he’s in a dream, as if he is separated from his own movements through the house by a veil. Coming back into the panic room he braces himself for the worst and finds it, more or less. Dean has no idea where he is, and is gasping and sort of sobbing and breathing in one motion, and begging still to die, though he’s stopped trying to do it himself. He thinks he’s in Hell, Sam’s pretty sure, or else thinks that the company of Hell has arrived to return him there, where he’s evidently meant to be. He thinks Alistair there, seems to almost welcome him; if he notices Sam at all, he thinks it’s an illusion, and once or twice, he lets out a strangled call for Dad or “help!” or Cas or, once, Mom. Helpless and useless and crawling out of his skin, Sam sits as close as Dean lets him get, waits it out, keeps up a weary litany of promises he can’t possibly keep, pleads with his brother, remember me, I need you, remember your little Sammy, I need you here to stay.
:::
He’s never said it, and he likely never will, but he was going to ask Dean to be his best man. Or that was the plan, anyways. Maybe he courage would have failed him. Maybe he’d have tried, and the conversation would have fallen apart. Maybe the fear of the obvious question (“What about Dad?”) would have kept him from asking at all. But he had planned it, had pictured his brother in a nice suit, face alight with a can-you-believe-this grin, flirting with the bridesmaids and giving an embarrassing toast, dancing with Jess and her mother and twirling them both, laughing boyishly all the while; secretly slipping a duffel of ammo and dirty magazines into the car just before they sped off, kissing behind the window reading Just Married. He still has this image in his head, of a photograph, Jess in white, Sam in a tux, their arms around each other, Jess’s best friend at her side, Sam’s brother at his. He doesn’t give it much thought, anymore, hasn’t in years, but he can honestly still picture that photograph, maybe a little faded from its place in the sun in the apartment or house that he and Jess would share, framed in silver. He can see it if he strains, propped up somewhere special, a mantle or a coffee table. That’s our wedding day, he can hear himself saying. There I am with Jess, and there’s Lori, maid of honor, and there’s my brother Dean. The best man.
:::
“As long as I’m around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you.”
It’s a promise Dean made again and again, in a hundred different variations, and he probably broke every single one, but he keeps promising. He’s well aware that this is the definition of insanity-doing the same thing again and again and yielding the same results-but his sanity is not exactly his best asset these days anyways. He’ll never stop trying to save his Sammy, and he can’t, is the thing. If he stops-if Sam wants him to stop-he has nothing. He’s never known life beyond his dad and his brother and the faded imprint of his mom, a flickering beacon of warmth and safety, one he’s tried his best to emulate for Sammy when he was small. He doesn’t know if any of it did any good-Sam certainly doesn’t seem too happy these days-but still he can’t stop trying. He doesn’t much care if it makes him pathetic, because Sam is genuinely worth it to him. Sam is his job, always, and he will do his job, but more than that, Sam is wonderful. Sam is warmth, and sweetness, and something good in a crap world. A reason to get home on time, to get home at all. To fix dinner, make the room someplace bright and warm and safe to sleep in. They don’t stay in the same rooms anymore, but it’s still true, it’s still generally enough. He can keep going even when the tide of memories is rising, when some combination of Hell and self-hatred do their damnedest to pull him under.
Most days he’s pretty sure it’s the only reason he’s still breathing: Sam is.
:::
Bobby calls, he must, to say it’s over, but Sam doesn’t need to be told. He’s aware the second it’s done that something’s happened, from the way Dean’s frantic rocking stops, the way his rough keening cuts off abruptly.
“Dean?” he asks frantically, launching himself at his brother, terrified for a moment that Dean has found a way to kill himself without Sam noticing.
Dean is blinking up at him, bleary and exhausted, and Sam puts a hand to his forehead and finds his fever broken. “Right,” he says, “right, okay, c’mere.” He hauls Dean to his feet, drags him to the bed, and collapses there, his brother half on top of him, damp with sweat and shivery still.
“Dean, listen, you’re alright now, yeah?” Sam pushes himself up against the head of the bed, allows Dean to tuck himself under Sam’s arm, his head back at Sam’s shoulder, his nose back at Sam’s collar. Sam’s hand finds its way back to Dean’s head, and he holds fast-doesn’t stroke through Dean’s hair like Jess used to do his, just holds his hand there, maintains a reassuring pressure as Dean’s congested breath finally evens out and he goes mercifully slack against Sam.
“Yeah,” he says, into Dean’s familiar smelling hair-beneath the smells of sweat and blood and vomit there’s Dean, reliable, smelling like motor oil and something rough-and-sweet that is uniquely Dean’s. “Yeah, you’re okay.”
:::
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~9,600
Spoilers: Through about the end of season four.
Warnings: Lots and lots and lots of talk of suicide, language, brief references to physical child abuse, very, very brief references to something approaching sexual abuse, some pretty severe familial dysfunction, brief discussions of torture, lots of none-too-healthy mental states.
Summary: Dean goes under. Written for this prompt.
Neurotic author's notes: Oh lordy it's four am. Okay, well, I loved this prompt. I really did. And this story...mostly fits it? I mean, yes, it does, but it's also just a sort of broad look at the Winchesters and the state of their union circa the end of season four (and kind of beyond), and how they got to be there. Blargh. It's long and strange and sort of stream of consciousness-y.
Also: The title and cut text are both from Tom Waits's "Starving in the Belly of the Whale."
Day One
For years now, Sam’s had this recurring nightmare. In it, he is answering a door, and his brother is there, somewhat unexpectedly-a holdover from the Stanford days-but happy, at ease. Sam invites him in, and it’s usually his freshman year dorm room, and then he turns away from Dean and when he looks back it’s to find Dean crumpled, collapsed, bleeding and keening and near-delirious, flinching away and biting back a sob when Sam dives to his side. There’s a prolonged, suspended moment of utter terror, and then Sam wakes up.
Worrying about Dean is nothing new or strange-it is and and for a long time has been one of the fundamental facts that makes up Sam's life-but there’s something about this particular dream that shakes him, still, even now when Dean has given him so many other terrifying images to dwell on. His brother climbed out of Hell, and what leaves Sam shaking and sweating under the covers is a decade old imagined moment of total weakness. It’s fitting, and like so many elements of Sam’s life seems like something akin to a sick joke. It shouldn’t surprise Sam, now he’s seen his brother return from the good-as-dead and never with a shred of triumph or peace to keep him company, but it does.
:::
They’re just over the Wisconsin state line and speeding southeast when Sam begins to suspect something has gone very wrong, which is just one more sickeningly unsurprising item on the ever-growing list he’s keeping in his head. It begins with Dean’s silence, which in and of itself is not such a rarity as it used to be-since Hell Dean has been a little more subdued, a little skittish. But there’s a strange heaviness that’s settled between them, and it sort of spooks Sam, so he tries to engage his brother. Engage the subject, there’s relic from a life he’s forgotten how to live, a phrase he picked up from Jess, who was a psych major, who wanted to be a child psychologist, do social work. Wanted to plug up people’s holes with the right words at the right moment, and she probably could have done it, too. She’s certainly the only person Sam’s ever known who might have. He has no words, of course-that he could ever say something to genuinely make Dean better is an illusion he abandoned sometime between his death and his brother’s. But the radio is as good a conversation starter as any.
The song is “Ramble On,” and that ought to coax at least the smallest grin from Dean, but instead it looks like he’s going to be sick, and that’s when Sam knows he’s well and truly fucked. Naturally.
:::
You don’t know what it is to hate yourself until you really, really hate yourself. Stress, self-doubt, and a firm conviction that his needs were secondary to his father’s and brother’s had been Dean’s constant companion for as long as he could remember, but to really hate yourself, that’s something else entirely. But that night in Fort Douglas, speeding towards the dawn and Pastor Jim’s-Dean wanted to crawl out of his body, his stupid body with his stupid head on top, abandon it forever, be free of this useless boy, this lagging burden of a pathetic soldier, whose own selfishness and irresponsibility had ruined his father’s hunt, had ruined everything, had almost gotten Sammy killed-and if Sam was lying deathly still in a hospital right now, that sweet bright spirit sucked right out of him, that would be on Dean, all on Dean, and he couldn’t-
He gave a violent twitch in the backseat, trying to physically dispel the thought, the image of his brother helpless and still on the motel bed. Sammy gave a sleepy little sigh-he’d barely woken up at all, and Dean’s whole world had changed-and Dad met Dean’s eyes in the rearview, just for an instant, and Dean thought he might shrivel up and die right there for the shame of it.
:::
Dean’s eyes are shiny and over bright, and he’s sort of sniffling periodically by the time Sam starts scanning for motels that won’t look too long in their faces-or at their credit cards. Sam’s attempts to pull some conversation out of him are met only with thick, snotty grunts of acknowledgement and the occasional muttered complaint of the cold. Sam isn’t cold at all, and it’s only just the beginning of the fall. Finally, Sam sucks in his breath and asks, “Dean, you feeling okay?”
He takes the time to reflect, with the sort of bitterness that makes him feel old and miserable, that most people can ask a question like that without weighing a thousand possible implications, potential offenses, unforeseen danger zones. Most people aren’t so littered with traumas and sore spots like land mines.
And, he reminds himself, most half-decent brothers wouldn’t resent them for it.
Dean gives a noncommittal shrug and clears his throat, then starts to cough. Because of course he’s sick. And suddenly Sam can’t quite stifle the roar of pure frustration, of exhaustion and fury and something approaching incredulity because can’t they ever just be done-
Jess, in his memory, the fragmented, constructed Jess that he clings to only in his moments of utmost desperation-for fear he might impose too much of himself and his distinctly un-Jess-like life onto her-reminds him that it’s okay to be overwhelmed. That it’s never easy to be loved by someone damaged.
Give it a rest, he tells the Jessica in his head.
:::
The first time Sam ever gave his brother stitches he was twelve years old. The details have faded with time-something about the pissy spirit of a seamstress, a condemned building, it didn’t matter anymore-but the moment when Sam steadied his trembling hand and first pushed the needle into his brother’s skin-and he’d nearly stuck it too close to the cut, needed Dean’s gasping “Wait, wait, not there, Sammy, wait” to break through his blind, panicked fumbling-remains as bright and stark as ever.
Later, when he was justifying to himself his decision to run away to Stanford (and he can’t remember when it became “run away” and not simply “go”), he would dredge up this incident again and again, try to focus on how young he had been, how in over his head, how unforgivably fucked-up the whole thing had been. But it never worked, because all he could remember was Dean’s pale, blood-flecked face, the way his eyes had traced Sam’s movements while he ground out encouragement through grit teeth. At the time, eighteen and selfish and stupid, he’d managed to turn that on its head, insist to himself that Dean was only a child himself, that none of it was right or okay and that was the ultimate meaning of the moment.
Sam’s stopped believing in moments with definitive meanings, stopped imagining his life is a story that pulls together in such a satisfactory way, but he’s pretty sure he felt more pride than fear that night. Twelve years old and sweaty and bloody and trembling and exactly where he was supposed to be.
:::
Dean was eleven years old the first time he kissed a girl. It was the summer, up in New England where the heat turns the air sticky and impossibly thick. Dean’s knowledge of sex came primarily from dirty magazines he’d stolen from the bottom of his father’s duffle, schoolyard chatter and the times in motels and sometimes bars bars when he saw and heard things he knew he shouldn’t-men and women writhing against one another, glimpsed for an instant before he turned red and ducked away; drunks who leaned too close and breathed out complaints about frigid bitches or suggestions as to how he might more productively use his pretty little mouth.
He wanted to be kissed, and she kissed him. She was twelve. Their mouths were closed and it was simple and sweet in a way Dean had never really experienced before. Two months later a woman with runs in her stockings would call him a sweet baby boy after he gave her quarters to get a Pepsi from the machine and she’d lean close, breath hot and smelling heavy and strong like a drunk’s, and he’d wrinkle his nose as she nibbled ineffectively at his mouth for a few moments, which was about the moment he gave up on the idea of sex being anything particularly innocent or sacred.
:::
Dean is coughing and feverish by the time they stagger into a motel room in northern Illinois, which is just fucking perfect. He’s withdrawn, too, staring at his hands and looking so utterly wrecked Sam briefly scrambles to recall the last person they saw die, and how, and what it might have meant to Dean, but gives up quickly, his head aching. It’s late and he just wants to go to bed, but Dean’s eyes are watering now, and this is not something Winchesters do, sit and stare at their hands with tears in their eyes. Sam is a bastard but he’s not cruel, and he gives Dean a moment to compose himself, takes a shower he desperately doesn’t want to bother with but ends up lingering in, brushes his teeth. He can hear Dean’s hacking, miserable coughs through the door, and when he finally emerges it’s to find his brother sitting with his back against the bed, knees up, head in his arms, a small plastic trash can by his side, reeking of vomit.
“Dean,” he sort of yelps, and he crouches down beside his brother who is shaking his head, moaning very faintly into his elbow.
“Don’t, Sammy,” he grates out, sounding so totally low and awful Sam feels his earlier irritation drain out of him in an instant. “I just-I don’t-just leave it. Just leave me here.”
“That’s the fever talking,” says Sam, automatically, even though it probably isn’t.
:::
At school Sam had made a concentrated effort not to think about Dean, and it had taken him until the end of his sophomore year to really shake the constant weight of worry. Even then, the thought of his brother-alone with their father, alone at all, wearing that look he’d had out on the road that night when Sam made it clear he was leaving for good-would occasionally intrude on his thoughts, always catching him like a blow, leaving him temporarily reeling. Sometimes he’d drift during lectures, see his brother stumbling into a motel bed all beat to hell and wincing, gasping maybe as the rough sheets made contact with some fresh, sloppily treated injury, and though Sam knew Dean was entirely capable of looking after himself, always had been-hell, Sam had learned to look after himself by watching Dean-it would still sting, for a second, like a paper cut or a shaving nick, because even though he is strong and smart and capable and unflinching and brave, Dean was really not built to live alone, and this knowledge has accompanied Sam for as long as he can remember.
He’d tried to push this knowledge aside, sworn off guilt, because Dad was a crazed, obsessed bastard and Dean was more than capable of living on his own, but all the while he’d known that wiser men than him had long ago figured out that just because someone can do something doesn’t mean they should.
:::
Dean throws up several times more, and then sits folded between the filthy toilet and the wall and holds his head in his hands and squeezes his eyes tight shut. Sam stands awkwardly in the doorway, unsure of what to do, and eventually decides to get Dean up from the floor as gently as possible, and somehow without implying that Dean couldn’t get off the ground himself if that’s what he wanted.
Dean flinches away from his touch and Sam wants to scream. Things can’t be this bad right now. They cannot be in such bad shape right now, there isn’t time. There is so much still that Sam has to do, and he might be able to do it without Dean-he doubts it-but he certainly can’t do it with Dean a wreck on the floor.
He eventually gets a hand up to Dean’s forehead and almost flinches back, the fever is so bad. Dean lets out a little noise of distress, and Sam tries once again to coax him off the floor. He succeeds only in dragging Dean a little further away from the foul-smelling toilet before Dean presses his warm forehead to Sam’s shoulder and whimpers that he wants to die.
Sam decides to call Bobby.
:::
Dean smoked his first cigarette-and, as it turned out, almost last-a few days before fifteenth birthday, out in the biting cold in Michigan. It had been given to him by a senior boy after he’d spectacularly lost a drag-out fight with some prick with a big mouth who’d called him an idiot and a faggot and a dickhead one too many times. Dean had lost so thoroughly he was actually glad Dad wasn’t due home for days, because crawling home thoroughly beat by some Neanderthal he started a fight with when he should have been keeping his fucking head down was entirely too much.
The smoke was bitter and calming in his mouth, and it took him a few tries to work out how to let it out right, and when he tried to push it out his nose like he was in a movie he had a coughing fit instead.
Sammy wrinkled his nose at the smell when Dean came to get him, frowned at Dean’s split lip and scuffed knuckles. “That’s no good, Dean,” he said, firmly but without malice, and turned to his worn library chapter book, leaving Dean standing in the doorway, all ragged and roughed-up, feeling impossibly small.
:::
The drive to Sioux Falls is long, maybe eight hours even speeding, and it’s made worse by Dean, who is near incoherent and apparently in pain, clutching at his head and mostly unaware of Sam, who was expecting fevered recollections of Hell or the maybe months following, and is now wishing that was what he had, because the words coming out of Dean’s mouth are scaring him.
“All those people,” he’s saying now, and this has come up a lot, all those people, and Sam isn’t sure if it’s all the people he didn’t save or all the people he tortured in Hell or something else entirely. He’s just guessing, here, and he ought to be pretty good at guessing Dean by now but somehow he’s still so unsure, Dean is still supposed to be big and strong and impenetrable.
“And, and, and who am I, to, to, to be-” Dean is mumbling, shakily, and then, clearly, “I should be dead.”
“Dean,” says Sam, his mouth very dry, “no. You-don’t say that. I know you’re miserable, right now, I know, but it’s just a fever.”
“I-I don’t-they were screaming, and I was dead. I should be still, I’m supposed to be. Sam, I should be dead.”
“Shut up,” says Sam, not caring how he sounds, “shut up, Dean, shut up. Go to sleep, you’re sick. Shut up.”
“I should be dead,” says Dean, more quietly, and Sam is roaring northwest, pushing 95.
:::
Day Two
When Dean first came for Sam at Stanford he’d been surprised to learn Dean was hunting by himself. Not because he wasn’t capable, he was, but just because Dean and Dad had always been such a unit. Sam had envied it, briefly, when he was eight or nine, the way Dad and Dean spoke to one another in low voices, out of Sam’s earshot, after Sam’s bedtime, the way Dean was privy to some part of their father’s inner life that Sam wasn’t allowed to see, the way they traded understanding looks and mirrored one another’s poses and expressions without even meaning to.
Of course, now Sam knows those secret conversations he’d been so jealous of were all about monsters and money and hospital bills and CPS, cons and scams and adulthood worries. Just Dad forcing Dean to be a grownup, just Dean molding himself into Dad. It had sort of broken his heart, later, to see Dean’s need for his father blow up in his face in the time leading up to-and following-his death, and he’d hated to admit it, but it had been validating as well. That reliance on their father, that blind faith, it was all wrong. It scared him for a reason he couldn’t explain for a long time. He only began to understand it when he worked out that he was far more like his father than Dean would ever be.
:::
By the time they get to Bobby’s, Dean is hot as a furnace and barely coherent, sounding tearful and professing to crimes Sam can barely make out, coming back always to the absolute certainty that he should be dead. Bobby’s face is set and grim as he helps Sam drag Dean-who appears to have lost the will even to flinch from their hands-into the house and onto the couch. He and Sam head to the kitchen, confer in low voices, discuss the possibilities that this is a curse or a parasite or something else awful while all Sam can really hear is Dean whimpering behind them, so utterly distraught.
Bobby is making noise about lore and legend and witches and what to look up and what to stab to make this stop, and Sam’s fingers are twitching to do something, fight somebody, rip something’s fucking lungs out if it means they can just have five minutes of peace, just a moment, if it means he can sleep without unsettling, guilt-warped dreams, if it means Dean will just stop with this litany of crimes he never had a choice in committing, if it means they can just stop for a second.
He realizes Bobby is staring at him and nods once, jerkily, then stands to follow Bobby wherever it is that he’s going, as long as it isn’t here, restless and miserable in this warm little kitchen.
:::
Sam had his first ever beer, of course, with Dean. He nineteen and Sam was fifteen and it was the sweet, sticky end of August, late dusk cicada weather, and he’d just recently shot up to Dean’s height. They were several thousand miles from the girl Sam had spent all summer haltingly romancing, and Sam was pissed and frustrated and still just young and unsure and Dean had felt for the kid, taken him outside into the warm swell of evening and they’d split a six pack, talked for hours, about girls, old hunts, rehashed their best funny stories, even if they both knew them by heart, even if they had very few stories the other hadn’t been a part of. They were easily affectionate, companionable and teasing and just together in a way they really hadn’t been in a long time, since Sam became edgy and resentful and derisive about all the simple things that made Dean happy-girls, guns, hamburgers, a good car and a good hunt-becoming so dismissive Dean felt nearly pitiful.
But this was simple and warm, and Dean couldn’t remember being happier. As the darkness began to dilute, they fell into contemplative silence, sensing the approaching dawn. Sam let his head fall onto Dean’s shoulder like he had in the back of the car when they were children, and it was all Dean could do to keep from beaming down at him, affection for his brother swelling in him like a balloon.
Then Sam said, like he was confessing a secret meant only for brother’s ears, “I have to get away,” and Dean felt his chest rip in two.
:::
Sam loved every piece of Jess, but the fact that she was a psych major was taken, both at the time and, far more seriously, years later, to be a sign that the universe was fucking with him. She tried her hardest not to analyze him, but no psych major worth her salt could really ignore a boy like Sam, scarred up and silent on the subject on his childhood and family, with his stunted social skills and spotty education, his wonderment at perfectly ordinary things like having the same address for more than a year, his nightmares and weird hang-ups. Sam knew he was a puzzle to her and didn’t even care, found it kind of sexy.
“You are not,” she told him the day he fell in love with her, “the sum total of your experiences. Nobody is.”
“So, I’m more than the sum of my parts,” he’d said, thinking of his father, of Dean, of the Impala and grubby hotel rooms and the seedy bastards they’d grown up around, thinking of the knives Pastor Jim kept in a hidden panel in the rectory and bazooka he and Dean used to beg Caleb to let them see, of missed meals and dumb cartoons at Bobby’s house and playing war games in the salvage yard and the way violence and Dean saturated almost every single one of his memories. Of his parts.
“That you are,” she’d said, and at the time it had been a fucking benediction.
:::
Sam falls asleep without meaning to and wakes not long after because Dean has gotten up and is lurching around, staggering into the kitchen, sniffling and mumbling to himself, pulling open the drawers and the cabinets, rummaging, and with a jolt that actually hurts Sam realizes he’s going for the knives.
“No. No, no, no-no-no-no-no,” he’s practically chanting as he bounds across the room, slams the drawer shut, yanking Dean’s grasping fingers away, “no, Dean, Jesus, Jesus, what, what is this. No.” He spins his brother around, takes him by the shoulders. Dean just blinks back, looking lost, then gives a little shutter and tries to pull himself away, mumbling so softly Sam has to lean in to hear him, catches “shouldn’t” and “can’t” and “please” and “die” and wrenches himself back up to his full height, takes Dean’s chin in his hand and forces him to make eye contact. His eyes are too clear and his face is pinched miserably, shiny with sweat. He’s shivery and far too hot, and he just went digging around Bobby’s kitchen for knives-
“Dean, enough. Come on. Enough,” he says, and without knowing what else to do, pulls Dean back to the couch.
:::
Dean only ever considered leaving once, and it wasn’t after anything had tried to maul him, and it wasn’t after dropped out of high school and it wasn’t after his father, too drunk to reign himself in, broke his rib. It wasn’t even after Sammy took a brush to the butt and launched himself, howling, at Dean, like Dad had whipped him raw. It was a few days after Sam turned seventeen. They’d gone a precious few days without any arguments or even particular tension-Dad had, for the first time in years, managed to spend an entire birthday with the boys, and they’d all been riding the wave of good vibes that had resulted, falling into an easy, companionable rhythm they’d never really had before. It was almost like when Sam was just little still, but somehow more adult, more shared, now Sam was a hunter himself.
They’d been in the kitchenette of the reasonably nice motel that was their home that month, Dad and Sam at the table, Dean making coffee, watching his father and brother. Dad was cleaning his guns, Sam was looking up from his book to point something out to their dad, and they were nodding and talking excitedly, their eyebrows furrowing and jumping in perfect unison. It occurred to Dean, for the first time in his entire life, that maybe they might not both need him. That wasn’t a bad thing, but in a moment of terrible selfishness Dean felt the urge to pitch a fit and storm out right then and there. Nobody needed him, he didn’t do much good, and he didn’t see why the hell he should stay.
:::
Around midnight Bobby helps Sam drag Dean down to the panic room after he starts trying to bash his head into the wall. Sam has spent the past two hours trying to talk him down, separating him from the astonishing number of things Bobby owns that Dean can try to use to hurt himself, trying to calm him down, placate him, convince him he doesn’t deserve to die.
“Fucking ghost sickness,” he huffs as he and Bobby deposit Dean on the bed, “of course.”
Sam wants to go back to Wisconsin and waste the responsible party himself, but Dean’s got a grip on his sleeve and starts whimpering and keening when Sam tries to tug free. Bobby puts a hand on his shoulder and tells Sam to stay put. “I’ll go,” he says. “Just tell me what you were doing.”
It doesn’t take long, and soon Bobby is gone with only a grave “Don’t let him kill himself, Sam,” and not for the first time that night Sam suspects he isn’t entirely forgiven. They’re left with only the sickeningly familiar whoosh of the giant overhead fan and Dean’s muted sounds of distress.
“If you can forgive me, Dean,” Sam says suddenly, “then trust me, anybody can forgive you anything.”
“No,” Dean moans, and Sam puts a hand to his forehead, prays that it was random. He’s pretty sure it isn’t, but he takes comfort in the heat still radiating from Dean’s face.
“Just the fever talking, man,” he says, and he’s proud his voice is so steady.
:::
Day Three
The whole thing with Ruby had made a great deal of sense at the time-famous last words, right? Sam knows he’ll never be able to explain it adequately, the overwhelming, unceasing panic in his head, the scrambling, scratching, miserably repeating loop: save Dean, save Dean, save Dean, no matter what it takes, save Dean. Bobby could never understand it, but he’d hoped Dean might, because Dean surely knew what it was to forget everything in the face of the gaping black hole that was the loss of a brother.
But an angel had done Sam’s job for him, and Dean had been too righteous-or too far gone, or too well-trained, or too clever-to see what Sam was doing, or why. That had hurt more than he cared to admit, and some part of him had wanted to stand in front of Dean, lay himself bare, be plaintive and pleading, tell him, “I did it all for you.” Dean ought to have been able to understand that, but all he’d understood was betrayal.
Sam was never able to properly explain himself, and he’d given up trying pretty quickly, decided to do it like Dean would have: never mind what it looks like, never mind what they say. Do what needs to be done, and do it right.
:::
Dean sleeps for a few hours, then sits bolt upright with a strangled cry and lies still, panting, sort of spaced out, for a long moment. Sam, who had been engrossed, exhausted and trancelike, by the shadows on the giant ceiling fan’s blades, their familiar sounds, and his memories of this place, jumps to attention, tries to gauge Dean’s awareness.
“You alright, man?” he ventures, trying to be casual. Supportive, even, without being condescending.
“I don’t want to be here,” whispers Dean, looking at the ceiling, eyes still glazed and over bright.
“The panic room?” Sam prompts him, even though he knows that’s not what Dean meant, encouraged by this direct response.
“No,” Dean replies, miserably, and turns onto his side. It takes Sam a moment to realize he’s pressing his face determinedly into the worn, thin pillow, not breathing.
“Dean!” he barks, grabs his brother by the shoulders and wrenches him upwards, gripping him tightly, resisting the urge to shake him. “Look, man, whatever it is that you-you’re sick, okay, listen to me. You can’t go. You can’t die. You don’t belong in hell, man. Even the freaking angels think so.”
“I’m always gonna go back there, end up back with him, Sam, you don’t know Alistair, you don’t know, you don’t know, okay, you don’t know, why don’t I just go now.” Dean is forcing his words out between spasmodic, hiccuping little breathes, and Sam realizes belatedly that there are tears coming down his brother’s face.
“You’re staying right here,” he says, far more confident than he feels, “because this is where you’re supposed to be.”
:::
When Dad found out Dean had lost Sam in Flagstaff he hit him squarely in the face, then the stomach. Kicked his ribs and snarled, “You selfish prick, you selfish fuck, you useless little bastard.” He’d been incredibly drunk, hauled Dean up by the collar and flung him out the door, told him not to come back without Sam if he knew what was good for him. Dean took him at his word, even though he knew that with the morning and the hangover Dad would recant. Sam wasn’t exactly five years old anymore, and Dean could not be entirely to blame for losing him.
Dean didn’t give his father that opportunity, and did not come back to the dilapidated house they were squatting in until he had a scowling and sheepish Sam by the elbow. It had taken four days of frantic searching, all the while holding back the tidal wave of guilt and misery and insecurity that Sam’s disappearance had brought on. There was no avoiding that he was the brother who had been unable to convince Sam to stay, unable to find him, he was the brother Sam was so ashamed of and sickened by, and all his years of efforts to ensure Sam was happy and safe and loved and had a childhood had come to absolutely nothing.
When he finally did find him, he boxed his ears in, pulled him into an awkward, one-armed hug, and dragged him home. Dad didn’t apologize, and Dean didn’t expect him to. He had been, after all, exactly correct.
:::
For a while when they were kids, Sam went through this phase with mothers. Well, motherly women, teachers mostly, the odd librarian or doting, middle-aged grandmother. He actively sought them out, charmed them with his dimples and sweet seriousness, with his puppy-dog eyes and oversized hand-me-downs. He let them all call him “honey” and ruffle his hair, cup his cheek, sometimes fuss over his uncut hair or his thinness. Sam played right into it, all big eyes and shy smiles, leaning into their hands and sometimes letting the speech impediment Dean-Dean!-had trained him out of slip back out.
It had kind of pissed Dean off at first, and then made him profoundly sad. He wanted to tell Sam about his real mom, who was soft and warm and perfect, who would scoop him up and hold him close and kiss his nose while he prodded gently at her glistening earring or toyed gently with her beautiful hair. He wanted to tell Sam that she sang “Hey Jude” at night and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” when she was cooking, that she made hot cocoa with milk and cream both so it filled him up with sleepy warmth. That she smelled like cinnamon and oranges and something else, but his memories of Mom seemed weaker every day, more and more like a dream, and somehow he was afraid he would lose them if he didn’t keep them close, and so, to his eternal shame, he did.
:::
Bobby isn’t answering his phone and Dean has tried twice more now to actually suffocate himself with a pillow. Sam is growing desperate in a way that feels alarmingly familiar, that feels like those weeks and days and hours before Dean died, before everything fell to pieces, and this only serves to increase his panic. He’s just hauled Dean off the pillow and into a slumped sitting position for the third time when Dean mumbles, “Why’re you doing this, Sam?”
Sam blinks, distantly pleased with Dean’s coherency, and the answer falls from his lips before he even has to think. “You’re my brother,” he says, and isn’t that obvious by now? The justification for the wild and the impossible and the monumentally stupid and the incredibly patient is brotherhood and it always has been. Surely Dean can’t be that far gone.
Dean shakes his head, looking pained, and won’t meet Sam’s eyes. “You’d be better off, if I-I don’t want to-you don’t know, Sam, what I, how I, you don’t understand-”
“Dean.” He’s working himself back up to hyperventilating, and Sam has already had to dodge Dean’s vomit twice. “Listen to me, please, Dean, I wouldn’t be, okay? I wasn’t. If you-if nothing else-God, Dean, I wasn’t better off without you and I never will be, alright? You’re-you-you’re a better person than me, Dean, okay, a way better person.”
“No,” Dean gasps, flinching like Sam tried to hit him, and Sam thinks he might have choked on his heart.
:::
Sam used to ask Dean about everything, why the sky was blue and why planes stayed up and why they were called butterflies when they didn’t have anything to do with butter, why they had to move and why they couldn’t have a pet, how to clean a gun and how to divide with fractions and how to use a semi-colon. It had become a point of tension in high school, as Sam’s continued interest in school began to contrast all the more sharply with Dean’s complete lack thereof, and Sam started asking questions Dean couldn’t answer-what year was the February Revolution again, how do you find the limit on this one, what looks good on a college application, what do ephemeral and impute and spurious mean, Dean, these are SAT words. But there was one thing Sam could rely on Dean for always, and that was girls.
At various times-nine, thirteen, sixteen-Sam had awkwardly approached Dean, looking for initiation into some new level of this particular strand of adulthood, and Dean delivered, crassly but never unkindly. Long past a time when Sam would dream of asking Dean about insects or hypotenuses or how to clean a gun, he still depended on Dean to decode the mystical language of girls, to elevate Sam a little from the gruff, greasy, distinctly masculine world they both occupied.
The two times Sam came the closest to calling Dean from Stanford had been when he had realized he wanted to sleep with Jessica Moore, and then that he wanted to marry her.
:::
He has no idea what time it is-no daylight down in the panic room, and he took his watch off several states ago and forgot about it entirely when Dean started puking and begging to die-but he’s exhausted and finds himself crawling onto the rickety bed behind Dean, propping his pliant brother up against him. Dean’s still fever hot and shivering in a sweatshirt and pressed up against Sam, breathing heavily as Sam awkwardly runs a hand through Dean’s hair in a poor imitation of the way he imagines people comfort each other in moments like this. He strains to recall the way Dean used to bring him down after nightmares-even as a little boy he’d had a brain too active for the night-and can come up with only vague, fleeting memories of physical closeness and Dean’s soft, rumbling voice in a dozen dimly lit motel rooms.
“Please,” Dean says to no one, and Sam cups his head all the more firmly, drags up a memory of Dean gripping his head gently in both hands, saying, “It’s okay, Sammy, I’m gonna pull the nightmares out.”
“Dean, it’s alright,” he says, pointlessly, because he can’t extract Dean’s nightmares, can’t even begin to understand them.
“It’s not,” moans Dean, into Sam’s collar, and Sam almost laughs, because when has it ever been?
:::
The last time Sam and Dean ever shared a bed they were nine and thirteen, and it had been about a year since they’d stayed at Caleb’s and it hadn’t occurred to him that they would need two beds. Caleb’s place at the time was small and utilitarian, and so they were left with only the same cot they’d been sharing since they were tiny enough that there was room left over.
Sammy didn’t really mind, still small and quick to crave physical affection when he was tired, still prone to falling asleep on Dean’s shoulder in the car on those increasingly rare occasions when they were both in the back seat. Dean, thirteen and officially no longer a child, had been a little uncomfortable with it, but seeing no other option had slid good-naturedly in beside Sam, who wasted very little time in burrowing up against him. Old habits die hard, Dean had supposed, and slept stiff and unhappily, jumped out of bed with the sun, leaving Sam curled round his abandoned pillow.
Years and years later, he’d regret his haste in that moment, recognizing it retroactively as the end of something kind of important, something he’d spend a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to reclaim. It’s a small regret in a pile of big ones, but its hurt seems to grow more acute with each passing year.
:::
“I wanna be done, Sam,” Dean grates out at one point, breath very hot and fast against Sam’s skin. His nose is pressed to Sam’s shoulder and he’s squirming miserably, having worn himself out detailing, with tears falling freely down his face, the first soul he tortured in Hell. Sam’s feeling more than a little rung out.
“I know you do,” says Sam dully, watching the fan, trying to push back thoughts of his withdrawal, of Dean’s face every time he was forced to consider the possibility that his brother was a monster.
“Please,” says Dean, and Sam can tell from the way his voice constricts that he’s screwing up his face against whatever wave of pain and misery is crashing through his head, and he wonders when he developed the ability to disconnect from this. Knows with damning certainty that were their positions reversed, Dean would be feeling Sam’s pain just as wholly as Sam, would not resign himself to looking at the ceiling and physically separating him from the pillow he was trying to suffocate himself with.
He almost tells Dean as much, but the words are stuck in his throat, so what he says instead is, “I need you, Dean, you know I do,” and when Dean begins to shake his head against him Sam continues, fighting exhaustion and a rising despair,“Yes, you know it, I need you to show me how to be good.”
:::
Day Four
Sometimes he’d shared bits of his childhood in pieces, wanting so badly to give some part of himself to Jess even if he couldn’t give it all like she could. So he dropped little crumbs, details without the larger picture. Showed her the half-orphanhood, poverty, the loneliness, the seedy bars and motels, the sense of fear and abandonment, sometimes even the closeness with Dean, which he reserved himself from sharing more frequently only because he was afraid of what might happen if he picked at that poorly-healed wound too much.
“To be honest, sounds like you dodged a lot of bullets,” Jess said once, some lazy morning under the sheets but not the covers, trading stories. “I mean, two kids alone as often as you guys were?”
Sam cracked his neck, looked at the ceiling, thought of the strange, suspended moments wherein he’d known something terrible was happening, or about to-the time there was a gunshot in the room next to theirs and he knew it wasn’t a salt round, the time he’d been drawing with chalk in a motel parking lot and a bleary-eyed man had come over and crouched down next to him, asked him about his drawing, run a possessive arm over his back and round his shoulders before Dean reappeared and told the guy to get going before he started screaming.
“What did that guy want?” Sam had asked, probably six or so.
“Nothing,” Dean had replied, shepherding him inside.
:::
When he was small, Sammy thought Dean was invincible, and had found comfort in that, the idea that Dean was safety. As they got older Sam stopped believing as much, no matter how much Dean tried to maintain Sam’s sense of security, if not his admiration. Sam was Dean’s job, and he knew that didn’t just mean food and laundry and bedtime and not letting his fucking spinal cord get severed in some kind of demented demon Olympics-it meant that Sammy was protected and knew it, that Sammy could be a kid, could fall in love with a girl. That Sam knew he was a special kid, smart and funny and sweet and wonderful, even when he wasn’t; that Dean would always take care of him.
Of course, Dean had failed in that somewhat spectacularly, but what was unforgivable was how thoroughly he’d allowed himself to fall apart in the aftermath. How was Sam supposed to feel protected now, supposed to feel anything even approaching admiration, let alone love, now he’d seen his towering big brother crumble, cry like a baby and confess to horrible crimes, to being no better than the monsters they hunted?
Well, clearly he didn’t, if he’d run to the arms of a demon over Dean. And as mad-as shaken and terrified and furious-as he was, Dean forgave it, because he couldn’t really blame Sam, in the end.
:::
Sam fell back asleep and woke up what felt like a very short time later to find Dean with his wrist pressed up against his face, blood moving sluggishly down his arm, and-
“Jesus fucking Christ, Dean, are you BITING yourself?!”
He’s up in an instant, keeping Dean from falling only with a firm arm on his shoulder, the other hand pulling Dean’s arm away from his mouth. Dean’s lips and teeth are red. Sam’s stomach jolts horribly.
“Dean, what the fuck, Dean, no, stop this, please just stop this.” Sam is pitching forward without meaning to now, his forehead pressed to the top of Dean’s head, and he can hear Dean whispering to himself, feverish and frantic, “gonna die again need to again shouldn’t be here need to go back down with you, I know it I know it I know it,” and for the first time all night Sam almost really cries, and somewhat shamefully, it’s from frustration more than grief for his brother’s broken state of mind.
“Dean, God, please, enough,” he croaks, knowing Dean can’t hear him, “enough, man, please, you have to stop.” He’s reluctant to let go of Dean even long enough to cross the room to get bandages, but he does, skittering like a nervous animal, never taking his eyes off Dean, who is staring at the stark, congealing blood on his arm, whispering still, rocking slightly.
Sam continues to beg half-heartedly as he wraps Dean’s arm and clumsily swipes his own sleeve over Dean’s face, trying to get some of the blood off.
:::
“Once when I was maybe ten, I was getting something from a vending machine at this motel, and the machine was by the reception desk, right? And the owner of the place comes out of the bathroom while I’m getting my soda and he just swats me right on the ass as he walks by. Kind of raises his eyebrows at me, too, like I was supposed to get it. Dean wouldn’t let me out after that, not till Dad came back, maybe a week later.”
It was three am, and they both had class in the morning, but the stories were spilling out of them so easily now there was no stopping it.
“Christ,” said Jess, carding a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs up off his forehead. “What did you eat?” she added, after a moment.
“In those days, almost all junk,” Sam replied, somewhat thrown by the question.
“From where?”
“Dean would go and get it.”
“At the vending machine?”
He sat up then, found her shape in the darkness, debated turning on the light. “What are you getting at?” he asked her, face folded up into a deep frown.
“I’m just thinking,” she said, and he knew she really was, was just processing what she heard aloud, but it had left him so shaken he didn’t lie back down right away, kept his eyes on her. Sensing this, she let out a little breath and said, “Just think you’re lucky you had him, is all.”
“Of course I am,” said Sam immediately. “I’d have been screwed without him,” he added, alarmed to realize he’d sort of forgotten.
:::
Sam slips upstairs to call Bobby the minute Dean seems to have calmed down even a little bit, is relieved beyond expression when he picks up on the fourth ring.
“Please tell me you’re close,” he says, before Bobby can even say a word.
“Hello to you too,” Bobby grumbles, then says, “Yes, I am close, but this bitch is tricky. How’s Dean holding up?”
Sam pauses, wants to be delicate in his answer. Knows Dean means something particular to Bobby that Sam can’t quite parse out, knows Bobby is going to be measuring his every word against the knowledge that when Dean was gone, Sam abandoned Bobby too, and ran around with a demon who tricked him with astonishing ease (and when Sam was dead Dean stuck with Bobby, it would seem, except when he was doing something stupid and irreversible that landed him where he is right now).
He swallows. His resentment of Bobby is, he knows, wildly misplaced. If anyone has earned his patience, it’s Bobby, but right now, Sam’s brain is fried and his limbs are lead-heavy and his brother is downstairs, very possibly severing a major artery with his teeth and babbling about Hell.
“He’s going to be okay,” says Sam, with the kind of firmness that Bobby will be able to see through in an instant, the blustery confidence that betrays real fear beneath it. “Just please hurry.”
:::
The truly remarkable thing about Cas-the thing that floors him long after he’s gotten over the angel part-is that Cas knows exactly what he is, saw him in Hell, broken beyond repair, and seems to sort of like him anyways. It fills him with a strange, floaty feeling, something close to pride that isn’t, and a deep shame, because he knows he’s failed Cas more than once now, knows Cas has gone out on a limb for him and gotten very little back.
But he keeps coming back, keeps seeing Dean as a person worthy of grace, worth saving, even after he saw, must have seen, the way Dean had smiled, feral, as he tore and dug and broke and shred those twisted, mangled souls down in the Pit. Cas had seen, in that depraved shadow of a man, something worthy of redeeming.
Of course, it hadn’t been that simple. Dean is part of some great and terrible plan, and Cas’s faith in him is likely wearing thin these days. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Dean is a letdown even to God-a God he didn’t even really believe in-but he remembers what Sam said about praying, and the knowledge that he’s failed them all-Cas and Sam and the great freaking man in the sky-threatens to swallow him whole. Dean in the belly of the whale of his own making.
:::
Sam gets downstairs to find Dean curled in the corner, fingers digging into the cut he’d made before, rocking again. When he sees Sam his eyes go wide and blank with terror, and he begins to shout, or try to, his voice hoarse and mucus-thick, “No, no, please no, Alistair, you promised, you promised, I’ll be better I swear, you promised-”
He’s applying still more pressure to the cut and it’s begun seeping blood again, and Sam dashes to his side, crouches down, takes his brother’s face in his hands. “Dean. Dean, it’s me, okay, you’re safe. It’s not-it’s Sam, Dean. Sam.”
“No, no, no-no-no,” Dean moans, trying to scramble away, “oh God, please no, don’t. You fucking promised, please take him away, please, I’ll do anything, I mean it, please.” Sam pulls his hands away, snatches the bloody arm out from under Dean’s digging fingernails. “Please,” Dean sobs, “not him, not him, you promised. Anything, I’ll do anything, just not him, stop it please please please-”
He’s hyperventilating again, and something has just clicked in Sam’s head and he’s staring at Dean, his words finally registered. Not him, you promised. Dean didn’t think he was Alistair, he thought he was an illusion, some shadow of Sam cast down in the Pit to make it worse on Dean.
For a full thirty seconds Sam had to bite down on his fist to keep himself from screaming.
:::
Day Five
It had taken some time, after Jess and Stanford and the fights and the discomfort, for Sam to remember that to be in the car with Dean, chasing a monster or a horizon, was really an unparalleled joy. Sam did not delude himself, knew some part of it was just the same instinct that kept even the most fiercely independent of his classmates crawling back into their childhood beds and mothers’ arms at Christmas, but so what? He never had a childhood bed, he had an Impala, and he never had a mother, he had Dean, who when the dust settled loved him with something more than the requisite brotherly affection or the loyalty and devotion John had passed onto his boys as gospel. Dean really did love Sam, every part of him, would probably have taken a shine to him even if they’d been strangers at any point in their lives. It made Sam feel a twinge of guilt sometimes, because he wasn’t sure how much of his love and devotion for Dean was just learned behavior as opposed to that open, honest, total love Dean felt-a bear hug personified in a brother who loved Sam so totally it would be his own undoing. But far more often than he felt guilty Sam allowed himself to simply bask in it, in that rare and sunny delight of being unconditionally loved, and-to be fair-of being home.
:::
Dean tried not to think of Sam in Hell, tried to keep the two totally separate in his mind, but there was nothing for it, once the pain got to be beyond anything he knew how to handle or even comprehend, once he found himself trying to sink back into some kind of peaceful memory, and soon enough Alistair got wise to this and found ways to fuck it all up, tear it apart, turn it upside down, mutilate it. All but one memory, one dim, distant recollection of the hum and gentle rocking of a moving car, of Sam, maybe four, curled almost all the way into his lap, his high sweet baby breath coming in warm puffs against Dean’s upper arm, his small fingers grasping at Dean’s jacket, the smell of their father, cigarettes and whisky and grease and gunpowder, filling the car, the boy in his lap smelling only of soap and something scrubbed clean and the tiniest bit sour, the Sam-smell that had clung to him since he was a newborn and clung to him now, under layers of motel soap and metallic blood and the clinging smell of gasoline, persistent, unyielding, the ultimate comfort-the last lingering traces of an innocent Sam.
:::
Bobby leaves a voicemail to say it can’t be long now, he’s closing in, and Sam can’t really focus on the words, drifts back downstairs as if he’s in a dream, as if he is separated from his own movements through the house by a veil. Coming back into the panic room he braces himself for the worst and finds it, more or less. Dean has no idea where he is, and is gasping and sort of sobbing and breathing in one motion, and begging still to die, though he’s stopped trying to do it himself. He thinks he’s in Hell, Sam’s pretty sure, or else thinks that the company of Hell has arrived to return him there, where he’s evidently meant to be. He thinks Alistair there, seems to almost welcome him; if he notices Sam at all, he thinks it’s an illusion, and once or twice, he lets out a strangled call for Dad or “help!” or Cas or, once, Mom. Helpless and useless and crawling out of his skin, Sam sits as close as Dean lets him get, waits it out, keeps up a weary litany of promises he can’t possibly keep, pleads with his brother, remember me, I need you, remember your little Sammy, I need you here to stay.
:::
He’s never said it, and he likely never will, but he was going to ask Dean to be his best man. Or that was the plan, anyways. Maybe he courage would have failed him. Maybe he’d have tried, and the conversation would have fallen apart. Maybe the fear of the obvious question (“What about Dad?”) would have kept him from asking at all. But he had planned it, had pictured his brother in a nice suit, face alight with a can-you-believe-this grin, flirting with the bridesmaids and giving an embarrassing toast, dancing with Jess and her mother and twirling them both, laughing boyishly all the while; secretly slipping a duffel of ammo and dirty magazines into the car just before they sped off, kissing behind the window reading Just Married. He still has this image in his head, of a photograph, Jess in white, Sam in a tux, their arms around each other, Jess’s best friend at her side, Sam’s brother at his. He doesn’t give it much thought, anymore, hasn’t in years, but he can honestly still picture that photograph, maybe a little faded from its place in the sun in the apartment or house that he and Jess would share, framed in silver. He can see it if he strains, propped up somewhere special, a mantle or a coffee table. That’s our wedding day, he can hear himself saying. There I am with Jess, and there’s Lori, maid of honor, and there’s my brother Dean. The best man.
:::
“As long as I’m around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you.”
It’s a promise Dean made again and again, in a hundred different variations, and he probably broke every single one, but he keeps promising. He’s well aware that this is the definition of insanity-doing the same thing again and again and yielding the same results-but his sanity is not exactly his best asset these days anyways. He’ll never stop trying to save his Sammy, and he can’t, is the thing. If he stops-if Sam wants him to stop-he has nothing. He’s never known life beyond his dad and his brother and the faded imprint of his mom, a flickering beacon of warmth and safety, one he’s tried his best to emulate for Sammy when he was small. He doesn’t know if any of it did any good-Sam certainly doesn’t seem too happy these days-but still he can’t stop trying. He doesn’t much care if it makes him pathetic, because Sam is genuinely worth it to him. Sam is his job, always, and he will do his job, but more than that, Sam is wonderful. Sam is warmth, and sweetness, and something good in a crap world. A reason to get home on time, to get home at all. To fix dinner, make the room someplace bright and warm and safe to sleep in. They don’t stay in the same rooms anymore, but it’s still true, it’s still generally enough. He can keep going even when the tide of memories is rising, when some combination of Hell and self-hatred do their damnedest to pull him under.
Most days he’s pretty sure it’s the only reason he’s still breathing: Sam is.
:::
Bobby calls, he must, to say it’s over, but Sam doesn’t need to be told. He’s aware the second it’s done that something’s happened, from the way Dean’s frantic rocking stops, the way his rough keening cuts off abruptly.
“Dean?” he asks frantically, launching himself at his brother, terrified for a moment that Dean has found a way to kill himself without Sam noticing.
Dean is blinking up at him, bleary and exhausted, and Sam puts a hand to his forehead and finds his fever broken. “Right,” he says, “right, okay, c’mere.” He hauls Dean to his feet, drags him to the bed, and collapses there, his brother half on top of him, damp with sweat and shivery still.
“Dean, listen, you’re alright now, yeah?” Sam pushes himself up against the head of the bed, allows Dean to tuck himself under Sam’s arm, his head back at Sam’s shoulder, his nose back at Sam’s collar. Sam’s hand finds its way back to Dean’s head, and he holds fast-doesn’t stroke through Dean’s hair like Jess used to do his, just holds his hand there, maintains a reassuring pressure as Dean’s congested breath finally evens out and he goes mercifully slack against Sam.
“Yeah,” he says, into Dean’s familiar smelling hair-beneath the smells of sweat and blood and vomit there’s Dean, reliable, smelling like motor oil and something rough-and-sweet that is uniquely Dean’s. “Yeah, you’re okay.”
:::