The Competitive Exclusion Principle States
Title: The Competitive Exclusion Principle States (or scenes from an alternate universe wherein Sam stole the Winchester boys in 1987)
Rating: PG-13
Words: 5,446
Spoilers: Vague, but for all aired episodes.
Warnings: Language, briefly mentioned child abuse, briefly mentioned neglect.
Summary: Basically picked up where " Reverse Engineering" left off, but Cas never comes for Sam.
Neurotic author's notes: This isn't really fic so much as scenes I wrote to make myself happy during finals week that became something akin to a fic. Please ignore all the timey-wimey issues and implications regarding Sam and Sammy coexisting, 2012!Dean, etc., etc. This is sort of just mindless self-indulgence (hence the slight woobiefication of Dean, for which I apologize on bended knee).
Also: The competetive exclusion principle states that two species competing for the same resources cannot coexist if other ecological factors are constant. I'm a nerdy, nerdy nerd. Cut text is from Mitch Albom. (God, remember The Five People You Meet in Heaven? Somebody should do a Supernatural/Five People You Meet in Heaven crossover of some kind.)
John makes it back before Fred does, which is somewhat troubling until Sam considers once again that Fred Jones was a man in the habit of giving beer to elementary school students. After about an hour Dean woke from his little nap on the porch and invited Sam haltingly inside, shyness and wariness turning the simple invitation into a red-faced, stammering affair Sam doesn’t know how to help Dean with. In the end, he tramps inside after little Dean, who immediately finds Sammy and engages him in another bouncy, little-boy conversation peppered with Dean’s deliberate ths. Sam stands in the doorway, awkward and uncertain, and tries to taper down the overwhelming wave of nostalgia as he stands in Fred’s house-Remember, he reminds yourself, they can’t know you’ve ever been here. But of course he has-he can see the table where he and Dean ate breakfast and cleaned guns, the stairway that goes up to a squat little hallway with three doors-Fred’s room, bathroom, the guest room with the rickety trundle bed where he and Dean slept. He can see the treacherously protruding counter edge by the doorway to the kitchen where he and Dean had both clipped their shoulders and, as they grew, their hips countless times.
He’s trying his damnedest not to look at little Sammy. It’s too weird, and makes him a little queasy. Instead he let’s Dean’s enthusiastic, impossibly high voice wash over him, mildly surprised to find it’s a comfort even now, deep in his bones. Everything’s okay, Sammy, I’m right here.
It’s not long before Dean appears and makes his way to the kitchen. After a moment he pauses, turns, and after a moment of squirmy hesitation calls out a tentative, “Um, mis’er Sam?”
Sam jolts, looks down at Dean, who is diminutive and shy in a way that is totally foreign to him, and it’s a wrench to remember once again that he is a stranger to his boy. “Y-yeah, Dean?” he replies, pleased with his voice comes out even.
“I’m, um, I’m makin’ lunch for Sammy, for m’brother,” he mumbles, like Sam could have forgotten who Sammy is. “D’you want me to make some for you?”
“I can make it, Dean,” he says, brushing aside a thousand memories of Dean clambering cheerfully around motel kitchenettes and rental house kitchens, fixing meals for the both of them even long after Sam was old enough to cook for himself. Stop thinking of Dean, he tells himself, think of a kid who’s eight and tired enough to pass out on the porch.
“N-no, is’okay,” says Dean hurriedly, “I can do it, I can, I just wondered if you, um, if you wanted some? I’m gon’ just make Sammy some soup.”
Sam opens his mouth to protest, then considers. He’s got Dean’s tenuous trust, but he is a stranger, and insisting he be allowed to cook for the boys might set off some major alarm bells in Dean’s hyper vigilant little head, and the last thing Sam wants is to get booted. To be lost in the past with your family is one thing; to be lost in 1987 is another thing entirely.
“I’d-I’d love some soup, Dean,” he says, and Dean nods and scampers into the kitchen.
He kind of hums to himself as he cooks, which is something he’d stopped doing by the time he was a teenager. Sam is astonished to think he’d forgotten about it at all. The soup is good, and Dean makes a lot, presumably in an effort to impress Sam. Conversation is easy and mostly between the boys. Sammy accepts Sam’s presence and doesn’t pay him much attention, preferring to chatter at Dean; it’s pretty clear he’s accustomed to all of his brother’s attention and likes it that way. It is incredibly surreal for Sam to watch him, almost dreamlike; he’s earnest and round and sort of bouncy, and a little boy in a way Sam could swear he never had been.
Which, he realizes rather abruptly, is not a very fair thought for him to have at all, not when Dean tried so hard.
He clears his throat. “This soup is wonderful, Dean,” he says, and Dean turns pink again and ducks his head, mumbles a “thanks” in the direction of his knees.
“Yeah, Dean, ’s yummy in my tummy,” Sammy sing-songs, rubbing his plump little belly for good will. Dean’s delicate, freckled little face slits into an enormous grin, and Sam is pleased with himself.
They end up in the living room, Sammy on the couch with a coloring book and careworn box of Crayola crayons, Dean and Sam on the floor with Dean’s homework spread in front of them. He’s only in the second grade, and it’s just September, so it doesn’t look like much to Sam, but Dean is worrying his lip and toying with the corners of his assignments. Sam knows Dean is plenty smart, and wonders guiltily if his presence is making Dean nervous. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter, because a familiar rumble shakes the house and Sammy lets out a delighted squeal of “Daddy!” and then both boys are up and racing each other to the door.
In the orange, late-afternoon September light, John Winchester looks like an angel, backlit and big and smelling like leather and smoke, beat to hell and exhausted and stooping low to greet his boys. Sam waits in the hall, awkwardly, as John straightens, Sammy on his hip, and he isn’t prepared for the way his heart stutters in his chest at the sight of his father, younger, clean-shaven, alive, with his boys at his side and his grin coming more easily than Sam can ever recall.
“Dad,” says Dean, “there’s another-um, there’s a, there’s somebody to see you.”
But John has, of course, already noticed Sam, and is setting Sammy down slowly, eyes on the intruder. “I can see that, Dean,” he says, his tone steely. “Take Sammy into the den.” Dean obeys, ducking his head and taking Sammy’s hand. John strides forward, shoulders back, and for the first time in his life Sam gets the John Winchester glare as a stranger. It turns out it’s very different from the version he reserved for his sons, and it’s at once immensely unsettling and much less frightening than its more intimate counterpart. He’s lightheaded just watching it.
“I haven’t been here long,” is all he can think of to say. “I need some help of a very peculiar kind. Word was you can help.” It’s astonishingly easy, Sam reflects distantly, to fall back into the rough, clipped vernacular of John’s generation of hunters.
“Whose word?” growls John.
Sam panics briefly before he tries, “Heard a rumor at Harvelle’s.” It’s a risk, he knows it, but as his brain frantically calculates-but John’s face relaxes a bit.
“What’s your name?” John says, inspecting Sam critically.
“Sam.” Winchester. Campbell. Singer. Plant. Van Halen. Angus. Nugent. Richardson. “Sam Moore,” says Sam.
“What’s your problem, Sam Moore?” says John, his voice with that hard edge he used to use when he was trying to order a surly, teenaged Sam around.
“Crossroad demons,” says Sam, and then the lies come easily. It’s natural, he discovers to his surprise, to make John like him. It’s a bit of a shock, as he’d honestly believed the two of them were destined to bump heads no matter what. Maybe John recognizes something of his kin in Sam he can’t identity, maybe he appreciates Sam’s competency or maybe Sam just knows instinctively how to appeal to him, but in any case soon they’re all sitting down to dinner, and for the first time in his life Sam is having a beer with his father and is being treated almost like an equal.
His good mood doesn’t last, though, as John’s attention is finally torn away from the two Sams at the table to settle on Dean. It’s clear he’s pissed Dean let a stranger into the house, and his every comment in Dean’s direction, jovial and casual though they may seem to a stranger, manages to be cutting in some small way. Sam can feel something hard and furious building in his chest as Dean folds further and further into himself, and by the time they’re doing the dishes and John tells Dean to “use some elbow grease for once” Sam has to intervene.
“I can do my own dishes, it’s okay,” he says, and when Dean turns to look at him, his eyes wide and calculating, Sam nods encouragingly. “Go watch cartoons with your brother,” he says, and he can feel John bristle as someone else deigns to order his boys around. Or order anybody around in John’s presence, Sam thinks bitterly.
Dean is glancing uncertainly between his father and this mysterious visitor, and when John takes a step forward Dean about leaps out of his skin and seizes the dishrag back up. Sam, recognizing he’s overstepped his bounds and desperate not to be kicked out of the house, ducks his head and manages an apology. Later, sitting in the kitchen with John, drinking a beer and swapping stories and scars (here is the jagged werewolf claw scar on John’s forearm, and here is the puckered place where the Impala’s emergency brake had dug into Sam’s hip in the crash that would one day, in a roundabout way, kill John himself-though tonight Sam amends the tale, spins a tale involving a Lady in White), Sam is so consumed with affection for his father, with nostalgia and with yearning, desperate love, that it all seems so terribly forgivable.
A day and a half later, the evening before John disappears off to Michigan with his boys in the hands of a virtual stranger and an MIA alcoholic, Sam is sitting on the couch between Sammy and Dean, watching their cartoons, when he notices four oblong bruises on Dean’s arm and his heart stutters. He knows those bruises. Dean hasn’t done anything wrong. John has been drinking almost nonstop. It adds up in a second. He doesn’t remember this, not when they were still so small, but then, he remembers the ever-present threat, unspoken, and it had to come from somewhere.
Sam goes to run a hand through Dean’s hair and Dean squirms away on instinct, and Sam’s decision is made for him.
:::
He chickens out, of course, thinking of science fiction’s destroyed timelines and of money and school and of Dean hollering and Sammy crying and he just stays and tries to fix what’s broken in John’s wake. Dean is still shy, Sammy still painfully serious for so small a boy, and Sam still feels like the world might explode when he scoops little Sammy into his arms, but it never does. Sammy just gets used to him, starts calling him “big Sam,” and spends most of his time trailing behind Dean. Sam stops thinking of him as “little me” and starts thinking of him as Sammy. Considering the implications of this makes his head ache, so he doesn’t much.
Dean, for his part, devotes an astonishing amount of his time to Sammy, and calls Sam “Mr. Sam” and doesn’t seem to expect anything. Sam tries to treat him like a little boy, to hug or help him the way he does Sammy, but Dean ducks away, the fleeting intimacy of their first meeting giving way to embarrassment and a steely determination to take care of his brother all on his own. He does let Sam do the laundry, and help with his homework, which gives Sam an opportunity to marvel at just how much potential Dean had really had if he’d ever tried at school.
He does try, he tells himself firmly, watching Dean worry his lip as he sounds out a word like a first grader. His intuitive grasp of math and science is somewhat extraordinary; he can cook three meals a day and fire a gun, can chatter, in rare moments of openness, to Sam about the Impala, but he’d fallen rather badly behind in reading comprehension, and Sam’s attempts to help are usually met with more embarrassed stubbornness than anything else.
“Sorry ’m stupid,” he tells Sam once, and sounds it, and when Sam tells him he isn’t stupid, not even a little bit, Dean tucks his chin against his chest and says “Yessir” like it was an order.
Nine days after John left, Sam catches Sammy in the act of decorating the bathroom mirror with toothpaste. He’s barely got past an indignant “Sammy!” before Dean is there, launching himself between them, pulling Sammy down off the counter and fixing Sam with what is clearly his best imitation of a threatening glare, despite the fact that his whole body is rigid with what might be fear.
Sam takes a step forward and Dean panics. “I was supposed to be watching him,” he says, sounding nothing, nothing, like the Dean Sam knows or remembers, “’s not his fault, okay, I was supposed to be watching him and he’s just a baby and-”
He’s breathing hard, and Sam is reminded like a slap that he is a stranger, and a very tall one, and Dean’s whole life has taught him to trust only his father and brother. He raises a placating hand and Dean flinches. “Don’t hit him!” he shrieks. “Don’t, okay, I was supposed to be watching him!”
Sam wants to throw up, and wants to apologize, and wants to gather Dean into his arms, and when he doesn’t do anything Dean pulls Sammy to his side and ducks out. Sam tries to follow but Dean clearly can’t handle that, so Sam goes and sits on the porch with the paper. Sam doesn’t so much as look at Sam for the rest of the day, makes himself scarce, but when Sam goes back into the bathroom to clean up Sammy’s mess he finds the job done for him.
Fuck it, he thinks, staring at a long streak Dean had accidentally left on the mirror, fuck it, I don’t care I’m getting them out I’m getting them out I’m getting them out.
On the twelfth day of John’s absence, Sam writes him a very long letter, explaining just about everything, and even apologizing, for taking his sons. He reads it twice, folds it up, puts it in an envelope labeled “John,” sets it on the kitchen table, and goes to pack a bag.
An hour later, he comes back downstairs, snatches the envelope up, and burns it over the sink. Then he goes and gets Dean. “Pack a bag,” he says, “one for you and one for Sammy. I’ll help.”
“Where are we going?” says Dean wearily. He’s used to this.
“Away,” says Sam, his blood rushing in his ears, his limbs strangely weightless. This is the stupidest thing he’s ever done. And he started the apocalypse once.
:::
His first instinct is to go to Palo Alto, but the twin realizations that this is probably a terrible idea and that, even if Jessica were there, she’d be four years old get him thinking rationally. He’s standing in a bus station in Maple Heights, Ohio, with two nervous, silent boys in raggedy coats and two stuffed army surplus duffles, and he needs a fucking plan.
He can’t go to Sioux Falls, or Blue Earth, or Lincoln. All his old caretakers-alive again, he thinks, his heart thrilling, alive like Dad and Jess and, Christ, Jimmy Novak and every other innocent who died on Sam’s watch-would be calling for his blood, if John had even worked out that the boys were gone yet.
He buys a ticket to Iowa because it’s the cheapest, then buys the boys a milkshake. The lady who sells it to them tells him his sons are adorable. Sam waits for her to say the littler one is his spitting image, but she doesn’t.
Dean is beginning to panic, Sam can see, and it’s easy to understand why. Sammy is used to carting around without explanation, trusts his brother, sees no reason to be afraid, but Dean is plainly wondering where the hell his father is.
Stop looking at me like that, Sam thinks, panicking a bit, I’m saving you from Hell, Dean, I’m saving you from so many terrible fucking things. Please let me save you this time, Dean.
They bundle onto the bus together, and after Sammy is asleep Sam bends low next to Dean’s ear and asks if he’s okay. Dean, who has been staring resolutely out the window with one small arm curled around Sammy, turns to him. “Where’s my dad?” he asks, in a high, thin voice.
“He’s hunting,” says Sam, stupidly, “that’s what he does.” Dean blinks and Sam licks his lips. “I’m going to take care of you for a little while now,” says Sam, and Dean’s eyes fill with tears.
“Is-did my dad-I-I’m sorry,” he stutters, and Sam reaches for him but he flinches away. Dean gives two or three truly spectacular sniffles before he calms himself down enough to address Sam again. “Did-did he-did Daddy die?” he whispers.
“No, Dean,” says Sam, and Dean’s lower lip trembles.
“Is he mad at me?” Dean’s face is open and desperate, and Sam’s heart is writhing around in his chest and he feels like he’s going to puke. What the fuck am I doing, he thinks, and this time Dean lets him reach out and card a hand through his hair.
“No, he’s not,” says Sam, firmly, “but he wasn’t-you need somebody to take care of you and Sammy.”
“I take care of Sammy,” says Dean, automatically, with total certainty. Like he’d say his own name. My name is Dean I take care of Sammy. “That’s my job.”
Don’t get mad at me. Don’t you do that. I had to. I had to look out for you. That’s my job.
Sam thinks his heart might be exploding in his chest.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll take care of you. That’ll be my job.”
:::
He rehearses, sometimes, what he’d say to his father. Plays it out in his head. Considers telling him everything.
Your wife told me once, he imagines saying, that she never wanted her kids as hunters.
He swallows that thought down in an instance. Not even John deserves that, and anyways Sam’s not sure he could ever say it in a steady voice.
:::
He writes Bobby a twenty-page letter and keeps it with him always. The moment to send it will come, he thinks, and he’ll send it then.
I would never deprive Dean and Sammy of you, it ends, and I hope you won’t either. I could never repay you all I already owe you, but I hope there’s still room in your heart for the Winchesters.
Yours very sincerely,
Sam Winchester
:::
Dean breaks down on a Thursday.
They’re still in Des Moines, and Sam is making plans to keep going west. He’s hustled up a decent amount of money playing pool and they’re in a motel so scuzzy Sam is terrified to leave the boys alone. All the money he had on him is already sunk on bus tickets and fast food. On Tuesday he’d won an exceptionally lucky poker game with Dean and Sam playing some childishly edited version of checkers in the same room, and if people thought he was odd or a bastard at least they didn’t try to beat him to death in front of his two little sons.
Sammy is watching cartoons and Dean has been in the bathroom long enough that Sam sneaks in to check on him, finds him sitting fully clothed in the tub, hugging himself into a ball, his face buried in his knees.
“Dean,” he rasps, dropping down to his knees, and Dean gives a full body flinch and then lets out a sob so wrenching Sam wants to puke. “Dean, buddy, please-”
“I’m sorry,” Dean howls into his knees, and Sam takes a moment to be grateful he shut the door behind him, and Sammy is engrossed in his cartoons. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” Dean is choking, still hiding his face, rocking back and forth minutely.
“It’s alright,” Sam blurts, clambering into the tub on instinct, horrified at this display. “Dean, stop, it’s okay, don’t be sorry, everything’s okay.” He puts a tentative hand on Dean’s shoulder, and quite abruptly Dean twists and buries his face in Sam’s chest, sobbing unrestrainedly and apologizing frantically between great hiccuping breaths and giant sobs, and Sam forgets this is brother entirely and pulls the kid into his lap, rocks him, cradles the back of his head. “It’s okay, shh-shh, calm down, baby, it’s okay, calm down, take a breath,” he whispers, bending his head low to Dean’s ear, rubbing his back.
“I’m-and Daddy said-and I-Sammy-what did-please can I go home?” Dean finally manages, and on some strange paternal instinct Sam holds him closer.
“I’m gonna take care of you,” he says, “okay, it’s gonna be alright. I’m gonna take care of you, I gotcha,” he coos, and he knows he’s parroting Dean’s own words back at him, echoing a thousand platitudes, replaying countless nightmares and injuries and hallucinates and that one time just after Jess died when Dean had found Sam curled in a ball between the bed and the bed stand calling Jess’s voicemail again and again with tears streaming down his face.
Dean is pushing back and setting his small hands against Sam’s chest and looking up at him. His little face is blotched and tear-streaked, and Sam is overwhelmed with so much affection it sort of hurts. Nobody is ever going to hurt you, he thinks fiercely, still rubbing Dean’s back, nobody nobody nobody I will tear them to shreds before they touch you.
He wonders if this is how Dean felt right before he sold his soul in Cold Oak.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says, “Dean, you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t. I’m just. I’m going to take care of you.”
“B-but why?” Dean whispers, voice hoarse from crying.
“Because you’re a good kid, Dean,” says Sam firmly, “and somebody ought to.”
:::
John finds them in Wisconsin. It’s been almost two months. Sam doesn’t know how long it took John to work out that they were gone-he seriously doubts Fred Jones is all that quick on the uptake-but he’s been covering his tracks damn well (it helps that he, thirty-year-old Sam Winchester, very literally doesn’t exist in 1987, and neither does Sam Moore) and they’ve managed to make the down payment on the world’s tiniest apartment. It’s cramped and on the first floor of a dilapidated building in a terrible neighborhood but Dean’s in school and Sam’s in daycare and Sam has two terrible jobs as Sam Richardson and the landlord takes pity on the sweet, scrawny Richardson boys and looks after the boys before Sam gets home from work.
The boys share the bed and Sam sleeps on a haphazard pile of cushions and plastic rods they’re optimistically calling a futon near the door. He hears the distant and familiar rumble of the Impala even in his sleep, and is outside in his bare feet with his gun drawn before John is even all the way out of the car.
It’s dawn and they stare at each other for a long moment. Sam is struck with the terrible thought that he is the only person on earth who will ever fully understand the confrontation that is about to happen, and his heart is suddenly aching for Dean-his Dean, older Dean-so desperately it nearly makes him stagger.
John’s gun is out as well. “Give. Me. My. Sons,” he growls, and Sam knows that if he hadn’t brought his gun out into the chilly morning he’d be dead already.
“No,” says Sam, simply. “I’m taking care of them.” He doesn’t care if John thinks he’s a demon or a rapist or a delusional sociopath. He really doesn’t. He cares about his boys.
“Who the hell are you?” John spits.
“I’m somebody who gives a damn about those kids,” he replies, not caring how utterly unfair it is, “and I have seen shit you can’t even imagine, John Winchester, and if you ever loved them for one second you will turn around and let them be.”
“You crazy fucker,” says John, with a disbelieving laugh. He cocks the gun. “I don’t know what you’re on, but if you get gone right now this can all be over. I’ll take the boys and you and me can go our separate ways.” Sam knows he’s lying. Can see he’s got the killing look already. And he really doesn’t care. “But if you don’t move in the next three seconds, your brains will be all over the pavement and I’ll have my sons either way.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” says Sam, cocking his own gun, and it is in that moment that he realizes he’d do it. In a second.
He would shoot John Winchester in the head, for Sammy and for Dean. The realization fills him with a pain so profound and unnameable he feels his eyes welling up.
“Try me,” says John, and Sam is thinking about those days John came home from a long absence, smelling so familiar and warm, remembers his scruff on Sam’s cheek as he held him close, remembers his father’s smile and his laugh and the way he looked when he rolled up his sleeves and the division soccer trophy he kept and the goofy way he sometimes sang in the car and the strange tilt to his familiar smile the last time Sam ever spoke to him, and he doesn’t want to shoot his father.
“John, please,” he says, “you have to believe me. I’m trying to-” His voice catches, and something must show in his face, something of a desperate man or of a Winchester, because John’s deadly glare flickers for a second. “I’m trying to save you,” says Sam, and it’s not a lie, “I’m trying to save you, and Dean, and-and Sammy, and I swear to you, I will never hurt them. I’ll never, ever hurt them. I’ve-I know-” There might be tears in his eyes now, and John’s face is a muddle of fury and confusion. “If I told you I have seen the way this ends,” he says, voice tight, “and it doesn’t-and I’m trying to fix it, would you believe me?”
John wants to say no, Sam can tell, but his finger isn’t on the trigger anymore. “What are you doing?” he says softly, and Sam shakes his head. A few tears tumble down his face and he almost laughs at the absurdity of it all. He’s remembering those times arguments with his father would reach such a pitch he’d cry in sheer frustration, remembers the way his father would soften or else call him a girl, remembers how Dean would plant himself between them and drag Sam away, desperate as always to make them stop it.
“Just trying to fix it,” says Sam, and he’s aware he sounds like a little boy.
John’s brow is furrowed and his jaw is working. You’re going to die, Sam wants to tell him, to save your son. It will be honorable, and terrible. You’re going to die, and your boys will die and come back in pieces of themselves. I’m going to do so many terrible things, Dad. You’re going to do bad things to children. Your sons are going to get lost, Dad, and they’re not going to be able to find their way back. Dean is going to die, Daddy, again and again and I can’t keep losing him. He’s all I ever had.
Sam is shaking, every inch of him, and if John wanted to take him down now he could, easily. He doesn’t. He lowers the gun, and Sam does the same.
“Am I ever going to see my sons again, Sam?” John asks, in that same resigned tone he used the last time Sam saw him. The voice he used when he knew he was going to die.
“I don’t know,” Sam whispers, and they stand there and look at one another in the thin morning light for a long time.
John’s face is a mass of grief and defeat, and Sam wants to vomit, but he doesn’t know what to do. He only knows he will not let things go the way they did the first time. He can’t. Not after everything.
A car alarm starts up distantly, and John turns, makes his way to the Impala. He pulls the door open. Pauses, looks at Sam, who’s still staring after them dumbly. “Goodbye for now, then?” he says.
“His name is Azazel,” says Sam faintly.
John stills. “Excuse me?”
“His name is Azazel,” says Sam again, more clearly this time, “the one who killed your wife. He killed you. Almost fifteen years ago now. Your wife made a deal to save you. She came from a family of hunters. He was making a lot of deals at the time. He’s building an army. Children whose parents he’s made bargains with. He comes for them on their six month birthdays. I don’t know where he is now. He’s marking kids, though. There’s a revolution underway in Hell. His-his name is Azazel.”
John is staring at him like he can’t quite process what he’s hearing. “Azazel,” he repeats.
“Yes,” says Sam, “and I’m sure.”
John looks at him for another long moment. “Who are you?” he breathes.
“I’m Sam,” he says softly, like that explains it all, and maybe it does, “and I’m trying to make it right.”
John stares for another long moment. The car alarm stops at long last. John takes a deep breath, and Sam swipes once at his eyes, blindly.
“You keep your head down, Sam,” his father tells him, “and look out for those boys.”
“Yes, sir,” says Sam thickly, and something in John’s face flickers with pain and recognition and then he’s gone.
:::
Sam watches his father drive away in the only home he’s never known, then goes back inside. His boys are in the bed, rumpled and tangled together. Sammy’s curled around his brother, fast asleep, but Dean’s awake, watching Sam with wide eyes. Sam makes his way to the bed and sits down. Dean blinks sleepily and rubs his eye.
“Are you okay, Sam?” he says softly.
“Yeah,” Sam replies, and then he leans foreword and presses his lips to Dean’s forehead in a brief, hard kiss. He closes his eyes, breathes in his brother’s Dean-smell, and when he pulls back Dean is looking up at him, bewildered.
“Are you sure?” he whispers, almost conspiratorially, like he’s promising not to tell anybody, like Sam can confide some secret fear in him.
“Yeah, baby, I am,” says Sam, and he runs a hand through Dean’s hair. “Go back to sleep, Dean. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Rating: PG-13
Words: 5,446
Spoilers: Vague, but for all aired episodes.
Warnings: Language, briefly mentioned child abuse, briefly mentioned neglect.
Summary: Basically picked up where " Reverse Engineering" left off, but Cas never comes for Sam.
Neurotic author's notes: This isn't really fic so much as scenes I wrote to make myself happy during finals week that became something akin to a fic. Please ignore all the timey-wimey issues and implications regarding Sam and Sammy coexisting, 2012!Dean, etc., etc. This is sort of just mindless self-indulgence (hence the slight woobiefication of Dean, for which I apologize on bended knee).
Also: The competetive exclusion principle states that two species competing for the same resources cannot coexist if other ecological factors are constant. I'm a nerdy, nerdy nerd. Cut text is from Mitch Albom. (God, remember The Five People You Meet in Heaven? Somebody should do a Supernatural/Five People You Meet in Heaven crossover of some kind.)
John makes it back before Fred does, which is somewhat troubling until Sam considers once again that Fred Jones was a man in the habit of giving beer to elementary school students. After about an hour Dean woke from his little nap on the porch and invited Sam haltingly inside, shyness and wariness turning the simple invitation into a red-faced, stammering affair Sam doesn’t know how to help Dean with. In the end, he tramps inside after little Dean, who immediately finds Sammy and engages him in another bouncy, little-boy conversation peppered with Dean’s deliberate ths. Sam stands in the doorway, awkward and uncertain, and tries to taper down the overwhelming wave of nostalgia as he stands in Fred’s house-Remember, he reminds yourself, they can’t know you’ve ever been here. But of course he has-he can see the table where he and Dean ate breakfast and cleaned guns, the stairway that goes up to a squat little hallway with three doors-Fred’s room, bathroom, the guest room with the rickety trundle bed where he and Dean slept. He can see the treacherously protruding counter edge by the doorway to the kitchen where he and Dean had both clipped their shoulders and, as they grew, their hips countless times.
He’s trying his damnedest not to look at little Sammy. It’s too weird, and makes him a little queasy. Instead he let’s Dean’s enthusiastic, impossibly high voice wash over him, mildly surprised to find it’s a comfort even now, deep in his bones. Everything’s okay, Sammy, I’m right here.
It’s not long before Dean appears and makes his way to the kitchen. After a moment he pauses, turns, and after a moment of squirmy hesitation calls out a tentative, “Um, mis’er Sam?”
Sam jolts, looks down at Dean, who is diminutive and shy in a way that is totally foreign to him, and it’s a wrench to remember once again that he is a stranger to his boy. “Y-yeah, Dean?” he replies, pleased with his voice comes out even.
“I’m, um, I’m makin’ lunch for Sammy, for m’brother,” he mumbles, like Sam could have forgotten who Sammy is. “D’you want me to make some for you?”
“I can make it, Dean,” he says, brushing aside a thousand memories of Dean clambering cheerfully around motel kitchenettes and rental house kitchens, fixing meals for the both of them even long after Sam was old enough to cook for himself. Stop thinking of Dean, he tells himself, think of a kid who’s eight and tired enough to pass out on the porch.
“N-no, is’okay,” says Dean hurriedly, “I can do it, I can, I just wondered if you, um, if you wanted some? I’m gon’ just make Sammy some soup.”
Sam opens his mouth to protest, then considers. He’s got Dean’s tenuous trust, but he is a stranger, and insisting he be allowed to cook for the boys might set off some major alarm bells in Dean’s hyper vigilant little head, and the last thing Sam wants is to get booted. To be lost in the past with your family is one thing; to be lost in 1987 is another thing entirely.
“I’d-I’d love some soup, Dean,” he says, and Dean nods and scampers into the kitchen.
He kind of hums to himself as he cooks, which is something he’d stopped doing by the time he was a teenager. Sam is astonished to think he’d forgotten about it at all. The soup is good, and Dean makes a lot, presumably in an effort to impress Sam. Conversation is easy and mostly between the boys. Sammy accepts Sam’s presence and doesn’t pay him much attention, preferring to chatter at Dean; it’s pretty clear he’s accustomed to all of his brother’s attention and likes it that way. It is incredibly surreal for Sam to watch him, almost dreamlike; he’s earnest and round and sort of bouncy, and a little boy in a way Sam could swear he never had been.
Which, he realizes rather abruptly, is not a very fair thought for him to have at all, not when Dean tried so hard.
He clears his throat. “This soup is wonderful, Dean,” he says, and Dean turns pink again and ducks his head, mumbles a “thanks” in the direction of his knees.
“Yeah, Dean, ’s yummy in my tummy,” Sammy sing-songs, rubbing his plump little belly for good will. Dean’s delicate, freckled little face slits into an enormous grin, and Sam is pleased with himself.
They end up in the living room, Sammy on the couch with a coloring book and careworn box of Crayola crayons, Dean and Sam on the floor with Dean’s homework spread in front of them. He’s only in the second grade, and it’s just September, so it doesn’t look like much to Sam, but Dean is worrying his lip and toying with the corners of his assignments. Sam knows Dean is plenty smart, and wonders guiltily if his presence is making Dean nervous. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter, because a familiar rumble shakes the house and Sammy lets out a delighted squeal of “Daddy!” and then both boys are up and racing each other to the door.
In the orange, late-afternoon September light, John Winchester looks like an angel, backlit and big and smelling like leather and smoke, beat to hell and exhausted and stooping low to greet his boys. Sam waits in the hall, awkwardly, as John straightens, Sammy on his hip, and he isn’t prepared for the way his heart stutters in his chest at the sight of his father, younger, clean-shaven, alive, with his boys at his side and his grin coming more easily than Sam can ever recall.
“Dad,” says Dean, “there’s another-um, there’s a, there’s somebody to see you.”
But John has, of course, already noticed Sam, and is setting Sammy down slowly, eyes on the intruder. “I can see that, Dean,” he says, his tone steely. “Take Sammy into the den.” Dean obeys, ducking his head and taking Sammy’s hand. John strides forward, shoulders back, and for the first time in his life Sam gets the John Winchester glare as a stranger. It turns out it’s very different from the version he reserved for his sons, and it’s at once immensely unsettling and much less frightening than its more intimate counterpart. He’s lightheaded just watching it.
“I haven’t been here long,” is all he can think of to say. “I need some help of a very peculiar kind. Word was you can help.” It’s astonishingly easy, Sam reflects distantly, to fall back into the rough, clipped vernacular of John’s generation of hunters.
“Whose word?” growls John.
Sam panics briefly before he tries, “Heard a rumor at Harvelle’s.” It’s a risk, he knows it, but as his brain frantically calculates-but John’s face relaxes a bit.
“What’s your name?” John says, inspecting Sam critically.
“Sam.” Winchester. Campbell. Singer. Plant. Van Halen. Angus. Nugent. Richardson. “Sam Moore,” says Sam.
“What’s your problem, Sam Moore?” says John, his voice with that hard edge he used to use when he was trying to order a surly, teenaged Sam around.
“Crossroad demons,” says Sam, and then the lies come easily. It’s natural, he discovers to his surprise, to make John like him. It’s a bit of a shock, as he’d honestly believed the two of them were destined to bump heads no matter what. Maybe John recognizes something of his kin in Sam he can’t identity, maybe he appreciates Sam’s competency or maybe Sam just knows instinctively how to appeal to him, but in any case soon they’re all sitting down to dinner, and for the first time in his life Sam is having a beer with his father and is being treated almost like an equal.
His good mood doesn’t last, though, as John’s attention is finally torn away from the two Sams at the table to settle on Dean. It’s clear he’s pissed Dean let a stranger into the house, and his every comment in Dean’s direction, jovial and casual though they may seem to a stranger, manages to be cutting in some small way. Sam can feel something hard and furious building in his chest as Dean folds further and further into himself, and by the time they’re doing the dishes and John tells Dean to “use some elbow grease for once” Sam has to intervene.
“I can do my own dishes, it’s okay,” he says, and when Dean turns to look at him, his eyes wide and calculating, Sam nods encouragingly. “Go watch cartoons with your brother,” he says, and he can feel John bristle as someone else deigns to order his boys around. Or order anybody around in John’s presence, Sam thinks bitterly.
Dean is glancing uncertainly between his father and this mysterious visitor, and when John takes a step forward Dean about leaps out of his skin and seizes the dishrag back up. Sam, recognizing he’s overstepped his bounds and desperate not to be kicked out of the house, ducks his head and manages an apology. Later, sitting in the kitchen with John, drinking a beer and swapping stories and scars (here is the jagged werewolf claw scar on John’s forearm, and here is the puckered place where the Impala’s emergency brake had dug into Sam’s hip in the crash that would one day, in a roundabout way, kill John himself-though tonight Sam amends the tale, spins a tale involving a Lady in White), Sam is so consumed with affection for his father, with nostalgia and with yearning, desperate love, that it all seems so terribly forgivable.
A day and a half later, the evening before John disappears off to Michigan with his boys in the hands of a virtual stranger and an MIA alcoholic, Sam is sitting on the couch between Sammy and Dean, watching their cartoons, when he notices four oblong bruises on Dean’s arm and his heart stutters. He knows those bruises. Dean hasn’t done anything wrong. John has been drinking almost nonstop. It adds up in a second. He doesn’t remember this, not when they were still so small, but then, he remembers the ever-present threat, unspoken, and it had to come from somewhere.
Sam goes to run a hand through Dean’s hair and Dean squirms away on instinct, and Sam’s decision is made for him.
:::
He chickens out, of course, thinking of science fiction’s destroyed timelines and of money and school and of Dean hollering and Sammy crying and he just stays and tries to fix what’s broken in John’s wake. Dean is still shy, Sammy still painfully serious for so small a boy, and Sam still feels like the world might explode when he scoops little Sammy into his arms, but it never does. Sammy just gets used to him, starts calling him “big Sam,” and spends most of his time trailing behind Dean. Sam stops thinking of him as “little me” and starts thinking of him as Sammy. Considering the implications of this makes his head ache, so he doesn’t much.
Dean, for his part, devotes an astonishing amount of his time to Sammy, and calls Sam “Mr. Sam” and doesn’t seem to expect anything. Sam tries to treat him like a little boy, to hug or help him the way he does Sammy, but Dean ducks away, the fleeting intimacy of their first meeting giving way to embarrassment and a steely determination to take care of his brother all on his own. He does let Sam do the laundry, and help with his homework, which gives Sam an opportunity to marvel at just how much potential Dean had really had if he’d ever tried at school.
He does try, he tells himself firmly, watching Dean worry his lip as he sounds out a word like a first grader. His intuitive grasp of math and science is somewhat extraordinary; he can cook three meals a day and fire a gun, can chatter, in rare moments of openness, to Sam about the Impala, but he’d fallen rather badly behind in reading comprehension, and Sam’s attempts to help are usually met with more embarrassed stubbornness than anything else.
“Sorry ’m stupid,” he tells Sam once, and sounds it, and when Sam tells him he isn’t stupid, not even a little bit, Dean tucks his chin against his chest and says “Yessir” like it was an order.
Nine days after John left, Sam catches Sammy in the act of decorating the bathroom mirror with toothpaste. He’s barely got past an indignant “Sammy!” before Dean is there, launching himself between them, pulling Sammy down off the counter and fixing Sam with what is clearly his best imitation of a threatening glare, despite the fact that his whole body is rigid with what might be fear.
Sam takes a step forward and Dean panics. “I was supposed to be watching him,” he says, sounding nothing, nothing, like the Dean Sam knows or remembers, “’s not his fault, okay, I was supposed to be watching him and he’s just a baby and-”
He’s breathing hard, and Sam is reminded like a slap that he is a stranger, and a very tall one, and Dean’s whole life has taught him to trust only his father and brother. He raises a placating hand and Dean flinches. “Don’t hit him!” he shrieks. “Don’t, okay, I was supposed to be watching him!”
Sam wants to throw up, and wants to apologize, and wants to gather Dean into his arms, and when he doesn’t do anything Dean pulls Sammy to his side and ducks out. Sam tries to follow but Dean clearly can’t handle that, so Sam goes and sits on the porch with the paper. Sam doesn’t so much as look at Sam for the rest of the day, makes himself scarce, but when Sam goes back into the bathroom to clean up Sammy’s mess he finds the job done for him.
Fuck it, he thinks, staring at a long streak Dean had accidentally left on the mirror, fuck it, I don’t care I’m getting them out I’m getting them out I’m getting them out.
On the twelfth day of John’s absence, Sam writes him a very long letter, explaining just about everything, and even apologizing, for taking his sons. He reads it twice, folds it up, puts it in an envelope labeled “John,” sets it on the kitchen table, and goes to pack a bag.
An hour later, he comes back downstairs, snatches the envelope up, and burns it over the sink. Then he goes and gets Dean. “Pack a bag,” he says, “one for you and one for Sammy. I’ll help.”
“Where are we going?” says Dean wearily. He’s used to this.
“Away,” says Sam, his blood rushing in his ears, his limbs strangely weightless. This is the stupidest thing he’s ever done. And he started the apocalypse once.
:::
His first instinct is to go to Palo Alto, but the twin realizations that this is probably a terrible idea and that, even if Jessica were there, she’d be four years old get him thinking rationally. He’s standing in a bus station in Maple Heights, Ohio, with two nervous, silent boys in raggedy coats and two stuffed army surplus duffles, and he needs a fucking plan.
He can’t go to Sioux Falls, or Blue Earth, or Lincoln. All his old caretakers-alive again, he thinks, his heart thrilling, alive like Dad and Jess and, Christ, Jimmy Novak and every other innocent who died on Sam’s watch-would be calling for his blood, if John had even worked out that the boys were gone yet.
He buys a ticket to Iowa because it’s the cheapest, then buys the boys a milkshake. The lady who sells it to them tells him his sons are adorable. Sam waits for her to say the littler one is his spitting image, but she doesn’t.
Dean is beginning to panic, Sam can see, and it’s easy to understand why. Sammy is used to carting around without explanation, trusts his brother, sees no reason to be afraid, but Dean is plainly wondering where the hell his father is.
Stop looking at me like that, Sam thinks, panicking a bit, I’m saving you from Hell, Dean, I’m saving you from so many terrible fucking things. Please let me save you this time, Dean.
They bundle onto the bus together, and after Sammy is asleep Sam bends low next to Dean’s ear and asks if he’s okay. Dean, who has been staring resolutely out the window with one small arm curled around Sammy, turns to him. “Where’s my dad?” he asks, in a high, thin voice.
“He’s hunting,” says Sam, stupidly, “that’s what he does.” Dean blinks and Sam licks his lips. “I’m going to take care of you for a little while now,” says Sam, and Dean’s eyes fill with tears.
“Is-did my dad-I-I’m sorry,” he stutters, and Sam reaches for him but he flinches away. Dean gives two or three truly spectacular sniffles before he calms himself down enough to address Sam again. “Did-did he-did Daddy die?” he whispers.
“No, Dean,” says Sam, and Dean’s lower lip trembles.
“Is he mad at me?” Dean’s face is open and desperate, and Sam’s heart is writhing around in his chest and he feels like he’s going to puke. What the fuck am I doing, he thinks, and this time Dean lets him reach out and card a hand through his hair.
“No, he’s not,” says Sam, firmly, “but he wasn’t-you need somebody to take care of you and Sammy.”
“I take care of Sammy,” says Dean, automatically, with total certainty. Like he’d say his own name. My name is Dean I take care of Sammy. “That’s my job.”
Don’t get mad at me. Don’t you do that. I had to. I had to look out for you. That’s my job.
Sam thinks his heart might be exploding in his chest.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll take care of you. That’ll be my job.”
:::
He rehearses, sometimes, what he’d say to his father. Plays it out in his head. Considers telling him everything.
Your wife told me once, he imagines saying, that she never wanted her kids as hunters.
He swallows that thought down in an instance. Not even John deserves that, and anyways Sam’s not sure he could ever say it in a steady voice.
:::
He writes Bobby a twenty-page letter and keeps it with him always. The moment to send it will come, he thinks, and he’ll send it then.
I would never deprive Dean and Sammy of you, it ends, and I hope you won’t either. I could never repay you all I already owe you, but I hope there’s still room in your heart for the Winchesters.
Yours very sincerely,
Sam Winchester
:::
Dean breaks down on a Thursday.
They’re still in Des Moines, and Sam is making plans to keep going west. He’s hustled up a decent amount of money playing pool and they’re in a motel so scuzzy Sam is terrified to leave the boys alone. All the money he had on him is already sunk on bus tickets and fast food. On Tuesday he’d won an exceptionally lucky poker game with Dean and Sam playing some childishly edited version of checkers in the same room, and if people thought he was odd or a bastard at least they didn’t try to beat him to death in front of his two little sons.
Sammy is watching cartoons and Dean has been in the bathroom long enough that Sam sneaks in to check on him, finds him sitting fully clothed in the tub, hugging himself into a ball, his face buried in his knees.
“Dean,” he rasps, dropping down to his knees, and Dean gives a full body flinch and then lets out a sob so wrenching Sam wants to puke. “Dean, buddy, please-”
“I’m sorry,” Dean howls into his knees, and Sam takes a moment to be grateful he shut the door behind him, and Sammy is engrossed in his cartoons. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” Dean is choking, still hiding his face, rocking back and forth minutely.
“It’s alright,” Sam blurts, clambering into the tub on instinct, horrified at this display. “Dean, stop, it’s okay, don’t be sorry, everything’s okay.” He puts a tentative hand on Dean’s shoulder, and quite abruptly Dean twists and buries his face in Sam’s chest, sobbing unrestrainedly and apologizing frantically between great hiccuping breaths and giant sobs, and Sam forgets this is brother entirely and pulls the kid into his lap, rocks him, cradles the back of his head. “It’s okay, shh-shh, calm down, baby, it’s okay, calm down, take a breath,” he whispers, bending his head low to Dean’s ear, rubbing his back.
“I’m-and Daddy said-and I-Sammy-what did-please can I go home?” Dean finally manages, and on some strange paternal instinct Sam holds him closer.
“I’m gonna take care of you,” he says, “okay, it’s gonna be alright. I’m gonna take care of you, I gotcha,” he coos, and he knows he’s parroting Dean’s own words back at him, echoing a thousand platitudes, replaying countless nightmares and injuries and hallucinates and that one time just after Jess died when Dean had found Sam curled in a ball between the bed and the bed stand calling Jess’s voicemail again and again with tears streaming down his face.
Dean is pushing back and setting his small hands against Sam’s chest and looking up at him. His little face is blotched and tear-streaked, and Sam is overwhelmed with so much affection it sort of hurts. Nobody is ever going to hurt you, he thinks fiercely, still rubbing Dean’s back, nobody nobody nobody I will tear them to shreds before they touch you.
He wonders if this is how Dean felt right before he sold his soul in Cold Oak.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says, “Dean, you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t. I’m just. I’m going to take care of you.”
“B-but why?” Dean whispers, voice hoarse from crying.
“Because you’re a good kid, Dean,” says Sam firmly, “and somebody ought to.”
:::
John finds them in Wisconsin. It’s been almost two months. Sam doesn’t know how long it took John to work out that they were gone-he seriously doubts Fred Jones is all that quick on the uptake-but he’s been covering his tracks damn well (it helps that he, thirty-year-old Sam Winchester, very literally doesn’t exist in 1987, and neither does Sam Moore) and they’ve managed to make the down payment on the world’s tiniest apartment. It’s cramped and on the first floor of a dilapidated building in a terrible neighborhood but Dean’s in school and Sam’s in daycare and Sam has two terrible jobs as Sam Richardson and the landlord takes pity on the sweet, scrawny Richardson boys and looks after the boys before Sam gets home from work.
The boys share the bed and Sam sleeps on a haphazard pile of cushions and plastic rods they’re optimistically calling a futon near the door. He hears the distant and familiar rumble of the Impala even in his sleep, and is outside in his bare feet with his gun drawn before John is even all the way out of the car.
It’s dawn and they stare at each other for a long moment. Sam is struck with the terrible thought that he is the only person on earth who will ever fully understand the confrontation that is about to happen, and his heart is suddenly aching for Dean-his Dean, older Dean-so desperately it nearly makes him stagger.
John’s gun is out as well. “Give. Me. My. Sons,” he growls, and Sam knows that if he hadn’t brought his gun out into the chilly morning he’d be dead already.
“No,” says Sam, simply. “I’m taking care of them.” He doesn’t care if John thinks he’s a demon or a rapist or a delusional sociopath. He really doesn’t. He cares about his boys.
“Who the hell are you?” John spits.
“I’m somebody who gives a damn about those kids,” he replies, not caring how utterly unfair it is, “and I have seen shit you can’t even imagine, John Winchester, and if you ever loved them for one second you will turn around and let them be.”
“You crazy fucker,” says John, with a disbelieving laugh. He cocks the gun. “I don’t know what you’re on, but if you get gone right now this can all be over. I’ll take the boys and you and me can go our separate ways.” Sam knows he’s lying. Can see he’s got the killing look already. And he really doesn’t care. “But if you don’t move in the next three seconds, your brains will be all over the pavement and I’ll have my sons either way.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” says Sam, cocking his own gun, and it is in that moment that he realizes he’d do it. In a second.
He would shoot John Winchester in the head, for Sammy and for Dean. The realization fills him with a pain so profound and unnameable he feels his eyes welling up.
“Try me,” says John, and Sam is thinking about those days John came home from a long absence, smelling so familiar and warm, remembers his scruff on Sam’s cheek as he held him close, remembers his father’s smile and his laugh and the way he looked when he rolled up his sleeves and the division soccer trophy he kept and the goofy way he sometimes sang in the car and the strange tilt to his familiar smile the last time Sam ever spoke to him, and he doesn’t want to shoot his father.
“John, please,” he says, “you have to believe me. I’m trying to-” His voice catches, and something must show in his face, something of a desperate man or of a Winchester, because John’s deadly glare flickers for a second. “I’m trying to save you,” says Sam, and it’s not a lie, “I’m trying to save you, and Dean, and-and Sammy, and I swear to you, I will never hurt them. I’ll never, ever hurt them. I’ve-I know-” There might be tears in his eyes now, and John’s face is a muddle of fury and confusion. “If I told you I have seen the way this ends,” he says, voice tight, “and it doesn’t-and I’m trying to fix it, would you believe me?”
John wants to say no, Sam can tell, but his finger isn’t on the trigger anymore. “What are you doing?” he says softly, and Sam shakes his head. A few tears tumble down his face and he almost laughs at the absurdity of it all. He’s remembering those times arguments with his father would reach such a pitch he’d cry in sheer frustration, remembers the way his father would soften or else call him a girl, remembers how Dean would plant himself between them and drag Sam away, desperate as always to make them stop it.
“Just trying to fix it,” says Sam, and he’s aware he sounds like a little boy.
John’s brow is furrowed and his jaw is working. You’re going to die, Sam wants to tell him, to save your son. It will be honorable, and terrible. You’re going to die, and your boys will die and come back in pieces of themselves. I’m going to do so many terrible things, Dad. You’re going to do bad things to children. Your sons are going to get lost, Dad, and they’re not going to be able to find their way back. Dean is going to die, Daddy, again and again and I can’t keep losing him. He’s all I ever had.
Sam is shaking, every inch of him, and if John wanted to take him down now he could, easily. He doesn’t. He lowers the gun, and Sam does the same.
“Am I ever going to see my sons again, Sam?” John asks, in that same resigned tone he used the last time Sam saw him. The voice he used when he knew he was going to die.
“I don’t know,” Sam whispers, and they stand there and look at one another in the thin morning light for a long time.
John’s face is a mass of grief and defeat, and Sam wants to vomit, but he doesn’t know what to do. He only knows he will not let things go the way they did the first time. He can’t. Not after everything.
A car alarm starts up distantly, and John turns, makes his way to the Impala. He pulls the door open. Pauses, looks at Sam, who’s still staring after them dumbly. “Goodbye for now, then?” he says.
“His name is Azazel,” says Sam faintly.
John stills. “Excuse me?”
“His name is Azazel,” says Sam again, more clearly this time, “the one who killed your wife. He killed you. Almost fifteen years ago now. Your wife made a deal to save you. She came from a family of hunters. He was making a lot of deals at the time. He’s building an army. Children whose parents he’s made bargains with. He comes for them on their six month birthdays. I don’t know where he is now. He’s marking kids, though. There’s a revolution underway in Hell. His-his name is Azazel.”
John is staring at him like he can’t quite process what he’s hearing. “Azazel,” he repeats.
“Yes,” says Sam, “and I’m sure.”
John looks at him for another long moment. “Who are you?” he breathes.
“I’m Sam,” he says softly, like that explains it all, and maybe it does, “and I’m trying to make it right.”
John stares for another long moment. The car alarm stops at long last. John takes a deep breath, and Sam swipes once at his eyes, blindly.
“You keep your head down, Sam,” his father tells him, “and look out for those boys.”
“Yes, sir,” says Sam thickly, and something in John’s face flickers with pain and recognition and then he’s gone.
:::
Sam watches his father drive away in the only home he’s never known, then goes back inside. His boys are in the bed, rumpled and tangled together. Sammy’s curled around his brother, fast asleep, but Dean’s awake, watching Sam with wide eyes. Sam makes his way to the bed and sits down. Dean blinks sleepily and rubs his eye.
“Are you okay, Sam?” he says softly.
“Yeah,” Sam replies, and then he leans foreword and presses his lips to Dean’s forehead in a brief, hard kiss. He closes his eyes, breathes in his brother’s Dean-smell, and when he pulls back Dean is looking up at him, bewildered.
“Are you sure?” he whispers, almost conspiratorially, like he’s promising not to tell anybody, like Sam can confide some secret fear in him.
“Yeah, baby, I am,” says Sam, and he runs a hand through Dean’s hair. “Go back to sleep, Dean. I’ll be here when you wake up.”