Where the Wildflowers End for Chris9065
Title: Where the Wildflowers End
Recipient: Chris9065
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 6900
Warnings: (see note below) Mentions of past trauma, abuse
Author's Notes: There is sign language use in this fic. I have used regular quotations to indicate signing. There is no verbal dialogue.
Summary: When Sam was born, Dean saw in color for the very first time.
When Sam was born, Dean saw in color for the very first time.
Dean told that story a lot. Most people thought he was being metaphorical and cooed over the close bond he had with his brother.
But he wasn’t. The world was grey before, muted, wintry even in summer. The moment Sam came into his life, he was enveloped in greens and blues, reds and oranges, purples and pinks.
Sam was everything good with the world. He was a giddy child, a fast learner. He always had flowers in his hair.
Then, the fire took their mother, and two weeks later, an infection took Sam’s hearing.
No longer were they a neat, Walmart family portrait sitting in a gold frame in a fireplace mantle. No, Mom was dead, Dad was an alcoholic, Dean wouldn’t speak, and Sam couldn’t hear. A promise of a normal future was ripped out from under them.
John took them onto the road. Far too young. They saw too much too little. Dean still rarely spoke out loud, but he found he didn’t need to. Sam created a sign language all on his own, and Dean and John learned it as easily as breathing.
Dean had always thought Sam was special. Sam was bright, Sam was color. Sam loved long, pink and purple shirts from the thrift store, and while he was young, John humored him, smiling at his radiant antics.
But Sam was six when Dean first thought Sam was different.
They were squatting in an abandoned farmhouse somewhere along an interstate in North Dakota. The cold was aching and ever-present; Dean forgot that fingertips weren’t supposed to be blue. He divided his energy between the part-time job he had at the grocery store and keeping Sam warm. He had recurring nightmares of Sam turning into a Solo-esque popsicle made out of ice instead of carbonite.
One evening, Dean came home from a late shift, tired and grumpy, but with a wallet full of cash. He’d gotten some fries on the way home, extra seasoning, just how Sam liked it.
But when he walked inside, Sam wasn’t on the couch. He wasn’t in bed.
He wasn’t anywhere.
Sam was just a little kid. At ten, Dean already felt Old. He already could lie his ass off to dubious grocery store managers and bike on his own. He kept the household safe while John killed monsters. It was his responsibility. It wasn’t Sam’s.
Dean checked all the weird little nooks and crannies, heart beating faster with each empty cupboard, bookshelf, and box. Sam was like a cat, curling up and shivering in the unlikeliest of places.
Dean burst onto the weedy, dead-yellow back yard, screen door rattling loudly against the ill-fitting frame. He stood on the back step, panting, staring out at Sam’s back. The kid was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the yard in just his pajamas, feet and hands bare to the elements.
And there was a sunflower in front of him.
Sam was giggling, hands raised to the sky, and as Dean watched, Sam pulled a sunflower from the earth. It grew like a timelapse, yellow petals opening, searching for the cloud-covered sun.
It was beautiful, but it was out of place. It was wrong. Sam had given it life but it would surely die.
Even at ten years old, Dean felt the gravity of the situation. This was not something little kids were supposed to be able to do.
It was something monsters did, maybe. But Dean knew with a violent certainty that Sam wasn’t a monster.
Dean circled the yard so he could come into Sam’s field of view without startling him. Sam glanced over at him with a gap-toothed smile, gesturing to the plant, signing, “Look what I made!”
“Good job, buddy,” Dean responded with stiff, cold, trembling digits. He nudged at Sam’s ice cube elbows, helping him up. “Let’s go inside, okay? I’ll get the fire started.”
Dean turned, ushering Sam back inside. A violent wind pushed them through the door, the sun-bleached grey fence circling the yard groaning and creaking.
Two days later, John came home. Dean didn’t say anything, even though he knew he should. The day before they left, Dean found John out in the yard, staring up at the healthy, hearty sunflower and the sunshine boy sleeping underneath it with pale blue skin and yellow petals on his cheeks.
***
John didn’t treat Sammy the same way after that. As Dean stumbled his way through puberty, hitting all of his “firsts” far too early without a care in the world, he watched John’s eyes narrow further each time he glanced at Sam.
The flowery clothes and pinks and purples were no longer acceptable. It was something John wanted Sam to “grow out of.” He tried to thrift for Sam, but anything he gave Sam ended up with a flower in the front pocket or a butterfly clip somewhere on it.
Sam was a chubby, short, smart, awkward, oddly dressed kid, and being Deaf made things harder.
Dean hated to think of it like that--hated to think of Sam’s deafness as a difficulty--but to the shitty, unaccepting small towns they haunted, it was.
Dean could tell John thought Sam was a burden. Thinking about it too long made his eyes burn and his throat ache, but it was the truth. John was tired of watching Sam like a hawk, of ripping daisies from between the floor tiles and throwing them out. He was tired of hearing the kids at school call him slurs and rip the heart-shaped stickers off his arms. He was tired of finding a good school for Sam, of explaining himself, of escaping CPS.
He was tired of it all.
It didn’t help that Sam’s “abilities” bloomed at, er, at the same time Sam did.
Unlike Dean, puberty decked Sam right in the face. He grew fast enough that his muscles cramped at night, leaving Sam an angsty insomniac. Pimples made constellations on his face and shoulders. He had to shave every day or peach fuzz overwhelmed him. One look at him and Dean knew he’d get big.
Sam’s hands moved at lightspeed, signing too fast for John but not for Dean. Sam invented new phrases all the time, and Dean got them immediately while John barked at Dean to translate. He didn’t even look at Sam anymore.
Sam was perceptive as hell. He was empathetic and over-emotional. Puberty didn’t help. And he knew exactly what was going on with John. He could feel what John felt for him.
If Sam cried, so did clouds. If Sam raged, glass broke. If Sam was happy, vines would encase the entire house. Flowers bloomed early. Dean’s allergies went nuclear.
With John, Sam was never happy. He rocked on a stormy sea of confusion, despair, anger, sadness, and fear, and their lives were rocked along with him.
At one point in November, they’d left four towns in the span of a week. It was easier than explaining why all the drop tiles in the Walmart had dropped at once. It was easier than apologizing to the woman cut up by the thorns on Sam’s roses.
John came home one day, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t pause. He went to the duffel in the bathroom and pulled out a pair of scissors. He crossed over to Sam, grabbed his hair, and cut it off in mismatched tufts while Sam cried and protested.
John tried to talk to Dean verbally, but Dean only responded in Sam. John’s words were coded about Sam, covering the truth with a thin, sheer, sheet. Dean refused to acknowledge him, especially after the haunted look entered Sam’s eyes each time he tried to tuck a phantom curl of hair behind his ear.
Dean didn’t want to admit it, hated to see it, but he knew John thought something was wrong with Sam.
Something very wrong.
***
Dean took Sam and ran after Sam’s first hunt.
John had been against it, but Dean and Sam had fought, failing to convince John that they could have his back. John finally relented on a dangerous case that two other hunters backed out of. It was a monster that made your ears bleed, so John found Sam to be an asset.
But Sam was more than an asset. Sam knew where the monster would be before it appeared. He knew who it had affected. He told Dean he could “see” its trail like snail slime through the air.
Sam found it and killed it. He overwhelmed it with Lavender, dandelions, roses, and daffodils, tearing it apart and wrapping it in roots. In less than a minute, it was as if it had never existed. The plants had taken it, and the plants were a part of Sam.
Dean took one look at John’s face and knew they had to go.
***
It was hard.
Sam’s hands went stiff, closing into fists, shutting Dean out completely. His eyes went shuttered, his hair knotted, face greasy and stubbled.
Dean knew he’d made the right decision, but seeing what this life was doing to Sammy was a wake-up call. Those colors he rambled about, the magic that came from Sam’s hands, it was being throttled. Sam was a wildflower in a lawn doused in fertilizer. Too beautiful and wild for these people to understand.
That’s why Dean let Sam show him the letter. Why he let Sam leave, even though it was fucking crazy, it was insane. Why he let a flower-feeling, unhearing Sam go to college.
***
Dean never spoke to his father again, but they were always on each other’s radar, one leaving Bobby’s the same day the other arrived. So Dean knew the moment John went missing that something was gravely wrong.
He went to Sam’s apartment and found a boy who towered over Dean by at least three inches. He’d filled out and turned golden in the California sun. His eyes sparkled. He had a girlfriend by his side, and pressure gloves on his hands.
Their apartment was filled with potted plants. Dean kept glancing at Jessica, wondering what she knew, feeling a drowning amount of jealousy at what Sam could’ve shared with her. She was just a civilian, just some rich Valley girl. She couldn’t know the full picture of Sam. It was too dangerous.
But she spoke Sam’s language. She baked cookies for Dean.
And Dean heard the raw, wordless sound of anguish that was wrenched from Sam’s throat when she burned.
***
Dean learned from Sam that Jessica taught him discipline. Concentration. Meditation. With it, Sam could stop the flowers, could hold it off for a while, and come home to a pot of dirt to breathe life in. He could go to class and have fun at parties and not put anyone in danger. The gloves seemed to help.
Seeing Sam grieve, seeing him shattered, and not seeing pouring rainclouds, not seeing little clovers peek out from Sam’s fingernails, it was a mindfuck.
Dean wasn’t used to it. He wasn’t used to Sam. Something was off between them. Dean’s hands didn’t work the same way they used to.
And Sam was just plain fucking unhappy. Even on brighter days, even when they grew closer, Dean could still tell Sam was keeping something from him. He didn’t comment on Sam’s hoodies and jeans, trucker boots and Carhartt jackets. He didn’t ask, and Sam didn’t say.
***
The next five years of Dean’s life were a rollercoaster with grief and fear instead of adrenaline and laughs.
They found Dad, and lost him. Sam smiled more, thrifting purple shirts and dumb, plastic flower hairclips. His hair grew long again. They left motels with a trail of irises and crocuses. Dean loved the colorschemes Sam talked with, encouraged the vines and growth, and learned to read more than just Sam’s hands and face. He learned Sam’s plants and their meanings, and tried his best to meet Sam somewhere, to show him he wasn’t a monster.
But Sam died in a camp for freak kids to a stab in the back. His flowers didn’t do shit for him, and he bled out thinking he was destined to go darkside.
And Dean would never admit, not to anyone, not even to Azazel after a demonic interrogation, but after Dean sold his soul, he saw fruits of darkness in Sam.
Sam changed. His plants went from daffodils to raspberry thorns, climbing vines, poison ivies and oaks. His colors were blacks and reds, and sometimes, the earth trembled where he stood, trees lashing and hissing in a sudden wind. He started wearing the hunter uniform, blending in in browns and greys.
On hunts, he was quicker to judge, and lost some of his concentration, hands twitching in accusation as an old, rotted Oak tree was ripped from the earth and smashed into the car of a suspicious and withholding witness.
It made their lives harder, reminding Dean of the county-jumping they did when Sam was a teenager. He never brought it up, never wanting to make Sam feel like a burden, like something wrong, but Sam read it off of him anyway, accusations flying wildly from his scarred fingertips on inebriated nights, pressure gloves the only things holding back a volley of stinging nettles.
Dean always hoped it would get better, but it didn’t. He went to hell. It was constant pain and anger, and the only respite Dean got was learning to relish giving others pain, taking the light from their eyes.
He came back a different man. His fingers were arthritic. Sam would sign to him, and Dean would respond with his mouth. He knew how much of a slap in the face it was by the spiderlike fractures that creeped up the motel bathroom mirror as Sam walked away from it.
They barely talked at all, save through Sam’s plants, and they careened into a midnight ever darker when they learned about the seals, and when Dean learned Sam had been drinking demon blood.
His powers reeked of ozone. His weeds were dead before they came out of the ground, but they did what he said anyway. He threw away his gloves. He ripped demons from bodies and tore heads off monsters. In another life, Dean would’ve had about a million pop culture references about the way Sam’s vines could lift grown men up and slam them into concrete, breaking their jaws. Now, Dean just watched in silence.
It was just dominoes after that. Dean couldn’t care anymore, couldn’t even feel anger. Lilith, Lucifer. The apocalypse. God.
Dean’s biggest regret of his entire life was the years he spent with his eyes closed and his hands in fists. He turned away from Sam, shunning him, and let him run himself into the ground until he fell into the Cage with Lucifer rioting inside him.
That was when color came back to Dean. When grief pierced his heart like a thorn, when guilt ate at him like a Buckthorn invading a meadow.
The spot where the earth closed around Sam sprouted a tall and lanky Scotch Pine, the largest Dean had ever seen, just stretching up from the middle of the cemetery one day. It made local news, but was forgotten about by everyone by the time the seasons changed.
Everyone but Dean.
He planted flowers, watched them grow, watched them die, planted them again.
He went through this six times.
Each time he came to the tree, his head was clearer. He’d been practicing American Sign Language and re-learning how to speak out loud in English. He had a stutter.
Sam’s vines and roots had curled their way throughout Dean’s bones, his veins, up around his heart and into his throat. Without Sam, he felt choked by dead things, holding the corpse of something long-gone.
Dean had a lot of regrets. He hated thinking about the life Sam had led. Growing up, Dean’s mission had been to prove to the world that Sam was beautiful. To demand respect and accommodation. To give Sam a steady diet of laughter and smiles.
He’d failed miserably. Sam had been kicked out of schools, abused by health professionals, judged and harassed by bigoted, small-minded people that were threatened by how much more he was than them. How much bigger in spirit.
He’d been abandoned by his father and his brother, one at a time. He’d watched all his loved ones get killed. At every corner, he’d been told he was a monster. That there was no way not to be a monster. It was a part of him. And when Sam had walked down dark pathways, Dean hadn’t held his hand and led him back into the garden. He’d joined the peanut gallery of stares and whispers.
Sam had fought his entire last year to prove himself to Dean, to gain some kind of martyr-ly redemption for something that was not his fault. He’d been the universe’s scapegoat. He’d been killed and condemned for both trying to adhere to the script he was given and for moving away from it.
Now, he was suffering for eternity in the worst place imaginable, beyond human comprehension. Dean’s only hope was that the suffering would be so great that Sam would cease to exist altogether. That final death was the only relief Sam would get.
Dean knew this too well. Despite Sam’s requests, he’d tried to get Sam out of there every day for five years, even if it meant Lucifer coming back up along with him. Bobby had tried to stop him. But it didn’t matter.
Dean couldn’t do it.
Dean had failed Sam.
***
The scariest thing was forgetting.
The longer Sam was gone, the more flowers Dean forgot. The more scents he couldn’t recall. The happier moments bled away while aches and scars remained as clear as the day they were made.
The day Dean formally gave up trying to get Sam back, he went on a road trip.
The least he could do, he decided, was remember. Was keep Sam alive in his head. Was honor him in a way he deserved.
Dean went on a tour of all of Sam’s favorite places, smiling with tears in his eyes at their eerie commonalities: the behemoths of Muir Woods, the Oak savannahs of New York Botanical Gardens, the scraggly, hardy wildlife of Joshua Tree. The pines of Arnold Arboretum.
His last stop was a familiar one, worn and soft like a beloved picture stuffed in someone’s wallet.
He drove North into Ohio, remembering this highway from when Sam said yes to Lucifer in Detroit.
He didn’t go that far. He headed west for an hour, making it to Cleveland with time to spare. He didn’t have to look up directions to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. He still remembered. Sam’s joy had imprinted this place on his mind like a brand.
Walking up was like stepping back in time. His fingers danced by his sides, muttering to themselves.
He lost himself in the massive, orb-shaped greenhouse, admiring cacti and lizards and rare flowering plants. He wandered the gardens in a daze, recognizing each flower by name, taking care to find the chrysanthemums and snapdragons. It came back to him like rain after a drought.
The trails were by far the most impressive, straddling a river and bracketed by several gorgeous waterfalls spilling into a landscape that was prettier than Eden. Sam had flourished here, staring up at the sunlit canopy in pure wonder, running down dappled paths and giggling manically. The air was clear, and so were Sam’s eyes.
There was a small overlook at the largest waterfall, where a few benches and flowerbeds dotted the riverbank. He and Sam had spent hours here, late for the bus back to school and pissing off the other supervisors.
Dean walked into the overlook with his breath caught in his chest. It was the same but different. Older, wilder, but still lovingly cared for. The bubbling water lowered Dean’s blood pressure. The forest blanketed below the overlook was flirting with fall, hints of ochre and rust dotting the green foliage.
A woman was bent over in one of the flower beds, planting new geraniums. Dean sat down on the bench. He kept her in his periphery as he admired the glittering water.
She finished putting in the last flower, patting dirt down with gloved hands. She tilted her head back, her straw hat slipping away from her face. She got up, turning toward Dean.
When she spotted him, she startled so badly she hiccupped, eyes going wide.
“Sorry,” Dean signed in Sam speak without thinking. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Didn’t see you,” she signed back, in the same language.
Her eyes were hazel, her cheekbones high. Her brown hair curled and frizzed at her shoulders. She had a mole on the right side of her nose.
Dean’s brain was struggling to put two images together. She was Sam but she wasn’t.
But she was. Oh, god, she was Sam. She was even more Sam than Sam had been in the last three years of his life. Dean’s chest burned with how much Sam she was, how much she was alive and right here. Right now.
“Sammy,” Dean signed, fingers twisting over and over again, “Sammy, Sammy, Sammy.”
Her eyes stayed wide, her lips thinning, and she dropped her trowel and backed away from him. She glanced back toward a trail through the trees.
“Wait,” Dean signed. “Wait, please, don’t go. Why are you here? What happened? Where have you been? How did you get out of the cage?”
She shook her head roughly enough for her hair to go flying. “STOP,” she signed with sharp movements. “STOP STOP STOP.”
Dean held his hands up, fingers frozen. They stood like cowboys in a shootout, staring at each other without blinking.
She wanted to run. Dean didn’t want to chase her.
Something was clearly off here, and Dean didn’t mean that Sam was a woman. He meant the doe-before-a-lion fear leeching the color from her skin, and the Virginia creeper slowly crawling across the dirt, its little graspers reaching as if to snag Dean by the ankle.
She was on the defensive. Did she recognize him?
A horrible thought struck Dean. “I’m not him,” he added, signing as quickly as he could. “You got out. You’re safe.”
“You don’t know me,” she signed back just as quickly.
“Then how are we talking right now?” Dean asked. He switched to ASL. “Why not like this?”
Her hands froze as she thought it over. He saw the suspicion on her face turn to confusion.
“Please,” he begged. “Let me talk to you. I don’t want to hurt you. Do you remember me?”
“It was just a dream,” she said, more to herself than to dream. “A nightmare.”
Dean stepped forward, watching her guard flash up, real and metaphorically. A honeysuckle appeared between them, sprawling, pushing Dean out of her space.
“I’m not a nightmare,” Dean said. He stopped there. He could try to say so much more, do so much more--his hands begged to apologize, to comfort, to interrogate, but he denied them.
This was her territory. Dean knew by the little white flowers poking against his knee that she had to be the one in control. So he waited.
“Who are you?” She eventually signed, still using Sam speak.
Dean thought on how to answer that one. “I’m your big brother,” he eventually settled on.
Sam laughed. She shook her head and wiped sweaty hairs off her forehead. “No,” curled her fingers.
“Yes,” Dean responded. “Do you remember me? Do you remember coming here as kids? Do you remember our big black car? Your stupid teal skirt?”
She shook her head again. “No.”
Dean was about three seconds from bursting into tears, but he was also oddly calm.
“Do you have a place?” He asked. “Where we can talk?”
The honeysuckle and Virginia creeper retreated. Sam cleaned up the paths and cared for the plants, hands twisting into patterns Dean didn’t recognize, body moving to an impossibly slow waltz.
And when she was done, she led Dean out of the garden.
***
Sam’s house looked like it was abandoned, but in a good way.
It was a small stone house, the kind with lower roofs and thick window panes, built at the end of the 19th century. It was absolutely overrun with vines, more green than any color, and the front yard was a wild garden, filled with life and color and plants.
The inside was the same. Pots and trellises and hanging planters and window boxes were strewn about the house with no sense or pattern, overflowing with life, turning the place into a busy greenhouse, dirt swept over the tiles without a care.
Sam glowed brightly inside her house. She was in her element, in her own space with her own plants. It was outfitted for a Deaf person, too, her phone flashing and buzzing instead of dinging, the fire alarm set up the same way.
Sam took him into the backyard, where a greenhouse with grimy glass and peeling paint was a mess of leaves and blooms and stalks and vines. They sat on a worn, vinyl bench that had bluebells creeping along the armrests.
She was talking before Dean had even gotten comfortable. “I don’t understand,” she signed. “How I know this. How I know you.”
“What do you remember?” Dean signed.
A wind pushed at the plants and made the windchimes sing. She looked down. ‘I don’t know. I just remember coming here. Knowing where I had to be.”
Dean shivered. “What about hormones? Did you know how to get those too?”
She shot him a wary glance, but she nodded, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I wanted to be free. So badly.”
Dean wanted to reach out and squeeze her hand or give her a hug. He wanted to comfort her like he’d comforted her after being stood up for prom or when Madison died.
He stayed still. He took even breaths. He listened.
“My nightmares…” she wiggled her hands like she was trying to flick water off them, an old nervous habit Dean hadn’t seen in a decade. “Are they real?”
Dean swallowed. “What do you see?”
She didn’t respond to that, looking out through the muddled greenhouse windows at the forested yard beyond. Her eyes went hooded, her jaw stiff and ticking.
“You went to hell,” Dean told her. “You sacrificed yourself for everyone. You saved the world. You were a hero.”
She stood up. “Enough.”
Dean got in front of her face. “I’m sorry I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you. I’m sorry I failed you.”
“ENOUGH,” she shouted, cracking a pane in the greenhouse. She closed her eyes, centering herself, and the blustering winds stopped. The thorns retreated.
She led him back through the house and to the front door. His welcome was clearly over, and he didn’t protest.
“Can I come back tomorrow?” He asked. “Can you tell me something new?”
“Maybe,” she said, and before he could thank her, or do anything, the door was shut in his face.
He walked back to the Impala at silence, parked behind her rusty little sedan. A pair of army men sat on her dashboard.
He smiled to himself.
He knew he’d be back.
***
That was the start of a very delicate dance that Dean had to learn as he was doing it.
He came over the next afternoon, waiting around until she came home from work. She was understandably annoyed, her dimples coming out in her irritation. She gave Dean her number and her hours, if only to stop him from being such a fucking creep. It turned out Sam had neighbors that probably would have hit him over the head with a baseball bat if she hadn’t told them he was her brother.
Dean liked her neighbors.
Sam made him tea that he drank out of politeness. She almost kicked him out when she caught him attempting to spike it with whiskey. He didn’t know he had a problem until he started feeling the symptoms of withdrawal.
Every day, he got to ask her a question. Or two. Or three. But never more than that. He put himself to work cleaning her house and checking the bills. She was allowed to ask him as many questions as she wanted.
Dean asked when she knew she was a girl, and she signed that she still didn’t really know. She knew she needed to change something, but she didn’t want to wrap herself up in an identity and cover up the chaotic wilderness that she truly related to.
She called it chopping off a rose to make a bush more orderly. She’d rather drain herself dry before doing that.
Dean was beginning to understand. It made sense. He thought about baby Sammy in her purple shirts and floral button-downs and hair clips and shiny lip gloss and painted nails. He thought about Sam growing her hair out. He thought about how Sam’s flowers grew taller and bloomed wider when she was allowed to wear what she wanted, when John wasn’t around.
The Sam Dean had known who wore leather and flannel was a censored Sam, a covered up Sam, someone hunched over and trying to wear out the storm. She’d been hiding, pushing through, shoving something down so that hunters wouldn’t have another reason to kill her.
Dean added it to the list of regrets Dean had, the list of things that were his fault, but Sam didn’t agree with him.
During the third day, she listened to him apologize. He deflated the giant balloon of agony that had been crushing all his vital organs for so long. She listened quietly as he apologized for anything and everything he could think of. He apologized for failing her and misgendering her and blaming her.
“I don’t remember everything,” she signed when he paused for breath, “but I don’t think it was your fault. You can’t carry around all that guilt. You’ll rot.”
He knew she was right, of course, but it was easier said than done.
***
The next breakthrough happened after one week of Dean’s social calls. He suggested they go out to eat, and, after some back and forth, Sam allowed him to drive her to a cafe downtown where she knew some of the waiters.
They took the highway heading into the city center. Between Sam’s neighborhood and the parts of the city that sat on the banks of Lake Eerie, there was a stretch of almost desolate farmland. It was only a few miles, but the land spread out on either side of them in rolling waves for what felt like an eternity.
Whenever Dean drove through parts of the country like this, he felt like he was flying. Like a chain had been cut loose from around his neck.
He turned to Sam. It was a reflex. He wanted to share this with her like the good old days.
But Sam did not share his carefree expression. One of her hands was gripping the door handle hard enough to make the bone in her wrist jut out. Her eyes were wide and glassy, flitting between the car’s cassette player, blaring AC/DC, and the farm fields.
He tried to keep his eyes on the road, but he nudged her, too, trying to gauge her reaction.
“Pull over,” she signed.
Dean glanced in the rearview, mind working quickly as he gauged traffic levels. He switched lands and pulled over as soon as he could, getting some honks from disgruntled commuters.
Dean turned the car off, music cutting off mid-lyric, and stared over her. The car shook with each highway driver that shot past him. He could hear her panting.
“We’ve been here,” she signed. “Before. Together.”
Dean glanced around. “Yes, probably,” he signed. “Many times.”
“One time I said goodbye to you, “she said, her hands flying now, agitated, a dandelion digging its way out of the gravel and up against the passenger side window, “I asked you not to save me. To let me go.”
“And I didn’t listen,” Dean responded, facing her directly. “I tried. Every day I tried. For five years. But I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes flashed with a painfully familiar kind of indignancy. She shoved him. “What’s wrong with you? You could’ve caused a second apocalypse!”
“And I would’ve done it to have my family back together again,” Dean replied. “To fix things.”
He thought she was going to punch him. She sucked in a ragged breath and lunged at him, and Dean was unprepared for the constricting, vine-tight hug that she drew him into. She dissolved in his arms like the blooms of a cottonwood, and, soon enough, their car was surrounded by them, a fuzzy, white fog like a winter snowstorm, but in August.
She was crying, and he was crying, too. The dandelions wrapped around the mirrors. There wasn’t anything to say.
She exhausted herself. She fell asleep leaning on his shoulder, and Dean, not wanting to wake her, drove carefully, apologizing to the weeds that were yanked off the car as he merged back onto the highway far too slowly.
Instead of taking her back to her home, Dean did something stupid. He headed East, toward Indiana, toward South Dakota and Bobby. He stopped for the night in a shitty motel that asked no questions.
He booked the room in cash and got the room keys. Neither of them had any bags. He didn’t have a plan. Sam had a life she had to get back to.
But right now, it didn’t matter. Right now, he was chasing the feeling of a dream, and time didn’t work the same way in dreams. The world would have to make room for the detour.
He woke her up and led her into the room. She was groggy, and barely looked around before collapsing on the bed.
Dean took the bed closest to the door, keeping watch.
Just like he used to.
***
When she woke up, she obviously had questions.
She had her memories, too.
Some of them, at least.
She asked about Dad and Bobby and Jess and Hell and it hurt Dean to answer each question, but not as much as he’d expected it to.
She asked him things he didn’t know about, and Dean’s sinking stomach told him it was the Cage. She had the most memories from there, the most fears and worries about normal life that Dean was quick to correct. Real life would not be a nightmare for her. Not anymore.
If Dean knew coming into her life would bring her back to hell, would he have stayed away? If Dean knew he’d be turning nightmares into flashbacks, would he have kept his distance?
They’re questions he couldn’t answer.
She sat there in quiet, overwhelmed silence, lanky Sasquatch legs hanging over the edge of the bed. She looked up at him. “What do you think happened?” She asked. “After Hell?”
“I don’t know,” Dean signed. “A miracle, maybe.”
She snorted. “Doesn’t feel like one.”
That’s what convinced Dean that it truly was one. “What do you want to do now?” He asked.
Sam shook her head with a smile. “Give me some time,” she signed. “I’m living two lives.”
Dean’s throat went tight at that. “If you need to go back to work, if you have friends--”
She grabbed his hand, stopping him. “I want to remember,” she signed. “Everything.”
“Okay.” Dean nodded. He braced himself for the hardest-hitting ones. “Ask me anything.”
“No. Not ask,” she said. “Show me. Show me our lives. Show me how we were.”
“It wasn’t good,” Dean said. “At least, not most of it.”
“It was us,” she said, her eyes going red and shiny. “It was you looking out for me. It was me trying to save you. You never made me feel like a monster. You made me feel normal.”
“I don’t want to hunt,” Dean said, and realized he meant it.
“Okay. Then we won’t. Take me somewhere.”
“We’ll do whatever you want,” Dean signed. “We’ll go places your plants will grow. We’ll live next to nature preserves. We can take pots and hangers with us.”
“Okay,” Sam laughed. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Right now?” Dean’s eyes widened.
Sam got up, and drew him into a hug. She let out a shaky breath. Lavender and sunflowers and water lilies forced their way up through the shitty motel carpeting and along the walls and from the light fixtures and through the gaps in the window. Without looking at her, Dean could hear her saying through her plants, “I remember. I’m home.”
He hugged her tighter. He felt tall black-eyed susans loop their stems around his arms and legs, and he let them, he embraced them, trying to show her, “you are home. You’re here. We’re family.”
It was what Dean had always tried to tell her.
Sam was beautiful. She was wild and carefree. She was color and light, and she allowed Dean to breathe. It wasn’t normal, but their lives weren’t normal. They would never be normal.
But they were alive. They were back on the road together. Sam’s eyes were bright and her hands moved without hesitation. Her flowers bloomed without shame. And Dean tried his best to make her laugh. Each day, he made a little more progress. The nightmares got a little easier to deal with. He led her through wild forests and state parks and watched her shine.
He still didn’t know why he’d been given this gift, why Sam had come back. He didn’t ask. He didn’t dare think of it or look into it. This was a gift horse of titanic proportions.
No, Dean was going to live his life with gratitude and celebration. He was going to let Sam grow, and protect her when he could, but not shelter her. Dean had done a lot of growing of his own while she was gone, his own trunk going broader, weathered by the seasons.
He felt like he’d been preparing for this. Like this was some cosmic way to give Sam what she was made for.
To show her true happiness in the face of scars. To make days warm and sunny after cold nightmares.
This was what Dean was meant to do ever since color had first come into his life.
The End
Recipient: Chris9065
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 6900
Warnings: (see note below) Mentions of past trauma, abuse
Author's Notes: There is sign language use in this fic. I have used regular quotations to indicate signing. There is no verbal dialogue.
Summary: When Sam was born, Dean saw in color for the very first time.
When Sam was born, Dean saw in color for the very first time.
Dean told that story a lot. Most people thought he was being metaphorical and cooed over the close bond he had with his brother.
But he wasn’t. The world was grey before, muted, wintry even in summer. The moment Sam came into his life, he was enveloped in greens and blues, reds and oranges, purples and pinks.
Sam was everything good with the world. He was a giddy child, a fast learner. He always had flowers in his hair.
Then, the fire took their mother, and two weeks later, an infection took Sam’s hearing.
No longer were they a neat, Walmart family portrait sitting in a gold frame in a fireplace mantle. No, Mom was dead, Dad was an alcoholic, Dean wouldn’t speak, and Sam couldn’t hear. A promise of a normal future was ripped out from under them.
John took them onto the road. Far too young. They saw too much too little. Dean still rarely spoke out loud, but he found he didn’t need to. Sam created a sign language all on his own, and Dean and John learned it as easily as breathing.
Dean had always thought Sam was special. Sam was bright, Sam was color. Sam loved long, pink and purple shirts from the thrift store, and while he was young, John humored him, smiling at his radiant antics.
But Sam was six when Dean first thought Sam was different.
They were squatting in an abandoned farmhouse somewhere along an interstate in North Dakota. The cold was aching and ever-present; Dean forgot that fingertips weren’t supposed to be blue. He divided his energy between the part-time job he had at the grocery store and keeping Sam warm. He had recurring nightmares of Sam turning into a Solo-esque popsicle made out of ice instead of carbonite.
One evening, Dean came home from a late shift, tired and grumpy, but with a wallet full of cash. He’d gotten some fries on the way home, extra seasoning, just how Sam liked it.
But when he walked inside, Sam wasn’t on the couch. He wasn’t in bed.
He wasn’t anywhere.
Sam was just a little kid. At ten, Dean already felt Old. He already could lie his ass off to dubious grocery store managers and bike on his own. He kept the household safe while John killed monsters. It was his responsibility. It wasn’t Sam’s.
Dean checked all the weird little nooks and crannies, heart beating faster with each empty cupboard, bookshelf, and box. Sam was like a cat, curling up and shivering in the unlikeliest of places.
Dean burst onto the weedy, dead-yellow back yard, screen door rattling loudly against the ill-fitting frame. He stood on the back step, panting, staring out at Sam’s back. The kid was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the yard in just his pajamas, feet and hands bare to the elements.
And there was a sunflower in front of him.
Sam was giggling, hands raised to the sky, and as Dean watched, Sam pulled a sunflower from the earth. It grew like a timelapse, yellow petals opening, searching for the cloud-covered sun.
It was beautiful, but it was out of place. It was wrong. Sam had given it life but it would surely die.
Even at ten years old, Dean felt the gravity of the situation. This was not something little kids were supposed to be able to do.
It was something monsters did, maybe. But Dean knew with a violent certainty that Sam wasn’t a monster.
Dean circled the yard so he could come into Sam’s field of view without startling him. Sam glanced over at him with a gap-toothed smile, gesturing to the plant, signing, “Look what I made!”
“Good job, buddy,” Dean responded with stiff, cold, trembling digits. He nudged at Sam’s ice cube elbows, helping him up. “Let’s go inside, okay? I’ll get the fire started.”
Dean turned, ushering Sam back inside. A violent wind pushed them through the door, the sun-bleached grey fence circling the yard groaning and creaking.
Two days later, John came home. Dean didn’t say anything, even though he knew he should. The day before they left, Dean found John out in the yard, staring up at the healthy, hearty sunflower and the sunshine boy sleeping underneath it with pale blue skin and yellow petals on his cheeks.
***
John didn’t treat Sammy the same way after that. As Dean stumbled his way through puberty, hitting all of his “firsts” far too early without a care in the world, he watched John’s eyes narrow further each time he glanced at Sam.
The flowery clothes and pinks and purples were no longer acceptable. It was something John wanted Sam to “grow out of.” He tried to thrift for Sam, but anything he gave Sam ended up with a flower in the front pocket or a butterfly clip somewhere on it.
Sam was a chubby, short, smart, awkward, oddly dressed kid, and being Deaf made things harder.
Dean hated to think of it like that--hated to think of Sam’s deafness as a difficulty--but to the shitty, unaccepting small towns they haunted, it was.
Dean could tell John thought Sam was a burden. Thinking about it too long made his eyes burn and his throat ache, but it was the truth. John was tired of watching Sam like a hawk, of ripping daisies from between the floor tiles and throwing them out. He was tired of hearing the kids at school call him slurs and rip the heart-shaped stickers off his arms. He was tired of finding a good school for Sam, of explaining himself, of escaping CPS.
He was tired of it all.
It didn’t help that Sam’s “abilities” bloomed at, er, at the same time Sam did.
Unlike Dean, puberty decked Sam right in the face. He grew fast enough that his muscles cramped at night, leaving Sam an angsty insomniac. Pimples made constellations on his face and shoulders. He had to shave every day or peach fuzz overwhelmed him. One look at him and Dean knew he’d get big.
Sam’s hands moved at lightspeed, signing too fast for John but not for Dean. Sam invented new phrases all the time, and Dean got them immediately while John barked at Dean to translate. He didn’t even look at Sam anymore.
Sam was perceptive as hell. He was empathetic and over-emotional. Puberty didn’t help. And he knew exactly what was going on with John. He could feel what John felt for him.
If Sam cried, so did clouds. If Sam raged, glass broke. If Sam was happy, vines would encase the entire house. Flowers bloomed early. Dean’s allergies went nuclear.
With John, Sam was never happy. He rocked on a stormy sea of confusion, despair, anger, sadness, and fear, and their lives were rocked along with him.
At one point in November, they’d left four towns in the span of a week. It was easier than explaining why all the drop tiles in the Walmart had dropped at once. It was easier than apologizing to the woman cut up by the thorns on Sam’s roses.
John came home one day, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t pause. He went to the duffel in the bathroom and pulled out a pair of scissors. He crossed over to Sam, grabbed his hair, and cut it off in mismatched tufts while Sam cried and protested.
John tried to talk to Dean verbally, but Dean only responded in Sam. John’s words were coded about Sam, covering the truth with a thin, sheer, sheet. Dean refused to acknowledge him, especially after the haunted look entered Sam’s eyes each time he tried to tuck a phantom curl of hair behind his ear.
Dean didn’t want to admit it, hated to see it, but he knew John thought something was wrong with Sam.
Something very wrong.
***
Dean took Sam and ran after Sam’s first hunt.
John had been against it, but Dean and Sam had fought, failing to convince John that they could have his back. John finally relented on a dangerous case that two other hunters backed out of. It was a monster that made your ears bleed, so John found Sam to be an asset.
But Sam was more than an asset. Sam knew where the monster would be before it appeared. He knew who it had affected. He told Dean he could “see” its trail like snail slime through the air.
Sam found it and killed it. He overwhelmed it with Lavender, dandelions, roses, and daffodils, tearing it apart and wrapping it in roots. In less than a minute, it was as if it had never existed. The plants had taken it, and the plants were a part of Sam.
Dean took one look at John’s face and knew they had to go.
***
It was hard.
Sam’s hands went stiff, closing into fists, shutting Dean out completely. His eyes went shuttered, his hair knotted, face greasy and stubbled.
Dean knew he’d made the right decision, but seeing what this life was doing to Sammy was a wake-up call. Those colors he rambled about, the magic that came from Sam’s hands, it was being throttled. Sam was a wildflower in a lawn doused in fertilizer. Too beautiful and wild for these people to understand.
That’s why Dean let Sam show him the letter. Why he let Sam leave, even though it was fucking crazy, it was insane. Why he let a flower-feeling, unhearing Sam go to college.
***
Dean never spoke to his father again, but they were always on each other’s radar, one leaving Bobby’s the same day the other arrived. So Dean knew the moment John went missing that something was gravely wrong.
He went to Sam’s apartment and found a boy who towered over Dean by at least three inches. He’d filled out and turned golden in the California sun. His eyes sparkled. He had a girlfriend by his side, and pressure gloves on his hands.
Their apartment was filled with potted plants. Dean kept glancing at Jessica, wondering what she knew, feeling a drowning amount of jealousy at what Sam could’ve shared with her. She was just a civilian, just some rich Valley girl. She couldn’t know the full picture of Sam. It was too dangerous.
But she spoke Sam’s language. She baked cookies for Dean.
And Dean heard the raw, wordless sound of anguish that was wrenched from Sam’s throat when she burned.
***
Dean learned from Sam that Jessica taught him discipline. Concentration. Meditation. With it, Sam could stop the flowers, could hold it off for a while, and come home to a pot of dirt to breathe life in. He could go to class and have fun at parties and not put anyone in danger. The gloves seemed to help.
Seeing Sam grieve, seeing him shattered, and not seeing pouring rainclouds, not seeing little clovers peek out from Sam’s fingernails, it was a mindfuck.
Dean wasn’t used to it. He wasn’t used to Sam. Something was off between them. Dean’s hands didn’t work the same way they used to.
And Sam was just plain fucking unhappy. Even on brighter days, even when they grew closer, Dean could still tell Sam was keeping something from him. He didn’t comment on Sam’s hoodies and jeans, trucker boots and Carhartt jackets. He didn’t ask, and Sam didn’t say.
***
The next five years of Dean’s life were a rollercoaster with grief and fear instead of adrenaline and laughs.
They found Dad, and lost him. Sam smiled more, thrifting purple shirts and dumb, plastic flower hairclips. His hair grew long again. They left motels with a trail of irises and crocuses. Dean loved the colorschemes Sam talked with, encouraged the vines and growth, and learned to read more than just Sam’s hands and face. He learned Sam’s plants and their meanings, and tried his best to meet Sam somewhere, to show him he wasn’t a monster.
But Sam died in a camp for freak kids to a stab in the back. His flowers didn’t do shit for him, and he bled out thinking he was destined to go darkside.
And Dean would never admit, not to anyone, not even to Azazel after a demonic interrogation, but after Dean sold his soul, he saw fruits of darkness in Sam.
Sam changed. His plants went from daffodils to raspberry thorns, climbing vines, poison ivies and oaks. His colors were blacks and reds, and sometimes, the earth trembled where he stood, trees lashing and hissing in a sudden wind. He started wearing the hunter uniform, blending in in browns and greys.
On hunts, he was quicker to judge, and lost some of his concentration, hands twitching in accusation as an old, rotted Oak tree was ripped from the earth and smashed into the car of a suspicious and withholding witness.
It made their lives harder, reminding Dean of the county-jumping they did when Sam was a teenager. He never brought it up, never wanting to make Sam feel like a burden, like something wrong, but Sam read it off of him anyway, accusations flying wildly from his scarred fingertips on inebriated nights, pressure gloves the only things holding back a volley of stinging nettles.
Dean always hoped it would get better, but it didn’t. He went to hell. It was constant pain and anger, and the only respite Dean got was learning to relish giving others pain, taking the light from their eyes.
He came back a different man. His fingers were arthritic. Sam would sign to him, and Dean would respond with his mouth. He knew how much of a slap in the face it was by the spiderlike fractures that creeped up the motel bathroom mirror as Sam walked away from it.
They barely talked at all, save through Sam’s plants, and they careened into a midnight ever darker when they learned about the seals, and when Dean learned Sam had been drinking demon blood.
His powers reeked of ozone. His weeds were dead before they came out of the ground, but they did what he said anyway. He threw away his gloves. He ripped demons from bodies and tore heads off monsters. In another life, Dean would’ve had about a million pop culture references about the way Sam’s vines could lift grown men up and slam them into concrete, breaking their jaws. Now, Dean just watched in silence.
It was just dominoes after that. Dean couldn’t care anymore, couldn’t even feel anger. Lilith, Lucifer. The apocalypse. God.
Dean’s biggest regret of his entire life was the years he spent with his eyes closed and his hands in fists. He turned away from Sam, shunning him, and let him run himself into the ground until he fell into the Cage with Lucifer rioting inside him.
That was when color came back to Dean. When grief pierced his heart like a thorn, when guilt ate at him like a Buckthorn invading a meadow.
The spot where the earth closed around Sam sprouted a tall and lanky Scotch Pine, the largest Dean had ever seen, just stretching up from the middle of the cemetery one day. It made local news, but was forgotten about by everyone by the time the seasons changed.
Everyone but Dean.
He planted flowers, watched them grow, watched them die, planted them again.
He went through this six times.
Each time he came to the tree, his head was clearer. He’d been practicing American Sign Language and re-learning how to speak out loud in English. He had a stutter.
Sam’s vines and roots had curled their way throughout Dean’s bones, his veins, up around his heart and into his throat. Without Sam, he felt choked by dead things, holding the corpse of something long-gone.
Dean had a lot of regrets. He hated thinking about the life Sam had led. Growing up, Dean’s mission had been to prove to the world that Sam was beautiful. To demand respect and accommodation. To give Sam a steady diet of laughter and smiles.
He’d failed miserably. Sam had been kicked out of schools, abused by health professionals, judged and harassed by bigoted, small-minded people that were threatened by how much more he was than them. How much bigger in spirit.
He’d been abandoned by his father and his brother, one at a time. He’d watched all his loved ones get killed. At every corner, he’d been told he was a monster. That there was no way not to be a monster. It was a part of him. And when Sam had walked down dark pathways, Dean hadn’t held his hand and led him back into the garden. He’d joined the peanut gallery of stares and whispers.
Sam had fought his entire last year to prove himself to Dean, to gain some kind of martyr-ly redemption for something that was not his fault. He’d been the universe’s scapegoat. He’d been killed and condemned for both trying to adhere to the script he was given and for moving away from it.
Now, he was suffering for eternity in the worst place imaginable, beyond human comprehension. Dean’s only hope was that the suffering would be so great that Sam would cease to exist altogether. That final death was the only relief Sam would get.
Dean knew this too well. Despite Sam’s requests, he’d tried to get Sam out of there every day for five years, even if it meant Lucifer coming back up along with him. Bobby had tried to stop him. But it didn’t matter.
Dean couldn’t do it.
Dean had failed Sam.
***
The scariest thing was forgetting.
The longer Sam was gone, the more flowers Dean forgot. The more scents he couldn’t recall. The happier moments bled away while aches and scars remained as clear as the day they were made.
The day Dean formally gave up trying to get Sam back, he went on a road trip.
The least he could do, he decided, was remember. Was keep Sam alive in his head. Was honor him in a way he deserved.
Dean went on a tour of all of Sam’s favorite places, smiling with tears in his eyes at their eerie commonalities: the behemoths of Muir Woods, the Oak savannahs of New York Botanical Gardens, the scraggly, hardy wildlife of Joshua Tree. The pines of Arnold Arboretum.
His last stop was a familiar one, worn and soft like a beloved picture stuffed in someone’s wallet.
He drove North into Ohio, remembering this highway from when Sam said yes to Lucifer in Detroit.
He didn’t go that far. He headed west for an hour, making it to Cleveland with time to spare. He didn’t have to look up directions to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. He still remembered. Sam’s joy had imprinted this place on his mind like a brand.
Walking up was like stepping back in time. His fingers danced by his sides, muttering to themselves.
He lost himself in the massive, orb-shaped greenhouse, admiring cacti and lizards and rare flowering plants. He wandered the gardens in a daze, recognizing each flower by name, taking care to find the chrysanthemums and snapdragons. It came back to him like rain after a drought.
The trails were by far the most impressive, straddling a river and bracketed by several gorgeous waterfalls spilling into a landscape that was prettier than Eden. Sam had flourished here, staring up at the sunlit canopy in pure wonder, running down dappled paths and giggling manically. The air was clear, and so were Sam’s eyes.
There was a small overlook at the largest waterfall, where a few benches and flowerbeds dotted the riverbank. He and Sam had spent hours here, late for the bus back to school and pissing off the other supervisors.
Dean walked into the overlook with his breath caught in his chest. It was the same but different. Older, wilder, but still lovingly cared for. The bubbling water lowered Dean’s blood pressure. The forest blanketed below the overlook was flirting with fall, hints of ochre and rust dotting the green foliage.
A woman was bent over in one of the flower beds, planting new geraniums. Dean sat down on the bench. He kept her in his periphery as he admired the glittering water.
She finished putting in the last flower, patting dirt down with gloved hands. She tilted her head back, her straw hat slipping away from her face. She got up, turning toward Dean.
When she spotted him, she startled so badly she hiccupped, eyes going wide.
“Sorry,” Dean signed in Sam speak without thinking. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Didn’t see you,” she signed back, in the same language.
Her eyes were hazel, her cheekbones high. Her brown hair curled and frizzed at her shoulders. She had a mole on the right side of her nose.
Dean’s brain was struggling to put two images together. She was Sam but she wasn’t.
But she was. Oh, god, she was Sam. She was even more Sam than Sam had been in the last three years of his life. Dean’s chest burned with how much Sam she was, how much she was alive and right here. Right now.
“Sammy,” Dean signed, fingers twisting over and over again, “Sammy, Sammy, Sammy.”
Her eyes stayed wide, her lips thinning, and she dropped her trowel and backed away from him. She glanced back toward a trail through the trees.
“Wait,” Dean signed. “Wait, please, don’t go. Why are you here? What happened? Where have you been? How did you get out of the cage?”
She shook her head roughly enough for her hair to go flying. “STOP,” she signed with sharp movements. “STOP STOP STOP.”
Dean held his hands up, fingers frozen. They stood like cowboys in a shootout, staring at each other without blinking.
She wanted to run. Dean didn’t want to chase her.
Something was clearly off here, and Dean didn’t mean that Sam was a woman. He meant the doe-before-a-lion fear leeching the color from her skin, and the Virginia creeper slowly crawling across the dirt, its little graspers reaching as if to snag Dean by the ankle.
She was on the defensive. Did she recognize him?
A horrible thought struck Dean. “I’m not him,” he added, signing as quickly as he could. “You got out. You’re safe.”
“You don’t know me,” she signed back just as quickly.
“Then how are we talking right now?” Dean asked. He switched to ASL. “Why not like this?”
Her hands froze as she thought it over. He saw the suspicion on her face turn to confusion.
“Please,” he begged. “Let me talk to you. I don’t want to hurt you. Do you remember me?”
“It was just a dream,” she said, more to herself than to dream. “A nightmare.”
Dean stepped forward, watching her guard flash up, real and metaphorically. A honeysuckle appeared between them, sprawling, pushing Dean out of her space.
“I’m not a nightmare,” Dean said. He stopped there. He could try to say so much more, do so much more--his hands begged to apologize, to comfort, to interrogate, but he denied them.
This was her territory. Dean knew by the little white flowers poking against his knee that she had to be the one in control. So he waited.
“Who are you?” She eventually signed, still using Sam speak.
Dean thought on how to answer that one. “I’m your big brother,” he eventually settled on.
Sam laughed. She shook her head and wiped sweaty hairs off her forehead. “No,” curled her fingers.
“Yes,” Dean responded. “Do you remember me? Do you remember coming here as kids? Do you remember our big black car? Your stupid teal skirt?”
She shook her head again. “No.”
Dean was about three seconds from bursting into tears, but he was also oddly calm.
“Do you have a place?” He asked. “Where we can talk?”
The honeysuckle and Virginia creeper retreated. Sam cleaned up the paths and cared for the plants, hands twisting into patterns Dean didn’t recognize, body moving to an impossibly slow waltz.
And when she was done, she led Dean out of the garden.
***
Sam’s house looked like it was abandoned, but in a good way.
It was a small stone house, the kind with lower roofs and thick window panes, built at the end of the 19th century. It was absolutely overrun with vines, more green than any color, and the front yard was a wild garden, filled with life and color and plants.
The inside was the same. Pots and trellises and hanging planters and window boxes were strewn about the house with no sense or pattern, overflowing with life, turning the place into a busy greenhouse, dirt swept over the tiles without a care.
Sam glowed brightly inside her house. She was in her element, in her own space with her own plants. It was outfitted for a Deaf person, too, her phone flashing and buzzing instead of dinging, the fire alarm set up the same way.
Sam took him into the backyard, where a greenhouse with grimy glass and peeling paint was a mess of leaves and blooms and stalks and vines. They sat on a worn, vinyl bench that had bluebells creeping along the armrests.
She was talking before Dean had even gotten comfortable. “I don’t understand,” she signed. “How I know this. How I know you.”
“What do you remember?” Dean signed.
A wind pushed at the plants and made the windchimes sing. She looked down. ‘I don’t know. I just remember coming here. Knowing where I had to be.”
Dean shivered. “What about hormones? Did you know how to get those too?”
She shot him a wary glance, but she nodded, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I wanted to be free. So badly.”
Dean wanted to reach out and squeeze her hand or give her a hug. He wanted to comfort her like he’d comforted her after being stood up for prom or when Madison died.
He stayed still. He took even breaths. He listened.
“My nightmares…” she wiggled her hands like she was trying to flick water off them, an old nervous habit Dean hadn’t seen in a decade. “Are they real?”
Dean swallowed. “What do you see?”
She didn’t respond to that, looking out through the muddled greenhouse windows at the forested yard beyond. Her eyes went hooded, her jaw stiff and ticking.
“You went to hell,” Dean told her. “You sacrificed yourself for everyone. You saved the world. You were a hero.”
She stood up. “Enough.”
Dean got in front of her face. “I’m sorry I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you. I’m sorry I failed you.”
“ENOUGH,” she shouted, cracking a pane in the greenhouse. She closed her eyes, centering herself, and the blustering winds stopped. The thorns retreated.
She led him back through the house and to the front door. His welcome was clearly over, and he didn’t protest.
“Can I come back tomorrow?” He asked. “Can you tell me something new?”
“Maybe,” she said, and before he could thank her, or do anything, the door was shut in his face.
He walked back to the Impala at silence, parked behind her rusty little sedan. A pair of army men sat on her dashboard.
He smiled to himself.
He knew he’d be back.
***
That was the start of a very delicate dance that Dean had to learn as he was doing it.
He came over the next afternoon, waiting around until she came home from work. She was understandably annoyed, her dimples coming out in her irritation. She gave Dean her number and her hours, if only to stop him from being such a fucking creep. It turned out Sam had neighbors that probably would have hit him over the head with a baseball bat if she hadn’t told them he was her brother.
Dean liked her neighbors.
Sam made him tea that he drank out of politeness. She almost kicked him out when she caught him attempting to spike it with whiskey. He didn’t know he had a problem until he started feeling the symptoms of withdrawal.
Every day, he got to ask her a question. Or two. Or three. But never more than that. He put himself to work cleaning her house and checking the bills. She was allowed to ask him as many questions as she wanted.
Dean asked when she knew she was a girl, and she signed that she still didn’t really know. She knew she needed to change something, but she didn’t want to wrap herself up in an identity and cover up the chaotic wilderness that she truly related to.
She called it chopping off a rose to make a bush more orderly. She’d rather drain herself dry before doing that.
Dean was beginning to understand. It made sense. He thought about baby Sammy in her purple shirts and floral button-downs and hair clips and shiny lip gloss and painted nails. He thought about Sam growing her hair out. He thought about how Sam’s flowers grew taller and bloomed wider when she was allowed to wear what she wanted, when John wasn’t around.
The Sam Dean had known who wore leather and flannel was a censored Sam, a covered up Sam, someone hunched over and trying to wear out the storm. She’d been hiding, pushing through, shoving something down so that hunters wouldn’t have another reason to kill her.
Dean added it to the list of regrets Dean had, the list of things that were his fault, but Sam didn’t agree with him.
During the third day, she listened to him apologize. He deflated the giant balloon of agony that had been crushing all his vital organs for so long. She listened quietly as he apologized for anything and everything he could think of. He apologized for failing her and misgendering her and blaming her.
“I don’t remember everything,” she signed when he paused for breath, “but I don’t think it was your fault. You can’t carry around all that guilt. You’ll rot.”
He knew she was right, of course, but it was easier said than done.
***
The next breakthrough happened after one week of Dean’s social calls. He suggested they go out to eat, and, after some back and forth, Sam allowed him to drive her to a cafe downtown where she knew some of the waiters.
They took the highway heading into the city center. Between Sam’s neighborhood and the parts of the city that sat on the banks of Lake Eerie, there was a stretch of almost desolate farmland. It was only a few miles, but the land spread out on either side of them in rolling waves for what felt like an eternity.
Whenever Dean drove through parts of the country like this, he felt like he was flying. Like a chain had been cut loose from around his neck.
He turned to Sam. It was a reflex. He wanted to share this with her like the good old days.
But Sam did not share his carefree expression. One of her hands was gripping the door handle hard enough to make the bone in her wrist jut out. Her eyes were wide and glassy, flitting between the car’s cassette player, blaring AC/DC, and the farm fields.
He tried to keep his eyes on the road, but he nudged her, too, trying to gauge her reaction.
“Pull over,” she signed.
Dean glanced in the rearview, mind working quickly as he gauged traffic levels. He switched lands and pulled over as soon as he could, getting some honks from disgruntled commuters.
Dean turned the car off, music cutting off mid-lyric, and stared over her. The car shook with each highway driver that shot past him. He could hear her panting.
“We’ve been here,” she signed. “Before. Together.”
Dean glanced around. “Yes, probably,” he signed. “Many times.”
“One time I said goodbye to you, “she said, her hands flying now, agitated, a dandelion digging its way out of the gravel and up against the passenger side window, “I asked you not to save me. To let me go.”
“And I didn’t listen,” Dean responded, facing her directly. “I tried. Every day I tried. For five years. But I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes flashed with a painfully familiar kind of indignancy. She shoved him. “What’s wrong with you? You could’ve caused a second apocalypse!”
“And I would’ve done it to have my family back together again,” Dean replied. “To fix things.”
He thought she was going to punch him. She sucked in a ragged breath and lunged at him, and Dean was unprepared for the constricting, vine-tight hug that she drew him into. She dissolved in his arms like the blooms of a cottonwood, and, soon enough, their car was surrounded by them, a fuzzy, white fog like a winter snowstorm, but in August.
She was crying, and he was crying, too. The dandelions wrapped around the mirrors. There wasn’t anything to say.
She exhausted herself. She fell asleep leaning on his shoulder, and Dean, not wanting to wake her, drove carefully, apologizing to the weeds that were yanked off the car as he merged back onto the highway far too slowly.
Instead of taking her back to her home, Dean did something stupid. He headed East, toward Indiana, toward South Dakota and Bobby. He stopped for the night in a shitty motel that asked no questions.
He booked the room in cash and got the room keys. Neither of them had any bags. He didn’t have a plan. Sam had a life she had to get back to.
But right now, it didn’t matter. Right now, he was chasing the feeling of a dream, and time didn’t work the same way in dreams. The world would have to make room for the detour.
He woke her up and led her into the room. She was groggy, and barely looked around before collapsing on the bed.
Dean took the bed closest to the door, keeping watch.
Just like he used to.
***
When she woke up, she obviously had questions.
She had her memories, too.
Some of them, at least.
She asked about Dad and Bobby and Jess and Hell and it hurt Dean to answer each question, but not as much as he’d expected it to.
She asked him things he didn’t know about, and Dean’s sinking stomach told him it was the Cage. She had the most memories from there, the most fears and worries about normal life that Dean was quick to correct. Real life would not be a nightmare for her. Not anymore.
If Dean knew coming into her life would bring her back to hell, would he have stayed away? If Dean knew he’d be turning nightmares into flashbacks, would he have kept his distance?
They’re questions he couldn’t answer.
She sat there in quiet, overwhelmed silence, lanky Sasquatch legs hanging over the edge of the bed. She looked up at him. “What do you think happened?” She asked. “After Hell?”
“I don’t know,” Dean signed. “A miracle, maybe.”
She snorted. “Doesn’t feel like one.”
That’s what convinced Dean that it truly was one. “What do you want to do now?” He asked.
Sam shook her head with a smile. “Give me some time,” she signed. “I’m living two lives.”
Dean’s throat went tight at that. “If you need to go back to work, if you have friends--”
She grabbed his hand, stopping him. “I want to remember,” she signed. “Everything.”
“Okay.” Dean nodded. He braced himself for the hardest-hitting ones. “Ask me anything.”
“No. Not ask,” she said. “Show me. Show me our lives. Show me how we were.”
“It wasn’t good,” Dean said. “At least, not most of it.”
“It was us,” she said, her eyes going red and shiny. “It was you looking out for me. It was me trying to save you. You never made me feel like a monster. You made me feel normal.”
“I don’t want to hunt,” Dean said, and realized he meant it.
“Okay. Then we won’t. Take me somewhere.”
“We’ll do whatever you want,” Dean signed. “We’ll go places your plants will grow. We’ll live next to nature preserves. We can take pots and hangers with us.”
“Okay,” Sam laughed. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Right now?” Dean’s eyes widened.
Sam got up, and drew him into a hug. She let out a shaky breath. Lavender and sunflowers and water lilies forced their way up through the shitty motel carpeting and along the walls and from the light fixtures and through the gaps in the window. Without looking at her, Dean could hear her saying through her plants, “I remember. I’m home.”
He hugged her tighter. He felt tall black-eyed susans loop their stems around his arms and legs, and he let them, he embraced them, trying to show her, “you are home. You’re here. We’re family.”
It was what Dean had always tried to tell her.
Sam was beautiful. She was wild and carefree. She was color and light, and she allowed Dean to breathe. It wasn’t normal, but their lives weren’t normal. They would never be normal.
But they were alive. They were back on the road together. Sam’s eyes were bright and her hands moved without hesitation. Her flowers bloomed without shame. And Dean tried his best to make her laugh. Each day, he made a little more progress. The nightmares got a little easier to deal with. He led her through wild forests and state parks and watched her shine.
He still didn’t know why he’d been given this gift, why Sam had come back. He didn’t ask. He didn’t dare think of it or look into it. This was a gift horse of titanic proportions.
No, Dean was going to live his life with gratitude and celebration. He was going to let Sam grow, and protect her when he could, but not shelter her. Dean had done a lot of growing of his own while she was gone, his own trunk going broader, weathered by the seasons.
He felt like he’d been preparing for this. Like this was some cosmic way to give Sam what she was made for.
To show her true happiness in the face of scars. To make days warm and sunny after cold nightmares.
This was what Dean was meant to do ever since color had first come into his life.
The End