Our Shadows Taller Than Our Soul, for tyrsibs
Title: Our Shadows Taller Than Our Soul
Recipient: tyrsibs
Rating: Teen for show-level language
Word Count: ~5500
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: Infinite gratitude to my nameless-for-now beta and bestie. We brainstormed for this story together and many of the ideas and lines in here are hers.
Title is from Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’
Summary: Every clanging step down the Bunker stairs feels like taking another step back in time. Always does.
Every clanging step down the Bunker stairs feels like taking another step back in time. Always does.
It’s funny, then, that the staircase was what forced them into the future; into their present. The winter of his fifty-sixth birthday - so more than ten years ago now, Jesus - Dean had gone down hard after a hunt. The stupid thing, the unbelievable thing, was that it wasn’t even a monster that got him. The hunt was a milk run, the scared and lonely spirit of a lost hiker up in the Rockies. But on the way back to the car - a sudden white-out blizzard, a hidden sheet of black ice, one misplaced step… Sam had inched them out of the storm, praying his heart out though he knew Cas wouldn’t answer, hadn’t had his ears on for almost a year. Knowing it was bad by how Dean, stretched out in the back seat, didn’t offer even token protest at being taken to the nearest hospital instead of pushing back home.
Spring flowers were in full bloom and it was almost Sam’s own birthday before Castiel reappeared, battered but alive, full of grace, to heal Dean with a touch. Sam had held his breath while Dean inhaled deeply, lungs expanding fully without pain for the first time since January, testing his weight on his formerly shattered leg while Sam waited to hear him make the inevitable next request of Cas: Take us home.
It didn’t come. After taking a celebratory lap around the sun porch that had become his domain, Dean grinned at Sam, that little-boy grin Sam had almost given up on ever seeing again, and said something stupid and predictable like, ‘Now I finally get to see what the upstairs of this place looks like. Bet you’re hiding a pair of identical twins up there in your room, eh Sammy?’
‘This place’ was the tiny, rundown split-level Sam had rented when the PT started talking about moving Dean out of the hospital. Sam had stared at the woman, wanting to both laugh and cry after her final stipulation for what a successful home transfer would look like. ‘The entry to the-’ he’d faltered in his reply, regrouped swiftly. ‘The entry to Dean’s house is nothing but stairs. There’s like twenty just to get from the front door to the, uh, the living room.’
Leaving Dean in low spirits Sam had taken off, driving slowly out of downtown Boulder with no destination in mind, finding his way by feel and by instinct to an older part of town where the houses were small, the neighborhoods solidly working-class and the teenagers too busy with after-school jobs to get into much trouble. The sight of a For Rent sign sparked an idea, a plan unfolded in a matter of minutes, and by the time he returned to the hospital, Sam had a bag of takeout in one hand and a rental agreement in the other.
They had never expected to stay in that house past Dean’s recovery, even if ‘Dean’s recovery’ had been a nebulous goal at best. But by the time Cas showed up, Sam had just finished a bunch of planting and landscaping and the view from Dean’s sun porch - which Dean himself had been slowly fixing up and arranging to his liking - looked pretty damn good. Dean’s meds meant he couldn’t drink, so Sam quit too in solidarity, and they were both sleeping better than they ever had before. Dean split his time between the porch and his other domain: the kitchen. To his brother’s great amusement, at the age of fifty-two Sam started to put on weight that wasn’t just more muscle for basically the first time in his life.
It was the most absurdly, disgustingly normal version of their life that either of them had ever known. And it blindsided Sam, how easily they settled into it. How he didn’t even realize they’d settled into it until Cas healed Dean and the only thing that changed was that Dean now came along on the six-hour drive - which became a five-hour drive, with Dean back behind the wheel - whenever Sam went back to the bunker to resupply, or research, or recon with other hunters.
When their lease in Boulder was up, the only question was where they’d look for their next house. Lebanon itself was way too small. Sam didn’t mind being one half of the mysterious ‘Campbell Brothers’ who dropped in once a week for food and booze, but the thought of living there outright was extremely claustrophobic. They agreed they needed to live within an hour of the bunker, in a town of at least twenty thousand. So then the question became whether Dean wanted to live along route 70 or 80. He picked 80 - a decision Sam would have placed a large amount of money on if anyone had asked - and then picked Hastings, because ‘If you’re going to live in Nebraska, you got to at least live where there’s a Kool-Aid festival every summer.’ They bought a duplex, just as run-down as their place in Boulder had been, fixed up one side nice and normal enough for the neighbors who occasionally stopped by, and turned the other side into their own version of Bobby’s house, keeping a couple of guest rooms ready for any hunter who needed a place to crash.
Usually that was Jody, sometimes with Donna, sometimes with the girls, but yesterday it was Garth’s twins who’d knocked on their door, apologetic and nervous. Well - Cas had looked apologetic and nervous. Sam had hid whatever anxiety he had over being the bearer of bad news under his usual bravado and swagger. Little Cas - Cassie, Sam had to remind himself, still adjusting to the she/her pronouns - was the studious one of the pair. From a young age, she’d taken on the duties of preserving and adding to the Men of Letters knowledge, all but moving in to the bunker after Dean’s accident. Little Sam, from an equally young age, had taken on the duty of imitating all of Dean’s mannerisms, to Dean’s deep bafflement and Big Sam’s unending entertainment. The twins had turned thirty last year and the hero worship showed no sign of abating; when they’d arrived on the Winchesters’ doorstep yesterday, Sam had on a black leather jacket over a Led Zeppelin tee. He stomped down the hall without removing his boots, asking for a beer and leaving his sister to deliver the news that a magical experiment they’d been working on had triggered the bunker’s fire suppressant system, floating a couple of the store rooms in several inches of water.
“I got most of it cleaned up,” Cassie said, ignoring her brother’s indignant call of ‘I helped!’ from the kitchen, “but I didn’t think you’d want me messing with the things in the ‘gross stuff store room’. Sorry…”
Sam clapped her shoulder and told her it wasn’t a big deal, and would have been ready to hit the road in ten minutes except that Dean wanted someone other than his brother-who-had-the-taste-buds-of-a-Neanderthal to give him their opinion on his new chili recipe.
*
“Wow,” Sam wrinkled his nose, stopping on the store room threshold. “They weren’t kidding.”
The smell of damp permeated the air, the usual hum and whir of the bunker’s everyday operation supplemented by the deep purr of a dehumidifier dripping away in one corner.
“Well, now I know why we call it the ‘gross stuff store room,’” Dean commented, craning over Sam’s shoulder, then letting out a short huff. “Why do we call it the ‘gross stuff store room’?”
“You don’t remember?” Sam lifted an eyebrow at Dean, then pointed to the rusty red file cabinet. All of the drawers were marked with peeling labels and one of them, bearing Dean’s handwriting, read: Gross Stuff.
“Oh, man.” Dean laughed, edging around Sam to make his way into the humid room. “That’s where I used to stash like, dried sheep’s eyes and lizard fingernails.”
“I think those would just be called ‘claws,’ Dean.” Sam rolled his eyes, knocking Dean’s hand away from where he was reaching for a stack of waterlogged papers. “Would you go make us some coffee?”
Dean’s eyebrows reminded Sam that he’d already been halfway through a French press when Dean found him in the kitchen that morning, and Sam grimaced, rubbing his neck. “I didn’t sleep great last night.”
“Uh-huh,” Dean deadpanned, looking pointedly at his watch. “And more caffeine at three in the afternoon is gonna help you sleep better tonight. Got it.”
“Fine, make it half-caf or something.”
Dean was already halfway out the door but swung back in with one hand on the doorjamb, the other pointing accusatorily into Sam’s face, eyes comically wide. “You shut your mouth, heathen.”
Sam shook his head, grinning down at the soggy papers, heart lifting a bit in the wake of Dean’s antics. Whether Dean had done it on purpose or it was the reflex of sixty-odd years of looking out for him, didn’t really matter, it worked.
Sam pulled up a chair, made sure it wasn’t too damp, and sat down. There was a reason that, whoever they’d trusted over the years with the run of the bunker, this particular room had remained largely off-limits to anyone but themselves. It had started with Dean and his ‘gross stuff’ cabinet, which became the receptacle for any weird or disturbing or potentially dangerous ingredient they collected - witchy stuff, useful to have around whether they were working with Rowena or against her at any given moment - and kind of snowballed from there. Weapons they didn’t know how to use. Spellbooks they didn’t know how to read. Sam figured a supernatural archaeologist would find it a fascinating cross-section of the potentially useful and potentially deadly debris of a hunter’s life.
Sam hadn’t been thrilled at the prospect of coming here to deal with all of it. It had needed dealing with for years, had been weighing on him actually, but thinking about it last night he’d got kind of jumpy, knowing that they’d have to tread lightly and not just because there were things in here that might, literally, kill them if handled wrong. He and Dean may have gotten more comfortable ambling down memory lane together as they piled on the years, but some of these boxes had been sealed up for decades, and Sam could only guess at what can of worms might be hiding behind this sodden label, or that grimy padlock.
Dean came out of the kitchen with the coffee tray just as Sam was setting a box down on the map table.
“Hey,” he nodded, wiping his hands on his jeans and accepting a cup from Dean. “Thought we’d work through it a load at a time out here, better light and, uh…”
“Less dank stank?” Dean supplied, sipping.
Sam huffed. “Yeah.”
“Oh man, are you kidding me?” Dean was already riffling through the box, straightening up holding an utterly unexceptional-looking piece of wood. “The Funny Stick! I completely forgot about this!”
Sam snorted, trying not to grin. “Uh, yeah, that was kind of the point of putting it away.”
Dean wasn’t listening. Putting down his coffee he stepped out to the center of the room, checking to make sure the space around him was clear and, before Sam could object, flicking his wrist. What Dean had christened the ‘Funny Stick’ transformed in an instant into a staff that looked like something out of a Moondoor LARPing session. Dean crowed in triumph, turning to grin at Sam. “Like riding a bike,” he declared, then started to twirl the staff, which turned into a heavy rope with a ball on one end which promptly smacked him right in the stomach. Sam spared a moment to make sure his brother wasn’t actually dying before doubling over himself, clutching the edge of the table as he laughed.
“Asshole,” Dean muttered when he got his breath back, glaring at the weapon that was once again a stick in his hand. “I was trying to get the nun chucks.”
“It’s a figure-eight.” Sam straightened, face hurting with his grin. “And you could never get it right, that’s why it ended up in the store room.”
“You’re a figure-eight,” Dean muttered, carefully setting the stick down and brushing off his hands.
Sam patted him on the shoulder with condescending consolation, then carefully moved the stick to the far end of the table. The Funny Stick was one of dozens of weapons, hundreds of items overall, that they’d moved out of Magnus’s invisible lair in the days after Dean made his first kill with the First Blade.
Sam remembered like it was yesterday - sitting at this very table, cataloguing the weird, interesting, and frankly disturbing things from Magnus’s collection. All the while keeping one eye on Dean, waiting for a sign that the Mark was going to take over, praying that his worst fears wouldn’t come true before his eyes.
The Funny Stick had brought Dean out of his funk for a while, delight on his face like a little boy who’d been transported into his favorite video game as he manipulated the absurd thing, trying to work out which combination of moves caused it to turn into which weapon. Trying - and, quite often, failing - then walking around with bruises for days on end, until Sam finally smuggled it out of sight and out of mind.
“All right, geek boy,” Dean said as Sam walked back around the table. “What’s the plan?”
They spent the next few hours going through the top layer of stuff. Things that had been left out and taken the brunt of the flooding. Papers too damaged to read that would have to be trashed, artifacts that could be re-filed after a little TLC. To Sam’s surprise, a lot of what they went through seemed surprisingly…meaningless. Things that had seemed so critical once upon a time, to keep safe, to keep track of, to keep ‘just in case’, most of it ended up in the trash pile. Of course, figuring out how to trash supernatural items wasn’t exactly a picnic, and by the time the sun would have been setting outside Sam was rubbing his eyes, thinking maybe holding on to this stuff would actually be the easier route.
He leaned his chair back on two legs, stretched his arms overhead and craned his neck to peer up at his watch. Yup, the sun would be sinking below the horizon right about now. He rubbed his stinging eyes again and muttered, “How’d we live somewhere without windows for so long?”
Dean snorted loudly. Sam dropped his chair back to earth to look over at him. Sometime when Sam wasn’t looking, Dean had slipped on his reading glasses.
“Don’t know, man, but next life, let’s skip that part.” Dean’s eyebrows furrowed and he wrinkled his nose, making the glasses twitch as he muttered, “Ruined my looks.”
Sam dropped his eyes to the wooden box he’d just emptied, fiddled with its metal clasp, taking a deep breath before saying, “Dean, we could talk to Cas-”
“No, Sam. Come on man, how many times are we gonna have this conversation?”
“Until you let me finish a damn sentence!” Sam raised his voice and his eyes, meeting Dean’s look defiantly.
“Finish all the sentences you want, you know what my answer’s gonna be.”
“Dean…”
Dean’s coffee cup hit the table with a smack. “Look, Sam. If you’re in pain, I’ll call Cas. If I’m in pain, you’re gonna call Cas whether I like it or not. But I ain’t calling him just to get out of wearing granny glasses, all right? We’re old, Sam. Deal with it.”
Sam clamped his tongue between his molars to keep his retort between his teeth. He was still glaring down at the box in front of him when Dean took a sharp breath then said, quiet and pleading, “Oh man, no, come on…”
Sam looked up to find his brother gingerly trying to peel back the leather cover of what looked like a hunter’s journal. Sam frowned, perplexed by the look of sorrow and loss on Dean’s face. They kept their dad’s with them and Bobby’s was back at the house, so whose…
“It’s Rufus’s,” Dean answered his unspoken question without looking up. “It’s completely ruined, even if we can get it open, the pages are mush. Dammit.”
Sam pushed himself up and leaned over the table to look closer. “Are you sure…” The question dwindled on his lips because yeah, that thing was completely waterlogged. He withdrew his hand and sighed. “That sucks.”
“Yeah.” Dean pushed his chair back a little, running a hand over his chin. “Heh. Remember how long it took you to transcribe this thing, when we got it from Bobby?”
Sam grimaced, then shook his head over a rueful smile. Rufus’s paranoia may have saved his ass time and again, but writing his entire journal in shorthand and cyphers…that was just mean.
“It’s funny,” Dean said a minute later, reaching for his coffee cup and swirling the dregs in the bottom. “Actually, it’s really not funny and I hope the old codger doesn’t come haunt me for this but…”
Dean trailed off, thinking; after a moment, Sam prompted, “But?”
Dean blinked up at him, threw the cold coffee down his throat and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I was just thinking, this old book really ain’t nothing but a souvenir. I mean we spent God-knows how long translating it and putting it on online, there’s nothing here that’s actually lost except…”
“Except the thing itself,” Sam agreed quietly. He looked at the journal. He could barely remember Rufus’s face or the sound of his voice, but his nearly incomprehensible scrawl was somehow still fresh in his mind. If every page hadn’t contained some fascinating new bit of information, Sam never would have kept at it as long as he did. But Dean was right, they’d transcribed every page, every bit of knowledge crammed in there had been digitized, analyzed and referenced many times over by them and by the next generation of hunters.
“Yeah,” Dean sighed, scrubbing at his chin. “I don’t know, man. I used to feel guilty, you know, like if I didn’t hold on to it all, I’d…I don’t know. Like, who was I, without all of this? Do you know what I’m saying?” Dean’s gesture took in the full length of the map table, now crowded with the detritus of a long life of saving people, hunting things. “But I guess time goes on, it gets easier to let go of it all.”
Sam nodded in quiet agreement, then his lips twitched and he huffed softly. “Some of it, anyway.” He pointed with his chin to where their dad’s journal sat a few feet to the left of Dean’s elbow.
Dean reached for it, drummed his fingers lightly over the leather, then slid it across the table to Sam. “Put it with the stuff we’re taking back to the house. I ain’t leaving anything valuable here as long as the Wonder Twins are gonna use this place like their magical playground.”
Sam grinned and stood up, stretching his back and groaning. It’d been a long time since he sat hunched over the map table for hours without a break.
“I hear you, brother.” Dean’s voice was gruff around his own stretch, knees and back popping as he straightened up. “And I’m starving. I’m gonna go put the chili on to heat up. Ah, but first…” He beelined for the table with the cluster of bottles and decanters, rubbing his hands together as he inspected the collection. A moment later, Sam had a cut-glass tumbler pressed into his hand, lifting it to clink against Dean’s.
Sam had never gone back to drinking after Dean’s accident. Dean used to bug him about it, pester him to have a beer with dinner, but when Sam didn’t rise to the bait Dean quickly let it slide. These days, Dean barely indulged himself, leaving Sam to say a silent prayer of thanks to whoever was listening. The way he wouldn’t even ask Cas to fix his eyes, Sam didn’t want to think about what he’d say if Sam suggested they bargain with the angel for a new liver. Dean still kept beer in the house, cracking it open when they had guests, but for the most part he went from one pool night to the next without reaching for a bottle in between.
‘Those broads drank me under the table,’ Dean had said, sounding inordinately pleased with himself, the first time he’d come home from his new pool club tipsy and fifty bucks poorer than when he’d left. The club was Dean and six or seven women, mostly biker widows, ranging from about fifty-five to Delores who, eighty-six last month, had made a serious play for Sam the first time they met. Dean loved that gang like Sam had never seen him love any organized group of people before. They met at Rocky’s, a real dive about twenty minutes down 80, and once every few months Dean would stay out all night, rolling in next morning in time for breakfast, shaking his head and saying, ‘Mistakes were made,’ grinning at Sam the same way he had when he was seventeen, twenty-seven, and, apparently, sixty-seven. Sam would roll his eyes - the same way he had when he was thirteen, twenty-three, and, apparently, sixty-three - and push a cup of coffee towards him, asking whose bottle of Viagra he’d stolen this time.
On the occasions when Sam would tag along to Rocky’s, he’d watch his brother nurse a beer through two, three games before switching to coffee, while he himself enjoyed the fact that a pool hall that hadn’t been remodeled in this century served a really good local kombucha. He suspected he’d go the rest of his life without drinking, or even thinking about it.
Except when they came home.
He felt a sudden warmth in his cheeks, fingers tingling. He sat back in his chair and looked down at his drink, surprised to find he’d only had a sip or two; it had been a very, very long time since he’d thought of the bunker as ‘home.’
He was still sitting there, staring contemplatively into his glass, when Dean clattered in from the kitchen, his boots sounding the same on the library floor as they always had. “Gettin’ your booze on, eh, Grandma, nice to see nothing’s changed there.” Dean set two bowls of chili on the table and smacked Sam’s shoulder as he walked behind him, but then stopped in his tracks. “What is that?”
Sam roused himself and sat up straighter, gaze refocusing on the curse box in front of him. “Don’t know, that’s why I was waiting to open it, see if you remember what we stashed in here. The box is Dad’s but I have no memory of reusing it after the rabbit’s foot, do you?”
“No, I mean, yeah that’s - I used it, it’s just, just threw something in there so it wouldn’t…”
Sam twisted to look up at his brother in time to see Dean swipe a hand over his mouth, then reach forward to snag the box off the table. “No big deal, I’ll put it back with the other curse boxes.”
“No big - hang on, Dean!” Dean looked like he was about to high-tail it down to the storage vaults and Sam half-rose to follow him, bracing himself on the table when Dean stopped after two steps. “What’s in there?”
“It’s really nothing.” Dean sounded much less cagey now, looking a little embarrassed as he came back to the table, dropping into his old familiar chair across from Sam. He set the curse box down in front of himself, out of Sam’s reach, and stretched out his legs, sinking down a little in his seat as he picked up his whiskey and look a long drink. “Just caught me off guard, Sammy, that’s all.”
“Oh…kay…” Sam looked sideways at his brother, and when he didn’t elaborate, prompted, “So, it’s dangerous?”
“Kinda. Not really.” Dean shrugged, then held up a hand as soon as Sam opened his mouth. Still stalling, Dean finished the whiskey in his glass and got up again for a refill. “Remember Magnus? Cuthbert-Whatever? Yeah. When we went back, when we were cleaning out his…his ‘zoo’…”
Sam mirrored Dean’s grimace. That had been a grizzly business. Sorting through his bizarre collection of weapons and artifacts was one thing, but dealing with…disposing of…the collection of living beings had been something else entirely. Something Sam had done his best to put out of his mind.
“So, what,” Sam asked slowly as Dean sat back down. “You have some sort of…creature in there?”
“What? No! Jesus, Sam. It’s a coin. It’s a…like a wishing coin.”
“Like that, what was it, Babylonian? That wishing well out in Washington.”
“Sort of, but more like, I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening, I only kept it because she left it behind, I wasn’t gonna take it.”
“…‘she’?”
“Yeah. She was, I think she was a fairy? She was bargaining for her life, man. Swore she belonged to a band of fairies who didn’t prey on humans, if I’d just let her go instead of wasting her she’d be in my debt, grant me wishes, blah blah blah.”
Into the awkward silence, Sam asked, “So…did you let her go?”
Dean rolled his head from one side to the other, then nodded. “Yeah, man. You remember how I was back then. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to go full-on berserker on every monster son of a bitch in there. But part of me was still…I knew it was the Mark making me crazy. She was pleading, like crying and everything,” Dean drew a swift air circle around his eyes to illustrate where the crying had, apparently, taken place. “You were out back dealing with those vamps and so I just, I let her go. I told her I didn’t want her in my debt though, I told her I wouldn’t take anything from her, but she left this coin behind, saying if I changed my mind, I could use it to summon her.”
Sam tried to let that sink in, but incredulity won the battle for his mouth. “And you never told me about it? You never even thought of using it - hell, we were working our asses off trying to deal with the Mark and you-”
“It would have been another deal, Sam, and you know it! When have those ever gone well for us?”
“It doesn’t sound like a deal, it sounds like a powerful being offering to grant you a wish.”
“Oh great, yeah that’s much better.” Dean was laying the sarcasm on thick. “At least with a deal you know what’s gonna kick you in the ass, but a wish? Forget about the wishing well cranking out gigantic alcohol-guzzling teddy bears, how about that pearl that was supposed to get Michael out of my head?”
Sam shut his mouth so fast his teeth snapped together. He looked down, forced his hands to unclench from around his tumbler. After a moment he cleared his throat. “Right. You’re right.”
“What was that?” Sam looked up to see Dean cupping his hand around his ear, leaning forward with a slight smirk. “I’m an old man, Sammy, didn’t hear you. Could you say that again, please?”
Sam grinned, couldn’t help it, and reached out for his pen, broadcasting the move before he chucked it at Dean’s head. Dean caught it easily as Sam over-enunciated, “I said, you - are - an - idiot.”
“Nah.” Dean grabbed his chili bowl and kicked his boots up onto the table, smug. “I know what you said, can’t take it away from me.”
He dug into his dinner, eating steadily for a few minutes before picking up his whiskey again. He took a sip then his head rocked to one side, eyes going absently up to the ceiling. He looked so much like himself, like Sam’s brother now and like Sam’s brother thirty years ago, it made Sam a little dizzy. They’d time travelled enough - Sam felt authorized to say that the kind of time travel that came of reminiscing could sometimes be just as disorienting as the real thing.
“Let me see the box?” he asked when he’d eaten enough to get Dean off his back about not appreciating his culinary efforts, and was a little surprised when Dean stretched out a foot to nudge it across the table without a grumble.
Sam just gazed at it for a minute, remembering the first time he’d seen it, the rabbit’s foot and the ridiculous but deadly comedy of errors that followed. He hadn’t thought about Bela in years. He rubbed a thumb lightly over the runes and sigils carved into the box, then pushed it away and leaned back in his chair. Picking up his tumbler, he turned it in his hand to watch the lamplight play in his last few sips of whiskey.
“What would you wish for now?”
Dean shrugged, offhand. “What do you think? To have Mom back. Dad, Jack…”
Sam ducked his head, finished his drink, and when he looked up again Dean’s face had changed, gone serious, gaze turned inward. The lamps sent out their low light to catch in Dean’s silver hair while their shadows failed to flatter away the sagging skin under his jaw. The lines around his eyes and mouth seemed etched deeper than they were a minute ago as he said, “Bobby…Ellen…Jo…Charlie…”
Sam had to do some mental gymnastics to recapture the thread of conversation, understand that Dean was still answering his question, because he’d gotten lost in the sudden, sweeping realization that they were old. They were old. They’d been laughing about it for years, but behind the jokes, what do you know…it was all true.
Dean was still murmuring names - Eileen, whose memory still made Sam’s heart twist painfully; Kari, who’d lived and worked in the bunker with them for almost five years before haring off alone on the trail of the demon who’d killed her family; Emil, the only person Dean had referred to as ‘like a brother’ since Benny, though in his case Sam had agreed wholeheartedly - the list wasn’t long, but it was long enough to drive the point home. None of the people they’d loved had got to where he and Dean were, not even close. Hell, in hunter years late sixties had to be…
Sam blew out his breath, not wanting to finish the thought.
“No,” Dean said, jerking Sam out of his head.
The pall of age that had settled over Dean’s features, unsettling Sam, was gone. Dean shook his head, broadcasting the kind of decision, conviction, that Sam had trusted to orient himself since he was a child.
“No,” Dean repeated. “Course I want them back. All of them. But Sammy, I’m thinking …If they were all here, back, it’d mess things up. You know it would, that’s how it works. And I just…” He sighed, but it wasn’t a weary sound. “We got it good, man. We’re here. Both of us. We made it. That’s all I would have asked for back then. And I’ve got it. And it’s enough.”
It was. A familiar sort of peace settled in Sam’s chest, watching Dean’s eyes crinkle up with his smile as Sam nodded in agreement.
Dean splashed a little more whiskey into Sam’s glass and silently they drank to the friends they’d lost along the way, and to the almost unbelievable fact that the two of them were still here.
A few minutes later Dean drained his glass, then pushed himself slowly to his feet. “I’m gonna hit the hay. See if my bed still remembers me.”
Sam shook his head, smiling. “I think I’ll head that way soon too. Gonna…” He waved vaguely at the papers, bowls, glasses. “I’ll check the locks and get the lights.”
Dean dropped a hand on his shoulder as he passed, heading for the hall and calling back without turning, “Don’t drink all my whiskey!”
Sam tipped his head back and listened to the sound of his brother’s steps as they faded down the hall, the echo soon swallowed up by the ambient hum of their home all around them.
Soon, Sam would get up and take all their dishes the kitchen. Soon, he’d climb back up the staircase to double-check the manual lock and then make his way down, turning out lights and finding his way to his room in the dark, easy as breathing. But for another moment he was just going to sit, and listen, and think: Dean was right…this is enough.
Recipient: tyrsibs
Rating: Teen for show-level language
Word Count: ~5500
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: Infinite gratitude to my nameless-for-now beta and bestie. We brainstormed for this story together and many of the ideas and lines in here are hers.
Title is from Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’
Summary: Every clanging step down the Bunker stairs feels like taking another step back in time. Always does.
Every clanging step down the Bunker stairs feels like taking another step back in time. Always does.
It’s funny, then, that the staircase was what forced them into the future; into their present. The winter of his fifty-sixth birthday - so more than ten years ago now, Jesus - Dean had gone down hard after a hunt. The stupid thing, the unbelievable thing, was that it wasn’t even a monster that got him. The hunt was a milk run, the scared and lonely spirit of a lost hiker up in the Rockies. But on the way back to the car - a sudden white-out blizzard, a hidden sheet of black ice, one misplaced step… Sam had inched them out of the storm, praying his heart out though he knew Cas wouldn’t answer, hadn’t had his ears on for almost a year. Knowing it was bad by how Dean, stretched out in the back seat, didn’t offer even token protest at being taken to the nearest hospital instead of pushing back home.
Spring flowers were in full bloom and it was almost Sam’s own birthday before Castiel reappeared, battered but alive, full of grace, to heal Dean with a touch. Sam had held his breath while Dean inhaled deeply, lungs expanding fully without pain for the first time since January, testing his weight on his formerly shattered leg while Sam waited to hear him make the inevitable next request of Cas: Take us home.
It didn’t come. After taking a celebratory lap around the sun porch that had become his domain, Dean grinned at Sam, that little-boy grin Sam had almost given up on ever seeing again, and said something stupid and predictable like, ‘Now I finally get to see what the upstairs of this place looks like. Bet you’re hiding a pair of identical twins up there in your room, eh Sammy?’
‘This place’ was the tiny, rundown split-level Sam had rented when the PT started talking about moving Dean out of the hospital. Sam had stared at the woman, wanting to both laugh and cry after her final stipulation for what a successful home transfer would look like. ‘The entry to the-’ he’d faltered in his reply, regrouped swiftly. ‘The entry to Dean’s house is nothing but stairs. There’s like twenty just to get from the front door to the, uh, the living room.’
Leaving Dean in low spirits Sam had taken off, driving slowly out of downtown Boulder with no destination in mind, finding his way by feel and by instinct to an older part of town where the houses were small, the neighborhoods solidly working-class and the teenagers too busy with after-school jobs to get into much trouble. The sight of a For Rent sign sparked an idea, a plan unfolded in a matter of minutes, and by the time he returned to the hospital, Sam had a bag of takeout in one hand and a rental agreement in the other.
They had never expected to stay in that house past Dean’s recovery, even if ‘Dean’s recovery’ had been a nebulous goal at best. But by the time Cas showed up, Sam had just finished a bunch of planting and landscaping and the view from Dean’s sun porch - which Dean himself had been slowly fixing up and arranging to his liking - looked pretty damn good. Dean’s meds meant he couldn’t drink, so Sam quit too in solidarity, and they were both sleeping better than they ever had before. Dean split his time between the porch and his other domain: the kitchen. To his brother’s great amusement, at the age of fifty-two Sam started to put on weight that wasn’t just more muscle for basically the first time in his life.
It was the most absurdly, disgustingly normal version of their life that either of them had ever known. And it blindsided Sam, how easily they settled into it. How he didn’t even realize they’d settled into it until Cas healed Dean and the only thing that changed was that Dean now came along on the six-hour drive - which became a five-hour drive, with Dean back behind the wheel - whenever Sam went back to the bunker to resupply, or research, or recon with other hunters.
When their lease in Boulder was up, the only question was where they’d look for their next house. Lebanon itself was way too small. Sam didn’t mind being one half of the mysterious ‘Campbell Brothers’ who dropped in once a week for food and booze, but the thought of living there outright was extremely claustrophobic. They agreed they needed to live within an hour of the bunker, in a town of at least twenty thousand. So then the question became whether Dean wanted to live along route 70 or 80. He picked 80 - a decision Sam would have placed a large amount of money on if anyone had asked - and then picked Hastings, because ‘If you’re going to live in Nebraska, you got to at least live where there’s a Kool-Aid festival every summer.’ They bought a duplex, just as run-down as their place in Boulder had been, fixed up one side nice and normal enough for the neighbors who occasionally stopped by, and turned the other side into their own version of Bobby’s house, keeping a couple of guest rooms ready for any hunter who needed a place to crash.
Usually that was Jody, sometimes with Donna, sometimes with the girls, but yesterday it was Garth’s twins who’d knocked on their door, apologetic and nervous. Well - Cas had looked apologetic and nervous. Sam had hid whatever anxiety he had over being the bearer of bad news under his usual bravado and swagger. Little Cas - Cassie, Sam had to remind himself, still adjusting to the she/her pronouns - was the studious one of the pair. From a young age, she’d taken on the duties of preserving and adding to the Men of Letters knowledge, all but moving in to the bunker after Dean’s accident. Little Sam, from an equally young age, had taken on the duty of imitating all of Dean’s mannerisms, to Dean’s deep bafflement and Big Sam’s unending entertainment. The twins had turned thirty last year and the hero worship showed no sign of abating; when they’d arrived on the Winchesters’ doorstep yesterday, Sam had on a black leather jacket over a Led Zeppelin tee. He stomped down the hall without removing his boots, asking for a beer and leaving his sister to deliver the news that a magical experiment they’d been working on had triggered the bunker’s fire suppressant system, floating a couple of the store rooms in several inches of water.
“I got most of it cleaned up,” Cassie said, ignoring her brother’s indignant call of ‘I helped!’ from the kitchen, “but I didn’t think you’d want me messing with the things in the ‘gross stuff store room’. Sorry…”
Sam clapped her shoulder and told her it wasn’t a big deal, and would have been ready to hit the road in ten minutes except that Dean wanted someone other than his brother-who-had-the-taste-buds-of-a-Neanderthal to give him their opinion on his new chili recipe.
*
“Wow,” Sam wrinkled his nose, stopping on the store room threshold. “They weren’t kidding.”
The smell of damp permeated the air, the usual hum and whir of the bunker’s everyday operation supplemented by the deep purr of a dehumidifier dripping away in one corner.
“Well, now I know why we call it the ‘gross stuff store room,’” Dean commented, craning over Sam’s shoulder, then letting out a short huff. “Why do we call it the ‘gross stuff store room’?”
“You don’t remember?” Sam lifted an eyebrow at Dean, then pointed to the rusty red file cabinet. All of the drawers were marked with peeling labels and one of them, bearing Dean’s handwriting, read: Gross Stuff.
“Oh, man.” Dean laughed, edging around Sam to make his way into the humid room. “That’s where I used to stash like, dried sheep’s eyes and lizard fingernails.”
“I think those would just be called ‘claws,’ Dean.” Sam rolled his eyes, knocking Dean’s hand away from where he was reaching for a stack of waterlogged papers. “Would you go make us some coffee?”
Dean’s eyebrows reminded Sam that he’d already been halfway through a French press when Dean found him in the kitchen that morning, and Sam grimaced, rubbing his neck. “I didn’t sleep great last night.”
“Uh-huh,” Dean deadpanned, looking pointedly at his watch. “And more caffeine at three in the afternoon is gonna help you sleep better tonight. Got it.”
“Fine, make it half-caf or something.”
Dean was already halfway out the door but swung back in with one hand on the doorjamb, the other pointing accusatorily into Sam’s face, eyes comically wide. “You shut your mouth, heathen.”
Sam shook his head, grinning down at the soggy papers, heart lifting a bit in the wake of Dean’s antics. Whether Dean had done it on purpose or it was the reflex of sixty-odd years of looking out for him, didn’t really matter, it worked.
Sam pulled up a chair, made sure it wasn’t too damp, and sat down. There was a reason that, whoever they’d trusted over the years with the run of the bunker, this particular room had remained largely off-limits to anyone but themselves. It had started with Dean and his ‘gross stuff’ cabinet, which became the receptacle for any weird or disturbing or potentially dangerous ingredient they collected - witchy stuff, useful to have around whether they were working with Rowena or against her at any given moment - and kind of snowballed from there. Weapons they didn’t know how to use. Spellbooks they didn’t know how to read. Sam figured a supernatural archaeologist would find it a fascinating cross-section of the potentially useful and potentially deadly debris of a hunter’s life.
Sam hadn’t been thrilled at the prospect of coming here to deal with all of it. It had needed dealing with for years, had been weighing on him actually, but thinking about it last night he’d got kind of jumpy, knowing that they’d have to tread lightly and not just because there were things in here that might, literally, kill them if handled wrong. He and Dean may have gotten more comfortable ambling down memory lane together as they piled on the years, but some of these boxes had been sealed up for decades, and Sam could only guess at what can of worms might be hiding behind this sodden label, or that grimy padlock.
Dean came out of the kitchen with the coffee tray just as Sam was setting a box down on the map table.
“Hey,” he nodded, wiping his hands on his jeans and accepting a cup from Dean. “Thought we’d work through it a load at a time out here, better light and, uh…”
“Less dank stank?” Dean supplied, sipping.
Sam huffed. “Yeah.”
“Oh man, are you kidding me?” Dean was already riffling through the box, straightening up holding an utterly unexceptional-looking piece of wood. “The Funny Stick! I completely forgot about this!”
Sam snorted, trying not to grin. “Uh, yeah, that was kind of the point of putting it away.”
Dean wasn’t listening. Putting down his coffee he stepped out to the center of the room, checking to make sure the space around him was clear and, before Sam could object, flicking his wrist. What Dean had christened the ‘Funny Stick’ transformed in an instant into a staff that looked like something out of a Moondoor LARPing session. Dean crowed in triumph, turning to grin at Sam. “Like riding a bike,” he declared, then started to twirl the staff, which turned into a heavy rope with a ball on one end which promptly smacked him right in the stomach. Sam spared a moment to make sure his brother wasn’t actually dying before doubling over himself, clutching the edge of the table as he laughed.
“Asshole,” Dean muttered when he got his breath back, glaring at the weapon that was once again a stick in his hand. “I was trying to get the nun chucks.”
“It’s a figure-eight.” Sam straightened, face hurting with his grin. “And you could never get it right, that’s why it ended up in the store room.”
“You’re a figure-eight,” Dean muttered, carefully setting the stick down and brushing off his hands.
Sam patted him on the shoulder with condescending consolation, then carefully moved the stick to the far end of the table. The Funny Stick was one of dozens of weapons, hundreds of items overall, that they’d moved out of Magnus’s invisible lair in the days after Dean made his first kill with the First Blade.
Sam remembered like it was yesterday - sitting at this very table, cataloguing the weird, interesting, and frankly disturbing things from Magnus’s collection. All the while keeping one eye on Dean, waiting for a sign that the Mark was going to take over, praying that his worst fears wouldn’t come true before his eyes.
The Funny Stick had brought Dean out of his funk for a while, delight on his face like a little boy who’d been transported into his favorite video game as he manipulated the absurd thing, trying to work out which combination of moves caused it to turn into which weapon. Trying - and, quite often, failing - then walking around with bruises for days on end, until Sam finally smuggled it out of sight and out of mind.
“All right, geek boy,” Dean said as Sam walked back around the table. “What’s the plan?”
They spent the next few hours going through the top layer of stuff. Things that had been left out and taken the brunt of the flooding. Papers too damaged to read that would have to be trashed, artifacts that could be re-filed after a little TLC. To Sam’s surprise, a lot of what they went through seemed surprisingly…meaningless. Things that had seemed so critical once upon a time, to keep safe, to keep track of, to keep ‘just in case’, most of it ended up in the trash pile. Of course, figuring out how to trash supernatural items wasn’t exactly a picnic, and by the time the sun would have been setting outside Sam was rubbing his eyes, thinking maybe holding on to this stuff would actually be the easier route.
He leaned his chair back on two legs, stretched his arms overhead and craned his neck to peer up at his watch. Yup, the sun would be sinking below the horizon right about now. He rubbed his stinging eyes again and muttered, “How’d we live somewhere without windows for so long?”
Dean snorted loudly. Sam dropped his chair back to earth to look over at him. Sometime when Sam wasn’t looking, Dean had slipped on his reading glasses.
“Don’t know, man, but next life, let’s skip that part.” Dean’s eyebrows furrowed and he wrinkled his nose, making the glasses twitch as he muttered, “Ruined my looks.”
Sam dropped his eyes to the wooden box he’d just emptied, fiddled with its metal clasp, taking a deep breath before saying, “Dean, we could talk to Cas-”
“No, Sam. Come on man, how many times are we gonna have this conversation?”
“Until you let me finish a damn sentence!” Sam raised his voice and his eyes, meeting Dean’s look defiantly.
“Finish all the sentences you want, you know what my answer’s gonna be.”
“Dean…”
Dean’s coffee cup hit the table with a smack. “Look, Sam. If you’re in pain, I’ll call Cas. If I’m in pain, you’re gonna call Cas whether I like it or not. But I ain’t calling him just to get out of wearing granny glasses, all right? We’re old, Sam. Deal with it.”
Sam clamped his tongue between his molars to keep his retort between his teeth. He was still glaring down at the box in front of him when Dean took a sharp breath then said, quiet and pleading, “Oh man, no, come on…”
Sam looked up to find his brother gingerly trying to peel back the leather cover of what looked like a hunter’s journal. Sam frowned, perplexed by the look of sorrow and loss on Dean’s face. They kept their dad’s with them and Bobby’s was back at the house, so whose…
“It’s Rufus’s,” Dean answered his unspoken question without looking up. “It’s completely ruined, even if we can get it open, the pages are mush. Dammit.”
Sam pushed himself up and leaned over the table to look closer. “Are you sure…” The question dwindled on his lips because yeah, that thing was completely waterlogged. He withdrew his hand and sighed. “That sucks.”
“Yeah.” Dean pushed his chair back a little, running a hand over his chin. “Heh. Remember how long it took you to transcribe this thing, when we got it from Bobby?”
Sam grimaced, then shook his head over a rueful smile. Rufus’s paranoia may have saved his ass time and again, but writing his entire journal in shorthand and cyphers…that was just mean.
“It’s funny,” Dean said a minute later, reaching for his coffee cup and swirling the dregs in the bottom. “Actually, it’s really not funny and I hope the old codger doesn’t come haunt me for this but…”
Dean trailed off, thinking; after a moment, Sam prompted, “But?”
Dean blinked up at him, threw the cold coffee down his throat and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I was just thinking, this old book really ain’t nothing but a souvenir. I mean we spent God-knows how long translating it and putting it on online, there’s nothing here that’s actually lost except…”
“Except the thing itself,” Sam agreed quietly. He looked at the journal. He could barely remember Rufus’s face or the sound of his voice, but his nearly incomprehensible scrawl was somehow still fresh in his mind. If every page hadn’t contained some fascinating new bit of information, Sam never would have kept at it as long as he did. But Dean was right, they’d transcribed every page, every bit of knowledge crammed in there had been digitized, analyzed and referenced many times over by them and by the next generation of hunters.
“Yeah,” Dean sighed, scrubbing at his chin. “I don’t know, man. I used to feel guilty, you know, like if I didn’t hold on to it all, I’d…I don’t know. Like, who was I, without all of this? Do you know what I’m saying?” Dean’s gesture took in the full length of the map table, now crowded with the detritus of a long life of saving people, hunting things. “But I guess time goes on, it gets easier to let go of it all.”
Sam nodded in quiet agreement, then his lips twitched and he huffed softly. “Some of it, anyway.” He pointed with his chin to where their dad’s journal sat a few feet to the left of Dean’s elbow.
Dean reached for it, drummed his fingers lightly over the leather, then slid it across the table to Sam. “Put it with the stuff we’re taking back to the house. I ain’t leaving anything valuable here as long as the Wonder Twins are gonna use this place like their magical playground.”
Sam grinned and stood up, stretching his back and groaning. It’d been a long time since he sat hunched over the map table for hours without a break.
“I hear you, brother.” Dean’s voice was gruff around his own stretch, knees and back popping as he straightened up. “And I’m starving. I’m gonna go put the chili on to heat up. Ah, but first…” He beelined for the table with the cluster of bottles and decanters, rubbing his hands together as he inspected the collection. A moment later, Sam had a cut-glass tumbler pressed into his hand, lifting it to clink against Dean’s.
Sam had never gone back to drinking after Dean’s accident. Dean used to bug him about it, pester him to have a beer with dinner, but when Sam didn’t rise to the bait Dean quickly let it slide. These days, Dean barely indulged himself, leaving Sam to say a silent prayer of thanks to whoever was listening. The way he wouldn’t even ask Cas to fix his eyes, Sam didn’t want to think about what he’d say if Sam suggested they bargain with the angel for a new liver. Dean still kept beer in the house, cracking it open when they had guests, but for the most part he went from one pool night to the next without reaching for a bottle in between.
‘Those broads drank me under the table,’ Dean had said, sounding inordinately pleased with himself, the first time he’d come home from his new pool club tipsy and fifty bucks poorer than when he’d left. The club was Dean and six or seven women, mostly biker widows, ranging from about fifty-five to Delores who, eighty-six last month, had made a serious play for Sam the first time they met. Dean loved that gang like Sam had never seen him love any organized group of people before. They met at Rocky’s, a real dive about twenty minutes down 80, and once every few months Dean would stay out all night, rolling in next morning in time for breakfast, shaking his head and saying, ‘Mistakes were made,’ grinning at Sam the same way he had when he was seventeen, twenty-seven, and, apparently, sixty-seven. Sam would roll his eyes - the same way he had when he was thirteen, twenty-three, and, apparently, sixty-three - and push a cup of coffee towards him, asking whose bottle of Viagra he’d stolen this time.
On the occasions when Sam would tag along to Rocky’s, he’d watch his brother nurse a beer through two, three games before switching to coffee, while he himself enjoyed the fact that a pool hall that hadn’t been remodeled in this century served a really good local kombucha. He suspected he’d go the rest of his life without drinking, or even thinking about it.
Except when they came home.
He felt a sudden warmth in his cheeks, fingers tingling. He sat back in his chair and looked down at his drink, surprised to find he’d only had a sip or two; it had been a very, very long time since he’d thought of the bunker as ‘home.’
He was still sitting there, staring contemplatively into his glass, when Dean clattered in from the kitchen, his boots sounding the same on the library floor as they always had. “Gettin’ your booze on, eh, Grandma, nice to see nothing’s changed there.” Dean set two bowls of chili on the table and smacked Sam’s shoulder as he walked behind him, but then stopped in his tracks. “What is that?”
Sam roused himself and sat up straighter, gaze refocusing on the curse box in front of him. “Don’t know, that’s why I was waiting to open it, see if you remember what we stashed in here. The box is Dad’s but I have no memory of reusing it after the rabbit’s foot, do you?”
“No, I mean, yeah that’s - I used it, it’s just, just threw something in there so it wouldn’t…”
Sam twisted to look up at his brother in time to see Dean swipe a hand over his mouth, then reach forward to snag the box off the table. “No big deal, I’ll put it back with the other curse boxes.”
“No big - hang on, Dean!” Dean looked like he was about to high-tail it down to the storage vaults and Sam half-rose to follow him, bracing himself on the table when Dean stopped after two steps. “What’s in there?”
“It’s really nothing.” Dean sounded much less cagey now, looking a little embarrassed as he came back to the table, dropping into his old familiar chair across from Sam. He set the curse box down in front of himself, out of Sam’s reach, and stretched out his legs, sinking down a little in his seat as he picked up his whiskey and look a long drink. “Just caught me off guard, Sammy, that’s all.”
“Oh…kay…” Sam looked sideways at his brother, and when he didn’t elaborate, prompted, “So, it’s dangerous?”
“Kinda. Not really.” Dean shrugged, then held up a hand as soon as Sam opened his mouth. Still stalling, Dean finished the whiskey in his glass and got up again for a refill. “Remember Magnus? Cuthbert-Whatever? Yeah. When we went back, when we were cleaning out his…his ‘zoo’…”
Sam mirrored Dean’s grimace. That had been a grizzly business. Sorting through his bizarre collection of weapons and artifacts was one thing, but dealing with…disposing of…the collection of living beings had been something else entirely. Something Sam had done his best to put out of his mind.
“So, what,” Sam asked slowly as Dean sat back down. “You have some sort of…creature in there?”
“What? No! Jesus, Sam. It’s a coin. It’s a…like a wishing coin.”
“Like that, what was it, Babylonian? That wishing well out in Washington.”
“Sort of, but more like, I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening, I only kept it because she left it behind, I wasn’t gonna take it.”
“…‘she’?”
“Yeah. She was, I think she was a fairy? She was bargaining for her life, man. Swore she belonged to a band of fairies who didn’t prey on humans, if I’d just let her go instead of wasting her she’d be in my debt, grant me wishes, blah blah blah.”
Into the awkward silence, Sam asked, “So…did you let her go?”
Dean rolled his head from one side to the other, then nodded. “Yeah, man. You remember how I was back then. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to go full-on berserker on every monster son of a bitch in there. But part of me was still…I knew it was the Mark making me crazy. She was pleading, like crying and everything,” Dean drew a swift air circle around his eyes to illustrate where the crying had, apparently, taken place. “You were out back dealing with those vamps and so I just, I let her go. I told her I didn’t want her in my debt though, I told her I wouldn’t take anything from her, but she left this coin behind, saying if I changed my mind, I could use it to summon her.”
Sam tried to let that sink in, but incredulity won the battle for his mouth. “And you never told me about it? You never even thought of using it - hell, we were working our asses off trying to deal with the Mark and you-”
“It would have been another deal, Sam, and you know it! When have those ever gone well for us?”
“It doesn’t sound like a deal, it sounds like a powerful being offering to grant you a wish.”
“Oh great, yeah that’s much better.” Dean was laying the sarcasm on thick. “At least with a deal you know what’s gonna kick you in the ass, but a wish? Forget about the wishing well cranking out gigantic alcohol-guzzling teddy bears, how about that pearl that was supposed to get Michael out of my head?”
Sam shut his mouth so fast his teeth snapped together. He looked down, forced his hands to unclench from around his tumbler. After a moment he cleared his throat. “Right. You’re right.”
“What was that?” Sam looked up to see Dean cupping his hand around his ear, leaning forward with a slight smirk. “I’m an old man, Sammy, didn’t hear you. Could you say that again, please?”
Sam grinned, couldn’t help it, and reached out for his pen, broadcasting the move before he chucked it at Dean’s head. Dean caught it easily as Sam over-enunciated, “I said, you - are - an - idiot.”
“Nah.” Dean grabbed his chili bowl and kicked his boots up onto the table, smug. “I know what you said, can’t take it away from me.”
He dug into his dinner, eating steadily for a few minutes before picking up his whiskey again. He took a sip then his head rocked to one side, eyes going absently up to the ceiling. He looked so much like himself, like Sam’s brother now and like Sam’s brother thirty years ago, it made Sam a little dizzy. They’d time travelled enough - Sam felt authorized to say that the kind of time travel that came of reminiscing could sometimes be just as disorienting as the real thing.
“Let me see the box?” he asked when he’d eaten enough to get Dean off his back about not appreciating his culinary efforts, and was a little surprised when Dean stretched out a foot to nudge it across the table without a grumble.
Sam just gazed at it for a minute, remembering the first time he’d seen it, the rabbit’s foot and the ridiculous but deadly comedy of errors that followed. He hadn’t thought about Bela in years. He rubbed a thumb lightly over the runes and sigils carved into the box, then pushed it away and leaned back in his chair. Picking up his tumbler, he turned it in his hand to watch the lamplight play in his last few sips of whiskey.
“What would you wish for now?”
Dean shrugged, offhand. “What do you think? To have Mom back. Dad, Jack…”
Sam ducked his head, finished his drink, and when he looked up again Dean’s face had changed, gone serious, gaze turned inward. The lamps sent out their low light to catch in Dean’s silver hair while their shadows failed to flatter away the sagging skin under his jaw. The lines around his eyes and mouth seemed etched deeper than they were a minute ago as he said, “Bobby…Ellen…Jo…Charlie…”
Sam had to do some mental gymnastics to recapture the thread of conversation, understand that Dean was still answering his question, because he’d gotten lost in the sudden, sweeping realization that they were old. They were old. They’d been laughing about it for years, but behind the jokes, what do you know…it was all true.
Dean was still murmuring names - Eileen, whose memory still made Sam’s heart twist painfully; Kari, who’d lived and worked in the bunker with them for almost five years before haring off alone on the trail of the demon who’d killed her family; Emil, the only person Dean had referred to as ‘like a brother’ since Benny, though in his case Sam had agreed wholeheartedly - the list wasn’t long, but it was long enough to drive the point home. None of the people they’d loved had got to where he and Dean were, not even close. Hell, in hunter years late sixties had to be…
Sam blew out his breath, not wanting to finish the thought.
“No,” Dean said, jerking Sam out of his head.
The pall of age that had settled over Dean’s features, unsettling Sam, was gone. Dean shook his head, broadcasting the kind of decision, conviction, that Sam had trusted to orient himself since he was a child.
“No,” Dean repeated. “Course I want them back. All of them. But Sammy, I’m thinking …If they were all here, back, it’d mess things up. You know it would, that’s how it works. And I just…” He sighed, but it wasn’t a weary sound. “We got it good, man. We’re here. Both of us. We made it. That’s all I would have asked for back then. And I’ve got it. And it’s enough.”
It was. A familiar sort of peace settled in Sam’s chest, watching Dean’s eyes crinkle up with his smile as Sam nodded in agreement.
Dean splashed a little more whiskey into Sam’s glass and silently they drank to the friends they’d lost along the way, and to the almost unbelievable fact that the two of them were still here.
A few minutes later Dean drained his glass, then pushed himself slowly to his feet. “I’m gonna hit the hay. See if my bed still remembers me.”
Sam shook his head, smiling. “I think I’ll head that way soon too. Gonna…” He waved vaguely at the papers, bowls, glasses. “I’ll check the locks and get the lights.”
Dean dropped a hand on his shoulder as he passed, heading for the hall and calling back without turning, “Don’t drink all my whiskey!”
Sam tipped his head back and listened to the sound of his brother’s steps as they faded down the hall, the echo soon swallowed up by the ambient hum of their home all around them.
Soon, Sam would get up and take all their dishes the kitchen. Soon, he’d climb back up the staircase to double-check the manual lock and then make his way down, turning out lights and finding his way to his room in the dark, easy as breathing. But for another moment he was just going to sit, and listen, and think: Dean was right…this is enough.