Fic: The Edges Between, rating T, Sam/Dean
Title: The Edges Between
Rating: T
Content: incest, mentions of suicide
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Notes: apologies for the lateness, thanks for the great prompts. I riffed off your fondness for truth spells and dysfunction.
Summary: Sam’s spent a lot of time soulless and more time than he cares to think about hiding from his greatest fear.
Sam has a lot of room inside his brain. Sometimes he wishes it were a little less, that there wasn't quite so much room for regrets, for fear, for the endless chewing over of mistakes made, repeated, twice repeated, and then replayed on loop for what feels like forever. On his better days, he acknowledges that if the space were smaller, then it's Winchester luck that there'd only have been room for the worst of it. That every scrap of space would be taken over with the gnawing of old grudges, the rattle of old bones, the scars pushing out the good bits, and there have been good bits. If the angels are to be believed, there were enough good bits to fill a heaven with discarded memories, enough to populate a fantasy that had his brother barred, a no-good presence that shadowed the corners of perfect Thanksgiving dinners, and slunk around the corners of green Stanford lawns.
It surprises him still, after all this time, the swell of bitterness that surges up in his chest at the thought, the sick misery that sat under his breastbone curled up and unmoving, not at the lack of Dean but at the unstudied open rawness of his brother's hurt."It surprises him still, after all this time, that there's a swell of bitterness still surging up in his chest at the thought of the unstudied open rawness of his brother's hurt. The sick misery that sat under his breastbone, curled and unmoving, was the reflected empathy of Dean's shame at being stripped so easily, displayed so openly in front of Sam. The knowledge of what that did to them, and the fallout from the eddying actions that ensued, was a thing that in the dark of night stabbed a needle of hurt into Sam's brain, right where he distantly remembered being taught that memories were kept. It was a thing that reminded him of Dean being in pain, because of him."
He doesn't think Dean will ever forgive him for that, even if he's long shoved it to the back of his mind. Or that Dean can forgive himself for that matter, but Sam's not going to arbitrate that one in some interpersonal moot. He can barely handle what his own mind throws at him in the long moments of stuffy darkness in motel rooms, between each breath of Dean's and each rattle of the pipes. He only picks over the bones of these ancient quarrels and half-forgotten grievances to keep from scratching at the wall he shouldn't touch - easier to roll over the past and dissect it than give into the urge. The wall isn't a real thing, he mostly knows that, but it's almost a tangible presence in his mind all the same, something he can feel round the edges.
He takes another breath and another, doesn't miss how they match Dean's slightly adenoidic sighs from where he's rolled onto his back in a drink-soddened sleep. There's a certain comfort in it. They're both alive after all, even if Sam's brain is too big and works too much, and leaves him hesitating day by day, unsure what's completely real, careful of any misstep that will lead to fire and the peculiar sensation - new and fresh each time - of his body bursting into flames, burning the word "Dean" from his tongue. The grudging supplements he's been offered don't match the spaces that exist there - not just behind the wall, but in the craterous gaps of memory that exist between his bodily resurrection and his mental one, and those bits are even harder to cease wondering about, to stop probing like that of a thoughtless tongue in a mouth's gap. He's been avoiding drink, whereas Dean's been hitting it hard. Whatever he puts in those spaces is going to be hard to get out. He's no stranger to plugging gaps with things that feel like they'll fit at the time. There's still a temptation though; perhaps it'd be easier to copy Dean in this, follow his footsteps, take a little comfort where he knows it won't be jerked away.
Sleep is just beginning to drift closer to him, a comforting numbing feel, when the memory flash hits out of nowhere, not something that can be mistaken as a dream or a thought or a hallucination, as Sam has had experience with all of those up close and personal. This has the hallmark of truth to it, solid and convincing, a Ming mark on an upturned vase, the sensory memory of a tongue in his mouth, hand clenched in his hair so tightly that it hurts in a way that flexes down his spine and leaves him hard, hard enough that he doesn't bite back, just snarls his pleasure back at whoever is kissing him. It's there in his mind, solitary and standalone. Sam doesn't know who he was kissing, apart from the fact that it was a guy - his eyes were closed in whatever this was - memory or fantasy. There's something disconcerting about it, and Sam doesn't know what, except that it belongs to that unknown time, that empty kingdom which only half exists for him. Intellectually, he knows that time happened and Dean, it seemed, was there for some of it. He tries to hold onto the failing shred of memory, but as fast as it appeared it disintegrated, falling between his fingertips, and he's falling after it into a sleep that had eluded him and now pulls him down relentlessly.
Dean is solicitous in the ways that he is when he is both guilty and refusing to admit that there's anything to be guilty about. Coffee without jibes, not using the last of the toothpaste and leaving the tube in the sink for Sam to find, the fact that the bottle doesn't take pride of place that evening. Nothing Sam could list or name in ways that wouldn't make him sound like he's the freak enumerating ten thousand tells, a cold reader out of a cushy gig, and the only way to not let it drive him mad is to stop picking it apart for all the different things Dean could be apologizing for. The best case scenario, Sam thinks before he reaches that conclusion, is that Dean feels guilt for not being straight with Sam in the first place about the time Sam's body spent walking around up here without a soul. The worst case scenario has a lot of variations, all of them around shit that Dean did in the time that Sam can't remember, or that Sam did and Dean feels guilty for in that misplaced hero complex where he tries to shoulder sins that belong to others, and ignore the ones he committed himself. It's an old hypocrisy that still drives Sam to sharp anger when he thinks about it too much, not least for the ways in which it reminds him of the way they're brothers.
Still there's worse ways for a day to go than Dean trying not to make it difficult and since Sam can change nothing in this second - Dean balks when he directly questions him - he decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He does his own share of agreeable semi-smiles and case suggestions, letting the mood lighten in a way that it hasn't since the moment he knew that something was wrong about the way he'd returned, from the way Bobby could barely look him in the eye. Dean responds to it, to him, in an almost furtive way as though he can't believe his luck, smiles when he looks at Sam and when he thinks Sam can't see. In fact, all things considered, it's been one of the better days that Sam's had in some time - which in this case stretches back a couple of years. He can't block his thoughts at night, but during the day it's easier to pretend, even to himself, that this isn't just some thin normalcy stretched over a gaping empty chasm.
There's even a whisper of a case nearby, something with a body count that's building. If it weren't for Bobby, they wouldn't even know there was a case at all, just a spate of stupid coincidences and embarrassing revelations that the local paper has been recording gleefully and in full - not in the front page but in the blind gossip column. Bobby's just heard through a friend of a friend, who knows from a friend that something's moved into town, something that feeds off truth, if not revelation. It's benign right now, but if the pattern holds, the suicides that follow aren't. Sam's never wanted a case like this less, but if it convinces Dean that he's fit to be back in the field then it might be worth it. He can't tell secrets if he doesn't know them after all, and not much prior to this past year is a mystery - in action, if not in thought. Mostly it's a fruitless couple of days of Dean charming the gossip columnist into giving up the names of the people she was writing about, and then doorstepping those people in the hopes that they'll be able to give some clue as to who had been convincing them to give up their deepest, darkest secrets with nothing more than a look, and then persuading them to act on it. Dean thinks that it's a trickster with a new schtick; Sam wishes he could agree.
There's something that feels off about it all. There's strain on the faces they interview, no laughter even from those around them. The confessions and actions aren't always obscene, but they're usually humiliating, and there's an air of fear in the town that's heightened by strangers asking questions. People close ranks pretty fast in towns this small, and it's a blessing and a curse. A curse when people lock down tight, fear of making it worse; a blessing, because anybody can be a clue, a source. This time though, nobody really wants to talk. Not about what Mrs Robson did down by the pond, or the charges Mr Duvall is facing. Not about how nobody knew, no-one even suspected, that Matty Jacobs had a dead child in a different state whom she never talked about, until she stood up sobbing in church to tell. They didn't get that one from the gossip column, but straight from the source, from Matty Jacobs when Sam wrestled her back from going over a bridge.
"I didn't mean to tell," was about as much as she could contribute, her tears choking her before she could ever explain about the child. The chill of it nags at Sam, takes up space in his brain that night, a distraction from the fire-edged expanse of the wall. He picks over what it might be, what feeds on the pain of truth as well as truth itself. Certainly not a Winchester, but that's about as far as he gets before Dean, who has been lying there suspiciously quiet, interrupts.
"This isn't worth it. We should leave tomorrow, get a start on a real case, Sam." There's barely veiled anxiety in his voice, and it feels like a question, not a statement. If Dean wanted out without compunction, then he'd have declared it, no stranger to conflict or getting his own way, by fair means or foul.
If Sam wanted, he could make Dean rethink this by not saying a word. He knows what'll go through Dean's mind, because it's been sitting in his own, the pale devastated face of Matty Jacobs, the hunted gaze of the town folk as they wondered which of them would be stripped next of all plausible deniability for a sin once committed or still coming to fruition. But he knows the other side of the coin as well, the cold fear that's begun to tremble in his bones. He'd thought that there was almost nothing that he would care about in the revelations of a town where nobody knew him, discounting, forgetting, that the only person to be standing there next to him was the only person he'd care about hearing the countless endless uglinesses that whatever this was could make him tell. He can imagine the maliciousness of the contextless secrets that could be emptied out of him, how bad they'd look if you stood them up like dominos. Stanford lawns with no Dean shadows. The fact he still hadn't forgiven their father. The way he still sometimes felt the phantom shape of Ruby beside him, looking up like she was waiting to see what he'd do next. And the worst of them all, the crime buried down so deep that he'd forgotten himself, that only broke the surface when he could hold it down no longer, bury it no further in his subconscious, and even now couldn't name for fear of the shame choking him.
"Yeah," he said, and the relief of it floods him. He doesn't know if Dean's doing it to save them both and doesn't care. "We'll ask Bobby to send someone else." He can almost feel Dean's surprise at the absence of a fight, the absence of Sam's bleeding heart routine that he pretends to despise and that in reality grounds them in their respective roles. Sam doesn't have the energy to pretend; all he wants is to get out of here, away from the oppressive atmosphere, to leave behind the danger of spilling even more of himself on the ground for strangers to pick over. He doesn't have enough to spare of himself these days, too much missing, too much hidden and too much gone.
"OK," Dean says, on the back foot. "We'll leave tomorrow. First thing in the morning."
If anything were as simple as that, then Sam would have a degree and Dean wouldn't have gone to hell. Packing in the morning takes about three minutes, even less taken out than usual, and Sam's loading the bags, when he comes back to Jessie Clunes with her earnest ponytail and her battered Doc Martins leaning against the door as she talks to Dean. It's almost embarrassing he'll think later that they didn't figure it out faster. That maybe the gossip columnist might be getting her sources first hand. He can only blame the way she looked so young, and flushed so much when he'd suggested she stop writing up the tips she was getting when it was hurting people like that. Been disarmed by her prompt apology and disclaimer about this being her first job. Still, it hits him then as he jogs back from the car and his hand is on his belt, his heart in his mouth as she reaches out and touches Dean's hand when he tells her they're leaving. He breaks into a run at that.
Sam can see the change in her as she whips around, her youthful mask dropped under foot and trodden on, something dreadfully constantly hungry shifting in her face, and it's instinct that has him throw the knife at her relatively confident that silver should do the trick, instinct that has Dean seize her by the neck and draw his own across it as she bats at his hands, and mouths something that Sam doesn't catch. He thinks for a second that Dean escaped whatever whammy she was laying on people, because Dean's busy dragging her back in doors, even as she shrivels into something ancient and withered. Dean's expression doesn't change when he looks up from her body, still open and stunned at the death, and Sam only has a split second to think I should cover my ears as Dean begins to speak. "I kissed you back, Sam," he says conversationally. "Because I didn't think I was ever getting the real you back. But you were the one who didn't want it."
Sam can count on the fingers of one hand and have room to spare, the number of times that he's seen Dean crumble. He's seen his brother sprawled in glass threatening him. Covered in blood and begging. Watching Sam walk out a door when he turned eighteen. None of those have ever been so swift and complete as the transformation that takes place in that second, where for the first time he can see what his brother will look like if he ever reaches an unlikely old age. Dean's sickly and beaten looking and he moves past Sam like a machine, stride quickening until he's out of the lot.
A shred of memory drifts to the top of his mind. A kiss. He knows now why it didn't make any sense. He feels things about that kiss, but he felt nothing during it. It's a little window, a little opening to the depth of the walking horror that he'd been for a year, and he wants to shiver, barely dares to move. Back Dean had said. Kissed you back. Which meant Sam had reached out first, that the strict regulation that had held him in check for years, dark thoughts buried beneath his skin had failed. There was some shred of comfort in that, even amongst the growing horror. Whatever other Sam was, he wasn't Sam. He'd violated the first, most basic rule of being Sam, upended the strictest and most essential necessity.
Acting on instinct, he moves the body further inside - it's light now, barely even any type of human - and closes the door on it. When he runs it's purposeful. She'd been getting stronger, bolder, the secrets worse and deeper, draining them out of people. Bobby had told them suicide was the main risk, and the fear of it is like ice water inside him, his heart pumping it around his whole body, chilling him all the way through, even as he runs. The car keys are in his pocket,a small consolation, and the fact that Dean wasn't carrying.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed, the changes that his body has gone through since he’s been gone. The strength and the speed, are still disturbing, but for now he welcomes them, as he near flat-out sprints after Dean. Instinct directs him to the river, to where they’d hauled Matty back from an untimely end; it’s somewhere he knows that Dean knows, though as minutes go by and he can’t see Dean his fear redoubles. Dean’s not such a fast runner that he could have outstripped him by that much. As he runs, shreds of thoughts tear off the mass in his brain and float upwards. Anger - how long could Dean have possibly hoped that this could be kept secret? Shame, all of it, pulsing and familiar, the accompaniment of too many years, and underneath it all, a sick sense of relief. He’d never wanted Dean to know, but it felt like a burden lifted that if it had to be revealed at all, that he hadn’t really been there for it. That whatever had happened, Dean hadn’t left him, given up on him completely.
Spotting Dean in the end isn’t difficult. He’s not in the river or leaning over it, instead he’s sitting on a bench, hands on his knees, as though he’s waiting for Sam. Running away from problems is of very limited use to a Winchester; confrontation or outright denial is generally less dangerous and about as fruitful. Denial is the most comforting; if Sam knows anything he knows that.
What Dean says next is not anything that he’d expected though. “I thought you sort of knew,” Dean says, drops each word as though it hurts. “Just something we didn’t talk about, you know?”
The list of subjects they don’t talk about so far outnumbers the ones they do that Sam can almost believe that there’s a grain of truth that somewhere, sometime this got crushed under that mountain of silence. Almost, except that he believes in himself, in this at least. That at no time from the first miserable awful moment where he put a name to this, to the moment he stepped willingly into hell that he’d let himself slip. Not even when Dean was in hell himself, and Ruby was there, her blood in his mouth, wringing him clean and dry of his secrets. Not even then.
“No,” he says, and holds his hands to stop the involuntary tremble that runs through them. “I never knew you knew.” This is the time for all the protestations, except Dean must already know them.
Dean turns to look at him then, and there’s a crease of puzzlement in his face. “I would never,” he says, and his voice breaks awkwardly for a second, “I would never have, you gotta know that. I thought you could stand it, if you didn’t think too much about it, and I didn’t think too much about it anyhow,” and the enormous self-loathing that is written on his face is the twin of what Sam’s seen in the mirror on and off for about a decade. Dean takes a breath, fortifies himself to continue. “It wasn’t you Sam. I messed up, I messed up so bad when he kissed me, but he only did it because he liked taking things apart to see how they worked and he couldn’t really figure how we did. Said it didn’t match up right to him, that gap between what he knew and what it meant. It wasn’t you, Sam,” and in another life Sam suspects that Dean wouldn’t believe that for a second, never any big believer in a gap between soul and body. Just now, when he needs to convince Sam of this one vital thing.
Regardless, the world is reshaping itself as he stands there, blocks falling into place like a reality Tetris, the whole picture twisting and turning into a new angle. Dean thought he knew, thought Sam knew that Dean would never have. That Sam in any iteration, soulless or not, could never have wanted it. Whatever that creature was, it was truths she’d taken from people, stolen from their skin and broadcast out, feeding on their shame. The truth as they saw it at any rate.
There seems abruptly, something deeply wrong with the fact that all Sam has of that kiss, is a half-flickered second of a memory not strictly his own. If he's spent half his life wishing away the inconvenient truth of what he feels, then he deserves at least that regret. It ties in with the subtle and increasing sense of alienation he's felt in a body barely even his own, a life he doesn't fit in, the knowledge that things have been stolen from him. He can’t force the truth out of Dean and he doesn’t trust the things that osmose their way past the wall. Still, there’s a ragged thump in his chest, a kind of relentless pounding where years of hiding war with the simple possibility that they’ve got it all so wrong.
He thinks again. You didn’t want it. Dean had said that. Dean had wanted it.
“Dean,” he says and barely recognises his voice. Dean looks up at that, and Sam stumbles forward until he’s standing in front of where Dean’s sitting, and kisses him, bent halfway down and awkward. It’s weird, half familiar, half not, and wholly wrong in no way that counts to Sam at the moment. There’s greed in what Sam wants. This is his, not the shell of him that walked around, that turned this down like it was nothing of import. There’s an answering madness in Dean as well, as though his protests that he would never do anything were sufficient once they’d been made, his hand round Sam’s neck, pulling him down further, mouth hard against Sam’s own, fingers winding into the short strands at the base of Sam’s neck, sharp tweaks of pain, and there’s something wrong about it, about the way it makes Sam feel and the way it comes naturally to Dean to do that to him. Sam wonders, not for the first or last time, about exactly what his soulless self had done.
When they break apart, Sam thinks this is where they’ll lose momentum, where shame will catch up with them both or guilt at any rate. He can’t feel it yet, but then he supposes, that those capacities at least must be dulled through disuse. Dean’s standing up, but he’s not running.
“Are you sure Sammy?” he says and the diminutive strikes Sam on all the wrong nerves and some of the right ones. He doesn’t know why Dean says it like that, unless he’s trying to remind Sam of what they should both be trying to forget.
“Yeah,” he says. He’s never been more sure of anything. The difference between this and every other bad decision he’s ever made, is that he’s walking in with his eyes open. Surely down the line that’ll count for them.
Rating: T
Content: incest, mentions of suicide
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Notes: apologies for the lateness, thanks for the great prompts. I riffed off your fondness for truth spells and dysfunction.
Summary: Sam’s spent a lot of time soulless and more time than he cares to think about hiding from his greatest fear.
Sam has a lot of room inside his brain. Sometimes he wishes it were a little less, that there wasn't quite so much room for regrets, for fear, for the endless chewing over of mistakes made, repeated, twice repeated, and then replayed on loop for what feels like forever. On his better days, he acknowledges that if the space were smaller, then it's Winchester luck that there'd only have been room for the worst of it. That every scrap of space would be taken over with the gnawing of old grudges, the rattle of old bones, the scars pushing out the good bits, and there have been good bits. If the angels are to be believed, there were enough good bits to fill a heaven with discarded memories, enough to populate a fantasy that had his brother barred, a no-good presence that shadowed the corners of perfect Thanksgiving dinners, and slunk around the corners of green Stanford lawns.
It surprises him still, after all this time, the swell of bitterness that surges up in his chest at the thought, the sick misery that sat under his breastbone curled up and unmoving, not at the lack of Dean but at the unstudied open rawness of his brother's hurt."It surprises him still, after all this time, that there's a swell of bitterness still surging up in his chest at the thought of the unstudied open rawness of his brother's hurt. The sick misery that sat under his breastbone, curled and unmoving, was the reflected empathy of Dean's shame at being stripped so easily, displayed so openly in front of Sam. The knowledge of what that did to them, and the fallout from the eddying actions that ensued, was a thing that in the dark of night stabbed a needle of hurt into Sam's brain, right where he distantly remembered being taught that memories were kept. It was a thing that reminded him of Dean being in pain, because of him."
He doesn't think Dean will ever forgive him for that, even if he's long shoved it to the back of his mind. Or that Dean can forgive himself for that matter, but Sam's not going to arbitrate that one in some interpersonal moot. He can barely handle what his own mind throws at him in the long moments of stuffy darkness in motel rooms, between each breath of Dean's and each rattle of the pipes. He only picks over the bones of these ancient quarrels and half-forgotten grievances to keep from scratching at the wall he shouldn't touch - easier to roll over the past and dissect it than give into the urge. The wall isn't a real thing, he mostly knows that, but it's almost a tangible presence in his mind all the same, something he can feel round the edges.
He takes another breath and another, doesn't miss how they match Dean's slightly adenoidic sighs from where he's rolled onto his back in a drink-soddened sleep. There's a certain comfort in it. They're both alive after all, even if Sam's brain is too big and works too much, and leaves him hesitating day by day, unsure what's completely real, careful of any misstep that will lead to fire and the peculiar sensation - new and fresh each time - of his body bursting into flames, burning the word "Dean" from his tongue. The grudging supplements he's been offered don't match the spaces that exist there - not just behind the wall, but in the craterous gaps of memory that exist between his bodily resurrection and his mental one, and those bits are even harder to cease wondering about, to stop probing like that of a thoughtless tongue in a mouth's gap. He's been avoiding drink, whereas Dean's been hitting it hard. Whatever he puts in those spaces is going to be hard to get out. He's no stranger to plugging gaps with things that feel like they'll fit at the time. There's still a temptation though; perhaps it'd be easier to copy Dean in this, follow his footsteps, take a little comfort where he knows it won't be jerked away.
Sleep is just beginning to drift closer to him, a comforting numbing feel, when the memory flash hits out of nowhere, not something that can be mistaken as a dream or a thought or a hallucination, as Sam has had experience with all of those up close and personal. This has the hallmark of truth to it, solid and convincing, a Ming mark on an upturned vase, the sensory memory of a tongue in his mouth, hand clenched in his hair so tightly that it hurts in a way that flexes down his spine and leaves him hard, hard enough that he doesn't bite back, just snarls his pleasure back at whoever is kissing him. It's there in his mind, solitary and standalone. Sam doesn't know who he was kissing, apart from the fact that it was a guy - his eyes were closed in whatever this was - memory or fantasy. There's something disconcerting about it, and Sam doesn't know what, except that it belongs to that unknown time, that empty kingdom which only half exists for him. Intellectually, he knows that time happened and Dean, it seemed, was there for some of it. He tries to hold onto the failing shred of memory, but as fast as it appeared it disintegrated, falling between his fingertips, and he's falling after it into a sleep that had eluded him and now pulls him down relentlessly.
Dean is solicitous in the ways that he is when he is both guilty and refusing to admit that there's anything to be guilty about. Coffee without jibes, not using the last of the toothpaste and leaving the tube in the sink for Sam to find, the fact that the bottle doesn't take pride of place that evening. Nothing Sam could list or name in ways that wouldn't make him sound like he's the freak enumerating ten thousand tells, a cold reader out of a cushy gig, and the only way to not let it drive him mad is to stop picking it apart for all the different things Dean could be apologizing for. The best case scenario, Sam thinks before he reaches that conclusion, is that Dean feels guilt for not being straight with Sam in the first place about the time Sam's body spent walking around up here without a soul. The worst case scenario has a lot of variations, all of them around shit that Dean did in the time that Sam can't remember, or that Sam did and Dean feels guilty for in that misplaced hero complex where he tries to shoulder sins that belong to others, and ignore the ones he committed himself. It's an old hypocrisy that still drives Sam to sharp anger when he thinks about it too much, not least for the ways in which it reminds him of the way they're brothers.
Still there's worse ways for a day to go than Dean trying not to make it difficult and since Sam can change nothing in this second - Dean balks when he directly questions him - he decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He does his own share of agreeable semi-smiles and case suggestions, letting the mood lighten in a way that it hasn't since the moment he knew that something was wrong about the way he'd returned, from the way Bobby could barely look him in the eye. Dean responds to it, to him, in an almost furtive way as though he can't believe his luck, smiles when he looks at Sam and when he thinks Sam can't see. In fact, all things considered, it's been one of the better days that Sam's had in some time - which in this case stretches back a couple of years. He can't block his thoughts at night, but during the day it's easier to pretend, even to himself, that this isn't just some thin normalcy stretched over a gaping empty chasm.
There's even a whisper of a case nearby, something with a body count that's building. If it weren't for Bobby, they wouldn't even know there was a case at all, just a spate of stupid coincidences and embarrassing revelations that the local paper has been recording gleefully and in full - not in the front page but in the blind gossip column. Bobby's just heard through a friend of a friend, who knows from a friend that something's moved into town, something that feeds off truth, if not revelation. It's benign right now, but if the pattern holds, the suicides that follow aren't. Sam's never wanted a case like this less, but if it convinces Dean that he's fit to be back in the field then it might be worth it. He can't tell secrets if he doesn't know them after all, and not much prior to this past year is a mystery - in action, if not in thought. Mostly it's a fruitless couple of days of Dean charming the gossip columnist into giving up the names of the people she was writing about, and then doorstepping those people in the hopes that they'll be able to give some clue as to who had been convincing them to give up their deepest, darkest secrets with nothing more than a look, and then persuading them to act on it. Dean thinks that it's a trickster with a new schtick; Sam wishes he could agree.
There's something that feels off about it all. There's strain on the faces they interview, no laughter even from those around them. The confessions and actions aren't always obscene, but they're usually humiliating, and there's an air of fear in the town that's heightened by strangers asking questions. People close ranks pretty fast in towns this small, and it's a blessing and a curse. A curse when people lock down tight, fear of making it worse; a blessing, because anybody can be a clue, a source. This time though, nobody really wants to talk. Not about what Mrs Robson did down by the pond, or the charges Mr Duvall is facing. Not about how nobody knew, no-one even suspected, that Matty Jacobs had a dead child in a different state whom she never talked about, until she stood up sobbing in church to tell. They didn't get that one from the gossip column, but straight from the source, from Matty Jacobs when Sam wrestled her back from going over a bridge.
"I didn't mean to tell," was about as much as she could contribute, her tears choking her before she could ever explain about the child. The chill of it nags at Sam, takes up space in his brain that night, a distraction from the fire-edged expanse of the wall. He picks over what it might be, what feeds on the pain of truth as well as truth itself. Certainly not a Winchester, but that's about as far as he gets before Dean, who has been lying there suspiciously quiet, interrupts.
"This isn't worth it. We should leave tomorrow, get a start on a real case, Sam." There's barely veiled anxiety in his voice, and it feels like a question, not a statement. If Dean wanted out without compunction, then he'd have declared it, no stranger to conflict or getting his own way, by fair means or foul.
If Sam wanted, he could make Dean rethink this by not saying a word. He knows what'll go through Dean's mind, because it's been sitting in his own, the pale devastated face of Matty Jacobs, the hunted gaze of the town folk as they wondered which of them would be stripped next of all plausible deniability for a sin once committed or still coming to fruition. But he knows the other side of the coin as well, the cold fear that's begun to tremble in his bones. He'd thought that there was almost nothing that he would care about in the revelations of a town where nobody knew him, discounting, forgetting, that the only person to be standing there next to him was the only person he'd care about hearing the countless endless uglinesses that whatever this was could make him tell. He can imagine the maliciousness of the contextless secrets that could be emptied out of him, how bad they'd look if you stood them up like dominos. Stanford lawns with no Dean shadows. The fact he still hadn't forgiven their father. The way he still sometimes felt the phantom shape of Ruby beside him, looking up like she was waiting to see what he'd do next. And the worst of them all, the crime buried down so deep that he'd forgotten himself, that only broke the surface when he could hold it down no longer, bury it no further in his subconscious, and even now couldn't name for fear of the shame choking him.
"Yeah," he said, and the relief of it floods him. He doesn't know if Dean's doing it to save them both and doesn't care. "We'll ask Bobby to send someone else." He can almost feel Dean's surprise at the absence of a fight, the absence of Sam's bleeding heart routine that he pretends to despise and that in reality grounds them in their respective roles. Sam doesn't have the energy to pretend; all he wants is to get out of here, away from the oppressive atmosphere, to leave behind the danger of spilling even more of himself on the ground for strangers to pick over. He doesn't have enough to spare of himself these days, too much missing, too much hidden and too much gone.
"OK," Dean says, on the back foot. "We'll leave tomorrow. First thing in the morning."
If anything were as simple as that, then Sam would have a degree and Dean wouldn't have gone to hell. Packing in the morning takes about three minutes, even less taken out than usual, and Sam's loading the bags, when he comes back to Jessie Clunes with her earnest ponytail and her battered Doc Martins leaning against the door as she talks to Dean. It's almost embarrassing he'll think later that they didn't figure it out faster. That maybe the gossip columnist might be getting her sources first hand. He can only blame the way she looked so young, and flushed so much when he'd suggested she stop writing up the tips she was getting when it was hurting people like that. Been disarmed by her prompt apology and disclaimer about this being her first job. Still, it hits him then as he jogs back from the car and his hand is on his belt, his heart in his mouth as she reaches out and touches Dean's hand when he tells her they're leaving. He breaks into a run at that.
Sam can see the change in her as she whips around, her youthful mask dropped under foot and trodden on, something dreadfully constantly hungry shifting in her face, and it's instinct that has him throw the knife at her relatively confident that silver should do the trick, instinct that has Dean seize her by the neck and draw his own across it as she bats at his hands, and mouths something that Sam doesn't catch. He thinks for a second that Dean escaped whatever whammy she was laying on people, because Dean's busy dragging her back in doors, even as she shrivels into something ancient and withered. Dean's expression doesn't change when he looks up from her body, still open and stunned at the death, and Sam only has a split second to think I should cover my ears as Dean begins to speak. "I kissed you back, Sam," he says conversationally. "Because I didn't think I was ever getting the real you back. But you were the one who didn't want it."
Sam can count on the fingers of one hand and have room to spare, the number of times that he's seen Dean crumble. He's seen his brother sprawled in glass threatening him. Covered in blood and begging. Watching Sam walk out a door when he turned eighteen. None of those have ever been so swift and complete as the transformation that takes place in that second, where for the first time he can see what his brother will look like if he ever reaches an unlikely old age. Dean's sickly and beaten looking and he moves past Sam like a machine, stride quickening until he's out of the lot.
A shred of memory drifts to the top of his mind. A kiss. He knows now why it didn't make any sense. He feels things about that kiss, but he felt nothing during it. It's a little window, a little opening to the depth of the walking horror that he'd been for a year, and he wants to shiver, barely dares to move. Back Dean had said. Kissed you back. Which meant Sam had reached out first, that the strict regulation that had held him in check for years, dark thoughts buried beneath his skin had failed. There was some shred of comfort in that, even amongst the growing horror. Whatever other Sam was, he wasn't Sam. He'd violated the first, most basic rule of being Sam, upended the strictest and most essential necessity.
Acting on instinct, he moves the body further inside - it's light now, barely even any type of human - and closes the door on it. When he runs it's purposeful. She'd been getting stronger, bolder, the secrets worse and deeper, draining them out of people. Bobby had told them suicide was the main risk, and the fear of it is like ice water inside him, his heart pumping it around his whole body, chilling him all the way through, even as he runs. The car keys are in his pocket,a small consolation, and the fact that Dean wasn't carrying.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed, the changes that his body has gone through since he’s been gone. The strength and the speed, are still disturbing, but for now he welcomes them, as he near flat-out sprints after Dean. Instinct directs him to the river, to where they’d hauled Matty back from an untimely end; it’s somewhere he knows that Dean knows, though as minutes go by and he can’t see Dean his fear redoubles. Dean’s not such a fast runner that he could have outstripped him by that much. As he runs, shreds of thoughts tear off the mass in his brain and float upwards. Anger - how long could Dean have possibly hoped that this could be kept secret? Shame, all of it, pulsing and familiar, the accompaniment of too many years, and underneath it all, a sick sense of relief. He’d never wanted Dean to know, but it felt like a burden lifted that if it had to be revealed at all, that he hadn’t really been there for it. That whatever had happened, Dean hadn’t left him, given up on him completely.
Spotting Dean in the end isn’t difficult. He’s not in the river or leaning over it, instead he’s sitting on a bench, hands on his knees, as though he’s waiting for Sam. Running away from problems is of very limited use to a Winchester; confrontation or outright denial is generally less dangerous and about as fruitful. Denial is the most comforting; if Sam knows anything he knows that.
What Dean says next is not anything that he’d expected though. “I thought you sort of knew,” Dean says, drops each word as though it hurts. “Just something we didn’t talk about, you know?”
The list of subjects they don’t talk about so far outnumbers the ones they do that Sam can almost believe that there’s a grain of truth that somewhere, sometime this got crushed under that mountain of silence. Almost, except that he believes in himself, in this at least. That at no time from the first miserable awful moment where he put a name to this, to the moment he stepped willingly into hell that he’d let himself slip. Not even when Dean was in hell himself, and Ruby was there, her blood in his mouth, wringing him clean and dry of his secrets. Not even then.
“No,” he says, and holds his hands to stop the involuntary tremble that runs through them. “I never knew you knew.” This is the time for all the protestations, except Dean must already know them.
Dean turns to look at him then, and there’s a crease of puzzlement in his face. “I would never,” he says, and his voice breaks awkwardly for a second, “I would never have, you gotta know that. I thought you could stand it, if you didn’t think too much about it, and I didn’t think too much about it anyhow,” and the enormous self-loathing that is written on his face is the twin of what Sam’s seen in the mirror on and off for about a decade. Dean takes a breath, fortifies himself to continue. “It wasn’t you Sam. I messed up, I messed up so bad when he kissed me, but he only did it because he liked taking things apart to see how they worked and he couldn’t really figure how we did. Said it didn’t match up right to him, that gap between what he knew and what it meant. It wasn’t you, Sam,” and in another life Sam suspects that Dean wouldn’t believe that for a second, never any big believer in a gap between soul and body. Just now, when he needs to convince Sam of this one vital thing.
Regardless, the world is reshaping itself as he stands there, blocks falling into place like a reality Tetris, the whole picture twisting and turning into a new angle. Dean thought he knew, thought Sam knew that Dean would never have. That Sam in any iteration, soulless or not, could never have wanted it. Whatever that creature was, it was truths she’d taken from people, stolen from their skin and broadcast out, feeding on their shame. The truth as they saw it at any rate.
There seems abruptly, something deeply wrong with the fact that all Sam has of that kiss, is a half-flickered second of a memory not strictly his own. If he's spent half his life wishing away the inconvenient truth of what he feels, then he deserves at least that regret. It ties in with the subtle and increasing sense of alienation he's felt in a body barely even his own, a life he doesn't fit in, the knowledge that things have been stolen from him. He can’t force the truth out of Dean and he doesn’t trust the things that osmose their way past the wall. Still, there’s a ragged thump in his chest, a kind of relentless pounding where years of hiding war with the simple possibility that they’ve got it all so wrong.
He thinks again. You didn’t want it. Dean had said that. Dean had wanted it.
“Dean,” he says and barely recognises his voice. Dean looks up at that, and Sam stumbles forward until he’s standing in front of where Dean’s sitting, and kisses him, bent halfway down and awkward. It’s weird, half familiar, half not, and wholly wrong in no way that counts to Sam at the moment. There’s greed in what Sam wants. This is his, not the shell of him that walked around, that turned this down like it was nothing of import. There’s an answering madness in Dean as well, as though his protests that he would never do anything were sufficient once they’d been made, his hand round Sam’s neck, pulling him down further, mouth hard against Sam’s own, fingers winding into the short strands at the base of Sam’s neck, sharp tweaks of pain, and there’s something wrong about it, about the way it makes Sam feel and the way it comes naturally to Dean to do that to him. Sam wonders, not for the first or last time, about exactly what his soulless self had done.
When they break apart, Sam thinks this is where they’ll lose momentum, where shame will catch up with them both or guilt at any rate. He can’t feel it yet, but then he supposes, that those capacities at least must be dulled through disuse. Dean’s standing up, but he’s not running.
“Are you sure Sammy?” he says and the diminutive strikes Sam on all the wrong nerves and some of the right ones. He doesn’t know why Dean says it like that, unless he’s trying to remind Sam of what they should both be trying to forget.
“Yeah,” he says. He’s never been more sure of anything. The difference between this and every other bad decision he’s ever made, is that he’s walking in with his eyes open. Surely down the line that’ll count for them.