Always By Your Side Part 1
It's midday in Bobby's junkyard and Sam is sprawled across the hood of a rusted out shell of a car, working on trying to slow down his breathing.
He’d escaped to the yard in search of the sun, mostly, and had found it, mostly. Right now, it’s beating down on his forehead, and heating up the corroded chrome underneath his back, creating a circuit of heat that wraps around him, causing beads of sweat to break out along his hairline, along the back of his neck.
No matter how hot the chrome gets it gets, it still doesn’t penetrate anywhere deep enough to manage the cold inside of him. He wakes up at night these days, filled with this absurd, evangelical certainty that all of his red blood cells are currently freezing inside of his veins, black and cracked and rotten, and it’s only a matter of time before the icy rot reaches his heart. If it hasn’t already.
Dean has been watching him all day.
Scratch that.
Dean has been watching him since the moment he’d woken up with his soul, with a weary expression that said he was already mentally rolling up his sleeves, bracing himself for the task of putting Sam back together again, when he inevitably falls to pieces. It’s not like he blames Dean for that. Hell, he can’t say he actually trusts himself any more than Dean does, all things considered. But there is a not so tiny, traitorous part of Sam who resents his older brother for not even trying to pretend otherwise, for not bothering with a pretext that things were going to get back to normal.
These days, Dean watches him like Sam is a stranger. Like a civilian who Dean can’t quite read, with a threshold for the supernatural violence of their daily life that is as yet undetermined, but which could be breached at any moment.
Its oppressive, living with Dean’s concern, and with his complete and utter lack of trust. It’s just easier to catch your breath out here, when you’re alone. It helps to imagine, even for a minute, like breaking doesn’t have to be an inevitability.
Sam breathes, still and regular and uninterrupted. It feels indescribably precious this time to himself. He hates himself, just a little, for how much he doesn’t want to ever leave this spot, to go back to his brother and the latest world ending horror.
He shifts positions a little, angling his face further up to the sun. He thinks that he’s starting to remember the outlines of what it had felt like to be warm.
Feeling cold there, bunk buddy? You know, I might have a few suggestions for how we can deal with that.
The leer in Lucifer’s voice is unmistakable.
Sam starts violently, sitting up and pulling his legs in protectively. Then he shuts his eyes -as if that would make some kind of difference to a hallucination - and waits obediently for whatever comes next.
He can't not wait.
Disobedience is a forgotten concept, like uninterrupted sleep, like room temperature, but then again, none of that is anything he wants to think too hard about just now.
There is an icy puff of air as Lucifer leans in tight and silent, and just kind of breaths for a moment against his neckline, invasive and chilling and close.
Sam tries to do is own breathing, in and out, nice and slowly and focusing on the physical sense of sun in the sky above him.
Except the sun feels distant of a sudden. A little colder and farther away. And really, how does that happen, from one moment to the next?
“You know, I never really thought about it, but the sun is awfully fickle, isn’t it?” the Devil says contemplatively from behind him. (Nick is crunching down on something, could be an apple core, could be a phalange.) “Leaving you all alone once a day, and then in the winter, even when it’s technically there, it’s barely doing anything at all. Is it any wonder, that it was during that first dark winter when, terror struck with the idea that the sun would never truly return to them, human beings first truly acknowledged the existence of my father? And then, what do you know, my father left them too! It’s actually a wonder more of you humans aren’t in therapy after all of that. Abandonment issues, attachment disorder, and all that jazz.”
Lucifer stretches indolently, curling up his body close to Sam’s. The stretch and slide of Nick’s muscles across the chrome hood sounds unsettling loud, feels unnervingly real. In spite of himself, he starts to tentatively turn his head, ready to face the hallucination head on.
In return for his troubles, he gets a long rough lick on his hand. “You don’t have to worry about me Sam,” Lucifer drawls contentedly. “I’ll always be right here, one way or the other.”
Shamefully, Sam loses his nerve. Instead, of turning around, he focuses on knees and finds his bandaged hand, digging in with his nails hard enough to feel it, waiting for the world to reassert itself.
Nothing in particular happens for a moment, except that it gradually occurs to him that he can hear a motor somewhere, slow and steady. The Impala? Dean coming back from a supply run into town?
No, wait. Sam should know this, Dean is inside with Bobby, fruitlessly looking up Leviathan lore, to avoid fruitlessly angsting over his brother and anyway, the sound is far too quiet and close. A little less mechanical than what he had thought at first.
Sam finally mans up and twists around. Right behind him is a large, indolent Siamese cat curled in a sunbeam. Blue eyes blink up at him as the cat continues to purr comfortably. A little baffled, Sam lifts a careful hand and allows it to sniff him. The cat does so easily and then inclines his head elegantly as if giving Sam permission to pay homage with a scratch.
It's his first real smile in a while, at least since he woke up the second time, with Hell in his head. Unfamiliar muscles across his face get stretched. The cat moves in closer and Sam runs his fingers over thin blond fur.
Better not let Bobby’s dogs find you out here, he advises the cat. It blinks and cocks its head, like it has heard him and is seriously considering the matter, but it stays right where it is, leaning into Sam just a little more.
In the end, Dean comes out to find him on foot, with no dogs at his heels, to call Sam in for dinner.
Dean snickers comfortably when he finds Sam and the cat curled up together. On Dean Winchester’s scale of personal displays of affection towards his mentally fragile brother, a snicker is a show of relief. It means Sam isn’t a drooling heap on the floor, yet.
“Making friends there, Sammy?”
In lieu of an answer, the cat meows irritatedly in Dean’s direction, as if reprimanding Dean for breaking up the moment. Sam smirks.
“Can we keep him? I'll name him Robert Plant. I can already tell that he’ll be a better singer than his namesake.”
“Watch it,” Dean glares, but that’s all he does. Even Dean’s comebacks are tempered now. Sam’s desperate for a well timed insult to his masculinity, but that apparently is a thing of the past.
Dean offers Sam a hand up from the car which again, is unsettlingly out of character. Before he can take it though, there is an angry hiss, and Dean's hand is jerking back, an angry red line across his wrist.
The cat is bristling possessively in front of Sam, and suddenly Sam can’t help but laugh, full and long at the total absurdity of the moment. Dean just looks between him and the cat, looking slightly unnerved.
-----
They spend the next few days not making any particular headway on the Leviathans. (“Look,” Bobby had said pacifyingly, “something will come up. It always does.” Sam had sat in the corner and silently watched as his brother fought a losing battle against his need to hit something, anything. Dean swears he’ll build Bobby a new bookshelf, and a better one, but is it really any wonder that he finds them a hunt, less than 24 hours later?) So they pull out of Bobby's, headed east towards coastal Maine and a possible water monster.
Honestly, Sam is good, better than he’s been in days. He’s thrown himself into research for the case, more than happy to occupy his time on a project that doesn't have to do with understanding the depths of his own, screwed up head. Despite Dean’s recent propensity for trying to wrap him in soft cotton, the truth is that Sam has always been better handling his shit when he has a job to focus on. So, Lucifer is just going to have to take a seat for a little while. He’s good. If he shivers a little too violently for the middle of summer, doubling up on the flannel helps a lot. And if the very concept of meat, especially pork, makes him stomach churningly nauseous, well that’s something he can learn to live with. It’s nothing anyone else needs to know about.
They move eastwards, leaving Sioux Falls at the crack of dawn, since neither of them are getting much sleep these days anyway. Pretty quickly, Sam falls into a fitful sleep against the passenger window, lulled by the noise of the engine.
In sleep, the Impala rearranges itself, becoming a shiny black motor boat on a stormy night sea. Sam is watching the waves break and crest against the horizon line. Someone has their arms wrapped around him, disconcertingly, intimately close.
He knows without looking, knows on a skin crawling, cellular level, who is standing there with him, holding him steady every-time he starts to lose his footing and slide uncontrolled around the deck.
“Oh Sammy,” Lucifer sighs in his ear, hooking his chin over Sam’s shoulder. “I miss us.”
One broad hand snakes up to brush gently through his hair, and the gesture is so, so Dean like, that it brings him to his senses, so to speak, enraging and terrifying him enough so that he bites down on his lip, and then bites down harder as the sea flickers around him.
“Going so soon?” the water whispers in Lucifer’s voice, black and rough with watery tongues. “We just got started.” The waves get choppier, rocking the little boat into ferocious angles. The boat engine growls underneath, and he is falling ludicrously backwards into Lucifer’s arms, as they ride towards the crest. Lucifer’s hand has moved to his shoulder, claiming and possessive and clawing.
Sam moans in spite of himself as the wave starts to break and the boat angles terrifyingly, vertiginously downwards. He catches a brief glimpse of mirror dark water as Lucifer frantically shakes his shoulder.
The actual Impala and the little back road they are driving down reasserts itself with stomach churning speed. Without realizing it, Sam has grabbed Dean’s hand around the wrist from where it been reaching out to him, and he is twisting it hard, Dean is braking and swerving more than a little frantically, while shouting at Sam to just “snap out of it, would you?”
Sam drops Dean’s hand like it’s burning, and tries to calm his skittering breathing, while Dean evens out the car.
It was a nightmare. Par for the course, considering everything, and it’s not like Dean doesn’t have experience of his own with that. All things considered, Sam is good.
After a moment, when both of them have a fraction of their equilibrium back, Dean clears his throat.
“Dude.”
“No.” Sam says flatly, staring at the cornfields, undulating towards the horizon on both sides of the car.
“Hey.” Dean stops, and tries again, choosing his words carefully. “Look man, it’s not like I like talking about this stuff. But I think we might have to. Maybe...maybe with everything that’s going on, maybe a case isn’t such a good idea right now?”
Dean says it gently enough, but the rage that builds in Sam comes on with unsettling swiftness. Two hundred years in hell, and Sam’s big brother still has no faith in him not to absolutely mess things up.
“I am handling it” he grits out, nostrils flaring and throat clogged with everything else he would like to say to his brother.
“I dunno, Sammy. Are you?” Dean raises a single eyebrow, questioningly, and the combination of serene innocence and honest concern in his expression makes Sam’s gives a little irritated flutter of recognition. It’s like he’s 13 again, and had just face planted in front of the landlord’s cute daughter, because his suave older brother had somehow managed to tie his shoelaces together without Sam noticing. Dean had sprung to the rescue then, playing the concerned big brother for his female audience, and clucking at Sam’s awkwardness with an affected solicitousness. And Sam had been forced to just sit there on the ground with his bruised palms, grinding his teeth and far too keenly aware that any attempt to point out the actual truth would come out sounding more like a immature whine from an adolescent kid with wounded pride.
“Because you barely sleep, and when you do it’s nightmares. You’re seeing stuff that’s not there. It’s not your fault, Sam. But it’s a lot to be dealing with and no one would blame you if you felt like you needed to ease back into things a little bit, least of all me.” Dean says all of that with so much feeling in his voice, like he’s been practicing it for ages, that Sam can’t help softening fractionally at the clear worry in his voice.
Why is it again, that he’s somehow never permitted to be annoyed with Dean? Somehow Dean is always the martyr, and Sam always, always ends up feeling peevish and young
“Sammy,” Dean says, picking his own words with an enraging long suffering carefulness. “It’s not that I don’t want to trust you. It’s just that it’s all still so recent. And Lucifer’s there in your noggin, and I don’t know how you even begin to cope with that, when I can barely-”
“Lucifer is not here now, Dean. It’s the two of us, and I’m getting a little sick of-”
There is a brief engine sputter. Then, Dean stalls out halfway, right there in the middle of the road.
They both sit there for a moment, both a little startled, both taking in their surroundings. There is nothing-no hint of danger or obstacles-nothing but flat country off to the horizon line.
It’s Sam’s turn to raise his eyebrows at his brother, but Dean cuts him off at the pass.
"Don't Sam...."
He tries one more time to open his mouth, but Dean is serious.
"No. Whatever you could possibly say Sam, I don't want to hear it. The Impala just doesn't stall. It just...it's doesn't. Not on its own.
Dean stalks around to the front and lifts the hood. His eyes widen and he curses fluently. After a second, Sam gets out to join him, more than a little curious in spite of himself.
From the dark of the engine compartment, two unsettlingly blue eyes blink up at him expectantly.
It takes Sam a moment to recognize the cat from Bobby’s junkyard. Despite his threats to Dean about bringing it on the road with them, he’s completely forgotten about it.
"There is a cat, Sam. In my car." Dean is trying like hell to maintain his dignity, and not sound like an affronted five-year-old. Sam’s suddenly having trouble remembering that he’s supposed to be mad at him, and is instead finds himself fighting back the beginnings of a grin.
“Alright,” Dean says. “come on. Get out of here."
He reaches a hand in, and gets hissed and swiped at or his efforts. The cat backs further into the compartment it's been hiding in.
"Jesus, Dean." Sam can feel his grin transmuting to a sibling category 5 smirk, as Dean moves back half a step. “Scared much?”
He leans forward and sticks a more tentative hand inside. Immediately, the cat comes to Sam, like they're long lost friends, who have been reunited after a heartless separation, sniffing comfortably, and then eventually jumping out onto the ground with an elegant, full body gesture that shows that this was exactly what it had meant to do all along, and wasn’t it lucky that Sam and Dean’s plans just happened to sync up with their own?
Sam squats to pet it, unaccountably fascinated by the way it rubs and weaves around him, purring and claiming him. It takes him a second to realize that Dean has gone silent, watching them.
“Dean,” Sam says, getting uncomfortable under the weight of his brother’s stare. Then he notices something. “Hey, I think it's sick.”
Dean grunts.
"It's cold," Sam continues. "I don't, I mean I don't think cats are supposed to be this cold." If anything Dean looks even more worried by that.
"Sam..."
"Yeah?"
"that cat was stuck next an engine for couple of hundred miles. It's damned lucky, actually a miracle, that it wasn't flambéed."
"And you're saying, after all of that, it's problem is that it's too cold?"
in the end, the cat comes with them. Sam is dead set against abandoning him in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, with no sign of civilization in any direction, not when they had no idea if the cat was used to hunting for its dinner, and when something might be physically wrong with it. Dean reluctantly agrees to take it as far as the nearest town with an animal shelter, but only on the proviso he can test it with silver (a chain link pressed close along one paw) and a holy water (a drop or two flicked into that pointed, oddly human face). The cat handles it all with a testy expression of wounded dignity, but it passes with flying colors.
Dean finally gets the engine to turn over again. Then he sulkily opens the door to the back seat with a look that says this is, un-categorically, the lowest he has ever sunk, that they were never to talk about this again and that Sam would be completely responsible for picking each and every single cat hair out of the upholstery. The cat, who has been dozing on Sam’s lap as Dean works on getting the engine going again, perks its head up curiously. Sensing the opportunity, it jumps elegantly into the backseat of the Impala, inspecting the interior with evident fascination, before curling up and continuing with its nap.
They get back on the road again. They’ve already wasted an hour or so on their unscheduled stop, and Dean for some unexplained reason, has set them a deadline of getting across the Wisconsin border before dinner time, so Dean turns on Guns n Roses and floors it for a little while.
Sam’s in a bit of a reverie, staring blindly at the passing cornfields when he’s startled by a soft thump, as the cat jumps from the backseat into the front bench.
“Oh no you don’t” Dean says. “There are limits to my hospitality, and they extend exactly as far as the back seat.” The cat sniffs the dashboard, totally unperturbed. “Go on,” Dean reaches a hand to nudge the cat away. The cat hisses. The sound is feral, unsettling enough to make Dean’s hand pause in mid-air.
“You know Dean, I don’t think he likes you very much,” Sam observes dryly, fighting down another grin.
“This funny to you, Sammy?”
“Hilarious.”
A few years ago, Dean would have said something like, “Get your furry friend back where he belongs, before I dump both of you by the side of the road. Make you hitchhike to Maine. See how funny you find that.” He might even have actually followed up on his threat; kicked Sam out of the car and make him walk for a few miles, letting Sam stew in frustration before driving back for him, giant, infectious grin plastered across his face. They would have gone out for beers later and Sam would have taken great pleasure in meticulously applying super glue to the labels of all of Dean’s beer bottles. And within a week, Dean would have charmed the cat into eating fillet of fish straight out of his hand.
What actually happens is that Dean gives him an inscrutable sidelong look, before shrugging and turning away. “Fine, then you’re in charge of him.”
Sam suddenly, ferociously misses his brother.
There are a few minutes of silence. On the tape deck, Styx is singing Mr. Roboto. Finally, Dean says, “and how do you know the cat is a he?”
Sam is startled. He’s not sure when he came to that conclusion, only that the cat’s character and personality has been steadily taking shape for him and that the unmistakable maleness of the animal is as clear as it’s yellow fur, and it’s oddly compelling ice blue eyes.
“I mean,” Dean slowly cuts his eyes carefully over to Sam, “There’s some strategically placed fur on that thing, so that means you must have checked right? Got up, like, all close and personal?” There is a smile threatening to break out across Dean’s face, and Sam knows he’s supposed to roll his eyes and act horrified at just how gross his brother is, so that’s what he does. But he also can’t help smiling a little.
Maybe it means his brother isn’t so far away after all.
The tape turns over and they drive on. Beside them the cat arranges himself with his head on Sam’s lap and goes right back to sleep. Sam falls back asleep not that long after.
He’d escaped to the yard in search of the sun, mostly, and had found it, mostly. Right now, it’s beating down on his forehead, and heating up the corroded chrome underneath his back, creating a circuit of heat that wraps around him, causing beads of sweat to break out along his hairline, along the back of his neck.
No matter how hot the chrome gets it gets, it still doesn’t penetrate anywhere deep enough to manage the cold inside of him. He wakes up at night these days, filled with this absurd, evangelical certainty that all of his red blood cells are currently freezing inside of his veins, black and cracked and rotten, and it’s only a matter of time before the icy rot reaches his heart. If it hasn’t already.
Dean has been watching him all day.
Scratch that.
Dean has been watching him since the moment he’d woken up with his soul, with a weary expression that said he was already mentally rolling up his sleeves, bracing himself for the task of putting Sam back together again, when he inevitably falls to pieces. It’s not like he blames Dean for that. Hell, he can’t say he actually trusts himself any more than Dean does, all things considered. But there is a not so tiny, traitorous part of Sam who resents his older brother for not even trying to pretend otherwise, for not bothering with a pretext that things were going to get back to normal.
These days, Dean watches him like Sam is a stranger. Like a civilian who Dean can’t quite read, with a threshold for the supernatural violence of their daily life that is as yet undetermined, but which could be breached at any moment.
Its oppressive, living with Dean’s concern, and with his complete and utter lack of trust. It’s just easier to catch your breath out here, when you’re alone. It helps to imagine, even for a minute, like breaking doesn’t have to be an inevitability.
Sam breathes, still and regular and uninterrupted. It feels indescribably precious this time to himself. He hates himself, just a little, for how much he doesn’t want to ever leave this spot, to go back to his brother and the latest world ending horror.
He shifts positions a little, angling his face further up to the sun. He thinks that he’s starting to remember the outlines of what it had felt like to be warm.
Feeling cold there, bunk buddy? You know, I might have a few suggestions for how we can deal with that.
The leer in Lucifer’s voice is unmistakable.
Sam starts violently, sitting up and pulling his legs in protectively. Then he shuts his eyes -as if that would make some kind of difference to a hallucination - and waits obediently for whatever comes next.
He can't not wait.
Disobedience is a forgotten concept, like uninterrupted sleep, like room temperature, but then again, none of that is anything he wants to think too hard about just now.
There is an icy puff of air as Lucifer leans in tight and silent, and just kind of breaths for a moment against his neckline, invasive and chilling and close.
Sam tries to do is own breathing, in and out, nice and slowly and focusing on the physical sense of sun in the sky above him.
Except the sun feels distant of a sudden. A little colder and farther away. And really, how does that happen, from one moment to the next?
“You know, I never really thought about it, but the sun is awfully fickle, isn’t it?” the Devil says contemplatively from behind him. (Nick is crunching down on something, could be an apple core, could be a phalange.) “Leaving you all alone once a day, and then in the winter, even when it’s technically there, it’s barely doing anything at all. Is it any wonder, that it was during that first dark winter when, terror struck with the idea that the sun would never truly return to them, human beings first truly acknowledged the existence of my father? And then, what do you know, my father left them too! It’s actually a wonder more of you humans aren’t in therapy after all of that. Abandonment issues, attachment disorder, and all that jazz.”
Lucifer stretches indolently, curling up his body close to Sam’s. The stretch and slide of Nick’s muscles across the chrome hood sounds unsettling loud, feels unnervingly real. In spite of himself, he starts to tentatively turn his head, ready to face the hallucination head on.
In return for his troubles, he gets a long rough lick on his hand. “You don’t have to worry about me Sam,” Lucifer drawls contentedly. “I’ll always be right here, one way or the other.”
Shamefully, Sam loses his nerve. Instead, of turning around, he focuses on knees and finds his bandaged hand, digging in with his nails hard enough to feel it, waiting for the world to reassert itself.
Nothing in particular happens for a moment, except that it gradually occurs to him that he can hear a motor somewhere, slow and steady. The Impala? Dean coming back from a supply run into town?
No, wait. Sam should know this, Dean is inside with Bobby, fruitlessly looking up Leviathan lore, to avoid fruitlessly angsting over his brother and anyway, the sound is far too quiet and close. A little less mechanical than what he had thought at first.
Sam finally mans up and twists around. Right behind him is a large, indolent Siamese cat curled in a sunbeam. Blue eyes blink up at him as the cat continues to purr comfortably. A little baffled, Sam lifts a careful hand and allows it to sniff him. The cat does so easily and then inclines his head elegantly as if giving Sam permission to pay homage with a scratch.
It's his first real smile in a while, at least since he woke up the second time, with Hell in his head. Unfamiliar muscles across his face get stretched. The cat moves in closer and Sam runs his fingers over thin blond fur.
Better not let Bobby’s dogs find you out here, he advises the cat. It blinks and cocks its head, like it has heard him and is seriously considering the matter, but it stays right where it is, leaning into Sam just a little more.
In the end, Dean comes out to find him on foot, with no dogs at his heels, to call Sam in for dinner.
Dean snickers comfortably when he finds Sam and the cat curled up together. On Dean Winchester’s scale of personal displays of affection towards his mentally fragile brother, a snicker is a show of relief. It means Sam isn’t a drooling heap on the floor, yet.
“Making friends there, Sammy?”
In lieu of an answer, the cat meows irritatedly in Dean’s direction, as if reprimanding Dean for breaking up the moment. Sam smirks.
“Can we keep him? I'll name him Robert Plant. I can already tell that he’ll be a better singer than his namesake.”
“Watch it,” Dean glares, but that’s all he does. Even Dean’s comebacks are tempered now. Sam’s desperate for a well timed insult to his masculinity, but that apparently is a thing of the past.
Dean offers Sam a hand up from the car which again, is unsettlingly out of character. Before he can take it though, there is an angry hiss, and Dean's hand is jerking back, an angry red line across his wrist.
The cat is bristling possessively in front of Sam, and suddenly Sam can’t help but laugh, full and long at the total absurdity of the moment. Dean just looks between him and the cat, looking slightly unnerved.
-----
They spend the next few days not making any particular headway on the Leviathans. (“Look,” Bobby had said pacifyingly, “something will come up. It always does.” Sam had sat in the corner and silently watched as his brother fought a losing battle against his need to hit something, anything. Dean swears he’ll build Bobby a new bookshelf, and a better one, but is it really any wonder that he finds them a hunt, less than 24 hours later?) So they pull out of Bobby's, headed east towards coastal Maine and a possible water monster.
Honestly, Sam is good, better than he’s been in days. He’s thrown himself into research for the case, more than happy to occupy his time on a project that doesn't have to do with understanding the depths of his own, screwed up head. Despite Dean’s recent propensity for trying to wrap him in soft cotton, the truth is that Sam has always been better handling his shit when he has a job to focus on. So, Lucifer is just going to have to take a seat for a little while. He’s good. If he shivers a little too violently for the middle of summer, doubling up on the flannel helps a lot. And if the very concept of meat, especially pork, makes him stomach churningly nauseous, well that’s something he can learn to live with. It’s nothing anyone else needs to know about.
They move eastwards, leaving Sioux Falls at the crack of dawn, since neither of them are getting much sleep these days anyway. Pretty quickly, Sam falls into a fitful sleep against the passenger window, lulled by the noise of the engine.
In sleep, the Impala rearranges itself, becoming a shiny black motor boat on a stormy night sea. Sam is watching the waves break and crest against the horizon line. Someone has their arms wrapped around him, disconcertingly, intimately close.
He knows without looking, knows on a skin crawling, cellular level, who is standing there with him, holding him steady every-time he starts to lose his footing and slide uncontrolled around the deck.
“Oh Sammy,” Lucifer sighs in his ear, hooking his chin over Sam’s shoulder. “I miss us.”
One broad hand snakes up to brush gently through his hair, and the gesture is so, so Dean like, that it brings him to his senses, so to speak, enraging and terrifying him enough so that he bites down on his lip, and then bites down harder as the sea flickers around him.
“Going so soon?” the water whispers in Lucifer’s voice, black and rough with watery tongues. “We just got started.” The waves get choppier, rocking the little boat into ferocious angles. The boat engine growls underneath, and he is falling ludicrously backwards into Lucifer’s arms, as they ride towards the crest. Lucifer’s hand has moved to his shoulder, claiming and possessive and clawing.
Sam moans in spite of himself as the wave starts to break and the boat angles terrifyingly, vertiginously downwards. He catches a brief glimpse of mirror dark water as Lucifer frantically shakes his shoulder.
The actual Impala and the little back road they are driving down reasserts itself with stomach churning speed. Without realizing it, Sam has grabbed Dean’s hand around the wrist from where it been reaching out to him, and he is twisting it hard, Dean is braking and swerving more than a little frantically, while shouting at Sam to just “snap out of it, would you?”
Sam drops Dean’s hand like it’s burning, and tries to calm his skittering breathing, while Dean evens out the car.
It was a nightmare. Par for the course, considering everything, and it’s not like Dean doesn’t have experience of his own with that. All things considered, Sam is good.
After a moment, when both of them have a fraction of their equilibrium back, Dean clears his throat.
“Dude.”
“No.” Sam says flatly, staring at the cornfields, undulating towards the horizon on both sides of the car.
“Hey.” Dean stops, and tries again, choosing his words carefully. “Look man, it’s not like I like talking about this stuff. But I think we might have to. Maybe...maybe with everything that’s going on, maybe a case isn’t such a good idea right now?”
Dean says it gently enough, but the rage that builds in Sam comes on with unsettling swiftness. Two hundred years in hell, and Sam’s big brother still has no faith in him not to absolutely mess things up.
“I am handling it” he grits out, nostrils flaring and throat clogged with everything else he would like to say to his brother.
“I dunno, Sammy. Are you?” Dean raises a single eyebrow, questioningly, and the combination of serene innocence and honest concern in his expression makes Sam’s gives a little irritated flutter of recognition. It’s like he’s 13 again, and had just face planted in front of the landlord’s cute daughter, because his suave older brother had somehow managed to tie his shoelaces together without Sam noticing. Dean had sprung to the rescue then, playing the concerned big brother for his female audience, and clucking at Sam’s awkwardness with an affected solicitousness. And Sam had been forced to just sit there on the ground with his bruised palms, grinding his teeth and far too keenly aware that any attempt to point out the actual truth would come out sounding more like a immature whine from an adolescent kid with wounded pride.
“Because you barely sleep, and when you do it’s nightmares. You’re seeing stuff that’s not there. It’s not your fault, Sam. But it’s a lot to be dealing with and no one would blame you if you felt like you needed to ease back into things a little bit, least of all me.” Dean says all of that with so much feeling in his voice, like he’s been practicing it for ages, that Sam can’t help softening fractionally at the clear worry in his voice.
Why is it again, that he’s somehow never permitted to be annoyed with Dean? Somehow Dean is always the martyr, and Sam always, always ends up feeling peevish and young
“Sammy,” Dean says, picking his own words with an enraging long suffering carefulness. “It’s not that I don’t want to trust you. It’s just that it’s all still so recent. And Lucifer’s there in your noggin, and I don’t know how you even begin to cope with that, when I can barely-”
“Lucifer is not here now, Dean. It’s the two of us, and I’m getting a little sick of-”
There is a brief engine sputter. Then, Dean stalls out halfway, right there in the middle of the road.
They both sit there for a moment, both a little startled, both taking in their surroundings. There is nothing-no hint of danger or obstacles-nothing but flat country off to the horizon line.
It’s Sam’s turn to raise his eyebrows at his brother, but Dean cuts him off at the pass.
"Don't Sam...."
He tries one more time to open his mouth, but Dean is serious.
"No. Whatever you could possibly say Sam, I don't want to hear it. The Impala just doesn't stall. It just...it's doesn't. Not on its own.
Dean stalks around to the front and lifts the hood. His eyes widen and he curses fluently. After a second, Sam gets out to join him, more than a little curious in spite of himself.
From the dark of the engine compartment, two unsettlingly blue eyes blink up at him expectantly.
It takes Sam a moment to recognize the cat from Bobby’s junkyard. Despite his threats to Dean about bringing it on the road with them, he’s completely forgotten about it.
"There is a cat, Sam. In my car." Dean is trying like hell to maintain his dignity, and not sound like an affronted five-year-old. Sam’s suddenly having trouble remembering that he’s supposed to be mad at him, and is instead finds himself fighting back the beginnings of a grin.
“Alright,” Dean says. “come on. Get out of here."
He reaches a hand in, and gets hissed and swiped at or his efforts. The cat backs further into the compartment it's been hiding in.
"Jesus, Dean." Sam can feel his grin transmuting to a sibling category 5 smirk, as Dean moves back half a step. “Scared much?”
He leans forward and sticks a more tentative hand inside. Immediately, the cat comes to Sam, like they're long lost friends, who have been reunited after a heartless separation, sniffing comfortably, and then eventually jumping out onto the ground with an elegant, full body gesture that shows that this was exactly what it had meant to do all along, and wasn’t it lucky that Sam and Dean’s plans just happened to sync up with their own?
Sam squats to pet it, unaccountably fascinated by the way it rubs and weaves around him, purring and claiming him. It takes him a second to realize that Dean has gone silent, watching them.
“Dean,” Sam says, getting uncomfortable under the weight of his brother’s stare. Then he notices something. “Hey, I think it's sick.”
Dean grunts.
"It's cold," Sam continues. "I don't, I mean I don't think cats are supposed to be this cold." If anything Dean looks even more worried by that.
"Sam..."
"Yeah?"
"that cat was stuck next an engine for couple of hundred miles. It's damned lucky, actually a miracle, that it wasn't flambéed."
"And you're saying, after all of that, it's problem is that it's too cold?"
in the end, the cat comes with them. Sam is dead set against abandoning him in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, with no sign of civilization in any direction, not when they had no idea if the cat was used to hunting for its dinner, and when something might be physically wrong with it. Dean reluctantly agrees to take it as far as the nearest town with an animal shelter, but only on the proviso he can test it with silver (a chain link pressed close along one paw) and a holy water (a drop or two flicked into that pointed, oddly human face). The cat handles it all with a testy expression of wounded dignity, but it passes with flying colors.
Dean finally gets the engine to turn over again. Then he sulkily opens the door to the back seat with a look that says this is, un-categorically, the lowest he has ever sunk, that they were never to talk about this again and that Sam would be completely responsible for picking each and every single cat hair out of the upholstery. The cat, who has been dozing on Sam’s lap as Dean works on getting the engine going again, perks its head up curiously. Sensing the opportunity, it jumps elegantly into the backseat of the Impala, inspecting the interior with evident fascination, before curling up and continuing with its nap.
They get back on the road again. They’ve already wasted an hour or so on their unscheduled stop, and Dean for some unexplained reason, has set them a deadline of getting across the Wisconsin border before dinner time, so Dean turns on Guns n Roses and floors it for a little while.
Sam’s in a bit of a reverie, staring blindly at the passing cornfields when he’s startled by a soft thump, as the cat jumps from the backseat into the front bench.
“Oh no you don’t” Dean says. “There are limits to my hospitality, and they extend exactly as far as the back seat.” The cat sniffs the dashboard, totally unperturbed. “Go on,” Dean reaches a hand to nudge the cat away. The cat hisses. The sound is feral, unsettling enough to make Dean’s hand pause in mid-air.
“You know Dean, I don’t think he likes you very much,” Sam observes dryly, fighting down another grin.
“This funny to you, Sammy?”
“Hilarious.”
A few years ago, Dean would have said something like, “Get your furry friend back where he belongs, before I dump both of you by the side of the road. Make you hitchhike to Maine. See how funny you find that.” He might even have actually followed up on his threat; kicked Sam out of the car and make him walk for a few miles, letting Sam stew in frustration before driving back for him, giant, infectious grin plastered across his face. They would have gone out for beers later and Sam would have taken great pleasure in meticulously applying super glue to the labels of all of Dean’s beer bottles. And within a week, Dean would have charmed the cat into eating fillet of fish straight out of his hand.
What actually happens is that Dean gives him an inscrutable sidelong look, before shrugging and turning away. “Fine, then you’re in charge of him.”
Sam suddenly, ferociously misses his brother.
There are a few minutes of silence. On the tape deck, Styx is singing Mr. Roboto. Finally, Dean says, “and how do you know the cat is a he?”
Sam is startled. He’s not sure when he came to that conclusion, only that the cat’s character and personality has been steadily taking shape for him and that the unmistakable maleness of the animal is as clear as it’s yellow fur, and it’s oddly compelling ice blue eyes.
“I mean,” Dean slowly cuts his eyes carefully over to Sam, “There’s some strategically placed fur on that thing, so that means you must have checked right? Got up, like, all close and personal?” There is a smile threatening to break out across Dean’s face, and Sam knows he’s supposed to roll his eyes and act horrified at just how gross his brother is, so that’s what he does. But he also can’t help smiling a little.
Maybe it means his brother isn’t so far away after all.
The tape turns over and they drive on. Beside them the cat arranges himself with his head on Sam’s lap and goes right back to sleep. Sam falls back asleep not that long after.