SPN Fic: ...And All of It Insane
Title: ...And All of It Insane
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean, Sam, Bobby
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentions of torture and rather violent murder
Spoilers: Some spoilers for the end of season 6.
Words: 4,710
Summary: Hiding an injury from someone who knows you better than they know themselves isn't an easy thing to do, especially if that someone basically lives in your pocket. Sam still managed to do it - and the reasons for that turn out to be a lot worse than Dean ever imagined.
Note: Late fill for this prompt by foxstarreh at the latest ohsam comment fic meme.
The thing was, Dean had basically raised Sam. So he knew him like he knew no other person on the planet, including himself. He knew how Sam walked when he was in pain, could tell when his colour was anything but healthy. He could tell from the sound of Sam’s breathing in his sleep if he was sick. Since he was four, all his senses and instincts had been tuned in on his brother to notice at once if anything was the slightest bit off. He had learned Sam like a language.
The other thing, though, was that Sam was a grown-up man with a lifetime of experience in hunting, and Dean had naively thought that counted for something. Sam had to know that you didn’t hunt with a broken arm or try to take in vital information on how to take out a Jashi with your mind addled by fever. And therefore Dean ignored all the signs, since simply based on the fact that Sam was still alive he assumed that his brother wasn’t an idiot.
It was actually much worse than that, but until Dean figured that out, he went with the idiot-thesis.
In the beginning, he even went with the thesis that Sam really hadn’t broken anything, and that the way he moved, the bruised look to his eyes, was just as sign of his exhaustion. Sam didn’t sleep well, or much, lately, and it showed. Hell, often Dean didn’t sleep much better, so who was he go and berate the kid?
So what if Sam winched every so often if he moved wrong? He’d been tossed through two wooden walls and down a flight of stairs by a pissed off vampire the other day, so who could blame him for being a little bruised? Dean had asked him if he was okay after the hunt and Sam has said yes, he was. And that was it. Dean and Sam didn’t whine over scratches, but they knew serious injuries got people killed, and not just themselves, so even Dean’s manliness didn’t extend to hiding broken bones or infections. In fact, doing so would never have occurred to either of them.
Therefore, when Sam said he was okay, it never occurred to Dean that he might not be.
And while Sam seemed to hunch over a little more on the way to Sacramento, he never flinched away from touches, not even to the colourfully bruised wrist the vampire had left as a memento. He didn’t show any consciousness of how he moved either, so yeah. Exhaustion it was. Maybe a headache, because Sam didn’t eat or drink enough and Dean knew that was important. And worry might have played a part as well. After all, Becky used to be a friend, and even through they hadn’t spoken to each other in all the years between them saving her from the shape shifter and her call a week ago, it was obvious that Sam still cared.
That, it turned out, was also worse than Dean thought at first.
About a year ago, friends of Becky’s had disappeared. Three young women within two weeks, and neither of them had been seen again. One week ago, finally, the police had found one of them - she had been murdered in the sewers and stripped of her skin, which remained missing to this day. It was gruesome enough to remind Beck of the shifter and call her old monster-hunting friend from Stanford for help.
Sam insisted they went at once, with no day of rest after the vampire incident. Naturally, he was worried. All the victims were connected to Becky somehow, so it wasn’t far-fetched to believe she might be at the centre of it all somehow, or a potential victim at the very least. And naturally, Sam felt guilty, because if whatever had taken those women was after Becky, chances were her connection to Sam was the reason.
Dean got that. Hell, how well he understood! What he didn’t get was that it was more than that - not until they found out what had happened to those women and Sam, for all his disgust and horror, almost collapsed on the spot and nearly cried with relief.
In the years since they last saw her, Becky had married and moved to Sacramento. By the time Dean and Sam found her new address, the police had found the other two victims as well as the killer. As it turned out, it wasn’t a monster - at least not a supernatural one. It was just a sick bastard who liked to kill young women and keep their skins as trophies. One of Becky’s neighbours. She was shocked, to say the least. Thanked Sam and Dean a hundred times for coming when she came, apologized from having them drive all the way for nothing, and was so happy to see Sam again. Worried, too - Dean could see it when she looked at Sam and recognized it for what it was because he looked at his brother like that himself more and more often since the wall had come down and Sam had emerged from the wreckage every so slightly off.
She insisted on the two of them staying at her place instead of looking for a motel, but Sam refused to accept the offer. Dean had the impression that Becky’s husband wasn’t entirely unhappy to see them go again so soon after arriving.
Dean himself wouldn’t have minded a proper bed and a homemade meal or two for free, but he didn’t protest when Sam got back in the car and told him to drive. They needed to talk, and someone else’s house wasn’t the place for that.
Because Dean was… not exactly pissed, but still rather frustrated about the time they wasted on this entirely useless trip. Sam didn’t only seem to not mind the lack of case, he seemed almost happy about it. Dean had seen how all the tension left his brother the moment Becky told them about the police’s discovery, and he wanted to know what was going on in his brother’s freaky brain.
So he asked. Sam didn’t tell him. So he asked again. Sam refused to look at him. So Dean got annoyed and Sam sat beside him, hunched and silent, and dug his nails into the bruised and swollen wrist he held cradled against his chest.
With Sam being useless as a source of information, Dean eventually figured it out for himself. What had Sam so freaked out about something that happened a year ago, when he wasn’t even topside to have anything to do with it?
And that, of course, was the answer.
“Dude,” he said. “You didn’t think Robo-You had gone after those girls, did you?”
Beside him, on the passenger seat, Sam shrugged to signal that it was really not at all important and Dean should just forget about it. “The memories are back now, but I don’t remember everything. I have no idea what I did during that time. It’s possible.”
“What you did during that time? Sam, during that time you were gone.” Burning in hell. Screaming, if he happened to have an intact throat and vocal cords at the moment. “Also, why would he do anything to Becky’s friends? He was ruthless, but he wasn’t that much of a psycho.”
Sam shrugged again, clearly not wanting to talk about it. “You have no idea what I would do at that time. What I have done. This? If I thought it might get me something I wanted, it could have been me.”
“I keep hearing you speak of him in the first person, Sammy,” Dean said, trying to keep down the anger that welled up in him. “That wasn’t you, okay? Even he didn’t think he was you!”
“Kinda hard to believe that when I have his memories in my head, Dean,” Sam said lightly. “I remember what he did, how he thought. I could give you his reasoning for every murder he committed.”
“Right.” Dean squirmed uncomfortably behind the wheel, not wanting to know how that felt. “Still not you. There’s a motel not five miles from here. I’ll get us there.”
“We can keep going. It’s not late yet.”
“Forget it. We drove through two nights to get here because you insisted on dropping our well-earned day off for a case that didn’t even exist. You got your will, now I get mine. In case you didn’t notice, you weren’t the only one Bitey tossed around, and I, for one, need some recovery time.”
Sam didn’t say anything after that, so Dean got them to the motel, checked them in, and dragged their stuff over to the room, while Sam remained sitting in the car, all brooding and moody and never looking up. Dean very nearly had to drag him to the room as well - fortunately for both of them, Sam snapped out of it just in time to avoid that.
His little trip to the present didn’t last long, though. Once in the room, he sat on the edge of his bed and stared at nothing, and when Dean came out of the shower, he still sat there, without having moved, without acknowledging Dean’s presence in any way.
“Dude,” Dean said carefully. “You okay?”
He had to wave his hand in front of Sam’s face a few times before Sam blinked at him and said yeah, of course he was okay. He’d take a shower now. And then he went to the bathroom, and emerged a minute later to get his towel and shampoo from his duffle.
He was moving slower than normal. When he blinked, his eyes stayed closed a millisecond too long. And he had needed a minute to figure out he forgot his stuff outside the bathroom. All that drove Dean to the conclusion that Sam was a lot more exhausted than he should be.
Either that, or he was getting sick.
Once the thought was thought, Dean was on the lookout for signs. And sure enough, Sam’s face, when he finally emerged from the shower, was pale, almost white - and his cheeks were flushed.
“Do you have a fever?” Dean asked him, because the direct approach seemed promising to him.
Sam looked startled. “No. Why do you think so?”
“Your face is flushed.”
“The shower was pretty hot.”
Fair enough. “You feeling alright?”
“Sure.” Sam shrugged. “I’m just a little tired.”
“Then sleep,” Dean ordered. “And don’t forget to brush your teeth, Sammy!”
He got a grimace in reply, which put him at ease. Sam was okay, just tired. If it was something worse, he’d have said so rather than have them drive across the country for fake cases.
“How’s your arm?” Dean asked as Sam slipped under the covers of his bed. It wasn’t even quite dark outside, but if he was tired, he had to sleep. It would be a blessing if he actually could for a change. “Still hurting?”
“No, it’s okay,” Sam assured him. Dean tried to catch a glimpse, but Sam had the limp hidden under his oversized shirt that covered it down to the tips of his fingers. Which was odd, because it was quite warm inside the room, and once again, Dean’s alarms went off.
Sam didn’t try to protect the arm, though, which had to be a sign against broken bones or bad sprains. After all, the last time he’d broken his arm, he’d told Dean and gotten a nice cast for it, all without protest. Okay, so he had told Dean only after Dean had made him shovel a ton of dirt into a hole, but those were details. It was still the same day, so it basically counted as “at once”.
So, since Sam wasn’t an idiot, it had to be exhaustion. As if to confirm it, Sam fell asleep almost immediately, and Dean kept throwing glances in his direction while watching TV on low volume. Eventually he went to sleep himself and woke up in the night to the sound of dry coughs and retching coming from the bathroom.
One minute later, he was leaning against the doorframe, looking down at his brother kneeling in front of the toilet.
“Anything you want to tell me?” Dean didn’t try to keep the anger from his voice. “How long have you been sick? Are you fucking trying to get us both killed?”
Sam flinched at his words. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Just woke up feeling sick. Must’ve eaten something bad.”
He sounded pitiful, like he was five. Dean had a hard time staying mad at him like that, but by God, he could try.
“You didn’t eat anything in days, bitch,” he said roughly. “So how long?”
“Honestly, just now. And I’m already feeling better. I guess I just needed to get it out of my system.” To underline his words, Sam climbed to his feet and flushed the toilet. Dean noticed that he reached for the button somewhat awkwardly with his left hand. After he washed up he went back to bed, and Dean spend the rest of the night lying awake, listening to the occasional coughs his brother couldn’t quite suppress.
-
Dean wanted to stay at the motel another day, because neither of them slept much and Sam looked like hell. Sam insisted on leaving, said this motel was too expensive for their standards, which was kind of true. Eventually Dean let himself be talked into moving a couple of towns over to the kind of shithole they were more used to, but before he packed his stuff, he tossed a clip of ammo over to his brother and Sam caught it with his right hand and immediately let it fall to the floor. He didn’t make a sound, though, which was kind of creepy.
It turned even more creepy when Dean polled up his brother’s shirt to finally get a good look at his arm and saw that not only the wrist was blue and black and swollen, but the hand as well, not even sparing the fingers.
Two hours later, when Dean was sitting in the waiting room of the nearest hospital, he was convinced that his brother was a moron who deserved all the pain he had to have suffered these last few days. Only a moron would fail to mention that a vampire had broken his wrist, his hand and his fingers and instead insist to go on a hunt.
Had there really been a hunt in Sacramento, Sam could have gotten himself killed, and Dean as well. The latter was what really had Dean worried - not because of the risk to himself, but because Sam wasn’t reckless like that, not when someone else was involved. It didn’t make sense. Sam knew better than that.
For the moment, Sam was out, though, and unable to give any explanations. The arm had needed surgery, a couple of Sam’s rips were cracked and the infection a seemingly harmless cut on his shoulder had given him when it was left untreated had progressed beyond what the doctors were comfortable with. The real problem, however, was in Sam’s mind, and Dean needed another week to finally figure that out.
Sam’s arm and hand had been broken in seven places and the fever had been burning him up for days. And yet there had been no sound, no sign of discomfort except a slight favouring of his good hand. So, okay, some of the breaks hadn’t been as bad in the beginning, but days of ignoring them made everything a lot worse. Which meant Sam had been in horrible pain for a long time, and he’d barely as much as grimaced.
That got Dean thinking. He thought a lot, and he did it quietly. Sam, when he woke up all doped up on painkillers, obviously expected a lecture and interpreted Dean’s silence as steaming anger. It wasn’t entirely wrong - Dean was angry, but at himself as much as at Sam, because if Sam was in excruciating pain, he should have noticed that a lot sooner. And, yeah, he’d noticed something was wrong and blamed it on exhaustion for far too long, but that still didn’t explain how this could have gone so far.
The only explanation he came up with for Sam’s ability not to show his pain was that Sam didn’t feel the pain in the first place. Dean was no medic, but he had heard once of some sort of disability that left people incapable of registering pain. So maybe, he thought, something had disconnected in Sam’s mind when the wall came down, leaving him ignorant of his own suffering. If that was the case, it would be damn inconvenient. As this incident showed, that was a pretty dangerous condition for a hunter to have. But at the same time, being unable to feel pain certainly wouldn’t have been the worst that ever happened to Sam.
Too bad that the theory didn’t withstand closer inspection. Because if he thought about it, Sam had been damn pale for days. His hands had been shaking, and Dean remembered the fine layer of sweat he’d seen on his brother’s forehead every now and then, usually attributing it to lack of sleep or simply the temperature. Looking back, though, those were all signs of pretty awful pain.
So much for that.
They left the hospital on Sam’s insistence and to the disapproval of the doctors a week after Sam’s surgery and started their journey to Bobby’s. Sam was quiet all the time, only speaking when spoken to. At least Dean got out of him why he had kept his state secret for so long:
“If I’d said anything, you would have dragged me to a hospital. Imagine something had really been after Becky. We would have lost too much time.”
“Okay,” Dean said, even though it was absolutely not okay. “But that was before we found out it was a bust. Why didn’t you tell me once we knew Becky was safe?”
Sam shrugged uncomfortably. “I didn’t… Well.” He seemed to have trouble finding the right words. “If you’d known I kept it from you, you would have stopped trusting me if I said I was okay.”
“And that’s exactly what happened,” Dean told him harshly. “Seriously, Sam. Did you think you could just keep it secret until it healed on its own? I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”
“I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“Bullshit,” Dean spat, but that was the only explanation he got. Whenever he brought it up, Sam would insist on it not actually being an injury worth mentioning. And even though he was still very much hurt, he never paid any attention to his illness or gave his broken arm a rest as they made their way to Sioux Falls. Which didn’t make any goddamn sense because there was no point in hiding it anymore. Yet Sam never asked for a break, ignored his medication, and Dean had to yell at him more than once because he tried to wrap his fingers around a door handle despite the cast, as if he’d forgotten the injury was there.
The problem wasn’t, Dean eventually figured out, that Sam didn’t register the pain, or wilfully tried to hide his injuries. The problem was that he simply didn’t realise that pain that strong, injuries that bad were actually a problem. He didn’t hide them because of misguided pride or to keep Dean in the dark, but because he literally didn’t think they were worth mentioning. Or even something that needed to be acknowledged through expressions of pain.
Dean had a hard time wrapping his mind around that idea, but as soon as the idea formed in his head, it all seemed to make so much sense, in a tragic, sad, and entirely heartbreaking way. Sam had been in hell for… a very long time. He’d experienced agony even Dean with his decades on the rack knew he couldn’t imagine. A broken arm was nothing compared to torn-off skin, ripped-out entails and white-hot metal pored down his throat, all at the same time. A broken arm and an infected wound were a starting point, if that. They weren’t worth paying attention to.
A hundred miles from their destination, Dean realised that this was a big problem for a hunter, hell, for anyone. But especially for a hunter. Even worse than not feeling pain at all. And they still hadn’t made it to Bobby’s doorstep when he realised that it might not be a problem he would be able to solve.
Not that he didn’t try in the days that followed. But discussing the issue with Sam went nowhere. Sam didn’t even realise the issue existed, and trying to get him to see it only led to Sam getting angry and a lot of yelling on both sides.
Logic didn’t help either. The argument “If I broke my arm in seven places, would you tell me to just keep using it?” only resulted in a blank stare followed by a slammed door and Sam storming off. Followed by Bobby dragging Sam back in an hour later, soaked with rain and down with another fever. Tension ran high those first few days at Bobby’s, with Sam being ill and hurt and not even getting it, and Dean being helpless and frustrated, thinking his brother was being deliberately stubborn.
He realised he was mistaken about that the day Bobby hurt his hand. He’d been working on a car in the yard, and managed to squeeze his hand between something hard and something hard and sharp. He came in cursing and bleeding badly, his hand discoloured where it wasn’t turning black, and Sam just watched as Dean did what he could to help him. There was no sign of concern or sympathy on his face, just that vaguely frustrated frown that meant he was trying to figure something out.
He didn’t get it.
And Dean had no time to analyse this new revelation. He had to drive Bobby to the hospital, and when they came home five hours later with stitches in Bobby’s hand and a his arm in a sling, Sam had passed out on the floor of their room, surrounded by empty bottles, and the narrow, private little corner beside his bed had been completely trashed.
-
Bobby never quite understood it, though Dean could tell he tried. And he appreciated the effort, he did, but fact was that Bobby couldn’t understand. It was impossible, because Bobby had never been to hell. Dean had. And while he didn’t entirely understand himself, not really, he at least had a point of reference. He knew that four decades were four decades, and a century was a century - and however long Sam had been in the cage had been a very, very long time.
The things that happened to them in hell had happened. They were weren’t any less real just because they didn’t have any scars to show for them. That was what no one understood who hadn’t experienced it. Those experiences were real, and they had shaped Dean and Sam as much as any experience they had while they were alive.
What Sam had learned - what had been soaked into the marrow of his bones, into the deepest layers of his mind - was that there was no limit to the pain, terror and humiliation a person could endure without the relief of unconsciousness, death, or insanity. He’d learned that every injury lesser than what would horribly kill a living person was a blessing - a rare break between tortures beyond even Dean’s imagination. It was a truth he had learned in centuries worth of hard lessons, and a lifetime in the real world would not be enough to unlearn it.
Who could tell what was real, anyway?
When it finally sank in just how serious this was, Bobby suggested help. Like, professional help. “He ain’t able to care for himself, Dean,” he said one day, when Sam was outside on the porch, reading a book on something or other. “A damn cold could kill him. And you can’t take him on a hunt, because he can’t look out for you.”
“He looked out for me well enough last time,” Dean protested. “Without him having my back, the vampire would have smashed me through a wall. And a window.”
“And if he had? Sam might have let you die without even realising he was doing it.”
Dean didn’t say anything in reply, because there was nothing he could say. Bobby was right. Bobby had his hand messed up and the old Sam would have been fussing over him to no end. This Sam didn’t even seem to register it.
Sometimes Dean just wanted to wrap his arms around his brother and weep for all the things Sam had lost when hell tore him apart.
Bobby’s voice was quieter, gentler when he continued. “Face it, Dean, this is too big for you. For us. I’m not saying you should give him up - on the contrary. Give him a chance. We can’t be there for him twenty-four seven, and like this it’s only a matter of time before he gets himself killed. Or someone else - and you said yourself that his guilt works as well as ever. Don’t do that to him. Have someone look after him, just until he’s better.”
“He’s never going to get better,” Dean said what he had been unwilling to even think for days, and it hardly hurt at all. “It’s too much. You could just as well try to unlearn how to walk.”
“Sam’s smart…”
“’s got nothing to do with that. He can intellectually understand it all he wants, there’s no point if all his instincts are gone. I’m not going to leave him to some strangers for something that can’t be changed.” Least of all against Sam’s will. Sam didn’t even understand there was something wrong with him, and Dean didn’t want to as much as imagine the betrayed look on his face if he dragged him to some mental institution to be locked away for his own safety.
“Then what are you going to do?” Bobby asked, challenge in his voice, and Dean let out a long breath he’d been holding far too long.
“What I have to.”
-
The decision to give up hunting wasn’t, in the end, that hard to make. Dean had done it before, and it hadn’t been all bad. In fact, it could have been amazing. What had spoiled his life with Lisa and Ben had been the constant worry for their safety, and the fact that it was damn hard to enjoy life knowing his little brother was burning in hell.
Now Sam was with him, and Sam was well aware of what was out there and how to kill it. Giving up hunting for Sam was easy. Making Sam understand that it wasn’t a selfless sacrifice with which Dean ruined his own happiness for Sam’s sake would be a harder battle to fight. Making Sam understand that this could be a good thing for both of them… well. It would take time.
But Sam was still Sam, and Dean remembered the little boy who’d always wanted to stay at one place long enough to grow a garden, of all things. Their dad had never been able to fulfil that wish. Dean thought it was time.
The house Bobby helped him get was small, remote enough for them to have some peace and quiet but not entirely out in the wild. There were some neighbours, and a small town nearby, with shops and all facilities they might need. There was room for a garden, and the house was old enough for Dean to dust off his carpenter skills in order to turn it into a home.
He told Sam he had found a place for them to wait out his recovery without getting on Bobby’s nerves all the time. He didn’t tell him they were going there to stay.
Sam would figure it out eventually. He was the smart one, after all.
June 19, 2011
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean, Sam, Bobby
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentions of torture and rather violent murder
Spoilers: Some spoilers for the end of season 6.
Words: 4,710
Summary: Hiding an injury from someone who knows you better than they know themselves isn't an easy thing to do, especially if that someone basically lives in your pocket. Sam still managed to do it - and the reasons for that turn out to be a lot worse than Dean ever imagined.
Note: Late fill for this prompt by foxstarreh at the latest ohsam comment fic meme.
The thing was, Dean had basically raised Sam. So he knew him like he knew no other person on the planet, including himself. He knew how Sam walked when he was in pain, could tell when his colour was anything but healthy. He could tell from the sound of Sam’s breathing in his sleep if he was sick. Since he was four, all his senses and instincts had been tuned in on his brother to notice at once if anything was the slightest bit off. He had learned Sam like a language.
The other thing, though, was that Sam was a grown-up man with a lifetime of experience in hunting, and Dean had naively thought that counted for something. Sam had to know that you didn’t hunt with a broken arm or try to take in vital information on how to take out a Jashi with your mind addled by fever. And therefore Dean ignored all the signs, since simply based on the fact that Sam was still alive he assumed that his brother wasn’t an idiot.
It was actually much worse than that, but until Dean figured that out, he went with the idiot-thesis.
In the beginning, he even went with the thesis that Sam really hadn’t broken anything, and that the way he moved, the bruised look to his eyes, was just as sign of his exhaustion. Sam didn’t sleep well, or much, lately, and it showed. Hell, often Dean didn’t sleep much better, so who was he go and berate the kid?
So what if Sam winched every so often if he moved wrong? He’d been tossed through two wooden walls and down a flight of stairs by a pissed off vampire the other day, so who could blame him for being a little bruised? Dean had asked him if he was okay after the hunt and Sam has said yes, he was. And that was it. Dean and Sam didn’t whine over scratches, but they knew serious injuries got people killed, and not just themselves, so even Dean’s manliness didn’t extend to hiding broken bones or infections. In fact, doing so would never have occurred to either of them.
Therefore, when Sam said he was okay, it never occurred to Dean that he might not be.
And while Sam seemed to hunch over a little more on the way to Sacramento, he never flinched away from touches, not even to the colourfully bruised wrist the vampire had left as a memento. He didn’t show any consciousness of how he moved either, so yeah. Exhaustion it was. Maybe a headache, because Sam didn’t eat or drink enough and Dean knew that was important. And worry might have played a part as well. After all, Becky used to be a friend, and even through they hadn’t spoken to each other in all the years between them saving her from the shape shifter and her call a week ago, it was obvious that Sam still cared.
That, it turned out, was also worse than Dean thought at first.
About a year ago, friends of Becky’s had disappeared. Three young women within two weeks, and neither of them had been seen again. One week ago, finally, the police had found one of them - she had been murdered in the sewers and stripped of her skin, which remained missing to this day. It was gruesome enough to remind Beck of the shifter and call her old monster-hunting friend from Stanford for help.
Sam insisted they went at once, with no day of rest after the vampire incident. Naturally, he was worried. All the victims were connected to Becky somehow, so it wasn’t far-fetched to believe she might be at the centre of it all somehow, or a potential victim at the very least. And naturally, Sam felt guilty, because if whatever had taken those women was after Becky, chances were her connection to Sam was the reason.
Dean got that. Hell, how well he understood! What he didn’t get was that it was more than that - not until they found out what had happened to those women and Sam, for all his disgust and horror, almost collapsed on the spot and nearly cried with relief.
In the years since they last saw her, Becky had married and moved to Sacramento. By the time Dean and Sam found her new address, the police had found the other two victims as well as the killer. As it turned out, it wasn’t a monster - at least not a supernatural one. It was just a sick bastard who liked to kill young women and keep their skins as trophies. One of Becky’s neighbours. She was shocked, to say the least. Thanked Sam and Dean a hundred times for coming when she came, apologized from having them drive all the way for nothing, and was so happy to see Sam again. Worried, too - Dean could see it when she looked at Sam and recognized it for what it was because he looked at his brother like that himself more and more often since the wall had come down and Sam had emerged from the wreckage every so slightly off.
She insisted on the two of them staying at her place instead of looking for a motel, but Sam refused to accept the offer. Dean had the impression that Becky’s husband wasn’t entirely unhappy to see them go again so soon after arriving.
Dean himself wouldn’t have minded a proper bed and a homemade meal or two for free, but he didn’t protest when Sam got back in the car and told him to drive. They needed to talk, and someone else’s house wasn’t the place for that.
Because Dean was… not exactly pissed, but still rather frustrated about the time they wasted on this entirely useless trip. Sam didn’t only seem to not mind the lack of case, he seemed almost happy about it. Dean had seen how all the tension left his brother the moment Becky told them about the police’s discovery, and he wanted to know what was going on in his brother’s freaky brain.
So he asked. Sam didn’t tell him. So he asked again. Sam refused to look at him. So Dean got annoyed and Sam sat beside him, hunched and silent, and dug his nails into the bruised and swollen wrist he held cradled against his chest.
With Sam being useless as a source of information, Dean eventually figured it out for himself. What had Sam so freaked out about something that happened a year ago, when he wasn’t even topside to have anything to do with it?
And that, of course, was the answer.
“Dude,” he said. “You didn’t think Robo-You had gone after those girls, did you?”
Beside him, on the passenger seat, Sam shrugged to signal that it was really not at all important and Dean should just forget about it. “The memories are back now, but I don’t remember everything. I have no idea what I did during that time. It’s possible.”
“What you did during that time? Sam, during that time you were gone.” Burning in hell. Screaming, if he happened to have an intact throat and vocal cords at the moment. “Also, why would he do anything to Becky’s friends? He was ruthless, but he wasn’t that much of a psycho.”
Sam shrugged again, clearly not wanting to talk about it. “You have no idea what I would do at that time. What I have done. This? If I thought it might get me something I wanted, it could have been me.”
“I keep hearing you speak of him in the first person, Sammy,” Dean said, trying to keep down the anger that welled up in him. “That wasn’t you, okay? Even he didn’t think he was you!”
“Kinda hard to believe that when I have his memories in my head, Dean,” Sam said lightly. “I remember what he did, how he thought. I could give you his reasoning for every murder he committed.”
“Right.” Dean squirmed uncomfortably behind the wheel, not wanting to know how that felt. “Still not you. There’s a motel not five miles from here. I’ll get us there.”
“We can keep going. It’s not late yet.”
“Forget it. We drove through two nights to get here because you insisted on dropping our well-earned day off for a case that didn’t even exist. You got your will, now I get mine. In case you didn’t notice, you weren’t the only one Bitey tossed around, and I, for one, need some recovery time.”
Sam didn’t say anything after that, so Dean got them to the motel, checked them in, and dragged their stuff over to the room, while Sam remained sitting in the car, all brooding and moody and never looking up. Dean very nearly had to drag him to the room as well - fortunately for both of them, Sam snapped out of it just in time to avoid that.
His little trip to the present didn’t last long, though. Once in the room, he sat on the edge of his bed and stared at nothing, and when Dean came out of the shower, he still sat there, without having moved, without acknowledging Dean’s presence in any way.
“Dude,” Dean said carefully. “You okay?”
He had to wave his hand in front of Sam’s face a few times before Sam blinked at him and said yeah, of course he was okay. He’d take a shower now. And then he went to the bathroom, and emerged a minute later to get his towel and shampoo from his duffle.
He was moving slower than normal. When he blinked, his eyes stayed closed a millisecond too long. And he had needed a minute to figure out he forgot his stuff outside the bathroom. All that drove Dean to the conclusion that Sam was a lot more exhausted than he should be.
Either that, or he was getting sick.
Once the thought was thought, Dean was on the lookout for signs. And sure enough, Sam’s face, when he finally emerged from the shower, was pale, almost white - and his cheeks were flushed.
“Do you have a fever?” Dean asked him, because the direct approach seemed promising to him.
Sam looked startled. “No. Why do you think so?”
“Your face is flushed.”
“The shower was pretty hot.”
Fair enough. “You feeling alright?”
“Sure.” Sam shrugged. “I’m just a little tired.”
“Then sleep,” Dean ordered. “And don’t forget to brush your teeth, Sammy!”
He got a grimace in reply, which put him at ease. Sam was okay, just tired. If it was something worse, he’d have said so rather than have them drive across the country for fake cases.
“How’s your arm?” Dean asked as Sam slipped under the covers of his bed. It wasn’t even quite dark outside, but if he was tired, he had to sleep. It would be a blessing if he actually could for a change. “Still hurting?”
“No, it’s okay,” Sam assured him. Dean tried to catch a glimpse, but Sam had the limp hidden under his oversized shirt that covered it down to the tips of his fingers. Which was odd, because it was quite warm inside the room, and once again, Dean’s alarms went off.
Sam didn’t try to protect the arm, though, which had to be a sign against broken bones or bad sprains. After all, the last time he’d broken his arm, he’d told Dean and gotten a nice cast for it, all without protest. Okay, so he had told Dean only after Dean had made him shovel a ton of dirt into a hole, but those were details. It was still the same day, so it basically counted as “at once”.
So, since Sam wasn’t an idiot, it had to be exhaustion. As if to confirm it, Sam fell asleep almost immediately, and Dean kept throwing glances in his direction while watching TV on low volume. Eventually he went to sleep himself and woke up in the night to the sound of dry coughs and retching coming from the bathroom.
One minute later, he was leaning against the doorframe, looking down at his brother kneeling in front of the toilet.
“Anything you want to tell me?” Dean didn’t try to keep the anger from his voice. “How long have you been sick? Are you fucking trying to get us both killed?”
Sam flinched at his words. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Just woke up feeling sick. Must’ve eaten something bad.”
He sounded pitiful, like he was five. Dean had a hard time staying mad at him like that, but by God, he could try.
“You didn’t eat anything in days, bitch,” he said roughly. “So how long?”
“Honestly, just now. And I’m already feeling better. I guess I just needed to get it out of my system.” To underline his words, Sam climbed to his feet and flushed the toilet. Dean noticed that he reached for the button somewhat awkwardly with his left hand. After he washed up he went back to bed, and Dean spend the rest of the night lying awake, listening to the occasional coughs his brother couldn’t quite suppress.
-
Dean wanted to stay at the motel another day, because neither of them slept much and Sam looked like hell. Sam insisted on leaving, said this motel was too expensive for their standards, which was kind of true. Eventually Dean let himself be talked into moving a couple of towns over to the kind of shithole they were more used to, but before he packed his stuff, he tossed a clip of ammo over to his brother and Sam caught it with his right hand and immediately let it fall to the floor. He didn’t make a sound, though, which was kind of creepy.
It turned even more creepy when Dean polled up his brother’s shirt to finally get a good look at his arm and saw that not only the wrist was blue and black and swollen, but the hand as well, not even sparing the fingers.
Two hours later, when Dean was sitting in the waiting room of the nearest hospital, he was convinced that his brother was a moron who deserved all the pain he had to have suffered these last few days. Only a moron would fail to mention that a vampire had broken his wrist, his hand and his fingers and instead insist to go on a hunt.
Had there really been a hunt in Sacramento, Sam could have gotten himself killed, and Dean as well. The latter was what really had Dean worried - not because of the risk to himself, but because Sam wasn’t reckless like that, not when someone else was involved. It didn’t make sense. Sam knew better than that.
For the moment, Sam was out, though, and unable to give any explanations. The arm had needed surgery, a couple of Sam’s rips were cracked and the infection a seemingly harmless cut on his shoulder had given him when it was left untreated had progressed beyond what the doctors were comfortable with. The real problem, however, was in Sam’s mind, and Dean needed another week to finally figure that out.
Sam’s arm and hand had been broken in seven places and the fever had been burning him up for days. And yet there had been no sound, no sign of discomfort except a slight favouring of his good hand. So, okay, some of the breaks hadn’t been as bad in the beginning, but days of ignoring them made everything a lot worse. Which meant Sam had been in horrible pain for a long time, and he’d barely as much as grimaced.
That got Dean thinking. He thought a lot, and he did it quietly. Sam, when he woke up all doped up on painkillers, obviously expected a lecture and interpreted Dean’s silence as steaming anger. It wasn’t entirely wrong - Dean was angry, but at himself as much as at Sam, because if Sam was in excruciating pain, he should have noticed that a lot sooner. And, yeah, he’d noticed something was wrong and blamed it on exhaustion for far too long, but that still didn’t explain how this could have gone so far.
The only explanation he came up with for Sam’s ability not to show his pain was that Sam didn’t feel the pain in the first place. Dean was no medic, but he had heard once of some sort of disability that left people incapable of registering pain. So maybe, he thought, something had disconnected in Sam’s mind when the wall came down, leaving him ignorant of his own suffering. If that was the case, it would be damn inconvenient. As this incident showed, that was a pretty dangerous condition for a hunter to have. But at the same time, being unable to feel pain certainly wouldn’t have been the worst that ever happened to Sam.
Too bad that the theory didn’t withstand closer inspection. Because if he thought about it, Sam had been damn pale for days. His hands had been shaking, and Dean remembered the fine layer of sweat he’d seen on his brother’s forehead every now and then, usually attributing it to lack of sleep or simply the temperature. Looking back, though, those were all signs of pretty awful pain.
So much for that.
They left the hospital on Sam’s insistence and to the disapproval of the doctors a week after Sam’s surgery and started their journey to Bobby’s. Sam was quiet all the time, only speaking when spoken to. At least Dean got out of him why he had kept his state secret for so long:
“If I’d said anything, you would have dragged me to a hospital. Imagine something had really been after Becky. We would have lost too much time.”
“Okay,” Dean said, even though it was absolutely not okay. “But that was before we found out it was a bust. Why didn’t you tell me once we knew Becky was safe?”
Sam shrugged uncomfortably. “I didn’t… Well.” He seemed to have trouble finding the right words. “If you’d known I kept it from you, you would have stopped trusting me if I said I was okay.”
“And that’s exactly what happened,” Dean told him harshly. “Seriously, Sam. Did you think you could just keep it secret until it healed on its own? I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”
“I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“Bullshit,” Dean spat, but that was the only explanation he got. Whenever he brought it up, Sam would insist on it not actually being an injury worth mentioning. And even though he was still very much hurt, he never paid any attention to his illness or gave his broken arm a rest as they made their way to Sioux Falls. Which didn’t make any goddamn sense because there was no point in hiding it anymore. Yet Sam never asked for a break, ignored his medication, and Dean had to yell at him more than once because he tried to wrap his fingers around a door handle despite the cast, as if he’d forgotten the injury was there.
The problem wasn’t, Dean eventually figured out, that Sam didn’t register the pain, or wilfully tried to hide his injuries. The problem was that he simply didn’t realise that pain that strong, injuries that bad were actually a problem. He didn’t hide them because of misguided pride or to keep Dean in the dark, but because he literally didn’t think they were worth mentioning. Or even something that needed to be acknowledged through expressions of pain.
Dean had a hard time wrapping his mind around that idea, but as soon as the idea formed in his head, it all seemed to make so much sense, in a tragic, sad, and entirely heartbreaking way. Sam had been in hell for… a very long time. He’d experienced agony even Dean with his decades on the rack knew he couldn’t imagine. A broken arm was nothing compared to torn-off skin, ripped-out entails and white-hot metal pored down his throat, all at the same time. A broken arm and an infected wound were a starting point, if that. They weren’t worth paying attention to.
A hundred miles from their destination, Dean realised that this was a big problem for a hunter, hell, for anyone. But especially for a hunter. Even worse than not feeling pain at all. And they still hadn’t made it to Bobby’s doorstep when he realised that it might not be a problem he would be able to solve.
Not that he didn’t try in the days that followed. But discussing the issue with Sam went nowhere. Sam didn’t even realise the issue existed, and trying to get him to see it only led to Sam getting angry and a lot of yelling on both sides.
Logic didn’t help either. The argument “If I broke my arm in seven places, would you tell me to just keep using it?” only resulted in a blank stare followed by a slammed door and Sam storming off. Followed by Bobby dragging Sam back in an hour later, soaked with rain and down with another fever. Tension ran high those first few days at Bobby’s, with Sam being ill and hurt and not even getting it, and Dean being helpless and frustrated, thinking his brother was being deliberately stubborn.
He realised he was mistaken about that the day Bobby hurt his hand. He’d been working on a car in the yard, and managed to squeeze his hand between something hard and something hard and sharp. He came in cursing and bleeding badly, his hand discoloured where it wasn’t turning black, and Sam just watched as Dean did what he could to help him. There was no sign of concern or sympathy on his face, just that vaguely frustrated frown that meant he was trying to figure something out.
He didn’t get it.
And Dean had no time to analyse this new revelation. He had to drive Bobby to the hospital, and when they came home five hours later with stitches in Bobby’s hand and a his arm in a sling, Sam had passed out on the floor of their room, surrounded by empty bottles, and the narrow, private little corner beside his bed had been completely trashed.
-
Bobby never quite understood it, though Dean could tell he tried. And he appreciated the effort, he did, but fact was that Bobby couldn’t understand. It was impossible, because Bobby had never been to hell. Dean had. And while he didn’t entirely understand himself, not really, he at least had a point of reference. He knew that four decades were four decades, and a century was a century - and however long Sam had been in the cage had been a very, very long time.
The things that happened to them in hell had happened. They were weren’t any less real just because they didn’t have any scars to show for them. That was what no one understood who hadn’t experienced it. Those experiences were real, and they had shaped Dean and Sam as much as any experience they had while they were alive.
What Sam had learned - what had been soaked into the marrow of his bones, into the deepest layers of his mind - was that there was no limit to the pain, terror and humiliation a person could endure without the relief of unconsciousness, death, or insanity. He’d learned that every injury lesser than what would horribly kill a living person was a blessing - a rare break between tortures beyond even Dean’s imagination. It was a truth he had learned in centuries worth of hard lessons, and a lifetime in the real world would not be enough to unlearn it.
Who could tell what was real, anyway?
When it finally sank in just how serious this was, Bobby suggested help. Like, professional help. “He ain’t able to care for himself, Dean,” he said one day, when Sam was outside on the porch, reading a book on something or other. “A damn cold could kill him. And you can’t take him on a hunt, because he can’t look out for you.”
“He looked out for me well enough last time,” Dean protested. “Without him having my back, the vampire would have smashed me through a wall. And a window.”
“And if he had? Sam might have let you die without even realising he was doing it.”
Dean didn’t say anything in reply, because there was nothing he could say. Bobby was right. Bobby had his hand messed up and the old Sam would have been fussing over him to no end. This Sam didn’t even seem to register it.
Sometimes Dean just wanted to wrap his arms around his brother and weep for all the things Sam had lost when hell tore him apart.
Bobby’s voice was quieter, gentler when he continued. “Face it, Dean, this is too big for you. For us. I’m not saying you should give him up - on the contrary. Give him a chance. We can’t be there for him twenty-four seven, and like this it’s only a matter of time before he gets himself killed. Or someone else - and you said yourself that his guilt works as well as ever. Don’t do that to him. Have someone look after him, just until he’s better.”
“He’s never going to get better,” Dean said what he had been unwilling to even think for days, and it hardly hurt at all. “It’s too much. You could just as well try to unlearn how to walk.”
“Sam’s smart…”
“’s got nothing to do with that. He can intellectually understand it all he wants, there’s no point if all his instincts are gone. I’m not going to leave him to some strangers for something that can’t be changed.” Least of all against Sam’s will. Sam didn’t even understand there was something wrong with him, and Dean didn’t want to as much as imagine the betrayed look on his face if he dragged him to some mental institution to be locked away for his own safety.
“Then what are you going to do?” Bobby asked, challenge in his voice, and Dean let out a long breath he’d been holding far too long.
“What I have to.”
-
The decision to give up hunting wasn’t, in the end, that hard to make. Dean had done it before, and it hadn’t been all bad. In fact, it could have been amazing. What had spoiled his life with Lisa and Ben had been the constant worry for their safety, and the fact that it was damn hard to enjoy life knowing his little brother was burning in hell.
Now Sam was with him, and Sam was well aware of what was out there and how to kill it. Giving up hunting for Sam was easy. Making Sam understand that it wasn’t a selfless sacrifice with which Dean ruined his own happiness for Sam’s sake would be a harder battle to fight. Making Sam understand that this could be a good thing for both of them… well. It would take time.
But Sam was still Sam, and Dean remembered the little boy who’d always wanted to stay at one place long enough to grow a garden, of all things. Their dad had never been able to fulfil that wish. Dean thought it was time.
The house Bobby helped him get was small, remote enough for them to have some peace and quiet but not entirely out in the wild. There were some neighbours, and a small town nearby, with shops and all facilities they might need. There was room for a garden, and the house was old enough for Dean to dust off his carpenter skills in order to turn it into a home.
He told Sam he had found a place for them to wait out his recovery without getting on Bobby’s nerves all the time. He didn’t tell him they were going there to stay.
Sam would figure it out eventually. He was the smart one, after all.
June 19, 2011