if love sits on your heart like stone (2/5)
two;; then I am insatiable
eight hours prior
The sight that greets him when he walks into the room, fettered by chains around his ankles, his wrists, is - to say the least - unexpected. It almost shocks him into speech, but nothing gets past his throat, not even a croak.
“Sit,” is what she says, and he does, sinking onto the chair, confusion and hope fluttering in his chest, making his hands shake.
“I could hear you from the very moment you lost him,” she says, sorrowful, gentle undertones that she has never taken to with him. “It hasn’t stopped since - I hear the grief of people, even across cities, sometimes, when it’s strong, but it always fades.” She looks at him. “Yours hasn’t - it was less loud at times, across states - but it doesn’t stop.”
If that is all Missouri has to say, he can do one better - it won’t. He knows it now, knows it as sure as he knows that the waves will continually crash upon the shores, that the sun will rise and set day after day after day, that his world revolves around nothing else but Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.
“You did something in Dayton,” she says next, and this time his eyes startle up to hers. “I can hear him now, Dean, and the things... the things they’re doing to him...”
He does make a noise then, a choked whimper -
“He’s still in there, Dean, but I can hear him - something’s changed with what you did in Dayton. I need to know what it is.”
He tries - he really does, opens his mouth, forms the words between his lips, between his teeth, and - nothing comes out. He’s just about to panic, mind still slow and sluggish from drugs, lagging behind his racing heart, when a hand gently pulls his fingers away from shredding the bedsheets.
She winks at him when he looks up. “Psychic, remember?” The tiniest hint of a smile quirks his lips up, strengthened by hope, and the next moment Missouri is shaking her head at him. “You shouldn’t be messing with blood magic, boy - anything could have happened.” Then - “If the Cage is anything like Hell or Heaven, it doesn’t house physical bodies - it isn’t made to keep them in. Whatever you did must have changed something in the Cage - I think... I think Sam is free to leave, but he wouldn’t know his way back. Where is the amulet?”
And the world goes blank.
---
In the end, it’s the same thing that breaks them both.
“No. No. Not him - no, you can’t...”
The thing wearing Dean’s body grins and stretches. “Might need a little practice to wear this quite right, Sam,” he says, “But I’ve finally gotten it, haven’t I? I’ve tried flaying you, pulling you apart, burning you up... I’ve tried Jess, Daddy, Madison... even Mommy - but none of them, none of them are quite your precious Dean, are they?” He pulls a sneer, grotesque on Dean’s lips. “Jack. Pot.”
Sam shudders and looks anywhere but at him.
“He tried to take you from me,” Dean’s voice, perfectly resurrected from Sam’s memory, right beside him. He flinches. “Marked your pretty little soul for himself, tried to pull it away. And look what he’s done - I had to lock you in there, in that shell - so breakable - and I can’t play with you anymore, Sam.
“Well, guess what? Neither can he. When I’m through with you, Sam, big brother’ll be the last person you want touching you.”
“No - no, you can’t do this - anything, anything but this, please.”
A dark chuckle, Dean’s hand in his hair, breath against his ear. “Anything, hmm? I don’t know, Sammy, do you really want this?”
Sam swallows. “Anything - anything you want, just not this. Don’t - just don’t pretend to be Dean. P-please. I’ll do anything else, anything else you want, I swear. Please. Please -”
The grip releases. “Shh. Begging so good, Sam,” a mocking facsimile of big brother pride. “You get your way - no big brother for you.” A brand appears in his hand, out of nowhere. “I can make sure of that.”
---
“It’s not lost,” Missouri says, when the buzzing in his ears finally stops and fades into a dull hum at the back of head.
He stares.
“You know your brother,” she says. “Better than anyone - now tell me, has Sam ever given up on you?”
It was just a piece of metal on a leather cord, he wants to say. It was always meant for Dad; he gave it to me as a second-hand gift. But air-fresheners on a dingy Christmas tree had said different. Light-hearted banter and dimpled smiles painted over a bleeding heart had said different. Disappointed eyes, yet still filled with so much hope, so much love, so much trust - had said different. It’s okay, Dean - had said different.
“He didn’t leave the amulet in the trash can.”
Hope rises like a tidal wave, lodges in his throat, too wild, too desperate to be helpful, but he pushes it down, forces his mind to work.
---
“Hey, Dean - ”
“Yeah?” It comes out gruff, but Sam isn’t even looking at him anymore, staring at the ground where his scuffling foot has cleared out a little patch of smoother, finer dust.
“Um - my duffel. You can - you can look through it - after, y’know,” and Dean wants to strangle him - for demolishing the wall he’s constructed around Cage and Hell and Sam and gone, but Sam’s sounding like Dean hadn’t fed and clothed and bathed him, like he can’t ask for anything and Dean will move Heaven and Earth to get it for him - “If you want, I mean. Just. Only if you want.”
---
Sam’s duffel, he thinks, raises his eyes to Missouri.
The next time she sees him, two days later - because apparently Missouri has resources - she reaches out to touch his hand, and he closes his fist around blessed metal.
The ritual is nothing overly complicated, for being the last step to getting Sam out of the Cage. Neither is leaving an opening when the guards aren’t paying attention, enticing enough that the group that’s been eyeing him like a hungry pack decides to jump him. His fists need no encouragement to meet flesh, crack bone.
The jagged cut on his cheek burns like fire, feels like hope.
The rusty nail protruding from his side the night after is a pathetic imitation of Hell at best, but it feels like victory. He grins, turns, faces the serial murderer whose hand is still on the nail, and almost laughs at the look of terrified horror on the man’s face.
And then he passes out.
Or, at least, does a passable imitation of it that the guards are fooled and rush him off on a poorly policed ambulance to the hospital. On one hand - in their defense, it would be absurd to expect a man impaled on an inch-thick nail gushing blood from the hole in his side to knock out three guards, jump off the moving ambulance and hike to the nearest abandoned farmhouse. On the other hand, they have never met a man who’s experienced Hell.
---
Sam wakes up in a field. To be exact, he wakes up in a cemetery in Kansas, and the first thing he realises is that he’s thirsty. The next thing he realises is that worse (and a thousand times better) than the lashes and burns and cuts on his body, his heart is trying to scorch its way out of his ribcage, and more bizarrely than that, towards a specific direction. Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s stumbling away, clawing and crawling his way across the cemetery, and it’s the only thing that eases the burning in his chest.
It isn’t long until it occurs to him that there is method to his madness.
It’s the strangest feeling, floating away while Lucifer and Michael are watching, hands on his body, eyes on his soul. It feels like warmth and hope and brother, all things that have been stripped away in the Cage - it feels like Dean. It’s probably nothing short of opening up the Cage and letting the Apocalypse happen, and Sam should be angry, should be outraged that Dean is undoing the one good thing he’s ever done, should want Dean to stop - but he can’t not be selfish, and God help him, he had never been able to not want Dean, not need Dean, even when he wanted to, even when he should have let Dean go. And Dean is here, where Sam can feel him like water on a parched soul, and nothing has ever felt more blessed than that.
It doesn’t last.
Being yanked back into his own body feels like he’s being uprooted, abandoned, forgotten. And then Lucifer’s hand is on his chest, on his heart, where he has always been Dean’s -
- he screams.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” Lucifer had said. “Dean isn’t getting you.”
It’s a promise, not a threat - and Lucifer has never lied to Sam. Less because he isn’t the Father of Lies, more because he makes every precaution possible that a promise becomes reality, and stays it.
Stopping is worse than the wounds on his body scraping across dried grass and stinging with sweat combined. Sam staggers to his feet and starts trudging (crawling) towards the most painful direction he can find.
---
Sammy, he thinks, and watches his baby brother drop the blocks in his hand and turn to look at him, dimples flashing. At nearly two, Sammy still barely talks, and Dean has only just started again a couple weeks back on Dad’s insistence, words coming slowly, unnaturally, like he’s maybe losing something with every syllable that comes out of his mouth. Thoughts, on the other hand - thoughts are easy, and even though Dad doesn’t seem to hear him, Sammy does. Hey, c’mere Sammy.
Sammy’s dimples deepen, and he pushes himself up onto stubby toddler legs, tottering towards Dean.
Dean’s own smile widens, and when Sam gets close enough, he pulls him onto his lap, holding him safe as he wriggles into a comfortable position. Hungry?
Sam doesn’t nod or shake his head, but Dean feels the faint rumbling in his stomach, and reaches over to the grocery bag sitting on the floor beside him.
Sammy, he thinks, three months later, when Sammy has started forming full sentences, and watches his baby brother flip through a book, enraptured.
---
Unfortunately, Hell or not, infection is a bitch, and bacteria-infested farmhouses aren’t kind to open wounds, less so to open wounds made by rusty nails. Shock-tremored fingers open up the emergency medical kit swiped from the ambulance, splashing disinfectant liberally over the hole in his side. The next thing he registers is the Impala’s metal beneath his palm, cool from the night air - and she’s lurching down the highway, and Dean has never been more thankful for his Baby, for all that he could barely stand being in the car... after.
It feels like his entire life - or non-life, even, because some of the ‘skills’ he’s been using can’t be credited back to John - was only training for this, culminating in the core of his entire being - save Sammy, protect Sammy, find Sammy, be with Sammy.
---
The wind bites into his bones, seeping through the three layers he has on like they’re not even there. He stumbles onwards blindly, letting his heart tug painfully against his gait, clumsy and uneven. Screw Dean’s rubbish timing, he thinks, because of fucking course his brother just had to raise him from Hell right when it turns really fucking cold. Three layers may be all good in May, but in fucking whatever-month-it-is, he may as well be buck naked. A particularly strong gust rocks him back on the balls of his feet, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t just keel over backwards from the force.
He simply stands there for a moment, wanting nothing more than to curl up and wait for his big brother to come get him - which, thinking of, why shouldn’t he? His knees are already starting to buckle when he remembers.
---
Dean’s stumbling out of the Impala before the engine even has time to cut off entirely, breath coming in pathetic gasps. His heart is climbing out through his throat, threatening to choke his windpipe. Sammy, he thinks, and in his mind’s eye, he can see the familiar floppy-haired kid, his kid, rounding a gravestone, appearing, right there, close enough to touch - any moment now, any moment and this nightmare will be over, and Sam will be back here, right where he belongs - any moment now. Sammy, is his second thought, closer to a plea now, because he knows Sam, and he knows Sam would know that Dean was coming for him - any second and he’ll feel that hand, once so tiny, closing over his shoulder, behind him, beside him, somewhere, somehow -
Maybe he wasn’t raised here, is his third - because there are only so few hiding spots in a cemetery that’s nothing more than a field, and Sammy isn’t going to appear randomly from the ground like one of those funny-looking creatures in the desert or whatever, never mind that for five fucking years, those were his favourite animals. The thought forces a laugh out of his throat - a breath punched out, more desperate than amused - and then he sees it.
He shouldn’t be able to recognise Sam’s blood from anyone else’s - but there’s a patch of rusty brown on the gravestone a few feet away, and he knows it as sure as that his heart has reason to beat for no one but his brother - that it’s Sam’s. It’s a bloody, painful trail from the spot that swallowed up his raison d’etre - staining the grass in a way that would never have happened if Sam was doing anything but crawling, dragging himself across the ground. It’s not difficult to follow, not even for an amateur and certainly not for Dean - at least until it leaves one bloody handprint on the flaking white paint of the fence - and disappears.
He’s on the ground before he knows what’s happening, knees buckling and legs giving out like his life has just been ripped out of him. “Sammy,” he mouths more than says, breath sucking in quick and hard, and if he thought that insistent swelling and clawing in his heart was bad, it has nothing on the way it feels now, like laceration, like knives, like fire - like his own personal hell.
It’s irrational, is what, because if he had any doubt that Sam wasn’t truly raised from the Cage, it would have been settled by the blood trail Sam’s left behind. The brown under his palm where his hand has found its way to the fence, like it brings him any closer to Sam is plain, hard evidence that he’s done his job, fulfilled his purpose, brought little brother back to life, but it only feels like confusion and hurt and Stanford - it feels like abandonment.
He huffs out a laugh, silent save for the air that whooshes out of his lungs. The sob that comes then is dry, humiliating. He was willing to house Sam’s soul in his own body, put him up in the one place Dean had never shared with anyone, and here Sam was - his first reaction upon getting out of Hell, to run away from Dean, unwilling to leave even a note except in his blood, standing starkly out like accusation, like you let me die, like you did nothing but hurt me and let me get hurt, like go away and don’t try to find me.
And now they’re stuck with some sort of complicated, unwanted soul bond, an accident, a burden Sam has to live with.
He laughs again, chest no longer hitching with useless, tearless sobs, and lets his eyes drift listlessly across the field.
The blood trail stands out glaringly under the waning sun, and suddenly, like something’s shifted across his eyes, it’s not screaming abandonment and unwanted anymore, but hurt and baby brother.
Dean pushes up, staggering on legs shaky from exhaustion, and doggedly burns his own trail back to the Impala. Sam needs - maybe not the way Dean does, maybe not ever half as much - but he needs, and Dean has never been able to say no to that.
The Impala tearing down the highway is less driven by desperation this time, determination more than need fuelling her.
---
There is nothing for it - Sam is, in one word, miserable. The rain started God knows how many hours ago. Somehow it’s like the entire water mass in the world has decided to empty itself on fucking godforsaken Montana, and of course it would, because it’s not like whoever the Upstairs Guy is right now doesn’t have a beef with Sam. He should be expecting it by now.
He also really should have hotwired that car instead of deciding to hike this last leg. He doesn’t really know where Dean is - except somewhere to his... southeast, he decides, swiveling on one foot briefly - but even he isn’t that good. He’s known not to underestimate his big brother, but there is still no way Dean can now warp time and catch up with him under the twenty-four hours he’s been hiking, hotwiring cars - even hitching rides. The trucker had pulled his semi up beside Sam, and Sam had barely noticed.
Goodness knows what he’d been thinking, inviting a bloody, limping man into his vehicle, but Dean had always said he looked like a lost puppy, and apparently that worked, because bleeding onto his upholstery, the man still looked more sympathetic than wary. Because Sam looked really unthreatening, the man had all but said, and it was all Sam could do to hold back a snort. Not that he was so inclined, because he really wasn’t a raging psychopath, but half-beaten to Hell or not, he could still kill him easily if he needed to.
A chuckle under his breath, mangled with phlegm and a burning throat. Dean would slap him on the head and dose him with fluids, but Dean isn’t here, is he?
---
He knows exactly where Sam stopped running on sheer stubbornness, and started covering up the trail he was leaving behind him - more a straight line north than anything else. Tracking through cities is a hassle for a mute, which is currently what he is, because for whatever stupid-ass reason, he still can’t force a single word - a single syllable - past his lips. But he gets by - by thirteen, he had already mastered that it was less about talking, and more about looking - and looking he does just fine without saying a word. He charms the ones that need to be charmed, garners sympathy from those who have sympathy to offer, and even - on a few occasions - scares the hell out of the ones that need to be scared.
Himself a little too, if he’s being honest - because with his bare hand on the douchebag’s throat, pressing in enough to feel the pulse jackrabbiting under his fingers, there is not a doubt in his mind that he would stop that heart between this very heartbeat and the next if it came down to it. Evidently, the man realises that too and he gets the information he needs, but he leaves with a strange taste in his mouth - knowing that remorse would be the last thing he would feel for ending the life of a man who stood in between him and Sam.
He meets up with Bobby too, if only because Missouri can’t keep her mouth shut, and Bobby’s a hard son of a bitch to refuse to meet up with, voice or no voice.
“You remind me of Sam,” Bobby says, after promising to help keep a lookout for Sam, and his tone is cautious, almost wary. “The way he was after you... after you made your trip downstairs.” He huffs a laugh, and the sound is tired, mirthless. “Remind me of your dad too - just closed up real good, wouldn’t let anyone in,” and Dean looks up at that.
He tries then, tries as hard for Bobby as he would have for John, opens his mouth, forms his lips around a word, any word, pushes in his throat, tries to say something - anything - until he snaps his jaw shut over silence.
He pretends not to see the disappointment on Bobby’s face. Pretends it doesn’t cut quick, deep, just tugs at the corner of his lips until a facsimile of his shit-eating grin appears on his face. It fails, just like the rest of what he does, if Bobby’s expression is anything to go on.
Bobby doesn’t offer to help, and Dean doesn’t ask.
---
Sammy just turned two a week ago. He’s finally started babbling - and Dean’s started to talk again too, more than just the monosyllabic words I got when I tried to make him talk a few months back - actual sentences. They seem to understand each other perfectly, with or without words. I don’t have the same gift, which is why Dean talking is a relief. He acts as translator for Sammy’s wants and needs, sometimes not even needing to decipher Sammy’s babbles. Dean knows Sam intuitively, instinctively, and perhaps someday that will be what saves Sammy.
---
It isn’t long before Sam realises someone is tailing him. Even nursing infected injuries and half-dizzy from the burning in his chest on his best days, he is still his father’s son, and Dean’s brother. He gives them the slip twice, but they’re dogged in their tracking, and his body is a traitor. He’s shivering in the basement of an abandoned building, sweat dripping from his hair into his eyes, and for a moment he wishes Dean were there, before he remembers that it was the point of the entire road trip he’s been taking. And then he hears them.
They’re not being subtle, which is their first mistake. An underestimated Winchester is - well, an underestimated Winchester. It is no small effort to force the rattling in his body to still, but whatever it is these men - hunters, he realises, and would have days ago if his mind was actually functioning - have in store, he is certain it’s nothing pleasant. The only other thing he is certain of, is that if he’s going down, he’s going down swinging.
He catches the first by surprise, deadly and silent - a quick, slick in-out between the ribcage, and then he’s down. He dispatches the next two as well, elbow sinking into gut, heel into shin, knee in the balls, and every dirty trick his big brother has ever taught him. He’s sixty-percent sure that one of them is no longer in the gene pool - or going to get laid, unless chicks dig scars that slash across the face over eyes and lips and nose. The other has a shattered knee, but then there are three more, and it’s only adrenaline that’s holding him up.
On the bright side, he supposes, the way he goes completely limp just when they’re getting ready for a fight is probably some form of revenge, as he smirks at the last glimpse of dumbfounded faces before everything goes black.
---
“Sam Winchester.” He blinks owlishly against harsh fluorescent light, and doesn’t place the voice for a moment. “Guess they were right after all - there’s the Devil in you alright.”
A face floats into his line of vision, and if unimpressed incredulity shows on his face, he’s too tired to be polite. “Roy?” Or his voice, actually.
His vision clears just in time to catch the brief flash of outrage on Roy’s face. “Huh - got it in one. Guess we didn’t do the job thoroughly enough the last time, Sammy boy. This time’s gonna be different, I promise.”
“Um.” He blinks again, squinting up at the manacles around his wrists and feet, tugging experimentally. “Yeah, okay.” Something should clue him into the reason for the expression of outraged incredulity that he keeps glimpsing on Roy’s face - or the other two hunters’, for that matter, but his brain feels like cotton wool, except saturated with liquid, so heavy he can’t seem to think straight.
“Where’s big brother, anyway? He coming to the rescue like the last time he did? Oh, wait - ” He seems to take Sam’s snort as a challenge for more. “Or has he finally seen the light and abandoned you?”
“I think he’s tracking us down, actually,” Sam replies absently, and starts examining the cuffs on his ankles. They’re heavy, lined with what seems to be similar sigils as the ones on his wrists. Demon, is what they think he is then, and apparently his soaked-cotton-wool brain seems to think it hilarious, because he starts laughing, unsettling enough to warrant a splash of what appears to be holy water on his face. He sputters a bit, realises. Demon is what they think he is, and they’re so behind on the Hunters’ Quarterly that he snorts again, because all the work on his body right now, cuts and burns and brands - they’re the work of an angel. Two angels, really - two archangels, because once Michael figured out his destiny had all but been blown to shit, he’d become incapable of resisting his little brother, and if said little brother just wanted him to join in on the fun of torturing Sam, no complaints were going to come forth from him.
Pain bursts on the side of his face, familiar and annoying. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, bitch.”
It’s such a cliche line, Sam can’t help the huff that escapes his lips - and barely winces when a slap greets him again, this time stinging harder.
The next two hours, because Sam has been trained to count seconds even half-asleep, or in this case - half-dead, is a blur of abuse, verbal and physical, but if these second-rate hunters think they have anything over two angry, bored archangels, they’ve got another thing coming.
---
At some point, Sam starts losing time. Part of it is out of pure boredom - if they call this torture, they really need to take a few lessons from Lucifer. Another part because much as he would like to be otherwise, he’s just downright fucking sick. The insistent throb in his chest doesn’t let up, burning and clawing and gouging - with that, he really doesn’t think it’s fair that his torturers are offended by his occasional inattention.
That all ends when he jerks awake with a thirst he hasn’t had for a while, and opens his eyes to a flask thrust under his nose. He raises his eyes to the man in front of him, and feels a jolt of satisfaction when the man flinches, liquid sloshing in the flask. A second later, the trepidation on his face turns into crowing triumph, and everything clicks into place.
“Go to Hell,” he spits, and the man before him laughs.
It’s another voice that speaks up, to his right - and it’s so much like a reunion of all the people he’s ever pissed off in his entire life that if not for the circumstances, he would have laughed. “What’s the matter, Sammy? Don’t like the breakfast we prepared for you?”
The thirst, the hunger - burns in his throat, through his veins, the only thing that has managed to rival that hand in his chest trying to claw itself out, propel itself forward. He wants. God help him, he wants. Every breath he takes, he wants, damning him to something worse than Hell. “Fuck you.”
Tim steps into his line of vision, grinning. “No,” he says, slow and cruel, “This is so much better.”
And it all goes to Hell.
---
He feels it, coursing through his veins, like power, like ecstasy, like ash like failure like worse than death. And worse than anything else, he feels it, owning him, filling him, snaking into every tiny crack and pushing out any leftover good he’s ever had - pushing out that Dean-shaped ache in his chest, numbing it, making it insignificant. Dean, he thinks, because his mouth might sully that name, Dean, I’m sorry.
---
For a moment, he thinks he might have imagined it, finally actually going batshit insane. And then it’s Sam’s voice again - Dean, I’m sorry.
He’s pulling up to the side of the road before he’s even aware of what’s happening, and then because he hasn’t done it since he’d turned seven, cautiously - Sammy?
There’s no reply.
Sammy!
The name echoes back, reverberating in an empty room.
---
It’s at his eighth feeding of the day, bottle held to his lips, hand over his nose, choking him into swallowing, submitting, when he feels it. The cuffs have been burning him since the second gallon, a nuisance that barely registers, but when he pulls at them, twisting away from the blood, he feels it. The brittleness, the sheer weakness of the cuffs holding him in place, barely enough to hold him in place. And the coolness - because sometime between three and five gallons of demon blood, it’s stopped burning.
It’s probably credit to their lack of intelligence, or their basic inability to do any kind of decent research, that they don’t realise that demon blood isn’t weed, doesn’t make him susceptible, doesn’t make him weak. Drunk on power, yes, but Sam hadn’t turned to demon blood so he could feel weak or manipulated - it was the only thing that had cleared his mind, let him think.
“Just imagine,” it’s Walt this time, shaking the empty bottle between his fingers, voice soft and slimy and almost enough to make Sam crack the pipe he’s chained to and swing it at his head. “Just imagine, Sam, how good a show the withdrawal will be.”
Sam grins, loopily, gestures awkwardly with his cuffed hand, and Walt drops the bottle, moves closer, until his ear is almost at Sam’s lips. Rookie. “Just - watch,” Sam murmurs, crystal-clear and steel-cold - and then he’s breaking the cuffs like clay, and then breaking Walt’s face like it’s the best feeling on earth.
It would barely take any effort to stop the hunters - all eight of them on duty - from reaching him, just a brief second of concentration to break a spinal cord, far too easy - but he takes his time, lets Tim rush at him, lifts a hand, and twists. “No,” he quips. “This - is so much better.”
And stands back and watches as the rest of the men flee.
Walt is still on the ground, clutching at his pelvis, leg severed thigh down, half hanging off, and it is pure horror in his broken face. Sam cocks his head, lifts a finger to his lips.
“Just - watch,” he says, and walks out the door.
There’s nobody to stop him.
---
Dean catches onto Sam’s trail two days later. Walks more than breaks into the warehouse - and it’s there that he knows something’s wrong. The basement is his first stop, because he knows Sam, and some habits Sam has just never been able to break. The blood takes no trained eye to notice. Some enough to be a fatal injury, some just hints, dragged along rusty steel or dusty concrete. Hunters, he realises, remembering the break-in, rage rising like tide.
Whoever it was who had been going after Sam hadn’t cared about anyone going after them, and the thought sends Dean’s blood boiling, because they know, they know that Sam has a brother, has a Dean, and the thought of them thinking Dean doesn’t care - thinking that they could get away scot-free after touching his baby brother -
If nothing else in the world is certain, this is - they have a second thought coming.
---
The warehouse - always the warehouses - he bursts into is empty. Well, not empty, because there’s a dead man on the floor, and one barely alive, glaring at him. It takes a moment for him to recognise the face - Sammy must have done one hell of a job on his face. Attaboy. When it hits him, who he’s looking at, he just rolls his eyes and walks away to the - miracle of miracles, given the two exhibits he’s passed by - central attraction. The cuffs are broken, but the chains are still attached - to the pipes just above, and along the wall. And then - off to the side, two gallon bottles of dark red liquid. His hands are shaking when he walks over to Walt.
How long? Mouthed, because like a useless mute, he still can’t speak. A beat of silence, and then, miraculously steady, a hand on half-off stump that used to be Walt’s leg, something almost like pleasure blossoming at the unholy scream that tears out of Walt’s lips. How long?
There’s a moment more of gritted teeth and hatred, and then - “Five days.”
He nods once, satisfied. How much?
The answer is more forthcoming this time, spit out between bloody teeth. “Almost got all the sixth gallon in him.” A chuckle, almost deranged. “Didn’t get all of it in - but that’s still going to be one hell of a withdrawal, Winchester. Imagine what we could’ve accomplished, having a demon-killer at our beck and call - like a pet.”
Six gallons - the hunter in him, the torturer - wants to stay and make the last few hours of Walt’s life the most memorable few hours, but there’s something else in him that’s chanting Sammy Sammy Sammy Sammy Sammy, and he can’t ignore that, can’t ignore the aching burn in his own chest. He stands to leave.
“You should’ve seen him,” Walt yells after him, too obviously vying for a quick death. “He was like the Devil - if there ever was your brother in Sam Winchester, he’s gone. You should’ve been there.”
Yes, he thinks. I should have.
---
He doesn’t seem to be able to keep the sounds in - grunts and whimpers and sobs, embarrassing sounds - sounds Dad would almost certainly tell him to stop. Suck it up. Be a man.
He doesn’t want to be a man. He was never born to be a man - just a stupid, pathetic demon-human hybrid, who doesn’t even have the strength to let his brother go. Of course, once Dean finds him like this, once Dean figures out what’s going on, the choice won’t even be in his hands anymore. For the better, he supposes, because then he’ll be back where he really belongs.
He’s shaking so hard, breath rattling and teeth chattering, that he doesn’t even hear the door open, metal grating harshly across the abused floor. And then, like damnation, like salvation, like everything good that has ever been in his life -
“Sammy.”
part 3;; and if you are a ghost
eight hours prior
The sight that greets him when he walks into the room, fettered by chains around his ankles, his wrists, is - to say the least - unexpected. It almost shocks him into speech, but nothing gets past his throat, not even a croak.
“Sit,” is what she says, and he does, sinking onto the chair, confusion and hope fluttering in his chest, making his hands shake.
“I could hear you from the very moment you lost him,” she says, sorrowful, gentle undertones that she has never taken to with him. “It hasn’t stopped since - I hear the grief of people, even across cities, sometimes, when it’s strong, but it always fades.” She looks at him. “Yours hasn’t - it was less loud at times, across states - but it doesn’t stop.”
If that is all Missouri has to say, he can do one better - it won’t. He knows it now, knows it as sure as he knows that the waves will continually crash upon the shores, that the sun will rise and set day after day after day, that his world revolves around nothing else but Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.
“You did something in Dayton,” she says next, and this time his eyes startle up to hers. “I can hear him now, Dean, and the things... the things they’re doing to him...”
He does make a noise then, a choked whimper -
“He’s still in there, Dean, but I can hear him - something’s changed with what you did in Dayton. I need to know what it is.”
He tries - he really does, opens his mouth, forms the words between his lips, between his teeth, and - nothing comes out. He’s just about to panic, mind still slow and sluggish from drugs, lagging behind his racing heart, when a hand gently pulls his fingers away from shredding the bedsheets.
She winks at him when he looks up. “Psychic, remember?” The tiniest hint of a smile quirks his lips up, strengthened by hope, and the next moment Missouri is shaking her head at him. “You shouldn’t be messing with blood magic, boy - anything could have happened.” Then - “If the Cage is anything like Hell or Heaven, it doesn’t house physical bodies - it isn’t made to keep them in. Whatever you did must have changed something in the Cage - I think... I think Sam is free to leave, but he wouldn’t know his way back. Where is the amulet?”
And the world goes blank.
---
In the end, it’s the same thing that breaks them both.
“No. No. Not him - no, you can’t...”
The thing wearing Dean’s body grins and stretches. “Might need a little practice to wear this quite right, Sam,” he says, “But I’ve finally gotten it, haven’t I? I’ve tried flaying you, pulling you apart, burning you up... I’ve tried Jess, Daddy, Madison... even Mommy - but none of them, none of them are quite your precious Dean, are they?” He pulls a sneer, grotesque on Dean’s lips. “Jack. Pot.”
Sam shudders and looks anywhere but at him.
“He tried to take you from me,” Dean’s voice, perfectly resurrected from Sam’s memory, right beside him. He flinches. “Marked your pretty little soul for himself, tried to pull it away. And look what he’s done - I had to lock you in there, in that shell - so breakable - and I can’t play with you anymore, Sam.
“Well, guess what? Neither can he. When I’m through with you, Sam, big brother’ll be the last person you want touching you.”
“No - no, you can’t do this - anything, anything but this, please.”
A dark chuckle, Dean’s hand in his hair, breath against his ear. “Anything, hmm? I don’t know, Sammy, do you really want this?”
Sam swallows. “Anything - anything you want, just not this. Don’t - just don’t pretend to be Dean. P-please. I’ll do anything else, anything else you want, I swear. Please. Please -”
The grip releases. “Shh. Begging so good, Sam,” a mocking facsimile of big brother pride. “You get your way - no big brother for you.” A brand appears in his hand, out of nowhere. “I can make sure of that.”
---
“It’s not lost,” Missouri says, when the buzzing in his ears finally stops and fades into a dull hum at the back of head.
He stares.
“You know your brother,” she says. “Better than anyone - now tell me, has Sam ever given up on you?”
It was just a piece of metal on a leather cord, he wants to say. It was always meant for Dad; he gave it to me as a second-hand gift. But air-fresheners on a dingy Christmas tree had said different. Light-hearted banter and dimpled smiles painted over a bleeding heart had said different. Disappointed eyes, yet still filled with so much hope, so much love, so much trust - had said different. It’s okay, Dean - had said different.
“He didn’t leave the amulet in the trash can.”
Hope rises like a tidal wave, lodges in his throat, too wild, too desperate to be helpful, but he pushes it down, forces his mind to work.
---
“Hey, Dean - ”
“Yeah?” It comes out gruff, but Sam isn’t even looking at him anymore, staring at the ground where his scuffling foot has cleared out a little patch of smoother, finer dust.
“Um - my duffel. You can - you can look through it - after, y’know,” and Dean wants to strangle him - for demolishing the wall he’s constructed around Cage and Hell and Sam and gone, but Sam’s sounding like Dean hadn’t fed and clothed and bathed him, like he can’t ask for anything and Dean will move Heaven and Earth to get it for him - “If you want, I mean. Just. Only if you want.”
---
Sam’s duffel, he thinks, raises his eyes to Missouri.
The next time she sees him, two days later - because apparently Missouri has resources - she reaches out to touch his hand, and he closes his fist around blessed metal.
The ritual is nothing overly complicated, for being the last step to getting Sam out of the Cage. Neither is leaving an opening when the guards aren’t paying attention, enticing enough that the group that’s been eyeing him like a hungry pack decides to jump him. His fists need no encouragement to meet flesh, crack bone.
The jagged cut on his cheek burns like fire, feels like hope.
The rusty nail protruding from his side the night after is a pathetic imitation of Hell at best, but it feels like victory. He grins, turns, faces the serial murderer whose hand is still on the nail, and almost laughs at the look of terrified horror on the man’s face.
And then he passes out.
Or, at least, does a passable imitation of it that the guards are fooled and rush him off on a poorly policed ambulance to the hospital. On one hand - in their defense, it would be absurd to expect a man impaled on an inch-thick nail gushing blood from the hole in his side to knock out three guards, jump off the moving ambulance and hike to the nearest abandoned farmhouse. On the other hand, they have never met a man who’s experienced Hell.
---
Sam wakes up in a field. To be exact, he wakes up in a cemetery in Kansas, and the first thing he realises is that he’s thirsty. The next thing he realises is that worse (and a thousand times better) than the lashes and burns and cuts on his body, his heart is trying to scorch its way out of his ribcage, and more bizarrely than that, towards a specific direction. Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s stumbling away, clawing and crawling his way across the cemetery, and it’s the only thing that eases the burning in his chest.
It isn’t long until it occurs to him that there is method to his madness.
It’s the strangest feeling, floating away while Lucifer and Michael are watching, hands on his body, eyes on his soul. It feels like warmth and hope and brother, all things that have been stripped away in the Cage - it feels like Dean. It’s probably nothing short of opening up the Cage and letting the Apocalypse happen, and Sam should be angry, should be outraged that Dean is undoing the one good thing he’s ever done, should want Dean to stop - but he can’t not be selfish, and God help him, he had never been able to not want Dean, not need Dean, even when he wanted to, even when he should have let Dean go. And Dean is here, where Sam can feel him like water on a parched soul, and nothing has ever felt more blessed than that.
It doesn’t last.
Being yanked back into his own body feels like he’s being uprooted, abandoned, forgotten. And then Lucifer’s hand is on his chest, on his heart, where he has always been Dean’s -
- he screams.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” Lucifer had said. “Dean isn’t getting you.”
It’s a promise, not a threat - and Lucifer has never lied to Sam. Less because he isn’t the Father of Lies, more because he makes every precaution possible that a promise becomes reality, and stays it.
Stopping is worse than the wounds on his body scraping across dried grass and stinging with sweat combined. Sam staggers to his feet and starts trudging (crawling) towards the most painful direction he can find.
---
Sammy, he thinks, and watches his baby brother drop the blocks in his hand and turn to look at him, dimples flashing. At nearly two, Sammy still barely talks, and Dean has only just started again a couple weeks back on Dad’s insistence, words coming slowly, unnaturally, like he’s maybe losing something with every syllable that comes out of his mouth. Thoughts, on the other hand - thoughts are easy, and even though Dad doesn’t seem to hear him, Sammy does. Hey, c’mere Sammy.
Sammy’s dimples deepen, and he pushes himself up onto stubby toddler legs, tottering towards Dean.
Dean’s own smile widens, and when Sam gets close enough, he pulls him onto his lap, holding him safe as he wriggles into a comfortable position. Hungry?
Sam doesn’t nod or shake his head, but Dean feels the faint rumbling in his stomach, and reaches over to the grocery bag sitting on the floor beside him.
Sammy, he thinks, three months later, when Sammy has started forming full sentences, and watches his baby brother flip through a book, enraptured.
---
Unfortunately, Hell or not, infection is a bitch, and bacteria-infested farmhouses aren’t kind to open wounds, less so to open wounds made by rusty nails. Shock-tremored fingers open up the emergency medical kit swiped from the ambulance, splashing disinfectant liberally over the hole in his side. The next thing he registers is the Impala’s metal beneath his palm, cool from the night air - and she’s lurching down the highway, and Dean has never been more thankful for his Baby, for all that he could barely stand being in the car... after.
It feels like his entire life - or non-life, even, because some of the ‘skills’ he’s been using can’t be credited back to John - was only training for this, culminating in the core of his entire being - save Sammy, protect Sammy, find Sammy, be with Sammy.
---
The wind bites into his bones, seeping through the three layers he has on like they’re not even there. He stumbles onwards blindly, letting his heart tug painfully against his gait, clumsy and uneven. Screw Dean’s rubbish timing, he thinks, because of fucking course his brother just had to raise him from Hell right when it turns really fucking cold. Three layers may be all good in May, but in fucking whatever-month-it-is, he may as well be buck naked. A particularly strong gust rocks him back on the balls of his feet, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t just keel over backwards from the force.
He simply stands there for a moment, wanting nothing more than to curl up and wait for his big brother to come get him - which, thinking of, why shouldn’t he? His knees are already starting to buckle when he remembers.
---
Dean’s stumbling out of the Impala before the engine even has time to cut off entirely, breath coming in pathetic gasps. His heart is climbing out through his throat, threatening to choke his windpipe. Sammy, he thinks, and in his mind’s eye, he can see the familiar floppy-haired kid, his kid, rounding a gravestone, appearing, right there, close enough to touch - any moment now, any moment and this nightmare will be over, and Sam will be back here, right where he belongs - any moment now. Sammy, is his second thought, closer to a plea now, because he knows Sam, and he knows Sam would know that Dean was coming for him - any second and he’ll feel that hand, once so tiny, closing over his shoulder, behind him, beside him, somewhere, somehow -
Maybe he wasn’t raised here, is his third - because there are only so few hiding spots in a cemetery that’s nothing more than a field, and Sammy isn’t going to appear randomly from the ground like one of those funny-looking creatures in the desert or whatever, never mind that for five fucking years, those were his favourite animals. The thought forces a laugh out of his throat - a breath punched out, more desperate than amused - and then he sees it.
He shouldn’t be able to recognise Sam’s blood from anyone else’s - but there’s a patch of rusty brown on the gravestone a few feet away, and he knows it as sure as that his heart has reason to beat for no one but his brother - that it’s Sam’s. It’s a bloody, painful trail from the spot that swallowed up his raison d’etre - staining the grass in a way that would never have happened if Sam was doing anything but crawling, dragging himself across the ground. It’s not difficult to follow, not even for an amateur and certainly not for Dean - at least until it leaves one bloody handprint on the flaking white paint of the fence - and disappears.
He’s on the ground before he knows what’s happening, knees buckling and legs giving out like his life has just been ripped out of him. “Sammy,” he mouths more than says, breath sucking in quick and hard, and if he thought that insistent swelling and clawing in his heart was bad, it has nothing on the way it feels now, like laceration, like knives, like fire - like his own personal hell.
It’s irrational, is what, because if he had any doubt that Sam wasn’t truly raised from the Cage, it would have been settled by the blood trail Sam’s left behind. The brown under his palm where his hand has found its way to the fence, like it brings him any closer to Sam is plain, hard evidence that he’s done his job, fulfilled his purpose, brought little brother back to life, but it only feels like confusion and hurt and Stanford - it feels like abandonment.
He huffs out a laugh, silent save for the air that whooshes out of his lungs. The sob that comes then is dry, humiliating. He was willing to house Sam’s soul in his own body, put him up in the one place Dean had never shared with anyone, and here Sam was - his first reaction upon getting out of Hell, to run away from Dean, unwilling to leave even a note except in his blood, standing starkly out like accusation, like you let me die, like you did nothing but hurt me and let me get hurt, like go away and don’t try to find me.
And now they’re stuck with some sort of complicated, unwanted soul bond, an accident, a burden Sam has to live with.
He laughs again, chest no longer hitching with useless, tearless sobs, and lets his eyes drift listlessly across the field.
The blood trail stands out glaringly under the waning sun, and suddenly, like something’s shifted across his eyes, it’s not screaming abandonment and unwanted anymore, but hurt and baby brother.
Dean pushes up, staggering on legs shaky from exhaustion, and doggedly burns his own trail back to the Impala. Sam needs - maybe not the way Dean does, maybe not ever half as much - but he needs, and Dean has never been able to say no to that.
The Impala tearing down the highway is less driven by desperation this time, determination more than need fuelling her.
---
There is nothing for it - Sam is, in one word, miserable. The rain started God knows how many hours ago. Somehow it’s like the entire water mass in the world has decided to empty itself on fucking godforsaken Montana, and of course it would, because it’s not like whoever the Upstairs Guy is right now doesn’t have a beef with Sam. He should be expecting it by now.
He also really should have hotwired that car instead of deciding to hike this last leg. He doesn’t really know where Dean is - except somewhere to his... southeast, he decides, swiveling on one foot briefly - but even he isn’t that good. He’s known not to underestimate his big brother, but there is still no way Dean can now warp time and catch up with him under the twenty-four hours he’s been hiking, hotwiring cars - even hitching rides. The trucker had pulled his semi up beside Sam, and Sam had barely noticed.
Goodness knows what he’d been thinking, inviting a bloody, limping man into his vehicle, but Dean had always said he looked like a lost puppy, and apparently that worked, because bleeding onto his upholstery, the man still looked more sympathetic than wary. Because Sam looked really unthreatening, the man had all but said, and it was all Sam could do to hold back a snort. Not that he was so inclined, because he really wasn’t a raging psychopath, but half-beaten to Hell or not, he could still kill him easily if he needed to.
A chuckle under his breath, mangled with phlegm and a burning throat. Dean would slap him on the head and dose him with fluids, but Dean isn’t here, is he?
---
He knows exactly where Sam stopped running on sheer stubbornness, and started covering up the trail he was leaving behind him - more a straight line north than anything else. Tracking through cities is a hassle for a mute, which is currently what he is, because for whatever stupid-ass reason, he still can’t force a single word - a single syllable - past his lips. But he gets by - by thirteen, he had already mastered that it was less about talking, and more about looking - and looking he does just fine without saying a word. He charms the ones that need to be charmed, garners sympathy from those who have sympathy to offer, and even - on a few occasions - scares the hell out of the ones that need to be scared.
Himself a little too, if he’s being honest - because with his bare hand on the douchebag’s throat, pressing in enough to feel the pulse jackrabbiting under his fingers, there is not a doubt in his mind that he would stop that heart between this very heartbeat and the next if it came down to it. Evidently, the man realises that too and he gets the information he needs, but he leaves with a strange taste in his mouth - knowing that remorse would be the last thing he would feel for ending the life of a man who stood in between him and Sam.
He meets up with Bobby too, if only because Missouri can’t keep her mouth shut, and Bobby’s a hard son of a bitch to refuse to meet up with, voice or no voice.
“You remind me of Sam,” Bobby says, after promising to help keep a lookout for Sam, and his tone is cautious, almost wary. “The way he was after you... after you made your trip downstairs.” He huffs a laugh, and the sound is tired, mirthless. “Remind me of your dad too - just closed up real good, wouldn’t let anyone in,” and Dean looks up at that.
He tries then, tries as hard for Bobby as he would have for John, opens his mouth, forms his lips around a word, any word, pushes in his throat, tries to say something - anything - until he snaps his jaw shut over silence.
He pretends not to see the disappointment on Bobby’s face. Pretends it doesn’t cut quick, deep, just tugs at the corner of his lips until a facsimile of his shit-eating grin appears on his face. It fails, just like the rest of what he does, if Bobby’s expression is anything to go on.
Bobby doesn’t offer to help, and Dean doesn’t ask.
---
Sammy just turned two a week ago. He’s finally started babbling - and Dean’s started to talk again too, more than just the monosyllabic words I got when I tried to make him talk a few months back - actual sentences. They seem to understand each other perfectly, with or without words. I don’t have the same gift, which is why Dean talking is a relief. He acts as translator for Sammy’s wants and needs, sometimes not even needing to decipher Sammy’s babbles. Dean knows Sam intuitively, instinctively, and perhaps someday that will be what saves Sammy.
---
It isn’t long before Sam realises someone is tailing him. Even nursing infected injuries and half-dizzy from the burning in his chest on his best days, he is still his father’s son, and Dean’s brother. He gives them the slip twice, but they’re dogged in their tracking, and his body is a traitor. He’s shivering in the basement of an abandoned building, sweat dripping from his hair into his eyes, and for a moment he wishes Dean were there, before he remembers that it was the point of the entire road trip he’s been taking. And then he hears them.
They’re not being subtle, which is their first mistake. An underestimated Winchester is - well, an underestimated Winchester. It is no small effort to force the rattling in his body to still, but whatever it is these men - hunters, he realises, and would have days ago if his mind was actually functioning - have in store, he is certain it’s nothing pleasant. The only other thing he is certain of, is that if he’s going down, he’s going down swinging.
He catches the first by surprise, deadly and silent - a quick, slick in-out between the ribcage, and then he’s down. He dispatches the next two as well, elbow sinking into gut, heel into shin, knee in the balls, and every dirty trick his big brother has ever taught him. He’s sixty-percent sure that one of them is no longer in the gene pool - or going to get laid, unless chicks dig scars that slash across the face over eyes and lips and nose. The other has a shattered knee, but then there are three more, and it’s only adrenaline that’s holding him up.
On the bright side, he supposes, the way he goes completely limp just when they’re getting ready for a fight is probably some form of revenge, as he smirks at the last glimpse of dumbfounded faces before everything goes black.
---
“Sam Winchester.” He blinks owlishly against harsh fluorescent light, and doesn’t place the voice for a moment. “Guess they were right after all - there’s the Devil in you alright.”
A face floats into his line of vision, and if unimpressed incredulity shows on his face, he’s too tired to be polite. “Roy?” Or his voice, actually.
His vision clears just in time to catch the brief flash of outrage on Roy’s face. “Huh - got it in one. Guess we didn’t do the job thoroughly enough the last time, Sammy boy. This time’s gonna be different, I promise.”
“Um.” He blinks again, squinting up at the manacles around his wrists and feet, tugging experimentally. “Yeah, okay.” Something should clue him into the reason for the expression of outraged incredulity that he keeps glimpsing on Roy’s face - or the other two hunters’, for that matter, but his brain feels like cotton wool, except saturated with liquid, so heavy he can’t seem to think straight.
“Where’s big brother, anyway? He coming to the rescue like the last time he did? Oh, wait - ” He seems to take Sam’s snort as a challenge for more. “Or has he finally seen the light and abandoned you?”
“I think he’s tracking us down, actually,” Sam replies absently, and starts examining the cuffs on his ankles. They’re heavy, lined with what seems to be similar sigils as the ones on his wrists. Demon, is what they think he is then, and apparently his soaked-cotton-wool brain seems to think it hilarious, because he starts laughing, unsettling enough to warrant a splash of what appears to be holy water on his face. He sputters a bit, realises. Demon is what they think he is, and they’re so behind on the Hunters’ Quarterly that he snorts again, because all the work on his body right now, cuts and burns and brands - they’re the work of an angel. Two angels, really - two archangels, because once Michael figured out his destiny had all but been blown to shit, he’d become incapable of resisting his little brother, and if said little brother just wanted him to join in on the fun of torturing Sam, no complaints were going to come forth from him.
Pain bursts on the side of his face, familiar and annoying. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, bitch.”
It’s such a cliche line, Sam can’t help the huff that escapes his lips - and barely winces when a slap greets him again, this time stinging harder.
The next two hours, because Sam has been trained to count seconds even half-asleep, or in this case - half-dead, is a blur of abuse, verbal and physical, but if these second-rate hunters think they have anything over two angry, bored archangels, they’ve got another thing coming.
---
At some point, Sam starts losing time. Part of it is out of pure boredom - if they call this torture, they really need to take a few lessons from Lucifer. Another part because much as he would like to be otherwise, he’s just downright fucking sick. The insistent throb in his chest doesn’t let up, burning and clawing and gouging - with that, he really doesn’t think it’s fair that his torturers are offended by his occasional inattention.
That all ends when he jerks awake with a thirst he hasn’t had for a while, and opens his eyes to a flask thrust under his nose. He raises his eyes to the man in front of him, and feels a jolt of satisfaction when the man flinches, liquid sloshing in the flask. A second later, the trepidation on his face turns into crowing triumph, and everything clicks into place.
“Go to Hell,” he spits, and the man before him laughs.
It’s another voice that speaks up, to his right - and it’s so much like a reunion of all the people he’s ever pissed off in his entire life that if not for the circumstances, he would have laughed. “What’s the matter, Sammy? Don’t like the breakfast we prepared for you?”
The thirst, the hunger - burns in his throat, through his veins, the only thing that has managed to rival that hand in his chest trying to claw itself out, propel itself forward. He wants. God help him, he wants. Every breath he takes, he wants, damning him to something worse than Hell. “Fuck you.”
Tim steps into his line of vision, grinning. “No,” he says, slow and cruel, “This is so much better.”
And it all goes to Hell.
---
He feels it, coursing through his veins, like power, like ecstasy, like ash like failure like worse than death. And worse than anything else, he feels it, owning him, filling him, snaking into every tiny crack and pushing out any leftover good he’s ever had - pushing out that Dean-shaped ache in his chest, numbing it, making it insignificant. Dean, he thinks, because his mouth might sully that name, Dean, I’m sorry.
---
For a moment, he thinks he might have imagined it, finally actually going batshit insane. And then it’s Sam’s voice again - Dean, I’m sorry.
He’s pulling up to the side of the road before he’s even aware of what’s happening, and then because he hasn’t done it since he’d turned seven, cautiously - Sammy?
There’s no reply.
Sammy!
The name echoes back, reverberating in an empty room.
---
It’s at his eighth feeding of the day, bottle held to his lips, hand over his nose, choking him into swallowing, submitting, when he feels it. The cuffs have been burning him since the second gallon, a nuisance that barely registers, but when he pulls at them, twisting away from the blood, he feels it. The brittleness, the sheer weakness of the cuffs holding him in place, barely enough to hold him in place. And the coolness - because sometime between three and five gallons of demon blood, it’s stopped burning.
It’s probably credit to their lack of intelligence, or their basic inability to do any kind of decent research, that they don’t realise that demon blood isn’t weed, doesn’t make him susceptible, doesn’t make him weak. Drunk on power, yes, but Sam hadn’t turned to demon blood so he could feel weak or manipulated - it was the only thing that had cleared his mind, let him think.
“Just imagine,” it’s Walt this time, shaking the empty bottle between his fingers, voice soft and slimy and almost enough to make Sam crack the pipe he’s chained to and swing it at his head. “Just imagine, Sam, how good a show the withdrawal will be.”
Sam grins, loopily, gestures awkwardly with his cuffed hand, and Walt drops the bottle, moves closer, until his ear is almost at Sam’s lips. Rookie. “Just - watch,” Sam murmurs, crystal-clear and steel-cold - and then he’s breaking the cuffs like clay, and then breaking Walt’s face like it’s the best feeling on earth.
It would barely take any effort to stop the hunters - all eight of them on duty - from reaching him, just a brief second of concentration to break a spinal cord, far too easy - but he takes his time, lets Tim rush at him, lifts a hand, and twists. “No,” he quips. “This - is so much better.”
And stands back and watches as the rest of the men flee.
Walt is still on the ground, clutching at his pelvis, leg severed thigh down, half hanging off, and it is pure horror in his broken face. Sam cocks his head, lifts a finger to his lips.
“Just - watch,” he says, and walks out the door.
There’s nobody to stop him.
---
Dean catches onto Sam’s trail two days later. Walks more than breaks into the warehouse - and it’s there that he knows something’s wrong. The basement is his first stop, because he knows Sam, and some habits Sam has just never been able to break. The blood takes no trained eye to notice. Some enough to be a fatal injury, some just hints, dragged along rusty steel or dusty concrete. Hunters, he realises, remembering the break-in, rage rising like tide.
Whoever it was who had been going after Sam hadn’t cared about anyone going after them, and the thought sends Dean’s blood boiling, because they know, they know that Sam has a brother, has a Dean, and the thought of them thinking Dean doesn’t care - thinking that they could get away scot-free after touching his baby brother -
If nothing else in the world is certain, this is - they have a second thought coming.
---
The warehouse - always the warehouses - he bursts into is empty. Well, not empty, because there’s a dead man on the floor, and one barely alive, glaring at him. It takes a moment for him to recognise the face - Sammy must have done one hell of a job on his face. Attaboy. When it hits him, who he’s looking at, he just rolls his eyes and walks away to the - miracle of miracles, given the two exhibits he’s passed by - central attraction. The cuffs are broken, but the chains are still attached - to the pipes just above, and along the wall. And then - off to the side, two gallon bottles of dark red liquid. His hands are shaking when he walks over to Walt.
How long? Mouthed, because like a useless mute, he still can’t speak. A beat of silence, and then, miraculously steady, a hand on half-off stump that used to be Walt’s leg, something almost like pleasure blossoming at the unholy scream that tears out of Walt’s lips. How long?
There’s a moment more of gritted teeth and hatred, and then - “Five days.”
He nods once, satisfied. How much?
The answer is more forthcoming this time, spit out between bloody teeth. “Almost got all the sixth gallon in him.” A chuckle, almost deranged. “Didn’t get all of it in - but that’s still going to be one hell of a withdrawal, Winchester. Imagine what we could’ve accomplished, having a demon-killer at our beck and call - like a pet.”
Six gallons - the hunter in him, the torturer - wants to stay and make the last few hours of Walt’s life the most memorable few hours, but there’s something else in him that’s chanting Sammy Sammy Sammy Sammy Sammy, and he can’t ignore that, can’t ignore the aching burn in his own chest. He stands to leave.
“You should’ve seen him,” Walt yells after him, too obviously vying for a quick death. “He was like the Devil - if there ever was your brother in Sam Winchester, he’s gone. You should’ve been there.”
Yes, he thinks. I should have.
---
He doesn’t seem to be able to keep the sounds in - grunts and whimpers and sobs, embarrassing sounds - sounds Dad would almost certainly tell him to stop. Suck it up. Be a man.
He doesn’t want to be a man. He was never born to be a man - just a stupid, pathetic demon-human hybrid, who doesn’t even have the strength to let his brother go. Of course, once Dean finds him like this, once Dean figures out what’s going on, the choice won’t even be in his hands anymore. For the better, he supposes, because then he’ll be back where he really belongs.
He’s shaking so hard, breath rattling and teeth chattering, that he doesn’t even hear the door open, metal grating harshly across the abused floor. And then, like damnation, like salvation, like everything good that has ever been in his life -
“Sammy.”
part 3;; and if you are a ghost