Primal- Seeing is believing, Part 3
Sam woke up to a strange and contradicting notion of feeling light as a feather and so strong and invincible that he could take on a brick wall and win. It took him all of a second to figure out that he was on drugs. The good kind, the kind that made the pain feel like it belonged to someone else entirely.
The heavy-duty drugs explained the annoying beep beeping noise that had been sound-tracking his existence ever since Sam had opened his eyes. Hospital.
Sam forced his sluggish brain to come up with the events that had led him to be floating in happy juice in a hospital bed, and, what was scarier, why Dean wasn’t bitching to him from a chair next to him.
“Mr.? You awake, sir?”
Sam blinked, confused as to why there was a voice talking to him when there was no one around. His unfocused eyes landed on the shape at the foot of the bed, a tiny woman with shoulder-length gray hair.
The grunt that left his lips must’ve sound like an answer to the woman because she went on. “I realize that you’re still a bit spacey from the pain relief medication we’ve got you on, but it’s paramount that you give us any and all details about your health or any previous condition that we should be aware of before proceeding with your treatment. Also, a na-“
“W-who are you?” Sam cut through her speech, dizzy from the amount of words being hurled at him. God! His mouth felt like a dry rock had been stored in there for the past month.
The basic question seemed to give her pause. “I’m Dr. Emily Barks,” she said slowly, “we already met in the ER, don’t you remember? I set your leg, which, by the way, should heal nicely if you stay off of it for the next six weeks or so...”
Sam stared at her before looking at bottom half of his body. There was a chunky, white cast covering his right one from knee to foot. How had he missed that?
“You weren’t carrying any ID when the paramedics brought you in,” she went on, moving to his right side. “Can you tell us your name? John Doe doesn’t really suite you.”
The cogs in Sam’s brain were starting to turn, protesting every step of the way. There was something big and terrible waiting for Sam at the end of that turn of thought, but he couldn’t stop himself from pushing.
The first thing he remembered was the pain. The inescapable and all-involving agony that arrived seconds after he heard his bone snapping and Dean screaming his name. Dean! “Where’s my brother?” Sam blurted out, sitting on the bed like a loose spring.
The woman looked at him, this time more focused on his features rather than his medical condition. “Which one is your brother? Tobias Jones or the other John Doe we found?”
Sam forced his brain to think rationally, which was a Herculean effort given that every cell inside him kept screaming to find out what had happened to Dean. But they had been caught inside the house of man who, for all Sam knew, could’ve died from the wounds they had not been able to prevent. It would not be productive for the Winchesters future for them to be arrested for murder.
Then again, if Jones had managed to survive, Sam’s lie about who he was would last a pathetically short life. “The other John Doe, “ he confessed.
The woman gave him a look over the top of black-rimmed glasses. “John and John too,” she muttered. “You know what? If what I hear is true, you and your brother can keep your secret identities all you want. After all, superheroes are entitled to some anonymity,” she added with a playful smile.
Sam’s confusion must have reached his face because her expression went from playful to understanding. “The only reason why you and your brother aren’t currently cuffed to your beds and have a police officer standing guard is because Mr. Jones told everyone that two men came to his aid when something attacked him inside his home. He claims, for all who want to hear it, that the two of you saved his life.” She paused, giving him another look, waiting for him to add something, anything. “I suppose the details of what exactly attacked him and made his eyes simply vanish in thin air are as mysterious as your name, hum?”
Sam swallowed the anxiety in his chest and looked up at her. “Can I see my brother?” he asked instead, ignoring her curiosity.
“I’ll send an aid with a wheel chair,” she replied tiredly, unable to hide the frustration from her voice.
Sam wasn’t sure he could even answer her if he wanted to. The correct order of events was kind of fuzzy after that statue fell on top of him. He remembered Dean trying to come down the stairs, he remembered the dissolving steps and his brother almost falling over and...
Dean had said something about lighting things up and Sam had barely paused to consider if his brother meant for them to burn the house with them and -hopefully- the Sandman inside or if he’d meant using the house’s fire suppressing system to soak the Sandman... even though water hadn’t worked before and there was no reason for Sam to believe it would work then.
No. After working side by side with Dean for so many years, Sam had just flipped his lighter on and set the carpet on fire.
Pushing his drugged brain into trying to figure out why water had worked against the Sandman the first and last time but not the second, was giving Sam a vicious headache. He was going in circles, like a hamster on steroids, trying to make that little wheel reach the speed of light.
The soft sound of rubber wheels on linoleum pulled Sam away from his frustrating line of thought. An aid, a tall middle age man with a big mustache, steered a wheelchair into the room, parking it next to Sam’s bed.
“Morning, Mr. Doe,” he said cheerfully. “My name is James and I’ll be your driver for the next hour.”
:o:
James, designated driver that he was, pushed Sam’s chair -despite Sam’s protests- from the Orthopedic level to the elevator at the end of the hall. Dean -the other Mr. Doe, as everyone seemed to refer when talking about them- was two levels down, in at the Ophthalmology department.
Sam had frowned in confusion when James had announced their destination. He was pretty sure that he had told his doctor that his brother was the other person found at the house without an ID, not Mr. Jones. Sam painfully remembered that they had arrived too late to save the man’s eyes, so it made all the sense in the world for him to be in ophthalmology... not Dean.
Not Dean.
By the time James turned the chair to enter the third room on the right, Sam was sweating and struggling to control his racing heart. They knew the Sandman attacked people’s eyes, they’d seen how the man they’d saved had been... how could they have been so foolish to think that they would be immune to such attack?
The window blinds were open, casting a soft glow inside the room that made everything look washed out, including the single patient occupying the place.
Dean was lying in the bed, white gauze wrapped around his head, completely covering his eyes and half his face. He turned to the door as their arrival disturbed the silence of the room. The skin around his mouth looked red and abraded, like someone had tried to scrub it raw and his lips looked painfully dry.
“Who’s there?” Dean whispered, voice raspier than usual. “Come on, s’ not funny to mess with the blind guy.”
“I’ll leave you two alone,” James said softly over Sam’s sharp intake of air.
“Sammy, is that you?”
Sam gulped down the bile amassing in his throat, sweaty palms slipping off the handrails as he pushed the wheelchair closer to the bed. “Yeah, Dean, it’s me,” he voiced, hating how fragile and broken his voice sounded.
“Jesus, man, I was just pulling your leg with the whole blind thing! No need to sound like I’m dying,” Dean let out, sitting up straighter. “It’s not nearly as bad as it looks, just a scratched cornea or whatever they called it,” he went on, looking straight at him like the cover over his eyes was made of bubble wrapper rather than clothe. “Hey, how’re you doing? They told me you had a broken leg but that it was healing fine. You in any pain? Did they put you in a cast? Man, those things itch like a bitch-“
Nervous-Dean tended to talk a mile an hour, a fact that Sam had never mentioned to him, afraid that Dean would stop doing it entirely and Sam would lose one of the small gives he had into the workings of his brother’s mind. However, he had sounded so confident and relaxed that for a few seconds Sam believed that this was just the worst prank ever. “W-what?”
“Doc said that your cast can come off in about a month and a half and these,” Dean said, pointing to his gauze-covered face, “in about a week and that my eyes should be pretty much back to normal then.”
Sam closed his eyes, selfishly happy that Dean couldn’t read his expression right then. “’Should’? ‘Pretty much’? Was your doctor trying to guess the lottery numbers or are you editing his words?”
Dean frowned, or at least Sam thought he did, from the way his bandages wrinkled at the edges. “Are you pissed? You sound pissed...”
Sam couldn’t help the bitter laughter that came out of his lips. “I guess the drugs they’re giving you are better than mine.” He paused, thinking back at what Dean had said and staring at his cast-covered leg. “’Pulling my leg'?! Seriously?”
Dean just smirked, obviously very happy at his terrible pun. He pulled his bed covers away and sat up. “Well, I hope you’re not high enough that you wont find us the exit door, because we’re out of here.”
Sam just sat there, staring at his brother until he remembered that Dean had no way of knowing that he was doing the staring thing. “W-what?”
Dean let his head fall forward, turning it from side to side. “God, you are high,” he concluded from Sam’s disjointed speech. “Never mind... we’ll find our way around that. Let’s go!”
Sam had the presence of mind enough to make a grab for Dean’s arm as he got to his feet and swayed to the side. “Sit down, you fool. Not picking you up if you fall on your ass,” he hissed. “Where exactly do you think we’re going with a bum leg and with you bl-“
Sam stopped himself from actually saying the words. Beneath his fingers, he could feel Dean’s muscles tensing up.
“It’s temporary, Sam,” Dean hissed back. “Much like our current grace period of no one questions asked. Do you wanna stick around until someone in charge of the money in this place decides to take matters in hand and comes demanding proper IDs from the two of us?”
Sam’s grip on Dean’s arm relaxed. He had a point. One that didn’t exactly denied Sam’s point, but that surely was more pressing in urgency. “Can you even stand without falling down?”
Dean pulled his arm away with more force than necessary. “Yeah, you idiot,” he muttered. “You just went all Florence Nightingale on my ass before I could get my bearings, that’s all.”
In a couple of hours, Sam would be wondering why the hell no one stopped them. More than that, he will be downright amazed that they managed to get to the front door at all.
He could only imagine the sight that the two of them presented in those hospital halls, Sam with his leg stretched out ahead of his chair, being pushed forward by a man with his eyes covered, while whispering directions and cringing in fear at every near miss with the walls that Dean put them through.
Right then, in the moment, the only thing that Sam could focus was on not banging his broken leg against anything more solid than a few ferns and making it to the exit.
It was only when they left the cab that had taken them back to their motel room that Sam felt like he could breath again. “What now?”
Dean turned his half mummified face to him, “Now we go put a Sandman down.”
Sam laughed so hard at something that was so absolutely not amusing that he was damn sure that he was still high on drugs. He just hopped Dean was too.
:o:
They made quite the pair as they tramped noisily into yet another motel room; Dean, eyes swathed in enough gauze to clothe to build a tent, and Sam hobbling on crutches, his leg wrapped in a shiny white cast. Exhausted, and neither of them in any shape to drive, they had taken a cab back to the Impala. Each had a twenty-dollar bill sewed into the seams of their coasts exactly for situations like that. It came in handy more often than it should.
It was nothing short of a miracle that the car hadn’t been towed into some police impound. It stood there even now; still parked in the same place they had left it the previous night, looking like a lost puppy waiting for her owners to return.
They rolled it towards the nearest motel and prayed to any higher power listening that no one called the cops on them as they booked a room looking like two extras from a Thriller remake.
Sam collapsed on the bed as soon as the door was open; Dean felt the air shift around him, heard the bed creek. Sam would be out for the count for at least a couple more hours. Good. Now he needed to escape…
“I’m gonna hit the shower; wash this hospital stench off me,” he rasped out loud to a, hopefully, already asleep Sam. He moved hesitantly forward, measuring his steps, hands slightly raised. Distance, he needed distance and to- to hide.
“Wai- wait,” he heard Sam start over the groaning of the bed. The metal of his crutches clanked and Dean knew he was struggling to get up. “Just hang on a sec. I’ll help you find it.”
“No,” Dean snarled, his back stiff and head turned in the direction of Sam’s voice. “Don’t need a guide dog, Sam.”
The oppressing and complete silence coming from the spot where Sam was told Dean what he was already well aware of. He was being an ass. “Just... just tell me where to go,” he offered as a peace token. “For eighteen bucks a night, the room can’t be all that big, can it?”
The room was still quiet, paused on Sam’s reaction. A short intake of air followed by a long exhale. Sam probably counting to ten in his head.
“Fine,” Sam said after a moment. He sounded a little hurt but Dean couldn’t focus on that; all that mattered was that he’d capitulated. Thank God. “Turn slight left and you’ll be facing the center of the room. Bathroom’s at ten o’clock.”
Dean tiptoed his way ahead, expecting at any second to bang his foot against a bed or walk right into a table. The room seemed to be closing in on him and he had to fight the amounting pressure surrounding him to suck in some oxygen.
Finally, his extended arm hit something. He felt around with his fingers. A door. Dean stepped quickly inside and closed the bathroom door behind himself.
Safe from Sam’s prying gaze, Dean pressed his back to the door and slid down until his ass collided with the cold tile floor. No matter how large the gulps of air he took, it wasn’t nearly enough to feed his starving lungs.
Deep inside, he knew he was having another panic attack, but he couldn’t stop it. Most important of all, he couldn’t let Sam hear him.
It wasn’t even the fact that his whole world was black and he couldn’t see a thing; it was what he was seeing in that darkness that was scaring the shit out of Dean.
There, he had said, even if it was just in some demented internal monologue where he kept narrating the various ways in which his life was fucked up.
Scared wasn’t even the right word, no. Dean Winchester was terrified. Terrified because some monster had attacked him, screwed with his eyes but, even currently wrapped in enough gauze to cover a tall mummy and with an entire flock of medical doctors assuring him that there was an eighty percent chance he might get his sight back, Dean was still seeing things. Now. When he should be seeing nothing but the boring inside of his eyelids.
No, he wasn’t seeing things; he was seeing them. People and... other things.
The first time he had noticed it, truly notice it, was when he’d first woke up at the hospital, surrounded by a group of doctors and their students.
It was unsettling, and if he were ever to meet them again in the middle of the street, Dean would not recognize a single one of them, yet at the hospital, in that room, he could see enough details about each person surrounding him to pinpoint exactly where each stood.
He had known that the doctor closest to him was coming down with something, because everywhere he moved, a slightly yellow tinge followed him; he knew that the one on his right was engage to be married because he was surrounded in violet; he could tell that the one closest to the door was pregnant with a boy because she exuded baby blue like it was a rare perfume.
It was disorientating, it was nauseating and it was all Dean could do to not run out screaming from that room as soon as he realized that he was not tripping on drugs.
Thinking back, Dean knew he shouldn’t have been surprised at what he had been seeing. In fact, he had seen it before. He had just been so deep in denial that he had actually refused to see it.
He had seen it with the coroner, he had seen it at Mrs. Figgs place, he had even seen it every single time they’d faced the Sandman. And that was just the last couple of days. In all honesty, he had been seeing it for months now.
Dean was nothing if not the master of denial.
He’d written it off at the time as a lack of sleep, or perhaps an after effect of some blow to the head; he had even figured it to be a product of mixing too much alcohol and sleeping pills.
The genesis of the problem, Dean was forced to recognize it now, was not as external as he wished. Blows, booze and drugs were as much the culprits of what he had been seeing as his previous encounter with fairies was to blame for the fact that he could see a monster that no one was supposed to see.
Dean could see things, even without using his eyes. It was just one more aspect of the ways the tattoo had fucked up his life.
Back at the hospital, Dean had recognized Sam the second he’d been wheeled into the room. His baby brother had a dark golden color about him that made Dean think about summer days and driving along the road watching the sun racing to set ahead of them.
Sam was worried sick. That much was easy to see even without a pair of functioning eyes, but Dean couldn’t find the words to reassure his brother. What was he going to say, anyhow? ‘Hey, there’s a 20% chance my eyes are screwed for life, but not to worry! I can see frigging lights around people’?
So, Dean had swallowed his fears and his panic and he had bullied Sam out of that hospital because, truly, they needed to get out of there.
The first ghost he saw on the corridor nearly sent him and Sam straight into a cluster of chairs. Or so Sam yelled at him when his leg collided with one.
It made sense that a place like a hospital would have its fair share of lost souls. No, what had scared the shit out of Dean was that he hadn’t expected the violent neon green light fest that they exuded. After struggling to grow accustomed to the somewhat faded lights of the living, the harsh coloring of the dead had felt like an assault on his retinas.
It was a relief when he and his brother had finally made it out and got inside a cab to take them away.
Feeling more in control and less shaky, Dean finally managed to drag himself to his feet and feel his way to the shower stall. He was counting on Sam still being too hopped out on painkillers to notice the silent bathroom but even so, Dean turned the shower on.
Lulled by the falling water and the steam that turned the air solid and present, Dean slipped out of his clothes, careful to keep himself anchored by pressing one shoulder to the nearby wall.
Under the warm spray of water, he ran his fingers through his wet hair, feeling his way around the soaked bandage. He yanked it away in fury and toss it on the floor, feeling slightly vindicated when it landed with a pathetically wet flop. For a second, Dean considered pissing on everything the doctors had said and just open his eyes.
He ducked his head down, punching the slick wall with more force than necessary. This was a good thing, he tried to convince himself. The fact that he was turning into an even bigger freak was a good thing. How else would a guy with a bum leg and a poor Ray Charles imitation could stand any chance of going up against the Sandman for round... three, was it?
Because there was no doubt in Dean’s mind that they could not afford to wait until he and Sam were in fighting condition to go back after the Sandman. Robbed of its victim the previous night, Dean knew that the thing would go back at it that very evening.
They had no time to waste. And that included Dean’s self-indulgent freak out.
Putting his game face back on, Dean turned the shower off and came to an annoying realization; “Forgot some damn clothes,” he announced to the room in general. The room ignored him.
Or not. “You okay in there?” Sam’s concern floated from outside, thick as molasses.
“Yeah,” Dean answered, his voice like gravel. He fumbled around for some towels, knocking a whole stack of them to the floor. “Shit!” he whispered, wrapping one around his head, careful to cover his eyes as well, and another around his waist. “Coming.”
How long had he been in there anyway? The sudden urge to look at his watch and find out took him by surprise and Dean gulped down a surge of bile. His building freakiness might have been handy for fighting monsters -God, he was like a damn Daredevil now- but the loss of his sight left him helpless and clueless for everything else. Taking a careful and long breath, Dean opened the door.
Now, to which side was the fucking beds again?
“Three steps, straight forward,” Sam’s tired voice answered, even though Dean was pretty sure he had not voiced his question. “There’s a pack of clean gauze on top of the covers.”
Dean gave him a silent nod, a bigger thank you than he could possible voice at that point. “So, the Sandman is actually Morpheus, the Greek not-guy-from-the-‘Matrix’,” Dean said as he sat heavily, feeling tired to his bones. His fingers worked nimbly as he replaced the towel for some proper bandages. “How do we end him?”
The sound of fingers striking a keyboard furiously came from the same place as Dean saw Sam’s glowy colors. “We need to go back to the Faerydae’s house,” Sam simply said.
“The broken vase thing,” Dean guessed.
“The broken amphora, yes,” Sam corrected. “Salt water seems to be the answer to weakening Sandman, but once that’s done, we’ll need something to contain it. My guess is that that amphora was made specifically for that purpose.”
“You think the widow will just give it to you?”
The typing stopped. Dean could feel Sam’s eyes roaming over him. He stopped himself from staring right back at his brother.
“I think the safest bet is to just steal it,” Sam eventually said.
:o:
There had been a time, not that long ago, when Sam and Dean could’ve called for reinforcements to help them out. Bobby had been their first choice of a third partner, more of a member of the family than just another hunter. The Leviathan, however, had made sure that such option was forever removed from their lives.
Garth wasn’t so bad as a helping hand. As a hunter, he defied the odds of survival with every monster he faced and in all honesty, Dean had never met someone less equipped to even be a hunter, but he had to admit that the peculiar man had grown on him to the point of actual friendship. Unfortunately, Garth was on the other side of the country, hunting down a pair of banshees.
Castiel would’ve been perfect to just pop into the widow’s house and pop out carrying what they needed. The angel, however, was still stuck in Purgatory and there wasn’t much Dean could do about it besides worrying about him and feeling guilty.
That left the Winchesters to do their petty theft on their own, even though Sam with his broken leg was about as lame as a thief could be and Dean without his eyes was just a joke’s punch line waiting to happen.
As it had been all of their lives, the Winchesters just carried on and manage to find a way to make their disadvantages work in favor of their purpose.
As they couldn’t afford to wait and see if Mrs. Faerydae would leave the house of her own volition, they decided to play the ‘man in distress’ card, a Winchester’s specialty.
Thinking back, it had been a while since they’d last used it. In fact, Dean realized with a pang of grief, their father had still been with them when they’d last used it, against that nest of vampires who’d stolen the Colt.
Dean rang the bell and put on his most miserable face. Given that half of it was covered in white bandages, it wasn’t all that hard.
“Can I help you?” a feminine voice called from the inside.
Dean could bet that she was holding a phone in her hand, 911 on speed dial in case this was some ruse to rob her, which, in a way, was exactly what it was. Just as long as it wasn’t a gun, Dean was cool.
“Sorry to bother you, ma’m,” Dean said to the closed door. “I just wanted to ask what street we’re on.”
“Common Street,” the woman answered. “Are you lost?”
Dean almost smiled at the easy cue. “No, ma’m. It’s just that...” he paused for effect, letting the slump of his shoulders speak for him. “Thank you, ma’m.”
“Wait,” the woman called back, the door still between the two of them. “There’s plenty of people on the street that you could’ve asked that. You didn’t come knocking on my door just to ask for directions, did you?”
Dean let out an embarrassed smile, knowing that Mrs. Faerydae would be watching him closely through the peephole. “It was the lilac smell,” he ‘confessed’, stealing one more deep breath of the sweet perfume. It was common enough flower around that neighborhood; it would do fine for what he needed. “My sister has the same flowers in her yard. I thought I was in the right place, that’s why I rang the bell” Dean explained, turning to leave. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”
He didn’t even have to try that hard when his feet fumbled with the step and he almost lost his balance.
“Wait,” the woman said again, her voice this time followed by the unlocking of several b bolts on the door.
Dean heard the heels of her shoes take two steps in his direction before stopping. Turning in her direction, Dean found himself facing a beautiful violet color.
“Where does your sister live?”
“The cab driver was supposed to take me to her place on Gravier Street.... we drove around for a long time and he brought me here instead. I think he was just looking for some easy cash,” Dean said, putting the right amount of awkwardness and embarrassment in his words. “I’ll just give her a call at work and ask her to pick me up.”
There was a moment of silence from where the widow stood still next to him. Although Dean could not see the battle of emotions running through the woman’s face, he could imagine it.
“Nonsense,” she said, finally coming to a decision. There was a clattering of keys as she locked the door behind her. “Gravier Street is just around the corner. I’ll take you there myself.”
When she offered her arm to guide him through the streets, Dean almost felt bad for deceiving her like that.
:o:
“Crap!” Sam let for the fifth time in the last ten minutes. “Damn tiny, crappy piece, motherfuc-“
“Now I know why you flunked arts and crafts,” Dean snickered from his station, leaning against the head of the bed. The slide of blade against the whetstone punctuated the intentional pause before he added, “you suck at it.”
Sam gave him a murderous look, completely useless, he knew, as Dean’s eyes were still covered. A pity, really, because the look had related very accurately how much Sam would like to scalp his annoying brother right then.
He wasn’t even going to mention -again- how totally wrong it was for Dean to be sharpening knives that were already sharp as needles when he couldn’t actually see the blades or the whetstone. Instead, Sam returned his focus to the tiny pieces of clay he was trying to put back together. Trying being the operative word.
Fortunately for them, the amphora had been broken into two major pieces. It was the tiny fragments that had fallen from the outside, ruining the pattern of scribblings covering the thing, that Sam was struggling with. It was like putting together the most complicated puzzle ever without the benefit of knowing what the thing was supposed to look like in the first place. To say that Sam was kind of frustrated was akin to say that the Universe was kind of big.
And if he got one single piece in the wrong place... well, Sam doubted that he or his brother would survive their encounter with the Sandman to try a second time. The amphora had to perform as it was supposed -as they hopped it would- or they were pretty much screwed.
“You really think Morpheus would hit again in the same place?” Sam asked, meticulously spreading superglue on one side of a thin piece. “There were more people present the day of the accident. What if it picks any of the others?”
The whetting sound stopped for a second and Dean looked directly at him. It made Sam’s fine hairs stand at attention whenever he did that, because Sam knew for a certainty that Dean was, for all intents and purposes, blind until those bandages came off.
But still... Dean wasn’t acting as someone temporary disabled; he wasn’t acting like the loss of such an important sense affected him at all, other than some cussing whenever he bumped against some crap Sam had left in the middle of the floor. Point in case: Dean wasn’t just looking in the general direction from where Sam’s voice came; he was looking straight at him.
“It will come back to finish what it started,” Dean said with as much certainty as someone pointing out that the sun will rise and set every single day. “Ancient gods are pissy like that.”
“Jones is still in the hospital,” Sam pointed out, even though he knew Dean was fully aware of that fact. “How are we gonna trick it into thinking it actually has someone to attack?”
Dean resumed the steady rhythm of sliding the knife’s blade right from left, over and over. “You know how.”
Sam’s sighted. His leg throbbed in response to the pang in his heart. Yeah, he knew exactly how they could fool the Sandman into thinking there was someone there for it to attack. Didn’t mean Sam liked it one bit. “Flip a coin?” he asked, dry humor that fell flat in the short distance separating them.
Truth was, either side of the coin was crappy. The one sleeping on the bed risked waking up dead, metaphorically speaking, and the one awake would have to face the Sandman alone, even if for a short span of time.
“I’m the one who can see it,” Dean pointed out.
“That was before,” Sam said, focused on placing the last piece of the puzzle and not even bothering to look up to call Dean’s bullshit. “We’ll just have to fi-“
“Nothing’s changed.”
Had their last name been Smith, Wesson or even a different branch of Winchesters, those words would have been nothing more than a failed joke, a bad case of denial. But not for the Winchesters; not for Sam and Dean. Dean meant exactly what he had said and Sam knew it.
The broken amphora was almost returned to its previous fragmented status, Sam’s fingers slipping and assaulting the frail, badly glued clay. “Come again?”
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