PART FIVE: You Don’t Know Me

[amypond45]

Which is when everything starts going to hell, of course.

About a week after Sam finds the garden exit, he finds the bodies.

He’s not looking for anything particular, just exploring. Dean had assured him he was welcome to open any unlocked door, and this particular afternoon he’s stuck inside because it’s raining cats and dogs outside and he wasn’t able to work in the garden. He’s already spent several hours in the library, and he’s restless.

Deep in the bunker, near the dungeon where he spent his first couple of weeks, he finds an unlocked door at the end of a dark hallway.

The smell makes him gag as soon as he opens the door. There’s not much light, but he can see the room is piled with bodies, none alive, all in various stages of decay.

Sam’s horror and disgust give way almost immediately to shock and betrayal.

How had he not sensed this? How had he not read this in Dean’s mind? How had Dean gotten away with this? All this time, Sam thought the lost hunters were safely tucked away in a holographic hallucination, or teleported to safety somewhere far away.

Yet this whole time, here they were.

Sam’s seen dead bodies before. He knows about rates of decay. He’s opened more coffins, seen more fresh corpses than most hunters. He can tell right away that these have all been here for a while, but not forever. Not much longer than Sam has been here. In fact, the freshest corpses look no more than a couple of months old, if that.

The horrible truth rocks Sam’s sense of reality to the core. It doesn’t seem possible, but the terrible evidence is right there, in flesh and blood.

Dean had been killing hunters until shortly before Sam got here.

Sam's head spins along with his stomach. He needs to get out, to get as far away from this awful place as he can go.

He slams the door shut and runs.

The garden is a drenched, muddy mess, brown and slippery in the deluge. Lightning flashes and thunder booms as Sam makes his way to the far corner, wiping rain out of his eyes. It’s darker than it seemed from inside the bunker, probably later than he thought.

When Sam gets to the tunnel entrance, he takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He slips the penlight out of his pocket and shines it into the darkness, but of course, it doesn’t have much effect. He should have grabbed the bigger flashlight in his room, but he hadn’t wanted to take the time. Getting away from the bunker and his grisly discovery is all Sam could think about.

When he reaches the bottom step into the tunnel, his feet splash into at least a half-inch of water. The rain has made its way in, making the tunnel as slippery underfoot as it is gloomy. Sam doesn’t dare run for fear of falling, so he directs the beam of his penlight on the ground in front of him and feels along the stone wall with the other hand to make his way. Even so, he slips and nearly falls several times before reaching the steps on the other end of the tunnel. As he starts to climb the steps, his feet slide out from under him and he face-plants across the steps, losing his penlight and skinning both knees and the palm of the hand he put out to catch himself in the fall.

“Fuck!”

His voice echoes through the tunnel. His wrist throbs, along with a burning scrape on his left cheek. His fingers come away red with blood when he touches his cheek.

Sam stumbles up the stairs and out into the woods. Much to his chagrin, he finds that total darkness has descended, relieved only by flashes of lightning. The rain is still coming down hard, although it’s more of a steady rain and less of a deluge, thanks to the trees. Nevertheless, with no trail or light to lead him to one, the going is hard. Without the moon or stars to guide him, Sam’s not even sure of the direction he’s going, except that it’s away from the tunnel and therefore away from the bunker.

He half-runs, stumbling most of the time, for what feels like hours, although it’s probably only a few minutes. The sounds of the rain and the occasional thunder muffles the sounds of his movements, or anything else, so when he suddenly finds himself surrounded by wolves Sam’s almost too surprised to react.

Sam counts ten wolves, all baring their teeth at him and growling. He searches the ground around him frantically for something to fend them off with, but finds only the slenderest of sticks. Before he can reach down to grab it, they’re on him, teeth digging into his arms and legs, yanking him off balance. He hits and kicks at them and even manages to grab one of them hard enough to give it a good head butt, but he only gives himself a headache. The wolves sink their teeth into his limbs over and over, so that even as he pushes them off, he feels himself weakening. He’s losing blood. They probably smelled the blood on him from his fall back in the tunnel, he realizes dimply. The adrenaline pumping through his veins is probably the only thing keeping him on his feet after a few minutes, and the wolves are relentless. When he tries to run, they jump him from behind, pushing him to the ground with their weight. He scrambles to his feet again and they bring him down again, all the while tearing away at his arms and legs, nipping at his ankles when he’s down.

He needs to keep them off him when he’s down, he thinks, keep them away from his major arteries. Once they get him down they go for his throat, his groin. Severing those arteries is a death sentence.

Dean! he screams with his mind, over and over. The instinct to call for help from the person least likely to give it to him, the person he’s running from, is overwhelming. As his consciousness slips away, he forgets why he was running, forgets everything but Dean.

He’s on the ground again, curled into a fetal position to protect his face, his throat, but it’s only a matter of time now. With his last conscious thought, he projects his love to Dean, his sorrow for letting him down.

He thinks he hears Dean calling him, but he’s already blacking out. Everything has become grey and fuzzy, the only sound is the snuffling of the wolves as they crowd in for the kill.

At least it won’t hurt much, he thinks, and then everything goes black.

//**//**//

“Sam! Sammy! Hey there! Yeah, that’s right. There he is. You’re gonna be alright, I promise. Right as rain. Right as rain.”

Sam’s vaguely aware of Dean’s hands on him, of Dean picking him up and carrying him, cradling him in his strong arms. Dean shouldn’t be strong enough to carry Sam. Sam tries to help, tries to wake up enough to put his arms around Dean’s neck, but it’s useless.

He passes out again.

The next time he comes to, he’s lying in his bed in the bunker. Dean’s cutting his clothes off, washing his wounds.

“You’re going to be okay, Sammy, I promise,” Dean murmurs, although Sam can sense the panic Dean feels. The desperation.

As he drifts in and out of consciousness, Sam’s aware of pain and blood as his body struggles to survive. At one point he’s sure Dean’s lying on the bed with him, holding him as he cries, pleading with Sam to hold on, to come back to him.

Something cold is running through his veins. Sam’s freezing to death from the inside out. He struggles to regain consciousness, to push away from the source of the chill pumping into him from his left arm, but he’s too weak.

“Come on, Sammy, get better now,” Dean’s voice intones, over and over. “You need to heal. This has to work.”

Sam’s heartbeat slows, pumping sluggishly with whatever is in his veins. In his mind, Sam’s standing on the shore of a vast ocean, lightning and thunder receding into the distance, sky darkening. He’s alone on an island, far from home, unable to cross the ocean to get back where he belongs.

“Hey, Sam.” Dean stands beside him, staring out to sea. Sam feels Dean’s hand in his. “It’s just us now.”

“No!”

Sam rises into the air, away from Dean, away from the island and the ocean and the sick feeling inside him.

Something’s wrong. Something’s terribly, horribly wrong.

“No!” he shouts as he sits up in bed, blinking, wrenched from the dream by his own panic. He’s naked. The sheets are blood-stained, but not soaked as he expected them to be.

Dean lies beside him, fully clothed and sound asleep.

Sam looks down at his body. Where there should be bite marks, there is only smooth, unblemished skin. Even his old scars are gone.

What the hell?

“Dean.” He shakes the demon but gets no response. Dean is deeply asleep.

Exhausted, Sam thinks, after what he just did to save me.

“What did you do?” Sam whispers. His heart is pumping normally again, and his veins no longer feel like there’s something freezing coursing through them. He feels normal. Healthy. Not even any lingering pain from all those wolf bites, his sprained wrist, the gash on his cheek, his skinned knees.

Sam gets up, looks at himself in the mirror. His face is as free of scars or scratches as the rest of him.

He stumbles out into the corridor, only a little stiff from lying in bed for so long, and makes his way to the bathroom. As he stands under the shower, letting the water flow over him as he washes the last of the blood from his hair and body, he tries to reconstruct the events that led up to waking up naked next to a heavily sleeping Dean.

He should be dead. He knows that much. But instead of bleeding out, every single one of his wounds is completely healed, with no sign of what he remembers happening the night before, or however long ago it was that he was being eaten alive by wolves. That something involving deep magic has happened is as clear as the water cascading down his bare chest.

Dean magically healed him.

When he gets back to his room, dripping and clad only in a towel wrapped around his hips, Dean’s still dead to the world. He doesn’t stir as Sam gets dressed, noisily opening and closing drawers as he pulls out underwear, a t-shirt, jeans and socks. As he reaches for his shoes, he notices the wad of bloody bandages in the trash, along with something that looks like intravenous needles, connected on either end of a long tube. The sight makes Sam’s left inner elbow ache, but when he looks down at the skin he sees nothing, no sign of a needle being inserted into a vein, even though he remembers the feeling.

What the hell?

On a hunch, he takes his razor out of the cabinet above the little sink, runs the blade across the palm of his hand. He hisses at the sting, dropping the razor into the sink.

The skin peels back and blood oozes up, just as it should. Then, just as quickly and impossibly easily, the cut closes up in front of his eyes, skin knitting together so that there’s nothing left to show that there was any cut there a moment before.

Sam feels the air leave his lungs in a gush as a sudden thought hits him.

He turns to the bed and shakes Dean, vigorously this time.

“Dean? Wake up. Wake up! What the hell did you do? What did you do to me, goddamn it?”

Under Sam’s determined efforts, Dean finally rouses. His eyelids flutter. He groans as Sam keeps shaking him, rolling over onto his belly to snuggle deeper into the bed at first, burying his face in the pillow Sam was sleeping on and grinding into the mattress with a moan that’s absolutely obscene.

“Dean!”

Sam pushes at him, forcing him to roll over. It surprises him that he’s strong enough to force Dean to move.

But then it doesn’t.

“What the fuck, Dean! What did you do? Did you - what? Turn me into a demon? Is that what happened? Am I like you now? Answer me!”

Dean rolls onto his back, blinking up at Sam, clearly fighting the urge to sleep. It’s obvious that Sam’s urgent tone has gotten through to him. He’s making every effort to concentrate, despite his exhaustion.

“Demon?” Dean’s speech is slurred. “You still think I’m a demon? Haven’t your Spidey-senses figured it out by now?”

“Figured what out? What the hell did you do to me, Dean? What the hell’s going on here?”

Dean pushes himself to sitting with obvious effort. “I should ask you the same thing,” he says, speech still slurred. “Why did you run, Sam? What happened? I thought we were bonding, man. I thought we were finally connecting.”

A stab of guilt pierces Sam as he senses Dean’s memories of panic and desperation when he figured out that Sam was gone. Sam leaving was always Dean’s worst fear, Sam sees that now. Somehow, he’s always known.

“I found the bodies,” Sam says. “Dead and decaying. In the dungeon.”

Dean takes a breath, lets it out. He scrubs a hand over his face. “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Sam stares. “That’s all you can say? Those were people, Dean. Hunters, sure, but human beings! You killed them just for trespassing. What the hell!”

Dean shakes his head. “I didn’t kill them, Sam.”

“What? Of course you did! How else did they end up stashed in a closet in the basement, huh?” Sam runs a hand through his hair. “Don’t lie to me, Dean. You killed those guys.”

Dean swings his legs over the side of the bed, clenching his fists in the blood-stained sheets.

“I can see how it looks that way, Sam, but the truth is, the wolves killed them, same as they killed you.”

Sam stares. “The wolves?”

“They’re protectors,” Dean goes on. “It’s their job. Somebody trespasses in those woods, they go after them. They keep the bunker safe from predators. And your people are pretty predacious.”

Sam’s jaw clenches. He thinks about the day he first arrived, the path through the woods that led straight up to the bunker’s front door.

“You’re lying,” he says. “When I first came here to collect my dad, there were no wolves. Not then.”

Dean lifts his eyes to Sam, deep pools of emerald green under long, dark lashes.

“That’s because they wanted you to come,” he almost whispers. “They wanted you because -”

Sam’s stomach flips. He knows why, although it doesn’t make any sense.

“And my dad -”

“Was just the bait,” Dean finishes. “To get you to come here in the first place.”

Sam could drown in those moss-green pools. He wants to.

“What did you do to me, Dean?” He gestures toward the trash can, at the needles and the tube and the bloody bandages. “What am I now?”

Dean takes a shaky breath. “I had to do it, Sam. I couldn’t let you die.”

“What. Did. You. Do.”

Dean’s eyes drop to the floor, and Sam senses his embarrassment. Dean’s abashed at what he did. Sam can sense it.

But he’s not sorry.

“I gave you a blood transfusion,” Dean admits. “You have my blood in you now.”

Sam gasps. He knew it, could already sense it, but hearing Dean say it shocks him anyway.

“So I’m like you now?” Sam spits out. “Immortal? Demonic?”

“Not demonic,” Dean says quickly, looking up. “There’s nothing inherently evil about it, Sam. My blood changes you. And yes, it keeps you alive. You won’t get sick, you’ll heal quickly from any wound, and you won’t age.”

“You didn’t ask,” Sam accuses, shaking his head. “This isn’t something I wanted, Dean.”

“You would’ve died!” Sam senses Dean’s earlier desperation, the moment he made the rash decision to do this.

Sam throws his hands up. “Then I should’ve died!”

He paces, irritation and frustration giving him boundless energy. His blood thrums.

“I couldn’t let that happen, Sammy.”

Dean’s voice breaks, and Sam stops pacing. The demon sits on the bed with his head down, hunched over in defeat. Sam can sense his fear, even now, that Sam will leave him, that he will drive Sam away, that he’s already driven Sam away. Sam will leave, and Dean will have no one to blame but himself.

Sam’s not going anywhere. But he’s not ready to say that to Dean. Not yet.

“You didn’t ask,” he says again.

Dean nods. “I couldn’t lose you. I did the only thing I could do.”

He shakes his head, looks up at Sam with eyes narrowed, jaw set tight, determined.

“And I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

Sam stares into those deep green pools for a moment, then he reaches down, grabs Dean by his collar, and drags him up. With his new strength, it’s easier than Sam had imagined. He pulls Dean against him, holding his gaze another moment until Dean’s eyes drop to Sam’s mouth and Sam can feel Dean’s erection pressed hard against his belly.

Sam captures Dean’s mouth in a bruising kiss, kisses him hard and thorough, angry and possessive. He thrusts his tongue into Dean’s mouth, feels Dean moan and open for him, senses Dean’s utter submission and the little flutter of hope deep inside him.

When he comes up for air, Dean looks dazed. His cheeks are flushed and his eyes are moist. His lashes flutter.

“Don’t,” Sam hisses, giving him a little shake. “Don’t do it again.”

He pushes Dean, who falls back on the bed. Then he stalks to the door, flings it open, and charges out, slamming it shut behind him.

He may forgive Dean, but not today.

Today, he’s got work to do.

//**//**//**

Sam spends the rest of the day shoveling dead bodies into giant trash bags, then hauling them up the stairs, down the hall, and out into the woods behind the garden. He chops down trees, creates a clearing, then builds a funeral pyre out of dead branches.

The wolves leave him alone now. He tries not to think about what that might mean.

With his new strength and endurance, he doesn’t get tired. His muscles don’t ache. He sweats, though, and by the time the fire has mostly done its job, Sam’s covered in sweat, dirt, and smoke, It’s been almost a full day since he woke up on the bed in the bunker, transformed. He watches the fire die as the sun comes up, then trudges back through the tunnel and into the garden.

Dean’s gone from his room when he gets back, and Sam’s relieved about that. He’s not as angry as he was earlier, but he doesn’t want to talk to Dean either. Not yet. He needs to figure a few things out first.

As he showers and shaves, he thinks about Dean’s curse, about how he’s apparently given it to Sam. He needs to understand more about that. Sam needs to figure out a way to cure them both now.

Dean’s powers of invisibility and teleportation haven’t translated to Sam, as far as he can tell. He’s just as psychic as ever, though. He can read Dean’s thoughts now, not just his feelings. Dean was head-over-heels for him when he first saw Sam, standing at the top of the stairs to the bunker’s entry, bold and brave and determined to save his dad. Dean had dreamed about Sam before he even saw him. His dreams were like Sam’s, riding in the car together.

With his enhanced power, Sam sees what Dean saw. He knows what Dean was thinking.

Sam’s got the upper hand in their relationship now. Crazy thing is, Sam probably always had the upper hand. Dean’s a bottomless well of insecurity and need, traumatized in a childhood from which he’s never recovered. His birth parents abandoned him, his adopted caregiver never loved him, and Dean feels he deserved it because he was a bad boy. He wasn’t good enough. It was all his fault. He feels he did terrible things, during his time as a hunter, and now he’s convinced he’s a bad man. A monster. He’s sure Sam will leave him. He feels he deserves it.

But Sam’s not leaving Dean. It may take some time to heal the rift Dean caused by doing this thing he’s done, but Sam will figure out a way to fix it, to fix Dean too, if he can. Nothing can stop him now.

NEXT CHAPTER