SPN Cinema entry: In A Parallel Time
Title In A Parallel Time
Author Brutti ma Buoni
Movie Prompt Martha Marcy May Marlene is an awesome, disturbing film about a young woman returning to her sister (and sister's husband) and 'normality' after some time living in a cult.
Characters/Pairings Sam, Dean/Lisa, but a gen fic at heart
Rating PG13 [Um, belatedly I realise there's some fairly explicit if fleeting sex in this. It's *still* gen at heart.]
Word Count 4100
Summary Despite appearances, this is not an all human AU, but it *is* an AU for post-Swan Song. Sam returns after a long absence, and things are not quite as he remembers them. Should he mention that?
Notes: As the film unfolds, we understand via flashbacks more about what drives M's odd behaviour, much more so than her sister does. Her sister is just trying to cope, glad M is back, but spooked by her weirdness. An external threat also looms, but I won't spoil just what - it doesn't affect this fic, which takes the initial premise of the film only, plus a quote for the title, and a lakeside location that isn't SPN canon. The fic gives that setting a good, hard SPN twist. The other important thing I've taken from the film is that it's got a strong double POV: M and her sister, not understanding what's happening in each other's worlds the way the viewer who sees both does. I’ve also borrowed one last structural thing I explain in an endnote.
The day he got Sam back, everything changed for Dean. Of course it did. You don't just lose your only brother for a year and change, and then say, "Oh hi," when he comes back from nowhere, and go on with life like it was nothing. Or, maybe you do. But you're not Dean Winchester.
The call came late, stupid o'clock, and Dean was exhausted after a long shift. So tempting, to leave the phone to ring. (He often wondered, after, what would have happened then. Nothing good, for Sam, he guessed.)
"… Dean?" The voice was soft, faraway, like on a much older phone system, crackling with distance or uncertainty.
"Sam? Sam is that you?" Fifteen months without one word from Sam, but Dean would never, ever mistake his baby brother's voice. Dean said his name loud enough to wake Lisa. She stirred, raising up on her elbows. She'd processed 'Sam' enough to be alert, trying to read Dean.
"Can you come get me?" It was a little soft, wavering. As though not sure of the answer.
"Of course I can," said Dean, before any practical thoughts intruded. "Uh, where are you?"
Far, it turned out, so they met halfway. Sam had some cash, then. It must have been a less scary kind of cult than Dean imagined. He didn't say cult, of course. Just 'where you were'. Code, non-judgemental.
It didn't matter where Sam had been. He was back. Dean had his arms around his brother. He was thin. Kind of dirty, and didn't smell great. But it was Sam, and Dean didn't plan on letting him go anytime soon.
*
Sam is out. Don't question it. Just live. If you can remember how that goes.
*
Sam was weird, though.
That shouldn't have been a surprise. Cults did that to their members, right? Took them out of society, so everything familiar was despised, everything inside the new fake family was the only right way?
Dean watched Sam drifting round the lake house, picking up eggplant and perfume like he'd never seen them before. He looked inhuman, almost, if there was such a thing. Like he'd been kidnapped by aliens, brainwashed and returned
Dean found himself in kitchen-corners, under the blankets, out on the deck, discreet little chats with Lisa. About Sam. Away from Sam, and hidden. What should they do? Did he need medical help? Should they find a shrink? (On whose funds, neither of them asked. They were comfortable enough, but they didn't have much in savings. Nothing in the way of health insurance to cover a random brother back from oblivion.)
Sam stripped naked to swim. Every morning. Not like Dean's Sam, reliably prudish and eye-rolling at his older brother. And he stayed in the (definitely not warm) lake waters too long, rubbing and sluicing at his skin and hair. Dean watched him, pretending to wash breakfast things for long, worried minutes.
The fourth day, Lisa caught him. She rested her face between his shoulder blades, spoke into his back. "He's not okay. You know that." She came to stand beside Dean, watching silently as Sam dunked and scrubbed, dunked and scrubbed, till his skin was red. "People who do that… It's like he can't get clean."
Sam looked up, from the lake. No way could he see in at the window, not at that angle and water-bleary, but he stopped, and Dean could have sworn they made eye contact.
Late that night, Sam got in bed with them, and Dean couldn't pretend everything would be okay anymore.
*
Sam remembers the fall. The fall into nothing and hell all at once. Knowing he was going into the cage. Knowing why. Glorying, even as he screamed in fear at his own sacrifice. It was the biggest thing he'd ever done. He could never take it back.
But Dean would be okay, in his other life. Forgetting. There was that. That, Sam could hold onto.
*
Dean and Lisa were fucking, slow and unhurried, more about trying to work through the day's tension than because anyone needed to come now, right now.
And then Lisa screamed.
Dean's head shot up, but he looked first in the wrong direction, so he had time to process the way the mattress was shifting, from a heavy weight behind him, the hint of fabric pressing against his hip, as the weight of Sam's body pressed the covers close. As his head whipped around, he knew exactly what he'd see: Sam, the way Sam used to get into bed with him as a kid, all ruffled hair and pleading eyes. Looking down at Dean, as Dean screwed his head around and upwards, trying to look at Sam even as he tried to cover Lisa.
"Can I get in bed with you," Sam asked, simple and clear as a tired four year old. The child he no longer was.
"No!" Lisa shouted, the strain in her voice evident. She was trying to be reasonable, but still mad as hell and horrified. Dean could feel her rigid against him. His dick was trying to go limp, but clamped in her suddenly-clenched cunt he had a moment of stupid fear that he'd never get free. Tried not to let on, to anyone.
Sam blinked at them. Said nothing.
"Sammy," Dean tried, "It's bedtime." Back to childhood terms. It didn't work so well with Sam at five, but it seemed to get through this time. At least, he stood up, and moved away, silently closing the door behind him.
Dean exhaled heavily, resting his forehead on Lisa's.
"You're right. He's not all right at all."
*
Sam remembers the cage. Remembers the first few times, before it all merged, that he was split in half, fucked to hell and back, flayed and sliced, speared and impaled and violated. Always holding on to the truth, that it was worth it. That he could bear it, for the world.
Until he couldn't hold on any more. And he remembered that his brother had been here before, and had done just the same. And he took up the instruments of torture.
And he taught Michael and his own brother how to bear.
*
Dean tried to talk to Sam. Of course he did. He might not be the most emotionally literate guy ever, but his devastated, silent, weird brother returned from God knew where? Yeah, he'd try to talk.
It didn't go well. Partly because Dean was really trying to avoid the word 'cult' or sound too judgmental (Lisa coached him on this part). So it was a little hard to ask for details. Without details, Dean found it hard to judge just how crazy Sam was, if he was crazy at all. (Lisa didn't want him to say 'crazy' either. But Dean didn't have another word for 'adult guy who used to understand privacy getting into bed with us when we're fucking'.)
He was forced into oblique questions. "How was it… where you were?" "Did you meet nice people?" "Do you miss it?"
When he asked the last question, something flashed across Sam's face, like a vision of hell. Except that was crazy talk of itself, and Dean didn't know where the words had come from. But Sam shook it off. "I'm okay. I did important things, before."
"What things?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Try me."
"You've forgotten what it's like." And Sam walked out.
See? Crazy. Because Dean had a perfectly decent memory, thank you. For their Kansas childhood, Sam's law degree, the whole shebang. For Lisa, and their life together. And for the day Sam just wasn't there anymore.
Dean maybe went a little crazy when he lost Sam, but he wasn’t insane-crazy. Not like forgetting stuff crazy. Nothing like that.
*
Getting out of the cage is sweet release and happiness, right? Everything in Sam’s world is okay now.
Hah. Yeah, right. Because you get to be in the cage, forever, and it doesn’t change you at all.
Don’t mistake it. Sam wants to be out, back, safe, not in pain, not causing pain. But it’s inexplicable and it feels…
It feels wrong. That’s how it feels. Like he isn’t Sam anymore. Like all of that was a lie, all the stuff in his head a lie. And that would make him crazy, right?
Doesn’t help, that he’s living Dean’s lie, and Lisa’s lie, every moment. The lie that Sam constructed for them, as he was falling. The lie that Lucifer or Michael or God gave him, as reward or price or whatever Sam doesn’t understand. But it was offered as he fell, and he took it. So Dean would be okay.
Sam remembers before. The light, sweet connection of Dean and Lisa. Nothing like this intense, domestic normality. Sam remembers Ben. He wonders what happened to Ben. That hadn’t been a part of the deal.
Sam hopes he’s not in hell. That would be bad.
*
Sam started going for long walks. It made Dean a little uneasy, like Sam might just vanish again. Or something else.
Lisa didn’t trust Sam. Didn’t think leaving him alone was such a good idea. “He’s… he needs help, Dean. Help we’re not giving him. Whatever they did to him, it’s not the Sam I remember.”
Dean thought, before he could stop himself, that there was damn all for Lisa to remember about Sam. But then he caught the thought, examined it, remembered years of living with Lisa, Sam around and about. Of course Lisa knew Sam from before. Dean knew that. It felt right, there being a third person with him and Lisa. Younger. Sam fitted.
After a week of watching Sam walk away and having him come back, Dean relaxed a little. That was the day Sam didn’t come home till after dark, when Dean was halfway to calling the cops (who wouldn’t act, he knew that - remembered it from the last time, when they said a healthy twentysomething didn’t have to come home every night, even though everything inside Dean said how much Sam should be there, every night.
This night, when Sam came into sight, Dean’s gut-clench relaxed, just enough to say he’s home.
And then Dean saw the blood. Encrusted under Sam’s fingernails. Smudged on his cheek.
*
You can’t summon great demons with deer blood, but it’s enough. Sam whispers into the chalice, makes a connection.
Whispers come back. Minor demons, hearing Sam Winchester’s voice, and they start buzzing with it, till the blood bowl is humming in Sam’s hands, and he raises it to his lips.
He doesn’t drink the blood. That’s craziness. He doesn’t talk back to the demons, not once he knows they are real. He doesn’t want the demons. He just needed to know they were out there. That every moment of normality with Dean and Lisa is just a thin skin on the reality of deep, dark evil across this world.
He exorcises the chalice, and it becomes just his thermos cup once more. He’s just a hiker. It’s all normal.
He doesn’t remember to wash himself clean of the blood, till he sees Dean’s horrified gaze. Sam’s been drenched in blood since he can remember.
*
Dean didn’t tell Lisa. What could he say? (“Yeah, so he’s a crazy man, you were right. I think he drank some weasel’s blood today, or something.”) Worse, he didn’t even want to tell her. It wasn’t her world.
But they shared their world now. Right?
That night, he dreamed. Crazy dreams, crazy enough for Sam. With guns and black-eyed demons. Nomadic children in a muscle car. Women blazing on the ceilings of happy homes. Lisa with a kid, a stranger to Dean. All wrong. All familiar. He woke in the middle of the night, heart pounding.
Lisa slept, oblivious.
Dean slipped out of their room, along the hallway, and into Sam’s room. Smaller, with nothing Sam-ish about it except for the duffel he’d arrived with. So few possessions, but they smelt of Sam and home.
Sam was awkwardly sprawled in the guest double, his bulk too large for ordinary bedrooms. The dreamworld was still with Dean, deep in, and he couldn’t shake the notion this was real, how life should be. He flipped up one side of the covers, and crawled in to the crowded bed. Sam grumbled under his breath and shifted enough to make space, pressing the two bodies too close for comfort, unless this was your comfort.
Sam’s hand was in front of Dean’s face. There were still traces of blood on his skin. Dean closed his eyes, relaxed and slept.
*
Sam isn't sleeping. Sam is home. There's never been any other home than this, where Dean is. He can't remember why he would ever have left.
He woke the demons. Are they coming? It didn't seem so important, when he needed so badly to know that his memories were real. But now Sam's coming back into his right mind, just a little. And he remembers that you don't talk to demons. Not ever.
What did he do?
*
Dean woke to a sense of deep rightness, and the knowledge he'd done something insane. He's thirty-one years old, and he should not be in bed with his little brother.
As his eyes opened, he found someone else was of that opinion.
"Lisa?"
"Dean?" Her tone was cold, not angry. "What the hell?"
He considered lying. Sam could have had a nightmare, been sleepwalking… No. "I don't know, Lees. I just… I missed him."
His eyes dropped closed. He couldn't think what to say. Didn't want to move. Didn't understand why not.
Something stirred, at the back of his brain.
*
Sam listens to his brother feeling the first quivers of memory. Feels the rigidity of his body as Lisa talks.
Dean says, "Sam? When did we sleep like this? I can't remember."
Sam says, "Long time back." Two years, maybe, the last time? A few nights before Dean died, for comfort. Not often, not since Sam left for Stanford. But most nights before that. To Sam, it feels inevitable. Odd, to see Dean forgetting/remembering in half realisation. It’s important Dean shouldn’t remember, of course, but Sam’s little-brother-trusting instincts kind of thought he would.
They get up slowly, avoiding each other's eyes, and unsurprised to find Lisa has left by the time they make it to breakfast. Something in Dean is breaking down. He's slower, like there's something between him and each action. Sam wonders when the questions will come; the ones that Lisa is already asking.
But when he goes out for his walk today, Dean comes too. And at the store, there's a guy whose eyes turn black, just for a second, as Sam passes.
*
Dean didn't understand a word of what Sam was trying to tell him, but he recognised the urgency. Demons? It’s one way to think of the cult, he guessed. Something other. Maybe that was healthy. So long as Sam didn’t think it was real, and the way Sam was acting, Dean wasn’t too certain about that.
“Will they try to take you back?” Dean did a lot of research, after Sam left. Lisa called it an obsession, but he just needed to know. What were the chances of Sam coming back? Would he still be Sam if he did? Dean hadn’t even wondered, though the websites he found cured that pretty fast, whether Sam would be allowed to leave, or killed if he left. Dean bought a gun then, to Lisa’s horror. It made him feel more secure. He took lessons, found himself a natural shot (“You sure you never did this before?” It was a compliment he couldn’t feel was justified, somehow, though he told Lisa all about it. Only to reassure her.)
Now, Sam nodded. “I think so. I think we’re in danger. Call Lisa, tell her to go someplace else. Get the weapons.”
“What?”
Sam looked at him. “You don’t have weapons?”
“No! Well, one handgun.” Dean felt defensive, suddenly, at the incredulity in Sam’s eyes. “We don’t want an arsenal in our home, Sam. It’s not how people should live.”
Sam closed his eyes, briefly. “Dean. They will kill us. That’s what they do.”
A piece of panic, so solid he could feel its outline, settled in Dean’s stomach. “You mean it.”
His brother nodded, very solemn. “I know what they’re like. I was a part of them for a long time.”
The panic-lump burned, acid and stark, over what Sam was saying, without words. My little brother. Six seven of pumped muscle and brilliant brain. Not a guy to cross, if he became something other than the thoughtful scholar Dean knew. My little brother killed someone. Probably. No, definitely, Dean realised, looking at Sam’s expression.
"Man," he said, shaking his head. "I… I feel like I don't even know you, Sam."
*
Sam should leave it. Should, should. But the habits of hell are burning at his backbrain, and the demons are coming, and it's too much. So he breaks it all up.
"No, Dean. No, you don't know me," he says, and Dean's face crumples, just for a second, because in Dean's world brothers don't live like that. And Sam moves in, jabs in the knife again, twists it deep, so Dean will never be right again. "But who you really don't know? It's you. You aren't this-" He waves around at domesticity, normality, falsehood. "You're a hunter. I'm a hunter. Our grandfather, mother and father were killed by a yellow-eyed demon who tried to turn me into a weapon to open the gates of hell." (It's a sloppy précis, it's brutal, and Dean will never take it in, but Sam needs to say it.) "Then we raised Lucifer, and we took him down, in my body, into a cage where he was supposed to stay forever. With me. But I got out, and now I think the demons are coming."
Dean's head is going, metronomically, right-left-right-deny-deny-deny. Of course.
"And when I fell, Lucifer offered me something, and I took it. It was a new life for you. With Lisa. Like normality." Dean stops still, stops breathing. "Dean… where's Ben?"
Sam doesn't know what he expects to hear. Expects Dean to blank him, most likely. But Dean shakes his head, not denial this time but shaking out of his trance. "Fuck you. FUCK you, Sam. Don't speak that name to me with your lies. You came here, you didn't even mention Ben once, and now you say this shit and you say his name in the same breath?"
A pit opens up inside Sam. Ben was here, now he isn't. Dean's eyes are red, his fury palpable. "Shit. Ben's dead?"
He sees stars.
*
Dean punched his little brother. Dean didn't do stuff like that. But Sam talking about Ben that way, like he was just a thing, an interesting fact… Not a kid Dean had come to love like his own, who Lisa mourned every day, every hour. Who had got ill just when Sam-
Something clicked in Dean's brain. A small click. Not a revelation. Just… Ben had fallen ill just when Sam vanished.
That was a coincidence…
Dean Winchester was born in Lawrence, Kansas. He had a normal childhood, apart from losing his mom at a young age. He grew up very close to his dad, and his little brother as they-
Dean's brain fritzed. There were memories there, but not solid ones. Not clear. He could remember car journeys with Dad and Sam, hot and dusty, that felt real. But groping for schools, schoolfriends, neighbours, sports teams… it was all there, but it didn't add up. The schools, too many. The neighbours, nameless and worried.
This demon bullshit was…
Black eyed demons. Yellow eyed demons. Mom, on the ceiling, in flames. Jess, likewise. Dad, making a deal. Dean, making a deal. Sam dead. A crossroads. The hell hounds. Hell. Burned flesh on his arm. Raised from perdition. Cas. Ruby. Lucifer. Michael. The Pit.
Dean making Sam a promise. Dean at Lisa's door, and the moment when a tentative, "Can I come in?" became a routine, "Hey, honey. Tiring day?" and she started to cry, because the doctor was there, for Ben.
The entangled strands wouldn't disentangle. Dean didn't even know what was true. He remembered the look of Ben, so small in his bed, burned up by the disease that flared from nowhere and took away the kid in weeks. Remembered weeks. That was true, wasn't it?
Sam started to stir, and something cracked outside the house. Dean's head whipped around. Just a deer in the woods, this time. But-
Dean Winchester, the hunter, started to re-emerge.
He called Lisa, asked her to stay with Annie while he and Sam talked. She got it. ("Is he violent?" "Not yet," Dean prevaricated. Probably Sam wouldn't get violent with him or Lisa, but demons…). Dean needed her safe, and he needed her elsewhere, away from demons and Dean's realisation about what happened to her son.
Sam spat blood onto the floor. "I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know Ben would be the price."
"You took a deal from the devil, Sammy," said Dean. "Should have learned by now."
Sam blinks at him, still dazed from the punch. "You believe me?"
Dean shrugged. "I remember."
*
Sam knows he doesn't, not really. Dean from last year, his Dean, would have Sam tight in his arms just now, weeping into his neck for a brother returned. Sam remembers doing that for Dean. That was how it was, when the person you loved most in the world came back from hell.
But this isn't quite his Dean. There's a skin of normality, of Lisa, of things that aren't the Winchester way the way Sam learned them. He should be glad.
He hates it.
*
Sam looked off, more than what a right hook to the jaw could explain. But he was up and moving. "One gun? Nothing you hid and didn't think about?"
Dean shook his head. "We got some kitchen salt, that'll be about it for weapons." No call for iron in these soft, friendly woodlands.
"Car?"
"SUV." At least Lisa took the Prius. The Winchester brothers off to fight demons, in that? Dean almost laughed, though there was nothing else remotely to amuse.
"Okay. We take off, we get help. Maybe Rufus, he's closer'n Bobby. Weapons, what else?"
"My wife?" Dean said it acidly, and Sam recoiled visibly. (Were they even married? Dean truly believed so, but memories of a wedding wouldn't come to mind.) "Lisa's safe. Told her you'd gone insane and I was dealing. Any clue how many demons, when they're coming? For what? Some kind of plan? They want you back?"
Sam gaped back at him. "I… I have no idea."
Dean nodded. "Sure. Why would you? We'll deal." Big brother Dean, till the end of the world. Maybe there were no demons, not really. Maybe they'd find Ben, secretly alive, and torture the demons till they released him, like the heroes they were (though he remembered the cold little body, the blue lips, the undertaker's kind eyes, and didn't believe that). Maybe all Sam needed was to get away, get some help, get hell out of his brain. Maybe they'd live till tomorrow.
Sam was still his brother, weird and inexplicable though the two jostling lifelines sat in Dean's head. Dead, in the cage, in a cult, none of the above - Sam was back. Dean would protect him.
Dean wouldn’t think about what that meant for Lisa. And Ben. Not till after they lived a little longer. Because Dean wouldn't have taken that deal. He knew better now. But he needed to push that thought away till there was time.
Loaded up fast, into the car, onto the road, Sam clutching their only gun, surrounded by rock salt and on edge as hell. Dean's mind felt split. Total familiarity, total sense of wrongness. Fear and disbelief. Sam back, Sam insane, Sam the killer, Sam bringing bad things, Sam who was the only home Dean ever had.
A Jeep passing them on the road, black car, driver's head turning as they passed. For a moment, Dean was certain that his eyes flashed black.
***
ENDNOTE: Okay, don't hurt me for the abrupt ending. Totally took that from the film too. Still really, really worth seeing the film, though.
Author Brutti ma Buoni
Movie Prompt Martha Marcy May Marlene is an awesome, disturbing film about a young woman returning to her sister (and sister's husband) and 'normality' after some time living in a cult.
Characters/Pairings Sam, Dean/Lisa, but a gen fic at heart
Rating PG13 [Um, belatedly I realise there's some fairly explicit if fleeting sex in this. It's *still* gen at heart.]
Word Count 4100
Summary Despite appearances, this is not an all human AU, but it *is* an AU for post-Swan Song. Sam returns after a long absence, and things are not quite as he remembers them. Should he mention that?
Notes: As the film unfolds, we understand via flashbacks more about what drives M's odd behaviour, much more so than her sister does. Her sister is just trying to cope, glad M is back, but spooked by her weirdness. An external threat also looms, but I won't spoil just what - it doesn't affect this fic, which takes the initial premise of the film only, plus a quote for the title, and a lakeside location that isn't SPN canon. The fic gives that setting a good, hard SPN twist. The other important thing I've taken from the film is that it's got a strong double POV: M and her sister, not understanding what's happening in each other's worlds the way the viewer who sees both does. I’ve also borrowed one last structural thing I explain in an endnote.
The day he got Sam back, everything changed for Dean. Of course it did. You don't just lose your only brother for a year and change, and then say, "Oh hi," when he comes back from nowhere, and go on with life like it was nothing. Or, maybe you do. But you're not Dean Winchester.
The call came late, stupid o'clock, and Dean was exhausted after a long shift. So tempting, to leave the phone to ring. (He often wondered, after, what would have happened then. Nothing good, for Sam, he guessed.)
"… Dean?" The voice was soft, faraway, like on a much older phone system, crackling with distance or uncertainty.
"Sam? Sam is that you?" Fifteen months without one word from Sam, but Dean would never, ever mistake his baby brother's voice. Dean said his name loud enough to wake Lisa. She stirred, raising up on her elbows. She'd processed 'Sam' enough to be alert, trying to read Dean.
"Can you come get me?" It was a little soft, wavering. As though not sure of the answer.
"Of course I can," said Dean, before any practical thoughts intruded. "Uh, where are you?"
Far, it turned out, so they met halfway. Sam had some cash, then. It must have been a less scary kind of cult than Dean imagined. He didn't say cult, of course. Just 'where you were'. Code, non-judgemental.
It didn't matter where Sam had been. He was back. Dean had his arms around his brother. He was thin. Kind of dirty, and didn't smell great. But it was Sam, and Dean didn't plan on letting him go anytime soon.
*
Sam is out. Don't question it. Just live. If you can remember how that goes.
*
Sam was weird, though.
That shouldn't have been a surprise. Cults did that to their members, right? Took them out of society, so everything familiar was despised, everything inside the new fake family was the only right way?
Dean watched Sam drifting round the lake house, picking up eggplant and perfume like he'd never seen them before. He looked inhuman, almost, if there was such a thing. Like he'd been kidnapped by aliens, brainwashed and returned
Dean found himself in kitchen-corners, under the blankets, out on the deck, discreet little chats with Lisa. About Sam. Away from Sam, and hidden. What should they do? Did he need medical help? Should they find a shrink? (On whose funds, neither of them asked. They were comfortable enough, but they didn't have much in savings. Nothing in the way of health insurance to cover a random brother back from oblivion.)
Sam stripped naked to swim. Every morning. Not like Dean's Sam, reliably prudish and eye-rolling at his older brother. And he stayed in the (definitely not warm) lake waters too long, rubbing and sluicing at his skin and hair. Dean watched him, pretending to wash breakfast things for long, worried minutes.
The fourth day, Lisa caught him. She rested her face between his shoulder blades, spoke into his back. "He's not okay. You know that." She came to stand beside Dean, watching silently as Sam dunked and scrubbed, dunked and scrubbed, till his skin was red. "People who do that… It's like he can't get clean."
Sam looked up, from the lake. No way could he see in at the window, not at that angle and water-bleary, but he stopped, and Dean could have sworn they made eye contact.
Late that night, Sam got in bed with them, and Dean couldn't pretend everything would be okay anymore.
*
Sam remembers the fall. The fall into nothing and hell all at once. Knowing he was going into the cage. Knowing why. Glorying, even as he screamed in fear at his own sacrifice. It was the biggest thing he'd ever done. He could never take it back.
But Dean would be okay, in his other life. Forgetting. There was that. That, Sam could hold onto.
*
Dean and Lisa were fucking, slow and unhurried, more about trying to work through the day's tension than because anyone needed to come now, right now.
And then Lisa screamed.
Dean's head shot up, but he looked first in the wrong direction, so he had time to process the way the mattress was shifting, from a heavy weight behind him, the hint of fabric pressing against his hip, as the weight of Sam's body pressed the covers close. As his head whipped around, he knew exactly what he'd see: Sam, the way Sam used to get into bed with him as a kid, all ruffled hair and pleading eyes. Looking down at Dean, as Dean screwed his head around and upwards, trying to look at Sam even as he tried to cover Lisa.
"Can I get in bed with you," Sam asked, simple and clear as a tired four year old. The child he no longer was.
"No!" Lisa shouted, the strain in her voice evident. She was trying to be reasonable, but still mad as hell and horrified. Dean could feel her rigid against him. His dick was trying to go limp, but clamped in her suddenly-clenched cunt he had a moment of stupid fear that he'd never get free. Tried not to let on, to anyone.
Sam blinked at them. Said nothing.
"Sammy," Dean tried, "It's bedtime." Back to childhood terms. It didn't work so well with Sam at five, but it seemed to get through this time. At least, he stood up, and moved away, silently closing the door behind him.
Dean exhaled heavily, resting his forehead on Lisa's.
"You're right. He's not all right at all."
*
Sam remembers the cage. Remembers the first few times, before it all merged, that he was split in half, fucked to hell and back, flayed and sliced, speared and impaled and violated. Always holding on to the truth, that it was worth it. That he could bear it, for the world.
Until he couldn't hold on any more. And he remembered that his brother had been here before, and had done just the same. And he took up the instruments of torture.
And he taught Michael and his own brother how to bear.
*
Dean tried to talk to Sam. Of course he did. He might not be the most emotionally literate guy ever, but his devastated, silent, weird brother returned from God knew where? Yeah, he'd try to talk.
It didn't go well. Partly because Dean was really trying to avoid the word 'cult' or sound too judgmental (Lisa coached him on this part). So it was a little hard to ask for details. Without details, Dean found it hard to judge just how crazy Sam was, if he was crazy at all. (Lisa didn't want him to say 'crazy' either. But Dean didn't have another word for 'adult guy who used to understand privacy getting into bed with us when we're fucking'.)
He was forced into oblique questions. "How was it… where you were?" "Did you meet nice people?" "Do you miss it?"
When he asked the last question, something flashed across Sam's face, like a vision of hell. Except that was crazy talk of itself, and Dean didn't know where the words had come from. But Sam shook it off. "I'm okay. I did important things, before."
"What things?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Try me."
"You've forgotten what it's like." And Sam walked out.
See? Crazy. Because Dean had a perfectly decent memory, thank you. For their Kansas childhood, Sam's law degree, the whole shebang. For Lisa, and their life together. And for the day Sam just wasn't there anymore.
Dean maybe went a little crazy when he lost Sam, but he wasn’t insane-crazy. Not like forgetting stuff crazy. Nothing like that.
*
Getting out of the cage is sweet release and happiness, right? Everything in Sam’s world is okay now.
Hah. Yeah, right. Because you get to be in the cage, forever, and it doesn’t change you at all.
Don’t mistake it. Sam wants to be out, back, safe, not in pain, not causing pain. But it’s inexplicable and it feels…
It feels wrong. That’s how it feels. Like he isn’t Sam anymore. Like all of that was a lie, all the stuff in his head a lie. And that would make him crazy, right?
Doesn’t help, that he’s living Dean’s lie, and Lisa’s lie, every moment. The lie that Sam constructed for them, as he was falling. The lie that Lucifer or Michael or God gave him, as reward or price or whatever Sam doesn’t understand. But it was offered as he fell, and he took it. So Dean would be okay.
Sam remembers before. The light, sweet connection of Dean and Lisa. Nothing like this intense, domestic normality. Sam remembers Ben. He wonders what happened to Ben. That hadn’t been a part of the deal.
Sam hopes he’s not in hell. That would be bad.
*
Sam started going for long walks. It made Dean a little uneasy, like Sam might just vanish again. Or something else.
Lisa didn’t trust Sam. Didn’t think leaving him alone was such a good idea. “He’s… he needs help, Dean. Help we’re not giving him. Whatever they did to him, it’s not the Sam I remember.”
Dean thought, before he could stop himself, that there was damn all for Lisa to remember about Sam. But then he caught the thought, examined it, remembered years of living with Lisa, Sam around and about. Of course Lisa knew Sam from before. Dean knew that. It felt right, there being a third person with him and Lisa. Younger. Sam fitted.
After a week of watching Sam walk away and having him come back, Dean relaxed a little. That was the day Sam didn’t come home till after dark, when Dean was halfway to calling the cops (who wouldn’t act, he knew that - remembered it from the last time, when they said a healthy twentysomething didn’t have to come home every night, even though everything inside Dean said how much Sam should be there, every night.
This night, when Sam came into sight, Dean’s gut-clench relaxed, just enough to say he’s home.
And then Dean saw the blood. Encrusted under Sam’s fingernails. Smudged on his cheek.
*
You can’t summon great demons with deer blood, but it’s enough. Sam whispers into the chalice, makes a connection.
Whispers come back. Minor demons, hearing Sam Winchester’s voice, and they start buzzing with it, till the blood bowl is humming in Sam’s hands, and he raises it to his lips.
He doesn’t drink the blood. That’s craziness. He doesn’t talk back to the demons, not once he knows they are real. He doesn’t want the demons. He just needed to know they were out there. That every moment of normality with Dean and Lisa is just a thin skin on the reality of deep, dark evil across this world.
He exorcises the chalice, and it becomes just his thermos cup once more. He’s just a hiker. It’s all normal.
He doesn’t remember to wash himself clean of the blood, till he sees Dean’s horrified gaze. Sam’s been drenched in blood since he can remember.
*
Dean didn’t tell Lisa. What could he say? (“Yeah, so he’s a crazy man, you were right. I think he drank some weasel’s blood today, or something.”) Worse, he didn’t even want to tell her. It wasn’t her world.
But they shared their world now. Right?
That night, he dreamed. Crazy dreams, crazy enough for Sam. With guns and black-eyed demons. Nomadic children in a muscle car. Women blazing on the ceilings of happy homes. Lisa with a kid, a stranger to Dean. All wrong. All familiar. He woke in the middle of the night, heart pounding.
Lisa slept, oblivious.
Dean slipped out of their room, along the hallway, and into Sam’s room. Smaller, with nothing Sam-ish about it except for the duffel he’d arrived with. So few possessions, but they smelt of Sam and home.
Sam was awkwardly sprawled in the guest double, his bulk too large for ordinary bedrooms. The dreamworld was still with Dean, deep in, and he couldn’t shake the notion this was real, how life should be. He flipped up one side of the covers, and crawled in to the crowded bed. Sam grumbled under his breath and shifted enough to make space, pressing the two bodies too close for comfort, unless this was your comfort.
Sam’s hand was in front of Dean’s face. There were still traces of blood on his skin. Dean closed his eyes, relaxed and slept.
*
Sam isn't sleeping. Sam is home. There's never been any other home than this, where Dean is. He can't remember why he would ever have left.
He woke the demons. Are they coming? It didn't seem so important, when he needed so badly to know that his memories were real. But now Sam's coming back into his right mind, just a little. And he remembers that you don't talk to demons. Not ever.
What did he do?
*
Dean woke to a sense of deep rightness, and the knowledge he'd done something insane. He's thirty-one years old, and he should not be in bed with his little brother.
As his eyes opened, he found someone else was of that opinion.
"Lisa?"
"Dean?" Her tone was cold, not angry. "What the hell?"
He considered lying. Sam could have had a nightmare, been sleepwalking… No. "I don't know, Lees. I just… I missed him."
His eyes dropped closed. He couldn't think what to say. Didn't want to move. Didn't understand why not.
Something stirred, at the back of his brain.
*
Sam listens to his brother feeling the first quivers of memory. Feels the rigidity of his body as Lisa talks.
Dean says, "Sam? When did we sleep like this? I can't remember."
Sam says, "Long time back." Two years, maybe, the last time? A few nights before Dean died, for comfort. Not often, not since Sam left for Stanford. But most nights before that. To Sam, it feels inevitable. Odd, to see Dean forgetting/remembering in half realisation. It’s important Dean shouldn’t remember, of course, but Sam’s little-brother-trusting instincts kind of thought he would.
They get up slowly, avoiding each other's eyes, and unsurprised to find Lisa has left by the time they make it to breakfast. Something in Dean is breaking down. He's slower, like there's something between him and each action. Sam wonders when the questions will come; the ones that Lisa is already asking.
But when he goes out for his walk today, Dean comes too. And at the store, there's a guy whose eyes turn black, just for a second, as Sam passes.
*
Dean didn't understand a word of what Sam was trying to tell him, but he recognised the urgency. Demons? It’s one way to think of the cult, he guessed. Something other. Maybe that was healthy. So long as Sam didn’t think it was real, and the way Sam was acting, Dean wasn’t too certain about that.
“Will they try to take you back?” Dean did a lot of research, after Sam left. Lisa called it an obsession, but he just needed to know. What were the chances of Sam coming back? Would he still be Sam if he did? Dean hadn’t even wondered, though the websites he found cured that pretty fast, whether Sam would be allowed to leave, or killed if he left. Dean bought a gun then, to Lisa’s horror. It made him feel more secure. He took lessons, found himself a natural shot (“You sure you never did this before?” It was a compliment he couldn’t feel was justified, somehow, though he told Lisa all about it. Only to reassure her.)
Now, Sam nodded. “I think so. I think we’re in danger. Call Lisa, tell her to go someplace else. Get the weapons.”
“What?”
Sam looked at him. “You don’t have weapons?”
“No! Well, one handgun.” Dean felt defensive, suddenly, at the incredulity in Sam’s eyes. “We don’t want an arsenal in our home, Sam. It’s not how people should live.”
Sam closed his eyes, briefly. “Dean. They will kill us. That’s what they do.”
A piece of panic, so solid he could feel its outline, settled in Dean’s stomach. “You mean it.”
His brother nodded, very solemn. “I know what they’re like. I was a part of them for a long time.”
The panic-lump burned, acid and stark, over what Sam was saying, without words. My little brother. Six seven of pumped muscle and brilliant brain. Not a guy to cross, if he became something other than the thoughtful scholar Dean knew. My little brother killed someone. Probably. No, definitely, Dean realised, looking at Sam’s expression.
"Man," he said, shaking his head. "I… I feel like I don't even know you, Sam."
*
Sam should leave it. Should, should. But the habits of hell are burning at his backbrain, and the demons are coming, and it's too much. So he breaks it all up.
"No, Dean. No, you don't know me," he says, and Dean's face crumples, just for a second, because in Dean's world brothers don't live like that. And Sam moves in, jabs in the knife again, twists it deep, so Dean will never be right again. "But who you really don't know? It's you. You aren't this-" He waves around at domesticity, normality, falsehood. "You're a hunter. I'm a hunter. Our grandfather, mother and father were killed by a yellow-eyed demon who tried to turn me into a weapon to open the gates of hell." (It's a sloppy précis, it's brutal, and Dean will never take it in, but Sam needs to say it.) "Then we raised Lucifer, and we took him down, in my body, into a cage where he was supposed to stay forever. With me. But I got out, and now I think the demons are coming."
Dean's head is going, metronomically, right-left-right-deny-deny-deny. Of course.
"And when I fell, Lucifer offered me something, and I took it. It was a new life for you. With Lisa. Like normality." Dean stops still, stops breathing. "Dean… where's Ben?"
Sam doesn't know what he expects to hear. Expects Dean to blank him, most likely. But Dean shakes his head, not denial this time but shaking out of his trance. "Fuck you. FUCK you, Sam. Don't speak that name to me with your lies. You came here, you didn't even mention Ben once, and now you say this shit and you say his name in the same breath?"
A pit opens up inside Sam. Ben was here, now he isn't. Dean's eyes are red, his fury palpable. "Shit. Ben's dead?"
He sees stars.
*
Dean punched his little brother. Dean didn't do stuff like that. But Sam talking about Ben that way, like he was just a thing, an interesting fact… Not a kid Dean had come to love like his own, who Lisa mourned every day, every hour. Who had got ill just when Sam-
Something clicked in Dean's brain. A small click. Not a revelation. Just… Ben had fallen ill just when Sam vanished.
That was a coincidence…
Dean Winchester was born in Lawrence, Kansas. He had a normal childhood, apart from losing his mom at a young age. He grew up very close to his dad, and his little brother as they-
Dean's brain fritzed. There were memories there, but not solid ones. Not clear. He could remember car journeys with Dad and Sam, hot and dusty, that felt real. But groping for schools, schoolfriends, neighbours, sports teams… it was all there, but it didn't add up. The schools, too many. The neighbours, nameless and worried.
This demon bullshit was…
Black eyed demons. Yellow eyed demons. Mom, on the ceiling, in flames. Jess, likewise. Dad, making a deal. Dean, making a deal. Sam dead. A crossroads. The hell hounds. Hell. Burned flesh on his arm. Raised from perdition. Cas. Ruby. Lucifer. Michael. The Pit.
Dean making Sam a promise. Dean at Lisa's door, and the moment when a tentative, "Can I come in?" became a routine, "Hey, honey. Tiring day?" and she started to cry, because the doctor was there, for Ben.
The entangled strands wouldn't disentangle. Dean didn't even know what was true. He remembered the look of Ben, so small in his bed, burned up by the disease that flared from nowhere and took away the kid in weeks. Remembered weeks. That was true, wasn't it?
Sam started to stir, and something cracked outside the house. Dean's head whipped around. Just a deer in the woods, this time. But-
Dean Winchester, the hunter, started to re-emerge.
He called Lisa, asked her to stay with Annie while he and Sam talked. She got it. ("Is he violent?" "Not yet," Dean prevaricated. Probably Sam wouldn't get violent with him or Lisa, but demons…). Dean needed her safe, and he needed her elsewhere, away from demons and Dean's realisation about what happened to her son.
Sam spat blood onto the floor. "I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know Ben would be the price."
"You took a deal from the devil, Sammy," said Dean. "Should have learned by now."
Sam blinks at him, still dazed from the punch. "You believe me?"
Dean shrugged. "I remember."
*
Sam knows he doesn't, not really. Dean from last year, his Dean, would have Sam tight in his arms just now, weeping into his neck for a brother returned. Sam remembers doing that for Dean. That was how it was, when the person you loved most in the world came back from hell.
But this isn't quite his Dean. There's a skin of normality, of Lisa, of things that aren't the Winchester way the way Sam learned them. He should be glad.
He hates it.
*
Sam looked off, more than what a right hook to the jaw could explain. But he was up and moving. "One gun? Nothing you hid and didn't think about?"
Dean shook his head. "We got some kitchen salt, that'll be about it for weapons." No call for iron in these soft, friendly woodlands.
"Car?"
"SUV." At least Lisa took the Prius. The Winchester brothers off to fight demons, in that? Dean almost laughed, though there was nothing else remotely to amuse.
"Okay. We take off, we get help. Maybe Rufus, he's closer'n Bobby. Weapons, what else?"
"My wife?" Dean said it acidly, and Sam recoiled visibly. (Were they even married? Dean truly believed so, but memories of a wedding wouldn't come to mind.) "Lisa's safe. Told her you'd gone insane and I was dealing. Any clue how many demons, when they're coming? For what? Some kind of plan? They want you back?"
Sam gaped back at him. "I… I have no idea."
Dean nodded. "Sure. Why would you? We'll deal." Big brother Dean, till the end of the world. Maybe there were no demons, not really. Maybe they'd find Ben, secretly alive, and torture the demons till they released him, like the heroes they were (though he remembered the cold little body, the blue lips, the undertaker's kind eyes, and didn't believe that). Maybe all Sam needed was to get away, get some help, get hell out of his brain. Maybe they'd live till tomorrow.
Sam was still his brother, weird and inexplicable though the two jostling lifelines sat in Dean's head. Dead, in the cage, in a cult, none of the above - Sam was back. Dean would protect him.
Dean wouldn’t think about what that meant for Lisa. And Ben. Not till after they lived a little longer. Because Dean wouldn't have taken that deal. He knew better now. But he needed to push that thought away till there was time.
Loaded up fast, into the car, onto the road, Sam clutching their only gun, surrounded by rock salt and on edge as hell. Dean's mind felt split. Total familiarity, total sense of wrongness. Fear and disbelief. Sam back, Sam insane, Sam the killer, Sam bringing bad things, Sam who was the only home Dean ever had.
A Jeep passing them on the road, black car, driver's head turning as they passed. For a moment, Dean was certain that his eyes flashed black.
***
ENDNOTE: Okay, don't hurt me for the abrupt ending. Totally took that from the film too. Still really, really worth seeing the film, though.