These Days of Remembered Glory
So. I wrote this several months ago - almost nine months ago, now - as a reaction-fic to the s5 finale. I have since written several post-5.22 AUs, but this one, my first, remains the one I'm most fond of. With the intent of getting all my SPN fanfic in one place, I'm posting this here.
Warnings: SPOILERS for 5.22: Swan Song, and for pretty much the whole of Season 5. Swearing, weirdness, metaphor abuse, experiment no. I've-lost-count at getting Dean's voice to come out right, present-tense.
Summary: Sam's back - not quite in the shape or form Dean would want, and with a price that might be too high for him to pay, but Sam's definitely back, and Dean's not complaining.
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any of its characters.
(Random A/N: Looking back on this now, I find it amusing that this story - the basic concept behind it, anyway - kind of functions as a photographic negative of what eventually happens in canon s6.)
These Days of Remembered Glory
It's when the hallway light starts to flicker that Dean gets excited.
Lisa's pissed - didn't she just have that changed? - and gets Dean to fix it. She gets pissed a lot these days, Dean notes, and sometimes her fits of petty futile anger remind him of Sam so much he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Though he feels that his usual snark at that stage about time-of-months, while always drawing an annoyed snort and a swat from one of his brother's gigantic hands, will not be so well-received by Lisa.
But yeah, Dean's excited, because, hey. Take the hunter away from the hunting, but not the hunting from the hunter, and all that. Also, more importantly, if this is what he thinks (hopes) it is, then it is something - something filling the whistling void since, since. Since, well. He wants it to be what he hopes it is so bad; he wants that piece of LifewithSam, to take that lonesome festering grief and do something with it. He wants that LifewithSam to have been real, because everything that they were and could've become shouldn't be confined to a hole in the ground and a strained, tunnel-vision adherence to a promise made to a dead (dead? Worse than dead, and oh, lord, Sam -) man.
"Goddamit, Sam, I miss you," Dean whispers.
He pulls a chair to the wall and climbs on; squints at the light, tapping against the glass bulb with his nails. He's pretty sure he doesn't want to get disappointed if it's just a crappy replacement or wiring, or whatever. "Come on," he says. "Come on, you son of a bitch."
A chill seeps down the corridor and the light flickers again. Dean's jaw locks; his skin suddenly feels stretched too tight over his body, and his hair prickles on the back of his neck. He makes a quick inventory of his available resources: weapons still in the hidden compartment of the Impala's trunk, parked right by the front door; salt on the kitchen counter, down the hallway and to the left; iron poker that he's placed with blessed forethought by the chair. The chill deepens until Dean can see his breath, and the ensuing adrenaline is energy and Sam and this-is-our-family-business and I-haven't-been-forgotten.
Finally, he sees a form resolve to life ahead of him, a strange and unnatural twist of molecules that makes the air shimmer. He gets off the chair, and lifts the poker, ready. The light gives one last flicker before completely going out, and Dean… Dean can see.
Dean can see Sam.
Dean can see -
Dean can -
"Hey," Sam says, a little shyly, his hair falling into his eyes.
"Hey," Dean says back, his voice kind of shrill and squeaky, and, yeah, it hardly sounds earth-shattering, but Dean figures that the moisture in his eyes and the tremors cascading down his limbs says everything else that's needed.
Dean Winchester has not always had a great track record in keeping promises, but never let it be said that he doesn't try.
He's a mechanic, now - seemed about the only job that made sense - and life's been going on, at least as best as he can make it go (and damn if that doesn't sound like a lot of the junk he gets at work to fix). It was difficult at first - Lisa was ready with beer and sympathy and home when Dean came to her door for the second time, but once he could just about look past his own devouring grief, he could see how shaken she was: a glimpse into the fear and confusion and love and relief and whatever the hell it was that shone in her eyes when he stomped into her life again with cryptic warnings and reassurances and a whole load of emotional baggage.
Sometimes, Dean thinks (and he's had a lot of time to think) about the battle against the angels and demons, against the Apocalypse, and wonders about how easy it had been to lose sight of the people they were fighting for. Suddenly lofty concepts like Heaven and God and the devil and death were swatted around in the Winchester family backyard, the Apocalypse a claustrophobic journey in each others' darkness rather than a sweeping tide of worldwide destruction. And yet, like a slow-creeping disease, the supposed End of the World consumed people, people like Lisa and Ben, in their own fears - it killed by the hundreds and thousands, and yet managed to be so insidious in its onset that humanity never had a goddamned clue about what they were really up against.
But the fear, the fear. It had been all that humanity required to stew in their own grime, leave them open for evil to destroy them from within.
The fear and the fervent emotion still lingered, connected them - Lisa and Ben and Dean and home and - with a bond sometimes stronger than remembered love and desperate promises.
It took a while for Dean to settle - at first, he thought he could see Sam everywhere: standing around street corners, curled up on the couch, hunched over his laptop at the dining table… sometimes so vivid, so real, he swears he could see the screen light reflected in Sam's eyes, the extra creases in the couch and smell the smell that screamed Sam: gun oil and old books and that pansy-ass cologne that Dean spent years trying to get him to lose but Sam would wear anyway, just to annoy him. Lisa later told him that those times were frightening, times when he would simply collapse upon himself and remain unresponsive. Dean remembers nothing but the pain, though.
Eventually, though, he stepped into the routine of the household, the 'apple-pie life' that Sam had insisted he indulge in. Waking up in the same bed every morning, dropping Ben off at school before work, evenings spent talking, watching TV, playing ball, having home-cooked dinner as a family. Scary shit at first, but Dean stuck through - Sam would've been proud.
And now, two years since SamLuciferMichael, two years of painful adjustment, Dean isn't exactly prepared for this.
Sam tilts his head slightly, raises an eyebrow. "Dean?"
He even has the same clothes on. The worn beige jacket, blue shirt (with the bloody bullet holes), faded jeans, the floppy hair, that enormous forehead scrunching up into lines of his usual geek boy, pain-in-the-ass little-brother concern, and -
Before he's even aware of what he's doing, Dean's stepped to Sam in two long strides and is enveloping his shoulders in a crushing hug.
And he's… there, thank god, not a wisp of air that disappears beneath his touch. He's solid, and real, if a bit cold (of course he's cold) and Dean holds on for dear life, hearing the satisfying click of something vital sliding into place in his head as Sam hugs him back.
"Dean," Sam says again after a little while, and Dean pulls back, a little reluctantly. "Sammy, how -?"
"Jesse, I think," Sam says, his eyes shifting to his flexing fingers. "He… got me out, somehow. Not my body, obviously, but… me, and, uh." Sam's fingers clench into fists. "And, I, uh, you know. I'm here."
Jesse. The human-demon child, the supposed Antichrist that Castiel wanted to murder. Dean's almost forgotten about him, in the rush of everything else that's happened. "But why?" Dean asks before he can really stop himself.
"I don't know," Sam says, and his body flickers like it's been disturbed a bout of static. "He said… my job isn't over. I think that's what he said. He said I had to continue hunting." Sam smiles, melancholy and a little bitter. "A ghost hunting other ghosts. Some irony, huh?"
"Hunting, huh?" Dean wishes he has something less stupid to say, but, hey. He's just a bit blindsided now, okay? Not to mention getting emotional.
"Yeah." Sam looks up at him again. "As soon as I came back, I knew I had to find you."
Dean isn't sure if he can hear a quiet Help me somewhere in there - two years of no-Sam, and two years of a different-Sam before that have really messed with his Big Brother Intuition. He thinks about hitting the road again - just him and Sam and the Impala, hunting down monsters and just… just being, like they were before all the shit about Sam's destiny and the angels and the Apocalypse began.
Simpler times, Sam had said.
A long-buried ache starts in Dean's chest, and he yearns to lose himself in the vision.
"Well, obviously," Dean says. "You were always going to need the smarter member of the team."
Sam smiles. "Looks like we've got work to do."
Dean grins so hard he wonders his lips don't snap like worn elastic bands.
In the end, leaving is both hard and easy.
He tells Lisa that he'll be away for a few days - visiting Bobby and a few old friends - and her eyes narrow ever so slightly: not quite anger, suspicion or fear, but she doesn't say anything; merely nods and wishes him a safe journey. Ben is much, much harder: Dean's grown rather attached to the kid over the years, and he knows that part of Lisa's anger-suspicion-fear is so that he doesn't abandon Ben, not when the kid has slowly but surely begun to accept Dean as part of the family. Dean's not sure about what he's going to do, really: whether he's going to disappear forever or just drive down the road and back, so he just packs a light duffel, repeats practiced farewells and reassurances, and leaves.
Sam materialises in the car after Dean's closed the door, making him jump. It reminds him of Castiel - no, more like Crowley, maybe, what with that unmistakable aura of cold and stale air that Sam carries with him now -
Okay. He is definitely going to stop that line of thought.
"So, Sammy," he says. "Where to?"
Sam shrugs and grins. He smiles a lot now, Dean notes, sunny and relieved and free. "Where the road leads us, I guess." He reaches for the newspapers in the backseat, opens one, and then pauses.
Dean starts the car. "What?"
"This is so weird, man." Sam shakes his head. "It's been a really long time since we've actually looked for jobs, yeah?"
"Not since our last visit to Heaven," Dean agrees, and then laughs. "And damn if I've actually kind of missed saying shit like that."
Sam just grins back and buries his head in the newspaper.
A week later, they're in the basement of a recently-abandoned house in some town in Oklahoma, trying to deal with an itinerant poltergeist. Dean's already placed two of his six gris-gris bags, but now he's a little too pre-occupied with dodging random objects that the poltergeist is hurling at him - books, telephones, furniture, even wood ripped out of the wall.
Sam, of course, has no problem as all the shit go right through him, and just as Dean's going to yell at him to move his ass and make himself useful, he frowns and grabs Dean's remaining bags. "Just… hang in there," he says, and disappears through the wall to the next room. Dean's just about finished thinking that he's never going to get used to seeing his brother do that, and dodging the next barrage of projectiles, when the room is consumed by a bright blue light. When it finally fades away, and Dean has blinked his vision back into focus, Sam's standing before him, and there are no random flying objects in sight.
"The poltergeist's gone," Sam says.
No shit, Sherlock. "You got all those bags in place?"
"Apparently I can pull corporeal stuff along with me when I concentrate hard enough." Sam smiles widely. "Maybe I can try pulling your sorry ass the next time you run recklessly into trouble."
Dean stares at him disbelievingly. "Awesome," he says.
And no, he's definitely not too old to call things that, no matter what Ben says.
They come across omens pointing towards a possible demon the next day.
Dean's parked in front of his laptop, clicking through weather patterns and other such weird shit, while Sam's ghosting (geez, really need to stop with the bad puns) around the motel room, picking up random objects, examining them and putting them back. It's when Sam makes a small sound of distress that Dean turns around, to find his brother holding up the morning newspaper. He looks disappointed and a little scared.
"What's wrong?" Dean asks warily.
Sam hands him the paper opened to the second page, and points out an article. "The house where we banished the poltergeist," he says. "It burned down late last night."
Dean raises his eyebrows. "Huh. Good thing it was already deserted, then."
Sam's looking at him with an I-can't-believe-you're-reacting-this-way look on his face, and it - it's so damn familiar that Dean resists the urge to smile. "Look, the 'geist had the place pretty messed up, already - it was probably a gas leak or something." He turns back to the laptop. "Now, are you going to help me with this demon problem, or not?"
Having Sam back with him on the hunt is great, it really is, but there are a lot of changes both of them need to get used to. For one, Dean's EMF meter is pretty much useless when it's around Sam: it goes haywire all of the time. And not just the meter; even the car radio, and occasionally the laptop's wireless capabilities (not to mention messing up the electricity in the places they visit: something Sam insists he can and is trying to control), but Dean's not really complaining. Ghost-Sam definitely beats Sam-locked-in-Hell.
Of course, there's also the times he has to eat at public places and remember not to talk to Sam because nobody else can see him (not that he gives a shit about whether people think he's crazy or not), or when he books motel rooms with only one bed, because hey, Sam doesn't sleep, eat, or shower. It creeps the crap out of Dean sometimes, gives him nightmares and stomach trouble, but he's pretty sure he's okay with all of that because his brother's still there, bitching at him to take better care of himself, occasionally pulling his patented Puppy-Dog Eyes. Sam's… Sam, even if in a different form, and Dean takes the greatest comfort from that.
Not that the present situation doesn't come without its advantages, of course. Sam's little stunt with the poltergeist case the previous day is only one of the ways that Sam's, uh, condition, has made hunting a heck of a lot more easy.
He tries not to think how Sam's demon-blood had made hunting demons a heck of a lot more easy, too.
Apart from the omens, they are unable to find anything else that can help them find the demon; finally, Dean has to admit defeat and move on. "Maybe you could ask Bobby for a location spell," Sam suggests, and Dean responds with a non-committal grunt, because, Bobby? Yeah, he hasn't spoken to the man in years, and Dean feels guilty and scared of the prospect of opening up communication with him again.
Sam has him figured out in a few seconds. "I don't believe this," he says. "You aren't in touch with Bobby anymore? He's not - gone, is he?"
"I don't know, Sammy." And okay, now Dean just feels like a total tool for not even bothering to check on the closest thing he's got to a father-figure… but he wanted a clean break from hunting; he wanted to keep his promise. To Sam, for god's sake, the same Sam who's now glaring at him and making him feel smaller by about four feet. "Call him, then," Sam says, and disappears abruptly (Dean's also noted that Sam apparently has even less control over his abilities whenever he's stressed or angry, and if Sam is in his place, Dean just knows the big geek will use the opportunity to study the Behavioural Aspects of the Paranormal or some such pretentious shit).
Dean first tries Bobby's mobile, praying the man hasn't changed his number, but is met with no response. He then tries Bobby's landlines - all of them - but those attempts meet with the same fate. A sliver of apprehension is starting to twist up his spine, as he scrolls down his limited contacts and calls another of Bobby's close Hunter friends.
"Thought you and Bobby were close enough for you to know by now," Rufus replies to Dean's frantic questioning.
"What - what should I know?"
"The man died a couple of years ago," Rufus says matter-of-factly. "During a hunt. It was a rugaru, I think."
Dean's stunned. He makes a small sound from the back of his throat that Rufus obviously interprets as encouragement, because he continues, "I'm sorry, Dean. He was a good hunter and a good man. But I would've thought he'd have better sense than going into a hunt that dangerous without backup."
Dean hears the accusation there, somewhere: you should've been with him. Instead, you were too busy wallowing in your own misery, living Normal while your family and friends died around you.
He's not sure if Rufus is still talking - there's this rushing in his ears that's blocking out all other sound - but he cuts the call anyway. He tucks the phone against his belly with his arms, shoulders hunched and head bowed, tears pricking at his eyes.
He stays like that for two hours until Sam finds him.
Sam hasn't talked about what happened to him in the time between taking Lucifer and Michael to Hell and coming back since he first saw Dean in Lisa's home, and Dean's not about to push him. Dean knows - and yeah, does Dean know - that there are some things too traumatic to open up about until you feel you're ready. He expertly guides the conversation to another topic whenever it takes an errant turn into dangerous territory, and tries to fight down that strange mixture of contentment and uneasiness that burgeons in his chest when Sam shoots him a grateful look.
These days it's made easier as both of them lapse into bouts of long silence when they're alone together. Dean's not sure what Sam's thinking about, but Dean's head is filled with Bobby and how he's let him down, a swirling little inferno of fond memories and crushing guilt that threatens to burn down his defences and turn him into a blubbering mess. Hell, he was a blubbering mess that night when Sam came back and demanded to know what had become of Bobby - through his tears and his self-recriminations, and he remembers Sam had been there, reassuring and sharing in his grief, and Dean wonders if he is crazy to have felt both joy and sorrow in such equal amounts at the same time.
But yeah, they continue to hunt - and apparently, a lot of creepy shit got loose post the Apocalypse-that-never-happened, because they hardly ever get a break between jobs - and Dean tries to just. Just keep moving. Him, Sam, and the Impala. That's all he needs.
Sometimes, Sam gets pensive and distant, his face looking stretched and so old, although he's still twenty-seven, and looks exactly the way he did the day he died. Dean lets him be, with one aborted attempt at snapping him out of his funk ending in wistful wishes from Sam for the ability to drink alcohol again.
There's another time when Sam gets the look again, watching Dean eat a burger at a drive-in. The near-constant chill that pervades the car when Sam's in it deepens a bit, and Sam murmurs, "It was always so cold."
Dean stops mid-bite. "What?" he says, around a mouthful of burger.
"Always cold," Sam repeats, not looking at him. "But not dark. Only if it had been dark…"
And says nothing more.
Dean tries to get Sam to tell him more, but Sam refuses, and Dean gives up, hoping it'll come on its own, in time. Sam's always been the more reserved one (the one more prone to dark secrets) out of the two of them, after all.
He goes back to finishing his burger, trying to ignore the cold and the gleam of the perennially fresh-blood from the bullet wound over Sam's heart.
Dean's fighting a growing panic as he stares at the screen in front of him. "More omens," he says, running a hand through his hair. "Jesus, is something following us?"
"I don't know," Sam says, looking at the screen over his shoulder. "It's not like we've found anything else connecting it to a demon; maybe it's not one, at all."
"Yeah, well, show me anything else even vaguely supernatural from which we can draw that conclusion from!" Dean snaps irritably. Sam's got his mouth open to answer, even about to raise his arms to the side in his patented Sammy Pose of Intense Agitation, when Dean's phone rings. He rolls his eyes at his brother, gets up and pulls out the phone. Sam takes the opportunity to settle in front of the laptop, and start typing furiously.
Dean glances at the caller ID: Keith Riley. He frowns, before he remembers it's one of Lisa's neighbours that he'd given his number to as an emergency contact. He flips the phone open. "Mr. Riley?"
"Dean? Dean, where are you?"
"Not far away," Dean says warily. He's starting to have a really bad feeling about this. "Why? What happened?"
"I'm sorry, but there's, uh, been a fire at your house."
And yeah, Dean's just about ready to swear that somebody's ripped out his lungs at that point, because he just can't breathe. "What?" he manages. "Lisa - Ben -"
"Ben's safe, and Lisa's in the hospital with minor smoke inhalation injuries, but she should be fine. But, Dean, everything else… everything else is gone."
Dean swallows. "Thanks, Mi- Keith. I'll come there as soon as I can." He flips shut the phone and turns to see Sam staring at him, looking extraordinarily pale, even for a ghost.
"The house burned down, didn't it," Sam says quietly, even before Dean has a chance to open his mouth.
Dean's eyes widen. HowhowSam.
Sam takes his silence as a yes, and nods in a strange sort of resignation. "Lisa and Ben… they're -"
"They're okay."
"Oh." Sam gets up, looks at him with troubled eyes. "You should probably take a look at this," he says, gesturing at the laptop. Dean's a little too numb for disobeying right now, so he sits in front of the computer to see that Sam has pulled up several web-pages - each of them with news-stories about house-fires. Not just random ones, though - one glance is enough for Dean to ascertain the pattern.
These are fires that started in every place that they have visited so far.
Not just in the city or town - but the actual houses and motels that they have crossed the thresholds of. A no, it can't be dies in Dean's throat as he shifts his shocked gaze to Sam, who's got that old, old look on his face again, and Dean suddenly remembers that his brother has just spent two centuries in Hell.
"Everywhere I go," Sam says softly. "Including your life."
Dean gets up, knocking back the chair, breathing fast. "Sam -"
His brother's shaking his head. "It was too early for me to come. These omens? I'm pretty sure they're because of me, too."
"Sam, whatever you're thinking, it's not -"
"I have to go, Dean. I'm so sorry." Sam smiles his familiar melancholy smile. "Maybe we can meet again. After I figure this crap out."
Dean knows Sam is making sense, but a part of Dean - and it is a large part - tells him that he's just got his brother back, and no way in Hell is he going to let Sam go again, let himself go through that grief and despair again, let his little brother suffer on his own… again -
"Dean," Sam says again, voice shaking a little bit, though of course he can't cry (ghosts don't cry; dead people don't cry). But Dean's crying, the tears are running down his face and he has no way of checking them, and how can this be fair; after everything that's happened, and everything that they've done, why don't the Winchesters ever get a goddamned break?
"You're probably right," Dean rasps, and that there? Is all the goodbye he can afford.
Sam smiles one last time, then disappears.
Dean dips his face in his hands, and stays like that for a long time.
Finis
Warnings: SPOILERS for 5.22: Swan Song, and for pretty much the whole of Season 5. Swearing, weirdness, metaphor abuse, experiment no. I've-lost-count at getting Dean's voice to come out right, present-tense.
Summary: Sam's back - not quite in the shape or form Dean would want, and with a price that might be too high for him to pay, but Sam's definitely back, and Dean's not complaining.
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any of its characters.
(Random A/N: Looking back on this now, I find it amusing that this story - the basic concept behind it, anyway - kind of functions as a photographic negative of what eventually happens in canon s6.)
These Days of Remembered Glory
It's when the hallway light starts to flicker that Dean gets excited.
Lisa's pissed - didn't she just have that changed? - and gets Dean to fix it. She gets pissed a lot these days, Dean notes, and sometimes her fits of petty futile anger remind him of Sam so much he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Though he feels that his usual snark at that stage about time-of-months, while always drawing an annoyed snort and a swat from one of his brother's gigantic hands, will not be so well-received by Lisa.
But yeah, Dean's excited, because, hey. Take the hunter away from the hunting, but not the hunting from the hunter, and all that. Also, more importantly, if this is what he thinks (hopes) it is, then it is something - something filling the whistling void since, since. Since, well. He wants it to be what he hopes it is so bad; he wants that piece of LifewithSam, to take that lonesome festering grief and do something with it. He wants that LifewithSam to have been real, because everything that they were and could've become shouldn't be confined to a hole in the ground and a strained, tunnel-vision adherence to a promise made to a dead (dead? Worse than dead, and oh, lord, Sam -) man.
"Goddamit, Sam, I miss you," Dean whispers.
He pulls a chair to the wall and climbs on; squints at the light, tapping against the glass bulb with his nails. He's pretty sure he doesn't want to get disappointed if it's just a crappy replacement or wiring, or whatever. "Come on," he says. "Come on, you son of a bitch."
A chill seeps down the corridor and the light flickers again. Dean's jaw locks; his skin suddenly feels stretched too tight over his body, and his hair prickles on the back of his neck. He makes a quick inventory of his available resources: weapons still in the hidden compartment of the Impala's trunk, parked right by the front door; salt on the kitchen counter, down the hallway and to the left; iron poker that he's placed with blessed forethought by the chair. The chill deepens until Dean can see his breath, and the ensuing adrenaline is energy and Sam and this-is-our-family-business and I-haven't-been-forgotten.
Finally, he sees a form resolve to life ahead of him, a strange and unnatural twist of molecules that makes the air shimmer. He gets off the chair, and lifts the poker, ready. The light gives one last flicker before completely going out, and Dean… Dean can see.
Dean can see Sam.
Dean can see -
Dean can -
"Hey," Sam says, a little shyly, his hair falling into his eyes.
"Hey," Dean says back, his voice kind of shrill and squeaky, and, yeah, it hardly sounds earth-shattering, but Dean figures that the moisture in his eyes and the tremors cascading down his limbs says everything else that's needed.
Dean Winchester has not always had a great track record in keeping promises, but never let it be said that he doesn't try.
He's a mechanic, now - seemed about the only job that made sense - and life's been going on, at least as best as he can make it go (and damn if that doesn't sound like a lot of the junk he gets at work to fix). It was difficult at first - Lisa was ready with beer and sympathy and home when Dean came to her door for the second time, but once he could just about look past his own devouring grief, he could see how shaken she was: a glimpse into the fear and confusion and love and relief and whatever the hell it was that shone in her eyes when he stomped into her life again with cryptic warnings and reassurances and a whole load of emotional baggage.
Sometimes, Dean thinks (and he's had a lot of time to think) about the battle against the angels and demons, against the Apocalypse, and wonders about how easy it had been to lose sight of the people they were fighting for. Suddenly lofty concepts like Heaven and God and the devil and death were swatted around in the Winchester family backyard, the Apocalypse a claustrophobic journey in each others' darkness rather than a sweeping tide of worldwide destruction. And yet, like a slow-creeping disease, the supposed End of the World consumed people, people like Lisa and Ben, in their own fears - it killed by the hundreds and thousands, and yet managed to be so insidious in its onset that humanity never had a goddamned clue about what they were really up against.
But the fear, the fear. It had been all that humanity required to stew in their own grime, leave them open for evil to destroy them from within.
The fear and the fervent emotion still lingered, connected them - Lisa and Ben and Dean and home and - with a bond sometimes stronger than remembered love and desperate promises.
It took a while for Dean to settle - at first, he thought he could see Sam everywhere: standing around street corners, curled up on the couch, hunched over his laptop at the dining table… sometimes so vivid, so real, he swears he could see the screen light reflected in Sam's eyes, the extra creases in the couch and smell the smell that screamed Sam: gun oil and old books and that pansy-ass cologne that Dean spent years trying to get him to lose but Sam would wear anyway, just to annoy him. Lisa later told him that those times were frightening, times when he would simply collapse upon himself and remain unresponsive. Dean remembers nothing but the pain, though.
Eventually, though, he stepped into the routine of the household, the 'apple-pie life' that Sam had insisted he indulge in. Waking up in the same bed every morning, dropping Ben off at school before work, evenings spent talking, watching TV, playing ball, having home-cooked dinner as a family. Scary shit at first, but Dean stuck through - Sam would've been proud.
And now, two years since SamLuciferMichael, two years of painful adjustment, Dean isn't exactly prepared for this.
Sam tilts his head slightly, raises an eyebrow. "Dean?"
He even has the same clothes on. The worn beige jacket, blue shirt (with the bloody bullet holes), faded jeans, the floppy hair, that enormous forehead scrunching up into lines of his usual geek boy, pain-in-the-ass little-brother concern, and -
Before he's even aware of what he's doing, Dean's stepped to Sam in two long strides and is enveloping his shoulders in a crushing hug.
And he's… there, thank god, not a wisp of air that disappears beneath his touch. He's solid, and real, if a bit cold (of course he's cold) and Dean holds on for dear life, hearing the satisfying click of something vital sliding into place in his head as Sam hugs him back.
"Dean," Sam says again after a little while, and Dean pulls back, a little reluctantly. "Sammy, how -?"
"Jesse, I think," Sam says, his eyes shifting to his flexing fingers. "He… got me out, somehow. Not my body, obviously, but… me, and, uh." Sam's fingers clench into fists. "And, I, uh, you know. I'm here."
Jesse. The human-demon child, the supposed Antichrist that Castiel wanted to murder. Dean's almost forgotten about him, in the rush of everything else that's happened. "But why?" Dean asks before he can really stop himself.
"I don't know," Sam says, and his body flickers like it's been disturbed a bout of static. "He said… my job isn't over. I think that's what he said. He said I had to continue hunting." Sam smiles, melancholy and a little bitter. "A ghost hunting other ghosts. Some irony, huh?"
"Hunting, huh?" Dean wishes he has something less stupid to say, but, hey. He's just a bit blindsided now, okay? Not to mention getting emotional.
"Yeah." Sam looks up at him again. "As soon as I came back, I knew I had to find you."
Dean isn't sure if he can hear a quiet Help me somewhere in there - two years of no-Sam, and two years of a different-Sam before that have really messed with his Big Brother Intuition. He thinks about hitting the road again - just him and Sam and the Impala, hunting down monsters and just… just being, like they were before all the shit about Sam's destiny and the angels and the Apocalypse began.
Simpler times, Sam had said.
A long-buried ache starts in Dean's chest, and he yearns to lose himself in the vision.
"Well, obviously," Dean says. "You were always going to need the smarter member of the team."
Sam smiles. "Looks like we've got work to do."
Dean grins so hard he wonders his lips don't snap like worn elastic bands.
In the end, leaving is both hard and easy.
He tells Lisa that he'll be away for a few days - visiting Bobby and a few old friends - and her eyes narrow ever so slightly: not quite anger, suspicion or fear, but she doesn't say anything; merely nods and wishes him a safe journey. Ben is much, much harder: Dean's grown rather attached to the kid over the years, and he knows that part of Lisa's anger-suspicion-fear is so that he doesn't abandon Ben, not when the kid has slowly but surely begun to accept Dean as part of the family. Dean's not sure about what he's going to do, really: whether he's going to disappear forever or just drive down the road and back, so he just packs a light duffel, repeats practiced farewells and reassurances, and leaves.
Sam materialises in the car after Dean's closed the door, making him jump. It reminds him of Castiel - no, more like Crowley, maybe, what with that unmistakable aura of cold and stale air that Sam carries with him now -
Okay. He is definitely going to stop that line of thought.
"So, Sammy," he says. "Where to?"
Sam shrugs and grins. He smiles a lot now, Dean notes, sunny and relieved and free. "Where the road leads us, I guess." He reaches for the newspapers in the backseat, opens one, and then pauses.
Dean starts the car. "What?"
"This is so weird, man." Sam shakes his head. "It's been a really long time since we've actually looked for jobs, yeah?"
"Not since our last visit to Heaven," Dean agrees, and then laughs. "And damn if I've actually kind of missed saying shit like that."
Sam just grins back and buries his head in the newspaper.
A week later, they're in the basement of a recently-abandoned house in some town in Oklahoma, trying to deal with an itinerant poltergeist. Dean's already placed two of his six gris-gris bags, but now he's a little too pre-occupied with dodging random objects that the poltergeist is hurling at him - books, telephones, furniture, even wood ripped out of the wall.
Sam, of course, has no problem as all the shit go right through him, and just as Dean's going to yell at him to move his ass and make himself useful, he frowns and grabs Dean's remaining bags. "Just… hang in there," he says, and disappears through the wall to the next room. Dean's just about finished thinking that he's never going to get used to seeing his brother do that, and dodging the next barrage of projectiles, when the room is consumed by a bright blue light. When it finally fades away, and Dean has blinked his vision back into focus, Sam's standing before him, and there are no random flying objects in sight.
"The poltergeist's gone," Sam says.
No shit, Sherlock. "You got all those bags in place?"
"Apparently I can pull corporeal stuff along with me when I concentrate hard enough." Sam smiles widely. "Maybe I can try pulling your sorry ass the next time you run recklessly into trouble."
Dean stares at him disbelievingly. "Awesome," he says.
And no, he's definitely not too old to call things that, no matter what Ben says.
They come across omens pointing towards a possible demon the next day.
Dean's parked in front of his laptop, clicking through weather patterns and other such weird shit, while Sam's ghosting (geez, really need to stop with the bad puns) around the motel room, picking up random objects, examining them and putting them back. It's when Sam makes a small sound of distress that Dean turns around, to find his brother holding up the morning newspaper. He looks disappointed and a little scared.
"What's wrong?" Dean asks warily.
Sam hands him the paper opened to the second page, and points out an article. "The house where we banished the poltergeist," he says. "It burned down late last night."
Dean raises his eyebrows. "Huh. Good thing it was already deserted, then."
Sam's looking at him with an I-can't-believe-you're-reacting-this-way look on his face, and it - it's so damn familiar that Dean resists the urge to smile. "Look, the 'geist had the place pretty messed up, already - it was probably a gas leak or something." He turns back to the laptop. "Now, are you going to help me with this demon problem, or not?"
Having Sam back with him on the hunt is great, it really is, but there are a lot of changes both of them need to get used to. For one, Dean's EMF meter is pretty much useless when it's around Sam: it goes haywire all of the time. And not just the meter; even the car radio, and occasionally the laptop's wireless capabilities (not to mention messing up the electricity in the places they visit: something Sam insists he can and is trying to control), but Dean's not really complaining. Ghost-Sam definitely beats Sam-locked-in-Hell.
Of course, there's also the times he has to eat at public places and remember not to talk to Sam because nobody else can see him (not that he gives a shit about whether people think he's crazy or not), or when he books motel rooms with only one bed, because hey, Sam doesn't sleep, eat, or shower. It creeps the crap out of Dean sometimes, gives him nightmares and stomach trouble, but he's pretty sure he's okay with all of that because his brother's still there, bitching at him to take better care of himself, occasionally pulling his patented Puppy-Dog Eyes. Sam's… Sam, even if in a different form, and Dean takes the greatest comfort from that.
Not that the present situation doesn't come without its advantages, of course. Sam's little stunt with the poltergeist case the previous day is only one of the ways that Sam's, uh, condition, has made hunting a heck of a lot more easy.
He tries not to think how Sam's demon-blood had made hunting demons a heck of a lot more easy, too.
Apart from the omens, they are unable to find anything else that can help them find the demon; finally, Dean has to admit defeat and move on. "Maybe you could ask Bobby for a location spell," Sam suggests, and Dean responds with a non-committal grunt, because, Bobby? Yeah, he hasn't spoken to the man in years, and Dean feels guilty and scared of the prospect of opening up communication with him again.
Sam has him figured out in a few seconds. "I don't believe this," he says. "You aren't in touch with Bobby anymore? He's not - gone, is he?"
"I don't know, Sammy." And okay, now Dean just feels like a total tool for not even bothering to check on the closest thing he's got to a father-figure… but he wanted a clean break from hunting; he wanted to keep his promise. To Sam, for god's sake, the same Sam who's now glaring at him and making him feel smaller by about four feet. "Call him, then," Sam says, and disappears abruptly (Dean's also noted that Sam apparently has even less control over his abilities whenever he's stressed or angry, and if Sam is in his place, Dean just knows the big geek will use the opportunity to study the Behavioural Aspects of the Paranormal or some such pretentious shit).
Dean first tries Bobby's mobile, praying the man hasn't changed his number, but is met with no response. He then tries Bobby's landlines - all of them - but those attempts meet with the same fate. A sliver of apprehension is starting to twist up his spine, as he scrolls down his limited contacts and calls another of Bobby's close Hunter friends.
"Thought you and Bobby were close enough for you to know by now," Rufus replies to Dean's frantic questioning.
"What - what should I know?"
"The man died a couple of years ago," Rufus says matter-of-factly. "During a hunt. It was a rugaru, I think."
Dean's stunned. He makes a small sound from the back of his throat that Rufus obviously interprets as encouragement, because he continues, "I'm sorry, Dean. He was a good hunter and a good man. But I would've thought he'd have better sense than going into a hunt that dangerous without backup."
Dean hears the accusation there, somewhere: you should've been with him. Instead, you were too busy wallowing in your own misery, living Normal while your family and friends died around you.
He's not sure if Rufus is still talking - there's this rushing in his ears that's blocking out all other sound - but he cuts the call anyway. He tucks the phone against his belly with his arms, shoulders hunched and head bowed, tears pricking at his eyes.
He stays like that for two hours until Sam finds him.
Sam hasn't talked about what happened to him in the time between taking Lucifer and Michael to Hell and coming back since he first saw Dean in Lisa's home, and Dean's not about to push him. Dean knows - and yeah, does Dean know - that there are some things too traumatic to open up about until you feel you're ready. He expertly guides the conversation to another topic whenever it takes an errant turn into dangerous territory, and tries to fight down that strange mixture of contentment and uneasiness that burgeons in his chest when Sam shoots him a grateful look.
These days it's made easier as both of them lapse into bouts of long silence when they're alone together. Dean's not sure what Sam's thinking about, but Dean's head is filled with Bobby and how he's let him down, a swirling little inferno of fond memories and crushing guilt that threatens to burn down his defences and turn him into a blubbering mess. Hell, he was a blubbering mess that night when Sam came back and demanded to know what had become of Bobby - through his tears and his self-recriminations, and he remembers Sam had been there, reassuring and sharing in his grief, and Dean wonders if he is crazy to have felt both joy and sorrow in such equal amounts at the same time.
But yeah, they continue to hunt - and apparently, a lot of creepy shit got loose post the Apocalypse-that-never-happened, because they hardly ever get a break between jobs - and Dean tries to just. Just keep moving. Him, Sam, and the Impala. That's all he needs.
Sometimes, Sam gets pensive and distant, his face looking stretched and so old, although he's still twenty-seven, and looks exactly the way he did the day he died. Dean lets him be, with one aborted attempt at snapping him out of his funk ending in wistful wishes from Sam for the ability to drink alcohol again.
There's another time when Sam gets the look again, watching Dean eat a burger at a drive-in. The near-constant chill that pervades the car when Sam's in it deepens a bit, and Sam murmurs, "It was always so cold."
Dean stops mid-bite. "What?" he says, around a mouthful of burger.
"Always cold," Sam repeats, not looking at him. "But not dark. Only if it had been dark…"
And says nothing more.
Dean tries to get Sam to tell him more, but Sam refuses, and Dean gives up, hoping it'll come on its own, in time. Sam's always been the more reserved one (the one more prone to dark secrets) out of the two of them, after all.
He goes back to finishing his burger, trying to ignore the cold and the gleam of the perennially fresh-blood from the bullet wound over Sam's heart.
Dean's fighting a growing panic as he stares at the screen in front of him. "More omens," he says, running a hand through his hair. "Jesus, is something following us?"
"I don't know," Sam says, looking at the screen over his shoulder. "It's not like we've found anything else connecting it to a demon; maybe it's not one, at all."
"Yeah, well, show me anything else even vaguely supernatural from which we can draw that conclusion from!" Dean snaps irritably. Sam's got his mouth open to answer, even about to raise his arms to the side in his patented Sammy Pose of Intense Agitation, when Dean's phone rings. He rolls his eyes at his brother, gets up and pulls out the phone. Sam takes the opportunity to settle in front of the laptop, and start typing furiously.
Dean glances at the caller ID: Keith Riley. He frowns, before he remembers it's one of Lisa's neighbours that he'd given his number to as an emergency contact. He flips the phone open. "Mr. Riley?"
"Dean? Dean, where are you?"
"Not far away," Dean says warily. He's starting to have a really bad feeling about this. "Why? What happened?"
"I'm sorry, but there's, uh, been a fire at your house."
And yeah, Dean's just about ready to swear that somebody's ripped out his lungs at that point, because he just can't breathe. "What?" he manages. "Lisa - Ben -"
"Ben's safe, and Lisa's in the hospital with minor smoke inhalation injuries, but she should be fine. But, Dean, everything else… everything else is gone."
Dean swallows. "Thanks, Mi- Keith. I'll come there as soon as I can." He flips shut the phone and turns to see Sam staring at him, looking extraordinarily pale, even for a ghost.
"The house burned down, didn't it," Sam says quietly, even before Dean has a chance to open his mouth.
Dean's eyes widen. HowhowSam.
Sam takes his silence as a yes, and nods in a strange sort of resignation. "Lisa and Ben… they're -"
"They're okay."
"Oh." Sam gets up, looks at him with troubled eyes. "You should probably take a look at this," he says, gesturing at the laptop. Dean's a little too numb for disobeying right now, so he sits in front of the computer to see that Sam has pulled up several web-pages - each of them with news-stories about house-fires. Not just random ones, though - one glance is enough for Dean to ascertain the pattern.
These are fires that started in every place that they have visited so far.
Not just in the city or town - but the actual houses and motels that they have crossed the thresholds of. A no, it can't be dies in Dean's throat as he shifts his shocked gaze to Sam, who's got that old, old look on his face again, and Dean suddenly remembers that his brother has just spent two centuries in Hell.
"Everywhere I go," Sam says softly. "Including your life."
Dean gets up, knocking back the chair, breathing fast. "Sam -"
His brother's shaking his head. "It was too early for me to come. These omens? I'm pretty sure they're because of me, too."
"Sam, whatever you're thinking, it's not -"
"I have to go, Dean. I'm so sorry." Sam smiles his familiar melancholy smile. "Maybe we can meet again. After I figure this crap out."
Dean knows Sam is making sense, but a part of Dean - and it is a large part - tells him that he's just got his brother back, and no way in Hell is he going to let Sam go again, let himself go through that grief and despair again, let his little brother suffer on his own… again -
"Dean," Sam says again, voice shaking a little bit, though of course he can't cry (ghosts don't cry; dead people don't cry). But Dean's crying, the tears are running down his face and he has no way of checking them, and how can this be fair; after everything that's happened, and everything that they've done, why don't the Winchesters ever get a goddamned break?
"You're probably right," Dean rasps, and that there? Is all the goodbye he can afford.
Sam smiles one last time, then disappears.
Dean dips his face in his hands, and stays like that for a long time.
Finis