Elysium
Title: Elysium
Summary: Sam doesn't know where he is, but there's something really wrong about Dean.
Warnings/Spoilers: R for language, Spoilers through S5
Author's Note: Aftermath-verse.
Okay…
It’s dusky dark and the air smells like rain. His back is wet - no, the ground is wet. He’s lying on the ground, blades of tall grass are tickling his nose and he’s cold.
Okay.
He sits up carefully, testing for injury. Nothing hurts. Everything’s fine, so -
He looks around.
It’s an open field, nothing but gently rolling grass in sight, no trees, no sign of movement. The grass ripples with the force of the wind, as if a hand is palming across it, ruffling a head of hair.
Sam trembles.
Is it a dream?
The sky’s a swirling mass of grey and he doesn’t like this, he really doesn’t like it. The rain smells closer. Wind lashes his face and whips his hair against his eyes until he has to close them. It’s all too much.
“Sammy?”
He closes his eyes at the sudden rush of relief and feels a little foolish.
What was he worried about? Dean is here.
***
“Heya, Sammy,” Dean says in that resigned you-win tone.
He raises his eyebrows. “Hey, Dean.”
“Sleepwalking again?”
“I guess -?” That’s as good an explanation as any. Certainly sounds a lot less scary than I don’t know how the fuck I got here.
“Because your bed was empty, and I’m not stupid, Sam.”
Sam frowns. “I never said you were stupid.”
“You have a nightmare?”
“Not that I can remember.” Sam rakes his hair back from his face. “I don’t know, maybe I ate something funny.”
Dean’s got that twisted smile Sam hates, fuck that smile, fuck Dean for pretending he’s all right when he’s not. He’d never let Sam get away with that shit. “It’s been two months, Sammy.”
“Two months - what?”
“I know she was,” Dean says, and okay, that doesn’t make sense. Something’s not right with this.
“I know, kid,” Dean responds to absolutely nothing, and he reaches out a hand wrapped in gauze and Sam remembers that injury oh oh oh.
***
If this hadn’t happened before, he’d be much more alarmed.
He sits on the ground beside Memory-Dean and talks about Ruby and demon blood and seals and Lilith and says I’m sorry about a thousand times, and his brother wraps an arm around him and pulls him close and says he’s so sorry about Jessica.
“I don’t know what to do,” Sam says, throat tight, regulating his breath automatically, because he’s pretty sure he’s got a cold or an infection. His lungs are burning. It could just be the fact that he can’t fucking cry, the fistful of emotions he’s swallowing. “I don’t know how to make it right.”
Dean pulls him closer. “It’ll be all right. You’ll get through this one, Sam.”
Sam closes his eyes and lets himself believe.
***
There’s only cold air on his shoulder and he knows before he opens his eyes that his brother is gone.
Memory-brother.
It’s all right, because memories ebb and fade like tides, drift in and out like bad radio, and he’s used to this. This is how it goes in his head, when he closes his eyes. It’s sharp and poignant and slips away the moment he tries to hold on.
This is how it was in heaven.
Just like this, except that in heaven Dean (real Dean) was next to him, comparing notes. Living his own memories. Swearing at angels and smiling at Sam and hearing him in a way Memory-Dean can’t because Memory-Dean isn’t Dean, so how is Sam supposed to believe this is heaven?
Come to think of it -
He stands and stretches and feels the solid reality of muscle pulling over bone, and this isn’t heaven, heaven is ethereal, this is Sam’s body alive and intact and sporting the beginnings of a chest cold, apparently, so he’s not even fucking dead.
So this isn’t heaven.
***
He finds the car parked in the middle of the field, and he finds Dean on the hood smoking a joint, and that’s as clear a mile marker as he needs. Sam climbs up onto the car and takes a seat beside the memory of his seventeen year old brother.
“Don’t tell Dad,” Dean says, passing over the twist of paper and herb and holding a lighter to the end. Sam inhales despite his burgeoning illness and feels the burn deep in his lungs, deeper than he usually feels oxygen. What’s up, asthma?
He tries to hold the smoke in the way Dean does, but of course he can’t and he coughs and coughs until his body is pitching forward off the car, but it’s fine because it’s just a memory. He feels Dean’s hands on his back and shoulder a second before they actually touch. He hears Dean’s voice soothing - “it’s all right, Sam, cough it out and breathe” - and knows what will happen, knows his lungs will unclench and he’ll stand up and sock his brother in the arm and Memory-Dean will wrestle him down and never let him smoke again ever, they’ve learned their lesson -
That’s not what happens.
Dean’s hands tighten on him and one moves to his neck, and Sam’s body heaves, but he isn’t getting any air.
Dean’s soothing sounds a whole lot more like sobbing.
This isn’t Memory-Dean.
This never happened.
Smoke smoke all around and Sam’s vision tunnels and -
***
Okay.
His lungs are loose and relaxed and moving air, chest rising and falling and filling with oxygen, beautiful sweet delicious. The smoke is gone. The smoke was never here.
It’s a dream. It has to be a dream.
Sam’s had nightmares all his life, and Dean always pulls him out of them with both hands, fingers fisted in flannel, eyes staring into Sam’s as if some clue might have been left behind. He doesn’t ask about the dreams, he just watches, and it’s only when he’s seen enough to satisfy him that he’ll let Sam go and bring him a glass of water and mumble platitudes to which Sam has honestly never listened.
It’s that first touch that makes Sam feel safe. That first understanding of his brother’s hand on his shoulder. That’s what brings him home.
He looks up at the dark vortex of sky and waits.
***
When Dean appears, it’s not from the sky.
And it’s not safe.
He’s ten yards away, wide stance, narrowed eyes, the rising wind lifting his hair away from his head just barely perceptibly. The storm’s kicking up.
“Sammy.”
This isn’t familiar. This feels wrong.
“Dean?”
Dean’s expression doesn’t waver. He isn’t reacting to Sam. He’s a memory. Memory-Dean, but -
Sam doesn’t remember this.
As his brother pulls out a gun and levels it at Sam, the sky splits open and the rain starts to fall in sheets.
The shot is lost in a clap of thunder.
***
“Sammy!”
Dean’s hands, warm and anxious, and Sam opens his eyes and looks into his brother’s eyes. Stares. Dean.
Awake awake thank fucking god and Dean’s holding his shoulder with one hand and the other is pressing against his chest, pressing too hard, hey, Sam can’t breathe, Sam’s lungs, shit, Dean, let up -
Dean lifts his hand and it’s solid red and Dean is shaking and crying and “Sammy, stay with me, Sam.”
He looks down.
Blood welling up -
Dizziness overcomes him and he falls back on the ground and now he’s shaking, shaking and he can’t remember how to draw breath and it hurts hurts hurts.
“Sam!” Dean cries, like he didn’t fire this shot himself, like he didn’t fucking kill-
no no no I’m not dying I’m not dying this never happened.
***
Okay.
Dean is gone and the blood is gone and Sam is alive and Sam is alone.
And Sam is so, so afraid.
The rain’s still falling, and the grass that was soft and tickled his face is sharp-edged and painful against his ankles as he runs aimlessly, desperately, away from whatever is happening.
He runs blindly, panicked, until he collides with something solid and falls back to the ground with a thud that jars his teeth.
He looks up. Dean looms above him.
“Hey, Sammy.”
***
Dream-Dean or Memory-Dean or whatever the hell he is has shown his stripes. He’s not Sam’s brother. He’s a menace with a fucking gun in his hand. Sam’s not going to talk to him anymore.
He stands and puts his back to Not-Brother and walks resolutely away from him, never mind that this Dean might be dangerous, never mind that this Dean might shoot him or jump him or put a knife in his back, Dean kills him and he doesn’t die so fuck Dean.
And that’s maybe the worst thought his head has ever given him.
He wants to turn around and run to his brother, this awful shade of his brother, and embrace him, not fuck Dean, Dean is important and Dean is family and Dean is every fucking happy memory he has.
Dean is fucking up every happy memory he has.
***
He’s flying a box kite, and he passes the string to Sam without comment.
Sam was fourteen years old when this happened and too old for kites, but not too old for aerodynamics, and anyway he’d never flown a kite before. He remembers this one. Dean swiped it from a supermarket, and Sam was doubly impressed because he’d believed all kites were triangles.
He runs with the kite a little, feeling the wind catch it and tug it in all directions, feeling the heavy canvas lift in the storm and take some of his weight -
It wasn’t storming when this happened.
Kites shouldn’t fly in thunderstorms.
He releases the string just as lightning lances down from the sky and Dean’s kite never burned but this one does, sharp and hot all the way down the string and into his hands, his bones. Sam falls to his knees in shock and pain and clutches at the grass, only to pull away, gasping, hands bloody where the blades (fucking blades) cut into his skin.
Dean laughs and calls his name.
***
There’s a tree on the edge of the field. A willow. The ground at the base of the trunk is relatively dry and sheltered.
Sam crawls under the fronds and hides.
When they were young, Dean used to point to something - a water fountain, a park bench, a pay phone - and say, “That’s home base, Sam. If you get lost, you go there and wait for me.”
This tree feels like home base.
He waits.
His fingers trace a pattern in the dirt over and over, four circles clustered together, and he stares at it and tries to understand.
***
Sam stays very still for a long time.
Ten minutes or twenty minutes or his entire life.
Hiding from Dean. Waiting for Dean.
He curls up facing away from the field, doesn’t want to see the strange and malevolent grass through the fronds of the tree. Enough of this strange and hostile place. Enough of the messy gray sky and the rain that falls like bullets. Enough of the Deans that aren’t Dean.
Just - enough.
Maybe he sleeps.
At some point the rain stops. A while later, Sam notices and turns to face away from the trunk of his tree, his home base. His fingers find one of his sketches in the dirt and he clutches at the cluster of circles, pulls it up in his hand, grips it tightly like it contains his salvation.
***
The grass is brown and dead and crunches under Sam’s feet when he walks. There are trees now, sparse around the edges of the field, and the world seems much smaller. He’d grown accustomed to seeing for miles. The deep and ominous grey of the sky has dulled to colorless, hopeless, empty as a black-and-white photograph of a rainbow.
Dean’s a bloody mess on the ground at his feet.
Sam kneels beside his brother, slowly despite the urgency pounding through his veins (DeanDeanDean!) and feels for a pulse.
Alive.
Alive, and blood on Sam’s knuckles -
Dean’s heartbeat stutters and falters and Sam grips his arm. “No - Dean -“ Don’t die. Don’t leave me. I can’t be alone here don’t fucking go. Memory-Dean is better than no Dean at all, so go ahead, turn Sam around and kill him with smoke and fire and a shot to the heart but don’t fucking go, Dean, don’t you leave.
Dean’s eyes blink open just a little.
“I won’t leave you,” he whispers, and Sam’s heart fills with hope -
Everything happens very fast after that.
***
He’s torn away from his brother violently, excruciatingly, and he screams without words and reaches for Dean (memory?) and his hands close on empty air and he’s falling.
There’s laughter. It’s sickening and he can’t scream anymore.
There’s an unfamiliar sensation fucking god what and he’s curious, he honestly just doesn’t understand this feeling -
Oh oh OH it’s pain it hurts it hurts stop PLEASE!
DEAN!
Strange eyes and strange shapes and noises that sound like bleeding and a hand on his arm that is absolutely, unequivocally not Dean.
A voice says his name, and something in Sam withers and dies.
Now he remembers.
Now he knows.
Sam knows what happened. Do you? Click here for answers, Encyclopedia Brown.
Summary: Sam doesn't know where he is, but there's something really wrong about Dean.
Warnings/Spoilers: R for language, Spoilers through S5
Author's Note: Aftermath-verse.
Okay…
It’s dusky dark and the air smells like rain. His back is wet - no, the ground is wet. He’s lying on the ground, blades of tall grass are tickling his nose and he’s cold.
Okay.
He sits up carefully, testing for injury. Nothing hurts. Everything’s fine, so -
He looks around.
It’s an open field, nothing but gently rolling grass in sight, no trees, no sign of movement. The grass ripples with the force of the wind, as if a hand is palming across it, ruffling a head of hair.
Sam trembles.
Is it a dream?
The sky’s a swirling mass of grey and he doesn’t like this, he really doesn’t like it. The rain smells closer. Wind lashes his face and whips his hair against his eyes until he has to close them. It’s all too much.
“Sammy?”
He closes his eyes at the sudden rush of relief and feels a little foolish.
What was he worried about? Dean is here.
***
“Heya, Sammy,” Dean says in that resigned you-win tone.
He raises his eyebrows. “Hey, Dean.”
“Sleepwalking again?”
“I guess -?” That’s as good an explanation as any. Certainly sounds a lot less scary than I don’t know how the fuck I got here.
“Because your bed was empty, and I’m not stupid, Sam.”
Sam frowns. “I never said you were stupid.”
“You have a nightmare?”
“Not that I can remember.” Sam rakes his hair back from his face. “I don’t know, maybe I ate something funny.”
Dean’s got that twisted smile Sam hates, fuck that smile, fuck Dean for pretending he’s all right when he’s not. He’d never let Sam get away with that shit. “It’s been two months, Sammy.”
“Two months - what?”
“I know she was,” Dean says, and okay, that doesn’t make sense. Something’s not right with this.
“I know, kid,” Dean responds to absolutely nothing, and he reaches out a hand wrapped in gauze and Sam remembers that injury oh oh oh.
***
If this hadn’t happened before, he’d be much more alarmed.
He sits on the ground beside Memory-Dean and talks about Ruby and demon blood and seals and Lilith and says I’m sorry about a thousand times, and his brother wraps an arm around him and pulls him close and says he’s so sorry about Jessica.
“I don’t know what to do,” Sam says, throat tight, regulating his breath automatically, because he’s pretty sure he’s got a cold or an infection. His lungs are burning. It could just be the fact that he can’t fucking cry, the fistful of emotions he’s swallowing. “I don’t know how to make it right.”
Dean pulls him closer. “It’ll be all right. You’ll get through this one, Sam.”
Sam closes his eyes and lets himself believe.
***
There’s only cold air on his shoulder and he knows before he opens his eyes that his brother is gone.
Memory-brother.
It’s all right, because memories ebb and fade like tides, drift in and out like bad radio, and he’s used to this. This is how it goes in his head, when he closes his eyes. It’s sharp and poignant and slips away the moment he tries to hold on.
This is how it was in heaven.
Just like this, except that in heaven Dean (real Dean) was next to him, comparing notes. Living his own memories. Swearing at angels and smiling at Sam and hearing him in a way Memory-Dean can’t because Memory-Dean isn’t Dean, so how is Sam supposed to believe this is heaven?
Come to think of it -
He stands and stretches and feels the solid reality of muscle pulling over bone, and this isn’t heaven, heaven is ethereal, this is Sam’s body alive and intact and sporting the beginnings of a chest cold, apparently, so he’s not even fucking dead.
So this isn’t heaven.
***
He finds the car parked in the middle of the field, and he finds Dean on the hood smoking a joint, and that’s as clear a mile marker as he needs. Sam climbs up onto the car and takes a seat beside the memory of his seventeen year old brother.
“Don’t tell Dad,” Dean says, passing over the twist of paper and herb and holding a lighter to the end. Sam inhales despite his burgeoning illness and feels the burn deep in his lungs, deeper than he usually feels oxygen. What’s up, asthma?
He tries to hold the smoke in the way Dean does, but of course he can’t and he coughs and coughs until his body is pitching forward off the car, but it’s fine because it’s just a memory. He feels Dean’s hands on his back and shoulder a second before they actually touch. He hears Dean’s voice soothing - “it’s all right, Sam, cough it out and breathe” - and knows what will happen, knows his lungs will unclench and he’ll stand up and sock his brother in the arm and Memory-Dean will wrestle him down and never let him smoke again ever, they’ve learned their lesson -
That’s not what happens.
Dean’s hands tighten on him and one moves to his neck, and Sam’s body heaves, but he isn’t getting any air.
Dean’s soothing sounds a whole lot more like sobbing.
This isn’t Memory-Dean.
This never happened.
Smoke smoke all around and Sam’s vision tunnels and -
***
Okay.
His lungs are loose and relaxed and moving air, chest rising and falling and filling with oxygen, beautiful sweet delicious. The smoke is gone. The smoke was never here.
It’s a dream. It has to be a dream.
Sam’s had nightmares all his life, and Dean always pulls him out of them with both hands, fingers fisted in flannel, eyes staring into Sam’s as if some clue might have been left behind. He doesn’t ask about the dreams, he just watches, and it’s only when he’s seen enough to satisfy him that he’ll let Sam go and bring him a glass of water and mumble platitudes to which Sam has honestly never listened.
It’s that first touch that makes Sam feel safe. That first understanding of his brother’s hand on his shoulder. That’s what brings him home.
He looks up at the dark vortex of sky and waits.
***
When Dean appears, it’s not from the sky.
And it’s not safe.
He’s ten yards away, wide stance, narrowed eyes, the rising wind lifting his hair away from his head just barely perceptibly. The storm’s kicking up.
“Sammy.”
This isn’t familiar. This feels wrong.
“Dean?”
Dean’s expression doesn’t waver. He isn’t reacting to Sam. He’s a memory. Memory-Dean, but -
Sam doesn’t remember this.
As his brother pulls out a gun and levels it at Sam, the sky splits open and the rain starts to fall in sheets.
The shot is lost in a clap of thunder.
***
“Sammy!”
Dean’s hands, warm and anxious, and Sam opens his eyes and looks into his brother’s eyes. Stares. Dean.
Awake awake thank fucking god and Dean’s holding his shoulder with one hand and the other is pressing against his chest, pressing too hard, hey, Sam can’t breathe, Sam’s lungs, shit, Dean, let up -
Dean lifts his hand and it’s solid red and Dean is shaking and crying and “Sammy, stay with me, Sam.”
He looks down.
Blood welling up -
Dizziness overcomes him and he falls back on the ground and now he’s shaking, shaking and he can’t remember how to draw breath and it hurts hurts hurts.
“Sam!” Dean cries, like he didn’t fire this shot himself, like he didn’t fucking kill-
no no no I’m not dying I’m not dying this never happened.
***
Okay.
Dean is gone and the blood is gone and Sam is alive and Sam is alone.
And Sam is so, so afraid.
The rain’s still falling, and the grass that was soft and tickled his face is sharp-edged and painful against his ankles as he runs aimlessly, desperately, away from whatever is happening.
He runs blindly, panicked, until he collides with something solid and falls back to the ground with a thud that jars his teeth.
He looks up. Dean looms above him.
“Hey, Sammy.”
***
Dream-Dean or Memory-Dean or whatever the hell he is has shown his stripes. He’s not Sam’s brother. He’s a menace with a fucking gun in his hand. Sam’s not going to talk to him anymore.
He stands and puts his back to Not-Brother and walks resolutely away from him, never mind that this Dean might be dangerous, never mind that this Dean might shoot him or jump him or put a knife in his back, Dean kills him and he doesn’t die so fuck Dean.
And that’s maybe the worst thought his head has ever given him.
He wants to turn around and run to his brother, this awful shade of his brother, and embrace him, not fuck Dean, Dean is important and Dean is family and Dean is every fucking happy memory he has.
Dean is fucking up every happy memory he has.
***
He’s flying a box kite, and he passes the string to Sam without comment.
Sam was fourteen years old when this happened and too old for kites, but not too old for aerodynamics, and anyway he’d never flown a kite before. He remembers this one. Dean swiped it from a supermarket, and Sam was doubly impressed because he’d believed all kites were triangles.
He runs with the kite a little, feeling the wind catch it and tug it in all directions, feeling the heavy canvas lift in the storm and take some of his weight -
It wasn’t storming when this happened.
Kites shouldn’t fly in thunderstorms.
He releases the string just as lightning lances down from the sky and Dean’s kite never burned but this one does, sharp and hot all the way down the string and into his hands, his bones. Sam falls to his knees in shock and pain and clutches at the grass, only to pull away, gasping, hands bloody where the blades (fucking blades) cut into his skin.
Dean laughs and calls his name.
***
There’s a tree on the edge of the field. A willow. The ground at the base of the trunk is relatively dry and sheltered.
Sam crawls under the fronds and hides.
When they were young, Dean used to point to something - a water fountain, a park bench, a pay phone - and say, “That’s home base, Sam. If you get lost, you go there and wait for me.”
This tree feels like home base.
He waits.
His fingers trace a pattern in the dirt over and over, four circles clustered together, and he stares at it and tries to understand.
***
Sam stays very still for a long time.
Ten minutes or twenty minutes or his entire life.
Hiding from Dean. Waiting for Dean.
He curls up facing away from the field, doesn’t want to see the strange and malevolent grass through the fronds of the tree. Enough of this strange and hostile place. Enough of the messy gray sky and the rain that falls like bullets. Enough of the Deans that aren’t Dean.
Just - enough.
Maybe he sleeps.
At some point the rain stops. A while later, Sam notices and turns to face away from the trunk of his tree, his home base. His fingers find one of his sketches in the dirt and he clutches at the cluster of circles, pulls it up in his hand, grips it tightly like it contains his salvation.
***
The grass is brown and dead and crunches under Sam’s feet when he walks. There are trees now, sparse around the edges of the field, and the world seems much smaller. He’d grown accustomed to seeing for miles. The deep and ominous grey of the sky has dulled to colorless, hopeless, empty as a black-and-white photograph of a rainbow.
Dean’s a bloody mess on the ground at his feet.
Sam kneels beside his brother, slowly despite the urgency pounding through his veins (DeanDeanDean!) and feels for a pulse.
Alive.
Alive, and blood on Sam’s knuckles -
Dean’s heartbeat stutters and falters and Sam grips his arm. “No - Dean -“ Don’t die. Don’t leave me. I can’t be alone here don’t fucking go. Memory-Dean is better than no Dean at all, so go ahead, turn Sam around and kill him with smoke and fire and a shot to the heart but don’t fucking go, Dean, don’t you leave.
Dean’s eyes blink open just a little.
“I won’t leave you,” he whispers, and Sam’s heart fills with hope -
Everything happens very fast after that.
***
He’s torn away from his brother violently, excruciatingly, and he screams without words and reaches for Dean (memory?) and his hands close on empty air and he’s falling.
There’s laughter. It’s sickening and he can’t scream anymore.
There’s an unfamiliar sensation fucking god what and he’s curious, he honestly just doesn’t understand this feeling -
Oh oh OH it’s pain it hurts it hurts stop PLEASE!
DEAN!
Strange eyes and strange shapes and noises that sound like bleeding and a hand on his arm that is absolutely, unequivocally not Dean.
A voice says his name, and something in Sam withers and dies.
Now he remembers.
Now he knows.
Sam knows what happened. Do you? Click here for answers, Encyclopedia Brown.