Fic: Gone Boy
Title: Gone Boy
Summary: Sam doesn't sleep for three days after Dean dies.
Author's Notes: Set right after 3x16. An exploration of what Sam might have went through in the days after Dean went to Hell.
Sam doesn't sleep for three days after Dean dies. He drives for four hours to Pontiac, Illinois with his brother's mangled corpse wrapped in red-stained bedsheets in the back. He doesn't know why exactly he buries Dean there; in the middle of the woods by the road, in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he stops the car because he can't keep driving anymore, maybe it's something else.
He looks for three hours for a wooden box that will fit Dean. It's nearing morning and shops are opening, but he finds a funeral home that's still closed and takes an unfinished wood coffin from the work room out back. There's no lining to it, no latch, no gloss, no hinges. It's just a wooden box and a lid.
Bobby suggests they burn Dean, give him a hunter's funeral like he'd have wanted. Sam explains that Dean would need a body to come back to, one day. You just don't give up, Bobby says. Sam grabs the shovel out of the trunk and says nothing.
It takes him two hours to dig Dean's grave. It's raining and he's soaked to the bone, shivering, fingers numb around the shovel's handle. He takes his time, he goes slow, because he wants more than anything to prolong putting Dean in the ground.
He doesn't let Bobby help, and when the man offers to clean Dean up, Sam tells him to sit in his truck and stay out of the way. He feels Bobby watch every fistful of dirt he turns out of the ground. He looks up at one point, once the grave is dug, and he squints through the rain to see Bobby crying, head bowed over his steering wheel.
Sam can't find it in himself to care.
It takes another two hours to clean Dean up. He has to lean over the front seat of the Impala as he dabs up drying blood from where Dean's body is crammed in the back seat. Dean's skin is shredded; his chest is ripped open. It takes Sam a whole hour just to stitch the skin back over Dean's exposed, stiff heart.
He gently pulls the amulet away from Dean's neck and loops it around his own. It rests cold against his chest, feeling unfamiliar.
He struggles to get Dean into the grave, he manages fine getting him from the car to the hole, but there's no way of putting him in the ground on his own without being rough. Bobby's there, Sam never even heard him leave his truck, and he takes Dean's feet. The two of them lower Dean into the casket, taking care like it might hurt him.
Sam can't stop thinking about what will be hurting Dean.
Life wasn't worth it. Sam's life wasn't worth it.
Bobby tells him to go back to South Dakota with him. Without thinking, Sam says yes. Sam's tailing Bobby's truck and he can hear Dean's tapes rattling in the glovebox, he inserts the first one his fingers find and turns the volume up loud enough to hurt.
It's Dean's song, but there's no Dean. The empty seat next to him is like a gaping void, ready to swallow Sam up. Sam wants to let it. He sees an intersection up ahead and slows the Impala down, ever so slightly, and once he reaches the turn he yanks hard on the wheel. He clamps his foot down on gas and lets the car growl, speeding away. Far from Bobby, far from anyone.
The motel he checks himself into is as rundown as they come. The neon lights are flashing and broken. Welcome to Dead End Hotel. Or at least that's what Sam reads. He's doesn't know what the name really is.
Sometimes, Sam thinks he left his sanity all the way back in Broward County.
It's not until he lets himself into the room that he realises he'd booked a double. He goes back to the reception and asks to change to a single, right after he throws up what little he already had in his stomach.
Sam lies down on his single bed in his single room and watches the numbers on the clock flash and change. He doesn't get up and he doesn't sleep. He's in a state of constant consciousness, stuck in his head, re-watching his brother's last moments. He lies awake for hours until the sun comes and goes. When he finally gets up, forcing his shaking hands to fill a glass of water, he finds that his phone has been switched off. There are over thirty missed calls from Bobby. He checks his messages, barely noticing the five from Bobby. There's a missed message from Dean dated May 2nd. Dean called him the day he died.
Sam puts his phone away, leaves it in the bedside drawer, and goes out to find a liquor store.
He doesn't remember much of that day. He finally sleeps that night.
When he wakes up, he has a headache that rages against his skull. His mouth is dry and rough like sandpaper. His stomach churns like his intestines are coiling around inside. He rolls over to find no other bed. No Dean.
He vomits all over the carpet.
The rest of the day is spent in the bathroom. He thinks of Dean. He makes plans to go back to the liquor store. When Dad died, it was painful. When Jess died, it was like the air was taken from his lungs, the blood from his veins. When Dean died, there was nothing. Just void. Unimaginable, endless nothing. Nothing would ever be okay again, not when there's nothing left.
And the worst part is that there's no closure. There never will be. No one can tell Sam that Dean's in a better place. Dean's in the worst place. Dean's gone forever.
Sam sleeps for the rest of the day and wakes up at 3am. His headache has resided slightly but his stomach is growling, tightening painfully with hunger. He forces down an energy bar and a bottle of water. And he sits.
He sits because there's nothing to do. Nowhere to go. No one to be there for.
There's nothing left for him but that message on his phone. He can't listen to it. He needs it to be waiting for him a while longer.
He gets more phone calls; he doesn't answer any of them. Most of them are from Bobby, a couple from Ellen. One comes from an unknown number from Kansas so he guesses it's Missouri. There's no doubt she knows what's happened.
You've got God-given talent… well, not God-given but you get the gist.
If Ruby were here, and who knows what happened to her, Sam would start asking questions. Once Yellow-Eyes was out of the picture, so were the visions. But Sam could always feel something. There was something that wasn't dead inside of him, something stronger than him, something he doesn't understand, never has, not since he was a little kid.
And that's something Dean never knew. Dean will never know, now. Sam wishes he could tell him, now that he's gone. Sam wishes a lot of things he hadn't wished when Dean was alive.
He needs to talk to him. He needs it more than he needs air.
He finds his phone, finds the message. It takes him half an hour to click listen.
"Heya, Sammy. I'm sorry I turned your phone off. I didn't want you to hear this until… until after. I know that right now you'll be hurting, I know, believe me. Just… don't do it alone, okay? I know I'll be gone and it sucks, I mean, I'm the funniest person you know. But you've got Bobby, kid. You've got Ellen, and Jo. Please, Sammy, don't be alone. You know I've never been so good with words, or at least the whole feelings thing, but I want you to know that I did it all for you. Everything was always for you. Freaking peanut butter and banana sandwiches. For you, Sammy… Right. I should hang up now. We've still got work to do, right? And if for some freaking reason we get a miracle and this message is pointless, well, good. But if this goes how I think it goes, and I've left you alone. I'm sorry. And don't be alone."
The message ends with a beep but Sam keeps the phone pressed to his ear. There's rage curling up inside of him like flames.
"Fuck you, Dean," Sam spits into the phone. "You don't get to do this. You don't get to bring me back from the dead. You don't get to go to Hell. You don't get leave me alone. You don't get to do any of that and feel like you can tell me not to be alone. You left me! I'm alone now because of you! Don't be alone? What the fuck does that mean? Bobby, Ellen, Jo, none of them are you. I don't need them. I need you and you fucking left!"
He's crying now, bawling his eyes out into a phone with no one listening on the other line. At the back of his mind he wonders if he's finally, truly snapped. He doesn't care.
"How could you do this to me, Dean?" Sam asks. There's no reply. He'll never get his answer. "You couldn't live without me. Did you honestly think I'd be fine without you, you asshole? I was at peace. I was dead but I was at peace. You could have lived with that. How could you think I would survive knowing that you're in Hell for the rest of eternity?"
There's nothing but silence on the other end. Sam snaps the phone in half, climbs in the car, and drives.
An hour out of state, Sam throws the broken halves of his cell phone out of the window.
There's nowhere to go. There's nothing to do. There's no one to be there for.
Sam is gone.