SPN/DA Fic: The Wellspring (26/?)
Title: The Wellspring
Author: scourgeofeurope
Fandoms: Supernatural, Dark Angel
Rating: R (gen)
Summary: Sam and Dean find a tiny smartass in a barn. What are they to do?
Warnings: Excessive swearing, angst
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's Notes: We can thank lizadork again. ♥ This wouldn't exist if it weren't for her ability to ease me through my psychosis.
Additional author's notes and previous chapters can be found here.
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Sam isn’t a ghost. He’s sitting on the couch, squeezing the cushion with his fingers and he can feel the roughened fabric against his skin, can remember years and years of sleeping here, breathing in the musty scent of time going by. He remembers when his legs got too long to fit and it felt like it took forever at the time, but it was just an instant, really. Childhood was like a swift cut of a knife, just a passing moment that opened him up and kept him bleeding.
He tried to close the wound. He did, he tried so hard to close it and get away from it, but he couldn’t. He can’t. It’s open and salted and seared by the flames of the fire, that fucking fire, the unyielding adhesive that bound Sam to his brother’s arms, that keeps him here still.
But Sam’s not a ghost. He’s not. Even if they’re eternally welded to whatever it is they’re haunting, ghosts can disappear. Ghosts can hide and do what they will without anyone seeing or hearing them, because ghosts are sneaky and incorporeal bastards. And Sam may be sneaky, but he’s not incorporeal in the least. There’s this couch, you see, and he can feel it in every sense of the word, this couch and his jaw, which is still throbbing from Dean’s quick fist.
He slept earlier, but he’s awake now. It’s the dead of night and he’s awake and they’re asleep on the floor, the three of them with Dean in the middle. Alec’s got his nose tucked into Dean’s solid side as if he’s trying to keep it warm, a limp little arm splayed over the rhythmic chest. Ben’s got a fistful of the charcoal T-shirt in his hand, and his eyes are shut and soft now. They were tight before, and his jaw was tense when he was pretending. It took a while, maybe about as long as it took for his legs to grow, but Sam knows now when they’re faking it.
They should never have to fake it. They should always be comfortable enough to sleep, should always feel safe enough. Like now. With Dean. As long as Dean’s here they’ll be fine. Dean is an unshakeable and surrounding presence, sometimes so much so that he makes it hard to breathe.
It’s not about that this time, though. It’s not. It’s not about a need for freedom or a need to get away or the pursuit of a normal life. This isn’t like Stanford and Sam’s not leaving in hopes of becoming a yuppie lawyer and forgetting this entire sad fucking existence that he’s been leading since he was six months old. Stanford was a long time ago, when he was eighteen and stupid and thought he could lose it, thought it wouldn’t follow him to wherever he ended up. Now he knows he can never leave it. You can’t leave something that’s inside of you.
Sam’s not being selfish.
He’s not.
They should always sleep this way. They should never have to worry about snow globes flying at their heads. They should never have to worry about the guy they once saw fit to call Uncle leaving marks on their arms.
Which is why Sam’s getting up from this couch. He feels unsteady on his feet as he takes in their darkened shapes and he wonders if John felt like this all those times after that sometimes-hug or sometimes-hair-ruffle and that always-repetition-of-rules-and-schedule, all those times when he would walk out that door. It’s not really walking. Sam knows this even before he’s done it. It’s not walking, it’s stumbling. Sam’s going to stumble out that door, just like his dad used to.
And he’s going to come back. Just like his dad used to. This isn’t forever, this is just...he just needs to find some control, needs to make sure he can keep them safe even from himself and they don’t need him right now, anyway. They have Dean. They’ll always have Dean, just like Sam will always have Dean. They’ll have him even when they don’t want him.
He feels like he’s walking on ice, like his feet could slip out from under him any moment now and land him on his ass. But they don’t. He makes it to his duffel, which is already packed and ready to go. He’s reaching to pick it up when he notices Ben’s bear leaning against its side, lonely and forgotten.
“Fuck,” he whispers, and the word’s eaten up by the darkness before it reaches the three dozing lumps on the floor. They don’t stir. He doesn’t want them to stir. He doesn’t want them to wake up before he’s gone - or before he comes back, when he’s better, when he’s got a handle on this shit.
But then there’s this bear, and the memory of Ben’s face when Dean knelt down and gave it to him, that face that showed little in ways of fondness for the gift even though his hands were gripping it like they’d never let it go. Ben needs things to cling to.
M’I yours?
Sam needs to give him these things. Ben is his, his and Dean’s, and Sam needs to give him these things.
Sam likes to lie to himself. He’s totally a ghost, a cold breath in a dark room, feet somehow so light they’re floating him over to that pile of Deans on the floor. He doesn’t know how he got here, to this space next to this boy where he’s kneeling, where he’s so cautious about wedging a child’s toy under a child’s arm, and then he can’t even leave it at just that. The blanket’s too low, so Sam pulls it up to Ben’s shoulders and the kid sighs in his sleep, fist unconsciously clenching and unclenching the cotton of Dean’s T-shirt. And Sam can’t leave it at just that, either.
He touches the boy’s cheek with faint fingers, vaguely hoping that he’s leaving marks no one will ever see. Ben’s fucked up and Alec’s fucked up and Sam’s fully aware that there’s blood on those tiny hands, but it doesn’t change what he sees or feels. Ben is warm and pure and beautiful under Sam’s skin, and so is Alec. They shouldn’t have to be exposed to his psychic whatevers.
He’s just about to get up when Ben flinches, eyes popping open in time with a sudden inhalation of breath.
“Benny…”
“Uncle Sam?” The kid blinks and rubs at his eyes but he relaxes somewhat. “Is something wrong?
“Nothing’s wrong. I just…I wanted you to have your bear.” That’s the truth. Some of it, anyway.
“Oh. Thank you.”
“No problem. Go back to sleep for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Ben’s eyes remain stubbornly open for a while. Sam waits, drifts a calming hand up and down the kid’s side until he finally relaxes and shuts them again.
He doesn’t know how else to say goodbye.
It’s snowing again. It was melting earlier, but now it’s probably all frozen. He’s cold just looking out the window, but he hitches his bag over his shoulder and zips up his coat, sucks in a breath and steps out the door. It won’t be that long, it won’t, and when he gets back, it’ll be better for all of them. Maybe they’ll even be able to sleep again like they used to, maybe Sam will be able to feel that closeness again, that warmth of his brother and his…their boys. His and Dean’s. They’ll sleep again, all in a pile, because it’s hard to get two beds these days and Sam won’t have to worry about when he’s awake, about how he might get angry or scared or freaked the fuck out because he’ll be able to control it.
Just as soon as he gets back.
“Sam?”
If he ever leaves.
Sam turns around. Snow crunches under his boots. He can make out Dean’s silhouette on the porch, the yellow light of the open doorway outlining his rigid form. Sam knows his brother, knows every facial expression and every stance because he’s been memorizing them for twenty-six years and he knows for a fact that this is Dean’s what-the-fuck-do-you-think-you’re-doing stance. It didn’t used to look this way. About fifteen years ago, it was just a replica of Dad’s what-the-fuck-do-you-think-you’re-doing stance, but sometime between Stanford and Dad’s death, Dean managed to conjure something of his own out of it. And Sam learned that one, too. It’s this one.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Aren’t you cold?”
Dean doesn’t respond to that, just disappears into the house and Sam kind of regrets saying anything, because really…he could have just left. Dean might have just stood there with feet petrified by the snow, and Sam could have walked away in that universe where Dean isn’t the sort of guy to just go back inside to slip on some worn combat boots and trudge out into the freezing cold in nothing but his boxers and T-shirt, in that universe where Dean doesn’t always come after Sam.
Sometimes Sam wishes he lived in that universe. Sometimes, like now, with his brother yanking him back by the strap of his duffel.
“Dean.”
“Get your ass back inside.”
Okay, maybe it’s not purely selfless, the reason Sam’s leaving. There’s this, too, this entire situation where Dean’s got the reins and Sam’s fighting against the bit - but for God’s sake, it’s been his entire life and the corners of his mouth are starting to tear.
“No.”
Dean’s jerking the duffel’s strap again, and then he’s gripping Sam by the elbow, leading him inside, and Sam’s so used to this that his legs just carry him along. Dean’s in charge, Dean’s always in charge until Sam snaps out of it and starts asking why and what-for, when he pulls back and pushes his brother away.
“Sammy,” the growl is low and warning. “I’m fucking freezing and I swear on everything holy-“
“You don’t believe in anything holy.”
“I swear on Mom’s grave-“
“Mom’s not in there.”
Dean grits his teeth and stomps his foot, snarls in frustration before reaching for Sam’s elbow again. Sam’s quicker on the uptake this time, though, and his evasion is swift. He’s not…he won’t let Dean do this to him. He’s not fifteen.
“I’m not fifteen.”
Another foot stomp. A hand reaching up to pinch the bridge of a nose. “You’re right. You’re not fifteen.” Dean agrees, and he sounds like he means it. Sam would feel gratified if he didn’t know his brother so well, if he didn’t know what was coming next. “You’re freakin’ seven. You did this when you were seven and I was twelve and it was cold as balls then, too. M’sorry, Sam. This time I can say for certain that Dad’s not coming back, so suck it the fuck up and get your ass back in the house.”
Sometimes there’s nothing more enraging in this world than a sibling who can recount every embarrassing childhood anecdote for every possible present scenario - especially when that sibling is completely wrong in doing so. “Don’t act like you don’t know why I’m doing this. You know why.” Sam’s voice carries in the dark. He didn’t realize how loud he was talking until now.
“I do. And it’s for a stupid fucking reason.”
He didn’t realize how close he was standing to his brother, either. He can feel Dean’s hot breath graze his chin, can hear the knuckles pop as the guy’s fists clench. They’re going to start swinging any moment now.
I’m trying to keep you safe, Sam wants to say. I’m doing this for you and yours, ours.
“You’re a stupid fucking reason,” he says instead, and he may not be fifteen, but his voice is, fifteen and surly and shut-the-fuck-up-I’m-not-like-you. This isn’t how he wanted it to go down. Sam’s mature outside of arguments with his brother, he swears it.
Dean’s apparently had enough. Sam can tell by the way his brother’s grabbing the front of his coat and heaving him in the direction of the house and this is the shit that Dad used to pull. Winchesters have always been about the manhandling.
Sam’s about to pull away, is about to tell Dean to get his fucking hands off him, but that’s when he looks up and sees their small faces pressed against the window, pale and drawn. He can’t let them see him like this, not again.
“Dean…Dean.” Dean’s not listening. Sam digs his heels into the ground, easily throws his brother off-balance, but catches him, grabs his arm and steadies him before he can topple all angry-faced and bare-skinned into the snow. “I’ll go in, okay? We’ll talk it over. Just…the kids.”
Dean tears his arm away from Sam’s hold, but refrains from reaching back to seize him again. His eyes skitter over to the window just in time to see Ben and Alec duck away.
“Fine,” comes the grunt, and Sam’s not surprised when Dean just stands there and waits for him to start trudging in first, as if expecting he’ll run away when his back is turned.
But, whatever. They’re going into the house because Sam said he would go into the house and that’s some slight form of control, so maybe, for once, Sam can take the reins. He just needs to make Dean see reason, needs to stay on top of the conversation and then maybe they can discuss this like two grown men as opposed to some emotionally-stunted asshole and his baby brother.
The kitchen is warm and Dean’s quick to shut the door and shake the cold from his legs. Sam watches him with steady eyes. He’s going to keep this short and civil and to the point. He clears his throat, feeling for a moment like he’s back in college and about to give a presentation worth an exorbitant percent of his grade.
“Let me start this off by saying that you can’t make me stay-“
The impact of Dean’s fist knocks him back a few steps this time, his ass colliding with the kitchen counter before he can go any farther, or potentially lose his balance. Sam doesn’t know why he’s always taken off-guard by his brother’s blows, or why he always mistakenly assumes that the art of talking like adults is something everyone achieves by the time they reach their mid-twenties - it’s moments like these when he realizes he still needs to wise up to the fact that while his legs grew, the couch didn’t. His surroundings will never match his age, and neither will the way his sibling treats him.
Sam shakes his head, lifts his eyes from the dirty kitchen floor to meet his brother’s, but they stop less than mid-way up.
All cats need bells. Alec and Ben are no exception. He didn’t hear them come in, didn’t see them step in front of him or form this low wall to shield him from Dean.
“We don’t hit our brothers,” Alec says, his voice strong but edged with either shock or hurt, Sam’s uncertain. “Not in this family.”
Sam briefly wonders if he’s too young to have a heart attack. The kid listens - he listened all those months ago. To Sam. The recitation is almost word for word and Sam can’t help the swell of pride that rises from his gut, even now. Even now when he knows for a fact that he shouldn’t feel pride at all because Alec’s forgetting that exception to the rule - and this...
Sam doesn’t even know anymore, because here they are, standing between him and Dean, small limbs strained and ready to break them apart lest they start hurting each other.
Dean’s eyes are like slowly cracking glass. “Kitten-“
“We don’t hit our brothers,” Alec repeats, and there’s a small snarl to his voice this time, a ferocity that will one day grow into something perpetual and underlying, a command, an order, a rule. It strikes Sam that it’s not the first time he’s heard this tone come out of this mouth.
You’re scaring my brother. You don’t get to do that.
Dean’s entire life has been about keeping Sam safe, and maybe it wasn’t just because Dad gave him a job to do. Alec never met John Winchester, but here he is with that same need ingrained into him, into his very nature, that need to protect his brother, his uncle, his blood.
And Sam was going to leave him. The exception to the no-hitting-your-brother rule might very well apply in this case.
He reaches a hand forward, snatches the back of the boy’s far too-big T-shirt between two fingers, pulls him in so that his head is just barely touching Sam’s stomach.
“It’s okay, buddy.”
He feels the head brush from side to side. “S’not okay. It’s never okay.”
Ben’s moving now, edging over to the refrigerator. Sam watches as he pulls a dishrag off the counter, stands on his tiptoes to get into the freezer for ice.
“Benny…”
“Ice takes down the swelling…it’ll swell…” Ben’s voice is quiet as he wraps the cubes in the cloth, presses the cold package into Sam’s hand. “Normal people swell. You’re kind of normal. You’ll swell.”
It feels like something’s breaking inside of him when he realizes it. Sam was going to leave, he was going to leave them. He can’t even process the reason at this point, he just can’t-
“What in the fuckin’ hell?” Bobby’s standing in the threshold, looking at them with wide, tired eyes. Sam wonders if the hunter sleeps in that hat, because it’s on his head even though he was obviously just sleeping. Maybe he keeps it on the nightstand, puts it on every time he gets up out of sheer habit. Maybe he- “Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Your face looks like it’s bruising. Someone hit you, boy?” Wise eyes float over to Dean, who grunts and straightens, meets Bobby’s gaze with a surly glare.
“He fell down some stairs.”
Bobby raises his eyebrows, crosses his arms. “Uh huh.”
“The porch stairs. He was on his way out.” Saying those words does something to Dean to take him back ten minutes, and he clenches his hands into fists again. This time they’re not in the dark, though, and Sam can see the look in his eye - the hurt mingling with the anger, almost overpowering it, but not quite. “Sammy was running away from home.”
Bobby levels a look at Sam for only a second, but the disappointment in his eyes is nothing in comparison to the way Alec’s taking steps away, turning around, backing up into Dean with the pain of betrayal raw on his face.
Ben doesn’t move. He just looks at the floor.
“I think you need to cool off.” The words are directed at Dean, and Sam watches his brother’s eyes narrow even as he places a relatively gentle hand on Alec’s chest.
“M’fine.”
“Did that sound like a suggestion to you?” Bobby’s irritated to all hell. Sam doesn’t blame him. It’s one thing to bombard his house while they’re on the run from the government, it’s completely another to disrupt his sleep.
Dean closes his eyes, mouths something incomprehensible. Sam can practically hear him willing himself not to snap. “No, sir.”
“You’re damn right. Now, I’m going back to bed. I expect you,” Sam finds himself on the end of a steely gaze, “to still be here when I wake up. And I also expect you to be in one piece,” Bobby adds, eyes drifting over to Dean.
“He’s not going to hit Uncle Sam again,” Alec interjects, reaching out and gripping Dean’s free hand with his own. “S’okay, Bobby.”
Bobby’s lip twitches. “You’ll hold down the fort, will ya?”
“Yes, sir, if you want to give me n’ Ben ultimate power.”
“You gonna abuse it?”
“Most likely.”
Bobby allows himself a full-fledged smirk, though he doesn’t respond with anything but a nod before turning around and walking himself back to bed. Sam watches Alec tilt his head up to look at Dean. Dean, whose eyes don’t seem to be leaving Sam anytime soon.
“I’m taking that as a passing over of the torch, just so you know.”
Sam’s not even sure if Dean heard that, what with the fact that he simply pats Alec’s narrow chest once before disentangling himself from the boy.
“Dad?”
Dean’s silent as he pulls a chair out from the kitchen table, sets its back against where the walls meet in the corner of the room. Sam has no idea what the hell this is about and he’s so busy staring at the lone piece of furniture that he’s surprised to feel his brother’s hand on his elbow again, gripping it, though not nearly as roughly as before.
“Dean?”
“Just…come.” There’s a plea somewhere amidst Dean’s quiet anger and Sam feels like his legs are propelling themselves into following the tug so obediently, into allowing those hands to push him down into that chair.
“What-“
Dean cuts him off with a finger in his face. “Don’t fucking move.”
“Dean.” There’s no way in hell. Sam’s not fifteen, and he’s not nine or ten, and he’s definitely not five.
But then there’s a smaller replica of Dean’s finger imitating that same stern gesture and Alec’s voice echoing those words, “Don’t move.”
And then they’re turning around, both of them, and Dean’s calling for Ben to follow, because apparently “Uncle Sammy’s got some thinking to do.”
Ben lingers, though. He lingers, and puts a small hand on Sam’s knee, looks up at him with sad green eyes, says in a voice that doesn’t actually expect Sam to obey but hopes so clearly that he will, “Please don’t go.”
Sam doesn’t move. Sam doesn’t go.
He can’t.
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It’s been two hours at least, and Sam’s still sitting here, his ass aching even though he’s slouching, legs extended for miles in front of him, tipping the chair back onto its hind bolsters like a bored kid in grade school. And he knows how ridiculous this is, how he shouldn’t be submitting to Dean’s fraternal power trips because this...this is the problem. Well, part of it, anyway.
And Sam was angry, still is, but before it was the kind of anger that could take down a forest. That was before the downpour, though. That was before they woke up and he saw them awake and in the light and they were like tiny flesh-covered fire hydrants with socked feet and hurt faces and he was going to leave them. He still can’t believe he was going to leave them. It was easier in the dark, when he was caught up in that game of pretending he wasn’t a ghost.
Sam needs to come to terms with the fact that he’ll always be exactly like the things he hunts.
“Uncle Sam?” Alec’s a whisper coming through the door and his steps are silent as he pads forward. He stops at Sam’s knee, quirks a lip upward. “Have you learned your lesson, yet?”
Dean’s infuriating in all of his forms, but at least this one’s small enough and willing enough to be easily manhandled. Sam grunts, pulls the kid in and up onto his lap, brushes his mouth over the spiky head.
“Your hair’s growing back fast,” he mumbles into the boy’s scalp. He doesn’t know if it’s true, really, but he knows it’ll make Alec happy to hear it, so he says it anyway.
“Yeah?” Alec’s voice is bright. “I thought it might be. Maybe I’ll be able to grow some long, gorgeous locks like yours, huh, Uncle Sam?”
“Maybe.”
“S’my hope for the future, honestly.”
Sam snorts, lifts his head up only to replace it with his index finger, which he trails down the center of Alec’s head to the base of his neck, slicing the barcode in half on his way. Alec shivers, shakes the digit off.
“I think it’s growing in darker, too,” Sam tells him.
“Like Dean’s?” Hope. Sam feels like he hasn’t heard hope like that in a long time.
“Like Dean’s,” he agrees. “And you’re getting bigger. You must have shot up at least an inch since we found you.”
“Awesome,” Alec says, even though he doesn’t seem to care too much about that particular observation. He swings his legs, knocks his ankles gently back into Sam’s shins. Sam’s hand is moved over to rest in a tiny lap, his fingers plucked and picked at as Alec sits without saying a word for at least five minutes.
“Alec?”
Alec shakes his head.
Dean doesn’t like to talk, either, when he’s mad at Sam. In fact, sometimes Dean likes to pretend his anger doesn’t exist at all.
“Sweetheart?” Sam tries again, because it works when Dean does it, these pet names. Dad never used them. Dad was all about the “champ” and the “sport” and the “kiddo,” but Dean...
“What?” Alec grumbles, and his ankle comes back just a little bit harder into Sam’s shin this time.
Dean understands himself better than even he knows. He understands the words he doesn’t say, that Dad didn’t say, the words that will open him up. Sam sometimes still wonders what his mother smelled like, if her skin was soft, if she used these words while he wailed like an asshole infant, or when Dean scraped a knee, back when Dean was still young enough to shed more than one tear at a time.
“Do you have something you want to say to me?” Sam braces himself, well aware that he just handed a child a gun and told him to shoot.
Alec shakes his head. Again.
“Nothing? We’re just going to sit here, then?”
“Yeah.” The kid shifts on Sam’s lap, makes himself comfortable. His head is heavy and limp against Sam’s chest.
“Okay,” Sam agrees, because he doesn’t know what the hell else to do. If it were Dean, he would press, possibly yell, bait the bastard into letting him have it, letting it out, but this isn’t Dean.
Alec kicks his leg out again and brings it back. Hard.
Slash that previous thought. It’s a little Dean.
“Fuck,” Sam hisses, because the sting is red and hot and lasting. “Alec Winchester.”
If the name gives the boy pause, he doesn’t show it. He keeps himself stubbornly fitted into his human chair even as Sam attempts to lean forward and rub the pain from his leg.
“Alec, we don’t hurt each other.” Sam knows just how ridiculous he sounds. Hurting each other is all they’ve been doing recently, after all.
“You hurt me first,” the kid shoots back, crossing his arms. “You’re a fickle bitch, Uncle Sam.”
Holy shit, the mouth on this kid.
“Hey.” The reprimand just gets him an elbow to the ribs. Sam winces at the pain, tries not to vocalize it. “The rule about not hitting brothers extends to uncles, too, Alec. Do it again and I’ll-”
“Unless they deserve it.” Alec twines his legs behind Sam’s, locking himself into place lest Sam try to move him. “You made that exception and you fit into it. Deal.”
“Alec-”
“Fuck you,” the kid snarls, slapping away Sam’s grabby hands. Sam’s pretty sure he’s going to start kicking again any second now and maybe this time he’ll bruise or sprain or break something, but instead he just presses Sam’s hands down onto his own small thighs, keeps them there so Sam can’t move them, and asks in a voice that’s trying so hard, but failing to maintain that animalistic pretense, “Why did you want to leave me?”
The crack in Alec’s voice shoots a bullet into Sam’s gut. Fuck childhood, sad miniature versions of Dean are what’s going to cause him to bleed out in the end.
“I didn’t want to leave you,” he says, because that’s true. It’s the truest thing he’s said all day, in fact.
Alec shakes his head. “Then why the fuck were you trying to go? We only do what we want. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Not out here.”
Out here. Alec’s just starting to breathe the world into his lungs, he doesn’t...he can’t possibly understand what out here’s all about, yet.
“It’s not that simple, baby.”
“M’not a baby. I’m a genetically-enhanced instrument of death, and it is that simple. Nobody was pushing or pulling you out that door. It was just you, walking away from us.”
Sam wedges his hands out from underneath Alec’s palms, wraps his arms around the kid’s middle. Dean has this power, too, the power to only see black and white when he feels like it - selective ignorance in its most innocent form. “We do what we want, but we have to keep moral and familial obligation in mind. I was trying to keep you safe. ”
“You’re doing it wrong.”
Alec doesn’t understand, doesn’t even want to understand. Sam has to make him understand.
“Alec, I...I’m not the safest person to be around right now. This...thing...you, um, you know about this thing, you’ve mentioned it-” Sam can’t say what it is. Sam can’t talk about freak adrenaline things to tiny children who weren’t and should never be raised in this life.
“I don’t give a clown’s ass about your telekinesis, Sam.”
He really needs to learn to stop underestimating them.
“Alec.”
“I don’t. It saved us. You have freaky brain powers and that’s awesome. Why can’t you see that’s awesome?”
Sam can’t see that’s awesome because it’s not awesome and he doesn’t know how to explain to Alec that sometimes being a freak doesn’t mean you automatically fit in with other freaks, even if they are your blood. He doesn’t know how to explain that some freaks are good freaks and some freaks are dark freaks, so he goes for the simple version.
“It comes from a bad place.”
“No.” Alec’s head isn’t going to stop shaking today. “It doesn’t.”
“Alec-”
“It comes from you, doesn’t it? You’re a good place. You’re good people.” The boy hasn’t unlinked his legs, yet. If anything, he’s twining them tighter as the conversation progresses. “You’re good and you think bad things, like Ben. There’s nothing bad about you, you just think there is.”
“The things in our lives aren’t so black and white. You know that. There are circumstances-”
“I don’t care about circumstances,” the boy growls, his legs now choking Sam’s own like two pythons. “There are simple rules that everyone should live by and number one is that you stay with your unit. You stay with your unit even if you don’t want to, and even if they don’t want you to sometimes, because if you don’t have your unit, you don’t have anyone and then you disappear.”
You stay with your unit. You stay with your family. Everything that Dean understands is what Alec understands is what Ben understands. Sam’s outnumbered and starting to feel disillusioned.
“What happened to ‘we do what we want?’”
“S’a moot point now. I don’t give a shit about what you want. I don’t want you to disappear.”
Sam doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything, not for a long time. They sit there and they breathe and Alec eventually unhooks his legs, goes back to gently swinging them back and forth, ankles once again colliding with Sam’s shins. Sam wonders what they’re waiting for. Sam wonders why he’s still in this chair. He can get up anytime he wants to. The kid might have grown, but he’s still small, and Sam can get up anytime he wants to, can pull the kid up and set him on the ground and try his best to muddle through this situation without disappearing.
“M’bad, you know.”
The admission is almost inaudible. Sam has to strain to hear it, but once he does, he realizes that he’s not going anywhere any time soon. This is what their bones are made of, these words. Self-loathing, yet another Winchester curse, another defect passed through generations of blood and misery.
“You’re not bad,” Sam says, and he shifts, catches the boy’s legs in the crook of his arm, swings him around so they’re dangling limply across his thighs. He swallows when he feels Alec’s head drop onto his shoulder, tries to down his guilt because he was going to leave and this, this boy in his arms so pliant, is trusting him to stay.
“I am, too,” Alec mumbles, his breath like a faint kiss against Sam’s neck. “I want guns.”
“You can’t have ‘em. But wanting ‘em doesn’t make you bad.” Sam feels a slight movement against his clavicle, another head shake.
“I want them and I want to use them. I want to shoot them all dead.”
Sam doesn’t have to ask who.
“Every last one of them, every one of them who touched me like I was made of wood or metal or clay or what-the-fuck-ever else you can make shit with. Every one of them who locked me up in spaces too small because I spoke without permission. I want them dead and I know it won’t be hard because I’m an awesome shot.”
Sam doesn’t tell him it’s disturbing, hearing him talk this way. He can’t. He has a palm on the kid’s hip, though, and he presses it in, brings Alec in as close as he can.
“What they did to Ben…he’s s’posed to be like me, you know, like Dean. He’s s’posed to be a rebel who cracks jokes at inappropriate times, who knows he doesn’t have to do what anyone says ever unless he wants to. And he’s not. It’s in him, somewhere, I know it, but he can’t let it come out and that’s their fault. I want to kill them for what they did to him. I want to kill them for fucking him up so badly that he thought a corpse’s teeth would bring him luck.”
“I know,” Sam says. It’s all he can say. It’s all that will come out of his mouth. “I know.” Again and again in hushed tones against the kid’s head.
“I want to kill them because they shot the guy that saved us…did you…you saw him. He shot him. Lydecker. He put him on his knees and he shot him through the back of his skull and that was my fault, I should have gotten him out, he saved us, he let me out and we’re alive now because he…he let me out and Lydecker just shot him dead.”
Alec’s been living with this for days, and Sam…Sam kind of knew it, kind of assumed it as soon as the guard went down and Alec…Alec grabbed the gun as soon as he caught his breath, but then he was fine again, dandy, like Dean was after Dad died, like Dean is after anything that fucks him in the head until he completely loses it. And all Sam can say is, “That’s not your fault.” I know. That’s not your fault. There was a point in time when Sam’s vocabulary was pretty extensive, he swears it.
“S’okay, Uncle Sam,” Alec tells him, and his voice isn’t broken or even cracking, but it’s not empty, either; it’s just steady and resolute. “M’gonna go back there one day and I’m going to burn it to the ground. When I’m big. Big like Dean.”
“Alec, I-“ A small hand shoots up and covers his mouth. Sam doesn’t fight against it, lets it rest there for a good quarter-minute until Alec removes it himself.
“I just…I wanted you to know that I have bad stuff inside of me, too. Really bad stuff. Wherever it comes from, your mind thing? Pales in comparison. You don’t want to hurt anybody. I know you don’t because we’re blood, right? I’m yours and you’re mine and all that? M’not-“
“Yeah,” Sam breaks in. “Of course.”
“And you won’t leave me? You can’t keep me safe if you’re not here.”
It may or may not be a mistake, but Sam nods and asserts, “I won’t leave you,” because he won’t. Not ever. Not unless someone drags him in bloody pieces out the door.
He feels Alec’s lips brush his jaw.
“Good.” The kid swings his legs around and slides off Sam’s lap. “I’m holding you to that.”
Sam watches as Alec traipses out of the kitchen, step as light as if they had just discussed the weather. The room is heavy and Sam’s ass aches, but he still doesn’t move from this chair, not until Dean wanders in, rubbing his eyes like he’s just been asleep.
“Sam? I, uh…”
Dean’s sorry. Dean’s looking at the floor and shuffling his feet and trying to get the words out.
“Yeah,” Sam says, and stands, stretches, as his brother manages to lift his gaze again, relief painted all over his face. “Me, too.”
“You’re not...”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Dean brings up a nervous arm and scratches the back of his head, focuses his gaze somewhere around Sam’s knees. “We’re going to figure this thing out. I’m gonna try to be…I’m not going to let anything-“
“I know.”
Dean lifts his head. Sam tries not to fidget under that green-eyed stare for a long moment, but then his brother smirks, reaches a hand over, and claps his shoulder. He gestures with his eyebrows in the direction of the chair, says, “Now you know how Alec feels.”
Sam wants to tell Dean that truer words have never been spoken, but he doesn’t, just smacks the center of his brother’s back with a large palm and offers a half-smile. He leaves his hand there, feels Dean tense and relax under his touch. “I think we should try to go into town sometime, earn some money. Alec needs those sneakers.”
“Yeah?” Dean sounds surprised. “What happened to ‘not spoiling the kids’ or whatever the hell you were ranting about a few weeks ago?”
“He needs them before he gets too big for them,” Sam says, without adding what he’s thinking when he says it: Alec just never needs to get big. Ever. Alec needs to stay small for as long as it takes for Sam and Dean to go back to Wyoming, to destroy Manticore so Alec and Ben won’t ever have to think about it again. Sam doesn’t care about changing perspectives or growing legs because that couch will always be the same size, and Alec’s hands will always be too small to carry a gun.
Dean tilts his head to the side, looks at the ceiling as if he’s contemplating Sam’s reason for saying this now, but then he nods. “Yeah, I guess he does.”
“Great.”
“Terrific.”
They don’t say anything else because there’s nothing else to say. Sam’s still here and he’s still got a poison inside of him. He’ll still float through the days either trying to control it or forget it, and he’ll still have Dean to anchor him down, Dean and Alec and Ben, who he’ll try not to hurt and will never leave, because he can’t. Sam’s not a ghost and he can’t disappear.
Next
Author: scourgeofeurope
Fandoms: Supernatural, Dark Angel
Rating: R (gen)
Summary: Sam and Dean find a tiny smartass in a barn. What are they to do?
Warnings: Excessive swearing, angst
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's Notes: We can thank lizadork again. ♥ This wouldn't exist if it weren't for her ability to ease me through my psychosis.
Additional author's notes and previous chapters can be found here.
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Sam isn’t a ghost. He’s sitting on the couch, squeezing the cushion with his fingers and he can feel the roughened fabric against his skin, can remember years and years of sleeping here, breathing in the musty scent of time going by. He remembers when his legs got too long to fit and it felt like it took forever at the time, but it was just an instant, really. Childhood was like a swift cut of a knife, just a passing moment that opened him up and kept him bleeding.
He tried to close the wound. He did, he tried so hard to close it and get away from it, but he couldn’t. He can’t. It’s open and salted and seared by the flames of the fire, that fucking fire, the unyielding adhesive that bound Sam to his brother’s arms, that keeps him here still.
But Sam’s not a ghost. He’s not. Even if they’re eternally welded to whatever it is they’re haunting, ghosts can disappear. Ghosts can hide and do what they will without anyone seeing or hearing them, because ghosts are sneaky and incorporeal bastards. And Sam may be sneaky, but he’s not incorporeal in the least. There’s this couch, you see, and he can feel it in every sense of the word, this couch and his jaw, which is still throbbing from Dean’s quick fist.
He slept earlier, but he’s awake now. It’s the dead of night and he’s awake and they’re asleep on the floor, the three of them with Dean in the middle. Alec’s got his nose tucked into Dean’s solid side as if he’s trying to keep it warm, a limp little arm splayed over the rhythmic chest. Ben’s got a fistful of the charcoal T-shirt in his hand, and his eyes are shut and soft now. They were tight before, and his jaw was tense when he was pretending. It took a while, maybe about as long as it took for his legs to grow, but Sam knows now when they’re faking it.
They should never have to fake it. They should always be comfortable enough to sleep, should always feel safe enough. Like now. With Dean. As long as Dean’s here they’ll be fine. Dean is an unshakeable and surrounding presence, sometimes so much so that he makes it hard to breathe.
It’s not about that this time, though. It’s not. It’s not about a need for freedom or a need to get away or the pursuit of a normal life. This isn’t like Stanford and Sam’s not leaving in hopes of becoming a yuppie lawyer and forgetting this entire sad fucking existence that he’s been leading since he was six months old. Stanford was a long time ago, when he was eighteen and stupid and thought he could lose it, thought it wouldn’t follow him to wherever he ended up. Now he knows he can never leave it. You can’t leave something that’s inside of you.
Sam’s not being selfish.
He’s not.
They should always sleep this way. They should never have to worry about snow globes flying at their heads. They should never have to worry about the guy they once saw fit to call Uncle leaving marks on their arms.
Which is why Sam’s getting up from this couch. He feels unsteady on his feet as he takes in their darkened shapes and he wonders if John felt like this all those times after that sometimes-hug or sometimes-hair-ruffle and that always-repetition-of-rules-and-schedule, all those times when he would walk out that door. It’s not really walking. Sam knows this even before he’s done it. It’s not walking, it’s stumbling. Sam’s going to stumble out that door, just like his dad used to.
And he’s going to come back. Just like his dad used to. This isn’t forever, this is just...he just needs to find some control, needs to make sure he can keep them safe even from himself and they don’t need him right now, anyway. They have Dean. They’ll always have Dean, just like Sam will always have Dean. They’ll have him even when they don’t want him.
He feels like he’s walking on ice, like his feet could slip out from under him any moment now and land him on his ass. But they don’t. He makes it to his duffel, which is already packed and ready to go. He’s reaching to pick it up when he notices Ben’s bear leaning against its side, lonely and forgotten.
“Fuck,” he whispers, and the word’s eaten up by the darkness before it reaches the three dozing lumps on the floor. They don’t stir. He doesn’t want them to stir. He doesn’t want them to wake up before he’s gone - or before he comes back, when he’s better, when he’s got a handle on this shit.
But then there’s this bear, and the memory of Ben’s face when Dean knelt down and gave it to him, that face that showed little in ways of fondness for the gift even though his hands were gripping it like they’d never let it go. Ben needs things to cling to.
M’I yours?
Sam needs to give him these things. Ben is his, his and Dean’s, and Sam needs to give him these things.
Sam likes to lie to himself. He’s totally a ghost, a cold breath in a dark room, feet somehow so light they’re floating him over to that pile of Deans on the floor. He doesn’t know how he got here, to this space next to this boy where he’s kneeling, where he’s so cautious about wedging a child’s toy under a child’s arm, and then he can’t even leave it at just that. The blanket’s too low, so Sam pulls it up to Ben’s shoulders and the kid sighs in his sleep, fist unconsciously clenching and unclenching the cotton of Dean’s T-shirt. And Sam can’t leave it at just that, either.
He touches the boy’s cheek with faint fingers, vaguely hoping that he’s leaving marks no one will ever see. Ben’s fucked up and Alec’s fucked up and Sam’s fully aware that there’s blood on those tiny hands, but it doesn’t change what he sees or feels. Ben is warm and pure and beautiful under Sam’s skin, and so is Alec. They shouldn’t have to be exposed to his psychic whatevers.
He’s just about to get up when Ben flinches, eyes popping open in time with a sudden inhalation of breath.
“Benny…”
“Uncle Sam?” The kid blinks and rubs at his eyes but he relaxes somewhat. “Is something wrong?
“Nothing’s wrong. I just…I wanted you to have your bear.” That’s the truth. Some of it, anyway.
“Oh. Thank you.”
“No problem. Go back to sleep for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Ben’s eyes remain stubbornly open for a while. Sam waits, drifts a calming hand up and down the kid’s side until he finally relaxes and shuts them again.
He doesn’t know how else to say goodbye.
It’s snowing again. It was melting earlier, but now it’s probably all frozen. He’s cold just looking out the window, but he hitches his bag over his shoulder and zips up his coat, sucks in a breath and steps out the door. It won’t be that long, it won’t, and when he gets back, it’ll be better for all of them. Maybe they’ll even be able to sleep again like they used to, maybe Sam will be able to feel that closeness again, that warmth of his brother and his…their boys. His and Dean’s. They’ll sleep again, all in a pile, because it’s hard to get two beds these days and Sam won’t have to worry about when he’s awake, about how he might get angry or scared or freaked the fuck out because he’ll be able to control it.
Just as soon as he gets back.
“Sam?”
If he ever leaves.
Sam turns around. Snow crunches under his boots. He can make out Dean’s silhouette on the porch, the yellow light of the open doorway outlining his rigid form. Sam knows his brother, knows every facial expression and every stance because he’s been memorizing them for twenty-six years and he knows for a fact that this is Dean’s what-the-fuck-do-you-think-you’re-doing stance. It didn’t used to look this way. About fifteen years ago, it was just a replica of Dad’s what-the-fuck-do-you-think-you’re-doing stance, but sometime between Stanford and Dad’s death, Dean managed to conjure something of his own out of it. And Sam learned that one, too. It’s this one.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Aren’t you cold?”
Dean doesn’t respond to that, just disappears into the house and Sam kind of regrets saying anything, because really…he could have just left. Dean might have just stood there with feet petrified by the snow, and Sam could have walked away in that universe where Dean isn’t the sort of guy to just go back inside to slip on some worn combat boots and trudge out into the freezing cold in nothing but his boxers and T-shirt, in that universe where Dean doesn’t always come after Sam.
Sometimes Sam wishes he lived in that universe. Sometimes, like now, with his brother yanking him back by the strap of his duffel.
“Dean.”
“Get your ass back inside.”
Okay, maybe it’s not purely selfless, the reason Sam’s leaving. There’s this, too, this entire situation where Dean’s got the reins and Sam’s fighting against the bit - but for God’s sake, it’s been his entire life and the corners of his mouth are starting to tear.
“No.”
Dean’s jerking the duffel’s strap again, and then he’s gripping Sam by the elbow, leading him inside, and Sam’s so used to this that his legs just carry him along. Dean’s in charge, Dean’s always in charge until Sam snaps out of it and starts asking why and what-for, when he pulls back and pushes his brother away.
“Sammy,” the growl is low and warning. “I’m fucking freezing and I swear on everything holy-“
“You don’t believe in anything holy.”
“I swear on Mom’s grave-“
“Mom’s not in there.”
Dean grits his teeth and stomps his foot, snarls in frustration before reaching for Sam’s elbow again. Sam’s quicker on the uptake this time, though, and his evasion is swift. He’s not…he won’t let Dean do this to him. He’s not fifteen.
“I’m not fifteen.”
Another foot stomp. A hand reaching up to pinch the bridge of a nose. “You’re right. You’re not fifteen.” Dean agrees, and he sounds like he means it. Sam would feel gratified if he didn’t know his brother so well, if he didn’t know what was coming next. “You’re freakin’ seven. You did this when you were seven and I was twelve and it was cold as balls then, too. M’sorry, Sam. This time I can say for certain that Dad’s not coming back, so suck it the fuck up and get your ass back in the house.”
Sometimes there’s nothing more enraging in this world than a sibling who can recount every embarrassing childhood anecdote for every possible present scenario - especially when that sibling is completely wrong in doing so. “Don’t act like you don’t know why I’m doing this. You know why.” Sam’s voice carries in the dark. He didn’t realize how loud he was talking until now.
“I do. And it’s for a stupid fucking reason.”
He didn’t realize how close he was standing to his brother, either. He can feel Dean’s hot breath graze his chin, can hear the knuckles pop as the guy’s fists clench. They’re going to start swinging any moment now.
I’m trying to keep you safe, Sam wants to say. I’m doing this for you and yours, ours.
“You’re a stupid fucking reason,” he says instead, and he may not be fifteen, but his voice is, fifteen and surly and shut-the-fuck-up-I’m-not-like-you. This isn’t how he wanted it to go down. Sam’s mature outside of arguments with his brother, he swears it.
Dean’s apparently had enough. Sam can tell by the way his brother’s grabbing the front of his coat and heaving him in the direction of the house and this is the shit that Dad used to pull. Winchesters have always been about the manhandling.
Sam’s about to pull away, is about to tell Dean to get his fucking hands off him, but that’s when he looks up and sees their small faces pressed against the window, pale and drawn. He can’t let them see him like this, not again.
“Dean…Dean.” Dean’s not listening. Sam digs his heels into the ground, easily throws his brother off-balance, but catches him, grabs his arm and steadies him before he can topple all angry-faced and bare-skinned into the snow. “I’ll go in, okay? We’ll talk it over. Just…the kids.”
Dean tears his arm away from Sam’s hold, but refrains from reaching back to seize him again. His eyes skitter over to the window just in time to see Ben and Alec duck away.
“Fine,” comes the grunt, and Sam’s not surprised when Dean just stands there and waits for him to start trudging in first, as if expecting he’ll run away when his back is turned.
But, whatever. They’re going into the house because Sam said he would go into the house and that’s some slight form of control, so maybe, for once, Sam can take the reins. He just needs to make Dean see reason, needs to stay on top of the conversation and then maybe they can discuss this like two grown men as opposed to some emotionally-stunted asshole and his baby brother.
The kitchen is warm and Dean’s quick to shut the door and shake the cold from his legs. Sam watches him with steady eyes. He’s going to keep this short and civil and to the point. He clears his throat, feeling for a moment like he’s back in college and about to give a presentation worth an exorbitant percent of his grade.
“Let me start this off by saying that you can’t make me stay-“
The impact of Dean’s fist knocks him back a few steps this time, his ass colliding with the kitchen counter before he can go any farther, or potentially lose his balance. Sam doesn’t know why he’s always taken off-guard by his brother’s blows, or why he always mistakenly assumes that the art of talking like adults is something everyone achieves by the time they reach their mid-twenties - it’s moments like these when he realizes he still needs to wise up to the fact that while his legs grew, the couch didn’t. His surroundings will never match his age, and neither will the way his sibling treats him.
Sam shakes his head, lifts his eyes from the dirty kitchen floor to meet his brother’s, but they stop less than mid-way up.
All cats need bells. Alec and Ben are no exception. He didn’t hear them come in, didn’t see them step in front of him or form this low wall to shield him from Dean.
“We don’t hit our brothers,” Alec says, his voice strong but edged with either shock or hurt, Sam’s uncertain. “Not in this family.”
Sam briefly wonders if he’s too young to have a heart attack. The kid listens - he listened all those months ago. To Sam. The recitation is almost word for word and Sam can’t help the swell of pride that rises from his gut, even now. Even now when he knows for a fact that he shouldn’t feel pride at all because Alec’s forgetting that exception to the rule - and this...
Sam doesn’t even know anymore, because here they are, standing between him and Dean, small limbs strained and ready to break them apart lest they start hurting each other.
Dean’s eyes are like slowly cracking glass. “Kitten-“
“We don’t hit our brothers,” Alec repeats, and there’s a small snarl to his voice this time, a ferocity that will one day grow into something perpetual and underlying, a command, an order, a rule. It strikes Sam that it’s not the first time he’s heard this tone come out of this mouth.
You’re scaring my brother. You don’t get to do that.
Dean’s entire life has been about keeping Sam safe, and maybe it wasn’t just because Dad gave him a job to do. Alec never met John Winchester, but here he is with that same need ingrained into him, into his very nature, that need to protect his brother, his uncle, his blood.
And Sam was going to leave him. The exception to the no-hitting-your-brother rule might very well apply in this case.
He reaches a hand forward, snatches the back of the boy’s far too-big T-shirt between two fingers, pulls him in so that his head is just barely touching Sam’s stomach.
“It’s okay, buddy.”
He feels the head brush from side to side. “S’not okay. It’s never okay.”
Ben’s moving now, edging over to the refrigerator. Sam watches as he pulls a dishrag off the counter, stands on his tiptoes to get into the freezer for ice.
“Benny…”
“Ice takes down the swelling…it’ll swell…” Ben’s voice is quiet as he wraps the cubes in the cloth, presses the cold package into Sam’s hand. “Normal people swell. You’re kind of normal. You’ll swell.”
It feels like something’s breaking inside of him when he realizes it. Sam was going to leave, he was going to leave them. He can’t even process the reason at this point, he just can’t-
“What in the fuckin’ hell?” Bobby’s standing in the threshold, looking at them with wide, tired eyes. Sam wonders if the hunter sleeps in that hat, because it’s on his head even though he was obviously just sleeping. Maybe he keeps it on the nightstand, puts it on every time he gets up out of sheer habit. Maybe he- “Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Your face looks like it’s bruising. Someone hit you, boy?” Wise eyes float over to Dean, who grunts and straightens, meets Bobby’s gaze with a surly glare.
“He fell down some stairs.”
Bobby raises his eyebrows, crosses his arms. “Uh huh.”
“The porch stairs. He was on his way out.” Saying those words does something to Dean to take him back ten minutes, and he clenches his hands into fists again. This time they’re not in the dark, though, and Sam can see the look in his eye - the hurt mingling with the anger, almost overpowering it, but not quite. “Sammy was running away from home.”
Bobby levels a look at Sam for only a second, but the disappointment in his eyes is nothing in comparison to the way Alec’s taking steps away, turning around, backing up into Dean with the pain of betrayal raw on his face.
Ben doesn’t move. He just looks at the floor.
“I think you need to cool off.” The words are directed at Dean, and Sam watches his brother’s eyes narrow even as he places a relatively gentle hand on Alec’s chest.
“M’fine.”
“Did that sound like a suggestion to you?” Bobby’s irritated to all hell. Sam doesn’t blame him. It’s one thing to bombard his house while they’re on the run from the government, it’s completely another to disrupt his sleep.
Dean closes his eyes, mouths something incomprehensible. Sam can practically hear him willing himself not to snap. “No, sir.”
“You’re damn right. Now, I’m going back to bed. I expect you,” Sam finds himself on the end of a steely gaze, “to still be here when I wake up. And I also expect you to be in one piece,” Bobby adds, eyes drifting over to Dean.
“He’s not going to hit Uncle Sam again,” Alec interjects, reaching out and gripping Dean’s free hand with his own. “S’okay, Bobby.”
Bobby’s lip twitches. “You’ll hold down the fort, will ya?”
“Yes, sir, if you want to give me n’ Ben ultimate power.”
“You gonna abuse it?”
“Most likely.”
Bobby allows himself a full-fledged smirk, though he doesn’t respond with anything but a nod before turning around and walking himself back to bed. Sam watches Alec tilt his head up to look at Dean. Dean, whose eyes don’t seem to be leaving Sam anytime soon.
“I’m taking that as a passing over of the torch, just so you know.”
Sam’s not even sure if Dean heard that, what with the fact that he simply pats Alec’s narrow chest once before disentangling himself from the boy.
“Dad?”
Dean’s silent as he pulls a chair out from the kitchen table, sets its back against where the walls meet in the corner of the room. Sam has no idea what the hell this is about and he’s so busy staring at the lone piece of furniture that he’s surprised to feel his brother’s hand on his elbow again, gripping it, though not nearly as roughly as before.
“Dean?”
“Just…come.” There’s a plea somewhere amidst Dean’s quiet anger and Sam feels like his legs are propelling themselves into following the tug so obediently, into allowing those hands to push him down into that chair.
“What-“
Dean cuts him off with a finger in his face. “Don’t fucking move.”
“Dean.” There’s no way in hell. Sam’s not fifteen, and he’s not nine or ten, and he’s definitely not five.
But then there’s a smaller replica of Dean’s finger imitating that same stern gesture and Alec’s voice echoing those words, “Don’t move.”
And then they’re turning around, both of them, and Dean’s calling for Ben to follow, because apparently “Uncle Sammy’s got some thinking to do.”
Ben lingers, though. He lingers, and puts a small hand on Sam’s knee, looks up at him with sad green eyes, says in a voice that doesn’t actually expect Sam to obey but hopes so clearly that he will, “Please don’t go.”
Sam doesn’t move. Sam doesn’t go.
He can’t.
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It’s been two hours at least, and Sam’s still sitting here, his ass aching even though he’s slouching, legs extended for miles in front of him, tipping the chair back onto its hind bolsters like a bored kid in grade school. And he knows how ridiculous this is, how he shouldn’t be submitting to Dean’s fraternal power trips because this...this is the problem. Well, part of it, anyway.
And Sam was angry, still is, but before it was the kind of anger that could take down a forest. That was before the downpour, though. That was before they woke up and he saw them awake and in the light and they were like tiny flesh-covered fire hydrants with socked feet and hurt faces and he was going to leave them. He still can’t believe he was going to leave them. It was easier in the dark, when he was caught up in that game of pretending he wasn’t a ghost.
Sam needs to come to terms with the fact that he’ll always be exactly like the things he hunts.
“Uncle Sam?” Alec’s a whisper coming through the door and his steps are silent as he pads forward. He stops at Sam’s knee, quirks a lip upward. “Have you learned your lesson, yet?”
Dean’s infuriating in all of his forms, but at least this one’s small enough and willing enough to be easily manhandled. Sam grunts, pulls the kid in and up onto his lap, brushes his mouth over the spiky head.
“Your hair’s growing back fast,” he mumbles into the boy’s scalp. He doesn’t know if it’s true, really, but he knows it’ll make Alec happy to hear it, so he says it anyway.
“Yeah?” Alec’s voice is bright. “I thought it might be. Maybe I’ll be able to grow some long, gorgeous locks like yours, huh, Uncle Sam?”
“Maybe.”
“S’my hope for the future, honestly.”
Sam snorts, lifts his head up only to replace it with his index finger, which he trails down the center of Alec’s head to the base of his neck, slicing the barcode in half on his way. Alec shivers, shakes the digit off.
“I think it’s growing in darker, too,” Sam tells him.
“Like Dean’s?” Hope. Sam feels like he hasn’t heard hope like that in a long time.
“Like Dean’s,” he agrees. “And you’re getting bigger. You must have shot up at least an inch since we found you.”
“Awesome,” Alec says, even though he doesn’t seem to care too much about that particular observation. He swings his legs, knocks his ankles gently back into Sam’s shins. Sam’s hand is moved over to rest in a tiny lap, his fingers plucked and picked at as Alec sits without saying a word for at least five minutes.
“Alec?”
Alec shakes his head.
Dean doesn’t like to talk, either, when he’s mad at Sam. In fact, sometimes Dean likes to pretend his anger doesn’t exist at all.
“Sweetheart?” Sam tries again, because it works when Dean does it, these pet names. Dad never used them. Dad was all about the “champ” and the “sport” and the “kiddo,” but Dean...
“What?” Alec grumbles, and his ankle comes back just a little bit harder into Sam’s shin this time.
Dean understands himself better than even he knows. He understands the words he doesn’t say, that Dad didn’t say, the words that will open him up. Sam sometimes still wonders what his mother smelled like, if her skin was soft, if she used these words while he wailed like an asshole infant, or when Dean scraped a knee, back when Dean was still young enough to shed more than one tear at a time.
“Do you have something you want to say to me?” Sam braces himself, well aware that he just handed a child a gun and told him to shoot.
Alec shakes his head. Again.
“Nothing? We’re just going to sit here, then?”
“Yeah.” The kid shifts on Sam’s lap, makes himself comfortable. His head is heavy and limp against Sam’s chest.
“Okay,” Sam agrees, because he doesn’t know what the hell else to do. If it were Dean, he would press, possibly yell, bait the bastard into letting him have it, letting it out, but this isn’t Dean.
Alec kicks his leg out again and brings it back. Hard.
Slash that previous thought. It’s a little Dean.
“Fuck,” Sam hisses, because the sting is red and hot and lasting. “Alec Winchester.”
If the name gives the boy pause, he doesn’t show it. He keeps himself stubbornly fitted into his human chair even as Sam attempts to lean forward and rub the pain from his leg.
“Alec, we don’t hurt each other.” Sam knows just how ridiculous he sounds. Hurting each other is all they’ve been doing recently, after all.
“You hurt me first,” the kid shoots back, crossing his arms. “You’re a fickle bitch, Uncle Sam.”
Holy shit, the mouth on this kid.
“Hey.” The reprimand just gets him an elbow to the ribs. Sam winces at the pain, tries not to vocalize it. “The rule about not hitting brothers extends to uncles, too, Alec. Do it again and I’ll-”
“Unless they deserve it.” Alec twines his legs behind Sam’s, locking himself into place lest Sam try to move him. “You made that exception and you fit into it. Deal.”
“Alec-”
“Fuck you,” the kid snarls, slapping away Sam’s grabby hands. Sam’s pretty sure he’s going to start kicking again any second now and maybe this time he’ll bruise or sprain or break something, but instead he just presses Sam’s hands down onto his own small thighs, keeps them there so Sam can’t move them, and asks in a voice that’s trying so hard, but failing to maintain that animalistic pretense, “Why did you want to leave me?”
The crack in Alec’s voice shoots a bullet into Sam’s gut. Fuck childhood, sad miniature versions of Dean are what’s going to cause him to bleed out in the end.
“I didn’t want to leave you,” he says, because that’s true. It’s the truest thing he’s said all day, in fact.
Alec shakes his head. “Then why the fuck were you trying to go? We only do what we want. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Not out here.”
Out here. Alec’s just starting to breathe the world into his lungs, he doesn’t...he can’t possibly understand what out here’s all about, yet.
“It’s not that simple, baby.”
“M’not a baby. I’m a genetically-enhanced instrument of death, and it is that simple. Nobody was pushing or pulling you out that door. It was just you, walking away from us.”
Sam wedges his hands out from underneath Alec’s palms, wraps his arms around the kid’s middle. Dean has this power, too, the power to only see black and white when he feels like it - selective ignorance in its most innocent form. “We do what we want, but we have to keep moral and familial obligation in mind. I was trying to keep you safe. ”
“You’re doing it wrong.”
Alec doesn’t understand, doesn’t even want to understand. Sam has to make him understand.
“Alec, I...I’m not the safest person to be around right now. This...thing...you, um, you know about this thing, you’ve mentioned it-” Sam can’t say what it is. Sam can’t talk about freak adrenaline things to tiny children who weren’t and should never be raised in this life.
“I don’t give a clown’s ass about your telekinesis, Sam.”
He really needs to learn to stop underestimating them.
“Alec.”
“I don’t. It saved us. You have freaky brain powers and that’s awesome. Why can’t you see that’s awesome?”
Sam can’t see that’s awesome because it’s not awesome and he doesn’t know how to explain to Alec that sometimes being a freak doesn’t mean you automatically fit in with other freaks, even if they are your blood. He doesn’t know how to explain that some freaks are good freaks and some freaks are dark freaks, so he goes for the simple version.
“It comes from a bad place.”
“No.” Alec’s head isn’t going to stop shaking today. “It doesn’t.”
“Alec-”
“It comes from you, doesn’t it? You’re a good place. You’re good people.” The boy hasn’t unlinked his legs, yet. If anything, he’s twining them tighter as the conversation progresses. “You’re good and you think bad things, like Ben. There’s nothing bad about you, you just think there is.”
“The things in our lives aren’t so black and white. You know that. There are circumstances-”
“I don’t care about circumstances,” the boy growls, his legs now choking Sam’s own like two pythons. “There are simple rules that everyone should live by and number one is that you stay with your unit. You stay with your unit even if you don’t want to, and even if they don’t want you to sometimes, because if you don’t have your unit, you don’t have anyone and then you disappear.”
You stay with your unit. You stay with your family. Everything that Dean understands is what Alec understands is what Ben understands. Sam’s outnumbered and starting to feel disillusioned.
“What happened to ‘we do what we want?’”
“S’a moot point now. I don’t give a shit about what you want. I don’t want you to disappear.”
Sam doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything, not for a long time. They sit there and they breathe and Alec eventually unhooks his legs, goes back to gently swinging them back and forth, ankles once again colliding with Sam’s shins. Sam wonders what they’re waiting for. Sam wonders why he’s still in this chair. He can get up anytime he wants to. The kid might have grown, but he’s still small, and Sam can get up anytime he wants to, can pull the kid up and set him on the ground and try his best to muddle through this situation without disappearing.
“M’bad, you know.”
The admission is almost inaudible. Sam has to strain to hear it, but once he does, he realizes that he’s not going anywhere any time soon. This is what their bones are made of, these words. Self-loathing, yet another Winchester curse, another defect passed through generations of blood and misery.
“You’re not bad,” Sam says, and he shifts, catches the boy’s legs in the crook of his arm, swings him around so they’re dangling limply across his thighs. He swallows when he feels Alec’s head drop onto his shoulder, tries to down his guilt because he was going to leave and this, this boy in his arms so pliant, is trusting him to stay.
“I am, too,” Alec mumbles, his breath like a faint kiss against Sam’s neck. “I want guns.”
“You can’t have ‘em. But wanting ‘em doesn’t make you bad.” Sam feels a slight movement against his clavicle, another head shake.
“I want them and I want to use them. I want to shoot them all dead.”
Sam doesn’t have to ask who.
“Every last one of them, every one of them who touched me like I was made of wood or metal or clay or what-the-fuck-ever else you can make shit with. Every one of them who locked me up in spaces too small because I spoke without permission. I want them dead and I know it won’t be hard because I’m an awesome shot.”
Sam doesn’t tell him it’s disturbing, hearing him talk this way. He can’t. He has a palm on the kid’s hip, though, and he presses it in, brings Alec in as close as he can.
“What they did to Ben…he’s s’posed to be like me, you know, like Dean. He’s s’posed to be a rebel who cracks jokes at inappropriate times, who knows he doesn’t have to do what anyone says ever unless he wants to. And he’s not. It’s in him, somewhere, I know it, but he can’t let it come out and that’s their fault. I want to kill them for what they did to him. I want to kill them for fucking him up so badly that he thought a corpse’s teeth would bring him luck.”
“I know,” Sam says. It’s all he can say. It’s all that will come out of his mouth. “I know.” Again and again in hushed tones against the kid’s head.
“I want to kill them because they shot the guy that saved us…did you…you saw him. He shot him. Lydecker. He put him on his knees and he shot him through the back of his skull and that was my fault, I should have gotten him out, he saved us, he let me out and we’re alive now because he…he let me out and Lydecker just shot him dead.”
Alec’s been living with this for days, and Sam…Sam kind of knew it, kind of assumed it as soon as the guard went down and Alec…Alec grabbed the gun as soon as he caught his breath, but then he was fine again, dandy, like Dean was after Dad died, like Dean is after anything that fucks him in the head until he completely loses it. And all Sam can say is, “That’s not your fault.” I know. That’s not your fault. There was a point in time when Sam’s vocabulary was pretty extensive, he swears it.
“S’okay, Uncle Sam,” Alec tells him, and his voice isn’t broken or even cracking, but it’s not empty, either; it’s just steady and resolute. “M’gonna go back there one day and I’m going to burn it to the ground. When I’m big. Big like Dean.”
“Alec, I-“ A small hand shoots up and covers his mouth. Sam doesn’t fight against it, lets it rest there for a good quarter-minute until Alec removes it himself.
“I just…I wanted you to know that I have bad stuff inside of me, too. Really bad stuff. Wherever it comes from, your mind thing? Pales in comparison. You don’t want to hurt anybody. I know you don’t because we’re blood, right? I’m yours and you’re mine and all that? M’not-“
“Yeah,” Sam breaks in. “Of course.”
“And you won’t leave me? You can’t keep me safe if you’re not here.”
It may or may not be a mistake, but Sam nods and asserts, “I won’t leave you,” because he won’t. Not ever. Not unless someone drags him in bloody pieces out the door.
He feels Alec’s lips brush his jaw.
“Good.” The kid swings his legs around and slides off Sam’s lap. “I’m holding you to that.”
Sam watches as Alec traipses out of the kitchen, step as light as if they had just discussed the weather. The room is heavy and Sam’s ass aches, but he still doesn’t move from this chair, not until Dean wanders in, rubbing his eyes like he’s just been asleep.
“Sam? I, uh…”
Dean’s sorry. Dean’s looking at the floor and shuffling his feet and trying to get the words out.
“Yeah,” Sam says, and stands, stretches, as his brother manages to lift his gaze again, relief painted all over his face. “Me, too.”
“You’re not...”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Dean brings up a nervous arm and scratches the back of his head, focuses his gaze somewhere around Sam’s knees. “We’re going to figure this thing out. I’m gonna try to be…I’m not going to let anything-“
“I know.”
Dean lifts his head. Sam tries not to fidget under that green-eyed stare for a long moment, but then his brother smirks, reaches a hand over, and claps his shoulder. He gestures with his eyebrows in the direction of the chair, says, “Now you know how Alec feels.”
Sam wants to tell Dean that truer words have never been spoken, but he doesn’t, just smacks the center of his brother’s back with a large palm and offers a half-smile. He leaves his hand there, feels Dean tense and relax under his touch. “I think we should try to go into town sometime, earn some money. Alec needs those sneakers.”
“Yeah?” Dean sounds surprised. “What happened to ‘not spoiling the kids’ or whatever the hell you were ranting about a few weeks ago?”
“He needs them before he gets too big for them,” Sam says, without adding what he’s thinking when he says it: Alec just never needs to get big. Ever. Alec needs to stay small for as long as it takes for Sam and Dean to go back to Wyoming, to destroy Manticore so Alec and Ben won’t ever have to think about it again. Sam doesn’t care about changing perspectives or growing legs because that couch will always be the same size, and Alec’s hands will always be too small to carry a gun.
Dean tilts his head to the side, looks at the ceiling as if he’s contemplating Sam’s reason for saying this now, but then he nods. “Yeah, I guess he does.”
“Great.”
“Terrific.”
They don’t say anything else because there’s nothing else to say. Sam’s still here and he’s still got a poison inside of him. He’ll still float through the days either trying to control it or forget it, and he’ll still have Dean to anchor him down, Dean and Alec and Ben, who he’ll try not to hurt and will never leave, because he can’t. Sam’s not a ghost and he can’t disappear.
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