Home, Alone (SPN genfic, 1400 words, T)
Title: Home, Alone
Fandom: SPN
Pairing: none
Characters: Sam, Dean, Rowena, Castiel
Wordcount: c.1400
Rating: T
AO3 link // Tumblr post
Summary: Christmas just ain't Christmas (without the one you love).
Author's notes: Sort of based on this Tumblr post. Also, at some point I'll write Sam in the Cage, I'm just not emotionally ready for that yet...
Dean calls Sam’s phone thirty-seven times between the moment that Amara dumps him back at the hot-dog stand and the second he slip-tumbles down the bunker’s front steps. He calls Sam from the sidewalk with the car key in his hand; calls him from a gas station just outside town; calls him from a rainy rest stop at the side of the road. Most often, he calls him from the driver’s seat, pounding frustrated at the wheel when his brother’s phone clicks over to voicemail again and again and again. “You’ve reached Sam,” Sam tells him. “Leave a message and I’ll call you back.“
“Then call me back, you fucker,” Dean says and hangs up, throwing the phone frustrated onto the passenger seat where it bounces across the leather and finally settles out of reach. He jams the pedal hard against the floor, feels the car roar underneath him. It’s stupid, this urgency. He’s already certain that Sam won’t be home.
Sam isn’t at home, and Dean knows it as soon as he steps through the door. The air’s too quiet in the bunker, too still. But he hurries through the hallways anyway, calling Sam’s name; stumbles down to the dungeon where Rowena’s chair sits empty, codex and printouts still spread over the table. There’s nothing of Sam there at all, no evidence that his brother was ever even here except the faint clean scent of him still lingering on the air. Dean squeezes his hands into impotent fists, breathing deep to try and control the pounding in his chest. Shit. Shit shit shit.
He stalks rapid back to the bunker’s upper level, to the library where the cell reception’s okay, and calls Crowley. No response, of course. That dick. Dean’s gonna slit him up the back of his spine next time he sees him, pay him back for what’s happened to Sam.
Just to torture himself, Dean listens to Sam’s voicemail again.
“Hey, Dean. Um. Don’t be mad. I know I said that I wouldn’t do anything without you. But I’ve called you three times now, and Rowena is waiting, and she says if we don’t make a move in the next half hour then the lunar alignment’s gonna shift out of whack and we’re gonna have to wait another month for this. And um. I don’t think you’d want me to do that?” In the background he can hear Rowena, faint and mocking. “Sorry,” Sam says, rushed. “And Dean. I’m. I’ll be careful, okay, but if something happens to me. It’s. I mean. Don’t do anything stupid, alright?”
“Come on, Samuel,” says Rowena.
“I’ll see you soon,” Sam says.
Dean almost killed Sam twice this past year, once with a hammer and once with a scythe. He thought about doing it a helluva lot more: dreamt nasty dreams of his brother white-faced and pleading, bones twisting sideways under Dean’s hands. He shouldn’t… after all of that, what right has he got to fear for Sam’s life?
Of course, that’s exactly what makes it so horrible. Dean’s done a lot of bad shit to his brother over the past few years; he knows that, alright. But he’d kind of counted on being able to sort it out. Not immediately, not while the wounds were raw, but at some point in the future there was this feeling that he’d lay out the apology and Sam would nod and bite his lip, and look at Dean all sappy and beneficent and probably pull him into a hug. “I forgive you,” Sam would say (because Sam always does), and everything would be back to normal, and Dean could finally lose the prickling feeling that he’s been carrying tucked under his lungs.
Thing is, now Sam is gone, and Dean hasn’t made it up to him: not any of it, not yet. ‘It should be you up there, not her.’ Sam won’t have forgotten that. Dean can’t forget it himself. Christ, there’s just no way he could forget it, not with Sam swallowed deep in Hell and likely thinking he deserves to be there.
As soon as Dean starts to consider the Cage he starts to spiral. Fuck. He can’t. The idea hits every time with the same swift sick jolt, slamming him back to Stull Cemetery and his absolute, aching loss. Forever. They’d skirted the word in the weeks before Sam jumped. When it was done, the ground closed up quiet like it had never even shifted, ‘forever’ had been the only thing Dean could see.
And after… Dean doesn’t know the half of what went down there, but last time it broke Sam, okay; and if Dean didn’t handle things well that time around, he’s really not sure how he could handle it now, not when the waking nightmares Sam’s suffering might conceivably feature him in a starring role. Add to which, Sam now seems somehow less solid than he did back then; less stubborn, less angry, less sure. More fragile. Brittle, might be the word.
Dean just wants Sam the fuck back, okay?
~~~
Two days after Sam disappears, Dean’s still in the bunker and still telephoning Crowley and he has half the contents of the library stacked up around him on the table and floor. Cas is sitting opposite, supposedly researching but actually glancing up to check on Dean’s condition every five minutes.
“Can you stop fucking looking at me,” Dean says, and slams his chair right back against a pillar, stomps through the bunker with blurring eyes and finds himself in Sam’s room, not really on purpose. The place is just as miserable as it’s always been: dominated by the desk and the big TV, nothing on the walls, no personal possessions or photos on view.
There are, however, some papers on Sam’s desk; and Dean leafs through them, just in case. It’s slim pickings. There’s some stuff about Biblical prophets (really, Sam?), a photocopied article about Lizzie Borden, and at the bottom of the pile some scribbled notes about the Mark of Cain that Dean shoves hurriedly back beneath everything else as soon as he deciphers Sam’s handwriting and understands what they are. Is he never going to be able to forget about that thing?
His flustered movement dislodges a pencil, sends it skittering to the ground. Working on autopilot, Dean bends over to pick it up; and finds himself face-to-face with a small stack of brightly wrapped Christmas gifts, stashed discreetly beneath Sam’s bed. Because, Dean realises suddenly, it’s December 21st, and of course Sam ‘I don’t do domestic’ Winchester came over all soft and traditional about the festive season.
Dean’s under no illusions: Sam doesn’t like Christmas. If he bought presents, and tinsel, and all the other shit which Dean’s soon dragging out to spread over the floor of Sam’s room, then he did that for Dean. Maybe for Castiel, too, because there are packages for him amongst the pile; and who knows but that Cas wouldn’t enjoy a little festive tradition. But mostly, Sam did it for Dean. He went out or stayed in and ordered this huge ugly plastic Santa and slept with the damn thing under his bed. He bought four separate presents that he thought Dean would like. And he wrapped them all carefully in holly-print paper and left them in his fucking bedroom while he tripped merrily off to Hell. Jesus, Sam. Could you not, maybe. Could you not make me miss you, Dean thinks.
Dean doesn’t open the gifts. It’s December 21st. He’s not that much of a dick. And he wants to open them in front of Sammy, on Christmas Day. But it’s just possible that he picks up one (a squishy one) (pretty sure it’s slippers) and that he sits down on Sam’s bed and hunches over, maybe with the parcel crinkling soft against his chest.
Hell time moves 120 times faster than time up here. Sam’s been missing for forty-eight hours, or about eight months. Jesus. Dean’s fingers dig into the wrapping, hard enough to tear. He catches an inadvertent glimpse of what’s inside.
It is slippers, fucking ugly slippers because Sam’s taste in clothes is horrible, and Dean stops pretending not to cry.