Touch and Go (Supernatural, 3188 words, complete)
So... I should be posting a new chapter of my longer fic but I have had this idea in my mind all week so in the end I just had to write it and get it out of my system. Next bit of I Don't Trust Me should be up tomorrow or Thursday. I'm pretty happy with this so yes... please let me know what you think!
Title: Touch and Go
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Characters: Sam, Dean, Jody (barely)
Word count: 3188
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Warnings: language; content: blood loss, mentions of suicide, loss of bodily control?
Spoilers: Through 9.21
AO3 link
Summary: Tag to 9.19 (Alex Annie Alexis Ann) in which Dean realises what Sam is so angry about. Author's notes: This is basically a fix-it fic for Season 9's glaring failure to fully address why Sam was so disturbed by what happened with Gadreel (when ANY FULE CAN SEE it is the latest in a long line of similar traumatic experiences). Also, it allows me to work through my feelings about Sam's burnt-off tattoo.
“How’ve you boys been?” Jody asks as they stand in the parking lot.
“Peachy,” Dean says. “Touch and go,” says Sam.
Two days later, Dean hurries down the wooden cellar steps of the vampires’ nest. He can feel the weight of his brother against him, Sam’s forearm pressing awkward and heavy into his shoulder. Honestly, Dean is mostly surprised that Sam is even standing; what looks like half the blood in his body is up in the kitchen above them, brimming dark in the jars and tubes the vamps had used to drain him. Luckily, Jody has things under control, taking the head off the mama vamp with a confident stroke as they reach her. The girl, Alex or Annie or whoever she is, gazes at the pair of them with frightened, blood-glazed eyes; and Dean moves towards her, leaving Sam to buckle on the stairs behind him.
After a few moments with his head between his knees, Sam holds it together, more or less, until they leave - enough, even, to give Dean shit for saving his ass again. But as they pull out to take the road back home, Dean’s glance toward the passenger seat (as natural and swift as breathing) reveals a disturbing pallor in his brother’s face; and by the time they’re halfway through what should be a five-hour drive, Sam’s lolling grey and clammy against the window, barely upright and almost totally unresponsive. Dean’s torn between wanting to pull over and check him out and knowing that the faster they’re back in the bunker, the faster he can fix Sam up. He presses the pedal to the floor.
Finally, after what feels like days, they’re drawing up beside the familiar red-brick arch of their home. By now Dean’s pretty certain that his brother’s passed out; and sure enough, when he opens the passenger door, Sam slumps soft and unmoving into his arms. “Come on Sammy,” Dean says, not expecting to be heard. “You’re about ten feet too tall for me to lift you on my own.” Surprisingly, Sam stirs a little; and when Dean hoists him to his feet, his legs are set just solid enough that Dean’s able to walk the two of them through the door.
Even with Sam’s half-hearted support, God only knows how long it takes to get him down the stairs and into his room. By the time Dean swings him onto the bed he’s sweating hard, flushed red with the effort of lugging Sam’s concentrated, muscular bulk. Dean manoeuvres his brother across the mattress and Sam flops back, his long hair splaying out across the single, thin pillow beneath him. He murmurs something undiscernible: but when Dean bends closer in the hope of a repetition, all he can hear is Sam’s shallow, uneven breathing. Dizzy with panic and exhaustion, Dean hurries back along the corridor to the store room where they keep their kit, raking through the fridge for the blood bags he knows are there. For a moment, he finds himself wishing that Zeke were still in his brother, patching him up from the inside out.
It’s only when he has the IV properly set up, blood pumping slow and sure back into his brother’s veins, that Dean notices the markings on Sam’s belly, exposed as Dean pulled him along the bed. With a guilty glance towards Sam’s still-closed eyes, Dean tugs at the material of his brother’s shirt, pulling it further up towards his chest. What he sees tips his stomach in a nauseating flip.
Sam’s whole torso is covered in tattoos, ink curling in whorls and tendrils across every expanse of skin. Dean can recognise some of the symbols: Enochian, Aramaic, Ancient Greek. Others he is fairly certain he’s never seen before. There are crosses, lightning bolts; something that looks like the head of a ram. But most often, over and again, is the mark Dean carries himself: a five-pointed star inside a ring of angelic fire. He can count at least fifteen iterations of the design, squashed miniscule between winding strands of text, or tucked economically into a mosaic of unfamiliar runes. The largest, the size of his palm, is centred across Sam’s sternum, above his heart.
Dean extends his fingers, wanting to touch, before folding them back into a fist. Lately, Sam’s been flinching away from his hands, drawing into himself as Dean leans over to look at a laptop screen or a book. The rawness of the new tattoos might serve as an explanation: but there’s something stark and private about them that makes Dean shy of a further intrusion.
Instead he looks up, casting his eyes around the room he’d been too busy and anxious to see as he carried Sam in. It’s changed dramatically since he was last here. The bare walls that had made Charlie so sad are invisible, now, behind tacked-up sheets of notebook paper, covered in Sam’s spidery college-boy scrawl. Letting Sam’s shirt fall back across his body, Dean stands and moves to take a closer look.
The pages are covered in drawings in ballpoint pen, elements of the web of symbols now covering Sam’s body. Sam has labelled them: ‘Babylonian warding glyph’; ‘Ancient Egyptian banishing spell’. Dean sees several sheets on which the same signs are repeated in different formations, fit into one another, overlapped or interlocked. TRIPARTATE SIGIL = STRONG, Sam has written on the bottom of one piece of paper, underlining the final word so violently that his pen has cut through the page. In other places the writing is too tiny and cramped to read.
Seeing the images takes Dean back to the day that he and Sam got inked, the tattoo parlour empty on a damp spring Iowa afternoon. Dean hadn’t been sure about the hygiene of the place, wiping a suspicious finger along the countertop with no regard for the owner’s glare. He’d have preferred to wait until they hit a bigger city, somewhere where the artists might have experience outside tramp-stamping butterflies onto teenage girls; but Sam had been adamant and Dean hadn’t wanted to fight. Not after seeing the way Sam clung to the protective medal that Bobby had given him. More than once in the weeks after Meg had possessed his brother, Dean had noticed Sam thumbing the surface of the porcelain disc, clutching it between fingertips bleached white with the pressure of his grasp. Dean hadn’t said anything, just maintained a watchful eye, awkward at his inability to fix what had happened to Sam. He was still feeling the shame of his own ill-thought-out quip about his brother having had a girl ‘inside him for a week’. It’d been an attempt to lighten the mood, to erase the memory of Sam black-eyed and laughing in Bobby’s broken demon trap, or captured on fuzzy CCTV as he cut a hunter’s throat. Dean had thought he was being generous - forgiving, even. After all, he was the one who’d been shot. But the painful twist of Sam’s mouth in response to his line had left him stinging with regret, made worse when Sam woke up shouting and terrified three nights in a row. Turned out it wasn’t so funny to have somebody running your show, even if she was a punk-ass girl with an attitude problem. If Sam needed the talisman for reassurance, that was fine.
As it had turned out, the medal still wasn’t enough. That became clear when Sam managed to leave the thing in a motel bathroom. They had been half an hour down the road when he realised, the fingers initially slipped stealthily into his pocket scrabbling more frantically as he discovered the necklace was gone. Dean, lost in the road and the music, hadn’t noticed at first what was happening; but when he turned to tell Sam to keep his elbows to himself, what he saw had been so alarming that he’d pulled the car over right there. “Shit,” Sam had been saying, clawing desperately at his clothing. “Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit,” barely breathing between the words. He’d ripped the lining of his jacket apart before Dean could get him to stop and focus, jamming his hands against the sides of Sam’s face and steering his eyes towards him. After Sam had calmed down enough to talk, it had been easy enough to swing back and pick up the charm: but later that evening, when he’d presented Dean with a carefully outlined drawing, blotchy blue pen on narrow-gauge paper like the ones on the walls all around, Dean had been more than ready to comply.
Remembering how bruised Sam had been by that possession leaves Dean back in the bunker feeling queasy deep down inside. Sure, the tattoos had been embarrassing at times: nothing to make two guys feel idiotic like baring your matching chests to a curious stranger. But they’d also meant something, had literally been with them both through Hell; and he’d not given a thought to replacing Sam’s after Cas had burned it away. He imagines his brother, gaunt-faced in the mirror, fingers ghosting over the space where the symbol had been. Sam’s grip on his bodily reality can be insecure, Dean knows. What might it have meant for him to lose this last part of himself?
He feels worse when he starts to pick through the books and folders that are strewn across the room. Sam’s obviously been ransacking the archives for advice: the volume on the desk falls open at a chapter headed ‘protecting from the influence of spirits’. Sam has marked the page with another of his endless sheets of paper, this one carrying what looks to be a list. ‘Demons,’ Dean reads. ‘Ghosts. Sirens. Witchcraft. Angels.’ These are all the ways in which people have taken control of Sam: from Dr Ellicott way back at the Rockford asylum to that stupid kid Gary and his friends in Massachusetts. That’s not counting the big ones, of course: Lucifer, Meg. Gadreel.
An index card pinned to the wall above the desk says ‘ABADDON. Souls. A way to lock them in?’ Scratched-out symbols suggest Sam’s been having less luck with that one. Dean remembers the eighteen months of RoboSam running riot, sleeping around and slicing throats with a carefree attitude utterly foreign to the real Sam, with his painstaking empathy and carefully hoarded guilt. He thinks: Sam’s hands have done a lot of things that his mind never really agreed to.
A hunch prompts Dean into the bathroom beside Sam’s room, where he finds a tattoo gun sitting innocently on the shelf, small pots of dark ink stacked neat in a row beside it. A bottle of holy water completes the tableau, suggesting to Dean that Sam’s been experimenting with a dye of his own composition. “Fuck, Sammy,” Dean breathes. Did he really do this to himself?
It’s a stupid question, really. There’s nobody else who could have done it for him. And the two of them have certainly been spending plenty of time on their own. Dean thinks of all the hours he’s passed, jammed against the headboard of his bed with Metallica loud in his ears. Sam could have been up to anything, and he’d never have known. Dean tries to picture it: Sam hunched over his own torso in the glare of a bathroom light; blood beading under the needle as it buzzes meticulously over his flesh.
A faint sound from the bedroom makes the image disappear. Dean steps through the door to find Sam blinking blearily up at the ceiling: but he catches the moment at which his brother’s consciousness really returns. Sam gasps in a horrified breath, his left arm thrashing and tangling in the IV’s plastic tube, his right hand pushing against the surface of the bed. Dean’s at his side in an instant. “Hey,” he says. “Sammy. Hey.” Sam’s still struggling upright, fighting against his grip. “It’s me,” Dean tells him. “I’ve got you. I’m here.” He looks around for another pillow with which to prop his brother up, but there’s nothing in Sam’s spartan chamber of a room. Dean grabs his jacket from the floor, bundles it and stuffs it behind Sam’s head. Either out of dizziness or because he’s realised he’s safe, Sam stills.
Dean hopes that it’s just the blood loss provoking this anxiety. Otherwise… what else has he missed, cut off behind bedroom doors? He thinks uneasily of Sam waking at night, calling out with no-one to hear.
Dean looks away, just for a second, reaching behind him to pull up a chair. When he turns back Sam’s face is papery-pale and the rims of his eyes are red. “Take it easy,” Dean says. “Calm down.”
Sam’s shaking fingers clutch tight around his wrist. “What happened?” he says. “Where are we?”
Dean frowns. “Sammy? We’re in the bunker. In your room.”
Sam looks anything but reassured. “What time is it? Where - I don’t -” His breath is coming faster and Dean’s not sure whether that’s good. Maybe it’ll help to pump the blood back into his system - or maybe it’ll overstrain Sam’s already beat-up heart. In the split-second he takes to ponder the question, Sam works himself up into a full-blown panic attack, his free hand dropping Dean’s to paw ineffectually at his chest. “Dean,” he says, repeatedly. “I don’t remember how I got here.”
The words put Dean back in a warehouse on the edge of Sioux Falls, Sam gesticulating and terrified, firing his gun at the air. He wants to squeeze his brother’s hand or twist his injured wrists; wants to do like he did in the car all those years ago, grab Sam by the sides of the head and force him to look in his eyes. But something about Sam’s carefully warded body makes him stop. All those black lines, coursing over his brother’s skin: they’re ‘keep out’ signs and Dean’s intervention is part of the reason they’re there.
Instead he ducks his head, trying to intercept Sam’s flickering gaze. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, hey, hey. Look at me. Look at me. SAM!”
The raised voice seems to do it, shocking Sam into catching his eye. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t,” Sam says: but it’s weaker, more uncertain, less wildly out of control; and his breathing is hitching, finally beginning to slow. “Dean,” he says miserably. “What happened? What did I do?”
“You?” asks Dean, baffled. “The only thing you did is pass out. We were hunting a bunch of vampires, Sammy, do you remember that? They got you, man, they pulled a gun on you and they knocked me out and they drained a whole lot of your blood. That’s why you’re feeling weird. It’s the blood loss. That’s all.”
Sam blinks, looks around.
“You blacked out in the car,” Dean continues, not wanting to stop talking until Sam’s lips stop trembling and he stops glancing over Dean’s shoulder as though there might be someone lurking behind. “So when we got back I carried you downstairs - you weigh a ton, if you didn’t know - and I hooked you up with a couple of pints of O negative and… well, here we are.”
“That’s it?” Sam whispers. “I didn’t - you didn’t…” The question trails off into nothing, but Dean’s beginning to understand what he means.
Dean knows he’s supposed to be mad at his brother right now. The stuff Gadreel had said Sam was thinking… the stuff Sam had told him himself. But seeing all this? The writing all over the walls and all over Sam has him realising that what he’d thought was an angry sulk was actually Sam doing his best to hold himself together.
“No,” he tells Sam. “Honestly. There’s nothing freaky… nothing inside you. This is just your regular - every day - loss of consciousness. Really, Sammy. I promise. That’s all it is. Besides,” and he’s already not sure he should say this, “that little masterpiece you’ve got going all over your chest? Don’t think anyone’s gonna be messing around in there for a while.”
He’s not sure what he expects Sam to say about the tattoos: probably to get angry with Dean for invading his personal space. He certainly doesn’t anticipate what actually happens. Sam’s eyebrows pull tight and his mouth compresses and big tears start to roll down his face. Dean’s pretty certain that this is mostly to do with the blood loss - that Sam would never be acting like this if he wasn’t too weak to stop it - but it doesn’t make him feel any better about what’s going on. It’s the same experience as finding the ink beneath Sam’s shirt: his brother is emotionally peeled open, raw, exposed.
“Hey,” he says, “Please. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” Sam says, voice thin. “I’m just… I don’t know how many more times I can wake up to find that chunks of my life have gone missing.”
Dean thinks sickly about glowing blue eyes, about Sam slumped in corners or stiffening out of himself mid-sentence. He thinks of Sam in a soft blue shirt, eating a sandwich in Bobby’s kitchen and wondering “how long was I gone?” He thinks about his brother thrashing on the floor of a Rhode Island motel room after he damaged the wall in his head just trying to make things right. And he thinks about Sam in a graveyard in Wyoming, pale and implacable, asking him, “did I die?”
Dean considers whether that night in Cold Oak was the first step on the road to right here. Maybe that was when his mission, keep Sammy safe, started twisting into something more complicated. And now, years later, here’s his little brother, Azazel’s chosen one, Lucifer’s vessel, held together with - what had that ginger-haired goddess said? Duct tape and safety pins. More like hope, and homemade tattoos.
“Yeah,” he says. “I get it. Sam. I’m sorry about your tattoo.”
Sam looks up at him. “Yes,” he says. He smiles, faintly, and shrugs his right shoulder, the arm not attached to the drip; swipes his hand across his torso in a gesture of something like pride. “Don’t worry. I got it covered.”
Dean’s pretty sure that this is forgiveness. He’s finally found the right way to apologise for what he’s done. His head swims for an instant, vision blurring in grateful relief. “Okay,” he says, and he’s not quite sure if he’s talking to Sam, or himself. “Okay.” He stands up. “Alright, big man. The blood bags are fine but you need some proper refuelling. I’m thinking cheeseburger? Medium rare?”
Sam nods, and Dean’s turning to leave the room when his brother’s voice brings him up short.
“Dean. I know you’re sorry, properly sorry, and I forgive you. I do. But - fair warning. If you ever let anybody else into this body then I’m tearing it to pieces, first opportunity I get.”
Dean looks at his brother, tall and skinny and determined and fierce.
“I mean it,” Sam says. “I’m done being out of control.”
Three weeks later, Dean kills Abaddon and begins to find out what Sam means.
Title: Touch and Go
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Characters: Sam, Dean, Jody (barely)
Word count: 3188
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Warnings: language; content: blood loss, mentions of suicide, loss of bodily control?
Spoilers: Through 9.21
AO3 link
Summary: Tag to 9.19 (Alex Annie Alexis Ann) in which Dean realises what Sam is so angry about. Author's notes: This is basically a fix-it fic for Season 9's glaring failure to fully address why Sam was so disturbed by what happened with Gadreel (when ANY FULE CAN SEE it is the latest in a long line of similar traumatic experiences). Also, it allows me to work through my feelings about Sam's burnt-off tattoo.
“How’ve you boys been?” Jody asks as they stand in the parking lot.
“Peachy,” Dean says. “Touch and go,” says Sam.
Two days later, Dean hurries down the wooden cellar steps of the vampires’ nest. He can feel the weight of his brother against him, Sam’s forearm pressing awkward and heavy into his shoulder. Honestly, Dean is mostly surprised that Sam is even standing; what looks like half the blood in his body is up in the kitchen above them, brimming dark in the jars and tubes the vamps had used to drain him. Luckily, Jody has things under control, taking the head off the mama vamp with a confident stroke as they reach her. The girl, Alex or Annie or whoever she is, gazes at the pair of them with frightened, blood-glazed eyes; and Dean moves towards her, leaving Sam to buckle on the stairs behind him.
After a few moments with his head between his knees, Sam holds it together, more or less, until they leave - enough, even, to give Dean shit for saving his ass again. But as they pull out to take the road back home, Dean’s glance toward the passenger seat (as natural and swift as breathing) reveals a disturbing pallor in his brother’s face; and by the time they’re halfway through what should be a five-hour drive, Sam’s lolling grey and clammy against the window, barely upright and almost totally unresponsive. Dean’s torn between wanting to pull over and check him out and knowing that the faster they’re back in the bunker, the faster he can fix Sam up. He presses the pedal to the floor.
Finally, after what feels like days, they’re drawing up beside the familiar red-brick arch of their home. By now Dean’s pretty certain that his brother’s passed out; and sure enough, when he opens the passenger door, Sam slumps soft and unmoving into his arms. “Come on Sammy,” Dean says, not expecting to be heard. “You’re about ten feet too tall for me to lift you on my own.” Surprisingly, Sam stirs a little; and when Dean hoists him to his feet, his legs are set just solid enough that Dean’s able to walk the two of them through the door.
Even with Sam’s half-hearted support, God only knows how long it takes to get him down the stairs and into his room. By the time Dean swings him onto the bed he’s sweating hard, flushed red with the effort of lugging Sam’s concentrated, muscular bulk. Dean manoeuvres his brother across the mattress and Sam flops back, his long hair splaying out across the single, thin pillow beneath him. He murmurs something undiscernible: but when Dean bends closer in the hope of a repetition, all he can hear is Sam’s shallow, uneven breathing. Dizzy with panic and exhaustion, Dean hurries back along the corridor to the store room where they keep their kit, raking through the fridge for the blood bags he knows are there. For a moment, he finds himself wishing that Zeke were still in his brother, patching him up from the inside out.
It’s only when he has the IV properly set up, blood pumping slow and sure back into his brother’s veins, that Dean notices the markings on Sam’s belly, exposed as Dean pulled him along the bed. With a guilty glance towards Sam’s still-closed eyes, Dean tugs at the material of his brother’s shirt, pulling it further up towards his chest. What he sees tips his stomach in a nauseating flip.
Sam’s whole torso is covered in tattoos, ink curling in whorls and tendrils across every expanse of skin. Dean can recognise some of the symbols: Enochian, Aramaic, Ancient Greek. Others he is fairly certain he’s never seen before. There are crosses, lightning bolts; something that looks like the head of a ram. But most often, over and again, is the mark Dean carries himself: a five-pointed star inside a ring of angelic fire. He can count at least fifteen iterations of the design, squashed miniscule between winding strands of text, or tucked economically into a mosaic of unfamiliar runes. The largest, the size of his palm, is centred across Sam’s sternum, above his heart.
Dean extends his fingers, wanting to touch, before folding them back into a fist. Lately, Sam’s been flinching away from his hands, drawing into himself as Dean leans over to look at a laptop screen or a book. The rawness of the new tattoos might serve as an explanation: but there’s something stark and private about them that makes Dean shy of a further intrusion.
Instead he looks up, casting his eyes around the room he’d been too busy and anxious to see as he carried Sam in. It’s changed dramatically since he was last here. The bare walls that had made Charlie so sad are invisible, now, behind tacked-up sheets of notebook paper, covered in Sam’s spidery college-boy scrawl. Letting Sam’s shirt fall back across his body, Dean stands and moves to take a closer look.
The pages are covered in drawings in ballpoint pen, elements of the web of symbols now covering Sam’s body. Sam has labelled them: ‘Babylonian warding glyph’; ‘Ancient Egyptian banishing spell’. Dean sees several sheets on which the same signs are repeated in different formations, fit into one another, overlapped or interlocked. TRIPARTATE SIGIL = STRONG, Sam has written on the bottom of one piece of paper, underlining the final word so violently that his pen has cut through the page. In other places the writing is too tiny and cramped to read.
Seeing the images takes Dean back to the day that he and Sam got inked, the tattoo parlour empty on a damp spring Iowa afternoon. Dean hadn’t been sure about the hygiene of the place, wiping a suspicious finger along the countertop with no regard for the owner’s glare. He’d have preferred to wait until they hit a bigger city, somewhere where the artists might have experience outside tramp-stamping butterflies onto teenage girls; but Sam had been adamant and Dean hadn’t wanted to fight. Not after seeing the way Sam clung to the protective medal that Bobby had given him. More than once in the weeks after Meg had possessed his brother, Dean had noticed Sam thumbing the surface of the porcelain disc, clutching it between fingertips bleached white with the pressure of his grasp. Dean hadn’t said anything, just maintained a watchful eye, awkward at his inability to fix what had happened to Sam. He was still feeling the shame of his own ill-thought-out quip about his brother having had a girl ‘inside him for a week’. It’d been an attempt to lighten the mood, to erase the memory of Sam black-eyed and laughing in Bobby’s broken demon trap, or captured on fuzzy CCTV as he cut a hunter’s throat. Dean had thought he was being generous - forgiving, even. After all, he was the one who’d been shot. But the painful twist of Sam’s mouth in response to his line had left him stinging with regret, made worse when Sam woke up shouting and terrified three nights in a row. Turned out it wasn’t so funny to have somebody running your show, even if she was a punk-ass girl with an attitude problem. If Sam needed the talisman for reassurance, that was fine.
As it had turned out, the medal still wasn’t enough. That became clear when Sam managed to leave the thing in a motel bathroom. They had been half an hour down the road when he realised, the fingers initially slipped stealthily into his pocket scrabbling more frantically as he discovered the necklace was gone. Dean, lost in the road and the music, hadn’t noticed at first what was happening; but when he turned to tell Sam to keep his elbows to himself, what he saw had been so alarming that he’d pulled the car over right there. “Shit,” Sam had been saying, clawing desperately at his clothing. “Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit,” barely breathing between the words. He’d ripped the lining of his jacket apart before Dean could get him to stop and focus, jamming his hands against the sides of Sam’s face and steering his eyes towards him. After Sam had calmed down enough to talk, it had been easy enough to swing back and pick up the charm: but later that evening, when he’d presented Dean with a carefully outlined drawing, blotchy blue pen on narrow-gauge paper like the ones on the walls all around, Dean had been more than ready to comply.
Remembering how bruised Sam had been by that possession leaves Dean back in the bunker feeling queasy deep down inside. Sure, the tattoos had been embarrassing at times: nothing to make two guys feel idiotic like baring your matching chests to a curious stranger. But they’d also meant something, had literally been with them both through Hell; and he’d not given a thought to replacing Sam’s after Cas had burned it away. He imagines his brother, gaunt-faced in the mirror, fingers ghosting over the space where the symbol had been. Sam’s grip on his bodily reality can be insecure, Dean knows. What might it have meant for him to lose this last part of himself?
He feels worse when he starts to pick through the books and folders that are strewn across the room. Sam’s obviously been ransacking the archives for advice: the volume on the desk falls open at a chapter headed ‘protecting from the influence of spirits’. Sam has marked the page with another of his endless sheets of paper, this one carrying what looks to be a list. ‘Demons,’ Dean reads. ‘Ghosts. Sirens. Witchcraft. Angels.’ These are all the ways in which people have taken control of Sam: from Dr Ellicott way back at the Rockford asylum to that stupid kid Gary and his friends in Massachusetts. That’s not counting the big ones, of course: Lucifer, Meg. Gadreel.
An index card pinned to the wall above the desk says ‘ABADDON. Souls. A way to lock them in?’ Scratched-out symbols suggest Sam’s been having less luck with that one. Dean remembers the eighteen months of RoboSam running riot, sleeping around and slicing throats with a carefree attitude utterly foreign to the real Sam, with his painstaking empathy and carefully hoarded guilt. He thinks: Sam’s hands have done a lot of things that his mind never really agreed to.
A hunch prompts Dean into the bathroom beside Sam’s room, where he finds a tattoo gun sitting innocently on the shelf, small pots of dark ink stacked neat in a row beside it. A bottle of holy water completes the tableau, suggesting to Dean that Sam’s been experimenting with a dye of his own composition. “Fuck, Sammy,” Dean breathes. Did he really do this to himself?
It’s a stupid question, really. There’s nobody else who could have done it for him. And the two of them have certainly been spending plenty of time on their own. Dean thinks of all the hours he’s passed, jammed against the headboard of his bed with Metallica loud in his ears. Sam could have been up to anything, and he’d never have known. Dean tries to picture it: Sam hunched over his own torso in the glare of a bathroom light; blood beading under the needle as it buzzes meticulously over his flesh.
A faint sound from the bedroom makes the image disappear. Dean steps through the door to find Sam blinking blearily up at the ceiling: but he catches the moment at which his brother’s consciousness really returns. Sam gasps in a horrified breath, his left arm thrashing and tangling in the IV’s plastic tube, his right hand pushing against the surface of the bed. Dean’s at his side in an instant. “Hey,” he says. “Sammy. Hey.” Sam’s still struggling upright, fighting against his grip. “It’s me,” Dean tells him. “I’ve got you. I’m here.” He looks around for another pillow with which to prop his brother up, but there’s nothing in Sam’s spartan chamber of a room. Dean grabs his jacket from the floor, bundles it and stuffs it behind Sam’s head. Either out of dizziness or because he’s realised he’s safe, Sam stills.
Dean hopes that it’s just the blood loss provoking this anxiety. Otherwise… what else has he missed, cut off behind bedroom doors? He thinks uneasily of Sam waking at night, calling out with no-one to hear.
Dean looks away, just for a second, reaching behind him to pull up a chair. When he turns back Sam’s face is papery-pale and the rims of his eyes are red. “Take it easy,” Dean says. “Calm down.”
Sam’s shaking fingers clutch tight around his wrist. “What happened?” he says. “Where are we?”
Dean frowns. “Sammy? We’re in the bunker. In your room.”
Sam looks anything but reassured. “What time is it? Where - I don’t -” His breath is coming faster and Dean’s not sure whether that’s good. Maybe it’ll help to pump the blood back into his system - or maybe it’ll overstrain Sam’s already beat-up heart. In the split-second he takes to ponder the question, Sam works himself up into a full-blown panic attack, his free hand dropping Dean’s to paw ineffectually at his chest. “Dean,” he says, repeatedly. “I don’t remember how I got here.”
The words put Dean back in a warehouse on the edge of Sioux Falls, Sam gesticulating and terrified, firing his gun at the air. He wants to squeeze his brother’s hand or twist his injured wrists; wants to do like he did in the car all those years ago, grab Sam by the sides of the head and force him to look in his eyes. But something about Sam’s carefully warded body makes him stop. All those black lines, coursing over his brother’s skin: they’re ‘keep out’ signs and Dean’s intervention is part of the reason they’re there.
Instead he ducks his head, trying to intercept Sam’s flickering gaze. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, hey, hey. Look at me. Look at me. SAM!”
The raised voice seems to do it, shocking Sam into catching his eye. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t,” Sam says: but it’s weaker, more uncertain, less wildly out of control; and his breathing is hitching, finally beginning to slow. “Dean,” he says miserably. “What happened? What did I do?”
“You?” asks Dean, baffled. “The only thing you did is pass out. We were hunting a bunch of vampires, Sammy, do you remember that? They got you, man, they pulled a gun on you and they knocked me out and they drained a whole lot of your blood. That’s why you’re feeling weird. It’s the blood loss. That’s all.”
Sam blinks, looks around.
“You blacked out in the car,” Dean continues, not wanting to stop talking until Sam’s lips stop trembling and he stops glancing over Dean’s shoulder as though there might be someone lurking behind. “So when we got back I carried you downstairs - you weigh a ton, if you didn’t know - and I hooked you up with a couple of pints of O negative and… well, here we are.”
“That’s it?” Sam whispers. “I didn’t - you didn’t…” The question trails off into nothing, but Dean’s beginning to understand what he means.
Dean knows he’s supposed to be mad at his brother right now. The stuff Gadreel had said Sam was thinking… the stuff Sam had told him himself. But seeing all this? The writing all over the walls and all over Sam has him realising that what he’d thought was an angry sulk was actually Sam doing his best to hold himself together.
“No,” he tells Sam. “Honestly. There’s nothing freaky… nothing inside you. This is just your regular - every day - loss of consciousness. Really, Sammy. I promise. That’s all it is. Besides,” and he’s already not sure he should say this, “that little masterpiece you’ve got going all over your chest? Don’t think anyone’s gonna be messing around in there for a while.”
He’s not sure what he expects Sam to say about the tattoos: probably to get angry with Dean for invading his personal space. He certainly doesn’t anticipate what actually happens. Sam’s eyebrows pull tight and his mouth compresses and big tears start to roll down his face. Dean’s pretty certain that this is mostly to do with the blood loss - that Sam would never be acting like this if he wasn’t too weak to stop it - but it doesn’t make him feel any better about what’s going on. It’s the same experience as finding the ink beneath Sam’s shirt: his brother is emotionally peeled open, raw, exposed.
“Hey,” he says, “Please. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” Sam says, voice thin. “I’m just… I don’t know how many more times I can wake up to find that chunks of my life have gone missing.”
Dean thinks sickly about glowing blue eyes, about Sam slumped in corners or stiffening out of himself mid-sentence. He thinks of Sam in a soft blue shirt, eating a sandwich in Bobby’s kitchen and wondering “how long was I gone?” He thinks about his brother thrashing on the floor of a Rhode Island motel room after he damaged the wall in his head just trying to make things right. And he thinks about Sam in a graveyard in Wyoming, pale and implacable, asking him, “did I die?”
Dean considers whether that night in Cold Oak was the first step on the road to right here. Maybe that was when his mission, keep Sammy safe, started twisting into something more complicated. And now, years later, here’s his little brother, Azazel’s chosen one, Lucifer’s vessel, held together with - what had that ginger-haired goddess said? Duct tape and safety pins. More like hope, and homemade tattoos.
“Yeah,” he says. “I get it. Sam. I’m sorry about your tattoo.”
Sam looks up at him. “Yes,” he says. He smiles, faintly, and shrugs his right shoulder, the arm not attached to the drip; swipes his hand across his torso in a gesture of something like pride. “Don’t worry. I got it covered.”
Dean’s pretty sure that this is forgiveness. He’s finally found the right way to apologise for what he’s done. His head swims for an instant, vision blurring in grateful relief. “Okay,” he says, and he’s not quite sure if he’s talking to Sam, or himself. “Okay.” He stands up. “Alright, big man. The blood bags are fine but you need some proper refuelling. I’m thinking cheeseburger? Medium rare?”
Sam nods, and Dean’s turning to leave the room when his brother’s voice brings him up short.
“Dean. I know you’re sorry, properly sorry, and I forgive you. I do. But - fair warning. If you ever let anybody else into this body then I’m tearing it to pieces, first opportunity I get.”
Dean looks at his brother, tall and skinny and determined and fierce.
“I mean it,” Sam says. “I’m done being out of control.”
Three weeks later, Dean kills Abaddon and begins to find out what Sam means.