![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
the sun's gone to hell.
Supernatural. Sam/Dean. R. Warnings for incest, language, character death, and angst. For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pipi_d, for Christmas. Vesela Koleda, Petra! Title from "Brothers in Arms", by the Dire Straits. Fic also available in Chinese here, thanks to vrai.
part 1:
Two weeks after they finally find their father, he leaves again. Just a short job, he promises, just to the next town. Dean wants to go with him, but John refuses, tells his sons to take a night off, maybe knock back a bottle or two and relax.
It doesn’t take much to get them to agree; it’s been a long few months, and road wear is showing on both of them. Dean feels like there’s always dust on his clothes, dirt and blood, and Sam has been getting more and more quiet ever since Rockford.
They both end up plastered that night, and Dean tells Sam that he should go.
“Don’t have to do this anymore,” he says, as levelly as currently possible. “You could go back. Finish that degree. Live your normal life.” Sam kisses him then, and they taste the same, he thinks, both like liquor and too many miles. He pushes Dean’s words to the back of his mind while clumsy, drunk fingers work buttons and zippers and when they tumble heavily onto the cheap motel mattress, but the idea stays with him long past the morning hangover.
Barely a week after that night, Sam packs his bag for a second time and leaves. His father doesn’t say anything, just gives him a tense nod and a tight-lipped smile and slaps him on the back, slips a scrap of paper with a new phone number into his son’s hand without a word. Dean tries to act happy for his little brother, fails miserably, and, instead of waving goodbye, ends up staring at the door frame once Sam walks through it.
---
I know it's everybody's sin
You got to lose to know how to win
-- Aerosmith, “Dream On”
part 2:
Dean starts counting the night his father dies. It’s like a new calendar, and he follows it subconsciously, marking tallies somewhere inside his head.
When the phone rings at three in the morning, Sam knows something’s wrong before he picks up. Maybe it’s the hour, or maybe it’s that Spider sense tingling. “Sammy?” the voice at the other end says, and Sam can almost see his second chance falling apart, like a house of cards.
“Dean?”
“He’s dead, Sam. Dad’s dead.”
It should be profound. It should echo in his head, rise a snowball in his throat, but all it does is sound loud and clear, shock him fully awake. “Where are you?” Sam asks, already flipping the light on and going to his bag in the closet (it’s not even fully unpacked yet; there might still be a loaded GLOCK at the bottom, too).
Dean gives Sam the name of an obscure small town some hundred miles away, and Sam’s known him long enough to know he’s just trying not to cry until he can get off the phone. “You don’t have to—” he begins, but Sam cuts him off.
“I’m coming.”
“S’late, Sammy.”
“I’m coming. I’ll be there tomorrow, prolly before noon. Just... don’t do anything stupid.”
“Yeah. All right.” He’s in shock. He must be. Dean always argues.
Sam has managed to pack most everything one-handed with the phone pressed to his ear, and he’s sure he can find a car to borrow, three AM be damned. “I’m coming,” he repeats one last time. “And Dean?” There’s a vague mumble of acknowledgement. “Stay off the fucking road. I mean it.”
Sam leaves campus an hour later, and he pulls over just shy of six-thirty. He leans over the steering wheel and cries, and the dawn is mocking him, all pink and purple and full of happy promise. At seven-oh-two, he wipes his eyes and heads off again.
---
“It’s Biblical numerology. Noah’s Ark, it rained for forty days... The number means death.”
day 1
Dean opens the door to the motel room for him sometime around eleven, but now they’re both tired and minutes and hours are starting to look fuzzy in the grand scheme of things.
His brother looks like shit, Sam notices, and he lets Dean close the door before he hugs him, a tight embrace that should be pure comfort but is something more. Dean’s eyes are red and there’s a smear of blood on his cheek, dirt on his clothes and under his nails.
“What happened?” Sam asks quietly once they’re sitting on either side of a foot-wide aisle between twin beds, and Dean closes his eyes, shakes his head.
“Fuck, I don’t wanna talk about this now.”
Sam nods slowly. “Okay,” he says, studies his brother with a medic’s eye. “Any injuries?”
“Few scrapes,” Dean replies flatly. “I’m fine.”
It’s bullshit. He’s not fine. Sam isn’t fine, and he’s barely spoken to their father in the past five years. “You’re fine,” he repeats evenly, and Dean looks at him through vaguely narrowed eyes.
“Don’t, Sammy.”
“Okay,” Sam says again, and Dean relaxes, falls back onto the thin mattress.
“What time is it?” he asks, not really caring about the answer.
“Doesn’t matter.”
They stay like that, perfectly silent, for at least fifteen minutes. Finally, Dean sighs, lifts his head and says, “C’mere, Sammy,” and reaches to pull off his shirt, and Sam goes to him, undoing his belt along the way, because Dean’s grieving and Sam isn’t yet, because this is what Dean did for him when Sam lost Jess, because this is how they deal with death and defeat.
It’s just their way.
day 2
“Dean.”
“Huh?”
“We have to talk about this,” says Sam the next night, and Dean wishes he could come up with a new way of saying that whenever something goes wrong. We have to talk about this. It’s getting fucking old.
“What does it matter, Sammy? What does it really matter?”
Sam sets their father’s journal aside, drops it on the nightstand and fixes Dean with a hard stare that they both inherited from their parents. “I need to know, Dean. And you need to get it out.”
“I’m not sure what it was.” Sam nods and waits for the rest, and Dean takes a long moment before going on. “We split up; I was down in Austin – there was a poltergeist freaking out these kids in an orphanage.” He speaks in monotone, on autopilot. “Three days ago, Dad called me, said he needed me here. Didn’t tell me what was going on.” He reaches for the glass of water on the nightstand and takes a long drink before he says, “When I got here, he was dead. It wasn’t the same thing that killed Mom and Jess.”
“Are you sure?”
“He didn’t burn, Sam. Whatever it was, it just ripped him apart.”
“Oh.” Sam sighs, shifts on his mattress, pulling his knees up to his chest like when he was little. “How are you, Dean?”
“Me?” Dean gives him an incredulous look. “How am I? Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“I’m a fucking wreck, that’s how I am.” He slams the glass back onto the nightstand and the cheap plaster lamp wobbles. Sam’s mouth falls partly open, because he was prepared for tears and more silence, but not for this. Dean has hardly ever shouted at him. Even when they’d argue, he always managed to hold it together.
The shock on Sam’s face must strike some sort of a chord with him, though, because he lowers his voice when he goes on in a steely tone that isn’t much better. “My father just died, Sam. He told me he needed me and I didn’t get there in time and he’s dead. And so I call my little brother, who comes running and fucks me when he gets here and expects that to make everything okay. But you don’t seem to care, Sam. I don’t think you even give a damn.” He’s not yelling anymore, but it feels like it, and Sam bites his tongue to keep from shouting back. “Do you care?” Dean asks in a smaller voice, and he’s shaking now, like he’s freezing, even though the room is small and stuffy.
“Of course I care,” Sam says, but he’s not sure if he can believe it himself.
“You always sucked at Poker,” Dean mutters bitterly before starting off again. “You want to know how I am? This was my life, Sam. Everything. The hunting, Dad... You left, ran back away as soon as you could, because you have something else. What am I supposed to do now?” His eyes are rimmed red with tears that he refuses to let fall, and his tone makes it clear he doesn’t want the question answered. “Good night,” he snaps coldly, clicks off the light and rolls over, turning his back, and Sam is left sitting in the dark.
day 6
On the sixth day, Sam cries. Not just a brief respite on another stretch of highway, but really cries.
They’re both lying awake pretending they’re not, and the tears come. He crawls into his brother’s bed like when they were little kids and Dean holds him, glad to be the stable one again.
He wraps his arms around his brother’s waist from behind and Sam shakes and doesn’t notice when Dean cries with him, just for a few minutes.
day 9
“Are you going back?” Neither of them pretends it’s an idle question.
“I don’t know,” Sam says tentatively, sets aside the knife blade he’s sharpening. “What are you going to do, Dean?”
“I asked you first.”
“You can’t keep living like this, not if I’m gone.”
“Sure I can. It just won’t last very long.”
“You don’t have to keep living like this,” Sam amends. “You could go to school, Dean. Or get a real job. Do something other than death for a while.”
“Who’re you kidding, Sammy? This is all I know. Besides, who’s going to school or hire a guy who’s legally dead?” Sam lowers his gaze and Dean presses on. “Remember St. Louis? The rest of my record ain’t exactly shiny and spotless, either.”
“I don’t think I can do this anymore, Dean.”
“Not asking you to,” his brother answers. He checks his watch. “Eight’s not too late for coffee, is it? I saw a diner a block over when we pulled in yesterday.” He gets to his feet, grabs a room key from the desk. “Want anything?”
Sam shakes his head, sighs and turns his attention to the laptop Dean abandoned. The weather report is calling for rain.
day 11
“One month,” Sam says aloud, and Dean rolls over in the darkness, flips the bedside lamp back on.
“What’s one month?”
“I’m going back. In a month, or my credits are shot.” He tears his gaze away from the ceiling and props himself up on an elbow to look his brother in the eye. “I’m giving you a month, Dean. To figure out what you’re going to do. It can’t be this, not for the rest of your life.”
Dean ponders this for a moment, then flips off the light and lies back down.
day 12
He hands the plastic-covered menu back to a too-blonde waitress and she smiles at him suggestively. Dean returns the look half-heartedly, but she doesn’t seem to notice his lack of enthusiasm.
“What about Jess?” He asks Sam once she’s gone, and Sam nearly spills his coffee on his lap.
“What?”
“Jessica. The thing that killed her. Are you really going to let it live?”
“Fuck, Dean. Dad spent his whole life looking for the thing. Twenty-three years and he didn’t find it. You know what he had on it? Two pages. Two pages in the book, and nothing even remotely specific.”
Dean sighs. “There goes my secret weapon.”
“You really wanted to guilt me into staying?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? It isn’t working.”
Sam shakes his head sadly, smiles politely as the waitress brings their food.
“One month?” Dean says finally, reaching for one of his brother’s French fries.
“One month,” Sam agrees, batting his hand away.
day 16
Later that week, Sam follows his brother to a new Middle of Nowhere. A pair of twin girls are possessed, and the exorcism seems to take more of a toll on the brothers Winchester than on the victims, even after one of them dies.
Her eyes stay open, hollow and shocked, long after it’s over. The family is just grateful to have at least one of their daughters alive.
They’ve both had a few drinks when Sam reaches for his brother that night, but Dean pulls back when Sam’s hands start on his jeans.
“Not tonight,” he says weakly, and Sam blinks at him slowly, surprised. He steps back, and Dean swallows hard. “I think I’m going to fall,” he says, and his voice isn’t slurred like it should be for this. “I can’t fall, Sammy,” he concludes, trying to sound determined while his voice breaks.
Sam traces Dean’s jaw with his thumb. “If you fall,” he says into his brother’s ear, “I’ll bring the super glue. Put you back together again.”
Later, Dean tries to rationalize, or at least to fool himself into believing this is okay. Sam broke and rebuilt himself after Jessica died. This isn’t the same and he knows it, but maybe it’s his turn. So he lets Sam take care of him, just for tonight, because everyone needs to be vulnerable sometimes.
The next morning, they tacitly agree to pretend it never happened. That works for Dean. He doesn’t deal well with being weak.
day 21
On the twenty-first day, they steer back west and end up in California again. They drop by Stanford to leave the borrowed car, and Dean takes his first good look at the place. It feels like Sam, like somewhere his brother could feel at home and safe, and that hurts.
At lunch, Sam starts looking through local papers, circles things with a red, felt-tipped pen, and Dean doesn’t say anything when he sees Sam’s marked a bunch of job classifieds, not paranormal activity.
day 23
“We’re taking a break,” Sam says determinedly, grabbing Dean’s keys from his hand before he can argue. They end up on the coast, at the beach. It’s just cold enough out that Dean doesn’t feel obligated to put on a swim suit, which he wouldn’t have done anyway.
The ocean is pretty, though and Sam grins and pulls off his shirt and shoes and dives in still wearing his jeans.
“You’re crazy,” Dean says when his little brother (who really isn’t so little anymore) finally comes up out of the water.
“Gimme your jacket, I’m freezing,” Sam replies brightly. Dean does, and he feels good about Sam smiling, because it’s not something he gets to see very often anymore.
For once, Dean kisses his brother when it’s not a matter of cold comfort, and they both grin as he twists his fingers in wet hair. They make it as far as the Impala’s back seat.
For once, it’s not for some perverse need but for want, and that makes a hell of a difference, for both of them.
“You got sand in my car,” Dean accuses him later, but Sam just grins and nips playfully at his earlobe and reaches into Dean’s jacket pocket for their room key.
day 27
“Where are we headed?”
“South. Fires in Florida.”
“Fires? Florida?”
“Yeah, Florida.” Dean tosses hands him the paper and taps his fingers idly on the gearshift. “Who’d’ve thought?”
“Anything suspicious about them?”
He makes a noncommittal sound in his throat, and Sam sighs. “If it were just fifty miles down the road,” he says carefully, “would you still be interested?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Chasing fires across the entire country has pretty much defined our lives. Isn’t that enough of a reason?”
“It means that Florida’s far.”
“Thanks for the geography lesson, professor, but—”
“I gave you a month,” Sam says. “Less than two weeks and you’re dragging me to the other end of the country?” Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel and starts searching for a tape in the box at his feet. “Damnit, watch the road. This isn’t really about the fires.”
Dean shouldn’t insult his brother’s intelligence. He knows that. Sammy got into fucking Stanford, and without any help from either Dean or their father at that. But Dean’s not ready to admit that he doesn’t want to take the road out of California alone.
“There’re reports of something about a hundred miles east, too,” he says instead. “Could be another Wendigo.”
“That’s closer than Miami.”
“Yeah. Closer.”
day 30
Sam’s a cuddler after sex, and because he’s numbered their days for him, Dean gives him twenty minutes every now and then. They’re naked and still not breathing completely normally when he pushes himself up onto his elbows and looks down at his brother, frowning. “Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“I decided.”
“Decided what?”
“You gave me a month, right?”
“Yeah...”
“I’m not giving this up. The hunting.”
Sam sits up and turns to face Dean, who’s eying him carefully, jaw set in a way that makes it clear he’s not very open to suggestions at the moment.
“You really want this to be your life?”
“It already is, and it’s working out fine for now.”
“Fine. Yeah, right.”
“You want me to do something productive, right? Something I’ll be good at? This is it. We help people like this, Sam. How did you live with yourself those four years? God, what did you do if you saw something strange?”
A month after he got to college, Sam killed a vampire just outside his dorm. Its victim had been a pale, redheaded girl who honestly looked like she hadn’t seen daylight in years, and he’d taken her out to dinner a few times. He asked her not to mention anything, but she talked about the attack constantly, and after a few weeks Sam broke it off.
That same day, he’d met Jessica for the first time. He always liked to think that there was some twisted serendipity in that moment, a completion of the break from his former life. After that, he ignored anything odd, ignored the smell of sulfur about people he brushed past on campus and threw out the gun Dean had shoved into his bag at the last possible moment on the day he left.
“I just... didn’t pay attention to it,” he says in a hollow voice and closes his eyes and waits for the bomb to drop.
Dean stays quiet and for a moment, Sam thinks he might let it pass, but then his brother starts shaking his head. “Well. I hope you enjoy the picket-fence property you buy with your thirty pieces of silver.”
“It wasn’t like that. I just—”
“You just what? You just let people die?” He laughs quietly, dangerously. “You were that desperate to be normal? Jesus Christ, Sam. Is that what you want me to do now? Forget about this, the past twenty-three fucking years, pretend it never happened? Pretend we are normal?” He gets up, pushes Sam aside and pulls on his clothes at random.
“This is a part of us,” he says when he’s dressed and standing by the door. “You can’t just leave this kind of thing behind.”
He finds his keys in his pocket and opens the door.
“Don’t wait up.”
day 33
On the thirty-third day by Dean’s new calendar, they find a werewolf hideaway in the sewer systems. They’re mostly grown men, all of them at least half-crazy, a few of them saner than the others. There’s one little girl and two teenaged boys, and they’ve all been under the moon’s influence long enough to believe, at least to an extent, that they’re truly just animals.
The full moon is in two days, and they’ve been running wild and killing for months.
“We can’t help here,” says Dean gently while Sam watches the two boys fight over a bloody steak one of them stole from the trash outside the local butcher’s. “They’re nutjobs, Sammy. Beyond what we can do.”
“There’s always something,” Sam answers and Dean smiles at him.
“You’re finally getting it, huh?”
They do their thing, talk to the sanest of the bunch, find them cages for the nights of the full moon and leave the lycanthropes a large chunk of their limited funds. The Impala pulls onto the highway at five-twenty-six the evening before the full moon.
day 34
“You were good back there,” Dean tells his little brother just after midnight. Sam looks ready to snap after six solid hours of Metallica, and he could probably use the positive reinforcement. “You’re a real people person, you know that? Good at talking.”
His brother smiles. “That’s what my counselor said. It’s why I chose law.”
“Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Dean says, and they both laugh a bit, more because they need something to laugh at than because it’s really funny. And Dean has never been a fan of lawyers.
A dreaded awkward silence fills the car after that, and it ends with Sam putting a hand on his brother’s arm and saying, “Dean?” Dean looks over at him and the expression on Sam’s face is one he could deal with at a later time.
He expects an argument, but instead, Sam leans across the gap between their seats and kisses him.
“Christ,” Dean mutters and pulls to the side of the road. “Don’t do that when I’m driving,” he says, and then groans when Sam snaps off his seat belt and gives him his attention, fully. “Is this normal?” he asks casually while Sam tugs at his shirt, and his brother shakes his head.
“Don’t do this now,” he says, wiggling to find a comfortable angle. “I hate this car,” he adds and Dean smacks the back of his head lightly.
“Don’t talk about my car that way,” he warns. “Worth more’n your life.”
And it’s the wrong thing to say, but neither of them acknowledges the fact out loud, because that would just lead to another argument, and they’ve got a week left. They haven’t got time for arguments.
day 36
On the thirty-sixth day, Dean fucks him up against the outside wall of a church. They find a small town being terrorized by the spirit of an old witch, and they track her bones to a small, dark cemetery behind an old-fashioned chapel probably dating back to the first witch hunts.
The fire is still spitting and crackling as Dean pushes his little brother’s back against the coarse stones, pulling their clothes away and off with practiced ease and speed.
Dean has lube prepared, of course, because Dean is Dean and is always prepared for sex. Sam opens his eyes, just for a moment, catching sight of the cross marking one of the graves, and he thinks that by God, they’re going to Hell. Their tickets are booked and their seats are reserved, right between the psychopaths on one side and the Elvis impersonators on the other.
He’ll have bruises for days, he knows, on his hips from Dean’s hands and along his back from the wall, but oddly, Sam can’t bring himself to care.
day 38
Sam wakes him at five-thirty in the morning, shaking him hard, and Dean mutters futilely to get him to go away, goes as far as to throw his pillow before realizing that it’s at least somewhat necessary to his sleeping process.
“What?” he snaps finally, accepts the cup of coffee Sam hands him with little gratitude.
“Look,” Sam says, shaking a newspaper in his face. “This,” he adds, jabbing a finger at a small article toward the bottom of the page. Dean blinks his eyes, trying to adjust to this state of awake, and Sam impatiently snatches the paper back and begins to read aloud. “‘A Virginia man was jailed yesterday evening on charges of arson and the murder of his wife’.” He clears his throat and goes on. When he finishes reading, he looks up, eyes bright with a manic enthusiasm Dean had never seen there before. “It’s our story, Dean,” he says, and Dean is sitting up by now, coffee half gone, frowning. “He said his wife was on the ceiling, she was still alive – all on the record.”
“I heard you,” Dean says slowly.
“Our story. Mom, and Jess... We have to go talk to this guy.”
“Why? So he can tell us what we already know?”
Sam looks stunned for a minute. He drops the paper slowly to his side and he sits down. “I’m sorry, did we just step into an alternate reality? What are you waiting for, Dean? This is what we’ve been looking for our entire lives. This guy could know something.”
“Don’t do this, Sam.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Damn it! Don’t pretend this will make everything all right. Don’t get your hopes up. I can tell you right now this won’t be the break we’ve been waiting on forever. Reality doesn’t fucking work like that. And I can’t deal with disappointment again. Not from you.” He grits his teeth and takes a deep breath. “Don’t act like you’re not leaving tomorrow, Sam. Don’t try and make me forget it.”
Sam just stares at him. “Maybe I should’ve let you get your beauty sleep first,” he says shortly.
Dean scowls, and they stare each other down for a few minutes before he backs down. “Okay. Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just tired, Sammy. I’m tired of all of this.”
It’s Sam’s turn to shout. “So end it!” he snaps. “I keep telling you – you can do whatever you want! You’re not going to let Dad down anymore; do what you like! I know you’ve got things you want in this life, Dean, things that don’t involve taking another step toward Hell every time you even dare to breathe.” He drops himself onto the bed. “I do want normal, okay? And you don’t have to do this. Just... let’s check this out. If it pans out, great, and if not... we’ll give up. We’ll be done.”
“It’s not supposed to work like that,” his brother says in a shaky voice.
“Please,” Sam says softly. “Promise me. Tell me that this is it. After this, it’s over.”
“Richmond’s not close.” His brother gets to his feet. “If we’re going, we should go now. I’ll go take care of the room charges; you pack our stuff.”
“Dean. Please. This’ll kill us both if we don’t stop.”
Dean doesn’t ask what this entails. Chasing their mother’s killer? The hunting? Them, together?
“I’ll get gas while I’m at it,” he says and closes the door.
day 39
“Nothing,” Dean says heavily once they leave the police station. He tucks two fake ID cards into his pocket. “Nothing new.” Sam leans against the hood of the car, jaw set, eyes focused on space. “I’m sorry, Sammy.” And he means it. He wishes he could finish this, not just give up on it. This belongs more to his father and brother than to Dean himself.
Sam nods slowly. “I was so sure.” He hangs his head and stares at the ground. “You were right,” he says. “Go celebrate.”
Dean shakes his head. “I wish I wasn’t. Come on. Let’s go back to the motel; it’s getting late.” He kicks absently at a pebble by his foot. “I’ll drive you back tomorrow.”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll see what happens.” He nudges Sam’s arm. “C’mon.” His brother nods wordlessly and follows when Dean heads to his seat.
day 40
The first thought in Sam’s mind when he hears the gunshot is that he’s never heard it sound so loud before, even when he was the one doing the shooting. The second thought, the one that comes when he sees Dean’s face over the free-standing shelf between the aisles and his brother stumbles and falls to the ground, is that it shouldn’t be like this. Never like this.
Dean was content to fighting demons, fighting evil. Forces greater than themselves, kicking their asses all the same. Dean would be happy to go out fighting an Apocalypse. If he had been able to assess the situation fully, Dean would have bitched about an amateur’s bullet being the thing to off him.
They’d made a stop on the way. It was just a hole-in-the-wall convenience store, cramped and with all the diversity of three brands of beer and eight flavors of chips.
Sam is on the ground, hidden behind a pyramid-shaped display of applesauce, tying his shoe when two teenaged kids wearing baseball caps backwards come in with a gun and demand the owner’s money.
They’re new at this, that much is clear. The way the tall kid holds the gun is far from professional, and Sam thinks briefly that he and Dean could take these brats. That’s when the shopkeeper reaches for a shotgun beneath the counter instead of the cash register, and the kid panics, pulls the trigger and the bullet catches the owner in the head when the gun kicks.
His friend starts yelling, and Sam thinks for one wild moment, if only. If only they hadn’t left everything in the car, because they could’ve done something, maybe, maybe they could’ve scared them enough to get the tall one to put down the gun and—
And then comes the second shot. It’s loud, too loud to be normal, but the sound of his brother falling to the floor, knocking boxes of band aids off their shelves as he goes, is even louder.
“Shit, man! The fuck you do that for?”
“Could’ve IDed us. C’mon, before someone fucking hears. Just go!”
They rush out the door and around the corner, and Sam gives them all of two and a half seconds to get lost before he’s out from behind the display and beside Dean. His brother was standing in the First Aid corner, and the irony isn’t lost on Sam as he raids his Dean’s pockets for his phone and dials a frantic nine-one-one before he realizes the battery is dead.
“Forget it, Sammy,” Dean says weakly. He coughs blood into his hand.
“Stay with me,” Sam says, trying to sound calm, but he’s shaking so badly he can barely stand. He drops to his knees and he vaguely recalls their father once telling them that best case scenario, they had fifteen minutes after a stomach wound like this.
“Nearest hospital’s half an hour,” Sam hears his brother say, and he knows Dean is right.
“Not like this,” he answers firmly, throws the phone down in frustration. “There’s gotta be something – just hold on.”
His brother laughs faintly, coughs again. “Sammy. S'okay.”
“No.”
“Sam.”
Tick, tock.
“You can’t do this to me,” Sam says firmly. “You have to outlive me, okay? ‘Cause I can’t do this, Dean.” Vaguely, he can recognize that he’s crying, that the tears on his brother’s face are his own, not Dean’s. “Not again,” he hears himself say. “Not that strong.”
Dean groans, and his body jerks like he just took a punch to the gut. “I’ll tell ‘em hi for you,” he mutters, and he sounds sleepy.
His hand reaches blindly for Sam’s, and Sam takes it. “Serendipity, yeah?”
Sam says, “You’re not making any sense.” His vision is blurry now.
“Sure I am. Just don’t notice.” Something that might be a smile flutters over his features and he closes his eyes.
---
“What is Hell but the total absence of hope? The substance, the tactile proof of despair?” – from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
part 3:
It should be profound.
It should muffle everything, leave him with just his own thoughts and shock, because he’s already alone anyway. It should block out everything, make the whole world dark and hard. It doesn’t, because death only works like that in the movies. Sam thinks that reality is worse.
The world goes on outside his window, and that hurts more than Hollywood.
He drives out the next morning, gives the police his number at Stanford. The cops assure him that the security tape is enough, but that they’ll call him if they need him. The chief advises him to stay off the road, and Sam shakes his head and gropes in his pocket for Dean’s keys. His brother isn’t here anymore, so the road is how he’ll deal with loss.
He pulls into campus seven hours later. His room smells like dust and more than a month of locked doors and latched windows. Sam falls onto his back on the mattress and stares at the ceiling. For the first time since Jess died, this feels oddly comfortable. Comforting, even, in its own way. For months, he dreamed about Dean, about his father, about fires and gravity defied.
It’s okay to sleep like this now. There’s no one left to lose.
Supernatural. Sam/Dean. R. Warnings for incest, language, character death, and angst. For
pipi_d, for Christmas. Vesela Koleda, Petra! Title from "Brothers in Arms", by the Dire Straits. Fic also available in Chinese here, thanks to vrai.part 1:
Two weeks after they finally find their father, he leaves again. Just a short job, he promises, just to the next town. Dean wants to go with him, but John refuses, tells his sons to take a night off, maybe knock back a bottle or two and relax.
It doesn’t take much to get them to agree; it’s been a long few months, and road wear is showing on both of them. Dean feels like there’s always dust on his clothes, dirt and blood, and Sam has been getting more and more quiet ever since Rockford.
They both end up plastered that night, and Dean tells Sam that he should go.
“Don’t have to do this anymore,” he says, as levelly as currently possible. “You could go back. Finish that degree. Live your normal life.” Sam kisses him then, and they taste the same, he thinks, both like liquor and too many miles. He pushes Dean’s words to the back of his mind while clumsy, drunk fingers work buttons and zippers and when they tumble heavily onto the cheap motel mattress, but the idea stays with him long past the morning hangover.
Barely a week after that night, Sam packs his bag for a second time and leaves. His father doesn’t say anything, just gives him a tense nod and a tight-lipped smile and slaps him on the back, slips a scrap of paper with a new phone number into his son’s hand without a word. Dean tries to act happy for his little brother, fails miserably, and, instead of waving goodbye, ends up staring at the door frame once Sam walks through it.
I know it's everybody's sin
You got to lose to know how to win
-- Aerosmith, “Dream On”
part 2:
Dean starts counting the night his father dies. It’s like a new calendar, and he follows it subconsciously, marking tallies somewhere inside his head.
When the phone rings at three in the morning, Sam knows something’s wrong before he picks up. Maybe it’s the hour, or maybe it’s that Spider sense tingling. “Sammy?” the voice at the other end says, and Sam can almost see his second chance falling apart, like a house of cards.
“Dean?”
“He’s dead, Sam. Dad’s dead.”
It should be profound. It should echo in his head, rise a snowball in his throat, but all it does is sound loud and clear, shock him fully awake. “Where are you?” Sam asks, already flipping the light on and going to his bag in the closet (it’s not even fully unpacked yet; there might still be a loaded GLOCK at the bottom, too).
Dean gives Sam the name of an obscure small town some hundred miles away, and Sam’s known him long enough to know he’s just trying not to cry until he can get off the phone. “You don’t have to—” he begins, but Sam cuts him off.
“I’m coming.”
“S’late, Sammy.”
“I’m coming. I’ll be there tomorrow, prolly before noon. Just... don’t do anything stupid.”
“Yeah. All right.” He’s in shock. He must be. Dean always argues.
Sam has managed to pack most everything one-handed with the phone pressed to his ear, and he’s sure he can find a car to borrow, three AM be damned. “I’m coming,” he repeats one last time. “And Dean?” There’s a vague mumble of acknowledgement. “Stay off the fucking road. I mean it.”
Sam leaves campus an hour later, and he pulls over just shy of six-thirty. He leans over the steering wheel and cries, and the dawn is mocking him, all pink and purple and full of happy promise. At seven-oh-two, he wipes his eyes and heads off again.
“It’s Biblical numerology. Noah’s Ark, it rained for forty days... The number means death.”
Dean opens the door to the motel room for him sometime around eleven, but now they’re both tired and minutes and hours are starting to look fuzzy in the grand scheme of things.
His brother looks like shit, Sam notices, and he lets Dean close the door before he hugs him, a tight embrace that should be pure comfort but is something more. Dean’s eyes are red and there’s a smear of blood on his cheek, dirt on his clothes and under his nails.
“What happened?” Sam asks quietly once they’re sitting on either side of a foot-wide aisle between twin beds, and Dean closes his eyes, shakes his head.
“Fuck, I don’t wanna talk about this now.”
Sam nods slowly. “Okay,” he says, studies his brother with a medic’s eye. “Any injuries?”
“Few scrapes,” Dean replies flatly. “I’m fine.”
It’s bullshit. He’s not fine. Sam isn’t fine, and he’s barely spoken to their father in the past five years. “You’re fine,” he repeats evenly, and Dean looks at him through vaguely narrowed eyes.
“Don’t, Sammy.”
“Okay,” Sam says again, and Dean relaxes, falls back onto the thin mattress.
“What time is it?” he asks, not really caring about the answer.
“Doesn’t matter.”
They stay like that, perfectly silent, for at least fifteen minutes. Finally, Dean sighs, lifts his head and says, “C’mere, Sammy,” and reaches to pull off his shirt, and Sam goes to him, undoing his belt along the way, because Dean’s grieving and Sam isn’t yet, because this is what Dean did for him when Sam lost Jess, because this is how they deal with death and defeat.
It’s just their way.
“Dean.”
“Huh?”
“We have to talk about this,” says Sam the next night, and Dean wishes he could come up with a new way of saying that whenever something goes wrong. We have to talk about this. It’s getting fucking old.
“What does it matter, Sammy? What does it really matter?”
Sam sets their father’s journal aside, drops it on the nightstand and fixes Dean with a hard stare that they both inherited from their parents. “I need to know, Dean. And you need to get it out.”
“I’m not sure what it was.” Sam nods and waits for the rest, and Dean takes a long moment before going on. “We split up; I was down in Austin – there was a poltergeist freaking out these kids in an orphanage.” He speaks in monotone, on autopilot. “Three days ago, Dad called me, said he needed me here. Didn’t tell me what was going on.” He reaches for the glass of water on the nightstand and takes a long drink before he says, “When I got here, he was dead. It wasn’t the same thing that killed Mom and Jess.”
“Are you sure?”
“He didn’t burn, Sam. Whatever it was, it just ripped him apart.”
“Oh.” Sam sighs, shifts on his mattress, pulling his knees up to his chest like when he was little. “How are you, Dean?”
“Me?” Dean gives him an incredulous look. “How am I? Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“I’m a fucking wreck, that’s how I am.” He slams the glass back onto the nightstand and the cheap plaster lamp wobbles. Sam’s mouth falls partly open, because he was prepared for tears and more silence, but not for this. Dean has hardly ever shouted at him. Even when they’d argue, he always managed to hold it together.
The shock on Sam’s face must strike some sort of a chord with him, though, because he lowers his voice when he goes on in a steely tone that isn’t much better. “My father just died, Sam. He told me he needed me and I didn’t get there in time and he’s dead. And so I call my little brother, who comes running and fucks me when he gets here and expects that to make everything okay. But you don’t seem to care, Sam. I don’t think you even give a damn.” He’s not yelling anymore, but it feels like it, and Sam bites his tongue to keep from shouting back. “Do you care?” Dean asks in a smaller voice, and he’s shaking now, like he’s freezing, even though the room is small and stuffy.
“Of course I care,” Sam says, but he’s not sure if he can believe it himself.
“You always sucked at Poker,” Dean mutters bitterly before starting off again. “You want to know how I am? This was my life, Sam. Everything. The hunting, Dad... You left, ran back away as soon as you could, because you have something else. What am I supposed to do now?” His eyes are rimmed red with tears that he refuses to let fall, and his tone makes it clear he doesn’t want the question answered. “Good night,” he snaps coldly, clicks off the light and rolls over, turning his back, and Sam is left sitting in the dark.
On the sixth day, Sam cries. Not just a brief respite on another stretch of highway, but really cries.
They’re both lying awake pretending they’re not, and the tears come. He crawls into his brother’s bed like when they were little kids and Dean holds him, glad to be the stable one again.
He wraps his arms around his brother’s waist from behind and Sam shakes and doesn’t notice when Dean cries with him, just for a few minutes.
“Are you going back?” Neither of them pretends it’s an idle question.
“I don’t know,” Sam says tentatively, sets aside the knife blade he’s sharpening. “What are you going to do, Dean?”
“I asked you first.”
“You can’t keep living like this, not if I’m gone.”
“Sure I can. It just won’t last very long.”
“You don’t have to keep living like this,” Sam amends. “You could go to school, Dean. Or get a real job. Do something other than death for a while.”
“Who’re you kidding, Sammy? This is all I know. Besides, who’s going to school or hire a guy who’s legally dead?” Sam lowers his gaze and Dean presses on. “Remember St. Louis? The rest of my record ain’t exactly shiny and spotless, either.”
“I don’t think I can do this anymore, Dean.”
“Not asking you to,” his brother answers. He checks his watch. “Eight’s not too late for coffee, is it? I saw a diner a block over when we pulled in yesterday.” He gets to his feet, grabs a room key from the desk. “Want anything?”
Sam shakes his head, sighs and turns his attention to the laptop Dean abandoned. The weather report is calling for rain.
“One month,” Sam says aloud, and Dean rolls over in the darkness, flips the bedside lamp back on.
“What’s one month?”
“I’m going back. In a month, or my credits are shot.” He tears his gaze away from the ceiling and props himself up on an elbow to look his brother in the eye. “I’m giving you a month, Dean. To figure out what you’re going to do. It can’t be this, not for the rest of your life.”
Dean ponders this for a moment, then flips off the light and lies back down.
He hands the plastic-covered menu back to a too-blonde waitress and she smiles at him suggestively. Dean returns the look half-heartedly, but she doesn’t seem to notice his lack of enthusiasm.
“What about Jess?” He asks Sam once she’s gone, and Sam nearly spills his coffee on his lap.
“What?”
“Jessica. The thing that killed her. Are you really going to let it live?”
“Fuck, Dean. Dad spent his whole life looking for the thing. Twenty-three years and he didn’t find it. You know what he had on it? Two pages. Two pages in the book, and nothing even remotely specific.”
Dean sighs. “There goes my secret weapon.”
“You really wanted to guilt me into staying?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? It isn’t working.”
Sam shakes his head sadly, smiles politely as the waitress brings their food.
“One month?” Dean says finally, reaching for one of his brother’s French fries.
“One month,” Sam agrees, batting his hand away.
Later that week, Sam follows his brother to a new Middle of Nowhere. A pair of twin girls are possessed, and the exorcism seems to take more of a toll on the brothers Winchester than on the victims, even after one of them dies.
Her eyes stay open, hollow and shocked, long after it’s over. The family is just grateful to have at least one of their daughters alive.
They’ve both had a few drinks when Sam reaches for his brother that night, but Dean pulls back when Sam’s hands start on his jeans.
“Not tonight,” he says weakly, and Sam blinks at him slowly, surprised. He steps back, and Dean swallows hard. “I think I’m going to fall,” he says, and his voice isn’t slurred like it should be for this. “I can’t fall, Sammy,” he concludes, trying to sound determined while his voice breaks.
Sam traces Dean’s jaw with his thumb. “If you fall,” he says into his brother’s ear, “I’ll bring the super glue. Put you back together again.”
Later, Dean tries to rationalize, or at least to fool himself into believing this is okay. Sam broke and rebuilt himself after Jessica died. This isn’t the same and he knows it, but maybe it’s his turn. So he lets Sam take care of him, just for tonight, because everyone needs to be vulnerable sometimes.
The next morning, they tacitly agree to pretend it never happened. That works for Dean. He doesn’t deal well with being weak.
On the twenty-first day, they steer back west and end up in California again. They drop by Stanford to leave the borrowed car, and Dean takes his first good look at the place. It feels like Sam, like somewhere his brother could feel at home and safe, and that hurts.
At lunch, Sam starts looking through local papers, circles things with a red, felt-tipped pen, and Dean doesn’t say anything when he sees Sam’s marked a bunch of job classifieds, not paranormal activity.
“We’re taking a break,” Sam says determinedly, grabbing Dean’s keys from his hand before he can argue. They end up on the coast, at the beach. It’s just cold enough out that Dean doesn’t feel obligated to put on a swim suit, which he wouldn’t have done anyway.
The ocean is pretty, though and Sam grins and pulls off his shirt and shoes and dives in still wearing his jeans.
“You’re crazy,” Dean says when his little brother (who really isn’t so little anymore) finally comes up out of the water.
“Gimme your jacket, I’m freezing,” Sam replies brightly. Dean does, and he feels good about Sam smiling, because it’s not something he gets to see very often anymore.
For once, Dean kisses his brother when it’s not a matter of cold comfort, and they both grin as he twists his fingers in wet hair. They make it as far as the Impala’s back seat.
For once, it’s not for some perverse need but for want, and that makes a hell of a difference, for both of them.
“You got sand in my car,” Dean accuses him later, but Sam just grins and nips playfully at his earlobe and reaches into Dean’s jacket pocket for their room key.
“Where are we headed?”
“South. Fires in Florida.”
“Fires? Florida?”
“Yeah, Florida.” Dean tosses hands him the paper and taps his fingers idly on the gearshift. “Who’d’ve thought?”
“Anything suspicious about them?”
He makes a noncommittal sound in his throat, and Sam sighs. “If it were just fifty miles down the road,” he says carefully, “would you still be interested?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Chasing fires across the entire country has pretty much defined our lives. Isn’t that enough of a reason?”
“It means that Florida’s far.”
“Thanks for the geography lesson, professor, but—”
“I gave you a month,” Sam says. “Less than two weeks and you’re dragging me to the other end of the country?” Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel and starts searching for a tape in the box at his feet. “Damnit, watch the road. This isn’t really about the fires.”
Dean shouldn’t insult his brother’s intelligence. He knows that. Sammy got into fucking Stanford, and without any help from either Dean or their father at that. But Dean’s not ready to admit that he doesn’t want to take the road out of California alone.
“There’re reports of something about a hundred miles east, too,” he says instead. “Could be another Wendigo.”
“That’s closer than Miami.”
“Yeah. Closer.”
Sam’s a cuddler after sex, and because he’s numbered their days for him, Dean gives him twenty minutes every now and then. They’re naked and still not breathing completely normally when he pushes himself up onto his elbows and looks down at his brother, frowning. “Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“I decided.”
“Decided what?”
“You gave me a month, right?”
“Yeah...”
“I’m not giving this up. The hunting.”
Sam sits up and turns to face Dean, who’s eying him carefully, jaw set in a way that makes it clear he’s not very open to suggestions at the moment.
“You really want this to be your life?”
“It already is, and it’s working out fine for now.”
“Fine. Yeah, right.”
“You want me to do something productive, right? Something I’ll be good at? This is it. We help people like this, Sam. How did you live with yourself those four years? God, what did you do if you saw something strange?”
A month after he got to college, Sam killed a vampire just outside his dorm. Its victim had been a pale, redheaded girl who honestly looked like she hadn’t seen daylight in years, and he’d taken her out to dinner a few times. He asked her not to mention anything, but she talked about the attack constantly, and after a few weeks Sam broke it off.
That same day, he’d met Jessica for the first time. He always liked to think that there was some twisted serendipity in that moment, a completion of the break from his former life. After that, he ignored anything odd, ignored the smell of sulfur about people he brushed past on campus and threw out the gun Dean had shoved into his bag at the last possible moment on the day he left.
“I just... didn’t pay attention to it,” he says in a hollow voice and closes his eyes and waits for the bomb to drop.
Dean stays quiet and for a moment, Sam thinks he might let it pass, but then his brother starts shaking his head. “Well. I hope you enjoy the picket-fence property you buy with your thirty pieces of silver.”
“It wasn’t like that. I just—”
“You just what? You just let people die?” He laughs quietly, dangerously. “You were that desperate to be normal? Jesus Christ, Sam. Is that what you want me to do now? Forget about this, the past twenty-three fucking years, pretend it never happened? Pretend we are normal?” He gets up, pushes Sam aside and pulls on his clothes at random.
“This is a part of us,” he says when he’s dressed and standing by the door. “You can’t just leave this kind of thing behind.”
He finds his keys in his pocket and opens the door.
“Don’t wait up.”
On the thirty-third day by Dean’s new calendar, they find a werewolf hideaway in the sewer systems. They’re mostly grown men, all of them at least half-crazy, a few of them saner than the others. There’s one little girl and two teenaged boys, and they’ve all been under the moon’s influence long enough to believe, at least to an extent, that they’re truly just animals.
The full moon is in two days, and they’ve been running wild and killing for months.
“We can’t help here,” says Dean gently while Sam watches the two boys fight over a bloody steak one of them stole from the trash outside the local butcher’s. “They’re nutjobs, Sammy. Beyond what we can do.”
“There’s always something,” Sam answers and Dean smiles at him.
“You’re finally getting it, huh?”
They do their thing, talk to the sanest of the bunch, find them cages for the nights of the full moon and leave the lycanthropes a large chunk of their limited funds. The Impala pulls onto the highway at five-twenty-six the evening before the full moon.
“You were good back there,” Dean tells his little brother just after midnight. Sam looks ready to snap after six solid hours of Metallica, and he could probably use the positive reinforcement. “You’re a real people person, you know that? Good at talking.”
His brother smiles. “That’s what my counselor said. It’s why I chose law.”
“Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Dean says, and they both laugh a bit, more because they need something to laugh at than because it’s really funny. And Dean has never been a fan of lawyers.
A dreaded awkward silence fills the car after that, and it ends with Sam putting a hand on his brother’s arm and saying, “Dean?” Dean looks over at him and the expression on Sam’s face is one he could deal with at a later time.
He expects an argument, but instead, Sam leans across the gap between their seats and kisses him.
“Christ,” Dean mutters and pulls to the side of the road. “Don’t do that when I’m driving,” he says, and then groans when Sam snaps off his seat belt and gives him his attention, fully. “Is this normal?” he asks casually while Sam tugs at his shirt, and his brother shakes his head.
“Don’t do this now,” he says, wiggling to find a comfortable angle. “I hate this car,” he adds and Dean smacks the back of his head lightly.
“Don’t talk about my car that way,” he warns. “Worth more’n your life.”
And it’s the wrong thing to say, but neither of them acknowledges the fact out loud, because that would just lead to another argument, and they’ve got a week left. They haven’t got time for arguments.
On the thirty-sixth day, Dean fucks him up against the outside wall of a church. They find a small town being terrorized by the spirit of an old witch, and they track her bones to a small, dark cemetery behind an old-fashioned chapel probably dating back to the first witch hunts.
The fire is still spitting and crackling as Dean pushes his little brother’s back against the coarse stones, pulling their clothes away and off with practiced ease and speed.
Dean has lube prepared, of course, because Dean is Dean and is always prepared for sex. Sam opens his eyes, just for a moment, catching sight of the cross marking one of the graves, and he thinks that by God, they’re going to Hell. Their tickets are booked and their seats are reserved, right between the psychopaths on one side and the Elvis impersonators on the other.
He’ll have bruises for days, he knows, on his hips from Dean’s hands and along his back from the wall, but oddly, Sam can’t bring himself to care.
Sam wakes him at five-thirty in the morning, shaking him hard, and Dean mutters futilely to get him to go away, goes as far as to throw his pillow before realizing that it’s at least somewhat necessary to his sleeping process.
“What?” he snaps finally, accepts the cup of coffee Sam hands him with little gratitude.
“Look,” Sam says, shaking a newspaper in his face. “This,” he adds, jabbing a finger at a small article toward the bottom of the page. Dean blinks his eyes, trying to adjust to this state of awake, and Sam impatiently snatches the paper back and begins to read aloud. “‘A Virginia man was jailed yesterday evening on charges of arson and the murder of his wife’.” He clears his throat and goes on. When he finishes reading, he looks up, eyes bright with a manic enthusiasm Dean had never seen there before. “It’s our story, Dean,” he says, and Dean is sitting up by now, coffee half gone, frowning. “He said his wife was on the ceiling, she was still alive – all on the record.”
“I heard you,” Dean says slowly.
“Our story. Mom, and Jess... We have to go talk to this guy.”
“Why? So he can tell us what we already know?”
Sam looks stunned for a minute. He drops the paper slowly to his side and he sits down. “I’m sorry, did we just step into an alternate reality? What are you waiting for, Dean? This is what we’ve been looking for our entire lives. This guy could know something.”
“Don’t do this, Sam.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Damn it! Don’t pretend this will make everything all right. Don’t get your hopes up. I can tell you right now this won’t be the break we’ve been waiting on forever. Reality doesn’t fucking work like that. And I can’t deal with disappointment again. Not from you.” He grits his teeth and takes a deep breath. “Don’t act like you’re not leaving tomorrow, Sam. Don’t try and make me forget it.”
Sam just stares at him. “Maybe I should’ve let you get your beauty sleep first,” he says shortly.
Dean scowls, and they stare each other down for a few minutes before he backs down. “Okay. Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just tired, Sammy. I’m tired of all of this.”
It’s Sam’s turn to shout. “So end it!” he snaps. “I keep telling you – you can do whatever you want! You’re not going to let Dad down anymore; do what you like! I know you’ve got things you want in this life, Dean, things that don’t involve taking another step toward Hell every time you even dare to breathe.” He drops himself onto the bed. “I do want normal, okay? And you don’t have to do this. Just... let’s check this out. If it pans out, great, and if not... we’ll give up. We’ll be done.”
“It’s not supposed to work like that,” his brother says in a shaky voice.
“Please,” Sam says softly. “Promise me. Tell me that this is it. After this, it’s over.”
“Richmond’s not close.” His brother gets to his feet. “If we’re going, we should go now. I’ll go take care of the room charges; you pack our stuff.”
“Dean. Please. This’ll kill us both if we don’t stop.”
Dean doesn’t ask what this entails. Chasing their mother’s killer? The hunting? Them, together?
“I’ll get gas while I’m at it,” he says and closes the door.
“Nothing,” Dean says heavily once they leave the police station. He tucks two fake ID cards into his pocket. “Nothing new.” Sam leans against the hood of the car, jaw set, eyes focused on space. “I’m sorry, Sammy.” And he means it. He wishes he could finish this, not just give up on it. This belongs more to his father and brother than to Dean himself.
Sam nods slowly. “I was so sure.” He hangs his head and stares at the ground. “You were right,” he says. “Go celebrate.”
Dean shakes his head. “I wish I wasn’t. Come on. Let’s go back to the motel; it’s getting late.” He kicks absently at a pebble by his foot. “I’ll drive you back tomorrow.”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll see what happens.” He nudges Sam’s arm. “C’mon.” His brother nods wordlessly and follows when Dean heads to his seat.
The first thought in Sam’s mind when he hears the gunshot is that he’s never heard it sound so loud before, even when he was the one doing the shooting. The second thought, the one that comes when he sees Dean’s face over the free-standing shelf between the aisles and his brother stumbles and falls to the ground, is that it shouldn’t be like this. Never like this.
Dean was content to fighting demons, fighting evil. Forces greater than themselves, kicking their asses all the same. Dean would be happy to go out fighting an Apocalypse. If he had been able to assess the situation fully, Dean would have bitched about an amateur’s bullet being the thing to off him.
They’d made a stop on the way. It was just a hole-in-the-wall convenience store, cramped and with all the diversity of three brands of beer and eight flavors of chips.
Sam is on the ground, hidden behind a pyramid-shaped display of applesauce, tying his shoe when two teenaged kids wearing baseball caps backwards come in with a gun and demand the owner’s money.
They’re new at this, that much is clear. The way the tall kid holds the gun is far from professional, and Sam thinks briefly that he and Dean could take these brats. That’s when the shopkeeper reaches for a shotgun beneath the counter instead of the cash register, and the kid panics, pulls the trigger and the bullet catches the owner in the head when the gun kicks.
His friend starts yelling, and Sam thinks for one wild moment, if only. If only they hadn’t left everything in the car, because they could’ve done something, maybe, maybe they could’ve scared them enough to get the tall one to put down the gun and—
And then comes the second shot. It’s loud, too loud to be normal, but the sound of his brother falling to the floor, knocking boxes of band aids off their shelves as he goes, is even louder.
“Shit, man! The fuck you do that for?”
“Could’ve IDed us. C’mon, before someone fucking hears. Just go!”
They rush out the door and around the corner, and Sam gives them all of two and a half seconds to get lost before he’s out from behind the display and beside Dean. His brother was standing in the First Aid corner, and the irony isn’t lost on Sam as he raids his Dean’s pockets for his phone and dials a frantic nine-one-one before he realizes the battery is dead.
“Forget it, Sammy,” Dean says weakly. He coughs blood into his hand.
“Stay with me,” Sam says, trying to sound calm, but he’s shaking so badly he can barely stand. He drops to his knees and he vaguely recalls their father once telling them that best case scenario, they had fifteen minutes after a stomach wound like this.
“Nearest hospital’s half an hour,” Sam hears his brother say, and he knows Dean is right.
“Not like this,” he answers firmly, throws the phone down in frustration. “There’s gotta be something – just hold on.”
His brother laughs faintly, coughs again. “Sammy. S'okay.”
“No.”
“Sam.”
Tick, tock.
“You can’t do this to me,” Sam says firmly. “You have to outlive me, okay? ‘Cause I can’t do this, Dean.” Vaguely, he can recognize that he’s crying, that the tears on his brother’s face are his own, not Dean’s. “Not again,” he hears himself say. “Not that strong.”
Dean groans, and his body jerks like he just took a punch to the gut. “I’ll tell ‘em hi for you,” he mutters, and he sounds sleepy.
His hand reaches blindly for Sam’s, and Sam takes it. “Serendipity, yeah?”
Sam says, “You’re not making any sense.” His vision is blurry now.
“Sure I am. Just don’t notice.” Something that might be a smile flutters over his features and he closes his eyes.
“What is Hell but the total absence of hope? The substance, the tactile proof of despair?” – from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
part 3:
It should be profound.
It should muffle everything, leave him with just his own thoughts and shock, because he’s already alone anyway. It should block out everything, make the whole world dark and hard. It doesn’t, because death only works like that in the movies. Sam thinks that reality is worse.
The world goes on outside his window, and that hurts more than Hollywood.
He drives out the next morning, gives the police his number at Stanford. The cops assure him that the security tape is enough, but that they’ll call him if they need him. The chief advises him to stay off the road, and Sam shakes his head and gropes in his pocket for Dean’s keys. His brother isn’t here anymore, so the road is how he’ll deal with loss.
He pulls into campus seven hours later. His room smells like dust and more than a month of locked doors and latched windows. Sam falls onto his back on the mattress and stares at the ceiling. For the first time since Jess died, this feels oddly comfortable. Comforting, even, in its own way. For months, he dreamed about Dean, about his father, about fires and gravity defied.
It’s okay to sleep like this now. There’s no one left to lose.