Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They end up driving past this weird old bowling alley-slash-arcade about a million different times during the case and Dean keeps side-eying it like it’s going to turn him to stone if he looks it straight on (which...wouldn’t be the weirdest thing about this case, actually). And Sam, because he’s Sam, and unable to not notice Dean ever, thinks about the time the eighth graders were supposed to go to the bowling alley if they had good grades and Dean spent hours doing math and english homework, only for Dad to drive up to the crappy motel they were staying at and yell at them to pack their stuff the night before Dean would have gotten to go.

So, when the case is over, Edimmu at peace and Jack-in-Irons deader than most things, they pack up, and Sam makes notes in his journal, typing furiously so that he doesn’t forget anything before it hits the document. He’s pretty sure he’s read about another account of Jack-in-Irons in a Men of Letters journal somewhere, but he needs to look it up again once they’re back at the bunker. He makes a note—check leather journal on middle shelf. The author’s name escapes him, but that’s not too worrisome. All of those old Men-of-Letters journals have names like James Matthews III and Stanton Johnson Jr. attached to them, and they tend to blur together. Sam keeps them straight by remembering what’s inside.

He tries not to feel guilty for not caring who it was who wrote them.

He’s busy with the description of the Edimmu, and Jim Croce is playing because Dean’s been in a mood ever since the whole Edimmu-warning part of the hunt, and there’s the stupid bowling alley again. Dean shifts in his seat, faces more left than normal, and side-eyes it again. Sam slows his typing, and on impulse, slaps Dean’s shoulder.

“Slow down—turn in there,”

Dean looks at him with incredulity, even as he presses down on the brake, “Need the bathroom already? Man, you might want to have that checked.”

Sam finishes typing and folds the case back over the screen as Dean maneuvers into a parking spot far enough from the doors that it’s unlikely someone will dent the paint job.

“No, just thought we should stop by. We’ve driven by this place like...what? Seven, eight times?”

A police siren screams to life a few blocks away, and they both slide down their seats a bit in response.

“You-” Dean emphasizes, turning in his seat to stare Sam down, after a short silence as the police car blares past the bowling alley, “want to go bowling?”

Sam shrugs, “Why not?”

“Christo.”

“Funny. C’mon, bet I get more strikes than you,” Sam says, sliding out of the car.

“Oh, you’re on,” Dean says in reply, kicking his door open.

And they play four games because it’s bowl-for-two-hours Tuesday, and Dean complains about the price of bowling shoes the whole awful time, but gets into it when it’s his turn, and keeps making jokes about getting Sam the bumpers. Dean wins the first two games, and the last, and excuses his loss in the third game as ‘mid-season slumps’ and they get gross pepperoni pizza and better-but-still-not-good nachos from the snack bar, and when their time is up (both of them rushing their turns to see the outcome of the fourth game, which is the closest of all three), they return their shoes.

Dean glances at the arcade, then grins his stupid grin at Sam, who sighs. They get two cards for the arcade, and Dean complains the whole time that arcades are about quarters and watching the tickets scroll out of the dispenser, but plays skee ball five times in a row anyways as Sam tries his luck at the basketball hoops.

And the whole thing is kind of hilarious because other than them, there’s only a small family with a screaming toddler and two older children who fight the whole time, and this old couple that joins them for a round of team air-hockey and soundly trounce them.

When Sam runs out of credits, he tosses his card at Dean, who still has three more goes and tells him he’ll be in the car, because it was Sam who drew the short straw of needing to research through the night last night while Dean camped out on the targeted civilians’ couch and he’s tired.

He conks out for a little bit in the passenger seat, head against the window, and jolts awake when Dean opens the driver-side door and tosses something at his face.

Sam snatches it out of the air and blinks blearily at it. It’s a bright blue stuffed triceratops that has no place in the smelly-as-all-get-out Impala. He mentally puts air fresheners on their shopping list.

“What’s this?” He slurs, slipping back into rest mode, dropping the toy on the middle ground of seat between them.

“That is what your fake card tickets got you,” Dean says, trying and failing to smother his smile.

“What did you get?” Sam questions, raising an eyebrow at Dean and trying to adjust his jacket so that the zipper doesn’t dig into his jaw.

“Cleaned out their entire starburst stash,” Dean says, reaching into one pocket to draw out a handful, “and they’re all mine, so don’t ask for any.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Sam mumbles into his elbow as he adjusts his position again.

“Hey,” Dean says, in that not-really-a-statement-but-more-a-command way he got from dad, “you wanna sleep in back?” He shoves three unwrapped yellow starbursts into his mouth at once and talks around them, “I’m good to drive for a while.”

Sam hums, and thinks about moving, then thinks better, “This is fine.”

He can almost hear Dean’s eyes rolling, and it’s only his quick reflexes that save him from face planting when Dean leans over him and pulls the door handle.

“Dean!” Sam says, angrily, now wide awake.

“Sam!” Dean mimics, then, pointing a thumb behind him, “Backseat.”

Sam clenches his fist around the edge of the door and thinks about the fact that he’d been hovering between awake and asleep and that had been safe and now he had to wait for his heart to stop beating so fast again, and that would take forever and he—he stomps to open the other door.

Dean doesn’t say anything, just turns the key in the ignition and ignores Sam’s grumbles as he contorts himself into the backseat after closing the door. Jim Croce is still playing, but Dean’s got a hand under the seat as he pulls out of the parking lot, and it switches to Air Supply, and before he knows it, Sam’s getting pulled under, and when Dean tosses the stupid bright blue triceratops behind him so it lands on Sam’s stomach, he can’t bring himself to shove it off.

He blinks awake when Dean pulls in to get gas and sits up, dumping the triceratops on the floor and opening the door, needing to practically crawl out because his head keeps bumping the roof. Dean gives him a nod, and he heads to the bathrooms, and nearly has a heart attack when the door opens just as he’s heading in and he almost runs into an old guy that smells like cigarettes (it nauseates him).

He remembers when he wasn’t jumpy.

After finishing his business, he heads to the sink and tries to avoid looking in the mirror. He’s not that successful, and somehow manages to catch his own eye, and he’s glad smoker-guy is gone, because seeing someone jump at their own reflection would probably freak out anybody, and he really doesn’t want to deal with people right now.

(Even sharing a space with Dean has gotten more draining, and he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t tired, except that he can, and it was when he was on demon blood, and he never, ever wants to go through that again.)

Breathe. Relax. Stop gripping the sides of the sink.

He heads back to the Impala—back home, except it’s not familiar anymore—and it feels like his boots are weighing him down.

I’ve got heavy boots, he thinks, and then wonders where he’s heard that before and he’s back at the car, back at Dean, and he lets the thought go.

Because Dean’s Dean, Sam’s not surprised when he finds the triceratops in his bag, squished in between his glock and dirty laundry. He thinks about what to do with it—where to hide it to startle Dean, how to burn it—but his boots are still on, and he needs to find that journal with the Jack-in-Irons in it, so he leaves it in the bag and pulls out the dirty clothes, and then all the other clothes that were in the bag that are gross by their association with the dirty ones.

He dumps them all in the wash, puts in more detergent than the bottle says to, and clumps his way to the library, letting his boots scuff along the floor more than usual because it makes a weirdly gratifying noise and he feels like his brain’s about to fly out of his head.

Dean always says he spends too much time in his head. He doesn’t know the half of it.

Sometimes he’s not even there, not really.

In the war room, he picks up a sharpie and starts crossing off days on the calendar they keep on one of the tables. Almost eight months since the last demon signs popped up. The map (which had occasionally gone off for indeterminate reasons before) hasn’t so much as blipped since it sent the bunker into shut down.

He’s cold. He shouldn’t be.

The library—well, what he and Dean call the library and the Men of Letters called the Vault because they were pretentious like that—is the same as always, safe and solid. He likes it in here, because it feels real, and he’s able to read and study without the threat of a hunt hanging over their heads all the time. (But he misses what down-time used to mean—when he and Dean and the Impala would do things. Things that would get him out of his head.)

It’s just hard, sometimes. That’s all. That’s life.

Dean stops in, wearing the dead-guy-robe, tells Sam he switched the laundry to the dryer, and asks what he wants for dinner.

“Don’t care,” Sam says, easily.

“You never do,” Dean grumbles.

“Something healthy.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Then Dean wanders off, and the rehearsed nature of the conversation sets Sam’s teeth on edge, and the pit in his stomach rears its head, just as ugly as that drawing of The Little People of the Passamaquoddy Natives that decorates the inside cover of the book that Sam knows is on the third shelf of one of these bookcases.

He takes a breath, realizes it’s hard to take a deep breath, and almost panics, except he forces the panic out and draws air into his lungs, holds it, lets it go. Then he stands to thumb through the books on the middle shelf of the case with the wiggly shelf that Sam’s not sure isn’t caused by the Bunker itself trying to draw attention to the books there, and he can’t bring himself to look at those a third time, at least not today.

He knows there was a journal here, bound in real leather, that had an account of a Jack-in-Irons on a page toward the back, right next to an entry about some random ghost in the German countryside. But it’s not there. He swears it was there, can remember putting it on this exact shelf, except it's not there and he’s not sure about anything anymore.

The closest bathroom is too far away, so he leans over the trashcan to puke.

Dean comes running at the sound—because everything echoes in the bunker, rattling around the hallways with abandon—and then skids to a stop, nose wrinkling, and Sam knows (thinks) (hopes that it’s a fact)—that Dean hates dealing with bodily fluids and anything with germs, even if he can deal because he’s a Winchester, so he waves him back as his stomach muscles clench.

He heaves again, straining to keep his hair back with his left hand, even though the front wants to escape his hold. He pauses, breathing heavily, and spits, bringing his right hand up to his mouth to wipe it.

“You good?” Dean asks, still half-in, half-out of the room.

Sam closes his eyes, lets his hair fall in his face, “Think so. Told you those nachos were probably poisoned.”

Dean laughs, and it’s closer than before, and there’s a hand on his forehead, and he can’t help but lean into it because it’s warm and safe and Dean, and too soon it’s gone, but then back on his neck, making him scrunch his shoulders in discomfort.

“You’re all clammy,” Dean says, pressing his other hand to Sam’s cheeks, then his forehead again, “and shaky. Might be food poisoning. You notice anything else?”

Sam shakes his head, then regrets the movement because it makes his stomach roll again.

Dean sighs, “And I was making salad and everythin’.”

“Sorry,” Sam says, wishing Dean would leave his hand on his forehead because he’s freezing, but Dean is moving, sliding the trash can out of the way, “I’ll get that, sorry.”

“Not your fault Sammy,” Dean says, a tinge of humor in his voice, “C’mon, think you can walk to your room?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, blinking his eyes rapidly, “can you get me some water?” And he feels awful for asking Dean for anything, but his mouth feels even more awful and it reminds him of—of—

He’s shaking as he leans away from the wall that’s been supporting him, and realizes he’s been shaking for a while. He wonders how long it’s been since they got back, how long it's been since Dean asked what he wanted for dinner. His phone is on the charger halfway across the room though, so he can’t check, and he’s not even really sure if they got in at 6 AM or 6 PM, so it probably wouldn’t help any.

“Yeah, I’ll get you a couple bottles. Don’t die on your way down the hall, okay?” And Dean actually sounds worried, and that makes Sam feel even worse.

(He tries not to think about what lengths Dean’ll go to this time if he does.)

“Kay,” he says, trying to laugh, but just making his stomach do something entirely unwanted instead.

The problem, he thinks, is he’s probably been sick for a while—maybe for his whole life.

He manages to stumble his way to his room—door twenty-one, thirteen plus eight, a new level of sin—and digs his toothbrush and toothpaste out of the side pocket of his bag, and starts to scrubbing, even though the mint flavor threatens to set off his gag reflex.

“Here,” Dean says, as he walks in the room, stomping as loudly as ever, “two water bottles, and these meds that’ve been in the Impala for... Ever.”

He tosses all three things on the bed and drags Sam’s trash can over to the bed, even as Sam tries to stop him by mumbling “Wait,” around the toothbrush in his mouth.

“Sit down, idiot, you can spit just as well from the bed as you can over there.”

Sam sits, and immediately wants to lay down, because he’s realized his head hurts too, and he should have really seen this coming, but it seems like he has a headache half of the time anyway, even when he’s not sick and puking and uncomfortable because his armpits are sick-sore-itchy. He spits, then washes his mouth out with water, avoiding Dean’s gaze as he promptly spits the water back out and puts the bottle down.

He knows exactly what Dean’s going to say even before he opens his mouth.

“You need to get some fluids back in you,” Dean says, nodding with his eyebrows raised at the water bottle that’s now sitting uselessly on the floor.

“I’m just gonna throw it back up,” Sam argues, and then he finally starts the process of unlacing his boots, trying to ignore Dean, even though that is one of the few things he thinks is actually impossible.

Dean sighs, but doesn’t argue, and that’s not like Dean, and it’s not like Sam, and he wonders when they got so...different. Not from each other, but from the past.

Sam manages to kick his boots off, then pulls his belt out of the loops and chucks it on the desk before laying down.

“PJs?” Dean questions.

“Mmfff,” Sam replies, face down in his pillow. The box of pills is digging into his hip, but he just can’t be bothered, not with his stomach complaining like it is.

Dean mutters something uncomplimentary, and moves it and the other water bottle before tugging the covers out from under Sam, who doesn’t help, at all, even though he should, and it shouldn’t be Dean’s job to take care of him, even though that’s the way it’s been since the beginning and—

“Get some sleep,” Dean says, tugging the covers up to just under Sam’s shoulder blades.

Sam wakes up confused, but he doesn’t remember why he’s confused (except it was something burning inside him, a blue light, and oh, he knows what he was dreaming about, it’s all he’s been dreaming about these days), and he turns his head and Dean’s sitting at his desk, sipping some something that might be whiskey, but he’s not sure, because his head’s all foggy and clogged.

“Mornin,” Dean says, moving his gaze from his laptop to Sam.

“‘s it?” Sam mumbles, still trying to shake off the confusion that must have come from a dream.

Dean glances back to his computer, “It’s eleven. AM. Next day. You’ve been sleeping for about fourteen hours.”

Sam makes an incredulous noise, but just slumps back into the pillow.

“Hey, don’t do that. We gotta get you hydrated,” Dean puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes, more gentle than usual, but still enough to make Sam’s stomach send a very clear message on the queasy meter.

“Gonna throw it up,” Sam says, feeling bile rise at just the thought of it.

“You want the IV instead?” Dean questions, sounding a lot like Bobby.

“No.”

“That’s what I thought. C’mon, Sit up.”

And Sam does that, because Dean knows best, and he doesn’t want the IV, because then he’d have it sticking into him and—well—

He used to be okay with needles. It’s harder now.

Choking down the water is a struggle, and he’s entirely surprised when it doesn’t immediately come back up, but instead swirls sinisterly in his stomach.

“See?” Dean says, after a tense minute.

“Don’t jinx it,” Sam growls, curling with his arms around his middle.

Dean scoots the chair closer to the bed and drums his fingers on Sam’s head, “Told you reading too much wasn’t good for you.”

“Was probably the bowling alley nachos,” Sam retorts.

Dean ignores him, “There’s that quote. Bobby said it a lot.”

Sam heaves a sigh, knowing exactly what Dean’s talking about, much to his own misfortune, “‘From so little sleeping and so much reading’?”

“‘His brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind!’” Dean finishes with a snap of his fingers, “Sounds like you, alright.”

“Probably the nachos Dean,” Sam says, slumping even further into his slouch and trying to find the pattern of the song that his brother keeps drumming on his head.

“Or that pizza.”

“Yeah, that was gross too. Are you drumming Leroy Brown?” Sam questions, tilting his head a little.

Dean stops drumming, “No.”

A snort finds it way out of Sam’s nose, “Sure.”

“Shut up you...invalid.”

“Oh, the big words, what an accomplishment,” Sam says, finding himself slanting to the side and his eyes closing without any effort on his part.

Dean nudges the water bottle back into his hand, “If you’re makin’ fun of me, you’re well enough to drink some more.”

“Ugh,” Sam grunts, before taking another sip.

“You need a shower too. You were sweating like, the whole time.”

“Watching people while they sleep is creepy,” Sam says, feeling entitled to a little complaining after the day (night?) he’s had.

Dean fumbles his words for a minute, “You could’ve been dying.”

And he thinks about spitting up blood, about a church and a demon and the few memories he has from after—Dean with a handkerchief in hand, stumbling to the car, finally feeling that maybe, just maybe, he’d overcome the demon in him for the last time. (He hadn’t, he figured out later, but that was how his life went—even purification can’t fix that kind of evil.)

“Just food poisoning. Just ‘cause you never get sick from all that crappy fast food doesn’t mean I don’t,” he says, argumentatively, just because he can.

“I know,” Dean says, sounding offended, “I’ve been takin’ care of you bein’ sick since ever.”

Sam immediately feels awful again, his gut rolling, but this time with guilt and with shame, “Sorry. I know you have.”

Dean doesn’t reply, except to pat Sam’s shoulder, which in Dean talk means let’s not talk about it.

“I’ll go start the shower for you. Get up, okay?”

“Yeah, I’m getting.”

And Dean leaves, and Sam stares at the floor, and then stands up, turning to straighten out the covers, because that’s one thing dad taught him that he never really goes against and that stupid blue dinosaur is on the bed, and he stares at it for a minute, then sighs exasperatedly and picks it up to chuck onto the chair Dean vacated, only stumbling a little at the action.

The shower is nice, even if his legs wobble a bit and the smell of his shampoo makes him want to do a repeat of his show yesterday.

The problem comes about when he has to get out, and he knows it’s going to be freezing out there, and it’s not the same, it really isn’t, but he’s just never warm anymore, it feels like he can’t ever keep his heat in and—

He grabs a towel and steps out of the shower bank, spotting the pile of clothes and the extra towel he’d heard Dean drop off earlier.

It’s freezing.

He slides his boxers on, then the plaid pajama pants that were supposed to belong to Dean but went to Sam because Dean ‘accidentally’ got them too long in the leg, and then finally drops his towel from off his shoulders to tug on the t-shirt that was originally at the top of the pile.

The vents in the shower room blow cold air, and it’s a problem, because his hands are shaking from it, and from being sick, and stepping onto the cold floor has made his feet go numb.

He wraps the extra towel around his shoulders to catch the drips from his hair and plods his way back to his room. Dean’s already there, with a bowl of what looks like soup, and a sleeve of saltines that Sam knows is probably the last one because before they left for the last case, he decimated the second-to-last one. There are two more water bottles on the desk than there were previously.

“Princess Bride time Sammy, I tried to find a tray or somethin’ but all there was was that cookie sheet thing that weighs like twenty pounds, I swear.”

“Princess Bride?” Sam asks, raising his eyebrows.

Dean points a finger at him, “It’s a classic and you know it.”

“Inconceivable,” Sam says, with the little bit of a smile that crept onto his face when he walked into his room and found the heat on.

“You gotta say it with more umph,” Dean chides, “Inconceivable!”

Sam walks over to his drawers and pulls out a pair of socks that he knows were in that load of laundry he put in the wash because the one has had the bottom of it darned about seventeen times and it’s completely different colors from the rest of the sock.

“Thanks for getting my laundry,” He says, thinking about Dean doing exactly what dad said and never getting anything in return, hardly even a smile in his direction.

Dean hums a “mmhmm,” then tugs the towel off of Sam’s shoulders and replaces it with a blanket that was definitely an old Men of Letters relic because there’s no way either of them would have ever picked up a blanket with that garish of a pattern on it. Sam is bundled away to the bed, and he wants to complain or say that Dean doesn’t have to do this, but if Dean leaves he thinks he’ll—if Dean leaves, it might be to find another angel—he’s sick, he doesn’t want—

“Try to get some of that soup down, it’s alphabet.”

“Why?”

Dean shrugs, “I’m eatin’ it too, and it looked hilarious.”

Sam looks at Dean, and at how his shoulders are tensed, just a bit, and thinks about living off of spaghettios for a couple of months when he was thirteen or so, and how he’d complained every single meal and how he can’t even look at a can of them without getting nauseous, and says, “Remember when we’d get this and always try to find our names?”

Dean’s eyes crinkle as he situates himself next to Sam on the bed and grabs the bowls of soup, “Yeah, there were never any W’s, so we’d break the other letters up or use V’s for it.”

Sam laughs a bit, and realizes his nose isn’t protesting the smell of the soup, and his stomach is at least somewhat at rest, and Dean is like a block of warmth to his left, and he forgot Princess Bride started with the kid and the grandpa.

Dean nudges him awake for Inigo Montoya’s final fight with the six-fingered man and Sam wiggles under the covers and lets Dean pull the awful bird-patterned blanket on top of him too, and when Dean gets up to turn off the TV, he doesn’t even complain when the triceratops is chucked at his head again.

He does make a muffled noise of offense, but it’s ignored as Dean presses the back of his hand to Sam’s forehead, and it’s soft and warm and he’s halfway to sleep when Dean turns off the lamp and says a quiet, “Night Sammy.”

“Night,” He says back, mouth pressed into the blankets that surround him, even though he’s well aware that it’s nowhere near nighttime.

“Sheriff Mills called when you were sleeping,” Dean says as a welcome when Sam blearily wanders into the kitchen.

“Did you even sleep?” Sam asks, staring at Dean, still in that stupid robe.

“Yeah, couple hours,” he says, waving a hand, and that’s better than some days, “She needed some help with a case.”

Sam finishes waking up, just like that, “When are we heading out?”

“Relax,” Dean says, putting his feet up and sipping out of the mug that’s missing the handle because of the time Dean had dropped it violently in the sink while doing the dishes, “She just needed some research done, I got it. Wasn’t even her that needed it, really. You know she’s got a… hunter network or somethin’ now?”

Sam slumps, relieved, into a chair, heart rate slowing back to normal, “Sort of. She mentioned she’d met some other hunters last time I talked with her.” He reaches over and steals Dean’s mug, taking a sip, even though it’s too close to lukewarm for his taste.

“Hey! Get your own” Dean complains, grabbing his mug back, “Germs dude.”

“Same germs,” Sam says, gesturing between them, “how do you stand it room temperature anyway?”

Dean shakes his head at him, “How do you stand it burning your taste buds off?”

Sam shrugs, then stands back up to grab his own mug.

“You feelin’ all better?” Dean asks, scrolling through something on his phone.

“Think so,” Sam says, and it’s the truth. He feels...there, and awake, and thinking about food doesn’t make him want to chuck his cookies again (at least, not any more than normal).

“You know she was gonna study english in college before she went into law enforcement stuff?”

Sam takes a half a second to reconcile ‘she’ with their previous conversation about Sheriff Mills, then offers, “Huh.” Sam purses his lips and raises his eyebrows before bringing his newly filled mug to his mouth.

“We talked about—” Dean interrupts himself with a laugh, “- uh, The Outsiders, you know, that uh book-”

“Stay gold, Ponyboy?”

“Yeah, that one. Remember how, uh, I got assigned it for reading—”

“And you gave it to me and told me to tell you what it was about, but we moved before you even needed to write the report, and then you read it like a year later when we were stuck in uh-” Sam waves his hand absentmindedly.

“Georgia, with all those kids you played soccer with.”

“Yeah,” Sam nods, smiling.

“Didn’t we watch the movie sometime?” Dean asks, taking another sip from his mug, “With what’s-his-face in it?”

Sam squints, and vaguely remembers watching parts of it at Bobby’s sometime before dad had had his row with him, “Tom Cruise?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, then stands up to get more coffee, “So, Jody really likes that book, and this other one—I can’t remember what she called it,” he waves his hand absentmindedly, “but it was about this white kid who runs away from home with her black nanny.”

Sam sits up straighter, “I’ve read that one…It’s, uh, something with bees.” He can’t remember much about it, but Jess had—

He’d read a lot in college.

“Yeah, bees, I remember that part. Anyway, she said I should read it.”

“I’ll look it up, there’s probably an audiobook,” Sam says, thinking about how Dean likes to work with headphones in.

Dean lights up at that, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

They subside into silence as they sip their coffee, and Sam moves a bit so that he can sit on the counter instead of leaning against it. Something about this feels real, and here, and their type of safe. And there wasn’t a single charged part of the conversation that strayed too close to—

They’re okay.

Chapter Text

Some days, he knows it’s going to be a bad one from the start. Others creep up on him.

He sits in the library, and he tries to focus. These books need to be skimmed, to be written down and recorded and moved from their boxes into some semblance of order, but he can barely bring himself to turn the page of this one.

He sits, and he shakes on the inside, and he wonders if his soul—broken, frayed, duct tape and safety pins—is flickering the way he pictures it doing.

His fingers itch.

And then he sees the blood.

He turns the page, straining under some pressure he doesn’t understand.

“Hey, think I found a case,” Dean says, walking into the room.

And Sam has to move then, has to exist outside of himself again, and it doesn’t make it easier, but it’s some kind of pitiful motivation, so he takes it and tries.

“Where?” He says, standing up, looking at Dean, dressed in something other than the robe he’s been wearing around for most of the past couple of days.

“Near Omaha, not even far to drive. Just looks like a possible haunting—lady says she got pushed down the stairs by an ‘entity’ and the family dog was, uh, get this,” Dean puts his one hand up in air quotes, “‘ripped apart limb from limb’. Kinda seems like our thing.”

Sam can feel the ball of whatever in his gut roll and expand, and he wants to scream, but he raises his eyebrows and says, “I’ll get the bags,” instead and starts to walk around the table.

“Whoa Sammy, what the—what you do to your hands?” And Dean sounds incredulous, shocked even.

Sam looks down at his hands and they’re bleeding. He hadn’t thought that that had been real.

“I—” He stares some more, blinks a few times, and Dean looks at him incredulously, placing the laptop onto the table and sliding himself over to the other side of the table, skipping walking entirely.

“How in the hell did you cut up your hands?” Dean asks, grabbing both of Sam's wrists and tugging his hands to eye level.

Blankly, Sam looks at the blood that's dripping from the tips of his fingers and pooling in the palms of his hands, “I don't know—I didn't notice—what?”

Dean drops his hands, shoulder-checking Sam back into his chair, but in a weird, gentle way, “Stay there, try not to get blood on the floor.”

“Dean—” Sam starts, already at a loss as his curls his hands, trying to catch the drops, even as a couple plonk to the floor.

Dean gives him a look, and launches himself back over the table, this time to the map room, nearly knocking over a lamp, “Don't touch anything,” he calls, almost as an afterthought.

And Sam doesn't, just sits and stares, finally feeling the sting in his hands. The blood makes it hard to see, but he thinks they might just be a series of small cuts, almost like—

Almost like-

Paper cuts, he decides, shaking his head a bit. Big ones, deep. But paper cuts. Not—not. Just paper cuts.

Dean comes back with the small first aid kit and the large tube of off-brand Neosporin they keep close by it. Dean takes a seat on the table in front of Sam and pops the lid, sending the things inside flying onto the floor and the books Sam was reading.

They keep their first aid kits well-stocked.

Dean mutters a quiet curse, but pulls out the wide cloth bandages and leaves the mess.

“I think they've already stopped bleeding,” Sam says, helpfully, as Dean soaks up the blood.

And he's mostly right too, the ones on his fingers have started to scab.

Dean trades out the cloth for an antiseptic wipe that he opens with his teeth.

“Oh, ugh,” he mutters, spitting.

And that's supposed to be hilarious, Sam thinks, wondering if losing your sense of humor was a sign of some kind of trauma.

He huffs a laugh, “You're not supposed to put it in your mouth.”

“Gotta live life on the edge Sammy,” Dean says, mildly, and then starts scrubbing.

It stings, so Sam screws his eyes shut. He’s not really sure why, but that’s what he’s supposed to do.

Dean mumbles under his breath as he works—singing ‘na-nas’ along with the opening to “Thunderstruck” and grumbling about Sam getting hurt.

When Sam opens his eyes, it’s because Dean issues an “Ow,” loudly.

“What?” He asks, looking at Dean as he shoves his hand in his mouth.

“Dat damn book cuff ee,” he spits out from around his fingers.

Sam’s been translating Dean’s toothbrush talk since he was four, so he gets the gist, “Which one?”

Dean pulls his hand out of his mouth and glares at the blood that wells up along the cut he’s now got across three of his fingers on his left hand, “Middle one there, the one you were reading.”

Sam reaches out to tug it closer but immediately lets go of it because this time he actually feels the slicing sting on the backs of his hands.

“Ow,” he issues quietly.

“Dumbass,” Dean says immediately, “Stop touching the curse book.”

“I wasn’t going to touch it again!” Sam says, glaring. Dean forgets sometimes that Sam’s not five-years-old and does actually own a mostly-functional brain.

“Good!” Dean replies, ripping open another antiseptic wipe, scowling.

Dean bandages the cuts for both of them, then tucks everything back into the first aid kit, carefully grabbing the band aids that had landed on the book by pushing them off of it onto the table with his pinky finger.

“Okay. I’ll find some gloves and put this in a nice, thick plastic bag. You go get the stuff.”

Sam stands up and sighs, starting the walk to Dean’s room. Something in his stomach quivers, and he pushes it down. He doesn’t have time to be irritated. There’s a hunt.

He shoves the laundry he meant to put away in his drawers in his bag instead, and pulls the emergency bag he keeps under the bed to go with it.

Mumbling under his breath, he does a sweep of the room, “Bathroom stuff, clothes, suits in the car, jacket, wallet, phone,” he feels like he’s missing something, but that’s probably just him being paranoid as usual, so he turns out the lights and walks to Dean’s room, where his brother’s bags are laying outside on the floor.

He lifts them up on his shoulders, checks under Dean’s door for any light he’d forgotten to turn off, and doubts himself. He heads back to his room and peeks in, double checking that he’d flipped the switch. He does the same in Dean's, and finally heads to the garage, knowing Dean’s already there, checking the Impala and weapons stash.

This is their routine. It should be easy, rehearsed.

Each step hurts, and it’s only the thought that Dean’s expecting him to hurry that stops him from sitting on his bed and staring at the wall for an hour like he does sometimes.

The thing is, he knows it’s unhealthy. He knows he’s not in a good place.

That doesn’t change the fact that he’s been in this place for a long time, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever get out. (He doesn’t really expect to live long enough to figure it out anyway.) Not a big deal, in the long book of screwed up things in Sam’s life.

He walks into the garage and gets back to living life.

“Anything else?” He asks, loading the bags into the trunk that Dean’s left open.

“Got the cooler,” Dean says, hefting it into the backseat, “lights?”

“Got ‘em.” He hopes.

“Let’s head out.”

Sam slides into his seat and listens to the sound of both of their doors slamming shut at the same time.

He spends most of the drive on his laptop, headphones in to drown out Dean’s music with his own noise.

He flips through scans of the file he’s indexing—lists of previously known members of some occult group in southern Australia that’s known for their illuminati connections—marking areas of interest to focus on later. Once he’s got all of these down, he’ll get around to cross-referencing with current records and see if he needs to find a hunter down there to take care of any issues.

Goals are what drive him now—small ones, getting little things done. At least he knows he can do them, unlike—

Dean turns up the volume as he rolls down his window on I-80, blaring past minivans and semis alike. Sam doesn’t bother to turn his up—his audiobook he wasn’t even paying attention to ended almost an hour ago. Besides, Zeppelin’s on, and any time now…

Dean pulls the earbud out of Sam’s left ear, starting to yell along with the music.

“Ramble on! And now's the time, the time is now,” he hits Sam in the shoulder, drumming his other hand on the wheel, grinning because he knows this annoys Sam to no end, “To sing my song! I'm goin' 'round the world, I got to find my girl!”

And maybe it’s because it’s a weird day, or maybe it’s because he remembers being eight and singing along with the radio in the backseat with Dean, kicking the seat enough to make dad threaten to turn off the music because he was so excited. (He’d known the lyrics to all of Zep’s greatest before he could long divide.) Or maybe he wants to throw Dean off his rhythm, or maybe he’s just sick and tired of sticking to the same damned routine the whole time—that’s what got them into this mess—so he joins in.

“On my way!” And Dean looks over to him, wide-eyed, faltering over the next line, “I've been this way ten years to the day!”

And then Dean grins at him and guns it round a pickup going fifty in a sixty-five zone, and Sam shakes his head at him.

“Ramble on! Gotta find the queen of all my dreams!” And Dean headbangs, still drumming on the wheel as air fwoops by through the open window.

Dean keeps singing, but Sam sinks back into his seat and just watches him, shaking his head at every exaggerated movement and at Dean’s over-the-top singing.

He knows Dean is actually capable of singing like a normal human being, but Dean like this, wild and screeching along to the lyrics, completely out of tune is somehow better right now. It’s Dean, plain and simple, something that’s familiar and so Dean that Sam can feel himself sliding back into place, feeling all of thirteen again, laughing as Dean took sharp turns in the car that was newly mostly-his and blared his music. He’d trusted Dean to keep him safe even with the threat of cops pulling them over present in the back of his mind. He’d been able to trust Dean.

The music fades, and Dean turns down the volume, and Sam’s back to the present, and everything is weighing him down again. He turns back to his computer and finds the 5% battery warning up on screen, and like that, everything is back to being awful.

And it’s so stupid that a low battery gets to him like this, but it’s been this way for a while—something dumb and small will come along and ruin his calm that he worked so hard for, and that has been just out of reach ever since—

Dean signals over to the exit, foot easing onto the brakes as he takes the curve at ten above the posted speed limit.

“Dude, slow down,” Sam complains, staring at the suburban that’s practically on their bumper in the rearview.

Dean scoffs, “How am I supposed to do that, genius? This idiot is on my tail,” and he lets off the brake and guns it again, switching lanes, “Should’a taken one-thirty-six.”

Sam closes his eyes, tries not to think about the semi that’s behind them now, that Dean pulled in front of without any consideration for the giant, barreling weight that’s now behind them, and if the driver doesn’t slow down enough, it’ll be them getting slammed into and—

He relaxes the grip he has on the seam of his jeans near the knee as Dean switches lanes again.

“It’s a wonder you don’t get pulled over every two miles,” Sam mutters, and rolls his shoulders, slumping back into his seat as he slams his laptop shut.

“What crawled up your ass this time?” Dean says, eyebrows dropping enough to wrinkle his forehead, “You’ve been pissy since—well, forever, basically, but especially—”

“Dude, shut up,” Sam says, heart beating fast enough that he thinks it’s gonna pull a Looney Tunes and catapult itself out the windshield.

And now Dean’s mad, and Sam realizes that’s what he’s been aiming for, because Dean mad is familiar too, and it’s easier, sometimes, to get mad right on back.

“Shut up,” Dean mocks, pulling a face, “Didn’t know it was time for PMSing, but go ahead.”

“Being a girl’s not a bad thing and Jody would be disappointed in you,” Sam prods, watching as Dean swells in outrage. Sheriff Mills keeps calling and texting them, sometimes about hunting (especially after that mess with Vesta), but not always. Mostly she just tells them off for always calling her Sheriff.

“Oh, pulling the Jody card, great one,” He says, rolling his eyes, and Dean’s still angry, but it’s not directed at Sam anymore, and he’s lost again, and—

He slouches further in his seat and watches out the window as Dean turns up the radio, tuning it until he finds a news station.

They don’t talk as the announcer jabbers on about some car sale with some MSRP something or other, and Sam wishes he could just leave, he doesn’t want to exist anymore and—

Dean pulls into a gas station and turns the key, out the door before the engine stops, and Sam crawls out, twists his spine to pop it, and goes to open the trunk to grab his monkey suit.

They head up to the porch that’s overflowing with old furniture, sitting, worn, in unorganized stacks, but there’s a tricycle and a skateboard on the lawn, and scattered toys too, so it’s not as creepy as Sam wants it to be for the sake of regularity.

Dean rings the doorbell, and they both reach into their jacket pockets.

A young kid, maybe six or so opens the door and stares at them through the screen, hiding most of her body behind the door.

“Hi there,” Dean says, flashing a smile, then his badge in sync with Sam, “We’re from the FBI, are your parents home?”

She nods, then leaves, presumably to retrieve someone. They stand, aimless on the porch for a moment, and Sam takes a look down the street. There are lots of abandoned toys in yards, but no kids. He blames video games.

A woman walks up to the door, the kid from earlier trailing behind her, “Hello? Can I help you?”

“Sure hope so,” Dean says, a bit of southern coming through in his accent. Sam tries to hide his sigh, because that means Sam is the one with north eastern this time. (They started to try and differentiate after that one case where the one guy that worked at the antiques shop they investigated tagged them as brothers from just their inflections. That was a weird case. Also, a short one, because the antiques guy also had a solid belief in the supernatural already, and also offered to make them tea after knowing they were impersonating FBI agents.)

They pull out the badges again, and Dean introduces them, “I’m Agent,” he pauses for a split second, not long enough for anyone other than Sam to notice, “Bryan, and this is Agent McDonald with the FBI. We were called in to check in with the animal mauling you reported?”

The woman relaxes a bit, and moves to open the screen door, “I didn’t know the FBI worked with things like that,” she says, a question in her tone, “Aren’t you guys busy trying to figure out who D.B. Cooper is or something?”

Sam laughs at the joke, and Dean follows after a brief moment where Sam can practically see the light bulb click on.

“Yeah,” Dean says, “Not really our department,” This he follows with a wink. “There’s been an odd pattern of animal deaths in the area recently, and we got called in to work with the local PDs.”

The woman is much more relaxed now, but Sam’s got half an eye on the girl that’s hiding behind her mom, and she’s near tears, lip wobbling. She meets Sam’s gaze, and looks away when he tries to shoot her a smile.

“Well, come on in,” the woman invites, stepping aside to let them through, “sorry, the house is a mess, we’re doing some cleaning and the kids are on break.” She’s got a harried air about her that Sam associates with moms from all around the country. He wonders if his mom would—

“Do you want anything to drink?” The woman asks, and Sam really wishes he and Dean hadn’t been silently angry at each other on the ride over, because then he’d know her name, and more about the case beyond the bare details Dean fleshed out at the beginning of the drive.

They both shake their heads, and Sam says “No thanks,” while Dean flashes yet another smile and says, “Naw, we’re good.”

A series of bangs sounds overhead, and a boy’s voice yells, “You can’t shoot your allies, genius!”

“Josh!” The woman yells, “Keep it down!”

There’s no reply, but there’s no loud bangs either.

“Sorry,” she says, looking sheepish as she leads the way, “He’s got his friend over, they get excited with their game.”

They sit at the kitchen table, because the living room is a bit covered in papers and what looks like three buckets worth of legos.

“So, Ms. Trevino, can you tell us about the incident with your dog?” Dean asks, pulling out the notepad he keeps in his left pocket to seem official.

That’s usually Sam’s move, but he lets Dean take the lead on this one. He tries to focus on the woman in front of them, but the girl from earlier is hiding around the corner, peeking around it when she thinks Sam isn’t looking, and he wonders if this is normal for her. He tunes back into the conversation.

“And, poor kid,” the woman’s saying, “she was the one to see Socks, well, you know,” she gestures, “and she’s been worried to go outside ever since.”

“Can’t blame ‘er,” Dean says, and Sam nods, “Would you mind if my partner talks with her?” And Sam wishes he’d tuned into the conversation earlier, as Dean continues, “He’s good with kids, doesn’t bite,” and Sam thinks that’s directed at the girl who’s frozen against the door frame a few feet away.

“Delilah,” the woman says, “Would you mind telling the nice FBI man about Socks?” And she sounds worried, stressed.

The girl shuffles in place and shrugs, hiding her face behind the door frame again.

Sam stands up, wishes Dean would stop doing things like this, because it’s not Sam who’s good with kids—he never knows how to handle them, and Dean should be doing this—but he stands up and crouches near the girl.

“Your name’s Delilah?” He asks, trying to sound gentle, reliable. She nods, shyly.

“My name’s Sam,” then he hesitates, “are you any good with building things with legos?” He thinks about Dean, comforting civilian kids, coaxing answers out of them.

The question makes the girl smile, and her eyes light up, and she nods.

“You think you could show me some cool stuff to build? I’ve got a nephew who’s really good at building, and he shows me up every time,” he shakes his head, tuts his tongue, and wishes lying wasn’t as easy (sometimes easier) than breathing.

She giggles a bit, and nods again. She moves to the living room, which is connected to the kitchen because of the open floor plan that he can practically see Dean envying out of the corner of his eye. He nods at Dean and Ms. Trevino, who’s looking a little less apprehensive, and as he walks away, says, in confidence with Dean, who leans forward to look interested, “She hasn’t laughed much since the whole thing. I’ve been worried.”

And even before Dean says it, Sam knows he’s going to say, “Kids are tough, sometimes they just need time,” and Sam wishes things were different, and they could say that they just need time.

Delilah is already starting to build something, and the blocks are the large kind, the kind Sam vaguely remembers Pastor Jim keeping in a plastic tub under his desk that he would pull out and let Sam and Dean play with when they stayed with him.

“What’cha building?” Sam asks, lowering himself to the floor to sit cross-legged.

Delilah looks up at him, then back at the floor, and in a quiet voice says, “A boat.”

“Whoa,” Sam says, frantically trying to remember what it was like to be six, then promptly throwing out the thought when he remembers that at six he was busy figuring out that monsters were real and starting his obsession with praying, “What kind of boat?”

“A cruise ship,” she says, smiling, “so it can go on water and people can waterslide on it.”

“Man,” Sam says, sliding a few bricks toward himself, “that’s pretty awesome. What should I build?” He puts a couple bricks together, then pulls them apart again.

“Dunno,” Delilah says, shrugging.

“How about a house?” Sam says, figuring that it wasn’t too much to ask of his lego-building abilities.

“That’s boring,” her annoyed voice informs him, “you should build another boat.”

“Cool idea,” Sam says, and wonders how he’s supposed to do that, “you’re helping me with lego building already!”

It sounds so fake coming out of his mouth, but Delilah doesn’t seem to mind, and she’s warming up to him. Dean and Ms. Trevino are talking quietly over at the table, and Sam pictures their gazes burning into his back.

Sam starts putting the legos together, building a base like Delilah is doing.

“What happened to your hands?” Delilah asks suddenly, pointing to his bandages.

“Mmm, I got in a pretty nasty fight with a book,” Sam says, trying to joke. Delilah giggles, so he thinks it works.

“So,” Sam says, and wonders if he should treat her the same as any other witness, “you want to talk about what happened with Socks?”

She looks up at him and tilts her head.

“You think you could tell me about what happened that day? Did anything weird happen?” Sam tries, stacking on another layer to his apparent boat, this time attempting to overlap the breaks between blocks.

“Uh, huh,” Delilah says, and she’s sticking a plastic animal inside the square she’s built out of lego bricks as she continues, “the weird man was in mama’s bedroom again.”

“Weird man?” Sam questions, feeling hope rise in his chest, and it’s weird, but it would be really nice to get a win here.

“He’s got funny clothes, and he’s got a mean face too. He doesn’t like when Josh plays his music.”

“Yeah? Was he big like me, or smaller like you?”

“Big, but big like the other guy.”

“Agent...Bryan?” Sam asks, and he thinks they went with Bon Jovi this time because Dean wanted to annoy him.

Delilah nods, and then frowns at his boat, “No, not like that. You gotta build up the wall first, then put in the middle.” She stands up and sits down on Sam’s knee, and he’s a little taken aback, but he lets her fix what he’s done wrong, then works with her to build up the wall.

“Have you seen this man after that day?”

She nods, brow furrowing as she wiggles a four-block into place, “He’s in mama’s room sometimes when I go to bed.” She turns around and looks at him, giving him a very serious look, then whispering, “Mama can’t see him.”

She goes back to working on her boat, and Sam wonders if she’s psychic, or if the ghostie is something kid related.

“McDonald,” Dean calls, and Sam whips his head around to look at him, “You ready to head out?”

Sam looks back at Delilah, then back at Dean and nods, giving him a thumbs up.

Delilah looks at him as he stands up, “You didn’t finish your boat.” She sounds upset.

“Aw man,” Sam says, “Guess I didn’t.” He crouches down next to Delilah, “But I learned a lot about how to build one. I’ll try it on my own next, and see if I can do it, how’s that?”

“Promise?” Delilah asks, and she holds out a pinkie, and Sam wonders if he was ever that innocent.

“Promise,” He says easily, then wraps his pinkie around hers, the one finger he doesn’t have bandaged on that hand. He glances at where Ms. Trevino is still chatting with Dean, “I promise to try and get the angry man to go away too, okay?”

Delilah smiles then, a big one, full of teeth and gums where teeth should be, “Okay!”

They wait until they’re in the car to talk.

“Well, I got diddly-squat,” Dean says, rolling his eyes, “she apparently tripped on the third step up and got a nasty bruise. Just another superstitious nut—”

“It’s definitely haunted,” Sam interrupts Dean’s complaints, “Delilah’s been seeing a man in her mom’s bedroom at night, and it’s freaked her out.”

“Well Sammy, sometimes moms need some time with a special someone—”

“Not like that, Dean” Sam says, sighing, “A tall guy, wearing ‘funny clothes’ with a mean face. Sounds kinda ghostly.”

“So we’re going off ‘kinda ghostly’. Great.”

“C’mon, ‘ripped limb from limb’, remember?”

Dean rolls his eyes as he starts the car, “Yeah, yeah, probably just a friendly neighborhood psychopath.”

“Dean,” Sam huffs out.

“I know, I know. Let’s grab a motel, get us some more beer, because you did not pack enough, and dig up the house’s history.”

“It was your job to pack the cooler this time!”

“Was not—I was the one who got splattered with monster guts last hunt, remember,” Dean turns onto main street, “so, your turn.”

“That’s not a rule,” Sam says, and a bit of panic is in his voice, and he knows it, but if it’s a rule, that means he’s forgot that they made it one, and that means he’s lost a chunk of memory and he could have been anyone and—

“Is now, princess,” Dean says, with all the air of a bossy older brother, “and if one of us gets to play legos with the cute kid instead of playing nice with Mother Suburbia, they have to dig up the next grave.”

“Dean,” Sam says, and his heart is still thumping in his chest, “you’re the one to put me on kid duty.”

“And? You got to play with friggin’ legos while I had to chat about Mrs. Susan B. Anthony next door.”

“I’m not digging up the next grave alone.”

Dean waves his hand, “Sure you’re not.”

And they work the case, and it should be harder, but the county records are easily hacked, and the motel room is only a little mysteriously stained, and the chinese food Dean picks up from around the corner and down the street isn’t as suspicious as it sometimes is, and Dean didn’t get pizza, even though it’s closer, and Sam wants to think it’s because Dean’s being smart and thinking about the last time they got pizza, but it’s probably just Dean wanting sweet-and-sour.

“Got it,” Sam says, and it surprises himself, because the sun is still high in the sky, and Dean hasn’t even broke for dinner yet.

“Already?” Dean asks, sounding incredulous, “That’s quicker than that time with the antiques guy.”

“What was in that tea?” Sam asks, and shares a mutual shrug with Dean, “Anyway, check this out.”

He turns his laptop so Dean can see the newspaper article, and sits up in his chair, “Frank Fitzpatrick, died 2003 from an infected dog bite. Angry face, and apparently,” he raises a finger in the air, ”had a proclivity for hating the neighborhood kids.”

“Why does that matter?” Dean asks, and he’s not being annoyed-brother-Dean, but involved-in-the-hunt-Dean, and it makes Sam want to feel something.

“Didn’t you notice?” He asks, incredulous. Dean shakes his head.

Sam continues, “That whole street was covered with kids’ stuff, but no one was out, even though it’s the beginning of their school break and super nice outside.”

“Easy,” Dean says, “video games.”

“I’m thinking maybe they’re just picking up on Fitzpatrick, you know kids are more sensitive to this stuff sometimes.”

Dean makes a face that means he agrees, “Okay. You got a grave?”

“Only one cemetery in the area, he’s got a registered plot there, and there’s apparently a map at the entrance.”

“Alright.”

“Yeah.”

They sit in silence for a moment.

“Dude,” Dean says, “it’s still not... afternoon. What are we supposed to do until it’s clear?”

Sam shrugs, “Watch tv? Read a book?”

“Ugh,” Dean says, then stands up, only to lay back down a moment later, “I hate when this happens.”

Dean’s asleep when Sam slips out, and he leaves a note—getting road snacks, be back asap—and he can’t be in that motel room any longer, slowly turning down the volume on the soap Dean was watching before he passed out so that the sudden noise change wouldn’t wake him up. Dean deserves a good nap, and they probably won’t get to sleep tonight either if the dirt in the cemetery is as dry as he suspects it might be. Hasn’t rained a lot here recently.

He doesn’t bother to take the Impala—Dean would hear the engine start and flip out on him when he came back because the Impala is both of theirs but mostly Dean’s, and it’s just something Sam’s come to terms with.

They got a motel right on main street, so it’s easy to follow the sidewalk until he finds an actual grocery store, not the gas station deal he’s known for his whole life.

He grabs a basket on his way in, and stares at the carts that have seats for kids that look like race cars and doesn’t feel anything.

He’s not sure if he’s there, if he’s being honest with himself. Sometimes everything just feels … fake. Unsettling.

It’s a bad day.

He gets crackers and chips and beer, and on a whim, a giant plastic tub of animal crackers, and picks up some apples too, just trying to remember what he likes, what Dean would expect him to bring back. He’s kind of floaty, and he wishes Dean was here to be angry and drag him back down.

The store has self-checkout, and Sam would be glad, except he doesn’t feel anything other than the ever present guilt, and when the machine prompts him to put in his rewards card number, he almost laughs, although he’s not sure why. The employee walks over to approve him for the alcohol purchase, and on his way out, she hands him a flyer, and he takes it with a nod and returns her, “Have a great day,” with a, “You too,” and tucks the receipt into one of the bags.

He wants to scream, only he’s not sure he even remembers how.

On the walk back, he reads the flyer, thinks Demolition Derby?, then thinks Demolition Derby, and remembers being younger and sitting on an old motel towel on burning hot bleachers, rubbing dirt out of his eyes while Dean and Dad cheered for a bunch of cars that were making awful revving sounds.

Then he looks at the time, and thinks, huh, and then he’s back at the motel.

Dean stirs when he opens the door, and Sam hums a Just Me in their language that used to drive dad bonkers, because they could have an entire conversation in just grunts and humming noises, and Dean settles back down.

He packs the beer into the cooler, rethinks the idea, takes them out again, and dumps the mostly melted mess into the sad parkstrip by their room and takes the tiny plastic bucket to the ice machine and starts the tedious process of refilling the cooler. Back in the room, he packs in the beer again, and thinks about how he and Dean (probably mostly Dean, unless he was spacing again) managed to drink the other cans in the time between getting to the motel and Dean falling asleep.

Dad had been a pretty heavy drinker growing up, and Sam wasn’t actually very sure what a normal amount of casual drinking was, except that Jess’ Dad had—

It’s probably not healthy for Dean (or him) to be downing that much, even if it’s just beer, and not whiskey like Dean likes to drink at the bunker.

I should get back to drinking smoothies again, he thinks, and then realizes he hasn’t been out running since before the Jack-in-Irons case, and he’s not actually sure when they got back from that particular case and he’s going to fall into bad habits and he probably has addictive personality, and he’s got no excuse for—

Dean snorts in his sleep and Sam digs his thumb into his left hand, and when that’s not enough, he brings his arm up and bites down on the flesh of his upper arm, lightly, just enough to feel the pain. Then he pokes at a bruise from slamming his hip into the library table on accident until it stings and pulls at the bandages around his fingers until they catch on the cuts.

Then he stands up, pulls out his laptop and starts the process of recording the file he never finished.

He starts making noise around five, and Dean wakes up, blinking awake instead of startling like he does sometimes (most times.)

“Hey, you still like demolition derbies?” Sam asks, picking up the unwrapped plastic cup he took from the bathroom counter to take a drink of lukewarm tap water.

“Huh?” Dean questions, stretching into a yawn, “Sure?”

“There’s one at seven. Goes for a few hours—it’s about a forty-five minute drive there, thought it could be a good time waster. Tickets are fifteen a piece.”

“For a derby?” Dean asks, leaning down to pull off his socks which he sniffs before tossing them far away from himself, “That’s highway robbery.”

Sam keeps looking at his computer, but he’s not really sure if he’s typing the right stuff anymore, and the stupid thing in his stomach is roaring to life faster than the Impala’s engine

“Thought it could be fun,” he says with a shrug, “we don’t have to.”

“You kidding?” Dean says, replacing his socks with fresh ones from his bag, “Miss a demolition derby that you’re voluntarily going to? I’m not that crazy, Sammy. Cars man, explosions,” he makes a ‘boom’ motion with his hands, popping his lips before moving to the bathroom.

Sam grimaces and twists his ankle until it pops.

They stand in a dirt parking lot on the south side of the city and inch their way forward in the line that stretches halfway around the front of the stadium.

“This place used to just be rodeo grounds, but they expanded it a few years back, added more seating and lighting—”

“Where’re you getting this from?” Dean asks, exasperated.

Sam points, squinting his eyes, “That sign.”

“Are you ever not reading?” And Dean rolls his eyes, then cranes his neck to see how much further they have to go until they hit the ticket booth. Still another ten minutes of waiting, at least, if the line keeps moving this slowly.

And Sam considers, remembers all the times he’s read the nutrition facts on boxes and the directories of every practically every motel they’ve ever stayed in, and says, blandly, “No.”

Dean socks his shoulder—not particularly hard, but enough to have an impact. Sam purses his lips in Dean’s direction, but there’s not much actual heat in his expression.

It’s something familiar instead, something fond. And Sam knows it—knows it because that was just Dean, something between them that’s not anger or exasperation or awkwardness (or something verging on hatred that neither of them would ever admit to).

Dean sighs and shuffles forward in the line, smiling a bit at the little kid who’s peeking over his dad’s shoulder at the two of them, grinning as the kid ducks down, then looks around the other side of his dad’s head.

Sam grins as Dean pretends not to notice, looking down at his phone that’s still on the home screen.

The kid pops up a bit more, and Dean looks right up at him, and the kid giggles and ducks back down again.

Dean plays the game with the kid until they get to the ticket booth, and waves at him as the family disappears on the other side of the fencing.

“How many?” The girl behind the counter asks, hiding a sigh. She’s probably college age, maybe high school.

“Two please,” Sam says, tugging his wallet out—he’s got an old fake in there he needs to remember to switch out—and handing over two twenties he’d gotten from a bet he’d made while halfway to drunk in a bar somewhere in east Montana.

“Here ya’ go,” the girl says, sliding the two tickets and his ten dollar change over through the hole in the plastic that separated the booth from the customers, “Concessions are on the south and north sides of the stadium, no alcoholic beverages outside of the beer garden, enjoy the derby.”

“Thanks, Sam says, handing Dean the tickets so he can tuck the ten in his pocket. Dean’s smiling, but trying not to.

“This is so stupid,” Dean says as they head to the gate where another bored college-age kid takes their tickets and rips off the stub, waving them through.

Sam looks at him, blankly, “What about it?”

“Just,” Dean starts, blowing air uselessly out of the side of his mouth, “y’know.”

“No, I don’t. That’s why I asked.”

Dean fixes a perturbed stare at him, before nodding his head at the good seats he’s spotted, “No alcohol outside the beer garden?”

Sam wants to laugh a bit, because that’s probably not where Dean’s thoughts had been heading at the start of that thought, but it’s just—it’s just—

“It’s a family thing man, they don’t want kids to have to deal with a bunch of dumb drunks.”

Dean looks like he wants to contradict that, but as they sit down on the bleachers, he nods his head in acknowledgement before starting up his complaints about the heat that’s burning through his jeans because of the metal they’re sitting on, and Sam tunes him out.

It’s—he doesn’t mean to, not really. Some days, Dean talking about some useless topic or lecturing him on cars or Zep or whatever is the most comforting thing he could ask for.

Today’s a bad day though, and he’s not sure if he’s too far in his head or too far out. That distinction is blurry now, and he doesn’t think it really matters anyway.

Dean snaps his fingers in his face, “Hey, did’cha remember bug spray?”

Blinking, Sam holds his arms out, “Does it look like I did?”

“Oh don’t worry,” a middle-aged woman butts in, turning around on her fashionable bleacher pillow to look at them, “You don’t have to worry much about the bugs around here.”

Their eyes meet, and Sam thinks be nice to the mom lady, and Dean tilts his head in acknowledgment, but squints his eyes—if I have to deal with Mrs. Stepford again, I’m gonna go ballistic.

“That so?” Dean asks, smiling in the most fake-friendly manner Sam’s ever seen.

Apparently no one else can pick up on it though, and the lady smiles at Dean in that way that white mom people seem to do when they’re not in the fed attire, like they can smell Dean’s All-American boyish charm in the air.

“Oh, you bet, sweetie. We had this crazy epidemic back in the day, when I was, oh, probably high school age, and the bugs came through and killed all the plants,” she says, gesturing, slapping her (probable) husband lightly on the shoulder, “do you remember that?”

The guy turns around, and he’s got a moustache that he kind of manages to pull off in that every-single-male-science-teacher-Sam’s-ever-had way.

“Oh yeah,” he says, bouncing a kid on his lap, “it was all over the news—it was probably, what, summer of ‘91?”

And Sam wonders what age these people think Dean is. They're obviously close to the same age, but people never seem to be able to pin down either of them down. It’s usually a good thing, but sometimes—

“Sounds about right,” the woman says, “killed the corn, almost put lots’a people outta business. Anyways, after a little while, they all flew away or something and we haven’t had a problem with any of the annoying-type bugs since!”

Dean raises his eyebrows, and they glance at each other quickly, “Huh, that’s crazy. Kind of like that town near...Saguache, right Sam?”

And Saguache is their word for suspicious, and it’s a miracle Sam even remembers that, it’s been so long since they’ve used the code they developed in between moments in childhood.

“You’re thinking of that city near La Junta,” Sam replies, and that’s still Colorado, so Dean knows Sam’s on the same page, but he doesn’t think they should worry too much about it.

“Oh yeah,” Dean waves his hand, “you’re right.”

“You boys must not be from around here,” the man says, passing the kid he’d had in his lap to his wife to pick up the crying girl who’d just hit her head on the bleachers, kissing her forehead.

“Naw,” Dean says, still friendly, and Sam just knows he’s the only one who can tell that he’s calculating which story’s going to be best for the situation, and he’s not sure why Dean’s bothering—it’s not like the family’s a witness to something, and living in a town without mosquitoes is probably just lucky, not a reason to interrogate them, but it’s Dean, and they’re in too deep now anyway.

Dean continues, letting his hesitation play off as sadness, “Dad just passed, so me and Sammy’re on the cross-country trip he always wanted to go on, y’know, in his memory.”

Sam rolls his eyes, playing along, even as he’s surprised the reference to dad doesn’t make his stomach drop out from under him as it usually does, “In memory of his stingy money-mongering, you mean.”

And Dean catches on to the game they’re playing, and it’s risky, bringing in some real feeling into this, but the derby’s still not started yet, even though Sam’s pretty sure it’s a few minutes past seven at this point, and he’s feeling...not angry, but annoyed by Dean’s need to talk to people. Plus, it’s the earliest thing they learned about lying. Putting some truth in there makes it easier to lie and keep it straight.

“Sammy, you’re a lawyer, you can shut up about that,” Dean says, good naturedly, playing to the audience.

“Student debt man,” Sam says, glaring at Dean just a little more than that jab would warrant for anyone else, “I’m still being yanked along, don’t worry about that.” Well, that’s a lie. Turns out dying has its uses after all.

The man laughs, and bounces the now giggling girl on his knee, “I get ya’ there,” he says with a wink, “med school’s just as bad. And malpractice insurance,” he finishes with sigh.

And Sam’s tagged him wrong, but thinks it makes sense, and he wonders if he’s a pediatrician. He’s got that look.

Sam laughs along with the guy, nodding, and is instantly relieved when a voice comes on over the loudspeakers.

The crowd cheers, and the few cars that are already in the ring rev their engines.

Sam sits back as far as he can in the uncomfortable seat and lets the sounds roll over him, trying to ignore the way Dean looks at him before he starts to get that excited look on his face.

Sam smiles, and wishes—

Well, he wishes a lot of things

“I’m not digging this grave by myself Dean,” Sam growls, narrowing his eyes at Dean, who has the moxy to aim a cocky grin at him.

“We decided this earlier Sammy,” he says, leaning onto the shovel he blatantly isn’t using, “Your turn.”

Headlights flash down the road, and they both duck down behind gravestones.

“Who even puts the cemetery in the middle of town?” Dean asks in a whisper, mildly outraged.

“Not every graveyard can be in the middle of nowhere, Dean.”

Dean pokes his head out from behind his headstone, straightening up into a standing position, “We should’a got the cemetery crew outfits, this place is way too well kept.”

“Yeah, from where?” Sam asks, digging his shovel into the sod, cutting it into a square that he yanks out, “Plus, if the real crew shows up, we’re better off saying we’re from a museum or something, they’ll all know each other, town like this.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, finally picking up his shovel to cut the sod, “Least he’s not one of the rock covered ones.”

Sam grunts in agreement, hopping onto the shoulder of his shovel to get the blade in deeper.

“You bring the tarp?” Dean asks as he copies Sam’s movement, finishing a rectangle piece and hefting it up to rest near the others Sam’s already pulled up.

“Under the gas cans,” Sam says, before slowing his movement to listen, hitting the deck at the same time as Dean as another car goes by.

Dean hefts himself up the second it’s out of sight, and starts in on more complaining, “Why’d this guy have to be in the least tree filled corner?”

Sam ignores him and gets back to work.

He’d say it’s soothing to work like this, but it’s not. In fact, he spends most of the time paranoid that a car’s going to stop and spot them. Plus, he hasn’t slept in...well, a while.

Dean’s still going strong, stripped down to a single layer, same as Sam, but somehow barely sweating. Sam hates him, he really does.

They haven’t quite made it to six feet yet when Dean straightens up and hauls himself out of the hole.

“Break time Sammy, don’t wanna be dehydrated when this guy shows his ugly mug.”

And Sam would whine, but he’s needed a drink since three feet down, and his feet are killing him. Plus, he sure he got worms in his hair earlier when Dean ‘accidentally’ dumped dirt on his head, and he’s just—

He’s tired.

Dean hands him a bottle of water, and Sam chugs the whole thing without tipping it back up, and crumples the bottle when he’s done, pulling himself up so that his legs dangle into the hole, just across from Dean.

“Ugh,” Dean says, leaning back, before jetting back up when he realizes he’s laying in the dirt pile, “I hope this guy is just a six-footer.”

“Rest of his family’s already buried, so hopefully. Nebraska doesn’t have depth laws, I don’t think. I didn’t check the county rule though,” Sam says, and immediately feels awful that he didn’t, because that’s his job he’s supposed to research and—

“Guess we’ll see,” Dean says, tossing another water to Sam, who almost fumbles it, blinking tiredly at just the wrong time.

They both drink their bottles to the halfway mark, then hop back in the hole.

Turns out Fitzpatrick isn’t a six-footer, but a six-and-an-extra-annoying-half-footer, and Sam’s so ready to get to the casket that he accidentally cracks it with the force of his shovel when he’s not expecting it to hit.

Dean mutters an annoyed, “Dude,” but helps Sam uncover it, then cheerleader lifts Sam out of the hole to grab the shotguns and salt.

Sam picks up the #10 can they’ve taken to keeping road salt in since the bag’s too large to keep in the trunk, and snorts when he hears Dean’s “Ugh,” that means the casket’s open.

Then the light breeze that’s been keeping the sweat on Sam’s neck cool stills and the already freaky quiet cemetery goes completely silent.

“We’ve got company,” Sam says, calmly, reaching down to hoist Dean out of the hole, passing him his sawed-off.

Dean takes it, shuffling so they’re back to back with Sam and his can of salt nearest the grave.

“Yeah, I kind of got that Sammy, thanks.”

Sam pops the white lid off the can and dumps half of it on the bones.

There’s a ‘Hah!” from behind him, and then the sound of Dean shooting. Sam turns to grab the gasoline and spots the flash out of the corner of his eye and aims, firing at the same time as Dean. Fitzpatrick disappears again, flickering out of existence, and Dean passes him the gas can.

Sam douses the dirt-dusted bones with gas and reaches for his breast pocket, only to remember that he took off his overshirts, and there’s no lighter in his jeans because these are the pair with holes in both front pockets. He swears, loudly, just as Dean goes flying over his head with a yelp.

He hates when easy hunts get messy.

Scrambling, he leaps over the hole they’ve dug, landing in the pile hands first, his sawed-off getting half buried in the loose dirt. And then, picking himself up to snatch at the pile of shirts he and Dean left next to the edge of the tarp, he finds himself face to face with Fitzpatrick.

“I am the last line of defense,” the ghost intones, managing to yank at Sam’s t-shirt, pulling him nearly nose-to-nose with the dead guy.

Sam wants to scream, and he’s not sure why, he’s dealt with way worse before, and Dean’s already up and running, snatching up the pile of shirts as the ghost tightens his grip on Sam’s shirt and sends him flying.

He has a moment, when he hits the ground, where he’s not sure where he is, where he’s not sure what’s real, why he’s on the ground, or why he can’t breathe. But then air makes its way back into his lungs, and there’s an unearthly scream behind him, and he’s back.

“Sammy, you okay?” Dean calls.

Sam manages a thumbs up, still trying to get air to flow properly, and feeling like his back’s going to split in two the moment he manages to sit up.

He can hear Dean’s heavy breathing from over here, and he wants to find out if Dean’s okay too, because he didn’t get to see where he landed, and anything could have happened when he wasn’t paying attention and—

Dean’s standing over him, reaching out a hand to pull him up, and against his better judgement, Sam grabs it, and lets his brother yank him to his feet.

HIs back screams at him, and he’s going to be sore tomorrow, and he can already tell that turning his neck to the right is going to be a challenge for the next few days.

“You good?” He manages to wheeze out, leaning one hand on Margaret Wells’ 1921-2008 Loving sister, daughter, wife, and mother stone

“Peachy,” Dean says, “I feel like number thirteen.”

And it takes Sam a moment to process that, and another one to send his have you gone completely round the bend? look at Dean.

“Dude, number thirteen? The Escort that got boxed in by the two W-bodies?”

Sam kind of feels like slamming his head into Margaret Wells’ stone until Dean stops talking about the derby.

Then his eye catches the light that’s glaring out from one of the nearby houses, and he swears.

“We’ve been had,” he says, by way of explanation, jerking his head toward the silhouette that’s visible in the window, a person obviously facing the cemetery with a phone to their ear.

“Oh, come on,” Dean complains, hobbling along with Sam to the hole that’s just got a few burning embers now.

They tug on the tarp, hurriedly, managing to shift most of the dirt on it back into the grave, then Sam plays tetris with the sod pieces as best he can as Dean gathers up their gear, and they speed-walk to the Impala that’s hidden in the copse of trees on the opposite side of the cemetery, tripping over old stakes in the process. Dean only steals four this time.

They load up the trunk messily, shoving the tarp and Sam both into the backseat, and putter out of the area, headlights off.

Dean turns them back on and gets up to the speed limit once they’re out of hearing distance of the cemetery, and Sam lays on top of the dirty tarp, picking at the bandages on his fingers and regretting a lot of things.

Number one is screwing up his back. Number two is not sleeping when he had the chance. Number three is being the designated not-driver and having to lay painfully on his injured back and not fall asleep, because Dean can and will give him hell if he does.

He could keep going, but he can hear sirens in the distance.

“If we get stopped, throw the tarp over yourself,” Dean says, a bit of a laugh in his voice.

“The whole point of me not being up there is so we don’t get stopped, genius.”

“Never know with these Nebraskan cops Sammy, you never know.”

Sam rolls his eyes hard enough that it sends his headache pulsing, and that’s number four on the list of regrettable actions.

The radio’s off, probably because Dean couldn’t find a good oldies station earlier, and the box of tapes is on Sam’s side, out of reach unless Dean wants to pull a move that’ll have Sam snapping at him for weeks.

They drive in silence, and Sam watches the streetlights go by at an angle he hasn’t been awake for in years.

“Was that too easy?” Dean asks at the same exact time Sam says, “That was a weird ghost.”

They both sit silently for a minute, then Dean swears violently.

“Did he say anything to you?” Sam asks, trying to adjust his position so the potholes Dean inevitably hits don’t jar his back as much.

“No,” Dean says, dragging out the word, “What he say to you?”

Sam imitates the low octave the ghost spoke in, “‘I am the last line of defense.’”

“That’s...not good,” Dean says, taking a left to get back on track to get to the motel after their evasive maneuvering.

“Probably not,” Sam says, and wishes, desperately that the world made sense and that he didn’t feel like he was drowning the second the adrenaline faded.

They both sigh at the same time, and Dean hits the palms of his hands against the wheel, glancing heavenward.

“How’s about we take a detour and check on the Trevinos,” Dean says, sounding resigned.

Sam nods, then makes that regret five because his neck is going to kill him, “Sounds good.”

Regret six comes about relatively quickly, because he doesn’t know how to make the right choices anymore.

Of course, that action is followed by a series of bad choices, so he’s honestly done naming them.

They drive up to the Trevino’s, and sit in darkness for a hot minute.

“Ghosts are just...awful,” Dean says to Sam as he (painfully and very slowly) sinks into his place on the passenger side, “It’s probably nothing.”

“Probably,” Sam agrees, just as the Trevino’s front door opens and Delilah walks out, followed by a boy that must be Josh.

Dean and Sam stare at them, and then they both catch movement down the street. Another front door, another kid. Then another, and three, one of them just barely old enough to toddle out the door.

“Probably nothing,” Dean repeats, then bashes his head backward into the seat, before hauling ass out the door. Sam follows, cursing under his breath with every painful movement.

“What the—?” Dean questions, incredulously, as more kids stumble out of doors and start zombie-ing down the street.

Sam reaches out when Delilah reaches the road, and wraps an arm around her.

“Delilah!” He says, pulling her back, “Hey, hey, whoa, can you tell me what’s going on?”

It’s only years of training and experience as well as the distance his brain insists on putting on the situation that has him calm, and Dean’s even worse, yanking arms of kids back, yelling a loud, “Snap out of it!” that should have definitely garnered some worried people at windows.

Instead, Delilah bites Sam’s arm, and a kid who can’t be more than twelve leaps up and puts him in a headlock, heels digging into the sensitive area just under his ribs.

“What the—” Sam yelps, as two kids, probably eight or nine, rush him, and he’s forced to let go of Delilah.

Dean’s faring no better, from what he can see. There’s even more kids walking the street now, filtering in from the next block up.

Dean’s curled on the ground, one hand pinned by the weight of a probable toddler, and other kids are kicking him the same as they’ve started to kick Sam.

“Sammy!” Dean yells, voice cracking as a boy in firefighter pajamas lands a kick to his stomach.

“Dean,” Sam manages to gasp out, his back screaming at him as more children pile on, and the same kid keeps his arms locked around his throat.

The problem is, he doesn’t want to hurt any of these kids, and he doesn’t know what’s going on, and he hasn’t slept in at least two days by this point, and nothing makes sense, and he can’t breathe, and—

The kids start moving again, a couple stomping on Sam’s back on their way through the street, and another on his left ankle, making him suck in a sudden breath as the head-locker releases his grip and follows the crowd.

Sam drags himself up, over to Dean—who’s trying to do the same in reverse.

“Did we—“ Dean starts, wheezing, “Just get beat up by a bunch of—of kindergarteners?”

“Think so,” Sam manages, pushing the two of them onto the sidewalk and out of the way of the still oncoming hoard.

“We gotta—“ Dean says, leaning against a fence, “Follow.”

Sam nods, “The hell is this?”

Dean shakes his head, and they use the fence to pull themselves up and limp their way across the street. The kids don’t seem to have an interest in them anymore.

They slide into the Impala, and Dean starts her up immediately, and drives up onto the unused sidewalk without hesitation. Sam groans at the bumps that happen every time they hit another parkstrip, but his head is racing.

“What the hell?” Dean asks, gunning it as they hit a driveway, then easing up as he navigates them in the tiny space between the fence and the tree, before driving into the street, pulled in front of the stumbling kids.

“I don’t know,” Sam wheezes, curling in on himself and pressing his thumb into his palm with all the effort he can manage.

Dean thumps his palms on the wheel, “Damnit!”

And Sam’s head is killing him, and his back is going to give out on him, and everything is wrong with the world, and this feels unreal—a shoddy dream, an out of body experience—and all he can think about is that stupid antiques guy case.

“Pied Piper story!” He forces out, some weak excuse for a light bulb flickering in his brain, and he slams a hand on the dash, “Antiques guy!”

Dean slams the brakes, and Sam leaps out as best he can, and Dean follows. The kids just walk around the car that’s now in their path.

Dean pops the trunk and they both go searching for the tiny bag they threw in the back a couple months ago.

“Got it!” Dean says triumphantly, pulling out the decorative bag. He pulls out the wooden flute Antiques guy had forced on Dean as they left, with a cryptic, “You’ll need this soon.”

“Play!” Sam says, looking forward as the kids keep stumbling, and he watches their feet, and he understands, “You gotta drown out the music!”

“What music?” Dean asks, arms spread wide, chest heaving.

“Pied Piper! Play!” Sam says, then takes off, trying to head off the front of the pack.

“Why me?” Dean shouts, slamming the trunk closed.

Sam manages to turn around just enough to flip Dean off with his still sort-of bandaged hands, trailing bits of cloth from using the shovel without gloves.

He manages to get ahead of the kids, hearing a shrill version of what he thinks is supposed to be “Hot Cross Buns” start in the distance. Gasping, limping, he eyes the stumbling kids and follows their collective gaze.

There’s a figure in the distance, because of course there is.

He pulls out his gun and advances warily.

A voice calls, “In all my time locked in this awful town, I never anticipated it being the Winchesters who set me free.”

The guy—the monster, Sam corrects—isn’t anybody recognizable, which is a relief, because it seems like lately that’s all it ever is. He’s scrawny, wearing a t-shirt and a green flannel Sam’s sure he’s got a copy of back in the bunker. Sam’s probably got at least a foot on him, but he holds himself the way Sam associates with things like demons—a kind of strength reigned in only by the body being inhabited. But this isn’t a demon, or if it is, it’s a damn crafty one.

“Always though the Pied Piper was a story about remembering to pay back your debts,” Sam calls from a casual couple yards away, adjusting his stance. Silver bullets, but they might not do anything.

“Well,” the guy says, “That is the lesson they tried to teach people. Some of them got the wrong idea though, evidently enough.”

“He was a witch, wasn’t he,” Sam says, with sudden understanding as his head pounds, “the guy we burned.” For a second, the hole they dug blurs into all the others, and he can’t remember the name on the gravestone. Frank, he remembers, his name was Frank.

“That he was,” says the Piper, twirling a flute-like instrument that looks eerily similar to the one he’d just left Dean with, “And as much as I hate the guy, I’ve gotta give him props, he was a damn good one. Got me locked down in this town real tight, even had every mayor since ‘89 on his side with it too. No bugs to destroy the crops, no rats to sneak into basements, not even any mosquitoes to bug the suburbanites. And all of this for the low, low, price of chaining a cosmically powerful being to one witch’s power and giving him grocery money. Great, isn’t it?”

Sam can hear Dean in the distance, if he strains his ears over the melodic voice of the Piper in front of him. It sounds like an incredibly bastardized version of Janie’s Got a Gun, like a toddler who’d heard the song once had taken up the recorder.

He wonders what it says about himself that he can recognize the melody behind all that.

“Good for the town, I’d guess,” Sam says, hoping to keep the guy busy while Dean keeps doing whatever he’s doing that’s making it so the kids aren’t coming any closer, instead standing blankly in the street.

“But not so much for me,” finishes the Piper, and back in the day, Sam had thought every storybook and movie and Saturday morning cartoon was lying to him about the villain monologue, but he’s been up against enough himself to notice that it’s just a recurring pattern. Everyone has a bone to pick, and being locked up in a town doing the will of a witch in cahoots with the city leadership apparently offered plenty of them.

“So,” Sam says, limping a little closer, just enough to see that the Piper’s eyes are glinting in the light coming from the streetlamps in a way very distinctly not human, “Let me get this straight. Witch catches onto some kind of binding spell, hears a little too much about a guy who can stop the bug invasion. Gets the town in on it, probably some kind of, what, blood sacrifice?”

The Piper nods, a wry grin showing off teeth that look just a little . . . off. “Once every three years, someone has to die. They usually picked off the old ones, the ones in homes that everyone was expecting to die anyway. Were pretty clever about it too. Turned on the witch in the end though, the new mayor didn’t much like some of his more . . . shady practices. They said it was a dog bite, but the hospital’s on the mayor’s payroll too. Unfortunately for me, that didn’t free me quite yet, because ghosts can hold contracts too.”

A kid in the corner of Sam’s vision starts to turn away, tilting his head to listen to something in the distance.

The Piper smiles widely, continuing without an ounce of worry on his face,“And then, lucky me, you came along. The Winchesters, giving me free reign to steal away all of these children. The universe does like its irony.”

Sam snorts a bit at that, and looks at his hands gripping his Taurus, the way the bandages are coming undone. The cuts he’d sustained from a book that was supposed to help him. He considers how his head is throbbing, the way his voice rasps when he speaks because something in his throat caught wrong when that kid was choking him out.

Like that, his brain zaps from point A to point Z with only a quick pit stop at point R in that way that bugged the crap out of dad (and Dean, sometimes, when he was irritated already).

There’s a book in the library that he keeps tucked behind another shelf of books with topics varying from The Care and Keeping of Witchcrafting Moss to Folclore de Portugal (all the ones Dean is least likely to pick up). It fits nicely between the shelf backing and the other books, thin enough to slip between them with ease. The title simply translates to “Blood,” as far as Sam can tell, but the Men of Letters constantly referenced in when discussing any type of blood ritual.

He’d picked it up after the first time a pencil he’d dropped took just a little too long to hit the floor.

But hidden between that book’s pages was information. Information he could use now.

He shuffles forward, and the Piper raises his pipe.

“Easy there Winchester. I’ve got no bone to pick with you, but I’ve got an entire town to take to the bank, so you’ll have to excuse my bad manners. Put down the gun.”

Sam bends down slowly, leaves his gun on the road, and raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. He carefully uses the movement to loosen his bandages further. He shifts his weight onto his left leg and feels the heft of his small silver knife against his calf. Good to know he hadn’t lost that along the way.

There’s no lore about the Pied Piper in Sam’s brain to pick at, no musing about Hamlin by the Men of Letters, nothing except his understanding of the importance of blood and special weapons.

So when the Piper readies himself to play, gaze behind Sam now, where the kids have turned around, and a couple have started to stumble toward the shrill notes Dean’s playing, Sam takes the opening.

It’s a blur, in that way fights tend to be. Dodge, punch, blood in his mouth, he’s bit his cheek. Head’s throbbing, someone’s yelling.

He gets the bandages around the Piper’s wrists, who acts like Sam’s pressed brands to him, thrashing and bucking. Sam takes him to the ground and gets a knee on the Piper’s wrist, pressing down with all his weight. The pipe goes spinning off onto the asphalt, and the Piper screams a loud, “NO!” rattling a few nearby windows and echoing in Sam’s head. Sam reaches for his knife.

“It doesn’t matter if you kill me,” the Piper spits, fury in his eyes, “There’s others.”

Sam pauses in his movements, weighs the idea that the Piper is lying, “What others?”

The Piper grins, and Sam can see the awful black of his teeth, “Oh, didn’t you know,” he says in singsong, “the demons have gone, thanks to you. Rather big power to fill there.”

And Sam’s stomach swirls. He remembers some comic book in the back of the Impala one dry summer, Dean flinging it back to Sam after flipping through it as they drove through Nevada. A mob boss, taken down by superheroes, the explosion of crime the superheroes had to deal with because of it.

Sam trades out his knee with his hand, uses his other knee to hit where the Piper’s solar plexus should be, and stretches out his leg to pull the pipe in close.

Coughing and wheezing, the Piper babbles, “There’s nothing you can do about it, there’s too many of us! So many monsters, all hiding and biding their time until the demons left, waiting to snatch back their places in the world. No angels around either! There will be blood spilled, a bath—”

Blood does spill, from Sam cutting into his palm and letting it drip onto the pipe. Somewhere, in the distance, he remembers learning that you have the most nerves in your hands. Pain is a part of any ritual.

“Don’t you remember—you’ve been a hunter for years,” the Piper snarls, “Fighting lake monsters and Wendigos every other week, until the demons came around, didn’t you wonder where they all went?”

“Other hunters took care of them,” Sam murmurs, picking up the pipe and pressing bloody fingerprints to it. A personal kill, “We took care of some.”

The Piper struggles beneath him, “It’ll be a bloodbath—I can give you information—I can tell—”

Sam adjusts his weight, gets it behind his movement, and looks down into venomous eyes.

He grins, “We’ll deal with it, without you.”

The Piper doesn’t scream when the pipe, sturdy and sharp, plunges into where a heart would be. Instead, his face goes blank, and Sam feels power rip through the street, and for a moment it feels enough like electricity that for a moment, he wonders if an angel touched down.

But moments later, the pressure releases its hold, and beneath Sam, the Piper crumbles, skin turning to dust.

Rats and bugs explode underneath him, and Sam scrambles away, shaking himself violently. A grasshopper gets flung out of his hair, and a centipede won’t detach from Sam’s hand for a stressful moment.

They scatter, going every which way. Sam thinks he spots a snake heading toward the trees, and a gopher start digging into someone’s lawn, but he’s busy scraping nails along his arms and scalp, shuddering. For a moment, all he can think about is that time with the curse and the houses, and bugs inside of his ears.

He really just wants to collapse right there, asphalt be damned, but there’s a sob behind him, and he’s reminded of just why he’s there.

Kids huddle together, staring in shock at Sam, at the houses they’re in front of.

“Hey, hey there,” Sam says, voice rough, curling in his shoulders and trying to duck down as best he can, “You guys okay?”

More kids start crying, and Sam can feel the post-adrenaline exhaustion start to hit.

Something comes running and hits his leg. Delilah, he registers. Who is crying.

“Hey, hey sweetheart, you’re okay, we got rid of the bad guy,” Sam says, ducking down. To his surprise, Delilah tackles his neck. He’s got blood everywhere, he notices. His hand is still bleeding.

“Delilah!” a kid calls, skidding close to Sam and stopping in shock.

“Josh, right?” Sam asks, gently. Josh nods, looks like maybe he’d be willing to fight Sam for his baby sister.

Sam uses his arms to gently tug Delilah back, trying to keep her from getting his blood on her, “It’s okay sweetheart, it’s safe. Why don’t you go check on your brother?”

Tear-filled eyes look at him, and then at Josh, who’s hesitantly reaching out a hand. Delilah detaches and goes to hold it. Other kids are coming closer now, looking for someone to take care of them.

“Josie!” A voice calls fearfully from a porch a few houses down, Sam vaguely registers that other doors on the street are opening, and kids are crying and yelling, and parents are too. His vision is spotty, and it’s really loud.

Dean’s voice bleeds through, “Sammy!”

From his spot on the ground—when did he sit down?—Sam calls back, “Dean!”

Dean, busted nose and blood on his face, comes running as best he can and ends up on the ground next to Sam, dropping the flute thing on the ground to grab at Sam’s face.

“Though I told you to stop picking fights,” Dean says, voice a little more shaky than Sam would have expected, considering the situation.

Sam snorts, puts a hand on Dean’s leg, “Like you’d ever turn down a fight.”

Dean grins a stressed grin and scans the surroundings. He tilts his head, eyes wide. Need to split, quick.

Sam spots his gun, manages to pull himself over to it, and then he and Dean help each other up, straining the whole way. Dean goes to stumble over to the sidewalk, but Sam mutters a, “Wait,” and they backtrack to pick up the two flutes.

“Josh! Delilah!”

Ms. Trevino is clad in pajamas, her hair frizzy and in all different directions. She wades through the crowd toward them, and Delilah and Josh run to her.

Both Sam and Dean freeze. With their arms around each other like they are, pressing their sides together, it’s hard to share an alarmed look, but they manage. Sam stuffs the flutes in the back of his pants, beside his gun, and goes to follow Dean’s tug toward the Impala.

“Agents?” Ms. Trevino calls from just a couple yards away. Dean’s fingers tighten from where they’re practically woven into Sam’s shirt, and Sam tries to recenter himself. Dad’s rules. Don’t get spotted. If you do get spotted, don’t be memorable. If someone can identify you, you’re in trouble. Get out, quick.

“Ma’am,” Dean acknowledges, swaying on his feet, his voice as steady as his gun arm.

For a moment, Ms. Trevino stares at them, taking in Dean’s busted nose—still bleeding—and the general disarray Sam hasn’t really had time to address with his own self—still bleeding too, he’s pretty sure, although he’s not sure he has the brain power to process it if he is.

He can see the moment fear enters her eyes, arms that are hugging her children tightening, and her eyes widening.

Sam holds onto Dean, gets ready to drag him along if they have to make a break for it.

“Mom,” Delilah sobs, her tiny face now covered in tears and snot, “mom, they, they stopped him.”

That stalls any freak-outs Ms. Trevino was planning, and she blinks at them. Dean holds out a hand, getting ready to piece together some story that’ll buy them enough time to slink off and get out.

Sam doesn’t have much choice in his reaction, because his head decides that right now is a great time to throb and send the streetlights strobing in his vision. He thinks he groans, but he’s not sure. He knows he goes down to his knees, because Dean can’t help but follow, cursing as they take to the pavement.

“Sam? Sam!”

His voice fades, and so does everything else except the strobing lights, which don’t even bother to go away when his eyelids fall shut.

Fear. Scared. Melody, calling. Years change, more children. Easiest prey. Terror, don’t want to go—momdadscared, song is saying come along. Song, music. Calling calling. Blood, ruin. Children, following. Home, where is it? Want togohome.

Music plays.

It’s loud.

So,

so,

loud.

He comes to lying down, his head throbbing so much that he doesn’t notice his own consciousness for a space of time.

“Sam?” Dean’s voice whispers, close to his ear.

That drags him out of the indeterminate blankness, and he moans as he tries to squint his eyes open, the light sending them shut again immediately.

“Sam, c’mon, need you to listen.”

He flaps a hand in the general direction of Dean’s voice, tries to re-open his eyes.

“Kay, look. We’ve got a situation. Play it like Akron.”

Sam tries to mumble a ‘I hate Akron,’ but it comes out more like “Mphron.”

Another voice enters the equation, “Is he awake?” Childish, curious. It takes him a second to place it. Delilah.

“Delilah,” Ms. Trevino says suddenly from Sam’s left, “Kitchen please, people are hurt.”

The light finally becomes manageable and Sam blinks away the pain-tears to focus in on Dean, who’s next to him, one hand braced somewhere by Sam’s right ear.

“Okay there Sam?” Dean asks, something weird about his voice that Sam can’t figure out.

“Unh,” he offers, trying to play Akron—which is possibly the easiest play for the one who’s down. Dean’s got a lot of work being the second part of the act—to the best of his limited ability.

“Well, at least you’re conscious,” Dean mutters under his breath, just quiet enough for Sam to pick up on.

“Are you sure I can’t take you to the hospital?” Ms. Trevino sounds worried, stressed, maybe like she’s got nails near her teeth or a strand of hair wound around her fingers, “You should be at the hospital.”

Something about that sends synapses flashing in Sam’s brain, and he tries to rear up, stopped by Dean’s arm that’s suddenly across his chest.

“Whoa there cowboy,” Dean says, gently pressing him back down with a flash of worry in his eyes that’s gone as soon as it appears.

“No—h’spital. ‘S corrupt. Bad—” Sam’s breaking away from Akron, but he’s got to tell Dean, he never got the chance—

Dean keeps a hand pinned to his chest to keep him flat, taps five times against Sam’s sternum—a warning—let me take the lead.

“I know, Agent, I got it taken care of. No hospital.”

He needs to let Dean know, he has to, flings his own hand up to tap against the one Dean’s now got tracking his heartbeat, pushes down so one of Dean’s fingers presses painfully against his clavicle—important, asap.

“Mayor, corrupt. Not—not dead guy only—” he manages, his head still sending strange pulses of pain that he can feel through his whole body.

Dean sucks in a breath, faked, probably for Ms. Trevino’s benefit “You sure Agent?”

Sam nods, and regrets it. Everything hurts.

“Okay, we’ll be working off that information from here on in the investigation,” Dean says, removing the hand on Sam’s chest, taking his wrist instead to keep track of his pulse, “Ms. Trevino, you’ve been an incredible help. If our department was out in the open, we’d be naming you as a hero. As it stands, my partner is injured and it seems like this conspiracy extends even further than we anticipated. I’ll need to update headquarters. Do you happen to know who the mayor is?”

Ms. Trevino inhales loudly, “I—I work for the finance office. We—we’ve been working on—we thought there was something wrong in the budget—”

Dean’s hand on his wrist tightens, almost reflexively.

“That’s excellent, Miss, it’s always an honor to meet hardworking city employees who won’t stand for corruption within their organization.”

Sam can’t see her, so he pictures Ms. Trevino puffing up a bit, soothed by Dean’s professional attitude and calm demeanor in the same way as dozens of citizens have been before her. It’s an easy act, for both of them. People rarely notice the questions hidden in the tone of it if they’re careful about how they phrase things.

“Well,” she continues shakily, “Mayor Newberry is—um, she’s the mayor. She, um, she’s been in for a few years now. People liked her, but she’s—her popularity’s been decreasing and she’s been using money weirdly?” she says it like a question, “We, um, the financial department called her out on it. We’ve been trying to solve it internally, but I always knew something bad would happen, my astrologist said so, I should have listened.”

His eyes have closed again, but even then, Sam can tell Dean’s about one sentence away from an eyeroll.

“Thank you for your statement, Ms. Trevino. I’m sure the local departments will also be interested in hearing it.”

“Oh,” Ms. Trevino says, sounding devastated, “Can’t you take care of talking to the police?”

“It’s like I explained,” Dean says, hiding his exasperation in a way that Sam can read like he’s thrown it up on a billboard—a flashing one, “Our department of investigative services is hidden from the public eye. You are now one of very few civilians to be entrusted with the knowledge of our existence. Working with the local police departments is a risk we often take, but we can’t play our hand without outing ourselves to more people. I imagine that you, as an aware American citizen, can understand the importance of having departments able to investigate the more . . . unusual cases without interference.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course,” Ms. Trevino stutters out, and Sam almost feels bad for her, “Of course, I will do—it’s my duty, I’ll make sure to—”

Dean cuts her off, “Thank you very much. Once my partner is able to move, we’ll be on our way, and you won’t have to worry about abductors anymore, and your neighborhood will be safe again.”

Ms. Trevino agrees, sounding very overwhelmed, and there’s movement that means she’s leaving the immediate area, and Sam can hear her murmuring to her children—“It’s okay, dear god, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Sammy?” Dean says, in the quietest voice he possesses, air whistling between his teeth as he barely moves his mouth to speak, “What’s the game plan? Good to go?”

Sam takes a quick inventory of everything and opens his eyes to meet Dean’s, whispering “Hurt. Okay to walk. Need to take care of mayor—”

“Let the system do that,” Dean offers, his eyes tracking people at the edge of his vision that Sam can’t focus on.

Sam remembers what happened the last time he moved his neck and decides against shaking his head, “She was involved . . .” for a second, he loses his train of thought, and all he can think about is music, loud, calling, before he snaps back into the moment, “Witch. Guy we burned. Don’t know—don’t know if she’s—”

A couple of curses are muttered under Dean’s breath, and for the first time, Sam realizes that the flashing lights aren’t just his head screwing with him—there’s bright red and blue filtering through the curtains alongside weak sunlight.

“How long?” He asks, bracing his arms to take his weight as he starts the journey to a sitting position.

“Hour, maybe? I think?” Dean says, bracing one hand under Sam to help him up, “Police came by, lied, told them we were staying with the Trevinos and heard the commotion outside and we fought off a kidnapper. Tried to get us to go in an ambulance, told ‘em we were fine, and you have narcolepsy that shows up after stressful events. They’re supposed to come back for our statements once they get all the kids figured out.”

Sam goes to argue for staying so that they don’t cause grief with the police for the Trevinos and his brain trips over Dean’s lies.

“Narcolepsy?” He questions, not quite outraged, but more stumped at Dean’s bizarre life choices, “You went with narcolepsy?”

“Well, what else was I supposed to do?” Dean asks, helping Sam swing his legs to the floor, “Not much wards off EMTs, I’ll bet they’ll send them in too, once they’re finished treating all those kids. We’re better off taking a quick exit.”

Sam feels the pit in his stomach widen, and he nods, wincing at the movement. He gets his feet underneath him and stands, only swaying a bit. How long’s it been since he slept actual sleep?

“Okay,” Sam says, blinking his eyes blearily, “what’s the plan?”

Dean’s eyes flicker around and land back on him, “Sneak to the car. Plan A, we get out, we find the mayor’s house, do what we have to. Plan B, cops catch us leaving in the car, we lie our balls off and jet out. Pretend we’re getting you to a hospital. Then the mayor’s house.”

Sam voices his agreement with the puff of air that came out of his lungs instead of a word. Everything hurts.

Dean’s arm goes under his shoulder, and up they go. The world spins for a minute, and there’s a buzzing in his brain that threatens to send him back down, but they have to get moving, so Sam swallows down his reluctance and tries to center himself without Dean acting as a crutch.

“Ms. Trevino,” Dean says, voice straining, but professional all the same, “Thank you for your assistance. Our bureau will be in contact with you and involved in the investigation of the mayor. Stay safe.”

She’s huddled with her kids at the kitchen table, worry pulsing through all three of them. She stands up, hugs her arms to herself awkwardly.

“What—what should I tell the police? They, they wanted your statements…”

Dean nods, “Go ahead and tell them that Sam here winded up hitting his head when he passed out again and I’m taking him to the hospital in Omaha because we know people there. They can catch up with us there.”

Ms. Trevino fidgets, and her eyes dart to her kids, then back to them, “I—I can’t lie to the police—”

“Don’t worry,” Sam interrupts, “we really are headed to Omaha’s hospital. We have to regroup at headquarters, and the hospital there is closest. They’ll find us there for statements.” It’s awful, lying like this to her, but the police have already seen them. Not much else they could do. Hopefully, the police will back off her at some point. They do have a crisis on their hands, after all. And, he’s pretty sure there’s more than one hospital in Omaha, that should work in their favor.

“Oh—okay,” Ms. Trevino stutters out, “I’ll, I’ll tell them.”

“Thank you,” Sam says, trying to smile.

He and Dean take a second to breath, and then they start moving toward the door. Dean’s limping, pretty bad. Sam isn’t sure he’s doing much better.

Just before Dean turns the doorknob, Sam feels a tugging at the hand that’s not wrapped around his ribs. He turns, and Delilah’s there, eyes wide and watery. Crouching down is painfully the wrong decision, but he does it anyway.

“You’re alright?” Sam asks, and he can feel Dean’s tension behind him, knows they need to get out of here, but he can’t—she deserves—she’s so young—

She nods, and her jaw wobbles worryingly, “You saved us,” she says, almost whispering.

Sam smiles, feels a scab on his lip break again and tries to ignore it, “We tried to,” Sam says, honestly—at least that much is true.

Delilah nods seriously at him, and steps forward. She reaches her hands around his neck, and Sam raises an arm to gently pat her back. Ms. Trevino and Josh are watching from the table, exhausted. Sam closes his eyes for a minute, breathes, and remembers that this is what it’s about. Saving people. Who knows what’ll happen to Delilah, or Josh, or any of those kids, but at least they have the chance. The choice.

One last pat, and Sam gently leans back. Delilah does the same and nods seriously at him, like they’re sharing a great big secret that’s hidden under their skins. Sam nods back, feels the pain shoot down his spine again, and stands, his hand going back to cross over his torso again. Everything hurts so much that it’s hard to pinpoint the hurt areas.

Dean opens the screen door, heads out. Sam spares one more smile for the Trevinos and follows him.

There’s no chance for Dean to start asking questions once they head outside, but Sam can feel them buzzing around them. Sam has questions too, but they’ll have to wait. They’ve got to get back to the car, which will involve dodging the police, scamming the police, or running from the police (or, with their luck, a mix of all three). They creep around the Trevino’s neighbor’s house, skirting window wells and sidewalk chalk alike as they cross the patio. The lights are on inside, and there’s yelling from inside that consists mostly of, “You’re the police, you should be protecting kids!” They share a look, and hop the fence. Dean biffs the landing, cursing quietly as he takes to the ground, and Sam has to reach out and grab the fence to steady himself. His hand lights up with pain, and he closes his eyes to ground himself. Dean grumbles next to him.

He reminds himself to breathe, that it’s fine, that they’re going to get out—out—that he’s not—this is normal, this is everyday—

Dean grasps the hand he holds out, pulls himself to his feet, and onward they go, peering around the sides of houses, avoiding stepping on things, looking out for dogs.

Sam slides next to the siding of another house and checks around the corner. In the dim, red light the sun’s trying to give off as it struggles to rise, he can see their car, parked sideways in the street.

“Got it,” he hisses to Dean, who’s leaning his weight against the house as well, “Cop cars are all over it though.”

And they really are. The Impala must’ve been right in the way for the entire police force of the town, because there’s three cop cars parked haphazardly behind it, cutting off the street.

Dean thumps his head quietly against the house and then moves right behind Sam and leans on him, looking over his shoulder. This close, and this aware, Sam can feel how Dean is shaking, just enough to set off warning bells in his brain. Nothing they can do though, this is their situation. They’ll deal with their injuries and wobbliness once they finish this case and get out.

Right next to his ear, close enough that Sam can feel his breath, Dean says, “Okay. Play it cool. If we get in and out quick enough we might make it.”

Sam nods, knows Dean can feel the way he winces at the moment by the way the hand on his shoulder tightens. They both breath in at the same time, and then start moving.

Sam tells himself to focus. Tells himself to be in the moment. He is. It’s all he can think about. It’s all he has time to think about. And there it is, that feeling that acts as a drug. A hunt, the adrenaline, Dean by his side. It’s addicting, this camaraderie. The reminder that there are things bigger than them.

Dean’s trying to play off his limp. Sam removes the hand from around his ribs. They walk out from behind the house—no fence at the front of the house, a box missing one wall.

Confidently, they head toward the car, walking with a purpose. Acting shady is the reason so many people get caught. Guilt is a hell of a marker.

They make it to the Impala. There’s still shouting in the distance, and police cars on the opposite end of the street are flashing their lights and the occasional siren. People are out on their lawns, their porches, hugging kids close. Sam can feel eyes on them as they open the car doors. They’re in the middle of everything. Surrounded. Kids are crying. A man in pajamas runs past them, screaming out, “Lydia!”

Sam collapses on the seat, and feels Dean do the same on his side. Something pokes him in the back, and he wiggles the flutes and his gun out of his pants and drops them lazily on the floor after double-checking the safety. Dean breathes in, and goes to close the door. The split second that they take to reorient themselves is their mistake.

“Mr. Bozemen?” A voice calls. Dean freezes in his movement to reach for the door handle. Sam tilts his body toward him, blinks in understanding when Dean mouths ‘B.’ He inches his foot forward and scrapes it along the floor of the car, tucking the gun and the wooden flutes under the seat.

“Yeah-ha?” Dean drawls, turning toward the police officer who’s got one hand near her waist and the other holding a flashlight in their direction, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

Sam wants to hit Dean’s shoulder, tell him off for joking right now, but the officer relaxes the hand near her hip and walks closer.

“I was just about to send our backup officers to grab you, we need to get your statements.”

Dean nods, like that was exactly the plan all along, “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking, I guess you guys would’ve been looking for us at the Trevinos, huh? Sam here,” he jabs his thumb in Sam’s direction, “Just had a narcoleptic episode. We wanted to get his meds, try and stave off any more.”

“Yeah,” the lady says, nodding. She looks at Sam, “Saw ya’ when we came to check up on the Trevinos.”

Sam tries to nod, express appreciation for the clarification, things tilt a bit sideways for a minute, and when he tunes back in, Dean’s jabbering.

“—just a micro-sleep, does it sometimes after an episode. Don’t worry, he’s good. Just need to get him his meds and we’ll be fine.”

Sam’s distantly impressed that Dean remembered ‘micro-sleep’. They’d done a case in New Mexico the summer before Sam left to college, read medical journals and textbooks to learn about narcolepsy. Turned out to be useless, just a witch with anger issues, but they’d both had the terms floating around in their heads for a couple weeks. Things like this, he forgets. Their history. All the in-jokes, the shared knowledge.

(He forgets, until he’s gone.)

Sam blinks, shakes his head a bit and jolts at the pain. He keeps forgetting. Maybe something is wrong.

“We’ll need you to come down to the station,” the officer says as Sam pulls himself into a more alert sitting position.”

“You got it,” Dean says, “Any way I could take the car with me? We’re in the way here a bit.”

She shakes her head, “Why don’t you move it to the side of the street and we’ll send you down in a couple of our cars?”

Sam’s fingers tighten around his knee. That’s not good news—they’re suspects.

Dean grins at her and taps the wheel, “Sounds great!” Sam can practically hear his teeth grating against each other.

While the officer is busy with her radio, Dean turns to Sam. He flicks his eyes back at the officer, and then holds up a finger. Sam sighs, but tracks it, gives a discrete thumbs up. Dean settles back into his seat after a moment, eyes still worried. They need a chance to talk, but it doesn’t look like they’ll have one anytime soon.

“Alright. A couple of officers are going to escort you to the station,” says the officer, walking closer to the car, “We’ll get your statements and get started on the paperwork. It looks like the two of you are the only adult witnesses,” the professional look on her face breaks for a moment, and they can see the stress lines on her forehead, “so it’s very important that we get all of the facts.”

Sam and Dean both nod their acquiescence. Two uniformed police officers start walking in their direction. One guy leans on the car.

“Nice ride,” he says, “What year is it?”

“Seventy,” Dean lies easily, relaxing into car talk, “was my dad’s ride, he left it to me.”

“Chevy, huh?” The officer continues, “I’m more a Ford man myself.”

Sam is grateful for that—it’s unlikely the guy will call Dean out on the incorrect year then, and any misinformation they can manage will work in their favor.

Dean shakes his head, tuts his tongue, “Shame.”

They share a laugh, and then Dean’s gesturing toward the curb, and the officers are moving to back a police car out so they can park the Impala.

A moment later, and Dean’s pulling the car next to the sidewalk, hands tense on the wheel. He glances over to Sam and taps his foot thoughtfully against the gas pedal.

Sam shakes his head. There’s no way they’re getting out of a police chase if they take off, and something like that is more likely to kill or injure themselves or other people. Besides, it’s not like they’ll get far with half the police force behind them. They’ve got a better chance (but still not a great one) with the police. They don’t know the area, and there’s too many traffic lights on the way out of town, plus commuters. A trap for escape vehicles if there ever was one.

Dean either agrees with Sam’s thoughts on the subject or just doesn’t want to put the Impala through something like that, (dad’d always warned them, you’re better off getting arrested then getting dead) and he turns the key.

“Ready to rumble?” He asks. A phrase that means they’re still sticking with plan B, albeit a little more complicated version of it.

Sam grimaces, “Yeah, sounds good.”

They both make their way out of the Impala, and Sam slams the door shut. Dean bends back over, leaning on the seat, and rummages through the glove compartment.

A moment, later, that slams too, followed by Dean’s door. The bright orange pill bottle he’d grabbed is tossed Sam’s direction, and he catches it double handed.

“Thanks,” he says, as Dean locks the car. He twists the cap as they start to follow the officer who leads the way. He fakes dumping a couple pills in his hand and swallowing them, taking the paper clips they store in the bottle and tucking them in his pocket alongside the bottle. If they end up in handcuffs, they might have a chance.

Dean’s trying his best to hide his limp, and it’s probably not going as well as he hoped, but neither of the officers remark on it, moving instead to open up the back doors to a police cruiser, gesturing them to opposite sides.

They share a look before ducking down into the car. If they play it cool, they might make it out of this. Running now isn’t really an option.

For a second, Sam pictures it. Slamming the officer’s head into the door, elbowing him in the gut. Dean doing the same on the other side. Trying to run, except neither of them are in good condition, Dean would probably trip, Sam might pass out. They might get shot.

He doesn’t want to die by the hand of a police officer in the middle of the suburbs when the case might not even be solved.

Plus, there are kids around. They don’t need that kind of trauma.

Dean chats about cars with the officer on the short ride over. Sam tries to snort at the right parts. His head fuzzes out again.

Drugs, busted, mom and dad are gonna kill me shouldn’t have sneaked out I never meant to rob that store, no that’s an awful lie, Zach’s gonna rat me out, I wish I had a blunt right now—

He digs his fingernails into his left palm and only realizes when it starts bleeding again. Dean’s talking about serving in the marines now. Something fake about a deployment he never went on. Sam shifts to press his opposite palm against the bleeding cut.

“And Sam here, he saved my life dragging me outta there before the place exploded,” Dean says, nodding his head in Sam’s direction. Sam forces a tight-lipped smile.

“Man,” one of the officers says, signaling to take a left turn, “I didn’t know they let narcoleptics in the military.”

Sam shrugs, “Wasn’t narcoleptic at the time. Took a hit to my head on my last deployment, left me with some brain damage.”

He can see the two officers exchange a look and a shrug. Something in his shoulders relaxes at it. They spend a lot of time relying on people’s ignorance and lack of knowledge.

Dean huffs a laugh, “And now you pass out when you get too excited.”

Sam rolls his eyes, knowing the officer in shotgun is watching them from the corners of his vision.

They pull into the station, and the officers get their doors for them. They walk inside, and it’s utter chaos. There’s people running around everywhere, kids crying, parents yelling, and only a couple officers are around to handle it all.

“Gonna be a rough week,” one of the officers escorting them jokes wryly.

The other officer snorts, “No kidding. We’d better be getting paid overtime for this.”

They lead them to a room further back, point them to a couple of uncomfortable seats, and then move to chat with a harried-looking lady who’s typing away at her computer and talking to about five different people at once.

Dean leans over, turning his head so he can whisper, “You’re not concussed, right?”

Sam shakes his head, darting his eyes back and forth. His head and neck throb.

There’s a sigh of something that could be relief, but definitely isn’t, and then Dean mumbles, “We need to get out of here. Should’ve bailed with the Impala.”

“And died in a car chase? No thanks,” Sam breathes out, “Plan?”

The two officers are turning back to them, so Dean doesn’t have a chance to answer, pushing himself back out of Sam’s bubble.

Car-officer nods his head at the hallway, “An officer will be by to take your statements, we’ve got to get back to the crime scene.”

Dean gives him a thumbs up, “Sounds good. We can chill out as long as you guys need us to, we’re on vacation.”

Both officers give professional head nods and walk away. Sam shares a look with Dean, and they both take a moment to weigh their chances of sneaking out.

Before Sam can even glance toward the front doors, a lady in heels and a pantsuit is striding toward them with purpose.

“Mr. Bozeman and Mr. Butler?” She questions, a tablet running information held to her side.

Dean smiles at her, “That’d be us.”

“Excellent, my name is Detective Salazar, I’ll be taking your statements.”

Sam squints his eyes at the use of ‘Detective’ and moves them mentally further along the suspect track in his mind.

“Great,” Sam says, shifting as if to move to his feet.

“Give me just a second to get some paperwork for you, and then we can start to get you out of here,” she says, holding up a finger as she moves toward the desk with the furiously typing lady.

Dean smiles and bobs his head, his hands tightened into fists and tension in his shoulders.

Sam darts his eyes over to Dean, and feels something squirm in his stomach at the helplessness that’s hidden in Dean’s demeanor.

They’re stuck. Sooner or later, their identities will be discovered, and they don’t exactly have a prison-break plan stuck in their back pockets this time. They need to get out of there, but if they can manage to do it without attracting suspicion, they might actually have the time to get to the mayor’s house and out of town before the entire police force is deployed to find them.

This was just supposed to be a salt-n-burn. They’d gone to a derby earlier.

And now they’re stuck in a police station, Dean with a bad leg and who knows what else, and Sam feeling like he’s about to topple over any second.

Sounds like every other Tuesday.

An officer rushing from a back room up to the front nearly trips over Dean’s outstretched legs, and turns and gives him an apologetic wave. Dean nods, twisting to glance at the back of the police station for an exit. The officer keeps moving, and then freezes, turning back to stare in their direction. Sam carefully doesn’t make eye contact, pulling out a phone that’s ticking its way to 0% battery.

The officer turns away, and starts moving away, shoulders nearly around his ears.

“Dean,” Sam hisses, as soon as the guy’s out of earshot, wanting to jerk his head in the direction of the cop who’s busy doing the ‘I’m not running, just walking extremely quickly’ walk, but knowing it’ll just send pain shooting up and down his spine.

Dean leans over, brows furrowed, “What?”

“Guy IDed us,” he whispers.

There’s no double check of Sam’s suspicion, because there’s no time. The interrogating cop is back, heels clicking.

“Okay, if you could follow me Mr. Butler, we’ll get your statement and send you on your way.”

Sam tries not to telegraph his stress, and gives the cop a smile without teeth. He stands up, and the cop turns away, so he turns to look at Dean, to question if this is the time they make a break for it.

Dean shakes his head and mouths ‘Narcolepsy.’

The idea sinks in, and Sam turns back around, takes a step toward the cop, and then, already regretting the damage he’s going to do to his already sore body, lets his legs go out from under him.

He catches himself on his hands, ignoring the sounds that burst out around him, and then slumps forward.

A hand on his forehead stops him from slamming it against the floor.

Someone’s yelling. Sam focuses on keeping his breathing steady.

Dean, who’s keeping one hand between Sam’s head and the floor and one between his shoulder blades yells back, “Everyone, calm down. He has narcolepsy.”

Sam’s back is screaming at him for the position he’s in, and he kinda wants to throw up. It’s not the first time they’ve faked something like this, and it won’t be the last, but it never fails to make him feel guilty. Last time it was a seizure, so at least he’s not having to thrash around.

The cop is somewhere above his head, “Is he alright?”

“He will be. Do you have a quiet room? He’s gonna be confused when he wakes up, it’ll be good if he doesn’t have to deal with anyone he’s not familiar with.”

“Uh, yeah, yes. You can—the chief’s office is right here, he’s—I’m sure you can use it for a moment,” she says.

“Okay, okay. Help me get him up?” Dean asks.

“Of course,” she’s back to professional, calm.

Dean gets on one side of him, and the cop ducks under his arm on the other side. Sam does his best not to tense up, letting his feet drag behind him.

When he peeks from behind his lashes, the cop is reaching out with her free hand to open a door. He pretends to start waking up.

“Hey Sam,” Dean says, and there’s a current of cheer underneath his faked worry, “Welcome back.”

“Out?” Sam questions, as he tries to find his footing, and Dean takes the lead in lowering him into a chair.

“Yup, in a police station, ain’t that a first? Hey,” Dean turns away from him, toward the cop, “would you mind getting some water? It helps him wake up.”

“Sure,” she offers, “I’ll be right back.”

“Thanks,” Dean says, all smiles. As soon as the fogged door shuts behind her, Sam jumps to his feet, and Dean’s already opening the window that’s helpfully large. Sam goes to the door and turns the deadbolt.

Dean pops the screen out with his boot and follows it through, crouching behind the bushes, and waving Sam through.

They slink around the police station as best they can, trying to avoid cameras, but no doubt being caught on some anyway.

The back of the police station is a parking lot with most of the police cars missing, and then a road that probably hasn’t seen repairs since it was laid down. They manage to cut across the street and through a yard that’s mostly weeds before the sirens and yelling start.

Dean leads the way, limp-running through yards and behind trees. There’s vague, indiscernible shouting behind them.

Booking it across another street lands them next to a canal, and Dean wastes no time in sliding down into it. Sam winces as he follows, and wishes there was another way. There’s rocks everywhere, nearly sending Dean sprawling after every other step he takes. Thankfully, it’s dry as bones down here, or they really might have brained themselves on rocks.

They follow the canal in the general direction of the Impala until they hit a tunnel too small to squeeze through and pull themselves out, sun sending spikes of pain through Sam’s eyes.

Dean’s sense of direction is as impeccable as always, and soon enough they’re two streets over from where they need to be. They crouch behind a car as a cruiser rockets past, lights blazing. This neighborhood’s probably become more exciting than it’s ever been.

“Change of plans,” Dean says, putting his weight on his good leg while another car goes past, “leave the mayor, come back later.”

“Dean,” Sam says, voice cracking over the pain in his throat, “we don’t know what kind of damage she’ll do—”

“I know,” Dean grits out, turning to scowl at Sam, “Risk we’ll have to take. We’ll send up the signal that there’s a problem later, but right now a lady we don’t even know is a witch isn’t the priority.”

Sam knows he’s right, but it doesn’t make this any better. He nods, frowning, and they move to cross the street once it’s clear.

The street’s cleared since they were there last, just two cop cars loitering around, with the officers themselves talking back and forth on radios. There’s an BOLO for them, no doubt.

Once again, they find themselves slinking through backyards. Dean’s limp is worse now, left leg leaving drag marks when they tread through someone’s garden. Sam’s vision keeps going fuzzy. Time stretches like taffy, and Sam’s heart hammers away in his chest.

Dean ushers him around the side of a house, and the Impala is there, within reach. If Sam were a stronger person, if he could overcome his own feelings, he’d have convinced Dean to leave it. As is, the thought of abandoning the car plucks at something painful in his stomach. It’s—they—it’s all they’ve ever really had.

The times they’ve had to use other cars haven’t been good ones. The Impala is their history, their childhood, their family (as much as Sam would hate to admit it).

So, they might as well go out like this, if they do.

The path is clear, if they can avoid the cops standing at the end of the street, likely on high alert.

They share a look, Dean raises his eyebrows, and Sam nods, grinding his teeth together when a nerve pinches.

The both straighten up and walk out, confident.

Dean slides the key into the lock, and it clicks open. They both slide in, and Dean starts up the car. Sam watches the cops in the side mirror.

The Impala rumbles beneath them, and Dean rolls them down the street, casual.

One stop sign, then another. They drive past the cemetary, then past the motel they never checked out of. Sam’s still got a key card in his wallet for the room.

Dean follows a road for a long while, and the world expands. There’s no flashing lights in the rearview.

Something breaks inside of Sam and he chokes on his own spit as he starts to laugh. After a couple of seconds, Dean joins in.

They’re hurtling down back roads away from a city, aching down to their bones, and calling a hunt successful, even though it really wasn’t.

“Narcolepsy,” Sam gasps out, pressing his forehead against the dash to brace himself as the pain from moving so much hits him.

Dean laughs, one hand leaving the steering wheel to press against his shoulder, “Narcolepsy.”

“Narcolepsy,” Sam says, disbelieving.

“Narcolepsy,” Dean agrees.

Sam shudders, “Narcolepsy.”

“Narcolepsy,” Dean repeats, shaking his head.

“Narcolepsy.”

“Narcolepsy.”

It doesn’t feel like a word anymore. There are tears in Sam’s eyes, and when he finally slows down to breath and look over at Dean, there are tears in his too.

He’s not sure if it’s from laughing or the pain or the stress that’s pouring off of them in bucket-loads.

The sun is in exactly the right angle to hit Sam’s eyeline when he manages to stretch himself back up, so he pulls down the visor. Dean does the same.

A couple more chuckles bounce between them before Dean shakes his head and gestures toward Sam’s seat. Sam manages to reach underneath and pull out the box of tapes, and his hand brushes wood.

“Top one-hundred greatest hits,” Dean says, opening and closing his fingers in a ‘gimme’ motion.

Sam rolls his eyes, ignores the flute, and pulls out the cassette they found in a specialty shop in a city somewhere near Sioux Falls that replaced a couple that’d worn through their tape.

Dean jams it in the deck and the Rolling Stones come rocking out, already halfway through the song.

“Did you hit your head?” Dean asks over the music.

Sam shakes said head, “No. I’m not sure why…”

“You passed out?” Dean finishes.

“Yeah, it was—” he thinks about it, the way memories that weren’t his buzzed through him, sent him spiraling, “—weird. I think killing the Piper had some repercussions.”

“How’d you do that, anyway?”

Sam shrugs, regrets the movement, and finally reaches into the glove compartment to pull out their painkillers. Dumping a few into Dean’s outstretched hand and then into his own, he admits, “Stabbed him through with his flute.” They both down the pills dry.

Dean makes a face, “The one you had stuffed in your pants?”

Sam sighs, “That one, yeah.” It’s still underneath him, probably still covered in his blood. Like his shirt, under the flannel that Dean must’ve buttoned up when he was unconscious. Like Dean’s shirt too, from the broken nose that Dean also must’ve taken care of, “Bled on it, stabbed him in the heart. He...exploded.”

“Exploded?” Dean says, in that ‘excuse me’ tone of voice he reserves for the utterly ridiculous.

Sam nods, gets distracted by something that runs across the road before he can get a good look at it.

“You remember those bugs?” he asks, tucking his hands into his armpits because he just realized how they’re shaking, “Back in—with the, uh, Native American curse?” Man, his throat hurts.

Dean draws his head back, glances at Sam, “Yeah?”

“It was kinda like that. He exploded into bugs.”

It sounds ridiculous out loud, but so does ‘I started the apocalypse and have died a few times,’ so he doesn’t exactly care.

Dean follows a train of thought that’s written out on his eyebrows and frowns.

“Gross.”

“Yeah,” Sam agrees, “it was nasty.”

They stop once they’re an hour out, just alongside the road, and wrap each other up in bandages. Dean stops once he reaches Sam’s hands, taken aback.

“Your cuts weren’t this bad earlier,” he says, holding a roll of bandages in one hand and anti-bacterial wipes in the other.

Sam lifts a shoulder tiredly, “Had to bleed on the flute. Think I re-opened a couple too.” He’s zoned, floating a bit. The painkillers have helped, and Dean keeps looking over at him like he might disappear, so he’s feeling okay, but nothing about this feels right.

“You need some sleep,” Dean says as he scrubs at scabs that are threatening to come right off and restart the bleeding.

“You do too,” Sam says, trying to muster up the strength to sound argumentative, but pretty sure he just sounds like he’s two seconds away from passing out again.

“We still have those caffeine pills somewhere?” Dean asks.

“Think they’re in the back,” Sam says, wincing as Dean helps him work his flannel off. Dean holds up an ace bandage like it’s a weapon and nods at his bloody shirt. Sam lifts it up without complaint—he did just make Dean do the same thing. But where Dean’s chest was littered with dark, purple bruises, Sam’s is an exercise in red dots and bumps.

“What happened to you?” Dean asks, running a hand over them, making Sam’s belly suck in as he inadvertently runs fingers over a ticklish spot.

Sam shrugs helplessly, “Think I hit the asphalt?” He offers, knowing that’s not the right answer.

“Kind of…” Dean trails off, then leaves Sam sitting on the hood of the car to grab his phone.

“Damn service,” Dean says, walking back, holding his phone up like maybe he’ll catch an extra bar up there.

“What?” Sam asks, wondering where he lost track of the conversation.

“Just was gonna look up what hives look like ‘cause that’s sort of what you got.”

Sam glances back down at his chest. Dean puts a hand on his shoulder blade and he flinches away.

“On your back too.”

There’s worry in Dean’s tone and manner, and Sam can follow his train of thought.

“Don’t think a curse would just give me hives,” he offers, uncrossing his arms and letting them pin his shirt under his armpits.

“Yeah, nah,” Dean replies, “Just...Last time you had them you were like three.”

Sam files that away, but remembers something Dean doesn’t know, “No, last time I had them I was...in college.” He regrets mentioning it as soon as it’s out of his mouth but he’s too exhausted to do anything about it.

Dean picks up the antibacterial wipes and gets to work on Sam’s front, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, twitching away from the cold, “Went on a hike, came back all red and itchy. My friends thought I touched poison ivy, but I knew better.”

They share a grin that’s full of memories.

“So, mysterious hives with no real reason?”

Sam shrugs, “I guess.”

Dean moves to his back, “Well, we’ll keep an eye on them.”

They finish up with their patch-up job and Dean searches the backseat for the caffeine pills they chucked back there sometime last year. He downs a couple and offers Sam the only blanket they keep in the front of the Impala—a useless, ratty thing that’s been in there for years. He uses it to cushion his neck as he slants himself into position to fall asleep.

He’s not sure if he sleeps or not, because it seems like he opens his eyes a lot and finds himself in enough pain to make him whimper uselessly and try to shift into a more comfortable position. Every time his eyes are open, there’s another song playing and they’re still going too fast. It feels like he keeps remembering weird things. Dean in the front, reading a comic book aloud to Sam, who hung off the seat in the back and looked at the pictures with Dean until dad told him to sit down. Dad, drinking coffee and letting Sam have a sip because he wouldn’t stop pestering him. A man, hanging an angel on the rearview mirror. The first time he rode shotgun, and not even caring that it was the first time, because Dean was hurt.

Dean hits one too many rumble strips and Sam finds himself awake, looking up at Dean from where he’s contorted to lay down in the no-man’s land of seat between them, his neck and head pressed up against the side of Dean’s leg. He pulls himself upright, shaking off something and regretting every movement. Blindly, he rummages through the glove compartment and downs more pain-killers. Through his haze, he realizes Dean’s head is nodding. Those caffeine pills, he remembers, do a good enough job for a little while, but after that, the crash hits hard.

“Pull over,” he says, coughing as his throat tries to give out on him. When he glances at the side mirror, he can see the bruising that’s settled around his neck.

Dean blinks and follows directions. Sam opens his door, walks around to the front of the car and waits for a rusty truck to hurtle by before opening the driver’s side. Dean shakes his head at him, but scoots over.

“Where’d you put the pills?” Sam asks, reaching into the back and straining every sore muscle in his back to pull a lukewarm water bottle off the seat.

Dean doesn’t bother to speak, just reaches into his pocket and hands over the pills. It feels suspiciously lighter than the last time Sam handled it, but he can’t really complain because he’d been the one sleeping through Dean struggling to keep them on the road.

Sam takes two, washes them down with the water, and puts the car in gear.

A headache starts pounding at his head an hour in. His phone buzzes. He takes an exit once he realizes they’re headed toward empty. Dean doesn’t even stir when he gets out to fill up, and the light of his screen sends more flashes of pain arcing through him. His heart is beating too fast. He takes another caffeine pill.

His phone, sitting at a nearly useless 7% has about twelve different news notifications in the drop-down bar when he glances at it.

News alerts are on for some very specific things in Sam’s phone. He taps on one, and is taken to a Breaking News page for some Nebraskan newspaper.

Notorious Winchester Brothers Spotted in Beatrice, Wanted for Questioning

Sam feels something inside his chest drop at the sight of it, but he’s not surprised. He glances nervously at the security cameras that have no doubt picked them up.

He clicks on another article.

Not So Dead After All? FBI Investigators Come Under Fire With Spotting of Winchester Brothers

The gas pump clicks and thumps, and he reaches over to put the hose back and says no to a receipt.

He thanks something—not God, that’s for sure—that he’d had a credit card on him. No better way to get caught then wandering into a gas station who-knows-how-far from the place they were last spotted.

He gets back into the car and starts driving again. Dean’s moved so his legs are practically on the gas pedal and his nose is pressed against the seat.

Sam’s hands shake where they grip the wheel, but he heads out, looking for a back road that won’t take them on the freeway. They just need to keep heading away right now, as much as he’d like to start the turn-around to the Bunker Dean had probably been planning. No backtracking.

Dean leans over and rolls down the passenger window, slapping Sam’s shoulder through it as he fills up the car, three more shaky hours and one driver swap away.

“Doesn’t look like there’s any junkies hanging out over there,” he says, pointing to a dilapidated strip-mall with multiple storefronts covered in Buy This Space signs.

Sam grunts, “Sure? Using a bad card here.”

“Dude, if I have to drive anymore we’ll be sleeping in a ditch.”

“Just make a loop, cameras might’ve picked us up here.”

“Bar on the opposite side, we’ll park her there.”

They do so, and if Sam’s brain could connect anything other than stop equals sleep, he might worry about the car. Instead, he reaches in the back and loads up his arms. The less trips he has to make, the better chance his back won’t give out on him.

Inside the abandoned store, they lay down sleeping bags behind the counter and drop their other things in a haphazard pile next to them. They mumble incoherently at each other, and Dean nearly falls asleep standing up.

They both hit the sleeping bags hard, and Dean’s breath slows to sleep almost immediately. Sam’s eyes stay open for a suspended moment where he stares at the shapes headlights make on the wall above their heads.

Chapter Text

Dean wakes him up at what feels like the crack of dawn when he gets up to piss, and Sam can’t just fall back asleep because the entire right side of his neck has seized up, and his back feels like somebody’s gone and stabbed a few knives between his vertebrae.

And he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to stabbing.

He manages to pull himself vaguely upright enough to stumble to the med kit and shake a few painkillers out of a bottle. He downs them dry, working for a minute to gather enough spit to swallow with. After, he fishes for a plastic bag in their supply bag, awkwardly keeping his right arm close to his body; he opens the cooler they managed to drag in at some point last night and scoops the last vestiges of ice into the bag.

Stumbling back to his sleeping bag, he drags Dean’s blanket over to his side, figuring that the day Dean sleeps with both a sleeping bag and a blanket anywhere outside of a Nor’easter is the day Sam’ll know all of this is just Lucifer screwing with him.

He tucks the extra blanket under him, trying to cushion his back as best he can. When Dean stumbles back in, he grumbles a sleepy, “Steal my blanket, why don’t ya?” and collapses back onto his sleeping bag.

Sam grunts at him, using the weight of his hand to keep the ice-bag on his neck.

Dean grunts right back and rolls over.

When Sam wakes up again, he’s still aching, and the bag of ice has completely melted, leaving condensation on his face. It’s mostly dark, because the windows are boarded up pretty tight. When he manages to pat around his head enough to find his phone, he finds out it's eleven. AM.

It’s not often he crashes for more than six hours at a time, and he’s more than doubled that.

Makes sense as to why his stomach appears to be trying to eat itself at least.

He sits up and starts trying to ease his neck into a small stretch, but has to stop because of the flare up of pain. Blinking, he stares at where Dean’s slumped face-first into his squashed pillow in pants he knows he wasn’t wearing last night because they’re Sam’s. His good pair, the ones they picked up in that thrift shop in Minnesota after that thing with the pishtacos a couple months ago. Way too loose around the waist, but he wears a belt all the time anyway, and he’ll happily take some bunching in exchange for them covering his ankles.

Sam glances over to the pile they’d left their bags in and spies a doughnut box. He half-scoots, half-slides, half-crawls over and flips it open. There are three missing, and no maple bars left, so this is Dean’s purchase and not an Alice in Wonderland situation. He takes a look at his hands that are covered in dirty bandages and blinks slowly. If dirt is what kills him, he’s won at life.

There’s a half a container of apple juice left too, the giant bottle, non-refrigerator kind, and Sam downs his share in-between bites of doughnut, barely tasting any of it. Right now, all he needs is calories. And not to puke this up.

He’s got a goal, he can do it. His thoughts keep jumping around. He can do this.

The food bag is open, so he can see the animal crackers he bought—what, two days ago? He hopes. Time is weird when you’re on the run. The seal is gone and some crackers are too. He thinks Dean must have really been hungry.

But Sam opens it too, barely acknowledging when Dean snorts in his sleep and rolls over. He gets what he thinks are a camel and a hippo.

Man, his life is weird.

Dean’s phone starts buzzing, and Dean doesn’t even bother to stir to turn it off, so Sam scoots back over to the sleeping bags and picks it up. Jody Mills.

“Hello?” He grumbles out, voice grating. His throat is still sore from that kid choking him, but that’s not a new thing.

“Dean?” Comes Jody’s voice, confused, and Sam is violently reminded of the fact that they are brothers, no matter how easy it is to pretend otherwise.

“No, sorry, Sam. Dean’s asleep.”

There’s a bit of a laugh, “You alright there? Haven’t taken up smoking since I last saw you?”

Sam tries to laugh and starts coughing instead. Once he catches his breath, he manages to say, “Would probably be a healthier habit than hunting.” He lowers himself down on his stomach and wiggles until he’s close enough to grab the apple juice container he left open.

“That’s true enough,” Jody says, and drops it, “So, I hear you guys aren’t dead.”

Sam sighs, “Yeah, guess not.”

Jody huffs another half-laugh, “So, you got feds on your tail?”

“Don’t know,” Sam admits, “think we made a quick enough exit to throw them off, plus, last I checked, they were going to trawl Kansas ‘cause of some tip.” He hopes it wasn’t anyone in Lebanon, it’ll make things difficult.

“Well, seems like that’s the plan, from what I’ve read,” Jody agrees, then pauses a second before speaking again, “Question for you and Dean?”

Sam finishes guzzling down the juice with the receiver as far from his mouth as he can make it go without moving the speaker from his ear, “Let me wake him up, just a sec.”

He reaches out with his foot and jabs Dean in the butt. Dean snorts and swears at Sam blearily.

“Jody’s on the phone. Kay, Jody you’re on speaker.”

“Morning Dean. Should I say afternoon?”

“I dunno, what time’zit?” Dean moves to sit up and swats Sam’s leg in retaliation, grabbing behind the knee to dig his fingers in. Sam’s leg jolts, and he tries to kick Dean, but fails because it just makes his back throb, so he has to stop.

“Almost twelve here, you guys in a different time zone?”

Dean flops on his stomach parallel to Sam, balling the sleeping bag under his chest and reaching a hand out to mess with Sam’s hair.

“Honestly,” Dean says, “No clue,” He looks over to Sam like he expects him to have the answer, but Sam doesn’t even remember how long they drove yesterday, so they could really be in any state sort-of-west of Nebraska, “Where are we?”

Sam shrugs as best he can with his neck like it is, and leans down to rest his head in crossed arms, “Dunno. It’s eleven. Somewhere outside Nebraska at the least. Probably.”

“Well,” Jody says, interrupting what could have been a minutes-long debate as to where they ended up, “Good morning anyway. Listen, some hunters I know are looking to throw a barbeque-and-bonfire at my place tomorrow and I thought I’d invite ya’ to come by if you were nearby.”

Sam and Dean share a look that has a bit too much meaning in the eyebrow raises. Hunter gatherings are asking for trouble Dean communicates, twisting his mouth to the side. It’s Jody, Sam tilts his head at the phone, but yeah. Could be fun, Dean thinks, raising his eyebrows at Sam. Wanted men, Sam implies with his pursed lips. So are most hunters, Dean retorts with a nostril flare. Gordon, Sam thinks, and that’s the end of the silent conversation.

“Much as we’d love to,” Dean says, “think we’ll have to pass. We, uh, told you hunters don’t usually like us much? Right?”

And Sam knows they did, because they always made sure to let people know not to mention they knew them to other hunters.

Jody snorts, “Well, maybe some don’t. The ones I know are more likely to tell ridiculous stories about you. They don’t believe I know you in the least.”

Dean purses his lips and nods, “Yeah?” He glances over to Sam who shakes his head gently and has to blow hair out of his face.

“Well, we’ll think on it, right Sammy?”

And Sam caves under the look Dean gives him, and mumbles a, “Yeah,” into his arms.

“That is, if the coppers don’t decide to throw us in federal prison before we get there,” Dean adds.

Jody laughs, “Can you believe I’m friends with wanted criminals?”

Something soft swells in Sam’s stomach, and he smiles a bit. He doesn’t answer, but Dean seems to have a revelation.

“There aren’t going to be any hunters named Roy and Walt there, are there?” Dean questions suddenly, and Sam doesn’t have to be looking at Dean’s face to know that murder entered his eyes in that instant.

“Not as far as I know,” Jody’s voice says, “But I can call around to make sure. I’m guessing there’s bad blood there?”

Sam can’t help but snort, “You could say that.” Garth mentioned them a while back and Dean had nearly had a conniption, turning bright red and speechless at the mention of them. Bit of an overreaction in Sam’s opinion.

A slap hits the side of his head, not hard enough to even jolt Sam’s head, “Yeah, I don’t think there’s much hope of us coming if they’re there,” Dean says.

“Well, you boys think on it. We’re getting started about noon tomorrow, so you’ve got some time if you wanna make your way up here or come up with a better excuse. Or get sent to jail, I guess.”

They share another look, this one a little shameful.

“Okay,” Dean says at the same time Sam says, “Thanks Jody.”

“Bye,” Jody drawls, like she’s been waiting on them to end the call. And, Sam reflects, it is usually one of them who ends it.

“Bye,” they both say, and there’s some slight confusion over who’s reaching out to end the call, but Dean slaps Sam’s wrist away and presses the button.

They sit in silence for a second, and Sam considers the linoleum under him. It’s not very nice linoleum.

Dean groans and pushes himself up into more of a plank position, then curls in on himself, pain flashing across his face. Sam reaches out to steady him, and Dean shrugs him off.

“What is this, a slumber party? Up and at ‘em, we’ve got a barbeque to get to.”

“If it wasn’t a barbeque, you’d’ve said no,” Sam grumbles, pressing his face into his arms.

“C’mon Sammy,” Dean wheedles, while prodding Sam’s legs, finding the ticklish spots all too easy, “Food. Beer, probably. Jody!”

“Hunters who hate my guts,” Sam says, twitching away from Dean’s fingers.

And for the split second before Dean speaks up, Sam knows they’re both thinking about Gordon and what’s-his-face, the Jesus guy, and that means they’re both thinking about the apocalypse and—

“Fine,” Sam says, interrupting Dean and lifting his head so his chin rests on his arms, “But we’re picking up some Icy-Hot things on the way, my neck is killing me.”

He turns his head to rest his cheek on his arms instead, wincing at the movement, and catches the wide smile Dean’s got on his face. He sometimes forgets Dean likes being a hunter. Likes talking with other hunters. Likes hunter bars and hunter hangouts and the only reason he doesn't go to them is ‘cause he has Sam associated with him.

“And,” he adds, just to be petulant, “I get to say that you got beat up by a bunch of kindergarteners.”

“Hey!” Dean says, smile lessening just a bit, “Some of them were very large twelve-year-olds.”

Sam can’t help but snort at that, making a piece of his hair move with the exhalation and then flop back into place, greasy.

“I want a shower,” Sam says.

“Me too. Some real food would be good,” Dean says with a pat to his belly, “Need some bacon.”

Sam makes a disgusted expression and Dean pushes more hair into his face.

“How’s your hives?” Dean asks, stretching in what looks like an extremely painful manner.

It takes Sam a moment to remember what Dean’s talking about, and when he does he sits up so he can lift up his shirt. The bumps have faded, and he’s no longer itchy. A faint redness is all he can see.

“Looks fine,” he says.

Dean stretches around him and glances at his back, “Good here too. Must’ve been a weird allergic reaction to something.”

Something clicks in Sam’s brain, “I think I might’ve gotten bit by one of the bugs, that could’ve been it.”

Relief is hidden in Dean’s face when he faces Sam again, “Sounds about right, you freaking me out over a bug bite.”

Sam doesn’t have the energy to dispute Dean on this, so he just makes a face and slumps back over.

“Get up bitch, I want breakfast.”

Sam groans into the sleeping bag.

After exiting a truck stop with pay-with-quarters showers that probably hadn’t been cleaned since they built the place, they eat at a diner-style restaurant that proclaims that it’s Where the Locals Eat, and that’s how they figure out they’re in Wyoming, which makes Dean laugh for some bizarre reason.

Dean orders bacon, just as he promised, and sausage too, just because, as Dean proclaimed when he turned into the parking lot, “They serve all-day breakfast!”

Sam rolls his eyes, but he ends up ordering some banana-nut pancakes, so he can’t complain.

Only a couple of bites of his pancakes are sacrificed to the keep-Dean-fed fund at the end of the meal, and Sam feels strangely proud of the fact that he managed to eat that much. Maybe he’s finally getting over his stomach bug.

Of course, his toes are numb, because the diner tables are tiny and Dean keeps purposefully stomping on his feet.

He manages a good shin kick in retaliation once they exit.

“Hey!” Dean says, offended.

Sam makes a face back at him and slides into the Impala.

Dean starts the car and says, “Jody texted back. Says they could use some cantaloupe if we’re serious about contributing.”

“We’re not heathens,” Sam says, scrolling through his emails.

“Nope,” Dean grins, “Just raised by wolves.”

Sam can’t help but smile a bit at that, but his stomach drops out from under him all the same. It’s an old family joke, one Bobby kept perpetuating after John wasn’t around to do it.

It hurts to think about.

“You wanna grab a motel tonight, do some hustling, and head out early tomorrow? It’s what, seven hours to Sioux Falls from here?” Dean asks, but he’s not really asking.

“Yeah,” Sam says anyway, “I’m still exhausted.” He is. Calories, sleep, money. The three things to get done in-between hunts.

When they stop for gas somewhere near Spearfish the next morning, Sam uses the free wifi from the cafe across the street to look up grocery stores where they could pick up canteloup at this time of year.

Dean slides back into the car with a couple of bags of peanut M&Ms and Sam turns them down when offered as he slants his phone screen toward Dean.

“Grocery store in Pierre we could stop by if you wanna take 14 instead of I-90. It’s on the way.”

Dean takes a second to squint his eyes at the address and nods, “Sounds good, I’ll switch over to 281 and head down after. Take the back way.” He pulls a few packets of beef jerky from a pocket and tosses two into Sam’s lap, “Chow down, that’s breakfast.”

Sam sighs, and reaches in the back for the container of animal crackers instead.

“What’s with those anyway?” Dean says around a mouthful of jerky as he pulls out of the lot.

Sam shrugs, pops a few in his mouth without looking at them and tries to speak around his full mouth, “Been a while since I had some and I thought we could use the container for salt after. Less risk of cutting ourselves on the edge.”

Dean raises his eyebrows at that, takes a second to think about it, and nods, “Smart.”

He reaches over and pulls out a handful as soon as he’s finished chewing the jerky, like Sam giving it a purpose made it okay to eat them outside of starvation.

Sam’s just glad he figured out an excuse.

“Hey,” Dean says after an hour of Jimi Hendrix, “Y’know, with all these hunters,” he pauses to turn down the volume a bit, “We gotta, you know,” he waves his hand distractedly then winces, holding a hand up to his nose.

“Work together?” Sam asks, looking up from his book on Anasazi legends.

“Yeah,” Dean says, glancing over, “They’re gonna be looking for cracks.”

Sam thinks they’re cracked enough that nobody would have to go looking for it, but that’s beside the point, “Yeah. On the same page?” They haven’t really been, for a long while, he thinks.

“Your hair is dumb, I’m awesome, no Men of Letters stuff, the whole shebang,” Dean says.

“Can do,” Sam says with a hum. His eye twitches. This act is one of their oldest ones. Dean puts up his best class-clown, Sam acts his best little-brother, and they don’t let people see the hellfire in each other’s eyes.

It’s obvious that there’s a party going on at Jody’s because there’s cars everywhere. Dean nods appreciatively at a car Sam’s sure he’s also supposed to appreciate, and elbows Sam in the gut.

“Check it out,” Dean says with a grin.

Sam pulls two cantaloupes out of the back and hands them to Dean, “Cool,” he says, blandly.

Dean sighs in his most put-upon way, “You just don’t appreciate cars the way they’re meant to be appreciated.”

“Does it get me where I need to go? Good car,” Sam says, grabbing two more melons for himself. They’re awkward to carry, like he’s trying to hold seven salt canisters at once.

There’s another sigh, but it’s an old argument, so Dean lets it drop. They tromp up to the front door, and Dean knocks with his foot, cantaloupes held under his arms like particularly unwieldy footballs.

Inside, there’s noise that means that the cars aren’t just for show, and Dean knocks again.

“Coming!” Jody’s voice calls, yelling out a, “Don’t use my microwave for anything that doesn’t go in the microwave,” right after. The door opens.

“Dean! Sam! Glad you boys could make it,” she says with a grin, opening the door wider, “Food’s going in the kitchen—what on earth happened to you?” She glances up and down, taking in Dean’s two black eyes and the cut on his chin and the bandages on Sam’s hands.

Sam grins, and looks at the back of Dean’s head, “We got beat up by some kindergarteners.”

Dean looks back at him and gives him a vague you’re-dead look, before turning back to Jody, “And Sam got beat up by a book.”

Sam lets his eyebrows drop and he makes a face at the back of Dean’s head for Jody’s benefit.

Jody shakes her head at the both of them, “You boys have the strangest lives,” she leans back from the door and gestures them inside.

They both smile at her, and Dean leans in to smack a kiss on her cheek, sliding past her with ease, not knowing what ruin he spread in his wake.

Jody’s shaking her head, but smiling, “Your brother really always that much of a lady’s man?”

Sam squints his eyes, “You’ve got no idea,” he says, weighing down the words with every time Dean’s flirting had got them in trouble in the past. After the mess with the church group, Jody probably understands.

And his heartbeat has picked up, and he thinks for a split second he’s gonna drop the cantaloupes, because now he doesn’t know the protocol. Dean did it, does that mean he does? Jody must like Dean better, so he probably shouldn’t—

He leans in as he passes and kind of . . . taps his cheek against Jody’s, feeling bad for the scruff he’s still not managed to have a moment to shave off. Or really, he’s squandered the moments he did have lying motionless on an awful motel bed and blankly scrolling through articles detailing the complex history of the Winchester Brothers and their crimes.

“New haircut?” He asks, awkwardly as she turns to follow him.

“Eh, chopped some more off. Gets addictive,” she says easily, closing the door.

“And your shoulder?” Sam asks, belatedly.

“Turns out even a Roman goddess can’t keep me down,” Jody replies, touching one hand to where Vesta stabbed her through. Her sling’s gone, so it’s probably okay.

They stand in the foyer for a moment.

“Anyway,” Jody says, “You’re looking better than the last time I saw you, y’know, minus the bandages.”

Sam lets his face screw up tight for a moment, then makes himself relax. That’s not something he needs to put on Jody, “Yeah, that’s a story. Boring one, I’ll save you from it.”

Jody snorts, “Thanks?” She pats his cheek, “Here to listen if you need it.”

Sam tries to laugh, “Thanks. That’s what I’ve got Dean for, right? Each other’s unpaid therapists.”

He doesn’t mention that there hasn’t been much of that since Gadreel—since—with—

Jody pats his cheek again, and heads toward the stairs, “Gotta go make sure no one’s up to bad business upstairs, you hunter types are unstoppable.”

Sam snorts, and moves out of the way so she can walk past him. He looks around, tags people’s faces, doesn’t recognize anyone. He hefts the cantaloupes back into position, and walks to the kitchen. He has to flatten himself against the wall in the hallway so that a guy in jeans and flannel all too similar to Sam’s own outfit can pass by.

Dean’s already in the kitchen, taking charge of something or other, telling someone where things are. The last time they’d dropped by, he’d offered to help with dinner, and Jody had given them both the tour.

Some lady in a leather jacket that Sam is pretty sure is too thin for the temperature outside asks, loudly, “Anybody know where I can get a bread knife?” She’s rifling through Jody’s knife drawer with little luck.

Sam sets his cantaloupes down on the table by where Dean’s put the other ones and leans around Dean to open a different drawer.

“Here you go,” he says, to the lady, handing over the bread knife handle first.

She does a quick assessment of him, hunter style, but does a double take, and Sam pretends to be occupied by Dean shoving him out of the way with a muttered, “Scoot.”

After a couple of seconds, she takes the knife from him and issues a quick, “Thanks,” with an appreciative nod. Her eyes don’t leave him as she starts to head out of the room, however, and Sam’s not sure if she’s recognized him, or if this is the thing where she’s doing what Dean’s termed, “Appreciating the Winchester Look.”

“Sammy, grab a colander and a cutting board for me,” Dean says, slapping Sam’s shoulder with the back of his hand.

Sam rolls his eyes and goes to the opposite cupboards, noticing how the couple at the table and the two guys in the corner stopped all conversation. He reaches up and grabs what Dean asked for, turning around.

“You are,” says the guy Sam passed in the hallway, now leaning against the kitchen door frame, “Aren’t you?”

Dean turns around after a beat, a stupid smirk on his face, “Talking to me? And then he notices the state of the stove, “Who thought leaving deviled eggs on the hot stove was a good idea?”

He moves to take the plastic container off the heat and the guy says, “Either of you. You’re the Winchesters, ain’t ya?”

Sam feels his heartbeat spike but moves to grab a few tupperware out of the cupboard, “Yep.”

Dean spins around and tosses the guy a wooden spoon, ignoring everyone else, “I’m Dean, this is Sam, and your new job is to get that potato salad mixed up.”

The guy cracks a smile that Sam thinks is a little shocked, but moves to do as Dean says.

“Honor to meet ya’, I suppose. Bucky Sims,” he says, gesturing to himself, “Ain’t ya’ both supposed to be dead a few times over?”

The other people are watching them intently, like maybe they hold the answers to the universe. Sam’s pretty sure they don’t have that. Pretty sure. Mostly sure.

They both shrug and speak at once, “It didn’t stick.”

Sam rolls his eyes at Dean and ignores the urge to flip him off. In sync, he thinks, just like they talked about.

Jody enters the kitchen at that point, looking more frazzled than before, and relaxes when she sees Dean at the helm.

“Oh thank God, I thought maybe Elvis was trying to heat the potato salad in the microwave again,” she says, leaning a bit against the doorframe, where Sims was before.

Another bowl of something Sam thinks is probably pasta salad is shifted to the kitchen table thanks to Dean, and he grins at Jody, “I got this, Sheriff.”

Jody raises her eyebrows and her hands do a bit of a helpless gesture, “I’m putting you in charge of food from now on.”

Dean smiles even wider, “Good with me.”

The other five people in the room are still watching with wide eyes.

“Need someone to grab the chairs in the basement, they’re in a kind of weird place—”

Sam interupts her explanation gently, “I know where they are,” he says, thinking of the last time he and Dean were here and he’d been sent to grab some board games from the basement, “I’ll grab ‘em.”

He moves to slide past Jody, and she squeezes his arm as he passes, “Thanks Sam.”

A smile worms it way back onto his face, and he finds that his heart has calmed a bit, shifting from there is a demon right there level to every day, “You got it.”

As he exits, he hears one of the other hunters he doesn’t know the name of say, “And here I thought you were joking about knowing the Winchesters, Jody.”

Dean says something Sam can’t quite make out, but there’s laughter that follows.

The basement is cool and dark, and a whole lot less creepy than most basements Sam seems to find himself in. Now that he thinks about it, he and Dean do live in what is just an expanded version of a basement . . .

Sam shakes himself out of his thoughts and on his way back up the stairs with the chairs in hand, he bumps his right arm against the door. He hisses in quiet pain, reminded violently of the fact that he’d been thrown through the air a couple days ago. The heat cream helped, but it’s sore as all hell still.

He’s had worse though. A lot worse. And besides, if he doesn’t heal right away, it means there isn’t a angel hanging around, pushing him to heal from the inside.

He moves on.

Navigating through the hunters is a strange affair, because somehow between him entering the basement and exiting, word must have gotten around that he and Dean were there. He can feel the various gazes burning into him as he lugs the chairs awkwardly around furniture and out to the back door.

The thing about other hunters is that it’s always a guessing game now. There’s some still trucking from the days when SamandDeanWinchester were people the hunters they’d run into would know right off the bat as ‘Ol’ John’s kids’.

Now it’s usually Dean Winchester dead-five-times-over and Sam was-actual-Lucifer Winchester.

(Sometimes it’s Sam-needs-to-die-for-starting-the-apocalypse, but they can usually avoid those people now.)

And the other thing is that he and Dean haven’t ever been big on the whole hunter community. Dad didn’t take Dean to a hunter hangout until he was seventeen, and he constantly left them out of hunts if any other hunter was involved. Sure, people knew them, especially after Dean dropped out and they really started ganking monsters on the regular with dad, but they never went to these gatherings. Too dangerous, dad said.

Sam wonders if it was because of him. No good introducing your son to hunters who’d want to kill him.

(He thinks, if the memories that spun ‘round his head during the trials were to be believed, that there was a hunter. Who—they’d found him dead, Caleb said over a phone call Sam probably wasn’t meant to overhear. After a hunt with dad. Sam hadn’t liked the guy, he’d been too friendly with Dean, too nose-first into the investigation the Winchesters had been on for a solid week already. Dead, and Sam didn’t do it, but someone thought he did.)

He finds Jody in the backyard chiding some lady about not charring the burgers into bricks. She catches sight of Sam and smiles.

“Thanks Sam! Mind plopping them over there on the patio?” She points, going back to her discussion.

Sam grins and gives her a nod and starts walking. The lady from before in the leather jacket watches him pass from where she’s cutting buns on the table Jody must’ve dragged out for the occasion.

He tries to shake it off. Jody warned them. People talk about them. That’s nothing new.

He’s putting up the last chair when a voice sounds from behind him, loud enough that the couple of conversations going on putter to a stop.

“Sammy Winchester, as I live and breathe.”

Sam almost loses his balance spinning around.

It’s an older guy, pushing sixty at least. Brown skin, a moustache. Long hair, pulled back in a braid.

For just a second, he’s eleven again, looking at the same guy with a good twenty years shaved off his face and thinking his long hair and earring were the coolest things on planet earth.

“Uh,” Sam blinks and lets recognition run over his face, “Eric, right?” Thank, well, not God, for his dad’s obsessive journal keeping.

The guy reaches out with the hand not clutching a bottle and shakes Sam’s.

“Got that right, must’ve been twenty years since I last saw ya’, tiny thing that you were. Had a couple extra feet tucked away in those giant boots a’yours, didn’tcha?” Eric’s smiling and still pumping Sam’s arm up and down, so maybe he missed out on all the Sam-Winchester-ended-the-world stuff.

Sam ducks his head. He and Dean had ended up tucked in a backroom in a house belonging to this hunter way back in the day, when dad was nearby looking at demon signs (not that they’d known that at the time, and Dean spent the whole time angry that they’d been dropped off at a stranger’s house like a shipment of ammo yet again, even though he wouldn’t admit it). The guy’s name was in some corner of dad’s journal.

“Guess so. Dean always says he fed me too many vegetables,” Sam says, with a bit of a grin as they drop hands.

Eric laughs, head thrown back and a hand slapped to his leg, “I remember that brother of yours, not that I forget many people. He around here? I keep hearin’ stories ‘bout you two being dead and not-dead, so I’ve stopped believin’ all of them.” He’s a good natured guy, Eric. Taught Sam how to calculate volumes when Sam struggled with catching up to the math at school.

“Yep,” Sam says with a nod toward the house, “he’s in the kitchen.”

Another smile is sent his way, and a hand slaps his back, sending pain shooting up his neck, “Well, I’ll have to stop and talk to you boys about all these stories I’ve heard about your shenanigans. Singer, rest his soul, always had the best ones.”

“Yeah,” Sam says softly, leaning down to adjust a chair so it aligns better with the others, “he would.”

“We all miss ‘im, but I’ll bet you boys miss ‘im most,” Eric says. No tact, but Sam kind of appreciates it, nods in response with a slight smile.

Eric sticks around Sam as he helps out where Jody points him, going on and on about this story and that, and have you heard and well, back in my day, and he’s almost grateful for it, especially when the apparently notorious Elvis shows back up and tries to talk to Sam.

He nearly pukes on the guy, but Eric steps in and quite literally slaps Elvis around the head and tells him off for his tact.

Sam likes this guy.

He makes a quick exit, feeling generally crappy again, after riding the high from the hunt for this long. It’s always easier right after a hunt, him and Dean in sync, his purpose clear, his anger gone for just a moment. The string of hunts they keep finding themselves on—going off of weak information and single news articles—keeps them going. Keeps them together.

Eric follows him into the kitchen. Dean’s cutting up the cantaloupes, but sets down the knife when he sees Sam’s face.

“All good?” He asks quickly, ticking an eyebrow. Who do I need to kill.

“Yeah,” Sam says, lying through his teeth. He tends to go pale when he’s shaken up, and Dean’s too good not to notice. He smiles cheerfully. Nobody, if you don’t want me to kill you instead.

“Dean Winchester,” Eric says, placing one hand on a hip, “just as mopey as I remember.”

Dean looks away from Sam and recognition replaces his murder glare, he glances toward Sam with wide-eyes, and Sam mouths ‘Eric’.

“Eric, right? From that winter down in Arizona,” Dean says, his flickering uncertainty probably unnoticeable to anyone other than Sam.

“Got that right. I’d shake your hand, but I like cantaloupe juice only after eating the stuff.”

Dean looks down at his hands, which are indeed covered in cantaloupe guts, and gives a huffing laugh, “Well, I’ll let you off the hook this time.”

Sam leans against a counter and watches through half-closed eyes as people pass through and Eric and Dean laugh over something or other. He’s pretty certain, from what Jody’d told him after the Vesta case, that very few of these people actually know her. Hunters are like that, turning up places whenever someone mentions food.

He leans hard enough against the marble to send shocks of pain up his back and presses a nail into the scar on his left hand through the bandages. It makes it easier to breath for a moment.

“Would you mind taking this bowl out to the tables?” Dean asks Eric.

“You got it, boy-o,” Eric says with cheer, picking up the cantaloupe bowl with one arm and opening the door with another.

For a second, it’s quiet. No one’s in the kitchen except them.

Dean looks over at him, and Sam snaps to attention. Dean tilts his head, You really okay?

Sam tilts his head, screwing up the right side of his face, Been better, fine now. And well, if that isn’t a lie and a half. One they’re too used to.

They nod at each other, and Dean hands him another bowl of cantaloupe, with the warning, “It’s heavy.”

“Oh really,” Sam says, “I never would have guessed.”

“Oh shut up.”

“Nose okay?” He asks, delaying his exit.

Dean shrugs, “Hurts and I can’t breathe, but it’ll heal.”

“Hope so,” Sam says, “I wouldn’t want to have to hang around someone with permanent racoon eyes.”

“Like you can talk,” Dean says, making a face, “Mr. ‘sleep is for lesser men’.”

“We both just slept for about twenty years. I sleep.”

Dean rolls his eyes, but that’s the end of the conversation, and Sam carries the bowl out to the table, setting it next to the other one clumsily, his bandaged fingers providing absolutely no friction to keep the metal bowl in hand.

A large tray of burger toppings comes along with Dean when he exits the house, and Sam finally registers that the backyard’s gotten crowded, the roaring fire surrounded by people choking on the smoke.

Jody smiles at them, sending a thumbs up toward them that Dean returns, and then Dean’s tilting his head toward the group of unoccupied chairs.

“Okay everyone,” Jody’s voice rings out, businesslike, “thanks for coming. Asa’s sorry he couldn’t make it—”

“Which is exactly why he abandoned us to go on a hunt,” that guy who’d introduced himself earlier—Brett? Bryan? No, Bucky, that’s it—says, drawing a laugh from a few people.

Jody rolls her eyes, and Sam wonders just how familiar she’s become with the hunting world, “As I was saying, Asa’s sorry he couldn’t make it, but I’m glad to have you, so get some food before it all goes cold.” She gestures at the table, and hunters start to crowd it.

“Let’s get some food,” Dean says, pulling himself up again.

“Go ahead, I’ll save the seats,” Sam replies, pulling out his phone. He’s got unread emails to go through, and a mayor he needs to investigate, but bringing his laptop would probably be rude.

Dean moves to get in line, and Sam settles in, flicking his way through various spam emails.

“Saving this seat?” Eric asks from his right, holding a plate of food.

Sam glances up, then over, and shakes his head, “No, go ahead.”

“Gonna get yourself some food?”

“Uh, yeah, just saving Dean’s seat.”

Eric nods thoughtfully, “Good on ya’.”

Sam tries to smile, and then flicks an email to delete it.

“So,” Eric says, “you boys’ve been up to a lot since I last saw ya’.”

Sam snorts and glances up to see Dean loading up his plate, “You could say that.”

The couple from earlier walks up, each with a plate in hand.

“These seats taken?” The guy asks, pointing to the seats kitty-corner to them.

“Not at all!” Eric proclaims.

They settle themselves down, and the lady shivers a bit.

“Little far from the fire,” she says.

When it becomes obvious that the guy isn’t going to respond to that, Sam nods and mutters, “Uh-huh.”

Dean walks back in, stepping over Sam’s feet, and plops himself down. He’s already got a cookie stuffed in his mouth, and two more on his overflowing plate.

“ ‘oo ‘et yourself some ‘ood,” he says, around his mouthful of food.

Sam takes a moment to stare at him and shake his head.

“What?” Dean asks, a couple crumbs falling from his mouth.

Sam keeps shaking his head, “You’re disgusting.”

Dean draws his head back and looks genuinely confused. Sam sighs and shakes his head again before standing up and weaving around Eric to get to the food table. Dean really does possess manners, sometimes. It’s hard to believe, but he does.

There’s plenty of burgers left, steaming a bit in the air, and enough salad to feed a small village, so Sam fixes his plate, very purposeful in avoiding eye contact.

He hates this. So much.

But at least Dean’s in his element. That’s what really counts right now. He owes him that much.

He’s at the tail end of the line, so when he gets back to the grouping of chairs, most of them have filled up. He steps carefully, dodging precariously placed beer bottles and people’s feet. Dean acknowledges him with a nod when he sits down, but otherwise continues his conversation normally.

“—and Sam here goes flying, nearly cracks his head on a tombstone, and so I have to go running for the lighter, and we light the son of a bitch up, and think that’s everything, right?”

Must be explaining away his black eyes. Either that or telling any one of the numerous ghost-burning stories they’ve got tucked away, but Sam’s money is on the witch-ghost.

He takes Dean’s distraction and runs with it, tipping his plate a bit and holding it over the one on Dean’s lap so that some of his salad drops onto Dean’s plate. It didn’t escape his notice that the only greens on Dean’s plate was the single piece of lettuce on his burger.

He draws back and smirks a bit when the guy across from them—Bucky, his name is Bucky—nods surreptitiously at him, a grin in place.

“I mean, we both had a bad feeling, and being in this business, we decided to trust our guts, and headed back to the family’s house, just to be safe, and we sit there, a minute maybe, and then these kids start walking out of their houses, right, still in their pajamas, and we’re stuck wondering what’s going on, so we get out of the car, and all these kids are coming outside, walking like zombies or something, and Sam pulls this stupid move—”

Sam screws up his face and interrupts, “It wasn’t stupid, it was logical!”

Dean turns to face him and scowls, “Yeah, sure, walking right up to the zombie kids and asking what they’re doing is a great plan, you’re right.”

“Like you were doing anything different,” Sam replies, a little outraged.

Dean brushes him off with an eye roll, “Anyway, so these kids—”

Sam rolls his own eyes and settles back, picking up his burger and chewing as he listens to Dean’s slightly exaggerated tale. Most of the hunters are listening too, eating thoughtfully. There’s some closer by the fire who appear to be having their own discussion.

“So next thing I know, the kids are waking up, and I’m running, because who knows what Sam’s doing—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Eric says, leaning forward on a knee so he can see Dean easier, but looks at Sam, “You killed it?”

“Yeah,” Sam answers, shrugging.

The girl from earlier speaks up, “How? I’ve never heard how to kill something like that, did you just have to shoot it?”

Eyes turn to Sam and he swallows his bite of burger, suddenly nervous, “Yeah, no, I, uh… I stabbed it through with its pipe.”

Eyebrow raises all around, and then Bucky asks, “Just like that?”

“Well,” Sam admits, “I bled on it first.”

“On purpose?” Bucky questions.

Sam shrugs again, and this time it pulls something in his neck, so he balances his plate on his leg so he can rub at it, “Well, yeah. I mean—blood is always significant, so I figured it was like a killing ritual, y’know?”

Bucky shakes his head, seemingly mistified.

“Don’t get him started on rituals,” Dean interjects, “he won’t stop for at least two or three hours.”

Sam turns to make a face at Dean, who makes one back, and holds up his plate, “Also, what the hell Sam?”

Sam glances at the salad that is laying uneaten on Dean’s plate, and wants to implode from the pressure of people staring at them, so maybe something fires incorrectly between his brain and his tongue, and he’s a little too harsh.

“What? You need vegetables to live, Dean.”

“Like hell I do,” Dean grumbles, spearing a piece of lettuce so he can wave it in Sam’s face. Sam holds up a hand and smacks Dean’s wrist down.

“At the rate you’re going, it isn’t gonna be Roy and Walt who kill you next, it’ll be your cholesterol levels.”

He can see the surprised spark in Dean’s eyes, but it’s quickly covered up when Dean snorts and dramatically shoves his forkful of salad in his mouth, speaking around it.

“Happy?”

“Sure,” Sam says, rolling his eyes.

“Roy and Walt actually killed the two of you?” Eric asks, sounding confused, “I thought they were just makin’ that whole thing up.”

Dean nods, and swallows his food, “Yeah, few years back, shot right through the chest. Ruined a couple a’ perfectly good shirts.”

Sam snorts in agreement. It’s true enough.

“Wait,” says the guy to the left of Bucky, who Sam’s unfamiliar with, “You guys died?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, stabbing the salad again with a vengeance, “no offence, but that’s kind of old news. You must be new to the game.”

“Uh, yeah. Rick’s the name.”

“Good to meet ya’,” Dean says, nodding his head.

“So what happened with the Pied Piper?” The lady asks.

Dean doesn’t say anything, so Sam picks up the slack, “Stabbed ‘im, exploded into bugs. End of story, really.”

“Sure, if you don’t count us dodging the police, getting caught by the police, and our daring getaway, of course.”

The lady grins, and Sam thinks he likes her attitude, “Is this why your faces are plastered all over the news?”

“Again? Yeah,” Dean says, huffing out a breath, “I’m sick and tired of being on the FBI’s watchlist, it’s exhausting.”

Sam rolls his eyes as the conversation continues to devolve and settles back in his chair. Hopefully these people don’t harbor secret hatred against him, and they can get through this meetup without any more issues.

That’s the hope, at least.

After everyone finishes their food, the stories continue, each one a little more exaggerated than the last, each hunter feeling the need to one-up each other. People wander in and out of groups, and Sam huddles closer to himself, offering quiet comments whenever conversation falters. Dean, at one point, stands up to get more food.

“So Tim, he’s there, middle of nowhere, without a cell phone, and here I am thinking the monster got him—” the lady Sam never caught the name of says, more animated now that the guy she was with left to talk with people by the fire.

There’s a familiar sound that Sam doesn’t even actively register until after he’s moved his hand to catch keys that were flung his way. He turns away from the conversation to raise an eyebrow at Dean, who’s still got his mouth open funny from clicking his tongue, and is standing uselessly behind the second row of chairs, having wormed his way into a conversation with Eric and Jody. Dean makes a face, uses the hand that’s not balancing his second plate of food to mime putting on a coat, and Sam rolls his eyes at him.

“‘Scuse me,” he says, exiting the conversation without a fuss. He stands up and stomps through the light layer of snow that’s still sticking to the ground, and thinks about what it means that Dean of all people is admitting to being cold. This far from the fire, his breath puffs out in front of him, visible, and he tries to reorient himself to the temperature he knows it should be.

His body hasn’t been great about feeling the cold ever since—with—in the—

He unlocks the back door to the Impala and pulls out his and Dean’s thicker coats, mean things, meant to ward off the nastiest chill they could encounter south of the Canada border. He shakes them out a bit, and barely catches a flash of blue that appears when he does so. Bending down, his brows furrow.

It’s that dumb triceratops toy, the one he’d forgotten about after hiding it in Dean’s drawer not long after they watched Princess Bride and Sam had thought that maybe Dean had meant well, after all—

Someone clears their throat behind him, and he jumps, tossing the toy into the car so he can put his hand on the butt of his gun.

The lady in the leather jacket who hadn’t taken her eyes off Sam since she’d spotted him in the kitchen is standing in the snow near the front of the Impala. She’d sent off warning bells in Sam’s head, but he’d been trying to ignore her—made easy by the fact that she’s been mostly hanging out around the fire Sam’s been avoiding. She raises her hands in a surrendering gesture.

“Whoa, I can get not knowing how to say hello, but shooting me is a little much.”

“Um,” Sam says, articulately. He drops his hand from his waistband and pulls the coats closer to himself, slamming the door shut and locking it in one smooth gesture, tucking the keys in his back pocket.

“Or,” the lady says, her tone turning sour, “maybe you just wanted to play dumb the whole time.”

“Look,” Sam says, eyes flitting around while he tries to seem nonchalant, “um, if I’ve done something that annoys you, I can just leave—”

The lady is looking at him with shock and anger in her face, shaking her head slowly when she interrupts, “So you actually don’t remember, huh? Great,” her mouth screws up, “glad to know I’m just that memorable.”

She turns to head back toward Jody’s, and Sam stands in befuddlement for a moment before he speaks up.

“Wait,” he calls, stumbling forward a step with his free hand outstretched, “look, my memory’s not all that great sometimes,” a bit of a lie, but not a fully-fledged one, “if you could just jog it a bit. . .”

She turns back around, looks at him with narrowed eyes, “New Years, 2010? That case with the ghouls? We had crazy sex and you left without giving me the phone number you promised me?”

Sam is taken aback for a moment, he blinks, uncomprehending, and then tries to do the math. Once he does, he doesn’t like it.

Something tries to click in his head.

“Um, Janice?” he tries, holding his arms close to his chest.

Her mouth slants to a flat line, “Janeece. Nice try though,” she moves to turn away again, and Sam just can’t do this. Can’t—can’t make someone think they’re unmemorable enough to forget.

“Hey, wait, I, um” he says, twitching under her gaze as she once again rounds on him, “look, I . . . I wasn’t . . . exactly myself when you met me. I, um, the, I’m not great with the memories from then?”

“Oh, sure,” Janeece says, drawing it out sarcastically, “What, you’re gonna tell me you were possessed by a demon when I double-checked that for myself about a dozen different times?”

“No, um” and he’s gotten himself backed into a corner, no way to go but out, “I, um, didn’t have a soul at the time?” His sentence tips upward into a question mark that shouldn’t have been there.

Janeece stares at him long enough to make his ears turn red from something other than the cold, and then she stalks a couple steps closer.

“That . . . checks out surprisingly well,” she says, glancing him up and down, “you lying to me?”

“No, no, um,” he hurries to explain, “I, really, it’s complicated, but I didn’t really have a soul for a while, and, um, it wasn’t exactly me? Except it kind of was?”

This is something he doesn’t like to think about. It’s too close to other memories, not that wandering around soulless didn’t provide ample nightmare fuel, but it’s just so easy to slip from what his body was doing up on earth while his soul was—

The lady huffs, and looks vaguely angry, but not so much at Sam, more at the world in general. She mutters a quiet, “Figures,” and then meets Sam’s eyes.

“Well, sorry to confront you like that, I guess.”

Sam shrugs and tries to play it off, “It’s fine. Must be...pretty weird.”

“Yeah,” she says, “you could say that.” She turns to walk away, and Sam lets her. Once she’s out of sight, he leans back against the car, and all the air in his lungs rushes out.

There are things he tries not to think about. The stuff he’d done when he was soulless falls under that category. There’s too much there.

After a minute, he collects himself and walks back. Dean’s coat and keys go to him, and then, somehow, Dean ropes him into a conversation about river creatures with a couple of the hunters who’d been near the fire earlier.

He’s fine.

Once the fire starts to die down, the hunters start leaving. Sam’s grateful. His back and neck are killing him, people are exhausting, and dodging Elvis is an lesson in patience and persistence. Dean’s thriving, having gotten multiple new numbers programmed into his phone, and told every good story they’ve got that doesn’t involve demons or angels.

In the end, it’s them, Jody, and Eric left to clean up. Sam shivers a bit at the chill that he can’t really feel and folds up the chairs.

Jody plies them with food, and Eric claps them both on the back, and Dean makes some stupid joke that Sam pretends to laugh at, even though his skin is crawling and his stomach is trying to mimic the disasterousness of Pompeii.

They settle into the Impala, and Sam distantly hopes Dean’s not too drunk. It was just beer, but Dean had a lot—it seemed like there was a new bottle in his hand every time Sam turned around.

It doesn’t really matter in the end. Dean settles into the seat and turns to him, the heater rattling.

“You good?”

Sam blinks a bit, “Yeah, why?”

Dean shrugs, “Just checking. It’s—it’s been awhile since...Hunters, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Sam sighs, “It was… It wasn’t awful.”

Dean nods, but leaves the car in park.

For a moment they sit there. Sam breathes in and gathers up his courage.

“I don’t think we should go back to the Bunker yet.”

Dean’s eyes flick over to him and hover somewhere next to Sam’s shoulder.

“I was thinkin’ the same thing. Too risky. We don’t know if—” he trails off.

“If the cops are in Lebanon,” Sam finishes. It’s a scary thought, just a bit. They’re just now getting used to the Bunker, having someplace to return to after a hunt, having beds they sleep in on the regular, having a functional oven, even. He can’t really call it home, there’s something like a jinx hidden in those words, but it’s nice. He doesn’t want to lose it to a cell block and bartering ramen packets in the yard.

“I’m thinking west again,” Dean says.

Sam shrugs, “Sounds good.” It’s a game they’re used to—pick a direction and drive. It’s a story they’ve got written in their bones.

Dean shifts them into reverse and then they’re heading out.

Sam decides to close his eyes, just for a moment.

There’s a guy, black, with dreads. A store with guitars on the walls and records on the shelves. A logo—Muse-ic—shaped like a guitar pick. A flashing light, something gets thrown at the guy’s head. A violin case. The cash register nearly takes his fingers off. Stress lines around the man’s eyes, shaky hands.

A street, lit up in the darkness. The logo, over a storefront.

Sam jolts awake.

Dean tosses a paper bag into his lap.

“Morning sunshine,” he says, despite the fact that it’s pitch black outside the car windows once you glance past the lights of the businesses they’re surrounded by.

Sam squeezes his eyes tight, and then reopens them, moving a hand to dig through the bag. Wendy’s, because small town diners remember people a lot better than chains with overworked teenagers. He hates the fries, but at least it’s edible. If he ever has to eat at a Biggerson’s again, he might just vanish out of existence.

While he eats his chicken sandwich, he pulls out his phone and decides that it’s worth it to use his limited data for this, if only to calm the swell of panic in his stomach. Last time he had a dream like this, they ended up fighting a Jack-in-Irons in the middle of a deserted highway.

Dean grunts at him, so he picks up the drink between his thighs and offers it up to Dean, who’s got one hand on the wheel and one hand stuffing chicken nuggets in his mouth. No cup holders means that Sam’s shotgun duties are in full effect.

After he finishes with the drink and hands it back to Sam, Dean gestures a hand toward the windshield.

“Got anywhere to be headed?”

Sam is silent for a second, tapping away at his screen. He takes a bite of his sandwich to delay conversation for a moment longer, and then finds what he’s looking for.

His stomach twists enough that he regrets even considering the notion of eating his chicken sandwich, and something in his chest feels heavy. He can’t—Dean can’t—he doesn’t want to let Dean down again - there’s no reason for—

“I might have a case,” he says, “it’s pretty flimsy though.”

“I will take flimsy,” Dean says, smiling, just like Sam knew he would.

“Head to Medford, Oregon then. Looks like there might be a poltergeist in a music shop.”

He hopes he’s right. Except for how he really, really hopes he’s wrong.

“Got that pretty quick,” Dean remarks, offhand.

Sam chews the piece of his sandwich in his mouth until it gets soggy, “Yeah, alert on my phone—you remember that program, um, Ash had, back then, for demons?”

“Yeah.”

“I rigged up a couple algorithms to look for things in chat rooms and stuff,” not a lie, it’s just that those algorithms don’t run on his phone, and they haven’t been of much use yet, catching far more talk about the Supernatural books than anything of use, “caught one, looks like.”

Dean nods, snorts, “Nerd.”

Sam rolls his eyes, and Dean ticks the radio up and takes a left turn without turning on his blinker.

Oregon it is.

Dean pulls into a gas station and Sam gets out to fill up while Dean heads inside, sunglasses on now that it’s bright enough out to be acceptable. Sam tries his best not to glance at the cameras.

Dean comes back with jerky and a couple Hostess fruit pies, which means that Sam’s in trouble. If those pies are coming anywhere near Dean’s mouth, there’s something wrong.

Sam settles in behind the steering wheel, and Dean slumps into his sleeping position, wincing as it turns his left leg the wrong direction. He leaves the sunglasses on, blocking against the sun and probably against a hangover.

Sam stops at a stop sign, counts 1-2-3 in his head, and lets off the break.

“Would be nice to have angel healing right about now,” Dean says, quiet enough that Sam almost misses it.

Sam’s throbbing back and neck and the itching cuts on his hands agree. He carefully keeps his gaze on the road and clears his throat.

“I miss him too.” The needle ticks up toward five-above the speed limit, and then to seven-above.

Dean’s silent for long enough that Sam starts to think he might’ve fallen asleep.

“I keep expecting him to pop up in the backseat or something,” Dean says, “Or to wake up with him staring at me or something as equally creepy.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, lamely. It’s been weird. Without Cas around. Without angels and angelic politics and the shadows of wings in his peripherals.

Dean sighs, and apparently that’s the end of the conversation, because he turns away from Sam and settles in.

Something about it crawls under Sam’s skin, and while Dean snores away next to him, he works it out in his head.

Cas had—they’d had a complicated relationship. But Cas… After Bobby, he was all they really had left.

And now…

They don’t even know if he’s alive. If he’s managed to survive up in heaven, with angels who want him dead or tortured or locked away. Sam swallows his empathy down and it sits heavy in his stomach.

It was his choice though. And it’s not like they have one, down here with shields around heaven and a singular angel wandering—

Sam’s thoughts stutter, and he moves the car up to ten-above.

He hadn’t even—why had Dean—if they had a chance to get an angel out of heaven—

Teeth grind together in his mouth, and he purposefully gathers the dead skin on his lips and bits it off. Why hadn’t he considered—well, he knows why. He’s been trying to avoid thinking about—But those months after, why hadn’t he—

Did Gadreel alter—

Did Dean—

He shudders enough that the Impala almost strays to the other side of the road, and then he tells himself to pull it together.

Another person to not think about, then. He can do that.

Except—

No.

He drives, keeping his eyes on those dashed yellow lines, and tries hard not to think about Cas or angels or semi-trucks barreling behind them.

“Garth texted,” Dean says, voice rough with sleep once Sam pulls over for gas somewhere in Montana, “looks like he’s having a kid.”

Sam’s eyebrows shoot up, “No kidding?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “he also says he needs your new number.”

Sam furrows his eyebrows and glances out at Dean, who’s leaning against the car while the fuel pump runs.

“Forgot I changed it,” he says, even though he didn’t forget.

Dean hums in response and presses the button for a receipt.

“Kevin emailed,” Sam says, twisting his chair back and forth in the middle of a nearly empty Arby’s in Utah. He likes these seats, the kind that rotate. It gives him something to do.

Dean’s finishing up the last of the curly fries, and one hangs out of his mouth when he asks, “All good?”

Sam makes a face at Dean’s messy eating, and scrolls through his inbox to find the message again, “Yeah. No visions, and he’s finally stopped taking those caffeine pills. His mom’s got a new job, and he’s getting back to playing the cello.”

“Good for him,” Dean says, genuine.

Sam nods and steals Dean’s milkshake.

“Remember that time with the Spriggans when you were a kid?”

“I was fifteen, Dean.”

“Yeah. Remember—” Dean hiccups on a laugh, “- remember how dad wound up with that busted arm and we stayed in, uh—”

“Palmyra.”

“Yeah, Palmyra, and you, uh, got that job in that grocery store?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember how bad you hated it?”

“Yeah. It sucked. I remember.”

“Well, you really rocked that bowtie, Sammy.”

Dean subsides into silence again, and the Doobie Brothers play in the absence of his voice. Dean’s been doing this a lot lately, talking about things he remembers out of the blue. Sam’s not sure why yet, but he doesn’t think it’s anything bad, at least not yet.

Times like this, he’s pretty sure they can get back to normal. He hopes for it.

He pukes up Subway on the side of the road, half-an-hour out from Medford, and Dean holds his hair back while laughing at the fact that Sam was the one who wanted to eat there in the first place.

Sam doesn’t tell him it probably wasn’t the sandwich, but the fact that Lucifer starred in his dream when he dozed off, long-term habits forcing him to grab every chance to sleep that he can, not that he’s been staying asleep for very long.

Instead, he laughs along with Dean weakly, and wonders at how screwed up he is.

Muse-ic is sandwiched between a brewery and a fabric store, and is just as pretentious as it sounds in theory.

There’s signs in the windows that don’t exactly match up with Sam’s dreams, (not visions, he’s not calling it a vision) however.

“Closing-out sale,” Dean says, raising his eyebrows and pursing his lips, “well, glad we drove all the way up here for the fifty-percent off coupon.”

“Shut up,” Sam says, smoothing out his t-shirt as they wiggle their way out of the car on the cramped street, “I told you this was a stretch.”

Dean walks up beside him and squints at the store, “Well, as much fun as it would be for you to be wrong, I don’t think poltergeist is out of the picture. If my place started freaking out on me, I’d sell out too.”

Sam considers this, then nods, impressed, “Guess so. Let’s check it out.”

The door strums a guitar over their heads when they walk in, and Dean immediately heads for the vinyls.

“Hi, welcome to Muse-ic,” a voice says, bored, “Everything’s a bargain, because the store’s haunted and I’m moving to New Mexico.”

Sam allows himself a moment to be taken aback, then another moment to catch Dean’s eye and exchange a ‘what-in-the-hell’ look, and then he moves into discovery mode. It’s not the first time someone’s openly believed wholeheartedly in the supernatural, but it’s a rare enough occurrence that it’s a little shocking.

“Haunted?” Sam questions, moving to the counter. A man moves behind it, tall, black, with dreads and stress lines around his eyes. Sam’s heart drops to hang out with his intestines.

“Yeah man,” says the owner, “it’s freaky as all get-out. Doors slamming themselves shut, lights flickering—the ghost threw a violin at me the other day! I’m not sticking around with something like that, no thanks.”

“You don’t say,” Dean says, sauntering close to the counter.

“Yeah man. I know all those ghost shows tell you about ‘em, but it’s freaky for it to happen to you. Besides, I’ve been wanting to get rid of the shop for awhile,” he leans in and stage whispers, “don’t tell my dad that though.”

Sam snorts a bit, and glances at Dean, who quirks an eyebrow at him. Sam shrugs.

Dean turns to face the guy, “Well, funny story. Me and my brother,” he juts a thumb out at Sam, “hunt ghosts and things. If you’ve got a ghost hanging around, we could take care of it for you.”

“Mmm-hmm, I’m sure. And you’ll just need three easy payments of $99.99, right? What do you think I am, an absolute idiot?”

“All we’d need is an hour in the shop after you close,” Sam interjects, hurriedly, “we don’t charge for it.”

The guy stares at them both for an uncomfortable amount of time.

“Lenny sent you guys, didn’t he? Man, he has no clue how to stay out of my business. It’s not like the shop’ll sink me if I don’t sell it!”

Sam and Dean share a look, and Sam decides it’s time to improvise even further.

“Look, I don’t know your whole situation, but it’d definitely be easier to turn a profit on the property if it wasn’t haunted.”

“Well, I know that,” the guy replies, before another pause stretches before them.

Dean clears his throat.

“An hour. That’s it?”

“That’s it. No more ghosts, you can sell the place and get out of here,” Dean says, leaning against a shelf.

“And no payments?”

“Nope,” Sam says, tucking his hands in his back pockets.

Another long moment stretches out, and then the guy sighs and slumps down on the counter.

“I don’t deserve Lenny, I really don’t. No messing around with the merchandise, I’ve got the security system up on my laptop, and I’ll be watching you the whole time.”

“We… might have to destroy some walls,” Sam says, fidgeting.

The guy blinks at them, and then shrugs, “I can fix the walls.”

“We’re in agreement then,” Dean says.

“Looks like it,” the guy says.

The guy—who never did tell them his name—leaves at five, promising to be back if they snag his stuff.

They prep the bags in the car, ingredients a little different from the first time they did this, to account for the possibility of a more dangerous poltergeist, but pretty much the same.

“You think that psychic’s still alive?” Dean asks, staring off somewhere as he puts the Angelica root in the piles.

“Missouri?” Sam asks, getting a nod in response, “Probably. Hopefully.”

Dean hums and adds holy oil to the mixture.

Part of the problem with poltergeists is that they don’t always attach themselves to somewhere meaningful to them. It makes finding the bones or other remains of the person the spirit belonged to pretty difficult. That’s why something like this ritual is so useful. It wouldn’t do much to a normal ghost, maybe slow them down a bit, but hunters—and the Men of Letters—have been using things like this for millenia.

Of course, it doesn’t make completing the ritual any easier.

The shop is small, and unconnected to the other buildings, so getting the four spots for the cardinal directions isn’t a struggle. What is is the poltergeist deciding that it doesn’t like them doing the ritual and throwing things about the shop. Including Sam, who almost gets impaled on a guitar. That’d be a sucky way to go out.

He struggles to his feet and busts through the plaster of the wall with his elbow once he realizes he’s facing the south wall.

The poltergeist shrieks, and a violin bow almost goes through Sam’s brain via his eyeball.

Just a normal Friday for them.

Dean kicks a hole in the wall next to the front door and stuffs the bag in, and then the whirlwind dies down. Four bags, four walls, no more poltergeist (hopefully).

“Well, that was fun,” Dean says, slumping to sit on the floor next to a drum set. A record on the wall loses its precarious balance on a nail and nearly falls on his head, crashing into the cymbal instead.

Sam starts laughing, and Dean soon follows. They’re both still cracking up when the owner comes sprinting back in, laptop clutched in his arms like it’s a teddy bear.

“Hey man,” Dean says, once he can talk again, “Sorry about your stuff.”

“No, no, that’s—that’s, um, fine,” the guy says, shaking, “you, uh, you got rid of it?”

“Yep,” Sam says, thumping his head next to where the violin bow is hanging in the wall, “no more ghosts.”

“Great, um great. I, um, I didn’t think it would be—” the guy’s stuttering, so Sam takes pity on him.

“We’re used to it, don’t worry.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, holding the laptop even tighter to his chest, “Wow.”

Dean forces himself back up to his feet and rolls his shoulders, “Well, should be heading out, ‘eh Sam?”

“Yep, yep,” Sam says, shaking his head. It’s spinning a bit, probably from getting tossed over those shelves.

“Wait!” The owner says, rushing to the desk. He presses some buttons on the register, fumbling. He pulls out a few ones and a ten, “I can’t—you guys should take some money. I don’t have much—”

“Relax man,” Dean says, walking closer to Sam, “We already told you, we do this for free.”

“But…” the guy trails off, glancing back and forth between them, before landing on some conclusion that lights up his face, “I know! You can have some of the stuff! I’ll never sell it, so you should take some. As thanks.” He’s nodding frantically, and Sam feels bad for him. Having something chucked at your head by a ghost is one thing. Seeing someone almost get murdered by a ghost is another.

“We’re fine,” Sam says, holding out a hand, “really. We just wanted to help.”

“No, no, you have to take some things. It’ll make things right.”

And that is how they find themselves driving away from Medford with three guitars, a stack of vinyls, a cardboard box filled with various musical instruments and a package of picks, and a music stand in the backseat.

They don’t talk on the way out of town, and a part of Sam feels oddly blank. Hunts usually make things easier. It means slipping back into bantering and arguments. It means smiling at each other sometimes. Now, for whatever reason, Sam feels something slimy in his chest wriggle around and make itself and home.

Dean stops at the first diner that proclaims it has pie.

The email is sandwiched between his Sumerian Monthly newsletter and a spam email promising to help Sam build credit if he transfers money to an offshore account.

Attn: Moose

He hasn’t thought about Crowley since sending him off with his newly minted fake IDs and social. Or rather, he has purposefully avoided thinking about Crowley since the send off. But there is no doubt in his mind that this email is from the newly-humanised demon.

He flicks his eyes up over his laptop, glancing at Dean, who’s busy chowing down on a burger and watching the tv behind Sam’s head.

The cursor hovers for a second, and then Sam clicks.

Moose,

Thought I’d update you on the sorry state of my life as the newest employee at Jack’s Bar and Grill. I now make over minimum wage, thanks to the fact that two managers quit and I’m the only one crazy enough (or rather, not secretly in high school enough) to take the job.

I stand by my assertion that while demons are hellish, it’s humans that are truly awful beings. Customers are poison.

My newly present moral compass directed me to send a thank you your way. You and squirrel did not need to send me off with anything other than the suit I was wearing (Which you ruined, by the way. I won’t charge for dry cleaning because I’m becoming a nice person without my consent.). The identification and money have provided me food and shelter.

Best of luck with whatever fresh hell is inevitably heading your way.

Crowley

Sam can’t help but notice that there is no explicit “thank you” in the email, but he can forgive it. Crowley hasn’t been human for a few centuries after all. Niceties are probably a struggle.

And it isn’t that he doesn’t recognize the email for what it is—it’s a ploy for friendship. An opportunity for Sam to hit reply and form a new connection.

He hits delete.

(It’s not because he hates Crowley, it’s not. Out of all the people Sam knows, Crowley probably understands him best.

That’s the scary part.)

He clicks on the compose button and reaches for his wallet to rummage through the business cards he has in there. Some are fakes, but some aren’t.

Antiques and Palm Readings, one reads, and Sam flips it over to glance at the email address. He types it out and then types out a quick thank you. Can’t hurt to thank a guy who saved the lives of a bunch of children, even if it got them into a heap of trouble.

“You remember when dad used to take us camping?” Dean asks, eyes still looking somewhere behind Sam’s head, watching whatever sport is playing this time of year.

“Yeah,” Sam says, distracted, “sure.”

Dean’s eyes flicker toward him, and then Sam’s laptop is being shut. He moves his fingers out of the way, quickly, glaring at Dean while he recovers.

“Yeah, I remember. This is important, Dean.” He reaches out to reopen the laptop, but Dean’s still got a hand on it.

“Do we still have that tent in the back?”

Sam blinks, then thinks about it, “The tiny one with the awful zipper?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Probably, it was in there last time I saw it.”

“We should go camping. Real camping. Tent and campfire and all”

Sam stops trying to pry Dean’s hand off his laptop and stares openly instead, fueling his look with every ounce of incredulity he can muster.

“Dean, it’s still cold out.”

“So? Seems like we learned how to camp in the snow better than anything else.”

Sam takes a moment to just breathe and question his brother’s sanity.

“Why?” He’s curious.

Dean shrugs, and the hand moves away from his laptop, but Sam doesn’t reopen it. Dean’s trying to play it cool, which means that this means something to him, even if Sam doesn’t know what.

“Just thought it could be a good way to throw off any cops, no way to get caught on camera if you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

It’s not a completely useless excuse, but Sam still takes a long look at Dean, trying to figure out why. Dean squirms a bit under his stare, but stands his ground.

“Whatever,” Sam says, finally, opening up his laptop. Dean grins and stuffs the rest of his burger in his mouth.

Sam looks up the list of campgrounds on his phone, relying on the spotty wifi networks to get him through.

“Up a canyon?” He asks, scratching the side of his face.

He sees Dean shrug out of the corner of his eye.

“Okay, got one.”

There’s a smile trying to find a way onto his face, but it’s such a strange thing that he doesn’t much mind. If somebody told twelve-year-old Sam that someday he’d be looking forward to camping out in a cramped tent in the middle of nowhere, Sam probably would have shanked them. Just for his honor or something.

But here they are, somehow still alive after all these years (twelve-year-old Sam would have been surprised by that too), heading up a canyon to camp for no other reason than that they can.

Up in the mountains, it’s a little cooler, a little more humid. For a second, the trees remind him of all the hunts that’ve gone bad for them in the woods, but he’s used to everything going wrong, so he decides he’ll enjoy the view instead. They drive by a pitiful excuse for a lake, and Dean interrupts Rolling Stones with a vague, “Deer.” Sure enough, when Sam looks over, there’s a deer, staring at the Impala as they cruise past.

They set up camp in silence, a kind of calm camaraderie coming over them. Sam wonders if Dean is thinking about Dad, like he is.

When he’d been in the middle of the trials, he hadn’t slept well. Turning a lot, needing to get up to cough. Getting too hot, getting too cold. He’d had lots of strange, interrupted dreams. Dad was there a lot, in snatches of memory. Once, during the summer, they’d camped for three weeks with the only shower being the creek that ran nearby. Dad taught them survival skills, first aid, how to catch and cook a squirrel over a fire started only with a magnifying glass and the fluff from inside Sam’s jacket pockets. They’d slept out under the stars the nights it didn’t rain, and he and Dean had to sleep in a temporary tarp shelter twice, when dad drove them out into the wilderness blindfolded and left them to get back to camp on their own during a two-day bombardment of rain that came down heavy enough to make Sam joke about building an ark.

It’s different now, but it’s still just him and Dean. Surviving.

“Gonna be a tight squeeze,” Dean says, in the calm.

Sam looks over to where Dean’s setting up the tent, thinks ya’ think?, and says, “Been in tighter,” instead.

The tent says two man, but those two men sure weren’t Winchesters.

Dean makes a face at him, like he can hear the sarcasm, but rolls his eyes and hammers in the stakes without further comment.

Sam wanders out, looking for firewood. It’s dry enough beneath the evergreens that he finds plenty, but they’re all unwieldy things, and he’s not looking forward to chopping them. He tugs some of them back to camp half-heartedly, focusing more on how the mountain air feels in lungs that should belong to him. He kicks the fireplace rocks into submission and pulls out a shovel to do something other than dig up a grave for the first time in a long time.

When he tunes into Dean, he’s half-singing, “When you talk about destruction, don’t you know you can count me out.”

Sam throws a shovel-full of ashy dirt a little too close to Dean’s boots. He sends Sam a dirty look, but he blinks innocently. Dean snorts and stretches, leaning into it.

“Been a long time since I’ve been camping,” Dean says, “If you don’t count camping out in abandoned houses.”

Sam raises his eyebrows, “I don’t.”

Dean tosses him the bird and hauls the cooler out of the backseat, a couple of harmonicas and a mouth keyboard falling out in the process.

“We meet the weirdest people,” Sam says at the same time Dean gestures at the musical mess with a put-upon expression permanently fixed on his face.

“Ya’ think?” Dean questions, rolling his eyes again.

Sam thinks that maybe this is the most genuine nicest they’ve been to each other for a while.

Sam starts the fire, and Dean tosses some loose twigs on it once it’s started to burn.

They watch, quietly, as the sun sets, bathing the area in red. Sam looks over at Dean a couple times, and catches the glint in his eyes. When the first star appears, he points to it and kicks Dean’s shin. Dean kicks him back.

The stars are nice out here. It’s been a long time since they’ve been star gazing. A really long time. He thinks maybe Dean tried to when there was a soulless Sam wandering about, but this isn’t logic, or natural.

They don’t often talk when they’re star watching, but it’s a day of breaking rules, so when Dean speaks up, Sam’s not surprised.

“Makes you feel small, don’t it?” He questions.

Sam smiles, feels his dimples form, and doesn’t even try to lessen it, “Great, isn’t it?” He questions right back.

Dean grins at him.

Just a couple hours into it, when the fire’s not quite down to embers because Dean keeps feeding it, Sam can feel a headache starting to come on. He reaches over and slaps Dean’s chest.

“Gonna hit the hay,” he says, getting to his feet and trying to stretch his neck around. It doesn’t much want to move, still stiff.

Dean snorts at him, “Sure thing, gramps.”

Sam flicks Dean’s head as he passes and unzips the tent, struggling with the zipper that hasn’t been quite right since the last time they’d really used it way back before—before-

Before.

Inside, their sleeping bags (extra long, not that they fit, either of them, anyway) are tucked next to each other. Sam manages to figure out that Dean left the toothbrushes in the Impala and forces his way back out. He finds Dean pulling a guitar out of the backseat.

Dean freezes once he sees Sam, and that cements the idea that he’s not just moving things around.

Sam goes to the other side of the car and digs through his duffle, watching Dean hover awkwardly out of the corner of his eyes. He puts toothpaste on his toothbrush and starts scrubbing.

“You play?” he asks from around his mouthful of toothpaste.

Dean shrugs, but closes the door on his side and slumps in on himself, “You remember, uh, Sonny’s?”

Yeah, Sam remembers. It sends a million different feelings coursing through him. He remembers.

“Yeah.”

Dean adjusts his grip on the guitar and starts to walk back toward the campfire, “Learned a little bit while I was there. Thought I’d see what I remember.”

Sam spits into a bush and opens the car door again to grab a water bottle. He rinses his mouth and his toothbrush then packs everything back inside the Impala.

He hesitates a moment. His head is pounding, and his stomach feels weird, but Dean’s not—there’s not—Dean doesn’t—

He thinks he’ll regret it if he leaves.

So he returns to his spot next to the fire and settles in. Dean glances at him a couple times, but goes back to tuning the guitar.

Sam takes another drink from the water bottle and finally realizes he’s shivering. He moves a bit closer to the fire, now down to coals that would be perfect if they’d thought to bring any marshmallows.

Dean strums a cord, then messes one up and corrects himself. He plucks a couple of strings.

“You’re gonna ruin your hands playing without a pick.”

Dean shrugs, “It’s not that bad. Just have to get used to it again.”

Sam sips at his water and tries to force the thing bubbling up in the back of his throat back down. This is a Dean thing, no need for him to get his grubby hands on it.

Dean plays a couple chords without any pattern, and then settles into something that sounds familiar, but off.

They haven’t listened to American Pie for… A long time.

Dean strums something wrong, and Sam’s head pounds, and he blurts out, “You’re one finger off on that E-minor chord.”

Dean stares at him, hand hovering over the guitar.

“Your um, second finger, you’re one fret off,” Sam mumbles, tossing the plastic water bottle into the fire, then the cap. Bad for the environment, but it’s an old habit.

Dean glances down at his finger placement and corrects his positioning, pausing to strum.

“Since when do you play?” Dean asks, uncertainty dancing around his mouth.

Sam shrugs and tucks his hands in his pockets to drag his coat tighter to his body, and something awful thrums inside him, right next to something that makes him want to cry, “In, um. I, uh. J-Jess, she, um. She played.”

He stares into the fire and tries not to let the memories of a different life bubble to the surface. He’s long past it now, he has to be.

Dean clears his throat and taps his foot, and then leans over, holding the guitar by its neck toward Sam.

“Prove it.”

Sam stares at Dean for a long minute, the low flames of the fire giving his face a strange, flickering quality that’s a little uncomfortable.

He finally reaches out and grabs the guitar, settling it into position. It’s been a long time, and it feels as unfamiliar as he remembers it being the first time he’d picked one up.

“I don’t remember much,” he admits to Dean, letting the strings bite into his fingers. Some things—positioning and chord charts—have stuck in his head, the same way facts and stories and rituals always seem to, but that doesn’t mean this is like riding a bike. Something like this takes practice and dedication that Sam never kept up on.

He strums a couple chords, then plucks a few notes—disjointed, all of it. The songs he’d learned back then, infatuated with a girl and the idea of creativity, are lost to age.

He plucks a couple more notes, then strums a few more chords, and stops, handing it back to Dean, who’s got his chin resting in a hand that in turn is resting on his knee.

Between the lighting and the scruff Dean hasn’t shaved yet, he looks a lot like dad. Just as worn out and just as tired as any memory Sam has of him.

Sam runs his hands down his thighs, then back up once Dean takes the guitar back, and stands up, heading back toward the tent without a word, All these years, and there’s still things they don’t know. Tripping hazards, curiosities.

His head pounds, and everything looks a little wonky, so he bundles himself up and slides into the sleeping bag, head pillowed on his extra jacket. He watches the light from the fire that’s barely visible behind the tent wall, and rubs his temples with a hand that really should know if it’s cold or not.

From there, it’s a ping-pong-table journey to various hunts—they meet up with the Ghostfacers again, out of all people, in Washington. There’s an arachne near Baton Rouge, an awful case with a night hag that takes them up the coast of North Carolina. They jump up to Sioux Falls after a two-day stop at the Bunker, fight some vampires, and help Jody save a girl named Alex. That one makes the two of them itchy, and after a couple days spent healing up (Sam gets dizzy if he stands up too fast, or if he tries to run, or if . . . he does anything, really), they head back out. A weird thing with mobster monsters boils under Sam’s skin until he can take out a rawhead with a strange sense of vindication in an abandoned building between Springfield and Chicago. For some reason, there’s an Ōkami in Pittsfield, Vermont, and that sends them scrambling for Bobby’s notes before they end up shoving the thing in the only woodchipper in a fifty-mile radius out of sheer annoyance.

And content is the opposite of what he should feel. He’s suffered through hunting for so many years, taken it one case at a time, and repeated saving people as his mantra. He and Dean have baggage, upon baggage, stacked on top of more baggage, it shouldn’t work.

But now? The ease that comes between him and Dean after a successful hunt? Whatever it is about hunts that lets him zone into research and out of the maelstrom that exists in his head at any given time?

The fact that they’ve started to do things again, things that aren’t sitting in the bunker or drinking themselves half to death to drown their anger at the unfairness of the world?

It’s addicting. It pulls him back in, it’s all he’s thinking about, the next hunt, and what they’ll do once it’s over.

The camping trip is a one-time event, but the hunt after that one, Dean looked at him and grinned, even in the midst of a crocotta’s filth, the thing already starting to rot on the floor, and said, “Hey, want to catch a movie?” So, because it was only one in the afternoon after they showered, they ended up at a matinee screening of The Lego Movie, sandwiched between two families with squirming kids, and Dean ate way more than his share of the popcorn, and they both pretended not to be invested in the story.

After that, they spent a free weekend lounging at a motel with an actual functioning pool, far enough south that it was warm enough to spend quality time in it. And then Dean came back from a food run with a couple of baseball tickets and they went to watch the game, Sam cheering for one team, and Dean for the other, just for the drama of it.

Spring tips into summer, and when they light up a grave in Florida to waste a spirit that’s been shoving people off of boardwalks, Sam works up the courage to be the one to suggest something, and they both freckle at the beach, and Dean gets a killer sunburn that has Sam out buying Aloe lotion at eleven at night, a hangover practically already pounding behind his head.

There’s a music festival in Garland, Texas, that Sam convinces Dean to stop for after a near run-in with the FBI in Waco—his skin finally settles into a tan while they’re there, and Dean just freckles more.

And other hunters have their phone numbers now, so sometimes one of their screens—or both, if it’s the nicknames-only group chat—will light up at odd times of the day, and they’ll answer questions about what to do with certain monsters, what a case sounds like it might be. The influx of monsters just seems to spur the other hunters on, and Sam volunteers in the group chat to keep track of everyone’s hunts to see if there’s a pattern (so far, nothing, but the map room is getting more use than it’s probably had in its entire existence, whenever they’re close enough to Lebanon or have a big enough gap between hunts to stop by), so more and more people are texting him with information, and for the first time Sam actually feels like maybe he’s a part of the hunting community.

He picks up a couple books for fun in a brightly colored bookstore in a tired town in Minnesota, and Dean prods him into reading one aloud in a long forgotten tradition. Dean turns up, one day, with a battered copy of The Outsiders and a slanted grin, so they spend the meandering trip back to the Bunker from Grantville, Georgia reading it.

And sometimes, Sam’s heart tries to beat itself out of his chest, and sometimes he can’t look Dean in the eye, and sometimes he thinks he sees a flash of blue in someone else’s eyes, and sometimes he spends his free time lying in bed, doing nothing, and sometimes he screams himself awake, or scratches his hands and arms up in his sleep, and sometimes he doesn’t know what’s real or not, and sometimes—

They’re doing better than they have been for a long time. Sometimes they slip back into brotherly banter without spite fueling the words, and sometimes they play slapjack at the laundromat with the cards that’ve been in the junk box in the Impala since the dawn of time.

He’s okay. They’re okay.

They’re making it work the Winchester way. Sometimes they smile, and they mean it.

And sure, sometimes his visions pound so badly at his head that he can’t look at his laptop screen, and sure, sometimes trying to figure out how to convince Dean that he found a case online is stressful enough to make him nauseous, and sure, that book should have fallen to the ground instead of causing him a nosebleed while floating back to the table, and sure, they’ve got the FBI on their tails again, and sure, they have to worry about money and whether or not it’s worth it to stop at a motel again, and sure, sometimes goals aren’t enough to motivate him anymore.

But it’s worth it, because after taking care of a nasty shapeshifter in Iowa, Sam digs through his duffle to find a pair of clean boxers and ends up with a triceratops toy in hand and Dean guffawing his way through Sam realizing how it got there, and who put it there, and then they end up playing a strange version of catch with the thing that ends up almost being cops and robbers and nearly knock over two separate lamps in a motel room decorated with various flowers, none of which should have gone together.

And after, both of them collapsed on the opposite bed, they grin at each other tiredly, and for a second, Sam thinks they can make it through this, just like they’ve made it through everything else. They’ve lost Cas, they’ve lost Bobby, they’ve got what feels like a million different betrayals between them, and Sam’s got enough guilt to drown Noah’s ark, but they can still smile. They can still do stupid things and still hunt monsters and still save people.

They can still be brothers.

It's a town in-between jobs in rural Idaho of all places where Sam finds the book. It's in the library he's visiting because he had to get out of the motel room and he needs wifi, sitting comfortably on a Recommended Reads table.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the title reads. It curls itself around Sam's tongue, reminding him of airline pretzels.

He picks it up, thumbs through it. Catches himself reading it.

He remembers it now, sometime after Stanford, before angels and heaven and hell, sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala—one leg crooked up on the dash in a flexible feat he’d never accomplish now, what with his knees and back—reading the book aloud because the tape deck broke again and Dean only liked quiet when it was on his terms. It’d been the first time they’d read a book together since before Sam left. Dean had complained through the first couple pages, but listened intently to the rest of it whenever they were driving to one hunt or another (or nowhere in particular except away).

So he flips the page and reads down it until his brain latches onto the line, “Being with him made my brain quiet,” and he trips over it, reads it, rereads it, remembers doing the same, back with Dean, thinking that he’d never figured out how to phrase it before seeing it on that page and saying out out loud.

The library’s not funded enough to have sensors for book thieves, so he sneaks out with it, stuffs a couple of fives left over from drive-throughs in the donation box, and tells himself he’ll bring it back tomorrow.

Dean’s gone when he gets back. The Impala too. He checks his phone, realizes it’s been on silent the whole time since the hunt, and finds a text from him.

out for drinks

Which really means Dean’s either getting blackout drunk or finding someone to share a bed with. He’s gone back to his habits when they’re out and about, sometimes. Like not being in the Bunker means he has to return to his old lifestyle.

Sam sits down on his bed and unloads his bag, plugging in his laptop in the outlet next to the alarm clock. He takes another look at his phone before going on a quest to find another outlet in the room not taken up by the tv or the mini-fridge. There’s one, under the bed far enough that he has to wedge his head underneath it to reach, but it works.

He organizes the various floating papers from his bag—pamphlets, a list of potential angelic hideouts, a crushed paper airplane (no doubt from Dean)—and then repacks everything except his laptop and the book.

It’s early enough, and summer to boot, there’s more than enough light to read by coming in from the window. Sam lifts a hand, scratches at his scalp. Low humidity, he realizes, as he finds himself biting off dead skin from his lips.

He lost his last chapstick somewhere in-between the Bunker and New Mexico.

Finally, he stops stalling and just grabs the book and sits on Dean’s bed, nearer to the window than he would’ve been over on his, with the added bonus of being directly next to the air conditioner. He spares a moment to look guiltily at his laptop and think about all the research he still needs to get done, all the time he’s wasting not looking for the next hunt and then promptly thinks screw that and opens the book. It’s familiar, but there’s a lot of time (hell time, something in him whispers) between this and his last read of it.

It’s easier than it should be, losing himself in a book. He lets it trickle over him, finds comfort in the language of it, the strangeness of the timelines, the line, “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”

When the light fades out, he switches over to his bed, closer to the lamp he flicks on and glares at for a moment for its pitiful attempt at being a lamp.

Dean doesn’t come back that night. Instead, it’s the next morning, just a couple hours after Sam finished the book, pressed palms to his watering eyes, and finally realized he was tired. He wakes up enough to register Dean and rolls over, bringing the comforter with him to hide his head under.

Dean’s muttering under his breath, but Sam’s fading out again, some stray thoughts about keys and vases fluttering through his brain. He thinks maybe he should care about the stench of alcohol Dean brought with him, but it’s familiar enough that he can’t work up the energy.

Chapter Text

The visions aren’t any easier, even after all this time. They tend to blindside him—he’s become paranoid about every headache he has now.

And he has a lot of headaches.

For some reason though, he’s managed to hide them from Dean. When they’re at the Bunker, they’ve got the possibility of multiple hallways worth of space between them at any given moment, and if they’re at a motel, he can usually pass them off as a normal headache, or a bad nightmare, if they wake him up. Dean sometimes looks at him sideways, but Sam can’t bring himself to admit to anything. These visions are just a nasty last-minute reminder of the fact that he’s got evil in his veins, pumping through his entire being. He doesn’t want Dean to have another reason to—

He doesn’t want Dean to—

He doesn’t want to have to leave.

So he doesn’t say anything as the weather cools and trees start to drop their leaves. And when Dean’s eyes flick a little too far to the side, he plays the trial card, feeling sick about doing it at all, but not seeing another option.

And it’s just too easy to mutter under his breath, hangover sunglasses over his eyes despite the fact that he’d had a single beer the night before, “Been getting headaches ever since that hellhound I ganked.”

Dean takes that in, and doesn’t reply in any way Sam can hear, but the next time he starts rubbing at his temples, a couple of ibuprofen are dropped into his hand, and Dean settles into his role of watching Sam for sickness again.

So, when Sam screams himself awake in an awful motel in southern Illinois, Dean’s there in a heartbeat, giving Sam something to hold, something to reassert his control over reality with.

“Easy Sam, you’re good. We’re good.”

He slows his breathing purposefully until he doesn’t think he’s going to puke over the side of the bed and lets go of Dean’s shirt, slowly lowering himself to the bed again, trying to calm his heart.

“You good?”

“Yeah,” he manages to croak out, blinking at the abstract patterns of paint on the ceiling.

That should’ve been the end of conversation, Dean should’ve nodded and flicked the light back off. That’s the pattern, the rhythm they know all too well. It gives them each a touch of privacy they need on occasion.

But Dean stays sitting on the edge of the bed, fidgeting with the bunched up comforter.

“You, uh… You’ve been having a lot lately. Nightmares.”

Sam’s stomach reminds him that it’d like to chuck its contents, please and thank you, but he swallows heavily and tries to crack a smile, turning a bit so that he’s balanced on his forearm, nearly on level with Dean. He’s been good about this, if he plays his cards right, Dean’ll never have to know. Any suspicions hidden in his brother’s mind will be tucked away, and they’ll move on.

“What, now you want to talk about feelings?”

Dean balks at that and wrinkles his nose in Sam’s direction, “No thanks Samantha, just checking in.”

“Alright then,” Sam says, drawing out his vowels, raising his eyebrows at Dean, who finally deigns to look uncomfortable.

Dean swats his leg and moves to turn off the lamp and crawl back into his own bed, and Sam settles back in, listening to Dean’s soft breathing. He digs his fingernails into his palm and tries not to shudder.

He bides his time there, watching the neon sign outside the window that the curtains don’t really block out, and waits until Dean’s finished snoring and has settled into deep breathing and slinks out of bed, tiptoeing his way to his bag, pulling out his laptop. He pads over to the bathroom and pushes the door until it’s not quite settled into the jamb and sits on the toilet lid.

He hunches over his laptop and gets to work.

Over a breakfast of coffee and muffins Dean wandered in with, he tells Dean about the hunt.

“So, looks like this Wendigo is scheduled to reappear this year, and I’m not sure anyone will catch up with it before we get there, just because it’s been so long.”

A story about old records matching up and a mostly made-up lecture on the Men of Letters history with Wendigos has Dean jumping at the bit to head up to Iowa and try to catch the thing before it starts eating the locals.

Sam spends the drive trying to pretend he doesn’t want to go to sleep, and then dozes off anyway, waking up with a crick in his neck when Dean shakes him. They’re in a nearly deserted parking lot, a lone car reading ‘For Sale By Owner’ the Impala’s only company.

“So,” Dean says, digging through the trunk while Sam tries to blink himself awake, “was thinking we hit up a couple of local hotspots and try to get a read on the hills and hiking paths.”

Sam’s aching head disagrees with that, and every moment they waste is a risk. His visions aren’t exactly prompt, most of the time.

“No need,” he says, leaning in to drag out a knife to strap to his belt, “Men of Letters had a map to possible locations. Easier to go off that.” He gestures to the map he has on his phone, marked only by himself.

And sure, it’s a lie, but the thought of playacting tourists or visiting family when he’s got the path already mapped out in his brain sends shakes through his fingers.

Dean looks at him weird, and then shakes his head, “Geek.”

Sam rolls his eyes and tucks a flare gun under his belt too. Can’t hurt to have a couple back-up plans, even if his vision showed him a successful torching of the Wendigo.

Dean’s got a tense look around his eyes, but he slams the trunk shut and grins at Sam.

“Which way, MacGyver?”

Sam nods his head and holds out his phone like a compass.

Everything goes smoothly until the moment the Wendigo doges Dean’s molotov cocktail and it lights a scrubby bush up instead of the monster.

The Wendigo roars, an awful, primal sound that rattles something animal inside Sam, and he tucks himself down in response, instinct demanding it.

Dean, apparently doesn’t have the same instincts, because a second later, the Wendigo’s sweeping arm catches him against his chest, just outside the circle of Anasazi symbols he’d stepped out of to get a good shot for his throw.

Sam has to watch as Dean goes flying, the power behind the Wendigo’s swing terrifying. Time doesn’t slow or drag out—instead, Dean’s scream of pain does, just as awful and primal as the Wendigo’s.

“Dean!” Sam yells, helplessly.

Dean’s obviously still conscious, one arm dragging fingernails against the dirt, but he doesn’t respond.

This close to the beast, the Anasazi symbols seem incredibly flimsy. The Wendigo roars again, this time at Sam, and then it does the most terrifying thing it’s done yet and turns toward Dean, who’s scream-whimpering every few seconds.

The thing in Sam’s stomach explodes, and everything goes red for a second, and then he’s moving from out behind the boulder he’d been crouching behind and draws out the flare gun that he’s managed to keep a hold of. Behind him, the gasoline drips steadily out of the container he knocked over in his rush to duck, but he can’t focus on that.

He aims, and gets ready to fire, and then something catches his arm, sending the flare gun flying back, and him to the ground, his shoulder bursting into flares of red-hot pain. The wendigo’s arm, fast and deadly, draws back from Sam, and it roars again.

It echoes in Sam’s head as he kneels, shaking in the dirt, his good hand clutching his shoulder, and tears of hurt and frustration and terror blurring his vision.

That doesn’t stop him from watching the Wendigo stalk toward his brother, taking its time now that the threat has been neutralized.

For a second, Sam’s vision wavers, and branches of light spiral off in different directions. He sees Dean in his coffin, after the hellhounds. Dean, lying, shot, on the floor of the Mystery Spot. Dean, choking on his own blood. Dean, again and again.

The explosion in his stomach goes nuclear, and the scene wavers in front of him.

Dean.

Wendigo.

Arm.

Dirty fingernails.

Howling.

The Wendigo’s arms, reaching out for Dean’s shuddering body.

And then a million neurons fire in his brain at once and he lets go of his shoulder to hold out his hand. For a second, he thinks he catches Dean’s eyes, filled with pain and shock, and then something is hitting his palm, and he’s twisting, aiming, and firing. In the split second before it hits, he’s distantly grateful for his dad making them shoot with their non-dominant hand, all those years ago, and then there’s more screaming from the Wendigo, and it lights up, flaming.

Sam loses track of of time for a second, and once he catches back onto the passing of it, he finds himself kneeling in the dirt again, one arm digging into the ground and holding him up, while the other lays limp and useless. He can’t feel his fingers on that hand.

“Dean,” he whispers, voice cracking. He drags himself to his feet, stumbling, and tears he’s not sure of the origin of streaming out.

Dean’s not moving anymore, and when Sam slumps next to him, a horrible future stretches out before him, short and horrifying.

Then, he sees Dean’s chest move and feels his pulse under his shaking fingers, and he—he leans down to press his forehead to the dirt and sob out pleading and praise. His prayer has no direction, but there’s no doubt that’s what it is.

He feels for Dean’s ribs—definitely some issues, and tries not to look at his leg. Calm head. Stay calm. Get to help. Make sure they’re still breathing. Check for bleeding.

Pain arcs through him, and his vision whites out, and then he’s forcing himself to his feet and ripping off his flannel to use in tying up his useless arm. His phone blinks zero bars at him when he wiggles it out of his pocket, and he slides it back in, a pit reopening in the real estate in his gut.

Every moment of dad’s training—long hours, sleepless nights, shot after shot, training upon more training—flashes behind his eyes, and he nearly blacks out again, but steadies himself out of sheer determination and stumbles toward the small copse of trees the Wendigo surprised them by.

He gets to work, ripping up the rest of his shirt as best he can with one shoulder out of commission. Their bags are covered in gasoline now, but the rope and tarp are all he needs.

He can’t let himself think about it. If he does, they’ll both be out of commission, and Dean needs a hospital. He can’t think about the last time Dean needed—he can’t, he has to focus, they just need to get to a cell signal.

And then he stops and a realization socks him in the gut, and he can’t—he can’t—he can’t—

He can’t—

Moving Dean is a risk. Not moving him is one too.

He’d be quicker on his own, he’d get in range faster, he’d get Dean help sooner.

But he’d be leaving Dean.

He’d be leaving Dean.

He can’t—

He freezes in indecision, clutching a gasoline-soaked rope to his chest, and shudders. For one wild moment, he wishes dad would come and find them. Or Bobby. Or Caleb. Pastor Jim. Ellen. Jo. Hell, he’d take Ash.

He wishes that he could pray to Cas, that he’d show up and poke Dean’s forehead so they could move on.

No one knows they’re out here. They didn’t stop anywhere in town. The car is sitting uselessly in a parking lot.

Dean could be dying.

He doesn’t want to make this decision.

But logic thrums through him, and he forces himself up, stumbling to Dean’s side. He sticks his gasoline covered fingers under Dean’s nose, and tries to poke him awake. There’s no response.

He gives himself thirty seconds to put his head in his hands and shake and pray, a fervency to his words that hasn’t been present in his pleading since he was ten and begging God to let his family live and come back safe.

Then he reaches into Dean’s pocket and types a message out to his own number but doesn’t hit send. He grabs Dean’s limp hand and crosses it onto his chest, phone underneath. He watches Dean breath and bites down so his jaw can stop wobbling.

Then he grabs the supplies and surrounds Dean with them, everything in his reach if he (ever) wakes up.

The knife in his belt is held steadily in his hand, and he starts moving, looping the extra rope over his good shoulder.

Every step away from Dean forces him to go faster, faster.

His shoulder jostles, and he sees spots, but he keeps going until he’s jogging down the winding hiking path.

Boots hit the ground with a vengeance.

He’s running away again.

Later, the trip won’t register in Sam’s mind as anything but a blur, but the second he pulls out his phone and sees a feeble bar light up, everything snaps into focus, and his legs fall out from under him, and he nearly falls on his bad shoulder.

His fingers can’t type the numbers fast enough.

911, what is your emergency?

He drags himself into a sitting position and waits. The lady on the other end of the line is trying to keep talking to him, but nothing is registering, his brain a useless mush. At one point, he thinks he must pass out, because the next thing he knows, someone is rolling him onto a stretcher and the sky is turning pink with the sunset.

He sits himself up and thrashes out at the people around him. There’s loud voices, and his head is pounding, pounding, pounding. He clutches at it and feels a few tears seep out. They seem to make it worse, increase the pressure in his head. Someone is talking to him.

“My brother,” he croaks out, trying to shield himself from the lights that bob in the darkness.

“Sir, I need you to lie down—”

He can’t shake his head unless he wants to see what the universe looks like in between its cracks, so he just huddles closer to himself and presses the only hand he can to his eye.

“My brother,” he insists, the words tripping their way out, “you gotta find my brother.”

“Sir, medical teams are on the way to him right now, we need to—“

She’s not listening.

“My brother, Dean,” he snarls out, the world spiraling into pulses of light, “my brother.”

The noise is too much, he changes his grip so that his hand is covering his ear.

“My brother,” he says again, pleading this time.

When the world fuzzes out again, he uses every last ounce of will he has to try and convey the importance of getting to Dean.

“Dean.”

The hospital is a blur of people and things and questions. Everything about it is too much, but Dean had been there when he woke up on the way out of the ambulance, on another stretcher, unconscious, surrounded by people, but there. He has to keep it together. For Dean.

“Is my brother okay?” He asks, again and again, as people try to talk to him. One nurse spares him a moment and tells him he’s in surgery, but they think he’s going to be just fine.

Sam knows enough to not trust that, but lights keep flashing warnings behind his eyes, and every sound someone makes adds to the orchestra of five-year-olds playing a symphony in his brain, and he holds the hope close to his chest.

The doctor comes in and sits on one of those rolling chairs. She’s tired, that much is obvious, so Sam mentally praises her for her professionality as she begins her speech.

“Hi, I’m Doctor Martini, how are you feeling?”

He’s exhausted, drained, worried about getting arrested, and everything is sore. His head is throbbing, pulsing, and when he lays down a certain way, he feels like he’s going to throw up. He’s got feeling back in his arm—but not the good kind.

"Fine. Do you know how my brother’s doing?”

She smiles a tight-lipped smile at him and takes the question in stride, “He’s recovering well from the surgery. We’ve got him under close observation, but once he passes through the biggest threat of infection, you’ll probably be able to go and see him.”

“How bad’s his leg?” Sam questions. He knows it has to be nasty.

The doctor swallows a sigh, and consults the clipboard at the end of Sam’s bed, almost absentmindedly, “Your brother experienced some extreme high-impact trauma. His leg took the brunt of it, and the bone shattered. Luckily, it didn’t pierce the skin, but it’s going to be a long recovery.”

“Comminuted fracture?” Sam questions. His dad once shattered a bone in his arm, and he’d hung off of every word the doctor said while he and Dean sat next to dad’s bed. Hospitals make him nervous, and at this point, he’s almost accepted the fact that they’ll be arrested the moment either of them heals up enough to function.

The doctor raises her eyebrows and nods, “Yep. We had to place screws in your brother’s leg during the surgery. He’ll be in a cast for a long while.”

“Do you know how long?”

“With the type and severity of break he has? We’re looking at a couple months at least, and lots of physical therapy to follow.”

Sam’s stomach drops out from under him. Monsters don’t stop for things like broken bones and physical therapy. He’s got to keep it together though. Too many eyes. Any investigation into their identities, and Dean’ll be healing his leg from a prison bed. As long as he can keep it together, they have a chance. His iffy arm and two working legs have the advantage between the two of them right now.

He swallows and nods his head slowly.

“Now, if you don’t mind, I have some questions for you.”

Sam looks up from where he’d been vacantly staring at his hands where he’s got them twisted together so he can prod at his scrapes on the down-low. His right hand is buzzing with pain, but whatever they have him on makes it bearable.

"Uh, yeah.”

"The monster, did you get it?”

Sam blinks at the doctor, darts his eyes to the door, and measures his chances for escape. It won’t happen, not without Dean, and not without knowing where he even is.

The doctor sighs and leans forward to rest a hand on her knee.

"Look, I’ve been in on the monster scene for a while. My sister...” she trails off, “Well, we don’t talk anymore, but I thought about calling her up once I heard about the local legends. She’s a hunter. Like you, I’m guessing.”

Sam nods absently and tucks his thumb in so he can use his fingernail to scrape at his scars.

"We, uh, yeah. We killed it. Shouldn’t—it shouldn’t be a threat anymore.”

"Good,” the doctor says, straightening back up and the mask of professionality she’d entered with slides back over her features, “Well then, Mr. Rivers, how’s your head?”

"Uh,” Sam says, trying to switch gears despite the throbbing behind his eyes, “fine?”

Doctor Martini raises her eyebrows at him, “Sure about that? My notes here say that you were clutching your head and your eyes weren’t tracking when the EMTs finally got you in the ambulance. Not normal symptoms of shock, and you were lucid enough to talk to first responders. Do you have a history of head pain?”

"I—uh, I get migraines sometimes,” Sam says, trying to figure out a way to explain his behavior that won’t get him sent to the psych ward.

"Have these migraines ever been treated by a professional?”

"Uh, no. Not really.” He tries to hide his bewilderment and swallow down the scratchiness in his throat, “They—uh, I had them on and off for a long time, and then they kind of...faded away. They just recently started again.”

"And have you experienced any lifestyle changes recently?”

"Uh,” Sam has to think. There’s just not really a way to tell a medical professional, no matter how involved in the hunting world, that he nearly died, had an angel stuffed in him, and has demon blood running in his veins that occasionally gives him visions of the future.

He shrugs, trying to meet the doctor’s eyes.

"Do you regularly consume caffeine?”

"Uh, coffee, yeah,” Sam says, returning his eyes to his hands. He wishes Dean were in the room, even if he was just unconscious. His arm hurts.

"Do you have a history with brain or head injuries?”

"I’ve, uh, had a few concussions in my lifetime, yeah,” he admits, wondering if angelic healing can heal something like that. If so, maybe he doesn’t have any damage, but if not… Those types of injuries pile up.

The lights are way too bright. The pain they’re causing his eyes is worse than whatever soreness is pulsing through his body. He thinks maybe they’re the reason why his vision is so blurry.

"How often do you experience these migraines?”

"Maybe once a week?” Sam offers, unsure.

"Do you have a family history of migraines?”

Another shrug is all the doctor gets, a little wobby, “Didn’t know my mom. My dad was an alcoholic, so no telling there.”

He’s done his research—or rather, Jess had, back when the stress of finals tended to make him hurl and hole himself up in a dark room and-

His head is throbbing.

The doctor nods, flipping over a page on her clipboard, “Do you exercise regularly?”

“I try.”

“How do you usually treat these migraines?”

"Uh, over-the-counter pain meds and a dark room, mostly.”

"And you’ve never seen a doctor about these migraines?”

Sam pulls at a scab on his hand, “No, uh. They don’t happen that often. Mostly crop up when I get stressed.”

It’s not a complete lie. The origin...is a little different.

"Do they usually make you pass out?”

"Uh, they have before.”

"Are you experiencing head pain right now?”

Sam can see where she’s trying to lead him, and he’s tired, he’s ready to find Dean and get out of here, he doesn’t want to be in charge, he doesn’t want to have dragged his brother out of the woods and right into the hands of the police who’re no doubt going to be raining hellfire down on them as soon as they realize who they are—

He shrugs with one shoulder, glancing somewhere beside the doctor’s right ear, “I guess.”

The doctor’s volume is lowered when she next speaks, and Sam’s distantly grateful. He hadn’t realized how the sound was hurting him.

“Well, I’m going to recommend a blood test and an MRI. If we can rule out certain causes, it’ll help in the treatment.”

“I, uh, I don’t need…” Sam trails off. He’s so sick of lying. It’s all he ever does anymore. And if treatment involved medication, it’ll be good to be able to stock the med kits legally. It’s not like taking some kind of treatment to get pain meds is anything new for them.

The doctor’s mask breaks one more time, and she just looks sad.

“And how is your arm feeling?”

“Better,” he offers.

Something about that must tick the doctor off, because the expression on her face goes blank and she stands up.

“How about I turn the lights off in here and let you get some rest? Hopefully your brother will be awake tomorrow, and you can see him. Then we can discuss treatment for both of you.” Sam nods and leans back in the bed as the doctor stands and walks toward the door. “If you need to call anyone, you can do that when you wake up as well,” she says before turning out the light and exiting, shutting the door behind her. Do they even have anyone to call? Anyone who’d really miss them?

Jody, Sam remembers, she’ll be calling soon to check in on them. She does that now, trying to see if they’re still alive. He tries to lay down so that the throbbing isn’t worse than when he’s sitting up and is grateful for whatever meds they have him on. They’re dulling the pain, and he hasn’t slipped into an unwanted vision yet. Before he drifts off, he tries to shut down all his thoughts about what they’re going to do. Dean, with a busted leg, and no Cas around to help— No Cas— Cas— At least they have the car nearby. And the Bunker once they get out. (He tells himself it’s not an if.) They’ll figure it out from there. They have to.

A police officer takes Sam’s statement. A couple of people pass through and ask questions too. Sam fibs his way through, same easy story they’ve been using when they end up in the hospital since he was old enough to go on hunts. They were just out hunting in God’s country and something big and mean attacked, sorry officer, my memory’s a little wonky. He can see the people glance at his arm, and the gashes that hide under it, and decide on mountain lion or bear or whatever the local story is.

He spends every second of it with his heart rattling, expecting to be arrested, to have the cuffs slapped on.

The hospital makes him call Jody. She’s the only person that could feasibly count as their emergency contact, except maybe Garth (but it’s coming up on the full moon, so that’s a no go).

And she insists on driving down to get them.

Sam doesn’t have the energy or brainpower to argue with her. Everything is an effort, drugs screwing with him and uncertainty exhausting him.

He and Dean have a moment, once they relocate Sam—who’s upgraded from complete bed rest to being able to be pushed around in a wheelchair—and it’s almost as jarring as the pain in Sam’s arm.

Seeing Dean again, breathing and complaining and flirting with a nurse older than him by a couple decades hurts. It punches something out in Sam’s heart.

Winchesters don’t cry for much, but the moment when their eyes meet is a close one.

Sam can’t hug well with his arm, and Dean’s confined to the bed, and they have an audience, so all Sam can do is say, “You look like crap,” his voice cracking.

“Hark who’s talking,” Dean says, a muscle in his cheek twitching.

“Jody’s coming to get us,” Sam says, watching as the nurses leave, “she’s bringing Alex.”

“Why?” Dean asks, brows furrowing as he presses the button to shift the bed closer to sitting.

There’s a million reasons. They’re all Sam’s fault.

The lights in Dean’s room are almost worse than the one in his, pounding away at his brain, even through the painkillers.

He shrugs, then regrets it, “She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Dean’s probably got more questions on his tongue, but a doctor walks in to talk with them, so he just settles back in and side-eyes Sam throughout the conversation.

Rest is the prescription for them both. Physical therapy, especially for Dean. A list of a dozen things Sam’s not supposed to do or eat to keep the migraines from becoming debilitating.

Sam rips up one of the pamphlets with worrying fingers while they wait. Someone brings them their things.

The world inside the hospital moves on, bustling. In a couple weeks, no one here will remember them well. They’ll just be stories—those guys who got attacked by the oogie-boogie out on the trail.

Other people will never know.

And it’s nice to think about that fact. Anonymity was Sam’s enemy for years, he hated having to duck down, be a nobody, and try not to be memorable. He developed an appreciation for it later, the blessing of hiding in a crowd, the enormity of the universe and how small he is in it.

Dean’s next to him, eyes on the awful soap on tv. They keep breathing in at the same time. Dean’s inhales are laboured sometimes, one of his ribs cracked.

The world seems like it went a little sideways somewhere along the way.

Jody announces her presence with a laugh, startling them both out of their daydreaming.

“How do you guys get yourselves in these situations?” She asks, walking into the room and leaning down to wrap an arm around Sam.

He does his best to hug back with his good arm.

“Jody,” Dean says, holding out his own arm for a hug, “you didn’t need to come all the way here, you’ve got a life.”

“And you guys had another way to get out of here between Sam’s arm and your leg, right?”

Right-side injuries for them both. They could’ve made do, they would’ve.

But Jody’d spent seven minutes listing reasons why that was a bad idea, and he’d been so tired, and he’s so sick of them only having each other—

Dean shrugs, “We would’ve made do.”

Jody shakes her head at them, and then asks, “Where’s your car?”

Dean argues with Jody over whether or not she should go get the car, and Sam finally looks up and spots Alex in the doorway, arms crossed tightly. He tries to smile at her, but he knows it doesn’t reach his eyes. She nods in acknowledgement anyway.

“It’s a good thing it’s the weekend,” Jody says, finally wrangling the Impala keys out of Dean’s bag of things, “I can drive your car, and Alex can drive the truck.”

Dean’s flabbergasted enough to freeze up, mouth opening and closing in shock. Sam laughs.

And so the world spins on (without them).

They stay at Jody’s place for four days after Jody and Alex drive them back to Sioux Falls (Sam and Alex spent the trip in Jody’s truck in awkward mostly-silence occasionally broken when Sam figured out another question to ask about how she’s liking school). Dean spends it watching tv from the couch and ordering Sam to grab him food. Sam spends it puking up whatever he eats because whatever meds he’s taking don’t agree with his stomach (or at least, that’s what he tells Dean).

The second day, Sam dozes off, pretzeled in Jody’s armchair as he sort-of-watches the superhero movie Dean made him put in the dvd player. He wakes up on the floor with Dean yell-laughing at him and his gashes threatening to re-open.

His face hurts from where it hit the ground.

“Lucky you didn’t break your nose,” Dean says, still cackling, “that was a nice head dive.”

“Shut up,” Sam grumbles, reorienting himself and trying to pretend that the pressure in his chest isn’t choking him.

Dean’s been worse than usual. Rude—not to Jody or Alex, but to Sam. It hasn’t been this bad for years.

Sam worries.

He gets up and walks out of the room, leaving Dean to his movie, and goes to lean over the toilet in the bathroom, breathing heavily. His stomach swirls, and his heart races, and he tries to think over the panic in his brain.

“Hey Jody,” Sam says, after dinner that night, while Dean lectures a bored Alex on the joys of classic rock, “I think I might have a hunt.”

“You’d better not—” Jody starts, drawing herself up, readying for a fight as she hands Sam another plate to rinse.

“I’m not going,” he interupts, voice low, eyes darting to glance at Dean, “But I thought maybe you would know someone who could take it? Looks like a black dog in Otero, New Mexico.”

Jody hands him a couple of forks, and he runs them under the water.

“I could make some calls,” she says.

“Thanks,” Sam says, fervently.

On day four, Sam finally proves his mobility to the degree of Jody’s approval, and between the three of them, they manage to get Dean in the car, stretched out on the backseat—despite his disapproval of the idea.

Jody hugs them both goodbye and finally releases the keys she’s been holding hostage (they didn’t tell her about the extra copies or the fact that both of them know how to hotwire a car). Sam slides into the driver’s seat and pointedly waves goodbye with his right arm.

It’s been a few weeks since they were last in Lebanon. Sam tells himself it’ll be good to go back.

Dean waits until they’re an hour into the drive to speak up, tone serious.

“Look, I saw what happened,” he says, and Sam stops breathing, “with the flare gun.”

Sam nearly chokes on his own spit and slows the car, heart rate doubling and that awful thing in his chest trying to constrict him. He signals over, refusing to look in the rearview so he doesn’t have to see Dean’s face. He sits for a second, breathing hard.

Dean states, “Look—I’m not—I’m just gonna say what I know. I know that you shouldn’t have known all those details about that hunt. Maybe others we’ve been on too. I know you keep getting headaches.”

Sam curls in on himself, resting his head against the top of the Impala’s worn steering wheel.

Dean continues, “I know you passed out in the ambulance. I know that you told Jody about a hunt you sure as hell didn’t have any information on.”

Dean had borrowed Sam’s laptop. Sam’d given it to him without a second thought.

Chest. Constricting. Wheezing.

“Sammy,” Dean says, one arm reaching over the seat to grasp at his shoulder, “There’s no way that flare gun spun itself back to you.”

And it’s awful, drowning guilt that washes over Sam.

“I just. Look, Sam. You should have told me,” Dean grinds out. And this is the worst possibility. It should’ve been Sam’s choice to say it. It would have been a million times easier if he’d just mentioned it to Dean, a calm hey, think my visions are back or so get this, I made a pencil float the other day instead of this. Quiet in the Impala, headlights passing them every so often, their places switched, because it’s Dean that’s supposed to be at the wheel, it’s Dean who is in charge, who’s the moral compass between them, because heaven (and hell and everywhere in between) knows Sam can’t make a decision without ending the world—

“I know,” Sam mumbles, trying to focus on the hand Dean’s got on his shoulder. The hand that means maybe this isn’t the point where Dean tells him to get out, to never come back—

“When?”

Sam tries to swallow, can’t get past whatever’s happening in his throat, “After. After the trials. I think. After—after,” he takes a second, “After Gadreel, for sure.”

The grip on his shoulder tightens a bit, “And. You’re not—it’s not-”

Sam’s reality shifts to the side, and he sits up sharply, spinning in his seat to look Dean in the eye and knocking away his hand, sending pain spiking through his shoulder and down his arm.

His voice is sharp, with no waiver, “I’m not drinking demon blood-”

“No—Jesus, Sam, I know that—”

Sam snorts, leveling his glare, “Like you weren’t gonna ask.”

“I wasn’t!” Dean defends, reaching his hand out to grab Sam’s collar as best he can. He’s straining, over the seat with his leg stretched out on the bench, “I’m not an idiot.”

Sam reaches up, grasps Dean’s wrist with his own shaking fingers. He feels like any second the lump in his chest is going to boil over, and then maybe he’d burn up from the inside out, not like that’d be a new experience, that’d been everyday in the Cage—

"Sammy,” Dean says, and he’s got a rasp in his throat that Sam doesn’t hear often, “That’s not—I wasn’t askin’ that.”

Sam can’t handle the gleam that shows in Dean’s eyes when another car goes past, and he curls his legs up on the seat so he can just press his face against the seat. Dean loosens his grip on his shirt and moves his hand up to hold on to the back of Sam’s head instead.

“I would never,” Sam says with a shudder, “Never.”

“I know, I know Sammy.”

“Sure doesn’t seem like it,” Sam says, finally stopping his staring contest with the seat back so that a couple of tears spill out, “You’ve never—You don’t trust me to make decisions, and I understand that—”

“I trust you!” Dean interjects, his hand tightening to grab onto some of Sam’s hair, “I trust you with my life.”

“But you don’t trust me to make good decisions, and that makes sense!” Sam says, returning his eyes to Dean’s, letting Dean’s hand switch to press against his head near his ear, “I don’t trust me to make good decisions.”

“Sam-”

“Look,” he says, and it’s like everything from the past few months has tumbled to the tip of his tongue, “the trials, they were supposed to purify me. Obviously, that didn’t work—”

“‘Cause there’s not a single evil bone in your entire body!” Dean says, now gripping the hair over his ear, “‘Cause you’re the best damn person I know.”

“Dean-”

“No. My turn. You know what I don’t trust you with? Your own life, Sam. You know why I zapped myself into that head’a yours to tell death to screw off? ‘Cause I had to watch you slap that hand over Crowley’s mouth knowin’ you were about to die, and you were okay with it.”

“Don’t put that on me,” Sam says, blinking furiously, “I deserve a hell of a lot of stuff for the stuff I’ve done, but having that angel in me isn’t one of them.”

He yells the last part, grabbing back onto Dean’s wrist with both hands. It’s the truth, it’s the only truth he can abide by, because he can’t handle another damn thing he’s responsible for. He can’t think about the yes he’d been tricked into and claim that as his fault. Not much is Dean’s, but he can’t not put this one on him. It’s been in his head for months, ever since that day he’d woken up in the bunker infirmary and watched from distant eyes in his own head as blue light evacuated his body. Dean had grinned widely, had squeezed Sam in a hug worthy of a resurrection, and Sam had puked up the breakfast he’d eaten when he’d thought his hands were his own.

He doesn’t blame his brother for much. His anger toward his dad has died down. He never really blamed his mom for anything.

He’s even forgiven Crowley.

But he can’t get past this. He just can’t.

“He saved your life,” Dean says, shifting as close as he can manage, and they really should have had this fight in a different space, “I’m not gonna apologize for saving the life you threw away Sammy, I’m not.”

And that’s not what Sam wants absolution for. He wants it for every second Dean looked him in the face in those following months, after the dog thing, after Charlie, and lied to him. He wants it for every second he spent feeling comfortable in his body for the first time in his entire life, finally purified after those trials, finally clean. He wants it for every second it keeps him awake at night, how he’s never sure anymore if he’s in the clear, or if maybe someone decided it would be better to stick Sam Winchester away in his own mind. He wants it for all these months of silence on the subject, for Dean moving on like it was just another hunt.

Sam lets go of Dean’s wrist and lets the anger he was building up curl back into its ball. He doesn’t know how to use it anymore.

“Let’s just get back to the Bunker,” he says, looking out of the windshield at the barrenness ahead of them.

“Sam-”

Sam shoves a tape into the deck and turns up the volume until he thinks his ears might bleed from it and signals back into traffic.

The Bunker’s never felt so empty.

Dean sticks to his room most of the time, laid up in bed except for when he ventures to the kitchen on his crutches, cursing every other step he takes.

He takes his painkillers with whiskey, glaring at Sam everytime he makes to point out the danger of it.

And wouldn’t that be the great irony, a Winchester dying from alcohol and pills.

Sam holes himself up in the library and decides he’s finally going to get these books digitized. Most of the time, he passes out there, after taking his own painkillers and not gathering up the motivation to move to his bed.

The days stretch together, and he’s never really sure when it’s night or morning, the Bunker lights as steady as always.

He stops eating, mostly.

Fasting, he tells himself, an acquittal of sorts. A type of penance.

His stomach can’t handle it, most of the time, and that’s the real reason. It’s in knots constantly, and his head pounds and makes it worse.

Dean cuts him off from the coffee at one point, threatening to toss all of it down the drain and bust up the coffee maker.

Sam backs down, even though his head pounds worse for it. He’s been drinking coffee since he figured out how to work the crappy little machines in the motels they stayed at. Dean used to say it’d stunt his growth.

Now, he just quotes the doctor on how to reduce Sam’s migraine pain, and a challenge lies behind Dean’s eyes, daring him to complain about how they’re not really migraines, to admit to everything again like he’s some two-bit daytime TV show playing off the same secret for three seasons.

Dean wants a fight. He wants something real.

Sam just can’t.

He doesn’t have the energy to. Especially now without the caffeine to speed up his heart and blur things together.

So they float around in nothingness.

He goes out to stock up on rock salt and bullets and comes back with a motorcycle and a box of books and cassette tapes.

They have Navajo tacos for dinner, and Sam mentions it halfway through, once Dean’s relaxed enough and has a beer in him.

“Stopped by a yard sale today.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Uh, picked up a couple things.”

Dean’s eyebrows tick up, “Like what?”

Sam shrugs and moves a couple pieces of his scone around on his still nearly full plate.

“Books. Some cassette tapes. A motorcycle.”

Dean almost chokes on his next bite, and lets it fall, half chewed to the plate.

“A motorcycle?” he asks, treading the line between disbelief and outrage.

Sam digs the fingers of his hand into his thigh under the table.

“Yeah. Some guy’s dad’s old one. Been sitting in a shed for a year, and the guy didn’t want to fix it up. Doesn’t run, but I figured…”

He’d figured maybe it would get Dean out of his room. Maybe they could sit in the garage and Dean could gripe and yell at him about it and—

“Where’d you get the money for something like that?”

“Guy was selling it cheap. Used some of my reserve funds.”

“Reserve funds?” Dean’s gone nearly monotone, and Sam’s too terrified to glance up at his expression.

“For emergencies, you know. Nice to have some money tucked away.”

And in the silence that follows that, he remembers that day when Dean dropped him off at the bus stop and pressed a few precious bills to his chest and Sam shook his head and passed them back, giving Dean a glance into the side pocket of his bag, bills curled up in neat rolls inside, and the look on Dean’s face, like Sam’d done something worse than want to leave.

“Just thought it could be nice for local trips, you know. If we’re… If we’re sticking around here.”

He finally risks a look up, and watches as a million indiscernible emotions flitter across Dean’s face.

Dean settles on intrigue with a hint of hurt in the way he moves his jaw, and grunts.

“I—I thought maybe you could give me some pointers. On how to fix it up?”

Dean sighs and then stares off into nothing, fingers tapping something on the table while he thinks, “Well, check the carburetor first, even if that’s not the problem, you’ll want to clean it if it’s been lying around. Double check the battery, but if it’s neither of those, it’s probably the spark plug. If you get to that point and it’s still not working, it’s the motor.”

Sam’s gut drops, but he tries to nod.

He fumbles the tools in the garage all on his own, and Dean’s not even there to laugh at him for it.

Dean believes him when he tells him there’s a movie festival in Tennessee he wants to go to.

But he doesn’t take the bait.

And so maybe Sam’s reaching the end of his rope, maybe he’s scraping the barrel, but Dean doesn’t go out of the Bunker anymore. His leg is an issue, but they could manage. They could make it up the stairs and out to the car and they could drive.

But Dean just waves him off and tells him to have fun.

He winds up outside of Memphis where he fills up on gas and consults his phone for directions. A mom filling up her minivan looks at him with suspicion, so he nods vaguely in her direction and fits the helmet back over his head, straddling the bike. The kickback startles him still, despite everything, but he manages to get going just the same.

Jack’s Bar and Grill is a shoddy place, the kind Sam grew up familiar with in strange ways. From the parking lot, when he and Dean would be left behind when dad met up with a contact. From when Dean would work a crappy job when they were in town long enough for it. From when he’d taken a job in Cali for the summer working sixty hour weeks plus his part-time job.

From stumbling in, half dead with blood loss or sleep deprivation after a hunt and devouring burgers or steaks or whatever was half off that night and then getting drunk with Dean and stumbling back to their motel. From finding the Impala in the parking lot in the morning.

He walks in, and figures that he matches the clinentel. Leather and helmet hair and whatever look in his eyes that makes a couple people avert their faces and hunch their shoulders.

Crowley’s easy to recognize from the back. Sam thinks maybe he’s going bald. He wonders, not for the first time, who’s body Crowley’s got.

He slides into a seat at the bar that’s been reupholstered a minimum of six times, steels himself, and calls out, “What’s a guy gotta do to get a drink around here?”

Crowley turns around so sharply that Sam worries about the glasses he’s holding and the state of the floor beneath him.

A glare is leveled his way, so he sends his best Dean-grin back.

“Sam,” Crowley greets cordially, “What are you doing here?”

Sam shrugs, “Well, I was just going to get a drink, but the service here is so bad I might want a customer card.”

The look he gets is almost worthy of a King of Hell. A glass is slammed down in front of him, and alcohol poured.

“Cheers,” he says, to the interest of some of the customers around him, who he thinks are either regulars or just that nosy, “when do you get off work?”

Crowley grits his teeth, “Eleven.”

The whiskey burns down his throat, and Sam feels the urge to cough in a way he hadn’t since he’d sipped his first vodka.

“Well then, I’ll look forward to talking with you.”

Sam stands up and searches out an empty booth and settles in. A nervous girl who can’t be more than twenty takes his order, and he pulls out his laptop. The sound of people serves to make things feel right at home, and he gets to work digitizing a few Men of Letters documents he’d scanned.

The steak he gets is a little more well-done than he likes, but it’s edible, and the drinks he keeps ordering leave him buzzed enough to enjoy the fairly mediocre salad that accompanies his entree.

Slowly, the tables and booths start to empty, leaving a few drunks at the bar.

Crowley packs up a bag of trash and disappears into the kitchen. Sam packs up his stuff and heads out, bill long since paid for.

He catches him in the alley out back, tossing the trash in the dumpster.

“We need to talk,” Sam says, dodging a shard of glass from a shattered bottle that’s lying in many pieces on the pavement.

Crowley turns around and huffs out his displeasure, then glances up and down the alley.

“Heard about that angel leaving,” Crowley says, finally, leaning against the wall.

Something squirms in Sam's stomach, and he hunches down a bit, ”Dean tell you?”

“Who else?”

Sam shrugs and fiddles with a loose string on the hem of his shirt, staring off into the night, “Would take a lot to get an angel down here through whatever Metatron and—and Cas did to heaven.”

“Ah,” Crowley says, “so you've put together the pieces.”

“Wasn't all that hard. Not many people I know could manage that.”

Crowley spreads his hands, “Suppose not. I am quite full of information.”

“So you know Azazel's full plan then.” It isn't a question.

Fingers flex, and Crowley drops his hands down, bemused, “Azazel? That bastard's been dead for years.”

“I know,” Sam intones dryly, “we killed him.”

“Then…” Crowley trails off and studies Sam's face to the point where he starts to feel even more uncomfortable.

Sam just blinks though, thinking of that poker game he played to save Dean and Bobby's asses.

Some kind of understanding washes over Crowley's face, and Sam's not particularly pleased with that.

“My demons always were glad that Sam Winchester's powers had disappeared-”

Sam interrupts, “What do you know?” That growl in his voice is back.

“Well,” Crowley drawls, a bit of a glint in his eyes, “not all that much.”

Sam's thumb twitches, and his switchblade is in his hand and up against Crowley's throat in a blink.

Crushing an arm against Crowley's chest and using his height to loom, Sam leans in close, staring into all too human eyes.

“What. Do. You. Know.” He bites out, close enough to smell cigarettes on Crowley’s breath.

Crowley’s adam’s apple bobs up and down, but he shows no other sign of nervousness.

“Now, come on Sam, is this really necessary?”

Sam tilts his head and narrows his eyes, “I don’t know, how about you decide that by telling me what I need to know?”

Crowley huffs out a breath, and Sam wants to puke at the stench. He’d grown up in smoke-filled motels, knew the stench inside and out (it was a short-lived time in his life, a couple cigarettes behind the school, just because dad told them not to) but he hates the smell, always has.

“Look,” Crowley drawls, “All I know is that Azazel’s plan was meant to build an army and open the way for Lilith. He got impatient, pushed people into killing each other, and he never really knew the big angelic picture.”

“The picture?” Sam questions.

“The plan! Heaven kept its secrets nice and locked up, none of us lowly demons knew about the seals and such until Lilith decided we needed to know. Even she didn’t know everything—she knew she needed you to kill her, but that was it.”

Sam’s stomach squirms, and he finally backs up, letting his knife hand fall to his side.

“That bitch had daddy Lucifer whispering in her ear, so of course she gave herself up on behalf of him,” Crowley spits out, scowling.

“You worked for her,” Sam accuses, sickened.

Crowley’s face turns even more red, “Like I had a real choice in the matter! Lilith was the winning team, of course I was going to go with her!”

Sam knows a little too much about working with evil to save something less evil, so he backs down.

“So, Azazel and Lilith weren’t connected.”

Crowley shrugs, “To a certain extent, I’m sure. You keep forgetting that heaven and hell were working for millenia to make sure you two were born.”

Sam just blinks tiredly, his lack of sleep finally catching up with him.

“But,” Crowley says, watching Sam’s face with careful eyes, “Azazel didn’t try to form a backup army with you in it just because you were destined to be Lucifer’s vessel. He was taking talents, trying to increase his influence up here.”

Sam frowns and fidgets with the blade of his knife while looking somewhere next to Crowley’s ear, “Taking talents?”

“You’ve read the stories, what do witches and demons always want?”

“A contract.”

“The first born child. Or any child, for that matter.”

Something nerve-wracking tries to click in Sam’s brain.

Crowley continues, “And not just of anyone—the nobles, the talents. Get the right kid, bind them to you, and you’ve got powers up the wazoo.”

Oh.

“You mean—” Sam’s voice cracks, “psychics. Azazel really did want an army of—of psychics.”

“Demon blood’s a funny thing. Can give the right person a power boost, that’s for sure, but the way Azazel used it? It was a binding agent. Left him with a lot of fun powers that a demon as useless as him never would’ve had on his own.”

The alley wall presses up against Sam, and he thinks he might be shaking, but he’s too busy thinking.

“So I’m—I’m—”

“A natural-born psychic, most likely, yes,” Crowley says evenly, “Not exactly a surprise, what with that bloodline of yours. Campbell hunters always had a sense for danger in a little more quantity than the rest.”

This. This is—he needs—he’s got to—he’s unclean - what does—

The floor doesn’t seem so solid anymore, so he slides down the wall and lets the shards of glass come dangerously close to his ass.

It doesn’t make sense. Except for how it does.

Crowley crouches down in front of him after a minute of Sam’s heart racing and his brain winding up down useless dead ends.

“Sam,” he says, something tight in his voice, “when was the last time you slept?”

Sam snorts at the idea and doesn’t bother to answer.

Crowley looks toward the heavens and mutters something Sam’s too distracted to pay attention to.

“Alright Moose, you can have the couch tonight.”

Sam’s head pops up, and he squints, “I don’t need a couch to sleep on, Crowley.”

“Well, unless you’re planning on going out via crashing your car because you fell asleep at the wheel, I suggest you come with me.”

His heart is pounding along with his head, and maybe he’s a little drunk, and Crowley used to be one of their worst enemies, and now he’s holding out a hand, waiting for Sam to take it.

He does.

When he gets back, after sneaking out of Crowley’s one-star apartment to his motorcycle and taking off, the Bunker is quiet.

He finds Dean in his room, beer cans littered everywhere and a bottle of scotch on the nightstand, a lot lower than when Sam last saw it.

Something burns inside him at the sight of Dean passed out in the wreckage and he turns him over to rescue position and stalks out, some distant goal egging him on.

He grabs the wine bottles from the cabinet that they never look in, the bottles of whiskey in the cupboard, and the brandy in the pantry.

Dean’s room provides another bottle of whiskey and a half-empty can of beer. He turns out the light this time when he leaves.

He thinks about taking the beer bottles in the fridge too, but something stops him.

The gun range isn’t a very far walk.

“What the hell?” Dean questions, walking with one crutch as he stumbles into the gun range a couple hours later and finds Sam on the ground, grinning. Sam watches the comprehension fall onto Dean’s face and smiles harder.

“What the hell,” Dean repeats, taking in the shards of glass littering the ground and the liquids splattered everywhere.

“Screw you, that’s why,” Sam says, draining the last of the whiskey he’d kept out of the target range.

“Sam, what’s wrong with you?” Dean asks, aghast.

“What isn’t?” He shoots back, laughing.

There’s fury building on Dean’s face, and Sam couldn’t care less.

Screw Dean. Screw Crowley. Screw Azazel and Lilith and Lucifer and screw 'em all.

Dean stares at the carnage for a moment longer and then turns and leaves. Sam laughs to himself for a long time.

He startles himself awake with a scream, chokes on it, and throws the covers off of himself, twisting to sit so he can put his head in his hands.

Light, missing time, My name is Gadreel, imagining faces beneath angelic hands, burning.

Rhythmic stomps come down the hallway, and he turns on the lamp just in time for Dean to open the door, distinctly not bleary-eyed. He hasn’t been sleeping well either, knowing what they know and not doing anything about it. Dean belatedly knocks, a quick one-two.

“Hey,” Dean says, leaning against the doorway, “you good?”

He’s not. He never is, hasn’t been for a long time ever since—ever—with—

“Fine,” he grinds out, pushing his palms into his eyes until it hurts and then tugging his hands through tangled hair, getting his fingers caught in snarls.

Dean huffs out some air, and Sam’s ready for him to turn around, to get back to—to whatever he was doing, drinking, watching a movie, trying to sleep with all the devils running around in his head, but he opens the door further, and limps his way into the room. He takes a seat on the corner of the bed, bracing himself on his good knee.

With a sigh like Sam’s forcing him to say it, Dean asks, “Ready to talk about it?”

And in an abstract way, Sam kind of is. But, if he did, it would hurt Dean. It would hurt this balance that they have, the tension would ratchet on up, increments at a time, and drown him. Choke him.

“No,” he says, finally, after a moment where he pretends to consider it.

Dean makes a face in the corner of his vision, rolls his eyes in Sam’s direction, “You’re always harping on me to tell you everything. Glad to know I’m still not the only hypocrite in the family.”

Something in the phrasing of that breaks Sam’s heart into another piece, makes his tongue curl in disgust.

“I—I’m not, Dean,” he forces out, “I’m fine.”

Dean narrows his eyes and bites out, “Yeah, sure. What was it this time? Poltergeist in Santa Monica? Lake monster in St. Petersburg?”

Sam turns his head to blink at Dean, uncomprehending for a moment before it clicks, and the pit in his stomach sinks.

“It wasn’t—I didn’t have a vision,” he’s mostly sure of that, at least, “It was just—just a,” he tilts his head down and stares at his hands, “a run-of-the-mill nightmare.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes I’m sure,” Sam retorts, feeling queasy.

“Because if not, we need to get somebody to take care of—”

“It was about Gadreel, okay?” Sam interrupts, clenching his fists and teeth, “Not a hunt.”

Dean backs down visibly, shoulders sinking in and face turning stony.

“Still on that boat, huh?”

Sam closes his eyes, breathes through the anger as best he can and growls a, “Yeah.”

For a second, there’s silence.

“He saved your life,” Dean says.

Sam has to unclench his jaw to respond, “I know. Doesn’t make it any better.”

Dean breathes in heavily, turns to face him, “I’d do it again,” he says, matter-of-fact, “In a heartbeat.”

The pit in Sam’s stomach tries to swallow him whole, and it’s just like Dean to finally decide to have a conversation about it, after all these months, when he’s ready, on his time, on his terms.

Sam can’t do this. He can’t lie, can’t be okay with it.

“I was ready to die, Dean,” he forces out, not meeting his brother’s eyes, too afraid that that’s what will pull him over the edge of fury, “You tricked me.”

And there it is, the honest truth. Dean tricked him into something—the one thing—that terrifies him the most. There were millions of chances where Gadreel could have—he’d been in Sam, it was—

“If the situation were reversed,” Dean says, voice steady, but tension in it, “and I was dying,” he shakes his head, “you’d do the same thing.”

Sam’s heartbeat is racing. His skin is clammy.

He knows exactly what he’s going to say when he says it.

“No, Dean,” he says, evenly, “I wouldn’t.”

In his peripheral vision, he can see how uncomprehending Dean is.

“Same circumstances?” he continues, feeling sick at the very idea of making his brother go through that, he’d hurt himself before ever doing that, “I wouldn’t.”

It hurts. It hurts to admit it. It hurts to think about it. The thought of letting Dean die—the thought of giving him up, just to save him —it kills him. He knows—he wouldn’t last long without Dean. It would be killing them both.

Maybe it would be worth it. Can’t hurt the world if you’re not in it. And Dean? He’d be heading to heaven. To life with Lisa and Ben, or Benny, or whoever else made happy memories with him. He could let him go, knowing that he’d be happier.

Dean is taken aback. He’s hurt. Sam knows it, can feel it in the air, read it in Dean’s shoulders, feel the ache of it in his own stomach.

Dean leaves. Just stands and leaves.

And that’s usually Sam’s move, walking away from a conversation. He isn’t used to Dean pulling it.

That’s why he tells himself it’s okay to let him go. To let him limp out, sans crutches he really should be using. Crutches Sam can’t force himself to mention.

Dean can’t understand what Sam would do to save him from that.

He can’t ever understand what it feels like to have something—someone else—living in you, pushing you down—drowning you—

It’s cold.

It's a small note in the middle of Walter Pearson's journal that does him in.

There is some evidence that angelic possession leaves behind trace amounts of grace. CH3 is attempting to find a way to extract it without harm to the individual.

He doesn't have anything in his stomach to puke up, but he kind of wishes he did.

“Sam!” Dean yells, “We’re out of beer!”

He ignores Dean. The pressure’s been building ever since Dean drank the last beer. Dean’s twitchy, angry.

Some distant part of Sam is waiting for Dean to take it out on him, almost can’t wait for it. He hasn’t gone shopping in days.

I speculate that these traces of grace could be used to summon an angel to one’s location.

“Sam!” Dean calls again.

Does it matter? Demon blood, angel grace, powers from years of breeding by heaven—it’s all the same. He never should’ve—

“Sam! Dammit, where are you?”

He scratches up his arms, lets them turn red.

It is, however, likely that grace (if it always functions according to the findings in experiment 45T) can never be fully removed from a vessel, unless the soul is somehow removed as well.

It’s always been his soul that’s the issue.

“Sam,” Dean says, out-of-breath from limping around without his crutches, and leaning against the door to Sam’s room, “you need to go shopping.”

“I’ll go shopping when you come with me,” Sam says, flipping a page in the book.

“Sam,” Dean says, “we’ve been over this—”

“Yeah,” Sam says, “We have.”

Dean scowls and grits his teeth, and for one second, Sam thinks the fists his hands form will head in his direction.

Then Dean turns around and limps away.

Addendum: CH3 experiments concur with above statements. Grace is with a formal vessel until death. Full removal is not possible.

Of course.

He doesn’t bother making an excuse the next time he leaves. He just yells down the hall and waits for Dean to reply. He hasn’t actually seen Dean at all for more than twenty-four hours, rotating around each other, caught in orbit.

It’s a pressure, a strain.

Sam knows it, ignores it, picks up a single duffle, straps it to his bike with a bungee cord, and heads out.

The trip should have taken over three hours. He makes it just under two and a half. Back when he’d first learned to drive, he’d obeyed every speed limit sign like it was the word of God.

Not much use for the word of God anymore.

He takes a long route through town, resolutely ignoring everything he passes by. As he pulls up to park along the curb, a curious face peers at him through a fence. They stare at each other for a moment, and Sam feels a bit of a smile on his face.

He’s tired, aching, and he leaves his helmet on the bike to go say hello to the dog.

He can’t tell the breed, but it’s a big, black and white, fluffy one, and it shakes its tail ridiculously when Sam crouches down to offer his fingers up for sniffing. The dog woofs low in its belly and turns circles so Sam’s fingers brush along its fur.

“She don’t usually like many people,” a gruff voice says, and Sam berates himself silently, tensing up for a fight.

“Sorry, I should’ve asked if I could pet her,” he says, looking up to meet the eyes of an older gentleman, wearing a sunhat and overalls covered in dirt, from where he was presumably working in a backyard garden (either that or burying a dead body, but Sam’s trying to be positive).

The man squints at him and chides the dog, “Oreo, sit,” to stop her from leaping up, trying to reach Sam through the fence.

Sam tries to calm his breathing and compulsively sticks his hands in his back pockets so he can feel the bump where he’s concealing a gun. The guy looks him up and down.

“You Sam?” He questions, and Sam’s heart rate doubles again.

He scans the street, reminds himself of where his weapons are, and answers, “Uh, yeah?”

The man nods, “Missouri said you’d be by,” he tilts his head toward the mailbox reading Moseley, “She’s out on business, asked me to keep an eye out for anyone stopping by.”

Sam tries to smile, “Thanks for that. Guess I’ll stop by later.”

“She also said,” the guy nearly interrupts, “that you were a, and I quote, ‘scared fellow, good with dogs and babies and not with when to run or not’, so if you get in here, I’ll get you some ice tea and we can both wait for her to get back.”

Sam’s tongue juts out to wet his lips and he tries to recenter himself. There’s always been reasons hunters don’t like psychics all that much as a group. Times like this, Sam remembers why.

“I—uh,” he stammers out, backing up a step, “Thanks, but I can, uh, I’ll come back.”

“She said you’d say that, damn woman,” the guy says, rolling his eyes, “but I owe her a favor or twelve, so if you don’t get in here, I’ll have to insist.”

He takes off a gardening glove (no blood, Sam notes somewhere in the back of his brain) and lifts the gate latch, using his other hand to ward off Oreo, who is bounding with excitement.

Sam doesn’t like the word ‘insist,’ so he carefully steps forward, and then into the fenced yard when the man steps back to let him inside. Oreo almost immediately bounds over to him, nearly knocking him down. Sam chances an analysing glance at the guy, and then kind of gives up. He’s got no way to toss holy water on the guy without looking absolutely insane, and Chriso wouldn’t work on any demon worth their salt. The guy could be any number of things, he could be laying a trap, Missouri could already be dead—

Sam crouches down and is bowled over by the massive dog, who barks happily and tries to lick his face. He does his best to cover it with his arms, but Oreo is very insistent.

The guy is laughing, and the part of Sam that is busy freaking out is convinced that this is it, this is how he dies, this was the trap all along—

And then the guy’s grabbing Oreo’s collar and pulling her off of Sam, chuckling, “Sorry ‘bout that, swear that usually she’d just go for biting your arms off instead.”

It’s some kind of bizarre humor, and Sam can’t help but grin, picking himself back up, “If you say so,” he offers, quietly.

“I do say so,” the man retorts back, and then starts dragging Oreo to the porch, “This way, I’ll get you some tea. Name’s Jorge, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you,” Sam starts to say, voice fading as Jorge continues to walk away from him. He silently lowers the hand he’d been raising for a handshake and follows him up the porch steps.

Jorge points him to a chair and then walks into the house. Oreo bounds up to Sam and wiggles fiercely in his personal space. He gives in and starts petting.

Jorge slams a cup of ice tea in front of him a couple minutes later and takes the other seat.

“What you think about the game?” Jorge asks, taking a swig of his own drink.

Sam blinks and hesitantly takes a sip of the tea, “Uh, which one?”

Jorge’s eyes light up, and he dives into an explanation of the game that apparently gave away the fact that he must live under a rock (he’s not...wrong). Sam gets a play-by-play of every move, every player, and every game that’s led up to it.

Oreo rests her head on his leg, and he scratches behind her ears.

It’s nice. Jorge apparently doesn’t expect any input from Sam except a couple ‘wows’ and ‘uh-huhs’. Overhead, the sun stretches to the west.

When Missouri finally shows up, it’s somehow a bit of a surprise.

“Sam Winchester,” she says, when she reaches the top of the porch steps, interrupting Jorge’s analysis of the ref’s penalty decisions, and placing her hands on her hips, “how long’s it been?”

Sam gently nudges Oreo’s head off his leg and stands, ducking his head and shoulders down, “Long time.”

“Mmm hmm,” Missouri hums, unimpressed look in her eyes before they soften and she opens her arms, “get in here boy.”

He leans in for the hug, and after he loosens his grip, she holds on a little longer.

When he can finally lean back, he finds Missouri’s hand on his cheek, pressing against the scruff, and she pats it like she doesn’t know what else to do.

“You poor thing,” she says, shaking her head, eyes watery.

Sam tries to smile, doesn’t think it comes out right, and pulls away.

“Well, thank you Jorge,” Missouri states, turning to her neighbor who’s leaning back, watching them, “Lord knows this one would’ve chickened out if there wasn’t nobody nearby to stop him, and those Richardsons needed a whole lotta help.”

Jorge raises his glass in recognition, and turns his gaze to Sam, grinning, “Good to talk with you, Sam. Stop by anytime, Oreo could use the doting. She’s higher maintenance than I can keep up with.”

“Uh, thanks,” Sam says, quickly, patting Oreo’s head in goodbye when she nudges it, “And for the tea,” he gestures to his empty glass.

“Anytime,” Jorge says, before turning to Missouri, “And that’s one less favor I owe you.”

Missouri rolls her eyes, “Yeah, yeah, I know you been keeping track.”

She starts back down the stairs and Sam follows, heart racing. When they reach the gate, Oreo tries to follow, so Sam has to push back against her, with all the gentleness he can, to close the gate.

Oreo whines, and he feels awful.

“Come on Sam, the dog will get over it, don’t you worry.”

He snaps to attention and follows Missouri up to her house and through the front door.

“Grab a seat in there,” she says, gesturing to the same room he’d seen all those years ago, now with furniture and paint changed, “I’ll be in in a moment.”

“Thanks,” he says, his boots clunking against the floor as he follows her directions.

He settles himself on a couch and presses his hands together. It makes the largest scar on his left hand brush against the palm of his right. He links his fingers together like that, rubbing his hands back and forth.

The last time he was here . . . he’d had no idea what things were headed his way. Their way. Dean hadn’t been to hell. Dad had still been alive. Jess’ death had been fresh—

“Boy, if you don’t turn off those gloomy thoughts you’ll end up like your brother,” Missouri says, “And how is he?”

“Uh,” Sam says, freezing in place, “Fine.” He thinks about the beer cans and bottles he’s cleaned up in the past month, Dean trying to limp around without his crutches. That awful journey after the Wendigo, knowing that if he didn’t get his brother out—

“Don’t you be lying to me,” Missouri says, sitting down across the coffee table from him and setting a plate down.

Sam looks at her blankly.

“Well, don’t stare at it, eat up,” she says, “You’re skin and bones.”

“Missouri, I—” he starts.

She reaches out and swats at his entwined hands, “I invite you into my home, the least you can do is eat my food.”

And, oh, she’s right, he’s rude and ungrateful and ruining everything and—

“Oh Sam,” she says as he reaches out to pick up the plate—turkey sandwich and an apple, cut up into slices, “baby, you—”

She chokes up, and Sam freezes, a triangle half of the sandwich on the way to his mouth.

Missouri clasps her hands together, and that watery look is back in her eyes. She shakes her head back and forth, pressing her lips together, then draws in a breath.

“Nevermind,” she says, “that’s not why you’ve come here, is it?”

Sam takes a bite of the sandwich and shrugs.

Missouri sighs, “Well, you’re not the only psychic to show up on my doorstep looking for answers.”

The sandwich feels like it sticks in his throat, and Sam puts the plate back down.

“So I’m—I’m really—”

“You’ve been psychic a long while, Sam. But demons, they mess people up inside.” She shakes her head frowning.

Something settles in Sam’s chest, and it’s familiar. Comfortable, almost.

“So, I’m not supposed to—to have these powers?” It’s almost not a question.

Missouri straightens up and that and scowls at him, “Now when did I say that? If you would turn off that brain of yours for a second and stop jumping to conclusions, maybe I could finish what I’m saying.”

Sam shrinks back, chided.

“Psychics are a funny thing,” Missouri says, “that phrase at least. Hunters use it, most everyone does, just to mean someone who can do something weird with their mind. Not like being able to do calculus problems without writing them down, but seeing the future or the past or moving things or seeing souls or touching souls.”

Sam nods. He’s read every book the Men of Letters has on psychics that he can find.

“Now, the reason all those get lumped together is because any given psychic can develop any one of those. Gifts tend to run in families, but not always. And when you first get your gifts, they can be a little,” she moves her hand in a circular motion, “all-over.”

Sam picks up a piece of the apple and starts chewing.

“But you,” she says, reaching out to grab his hand, “you had something leeching off your powers for years, locking them down. They never got a chance to develop.”

And it clicks, finally, all the interweaving spiderwebs colliding.

“So that’s what happening right now,” Sam says, breathing in sharply and digging the fingers of his free hand into his knee.

“You been having problems with seeing things, been tossing things around? Seeing weird lights?”

The world’s tilted, and Sam’s trying to get used to his new center of gravity.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Missouri nods and he fumbles a bit, pulling his hand back so he can scratch at his neck.

“So,” Sam says, and something like a laugh bubbles up from his belly, “I’m going through psychic puberty.”

“Seems like,” Missouri says, “I’m no expert, but I’ve seen a few psychics developing in my time.”

For a second, Sam can’t breathe, and then he can and it’s like he hasn’t been breathing his whole life.

Missouri talks more about it, how to handle them, how to work on focusing his gift and figure out what it is his specialty is.

He doesn’t tell her that he already knows.

He manages to choke down the sandwich and apple before he leaves, and Missouri hugs him tight.

“Bring that brother of yours next time,” she says, finally letting him go.

“I will,” Sam lies, turning to leave.

“And Sam,” she says, stopping him, “call if you need anything. Anything at all.” She holds out a sticky note with a phone number on it.

He runs his thumb over it and nods, tucking it into his breast pocket.

The ride back is easier. He doesn’t weave in and out of traffic, he takes the long way around.

It’s not normal, but it’s other people’s normal.

And if he does this right, he can leave it behind for good.

There's a door inside room 16C. It opens up to a spiral staircase evidently not made with people of Sam's height in mind. He squeezes down, hunched over. They keep going down. And down.

When he hits the ground, it's dirt. He's glad he pulled on his jacket before he ventured out, because there's a flashlight in the breast pocket.

Enochian sigils shine back at him. He turns around, following the writing all the way around the chamber.

Words he knows pop up, and he does his best not to translate them out of sheer habit (sheer terror).

There’s one wall without sigils. He walks closer, and feels a hum, and his headache thrums forcefully against his skull.

He can taste the magic on his tongue.

He backs away and goes back to glancing at the sigils and writings. They’re not all Enochian. He spots Etruscan and Ako-Bo phonetic spellings and a couple he doesn’t recognize.

There’s some gaps in between sentences and shapes, and an idea floats into his head.

He loads up the cart in Home Depot, mulling over what he needs. When he checks out, the cashier asks, “New project?”

Sam smiles, “Decided to get into rock carving.”

The cashier smiles back and tells him his total.

“You haven't gone hipster on me, have you?” Dean asks when Sam enters the kitchen.

Sam spots the food, and for once he and his stomach are on the same page.

“Huh?” He asks, spooning himself up a plate and plonking it down on the table.

Dean gestures with his fork, “Y'know, the hair, the hipster glasses, the scruff,” he uses his free hand to rub at his own chin.

Sam blinks and looks down at what he's wearing. Camo pants and a t-shirt that was originally white, both of them covered in dust.

“Yeah, army hipster chic, it's the newest thing,” he says around a mouthful of lasagna, “And my hair’s not long enough to be hipster.”

Dean rolls his eyes.

“So, what’re you doing?” Dean finally asks, when it becomes clear that Sam won’t volunteer the information.

Sam swallows and responds, “Found where all the Bunker’s protections are. Or at least some of them, anyway. Just wanted to add some stuff.”

For a second, it looks like Dean’ll ask what, but then the conversation ends.

Sam’s distantly glad. Telling Dean he’s still paranoid about Lucifer getting in was not on his to-do list today.

When they both finally snap, it's a long time coming. Dean’s sick of limping around and needing help to get up and down stairs without his leg giving out on him, and he’s antsy, needing something to busy him with every moment. Sam’s been feeling out of his head for days, and he can’t keep anything down anymore, eating whatever he needs to when Dean calls him out on not eating, only to chuck it up not long after. The trials were supposed to kill him. Angels can’t fix evil.

Sam loses weight he doesn’t really have to lose. He can tell, because even Dean notices and makes Sam more food to make up for it. Not much sticks. He tries to puke in the bathroom furthest from Dean.

Doors slam sometimes, when Sam slams back into his head. His migraines get worse.

He and Dean get snippy at each other—which is normal to a degree, but has taken on a sharp edge that leaves Sam anxious.

It comes to a head one day, when Dean shuffles his way into the library where Sam’s busy digitizing file cards and puts a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich and an apple on it in front of him.

When Dean hits his leg against the edge of a table as Sam tries to give his thanks, he goes down with a thud, catching himself on his forearms.

“Dean!” Sam’s out of his seat like a shot, arms tucked under Dean’s armpits, hefting him up, kicking a chair out from under the table to get him situated it.

“Damn it, I’m fine Sam, geddoff me.”

Sam prods his arms for breaks or sprains, and Dean wrenches his arms away.

“I said get off,” Dean snarls, “boundaries much?”

And normally, Sam would back off. He would escape—to his room, to the kitchen, outside the bunker—and take a breather. He’d refocus on why Dean is the way he is, he’d think about all the stuff Dean’s been through, and he’d start to feel sorry for storming off. Eventually, he’d do something to make up for it and hope Dean would understand.

This is different. He’s got anger rolling around in his gut, he’s got Missouri’s words rattling around in his brain, Crowley’s face once he realized seared into his mind. He’s run out of things to add to the stone walls underneath them. He’s got a headache that never goes away now, and his visions have dissolved into unhelpful glimpses that only serve to make him anxious about whoever is going to die because he doesn’t have control over his powers.

Dean talking about boundaries—well, he took tenth-grade chemistry in seven different states, he knows that that’s called a catalyst.

“Like you’d understand boundaries if they hit you in the face,” he mutters, backing away from Dean to reorganize the index cards he sent into disarray by standing up so quickly.

Out of the corner of his eyes he watches Dean’s face shift through confusion to shock, and settle on anger. Some dark thing inside him that he can’t blame on demon blood rears its head, and his heart picks up speed.

“The hell you say to me?” Dean says, the hand he left on the table curling into a fist.

And here, here is where he should back down. This is where he says, ‘sorry, I haven’t slept,’ this is where he plays the little brother card, lets his eyes get big and wide and watery to make Dean back off. This is where he decides to play therapist to fix Dean, this is where he gets frustrated (but not angry) and leaves, goes to the room that’s his and only his.

Instead, he places an index card back in its stack and meets Dean’s eyes, “I said,” he says, calmly, “You wouldn’t understand boundaries if they smacked you in the face.”

Dean’s eyes narrow, “And what’s that supposed to mean?” He stands back up, catching himself with the hand that isn’t prepared to swing.

Sam lets out a huff, “It’s supposed to mean that you’re a hypocrite.”

“Hypocrite, yeah. Sure,” Dean drawls out, “Hark who’s talking.”

“Yeah, I am. Just because I have things wrong with me doesn’t mean everything I say is wrong.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean, huh? You think I don’t listen to you? I’ve been stuck with you my whole life, and when have I ever seriously ignored you?”

“There’s a difference between ignoring and not listening,” Sam says, settling into a stance with his arms crossed.

“Is this still about that Gadreel stuff?”

“Maybe,” Sam says with a shrug, “or maybe not. It’s about everything.”

Dean huffs and shakes his head, “You know, I should be the one angry at you.”

“You are,” Sam points out.

Dean stutters for a second, glaring, “Yeah, yeah I am. You know why? Because I thought I had a brother who was gonna stand by me. I thought we were in this together. And then you’re just living life saying you wouldn’t try to save me?” Something in Dean’s voice crackles.

“Dean, that’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Sure about that? Because that’s what it sounded like to me,” Dean says, holding his arms wide.

Sam’s stomach knots itself closer to Gordian with every word.

“Dean,” he says, backing down, lowering his voice, “if it was the same situation I was in, yeah. I wouldn’t save you.”

Dean snorts and shakes his head, and Sam thinks maybe those are tears in his eyes.

“And besides,” Sam says, “it was useless. You could’ve saved Cas instead, you could’ve gotten him out of there.”

“And how do you know that?” Dean snarls.

“Crowley,” Sam shrugs, “he had a lot to say about it too.”

“Sam, you don’t understand a single dam word that’s coming out of your mouth.”

“No, I think I understand just fine. You made the call, you did it. You picked forcing my worst nightmare on me instead of saving somebody from their family that’s probably torturing him right now—”

And then he’s seeing stars from on the ceiling, and his jaw is on fire. Dean shakes out his fist and tries to catch his balance again.

“Y’know, I thought I left Dad behind when we burned him,” Dean spits out, voice wobbling, “but turns out you’re just the same as him,” he leans over the table with hellfire in his eyes.

For a second Sam still can’t breathe. He doesn’t know what the word means.

The next time he inhales, it’s in his room, bent over a trash can, heaving.

He packs his bags like he’s just leaving for another hunt.

The steps shudder with the force he applies to them as he goes up them. Dean yells after him, furious. Sam doesn’t listen, because he knows that the moment he steps out that door he won’t be coming back.

He feels guilt swell in his chest when he hears Dean trip over his bad leg and go crashing down again, but the second he hears him cursing and getting back to his feet, he’s back on autopilot.

He starts the motorbike without any trouble and guns it.

Chapter Text

Jody’s the one to find him, driving up in her truck, the Sheriff text glinting in the moonlight when she turns off her headlights.

Sam doesn’t move, really, just glances over and registers that it’s Jody and lifts the can to his lips for a swig.

This spot was his whenever Dad would drop them off at Bobby's. The edge of the scrapyard, now just a pile of rusting metal, used to be safe. He's not so sure anywhere is ever actually safe.

A blanket—a quilt, really, once he gets a good look at it—is tucked around his shoulders and the can disappears from his hand.

“When I said you boys were always welcome here, I meant at my house, not freezing in the general vicinity,” Jody says, sitting next to him, shivering.

Sam doesn’t really know how to respond, so he reaches for a different can.

“Oh no you don’t, mister,” Jody says, slapping his hand away, and he’s reminded of Chronos, the falling-apart house and his falling-apart brain, and he needs to make an effort, because it’s Jody, and that’s what she’s always done for him, even though he’s never deserved it, even though it was him who made her leave while he shot—

“Sorry,” he mumbles, quietly, tucking his hand closer to his body again.

He’s got no delusions as to why she’s here, and for a second he imagines Dean, tripping over his own leg trying to get up the stairs, and he really hopes Dean’s not en route.

“If that’s a sorry for making me listen to your brother nearly kill himself trying to get up stairs while he was on the phone with me, apology accepted,” Jody says, patting his knee and then squeezing it.

The guilt piles up in his throat again, and his eyes water, and he thinks he should be cold. It’s hard to tell anymore.

Before he can ask, Jody says, “I sent someone I know to go make sure he wasn’t trying to drive anywhere like an idiot. He’s in the area. Good guy. He’ll take care of your brother, drive him up here later. Or not. We’ll see what happens.”

Sam nods, thinks that maybe he should feel better for it.

Jody squeezes his leg again, says, “How ‘bout we get outta this cold?”

And he hadn’t really noticed the cold, it’s been freezing for weeks, he’s wandered the bunker in layers while Dean—

“Okay,” He says, and stands up.

Jody tells him about work on the way, talking about training a new deputy and sharing little stories about the office.

Sam tries to smile at the right parts, but he’s busy thawing; he keeps shaking. Maybe he was cold after all.

The thing about it was that after years of being burned alive by hellfire, a cold touch was welcome and—

Sam fumbles the door handle, not used to it being so high up. In the Impala, he could open the door blindfolded in a snowstorm with his left elbow.

Dean doesn’t know that sometimes, when he’s supposed to be out running, or in his room, he’ll sneak down to the garage and just lean up against the car. He’s lost most everything else, so when he needs to remember, it—she, Dean would correct—is his scrapbook, a yearbook of stories and blood and Dean.

When a blue blaze of light had finally left him, when he and Dean had duked it out and Sam had to scrub himself in the shower until his skin was red from the scratching, and his nails were down to the quick, he’d shakily wandered, barefoot and wrapped in the only hoodie he didn’t remember wearing in the past months, down to the garage and tucked himself in the backseat, face pressed against the seat-back. Dean had found him there, hours later, when he’d tried to fling a duffle in the back because he thought Sam had left the bunker.

Sam nearly cut Dean’s finger off when he slammed the door shut.

Jody leads him inside, talking about how she’s sorry about the mess, and Sam can’t even bring himself to say ‘it’s okay,’ so he just shakes his head and tries to smile. He loses track of himself for a second, and when he comes back, sitting on the couch, he panics, because he doesn’t remember, he doesn’t remember, but that bastard angel is gone, he’s gone, there’s nothing else inside Sam except himself—

“Hey Sam,” says Alex, wandering in with pajama bottoms on and her hair up. She’s looking better—well, as good as one can be after, well, everything.

He works at the lump in his throat until he can mutter a quiet, “Hey—uh—hey.”

His teeth are chattering, he notices.

Alex sits in front of him, on the coffee table, and picks up his wrist, pressing her fingers to his pulse point.

“I’m going to check your vitals,” she declares, reaching for the quilt that’s still around his shoulders. He lets her pull it off and help him out of his overcoat and his flannel.

He stares at the scars that have started to accumulate now that they don’t have an angel on-call to heal them up.

It’s a good thing Alex won’t need his t-shirt off.

Alex sticks a thermometer in Sam’s mouth, and he vaguely wonders where Jody went. There’s noise in the kitchen he thinks might be her.

Sam watches the second hand on the clock tick past the eight again.

The thermometer beeps, and Alex pulls it to look at the flashing numbers.

“Ninety-five-point-four,” she says quietly, “Sam, you’re hypothermic.”

Jody looks on from the doorway, her sigh at the news drawing Sam’s attention.

Sam shakes his head and shivers again, “Low ninety-seven’s my normal.” He thinks it is, at least. That’s where he hovered when he was in the hospital where—before—when he—

“Still a big difference, and still hypothermic,” Alex says, turning to Jody, “You got the towels and hot chocolate?”

Jody nods and heads back to the kitchen as Sam protests.

“B-below ninety-five’s hypothermic. I’m shivering. Not hypothermic.”

“Okay,” Alex says easily, and Sam wonders at how life’s changed for her, just from when he last saw her, “Were hypothermic then. Alcohol plus no coat plus cold equals hypothermic.”

Sam shivers violently, and allows Alex to tuck the blanket back around him, “That’s n-not how it works.”

“It is now,” Alex says, and he can’t tell any longer if she’s being sarcastic or not, so he shuts his mouth and lets Alex take his pulse again.

“Your heart always that slow?” She asks after looking up from her watch, almost absentmindedly.

“What is it?” He asks, staring at the pattern on Jody’s rug, and listening for Jody’s movements after the microwave dings.

“Fifty-five,” Alex says, and then, turning to Jody, “Thanks.”

That doesn't sound right, but he's not sure about much anymore.

She takes the offered mug and turns back to Sam, “Drink this, slowly.”

He takes the mug from her and nearly drops it because it’s so warm against his hands. He’s starting to think Alex has a point about being hypothermic.

Confusion is a symptom, he thinks. Or just a part of life. His life, anyway.

Jody comes back. He hadn’t noticed that she’d left. He sips at the hot cocoa and shivers violently enough that he worries about spilling.

Alex takes the towels Jody offers and starts to put one around Sam’s neck. Something gets crossed in his brain, and all he can think about is the—is with—Lucifer had—Dean—with the—

He flinches violently away, and his drink sloshes over the edge of the mug.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says, trying to grab at one of the towels to dab at the spots he’d gotten on Jody’s carpet—Jody who’d taken them in, who they didn’t—who Sam didn’t deserve, after everything—

“Sam,” Jody says, easily, “breathe. It’s okay,”

He catches air in his throat and swallows. Alex takes the mug from him, gently patting his fingers away from the towels.

Everything’s wrong, and nothing makes sense except for that memory he has of dad, clean-shaven for once, plucking Sam up from where he’d fallen and skinned his knees when they were training and saying, with all the air of imparting an ancient proverb, “Crying’s for girls Sammy, chin up.”

The trials made him think about dad a lot. He remembers things that’d been lost in the years. Like how his dad’s breath had always smelled like coffee in the mornings, when Sam’d been small enough to be carried out to the car when they left another town behind, or how he’d always have a grimacing smile for his son when Sam would leap on him after a hunt, when he was young enough that it was okay for him to miss his dad when he was gone.

He remembers other things too, but it’s all too easy to get those caught up in other things—things from—things when—when Lucifer—

He shudders out another breath, and blinks away the tears that try to form.

“Hey Sam, think you can lay down?” Alex asks, still sitting on the coffee table, one hand on his knee.

“I’m fine,” Sam says, as she pushes him down, one of the pillows he thinks is just supposed to be for decoration behind his head. Jody wiggles his boots, and he hears them drop, one at a time to the floor. He curls his legs in, wonders if there’s a couch out there he could stretch out on that doesn’t cost enough to make his eyes bulge out.

“Sorry,” he manages to mumble again. It’s like his words don’t make sense in his head anymore.

“Relax Sam,” Jody says as Alex tucks a warm towel under his head, leaves one on his chest, his groin. A blanket covers him. The same quilt from before, patterned red and black checkered pieces. He thinks maybe someone puts another one on top of that, but his eyes close. A shudder runs through him.

Jody sighs, says something he doesn’t catch. Alex replies.

His head hurts, he realizes. It’s pounding. White.

When things fade out, he’s not sure if it’s because he’s passing out or not.

He’s wandering heaven in his dream. He’s not sure why. He’s not dead, he thinks. Probably. He’s pretty sure Dean’s supposed to be here. It feels like a dream. Heaven, that time, had felt real, not like this, pulling apart at the seams.

“Dean?” he calls.

Dean would be at the Roadhouse, he decides, if he were here in heaven. So he wanders until he remembers he’s dreaming and decides he’d rather be where Dean is at.

Ash spits his beer when he walks in. Bobby, who’s there too—because this is one of Sam’s bizarre dreams, not one that ends up in the Cage, he hopes— stands up real fast.

“Have you seen Dean?” He asks them. No harm in asking, unless one of them is really Lucifer pretending to be someone else.

“Sam?” His dad says.

He’s asked Bobby and Ash, maybe Dad’ll know, Dad knows lots of things “Have you seen Dean?”

There’s a lot of people there, for no reason. He asks them all, haltingly, “Has anyone seen Dean?”

“He dead?” he hears Bobby ask Ash when all those people start talking. He hopes not. If Dean’s dead, he’ll have to do something drastic to get him back, because they left on the worst terms, and he can’t handle going through that again, and Jody’ll get sick of him soon, he can’t go back to an empty bunker.

“No,” Ash says, and Sam feels like he should smile at that. He’s not sure if he does, in this dream.

There’s a hand on his arm, he looks at it, frowns. Follows it up to a face.

“Why am I dreaming about you again?” Sam asks his dad, “It’s been you again and again. Have you seen Dean?” His thoughts spin fast, like that cotton candy machine at that carnival from when he was seven and Dad was back from a successful hunt.

“Sam,” his dad says, and he flickers, Sam turns over on the couch, sinking in.

He squints his eyes open, watches dust float around in a sunbeam and waits for his brain to come back online.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” Jody says at some point, jolting him out of his blank staring.

She’s in snowman pajama pants and a t-shirt, leaning casually against the doorway with a mug in hand.

“Hey,” he answers back, carefully monotone. He sits up and feels the knots in his back and neck and tries to stretch them out.

“How’re you feeling?” Jody asks, sipping her drink.

Sam blinks, “Much better. Thank you. For—” he tosses a hand up uselessly in the air, “Everything.”

Jody snorts into her mug, “You’re welcome. Breakfast?”

It doesn’t sound great, but it’s Jody.

“Sure,” he says, finally standing up. Everything is aching and sore and his feet are freezing.

Jody points a finger in his direction and spins it, “Why don’t you get changed into something more comfortable and I’ll go get stuff ready.”

Sam nods—a quick up-down—and goes to grab his duffle that’s lying innocently on the armchair. He takes a look outside and spots his bike sitting in the driveway.

“Hey Jody,” he calls, “thanks for grabbing my bike.” Must have had Alex help.

She calls back a, “No problem,” and Sam puts it on the list of things he owes Jody for.

“I wasn’t sure if it was stolen or not, so I figured picking it up would be better than leaving it,” Jody elaborates.

Sam pulls out the first t-shirt and flannel he touches, snatches a pair of boxers and then debates over the sweatpants underneath until he finally just cements his jaw in place and grabs them.

He walks to the bathroom and shrugs off his clothes. For a moment, his eyes land in the mirror and he cringes. He’s lost weight and muscle mass. Scars have started to accumulate again. When he was a kid, Dean made every scar between them seem cool, no matter how dumb the thing that tagged them was. Now, it’s just a reminder that—

Dean. He needs to—

He tugs the sweatpants over his legs, and then puts on the shirts, covering most of them up.

Looking back in the mirror, he can see how much like beaten crap he looks. His face is thin and pale, he’s got three-day-old scruff that just looks like a patchy mess, and underneath one of his baggy eyes, he’s got a bruise settling on purple.

Dean was right, he is turning into his dad.

He washes up and runs hands through his greasy hair then leaves it for later. Jody’s already seen him in various stages of mess, there’s no need for presentation.

He leaves his socks on, some irrational fear of freezing them off still lingering.

In the kitchen, Jody’s cutting a roll of dough with dental floss.

“There you are,” she says, “Mind finishing these up?”

“Uh, sure,” Sam says, hesitantly taking the floss from her and trying to mimic the smooth cross-and-cut she’d been doing.

“So, the bike, stolen?” Jody asks.

“Uh, no,” Sam says, cringing as his next cut turns out a roll even he with his limited baking knowledge knows is too big.

Jody smiles, and he sees it out of the corner of his eye, “Good. Wouldn’t want to have to arrest you or anything.”

Sam gives a weak laugh at that, trying to smile back.

“Do you want some?” Jody asks, holding up the coffee pot.

“No thanks,” he says, pulling the next roll out of the way, “I, uh, I’m cutting caffeine.”

“Good for you,” Jody says, an impressed look on her face, “I don’t think I’d ever be able to do that.”

Sam huffs a laugh, “Yeah, I’m not exactly happy with it.”

Jody laughs too, and then reaches around him to start placing the rolls on a cookie sheet.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Uh-huh,” he replies, finishing the last cut and backing away.

Jody gestures toward the table and he takes it as his cue to take a seat. His legs twitch with the desire to just leave, but he’s resigned to his fate. For whatever reason, Jody cares. And caring people make you do things you don’t like in the name of good or understanding or pure stubbornness.

“No work today?” he asks, fidgeting.

“Nope,” Jody says, “It’s Tuesday—I get today off, most the time.”

Sam nods and brings a hand to his mouth so he can bite at his nail.

Jody puts the sheet of cinnamon rolls in the oven and shuts the door, clicking the timer until she’s happy with it.

She turns around and sits on the other edge of the table, close enough that they could probably knock knees.

“So,” she says, serious, “I’m thinking we should talk.”

Sam exhales and smiles with half of his mouth, “We could always skip it.”

“Sam,” Jody says, and he drops the sad excuse for a smile, “yesterday was terrifying.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, wishing he had a cup of coffee just to have something to hold, “yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

“Not looking for an apology,” Jody says, shaking her head gently, “I’m just looking to figure out why it happened.”

Sam shrugs, feeling helpless. There’s a million reasons why yesterday happened—number one on the list is his own idiocy.

“Okay,” Jody says, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms, “I don’t know much of the story, all I know is that you and Dean had a fight of some kind, you left, and you ended up here, drinking yourself to death, and Dean knew that’s exactly where you would be. Do I have any hope that you were coming here?”

A bucket can only get so full. Sam decides his guilt is going in the bucket. It’ll overflow, but it’ll stay the same.

He shakes his head, letting his hair fall in front of his eyes without tucking it back. The truth, even though it would be so easy to lie. Everything is wrong in the world. He just wants something to be right.

Jody sighs, not surprised by any means, “I figured. You do know you’d be welcome here, right? That you are?”

For some reason, it’s that phrasing that nearly breaks the dam, and he stops the tears by sheer force of will. His voice comes out cracking, “Yeah—yeah. I—thanks.”

Jody nods, “Alright then. Why don’t you tell me the story?”

Sam huffs out something that tries to be a laugh but sounds a little bit too close to a sob than is comfortable for him, “I don’t know where to start.”

“How about with this?” Jody says, pointing to her face, mirroring the shape of Sam’s bruise. His jaw wobbles a bit.

He shrugs, “Me and Dean got in a fight. We—they tend to get violent sometimes. It’s how we—it’s been that way for a long time.”

Jody frowns, but once again lacks surprise, “Sam, I care about the both of you, but if Dean—”

“Jody,” Sam interrupts, “Dean’s not—this isn’t a,” he pauses, tries to screw his head on straight again, “We’re brothers. We fight like ‘em. Sometimes—sometimes we hurt each other. I just needed,” he comes to a full stop. Blinks. “I’ve always been the runner, you know?” Jody doesn’t reply, but nods, processing.

“And I,” he continues, “We both said things we shouldn’t have. And—” he fumbles for his words.

“And you ran,” Jody says.

“And I ran,” he agrees, running fingers over the scar on his left hand that didn’t ever heal right, even after Cas—even when—

“And you ran to . . . drink yourself into hypothermia?” Jody questions, carefully. Sam closes his eyes. This isn’t a conversation he wants to get into.

“It’s not—I’m.”

Jody reaches out a hand to stop his fidgeting fingers and clasps his hand tight, “Sam, look. I’ve been a sheriff for a while now. You wouldn’t believe the trainings we have to go through,” She laughs, sadly.

And then she says exactly what they’ve both been thinking, the question Sam knows Jody’s probably heard over and over again in every training, “Are you suicidal Sam?”

Sam slumps back in his seat, huffs out a breath, “Loaded question.”

Deflection’s easy. He and Dean have been doing it their whole lives. Deflection, compartmentalization, ignoring—it’s the Winchester coping mechanism.

Jody doesn’t play though, just tightens her grip on his hand, “Sam…”

“I’m not—” Sam starts, corrects, admits, “I don’t know.”

He watches Jody’s brows furrow slightly, then relax. She doesn’t say anything, but waits expectantly.

And it really is a loaded question, ready to aim and fire. There’s too much to consider, too much to question, a lot of history.

For some reason, he thinks about Ash, that time in heaven. You boys die more than anyone I have ever met.

He does know an answer though, not one he likes. Not one Jody will be comfortable with.

But it’s the one he owes to himself.

Ducking his head, he sighs, “Look, it’s—I’ve—I’ve been on-again off-again suicidal since I was fourteen,” Jody’s hand tightens, almost painful, “And—and it’s okay, I know how to deal with it. It kinda . . . comes with the territory. Dean—” he feels his throat close up, “I don’t know when it started for him, but he’s—it’s—he’s been there too. Both have. We usually... We’re there for each other.”

“Fourteen?” Jody says softly, and when Sam peeks up through his hair, he thinks maybe she might cry.

“Me and Dean, we’ve been fighting this fight a long time. Lots of people have it worse anyway. And it’s just… You kind of...Stop noticing when you want to die when—when your head’s always already on the chopping block,” Sam says, with a shrug, and a bit of a snort. He meets Jody’s eyes, and there’s too much there, so he glances away.

They both take a second to collect themselves, and Sam is selfishly glad he’s not the only one who’s feeling the pressure of this conversation.

“This fight,” Jody says, “between you and Dean. It wasn’t just an issue of someone not washing the dishes, huh?”

Sam smiles and shakes his head, “Not exactly.”

Jody lets the silence draw out, and he really wants to poke at the scar, but he also doesn’t mind the way Jody’s touching him. It’s keeping him centered, in the moment, here in Jody’s kitchen with the smell of cinnamon in the air.

But the absence of questions plucks at something, and Sam continues, “Dean… He’s not good with… Being down for the count, y’know? He needs something to keep him busy,” they both do, really, “and so not being able to hunt has been rough. He—he locks himself down. He’s been—” he shouldn’t share, not really, it’s Dean’s life, but, it’s been Sam’s too, “drinking. A lot. And I—I didn’t—I couldn’t help him. I tried, but…”

“But Dean’s his own person and you’ve got things to struggle with too,” Jody says, hitting it a little too hard on the nose.

Sam shrugs, “Yeah. And, it’s just been hard. So we both had a bad day, we both said some bad things, and I ran.”

Jody’s thumb absentmindedly rubs circles on the back of one of his hands, and he stares down at the table. Shame is an easy emotion for him.

There’s an awfully packed silence for long stretch where Jody appears to be deep in thought and Sam struggles with feeling awkward, and then the oven timer goes off. Jody startles, and Sam does too. Jody squeezes his hand one last time and stands up. She pulls out the cinnamon rolls and leans against the counter.

“Bobby—“ Jody’s voice catches, then she swallows and it comes back strong, “Sam, I don’t really know all that much about you and Dean beyond what . . .”

“What we’ve told you. Showed you,” Sam says, hands twitching. Jody nods, and he answers the question he doesn’t think she’ll ask, “We’re—we’re pretty good at that. Letting people see what we want.”

“Yeah,” she says, understanding washing over her face.

Sam, facing her unconscious accusation shrinks in on himself a bit and admits, “Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re doing it.”

Jody picks up her mug from earlier and pours more coffee in, then turns back to Sam.

“Do you want some hot chocolate?”

The change of subject throws him off for a second, and he can’t process the question.

“I—uh—wha... Sure,” he stutters out. His feet are still freezing.

Jody starts moving around the kitchen again, pulling out a can of hot cocoa powder and pulling the milk out of the fridge. She puts a mug-full of milk in the microwave and starts it. She moves to reclaim her seat at the table.

“Well then,” she says, sounding a little more chipper, “Man of mystery, tell me something about you.”

Sam freezes up, his hand halfway up to his mouth, “Uh, what, um?”

“I want to know something you wouldn’t tell me otherwise. Those things you don’t show people.”

Sam swallows heavily and listens to the sound of the microwave. It beeps, and Jody gets up to retrieve it. In the absence of her expectant look, a strange wave of emotion overtakes him. It’s—he shouldn’t—but he wants to try out the words. And Jody’s proven herself again and again and she hasn’t been a hunter for all that long and maybe she—

“I’m a little psychic,” he admits out loud, staring down at the table and scratching his neck.

Jody starts to stir in the hot chocolate powder, and looks at him. He doesn’t look back.

“Psychic?” She questions, moving back to the table and placing the steaming mug in front of him.

The shrug that follows the question is a heavy one.

“Yeah. Little bit. I—um, yeah.”

“Heard a little bit about psychics from all those hunters who keep wandering into town. Pretty general term, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“So, what’s being psychic look like for you?”

Sam lifts the mug to his lips and sips at it. It burns his tongue, so he sets it back down.

“Visions, mostly. Telekinesis sometimes.”

Jody’s eyebrows shoot up, “No kidding?”

Sam shakes his head, “And… I’m not sure, but sometimes I can sense other things. Ley lines and the sort. They kind of… I get a lot of headaches.”

Jody hums, taking a sip of her coffee, and then setting it down, “And Dean knows all of this?”

Sam’s heart drops at the reminder of Dean, and he shrugs again, “Mostly. He doesn’t… Hunters and psychics don’t usually…” he gestures vaguely, trying to find the word, “vibe.”

Jody stands up again and grabs a bowl that’s been sitting on the counter. She starts spooning glaze onto the cinnamon rolls. Then she sets the bowl aside and tugs two paper towels off the roll and sets a cinnamon roll on each. She carries them over and sets one in front of Sam.

“Well then, mister psychic, what else should I know about you?”

They talk for a while, long after the second cinnamon rolls have disappeared from in front of them. Jody drags out some things Sam hasn’t thought about in years. His favorite childhood song, the best place he’s ever lived, the fact that he had an imaginary friend for years. She shares things too, balancing it.

It’s nice. It’s more than nice.

Eventually, they clean up the kitchen, and she points Sam in the direction of the tv, so he settles down on the couch.

Alex comes home from school and Sam, for some bizarre reason, ends up helping her with geography homework that Jody declares has to be done or else.

He falls asleep sometime after that, and wakes up in time for dinner. Jody and Alex lead the brunt of the conversation, and then Jody drags him into watching the Princess Diaries with them. He doesn’t have the heart to tell them he’s seen it dozens of times when Jess—Jess had—he just pretends it’s a new watch for him.

That night, lying on the couch, he stares at the darkness for a long time and wishes for a lot of things. He thinks of his phone, the screen that remained free of anything marked Dean.

He wishes he were strong enough to be the first one to reach out.

Jody’s house is quiet without anyone else around. He pulls on his jacket, turns down the heat. No reason to have it up when he’s got a perfectly good coat hanging around. He messes around on his computer a bit, indexes a few pages he’d scanned and never got to. Finds himself twenty clicks deep on Wikipedia and cuts himself off.

He feels angry. He shouldn’t, he knows he shouldn’t. He is.

There’s dishes in the sink from breakfast, and a few dirty pans on the stove so Sam washes them, ignoring the dishwasher in favor of having something to do with his hands.

It’s too quiet. There’s no distant sound of rock music, no record player playing music older than the Impala. No Dean, interrupting him.

He puts away the last dish and makes himself eat the sandwich Jody’d left for him in the fridge. It doesn’t taste like much, turkey meat, cheese, mayo. Dean would’ve added mustard for him, even though Sam doesn’t go out of the way to do it for himself.

For a minute, he stands in the kitchen, doing absolutely nothing.

He hates this. He hates not knowing what to do without Dean around, hates it with a burning passion. It’s against everything he used to stand for, all the times he bitched and fought to be himself, his own person. All those times he did things just to separate himself from his family, just to be someone else.

He sucks in a breath and decides he should do his laundry.

The duffle bag seems to weigh more than it should when he shoulders it and gathers up his pile of dirty clothes. It drags him down. All he wants to do is sit and rot—

The washer lid clunks when he lifts it up, hinges letting it lean a little too far back and hit the knobs.

He double-checks every pocket, a long-term habit that Dean had drilled into him during all those hours spent at the laundromat, staring openly at the crackheads who wandered in, spending time calling each other trailer-trash so that when the people at school started to make fun of their flood-jeans it didn’t hurt so bad.

Once all pockets are certifiably empty, he opens his duffle. There’s dirty socks in there he hasn’t washed since the last time he packed.

He reaches in and digs around. Then, his fingers brush against something. He pulls out the small triceratops toy, somewhat squashed from being stored underneath everything.

Sam closes his hand around it, squeezing it.

His other hand he puts on the edge of the washing machine to support himself.

Somehow, he’d forgotten. Just a couple of months ago, they were fine. He’d found it in his duffle that time too, they’d tossed it back and forth over an imaginary line dividing a motel room and when they’d gotten back to the Bunker he’d tucked it in Dean’s pillowcase while he was in the shower.

It’d slipped his mind after that, an unimportant bright spot that he should have paid more attention to. A moment when he thought he could forgive Dean, where he thought maybe they’d make it through losing Cas and everything that came after.

He shudders and rummages around until he finds the dirty socks and tosses them in, adding in the detergent and putting down the lid. He presses the start button and sinks to the floor, pressing his back to the washing machine so that when it turns on, he can feel it rattle his skull.

The triceratops is useless. He never would’ve picked it out himself, he’d meant for Dean to take his tickets, that day at the bowling alley when he tried to speak Dean’s language, tried to say ‘I’m trying to forgive you,’ tried to start making up for everything Dean had given up for him.

He presses the triceratops close to his chest and draws up his knees, wincing at the ache in his legs.

It doesn’t matter. He’ll hang out here until Jody gets tired of him and go begging back to Dean, suffer through endless guilt trips and late nights and unspoken anger until they get back to working together. He’ll choke down his memories again, he’ll find them hunts to numb everything, to give him a goal, a purpose.

He’ll add more warding to the bunker, just in case.

And that’ll be it. The world might try to implode again, and they’ll try to stop it. Maybe sometime, one of them will die, and the other won’t bother to hurt because it’s just the same thing, again and again.

He needs to get stuff done. Maybe he’ll leave before Jody tells him to, drown himself in memories of how bad it could be and force himself to go back so he can find answers for everyone dealing with the swarms of monsters that are his fault. He never did figure out what happened to the Novak family, he owes them, he owes so many people. He should—he should—there’s so much—

He can’t move, except to shake along with the movement of the washing machine. The triceratops might rip from the pressure he’s putting on it if he keeps it up.

Back in the day, he’d never have thought, even for the briefest second, that he’d miss those days after leaving Stanford. At the time, they’d been some of the most painful days of his life.

Now, though, he misses them. Not because they didn’t hurt (they still hurt), but because he and Dean had each other’s backs. No angels, some demons, just themselves and a missing dad and the Impala and the open road.

He can’t remember the last time there wasn’t anything hovering over either of them (or both of them). They keep having to push each other up, but they only serve to pull each other down.

Or at least, Sam does. Dean’s always been the one pulling up, dragging him onward. When he loses Dean, he makes bad choices. When he loses Dean, he can’t think correctly.

The triceratops has dumb, blank, black eyes. He hates it.

His breathing is too fast, his heart rate too high, he’s shaking.

He hears Alex walk through the front door and manages to finally get to his feet and change the load of laundry to the dryer.

Jody keeps asking him if the end of the week is a good goal for when Dean can come up here, and he never knows what to say to it except, “That’s fine.”

And it is fine. He cleans around the house and finds hunts and sends them out into the vastness of the hunter group chat so that Dean can see he’s still alive without having to directly text them.

He has a vision one night, and jolts awake screaming. Jody and Alex wind up in the living room with a shotgun and knife respectively, and he shakes until he can jot down the information from it and have Jody call up a hunter to take care of it.

That’s Alex’s introduction to his psychic-ness, and she apparently takes it just fine, because the moment Sam starts insisting that everything will be fine once they get a hunter on it, she turns around and goes back to bed.

The next morning, Sam apologizes at breakfast while they’re gathered around cereal bowls.

Alex rolls her eyes, dumps her bowl in the sink, and says she’s leaving for school.

Jody tells him he doesn’t need to apologize.

He’s pretty sure he does.

That night, Jody recruits them for help with dinner, and she sings along with rock songs that pop up on her Pandora station while they roll burritos.

It all goes well until Sam’s zoned-out brain misses the fact that the station’s turned to Heat of the Moment, and the second it goes into the chorus he stops breathing and has to catch himself on the counter.

“Sam?” Alex asks, and he tries to draw in a breath to respond and can’t. His chest heaves, but no air goes in.

“Sam, you okay?” Jody asks.

He can’t—he has to find Dean—he has to.

He manages to move himself and slams a finger down on Jody’s phone screen. For a long second after the music turns off, he just shudders.

“Sam?” Jody asks, one arm reaching out to steady him.

“Sorry—sorry—I’m sorry,” he stutters out, “It’s—that’s not a great song for me.”

“Okay,” Jody says easily, leading him to a chair at the table, “okay.”

Dinner is accompanied by stilted conversation from Jody and Alex, and Sam doesn’t even register the food he’s eating.

Jody stops him from helping with the dishes, so he goes back out to the couch and pulls out his phone. He’s been keeping it on his person every waking minute (and some sleeping ones too).

His fingers shake, and he presses a number and then the call button.

Dean picks up after one ring.

“Hey Sam.”

Sam’s heard the words of God and seen the vastness of the universe, and still he thinks that this is the most beautiful thing in existence.

“Hey Dean,” he chokes out.

They don’t talk about anything much. Definitely not anything important. At one point, Sam finds himself relating the plot to Princess Diaries 2 to a strangely curious Dean.

Jody walks by and gives him a thumbs up when Dean’s voice comes on over speaker.

That night, one tiny knot in the mess of tangled yarn that is his heart is undone.

He sleeps a bit easier.

Sam walks out to the Impala with the march of the dead man. Or, he thinks hysterically, the born-again man. A hunter Sam thinks he’s seen before but doesn’t remember the name of,\ hops out of the car, and for a second, every molecule in his body screams about how wrong it is that someone else drove the car. He calms himself down, because he isn’t Dean. He isn’t. It’s a car. Just a car. Just the car that means everything.

“Man,” the guy says, walking up to Sam and blocking his view of Dean, “I don’t know what gave you the patience to deal with his backseat driving, but I’d rather not know.”

Sam grimaces a smile and gives the guy a nod that he hopes is interpreted as a thanks, because he’s not sure if his throat is up to the challenge. Dean is leveraging himself out of the car, working around his leg as best he can. Their eyes meet, and Sam is suddenly reminded of the time Dean came back from hell. The first time. High on demon blood, unsure of everything in the world except for revenge and power, he’d been confused. Hurt. His entire being had called him toward Dean. He’d wanted to hold on until the world crumbled around them. He’d wanted to break away so he didn’t contaminate Dean too.

His head spins, and he just watches from the porch as Dean maneuvers to grab something out of the car before slamming the door shut. His limping motion manages to propel him all the way over to Sam, and for a second, they stand there and stare at each other.

Sam can’t stand it for another moment and kind of lunges at Dean, who rears back like he’s expecting to get hit.

Sam hugs with every iota of strength he’d gained back these past couple days. Dean nearly loses his balance, and has to shuffle a bit to get it back, wrapping one arm around Sam, hand gently pressing Sam’s head into his shoulder.

“Hey’a Sammy,” Dean says.

Sam lets out a huff and manages a, “Hey.”

They take a second to just stand there, Sam supporting Dean’s weight as best he can, hunched over to press himself into Dean while also giving himself to Dean as a fencepost to lean against.

Dean pats the back of his head, pets it a bit, then mumbles, “We’ve got an audience.”

Sam thinks about Jody’s screen door and the living room window, “Don’t care.”

There’s something that was probably supposed to be a laugh that comes from Dean, and after another moment, Sam loosens his grip.

He uses the arms under Dean’s armpits to help him sit on the porch step and lets himself sit next to him, even though his absolute terror has returned and he’s not sure Dean really wants him there.

A bottle is pressed into his hand, and for a second, he’s thinking about Dean, alone in the bunker, without alcohol to help him sleep or deal with his memories.

“Cream soda,” Dean says, tapping the label, “You still like that crud, right?”

“Better’n root beer,” Sam confirms, glancing over at Dean’s bottle, which is, indeed, just root beer.

They sit for a second and drink their sodas.

“Let’s not do this again,” Dean says, “The whole ‘leave Dean in the bunker thing’.”

“Sorry—” Sam starts, surprised at how easy it is to say the word.

“Not asking for an apology,” Dean interrupts, “Just saying. We shouldn’t get to the point where it needs to happen.”

Sam snorts at that, but doesn’t respond. It feels like his brain’s gone on standby mode, or maybe like it’s stuck on a staticy station on an old tv. Another thing to feel guilty about, another time he abandoned Dean. He can add it to the pile.

Dean sighs a bit, looks out to the road, “Done a lot of thinking these past few days. Didn’t really have anything to do other’n think and watch Netflix. Arrested Development’s pretty good.”

“Me too. Not. . . Netflix. Thinking.”

“Okay,” Dean says, and gears up like what he’s about to say might hurt them both, “You go first.”

Sam feels a little shock run through him, and starts picking at the wrapper on his bottle. He’s—he’s—he doesn’t know where to start.

“Okay. Okay. So. Things. Things need to change. Between us.”

“You’re tellin’ me,” Dean mumbles when Sam pauses.

“We’re. We’re not—it’s not healthy Dean, how we’re living. Not just—it’s not just the drinking. It’s not even just the hunting or whatever. We keep—we’ve had to deal with apocalypses non-stop for years. We’re both—there’s a lot of mental stuff there. A lot of—there’s bad moves,” he pauses, and admits, “on—not just on my part.”

Dean takes it like a champ, but Sam can see how he’s holding himself back from defending himself. Or, more likely, deflecting, he corrects.

“I’m—I’m not trying to downplay the crap that I’ve done. But—but there’s stuff for both of us. That we—we need to address. Or something.”

Dean nods, taking another sip of his root beer.

Sam’s not sure how to put every conversation he’s had with Jody, every confusing train of thought he’s followed, every late night realization into words.

“Your turn,” he says, and wonders why he always thinks of Dean deflecting, when he’s just as bad.

Dean holds the bottle to his mouth for a moment, not drinking, just letting it sit there.

“I’ve realized,” he starts, breath whistling over the top of the soda bottle, “as chick-flick as it is, that I don’t know my . . . My job. When you’re not around,” he says, stumbling over the words, a hand rubbing at the knee of his good leg. Sam presses his shoulder against Dean’s.

“Hunting. It’s the life,” Dean continues, “It’s good. It works. But I don’t…” He trails off.

“I don’t want to do it without my brother,” Sam mumbles. A long forgotten joke that spanned a fall and half of winter one year in Texas. Sam, curled with his forehead against a desk, Dean, in the classroom two hallways away. Dean, walking him home, asking, “What you say to get them to back off?”

Dean slumps, nods. They sit, and Sam wonders if Jody and the other guy are still watching.

“Do you remember,” Sam says, not sure where he’s going with it, “when. With dad. After.” He steels himself, “When dad died, and we were both messed up about it?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, with just a touch of hesitation in his voice, “Long time ago, that.” He takes a swig.

Sam picks at the label of his bottle, “You knew,” a breath, “You knew I was messed up about it. And I kept drilling you instead. And you had it mostly figured out. It was me who—who wasn’t facing it.”

“Sounds like you,” Dean snorts.

“I—I think—I’m—I turn my feelings onto you when I get upset. I try to put things there that aren’t always and I—I’m sorry for that.”

Dean takes another second before he responds, looking somewhere to the left of the Impala, “I don’t think that’s always what it is. Sometimes, yeah. But… We’ve been through some of the same stuff. Or similar. And that… It screws with a person.”

They both know what he’s talking about. It’s not hard to jump directly from now to… then.

“It screws with your head,” Dean continues, “and we haven’t… Life hasn’t exactly been great all the time either.”

Sam shakes his head, agreeing.

“But you know, when I was—it’s always easier when I’ve got you to think about. When you’re around.”

“Being around him made my brain quiet,” Sam says, feeling the words trip over his tongue.

Dean frowns, “What’s that from?”

Sam huffs a laugh, “You remember that book, uh, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?”

Dean squints his eyes, “I think so.”

“Yeah. It’s from that.”

“Geek,” Dean says, rolling his eyes.

Sam inhales, and something shaky in his chest wobbles, “Jerk.”

Dean lights up, a smile tugging at his lips, “Bitch.”

They both smirk at each other, and then turn back to looking at nothing in particular.

“We’ve got lots of things to fix,” Dean says, “Or to figure out how to live with...right.”

Sam nods.

“I think…” Dean trails off for a moment, tapping one of his fingers against the glass of his bottle, “I think I never understood… The thing with Gadreel.”

Sam’s throat seizes up.

“I...I didn’t just watch Netflix. You had a lot of books out and I… Sam, there’s just…” He stops, seemingly without words to convey his thoughts with.

“Yeah,” Sam says, knowing exactly which books Dean’s talking about, “Those journals are pretty… In-depth. It’s actually interesting—the guy that was the vessel, Johan or whatever, he—”

“Sam,” Dean says, stopping his rambling.

Sam hunches back in on himself, “Sorry.”

Dean shakes his head, “No. I—I—Look, this isn’t—” he inhales, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being so selfish when you were dying. We keep doing this man, the back and forth dying. I can’t…”

“Yeah,” Sam says. He knows. He knows the untethered quality of the world when Dean isn’t in it, that sweeping blankness that makes everything void.

And Dean shrugs, adjusting the jacket of his collar.

“I don’t…” Sam begins, hesitating, “It’s gonna take a while before—before I can… Before I can forgive you for it. It hurts. But… I’m trying. I have been for a while.”

Dean’s eye twitches, and he tenses up and then releases it, slumping down, “Okay. I can live with that.”

“And I’m sorry too,” Sam says, “For… There’s a lot. I keep... “ he chuckles a bit, wry, “You know, I confessed in that church all the times I let you down. And I just keep doing it. I can’t—I’m—I can’t... You had a point. When you… what you said about dad and me. I keep trying not to be him, but everytime it seems like it just keeps turning around.”

“Dad was a good guy,” Dean defends, almost like it’s instinct, and then he backs down a little, “But you’re even better.”

That breaks something inside Sam and he can feel how his jaw wobbles at it.

They sit there for a long moment.

“This psychic stuff,” Dean says, “I... I know I haven’t been all that great about it. But I—I just—”

“It’s hard remembering what it was like last time.”

Dean nods.

Sam shifts away from Dean a bit and quietly admits, “I went to see Missouri. Crowley too. They, uh. They both seemed pretty insistent that you were the odd one out for not being psychic.”

Dean’s brows furrow and his mouth turns down into a deep frown, “You mean…?”

Sam shrugs, “Psychics tend to run in families. Ones like ours… It’s no surprise that I ended up with these… Abilities.”

“So they’re not…?”

“They’re not from the demon blood,” Sam says, and there’s something so freeing in that statement that he wants to yell it from on high, “Azazel bound all the psychic kids to him so he could feed off their power and control it. That’s why there were so many of us.”

Dean blinks, and his face smooths out to settle on contemplative, “Huh.”

Sam nods, pursing his lips.

Behind them, the screen door opens.

“Feel free to stay out here if you want,” Jody says, “but I’ve got dinner on the table.”

Dean turns to him, waggling his eyebrows. Sam can’t help but grin, shaking his head.

They head inside.

The dude who drove the Impala introduces himself as the famed ‘Asa Fox,’ and they spend dinner comparing hunting stories.

At one point, they start talking about first hunts while Alex rolls her eyes at them, and Asa admits, “A werewolf got me into this mess. A hunter saved my life and left, and I spend all my spare time finding news of hunts and trying to send them to her. There sure wasn’t a Mary Campbell in any phone book I looked in though, so I still don’t know who the hell she was.”

Next to Sam, Dean starts choking on his mouthful of food, and Sam has to fight not to do a spit take with the punch he’s just put in his mouth. He’s not entirely successful, and a little bit spills out onto his chin. He grabs his napkin and thumps Dean on the back. Once Dean has an air passage to breath through, he slams a hand down on the table and looks Asa in the eye.

“Did you say ‘Mary Campbell’?”

“Uh, yeah,” Asa says, looking just a little bit freaked out.

“Mary Campbell,” Dean repeats, agast.

Sam’s busy leaning back and shaking his head at the irony the universe likes to throw at them and pressing his hands to his mouth.

Dean shoves a hand into his pocket and comes back with his wallet. He flips it open and pulls out a worn picture.

“That her?” He asks.

Asa leans over and tilts his head at it. He shrugs, “Memory’s not the best, but I’d go with yes.”

Sam starts laughing, and Dean hits him in the stomach, making all of his air whoosh out of his body.

Asa and Jody are looking back and forth between the two of them, and even Alex looks intrigued.

Dean just sits back and whispers, “I'll be damned.”

Sam can’t stop laughing, and tears start to form in his eyes.

“We could start a club,” Dean says, shaking his head as he puts his wallet back in his pocket.

“What,” Sam says, in between his cackles, “The ‘In Hunting Because of Mary Winchester Club’? Tagline,” he thrusts his hand out and sweeps it across his body, “Now with a seventy-five percent survival rate!”

That breaks Dean, and he starts laughing too.

Asa’s brows furrow, and then something clicks, “Mary Campbell was…”

“Our mom,” Sam says, finally catching his breath, “Mary Winchester. Campbell was her maiden name.”

“No way,” Jody say, huffing out a laugh as well, “what are the odds?”

“Holy cow,” Asa says, mystified, “I guess that explains a bit.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, “no kidding.”

“So,” Jody says, after Asa leaves for some get-together or another and Alex begs off to finish homework, “What are we doing?”

Sam and Dean share a look. Dean nods at Sam.

“I think—We think,” he corrects, “We’re gonna take a break from hunting. A real break. Actively. I need to get a hold of whatever these powers are.”

“And I need to get one-hundred again. This leg won’t help anybody,” Dean says.

Sam nods at him, “And. We need to figure out. Something. For mental health stuff,” he feels awful just saying the words.

Jody smiles at them both, “That sounds good. I’ll be here, you can come up and stay anytime.

“Thanks,” they both say.

Jody reaches over the table and grasps one hand from each of them, “I’m glad. Just... Glad.”

She stands up and shoos them away from helping with the dishes and tells them to get the air mattress ready in the living room if they want to be of help. Sam helps Dean limp out of the room.

They rock-paper-scissors over the couch and mattress. Sam wins and has no qualms over stealing the couch away from Dean. When they bed down, he listens to Dean breathing and the ticking of a clock somewhere in the room and shuffles until he’s on his stomach and his leg can hang over the edge and rest on Dean’s.

“Okay Sammy?” Dean asks in the darkness.

“Yeah,” Sam says, and he thinks he might mean it, “I’m okay.”

Chapter Text

“Yeah, lamb’s blood should do the trick. Yeah, you bet. Say hi to Taylor for me. Uh, huh. Bye.”

Sam sets the phone down, and Dean grins at him from across the way, then strums a chord.

“Who you gonna call? Winchesters!”

Sam snorts and leans back in his chair, “Ever think we would end up being Bobby?”

“Bobby’s we ain’t. Man would swat you round the head for even thinking it,” Dean says, plucking something Sam isn’t sure is a real song.

“I’m thinking burritos for dinner. We’ve got the stuff, right?” Sam asks, shuffling papers around and closing tabs on his laptop.

Dean shrugs, “Should. Might be low on cheese, but we can work with that.”

Sam stands up and his head makes him sit back down.

“Vision?” Dean asks, already fading.

Sam nods, and then the world shifts around him.

He’s in an antique store. It’s familiar. He knows that jukebox.

An old guy, wizened, turns and looks at him like he can see him.

“Well,” the owner says, “what are you waiting for?”

His vision goes white again and then...

Sam slips back out. Dean is looking at him expectantly.

“Hunt?” Dean asks, and Sam’s not surprised that he’s a bit excited. They’d just done their second back-in-the-groove hunt last week, and it went as well as could be expected. Better, actually, now that they’re back on the same page for the most part.

“Uh, no? You uh,” he blinks rapidly, trying to steady the world, “You remember that antiques guy? In, uh, Calico Rock?”

Dean frowns, “Yeah?”

“I was back in the shop, but uh. The guy saw me? I don’t…”

“Someone saw you while you were in a vision? Does that ever happen?”

“No,” Sam says, “not really.”

“Well then, what the hell?”

Sam shrugs, “Know as much as you do.”

Dean rolls his eyes at the universe in general and starts limping toward the kitchen. It’s a lot less noticeable when he tries, but here at home he limps to his heart’s content.

“I’ll get the burritos going. You stay there and, I dunno, try to figure it out.”

“That’s not all,” Sam blurts out, flipping over some papers, “I think… I think we should check it out.”

“What, the antiques store? Again?” Dean asks, face wrinkled in confusion.

“Uh, yeah. I think… I think he was talking to me. He asked me what I was waiting for.”

“Well,” Dean says, stymied, “that’s not creepy at all.”

Sam huffs at Dean, and picks up his phone when it buzzes at him. It’s a text from Jody.

You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step—MLKJ

Hope all’s well with the Winchesters. Do you have Christmas plans?

He smiles and leaves it open to the message so he can respond.

“I’m telling you, I think we should check it out."

He texts back thanks Jody. Not sure. Probably not.

Dean face twitches up into a smile, “I’ll text Garth and let him know we might not make it out.”

“Good plan.”

Dean nods and picks up his phone to start texting. Samheads into his room to start packing. The pictures on the walls—him and Dean, him and Dean and Bobby, a copy of the picture Dad kept in his journal—gleam when he flicks on the light. His new bed takes up way too much space, but it’s easier for when Dean and him end up crashing there after binging something on Netflix.

He pulls out his duffel and starts loading it up.

Life’s okay. He’s okay. They’re healing.

And Dean’s left the dumb triceratops in his underwear drawer again. Sam considers making fun of him for his awful hiding spaces, but decides leaving it hanging from the ceiling fan in Dean’s room to find when they get back from the hunt is a better option.