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The drive back to Lebanon is suffocatingly quiet. Sam is bone-tired and his head feels full of thick cement. He’s trying to forget about everything that happened, everything he just learned, just to quell the manic urge to open his passenger-side door and jump out of the car as it hurtles down the interstate. Escape—why is he thinking of it like escape? He came back with Dean out of his own free will. Not that that means much anymore, not that he can trust that anymore. Nothing about anything feels real right now, not in a way he can rely on, but that’s why he can’t be alone. For whatever that’s worth.
Dean and Cas stay quiet, too. Sam doesn’t know what their reasons are and doesn’t care. He rolls down his window and lets the cold highway night air wash over him, the rushing sound of wind blocking out Dean’s music – playing quieter than usual, how nice of him – almost completely. It feels nice even if it blows his hair all over the place. He feels human. The sky is cold and black, looking eerily starless, as they drive through Illinois: Rockport is sixty miles away, the road sign says. Sam might blink and they’ll have passed Rockport. He’s too exhausted to be scared of that right now even though his stomach churns at the thought. Would I lie? There’s no way to know, in the end, that he’s alone now. He felt alone, alone enough, before too. Dean stops at some near-deserted 24-hour fast food place and asks if he wants anything – that’s the first time any of them have spoken since Pennsylvania. Sam doesn’t answer, Dean gets him a sandwich that he doesn’t eat. Don’t know what you put in this, he wants to say, don’t want to put anything inside me that you give me, but he knows it won’t make sense, and Dean will get upset instead of understand, and that will be just another headache inside Sam’s already throbbing skull.
He wants it to feel like it used to, that old familiar flicker of family, of belonging. Big brother looking out for him, making sure he eats, asking if he’s alright, like always, like it’s been forever. But it just feels foreign, perverted, like a stranger’s voice on a distorted frequency.
When Dean pulls over in front of the bunker and they step out into the freezing midnight-blue early morning, Sam automatically moves towards the trunk to get his bag, before he realizes that it won’t be there. He didn’t leave here himself. Angels don’t need clothes and books and a computer. His stomach churns again—he just wants to scrub his skin raw in the shower and go to sleep, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.
*
Once inside, Sam wordlessly makes a beeline for the bathroom, leaving the others in the library. Shower and sleep. Shower and sleep. Things will be better in the morning, he thinks, they have to be.
First thing he does, on autopilot, is empty his bladder—angels don’t do that for their vessels either, unsurprisingly. Washes his hands, focusing on the feeling of soap and warm water across his palms, there’s nothing else, nothing else, just this. Warm water, bathroom sink. Everything is here, everything is real, don’t think about the rest.
As soon as his breathing evens just slightly, out of nowhere comes the realization that there had been something else in his body watching him do this for months, when he thought he was alone. Watching him do everything, private things, dirty things, everything, everything – he thought he was alone, thought that hair-raising feeling of being watched was just another product of a half-broken, never-healing mind. He thought he was alone the whole time. The angel could take him over without him being able to remember those times, so maybe it did things he still doesn’t know about, even though he remembers some of it now—he can never know if it’s all of it. Something in his body, touching his body, touching any part of his body and he wouldn’t even know. Something that could still be there – still be watching – he wouldn’t even know.
Sam turns the tap off, dries his hands, and throws up in the toilet, twice, retching until there’s nothing coming out but burning bile that tastes like shame and rage. Violation is a deep and familiar hurt: so familiar he was happy to die to become clean again. And now—
How dare you do this to me. After everything that happened to me. After what he did to me. How could you not know. How could you not care.
And there had been so much time missing – terrifyingly – he had thought, quietly, that he was losing his mind again. Didn’t ask Dean again where the time was going because he didn’t want Dean to think he was going crazy. Lay awake one night wondering where the wounds on his neck disappeared to on that one hunt, not wanting to ask Dean because Dean would tell him there were no wounds until he believed it, and felt more insane by the minute. Trust me, Sammy. Would I lie? Trust me, Sammy.
I’m poison, Dean had said instead of I’m sorry. Well, Sam wants to say, what does that make me? What the hell does that make me?
This is hard. One step at a time. Pull yourself together. Get up off the bathroom floor, for starters. This is hard again, he hates that it’s hard again—it feels like it had just started getting easier. He starts to undress to get into the shower, fumbling with the buttons of his shirt with clumsy, exhausted fingers. He catches a glimpse of his chest in the mirror and the room starts to spin again. His tattoo isn’t there.
His tattoo should be there.
His brain doesn’t understand how to process that it’s not.
Is this really him? Is this really his body? Is he still stuck in his mind, possessed, this little discrepancy the one tell-tale sign that things aren’t right? Is he still in hell?
Is he still in hell?
Am I still in hell?
He stumbles dimly out of the bathroom and back to the others, but if he’s not real, maybe they’re not real. Still, he can ask. The devil isn’t anywhere to be seen – that’s a start, that’s a start. Stone number one. Ask Dean. Dean did this.
“Guys, um—”
Dean and Cas are sitting apart, in silence, in the bunker’s darkened library. Sam realizes, when they both look up in concern, that he must look crazy to them, bursting in with shirt half-buttoned up, trembling and stammering. Doesn’t have it in him to pretend that he’s anything but.
“Guys, where’s – where’s – I don’t have my tattoo? My – the – ”
Heavy silence for a moment as Sam doesn’t know how to finish his sentence. Dean won’t look at him.
“I had to burn it off,” Cas says finally, brow furrowed. “In order to allow Crowley to possess you to help you eject Gadreel.”
Sam tries to comprehend this, fails. “You can do that? You can’t – you shouldn’t be allowed to – it’s an anti-possession – what’s the point if – ?”
He can see the way Cas’s mind is working overtime trying to make sense of Sam’s disjointed words, and at another time would be grateful. “Well, as you know, it doesn’t apply to angels. A demon wouldn’t be able to burn it off, as that would be counterproductive for obvious reasons, but I can.”
“So,” Sam says, smiling but it’s not funny, ticking every item off with his fingers, “you put the angel in my body without asking me and then tied me down to tie the angel down and stuck needles in my brain to stick needles into its brain to force it to talk to you and then another angel had to burn off my tattoo to shove a demon in me to get the first angel to get out of me.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.” It’s Dean’s turn to speak, still not looking at Sam, and Sam, half-insane, wants to beat him to a pulp for that gruff defensiveness in his voice. He won’t, though. “Things kind of got out of hand.”
Sam has to laugh, but he can’t stop shaking. “Yeah. Right.”
Cas, this time: “I’m sorry, Sam, I can put the tattoo back for you – ”
Sam recoils violently from Cas, as if he had been burned again. “No—no, please don’t.”
He says it, on-guard and terrified, as if he’s expecting Cas to not listen and do it anyway. But of course Cas just steps back from where he’d advanced towards Sam to try and help him, tilting his head slightly in confusion and concern but saying nothing.
Cas didn’t lie, he tells himself, Cas didn’t know. Cas is safe? He closes his eyes, the memories coming in halting gasps, confused and hazy. Cas burned off the tattoo. Cas broke the wall. Cas was there. Cas saying I can’t possess a vessel without permission, apologetically, as if Sam’s inability to give consent was some pesky obstacle, those annoying terms and conditions that just got in the way, but he would if he could. Cas—only if you stood down, which you hardly did, Cas breaking him remorselessly to prove a point, to create a diversion. Cas isn’t safe.
It’s too much to think about, it’s all getting tangled and his brain feels like it’s on fire. But there’s one thing he can do—he can get his tattoo back. He needs his tattoo back, there could be anything lurking in the shadows, the next thing in line to steal his body away from him. It happened before – Meg – the first time. Things like to crawl up inside him and take him and make him evil, he doesn’t want that anymore. He’s tired of that. Can’t sleep until he gets it back. It’s not fair that they took it from him, it wasn’t their right, he needs it back, he needs—
“Dean,” he says, but his voice comes out too quiet, a broken rasp. He clears his throat and tries again. “Dean, I need to take the c—can I take the car, please, I just, I need to get the tattoo again, I need to go into town—”
Asking to take the car—he interrupts himself with another laugh he can’t control. He doesn’t own a car. Has no right to the one outside, the one he grew up in. Steal my baby, you get punched. Can’t get his own, that won’t work, Dean won’t like that. What belongs to Sam, then? Is there anything here that requires his permission to use? To destroy?
Dean finally looks at him, concern welling up in his eyes. Sam wants to hit him, again. “Sammy, uh, I mean—‘course you can take her, but it’s the middle of the night, nothing’s gonna be open. Look, are you – ?”
“Fine,” Sam mumbles, one syllable but slurred, and turns to stagger back to the bathroom. Can’t talk to them, can’t look at them.
Back to trying to shower. Take it in steps, Sam. Unbutton shirt, don’t look in the mirror. Turn. Don’t look in the mirror. Everything’s fine. It’s almost soothing, the warmth and rushing sound of the water cascading over all his skin (it’s all there, he reassures himself, but don’t look down) making him feel like he’s getting clean until he remembers and remembers and remembers and can’t stop. The memories have been coming in fits and starts. Kevin’s eyes burned out, the sickening smell of flesh on fire—don’t think about that, think about anything else. His own blood, dripping down his forehead, long sharp things being forced into his skull, squelching grotesquely around in his grey matter, sharp and screaming agony. He didn’t feel it when it was happening, but now, somehow, the pain is part of his life, part of his memory—he’s too tired to think about whether that makes it real or not. Whether the things that have been in this body that coalesces around Sam, that’s not Sam in any way that matters anymore, make him into something else while they steal it.
He feels like something else. Less of the person he was before, less of a person at all.
Maybe all that did something to Sam’s brain, too, maybe that’s why he’s unravelling like this. That was his flesh, after all, that was his pain. Now that he remembers it all through his own eyes, it starts to remind him of hell. Sharp things embedded in him, can’t move, can’t speak, can’t do anything but receive torment. He doesn’t want to think about hell. He was so close to being pure again.
It makes him bitter more than anything, when he can feel anything at all other than blank numbness or chronic fear. Everything always fucking goes back to that, to hell. He should have never come back from the Cage. There he would have become nothing in time, his sense of self ground into fine powder until he no longer had an identity and could no longer remember not-pain, until he stopped being Sam altogether and just became another inanimate fixture of hell created to receive suffering, and Sisyphus would find new contentment, and it would have been better than this. Than this fucking half-life. He was never a person for any of the time he was down there, and now he is one but barely and that’s harder. Carrying this ugly thing everywhere, hunchbacked with nowhere to put it down, not the kind of weight any human was ever built to withstand. It’s not fucking fair that he became so ruined. He was so much younger than he is now—he didn’t know, couldn’t know what he’d signed up for when he jumped into that pit. Couldn’t imagine, nobody could imagine, it was beyond comprehension. Hot tears like pinpricks in his eyes, he blinks them back because he’s not a fucking child – can’t cry like that when you’re only grieving yourself, even if you want to. Self-pity is ugly on someone who only reaped what they sowed, he knows that.
Take in steps, Sam, he tell himself, like he does when things get hard again. Sam. Sam. Repeating it in his mind until it stops feeling foreign. In the cage he’d been beaten down to a sliver of his identity—but he came back, and the hallucinations were taken away, and he told himself he could rebuild. You can be Sam again now. But he never was. Looks like Sam, sure, and talks like him sometimes, but he’s something else now. And now even more so. He should have died in that church, he wanted to die—this is worse, infinitely worse.
Take it in steps, Sam. Clean yourself. Soap and water. He looks down at his skin and knows it should be wrecked and bubbling with burns, or shouldn’t be there at all, raw muscle and nerve. It’s just an illusion, this whole thing, this whole second life. Maybe not literally, but close enough.
Sam wishes Gadreel had torn this stupid thing apart from the inside, while he had control. This body that’s not a home for him, that’s just a snare waiting for the next opportunity to close around him. So thoroughly that there would be nothing left but bone and blood and unrecognizable ribbons of skin and chunks of organs and muscle, nothing left to heal or salvage. Maybe then Dean would be able to say sorry.
*
He wraps a towel around himself, goes to his room, changes into nightclothes. Take it in steps. In the drawer of the nightstand, pill bottles, one for when the hell memories make him jumpy, one for when they don’t let him sleep. Sam shakes a couple of pills out of each bottle into his hand, then thinks about it and shakes out a few more. He ends up taking more of both than he should. That’ll be enough, he thinks, bleary. It’s been a long day. He just wants to sleep.
*
Sam has thick, confusing nightmares—hazy, underwater. He’s in this bed, but Lucifer is inside him again. He’s cutting off his own hands, his own tongue, thick copper blood soaking his bedsheets, covering him, he’s choking on it. Not strong enough to stop him this time—this is just an easy day, he knows from hell, it’s going to get worse. The knife in his clumsy left hand moves towards his eyes next. Lucifer always liked that, keeping him blind. Can’t stop it, can’t ever stop it.
Dean sits by the door and watches. I didn’t have a choice, he says, it was to save you. But in the dream Sam can’t hear him because he has slit his own throat.
*
“Sammy! Sam!”
Sam starts out of his uncomfortable sleep, grasping for the gun under his pillow.
It’s just Dean. Sam’s hand lingers on the grip for a moment.
Dean peers down at him, inside his bedroom for some reason—Sam can’t discern his expression through his bleary, early-morning vision. His mouth cottony and dry, he feels light-headed and unwell.
“Sam?”
“What?” he says, almost awake enough to be annoyed, sitting up and running his hands through his hair. “What’d’you need?”
“What do I – dammit, Sam!” Dean’s volume goes up suddenly and Sam flinches away from the noise, thinks, can’t you love me in a way that doesn’t hurt me? “You were screaming—I came in here, you were screaming, and then you – then you stopped breathing. You weren’t breathing. You’d be in a fucking hospital bed right now if Cas wasn’t able to fix you—what the fuck did you do?”
“Um.” Sam looks away, shamefaced, from his demanding stare. “Took some pills to get some rest. Prob’ly one or two too many.”
At this, Dean is genuinely apoplectic, eyes wide, gesturing erratically as he speaks. “If I hadn’t come in here in time – if you had – Sam, what the fuck?”
“I just—” Sam rubs both eyes with the heels of his palms, his fingers making fists in his hair. “I needed to sleep. You won’t understand, I just needed to sleep.”
A shadow passes over Dean’s face, still animated with worry, of remembrance. This has happened before. It was supposed to be over, Sam knows Dean is thinking. It was years ago now, the last time Sam said that – Dean asked him what the hell he was thinking, taking drugs with a stranger in the middle of the night, in his condition. I just needed to sleep, and he was dying.
It’s not the same, but it’s not not the same. His mind is an infected wound, leaking things it shouldn’t. You can’t torture someone who has nothing left for you to take away, Lucifer had said, and Sam had agreed—he didn’t think there wasn’t anything left that wasn’t done to him. Turns out there was. You weren’t supposed to do this. Not you, not of all people.
You knew. Dean was there, Dean saw what happened to him, his fractured mind, Dean saw how fucking scared he was every waking minute, which became every minute.
“Just hang on, Sammy,” Dean had told him the pitch-black snow-covered night before he was hospitalized, desperately, when they were sitting in some deserted café in some New Hampshire town in mid-December, Sam on his sixth coffee of the day and holding his hands over his ears with tears in his eyes. “We’ll get you through this, you’ll come back from this.”
“No, I won’t,” Sam said truthfully, trying not to look at the blood pouring out of Dean’s eyes and ears and mouth. Not real. Remembers how Dean’s face had fallen when he said that.
In the present: You knew. You knew everything. Can’t you say sorry?
“Sammy, I – ” Sam really thinks he’ll say it, just now, but he doesn’t. “Just – take it easy, okay? Rest up. But not like that, okay? Don’t do that again—please. Please, Sam.”
And he really is pleading.
“Okay,” Sam says, still not looking at him. “I won’t, it wasn’t – I won’t.”
For once in their lives, Dean doesn’t ask him if he’s okay, because Dean knows the answer and knows the reason and can’t stomach hearing it, Sam knows. He leaves later that morning like he said he would, not saying where he’s going or when he’s coming back. Sam is okay with that, doesn’t want much to do with him right now. Cold anger is easier handle than that stupid childish feeling of wanting his big brother, the real one, the one who wouldn’t do this to him in a million years, the only one who could, in another life, make it better. So anger he chooses.
It’s cold but sunny later that afternoon, typical of late autumn, when Sam drives in a rented car to go get his tattoo re-done. Though frantic last night, now he almost doesn’t want to bother. There’s a dull, pounding darkness shrouding his thoughts: his skin doesn’t belong to him—because, he thinks, what does. No part of him has been left unsullied, no place to put a protective sigil where it couldn’t be broken, apparently. He has been violated down to the blood, down to the soul. What does skin matter after that?
Still, he drives to the next town over, he smiles at someone who holds a door open for him, and nothing around him looks at all familiar, and he feels a little more real again all the same. The sting of the tattoo needle helps too: after the cage, this kind of pain is soothing. Little pain means no big pain: he’s been re-wired so it just feels like relief, like respite, even if the big pain never comes anymore. He doesn’t really know how to feel little pain anymore, it just doesn’t register the right way. It still hurts, but the hurt doesn’t feel like hurt. Grade-A freak, he thinks, almost finding it funny. He gets a sandwich and a coffee after it’s done and sits in the park alone as the wind blusters and the grass yellows and dies in anticipation of oncoming winter, and it feels almost good, to feel like he’s not himself in a town that doesn’t know who he is, don’t know what he’s done or what’s happened to him. Achingly, he doesn’t want to go back to Lebanon. It had just started to feel like home, but he should’ve known better.
But he does go back, he always will.
*
Dean stays gone for a while, when he comes back there’s a mark on his arm. Then more of the same. Sam can’t make his anger go away, the one thing he still holds in the palm of his own hand, and Dean never takes that well. There are odd silences, Sam tries to draw boundaries, Dean gets sad and then angry himself. Same old, except not.
One night after a hunt in the bunker’s kitchen, Dean starts talking about how he saved Sam, and Sam at last tries to cobble the words together explain—but he doesn’t get it, and gets mad when Sam tells him he only saved Sam because he didn’t want to be alone.
“I’m a person,” Sam says to Dean, finally, after several minutes of back-and-forth. “Do you get that? Because I don’t think you do.”
Dean looks at him like has two heads. “The hell does that mean?”
“I’m not – I don’t belong to you. I’m not just your brother. I get to have – Dean, I get to have a say. You can’t just take that away from me and not even – ” The word apologize dies on his tongue.
Sam is trying not to sound unkind, but a dark cloud gathers over Dean’s expression anyway. “You always fucking do this, Sam.”
“Do what?”
Dean swallows down the last dregs of his beer and gets up to throw out the remains of their takeout containers. “This fucking thing you do. Make people feel guilty for caring about you, like it’s suffocating you somehow. This life, this job, all of this, you can’t be – be independent, or whatever, Sam. For some reason you’ve always cared about that more than anything else, but by now it should get through your head. We need to look out for each other in this line of work, okay, that’s all I was doing and that’s all I do and that’s all I’ve ever done. Sorry if that’s not enough personhood for you, but without it you’d have been dead twelve times over at least.”
Silence, as Sam recovers from the sting of that.
“But,” Sam says, carefully, “I asked you to let me die. I didn’t want this from you.”
Downstairs, he couldn’t die: Lucifer didn’t let him die, he could, and did, have every inch of skin burned and peeled off and he would always come back and it would always get worse. Here he foolishly thought he could be afforded the dignity of the choice, as if he ever gets what he wants. Dying in an iron room in the house of someone you might call father. Dying in the iron fist of someone who calls you my brother like that means you belong to him. All he’s ever doing is dying, growing up and dying and coming back and dying again. He’d tried to choose living once, in Kermit, Texas with a girl and a dog, and started to finally feel like he could be human again. Could heal and be whole one day. But now there’s no more of that—now he’s realizing it’s not the living or the dying that’s wrong, but the choosing. If it’s his choice, it’s wrong.
Dean scoffs, disbelieving. “All I’m gonna say is you’ve gotta be one hell of an asshole to accuse someone of being selfish for saving your life. You’re mad, I get it – I do, but come on, man.”
“Okay,” Sam says and shuts down, because it doesn’t matter what he wants, because he doesn’t know what else to say, because what can you ever say to Dean anymore, and tries not to sound like he’s holding back stupid, angry, helpless tears.
At the end of their conversation, Dean looks him in the eye and tells him he would do it again. Do it all over again, to Sam. For the first time since they moved into the bunker, Sam, with violently trembling hands, locks the door to his bedroom that night. No place like home.
*
And so it goes. Dean will set a book down next to Sam at a library table and Sam will flinch at his presence. Sam tries not to be—afraid, or whatever this is. It’s not fair to Dean. Brother shoves brother’s head under water – it’s not supposed to feel like drowning. It’s love. It’s not supposed to hurt even when the salt water burns your eyes, nose, mouth. It’s just what brothers do. It’s all just what brothers do. Sam has a dim memory of his face being beaten to a pulp by Dean when he had no soul, a flurry of fists that never stopped until he thought he was going to be killed on the grimy floor at his brother’s hand, but it wasn’t me, he always thought, and so he was never scared, because when we talked about me not having a soul Dean said he didn’t think it was me. It’s only now that he’s remembering—Dean didn’t know, then, that he didn’t have a soul. But it’s not the same. He wasn’t hurting me – he was hurting what he thought wasn’t me, hurting something that looked like me, because he was angry at the thing that looked like me, that wasn’t me, that was me. It’s not the same. Just what brothers do to their brothers.
The Dean in his subconscious beat him bloody trying to stop him from dying. With tears in his eyes he’d listened, and now he’s here and he wishes he wasn’t. Wanted to be clean, not knowing he could even get more polluted than he already was.
In the cage he would ask Lucifer how much time passed, and he would tell him (and then tell him that they had forever left to go so settle in) but Sam would never know if he was lying or not. It wasn’t supposed to be like this here. It wasn’t supposed to – he got out. This wasn’t supposed to happen again. It’s not exactly the same, it’s not, he tells himself, this is love after all, this isn’t – that, but – it’s not different either. The revelation is quietly devastating, out of nowhere and yet not, a tumor sitting quietly in your brain until it slowly eats its way into your eye to tell you it exists. Blindness of more than one kind. It’s not exactly the same, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same—how could it be the same, how is that fair? Open hand or closed fist, when you’re the one getting hit over and over it’s all the same anyway.
Sam wants to forgive, but he can’t help but remember.
You always treat me like a kid, is what he would say when Dean did something like this, but it’s not that, anymore. People don’t treat their children like this either. He’s a bug in a glass jar that Dean scooped him up in, now tapping it angrily because he’s too scared to move or do anything interesting. He just wants to go back to where he came from, but he’s looking around a foreign land and that’s nowhere to be found. He didn’t come from anywhere—a house that burnt to the ground that he doesn’t remember, a car that went from dad to brother and never was his, a college town that forgot his name. There’s nowhere to go back to. There’s nowhere to run. This is home now, and it’s desolate in here, and all anyone says is he should be grateful someone remembered to punch in breathing holes.
*
Dean won't stop being hurt that Sam is angry with him, even if he says that he’s over it. He keeps saying Sam said he doesn’t care about whether Dean lives or dies, because Sam said that: the only thing is, Sam never said that. He wants to tell Dean, but the words die in his throat, dissolved by his anger like acid in his mouth. The only thing is, he remembers anger, and he remembers how he’s not supposed to feel it anymore.
For decades he had wanted to kill Lucifer, planned a meticulous and exacting revenge, less for the pain and more for the indignity, the violation. Some of that anger is still left, dormant, inside him somewhere. But eventually, eventually—you can only stand so much. He was only human. You need purpose to survive; down there, there was nothing else, so he embraced it. His purpose was to be hurt. That’s what he was made for. He was good at it, too. God brought Cas back, Cas brought Bobby back, Dean lived, everyone lived, but he was in hell, so this is what he was made for. He was never so arrogant as to think of it as martyrdom—the cage is azoic. No life, no humanity. He wasn’t being turned into a saint from suffering, he was being turned into a thing, or nothing, rotted hollow. He didn’t die for anyone’s sins but his own.
After all those years, it’s hard to forget up here that it’s not true anymore, that being hurt isn’t a natural state he needs to accept to carry on living. Not that anyone makes it easy.
Don’t be angry with me, Sammy – that’s Lucifer. Panic wells up. You’re not here, he tells Lucifer, but then he realizes it’s just a memory. Anger is what got you here. You don’t get to be angry. You deserve this. What I’m doing to you – he says, over Sam’s muffled, tongueless whimpers – no, stop, don’t think about what he did – it’s only what you deserve.
Sam catches his breath, heart pounding in his chest. Heart’s still there, good. Just a memory. Nothing else. Blink and it’ll go away.
Before all of this, he had perfected the art of reality again. Had learned to keep the devil at bay, most of the time. He’s got to cut it out again, this necrotizing tissue of his psyche that poisons the rest of it, and get better again, but he doesn’t know where it is this time, doesn’t know where to start. Or if it’s even there, or if this is something else. He misses his mind, his old mind, wishes it hadn’t become this diseased and rotting thing. But more and more just piles up – it’s all scrambled, he’s scared and backed into a corner and shielding his eyes from its grotesquerie, he doesn’t want to look, maybe doesn’t want to find it. Doesn’t want to think about what, or who, he has to cut out of it to get better.
Dean saves him from some vampires a few weeks later. Before Sam can say anything – “Yeah, I know. You wouldn't have done the same for me.”
That’s not what I said, he wants to say, I would have, I always have – but – Dean is saying that’s what he said. If he didn’t say it, it must be what he meant, even though he knows he didn’t mean that either. But he hasn’t meant a lot of things that he has done that have been bad anyway. That he needed to atone for. Everything feels wrong. He wants to be angry because he’s hurting so much he feels like he’s splitting apart – scared and violated, blood on his hands, scared, fucking terrified – but he’s been hurt before and he’s deserved it before. He was saving your life – that’s not a good thing when Sam does it, Sam’s not allowed to want “not normal—safe”, but it could be a good thing when Dean wants it for Sam. It could be the right thing—Dean does the right thing. Sam doesn’t. Those have been the rules for a good few years now. Everything feels wrong. No, that’s not right – his mind isn’t right, but all of these things feel right. You’re not supposed to be angry anymore, not since your anger killed the world and it was all your fault. If you’re angry, it’s wrong. If you’re angry, you’re not repenting right.
He feels like his brain is bleeding all the time, leaking out of his ears, perpetual hemorrhage. Dean is angry, but Dean isn’t crazy. Dean is stone number one, Dean is the centre around which Sam rebuilt his reality two years ago. Sam is crazy: Sam knows he’s not right in the head, so maybe this is all wrong – how do you be angry with someone for saving your life, after all? Stone number one. Listen to Dean. Dean who is father, mother, brother. Dean who is everything, who saves you, always has. How could you be angry? It doesn’t matter if you’re a little scared – this is love, after all. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t want it. Maybe that’s easier, in the end. Maybe that’s just easier, and things have been hard for far too long.
*
It hasn’t gotten better, the feeling of being watched, the fear, the uneasy sense of unreality. The new tattoo heals eventually, but his mind doesn’t—something got broken, and it won’t fix itself, no matter how hard he’s trying. He doesn’t know what his face looks like anymore, there’s still something crawling around in the attic even though they told him the premises were vacated.
Late one night, Sam’s heart is pounding for no reason as he stares at the ceiling: he can’t sleep and he’s so fucking tired and he’s not safe here. Looks around his darkened room, sparse and spartan: anyone could live here. Anyone is, kind of. After all this, it feels less like home even than before—hairs raised at the back of his neck, staring at the faint outline of someone else’s footprint on the doorstep, feeling like anything that belongs to him is not entirely his anymore, if it ever was. Abruptly, he climbs out of bed and goes to the bathroom, taking the hunting knife on his bedside table with him.
Carefully above the sink (he doesn’t want to make a mess), he drags the tip of the knife from the top left corner of his palm to the bottom right, a deep diagonal cut weeping blood. Sam realizes it’s flowing out too fast—the cut is deeper than he intended, but he just looks at it. Likes the way it looks, coming out of him like that. It hurts, but it’s just little pain, so the hurt feels fine, feels good. Little pain means no big pain. It feels like relief: it feels like the right amount of suffering. The right amount of punishment—he doesn’t know what he’s repenting for anymore, but it has to be punishment, otherwise all of this is for nothing and he can’t accept that. If it’s for something he did, or something he is, one day it will finally be enough.
He stretches and flexes his fingers, still watching the gore pour sickly out of the incision he made, running off the edges of his hand and down his wrist. First, the bloodletting: wash away the evils, the dark humours in him, do what the trials couldn’t do because he was forced to live.
After, he can stitch it up it’ll become a scar, and then he can have this pain whenever he needs it, to make the rest go away. It worked before, worked perfectly. Made the devil go away once, it can do it again. Still remembers Dean’s thumb digging into it the first time, the perfect hurt. Dean only hurts him to help him: clearly, he’s broken, clearly, he needs that. The same as before—iron room, locked inside, slowly dying. When he looks back – the memories are broken and hazy, left too far the rearview mirror after years of hell, he remembers being upset after he escaped. Remembers torture and pain, remembers guilt and blame and shame, remembers feeling like he’d been left to die in a cell with nothing but a jug of water he couldn’t reach and bucket to piss in that he couldn’t use because he’d been chained down, hand and foot, left to hold it in for as long as he could and then humiliatingly lie there in his own filth until something freed him, something that wasn’t Dean. But that was saving him. Dean only hurts him to help him. Some people, like Sam, need to be hurt to be loved.
The blood hasn’t slowed yet when Sam starts, hearing a noise behind him. He glances up at the bathroom mirror: Dean. Sam swallows hard, every muscle tensing—doesn’t know how he’s going to react to Sam bleeding without permission.
“Sammy, what the hell?” he mutters, clearly having just woken up, but he’s not mad.
Sam doesn’t answer. Again, he knows he looks insane.
“Don’t—did you do that to—?” Dean eyes move to Sam’s bloodied knife balanced on the lip of the sink and then back to Sam’s hand, and doesn’t need a response. “Sammy, what the hell.”
Dean comes up to him and grabs his wrist, rough. “Shit, that’s—let me go get—”
“Don’t go,” Sam says, suddenly. He notices only then that he’s shaking again. He’s afraid of something, but is too tired to figure out what. “Please.”
Dean, eyes wide with concern, stops at Sam’s request—looks at Sam like he’s a ghost. He might as well be. Sam thinks maybe he should still be angry, but the more this happens the more it starts to feel like the only thing, starts to feel like a right thing, a just thing, even if it hurts. What’s a body, anyway, except divine punishment. Sam wasn’t born to belong to himself, and better the devil that doesn’t want to hurt you, that hurts with you.
After a minute of silence, Dean not knowing what else to do—
“Let me just grab the first-aid kit, and I’ll stitch you up, okay?” Sam knows Dean knows he can’t fix what’s actually broken here, but he won’t let up with the soothing big-brother voice. “Be back in a sec, won’t even know I’m gone.”
Sam doesn’t want to be healed. Hurt me more, he wants to say, I can’t stomach being loved by you right now and nothing you do to me is wrong anyway. Dean is back as soon as he says he would be but Sam can’t say any of it. There aren’t words that make sense. None of this is Dean’s fault – Sam suffers because of himself, because of his own weak and broken soul.
When Dean reaches for Sam’s bleeding hand, he’s shaking too.
“This wasn’t supposed to – you weren’t supposed to – I don’t want this,” he blurts out desperately. “Sam, I was just – I just needed you here, safe. That’s my job. I didn’t want—I didn’t know.”
It’s not sorry, but it’s Dean. It’s enough. It’s enough because it’s Dean.
Sam wants to say it’s okay, but it’s not and everything is wrong and Dean is here like he always is. He wants to be a person who doesn’t know what hell feels like, he wants to not be in pain anymore but that’s all he’s made to take. He doesn’t register that tears have started to fall until Dean has pulled him into his arms, holding him close.
“Hang in there, little brother.”
He’s not just supposed to be someone’s little brother; there should be more to him. Maybe there was, once. Remembers a long, long bus ride to California, the anxious elation of being alone, himself, free, starting something new. But all those memories are half-gone now, distant and distorted. He can’t think about being Sam Winchester anymore, doesn’t want to be. That’s a fractured creature, sullied and polluted, a once-pristine river running rust-red with filth. But little brother. That comes natural, easy as breathing, always has. He can be that—he can be that. Stone number one: the organizing principle of the reality he has to start to re-build, again.
Dean doesn’t let him go, and Sam doesn’t want to be le go, hugging him back fiercely, palm-prints of dark red blood marked all over his shirt. If I’m yours, you’re mine too. Sam’s face resting against Dean’s shoulder, quiet sobbing, Dean strokes his hair, as gentle as he’s ever been.
“Don’t do it again,” Sam says quietly, voice muffled, “just please don’t ever do it again.”
Pained silence.
“You shouldn’t have said all that,” Dean says, a guilty release of the last few weeks of tension between them, pleading. A rare moment of vulnerability but the knife-tip is still at Sam’s throat. “All that stuff. You—it—you know how I get. You know—”
Sometimes people need to be reminded of what they did wrong, carved with a knife into their back. So they remember to be grateful for being loved, even if it’s not exactly how they want to be. Just another of the games they play.
“I know,” Sam says, because he won’t ever be anything other than monstrous, and there won’t ever be anyone else that can love him like this. He’s not sorry, but maybe he should be, and this is all he has left. “I’m sorry.”
Dean holds him even closer, like he’s a child again, comforting him. One hand on Sam’s injured hand, as if his touch alone can stifle the flow of blood. Sam lets him, pretending things are exactly what they used to be. Band-aids on skinned knees, emergency room on bicycle handlebars. Dean, his Dean, the same as he always was. Always there. And Sam is who he used to be, too. A person, and a body, all uninterrupted again.
I want to be back on that bridge at night again, a million years ago, I want to be chasing a sad little ghost story with you deep in cold coniferous country. I want to be in Louisiana in hazy July and seven years old again, film of sweat covering every inch of skin and you taking me to the shitty public library with no air conditioning, just a couple of fans blowing hot air around, and telling me to take only what I could read in a day or two since we’d be leaving soon, and I was so happy you brought me anyway. I want us to start over, but we can’t, but you’re all I have, so I have to pretend that we did, and you’ll take what you can get, whatever you can get.
“Let me patch you up now, okay? Don’t want you bleedin’ out or anything.”
Sam draws a shaky breath, keeps his eyes closed against Dean.
Soon they’ll separate, and Dean will open up the first-aid kit and wipe down Sam’s hand and stitch it up, wincing slightly himself every time Sam gasps in pain, but not stopping until he’s put back together again. But Sam shakes his head, and holds onto his big brother for a moment more, bleeding some more on the floor of the half-darkened bathroom at midnight in the underground middle of nowhere, and this is all that it has come to. Sam misses what they were, when they were John’s lost boys singing along off-key to scratchy cassette tapes down a hundred dark roads in their dad’s old beat-up car. You give me sutures by the light of a motel bathroom and I’ll hold your heart in my hands never knowing quite what to do with it, and we’ll grow up not knowing how to be apart. And so this is always how it’s going to end—there’s nobody else, there will never be anybody else, everyone else goes away and he is too fractured to be understood again. This is always how it’s going to end. In his arms, blood on his hands.
“It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know.”
Dean’s hands still on his, still gentle, soothing. They’re not always like that. What Dean does to Sam, it’s what Dean wants – what Dean thinks he needs. Dean would kill him to save him and then beg to be haunted. And Sam would say yes, every time.