Chapter Text
Pick a hemisphere.
He didn't, of course. What was he supposed to do, move to Argentina and hustle pool on three years of Spanish class? America was plenty big enough to vanish in. All it took was a bit of thinking. He couldn't go to a large city, Dean would be driving through and with their luck they'd run into each other immediately. Not a tiny single-stoplight affair, either - it's less likely Dean would go through a place like that, but if he did they'd be almost guaranteed to see each other. And he couldn't just vanish into the countryside, not without the money to put down on a house.
Midsize Midwestern it was, then. He headed north; neither of them liked the cold, and Dean hated driving his Baby through road salt. Eventually he passed Nowheresville, Minnesota. Population nine thousand and a bit. Midcentury houses supplemented by a condo-apartment neighborhood thing, just off Main Street, development mostly finished. According to the library records, not a single local legend about hauntings or famous murders. And two diners, so he applied for a job at the bigger one, center of town, further away from the seedy motel at the outskirts. Just in case.
The problem with bussing tables is that it leaves you a lot of time to think.
He tried not to spend his nights staring at his cell phone. A few months after he had started his new life, it actually rang, Dean's name popping up on the screen. Pick a hemisphere. It had been a horrible day; someone threw a plate at him. His head hurt. He was tired and angry. He didn't answer.
Three nights later he was drunk enough to call back. Dean's phone rang and rang and rang. He didn't answer either. Sam threw his cell phone in a drainage ditch, and when he came back for it the next morning the rain had washed it away.
Dean and Bobby and maybe Castiel would figure out this whole end-of-the-world thing. The best he could do for them was stay out of their way. He'd screwed up enough already.
A couple months after he lost his phone, the first demon found him. She flirted with him at the diner and broke into his apartment that night. He hadn't kept any holy water, but she wasn't a particularly powerful demon, so he managed to wrestle her to the floor and keep her in a headlock long enough to finish an exorcism. She swore at him about fighting the angels, about standing against the conquering host of heaven. Like Meg, she'd been keeping together a body too injured to survive, and the woman bled out across his kitchen tiles without even opening her eyes.
Once one demon had found him, the rest had a good idea of where to look. He thought about hitting the road again, but he was afraid of running into hunters. Into-
Anyways.
Lucifer was in his dreams sometimes. He didn't shout or threaten anymore, he was just smug. "You know you're not hiding, right?" he'd say. "I can find you whenever you're ready. I can make all this stop." Or "You're pathetic. It took Ruby over a year to convince you to fight, it's no wonder that without her you're back to cowering in a hole." Or "You know, it's frustrating. Dean's taken out ten of my best demons today. We can't control him. It's lucky for me that he's too arrogant to give Michael a helping hand."
Sam held onto those jabs at Dean, even if he wasn't sure whether they were true. Surely if his brother were dead Lucifer would be using it against him.
Every few months a demon or two would show up, and Sam would watch their blood drip and pool, and remember when it made him feel so powerful, lightning thrumming through his body, strong enough to face anything. Now, without any of their hunting gear, without anyone to practice with and keep him sharp, he was becoming weak and slow. Two years after he and Dean had parted, he was too slow. The demon knocked him out and tied him up, and it took painful hours to find an opportunity to escape. He didn't drink its blood. He just filled a bottle and kept it. In case.
The diner fired him for missing work without notice, and he found a job at the car wash. It was cold and miserable, but it kept him exercising.
The world around him was awful. That summer the air was heavy with smoke as wildfires raged across Canada and the Rockies. Standford got hit by an earthquake, which might have been coincidence and might not have been. Wars, sorry, military engagements sprang up everywhere, and the news started talking about nuclear proliferation. Was it angelic influence at the helm, or demonic? Sam wasn't actually sure.
The next time demons found him, it was four of them at once, armed to the teeth and bound into their bodies to prevent exorcism. He was coming back from a late shift, so there was no one to see them fight on the dark street. He killed one before he was forced to run, headache pounding with each step and his left arm already near-useless. As he fixed the salt lines across the windowsills, his door began to splinter, beating against the heap of salt at its base.
"Oh, you can keep us out, Sammy," hissed a man's voice from the other side of the door. "But that nice woman downstairs... can she?"
Sam grimaced and limped to the kitchen. He meant to retrieve a better knife, but his gaze caught on the refrigerator, blaring white in the shadowy room. He licked his lips, felt a trickle of blood rolling warm and wet down his arm.
A piercing scream split the air. The woman in 21A had a kid. Sam picked him up from the school bus stop sometimes when she had to work late. She'd brought him a casserole when he'd moved in, and hadn't even seemed to notice that she was interrupting his self-imposed solitude.
He ripped open the door before he even noticed he was moving. Blinded by the sudden light, he swept jars out of the way, sending them crashing to the floor, and grabbed the flask he'd left in the back.
It tasted bitter.
And he didn't have a headache any more.