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britomart_isChapter Two.
Dean turns thirty-seven on a cold day in the ruins of the old world. He's hobbling around in a walking cast these days, but he sucks it up and goes into town, because like hell is he going to sit at home and eat instant grits and Spam on his birthday. Dean stops by Randy's and toasts the shell-shocked schoolteacher in the corner with some kind of fermented corn beverage, rummages in the innards of a junker on the roadside for spark plugs, salutes the two prostitutes on Main Street, and swings by Mrs. Zhang's for Dong'an chicken and fried plantains. Mrs. Zhang cops a feel of Dean's ass on his way out and he knew it, he knew she didn't cut him so many discounts for nothing. He flexes his butt and goes on his way—plenty of Dean to go around—and burns his fingers when he steals a skewer of something off Ernesto's grease-splattered grill.
Dean left a fire going while he was gone, running the risk of burning the house down but ensuring that he won't return to a blue-tinged Samsicle. When he goes to put the sacks of food down, he finds Sam standing in the kitchen—not where Dean left him. It freaked the fuck out of Dean when Sam first started turning up unexpectedly, and Sam seems to have a knack for doing it only when Dean's not looking. Drives him crazy. Sam's bumped up against one of the kitchen chairs, gazing placidly at a saucepan on the counter. Dean figures it's kind of like a wind-up toy car—Sam will walk till he hits an obstacle and gets stuck.
"Thanks, Sam, it is a good birthday." Dean pulls food out of brown bags, encouraged by the grease that's seeped into the paper. "Nice of you to ask." He pushes Sam in the direction of the living room, the only warm part of the house.
They eat on the couch and Dean lets Sam take the half with the poking-out spring, 'cause if Sam has a problem with sitting somewhere uncomfortable he can damn well complain. He lets Sam try to eat with chopsticks for a couple minutes just because it's fucking hilarious, then takes pity on him and gets a fork.
When Dean's in a comfortable food coma, belly full and leftovers tucked into a snowbank outside, he lets himself slump down on the couch, sunning himself in the heat. The firelight has a warming effect on Sam's pale face, makes him seem more alive. When Dean sat Sam down on the couch, he draped a blanket over his shoulders. Sam wears the blanket in much the same way that a wire hanger would. Dean shuts his eyes. "I think we should move. In the spring. So fucking done with this Midwestern winter bullshit." He could really care less. He's seen every state except Hawaii, and they all suck more or less equally. And it's too late for Hawaii, since that one's underwater now. "Maybe Memphis. I hear it's pretty happening right now. Get to a big city, somewhere with more than two women under forty. I gotta cash in on the rugged older man thing, y'know? You'll be my wingman. Strong but silent type. Girls go crazy for that shit."
Dean squints one eye open at Sam and the pleasant food coma burns away instantly. Sam is looking at him.
"Sam?" Dean scrambles back up to sitting, faces Sam. Sam's eyes lazily track his movement. "Hey." Dean snaps his fingers in Sam's face, tries to regain eye contact. "Hey. Sam. Look at me." But the moment's gone.
Everything in Dean sinks, and all he feels is overfull and a little cold from the winter that seeps in through the cracks in the walls. Maybe next he'll be hearing voices, imagining that Sam's sending him messages in Morse code, reading Sam's tea leaves except they don't fucking drink tea. Dean's always known this about himself—that if he wants something enough, his brain might trick him into imagining that it's really there. Love, family, Sam. An oasis in the desert that shimmers and disappears when he gets too close.
After putting Sam to bed, wrangling long limbs under the covers and bracing himself for when Sam's wordless sobs begin, Dean goes to the bathroom to brush his own teeth. You know what's a pain in the ass? Brushing your fully-grown brother's teeth. Yeah. Dean brushes, ignores his three-day beard, and looks in the cracked mirror. And Dean's not—he's not a young man anymore. He just isn't. Hasn't felt like one in a long time, and reality's slowly catching up to the hunched-over broken-down rusted old thing he's felt like inside since the first time he shot a man in cold blood. Something crushed and aching at the core of him and bleeding outward. Gray in his hair and lines on his face (ruggedly handsome, Dean tells himself, and if there were anyone to see but his crazy fucking brother, that might mean something) and the future stretches on ahead mercilessly.
Dean hears the first of Sam's harsh breaths, and he suddenly has to sit down on the cold tile, because this is it, this is Dean's life now. The world may be slowly getting better outside, rebuilding and growing and finding hope, but this was never supposed to be Dean's world. He was never supposed to live this long. All he can see is himself, celebrating his eightieth birthday and nudging his septuagenarian brother around the house, still deluding himself that today might be the day the blank stares end. The floor is fucking freezing, but Dean can't quite get up, can't make his legs work just yet.
Dean has a lot to pay for. Maybe this is fate's judgment upon him. A far cry from the last Hell Dean inhabited, but still. Maybe Dean Winchester is finally getting what he deserves.
The day after Dean turns thirty-seven, he sleeps in till noon and wakes to find himself wrapped around Sam, one of the hazards of being a full-time nightmare watchman. His eyes feel tight and dry and Sam is really fucking bony, and Dean has a moment of sadness for the long and lithe man his brother used to be. Plenty of other things to mourn, but Dean just—doesn't have the energy. Dean rests the side of his face on Sam's chest while Sam, awake for who knows how long, stares unnervingly past the top of Dean's head. Dean runs a finger over Sam's Adam's Apple, because this Sam isn't exactly going to freak out over personal space. Mellowed by lethargy, Dean's quite content to stay where he is, rising and falling with the motion of Sam's breaths, pressing a hand against Sam's pulse point, into his hair, tapping the point of Sam's nose with a fingertip. Sam's stomach rumbles angrily. "Right, right."
Dean drags himself out of bed, wastes a little water to splash on his face and wake him up. He's sniffing a takeout container of week-old scallion pancakes trying to decide whether they're still good when he turns around and Sam gives him a freakin' heart attack, standing in the middle of the kitchen when Dean had left him lying down in bed. "Gonna put a goddamn bell on you," Dean mutters, and he gently shoves Sam into a chair and continues puttering with the leftovers. "Collar. Freakin' … least a dog can fetch the paper. Like a cat, just ignore me and sleep all day."
The cold slithers down Dean's spine and impertinently sneaks up his boxers when he leans out the door to collect last night's chicken from the snowdrift. No critters have chewed the box open in the night. Score. Dean pads back to the counter, body trying to shiver the cold away. "You hungry, Sammy?"
"Yes."
"God, I miss refrigerators," Dean says. "And convenience stores." Dean frowns into the can of instant coffee. Almost all gone, and he has no fucking idea where he's going to get more. "Shit. I so do not want to deal with Karen. Psycho." His lip curls at the idea of having to negotiate with the surly baker again, but he has little desire to drive to Kansas City for some back-room bartering of his own. Dean grabs a big spoon and starts shoveling leftover chicken from its paper box and onto a plate, and then freezes halfway through, brain catching up.
Sticky spoon still in hand, Dean turns around. A piece of chili pepper drops from spoon to floor with a squelch. Dean advances on the kitchen table, spoon raised like a weapon. He can't unclench his fingers from it.
Dean gets down on his knees in front of the rickety wooden chair, and repeats himself, slowly and carefully. "Are you hungry?"
"Yes." The voice is quiet, rough from disuse. Sam's head is tipped down, and Dean can't see Sam's eyes behind his hair. He wants to tip Sam's face up but doesn't dare. Sam's chin lifts, and his gaze slides over to fix on an empty corner of the room. "Are we going to eat the spicy food again?"
Dean swallows hard, clutching his spoon. "Do you want to?"
Dean must be staring a hole into Sam he's studying him so hard, but he could fucking swear he can see the gears turning, see something happening behind those eyes. "No," Sam says after a moment.
Standing up slowly and backing away, like he would from a dangerous animal that just might rip his throat out, Dean nods. "Yeah. Okay. No spicy food. The spicy food is out." Dean bumps into the counter and jumps a little, startled, then glares at it. "We can—what do you want?"
Sam stares at the corner, and Dean feels his guts twist and cramp because that was too much, open-ended question, he broke the spell, he fucked it up, he—
Sam's head twitches. He glances up at Dean, then back down at the floor, up again, almost experimental little peeks. Sam's gaze finally comes to rest on Dean, looking a little squirrelly. "I don't know," Sam says, and Dean will get sushi. He'll get caviar, he'll get a caramel motherfucking Frappuccino with extra whip if that's what Sam wants, because Sam sounds confused and a little lost and like he's been practicing sword-swallowing for the last year, and Dean is—he's—feeling a little dizzy, actually.
Dean vomits last night's plantains and half a scallion pancake all over the linoleum. He sits down next to the puddle and looks up at Sam, who is examining the half-digested mess with an untroubled expression. "Sam."
"When you say that," Sam says haltingly. "Do you mean me?"
"Yeah, Sammy." Dean's not sure what to make of that question. He wipes his mouth off. "You're Sam."
Sam looks at Dean—looks at him—and nods slightly. "Okay," he says. "Am I a person?"
"A person." Dean swallows hard, mouth sour. "Yeah, you're a person."
"Was I always?"
"Yes."
"Good," Sam says with a distracted, thoughtful expression. Then, forcefully: "I'm hungry."
The options are kinda fucking limited, actually, so Dean ends up heating Spam and beans in a skillet, and he serves up a plate for Sam a little nervously. Which is stupid, because given Sam's propensity for standing exactly where Dean puts him and staring at the wall, he's unlikely to walk out on Dean over an unsatisfactory lunch.
Forks scrape plates. Dean gets nervous again because they can't talk and eat at the same time and it's been a few minutes since he heard anything out of Sam and Dean's been stuck in this goddamn house with a broken leg and snow all around and a silent spectre of a brother and maybe Dean only imagined that Sam talked because it's kind of a fucking miracle that Dean hasn't already gone crazy from claustrophobia and isolation except Dean doesn't believe in miracles not at all which would suggest that not only is Dean crazy but Sammy certainly didn't just wake up out of the blue—Dean puts his fork down. He breathes. "Does that taste okay?"
Sam finishes chewing a mouthful. "Yes."
Dean's fingers twitch with excess energy till he comes up with something else to ask. "Are you cold?"
"Yes." And okay, yeah, Sam's in a tee and sweats and the house is cold and Dean can totally work with that.
"Okay. I'm gonna get you something warm. Okay? Don't go anywhere."
Dean step-thunks down the hall as quickly as he can with his leg in a cast, which isn't very quickly at all. He rifles through his drawers and comes up with a couple of his own flannels which'll probably even fit Sam now, he's lost so much muscle—but no. Dean puts the shirts back in the drawer and closes it. In the back of the closet, in the bottom of Dean's duffel, is something he hasn't allowed himself to look at in years.
Dean remembers thinking at the time that Sam was gonna be pissed that he'd left his favorite hoodie mixed in with Dean's laundry. The too-small one that made Sam all boyish and broad-shouldered and wasp-waisted and had all the girls checking him out, even if he didn't notice. Dean had figured that he'd just return it the next time he saw Sam, 'cause even if they couldn't hunt together, it's not like he was never going to see the kid again.
Dean never got a chance to give the hoodie back. And maybe once in a while he'd pull it out and look at it, soft and warm and brown, and maybe sometimes in those first years he fell asleep holding onto it, just 'cause he'd been too tired to put it back in the furthest corner of his bag. At first it smelled like Sam, so that when Dean had it in his hands it was this overwhelming presence, like Sam was there in the room with him, but the scent slowly faded until it was just a dirty sweater. Dean lost the sense-memory of what Sam smelled like not long before he heard about Detroit. After that, the hoodie went into the bag and never came out again. Dean could no longer afford that kind of sentimentality, and he had a job to do.
But still. Every other shirt Dean owned back then is long since torn up for bandages or covered in blood or left behind to lighten the load. Not this one.
When Dean gets back to the kitchen Sam has finished his own food and started on Dean's, long arm snaking out to spear chunks of Spam with his fork. Dean would like to think it's his little brother being a pain in the ass, but he's pretty sure that Sam's just not real clear on the idea of personal property.
"This is yours," Dean says, and he has to force his fingers to uncurl from the cloth when Sam takes it. Sam just sits there holding the sweatshirt, so Dean adds, "Put it on."
Sam stares at the hoodie like it's a Rubik's Cube, then fumbles with the zipper.
And actually, Sam taught himself to solve a Rubik's Cube in under five minutes by the time he hit middle school, so Dean kind of wants to stab himself with a fork. "Do you know how?"
"Yes." Sam awkwardly works one arm into a sleeve, and Dean could swear Sam sounds defensive. Sam gets the sweatshirt on, rumpled and twisted, and Dean zips it for him.
Dean bites his lip hard, trying to keep from doing something stupid, something he'll regret. He does it anyway. "Sam?"
Sam looks up at him.
"Do you know who I am?"
"Yes," Sam says, looking a little affronted. "You're—" A big hand splays against the tabletop as Sam searches for words. "The man who talks. And brings food. And fixed my foot."
Sam's voice reminds Dean of a thirteen year-old Sammy, the special 'duh, Dean, obviously' tone, and Dean's never missed that bratty teenager so much. Dean clears his throat, tries not to crumble. "But is there anything else? Anything else you remember about me?"
Sam's gaze goes distant, considering. Dean's begun noticing that Sam's facial expressions are always a little slow, tentative, like he's just figuring out what faces are for. Dean thinks he sees a slight upturn of Sam's lips. "You're there when I wake up." Sam thinks for a moment, then hesitantly offers: "My name is Sam."
"Yeah."
"Do you have a name?"
Dean feels like he's been kicked in the solar plexus, and unlike most people, he's actually been kicked in the solar plexus on a semi-regular basis for most of his life, so he knows what he's talking about. "It's Dean. My name's Dean."
"Dean," Sam says. Then again: Deeeean, stretches his mouth around the sounds, tries out the feel of it. "Good. It's good that I have a name for you." Sam's smile is slight but real, voice hoarse. "I'm really glad you're here, Dean."
As if it's just as simple as that.
That first day, Sam's quiet. Dean makes the mistake of chattering at him nonstop after they finish eating until Sam clams up and stares at the wall. Dean props Sam up on the couch and pretends to read a book about off-grid electrical systems till the words swim and his head aches. He keeps Sam in his peripheral vision, catches him sneaking glances at Dean, around the room, out the front window. Casing the joint, taking it all in.
With all that pretending to read, Dean has time to sort through the hundred thousand questions all clamoring in his head, divide them into piles: Urgent, Trivial, Delay As Long As Possible, and Hope Like Fuck It Never Comes Up. He picks one. "Hey, Sam?"
Sam's eyes flick over to Dean, and it still makes the little hairs on Dean's neck stand on end every time Sam makes eye contact.
"Why didn't you talk to me before?"
Sam blinks. "I didn't know I could."
"You didn't—" Dean falls silent, dumbfounded. Of all the possible answers, that wasn't one he was expecting.
"I thought I'd try it, though," Sam rasps, once-broad shoulders rising in a barely-perceptible shrug. When Sammy was ten, the vengeful spirit of an abused kid made him drink a glass of bleach. Dean cried and honest-to-god pissed himself from fear as he clutched a twitching Sam in the back seat on the way to the ER, begging Sam not to throw it back up and make things worse, pressing thank you kisses into Sam's hair when he swallowed down his retching. Sam's voice was a ghost for weeks afterward. Sam sounds like that now.
The afternoon passes quietly, but not snowbound and hobbled and alone in a silent house going slowly crazy quiet. More like an it's a hundred twenty miles till we hit Sioux Falls and the sun is warm through the windshield and the road is rumbling and I'll drive and you'll nap and when you wake up you'll let out a little puff of breath like the waking world is a surprise to you every time and you'll look over at me to check that I'm still there even though I'm driving the car so it's kind of obvious and you'll put your feet up on the dash and I'll remember playing little piggies with your pudgy baby toes because I always remember kind of quiet.
Sam doesn't speak again until Dean's tucked them both into bed, half-expecting (half-hoping for) a raised eyebrow, an innuendo, for Sam to slap Dean's hands away as he pulls the sheet up over Sam's chest. Dean curls up on the far side of the bed, cramped and tense from the cold (it's always cold), and bites his lip, knowing there's no point in going to sleep yet when Sam's nightmares will wake him up soon anyway.
"Something's changed," the hoarse voice says.
"The sun went away. 'Cause it's nighttime." Dean's shivering and tight-jawed and tired of dealing with quiet and cryptic Sam, which, come to think of it, isn't that different from teenage Sam.
Sam turns his head to look at Dean, and Dean thinks he detects just a hint of a jutting jaw, and oh yeah, that's definitely reminiscent of the sulky lanky fifteen year-old Sam once was, speaking a language Dean couldn't comprehend. The moon makes a pale scythe of Sam's side, cuts a dark silhouette. The light seeps into the negative space where Sam isn't. Dean can't see Sam's shadowed face, so the ghost-voice rasps disembodied into the room. "It's not the same as it was before," says the voice in the darkness. "I can talk, if I want to. I can walk places. If something hurts, I can make it stop. It isn't like it was."
Dean's tongue trips over answers and falls silent.
"There was a time. A before. When I couldn't do those things."
"There was."
"Because of Him." Sam's voice is as calm as deep water, currents roiling in the darkness beneath the surface.
Dean's breath goes heavy and stills in his chest. He'd hoped—it's stupid, now, looking back—he'd hoped that Sam didn't know. That if Sam was this broken, maybe—maybe—"Yeah."
"But you saved me," Sam says, like Dean's the big-brother hero who put a band-aid on his skinned knee. Bile rises in Dean's throat because he's forgotten his lines.
As long as I'm around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you.
"I don't save people," Dean says. "I just kill people. I try to kill the right ones." Dean rolls over, turns his back on Sam.
When Dean squirms to the far side of the bed, the cold air burrows under the disturbed blankets and cozies up to Dean's goosebumped skin. He hunches there in an unhappy curve even though he can feel Sam's body heat warming the sheets at his back. The solar corona of Dean's baby brother.
Sam's always shined so goddamn bright.
Before Dean even opens his eyes, he knows from the unimpeded sprawl of his limbs that he's alone in the bed. Whatever the reason is, it can't be good, so Dean stays where he is, eyes shutting out the world and body slumped in the barren landscape of sheets.
Until he smells something burning. Which, it turns out, is still a reliable way of getting Dean's attention.
When Dean walks into the smoke-hazed kitchen and finds Sam fumbling with the camp stove, flames shooting up from an unidentifiable spill on the kitchen counter, he stands and blinks for a moment, processing. Then he walks over to Sam, pulls his hands away from the indignantly sputtering little stove, and dumps a glass of water on the fiery mess. Dean inspects the charred remains of what appears to have been instant oatmeal.
Dean tries to remain calm as he makes clear to Sam that Sam isn't allowed to touch the stove, because he will set himself on fire and it will be gross and he will die in agony, and Dean will be really angry about it. By the end of it Sam's shoulders are slumped, face mildly glum, which given Sam's usual range of expressiveness is roughly the equivalent of fits of sobbing and rending of garments.
Sam looks like a dejected little boy, but Dean hasn't forgotten and will never forget that Sam isn't. No matter how broken he is, Sam is a grown man. A grown man who opened up the door and let the devil in.
There has to be a limit. There has to be something so bad that it will make Dean stop loving Sam. This, nearly destroying the world, and doing it on purpose – this has to be it.
"I wanted to make breakfast for you," Sam says, small and disappointed. Apparently Sam was paying more attention than Dean thought all those mornings when Dean fired up the burner to make a pitiful approximation of a hot breakfast. Sam's eyes fall on another box on the counter and he fusses with a wrapped Pop-Tart until it's reduced to shredded foil and crumbled pastry. "Here."
It's just not possible. Dean's been filling up the hollowness inside himself with disappointment and doubt until bitterness seeps into his marrow. There's no space left in him to hold the kind of feelings he used to have when Sam was around. And all the things in Sam that made Dean feel that way, they've been stripped away. Whatever's left of Sam is a burned-down building, steel bones looming naked over the ashes of the rest, roof fallen in and nothing inside worth saving. This is the limit, it must be. Dean takes the Pop-Tart. "Want to sit on the porch?"
Dean eats the demolished Pop-Tart and gives Sam the other one. The porch swing wails bitterly beneath their combined weight. Sam flexes cold toes, then pulls them up to sit on them. He hides his hands in the sleeves of his hoodie. "Cold."
"Yeah." Dean's fucking freezing in boxers and t-shirt, ready to shiver right out of himself like a snake shedding its skin. Which is why he doesn't complain when Sam silently shifts over on the swing, pressing warm against Dean from knee to shoulder.
"Dean?"
"Yeah?"
"Where did He go?" Sam squints into the glare that glances off the snow, all John Wayne stoicism.
"Hell," Dean says.
Sam nods like Dean said Cincinnati. "Is he coming back?"
"No," Dean lie-hopes. "Not ever." And really, there's something kind of wrong here, because Dean should be asking the questions. Dean should be getting answers. "What do you remember?"
"Lots of things," whispers the ghost of a voice.
It's started to snow again, clean and new, covering up the track of Dean's footprints in the front yard. "What's the first thing you remember?"
The tip of Sam's nose is pink from cold. "Walking. Going away from a building, and toward a road. Losing my footing, walking on soft things. He never looked down, you know, but I heard them crack when I stepped on them."
Dean accidentally stepped on a rat once, felt it squish, wet crunch, wriggling then still. Dean doesn't like rats. Dean's leg aches. His heart thumps. He turns his face and breathes and Sam smells like Sam.
"Before that. Before Lucifer." Sam doesn't so much as twitch at the name, and Dean's glad this isn't going to be a whole Voldemort thing.
"Before." The shape of Sam's mouth is thin and tight, brow furrowed, gaze turned inward, and whatever he sees there isn't something Dean wants to imagine. After long moments slide away, Sam shakes his head. "I don't know. It was so long ago."
"Four years." A lot of things can happen in four years.
Sam snorts something that might have been a laugh in a past life, and Dean has to tamp down the urge to punch him, because what does Sam have to be laughing about? "No," Sam says with a wry certainty that pours cold water on Dean's rage. "It was longer."
In the yard, the crisp outlines of Dean's feet have disappeared, and his nose is beginning to run from the winter air.
The sheets are cool and the bed is wide. Dean has space to stretch out his limbs, doesn't immediately run up against long legs and arms, doesn't slowly begin the morning with the rhythm of Sam's heartbeat against his ear. Usually Dean tries to wake up before Sam, in case Sam decides to go destroy the world before breakfast, but it's hard to keep up. Dragging a broken leg around makes Dean crash hard when he finally hits the pillow at night, and Sam is inexplicably, irritatingly energetic these days.
Sam's in the living room, pretending to read the M through O encyclopedia and sitting as ramrod straight as the tiny Sammy who'd tense up defensively after eating the last of the Twinkies. Dean doesn't realize why until he tips down the encyclopedia and sees his brother staring back at him.
Really his brother. Not the calm countenance in the white suit, all its expressions and movements foreign and wrong in Sam's body. Not the scruffy Unabomber Dean's been living with these last months. Sam's clean-shaven, baby-faced, and Dean's gut reaction lingers on shock (recognition, affection, greeting a loved one at the train station after a long journey) before swiftly plummeting into rage when he's struck by the image of Sam with a razor in his hand. There's a nick at Sam's jawline, the barest crust of blood.
Dean's "What the fuck were you thinking, you brain-dead fucking moron?" does not go over well. This is becoming something of a theme with them: Sam pushes, Dean restrains, screaming ensues, and still they're trapped together in a falling-down house in a falling-down world. Sam, wait for me and I'll shave your beard if you really want to look like a twelve year-old again. Sam, don't fucking go up on the roof even if it is fucking leaking, and give me that hammer right fucking now. Sam, if you ever attempt to carry me down the front stairs again I'm gonna castrate you in your sleep. Listen to me. Do what I tell you. Stop doing things that are going to get you in trouble just because you're a defiant little dipshit who doesn't know what's best for him.
Mice nibble at the crumbs in the bottom of the last box of stale graham crackers, and Dean still moves at a snail's-pace, slowed by a healing leg and unmedicated pain, but it's go out or starve and Dean doesn't want to starve any more than the mice do. He's just an animal, really, incapable of moral decision-making but stupidly committed to eating and sleeping and breathing for as long as his body will carry him, even when the righteous thing to do would be to lay down and die in penance. An animal, a scavenger, picking the bones of civilization clean and sucking out the marrow.
Dean folds himself uncomfortably into the garaged car and begins the slow process of sweet-talking the cold engine into starting. He jumps in his seat when Sam raps at the window. "What?" Dean says, muffled through the glass. He doesn't have the patience for another battle over whether it's fair to leave Sam at home when he goes out. Sam twirls his wrist: roll the window down. With a sigh, Dean does. "What is it?"
Sam leans his shaggy head in through the window, aggravating Dean's admittedly flexible sense of personal space. "I should drive."
Dean snorts. "That's a good one, tell me another."
The door groans when Sam swings it open and shoves at Dean's shoulder. "Move over. I'll do it. Just tell me where to go."
"No, Sam, you can't drive."
"Why not?"
"You don't know how."
"I know how to do other things. I remember how to tie my shoes. I remember how to clean a gun." Another example of Sam touching things he is not supposed to touch, and the fallout from Dean finding Sam with a Glock still has them falling into icy silence on occasion.
"You just can't, Sam."
"But that's not fair." Sam seems honestly confused. Dean can see the gears ticking in his brain, trying to parse how Dean can fail to bend to the logic of fairness. "Why?"
"Because I say so!"
"You're—" Sam searches for a word. "— bossy!" he finally explodes. Sam starts, stiffens, and then rocks with the impact when Dean launches himself at Sam.
It's the most awkward bear hug imaginable, Dean half-in and half-out of the car with his face crushed against Sam's chest, arms squeezing his middle. "You're so fucking irritating, Sam." Dean spreads his hands on Sam's back. "You have always been so fucking irritating." Joy blossoms in Dean like a firework, all colors and light, burning like it's too much for his body to contain. It's not a feeling Dean ever expected to experience again. He doesn't deserve it, it's not his to feel, this joy, but he furtively steals it from the universe anyway, and he can't stop smiling as he does it. He curls his fists in the lapels of Sam's flannel, knuckles sharp against Sam's chest. "You're the most annoying person I've ever met in my entire goddamn life."
Sam's hand chases after Dean, clutches his sleeve when Dean pulls away. Sam's smile is slight, tentative, like he knows something good has happened but doesn't understand what it is. "So can I drive?"
Dean settles back into the seat. The vinyl squeaks. The cold engine is finally warming into a throaty purr. "No. But if it makes you feel better I wouldn't have let you before, either. 'Cause it's my goddamn car." He thumps the passenger seat. "Get in."
The car seems the right size when Sam's in it.
It's simultaneously the best and worst thing about Sam, actually, the way he utterly hasn't changed. He's a perfect test case, maybe, in what happens when you strip away a lifetime of memory and habit and leave nothing but the foundations a person grows from. The core of Sam's personality, it seems, is being a motherfucking brick wall. Not just physically, though as atrophied muscles wake up Sam's shoulders are starting to look like the Great Wall of China again, but everything about Sam's personality is maddeningly intractable. He never lets well enough alone, full of questions and needling. Stubborn as a dog with a bone, or maybe one of those lizards, the ones with the teeth that latch onto flesh and don't let go till you surgically remove them. He loves to do things for himself, leaving Dean feeling useless and empty-handed, and his new favorite hobby seems to be saying no, much like when he was a toddler just picking up the powers of speech.
It takes Dean a while to figure out Sam's sudden penchant for vehement refusals, but once it strikes him why Sam might be relishing the ability to say no, he never begrudges it again.
Sam's hungry for his own history, pushing Dean to fill in vast blank swathes of his memory. Dean tells himself that Sam needs to remember on his own, just needs his memory jogged, that it's better that way. Tells himself that because it sounds more virtuous than don't make me say it, Sammy, don't make me tell you.
Sam's reacquainting himself with his life starts small—very small—like the day when Sam looks up from playing with frayed threads at the knee of Dean's jeans (because this Sam is handsier than the old one, relearning the world by touch), leans into Dean and says, "You and I, we're—"
"Brothers," Dean interjects quickly.
"Huh," Sam says, and leaves the subject there.
There are a few problems with this laissez- faire approach of Dean's, one of which Dean doesn't realize until they're picking through scrap metal at a junk yard and Sam backs him up against the rusted-out hulk of a delivery van and slides a knee between Dean's legs. Sam's long thigh presses tight against Dean, and Dean feels trapped by the cage of Sam's arms resting against the van on either side of his head. When his voice comes out high and hysterical, he rationalizes that it's a reasonable response to having a strong leg perilously close to sensitive bits. "Are you fucking crazy?"
Sam studies him intently, face far too close. "We don't do this?"
Dean gapes. They've covered the brothers thing, just like they covered whether Sam was a person, whether he had a name. Sam's lack of response to the word brother is a sore spot for Dean, an unhealed bruise he presses against when he wants to torture himself, but even if it doesn't mean anything to this new Sam, he should at least understand it in an abstract sense. "No," Dean says finally. "We don't."
Sam hmmms but doesn't move away. "Did you want to?"
Here at the end of the world, Dean hurls himself over the edge. "Yes."
There's something predatorial about the way Sam watches Dean's face, about the coiled strength and lurking danger of him. "Did I want to?"
"I don't know," Dean says, and he isn't lying. "Maybe. I wish like hell you'd told me if you did." It's not worth thinking about how things might have been different. It's not worth thinking about how he'd dialed Sam's number and hung up, come back on the tip of his tongue. It's not worth thinking about the day he realized he was never going to give Sam's hoodie back to him, not unless he burned him in it. Dean has to believe in fate, because if he had a choice—if things could have been different—
Sam leans closer, and the way he looks at Dean makes Dean feel sick. It was his favorite thing when he was a kid, the way Sam would look at him like he made the sun rise. Like he was Sam's entire world. "I think I did." Dean can see the chipped edge on Sam's tooth, the curls where sweat has dried Sam's hair against his forehead.
"Don't," Dean says. Don't look at me like that.
"Why not?" Sam asks, and the press of his lips is flat and dry on Dean's cheekbone, next to his ear.
There was once a time when the terror welling up in Dean would have expressed itself in an explosion of violence—shove Sam away, beat on the metal skeletons of cars, probably injure himself on one of them, stupid in a world without tetanus shots. But a lot of things have changed. Dean plays dead. He lets himself go limp against Sam's invading strength. "Because you're handing me everything I ever wanted on a plate."
Sam's so close that when he averts his eyes, turns his head away, it offers up the vulnerable skin of Sam's neck to Dean, too intimate. Sam speaks with the same delicacy he'd use to pick a lock or defuse explosives. "If we're going to punish ourselves, I wish you'd tell me what it's for."
Dean hates Sam, sometimes, for not remembering. For leaving Dean alone to carry the knowledge of how thoroughly they've both failed.
Dean pushes Sam away, lets him stumble over the trash on the ground, and leaves the junkyard without him. There are no radio stations anymore, but he puts the static on loud to fill up the silence in the car.
Sam gets home three hours later with feet blistered to bloodiness. He shuts the front door quietly and doesn't say anything.
Later, when Dean's washing Sam's feet, bandaging his rubbed-raw heels, he remembers the grief of a summer day, of a Sam that didn't even know that when he was in pain he could escape it.
Dean's hands move over Sam's foot without Dean's permission, thumbs massaging out the aches. Sam shivers when Dean's hands reach the muscle of his calf, groans when Dean works hard at a cramp.
That night when Sam is not-quite asleep – just close enough that Dean has plausible deniability, that he can tell himself Sam wasn't really meant to hear – Dean curls behind him and speaks into his ear. "I got you back." Dean's hand ghosts over Sam's ribs. "Do you even get it?" Dean's not sure when it happened, when Sam ruined him so thoroughly. "I got you back, Sam."
Sam's breath hisses out. His stillness against Dean is too perfect, deliberate. Dean can imagine—if he just reached around Sam's body—but he doesn't.
The darkness in the bedroom lulls Dean into speech like the intimate closeness of a confessional. "I'm not a good person," Dean says. "Even if I don't deserve it, Sam, I want to take it."
Dean hears Sam's hitched breath, his mouth opening and closing, but Sam doesn't shatter the weak illusion of sleep by speaking. Instead, Dean feels the shift of muscles in Sam's arm as Sam's fingertips slip beneath his own waistband.
"I'll just keep taking and taking," Dean says, and he feels the gentlest rock of Sam's hips, the almost imperceptible sound of movement beneath the sheets. "I'll take you any way I can get you." His lips brush the curve of Sam's ear. "I can't even feel sorry, Sammy. You make me greedy. I've got you back and it's all I can think about."
Dean feels a genuine sense of mourning, because he truly is broken. A pathetic, monstrous thing. There is no limit, it turns out, to how far he can fall for Sam.
"What've you done to me," he murmurs, and gives in to the impulse to bite, sharp, at the back of Sam's neck. Sam's whole body snaps tight, then shudders. Dean can feel Sam's arm still moving, working him through it. "What've you done to me?"
Whatever it is that Sam's done to him, it's a marvel and an abomination.
Every once in a while, Dean hauls a can of fuel or a handmade toy down the road to Neil and his daughter, never forgetting how it felt to lie broken in the snow and hear help coming for him. The girl is skittish, takes Dean's offerings and retreats to another room. She has a tendency to disassemble everything he brings and put it back together better.
Neil, Dean gets the impression, doesn't get many chances to talk to people over the age of eight. He claps Dean on the back as soon as he's through the doorway. "How's that brother of yours?"
Dean shrugs. "Talking now."
"Talking," Neil scoffs. "All casual-like, he tells me, 'talking now.' Like it's nothing." He clasps Dean's shoulder. "Congratulations."
Dean shrugs again, grins. "Yeah, well."
Neil's got some pretty intense barricading going on, booby traps all over the property, which Dean happily examines. More exciting, the man's a ham radio enthusiast, was even back in the civilized days, one of those guys who'd sit in his study chatting with slightly odd hobbyists thousands of miles away.
One brisk afternoon, Dean arrives at the beginning of one of Neil's conversations. Not so much a conversation as an argument. "This is KZ6UQH, what d'you mean you don't have a call sign?"
"Is this the radio? I think I may have pushed the wrong button. It's talking to me."
"Holy shit," Dean says, and shoves Neil to the side. "Cas? Is that you?"
There's a long pause, and then the calm voice crackles over the airwaves again. "Dean? You're in the radio."
"Holy shit," Dean says. "Hey. Uh. I'm glad you're not dead. That's awesome."
Castiel sounds pleased. "Yes. It is … awesome, that neither of us are deceased."
"How you doing? You on your own? How're you … I mean, shit, you're not starving to death or anything, are you?"
"Marijuana is very profitable," Cas says placidly. "I believe I have successfully located an economic niche."
"Wow. Okay. That works." Dean leans over the radio, rapt. There was a time when he was so ready to flee his burdens that he didn't care how the other survivors fared. It's good, though. It's weird. Sometimes it's easier to pretend that nothing came before this town, this house, this winter.
"How is Sam?"
Dean pauses, feels Neil watching him. "He's dead." Dean has no idea who else is listening on the other side of this conversation, and it's undoubtedly safer for Sam if he's just a bad memory for the rest of the world.
"I see," Cas says, tone opaque.
When Dean hears Neil putting his daughter to bed upstairs, sun already setting, he says his goodbyes.
There's a long silence, making him think Cas has already wandered off. Then, finally. "I'm glad you're finally getting what you deserve, Dean Winchester."
Dean trudges down the road toward home through graying snowdrifts. There's a light on inside, and someone waiting.
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