Chapter Text
They made it to Enfield, New Hampshire by eleven that night. Dean kept going.
"What are you doing?" Sam asked.
Dean hung a right onto Route 4 west. "Better not to bed down in the same town."
"Yeah, thanks, I know that, but why do we need to check in first? Let's just get this over with."
Dean put on his indicator and didn't make eye contact. "Tomorrow," he said.
Sam ground his teeth and looked out the window.
On the way up here, Dean had kept telling him to get some sleep, but as drained as he was, Sam couldn't. Seeing memories that weren't his everywhere was too distracting. As a consequence, he could feel his mood deteriorating along with his focus.
They pulled in at a motel in Hanover barely half an hour later. The place was a lot nicer than their regular. So that was how it was going to be.
"Stay here," Dean said when he got out to go check them in. Sam couldn't tell whether he said it in solicitude or to deliberately piss Sam off, or which option actually did piss him off more.
Either way, he'd have followed Dean in just to spite him, but he genuinely felt like shit. His ribs hurt. His ear hurt, fucking rat, should've eaten it the first time. Parts he hadn't so much as scratched hurt. He'd told Father Reynolds to text him when it was done, if he was alive, and there was nothing yet, so his stomach hurt. Anyway, he could picture the night clerk's face if she got a good look at him right now. She'd probably decline to give them a room.
He must have managed to space out, because he jumped when Dean dropped back into the driver's seat with a neutral, "Number twenty-three."
Sam knew standing up after sitting in the car for hours was going to suck. The best he could do about it was brace himself on the roof of the car and wait for the head rush to subside. Nothing about the process required Dean. Sam was not actively fainting, he was not bleeding out, he was not in any distress whatsoever, so of course Dean was suddenly right there, dropping the bags he'd snatched up before Sam could take any of them, reaching out to grab him.
Sam didn't snap or shove this time. He didn't have the energy. Instead he shuddered, from the soles of his feet to where he held onto the car's roof, like his entire body was trying to crawl away from Dean's hands.
He knew by his brother's pause that that was worse than if Sam had hit him. Whatever. If Dean didn't want his feelings hurt, all he had to do was back off.
Inside, Dean took off his shoes. Sam didn't. "It's only half an hour back to the cemetery," he said, still standing. "We don't have to wait a whole day."
"We don't have to do it tonight, either."
Sam got a surge of the irritation he'd thought he was too tired for. "I'm not dying, Dean."
Dean stopped with one boot off and glared at him. "Yeah? Well, you're not the only one who's had a long fucking day, either, and unlike you, I didn't spend yesterday asleep. Considering you're not the one who's going to be doing all the work, you don't get a vote."
Dean finished shucking his outerwear, running a hand over his brow like it was hot in here rather than frigid, and rummaged in the plastic bag that held Sam's meds and what passed for now as Sam's meals. It wasn't already time for more, surely? That alarm on Dean's phone hadn't gone off yet.
What Dean came up with was neither pills nor Ensure. It was wound wash and bandaging. The bottom of Sam's stomach dropped out like a rotten floor.
"C'mon. Let's get them changed and we can both hit the sack."
"I'll do it."
Dean's expression did not improve. "Sam, I really don't have the patience for this."
"You don't have to," Sam said, holding his hands out for the materials. "It's all in places I can reach."
"Sam, what is your malfunction? Just take your damn shirt off, I'm not going to molest you, Christ."
"I can change a fucking bandaid, Dean."
"Bandaid?" Dean threw the bandages aside and stood. "You got a hole in you that's a direct line to your heart, that shit can't get infected. And I wouldn't trust you to change an actual bandaid right now. Maybe if you'd slept in the car like I fucking told you to." He made a grab for the hem of Sam's hoodie.
Sam evaded him. At least, that was what he tried to do. What actually happened was that he jumped back, encountered the bed, and went down on his ass on the floor. Fire erupted in his ribs.
Instantly Dean was hovering over him, white-faced. "Sammy? Shit, Sam—"
Before Dean's reaching hands could connect, Sam got out, "Was I like this when you got back from Hell? I was, wasn't I? You should've fucking shot me."
Dean stared down at him. Sam stared back even though he wanted to turn over and vomit, willing Dean to drop it already.
Dean broke first. He levered himself up, scooped the wound care supplies off the bed, and threw them at Sam's feet. The door slammed behind him.
The sound of the Impala's engine never came. Sam both resented that and was relieved.
In the bathroom, he bit his lip as he considered the hoodie. His ribs were already inflamed from the fall; now he had to get all the layers off, clean the slice Jacob had left him with and his collection of catheter site pockmarks, then get everything on again. Probably the least arduous thing that had been required of him in weeks, but he felt inordinately sorry for himself anyway. It hurt a lot more than it would have with help, not that he'd have admitted it at gunpoint.
He got himself redressed and into bed just before Dean came back. There was no conversation this time, Sam already had his eyes closed; but the key being tossed onto the dresser, Dean moving about the room, the brightness of the overhead light all bashed right through the fog of exhaustion Sam was swimming in. He couldn't sleep in here. He didn't want this. He wanted the dark and security of his room, where no one could bother him.
As soon as he thought it, the wanting curdled. His room. He was thinking of that place as his room and wishing himself back there. Dean was here, with him, under this roof, and Sam wanted him away and himself back in the place where all he'd wanted had been Dean.
What the hell was wrong with him?
Dean moved into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar and light and sound spilling out. Sam found himself waiting, coiled up tight, both in case Dean came out to fuss over him and for him to do it. On high alert in case Dean didn't stay away and in case he did.
Twenty-four identical hours lay ahead of them before they would finally go to the Enfield Cemetery. It was much too long. He couldn't stand the tension, and he especially couldn't stand the misery of hating himself for it.
One of his unlabeled prescription bottles held more Ativan. Sam was bitterly reflecting that he couldn't knock himself out with it though—because if he overslept, Dean might well ditch him and go to the cemetery alone for Sam's own good—when he remembered the alarms on Dean's phone. Sam wouldn't sleep through anything. Dean was going to wake him up to take antibiotics and choke down precisely measured doses of Ensure no matter what.
Dean was still in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. Sam flung the covers back, raided the medicine bag like a rat, and took enough Ativan to make the time go away.
* * *
Shivering. Cold. He had something over him, like he'd finally been able to reach out and somehow bring the pipe's concrete close around him, but it was too light.
Something beeping. Not like the hospital's beeping; tinny and shrill and prepackaged by Nokia. Dean's voice: What th— F'ck. Right. Come on, Sam, meds. Come on, don't make this a bigger pain in the ass for both of us.
Sam?
Then: Sam? Sammy, what the hell did you take?
So Sam opened his eyes and said, clearly, "I'm fine, Dean, calm down." It would be hours before he remembered this and realized he'd only dreamt doing it.
Hand shaking his shoulder, hand patting his cheek, frantic hand at his pulse. Exhalation. Pills rattling in a plastic bottle and Dean muttering, c'mon, c'mon, how many—and then another big breath out. A long silence except for one long, wet sniff.
The mattress dipped, and Sam realized blurrily that he must not have gotten up and gone to the bathroom a moment ago, after all. Dean's voice came from way too close, although it was quiet: "I really hate you sometimes."
Sam slept for most of the day. That was a blessing, because it let Dean sleep for most of the day. God knew he hadn't gotten much sleep during the night.
Four Ativan weren't really all that much for a guy Sam's size. Not for a guy the size Sam used to be, anyway. That was probably all that had happened: Sam had tossed them back like he still weighted a couple hundred pounds, because why wouldn't he? Wasn't like he'd spent the last two days calculating dosages off a chart from the new number the hospital had provided. He probably didn't even know the new number.
Round about four-thirty in the afternoon, when Dean had been awake for a robust hour and a half, Sam stirred. There was a rustle of bedclothes as he turned, then the heavy puhh of Sam's breath against the pillow, and then the slow tapering off of all sound and movement as he dug back down into sleep. Then it all halted in the negative sound of someone snapping awake.
Sam pushed himself upright, face starkly white. "Dean?"
The defensive irritation Dean had been marinating in since last night vanished. He rose from the table. "Right here."
Sam looked around the room, disoriented. "Where's the phone?" His voice was wrecked; Dean had let him get dehydrated again, shit, shit, shit.
Dumbly, Dean handed him the backup burner from the nightstand. Sam shook his head once, hard, like a dog with something in its ear, and visibly struggled to focus on the phone. "No word from the good Father yet," Dean said when he realized what Sam was checking for. Sam's shoulders slumped.
Sam sat in the nest of covers, still in the hoodie he'd never taken off, staring at the bedspread without seeing it. He looked like something rejected by the USDA. The clerk at the Shell where Dean had stopped to peel the decals off the car had caught sight of Sam stumbling into the men's room and muttered about fuckin druggies; Dean had thought about reaching across the counter and slamming the man's face into it, but he'd had a point. Sam's hair was sticking up, greasy at the roots and straw-like at the tips. With the scruff he was sporting, he looked like a bona fide, train-jumping, bottle-in-a-paper-bag wino. He was starting to smell like one again, too. Something was going to have to give, but Dean wasn't sure precisely how or what when Sam couldn't do it himself and clearly preferred at least one set of walls between him and Dean at all times.
Despite the blatant discontinuity in their lives between their arrival in Providence and their departure from it, Dean's mind tended to skip over the intervening events, like folding a map so one stretch of highway met another a hundred miles away. But every once in a while, how different Sam looked, acted would hit him all over again, and the whole month would come back up in his mind like a bad meal.
That was when he wanted to know everything so bad it hurt.
Answers weren't what he wanted—not the way he'd wanted someone, anyone (and Sam would have done) to answer for all of this while he'd been tearing up the nation to find his brother. He didn't want facts, though he thought he was owed some. It wasn't even so much that he wanted to know what had made Sam like this.
He wanted to know absolutely every corner and detail that belonged in that month-long gap the same way when he'd been twenty-two, he'd wanted to know what every piece of clothing Sam owned smelled like. He wanted to know the way when he'd been fifteen, he'd stolen a bite of every food item Sam had put in his mouth in every diner, school cafeteria, gas station, or motel continental breakfast they'd passed through; eleven at the time, Sam had thought Dean was doing it to be a jackass, and he hadn't been wrong but he sure hadn't understood, either. Dean wanted to know the way he'd once sat outside a party in Palo Alto and seriously considered going in, finding the girl he'd watched peel her shirt off in a window with Sam, charming her into his car, and fucking her very, very thoroughly.
The feeling was worse since the church. He wanted to demand to know, What did you do each day? and What did you talk about? and What percentage of the time were you afraid? and What were the little pleasures, I know there were some, you can't fool me, I know how it goes. No; he didn't want to demand it. He shouldn't have to demand it. Sam had already told some random priest he'd only met once, had told him specifics and secrets and personal reflections; Dean was sure he had, Sam had been in there forever. Dean deserved to know at least as much as some priest. He was entitled.
He wouldn't have to come off as obsessive. He could pitch it healthy and reasonable, something like, Just talk to me, Sammy, please. I just wanna help. I can't do that if you won't talk to me. It's my job, right? Let me do my job.
Sam's below-the-belt jab from last night came back to him: Was I like this when you got back from Hell? And he thought, Yeah, actually, you kind of were.
Slowed by the lingering effects of the Ativan, Sam's fingers began to pick at the fancy hobnail bedspread. "I'm sorry," he said.
For half a second, Dean's only thought was, Well, Jesus Christ, don't actually tell me.
But Sam only said, "About—" and flopped his hand inarticulately.
Dean could've filled in the blank any number of ways. Sorry for keeping you in the dark, sorry for scaring the shit out of you last night, sorry for everything you went through, God, it must have been awful for you, too. But more probably Sam meant Sorry for being a fucking brat, which was confirmed when he continued, "One minute I think I'm fine with it, and then…."
Dean managed to say, "It's okay," and mostly mean it.
Sam's picking at the bedspread petered out. "Sometimes I feel different."
Careful not to ask the question too fast, Dean said, "Different how?"
Sam shrugged without meeting his eyes.
Dean sat on the other bed. "You went through something, Sam. That'll make you feel different, yeah. But that's all it is. There's nothing wrong with you. You're going to be fine."
Sam exhaled, then sort of laughed, a little self-deprecatory, a little embarrassed, and shook his head. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I'll feel better when I get back into hunting."
It was probably a good thing that Sam was looking anywhere but at Dean, who began intelligently, "Uh—actually, I was thinking—"
The burner phone buzzed.
Sam's wide eyes jumped up to Dean. The phone buzzed a second time; Sam thumbed it open and stared at the message there.
"What, what is it?" Dean said.
"It's done," Sam said after a minute. "But, uh. That detective, Gutierrez. She hit her head pretty bad. She's in critical condition."
Dean absorbed that. He wouldn't forget exactly what critical condition meant anytime soon. "Shit."
"Yeah." Sam put the phone back on the dresser. Dean caught the guilt on his face, though, and felt certain that this outcome was still better than the one Sam had expected.
Dean stood. After a month of missing his brother like a limb, he really, really wanted out of this room. It wasn't the acute need to get out before he punched Sam's newly fragile face in that he'd felt last night, more of an itch. Either way, he couldn't act on it. He couldn't leave Sam right now.
It would all be fine when they got to Bobby's, he told himself. Being in a familiar place would chill Sam out, which would chill Dean out. Except maybe they'd just make a short stop there, because Bobby was hunter central and Dean didn't need Sam getting any ideas. No worries. He'd enlist Bobby to help him find a place he could take Sam—still hadn't called the man, admittedly, but he was working up to it—and then they'd go there and once there weren't any more distractions, it would be smooth sailing. They'd get Sam built back up again, and maybe work on the place because anything Bobby found would need it, and by the time Sam was himself again they'd both have adjusted, downshifted, and would be ready to kick back and live the well earned good life.
They'd never go through this again.
"We've got hours before dark," Dean said. "You should get some more sleep."
From Hanover to the cemetery was about a half hour drive. The closer they came, the more memories Sam got, like running into spider webs. They stopped at the gate for Dean to read the plot map posted there in a little kiosk. Sam could have found the grave without recourse to any maps, but he had no idea how to tell Dean that.
He had no idea how to tell Dean about any of this.
When they got out, Sam turned in a slow circle to take in his surroundings. Enfield Cemetery lay at the end of a small lane overlooking Masacoma Lake and incorporated a number of smaller boneyards dating back to earlier centuries. The sky was overcast, but their lantern and the modest light pollution from towns nearby showed the outlines of headstones, walkways, trimmed lawn, and swaying grasses toward the periphery.
It was the first time he'd been outside-outside. That was, it was the first time he hadn't just been briefly outside to transfer from car to destination. Even here, the space was blank of people and screened off by woods, like Dean was regulating the rate of expansion of Sam's world as carefully as he did Sam's nutrition.
The plot they'd come for was modern. A wreath of high-end but still artificial flowers had been placed within the last couple of months, and the area was well kept. Sam and Dean stood side by side to read the headstone:
Bethany Rose Dorner
March 4th, 1979 – July 19th, 1997
Beloved Daughter and Sister
Dean installed Sam under a nearby tree with both their sleeping bags and a thermos before getting a rock bar and a shovel out of the trunk. The thermos contained hot water. Of course it did. No caffeine, no unvetted nutrients. Its warmth was welcome, though.
Particularly here.
It wasn't so much that there were a ton of memories in the cemetery—Jacob had only been back a few times—as that with nothing else to distract from them, they crowded in. Their banality was the most disconcerting thing about them. Here was where Jacob had stood during the funeral. Over there was where Aunt Louise had been buried, and as children they'd come here with their parents to visit her when both of them would rather have been on the water. Back that way was where Bethany had climbed partway up a maple tree, careful of her funeral dress, to retrieve the minister's stole when they'd buried Grandfather Fenn on a windy day. Jacob didn't even hate her, in the memories where she was still alive.
The rhythm of his brother shoveling solo was soothing like a lullaby and humiliating all at once. When Dean cracked open the vault with the rock bar, workmanlike as if he did this all the time—because he did, they both did, or anyway they both had—Sam knew he should be grateful to him for taking care of this when he physically couldn't have himself, but gratitude was not the feeling uppermost. At least, he supposed, he wasn't blank inside around his sibling.
Dean glanced up at him before opening the coffin, like he was waiting for permission. Sam hated the implication that carried that this was his baby somehow, like Dean had had to be talked into this instead of pointing them here without Sam even having to ask. Maybe Dean hadn't known Jacob like Sam did, but he'd seen something, somewhere, that made him care. Since he couldn't say so, Sam just nodded.
When the lid came up, he abandoned the sleeping bags and the thermos and the tree and knelt at the edge of the hole. He ignored the shivers that immediately set in. The fine drizzle was a cold rain, now, dampening the sailor suit dress she'd been buried in like she'd been a child. Dean used extra lighter fluid.
He brought out the lighter and hesitated a moment before offering it to Sam. "You want to?"
Again that implication that this was for Sam. It wasn't. It wasn't even primarily for Sam. But slim chance of ever having Dean admit that. "Go ahead," he said without looking up.
"All right. Well." Dean shuffled awkwardly at the edge of the grave for a moment. "Uh, Bethany, hopefully you're long gone, but if not… adios. And sorry."
He dropped the lighter. The grave went up.
The grief hit Sam out of nowhere.
They watched her burn. The firelight limned Dean's figure where rain and sweat mixed on his skin, showing the muscles of his arms and his t-shirt stuck to his torso. Sam got another memory then: not one of Jacob's, but his own of the first time their father had allowed him to come on a salt and burn. John had still done the lion's share of the digging, but Dean had worked as fast and as hard as he could, striving to impress, striving to prove manhood at the age of fourteen. Sam had been exiled to the perimeter with a shotgun. That salt and burn had been anticlimactic, too. Probably that was why their father had chosen it for them. John in charge of Dean in charge of Sam.
Wet clay soaked into Sam's ass where he sat on his heels. "Do you ever wonder what it's like for twins?"
Dean didn't answer immediately, didn't turn or look at him. He picked up the rock bar, stowed it in the car, and came back before he finally said, "Apparently it sucks."
Sam smiled humorlessly. So Dean had been thinking about it.
The flames bit into the wood of the casket and strengthened.
"It was over rowing times," Sam said. He didn't want to contain the knowledge. "She beat him that day, just by a few seconds. But he'd been thinking about it for a long time anyway, because her scholarship was bigger."
He stared into the fire like it could white out his mind's eye. "She never knew. She never had any idea what he really thought of her, the kinds of things that went through his mind—"
Dean sucked in a breath.
"He came back here during Christmas break of his freshman year with his whole family." Sam saw, from above, the crease of trousers someone else had pressed breaking over wingtips in the snow. "Parents and grandparents and cousins. He cried and they all comforted him. That was when he knew he'd gotten away with it."
Ask me. Don't ask me. Ask me. Don't.
Ask me.
When the flames started to die down, Sam worked his hand into the soggy pile of clay. It could only improve what was under his nails. He dropped the handful of earth into the grave and got up.
Just lifting the spare shovel out of the trunk got his body's attention. Working it into the clods Dean had already broken up was difficult; within three shovelfuls his grip was wobbling.
Dean looked as though he'd have liked to say something, but fuck him. He'd passed on his opportunity to talk.
* * *
Another thing about graves: Sam used to enjoy digging them. Sort of. He could work up a sweat doing it, and that always made him feel better even if his muscles ached afterward. He knew it was pseudoscientific nonsense, but it felt like sweating purged him from the inside out, bringing everything to the surface so he could wash it away. Now no matter what he did, he found himself exhausted long before he could sweat.
"You get first shot at the bathroom," Sam said. "You're the one who did all the work."
He was hoping a few minutes flat on his back while Dean showered would give him enough energy to at least wipe himself off with a washcloth. But Dean, untying his boots by the door to keep the mud off the carpet of this too-nice motel room, just said, "Nah, go for it."
So much for that.
Gripping the bathroom sink, Sam managed to toe off his shoes without having to deal with the head rush of reaching down to unlace them. He took a moment to figure out what he needed to remove next. Even though they hadn't expected Bethany to show up, he'd gone out dressed normally. No gun, because his Taurus was gone and he hadn't wanted to get into choosing one of the spares, but he'd strapped on a knife out of habit. So: next step, belt and knife.
He drew his belt out of the sheath's loop to free the knife and let his muddy jeans fall to the floor. Then he remembered that he hadn't brought a change of clothes in here. Shit. That meant he had to get these clothes off, wash himself, get them all back on again, go back out into the room, stay awake until he heard Dean get in the shower, and get these clothes off again so he could put on clean ones and finally, finally go to sleep.
Sam stared dully at the Bowie knife in his hand. It was good but nothing special. There wasn't much more exotic than a bear it would actually kill.
He unsheathed it and tested the edge. He'd been the last one to sharpen this. He wasn't sure how, when he and Dean both used basically the same techniques because they'd both learned them from the same place, but somehow they could always tell which one of them had sharpened what. It had just always been like that.
Down in the sewer, he'd never actually seen the knives he made very clearly. He'd adapted to the half-light, so much so that while he'd been down there, images had seemed normal, but when he accessed the memories now he realized how incomplete all of them were. Like partially developed photographs. Nothing like the glitteringly precise object he now held.
He pushed up his left sleeve. The skin of his forearm was grayish, something like newspaper stock, tacky to the touch. He angled the blade against the underside of his arm.
He was so tired he had no idea he hadn't locked the bathroom door.
Sam registered the door swinging open and Dean coming through it. He didn't process the look on Dean's face until after he'd moved, and Dean moved so fast Sam would have had difficulty following it even in peak condition. Then Dean's fingers were clamped around Sam's fist, and together they were driving the knife into the wall.
The movement yanked Sam forward and to the side. He lost what balance he had and found Dean's face suddenly inches from his own.
"What the hell, Sam?"
Dean's expression had removed language from Sam's brain. When he didn't answer, Dean's face contorted and he shook him, sending pain through Sam's ribs. "What are you doing?" Dean snarled.
Sam scrambled for purchase in this conversation. "Dean, no. I wasn't."
"Then tell me what you were doing!"
"Nothing—"
"You fucking asshole—"
"Just— Dean, remember Yellowstone?"
It was clear from Dean's face that he had no idea what Sam was trying to say, but at least he was listening. "We spent all that time in the woods," Sam babbled, "and we were always dirty, but Dad showed us how, with knives, remember, we sat up at night when he was gone and it was just us and used the knives, remember?"
Dean stared at him until his face crumpled. "Sammy, that's a good memory for you?"
Seeing that look on his brother's face made Sam want to disappear into a hole.
"He lied to us. What's wrong with you?" Dean was holding the back of Sam's head tightly by the hair, and it hurt.
Sam couldn't say, We were together. Not when that obviously hadn't been enough to make it good for Dean.
Shaking him once more, almost gently, Dean shoved him down to sit on the toilet seat. He turned away from him, hand coming up to wipe over his mouth, and Sam saw him take a deep breath.
After a second, Dean turned back to him. Sam was suddenly aware that below the waist, he was clad only in boxers and socks. He pressed his knees together and hunched on the toilet.
Dean saw him do it and something dark went through his eyes. "Sam, look at me."
Sam drew in on himself further and looked at his feet on the blinding white tile, mind looping in faulty circles.
Dean approached until he stood barely a foot in front of Sam. "I said look at me."
Sam looked past him instead. He'd never make it to the door.
He heard the tub start.
Dean reached for the hoodie, then the t-shirt. Sam fought, but it was blind, feeble, and pointless. The cold hit him as soon as they were gone. He shuddered when Dean went to his knees and hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers, but even if it would have stopped anything, the gesture was lost in his shivers. Dean pulled them inexorably down and off.
One sock was peeled off, then the other. Sam looked everywhere around the room that didn't have Dean in it, on the brink of hyperventilation, but when minutes went by and Dean still hadn't moved, he finally looked down.
Dean was holding his foot and staring at it. The color of its sole against Dean's hand seared itself in Sam's brain. As Sam watched, Dean picked it up and put his mouth on the arch.
It wasn't a kiss. Sam didn't know what it was, but it wasn't that. Dean just pressed his lips there for what seemed like a very long time. Sam's autonomic nervous system short-circuited at the faint moisture of them.
Finally Dean set his foot down. He put one hand on each of Sam's knees and pushed.
Sam fought again, muscles shaking against the pressure, but he didn't stand a chance. Dean kept going, and when Sam was completely exposed, sat looking at all of him like it was an act of violence. Sam felt the prickle of snot along his sinuses. Dean brought his mouth down on the skin of his inner thigh, and Sam lost his last tenuous thread of control.
It still wasn't a kiss. Not even when Dean put his mouth next to Sam's limp cock and stayed there, breathing damply through his nose. Certainly it wasn't when he moved to the outside of Sam's hip, or the plastic film on the cut over his ribs, or his belly, which was sucking in and out uncontrollably as Sam hyperventilated. Some mucus slid off Sam's chin and hit Dean's hair. Dean held his mouth against his side near his armpit, the apex of his shoulder, and his pectoral, and the only time it was a kiss was when he pushed to his feet and pressed his lips to crown of Sam's head.
The water shut off. Dean manhandled him up and over to the tub without a word.
Hot water hit his feet, then his ass. The sensation was simultaneously remote and unbearably intense, much like Dean's mouth had been.
The water scalded Sam up to his neck. He felt his balls shrivel and float. The angle made the mucus push uncomfortably back into his face. Sounds were all a little too big, even small ones, like when he had a fever. His eyes were open, but he wasn't really seeing anything. If he didn't see it, maybe it wouldn't be happening.
Dean crossed to the wall, yanked the knife out of it, and returned. He wiped the drywall off of it with his shirttail. Sam was naked in the water and Dean was fully dressed. This was what vivisection felt like.
"If you want a bath with knives," Dean said, "you can get it where everything else is supposed to come from."
He started with the forearm Sam had been going to start with and he wasn't gentle. He scraped the blade down the back of Sam's arm like he had Calvin off the rear window of the car, leaving behind sunburn pink. When he whisked the knife in the bathwater at the end of the stroke, what it had removed churned to the surface.
Dean pulled the metal over vulnerable tendons and around bony hollows, purged the tub, poured more scalding water over Sam with a Big Gulp cup from under the sink, and filled the tub again. He scoured Sam's arms one quadrant at a time before moving on to his torso and doing the same thing.
He scraped the soles of Sam's feet. He scraped his knees, the backs of them, his calves, his thighs. He pulled the knife down Sam's shins and back again; despite the ninety degree angle of the blade and the abuse its edge had taken going into the wall, fine hairs came away and joined the rest of the scum on the water. Dean hauled Sam upright, nearly dead weight, propped him against the shower wall, and planed down his back to the backs of his thighs. Sam's sides twitched at the passage of the blade that would split him open if he collapsed. Dean kept him upright with a bruising hand on his hip.
He finally set the knife aside in favor of a washcloth. Sam's arms gave out when Dean scrubbed over and around his genitals with the same deep, steady abrasion, sending him face- and chest-first into the cold tile. It jarred his ribs, but Sam barely shuddered. What made him moan—once, cut-off, miserable—was the washcloth between his buttocks. Sam hadn't defecated in weeks, but all that meant was that Dean only wrung the cloth out twice.
Dean went away for a few minutes. The shower spray pounded on Sam's back, bounced off the tiles into his face. Footsteps returned, changing tenor as they moved from carpet back into the bathroom.
Objects clinked against the side of the tub as Dean set them down: a pocket comb, Dean's boar bristle hairbrush, a fresh bar of soap and their dollar store shampoo. Dean guided him back down to sit in the tub; it hurt his pelvis until the water filled back up. Hunched over his knees, Sam closed his eyes when the shampoo was rinsed out of his hair with the Big Gulp cup.
Dean stropped the soap over the hairbrush and started on Sam's nails.
"I'm only gonna say this once." The lather on the brush turned from white to gray. "The only thing I see when I look at you is that you did what it took to survive." He dropped Sam's hand in the water and moved on to the other one. "I really don't give a shit about the rest."
The brush went in the trash after he used it on Sam's feet.
Sam's hiccups had died down to occasional spasms that made pain burst through his ribs. His eyes felt burned. His head hurt. He was past mortification. For the first time in weeks he was truly warm, but he was past comfort, too. All there was left was the fact of Dean. It was neither positive nor aversive. It just was.
When Dean finally brought the knife up to his neck, Sam shut his eyes and gave it to him. Dean carved off the beard and a layer underneath that, leaving the skin on Sam's face raw and new.
Afterward he showered with Sam sitting right there on the tub floor, suds coursing down his body under the water. He looked like he always looked: compact, strong, a few bruises, no new scars. He had a fading pockmark on the side of his neck that looked weirdly like some of Sam's own, but that couldn't be right. He finished, sat Sam on the toilet once more, and peeled off each of the waterproof dressings and replaced them, buck naked and efficient.
Walking back out to the room felt like a trance. Sam donned the socks and underwear Dean handed him, letting his brother pull the v-neck over his head and barely noticing the flare in his ribs. The clothes were clean. Not Winchester-clean, not merely free from obvious stains and worn only a couple of times, but clean. Sam could smell detergent through his swollen sinuses.
Dean made him drink a bottle of water, then pills, then Ensure, then handed him a toothbrush with toothpaste on it over a bowl right there in the bedroom, and this had gone on so long that Sam had passed the point of needing it to end. It all just was.
There was a hollow sensation in his stomach. Sam realized with distant astonishment that he was hungry.
Dean's hand on the small of his back propelled him toward his bed like it used to when he was little, when he was too dead on his feet to know what town they were in or whether they were in a house or an apartment or a motel. He let Dean bring more blankets out from the closet until the weight of them pushed him down into the mattress. Sam could have sworn he saw him hesitate for a moment before turning to his own bed and climbing in.
"Goodnight, Sam."
Dean's mattress creaked. The light clicked off. The room went still.
It didn't make any sense that Dean found sleep first, breaths leveling out in the next bed within minutes. Sam had never been this tired in his life. He'd been weaker in the hospital, and worse off in the sewer, but never so completely drained. He felt like he'd sweated something out from his core.
He didn't know whether this was the closest he'd ever felt to his brother or the remotest. He lay for a long time with his thoughts drifting on the ache of a bone reset.
All the way back at the beginning, he'd told Dean that he wanted to be safe, not normal. That had burned up on the ceiling, and he'd spent the intervening years straying further and further from it. Now he'd come full circle, except he wanted a different meaning of safe.
He didn't have abilities anymore. Everything he'd done to the spirit had been nothing more than a way of seeing. He'd used her power against her; he hadn't brought anything supernatural to the equation. But there was something in him, or about him, that one supernatural thing after another came looking for.
Lying spent on the mattress, he made a decision that felt like a realization: for his brother's sake, he would find a way to put this to bed for good. He was sick to death of it coming between them every time they thought they were done. He would finish this before whatever was in him surfaced again, or before Heaven or Hell could make it surface. While it was still inert.
This time, he was going to rip it out by the roots.
He'd tried before, of course. He'd gone through Bobby's library and quietly tried every purification rite he could find. He'd asked Castiel, too, and even Uriel once. But all that had been when he still thought it was about the blood. Now he knew it was seated somewhere deeper. That wasn't good news, but it was a lead.
Just on the cusp of sleep, he even remembered a place he could start looking. There'd been that address book in Rufus's house, the one he'd taken on a vague hunch that it might come in handy some day. Maybe there'd be someone in there worth talking to.
He shut his eyes and followed the thread of Dean's breathing until he found sleep.
Heartbeat.
It was a feeling more than a sound, heavy and warm, coming from inside him. It pulsed in the air and provided its own illumination.
Sam stood in front of him with his hand in Dean's chest. As Dean watched, he pulled Dean's heart out of it.
There was no pain. This was the opposite of pain. Dean watched his brother raise his heart to his mouth on a rising tide of ecstasy.
The heartbeat grew stronger, pounding everything else from his head. His heart was on fire.
Sam ate it.
Dean woke up as he came, his body arcing up into a bow. When he fell back down to the mattress, he stared up at the dark ceiling with his pulse still receding in his ears. His boxers were soaked. Even without moving, he could feel his own come sticking the material to his skin and trickling through his pubic hair and over his hip. After a very long time, he got up and went to the bathroom.
He pulled on the first pair of underwear he found in his duffel by touch, balling up the other and shoving it down to the bottom. Then, because he had no idea what else to do, he went back to bed.
His mind was empty. He wasn't thinking about this. There was nothing to think about. He hadn't had a wet dream since he was nineteen.
In the next bed, Sam tossed restlessly, features pinched with some unquiet dream. The urge to go over and fix it hit Dean with an unexpected intensity, but he held himself back. Sam needed sleep. Anything less than a screaming, thrashing nightmare wasn't worth waking him up over.
A sound attracted Dean's attention to the nightstand. It took him a moment to figure out what was making it: the alarm clock was vibrating against the surface of the table, just barely.
Sam frowned, shifted, turned over. The vibration stopped.
Dean lay in the dark. Away down on the highway, a truck marked its position by hitting its jake brake. It was traveling away from them, already some distance down the road though he hadn't noticed it until it braked. He didn't look at the clock. That had probably just been the passage of the truck.
He stretched his arm out into the gap between the beds and resolutely closed his eyes. Yeah, it had probably just been that.
.