Snow Angels, Reposted for Red
Sep. 7th, 2009 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ht_murray
Old fic, Sam/OFC, character death with a happy ending, sorta... Inspired by the song, Jacob's Dream by Allison Krauss. Reposted for the lovely redheadforever who was distraught that she couldn't find a working link.
Snow Angels
When Sam embraces his destiny, Dean's standing at the
Jayce's got Sam’s back, the way she has since
"The only true power is free will, Sam. Your only destiny is to choose." Hands on his shoulders, she whispers in his ear, "I know you can do it, baby."
He trusts her. Her voice is light and sunshine, makes him believe in fairy tales and happily ever after. He wonders if, somewhere in his subconscious mind, she’s just a leftover from his Boy Scout upbringing.
There are only two people of importance in his life. Dean is the center of his universe, always has been despite the unfortunate apogee that was Stanford. And Jayce? Well, he doesn’t know what she is, but the part of him that’s grown cynical and dark from searching for answers he never finds thinks maybe she’s Sam prepared. Sam prepared to be without Dean. He hates that even his subconscious would consider that possibility. He doesn’t want to believe it, but he doesn’t know what’s true. Not anymore.
"You can't be lost to the dark unless you choose to let go of the light." Her words tell stories he won’t tell himself, the kinds of things he prays for but knows he can’t expect.
In those stories, he saves Dean, and they stop—not hunting, not caring, just running. He doesn’t know how, but if he can save Dean, then anything is possible. They've been moving too fast and too far for too long to get their just rewards. But in the stories, the dreams that aren't visions, they save each other and finally stop running long enough to realize the only thing chasing them is years of good karma that could never quite catch up.
The demon arrives, eyes green, and accompanied by a pack of hounds. Dean raises not a hand, just smiles with a quirk and a snap of his head, a subtle shaking off of hope.
Sam doesn't shake anything off but the last bit of resistance he has to what he is and how he's made. He doesn't care anymore that he's had some after-market work done. He’s still
Not all men are created in God's image. Doesn't mean they can't do His work. They've eaten the fruit, don't need God to tell them what's right. Nothing about Dean suffering in Hell is right, deal or no deal. Sam knows that, no matter whose image he’s made in.
The demon comes to collect, and Sam raises everything he's got. It's his choice, and he makes it. Dean’s his big brother, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for him.
xXx
The battle doesn’t last long, just long enough. It fights harder than Sam expects it to. Dean’s just one soul. The demon must have thousands. How much can it be worth?
It takes longer than it would have, had Sam known what to expect.
The only part of Dean either of them has any claim over is his soul, and pulling it between them like photons down a fiber optic line stretches it out of the confines of its body.
Sam's not prepared for that, not prepared to look at Dean's soul laid bare and brighter than any light he's ever imagined. They stutter a little in their standoff as Dean screams with no throat and no mouth. The voice of light is a sound like a television set to blue screen in a room down the hall, just a tickle that makes them tremble. When they see Dean, see him for real, and hear him sing, (for souls do not miss their shells) they fight all the harder, so great is the prize.
They pull until Sam's eyes bleed, crimson dark as pitch. They stretch until the demon loses its host and hovers over them, dark enough to blank out the sun, but not Dean. Dean shines on.
Sam is stronger. Yellow sun and demon blood might cancel each other out in theory, but in practice, they are synergy, and Sam can’t not win.
The demon’s pure evil and a sore loser. It hasn’t come alone, and the dogs are hungry.
It ends, eventually, takes less time than it does for Sam to realize winning the race means outrunning happily ever after.
It's for the best Dean's soul is too bright for Sam's eyes, burns his retinas through like a welder's arc when Sam just can't look away. It’s best, as well, Sam doesn't see what they leave of Dean's body.
Fairy tales aren't true, but nursery rhymes are, and even Sam can't put Dean back together again.
xXx
Jayce is there in the dark with Sam, after, when he’s raw and broken, functioning only on the most visceral level. When Sam’s alone in the world, the last
There are no words between them. No room for words, no room for air when they're this close. Her breath in his ears— a tiny pant that breaks, a whimper that squeezes out of her throat under his kneading fingertips—doesn’t gel into words. Words couldn't work past both his lips and hers if they tried, but he knows her well enough to hear, "I'm sorry." He wishes she wasn't.
He takes care with her. Makes sure his kisses aren't too hard, too desperate, too much like tattoos. He keeps his fingers soft, his tongue slow and languid when he wants to claw, and bite, and scratch. He owns enough pain to keep him filled to overflowing with empty, won’t claim anything of her, even if she gives it. He makes sure what he says with his skin and his sweat is, "I love you," when what he means is, "Goodbye."
When he breaks inside her, it's with a sob, because it's only a little death, and he wants the full meal deal.
Jayce is there, but Sam’s an army of one. That’s his choice.
His arm brushes against the scratchy sleeve of the black suit jacket she picked out for him as he feels his way into the bathroom afterward. He supposes it's the right thing to wear, since they're burying Dean's leather jacket with what's left of Dean, but Sam has no intention of wearing it. He's not going to another funeral until he's the guest of honor.
He doesn't take goodbyes lightly anymore. The best he hopes for, as the blade trails up his arms, (deep enough to hit something important, even if he can’t see,) is sleep without dreams.
He’s far enough ahead of the good karma to meet its whip tail on the dark side of the world. For him, there’s no peace or rest.
Suicide kinda cancels that out, anyway.
--
Sam slides into the cold and the dark, but Dean's warm in a way he's never been.
There's light ahead of him. He knows, somehow, all that never was awaits within, just for him. There's a spring in his step, a lift to his chest that he can't ever remember having before. The thousand tons or more he's used to carrying around, that's crushed the air from his lungs since he was four and running through a burning house with Sammy in his arms, has lifted.
He thinks maybe he just doesn't feel it because he doesn't have feet, a chest, or lungs anymore, but if he were in Hell, where he was set to go, he'd feel it, he knows. So Sam won for them, saved Dean’s soul, if not his life. That's more than he'd hoped for.
"Way to go, Sammy," he beams, literally beams. If he had eyes, he'd squint. Nope, he doesn't miss those at all.
He does miss Sam, though. He wants to say goodbye, the way Dad had, but Sam isn't here.
There's just a wall of hurt as thick as pitch, and Dean can't go there, no light can. Dean can't see him, but he knows that hurt is Sam. He always knows when Sam's in pain, even when Dean's hurting himself. Sam always comes first, always.
And so he does now.
Dean's heart says piercing the darkness is more important than going into the light. Dean's never really been a believer in theology and the laws of faith, has only ever asked his heart what's right. His heart has always been Sam's.
"How do you think angry spirits are born, Dean?"
It doesn't matter. He can never stay angry with Sam.
So he stays, stares into the darkness, and hopes wherever Sam is, there can be peace and sleep without dreams.
xXx
Music Playlist at MixPod.com
Early spring, and there's still snow on the ridge behind their cabin, but it's warm enough for Mama to hang out the sheets and Timmy to run without his jacket. Jon Thomas loves nothing more than the smell of Mama's clean sheets, the warmth of the late-morning sun as he dodges between the billowing folds of cotton. There's enough breeze to keep the linen pressed close around him, always moving and rippling, but he knows Timothy is just ahead, running on little brother legs and teasing.
"I'm gonna get you, Tiny Tim!" He calls, baiting his brother to answer. Tim is all of five years old, now, and refuses to be called Tiny anymore. He'll always be Tiny Tim to Jon Thomas, who's three years older and taller.
No sound returns, though, just the heavy, flapping edges of the still-damp sheets, and Mama's voice on the other side of the clothesline, singing.
"I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see."
"Timothy?" Jon Thomas asks again.
Finally, Jon Thomas finds the edge of the sheet and pokes his head out. Mama's still shaking out wrinkles and smoothing linens over the line. She plucks one of the clothespins from the hem of her apron and fastens it over the cloth before pushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear. No sign of Timothy, though.
Scrunching up his face, Jon Thomas crouches down on his hands and knees, peers beneath the clothesline, but the only feet he sees are his own and Mama's.
"Timothy, you come out when your brother calls you," Mama says, reaching for another clothespin with a hum still lilting in her voice, "or Daddy's not gonna teach you how to skin that buck when he brings it back."
A giggle bubbles up from the other side of the woodshed, and Jon Thomas strides out in that direction, squaring up his shoulders and swinging his arms at his sides the way Daddy always does when Timothy's 'bout to earn hisself a switchin'. It's Jon Thomas' job to watch his little brother, which is why, he's sure, Timothy never gets a switchin' without Jon Thomas getting a few for letting him get into trouble in the first place.
Daddy's gonna bring home a big buck, and he says Jon Thomas can go hunting, too, just as soon as he learns to skin one proper. "No point in killing it," Daddy says, "if it's just gonna go to waste. God loves all of his creatures and don't condone no pointless killing." So, Jon Thomas is set on learning everything there is to know about getting the hide off a deer, and he ain't about to let Timothy get them both switched instead.
He rounds the corner of the woodshed only to be slapped in the face by a low-hanging branch as Timothy darts into the tree line, still laughing.
"Ow! Why, you little..."
"Hush, JT," Tim whispers harshly. "You'll scare it away."
"Scare what away?" Jon Thomas crouches down beside his little brother in the underbrush and follows his pudgy finger to a point a little farther up the hill. Sure enough, there's a rabbit nestled against a tree trunk. He can just make out the wiggle of its nose.
"I'm gonna catch it and keep it for a pet." Timothy whispers it into his ear like they're telling secrets in church, and Jon Thomas half expects a cuff to the back of the head for disrespectin' the Lord's house. Before he can explain that Daddy ain't gonna let 'em keep no rabbit unless it's for eatin', the fluffy little cottontail darts farther up into the tree line, and Timothy races off after it.
JT looks over his shoulder for a second, wonders if he should go back and get Timothy's jacket, at least tell Mama where they're at, but it's only a baby rabbit. He figures it won't go far, and he can still hear Mama singing, so he stands up, shoves his hands into the pockets of his striped bib overalls, and follows after his little brother, chin tucked into his chest. They'll be back in time for lunch, and he's got his own jacket on, if Timmy gets cold.
xXx
"Don't!"
Sam wakes with a start, sweat running down his brow. He scrubs his hands over his face and through his long hair, pushes the starchy sheet down his chest without opening his eyes. Postponing that bit of unpleasantness is part of his morning ritual, and if he doesn't open them, he can pretend the darkness is just sleep refusing to let him go.
He can't tell from the smell what time of day it is. Not sour enough to have slept past ten when housekeeping usually changes the sheets, but too damp to be any earlier than seven. There's just enough warmth against his cheek to tell him the sun's up as he presses the heels of his hands into his throbbing eye sockets.
His eyes always throb when he wakes up, and he doesn't know if it's phantom sensation, like when someone loses a leg, or if it's the lingering effects of the crystal-clear dream images burning across now-unused portions of his brain. He also doesn't give a flying fig. He just knows it hurts. What doesn't these days?
His chest heaves as though he's been running for hours, doesn't know if he's been chasing or being chased, just knows the fucking dreams are still in technicolor, even when nothing else is. He's not sure it's just a dream, but he tells himself it is, because he doesn't do visions anymore, not in any way, shape, or form, not without his yellow sun. He's not that guy.
His phone vibrates on the end table. It's easier to find if he leaves it set to vibrate. He'd never noticed before how sound could be such a deceptive locator. Too high a frequency, and the object sounds like it's right...there?...or is it there?...over there? Too low, and it wraps itself inside your head, uses your guts like the water in a singing champagne glass. He prefers his sounds more percussive now, the tap of a cane, the tick of a clock that’s too ignorant to know life does not go on, the buzz of a plastic phone bouncing on a table. Music needs a sounding board, and his is full of holes, so he'll just take the rhythm section, thank you very much.
He finds the phone before it jumps off the table and puts it to his ear after he knows it's gone to voice mail. It's not that he doesn't want to hear from Jayce. He just doesn't want to talk to her. There's a difference, really. He doesn't know what he's done to make her keep calling. Any intelligent girl would have given up on him when he tried to bleed himself dry in her bathroom. But then, love has been known to make fools of men. Why not women, too?
He gives her credit for being persistent, if foolish, and hopes she doesn't know he listens to all her messages before he deletes them.
"Sam, they won't let me talk to you. Won't let me see you. You have to tell them to let me in, or they won't."
"Sam, talk to me."
She sounds good. He's glad for that, at least. He hits replay and lets her voice lull him back to sleep.
xXx
They follow the rabbit until Jon Thomas is pretty certain that all they're chasing anymore is shadows. When their stomachs start to growl, they call it off and head for home.
They follow the sun. It was at their backs, warming the far side of Mama's sheets when they went into the trees, so turning their faces toward the light should lead them out. They don't remember that tricks of light led them this far into darkness, don't know that the sun only rises until it starts to set. Their rumbling tummies suggest it's past noon, and home is a shadow leaning the other way.
When it starts to get dark, their tired feet and their cold, cold fingers start to think their tummies are right.
And they’re afraid.
xXx
Sam snaps awake, shivering in his bones. He tells himself it’s night-sweat and not long-dead grave ice that freezes him to the sheets. But when the cold wraps around his shoulders, protective and too-still like skeletal arms, he slides his feet off the side of the bed, places his head between his hands, and rocks.
This dream is not a vision. Blind men don't see the future, and dead men don't tell tales. Well, they do, but that only matters in fairy tales, when men can make a difference, because they're men, and they have the choice. It doesn't matter here, where destiny vetoes free will, and brothers are torn to pieces in your place.
Besides, there's no reason in Heaven or Hell why he'd 'see' little boys who've probably been dead a hundred years.
Except the boys were brothers, and Sam can’t seem to forget that.
Sam’s not about to save anyone else's brother when he couldn't save his own. That's asking too much. He can still choose to say no, and he does. That's his final decision.
So, it must be the cold that drives him to pick up the phone without waiting for it to go to voicemail first. He must just need to feel the warmth of her sunshine voice. It's not because he cares.
--
Oh Mommy and Daddy, why can't you hear our cries? The day is almost over, and soon it will be night. We're so cold and hungry and our feet are tired and sore. We promise not to stray again, from our cabin door.
Timothy soldiers on the best his five-year-old legs will allow, under Jon Thomas' constant promises that home is just over the next ridge. He seems to get his second wind when the breeze turns to biting wind and snow starts to fall. Despite his insistence that he's a big boy, Jon Thomas knows Timothy would rather face a hundred rounds with Daddy's switch than a night in the cold and the dark. JT knows because he'd rather face a thousand rounds with the switch than one more minute of Timothy's teary eyes with no way to make things better.
Finally, Timmy just can't go any farther. He collapses on the banks of the creek. It’s a blessing really, because the snow has already settled over the thin sheet of ice that hasn't quite melted in the early spring sun, and Jon Thomas almost doesn’t see it. They'd have both been wet if Timmy's legs hadn't picked just that second to give out.
Jon Thomas takes one look at the hole in the ice that forms when he kneels at Timmy's side then gazes up into the sky to see if he can see the guardian angel Mama said is always watching over them. Snow floats to earth in big white clumps, lazy and gentle, like a caress, but there's no angel, and the wind is picking up.
JT makes a valiant effort to hoist his little brother up and carry him farther, but three years older and taller just isn't as big and strong as he'd have Timmy believe. They only make it as far as the tree line and fall beneath a white-barked birch.
Timothy hasn't stopped crying since both their tummies let them know it was well past dinner, and he won't let Jon Thomas console him.
"Ma-ma! D-daddy!" He hiccups weakly into the shoulder of Jon Thomas' shirt as JT props him against the tree trunk.
"They're almost here," Jon Thomas lies. The world is silent around them, and he knows Timothy's sobs are only swallowed into the wall of white. Mommy and Daddy can't hear, and they're not coming, so that only leaves Jon Thomas. Timmy is his little brother. He has to take care of him.
Jon Thomas is hauling the last branch back to the lean-to he's making when the clouds part for a moment and the moon breaks over the landscape. A chance glance over his shoulder makes him catch his breath.
The valley spreads out below him, clean and glowing, and...familiar. It's the same valley that stretches behind their cabin, the one the sun rises over every morning, and he knows like a voice in the darkness whispers into his ear, that they've been going the wrong way. They're farther from home than they've ever been, but he knows, when the sun rises in the morning, he'll see the way back.
He just has to protect Timmy 'til morning.
The break in the storm is brief, as they generally are, and the wind that sweeps down off the mountain shakes their tiny shelter around them as they huddle together. All they have for a blanket is JT's old down jacket, but it will have to be enough.
He lies down beside his brother, wraps his arms around the sniffling little boy, and pulls the jacket tightly around them. As Timothy's hiccups slow under the weight of exhaustion and fear, Jon Thomas says, "Angels are watching over us, Tiny Tim. Pray with me."
And they pray. "Now I lay me down to sleep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."
xXx
If Sam is expecting warmth in Jayce's voice and her gaze, then he gets it, laced with heartbreak and anger.
Sam feels the sorrow in her stare as her eyes trace over the long scars in his forearms. He knows by touch that they're hard, and white, and raised above the skin like mole-trails under a lawn. He knows by the sound of her breathing that they'll always be deep, and red, and gaping to her.
"They said you wanted to see me," she says.
They both pretend she didn't say "see."
"I had a dream," he says.
"Oh," she sighs in reply. He knows she'd hoped for an apology, but he doesn't have one to give.
He's not sorry he hurt her, just sorry he still does. She should have let him go when he chose to let go.
xXx
Jon Thomas wakes up first. He doesn’t think it’s been long enough to be morning already, but the light glowing behind the wall of snow that’s drifted around them says otherwise. He doesn’t know why Timothy’s hair against his nose doesn’t make him sneeze. It usually does when he first wakes up in the loft bed they share, has since Tim got too big for the drawer under Mama and Daddy’s bed at the bottom of the stairs.
Mama always jokes at breakfast that she knows when John Thomas wakes up by the sound of kitty cat sneezes in the loft.
JT’s not sneezing today, and his arm doesn’t tingle under the weight of Timothy’s head. But Tim’s not crying anymore. He’s snuffling into the crook of JT’s arm, and the light outside says it’s morning.
Surely, their prayers have been answered.
Timothy’s always been a light sleeper. Daddy says he keeps one eye open to keep the Devil from sneaking up. JT’s a little surprised, then, when he manages to get his arm out from under his brother’s head with out waking him. But it’s been a long night and a hard day before. Kid’s probably exhausted.
John Thomas isn’t.
JT lets Tim sleep while he worms his way out of their shelter, doesn’t flinch when he buries his exposed arms in the drift up to his elbows. Finding his feet, he takes a moment to gain his bearings.
Only he can’t.
There’s nothing around him anywhere that resembles the thick undergrowth and burgeoning spring sprouts they’d trundled over to get here. Nothing at all except light so bright it tingles, a glow he actually feels when everything else is numb. No amount of blinking brings the landscape into focus or quiets the glare.
Snowblind, he decides with a shrug. Daddy explained it to him once, how the light reflects off snow and makes everything else invisible. The thought only makes JT anxious to get home and tell Daddy he knows what it’s like for real.
This has been an adventure, but he did his job, protected Timothy. It’s morning now and safe to leave the shelter. JT’s ready to go home.
“Tim,” he calls. “Time to wake up. Mama and Daddy will be…”
He turns back to the shelter, and the shelter isn’t there. No shelter, no Tim, nothing, just darkness so thick it jiggles like bubbling tar. That tar has his brother.
“Timmy!”
Jon Thomas doesn’t think twice about leaping into the dark. The light is soon forgotten.
xXx
Sam’s not surprised Jayce is driving the Impala. Her bike has no rumble seat, and she’d never be able to balance Sam back there, even if he weighs next to nothing anymore.
Besides, Dean would want her to. Sam’s pretty sure it’s the first time the old car has had legal registration and insurance since Dean turned eighteen and stopped being Dean to anyone with the authority to incarcerate him. Sam wonders what name it would be under now, if it were his. After all, he’s the beneficiary, the only one left, and he’s proud of his name like he’s never been, but his family name comes with a lot of baggage he’d rather trade for his family.
“What you thinking about so hard?” Jayce asks. Sam can hear the rustle of her leather jacket against the seat, the way her fingers tap against the steering wheel to the beat of some Def Leppard song Sam’s forgotten the name of, smells the musk of cheap soap and too many hours driving with no destination in mind.
He thinks he could tell her that maybe the car’s possessed by Dean’s spirit, seems to be trying to turn her into him, but Sam won’t go there. Whatever way it is that she reminds him of Dean has always been there. She’s the same as she’s always been. Probably why she’s never given up on him, and he can’t take offense now, even if some little niggling part of him just does.
Dean always forgave him. Sam wishes he could.
He doesn’t really know how to answer Jayce’s question, since thought isn’t exactly what he’d call this rock tumbler of jagged emotional stones in his head, so he shifts nervously in the seat, his seat. He’s surprised it feels the same. Folds around him the way it always did, doesn’t seem to know that’s not Dean sitting in the driver’s seat anymore. He knows he’s lost weight and must feel different to her.
Her…
Wherever Dean is, Sam’s sure he’s laughing that his baby brother finally caved and called the Impala by her female designation. Sam would kick himself for smiling back, just then, but it feels so damned good.
“Nothing,” he chuckles, despite himself, and leans back to enjoy the ride.
xXx
When Timothy awakens, he's cold, so cold, and all the world is dark except one ray of light that streams across his face. As he watches, the hole in the snow above his head grows, seemingly of its own accord. He imagines it's an angel poking a finger through, until a soft coo breaks the silence. A faint hint of red glints wetly in the sunlight, and a little black beak pecks at the snow around the frozen berry. The dove finally comes into view and peers into the hole at Timothy, stops its pecking to coo and stare back at him with knowing eyes.
Timothy decides the bird is prettier even than the rabbit and smiles, despite his chattering teeth. He tugs at Jon Thomas' arms.
"Jon Thomas. Jon Thomas, look!"
But the arms are locked around him like a vice and too, too cold to be his brother.
The dove is still pretty when Timothy's screams pierce the snow and send it flying into the morning sky, but Timothy can't see it for the tears freezing on his cheeks as he cries to Mommy, and Daddy, and Jon Thomas. He vows to keep calling until someone answers. He does, long after the tears have turned to frost in his eyelashes and crying turns to sleep. He does, long after he doesn't wake up.
xXx
Dean's been calling into the darkness for as long as he can remember, when a dove lights upon his shoulder. Its shadow, long and dark with Heaven behind it, is swallowed by the void that was Sam.
Dean turns to the bird, a crack on his tongue about white splotches on his leather jacket, but he doesn't make it when the bird sobs in his ear.
It sobs, "Mommy," and Dean doesn't budge.
It cries, "Daddy," and Dean mourns what might have been.
But when it whimpers, "Jon Thomas," lost, and broken, and cold, it sounds like Sam. Dean's been waiting for an answer so long, he's sure that this must be the end of his waiting.
xXx
A thousand men had searched in vain, the west side of Pop’s Creek, but Jacob’s wife knew of a place and said to travel east…
Timothy hurts all over from the cold and the crying, ribs pressed into the frozen ground beneath him.
“Mo…o…om…my,” he hiccups. He can’t stop crying or calling. It dark, and he’s alone. Jon Thomas’ arms are flung over him, but he knows he’s alone. He can see the light outside through the hole in the roof of their shelter, but he’s afraid to go out in it. He’s not allowed to go alone.
So, he cries, and he waits, and the light gets brighter but he doesn’t go. The light will have to come to him.
xXx
Sam sits up suddenly, his arms wrapped around himself like he’s holding the edges of a blanket. In her surprise, Jayce hits the brake, and Sam yells as his head smacks against the windshield.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry…” Sam feels her hand reach out to his shoulder, senses the minute disturbance in the air current as she draws it back, forgetting she doesn’t call him that anymore. No one does.
That’s the way he wants it, so he reiterates by shrugging away, cracks his head a second time, against the window, and rests his forehead against it, waits for the dream to fade.
But it doesn’t fade. There’s no glaring Technicolor echo burned into his frontal lobe like the negatives of an old slide film, but the Dolby surround sound still blares inside his skull.
Mommy and Daddy why can’t you hear our cries?
“Sam?”
Her voice dulls the throb, mollifies the scratching rodents between his ears. He doesn’t want it, though, doesn’t deserve to be soothed.
He doesn’t care that he must look like an ass as his hand flails around in search of the radio knobs. The things are huge, shouldn’t be that friggin’ hard to locate, but then, he’s never really tried from the shotgun side of the car before. Against the rules. Dean’s rules. His fingers finally fasten onto the volume selector, and he twists past the click that turns the stereo on, far enough up the decibel meter to make the car vibrate beneath him. And that’s better, somehow.
Jayce pulls back onto the road and hands him a tissue when his nose starts to bleed.
xXx
Timothy’s tears stop, but his crying doesn’t. The light is too bright, and he squints his eyes so tightly against it that no tears can get past. His chest still throbs as he coughs, and hiccups, and waits.
He’s been waiting so long, he doesn’t remember his mama’s voice, doesn’t think he’d recognize Daddy’s.
That’s all right. When his waiting ends, the voice he hears belongs to neither.
xXx
Dean hates camping…and snow. Or, he did, when camping was darkness, mosquitoes, and things that go bump in the night going bump on the other side of some flimsy canvas without even proper windows or sills to salt. He’d hated snow when it was too cold for packing and too wet to make shoveling easy.
This snow is only powder, once great, fluffy flakes crushed to crystal dust under the weight of more weightless tufts and the roll of the wind. This is only one mound, one hollow cocoon of darkness in an ocean of light. It’s thicker than canvas, but still has no windows to salt.
And it’s crying.
It wails, great, whooping sobs that vibrate through him like bass guitar. There are no words, no more than there were words from the beak of the dove, but that’s all right, because Dean’s ears are only echoes themselves.
“Mom-my, Dad-dy, Jon Thomas…”
Dean hears with something that isn’t ears. He’s not ready to say with what. Death takes some getting used to, after all, takes time.
He gazes sadly at the snow drift and the darkness within. Takes longer for some than others, he thinks and tries not to stagger under the weight of darkness pressing up behind him, tries not to think of Sam.
xXx Part Four xXx
“Sam, are you sure you wanna do this?” Jayce’s voice is muffled, even though she’s barely five feet away from him in the motel room. He knows she’s got that one strand of her long, dark hair twisted into a rope, the ends pressed against the corner of her mouth like she’s painting each word with careful consideration. It’s one of her quirks, like clicking her tongue with a wink and pointing a finger gun at an angry spirit before dousing it with holy water, one of the things he…<i>doesn’t love</i>…used to find incredibly endearing about her.
It’s kinda pissing him off. Or maybe, he’s been pissed off for awhile and is just blaming it on her, but the casual, distracted way she’s conducting the research, like this is something they’ve done a hundred times before.
Well, it is something they’ve done before, but the before in question is sorta monumental. It’s before Dean died, before Sam’s universe collapsed, before Sam tried to bleed himself dry and landed himself in the fucking psych ward. Seems like all that should have changed things, but Jayce is the same, and it really isn’t fair.
But Sam needs her, can’t do this alone. He’s trying to behave himself, keep his temper in check. He knows it’s irrational, not the fault of anyone but the demon, and the demon’s dead, no match for Sam and his yellow sun.
The thing about behaving himself, though, about tact, is it takes a lot of energy, and Sam , quite frankly, doesn’t give enough of a damn to put in the effort.
“Sam?”
“What?” He knows his tone is sharper than he intends.
“I asked if you were sure you wanted to do this.”
“You ask like I have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
Sam sniggers. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You live in la-la land where you ride around on your purple unicorn, wave your glitter wand, and play master to the world’s grasshopper. ‘Your only destiny is to choose, grasshopper,’” he taunts, voice rising an octave to mimic hers. “Blah, friggin’ blah, blah, blah.”
He pauses for a second and waits for a rebuttal, a sharp intake of breath that would indicate at least some sort of dent had been made in her shiny, pink armor, but all he gets is the clicking of keys as she returns to her research. She’s so friggin’ unflappable. Even Dean who’d been master at finding and pushing people’s buttons, (especially Sam’s) had never been able to bait Jayce into an argument without making lewd comments about her…buttons.
It’s another one of those things Sam doesn’t love about her.
“There’s always a choice,” she says and goes back to typing.
Some part of Sam knows even that statement is completely calculated, intended to egg him on.
I’m not all right, but neither are you…You wanna take another swing at me, will that help?
He takes the bait anyway. “Oh, there is, is there? You ask me if I want to do this like I can just ignore the dreams, like I’m getting any sleep at all, like I can close my eyes and hear anything but that little boy crying for someone who’s never going to come.” He takes a deep breath, ignores the fact that it shudders on the way in, hiccups on the way out, because he’s not about to cry, he’s not! He didn’t even cry when Dean…when Dean…
“You know what I think?” Thinking is good, better than feeling. “I think it doesn’t matter what we choose, because something way bigger than us is pulling all the strings and having a good belly laugh at our expense. In fact, I know that’s true, because if what I chose mattered, then Dean would be alive. If what I chose mattered, then you would’ve had the decency not to break down the bathroom door when it was fucking locked for a reason. If what I chose mattered, then I wouldn’t have these!”
Sam holds his wrists out to show her, not the long scars he put in his forearms, but the red indentations from the restraints they kept him in afterward to keep him from doing it again—marks that got deeper every time he figured out a way to escape and got them tightened for his trouble until someone got his medication adjusted.
He actually hears her turn away, now. He imagines her waist-length hair swirling in long, shiny streamers around her shoulders as she does. It’s an overly romanticized image, he knows, but a blind man doesn’t make excuses or apologies for what his memories give him to see.
“You don’t…?” She breaks off, and he’d take way more satisfaction in that if he wasn’t practically hyperventilating himself. Not crying…definitely not that.
“You don’t still think about hurting yourself?”
“If I say I don’t, will you let me go to the bathroom with the door closed?”
He thinks maybe she’s crying now, feels a vibration in her fingertips when her hands settle over his knees, smells something damp in the air like sea spray when she leans closer. She rubs his knees like the ache swallowing him whole is just arthritis, and she’s slathering on Ben-Gay. It’s more touch than he wants, more than he deserves, but he’s too tired to push her away.
“Dean wanted you to live, Sam.”
He laughs, laughs from far enough down to creak the rickety box springs on his motel bed. The statement itself isn’t funny. Hell, it isn’t even false, but he knows she says it like it’s the motivation he needs to get to the top of Hamburger Hill.
He knows he’s supposed to say, ‘Oh, you know what? You’re right. What a fool I’ve been. I’m gonna go on and have the most rootin’ tootin’est happy goddamned life now and dedicate it all to Dean, because that’s what he’d want. And thank you so much for making me see the light.’ Well, fuck that! That’s not the solution.
That right there? That’s the problem.
He laughs until he’s squeezed every molecule of air from his lungs then almost chokes when he takes a heave in, because whattaya know, his throat’s full of freakin’ tears. Choking makes his eyes water up even more, and he’s heard laughter through tears is the best kind of emo, but this? This just sucks.
“Sam?”
Jayce’s grip on his knees tightens enough that he knows she’s thinking he’s lost his mind. What was your first clue, honey?
“That’s…” He takes in another heaving breath. “That’s just it. Dean would want me to live. He did want that. I think the whole ‘selling his soul to a demon for me’ kinda laid it all out on the table.”
“Then why do you want to throw it away?”
She actually sounds incredulous, and that puzzles Sam enough to choke off his laughter. He’d really thought she was smarter than that.
“Why does it matter so much what he wanted for me?” A beat. “Because he paid the ultimate price? Because he gave so much, I’m just supposed to be grateful he got torn to pieces right in front of me? What about what I wanted for him?”
“What about that, Sam?” Her hands loosen their grip on his kneecaps, spread warmth over his knees and thighs in great, drawing strokes. He hates that it feels so good. “What did you want for Dean?”
“I wanted him to live, for one!” It scares him a little just how quickly laughter turns to tears. Emo!Sam, the one who died and never came back, couldn’t even have switched gears that fast. Laughter, tears, joy sorrow, life, death. Intense is just intense.
He draws a hand across his face, the scratch of stubble loud in his ears like calloused fingers over fine stationery. It comes away damp, and he turns away, rolls over on the bed and draws his knees up into his chest. Her gaze is heavy on his psyche, and he doesn’t want her looking into his eyes when he can’t look back. He doesn’t want her looking through windows on an empty house.
Sam pinches the bridge of his nose, wipes his eyes again, and slides the hand, tears and all, between his head and the pillow.
“I wanted him to have a life, not just…this. I wanted him to have a wife, someone who didn’t just watch him ride off into the sunset but was there waiting when it rose again. I wanted him to have kids, be a father…” His voice breaks, and he doesn’t try to cover it up. “Dean was…when we were little, he was always there, way more than everyone else’s big brother, even more than Dad.”
The pillow under his head is cold, the side of his face sticky. He knows his head’s going to throb like a bitch in the morning, but he doesn’t flip the pillow, or reach for a Kleenex or a glass of water. He just lies in the mess his life made, what Dean paid for with his. “He would’ve been a great dad.”
She’s silent for so long Sam thinks he’s made it through to her, made her see how pointless it all is. He hopes maybe she’ll leave it alone. When this is all over, maybe she’ll leave him alone, too, find something better. Something way better. Better than Sam.
“You really are a selfish bastard, you know that?”
Sam doesn’t know what he expects her to say, but that’s not it. Still, he’s too tired to argue.
xXx
Dean battles with himself, hems and haws around whether to call out the crying child or just reach in and pull him out. He decides on widening the hole in the snow pack and looking in.
The little boy inside could be Sam. At that age, Sam was all round cheeks and watery eyes, hair thick and never combed. At that age, Sam looked at him a lot like this kid’s looking at him.
Dean wonders what age Sam is now.
“Are you a angel?” The little boy’s voice is hushed with wonder the way Sam’s used to be when everything was new, books were just for stories, and Dean knew the answer to every question.
Dean chuckles. “What makes you say that?” He reaches out a hand as he asks, grasps the tiny fingers in his. It’s been a long time since he held a hand. Probably best to start small.
“You hurt my eyes.”
Dean knows it isn’t true. The little boy’s squint is habit, not reflex. Nothing hurts here except alone, and now they’re not.
“Oh…” Dean looks down at himself, remembers what he sees is just another memory. His hand is in the ground, not looped into the hand of the child, his feet curled inside his boots like the witch’s under Dorothy’s house, but this is almost better.
The memory is perfect in its inaccuracy: fingers without callouses, smooth skin without scars, no pull in his ribcage from cartilage hardened by electrical burns, no evidence at all of so much past pain.
He shrugs. Maybe he is an angel. And wouldn’t that be the greatest cosmic joke ever; from condemned to an eternity in Hell to soldier in an army of light within the span of one breath, his last.
“Hurt your eyes?” Dean jokes with a snigger as he pulls the kid out of the snow drift, tousles the shaggy brown hair. “You’re the first one who’s ever complained, kid. I can name at least a hundred chicks who’d…” He stops, scratches the back of his head with a purse of his lips. “Okay, so maybe I can’t actually name any, but plenty, lemme tell ya…”
“You name chicks?” The boy asks, face twisted in confusion. “Are they pets?”
Dean opens his mouth, eyebrows raised sardonically, then snaps it shut again. The kids probably never heard of Penthouse, anyway.
“Something like that,” he laughs. It feels good in his throat, like liniment on a seized muscle, then fades away as the two stand back and size each other up.
God, the kid could be a little Sam. Awkward much? Dean clears some emotion from his chest, loosened by the laughter, as the little boy bends his neck at an awkward angle to look up at him. Now, that’s something Sam hasn’t done (hadn’t done) in forever.
“What about you?” Dean ventures. “You got any pets?”
The boy looks down, shakes his head. “Was trying to catch a rabbit, but it…” He pauses as though he’s lost his train of thought. “It got away. Anyways, Jon Thomas didn’t think Daddy would let us keep it.”
“Jon Thomas?”
“My bro…” The kid sniffs, and his voice hitches. “My brother. He built this to keep the snow off,” he says pointing to the lean-to. “Gave me his coat for a blanket.”
“Where is he, now?” Dean asks, though he’s pretty sure he knows.
The little boy’s head snaps around to the hole in the snow, remembering something he’d forgotten. When he turns his eyes back up to Dean, they’re deep and damp as ink wells, his gaze wavering like an oil slick in a puddle. “He won’t wake up.”
As full as his eyes are, it’s the kid’s nose that weeps first. He jerks his hand up to wipe it off, sniffles loudly. “I tried not to cry,” he admits. “JT says only babies cry. He calls me Tiny Tim, but I ain’t no baby. Not no more.” His eyes plead with Dean for understanding. Though Dean can tell he’s fighting with himself to keep the tears in check, Tim loses his fragile self control and starts to sob.
“Jon Thomas! Jon Thomas, you wake up now! Somebody’s here to take us home!” He dives into the snow drift and starts to claw into the mound. “Wake up! Please, wake up!” He wails.
Dean crouches down and puts his arms around Tim’s waist. He freezes momentarily when the roof of the shelter caves in and reveals two tiny skeletons folded together in bleached bone arms.
“Wake! Up!...Wake…Up…wakeupwakeupwakeup…” Tim chokes between his sobs and pleas. Dean tightens his hands around the boy’s waist and pulls him away, doesn’t want him to see.
He expects a fight, some sort of resistance, and tenses in preparation. When the boy turns in Dean’s arms and launches himself into the embrace, Dean falls out of his crouch and lands with a thump, ass-first in the snow.
He’s stiff at first, braced against a damp he can’t feel and an awkward he can, but then, Tim nuzzles into the collar of Dean’s jacket, shaking so hard, and Dean just has to hold him back. He’s not sure when he starts rocking the little boy, back-and-forth, back-and-forth, or when he turns his nose into the thick hair and starts to sing softly, but eventually, the shaking stops, and the breaths they share become deep and even.
Tim takes a long, deep breath and lets it out with a sigh. “You smell like Daddy,” he whispers.
“Dean, when’s Daddy coming home?”
“When he kills the monster. Now go to sleep.”
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“No, Sammy. You’re stuck with me forever.”
The bed dips and Dean lifts the corner of the blanket just enough to let Sammy in without any of the cold room air.
“Good.”
Dean chuckles softly, crab-walks back against a tree and sighs, too. Yup, just like Sammy.
“You can just call me Dean.”
Tim drifts to sleep, head on Dean’s shoulder, and Dean tries not to look at the bony, corpse fingers peeking out of the snow. If he had a body of his own, he’d burn theirs and bring the boys back together, now that he knows there is another side to meet on. But all he can do, now, is sleep with Tim in his arms, two brothers exhausted from waiting so long.
He wonders if Jon Thomas is waiting, too.
--
He hears them coming from miles off, splashes in the wave pool of his mind that swell, crest, and break over him with greater intensity as they draw near. Was a time, he knows, when they’d come tinkling like bells on a mercantile door, promising sweet, and shelter, and home. But the doors never open for him. People go up and down the mountain, leave flowers and tell stories at the ring of stone leftover from a search fire built as a beacon a hundred years ago.
But they never see him. They walk right past, ignore his cries of, “ ‘Please!’, ‘ Help!’, ‘Lost!’, and ‘Timothy!’
Jon Thomas hates them all. He doesn’t know a single one, knows they’re not to blame for what’s happened. But they don’t care. Daddy always said the measure of a man is the kindness he bestows on a stranger, for he never knows when the stranger is an angel sent by God to test him.
Jon Thomas doesn’t know what he is, no angel for certain, but a stranger, indeed, and not a one of the people he’s met in all the time he’s been wandering has offered to help. If he were an angel, they’d all fail the test and suffer God’s wrath. They’re not good people.
They deserve to be punished.
xXx
“You didn’t tell me we’d be camping,” Sam grumbles.
“You didn’t tell me you were gonna bitch the whole time, either. So, I guess we’re even.” He flinches as a corner of Jayce’s unfurling sleeping bag flaps by him in the evening breeze. He knows the flinch is a second behind the movement. If she’d wanted to hit him, she would have. The bitch.
“Excuse me if I’m not enjoying the scenery as much as you are. I’ve been stumbling around behind you in these woods for hours, tripping over roots and falling in potholes, and I’m starting to think you’re ‘forgetting’ to warn me about them on purpose.”
He hears her unscrew the cap, either from the water canteen or the silver flask Bobby gave her for her birthday on the premise that conversations with Sam were easier to handle when one or both of them was drunk. She swallows, and the soft ‘ahh’ that follows is tell enough that she’s definitely enjoying the burn of something more than water as the metal cap turns back into place with an annoying metal on metal squeak he thinks only he can hear.
“Please, Sam. If I wanted to kick your ass, I wouldn’t bother being all incognito about it.”
“You’d hit a blind man?
“If he’s being a pissy little bitch? Hell, yeah!”
“Don’t forget, a selfish bastard,” he spits, fumbling in the darkness for the corner of his own sleeping bag.
“You’re still mad about that?” There’s enough rise in her voice to tell him she’s amused. “Truth hurts, baby. I just call it like I see it. Deal.”
Worst part about that is, Jayce has always called apples apples, never pulls punches, has maybe less tact than even Dean had. It’s another one of those things he definitely doesn’t love about her.
And he’s always agreed with her assessments until she decided to assess him. Almost a year in psychotherapy and no one has managed to push his buttons the way she does. Analyze this, he thinks, and jerks his sleeping bag as far away from hers as he dares since he wouldn’t put it past her to pitch camp on the edge of a cliff.
“We’re probably not even in the right place,” Sam accuses as he sprawls on his sleeping bag, gaze fixed on stars he can’t see. “You probably got the facts wrong.”
When she answers, it’s with a matter-of-fact tone that indicates she’s not letting him rile her up. Bitch.
“Nope. Local legend says two little boys, Jon Thomas and Timothy Granger, eight and five, wandered off into these woods a hundred years ago. Most likely didn’t survive the first night out here when a snowstorm blew over the mountain hard enough to extinguish the beacon fire rescuers built at the peak. Their bodies were never found, and at least five suspicious deaths have been reported in the area in the time since, not to mention too many freakishly close calls to count. All signs point to restless spirit—probably one or both of the missing brothers.”
“Just one.” Sam’s got his arm flung across his face, and he doesn’t care if she can’t hear him. He really doesn’t want to talk about it, anyway. There’s just this stupid nagging part of him that has to see a puzzle solved, needs to watch the pieces snap into place, and that part of him can’t resist throwing out that bit of information. “It’s the older brother, Jon Thomas.”
When she doesn’t ask for more of an explanation, he pulls his arm down and cranes his neck in what he thinks is her general vicinity. “He died first. All my dreams after the snowstorm are just the younger brother, and he’s afraid to go out of the shelter, just lies in the dark and waits.”
“Mmm,” she says. Sounds to Sam like she’s heard it all before.
“Mmm?” He asks.
Her sleeping bag rustles as she turns over, and her voice is clear when she answers. “Sounds like someone I know.”
Sam wants to argue with her. He’s not hiding, not afraid, and he doesn’t choose to stay in the dark. His retinas were burned out for chrissakes, but he’s nearly asleep, lulled by the crickets and spring peepers along the creek bottom. Waiting in the dark is a lot more exhausting than it seems.
He shrugs her off. “Whatever.”
xXx
JT can tell by the rhythmic droop of their eyes that both of the intruders are drifting off to the beat of the same lullaby, tuned in to the same cricket or tree frog, one out of thousands he knows are there, singing, that he can’t hear.
He remembers lying awake in his loft bed, Tim curled beside him, with the tiny window over their heads cracked to the outside. Between the steady pulse of the night and the even rumble of Tim’s snores, JT never had slept so well.
He doesn’t remember the last time he’s slept. His entire world is darkness and the splashing of uncaring footsteps in the mire. No sooner is one batch silenced than another approaches. He thinks maybe he sleeps between. If he does, then he doesn’t rest, because every day he’s more tired and angry.
A lot of days have passed in this endless night.
He slinks closer, the dark splitting around and closing in behind him like savannah grass around a hunting cheetah. He circles closer, sizes up his prey: one girl, small in the folds of her bedroll, and a man, feet protruding from the open bottom of his own.
He would normally take the woman first, but the man has the smell of sickness on him, deep hollows beneath his fingers, and bone-like fingers. His death will be a mercy killing.
“Somebody! Somebody, help us!” He gives them a chance. He gives them all a chance.
“Somebody…”
The man sleeps with his eyes half open, the way Tim used to. He wonders what devil the stranger is waiting for.
He circles closer to the fire. “Help! We’re lost. Someone help me find my brother!” Fire dances in the wet-slits between the man’s eyelashes, and he seems to look back at JT, almost seems to see.
But he doesn’t. They never do. No one ever does.
“Please…”
The forest starts to move around him, dark power raining down on him in drops of sap like hatchling spiders parachuting out of their mother web. Anger wraps itself around him in long, silky strands and coils in his gut. It roils through him like stomach flu, and he knows what will happen when he lets it out. He’s seen what it does to people, the way their faces contort in agony while it rips out their dark hearts.
The first time it happened, the man had ended up spread across the forest floor like so much hog slop, and JT had watched in grim horror while scavengers carried off the pieces.
He’d been sorry then, sorry until the others came looking and cared more about the pieces than helping Jon Thomas find his Timothy.
JT hadn’t been sorry about what he did to them, though there was a lingering regret that they’d managed to get away. He supposes when he’s finally called to Heaven, there will have to be penance for not finishing God’s work. He’s willing to pay it. Until then, he’ll do what work he can.
He takes a step closer. These two have one more chance…
xXx
Sam sits with a start. He crawls backward out of his sleeping bag until the fire’s breathing up his back, his own breath heaves in a constricting chest.
Jayce stirs behind him with a scrape of nylon over dried leaves and needles.
“Sam?” Her voice, already thick with exhaustion and stolen moments of sleep, slides up out of its normal timbre.
She’s worried. He’s sorry.
He blames long hours of riding in the Impala with the music cranked too loud to think over, curses weeks of dreaming about someone else’s unrest, berates hours of stomping over treacherous terrain and exhaustion. He let his guard down, has failed to keep the door locked on a part of himself he’s vowed never to let out. Not ever.
And yet, in that moment between awake and asleep, where his conscious mind is lax and his subconscious still slumbers, the place where body, mind, and spirit—all parts, not just the factory-installed nuts and bolts, but the after-market oil and fluid—run together like the flavors in yesterday’s chili. The notSam has escaped.
“Sam, what’s the matter? It another dream?”
He could lie, but he doesn’t. They’ve come too far together. “No.”
“Then, what?”
“He’s here. Jon Thomas…he’s here.” His hand searches in the dark for a weapon.
“Where? How do you know?”
And that’s the kicker, ain’t it?
“Right there.” He points with a finger trembling so hard his arms is actually exhausted from the effort, sweeps back and forth a few times until he thinks he’s lined up with the mental crosshairs etched over the flashbulb image that burns behind his eyes. “I saw him.”
--
Jon Thomas takes a step back. No one’s ever looked at him before. He hopes, because even after a hundred years, this is still about finding Timmy. For a second, he believes they see him. The man presses away from him and points…
“Help me?” He asks. It’s a whisper laced with trepidation, the voice he uses to quiet Daddy’s gelding when rain pounds on the barn roof. “Please…”
xXx
“Wait? You see him?” Her voice is incredulous, but something in his expression must ring true, because he hears her rustling through their things. Holy water sloshes inside its bottle.
Glass. Glass bottle for holy water, plastic for soda, canteen for water…
“Don’t!” Using the familiar splash to guide him, he reaches for her wrist. There’s a tremble of adrenaline-fueled anticipation beneath her skin. He tries not to think about how good it feels to be touching instead of drawing away from touch. “He can’t cross the salt. Holy water will break the line. We’re safe in here.”
She stills in his fingers, but her voice picks up the vibration. “But he’s here…you see him?”
“Saw him,” he clarifies. “I’m not sure it was him, but I saw something.” He hangs his head. “Sometimes, I can…” His mouth snaps shut, because that’s not right. If he’s gonna come clean, it should be the whole truth. “It’s not me. I can’t…”
“But Psychic!Sammy can,” she finishes.
He jerks his hand from her wrist. Lies burn, and half-truths are his m.o. She’s not allowed. “You know? How could you?”
“Baby, I always knew,” she whispers. “I was there, too, remember? I saw what happened to Dean, and my eyes? They’re just fine. Whatever blinded you, Sam? You’re the only one who saw it, and if it was possible to just burn out a third eye, there’d be a lot fewer psychics in the world. It’s not really one of the options.” She runs a thumb over his chin. “I was just waiting for you to tell me.”
Sam snorts. He’s not sure what emo it is exploding in his chest, but he feels one side of his face twist in what’s either amusement or an evil sneer. “You’re okay with that? I have demon blood in me. I’m a monster.”
“No, you’re human, Sam, and that means you have free will. C’mon, all the research you’ve done in your life, and you never put together that man has domain over the earth and all who inhabit it? Same God made us all: man, beast, and demon, and He gave the earth to us.” She puts her hands on the sides of his face, fingers tracking into his sideburns. She turns his head down, and he can’t help but move his eyes away from the warmth of her gaze.
“Why do you think demons lie? Why do they steal and cheat?” She shakes his head and pulls his chin roughly back down toward her. “Listen to me, you stubborn ass. They to us because they don’t want us to know that we have power over them. All of us. So, you got some demon blood in you. You think that makes you less of a man? C’mon, Stanford, you had to have taken at least on biology class in college. What happens when a foreign protein is introduced into your blood?” She slides her hands under his ears, down his neck, and to his shoulders, shakes him again.
“Sam, what happens? Do you think it just splices itself into your DNA? Do you think a dog can turn a man into dog? That’s not how it works. When foreign protein gets in your blood, you develop a resistance to it, sensitivity that gets stronger the more you’re exposed to it. Stronger against it, Sam. Why do you think the Demon needed a man to lead his army? Because only a man could ever be strong enough to control them all. The Demon made you stronger, but he didn’t make you inhuman, and he didn’t take away your free will. You did that.”
xXx
What are they doing? Why can’t they hear him? Why did they pretend to see?
Lies! All lies! That man never saw him. JT doesn’t know how he missed it. This man doesn’t see anything. He’s blind.
JT sees it now, recognizes the blank stare, the lack of focus, fumbling fingers. The stranger’s probably crazy like old man Searcy. Mama always said that man was tetched, tetched by the Devil, and this man is a bad man if JT’s ever seen one.
He’s done calling, done begging. He’s given them all the chances they’re going to get.
The rage spirals up inside him, a burning gush of acid like spider venom, and this time, when he opens his mouth, he screams.
xXx
“Shit! Sam, get up!”
Before Sam can respond, Jayce’s hand slides into his. He’s surprised how strong she is when she drags him backward along the ground. He hears her take three steps before he gets his feet under him enough to follow.
“Wait! What’s going on?” Even as he says it, he hears movement in the trees, a rolling snap and crunch of underbrush and wind like whitewater.
“You ever seen The Evil Dead?”
“Yyyeahh?...Shit!” Denial makes him a little slow on the uptake, but he gets the hint. It’s not movement in the trees he’s hearing; it’s movement of the trees. The wind whips up around them, until his ears pop, and even without eyes, he envisions the perimeter of the salt circle Jayce laid around their campsite. He can make out the exact point where Jon Thomas’ wrath whirls in a vortex around them and folds back on itself at the boundary.
“The salt’s not gonna last long in all this wind,” Jayce shouts in his ear.
Sam doesn’t know what he thinks he’s doing, but he turns his back to her, puts his arms out to the side to keep her ducking around him, like he’s going to protect her. Maybe he is. That’s his choice.
Old habits die harder than older brothers.
“What’s he pissed at us for?” Jayce asks, like he’s supposed to know. She’s the one with all the yin-yang cosmic balance and order theories. Maybe she missed the part where no man, or boy, is an island. No spirit can exist, cut off from all it knows, and not be disillusioned.
Sam knows how angry spirits are born. The same way blind, angry men are born.
“He’s not.”
“Well, then he needs a subscription to Martha Stewart Living, cuz this is no way to treat guests.” She shouts the last phrase into the funnel, doesn’t mask the accusation in her voice.
Sam recognizes fear when he hears it.
He’s out of practice, reflexes shot to hell from months of lying and waiting for life and afterlife to go on without him. And he’s not the same Sam who lit up a shadow demon with a flare and digitized angry spirits in a camera phone viewer. He’s less than half of a whole that used to include Dean and about fifty more pounds of Sam, but he’s not alone, and he’s not powerless.
He is afraid, though. Of course, paralyzed by fear is not one of the options he has to choose from.
“Sam?” Jayce’s fingers constrict in his grasp and lock like zipper teeth in a too-tight pair of jeans as the salt line starts to disintegrate. The grains fly up in the melee and sting across Sam’s skin, burn his blank, dead eyes.
He knows the perimeter’s gone when a vine wraps around his ankle and starts to crawl up his leg. He braces himself as more wrap around his other leg and both arms. Funny, a year ago, he’d been booking the first one-way ticket out, but now, drawn and quartered isn’t an option he’s willing to choose, either.
He tenses every atrophied muscle in his body and shuts his eyes.
In his mind, there’s a door, and in the door, a window. He’s only ever opened the door once, and since he managed to slam it shut again, he’s been guarding the window, only occasionally drawing close enough to peer inside.
He’s spent twenty-three years pretending there’s no door, and the last twelve months blaming what’s on the other side for the lack of anything meaningful on this one. He’s tired of denial, and blame, and regret.
When it’s over, Jayce’s at his back, just like she has been since
Jayce’s voice is in his ear like sunshine and happily ever after when he makes the one choice he has left.
He takes a breath and breaks the window.
xXx
The scream freezes in JT’s throat, not because he can’t scream, not because he doesn’t want to, just because. It’s just not important anymore, and he doesn’t know why.
He does know, when he closes his mouth and opens his eyes, the man is looking back at him, not with the blank, roving gaze of a blind man, but right at him, right through him. There’s something in those eyes that JT hasn’t seen in a very long time. There’s light.
It’s not a flicker of firelight, the wick of a puling candle in the darkest corner of the room, but actual light, like the sun rising behind Mama’s clean sheets in the spring.
“Jon Thomas,” the man says, holding out his hand, “I’m Sam. It’s time to go home.”
JT doesn’t know how this man can call him by name, but he knows he’ll follow Sam anywhere, so long as those green eyes keep looking into the light.
xXx
Sam’s not sure exactly what light it is he’s leading them into. Not THE light, he’s sure, because despite his best efforts, he’s still alive…thank God. This is new territory for him, territory where, for some reason, he doesn’t trip over roots or fall in potholes at all, and instead of letting Jayce drag him through the woods, he’s the one who leads and knows the safest place to set each foot.
He can’t see, not really, just light and dark. In JT’s case, the light is a little boy, in Jayce’s, just an aura. What he can’t see, he feels with the same instinct he didn’t know he had but likes much better than head-splitting visions.
Sam’s so overwhelmed by the transition of his mental landscape from dusk to dawn that he doesn’t even realize he hasn’t heard Timothy crying in over a day. He only realizes it when a giggle and squeal bounce out of the light like a baseball from over a playground fence.
Jon Thomas, being only a little boy, even after a hundred years in isolation, does what any little boy would do. He chases the ball.
“Tim! Timmy!” JT pulls his hand from Sam’s and darts ahead.
Sam lets him go as they crest a rise along a dried-out creek bed. It’s been a long road, but now he knows life is the road, and for the first time in a year, he’s in no hurry to reach the end. He tightens his fingers around Jayce’s, because he doesn’t love how small they feel in his hand, but he doesn’t hate it, either.
He squeezes gently, doesn’t say, ‘I love you,’ with his touch, but definitely, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
There’s a calm in his heart as they finally clear the ridge, a certainty that whatever’s on the other side, he’s prepared.
He’s wrong.
There’s noting in any universe, known or unknown, that could prepare Sam to stride over that hill and find Dean—not Dean in little pieces scattered across the landscape in a mess of blood and gore, but Dean whole, and smiling, and airplaning Timothy Granger around and around while the little boy giggles with glee.
Sam thinks maybe his heart’s so torn between joy and grief that it stops altogether as Jon Thomas throws himself on his baby brother and squeezes for all he’s worth.
Either that, or Sam’s heart stops from asphyxiation. Dean’s never been a hugger. Apparently, death changes a man.
“Sammy, thank God!” Dean exhales like a prayer in Sam’s ear as he wraps his brother in his arms.
After a moment of surprised paralysis, Sam pats his brother on the back, resists the urge to cup one of his huge hands around Dean’s neck and keep him there forever. He doesn’t know how he’s allowed to hug his brother, his dead brother, but he’s grateful.
Life’s too short for anything less.
Dean breaks the hug first, smooths his hands over Sam’s shoulders, and looks him over from head to toe.
“You look like Hell, little brother.”
Sam shrugs. Now that he sees himself, he knows it’s true.
Dean smacks him on the arm with a smirk. “Not that I’d know. I’ve never been there.”
Sam knows, if he were seeing with actual eyes, they’d be blurry right now, because he knows there are tears in him that he’s not even trying to hold back.
“You did real good, Sammy. Real good.”
“Dean!” Timothy runs up between them and pulls on Dean’s coat sleeve. “Dean! It’s Jon Thomas! He woke up!”
Sam uses the distraction to sniff loudly and run a hand across his eyes.
Dean scoops the little boy up in his arms as though he didn’t die without ever getting to be a dad. He tousles Timmy’s hair like he doesn’t care that’s not his son, and Tim smiles back at him with a grin that more than makes up for all the years of thankless hunting.
Dean has to crane his neck back a little and hold Timmy out a little from his chest in order to look into the boy’s eyes without bumping noses, and Sam laughs at the way the proximity makes Dean’s eyes cross just a little.
“You ready to go home, then?” Dean asks.
Sam feels Jayce’s hand warm on the small of his back as both little boys nod up at Dean.
“Sam?” She asks.
Not wanting to break the moment, he just leans in closer, doesn’t feel ashamed if maybe his lips brush the shell of her ear, and says, “Let’s send ‘em home.”
xXx
The tiny bones are nearly ash, when Sam hears a strange noise in the breeze and turns toward where Dean’s carrying both boys piggy back and making horsey noises in the clearing so they won’t have to see. He doesn’t recognize the sound or the voice of the woman singing “Amazing Grace” to the rolling tempo.
When the first scent of lye soap reaches him on the breeze, Sam has an inkling of regret that he’s never played in sheets drying on a clothesline. A scene looms before him like a bubble out of a snow globe of linen flapping in the breeze, a woman pinning and singing as though it isn’t work she’s doing, just living and living well.
Sam doesn’t know how Dean came to be standing beside him without him noticing the movement, but he feels that familiar strong hand on his shoulder and turns with a grin on his face. Perhaps he expects to exchange high-fives or get a ‘that’s my boy’ for his trouble. What he gets is Dean, dressed in long buckskin with a rifle over his chest and a thick growth of beard over his chin.
Sam almost can’t recognize him, except those piercing hazel eyes are Dean even under the brim of the hat he’s wearing now. At his side, JT and Timothy tug at Dean’s coat sleeves.
“Daddy! You’re home! Did you get that buck, Daddy?”
From the other side of the clothesline, the singing stops, and the woman ducks beneath it as she runs, hand pressed to her chest and leaps into Dean’s embrace. “We missed you,” she says before kissing him tenderly.
“We’re home now,” Dean says. He’s looking at Sam when he says it and winks.
Sam knows goodbye when he sees it. As he watches, the Grangers disappear into the yards of flapping sheets and evaporate on the wind.
He knows he should be happy, and he is, but that doesn’t stop tears from coursing down his cheeks.
What he and Jayce have isn’t love, but he doesn’t stop her pulling him down into her arms and rocking him back and forth until the tears are dry.
It isn’t love, but it could be.
Life is full of possibilities, most of which Sam’s never even considered. But he’s a man, and men can choose. Sam chooses life.
The End
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