Slightly AU but with spoilers up to 2x01. I kinda don't want to tell you what makes it AU and just have you read it haha. OH THE MYSTERY. Just kidding- I think you'll catch on pretty quick. Enjoy!
Vines That Grow in Graveyards
Sammy cries out in the night as children do, and Dean nestles closer to him on the too-big motel bed and sweeps a hand through his swiftly-growing hair.
"It's okay, Sammy," Dean says, but he's not sure if it's true because Dad was only supposed to be gone for a few hours and now it's late, much later than it should be without him here. Dean's just turned seven, which means he's basically a man now, but that doesn't mean he wants to find out what happens if Dad doesn't come back this time. Even if he memorized all the steps Dad told him, just in case.
"Just get some sleep," Dean says to his baby brother. He watches the lamp on the bedside table shiver and coil like a snake. Sam growls out a sob, and the chair by the door shifts a few inches to the left. Dean pats Sammy's head and curls in a little bit closer, and the whiskey bottle on the counter sighs its relief.
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Sammy's only nine but he reads like he's running out of time. He falls into a kind of peace that Dean wishes he knew how to find for himself, but it's enough sometimes just to watch Sam get lost inside his own.
Sometimes, when he's lost in that space of his, Dean watches the pages of Sam's book flip without being touched.
Whenever Sam reads and Dad's researching on the other side of the room, Dean makes sure to put himself right between the two of them.
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Dean learns to ignore doors that slam on their own and lights that flicker when Sam's in one of his moods. It's risky to become acclimated, he knows, because there is more than one thing that lingers in the dark and makes things move. But the thing that does it most often, and thankfully only when Dad's not around, is not dangerous.
Sam's memorizing multiplication tables.
He's just stressed.
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There's an ugly green vase on the counter of the latest kitchenette of the latest motel room, and Sam won't stop glaring at it. It's an ugly shade of green, and it's got one long crack right down the middle of it.
Dean's sitting on Dad's bed because Dad hasn't been around for a few days and he's twisting the tinfoil that used to house the burritos they had for dinner into a million different shapes. He tears off a piece of it, the head of the snake he'd been shaping, and chucks it into Sam's hair. He stops after the third one because he doesn't like how Sammy's looking at him.
The vase on the counter shatters clear and sharp like crystal, a small and tinkling eruption that sends pieces of green raining down on the tiles of the kitchenette.
Sam stares at its remnants, fingers clenched into a fist like a waterfall. Overflowing.
Dean slices his hand open on one of the stray pieces when he bends to clean it up.
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Sam's been pushing his anger into the punching bag left over from the previous owners in the house they're staying in for now. Sam's been pushing his fury into the soles of his feet when he runs, worn-in shoes slapping against the pavement. Sam's been getting stronger.
But he shouldn't have the strength to lift his eighteen-year-old bleeding brother over his shoulder quite so easily. Dean knows this, like he knows the feeling of sticky red that runs down his ruined leg as he fights for clarity, or consciousness at the very least.
They're back at the car before they possibly could be and Sam hasn't moved from Dean's side but somehow the first-aid kit is no longer in the trunk, it's at Sammy's feet and Sam is threading a needle without looking, is ripping a hole through the denim of Dean's jeans without scissors or fingers, is pouring vodka into the ugly slashes while both of his hands find Dean's face, run a thumb along his ear.
By the time Dad finishes the thing off, gets back to the car, Dean is patched up and silent and Sam needs the punching bag or a stretch of concrete but he has neither so he unleashes it all on John instead. When they're in the car and the yelling hasn't ceased, Dean lets out a whimper he'd never be proud of just to make it stop. It stops.
Sam crawls into the backseat with him.
"How much do you remember?" he whispers later when Dad is curled over the steering wheel and snoring. And then, softer, a voice weighing less than air. "I'm scared."
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Dean tells him about the pages of his books and the way they turn on their own sometimes, and Sam shakes his head. Dean tells him about the broken vase and the moving chairs and the flickering lamplight, and Sam hides in the bathroom for an hour.
Dean slides down to sit on the other side of the door with his hands folded. He doesn't say anything. He listens to Sam breathing from the other side.
Dean's bottom lip trembles a little, but that's all.
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Sam is fifteen when he gets his first vision, and Dean has to stop him from downing an entire bottle of Advil when the headache hits him just a few minutes after he tells about the woman who will die in apartment 12.
"Apartment 12 where, Sam?" Dean asks (and he finds it strange that this is his first question, as if he's already accepted the images inside his little brother's head as truth).
"I couldn't see," says Sam, and then he moans and doesn't move from his bed for three hours.
Dean is glad Sammy needs the lights turned off to ease the migraine. He needs the lights off too, so he can think. So Sammy can't see his face.
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Sam has a right to be angry, which is why it doesn't count. It's a hard shove. It leaves a dent in the thin wall and Dean on the ground, gasping just a little bit. But it's not that bad.
Doesn't matter if Sam didn't actually touch him. Dean deserved it. Sam disagrees, but he just watches silently, tears glistening on his cheeks, while Dean tries to patch up the wall before Dad gets back.
Everything seems to happen within the times before Dad gets back.
Dean ends up covering the dent with the picture hanging over the back of John's bed- a childish mural of a rabbit chasing after a wolf, of all things. When Dad gets back, he pauses only for a moment to take in the redecorating that's been done.
"Time to go," he says just a few hours later. Dean is the last one out the door. He closes it softly enough, but he still hears the dull thud of the painting as it falls from its precarious new position and lands on the carpet.
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Sometimes when they're bored and alone in the motel, Sam will juggle pencils with less than his fingertips. He drives Dean crazy, changing static-y channels without a remote. The stovetop breaks, no microwave, and they have popcorn anyway. Sam pops the kernels himself.
Dean smiles and claps in sarcastic-but-real admiration, and his dreams are restless. In the morning, his hands shake.
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The fights between Sam and Dad are the worst. Dad doesn't understand how bad it could actually get, so he never backs down. Dean drags Sam out of the motel room and crushes him up against the ice machine down the hall and doesn't let him move.
"Calm down," he says, and it is softer than their Dad would say it, not a command but a plea. Dean does not want to fully understand how bad it could actually get. He can already feel his lungs seizing up inside his chest, lightheaded. "Please Sammy, calm down."
Sam hears the wheeze in his big brother's voice and the fight leaves him. Dean breathes deep, shifts so that it's not a restraining hold anymore. Sam sinks into the embrace, let's out a strangled, snotty huff.
"He doesn't understand, Dean. He doesn't get it. I can't keep doing this. I can't…."
"I know Sammy, it's okay. It's okay."
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Dean wakes early to check the newspaper before Dad can. He wants to see if the man Sam saw in his dreams last night is real.
He is.
For the first time in his life, Dean doesn't tell Dad about a possible hunt. He hoards that particular page and hands Dad the sports section and the story about cattle mutilations.
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"Maybe we should just tell him," Dean says one day when the heat makes him stupid. The sun is down but they're in Florida, walking side by side with their guns out and ready. Dad flanks the opposite side of the swamp, trying to catch a glimpse of the Eachy that's killed six people in the last two weeks, and Dean's head is heavy with the moisture in the air. The words just slip out.
Sam stops walking and stares, doesn't have to ask what Dean's talking about. The look in his eyes is too close to betrayal.
Dean swallows. "Sorry," he says. "I wasn't...I'm...sorry."
Dad yells for them then, urgent but without panic.
Sam is the one who kills the Eachy, and Dean thinks he sees a flicker of glee in his little brother's eyes when he digs the knife in and twists with vicious accuracy. The monster looks almost human once it's dead. Like a human covered in moss.
Later, when Dad goes to get more ice, Sam frowns at Dean from across the room.
"If he doesn't already know, there's no use telling him," he says.
Sam rolls over to sleep, and the lightbulb above his bed flicks off with certainty.
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The door breaks, almost off its hinges when Sam leaves. The wind is blowing and Sam slammed it hard, so it could just be an incredible amount of force meeting an incredibly pissed off young adult, but Dean knows it was something more. He's surprised the whole house didn't shake right off its foundations and crumble right into the earth.
Dean almost wishes it had.
He grabs the keys and drives his little brother to the bus station, tries not to make it obvious that he's memorizing the hollow point near Sam's throat and the heat inside his widened pupils. Pictures aren't quite the same as the real thing sitting next to you, everybody knows that. He doesn't get out of the car when Sam does, so the embrace is awkward and strained and doesn't leave an imprint on the seats.
That's the thing Dean wishes he could do over again when he thinks about it.
He doesn't think about it.
Back at the house, he fixes the broken door because they still have to stay for a few more nights. Dean tries to picture Sam's face when he finds the stress ball shoved in next to the extra cash in the side pocket of his duffle. He hopes Sam smiles a little, even if he isn't there to see it.
He hopes Sam uses the damn thing when he needs it.
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Three months and eighteen days after Sam leaves, Dean almost bleeds to death because it's an injury he's had before and it fixed up just fine on its own last time. Or so he'd thought.
He'd never realized just how much Sam had been doing behind the scenes until Sam wasn't there to do it anymore.
John fixes him up the old-fashioned way, chides him once he's out of the woods in that firm but soft tone that tells Dean he'd been really scared. He takes off three days later- sixteen hours after Dean walks all the way to the bathroom and back on his own.
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When he sees his little brother again, Dean doesn't ask about anything he actually wants to know.
Did it ever happen when I wasn't around?
How bad were the headaches?
Did you break things?
Did anyone understand?
Did you miss me like I missed you?
Instead he says, "You're rusty" and "Dad's missing."
They brush shoulders, and Dean feels his sprained knee from The Never To Be Discussed Santa Fe Debacle of six months ago loosen and mend. He almost doesn't remember what it's like to walk without a limp. He doesn't know how to say thank you, so he doesn't say anything at all.
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Dean is hunting a ghost. Dean is always chasing ghosts, one way or another.
This one has a scarf wrapped around her neck, long sleeves and long, dark pants to cover skin that houses the bruises left by her husband from all the nights before the last one, the one where he went too far.
Dean doesn't blame her for being restless or for wanting revenge, but he does blame her for not remembering that she'd already gotten it years ago. Her other victims didn't deserve it the way her husband had. They just happened to look similar.
Dean doesn't get a clear glimpse of the scarf or the long sleeves because just this once, he'd let Sam be the distraction while he digs. He's focusing so hard on listening for Sam's movement that he smashes the shovel straight through the casket, not realizing how close he is to the bottom. He climbs out from the hole he's dug, drops in the salt, the fluid, the match. Watches the flames rise.
She's already burning, so Dean's not quite sure how she has the strength to shove him into the mouth of the yawning grave, flames licking up to greet his descent. He feels heat all around him, face to the flames, far too close. But it's only for a moment.
Everything goes white.
When he wakes, it's only a few seconds later and he's lying on his back next to the flames, not devoured by them the way he should be. Sam is bent in half over him, breathing too hard. Blood runs from his nose and his cheeks are wet, but no new tears are forming.
"I almost couldn't…" he stutters, gasping. Hiccuping. "I almost didn't…"
"It's okay Sammy," Dean coughs, lips curled into a reassuring smile. "You did."
When Sam calms down (and it takes him until they get back to the motel), he doesn't make fun of the singed remainder of Dean's left eyebrow, but he does take an hour long shower, and when he emerges he looks more exhausted than before.
"Get some sleep," Dean says, already stretched out on the bed closest to the door. Sam doesn't argue, just drops his long body onto his mattress with finality.
"In the dream I didn't save you," he whispers a little while later, half-asleep in a voice not meant to be heard. Dean hears him anyway and can't think of anything to say.
A short while later, Dean jolts back from the brink of unconsciousness when he realizes Sam had to have been at least half a football field away from him. He turns to look at his little brother in the darkness, thinks he can almost still see the stain of Sam's blood from where it had dripped from nose to chin.
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"Did you do this?" Dean asks the moment the doctor has left the room, hailing him a miracle patient. Sam shakes his head, bewilderment outweighed by relief. His right eye is swollen shut.
"Dean, I tried," he says, voice breaking. "It was too much. Dad was closest, I could reach him in the helicopter but you...you were too far and then we were here and there was too much, there was so much and I couldn't…."
"Okay Sammy," Dean nods, wincing as the skin around the gash on his forehead tightens and pulls. His whole body aches in a way it wouldn't if Sam had been the one to fix him, but he'd had to be sure. "It's okay. You did good. You did really good."
Dad comes in then, and the conversation stops. Sam's fists shake, but he goes for coffee when Dad asks and blinks too many times on his way out of the room.
"What is it?" Dean asks, can tell by Dad's face that it's something.
And suddenly he knows, just as surely as he's ever known anything.
Dean thinks of the hastily mended drywall, the shattered glass thrown into the dumpster, the bed sheets torn to shreds by invisible hands and replaced with new ones, stolen from the front office in the middle of the night. All the things that happened in the gaps of before Dad came back. The fear and the uncertainty of knowing Sam but not understanding him.
A calculus book balanced on the edge of Sam's pinky finger, both of them laughing.
Pieces of a shattered light bulb that landed just a little too close to Sammy's eye for Dean's comfort.
The cuts in his own skin made whole, sewn up without needle and thread.
Sam asleep, dreaming other people's lives. Deaths.
Dean in the next bed over, awake and watching his brother twitch and twist, biting his lip until it bled.
And Dad knew about all of it.
"I am so proud of you," John says, and Dean barely hears it.
"If you can't save him, you'll have to kill him," John whispers, voice betraying him just a little, quivering over the 'k.'
To Dean, the words sound like a scream.
All that time spent covering tracks and creating cover stories. All that time worrying and worrying and worrying and holding it all, far from the reach of the man who raised them into a life of whiskey, shotguns, and a strict "kill the monster no matter what" policy. And John Winchester had known all along.
Kill the monster, Dad says before he dies.
Kill the monster, even if it's your brother.
A/N: I've always loved the "what if" questions that SPN raises, so this was my version of "What if Sam's powers had manifested themselves earlier?" Let me know what you thought, and as always, I am forever ready to discuss current and past seasons/episodes. Thanks for reading!