Note: This is a sort of companion piece to Fortress. I apologise for any errors, inconsistencies and shoddy quality as I proofread myself. Please don't ask me questions about the science of molecular movement. Thank you for your time.
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the following characters.
Sam Winchester had never been particularly intuitive, but if there was anything he knew well in this wide world at all, it was his brother.
Dean had always been the strong one. This was possibly because he was the elder, and possibly because Sam had been a bawling red-faced newborn the very first time Dean saved his life.
For years after (and though Sam wouldn't admit, not on pain of death; right through Stanford and out again, until that fateful night), Dean had been the Hero, the unbreakable, his anchor, protector and only constant in their shifting lonely life. He could laugh in the face of terror, come out of a hunt bloodied yet always alive, put the fear of Dean in the bullies that picked on studious little Sam and still have time to make those salami sandwiches for me, Dean, with the mustard and the onions and the crusts off plee-ease.
Dean had been Superman, before Sam even knew Superman existed.
He had been in sixth grade, possibly, before he realised his brother wasn't infallible. That under the strength and cocky self-assurance lay fear and sorrow and guilt and despair, all laid painfully bare on the sky blue floor of his father's hospital room. But his brother soon covered himself up again, expertly and meticulously smoothing over the flaws in his armour with jokes and smiling eyes and loud, loud laughter.
Sam had almost gotten used to the many masks his brother wore, accepted them as part of living this life they lived. The ease with which Dean hid everything almost made Sam forget that he hid anything at all, and he could very nearly have accepted this laughing caricature as his brother.
But recently, uncomfortably, he felt like he had spent the past few months watching the high walls of his brother's fortress fall, brick by lonely brick. It really hadn't seemed like much at first. A strange look in his too-bright eyes, an odd set to his jaw. His lips drawn uncharacteristically thin and the small staccato silences that suddenly grew into emptiness that Sam couldn't pull him out of. The flickering sadness that rearranged itself into a careful painting of smile when he felt Sam's eyes on him, and the bright, almost-genuine laughter, C'mon, Sam, let's get out of this damn rat-hole and hit up that bar we passed, when moments ago Sam would have sworn left right and centre there were tears in his brother's eyes.
He had asked, tried to milk clues and secrets and sometimes he felt, the key to fuckin' Shangri-la, from his brother's unwilling lips. But that was the problem with being a damned Winchester. Stubbornness was a streak that ran deep, and if anyone tried to pull you somewhere you weren't prepared to go, you dug your heels in deep and gave them the best tug-o-war they ever had. And that streak went deeper in Dean.
So Sam had let it go, as best as he could. Turned his face away from his grieving brother and his quiet pale not-Dean-at-all expressions and snuffed out the little voices that screamed to help him help him help him help him.
'Til tonight.
Tonight, he had come back from - from a little excursion, he thought with vehemence and guilt and just a tiny amount of self-loathing - to a dingy little motel room he couldn't stretch in and the sharp iron smell of blood in the air.
It was auto-pilot mode from then. He slid himself in noiselessly, reaching for the little knife in his jeans, as if a fucking pocket knife would do any good against something that had just mauled Dean motherfucking Winchester he would think dryly to himself later, and pressed against the cheap peeling wood of the bathroom door. The silence inside buoyed the little bubbles of fear growing in him and he stepped back and heaved his shoulder against the door and it suddenly seemed to him as if he had burst into some long-forgotten scene dredged out of his deepest darkest nightmare.
Sam was sure his brother was alive, because his head had snapped up at Sam's grand entrance and there were Dean's own guilty eyes staring at him in horror. But everything else was telling him no no no, the blood pooling like cheap wine on the linoleum tiles and the familiar sharp little knife dyed red that he was sure had been used to stab Dean because it was dyed red for fuck's sake, it was dyed red; and most of all, the numerous angry open mouths screaming from his brother's arms and legs and chest that he couldn't, he refused to, acknowledge. He stumbled, eyes still fixed on Dean and his green green eyes, because looking there would mean looking nowhere else, his own back pressed hard against the wall as if he was trying to melt into it and repeating the oh god oh god oh god that was like the thundering white noise trailing on and on in his head.
Forever stretched on before he was sharply brought back to the macabre scene on hand by a mild little sound of a throat clearing and looked at his brother, really looked at him. And Dean had smiled wistfully and rather sadly, blood drying on his cheek and forehead just there, where he had rested against his arms and said, 'You're back early, Sammy.'