I.
The thing is, Sam doesn't even remember why he was going through Dean's wallet in the first place.
Boredom, maybe. Or…or a dare? He seems to remember Dean telling him he'd never be any good at the lift and i really /i wanting to prove him wrong. But that could have been later. Or before. He really doesn't remember.
What he does remember is the wallet itself. One of Dad's infrequent non-weapon related gifts, close grained and expensive. His own wallet is a cheap thing, peeling and second-hand, and he's always envied Dean's. Idly, he wonders what Dean would do if it just…disappeared.
Probably beat the crap out of him, Sam thinks a moment later, rubbing thoughtfully at where he still wears the marks of Dean's knuckles on his bicep. Dean pulls his punches when they spar, but not by much.
"Toughen you up, Sammy," he says, with that annoying smirk, and moves lightly aside when Sam comes at him. "Oh! Too slow. Always too slow, son."
When Sam thinks about it later—and he does, from time to time—what he remembers is not the scatter of fake IDs and credit cards, not the bubblegum pink condom hidden behind Dean's real driver's license, but the cards.
There were several of them. A lot, actually, starting to become brittle but with their corners unbent and sharp. Unmarked by the scribbles and notes that dot the other receipts and random paper flotsam scattered within.
Joshua Payne, Assistant Coach, Baseball. USC. Richard J. King, Admissions Officer, University of Texas. Derman Peters, Head Coach, Baseball, Florida State University. Chris Ellsworth Jr., Arizona State University.
Others, but essentially the same. And it surprises him. Not because Dean's stupid or anything, but because he can't picture it. Dean doesn't really hate school as much as he seems to—especially chemistry and shop—but he's frequently bored and he'd much rather be out with Dad chasing down the freak of the week than 'wasting' the hours of the day school consumes. Which…Sam doesn't get. But he knows it's true.
And really, he can't even picture Dean in the context of college, other than maybe making a total ass of himself at some kegger or getting caught in one of the girls' dorms or something like that. But Sam tries. He's seen TV, and there was that poltergeist in Berkeley a couple years ago. He paints Dean in on that sprawling green campus, tinkering with his gadgets and flirting outrageously with sorority girls. He puts Dean on the mound, squinting as he watches the catcher call the pitch.
But the picture shatters on the hard rock of reality. The trunk is littered with the cast offs of Dean's toys, things abandoned and unfinished when there just wasn't enough money for screws and tape and solder, because they needed another load of rock salt or specially blessed vessels of bronze and glass or sometimes just because Dad didn't see a need for it. He sees sordid motels and blown out, tired forty-year old waitresses that pout and strut in their falling down bras, too short skirts and sloppy blue eyeliner. He sees Dean lighting yet another anonymous white candle for Mom in the local church as he has in hundreds like them all across the country. None of which have ever made a damn bit of difference, as far as Sam can tell.
Dean had only played baseball for a hot second anyway. He'd joined—in idleness and from his love of anything physical—in some dried up and dusty town in Texas that they'd lived in for the better part of a year. He quit the minute Dad said something about it interfering with the hunt. Sam had hated Dad a little then. He never once came to any of Dean's games, never bothered to notice how happy Dean was. Just laid down the law and expected Dean (and Sam) to toe that line. Because that's what good little soldiers do.
"I was getting bored with it anyway," Dean says with a shrug. "Buncha good ol' boys that act so hard and'd piss their pants if they ever saw any of the stuff Dad's been up against." He throws his mitt into the garbage, hard enough to knock the can over. "You wanna take a drive? I hear there's a haunted house over on Third; we could check it out, save Dad some time."
Sometimes Sam wonders what John would do if Sam were to point out to him that they're not soldiers, sir, thank you kindly, but he doesn't wonder enough to actually do it.
They always say he's the smart one.
II.
The funny thing is, Sam never sees himself in that context either, the foreign landscape of a life outside the life. He's made his bids towards normal, but nothing that ever took.
"Soccer? Freaking soccer? What the hell is that going to teach you…except maybe not to trip over your own enormous feet? Wait. Okay, that could be worth it, because dude…trying to sneak up on something with you is a serious exercise in getting me killed."
But now it's as if those business cards, so carefully hidden away and preserved, carried some secret contagion in their pasteboard surface, a virus that's sunken into his skin making him feverish and restless with too many thoughts.
He's distracted. Which, both Dean and Dad would say was, at best, stupid and at worst, suicidally dangerous.
Which might have been how he got hurt.
III.
What strikes him first is the silence.
Well. No. What strikes him first is the skinwalker, coming up out of the low-lying fog so fast none of them has time to react, a bristle of jagged protruding bones, long mis-grown teeth and orangey lantern-light eyes.
He doesn't remember flying. Doesn't even remember hitting the ground.
Just looking up an unknown amount of time later and seeing Dean backing towards him from a long way away, gun spitting lightning bursts of white with every step. He knows the gun in Dean's hand down to the hook shaped scar in the stock, the Mossberg, with a vicious recoil and a noise like thunder. But he can't hear anything. Nothing at all.
Dimly, he thinks he should get up.
Dad will have more than a few choice words about Sammy lying on his ass in the dirt while he and Dean do all the heavy lifting. But as much as the thought of Dad's scorn and anger turns Sam's stomach, the signals don't seem to be going through. His limbs remain stubborn (Winchester limbs, of course they are) and still; dried leaves crunch under his head as it rolls, boneless.
Then Dean's on his knees next to Sam. Dean's eyes are huge and scared and his hand's pressing and suddenly there's pain—God, pain like you wouldn't believe—but there's still no sound. Just Dean's mouth moving and that horrible look in his eyes that really tells Sam everything he doesn't want to know anyway.
"C'mon man; it'll be fun. An honest to God skinwalker! You know Dad's got our back and I got yours…what could go wrong?"
Sam stops fighting, a battle he's been losing for the last several minutes anyway. The last thing he remembers clearly is the sight of Dean's shoelace, tangled with burrs and frayed to string, right next to his face.
IV.
"Dude! I think you had to have flown like…twenty feet!" Dean swipes the last piece of toast off Sam's tray, munches it noisily and gets crumbs everywhere.
"Yeah, Dean. I was there." Sam shifts a little on the lumpy hospital mattress and feels his gown distinctly not shift with him. Still, even that little movement hurts like a bitch and he decides that it's not worth it to try and readjust any more.
"Well…yeah." Dean finishes the toast and goes for Sam's milk next. Sam debates saying something—just on principle, since he's really not hungry—then lets it go. Dean's been here the whole time—since Sam woke up hurting, disoriented and hazy with drugs—sleeping in the hard hospital chair and alternately charming and terrifying the nurses. Dean brightens. "But dude, it was really cool."
That was one way to put it.
Another way is this: two broken ribs, a broken arm, a collapsed lung, a rash of infected and weeping holes from the skinwalker's rotting forearm bones and a hematoma (with attendant concussion) the size of Montana. There isn't much that doesn't hurt, even beneath a thick layer of narcotics, and whatever doesn't is lost in the flurry of pain messages from the other bits.
He's not sure he cares, but he still has to ask: "Did you get it?"
Dean looks offended. "Of course! Come on, Sam. Dad had to go back and burn it, after we got you out of there, but yeah. Dead and gone." He cocks his fingers like a gun and shoots the air.
"Good," Sam says, and means it.
"Sam, I swear to God, if you do not wake up, I will find a way to resurrect your dumb ass just so I can kill you myself. Don't do this, man. Just…don't." A pause, that in the blackness seems to go on forever. "I'm sorry."
Dean scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and fidgets in the chair for a while. Sam's feeling punked out and sleepy again and he's in no mood to find out what bug crawled up Dean's butt this time, so he lets the quiet lie.
Finally, Dean bursts out: "So look. I was bumming around in Goodwill—you would not believe the collection of concert shirts they have there, Sammy—and I found this. And I thought you might like it." He takes his hand out of his pocket and shoves the newspaper wrapped bundle at Sam in a single gesture that rockets agonizingly up Sam's broken arm. "Happy birthday."
And that's how Sam remembers that today is his eighteenth birthday.
V.
So maybe it's the concussion. Or maybe it's the drugs. Or maybe it's just being stuck in this hospital bed bored out of his gourd, because it's been hours. In any case, when someone says, "So…do you ever think about still playing baseball?" he's a little shocked to realize it's him.
Flipping channels and twitching with enforced inactivity, Dean looks at him sidelong and skeptical. "Baseball? What brought that on?"
Sam's ears burn and he wonders if it's as obvious to Dean. He waves vaguely at the TV. "You just flipped past the Cubs game."
Dean snorts and backtracks to the channel. "The Cubs. What a buncha punks."
"So…do you?"
Dean eyeballs him again for a really long minute. Long enough for Sam to wonder if Dean knows that he went through his wallet. Then Dean shrugs. "Nah. Better things to do with my time."
"But you were really good," Sam insists.
Dean shakes his head. "Not as good as I am at this."
"Oh yeah," Sam scoffs and holds up his broken arm. "Just great."
The light in Dean's eyes becomes overcast as shadows move in. "If I could've taken that hit I would've," Dean says, his jaw flexing. Then the moment passes, as short-lived as any of Dean's moods. "'Sides, if you weren't so damn slow, would've never happened. We seriously got to work on your footwork, Sammy. Thought all that soccer was supposed to help you with that."
"Yeah, the whole four months I got to play really helped," Sam says dourly.
"Look, Dad told you…"
"I'm tired, Dean." Sam cuts his brother off, not wanting to hear it. It hurts like a sonofabitch, but he slides and rolls onto his side, away from Dean. "I'm going to take a nap."
The vinyl crunches and creaks as Dean settles back in the chair and goes back to surfing channels. "Yeah," he says dully. "Yeah, you go on and do that, Sam."
VI.
Sam wakes up screaming—which is bad enough—and puking, which just makes it twice as bad.
"C'mon, Sammy, c'mon…sit up, wake up, c'mon…"
Dean's arm is behind Sam, urging him up into a sitting position. Dean pushes the emesis basin under his face for him to choke and spew into, which he does. At length. Dean must have been hit the call button too at some point, because a moment later the duty nurse comes skidding in on her rubber soled shoes.
"Get the doctor!" Dean says. His voice isn't loud, but the nurse blanches anyway and goes silently out.
Sam coughs, which brings the taste of sick crowding to the front of his awareness, and he realizes it's not only puke he tastes, it's blood.
VII.
Turns out that not only did the broken rib nick a lung, but he's also allergic to the antibiotics they've been giving him. It's a whole week before Sam's well enough to be discharged, weak and shaky and minus fifteen pounds he really couldn't afford to lose.
Dad doesn't say much of anything, but he's there when Dean wheels Sam down to the lobby and outside, and he claps Sam on the shoulder with that crooked smile. "Hear you're gonna have one hell of a scar, son," he says.
"Yes, sir," Sam answers, feeling some taut wire of tension he'd barely been aware of loose and slack in his shoulders and back.
Another pat on his arm. "That's good. That's real good. You ready to travel?"
The thought of hours spent in the car while they hurtle towards yet another disaster waiting to happen leaves Sam shivery and sick, but he swallows it down, ducks his head and says gamely, "Yes, sir."
"Well, all right."
VIII.
They come to rest in Mississippi for a while, and Sam enrolls in the local school. They've been through this before, the three of them. They don't even bother to argue about it.
"Even in a life like ours, man needs his high school diploma, Dean. You let Sam do what he's going to do. Plenty of time for him to join us on the hunt. I waited for you, didn't I?"
Sam gets the notice in gym that the school guidance counselor wants to see him. They sit down and the woman—Ms. Hashimoto—offers him some water or a Coke. Everything's a Coke in Mississippi; he'll have to switch up his vocabulary again, he thinks as he turns her down.
"You know, Sam, you were only about a semester away from graduation at your last school." Hashimoto peers at him over arty black framed glasses.
"Yes ma'am, I know."
"It just seems strange to be transferring to a new school now. I don't see any trouble on your transcripts here; in fact…it would seem most of your teachers have nothing but praise for you."
Sam doesn't say anything, unsure where she's going with this. It stinks of a trap, but he doesn't know what kind.
Hashimoto sighs and pushes her glasses up with one lacquered fingernail. They're painted flamingo pink, like the shirt she wears under her suit jacket. He has a feeling Ms. Hashimoto's a little too exotic and a little too big-time for such a small town. "Look, Sam. I can see that you're an excellent student…when you actually attend school. Your standardized test scores are…great. But…nine schools in nine different states? And then the report from the school psychologist in…" She looks down at the file again, "Kansas?"
Sam's hands clench.
"Well. I'm sure you understand my concerns."
"My family just moves around a lot," Sam explains, as he's explained every other time. His voice doesn't even change from it's bright even inflection. "Gotta go where the work is, right?"
"Yes," Hashimoto agrees dubiously. "I understand that, I do. But…" She leans across the desk, looking helpful and earnest, and it's everything Sam can do not to recoil away from her. "What about you, Sam?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, obviously you're a bright and intelligent young man." She gestures vaguely. "There's no reason you have to keep living pillar to post this way, especially after you've graduated. So what is it that you want to do?"
"I want to go to college."
It's like the hospital, except this time Sam can't blame the morphine. His voice seems to tumble out of him without his awareness or consent, dragging a supernova of realization in its wake.
Dad will kill me, he thinks, and his stomach gives a dry lurch. Dean will kill me, he thinks a second later, and that's even worse.
But Ms. Hashimoto just smiles at him, toothy and white, pleased as punch as she sits back in her chair. "Well that's good!" she exclaims, delighted. "We can work with that. We can work with that just fine."