Disclaimer: I don't own them, I just like torturing them.
Warning: Includes character death(s). May induce mental warping. May not be safe for Biblical literalists.
Victim of the Game
Dean's body was long gone by the time the doctors let Sam wake up.
He knew Dean was dead as soon as he opened his eyes to see a hospital room, bare and empty, with no sign that anyone was keeping vigil over him. The lone chair was pushed against the wall, holding a bucket full of hospital-issue toiletries so as to leave more room free on the table.
There was only one thing that would keep Dean away.
The night nurse took pity on him, and told him the story that had been the gossip of the hospital for thirty-seven days, about the battered, bleeding young man who had dragged his equally battered brother into the ER; about the story he'd gasped out, his final words stained with blood from a gaping wound in his throat, something half-intelligible about his brother and a wild animal attack.
About the way they'd had to break his dead arms to get his unconscious but still-living brother out of his protective embrace.
The body went unclaimed, of course. But the nurse told him, in the voice of someone who expected him to be grateful, that the hospital staff had chipped in and paid for a nice suit for him to be buried in. In a pauper's grave, in a cheap casket with the county's other unclaimed dead.
Not until then did Sam start crying.
Buried, not cremated. There was no way for him to make sure Dean stayed dead, the way they'd done for Dad, the way Dean would have done for him. He couldn't dig up an entire communal grave.
As soon as he could walk, he walked out of the hospital. The day nurse had told him where to find the Impala—they'd moved it to the staff lot when they realized who it belonged to, another small gift, and one that he actually was grateful for. He drove the car into the night, listening to Metallica songs he despised because it didn't seem right to be in this car without them.
For the first time in a long time, there was no voice muttering in the back of his head, whispering of murder and fire.
When he found a motel and stopped, there were no dreams. No nightmares, no visions, not even a normal dream. Just the peaceful oblivion of sleep.
It wasn't right. He hadn't slept well for two years after losing Jessica. When he'd finally banished those nightmares, the demon began muttering to him, filling his sleeping hours with madness and glimpses of Hell. For the last six months, the only way Sam had found any rest was to swallow a few sleeping pills before bed—and he only dared that between jobs, when he knew the drugs wouldn't endanger him or Dean.
Now his brother was gone and he was getting the best sleep of his life. It wasn't fair.
Six weeks later, when he saw Dean walk into a crappy little diner outside Wichita, Sam thought he was hallucinating. He'd seen Jessica everywhere after her death. Seen Dad for awhile too. It was a normal part of grieving.
Except that it wasn't a hallucination. It walked up to a booth where a blonde was sitting by herself and struck up a conversation, and it had Dean's patented charm-their-pants-off smile.
Nothing undead that Sam could think of was known for flirting. At least, not that well.
The blonde invited it—him—whatever—to sit down—of course she did, because it was Dean, only it couldn't be Dean, because Dean was dead, because there was no way Dean would just up and leave Sam in a hospital in a coma, for fuck's sake, so it had to be a demon (but demons preferred the living, as far as inhabiting bodies went) or a zombie (except he didn't look dead) or a vampire (no, wait, he was stealing French fries off the blonde's plate) or—
Dammit, it couldn't be Dean, because Dean would never—
This was getting him nowhere. There was only one way to find out. Sam abandoned his lunch and crossed the restaurant. "Dean." Dean glanced up, in that absent-minded way he did when his mind was set on a woman—and then did a double-take so classic that Sam almost laughed.
But there was nothing to laugh about; every trace of amusement vanished as soon as Dean—it—whatever recognized him. "Sammy," he whispered. "Oh, fuck."
"It's not nice to let people think you're dead," Sam managed.
"Dead?" the blonde asked suspiciously, looking from Dean to Sam and back again. "Is this your boyfriend?"
Dean muttered something that sounded eerily like, "even dead they think I'm gay."
"He's my brother," Sam interrupted, "and he's supposed to be dead. That's what they told me, Dean, when I woke up in the goddamned hospital after five fucking weeks in a coma! Why did you leave me there?"
Dean looked at him—just looked, the way he had before he finally told Sam the secret Dad had given him—and sighed. "Excuse me," he said to the girl, and stood, grabbed Sam by the arm, and steered him out of the diner. Not a ghost, then. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"I think the guy that's actually still alive should be the one asking that question!" Sam shot back. "Why did you leave me? Hell, man, you left the car! That was the thing that really convinced me you were dead!"
"You needed the car. I didn't."
"Why not?"
Dean's gaze remained steady. "Dead men don't drive, Sammy." He raised his head, just enough to expose the scars on his throat—old and white and healed.
Except that Sam remembered them, remembered watching that demon sink teeth and talons into Dean's throat so deeply that Dean didn't even have a chance to scream before he was dead. No one could have survived.
"I made sure you were safe before I left," Dean said quietly. "They owed me that. You—you weren't supposed to find out this way."
"Find out what? That you're dead? I knew that already!"
"Sammy—"
"No! You're not keeping him!" He stalked across the parking lot to the car, fumbled around in the trunk until he found a gun. Shapeshifter, maybe. Sun was too bright for vampires. Could a demon be that good an actor? If lust was involved, maybe an incubus—but he'd never heard of one possessing someone before, incubi and succubi had their own forms—
"Sam, listen to me—"
Sam turned around. The gun in his hand was the one Dean always kept loaded with silver bullets. He hadn't touched it since he'd left the hospital. "You're not my brother," Sam said, sure of that at least, and put the whole clip into the thing pretending to be Dean.
That was the first time he killed Dean. But the diner was too crowded; he didn't have a chance to drag the body away for burning before people came running to investigate the gunshots.
From Wichita, he drove straight back to the county where Dean was buried and tried to claim the body. No luck.
Oh, he was in the right place. But nobody remembered burying Dean. Nobody on the morgue or coroner's staff remembered him. The hospital staff remembered Sam, and they remembered the car, and they remembered an old story about a guy who brought in his brother and died doing it, but that had happened to a cousin's aunt's best friend's sister, or something.
Whatever had taken Dean must have taken him before they reached the hospital. But nothing Sam had ever heard of would have killed one brother, taken over the body, and then carried the other to the hospital for medical attention. The undead and the demonic just weren't that considerate.
The second time was outside Plano. He ran into Dean at a haunted theater—Sam was there for the ghost, Dean was there for the pretty owner. No warning this time; Sam shot him from a distance and followed it up with decapitation (just in case Dean had turned into some kind of wacked-out Highlander reject) and burning, with seven full cartons of rock salt on the pyre.
Two months later, stuck in Detroit while waiting for the Impala to be repaired, he ran into Dean outside a car show. A few hours later, Sam added holy water and iron to the list of things that didn't work.
He had a separate journal now, dedicated to the creature that he still called Dean because he just hadn't been able to figure out what it was yet. Failed methods, disproven theories, possibilities—they were all there. Ash was working on putting things into a spreadsheet for him. Sam hoped that would let him find the pattern behind Dean's appearances. As it was, he stayed up most nights, choking down pills in a desperate attempt to fend off sleep as long as possible, reading and researching until his vision blurred and his body overruled the caffeine overdose.
He slept less now than he had on the road with Dean. Oh, there were no nightmares, no visions, not anymore. There was nothing. Just sleep, pure and restful and utterly terrifying. He didn't even have normal dreams. He had no dreams at all, good, bad, or otherwise. Not just didn't remember, but didn't dream.
It scared him more than the visions had. The visions he could understand, could fit into the universe. But dreamlessness—no. Everybody dreamed.
He stopped at the Roadhouse in December to wait out a blizzard, ransack Ellen's library, and pick Ash's brain. He spent forty-eight hours bouncing off the walls, a combination of anxiety, cabin fever, and caffeine, before Ellen slipped him drugged decaf in an attempt to get him to sleep.
He woke up a week later. Ellen was keeping a worried eye on him. "Honey," she said finally, her voice breaking, after he read her the riot act about her daring to drug him, about how he had to find this thing and set Dean free and she was getting in the way, "has it occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, this—this could be Dean?"
A bottle of whiskey flew off a shelf. She deflected it with a broom, but the damage was done. He was no longer welcome there, and they both knew it.
Well, it wasn't like he was the first Winchester to get kicked out of the Roadhouse.
Time passed, and the hunt became a game, a slow, tormented, torturous game.
If the promised war had ever manifested, maybe it would have turned out differently. Maybe with that distraction, Sam could have left the creature wearing Dean's body alone.
But it never came.
The number of possessions plummeted in those first six months. The fringe hunters, the ones who still had ties to the normal world, who hadn't pissed off the authorities so much that they had to hunt just to keep one step ahead of the law, were the first to go, slipping back into the normal population unremarked. Those who had taken one too many hits, one too many clawings, began disappearing next, fading into inactivity.
It wasn't supernatural. It was just a crash cycle. A population of predators could only sustain itself so long as there was adequate prey, and once the prey began vanishing...
There was more work, but Sam ignored it in favor of specializing. He ignored demons and anything that had a human catalyst. Nowadays, he focused strictly on the problems of the undead.
One in particular.
Every few months, their paths crossed. Dean was always Dean, with that cocky grin, quick to tease, and he always, always knew exactly what Sam had been up to since their last encounter.
It always ended with Sam killing him. Once he'd shot his brother in anger. Now he shot him, decapitated him, drowned him, staked him, dismembered him twice, all out of love. Whatever this thing was, he was going to kill it, if doing so killed him. He wept as he burned the body, cried himself to sleep if he had to after scrubbing the blood and ashes out of his hair, left motel rooms trashed when the telekinesis got out of control from the sheer emotional overload—but he always made sure Dean was dead.
And Dean always came back.
Sam was beginning to wonder if Dean was letting him win.
In late spring, two years after Dean's death—the first one—Sam tangled with a ghost outside Cheyenne—easy enough job, as it had a very clearly marked grave. No, the problem with it was the bunch of relatives religiously against cremation. They were going to have a fit when they discovered the mess he'd left in the grave. And it serves them right, he thought, trudging up the hill to the Impala. God, he hated the smell of burning corpse. You'd think he'd be used to it by now, but no, it still made his stomach heave.
Dean leaned against the car, waiting for him. "Happy birthday, Sammy."
"You don't get to say that," Sam snarled, walking past him to open the trunk and stash the shovel and gasoline.
"Who does, if not your brother?"
"You're not my brother." He debated the weapons.
"Sam, do we have to have this fight again?" Sam glared at him, and Dean sighed. "Can we at least skip the rock salt this time? That shit stings."
Truth was, there wasn't anything in the trunk that he hadn't used on Dean at one point or another. None of it worked. Not even the Devil's Trap had held him. "Why can't I kill you?" he whispered.
"Well, the fact that I'm already dead springs to mind."
"We used to kill dead things for a living."
"There's different kinds of dead. What happened to little Sammy-Who-Hunts-His-Destiny?"
"Destiny doesn't matter anymore. The war never started." Sam slammed the trunk shut.
"I see. And the demon, it still in your head?"
Sam refused to look at—it. "You know it's not." No, they'd had that fight a year ago at Crater Lake. Right before he wasted an hour drowning Dean, and spent another four making cement overshoes for the corpse. "Why are you doing this to me?"
"All I did was make sure you got to the hospital. Everything since then? That's been you. You're the one chasing me."
"I'm not chasing you." It was half the truth, and they both knew it. Sam didn't actively look for Dean, not anymore, but once their paths crossed...
As far as obsessiveness went, Dad had nothing on Sam.
"Dammit, Sammy, this is me you're talking to. And you know it, and I know you know it because you've killed me enough different ways to eliminate everything supernatural that mankind's ever encountered!"
"I can't let you stay like this."
"And burning me is the answer?" Dean shot back. "Dude!" Tears stung Sam's eyes at the familiar word. "Do you know how much it hurts to fucking burn? I won't even get started on how bad it hurts to reconstitute myself! Shit, the last time you burned me it took me two weeks to find all the ashes, and considering what—well, what with being dead and all, I'm not limited to the old-fashioned methods, you know?"
"You're dead," Sam repeated stubbornly. "You can't feel anything."
"Fuck it all, Sammy!" Dean grabbed him and shoved him against the car. "This has gone on long enough! It's not about you! It never was! Let it go and let me do my goddamned job!"
"Not about me?" Sam asked. It was the closest to an answer he'd gotten in two years. "What?"
"Son of a bitch." Dean let go of him. "I didn't—"
"Dean would tell me."
Dean stared at him a minute. "Put away the puppy-dog eyes before somebody gets hurt, Sam." Sam almost smiled. "It—none of the game was about you. It was never about you."
"The game? That's what—"
"Sorry. It's what we call it here."
"But if it—" Fear, heartbreak, and shock all collided somewhere in the vicinity of his throat. "You," he whispered. "The demon wanted you—"
"No. Not the demon. Demons are—well, they're like people. Pieces in games even they can't understand. They know a little more than people do, but in the grand scheme of things, demons— They can see blurs in bright light, where humans are totally blind."
"I don't—"
"I know you don't, and I'm sorry, Sammy, I wish I could explain, but— Everything we knew about our world and the supernatural, and we never, ever saw the whole game. We never even got a glimpse. And what I am—you wouldn't know what I am even if we had the words to describe it. I want to explain, I do, it's just—there's so much of it, and you're not—"
"Try me! You owe me that, after—after all this!"
Dean sighed. "You're right. And I still hate saying that, by the way." He kicked a rock, watched it bounce under the car. "Sam," Dean finally said, "what was the original meaning of the word sacrifice?"
"This is hardly—"
"Answer me." His voice was hard and cold; it reminded Sam of Dad, the way he'd issued orders without ever thinking what it might cost.
"To make sacred." It must have lodged in the back of his brain somewhere. How fucked up was his life that there was no telling if it came out of lit class or from Dad's journal?
Now he remembered. That demon had been coming at him, not at Dean. "You died to save me," Sam whispered. "You jumped in the way—oh, God, Dean, you jumped—"
"Worked, didn't it?"
Well, he could hardly argue with that flawless logic. Somehow, he'd forgotten just how maddening Dean's thinking could be.
"Anyway," Dean went on, "most sacrifices, these days, they're not pure. Or at least not pure enough. It—it takes a lot to put somebody in a place where they don't even consider their own welfare. A whole lot. Most people at least think, 'well, now they'll appreciate me' or 'this'll show them' or something."
He didn't have to go into more detail. When it came to defending Sam, Dean had never stopped to consider himself, never taken so much as a second to consider the consequences.
"Everything, down to putting you in danger from the yellow-eyed bastard—it was to put me in that spot, Sam. They wanted me. And when they told me that—well, let's just say letting me back long enough to get you to the hospital was the price for me leaving their interfering asses intact. Since then..." He ran his fingers over the scars on his throat, and shrugged. "I wish I could explain everything. But you wouldn't understand it if I tried. Humans just aren't made for that kind of information."
"You understand it," Sam said, stung.
"I'm dead," Dean reminded him, "it's not going to kill me if my brain fries. This—" he made a vague gesture that seemed to indicate his body "—it's not me, it's just what I need to interact with the game."
"You sound like you're not part of it anymore."
"That's what being dead means. Usually it just means your time in the game comes to an end, though. People like me—" He stopped, and shrugged. "Look at it this way, Sammy. Somebody has to set up the board."
"People who sacrificed themselves."
"Yeah."
Sacrifice.
To make sacred.
To make sacred.
"If you use the word angel," Sam said softly, "so help me—"
"Angel?" Dean laughed. "Shit, Sam, I look like an angel to you now? How hard did that demon throw you into the wall?"
For the first time in forever, Sam answered one of Dean's remarks with a smile. "Five weeks unconscious."
"Pretty hard, even for you. See any wings?"
"No, but—"
Dean took a deep breath. "Angels aren't high enough on the ladder to be sacred. What we call angels—they're pawns. Hell, below pawns. They're dust mites. Dust mites with harps and tacky footwear."
Sam had never been as grateful for the sheer solidity of the Impala as he was then, when his knees gave way, dumping him unceremoniously into the dust.
Dean must have read his thoughts. "Oh, no, not that high, not nearly," Dean said, with a chuckle; he knelt next to Sam and kept him from toppling over. "There's a lot of rungs between angel and god. I'm just a board-setter trying to do my job, and I can't. Not with you killing me every time you see me. I need you to let me go."
"Dean—"
"Please, Sammy. I like the idea that somebody remembers me."
"I'll always—"
"Not if you can't let go."
"You can make me forget?"
"If I have to. If it keeps interfering with the job. The game— I'm gonna have to spend a lot of time around here the next few years. I can't accomplish anything if you kill me every five minutes."
"Dean, I—" The tears were starting again. He desperately choked them down.
"Not to mention, I'm getting really, really sick of salt and fire." Sam had to smile at the familiar exasperation. "I have to finish setting up the board, Sammy. I've got a tight schedule here. There is a war coming, centuries from now, and if you don't let me work, none of the pieces will be in place when it comes."
"Why is the scheduling so important?"
Dean gave him another little grin. "Well, the next—ah—person I'm meeting is supposed to get married in a couple of years, but if she doesn't have the kid soon, he's not going to be in the same grade as her future husband's kid and they're never going to meet and the kid's going to grow up to be a psychotic. Now, you want that on your conscience?"
Sam wasn't sure he followed that sentence. He wasn't sure he wanted to follow that sentence, because of what it implied. "You mean—you're—"
"Most of us have different jobs. Lot of assassins. Some rearrangers, a couple of oracles. I'm the first one to get this gig since Gabriel fucked it up. Virgins are strictly off-limits these days." He shrugged. "Face it, Sammy—there were only a few things I was really good at. And they don't need me to burn bodies, shoot demons, or scam credit cards."
"Oh, hell."
"That's what we're trying to avoid, actually." Dean stood and dusted off his knees. "Now. We got a deal, Sam? I do my job, you move on?"
Sam used the Impala to pull himself back to his feet. "This war—is it the same one? The demon war?"
"There was never going to be a demon war," Dean told him. "The yellow-eyed demon was a pawn in a bigger game, same way we were. It— Christ, this makes me sound arrogant, but it was all about recruiting me."
"Mom? Dad? Jess?"
"I'm sorry, Sammy, but—yeah. Everything was part of the game. Including all the hell we went through."
If this was supposed to make him feel better, it was failing. Miserably. "How far back?"
"Farther than you'd ever believe. Time's not the same from this side of the board. You see more."
"How far back?" Sam asked again. "Mom meeting Dad? Our grandparents?"
"You're about three thousand years off."
Three thousand years. Millennia. "You were right," he said finally. "I don't believe it."
"Told you."
He sounded disappointed. "Dean, I—"
"I don't have—"
"How much of this is choreographed, Dean?"
Dean studied him for a long moment. "It all is, Sammy. There's no such thing as coincidence, just plans you haven't been able to figure out yet."
"Levels of the game."
"See, I knew you'd understand more than most people could. My boss said I should just wipe your memory and leave."
"You still don't listen."
Dean grinned. "Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I'm not still me."
"I don't find that reassuring."
"Didn't think you would. Sam, I really need to—"
"One more question." Dean gave him a look. "I'll shut up. I'll move on. I'll never kill you again. Just—you let me think you were possessed. You owe me one more."
"Okay, okay. Shoot."
"Did you take away my dreams?"
"You hadn't had a decent night's sleep in six years, Sam. Did I overdo it?"
"No dreams at all? You think?"
"Yeah, well, you know me. I worry." He grinned. "Want the nightmares back?"
Sam grimaced. "Those you can keep."
"Thought as much. Take care of yourself, Sam."
There was finality in those words. "You have been letting me win, haven't you?"
Dean smiled. "Bye, Sammy," he said, and then he was gone, vanishing into the breeze like a ghost.
Sam's suspicions were easy to confirm.
The blonde in Wichita had a daughter. So did a woman who worked at the car show in Detroit. The theater owner in Plano had twin boys. There were a half-dozen more, scattered throughout the country, along the route he'd chased Dean down these past years. Dean hadn't bothered with aliases, so each birth certificate listed a Dean Winchester as the father. Sam supposed that he'd quit worrying about the cops now that he was dead.
Setting up the board. Putting the pieces in place.
But he'd promised he'd move on, and let Dean do his job.
In Arkansas, he found the grave where Dean was buried. He burned the Dean-killing journal over the grave, a final silent farewell, and drove east, toward the ocean.
At night he dreamed without nightmares for the first time in nearly a decade, and the sleep healed.
the end