A/N: This was written for dollarformyname's super-awesome prompt at the latest comment-fic meme at ohsam over on LJ: "When Death re-souls Sam it doesn't quite stick. Every once in a while his soul slips free (maybe after a seizure?), his body walking around being a dick and not sleeping, while he gets to do the vengeful spirit gig for a couple of hours/days/weeks—it can vary—though he's not so much vengeful as disoriented and crazy, given the wall doesn't extend to his spirit form. So you have Dean, who sees all this redrum-on-the-mirrors chaos randomly breaking out around them, and Sam looking unsettlingly determined to banish the completely anonymous—"its identity is really not important, Dean, promise"—spirit that's latched onto him for no apparent reason, while trying to look all souled and innocent and kind of sucking at it. Whether or not Dean figures it out is up to the author. As is the winner."

So I went and made this 1000x angstier and ended up hurting/traumatising Dean just as much as Sam. IDK. But I enjoyed writing Robo!Sam so much, I'm not regretting anything.

Warnings: SPOILERS until and including 6.13: Unforgiven, vague allusions to 6.22: The Man Who Knew Too Much, gore, torture, insanity, weirdness, present-tense, metaphor-abuse.

A Life Less Lived

The first time he wakes up, he is thankful.

Despite what Dean may think, he does know what it is to feel; but he's also smart enough to know how to distance himself from needless emotions. He examines them, breaks them down to their very core so that he can use them to understand how others' minds work—but he will not let anybody else have the same advantage. It's a reasoning that he doesn't expect Dean to understand.

But this time, after an age spent in an endless nothing, he wakes up to light and sound and smell and taste and life—and he is thankful.

"Sammy."

Dean's leaning over him, lips pinched and eyes wet. He's carding a hand through his hair, and it feels incredible. He loses himself for an instant, lets the gratitude and whatever it is that Dean has always managed to inspire in him carry him over to a place that's about the closest to dreaming that he's ever gotten.

That instant is all it takes.

He feels a sharp, tearing pain as he's literally wrenched out of his own body—there's a moment when he's relishing the feel of cold hardwood under his back, the warmth of Dean's touch on his skin, and the next, he's hurling through the nothing again, pushed into the deepest, darkest recesses of Sam's mind, surrounded by fire and blood and endless horror.

The second time he wakes up, he is vengeful.

Dean's not entirely sure, these days, about who's supposed to be the one in danger of suddenly going off his rocker: him, or Sam. Ever since Rhode Island, Dean's been extra-careful in trying to avoid things that seem even remotely like they can trigger Sam's wall's collapse: everything from jobs involving demons (who knows what kind of memories those smarmy bastards can rekindle?) to friggin Dodge Chargers (seriously, he would've done that even without the whole Hell-wall thing). It's when he's sitting at a diner and looking at the rare steak on the neighbouring table and thinking flayed skin and raw meat and endless (delightful) pain that he supposes he might be taking it a little too far.

Sam tells him as much, all furrowed brow and tired, but steady eyes. "I'm fine, Dean," he says. "In fact, I'm more worried about you than me, right now. You're running yourself to the ground."

And that's just it, right? So focussed on the other that you don't give a crap about what's happening to you—the goddamn Winchester Way. It's probably what got them into the unholy mess that they've made of their lives, and it's probably what will keep dragging them further down.

If that means Dean should stop looking out for his brother, however—well, he'd rather breathe ammonia. Or something.

So he just says, "Shut up, Sam," and tries not to think about the steak (peeling away the muscle, layer by layer, exposing the—) until he can't take it anymore and drags them both out of the diner. He tells himself it's for Sam (it's always for Sam), but deep down he knows it's more than that.

(it's always been)

The days roll by and Sam seems okay—he's actually sleeping well, now, and is slowly losing that ragged-around-the-edges look (though that could just be the haircut—Robo-Sam was beginning to grow that mane like a friggin' hippie), and Dean thinks, maybe. Just maybe—the world's cut them a break, and Sam's actually going to be totally fine, for once.

It's probably an indictment of just how monumentally crappy their lives are, then, that Sam manages to collapse in a seizure barely a week after Dean's allowed himself to relax a bit. It's in the middle of a field, nothing but mud and scraggly vegetation for miles around, and Dean doesn't even know anymore, he really doesn't.

So he holds Sam until he wakes up, and thinks about how, for all the things that he can protect his brother from, he still can't block out the vast emptiness of a clear sky pressing down on you until you have no company but your thoughts, or the inexorable passage of time, where every second gone by is another second closer to Sam's inevitable breakdown.

Sam wakes up eventually and lies totally still for a few minutes, just blinking up at Dean, like he's too exhausted to do anything else. Dean knows the feeling; he lets him be.

Dean closes his eyes and listens to Sam's breathing and the sound of the wind and the faint, distant cry of a billion souls crying out in agony.

It takes a lot of effort to make sure that he stays in control—what with his soul constantly flitting around the edges of his perception, screaming and begging and pushing—but it's not like he has sleep or sentiment to distract him. He hasn't clawed his way back to the surface only to let something that's so destroyed that it doesn't know itself, push him back down.

If Dean notices something odd about him, he doesn't show it; he looks pale and tense and stretched tight, but Dean's always been that way, as far as Sam can remember. It feels like slipping into a pair of well-worn boots—him and Dean on the road, some stupid grand purpose driving them on through mile after mile, hunt after hunt, a million unresolved issues hanging between them, cloying in the air until Sam swears he can actually taste them: rotten and sickly-sweet.

Besides, it's easier to play along to the old charade, now: he doesn't know if he's gotten better at pretending, or if Dean's gotten better at denial. He thinks it doesn't matter, either way; he's alive, breathing and eating and talking and fucking, and he intends to keep it that way.

A couple of months after he takes back control, his soul disappears. He doesn't know why, or how, but he thinks good riddance anyway, because, hey, it's one less distraction.

That is, until Dean wakes up one night screaming his name, and every glass object in their room—lightbulbs, mirrors, whiskey glasses—shatter at the same time. The air becomes impossibly cold, and Sam can hear the screaming, high and ethereal and too goddamn familiar—STOP IT PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE—and thinks: not this shit again. He convinces a shaking and confused Dean to check them out of the motel, pronto ("Please, Dean" and those stupid dewy eyes have never worked better) and sits back in the Impala to consider his options.

To be honest, though, there's only one real option left.

If his soul's not going to give up without a fight, then he's damn well going to give it one.

It keeps following them.

Dean is not sure what the hell 'it' even is: a sceptre, a 'geist, some sort of weird hex (stupid goddamn witches, he thinks, just on principle)... it could be one among a million different things they've hunted. And it's not like the monsters these days are sticking to their usual M.O., anyway. For all Dean knows, it could be some sort of twenty-century-old spirit hybrid from frickin Mongolia or whatever, and that's just a conservative guess.

Whatever it is, it won't leave them alone, salt-lines or no. Apart from the usual signs of spirit activity—flickering lights, wonky electronics, the sudden drops in temperature—Dean swears he can also hear voices. They're screaming, calling out his name—Dean please Dean Dean DEAN—and when the screams get so loud that Dean's clamping (a hand over the victim's mouth) his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes shut and just waiting for (it to start begging) it to end, something would shatter, and it would be quiet again.

Sam's pretty even-keeled about the whole thing, which both freaks Dean out and makes him a bit relieved, because Dean feels like he's barely holding on here, and he doesn't think he can handle Sam falling to pieces too, he really doesn't. Sam is insistent on banishing the spirit—it's dangerous, he says, to have something latch onto them like this; sooner or later one or both of them is going to get hurt. Dean figures that's a good point, although the spirit hasn't seemed openly malevolent yet: only confused (and in so much agony).

"Besides," Dean says, "you're the one who's all about letting the dead rest in peace—remember Molly, and Highway 41? You sure you don't want to find out what this thing is, first?"

Sam frowns like he's struggling to remember what Dean's referring to, and his gut twists with unease. "Yeah, sure," Sam says finally. "But maybe this time, we could just skip the investigation and cut to the part where the spirit rests in peace? I mean, we probably don't have much time before it starts getting violent, or something."

Dean's not entirely convinced; not even when the screaming gets more frequent and he's seeing (blood and entrails) things wherever he turns. He can see Sam (sobbing on the rack, drooling blood while Dean slices him open from neck to groin) starting to get impatient: he's trying some exorcisms of his own, Dean's sure—Sam's never one to sit back and hope for the best, never will be, and Dean still hasn't figured out whether he loves him or hates him for it—but they don't seem to be working.

There's a morning when Dean's shaving and Sam's... well, somewhere; Dean doesn't really bother asking these days. The mirror above the sink fogs over and Dean's breath comes out in wisps of cloud. He clenches his jaw, waiting for the screaming (that will stop the moment he tears the throat out) to start, but he doesn't get any this time. Instead, there's only one voice, and it's weak and faint and plaintive and so goddamn familiar—

"Dean," it says. "I'm so sorry. Please stop. Please."

Dean raises a shaking hand and wipes the condensation off the mirror and sees—

—Sam standing behind his shoulder. Sam, bloody and raw, his skin peeling off his face and holding his guts in his hands and saying "Dean, please," like he wants to cry but knows he can't and—

—Dean whirls around, but there's nothing there (of course there's nothing there), but he can still hear Sam, can't he, friggin' whimpering now, just begging for Dean to stop stop please stop—

(and he listens to them plead, not just because it's fun, but because that moment of hope can hurt more than the deepest knife-cut. torture is an art, after all, and he learnt from the best)

"Shut up!" Dean screams and slams his fist into the mirror. He'll be cursing his fit of melodrama later when Sam's painstakingly removing glass shards from his knuckles, but right now his head is spinning and he can't do much more than hyperventilate and huddle next to the sink while his stomach churns with acid.

This is how Sam finds him an hour later, and he doesn't waste time in declaring that it was about damn time that they went to Bobby. Dean doesn't disagree.

Bobby is harder to convince than Dean. Sam understands perfectly; newly-resouled-sap or not, Bobby's not going to forget that Sam tried to friggin' sacrifice him not more than six months ago. He's always respected Bobby's practicality—it's one of the reasons he tried so hard to keep out of Bobby's radar (as far as he could) during the year he hunted with the Campbells.

So, yeah, Bobby's not buying his story of their unexplained spectral tag-along, until he sees Dean spooked beyond belief, his heavily-wrapped right hand cradled against his chest. He tries every test he can think of on them, and Sam just barely stops himself from rolling his eyes and telling the old man that they'd been over this already; that the ghost that's haunting them isn't really a spirit from the dead at all, but the ghost of a living man, as stupid as that sounds.

Sammy apparently has fantastic timing (always was a drama queen), because just as Bobby's shaking his head and saying he can't find any reason something would attach itself to them, the lights begin to flicker and the room gets so cold that frost is crawling over the windows.

"See, see?" Dean cries, more than a tinge of hysteria in his voice. "It's him, again. He's screaming—"

Bobby, who'd been muttering something about how it's impossible for spirits to get in while the house is so heavily protected, looks up in surprise. He's not hearing anything, Sam can tell. He looks to Sam, and Sam shrugs back helplessly—I know, I've tried telling him-although he can hear the screams, too.

"Dean," Bobby starts carefully, but Dean just flinches violently and storms out of the room. Sam nods briskly at Bobby—wait here, I'll deal with this—feels a smidgeon of pride because he's got his Sammy-impression nailed this time, and follows his brother.

He finds Dean in the kitchen. He's sitting at the table, staring at a bottle of beer like it's got all the answers to the universe. Sam settles down next to him, and both of them sit in silence for a couple of minutes.

"What if it's me, Sammy?" Dean asks finally, his voice low and rough.

Sam chews his lip. "What do you mean?"

"I mean this." Dean waves one arm vaguely. "The thing that's following us around. I keep—" He swallows. "I keep seeing things, Sam. Things I did in Hell."

"You can't possibly think—"

"You just saw what happened, Sam!" Dean says. "It got through Bobby's protections. Only I can hear it. It's got to be me, except..." Dean huddles into himself at this point, and Sam figures that this is the moment where he's required to put a hand on Dean's shoulder, so he does. "Except I don't understand, man. I just—I don't."

Sam takes a moment to think about the opportunity presented to him here: Dean actually thinks that Sam's soul is some kind of construct of his own mind. He isn't sure how Dean reasoned that out, but he's seen Dean slowly cracking over the last few months, and isn't entirely surprised.

"I know," he says. "We'll figure this out, Dean."

Dean just bends his head forward and gives a half-shudder that's about the closest Sam's seen to a sob from his brother. Dean's convinced himself that he's gone crazy—which Sam is perfectly okay with; it gives him more time to figure out a way to get rid of his soul permanently, and neatly removes any suspicion that something else might be going on.

"It's okay," he says, rubbing Dean's back gently. "It's going to be okay."

"I'm sorry," Dean says, sounding broken in ways that only make Sammy scream harder.

And that just suits Sam fine.

Finis