kind of coda to Thin Lizzie, but can be read as stand alone
title taken from Locked into It by Rue Royale (give it a listen while you read)
"I uh… I don't feel much of anything anymore."
That catches Sam's attention.
He stands up from his crouch and rises to his full height, towering over Len. Sam even tries to put his most menacing look on, but Len remains unbothered.
"I'm not scared of you," Len says defiantly, sounding like a petulant little kid.
"Yeah, well you should be." Dean walks into the hotel room and crosses over to Sam, handing him a gun filled with rock salt. "You don't wanna deal with an angry Sam," Dean smirks when he says it and Sam tries to return the grin but it doesn't really meet his eyes.
"So soulless, huh?" Sam makes sure their backs are turned to Len and checks his gun with unsteady hands.
"Apparently that's Amara's play. She eats 'em all, she grows, simple as." Dean's reinforcing the salt lines on the window and his face is tight, hardened lines of anger.
"Nothing is ever 'simple as', Dean." Sam sighs and turns back, wondering if Amara's connection with Dean makes him immune to the whole soul-sucking business. Sam sure hopes so, but just because Dean has a connection with her, doesn't mean she'll be sparing Sam from anything.
He sighs again, cracks his knuckles, and shakes his limbs out. It's ok. He's ok. When Dean's not looking, he rubs a hand across his chest and squeezes his eyes shut, just to make sure.
Sam's ok though. Sam's ok.
—
"You ok?" Dean asks through a bite of burger and with a mouth so full Sam's surprised he can even chew.
"Jesus, Dean, I get you don't give a shit about what you eat, but at least close your mouth when you chew," Sam says it without bite and without meeting Dean's eyes. He leans back into the booth and crosses his arms just so Dean won't see how much his hands are shaking.
"Sorry mother" Dean laughs and wipes his mouth with a napkin, crumpling it up and throwing it at Sam. It misses and falls in Sam's barely eaten salad. Dean's face falters but Sam's happy the conversation is going anywhere except how he feels.
Sam guesses he doesn't even react to Dean throwing the stupid napkin because next thing he knows, there's fingers snapping in his face. It makes him want to flinch but Sam's fine, so he doesn't. He's fine, and people who are fine don't make things like someone snapping their fingers a big deal.
"You didn't answer the question, bitch."
At this point, "Are you ok?", is the most pointless thing you could ask a Winchester. When are they ever ok? There might be a primordial entity who's in love with Dean and who's definitely going around sucking people's souls. By all lines of logical thinking, and Sam doesn't want to make this about him, but he could get his soul sucked right out too. So no, neither of them are 'ok', and Dean should know by now that whatever answer Sam gives him isn't going to be an honest one.
There it is anyway though, Dean's way of roughing up the question and making Sam feel not so scrutinized. He asks the question so casually, it at least gives Sam a minuscule sense of comfort. Maybe not everything's screwed. It totally is, Sam's mind supplies. He doesn't need his big brother to hold his hand though, and the kindest Winchester questions have always been asked through a layer of 'I don't care'.
Ironic as it may seem, when his brother goes all gentle and soft-spoken, Sam knows someone's screwed the pooch. Dean is loud and crass and uncaring about almost everything. Sam's the empathetic one of the two, and sometimes he wonders where he got that from. Certainly not from either of his parents. Dean was the most important person in his life growing up, yet they're nothing like him personality wise. Sam knows that he would never want to look up to someone like himself, not in a million years.
A phone rings and Dean picks up.
Sam's fists unclench at the thought of avoidance, and he rubs his chest like it's a sport.
—
"I feel weird."
Both Sam and Dean turn to look at Len, then back at each other.
"Weird how?" Dean asks, eyes locked on Sam.
"Like something's hatching inside of me. Something dark… With wings"
Sam feels his heart picking up its pace and he licks his lips nervously. Dean mouths something to him along the lines of 'I told you so!'.
"What?" Len asks, shifting forward in the backseat of the Impala.
"Nothing." It's said casually as if it doesn't matter.
"You looked at Sam like- You guys know what's wrong with me!" Len shouts and starts to get up, reaching over for the door when Sam and Dean both climb out of the car. Dean handcuffs him to the Impala and pats his hand gently.
"Hey!"
"You don't have a soul, Amara sucked it out" Dean deadpans, and Sam gives him a thousand yard stare.
Len considers this and decides it must make sense because he simply says, "How do I get it back, my soul?".
"Generally, you don't" Sam replies, and what was Dean thinking.
—
"No more waking up screaming from nightmares, no more flashbacks. Amara took away the pain." The babysitter lets down her shirt, hiding cig burns, and waves the gun around, monologuing to the room as if she's always wanted to.
If Sam didn't already know that being soulless turned him into a cold-blooded killer, then he'd be curious about this whole soulless thing. If Sam didn't already know that being soulless not only made him forget about the bad things but the good things too, then he'd be curious. Except Sam remembers most of that awful year when he'd really rather forget.
She called Amara a goddess.
The babysitter shoots, and Sam's suddenly on the ground, curled into himself, patting his chest down to feel for a gunshot wound. There's nothing there, and he feigns relief when Dean glances over at him with turbulent eyes.
Sam expects another shot to come, but it never does. Instead, the sitter stops moving and her eyes go glassy.
"Holy crap." A voice gasps from behind her and Sam recognizes it all too well.
With blood spurting out of her chest, the babysitter topples over, crashing into the ground. Len stands in her place, a bloody ax in his hand, red liquid plastered over his jacket. Sam scrambles up to meet him and Len turns robotically toward him, arms rigid.
"Woah Woah, let's put this away." Sam grabs the ax and lowers it to his side, hand shaky shaky shaky. Len is still staring in awe at the site of a dead body, and Sam throws the ax, quickly discarding it and jogging over to Dean.
He unties his older brother and fumbles over the thick rope as if he hasn't done this a million times before.
"Why didn't you move when she was about to shoot again?" Dean asks, voice thick with something Sam doesn't recognize. He wants nothing more but to hurry and get the goddamn ropes untied so they can get Len out of here and then drive as far away as possible.
"Shock I guess." Sam's answer is short, snipped. He finally undoes the bindings and helps Dean up to his feet, wiping sweaty palms on his jeans and wondering if Dean bought his answer.
It's not that he wanted to die. He swears he's over that, the one-way road leading to death. He swears he's over it. It's just Sam knows what the end game is, and he'd rather be rotting six feet under than even entertaining the idea of it.
Later when they Len upstairs, he says to Dean, "What kind of person can murder, and feel nothing?". Dean doesn't reply because he can count exactly, on one hand, the number of times he's done it, and he was never soulless. Sam wipes his nose out of reflex as if expecting a nosebleed. He hasn't been killing any demons lately, so he's confused when muscle memory moves a hand up to his face.
They take Len to the police station and get back in the Impala with steely determination. Sam leans his head against the fogged up window and wonders if Rowena knows any spells to wipe certain memories. Even if he had the balls to go ask, he knows what'd she say.
"Sam Winchester, you don't deserve to forget."
—
There's a spattering of scarlet freckles on his face.
When the girl on the ground writhes in pain and begs for help, he crouches slowly in front of her, crookedly grinning as the life seeps out of her and into the wet earth. He knows exactly where he cut her, places where he knows she'd bleed out the slowest. He leaves the needle with dead man's blood buried deep in her jugular vein, making sure she won't move until she dies.
When he got there, it didn't take long to kill most of her soon-to-be nest. Now there's only two left. The leader of the nest, and a teenage boy. He hasn't even been fully turned yet, and he can still be saved.
Sam doesn't plan on saving anyone today.
"Please. I know there's a cure. I know there is, I've heard people talk about it. Please. Please" The boy is crying, slow tears tracing trails down his face, cutting paths through dried blood. There are deep scratches under and around his eyes, and by their angle and depth, Sam can tell they were self-induced.
Sam abandons the dying leader and ignores her weak hiss. He ambles over to the boy and pulls up a rickety metal chair from the table beside them, turning it over and plopping down on it.
"Ezra."
The boy stops his whimpering for a second and looks up with shaded eyes at the man in front of him.
"I talked to your parents to find you. I needed clues." Sam swings the machete around in his hand and wipes harshly at the blood trickling down from his hairline into his eyes. "You're a devout Catholic aren't you?" Sam continues, and the words have the desired effect.
"You did something wrong, huh? That's how you ended up here, that's why they took you." Sam's just making shit up now, but the words are doing their job. The kid looks like the devil's standing in front of him, tempting him with promises that can never be fulfilled.
Sam has a burning curiosity blooming inside his hollow chest. He guesses if Dean figures things out, he'll find out what the devil really looks like. Some part of him knows, but not this Sam. This Sam could stare the devil in the eye and stay rooted to the ground.
"I didn't I swear. I didn't" The kid's sobbing again, his voice going up in pitch each time he utters something. Sam doesn't let up though.
"Am I going to hell?" Ezra asks, his eye twitching enough to make Sam split into a grin. He whispers it low and broken, voice cracking. Those'll be his last words.
"You're going to wish you were."
And with that, Sam slashes his own wrist open, shoving it into the boy's mouth. Ezra's half turned. His eyes go wide as saucers and he bites Sam's wrist, sucking up as much blood as he can before Sam kicks him away, letting the boy fall onto his back with a loud scream.
Sam's work is quick after that.
He grabs the kid and drags him to a metal closet where the vamps used to keep their blood supply. It's empty now. The boy is weak and ravenous, making it easy for Sam to throw him into the dark, confined space. A needle with dead man's blood. A sprinkle of ashes to hide his scent from other vamps. Lock the closet.
It'll take less than a week for the boy to die. A long, antagonizing week where he'll slowly starve to death.
As Sam's walking out, a feeble hand grabs his ankle. It's the leader, and there's a little smile on her face. She looks truly happy and that makes Sam angry. Why is she happy?
"Thank you."
"For what?" He spits because this is not how things were supposed to go.
"I'm going to die, but I don't mind. I don't mind…" Blood runs down her mouth and pools at his feet, mixing with dozens of other leaking bodies in the warehouse. "I don't mind, because you left me nothing to live for anymore." She sighs and closes her eyes gently.
With a clean cut, her head rolls down the uneven ground, and Sam leaves with a scowl on his face. Some half-assed story convinces a wasted Dean that everything went well, and there's nothing but satisfaction rolling in Sam's gut.
He doesn't want his soul back, ever.
—
"So you think she's just gonna keep munching on souls until we gank her?" Dean's voice is hard to hear through the spray of the shower but Sam's can understand well enough.
"Um…"
Sam sits outside the bathroom, the door only cracked open enough for voices to pass through. His knees are pulled up to his chest and he twiddles his thumbs fast enough to nauseate him. The vampires were almost six years ago, and he's buried that memory so deep, that when it comes back, it's like remembering for the first time.
Once, in the early hours of the morning, he went back to that warehouse. It was in the area of their hunt and the road signs kept on reminding Sam of something. He wasn't sure of what, but his feet dragged him into the building and to the metal closet. The chain locking it was broken and a dead boy slumped out of it, half of him already turned to bone.
Sam dry-heaved until he couldn't breathe and then he went for a run, pumping his legs until he couldn't feel them. He stopped at some park and collapsed on the grass where a concerned runner came and sat next to him, instructing him through breathing exercises. They planted a firm hand on his back and asked if they should call anyone, all the while motioning for him to stick his head in between his knees and just breathe.
He wondered if he smelled like death and sadistic murder.
"You got any thoughts, or am I just talkin' to myself?" A voice snaps him out of reliving distant memories, but it's too late. Tension wraps around his rib cage and his head pounds too much. His insides rattle and his breath comes in quick, pained bursts.
"I…uh…" Fuck, he needs to control himself. Dean already has enough shit to deal with, he doesn't need his pansy-ass little brother having a melt-down on the floor of a motel room.
"Sam?" Dean sounds worried. Sam thinks he shouldn't be worried. Sam's ok. Sam's ok. Sam's fine.
"Gimme a sec-" Breathe. Breathe. He sticks his head in between his knees and squeezes them together like a vise. He can't get his soul taken again. He can't. As soon as Dean's out of the shower Sam's going to beg him to do the impossible.
"She takes my soul, you shoot me. Point-blank, right in the head."
Counterproductive as it is, the pressure on his head lets him breathe a little easier. It always helps to put things into perspective. He's one person out of the seven billion in the world. Dean can find someone else. Dean can shoot him. (Sam knows Dean will never shoot him willingly.)
The shower must have turned off because Sam manages to hear the rustling of clothing and the squeak of feet on wet tile through the gallons of blood pumping in his ears. Then, "Sam, for the love of God- Oh."
Sam runs a hand through his hair then squeezes his head as hard as he can, nails digging into his hairline. There's a hand pressed to his mouth hard enough to bruise.
"Sammy?"
A body plops down next to him on the shaggy motel carpet, and all Sam can say is, "Please. Please talk about something else. Talk about anything else."
Dean knows what he has to do somehow, and the thick desperation in Sam's voice scares him, so he leans his head against the wall and begins to blabber, going on and on about anything but Amara.
"I don't care if it's a good memory or not," Sam's voice crackles from in between his knees. "Most of those are tainted anyway."
Dean's eyes flick from his little brother to the ceiling, and back again.
"Ok. Ok." Is Dean's reply, and Sam briefly wonders if Dean knows that there's nothing he can say to make him feel better. At this point, that'd be a signed contract with a reaper saying that Sam's theirs for eternity. Winning a million dollars is more likely than that ever happening.
So Dean starts, "South Dakota, way back when. I was 17, there was some Shrooms, a stripper, and Bobby came in to save my ass at some point…"
It'll end. That story will end, unlike most things in Sam's life. It will end and he'll stand up and say he's fine, and Dean will nod toughly, pretending as if this has never happened before.
It'll never end because Sam Winchester doesn't deserve to forget, so he rubs his chest just to make sure.
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