Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me.
Death ripped the souls out of her all at once. One bright flash of light, sixty seconds of screaming, and then—then there she was, lying unconscious on someone's rug a couple hundred miles from help, and Sam only had a second to realize what had happened before Death grabbed her and Deanna and dragged them away. Dragged them back to Bobby's house, dumped them and left. Within the hour. Deanna found a hunt.
For two months, they hunted like that. Deanna jumped into the fray with everything she had. Sam followed. The memories of Hell bleeding into her head kept her up at night, though she couldn't remember a time when she could sleep without nightmares. And hunting helped. It gave her something to hold, something to control, something to unleash her pain and anger on. So she worked out her memories, and her sister worked out her broken heart, and they ended up with a few more cuts and bruises.
Then Sam got a call.
Hospital. Little Rock. A young woman had been brought in. She'd been wearing nothing but a torn, blood-soaked trench coat with a phone number and the name Samantha Winchester.
It was three in the morning. They were fourteen hours out.
They arrived in Little Rock just after noon. Sam drove.
Deanna looks like crap.
Her hair was singed a week prior after she decided running into burning, poltergeist-infested houses to save some limited-edition Star Trek plates was a reasonable decision. Sam likes the change; her sister looks cute with short hair, no matter how much Deanna insists it makes her look like a dyke. Sam doesn't point out that Deanna's so butch it hardly makes a difference. And with deep circles under her eyes, a paler-than-normal complexion, and the fact that she's shaking uncontrollably… Sam's pretty sure she's not the only one who hasn't been sleeping lately.
"Samantha Winchester?"
Sam reluctantly tears her gaze from her sister and blinks up at the nurse. He's wearing pink scrubs. Her expression softens. "Sam. Yeah," she says, standing. "How is she?"
"Sam. I'm Anthony," the nurse says, flipping through his clipboard. "And first things first. The patient's name?"
"Castiel," Sam says.
"And your relationship?"
You're not my family. I have no family.
"She's my—she's our sister."
Anthony gives them a sympathetic look, practiced but not insincere. "Your sister's in bad shape," he says. "She was brought in half-dead from starvation and dehydration and she's suffered multiple broken bones and internal bleeding. She's stable but sedated. Does your sister have a history of mental illness?"
"Yeah, you could say that," Deanna mutters. Sam glares at her.
"She recently went on a… drug binge," Sam explains. "It changed her."
"Runs in the family."
"Deanna!" Sam kicks her ankle. "I'm sorry, Anthony. She's—we've been really worried. And we drove all night. Can we—can we just see Castiel? I promise we'll answer all your questions, but we have to see her."
"I don't," Deanna says, so softly Sam barely catches it.
Sam can't breathe.
It's Cas, only—it's not. The woman lying in the hospital bed is some twenty pounds lighter at least; her dark hair is brushed away from her face, which is still covered in burn scars underneath all the stitches. Her arms are wrapped in bandages. Her lips (cracked, bloodied, scarred) move in soundless whimpers. She's human.
"Where—who found her?"
"Group of women coming home from a spa day found her collapsed on the side of the highway wearing nothing but a dirty trench coat and a vast array of injuries. Defensive, offensive, self-inflicted."
Sam's stomach drops at the last. Self-inflicted. Deanna looks like she's either going to cry or throw up, but she does neither—just clenches her fists and digs her short-trimmed nails into her palms.
It takes three weeks before Sam decides Cas is stable enough to move. They keep her on the sedatives. Deanna bitches at Sam the entire way back to Bobby's. She can't understand why Sam is doing this, not after Cas lied to them and broke down the wall in Sam's head. And Sam lets her sister rant, lets Deanna poke and prod and shout about how they should have just left Cas in the hospital. Her questions are rhetorical, anyway—they both know why Sam is doing this. They both know Deanna would rather die than leave her angel in some hospital to waste away. It doesn't need to be said.
Bobby's not too thrilled about it either, but Sam won't budge, and in the end Bobby gives in. He constantly asks her what she plans to do when Cas is up and about. What if she's human. What if she's demon. What if she tries to take the souls back. What if angels come for her.
Sam doesn't want to think about it. She doesn't know. She doesn't care. Cas is family, and she's not the first Winchester to make the wrong choices, and Sam is going to save Cas.
Deanna spends most of her time away. She hunts with Bobby for nine days before he returns half-collapsed to the salvage yard and informs Sam that her sister is trying to kill him. After that, Deanna meets a pretty blue-eyed brunette in a bar and takes off with her for three weeks. She calls Sam one night, a little before 4 a.m. She's drunk, and she raves semi-coherently about how she took a nice, pretty, innocent girl and taught her to kill. Deanna laughs like she's dying. Sam puts the phone on the floor and stares and stares.
Sam spends most of her time in the panic room. She gradually takes Cas off the sedatives, coaxing her gently back to reality while the former angel screams and jerks in her restraints. She babbles endlessly in English and Latin and Enochian and a million other languages, probably, most of them long dead. She hallucinates horrific beasts, she tries to claw her own skin off, she lies still and cries quietly and begs, please, please, please. Sam doesn't know what she's praying for. Cas probably doesn't, either.
Sometimes she's lucid. That's the worst. Hallucinations, seizures, the constant gut-wrenching screams… Sam can help her through those. She can stroke Cas's hair and whisper I'm here, I'm here, So's Deanna, We're here. But when Cas is lucid, she looks into Sam's eyes with such sadness, such resignation. She doesn't talk—but then, what could she possibly say? Sam tries. She kneels by the cot, holds Cas's hand, smiles at her. She knows Cas thinks it's a lie.
"Why?"
Sam sighs. She's curled up on the floor next to Cas's cot, her head resting on the mattress. Cas is watching her, head tilted up as much as the restraints will allow.
"Why what?"
"Why did—why did you come for me?"
Sam slides her fingers through Cas's. "The hospital called me. You had my number in your pocket."
"Ah, yes." Cas drops her head back and stares at the pentagram on the ceiling, watches the fan-blades vibrate behind the trap. "So I did."
Sam's thumb draws tiny circles on Cas's palm.
She's well enough to be let out of her restraints. Cas is still mostly confined to the panic room, but it's not because anyone's forcing her. Sam's the only one around anymore. Bobby's set up a second residence in one of his sheds and barely comes to the house. Deanna's still hunting with her barfly. It's Sam and Cas and the panic room, except when they go upstairs and sit at the table and stare out the window.
One night, Cas leans over and kisses her. Sam kisses back.
"What about Deanna?"
"What about her?"
"You love her."
Cas considers this, staring at a spot on the iron-and-salt wall behind Sam's head, tracing a blood-drawn sigil with her gaze. "I suppose," she says. "Once. But we change, Samantha. We all change."
"And we all can change," Sam says quietly, and she kisses Cas again.
Cas isn't forgiven. But that's okay. Neither is Sam.