Sam enters the room, wincing with the creak of the door. Gadreel's memory informs Sam that the space should be tidy, or near enough. The bed should be made. There should be a tower of books on the bedside table, precarious only because of the number of them. Kevin's dirty laundry should sit in a box by the door.
Now, there is no box. Nor a stack of books, instead an untidy pile.
Months have seen the room accumulate clutter. Papers tacked to the wall with neat cuneiform on them, pages printed from websites and scholarly articles taped onto those, and the floor has books upon books upon books, all dog-eared and written in. There are more spiral-bound notebooks than Sam will have time to sift through soon. All the dirty laundry has been stuffed under the bed, the only space left, and Sam picks his way over to the unmade bed, stepping on books a couple times despite his best intentions.
He collapses onto the bed. For a moment, he sits there in the slight indentation Kevin left. Sam's breathing is the only sound now, and maybe the mess is Dean's. Maybe Dean came in here after burning the body, and—who cares? Kevin is gone. It was Dean that traded Sam's life for Kevin's.
Sam grabs Kevin's pillow and buries his face into it, a scream caught in his throat that won't come out, and maybe the pillowcase smells like Kevin, like salt-sweat and skin, and the scream scrapes his throat almost raw in its desperation to escape, so he pulls his face from the fabric to suck in air. Kevin's scent will fade to dust, soon.
Chest heaving, Sam drags his gaze over the clutter again.
Almost obscured by yet another pile of discarded books, two orange pill bottles are still capped. Sam reaches out, and pulls them both off the bedside table. Something hot curls in his gut. He twists off the first cap, to find the bottle half full of green pills. The second, a third full of blue.
So Dean was supplying Kevin with drugs. Still.
Sam clenches his jaw as the pills rattle in their bottles, because these are what Sam has left to shake, and he blows out a long long at Kevin had always been like looking into the worst sort of mirror.
It's no different now, and it's too late to confront Dean about supplying a minor with drugs.
Maybe—maybe if Sam had been here, he could have—have helped, somehow. With the translating, with Dean, with Cas, with Kevin, with everything. Sam traces the threading on the musty quilt with the pad of his finger. Did Kevin curl beneath it, hunched in on himself, like the layers of fabric could protect him?
Not that it did any damn good. Not that Sam did, either. (Which, shit. Sam dragged control of his body from the brilliant bright star of Lucifer. Saving Kevin from Gadreel should have been easy. So so easy. And instead—)
The last time Sam spoke with Kevin, it was under that Satanic billboard, with the world spinning spinning with the Trials. Part of his cleansing. All the time after Kevin came to the bunker belongs to Gadreel. Any time that Sam might have had with Kevin before—before, Gadreel stole that, too.
The door opens before Sam throws the pill bottles into the mess on the floor. Castiel stands in the doorway, illuminated by the dull lamps of the hall, his expression set like marble. If he notices the bottles Sam's hand, he doesn't mention it. "I believe I have found records that may be useful in our search, Sam," a pause, where he shifts, shoulders stiff, "If you feel ready."
Sam sucks in a breath—no, no, he's not ready, wasn't ready to fail somebody else, to say goodbye to yet another person he should have protected. A chill at his nape raises gooseflesh across his returned skin. He shifts, but it caresses him again, an icy finger at his neck, makes him shiver. "Yeah. Yeah. Let's—I need to find Gadreel."
Castiel leads Sam to the library, and the chill is gone.