Title: bury my body where it won't be found
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Adam, Dean
Rating: PG-13
Summary: There's still one Winchester stuck in Hell. Sam and Dean haven't forgotten.
Word Count: 2623
Notes: Covers 5.22 and most of S6.
Warnings: Some gore, Hell PTSD.
The wall holds back the worst of the nightmares. Sam can feel them knocking, searching for a way in. He gets tired, now, like any ordinary human. He gets distracted. His eye snags on a random object - anything from flowers in a garden to a man walking down the street and memory flares up, sudden and shocking as lightning in a dark night, illuminating for a jagged moment the shapes of things better left unseen.
The wall that Death erected won't last forever. Sam knows this. Dean knows this. When Dean refuses to speak of Sam's missing time, to raise any reminder of hell at all—the one his soul had suffered below and the chaos his body had caused above—it's frustrating, all the more because it feels too much like a futile effort to hold back the pent-up water behind a leaking dam, the inevitable already writ large on the wall.
This is the eye of the storm; the brief shelter they had made for themselves. They make the most of it, following the wreckage left in its wake, and when Sam can he fixes things as best as possible. There is blood on his hands; in the black-and-white flickers that return in his dreams he wipes it off and moves on forgetful of regret, even as the latest town and every town shrinks into nothing in the rearview mirror.
This is what Sam remembers:
Falling down the hot throat of the earth together, four beings in two bodies buffeted by the scorching winds from far below. Michael is screaming bloody hatred, curses undercut by the frantic beat of enormous wings. Razor-sharp feathers slice across Sam's face, his throat, their hands which still tangle together like the links of a chain. His brother's hand, his sweat-slick fingers. Adam, are you at home? Sam is selfish, still, especially in his selflessness. He longs for Dean desperately, as fervent and needy as he had ever been, even as a child. But the gate of Hell has slammed shut behind him, and Lucifer is swarming anew into Sam's head, knocking on its walls in rage. His promises curl around the insides of their skull like the coils of a snake. You should not have done that, Sam. We have the rest of eternity to teach you regret, Sam.
Sam shudders, pressing close against the beat of his brother's heart, unable to resist taking comfort in his brother's company, even if Adam is not the brother he truly wants, here with him, as Dean had been together with him in almost every part of his life. A tide of self-hatred breaks over him, that same old song; he recedes with it, letting himself tumble away into the deep, Lucifer riding the wave to flood him with the endless brilliant white of an angel's grace.
Sam asked Dean once, tentatively, about Adam, not long after Death had raised him and the wall was still solid and pulsing in his head, a dead zone where nothing could come in or out. Death had offered a choice, Dean replied, and they both knew that he meant that there had been no choice at all.
Adam, their tragic doomed brother, born of a cursed bloodline, whom they had never truly known. Sam has too many memories tangled up in the idea of family, memories of blood and sweat and tears, of love tangled up with self-sacrifice like the twists of a Gordian Knot. On the road, hunting back to back; words and deeds like the proverbial albatross around their necks. Maybe that was why he'd wanted to drag Adam into the life. You couldn't be a Winchester without being somehow disturbed, knocked out of the ordinary mould by catastrophe like lightning out of a clear sky. It was inevitable, but at least you wouldn't be going down that road alone.
Sam wasn't alone in Hell. But Adam is. The barest whisper of the torment they both went through from beyond the wall is enough to unman Sam, cut his strings and drop him to the floor into the always waiting pit. Dean still wakes up in the middle of the night with terror in every line of his face, taking too long to reassure himself of the border between dream and reality. We're alive, we're free, but it rings hollow, always, no matter who says it or how it's said. It was Hell. There isn't anything that can be said or done to take away the long shadow that still reaches into their lives like a corpse out of the grave.
There's nothing we can do. They have other matters to be worried about at the moment. The Mother of all monsters leading her children on a merry rampage across the country, for instance. The fact that Sam has just killed his own grandfather takes the stage particularly in the latest hits of the screwed-up nature of the Winchesters' family values. Family, or at least blood, isn't as strong as it used to be.
Still, Adam stays on his mind. Dean wouldn't be happy about that, if he knew. Adam is taboo, one of the keys to the many padlocks that shuts Hell away. Adam is the brother they couldn't save.
Sam wonders if they ever had the chance to speak in Hell, come to an understanding. He wonders if Adam hates him now.
They say that the Devil always keeps his promises.
There is no longer any point in it, no grand destiny hanging in the balance. They still battle anyway, brother against brother, deep in the bowels of the earth over a grievance that has lasted since the beginning of time and will likely last the rest of it. No finesse in it, no exquisite torture that breaks a human soul into that of a demon; just pure undiluted hatred and love gone sour with betrayal.
The only thing that matters, the only ends that ever mattered, is about punishment.
Sam is awake for every bit of it; no merciful sleep as Lucifer had once granted him, the silence and the deep shutting off his senses like the smothering weight of the sea. He feels it when Michael digs his hands into the bloody mess of his chest to tear at grace and soul alike without any regard which is which. He feels it when Lucifer sticks his thumbs into Adam's eyes and bursts them one by one with malicious glee. He feels it when the eternal flames of Hell lick into the broken shell of his body and burn his bones black.
When the reddish sky finally darkens in an approximation of night the angels drop their hosts and rest. Time is meaningless, here. There will always be the next morning, and the next, and the next, a long unending tunnel into the face of screaming eternity and the only light that Sam can see is the light of the undying fire. He had chosen this fate for himself, he thought he'd understood enough from Dean's slow, halting accounts of Hell to grasp the depth of this sacrifice.
He hadn't. He still doesn't.
Castiel touches him, a gentle push; that's all it takes to make the wall come down.
He doesn't even know what Castiel had done at first. He only notices that the light has shaded to a low crimson and that it's suddenly grown hot as if he is standing before an open furnace. The wind picks up, tossing bits of debris in his face, howling and shrieking and it is in his own voice, scraping the sides of his throat raw with pain.
The blast rips open his head, splitting apart the half-healed cracks that burrow through him like the roots of an ancient tree. Light dies. Sound dies. The only thing he can feel is the fire, the slow burning beneath his skin, and in horror he knows that everything that has happened was only a fever dream, another of Lucifer's many torments. He had never escaped Hell. He will never escape Hell.
The red sky brightens with the start of another false dawn. Round infinity and one has begun.
"I was in Heaven," Adam says.
His voice is hoarse and raspy, but Sam hears it just fine as if the words are arriving straight into his brain. They might as well be the edge of Michael's magical knife, sharp and shining and cold. He winces with a pain that has nothing to do with his slowly healing wounds, looking at the hand Adam had recoiled from as surely as it were poison.
"Yeah, making out on prom night." He tries to smile; it feels stiff and unnatural, the stretching of reluctant muscles. "I remember that."
There is still crusted pieces of Adam under his nails. Sam puts his hand away.
Adam nods, still staring far away into the reddish glow around them. He had started when his eyes had grown back some indeterminable time ago and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, even to look at Sam and acknowledge him.
"Mom was there too." The knife cuts deeper. "Probably won't ever see her again, though."
God damn it, Sam has to try. "Look, Adam, I'm—"
"Dean's up there, I'm down here." Adam lets out a bitter laugh that turns halfway into a racking cough. His fingers swipe his chin and come away flecked with blood. "Things turned out just the way you wanted, right? So, no, you really aren't."
They pass the rest of the night in silence.
Sam finds Adam in the heart of a tangled jungle, bent over what looks like a growth of bright red fungus clinging to a rotten log. The air is hot and humid, Sam's shirt already sticking to his skin; but Adam seems unbothered, both by the heat and the incessant buzz of the flies in a black cloud around him.
"Adam?" Sam calls, quietly.
When Adam stands and turns around, Sam sees that half of his head is smashed in, a red pulpy mess half-hidden by matted hair and the crawling mass of flies. The one remaining eye is trained on Sam, shadowed and full of an emotion Sam cannot read.
"Hey, Sam," his half-brother says. "Nice to see you finally remember me."
"I've always remembered you," Sam says, not without guilt. Sometimes he feels like guilt will be his default state of being, forever, now that the wall has fallen and left the distorted landscape of his soul bared. He walks now its twisting paths, his every step dogged by dead bodies. Their faces flicker again before his eyes in an endless loop, his own internal gallery of shame.
"No, you don't," Adam says with unexpected gentleness. "You forgot everything, including me...in order to survive."
He takes a step closer, his eye searching for something in Sam's face. Sam stands his ground despite the reek of death that comes off Adam in ripe, heavy waves. "I'm trying to remember," he says. It's the only apology he can think of with any true meaning. "Have you seen any other pieces of me running around?"
Adam waves a vague hand at the overgrown path that continues on as far as Sam can see into the impenetrable green of the jungle. "You might want to look over there."
"Thanks," Sam says, but he lingers, unwilling to leave. There are so many words he wants to say. Perhaps they have been spoken already in the cage, and if so the disfigured image of Adam who stands before him now is a damning testament to just how that turned out. Useless. It was done in the spur of the moment, it was fear that Michael would succeed in stopping him. Those few seconds play over and over again in slow motion, his hand flicking out, catching hold of Adam. Dragging all four of them into the cage together. If only Michael had returned a little while later. Or perhaps a push might have been enough. Sam doesn't know of any certain path but the way it ended: miserably for all involved.
Adam nods at the road. "Go on," he says with an encouraging, grotesque smile. "If you want...you'll find me again at the end."
"You came back," Adam says in wonder.
Sam hadn't wanted to. Lucifer had been full of rage, his grace melting holes into Sam like acid. Even now it feels as though his soul is riddled with thousands of strands of barbed wire. Lucifer curls possessively around him, through him, a dark rumble of mine leaking through whatever passes for an archangel's dream.
"I didn't want to," he admits.
"So why?" Adam's one good eye widens. The other one is lost to the broken mess that is the left side of his face, white bone showing through the ripped flesh. It is slower to heal than usual; Lucifer had had a lot of anger to burn, today.
Sam, I've come to take you home.
Castiel hadn't even paused to spare a glance for Adam. In his defense, battling one archangel was hard enough. If Lucifer hadn't been so weakened by the years of fighting, Castiel wouldn't have lived long enough to get the first word out.
This understanding passed by in the flash of a second. In that second, Sam knew that he had a chance.
"Sam, I didn't mean what I said before," Adam says. He's lying, but Sam knows better than to ruin the moment. "Please tell me you didn't stay on purpose." He sounds desperate and the thoughts running through his head are transparent as day; Sam sees the wreckage of his own body reflected back at him, Michael a perpetual wellspring of twisted self-righteousness and hatred for everything and everyone in the cage. Adam's hands itch with the continual desire to rip Sam apart.
"Lucifer was too strong," Sam says. Even as Adam fills with both relief and the shadow of something darker, his shoulders slumping, Sam adds, "It was impossible for me to go with Cass, either way."
Adam looks at him sidelong, a little wary. "Oh, really?"
The truth is that as Castiel had caught him up, as tender as if he was a child and ascended Sam had looked down and seen Adam below, the pale half-moon of his upturned, pleading face. And just for a second, he'd wished for Adam, to be together with him and wipe that terror from his eyes and mouth—
And at the same time Lucifer had pulled, hard and inexorable as an anchor. Something had to give. In this case, the tie between soul and body. Sam had flailed back to ground zero and Lucifer's loving embrace, while the light from Castiel's wings vanished into the distance and Sam had been unable to decide between horror at what he had just done or relief at Adam's swiftly hidden expression.
"We have to get out together, right?" Sam says. He tries for a smile. "We're brothers."
There is a pause. Adam gestures at both himself and Sam. "In case you've forgotten..."
"We aren't like them," Sam says. "We'll never be like them."
Another pause, one weighty enough to hang lead on. At the end of it Adam nods, reaches out to clasp Sam's hand. He is trembling, a bright sheen in his eye. "Okay," he says. "Okay. We'll get out together. Someday, somehow, we'll show those bastards."
Sam nods, the smile gaining substance as Adam returns it. Small and tentative, it feels like the start of something new. "Yeah," he says. "Sounds like a promise."
"Pick one," Death says. "Sam's soul or Adam's."
Dean hesitates. In the end, though, it is no choice at all.
"Sam," he says.
-end-
Ending Notes: Just needed to get this out of the system first. I mean, Jimmy could be sharing headspace with a bazillion drooling monsters and Adam is being used as Michael's and Lucifer's personal punching bag and they might as well have never existed for all the show mentions them. Gah! Godstiel had better do something about Adam in S7, that's all I'm saying.
Note: a sequel to this has been posted: the freshly turned earth of a guilty mind, set in Season 7. Check it out if you liked this! =)