Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.
A/N: I've been wanting to write a tag to Soul Survivor for a long time now, and it finally came to me. I know other ideas have stemmed from the question of 'What if Sam hadn't ducked?', but I'd like to share my own take on that question. So, I thought that this might make a good (angsty) Christmas present for my readers. I hope you enjoy it.
Cas looked haggard, with the shadows beneath his eyes and his wrinkled trench coat. His disheveled hair and pale skin. Despite that, he looked relieved. His shoulders slumped and he leaned against the edge of the nearby table. For a moment, he thought Cas might collapse into a boneless heap on the ground, but he stayed upright for the most part.
"Dean…"
Dean was… confused, at best. He remembered facing Metatron. He remembered telling Sam he was proud of them as he slowly stopped registering the world around him in any meaningful way. After that, he…
He was a demon. He died, and the Mark made him a Knight of Hell. The memories were foggy, but when he thought about them, they cleared.
He spent months hanging with Crowley like they were best friends and killing people who (probably) didn't deserve to die. He partied and drank and went to strip clubs, all while letting Sam believe he was dead. No, not dead. He left a note.
He left a fucking note like it would be enough for Sam to be told not to look for him. Of course, Sam was going to look for him. Crowley said that Sam had been readying to sell his soul to bring Dean back, and he didn't care. He was a demon, and he didn't give a shit about… about anything. He would've let Sam sell his soul for whatever he wanted. He wouldn't have given a shit about Sam damning himself.
A splash of water brought him back to the present, and he glared at Cas, spitting out the droplets that had gotten into his mouth.
"I had to make sure it was you."
"Well, it is," Dean said. "Where's Sam?"
He remembered Cole, and his willingness to let Sam be tortured and killed by a stranger he might've crossed paths with a decade ago. Yeah, maybe he promised to get his vengeance on Cole… if they ever encountered each other again. But he hadn't been about to go out of his way to help Sam.
Despite being forsaken by his brother, Sam hadn't given up. He was determined to find a way to save Dean, but Dean didn't want to be saved.
Or Dean didn't know that he needed to be saved, though he could've guessed if he gave the wilting bits of humanity left inside him any thought. Life was easier as a demon. He didn't feel regret. He didn't feel the anger and self-loathing that built up over years of failed hunts and mistakes and victims dying unnecessarily. To be blissfully numb of all of that, well, Dean wasn't complaining.
He tried to get up, but his wrists were still tied to the chair, which he noticed was centered in a Devil's Trap.
Cas looked away, his head drooped to avoid Dean's eyes.
"Cas?" Dean asked. "Cas, where's Sam?"
He had to be somewhere. The best case scenario his mind offered was that Sam had played a large role in curing him, and it drained him to the point that he needed to rest instead of waiting for Dean to return to his human senses. Possibly, he had been exhausted to the point of passing out, and Dean could make fun of him for fainting later.
"I'm sorry, Dean."
Dean chuckled a bit, trying to hide the pit that was growing deeper and deeper in his stomach. "Sorry for what?"
"I wasn't fast enough," he said. "Sam wasn't fast enough, either."
The memories that preceded being cured of his demonic affliction flooded his mind.
He spun the handle of the hammer around in his grip, savoring the balance and anticipating the moment it made contact with bone and flesh. He was happy with his weapon choice. The knife would've been too clean. Too quick. Too merciful.
"Sammy," he called. "C'mon. Don't you want to spend some time with your big brother? I know you've been looking for me. Well, here I am."
An endless stream of taunts left his mouth as he walked through the halls of the bunker. It was all just a game for him, and he knew how it would end. Sam wouldn't kill him. Sam wouldn't send him back to Hell.
No, Sam didn't have many options available to him when his end goal was to cure Dean, who didn't want to be cured.
He heard the security alarm begin screeching throughout the hallways and the emergency lights flashed red. He was trapped, but that didn't bother him. Not at all.
He spun the hammer in his hand by the smooth handle in his grasp and chuckled under his breath, a sound that, if he thought about it, was foreign and sinister to his ears (something that might have concerned him as a human, but not anymore). There was a darkness in him, and he was ready to fully embrace it.
He was trapped, but Sam was trapped with him. It wasn't what he expected from someone running away from him. For a smart man, it was a dumb move on Sam's part.
Dean moved through the bunker, his footsteps echoing in the empty halls. He wasn't trying to hide from Sam; Sam knowing that he was coming was part of the fun.
"No, Cas," Dean said. "That can't… I didn't…"
Cas pressed his lips into a thin line, looking down at the floor instead of at Dean. Looking at anything other than Dean.
Sam tried to reason with him, tried to cut him with Ruby's knife, but Dean wasn't the type to reason these days. Reasoning required thinking, and he was more than happy to let his instincts and desires drive him rather than logic and thought. It was easier this way.
And now he was finally putting Sam out of his misery. It wasn't like Sam liked their lifestyle. He never wanted to hunt or be taken way from his idea of normal. And Dean was finally getting rid of the one loose end from his human days. He didn't want to be cured, and Sam didn't want to give up on curing him.
He was solving both of their problems. Two birds with one stone. Or in this case, one hammer.
He brought the hammer down with enough force to crack through Sam's skull, and he savored in the feeling when the bone gave way and collapsed under his force. The crunch was music to his ears. He removed the hammer with a little effort, bits of Sam's brain still clinging to it, and brought it down again.
And again.
And again, until Cas stopped him with two fingers pressed against his forehead while he was too focused on Sam to notice him and a pair of handcuffs engraved with spellwork to contain a demon.
"I wasn't fast enough," Cas said again. "Sam wasn't fast enough, either."
"But you got there in time to fix him, right?" Dean asked. "He's just in his room resting, isn't he?"
There was a note of desperation in his voice that hadn't been there in a long time, longer than he could remember. Although, enough happened in their lives that it might have always been there, if not at the same level of intensity.
"There wasn't anything I could do. I wasn't strong enough to heal the wounds he had."
"No," Dean said. "You're lying. He's fine. He has to be."
Because if he wasn't, there was no one to blame but himself.
"Sam is dead," Cas said. "I'm sorry. I knew that he wanted to cure you more than anything, and he had everything prepared to do so. I knew I could at least finish what he started."
Dean didn't say anything in reply. The numbness and apathy of being a demon let him escape the horrors of his life. He escaped the guilt. The sorrow. The loss. The hopelessness.
And now he was thrown back into a world that left him drowning in those feelings. He was left drowning in self-loathing, unsure that he'd ever be able to look at himself in the mirror again.
Sam was dead.
He killed his little brother.
He burned Sam on a Tuesday, Sam's least favorite day of the week for reasons that Dean never really understood. Now, it was Dean's least favorite day of the week as well. Every day was his least favorite day because he was more alone in the world than ever before.
He didn't bother burying Sam. He figured that no demon would want his soul, and he was out of other options for bringing Sam back. So, he wouldn't be needing a body anytime soon. The least Dean could do was give him a proper hunter's funeral. If anyone deserved one, it was Sam. The man who saved the world with only a handful of people knowing the sacrifice he made to do so.
The man who saved Dean, only to be rewarded with death.
He stood and stared at the ashes long after the fire stopped burning. Any evidence of his brother's body was gone, and he would never see Sam again, even if he saw the damage he'd caused to Sam's head every time he closed his eyes. He knew that once Cas first gave him the news, but it hadn't sunk in.
Sam was gone, and he wasn't coming back.
Dean let the tears fall. He didn't even bother to wipe them away, no one was around to witness his display of emotion. He didn't say anything, not seeing a point in doing so. Sam wouldn't hear him, and it was Sam who was better at putting his thoughts and feelings into words and conveying them eloquently.
He asked Cas to let him do this alone, and Cas had left to work on one last piece of Sam's unfinished business: removing the Mark of Cain from Dean.
If Dean was lucky, that would end with his own death.
Sam's ghost couldn't be in the bunker, and Cas confirmed that it wasn't still in The Veil or in the bunker, but the halls still felt haunted. He looked over his shoulder constantly, trying to find the pair of phantom eyes he knew were watching him.
In truth, he knew that he wouldn't find anything in the bunker. No ghosts (Kevin was a special circumstance) or supernatural entities, other than Cas. Supernatural objects, sure, but the place was so warded that he rarely worried about being attacked while there. Unlike Sam, who'd not known the bunker as a place of safety at the end of his life.
With a sigh, he took his cup of coffee from the kitchen table and headed back to his own room. What was the point of sitting at the table if he was alone?
He stopped in front of Sam's door. He hadn't opened it since he burned Sam's body, but he passed it on a daily basis, the door always closed. That way, he could almost fool himself into believing Sam had shut himself in on the other side.
He could fool himself into believing that he still had a brother.
Not that Sam would want to be his brother after what he did. Hell, Sam probably would've wanted to cut off contact with him and run off to find his own way in life.
No, that wasn't true. He knew that Sam would forgive him, even if he didn't deserve it. Well, he hoped Sam would forgive him, but he knew he wouldn't deserve it.
He placed his hand on Sam's door. There was an untouched world beyond that slab of wood. Maybe Dean would get around to sorting through Sam's belongings one day, but he didn't think that day was in the near future. It wasn't like he could bring himself to throw out any of Sam's things.
Maybe he'd let it sit as it was instead. Let it be a relic of the man who once claimed that room as his own, touched only by dust and time. Yeah, he liked that idea better.
He balled his hand into a fist, knocked it against a door that would never again be answered, and continued into his own room, the bitterness of coffee seeming like nothing more than hot water to his taste buds.
Cas did it. He really did it. As Dean looked at the unmarked skin of his arm, tracing the place where the Mark used to be, he couldn't help but break into a smile at the thought that Sam would've been so happy to see this.
And that same thought wiped the smile from his face in a mere second. Sam wasn't around to see it. He hadn't been around to see Dean cured of being a demon either.
The relief of being freed from his curse was short-lived, and Dean felt a new evil fill the air, something darker and more ancient than anything he'd encountered in the past, including Lucifer. Every instinct told him to run, and he did. He left the shitty basement where Rowena worked under their supervision with the Book of the Damned (and how could Cas have thought that was a good idea?) and went outside.
The wind blew around him in wicked gusts that threatened to knock him off balance, and the same lightning that erupted from his arm when the Mark was removed struck the ground in several places with violent snaps of thunder accompanying each strike.
This was bad.
This was really fucking bad, and he was pretty sure that the approaching storm couldn't be escaped, but he hopped in the Impala anyway, the one thing that still felt like a home when he didn't overthink it. He jabbed the keys into the ignition and tried to get on the road before things really went to Hell, but a wave of deep grey and black swirling smoke was encompassing the city and headed towards him much faster than he'd be able to get away.
So, he curled up on the seat and put his arms over his head to protect it, hoping that he could withstand this new storm they'd unleashed by removing the Mark of Cain.
After his world faded to black and the Impala rocked and shook under the force of unnatural winds, everything stilled. He opened his eyes and saw a woman in a field in a clearing that seemed protected from the swirling clouds of madness around them.
He woke up on the outskirts of the city, the woman's voice mixed with his own echoing in his head, but he couldn't convince himself that it was just a dream.
He'd thought that would be the end. He'd confront Amara with a mess of souls stuffed in his body to the point that he felt like a nuclear reactor, and then he'd be blessed with death and be able to start working on earning Sam's forgiveness in their shared Heaven.
He was okay with that.
He wanted that.
But, as always, Dean Winchester did not get what he wanted. No, he helped Chuck and Amara sort out their differences. They went on a divine vacation, and dumped him in a forest in the middle of Who the Hell Knows Where.
Amara's last words repeat in his head. What did she mean about giving him what he needed most? What did she know? They might have had a connection, but there's only one person who could ever understand Dean better than he understood himself.
Footsteps rustled the grass off to his left, and Dean made a sharp turn on his heel, ready to confront any threat he came across.
Only it wasn't a threat. Standing on the edge of the treeline of the clearing that Dean was dropped off in was Sam.
It was Sam. Alive and… Alive and not dead, and Dean's mind couldn't think past those two concepts.
"Sam!" he called.
He wasn't sure that Sam had seen him before that point, or if Sam knew what was going on (Dean sure as hell didn't), but he knew without a doubt it was Sam. What shapeshifter would want to take his shape, and it wasn't like there was flesh left for a ghoul to consume.
"Sam!" he called again.
Sam's name felt foreign on his lips, but he was glad to be able to say it to Sam, something he thought he'd never do again.
He moved towards Sam slowly at first, stumbling and staggering in his disbelief. Then, he rushed towards Sam in a jog that was closer to a run.
Sam didn't move. He stood still and stared at Dean with wide eyes, but Dean couldn't read his emotions or what he thought.
He failed Sam when he was ten and let a Shtriga get to his vulnerable, sleeping brother.
He failed Sam at Cold Oak, when he was a handful of minutes too late to save him from being literally stabbed in the back.
He failed Sam at Stull Cemetery, where Sam fell into a pit with Lucifer because the only way they had left to fix the mess they made meant sacrificing Sam to an eternity (supposedly) of torture.
He failed Sam after The Trials, when Sam almost killed himself because he thought Dean didn't need or want him around anymore. He thought that closing the gates of Hell was the only useful thing he could do anymore. And Dean repaid him by allowing a rogue, lying angel to possess him, despite knowing that Sam was ready to die.
He failed Sam by accepting the Mark, which turned him into a demon.
He failed Sam when he killed him in the place they were supposed to be able to call home.
There were too many times that he failed Sam to count, but he could finally start making up for them with Sam right there.
He wondered if Amara knew how much this meant to him, to be able to see his brother again. To have his brother back. She had to know, right? After all, she said she would give him what he needed for giving her what she needed.
It was the first time in a long time that he felt a little lighter, a little less burdened by the weight of guilt and sorrow on his shoulders.
He closed the distance between him and Sam, arms wide and ready to pull him into a bone-crushing hug that he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to release Sam from. He reached towards Sam, finally close enough to grab him and never let go.
Sam flinched away.
A/N: Maybe not a merry Christmas story, but here's my Christmas gift to the readers who support me throughout the year and keep me writing, even when it feels like an insurmountable task to get a new chapter done. I look forward to a New Year filled with stories, imagination, conversation, and community.
This is a story that I'm willing to revisit and expand upon in the future, though I'm uncertain when.
Merry Christmas!