Summary: Codas to different parts of 7x02. And speculation on 7x03. Four scenes.
Author's Notes: How was it? My most heart stopping moments were when Sam nodded that he was seeing Lucifer and told Dean that Lucifer said he was the illusion. He looked like such a little kid, trying to be strong but wanting his big brother to make it right. And Dean's phone call to Bobby hurt in all the right ways. Looooooved it.
Warnings: Beginning masochistic!Sam, general insanity
Four Times
(In the Warehouse After Dean Finds Sam)
Making his decision quickly, Dean grabbed Sam's hand while he was distracted by an apparition all in his head. He was already sick with the idea of what he could use to ground Sam, but he carried on anyway, pressing his thumb over the tender wound. Sam hissed and squirmed, but Dean kept talking, kept holding on.
Dean tried so hard not to think about. Covering everything with booze and bravado, but he'd been top of his class in Hell for ten years. He knew how sometimes, whatever soul he was working over on the rack, would beg to be hurt. To just let the pain be physical for awhile instead of torturing their mind. In order to keep going. To cling onto their fading humanity a bit longer.
Dean hadn't really understood it. Pain was never a relief to him. The only thing close to that had been saying yes and getting off the rack. Though some had needed it.
But this was Sam. Sammy. And yeah, Dean didn't like to think about it.
The second time Sam tried to pull back, Dean let him, still trying to talk him down. He wasn't expecting Sam to continue on; hadn't meant for him to. But it did seem to be working. Sam's eyes stayed on Dean for longer and longer periods of time.
Dean kept eye contact with Sam. Somewhat because he thought it would help if Sam could see his eyes, mostly because Sam was digging into his hand so much harder than Dean had been willing to and he didn't want to see the expanding circle of his brother's blood.
For better or worse, Dean had been the one to set Sam on this particular path.
Getting the call from Bobby saved Dean any lengthy philosophical thought. They were off and Sam was moving under his own power which was more than Dean had dared hope for at one point.
Dean could handle replaying some of his own memories of the Pit. Calling on some better-left-forgotten skills. What he couldn't endure was ever admitting to himself that learning just how to hurt people in certain ways and showing Sam one of them may have just saved and destroyed his brother while he stood there and watched.
(After Dean Calls the Ambulance)
Fifteen minutes out. Too long. Too long. Too long.
"Sammy?"
Dean crawled an inch closer, as much as he could manage without passing out, and shook Sam again. The shaggy head lolled bonelessly and Dean quickly switched priorities. Reaching down, he grabbed Sam's wrist, trying to find his pulse, but he was shaking badly and he'd never been good at finding the one at the wrist for some reason.
"Sam."
Dean called again, fingers on Sam's neck. He felt a small bit of weight lifted off his shoulders at the beating. And then barely, a miniscule flicker of Sam's eyelashes caught Dean's attention and he redoubled his efforts.
"Sam? Sammy? Hey, hey!" Dean grabbed Sam's chin and turned him so they were face to face. He pressed his hand to the side of Sam's face and started shaking him again. "Sa-"
Dean drew back in horror at the blood on his hand. Sam was bleeding from his ears. This was not good. What had that thing hit him with? The last thing Sammy needed was another blow to his already mangled head.
"Sammy? Sammy….Sam…?"
There were other minimal signs. Sam's fingers twitched a bit, his eyes opened just enough for Dean to see they'd rolled back, only the whites visible. And all at once, Dean started to unravel. That breakdown that had been looming, but pushed into storage in light of Sam's own departure from reality.
Dean had lost Cas in the worst possible way. He may have lost Bobby. And now Sam? He couldn't. He just couldn't. Dean kept his sobs as soft as the whispers he kept chanting Sam's name in, only half aware he was even doing it.
"Sam. Sammy. Sammy…"
With a hand curled around his brother's neck, fingers pressed hard into that pulse point, Dean finally lost it. Everything narrowed into the rhythm under his fingers and the imperative need to do whatever it took to keep that beat going. Dean sobbed and prayed to a seemingly unconcerned god for two things. Let his brother come out of this alright,
Or let Dean go with him.
It was the only way it worked. Ever. He wasn't letting go again, not after that fall into the Cage. Not again.
When the paramedics arrived those never-ending fifteen minutes later, Dean scratched and bit and clawed like something wild as they peeled his hands off of Sam, slid his brother out from under what little protection he was still able to give him.
None of the well-intentioned voices made it through and Dean thrashed and screamed out his promised vengeance on them up until he was rolled into the ambulance a foot across from Sam. Until the paramedic with them in the back got smart and grabbed Dean's hand, placing it on Sam's arm. Only then was there coherence. Everything snapping back into focus.
Sam's head was lolling weakly, eyes far away as Dean called his name again and again and swore that there was something there that recognized him, that knew Dean was with him and that he had somewhere to come back to.
"I'm here. I'm here, Sammy. It's okay."
When his brother started seizing, Dean just held on tighter.
(Bobby Arrives to Bust the Boys Out)
Dean had been in the process of maneuvering his leg onto the floor, even though it hurt like hell, and detaching his IV.
"You might wanna keep the IV, kid. I'm thinkin' you're gonna need those painkillers."
Dean was shaking before he even looked up. He didn't think he could physically handle another full-body cry like in the scrap yard, but god that voice made him want to.
"Bobby." His voice was cracked at the ends and the older hunter's preset gruff expression softened immediately. The way he only did around Dean and Sam and would deny till his dying day that it ever happened.
When Sam and Dean had arrived to that burned out shell of home, the only home they'd ever had with four walls, Dean had felt the last visages of hope vanish as the minutes went by, not turning up any sign Bobby had escaped.
He hadn't been dramatic. If there was no Bobby and it was just Dean with a damaged and steadily declining, suffering Sam, he'd have driven right off that pier. And he knew Sam wouldn't have argued, would have been glad and thankful for the reprieve.
But here was Bobby, dressed in a suit, hair slicked back into respectability, eyes tearing a bit.
Right in front of him.
Bobby smiled and raised an eyebrow, trying for exasperation.
"You didn't really think a race of ancient monsters lighting my place up would take me out, did you?"
Even though it had turned out John Winchester hadn't been an invulnerable superhero, apparently Bobby Singer was.
"Okay. Okay, then we get outta here and hightail it to Jim's old place." Bobby scowled and leaned against the wall closest to Dean. "What?"
"I don't think it's gonna be that easy. Nothing with us ever is. 'Specially you two."
But Bobby always had a plan. For him to be bereft of one at the moment meant he'd had one going in and it had already imploded.
Dean's heart sank.
"What? What happened?"
"Sam woke up once already."
Dean steeled himself.
"Was he…?"
Bobby nodded grimly.
"Yeah. Bad." Dean slumped, the relief at Bobby's survival obliterated in the face of dread and fear.
"Right now they're chalking it up to the head injury." Bobby tapped his own head as an illustration. "But that's not gonna last. Screaming about the Devil isn't something that's generally looked on as normal in these kind of establishments." Bobby shuddered, clearly unnerved. "And he didn't stop screaming till they knocked him out. They've already got him tied down."
Dean's head snapped up, dread replaced with burning anger for what had been happening to his brother while he was drugged up.
"I know. I tried. They said it's for 'his own protection'. Guess he really freaked out in there. Managed to redo some damage to his hand."
Dean groaned.
"Dammit, no. They stopped him?"
Now Bobby was the confused one.
"Well, yeah. Kid was tearing into his own wound, Dean."
"It's what's keeping him grounded right now, Bobby." Dean registered that Bobby looked vaguely horrified, but found he didn't care. No one could know what it was like. No one except him and Sam had ever made it out still human.
Besides, after the initial instinctual recoil, Bobby seemed to understand to a degree. And really, Dean appreciated the first reaction because it meant that Bobby loved them enough to balk immediately at the idea of them hurting, let alone doing it to themselves.
"We'll get him out, Dean, but I gotta get you outta here first. They'll let you sign out, even if it's AMA. Won't happen that way with Sam unconscious. And if he does wake up before we get him out-"
"They'll bury him behind so many locked doors and warning labels we'll never get another clean chance."
Dean was already half into the shirt from the bag Bobby's brought him.
"Let's go get my brother."
(Bobby Breaks Sam Out of the Hospital)
Sam was trapped. Sam was strapped down and in pain and everything was fuzzy to the point that he couldn't see beyond colors.
But it was alright, he thought. Or at least it would be. Sam was hurt. So Dean would be by shortly to set everything back in order. It's what he did. Healthy or not, they followed each other into the deepest waters time and again; always forgoing a life vest because it would slow them down too much and they just didn't have that kind of time when they were separated.
The boys had been taught from a young age that when someone's drowning and struggling so hard to stay above water, that they're going to pull you down with them, you have to make a choice. Either let them drown…
Or drown with them.
It was a choice the boys never found difficult at all when it came to one another. Dean would be here. Sink or swim.
"Sam?"
But that wasn't Dean. Bobby. It was Bobby. But that couldn't be right because something had happened to Bobby.
It wasn't Dean. It was the man who had been more of a father to them than their own in the end.
A man that was dead.
And that meant Sam was too. Which meant Dean wasn't coming.
Ever.
"You hear me, boy? I need you to stay with me. Car's running right out front."
And Sam, despite knowing the truth of this deception, really wanted to hang onto it awhile. But the energy and focus he needed to do it…
What Bobby wanted, dead or alive, real or not, mattered to Sam.
But the voice calling for him wasn't Dean. Would never be Dean.
So Sam let himself drift. Just a little longer.
Stealing every moment before Lucifer got bored again.