Sure, Gabriel was an asshole, but not so much of an asshole that he deserved to end up like this, broken, bloody, cowering at every shadow. I almost felt sorry for him.

Ketch had gone to the kitchen, typical. Sam had gone to get supplies to patch up Gabriel. Also typical.

I followed Sam to the med room. "I should probably call Cas, tell him Gabriel's alive. Get him back here to lay some mojo on him," I said. Then Cas could babysit Gabriel and Ketch while Sam and I went to rescue Mom and Jack. "What he's gonna think when he sees him, though..."

Sam flinched. Like I said, Gabriel was an asshole, but he didn't deserve to be a whimpering mess. If I was this close to feeling sorry for him, I could imagine what Sam was feeling. Probably a lot more than just a flinch.

Well, we'd open that rift, get Mom back, get Jack back, get almost perfect back, and Sammy'd feel a whole lot better.

"Where'd Cas say he was going to be?" Sam asked as he started opening drawers and searching cupboards.

"Last he checked in, he was following a lead through Missouri. He thought maybe our old pal Luci-"

He flinched again. Sam flinched. It seemed familiar, somehow. A familiar motion. Like I'd seen it a lot, sometime or other. Maybe it was more than Sam feeling sorry for our wingéd friend. Maybe it was a muscle spasm or something. "Sam? You okay?"

"I hope we've got scissors small enough to cut through those threads without cutting into his lips. They're sewn in pretty tight."

His voice – because I listened – sounded normal. But while he talked he searched and didn't look at me.

And totally didn't answer my question.

"Sam?"

He swallowed. He dug around in the drawers and cupboards some more.

And I realized why that flinch was familiar when he answered me in a whisper so low I almost couldn't hear him.

"That's what I looked like in hell."

"What?"

"Yeah, uh, I, uh, when the wall fell? And I was stuck in my head with Soulless-Me, and me, and Hell-Me? That's – that's what Hell-Me looked like. Not with the – the –" he gestured to his mouth. " – of course. But the rest of it. That's what I looked like."

My blood pressure just about shot out through the top of my head. The wall? The wall that Cas destroyed on purpose and nearly killed Sam? All those flinches from all those months of all those hallucinations? I wasn't just going to call Cas, I was going to reach through the phone and drag him to the Bunker and make him answer for every unanswered –

Sam kept talking, whispering, and interrupted my plans for retaliation. "It's just – at night, still, sometimes, I still, I can still -" He closed his eyes, shook his head, swallowed once or twice and turned that bright shade of pale that all our lives had me hurrying for a bucket before he hurled over his shoes.

But he shook his head again and cleared his throat and went on like he'd never said anything remotely hellish.

"Here, good. I found a scalpel. I can cut the stitches without digging into his lips."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

"Yeah." He rounded up a few more supplies, and went back out to the library.

Where Gabriel waited, a broken, bloody, cowering, shell.

That's what I looked like. I still see it.

I couldn't take Sam through that rift with me. Seeing Gabriel so destroyed had overwhelmed him. What if we found Mom that way? Or Jack? What if we found them in a worse way?

No, I needed to find Mom and Jack now, there was no time to waste. The sooner we got them back, the better everything would be. But Sam couldn't come with me. I couldn't risk that we'd find Mom or Jack in that condition or worse.

I couldn't do that to Sam.

He had to stay behind.

The End.