A/N: I've always thought Sam has OCD, if only in a very minor way. This exaggerates what I see as canon, but just slightly. It takes place in Season 3, sometime after Mystery Spot (that episode is just...gah so awful why are the writers so evil sdfdjslfj). Anyway. Enjoy the angst. :)
Sam has never liked messes. They'd always put a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, twisted his insides, made him feel like somehow the world was malfunctioning.
But that was just it: the universe was off-kilter. When he'd first learned about entropy in school, about how the things tended toward disorder, he'd felt a little sick. No, that was an understatement—he'd been goddamn nauseous. Because didn't that mean he tended toward it, too? It had to; he was part of the universe, after all.
Early on, he knew he couldn't let that happen. Messes were what happened when things got out of control, and Sam was a master of control. Even if he didn't have a say in any other aspect of his life, in where he lived or went to school or what he did for a living, disorder was something he could prevent, eliminate. So he distanced himself. He organized, compartmentalized, listed, fixed, scheduled, counted, and above all cleaned.
As a teenager he would vacuum and dust and wash dishes and iron clothes in any temporary living space when his father and brother weren't looking. He'd lost sleep staying up to scrub at that one spaghetti stain on the carpet, to stand beneath scalding water at two in the morning and burn away the imaginary remainders of dirt and grime from a hunt days earlier (a hunt he hadn't wanted to go on). At Stanford he kept his side of the dorm room squeaky clean, nothing on the floor, dirty clothes in the hamper, post-it notes in a certain order on his bulletin board. His handwriting was meticulous and his schoolwork was checked and re-checked in an endless effort to achieve perfection.
And none of these things were seen as anything more than the actions of the rebellious son, the organized brother, the model student.
The only person who ever noticed Sam's peculiarities was Dean, and even he didn't seem to think it was very strange. Once, having caught Sam up at midnight, cleaning the kitchen counter in an apartment (the eighth apartment of 1998, but of course he didn't tell his brother he knew that), Dean had simply given him an appraising look and asked, "Need any help?"
Sam wasn't sure whether there'd been any double meaning there, but Dean hadn't let on if there was. He'd just taken a towel and asked what still needed cleaning.
Of course, he shouldn't have assumed he'd be able to hide it forever. But it had seemed to get better for a while, after Stanford. Dean had come along and made a mess, almost intentionally, clothes jumbled and unfolded, dirty things mixed with clean, preoccupied with food and beer and sex, and when they were on the road, just the two of them, Sam had started to forget about trying for perfection. He'd focused on revenge and hunting and finding their dad – and more recently, on keeping Dean out of hell.
But the mystery spot, the trickster, they'd...changed that. His brother had been dead for six months, and he'd been able to do nothing about it. And with no one around but himself and a very messy, messed up world, well. He had to control something. He'd become meticulous and unfeeling and structured, almost inhuman.
And now that he finally has Dean back, it's not like it can all just go back to normal. After all, his brother is still on what looks to be a one-way ticket to hellfire. He'll be gone again. In a way, nothing is different.
He tries to hide it. Hell, does he try. He confines himself to what Dean calls his Sammy quirks, folding his clothes and making his bed and setting his alarm and organizing his toiletries and eating his rabbit food and religiously cleaning the weapons. Occasionally he'll risk a slightly-longer-than-normal scalding shower, even if he's already clean, just to relish the sharp sting of the water on his skin, beating the message into him: You aren't going to let him die. Not again, not this time.
He hopes that Dean doesn't notice that something isn't quite right (that, somewhere in the midst of his desperation to control the mess around him, Sam has begun to lose control of himself). He's afraid of what his older brother will think, how he'll see him if he finds out. And he tells himself he's imagining it when Dean looks at him a little too long after he wipes an Illinois diner table clean, as he quietly counts the tiles of a Colorado grocery store floor when they stop for lunch and beer. He tells himself the worry in his brother's eyes has nothing to do with how often he washes his hands, or how many times a day – how many times during hunts – he has to grit his teeth and force himself to breathe because everything is so dirty and chaotic and wrong.
It doesn't always happen, of course, but when it does, it lasts. The sick feeling doesn't go away until he has flipped the universe right-side up, reestablished order by cleaning and organizing and measuring out careful quantities of chaos until balance is restored. And as long as Dean doesn't say anything, Sam remains convinced that his brother doesn't see him fighting away the off-kilter parts of reality.
Eventually, though, it's unavoidable. For both of them.
There's just too much red. They've just gotten back from a hunt, their twelfth of 2008, an eighty-year-old ghost of an eleven-year-old girl. And it is the fifteenth day of March and Sam is twenty-four years old and the motel bathroom faucet is dripping one, two, three, four times each second and the soap stings, it stings a lot, but his hands are still dirty and red, bloody, so bloody, under his fingernails and where did it all come from anyway, it wasn't there earlier, there hadn't been blood, it was just a ghost, right? Sam?
Sammy?
I'm fine, Dean, he calls through gritted teeth, through the haze, registering that his brother is there and yes he knows he's been in here washing his hands for far too long, but he can't just leave with all this blood, all this evidence of the truth, red hands sore and dirty and—
No, you're not. Either unlock the door or I will, Sam, I'm serious, right now—
And oh god it's Dean's blood isn't it it's his blood it's my fault I did this to him I'm what's wrong I'm unclean—
I'll knock down this door if I have to—
Clean I have to get clean this is chaos this is wrong everything is wrong—
"Sammy!"
And suddenly it's like a barrier is broken.
"Shit, Sam, stop! Just stop, okay? C'mere." He is yanked away from the sink, his hands held up carefully under the light. "Scratched yourself to all hell. Your hands aren't dirty, Sam. They're not. You need to stop this."
He looks down, and it hits him suddenly that the red, the blood, is his own doing. He'd scrubbed and scratched at his hands so harshly with his nails that he'd broken the skin in places.
When he looks back up, he finds that he has nothing to say.
Dean's gaze is painfully understanding. "You gonna stop doin' this? It's controlling you, it's not good. I've noticed; I'm not as stupid as I look." After everything, somehow he isn't surprised that his brother knows. Some part of him had already acknowledged it. "Huh? Sammy, come on."
"Yeah. Yeah, I'll stop, it's nothing."
Dean raises his eyebrows, and Sam looks down again.
"Hey. We'll fix this. I know not all if it's this bad, but dude, come on. At least let me clean the guns sometimes."
Sam swallows thickly through a small smile. Always more observant than I give you credit for.
"I mean, this isn't you, man. You just gotta let things be sometimes. Not everything's perfect, split into pieces like a goddamn pie. Be a rebel, eat a burger every once in a while. Mix your damn laundry. Let things be dirty, if they want to be."
He finds himself grinning, chuckling. He should've known. Dean knew all along, had been trying to help all along. He has under a year to live, and he's trying to help Sam. Strangely enough, it's more comforting than worrisome. After all, the universe needs balance. And for someone like Sam to have the chaos that is Dean Winchester in his life, intentional mess or not...well.
Need any help?
Just stop, okay?
It's controlling you, it's not good.
We'll fix this.
Evidently, he's all the better for it.
And he's going to get Dean out of the deal, so it's not like this is the wish of a dying man, or something. But maybe he doesn't need to control everything all the time. Maybe he can do what Dean wants, for once. At least try.
They are brothers, after all.