"I was twelve going on thirteen first time I saw a dead human being." - Stephen King, (The Body, aka: Stand By Me)
Sam had been just a kid when he saw his first dead body. He'd seen it through the fogged-up glass of a window because neither his father or brother would let him out of the car. The guy lay on the pavement in a pool of blood, his head smashed open like a pumpkin the morning after Halloween. It took Sam a while to realize the pink, gooey, substance lying there on the highway was what remained of the dude's brain. His stomach had rolled queasily. He'd watched his father pull out a phone and heard John's low voice talking to the 911 operator. The unmistakable sound of puking came from the other side of the car as Dean lost the battle to keep his breakfast down.
Sam had been thirteen, Dean seventeen. They'd both seen some horrible things, but none of it had prepared them for the sight – and smell – of fresh human road-kill. The guy had been struck and killed by a car as he walked along the rural road in the dark. The Winchesters had simply been the ones unlucky enough to find him come daylight.
Death and its foetid aftereffects came with the territory. When Sam was old enough to join his brother and father on Hunts he would come to learn that spirits sometimes did not wait centuries before manifesting. He lost track of how many graves he dug up, how many newly dead corpses he had burned by the time he was eighteen. It never got any easier - the sight, the smell, and sometimes the eerie moaning sound of air escaping past decaying vocal cords. Sometimes you won the battle over breakfast, and sometimes you lost. There was no shame in it. Death was never easy, nor pretty. It was a prominent part of the Hunter's life, but even witnessing it again and again and again a thousand times over could not lessen its horror.
Sam was twenty-three when the ugliness of death invaded his personal space. It came in the form of his father's corpse, more than twenty-four hours dead and already reeking of decay. When they'd lit John Winchester's funeral pyre the flesh sizzled and popped as it melted away from the bones; meat still fresh enough to cook, like pungent, rotten bacon. It was an all-too-familiar sound. They'd experienced the smell too, many times before. The stench of death often clung to them, permeating their clothes, their skin, their hair. It was difficult to eradicate. Sam sometimes wondered if any of Dean's conquests ever caught the unpleasant odor of eau de la morgue beneath their handsome lover's cologne.
"It's just an empty shell," Sam had told himself. He knew it to be true. He was a Hunter. He dealt in spirits. This rotting corpse, burning to ash before him, was not his father.
Only...it was. Sam could not make the distinction between what he knew and what he saw. He was no longer the outside expert come to offer assistance. He had taken on a starring role in the tale.
Dad...
Dean scattered the ashes into the wind over a wide stretch of empty prairie, not even bothering with any sort of eulogy, or even to mark the location when it was time to go. Sam had felt betrayed by it all. It was difficult for him to walk away. Perhaps that was why he'd insisted they visit their mother's grave not long afterward. He'd taken John's dog-tags and buried them there. Mary's body had burned too, and so had Jessica's but their remains were never recovered. Their graves were empty but no less meaningful. John's death had to have meaning too, and Sam needed a place to mourn, someplace static and unchanging. Dean, a nomad since the age of four, couldn't understand.
It was only a year later that Sam woke from a deep and dreamless sleep to the scent of death all around him. The stink of rot cut a sharp contrast to the metallic reek of blood that rose up from the mattress where he'd been lying. The blood had been his own, and despite Dean's words of reassurance, he had known from the moment he opened his eyes that the corpse he'd smelled had been his too. He had died and lived again, dragged back into the lifeless body that someone, something had renewed without his permission. Was that what had made him so angry inside, angry enough to kill, angry enough to relish killing?
Jake's skull exploding beneath an onslaught of bullets brought back memories of the man on the road. Seeing Jake's brain reduced to a quivering mass of pink pulp had filled Sam with an obscene satisfaction. It wasn't the man he sought to destroy, but the power within the man, the psychic gifts that rivaled his own. Death had awoken something dark and primal inside him. Rivals were to be eliminated. Any threat to his personal safety was to be eliminated. It was kill or be killed, survive at all costs.
Survive at all costs, no matter how high the price. The demon had made him strong, given him power. His death and subsequent resurrection had tempered those gifts, made him stronger and more powerful than ever. If his soul had been a prize before, it was now the jewel in Hell's crown.
Just when Dean realized his mistake Sam couldn't say, but in the last hours of his life it seemed obvious that he had made the connection. Sam should have died, and remained dead. His death would have been his salvation, and ultimately it would have also been Dean's. Dean, however, didn't have the gift of foresight to tell him the pain he'd felt then, wouldn't hold a candle to the agony to come later if he chose to bring Sam back. Now, among other things, he saw Hell as a just punishment for his impatience. His shortsighted selfishness might have doomed them both.
What pained Sam the most was not only his brother's impending death, but Dean's utter conviction that Sam could and would save himself on his own. He had the strength to reject his demonic destiny, keep himself on the straight and narrow, and not fall into temptation. Once Sam might have believed it too, but he no longer had such confidence. Every time he killed he had slipped further into the shadows. With Dean gone survival would become twice as difficult. Nobody would have his back. He knew he would automatically tap into every resource at his disposal to preserve his life, even those resources tainted with the same evil he battled.
Dean might not have believed in God, but he believed in Sam, whose greatest fear was that his brother's faith had been misplaced. Lilith had been the first test of Dean's faith, and Sam had failed it. He had lived when he should have died, protected from the she-demon's attack by the inhuman power inside him.
He was losing his grip.
Everything had unraveled back there in suburban Indiana. His bff Death had come calling, leaving behind a bloody mess and another horrific memory that would be permanently etched in to Sam's consciousness. It was shock maybe that made him shut down after it was all over. He just couldn't think of what to do next, how to make it all go away, how to get on with his life. For a long time he'd sat in one of the dining room chairs, silently staring at the broad arc of arterial blood marring one cream-colored wall. It looked like modern art, a streak of crimson paint on canvas. Build a frame around it and nobody would notice.
"Oh, dear God..."
No, Bobby. Not God. God wouldn't do this.
Sam's grief-addled, sleep-deprived mind had turned to hysterics when he could not get Dean's body into the car. Rigor came quickly to those suffering a violent death, and after struggling with a heavy, uncooperative corpse for some time, Sam could not stop the laughter from coming. He should have known it would happen. It had happened before, during the Trickster's "lesson" and Dean's last and most final demise, when Sam stood alone in a parking lot and shouted tearfully at a dead man for continuing to be a pain in his ass. Even in death Dean would have to be difficult, never mind the obvious futility of the task.
It had happened before. Sam knew what he had to do, and just like before he'd stolen a mortuary van to take Dean back to Kansas. He would let Bobby deal with the family, the cops and Ruby. What the old Hunter did for, or with them Sam didn't care, as long as he was left out of it.
As he drove away he had looked back at the child Lilith had possessed and saw the frightened look in her eyes – another innocence lost. He'd wondered what would become of her. Would she do what so many others had done after such an ordeal and grow up to be a Hunter? Or would she simply grow up scarred and twisted, seeking therapy in the form of drugs, alcohol, and sex, forever haunted by the memories of what had happened that night?
After their mother died, Sam's brother had done both.
Death wasn't pretty. It was stiffened limbs and discolored skin, a face bloated all out of recognition, the stench of blood and bowel, urine and decay. All the way from Indiana to Kansas it kept Sam company. All the way to Kansas he felt the open eyes he had been unable to close, staring at him through the lid of a plain wooden box. The feeling of being watched had made his back itch and crawl. There was no reassurance he could give himself either. He'd known Dean was not there, looking at him through dead eyes, but that was no comfort.
Dean was in Hell, the agony he'd suffered at the claws of the Hell hounds not ending with the cessation of life. If he concentrated, Sam could hear the sound of his brother's screams echoing back through the void.
Sam was now twenty-four, and more frightened than he'd ever been at any time in his life. Blood stained his hands beneath the blisters and the dirt. Sweat soaked his greasy hair and his filthy clothing. He couldn't remember the last time he'd bathed, nor could he recall the last time he'd slept. Exhaustion weighed heavily on shoulders already strained from lifting, pulling, digging...
A grave in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the broad blue sky, the wind and the grass, dug out from the fertile soil of the Kansas prairie. For once Dean would have somewhere to stay, a place he never had to leave. For the first time since their mother died, Dean would have a place he could call home.
When, and if, he were ever freed from Hell.
It was the least Sam could give him.
He ditched the van, and finally found a little peace in the back of a Greyhound bus bound for the Dakotas. At Bobby's he would pick up both the car and the shattered pieces of his life, but until then he slept - undisturbed. Death still shadowed him, surrounding him in a putrid miasma of stench that kept others away. Sam found an odd comfort in the scent; it was painfully familiar, and so was the hint of cologne he could smell lurking beneath it.
The bus rocked back and forth, the engine roaring as it made its way across prairie Sam had traversed a million times before. Behind closed eyes he watched the landscape flash by his window and heard the low throb of rock music coming from the radio.
Dude, you really need to update your cassette tape collection.