A/N: AU, picks up where S4 ended. And I'm back in present tense. Woot! Weird ass formatting is deliberate. Spoilers for S4 finale, but nothing too specific. Cookies-of-thanks to RoweenaC for beta'ing, drooling, and all 'round wonderfulness.
Rated for nasty-nastiness and one f-bomb.
:: ::
Come down slow and easy,
you'll find a way, we'll find a way.
Deny, the world will follow you,
I know we'll rise
I know you'll rise again
Each to Each, The Gutter Twins
:: ::
in his dreams, all he sees is white
These days, he wears dark glasses all the time. Heavy, black wrap-arounds that look like he got dressed in the dark or maybe just blindfolded. (Which is, after all, kind of the point.)
Because they're more paranoid than ever now (and this after a life-time of tossing glances over their shoulders with every pinch of salt and learning at the tender age of twelve how to sleep with a knife under his pillow and not slash his wrists open in the middle of the night) they take it a step further. He has contact lenses that turn his eyes cloudy and white and he thinks he probably looks like that guy in the freaky show that ran a couple of years ago, the blind carnival psychic (and no, he isn't blind to the irony in that, thanks very much. As if he didn't feel like a freak enough before...)
He doesn't go out much, trips and stumbles his way from the motel to the car and hunches in his seat, hands folded in his lap, elbows pressed tight against his side like he's afraid to touch anything at all. From the car to the diner, his brother's hand tucked discreetly under his elbow, voice a low murmur when Dean has to warn him about steps or chairs outside the door or the dog that's tied to the railing and watching them with a sad, lonely stare. Sometimes it's a library they go to, but not often. After all, not many twelfth century texts on demonic possession and exorcism have been translated to braille and it's like a form of torture for him to sit there and listen as Dean reads to him. When Dean forgets and trails off into strained silence, he never says anything. Just sits in the chair he's been parked in, hands in his lap again, elbows in against his side, the slow rush of people turning pages and taking notes and whispering beating against his ears.
searing, scorching, impossible white that burns and freezes and pounds at him, slams into the dusty air of the chapel and knocks them back, down, crashing hard into the floor
Every night, he sits on the chair or the bed, laptop balanced on his knees and his brother cleans the guns and sharpens the knives and pretends not to watch him. Really, he doesn't think Dean's actually taken his eyes off him in the last three months, wonders sometimes if even with walls in between them, Dean contrives, somehow, to still watch him. Sam slides his gaze up, behind the glasses, scans the corners of the ceiling (like he'd ever see the cameras if Dean didn't want him to) and jumps a mile when his brother suddenly blurts out an exasperated "What?"
"Nothin'."
And that's about as much as they talk in private anymore. Outside, in the middle of the small towns where nobody's a stranger except them, they chatter softly, Dean asks if he's okay, if he's doin' alright a half dozen times an hour and he can hear everyone commenting on it, how good he is to his brother. (They're never mistaken for a couple now and he can't put his finger on why, except that maybe there's a distance between them that could only ever be family.) They talk shop, sometimes, a quick and simple hunt one or the other of them picked out of the slew of possessions and signs and the broken seals they're still finding out about even now; eleven, twelve weeks after it all became rather academic. They tackle a spirit one time, find the grave and dig it up and season the bones (he never would've thought about it like that before, 'season the bones', it's more Dean's style than his own but all bets are off now and sometimes he remembers telling his brother he had to turn into Dean, had to be just like Dean if he was going to survive this crap hole of a world. 'Careful what you wish for,' he thinks, every time he remembers that. 'Gotta be so careful what you wish for.') before they torch them. They both flinch when the flames lick up out of the grave at them, both take a step back and never mention it.
And in between the hunts, they follow the apocalypse as it unfolds, trace news reports of the plague that's sweeping through New Mexico, of the skies turning black and the rivers red.
He remembers white light and ducks his head away from the somber talking head hazed by white noise on the staticky TV perched on it's wobbly stand in the corner of the room. Blinks once and sees the reflection on the inside of the glasses he doesn't even take off in their room now, not until Dean's passed out on the other bed, gone so far away Sam can't feel him there anymore. He waits for the solitude, makes himself pace silently through the moonlight for another ten minutes, then and only then does he reach up to the glasses, pull them away from his eyes, the tender skin under the nose-pads and under the arms desensitised by now. He blinks once or twice, turns slow, stretching like he's just woken up, the sodium-orange glow that lights the room warm and soft against his skin.
There aren't any streetlights outside their room, he knows, just the blue-white neon sign, but he tries not to think about that, even though it's the reason for their subterfuge. He'd rather just forget it, suspects sometimes that Dean already has, willingly, that Dean just thinks he really was blinded in the convent. That's why he's taken to keeping his glasses on until his brother's asleep, not sure either of them could stand the reminder of what really happened right now.
stone under his hands, someone else's fingers twisted in his shirt, tugging at him, pulling but there's another pull, a rip tide that drags him under and he thinks maybe he can hear a voice over the thunder and roar of the light, Sammy, come on, don't look. Close your eyesCLOSEYOUREYES SAM! and it's too late, it's far too late for 'sorry' for 'Sammy' for any of it as the sky turns, stone turns, flames turn sulphur yellow behind his eyes, he's coming
In the dark he can sit and stare at the wall, listen to his brother's dreams. He watches the shadows fall as the moon slides across the sky, shuts his eyes in a long, slow blink, fists his hands and grinds them into the sockets but it doesn't make any difference. He gets lost for a moment, in the way the wall shifts and changes when he looks at it through his hands, old paint suddenly new, suddenly wallpaper, then bare plasterboard and finally nothing at all, empty scrubland stretching away where he knows the city glows. Moves his hand and opens his eyes and sees the light, the neon and sodium and life-light that's now and thinks distantly that he prefers seeing then, before any of it was even a dream and maybe that's really why he wears at least the glasses all the time now, to see the past instead of the untenable present he's made.
But most of the time, he just wishes he could stop seeing anything at all, that the white lenses and the dark glasses and the hand tucked under his elbow were for hurt and scars and that this could feel like anything other than a twisted, fucked up gift he never wanted.
"Sam?"
Especially when he wants so badly to pretend he's asleep (which is tough, because he's starting to forget what sleeping feels like after four months of waking nightmares) when he's glad of the silence between them. Glad of the time to think in the nights, when he sits and looks at the past through his fingers and listens to his brother's dreams and wonders where all that light went; why, when they dared lift their heads from their arms as they cowered on the floor in the shattered pews in the corner of the chapel, why he didn't feel defeated. Just lost and hollow, like it had taken something out of him when it went, or like it opened something up inside him.
"'m fine," he mumbles. "Go back to sleep."
Waits for his brother to sigh, turn over again before he looks, steeling himself because it's so much harder with people. It's what makes him shut himself away, they grew up living a con, after all, it's not that hard to fake blind, burnt-out eyes after twenty-six years of practice and habit and god, he remembers Dean at twenty-six, breaking into his apartment, cracked and vulnerable (I don't want to) but burying it where it only shows in hindsight, damnably 20-20. It hurts, somewhere down deep, tears at him to look at a stranger in the street and see them, old and wizened and rotting and bare bones and then just dust or maybe ash, he can never quite tell, it changes so fast with every shift of his eyes.
But even that isn't so bad, not really. Not when he clings to that ripping, clawing pain inside, thinks sometimes that it's the only thing keeping him Sam, keeping him human (and he remembers a promise given, once, If I ever turn into something I'm not and wonders if either of them would even notice it now.) Not so bad, really, given that looking at his brother makes something in him break, snap with a clean, high crack that he can hear as clear as his heartbeat.
Because there's nothing there when he looks at Dean in the dark, and just his shadow in the light, nothing but empty space and a memory of a grin and a scowl and worry that looked more like anger and fear that looked, once, like the end of the world (until he knew what the end of the world really looked like).
Now and then, he lets himself wonder what his brother sees when Dean looks at him, those rare moments when his eyes don't just slide away to somewhere fascinating a foot beyond Sam's shoulder, if Dean sees past the glasses and the lenses and remembers but he thinks probably not, since he all but dropped dead (not funny, not even a little bit funny) on the spot when Sam looked for him in the pitch black of the convent and didn't find him, just heard him suck in air scorched metallic and stumble back, tripping over his own feet in his rush to get away. He didn't get it then, staggered after his brother, hands reaching out like some crappy extra in a bad zombie flick, tracking the sounds of Dean scrambling to get away from him, kicking at the floor, at the pews and the shocked, empty noises Dean was making, like someone was kicking him in the stomach, over and over again.
He didn't get it until he tripped and caught himself against the altar, saw his reflection in the blood-stained chalice Lilith had placed just so in the middle of the fouled altar cloth. Saw his eyes.
No, he thinks. If Dean still remembered that, he wouldn't be here now, wouldn't be sleeping and dreaming (of girls he knew once but not like that, girls he knew Downstairs, blood on their lips so sweet when he kissed them) in the next bed, there'd be no hand tucked carefully under his elbow, no voice murmuring 'easy, careful, two steps up and a dog tied to the railing, mean sonofabitch, looks like. Bastard owner doesn't know how to tie a damn knot', no one to call his name in the night however much they don't talk anymore.
If Dean remembered his eyes, really remembered, he thinks maybe Dean would have remembered his promise too, and one way or another there'd be no-one in the next bed at all.
So sometimes he thinks about snatching his glasses off in the motel room or the car, plucking the contacts out and looking right at his brother's shadow laid across the wheel and the door and the window, hint of a reflection in the glass, of bloodshot green eyes that won't ever quite meet his. Saying remember, Dean. Please? while there's still something in him to tear and hurt and crack at the things he sees now.
He won't.
He knows that.
But it's a nice dream.
and when he snaps out of the waking nightmare he keeps his eyes shut on his way to the bathroom, fumbles over the sink until he can get the lenses in and never, ever tells his brother that he can see just fine, even with the thick white glass and the shades and the lie, even with his amber eyes shut tight in the dark and his hands clapped over them, he can still see all of it, past and present and sometimes maybe future, he can see everything.
And everything is burning.