This is my headcanon.
I wrote it down because it made me sad, and because I'm a petty, horrible little man, I wanted all the rest of you to be sad, too.
Little more than a drabble. Written while taking a break from the request I'm currently working on. Takes place in season three. Or right after season three. Or in season seven. Anytime, really. Can be read as Wincest or simple brotherly love. Title taken from a lyric in the song "Hallelujah." Please review and tell me what you think.
For the first week after he loses Dean, Sam doesn't even bother with motel rooms.
Maybe he would sleep better in a bed. On a mattress. Even if it's the sagging, stained, alcohol-and-sweat-soaked kind that usually crops up in the places that he's used to. But he doesn't care enough to find out. He only gets an hour or two of sleep a night, and he always wakes with his back aching so badly that it brings tears to his eyes. He still doesn't go looking for a bed, though. When his eyelids get too heavy for him to keep driving without killing himself and destroying the Impala, he pulls over in the first place he can find, and he sleeps in the car.
He lays down in the front seat after kicking off his boots. He curls up tight, to fit in his tall, gangly frame. And he buries his face in the leather of the driver's side, where the scent of whiskey and beer has sunk in deep. Of a particular brand of aftershave. Of salt. Of ash. Of wet earth and honest sweat and a million other things that he wishes more than anything he could name, but that he only knows as "Dean." "Big brother." "Protector," even though he's old enough and big enough to believe that he no longer needs one. He digs his fingernails into the palms of his hands as he makes fists, and he rocks himself with silent sobs. He takes deep breaths, and he forces himself to forget. It gets harder and harder every night, but he keeps trying.
This is the scent he's fallen asleep to every single night for years. In the same small room, in this very car, when times were tough or there just wasn't so much as a by-the-hour place nearby. It means safety, it means love, and he can't bring himself to do without it. The knowledge that he's going to have to, eventually, is something that scares him more than anything else.
For a few hours each night, Sam sleeps curled up in a cocoon of something that's almost warmth, his cheek pressed to smooth leather and his heart sitting like a lead weight in his chest for reasons he can't quite remember and doesn't want to.
After two days, the scent has begun to fade. After five, Sam has to press himself deep into the seats to find it. And after eight, it's completely gone.
He tries to lie to himself, and say that it's still there, that some vestige of his brother remains. It doesn't work. That eighth night, Sam cries for real, but no one answers, for one of the first times in his life. Please. Come back. I'm hurt. I need you. He somehow expects something, and it hurts so much more when nothing happens. He doesn't sleep. He can't.
The ninth night, Sam checks into a motel room. He burrows deep into the pillows and the mattress, and he cries out softly, like a lost kitten searching for its owner. For the only thing that ever made sense or stayed with him no matter what. He hopes he will find something, anything, that's familiar. That can keep the illusion going. Just for another night.
He doesn't. He's lost half of himself, and is left with a gaping hole that he'll never fill, no matter how deep he goes, how loudly he screams. His missing puzzle piece is so far beyond his reach that it's as if it never existed. As if he's the only one that remembers it.
The pain and the terror of it sends him back out to the car. The room is too big. He knows he won't find what he's looking for, curling up tight as he shifts and presses and breathes.
But he can try. He can remember, and hope that just a little piece of something comes back to him.
This is all he has now, and all he ever will.