Hunters are not supposed to live long enough to get a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis.
So natually, you can imagine Sam's surprise when he started to feel the tingling pain through his fingers every morning. Stiffness locked up the joints, and he would painfully bend and unbend them while Dean drove. He would put his hand down between the seat and the car door, hiding his little exercise from his brother. But every time he needed to pull a trigger, he said a silent prayer first, terrified that his finger would lock. The first time it did that, he knew that he would not really be a hunter anymore. Yes, he had gone to college, nearly become a lawyer, but in the grand story of his life, he had been a hunter and nothing else. He had no idea how to be anything else, and he was scared to tell Dean what was happening. His left knee was the next thing to betray him, and he became a master at avoiding the hitch in his step when in his brother's line of vision.
One day, though, he had lifted his shotgun, stared down by a vengeful spirit, and his fingers had refused to pull inward. Dean had acted quickly, swinging an iron poker straight through the ghost, but then he had turned a serious, quizzical expression to his brother. Sam had tried to shrug it off; he even thought he had succeeded as they worked the rest of the job. Then back in the silence of the car, Dean had demanded answers. That man could be the pushiest son of a bitch out there. When Sam had finally admitted the truth – well, to say Dean was pissed was to put it lightly. He had hauled little brother to some ancient M.D. so quickly it made his head spin.
It had taken no time at all for the doc to give them the bad news: at only 45 years old, Sam Winchester had rheumatoid arthritis. He had been able to take the greys creeping into his hair, the crow's feet just beginning to peek out around his eyes, and even the fact that more than three beers in one evening meant a crippling hangover the next day, but to face this down was more than he could bear. He had gone into the bathroom in the waiting room of the doctor's office and cried into his hands. Of course he would never know that Dean had done the same thing out in the parking lot inside the Impala. Both of them had grieved the loss of the life they had aways known, but by the time they reconvened, neither mentioned it again. In fact, in front of each other, they never mentioned Sam's condition or even acknowledged it, though privately they both confessed the situation to Castiel. He was a trustworthy friend, of course, and never let either one's confidance slip.
Changes had to be implemented. They started out simple. The Men of Letters bunker was all stairs and intricate door locks, and so without talking about it much, they stopped calling it home base. Instead they used Bobby's house. The bones of the old place had always made them too sad to visit, but now, they were driven by necessity. They hustled pool and used their fraudlent cards to get the materials, and they set to work rebuilding the house. Dean grumbled a lot about how Cas was pretty useless for an angel of the Lord, but under the grumbling, he was patient, showing his friend how best to hold a hammer, which drill bit was needed for each job, and how often water breaks were needed when working in the South Dakota sun. Jody Mills put them up in her place until the shell of the house became enough of a place to live in. There was no upstairs yet, just the downstairs office and living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom. So they improvised, buying a couch and two air mattesses. Sam slept on the couch; its padding was enough to ease his rough nights, and no air mattress ever made was long enough for someone his height.
They still worked cases, but without mentioning it, Dean took on the physical action while Sam took on the research. For a while, that seemed okay. Then one day, Sam's knee was swollen to the size of a ham hock, and he had to wait in the car. The sensation of watching his brother walk into danger without him hurt worse than any fluid-packed joints.
After that, Castiel started coming with them on hunts so that Dean never had to go in alone. That helped some, but the shift was still inevitable. They started to take less hunts and more calls. Sam was good at answering the phones. He could put on a gruff U.S. Marshal voice that made your toes curl, and hunters started to hand out their new numbers more each day as word spread through that mysterious grapevine. Dean was the master of bullshit, and when he picked up the CDC line, the jargon and flim-flamming that came out of his mouth sometimes made Sam laugh so hard it hurt his face. Cas wasn't allowed to answer the phones; twenty of years of human contact, and yet he still had not mastered tone or rhetorical questions. All three of them gained a new respect for the man Bobby Singer had been.
It was a year or so after the diagnosis when Sam met Sadie Nolan. He was down at the grocery store in town, pushing a cart through the aisles (sometthing he had never done in his entire life), when a redhead caught his arm and smiled up at him. "You live up the road at Singer Salvage Yard, don't you? You're my closest neighbor. We're new to town," she had said. Sam had not felt that rumble in the pit of his stomach since Amelia, and he had gotten roped in so smoothly he hardly noticed it happening. First, they had talked in the grocery store for nearly half an hour; then he had offered to come by and take a look at her HVAC unit, only to get home and realize that he was going to need his brother's help for that. So both of them had loaded up and driven down the road to the Nolans'. Sam had been way too pleased to find that Sadie was divorced, and Dean would never have admitted it but had also smiled upon discovering that she had a bevy of kids – a 16 year old boy, a 14 year old girl, and another 11 year old boy to round out the mix. The eleven year old had followed Dean around all day, asking a million questions, while the teenagers scowled and looked suspicious. Sam had asked Sadie out on their first of many dates before they left that day.
It didn't take long for them to mix their lives as more than neighbors. The first couple dates were successful, and with each one, they shared more information, spinning their life stories out in carefully curated pieces. Sadie's ex-husband was an alcoholic who had gone into rages; he had once punched her in front of the kids. Sam told her about his diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and that it was the reason he, his brother, and their friend had to take up consulting rather than fieldwork. He left out any explanation of what exactly he consulted about.
As the weeks passed, they spent time together on a less formal basis, eschewing dates for simply being in one another's lives. Sam would spend the occasional night over at Sadie's, sneaking out in the morning before the kids woke up, even though that made his joints creak worse than usual, and Thomas, the gangly oldest child, started coming over to learn about cars with Dean. Melanie, the knob-kneed fourteen year old, thought Cas was the best listener she had ever met, and once the older kids were hooked, good-natured Nathan tagged along on their every adventure. Sam had never met someone like Sadie. She was unfailingly honest, blunt even, but always kind. How anyone's honest opinions could be that nice was beyond him.
Sam, Dean, and Cas kept working on the house, making it a little better with each project, and when it was time to renovate a third bedroom and finally get Sam off the couch, he went ahead and asked Sadie if she wanted him to stop sneaking out the window every morning. The smile on her face had said it all. Sam officially lived 1.3 miles away from Dean for the first time in 20 years, and embarrassing as it might be to admit it, he sometimes sat on his couch at night before bed and missed the sounds that had been his constant companions for so long. Dean's breathing had a distinctive quality, as did the swishing of the liquid when he lifted a bottle and took a swig out of it or when he swirled the liquor in a glass. Even Dean's snore, a thin, slight gruffle, had been by his side for years. It took him a few weeks to learn to fall asleep without it.
Of course he still saw Dean and Cas all the time. He would head over first thing in the morning for breakfast a lot of days. When he would walk in the kitchen, he would see Dean at the stove, frowning down at a skillet full of scrambled eggs, and Cas looking intently at the coffee maker as it dribbled dark liquid into the pot. Cas always made the java way too strong; Dean never complained. Together, they would shoot the breeze, answer the phones, and continue to fix the house. Sam liked working on the house, even if he technically lived down the road. He liked to imagine telling Bobby all about it if they made it to Heaven someday.
Some days he would get over to the house and find a hastily scrawled note.
"Sam,
We're chasing a case down in Oklahoma.
Dean"
Cas never wrote the notes; his handwriting was surprisingly terrible.
Other days, usually weekend days, Sam would get up late, eat breakfast at home with Sadie and the kids, and then Dean and sometimes Cas would come over to the Nolan household. They taught the angel how to grill, and he invested in a "Kiss the Cook" apron for himself. The joke made him laugh harder than anyone else could have. Other weekend days, the kids would trickle their way up the road to Singer Salvage Yard. Though it scared Sam half to death, Dean let Thomas drive any car on the lot he could get running, and it was not unusual to see the kid gripping the wheel of a classic junker tight as he rattled it up the road at top speed, grinning from ear to ear.
Their lives became so inextricably tangled that all of the memories became mixed. The rag-tag family celebrated Sadie's promotion to nursing manager at the local clinic with dinner out at the diner, a table of seven with appetites like you wouldn't believe. Cas had been the one to figure out how to set up the Slip and Slide for Nathan's 12th birthday, though he had sprayed Dean with the hose in the process, pretending not to know what he was doing. Melanie's date to her first homecoming dance was greeted at the door by a towering father figure with a kind smile, who offered stern rules but no threats. In the living room, however, he met a mother bear with flashing eyes and a surrogate uncle whose unnvering deep voice quietly warned him that his body would never be found if he hurt Melanie. Melanie had ushered her date out the door, every bit in charge of the evening, and kissed the protective cheek. "Thanks, Cas," she had whispered before slipping out the door. Sam thought she looked beautiful and so much like her mother in her blue dress.
All of this happened so gently, so subtly, that birthdays, straight A dinners, hunts, and vacations snuck by without Sam ever realizing he had a brand new life. Thomas graduated from high school with straight mid-level grades, but they were enough to get him into a state university. Sadie and Sam were the only ones actually taking Thomas to move in, but before he left, Dean checked under the hood of the junker the kid was taking at least six times. He filled it with gas, changed the oil, and checked the tire pressure. Cas had made sandwiches, enough of them for ten eighteen year old boys and put them in ziploc bags, individually, before dumping them into a giant ziploc bag. The sight of a ziploc bags full of ziploc bags was weird enough to be delightfully Cas, and it made Thomas smile. Dean and Cas kept Melanie and Nathan while the "parents" took the kid off to school.
That night, when he got back, Sam had gone over to Bobby's - they still called it Bobby's, even though they had made it thoroughly their own. Sadie had already taken the kids home, and Cas was out. He still went out sometimes, meeting with other angels, touching base with the world he had left behind. It was a rare quiet moment, and Dean had opened two beers and handed his brother one. They sat together at the small kitchen table. Sam rubbed the sore knuckles on his right hand, feeling the fluid move beneath them.
"Are you happy?" He turned the question to his older brother.
Dean seemed to consider it, looking around the house he shared with Cas, and then nodded. "Guess I am. What about you?"
"Yeah. I am. I got out." They both knew he what he meant.
"Lucky bastard," Dean said with a sarcastic smile.
They had lived so many lifetimes in all the years before these, but now, time seemed to be going faster than ever. There was a lot more to life than hunting and a whole lot more to living than always dying.
Sam wondered if maybe God hadn't watched out for them, after all.
AN: It is nice to imagine a few years of normalcy for the Winchesters, even though I really think they will have to die in the line of duty. I tried for a different tone in this oneshot, aiming for a third-person limited narrator. I kept imagining Patrick Stewart in Nightmare Before Christmas, in that true voiceover tone.