Amelia hadn't planned to take Sam back.

After he essentially left her without a word in the middle of the night and never called again, she'd decided her instincts had been right all along. He was a weirdo. It was her own fault, her own damn vulnerable fault, for letting herself be drawn into a relationship with someone who was clearly even more needy and unstable than she was. It just figured that after Don she would have gone looking for something to fix, and this messed-up loser had just happened to cross her path at exactly the right moment.

It was her own fault for fooling herself into thinking there was something there when there wasn't. She was damn lucky the worst he'd done was flake out on her and leave instead of hacking her to pieces in her sleep.

But for some reason, when Sam's number came up on her cell, she couldn't stop herself from answering it.

"Fucking idiot," she cursed herself before clicking accept. "Never could resist a wounded animal. Even when it bites you."

There was something wrong with Sam's voice. In all the times she'd heard him talk about his brother, heard him break down and lose himself in his grief, he'd never sounded like this. "A-Amelia?"

"Sam," she said. "Sam, are you okay?"

For a moment, she wondered if he'd hung up. Or if the connection had dropped. And then she heard a sound on the other line, a small intake of breath from Sam that twisted her heart in her chest. Sam was crying.

"What's happened, Sam? Is it Dean?"

"No." Sam drew in another breath, seeming to collect himself. "I'm sorry to call you, Amelia. I… Sorry I didn't call before."

"It's okay."

"You have no idea how much I..." His voice broke again. "I missed you so much."

Fuck. Amelia was already kicking herself before the words were out of her mouth but she couldn't help it. "Come home, Sam. Whatever it is, it'll be okay. Why don't you just come home?"

He knocked. It should have felt strange because this had been their house, but in Sam's mind it had never really been his. The only place he had ever really belonged was with Dean. But when Amelia answered, her soft hair silhouetted against the warm light of their living room and a gentle smile on her face, Sam had to close his eyes for a moment because he was almost overwhelmed by how right it felt, how easy it would be to let himself believe that was his place in life, his normal.

Amelia took his arm, her brow furrowing slightly, and led him inside. "Okay. What's going on with you? Are you in trouble?"

Sam shook his head. "No. Not like you're thinking."

"Dean's okay?"

Sam nodded, rubbing his thumb over the ugly scar on his left palm. It was a habit she'd noticed that he had, something he did almost unconsciously whenever he seemed worried or distracted.

"But you're not," she guessed.

Sam sighed, meeting her eyes, and he looked troubled. "There's a case," he admitted, and she guessed he was talking about the work he and Dean used to do, the private investigator stuff. "People are…" He stopped, pressed hard into the scar. "You know what? Never mind, you don't need to worry about it. Just. Thank you. For letting me come by. I won't stay if you don't want me to. I understand."

"Stay the night at least, Sam. You look like shit. Honestly, I'm not letting you drive away from here with that on my conscience."

He smiled at her gratefully. Always taking in strays, she thought, trying to tell herself it was bitterness that fueled that tight feeling she had in her chest, but knowing it was nothing but affection. She had missed him too.

No sooner had her offer to stay been accepted than Sam was banging around in her cupboards and burrowing through her pantry. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, watching him unravel for a moment before she interjected softly, "Sam? You looking for something?"

He held up a container and shook it. "Is this really all the salt you have?"

She came up behind him and felt him stop, his body tensing.

"I can run out to the store," he offered, not looking at her. "The convenience store on the corner, it should still be open. This isn't going to even cover the front of the house."

She put a hand on his back, and he stiffened and moved away from her touch. He handed her the container of salt. "I might have some in my bag. Out in the car."

"Sam, what's this about?"

"I know this sounds crazy—"

"Sam!"

She slammed the salt down on the counter. He jumped, and for a moment the just looked at each other until Sam took a deep breath in through his nose. "This isn't gonna make a lot of sense," he said tentatively. "But I… I need to make sure you're safe. Okay?"

"So, am I…" she gestured to the salt, "dangerously under-seasoned? Or what?"

The corners of his mouth tugged back into the barest shadow of a grin, hinting at those dimples she adored. "Something like that," he said. "I think I'm going to need you to trust me. Because I can't explain it without sounding like a crazy person."

"Not a chance." She sidled up to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, openly flirting. "You're acting like a crazy person. And you haven't earned even a bit of trust from me. Not yet."

He went still again, and didn't quite pull away, but she sensed something deeply wrong and distant about the way he just brought his hands up to her shoulders, as if he were feeling his way through this blindfolded and numb.

"Oh." She pulled away, trying not to be offended. "Right. Never mind. I'll go get you your salt." Fucking headcase. She headed for the door and grabbed her jacket while Sam stood rooted to the spot, looking out of it. "Are you particular? Sea, kosher, iodized, pickling?" She shook her head as she left, and Sam didn't make a move to stop her.

The ropes holding him burned his skin as the blade drew blood, and oh god, it hurt. It hurt. And then the pain vanished, and Lucifer's voice echoed in his head. "I'll let you in on a little secret, Sam. Sometimes the threat of something is worse than the thing itself. Sometimes your own fear is worse than anything I could ever do to you."

He held the point of the knife menacingly above Sam's eye, and Sam shrank back, trying to fight back the rush of irrational fear that Lucifer evoked in him. He tried to reason with himself, that his eyes weren't important, that pain didn't matter. It didn't work. "Please!" he blurted out. "Don't!"

Lucifer smiled. "Maybe I'll take something else then." He trailed the edge of the blade down Sam's cheek, down his exposed neck, and Sam looked away.

His gaze locked on Adam. It's okay, Adam's eyes said, eyes that were filled with just as much pain and despair but still found room to carry Sam's. Because Sam did this for him. It's okay, it's okay. I'm here.

Amelia shook him out of the nightmare, and Sam sat bolt upright on the couch with a cry. He looked down and realized with a flush of embarrassment that he had grabbed her wrist, and she was now trying to twist away from him like he was a convicted felon.

He let go with a mumbled apology and ran his hand through his sweaty, disheveled hair. He was breathing hard.

"You were dreaming," Amelia said, frowning, rubbing her wrist. "I think. Or else, someone in here was being murdered."

"What?"

"Is that new? Yelling like that in your sleep? Because I never heard you do that." She looked genuinely concerned.

"Sorry. Bad dream. I guess."

She looked at him critically. "Sam…" she started to say. Then she changed her mind. "But I guess it's none of my business. Not anymore."

"Amelia."

She patted his knee. "You keep your secrets. I'm going back to bed."

Sam watched her go. Then sighed, and leaned his head back against the cushions of the couch, feeling incredibly lost.

He was still awake, still sitting cross-legged on the couch with his thumb pressed into his scar, when she came downstairs in the morning. The haunted look hadn't left his eyes.

"I'm making coffee," Amelia said resolutely. "Then you're calling Dean."

Dean had worked his way through interviews with all five of the torture victims, although he had to conclude that the word interview was something of a stretch. One man was still in intensive care, and the others…

Dean shook his head, flipping through his notes at the local coffee shop where he had stopped to regroup after visiting with Meredith Williams, a mother of two who had been jumped by the demon on her way home from picking up dinner after work. She had stared blankly at Dean with eyes that clearly no longer saw the world around her. Lost in her own head.

He didn't like to see that look in people. He hated that demons thought they had the right to walk the earth at all. They were like cockroaches on a white-tiled kitchen floor, and the sooner they could close the gates of Hell for good…

The sooner he could close it, he corrected himself. Because apparently keeping the world safe wasn't exactly at the top of Sam's to-do list anymore.

If he was honest with himself, he'd been expecting Sam to go running back to Amelia and his normal life eventually. But it still hurt. Almost as much as the knowledge that Sam had written him off for dead.

He pushed it out of his mind for now, because it didn't matter anyway. Sam was gone. Sam had left him on his own, and he still had a job to do even if it meant he had to do it by himself. It wasn't the first time he'd had to go it alone, and it surely wouldn't be the last. Time to start buying what the universe was selling, Winchester.

His phone vibrated in his back pocket, and he pulled it out with a glance at the display. He recognized the name of the hospital where Jillian Reynolds was being kept. "Roeser," he answered.

"Agent Roeser?" said the doctor who Dean and Sam had met with about Jillian. "You asked me to call you about Jillian Reynolds, if she, ah, made any further statements regarding the name 'Sam Winchester.'"

Dean's spine straightened in his seat, fumbling for a pen and flipping open the manila folder to the notes Sam had taken beside the girl's file. "And has she?"

"Is Sam Winchester the name of a suspect in the case?"

"No, there's no connection," Dean said quickly, catching the pen cap between his teeth and yanking it off. "Why? Has she said something that would implicate him?"

The man hesitated. "Well, it's not my area, so obviously you can be the judge of that. Following the name 'Sam Winchester,' she's repeated a couple of phrases that seemed to be associated with the name, at least in the way she was saying them. They were: 'all your fault,' and 'you did this to me.'

"Huh," Dean said, pen poised over the report. His eyes traveled along the margin of neatly justified type where Sam's notes hung in blue ballpoint pen. Threat/fear would have been worse than actually doing it, said Sam's handwriting next to a paragraph of graphic description that Dean glossed over instead of reading. His brows drew together. Further down, Sam had scrawled: "Take something" = rape.

"Even in a patient as confused as Jillian," her doctor went on, "I'm sure you can see why it would seem as though she's clearly attempting to put a name to her perpetrator. Even if it's not the correct name. It may be a lead worth looking into. I actually consider it quite a significant—"

"It is. I'll look into it." Dean needed to go. There was more here that Sam knew that he hadn't told him, and he had a feeling he wasn't going to like it.

"Thank you. Oh, and one last thing! This may just be her way of soothing herself, but typically after she says all these things, she'll lapse into a repetition of the phrase 'it's okay.'"

Dean's gaze fell on Sam's blue pen marks, a phrase written smaller than the others, almost tucked away toward the bottom of the page. A lullaby, a reassurance, a mantra. It's okay. It's okay. I'm here.

"I thought it might be important."

"It might," Dean agreed, running a fingertip over Sam's words.

To be continued.