Sam is tired even when he's asleep.
He knows, vaguely, that he's dreaming right now, but that seems as undeniable as the demon blood running thin in his veins. There's no changing his circumstances or his surroundings. He's getting home, alone, the circles under his eyes aching like real bruises. He thinks Dean is still missing. But like most things right now that's blurry, liminal.
When he goes to open the door to his room, someone hits him from behind so hard it knocks the breath out of his lungs. They grab him, push him through the closed door with only a little resistance, and he can't see who it is, but they smell like Dean and sulfur. Sam is afraid and also shamefully, sickeningly aroused.
This isn't his room. Despite the absence of identifying details, Sam knows it's the motel where he and Dean made love for the very first time. Everything is bad and wrong in a way he can't quite identify, though, all nauseous angles and walls that pulse like infected flesh.
The bed is damp when Dean pins him to it, like the roof has been leaking onto it, bedding slowly rotting and mattress springs rusting away. Putrid water swells up around Sam's form as he sinks. He stares up at Dean, the black eyes, the freckles. He looks almost bored and Sam thinks he might rather have him leering. He's got his hands on Sam's chest to hold him in place, and they burn, like there's acid seeping from the lines in his palms and fingers. Sam's shirt has already melted away in a shapeless double-handprint pattern, and he's sure his skin is next.
"Please." Sam knows what's going to happen and despises that a part of him is resigned to it. "Stop."
"Stop what, Sammy?" Dean drags his hands down Sam's stomach to grip his hips, his ass. Fabric falls away and raw, blistering skin is left behind. "Big brother's gonna take care of you, just like I do all the time. Oughta shut up and lemme do my job."
"I miss you." Sam should not be hard. On some level, maybe, he deserves this. "I want you back. That's all I've wanted for months, I'm...dying, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't even know who I am without you. I've never known."
"Seemed to have a pretty good idea when you were with Jess," Dean points out. "Ruby. Amelia." He reaches up to Sam's head as if to stroke his hair, but what he's doing is actually burning him bald. "Face it, Sam, you know exactly who you are. That's all you've ever cared about. And we both know I wouldn't've ever had anything to do with you if I didn't have the shitty luck of being born to the same parents." He pauses. "Man. Just think about how I might've turned out if I hadn't had you around to fuck up my whole life."
"I'm sorry," Sam croaks. He doesn't usually get to talk, but it doesn't seem like being able to is making a huge difference. "I never meant..." He knows, somehow, that he's got his strength at the moment, just like his voice. He could hurt Dean if he tried. Break bones, tear skin, puncture eyes. No effort at all. But he doesn't want to do that anymore. "I need you. I just want you to come back."
"I think this is what you really want." Dean brings his hand back down to Sam's jeans, exposing him. Then he slides inside him easy on a froth of blood, acid, and dissolving flesh.
Sam gasps, breath hitching. Dean barely reacts to the entrance at all.
"I'd tell you this is all you're good for," he tells Sam almost gently, "but to be honest, I've had better."
He fucks him savagely to pieces, and it's a hell Sam is intimately familiar with.
The hunt went off beautifully, everything considered. They might've celebrated under other circumstances, but as it was, the silence in the car was icy. It was night and they were still states away from the bunker. Sam felt worn, the rush of saving an entire community from a vindictive mommy group coven no balm. Stretched as thin as he had been when the ghost of Lucifer and his own trauma had been nipping endlessly at his heels, and very, very lonely.
"Sounded like you had a rough one last night," Dean commented flatly, the first time either of them had spoken in hours. Sam could tell from the sound of his voice that he didn't actually expect it to go anywhere. Neither did Sam.
"I had...a nightmare." He wasn't sure what made him say it as he stared out the window, mile markers whipping past like glittering pins dropped onto a map of America. "I've been having nightmares for a long time now."
"Like, normal nightmares? Or something new?"
"Something new." When Dean didn't say anything, Sam continued, haltingly. "They're." He coughed. "Th-they're about you." He was agonizingly aware of the pain he was causing, of how selfish he was being by not just shouldering them alone. "It's stupid. It's just...I can't figure it out, and trust me, I've tried. I don't know why it's happening."
"I know," Dean replied. There was a note of...peace? Or something like it in his voice. But it wasn't the healthy kind. More like the peace someone made with suicide. "I was a demon, and I tried to kill you. Course you're havin' nightmares about me. Course you jump outta your skin when I walk in the room."
"Dean, this isn't your fault!" Sam exclaimed, turning to him. "It's mine. There's something wrong with me." He was desperate to make him understand. "And I hate it so much 'cause I've got you back again, but I can't even appreciate it. It's like you're still gone." He squeezed his own thigh where his hand was resting, hard enough to purple fingerprint bruises under his jeans. "And I know I'm hurting you."
"You're not hurting me, Sam." Dean sounded tired. "You're afraid me. I get it. I'm afraid of me right now, too."
Sam swallowed. Dean went on after a second.
"Maybe I oughta leave."
"No." Sam even shocked himself with the intensity of his immediate answer. He tried to translate how he was feeling. "I can't lose you again. I can't. Not so soon; hell, not ever! Being with you like this is still...infinitely better than not having you around."
"What d'you want me to do, then?" Dean demanded, tossing a hand up. He looked at Sam as soon as he did it, like he was expecting him to flinch, but there wasn't much room for fear inside him right now, unlike back at the motel room. The space was mostly taken up by frustration and misery. "You want me to hang around, but you're fucking terrified of me, Sam, and don't try and act like you don't have a good reason to be. I can't trust myself with you 'cause this?" He raised his right arm, fist clenched, elbow bent. "Is the Bloody Mark of Cain. Cain, who killed his own brother." His voice was cracking again. "I don't care who else this thing makes me hurt, just so long as it ain't you. But I'm scared it's gonna be. And so are you." He dropped his hand back to the wheel with a heavy slap. "So what's your grand, elaborate plan, Sam?"
"I don't have one." Admitting that felt like a bigger betrayal, a bigger failure, than telling the truth had been. "I don't know." He ground the heels of his hands into eyes that felt like they'd had highway grit packed into the sockets around them. "But I'm not gonna let you go. No matter how many notes you write asking me to."
Dean didn't bother responding to that. They were quiet all the way back to Lebanon, and Sam didn't even try to sleep in the passenger seat.
Sam's legs are broken again. Or missing. He's not sure, but he can't move or see them. He's in a dark room, where he's been for weeks, maybe months. Time hasn't mattered nearly as much since his century and a half, give or take, with the Devil.
He knows he's dying. He's heavily wounded, infections festering along the clefts in his body. Sam is rotting from the inside out. The scars that hellfire seared into his bones glow and pulse faintly where putrescent flesh has sloughed free.
Dean is here. He can see in the dark because his eyes are black. He wants to watch Sam decay away to nothing.
"You know you deserve this, right?" Dean asks quietly. Sam is fully aware.
When Dean touches him, his hand goes right through, the flesh now the consistency of leftover snow in a warm April. The new hole compromises what remains of Sam's integrity, and he feels himself begin to fall apart.
