All Your Dreams Are Still As New
Part three of a fanfiction by Velkyn Karma
Disclaimer: I do not own, or pretend to own, Supernatural or any of its subsequent characters, plots or other ideas. That right belongs to Warner Brothers and associated parties.
Life goes on, and for a long, long time it's not easy.
Dean feels the absence of Sam every day, and it doesn't matter that Sam had been physically absent for weeks before his death. There's nobody to call or email or text anymore. He can't listen to Sam's voice for even a brief few minutes before his little brother makes excuses about tests or studying or dinner with Jess. He can't look forward to the holidays, when Sam's due to fly in and spend time with the family again. None of that will ever happen again, and it hurts every day when he gets up in the morning and remembers that all over, realizes it wasn't just a bad nightmare.
He never forgives himself for failing to save his little brother when he was needed most.
Dean's not the only one handling it poorly, either. His mother seems to have aged ten years in just a few weeks, and she hasn't been feeling as well since that fateful phone call. Dean's not really surprised. He's seen what grief can do to the living and the dead alike when hunting, and some deaths, he's learned, are particularly grueling—especially when a parent buries a child. He understands that all too well—he's feeling that same level of grief, even if nobody else knows just how responsible he'd been for Sammy before the wish. And after being forced to bury her husband—dad—he can only imagine how much this hurts her.
Dean remembers his resolve on the side of the freeway the night of Sam's wake, and swears he's not going to do anything to jeopardize what's left of her family. Part of him is sorely tempted to hunt down the thing that killed Sam and destroy it, whatever it was. But there's always a risk in that line of work, and if he dies just weeks after they buried Sam...he doesn't know what will happen to his mother, and he doesn't want to know, or put her through that. He's uncharacteristically cautious, careful, determined to protect her, for dad and Sam and himself.
He's also, he admits to himself, afraid to leave mom or Carmen for too long, for a hunt or anything else. Sam's death proved that the supernatural is still out there, whether or not he chooses to acknowledge it—and if it can take Sammy, it can take mom and Carmen too. There's no way in hell he'll risk it, not after failing his family once about his old line of work. Especially knowing dark things can and have come to Lawrence, Kansas before. So he stays home, and he still reads the newspapers and watches the news for the current events stuff, but he reads more carefully between the lines to make sure nothing strange is going on, either. Nothing is going to hurt his family on his turf, and the first sign he gets of a werewolf or a demon wandering the area, he's going to make it wish it had never been created.
There's nothing of the sort, for which he's grateful, because it would be exhausting to hunt on top of everything else he's been doing. Since Sam's funeral he's been stretching himself thin, trying to take care of everything. Money's been tight with all the funeral expenses, and he's been taking extra shifts at the garage to help mom with the bills, working long hours for a few extra bucks since he can't exactly rely on credit card scams anymore. Between that, taking care of chores at home, stoping by mom's regularly to look after the house and make sure she's okay, and giving his girlfriend the attention she actually deserves, he's working himself to the bone.
He knows mom and Carmen are worried about him because of it, but honestly, Dean prefers it this way. When he's focused on constantly staying active, and actively looking after what's left of his family, it's easier to keep his mind off the pain of losing his brother. Sam accused him of doing the same thing after dad died, throwing himself recklessly into hunting in order to stave off the grief, and this works just as well.
Even so he still feels it—still thinks about Sam every day—but over time, as weeks turn into months, it starts to hurt a little less. Christmas is awful, and for a second time he entertains the notion of visiting the crossroads again when Sam's not there to enjoy the holiday with them, but it gets a little easier after that. He never gets over it completely—Dean can still feel that hole inside him left by Sam's death, feels the regrets over never being able to patch things up with him before he died, and he knows he'll never forgive himself for failing his little brother. But it's not as painfully sharp anymore, and there's nothing he can do to change it that won't hurt his family in the long run, so he soldiers on and looks out for mom and Carmen and promises to make the best of the situation that he's got.
And just when he finally thinks he's getting better, that things might be okay again, life takes the knife in his heart and twists it a little deeper like the goddamn bitch it is.
It starts at the beginning of February. Carmen's at her night shift at the hospital and Dean, only just dragging his ass through the door after more than twelve hours at the garage, decides to hit the sack early and sleep like the dead until his shift starts again tomorrow. He throws himself into bed, passes out instantly, and wakes three hours later with the distinctly chilly and all too familiar impression that he's being watched.
He cracks his eyes open, and there's a ghost right there next to his bed, staring down at him.
"Jesus!" Dean hisses, and his mind zips lightning fast through his defense options. No guns (Carmen hates them; too many ER gunshot cases), no silver or cold iron knife hiding under his pillow (great way to freak out your girlfriend), and the closest container of salt is in the kitchen, which the ghost is blocking the only door to. Great. It's the first time he's regretted dropping some of his heavily ingrained combat habits since his wish began.
He sits up sharply, already backing up against the headboard, feeling his heart pounding and the adrenaline coursing through him in preparation for a fight. He's a little rusty after months of not hunting, but he'll be damned if they think they can actually get away with killing him easily. His senses sharpen with the fight-or-flight response, his sleep-blurred eyes focus better in the dark as his brain kickstarts into action from a dead sleep—
—and he freezes, because that's not just any old ghost, it's Sam.
He stares at the ghost of his brother, stunned, and Sam stares straight back. He looks more alive than most ghosts Dean's seen in the past—not ashy and pale, with destroyed clothing or matted hair, and there's no hint of the impale injuries that killed him, the way most ghosts bear their last moments on their skin. He definitely still looks awful, though. There's traces of dirt on his ragged-looking jacket, his clothes are rumpled, and there's a nasty looking cut on one arm, like he got sliced with a knife at some point. The worst is his expression, which looks anguished, pleading and exhausted as he stares straight into Dean's soul.
This is usually the point where the ghost flips the switch and goes from being pitiable to ripping people's organs out through their mouth or some shit like that, and Dean knows he should be careful, should be prepared, should fucking run the hell out of there, but he can't. It's Sam. Sam's not—he wouldn't—he could never—
But that's not true, a traitorous little part of his brain hisses in the back of his head. Hell, he fucking shot you at the asylum last year, and other ghosts have killed for worse reasons than Sam's violent death.
But Dean doesn't run, or fight, or do anything but stare at his brother, stunned. And to his immense shock and relief, Sam doesn't do anything to hurt him, either—doesn't even move from where he's standing, just quietly stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets after a moment or two.
"Sammy?" Dean asks finally, slowly, his voice shaking so badly that in any other situation he'd be embarrassed.
The ghost of his brother doesn't react to his name at all.
"Sam," he tries again, stronger this time. This is the ghost of wish-Sam, after all—he'd been confused at the nickname before, maybe he doesn't understand it.
But Sam's ghost doesn't respond to that, either.
Dean slowly shifts, intending to slip off the bed. Maybe if he can reach out to his brother, try to touch him, he can get his attention better. Some ghosts had a hard time understanding where and when they were, and if Sam hasn't done anything aggressive yet Dean's pretty sure he's not going to—
But he barely gets one foot on the floor when Sam acts. The ghost's head tilts slightly, and his jaw clenches in a motion Dean recognizes as what his little brother does when he's trying to fight back emotion (and often failing miserably). He blinks once, and then, still staring like he's waiting for his big brother to do something, says pleadingly, "Dean...please..."
"Sammy?" Dean asks, alarmed and concerned by the raw desperation that he can hear even through the fuzzy far-away sound of his brother's voice. "Sam? Please what? Please what—"
But he blinks, and Sam's gone, like he'd never been there at all.
Dean leaps out of bed, still alarmed, and searches the entire house, but he finds not a trace of his brother, or any signs of a lingering ghost—no cold spots, mysteriously moved items, or flickering lights. He'd give his left arm for an EMF Meter and regrets, for the first time, that some of his gear hadn't come over with the wish.
He looks for over an hour, but finds nothing no matter how hard he tries, and eventually heads back to bed. But he doesn't sleep—just lays back and stares at the ceiling, turning the newest development over in his head, feeling sicker and sicker by the second.
Because the appearance of Sam's ghost can mean only one thing: his little brother isn't at rest, which means he's suffering even after death, and that hurts too much for Dean to bear.
Dean stews over it for days, to the point that Carmen asks him if he's feeling alright or if he's getting sick again. Dean just tells her he's fine, that he's tired after so many hours at work, and that he's got a lot to think about, and she eventually lets him be.
The last part isn't a total lie—he's been thinking about Sam's ghost and nothing else since the night he saw his little brother again. He doesn't know why Sam's stuck here and hasn't been able to move on, but he assumes it's the violent, sudden nature of his brother's death; they've hunted ghosts with less of a reason to cling to un-life in the past, after all. Then again, most of those ghosts had been vengeful spirits, hellbent on making the lives of anyone who hurt them—and anyone else that got in the way—miserable or non-existent. Sam hadn't attacked him, hadn't even looked angry, which was a little unusual in Dean's experience but certainly welcome compared to the alternative.
Still, whatever Sam's reason for being unable to move on, the thing that had unsettled Dean the most was Sam's raw, desperate pleading for something. There was no question in Dean's mind that Sam's spirit had been asking him for help somehow. The real questions were why, and help with what? Dean had never told this wish-Sam about any of his supernatural experiences, apart from that one brief conversation in which he'd mentioned Sam would be good at hunting, and Sam had probably assumed he'd meant deer or ducks or something. There was no reason for Sam to think Dean had any experiences when it came to ghosts, much less how to deal with them. He supposes that ghosts could maybe have some sort of sixth sense that helped them pick out people who knew about them, but that explanation sounds weak even to Dean, who's used to half-assed explanations in his old line of work. Or there's the possibility that Sam's just haunting everybody in the family. Dean's got no reason to think he's being targeted specifically, and he can't exactly ask mom or Carmen hey, seen Sammy recently? without sounding like a dick or getting locked in a rubber room.
Whatever the reason for the haunting, Dean's determined to help Sam with whatever it is he needs. He failed his brother in life, but he's not going to let him suffer in death, and that pleading, anguished, faraway please is stalking through Dean's dreams and nightmares more effectively than any of the ugly, nasty things he's killed in the past year. He needs to help Sam move on; it's the only thing left he can do for his brother.
He thinks on it for days, and in the end the only reasonable conclusion he can come to is that Sam had been begging his older brother to forcibly cut his ties to the real world—to hunt him, and to end him. Dean certainly knows how, with all the salt and burns he's done in his life, and it sure as hell sounds like something Sam would do. His ghostly pleading had been terrifyingly similar to his drunken begging for Dean to kill him if his freak powers made him cross over the irreversible 'bad guy' line into his so-called 'destiny.' And the danger of him slipping now is certainly real enough—if Sam isn't given the opportunity to move on soon, chances are high that he will change into a vengeful spirit, agonized and screaming for release but tethered to the Earth by invisible shackles, lashing out at anyone he can to ease his pain. Dean can't—won't—let that happen to Sam, no matter what; his brother certainly doesn't deserve such a horrible end.
But God, it's going to be so hard to do that to his brother. He hated the weight of dad's orders to murder his own brother if he couldn't save him, and he hates the thought of destroying him now after he couldn't just the same. This isn't a typical open and shut case—it's family, it's too close to the heart, and it hurts.
He drags his feet on the issue at first, hesitant, unsure. It's been four days since he saw Sam in the middle of the night, and he hasn't seen a trace of his brother's spirit since, or any of the usual signs of haunting. Maybe he'd just imagined it. Maybe he was stressing out from working too hard, and his grief over his brother's loss is slipping through the cracks and into his dreams, manifesting as a ghost in his mind. Maybe he's just going crazy. Whatever the reason, he doesn't want to be forced to hunt his own brother if there's really nothing to hunt; it's like digging a knife into his heart for no reason at all.
By day five with still no sightings he's almost positive it was all a dream. He can't deny the feelings of relief he has, knowing that Sam really isn't suffering, knowing he doesn't have to defile his brother's grave. The relief shatters when, feeling better than he has in days, he heads out to dinner with Carmen—Valentine's Day—and halfway through the meal Sam is suddenly, inexplicably sitting next to him at the table.
Dean nearly chokes on his steak. Carmen gives him a concerned look. "Honey? You okay?" she asks, leaning forward and utterly ignoring the sight of his dead brother sitting between them at the round table. She pats Dean on the back. "You're supposed to eat it, not breathe it."
Dean doesn't even listen to her. He's staring at Sam, who's staring back once again, still looking disheveled and exhausted. The long slice up his arm is bandaged now—weird, because he's dead, so there's really no need to patch it up, right? It's not like he could bleed out and die again, could he?—but other than that he looks a little worse than before. More exhausted than the last time. Slightly darker lines under his eyes. A more distraught expression on his face than before. A lower, more defeated sag to his shoulders.
"Honey?" Carmen looks at him, and glances to her right, trying to catch what he's staring at. "Is something wrong?"
She can't see Sam, Dean realizes. He's only visible to Dean, for whatever reason. Maybe it's because they shared blood, maybe it's because Dean's a hunter and has experience with this stuff, or maybe Sam's chosen to just haunt him for whatever reason. Whatever the case, Dean's the only one who can see him, which means Dean's the only one who can help him.
As if coming to the same conclusion, Sam seems to lean forward slightly towards him, expression anguished, helpless. And just like the night before, he says in a distant-sounding quiet voice, "Dean...please...you have to..."
"I..." But Dean is at loss for words. Sam gives him that tired, helpless look again, and then vanishes before his eyes.
"Honey?" Carmen's looking worried now, wearing that same anxious expression she had the night Dean returned from his almost-deal at the crossroads.
Dean shakes his head to snap back to his senses, and says more or less convincingly, "Sorry. Thought I saw somebody I knew...turned out I was wrong."
She looks like she doesn't quite believe him, but she lets it go. The evening is more or less ruined for Dean, but he goes through the motions anyway, hoping to put her at ease. He barely pays attention—his mind is on Sam, and now that he knows it's real, that he's not imagining things, he knows what he has to do, painful as it's going to be. It's going to hurt so bad to have to do this. But it'll hurt a thousand times worse if he puts it off because of his own cowardice and ends up in a fight with a malevolent, twisted mockery of his brother's spirit, because he was too much of a bleeding heart to put Sammy to rest while he was still himself.
He plans it carefully, waiting until Saturday night, when Carmen and her friends have a girl's night out. She offers to stay with him, still concerned after their last dinner, but he insists that she leave. "You have fun, you deserve it," he tells her truthfully enough. "I'm beat after the garage all this week, I think I'm just gonna head to bed early."
So she leaves and he waves her off with a smile plastered on his face, and as soon as her car pulls around the corner and out of sight he bolts into action. He makes a brief detour to the kitchen pantry to grab the cylindrical container of salt, and then heads for the garage for the rest of the supplies. Lighter fluid and flashlight, crowbar for the coffin from the tool kit, shovel from the gardening stuff, book of matches from the grill; he moves with lightning speed to snatch it all, and tosses them into the Impala's trunk on top of the magazines and discarded trash. "Just one more time, baby," he mutters to the car, as he pulls out of the driveway and heads for the cemetery half is family is buried in, careful to keep his speed legal so he's not noticed—he can't exactly cut and run when this job is done. "Just one more time and it's over."
It takes ages for him to work up the nerve to actually start digging, and even longer to actually dig the damn hole itself. Six feet of heavy soil doesn't transplant itself easily and it's a damn sight harder to do with just one person. It was a lot easier when he had dad, or Sam—but that thought hurts too much when he considers just whose coffin he's unearthing, and he forces himself away from that thought. "It's gonna be okay, Sammy," he mutters instead, over and over. "Just a little longer and it'll be over. Promise."
It's the most painful promise he's ever made.
He's shocked he doesn't have any interruptions while he digs. He's not so concerned by the police checking in—the grave's pretty far back from the road, and graveyard vandals are pretty rare in this town, so there's no need for them to check in on the place. He's more surprised that Sam doesn't show up during the process. In past experiences, ghosts have a tendency to get pissy when you try messing with their bones, or at the very least moody, and Sam's one of the moodiest people he knows—knew. But Dean doesn't see so much as a trace of Sam, his flashlight stays steady the whole time, and it's too fucking cold in mid-February to tell if there's a ghost lurking around so that's no way to tell either.
He hits the coffin without incident, and cracks it open easily, like the dozens of others he's cracked in the past. After that it's not so easy. By now it's been months, and what's left inside has decayed enough that it doesn't look like Sammy anymore, which is arguably a blessing; it'd be a hell of a lot harder to do this if it still looked like his brother. But he still knows, and seeing those remains are a sharp reminder of just how badly he failed to protect his little brother. You let him down, it says, and turned him into this thing.
Dean fights back the urge to throw up. He's gotta save Sammy, now. No time for weakness. He has to be the strong one, one last time. But even so, it takes him a while to steel himself to act.
When he finally does, he works with methodical precision. He's going to do this right, perfectly, once and for all, so it will finally be over for the both of them. He scatters the salt, empties the entire container to be on the safe side, and adds a liberal dose of lighter fluid before climbing out of the hole. Withdraws the book of matches from his jacket pocket, slips one of the matches out, and...hesitates.
"I...I'm sorry, Sammy," he finally says, after a moment, addressing the remains down below. "You don't know how much. I'm sorry I let this happen to you. It never should have...you never should have died, and you never should've turned into this." He swallows, voice shaking slightly as he adds, "I'm a shitty big brother, and I know it. But it's gonna be over now, okay? I promise. I'm gonna fix it right now. It'll all be over soon."
It takes him four matches and ten tries before he finally gets one lit, his hands are shaking so bad. When he finally gets the damn thing lit, it takes every ounce of his strength to wrench his fingers apart and let it drop. The tiny tongue of flame bursts into greater life as soon as it hits the fluid and the bones beneath, and soon the coffin is ablaze, crackling hungrily as everything within it is consumed.
Dean watches intently, unable to look away, not letting himself even try. This is Sammy's real funeral and he's the only one attending; he'll see it through to the end. "Rest in peace, little brother," he whispers, when the flames begin to curl back with nothing left to feed on.
In the morning and back at home, when Carmen makes them a late Sunday brunch, she asks with a confused look on her face if he's seen the salt. "I just bought that thing two weeks ago," she puzzles bemusedly. "It was almost full. We can't have gone through it all yet."
Dean doesn't answer her. The brunch, when it's finished, looks like it should be heavenly, but it tastes like ashes when he eats it, and he gives up after two bites.
Dean figures that's the end of it for Sammy, and his brother has to be at rest now. For Dean the torment's just starting, though. He knows Carmen's worried from the way she keeps asking if he's okay and trying to coax him to eat or sleep. And his mother watches him with concern every time he visits, tells him he really doesn't have to mow the lawn or fix the roof or pitch in on the bills this week. Once he overhears them talking to each other when they think he's using the bathroom, voices anxious. "I was so sure he was getting better after Sam...but it's like he's grieving all over again and I don't know why, I'm not sure what to do, he's starting to scare me a little..."
The worst of it is he really can't explain why he's like this to either of them, because they won't understand. For them, Sam was put to rest months ago at his funeral—they got their closure, they grieved, they managed to put it behind them slowly but surely. For Dean it's different—he just buried Sam a second time, and it's like picking open a wound to let it bleed all over again. All those regrets he felt before, the knowledge that he'd failed to protect his little brother, not once but twice...it's as sharp and as painful as the first time, compounded by Sam's suffering after death just as much as before it.
Carmen tries to convince him to go see a shrink, or get grief counseling, or some other crap like that. "It might help," she tries telling him gently. "I know you miss him, but you need to try and move on, he wouldn't want to see you like this..."
Like she'd know what Sammy thinks. She knew him even less than Dean's wish-self did. He refuses any form of counseling, even when his mother adds her own gentle-but-worried nudges for him to do so. The only thing a shrink's gonna do if he tells them about the salt and burn is give him a straight jacket anyway.
But he feels like shit inside all the same, with all those disgusting feelings of failure and regret and loss that won't go away, and it's like those things claw their way out of him into physical form. Maybe a week after he salts and burns Sammy's bones he gets sick again. It's the same thing he got before, on the day that Sam had died, as if life isn't busy rubbing his face in his own failure enough: fever, full-body aches, that pounding in his head, the difficulty breathing. And just like before, it gets worse, with that burning-knife pain on either side of his heart, and that strange, foreboding dread, that harsh anxiety that tells him something is wrong, wrong, wrong, and it's coming soon.
He's terrified at the feeling. The last time he felt it Sammy died; he's positive this is a sign that something else is coming, like Sam's agonizing visions when they were hunters. He calls mom and Carmen in a delirious haze, desperate to make sure they're both alive and okay, and when they assure him they are he makes them promise to be extra careful and get the hell out of wherever they are if anything weird happens. Carmen sounds worried and tells him she's coming home early to take care of him, he's obviously in bad shape. Mom seems concerned when he tells her not to go in the damn nursery because Dean, there hasn't been a nursery in the house in twenty years. He refuses to hang up and go to sleep like she asks until she promises anyway. She does, thank God.
Slightly more relieved, Dean drops his cell phone on the floor next to his bed, wearily curls up as another lance of pain spikes through his chest, and glances blearily at the door just in time to see Sam curl a hand around the doorframe and lean in to stare at him. Dean freezes, eyes wide and staring back in horror, and the next bolt of pain through his chest hurts worse than before.
Sam seems to realize it, because when Dean groans in pain he twitches forward a pace, like he desperately wants to come into the room but is being held back by something. Not salt lines, Dean thinks dazedly, through his shock and pain, don't do that anymore.
"Dean!" Sam yells, and even yelling he sounds so far away, bubbly, like he's underwater. He looks exhausted, his face anguished and terrified. "Dean, no, please, you can't, please, not yet—"
And Dean can barely make out what he's saying, fuzzy as his head is and far away as the spirit's voice is, but he hears enough to read between the lines: Please, don't give up yet. Not yet, not until you've freed me, you're the only one that can help.
He groans and squeezes his eyes shut against the next throb of pain. When he opens his eyes Sam's gone again, vanished as though he was never there to begin with. Shortly after the worst of the symptoms pass, and the chest pains and the anxiety fades, and Dean falls into an exhausted stupor.
It's only hours later, when he wakes again feeling marginally better, that he realizes what he'd seen, and what it meant. Because it had been real: there was no doubt about that. Sam's ghost had unquestionably come to visit again. But that means his brother is still not at rest, because there's something else tying him to this world, and that's even worse than before.
How many times is he going to fail Sammy anyway?
He really doesn't want to know the answer.
