A/N

Last chapter of the Samulet Confessions. It you like it, please review, as this is my first completed story in this fandom. If you're sorry it's ending, I am now working full time on the next story in this universe, Confessions of a Toy Soldier, the first chapter of which can be found via my profile, and the second chapter should go up this evening, after I have done some fact checking against the show.

I will also be taking prompts for this 'verse, just pm them under Salt and Burn Confessions, Which will debut this coming Sunday, I believe. Thank you for reading. Some Lisa love in this story, because I really like her and Ben. I think she put a lot of honest love into trying to heal Dean, and she doesn't always get the credit she deserves. It's quite possible this story assumes she knows more than she does in true canon, but I like to think that as she was a single mom, she would have gathered what info she could have about what was going on with Dean. As a mom myself, no matter how much I like or love someone, their emotional baggage doesn't get near my kid until I've checked it for bombs, so to speak, so that is my reasoning. This story gets things off my chest which nearly drown me every time I re-watch this show. Maybe now they will stop haunting me...

Disclaimer: Still not my sandbox.

"Heavy Things Don't Fly"

The haunting stopped, after Sam fell. Not the memories of Sam. Those were everywhere, anyplace he went, anything he did. The memory of his brother danced across his every waking moment, like rain sinking the ground, through any open crack, regardless of how small.

But that phantom weight around his neck, the small chiming clink that had shadowed him for weeks finally disappeared.

Dean missed it.

He still reached for it. Went to tuck it into his shirt if he was bending down, reached to take it off to shower. Still paused whatever he was doing, waiting for that tiny, inconsequential sound that never came.,The silence felt too big, now that it had stopped. He wanted it back, that last piece of his brother, but it eluded him.

Perhaps even the memory of it had given up on him.

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Lisa waited weeks to broach the topic. It was driving her crazy, the wondering, the not knowing. Dean had been too wounded, however, to raw, to ask what had happened.

The question circled her mind like a cat-burglar; searching for a weakness, a way to slip past her guarded lips.

Where had Dean's amulet gone?

Strangely enough, the night Dean had shown up at her door, it's absence had been the first thing her sleep-addled brain had noted.

Dean's amulet was missing.

The timing had never seemed right, however. Dean spent the first few weeks with her and Ben oscillating between nearly comatose silences and furious midnight drinking binges.

When he started to get better, he locked it all away. The Impala, his hunting supplies, even his old clothes. Dean hid away every part of himself that Sam had ever touched, guarding it as ferociously as a dragon guarded his treasure.

She might not have asked at all, ever, except that no matter how tightly Dean locked it all away during the day, it all leaked out at night, in his dreams.

He never spoke about them, but she could guess. Dean had told her the cliff notes version when he first appeared at her door. Sam, Lucifer, and an endless eternity of torture in the pit.

The entire world saved for the bargain price of Dean Winchester's little brother.

But after that first night, they hadn't spoke of it. Dean couldn't speak about it, not if he was going to be able to at least pretend to function. She knew he was still looking, still searching for a way to get Sam out. The books, the late night trips and phones calls all evidence of his painful quest.

All his searching had been in vain though, at least so far, and sometimes she thought that would be the death of Dean. She had long ago acknowledged that Dean might simply not be able to exist in a world that didn't have Sam in it somewhere.

She might not get to keep him.

She was determined to do whatever she could to heal him though.

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One night, the nightmares were particularly bad. After the third one, Dean had simply pulled up a chair to their bedroom window and sat watching the night.

She sat on their bed, arms wrapped around her knees and the sheets puddled around her hips as she faced him. The distance felt lonely to her, yet she knew Dean needed it at that moment. There was a Sam-shaped space between her and Dean, and the day she stopped respecting it might very well be the day he left for good.

He looked so broken, so tormented, that she finally asked what she had been wondering about for weeks. Getting him to talk about it, about anything was becoming more and more crucial. He wouldn't survive this if he didn't learn to confide in someone else. Sam had saved the world, but he couldn't save Dean.

"What happened to it?' Her voice fractured the silence, soft words cutting across the darkness like knives, and Dean flinched, actually flinched under the weight of them.

He took a lifetime to answer, surprised her by answering at all, in fact.

"It was heavy." He said finally. "I took it off, and I threw away, and now my brother is dead." Like a dam breaking, the words finally came then, torrents of them, like a poisonous river, and all she could do was listen and hope he didn't drown in them.

That was the first and last time Lisa ever saw Dean cry.

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He had poured out the whole story to her that night, of Christmases, little brothers, Heaven and faith.

The next morning they didn't speak of it. They didn't speak of it the day after that day, or even in any the days following that. Dean simply wasn't ready, and even if he had been, Lisa was still searching for the words to soothe the wound on Dean's soul. The song to soothe the savage beast.

Because how did you explain the nature of faith to someone who didn't have it? It was like trying to explain the sky to a blind man, like explaining flight to a fish.

And wasn't that the most crucial of the differences between the brothers anyway? Dean had operated in black and white, good and bad. What he could see, touch, taste. What he could kill.

Sam had been a different creature. Dean might have been a righteous man, but Sam had been a man of faith. Perhaps that was why Sam had been able to leave for college. Sam understood that just because a person wasn't there with you at that moment didn't mean they were gone forever. Sam had understood that even when he was apart from Dean, that Dean was still out there, still loved him.

Faith.

To Dean, loving a person meant being with them, preferably within arm's reach. Dean had needed to touch, to hear, to see. Dean needed proof. As far as Dean was concerned, he only got to keep what he could hold onto.

In Dean's mind, he had let go of his amulet, let go of his brother.

And he was never going to get either of them back.

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She finally approached Dean nearly a month afterward. Dean had grilled steaks for dinner, and now he was leaning against the picnic table with Ben, pointing out the constellations.

Lisa wondered if he had learned them to navigate with, or maybe to entertain a younger brother on countless nights spent in a car.

Or perhaps Dean had learned them from Sam himself. Sam sounded like someone who would have loved the stars, would have loved learning all the stories behind them.

"Bath time, honey," she said, and Ben obediently, albeit grudgingly ambled into the house.

She handed Dean a fresh beer before leaning beside him, staring into the darkening sky. Fireflies danced around them and it was beautiful and romantic and so close to perfect she wanted to cry.

Because between them was still that Sam-shaped space, and tonight she had to cross it. For Dean's sake, she had to try, had to believe that Sam would have wanted her to try. If Sam was brave enough to save the whole world, well, she could be brave enough to save his brother.

"I'm only going to talk about this once." She began quietly, feeling Dean tense beside her. "And then I am going to go into the house. If you can't follow, I understand. I want you to, but...I will understand. But I think you need to hear this, and I am the only one here to say it." She swallowed nervously, then continued.

"I think they were right. The demons, the angels. All of them. They were right. It had to be you, and it had to be Sam. It had to be the two of you." She watched his silhouette in the dark.

"Why?" Dean finally asked, voice low and anguished.

She took a moment to answer, marshaling her thoughts. "John raised you, Dean. He raised you to be a soldier, to do what's right, to do the hard thing even when all you wanted to do was run away."

"He raised me to protect Sam." Dean interjected angrily.

She reached for the words, desperate to make him understand. "And you did. You DID Dean, far better than John ever protected either of you. You were Sam's real father, YOU raised him, not John, and you did it right. That's why Sam was strong enough to fight against your father, strong enough to leave for college. Because when you do a good job raising your kid, they are supposed to leave, supposed to be strong enough to leave." She paused a moment for breath. Her heart was pounding, but she had committed to saying all this, committed to seeing it through.

"You did that Dean, for Sam. It wasn't your Dad, it was you. It had to be you. You were the only person determined enough, the only person genuinely good enough to raise Sam to be the person he ended up being despite the horrible childhoods you had. And Sam saved everyone Dean. Everyone. Me, you , Ben, the people down block. Sam saved everyone, but he was only able to do it because of you! Every time you taught him what loyalty was, what family meant, every time you came through for him, you were teaching him faith. And every time he fought back against your father, he was learning to to stand up for what he thought was right, to be strong. It wasn't because of his bloodline or his destiny. It was just Sam, and what you spent your whole life doing for him. John gave him strength, and you gave him faith."

She paused, wiped at her own tears before continuing. "So, yes. It probably had to be Sam. Who else had enough strength to beat the devil, and enough faith to try? It had to be Sam, because Sam was the only one who could have ever won. Any of those other special kids could have let Lucifer out, but only Sam could have stopped him. Sam wrote his own story. That's the legacy you gave him. It's hard, and it's horrible, but it's beautiful, too. Every terrible thing that happened to you and your brother, and you two used it to save the world." She finally stopped, the words run out of her like sand through an hourglass. She had no other words to give him, could only pray it was enough.

She started to walk away, back to the house.

"He thought I gave up on him, Lisa." Dean's voice stopped her, and she turned to look back at him.

"I threw that amulet away, told him it was worthless. It was a sign of his faith in me, and I wore it, right where he could see it, every day, nearly our whole damn lives. And then I threw it away. And the last thing he ever did was save me anyway." The pain in his voice made her want to weep.

"He forgave you Dean. I know he did." Lisa replied, heart breaking for him.

"How?" Dean insisted, surging to his full height, an intimidating black silhouette in the shadows of the back yard.

"Because that's what faith is, Dean. Like your angel friend said. Sam had faith in you. He didn't need proof. Yes, your amulet was a symbol, but that's all it was. Sam was strong enough to defeat Satan, don't short-change him now. He didn't need to see you wearing that amulet to believe in you. That's Sam's legacy. A faith in you so strong it could save the world."

She started back to the house, turning to add just one last thing.

"If you can see it, you don't have faith in it. You simply know it. You can only have faith it in something you can't see."

A/N

Yay! First story under RavensGame completed! So, I know many of you were hoping this would be the type of fix-it fic that brings the Samulet back. And trust me, I have imagined it back so many times I could do a whole fic where every chapter is another way that amulet comes back. But part of my whole challenge to myself with the confession's 'verse is to write stories that could be canon, just canon we didn't get to see in the show. And I truly believe faith is an important tenet of Sam's character, as is the fact that Dean struggles with it. So how to fix the Samulet without bringing it back? And thus the Samulet confessions were born.

Reviews are love.

As Always,

EverReader