Warning: brief mention of suicide.
Chapter Eight
The next two days are spent mending whatever you could of your car. The damage is severe, which would be expected since the truck rammed straight into the car, fucked up a lot of things along the way, so you fix what you can until the Chevrolet 67' car doors and fenders are shipped here. It's good, because May third is still not far away enough yet. The manticore case is taken up by another hunter, and even though hunting is the one thing that gives you anything close to meaning, the break is much-needed.
"Bobby's calling you in. Lunch's ready," Sam's voice pipes up. You almost look up reflexively, but you catch yourself in time because you don't want to see his face, the bruises marring and swelling his skin, cuts from metallic rings splitting it apart. It doesn't look any worse than after a hunt, once the blood is all gone, but it still makes your stomach lurch (because you know that they didn't come from a real monster), your knuckles heavy with its own wounds.
He doesn't wait for an answer. He's stopped waiting for them a long time ago, so he turns around and walks back inside.
He keeps his distance from you, ever since that night. It's not really a bad thing, but you can't help but notice that the distance is too wide and safe, enough that you can't touch him (hurt him) if you wanted to, and that he flinches every time you move too fast, and that his hands shake a little whenever you're in the same room as him.
...
The thing is, after you've put together all that you could of the car, and repaired the few other cars that needed repairing, there's no bottom of one left to lose yourself under, no other work to hide in until the car parts arrive. And May third is still too close and all there's left is whiskey, but after a day of you drinking to the brink of alcohol poisoning, Bobby has enough of it and forbids you from accessing the liquor cabinet. Which shouldn't really stop you, but he looked ready to grab his buckshot and shoot you with it, and you've learned a long time ago not to mess with the man.
So you're back to hunting now. Well, as good as the break was, maybe you were getting a bit restless anyway.
You find a case located in the Old House Woods of Matthews County, Virginia, six people dead from car accidents in the past four months, either ran into a tree or off a cliff, because something fucked with the brakes of their cars. One victim who was able to escape by breaking through the windows says the locks were all jammed, and the doors wouldn't budge no matter what.
…
He's drinking whiskey straight out of a bottle in the kitchen. A rare sight. He looks up and catches your eyes, his full of red and heavy sorrow, bruises still too dark and fresh on his face and making his sorrow look sadder, and you don't know what to do so you turn around and leave.
You have this hunch that he wanted to say something, that he was about to, the kind of things you don't ever tell each other anymore because they're not something you talk about with the man who killed your father or the man whose father you killed. Things that aren't said in a tone of detached professionalism about hunting and monsters and victims. You wonder what it might have been if you stayed around long enough to listen.
Tomorrow morning, you will get into a shitty car that's not yours, that looks like it has seen better days—a lot better days—and maybe he will be there. Maybe he won't be. Maybe after this third May, he wouldn't want to be here for another third May, and that would be good. That would be good. Maybe he will stand outside the car door and he will say, "I'm done running around with you, Dean. I'm stayin' here." And Bobby will take him in again and—
And then Sam would go and do something fucking stupid like eat a bullet or jump off a bridge, and then Bobby would be there to find his suicide note or his body, and he'd be there to wonder why because he would always believe that Sam had a reason, and he'd be there to grieve over the fact that he'd never know because he wasn't there at the right place and time to stop him. He'd be there to get caught in shit that wasn't his to get caught in, and you will not let that happen.
Here, with you, he thinks that there's something he needs to be around for. He thinks he needs to look out for you and keep you alive, and he takes it as some kind of a mission or a purpose or the only thread that's keeping him tethered to this world, and if it gets cut or snapped apart, he'll float away. That's what Bobby had told you, and you don't know what makes him think that, but then sometimes you look at Sam, so sunken in and deadened and sad most of the time, and there are moments when he's staring out the window of the car and there's something almost, almost like peace on his face. Maybe not peace, but a kind of resigned acceptance, perhaps. Like this is the best it can get for somebody like him and it's enough.
Bobby had once said before, "It doesn' make sense, maybe. But I think, bein' with you? This is the best I've seen him."
He was right. It didn't really make sense.
You look back and Bobby's there, Sam in tow with his arm around his shoulder, head rolling on his neck. They're walking upstairs to the guest room and you decide to wait until he's fallen asleep.
Here's something that happens, that you'll wonder about for a long, long time after. You're stepping up the stairs a half an hour or so later, and Bobby comes out of the room, and he looks nauseously pale and red-eyed and aghast and you're asking him, "Bobby, everything alright?" and he says nothing. He doesn't seem to know you're there.
He closes the door behind him and walks past you and you let him. You can only watch his retreating back until it turns and disappears little by little down the stairwell. You turn back to the room, turn the doorknob of it and push it open, and Sam's lying there on his bed, head turned away towards the wall in a whiskey-glazed slumber.
And you can't imagine what the hell happened in that room to put that look there on Bobby's face, and you want to know. You want to shake Sam awake and ask him (but those aren't the things you're supposed to talk about with him) or you want to go up to Bobby and check on him but you don't do any of that. Something stops you from it, roots you to the spot, and you stand there over him and try to think through the confusion and blankness until your already tired legs begin to ache, so you turn and crawl into your bed and lie down.
Sleep comes easy at times now but the dreams are always not of ease. You still jerk awake from remnant visions of guns and your dead father and fire (and sometimes, sometimes, you dream about walking into a bathroom to find empty hazel eyes and a long white cut on a cold arm and chestnut brown hair stuck to the ground in dried blood).
There's sunlight blinding your eyes when you open them. There's a rustle from somewhere around you. You sit up painfully slow, rub your eyes groggily, and you look at Sam, blanched face and shadowed eyes from a nasty hangover, and maybe something else that you can't really fathom, but a thought pipes up in your head, wondering if it has anything to do with what happened last night. His eyes are red and his brows are settled into a frown and his hands are quivering at his sides. For some reason, he looks like he's about to break down, standing there over his duffel with his hand tightly gripping the strap, head bowed and his chin clenched, lips trembling.
You pretend not to notice that.
When you're standing outside, ready to leave, Bobby seems as awful as Sam. They don't talk or interact, no embraces shared or words exchanged. Sam never chances a look at Bobby, while Bobby can't seem to stop looking at him, and it's a strange image because Sam has never been afraid of Bobby like this and Bobby has never been speechless and lost and devastated like this. There is a need to speak on the tip of his tongue, you can see it on his face, but he doesn't have the words.
Sam rushes over to the passenger's side of the car. He gets in. You get in. You look at him and at Bobby curiously, but you never ask because you shouldn't care enough to. The car purrs and starts and it drives on until the roads become lonely and long and endless. That's that.
...
You go to interview the escaped victim, and she tells you everything you already know from the newspapers. Jammed doors, screwed brakes and locks, couldn't understand what was going on, but she also tells you, after some cajoling ("nothing too strange to tell, ma'am"), that there were cold spots and the sense of a presence that she couldn't see before she got into the car.
Sam looks through old reports and articles and finds the story of a woman, Hayley Roth, who died in those woods under the same conditions. Having her life taken so suddenly and unexpectedly, she was not ready to move on and remained trapped here, restless and enraged at the world and so subjecting it to the same fate as hers.
All details are found. Tonight you go to the cemetery her body was buried in, and it should've been easy and simple the way salt-and-burn cases often are, but it wasn't. God, it wasn't. The way your whole world unraveled by one unseen pull and fell apart like a house of cards. Funny how you came in and you thought you'd leave the same way you left every other hunt, but you didn't. And he didn't. Funny, indeed, how you never know that you're minutes away from that moment your life falls off a cliff in a car.
…
The bitch knocks you the wrong way against a gravestone, and you hear it the second your leg snaps a bone. Fuck, it hurts right down to your toes, agony radiating down to them in waves. You fall down to the ground with a choked groan, grimacing. Sitting there against the tree that Hayley Roth's car had once crashed into in 1997, you're suddenly not sure if he will come back to pick you off the ground and carry you to the car, because you haven't fractured a leg in years. You're not sure how far he'll go to help you now, and maybe this is as far as it gets, where the line stops, especially after all the ones you crossed with him.
But he does come along to pick you off the ground and carry you to the car, grabbing you by the elbows and pulling you up and wrapping his arms around your waist, yours around his shoulders (it leaves you asking where exactly that line ends).
You hobble along with him, the spirit fortunately still gone for now. The grave was not even halfway dug when she came in, and so there's not enough time for one person to finish the hunt. She will kill either you or him before he's done and there isn't any point in trying when that's so obvious. You feel dizzy and cold from the agony and you're ready to pass out by the time you reach the shitty car. He puts you in the passenger seat and gets into the driver's seat, and you haul out of there.
But the car is rumbling on and Hayley is left behind. And when she's far away enough, Sam tries to stop the car and it doesn't. There is a moment of frozen realization passing over his face, the cold jolt of fear that twitches his eyes up and far-off. Your heart pounds in an imitation of those same emotions, your mind a frantic whirlwind to the point where you can't catch a clear thought and you can't think as the car speeds down to your death and his. You swallow down panic while he tries the door in some instinctive reaction, trying to find any solution possible, but it won't budge, the door stuck and locked without relent.
And here, you're watching him again, even now, and he's still so fucking young, and in the vulnerability of the moment (the finality of it), your heart opens up and he's still that same little boy with bouncy hair and big eyes and dimples like crescent moons in his cheeks. He's that same boy you felt oceans of love for. He is. He is here and he is real and he is going to die.
It leaves as soon as it comes, and you focus on the situation. You lean forward, grabbing a hold of Sam's wrist. His head snaps up at the contact. "My duffel bag, Sam," you say, sounding more composed than you really are. "In the backseat. Get the shotgun out. Break the window and get out, alright?"
He stares at you, wide-eyed, swallowing.
"Come on! We don't have time!" you yell.
He spurs into action, twisting around and reaching over for the duffel bag from between the gap of the seats. He grabs a hold of it and drags it close to himself, unzips it, digging through the items frantically with trembling hands until he pauses, and he pulls out a shotgun.
And then—
The car keeps speeding on and on. His face suddenly smooths out into something calm and fine, all that fear draining out of his eyes and mouth and shoulders, and it's like he's the only still thing in a world where everything's going too fast. He looks at you and smiles softly (sadly) in a way that doesn't make sense to you. Time slows down for a moment (or maybe it's just the bumps and jostles and the blurring roads and the panic of it all falling away for a few seconds), and you're staring at him, confused. He's looking at you as if he's seeing you for the last time, and that you being the last thing he sees is all he needed, and his smile still doesn't make sense to you.
The tires eat up the road beneath as the end comes closer and closer, and he leans over and slams it hard against the car window on your side. You want to ask, "what the fuck are you doing?" because he was supposed to try to escape himself, try to smash that shotgun against his side of the window to bail himself out.
So you do ask. "What the fuck are you doing?"
"You're going to be okay, Dean," is all he says, his face scrunched up with concentration and the force he's exerting as the back of the shotgun bashes into the laminated glass over and over, the noise pounding into your brain.
You grasp his arm and he pauses for only a second, before continuing. "Sam, no. Listen, I'm a gimp right now, okay? You're the one who can make it out of here."
"Well, I'm not going to." The collisions keep going, into the glass and into your aching head.
"Goddamnit, just get yourself out first! I'll be right behind you!"
"There probably won't be enough time for the both of us," he argues, the side of his ribs shoved up against the side of your shoulder, jerking with every clash on the window.
"Alright, you know what? Bobby's going to shoot me if I let you die."
He laughs a little, but it sounds all wrong, too forced and shaky and breathless, and like he doesn't think it's funny at all. "And you think he'll spare me if I let you die?"
"I'm not kidding."
"Neither am I." The frustration and anger erupt into something bigger, tightening up your chest and coursing through your veins like fire through gasoline.
"God, no, fucking listen to me! Stop trying to be some goddamn hero and help yourself!"
Sam's always been so fucking stubborn and selfish. Always did whatever the hell he wanted. Never stopped to think about what it might do to others.
He never stops.
"It's going to be okay," he says, winded and determined, and as if he didn't hear a word you said. His eyes seemed glazed over, almost as if in some kind of trance. "It's going to be okay."
You don't realize what you're saying until you've said it.
"Sammy, please." It was too soft and quiet and you don't think he heard you, and you can't stop staring at him, can't stop seeing bouncy hair and big eyes and crescent-moon dimples. "Please."
"You're going to be okay."
That's all he keeps saying, right until the window shatters and the pieces fly all over and he's pushing you out. It's the last thing you hear from him, muffled and cut off as air fills up your ears and drowns out his voice.
The world flips over as you fall out, and it spins and it spins and it spins, agony exploding all over your leg and jarring your skull, and when it stops and you lift your head up as much as the vertigo and pain allows, the car is driving on and on until finally the ground vanishes under it and it leaps, throwing dirt as it does, before disappearing down the edge.
And you are lying there watching it happen, shackled down by a damaged leg, and your pummeling heart lurches down to your feet painfully before stopping altogether. And it's all frozen silence after you gasped out something (maybe it was his name), and it's all silence in return and you keep waiting for a voice to break through the still, quiet air.
You keep staring and staring and staring at the edge of that cliff, as if expecting him to somehow emerge from there by some phenomenal miracle, unscathed. And then there is the distant, stifled sound of an explosion from somewhere far down below. You're crying and turning your head away as if turning away from it would mean you didn't really see it, clenching your hot and hazy eyes shut, your heavy throat and chest trying to sink you through the ground, your head bleeding red into the dirt and your leg swollen and throbbing.
…
The adrenaline has worn out long before, leaving you exhausted and still in anguish. You pass out and wake up the next morning to find a pair of hikers in your line of vision, shaking your shoulder and saying words that don't reach you through the sickening ripples of pain hurtling up your leg, the nagging ache in your temple, but you're saying—and you don't know why you're saying this when you already know it's pointless because you were there—but you're saying to them, "M-my brother-" You swallow down the realization that you haven't called him that in years, and it feels like glass shards cutting down your throat.
They look half-confused and half-concerned, hovering over you on the ground. You continue, "'was a car acc-accident. H-he fell off that cliff back there." Your eyes are prickling again, but you're so tired.
"When'd this happen?" the girl asks, and the boy stares silently at you.
"Las' night," you say, and they look at each other uncertainly, and they might be wondering why you're talking about him as if he's still alive, as if there's hope. They look at you again, and they look like they don't know what to tell you, or that they don't know what you want them to do. You don't know either.
Everything goes black, and maybe you'll wake up in the same place you are now or somewhere better (somewhere far, far away from here) and maybe after the way your insides are shredding apart when it all strikes into you again in that second, you won't wake up at all, but there is no longer any pain.
…
You open your eyes to white ceiling and walls and drips of morphine in your ear. Your leg is in a cast, your head bandaged, and you're looking up at the ceiling and for the first few seconds, in that space between sleep and awake, in the haze of painkiller drugs, you can't remember why the inside of your chest is so heavy and hollow. And then you remember and you wish you never did.
And for the longest time, you lie there and you stare at the whitewashed ceiling and you watch that car go off the cliff over and over.
…
You're standing a few days later in the parking lot of the hospital with crutches under your arm. You're looking up at it, the building towering over you, and you have a phone (cracked screen but it still works) but no car and no bags and nobody beside you to make sure you don't trip and fall on your face.
You've been in this place before, standing alone, and you felt alone back then but you feel so much more alone now, like this city and this world is too big when there's nobody standing next to you (crowding your space but never, never touching). It's different and it's worse and you still feel like you could wake up any moment to find that you're in your bed with coffee and breakfast and a newspaper on your night table.
But you never really wake up from this endless dream that keeps going for days and days and days.
So you are standing there with your phone in your hand, and you're calling Bobby to tell him that the boy he took in for the past ten years is dead, and there is a moment of detached marvel at how your life became from that to that to this. You're standing there with your phone in your hand and he picks up the phone and you're saying, "Sam's gone."
And you think you understand now, why Sam sounded the way he did when he told you your father was dead on that phone. You watched it all happen in front of your eyes and you still feel lost and confused and like you don't know what had happened at all either.
Bobby is now asking you what had happened. You're not answering him. He's almost pleading but you can't get any more words out because there is something pulling you down from the inside, and suddenly all you want to do is sleep so that you can forget that this isn't a dream even though it feels like it. Maybe this is cruel, but you hang up the phone.
That was the last time you spoke to him.
Author's Note: If anyone wondered about the point of that drunk driver ramming into the Impala in the last chapter, then here's the answer. I just didn't want Dean to lose his baby. :P
This chapter was very hard to write, for a lot of reasons. First of all, I had to move out of my comfort zone, which is to write solely about angst and emotions. I hope that it wasn't very underwhelming and nobody strayed too out of character. Second of all, I'm afraid that I may have unknowingly made some glaring errors, whether of the mechanical or the medical kind, neither of which I'm very well-versed at. There are a lot more things, but I'll leave it at that so that it doesn't get too long. I hope that I did justice to one of the most crucial points of this story, which was how Dean had lost Sam. Please don't worry though, as I have promised that this is not a deathfic.
To:
Ruby
ncsupnatfan
EmilyAnnMcGarrett-Winchester
Badwolf40
kV8
ForgottenDreamer98
lina89
Heidi
LilyBolt
Swiss Blue
Deanssammy
FriendlyTuesday
Nahla981
sarah
whatnosheep
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your kind and lovely comments. As always, they brighten my day to read. Thank you to all who tagged me and/or my story, all those who gave it a chance and read it, and all those who are still here and have waited so patiently. I'm very grateful. *hugs*
