Chapter 21 Raleigh, New York, 2013

Outside it was drizzling again, he could hear the slur of the water over the roof, could see the drops collecting and falling where the holes were, slicking the old floorboards, gleaming in the dim light.

Inside, he was burning.

The confessional was small, too small for him and his legs were already cramping as he knelt awkwardly in the narrow space, staring at the fretwork screen, separating him from no one.

Or someone.

Sam sucked in deep breath, closing his eyes and folding his hands together on the narrow shelf.

How to begin? Where to begin? Dean's suggestions rolled through his mind. Ruby.

You chose a demon over your own brother …

He had. He'd thought he was doing the right thing, had thought … his breath caught in his throat as the memories surrounded him, thick and choking with his delusions about being stronger. That's what it'd been all about, hadn't it? Being stronger than his big brother, able to get the job done while Dean vacillated and worried about him turning into a monster.

He opened his eyes and stared at the screen. He had. Turned into a monster.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned …

In the trunk of the car, the demon had looked out of her eyes and then it'd gone, and all that was left was a woman, terrified, pleading for her life. Ruby had argued about it. What's the difference between her and all the other meatsuits you killed to get at the demons inside? There was no difference, not to the innocent people he'd killed. They'd killed. But the nurse was the one who haunted him.

I'm sorry.

It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

Pulsing through his body, two forces warred, burning and battling for possession. One, an ancient evil, that had, over years, infiltrated every cell in his blood. The other a divine power, seeking out the evil and immolating it, one cell at a time. Forty days and forty nights. Not a real number. But a real penance. Preparation for the struggle that was consuming him now.

Killing Lilith. Letting Lucifer out.

Pride had driven him. To ignore the people who'd loved him. To listen to a demon who was manipulating him. You didn't need the feather to fly, you had it in you the whole time, Dumbo! Ruby had been right. His choices. She hadn't forced him to do anything he hadn't wanted to do. She'd just given him the options and he'd done the rest, choosing the wrong path, choosing the wrong course, every single time.

He hadn't saved anyone.

I'm having a hard time forgiving and forgetting here, Sam.

His head bowed. All his life, there had been one constant. One thing that had never changed. His brother, standing there, between him and whatever was coming for them; beside him; behind him. Always there. Dean had taught him how to tie his shoes. How to read. How to clean a gun and load it. How to get over a broken heart and how to stand up to the things he was frightened of facing. How to … do most of the things that had formed the foundations of his life. It hadn't been a smooth and easy journey, for either of them. What relationship ever was? Too much time together, too much unrelenting pressure. Too much fear. Too much … just too much. He'd seen his friends grow apart from their siblings. They hadn't had that chance, not until he'd run, gone to Stanford, shaken himself free of the life that demanded and demanded and gave little in return.

In college, he'd tried to bury his past. Pretend it didn't exist. Sam Winchester, student, pre-law, that's all anyone needed to know. Except for Jess. He'd told her a bit more. Not the real things, though. He hadn't wanted her to see those.

He'd been so angry with his family, he'd tried to pretend them out of existence for the first year, changing the subject when family came up in conversation, brushing off questions and telling outright lies. It'd taken longer to realise that there was a part of him that missed his brother. A lot longer to feel the pinch of loss for his father.

Their lives had been lived on the run and he still didn't know if the combative closeness they'd shared had been forced on them, or if it'd been something they'd somehow chosen. Dean had been his best friend for many years. His tormentor. His saviour when he'd forgotten a rule, taking the blame, standing between him and their father. Competent and frighteningly capable. The one who had his back. The one who knew his weaknesses. Sometimes so contradictorily gentle, that looking back, he could hardly believe it. Even now, he didn't know how his older brother could be so many people, all wrapped in the one, slightly battered exterior. Time after time, his brother had been able to see, somehow, what he'd been feeling. Giving rough comfort for the things that were just hurt pride or a skinned knee, but on those rare moments when the pain had gone in deep, Dean had opened up, revealing someone else, someone who stayed hidden most of the time, only coming out when really needed. Someone who cared too deeply and thought of that as a flaw, something he could be trapped with.

That exterior, he thought, was still pretending everything was fine. He didn't know what lay behind the infrequent smiles or the closed and shuttered expressions. Dean had stopped trusting him.

I don't think we can ever be what we were, you know?

It hadn't really been until that moment that he'd realised that he'd wanted them to have the unthinking and conditional trust he'd relied on his whole life. Not until it was gone. In the years that'd followed, they'd made some attempts to patch it over, put it back together again. None of it had worked. It hadn't been him, and it hadn't been his fault, when he'd been soulless, but that hadn't changed the impact on his brother. He'd been lost in a limbo of no leads and no answers when Dean had disappeared with Cas on the coattails of Roman's death, but that hadn't changed the impact either.

His back arched involuntarily as another flood of heat burned through him, and he gasped, eyes screwed tightly shut as he waited and waited for the agony to ease, to ebb away as it had before, slowly, gradually, leaving him feeling weak and shaky.

The anger, lying just beneath the surface, had been there as long as he could remember. Not always seething, but always waiting. He'd felt it and it had scared him, sometimes. The way it would come rushing out, lashing at anyone around him. In his nightmares, he could hear the clicks of the hammer falling onto the empty chamber, one after another as he'd pulled the trigger, the notch at the end of the barrel burned into his memories, sighted between his brother's eyes. That anger had been disproportionate, driven by something else, something not of him, but at the time, he'd known, with a sick feeling in his stomach, that he wouldn't have succumbed to it if those feelings, unarticulated – never articulated – hadn't been there to start with.

You can't understand, he'd told Dean. It's not in you the way it's in me.

As if in response to his thoughts, fire raced through his chest. His lungs froze, his diaphragm seizing in reaction. Just breathe, he told himself, just in and out, until you remember how to do it automatically. It was harder than he'd thought it would be, fighting the pain of the blood boiling in him, fighting the tightness of his memories.

He'd trusted Dean. He thought he'd trusted him. And for some things, he had. But not for others. Gritting his teeth, Sam forced himself to see.

It'd been a few months after leaving Palo Alto. The nightmares about Jess had been dissipating. He'd pulled a leaf from his brother's book of dealing with crap and hadn't talked about them, had immersed himself in grief and guilt and had tried to call up that anger to help him through. A mistake, he knew. Revenge, retribution, payback … none of it had helped. And the anger had driven him hard, and it had been a thousand times worse when he saw what Dean had done for him.

You shouldn't've done that. How could you do that?

What he'd meant, but hadn't been able to say, was that he couldn't deal with the burden of having that sacrifice on him. Later, he'd told Dean that he should've known, he'd had to bear the same burden of guilt for their father's deal. He'd seen that hadn't mattered to Dean. He'd done his job. What it cost was irrelevant to him.

If I'd killed Jake, instead of letting him live, Sam thought, none of what had followed would've happened. He couldn't have opened the iron tracks. Yellow Eyes couldn't have given him the Colt to use as a key to open the gate. Dean wouldn't have had to sacrifice himself to save him. Everything would've stopped at that moment.

He might've turned into a monster then and there. Shaking his head, he didn't discount the possibility, but he couldn't make himself believe it. He hadn't been that far gone back then.

He'd done what he'd thought was the right thing, and it had all gone to hell. Good intentions leading the way.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned …

The burden of having his life returned at the cost of Dean's had been manageable – he stopped at that thought, derisive laughter filling his mind at how he'd 'managed it' – but once Dean had been killed, it'd become intolerable, and Sam thought, he'd let it.

He'd tried to get Dean out. He'd tried everything he'd been able to think of. Everything Bobby'd been able to think of. None of it had worked. Now, he knew why. The whole thing, all of it, had been to get Dean down there. Demon armies, the manoeuvring between Lilith and Yellow Eyes, all of that had been the ruse. They'd only wanted one man. And they'd got him.

A righteous man.

He'd been that, Sam realised, his hands curling into fists on the narrow shelf. No ethics to speak of, no respect for the law or authority in most of its human forms, but Dean had a thick, incorruptible streak of morality running through him that only a handful of people on the planet seemed to have. An immutable capacity for understanding the difference between right … and wrong.

He didn't know why he hadn't seen that until it'd been too late. He thought, he'd thought, later, going back through all the events and all the things that'd happened, all the choices he'd made, that he'd known it, somewhere he hadn't wanted to look at. Had known that his brother had been right about Ruby, right about the power of the blood, right about everything. But he hadn't faced up to it. He'd wanted to believe … he closed his eyes, pressing his forehead against his knuckles … he'd wanted to believe that he was the stronger, the wiser, the braver of the two of them.

Like a lanced boil, the admission brought a fluxing torrent of infected poison bursting from him. Shame and pain and guilt, bleeding and aching at the way he could see himself, finally. No more excuses. No more rationalisations. He'd wanted to prove to Dean that he was the better man. He'd tried to prove it.

You know why I didn't tell you about Ruby, and how we're hunting down Lilith? Because you're too weak to go after her, Dean. You're holding me back. I'm a better hunter than you are. Stronger, smarter. I can take out demons you're too scared to go near. You're too busy sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. Whining about all the souls you tortured in hell. Boo hoo.

That memory brought a bone-deep shudder, a spasm of loathing. How the hell had he ever allowed himself to think like that? It wasn't conviction, or determination. It'd been arrogance, pure and unadulterated, driving him down a road that … and he'd never even seen it. Hadn't heard the way the words had sounded coming out of his mouth. When Dean had told him about what he'd done in Hell, he hadn't been able to say anything. What was there to say to a man who had once believed in himself and no longer did? He'd never seen his brother so … lost? Broken? He didn't even know how to categorise what he'd seen and heard. But he'd used it, he thought, another backflush of shame filling him. Had thrown it back at him when he'd been angry and the blood had been itching inside of him, and Dean wouldn't back down, wouldn't trust him.

A sound something between a laugh and a sob coughed out of his throat, his eyes filling.

Trust him? When had he ever given his brother a reason to do that? At first, he hadn't wanted to add the burden of his feelings onto Dean. The guilt and the nightmares about Jess. The slowly growing conviction that there was something wrong, wrong with him, confirmed with Dean's belated admission of what their father had said to him, confirmed with the visions of the other '83 kids, the ones who'd been fed by a demon. Then, he thought, he hadn't wanted to see the fear in Dean's eyes. It was a fear they'd both felt. A fear that their father might've been right. Keeping secrets. Telling lies. Hiding things he'd known would scare and infuriate his brother. Those first couple of years, they'd talked. A lot. Sometimes, they'd hadn't gotten much resolved, but they'd still talked to each other. They hadn't been so worried about disappointing one another, he thought. That'd changed. But it hadn't been Dean who'd changed. It'd been him.

He remembered looking through Dean's tapes, one day in the car, laughing because his brother hadn't seemed to be any different from the twenty-two year old he'd left behind. He remembered thinking then that his brother was a simple man, someone who saw things in black and white, in absolutes. He remembered Dean putting himself between Gordon and Lenore, taking on the hunter to save the vampire on his say-so. He remembered the phone call from his brother, when they'd split up in Indiana. Remembered the admiration in Dean's voice. He remembered being shocked out of his anger when Dean had told him – out loud and with desperation in his voice – that he was barely holding on. Remembered his brother's equally unwilling admission that he was worried that a part of him was missing, that when it came to his family, there was nothing he wouldn't do and he didn't know why. He remembered thinking then that what he knew of his older brother was almost nothing, that like an iceberg, what showed above the surface was only a fraction of what lay beneath.

In his veins, the battle was slowing. He felt light-headed, but he didn't know if that was a result of what he'd just gone through, or of too many days without food or sleep.

The purification of the blood of the exorcist requires the deepest commitment, Father Thompson's voice said in his mind, in his memory. Redemption is only possible when the mind is certain, no further doubts or justifications present. Contrition is the first step. And acceptance of all one has done. Atonement is requirement, sacrifice offered freely and without thought of self. And forgiveness must arise from those things. We are all human. None can say he or she is better than any other. Knowing oneself, with perfect honesty and perfect truth, is the only way to purification.

Perfect honesty and perfect truth, Sam thought. No doubts or justifications.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned … I have killed, in pride and in ruthless carelessness. I have risked my mortal soul in collaboration with the spawn of Hell. I have believed … I have believed myself to be right and just in my actions, yet have known they could not be right. I have betrayed trust and faith in me. I have lied and hurt those who loved me. I have let them down.

I have let him down. Too many times. I don't know how to forgive myself that.