Author's note: Sorry about the weird posting time, but I didn't want to not get this out, and tomorrow might be nuts!
Sammy can say all he wants that he doesn't remember how to be an annoying younger brother, but Dean knows better.
He'd always thought Luke had it in him to be obnoxious with the best of them, just hidden under layers of beaten-in obedience, flashes of it showing through once in a while. But now it's Sammy, and now he's home, and now Dean's gonna be able to keep his promises to protect him, and Sammy's making up for years of little brotherhood missed.
For example, the piece of bacon he just stole off of Dean's plate.
He's sneaky, too—his skinny little long-fingered hand darting to Dean's plate while Dean was talking to Jo, slipping back soundlessly. The bacon's already in his mouth by the time Dean notices.
"Sammy!" he cries, regretting his tone and his volume for a split second before Sammy bites off the bacon in his mouth, swallows, and laughs. "Damn it, Sammy, you got yours!"
"That was a good piece," Sammy explains, like it was totally reasonable and he doesn't understand what Dean's problem is, obviously he was going to take it.
"Which is why I wanted to eat it," Dean says, slowly and clearly.
"Think of it as a donation to giving me the experiences I missed out on as a kid," Sammy replies breezily, and Dean waits for his heart to plummet.
When it doesn't, he's confused for a second.
Every time Sammy's brought up what happened to him before, Dean has always felt an overwhelming sense of either pity, grief, or guilt. One of the three, always, sometimes more. But this time, nothing. Just amusement, fondness, and a vague actual irritation at having his bacon stolen because it did look like the best piece on the plate. This time, Sammy's eyes are crinkled a little at the edges, and he's taking a big bite of the bacon right in Dean's face, and there's no tension in his shoulders and Ava's giggling a little on the other side of the table next to Jo. This time, Sammy looks happy, like he can start to talk about the past as just that—the past. Like he can believe that it's over, that it's actually done with, and that it's something he can make jokes about.
And then Sammy's hand slips back to his plate to take what is clearly the second-best piece of bacon Dean has, and Dean growls low in the back of his throat. Sammy looks up, startled but apparently incredibly amused by the sound, and he bursts out laughing.
"Yeah, I'll give you a donation to experiences you missed," Dean promises, and grabs Sammy around the neck and drags him down off of the chair.
It's not the kind of play-fighting he'd always imagined doing with his brother—he's holding back, being careful because he knows Sammy's still injured. He's manhandling his brother carefully, making sure he doesn't hit the table with one of the welts on his back and he's keeping Sammy mostly on his side. The sum total is that it's a much more delicate operation than any kind of wrestling he'd done before, but Sammy is still shrieking with laughter, and even though he'd dropped the second-best piece of bacon on the floor in the scuffle, Dean thinks that it's an acceptable sacrifice.
Jo's been hooting and hollering and whistling with her fingers stuck in her mouth the whole time, and Ava's been giggling. Missouri's yelling something about how if they break her nice place settings she's gonna have them doing dishes for a month, and it's only when all of them go silent that Dean realizes something's up.
He sits up, Sammy still in a headlock, trying to bring his face around to see what's going on. Both of them are flushed and red and stifling laughter, and it's a stark contrast to the serious look on Ellen's face.
That heart-plummeting that Dean had been expecting earlier? Yep, there it is.
And he didn't think that these words would ever be reassuring to him, but when she says, "He's dead," Dean can breathe again.
He releases Sammy, who sits up slowly, pulling himself up along Dean's arm. When he no longer needs it to get up, Dean slips that arm around Sammy's back in a light touch. "When?" Sammy asks softly.
"Just a minute ago," Ellen replies. "Jim was with him."
"He get last rites?" Dean asks bitterly, and Sam looks up, startled at Dean's tone, maybe. Ellen just smiles tightly.
"Refused 'em," she answers, "though you know Jim had to offer. We're gonna get rid of the body soon, wanted you kids to know before we got the pyre lit."
Dean knows he's being irrational, but he can't help it, when he says, "You're giving that son of a bitch a Hunter's funeral? After what he did?"
"It's not a Hunter's funeral," Sammy interrupts, and everybody in the room turns to him. He flushes a little, and it wrenches Dean's heart a little that he's still so unused to anything but negative attention. "And I want to help."
Dean's cry of "Not a chance!" drowns out Ellen's softer "What?" and Ava's small gasp.
So it's Dean that Sammy glares at, his brows drawn into a stubborn frown. "I thought I got to make my own choices now," he says, which is a low fuckin' blow and he knows it. "I want to help."
"I'd've thought you'd never want to see that bastard's face again," Dean says through clenched teeth. "Let the adults take care of this one, Sammy, come on. You don't need to do this."
"What do you do to get rid of a ghost, Dean?" Sammy asks, and the seeming non-sequitur throws Dean for a second. Long enough for Sammy to stand and get back to his chair, where he sits, arms crossed, waiting for Dean's answer.
Dean stays on the floor, narrows his eyes, and says, "You salt and burn the body or object it's tied to."
"Why salt?" Sammy asks, for all the world like he's a professor and Dean is taking a class with him, except that the class would be Dean's Entire Fucking Life 101, so Dean's a little irritated.
"It's a purifier," he snaps. "Now what does this—"
"It's not a Hunter's funeral," Sammy interrupts. "It's a salt-and-burn. I need to do this, Dean. I need to get his voice out of my head."
Dean can't find any words to combat that.
"But what I don't need," Sammy continues, and there's just a twinge of hesitation, of anxiety in his voice as he says it, "is your permission."
And Dean gives in.
"For anything, apparently," he grumbles as he stands and plops himself down in the seat next to Sammy, "even eating my damn food. Well, my appetite's done anyway. We doin' this now, Ellen?"
Ellen's eyes are on Sammy and it takes her a minute to shake herself out of it, but she does and she says, "Yeah, Bobby and your dad are out building the pyre. Jim's readying the body. You boys can come outside whenever you're ready. You, too, Ava. Jo, you stay inside for this."
"Mom!" Jo's voice is filled with horror and indignation, and she clamps onto Ava's arm. "I want to stay with Ava!"
"This ain't your business, girl, and Ava's bigger than you," Ellen says firmly. "You're too little to see this."
"I'll stay inside with you, Jo," Ava says, her voice barely audible. Ellen looks surprised, then frowns.
"You don't have to baby her," she chides. "Jo can learn to live with disappointment for an hour or so. You do what you have to do, Ava."
"I ended it last night," Ava replies, more steadily. "I don't need to see the fire. I'll stay with Jo."
Ellen doesn't look totally convinced, but she says, "All right. You change your mind, don't be afraid to ditch her narrow behind wherever you are and come meet us." Ava smiles and nods her assent. Ellen's already turned to go when Jo shouts my behind ain't narrow! and doesn't turn back around to acknowledge her daughter.
Ava and Jo are saying something, and Missouri's going outside to meet Ellen and the men, but Dean doesn't notice anything but the complex play of emotions on his brother's face. For all his tough words a minute ago Dean can tell that Sammy's pretty shaken up about this whole thing, and he thinks back to the way Ava acted last night, how complicated it was for her. He doesn't touch Sammy, but he asks, "You doing okay?"
"I hated him," Sammy whispers, staring down at the table. "I hated him and he's dead. I should feel good about that."
"It's not a crime to not want to party 'cause a man's dead, no matter how shitty of a man he was," Dean says, he thinks pretty sagely. Sammy nods, thoughtful.
"I don't know how to feel about it," he murmurs. He looks up at Dean. "Is that okay?"
"He fucked you over, Sammy," Dean replies, scooting so he can look his brother in the eye. "You're not pretending he didn't. But lots of people have fucked you over. He was just the last one to do it, and he was the one who fucked you over bad enough that you found us. I'm no shrink, but I get how that's confusing. Hell, part of me wanted to shake that fucker's hand, because without him I don't know if I'd've ever seen you again."
Sammy doesn't say anything, just studies Dean's face, searching for something. Dean doesn't know what, and doesn't try too hard to figure it out, because Sammy's got the time now to look for what he needs. Walt's dead, Sammy's with Dean, and everybody Dean knows is gathered at Missouri's house to make sure nothing tries to separate them again.
Whatever it is it looks like Sammy found it, because he smiles, and while it's a little wobbly around the edges it's big and bright and he takes and releases a big breath. "Wanna go set a dead body on fire?" he asks, and laughs at Dean's disgusted face.
"We're the weirdest family ever," Dean grumbles as he stands, letting Sammy pull him to his feet. He feels his little brother's hand tighten a little around his wrist as he says it, and the smile on Sammy's face grows a little bit bigger. "Seriously, what kind of bonding time is this?"
Sammy just laughs and doesn't respond as he leads Dean outside. But his posture grows tighter and tighter as they head behind Missouri's house into the back yard, which has a high fence around it. Good fences make good neighbors arises in Dean's mind, and he figures that Missouri would be a difficult neighbor for a normal person without her big fence.
Luckily she also has a fire pit, which will be a good excuse for the smoke, and it looks like somebody coated the wrapped corpse liberally in sage. The adults are ranged around the body, Bobby and John putting the final touches on the pyre and Pastor Jim and Ellen setting aside cans of salt and gasoline. Missouri sees them coming first, and she motions for them to join her.
"We're just about ready," she says gently, raising her arm for Sammy to slip under. He does, and she squeezes him around the shoulders. "We figured you'd want to light him up."
Sammy doesn't say anything, just nods. Dean stands behind him, waiting, not wanting to interfere with this moment. John catches his eyes from across the yard, his hair dripping sweat into his eyes from the effort of building the pyre, and Dean feels a sudden swell of emotion.
It's fucked up, feeling like they're finally starting to gel as a family like this, over the corpse of a man who became their mutual enemy, about to burn his body without so much as a letter to his family, if he had any. Dean figures if that's necessary Ellen will take care of it, let whoever needs to know what happened to him know. But his dad is standing at the other side of the pyre, having labored over it in part to get rid of this toxic presence and in part to give Sammy something to mark his new freedom with, and Sammy is standing right here, steeling himself to salt and burn not only Walt Hamilton's body but also his own past.
It's not normal.
But maybe it's okay.
"You got anything you want to say before we do this, Sammy?" Bobby asks solemnly, walking over to the younger boy and handing him a scuffed-up Bic lighter like it was some kind of sacrament. Sammy takes it with equal gravity, looking at it rather than Bobby, maybe looking at his reflection in the chrome top.
He shakes his head, and Bobby steps aside.
It's a struggle for Dean to let Sammy walk up to the pyre by himself. He wants to stand next to him, to be right by him, and every instinct is raging against reason by screaming at him not to let Sammy get so close to Walt by himself, don't you know what happened last time?, but of course Walt is dead. Still, Dean can't help the way he feels, and he feels sick, even just the few yards away he is from his brother as he does this.
He stops a few feet away from the wrapped body, and glances uneasily at Pastor Jim. "Is there anything else you need to do?" he asks. Pastor Jim shakes his head and says nothing.
Dean can see Sammy's shoulders rise and fall as he takes a bracing breath. Then the lighter flicks on, Sammy tosses it onto the pyre, and it goes up like the fourth of July.
Sammy doesn't move, just stays in front of the pyre, and Dean doesn't move either until Missouri pushes him forward gently. He takes the hint and walks up to his brother, feeling the heat of the fire on his cheekbones first, and puts his arm around Sammy's shoulders.
They're quiet. The adults are all still standing in the back yard, but they've kind of meandered away, giving the boys some space and privacy. Even John has gone over to Missouri and is speaking to her in a voice too soft for Dean to hear, even if he'd been really trying to listen.
But he's not, because Sammy's here, his shoulders slowly unwinding beneath Dean's arm, his left hand clenched into a fist but his right hand still open like he forgot about it once the lighter was out of it. The fire is reflected in his eyes, but his expression is almost eerily neutral. He's very still, doesn't lean in to Dean, doesn't pull back.
They stay like that for a while, so long that it startles Dean when Sammy says, "What did he have to say?"
Dean doesn't insult Sammy by pretending he doesn't know what he's talking about, although it's tempting. "He said that it's Yellow-Eyes who set up the ritual. That it's got nothing to do with killing him...that it's a trap. One of his Hunter buddies, Clive, he was possessed."
"So the ritual would never have worked," Sammy murmurs, and he leans his head against Dean's chest.
"No. It was all to get you back where the demon could get his hands on you. And it ain't gonna happen, little brother, I can promise you that."
"Does anybody else know that Clive was possessed?" Sammy asks. Dean shakes his head. "So they're still gonna try to find me."
"Walt wouldn't have known where we were if it weren't for Dad," Dean assures him. "The others sure as hell won't be able to find us. We just gotta wait it out. The Black Moon's tonight—after that, it'll be too late for them to do anything to you. I'm gonna keep you safe." He rests his chin on top of his brother's head. "We all will."
Sammy nods against Dean's shirt, and they watch the fire in silence until it becomes too warm for both of them.
It's a bitter victory, Dean thinks as the fire consumes the body. A victory that involves the loss of someone who was ostensibly an ally and at least a useful tool, but it's a victory nonetheless. One step closer to fixing things for Sammy.
"Jo!"
Ellen's voice is piercing, cutting right through his reflections, and when he turns he sees why. Jo is stumbling into the back yard, her blonde hair bloodied over her forehead, clutching her arm to her and weeping silently. Ellen runs to her and grabs her, sitting her down on the floor and checking her over in a panic. Pastor Jim joins her and everybody else keeps their distance, Dean and Sammy coming only close enough to hear what Jo is trying to say.
"We just went into the front yard for a second," Jo is weeping, staring up at her mother like she's begging for forgiveness. "Just for a second, 'cause we were bored. I thought it was gonna smell bad but Ava said Miss Missouri put some sage on the pyre so it was gonna smell okay and I didn't even wanna go outside, Mom, but she wanted to and I was bored too—"
"Where's Ava, baby?" Ellen asks, stroking Jo's hair away from the gash on her forehead. "Sweetheart, where is she?"
Jo bursts into tears anew. "He took her," she sobs. "He took her. A man. He got gray hair and glasses and he had a gun."
"Nothing should've gotten through the warding," Missouri murmurs in alarm.
"Did he sound like this?" Sammy asks, and Dean looks at him in confusion at the affected Boston accent. But Jo's eyes widen and she nods. Sammy turns to Dean and says, his voice flat, "Victor Hines."
"One of the Hunters Walt was working with on the ritual," Dean says for everyone else's benefit. Sammy nods. "The demon must've found him and the other guy. Convinced them to do the ritual without Walt."
"Walt said the demon told them they couldn't do it without Sammy," Ellen says, still cradling Jo to her chest.
"They're not gonna do the ritual with Ava," Sammy replies, sounding dulled. "She's bait. They want me to come for her."
"That's not gonna happen," Dean growls, but there's something in the look that Sammy gives him that quiets him.
"It is," he says. "Because I'm gonna kill the demon. For good this time."
Walt's body is burning behind him.
It's cathartic, but not as much as he'd anticipated it would be; it's too confusing, too much to conceive of, that the greatest villain of his childhood is turning to ashes just feet away.
It's the closing of a door. The ending of a chapter.
And he feels like Samuel Winchester instead of Luke.
He feels like a Hunter, son of a Hunter, instead of a Lilim slave.
He can stand tall next to Dean, even though he can't match Dean's broad shoulders and heavy muscles from years of being active in the life, but he can stand up next to his brother and think, I am a Winchester.
And then Jo runs into the yard, and Ava is missing, and Walt's body is burning and with it Sam's past is burning, too, and this is it.
When he says he's going to kill the demon, he means he's going to kill all of the demons that have haunted him throughout the years.
The one with the yellow eyes is the root of all of it, though—the one who started it all, who ruined him as a baby, who took him from Dean and their father when he could have had a full life with them, who probably took his memories.
Who killed his mother.
Who was going to hurt his only friend in all those years of torment if he didn't stop it.
Luke wouldn't have been able to conceive of raising a hand against something like the Yellow-Eyed Demon.
Maybe Luke could have been the bait, like Ava's being forced to be again, to help his master take down the demon.
Luke couldn't have thought of it.
But Sam Winchester can.
Whether or not his brother likes it.