Thanks for reading and for all the kind reviews I've received so far. This story has never been easy to write, and I always end up fearing that I won't do it justice by skimming over some detail or not getting the emotions right. I think with them being hunters, it adds a whole other layer of conflict and what is expected on how they should react and deal with the fallout of what has happened. Hopefully when it's all said and done, I will have covered everything to the best of my ability. Thanks again for reading, and extra cookies for those who review...bambers:)
Chapter Twenty
Sam hadn't seen Dean in days. No, that wasn't true, not really. He'd seen him at the dinner table with his head buried in some auto magazine, mumbling responses to any conversation directed his way. He also saw him stumble into their bedroom every night well after midnight, smelling of Jack Daniels and tripping over his own feet, but he wasn't sure that counted as it was dark in the room and in truth he only saw his brother's shadow as he tumbled into bed. Then there were the times when he saw Dean arguing with their father, and although neither of them came out and said it was Sam's fault that their family was falling apart during those knockdown dragged out arguments, he knew they both blamed him. But the worst of the worst was when he knew in his gut that his older brother had seen him and pretended that he didn't.
His father was trying, Sam could see how hard he was trying, and yet the eldest Winchester had no idea how to bridge the fathomless abyss separating them. John spent his nights reading books and pamphlets on how to help a loved one regain their life after being sexually assaulted, and spent his free time arguing with Dean to get him to pull himself together to be strong for Sam. What his father failed to realize was that he couldn't force Dean not to be angry and disgusted by the sight of Sam.
Sam moved out of the bedroom they shared a week and a half after the incident at the school, making it easier for Dean to forget he existed. If Dean didn't have to see him then maybe he would stop drinking so much and the fights with their father would stop, and if that meant Sam was alone at least he was upstairs in the furthest room away from the front door.
School was another thing Sam chose to avoid rather than confront head on, never returning after that first day when he made a fool out of himself by barreling down the hallway in a pathetic attempt to escape his memories. Every night he locked his bedroom door, and when his father knocked in the morning to wake him for school, he'd mutter that he wasn't going and to leave him alone. Again, he couldn't force someone to do what they didn't want to do, and Sam had no plan on returning to a place that reminded him of Coach Driscoll.
It was cowardly, yes, and definitely not the Winchester way of dealing with a problem, but he hadn't felt like a true Winchester in weeks, and every single day he felt more removed from his family. The problem was that his family was really good at solving other people's problems, and yet when it came to their own screwed up lives they buried the hurt and the pain and went out to find something to kill to make themselves feel better.
He wished he could take up a knife or crossbow or some other weapon to cut away and kill the pain inside of himself that was destroying his family from within, but pain didn't work that way – you couldn't kill it to feel better, you just had to grit your teeth and try your damnedest to live through it and hopefully emerge on the other side stronger for having survived the ordeal. He didn't need to look any further than Dean to see living, breathing proof of what killing the pain did to a person. Of course his weapons of choice were of the mind numbing variety that would slowly eat away at him until there was nothing left but a shadow of what he once was, and that would Sam's fault as well.
He prayed about what to do every day, prayed so damn hard for the answers he needed, sat in the front pew of the church with his hands laced together, head lowered, hoping that if he could just figured out what he'd done to make Driscoll target him then he would be able to fix not only himself but his family as well. So far no meaningful answer had come to him, no reason why someone like Driscoll was born into the world to ruin other people's lives.
As he sat in his same spot in the front row, someone cleared their throat behind him, and he startled out of the troubled thoughts, and looked over his shoulder at Pastor Jim. This had become their normal daily routine, and it was the only thing Sam felt he could count on at the moment. It wasn't counseling, not in the strictest sense of the word, but with everything spinning wildly out of control, it was the only lifeline Sam felt he had.
"Do you mind if I take a seat?" Jim asked, gesturing to the pew Sam sat perched in, and that was the thing about the pastor, he asked for permission and never pushed if Sam said no. Sam nodded, and Jim took a seat at the end of the wooden bench. Fingers laced, he looked up at the cross, and maybe he was saying a prayer to give him the strength and guidance to deal with the three Winchesters that had invaded his life and turned it into a hellish existence. "We don't have to talk if you don't want to. We can just sit here in silence if you want. Or if you'd like, we can talk about whatever is on your mind. I just want you to know that you are not alone. It may feel like that right now, but I promise you that you don't have to go through this alone."
"But I am alone in this," Sam muttered, chest constricting painfully. "Dean hates me. He can't stomach the sight of me, and I get it, but it still hurts. I'm messing up his life and my father's – they don't want to be here, but they're stuck with me, and there's no way out of that, no way past the fact that I screwed up everything."
"You didn't do anything wrong, Sam," he said, and it actually sounded as if he believed that, and yet they wouldn't have been having this conversation if Sam hadn't trusted the wrong person. "And your brother doesn't hate you. He loves you dearly, and that's why this hurts him so much. He feels like he failed you. Dean, he can handle almost anything, he was raised to take on more pain than any man should ever have to endure, and he does it with a smile and a sense of humor. That said, the one thing that'll bring him to his knees – the thing that'll break him every time, is the feeling that he failed to protect you and you suffered because of it."
"You see, it is my fault," he whispered, vision blurring as his hands fisted, nails digging into his skin in an attempt to divert the overwhelming pain in his head and in his heart, to a physical pain that he had control over. "I wish no one had found out what happened. If I'd been stronger and kept it to myself, Dean would be okay and we'd still be brothers, and my dad wouldn't be hovering on the fringes trying to figure out how to talk to me and how not to argue with Dean. He doesn't want to be here, who would? We sit at the dinner table pretending to be a normal family while overlooking the fact that Dean is either drunk or stoned off his ass while my father smells as if he's knocked back a few himself, and has a hunting knife sitting beside his plate just in case, likely hoping and praying some creature interrupts pizza night so he won't have to deal with either of his sons."
Pastor Jim remained silent for several long moments, gathering his thoughts, and then shifted in his seat to rest his thigh on the cushioned seat of the pew. "How do you see yourself at the dinner table? You've said that Dean is either drunk or stoned, and your father is looking for an escape, but what is your role at the dinner table."
"I-I'm the one trying not to be noticed," Sam said after a lengthy pause. "Sometimes I wish I could just disappear…if I wasn't here then Dean and my dad wouldn't be at each other's throats. I'm tearing them apart, and it feels like if I wasn't around they would be out hunting and getting along."
"Have you had thoughts of harming yourself, Sam?" Jim asked in a gentle tone, concern for Sam's wellbeing evident in his warm brown eyes.
"It's not as if I have some sort of plan to take my own life, if that's what you're asking," Sam said, his eyes straying to the wooden cross, wondering if the church was the right kind of place to be talking about suicide. And it wasn't a lie, well, not exactly a lie. It was more like background noise inside of his head that played on a constant loop to remind him over and over again that what he'd allowed to happen to himself was the reason why his family was falling apart. Then there was the deep, heavily weighted emptiness in his chest that could only be filled by the brother that no longer wanted anything to do with him. How do I tell someone that it hurts to breathe, and have them truly understand what I mean by that? How do I explain that my throat aches from the tightness of keeping everything locked inside of me, and I don't know how to make it go away? I don't know how to deal with this, and I don't know how that will ever change. "Don't tell my dad, okay? He wouldn't understand."
"I don't think that's a promise I could keep, Sam. It's not uncommon for victims of sexual assault to become severely depressed, and with the added stress of worrying about your brother and father – I don't want you to get to a point where you feel as if there is no hope left in you that things will get better. And it does concern me greatly that you are expressing thoughts of wanting to disappear and not be around any longer."
"You can't tell him or Dean!" As his voice rose in anger, trembling panic welled up inside of him as he pictured how the two of them would react if they heard he was more depressed than they'd already assumed. His father would definitely ship him off to a mental institution, and Dean – he couldn't think about how Dean would react because it hurt too much being the cause of any more pain his brother was forced to endure. "Please, don't tell them, Pastor Jim. Please, don't…I promise I'm okay. If you tell them what I said, it'll just make everything so much worse."
"I know you're scare, Sam." He made a small move in his seat toward Sam, not enough to invade Sam's personal space, only one seat over from his original spot on the bench. "I can see how much you are hurting and I understand how utterly alone you feel. That kind of pain and those kinds of feelings don't go away on their own just because you want them to. You have to work at it, and part of that work is learning how to trust people again…and I think to start healing, you need to learn to trust in your father and then rebuild from there to include Dean and whoever else you feel as earned your trust. What do you fear will happen if you tell John you are not okay?"
"I don't want him to send me away," Sam admitted, swallowing hard against the raw tightness in his throat. "If he thought for even a moment that I wasn't handling this like a hunter, it would be all the reason he needed to have me committed so he and Dean could leave me behind and get back to hunting."
"You think hunting is more important to John than your welfare?"
"I don't just think it is – I know hunting is the important thing in my father's life." Anger clenched in his chest like a tight fist. "I'm only fifteen years old, and I was raised by my nineteen year old brother 'cause the man you think I should trust was never there for me or Dean. Hell, I wouldn't even be here right now if he was even half the father he should have been! He left us alone over and over again, and the coach saw that – he honed in on my desperate need for a father figure in my life, and that's what made me such an easy target for him."
"You're angry with your father for putting his need to hunt above you and Dean," he said, drawing in a deep breath and slowly exhaling. "You have every right to be angry, Sam. You shouldn't have had to live the way you and Dean have lived your lives. Neither of you boys ever got the chance to be kids or have a stable home life. Dean was a little boy the night your mom died and your dad placed you in his arms and told him to run out of the house, and the very next day he became a man with responsibilities no child should ever be expected to do." He moved a little closer on the bench, still not enough to be threatening, but enough for Sam to know that he was trying to bridge the deep, yawning gap between them. "And then there's you – a baby raised into the solitary, secret life of hunting, moving around from place to place, never having a place to truly call home. Dean's done the best he could, God knows he has, but you needed your father, and he hasn't been there for you. So you have every right to be angry at him. You have every right to want to be more important to him than the things he hunts. If it's too hard to share anything else with him right now then start where it all began – start by telling him that you're angry that he hasn't been the father you and Dean needed…if you resent him, you will never trust him, not fully, not in the way you need to be able to trust him in a time of crisis."
"You want me to yell at my dad for being a crappy parent?" Raking a hand through his hair, he blew out a heavy breath. "How is making him feel worse going to help me feel better?"
"It may not make you feel better right away, but locking those feelings inside isn't helping you in the slightest way. What is the worst thing that could happen if you yell at your father for not being there for you?"
"He could leave again, and this time not come back," Sam said without hesitation, fearing if he pushed too hard, if he made his feelings known, his father would leave for good and Dean would never forgive him for it. "I don't want to be the cause of any more pain for my brother, and if my father left for good, it would break him beyond repair."
"Telling John how you feel isn't going to make him leave, Sam. If there are two things I know to my marrow about John Winchester, they are that," he held up one finger, "he doesn't run away from a fight, not even one that he can't possibly win," he lifted a second finger, "and that he loves you two boys. I have no delusions in thinking that he might give up hunting, but I do know he'll always come back to you and Dean. And in truth, I believe he's been waiting for this fight, counting on it, and he'll shoulder it because he knows it's what you need to get off your chest to move forward."
Sam bit at his lower lip as he considered every possible outcome of sharing this one thing with his father, including how badly Dean might react if he saw the two of them arguing, but in the end Pastor Jim was right. "All right…I'll try to tell him how I feel about him leaving us to fend for ourselves. I just can't do it when Dean's around. I don't want him to see us arguing and blame himself for it."
"That's probably for the best," he said as he pushed up to his feet. "I'll go find Dean and see if he wants to take a walk with me. I've been trying to spend some time with him every day so he won't think it's odd that I'm trying to get him out of the house for a while."
"I-Is he okay? He hasn't spoken to me in over a week, and I try to stay out of his way as much as possible…he doesn't like to look at me and I get why. He blames himself for what happened, and seeing me only makes it worse for him. I'll keep staying away if that's what he wants, but I really need to know if he's okay." Pastor Jim hesitated long enough for a sick feeling of dread to begin to churn in his stomach."I really need to know what's going on with Dean. Please, don't keep it a secret from me, Jim."
"I'm not, Sam. I just haven't figured it out yet, but I promise you I won't stop trying to reach him." He looked down at Sam, and sighed. "In turn, I need you to promise me that you'll stop trying to avoid him. The two of you need each other like fish need water to survive, and you're both doing yourselves more harm than good by staying away from each other."
Sam pushed up from the benched seat, not eager to go and speak to his father, but fearing if he didn't get it over with he might decide not to confront him with his anger. "I'll try, but why does it feel like it'll be harder to do that than to confront my father?"
"Well, I think that might be because of the closeness you feel to Dean. The feelings you have for him go much deeper than those you feel for your father, and sometimes that makes it harder to share the pain you're feeling with him. You don't want to hurt him or have him to see you as vulnerable and afraid any more than he wants to hurt you or to have you see him that way. So instead of battling things head on together, the two of you have pulled back into yourselves in an attempt to save each other from pain. Does that make sense?"
"Dean calls them chick-flick moments, and he hates chick-flick moments." A faint smile pulled at his lips. "Thank you for listening, Pastor Jim. It means more to me than you'll ever know."
"No need to thank me, Sam. Your family means a great deal to me, and I'm just happy to help in whatever way I can…now go find your father and I'll look out for Dean, and maybe between the two of us we can figure out how to put your family back together again."
