Disclaimer: Ahh... If I owned Supernatural... well, Meg sure as heck would be dead, for one thing.

"Sibling relationships- and 80 percent of Americans have at least one- outlast marriages, survive the death of parents, resurface after quarrels that would sink any friendship. They flourish in a thousand incarnations of closeness and distance, warmth, loyalty, and distrust."

Erica E. Goode

"The Secret World of Siblings"

US News and World Report, 10 January 1994

Chapter Five

There was a bizarre smell in the air and it was the first thing to register in Sam's consciousness. The earthsafesolidhome smell was not gone, and damned if someone somewhere was not humming 'Highway to Hell,' but there was a freaky weird smell that Sam knew he recognized rising up through the deep blue distance of his mind. It was stringent and sour, and oh, nasty…

"That's alright, Tommy, just let it all out… Claire, call down to Maintenance and let'em know we need a mop down here. Here, just hold onto the bucket, Tommy, your mother's coming to pick you up, hun."

Sight came hard on the tail of the sudden, startling voices, harsh white industrial light that went just so well with the smell of elementary school lunch the second time around, and Sam recognized where he was. The faded, pink and white vinyl floor squeaked with a line of tiny sneakers, and leaning in various poses of listlessness or hyperactivity was a class of second graders.

Sam was standing in the nurse's office of John F. Kennedy Elementary, of Charity, Wyoming. It was May of 1991; Sam had just turned eight.

It was scoliosis screening day. Which normally-there's that word again- wouldn't have been such a big deal, except that a poltergeist had taken a liking to Sam just last night, and had shown its affection by tossing him down two flights of stairs. Dean had been angry and upset that he hadn't been there-he'd been in the basement folding laundry- but Sam had tried to tell him that he'd saved his life; he just hadn't gotten the chance to say it.

Dad had begun teaching him hunting things recently, and Sam recalled that he hadn't been very good, not a natural like Dean, who learned standing just so, and punching like this and never like that, just so easily, like breathing and eating and sleeping. Dad was frustrated with Sam, who was eager then, but so, so clumsy, and he gave gruff, strict lessons, scared senseless that his youngest son would be defenseless when his day came… and John knew it would come.

So Dean took up teaching Sam, too, teaching not offence but defense, teaching him to stand correctly with part of an old 'Twister' game, teaching him to go limp and loose when falling by rolling down the grassy hill out back on giddy bright afternoons. Dad thought that Sammy had to learn to kill, to kill or be killed, and Sam couldn't understand. Dean knew Sam needed only to survive. For now, that was enough. Dean could kill.

Sam needed only to survive, and Dean would come. Protection, Sam understood.

That's exactly what Sam had done. He'd gotten up from his bed, with a bad-strange-not-alone-where'sDean feeling, and had been about to go down the stairs to find him when, between one heartbeat and the next, he'd been flying. His only thought had been 'loose, limp ball, little brother… don't brace yourself!' and then he'd hit, halfway down the first flight, partially on his side and back, and had sort of tumbled down to the landing. He probably would have been stopped by the turn in the stairs, but another shove that had nothing to do with gravity renewed the awful upside down momentum, and three horrible bounces later he lay stunned on the living room carpet, breath, sense, and spirit slapped completely out of him.

The door to the basement flew open before Sam could register much more than pain from oh, gosh, everywhere—and Dean was there, between him and the poltergeist, with the bucket of rock salt from the basement stairs. The entire bucket flew much as Sam had moments before, and between inhale and exhale, the poltergeist was annihilated.

There was a still, small moment where the rain-patter of rock salt sliding back down the wooden stairs and slightly hysterical breathing filled the tiny, looming house. Then Sam was surrounded by Dean, pulled up into wiry eleven-year-old arms, and it had hurt horrifically in the best possible way. They had sat in the puddle of rock salt for a long time that night, Sam wrapped in his brother, too stunned even to cry, while Dean whispered shattered, stuttered apologies into his baby hair.

Neither thought to call their father back from the lead he was pursuing in Omaha for the week.

Poltergeists happened, sometimes. So you sat on the floor for as long as you had to, and you dealt.

Sam had been bruised in places his eight-year-old knowledge of anatomy had never imagined existed, and had a slightly sprained wrist, but had been extremely lucky. If you're well prepared, Dad always said, you'll never need to be lucky. Sam had been both. He'd had Dean.

It wasn't until the next day that the Winchester collective of luck and preparation ran out.

Sam was brought back into the moment of his vision by a highly unprofessional shriek. He looked over to where his younger self--and wasn't that the strangest thing he'd ever, no… wait, it wasn't—had just been stripped of the shirt he had heretofore refused to take off.

Sam would be first person to say that he and Dean had never been abused, or even neglected, in any major, legal way. The things that they'd lacked weren't overly different from the wants of other single parent families living below the poverty level. It was usually the additional things they had to deal with where their family got kind of dicey. Right at that moment, though, Sam had looked like the lead actor of an after school special, assuming that the special had the best effects makeup ever.

Sam remembered, suddenly, why he hated Wyoming. It hadn't really been their fault, hell, you could even say that they'd done the right thing. Sam would never see it that way.

He'd been trapped in that foster home for two weeks, and it was a nice, normal house with nice normal people. It's a wonder that experience hadn't put him off 'normal' for life. Fourteen days… and he hadn't spoken a word. But he'd cried… cried himself sick, even after the other boys called him sissy, and then he'd retreated. It had been all he had left. He'd been silent for two more weeks after.

Dean had spent the two weeks in Juvenile Detention for breaking both arms (six bones, all told) of the officer who'd later tried to separate them.

No. No, no, no. Sam backed away from the scene in front of him, the angry nurse and concerned doctor and the wide eyes of his classmates not at all deterred by the hastily erected privacy screen. He wasn't sure how far this was supposed to go, or why he was here, but he wasn't living it again. The memory of Dean being dragged down the hall away from him by the cops, screaming and fighting, the horrible unending fear of never seeing him or even Dad again, he'd never, ever been apart from Dean before, and he'd shrieked after Dean down that hall in a way that, remembering the cries, wrenched, wretched and hollow, still brought his heart into his throat… no.

They never spoke of it, after. Some things were more and worse and deeper. It was a memory so cold and dark that it had sunk like a sinister stone into the murky, nearly bottomless well of Winchester trauma.

Sam was determined that it would stay there.

The vision spun around him in a queasy anguished whirl, and the only solid thing was the relentless strength holding him up and… seriously, he didn't even know you could hum 'Leper Messiah' in such a soothing way.

The room darkened and settled around him, and…

What in the blue hell?

He was back at the Inn, but it was night… not that Sam had any idea how long he'd been under, at this point. Starlight stole through the lacy curtains of the Walker's bedroom, slipping soundless across the shine of well worn, loved antiques. Curled into the window seat was Laura Bennet, dressed in a soft, chocolate colored dress, the same bruise dark shade of her hair and eyes. She leaned into the jamb of the oversized window, her tiny form dwarfed by glass and shadow and silvered light.

"Pain is the price of power, Sam," her voice wandered, small and drifting, across the wide room to him.

He opened his mouth to reply, question, but his voice hadn't traveled with him. He was here to listen.

Laura wrapped her arms around herself, looking too old to look so young, and watched the night with sad eyes. "They ask so much more of us, their bright daughters and sons, than the darkness does of its children. They ask the entire measure of ourselves, more that we can conceive we are, and then wonder how much further we'll go. How much we can believe without seeing. How much we can see without sliding beneath the surface."

She pulled her knees to her chest, laying her head on her arms. "They came… asked me how much I was willing to give… what I was willing to lay on the altar. It's always that one more precious thing than you can stand to lose. You and your brother have paid in innocence and pain and blood. Tempered with pain and fire… to be blade and armor. Maybe you've paid enough, I don't know."

Whisper and reflection gave way to crisp clarity. "Point Peter is a between place. This house is founded on that rock… here things can be loosed or bound, affirmed or denied."

Faster than dreaming she was before him, so tiny before his height and it struck Sam suddenly when she laid a cold, pale hand on his face, that she'd been in his position, here, years ago, fighting the dark things, this tiny, plain, pale girl woman with eyes like bruises. "Power is pain, Sam. You can't see what you need to if you allow him to shield your eyes."

The world twisted around him again, and Sam, desperate to get out, reached with everything he knew for that new yet familiar one-solid-thing…

He couldn't tell if the hands were holding him up or holding him down.

His knees ached and his back ached and someone was holding him… desperate fingers wound in his hair, and Sam braced for the blinding migraine that was surely about to descend…

When it didn't.

He cracked one eye open tentatively, feeling about five years old. No pain accompanied the afternoon sunlight the flooded the library, and he opened his other eye.

It was Dean. Dean bracing him… humming AC/DC… Dean was the safe-solid-earth-smell. Sam was surprised, and then surprised at his own surprise. He knew this… he was simply finding again what four years had allowed him to forget, to displace with liberal arts requirements and contract law. It was like opening a dusty, cluttered box at the back of a closet and finding his entire childhood inside it, a Dean-shaped place he'd left empty and open and ignored the chill. He'd always known that he had to go… staying would have broken him. He hadn't known why he had to leave, back then, only that he couldn't stay and survive… and surviving was his first lesson, always. Now he knew why he'd had to leave… he never would have seen this, if…

He had to leave to come back.

"Sam? You in there, man?"

He managed to make his eyes focus, and he saw Dean's concerned face and the empty room around them. "Dean? Where is everybody? How long was I under?"

"A fucking long time! Are you okay? Where the hell were you?" There was the expected not very well concealed concern in Dean's voice, and something else, a razor edge of freaked out and not admitting it.

"Uh… Dean, you can let go of my face now."

Dean dropped his face in a way that was so Dean and so ugh, geez, man that Sam laughed out loud before he could stop himself. He fell into a seated position, leaning his arms on his knees and shaking his head at his older brother. Sam let his brother look him over for as long as he needed to, knowing that his standards of okay and Dean's standards for him being okay were light years apart and always would be.

Dean cocked his head to the side finally, sitting back against the side of a suede armchair. "I'll take that laughter to mean you're okay and I shouldn't be expecting you to start bleeding from every orifice anytime soon. Do you need some aspirin?"

Shaking his head, Sam looked at his brother critically. "No, I don't have a headache. What did you do? You—you were there… with me?"

Dean's eyes shifted away and back, so quickly Sam would have thought it was just a trick of the light, except for that thin blade of freaked out that sharpened in his face. "What do you mean I was there, Dorothy? I'm not dying again, am I?"

"No, Dean, and Jesus, could you be any less funny? No… I felt you, in the vision, you were there, it was a—a safe feeling. It's hard to explain."

Dean's eyes flicked again and this time Sam was sure he'd seen it. "It must be, 'cause you're doing a piss poor job of explaining it. And could you be any more touchy feely?"

Sam would have been more exasperated if he didn't know that Dean couldn't express his relief in any other way, ever since they'd outgrown sitting huddled in pools of rock salt. He decided they should keep moving. "I saw Laura Bennet… she told me things… there's something about this house, the mountain. She called it a 'between place'—that it was a place where things could be bound or loosed… affirmed or denied. And—and she said things… about us, about being… tempered by pain, to be armor and shield. She said that—that pain was power—that—you were shielding me from seeing and…" Sam drifted for a moment, staring at his brother. "You—you stopped—what did you…I didn't have a vision!"

"Then what the hell were you just talking about?" Dean had a sudden feeling that he wasn't going to like where this was going.

"No… I saw her—but… I mean, there was the whole scoliosis thing—the nurse's office—and then Laura—but it wasn't—there was something—" Sam was running his hand through his hair, frustrated.

Dean arched a brow coolly, letting Sam freak out if he needed to because it was his turn, anyway. "Anytime you wanna string a sentence together, there, Sam."

Sam scowled at him, knowing he looked petulant and not really caring. "That's what she said. Pain is power… I can't have the vision if I don't feel the pain. When you did what ever you did, you held me away from the pain and the vision."

Now Dean was scowling, and not looking petulant about it at all, which was really kind of annoying. "Wow, Sam. With conclusions like that, you could jump for the Olympics. And I'll say again, if you didn't have a vision, then what the hell are we talking about?"

"I had a vision, but not of the future! Not the one I was supposed to have! That's what she meant, I know it. If you stop the pain, you stop that vision." Sam wasn't quite sure why he was pissed, but he had no problem expressing it.

"Good." Dean wasn't a slacker when it came to anger management, either.

Sam sputtered. "Good? How is that good? What if—if—we need a warning about something? How will we know what—dammit, Dean, what the hell do you mean, good?"

"I meant it exactly the way I said it, Stanford. Dictionary, much? Good. Adjective. No more killer migraines, good. No more being a magnet for evil, good. See also: Sleeping through the night for a change and me finally being able to fucking help you!" Dean had a strange, almost fierce look on his face, but his words were measured and low.

"What if we miss something? Something we need to know? A warning, or if someone needs our help?" Sam was desperate, willing Dean to listen, please listen.

"We were doing fine before. We'll be fine again. I found a way to help you and I'm not going to apologize for doing it. I'm not about to watch you writhe in pain just for some supernatural broadband we don't even need." Dean's quiet voice held some of the horror he felt when sitting helpless beside Sam's agony. Nothing was worth it.

Sam's eyes were hard. "And I'm not about to watch you burn on a ceiling just because I can't handle a headache."

Dean was on his feet before Sam could even register his reaction. He stalked over to the small, oak card catalogue in the corner, yanking a drawer out with more force than was strictly necessary. Sam watched him flip through the cards faster than he could read them, and sympathy washed against anger within him. Standing, he went to join his brother at the table, ignoring the way Dean's shoulders stiffened as he approached. Pulling out another drawer, he sat heavily on the table's only chair.

Dean's voice was almost normal when he spoke. "I figure this library should have some good local history in it… maybe even some of Laura's personal books and records."

It was a sort-of olive branch, and Sam took it gratefully. "Good thinking. How long until the tourists come back?" Sam extended a branch of his own, knowing nothing had been resolved.

Just like that, Dean was back, all flashing grins and leather. "Man, you should have seen me toss silk shawl out of the way… She got some real altitude!"

"Oh, Dean, please tell me you didn't assault the tourists."