Direct sequel to "They Hammered in His Teeth" Warning: Mentions of suicide and hell trauma.
There's a bergamot glow about his soul this year. Lucifer stokes it a rageful fire — curls around him as a second skin in a mid-afternoon disaster, and listens when Sam says, "I don't know anything important."
No amount of tea or tangerines is going to fix this. Dean will try, regardless. Sam likes tea, though, and tangerines — no harm in accepting that which is offered, even if merely to grant his brother a modicum of relief.
Dean's treating him as if he'll shatter under the faintest inquiry, as if he's sacred when he speaks. Sam knows he's glimpsing some roof when he catches his brother's scrutiny, when he hastily glances away and poorly feigns otherwise. He's long abandoned the notion that Dean could ever walk away from him like a man walking away from a car crash — but the notion has never abandoned him in kind.
Maybe this will be what does it.
Maybe this will be the too much.
When they were kids, it was easy to forget that Dean wasn't born right next to him. It was even easier to take action before he learned how to endure. Now it's impossible to do either.
The problem is that Sam has decided what he deserves, but he has not decided what Dean thinks he deserves. Granted...Sam has come close, frighteningly close...but then Dean seems to pull Sam back from another brink, and a reassessment is necessitated — specifically, that their ideas of Sam's deserved might be on the exact opposite sides of damnation. Sam leaves it unprovoked, because he's a coward, really, and far too weak to grapple with the potential fallout. Unopened boxes are empty boxes.
That problem is that sometimes, when Sam looks in the mirror, all he sees is the face of the devil. Sometimes when he talks, all he feels is the inside of the devil's mouth. It's a wonder anyone can stand the sight of him. Can stand the sound of him.
And it's a wonder Dean can't see it too, can't hear it too, can't feel it too. Unless he does.
Sam remembers staring up into his sibling, lifetimes ago, and begging to be put down — begging for a promise. Sometimes he almost can't stop himself from asking again, but he's too afraid the answer will be different this time. And what would be the point, then, of anything?
The problem is he sleeps some nights. Each time he's certain it will be the last time. He thinks things — like how the black-lace overlay of his plucked eyelashes scattered across his spleen was called a piece of art — and then thinks that he shouldn't think those things. He longs out closed windows, trying to count back and determine how long it's been since the morning he woke up and everything hurt his eyes. Yet, the singular concrete pillar he inevitably settles his bones against is his cyclical condemnation of memory.
The problem is Sam is at peace with that.
He can only hope Dean's dreams are empty, because their production of an instance will never keep repopulating if any of Sam's mess crosses over. He can only hope he will palm Dean the Impala's keys, point him in an Eastward direction, and assert, "At least the house can't burn down with you inside it if you're not here."
The problem is...Sam has thrown a wrench in all his carefully constructed internalization. He screwed up, spilled his guts. And now...Dean is suffering. Scurrying after him, peeking into him, pushing food at him, rubbing dark circles as if they could be buffed away.
Sam, all his good, interred in a grave he will never earn.
Dean, all his good, wasted on the dispensation of a moral panic that Sam quite prefers to be pulling on his ankle like an iron chain.
But Dean is taking that chain from him, wearing it like noose.
Sam, forever gifting his brother nooses.
Sam, forever trapped at, "Can I believe you?"
Dean, forever a wild-eyed sentinel, painted gaunt and crazed by the sensation of sand slipping through his fingers.
In other words, it's entirely unsurprising when Sam finds Dean kneeling on the floor in Sam's doorway, a knife white-knuckled in his fist as he hacks into the wooden frame, his back curved in a manner no lesser man could ever mimic.
Eight days ago, Sam didn't kill himself.
Eight days ago, Dean began to unravel.
The spear is left undisturbed for so long this year, his flesh seals around it — a tree pushing through an apocalyptic wreckage. The pain grows with it, sprouts in the same direction.
"I hate that you can't speak."
Lucifer took his tongue four and a half months ago.
Today...he gives it back, in a breath of bitter autumn wind reminiscent of mightier decades, where Sam's voice lived without permission — captured, marching, gone.
Today, he gives it back, and listens closely when Sam says, "I will not be counted."
They sit in silence a very long time, shoulder to shoulder, legs half in the hallway, half in the bedroom — attention on the twisted sigil blistered into the frame by Dean's violent carving.
Sam clears his throat, because why not continue to breach, why not everything all at once, because he wanted to be in a hole anyway, right? "Dean—"
"Did you try?"
His brother refuses to look at him, coiled tight like a trap, sharp and gruff in that manner where he barely has jurisdiction of his own words. That's Sam's fault. He did that, again. Always doing that.
Silence.
He could pretend to need elaboration. That would hurt Dean. He could ask for more specificity. That would hurt Dean. He could lie. That would hurt Dean.
"Yes." Sam whispers, croaks.
Dean breathes for a while, stalled a dangerous refractory period, blade hanging loosely in his grip, elbows on his knees. "I've had this conversation in my mind a hundred times. And I can't...I still can't even start."
Sam shakes his head in dissent, attempting to duck into his brother's line of sight, tear him away from whatever misplaced self-recrimination he's bathing in. He didn't want this. This is everything he didn't want. Sam, always shoving their sorry lot further and further downfield, always jeopardizing the mission, always dropping other shoes.
Sam, a mutated bee, pollinating with poison.
Dean, holding the bag.
"You don't have to—"
"Shut up," barking, familiar, "This isn't the part where you get to let me off the hook. Listen. Fucking hell, Sammy. Jesus fucking christ. Seriously. I keep walking around here like I'm gonna find you on the floor with a hole in your head. And you're just gonna sit there and tell me the usual shit, because that's what you do! That's what you do...and I let you. Fuck that."
Sam's probably ghost-white — uncleanliness, frozen inside his veins. There's control, and he doesn't have it. Is this the moment? Was he right? Is this too much?
Finally, Dean's eyes on him — not fury, not done, just anguish. Just them, not knowing the answers to answerless questions. "Except I don't know what else. Or how else."
Sam tastes me either, eager to escape, before he manages to swallow it into the acid roiling within his stomach. Instead, he murmurs, "It's ok."
It's not ok, though, not to Dean. They both understand that. But maybe the understanding makes it ok enough. Until the next time.
Dean's gaze slips back to the crude symbol. Sam shifts a bit closer, testing. "So...you taking up witchcraft?"
Dean scoffs, "Don't be stupid."
Sam chuckles, a wet rumble of boot-strap misery...camaraderie. Dean smirks. Pressure leaks, slinks off somewhere, the place it hides until it comes back.
"It's — uh, well, it's supposed to ward off negative thoughts. Bad dreams, and stuff." Dean scratches at the back of his neck, half mumbling, red high on his cheeks. Oh boy, has he gotten himself here.
However, the admission is twisted and smashed between the stark jaws of regret...so much regret. A poignant haze of desperation and naivety offsets the angles of the ward, reminding Sam of when his brother used to tower in front of innumerable empty fridges — a child forced to to feed another child by trying to make a meal out of a measly array of condiments.
They tried not to be hungry.
The problem is hunger doesn't work like that.
Sam's chest does an odd stutter. He wishes he could tell Dean something that would be a solace, and still be a truth. He wishes he could tell his brother, "I have decided to grow old."
All he can do is remain here, be here, by Dean's side, and allow a small part of himself to believe that the squiggly maze of whittled lines, borne of the fiercest kind of love, might lead to a slight better.
Eight days ago, Sam didn't kill himself.
Eight days ago, Sam said he could stay.
So for eight days, he has.
His limbs are tied into knots this year. Lucifer props him up, coos at his perfect doll, and listens rapt as Sam recites, "My body cannot hide how much I want things, because I want things too much."
END