As Dean drives them back from a hunt, he never once reaches over to crank up the music. Sam watches the trees pass. Kansas is still a ways off, and so he settles back into the seat. Dean glances over at him, but his gaze stalls on the prop amulet hanging from the mirror.
Sam's stomach flips over and over, like it does whenever he looks at it. He forces a smile.
Maybe what Dean needs is a hobby—something constructive. When Sam had called Jody months ago to put out an alert on Dean, she'd told him to take care of himself, with that familiar, easy warmth she wears like soft flannel.
"And not just physically, Sam." A sharp reminder. "Everything else, too. A hobby that isn't researching or hunting might help. It… well, it's sorta helping Alex, when she's not—never mind. Anyway, she builds. If you want a birdhouse or four, you let me know."
A laugh erupted from him, a bright burst of light. "All right, Jody. I'll keep that in mind."
"Don't be a stranger, Sam. I'll let you know if I find anything on your brother." A threatening promise. He'd almost felt relieved.
Sam frowns out the window as the sun slides lower over the purple horizon. Playing the cello could be that for him, his birdhouse-building. And it might help Kevin, too—and Dean—?
He lays his head against the glass and closes his eyes.
Their breath rises as icy mist the moment they step into the bunker. Gooseflesh rises over Sam's skin like the drag of too-familiar fingers, and Dean reaches automatically for his gun. "Kevin!" Linda's voice splinters with ice. "That's enough!"
Sam and Dean barrel down the stairs to see Linda surrounded by fluttering sheets of paper, torn out from books and her notebook. In the center, she's trembling, tears frosty on her cheeks. Her son rips one last page from The Veil before he flickers out. Dean yanks Linda back as the pages finally land from their furious flight. "What happened?" he growls in his best Batman impersonation.
Linda pulls out of Dean's grip, but her lower lip trembles as if with cold. She bends to her upset work, gathering torn pages into her hands. "Kevin and I are fine," she tells them, tone coated sweet with honey. "It just is hard for him."
Like they don't understand how tough it is to be dead. Dean's expression goes dark and flat, eyes nearly black as he lifts up a page from Linda's notes—something about Flesh of the Blood?—and he crumples it up. He opens his mouth, to snarl out something, and Sam shakes his head at his brother. Dean drops the ball of paper; Linda makes a soft noise of outrage, picking up the ruined note.
Wordlessly, Dean stalks out. Sam lets out a breath that's wet and warm. "Linda—" he starts, then kneels to help her.
"Don't," she snaps, shuddering. "Don't."
She bows her head over the now empty covers of the book, and a tear drags slowly down her cheek before something invisible brushes it away. An apology that has her curling tighter in on herself.
What can Sam say that she doesn't already know? He leaves the pages in a neat stack, one sentence standing out:
Not much is known about the function of the Veil; however, those within the Veil are as lost children caught between two unreachable worlds.
Sam retreats to the kitchen, to wait out her grief.
The kitchen is more Dean's than Sam's, like most things. Sam scrounges up some pans and some thawed ground beef. There's a certain mindlessness to the sizzle-pop of the cooking meat, and he dumps too much garlic powder and salt onto it.
(On the counter, the coffeepot is silent and dusty.)
Sam finds penne and sauce. Good enough. Cooking is something he enjoyed at Stanford and Kermit. But there's something intimate about it that sets his teeth on edge here in the bunker. In so many ways, he wants that calm safety to be here in the bunker, but safety is hard to believe in the halls walked by a massacred people.
This bunker has housed the Wicked Witch, the King of Hell, a Hell Knight, the angel that caused the Fall, and now a momentarily-friendly ghost. If the bunker is home, they bring work home too frequently.
Sam stirs the meat.
Not long after, Linda slinks in. She finds a colander and offers it to him, and he takes it without drawing attention to her puffed up eyes and wet face. There's not much kindness left in him, but there's this.
"He wouldn't hurt anyone," she tells him, even and unflappable again.
Sam dumps the pasta into her peace-offering colander in a burst of steam. "Not yet," (maybe, he doesn't say). "Mrs. Tran, if he doesn't want to be brought back…"
"He's too young to know. What I do is my business," she snaps icily, and he uses all his energy not to flinch, so much he can't respond, throat all closed up, hands staying steady with desperate force of will. Linda is kind enough not to remind him he's to blame.
(Sam took control of his meat from Lucifer himself, and couldn't stop one lowly angel from burning Kevin out.)
No one eats the pasta that night. It sits unappealing and unwanted in the fridge.
In his room, Sam sprawls flat on his bed, gaze on the ceiling. It's dark and the bunker needs better heating if it's going to house an actually real ghost, rather than ghostly memories.
Sam barely hears a series of thumps from Dean's room. He shuts his eyes, pretending not to hear.
Maybe Dean won't break anything he'll miss. Then again, Dean's attachment to anything seems to fluctuate with every breath he draws. At least the Impala's clean now. That, at least, remains the same.
Sam curls under the blankets, insulating himself from the noise like he did when he was eleven and Dean brought home a young couple to—and no matter how loudly he breathed, he couldn't drown out the giggling, the grunting, the screech of the bed. Another crash sounds from Dean's room, clear as if through headphones, and Sam can picture the angry red Mark so easily, can't forget the bug-black eyes, glinting, and Sam rolls onto his stomach, closes his hand over the smooth grip of his gun.
It's heavy and empty in his palm. A gun can't protect him. But false security is something Sam's intimately familiar with. It's better than nothing.
When he sleeps, he sees black eyes and burnt out sockets.
Holed away in his room, Sam avoids Dean and Linda both. Avoids Dean's blurry, stubble-stained face and the Cain that simmers beneath his Marked skin; avoids Linda's sharpening desperation as she glues her notebook together, page by page. He lifts the cello just as his breath freezes.
Sam tenses, pain coiled tight in his shoulder. Ready to spring.
But Kevin only offers up the bow, eyes wide and smiling—bright, young, an expression Sam doesn't remember on Kevin's face, but hopes he can keep. "Let's try this again," Kevin chirps, as Sam's fingers close around the flimsy wood.
Sam rubs resin into the hair, as Kevin praises him for remembering; Sam takes four tries to recall the scale, but every few seconds, Kevin interrupts to tell Sam how great he's doing. And all the praise settles warm and abrasive in his chest, where Sam can't avoid it, but Kevin's smile would likely hurt if Kevin could feel pain anymore. A pang, as Sam sees—again, again—the smoking holes in Kevin's skull, an overlay to Kevin's translucence. "Sam?" Kevin's voice is still too-bright, jarring in the frosty room. "Hey. Do you need me to explain it again?"
When Sam nods, Kevin repeats himself with a patience Sam's never seen in either Tran. But the desperation is familiar.
The scale comes easier this time, still screeching, but not screaming, and he loosens his grip, supporting instead of strangling. Kevin shows his teeth as he smiles. But the effort rubs Kevin away again, until the room gain degrees and Sam finds himself wet with sweat.
Eventually Sam sets aside the instrument. He can't hide here forever; if he's learned nothing else, he's learned that.
Linda turns when Sam enters the kitchen, un-slumping like someone's pulled taut at her puppet strings. "Sam," she greets, and without asking she fills him an extra bowl of salad. "Dean is working on that car. He'll be in soon." She presents the information with ease, like reading off a weather report—as if it has no meaning for her. Maybe it doesn't. They're just a stop on the way to restoring her son, and everyone can see it clear as her neat handwriting.
"Thanks," he says as he takes the salad.
They settle around her research, which she doesn't bother to hide. Not that Sam can bring himself to really look at the carefully smoothed and taped pages. The Tran family isn't the first they've failed.
Dean enters in a beat-up, oily T-shirt. He smears black from his hands to his face, his mouth puckered in consideration. His Mark is wrapped up with white bandages: out of sight, out of mind. "Mrs. Tran." He leans against the doorway, like it will make him less threatening. "You know what you gotta do. I don't like it any more than you do, but—"
"We have time," she says, so simply, always a problem-solver, driven and—would she shudder and stop without a goal? Would the scars left by Crowley go rigid, make it impossible to move?
He can see some of the ridged places that Crowley carved out, and he knows what it's like to endure endlessly in the hopes of one person. But Dean was here, after. More or less. Kevin is and isn't. When Dean looks to Sam for reassurance, Sam can only clench his jaw.
Dean blows out an annoyed breath. Sam knows he's the pain-in-the-ass little brother as Dean growls at Linda in something like his demon voice, "Not much. We do this for a living. He's getting dangerous, kid or not. Come on, Mrs. Tran. He should be kicking back Upstairs, and you should go home. Do some yoga or PT or whatever. Order strippers."
She stiffens under his attempt at decency, that slick ready-made smile he slides into when he's hiding from something larger than his feelings. "Do not patronize me." Her mouth trembles, a flash of something so furious Dean's lucky he's the one with the gun. "I know my son, and I know what he needs. I don't presume to tell you how to take care of Sam—do me the same courtesy."
Linda stabs her fork into a few spinach leaves, as if she can puncture Dean's skin and release all the hot air. Dean huffs as Sam folds in over his own food, and Dean takes a step closer. Sam tightens his grip white-knuckled on his fork, but the lights flicker—Dean stills.
She looks to the ceiling, then to the switch, like she'll see her five-year-old son flicking it off and on, the best game ever invented. Lights-on, lights-off. But he isn't there. Or they can't see him.
Maybe Kevin doesn't like being talked about like he's not here either.
"Mrs. Tran," Sam says, keeping his hands where she can see them. "You've got to think about it. Just think about it."
Dean interrupts. "The anger builds and builds, and sometimes he might be able to control it—but that doesn't mean it's not there. Every day, it gets worse. Till it takes nothing to set him off. He's gonna hurt, and maybe kill, someone. He won't be able to stop himself. That's just the name of the game, Mrs. Tran. And trust me when I say, you don't want that for him. He's gonna to hate himself for it later. Even if you can save him." Dean's voice is low, scraped raw over the teeth of the First Blade, red with Cain's brand.
Sam shudders at what might be the chill in the room as Dean refuses to look at him.
"I'm through talking about this. It isn't up for discussion," Linda tells him crisply. "If you'd like us to leave, we will."
Rather than respond, Dean stalks out. Hopefully to take a cold shower. Sam exits not long after. He cleans out his bowl before he slinks back to his bedroom and the cello.
Sam settles at the foot of his bed, cleaning the instrument between his knees. He plays the scale over and over, repetitive, till it comes out almost right, and his shoulder complains, and—finally—his eyelids tug heavy, and he lays the cello flat, and flops over on his bed, blinking up at the bright light.
It gets flicked off, before Sam can rise to turn it off. It stays off, no game of Kevin's. Sam falls asleep. Finally.