Chapter 5

Sam only knows shuttered, gauzy light and mottled colors. When he wakens, he's pain-free, deep in the middle of a feather-soft hug of blankets, and magically, Dean's rumbly baritone is gentle in his ear even though the rocking beneath him signifies that the Impala's in motion. He glides back into slumber before he can puzzle it out.

He rejoices in the blackness of sleep. He curls into it, and wishes he won't wake, but when he does, there isn't much to behold: distant pain, a cool, calloused hand pressed to his forehead, a woman's voice that unfamiliar but mysteriously comforting. It's life with the volume turned down. And it's as much as his frayed psyche can tolerate.

Like ink flooding water, awareness begins to bleed into Sam's cocoon until it gradually unravels, and trauma descends. It starts with freeformed nightmares of frigid water and glistening needles and scooped out eyeballs squishing into a jar. It continues with insidious pain: purple ache in his arm, a sharp throbbing in his leg, a jagged pressure in his chest, an itchy twinge in his face.

He wakes with a gasp and a whimper. His heart is pounding and the light sears his irritated gritty eyes. He tries to dash an arm over his face, but something unyielding and rough grates against his cheek instead of a hand. He blinks at the brilliant and baffling glare of lime green, tracing the shock of neon from his fingers to his elbow.

"Sammy?" Dean's gravelly tone helps cut through the grogginess. "You with me?"

"Mhmm," Sam's voice is just a serious of scrapes and puffs that trail off into a hacking cough, but Dean beams as if he has just sung a flawless aria.

Sam's strengthless, hollow and melted into the mattress—all telltale signs that he's been out of it for days. In the past, Dean would be a visual reflection of how awful Sam felt, unshaven, sleep-deprived and shaky from anxiety and abusing too many vices. But he looks healthy and well-fed and edging on something Sam would pinpoint as happiness if that countenance occurs in anyone else but a Winchester. A strong hand slips behind his neck and shoulders to gently lift him up and stow another pillow behind Sam's head. His vision fritzes out like an old television at the new elevation, and he flushes with an unbearable heat.

"Hang on, Scarlet. No swooning. Take a few sips." A straw is nudged in his mouth and Sam complies. "Hopefully that'll help keep things steady at least until you can handle food." The Powerade pleasantly quells the worst of the wooziness. Before Sam can panic over not remembering how he got to the bunker, Dean fills in the blanks. "It's Thursday. You've been catching Zs for about two days since the hospital. We drove you back...from Iowa."

Cold, dirty water blasts on with a groan of pipes and he slams into consciousness fighting for air.

"They didn't let me sleep," Sam says numbly.

He glances around his room in search for...something. Sam runs his fingers through his hair in hopes of jumpstarting his sickness-sluggish mind to remind him why he feels like he's forgotten something important. The last week is little more than a jumbled haze of chaos and hopelessness, and an oddly pristine image of his mother holding him, concern pinching her young features. This image of her is vivid and imperfect, like a memory, instead of the faceless impression of love and warmth his feels when he dreams of her. His eyes flood with tears and he closes them, feeling the heavy-headedness and forced vulnerability of narcotics. "No more drugs," he demands.

"You're in pretty bad shape, man. You're going to need them."

"Messin' wit'my head. I thought...was Mom here?" Frowning tugs on stitches in his hairline. "Never mind...M'not makin' sense."

But Dean's expression is almost that of an excited puppy. If Sam could move his head, he'd be sure to find his brother wiggling a non-existent tail. "The hospital's just a blur, huh?"

"There was a hospital?" Sam quips.

"See, drugs aren't all bad. You missed me giving you a sponge-bath." Dean grins. "Keep drinking, dude."

They fall into a companionable silence. Sam doesn't have the voice or the mental fortitude to process how grateful he is that Dean is alive or that he survived. So he sips his drink and grunts a thanks when Dean slips a folded blanket under his casted arm that's beginning to throb in time with his heartbeat.

"Do you want to talk about..." Gruffness over love to mask the concern.

"No." Sam says sharply.

There's a hesitant and small tap on the door. "Dean, can I come in…or…"

Sunshine doesn't penetrate the bunker that resides two stories beneath the surface, and yet a woman glides in a halo of light. Sam gapes at the figure standing hesitantly in the doorway in jeans, an sloppily large t-shirt, and one of Sam's old flannels. Goosebumps pepper his skin as he flashes back to the Impala, and the tightness of his chest, the agony everywhere, but he remembers wilting into the lap of a woman who cradled him fiercely, limpid green-blue eyes and whispered admissions of love somehow is a balm on the trauma that bled along with his wounds.

Sam sucks in a breath, gaze flickering from Dean to his mother and back again. "It wasn't a dream?"

"No, Sammy. Amara did it after I talked her down."

To say she's beautiful is an understatement. She's literally breath-taking. Sam has to remind himself to inhale and exhale. Tears stream down his cheeks and his hands shake from more than low blood sugar. He tries to sit up, but can only lift his head an inch off the pillow before he's too lightheaded to find up. He sags back against the pillow, and tries to think of something profound to say instead. "Hi," he chirps, lifting three swollen fingers of his casted arm in a pitiful attempt to wave.

Mary smiles, and all Sam sees is Dean. "Hi."

Mary reaches his side and hovers uncertainly, but all it takes is Sam moving his left arm a little and she stoops down, gathering him up. She's thin, but strong. Her skin is soft and cold, not yet acclimated to the bunker's chilly climate. She smells of coconut and Ivory soap. And she's crying harder than he is. "My beautiful baby boy," she singsongs into his neck.

Sam gazes at Dean, who's red-faced and not even hiding the fact that he's crying too. Sam's so overjoyed, it circles back to a glorious sadness. "Best chick-flick moment ever, right?"

"Damn straight, Sammy." Dean settles on the bed, embracing them both.

They are a tangle of arms and casts and tears and flannel and laughter, and delighted to be so.

They are a family, united.

-SPN-

As many times as Sam has been fatally injured or psychologically tortured in The Cage and topside, recovery should be routine, like assembling a furniture—follow these easy instructions to put yourself back together.

But there are no manuals for the human soul, and Sam's is far more damaged than the next. He imagines that it looks like his a bit like his the wound in thigh: revoltingly inflamed, scorched sloppily sutured together by orneriness and martyrdom.

He stares at the gunshot wound until it loses its horror and shock, until he can see it and not immediately feel the unpleasant thump of the bullet's impact or feel the phantom weakness of the paralytic.

Until he no longer has the urge to gag at the haunting stench of his cauterized skin.

He hisses as he spreads the antibacterial over it and reaches for the sterile bandages Dean liberated from the hospital.

Sam's collected enough meager strength to take over his own ablutions. And he learned more about his captivity in its aftermath as the days are little more than a never-ending Picasso-esque blur of terror and torment. The British Men of Letters held him for just three days. The compound had been decimated in mysterious conflagration ignited by the "freak lightning strike," according to the media. Toni Beville had been discovered in the Welsh woods, surrounded the dead bodies of the guards Sam had killed in his drug-addled desperation to escape, with no memory and clutching the murder weapon. Sam recognizes the tidy markers of a Castiel clean-up.

It was over, Dean had promised.

As Sam awkwardly wraps his thigh one-handed, deformed by a bullet and a fire, he wishes he could believe him.

Sam's body is shutting down, cold, battered and exhausted, and he welcomes it. His eyes roll back in his head and he's drifting towards oblivion. There's a thunderous clang, wood hitting metal. Sam jolts back to his terrible reality to the smug simper of his torturer and this damned barn. "Where were we?" Sam sasses her and gets three deep slashes from a knife for his efforts, which only hastens the inevitable and desired end.

Sam jerks at the sound of Mary ducking into the room, and leans forward a bit to breathe through his mouth.

"Are you all right, Sammy?"

Sam swipes his free hand over his face, realizing he's panting, a little sweaty and half-dressed. He hurriedly tries to zip his hoodie one-handed to cover up the dark bruises, punctures and burns. "Um, yeah, just taking care of this."

He catches sight of her glimpsing at the injury, and growing faintly green. "It's not as bad as it looks, I promise. I've been shot before."

Horrified, Mary flinches, nostrils flared.

Sam falters, and reminds himself that he can't be as free with Mary as he can with Dean or even John.

While he likes waking up to hearing Dean and Mary's amicable yet hushed chatter, this is how their Dean-less interactions have gone when they try to venture beyond the jilted small talk of strangers. Sam doesn't know how to be a son-not to a parent who wants to learn who he truly is. With John, he always felt more like a soldier than a child, and he doesn't miss the irony that there's an emotional minefield preventing him from bonding with his mother.

Once John had learned what he was or what he come become, he stopped loving or respecting Sam. It was a ugly truth he'd accepted long ago, after John, knowing he was dying, had given Dean a heartfelt goodbye but left Sam with the final memories of raised voices and an exasperated "Get me a cup of a caffeine" dismissal. Sam accepted it, and tried to forgive. A decade of catastrophically bad deeds later, Sam can't bear another parental rejection, especially when he's too tired to fight.

Sam stutters. "Uh…no, I was just…it's an occupational hazard, that's all."

"You should probably be back in bed."

Washing up and getting dressed one-handed has sapped his meager stores of energy. He stands, weaving a little as he balances on one leg, to hitch up his sleep pants.

Mary steadies him without hesitation, one hand on his waist, the other on just above his elbow. "Is this okay? I'm not hurting you?" She asks. Sam shakes his head. She gazes up at him in awe. "This is the first time I've seen you standing. You are...bigger than I ever imagined."

"Dean was pissed when I outgrew him," he says. He eases into bed with a groan. Mary snags his sling off the nightstand and wordlessly sits. Both of the bones in his are broken and his arm needs to be jarred as little as possible in the first weeks of healing.

Mary talks nervously while she helps him guide his arm into the sling, and tucks him in. "My father—you're named for him—he was barrel-chested and big…like you…"

Toni's fingernails have been filed to taupe talons and dig into his cheek when she grabs his chin. "So you murdered your own grandfather?"

A hulking presence materializes behind him, and the chair is tipped backwards and until he's flat against the ground, arms still chained and pinned beneath him. The chair back pinches and digs into his upper arms, his hands are instantly numb. Toni sneers down with dead-eyed callousness. "You deserve this, Sam."

Above him the pipes groan and shudder. Water cascades downfall, hitting him with the intensity of a quarterback blitz. If the pressure working air out of his diaphragm wasn't bad enough, the stream is directly on his face and inescapable. Panic descends a second later when Sam can't draw breath. His suffering is punctuated by the staccato rap-tap of the chair legs thunking against the floor as he bucks and squirms to escape. He's still gurgling to keep water out of his lungs, when he feels the gouge-and-burn arm. Silver sparkles before his arms, water catching the light on its nefarious descent, and gleaming on thin, angled blade as it slices and digs in deep. Sam arches a little, screaming and choking on water and pain, He blacks out, burning from the inside out and drowning on dry land.

Sam blinks away, hand pressed to his aching chest, the memory and re-focuses on his mother, who's still talking. "…want to know what your life was like with…John, and hunting. I want to know if you were happy or if it was hard. Sammy, I want to know everything."

Happy.

Sam scoffs at the word. They've kept things light in deference to Sam's crisis and Mary's understandable shock, but now she's aching to plunge beneath the surface of saccharine small talk and glean some real knowledge about how her children fared without her. Though Sam's not sure she wants to the truth.

"Happy," he repeats. The word feels foreign in his mouth and stings like Toni's syringe. It imbues him with a rabid anger so quickly, Sam's scared by it. He glances around his room, the one Dean had meticulously cleaned while he was unconscious to rid it for the sinister stink of Lucifer's grace, and he feels more trapped here than he had in that barn. Sam had to be rescued from the clutches of an organization that deemed him a threat to the planet, and his undead mom wants to know if he was happy as a kid.

His heart races and he licks his lips, trying to steady himself. "We were raised like you. As hunters," Sam responds tightly, trying to baby-step her there.

"I can't imagine John as a hunter. I know he was a soldier, but I never really saw that side of him. He was always so gentle."

"If you walk out that door, Sam, don't ever think about coming back!"

Anger rises, and simmers within him like a low-grade fever. "Grief changes people." Sam rubs the back of his head as his headache intensifies. "Ya know, I'm pretty tired." He says dismissively.

Mary's shoulders slump. "Do you want me to leave?"

Sam turns away from her the best he can, and closes his eyes, and doesn't answer. He's not sure what he wants or what he needs. Maybe he just needs to try a little harder. "No."

She places a hand on his shoulder, offering tactile silence, while remaining quiet. Sam is uncomfortable, riddled with healing pain, and all new wounds. He wonders what his life would've been like if Mary had never died. If the demons would've still come. If she would've distrusted him and hated him as much as John did. If it would've saved them any pain.

His mother is alive and holding him and he should be over the moon, but he's been broken and lazily reassembled so many times, that what starts out as joy metastasizes into festering dread, ire and fear by the time it reaches Sam.

Sam can feel the glow of her smile even though his back is turned. "I can stay as long as you like." She scoots up on the bed with him, and runs a hand tentatively through his hair. "You were bald as a baby. I remember you with just a few wisps of hair, and now long as it. It's so beautiful."

Sam huffs a laugh. "Jess liked it long. I cut it for an interview, and she was pissed," he confesses sleepily.

"Jess? Is that the blonde in the pictures on your nightstand?"

"Mhmm."

"She's lovely."

Sam's accustomed to the flash-bang of misery that accompanies the memories of his girlfriend. "She was."

"Jessica Moore died because you didn't have the bloody courage to tell her what you are," Toni declares, outraged. "You deserve this, Sam."

She reaches for the blade. Sam drunkenly shakes his head. Whatever they've given him changes his thoughts into involuntarily, audible sound. "Should be fire," he slurs.

"As you wish."

And when the flame sizzles somewhere near his ankle, Sam denies himself the release of screaming until he can't fight that anymore either.

"You're shaking, Sammy, are you okay? Are you cold?"

Sam clenches his eyes shut as Mary leans over him to check his fever. She adds another blanket, too. "M'fine," he mumbles, turning his face into the rough cotton of his pillow. He can't do this.

"You deserve this, Sam. All of it."