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Hopelessly Ever After – Chapter 2

The grief was killing him like some methodically patient beast, who thrived off the fluidity of pain, the unhurried trudge to death. Dean just wished it would hurry the hell up.

He was awake, eyes dewy, stomach roiling with acid. He couldn't tell if that was hunger or from the booze. The bedroom was almost completely dark save the brilliant yellow sunlight humming around the edges of the black-out shades. He burrowed deeper under the covers, and tried not to feel ashamed at the backslide he'd taken.

He'd been doing marginally better. Lisa was more tolerant and definitely more crazy than Dean ever would have thought. She'd lost her mother a few years back, and knew the nuances of grief. That made her smart enough not to try to eliminate his drinking, but to limit it. She'd encouraged him to talk with one-hundred percent honesty about anything and everything. Dean didn't know how to start. There weren't words. But he'd tried and Lisa said that was good. So Dean wrote in his journal, not about hunting or monsters, but to Sam. The letters were mostly about things he'd tell him if he were still alive, the things he missed. It gutted him to admit what had happened between them and how they were was still so many unhealed wounds between them.

Then the basement had flooded due to a crack in the foundation and Sam's duffel had been destroyed. Dean had nothing left. Lisa and Ben had cleaned up the mess. Dean had stolen a bottle of gin from the helpful neighbors and he'd been in bed two days, burdened with this horrible promise. He wished he'd never come here. He wished he would have parked on the side of the road and blown his brains out like he'd been aching to do. He wished he could kill and maim and torture just because that's what was happening to Sam.

There was a rustling outside the bedroom door. Dean grunted and squinted at the shadows underneath it. He scrubbed a hand over his stubbled face, and sat up. It was nearly four in the afternoon. Lisa wasn't home from work yet, and that meant—"Crap." He muttered.

He pushed the liquor bottles under the bed just as there was a timid knock on the door. "Dean…"

"It's okay, get in here, kid."

The door opened and Ben peered around it, unusually uncertain. Light tumbled in behind him and burned Dean's bloodshot eyes. Ben seemed a little scared and reluctant, standing rigidly at the threshold.

Dean needed to teach the kid how to make some strong coffee. "What's up…you need something?"

"Um, I…think I did something that…you might be mad."

He'd snapped at Ben a few times unnecessarily. He'd always apologized, but sometimes it was hard to keep the anger in check. He'd scared him too when he patrolled the house with guns drawn or woke up screaming from nightmares. Dean wondered how much his presence in the house was screwing up Lisa's child.

"I won't get mad," he said gently. "I promise."

Ben entered the room completely, arms tucked behind his back.

"Whatcha got there? Did you break something? You can always say I did it. I owe you a few, right?"

Ben's eyes were hooded and he shifted from foot to foot. When he spoke, it was in a whispered mumble. "Parker and I were playing in the basement…and um, I wanted to show him how big Sam was and how cool his stuff was, so…I took stuff out of his pack and I forgot to put it back."

Ben drew his arms in front of him. He was holding one of Sam's beloved flannel button-ups, wrapped inside the worn blue fabric was Sam's journal. They were a little rumpled, but beautifully unruined by the fetid, muddy sludge that had soiled everything else.

Ben was still stammering with his little shoulders drawn upwards like he was bracing himself for Dean to yell. "I'm sorry…you said Sam's a hero and I wanted to show Jones. He has that really cool dirt bike and he kept bragging, but this is…"

Dean was hugging the kid before he realized he'd moved. His eyes were swimming as he gasped, "thank you, thank you…"

Ben's head rested on his shoulder, falling into the affection. "You're not mad? You told me not to touch his stuff."

"I know what I told you, I'm not mad, dude. I'm glad you didn't listen to me." Dean pulled back and held Ben by his shoulders. "Next time that Jones kid starts braggin' about that dumbass dirt bike, we'll show him the Impala, okay?"

Ben's face lit up like fireworks. "Really?"

"Yup, but just the not the trunk, though, okay?"

"Sure." Ben was vibrating again with the exuberance that only children had even though he swore he was a man. "That'll be epic!" He bounded out of the room.

Dean fell back on his bottom, and touched the shirt with extreme reverence and soul-crushing sadness. He wasn't sentimental—a lifetime on the road hadn't allowed it. That didn't stop him from pressing his nose to the collar and smelling Sam's cologne and aftershave. Jess had given this one to him, it was ugly as sin, pink and flowery, but Sam only wore it when he was in a good mood. "Guess I'm the bitch now, huh, Sammy?"

Dean hung the shirt in the back of the closet, tucked the journal under his pillow, and tried to salvage the day.

Grief was as malignant as a cancer. It was always there, rising and retreating like the tide. He'd been waiting for something—a personal Hail Mary from the big man upstairs as a thanks for his service, but it wasn't coming.

Sam was gone. And his last wish had been for Dean to live. As much as he wanted the grief to swallow him whole, he had one last duty as a big brother.

Dean washed his face, brushed his teeth and shaved. He took one more look at Sam's shirt in the closet and decided to make good on the promise. For his brother.

He found Ben in his room listlessly playing video games. "Kid, you wanna help me with something?"

Ben's head swiveled to him and he nodded instantly, dropping the game on the bed. "What are we gonna do?"

"Man's work. We're going to fix that crack in the basement."

Ben darted in his closet to find his shoes, and wiggled out of his shirt to put on an older one. "Cool! Hey, Deeeean, maybe we could do a trade, like I help you and you we can do stuff, like 'guy' stuff?"

Dean lifted his eyebrows, wondering how this kid wasn't his. "Sounds fair. You should make a list of guy stuff we can do."

Ben bounced on the stairs. "There's a park around the corner, we could play football! OOOH! We have a decent baseball team, we could go to a game! And one day, we could go to the big arcade at the mall…and then we could…"

Dean found himself smiling for real as Ben's enthusiasm bled into him.

That night, with Ben snoring on the couch from his long day of a digging, Dean ordered a pizza and opened a beer for Lisa as soon as she came through the door. He watched her eat at the kitchen table. When she was finished, Dean tried again. The words had never been there before. It had all seemed too big or too painful. He'd started off like he always did, opening and closing his mouth, starting sentences and trailing off. Lisa's hand settled over his, delicate but strong and Dean turned away, watching the lamppost across the street flicker and flutter, and it came to him, not like an epiphany or an idea, but more like the break of a damn, the splintering of a stubborn will to keep suffering and keep people out. Because Lisa had took him in and Ben looked at him with those adoring brown eyes, and Dean couldn't feel like this forever. "My mother was killed…when I was four. There was a demon in Sammy's nursery and she was just trying to protect him…"

-S-

Bobby Singer had many tales to tell.

He'd killed his wife, been arrested for her murder, fell into a bottle and managed to climb out when he found out why.

He'd saved a lot of lives and when it finally felt like he'd made up for killing the only woman dumb enough to love him, he retired.

He'd never had kids of his own, but he'd adopted a two idjits from a hunter crazier than him.

He'd been possessed. He'd been paralyzed. He'd stared the devil in the face, and lived to tell about it.

Bobby stared at the doors of a Kansas county hospital, and thought about all of those stories, and how none of it prepared him for the phone call he'd received while tracking down leads on a wraith two states over. A nurse that the very hospital he was eyeballing had called him, stating the police had picked up a disoriented young man on the side of the road a few miles north of Stull Cemetery. He appeared to be in shock and severely dehydrated, but he'd managed to give them a next of kin, and that apparently, was Bobby.

He unscrewed the cap of his silver flask and took a long pull. Unfortunately, the Johnny Walker Blue did nothing to ease the old hunter's anxiety. The nurse had given Bobby the description he expected: tall, built like a bulldozer, blue eyes and brown hair.

It was Sam, or even worse, some evil sonuvabitch wearing the kid like a bad suit. Either way, Bobby had to know.

The nurse had a kind face that belied her no-nonsense disposition. She rattled spoke fast and walked faster and before Bobby was prepared, he was standing outside of the room that held Sam.

Hope wasn't an emotion that hunters often felt, because it was foolhardy. The bottom always dropped out and allowing hope just made the fall that much farther.

Bobby sighed, knocking his baseball back further on his head and peered through the dust-clouded square of glass to peer at the man inside the room.

The kid looked an awful lot like Sam Winchester.

And a paternal rage flashed through him. "Why is he locked up?"

The nurse lifted her eyebrows at the tone. "He was in shock, exhausted and dehydrated when he got to the ER. As soon as he was hydrated, he decompensated. He took out a nurse and three security guards before he could be sedated."

Bobby's face didn't even twitch. He stared her down, waiting for more.

"He kept screaming about demons and…the devil, so he was transferred here."

Bobby's heart illogically soared. "All right, let me in."

"Mr. Singer, there's one more thing," Nurse Cramer said, trailing the swipecard to the room nervously around in her hands. "He keeps asking for salt."

His weathered face folded into a sly smile as he tucked a hand in his jacket and pulled out a small canister. "Brought my own."

The Thing That Could Be Sam was actually in an honest-to-goodness padded room, like the sanitariums he remembered his uncles whispering about when he was a boy. Except this one was cleaner and well-lit, even if it smelled sweaty and unclean. The occupant was bundled in a freakin' straight-jacket, crumpled on one side in the one shadowed corner. Bobby approached him carefully, trying not to let himself succumb to the clutches of hope and failing miserably. Losing Dean had been as gut-wrenching as it came, but waking up reborn to find Dean fashioning a cross at Sam's grave…it was more than he'd ever thought he'd live to see.

"Sammy," Bobby called out.

Sam's eyes barely flickered. They were a dulled blue. Bobby dropped to a knee, still overjoyed to feel the pop of the stiff joints in his legs. It took one look in the dilated, glassy eyes for him to realized that Sam was still drugged to the hilt.

Bobby set the salt down, and reached in his pocket and pulled out the holy water. "Are you thirsty, Sam?"

On a light day, Sam Winchester was a beast and as heavy as one too. It took a good amount of grunting and shifting to get him upright, especially with Sam twisting and whimpering at the contact. "Okay, kid," Bobby whispered. "Let's have some water, huh?" He tipped the flask, Sam choked at first, but drank steadily. No hissing. No fizzing.

Sam's eyes snapped to his and focused intently. He licked his lips, "Lucifer's…angel. M-make the symbol."

Bobby's eyes filled. Because that was Sam Winchester's genius at work when he was as weak as a newborn pup and back from a vacation in down under.

He nodded, cut his own arm and smeared the Enochian symbol on the wall like Dean had taught him, smacking his palm in the center. Sam barely flinched.

Bobby dove for the straps of the straight jacket. "You got sprung, huh, kid?" He was grinning like a snakeoil salesman with a trunk full of cash.

Sam nodded, but his head didn't rise after the second bob, so Bobby barely heard the rasped, "Dean's dead, huh? I k-killed him. E-everything's muddled."

Bobby's shaky hands worked the jacket off. Sam was sweaty and too-hot beneath it. His pale arms peppered with bruises and scrapes, knuckles raw. Sam's left hand was locked into a fist.

"Dean's fine, Sam. He's in Cicero."

Sam said nothing.

"We forgot silver," Bobby muttered.

"Don't need it." That fisted hand overturned and slowly opened to reveal Dean's ring, bloody and embedded in his palm before he closed it again. "G-get me out of here."

It didn't take long to get Sam signed out of the hospital. Bobby had documents and a silver tongue, but he didn't even need them. He showed them Sam's untreated hand, put on his stern face, and less than an hour later and one bandaged hand later, they were on the road to Indiana.