Hi. I did a few major edits to this part. This story kind of kills me, because it's hard writing the boys a part and getting into Sam's head is...not fun, but it's carthartic. I hope you like it. Let me know either way.

Thanks again for the reviews and alerts! They really mean a lot.

Chapter 3

Dean slinked into the house, smelling of booze and nicotine and freshly fallen snow.

He took off his coat and stuffed it into a plastic bag along with his other shirts. He tied it tightly, and dropped it next to the laundry machine. He grabbed a clean hoodie from the dryer. Dean hadn't gotten a job yet, but spent the day up hitting up bars along the Illinois border. Thanks to his still-sharp hustling skills, he'd made a little an easy five grand.

The holidays always seemed to tease out latent dysfunction—people needed to drown their sorrows in beers and bad behavior, and he'd made a killing. And it was nice, stepping back into the past, swindling losers out of their cash, and feeling the energy of truck-stop drive. Dean couldn't say he didn't miss the life, miss his car and the open road. He'd actually smiled and flirted with the bartender, and he'd turned his right, expecting to find Sam hunched over a newspaper or some lame novel Dean could barely understand. There was no one there, of course, no emo-Sasquatch, just an empty barstool and a bleeding hole in his heart.

So he came back to the house, bereft about Sam and the approaching holidays.

He moved out of the laundry room and was startled by the softly glowing colors littering the walls, the glitter and tinsel, and the gleam of a thousand bulb ornaments on the kitchen table.

He sucked in a deep breath, smiled winningly, and padded into the living room. Lisa and Ben were decorating the biggest Christmas tree Dean had ever seen. There were forgotten cups of cocoa on the table, Christmas carols playing on the stereo. Dean half-expected an elf to toddle around the corner.

"Did Christmas throw up in here?"

Ben popped out from the side of the tree. He was giggling and bouncing around like a kangaroo. "Deeean, we always do the tree this time every year. I'm glad you're back. We have a surprise for you." Ben said with wide eyes.

Ben and Dean had become fast friends in the five months since he'd been there. And he loved surprising Dean. His energy and glee was Dean's saving grace, and he loved that kid more than life.

Lisa pushed her dark curls over her shoulder and smiled along with her son. "Sit." He kissed him quickly, frowning at the smoke clinging to his skin. He shrugged and sat.

Their relationship had been a bit slower. Grief had changed Dean, leaving deep and permanent scars. It had also left him more than a little impotent. He loved her without the sex, and it was a hard, passionate, you-saved-my-life love, not the short-lived lust he'd thrived on as a hunter. Lisa was beautiful, all mysteriously dark features and a dusting of freckles, and she was also compassionate, funny and pretty damn cool.

Dean dropped into the soft black couch, unsure of what to do. This seemed like a Braden tradition that he was intruding on, and the thought of Christmas just wanted to go sit in the Impala and mourn in the dark. But he owed it to them to try.

"We have our ornaments. We make some every year. We made one for you."

Dean's eyebrows lifted as Ben pointed to the ornament, made out of a circle of cardstock and outlined inexplicably with colored buttons, but his name was spelled in out in pristine lines of glitter. "Wow, dude, I love this."

"Really? You don't think it's lame?" Ben was inching towards that line between child and teenager, listening to himself or doing what was popular and cool. This, however, seemed to be important to him.

"No way, dude, it's…been awhile since I had a Christmas tree. And I've never had my own ornament. Thanks, kid." He pointedly did not think about his last Christmas Sam gave him before he died.

"That's what I thought. I can show you how to make more ornaments if you want. We forgot Sam's."

Lisa froze. Dean nodded surely. "You want to make his for me? I'll join you in a second."

Ben nodded, unfazed. He liked stories about Sam, and Dean loved telling them. Ben sometimes acted as if Sam was on an extended vacation or away at school. "Can I? What colors did he like?"

Dean smiled. "All of them…except red."

"Got it."

Ben darted off to sit at the kitchen table and Dean settled into the comfort of the couch, watching Lisa decorate the tree, barefoot.

"You disappeared today," Lisa said as she handed him an ornament. Dean begrudgingly got off the couch and put it on the tree decorated in colored balls and twinkling lights.

The tree was real, and Dean wondered how she'd gotten it into the house.

"Thought I'd earn my keep. I don't like being a kept bitch, ya know?" He tossed the wad of cash on the table. He took her glass of wine and sipped from it.

"Have you ever thought about getting a real job?"

"Like the 'punch-a-clock, wear-a-tie' kind of job? I'm pretty sure I'm allergic. Besides, I have no skills and I'm dead, remember?"

Lisa sighed and took back her glass of wine. "Dean, you know…this is your home, right?"

"Uh, yeah, I have an ornament and everything." He grinned.

"Smart ass. I mean, like, you can unpack your stuff…and put down roots. You keep acting like we're going to have to pack up and move all the time."

"I've lived my whole life like that, hard habit to break."

"Dean…come here."

Lisa dragged him off the couch and down the hall where her study was. She'd been going to college online and often holed up in the purple-accented room while Ben and Dean played videogames or watched television. She opened the pocket doors and gestured grandly. "Fix this room."

"What?"

"It's boring and I hate it. Take the money you made from doing God-knows-what and make this room awesome. Knock crap down, smash things, do whatever you want. Make a mancave."

"You're serious?"

"As a heart attack."

Dean laughed, tickled, and stared at the bland room with just four walls and a desk, imagination stirring. "One more question: where do you keep your sledgehammer?"

-s-

Dean had always pegged suburbia as a place where yuppies went to die a painful death from boring jobs and lack of excitement. But this block was pretty cool. A Christmas blizzard had steamrolled their tiny town. The city was shutdown, but it didn't stop people from celebrating, in fact, it seemed to spur them on. Kids were out playing in the bluffs of plowed snow, dragging sleds up and down the block. Neighbors were opening their homes to each other.

On New Year's Eve, Dean and Ben shoveled off the deck, thawed out a bunch of meat, and had a winter barbecue, while Lisa invited friends over. Soon the deck was filled with husbands, drinking spiked cider; the yard was filled with screaming little kids, and the kitchen was filled with gossiping wives and babies. It wasn't bad, actually, the heat of the barbecue kept Dean from freezing to death, and he met a lot of guys from the neighborhood. They probably couldn't kill a Wendigo or exorcise a demon, but they were welcoming and friendly. He'd already been invited to a basketball game.

Dean had smothered the fire in the grill and headed inside as the temperature was rapidly dropping and snow was beginning to fall again. The house was filled with animated chatter and easy laughter. Children scuttled up and down the basement stairs. The Christmas tree flashed and twinkled in the corner. There was a crackling fire in the fireplace and friends in the living room. Despite everything, Dean was assaulted with overwhelming sense of home, of an intimacy that he'd never found in the dive bars or diners across the country. It was so disturbingly extraordinary that it took his breath away.

He stumbled into the room that Lisa had given him, the room that he had finished just before Christmas. It wasn't a mancave, though there was a gigantic movie screen and three oversized theater-style seats parked in front. On the far wall, there was a huge desk flanked by built-in shelves that Dean built himself for Lisa, and a set of beanbags and a hanging chair that Ben had been enthralled with at the store. It was a space for all of them, to play and grow, as a family. Dean hadn't even realized it until now.

He sat down in the desk chair. Silver poured in from the window and there was chatter echoing in from the kitchen outside. Lisa entered, sliding the pocket door partly closed. She looked beautiful in the red sequined tunic with heeled boots. She sat on his lap, pulling the bobby pins out of her hair. "The countdown's coming up. The champagne is ready, and the kids are all cracked out on sugar."

"Okay," Dean said. The darkness compelled him to whisper.

"This room is amazing, Dean. I showed it to Sid, and he wants to give you a job with his crew. Three days a week, cash only." She met his eyes with a sly simper. "I told him you were Canadian."

Dean winced. "Oh, shot to the heart."

Lisa unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. "The holidays suck, huh?"

"…not as much as I thought. I had fun today. I just…" He bit his lip. "When I was ten, we squatted in his house. Dad knew the couple that owned it were on vacation. It was huge, marble floors, big fancy kitchen. And they had a friggin' movie theater in the basement. Sammy and I loved it. And it was one of those silly things I held onto. I always said, 'when I had my own place, I'd have one of those'…and then one day I stopped wanting it, because I knew it wouldn't happen. And Sam…Sam had always wanted a desk…"

"Like the one you built me?" Lisa wondered.

"Bigger. He'd read anything he could get his hands on, but…dad limited him to five books like we were real soldiers. I used to stuff as many books as I could under the seats of the Impala and in my duffel. Because he couldn't have a real desk with real bookshelves."

"And the hanging chair?"

Dean huffed a laugh. "The chair's just badass…"

"So you built the room you always wanted? Why?" She sounded awed and honored.

"Because I'm home." He declared. "I don't know why I fought it so much."

At that moment, something within him changed, shifted. He looked at Lisa and saw more than a caretaker or a friend. He saw the woman who sat with him in a bathtub for thirteen hours; the woman who never forced him on a shrink, never looked at him like he was crazy; who trusted him with his kid and let him into her bed. He saw a woman who looked damn good in a red dress. He was drawn like a planet in orbit. He kissed her hard and deep, tasting the wine she drank and smelling her perfume.

He distantly heard the popping of noisemakers and the heralded arrival of the New Year as only Dean Winchester could.

-3-

Sam still wasn't used to breathing—the fulfilling pull of an exhale or the emptying lull of an exhale.

He wasn't used to the bigness of his body or the freedom of its movement.

He wasn't used to everything feeling so small or unimportant. He'd surpassed life and death, and had taken the very devil inside him. He felt a cryptic solitude inside of his own head, his own body. He'd felt violated beyond expression, all polluted soul and broken psyche.

Sam's memories were tampered with, jumbled up and muddled, like he'd been taken apart and reassembled wrong. With pieces missing.

He could only stitch himself back together the best he can and move on. How, Sam didn't know.

So, he ran, focusing on nothing more than eating up miles with his long legs and big body, the blissful inhale-exhale of breath. There was something confident and violently defiant that bloomed within him as he ran and prayed to Castiel. Because with every stride, every time his feet hit solid earth and felt the irreplaceable heat on his skin—another reassurance that he was alive, and not in the cage, being stripped of skin and limbs and of the very essence of humanity.

But then there were times of nearly insurmountable darkness, where he couldn't escape it, when he was wild from all that he'd endured. When It is a very real thing, a nefarious beast lurking in the edges of his peripheral or a demonic laugh inside of his head. Because Sam was more than just haunted by Lucifer, he was consumed by him.

Sam limped into the house after his daily run on blistered feet. He felt quieter, despite the pain swelling behind his eyes. He grunted at Bobby as he passed on the way to take a shower. The headaches were common—worse than migraines—but Sam could handle them. His pain tolerances were different now. He stretched for his cool down, adrenaline fighting the pain more than medicine ever would, and drained a liter of water.

A few minutes later, he was stooped under the too-small shower head. Water, feeling clean, was another innocuous miracle of being topside. When he first arrived at Bobby's, he'd taken seven showers a day, amazed by the fluidity of it.

There was a soft knock on the door, almost timid, but Sam still stiffened, braced for an attack. "It's me," Bobby called quiet but firm.

Sam relaxed. "I ran to the windfarm and back," he declared, scrubbing his hair. "That's, like, fifteen miles."

"Next stop, Boston Marathon."

"Yeah, maybe."

"You want anything special for dinner today? I'm headin' into town."

"I don't care." Sam ducked his head and waited for the inevitable inquiry.

"Or we could hit up the diner you like on the way out of town, and go see your brother."

Sam's lips turned upwards in a poor imitation of a smile. Bobby asked every day. And Sam had gently turned him down. He remembered what he did to Dean before he fell, felt his hands breaking his bones and Lucifer's lilt of glee; remembered what happened in The Cage. He was so beyond repair, and he knew Dean would drop everything to try to fix what wouldn't be fixed. He couldn't face him.

Yet the more sure-footed he got, the more his resolve was weakening. Dean had always grounded and reassured him. He needed that wordless communication and big brother guidance. He'd finally broke. "Yeah, Bobby, why don't we leave tonight?"

-s-

Bobby hadn't expect Sam to give in so easily. If Winchesters were anything, they were obstinate, bull-headed men who dug in more rather than surrender. But he'd seen Sam's growing struggle, heard him calling for Dean during the rare times he slept. They both knew that if anyone could help him, it was Dean.

The weeks after the mental hospital hadn't been nearly as hard as Bobby expected, except that Sam didn't sleep at night. He didn't like darkness. He didn't like barred windows or locked doors, often slept outside just after daybreak. He had nightmares and attack of feral panic at loud noises and sudden movements. Bobby just drank more coffee and approached Sam cautiously.

The drive from South Dakota to Indiana was an arduous one. Sam couldn't take enclosed spaces for very long, so they stopped often, before he panicked. Bobby relished in the time with the younger Winchester, taking him to shopping malls and campy interstate attractions, buying him whatever he wanted.

They arrived at Dean's four days later. Bobby had parked two blocks away at Sam's instance. They'd walked along the dark suburban street. Sam admired the roses and the perfectly maintained lawns like a man on a new lease on life should. Despite Sam's new darkness—the inability to be touched or the flashes of profound anguish—he was happier than any man in his position had the right to be. And maybe reuniting with his brother would fix what Bobby and time hadn't.

If that didn't make Bobby Singer believe in miracles, he didn't know what did.

They reached the Braden home, and inside parted curtains, Sam and Bobby beheld the new family. Dean was sitting at the table, passing a plate of food to Ben. Lisa joined them and Dean smiled, unguarded and candid. When Lisa leaned over to kiss Dean like two people invested in a life together did, Bobby was re-thinking his years of atheism.

Until he turned to look at Sam.

There was no overjoyed smile or even a move to cross the street and knock on the door, just a sobering wistfulness that broke Bobby's heart.

It was everything Sam had wanted, everything he'd fallen to protect and his brother had it.

The streetlight flickered madly. Sam was stumbling away through the evening mist, pulling Bobby with him. "Let's go. Dean'll see that."

"That's kind of the point, Sam. Your brother was destroyed. He got out and you can too."

Sam twisted around, face flashing with barely harnessed rage and tears in his eyes. "He's…we did this song and dance before, all those years ago a-at Stanford when he came to get me…and you know how it ended. Now there's a kid. I'm not doing this again."

"Sam…"

"We have to go."

"Just...just let him off the hook, Sam."

"I'm not making the same mistakes again. I did everything wrong before. Now, we need to go."

Bobby dug his heels in. He was stronger than he looked.

"Get in the car or I'll put you there myself, old man!"

Bobby did a double-take at the malice in Sam's tone. It was sinister and darker than anything he'd ever heard from the youngest Winchester. His fists were clenched and his chest heaved, and suddenly, that weak, raw thing that Bobby had rescued from a mental hospital was gone, and he didn't know what replaced it. He didn't know how much damage had been done. He didn't know what Sam was capable of.

Bobby climbed in the car and headed out of Cicero.

When they returned to the compound, there was a strange man with dirty fingers, haggard clothes and terrified eyes waiting for him just inside the gates. He'd somehow bypassed Bobby's elaborate security measures and booby traps. After the standard tests, he claimed he was Samuel Winchester even produced pictures of a young Mary and rescued pages from her journal.

Sam left two days later.

Yes, Bobby Singer had many tales to tell. He knew that the one about Sam Winchester's seemingly miraculous return from The Cage was going to be harrowing, and a happy ending wasn't a guarantee.