And in my hour of darkness,
She is standing right in front of me.
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
Writer: LENNON, JOHN / MCCARTNEY, PAUL
LET IT BE
Chapter Two
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They were walking again. Dean couldn't say how she'd managed to get him moving. He doubted it had involved anything as dramatic as her physically grabbing his arm and dragging him along. She just didn't seem the type to resort to physical solutions to solve complicated problems. She seemed more the passive resistance type, all that calm, steady authority with none of the more imposing traits that always rubbed Dean the wrong way.
For all that Sam had thrown Dean's 'blind faith', 'good little soldier' tendencies where their dad was concerned in Dean's face; Dean had never done well with authority figures. They pushed every button Dean had, bringing out his more pugnacious side.
See, Sammy. I can use the big words, too. Never mind that he only knew that word because Sam had called him that once and then had burst out laughing so hard when Dean had taken offense at being compared to a flat-faced, pork-roast of a dog with bulging eyes, that he couldn't speak to tell him what it meant. He'd staggered over to his laptop, wiping tears out of his eyes so he could see to type, and then had turned the laptop around so Dean could see.
He'd brought up some online dictionary and had typed in the word. Dean had read the screen while Sam continued to laugh and gasp until Dean thought the damn idiot was going to make himself sick.
Pugnacious: adjective: meaning inclined to quarrel or fight readily; quarrelsome; belligerent; combative.
Dean had then shut the laptop and turned to his soon-to-be-dismembered little brother.
"I'll show you pugnacious, bitch!" he'd threatened, trying hard to keep a straight face in the wake of his brother's hysterical laugher.
His smug, little shit of a little brother had looked at him with a happy grin so big you could have lost a pug in his dimples. "Bring it on, Fido!"
The wrestling match that had ensued had broken a lamp and an end table, and had had them both laughing so hard at the end that they'd had to call a truce because they both couldn't breathe.
Dean had never heard his brother laugh like that since, so full and open and unashamed. Sam rarely laughed at all, now, and when he did, it was as though he felt he shouldn't; lips merely twitching, head tipped down, brow creased, slight flush of shame to his face. There had been nothing in their life for so long worth laughing about.
"Do you believe in Fate, Dean?" Sister Mary asked suddenly, breaking through his thoughts.
"No."
"No?" She seemed surprised at this. She had stopped at a bank of elevators and had pressed the down button but she didn't look at him as she waited for the doors to open. "Then, you believe that coincidences are just that; things that happen for no apparent reason and with no apparent connection?"
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "In my experience, Sister; there are no coincidences," he commented cryptically. "The average person just doesn't want to see the truth that's staring them right in the face."
"I think you're right about that." The elevator pinged and the doors opened. They stepped aside to let the occupants disembark, and then stepped into the now empty car. She pushed the button for one floor down, but before Dean could question where they were going, she spoke again.
"Three weeks ago, I was in Leavenworth, Kansas, working as a Hospice volunteer in the VA hospital."
"Leavenworth, Kansas?" he repeated.
"Do you know it?"
"Sam and I were born in Lawrence," he answered, feeling a little numb. "It's about 30 miles or so from there."
She just nodded with a small smile. "I'd worked there for years, through the local arch diocese. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And then, three weeks ago, I was called in on a Tuesday night to fill in for Sister Sarah, who had never missed a day of work in the five years she'd been there. For some reason, that evening she'd just called in to say she couldn't be there. So I went in to fill her rounds.
"There was a coma patient, there; an old Vietnam Vet who had come in about a month before with his granddaughter. Now there was an interesting story. They had just met each other for the first time a few weeks before when he'd wandered into a homeless shelter where the granddaughter happened to be working.
"Neither knew much about the other, only that they existed somewhere. It wasn't until the granddaughter noticed the photograph he'd been holding was actually a picture of her mother that they learned who each other was. She'd brought him to the hospital a few days later, but he slipped into a coma that night. He'd been there ever since."
The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened. Dean swept his hand before him indicating that she should precede him off the elevator, and then he followed behind. She turned to the right and started down the long corridor.
"He woke up that night while I was sitting with him," she resumed her story. Dean wasn't sure where she was going with this tale or how—or even if—it had anything to do with them, but something made him listen. "One second, he was asleep as he'd been every night for the last month, and the next his eyes were open and he was looking right at me like he knew who I was. He was on Sister Sarah's rounds. I had my own patients who I saw on my rounds. I had never seen him before that night."
She stopped in the middle of the corridor, and turned to look at Dean. "He looked right at me, though; and I will never forget what he said to me. He said he had lived the life he'd lived, good or ill, and that it was too late to go back and do things differently. He'd made his peace with his life long ago. He then said that the morning before he'd walked into that homeless shelter, he'd told God that whatever He wanted to do with him, whatever He had planned, was fine. There were only two things he wanted before God took him.
"One was to finally meet his granddaughter."
"And what was the other?" Dean asked.
She shrugged with a sad smile. "To someday repay a debt he owed to someone who had saved his life during the war. He didn't say who it was, just that it was probably too late for that, but he was still hopeful. He grew real quiet after that, and I really thought he was just going to drift away.
"Then he suddenly opened his eyes again, and he looked right at me like he had before; but there was something different about him. It was like there was something else looking out through his eyes; something amazing and awesome. Something…Divine. He reached out and I took his hand; and he said, 'Go where you are needed, my child.'
"I said I would, of course. That is what I'd promised when I'd taken my vows. I wasn't promising him anything that I hadn't already agreed to do. When you are in the service of your vocation, you go where your calling needs you to go and you do what your calling needs you to do. Even when that place or that task seems… unimaginable.
"He just smiled and then he was gone. The next day, my superior told me that a sister parish on the east coast had just lost one of their sisters to illness. They needed someone with Hospice experience to fill in until they could find a more permanent replacement. My superior immediately thought of me. I said I'd go."
"Just like that?"
Again, she shrugged her shoulders and gave him that gentle smile. "You go where your calling needs you to go and you do what your calling needs you to do."
She started walking again, heading down another long corridor. Dean was so turned around; he really wasn't sure where he was anymore. He had no choice but to follow her. Her pace wasn't hurried. He hoped that meant that things weren't dire. Still, he didn't understand why she had asked him to meet her on the second floor instead of the first.
"I've been here a little over a week," she continued speaking, weaving her story in that calm, soothing voice. "To be honest, I've been wondering nearly that whole time why I was sent here. When I arrived at the parish, here, they told me that there had been a change, and that they needed me to help out at the hospital, instead. I didn't understand…until I found your brother."
Dean stopped. "You found Sam?" Even as he asked, he remembered her telling him how she'd heard Sam talking as she'd walked by the door.
She nodded. "Yes. I'd heard him speaking, and I knew just from his voice, alone, that he was lost. And when I saw him… He had that same look about him that I'd seen on the faces of the soldiers who had not fully returned from the war. Oh, their bodies were back, some broken and some without a mark on them to show for how they'd suffered; but their spirits were still there, still locked in that terrible place or in some terrible memory that they just couldn't seem to escape.
"I didn't know who he was or where he'd come from, just that he was hurting and that he was injured. I called the ER to ask for assistance and then sat with him until they showed up. It was only a few minutes, but he was…so…haunted. He kept saying the same thing over and over again, as if something was taunting him. I finally just placed my hands on top of his and started to pray.
"The next thing I knew, he was praying with me. Then he looked up at me, and… he seemed really afraid." She frowned. It was the first time she's shown any real emotion. "He called me Mom."
"You look like her," Dean said through the sudden lump in his throat. "You sound like her, too. She died when…" He caught himself before he finished that sentence. How would he explain how Sam knew what his mom looked or sounded like if he were to tell her that their mother had died when Sam was a mere six months old? "She died when we were kids."
"I'm sorry," she said, and Dean believed her. "When I told Sam who I was, he told me she had died." She looked up at Dean, her expression still troubled. "Sam experienced something…something unspeakably terrible, didn't he?"
As a matter of fact, Sam's soul spent the equivalent of 160 years trapped in in a cage in Hell with a pissed off Lucifer and a pissed off Michael!
He wondered what she'd say to that. "You can't even imagine," he said instead.
"I would guess that there aren't too many that can."
Dean gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. "No one could," he said angrily. "He should be a drooling puddle in a padded cell after what he went through, but he's not." He didn't know why he was saying this but he suddenly couldn't stop. Maybe, he just wanted her to understand. Didn't she say that she wanted that too? To understand so she could help Sam?
"It was rough at first; the nightmares, the hallucinations, the flashbacks. Half the time, he wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't. But then one day… it was like a switch had been thrown. I don't know how, but suddenly he was in control again. He'd figured out a way to ground himself."
"His hand," she said.
He nodded. "It was right after he'd injured it. He was having a really bad episode. It was like he didn't even know who I was. I grabbed his hand and I pressed into that cut, and suddenly he was back. After that, I'd catch him digging into it. He tore the stitches a few times, but eventually he stopped and it healed. It's been weeks. He rubs at it, sometimes; but that's it. Sometimes, it's like none of it ever happened."
He came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the hallway, her earlier comment suddenly fresh in his mind. "No way, did Sam try to hurt himself."
She looked at him with that gentle smile. "I didn't think he did, which is why I asked them to wait."
"Why?" he demanded. "What makes you so sure? You don't even know him. He could be all kinds of crazy, for all you know."
"I just know," she said calmly. "The way he looked at me; like someone who had seen Hell and had survived the flame. Like someone whose soul had been battered and bruised, and yet somehow, it was still intact. Injured, but not broken."
Dean spun away from her, away from that too familiar face. What she'd said… How she'd described what she'd seen in Sam's eyes… She was so close to the truth that he wanted to tell her everything. He needed someone else to know. He couldn't do this alone. He just couldn't.
He felt something touch his arm and he turned to look at her over his shoulder. "You're not alone, here," she said as though she had read his mind. "Your brother is grieving just as you are."
He looked away again, squeezing his eyes closed to keep the tears at bay.
"Dean, Sam and I had a few minutes to talk before the nurses showed up to help him. He told me that his uncle had just died, and that he had been like a father to his brother and him. He said he'd come to the chapel because everything was just so loud. He'd wanted it to stop and he thought it wouldn't follow him there.
"I asked him if he was alone and he told me that his brother, Dean, had come to the hospital with him, but that he'd left after his uncle had died. He didn't know where he was or if he was coming back. When I asked him if he wanted me to call him, though, he said, no."
"What?"
"He said he didn't want me to call you because you had enough to deal with. You didn't need his 'pile of crazy on top of everything else.' His words, not mine."
Oh, God, Sammy.
She slowly turned him so he faced her, and she gathered both of his hands into hers. Her hands were so small compared to his; the skin white to his sun-darkened, soft to his calloused. "You look after each other, don't you?"
"Our whole life, it seems."
"You both try so hard to protect each other from harm." He could only nod. "And yet, instead of turning towards each other for strength and support; you turn away and try to hide the pain you are feeling from each other. You both have suffered the same loss. Who better to understand what one is feeling than the other?"
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Dean slowly pushed open the door and poked his head into the hospital room. Sister Mary had warned him what he would find, but he still wasn't prepared for the sight that greeted him. He would never be prepared for something like that.
Sam lay sleeping on the bed, his head tipped slightly to one side, his hair fanned out across the pillow. His face was pale, the skin around his eyes sunken and bruised. An IV line ran from a bag to the back of his right hand. A band of white gauze circled his left.
Cuffs circled both wrists, anchoring him to the bed. It was the standard procedure for patients on suicide watch.
Sister Mary had explained that the doctor had seen the thin white scars running up the length of Sam's arms. They were barely noticeable, but because of how he'd been found, they'd looked for signs of previous attempts. Sedated, Sam hadn't been able to tell them otherwise, and they probably wouldn't have believed him if he'd tried. Few attempted suicides could be trusted to admit to the failed attempts, after all.
"Those weren't self-inflicted," Dean had told her. At the look of pain that had flashed across her face, he'd said nothing else about it. He'd tell the doctor as soon as one showed up. In the meantime, those cuffs were coming off.
He stepped into the room and approached the bed. He carefully undid the buckle around Sam's right wrist and set his arm on the bed beside him, then circled the end of the bed and freed the left.
"Ah, Sammy. What a freakin' mess we are." He reached up and brushed a lock of Sam's hair away from his temple. The slight discoloration of the skin was the only thing to indicate where the leviathan wearing Edgar's body had nearly killed him with the tire iron. He rubbed the back of his knuckle over the spot. Not the slightest bump remained.
Sam's lashes were spiked with tears, as though his grief was stronger than the sedatives in his system. Dean felt his own eyes sting and burn. He didn't know if it was from the tears he just could seem to shed or from the fatigue that was suddenly dragging him down.
He felt like he'd been awake and on his feet for days.
He spied a chair in the corner—a big sleeper chair—and dragged it closer to the bed. The thing weighed a ton, and it scraped across the floor with all the subtlety of the Impala door hinges after a week of rain. Sam didn't react to the noise.
Dean lowered himself into its cushions with a sigh. He reached through the side rail and took Sam's hand, mindful of the wound hidden beneath that white bandage. He cringed as he tried to imagine the state of mind Sam must have been in to unknowingly tear through the thickened scar tissue with nothing sharper than his own fingernails, and the level of anguish he must have been feeling if he'd needed that kind of pain to counter it.
"Not much of a stone one, am I?" he said bitterly. He dropped his forehead onto the rail and closed his eyes.
He lifted his head not even a minute later. The rail was too hard. More importantly, it was a barrier between them and there had been too damn many of those, lately. He let go of Sam's hand, tucking it against his hip. He carefully released the latch on the bar and lowered it to the floor.
He took Sam's hand again, cupping it between both of his. "I'm here, now, Sam. I'll be here when you wake up. I'll be right here." He dropped his head onto his hands and closed his eyes.
"Dean?"
He woke with a small gasp, his head shooting up from where it rested on the mattress by Sam's hip. He still held Sam's hand between his own. Confused, he sat up straight. Something slid off his shoulders to pool on the chair around his hips. He was surprised to see it was a blanket. He didn't remember having that when he'd closed his eyes what felt like seconds ago.
He let go of Sam's hand with his top-most hand and rubbed it down his face, blinking rapidly to get his sticky eyes to focus. He looked at Sam, expecting him to still be asleep.
Liquid hazel eyes met his.
"Hey," he said, pushing himself to his feet. He didn't have it in him to give Sam the usual glib remark. Not with the way Sam was looking at him like he thought Dean was another hallucination.
Habit compelled Dean to press his thumb into the center of Sam's palm, but he stopped himself. That was a crutch and one they had to stop using. Instead, he leaned over and cupped the side of Sam's face.
"It's really me, Sammy," he said. "So tell that sonuvabitch wearing my face to fuck off and die."
For all that Sam had learned at the heels of a master, he really didn't swear all that much. The real Lucifer was still in the Cage. They had to believe that, even if it meant that the Lucifer who taunted and harassed and tormented Sam was nothing more than an extension of Sam's own fractured psyche. Therefore the things he said and how he said them—hell, even the face the SOB wore while he said them—all had to come from Sam's own mind; rooting through Sam's own fears or Sam's own guilt for the means to inflict the most pain and the most anguish.
It was the worst kind of self-injury imaginable, and they couldn't keep countering it with more self-abuse. So if Sam didn't swear all that much, then Dean had to assume that the Dean who sometimes manifested in Sam's hallucinations wouldn't swear all that much, either.
If a few strategically placed f-bombs helped Sam tell the difference between the real Dean and the fake one, the real Dean was more than happy to do his part.
Apparently, his theory held merit. Sam drew in a shaky breath, his eyes going wide with shock. He blinked rapidly, spilling tears over the rim of his lashes. "Dean?"
Dean gave him the best cocky smile he could muster—which at the moment probably was closer to his worst. "In the flesh."
But instead of relief, Sam only looked away. "Why are you here?" he uttered miserably.
It was Dean's turn to wince. "Why do you think?"
"I told her not to call you."
"Yeah, well, luckily for you she's smarter than both of us."
Dean applied gentle pressure to the side of Sam's face hoping to coax him to look at him. Sam resisted, going so far as to close his eyes to force the issue. He face was so close to crumbling; Dean didn't know how he was holding back the tears.
"Sam, she didn't call me. I called you."
That got a tentative glance. "You did?"
"Yeah. When I finally came to my senses and realized that what I'd done." He sighed heavily. "Ah, man; I'm sorry I took off on you like that. I wasn't thinking straight. I just…I—I had to get outta there, you know? I just couldn't stand there and…and listen—"
"Oh, God," Sam gasped. "He's really dead, isn't he?" A sob tore loose. "That really happened? Of all the things that sonuvabitch has lied about, that's real?"
Another hitching sob broke free, despite how hard Sam was trying to keep them in.
"Oh, Sammy. Come'ere."
Dean barely pulled and suddenly he had his arms full of a grief-stricken, crying Sam clinging to him like he very life depended on it. Great, wracking sobs ripped out of him, and Dean just held him tighter, burying his face in his brother's sweat-damp hair. For a second, he actually envied Sam's ability to cry like that, to just let the pain and grief pour out of him in a purging rush. Dean's pain felt trapped, his grief locked behind the same damned wall behind which he'd locked every hurt he'd ever felt.
Tears leaked out, as though the ducts in his eyes were some kind of twisted pressure relief valve; but the bulk of his anguish stayed buried. As if sensing Dean's frozen posture, Sam started to pull away, mumbling apologies as he tried to escape.
"Don't, Sam," Dean whispered, burying his fist in the strands of his brother's hair so he couldn't pull away. Sam was still shaking, his sobs suddenly silent but still tearing out of him. He'd done that as a kid, burying his face in his pillow at night so they wouldn't hear him crying and think he was weak. Dean would see the traces on Sam's face in the morning and find the tear-damp pillow, and he'd feel like the worst big brother ever for not realizing his baby brother was hurting.
Sam wasn't weak. He was one of the strongest people Dean knew. He'd be damned if he'd let Sam think he thought otherwise. "Shshh. It's okay. Just let it out, Sammy," he crooned into Sam's hair. He wished he could take his own advice.
He had no idea how long they were like that, Sam sobbing in his arms and Dean gently rocking him. His back was a tight band of pain and his shoulders were burning, but he was not going to push Sam away while Sam still needed him. Eventually, Sam grew still, his head resting heavy in the crook of Dean's neck and his arms lax where they draped around Dean's chest and back.
Thinking Sam asleep, he carefully leaned forward and supported Sam's unresisting weight back onto the mattress. As he straightened, however, he saw that Sam's eyes were open. Slowly, his gaze lifted until it met Dean's. His eyes looked painful and swollen and a little empty.
"You are a mess, Princess," Dean teased, hoping to ease some of the tension from the moment.
Sam's brow dipped a little—if he'd been going for the bitchface, he'd failed miserably. "What are we gonna do, Dean?" he asked.
He sounded like the Sammy of old; 8-years-old or 12-years-old or 16-years-old, it didn't matter. He'd looked to his big brother to have all the answers, believing that Dean at 12 or Dean at 16 or Dean at 20 would come through. Well Dean didn't have all the answers. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been able to look Sam in the eye and say with confidence that he knew what they were going to do. He had no idea, and every instinct in him said to tell Sam not to worry, he'd think of something.
As he looked as his brother's grief-ravaged face, though; he knew he couldn't do that. He couldn't look him in those bloodshot, shock-numb eyes and lie. He could barely look him in the eye and tell him the truth, either.
He scrubbed his hand down his face. "I don't know, Sammy," he admitted. "I wish to God, I did; but I don't have the first damn clue."
Sam just nodded, his brow dipping further. He looked away for a second, and when he looked back at Dean, there was a subtle spark of classic Sammy-determination in his eyes. "Then I guess we had better figure something out, huh?"
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T. B. C.
Author Notes: I can't express how happy I am with the reponses I've received for this story. It has been very encouraging and I appreciate it very much. I hope you all are still reading. As always, thank you so much, Kailene, for all your help. You are the best.