qp
"Ten days, give me ten days and then burn the damn thing. You got me boy?"
It was a dream. At least Dean thought it was a dream. I mean hell, they hadn't heard from the ghost of Bobby in a long time, and they'd both been sure he'd finally moved on. To… wherever. Heaven, because despite being a drunken bastard most of the time, Bobby was a good man.
Sam noticed Dean's silence, though. His ears, trained from birth to replace his eyes, picked up on that sort of shufffft sound that the flask made when Dean turned it in his hands. "I thought you were going to burn that."
Dean, unsurprised by the things his brother noticed without seeing, just gave a shrug and tossed it on the ratty motel bed. "Yeah. Yeah, I should do that."
Sam's eyes, more hazel than Dean's which were flecked with blue, were half-lidded as usual. He'd been blind from birth, something to do with the amount oxygen he'd been given since he was born two months premature. "We can either risk giving him too much, which may cause blindness, or risk giving him too little and risk brain damage," the doctor had said.
Sam's birth had been a home-birth, unexpected, way too early, and even at his young age Dean remembered how small and strange the baby looked. See-through skin, little fists curled around themselves. His parents, of course, risked blindness, and despite John and Mary's initial grief, they never really regretted it.
Sam proved himself at eight, that he could hunt as well as Dean, and the damn kid was a genius anyway. So they just sort of… went with it. Of course John never really warmed to the kid, and maybe it was the blindness, but maybe it was just the fact that John blamed Sam for Mary's death. Or maybe it was that John was just a broken man and really it never mattered in the end because there was Dean, and Dean was always going to be there for his brother.
Dean glanced over at Sam, who was using his Braille ticker on the laptop, doing research for the crossroads demon they were hunting. His brow was furrowed in concentration. His eyes rolled to and fro, his eye-muscles weaker since he never used them, but he had a slight smile on his face and it gave Dean some comfort.
"I'll do a salt and burn on it tonight, for good measure," Dean said. He looked over at the flask and that dream hit him again. "Or you know, when we get done with this job."
The demon was easy to take out. The brothers had a rhythm, and they'd killed so many of those fuckers it didn't really matter anymore. Sam was more efficient than Dean in the dark, for obvious reasons, and managed to lure it to the Devil's Trap and then Dean had the honor—as he almost always did—of 'ganking that son of a bitch'. Easy as that.
Sam accidentally bumped his watch on the wall as they were heading out of the warehouse and the tinkling electronic voice read out the date. "Sorry," Sam said with a small laugh, as the sudden sound startled the brothers.
Dean realized it had been exactly ten days. He had the flask in his pocket. Sam stood by, his eyes mostly closed as Dean threw the flask into one of those discarded metal trash cans that no one really used anymore. Salt in his pocket, as always, bit of fuel, flick of the lighter.
Sam stood at his side as it burned, he warmed his hands on the flames a little and then rested his hand on Dean's shoulder. "I'm beat."
"Yeah," Dean said. He blinked against the smoke in his face and wiped his wrist across his brow, irritated to find a little bit of blood there. "Me too."
qp
It was pain that woke Sam from his sleep. Violent and pulsing behind his eyes, he let out a soft cry as he turned onto his side and groped for the bedside table. His head was spinning as he attempted to sit up, and the vertigo caused a wave of nausea to hit him so strong he wasn't sure he was going to be able to hold it in.
Letting out a slow breath, Sam pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand and felt the pain start to recede slowly. Licking his lips, eyes still squeezed shut, Sam touched his watch and the small voice read out that it was just past nine in the morning. Sam rarely slept that long, but it had been a particularly vicious night and both he and Dean needed the rest.
He turned his head slightly, listening, and found that Dean hadn't stirred yet, his big brother's breath still coming slow and even. The vertigo began to calm, as did Sam's stomach, and he finally was able to sit up completely. He kept his fingers pressed to his eyes, afraid if he let go the pressure would return, and he wondered if he was getting some sort of sinus infection or flu. This was no time to be knocked down by an illness, and the thought irritated him to no end.
Sam's free hand brushed down the front of his shirt and he realized he had fallen onto the bed and passed out in his blood-stained clothes, which was an unpleasant thought. A shower would probably help with any sort of headache anyway, so Sam dropped his hand and let his eyes blink open.
Normally, when Sam did this, he'd see light, but nothing else. Just a sort of piercing whiteness, and the occasional shadow, but that was it. This morning, however, something was… different. It was bright and there were… things, everywhere. Things looming and scary and Sam let out a shout, slamming his eyes shut and he threw himself against the headboard.
That had done the trick, succeeding in waking up Dean, who jumped up, his voice thick with sleep as he called out, "Sammy? What's wrong? What's going on?"
"Ah," Sam cried out as he tried to open his eyes again and was met with the same sort of… he didn't know what, but it was bright and horrible and different. His head spun from trying to understand what the hell it was and he struggled to stay upright.
He was going to vomit.
Trying his best to keep it down with his eyes open, suddenly a thing… this mass of shapes and strange color and it was moving, Sam could tell, because he know what the sound and feel of moving was like, and it was right in front of him.
That did it.
Groping on the side of the bed for the wastebasket he knew was there, Sam leaned over and retched. Hard. Not a lot came out, mostly bile and a little left-over beer from the night before, and the pounding in his head returned as he felt Dean's hand on his shoulder.
"What the hell is going on, Sam?"
Sam kept his eyes firmly slammed shut as he sat up, wiping his hand across his mouth. He felt disgusting now, he hated puking, and he was absolutely and completely terrified.
"I um…" he said. He cracked open one eye now, and that thing was there, so close, just a mess and jumble of things that Sam's head could not process.
He moved, and something moved with it, a… thing… and it reached across to touch whatever it was that sat in front of him. The moment the moving thing, that moved with his hand, made contact with the other thing in front of him, his fingers told his brain that it was Dean, and Sam felt a fresh wave of nausea wash over him.
"Oh god," Sam said. He closed his eyes again and let his fingers dash up the side of Dean's face to the thick, shining scar along his left ear.
That scar was Sam's touchstone. Dean had gotten it when he was eight, Sam was four, and it was during a stretch in a suburban neighborhood in Arizona. The house had a pool, and neighbors that wanted to watch the cute little boys while John was on the road. Everyone was so worried about the little blind boy in the shallow-end of the pool that they'd forgotten to mention the patch of slick concrete near the edge of the deep-end, right where a jagged chunk was missing.
Dean had cried out, "Cannon ball!" and ran. He slipped, cracked his head on the cement, and the jagged edge nearly tore the boy's ear clean off. It was the little blind boy who surprised the babysitters by pulling Dean out of the pool and kept the ear, which was hanging on by just a thin piece of skin, pressed to his head with a towel.
That injury took one-hundred and seventy-two stitches. Neither boy ever forgot that number. That scar was Sam's way of telling for sure who the man sitting in front of him was. Dean always wore his amulet and leather jacket, but anyone could wear that. Anyone. No one had Dean's scar.
Sam felt like puking again as he cracked open an eye. The thing in front of him, the Dean-thing, was moving again, shifting but he allowed Sam's fingers to press to the scar. Dean was used to that, never thought twice about it, but he was obviously confused about Sam's behavior, evident in his voice.
"What's wrong with you, Sammy? You're white as a damn sheet."
Dean's voice was coming from the movement of the shaped thing in front of him and being a genius, Sam put two and two together, though he wasn't quite sure how to process it completely.
Dropping his hand, Sam re-steadied himself on the bed, cleared his throat, did his best to look at the thing that he had to remind himself was his brother, and he said, "Dean… I think… I think I can see."
Sam absolutely expected the pregnant pause, and the sputtering from his brother. He expected the gruff, "What the hell do you mean, you can see? Like see, see? Like… with your eyes?"
Sam was still squinting, overwhelmed by everything his eyes were processing, things his brain had never processed before, but the more he told himself the thing standing in front of him was Dean, the easier it was getting. Well, sort of. "Well yeah."
"Bullshit," Dean said. Sam blinked hard as another thing suddenly encompassed his new vision, the motion of it making his stomach turn. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
Sam's hand darted out to feel three, and he said as much.
"Cute," Dean said. "Tell me with your eyes."
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. "Dean, I don't know what the hell fingers look like, or… or how many is three… or… Dean, I'm freaking out here. What the hell happened? How am I seeing?"
Dean took a step back from Sam and ran his fingers over his mouth and chin. "You're not fucking with me, are you?" It wasn't accusatory, it was… curious.
Sam shook his head, feeling terrified and miserable and totally confused. "No, Dean."
Suddenly Sam felt Dean's hands on his thighs, which meant Dean was kneeling in front of him, and Dean's calloused palms were on either side of Sam's face. "Open."
Sam hesitated, but obeyed, disliking everything that was assaulting him, but he took a deep breath because he'd been through worse. He squinted at the image of Dean that was kneeling in front of him and he found it strange and disconcerting. All the… shapes, as he assumed they were. And colors, though he had no idea what the hell a color really was. Color had always been described as things, and if someone was willing to go deeper, emotions and temperatures. Never… never this.
With a hesitant hand, still dizzy from watching his own body-parts move, Sam reached up and forced himself to watch what his other senses told him were his fingers, touch Dean's face. Lips. Nose. Eyes. Dean's ever-present five o'clock shadow scratching at the bottom of his fingertips. God.
"This must be what it feels like for a sighted person to go blind," Sam said with a harsh laugh as Dean sat there patiently, letting Sam explore his face with touch and sight.
"It's weird to see you looking at me, Sammy, I'll tell you that right now," Dean said with a small shake of his head. "We need to get you to a doctor."
Sam agreed, though he requested a shower first, which Dean offered to help, but Sam declined, instead choosing to shower with his eyes closed so he didn't fall and break his neck while trying to process what the hell everything was by sight.
The water felt good, too, and he couldn't stop stealing little glances of everything, though he honestly just didn't like any of it. It was bright and sharp and strange, and he was disoriented until he put his hand on the wall and could feel what everything was.
He wondered about the irony of it all, the people who lost their sight, were devastated by that loss, and how devastated he felt now by this sudden gain. It almost made him laugh as he stepped out of the shower and pulled the towel from the rack.
As he slipped on a clean shirt and pair of jeans, Sam heard Dean's slightly elevated voice in the room. Likely, Dean had called in reinforcements. Castiel, Sam had to assume. Anything that went wrong, Dean turned to the angel. Dean loved that winged son-of-a-bitch, as Dean so often referred to him, and protested the idea of love, but Sam never questioned those nights when Dean rented two hotel rooms, and never snorted at Dean's excuse that Sammy just needed a break from Dean's bad attitude.
With a sigh, Sam's hands ran over the sink, found his toothbrush and used it. His fingers found the faucet with ease, and then reached up to touch the mirror. He'd never in his life needed a mirror, save for those quiet months when they had the mirrors with little compartments behind them in the houses they rented for longer than a couple of weeks. Those… those were useful. Otherwise they were just cold, polished glass beneath Sam's fingers.
Now…
Sam was terrified to open his eyes. Terrified, to see what he looked like because he already knew. He already knew the shape of his face, length of his hair by his fingers. Knew that Dean was shorter than him, despite how much that little fact pissed Dean off. He knew it by feeling Dean stand next to him.
With trepidation, Sam raised one hand to his mouth, tracing his lips, one pressed to the sink, and he dared to open his eyes. Just a peek. Just a second. His eyelids flickered up, and he wondered if he would ever get used to those shapes. Light he was used to, but not like this. So concentrated and it bounced off of other things, other shapes.
He took a deep breath as he looked at his face, the nose and mouth he recognized with his touch, his hair which… that had to be light brown as he'd heard it described a thousand times, not so bad. Green eyes? Sam had imagined green was a more fierce color. Green had always been described as fresh, bright, vibrant, warm. This was just sort of… dim.
So this was him, huh? He liked himself better by touch.
Turning around, forcing himself to keep his eyes open, he groped for the door handle and pushed into the room. He tried not to wince at the barrage of shapes, and it took him a moment to recognize Dean by memory, though it was getting a little easier.
Ten steps to his bed, he counted in his head like he always did, without even really thinking about it. He felt for the edge, because he even though he'd once had depth perception explained to him, it wasn't a concept he understood. He turned to face Dean, his eyes still open. There was a thing, similar to Dean's shape, similar in colors, but not the same at all, really.
"Cas?" Sam asked, his voice hesitant.
"Hello Sam," Cas said, and Sam let out a breath of relief at hearing that gruff, gravelly voice of his.
Sam flinched as Cas stepped forward to him, still not used to the way the shapes and colors and things sort of moved, were in one place, far off, then suddenly occupying all of his visual space.
Sam swallowed hard and reached up, hesitantly because the Angel wasn't fond of being touched by anyone but Dean. He'd made special allowances for Sam, though, and put his hand on Cas's shoulder.
Cas, in return, put his fingers on Sam's forehead, a very familiar sensation Sam had experienced a number of times, as Cas was always patching up Sam and Dean. He could feel Cas inside of his head, sort of rummaging around and then, as fast as he'd appeared, he was gone, back to Dean's side and Sam was standing there holding the wall to keep oriented.
"Well?" Dean demanded. "Any idea what the hell is going on?"
Sam found it fascinating to watch what he believed to be Dean's mouth move with the sound of his voice coming out of it. The shapes his face made were strange, comical almost, and if Sam wasn't so freaked out he would have laughed.
"It seems the damage that occurred during Sam's birth have been reversed," Castiel said simply.
"But you said you couldn't heal him," Dean blurted, and despite not really understanding the whole process, Sam's eyes snapped to Dean's face.
"What do you mean by that?"
Dean stuttered for a minute, and then gave up trying to cover his ass. "I asked him if he could heal you," he confessed. "Hell, Sammy, we'd been through enough and we had this damn angel that could magically put shit back together. I had to check."
Sam took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Now was not the time to be angry or offended. Dean had always acted in what he thought was Sam's best interest. Dean had never patronized him, babied him, or treated him less. If a sighted person could do it, Dean fully expected Sam to figure out how to do it, too. Even drive, though the three times Sam had tried it, it hadn't ended well and Dean chalked it up to something Sam could do, but shouldn't.
Sam rubbed his face, pinching the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, going back into the familiar sightless world that he so missed right then. "Someone please tell me what's going on."
"This has demon written all over it," Dean said.
"Demon? Giving a blind man sight has demon written all over it?" Sam asked with a disbelieving snort.
"Oh come on, Sammy," Dean said, sounding as frustrated as Sam felt. "Look at you, man. You're… you're blind. You're as fucking blind as I would be if someone had ripped my eyes out right now. You have no idea what you're looking at."
Sam frowned, opening his eyes and stared at the shape of Dean. His big brother was right, of course. I mean, he'd been thinking the same thing in the shower, but it was frustrating to feel so incapacitated. The only real bonus was, he could close his eyes and go back to that world. He didn't have to stay sighted if he didn't want to. A sighted person struck blind didn't have that option.
"Taking him to a physician would raise a lot of questions that you cannot answer," Cas said, cutting into the boys' small argument. "I agree with Dean that this is likely the work of a demon over an angel. I did assess the damage, and being that it was caused by a natural process, I would not have been able to reverse it. More than likely a demon is responsible for this. But why, I couldn't tell you. I will do my own research, and you can continue yours."
Without so much as a by-your-leave, Cas had gone and Dean and Sam were alone. With a frustrated groan, Sam reached back, found the bed and flopped down. He laid his head back on the pillows, his fingers still pressed into his eyes, and he gave a small laugh.
"You know, when I was little, I always used to imagine what it would be like to see. I mean, I had all these descriptions. All these things I could feel and taste and touch and hear, but my brain could never wrap around the idea of sight."
Sam felt the bed depress down next to him and Dean's hand touched him, an unconscious habit Dean did, just letting Sam know he was that close to him. "Look man, we'll figure this out. Hell, if you hate it and can't live with it, you could always get a good face-full of Cas. I mean, there's the small risk that it'll kill you, and also hurt like a son of a bitch, but you won't have demons or angels fucking with your eyes again after that."
Sam couldn't help the chuckle and he sat up, eyes still closed. He reached out, found Dean's shoulder and squeezed it. "Thanks."
"Yeah."
Sam was silent again as the questions festered in him. "Do you think I should be? You know? Sighted? Is this being healed? Or is it being crippled?" They just sort of poured from his lips.
"I don't know, man," Dean said with a sigh, and Sam felt him shift uncomfortably. "I guess it could be something you learn to live with. You know, just like anyone who suffers a massive change in their lives. You'll learn to read and tell colors by sight and be able to pick me out of a lineup one day."
"Or I could go back to being blind."
"Yeah, that is an option. Unless this is some sort of fucked up demon magic that prevents you from ever losing your sight again, there are ways."
Sam nodded, fluttered his eyelids open and looked at Dean. He wondered if there was a way to get used to it. "Really, all I want to know is who did this, and why."
"Me too, Sammy," Dean said in that voice that read you don't fuck with the Winchester siblings. You just… didn't. Sam knew that they'd just need a day or two to adjust, and then they'd be on the case. They'd be on the case, and they'd figure it out and then they'd… fix it. Or live with it. Or whatever. He didn't need to know right then. All he wanted were answers.