A/N : Did everyone think I would never, ever update this project again?
SURPRISE!
Actually, I have one of my loyal readers, DomBird, to thank for this update. They submitted a prompt for my other project, How To Fix A Winchester, along the lines of "Sam and Dean finally discussing the Gadreel Fallout" and it was an amazing idea. It actually fell along the lines of the next update I had planned for Confessions of A Boy King, and Dombird graciously gave me permission to use their prompt for this project instead, so everyone pause and think for a moment on how amazing Dombird is.
Okay, so finally an update to Confessions of a Boy King. Normally this would be fluffy Friday, with this being an update to How To Fix A Winchester, but since this was the next prompt from that project due to be wrote, here we are.
All The Pretty Monsters updated yesterday, and Prisoner of War should update tomorrow, late. Sunday we should see at least two updates, perhaps including an update to the newest project, Tuesday's Child.
Reviews are love, especially since this project doesn't get the billing my others do, but I really love this chapter, and the one right before it also.
I would accept canon prompts for this project also, so if you had one you'd like to see wrote, if it isn't fluffy enough for How To Fix A Winchester, I might be able to work it into this project.
As Always,
EverReader
Disclaimer – Not my sandbox
Confessions Of A Boy King – Chapter Three
"We All Fall Down"
It was a beautiful night, the autumn air crisp and cool, the sky crystal clear, and the wind had died down to a gentle breeze.
Any amateur astronomer could have told you that there was a meteor shower predicted for that night, and in fact, families had set up all over that part of the country with blankets and telescopes and star guides, the kids chattering happily, excited to get to stay up late, while frazzled parents hoped desperately that the stars would actually fall, and that they wouldn't be forced to tuck disappointed children into bed in a few hours.
But the Winchesters weren't astronomers of any sort, amateur or otherwise, and as they lay on the hood of the Impala, the shiny fall of jagged glitter streaking across the sky came as a complete surprise.
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Sam felt his heart clutch in his chest as the first meteor shot across the dark sky.
Panic wrapped it's fingers around his lungs, and each exhale seemed just a little deeper than the inhale that followed. His ears started ringing, and black sparkles began to war with white dancing stars in his swimming vision.
"Sam? You okay?" Dean was asking dimly, but Sam was far from okay.
He felt like he was suffocating, like he was drowning on dry land, and he lurched up from the hood of the Impala in a panic, wrenching away from his startled brother and staggering towards the door to the bunker.
He let himself in haphazardly, not caring that the door slammed behind him, or that Dean had followed him worriedly, still calling his name.
"Sam, man, what's wrong, are you sick?" Dean's voice was far away, disjointed and fuzzy, the words rambling around in Sam's panicked mind.
Gasping, he made his way to the shower room, his now panicked older brother still following, but Sam was unable to speak, was terrified to even try.
Speeding up, he lunged for the bathroom door, slipping inside and slamming it shut in Dean's surprised face.
"SAM!" He could hear Dean holler as he began to beat his fist against the door, each reverberation almost as loud as Sam's own heartbeat in his ears as he wrenched open the medicine cabinet, flailing hands searching clumsily for the item he sought.
Bottles and bandages rained down in a clatter, the way the stars might or might not be falling outside, maybe the sky was falling, maybe the angels were falling...
His hand closed around the straight-edged razor blade, and with a sigh of relief, he slashed a brutal, efficient cut across the meat of his forearm just as Dean, frustrated and frightened by his little brother's lack of response, kicked in the door.
"What the fuck, Sam?" Dean yelled, lunging forward with a towel as dark crimson welled from the wound in his arm, the blood that had been tainted and cured and so many other things, but the most important thing to Sam at that moment was the pain.
It screamed up his arm, jabbing like an ice pick into his brain, and Sam felt his legs sag in relief, as Dean followed him down, still trying to stem the flow of blood from Sam's wound.
"TALK TO ME SAMMY!" Dean ordered, in that half-command, half-plea he had used on his younger brother his entire life, the voice that got him to school, woke him off, stopped fights with John and always let Sam know that Dean was coming, and to just...hold...on.
Limply, he raised his eyes to Dean's shocked green ones.
"I just had to know." He said simply.
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Dean sat, lips pressed together grimly as he set another stitch in his brother's wounded arm.
Sam hadn't said a word yet, not since that enigmatic statement about needing to know something, and as he finished up the last stitch (twenty-three, Jesus Christ Sammy) he marshaled his thoughts, trying to break his seemingly catatonic brother out of the shell he had retreated into immediately after nearly severing his own damn arm.
Dean had no idea what had just happened.
They'd gotten back from a case, just your average salt and burn, and the night had been nice, so Dean had pulled a couple of beers out of the case they had picked up on the way home, tossing one to his brother, and they had climbed on the hood of the Impala to enjoy the night for a while.
The meteor shower had been unexpected, but Dean had no idea why it would have frightened Sam so badly he'd try to hurt himself, Sam had always loved the stars, even as a kid.
And at least these really were stars, and not angels like last time...
"Shit." Dean dropped the roll of gauze in shock as his mind finally caught up, finally began to grasp just where his little brother's mind had gone in those few, desperate moments.
"Was it the angels?" He asked, leaning down and trying to make eye contact with Sam.
Sam blinked, seeming to start to focus a little better on his older brother. Swallowing, he nodded.
"I just...needed to know." He repeated.
"Needed to know what, Sam?" Dean asked gently.
Sam looked at him bleakly. "If this was real."
Dean felt the ground shift under him nauseatingly at his brother's words, at the realization of why Sam had done what he'd done.
A hundred memories of Sam, pressing his hand into his scarred palm to drive away his hallucinations of Lucifer flashed through his mind.
"Did you think it wasn't?" Dean pressed on, treading carefully, but needing to understand so he could somehow try to patch his little brother back together again.
Sam swallowed again. "The stars...the angels,"he corrected himself. "Those were the last things I saw before..." Here he went silent and Dean closed his eyes as shame flowed through him.
Gadreel. This was more Gadreel fall-out, literally.
"The last thing you saw before I let that bastard take you over." He whispered.
Sam nodded jerkily, not making eye contact.
"You were afraid it was a hallucination, that you were losing time again, like with Gadreel, like with Lucifer?" Dean asked.
Sam looked over at him. "It was so real, Dean. That's the problem, it was all so...real."
"Okay." Dean said, shifting through his brothers words, trying to find words of his own to somehow stitch Sam back together, the way he had stitched Sam's arm.
"Okay, but Crowley said you could remember everything, if you tried hard enough. You had access to everything Gadreel did when he was running the show." Dean reasoned.
Sam nodded, the motion nearly rocking his whole body. "That's not the problem, Dean. The problem isn't missing memories, it's having too many." He laughed bitterly.
"Sometimes, I feel like my entire life is just one big instance of deja vu." He added.
"Okay, I don't understand." Dean said.
Sam looked at him. "That's because it's never happened to you. When a demon takes you over, it's like getting too drunk and passing out, you're awake and then not, and you don't remember much. But an angel is kinder." He spat the word out like poison.
"They create a pretty little fantasy world and slip you in it, and you don't even realize that it's all in your head until you're out again." Sam explained.
"Like, with the djinn?" Dean asked, trying to understand.
"Yeah, I guess. But you said you knew something had changed, Dean. I had no idea, I fell asleep, next to you and the Impala and the damn sky was falling, and I woke up in the hospital, with that thing inside me, and from that moment on, it's like I lead two lives at the same time, and sometimes I can't keep them straight." Sam said bitterly.
"So, you cut yourself, to see if you'd feel pain, to see if you'd what, wake up?" Dean asked, horrified that Sam had been working through all of this by himself.
Then an even worse thought struck him. "Have you done this before, hurt yourself just to see if you'd wake up?"
Sam looked away. "Dean, I was possessed by Meg, Lucifer and Gadreel. Even after Lucifer was out of me, he still haunted me, he still hunted me. You were rock one, that's what you said, back in the warehouse, but then, after Dick Roman was gone, you were too. Some days I thought my entire life was a story I'd made up in my mind, and that I was really locked away in some psych ward somewhere. Some days, that would have been preferable. Then you came back, and things were better, I knew when things were real, but then Gadreel happened. And now, sometimes stupid little things make me feel like my entire world is shattering, and I'm falling through the cracks."
"Jesus Christ, Sam." Dean said, sagging beside his brother. "That's...Christ, Sam. Is that why you stopped hunting? Why you didn't look for me? You thought this was all some sick game of Lucifer?"
Sam shrugged. "I stopped because some days I didn't even know who I was anymore, not without you to remind me, and the days I did, I wished I hadn't. I finally just decided that maybe all this was a lie, but all I could do was more forward. Then you came back, and I figured that was better, because if everything was a lie, the lie was still better with you in it. Eventually, I came to feel more...real. I guess."
"And then Gadreel." Dean said softly.
Sam nodded. "And then came Gadreel. I know you were desperate, Dean. I know that. But I swore to myself that I would never become a monster for someone else again, I'd never let my body become someone's tool. I'd never become a thing, something to be used. But that's what Gadreel did to me, and Kevin died because of it."
"And all this time, you've wondered if you were crazy?" Dean asked.
Sam looked at him wryly. "We hunt monsters, live in the bat cave, have an actual angel as a wing man, died repeatedly, and we've both come back from heaven and hell. I'm fairly certain we must both be crazy, but no, Dean, most days I know this is real, that you and me and this..." He gestured at their home, "Is real. It's just, those stupid stars falling, I just..."
"Panicked." Dean supplied, sitting beside Sam on the ground, leaning against the wall.
Sam nodded. "I just...had to know."
"You're real, Sam." Dean said firmly, "And I'm real. And I'm sorry. I should have said it before, but it just seemed...to big for for words to be anything other than an insult. That's why I left, you know, because it was just too much."
"You scared me." Sam admitted quietly. "All the things we've done to try and protect people, the idea that we had become people who would do something so..."
"Desperate?" Dean said, with a humorless chuckle of his own. "Yeah, I was pretty desperate, Sam. I thought I lost you at Cold Oak, and we both know how badly I handled that. And then after you fell into hell, and then came back so..."
"Wrong?" This time it was Sam who offered the adjective.
"Hell yes, you were wrong. But I handled that badly, too. But after all of that I finally got you back, and those damn trials were ripping you away from me again. Asking you to stop was the hardest thing I've ever done, because I wanted all this to end, God, did I ever. But I asked, because I couldn't chose closing the gates over loosing you again. And then, when it looked like you were going to die anyway, it was like..."
"Like you'd lost everything." Sam said quietly.
"Yeah. So, I guess that must have been what it felt like when I went to purgatory, and you thought I was dead."
"Kind of." Sam agreed. "But I was in a pretty bad place, with pretty much everyone gone, you, Cas, Bobby, Kevin. Gadreel hurt more in a way, because I thought I was getting better. I had started waking up everyday knowing who I was, I felt...safe, I guess. Even with the trial sickness and the not knowing if I was going to live or die, at least I knew things were real."
"And then I fucked it up." Dean said self-indiscriminately.
Sam smiled a little. "The more I think about it, the more natural a choice it seems for you to have made, I just wished you would have told me, have trusted me. I spent days afterward just staring at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out if I was really the only person in my head or not."
"Gadreel said you would cast him out, and then you'd die." Dean said, looking away.
"Someday, one of us will die, though, Dean." Sam said softly. "I mean, just look at us. You have the freaking mark of Cain on your arm and we have no idea what it does, and I nearly cut off my own wrist tonight because I was afraid I was imaginary."
"Yeah. I've always known one of us had to go, I just decided it would be me first. I just never stopped to think about where that left you." Dean shook his head.
"Driving the crazy train, apparently." Sam said derisively.
"Don't, Sam. You've dealt with things no one should have had to, and you just...keep going. I forget that, sometimes, just how many ghosts you carry with you." Dean said with feeling. "Just...don't hurt yourself again, okay? Even if we're fighting, even if I'm not answering my phone, even if this stupid mark makes me grow a third eye and horns, just...wait for me. Eventually, I'll get my head out of my ass, okay kiddo?"
"You do realize, that as long as I spent in Hell, I am totally older than you." Sam said tiredly, as Dean helped him to his feet.
"Nope. Doesn't count. I am, and will always be your bigger, older brother." Dean declared.
"Funny, that's exactly what imaginary Dean would say, you know, if he were here and not you." Sam joked.
"Imaginary Dean can kiss my ass. I'm the original, dammit." Dean muttered.
