The longer version of this story unfolded prettily easily after I wrote the drabble. I was finishing up Raising Winchester, and it wouldn't leave me alone. In fact, it's a lot longer than I anticipated. So it'll come in a few parts, no more than three.
This story is a loose tag for "Dark Side of the Moon" and "When the Levee Breaks."
Please let me know what you think! I welcome constructive reviews, good and bad.
Chapter One
Flames burned hot and high around them, painting the sky in mottled, apocalyptic red. Lightning strobed behind dense plumes of smoke and bloated thunderheads. Sam and Dean careened into the forest, shooting blindly over their shoulders, laying down each other's cover-fire. Branches whipped at their faces and they weaved, correcting and balancing as they ran over the uneven, rocky earth. Sam's shins ached and his vision was staticky from the exertion of battle. Dean wondered when Sam had gotten so fast.
The sprint took them at least a mile away from the fire and fight. The brothers collapsed against the fender of the concealed Impala, panting and gripped their shotguns that still smoldering a bit. Dean coughed ash from his lungs. Sam sank to the ground, and tried not to vomit from the cramp contorting his diaphragm. Their senses were honed, every sound—from the distant cackle of fire to the too-near rumble of thunder—registered. The adrenaline paraded through them, blunting pain and fatigue. And for a fleeting second Sam felt powerful, more than human, instead of less.
Sam and Dean met each other's eyes and exploded.
"I can't believe you blew it up! Sammy the Pyro!" "I can't believe you risked that shot…I heard the bullet, man!"
The fight—an eradication of a web of evil-doing demons— felt like falling into a memory. The Winchester rhythm and flow that Sam thought had died when Lucifer rose, when Sam had folded his hands around Dean's neck, was back. They moved fluidly like two parts of the same machine. And for a few fleeting moments of terror and strength and freedom and badassery, it felt like Before. Before Sam had died. Before Dean had died. Before Castiel. Before Lillith.
Before that devastating walk down Heaven's Highway.
Neither wanted it to end. Sam stood up on quivering legs and offered a hand to Dean, whose eyes crackled with post-hunt euphoria. "You wanna get a beer?"
Dean punched him playfully in the arm like the big brother he was. "Hell yes I wanna get a beer! You drive, Sammy! First round's on me."
Sam caught the keys, laughing. He appreciated the spirit in which they were given, like the little brother he was.
-o-
Bars along backroads were timeless, and this one was no different. From the jukebox in the corner blasting out Alabama and Aerosmith to the strings of lights threaded through the rafters to the short skirts and high hair on the waitresses, it was like every bar Sam had been in as a hunter and child. This wasn't Sam's preferred type of bar—he liked funky and ecletic — but even the crunch of peanut shells on the floor and cigarette smoke in the air felt pleasantly familiar, the sights and smells of his childhood. And Dean was still riding the post-hunt endorphins, sipping at his whiskey as he chatted up two brunettes. He wasn't chugging it like a shattered man desperate for oblivion.
Sam wasn't sure if Dean would recover from their little roadtrip through Heaven. He'd tossed the amulet away, a kick in the face to Sam as much as it was an affront to an indifferent God. Sam knew Dean wouldn't talk about it. No matter how hard he tried, Dean wouldn't listen. He'd just stare at him with a stonily blank expression and glittering eyes that told him just how unspeakably hurt he was.
Dean had shut down, all broken spirit and brittle will, and Sam had to soldier on, despite the memories of Dean's that Sam had seen. A mother who couldn't talk to him because he existed yet, a living portrait of everything he'd ever wanted, everything he'd fought to have. Dean had selfishly wanted to stay in a memory that gutted Sam, and he never complained. He let him have it, no matter how much it hurt him to do it. Sam would endure anything for his brother.
But it figured that even Heaven would betray him. Sam couldn't even muster up the energy to be surprised.
"Hi, sugar," a doe-eyed waitress said with her caramel Southern lilt. She was carrying a plate of mini burgers. "I need you to settle a bet between me and Elaine, behind the bar."
She cleared away their empty glasses and sat down a huge plate in front of Sam. And he took the chance, eyes flickering to her cleavage. It had been a long time.
His eyes widened and his stomach growled as he smelled the uncanny crackle of hot grease and salt and meat. "I didn't order these."
"I know…but it's yours if you help me win the bet." She sat down in Dean's vacated seat. "See, I think you have a great smile, and Elaine doesn't. If I win the bet, she'll cover my shift for an hour."
"An hour, huh?"
"My feet are killin' me." She whimpered, pouting a bit for show.
Sam usually shied away from women, feeling tainted and dirty down to the soul, but he was three beers and four shots into the night. And he was still a red-blooded man. Things were pretty and swirly and light for the first time in years. He looked at her and managed a real smile, even if it felt foreign to him. The waitress—Lola—smiled too, clutching her heart with theatrical joy. "Yes! Dimples for the win!"
She turned to the older woman behind the bar with a cocky grin. "See you in an hour, Lainey!"
They chatted about stupid things like bars and college and music. They danced to some slow country song on the jukebox. They made out in Lola's cramped Mazda. Lola returned to work. Sam ordered more another beer and a whiskey neat for Dean from Elaine, and slipped into the bathroom. His hair was fluffed and fuzzed and he had the shimmer of Lola's gloss on his lips. He smiled, remembering ten lifetimes ago at Stanford, when nights like this were the norm, but it was always Jess' perfume lingering on his clothes and love curling in his belly instead of lust and repressed need. But Sam had learned to take what he could get.
Dean was quite shitfaced when Sam returned. He'd started on his drunken routine of hoovering down any and all alcohol still on the table. He grinned at Sam, gulping his beer. Sam smacked him lightly on the arm. "I just ordered that!"
"You snooze you lose, Sammy!" Dean chided, punctuating the sentence with an impressive burp. "You can't abandon the booze!" He was standing, hunched over the table, eyes glassy, wobbling.
He playfully pushed Sam away to guzzle more of the stolen longneck. Sam sighed in annoyance and easily plucked it from his grasp. "All right, buddy, last call. You're one whiskey away from stealing drinks from strangers."
"I did that once…and it was my birfday! People need to pony up the shots on your birfday." Dean smirked and gestured wildly to the empty chair.
Sam wasn't going to point out that it was his eighteenth birthday.
"Sit, stay…we're havin' fun. Apocalypse smahpocalypse, right? Winchesssters are goin' rogue!" Sam sat, laughing at his very drunk brother and sat. "Tell me about the girrrrl…she's pretty. And you totally have a hickey." Dean prompted.
Sam blushed down to his toes, and flipped up the collar of his shirt. "Just a girl…I think she picked me up, actually. She gave me a line about a bet on my smile."
Dean shook his head knowingly. "Aww, Sammy, such a slut. Please tell me you're a slut. You hit that, right?" But then the dopey expression melted away, twisting into discomfort. Dean gripped the table and shuddered for a second, leaning forward, brow pinched.
Sam lifted his eyebrows, feeling buzzed himself. "Can't hold your liquor, dude. Pathetic." He lifted the beer to his lips. "Don't you dare puke at the table."
Their evening of brotherly camaraderie abruptly descended into a gauzy blur of frenetic confusion. Arcing over the table, Dean swatted the beer bottle from his hand. The table nearly tipped over. Glasses rolled and broke. Dean grimaced—not in alcohol-induced nausea, but with actual pain—and toppled over from the chair and onto his knees. There was bewilderment, the cold sweat of panic, a woman screaming for an ambulance, Lola's terrified face.
Sam gathered Dean up, who was already sweating, and hauled him into the men's room. "Poison, Sammy. Got dosed."
Sam's vision wavered in between hysterics and anger. But he had been trained to act. He leaned Dean over the toilet, "Get rid of it. I'll be right back."
Dean knowingly rammed his fingers down his throat in an attempt to purge himself of the poison.
Sam tore himself away to the sound of Dean vomiting. He snatched one of the plastic bags draped over the bar for discarded peanut shells went back to the table, picking up the stray bottles and glasses. He used his peripheral vision to scan the bar, searching for anyone who seemed suspicious or possessed. After a few minutes, he backed away, seeing Lola pressed wiping the same spot of counter she had been when Sam was stalked out of the bathroom. He looked at her, the detached hunter instead of the unguarded guy drinking on Thirsty Thursday. She stepped forward, mouth opened to speak, but Sam turned away and jogged back into the bathroom.
Dean was still puking. The tiny bathroom reeked of alcohol and bile. "Y'alright?" Sam asked as he broke the beer bottles open in the sink, not caring if he cut himself in the process.
"…freakin' peachy…" Dean gurgled and shifted, pained. "…think it's…"
Sam saw the mouth and jagged edges encrusted with sulfur, "…supernatural," Sam supplied. The rage was festering and spreading like a nefarious poison of his own making.
It wasn't fair.
Sam's phone vibrated in his pocket. He snatched it, praying it was Castiel. The voice on the other end was a gravelly baritone, but it definitely wasn't angelic. "Have fun tonight, Sam. That one had your name on it. Consider it a devil's cocktail."
And now it was his fault.
-o-
Everything was too much. The growl of his Impala. The once awesome growl of the engine sounded maniacal like a voice reverberating in his head.
He could feel the impossibly heavy weight of his tee-shirt grating against his skin, sandpaper instead of well-worn cotton.
The lights were searing and blinding, triggering a thumping pain in his head and behind his eyes. But if he closed them, Dean was falling, succumbing to an inky evil that was a river of unbridled emotion—all of the terrible ones. It made him feel wrong and raw and naked, nerving endings and soul unsheathed and exposed.
The pain was an entity in itself, a blossoming monster scraping at the backside of his breastbone, tangling his intestines. It was a niggling, inescapable anguish, and it only promised for more.
Sam was there, trying to help, but his big hands were doing nothing but pulling triggers and ringing bells of pure torture. "I'm so sorry, Dean," Sam said again, and the pitch of his voice was a sharp screech akin to the grinding gears in Hell.
"Just…stop talking."
Sam carted him inside. Dean broke away, staggering to the nearest bed. He tore at his jackets, fighting encroaching weakness to get it off. Sam was already taking off his boots and socks, screaming about fever. The cold air on his feet was unsettling. He buried his face into the pillow, trying to borrow into it.
Castiel fluttered into the room but was gone minutes, and then Sam was squawking into his phone, stomping around the room on his frickin' gigantic clodhoppers. It was as quiet as a parade.
Sam crouched down at this bedside, pulling the pillow away from Dean's face, but when he spoke, it was in a husky whisper that somehow still ratteled Dean's teeth. "Cas says the toxin is something spun by demons. It'll make you achy and weak and he used the words 'candidly irritiable' for a few days. It's not fatal, but Cas is looking for an antidote anyway. I'm going to do more research, but Bobby said hydration with holy water should help."
Days? Dean groaned, feeling the flames of fever lick at the tips his ears. Sam looked sick with remorse, and Dean was still a big brother. "I'm never going out with you again, dude, you know that, right?"
Sam actually laughed, a surprised little snort. And for a brief moment, Dean didn't feel so bad.
-o-
The irritability Castiel had warned Sam about started as soon as Dean woke up from a tormented sleep. Sam was replacing the cloth on Dean's forehead, hoping to provide some relief like Dean had in the days Sam had been in the panic room. Dean's eyes darkened and his face shifted into a scowl of absolute wickedness. Dean slapped him, hard enough for the strength behind it belied the fever and weakness. "This is your fault, Sam. All of it is."
"I know, dude." Sam admitted, his cheek twitching and hot. He turned back to Dean, undeterred. He traded the cloth for a bottle of Gatorade thinned with holy water. "Drink, Dean, it'll help."
Dean drank, and then spit it in his face, snarling with rage. "I hate you."
Sam wiped the red out of his eyes, shocked but unfazed. They'd lived their lives with corpses and decay and festering, snarling monsters. They fought as many pussing, oozing infections as they had demons, so Sam could deal with whatever Dean threw at him. As time passed, it turned out to be anything Dean could reach, shoes, remotes, clock radio, a lamp. Sam didn't have time to dodge the wooden finial from their headboard. He hit him right on the shoulder when he returned from the convenience store. He staggered against the door, clenched his teeth as wood thwacked against bone. Sam staggered from it, cursing.
Dean's face was darkened with evil and glistening from the fever. "Mom should have aborted you."
His mouth fell agape, and Sam's visible hurt only seemed to spur Dean on. "Dad should have put a bullet in your head years ago."
The violent fits—Dean clawing Sam's arms until they bled, punching him in the face—felt like a punishment for more hunters aiming for Sam and Dean getting caught in the crossfire. Or for Sam ending the world. Sam had taken far, far worse. He'd even wished for it in those first bleak days after Lucifer had risen when Dean couldn't look at him and flinched if Sam moved too fast.
But the verbal abuse felt more like the unvarnished truth that Dean had exiled to some private place in his psyche.
"I'm glad Mom's not alive to see what you've become."
Sam scurried around the room, collecting all the weapons and stashing them in the bathtub.
"You are a monster, Sammy, and everyone can see it. A bloodsucking, demon-screwing freak." Dean slid down on the mattress, nagging pain getting the better of him again. He'd sleep next, fitfully, for an hour or so, and wake up nastier than he was before. It happened in cycles, and it was leaving both of them ragged with exhaustion.
Sam tossed some painkillers on the bed, ignoring the goosebumps that peppered his arms and the rock in his stomach. "Try these, maybe they'll help with the pain."
"You taking the whole bottle would help. You can't die but maybe they'd turn you into a vegetable."
"Yeah, that'd be awesome," Sam said mirthlessly.
Sam got Dean a glass of holy water for the pills. He sat it down next to him, fighting how his muscles defensively coiled, ready to defend himself against his own brother. "Dad never loved you. He just kept you around waiting for you to turn so he could put you down," Dean snarled.
Sam's pokerface never slipped, but his resolve was. "You're running out of material, dude."
Dean lifted his eyebrows as if Sam had issued a challenge. Then he spit in Sam's face—a disgusting glob of spongy saliva that landed in the corner of his left eye. It was a sign of revulsion and disrespect that Dean had never done to anyone, not even demons. Sam had to locked his muscles to keep from hitting him out of reflex. But his hands were shaking when he wiped the spittle away. He nudged the water closer. "Take your pills, Dean."
Sam cleaned the room, keeping his hands busy and filling his mind with the inane tasks at hand and the memories he'd wished he could have relived in Heaven. He'd been making a list of all of the things he remembered and cherished, the moments that helped shape the person he was when he left for Stanford. The hunt had gone so well that he was going to give Dean the unfinished list the night before, after the bar.
He thought of the Dean's face when he'd given him the zippo lighter for his sixteenth birthday. He'd remembered the day they'd found an abandoned tent on the street and went camping in the field behind Pastor Jim's church. Sam almost smiled as the recalled the first time Dean had taken him to the beach. It was a special memory, one so pristine he could still hear the cry of seagulls, feel the spray of the water on this face. The day had been overcast, the ocean was hazy and gray, but the clouds rolled and stacked up on each other. It was a majesty Sam had never seen until then, one that fortified his belief in the divine.
It was why he'd chosen to go to college mere miles from the beach, because of that day when they frolicked in the freezing waves in their clothes and boots, not caring about anything but being brothers.
The memories gave Sam the strength to bear this horrible night, and the wretched ones ahead. He'd already gotten Dean through twenty hours. He could handle fifty more as long as he focused and didn't dwell. He could do this. He could—
"Jess burned because of you." Dean's tone was weird combination of explosive meanness and agonizing weakness. "Your blood boils when you're burned alive. You cook like a slab of bacon. That's what you did to that beautiful, innocent woman. Probably should have shot her in the face after your first date. Itwould have been a whole lot nicer."
Sam's knees nearly buckled. His eyes filled. His heart splintered within him. The hunters had been gunning for Sam, and now he was thinking their plan had worked perfectly.