Barely twenty minutes after Dean's suspicious exit, Sam is reading.
He starts at the beginning.
LAZARUS RISING
The first day was all black.
The taste of ash, of metal and blood settled thick in his mouth, seeped into his skin, and it stung.
Each breath burned, so he stopped breathing. It made no difference.
Soon, there were things moving, bright flashes of teeth and eyes in the smoke, but they didn't get close enough to touch. They just circled. Taunted. Teased.
Dean could hear them sharpening their blades.
Could hear them singing. Hey Jude.
The song was tainted within a week, and his few sweet memories of a time before the fire were stained.
In his head, his mothers face warped and became the faces around him, stretched and pallid, sickly white skin stretched over bony cheeks and hollow eyes.
It over a year before they moved any closer.
When the first razor nicked into the soft skin of his cheek, just beneath his eye, he cried out with relief.
"Mom," he said, and the demon laughed, "you found me."
Weeks went by in a haze, just the wet sound of falling flesh mingling with his own voice as he sang.
She'd stop, he told himself, if he showed her he remembered the song.
Then, one day, the demon stopped slicing.
It brought it's face close to his to look him right in the eye, and it's slack skin was streaked with his blood. It licked it's lips and smiled as it sank long fingers into his open chest, yanking hard on his fractured ribs.
"Mom, no! Please!"
The demon's eyes shone bright, and at once, any belief that this was Mary was gone.
He thrashed, tried to get away, and it laughed.
"You black-eyed bastard, what did you do to her? Where is she?"
Three years down.
Another passed, slow, and the demon came to him as Sam. Blaming him. Burning him.
Another, and it came as John, disappointed and furious. He didn't use a blade; just his wild-flashing eyes and his rough hands, striking, crunching, breaking.
After that, it stopped, and he was alone, strung up in the dark, in the quiet.
Every now and then, he caught the sound of half-mumbled singing, hey Jude, don't make it bad, and flinched before he realized the voice was his own.
It left him long enough to crave the pain, just desperate enough to want to stop being alone at any cost.
It started offering him a way out after the first nine years had passed.
He took up the razor after thirty.
Once he did, he relished in the feeling of it sinking into unbroken skin, in the sound of gurgling lungs as they tried to breathe through the holes he'd singed into their throats, their chests, their cheeks.
When they looked at him too much, he took their eyes.
When they wouldn't look at him, he took their eyelids.
Somewhere at his core, he knew he should be disgusted. He was disgusted.
He imagined his own face where their faces were, and that made it easier.
For ten years, he tore into the other souls as though they were shadows of himself.
The light, when it finally came, was terrifying, and he dropped the rusted speculum to step forward. He raised his hand to touch it, to feel it burn, to destroy himself completely.
Instead, it just reached back, pressed warm and soothing against his freezing skin, and told him it was okay.
He was safe.
He was saved.
Sam closes the file, face pale. He can feel bile rising in his throat.
He remembers the way Dean was when he first came back, and regrets having asked him to talk about it so many times. He can't believe he was as well-adjusted as he was.
Still, he thinks, that can't have been what made him run off.
He sorts the rest of the files by date accessed and selects the most recent; a book called My Bloody Valentine, and hopes it will be less torture-porn than the last one.
When the first few pages don't offer anything but a horribly graphic description of those two kids from the Cupid case eating each other, he leans back in his seat and runs his hands through his hair.
"Jesus, Chuck, what is wrong with you?"
He hits the search button and is about to enter Dean's name when he notices Castiel is listed as a recent search term. He hits enter and starts reading a scene that features Castiel waiting at a lakeside for his phone to ring. Waiting for Dean.
His heart sinks. Without bothering to read further, he shuts the screen.
This is bad, he thinks, and pulls out his cell to text Charlie, this is really bad.
As he types out a message, he glances toward the ceiling.
"If you're still around, Cas, now would be a great time to get your ass back here."