The first time he had the dream, he barely remembered it the next morning, when he and Dean were back on the road, the silence between them growing heavier, clinging in the air like a bad smell. Sam had to stop himself from breathing through his mouth, as if he could try to filter the words that go unsaid, letting them rest on his tongue so they wouldn't choke him when they reached his throat. He stopped himself because if he opened his mouth, he wasn't sure what would come out- more bitterness, more guilt, more desperation Dean didn't want to hear. He's so tired of hearing his words twisted into the whines of a little brother, of the chubby little boy he used to be before he grew up and learned that he'd have to save himself- not from the monsters or the darkness, but from the stupid, self-sacrificial crap Dean would pull to keep him safe. He tasted bile in his throat as he thought back to the kid he used to be, in the dark, kept safe at the expense of the only person who bothered to see him as something other than a soldier-to-be. Sam had thought they were a team, finally equal, after Jess- after he rejoined the hunt. But obviously, he'd been wrong about that.
He was so caught up trying to keep himself from just puking out all the hurt and frustration, he barely noticed when they stopped for lunch.
"C'mon Sammy, who spat in your coffee? That waitress has been eyeing you the entire time and you've barely even checked out her ass!" Dean's voice cut through Sam's fog, but did nothing to raise his spirits. The waitress, several tables away, turned around to give them both a dirty look before finishing taking her order. Sam groaned. Dean waggled his eyebrows, trying to get a rise out of his mopey younger brother. When that failed to yield more than a half-hearted glare, he rolled his eyes and huffed out a long-suffering sigh.
"Dude, lighten up. We just stopped a little not-dead girl from making everyone fairy-tale themselves to death. Life is good," Dean offered. Sam's glare could have stripped paint.
"I'm not doing this, Dean." He gritted out. "You can act like nothing's wrong, but I can't just sit here and make stupid jokes when you're DYING." He didn't care that his voice got louder and louder, and the people around them started rubbernecking, trying to stare into Dean and see what was killing him.
"Jeez, Sammy, way to tell the whole neighborhood," Dean hissed back, slapping some bills down on the table and leaving without a backward glance. Sam bit his lip hard and curled and uncurled his fists, which buzzed and tingled dizzily. When he was certain he could keep from decking Dean, he walked out to find his brother leaning sullenly against the Impala. And that was the end of any conversation for that day.
The second time he had the dream, he wasn't asleep. Technically, it might have been the third time he has the dream…. He had woken up with the same taste in his mouth, the same tune rattling around in his ears, like he had an animatronic bird singing on his shoulder. It sounded a little like "Turkey in the straw", which he would never admit to knowing because Dean still made fun of him for being in a choir at one of their schools in fifth grade. He found himself humming the ditty while getting ready to take the first shower, until a well-aimed pillow caught him in the back of the head and Dean growled at him to stop singing the ice cream song and making him hungry. When he said it, there was a flash in the back of Sam's mind of something familiar, something like a memory from childhood that might have been a scene from a movie he saw or something he felt or even a story he was told. But he chucked the pillow back and headed to the bathroom and the feeling was gone.
As always, he had to bend his knees in the shower so the stream of water had a chance to hit somewhere higher than the middle of his back. Sometimes he thinks back longingly to his dorm at Stanford, and later his apartment with Jessie- there was something about being able to stretch to his full height and lean back against a steady stream of water that made those few years feel more like a home than any of the places he and Dean had stayed at in their years of travel. Now he was back to slouching into showers and stooping into the Impala, as if by rounding down his shoulders and lessening his body language he could somehow fit back into the life he'd tried so hard to grow away from.
Sam was at the tricky stage of rinsing the suds from his hair- and precariously leaning back so he can keep the trickles from running down his forehead- when a resounding crash from the other room yanked him upright.
For a second he was sure something has cleaved the top of his head right off- all he could feel was a cold line of pain at the start of his scalp and the water beating down on his upturned face. For a second, he choked and floundered, trying to keep his feet grounded. Then, he was-
shivering in the back of a car that used to mean happiness, dressed in little princess pajamas and clinging to Aaron's sweater like drowning men cling to life floats. The vehicle doesn't sing anymore, but growls and vibrates through her skin. Her eyes are swollen nearly shut with crying and her mouth is full of something that tastes dusty and dry and gross and she's been trying to keep herself from screaming since the scary man first told her that if she made one-little-peep, he'd go back and kill her family. The growling and vibrating stops and the scary man pulls her out of the car and into a dark building, takes her down down down a staircase and shoves her into a room at the very end of a gross-smelling hall. He closes the door before she can try and stand up and over the snick of the lock she can hear someone else breathing.
"Son of a bitch!" Dean's usual curse woke him from the-memory?vision?- so thoroughly he could hardly tell how long he'd been out of it. Sam took the time to finish his shower and squeeze most of the water from his hair before going out to check on his brother. Hunting together for most of his life had taught him early on to recognize when Dean swearing meant danger versus simple annoyance.
When he exited the bathroom, Dean was occupied with his duffle, pulling out a wrinkled shirt and jeans to change into. The motel's dusty black radio/alarm clock fusion was on the floor in pieces. Before Sam could do more than raise an eyebrow, Dean said," It was playing Hannah Montana."
"Miley Cyrus," Sam corrected, before his brain could catch up with his mouth. Dean turned around with an open-mouthed expression of pure glee, and started cackling when Sam groaned.
"No, no, no, please explain. College Boy listens to MILEY CYRUS? And you make fun of MY music?"
Sam looked away. In a flat tone, he said, "Jess had an old CD." Memories of his girlfriend dancing around their apartment, shaking her blond hair behind her goofily, clogged in the back of his throat. He cleared it and continued. "She used to play it during all-nighters to stay awake..." Dean nodded once and turned back to his duffle, too uncomfortable to say anything. Sighing, Sam pulled on some clothes and booted up his laptop, desperate for a hunt or something that might lead him to a way out of Dean's deal. Might as well wish for a unicorn while he was at it.
Somewhat whimsically, he typed "miracle cure" into the search bar and pressed enter. The first dozen results were some mystery novel by the same name and google's advice on how to take care of his nails, but after scrolling down a couple tens of results pages, he found a report in Nowheresville California of ten people being "miraculously" cured of fatal diseases. Dean started making impatient sounds from the other side of the room like he wanted to get going, but Sam scrolled through the article, half-squinting in concentration. Something about the story was oddly familiar, although he couldn't tell what. The "cured" people -he hesitated to call them victims, although that was how he and Dean usually referred to civilians who got mixed up in their kind of weird- were all different ages, and most were from different ethnicities and social backgrounds, it seemed. Not only that, but the "miracle" was from almost exactly ten years ago- and the reporter was speculating that it might have started happening again with a kid in the hospital making a deathbed recovery. Scrolling through the pictures, Sam sat arrested at the sight of the youngest non-victim. The face was unfamiliar, but something about his clothes...
Sam clicked on the picture, zooming in. The kid's sweater was a deep navy, but it was the words emblazoned across the front that caught his attention. When he read them, something seemed to grow a little cooler on the back of his neck. The dream came back to him in a blinding flash of fragmented images, adding to the pain of his throbbing forehead. He remembered without believing, for a moment, that he had been a little girl stuck in a room with someone else breathing behind him, that an ice cream truck man had grabbed her from her bed without anyone noticing, that the only thing she'd had to hold onto was her brother's school sweater. But most of all he remembered the name of the school, written in large goldenrod letters.
Sam shook his head to clear the images and immediately regretted it when his forehead throbbed in protest. He bookmarked the article and followed through on searching for sources, other reports from ten years ago, including ones for missing kids. Then, and only then, did he shut his laptop and turn to his brother to say, "Dean, I found us a hunt. It's in California."