"And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth."
-John 11:43
In his Djinn poison induced dream, Dean jumped at the chance to mow the lawn of his mother's house. His childhood house. He savored the chance to have the normalcy that was robbed from him when he was four years old. The homemade meals and sandwiches with their crusts lovingly removed.
Living with Lisa, it was different. It was just another chore. Another series of motions for him to follow with a strained smile while he pretended that he was cut out for the apple pie life. While he pretended that he wasn't dead inside.
But Sammy died in May, and his absence was too fresh in the summer for Dean to do more than go through the motions. He didn't know that the price of a normal life was feeling so alone. So empty.
Then again, he never expected to live a normal life without Sam.
In the fall, things weren't much easier. Dean helped Ben put together his Halloween costume (he wanted to be a real monster), and he remembered Sammy with a broken arm and Batman costume. The tear-filled eyes that begged him to make the pain stop. He wondered if Sam still wore that look now.
Lisa made pumpkin pie and apple crisp for Thanksgiving, but Dean barely tasted it. He remembered Sam's memory of a Thanksgiving with a family, shown by Zachariah, the way it was supposed to be. The way he never got to properly experience it.
A woman loved him, and her son adored him. He had a home, a job, and friends. This was what people described as perfect, but it never could be for Dean. So when Lisa and Ben went to sleep, he stayed up with a glass of whiskey in one hand and searched through anything he found that talked about Lucifer's Cage. Anything that as much as mentioned it.
Christmas was the hardest. Lisa and Ben gave him gifts, but Dean was never the gifting type. He didn't know what to buy a steady girlfriend for the holidays. He didn't know what a normal boy wanted for Christmas.
He couldn't watch the dumb movies—the freaky claymation ones—that played on the only channels available at the cheap motels he and Sam stayed at as kids. Sam hated Christmas, a reminder of the day where he learned about the darkness of the world and all the lies told to him for the first eight years of his life, yet he still celebrated it when they thought it would be Dean's last. When Dean wanted to celebrate his last Christmas with Sam to try and leave him with some good memories.
But Dean returned in time to celebrate the next one, and a few more after that. Except now it wasn't the same because last Christmas was Sammy's final Christmas and neither of them knew it. The closest thing Dean gave him to a gift was to throw his amulet in the garbage in front of him. He threw away the symbol of their brotherhood and their bond right in front of Sam. He was angry and hurt, but that was no excuse to give up one of the few possessions he prized.
He didn't know that the angels were playing them. He should have realized that they were trying to split him and Sam, and showing him Sam's memories without him would be the fastest way to do it.
Oddly, the lack of a weight around his neck made him feel heavy enough to sink straight down into The Cage and join Sam. If he knew it was Sam's last year, he would have been better. They would have celebrated every holiday (no matter how made up) and Dean would've treated him better. He would've had a little more faith in Sam, because who else in the entire world would willingly condemn themselves like he did to save a planet where 99.9% of its occupants would never know of his sacrifice? He would've held onto the amulet like a lifeline, and it would've made the days without Sam a little easier.
If he knew.
But he didn't know, so he left Lisa and Ben behind for a few hours (or a few days, he didn't pay attention) to drive aimlessly in the Impala until the gas ran dangerously low. He thought time spent in the closest thing he had to a home growing up would ease the ache, but each glance at the passenger seat to find it empty made it hurt more.
Dean couldn't remember Sam's birthday with the amount he drank, beginning with the sun when it rose. He also couldn't remember the last time they celebrated his birthday when he was alive. They always brushed things like that off like they weren't important. But when Dean didn't have anyone to celebrate with or for, he thought they might've have been a little more important than any of the Winchesters believed.
Sam was born in May, but he died in May as well. Dean promised himself that he would be too drunk to remember that day either. The day that Sam beat The Devil and damned himself.
But didn't he know that he damned Dean, too?
The second summer was another series of barbecues and lawn mowing. Dean's job in construction picked up a lot then, but at least it kept him too busy to think. Sid made for okay company, but his always upbeat attitude became grating on the days when Dean wanted to be left in his own little miserable world.
And Sid asked questions that Dean couldn't answer. Over a year of weekly meetings at the bar, and all Sid pried out of Dean was that he moved around a lot—his entire life, practically—and that he had a brother.
After a few too many drinks and a poorly worded question from Sid, Dean threw a shot glass at the wall, barely missing another patron's head, and the subject of his brother was never brought up again.
Halloween came again, and Lisa convinced Dean to hand out candy. She told him it would be good for him to do something normal and take his mind off things.
It worked for a while. Kids came with masks on mostly, so he didn't see Sam as a child and looking up at him with the puppy dog eyes that he never grew out of. The puppy dog eyes that graced Sam's face one last time before he was gone.
Then, there was a pair of boys whose clothing looked a little too familiar. When Dean asked who they were, and they replied that they were Sam and Dean from the Supernatural book series. Dean gave them candy, but Lisa had to take over for the rest of the night while he drowned himself in alcohol and memories.
Dean had to work on November Second, but he would have rather not woken up at all. His family was gone now, and he was left behind. But he went through the motions and went to work once again because he made a promise to Sam.
He just wondered how much longer he would be able to keep it until he shattered.
He opened his eyes. No, scratch that. He pried his eyelids apart with willpower as his crowbar until the cement of sleep gave way and cracked to let in sterile, white light. How was it possible for a human body to be so utterly exhausted and for that human to still be alive?
After a minute, the light became bearable. It was harmless, fluorescent lights that hung above him, not a thousand suns compacted into a tiny room like he originally believed.
Where the hell was he? More importantly, how did he get there?
"You're awake."
Sam sat up, feeling sharp pain shoot through his skull.
The nurse in the doorway rushed over and reached over to ease him back down, but he recoiled away from her hands.
"What's going on?" he asked
The nurse backed away a bit. "What do you remember?"
His mind was filled with memories of hellfire and Lucifer, but he didn't remember much else. Especially why he wasn't still with Lucifer in a cage.
He shook his head.
"You were found by Stull Cemetery, unconscious and with blood staining the back of you jacket, but the only cut that was there wasn't even deep enough to require stitches. A man found you and called an ambulance," she said. "We were hoping you'd be able to fill in the blanks when you woke up."
"What day is it?" he asked.
"October Thirtieth," she said. "You're up just in time for Halloween. I'm going to go get the doctor. I'm sure he'd love to talk with you now that you're up."
Sam nodded, but closed his eyes and fell asleep as the sound of the nurse's footsteps faded away.
He stepped in the house through the backyard, entering through a sliding glass door left unlocked.
The nearby clock chimed, announcing the start of a new hour.
Then, he was moving through the house. He saw Lisa in the kitchen, and he crept past without her turning her attention from chopping vegetables on a wooden board before shuffling them off and into a boiling pot on the stove. He slipped out of the room without her noticing, went up the stairs, and saw Ben with a handheld game.
Ben looked over with a smile, like he was expecting someone to come to his room, but then it was gone and his eyes grew wide. His mouth opened into a scream. Sam stepped into the room, and another figure stepped around Sam, grabbing Ben and holding his mouth shut.
"Shh," it said, eyes flashing pure black. "Don't want you and Mommy to spoil our present for Dean by making us kill you before he can get here."
Sam sat up in his bed, back in the hospital and safe from even Lucifer's torment for the moment, but it wasn't himself that he was concerned about. He looked at the clock in his room and saw that it was one in the morning.
The nurse told him that yesterday was October Thirtieth, which meant he had a sneaking idea of when the demons were planning to attack Lisa and Ben. After all, why not kill the family of a Winchester on November Second?
He was wearing a set of hospital scrubs, and didn't see his clothes or shoes anywhere in the room. Although, his clothes sounded like they came out dirty from him lying in the cemetery, so the hospital might have disposed on them.
He had bigger problems than tracking down his own clothing or shoes.
He snuck past the night shift nurse doing her rounds and hot wired a car in the parking lot. It was only when he caught sight of his own reflection that he realized that he looked much different than he did before his jump in the oddest way. He looked younger. He looked almost like the kid Dean picked up from Stanford again.
It almost made him laugh as he settled behind the wheel and pulled onto the streets, preparing for a long drive.
How could he look younger, when he felt centuries older?
The drive should have taken around eight hours, but Sam kept pulling over to the side of the road. He pulled over when his head felt like it was splintering under the intensity of memories of Hell. He pulled over when he felt the many times Lucifer flayed away his skin inch by inch, just to put it back and start again.
Instead, he arrived around noon, after ditching his stolen car blocks away and walking the rest to the house. It wasn't comfortable barefoot, but he barely felt the rough stones scattered on the sidewalks as they cut the bottoms of his feet.
If anything, he only felt the stares of random passersby who saw a strange man in white scrubs walking around. He'd be lucky if none of them were calling the police about an escaped patient, but he'd faced worse than anything a police officer could do to him.
He didn't feel what he thought he would. He didn't feel joy at the thought of being so close to Dean again. He didn't feel grateful about being alive again (and he was grateful).
He had a purpose, and he was moving forward to accomplish that purpose. It was the only way to keep Hell from flooding his head. Although, it wasn't enough to keep flashes of memories from striking at random, bad enough to leave him vomiting into the neatly-manicured bushes of someone's front yard.
He'd make it to Dean's house in time to prevent his vision from coming true if it was the last thing he did.
A/N: This has been sitting in my files forever. While I don't really write for SPN anymore or post on this site, I figured that there might be somebody who gets inspiration from it for their own piece, and that there's no harm in tossing it up. As of right now, I don't particularly plan on continuing it, but who knows what the future holds.
