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spn fic: if thine eye offend thee (sam/dean; r)
I couldn't sleep so I wrote Wincest.
If Thine Eye Offend Thee
Supernatural. Sam/Dean, Castiel, Ruby. R.
If Dean deserves to be saved, maybe Sam does too. Set during the time period from 4x01 through 4x07. ~3900 words
Sam finds himself hyperaware of opportunities to touch Dean.
When it's just the two of them it's easy, with nothing else he's supposed to focus on, but when they're cops or agents or trading intel with other hunters, Dean is bright and hot at the periphery of his consciousness. "Excuse me," Sam would say to a witness, touching Dean's elbow and leading him away to confer. A nudge with his toe under the table when he thinks Dean is being unnecessarily rude to Random Hunter #4293. The touches linger and distract Sam, even though he is the instigator, but he doesn't want to stop.
He just got his brother back from hell. He can indulge himself a little.
Driving from one hunt to another, Sam continues his habit from last year of draping his arm over the back of Dean's seat, fingers lingering on his neck.
"That tickles," Dean would mutter, eyes on the road, or if he's riding shotgun, then maybe he'd be half asleep or going through the notes of their next case. Either way, Dean would twitch his head like a horse flicking its tail to shoo flies. This invites escalation and soon they are engaged in slap-fights and name-calling until the car nearly veers of the road and "Look, what you made me do, asshole!" But they'd be grinning. They nearly go off the road on the way out of Pontiac, Sam laughing so hard, and his incredulous relief amplifies everything: his joy, Dean's protests, the sun outside, the cooling breeze.
"Why don't we stop for a bit?" Dean says when they pass a sign for a motel, and he doesn't have to ask twice. They check in, and once the motel door is locked behind them, it is a wrestling match to see who can pin who to the bed. A merciless claiming of each other with teeth and tongue and hands, and pain sometimes, but they are used to pain, inured as they are to violence as a side effect of their struggle for each other. They've had to fight a thousand things to earn the right to be right here, right now, deep in each other, the rest of the world on hold.
In the aftermath, Sam murmurs against the back of Dean's neck, "We should probably go," and Dean's only reply is a non-committal grunt, which Sam takes as license to move over his body and trap Dean between him and the bed. He presses kisses against Dean's jaw, and down his neck. A lick over his Adam's apple. Dean groans when their cocks rub against each other, still sensitive, so Sam twitches his hips, again, again, again until Dean is muttering soft curses into Sam's hair, fingers digging into his skin.
Sam presses a kiss against the thumb of the handprint, and Dean's breath hitches.
"Sam," he breathes.
Tongue tracing the shape of phantom fingers.
"Sam—"
He lets Dean flip them over, and, "What?" because the way Dean is looking at him, looking blindsided... "Dean, what?"
Instead of replying, Dean just kisses him again, which Sam will think is typical, in retrospect.
+
Sam wakes up in the middle of the night and he is the only one in bed.
Oh god, he thinks, pulling on his jeans. Oh god oh god oh god because it has all been a dream. He knew it. Of course it was. He pulls on his shirt as his heart pounds and he's already striding to the door and he doesn't know why, because Dean is still in hell, of course he is, he never came back because that would be too good to be true and good things don't just happen—
He yanks open the door and sees two silhouettes by the Impala. He blinks, and there is only one.
Dean looks up. Sam hears the frown in his voice. "Sam?"
But Sam just stands there, frozen by the open floodgates of relief.
Dean walks to him, step by step into the light and Sam catalogs bare feet, the frayed ends of jeans, the stain where he spilled coffee on himself earlier. That old blue shirt that hasn't been washed in months because it's been balled up in the trunk of the car with the rest of Dean's stuff.
"Hey," Dean says softly. "You okay?"
"I thought—" Sam says, but his voice won't work.
"You look like you just seen a ghost, man," Dean smiles, a familiar jaunt, but with shades of gray in it.
Sam lifts his hand and touches his brother's face, and his hand doesn't go through. Dean is solid and warm, not just a dream, and he closes his eyes and turns into the touch. Something hot and sharp cuts through Sam's chest.
"Let's go back to bed, huh?" Dean says, but once inside, he goes to his own bed, collapses on top of the covers with his clothes still on. It gives Sam pause, just for a second, and then he too goes to his own bed. He takes off his shirt. He takes off his jeans. He lies down on a mattress that feels too small, though it was just the right size when Dean was lying next to him.
And then he sleeps.
+
Dean doesn't talk much about Castiel. Sam tries to suss out the reality between the halo jokes and glib one-liners about self-righteous dicks with wings, but to no avail. This is unlike anything they've ever had to deal with before, so even though Sam can see that Dean is deflecting, he isn't sure what Dean is deflecting from.
"I don't trust the guy as far as I can throw him," Dean says on his fourth beer.
"But he's an angel," Sam says. "Look, maybe he's a dick, but not all supernatural creatures are bad, not especially if they're, you know, messengers of God."
Dean points at him and raises his eyebrows. "I'm not going to get theological with you."
"Dean, you were dragged down to hell and got pulled out by an angel. It's already theological."
"How do we even know he's what he says he is?" Dean challenges.
"The wings?"
"Harpies have wings."
"But he didn't try to eat your face off, so I think it's safe to say he's not a harpy."
"It's safe to say that he's a dick," Dean declares, because on top of the beer, he has also had a couple of shots of whiskey, and this is when his debating skills start to go.
After Dean passes out drunk, Sam gets out the motel Bible and shoves in next to Dean on the bed just because he can, and starts reading. He hasn't read the Bible for anything but research in years, and even this is also research, a little bit, but there is something of a held breath in his heart that feels like hope. That's the part that makes him feel like an interloper among these pages; he is also searching for something real.
Luke 2:9. An angel of the Lord appeared to them. The glory of the Lord shone down upon them, and they were terrified.
Sam glances over at Dean, who is snoring softly with his mouth open. The man heaven saw fit to raise from the pit. Is Dean terrified? Sam suspects yes, but he can't tell; the signals have been all wrong since his brother came back. But at least he's back.
"'Saved'," Dean had laughed, three beers ago. "Like I'm his fucking nest egg at the bank, Sammy, and those guys are going to make a withdrawal, I can fucking guarantee."
You're missing the point, Sam had started to reply, but then Dean started going off on some tangent about interest rates and stock market crashes and it hadn't made any sense, but Sam recalls finding it amusing, roping his brother into an involved discussion about the exchange rate between souls and salvation.
If Dean doesn't want to believe that he can be saved, then Sam will believe it for him. He will believe it whether Dean wants him to or not. There are stirrings in Sam of something he hasn't felt since that time in Providence with Father Gregory's ghost, but while that ordeal shook his faith, this one has returned it to him. It returned Dean to him, and thus they have become analogous in his mind.
Here's the thing: Dean and him, they've been tangled up for so long now that even when Sam's doing things for himself, he's also doing it for Dean, and vice versa. He has to believe Dean can be saved, because then maybe that means Sam can be saved. If Dean deserves salvation, maybe Sam does too.
"Maybe this is God's will," Sam remembers protesting to Dean, two years ago and two deaths ago.
Well, what if it is? What if it finally, finally is?
+
Ruby would text. meet me at the corner.
Dean asks where he's going and Sam says just down the street, going to the 7-11, checking something out at the library, at the crime scene, at the morgue.
I'll be back, he always says.
And Dean says okay, at least the first few times. Lately he's been saying okay and following up with when you gonna come back.
Sam replies that he won't be long.
Sam doesn't say, "I'm doing this for you," because that's the thing he tells himself; that's the little fire that he stokes inside, the one he's been tending all through the long summer. Sam doesn't need Dean to put it out. He doesn't want Dean anywhere near it, not when he is already at the center of it. He may have his brother back, but he still has unfinished business.
Ruby laughs. "You're not doing this for your brother. You're doing this for you."
Sam already knows how that one works.
+
He catches Dean paging through a Bible.
"Anything good?" Sam asks and Dean jumps, then immediately looks chastised, like he's been caught with a porn magazine.
He tosses the Bible on the table. "Just the usual bullshit," Dean mutters.
"Did Castiel—"
"No."
"You didn't even hear my question."
Dean just glares at him. Sam lets it drop.
+
They don't talk much after the rugaru incident and events surrounding. Mostly the events surrounding.
Sam says, "Look, I was just—" but Dean raises his hand and says, "Don't."
The next hunt is an angry ghost in Wichita, fairly straightforward, which is a relief. It's a relief just to have the hunt, have something to do. The ghost manages to knock Dean through a window before Sam lights the match though, so here they are, Sam stitching up the back of Dean's shoulder while Dean works his way through a fifth of Wild Turkey.
Sam keeps looking at the handprint.
For one thing, it's right there, so how he can not look at it, chastising him secondhand, but for another thing, Sam's been reading more Scripture and he has visions of burning wheels made of malachite, ox head lowing, eagle head screeching, and six wings. He's been reading the Quran, the Torah, the Hadith, how Gabriel has six hundred wings that shed jewels and span the horizon, how angels are literally the will of God and how after they've carried out their purpose, they dissipate.
None of them correspond to this brand on Dean's shoulder, this thing that marked him.
"Do you ever talk to him?" Sam finds himself asking.
"Who?"
"Castiel."
"What, like about the weather? How the Yankees are doing?"
Sam refuses to be deterred. "Do you think he'd talk to me?"
Dean looks up over his shoulder at him like Sam's lost his mind, and okay, maybe. "Why do you want to talk to him?"
"Why wouldn't I? I mean, don't you have questions? For an angel?"
"Yeah, maybe, like if he was gonna zap me to the past, why not zap me to a Zeppelin concert, huh?"
Sam cuts the sutures. "I'm serious, Dean."
"So am I," Dean snaps, and winces when Sam pours alcohol on the stitches. "Look, the guy said he'd kill you and you wanna sit down and have a little chat with him?"
Sam steps back and crosses his arms. "You said yourself you'd want to hunt me if you didn't know me."
The clench of jaw. The swallow. The glance away, and the look back into Sam's eyes with twice the fury and the nerve to be hurt. "That's different," he insists. "You know I'm looking out for you, Sam, I'm your brother."
"I know," Sam says softly. "I'm the last person who needs to be told that."
+
Sam wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks maybe he's still asleep.
There is a shadow by his brother's bed, and though Sam is still half in dreams, he automatically goes for the knife he keeps under his pillow. The shadow reaches out and touches Dean's head, and Sam croaks, "Hey."
But Dean seems to calm under its touch, and that stays Sam's hand. Sam didn't even notice Dean was agitated until he sees the agitation slipping away. Then the shadow looks up and Sam sees blue eyes, sharp, removed. The impression of wings and a gust of wind, and then the blue eyes are closer, directly above, the wings everywhere.
"No—" Sam says, but then he feels a warmth at his forehead, spreading down his body, and then it all goes black.
+
They get hammered one night.
Sam gives himself over to the drink, a half-baked plan at the edge of his mind, and the more he drinks, the more the plan takes center-stage. The more he gets drunk, the more he aches for Dean. Maybe it's a Pavlovian thing. He spent all summer at the bottom of a bottle and broken for his brother, so maybe that's what his body knows. Intoxication? Dean must be in hell. But Dean isn't, and that's the point, and he is here, they are both here, and Dean is so close, Sam only has to reach out.
"Hey," Dean says when Sam's hands cup his face. He shakes them off, so Sam places them on his shoulders instead.
"Dean, look, I know you're angry," Sam says. "About Ruby, about—"
This is maybe a terrible plan. Sam can't tell anymore; all he knows is the wrenching frustration he feels when Dean keeps him at arm's length. But the plan has been put in motion and he does not want to stop. He watches Dean's face for a sign, something that says no or stop, but all there is are his big green eyes and the way they've gone all bright the way they do when Sam is on the verge of taming him.
Tell me you want this too.
Dean says, "Sam." His palms against Sam's chest, clutching handfuls of t-shirt.
"But Dean, look, I—look. Okay?"
"Sam," Dean soothes. "Sammy, hey."
"Fuckin' worst summer of my fuckin' life, I am telling you." Sam laughs, a hysterical sound. "But Dean, you're back, I just—I just need you to be back."
"I am," Dean says. Not quite pushing Sam away. Not quite pulling him in, but lowering his resistance, letting Sam shift closer. "Hey. I'm here."
"Fuck, fuck fuck," Sam says, and slings an arm around Dean's neck and presses a kiss to his forehead. One more on his brow. Another on his cheekbone as Dean lifts his head, and somehow, some way, Sam is kissing his mouth, and the relief breaks him in two.
This was about as far as Sam planned, but then Dean is snaking his arms around Sam and he welcomes it, because no matter what Dean accuses him of, all Sam wants right now is to wrap himself around his brother, make him see. This is all for you, everything has been for you, the things I cut out of myself because you weren't there to stop me, this hunger that I've nurtured and all my violent tendencies, for you.
They stumble backwards onto the bed, and Sam props himself up on his arms and gives himself a second, just taking Dean in. How does he do that? How does Dean do that, where does it come from, this way of looking at Sam and making him feel completely ill-fitting in the best of ways, like his body cannot contain him, simultaneously too big and too small in the warmth of that gaze and all the promises contained therein.
"Sam," Dean says, voice as rough as his eyes are soft, and Sam is lost in it.
Sam doesn't believe in the calm before the storm. His life has been one endless storm, and Dean is both the lightning and the flood.
+
There is a part of Sam that is still surprised he wasn't immediately burned on the spot when Castiel shook his hand. Sam is a sinner, after all, and he feels this more heavily now that he has seen the arbiters of his redemption. What does redemption mean if it rests in the hands of creatures like that? Would it be the kind of redemption he wants? Will it absolve him of anything?
"Your change is three-thirteen, have a nice day," chirps the cashier, dropping it in Sam's hand. He puts the coins in the tip jar and takes the coffees.
He can't turn his mind off about it. Sam still remembers the feel of Castiel's hand, smooth and cool and soft. The hands of a sheltered man. There is nothing otherworldly about him except something hard and bright in his gaze. And who's the poor shmuck he's possessing anyway? What does he look like without an angel inside? Would his eyes be as dangerous? Would his voice grate as low?
The light changes and Sam crosses the street.
He is running out of places to ask for salvation.
The laughter of children gets louder as Sam approaches the playground, and it occurs to him that there are fewer and fewer things protecting him. It's a warm day for the first of November, and Sam thinks about how at this rate, soon there will be nothing protecting him from himself. (Isn't that what he wants? Isn't that he needs to take down Lilith?)
Sam pauses at the treeline when he sees Dean and Castiel talking to each other on the benches. He doesn't know why he stops; he knows he doesn't need to. He flashes back to that disorienting encounter in the motel room – two men, two angels, worlds colliding, and how Castiel and Dean had circled each other like wild animals, registering little else beyond their own mutual challenge and the impossible things they were asking of each other.
Is that what's going on? Is that what they're talking about? Sam can't tell from this distance. Dean and Castiel wear identical frowns, looking like they're trying to figure each other out, but the puzzle is bigger than either of them are giving it credit for. Dean has an angel chasing him down; Sam has a demon. The analogy is not lost on him.
A little part of Sam is saying, But I was the one who prayed. I was the one who believed.
He has come a long way to be dismissed.
If Dean deserves salvation, doesn't Sam?
Castiel leaves.
"Hey," Sam says, approaching the bench. "Got your coffee."
Dean smiles. "Thanks."
+
A sudden gust of wind, the beat of wings, and Castiel appears in the gloom of the parking lot between one blink and another.
"I... didn't think that would actually work," Sam says. "Um."
The night is suddenly too big for him. Sam, who has always been full of questions and too full of the hunger for truth, faced with the thing to whom he sent his sharpest deprivations. The very thing whose facade is beginning to crack before Sam's eyes. This is one last grapple for answers from a God who never gave any evidence of hearing the question. Where should he begin?
"You prayed to me, Sam?" And Castiel sounds surprised. He approaches Sam, not quite wary, but measured and watchful. He remembers Castiel's hesitation before taking his hand.
Sam wets his lips. "I, uh. I would seek audience with you." 'Seek audience'? What were they, in Middle Earth?
He nods, perhaps indulgently. "What troubles you?"
Everything. His brother. Ruby. His soul. Salvation. The taste of Dean's sweat. The taste of Ruby's. The taste of blood. Resentment. Fear. And love.
"Am I a hypocrite," Sam asks, "to want redemption and yet I do the things I do?"
Castiel cocks his head to the side, curious, but there is also concern there, coloring his expression. Incredibly, the angel looks worried about Sam, and suddenly he is the kind of storybook angel who offers succor and plays harps. In that moment, it feels like all of Castiel's attention is directed on him. The thought occurs to Sam: this is what Dean sees.
"What are the things you do?" Castiel asks.
But Sam doesn't know how to list his sins to an angel, no matter how dickish the angel, and especially not the one who gave his brother back to him. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Castiel is waiting and Sam feels like he is wasting something. I'm never strong enough. Instead, he says, "You said Dean deserves to be saved?"
Castiel frowns. "I said he thinks he doesn't."
This gives Sam pause. He knew Castiel's side of the conversation has been telephone-gamed by Dean, but it only sinks in now. Oh Dean. Of course. "So," Sam says, "does he?"
The angel takes a few steps closer, narrowing his eyes, and Sam feels pinned, stuck under glass. "What are you asking, Sam?"
"What," Sam says, and swallows. "What do I deserve?"
"We all deserve exactly what we have," Castiel says, which can't be true and feels profoundly unfair. It is no answer at all.
What a waste of a prayer, Sam thinks, but still he can't look away from Castiel's gaze, that vast unending blue, the well of almosts. He can't find it in himself to be angry – only disappointed, and very tired.
+
"You do, you know," Sam says, apropos of nothing.
"What?" Dean says.
They are driving out of town, leaving Samhain and witches and angels far behind. Okay, maybe not the angels. Sam has a feeling they won't be able to escape angels for a while. But anyway, there was something about the light, the way it hit Dean, the way it outlined him in gold, and suddenly his brother looked several years older than he did, but content, happy to be in the moment, the way he was singing contemplatively along to the radio. It filled Sam's heart with simultaneous pride and pain. His brother, who went to hell, who came back, who cannot love himself, who loves the world, who is trying to save it.
"What?" Dean asks. "What do I what?"
"Deserve to be saved," Sam says, matter of fact.
Dean just raises his eyebrows, shakes his head, and turns his attention back to the open road. But he is smiling, and that makes Sam smile too.
And I'll do it, Sam doesn't add.
I'll save us both, he doesn't say. I'll save us all.
Sam thinks he is the only one who can.
If Thine Eye Offend Thee
Supernatural. Sam/Dean, Castiel, Ruby. R.
If Dean deserves to be saved, maybe Sam does too. Set during the time period from 4x01 through 4x07. ~3900 words
Sam finds himself hyperaware of opportunities to touch Dean.
When it's just the two of them it's easy, with nothing else he's supposed to focus on, but when they're cops or agents or trading intel with other hunters, Dean is bright and hot at the periphery of his consciousness. "Excuse me," Sam would say to a witness, touching Dean's elbow and leading him away to confer. A nudge with his toe under the table when he thinks Dean is being unnecessarily rude to Random Hunter #4293. The touches linger and distract Sam, even though he is the instigator, but he doesn't want to stop.
He just got his brother back from hell. He can indulge himself a little.
Driving from one hunt to another, Sam continues his habit from last year of draping his arm over the back of Dean's seat, fingers lingering on his neck.
"That tickles," Dean would mutter, eyes on the road, or if he's riding shotgun, then maybe he'd be half asleep or going through the notes of their next case. Either way, Dean would twitch his head like a horse flicking its tail to shoo flies. This invites escalation and soon they are engaged in slap-fights and name-calling until the car nearly veers of the road and "Look, what you made me do, asshole!" But they'd be grinning. They nearly go off the road on the way out of Pontiac, Sam laughing so hard, and his incredulous relief amplifies everything: his joy, Dean's protests, the sun outside, the cooling breeze.
"Why don't we stop for a bit?" Dean says when they pass a sign for a motel, and he doesn't have to ask twice. They check in, and once the motel door is locked behind them, it is a wrestling match to see who can pin who to the bed. A merciless claiming of each other with teeth and tongue and hands, and pain sometimes, but they are used to pain, inured as they are to violence as a side effect of their struggle for each other. They've had to fight a thousand things to earn the right to be right here, right now, deep in each other, the rest of the world on hold.
In the aftermath, Sam murmurs against the back of Dean's neck, "We should probably go," and Dean's only reply is a non-committal grunt, which Sam takes as license to move over his body and trap Dean between him and the bed. He presses kisses against Dean's jaw, and down his neck. A lick over his Adam's apple. Dean groans when their cocks rub against each other, still sensitive, so Sam twitches his hips, again, again, again until Dean is muttering soft curses into Sam's hair, fingers digging into his skin.
Sam presses a kiss against the thumb of the handprint, and Dean's breath hitches.
"Sam," he breathes.
Tongue tracing the shape of phantom fingers.
"Sam—"
He lets Dean flip them over, and, "What?" because the way Dean is looking at him, looking blindsided... "Dean, what?"
Instead of replying, Dean just kisses him again, which Sam will think is typical, in retrospect.
+
Sam wakes up in the middle of the night and he is the only one in bed.
Oh god, he thinks, pulling on his jeans. Oh god oh god oh god because it has all been a dream. He knew it. Of course it was. He pulls on his shirt as his heart pounds and he's already striding to the door and he doesn't know why, because Dean is still in hell, of course he is, he never came back because that would be too good to be true and good things don't just happen—
He yanks open the door and sees two silhouettes by the Impala. He blinks, and there is only one.
Dean looks up. Sam hears the frown in his voice. "Sam?"
But Sam just stands there, frozen by the open floodgates of relief.
Dean walks to him, step by step into the light and Sam catalogs bare feet, the frayed ends of jeans, the stain where he spilled coffee on himself earlier. That old blue shirt that hasn't been washed in months because it's been balled up in the trunk of the car with the rest of Dean's stuff.
"Hey," Dean says softly. "You okay?"
"I thought—" Sam says, but his voice won't work.
"You look like you just seen a ghost, man," Dean smiles, a familiar jaunt, but with shades of gray in it.
Sam lifts his hand and touches his brother's face, and his hand doesn't go through. Dean is solid and warm, not just a dream, and he closes his eyes and turns into the touch. Something hot and sharp cuts through Sam's chest.
"Let's go back to bed, huh?" Dean says, but once inside, he goes to his own bed, collapses on top of the covers with his clothes still on. It gives Sam pause, just for a second, and then he too goes to his own bed. He takes off his shirt. He takes off his jeans. He lies down on a mattress that feels too small, though it was just the right size when Dean was lying next to him.
And then he sleeps.
+
Dean doesn't talk much about Castiel. Sam tries to suss out the reality between the halo jokes and glib one-liners about self-righteous dicks with wings, but to no avail. This is unlike anything they've ever had to deal with before, so even though Sam can see that Dean is deflecting, he isn't sure what Dean is deflecting from.
"I don't trust the guy as far as I can throw him," Dean says on his fourth beer.
"But he's an angel," Sam says. "Look, maybe he's a dick, but not all supernatural creatures are bad, not especially if they're, you know, messengers of God."
Dean points at him and raises his eyebrows. "I'm not going to get theological with you."
"Dean, you were dragged down to hell and got pulled out by an angel. It's already theological."
"How do we even know he's what he says he is?" Dean challenges.
"The wings?"
"Harpies have wings."
"But he didn't try to eat your face off, so I think it's safe to say he's not a harpy."
"It's safe to say that he's a dick," Dean declares, because on top of the beer, he has also had a couple of shots of whiskey, and this is when his debating skills start to go.
After Dean passes out drunk, Sam gets out the motel Bible and shoves in next to Dean on the bed just because he can, and starts reading. He hasn't read the Bible for anything but research in years, and even this is also research, a little bit, but there is something of a held breath in his heart that feels like hope. That's the part that makes him feel like an interloper among these pages; he is also searching for something real.
Luke 2:9. An angel of the Lord appeared to them. The glory of the Lord shone down upon them, and they were terrified.
Sam glances over at Dean, who is snoring softly with his mouth open. The man heaven saw fit to raise from the pit. Is Dean terrified? Sam suspects yes, but he can't tell; the signals have been all wrong since his brother came back. But at least he's back.
"'Saved'," Dean had laughed, three beers ago. "Like I'm his fucking nest egg at the bank, Sammy, and those guys are going to make a withdrawal, I can fucking guarantee."
You're missing the point, Sam had started to reply, but then Dean started going off on some tangent about interest rates and stock market crashes and it hadn't made any sense, but Sam recalls finding it amusing, roping his brother into an involved discussion about the exchange rate between souls and salvation.
If Dean doesn't want to believe that he can be saved, then Sam will believe it for him. He will believe it whether Dean wants him to or not. There are stirrings in Sam of something he hasn't felt since that time in Providence with Father Gregory's ghost, but while that ordeal shook his faith, this one has returned it to him. It returned Dean to him, and thus they have become analogous in his mind.
Here's the thing: Dean and him, they've been tangled up for so long now that even when Sam's doing things for himself, he's also doing it for Dean, and vice versa. He has to believe Dean can be saved, because then maybe that means Sam can be saved. If Dean deserves salvation, maybe Sam does too.
"Maybe this is God's will," Sam remembers protesting to Dean, two years ago and two deaths ago.
Well, what if it is? What if it finally, finally is?
+
Ruby would text. meet me at the corner.
Dean asks where he's going and Sam says just down the street, going to the 7-11, checking something out at the library, at the crime scene, at the morgue.
I'll be back, he always says.
And Dean says okay, at least the first few times. Lately he's been saying okay and following up with when you gonna come back.
Sam replies that he won't be long.
Sam doesn't say, "I'm doing this for you," because that's the thing he tells himself; that's the little fire that he stokes inside, the one he's been tending all through the long summer. Sam doesn't need Dean to put it out. He doesn't want Dean anywhere near it, not when he is already at the center of it. He may have his brother back, but he still has unfinished business.
Ruby laughs. "You're not doing this for your brother. You're doing this for you."
Sam already knows how that one works.
+
He catches Dean paging through a Bible.
"Anything good?" Sam asks and Dean jumps, then immediately looks chastised, like he's been caught with a porn magazine.
He tosses the Bible on the table. "Just the usual bullshit," Dean mutters.
"Did Castiel—"
"No."
"You didn't even hear my question."
Dean just glares at him. Sam lets it drop.
+
They don't talk much after the rugaru incident and events surrounding. Mostly the events surrounding.
Sam says, "Look, I was just—" but Dean raises his hand and says, "Don't."
The next hunt is an angry ghost in Wichita, fairly straightforward, which is a relief. It's a relief just to have the hunt, have something to do. The ghost manages to knock Dean through a window before Sam lights the match though, so here they are, Sam stitching up the back of Dean's shoulder while Dean works his way through a fifth of Wild Turkey.
Sam keeps looking at the handprint.
For one thing, it's right there, so how he can not look at it, chastising him secondhand, but for another thing, Sam's been reading more Scripture and he has visions of burning wheels made of malachite, ox head lowing, eagle head screeching, and six wings. He's been reading the Quran, the Torah, the Hadith, how Gabriel has six hundred wings that shed jewels and span the horizon, how angels are literally the will of God and how after they've carried out their purpose, they dissipate.
None of them correspond to this brand on Dean's shoulder, this thing that marked him.
"Do you ever talk to him?" Sam finds himself asking.
"Who?"
"Castiel."
"What, like about the weather? How the Yankees are doing?"
Sam refuses to be deterred. "Do you think he'd talk to me?"
Dean looks up over his shoulder at him like Sam's lost his mind, and okay, maybe. "Why do you want to talk to him?"
"Why wouldn't I? I mean, don't you have questions? For an angel?"
"Yeah, maybe, like if he was gonna zap me to the past, why not zap me to a Zeppelin concert, huh?"
Sam cuts the sutures. "I'm serious, Dean."
"So am I," Dean snaps, and winces when Sam pours alcohol on the stitches. "Look, the guy said he'd kill you and you wanna sit down and have a little chat with him?"
Sam steps back and crosses his arms. "You said yourself you'd want to hunt me if you didn't know me."
The clench of jaw. The swallow. The glance away, and the look back into Sam's eyes with twice the fury and the nerve to be hurt. "That's different," he insists. "You know I'm looking out for you, Sam, I'm your brother."
"I know," Sam says softly. "I'm the last person who needs to be told that."
+
Sam wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks maybe he's still asleep.
There is a shadow by his brother's bed, and though Sam is still half in dreams, he automatically goes for the knife he keeps under his pillow. The shadow reaches out and touches Dean's head, and Sam croaks, "Hey."
But Dean seems to calm under its touch, and that stays Sam's hand. Sam didn't even notice Dean was agitated until he sees the agitation slipping away. Then the shadow looks up and Sam sees blue eyes, sharp, removed. The impression of wings and a gust of wind, and then the blue eyes are closer, directly above, the wings everywhere.
"No—" Sam says, but then he feels a warmth at his forehead, spreading down his body, and then it all goes black.
+
They get hammered one night.
Sam gives himself over to the drink, a half-baked plan at the edge of his mind, and the more he drinks, the more the plan takes center-stage. The more he gets drunk, the more he aches for Dean. Maybe it's a Pavlovian thing. He spent all summer at the bottom of a bottle and broken for his brother, so maybe that's what his body knows. Intoxication? Dean must be in hell. But Dean isn't, and that's the point, and he is here, they are both here, and Dean is so close, Sam only has to reach out.
"Hey," Dean says when Sam's hands cup his face. He shakes them off, so Sam places them on his shoulders instead.
"Dean, look, I know you're angry," Sam says. "About Ruby, about—"
This is maybe a terrible plan. Sam can't tell anymore; all he knows is the wrenching frustration he feels when Dean keeps him at arm's length. But the plan has been put in motion and he does not want to stop. He watches Dean's face for a sign, something that says no or stop, but all there is are his big green eyes and the way they've gone all bright the way they do when Sam is on the verge of taming him.
Tell me you want this too.
Dean says, "Sam." His palms against Sam's chest, clutching handfuls of t-shirt.
"But Dean, look, I—look. Okay?"
"Sam," Dean soothes. "Sammy, hey."
"Fuckin' worst summer of my fuckin' life, I am telling you." Sam laughs, a hysterical sound. "But Dean, you're back, I just—I just need you to be back."
"I am," Dean says. Not quite pushing Sam away. Not quite pulling him in, but lowering his resistance, letting Sam shift closer. "Hey. I'm here."
"Fuck, fuck fuck," Sam says, and slings an arm around Dean's neck and presses a kiss to his forehead. One more on his brow. Another on his cheekbone as Dean lifts his head, and somehow, some way, Sam is kissing his mouth, and the relief breaks him in two.
This was about as far as Sam planned, but then Dean is snaking his arms around Sam and he welcomes it, because no matter what Dean accuses him of, all Sam wants right now is to wrap himself around his brother, make him see. This is all for you, everything has been for you, the things I cut out of myself because you weren't there to stop me, this hunger that I've nurtured and all my violent tendencies, for you.
They stumble backwards onto the bed, and Sam props himself up on his arms and gives himself a second, just taking Dean in. How does he do that? How does Dean do that, where does it come from, this way of looking at Sam and making him feel completely ill-fitting in the best of ways, like his body cannot contain him, simultaneously too big and too small in the warmth of that gaze and all the promises contained therein.
"Sam," Dean says, voice as rough as his eyes are soft, and Sam is lost in it.
Sam doesn't believe in the calm before the storm. His life has been one endless storm, and Dean is both the lightning and the flood.
+
There is a part of Sam that is still surprised he wasn't immediately burned on the spot when Castiel shook his hand. Sam is a sinner, after all, and he feels this more heavily now that he has seen the arbiters of his redemption. What does redemption mean if it rests in the hands of creatures like that? Would it be the kind of redemption he wants? Will it absolve him of anything?
"Your change is three-thirteen, have a nice day," chirps the cashier, dropping it in Sam's hand. He puts the coins in the tip jar and takes the coffees.
He can't turn his mind off about it. Sam still remembers the feel of Castiel's hand, smooth and cool and soft. The hands of a sheltered man. There is nothing otherworldly about him except something hard and bright in his gaze. And who's the poor shmuck he's possessing anyway? What does he look like without an angel inside? Would his eyes be as dangerous? Would his voice grate as low?
The light changes and Sam crosses the street.
He is running out of places to ask for salvation.
The laughter of children gets louder as Sam approaches the playground, and it occurs to him that there are fewer and fewer things protecting him. It's a warm day for the first of November, and Sam thinks about how at this rate, soon there will be nothing protecting him from himself. (Isn't that what he wants? Isn't that he needs to take down Lilith?)
Sam pauses at the treeline when he sees Dean and Castiel talking to each other on the benches. He doesn't know why he stops; he knows he doesn't need to. He flashes back to that disorienting encounter in the motel room – two men, two angels, worlds colliding, and how Castiel and Dean had circled each other like wild animals, registering little else beyond their own mutual challenge and the impossible things they were asking of each other.
Is that what's going on? Is that what they're talking about? Sam can't tell from this distance. Dean and Castiel wear identical frowns, looking like they're trying to figure each other out, but the puzzle is bigger than either of them are giving it credit for. Dean has an angel chasing him down; Sam has a demon. The analogy is not lost on him.
A little part of Sam is saying, But I was the one who prayed. I was the one who believed.
He has come a long way to be dismissed.
If Dean deserves salvation, doesn't Sam?
Castiel leaves.
"Hey," Sam says, approaching the bench. "Got your coffee."
Dean smiles. "Thanks."
+
A sudden gust of wind, the beat of wings, and Castiel appears in the gloom of the parking lot between one blink and another.
"I... didn't think that would actually work," Sam says. "Um."
The night is suddenly too big for him. Sam, who has always been full of questions and too full of the hunger for truth, faced with the thing to whom he sent his sharpest deprivations. The very thing whose facade is beginning to crack before Sam's eyes. This is one last grapple for answers from a God who never gave any evidence of hearing the question. Where should he begin?
"You prayed to me, Sam?" And Castiel sounds surprised. He approaches Sam, not quite wary, but measured and watchful. He remembers Castiel's hesitation before taking his hand.
Sam wets his lips. "I, uh. I would seek audience with you." 'Seek audience'? What were they, in Middle Earth?
He nods, perhaps indulgently. "What troubles you?"
Everything. His brother. Ruby. His soul. Salvation. The taste of Dean's sweat. The taste of Ruby's. The taste of blood. Resentment. Fear. And love.
"Am I a hypocrite," Sam asks, "to want redemption and yet I do the things I do?"
Castiel cocks his head to the side, curious, but there is also concern there, coloring his expression. Incredibly, the angel looks worried about Sam, and suddenly he is the kind of storybook angel who offers succor and plays harps. In that moment, it feels like all of Castiel's attention is directed on him. The thought occurs to Sam: this is what Dean sees.
"What are the things you do?" Castiel asks.
But Sam doesn't know how to list his sins to an angel, no matter how dickish the angel, and especially not the one who gave his brother back to him. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Castiel is waiting and Sam feels like he is wasting something. I'm never strong enough. Instead, he says, "You said Dean deserves to be saved?"
Castiel frowns. "I said he thinks he doesn't."
This gives Sam pause. He knew Castiel's side of the conversation has been telephone-gamed by Dean, but it only sinks in now. Oh Dean. Of course. "So," Sam says, "does he?"
The angel takes a few steps closer, narrowing his eyes, and Sam feels pinned, stuck under glass. "What are you asking, Sam?"
"What," Sam says, and swallows. "What do I deserve?"
"We all deserve exactly what we have," Castiel says, which can't be true and feels profoundly unfair. It is no answer at all.
What a waste of a prayer, Sam thinks, but still he can't look away from Castiel's gaze, that vast unending blue, the well of almosts. He can't find it in himself to be angry – only disappointed, and very tired.
+
"You do, you know," Sam says, apropos of nothing.
"What?" Dean says.
They are driving out of town, leaving Samhain and witches and angels far behind. Okay, maybe not the angels. Sam has a feeling they won't be able to escape angels for a while. But anyway, there was something about the light, the way it hit Dean, the way it outlined him in gold, and suddenly his brother looked several years older than he did, but content, happy to be in the moment, the way he was singing contemplatively along to the radio. It filled Sam's heart with simultaneous pride and pain. His brother, who went to hell, who came back, who cannot love himself, who loves the world, who is trying to save it.
"What?" Dean asks. "What do I what?"
"Deserve to be saved," Sam says, matter of fact.
Dean just raises his eyebrows, shakes his head, and turns his attention back to the open road. But he is smiling, and that makes Sam smile too.
And I'll do it, Sam doesn't add.
I'll save us both, he doesn't say. I'll save us all.
Sam thinks he is the only one who can.