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The first time you see him is on the Wednesday afternoon of the first week of classes: medieval literature with Professor Sandry.
His notebook is so brand new that the cover is still shiny, and he has to scratch his pen on the back in order to get the ink flowing. He writes his name inside, and takes careful notes in neat handwriting: no loops, no squiggles. You squint sideways.
Sam Winchester. It suits him, like some character in a Hemingway novel. You wonder if he has a secret tragic past, like they all seem to.
Sam sits absolutely still, completely focused, while Prof. Sandry rambles her way through the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
He’s almost too big, this Sam, his frame curled uncomfortably in the seats of the lecture hall. He has big hands, broad, with long fingers. You lean your chin against your hand and watch him from under your eyelashes.
He was a verray, parfit, gentil knight, he writes, and then a name you can’t quite see, that he strikes out. You pull your attention reluctantly away, and try to think about Chaucer’s narrative voice, like you’re supposed to.
At the end of class, Sam turns to you and smiles, a little confident, a little shy, long bangs falling over eyes that are almost startlingly green.
He's one of the most beautiful boys you've ever met, lanky and lean, with a self-deprecating smile. There are a lot of beautiful boys in Palo Alto, but there’s something about Sam, something in his eyes, in that heartbreaking, lopsided smile. He’s wearing an old grey hoody with a broken zipper, and jeans that are frayed at the knees.
He asks you out for coffee, diffident, like he expects you to refuse.
You say yes.
**
He kisses you for the first time nearly two weeks later, under the light of a crescent moon so bright it makes the white sand of the beach shine like snow. In bare feet, you have to reach up on tiptoe, and he wraps warm arms around you and draws you in close. You can taste his smile under your mouth. He takes your breath away: it’s a feeling you’re getting used to.
**
Sam doesn't talk about his family, not on that first coffee date, not on your second date, when you see Last Year at Marienbad in the student cinema, nor on the third, fourth or fifth. You figure he’ll get round to it in time, but he doesn’t.
There's nothing in his room that suggests that he ever belonged to anyone. His roommate has photos on a pinboard, a first-aid certificate, and a banner from some high school in the Mid-west.
Sam has none of these things, no family pictures, no souvenirs. All his clothes are old, probably second-hand. All his books are new.
You wonder if he's lost someone. You wonder if he's run away.
You don’t ask, not yet. There’s time.
**
He holds your face in his hands, and kisses you with his wide, beautiful mouth, over and over until your breath is stolen, and he lets you roll him over and undress him, lets you take your time and explore, button by button.
God, he’s beautiful.
It hurts, that first time together, not your first time ever but it might as well be for all it resembles the other times you’ve done this. Sam’s huge, inside you, almost painfully so, and limber and warm underneath you. His eyes hold yours, shocked and intent, like he can see everything you are, every part of you, inside you, and he’s invading your body, everywhere, and you welcome him in.
He moves, and you do, too, and there’s pleasure then, shaping you new, dark and heavy and insistent. There’s a rhythm there, strong and sweet, and the pleasure chases the pain right away, and you’re right there, almost right there.
And then Sam stills, tensing suddenly, and hides his face against your shoulder.
“Jess,” he says, a plea, an apology, a prayer, almost, and comes, trembling in your arms. You hold him through it, your body clenching with disappointment even as your heart swells with tenderness.
You kiss his sweaty forehead. “It’s alright, baby,” you whisper, and you mean it. It doesn’t matter.
After a minute, when he’s himself again, he moves downwards, and buries his face between your thighs. He eats you out with such gentle tenacity that you feel yourself surging towards him, wet and open and utterly beside yourself with the goodness of it, the intimacy and embarrassment and delight of it.
You’re right on the verge again when he pulls away, and climbs up your body. You can feel he’s hard again, and this time, you put your hands through his hair and drag his lips to yours.
“Fuck me,” you hiss against his mouth, and he does, and this time it lasts and lasts, until there’s nothing but the two of you, nothing but his movement in you, nothing but his body and yours. And it’s perfect.
“Jess,” he says, again, afterwards, into your hair, and you turn your face into his neck, feel the pulse there, under your mouth.
**
You don’t move in together so much as he never really leaves: the details sort themselves out, and come February you’re living in a little apartment overlooking the campus.
You like to watch him when he sleeps. He has nightmares, but he can’t remember them afterwards.
He paints your kitchen wall a bright summer blue.
You swim together in the ocean.
You study together, late into the night.
He runs every morning, and gets back early enough to make you breakfast.
You argue about politics.
You bake him cookies.
You talk about getting a dog, about settling down, about what you’re both going to do when you graduate.
You think that this might be the beginning of the rest of your life.
**
One time, a goldfinch flies into the window outside, and lies, stunned and staring, on the concrete below.
Sam cradles it gently in his hands, a tiny little thing, and feeds it out of an eyedropper, bread soaked in soymilk. He lays it in a shoebox, on a dishtowel for warmth.
You wake in the dark hours of the night, and you can hear him talking to it, softly, trying to wheedle it into eating. It dies from shock before the morning. That’s the first time you ever see him cry.
You wrap it carefully in the same dishtowel and bury it under a tree near the library.
“You did your best,” you tell him, and he shakes his head, as if that will never be enough.
**
Sam can cook an excellent Spaghetti Bolognese, light on the parmesan, heavy on the basil, just the way you like it. He can clear a pool table in two minutes flat. He can finish the New York Times crossword, even on Saturdays. He’s a pretty terrible dancer. He's not great at parties, period: he watches everyone, quietly, like people are a foreign language to him, one that he understands well but isn’t confident speaking.
He can darn his socks, curled up on the couch with the needle held up to the light.
There a lot you don’t understand about him, but one thing you know for sure. Someone’s taken care to bring him up right. Someone's loved him.
**
You spend a lot of time imagining that person. The lost mother - green eyes, dark hair cut into a bob - the one introduced him to books, and literature and music. The one who taught him to help old ladies carry their groceries home, and taught him to study with a work-ethic you've never seen in any of your trust-fund friends.
You come to love her, that phantom mother. She taught him his respect for women, his passion for justice, his drive towards a better life for himself, for both of you. She dovetails sweetly into your idea of Sam, gentle and smart and dedicated, funny and and serious and brave.
Dean Winchester arrives in the middle of the night in November. He comes as a bit of a surprise.
**
Dean's good-looking, like Sam is, but in a completely different way, shortier, cockier. He flirts with you, right in front of Sam, and it’s annoying and endearing in equal parts – he must know it’s going nowhere, but it's a kind of default response to his own nervousness, like a blink or a stutter.
You don’t get why he’s nervous, though. Sam stands next to you, radiating angry and frustrated and irritated, but you know him better than that. When Dean crosses the room, Sam’s face turns toward him like a flower opening in the sun, and Sam’s imagined Mom dissipates into thin air.
Dean's not what you expected, but he fits. He’s the missing part of Sam, the key to the puzzle. He’s the one who’s loved Sam as much as you do. He’s the one Sam loves back. It just makes sense, somehow.
**
Sam follows Dean, on the basis of some mixed-up story of Dad and a hunting trip. It’s weird as all hell, but you trust him. You trust Dean to look after him.
Sam kisses you goodbye, softly, and holds you close. Later you’ll think back to that last kiss and wish it had been more than that brief touch of his mouth against yours, the whispered “thank you,” and quick, fierce hug.
You call after him “have fun, dingus,” and he turns back - sharp, bright grin - and he’s gone.
You come to realize that people don’t know when things are happening for the last time until it’s too late to go back and change them. You would have done a lot of things differently, if you’d known.
**
You burn on the ceiling, world tilted upside down, your blood drenching the bed below, with Sam, beautiful Sam, reaching toward you, trying to save what’s already lost.
It hurts more than anything you could possibly have imagined, your womb spilling out of you, the fire that engulfs you, the look in his eyes.
And then there’s death, or something like it.
**
After the pain, there’s silence. There’s light, warm and inviting and terrifying. The rest of the world’s dark in comparison, dark and damp and colorless, cast into perpetual shade.
You can’t go, though. Not yet.
You stand in a crowded street, and people walk past you, walk through you, and you watch as they drive past, Sam and Dean, in Dean’s ridiculous car. Sam looks out the window at the cloudy sky - so sad - and then he sees you standing there. His eyes open wide and his neck cranes back, and Dean drives on, oblivious.
Sam can see you.
He’s the only one who can.
**
You sit next to him that night at dinner. You stand across the street and watch him use a fake ID to get access to the remains of a crashed plane. You watch the two of them hunting together, evil things that you never dreamed existed. They fight a Wendigo, a poltergeist, an angry spirit with a hook for a hand. You watch Sam saving people, over and over, because he couldn't save you.
This is what Sam never told you about. This crazy life he’s led, this crazy, heroic, dangerous life.
And through it all, his brother, at his side. That's the thing you don't understand: why he never told you about Dean.
**
But then, there are lots of things you never told him. You never liked the chicken soup he used to make you when you were sick, but you ate it anyway. You didn’t like the smell of Opium but you wore it because he bought it for you. You knew he sometimes let you win at chess, but you let him win at poker, so you figured you were even.
The main thing you never told him, the thing you never could find the words for, was how he made you feel: like every hurt, every heartbreak, every tiny event in your life, led you to the time when you were together. No one in your whole life had ever made you feel the way you felt when he looked at you, like you were something different, something special.
You think maybe that’s why you’re still here, because Sam still looks at you like that.
He makes you feel real.
**
He talks to you, when Dean’s not there.
“Remember that time at Caitlin’s party,” he says. “Remember? We made out under the walnut tree in the back yard, and our clothes were covered in that black stuff from the walnuts.”
You can’t answer him, but if you could, you’d remind him that he had walnut shaped bruises on his back for a week, and the black never came out of your sweatshirt, just faded to a dark green that stained forever.
“I’m scared I’m losing it,” he says. “Dean doesn’t understand.”
You can’t answer him, but if you could, you’d tell him that Dean sees more than Sam thinks. Dean’s scared Sam’s losing it, too. Almost as much as he's scared of losing Sam.
”I dreamed about you burning,” he says, like the confession is being torn from him. “I should have warned you.”
You can’t answer him, but even if you could, you wouldn’t know what to say.
**
You sit on the end of the bed when he’s sleeping, wishing you could keep his nightmares at bay. Dean watches over him, too, your mirror image, and in those moments you see Dean’s private face, the one even Sam never sees.
“It’s all right, Sammy,” Dean whispers, gruff voice belying the care with which he strokes Sam’s hair away from his face. In his sleep, Sam calms, and turns towards the touch, soothed. “It’s going to be all right.”
**
“It’s an Ogopogo,” Dean says, over dinner one night, relishing the word, “a lake demon,” and Sam sits and listlessly shuffles salad around his plate. He’s gotten thinner, paler, his hair lank across his face. He casts a sideways glance at you, and you slide in beside him, a hand on his knee that neither of you can feel. It’s comforting, nevertheless. Somehow.
“Okay,” Sam answers.
**
Sam wakes after midnight. He dresses silently, and you follow him down to the lake.
He stands there, still as a statue, knee-deep in water, for an hour or more, and you watch. You never tire of watching. He cuts his palm with his hunting knife, and lets the blood drip into the water, and you realize he’s offering himself up.
He’s looking at you, strangely triumphant, as the creature rises from the murk and drags him down.
**
Dean won’t wake. He’s flat on his back, with his forearm across his eyes, and you scream at him, silently, and nothing happens.
It takes everything you’ve got, all the energy in you; you throw yourself against the bed, again and again, and nothing happens, nothing.
It’s Sam, you howl, wake up, it’s Sam, and somehow, somehow, you flail at the glass on the bedside table, and it falls, and smashes to the ground, and Dean wakes and sees you, really sees you.
You’re crying, now, Sam, it’s Sam. Dean follows you out of the motel room, running in bare feet across the asphalt of the parking lot and down through the woods to the lake.
You dive down, and the dark water closes silently over your head. Sam’s been dragged way down, hidden in the deepest part of the water, and you follow. He’s dying, you can see it: you know what that looks like. He looks at you through the murk and smiles and reaches for you one last time. And then Dean is there, diving near you, through you, to drag his brother to the air and light.
You sit on the pebbled shore and watch as Dean breathes the life back into him, watch as Sam turns weakly to the side and coughs up putrid lake water, watch as Dean sags back against the beach with his hands covering his face.
**
Dean’s mouth is a thin line, almost nothing at all, and his anger is so palpable that you can feel it in the air, feel it right through you.
“When were you going to tell me?” he asks Sam, and Sam just shrugs.
Dean wants to salt and burn you.
Sam won’t let him. It wouldn’t work, anyway.
It’s not some strand of hair or lost possession which is keeping you here. You’re in Sam’s heart, and he’s in yours. He won’t let you go, because you’re part of him. He can’t.
**
“You can’t have him,” Dean says, gently.
It’s late at night, and you’re not even sure he knows for certain you’re there.
Sam’s asleep, but restless, and Dean’s in his customary place, sitting, watching. You let him see you, perched in the same position on the opposite side of the bed.
You expect him to rage at you, or threaten, but he’s simply immovable. In contrast to his solidity, you feel like the air will take your atoms and scatter them away. Sam’s gaze strengthens you, it always has. Dean’s turns you to nothing.
Your hands shimmer before your eyes, and the light shines behind Dean, bright and warm, touching the tips of his hair with gold.
You can’t go into it.
You’re not free yet.
“I’ll look after him,” Dean says, pleading. “You know what he’s like. He won’t forget you. But I won't let you have him.”
You believe him.
But it’s not his decision.
**
“Wait for me in the light,” Sam says, and you know he’s saying goodbye. He's got to hunt, and he can't do what he has to when you're there watching.
You remind him of a blue kitchen, a moonlit beach, a walnut tree. You remind him of everything that's gone.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
It's not true. He’s got a long road ahead of him. You’re just his first loss; you won’t be his last.
Leaving him is like dying all over again, a tearing feeling in your chest that chokes you. You’d give your soul to stay, if you knew how. But Sam’s letting you go. It’s his last act of love, and it hurts worse than any punishment he could have chosen.
And because he loves you that much, you have to let him go, too.
**
You wait and watch, out of sight, just a little longer.
You watch Sam sitting on the trunk of the car. You watch as Dean hoists himself up, so they’re sitting there together, looking out on a lake that will be safe now, for children to swim in, for farm animals to drink in, for people to fish in.
Dean bumps his shoulder against Sam’s, and Sam looks down at where his hands are clasped, white-knuckled, in his lap. His face twists up, and he makes a small, ugly noise and turns his face into Dean’s chest. Dean puts an arm round him, and holds him close.
That’s the last time you see Sam cry.
**
You don’t know what will happen next.
The light's blinding, now, so beautiful, so terrifying, so strange, so very bright.
Sam, you think, in the last moment.
And that’s all there is.