Chapter Text
No matter how many times he’s had to do it, Sam has never gotten used to rummaging through a dead stranger’s sock drawer.
Sifting through anyone’s delicates and forgotten, tucked-away secrets (empty wrappers, overdue bills, sex toys - you name it; he’s found it) feels intrusive enough as is, let alone when all you can see while doing it is their blank face staring up from a mortuary trolley. When all you can think is, these are the clothes they would be wearing if they had lived to see today.
In this case, the chest of drawers stuffed full of mismatched socks and tatty bras belongs - or rather, belonged - to twenty-six-year-old Jackie Denton: born, raised, and stuck in the same 200 population nowhere town her whole life; underpaid fry cook at a local greasy spoon; and Old Cairn, West Virginia’s most recently deceased.
Her body was found two days prior in the ditch beside Cardinal Road, an hour’s drive out from town. Naked, save for a white bed sheet spread over her. One laceration was found on the throat, nearly deep enough to sever, the likely cause of death. Her body was covered in various bruises, though none of which seemed to indicate struggle, and the post-mortem revealed evidence of sexual penetration, likely from multiple foreign objects. She bled a great deal.
Most importantly, though, and what drew him and Dean to what may otherwise look like a cut-and-dry murder scene, were the sigils on her palms and soles. The same intricate patterns Sam had seen before in summoning circles and carved into the desks of psychics, drawn on in blood. Her own, the lab discovered. Some of the lines had been scuffed, sweated off before her death and worn away by the elements, but there’s no mistaking witchcraft when you see it.
Dean laughs suddenly - something chirpy, the sound of victory. Pretty much the only thing Sam’s heard since they got in here, other than the dull, slow beeping of his EMF reader and the shuffling of hands inside cupboards.
“You got something?”
“More than something, Sammy,” he calls, the grin visible through his voice.
Must be good then, thank God. They’ve been scouring her room for half an hour already, and Randy Grey, landlord of the house share and occupant of the room down the hall with the overwhelming herbal smell, has got to be losing his patience. Itching for these two ‘feds’ to get out of his hair and away from his farm.
Sam gratefully slams shut the drawers he’s been rooting through and turns to the other side of the room, where Dean is standing proudly showing off an altar in her closet.
His eyes widen, impressed. Not that he should be, really, but he has to admit to himself that it’s one fine altar: velvet draping, tall candles, ceremonial knives, a chalice, neatly arranged vials of various substances. Two figures sit in pride of place in the centre - a small, hand-carved Great Mother and Horned God. Hanging from above, dried flowers and rabbit's feet, crow’s feathers and crystals.
Rowena herself wouldn’t scoff at it.
“And…” Dean throws a journal at him. It’s heavy in his hands, thick-bound and tatty. Can’t be any more than a couple of years old. “Check that out.”
A quick flick through is enough to convince Sam it’s worth taking. Near every page is full to the brim with notes and diagrams, diligently dated and bookmarked. And if that wasn’t enough, he has learned to recognise, these last too many years, when crazy is seeping into handwriting, and Jackie’s - poor girl - is textbook.
“Looks good,” he says as he hands it back.
“‘Sides, it’s not like we’ve managed to find anything else,” Dean mutters, pocketing the journal. “We’ve got a few other guys we could question anyway if this comes up empty.”
When he says a few, he means a few. Very few. Jackie was by no means popular. A household name around these parts, as Randy explained to them on the way in, having no trouble chatting shit about a dead girl, but for none of the right reasons.
Her mom had been on the bottle since she was born, never managed to get over those baby blues, fell off the map somewhere down the line, and her daddy was a character in his own right. Nothing ever got proven, of course - they’re a year too late to get any kind of truth out of him now; the bastard’s long since been buried - but small-town folk talk, and, well, there are only so many reasons a girl turns out like Jackie.
Troubled, Randy called her. Off-putting. Said that you could see the damage.
Her closet is a testament to that.
Dean steps away, and Sam looks down at the new pile of mess he’s made atop all her others. A mound of bags and blankets that covered the altar; all the tiny, precious things she had been keeping underneath it; empty hangers. Not that it matters, not really. She’s not going to be coming home any time soon.
Still, Sam hangs back when Dean heads down to let Randy know they’re heading off. Spends a couple of minutes of his time setting her covers straight, binning the old pizza boxes and polypropylene cups she’s left scattered about, and closing the closet doors. He takes that little bit of extra care because he can’t help but feel for Jackie.
He sometimes wonders if people can see the damage on him, too.
Sam walks back to the B&B with two bags of shitty, greasy food and no new info. Not that he expected to get any, of course, but he at least hoped to notice something in the old diner where Jackie once worked: a patron in the corner with shifty eyes, a waitress with a not-so-bright smile.
But no, nothing. It was as if she had never worked there. The air was light, not brought down by loss; eyes were wet with tears of laughter, not sorrow. He had to wonder for a moment, waiting there for his name to be called, stomach churning from the stench of the fryer and thoughts of forgotten socks, if any of them had even noticed she was gone.
So now, pushing his way through the entrance of the only rest place in town - a classic, Mom and Pop B&B, a grand departure from their usual style, all polished oak and frilly lace doilies and big smiles from the reception on his way through to their room - all he can hope is that her journal comes good.
Dean’s eyes light up the second he pushes open the door. He looks up from the journal in his hands and gives Sam, or rather, the two bags he’s carrying, a real warm grin. Must be hungry. And a good thing, too, because Sam’s not so sure he can stomach all that much of his own.
“Find anything useful?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the journal as he drops the bags on the table.
“Well,” Dean sighs as he leans over and starts tearing them open, fishing out his triple cheeseburger and taking a bite in seconds flat. Practised ease, like he’s a bloodhound. Through his first mouthful, grease-spitting, he continues: “She was asking for it.”
“Dean,” he huffs, rolling his eyes, ignoring how cold the words feel on his ears, hitting like a glacial breeze. It’s not unusual for his brother to joke in such a distasteful way. It just feels different this time. “Come on.”
“No, I mean literally.” With his spare hand, fingers fat slick and shining, he throws the journal over to Sam. It’s all been newly dog-eared. “Check it out.”
Turns out, Dean was right. She was asking for it. Part of it, anyway.
Jackie, Sam discovers over dinner (half of a chicken club: the only tolerable thing on the menu), was a member of a small collective of witches. From what they can see written here, their magick was pretty clean. Didn’t involve any devil deals or human sacrifice or the like. It was more along the lines of Gnostic Mass and protection charms.
In the days leading up to her death, though, much of her journal discussed their plans to attempt a new kind of magick. With Jackie as the ritualist.
“What even is eroto-comatose lucidity?” Dean mumbles through a mouthful of fries. “You ever heard of that one before?”
“Some kind of sex magick,” he explains, a little red in the face. He first heard of it through the books he inherited from Rowena, and she didn’t skimp on details. “The idea is that the ritualist gets aroused without relief to the point of exhaustion, and when they fall into this liminal state, they can supposedly commune with their Gods or receive revelation. It was developed by Crowley back in the 1900s, apparently.”
Dean raises his eyebrows. “Our Crowley?”
“Different Crowley.”
“Huh…” He mulls the idea over for a second before settling on leaving his reaction at, “Weird.”
“Not inherently bad, though. Not any kind of ritual that’d kill her.”
Which leaves the question: what went wrong? Was it a case of her coven turning on her, making her believe she was participating in one ritual when in reality they planned to take her life for another? Or did they invite the wrong deity, let something more sinister slip through the veil? Either way, it’s her body used in a way she hadn’t wanted. A tough way to go - Sam would know.
“Right, well, guess we’ve gotta coven to hit,” Dean sighs. He licks his fingers clean, screws up his garbage, tosses it over to the bin in the corner-
And misses. Spectacularly badly.
“...Tomorrow.”
Sam smirks. “Yeah, alright, old man. Getting too close to bedtime?”
“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Dean mocks, kicking off his shoes and socks and falling back onto his bed. “At least I'm not going grey.”
In retaliation, Sam chucks one of the room’s hundreds of gaudily patterned couch pillows at his face. Unfortunately for him, Dean takes it in his stride. Grabs the extra pillow and throws it onto his bed - already lined with an ungodly amount of plush furnishings: ‘a grandma’s paradise,’ they had joked when they first walked in.
It’s not long before Dean’s flat out. It’s far longer until Sam is. He decides to spend the night catching up on the details he missed, flicking through every page of that diary until the words stop making sense and the lines between writer and reader thin and blur.
When he finally does fall asleep, all too late in the evening, he is met by dreams of warm rooms and cold hands.
The order operates out of an old fabric mill about an hour's drive from town, one that got abandoned back in the eighties when the business was told to shove off by the local council because the roof started caving in. The building is wide but squat, brick and steel, unassuming enough that, should anyone pass by on one of these scarcely used back roads, they wouldn’t think to look twice.
They know all this because Jackie told them. It’s not often that they’re fortunate enough for details to be literally spelt out for them - in this case, the address written plain as day, directions for navigating the roads, along with the names and numbers of several members.
Sam, running on three hours of sleep and one bite of a bagel, finds it a welcome change of pace.
“Just down there,” he says, gesturing to the side road to the left, just as the tinny voice on his phone announces they have reached their destination. They pull to a stop in a small, gravel-lined parking lot right before the entrance. The area is ill-maintained, overgrown, but certainly suitable for squatting - or whatever else these guys have been doing here.
Theirs is not the only car in the lot. Just on the other side, tucked close to the building in a spot it seems to have long claimed, is a busted Nissan Leaf - which they can only assume belongs to the scrawny twenty-something smoking a cig against the hood. Sam and Dean give each other the same look, pocket their guns, and head out.
He doesn’t seem all that phased to see them approaching; more resigned, as if he knew this was coming. Shit, maybe he did. These are witches they’re dealing with, after all.
“Shit. You cops?” he calls out to them after a long drag, voice hoarse and croaky, biting back a cough. He’s in for another as soon as he’s finished, fingers shaking every moment they’re not at his lips. They’re in plain clothes today, but Sam suspects their stern demeanours and not-so-concealed carries are what have tipped him off to them not being there out of a mutual love for the dark arts.
Dean takes the lead this time, lets Sam hang just behind him, watching his back. He doesn’t answer the question, only asks one of his own: “You a witch?”
“I prefer Magician,” the man says with an air of disdain before dropping his cigarette to the floor and stamping it out with his shoe. “Hunters, then?”
They nod.
“Fuck,” he mutters, rubbing a hand over his face. Though he tries to keep his expression straight and closed, there is a detectable undercurrent of anxiety running through him. “Look, I swear, I know how this looks, but we didn’t do it.”
“Do what?” Dean asks.
“Kill her. Jackie. That’s what you’re here about, right?”
“Sure is.” Dean plucks the journal from his pocket and waves it in front of the man’s face. He turns sallow at the sight of it, visibly swallows. “See, we’ve got it down in here that you guys were meant to perform a ritual the night she died. How’d that go for you?”
Mr Magician sighs, something heavy, right from the soul, and starts picking at a loose thread at the hem of his shirt, avoiding their eyes. Sam tries to decide whether this makes him look more guilty or more like a scorned kid getting told off for something he didn’t do. Unfortunately for their case, he’s leaning towards the latter.
“This wasn’t how it was meant to happen. We studied this ritual, all of us, for months, and Jackie- she said she was ready, okay, she swore it. So she fell into the trance like she was supposed to, everyone thought it was going fine, you know? Exactly as we read it… But something wasn’t right when she came to.”
Sam furrows his brow. “In what way?”
“Like, usually - well, from what we heard - people come out of this, and they feel relieved or blessed or whatever. I mean, she was talking to our God; she was so excited beforehand, we all were. But then afterwards, Jackie was just…” He trails off, scrunches his face. He’s starting to look a little green around the gills. There’s a hollow look in his eyes that Sam can sympathise with.
When he begins again, his voice trembles. “Scared. Really scared. She kept saying that it was him. Over and over, it was him. That he’d found her again, that she’d never get away. And, I mean, I’m not stupid - she told us about what her Dad did to her, we knew who she meant.”
“How could that have happened, then? If you all did the ritual to the letter?”
He shrugs halfheartedly, wipes his runny nose. “Can’t say for sure. Our best guess is that she lost track of her thoughts during the process. Like, the whole point is to meditate on the deity throughout, ignore all the stimulation and whatever, just focus. But I guess in hindsight, with her history… Maybe she got the wires mixed up. Forgot what she was meant to be doing, who she was with.”
“Yeah, hindsight’s a bitch,” Dean says, voice hard, clearly pissed. Sam feels more sick than angry. “I mean, if you knew, couldn’t anyone else have offered? None of you stopped to think maybe this wasn’t the right person to shoot the shot?”
He looks down, sheepish, ashamed. Whispers, with all the weight in the world:
“We didn’t think.”
They take a second. Breathe. Dean wipes his hand over his face.
“And then?”
“Well, she, uh… she got up. She grabbed one of the knives we’d used to draw her blood for the sigils, and she… well, I’m guessing you saw the body, right?”
“So she killed herself?”
He nods. “And then we hid the body. Not very well, I take it. None of us knew what to do; we’d never seen anything like that before.”
“Where are the rest of you, then?” Sam asks, looking around a near-empty lot, ears straining to find voices which aren’t there.
“They’ve all cleared out already. I was about to as well; you caught me just in time.” Sam peers through his windshield. Sees inside two boxes and a suitcase occupying the back seat. He supposes they were lucky. “I’m done with all this. We all are. I mean, Jackie was like a sister to us. I can’t risk anything like that again.”
Sam and Dean share a look, seem to agree he’s being genuine. He’s got that look about him, one they’ve learnt to recognise after a lifetime on the job. Genuine, all-consuming, life-ruining grief. Besides, it lines up with Jackie’s story well enough, and now it’s this guy’s word against no one's.
Shit, he’s only a kid, really - younger than them, anyway, and God knows they’d done worse in their lives by the time they were his age. There’s a good chance here that he can put all this behind him, make something of himself, not let the rest of his life be dictated by some dumb past mistake.
Or maybe they’re just going soft.
Either way, when Dean steps back and gives him the all clear to head off, he doesn’t waste a second.
They check out the mill. Just to clean up, check for any signs of EMF, foul play, any other reason Jackie may have done it other than of her own free will. That, and to make sure there are no stragglers left behind, planning to start their collective afresh. No forgotten hex bags or talismans strewn in corners to be found later by adventurous youths.
It’s big on the inside, too. One sprawling concrete chasm with a mezzanine overlooking the floor and an office and a break room at the back of that. All the machinery has been cleared out, and if the order bothered with furnishing the place, they took all that with them when they went. The walls are shoddy, close to crumbling, and the roof fares even worse - made more of hastily fixed tarpaulin now than the corrugated steel it once was.
Tucked away in one of those small back rooms is where Sam finds the mattress. It’s an ugly thing, like the kind of trash you’d find left on the side of a road, free to take or more likely to live there forever until it rots, with tatty corners and broken springs and a collage of stains in myriad colours.
There are cuffs left strewn over it. Soft ones, well-padded; not designed to hurt, only hold. He wonders how badly they were needed. If it came to a point where she begged them to stop and pulled on those restraints with the last of her strength, where she wanted out more than she wanted answers, where the faces of her friends turned into the faces of another.
Just two paces from its foot is a pool of blood. Tacky and brown, buzzing with tiny flies. Sam is struck sick with the knowledge that this room - filthy mattress, crumbling walls, cobwebs in the corners - is the last thing Jackie ever saw.
This is no place to die.
God. She must have really wanted it.
He swallows down the lump in his throat, and it sits like a block of ice in his stomach.
“Oh, shit,” Dean curses from behind him, making Sam jump. If his brother notices, he doesn’t say. “Well, those lot did a piss poor job of cleaning up after themselves.”
“Not funny, Dean.”
“Yeah, alright, Grouchy,” Dean teases, rolling his eyes. Sam has a hard time finding the humour. “The other office was clear; you find anything in here?”
Sam sighs, looks down at his blank reader. “Nothing apart from the obvious.”
“Right.” Dean takes a few steps forward and starts looking around. Grimaces as the blood, swats at flies. Picks up the cuffs and drops them again in seconds, then wipes his hands on his jeans. Like they’re filthy. Like the whole thing is. “Guess that’s it then.”
Sam’s not so sure it is.
Jackie’s father’s grave isn’t hard to find. It isn’t well-loved, either.
It sits in a back corner of the small town’s only cemetery: an ill-managed plot of land shoved at the back of an ageing church with dwindling patronage. The bodies must be crammed in down there, lying cheek to cheek under all this earth. It’s hard to walk for all the headstones in their path.
The headstone they’ve sought is nothing to write home about, so easy to miss that they almost walk past it. All he has to mark his grave is a slab of stone carved with his name and dates: no passage inscribed, no words about his love, his honour, no mention of the only person he is - or was - survived by. In the short year it has been placed, the weather has taken its toll, buried it under leaves and grass and mud, with nobody there willing to tend to it.
His body burns well. Burns bright. Crackles and flickers, warms their hands, stings their eyes. His smoke rises, itches their noses, fills their lungs, and dissipates into the air. It reeks, but it’s worth it to know that means he’s gone. Whatever good that’ll do now.
They stand there for a good hour or two, watching the flames roar and dwindle. At one point, Dean jokes that they should’ve brought marshmallows. Sam pretends to laugh. By the time it has died down, there is nothing of that man left but char and salt and bone.
It still doesn’t feel like enough.
They agree to pack up their things and set off that same night.
It’s not as if Old Cairn boasts any kind of nightlife to entice them into sticking around any longer, and it’s probably for the best they make a quick exit. It’s not like the chances of anyone stumbling across the graveyard before dawn are particularly high, but better safe than sorry.
The last thing they want, after all the hell they have been through, is to wind up in jail for something so humdrum as grave digging. That’s a rookie hunter’s mistake.
The folk at the B&B seem sad to see them go. Wave them off as they trudge past reception with their heavy bags and dirty fingernails, remind them to stop by again in a tone edging on desperate.
“Business must be slow if they want us back again,” Dean remarks as soon as they’re out of earshot, pushing through the entrance doors and out onto a street they’ll both be glad never to see again.
“I’m sure they’ll change their minds when they realise the card we gave them is a dud.”
Dean shrugs, smirks. “Or maybe they’re just grateful for the company. I mean, it’s not every day the FBI rock up in town, is it? That’ll be a story.”
They cross the road and reach the Impala. Dean can get a little nervy leaving her parked just anywhere these days - the lock’s long since failed them, and the back left window is stuck rolled an inch down; neither of them will admit it, but she’s on the way out - but that hasn’t been a problem here. In all three of their days holed up in this shithole town, they’ve seen perhaps a total of ten people walking down this street, and not a single other car.
Sam snorts. “It’ll be a story when they realise we were lying. What do you suppose they’ll figure? Serial killers?”
It’s warmer inside the car. Not quite cosy but close enough. They both practically sink into their seats once they’re in, that old vinyl so cracked and worn it’s moulded to their shapes like memory foam. Dean starts getting himself settled in: tunes the radio to some old rock station, wipes a smudge from the rearview with his jacket sleeve, and kicks off the engine. There is nothing more comforting to either than that familiar, reliable purr.
“Better that than necrophiliacs.”
“You think?”
“Totally.” They start moving, ground peeling away. “Serial killers get documentaries and fan clubs, and what do necros get?”
“Huh.”
Sam has to concede.
They’re well out of town in minutes. It goes from everything around them to a dim, blurry speck in the rear window to nothing but a shitty memory. It feels good to see it go.
That night, in the car, head bobbing against the passenger side window as Dean speeds his way west down Route 50, Sam has a dream.
It’s not as if this is anything new. It still happens from time to time, when stress runs high, or faith runs low, when the nights draw longer and colder, and the world feels more distant. He can recognise it now for what it is: notices the patterns, feels the differences.
But seeing the devil is never any less disquieting.
His eyes are so blurry that it’s hard to make out the figure leering over him, but he knows he is there. Can smell him: burnt feathers and necrosis.
He wants to ask, what are you doing here? But the words won’t form, turn to sludgy whimpers on his lips that make the devil grin.
(He always did like that, didn’t he? When you were too fragile to fight, too sick to complain. When his light was so bright you couldn’t see what he was doing to you, only feel it, every second of it, in terrible clarity.)
A hand falls, strokes his cheek. The motion is loving, but the act is not; there is no comfort to be found here. The devil’s skin is hard as marble and bitterly cold, and each finger on his face is a dagger to his heart.
Sam tries to move, to raise his head, his arms, to push him away, to beg him stop, please, I don’t want this, I changed my mind, but he is far too heavy. There is nothing he can do but lie still, breathe, and remind himself that he can’t hurt him, not anymore, not in any way that matters.
The devil bears down. Leans closer, closer, until they’re eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. His breath is frigid. It smells like old iron.
Look at you, Lucifer says, lips grazing his, speaking into him, filling his lungs.
You’re filthy, Sam.
By the time Sam manages to claw his way out, the whole scene has changed.
They’ve pulled over onto the hard shoulder. The headlights of approaching cars illuminate them in brief flashes; they make the tiny raindrops scattered over the windscreen flicker and dance like TV static. Dean stares at him from the driver’s side, hands gripped tight around the wheel, white-knuckled.
And there is no devil on top of him.
“You alright?”
Dean sounds stilted and awkward, almost embarrassed to be there, the witness. Bad dreams are no stranger to them, but comforting afterwards is neither of their forte. He offers over a half-empty water bottle, though, which Sam graciously accepts. The gesture does more for him than words ever could.
“Yeah, sorry,” Sam croaks between shuddering breaths and heavy gulps. “Uh, how long was I out?”
“Couple of hours.”
It must have been. It’s darker now, the night deeper, more solid. Between them sit two empty cans of some obscure-branded energy drink and a packet of half-eaten jerky. They weren’t there when Sam shut his eyes.
It’s strange. It felt like he was dreaming forever. He’d hoped they would be closer to home by now.
“…You sure you’re okay though?” Dean starts while Sam is busy screwing the lid back on an empty bottle - anything to keep his hands busy, eyes down. “Started breathing pretty funny for a while. I couldn’t get through to you.”
“Yeah,” he lies. “Yeah, just… Weird dream.”
Dean raises his eyebrows, lets a smirk creep up on his face. “Sexy?”
Sam huffs, almost a laugh. All for show, of course, but Dean doesn't have to know that. The less Dean knows about this dream, the better.
“You know, I think I saw a sign for a Super 8 about twenty miles ahead. You wanna call it a night, pick back up again tomorrow?”
“Nah, don’t worry,” Sam says, stretching out his back, cracking his knuckles, his neck. Solidifying that step into wakefulness, the distinction between now and then. “I can, uh, take over driving for a while, if you want?”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
He’s done enough sleeping for one night.
Dean chews it over for a second, seems to want to resist, as he always does when anyone but himself offers to drive his car. But then he yawns, jaw clicking, eyes watering, and relents. Walks around the back of the car while Sam slides over into the driver’s side - not quite as comfortable, the dip deeper, moulded to slight curves he doesn’t have.
The radio is kept off the rest of the way. He lets himself listen to the hum of the engine, the sound of wheels running over wet tarmac, and, eventually, Dean’s peaceful snoring from the passenger side. His ears stay tuned in, alert, for any rogue noises, any whispering from the back seat, but the devil doesn’t disturb him again. Not tonight.
But that reprieve doesn’t last. It was foolish for him to hope he could leave those memories behind with that room in Old Cairn. To think that solving a case and burning a body would be enough to clear the devil’s spirit, too. He lingers longer than others. Sam should know this by now.
Still, better to suffer at home than on the road. Even if home is a term he uses all too loosely. It’s hard to look upon these unpainted walls, squeaky linoleum floors, and hollow halls and find any semblance of comfort. They never even bought their own bedding, their own crockery - it’s all decades-old hand-me-downs from halfway hunters.
Then again, they do say home is where the heart is, and his has always been wherever his brother is near.
Dean likes the bunker. Loves it, even. Doesn’t seem to care about how living windowless fucks up his circadian rhythm, how weeks can be lost down there in what feels like hours. He’s just happy to have something stable, a safe place to park the car. And when Dean feels stable, Sam does, too.
At least here, he’s in a room of his own when it happens. There is privacy and security. A comfort to be found in thick walls and locked doors, in salt lines and hand-carved warding. He can deal with this sudden, embarrassing onset of night terrors and piss-damp sheets and aching throats and phantom hands as long as there is no risk of anyone seeing it.
He’s never going to fully recover from Hell. He knows that; they all do. Dean won’t either. Until their dying days, they will suffer the consequences of returning from a place no one should - whether that looks like bouts of nightmares and shaking hands, or late-night binges and a trigger-happy finger.
But he can at least keep it to himself.
All shaken up, aren’t you, Sammy? Lucifer whispers into his ear, hand curling into his hair, pulling too tight. It’s close to the softest he’s ever held him. Did the poor whore Jackie’s story hit a little too close to home?
Is she why you’re thinking of me again? Of this?
Another hand now. Reaching down, down, down. His touch is soft, feather-light, but his nails are sharp like talons. They score his skin on their way down, down, down. They tear at his jeans all too easily.
Do you miss it?
He’d really like to wake up now. Please. He wants out. He changed his mind. Take them off-
Being my bitch?
One morning, a week or two since the hunt and only three miles into his usual ten-mile run, a stray twig on his path sends Sam falling flat on his hands and knees. It doesn’t hurt, not really, nothing does in comparison to all of it, but he still winces and hisses, raises his hands gingerly to inspect the damage.
His palms are indented, sore. They look more like pumice stone than flesh. At least he knows up here it bounces back. His joggers have torn on the right knee but not the left. A shame, he liked these, but unsurprising - they were nearing their end anyway, three whole years of use behind them. He’s bled only a little, just a smudge of red, barely a trickle, really. And yet when he looks down at it, he is overwhelmed by the desperate urge to cry.
Shock, he figures, counts for a lot of it.
And he is so, so tempted to give in to it, to just let go, let them fall - he can’t remember the last time he let himself; truth be told, he thought those wells had dried up long ago - until he hears heavy, limping footsteps approaching and a vaguely familiar voice call to him:
“Nasty tumble you just had there.”
Which is enough to remind him that he is both in public and an adult man, and that, no matter how tempting, sobbing over a scuffed knee is perhaps not the best look for him.
He turns around and recognises the face instantly. Floyd, he thinks his name is. Or something like that. One of the repeat faces around this lakeside. He and Sam keep a similar routine. Always pass in the morning at around seven thirty, share a smile, maybe a brief wave. Though while Sam runs, Floyd only walks - rather, a shuffle at best, not nearly enough to satisfy that yappy, overexcitable chihuahua of his that seems to drag him every step of the way.
One time, maybe a few years ago now, he helped Floyd to a nearby bench when he was overcome with a dizzy spell. Sat with him there until it passed, made sure it wasn’t anything worse, pet his weird dog, made a little conversation.
Funny how the tables turn.
“You alright, son?” he asks, voice warm but raspy, the sound of a long-time smoker reaping what he sowed.
Sam chuckles, sheepish, face tinted pink, and brushes his bloodied palms on his thighs. “Yeah, I’m good. Just lost my footing.”
“Well, I saw that part. You went flying for a second there,” he laughs, smiling.
(Something in Sam's chest aches at the thought of flying. It’s been years now since he last felt an angel’s feathered wings around him, the world breezing by in seconds. He never thought he’d miss it.)
“Need a hand?” Floyd offers, extending one down, but Sam shakes his head, insists he’s fine, really, no bother, and pulls himself to his feet with an ill-stifled groan. His knees have been giving him trouble lately, even before he crashed right down onto them - not that he’ll admit it. That’s age catching up; something he never thought he’d get to see.
He isn’t even sure he wants to.
He brushes himself off once he’s standing straight, rids himself of any stubborn pebbles and smudges of dirt. It’s as he’s looking down, making sure he’s put together, that he realises Floyd hasn’t walked off yet. He stands there, wild dog weaving between his feet, all his weight bearing down on his walking stick, and he just keeps looking.
It’s hard to pinpoint why he finds this so unnerving, knows he only means to be polite and look out for him. Hell, this might have been his first human interaction in weeks based on what little he knows about the know.
But there’s something in there. In how he waits still despite the toll it takes on his old bones. In the look in his eyes: that weariness, that tinge of sorrow, of apprehension. Something cold and distant behind his warm smile. The kind of look that says: I can see it, you know?
Sam clears his throat and takes a step back, off in the direction he was headed. Doesn’t say anything, isn’t sure he can at this moment, throat all choked and dry, but the gesture alone seems to be enough for Floyd to get the message.
He nods, says, “You take care now,” in a tone that makes Sam’s stomach churn. As he jogs off, picks his pace back up, gets himself into that rhythm, he can’t help but wonder:
Did he always use to look at you like that?
(It was him. He found me again. I’ll never get away.)
Picture Lucifer in The Empty. Picture total absence: gone forever, never existed. Picture tar and oil and sludge and vacuum and space and so much space and no stars no blood no pain no anything no hand on your arm no tongue in your mouth no-
(Oh, don’t be stupid. He’s never gone.)
Sam dreams again that night. His face is buried into a sodden mattress, there are cuffs on his wrists, and no matter how many times he begs, pleads, says no, no, I changed my mind, it wasn’t worth it, I don’t want this anymore, the devil doesn’t relent.
He wakes drooling and half-hard, and he thinks of Jackie.
Doesn’t want to; can’t help himself. Young vic, Old Cairn, stripped and bleeding. One of a million hunts, a name he should have forgotten by now. Searching for God only to be faced by her rapist. Driven to the edge by the knowledge that even death won’t separate them.
It’s a story he knows all too well.
Only he never needed a ritual to open his eyes to it. He’s always been a psychic.
Sam blinks, and then there is a plate in front of him. On it, a childhood favourite: hot dog spaghetti, smothered in butter. One of the few meals Dad was capable of reliably cooking, and the first he ever taught Dean to make once he was tall enough to reach the stove.
Most food came from cans, but not this. This was a family meal, a sit-together-at-the-table-and-talk meal.
Speaking of, Dean’s here. He hadn’t even noticed him enter the room, but there he is, settling himself down on the chair opposite him with a plate of his own, though it’s abundantly clear from the look on his face that he has no intention of touching it.
It’s strange to see him down here among these forgotten things. Stuffed between dusty boxes, balancing his plate atop a stack of centuries-old manuscripts and broadside papers. He wonders how long it took to find him, how many rooms he had to pore through before he finally stumbled his way down here, found Sam hidden at a table at the back of the bunker’s deepest archive.
Dean hates the archives. Claims these dingy, shelf-lined rooms set off his non-existent allergies anytime Sam asks him to come down to give him a hand. Not that Sam can blame him, there are plenty more exciting things to see in the bunker. It’s not like Sam ever finds himself wandering into the garage unless he’s got reason to think Dean’s one bad day away from blowing his head off.
His being here shows intention. Proves Sam’s not fooling anyone.
“What’s this?” Sam asks, staring down at his plate, using his fork to twist noodles into mountains. Dad always hated it when they’d play with their food, especially food like this, table food, home-cooked food. Didn’t ever want any of it to go to waste.
But Dad’s not here now, is he? He’s in Hell. There are much bigger problems than wasted meals down there.
“What’s it look like? Dinner.” Dean’s stabbing down at hunks of meat, breaking them apart into tiny, mushy, meaty scraps. Sam has to look away; it brings back too many memories.
“Yeah, obviously. But, I mean, why?”
Dean raises his eyebrows. “What, is it a crime to wanna hang out with my brother?”
“Is that what this is?” Sam asks, chancing a glance up. He’s seen Dean less tense when tied up and beaten. “Just hanging out?”
For a moment, Dean doesn’t say a word. Stares down at his plate with dead eyes, poking and mashing. Takes one big mouthful and swallows with a grimace, hardly chewing, as if to prove that’s all this is: a shared meal, a casual conversation.
And then:
“I was thinking maybe we could spend a few nights at Jody’s place.”
“...Oh.”
This shouldn’t feel so devastating. He loves Jody, loves the girls, loves spending time away from this glorified crypt. Any other time, he’d be up for it. Would be the one suggesting it, even. Planning the trip weeks in advance, aligning it with some kind of birthday or celebration, picking out a nice bottle of red to gift her when they show - something she’ll shut in her cupboard for better company before cracking open a beer.
But it’s not any other time. He doesn’t want them to see him like this: fragile and skittish, paranoid, falling apart. What will they do if he wakes up screaming? If he pisses the bed or moans the devil’s name?
He doesn’t want much. He just doesn’t want it to be so visible.
“You asking or telling?” he asks, already knowing the answer; that’s the way it's always been with Dean - the illusion of choice.
“Look, Sam, this isn’t…” His brother sighs deeply, drops his fork, rubs his eyes. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You can’t keep wasting all your time down here.”
Sam scoffs. “I’m not wasting it, Dean.”
This, in particular, is a bugbear of Sam’s. When Dean hits a rough patch and starts isolating himself, he spends his hours drinking himself to oblivion or pissing bullets away in the shooting range or hiding under his covers like a kid. And because that’s what he does, he thinks everyone else does, too.
This time isn’t wasted, not like Dean wastes his. He’s working hard, staying busy. He’s keeping the devil out.
“I mean, how long have you been down here anyway? I swear I haven’t seen you upstairs in, like, weeks.”
An exaggeration, but not far off. He hasn’t left the bunker since the fall. The scabs are long healed.
“A couple of nights, I guess,” he answers vaguely.
“Jesus, Sam,” Dean hisses, shaking his head. “Do you even sleep?”
Sam shrugs, looks down. He does sleep. Just doesn’t want to, is the thing.
That’s when Lucifer finds him.
“So?” Dean’s eyes are on him, waiting. Sam’s not giving him much to work with, he knows. He’s being remarkably patient about this, and Sam has to wonder how long that will last. It always wanes eventually. He can’t afford to stay sick forever.
“When are we leaving?”
It’s a long drive to Sioux Falls. It’s not nearly long enough.
Jody’s home is all big smiles, couch pillows, family photos, and hidden weapons. There’s so much life in every corner. From a fridge practically plastered in novelty magnets Claire has brought home from far-off hunts, to ring marks on the dining table and muddy boots lined up by the door. It’s everything the bunker isn’t. It’s everything he grew up wanting.
It should feel good to be here.
Sam likes to think he puts on a good show of it. He pulls Jody into a hug as he enters the door - one-armed, firm, a few pats on the back, just as he always does, no matter how badly the contact makes his skin crawl. Sits shoulder to shoulder with Dean and Alex on a cramped couch, doesn’t once shiver. Drinks what he’s given and eats his fill and laughs along. Refrains from running.
When Alex has to head off early for a graveyard shift at the hospital, he bids her a warm farewell, helps Jody pack up a Tupperware full of snacks to see her through till morning, and even offers to drive her there, though he’s politely declined. When Patience asks for stories of his Stanford days, he happily obliges, though half the stories he tells are false - anything true about that time in his life is either tainted or washed away with the years.
But he can only keep pretending for so long. He’s getting older now, far older than he has any right to be, and his capacity for showmanship dwindled somewhere around his second day in the Cage.
Dean’s noticed. He’s noticed all night, Sam’s devolution. Glared when he spun tales of busy days and enjoying the sunshine, grimaced (as if he has any right to judge) at how quickly he started chugging back beers once Kaia started asking about the last hunt they went on, slapped his hands away from his mouth when he’d start biting at his nails.
The night winds down. Slowly to begin, measured in empty glasses and falling words per minute, and then faster, faster, until it’s only he and Dean left. Empty table, deck of cards between them, clock in the corner ticking past midnight.
Sam’s knee is going a mile a minute, jolting up and down underneath the table at such a pace he wouldn’t be surprised if the whole limb snapped in two. There’s something in him that knows he needs to run. It’s getting ready, revving the engine.
It’s only a matter of when the starting gun will sound.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Dean asks, shuffling cards he has no intention of playing.
Sam shrugs, plays the fool, tries to laugh it off. “You haven’t exactly given me the chance.”
It doesn’t work.
“I mean,” Dean huffs, voice hard, direct, all pretences dropped. “Why haven’t you been sleeping?”
This was always coming, Sam knows that. But the confirmation still hurts. Rips all the air from his lungs and stamps on his heart. An alarm starts ringing in his head: visible, visible, visible. He can see the damage.
He swallows, throat dry. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Dean’s hands still. He pushes his cards into a neat stack, sets them aside. Takes a swig from his near-empty bottle.
“Cut the bull, Sam. I-” It starts gruff, angry, but then he grinds himself to a halt. Grits his teeth, slams his fist to his mouth, forces himself to take a measured breath. He’s getting better at that lately. Mellowing out. Oddly enough, it’s more unnerving than if he got up and punched him.
“Are you, you know…” He makes a vague spiralling gesture towards his head. “Seeing him again? You know, uh, is it like last time? Will he not let you sleep?”
“No.” He shuts that down immediately, aggressively. Just the mention of ‘last time’ brings to mind the stench of hospital antiseptic and his head cooking under ECT. Worse than Dean knowing something is wrong is having him believe it’s even worse. Shutting him down, tightening the leash, hiding his guns. He doesn’t want that again. He can’t.
“No,” he reiterates, calmer this time, more conscious. “I’m not hallucinating, I can sleep. I just don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the only time I do see him.”
Dean sighs, sounding halfway relieved.
“Nightmares?” Sam gets it. Nightmares, he can understand. Nightmares are normal people crazy, not crazy people crazy. What he’s about to say, though, is.
“I’m not so sure.”
“What do you mean?” Furrowed brow, expressionless face, cold eyes. He looks more like he’s deactivating a bomb.
“ I mean- I think- I’m not…” he stumbles hopelessly, lips numb, moving without permission. His heart is in his throat, his soul is ten miles above, his brain is down in the pit. Existence feels like getting spun and spun and spun on a roundabout until the grins and laughter start fading, turning into pleas to stop, let me off, it’s not fun anymore.
“I think maybe I’m having visions.”
Silence for a moment. Stillness. Sam half-wonders if Dean’s shot up and left the room until he finally works up the courage to look, and there it is: disappointment. Clear as day. It’s a look Sam knows all too well.
“Right,” Dean sighs, massaging his temples, at a loss for words. He looks so much like their father. Sick of Sam’s shit. “What, uh… why?”
“So, you know, around the time when, uh, Amara got let out, and I started getting those… well, I thought they were messages from God, at the time, but it turned out to be, you know, um, Lucifer reaching out to me through the cage? Sending me stuff, trying to get me back down?”
Dean nods. It’s not something you just forget.
“I think this is like that,” he whispers, voice cracking, shameful. “It’s all the same kind of stuff. Him and me, in the Cage. Everything that happened. It’s every night, Dean. Every night.”
Tears are dropping onto Jody’s dining table. Must be his, though he doesn’t feel them fall. Doesn’t feel much of anything besides a thrum of static in every limb, a crushing emptiness in his chest. He doesn’t like crying in front of Dean - in front of anyone, really - but he can’t get himself to stop.
He’s only a passenger again. It would be terrifying if he weren’t so used to it.
“How…” From the corner of his vision, Sam can see Dean’s hand reaching across the table, twitchy and uncertain, never close enough to land. “How is this different to before. When it was, you know…”
All in his head. When he was weak enough to let mere memories drive him mad. When he lost himself so fast, so hard, so thoroughly, it took an angel to fix him.
They have no angel now.
“It’s just... It just feels it. It’s so real. It has to be.”
He can hardly hear himself. Wonders, vaguely, if he’s making any sense at all. The world, his body, everything - it all feels so distant. He just wants to come home.
“Sam, hey, listen.”
Dean’s beside him now, crouching down, eye level. He puts an arm around his shoulder, raises him to unsteady feet. They stumble, in tandem, towards the couch on the other side of the room, the one Jody set up for one of them to sleep atop while the other took the air mattress at its feet.
Sam can’t feel a thing of it. If he couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t know Dean was there.
“Sam.” A hand on his jaw gently props his limp head up, sets eyes to eyes. “Whatever you think are visions are just… It’s just your head screwing you around.”
Sam tries to shake his head, say no, no, it can’t be, but he is much too weak, too far away, and Dean presses on.
“It happens to me, too, sometimes. I get these dreams, ones of, you know, things I’ve seen, things I’ve done. And they feel so real, Sammy, I get that, I do. But please. You need to accept this now, alright. Knock it into your skull before this whole… whatever starts going anywhere. None of it’s real. There are no visions, there is no Lucifer. Not anymore.”
He sounds so sure of it. So sure. And Sam is so tired, so desperate.
“How can you be sure?” he barely manages to ask through a face full of tears and a throat full of snot. Dean’s hand is still the only thing keeping his head up; it’s all slippery now.
“I just am.”
Sam sniffles. Attempts to wipe his eyes. “You promise?”
Dean ruffles his hair, pulls Sam’s limp body into a hug, just as he did when they were younger, when nothing bad had caught them yet. It feels like getting pulled into a time machine. “Promise, Sam. Okay?”
Sam nods weakly into his shoulder. The world feels just that little bit safer, that little bit more solid. He lets himself fall asleep on Dean’s shoulder for the first time in years.
Sam is awake but isn’t. The devil is there but not. And there is something slithering inside of him.
Then Sam is awake for real. The devil isn’t there but is. And there is cum in his jeans.
Oh, God, there is cum in his jeans.
Thick and hot and sticky, and he can’t feel anything else but that. Not even Dean’s hands pressing down on his shoulders, restraining his thrashing and kicking. Not the wails in his shredded throat, still going, endless: please, Lucifer, no, no more, I don’t want it, please, it’s too much, too much-
Jody’s in the doorway, watching the scene from afar. Hand over her mouth, tears in her eyes, asking, begging, what’s wrong, what she can do to help, but there is nothing. There’s nothing.
And he decides, in that moment, that it can’t just be dreams. No matter what Dean insists, what Dean thinks he knows.
Because if Lucifer is truly dead, it means he’s doing all this to himself.
He wouldn’t do that.
He can’t be.