Chapter Text
MAY
Death stared at the scene before him with more interest than he’d given anything in the last millennia.
Before him, frozen in the space between time, the space where Death does his best work, are two archangels, finally in their vessels, the ones the angels and demons had been creating for generations.
Death knows these archangels because he was there before they were created.
Even he is unsure of whether Light and Darkness came before or after Death because Death could not exist without either, but he remembers being there when they came into being.
And as time stretched on, their creations became smaller and smaller in his sight.
Lucifer, like a mayfly in the breadth and depth of Death’s understanding and consciousness, was so small—and yet he had power over Death.
And Death, well, after all this time, it would be hard to say that he is petty, but more so that he has so little love for creation that every extra annoyance can be deemed an embarrassment and atrocity.
So, he gave the ring.
Bacterium. That’s what the Winchesters are to him.
And yet.
The bacterium is taking over the incessant, annoying mayflies.
Interest. Intrigue. Curiosity.
No longer familiar feelings. Still, as he looks upon the two archangels, wrapped in chains of souls and determination, his interest slowly, unfathomably, changes to admiration.
For eons, Heaven and Hell have fought, desperately, over souls. Over the fate of the humans that they both have detested.
Because the Light and Creation, when they knew that they would soon leave their angelic creations to themselves, had left behind a way for the angels (and consequently, the demons), to continue in perpetuity without their presence.
How else would heaven, the home of the angels, keep power? How would the angels hold sway or even avoid death without feeding on the energy and light of their creator day in and day out?
After all, everyone, even Death, needs to feed on something.
But the Creator made beings that were a nasty, awful mix of jealous, needy, and fully dependent. Perhaps the Creator thought that given a few millennia, the angels would finally learn to rule themselves, learn to think.
But they hadn’t made them that way.
And so began the millennia of work to fulfill the final words of the Creator—and to what purpose? To be able to decide which of the parties would have the joy of destroying God’s gift of life to them. Little did they know or understand that the destruction of the human race would also be the destruction of themselves.
Humanity could live, gladly and happily, without the presence of heaven or hell, but could not die simply and consistently without them. Heaven and Hell could not live without the souls of the humans they so detested, and thus would die a slow and painful death without them.
As Death gazes upon the bacterium and the mayfly, he considers the nature of symbiosis.
He walks to the body of Sam Winchester, follows his gaze to the car, to the body of his brother. Death peers through time, watches in slow motion as Dean Winchester wrestles back a force actively feeding on his soul and traps Michael in bonds of his own creation, sealing that which would, to a human mind, constitute a mouth, shut, sewing stitches of pure will to keep angelic lips closed.
He watches Sam Winchester, soul already battered and bruised (Lucifer never could be kind to of any of his Creator's favorite creation, after all), surge forward, a force of his own, battling back a sea of grace with bare hands and holding his own, pushing it back and back, until Lucifer has been subsumed, drowning in the power that is flowing through Sam Winchester.
And Death, who began and saw the universe become, smiles.
He walks forward, holds out a hand to take again his ring, united with its brothers. He separates the rings, returns his own to his finger, and steps away.
It’s about time that the power of human souls is realized by the heavens and earth and depths below.
Bobby was not supposed to be alive. Hell, neither was the entirety of earth. But the himself thing was a little bit more personal.
He sits silently in his study, attempting to take it all in, with some help from his liquor cabinet.
Michael and Lucifer, the greatest threats to humanity, are in his basement. They’re in Sam and Dean.
According to Dean, Michael is just there. In his head. Silenced, somehow. Bobby hasn’t even tried to research for this one—he knows there’s no point. They’re in unexplored, world-ending levels of new territory.
And damn if that doesn’t make it worse. If they had a clue what was going on, there’d be hope. As it is, all they have is a vague promise from Castiel that he’s ‘working on it’.
With another swig from a slowly emptying bottle, Bobby turns to look at the clock. A few hours past when lunch probably should’ve happened, but he’s been busy fielding calls from other hunters, trying to get the scoop on what the angels and demons are up to now that the apocalypse has stalled out, and adding the wards that Castiel had suggested to the walls of his house.
Getting upright takes more effort and old-man grunting than he’d like to admit, but he makes it to the kitchen and starts piecing together some sandwiches with the last of his lunch meat. He balances the two plates and a couple of plastic water bottles in his arms and starts a slow descent into the basement.
Bobby has to put the plates down to unlock the panic room (funny, he thinks, that he’s not used the lock in the direction he’d anticipated using it most). He takes a peek first, through the slat. Sam and Dean are in their usual spots. He feels a slight pang of relief run through him as he unbars the door and swings it open. Sam—Lucifer—had flown off again last night. Bobby had been woken up to the sound of Dean shouting for him, praying loudly to Castiel. Sam had come back blue in the face, shivering. Castiel had dropped him off with barely a pause to tell them that things in heaven are not going well before flying off again.
At least it seems like Sam’s recovered from the jaunt to the alps alright, although it’s hard to tell with him these days. He’s barely uttered a word since Stoll, when he looked at Michael-in-Dean, smiled, and said, “I’ve got him Dean. It’s okay. I’ve got him.”
When Bobby walks in, he can still see the remnants of the violence Michael had gotten in in the seconds it had taken Dean to wrestle him back. Sam’s got two black eyes, courtesy of his still-healing broken nose. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him though—or if it is, he’s just too far gone to do anything about it.
“Hey,” Dean says from his place on the cot next to Sam, tossing a magazine aside and sitting up as Bobby holds out the plates of sandwiches and chips. Dean takes his plate, sets it down, and grabs one of Sam’s hands, squeezing tight, “Sam. Sammy. C’mon, it’s lunchtime.”
Bobby watches Sam, almost like he’s resurfacing from a deep dive, taking in a deep breath, eyes widening. His head turns quickly, focusing on Dean, muscles tensed before he seems to recognize who he’s with. Another deep breath and he relaxes, blinking rapidly. Dean passes him a plate and Sam, without a word, robotically takes a bite.
Dean meets Bobby’s gaze, blinks tiredly, and shrugs, shaking his head. No improvement from Sam. If anything, it’s getting worse. They don’t know why it’s worse for Sam than it is for Dean—not that it’s been easy on Dean either.
“Thanks, Bobby,” Dean says, mouth half-full as he gestures toward his plate.
Bobby gives a nod, “No news from Cas. Demon signs are up but evidence of possession is down. Don’t know what the hell Hell’s up to.”
Sam drops his partially eaten sandwich to the plate in his lap and makes a face, bringing his hands up to his head and curling in on himself. Dean’s there almost before Bobby can even process what is happening.
“Easy Sam, I’ve gotcha.”
Dean’s own plate gets discarded without fanfare and he reaches for Sam’s hands where they’re digging into his scalp, peeling his fingers back and replacing them with his own, smoothing back greasy hair and pulling Sam closer to himself. For a moment, Sam resists, but then he drops heavily onto Dean’s shoulder, curling in. Bobby has to dive in to catch Sam’s plate before it can crash to the ground in pieces, but manages to save it in time.
“I gotcha, I gotcha Sammy,” Dean mutters. Bobby watches Sam come back to himself, slowly. Dean’s the only thing they’ve found that helps. Bobby has the feeling in his gut that Dean’s the only reason Sam’s holding on right now. The only way Lucifer could be defeated.
“Stack the plates by the door when you’re done,” Bobby says, getting a nod of acknowledgement back from Dean. He stands and starts walking toward the door, a firmer resolve to find a solution pounding in his head, cutting through the three-day alcohol-based daze he’s been in.
“Hey Bobby,” Dean says, just as he’s about to leave.
Bobby turns.
Dean opens his mouth, closes it, frowns, and opens it again, “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Bobby says.
He exits, locks the door, and starts the trek upstairs again.
There’s got to be something. There has to be. He can’t leave them down here forever. He sits down heavily in his chair, takes a small drink of whiskey with his own sandwich, and picks up the phone.
Sam is getting better at recognizing when Lucifer is messing with him. Either that, or Lucifer is becoming more and more apathetic, not putting as much effort into pretending.
Tonight (today? The days run together down here, the fan always overhead, sleep constantly disturbed), Lucifer is pretending to be Jess again. His hand molded in the image of hers, caressing Sam’s cheek.
Sam shudders, rolls away, but the edges of the dream are tenuous, all too ready to explode into another all-out war between himself and Lucifer. He can’t get far.
“Sam,” Lucifer says, in her voice, “you know you don’t need to fight this so hard.”
The phrasing is perhaps the worst part, pulled from Sam’s memories, ringing true as he recalls Jess, compassionate and understanding as she gently convinced him to sleep, to eat, to breathe, to take a break.
He wants to take a break, more than anything. But the second he checks out, Lucifer takes the stage. The second Lucifer takes over, everything is over. There’s been too many close calls already. Split seconds where Lucifer gained the higher ground, just enough, for long enough, to fly Sam away. Away from Dean.
“Sam,” and Lucifer’s voice has changed, taking on a deeper, familiar tone, “sometimes you need to take the loss and call it a day.”
Sam knows if he turned around, his dad, gruff and unshaven, would be in front of him. He knows if he let Lucifer gain any ground, that John Winchester would reach out, hug him, tell him he was proud of him. He knows if he lets that happen, he’ll drown again.
He stays still, turned away from Lucifer, ignoring his tugging on Sam’s memories, the hands filing through his brain like they own everything in it.
“Oh, but I do,” Lucifer says, and this time it’s a soft but mostly unfamiliar voice. Sam’s been through this enough times to know that if he looks, his mother will be staring back at him.
He can feel Lucifer, looming. He knows that Mary will next come up to him, tug on his arm, reach up and tilt his head so that she can hold his face.
He sidesteps the hold, tries to keep his thoughts in order enough to remember who it is who’s talking to him. The second he forgets is the second he loses the fight.
Lucifer, in his guise, still manages to grab hold, tugging on his hand. Sam slams his eyes shut, twists away, unable to shake his grip.
The hand holding him digs in deep, nails cutting into the fleshy part of his palm. Even here, he can feel the pain. He wonders if, like at other times, he is doing this to himself, outside of the dream. Wonders if he will wake in the panic room with blood spilling from his hand, wonders if it will stain his clothes, the sheets, the floor. Blood in the panic room, where it’s not supposed to be.
(The scent of it still gives him the Pavlovian response, his mouth waters when he sees blood, oozing. He feels the lurch in his stomach, urging him to reach out, paint it on his fingers—)
The pain grows more intense, but still Sam refuses to open his eyes, refuses to see Lucifer like this again. Refuses to let him have this power over him.
Something sparks behind his eyes, something in the distance, in the nebulous edges of this space that Lucifer has dragged him to for his nightly torture. Sam keeps his eyes shut, tunes out the quiet murmurs of please Sam, Sammy, don’t do this to me, and reaches out. For a moment, it’s like tv static, like the faint buzz of a CRT television that Sam had been sitting too close to, and in his mind, outside of Lucifer, he can hear the faint call from ages past in Dean’s voice: “If you sit that close you’ll ruin your eyes.”
And then with that, the grip Lucifer has on his hand fades away. Sam reaches out, blind, toward the spark, and tumbles into a memory.
“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”
“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”
“Ow! Dean, not that hard.”
“Don’t be a baby.”
“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”
“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”
Sam is small. Small enough that even Dean is riding in the backseat while their dad drives.
He curls his right hand back into a fist, left hand holding tight to Dean’s larger, freckled hand.
“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”
Dean plays scissors again, and this time Sam is ready with a rock. He grips tightly onto Dean’s left hand, rears back and slaps the back of it before Dean can draw back. Both of their hands are bright red, neither of them willing to call uncle on their house-rules version of the game.
Dean grimaces, but keeps it going.
“Rock, paper, scissors, slap!”
Sam’s ready again this time. Dean’s been throwing scissors almost the whole game. He goes to slap, but loses his grip on Dean’s hand and just claps into his own palm.
“Ha!” Dean crows, a smug look on his face. He raises a triumphant fist and punches the ceiling.
“Careful,” comes the strict command from the front seat, their dad’s constant watch in the rearview catching the movement.
“Sorry dad,” Dean says, drawing back into himself, straightening up.
“Again!” Sam demands, wiggling his fingers, feeling the sting of the few slaps Dean has gotten in.
Dean rolls his eyes but holds out his hand, grasping onto Sam.
Sam jolts awake as the squeezing hold on his hand becomes suddenly real. Instinctively, he squeezes back. When his eyes finally decide to focus, in the dim light of the panic room, he can see Dean in the cot, directly next to him, one eye slanted open and looking at Sam. Sam slows his breathing and squeezes Dean’s hand again, where it lays on the pillow, next to Dean’s head. Dean squeezes back and closes his eye, evidently having been barely woken out of his sleep and finding it again easily. The pressure on Sam’s hand nearly disappears, but he keeps Dean’s hand in his grip.
It’s childish. It’s infantile, really.
(Their dad would’ve . . . Well, in this case, he doesn’t know what his dad would’ve done. Probably shoot them both point blank to see if that killed the angels.)
But it feels better—safer—when he knows Dean’s nearby. It makes him feel like he’s less likely to be flown away, to lose control, to be forced back and drowning.
Sam cautiously turns in the cot, looking above to the fan, rotating slowly above him. His heart jumps into his throat and he tightens his hold on Dean again. If he’s not careful, he can see them here again—Alistair, himself, his mother—like he’d never actually detoxed. He tries to swallow around the lump in his throat and finds it hard to breathe.
His grip on Dean’s hand gets tighter, and tighter, until someone would need pliers and a hacksaw to separate them. Dean stirs.
“S’mmy? Y’right?”
Sam pulls in a panicked breath through his nose. This isn’t like last time. Dean is here. He doesn’t have demon blood in him (just something, someone worse, so much worse).
Dean pushes himself upright, into a hovering plank position, pushing down on Sam’s hand through the motion.
“Sammy?”
Since the moment Sam had managed to grab control, to wrest Lucifer away from the driver’s seat, he’s been trying to hold it together. He has to. If not for himself or the world, then for Dean.
So when the tears start to prick at his eyes, he turns his head swiftly away. Not quick enough, even in the near-darkness.
“Sam, what’s wrong?”
Sam shakes his head.
Dean moves their joined hands over, crossing Sam’s arm over his own chest so that Dean can body his way onto the cot beside him.
And for a second, all Sam can see is the figment of Dean (Figment? Vision? Reality? He can’t parse his memories enough to remember if it was real) standing over him, telling him about how disappointed he is. And then, with a sinking twist in his stomach that Sam has started to recognize as Lucifer pulling strings, he hears only the words Dean had left him with before Sam had gone in to fight Lilith.
“A monster.”
It’s instinctive, almost, to suddenly drop his grip on Dean, to push his other hand up and shove Dean back, heart pounding as the words of Dean’s message echo in his mind. He has them memorized, down to the slightest inflections and pauses. His mind can replay it with perfect recall.
And Lucifer knows that too.
Sam goes toppling off the cot, landing badly on one of his wrists as he tries to catch himself, but the sharp pain does little to cut through the fog of “You’re not you anymore and there’s no going back.”
“Sam?”
His heart is pounding as he scrambles backward, trying to increase the space between them so he can force his brain to sort out the truth from the past.
More pain rockets up his arm as his hand scrapes along the ground, and Sam looks down, sees blood pooling in his palm and feels sick.
It’s a dry retch that comes through, but Sam still panics, grabs for a bucket. Nothing comes up, but Sam can’t stop his body from performing the motions. It’s only a moment later when he feels a warm hand on his face. He flinches back, but Dean persists, gathering Sam’s hair back and out of his face.
“Easy Sammy, deep breath, c’mon, you can do it.”
Sam clutches the bucket to his chest, twitching away as Dean lays a hand on his back.
“Whoa, easy, you’re just working yourself up, take a breath.”
Dean’s words cut through some of the chaos rattling through Sam, familiar enough for them to take place in his mind. He forces himself to take a deep breath and pushes down the pressure in his stomach, in his head, feels the resistance from Lucifer he’s come to expect, but gains enough ground to make his body stop heaving. For a second, all he can do is shudder.
Then he blinks and the remnants of his last visits to the panic room disappear.
“Just like that, you’ve got it.”
Dean’s hand is steady on his back. His other hand comes around to help Sam unclench his grip on the bucket, lowering it back to the ground.
“Alright, easy, you’re alright,” Dean continues, those muttered lines of comfort that take Sam back to a simpler time, to days spent sick with the flu or downed with a broken leg.
Even so, Sam can’t help but interrupt.
“Can we—” his voice is hoarse, whether from his queasy episode or from disuse, he’s unsure, “tomorrow. Can we go outside?”
It takes a span of two breaths for Dean to answer, and Sam keeps his face turned away but pictures first the look of surprise, then the moment of processing that Dean takes, knowing his brother’s reaction before it ever hits his ears.
“Yeah, yeah we can do that. For a couple of hours.”
Sam nods, dropping his head into his hands, propping his elbows on bent knees. He knows—because he’s felt the change, the charge in the air—that the panic room does something, helps at least a little bit. He knows Cas added some things, things to keep Michael and Lucifer hidden from prying eyes.
But he can’t—this place—
He needs out. They don’t stay places this long. Ever. They need out.
“We’ll tell Bobby in the morning, take a couple hours before it gets too hot out.”
“Okay,” Sam says.
“You ready to try and get some more sleep?”
Sam isn’t willing to try that again tonight, but he nods in agreement anyways, takes the hand Dean offers him, and stands, wincing as sharp pain travels up his arm. He can’t stop himself from making a quiet grunt of pain.
Too in-tune, as he so often is, Dean catches it.
“What’s—oh, damnit, you’re bleeding.”
Dean turns to grab at some loose bandages, left over from patching Sam’s face back together. Sam stares down at his hand. Sure enough, there are some deep gouge marks, as if someone had scraped away at his hand. Sam looks at his other hand, at his fingernails. Nothing.
For a sharp second, he’s sure the nausea is about to come back, and even more certain that Lucifer is about to steal him away (he feels the swooping in his stomach, the weight on his back), and then it’s gone as Dean returns and starts dabbing at the scratches with an alcohol pad.
Lucifer’s laughter echoes in his mind, but slowly fades as Dean keeps mumbling about this and that—”Gonna need to get you gloves to wear while you sleep at this rate,”—and Sam doesn’t have the heart to tell Dean that the cuts aren’t by his own hand. Sam’s wrist twinges as Dean rotates his hand around, but he keeps his mouth shut. Dean’s already lost enough sleep because of him tonight, let alone if they have to wake up Bobby to get an ace bandage for a sprained wrist.
“There we go,” Dean says, moving to rinse off his hands.
Sam stands and walks back to his cot, laying down and curling up as best he can on the thin mattress, cradling his bandaged hand close to his chest.
Tomorrow. He can make it to tomorrow, he decides, as he listens to the sound of Dean shuffling around on his cot, right next to Sam. A few more shifting sounds, and then a hand, warm even through Sam’s shirt, on his back. A couple of steadying pats, and then the hand curls so Sam can only feel the ridges of Dean’s knuckles if he’s concentrating.
Tomorrow. Things will be better tomorrow.
(That’s what he keeps telling himself.)
Dean feels like he’s being rattled from the inside out. Like there’s a constant conga line through each brain cell, making it all jolt about like Dean’s at the front of a concert with the bass turned up all the way, shaking his bones.
Michael doesn’t stop. But Dean doesn’t either.
When he looks over, finally acknowledging his own existence among the living after a night of sleep that could be considered the opposite of restful, it’s clear that Sam hasn’t even tried to sleep after his episode in the early hours of the morning. Sam is curled up, tense.
Dean reaches out, nudges him with an arm half-asleep from how it was draped across the small space in-between them. Sam twitches and rolls over.
“Hey,” Dean says, voice nearly all gravel.
“Hey,” Sam returns.
And that’s more than Sam’s usual number of words-per-day, and it hurts something deep inside Dean to witness that, witness Sam—chatterbox Sammy, all questions, no breathing—go silent. It’s more Dean’s move than Sam’s, but half the time it seems like Lucifer’s got a stranglehold on Sam’s voicebox.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s in control, at the helm. Dean doesn’t bother to ask these days, because Lucifer’s gotten better at lying about it. Good enough that Dean had let go, let him fly away with Sam without clutching tight and going with him.
Dean hates to admit that he’s scared of anything, let alone Lucifer, the same Lucifer that’s sharing a body with his brother right now, but he knows inside that he is. Lucifer has a different kind of presence in Sam than Michael does for Dean. Like Lucifer’s just boiling under Sam’s skin.
With as much of a smile as he can muster this early in the morning with this many dark thoughts drifting through his mind, Dean pats at Sam’s shoulder and then pushes himself upright, groaning with the struggle of it. Somehow, having an archangel tangled up in his soul (or something like that, Cas had tried to explain but it hadn’t made sense then and doesn’t make sense now) hasn’t afforded him any degree of relief from the aches and pains that come with the day-to-day.
And so begins another day. Another day of staring at the wall while the echoes of Michael’s wailing pound away at his sanity.
There’s a clattering at the door and then it shoves open. Bobby, with the welcome gift of breakfast in his arms.
“Mornin’,” Bobby says by way of greeting.
Surprising both Dean and Bobby, Sam replies, “Mornin’.”
Bobby turns to squint at Sam, probably following the same line of thought as Dean finds himself thinking—is this another play by Lucifer?—before walking further into the room and divvying up the breakfast plates between them. There’s scrambled eggs, just a little too far on the side of soft, and toast, a little too dark, but Dean gladly picks up a fork and starts chowing down. Beside him, Sam picks up a fork and plays with his food, fooling no one.
“Can—” Sam says, stopping to clear his throat, “Dean, you said we could go outside today.”
Dean looks up from his breakfast, chipmunking the food in his cheeks as he is reminded of his early-morning, half-awake promise, “Oh yeah.”
He quickly swallows half of his food so it’s easier to talk and turns to address Bobby.
“We’re gonna take a couple hours outside today.”
A couple of lightning-fast emotions cross Bobby’s face before he responds, “Alright. After breakfast? The yard could use some tidying up if you’re up to it.”
“You got it,” Dean says, between his next two bites of food. He isn’t taking the time to taste his breakfast, knowing all too well that something has been off about his taste buds ever since Michael set foot in his body. Of all the things to be stolen from him in the past weeks since Stoll, he is perhaps most irritated about that one.
Bobby shuffles around the room, picking up the occasional magazine and putting it back in its stack, adjusting the few books that he’d brought down here, anticipating Sam wanting to read. Dean’s the only one who’s touched them.
Sam’s still picking at his food, having taken only a couple bites, but that’s more than some days, so Dean finishes his plate and stands up.
“Ready to go?”
“Let me get my shoes,” Sam says, putting down the plate with a look of passing disgust at the food on it. Dean wonders if Sam’s having the same problem he is, or an entirely different one. Either way, he doesn’t know because they haven’t talked about it. They haven’t talked about much, to be fair. Sam hasn’t talked at all.
Dean walks over to the small pile of things they’d brought down here—changes of clothes, shaving cream, and shoes, but no weapons—and tosses Sam his pair of tennis shoes, stuffing his own feet into his boots.
They follow Bobby up the stairs with few words between them. The sunlight coming through the windows seems monstrously (angelically?) bright. Squinting, Dean moves past Bobby, clapping him on the shoulder in a gesture of thanks. Sam trails behind him. At the front door of the house, Dean takes a breath before opening it. Outside, the world looks the same as it always has. The dusty, reddish brown of the junkyard, the brilliantly green trees in the distance, the rusting metal.
For a moment, Dean recalls a memory, back when Sam was small enough to ride piggyback, weaving through the cars as Sam made blaster sounds with his fingers, shooting imaginary villains as Dean acted as spaceship. They must’ve just watched one of the Star Wars flicks or something—Return of the Jedi, maybe.
His chest twinges, painful. He’s not sure if it’s Michael pain or just the hurt of remembering simpler times.
Dean turns to Sam, ready to make some kind of joke about being out in the wild again, the kind that a few years ago would’ve led Sam to a rant about animal rehabilitation or zoos or something like that.
When he turns, he sees only Sam’s back as he walks steadily away from Dean.
“Sam?”
Sam doesn’t respond, and Dean holds his breath, suddenly certain that this has all been a Lucifer plot.
And then he sees where Sam’s going. His breath comes back.
The Impala still has bloody streaks down the side. Two of the windows are shattered, there’s a crack in the back windshield, and one of her mirrors is missing. That pang in Dean’s chest returns, and he grimaces. Under any other situation, he wouldn’t have let this stand.
Sam reaches the car first. Dean catches up with him just in time to watch Sam’s face as he crumples against the side of the car.
“Sam?” Dean reaches out and grabs on to him, feeling the all-too familiar worry crush around his shoulders again.
Under Dean’s hand, Sam’s shoulder heaves up, then down. Dean realizes, suddenly, that he hasn’t seen Sam cry since—before he said yes.
It’s disconcerting.
Sam makes—made—fun of him and his attachment to the car for years, but it had been easily shrugged off because Dean knew logically that Sam was just as attached. It was obvious in how anytime they had to leave the Impala behind, Sam would always put together the plans to circle back, how he’d spend mealtimes in cafes searching up and finding parts in case any needed replacing, in how he stopped complaining when Dean made them stop for maintenance or a car wash, how he’d smile brilliantly and toss a bucket of water over the hood to soak Dean’s pants on the other side when they were cleaning her up.
The Impala was all they had.
Watching Sam break in front of him, clinging mournfully to the dented roof of the car as he hides his face in his arms stirs something in Dean’s heart, makes emotion go racing through his body, and for just a moment, it’s silent in his head. Michael’s constant pounding stops, and Dean doesn’t know how to respond.
He just holds Sam’s shoulder and starts looking over the car as Sam cries—his crying getting louder, even as he’s visibly trying to stifle it.
Dean’ll need to hammer out the dents again. Touch up the paint. Find new windows.
Soon. As soon as Cas figures out a solution. As soon as they can know for certain that the apocalypse is stopped and not just sitting in a constantly rising elevator as they wait, dreading the opening of the doors. As soon as they can breathe.
Sam is quieter now, mostly sniffles, and he’s leaning more into Dean’s hand, so Dean moves closer and pulls him in, leaning both of their weight against the car. One hand goes to Sam’s head, tucking Sam under his chin, even though they’re both too old and Sam’s too tall for it.
Overhead, the sun continues to shine. A few clouds cast some shade on the ground. A squirrel runs past the fence line.
Dean’s head stays silent, and he can’t help but think that maybe being out here, near the car, is helping. That it’s reminding him how to ground himself and feel the comfortable weight of the world on his shoulders in a familiar way.
“Hey,” he says, once Sam’s breathing has evened out, “let’s go grab a trash bag, clean up the place for Bobby.”
There’s loose paper and other assorted garbage across the junkyard, probably from a windstorm. Bobby’s always been good about keeping it somewhat tidy, if not organized, out here. Something about appearances.
“Yeah,” Sam says, surprising Dean. He pushes away. His eyes are red and puffy. For a moment, Dean wishes Sammy were still small. Small enough for him to wrap up tight and hold to his chest. But, instead, he’s got Sam, tall and broad shouldered, with a scrappy little beard trying to take hold on his face.
And that’s okay too.