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One of them has to leave.
Sam knows that with the certainty with which cowboys in westerns state that this town isn’t big enough for two of them. The bunker, huge and sprawling and full of history, feels small and claustrophobic when they get in each other’s way, which is fairly often. There’s only one library. There’s only one kitchen.
Dean doesn’t cook for Sam anymore. He doesn’t cook for himself either. The larder’s stocked with canned stuff, reminding Sam of the rental-of-the-month Dad used to leave them in, some rundown house in some rundown town, two weeks’ worth of food supplies stacked on the counter when they all knew he wouldn’t be back for at least a month.
Dean had been the food supplier, even then. He’d go out and hustle pool, leaving Sam at home, telling him to lock the door and salt the windows.
It’s been two weeks since their last conversation. They’ve talked since then, but only about work, and no more than required. Dean is sleepless and stubbled and whiskey-soaked pretty much all the time. Sam remembers the last time he’d been this way, before Purgatory. And it had been Sam’s fault then, too: Sam and his hallucinations and his fucked-up brain that wasn’t letting him sleep.
He’s opening up a can of beans when the opener slips from his grasp and cuts a deep red line in his palm. It’s the same palm he’d pressed his thumb into to remind himself of what was real, the way Dean had taught him to. Dean’s under his skin all the time and there’s no way to slice himself open and cut Dean out, throw him away like a vestigial organ. His well-intentioned, unreasonably over-protective big brother, who puts everything else after his need to protect Sam, even Sam himself.
He’s running water over his hand at the sink when Dean comes in.
Sam shifts his gaze from the pink water swirling in the sink to Dean’s face. Dean opens his mouth, and there’s a thousand things that Sam anticipates hearing, most of them along the lines of “Are you OK?” and “What happened?” and “Let me take a look at that.”
He doesn’t hear any of them. Dean shuts his mouth, his lips pressed into a line, holding back every single word of concern that rises up in him. It isn’t good enough, because Sam can virtually see the way Dean’s fingers are twitching to be on him, to check that he’s OK.
“It’s fine,” Sam says. “Just a scratch.”
Dean nods, backs away.
*
Saying they couldn’t be brothers anymore had been silly, childish in a way Sam hasn’t been since he was four. There was that time that Dad had left them at Bobby’s for the better part of a year, and when he’d returned, he’d been a stranger to Sam. “You’re not my daddy,” he recalls saying, running to Bobby and clinging to his leg, his forehead against Bobby’s kneecap. Either he hadn’t turned around to see the expression on his father’s face, or he doesn’t remember it.
Dean should know better than to take Sam’s words at face value: hell, even his actions. He’s always thought that Sam went to Stanford because he wanted to get away from both Dean and Dad. He doesn’t remember that Sam called him every day for a month before giving up because Dean wouldn’t answer any of his calls. More likely than not Dean was in a hunt and unable to answer the phone, but he’d never returned one of Sam’s calls.
That was Dean: he’d love Sam on his own terms, and if Sam didn’t agree with his terms, Dean would shut him out.
And maybe this, these last few weeks, are Sam’s way of establishing his own terms. Those are my terms, he’d said to Dean, expecting an altercation, expecting Dean to stand his ground and say “Fuck you, no, you don’t get to say we’re not brothers anymore.”
Instead, Dean had agreed. Dean had stood there and listened when Sam had told him that if the circumstances had been the same, he wouldn’t have kept Dean from dying. He knows Dean heard “I don’t love you the way you love me.” Maybe he even heard “I’ve never loved you.” Sam’s not sure what Dean heard, but words are beyond them now. They’re in a place where even breathing the same air has become a burden, and Sam’s begun to wonder if living with Dean again, so soon after everything that had happened, had been a good idea after all.
It’s not like he really had a choice: they need to work together to find Gadreel, make him pay. At this point, Sam couldn’t care less about who’s running Hell, Abaddon or Crowley. He’s not even sure why Dean went and got himself marked with Cain’s stamp. He suspects it’s more to do with Dean’s guilt over Sam than with any crushing need to get rid of Abaddon, and there’s a thought that Sam doesn’t really want to get behind.
He’d read a play at college for French lit class, No Exit, Sartre’s work on the idea that hell is other people. Right now, regardless of who’s actually running Hell, Sam and Dean are each other’s Hell, revolving around each other in a fiery orbit, never touching, always close enough to burn each other.
He contemplates leaving, more than once. It would be easy enough to live out of a car, out of motel rooms, the way they’d done pretty much his whole life, except for the four years he’d been at college. He could still work with Dean. Or maybe they’d split tasks, and Sam would look for Gadreel while Dean went on his own quest.
But Dean had been right. When they were together, the crappiness was split in half, the burden divided, more manageable.
And then there was that thing between them, the thing they never talked about. It had started when Sam was sixteen, a courageous kiss that he’d managed to plant on Dean’s lips one night after the first time he’d had three beers in a row. They’d never really stopped after that, except for the years Sam had been on his own. They’d taken up where they’d left off as though they’d never stopped, Sam taking the pain that he was carrying after Jess and lashing Dean with it, bruising Dean, marking him, writhing under Dean and begging to be marked in return. Dean had done everything he’d asked for, taken everything Sam inflicted on him, swallowing Sam and his pain whole until they were sharing all of each other.
*
One afternoon, he goes to the library to find Dean already there, nose-deep in a thick volume. For all that Dean complains about research, he’s never underestimated its value.
Dean gets up immediately, pushing his chair back, and Sam knows he wants to give Sam his space.
“Stay.” He holds up his book. “I’ll only be a minute.” He returns ‘Volume L to N’ to its place on the shelf, and slides out ‘Volume O to R’. He’s halfway through the twenty-four volume set, and he misses Kevin like it’s a physical ache.
He’s almost out of the room when Dean speaks. “Don’t leave.”
Sam turns around. “What?”
“Don’t leave the bunker, Sam. It’s. You can have it, if you like. I can leave. But you… stay here. Please.”
“What difference does it make?” Sam’s barely able to get the words out, as if his voice is rusty from disuse.
“This isn’t the safest place, not after… But it’s safer than—” Dean cuts himself off, as though suddenly aware that he’s talking about protecting Sam again. “It’s got a lot of tech you can use, and… and all these books.”
Sam holds his gaze. “I’m not going anywhere, Dean.” It doesn’t matter that he’d been thinking of leaving. If one of them leaves now, it could be another four years before they communicate again. Sam’s not willing to let that happen. “And neither are you.” He clears his throat, aware that he’s veering dangerously close to something he doesn’t want to say, not just yet. “We have work to do.”
Dean keeps looking up at him, and Sam watches as the tiny spark of hope that had appeared in his eyes when Sam told Dean he wasn’t leaving dies at his last words.
“Right,” Dean says, nodding.
“You going to keep agreeing with everything I say?” Sam asks.
Dean opens his mouth, and then shuts it again.
“What, Dean? Say it. I want to hear it.”
“You’re not leaving me much of a choice here, Sam,” Dean says, and Sam hates how helpless he looks.
“Good,” he says. “Now you know how it feels to have your choices taken away.”
He’s pushing, and he knows it. He wants Dean to stand up, shove his chair back so it topples over. Maybe if they bite and scratch, they’ll leave each other with new wounds that cover the old ones.
Instead, Dean turns away, fixes his gaze on the floor. “You were right. Everything you said about me, about the way I am… you were right. I got nothing to say in return, Sam.”
You could say the one thing you haven’t said, Sam thinks. You could say you’re sorry. You could take back what you said about doing the same thing again.
“And I know…” Dean continues, still not looking at Sam. “I know there isn’t one fucking thing I could do to make it up to you. I know there’s no fucking way we’re going back from this. There’s nothing I can say or do to make things right. So, I. I just. I’m not saying anything because yeah, I agree with you. And if you… if you want to…”
“If I want to what?”
“If you want to punish me, you can. I’ll take it, I’ll take whatever you want me to take.”
“You think that would make it all go away? That would make you stop feeling guilty? It’s not that easy, Dean.”
“Never said it would be easy.”
Sam takes a step closer to Dean, putting his book down on the table. His fingers are twitching with the need to touch, the sense memory of Dean’s skin already under his fingertips.
“You can’t make things right,” he says. Sam’s the one who needs to make things right, this time, and he’s not going to spell it out for Dean. He’s not going to let Dean sacrifice himself to some fucking quest either, let himself be used as some sort of weapon because he’s been stupid enough to go and get himself branded with the Mark of Cain when Sam wasn’t there to stop him. “You can’t.” He doesn’t say ‘I can’, because Dean needs to figure that one out for himself.
He picks up his book and goes back to his room.