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It’s been six months since Dean passed.
Sam grips the gear shift, white-knuckled and afraid. The glinting glass of the Impala fog with his breath, but he can’t roll down the window, can’t crack the door. He’s stuck, sinking into the upholstery.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.
He and Dean spent their whole lives in each other’s back pockets, and death was meant be that way too. Hell, high-water, or heavenly choirs, Dean would never leave his side.
But he did. For six long months, Sam’s missed the scent of stale coffee and blueberry pie. Missed the constant nagging to stop lollygagging and get this show on the road, missed the anime porn and half empty glasses of straight whiskey. He’s missed the way Dean picked up boxes of matches at every highway diner and shady bar, a tiny, neat collection in the trunk of the car.
He’s missed the way Dean laughed.
Sam’s missed his big brother, who went to his goddamned grave thinking Sam wouldn’t die for him.
He taps his fingers against the steering wheel. He checks the time on his phone, the numbers ticking steadily forward. The waiting is going to do him in.
Where is he?
Sam drove halfway across the country to be here, past silvery tree trunks, branches dripping Spanish moss, past golden cattails glinting in the sun. He drove over bridges peeling ribbons of paint, and concrete pitted with holes. He drove and drove, and with his hands on the wheel it was like he could feel Dean behind him, gently exhorting him to let up on the gas.
Baby’s a real lady, she doesn’t deserve to be ridden so hard and put away wet.
Sam’s mouth quirks. Dean never did have any idea how to treat women.
He leans his head back against familiar leather, breathing in the Impala’s familiar scent, leather and gun oil and the barest hint of sage. They’re hunter smells, home smells. Sam’s long past denying that. He never took feral pleasure in the blood and the gore, but he won’t deny that there’s honor in it. Saving people, hunting things – they’re not the only stuff he’s good at, but he is part of a small talent pool.
These days, he even takes pride in the family business.
He always has, really. Sam never bucked the job because it was intolerable. He left, time and time again because hunting is inexorably tied up in Dean. It was stupid stupid stupid.
Even when Sam was able to run away, it was so fucking dumb.
He saw the California coastline, sun drenching his skin and old books under his fingertips. The air was cypress and eucalyptus, ice plant and birds of paradise. Sam finally saw a life that wasn’t running away from something, but towards it. And every moment of it was idiocy, insanity. There was no way to outrun his big brother.
Dean’s in Sam’s bones.
“Hey, kid.”
Dean’s also behind him.
Startled, Sam meets Dean’s eyes in the rearview window. That was fast. He didn’t expect it to happen so fast.
And Dean looks the same. Which is strange, ‘cause he’s dead.
Dean’s got on his groddy jeans, hems frayed and marked with maybe more indistinguishable stains than before. His dinged up boots, worn leather jacket, and his half day stubble; it’s all there. He’s Sam’s brother, through and through. But there’s also a calmness to the set of Dean’s face that Sam has never seen before. It makes Sam grit his teeth, sets his nerves on edge.
“Dean.” Sam takes a deep breath. “Long time, no see.”
“Half a year, Sammy. Don’t be such a drama queen.” He pauses, mulling over his words. “You can’t just ring me up and expect me to come running.”
Sam shrugs, like what he’s done is no big deal. “Can’t I?”
“I’m not a chihuahua, Sam.” Dean softens and adds, “You shouldn’t have called.”
Sam knows that. He does.
After all, the thing about Reapers is, you can only see them when they’re coming right at you.
His fingers move over the steering wheel, but they’re not corporeal. His body’s slumped in the backseat, almost touching Dean’s knee. “What was I supposed to do? Just let you go?”
“Yes.” Dean bites his lip, teeth running over plush red. The hypocrite. “Forget about me.”
Sam makes a rude noise. “Right. Sure. That sounds likely.”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Bitch.”
“Jerk,” Sam shoots back. He’s already relaxing, and why shouldn’t he? Dean is safety. That’s never going to change. “How do we fix you?”
Sad eyes, leonine, like a lion stuck behind bars at the zoo. Resigned. “You don’t. We don’t.”
That won’t do. They’ve been in worse situations. Sure, Sam can’t think of any, but they have.
“I can’t accept that.”
He’s not being dramatic. Merely truthful.
He’s let Dean go more times than he can count. It’s not a mistake he cares to repeat.
“Doesn’t matter what you can’t accept, Sammy.” Dean’s hand lifts, and in the periphery of Sam’s vision it looks skeletal and strange, like Dean’s marrow is writhing shadow. But when Same focuses, it shifts into normalcy.
Dean’s scarred knuckles.
Dean’s blunt fingertips.
The intricate tracery of Dean’s veins, growing more transparent the older he gets.
Got. Tenses are hard when you’re a Winchester.
“Don’t give me that crap. If there was nothing we could do, you wouldn’t be here.” Sam swallows, grateful for this gift, this conversation. Grateful that his brother’s here, when common sense and every supernatural entity in the universe has tried to stand against him. “I thought we were destined for the void. How did this happen? How did you…?”
“Yeah, Billie always threatened that like it was the worst place our souls could go, didn’t she?” Dean hums, pinning Sam with a look of such overt fondness that it makes a lump form in his throat.
This time, for sure, he’d thought. This time, he wouldn’t be able to get Dean back.
That was the real substance of the threat, but Dean’s right too. The void would be peace, after everything they’ve been through. Not a punishment. Peace.
Dean shrugs.
“Billie’s dead,” he says, “and Sammy, I think they’re onto us.”
“What do you mean?”
Dean’s touching the worn leather seats, the familiar curves of the Impala. It’s absentminded, familiar. A man, finally come home. He says, “I don’t think those fucks up there are ever going to let us rest.”
Sam doesn’t know if he means in heaven or if he means the universe at large, that broad, big thing that encompasses so much more than angels and demons and an absent god. He tells his brother, “They know we’d like it too much.”
He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t like it if Dean was at rest, at least, not if Sam couldn’t be right there, at his side. He says so, out loud, and Dean grimaces.
“You’re being ridiculous,” he replies, and for a man who was edging forty before his death, he sounds remarkably like a toddler. “We can’t just-“ he makes a vague gesture with this hands, something he expects Sam to translate for him.
And Sam does, because that’s how they’ve always been.
“We can,” he insists. “We’ve got options. We’ve got angels, Dean. Fucking angels-“
“Mostly just Cas-“
“Cas is still an angel! He’ll help. And I’m-“
“My kid brother,” Dean replies firmly. He crosses his arms, shifting his weight. “You’re my kid brother, and I want you to have a life, Sammy. That takes precedence over anything else. It always will.”
“But angels-“
“Screw the angels. Screw Cas.”
“I think he’d like that.”
“Yeah, well.” Dean shoves a hand through his hair and Sam can see the effort it takes for him not to let discomfort burn through his Enochian-marked bones. “He’s not my type.”
“You don’t have a type.”
“I have you,” Dean says, and that hangs between them, heavy in the air.
It’s exactly like it always is, even when Sam was in California, thousands of miles of space away from watching and wanting everything he couldn’t have, but still needing it, a thrum, white noise in the back of his brain. Needing Dean is an instinct, was, even after he walked away from him, but so is knowing if he said something, even once, he could have him. There’s the rub, right?
Dean will give Sam everything – it’s forever that way – whether Dean’s actually into it or not. There’s never once been a time where Sam couldn’t have Dean with a word.
But knowing whether or not it was real? And something Dean genuinely wanted?
That’s a trickier bet.
That’s the only thing that’s ever stopped him.
“I don’t want you roping Cas into this,” Dean says, though he has to know it’s already too late. Castiel has been up to his elbows in research for months now, trying to figure out how to undo what the heavens have willed into being. Trying to unmake a reaper. “This isn’t a bad way to live.”
“Killing people?”
“Saving people,” Dean corrects with a furrowed brow. It’s just like him; he always finds a way to spin violence into goodness. “I’m not going to leave any haunted houses.”
“The world is a haunted house,” Sam shoots back.
“You know what I mean.”
Sam shrugs. “Less for me to salt and burn, I guess.”
“You ain’t gonna salt and burn anything if you don’t snap out of this.” Dean reaches forward, almost touching him.
He’s insubstantial, wavering in the moonlight, which is so fucking odd.
Dean is and always has been the only real thing Sam knows.
He can’t be reduced to this. He can’t live as a ghost.
Sam slaps his luminous hand away. “Quit playing around.”
His brother’s mouth gapes open. “Who’s playing? Time’s up, Sammy. You either get up or you’re sticking around a while.”
Even like this, incensed and floundering for words, Dean is irresponsibly pretty, the kind of breathtaking that needs a warning label.
He wields all that power easy as a knife, but he doesn’t understand it. He’s never understood the way just looking at him can choke the air from Sam’s lungs, the casual sucker punch effect of his leonine eyes grazing skin.
It’s reckless, letting someone so gorgeous roam the streets, breaking hearts and taking names. It’s reckless, Dean taking all of that away.
Sam says, “Fuck you for thinking I’ll leave you behind.”
“Fuck you for coming in the first place,” Dean snaps back. “I didn’t ask for a martyr, Sam.”
“You told me once – there ain’t no me if there ain’t no you. Dean-“ Sam’s got gravel in his voice. “Don’t leave me.”
“Sam…” Dean is panicking now, and Sam gets it, he does, but he’s got more ghosts than he’s got friends. Where’s the real harm in becoming one of them?
No, that’s not right. He doesn’t want to die.
He just wants Dean to live.
“I’ll wake up,” Sam says. “I’ll be fine, as long as you promise me that you will too. This isn’t forever.”
“I don’t know if I can promise that, Sam.”
“Promise me,” Sam grits out, a challenge.
Dean is aggravatingly quiet.
In one quick move, Sam twists full on in his seat, knees against leather as he leans into the back of the Impala. He’s got Dean by the back of the head, fingers digging into his brother’s scalp. “Dean, promise me.”
Dean opens his mouth, probably to say no. That’s when Sam pushes their mouths together.
As far as kisses go, it’s messy, and desperate, and electric the way Sam always imagined it would be.
Dean gasps into him, a hot gust of air that tastes impossibly like whiskey and heat.
“Sam,” he manages, half a moan, his hands gripping the lapels of Sam’s flannel shirt. Sam knows then that he could crawl back there, straddle Dean’s lap and have him, the way he’s wanted for years.
He could do all of that, while the real him, what’s left of him, sits up front, quiet and breathless and dead.
That’s not an option.
He lets the kiss drag on, a bittersweet sting. Then he wrenches himself away from Dean’s lips, from the thick press of Dean’s tongue against his, and tilts their foreheads together. “Promise me. We’ll find a way.”
Dean’s eyes flutter closed, pain creasing his face. But when they open again, Sam can tell he’s won.
Dean says, “I promise, Sammy. I promise.”
So Sam crawls back into the front scene. In the pale moonlight, he settles back into his body. He meets Dean’s eyes in the rearview window and murmurs, “I’m holding you to this.”
Annoyed, Dean mutters, “I said what I said.”
The reassurance rings in his ears as Sam wakes up alone.