Archive of Our Own

Jack sees himself standing on the other side of the road.

“Oh,” he says. “Uh.”

And then it’s gone. And then he’s gone.

“Uh.” He says again. Because what else could one say when you see your own figure slouched on the sidewalk, a river of asphalt between the two of you.

What else is there?

& & &

He sees himself again twenty minutes later inside the closest store to the bunker, the one that had the coffee that Sam liked, the beer that Dean liked, and the cereal Jack wasn’t allowed to have that he really, very much liked.

He’s staring at the box, wondering if I pay for it and then stuff it in my coat maybe they’d never know, when he sees himself standing at the very end of the aisle in front of the refrigerated section, illuminated by broken lights and the blinding white of rows of milk.

There’s a cashier at the counter at the other end and Jack glances at her, wants to ask do you see me but when he opens his mouth no words come out. He feels eyes on the back of his head, prickles up his neck. When he looks back, he’s disappeared.

“Oh.” Oh.

& & &

Jack knows he should tell someone. I saw myself twice tonight. Once in front of the milk.

They’d make fun of him. Wouldn’t they? You looked up at a reflective surface and saw yourself? And you’re worried? He’s just a kid. Doesn’t understand everything yet. Confused by mirrors. Maybe they shouldn’t let him out on his own for awhile. Or ever again.

No. No. He’s probably just tired. He gets tired now. He gets tired a lot.

That was a human thing, wasn’t it? Being tired.

All the time though? All the time. Probably.

& & &

To his room. Directly to his room. What was it he heard from Dean, picked up by Castiel? Do not pass GO, do not collect two-hundred dollars. Maybe that wasn’t applicable here. Maybe it didn’t make sense.

Sam thanks him when Jack drops the bags on the kitchen table, starts to say something else, but it’s lost in the echo of the hallway, words bouncing off Jack’s back as he retreats.

& & &

It’s under his bed. He’s under his bed.

Jack’s not sure how he knows. He only made it to the doorway but he can feel a body under there.

(He should tell them he should tell them he should tell—)

He takes in a breath, crouches down and sees himself lying on his back under the loose, broken-through springs of an old mattress. He watches himself turn his head and stare, unblinking, back at him.

He closes his eyes. His heart is going whump whump whump in his ears.

When he looks again, his perspective has changed. His head spins and it takes him a second to realize he’s seeing the room from the floor. He’s seeing it from the floor because he’s under the bed.

He’s under the bed, staring at himself crouched by the doorway. Watching. Watching himself.

“What—” He starts to speak but he shushes himself and then the door opens, Sam’s voice saying Jack?

—and the door slams Jack in the back, hits him because he’s crouched right in front of it.

“What’re you doing?” Asked with an amused tone. Funny.

“I dropped something,” Jack manages to answer. “I think it went under the bed. I can’t find it.”

“You never will. Things get lost under there, they’re gone forever,” Sam says and Jack turns his head, looks up to him, feels a frown pull on his mouth. Sam smiles. “Our dad used to call them ‘black holes’.”

“Ah,” Jack says. He doesn’t exactly understand but he gets the gist. He looks at his hands.

Things get lost under there—

& & &

How do you know if you’re not yourself?

“I think I’ve gone missing,” Jack says in the kitchen to the back of Sam’s head. Sam stops doing whatever it was he was doing, arms moving, shoulders tense and then turns slowly, looks to where Jack is standing, washed pale under the fluorescent lights.

“What?” He hadn’t heard him or he didn’t understand. Jack decides to lean on the latter.

“That thing I lost. I think it’s gone missing.”

“Ah,” Sam says. “Oh. I did say…” He doesn’t finish, trails off. He did say. His brow is furrowed. After an awkward silence: “Are you alright?”

“Sure,” Jack says. Smiles. He tries to smile. He’s not sure if he does or not.

“Okay,” Sam replies. Just: Okay.

& & &

He’s brushing his teeth when the shower turns on by itself.

He’s brushing his teeth and when he pulls the toothbrush from his mouth, it’s soaked in blood.

It drops, clattering into the sink, water, frothy mint, and red mixing together. There’s a shadow behind one of the curtains that looks to be in the shape of himself. He wipes hands at his face, rubs a finger over his teeth squeak squeak squeak. There’s so much. He can’t taste it but he can feel it.

He holds his hands under his chin to catch it, but it dribbles through his fingers onto the title floor someone had just scrubbed clean.

“SAM.” Calls for him once. He doesn’t want to— There’s so much else going on. Too much and this is a burden, this blood is a burden. But it’s instinct. The shadow behind the shower curtain doesn’t move. He’s still there.

He’s not sure how Sam heard him, how close he must have been or if sound has a way of travelling differently in here but he’s there. Panicked. Fearful.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” What’s the matter? What— Jack holds his hands a little further away from his face but not far enough that he can’t keep attempting to capture the slosh slosh in his palms. Sam shakes his head. Water from the sink, water from the shower. So much noise. So much blood. “Jack. Jack, I don’t know what you’re— There’s nothing there.”

The silence is so sudden it makes his ears ring. The room is cold again, the damp heat from the shower lost, seeping back into the walls. He doesn’t need to turn around to know that his other self has left— or was it him, was the person in the stall him and this person here, this person still holding now-clean hands toward his friend the imposter?

“Jack”—still saying his name, saying it often like Sam is trying to ground him into here and now and this place—“Talk to me.” Please just say something.

“You didn’t see it.” He puts his hands down to his sides. Slow.

“See what?”

“Can you see me?” Jack hears himself ask instead. Sam scowls— No. Frowns. Concern. It knits between his eyebrows, wrinkles his forehead. He steps forward, tightens the space between them, reaches a long arm out and places his hand on one of Jack’s shoulders. It feels heavy. It feels like if he pushed down just a little harder, it’d go right through him—

(Jack had seen a video once when he was up too late—couldn’t sleep because his head wouldn’t stop whispering to him—of people at a beach, children building a sandcastle. It was beautiful, with its sharp edges, shells, and bucket-shaped towers. And then someone came along and stepped on it. Just a little pressure from the bottom of a foot and the whole thing collapsed.)

“Yeah. Yeah. Of course I can,” Sam says. Face still scrunched with concern. “You’re here.” A pause. “Jack. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” He’s exhausted. He feels like he could fall asleep standing up. He withers under Sam’s hand.

“Whoa. Okay. Hey.” Sam holds him upright. He must have felt it.

“I’m tired.” Just that. He’s tired.

“Alright. Let’s get you to bed, huh? Come on.” No more questions. There should be. Should be millions of them but he’s not asking. Instead he’s walking with Jack to his room, walking the whole way right to his bed. Waits as Jack climbs in, pulls the covers up to his chin. Jack says nothing as he closes his eyes because what was there? What could be said.

He was blood blood blood blood and then not.

“Get some sleep. We’ll figure this out in the morning,” Sam says. He doesn’t leave right away. Jack can feel him watching him. The light goes out, the door closes and he’s alone for five seconds (he knows, he counted) and then he feels eyes on him again.

He stands in the corner and watches himself sleep.

& & &

Sam is talking quietly to someone on the phone.

It’s morning and Jack is shuffling to the kitchen again (here, why always here these days). He slept through the night but had no dreams. It was— Nothing.

“I don’t know,” he hears Sam say. “I’m worried. Something is definitely up. See what you can dig up when you get a chance but I’m not sure it—” He stops abruptly, spins from where he’d been shifting from one foot to the other in front of the counter, hunched, facing the cabinets. “I’ll call you back.”

“You’re talking about me,” Jack says immediately after Sam hangs up.

“Well. You’ve been— Do you want to talk about it?” Did he want to? No. He didn’t. He knew he should. I’m worried. Something is definitely up. Who had he been talking to? Dean? Mary? Castiel? He’s not sure which one he’d rather it have been. “About last night.” Like the lapse was because Jack needed clarification. As if he didn’t know what Sam was referring to. As if he could forget.

“I don’t know.” Those three words, suddenly said too much in such a short amount of time. He says nothing else for long enough that Sam’s posture changes from tense to sagging, like he’s given up, like he figures he won’t get anything else from this and he’s frustrated.

(They’re always so frustrated with him. Even when they say they aren’t, Jack convinces himself he can feel it and it weighs in his gut— all I’m good for is hurting people and getting in the way. He didn’t like that voice, the one that made him curl a fist and hit himself but he doesn’t know what to do with it. Tell someone? Do humans hear voices like that, too? He knew about the bad dreams. Not so much about the bad thoughts.)

“There was blood,” Jack says reluctantly. Sam’s posture shifts again. The wrinkle between his brows.

“Blood.” A sharp inhale. “Where?”

“Me.” He holds up his hands the same way they had been cupped the night before. “I was brushing my teeth and then it was…” It was. He drops his arms.

“Has this happened before? You seeing… these things?” Sam asks. He’s dancing around I think I’ve gone missing and can you see me. Jack is relieved. He doesn’t want to talk about that. He doesn’t want to talk about his double. About how he might be the double.

“No,” Jack answers. He’s getting the hang of lying. Or at least he believes he is. Depending on who you ask, that may or may not be a good thing.

“So this started— This started yesterday?”

“Yes.” A single nod. That was true.

“Okay. Well. Look. Have some breakfast. Take it easy today. Let me know if anything— Just come find me, alright?” He’s being gentle. Cautious. There is a surge of anxious love in this small room and it raises the temperature by a degree. Jack agrees. Of course. Yes. I will. But he does not say I promise and he wonders if Sam notices.

& & &

Uneventful. No more Other Him. No more blood. Maybe he just needed sleep. It was easy for him to lose track of time, especially these days when he was emptier than usual. Lost time and a noisy brain. Insomnia, the internet told him. But for the things like this— It hadn’t been that long.

Sam hovers. He’s got research to do but he hovers as much as his books will let him.

Jack is sitting at the table in the main room, the vaulted ceiling seemingly miles above him, the lights dim, when he’s suddenly aware that his feet feel wet. Like they’re resting in something sticky. He slides his chair back, stares down at the puddle of blood surrounding him. Dark. Old blood. As if it had been accumulating for some minutes—hours—and he was only just aware of it. He looks around, tries to find the source, where was it coming from?

He doesn’t think to look down at himself until he can’t find anything else.

The bottom half of his shirt is soaked in it. His jeans— Someone is watching. His Other Self is standing across the room, up against a bookshelf, directly under a hanging lamp. Like a spotlight. Here I am. Look at me.

He stands abruptly, not sure where he’s going, what he’s doing, and the second he’s on his feet his insides feel like they’re trying to escape through a chasm in his stomach. It’s a sickening, terrifying feeling and he holds his hands to himself, tries to keep things where they belong, tries to keep this body from becoming hollow—

Sam. He needs to find—

“Sam.” Too quiet. Not loud enough. But you can’t be loud when you’re dying. He can’t. His Other is still there. “Sam.” He attempts to walk, to move. Each step is worse than the last, his hands can only do so much. He’s being followed. “Sam.” He was reading. Research. Jack didn’t remember the library being so far away before.

He leaves footprints behind him. He leaves smears on the wall.

He leans on the door (finally finally) and it opens inward, opens with his weight alone.

“Sam,” he says as he slouches into the room.

Sam looks up immediately, pages flying, paper scattering, the slam of a book hitting the floor. Jack makes it a foot or two in before collapsing and Sam makes it to him a second or two before he hits the floor. He goes down with him, two bodies down down down, arms holding him but Jack won’t let go of his stomach because it’ll all spill out there’s so much blood it’s such a mess he doesn’t know how he’s still—

A figure in the doorway. Watching. Always watching.

“What is it? What’s the matter? What’s happening?” What what what. He’s not sure how much of it Sam can discern but he must extrapolate something because he doesn’t give Jack a reasonable amount of time to answer, keeps talking. “It’s not real. Whatever it is— Hey. Look at me. Look at me, alright?” Jack does, hadn’t even realized he was looking at himself instead, at the debris of this body that trailed behind him as he came here. “It’s you and me here. There’s nothing there. You’re okay.”

He says that, over and over, until Jack’s insides knit back together, until the hole closes, until the blood dissolves.

But the Other is still there.

Jack looks at it, Sam’s arms still around him.

“What’re you seeing?” He notices. Of course he notices. Observant. If Jack knew enough about it, he would later blame his honesty on adrenaline. His brain feels like it’s vibrating.

“It’s me.”

“You.”

For the first time since he’s started seeing him—since yesterday—the Other Him smiles.

Sam lets go of Jack and he doesn’t want him to, he still feels like maybe he could fall apart (like a sandcastle that’s been stepped on) but he doesn’t say anything, sits up and it’s cold. Sam’s standing his full height and he’s looking right at him but he doesn’t seem to know that, his question the confirmation Jack didn’t need.

“Where is he?” Where are you?

I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m him or me. I don’t know where I am.

Jack points, realizes that Sam has his back to him.

“Where—” Turns back around, sees the extended arm, the long finger. There.

One step. Two. Three. Four— Closing the gap. Sam reaches for him and his fingers just barely touch his chest. Sam recoils as if he’d been burned, checks his fingertips like he’s expecting to see that they’ve been singed. Takes a step away. Puts a hand to his own chest for a fleeting moment.

“You felt something.” He did. He clearly did. He definitely did. But he had to say it. The words needed to be out there. Sam doesn’t answer, goes to make a more aggressive grab but fills his palms with handfuls of nothing but air.

It disappears.

“Whatever that— I know this isn’t—” Sam turns back to Jack, reaches a hand down to help him off the floor and Jack accepts it, lets himself get hauled upright, legs shaky. “I know this isn’t going to sound— This is good. This means you’re not losing it.”

“‘Losing it’.” Jack repeats.

“I was worried”—There’s the word again; worried. Sam worried about him a lot—“The stress of everything that happened. What you’ve been dealing with… Sometimes people crack.”

Losing it. Things get lost under there, they’re gone forever. Our dad used to call them ‘black holes’.

“But this—” Sam continues, “The fact that I felt something— This is a thing we can fight.” He tries a weak smile but Jack doesn’t return it. His head is going and going, thinking, tick tick tick. It should make him happy. He should be glad. It’s just another monster, like the hundreds the Winchesters have hunted before.

“What if I was?” He asks.

“What if you were what?”

“Losing it.” Sam exhales heavily through his nose when Jack says it, takes a couple seconds before he responds.

“We could fight that, too,” he says. “It’d just be. Uh. It’d be a heck of a lot more difficult. But we’d figure it out. Just like we’re going to figure this out. Okay?”

“Okay.” It doesn’t feel okay. But he’ll say it anyway.

Sam goes to the table where he’d been working, starts clearing space, closing open books without marking what pages he was on. He pulls out a piece of paper even though his laptop is within arms reach, grabs a pen and hunches over.

“I need you to lay out what you’ve been experiencing. All of it. And once we get a list going—”

“—We can narrow down what we’re looking for,” Jack finishes. This he can do. This is a distraction. It’s not the one he wants—he needs to tell him but he doesn’t want to, he still doesn’t want to, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go, he could deal with this on his own but it was his brain betraying him the first time in the bathroom when it called for Sam the moment he started spilling red—but it’s the one he has.

(He wants to go to bed. He wants to sleep. Maybe he just needs time. Maybe it’ll be all better in the morning.)

& & &

Jack tells him.

The blood. The figure. I think I’ve gone missing.

Sam glances at him each time he finishes scribbling. His whole body is tension. No. Maybe not that. Fear?

Sad.

Sam is sad.

& & &

It’s three in the morning and they haven’t found anything. (Not yet, Sam assures.)

Jack’s drifting, eyelids heavy, his head feeling like it’s stuffed with a wet t-shirt—

—Someone screams.

“Jack! Jack!” Hands on his shoulders, shaking him back to here and now and this place. Oh. It was him.

“What?” And then: “I’m sorry.”

“No, you don’t have to— It’s—” Sam sits back down. “What happened?”

“Nothing. I just— I was falling asleep.” He doesn’t think anything happened, wracks his brain for a stray dream or a whisper or something that hurt but there wasn’t anything. There wasn’t— “I didn’t dream last night.” He’d forgotten about that. It had seemed unimportant when his organs were falling out of his stomach.

“That happens sometimes,” Sam says.

“Not to me.” But maybe it does to Him.

It’s like Sam can read his mind. “You’re you. You’re not— Whatever this is, it’s messing with your head. But you’re here, Jack, alright? I know it’s you.” Jack looks at him, looks away from where the figure had stood in the doorway hours before. “I’ll always know.”

Jack doesn’t respond because he’s not sure how.

& & &

Another two hours.

Jack’s bones feel like they’re full of cement. This isn’t right. Normally he could last twice this long without crashing, even as a human. But now he wants to sleep sleep sleep. He wants to crumble away. He wants Sam to push down on his shoulders and topple him like wet sand.

“I need to—” What he needs isn’t said, partly because he doesn’t know and partly because, when he stands, his feet immediately begin to slip slide because the entire floor is coated with a too thick layer of— Oh no.

He checks himself, every inch but nothing is wrong. He’s fine.

Spinning towards Sam he loses his balance, catches himself on the table.

“What?” Sam asks, always paying attention, always aware when Jack is in the room. “What is it?” But he’s fine, too. So where—? Eyes watching him, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Jack closes his eyes, his heart shrieking in his chest. For a split second he feels no longer heavy but as light as a feather.

He explodes.

& & &

Jack is looking at himself. One of them is him, one is not but either way, they stand across from one another.

The mouth opens but doesn’t make the movement of words. “.”

“You’re right,” Jack says in reply. Weighted but hollow. Is this what death feels like? He’s surrounded by an ocean of grey. It’s so viciously frigid here he can’t feel his skin. Or maybe that’s something else.

“.”

“Yes. I want it to—” Something tugs at him, like a thin string wrapped around his brain, a hand on the other end, pulling. Distracted, he follows the pull.

Through a haze, as if he’s being enveloped by fog and not a color, not just a color, he sees Sam, distraught, kneeling in blood on the library floor, covered in red as his hands try to seemingly put the pieces of Jack back together.

It’s not real. Whatever it is— Hey. Look at me. Look at me, alright? It’s you and me here. There’s nothing there. You’re okay.

It’s not real.

This is a thing we can fight.

This isn’t real (this grey, this end of everything) and that isn’t either (Sam looking for bones, curling a shredded t-shirt in a shaking fist).

“.”

“No,” Jack says, turning back to face the Other Him. That’s it. Just: No.

Grey turns to black, to a red so violent it feels like it’s ripping him apart, to a white so blinding his eyes melt.

And then: black again. And then:

& & &

He opens his eyes.

Jack is on the floor, Sam kneeling over him, hair hanging down like a curtain over his face. There’s a hand on the side of Jack’s face but it moves, floats away.

“What—” Jack starts. He remembers the Other Place with the Other Him. He remembers, oddly, exploding. And yet his mind also questions: how did I wind up on the floor?

“You got up,” Sam is saying. “And then you just… collapsed. You were—” A pause, a visible swallow. “You were cold.”

“How long was I—?” Jack sits up, just slightly, props himself up on elbows and there’s a clear ring of salt around him. Around the both of them.

“About five minutes. And twenty seconds.” A nervous laugh. He’d timed it exactly. Each ticking hand. How long was Jack cold and limp on the ground. Five minutes and seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—

“The salt.”

“It’s pretty amazing what salt can do, right?” Another laugh. “Even for things we’ve never seen before.” He’s not asking. He isn’t asking what happened, where Jack went, if he went anywhere at all and Jack doesn’t ask if Sam saw anything else, if his Other was there, if Sam tried to burn his hands again in an attempt to catch it. “Here.” Sam helps him to his feet and he wobbles. They stay in the circle. “But look”—Sam leans over towards one of the tables, towards the stacks of books, lifts a small open one from the top of the pile, holds it up to Jack—“Before you— I think I found it.”

The text is tiny, barely legible from age and Jack’s not sure how Sam made head-or-tails of it. There’s artwork in the bottom left corner, a man standing in front of an etched background, facing an exact copy of himself but behind the double like a shadow, the black silhouette of something massive and demonic. Jack feels, suddenly, like he’s being watched.

“They’re so rare,” Sam is explaining, “That they don’t even have a name. And there’s only been a couple written accounts of them. Nobody’s even sure, really, if it is a ‘them’. It could just be one. For centuries.” This is what Sam likes, Jack’s noticed. The research. The discovering. Opening some rare book written hundreds of years ago by men and women that were now dust because of time or because their bodies were burned and finding the answer.

“What does it want?” Jack asks even though he knows. It told him in the Grey. Sam doesn’t respond. He doesn’t respond, not right away and, when he does, he answers an entirely different question.

“It doesn’t seem to have a pattern in who it targets. Whoever it is— They’re just unlucky.”

“Unlucky,” Jack repeats. “Can we get rid of it?” Here, surrounded by salt, Jack almost feels like himself again. He’s shielded. He’s not the Other. He’s not missing. He’s here. Sam’s lips form a tight line and he turns the book back towards himself. “Sam.” He’s not telling him. He’s not telling him because—

“Hang on. I lost the part where— Okay.” A finger drags along the lines on the page. “It’s some, uh. Some complicated ingredients. Hard to find typically. Very specific—” He glances down at Jack, looks like he sees something in his face, in his eyes, but Jack doesn’t feel as if his expression has changed. “But I can do it. Just stay here.”

Like Jack had anywhere else to go.

& & &

It smells like rotting earth.

They’d driven past a swamp once while out on a case, the windows rolled down, and the stench had been overwhelming. Dean had laughed at Jack’s disgust. This—whatever Sam had mixed and mashed together in the bright blue bowl he’d borrowed from the kitchen because the fancy one was missing, the one made of metal and curled designs—was like that. It smelled like rotten earth and Dean laughing at him.

“Here’s the part you’re not going to like,” Sam says. I don’t like any of this, Jack thinks. How much worse can it actually be. “You have to drink it.” Jack scowls and Sam chuckles, a genuine one, not like when he was trying to reassure him to lighten the mood after he thought Jack might have been dead. (He was cold. Dead people got cold.) “I know. But it— This should work.”

Jack accepts the bowl, remembers watching a stranger, another hunter-in-training who lived here sometimes—a girl with fiery red hair that reminded him so much of Rowena that he almost, for a split second, thought it was actually her—make pancake batter in it just a week ago. It sizzled when it hit the beaten up pan. See those bubbles, she had said, that's how you know when it’s done.

This mush, this dark brown liquid, was bubbling. But it definitely was not pancakes.

It tastes worse than it smells. It makes him dizzy. His stomach lurches but he manages to keep it down.

“Also, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to—” Without warning, Sam swipes his foot along the floor and breaks the circle. At least he sounded like he meant it.

All at once, Jack feels wrong again. The sludge is in his veins. It’s in his brain. Sam is saying words but Jack doesn’t know what they mean. It sounds like gibberish. Heavy, so heavy, tired. The sludge is blood and there’s too much of it inside him. He feels bloated with it.

He’s standing on the sidewalk staring at himself. He’s under his bed. He’s watching himself sleep. He’s seeing himself sitting at the big table. He’s watching himself in Sam’s arms, trying desperately to hold his body together.

Jack opens his mouth and says: “.” His ears are rushing but somehow, over the noise, Sam is just slightly louder. Nonsense words. Angry. “! .”

He’s himself. He’s the Other. He’s both at the same time. He—

Bloated. He’s bloated with it. He’ll explode again and there won’t be any pieces for Sam to recover. He wants to tell him he’s sorry. He loves him but all that comes out is   

—

& & &

Jack sits up, inhales sharply. He’s in his room. His head is killing him. It’s never hurt this bad before.

“Hey.” Sam’s voice. Soft. Careful. “Hey.” The mattress sinks slightly when he drops down, hands folding and unfolding uselessly in his lap.

“Did it work?” Voice hoarse.

“You tell me. How do you feel?” Jack takes a minute. Takes stock.

“Hungry.” A twitch of the side of his mouth. A half-second smile. “I’m here.”

“Yeah. Yeah you are.” A laugh let out on a tired sigh. “Do you see him?”

“No. But he wasn’t there all the time. He just—” He peers around the room. Just them. Time would tell. The hours would let him know but, for now… Well. For now, at least. “Thank you.”

“You’re— I—” Sam seems… not stunned. Unreadable. He reaches over instead and hugs Jack. “And hey. Look,” Sam says when he lets go, “You’ve definitely made your mark. According to what I’ve read, it seems like you’re the first person in a hundred years to survive it.” Jack frowns. “And you get to name it. What’d’ya want to call it?”

“Me?”

“Somebody has to. Somebody should give it one.”

“Oh. Ah.” Was he himself or the Other Him. “The Other.”

“The Other,” Sam echoes. Nods. “I’ll let you rest. Find you some food.” He stands, starts for the door but stops when:

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What were you saying? After I drank that stuff?” He hadn’t seen any invocation—nothing that looked like one anyway—when Sam had shown him the book while they stood in a circle of salt. “What language was that?” He’d heard Latin before, he’d spoken it before. That wasn’t it. Sam’s brow furrows.

“I wasn’t— That wasn’t a spell. I was— I saw it, after I broke the salt. After you drank— I was telling it to let you go.” A frown. “What did you hear?”

“I don’t know.” (Sam trying to hold his pieces together, a hand on his face, “Let him go, get the fuck out of here you son-of-a-bitch—” ) His head throbs. He can feel the whump whump of his heart in his skull. He winces, rubs his forehead.

“Okay.” Another sigh. “I’ll be right back.”

Jack listens to him leave, the retreating footsteps.

Staring across the room, he only sees a blank wall. He checks under the bed, down to the black hole he’s been sleeping on top of for months, but the only thing he finds is a sock.