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“Dean?” says Jared, with a wobble in his voice. Jensen blinks at him, his eyes reacting to the light. Jesus. Jared looks terrible. His hair is greasy and his beard is thick and he’s almost as skinny as the months after he fucked up his shoulder. Jensen’s stomach clenches.
“It’s okay,” he says. He moves towards Jared, reaches for him, and Jared falls into the hug, gripping his forearms fiercely over Jensen’s back. Jensen moves a soothing hand across Jared’s shoulders as he tries to calm his own rising panic. He’s trying to understand what’s wrong. Surely it isn’t-- it’s hard on both of them, ending the show, but they decided to do it. It was never meant to leave Jared like this. And he seemed fine last night; tearful, but essentially okay.
Last night. With a flash of relief, Jensen realizes that he is dreaming. Jared was fine last night, at the wrap party. And here they are on set. And there’s no crew here and didn’t-- yeah. Jared just called him “Dean”. This is the world’s most vivid tequila dream, that’s all.
“It’s okay, Sammy,” Jensen says, experimentally.
Jared - Sam - is sobbing into his shoulder. He’s not making much noise but Jensen can feel every hitching breath against his chest.
“Hey,” says Jensen, and he steps back a little, tries to catch Jared’s eye. “I’m here, it’s okay.”
Jared mirrors the movement, stepping back out of Jensen’s space. He’s nodding but he doesn’t meet Jensen’s eyes. Instead, Jensen watches as Sam - and it is Sam, Jared never does this but he’s seen it a hundred times from Sammy - folds all of the emotion back into himself, sucking it down with a shaky inhale. Then he grins weakly in Jensen’s direction. “It’s good to see you back, man,” he says. “You don’t even know.” His voice is breaking already.
“Hey,” says Jensen, and moves in to hug him again. “It’s okay.”
Sam squeezes tightly then taps him on the back, thud-thud to signal that it’s okay to let go. He looks a little better this time. “I can’t believe you’re here.” A frown creases his forehead. “Do you-- how much do you remember?” Jensen blinks at him and Sam shakes his head. “Sorry. You probably don’t want to. I’m just. I’m so sorry it took so long. I can’t-- shit, man.” He reaches forward to trace his fingertips over Jensen’s shoulder, down his upper arm. “Um. Do you need to eat?”
Jensen isn’t hungry. This is a dream and if it weren’t, he’d be too hungover. But Sam looks so hopeful that he finds himself agreeing to be fed.
“I’ll, uh. I should call Rowena, maybe,” Sam says. He keeps looking at Jensen, darting glances that skitter away when Jensen looks back. “She said this wouldn’t work. That it wouldn’t, uh. The enchantments on the box were too powerful.” Unexpectedly, he laughs. “Guess I showed her.”
There turns out to be nothing in the fridge. Sam scratches at his forearms. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ll go out. I can get you whatever. Burgers good?”
“It’s okay,” Jensen says. “I’m not so hungry.” Sam frowns but he doesn’t say anything.
They drink coffee instead, industrial-strong so that even Jensen coughs. No wonder Sam is so twitchy, that his hands tremble as he holds the cup.
“You look like you need some sleep,” says Jensen.
“Yeah,” says Sam. “Yeah, I probably do.” He rubs the back of his neck and doesn’t meet Jensen’s eyes. His movements are different than Jared’s, whose pent-up energy tends to vent itself balletically or in bouts of rapid-fire speech. Sam is noticeably quiet and his internal tension expresses itself only in the smallest movements, the tap of a toe or the twitch of a fingertip. It’s okay, Jensen wants to say to him. Let it out. Let go.
Sam won’t go to bed, despite Jensen’s best efforts. In the end he falls asleep in a chair in the library, his head pillowed on his forearm and an undrunk glass of whisky on the table beside him. Jensen drains his own glass, swills the alcohol around his mouth and inspects the bunker, cautious at first but growing bolder as Sam shows no sign of waking. Everything is extraordinarily vivid. Every book has a title on the spine. The leather is soft and textured under his fingertips. It’s like no dream he’s ever had before. But maybe that isn’t true; maybe this is how it always feels and it’s only at the moment of waking that the detail drains away.
He finds parts of the kitchen that he's never seen on screen. Then he goes looking elsewhere. Two right turns and a handful of stairs take him to the archive rooms, which are musty and silent behind their thick walls of books. He walks through one of them and into the dungeon. Chains hang from the ceiling. Hooks bristle from the walls. In the centre of the floor, a dark circle of ashes mark out the remnants of a spell. Charred, uneven lumps of some organic matter are scattered over the space. Jensen knocks one of them with the toe of his boot and it sends a sharp shock of horror up his spine. It's as if, for a split second, someone put their mouth against his ear and screamed.
The loud clang of the outside door sends him back to the war room, where he finds Sam and Rowena facing one another across the table. Rowena looks Jensen up and down.
“Well, I never expected to see you again.”
“Here I am,” Jensen says. There’s no mistaking this woman for Ruth. She crackles with power, the buzz of it almost audible, like the hum of a switched-on TV.
“And Michael?” she says, turning back to Sam.
“He’s still in the box.” Sam’s voice is hoarse. The creased imprint of his shirt sleeve stands out on his cheek. “Right, Dean? He’s not in your head?”
“No,” says Jensen. He taps his forehead. “Not in... this noggin.” Why is Dean's cadence so hard to find?
Rowena frowns. At her sides, her fingers clench and unfurl. A ghostly hand brushes over Jensen’s forehead. Jensen watches as she masks her shock.
“Sam,” she says, and she walks around the edge of the room, keeping the table between her and Dean. “I don’t think this is your brother.”
“What?” says Sam.
“It's not him.” There is an edge to her voice. “I told you that there was no chance of breaking those enchantments on the box. That you'd be more likely to summon something from another world than you would be to break Dean out.”
This is not good. It would probably be worse if it were the other way around, if Jensen were Jared feigning Sam and Dean found out. But it’s a risky position even so.
“Where are Jack and Castiel?” Rowena asks.
Sam stands up and walks over to Jensen. He places his hand between Jensen’s shoulder blades. It’s warm.
“Thanks for your help with everything,” Sam tells Rowena firmly. “I really appreciate it. Thanks for keeping an eye on me, too. But we’re good now. Dean and I. We’re good. You can go.”
~
Jensen doesn’t know which bedroom is Dean’s. On set they use one room for all of them, dressing it differently. He has to ask Sam to show him the way, which makes Sam terribly worried. “You can’t remember?” he says.
“It’s, uh, patchy,” says Jensen. Sam’s mouth purses tight.
Lying in bed, Jensen turns over the puzzling fact that he is not waking up. But time is funny in dreams. In a moment he will open his eyes in his Vancouver apartment and this will all concertina down into nothing, an anecdote to tell Jared or report at the next convention. It is not surprising that Sam and Dean are on his mind; that he is picturing them isolated and abandoned. It makes perfect sense.
Sometime in the dark night the door creaks open and Jensen sees Sam’s distinctive frame outlined against the corridor’s faint grey light. Sam climbs into the bed and knots his fingers into Jensen’s T-shirt. “Dean,” he says in a thin voice and buries his face in Jensen’s neck. Jensen holds him.
Jensen thought he knew all there was to know about Dean but caught here, he begins to understand how much he’s missing; all the nights and evenings and missing months and days that have remained offscreen, untold. How many times has Sam come to Dean like this? Is this what Sam wants from him? Is this enough?
When Jensen wakes in the morning his bed is otherwise empty but he is still in the bunker. He is reminded of the episode they filmed this season set in Dean’s imaginary bar, the static, eternal loop of a single day. He half expects Jared to walk through his bedroom door and say “Poughkeepsie.”
He takes a shower in the institutional, open bathroom. When he looks in the mirror he sees himself. Rather than the pentagram Dean wears on his chest, Jensen’s own tattoo spreads familiar over his upper arm. Jaybird. JJ. He catches her face in his mind for a moment but it dissipates almost instantly, leaving him staring at the reflected image of the bird. Her eyes are bound, blindfolded for justice--for impartiality. Unseeing, she does not discriminate.
Sam has been out for groceries. He presents Jensen with a cold, greasy tray of breakfast meats in a styrofoam container. Jensen pokes at it, eating as much as he can, conscious every moment of Sam’s anxious gaze. Moved by the instinctive imperative to reassure, he finds himself clowning, mugging exaggerated relish. Sam smiles and his shoulders begin to relax. “Awesome,” says Jensen, spraying sausage.
When he’s done he wipes his chin and contemplates the long stillness of the day ahead.
“Should we be, uh, working?” he says.
Sam’s features spasm for a moment, unreadable. “Let’s stay here a little longer.”
Jensen could say to Sam that he’s claustrophobic, after the box. Hell, only a few-- a few weeks, a few episodes ago, Sam was saying that he hated the bunker. He might be glad to get out. But if Jensen is honest about it, he is relieved. He doesn’t want to hunt monsters, not in this world where the knives and claws and teeth are all sharply vicious and real.
No, better to stay here, safe underground. They can stay underground and Dean, in this reality, will remain in his coffin under the sea. This is something that Jensen has not so far considered. Sam believes that his brother is here beside him when in fact, Dean is under the water with gallons of it pressing down on him and Michael pushing out from within. Jensen thinks about the scream which he heard in the dungeons, about the bloody fingernails that makeup gave him when they filmed Dean's dream. Maybe he has an obligation here.
Sam is sipping his coffee. When he notices Jensen looking at him, he smiles. “Do you want to watch a movie or something?”
“Poughkeepsie,” Jensen says. He doesn’t know that he is planning to say the word until it’s out of his mouth.
Sam’s cheeks go pale. He drops his mug and it glances off the edge of the table, shattering into white shards on the cold tile floor. “What,” he says, barely audible.
Jensen didn't think this through.
“Dean,” says Sam, grating and desperate. “Dean? What do you mean?” He pushes back his chair and stands up, swaying on his feet. His eyes dart rapidly around the room. From somewhere about his person, he produces a knife. The blade glints sharp and threatening in the false electric light.
“What is it?” Sam says, and Jensen doesn’t know how to answer. “How do I get out?” Jensen is silent and Sam repeats himself. “How do I get out?“
Jensen knows that Sam and Dean need each other. He has played it and said it again and again and again. But it's something else to feel it physically for himself, the sharp tug of connection that runs from his chest to Sam's. His own children, surrounded by love, don't need him this much.
“Sorry,” says Jensen. “Sorry, I didn't. I shouldn't have said that.” He touches Sam's hand and Sam lowers the knife. “It's okay, Sam.” Jensen puts his palms on either side of Sam's face. Sam drops his forehead to meet Jensen’s. They breathe.
“I just feel like I'm dreaming,” says Jensen. “Like I'm swimming. It's… I'm freaked out, is all. To be here.”
Sam grips his fingers around Jensen’s wrist, iron - strong. “Don't worry. I've got you,” he says.