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Sam wakes up hungry. That isn't unusual in itself; supplies have been thin on the ground since Chuck flipped the table, but this hunger isn't quite the one he expected to wake to. It takes him a minute, lying there in the straw, to figure out what it is that he's feeling. It's a sensation that's not quite a sensation, something somewhere between physical thirst and mental restlessness. Finally he places it: this is a craving.
He watches dust motes turn in the predawn light that shows between the boards of the hayloft. Beside him, Dean stirs. Sam hasn't moved or made any sound, but that never matters. The ghost of a smile touches Sam's lips.
The straw crinkles with the movement of a body stretching; Dean smacks his mouth, once, and sniffs. Exactly five seconds go by, and then Dean pushes himself up to sit, which they can just barely do in here, with a groan.
"Morning, sunshine," Sam says, still watching the dust motes.
"Morning. I'm gonna leave a comment card on our way out of this B&B with a strong recommendation that they invest in memory foam."
Sam snorts and finally sits up. The movement pulls on his shoulder, but he doesn't let that show. Dean's eyes flick down to the wound, anyway. "We've stayed in worse," Sam points out. "Places with bigger rodent problems, for sure."
Dean yawns as he rubs at the back of his neck. His hair is sticking up at the back, and he has the impression of a zipper over one cheek from using his jacket as a pillow. "Well, there's that. Anyway, we should keep moving, and I guess two stars is enough for a pit stop." He scrutinizes Sam. "You hungry?"
If he knew about the cravings, Dean would probably consider Sam not mentioning them to be secret-keeping. But Dean doesn't want to know, and that's a secret Sam keeps for the both of them. "I could eat," Sam says. He reaches for his boots.
"Gimme a look at your shoulder," says Dean.
"Later. Gonna get a bath in."
"Sam. Gimme your damn shoulder."
"After."
Dean is between Sam and the ladder down from the hayloft, but Sam clambers over Dean's legs, ducking under the pitch of the roof, and swings one leg down onto a wooden rung he tests lightly before planting his weight. "I'll look for a bucket," he says.
"Stop being a little bitch," says Dean.
Sam shakes hay out of his hair and into Dean's face as he passes, and his brother's curses follow him down the ladder.
"You know, I was going to be nice to you for your birthday!" Dean shouts after him.
Sam lets himself grin since Dean can't see it.
Outside it's pearly gray and loud with birds, those hyper-obnoxious ones that really kick in between the hours of four and five a.m. and don't back off until just after the hour you might actually want to get up. Sam finds a bucket that looks reasonably sound next to a tractor sprouting weeds out of its foam seat. The barn is the last relic of a farm that's been sold for subdivision; half a mile away, CATs and bulldozers lie scattered among fluttering pink survey markers. They haven't moved since the Fog ate the nearby town that was trying to eat this farm.
He shucks his shirts one-handed as he heads down to the river. The twisting motion hurts like a bitch, but it's a clean hurt, the pain of a wound that's raw but not infected. It'll pass. Anyway, Sam's not stupid. He shot God in His left.
The river is shallow, swift, stony, and cold. At the bottom of the hill, Sam drops his shirts in a pile, skims off his jeans and underwear, and wades straight in. The cold wraps sure around his ankles, then his calves. Sam shuts his eyes and concentrates on that.
And it's possible to concentrate. This craving is mild. This is an itch, an annoyance. This is nothing compared to the sweating, shaking state in which he does not so much need the blood as find all else driven from his mind but the patent impossibility of going the rest of his life, the rest of his life without it.
It makes sense he's having cravings, really. It's been a while, but they always tend to crop up when he feels helpless. When God Himself has decided to undo their life's work as a personal fuck-you, say. Of course at such moments Sam wishes to feel powerful. Of course at such moments the awareness of his own inadequacy, always there, should be harder to bear; of course life and everything in it should seem unsatisfactory.
It doesn't matter. The craving is not a problem in need of a solution, but a fact. What he has to do today is no different from what he had to do yesterday: go about his business and not drink. This is also what he has to do tomorrow, and every day after it: get up, go about his business, and not drink.
Sam thinks to himself, One: We admitted to ourselves that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable, steps down off the rock shelf he's standing on, and lets the cold around his midsection steal his breath.
Of all the unlubricated mindfucks regarding the nature of free will Sam's been on the receiving end of throughout his life, being an addict is probably the most intractable of them. It's not even so much the questions it raises that are specific to Sam that do his head in—or, at least, not these days. There was a time when he was preoccupied with questions like When did this start? and Is it the blood I'm addicted to, really? and How much is my fault? And, of course, an old favorite: What does it all mean? But he's mostly given up asking. Not willingly, certainly not gracefully, but he reached a point where he was just too exhausted for that crap.
He shared about it in a meeting once, after Magda—obliquely, of course—and when he admitted that he was dropping the philosophical inquiry only because he was sick of it, not because he'd become reconciled, heads all around him nodded approvingly. "Let go and let God," said a lady, and more heads bobbed, up and down like drinky bird desk toys to a murmur of, "Let go and let God."
This was Sam's first encounter with the phrase, and he stood at the front of the co-opted Sunday school room somewhat taken aback. All he could think of was that he wouldn't let God tune a guitar, but it seemed contrary to the spirit of the proceedings to say so.
Sam started going to meetings because he didn't know what else to do. What he did know was that he couldn't afford to fuck up. The chip Lindsey showed him was NA, so NA was his first port of call, but he wasn't picky; NA, AA, GA, OA—whatever flavor of Anonymous happened to be playing in town on a night when the world wasn't ending and he could get away from Dean for a couple of hours was good enough for Sam.
They were all equally arbitrary, and he felt equally out of place in each. He is out of place in each. Addiction's as good a descriptor as any for this thing with him and the blood, but he's not a run-of-the-mill addict. He just isn't. Through times when he liked it and times when he didn't, Sam has always been a special case. The point has cost him much mental agony. He'd been attending the same AA meeting outside Kermit for three months, feeling both like a liar and, despite that, superior every time, before he figured out that it might be true but it also doesn't matter. If he'd had a sponsor, they would probably have congratulated him that night on having reached the point of surrender.
Surrender is a word that features heavily in AA. No wonder Dean doesn't like it much.
But that just shunts him right back to the heavy philosophical questions about what freedom is.
Not that Sam is any kind of Twelve Step expert. That span while he was living with Amelia remains the only time he's ever attended meetings with any regularity, and he's not even positive the meetings actually help. It's more like: he's made it this far, and he's been to some meetings along the way, so no sense disturbing what might turn out to be a delicate balance. Right?
Smoke reaches him from up the hill, warm and fragrant though it's probably just rotted planks and hay. A fire. All of their rations are edible cold, but Dean is cooking. He is up there warming up Chef Boyardee in the can and/or toasting Pop-Tarts over an open flame because it's Sam's birthday, the world is ending, and this is what Dean can give him.
Two: We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
The belief in a Power was mandatory. It didn't have to be God, or Jesus, or anything religious, the people in the third church basement Sam found his way into explained to him. It could be reality. It could be the Fellowship itself; that was a popular one. One woman said she knew a guy thirty years sober who used a tree. Pick a Higher Power, any Higher Power.
For a while, though Sam didn't even know he was doing it at the time, that was Dean. He'd just started the apocalypse. Dean was right there. It seemed natural, or at least inevitable. Surrender, said the Program, and Dean had promised to kill him. He never followed through, but that voicemail lent Sam a sense of security at a time when he badly needed it. Dean was his failsafe. As higher powers went, that beat the hell out of God.
But that was when he still thought dying would be the closest he could get to sanity. Then Sam did die, continuously, forever, and learned that it was not. Afterward, he could only turn to the One who had created a cage that could keep such insanity contained. That was power higher than Sam by definition.
Praying to something in the sweating depths of need only because he was out of better ideas did not lessen the prayer's intimacy. If anything, removing of the illusion of choice actually increased it.
Sam scrubs himself all over, vigorously, raking up dust and dead skin with his nails and washing the little snakes of crud away in the current before he picks up his knees and lets himself plunge straight down and the water hits the wound in his shoulder and it hurts, it hurts, it is beautiful, and his eyes are closed but he feels the sun burst over the horizon when he stands and it lights up his wet skin.
Three: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
He shakes his head, flinging river water all around him for yards, and opens his eyes and rakes back his hair. He wades back up to where it's shallower. The air is cold, gives him goose pimples, but there is also the sun's fragile warmth.
No matter how many times he gets resurrected, Sam will have spent vastly more time in Hell than on Earth. Nothing will ever change that. Sam knows the Devil better than his own brother and the reverse is also true. Nothing will ever change that. When the Devil got out of his box a second time, everything Sam had endured to put him there was rendered meaningless. Dean killed Lucifer, and it might even be permanent, but he will never, ever be able to kill that.
Let go and let God.
It's not like Sam hasn't assumed all along that God saw his suffering in the Cage; omniscience is His whole shtick. But there's a difference between seeing something and watching something. Sam didn't know that. He found out a week ago, in the war room in the bunker, when a Creator with delusions of humility called them His favorite TV show.
Dean's voice shouts down the hill: "Sammy, hurry up! Soup's on!"
"Coming!" Sam hollers back, but he makes no move to get out of the river. The pebbles hurt his arches and his toes are numb in the cold. The birds are mounting their last crescendo before they'll mellow out for the day. The sunrise bleeds through the black tangle of trees on the horizon as it spits on its hands and really gets down to business, outlining everything in orange with that clarity that only this exact hour ever yields. The light will be the same color come sunset, but the way it illuminates is never the same.
He remembers something Jess told him once: that when the Greeks prayed to the Olympians, they did it standing upright. When they prayed to Hades, they got down on their knees and pounded on the earth, to make themselves heard. According to the nature of the god, they got on its level when they had something to say.
What did Chuck call it? A perfectly balanced quantum link between whoever's shooting it and whoever they're shooting at?
Sam puts his hand to the wound on his shoulder and squeezes.
It hurts exactly as much as he thought it would. He's something of an expert on hurting; a couple centuries in the Cage will do that for you. The pain is a hot, black burst that rolls all through him, and he feels sticky warmth leak out between his fingers.
In the rising sun, he watches the blood run down into the river and laughs.