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It wakes him up at night.
The wound throbs. A fluttering pulse, like heartbeats overlaid. Images linger behind his eyes—bright white light, metal walls, his own bare feet in the center of a devil's trap—and then fade to shadow. Sam touches his shoulder with the flat of his palm, presses against it as hard as he can. It doesn’t hurt, not really, but it feels like there’s something behind it, something pressing back. He feels it all the time—always there, always taking up space in his mind. White noise underlying the soundtrack of his life. Sometimes he sinks into it, sometimes he can’t hear anything else.
He’s seeing through the cracks, seeing the way of things in other worlds without getting to know the why. But there are some things no one should see, some things no one should know. It’s Sam’s rotten luck to see them anyway. Except it isn’t luck, and that’s one of the things he knows.
Sam rubs his eyes and stands, shuffles out into the night-dim hallway, heads for the kitchen to get away from his thoughts and the phantom scent of sulfur that follows him from his dreams. He presses the back of his hand against his nose, and tries not to think about the flashes of a thousand other Sams living a thousand other lives.
Chuck treats his universes like a child treats their drawings, hung on the fridge to be admired for a day or a week or a month, until the next one takes its place. The old ones tossed aside and forgotten. This universe alone keeps Chuck coming back to watch and poke and prod, in this world alone Sam and Dean keep his attention.
Sam has seen flashes of terrible things—red lights and screaming alarms, a snapped neck and a smile—that bored Chuck. He’s seen, too, the softer worlds that Chuck abandoned—Dean cutting grass, kid’s bike in an open garage, beer sweating on the stoop. World’s too bleak or too kind to be meaningful. It’s a certain kind of suffering that interests Chuck.
Sam remembers the graveyard, the way Chuck leaned in—the ghost of a giddy smile, the laser focus—as he waited for Dean to pull the trigger of the gun he put in his hand. Because Chuck wants a world with stakes. He wants love, but only if it’s costly, only if he names the price. He wants choice, but only if it hurts, and only if he gets to watch you choose which way to lose. Sam knows what it means to entertain a God, though he tries not to think about that, either.
There’s only one light on in the kitchen when he gets there and Sam doesn’t bother with the rest. He grabs a coffee mug, unsure if it’s coffee he wants when the sound of a glass hitting the table startles him. He turns to find Dean sitting at the shadowed table, glass in hand and bottle of whiskey at his elbow.
“Hey,” Sam says.
“Hey.” Dean looks him over like he always does, tilts the bottle towards him.
Sam joins him at the table, holds out his mug to be filled. He thinks about telling Dean that he’s seeing those other worlds, but something stops him. He knows his brother, he knows the way that Dean carries guilt that isn’t his. All the ugliness would drag him down, but that’s not what really scares Sam. Because somewhere out there some other Dean kept Sam safer, saved the world faster, didn’t loose as many people, and the weight of knowing that might just crush him. No matter that they’ve both chosen to stay who they are in this world, it’s different when it’s always there, thrumming like another heartbeat underneath your skin. It’s better that this happened to Sam.
Sam must make a face, because Dean presses his lips together and nods at Sam’s shoulder. “That thing still bothering you?”
“It’s fine,” Sam says, and barely stops himself from shrugging and upsetting the wound.
“Right.” Dean throws back what’s left in his glass, leaving his mouth slick. He wipes the back of his hand across it, takes the shine from his lips.
Sam looks away, almost touches his shoulder, because there’s other things he’s seen, too. Worlds where Dean’s mouth is something he’s allowed to watch. Where they’ve faced down this thing that breathes in the shadows between them, ebbing and flowing over the years, but never really going away. Here, they’ve never talked about it, even when its gravity pulls them to the brink. But somewhere out there, Sam’s hand is a welcomed weight on Dean’s thigh.
When Sam looks up, Dean’s watching him, his eyes heavy and dark, lids low. Sam’s lips part, his breath comes fast, blood rising to match Dean’s because that’s what it does. And for a moment the wound, the pulsing of those other hearts, all the Sams who had it worse, the few who got it right. None of it matters. It’s just them, cradled in the dark hours of the morning, with the same, familiar unspoken thing drifting up like warm air between them, and Sam thinks now, maybe now, as he watches Dean breathe and feels his own muscles tense with readiness.
The wound pulls, ache cutting through the stillness, and Sam knows that there's something behind it, he knows that God likes to put the gun in your hand, and he knows the way Dean carries guilt. So he stands, moves away, because this isn’t that kind of world, no matter how much he wants it to be. Behind him the bottle clacks against the rim of Dean’s glass as he pours himself one step closer to a soft-edged world.
Later, Sam will sit bolt upright in bed, throat slick with sweat, heart racing, ache low in his gut, taste in his mouth like salt and whiskey. And he’ll know something new. He’ll know the way it feels to have it, even though it isn’t his.
It keeps him up at night.