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It’s November 2nd, 2010, and it’s been twenty seven years since Dean had carried his baby brother out of a fire.
It still feels like it happened yesterday. He can still taste the smoke, still remembers the heaviness of the warm bundle in his arms. He had only been allowed to hold Sammy on his own a few times, before; each time he’d been sitting down, with Sammy all wrapped up and Mom reminding him to prop up his head, sweetie, he’s still very little. So Dean held Sammy very carefully as he carried him down down the stairs that he’d been warned many times not to run down before.
It’s November 2nd, 2010, and all Dean wants is to hear Sammy’s voice again. His voicemail had run full a few weeks ago, but today Dean’s finally drunk enough to dare and try to go through Sam’s duffel in search of his phone.
At least, that’s what he had thought until he pulled the tarp of the Impala, raising dust in the dim light provided by the sole lightbulb, and saw the bag resting in the backseat.
He can do this, though, has no choice but to do this while he still feels numb enough. He collects himself with a shaky breath and pulls the duffel out with trembling hands, puts it down on the floor. He reaches for the bottle of Jim Bean he left on the rickety table and sits down next to it, resting his back against the garage wall. A sob threatens to escape out of his chest, and he pulls the duffel closer to himself. It’s light, too light to be carrying all that’s left of his world.
The sight of Sammy’s neatly folded shirt right up front is a punch to the gut, a reminder of why he only thought he could do this after he got wasted. He brushes his fingers over the fabric; it’s wrinkled, because there’s no method of folding that’s effective against living on the road, something Sam has quietly agonized over ever since he was a teen.
Thankfully, the phone’s in the side pocket, along with two chargers because Sammy’s the type to carry a spare, seemingly just to roll his eyes at Dean when he’d left his at the last motel. Usually he’d kept them in different places – one in the bag, other in Impala’s glovebox, but it seems like Sam’s also the type to organize his stuff and fold his shirts before going off to sacrifice himself to save the world. As if getting his things out of Dean’s sight would make it easier for him. It does not, at least Dean doesn’t feel like it’s working. He’d thought that he missed Sam after he left for Stanford, when John told him to never fucking come back, but Stanford’s got nothing on this.
The phone’s out of battery. Dean knew that, of course – it’d been going straight to voicemail ever since he first tried it. He plugs it into the outlet next to him, waits for the screen to lit up. His eyes travel back to the duffel. He wonders what else he could find, if he were dumb enough to try to go through he rest of Sam’s belongings. They don’t have many mementos. Few photos survived the fire 27 years ago and few have been taken afterwards. He had felt the loss of that one photo of Mary and John that Sam took to Stanford dearly. Maybe he would find it now, tucked away safely in the bottom of the bag, where it’s the least likely to get damaged or lost, assuming that it survived the second fire, the one that pushed Sam back into this life. He had pulled Sam out of that one, too.
The phone lights up.
God, he can’t do this. Exept – exept – he just wants to hear him again, even if it’s just It’s Sam. Leave a message, he wants to hear his brother’s voice one more time. He turns the phone on, unlocks the screen, takes in Sam’s generic wallpaper before dialing the voicemail. The disembodied, automatic female voice informs him that he’s got twenty nine new messanges and he presses the button to delete them all, thank you very much, he knows what they are and he’s not here to listen to his own drunken calls. He hesistates, though, when the lady tells him that he has one saved message. This is the first time he has touched Sam’s phone since he went away, and that means that it’s something that Sam chose to keep. He presses the #1 to hear it out.
His own voice comes as a cold shock, freezing the breath in his lungs and stiffening his limbs.
Listen to me, you bloodsucking freak. Dad always said I'd either have to save you or kill you. Well, I'm giving you fair warning. I'm done trying to save you. You're a monster, Sam. A vampire. You're not you anymore. And there's no going back.
He blinks, slowly, trying to comprehend what is it that went down just now. Only it wasn’t just now, he realizes when he looks at the screen, the message had been first left on May 13th, 2009, and that means that it’s been over a year Sam heard it and decided that it’s important enough to save.
Dean leans away and loses the dinner.
He remembers Zachariach saying that Sam’s going to need a little nudge, remembers Sam’s face in the convent and every single day after that, remembers the way he flinched when they met again after his trip to the future. Most of all, he remembers all the time they had lost. It had taken him so long to let Sam in again and even then, he was holding back, keeping Sam at arm's length.
He wonders whether Sam had figured it out, or whether he had just thought that Dean, in his benevolence, decided not to go through with killing him after all.
It’s November 2nd, 2010. Six months ago Dean let his brother go to hell, and each day since then has felt like forever had gone by.