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“It wasn’t you, Sam,” Dean says, as Sam chokes back the last of the whiskey and sets down the glass and curls nails into arm like that’ll make him feel something. “It wasn’t your hands that killed Kevin. Don’t say that. It wasn’t you.”
The way Dean’s looking at him right now makes that statement feel all too true—like whatever body is sitting in Sam’s spot in the bunker library at three in the morning, it’s not actually Dean’s little brother. Sam stares down at those hands, the ones that supposedly belong to him, and picks back up the empty whiskey glass to turn it over in them as he turns Dean’s words over in his mind. It wasn’t your hands. Yeah. It wasn’t you. Sam doesn’t know how to tell Dean that this fact makes him want to throw up more than the thought of Kevin’s death. He doesn’t know how to even admit to himself that he’d rather it had been him who’d done it. He just wants his hands to belong to himself for once. He wants them to be his hands.
They weren't your hands. It wasn’t you.
“Found us a case,” Dean is saying now, and Sam has to actively tune back in. He’s not sure how Dean can jump from topic to topic so quickly, train of thought apparently a direct line from “It was actually the angel that I let possess you that killed the kid we were supposed to be protecting, so don’t worry about it!” to “Let’s go on a hunt.” Sam’s not arguing, though. He lets himself nod along to whatever Dean’s saying. Basic vengeful spirit. Leave in the morning. He knows the drill. Pack your bags, wake up early, get your ass in the Impala; it’s just what they do.
Sometimes Sam thinks about what it might be like to be someone who owns specific outfits for different occasions. Various kinds of shirts and pants and what-have-yous, for the apparent complexities of average day-to-day life. He can’t really imagine it, can’t imagine what it would be like to pack more clothes than weapons into those backseat duffels. It’s weapons you need a variety of. Which gun for which monster? What everyday items like salt and fire pokers? Dig out the machetes, or will a simple dagger do the trick?
Some people have walk-in closets.
Sam makes his way to the bed in the room in the bunker that is the space he occupies. He packs his bags. He wakes up early. He gets his ass in the Impala. It’s just what they do.
It only takes a few hours to get to the town where people have been dying. Sam knows he heard Dean say the name of it, but he’s forgotten and he doesn’t see any illuminative signs once they roll in. It’s not like it really matters, anyway. The town has a ghost and a motel and that’s all they need, no name required.
The murders have been relatively scattered, no specific building to tie it all down to, so they start with interviewing witnesses instead of researching history. Sam methodically puts on the fake suit and tucks within it the fake ID badge. He catches a glimpse of himself in a small wall mirror on the way out of the motel room. There’s not the usual moment of recalibration his brain often takes when he looks in a mirror. For some reason, he can most easily recognize himself when he’s wearing a lie. Or maybe it’s just the grimy motel mirror, the way it doesn’t demand recognition. You’re allowed to be anyone, it says, you don’t need to be yourself. In fact, it’s discouraged.
The day passes in a blur of interviewing distraught witnesses and breaking into the houses of the deceased. They make no progress, but the familiarity of it all, the routine, the way even lying to peoples’ faces and picking locks to root through possessions no longer possessed is just as methodical to them at this point as putting on a suit—it’s comforting. It’s working under fake names that don’t require Sam to be Sam, and yet it’s also the kind of day that has made up Sam’s life for years, has most assuredly been a huge factor in who he is, so he feels more like himself than he has in a long time. He is more himself than he’s been in a long time.
They grab food at a diner in the early evening; it’s still bright outside but the uncertain heat of initial summer days, the heat that never quite seems to know what to do with itself until mid-June when it suddenly finds a hateful kind of passion, has been settling down in the wake of a cool breeze and Sam orders a coffee along with his salad just to keep the evening chill away. Dean looks at him weirdly, probably thinking it’s a caffeine thing, but it’s the “my little brother is wack sometimes” kind of look instead of the “I don’t recognize you anymore and that’s lower than my usual standards for you” kind, so Sam allows himself to make a bitchy expression in response. They eat deliciously crappy food, and chat up the waitress, and haul themselves out of the booth and then the door when they’re done. Sam squints against the low sun as they slide into the Impala to get back to the motel.
“Well, I guess we’ll start again tomorrow,” Dean sighs, pulling open the room door and then collapsing onto his bed as soon as he gets inside. Sam sits down on the other one and starts taking off the dirt-scuffed shoes he’d been wearing. Dean just kicks off his own. “But man, even if we didn’t get anywhere, this feels good. I mean, the bunker’s great and all, but I just don’t feel like myself sometimes if I’m not eating greasy diner food and sleeping in a crap motel, y’know?”
Sam does know, it’s how he’s been feeling all day, but something in his mind decides to get stuck on the words “I just don’t feel like myself sometimes.” It’s like a part of him is just lying in wait to hear something that will give it justification to flip a switch in his brain, the switch in charge of how real or unreal things feel. He has to remember to keep taking off the shoes after a moment or two of processing Dean’s sentence. Those specific seven words decide to repeat themselves in his mind. He observes his own thoughts about the matter—myself, my self, I am a self, am I a self—as though they’re not his own. Maybe they’re not. A truck passes by on the highway outside the motel, engine loud enough to be heard clearly through its walls. He gets up and goes to the bathroom to splash some water on what he supposes is his face. This mirror has higher expectations of him than the other one, and for an instant the reflection within it is joltingly unfamiliar. It is my self. He notices the lips of the reflection look chapped. Then he notices they feel chapped. He runs a finger along the bottom lip. He wonders if it will start to bleed if it gets dry and cracked enough. He looks at the finger. There is no blood. Of course there’s not. The lips hadn’t been bleeding when he’d looked at them in the mirror just a moment ago.
“Are you gonna shower anytime soon, or can I hog the bathroom for once?” Dean calls through the door.
“Give me a minute,” Sam yells back, almost on autopilot. Is a minute enough time for—
For what?
His brain is suddenly stuck. What was the purpose of coming into the bathroom? He looks around, notes the standard motel grime on the walls, wonders why it even registered. He looks down at the hands.
His hands.
He wonders if they’d feel more like his hands if they were bleeding like his lips. Like his lips aren’t. He flexes the fingers of one hand, curls it into a fist, flexes it again. The dry skin on it looks almost like a stretchy sort of plastic. Could it be cut open? Would there be blood underneath? Would it reek of sulphur?
(For a split second, he imagines a shimmer of grace, and then quickly clears his mind.)
Maybe there would just be bone. Maybe twigs bundled together in a parody of the human form, like what Alicia Banes is made of now. Or maybe it would be an actual skeleton, but one that’s been reanimated and then refitted for skin that’s been designated as Sam’s. If so, someone didn’t make the labeling clear enough. Sam wonders if there are anti-angel tattoos. He wonders if Dean would ever reshape him out of twigs and twine just to have a brother again, one who actually seems like Sam instead of drinking whiskey in the library at three in the morning, one who doesn’t ever require use of the “I don’t recognize you anymore and that’s lower than my usual standards for you” kind of look. He wonders if he would be trapped within such a creation or if he would finally be free, on to whatever the afterlife looks like for something like him, at peace while Dean carried on with something that wasn’t independent enough to not be grateful to be alive.
Sam suddenly realizes that he hasn’t felt as ungrateful recently, or angry or broken or anything of the things he’d been feeling however long ago (Has it been weeks? Months? Time is usually only defined for them by the at least somewhat linear progression of monsters and apocalypses). But he doesn’t feel grateful either, or remorseful. He doesn’t feel anything. He wonders why he doesn’t feel anything. He wonders if he should check. (Check the twig creature thing, that is. Just to make sure that he’s not some magical creation that has only been pretending at being Sam.) He wonders if the edge of the blade currently tucked in the belt the reflection is wearing would feel as cool against skin as the tiles that make up the bathroom floor. Then he decides he’s not motivated enough to find out.
Dean’s phone rings outside the bathroom door. Sam walks out in time to hear Dean greet someone by name. Sam doesn’t recognize the name, but based on what he can hear from the rest of the conversation, it’s one of the people they’d interviewed earlier that day. Maybe a friend of one of the victims. Dean is confirming something about a locket. Sam listens to the half of the conversation that he can’t hear for a full minute until he realizes Dean has already hung up the phone and is now staring at him with raised eyebrows.
“Dude, you good?”
Sam nods the—his head.
“She remembered her bestie got a locket from a thrift store the day before she died. She said it gave her weird vibes or whatever. She’s bringing it over now.”
“Okay,” says Sam, sitting back down on the bed. Dean flips on the TV and they watch a random program for the fifteen minutes it takes for the girl to get there. Sam can’t remember the program once Dean turns it off at the knock on the door. It was familiar, something they’ve watched before to pass the time in motels like this one. He figures that’s all he needs to know about it, really.
The girl steps in nervously and holds out the locket. She’s got gloves on and everything. Dean takes it into his own bare hands without a second thought, studying it carefully before swinging it in Sam’s direction so he can have a look.
“Look familiar?” Dean says grimly, then turns to the files laid out across the small, rickety table by the TV stand without waiting for an answer. He sifts through them before pulling out a picture of one of the victims—who has an antique locket around his neck, Sam notices, and he looks back at the one Dean’s still got twined around his fingers to see that they’re one and the same. It’s a pretty safe bet at this point.
“I’d be surprised if this wasn’t the object it’s tied to,” Sam agrees, and then wonders detachedly if he really would be surprised, or if that’s another feeling that just doesn’t exist for him anymore. Carried away in the arms of apathy. Should he add the presence of his soul to the list of things to check?
“Then let’s burn, baby, burn,” Dean grins, and Sam looks up at the unreserved words only to see the girl gone and the door closed. He doesn’t remember her leaving. But this is familiar, this is comforting. He feels his summer-dry lips grinning back at Dean, and when Dean tosses him the lighter, he grabs it and flips it around in one practised movement. Dean fumbles for an ashtray to lay the locket in, then holds up a hand for pause and roots around in his duffel for the EMF reader—just to make sure, Sam supposes. It lights up and sings the shrill tone of Sam’s childhood, and Dean smiles wider. “Easy hunt, huh? Nice for once.”
Sam can’t say he minds not being thrown into gravestones by an angry ghost. (Then the thought decides to stick in his head, and he looks at it and thinks it’s probably not true, just something he thought on autopilot. He thinks maybe the pain would be good, actually, just to tell him if—just to remind him that he exists.)
The locket is salted. The locket is burned. A shriek seems to be blown in snatches around the room for a brief moment when the flame finds a big breath of life. Then the locket isn’t a locket anymore, just metal melted into something no longer recognizable as what it had once most likely thought itself to be.
It’s just what they do.
“Hey, it’s only six. We might as well just head back to the bunker.” Dean looks at Sam expectantly. “I could call Cas and let him know we’re coming home?”
Sam’s brain is taking a couple seconds to process this. It’s rare a hunt finishes so quickly. And even when it does, this late in the day they’d often stick around for another night just for the sake of it and head out in the morning, assuming the local sheriff wasn’t out for their heads. But they have the bunker now. A home, according to Dean, which Sam doesn’t think he’ll ever really understand. And, of course, Cas.
“Sure,” Sam says. “I guess we haven’t even really unpacked yet.”
So they gather their things, get their asses back in the Impala, and are off by 6:15. It’ll be a few hours ‘til they get there, so Sam lets his head rest against the window, lets his eyes close, lets the vibrations of the glass soothe him into a kind of half-sleep. Doing it tends to give him a subtle headache, but he’s fallen asleep like this more than once, rock music and the give of the road slowing his breath and mind.
He falls out of this half-state and into legitimate sleep eventually, and when he wakes up over an hour and a half later to a rock song that sounds just as generic and endless as the one he’d fallen asleep too, a sky slowly darkening into night, and Dean using the sides of the steering wheel as a makeshift drum set, he feels comfortably awake, if far from energetic. “Where are we going next, again?” he asks, voice gritty from his makeshift nap, staring out at the blurred landscape that’s passing them by.
Dean doesn’t halt in his finger-drumming, but Sam can feel him looking over. He looks back and observes that on a hypothetical spectrum of the preciously discussed kinds of looks, this one would probably be in the middle. “Bunker, Sam.”
Oh. No new town, new ghost, new motel. Instead, the bunker, with its colors that feel close to saturated and its rooms that don’t have windows to let in the light of day or the lack thereof at night. Sam swallows down an ache of grief that he doesn’t fully understand in favor of replying, “Right, sorry, I don’t why I—” He lets himself trail off. Dean doesn’t comment on it. Sam closes his eyes again.
They arrive soon after that. The door closes heavy behind them. The teal and golden of the lights and the rich mahogany of the bookshelves makes Sam feel washed out in comparison. He feels out of place. He feels distant. He feels intangible. He tells Dean and Cas he’s going to bed early. He drops his duffel on the bed out of habit, and doesn’t bother moving it when he lies down himself, just runs his fingers over the coarse canvas next to him mindlessly as he stares up at the clean, solid ceiling. Everything feels silent, including him. A distant part of him wonders, where have I gone? Another part of him wonders how it is that he still has parts of himself to wonder about things with. The silence is empty; so is he. There is no dripping of a stubbornly leaky faucet in a tiny motel bathroom. There is no one-pitch buzz of a minifridge broken to the point it keeps their food at room temperature but still intruding on them with its electrical hum. There is no Dean making quiet, almost-snoring sounds in his sleep on the other bed. (There is no other bed.)
I’m tired, he thinks, and almost starts to say it out loud just for the sake of filling the silence, but nothing manages to come out. Of course it doesn’t. How could he fill anything when he himself is hollow inside? He’s not a creator; he, too, is just something to be filled, his body and being all scooped-out to make room for whatever might decide to fill it, but somehow still existent enough that whatever has filled it can leave scars.
What are you, he thinks, and closes his eyes and sees Kevin’s face lit by holiness, by celestial beauty, by divinity. Kevin had dropped to the floor like a knife falls to the cutting board, eye sockets blackened and still burning at the edges. Holiness, Sam has found, is absent of the peace one might expect from it. (And divinity brings redemption only in the name of tragedy, and celestial beauty is inseparable from terrible pain, and Sam—knives that cut to the bone and cold that cuts to the soul and love that is a devastation, a desolation, a terrible eternity—would know.)
(But he doesn’t want to think of the Cage, because that gives the whole world that simultaneously saturated and washed-out atmosphere that the bunker invokes. Levels of unreality build in his mind that bury him deeper and deeper into shallow semblances of life and thought and being that he can never fulfill. He is drowning in the absence of anything substantial enough to ground him.)
What are you, he thinks.
I am not. That must be the only answer. I am simply not.
It wasn’t you, he thinks. The hands of a body he’s barely in stall their fidgeting; the body lies quietly breathing on the bed. Awake, though, still awake, not giving anything a chance to creep in and inhabit it alongside him.
No, it wasn’t.