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“We’re family.”
“You’re saying this like it’s some sort of a cure-all.”
‘Yeah, you wouldn’t do the same for me, I know.’
Green hills and misty valleys pass by the open window, and Sam feels a sharp touch of cold air. There must be a lake or a river nearby. Forest on the sides of the road melts into the fog, sundry leaves blend into one generous brush stroke of dark-green. The deep, calming colour of real life hides the world of creatures that have the right to be on the surface of this planet and have never betrayed it. Plants, that is, Sam thinks sleepily. Plants never kill anyone. Plants survive, and lavish, and grow, and create a beautiful fan of green feathers that hovers over the road, peeking through the net of entangled aspen branches. Greenness strives, breathes, smiles quietly to its mossily-soft thoughts, and gives birth to weightless purple and yellow and, and more purple, these gentle flowers, too fragile to be as much as touched by a human.
Plants don’t pick up dark artifacts that created murder itself and don’t walk around cutting heads off. No, his own brother does it. Of course he does.
Blood is definitely the origin of evil, Sam thinks. He is entranced into staying awake by coffee and cold air, but his body is exhausted and continually attempts to switch off. Sam tilts his head over the back of the seat. Neck cracks in the usual spot. He stretches his knees diagonally into that peculiar position where it’s almost comfortable to half-lay and half-sit while remaining a reliable distance away from the dirty denim of Dean’s jeans.
Sam thinks that their life has long lost bold romanticism and light-hearted courage. It’s just blood now; no, it’s always been blood. Blood gave origin to the twisted animal called human, and this animal walked and murdered. He and Dean, they grew from blood, too harshly, hastily made to be plants. When did he miss that moment, that point of no return when Dean’s features became frozen and rigid, when his muscles toughened, when his smile turned fake and his eyes didn’t shine but leaked with tiredness and anger? It must have started with the first kill. Sam feared to look at Dean more than necessary. Sam told himself that it was anger that kept him away, or essential distance to keep peace. But he was scared of what Dean has become.
Sam liked to avoid being straightforward. To boldness, he deep in his heart preferred hints, metaphors, complexness of verbal expression. He liked the intricate connections of sounds when they made their way into words and formed whole talks – Dean has never been a fan of those. But what Sam struggled with was finding the right words to describe the situation. He felt that he has to dive deeper if he wanted even to attempt to reach Dean. Their problem here, - it was indescribable, and Sam hurt. He saw no way out, no light ahead. All he wanted was the same thing that he had wanted before – death. He saw a glimpse of it, and it wasn’t threatening at all. Instead, the sharp stare of Death was promising and clear, much clearer than Sam’s life in the past couple of years. Wisdom and peace attracted Sam’s long-suffered soul, and he longed to say ‘yes’ to oblivion. And he believed – there was still something in him that believed – that aside from clowned Heaven and grotesque Hell, there were other worlds – the true ones, the right ones. There’d be the worlds not ancient, but eternal; the worlds where light and dark were complete and not ephemeral; the worlds to which humanity and its loose morals, unsteady beliefs, and poorly-written scripts could not extend. Sam sensed it when he was on the brink of death: the true light at the end of the tunnel. He knew that all facts of his life proved otherwise; that his life itself was a proof of dark dullness and cliché-ity of this universe, but Sam believed that this wasn’t all. It was too human to believe that this was all that they got from the beginning of time – wars, fight for power, hate. There must have been worlds before blood, and they were on the other side.
Sam didn’t die when he was meant to; not once, not twice. Dean brought him back. A shadow of a man – cracks and stitches, one-liners and no evolution of the character - he kept reaching for Sam’s trembling essence, grabbing it with his dry, warm hands, and pulling back into the sad darkness of this world. A dark angel with a livid frown, Dean guarded him, not letting him leave, and expecting the same in return. And no matter how much Sam wanted to die, it was not in his powers to resist Dean. After all, Dean was blood.
Guards in the world of shadows. Even their goals were shadow-y and transient now: knights and scribes, wingless birds of paradise and tailless dogs. Their world was a dark comedy, tedious and never-ending.
Sam woke up. Turns out, his body overtook the struggles of his mind to make him even more depressed than he was, and he fell into the oblivion – not for long enough, sadly. There were goosebumps on his neck from the breeze that was so cold that it burned the skin, and he couldn’t feel his right arm. Sam yawned, moved his legs slightly, and with horror noticed that his left knee was in direct contact with Dean’s hip, not just brushing it, but heavily pressing into Dean’s tense, rock-hard muscles. The scary part of this position was the complete lack of reaction from Dean.
‘Um,’ Sam hastily looked at Dean – still mask of a frowned face, lips pressed together, eyes blank and fixed on the road, not a tremble or a movement – ‘Sorry.’ He quickly re-adjusted on the seat and closed the goddamn window. Dean didn’t show any reaction.
They came back to the bunker late at night, and Sam got some takeaway from their favorite Indian joint in the nearest town. Dean was still silent, somewhere deep in his head (talking to the blade? Sam thought sarcastically), and didn’t show interest in food, which scared Sam more than his disinterest in small talk.
Sam wished he could go straight into his room and pretend, just like he wanted, that he and Dean are just partners at work, that none of this means anything to him, but seeing Dean sitting in the vast brightness of the empty room, just staring into space, next to an untouched container with food, Sam sighed and turned back. It was Dean.
‘C’mon, buddy, talk to me.’ He said, leaning over the table next to Dean. ‘I’m not lecturing you or anything. Just give me an update.’
Dean looked up at him, which created an impression that he was angrily rolling his eyes. Sam half-smiled and lifted an eyebrow. ‘Dean,’ he said in the voice that he knew Dean grew to hate, but he couldn’t do it any other way. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m good,’ spit out Dean, shifting his gaze away.
‘Please.’
‘What, you want me to feel like crap, huh?’ Dean’s sharp gaze focused on Sam, spilling dark, acidic anger.
Sam sat at the edge of the table, his body stiff and intoxicated with fear. He tried to smile, but only one corner of his mouth obeyed. It was Dean in front of him, but it also – it wasn’t.
‘No, I just want to talk to you. To Dean.’
‘Sounds more like you want to talk to your dog.’
Sam smiled, unsure.
Dean suddenly got up in a swift, fluid motion.
‘You want me to feel bad and to come crying to you? So what? So you’d help me? You can’t help.’
He stood right in front of Sam, and in his eyes, Sam saw the sharpness of the blade, iron and blood.
‘I’m fine.’ Dean continued in a low voice, rusty and tired, but ever-angry. ‘Which means that I’m not. But it doesn’t matter until I kill Abaddon, and Metatron, and anyone else’ – he paused, looking at Sam – ‘who would get in my way.’
Sam knew that he was looking for trouble, but he had to ask, because Dean was his brother and because he couldn’t not to.
‘How badly do you need to kill them, Dean?’
Dean clenched his teeth so hard that it looked nearly comical, and shifted close, grabbing Sam’s shoulders. His face was now close enough for Sam to see the dark tan of his skin, rough lines around his mouth, small, very light and kind of ginger-looking hairs of his stubble, and the deep frown that hadn’t left Dean’s face in – what? – years now.
‘I gotta do whatever has to be done. End of story. Now, leave me alone, won’t you? Last I remember, you were the one who didn’t want to be brothers anymore.’
As much as Sam didn’t appreciate bringing up this topic, he saw a blink of conscience in Dean’s features (a lighter color of eyes? Softer wrinkles near the lips?), and immediately pressed onto it.
‘This doesn’t mean that I won’t worry about you when you’re clearly not okay. As a partner, Dean, I still want to make sure you’re ok, and you’re so not.’
He took Dean’s wrists into his own. Dean’s eyes were quickly getting lighter, and Sam knew that he couldn’t, mustn’t shut up now.
‘Dean, what we’re doing, this is so bigger than you and I. This war… angels and demons, it can break us in an instant, so we need, we have to stay our own selves, because if you’re a blind weapon, Dean, you’re no good. Remember me, remember when I drank demon blood? I was stronger, but I was a vessel for this power, and I couldn’t control myself, and I was used…
‘But this is different,’ interrupted Dean, ‘I’m stronger and I-’
‘I’m not saying this is an identical situation, but this strength – this is why we stay human and still win, Dean, - this strength blinds you. If you lose your human side, you’re nothing but an embodiment of this goddamn knife. And you’re not that,’ – Sam stopped to breathe in, suddenly much more emotional than he intended to be, and his hands were still wrapped around Dean’s wrists. He felt Dean’s pulse beating, his blood, their blood pumping through these hands that crushed so much evil, and yet skin on the underside of the wrists stayed soft, thin, only barely covering the veins – and Sam swallowed, hungrily, like a crazy vampire, in-the-middle of a hearty monologue, unable to continue, swept away by the gentleness of Dean’s wrists –
He started sobbing, completely unplanned, like he drank a witch poison and wasn’t being himself – he saw Dean’s eyes getting clear, his frown smoothing down and he was smiling – his Dean, the true Dean – and he remembered that this wasn’t real, none of this was real, it was a spell, another evil bastard doing a trick on them, fighting battles too grand for them to interfere, but they were forced in anyway.
And Dean looked at him, his eyes clear now, with the dark spell fallen for a moment, with evil, dirty mark hidden by the edges of a shirt, with Sam going full-on weirdo in front of him - Dean had to step closer, gently release his hands from Sam’s, take his face – so childish now, brightly lit with tears, and he was laughing like crazy as well, like all the battles that they fought have been left behind – Dean took his face into his hands, and leaned in, and kissed him.
“There ain’t no me if there ain’t no you.
“There isn’t anything, past or present, that I wouldn’t put in front of you.”