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It’s a Sunday morning when Sam Winchester gets a voicemail from God. He doesn’t answer the call because he’s in church, and maybe ten years ago Sam would’ve thought that was a sign. Six years ago he would’ve just thought it was cruel. Now, Sam mostly thinks it’s funny. The call is coming from inside the house, Sam laughs to himself, but when Angelica gives him a questioning look from beside him in the pew, he just shakes his head and pockets his phone. Something tells him she wouldn’t exactly see the humor in it, even if she had the context.
Gels is pretty serious about the whole church thing. It bothers Sam less than he thought it might. Most of the people he met through the trauma group were pretty religious in some denomination or another, and Sam could empathize. There was a time where thinking about a higher power made him feel less helpless, too. Maybe the repetition of the idea that God didn’t want you to suffer, Sam, was less than helpful, but Sam was good at compartmentalizing, at picking out the helpful paths on roads paved with good intentions. He’s still pretty good at that, if he does say so himself, which is why he finds himself in a pew next to his wife every other Sunday. He likes the pastor, anyway, and the sermons lack the fire and brimstone talk that would have him struggling to breathe in his seat, so he can spare a few hours a month to make his wife happy. Peace be upon them, et cetera.
When they first started attending, Sam had tried to think of Jack. But Jack bore no resemblance to the man the pastor talked about and even less to the one in the bible. Jack hadn’t left any commandments or instructions or lessons for his children, because he was only born in 2017 and was still a child himself. Babies having babies, he remembers one health class teacher muttering about when he was 16 and a girl in his class announced she was six months pregnant. Babies having flocks, he thinks now, sitting in the pew, eyes tracing over the same line in the book in his lap over and over again. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the path of righteousness. Sam thinks privately that Jack deserves to lie down in the green pastures next to the still waters rather than shepherd every other tortured soul on the planet, but he stops that train of thought before it can pick up any speed. He doesn’t know what counts as praying anymore and he doesn’t think Jack needs to hear what he thinks of his new position, wherever he is. Maybe there was a time Sam could’ve been his guide — he had certainly tried hard enough to restoreth his soul — but that time had long passed. Jack had gone from son to Father and Sam was to blame for that. He had no right to criticize it after the fact. These days, Sam sits in the pew and tries very hard to think of nothing at all.
Except, of course, when his phone lights up with a call from SHURLEY, C and Sam sends it straight to voicemail.
So. That’s new. Sam has already filed that information into a pile of ‘things I can’t afford to think about right now,’ and imagines for a second a world where he doesn’t listen to it at all. A world where he deletes the message and blocks the number and comes back to church the Sunday after next and doesn’t think about it again. A world where Angelica chastises him for checking his phone during the sermon, and he laughs and says “Forgive me, I know not what I do,” and she playfully slaps him on the arm, and that’s the end of the conversation. It’s a nice world, but it’s not the one Sam lives in. Sam knows that tonight, long after they retrieve DJ from sunday school and get pizza for dinner and go to bed early because it’s a school night, after Sam reads his son a bedtime story and gives his wife a goodnight kiss, after Sam lies and says he has papers to grade, they slipped my mind, I’ll be up soon, don’t wait up, Sam will walk into his garage and sit in that dusty black muscle car and hit play on the voicemail left to him by God. Or by... the ex-God. The man formerly known as God? Sam wonders if the position is like being president, where the title sticks with you after your term is up. He doesn’t suppose that’s what Chuck was calling him about, but maybe he could ask him. Sam stifles another laugh that he’s pretty sure would come out more hysterical than he would like and focuses on the pastor.
“Jesus said, ‘Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works?’” the pastor is saying. “But the Lord wants a personal relationship with us. Those who call him Lord but don’t know him, or love him, they’ll struggle with their final judgement. If we don’t know Christ, he can’t know us. If he doesn’t know us as his children, how will he let us into Heaven? How will he find our names on the list?”
Sam thinks those who find themselves with their names unwritten are lucky. He’d quite like a less personal relationship with God, who certainly knows his name, and apparently knows his phone number.
“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me,’” the pastor reads. His name is John, but Sam doesn’t think about how horrible that is, how funny that is until much later, when he’ll think that it’s so on-the-nose that it feels like a leftover from the Chuck days. Instead he thinks about how heavy his phone feels sitting in his pocket. I never knew you, Sam thinks to SHURLEY, C. Depart from me. But he’ll listen to the message all the same.
---
The rest of the day passes the way Sam had predicted, although when Angelica kisses him goodnight to head up to bed, he doesn’t need to feed her a line about having to grade papers. “Going out to the car tonight?” she asks him in that careful, glass-edge tone Sam is intimately familiar with. Eggshell thin and gentle. There was a time in Sam’s life that a tone like that would set him off, but he’s 45 now, and he doesn’t get set off anymore. He’s older than Dean ever was and gaining on John. Mary he’d passed a long time ago. There was something calming about those facts that made him feel infinitely older than he was (although, if you counted the time in the Cage-- Sam tried not to count the time in the Cage), like how you feel warm right before you freeze to death. Sam’s anger had frozen years ago. “Don’t stay out too late,” Angelica says mildly, brushing a hand through his hair after carefully telegraphing the motion. Sam leans into her touch gratefully.
“I won’t,” Sam says, and if he’s lying, neither of them mind. Gels gets it, and not in the way that people say they get it when they just want to. Sam remembers when they met, remembers the whip-sharp voice of the brittle girl sat across from him in the first support group meeting he had gone to. It had been Jody’s idea, the group, and Sam had quietly thought it was a stupid one. Sam had been through — he hated to think about himself like the world’s most injusticed man, or whatever — but he had been through the kinds of things he wouldn’t know how to begin to describe in a way that would allow anyone else to connect with him at all. How do you sit in a circle with people professing the worst things that ever happened to them while sitting there knowing you shot God when he tried to kill your son? How do you explain you watched your brother die hundreds of times but the last one was still the worst? How do you begin to touch the Cage — Sam didn’t want to touch the Cage. But Jody asked him to go, had said, “Think of it as forced social interaction, because I can’t be the only person you ever speak to, it’s driving me batty,” and he didn’t think he could bear to alienate one of the only friends he had left, so he went.
It had ended up being — good. Sam had kept going for almost a year. He didn’t talk much, but he listened, and he found it easier to empathize than he’d thought. Knowing he wasn’t the only one in the world with tragedies looming over their shoulders casting shadows over everything they looked at was helpful, even if his particular tragedies had a more Biblical overture than most, a shadow in crucifixion pose. Some people there felt slighted by God, and Sam would look at them and think, Is it worse? Is it worse that all of this happened and He couldn’t care less about you? Or is it worse if He did it on purpose? and never have an answer. But thinking it was something. And then there was Angelica.
His first night in the group had been her first night too. He hadn’t noticed her at first, the way Sam didn’t notice anyone at that point. It was only a few months after Dean’s death, and everyone was faceless to him. He didn’t want to learn any new faces, because one day he’d learn the one that would push Dean’s out of his limited memory. But she’d introduced herself to the circle and said, “My boyfriend died in a fire and I can’t get the smell of smoke out my hair,” and Sam had looked up and seen her. Soft features, big eyes, a perpetually frowning mouth — he learned her face.
They didn’t really meet then. It took a couple months of group before Sam volunteered information about Jess to the circle, but when he did, Angelica had cornered him at the coat rack in the basement of the old church while everyone was filing out. “Do you still smell the smoke?” she had asked him, and he hadn’t known what to tell her. She was young, younger than him by a decade at least, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth. Sometimes when he visited Jody, he’d walk into the bathroom after Alex had been getting ready, and the smell of hair on the curling iron would make him feel sick. “Only when the fire’s burning,” he’d said, and she asked if he wanted to get a drink.
It hadn’t been a good idea. She was in her 20s, and in his trauma support group, and still fucked up over the fire that killed her boyfriend, and Sam was… well. Sam felt like some skeevy old man, leering over some girl barely older than Claire who was dealing with more than anyone her age should have to, but he was dealing with more than anyone should have to, too, and he was so lonely he could feel it echoing off the walls of the bunker when he walked around it alone, so he said yes. In a stupid, petty little way, he felt closer to Dean. “Heyyyy, Sammy,” he could almost hear Dean saying wolfishly, “A college girl! Didn’t think you still had it in ya!”
They’d gone to a bar and gotten hammered. Then they went back to her place. It was bad, and Sam doesn’t mind saying so now. These days they joke about it. Being touched was so foreign to Sam that his skin had crawled at every point of contact, and Angelica had cried afterwards. It had been a bad idea, they agreed, and they didn’t exchange numbers, and they didn’t look at each other in group for the next month. But then.
But then.
Sam passes by the small framed wedding photo they keep on the hallway table on his way to the garage, and he runs his fingers along the edge of the frame. Gels looked so beautiful, long brown hair and frowning mouth and all, six months pregnant. She was embarrassed by the pictures, by the shotgun wedding, by all of it, so they didn’t display them anywhere else, but Sam thinks they’re his favorite pictures they have. It had been a rough first year with them — a rough first few years, if he’s being honest, having only really gotten into a comfortable swing of things since DJ had turned 4 two years ago and they’d been able to put him into part-time daycare so they both could work. But getting married had been important to her, so Sam had agreed. Keeping the baby had been, too, before that. Sam had hesitations he didn’t know how to voice to her — how do you tell the girl who didn’t want to have a baby out of wedlock that you don’t know if demon blood is genetic? That you don’t want to create another vessel for the devil, because dead doesn’t mean gone forever? And it was her call ultimately — it was her body, and Sam was the last person to try to tell anyone what to do with their body. So Sam had agreed. Keeping the peace, he could do. Dealing with an unexpected child, he could do. At least this one probably couldn’t murder people with his mind, although sometimes when Sam tells DJ he has to brush his teeth with toothpaste before going to bed, he could swear the kid is trying to.
So Angelica gets it. The compulsion Sam has to climb into the passenger side of the Impala some nights and sit there, pressing his thumb into the old, faded scar in the palm of his hand. She has her own compulsions, her own rituals, and Sam gets it too. They’re two gears of one coping mechanism, operating parallel to each other but supporting the machinery around them. Sam lets her think that’s what he’s doing tonight, and it’s not too far off. Sitting in the car, thinking of Dean — that’s Sam’s version of talking to God, these days. All the devotion and desperation of when he used to pray, and doing about as much good too. Tonight is just a little bit more literal, that’s all.
Sam sits for a few minutes first, letting the smell of the old leather seats take over his senses until he can’t smell it anymore. Sam thinks about how people say you never know what your own home smells like, but he doesn’t think that’s true. He knows the scent until it washes around him so completely he stops being able to pick it out anymore. You can go home again, for about 95 seconds at a time. Once he’s acclimated, he pulls out his phone, a blinking red 1 still displayed proudly on the screen. He takes a deep breath and hits play.
“Uh, Sam?” the voice crackles out of his speakers, and all the hair on the back of Sam’s neck stands up straight. “Sam Winchester? It’s Chuck. Um, Shurley. I got your number from Professor… what’s his name, at the college, Lemuel, I think. I, uh, was hoping we could talk. If you wanted. I have some questions and I’m sure you do too. Just call me back, please. If you get this. Thanks,” and then the call ends, and the voicemail lady is asking if Sam wants to save this message. He does. He plays it three more times before he even registers he’s done so.
I have some questions. Sam starts to laugh like he’d stopped himself from doing in the church, hysterical and high-pitched, bubbling out of him beyond his control. I’m sure you do too. Even to his own ears, Sam sounds a bit nuts, but he’s done worse wailing in the Impala before, and he knows they can’t hear him in the house. Heat blooms in his eyes and he realizes he’s crying. Just call me back, please. Sam recognizes the desperation, the plea. He had done enough of that in his life to know it echoed back to him. If you get this. Sam wonders, thoughts flitting through his mind faster than he can grab onto them, if Chuck was down on his knees when he made the call. I have some questions and I’m sure you do too. It’s funny, right, Sam thinks to himself, it’s funny because Chuck’s writing had never made too much use of understatement. Maybe he’d improved. He’d had lots of time to practice, to hone his craft. Maybe he’d gotten a better editor. Just call me back, please. Or maybe, Sam thought, laughter dying in his throat, maybe he was looking for one.
It’s 11:47pm on a Sunday night when Sam hits ‘call’ and raises his phone to his face.
Chuck’s assistant answers.
Sam makes the appropriate arrangements with her, and when he hangs up, he laughs until it’s Monday.
---
Monday through Friday, life goes on as normal. Sam likes his job. He had to lie to get it, of course, but Sam has long since accepted that having a normal life has dishonesty built into the foundations. Sam had called in some favors to fake a degree shortly after Angelica had cornered him in the old church basement holding a pregnancy test, and now he works as a TA for a creative writing course at the Kansas City Community College under Professor Lemuel, who thinks Sam has a real knack for horror writing and a real love for grading papers. He’s not wrong on either count. The money isn’t great, but Sam likes the work. He likes Lemuel, he likes getting to help students figure out how to tell a story. He thinks Mr. Wyatt would be proud of him.
A downside he hadn’t predicted to the job was that Lemuel would think nothing of giving out Sam’s phone number to a cult favorite horror writer like Carver Edlund, who reached out in an official capacity after seeing some of Sam’s writing used in an essay Lemuel had published on his own personal website. “I’ve read his stuff, you know,” Lemuel mentions casually to Sam on Wednesday afternoon, and Sam stiffens. “Not those dreadful Supernatural books, but his other projects. His recent ones, the critically acclaimed ones. He’s not half-bad at a tragedy, that Edlund,” he continues, and Sam huffs out a breath. You have no idea, Sam thinks, but he only smiles tightly at the professor, handing over a pile of freshly graded essays. “You can tell he understands a profound loss of identity, the way he writes about the self and the monster,” Lemuel continues, not particularly bothered by Sam’s lack of response, which is part of why Sam likes him so much. “I said the same thing about your writing when I hired you, you might remember. So it didn’t surprise me one bit to get an email from his assistant about your werewolf story.”
“Sure,” Sam says easily, like Lemuel didn’t uproot Sam’s entire foundation underneath his feet in one email. Like Sam hadn’t built his entire shaky attempt at a straw-hut life on the idea that Chuck couldn’t get to him anymore, that Chuck would have no influence on his story, only to realize that for all of God’s blustering it was man that raised the windstorm that could tear it all apart. Chuck may be a human now, but humans have been humans much longer, and the reason humans are so good at destroying each other without meaning to is because they’ve had all of creation to practice.
So maybe Sam is being dramatic. So what? He’s earned it. He could’ve deleted Chuck’s message, or told his assistant to tell him to go fuck himself, but the boat’s already been rocked. Chuck knows where he is, how to find him. Chuck may be a human now, but humans can hurt each other just fine. Humans have guns and knives and hold grudges, and Sam would put money on Chuck nursing a pretty heavy one. Sam knows it’s safer for Angelica and DJ for Sam to meet Chuck on his terms, to gauge the situation in person. Sam has guns and knives too, he figures, and if he has to shoot God again he doesn’t intend for him to walk away the second time.
“What did he want, anyway?” Lemuel asks, but his mind has clearly already moved on to other trains of thought.
“Don’t know yet,” Sam answers honestly. “But we’re meeting at the zoo on Friday to talk about whatever it is.”
“At the zoo?” Lemuel looks at Sam, bushy white eyebrows raised in surprise, and Sam thinks fondly of Donatello. “Writers,” the professor scoffs good-naturedly, self-deprecatingly, “we always have to be such eccentrics about everything.”
It’s really not all that funny, but God help him, Sam laughs.
---
On Friday after work, Sam goes to meet God at the Kansas City Zoo. He even has to cut out early to make it before close, but Lemuel doesn’t mind. He tells Angelica he’s meeting an old friend, and he can tell her curiosity is piqued (Sam doesn’t have many friends, and he certainly doesn’t have any old ones), but she smiles and says she’s going to take DJ to the movies, and they’ll see each other back at home. Sam thinks about all the steps it would take to explain any part of this to her, and he feels like they would lead him all the way back down to Hell before he could even touch all of it. He could tell her he was meeting a writer, hand her a stack of Supernatural books, and let her piece it together if she wanted to. If she could even wrap her head around it. That would be the coward’s way out, but Sam is pretty sure there’s worse things to be in life than a coward. Like the true vessel for Satan, like the boy with demon blood, Sam’s mind supplies for him, especially to a sweet religious girl from the midwest.
So Sam doesn’t tell her. He doesn’t even feel that guilty about not telling her. Sam had always imagined his normal life, his after-we’re-done-hunting life if it ever happened, wouldn’t involve so much lying. He’d imagined telling his partner everything, if they didn’t already know. They’d do basic, white-magic spells for safety and keep salt on hand and a gun locked in a cabinet but they wouldn’t be scared and they wouldn’t be involved. But that’s not what his normal life is. Not normal, Sam thinks. Safe. A safe life involves big brick walls wrapping around the first four decades of his life, and Sam does the spells and keeps the salt and the gun by himself, and that has to be enough. Gels and DJ go to the movies on a Friday night and don’t even know there’s a world out there where safe isn’t just the default state of being, and they never have to know that God is real and would happily burn them on the ceiling just for the sake of some poetic symmetry if he still had the juice to do it. They get to think Sam goes to the zoo at 3pm on a Friday afternoon to meet an old friend, and the only thing weird about it is that Sam has a friend.
Sam gets there fifteen minutes early, but he’s still beat. He pays the admittance fee and walks into the entrance, planning to find a bench somewhere to sit and scope out Chuck’s arrival, but Chuck is already standing slightly off to the side of the first walkway and Sam’s eyes snap to him like he’s compelled. Chuck isn’t looking at him, but Sam gets the feeling like he’s being watched anyway. Maybe that’s just innate to who Chuck is. Maybe it’s innate to who Sam is.
Chuck is wearing a navy blue blazer over a white turtleneck, and he’s standing with his arms folded lightly across his back, watching a lemur casually climbing along a tree in the exhibit in front of him. He looks — he looks betterthan he did when he was in prophet mode, but not quite as put together as he’d looked when he’d revealed himself to them as God. His hair is a little shaggy, his beard is a little unkempt, and it looks like his nose had been broken and healed a little bit off. Sam walks up to him, the knife tucked into his boot weighing heavy on each step. He has no idea what he’s going to say, so he opts to say nothing. Chuck glances up at him sidelong as he comes to stand next to him, and Sam had never really felt the height difference before, but he feels like he’s towering over him now. “Sam,” Chuck greets him calmly, and the sound of his name in Chuck’s mouth makes Sam shudder.
“Chuck,” Sam responds. “I got your message.”
Chuck gives him a small smile, still watching the lemurs. “I’m glad you called back. I wasn’t sure that you would.”
“Yeah, well,” Sam responds curtly, feeling his patience start to wear thin. “What did you want?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think these past few years,” Chuck replies, serene as ever, like he’s purposefully ignoring Sam’s tone. “Time to think about things I never paid much consideration to. The end, you know? I’d created so many things but ended so few of them myself. I was only really focused on you and your brother’s, but I’m starting to think I wasn’t actually very good at endings.” He waits for a few seconds, like he expects Sam to comment, but Sam just stares at him. “So,” he continues gamely, “I’ve been reflecting. There’s really only — nobody else but you knows who I am. I think the number of people who know who you are is probably pretty low too, am I right?”
Sam inhales sharply, but Chuck doesn’t seem to be waiting for him to answer. Instead, he starts moving along the walkway, and Sam follows as if attached by string. Or a leash. “I can’t see you telling your wife about everything,” Chuck muses, smiling absently at the next exhibit they pass, where a tiger is lounging on its back in the sun. “Not now. Especially, I mean, how old your son looks in the photos online, that must’ve been a pretty, uh, speedy courtship. Not exactly a lot of time for trust falls.”
Sam can feel his old, frozen anger start to simmer somewhere deep inside his gut. “Don’t,” he spits out, barely opening his mouth to do it, almost just baring his teeth.
Chuck doesn’t seem fazed. “Of course, I couldn’t find much on Dean, but I don’t think Dean would retire, so it makes sense he’s still off the grid,” Chuck finally actually looks at Sam, and he doesn’t — it doesn’t look like he’s trying to be cruel, or mocking, and Sam realizes that Chuck doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t know. How would he possibly? “Did you two fight over your retirement? Or is that an old dog with no tricks?” He pauses for one second, two, while Sam blinks at him dumbly, and then goes on, “Sorry, sorry,” sheepishly, raising his hands like mea culpa. “I’m not trying to pry. I’ve been trying to give you boys your privacy while I figured it all out. Do you know why I wanted to meet you here, Sam?”
Sam feels his eyebrows furrow and he glances around. “Witnesses?” he guesses coldly, and Chuck laughs, turning his attention back to the sleeping tiger.
“I made so many creatures,” Chuck says softly. “Began so many journeys. I lost interest in too much of it. Narrowed my focus down too much. Missed a lot. I thought coming here would offer some good perspective.”
Sam remains silent as he follows Chuck along the path. He thinks he’s seeing things clearly enough.
“I guess what I’m trying to say, Sam, is that I’m sorry,” Chuck pulls up to a stop in front of a fenced off grassy field where peacocks are strutting about, feathers full and on display. “And that I think we’re in a unique position to offer each other answers to questions we can’t ask anyone else. You want to know about your life, I want to know about the new Heaven order, we can work together on this.”
“A unique position?” Sam repeats, and for the first time Chuck loses the smile as his face falls and his shoulders slump just a little bit. Sam thinks he just went off-script. Sam thinks he was supposed to be grateful for what Chuck just offered him.
“We— well, you know what’s going on with Jack,” Chuck stumbles before straightening his back again, “and I’m, you know, God, so I have all the answers you’ve ever prayed for, and we both know you prayed for a lot. Come on, Sam, neither of us can live our whole lives strangers to everyone. We know each other, man. We can help each other out here. I don’t even — I don’t know if I even have a soul, or what’s going to happen when I bite it. But you know, or at least you can find out. And I know everything you’ve wanted to know. So let’s do some insider trading here.”
Sam feels something inside him snap under the weight of what Chuck just said. “You’re not God,” Sam says, and when he speaks, his voice is razor-thin. “Not anymore. No matter what outfit you wear, or how straight you stand up, or how many hosts of heavenly creatures you try to show off for me,” he gestures out at the peacocks, and Chuck’s eyes dart around, refusing to follow the motion. “You thought you could offer me some cosmic knowledge and I’d drop to my knees right here?” Sam asks, and if that gets him a dirty look from a guy walking by with his kids in tow, he doesn’t notice. “That I’d supplicate myself to you like the good old days? Old faithful Sam, always ready with a ‘forgive me, Father,’ to make you feel big again? You thought, what, you’d remind me that you created peacocks and I’d be ready to shower you in prayer?”
“Sam—,” Chuck starts, shifting uncomfortably, but Sam’s had enough of listening to Chuck monologue his justifications to last a lifetime.
“I already prayed to you,” Sam starts, voice shaking with how badly he wants to yell. Anger is thawing; cracks in the ice. “Every day. For years. I prayed, begging you for answers. For clarity. For forgiveness. I prayed to you and begged and pleaded for any sort of response and you let me walk back into the Cage with— you let me walk back into Hell and thought nothing of it. You let me jump into the Cage the first time to suffer, for years, for centuries, because it was part of your stupid story. You weren’t ambivalent to any of it. You wanted it to happen. You made it happen on purpose.”
Chuck opens his mouth to respond but the look Sam gives him is thunderous enough that he closes it without speaking, shuffling his weight from foot to foot nervously.
“I prayed every day for decades,” Sam continues. “Since I was old enough to get the concept up until the day you killed Jack. I prayed every day in the Cage. You don’t know what I would’ve done — how it would’ve — what it would’ve meant, to get an apology from you. An explanation. But you—” Sam stops to collect himself, swallowing harshly and closing his eyes against the burn he’s starting to feel prick along his waterline. “But I wasn’t praying to you,” he says, whisper-harsh. “I was praying to God. I needed to hear it from God, not some hack who lives comfortably somewhere in fuck off Ohio off the profits of crappy paperbacks about the worst years of my life. You don’t get to decide to be God to me now. You’re just a man, Chuck, and your apology means jack shit.”
Chuck’s face crumbles, and Sam thought that might be satisfying in some way. Sam thought he might feel big, or cathartic, or like he won. He thought he might feel like David taking down Goliath. But Chuck is no giant. Chuck is just a sad man on the verge of tears, and Sam feels nothing at all. “If I wanted to see a sorry man desperately trying to pull a life together, I could just look in the mirror,” Sam says, dark and cruel and honest. This is the new book of Samuel, he thinks. “Don’t call me again.”
He starts to walk away back towards the zoo’s entrance, but Chuck calls out to him and freezes him in his place. “Sam, come on, man. You can’t just keep running away. What’s Dean going to say when—”
Sam spins back around and when he responds he realizes too late to do anything about it that he’s yelling, the kind of deep, loud yell he hasn’t done since he was in his 20s and thought there was still enough to be accomplished by raising the volume. If someone could hear him, he’d thought, surely they would help. “Don’t fucking talk about Dean.” People turn to look, mothers disapprovingly pulling their kids away and nosy teenagers looking on eagerly, but Sam doesn’t care. He jumped into the pits of Hell once to save these people all because the man standing in front of him thought it would be poetic. He went through— he suffered— for a hot second, anger bursts in Sam like a forest fire, the hot, ashy smoke billowing behind his teeth. Nobody cares what he did for them. Not these people, not Chuck. Nobody ever cared.
“Sam,” Chuck starts, and he sounds small. He sounds like Chuck-the-prophet they met in 2008, not the God who talked down to them in a graveyard before raising the dead. Weak and scared. But he had been acting then too. “This isn’t what either of us deserve, okay? I was a dick, I get it, but we’re both just people now, and that’s not the happy ending you think it is. Maybe we can change that together.”
“There aren’t any happy endings, Chuck,” Sam throws his hands up in frustration, and feels a sick satisfaction when Chuck flinches at the motion. “Real people, we don’t get happy endings. There are just endings. Things just end. Get used to it.” Sam takes a deep breath, trying to center himself, to find the block of ice to shove his anger back into. “If you try to contact me again, I will kill you, and you can find out the hard way if you get to go to heaven or not.” He doesn’t exactly succeed.
Chuck shrinks away from him then, looking like he did the last time Sam had seen him on the ground, begging as they'd driven away. Maybe when Sam sat in the pews at church and listened to the pastor talk about the Lord he didn’t sound anything like Jack, but he certainly didn’t sound anything like the man standing in front of him now. Something sparks deep inside of him, compels Sam to add, “That goes for Dean too,” before he can think better of it. He thinks Dean would like it, this lie. He thinks Dean would think it was funny, to not let Chuck know he did get his tragic ending after all. That Dean fading away under the palms of Sam’s hands was a moment only the two of them shared and that Chuck would never get to know about it. That Chuck could spend years fruitlessly searching for any evidence of Dean and think Dean was just that good at hiding. Sam smiles, and it’s a cold, hard one.
Chuck takes a step back. “You have my number if you change your mind,” he says, voice wavering. “We can help each other out here, Sam, we can work together. I know we can.”
A zoo employee approaches, eyeing Sam warily like maybe he should be in one of the exhibits behind a glass wall. “Sir, we’ve received complaints about your language and we have to ask you to leave,” he says, trying to affect confidence, and Sam recognizes the tone as the same one Chuck had used when Sam had first arrived, just applied less skillfully. Chuck had always been as afraid of him as this 17-year-old minimum wage employee was. That's all this meeting had ever been — puffed chests and tail feathers spread. Sam laughs, a bright, brittle sound, and the employee nervously steps back.
“I’m going,” Sam says easily, raising his hands. He spares Chuck one last pitying look — here stands the Almighty, cowering behind Kyle, he thinks, and says, “Good luck with your next book, Chuck. Hope you get better at endings,” before turning and walking out the way he came in.
Sam walks, and he doesn’t stop walking until his legs hurt, just to be sure he walks further than Chuck could possibly follow him. When you look behind you and see only one set of footprints, Sam thinks a bit deliriously as he reaches a small stream somewhere at least two hours out from the zoo’s entrance, that’s when I outran you, you motherfucker. Sam all but collapses onto the gentle hill overlooking the stream. That’s when I left you when you needed me the most. See how you like it.
---
Sam sits, alone on the hill in front of the stream, until the sun begins to set.
And then, all of a sudden, Sam is not alone. He doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows, and then he can smell the faint scent of chocolate and cinnamon, and then he knows who’s there.
“Jack,” he says, like a prayer, eyes closed. His anger has thawed, melted into something else. He doesn’t want to aim it at Jack, so he tries to swallow it, and then he opens his eyes. He almost doesn’t believe what he sees, doesn’t want to blink in case Jack disappears again. Sam wonders if this same choking fear is how John felt, that time in Chicago hunting Meg, the first time he’d seen Sam after Sam had left for Stanford. Sam wonders if John had also thought that when sons leave their fathers, they never come back.
Jack is sat next to him on the hill, looking exactly as he did the last time Sam saw him, although he’s ditched the all-white outfit in favor of a red hoodie and khaki pants. He looks like a teenager, and he’s a baby God. Jack raises one hand in a nervous wave, smiling tepidly. He’s worried, Sam realizes. He’s worried the way I feel about Chuck is the way I feel about him. Angry. Disappointed. And he wouldn’t be wrong. Sam is angry, and he is disappointed. Jack had left them, and then, after Dean, he had left Sam to rot in the Bunker for months with nobody. No family left, nothing. Sam had prayed to Jack a lot back then, sometimes sad and understanding and other times wailing and pleading and begging, and gotten nothing in return. But it wasn’t like it had been before. Everything Chuck had done was malignant, spreading and growing and spinning out of Sam’s control, even the things that had seemed good at first. This time, the nothing in return was a benign absence of God, of interference, which Sam had wanted. Sam wasn’t angry with Jack as God. He’d been angry with Jack as a parent. How could you grow up and leave me, Sam had felt, deep in his bones, sitting in Jack’s empty room. I wasn’t ready. I’m not ready yet.
“Hello Sam,” Jack says in his pleasantly neutral voice, with his pleasantly neutral face, and his gently shaking hand. Sam never knew Jack as a baby, but he suddenly feels the urge to cradle him, to clutch him against his chest and feel their hearts beat together like he used to do with DJ when he was a newborn, when he just had to be sure they were both alive together. We made it, we’re making it, we’ll make it, over and over in the rhythmic beating against their ribcages.
“Hi, Jack,” Sam says uselessly, feeling stupid and tongue-tied and angry and everything all at once. He goes to say something else, like how are you or where have you been or I’ve missed you or why did you leave or why did you let Dean die or are you proud of me or will I be proud of you or are you happy but he can’t get past the first sound before his voice gives out, instead just letting out air in a couple of stutters, almost like he’s laughing. He swallows around the sudden, heavy feeling in his throat. “Wasn’t expecting to see you,” he settles on, eventually.
Jack nods and smiles, like he doesn’t realize that sentence prompts an explanation. And maybe he doesn’t. Sam’s not sure what Jack’s day-to-day looks like these days, but he probably doesn’t have much time devoted to human customs. After a few seconds, he seems to cotton on. “I saw what happened back at the zoo,” he says carefully. “I wanted to know if you were alright.”
Sam blinks and finds his eyes are burning with tears again. He turns to face the water, despite how hard it is to tear his gaze off Jack. “That’s— Jack, what happened there, that’s… I appreciate your concern, but that’s nowhere near the worst thing that’s happened since you left. Why do you care now?”
“I always cared,” Jack sounds small, impossibly young for a moment. “Sam, I always cared. I’ll always care.” Sam’s jaw aches, and his chest burns, and he bites his lip until he tastes copper. His body is failing him. What else is new? “I didn’t think I could be Jack for you and be… God,” he says, like the word is unfamiliar on his tongue, and it probably is. A title like that doesn’t seem like Jack’s style, “at the same time. I know me being Jack was important to you, but…”
“But there are more important things out there than me,” Sam finishes, and he can see Jack drop his head. “Cosmically, I mean. I get it,” Sam tacks on, trying not to sound bitter.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” Jack says quietly. “I hope I’m doing a better job at all of this than my grandfather did.”
Sam stands up carefully, ignoring the protesting of his aching calves, and he holds one hand out to Jack to help him do the same. “You’d have to be, Jack,” Sam says with a small smile, “the bar is on the floor,” and with Sam further down the hill, they’re eye-to-eye when Jack breaks out in a smile back. He pulls Sam in with surprising strength, crushing him in a hug that makes Sam think about —
“Daddy!” DJ cries out, voice bold and brassy and loud and vibrant as Sam opens the door getting home from work. DJ barrels into his father like he’s the most alive thing in the world, and Sam thinks he might be. It was DJ’s first day at daycare today, and he still has his backpack on. Sam grabs the handle, lifting DJ up by the bag as the 4-year-old lets out a stream of giggles.
“Hey, little big man,” Sam says, bringing his other arm around to scoop DJ up, and crush him into his chest in a hug while he’s still giggling. “You had a big day today, didn’t you? I bet you didn’t even have time to miss me.”
“Nooo-ooo-oo,” DJ says into Sam’s neck, still laughing. “Always miss you, Daddy! But did you know, I can write my own name?”
“Can you?” Sam asks, looking up at where Gels is leaning against the kitchen door frame, watching them with a smile. He winks at her in greeting, and she sticks her tongue out in response. Sam thinks, in this moment, so powerfully that it fills him from head to toe, every cell in his body, like possession but good, that maybe not everything had been worth it to get him exactly where he is right now, but he’s never going to forget how lucky he is to be here anyway.
“Lemme show you, lemme show you! Ms. Kendall taught me and I can do it myself!” DJ wiggles in his arms fiercely until Sam has no choice but to put him down, and rocket launches himself into the kitchen. Sam follows dutifully, stopping only to press a kiss to Angelica’s forehead as he passes her, and thinks — possession but good. Sam was lucky enough to have a family build itself around him while he had been busy drowning in the grief from losing his last one, and he wasn’t ever going to take that for granted. “DADDY! Hurry UP! I’m doing it!” Sam grins, and —
Sam snaps back into the present, arms around Jack with that same feeling still coursing through his body. “Did you just…? Was that, what was that?”
“You were remembering,” Jack answers happily, pulling back to smile at Sam. “I just helped a little bit.”
Sam grins a bit incredulously and wonders if Jack will ever stop surprising him. “Were you — there?” he asks. “When it happened?”
Jack raises one hand, tilts it back and forth stiltedly. The awkward gesture reminds Sam so strongly of Castiel he almost sways on his feet as it hits him. “Kind of,” Jack says. “I was there and I wasn’t. I’m always everywhere and I’m not. It’s hard to explain. But your family is wonderful, Sam. I’m so happy you were able to find it.”
There’s a weight in Sam’s throat suddenly that he can’t quite swallow against, and before he has any real awareness of it, he feels tears streaking down his face. “You’re my family too, Jack,” he says, and there’s so much more he’d like to say. He thought he’d want to ask — about Heaven, about angels, about Dean and about Castiel and about John and Mary and Bobby and everyone else — but he finds himself suddenly unwilling to hear any of the answers. Sam has spent too much of his life knowing too much about what comes after it. There’ll be enough time, Sam thinks, for the answers when it’s all over.
“I’d like to be,” Jack says, and there’s tears in his eyes too. “When I can be. And…” Jack takes a deep breath, steeling himself for whatever he’s about to say, and Sam recognizes himself in that action. Possession but good, Sam thinks. Your family is in you and you are in your family. “And I’d like to meet DJ,” Jack says quietly, determined. “Maybe I could visit sometime.”
“I’d like that,” Sam replies, and means it. He can imagine it, the two of them bent over a piece of construction paper, writing their names in bright markers with the grim determination of knowing the way only kids know that everything is of equal importance, from watching over all of creation to writing your name properly. It feels right to think about. It feels… not normal, but safe. “We’ll have to figure out how to introduce you first. I think the real story might be a little bit overwhelming.”
“You can tell them I’m one of your students,” Jack suggests easily. “I’ve learned a lot from you, so it’s not even really a lie. Dean told me those are the best kind of lies to tell.”
Sam laughs at that, and Jack does too, eyebrows slightly furrowed like he doesn’t quite get it. Laughing just to be a part of the laughter, Sam thinks. What a concept. “I know you’re probably busy right now,” he says softly, and Jack gives him an apologetic smile. “But do you think you could spare a couple hours to walk me back to my car?”
“I can do that,” Jack answers brightly, and he holds his hand out for Sam to take. Sam does.
It’s a quiet walk back. Nobody says anything about the afterlife, or about global warming, or about meteors or natural disasters, or about going to church every other week. It’s peaceful. I will fear no evil, because thou art with me, Sam thinks quietly to himself as they pass the entrance of the zoo again, closed now, with only the far-off cries of a few animals as a reminder of what exists out there in the dark. Jack comments that he’d like to come back and see the snakes, and Sam grins. Maybe there was divinity to be found at the Kansas City Zoo after all.
Jack hugs him again before he gets into his car and tells him to drive safe. Sam’s got a half hour trip before he gets back home, and Gels and DJ will both be in bed before he makes it, but he’d texted her already and he knows there’s dinner in the microwave, sleep pants in the dryer, and a kid tucked into bed excited to watch cartoons with his dad in the morning waiting for him at home. Jack says he’ll be in touch, and Sam finds it easy to believe him this time. He drives away, and appreciates that Jack stays visible until he’s out of Sam’s eyeline. Not normal, but safe.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, Sam thinks to himself, or maybe he says out loud. He doesn't know what passes for praying these days, but he thinks that it’s alright if he doesn’t know. He thinks Chuck is probably focusing on the wrong thing by obsessing over endings. Sam meant what he’d said to him, but he doesn’t think he’d said it right. Things do end, but new things start all the time.
There was an ending at the Kansas City Zoo today. When Sam gets home, he takes out his phone, opens his voicemail, and deletes all saved messages. That’s an ending too. Later, when he checks his phone in the morning, there’ll be a message from Jack from the number 444, and Sam won’t want to save over the old number that sits untouched next to WINCHESTER, D. and CAS, so he saves the contact as SHEPARD, J. and he’ll laugh when he does it. That’s a beginning.
That’s enough for me, Sam will think, his son in his lap eating dry cereal and laughing at the TV, and his wife waking up to the smell of the coffee Sam started for her. I shall not want.