Work Text:
Sam tries to get back to the bunker as fast as he can. He has the gas pedal against the floor and he’s pushing the borrowed truck to its limits. The engine is barely functioning by the time he pulls up to the bunker and jumps out of the car. He sprints to the door and freezes a few feet away. It’s already open, this isn’t good.
Rushing inside he barrels down the stairs, terror thrumming under his skin. A pile of bodies, three to be exact, are spread out across the floor and blood pools in thick circles around the men. Dean is here, or at least he was. Shit. Sam reaches for his gun just in case, flipping it into his hands as he rounds the corner and comes face to face with Cas.
Sam freezes, gun tumbling to the floor. Cas’s face is bashed up pretty bad, blood splattered across his forehead and still leaking from his nose and mouth.
“What the hell happened?! Are you alright?”
Cas shakes his head solemnly. “He was going to kill me, he almost did. He stopped. I don’t know why, but he did.He’s gone, Sam. That man was not your brother.”
“Fuck,” Sam mutters. He clenches his fist and slams it against the wall. Biting his lip he shakes his head. “We have to cure him, Cas.”
Cas sighs heavily, “What can we do? Rowena isn’t helping and we don’t know if the spell will work. Even if she manages to figure out the spell, what if it doesn’t work? What then?“
“I don’t know! I just... we have to save him. We have to.“
“At what cost?”
“I don’t care. I’ll die if I have to.”
“I know.”
Silence takes over and Sam doesn’t know what else to say. They both know it’s the truth. Sam would rather die than see his brother become the thing he hates most.
“Are you going to be okay? Can you heal?” Sam asks.
“It will take me awhile, but I’ll be alright.”
Sam pats Cas’s shoulder, smiling slightly. “Good that’s good.”
“You should sleep,” Cas offers, looking up at Sam. The skin around his eyes is starting to tinge purple and blue and the blood drying on his cheeks is crusting into a dark red. Dean did this to him, to his best friend. Sam feels like he’s going to be sick.
“I don’t think if I can. We have to find him, Cas, sooner rather than later.”
“You need to take care of yourself too.”
Sam releases a huff and shakes his head incredulously at Cas, “Okay, I’ll try I guess. Come and get me in a few hours?”
“Of course. I should be healed by then.” Cas places a gentle hand onto Sam’s shoulder, his hesitant smile looks weirdly out of place on his blood covered face. “We will find him, Sam.”
“I know we will, I’m just scared about what we will find when we do.”
~~~
Sam’s room feels dark, wide open and closed in at the same time, like a black hole threatening to swallow him whole and drag him into oblivion. He knows he’s not going to sleep, it’s fruitless to try. His mind keeps repeating the same two phrases over and over.
It’s your fault.
I think it should be you up here instead of her.
He collapses onto his bed, falling back against his pillow and covering his face with his hands. When the tears start, they come in showers. The small droplets leave dark marks on his shirt and make his sleeves all wet. This wasn’t supposed to go this way, no one was supposed to die, no one was supposed to get hurt. He just wants Dean to be okay again; he just wants his brother back.
Sam rolls over, onto his side, curling in on himself. His hands drop from his face and he wipes his eyes with his already wet sleeve and tries to blink away the tears. He catches sight of the picture of him and Dean he has framed sitting on the nightstand. It was taken eight, maybe nine years ago while they were in between hunts a month after their dad died. They needed a break following John’s death and they had both wanted to go visit Old Faithful since they were kids, so they did. Even though John had just died, back then, they were happy. The weekend vacation was much needed and they saved seeing Old Faithful until the last day.
The Geyser was beautiful, spurting water high up into the air before coming crashing down onto the dirt. They’d both watched in amazement before Sam suggested they document this. He asked another tourist nearby to take their picture. It’s one of Sam’s favorite pictures of himself with Dean. His arm is slung around Dean’s shoulder, and Dean’s arm is wrapped around his upper back. He’s smiling and Dean is too. He hasn’t seen a smile that big on his brother’s face since before he went to hell; he misses it.
Sometimes, especially right now, he wishes they could go back to a time before the Apocalypse, before things got complicated, before everything got so big and so fucked up he hardly knows what’s right and wrong anymore. He doesn’t regret saving the world and he’ll never fault Dean for selling his soul for him when he did. He gets it, now more than ever. But it’s not just that. He misses how simple life used to be back then.
He misses the easy hunts, the weekend ones where they got in and got out without any scratches and sped away from those tiny towns, smiles still on their faces. He misses all that, but most of all he misses Dean, the real Dean who has been missing for the past sixteen months. Sure, there was a time after Dean was cured that Sam thought his brother was okay, but he wasn’t, not really.
And he won’t be, not until he gets that damn mark off his arm.
Sam doesn’t want to watch his brother burn the world down, he can’t. If he had the balls, Sam knows he should kill him. Logically, he knows this, but he never would. Sam can barely live knowing the woman he thought of as his adopted little sister was killed. If Dean died, if Sam killed him, no matter what the circumstances, Sam would never be able to live with himself.
He stops crying eventually, sobs turning to sniffles and a runny nose. His eyes are swollen, red and puffy. It’s been awhile, Cas will probably be up soon. Scanning with his hand across the bed, he searches for his cell phone. It’s underneath one of his pillows and despite his mind screaming at him to not check where Dean is, he does. The impala isn’t far, only about ten miles out of Lebanon, and heading east. He’s probably not coming back.
Sam contemplates calling him. He types in Dean’s number and stares at the glowing letters for the longest time. He could call him, but Dean probably wouldn’t answer and even if he did, his words would just make Sam hurt more than he already is. He backspaces all the numbers and reopens the tracking app. Thirty miles away. Dean is running away, fuck.
He throws his phone into his pocket and slips on some shoes, jogging down the hallway to find Cas.
It’s time to save his brother.