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Dean hates serious conversations. Always has, always will. They disrupt the natural rhythm of the Winchester way—they disturb the peace.
He grew up with Sam and Dad at each other’s throats any chance they could get; any hint of a reference to a touchy subject coming out of one of their mouths and the other would be on it in an instant, and Dean would be stuck in the middle if he didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Everything has always been much easier when everyone just pretends there’s nothing wrong. Doesn’t matter what Sam snapped over the phone during Dad and Dean’s hunt or which apparently important school event Dad was making Sam miss, nothing would’ve gone wrong if they’d just shoved it to the side and kept up the simple, ordinary patter of their lives. No bombs can go off if everyone just ignores the fuse, right?
Dean is unfortunately well aware that Sam is not the type to ignore a fuse. Sometimes, Sam is the fuse. Often, especially when he was younger, he’d been the one to light it.
It’s a week after Dean lost the mark, and regardless of what’s happening with the Darkness, they’d finally started to settle back into their usual rhythm. So what if Dean had been a demon? So what if he had been terrifyingly close to swinging a scythe into Sam’s neck, or Sam had been all too ready to take on universe-destroying consequences just to save him? That was in the past. They were good. There was a new, looming apocalypse to deal with, but the peace between them had been regained.
Except Sam had decided today would be a great day to sit down in front of him, take his beer and slide it to the side, and start talking. And when the words “We need to talk” come out of Sam’s mouth, you know you’re in for a serious conversation. Peace disturbed. Rhythm disrupted. Fuse. Lit.
Dean reaches over and steals his beer back. He remembers how cold the scythe felt in his hands as he swung. He thinks, with this mild, apathetic annoyance that he hasn’t quite been able to shake since going demonic, and on a deeper level with this ache that hasn’t gone away since he told his little brother to close his eyes, that this is one serious conversation he probably owes it to Sam to have.
“I did a lot to get to you, I know. And you said we were fine now,” Sam is saying, voice level but eyes as big as they were when he was kneeling in front of Dean and waiting to die. “But you don’t usually move on from shit I do that fast. I don’t wanna think we’re good and then get blindsided when you bring it up again a month from now. I don’t blame you if you regret not killing me when Death gave you the chance. I just needed to, I guess, know for sure.”
The ache gets worse, somewhere in the pit of Dean’s stomach. He should regret it. But the only thing he can bring himself to regret is ever considering killing Sam in the first place. His little brother. His world.
He so desperately wants to stop talking about this.
“All good,” he forces out. “You did what you had to. I get it. And I’m not gonna—pull a friggin’ weapon of Death on you again, or anything. Let’s just move on.”
Sam frowns. “I did a lot, Dean. You’re sure it’s okay?”
Dean shifts uncomfortably. He knows the lengths that can be gone to when someone you love has tossed their humanity down the drain. There’s a lot more in their past than just Dean holding a hammer or a blade. “I did worse when you were…”
“Demonic,” Sam supplies, too matter-of-fact for Dean to tell if he’s saying the word so bluntly out of self-loathing or resignation or simple apathy. “I don’t blame you for any of that, Dean. You did what you needed to. It was the right thing to do.”
Dean can still recall with perfect clarity the twisting in his gut when Sam screamed for him. Pleaded. Begged so loud it echoed through the house and for a week after the detox was over Sam’s voice was scratchy and worn.
“I was ready to let you die, Sam,” he says. Harshly. He’s not as good at holding back the self-loathing from his voice as Sam is. And once he starts, he can’t stop. “The first time around. As long as you died human. I would have just—stood there and listened to you die and thanked fucking Heaven that at least you weren’t gonna go to Hell. At the very least, we’re even.”
Sam is looking at him. No, watching him, as if waiting for something, as though it isn’t all laid out right there in the tremble of his words and the already-emptied beer bottle on the table in front of him. Dean suddenly gets terribly worried that the only thing that’s gonna fix this, gonna make them really even, match his guilt to Sam’s endless own, is if he says the words “I’m sorry.”
Those two words have never felt at ease in Dean’s mouth, however much they might spill an inordinate amount from Sam’s. He doesn’t know that an apology could do anything at this point but shorten the fuse. What’s gonna happen when it burns all the way down, he has no idea, but he knows it’ll be something bad—he’s always felt that way, like every time they start really, seriously talking, a clock starts ticking closer to catastrophe. Inevitable disaster is just another part of the Winchester way, after all.
He curls his fingers into fists under the table. Suddenly feels irrationally angry. He finally caved and tried for a real, honest conversation with Sam, poured himself out, revealed all the ugliness that feels like it’s constantly bubbling underneath his skin just waiting for someone to notice it with him always holding his breath so no one does. He just split himself open and showed it to the world. To Sam, that is. For Dean, in some ways, many ways, Sam and the world are one and the same. And Sam, for all his talk of communication and feelings and whatever the fuck, is just sitting there in silence, looking at him like it’s not enough that Dean tore himself open, like surely there’s worse to come. The conversation started with Sam wanting to clear the air and turned into Dean being put on trial, and Dean would get up and walk away and maybe throw something at the wall if he hadn’t done it to himself.
Dean wants to apologize. But more than that, Dean wants to be forgiven. Sam is good at forgiving, occasionally eventually but more often quickly, usually without any apology from the other end at all, and to break the silence with anything as heavy as an “I’m sorry” would be to shatter it. Like coming from his mouth, even an apology is made of something violent.
There are haunted houses.
Really haunted ones, and old, left abandoned at the edge of towns where they’ve been standing for a century at least. So old they’re practically skeletal, and everyone who’s dared to disturb them has been killed. Violently. In those houses, those hauntings, sometimes it’s better not to try to hunt anything down–better to instead keep people as far from it as possible and let the ghost lie.
In this room of old walls and older books, and in the silence that hangs in the air between them, it feels better to wait for the forgiveness to come first.
“Whatever,” he mutters, finally, when Sam’s gaze is still watching half a minute later, the silence hanging like thin shards of ice on unspooling threads above them and reaching the table to break apart as soon as Dean opens his mouth. There’s something in that gaze, something that seems older than even the books and walls. Some pain from years ago. So many pains over so many years, and the panic room just another to add to the list, and not one that should be carried in his little brother’s eyes six years after the fact.
Comfort wouldn’t work with this one, Dean knows, and this stupid chick-flick moment hasn’t worked either, so he resorts to a different method—more dubious, but one just good at maintaining silence as Sam—that he’s often employed when it comes to sources of Sam’s pain: deny they ever could have caused pain in the first place. Fuse? What fuse? “Whatever,” he repeats. “It doesn’t matter, right?” His fists are digging into his thighs under the table. “It didn’t actually kill you, so. Count our blessings and all that.”
“Yes,” Sam says, “it did.”
There was one like that in Ohio. One of those old houses that stood so still and serene. It was just a few miles outside of this tiny town called Oberlin, and a student from the music conservatory nearby had been found inside, chest ripped open by what the coroner said could only have been hands, except they couldn’t’ve been, not really, human hands aren’t strong enough to do that, and yet there were the marks around the gaping hole in her chest where fingernails had violently torn, there were the scratches just inches below the bloody-white edges of her ribs where they’d been snapped apart. Dean and Sam had lingered on the edges of the property for only a minute or two before deciding this was one haunting better left to lie.
The cool air and the blank windows had felt just as still, just as serene, as they must have just minutes before she died, and Sam said he wondered what it’d been like, that moment in between when the violence of the house was at peace and when someone stepped inside and forced it to be acknowledged for the first time in years and was torn open for it, and Dean tried not to hate how Sam always said weird shit like that because it tended to stick at the corners of his mind for a few days after, and he, Dean, said they’d better go, leave the house back to its serenity and maybe put up some extra police tape around the property so no one else came in to disturb it, because violence is violence but when it’s left unacknowledged, undisturbed, it’s peace.
Dean’s breath catches in his chest, right around the start of his rib cage. It hurts.
“What?” he says.
“It did. Lucifer brought me back.”
“I don’t—um.” Dean wracks his brain for the timeline. “I don’t understand.”
“The second time around,” Sam says, as if he somehow knows Dean’s specific confusion. “After Famine. Lucifer’d been out for a while then. Been let out for a while,” he revises. Dean listens for the usual guilt in his voice, but the tone remains level. He wonders how Sam can be this calm when he himself feels like he’s being torn apart. He wonders if Sam had got it wrong back in Ohio, about that theoretical moment between serenity and violence–maybe the serenity hadn’t ever left at all. Maybe the air had stayed still and quiet the whole way through. Maybe she had wondered about the silence, as she died—
Sam had died.
Sam’s died before, of course. Dean’s world, primarily made up of Sam himself, has violently shattered every time.
Except, apparently, for that one, when Dean had been out at a bar half the night, teaching Cas to wash the taste of raw meat out of his mouth with cheap whiskey while Bobby took the first shift back home, and the other half of the night lying on Bobby’s couch blasting Led Zeppelin through cheap headphones (shoplifted seven years back) to drown out whatever was going on in the panic room below while Bobby took his own break in town and Cas chugged water in the kitchen to wash out the taste of the whiskey. Cas headed out to survey the damage in the town left behind by Famine when Dean was nearly through the “In Through the Out Door” album; he was in the middle of “The Song Remains the Same” when Cas got back and checked on Sam and let Dean know the detox was over, and also there were police from three cities away swarming Famine’s town but no one had quite yet figured out what to do with all the bodies.
“You didn’t die,” Dean forces out, “you couldn’t have.” Because that method of denial had worked out so well sixty seconds ago. “Bobby and, and me—we were there, we would’ve known. You were fine, Cas walked you up the steps less than six hours after you went in.”
“After you put me in,” Sam says mildly, same way he’d corrected himself to “Let out.” Level. Calm. “Like I said, I think it was the right thing for you to do. Lucifer jumped on the whole, uh, ‘being locked up by your own brother’ thing pretty quickly, though. I mean, I wasn’t with him for very long, he wanted to get my soul back to my body as soon as possible, before Heaven caught wind of anything, I think. But.”
“Sam.” Dean chokes on his own brother’s name. How is he supposed to believe this? That Sam had died down there twenty feet below him and through a door Dean had been the one to force close, and then had a talk with the Devil while the latter stuck the former’s soul back in his body? His dead body, his, his corpse—
How is Dean supposed to—to know this? To add this to his own long list of pains as though this isn’t the one that might threaten to finally send him buckling under the weight?
“Let me get this straight,” he says, forcing disbelief into his voice. It sounds desperate even—especially—to his own ears. “You died , and Lucifer came for a visit, huh, and talked to your—your soul? While you were dead. And then, uh, resurrected you?”
“I don’t really think there was that much talking. I don’t really, um,” and Sam sounds something less than calm for the first time this whole conversation. Not because there’s something else there to take the place of that stagnant emotion: he just sounds less. “I don’t remember it very well? I mean, when you’re that close to the line between life and death, whatever side of it you’re on—it’s not a very, um, lucid thing.”
This—this Dean understands. Both the brothers know this line very, very well.
“Mostly,” Sam continues, “I just remember how, how bright he was. And a few of the things he said, but mostly the brightness, and then I woke up. And I was fine. Not perfect, obviously, but alive, and pretty much clean, so it was fine.”
“Bright,” Dean repeats. His tongue feels thick in his mouth. “You sure that wasn’t your brain dreaming up the ol’ pearly gates? Light at the end of the tunnel kind of thing?” He’s not sure why he’s still trying to twist this around, into a joke or a lie or another belief of Sam’s that’s turned out wrong to add to the list, right below “angels are good” from when he was praying at twenty-two and a few above “Dean is secretly a rock star” from when he was six and went along with everything his big brother told him.
“No,” Sam says seriously, “it was bright like lightning. Or a star. That’s what Lucifer’s like, at the right angle. He’s—” He cuts himself off sharply.
Dean remembers Jimmy saying like being chained to a comet. He remembers the look in Jimmy’s eyes when he said it, holding something a little more than just plain horror. He wonders if the word Sam was about to say might have been something along the lines of beautiful.
He wishes he could be surprised, but there are only two ways Sam talks about Lucifer—the one where he breathes like he’s drowning and can’t even get out the name, and the one where he’s a little like this, a little too detached, like he's this casual observer of some big celestial event, something that only comes around every two hundred years and is probably on its way to crash into a nearby planet but as long as you’re standing on Earth with a telescope watching it cross the sky from a safe distance of a hundred million miles away you get to stay an observer and not some doomed resident of a world about to go up in flames. You get to call it beautiful instead of screaming.
Faulty metaphor. Can meteors even wipe out planets like that? Dean doesn’t know, Dean’s never cared to learn anything about astrology or whatever it’s called, except for that time Sam had dragged him out back behind the motel one night when he was close to 18 and Sam 14, to see some stupid shooting-star-type thing Sam had heard about in school. It had even had a name, something with the word “bop” in it, Dean thinks, and he had tried hard to listen to Sam’s rambling about it even though he was tired as hell from John’s military workout routine the day before. Sam had stared up at the sky and tried to point it out to Dean amid the stars, thousands of dots of light shimmering throughout the sky, and Dean had never quite been able to pick it out of those jumbles and clusters of light, but he’d wished he could because the look in Sam’s eyes was something like awe as he talked about how big the thing was and how it was made of rocks and dust that were glowing from the sun and how cool it was that they got to see it like this, a hundred million miles away.
Dean thinks it might have been a comet, actually.
Had to have been, those are the only things that get that close, right? Besides meteor showers? He doesn’t know. He feels like he doesn’t know anything at all, not anymore, at least. He doesn’t know the name of the thing that was probably a comet that passed through the sky in 1997. He doesn’t know how bright Lucifer must have shone to make Sam talk about him like this, like he’s a hundred million miles away. He doesn’t know which part of the detox it was, exactly, that killed Sam in the end.
He’s not going to ask.
The girl was so still on the table of the morgue. It was almost odd, because of how violent the hole in her chest was. But everyone is still when they’re dead. Sam must have been lying that still on Bobby’s cot–or maybe, hell, maybe the cold steel ground below it–when Lucifer brought him back. Still like a corpse. Like a house. And then waking up again, gasping air into newly living lungs, body acknowledged, disturbed. The words play through Dean’s head like an echo: Sometimes it’s better to keep people away, to let the—
“And I was a soul, of course, and everything’s so much—more, when you’re just a soul. That’s probably why I remember it so well. The light of, of him.”
ghost—
“Because it’s not like it was some big thing, you know? I’ve died before, much worse than that, and for longer—and I came out better than I would have if I’d just barely lived, probably, and you didn’t even notice, so it wasn’t. You know. A thing.”
lie—
“I just wanted you to know,” Sam says, “if we’re ‘counting our blessings’”—finger quotes around the words Dean had stupidly, idiotically spoken at the start of this awful conversation—“what that, um, blessing actually was. But, um, you know, it only ever affected me, and what I did last year—it was bad, it hurt people. There were probably vessels that, that died when I killed the demons inside, just trying to get to you. And they didn’t have an archangel to bring them back. Which, I mean, that’s probably for the best, that they got that peace after death, but they still died in the first place. Because of me.”
Ghosts aren’t usually violent because they were when they were alive. It’s because they’ve lived on that far-from-lucid line between life and death for too long to be able to be anything else. Even when they’re lashing out in cruelty, in fury. Even when they’re killing people on a sort of autopilot, their own death echoing into whatever poor person happened to disturb their peace as they stand in the background and relive it themselves, faded, still. The violence isn’t their fault. And all you can do is burn their bones.
Because it’s almost always impossible to tell what will get a ghost to let go on their own, without the bone-burning. Not just what will give them peace, but what will take them from their violence. It can be the oddest thing, like the realization that their living loved ones had moved on from their death, or a reenactment of an important moment from their life done the way they wished it had been. Dean wonders if the ghost in Ohio might have let the college girl go if she’d just done the right thing to trigger its proper passing. Maybe her death could have been avoided if she’d somehow known to do what needed to be done, or say what needed to be said; something like, possibly, I’m sorry.
Dean feels like he can’t breathe, like something’s clawing at his chest and snapping his ribs. He thinks that however he feels now, Sam must have felt so much worse. When he was dying, there in that cold round room built to save and protect and made into a jail cell by the very man who’d built it and by a brother who still thought it could only mean safety. Maybe even when he was waking up. It had been a bit after dawn when he’d finally come up from the panic room with Cas’s okay. How much light had been coming through the vent when Sam had opened his eyes after death? Had he had to come back to life in darkness?
Dean always remembers from his own resurrections the first light seen since his death as a glaring thing, however bright it really was—the sunny sky when he’d clawed his way from his own grave after Hell, the dim motel lamps after Joshua had resurrected them from rifle shots to the chest, all making his eyes ache after the relative darkness of death. But–
Bright like lightning. Or a star. It couldn’t have mattered how much light was coming into the panic room. It must have felt like darkness all the same.
“Sam,” says Dean, carefully, and he’s thinking of comets so far away they can’t be seen for all the stars, and fuses that honestly might have been lit years before either of them were even born, and haunted houses that probably don’t actually know what to do with the words “I’m sorry” any better than Dean ever has. His chest hurts. Right around the rib cage. He wants to tear himself open with his bare hands, and there is something serene and dead sitting across from him that hasn’t yet figured out how to move on. “I have never wanted to kill you. You gotta believe that, man. And I’m s—” Shit. No, not today. “I’m just glad you’re here, is all. I’m glad I didn’t go through with it.”
“I wish you had,” says Sam. His voice is level, his tone calm. There is something violent between them, and it’s in the shape of peace.
Dean pushes his chair back with a loud scrape that sets his teeth on edge. He flattens his hands on the table and takes a breath, and then he grabs what’s left of his beer and turns in the direction of the hall. There’s nothing but silence from his brother behind him, and he doesn’t look back as he walks out of the room. He just really doesn’t like serious conversations, is all. Better, he thinks, to let this one lie.