Work Text:
Sam had a vision. He was pretty sure it was the real deal, even if he hadn't had one in years. It was of a wall. Or rather, a Wall. It was long and high and didn't seem to have any doors or windows in it, just a wall stretching away into the distance. Dean was on the other side of it. He knew this with the intense certainty of dream-logic, and also because he could hear Dean calling his name. He called out “DEAN!” and got back an answer, like an echo: “SAM! SAMMY! IS THAT YOU?!”
Then he woke up, his answering bellow of “DEAN!” ringing through the room.
Sam booted up the laptop and started to research.
Eventually, with a little help from Charlie and Kevin, Sam found lore referring to a wall separating Purgatory from the world, and a spell you could use to get there. The ingredients were as full of gross and obscure bodily fluids as theses things usually are, but Sam is nothing if not persistent, and eventually he had it all assembled.
The Wall isn't quite what he'd imagined, somehow. He'd been picturing a prison wall, something ancient and stone, mortared with the blood of the innocent. Something a lot less like a rock concert. And yes, that does appear to be Jim Morrison on the stage, singing about how he's going to “Break on through to the other side.” Sam waits for a little while, to see if any breaking through is about to happen, but Jim appears to be more interested in the young ladies in the audience than any sledgehammer action. “Dean would love this place,” Sam thinks to himself sadly, but when they announce that all the living and dead members of Pink Floyd will be re-uniting for the next set, Sam decides to move on. These aren't the Doors he's looking for.
He can see the Wall stretching out into the distance beyond the stage, and he follows where it leads. The after a while it starts to look a little more properly ancient, and he can hear someone in the distance. Before he can get his hopes up, however, it resolves into a young man with donkey ears, apparently having some sort of primitive phone sex with an unseen person on the other side of the Wall, which somehow appears to listening in lasciviously.
Moving right along, Sam almost gets caught up in a small but ferocious Mongol horde who are attacking the next section of wall. There are gates here, but they're locked and barred and protected by archers and people with boiling oil.
He leaves the Mongols to it.
And so it goes for the rest of the day. The ghost of Ronald Reagan urges no-one in particular to “tear down this Wall!” He passes a young lady, a pretty blonde in a hoodie, sobbing her heart out by a totally generic, beige section of Wall. He fights down the urge to comfort the damsel in distress – his track record on that isn't all that great, frankly – and keeps going.
At last, the wall starts to look more familiar, a battered industrial grey, scarred and scratched and tagged, the kind of wall you'd find in any vacant warehouse set in Hollywood. Sam stops for a moment to get his bearings. And that's when he hears it: somewhere, faint and far-away, but there: Dean calling his name. “Dean!” he bellows back.
“SAAMMMM!” comes the answering cry, and Sam loses it a little, pounding frantically at the Wall. “DEAN! DEAN! I'M COMING FOR YOU! DEAAANN!” The responding cries of “SAM! SAMMY! SAAAAAMMMM!” come like a strange echo. It's hard to say how long this goes on for.
Sam, exhausted by the excess of emotion, sags against the Wall. He's rather surprised to discover that the bit he's leaning on seems to be strangely door-like, and wonders how he failed to notice that before. “Dean?” he says, a little hoarse by now. “Sam!” comes the reply. Sam puts his hand to the door, tentatively.
“Oh, for fuck's sake!” comes a voice, very definitely not Dean's, from the other side of the Wall.. “What the hell is wrong with you two anyway? Do you know how much trouble I went to to make this door, and you're just going to stand there and yell at each other through it? Is it like a fetish, or what?”
The door is flung open with a crash, and Dean stumbles through it, muddy and blinking in the sunlight. Sam catches a glimpse of a familiar, diminutive figure behind him, but then his arms are full of Dean, and all other considerations are forgotten as they cling to each other for the traditional I-thought-you-were-dead hug.
Eventually, Dean starts doing that pat-down thing, where he checks Sam for non-existent injuries. Sam submits to it for a moment, enjoying the feeling of being touched by his brother, before he starts batting Dean's hands away. Well, not so much “batting them away” as holding them, really, but who's counting?
As they finally start the long walk back to civilization, Sam's brain starts up again. “Was that Gabriel?” he asks. “Yeah,” Dean says. “Turns out he got the afterlife of a Norse god, not an archangel. Someone's idea of a joke.” Dean brightens. “Not so bad, really, Valhalla and all. Man, those guys can drink.” He sounds admiring, and Sam, who has been trying not to imagine all sorts of horrible torments his brother's been suffering, is now assailed by a mental image of Dean drinking and carousing with a bunch of Vikings. “And the women! You shoulda seen 'em, Sammy!”
Sam's mental image is getting a lot more X-rated, and he doesn't like it. He's startled out of his thoughts by Dean's shoulder knocking into his as they walk side-by-side. “Dude,” says Dean, “You do realize if I'm going to date a freakishly tall chick with giant biceps, it's gonna be you, right?” Sam glances at Dean's face, fond and open, the way he hasn't seen it in ages. Sam can feel himself blushing a little. “Dude,” he says, trying to regain his dignity, “You do realize I'm not actually a girl, right?”
“Whatever, Samantha,” Dean says. “Still think you'd look pretty hot in one of those Viking barmaid outfits.”