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It figures that if something unexpected were to happen, it would start in the middle of a case. There are worse possible scenarios, but, in the moment, this strikes Dean as the worst. Early afternoon, bright sunlight streaking through gauzy curtains, the witness gone full fucking hostess on them, seating them on a floral couch in a Better Homes and Gardens type of room that she’s obviously proud of. They’ve caught themselves between courteous and awkward: they’ve followed her into this out-of-the-way room; they’ve refused her offer for lemonade.
Dean is wondering, idly, if she’s someone Sam would have banged, when he was sans soul. She’s pretty, and lively—but she’s married. Of course, Sam-with-no-soul might not have cared about that. But she also has two kids, and she also shows off her decor and makes lemonade. She’s domestic. In a few years, she’ll be a soccer mom.
Right now, Sam is listening to her with all the sincerity his huge forehead can handle. If he wants to fuck her, he’s showing no signs. It’s almost painfully reassuring.
And then, mid-sentence, he doubles over with his fingers pressed to his eye sockets.
The witness is saying something, but Dean ignores her: from what he remembers, the worst of this should be over fast, and he needs to be ready for when Sam comes out of it. But then Sam goes from breathing fast to actually crying out in pain, and it doesn’t stop, and Dean surges up and hauls Sam with him. Throwing some authoritative yet vague apology to the witness, he pulls Sam awkwardly to the front door. Sam has the heels of his hands pressed hard into his eyes. He falls more than walks down the steps and almost faceplants on the sidewalk. It's a physical feat for Dean to get him to the car and work the door open. Dean gets Sam's butt into the passenger seat and he immediately folds again, forehead to knees, dress shoes on the curb. A few houses down there’s a woman pushing a stroller in their direction. Sam’s gasps are like a bomb about to go off. "Feet in," Dean says, "feet in." Sam, miraculously, pulls his long legs into the footwell so that Dean can close the door.
Dean drives a few blocks until they come to a park, then pulls past the colorful playground and into the unpaved section of the parking lot, treeline on one side and abandoned metal equipment on the other. He keeps the car running, has his cell open in one hand (just in case) and the other hand on Sam’s back, his heart pounding, until Sam stops making noise, catches his breath, and starts to sit up, his hands still covering his eyes.
“Sam? You good?” He grasps Sam’s arm, wants to get a look at his face.
Sam tenses. “Don’t, don’t.” He tilts his head back, and slowly removes a hand from one eye, then the other. It’s not until he tilts his head forward again that he starts to relax, blinking widely. He seems shell-shocked, so Dean doesn’t pester him, just turns the Impala around to get them back on the road, sending a few curious crows squawking.
It’s several stop sign silences before Dean says, “What did you see?”
Sam turns his head. “What?”
“Vision, right? What was it?”
Sam’s response is immediate, level: “It wasn’t a vision.”
“Huh?”
“I didn’t see anything. It wasn’t a vision.”
Dean’s almost embarrassed by how much of his alarm is tempered by relief. “Okay, then what was it?”
“I don’t know,” Sam says. “It felt like… like someone was gouging my eyes out, or something.”
“Jesus,” says Dean. “Do you think that’s related to—”
“Asshole ghost?” says Sam. (Soccer Mom had terrible taste in men; Dean hopes her current boyfriend deserves the ruptured spleen much less than the guy whose ghost gave it to him.) “Huh,” says Sam, and in the attic of his voice Dean can hear the gears of his brain working. “Doubt it.”
He’s probably right. The case is stupid simple. A 6-year-old could connect the dots. A 6-year-old could probably dig up the grave, too, given enough time.
“Well, let’s wrap this thing up. And hope it doesn’t happen again.”
–
Of course it happens again. Sam has just dropped the matches when he screams and collapses, knees on the lip of the grave. He’s tipping forward; Dean lunges, grabs bicep and shirt collar, and for a moment, before he pulls his brother’s weight back, he’s almost overcome by the drag of Sam’s body toward the heat and flames.
Denailing, Sam explains, when he’s back in the passenger seat and Dean’s shooting questions, wound tight, hands clamping the steering wheel. Fingernails and toenails: all twenty at once.
“Son of a bitch,” says Dean. It can’t be a ghost.
Sam looks at his hands, his fingers, the grave dirt under his nails. Closes his eyes and rolls them, full and round in their sockets.
“Hey, Sam,” says Dean, sudden idea momentum: “you think this has anything to do with past cases? That pagan god who yoinked your fingernail that one Christmas? And that time Doc Benton almost scooped your eye out?”
“Maybe,” says Sam. He swipes thumb and fingers down his cheeks, doesn’t mention the puncture wounds he’d felt being inflicted there after Dean dragged him away from the fire: little ragged crescent-jabs, ten on each cheek.
–
They call Bobby. He can’t find anything. His sigh crackles regret over speaker. “Be careful, boys. I’ll keep digging.”
They pray to Castiel. He doesn’t answer.
Sam shrugs. “Civil war.”
“My ass,” says Dean.
They pay for an extra night at the motel, review the case, keep an eye and ear on the local news to see if they missed anything: a witch, maybe, or a cursed object. Dean goes back to talk to the witness, lets her make him coffee with her new French press, seat him at her vintage-chic table. The coffee is decent, but he runs out of questions only two sips in. He sits through a couple of anecdotes about the antics of the neighborhood dog before excusing himself. There’s nothing more to the story than what he and Sam finished with a salt and burn.
“How’s your partner doing?” she asks as he stands up.
“Oh, he’s peachy. He just gets migraines. Sudden-onset. The cluster kind. You know.”
She nods sagely. “Sounds brutal.”
He leaves his lukewarm mug on the table and forgets to thank her for the half he drank.
He’s hitting potholes on a bad stretch of road—grits his teeth and doesn’t slow down until he gets to the motel. When he steps into their room, Sam is writhing on the floor.
Dean’s not surprised, somehow, but his insides still drop with a staggering swoop.
When he puts a hand on Sam’s chest, Sam flings his hand away with a suddenness and force that almost topples him. Sam’s breathing harsh and desperate and vocal, teetering just this side of self-control. His right foot hits one of the cheap motel chairs and when it falls to the carpet the clatter is soft, apologetic. Dean is seized with an urge to grab the chair and hurl it through the window, make a cacophony of breaking glass. Sam brings a hand toward his chest: it hovers, judders over his heart, then pulls back as he arches, spine curling, neck straining, body and limbs peeling away from his chest like his heart is burning, pumping boiling blood. He starts to scream, chokes on it.
Dean curses. He tears off his jacket so he can pull off his overshirt, ball it up and stuff a corner into Sam’s mouth—not enough to gag, just enough to muffle, because the last thing they need is some idiot bystander hearing anything that could trigger their fucking “concern.” Sam bites down on the fabric immediately, his eyes opening just enough to squint lash-vision at the ceiling.
“Sam. Sammy. Hey. I’m right here. Sam?”
Sam makes a sound that’s a name or a word or a syllable or a sob before twisting and screaming full-force into Dean’s plaid.
Dean spends the next few minutes worrying, stupidly, whether eyeballs can be bruised from being screwed shut so tightly.
When it’s over, Sam keeps his eyes closed. Lies there and pushes air in and out his nose.
Dean gives him a minute—or ten seconds, maybe, but it feels like a minute—before he tries Sam’s name.
Sam drags a hand up and pulls Dean’s shirt out of his mouth, then folds his arms across his face and draws a knee up. In a second he’s going to curl up and turn his back to Dean completely. Dean panics. He grabs Sam by the shirt and hauls him upright, props his back against the side of the bed. Sam has his hands wrapped around Dean’s wrists, and Dean almost says “It’s okay, I got you” before he realizes that Sam, weak-gripped but resolute, is trying to remove Dean’s hands from where they’re twisted in the fabric over his chest.
“Okay,” says Dean, “okay.” He lets go and evaluates. Sam is still breathing too hard, mouth a thin line, hair and shirt damp with sweat that Dean feels on his hands. He’s pale and he’s not looking at Dean. He’s not looking at anything, but he’s especially not looking at Dean.
Dean walks to the bathroom, gets a cup of cool water. He’s not willing to leave the motel room while Sam’s in it, otherwise he would go out and grab something bottled. The motel water tastes like copper, like bit-your-tongue tang. Or maybe that’s just Dean. (You can get the full effect by opening your mouth to the shower spray, swallowing slow so the scarlet-savor coats your throat.)
When Dean comes back with the water, Sam’s shuttered, arms folded across his knees and head buried. The air is dead. Dean taps him on the elbow and bumps the cup against his arm. The tiny rustles of Sam’s shifting multiply and magnify like a slow-motion thunderclap and culminate with him lifting his head and reaching out a hand. His fingers are trembling and his grip is loose. It takes a long time for him to drink the water, pausing between small, slow swallows. It seems like any second the cup should slip out of his fingers, but Dean doesn’t interfere, and Sam doesn’t spill.
Dean takes the cup when Sam’s finished. “You want more?”
Sam shakes his head without looking up. “Thanks,” he says, unnecessarily. It’s more whisper than voice, but it’s a word, and Dean takes it as a signal that Sam is about ready to talk.
“So… what the hell was that?”
Sam takes a breath, deflates with it. Shakes his head minutely. “I don’t know.”
His voice is all creak and whistle. He makes a soft humming noise, like that’s all the energy he can put into clearing his throat. Dean waits. Sam is quiet.
“Was it your heart?”
Sam turns his head an inch toward Dean, his eyes on the floor. “At first I thought it was; like a werewolf attack or something. But then it was… too painful.”
“What’s more painful than literally getting your heart ripped out of your chest?” He means it as a joke, but he’s willing to believe they’ve both had worse.
“It wasn’t—” Sam sounds pained. His fingers tighten around a wrinkle in his sleeve. “I mean, it felt different. More… invasive.”
Dean gives it a beat. “What’s more invasive than literally getting your heart ripped out of your chest?”
Sam actually glances at Dean then, gives him a split-second attempt at a smile before his face gives up spectacularly and his eyes drop like weights. His mouth opens, closes, twice. “When I didn’t have my soul...”
“Sam,” Dean warns. “We can’t go there. You’ll be twitching on the floor again in two seconds.”
“Seems like I’ll be ‘twitching on the floor’ either way.”
Sam is finally looking at him, and now Dean looks away. “Yeah, Cas shoved his hand in there.” He feels Sam’s stare intensify.
“...‘In there’?”
“In your chest. To see if your soul was still inside you. And it wasn’t, so Death shoved your soul in.”
“Did I ask for that?”
Jesus fucking Christ. They could be at the end of a hunt, him, Sam, and Dad all dead tired and bleeding in ten places, and Sam could still find it in him to be like this. Dean almost misses Sam’s fights with Dad, the days when Sam’s pissiness was channeled to John by default.
“You needed it,” Dean says. “You don’t know.”
–
Dean prays again. In Sam’s estimation, it’s not Dean’s persuasion, or his threats, but his sheer obnoxiousness that gets him results this time. Castiel answers.
…In the form of a petite young woman whose tailored ensemble and grey makeup sallows her honeyed complexion. Sam dislikes her on sight.
“What assistance do you require?” She starts saying it a fraction of a second before Dean starts saying “Who the fuck are you?” and neither flinches or concedes to the other.
“I am here at the behest of Castiel.” She says it with a plastered half-smile and insincere patience. “What assistance do you require?”
“How about some face time with your boss?” says Dean.
“Castiel sent me on his behalf,” says the angel. Her tone is less superior than it is absolutely belittling in its boredom. “He is—as you have been told—very busy with matters whose importance far outweighs yours. Now: what assistance do you require?”
“Okay,” says Sam, in an attempt to intercept the combative energy radiating from Dean. “I’ve been experiencing these… memories… that aren’t really memories?” Sam looks to Dean, who, surprisingly and unsurprisingly, adds nothing more. “We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.”
Without warning, the angel raises an arm in front of her and starts moving toward Sam.
Sam takes a step back.
“Whoa,” says Dean. “What are you gonna do to him?”
“I’m going to give him an assessment.”
“You don’t know what’s going on in his gourd.”
“Hence the assessment.”
“How do we know we can trust you?” says Sam, because she hasn’t lowered her hand, and he doesn’t even know her name. Her eyes are boring into his, disinterested but intent.
“I’m working under Castiel’s direct orders,” she says, and she’s coming toward him, fingers reaching up to his forehead.
In Sam’s periphery, Dean is still.
Sam locks onto the angel’s brown, unblinking eyes and closes his own.
The sensation is like a living flash without a fixed source, omnipresent, illuminating all interiors from all angles. It’s not entirely unfamiliar, except for the feeling of that flash hitting a wall that’s keeping a corner dark. And of a little blip of that flash, a little reaching pseudopod, making it past that wall for the briefest second, almost like a foot sliding under a door. The flash is gone as quick as it came; but when that foot retreats from under the door, it drags out some bit of residue with it, leaving a dark smear behind.
The stuff is flammable.
It ignites, now that it’s this side of the wall, and the flames spread like wildfire from Sam’s spine to the tips of his nerves. It’s over so fast that he’s pretty sure he didn’t have time to scream. He feels sweat on his forehead, which makes sense—the fire was so hot. Or maybe it’s that the air is wet, is water, which is why he can’t breathe, why Dean’s voice sounds muffled and distant.
Sam registers another voice and remembers where he is. There’s conversation going on without him. Going on about him. Sheer anger at having missed time motivates him to start clawing his way toward awareness.
“Wait,” he says, or thinks he’s saying. “Wait.” His face is against the motel carpet; its crusty fibers grind into the skin at his cheekbone.
There’s the sound of wings, then silence.
Sam’s feeble fuck is drowned out by Dean’s. When the world stops buzzing enough for him to sit up, Sam says it again, makes sure it’s the loudest one.
–
“It’s a loophole,” Dean repeats; “not a structural problem.”
“Yeah, her ‘exact fucking words,’ I got that part,” snaps Sam. He’s avoiding Dean in the mirror, Dean staring at him like it’s a one-way and not a reciprocal reflection. He splashes more cold water on his face, like that will get rid of the memory of the carpet against it, of the long, blonde, stranger’s hair that clung to his cheek afterward; and the terrible sensation of removing that hair—the tiny, intimate, thready pull—almost as bad, somehow, as being electrocuted by angel. “Where did this ‘loophole’ come from?”
“I told you: she said she didn’t know.”
“And she can’t un-loop it? An angel can’t fix it?”
“Yeah, apparently not.” Dean’s looking down now, and around the room, angry like someone’s trapped him in here.
“But they are memories,” Sam says, staring down the drain of the sink. “Right? They’re real. They’re my own memories, leaking through the wall in my brain.”
“Yeah. I mean, not exactly. But, yeah, sounds like it.”
Dean’s voice is coming from around the corner now, near one of the beds. Sam turns with his back to the sink and talks in his direction, to the wall in between them.
“Okay,” says Sam. His voice is rising and he doesn’t fight it. “What does ‘Not exactly’ mean?”
“She said your brain can’t process the memories, so. The rest of you does.”
“‘Can’t process’ because of the wall?”
Dean takes too long to respond; but when he does, he sounds sincere, if distressed. “I don’t know, Sam.”
They’re quiet. Sinkwater drips off the edge of Sam’s nose. He swears he can smell the iron in it. He grabs a towel, buries his face in it.
“I don’t remember,” he says. “How can they be memories if I don’t actually remember?”
“I don’t know. ‘The Body Remembers,’ or whatever.”
“The body doesn’t remember because the body wasn’t there.”
“What do you want me to say, Sam?!” Dean is suddenly loud, vowels wider, like he’s stamping them over the word neither of them are quite saying. “She said they’re your memories, just translated.”
“Yeah, King James Version isn’t cutting it for me. It’s just my body fucking me over. Just give it to me in the original Hebrew.”
“Sam,” Dean says, urgent, like he’s about to start saying something else. But Sam waits, and Dean is quiet.
Sam grips the towel, trying harder, now, to keep his tone even. “What else did she say?”
“That was pretty much it,” says Dean.
Sam thinks it would be easier if he believed Dean was lying about that. But he doesn’t.
“She was a real piece of work,” says Dean. Changing the subject. Standing up and pacing.
“Who do you think she was?”
“A bitch.”
Not her, Sam thinks; the vessel. That’s why he disliked the angel: the vessel didn’t fit right. It makes him wonder what the angel did to make her say yes.
Dean announces that he’s calling Bobby. Sam watches him walk out the door. He thinks about filling the sink and dunking his whole face in. He showers instead.
Sam’s sick of the motel room: sick of that water adulterating the fresh familiarity of his toothpaste; sick of the austere blue tint of the bathroom light; sick of the insistent X shapes, globular and granite and grating, in the wallpaper pattern.
Sam asks if they can leave as soon as he steps out of the bathroom.
“Please,” says Dean. His bag is already packed.
–
The weather is misty, so much so that the dinner they grab seems to have been permeated with moisture on its brief journey from the drive-through window to the car. Or maybe Sam is imagining things. He’s had a lot of fries in his life, and few have been this soggy. Dean complains half-heartedly about his burger, but Sam knows that he wouldn’t have chosen to eat anywhere else today, because that would have meant having to wait. Crappy road food at least means getting on the road.
Sam gathers up the trash from the meal, uses the last half a napkin to wipe the grease from his fingers, watches the wipers clear the gathering drops from the windshield.
“I’m giving us three days,” he says.
“What?”
“Three days to figure out whatever the hell this is.”
“And what happens after three days?”
It’s the fear in Dean’s voice that Sam was most expecting and least looking forward to. He’s furious at it, and angry with himself for that fury.
“If I have to deal with these memories, I want to deal with them whole, not warped, not… whatever this is.”
“Sam, whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”
“I have to know.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“You don't want me to know. But I can’t keep not knowing.”
“No, Sam, you don’t want to know. Because if you did know, you’d know that you don’t want to know.”
“I’m not you, Dean.”
Sam’s not sure what he means by that, but he hears the implications when he says it out loud. Judging by the silence coming from Dean, he heard them, too.
“Remember what Death said? Breaking that wall could kill you, Sam.”
“No, I don’t remember. I don’t remember the last year and a half of my life.”
“Why would you want to remember?”
“Because it’s my life!”
“It’s hell, Sam.” Dean’s voice cracks. He’s speaking like he’s afraid someone might overhear them. “It’s hell.”
“I know.”
“You don’t.”
–
There are some things Sam will never really talk about. Hell is one of those things, and he doesn’t even have the memory of it to keep secret. What he does have, currently and tangibly, is a rising panic at the thought of his body brainwashing him, of these episodes possibly skewing his memories forever before he even gets a chance at the truth. These are things he could tell Dean, if he could put them into words. What he can’t share is the deep, bone-cold dread of someone—of Lucifer—possessing intimate knowledge of his experiences where he has only a blank. It’s stupid, because he can forget about it and be perfectly fine. He’s been used enough times to be able to lock that shit away. But in those moments where he can’t forget, that sense of powerlessness hits so hard that his body and his senses start to distance themselves from him, as if they’re not sure whether they belong to him at all.
If Sam has to remember what Lucifer did with his hands before he jumped into hell, he wants to remember who he was, in hell, in the hands of Lucifer.
–
It happens again, in the car. It just sounds like pain, flat-out and gut-deep, and Dean tenses like he’s the one drawing it out, watching the eyes glaze, the lips part in exquisite agony, perfect bubble of blood forming between them. The car drifts; Dean turns the wheel sharp, hits the brakes hard to pop that bubble. Sam gets his door open and spills out into the roadside ditch. The blood roaring in Dean’s ears isn’t loud enough. Sam helps by pushing the passenger door closed.
–
Dean clocks the passage of time by Sam’s carriage when he gets back in the car: the tenor of his exhaustion, how long he’s marinated in aftermath. He seems soaked deep in the realization that there’s nothing to say. It’s been a long time, then. Dean stares straight ahead, and he can sense Sam doing the same, can see the white of his eye through the mud smeared on his face and hair.
Dean’s hands are clamped—cramped—around the steering wheel. He can’t move, hasn’t moved. Then Sam takes a breath that’s just too loud and deep, and it isn’t even that he’s going to say anything, he’s just breathing—he’s breathing the way Sam does when he fucking can’t quite keep a lid without exhaling his internal temperature back down from boiling point—and he’s so vividly there that it sets Dean off, tripwire. He’s out of the car. He follows the road like a diving line, air thick like water around him.
His body is beginning to acclimate to the idea of turning around and heading back when he registers the rumbling of the Impala. It pulls up beside him, window rolled down. It’s raining. Dean’s wet. He’s shivering. Sam looks at him, saying nothing, and Dean dares to look back. Sam doesn’t want much from him. He just wants Dean to get in the car.
Dean does. He lets Sam drive.
–
Sam only stops the car after Dean’s had to physically correct the wheel twice. He turns onto a seasonal road and follows it further into the woods than he needs to, terrified to lose that forward momentum—afraid that, when the car stops moving, whatever he’s been outpacing will gather up behind him like a tidal wave. He puts the car in park and starts to run a hand through his hair but his fingers catch in dried mud, sending a little avalanche of dirt rolling down his shoulder and sprinkle-thudding onto the seat.
“Sorry,” he says, throat dry.
Dean’s reply is anticipatory, so immediate it’s almost an interruption: “Don’t apologize.”
The engine is idling. Dean leans over and turns back the key. The trees are grey and naked and silent. The sky is beginning to lighten.
“You want the back?” Dean says. Sam doesn’t answer. Dean brushes the dirt off the seat and into the footwell. There’s a wash of cold air as Dean opens the car doors to step out and get back in. Dean lays down on the bench. Sam leans his forehead against the steering wheel.
“Tell me you haven’t been poking at it.”
“I haven’t been poking at it.”
“Tell me you won’t, okay?” says Dean. “Bobby’s got a lead.”
Sam doesn’t believe him. “Okay,” he says. He knows Dean won’t believe him, either.
Sam gropes for that chink in his mind and finds it by instinct, like a tongue returning to an empty gum. It’s a slippery thing, not like a fissure he could easily pry at or crack open, but Sam’s stubborn. He could find a foothold.