Chapter Text
January 3rd, 2011
Singer Salvage Yard, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Back propped against the windshield of the Impala, Sam watched the stars.
Distant, cold, shivering pinpricks of light. He could relate. He was floating, not sinking or swimming, just content…if content could be applied without emotional attachment. He was here, sitting on the car, hands in his pockets—and he was a hundred miles away, looking for their next case, sorting out maps and patterns. It was the only thing that mattered at this point, it was as much a part of him as the blood beating under his skin. The most real, alive part of him.
He knew Dean was inside, cooking something up with Bobby. Probably something dangerous, stupid or counterproductive. That bothered Sam as far as the hunting went, because more often than not Dean was distracted these days, and a distracted hunter wasn’t a hunter on top of the job. Him and Bobby both—they were open books of caring. Like sunspots against Sam’s cold glow. Suns and stars. Sam was wearing out trying to keep up appearances around the two of them.
The door to Bobby’s house banged shut somewhere behind him. Sam puffed his cheeks full of air, leaning his head against the windshield. He expected it when he heard Dean stalking over to join him, boots crunching through the gravel. What caught him off guard and brought on a whiplash of animalistic surprise was Dean’s hand grabbing his arm, spinning him around on the hood
“Get off.” Dean growled.
“Dean—”
“I said, get off my car!”
Sam obliged, hopping down, giving Dean a cock-eyed look. He hadn’t done anything to warrant the anger in Dean’s haggard face. He hadn’t pushed his buttons, hadn’t made a move to illicit this kind of an emotional backlash. But here it was, standing right in front of him. Dean, angry. Dean, broken. The more time Sam spent with him, the less useful Dean seemed as hunter. This obsession was getting out of control.
“You still in there, Sam?” Dean asked quietly, firmly.
Sam raised an eyebrow. “I think we both know the answer to that, Dean.”
Dean took a step closer. He wasn’t going to let this go, not this time. Sam could see it in his eyes. “I need to know a piece’a you is still in there, Sammy, or what the hell am I tryin’ to do, here?”
Sam blew out a breath into the chilly air and rocked his head back. “What do you want from me, Dean?”
“I want some emotion outta you! I want you to feel this!” He grabbed the back of Sam’s neck, and looked him dead-on in the eyes, something Sam knew Dean had done a lot when they were kids. His way of letting Sam know he was there, he wasn’t going anywhere. Through freak thunderstorms, times when their dad wasn’t around, when Sam was just a little kid. It went through Sam’s head like crunching numbers. Didn’t register any deeper than that, and Dean seemed to get that, because he grabbed Sam by his arms and pulled him in, hugging him hard. “Dammit, Sam, feel! Feel something, feel anything!”
Sam stayed unresponsive to Dean’s embrace, rolling his eyes up until he could see the stars. Dean’s theatrics were seriously wearing on him. “I feel…you crushing my ribcage.”
Dean’s reaction? Hold tighter. Typical. Now that he had his blinders off, Sam could see Dean’s flaws like they’d been stripped out and personified, cut into perfect contrast. And man, did he have a lot of flaws. It was so bad sometimes that the black almost completely blotted out the white, like soot on snow. And the worst part was the huge gaping hole in his focus that Dean had when it came to his Sammy. His brother—Sam wasn’t even that person anymore. It was like Calvin and a Duplicate machine, a separation of self from self. A part that Sam didn’t want inside of him anymore, because it meant having that same weak spot that turned Dean into this sieve of raw feeling almost every single day.
It was pitiful. Sick. And they said he was the one with the problem.
“Sammy, I need your help. I can’t do this alone.”
Sam’s kickback response: fake it. Fake the emotion, pretend like he cared, give Dean the fix he wanted to satisfy his emotional needs, and then they could get back to what was really important: hunting. The only place where they were on the same page, still speaking the same language. The only thing keeping Sam around.
He slung up an arm and hugged Dean back. “I’m not going anywhere, Dean.”
Dean stiffened and yanked back, shoving out from under Sam’s grip, giving him this look like he wanted to skin him alive. “You bastard.”
Sam smirked. “Relax, Dean. It was a joke.”
“You’re sick, you know that?” Dean paced away, rubbing a hand across his unshaven jaw. “Man, you’re a mess. You’re a sick, freaking monster.”
That hit hard, jolting a memory inside of Sam.
Don’t say that to me!...Don’t you say that to me.
“Gnnh!” Sam jerked awake in the front seat of the Impala, sitting up straight, spitting out breath through his open mouth. “Gah.” Fissures of pain zigzagged through his skull, splitting it open. He pinched the bridge of his nose, then pressed the heels of his hands above his eyes. “Ahhh…”
Fighting these headaches on willpower alone was like trying to stop a drill going into his head with a piece of cardboard. Ineffective and probably pretty stupid. It wouldn’t take him ten minutes to walk into a drugstore, buy something and at least cut the corner on these migraines.
After Vermilion, he couldn’t talk himself into it. It wasn’t a matter of addiction so much as nothing he could buy for a cheap twenty bucks at a Walgreens was going to do anything for a pain that went this deep. It was like having a pongee stick buried to the roots in his head, and he knew for a fact Advil couldn’t top that. Six oxycontin had left him strung out but still in so much pain he’d dragged himself to the toilet and thrown up before he’d gotten sober.
And the way Dean had been looking at him after that, like Sam was some kind of hopped up timebomb waiting to go off…
He’d learned that these headaches wore off a little bit if he gave it time. So he gave it time; sat slumped over the steering wheel of the vintage pickup truck Bobby had loaned him when he’d left the salvage yard two days ago. Eventually the white fire burned itself out behind his eyes, and Sam sat up, a little dizzy but okay. For now.
Okay, now that the memories had climbed back behind the wall.
Arms draped over the steering wheel, Sam squinted against the rising sun, staring across the river toward Memphis. The city was highlighted with gold, a jungle of steel and glass and fog. Sam was parked under the overpass of Forty, commuters rumbling over his head on their way into the city for work.
Sam’s next job was in there, too. Somewhere. He wasn’t really sure where it was, or what he was looking for. He had vague snatches, things he’d remember when he flashed back to the hunts he’d done while he was soulless. He knew there was a girl—a girl asking him for help. And an older woman was involved. Maybe. But that was all he’d managed to piece together.
There was an honest truth in all of this that was stuck in his gut, trying to claw its way out, and Sam shoved it down. He started the truck, the vibration of an old but well-kept engine shimmying up his arms. He pulled out from under the bridge and onto the nearest on-ramp, heading into the city.
He was starting mostly from scratch, here, along with the vague clues and hints that had come unburied from behind the wall. Driving into Memphis, windows rolled up against the cold, he figured this was the last few seconds of peace and quiet he’d get. So he held on to it.
Before leaving Sioux Falls, he’d pulled Dean aside and told him two things: to watch his back, and to not get in touch. Dean had bucked him on that one—Dean always did. Something their dad had taught them when they were kids: always keep each other in your line of sight. That rule had haunted Sam his first year at Stanford, woken him up in the middle of the night reaching for his phone after nightmares that made him think Dean was in danger. After those had stopped, the silence with his family had been easier to ignore. But a part of it had always been there, sitting on Sam’s chest, a cosmic taunt telling him that not only had his dad kicked him out, but Dean had, too.
Like Dean hadn’t followed him out onto the street that night. Grabbed his arm. Spun him around. “Sam. Don’t do this, man, don’t go.”
“You heard dad! He told me if I walked out, that was it.” Sam had spread his arms out in a gesture of finality. “This is it, Dean.”
“Not for you and me, Sam. I’m not letting you walk out on us like this.”
But Sam had. He’d turned and walked down the road.
“Sam—Sammy! Hey! You can turn your back on dad, little brother. Don’t turn your back on me!” Dean had called after him. “Sam, you know what’s out there! Don’t go after this by yourself!”
“Sorry, Dean.” Sam had muttered under his breath, keeping his eyes ahead. “I’m not gonna live this life.”
“Sam! Dammit, come back! We can still work this out!” Dean had sounded like his world was cracking into pieces. “Sam, please, dude, come on!”
He’d pretended not to hear Dean fall onto his knees in the middle of the street, smacking his hands flat down on the pavement. “Sam!”
He shook off a memory that wasn’t as dangerous as anything behind the wall, but still wasn’t pleasant, and gave his cell phone a cursory check. No calls or texts from Dean, which was a surprise and a relief. Sam knew from experience that asking Dean not to do something was usually as effective as forcing his hand, so the prolonged radio silence scratched under Sam’s skin a little bit, made him uneasy. He shoved that down, ran a hand along his jaw and tried to get his head in the game, start planning.
That he’d been in Memphis for more than twenty-four hours, before…that was a given. The flashes Sam saw told him that much, staggered glimpses of daytime and nighttime in different places, with different people. He didn’t have a tangible starting point, but he figured someone must have seen him, at some point or another. He’d just have to drive until he found some place that looked familiar.
Easier said than done. Sam cruised the streets in rush-hour traffic, looking for landmarks that stood out as something other than pictures from books or drive-bys during other hunts. Nothing in the webwork of streets and buildings made any sense, and by noon Sam was so frustrated he felt like he was going to kick the cab of the truck apart. He stopped outside of a retro, midtown café and headed inside.
The place was warm in the beginning of January, laid-back, set up with bar stools and lounge couches. While he waited for his order, Sam leaned one elbow on the counter, taking stock of the place, noting the two exits and one window and the television on the wall. Pretty cozy place; there were a dozen like it around Stanford, and Sam remembered spending his weekends on these kinds of couches, Jessica sitting across from him, tangling her feet up in his while they did research for their classes.
He remembered dragging Dean into one of these places once, too. He’d complained about everything—the food, the drinks, the modestly-dressed girls behind the counter. Then he’d gotten bored and started flicking the discarded raisins from Sam’s salad into his water glass.
Those memories made it hard to sit down and eat his club sandwich alone, but Sam resisted the urge to check his phone. He’d have heard if someone was calling him. Especially because, being Zeppelin’s ‘Ramblin’ On’, his ringtone for Dean was pretty hard to block out.
Sam watched the news instead; word on strange deaths that hunters could chalk up to monster slayings were becoming fewer and further between. In fact, after that new breed of monster had cropped up in Vermilion—and then been stomped out just as fast by a Shapeshifter posing as Sam and Dean’s father—there hadn’t been much activity at all. It made Sam a little nervous.
He rested his chin on the edge of the tall plastic cup the barista had given him, and let his eyes swivel around the room, taking everything in again—finally landing on a poster board behind the counter, plastered with pictures of patrons that looked like they’d been taken with pretty cheap cameras. Sam smiled slightly, looking harder at the faces—
Flashed.
Nighttime. Hookah smoke. A totally different atmosphere. Sweaty bodies clustered together. A very drunk girl with her arm around his waist.
Sam almost kicked his chair over getting up, sliding around the counter to look at the collage. The picture was grainy, dollar-store quality…but there was no mistaking the face he saw every time he looked in the mirror. It was him, reluctant, pulling back at the same second the camera snapped the picture, trapping his soulless face forever, right here in this café.
Sam felt a rolling punch to his insides, wondering if it was casual circumstance or memory that had brought him right back here. How much was seeping through without him even realizing it?
He turned to the barista, who smiled blankly at him. “Excuse me. Can you tell me when this picture was taken?” He pointed to the photograph of him and that girl—her face triggering something deep in his head.
“About…mmm, seven or eight months ago?” The barista said. “We were having a senior’s night in, and…things got a little wild.”
Seven or eight months. Right before he’d reconnected with Dean. Sam felt a feather-light brush of uneasiness on his neck. “And that girl. Any idea where she is?”
“No, sorry. We don’t keep track.”
“Okay, what about that guy? Where was he staying?”
The girl looked from the picture to Sam and back again, frowning. “Hey. Isn’t that you?”
Sam smiled tautly. “Twin brother.”
“Right.” She nodded. “Yeah, his address, we did get.” She pulled a scrap of paper from behind the cash register and handed it to him. “Left this with one of our girls. Said she could come around any time he wanted.” She pitched her voice low. “No offense, but your brother’s kind of an ass.”
Sam tucked the paper into his back pocket. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, he was obviously with the girl in that picture, you know? But he was still asking one of my friends over to his place.” She straightened up.
“Yeah. He’s a…” Sam trailed off, looking for a good word. Couldn’t find one. “Sorry. For everything he did.”
“Not your fault.” The barista shrugged and sauntered away, and Sam grabbed the rest of his sandwich on the way out, wondering why a step in the right direction felt like backsliding on his first day on the job.
King’s Ridge Motel. It was a pretty off-the-cuff place, a hole in the wall on the far outskirts of Memphis. Not really a surprise for Sam when he pulled up outside, double-and-triple-checked the address on the slip of paper the barista had given him, then got out. Either some part of him remembered this, too, or else his logical half just wasn’t surprised he’d gone this shady when he was soulless. Place really did look like a crack-house or a brothel.
The guy behind the front desk in the dingy, mildewed lobby had a beer gut and a cigarette dangling out of the side of his mouth like a permanent cancerous growth. He stared at Sam with bleary eyes as he walked in, hands in his pockets.
“Hi, my name’s…” Sam trailed off, brain scrambling for a lie. “Uh, Zappa. And I’m, uh, with the—”
“Bull.” The guy croaked, and Sam straightened, a little surprised. “You’re that Deacon kid, stayed in four-oh-six last year.”
Sam decided to go with it. “Right, sorry. Zappa’s my nickname, guess I got…” He let that trail off, too. “Doesn’t matter. Listen, uh, last time I was here, I…got pretty wasted.”
“Damn right you did.” The guy laughed, shaking ash off the end of his cigarette. Sam stared at the flickering embers inside the roll, then shook his head and met the man’s bloodshot gaze.
“I was just wondering…if I brought a girl here with me. She’d be about this tall,” Sam held a hand at chest height. “Blonde?”
“Saw lotsa women with you, kid. No blondes.”
Sam didn’t know whether or not to be relieved. “Well, could I maybe see the room I stayed in? Y’know, trying to put together the pieces now that I’m…” The next word stuck in his throat. “Sober.”
“Eh.” The guy bent down and started fishing under the counter, pulling up a ring with a key on it. “Gonna cost ya. Forty a night.”
Sam had been expecting that. He laid three hundred on the counter and grabbed the key. “You’re sure this is the same room?”
“Wouldn’t forget it. Haven’t filled it since. Needs some fixin’ up after what you done to it, and we just don’t have the money.” The guy slouched over to a stool on the far end of the counter. “Should have you pay up.”
Sam headed for the staircase before the man could make good on that thought.
Four-oh-six was at the end of a hallway, which made sense; it was always a good idea to have empty rooms on both sides of you, if you couldn’t get the room at the end. Less likely for people to overhear things they shouldn’t. It figured Sam had remembered that when he was soulless.
He stuck the key in the lock and leaned his head against the door for a second, not really sure what he was looking for, here. That girl. Answers. A reason for this rock-hard feeling in his gut like this was bigger than what it looked like on the surface.
Sam shoved the door open and stepped inside.
Stopped.
Stared, throat constricting. Couldn’t swallow. Move. Think.
He couldn’t have been sober when this happened.
It looked like a scene out of The Number Twenty-Three. Words, on every wall. Some of them carved on, others scrawled in marker. Bed overturned, sheets ripped off. It seemed the place hadn’t been touched since he’d been here more than half a year ago. And this was definitely all him—his handwriting, his carving style. Chunks of plaster had been kicked in, fist-sized holes in the wall. Gouges on the rotten bathroom door. Blood on the bathroom tiles.
And he’d done it. All of it. It wasn’t a memory so much as a gut instinct that told him that. He’d ransacked this place.
The question was, why?
Sam shed his jacket and looked around for something, some sort of starting point that he could use to unravel what was written here. But when he looked at the walls for more than a few seconds, it gave him a shooting pain similar to his headaches, like his brain was trying to take the scrambled words in all at once and decode them.
And then his eyes found it: one word, scarred in the wall, infected with mold, standing out white and jagged like a broken bone from torn skin:
DEAN.
In huge letters, covering marker writing. He’d missed it the first few times he’d looked because the four letters were so spread out.
But he’d been conscious. Aware enough of his brother’s existence to write his name in with the rest of the poisoned, alcoholic ranting. Sam walked over, dipped his fingers into the groove and rested his temple on the wall, looking along its length—looking for something else that would stand out.
And it did.
It took him all day, pacing, not going out for more food, splashing water from the rusted pipes in the bathroom onto his face, his headache coming back slowly but with a vengeance—but he finally found a tiny pattern. He was sitting with his back against the wall, one leg stretched out, the other propped to his chest, staring up at the carving of Dean’s name and tapping his fingers sporadically on the wooden floor; and it jumped out at him, a name that looked familiar after all the reading. Sam tilted his head to one side, frowning, reading the word again. Then he shoved up onto his feet, walked over and laid his hand flat over it.
“Annalise Stetson.” He said quietly, and the words tasted electric, bringing on a repressed emotion: guilt. Maybe something he’d expected to feel when he was here before, but it’d never come out of the woodwork.
There was definitely something to that name, something important he was missing, and Sam knew where to go next. He threw his jacket back on, grabbed the keys and headed downstairs.
Sam’s laptop was in the place it would see the least use: the front seat of the Impala. He’d left it, not because he didn’t need it, but because it might be an incentive for Dean to actually do some speed-research, if he had all of their favorite bookmarks right as his fingertips and didn’t have to wade through the bog of Google. Consequently, Sam’s only available resource was the public library, which was closed for the night by the time he got there.
Rather than head back to the rank motel and try sleeping with the clear signs of his mental disparity glaring down on him like an overblown streetlight, Sam did the same thing he’d been doing for three days: he stretched out across the seat of the truck, which barely accommodated half of his lanky body, and he slept in there.
Slept—barely. Woke up every half hour in shakes and sweats, clawing his way out of an endless black pit. Maybe Hell. Maybe something else. Sometimes it felt like his mind was trapped inside the wall itself, keeping him pinned and chained between memories and reality. He returned to that in-between prison every time he slept.
A wall. The Great Wall of Sam. That was crap. Wallpaper over plaster. Glass with veins. Smoke and mirrors. The wall was a window fogged up with the breath of his past and every time Sam wasn’t on guard against it, he was smudging through and catching glimpses of the light on the other side. The Hellfire.
For whatever reason, it was strongest when his guard was down. When he wasn’t focused on a case, or when he was on the edges of sleep. So he was getting less and less sleep—less than Dean normally got, even, and that was saying something. Two hours a day, if he was even that lucky.
This wasn’t any exception; Sam spent most of the night twisting around the cab, trying to get comfortable, bracing his back against the bench seat to calm the shakes. He remembered being a kid—maybe ten, eleven. Getting scared of something, what it was—not really important. Walking down into Bobby’s study, seeing Bobby still awake, poring over a lore book. Sam had crawled under the desk, curling up like a cat at Bobby’s feet.
“Boy, you’re too old for this.” Bobby had muttered, but he’d braced his foot on Sam’s back and started nudging him back and forth, slowly. Sam had huddled up tight and stayed down there, Bobby rubbing his boot up and down Sam’s back, until Sam had finally been lulled to sleep.
God, Sam figured he’d give anything not to be alone right now. Maybe it’d even be worth breaking radio silence. Not with Dean—if Dean heard one scrap of how yanked apart Sam was feeling, he’d be cruising at eighty-five for Memphis before Sam could get in the next word edgewise.
Sam pulled out his phone, one arm tucked behind his head, and let the cursor hover over Bobby’s name. Wavered, uncertain.
Called the number before he could change his mind.
Except he did, every time it rang; like picking petals off a daisy. Hang up. Stay on. Hang up, stay on. Hang up. Stay—
“Yeah?”
“Bobby.” Sam sighed out the name, not sure if he was relieved or more stressed. Three days. He’d made it three whole days.
“Sam?” Bobby’s tone pitched a little higher. “Thought you were keepin’ closed lines on this one, kid.”
“Trying to.” Sam replied. “I guess I just…needed someone to talk to.”
“Uh-huh. Talk to, not at?” Bobby said. “Guess that’s why you picked me for your date instead’a that idjit brother of yours.”
Sam half-smiled, closing his eyes. “I dunno, I was just sitting here thinking about when we used to stay at your house. Remember that time I crawled under your desk and you kicked me until I fell asleep?”
There was a long, slightly awkward pause. “I remember that happenin’ once or twice.” Bobby finally said.
Sam flipped over, propping his temple on his fist. “What about that talk we were supposed to have after Essex, Bobby? Remember that?”
“Sam, you all right?”
He squeezed his eyes shut as tight as his throat, right then. He needed so badly to drop out the distance between himself and the people he cared about. Back against the wall, already, just from being in that café, in this city, in that motel room.
“Not really sure. I just—” He couldn’t shake it, that gnawing in his gut, that feeling like something inside of his mind was splitting open. “Just needed to talk to you, I guess. Sorry.”
Bobby growled out a breath. “Don’t go apologizin’ to me, boy. And don’t you go off sayin’ some kinda goodbyes, either. You work this case and you come on back home, you hear me? If I find out you made one stop before you came back to my place, you and me’ll have some problems. Understand?”
Sam swallowed the planet-sized lump in his throat. “Yes, sir.”
“All right.” Bobby said gruffly. “Now you listen to me. Get some sleep, hit the ground runnin’ first thing in the mornin’. No problem’s so bad a good rest can’t help. And believe me, boy, you got a few month’s catchin’ up to do.”
The reminder nailed into Sam’s chest. He could tell Bobby he was having trouble sleeping, but that’d more than likely pull Bobby in his direction. Make him want to help, even fly out to Memphis. And that was the opposite of what Sam wanted. “Yes, sir.”
“All right.” Bobby cleared his throat. “Got some stuff I gotta take care of.”
“Right. No, that’s fine. Sorry for interrupting.” Sam said quickly.
“Sam?” Bobby said sharply, before Sam could hang up. “You call me if you need any-damn-thing, and I’ll see what I can do to help.”
In the darkness of the cab, Sam smiled. “I will.”
He hung up, flipped the phone over, pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. For a few seconds—a few black silent heartbeats outside of the pit—he felt comforted.
Sam spent the rest of the night in between push and pull, waiting for sunrise and for the library to open.
He finally gave up, got out, walked a few blocks to a generic gas station and bought a cheap, watery cappuccino. By the time he got back, the parking lot was already starting to fill up, a car and a van parked on either side of the pickup, fencing it in.
Sam frowned, walked past and headed up the steps into the building.
The inside of the library felt stiff and quiet, like it was holding its breath. It’d already been open for fifteen minutes according to the clock on the wall, but it felt like no one had been inside for a few years.
Sam headed straight to the reference desk, where a middle-aged woman was clicking intently on her computer. Sam leaned crossed arms on the counter and waited for her to notice him.
After a few minutes, she slid a beady glance his way. “No beverages allowed inside the library.”
Sam looked down at the cappuccino, decided it wasn’t worth it, chucked the drink into the trash can beside the desk and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Could I use one of the computers, please?”
The woman sniffed. “I’m surprised a young man like you doesn’t have his own brain machine.” She pulled a card off the lanyard around her neck and led him through a set of double doors and into the shelving part of the library. Sam hesitated just over the threshold, a wave of memory slamming him: stepping into this room, hands twitching, anxious, fidgety because there were too many people around. A hot, heavy hand on his shoulder. Someone talking in his ear.
“Coming?” The librarian snapped. Sam shook his hair from his eyes and hurried to join her, forehead creasing as he poked around the edges of the memory. Why this library? What had he been looking for during his last visit? Same name? Different one?
The woman led him to a niche of computers in the back corner of the library, logged him into one and let herself back out. Sam sat staring at the screen, not really sure what to do next—then, finally, sucked it up and typed in the name: Annalise Stetson.
Something smashed on the shelves behind him; Sam swiveled around in the chair, shoulders hunching, and saw a stack of books tumble onto the floor. A husky, sharp voice muttered, “Oh. Son of a bitch.”
Sam knew that voice.
He swung up onto his feet, one hand against the bookshelf to brace himself, as the man walked around the corner and started picking up the books, muttering to himself. A short brunette woman scurried over to join him, and was reaching for a book when she saw Sam standing there, staring.
Her already-wide-eyes nearly dropped out of her head. “Oh, my God. Sam.”
“Gwen?” The name stuck in Sam’s throat.
Samuel Campbell looked up sharply at his youngest grandson.
A wicked smile crossed his face.