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It’s his eyes, Sam decides. That weird… differentness is in his eyes.
But if he says it’s in his eyes he’d also have to say it’s in his hair and the way he breathes and moves and in his very fucking SHADOW if Sam wants to get right down to it.
Sam thought he’d be angry it took so long to get him out. Dean brushed it off, pulled his sunglasses down tight and continued on his way.
He doesn’t drink as much—he’ll still have a beer or two with Sam every so often, but there aren’t week long binges where Sam’s terrified every time Dean cuts the car around a corner too fast, or too slow and he can FEEL the grind of the guardrail just INCHES from his door. He doesn’t sleep around as much—Shocking, Sam had sprayed him with holy water when Dean had turned down a blonde in a halter top and a mini skirt. Dean blinked at him stupidly, wiped the holy water away from his mouth and flicked his fingers in Sam’s direction, “Funny… real funny.”
Sam wakes up with his hand in a bowl of warm water—Dean has forgotten that Sam’s got better bladder control now than he did at twelve. Sam doesn’t know what to think about it. Keeps quiet for a few days, watches as Dean’s attempts grow bolder, salt in his tea, Vaseline on the bottoms of his sneakers so when he goes into the gas station to pay for the tank full he falls flat on his ass. Blue food coloring in his mouthwash so he walks around looking like he kissed a Smurf for an hour before he realizes it. Lacing the lotion he uses to masturbate with with Icy Hot was the last straw and it’s about two hours too late when Dean realizes the weird, chemical grittiness at the bottom of his coffee cup wasn’t powdered creamer but about six laxative tablets.
Sam laughs his head off when Dean has to pull onto the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and squat in some bushes.
“You son of a bitch… I’ll get you for this. There will be NO mercy!” Dean says in a groan; “I’m gettin’ my own coffee from now on.”
Sam laughs some more and tosses him a handful of old Wendy’s napkins.
Dean LISTENS… he doesn’t just sit there and tolerate Sam speaking, he LISTENS, watches Sam’s face while he talks and RESPONDS to conversation even if it was one Sam wished they weren’t having.
“It’s not like it would BOTHER me if you do, Sam… Really. I mean if that’s what you like it’s what you like, why would you think it would bother me that your—your door swings both ways?”
Sam rolls his eyes; “I said ‘hypothetically’ that doesn’t mean—“
Dean’s eyebrow cocks up over his sunglasses and the corner of his mouth twitches up knowingly.
Sam rubs the bridge of his nose; “Just shut up and watch the road.”
Sam gets slashed by a Wendigo about a week later. It’s deep, dangerously deep and Dean has to use duct tape to hold his brother together until they can get out. He has Sam in the middle of a protective circle wrapped in both their soiled coats, his eyes are shining in the dim light from Sam’s dying flashlight as he scans the night.
Sam can’t do much but watch and try to keep his teeth from chattering at the cold and shock and blood loss. Dean has his hackles up, almost literally. His body is warm—warmer than it should be considering where they are—and all the little hairs on his arms and the back of his neck and even the hair on his head seems to be standing on end. He’s still, Sam can barely hear him breathing and if it wasn’t for the silvery puffs of it in the air he would think Dean as just a man shaped statue in the night.
“I’m gonna get it,” Dean says quietly. It’s barely a whisper.
“D-don’t be st-st-stupid,” Sam’s teeth are chattering and it’s getting harder to keep his eyes open.
“I’ll get it…”
Sam pulls at his shirtfront, trying to keep him still. He’s in too much pain to do much else, but Dean moves anyway. One backpack under Sam’s head, the other under his heels to keep them elevated. And Sam watches in horror as Dean walks into the night with a can of lighter fluid and a book of matches in one hand and a knife in the other. Their flare gun lost when Sam had been attacked.
Dean wanders the perimeter like a guard dog. Sam can see him every so often just a man shaped shadow against moonlight. Sometimes Sam’s eyes play tricks on him and he could swear that there are two men out there hunting the Beast.
It’s eerie how silent his brother is in this place. How he seems to become part of it, then he realizes—from what little Dean’s told him, that he WAS a part of a place like this, for a long time. Twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five. Not a moment’s rest, not a single second’s respite. He’d mentioned ‘Adapting’, mentioned something about Darwin and changed the subject.
It took Sam weeks to realize that Dean had been cast into Purgatory and come out alive… and better off for it.
The Wendigo came before dawn, dropped from the treetops and Sam cried out as the thing landed on Dean’s back.
It was furious and quick, ghastly silhouettes against the glow of dawn and the black of tree limbs. Slash—stab—bite—scream—hit—and suddenly flames. Screeching… The night was alight with it, amber and yellow and bloody red.
Dean’s face was almost serene, eyes reflecting blue and catlike, all seeing. His shadow was dark and huge stretched out to either side of him on the trees seeming to move with a life of its own. There were scratches on Dean’s chest, tears in his shirt, a thin gash across the bridge of his nose and a splatter of something black on both hands. He meets Sam’s wide eyes over the flames, jerks his chin up and says calmly; “Got him.”
Sam gets stitches before noon, fluids and a good dose of pain meds. He’s on his back for most of a week in a hotel room half the state away because the last thing he’d wanted to do was stay a second longer in that hospital than he’d had to. Sneaking out of hospitals had been honed to an art form between the two of them, even if all you were clinging to your brother for support and only wearing a pair of soiled jeans, untied boots and a backless smock stuffed up under your jacket.
Dean stays close, measures the time between doses of medicine precisely, checks and if need be changes bandages every four hours. He keeps studious watch, sits on the end of his bed and watches the door with his hands on his knees and his back straight.
Sam, in the delirium from the pain and the medication, more than once looks over and thinks he sees Cas sitting there. He doesn’t mention it when he’s lucid, but he can’t be certain he doesn’t say something when he’s not, though if he does Dean doesn’t say anything.
Dean brings Sam food full of protein and iron, spinach salads with chicken, broccoli rice and cheese soup, grilled lemon pepper tilapia with sautéed tomatoes and a token greasy hamburger that Sam only eats because Dean brought it to him.
Sam is worried about Dean’s sleeping habits, thinks Dean might be forgoing sleep so he can sit up and ‘keep watch’ but that can’t be true because Dean doesn’t look tired. He’s suspicious of his brother but doesn’t say anything. When he’s healed enough to move without threat of collapse Dean does sleep. Climbs into bed and is out like a fucking light. Sam comes out of the bathroom and notices him lying there, limp and ragdoll like then carefully, artistically drapes every pair of dirty socks in his bag across Dean’s face as he sleeps and stretches a condom over the gear shift in the car.
Dean cusses at him when he wakes up and puts Nair in his shampoo again, then laughs hysterically when all Sam’s pubic hair comes out instead of the hair on his head… Apparently he was out of body wash.
Sam replaces all the tapes in the car with Queen, Dean calls a truce and wrings a finger in his ear for half an hour. Sam feels smug.
Dean prefers his t-shirts two sizes too big now, Sam doesn’t know why and he turns quickly with a fist whenever something touches his back. Sam learns pretty fast to say something before he touches Dean’s shoulder. Dean doesn’t get cold as easy anymore, it’s almost as if he doesn’t notice the chill in the air or the bite of the wind. He eats fewer greasy hamburgers and—Sam nearly sprayed him with holy water again—has started frequently eating dried berries and nuts… Sam laughed aloud when Dean said innocently that he needed more fiber in his diet.
“Hey,” Dean said one evening, “Let’s head north.”
“Why? I haven’t heard about anything going on up there.”
“Because it’s New York!”
“And?”
“AND… There’s a shit-ton of museums up there. They’ve got dinosaur bones and… and stuff.”
“You hate museums.”
“No I don’t.”
Sam snorts. “Whatever,” But he eyes Dean curiously all the way there. Something is different, more so than the obvious… Dean is—he’s changed somehow and Sam wants to know why.
Dean replaces every pair of Sam’s underwear with adult diapers. Sam superglues Dean’s hand to a bottle of lube and the box to a cheap gay porn DVD he lifted from a gas station. Dean changes the ringtone on his phone and Sam leaves it that way because it annoys Dean more than it does him.
Dean is quieter, smoother. Sam doesn’t want to think ‘Animalistic’ but he does and it’s not just because Dean’s hair isn’t so tidy anymore and he seems to have trouble keeping the scruff on his jaws shaved clean… It’s not just because of the differentness about his eyes, although THAT is freaky as hell. Scares Sam shitless when Dean isn’t wearing sunglasses, but nothing in their arsenal reacts with Dean’s blood. Silver, Iron, Salt, Holy Water, The Knife, an Angel Blade… Nothing. Sam thinks ‘Animalistic’ because when he isn’t thinking about it consciously and just looks at his brother from the corner of his eye he can see the way Dean goes still and quiet when there are people around, how he watches them like a lion watches gazelle or a wolf watches a baby deer… It’s almost as if Dean would just as soon hunt this regular Joe on the street corner as he would a monster—and THAT, Sam thinks, is what scares him the most, because what’s keeping Dean from doing it? What’s keeping him from BECOMING one of the monsters they kill?
It’s usually about then that Dean will turn his head away from the people and Sam will be able to tell his brother is looking at him, but all he can see are those damned sunglasses and it’s frustrating because he can’t tell what’s going on in Dean’s head anymore, can’t tell what his brother is thinking without being able to see his eyes and how does he know that Dean ISN’T hunting people, just being very quiet about it.
“Calm down,” Dean says into his drink; “You worry too much. I’m not gonna go all Hannibal Lector on you.”
Sam cocks an eyebrow.
“Although I wouldn’t mind some fava beans and a nice Chianti—“
“DON’T!” Sam says through a grin just as Dean starts making an absurd slurping noise and the thoughts are gone.
Dean is human… but MORE.
He moves weird. Not necessarily different, but just… weird. Like his center of gravity is subterranean. As if he’s got something big held out on a pole to either side of him like a tight rope walker and he could tap dance on a razor’s edge and not cut himself if he wanted to.
Sam watched his brother scale a ten-foot fence a minute ago, grab two handfuls of razor wire and swing over it without a scratch. He landed on his feet, knees bent, lips parted, drawing air over his tongue like a cat or a snake or something—His eyes reflected back the beam of Sam’s flashlight in a spectrum of blue and silver and something a little red, his pupils are shrunk up to nothing in the light, just pinpricks, and they expand quickly when he looks off into the dark or hears a sudden noise.
Sam squeezes through the gap Dean’s made in the fence, he sprained his ankle a few weeks ago and it’s still giving him trouble so climbing wasn’t a safe option, then they’re off sprinting toward the old hotel where the djinn is nesting without a sound.
Two days later in a hotel in New Mexico Sam wakes up with his hand in a bowl of water and a wet place on the sheets beneath him. Dean laughs so hard tears drip from under his sunglasses. Sam puts Wasabi in Dean’s toothpaste tube and enjoys the hacking spitting sounds his brother makes as he tries to scrub the burn out of his mouth.
Dean is quiet when he hunts unless he’s forced to speak. It’s like he stops breathing and melds into the darkness. Sometimes Sam forgets he’s there, forgets what had to be done to bring him BACK and Dean brushing his elbow or the blue reflection of his eyes from across the room startles Sam for a minute, until he remembers.
Dean walks up to one of the spine covered toad like creatures Sam had identified as a sub-species of Fae and twists its flat lizard like head off its shoulders in a gush of black sticky blood. Sam wants to tell him that stabbing them with an iron knife kills them just as quickly as beheading and is much less messy but Dean’s already made up his mind and is gone into the shadows again.
Dean pulls the creatures’ teeth out with a pair of pliers on his utility knife, says that if you grind them up with a few herbs they make good medicine. “Better than penicillin,” He’s smiling as he says it and smearing around the ichor on his face with his shirt tail.
Sam fishes out a jar from the trunk and Dean puts the teeth in it and lets Sam douse his hands in holy water to get the sticky black gore off.
Sam bites the bullet and asks what happened in Purgatory a week later. He’s driving for the time being and Dean looks like he’s asleep, his head even lolls around limply with every turn but Sam knows better. Dean doesn’t—doesn’t feel asleep.
“What happened in there?” He says softly, not really expecting an answer, Dean can be stubborn when he wants to be.
It’s quiet for a while, just something playing softly on the radio that Sam can’t identify.
“Everything,” Dean says slowly.
Sam swallows; “Everything?”
“Everything in Dad’s journal was there and some stuff I’d never seen before… You remember that first Wendigo hunt after I picked you up?”
Sam nods.
“It was like that all the time. Frantic… No rest, just constant purposeless violence. Everything wanted to kill us. The trees, the fuckin’ dirt… Everything. There were eyes everywhere, glowing, watching… It was so dark it was hard to see… then it wasn’t anymore.”
Sam swallows a lump in his throat.
“I don’t know how many times I got messed up… It—it pulls your thoughts out—eats them,” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat; “Like Neverland, when you’re there for so long you forget about anything that happened before… You forget what you’re supposed to look like, what you’re supposed to be.”
“What you’re supposed to be?”
Dean swallows; “Human… You forget that because it’s easier to have teeth and claws and thick skin and see in the dark.”
“Was Cas there?” He says it before he even thinks, bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood but it’s too late, the words are out and Dean’s jaw is clenched.
“Yeah,” He swallows and Sam can hear his throat click. “Yeah, he was.”
“You found him?”
“He found me. Found us.”
“’Us’?”
Dean breathes in and continues on, ignoring Sam’s question; “He kept tryin’ to run away, said his grace called to the things there… But I saw him. He—he’d changed too and it scared him, scared us both. But we got over it.”
Sam glances at him curiously, then again when Dean remains silent and sees his brother is looking out his window with a little smile on his face, there’s something wet shining on his cheek.
“Dean?”
Silence.
“Dean, when I got you out… why didn’t he come with you?”
Dean props his jaw on his hand and doesn’t say a word.
There’s a girl in Virginia, she has brown hair and round black lensed glasses she never takes off. She accidentally hits Dean in the crotch with her stick as she’s folding it at the counter of a tiny diner and Sam has a laugh at his brother’s expense.
The girl is nice, apologizes and buys them coffee. She talks quietly, asks where they’re going, road trip? That sounds nice, have you been to DC yet? The museums are fantastic!
Dean makes up an excuse to stay in the area so Sam can see her again. They stay for a week and Sam spends the night at her place.
Sam calls her every night after they leave the area so they can talk, Dean likes to stand in his brother’s line of sight and make kissy faces, or any number of other rude gestures trying to make Sam say something stupid. It only works twice, until Sam starts describing to her exactly what Dean’s doing, then that takes all the fun out of it.
There’s a witch in Milwaukee and a couple demons in Yazoo.
Sam makes an excuse about a salt and burn in Virginia—Dean knows better but swings by anyway.
Dean does manage to find a salt and burn at a college campus a few towns over says he can handle it on his own and leaves for two weeks.
Sam is grinning like an idiot when he comes back.
A poltergeist in West Virginia takes longer than they thought it would because the wife thought it would be a good idea to try a séance and ‘talk’ to the spirit and wound up getting possessed. Then there’s a werewolf a few towns over that is actually a dumb as shit teenaged shape shifter who has seen ‘American Werewolf in London’ too many times and decided to scare the shit out of some farmers.
Sam steps in a cow pie and Dean makes him clean the car top to bottom but Dean says the stink still lingers and every so often pats the dash and apologizes to the car.
Sam buys a few air fresheners and hides them under his seat.
They’re in Ohio when Sam gets the call.
It’s not a demon. It’s not even anything supernatural and maybe that’s worse, just a drunk driver and a blind girl at the crosswalk.
Sam makes Dean pull over, walks over to an oak growing in the ditch and breaks two fingers punching it. He’s confused, he’s tired, he’s angry and everything hurts.
Dean shouts at him, tells him to stop acting like a lunatic. Sam punches him so hard his sunglasses break and split his eyebrow and cheek but Dean doesn’t fall. Just stands there like a fucking brick wall for a minute with the heel of one hand pressed to the blood, eyes glinting coldly—Sam flinches when Dean moves, flinches because he expects to be hit back, expects to find out just how much MORE than human Dean is now, but instead he’s squeezed… Hard.
Sam feels trapped for all of ten seconds, he writhes and curses and demands to be let go then goes still. Dean just holds him, whispers that it’s OK… no—no it’s not, fuck. It’s not OK, it’s not fair. It’s not right and he doesn’t know what to say to make it OK and if it’ll make Sam feel better he can punch him again.
The idea makes Sam feel worse and he tangles his fingers in Dean’s shirt and holds on with everything he’s got, it doesn’t feel like much at the moment but it makes his hands ache.
Dean takes a deep breath and lets it out and doesn’t pull away when Sam starts making wet breathless noises into his collar, just stands there with one hand tangled in Sam’s stupid hair and the other around his chest.
When they stop to fill up the tank just after sunrise Sam buys his brother a new pair of sunglasses. Dean slips them on and pushes Sam into the passenger seat.
”I’ll wake you when we get there.”
Sam looks at him evenly with tired bloodshot eyes and nods. Dean has changed, maybe it’s a bad thing… maybe it’s not; “Thanks…”
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