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rahmiA few months back, there was this sudden rash of "so-and-so makes a wish" stories, and I thought, hey! There's one for Dean and one for John, so I'm going to write one for Sam! And I did. Only, I thought it was going to be this teeny tiny little drabble thing, and it's really, really not.
So. It's um. Done, for the most part, and it's a monster. I blame Seaica for being all supportive when I just wanted her to tell me the idea sucks and would I please shut up about it. And the Devil, for harrassing me into posting the second part even though I wanted to die.
Title: Secure the Blessing
Summary: Sam makes a wish. Dean is not pleased.
Rating: PG-13. Ish. PG at the least.
Pairings: None/Gen.
Word Count: Around 21,000
Warnings: Mentions of child abuse, swearing, a little bit of gore, cheesy happy endings. No, really. Cheese.
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to the CW, Kripke, and whoever else it belongs to. Not me. I'm just borrowing.
They know they're not ready for the Demon, but it's more than ready for them.
It picks off Andy first, while he and Dean are investigating a haunting in North Dakota.
Sam watches them, watches the way Andy dies screaming, trying to bend the other psychics into letting him go until they cut his tongue out and roast his brain.
It’s just cruel, needless violence, because the Generals are all immune to his power anyway, but what makes Sam start vomiting after the vision ebbs away is the fact that Ava’s there.
She’s smiling her sweet, loopy smile, and when his head clears enough that he can think, he looks at Dean and swears her eyes were locked on him the entire time.
It's the opening gamble.
Sam gets three days grace before the visions start up in earnest, a cycle of death after death after death. He’s aware, vaguely, of Dean’s white face looming in between the murders, of Dean’s hands manhandling him out of puked on clothes and into the Impala, but mostly he just lives in the violence.
Dean spends seven days driving them as far away from everything as he can while Sam’s head explodes with vision after vision, the Demon’s Chosen gutting and pillaging and burning in every city in the country. They come so quickly he can't even pinpoint a location, just finds the end of one massacre only to be led into the beginning of another.
In his more lucid moments, he realizes that Dean’s running more from the other hunters than he is from the Demon. The Demon has proved time and time again that it can track them down damn near anytime it wants to; the hunters, not so much. Everyone's looking for someone to blame, for someone to help, and both their phones are ringing off the hook.
It blends in with the shrill scream of another woman, another man, another child.
The visions don't let up so much as something in Sam's brain finally says enough. He's aware of a feeling like picking at the dead skin after a cast comes off, and between one vision and the next he finds that he can regulate them to the back of his mind with ease.
Dean bitches that it would have been a goddamned good skill to come up with seven fucking days ago, but there's relief softening the harsh edges to his face. Sam doesn't ask how many mysterious deaths have been tallied up in the last week, because he's not really sure that either of them could stand knowing.
Instead, he calls Ash, one of the few people they're still on speaking terms with. He doesn't actually get through, which doesn't surprise him, but the message he gets is tailored to them. Sam listens to it once, while Dean's sleeping in the backseat, then says Dean's name softly and puts it on speaker phone when his brother jerks awake.
"Sam'n'Dean. The activity is all over the freakin' place, man. Just pick a town." There's a long, low pause, the sound of a smoke filled breath shakily exhaled, then, "Jo's dead. Found her strung up outside the Roadhouse doors, so it'd be good to not show up here. Everyone's gettin' pretty itchy."
Dean's mouth thins out as he says, "Meg," and Sam watches the backs of his eyelids for a minute and says, "Petaluma." He opens his eyes and doesn't think about the fact that Ava has to know they're coming even before they do, that he’s got ten different ways for Dean to die just waiting behind his eyelids.
----------------------
They curl up around each other in the backseat when they have to stop. It's uncomfortable; the backseat of the Impala was too small for the both of them when they were still teenagers. They spend a good hour kicking each other each night and bitching about needing more space; Dean has a tendency to shove his cold hands up the back of Sam's shirt, and Sam drools sometimes.
But it also means that Dean doesn't have to reach as far to shake him awake from the inevitable nightmare, and Sam doesn't have to wake up with his brother draped over the back of the seat, snoring on his shoulder, so they make do.
----------------------
He’s right about them waiting.
The instant they cross into the city where the most dying is happening, something hits all three of them, Dean, the Impala, and Sam. Sam goes down nearly crying as his head explodes with pain, as the visions double and triple to the point where even not really seeing them anymore can’t stop the agony; Dean’s trying to reach for him as the Impala suddenly skitters out of control and then there’s blackness for a few blessed seconds.
When they come to, they’re being lifted out of the trashed car by a woman with Meg’s slow smile.
“Dean-o, Sammy-boy. It’s just swell to meet you two again. Would you like to see Daddy?”
Sam’s still reeling a little, but he struggles when she hands him off to a man with a really bad toupee. The man simply tightens his arms and chuffs under his breath, cuffs him lightly on the side of the head and tells him to behave like Sam’s an errant puppy.
If he could wrap his mind around the fact that a man, not possessed, because he can fucking well tell now, almost a foot and a half shorter than him is keeping him pinned to his chest, he might be fighting it a little more.
“I’m going to kill your Daddy, sweetheart,” Dean mumbles under his breath and Meg laughs as she leans in to lick the blood that’s running freely down the side of his face.
“Baby, you couldn’t kill him if you tried,” she hoist him over her shoulder, slaps his ass and easily holds down his struggles with nothing more than a small hand, “Oh. That’s right. You already have. Not very good on following through, are you?
“Does that carry over into bed?”
He hangs upside down from his own vantage point over the shoulder of bad toupee man and listens to Dean and Meg insult each other. It’s almost a relief when they get to a slaughterhouse building and the Yellow-Eyed Demon is standing there. Almost.
The relief lasts for all of the ten seconds it takes for toupee man to dump him on the floor and for the both of them to realize that there’s a familiar face in the semi-circle of people around the demon.
Ava gives them a bright smile and a thumbs up.
“... oh, that’s just all kinds of wrong, Sammy.” Sam turns his head to look at Dean, at the way he’s still hanging from Meg’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes and pulling a face at Ava’s enthusiasm. Yeah, he can understand that.
“Eyes up front, boys,” Meg says, and then Sam’s being shoved against a wall and pinned in a way that brings back memories he doesn’t need right now, not with the visions whispering that Dean could die this way or that way or he could go with a gun in his hand after he takes out a Sam that smiles almost as widely as Ava while he rips a small boy to shreds.
The Demon’s gliding to him a second later, negligently telling Meg that she’s welcome to play with Dean over Dean’s protest of hell no, she’s a disease ridden cunt.
Sam buttons down tight the minute he realizes that some of the visions insistently clattering for his attention have his eyes flashing yellow at Dean. He wants to worry about Dean, about what a demon carrying one hell of a revenge torch can do to a body, but Dean will never, ever forgive him if he gets possessed because of him.
“You’re going to be my new host, kiddo,” the Demon says, leans in to, swear to God, sniff his hair, “All that power trapped up in your head...” He nuzzles his cheek and Sam can’t help the surprised skip of his eyes over to Dean’s.
Dean’s got both eyebrows raised, paying more attention to him than the way Meg’s crooning in his ear. “What is it about you that has all the demons clamoring for a piece of your ass?”
Meg takes that as an invitation to actually start hurting him and Sam snaps his eyes back to the demon he has to deal with before it can make him feel helpless and small.
“Sammy, Sammy, Sammy,” the demon hisses, soft and low, and if he could fucking move enough to hit it he would. No one was allowed to call him that but Dean, already choking and sputtering in the grip of Meg’s newest meat puppet. “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. Just open up a little bit,” and here the Demon waits as Dean makes a little choking noise that causes Sam’s entire body flinch, “And Dean-o will be just fine.
“I would hate to undo Daddy’s touching sacrifice. Wouldn’t you?”
It’s trying to get a response out of him, trying to make his heartbeat spike so that it can pry its way in, so Sam, perversely, clamps down even tighter on everything but the anger. “You’re looking a little tense,” he lifts his lip in a snarl, tries to smile like Dean does, “Why don’t you go relax with Meg?”
There’s an almost shocked silence, the random milling of the Demon’s generals and the whispering taunts from Meg grinding to a halt with gratifying quickness.
Dean wheezes out a quiet, “Dude, demonic incest? Really?” before Meg’s got him bleeding out all over the place again and there’s suddenly a huge stream of movement that Sam’s mind can’t comprehend altogether.
He sees Ava go down out of the corner of his eye, clutching her head and almost screaming, and the Demon flicking a hand at Meg in a move that would have made Dean snort and giggle to himself if he wasn’t so busy trying not to die, and then he sees Meg shrug.
Ava’s yelling, “DON’T--!” when Dean goes flying. Sam barely hears her.
Sam’s reaching for Dean even though he knows he’s not going to make it; he’s cursing loudly, fighting the power that’s got him pinned to the wall, and in the back of his mind he’s wailing something childish and pleading, no Dean no no no n--
Dean’s looking at him, the instant before his head breaks open on the cement. Dean’s looking at him and his eyes say sorry and whoops and Sammy and Sam’s forever going to equate his powers to the sound of his brother’s skull splitting open.
It whips out of him like it did back at the Miller’s, all this energy desperately trying to do what he wants, the little kid in him babbling that Dean can’t die if his brains aren’t actually leaking out the back of his skull and it’s like he’s holding both hands to Dean’s head, only he can’t really feel the way the grey matter tries to slip slide through his phantom fingers.
That’s when the Demon leaks in, shoves its way through the cracks Sam’s feeling as Dean’s brains are literally slipping through his psychic fingers.
He’s got a moment of being shoved into a neat little box in his head, of a cage closing as the Demon whispers menace and smug sureness, and then he fucking snaps. He’s not even sure what the hell’s going on in him, but something picks up the memory of Scott Carey’s trembling voice saying that he fried the neighbor’s cat, turns it over and stares at if from a different angle, and then it clicks and he’s using it.
The Demon’s recoiling and shrieking inside him, trying to open his mouth and flee, but Sam just clamps down tight, the way he’d been told would help stave off demonic possession. He’s roasting the fucker from inside him, and okay, every inch of him feels like it’s on fire and it hurts like every loving fuck, but he’s past caring.
Meg’s interference doesn’t even really register with him; the moment he feels the demonic presence swell, he’s got everyone pinned down to the floor, easy as breathing.
He hears Ava babbling, distantly, while he’s still hunting down the last traces of the Demon in him, “You shouldn’t have killed him, oh God, you shouldn’t have done that, I tried to stop you! He’s going to burn us all, we’re going to explode oh God, oh God.”
That’s a pretty good idea, he decides. When the demon inside him stops trying to get out, he turns on the others, bares his teeth, and watches the way Ava’s face melts off in the fire that comes. Sam absently prevents Meg from slipping her leash, from pulling out of the body of some poor woman who’d been brain dead for weeks now, and just lets them all burn.
The smell of burning flesh is pretty rank in an enclosed space, but Sam just drops to his knees next to Dean and stares.
Dean’s face is looks pretty normal, a little beat up, a little bloody, but normal. The back of his head is still being held together by the stubborn part of Sam that refuses to let any part of his brother end up smeared in with the ashes of half a dozen other people. Sam trails his fingers across Dean’s forehead, apologizes softly to the air because he’s got no salt and he’s not stupid enough to think that Dean would ever rest without him.
It takes him far longer than it should to realize there’s a cloud of black smoke hovering just to the left of him.
“If you don’t leave right now, I’m going to kill you,” he tells it listlessly. “In fact, I just might do it anyway.”
The smoke wafts for a minute, pulls up into itself and spreads out again, and then it speaks. “We are prepared to offer you a deal.” Sam can’t tell if that’s actually out loud or if the black smoke he’s melted into his flesh is responding to what the demon’s thinking.
“I’m going to kill you all.” He closes Dean’s eyes, leaves his hand there so that he won’t have to see when they open again. “What makes you think there’s anything you could give me?”
“We are prepared to offer you a deal,” it says again, like he hadn’t even spoken, “It is outside our regular realm of actions, but we wish very much to not fight a war for the dead.
“You’re nemesis is dead, Sam. Why kill more when you don’t need to?”
He‘s starting to get a headache, a mother fucker of a thing behind his eyes that goes great with the general feeling of third degree burns under his skin, and Dean’s skin is already too cold. “I’m still not seeing a reason not to.”
“You are aware of the deal your father made for your brother? We are willing to offer the same deal to you.”
Sam’s shaking his head before he even thinks about it, tracing the fingers of his free hand across the amulet on Dean’s chest. “It would kill him.”
There’s mostly silence, broken only by the grating almost noise of the black cloud shifting around itself, the sound his body’s making as it tries to absorb the remains of the demon that’s plagued him all his life. Sam just strokes Dean’s hair with the hand he’s got over his eyes and wonders if black smoke burns as well as bodies do.
“We want only a token sacrifice, Sam. Say, your powers, in exchange for your brother, father, and mother. That seems like a fair deal, doesn’t it?”
Mom? Sam looks up from Dean, realizes he’s crying when he only sees a blur of dark, and furiously wipes his face on the tattered sleeve of his jacket. Mom and Dad? How the hell was that even possible?
He wants to take it, no questions asked. He really does. But demons aren’t known to play fair and no matter how much he wants to curl up into a ball next to Dean and just lie there until he dies, his brother would kill him if he did something stupid.
"If I don’t have psychic powers, what’s to keep you from going after them all anyway?” he wants to know.
“Ah. How about this then? We make a little deal. One that benefits everyone involved. You get to keep your powers. We bring your family back. You don’t kill any more demons, and we don’t touch your family,” the smoke twists into itself, expands exponentially until Sam realizes that there’s actually more than one demon whirling around in front of him.
“Of course, we can’t speak for all of the demons, so you’ll have to be extra careful, make sure not to piss anyone off, won’t you?” there’s multiple coughing sounds that might be a laughs, then a different speaker hisses out, “Winchesters. They piss everything off.”
Sam feels his brain half-heartedly track the speaker in the mass of seething demons and try to set it on fire. He doesn’t try to stop it. The demons stir a little, one separating off from the rest to curl around his back in apparent chiding, and Sam tells himself to focus, think, stop just feeling.
He’s still got his palm over Dean’s eyes and he’s still holding his head in.
“The Yellow-Eyed Demon?” he finally manages to ask.
There’s another coughing sound and Sam doesn’t even have the energy to flinch away when a tendril of that black smoke curls towards his face. It recoils a moment later anyway, and then there’s more coughing laughter and another voice says, “Oh, he’s dead. Congratulations, you’re now the proud owner of a body soaked in demon. How does it feel?”
Great. He hates the supernatural things that think they have a sense of humor. “You aren’t going to try to bring him back?”
“We’re doing this for us,” that’s a forth voice, four demons, and from the size of the cloud Sam kind of wonders what the fuck they’re so scared of. He’s wiped, ready to fall over, and feeling more energy drain out by the minute as he holds Dean’s broken body together like it still matters. “Why the fuck would we bring back the idiot who got us in this mess in the first place?
“‘Oh, we can conquer the humans, have so many suffering meat puppets at our hands. It’ll be fun! Let’s just toy with a couple hundred of the humans that could probably kill us if they ever got their shit together enough to figure it out… oops.’ Good riddance.
“So, we got a deal?”
Sam wants to tell them to fuck themselves. He really does. But Dean’s dead and Dad’s dead and Mom’s dead and Jess is dead and if there’s any way to fix that, he’s going to take it. “I don’t kill any more demons. You don’t touch my family,” Sam drops his head, hunches his shoulders as he imagines just how furious with him Dean or Dad would be, and then says, “Deal.”
“Good.”
A scuffling sound at the door makes him whip his head up to stare, makes his powers go haywire as they simultaneously try to shove the approaching figure into the nearest wall and electrocute it. He’s tired though, and now that he’s had time to go numb he can’t quite get it to work anymore, and he ends up pushing the woman back a few inches as her hair smokes warningly.
She’s got demon-black eyes and a pretty, sculpted face, and Sam’s positive that even if she wasn’t being controlled by a demon like a handy meat puppet that she would be tripping warning bells in the back of his head. She tosses her hair over her shoulder, clucks disapprovingly at the smoke still rising from it, and a moment later it smothers out like it was never there.
“That wasn’t nice,” she says. “My host is most displeased.” She pauses for a second, surveys the greasy remains of half a dozen people and then turns impressed eyes onto Sam. “She does, however, greatly appreciate this display of pyrokinesis. She feels that there should be more burnings in this time period.
“Catch, Sammy,” she says suddenly, and yeah, his reflexes aren’t really working all that great right about now either, because he can’t figure out if he wants to remove the hand that’s making sure he doesn’t have to deal with Dean’s staring eyes (green and dead and no more Dean in them at all and if he thinks about he’s going to start screaming and never stop) or the one clutching Dean’s charm.
The thing that lands on the floor just to the left of his drawn up legs is pretty much a pile of bones held together by strips of what looks like leather. He’s never been good with bones, but he’s pretty sure those are human finger bones and a bird furcula, and he starts to get a weird feeling shivering up his spine when his gaze whips back up to take in the demon-possessed woman.
There’s a general coughing sound again from his peanut gallery of demons and then the one still behind him is reaching out tendrils of smoke to pick the ugly thing up and drop it onto the back of the hand curved over Dean’s cheeks.
He lets his hand turn over and curl around the pile of bones, keeps the back of his fist pressed over Dean’s eyes and tries not to feel the way Dean’s eyes have opened again. It tingles in his palm, like there’s an electrical charge getting ready to release and then it warms almost to the point of burning.
The instant his hand closes over the bones, the demon wrenches free from the not-woman, and she’s squatting next to him with a wave of exotic smelling perfume. “That’s a dirty trick,” she says as she tilts her head up to look at the amassed demons, “You’re lucky I’m nice.”
More demon laughter, shifting in the black cloud, before she locks eyes with him and he feels like he’s just dipped his hand into fire. “You’ve got a wish coming your way.”
“You’re a jinn,” he says to her, to the gathered demons who have all fallen mostly silent, “You’re a jinn and you’re working with... demons?”
“Jinniyah, boy.” She surveys him with a squinted look and smiles. “A female jinn is called a jinniyah. What are they teaching you kids these days?” She tosses her head, makes her hair fall across her chest in a way that highlights the glittering patterns on her dress, and waves a hand up at the cloud of demons.
“I owed one of them a favor,” she wrinkles up her forehead, shrugs, and mutters darkly that she can’t tell them apart and isn’t quite sure which one she owed the favor to, “A while back someone vacated one of my pretty harem boys when I asked nicely enough. It’ll be good to balance the books again.”
The demons swirl some more. Sam’s almost finding it hypnotic and he has to shake himself and concentrate on the pain beating against his temples and the pinched feeling he’s getting from holding onto three things when he’s only got two real hands. “Why do you want to make a deal if you can possess a jinniyah?”
“Demons can’t make wishes, Sammy; that’s why we trick humans into doing it for us.” It’s the second voice again, and a lick of dark smoke towards the jinniyah, which she just nonchalantly waves her hand through like it’s nothing.
Somewhere in the back of his head, along with all the pounding and the little kid gibbering wildly for Dean to wake up, is Bobby’s voice telling him to be damn glad that anything purely evil, demonic, or dead can’t make wishes, or else the world would be a fucking hell pit to live in.
The jinniyah laughs like a crackling fire, drags her hand through the ash that’s settled all over the floor and licks it clean with a purr. “Nice burning here, Sam,” she declares, “I approve. I miss all the burnings that used to go on in this country.”
Sam’s stuck on the fact that she’s licking people and demon off of her dainty little hand. He feels his stomach rise and is vaguely surprised to find that it’s the first time all day, despite Dean being cold and dead next to him.
She notices him watching, because she guiltily puts her hand flat against her knee and smiles at him again.
“Close your eyes, kid, and make a wish. No strings attached, from my end at least,” she’s touching Dean as she says it, murmuring under her breath about a waste of a perfectly lovely man and how much she‘d love to take him back with her if only he were still alive. She’s lucky that Sam doesn’t have his knife because he’d have chopped her hand off for it.
As it is, he’s too tired.
Her hand feels like his bones do, like it’s sizzling on the inside, just about ready to burst into open flames. Sam thinks about batting it away, but leaves it there. If she’s touching him, than she’s not touching Dean. “You’ve got my talisman,” she says, nodding to his fist, “Any ridiculous old thing you want is yours.
“Make it a good one.”
The demons are seething again, coiling around each other as they wait to see what he’ll do.
So he closes his eyes, grips Dean’s amulet hard enough that it’s cutting into his palm, and he makes a wish.
I want Mom to be alive. I want Dad to be alive. I want Dean to be alive. I want them to have a home and be safe and I want to remember all of this so I’ll be able to protect them if something comes after them. I don’t want Mom to die and I don’t want Dad to ever have to teach Dean how to be a soldier and...
And I don’t want to be there with them, because supernatural shit is drawn to me.
“That’ll do, Sammy,” the jinniyah says softly and there’s a touch like a whisper against his forehead and the world stops and rearranges itself just for him.
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The jinniyah is one of her kind, all tricky phrases and fire born impulsiveness, so when the ghost touches the little bit of bone and hide that passes for her talisman right as she makes the world fall away in favor of one twenty five years ago, she grins in delight and gives him a gift.
She hopes he’s happy with it.
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John’s dreaming about his sons. He’s dreaming about a man with yellow eyes and the way his boy’s head sounds when it opens to spill grey matter that doesn’t go anywhere; he’s dreaming about the way his baby looks numb and uncaring while he sets three people on fire. He’s dreaming about Dean, all grown up and all torn down, being dead and someone he knows in his dream bones is his other boy, his stubborn “why?” son, wishing he was.
He’s dreaming about hell, about burning and burning because he had to have his vengeance, about knowing that nothing the demonic sons of a bitches down there could do to him would be worse than what he’s done to his two boys.
John’s dreaming about blood and fire, suffering and sacrifice and family, and he wakes up to the sound of screaming.
It’s not the kind of baby screams he’s come to expect from having a small child. It sounds like somebody’s dying in the room next to his, like they’ve just lost an arm or a leg and are screeching out their death throes in some foreign country filled with sun and rain.
He almost gets violently sick all over the bed, because it sounds a lot like what he was just listening to in his head, like a man holding his brother’s brains in as he waits for the world to end.
Mary’s already rolled out of the bed and running across the room, late term pregnancy be damned, by the time he stops groping around for his gun. He’s got a moment of embarrassment that the first thing he thinks of is to shoot the poor bastard to put him out of his misery and then he’s getting up to check on Dean too.
His son’s kicking and screaming on his bed, shrieking words that he has no business knowing as well as the occasional, “No, Sammy, no!” The name Sammy conjures up something, some half image of a boy with dark curly hair and a deadly pout, a man who’s ridiculously tall and still has the same puppy eyes, but it’s gone in the same minute, whisked away with the knowledge that he might have had a son named Sammy, if Mary wasn’t carrying a girl.
John’s still shocked, staring at this wild little thing when he’d put a happy, smiling little boy to bed a few hours ago, but he snaps out of it when he sees a small heel going on a direct collision course with Mary’s very pregnant belly.
It’s a minor miracle that he catches Dean’s foot before it hits Mary; no one besides him seems to notice anyway, Mary still trying desperately to gentle her boy and Dean trying just as desperately to roll off the bed and away from her. John just hovers ineffectively around the both of them, catching Dean’s fists and feet before they can do any damage, making sure Mary doesn’t fall off the bed.
He feels pretty damn useless, and pretty damn scared. John’s damn sure that most three year olds don’t wake up from nightmares screaming that they’re going to kill their mother if she doesn’t let them go find Sammy right the fuck now. He’s sure that Dean doesn’t even know language like that, and if there’s a little bit of panic curling in his stomach, he’s also damn sure he’s entitled to it.
It’s a long fifteen minutes before Mary manages to get Dean into her arms.
She’s singing softly to him, rocking him with helpless tears running down her face, but Dean sits there like a rag doll, like he‘s never been there in his life. Even then, he’s still weakly throwing out punches, hiccupping under his breath as he demands Sammy back, repeating that they’re dead and he doesn’t believe in them so they needed to go the hell away and stay dead, and give Sam back.
Dean’s voice breaks when he adds a forlorn please to the end of that sentences, and that‘s what finally breaks John out of his incredulous numbness. He curls one arm around his wife and the other around the his son’s shaking little back, and he tells him that everything’s going to be okay.
“Sammy,” Dean whimpers again, “Where’s Sammy?”
Mary rests her head on top of their sons and whispers, “It’s a bad dream, love. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
They call a child psychologist in the morning, because there’s bad dreams and then there’s what Dean had last night. John’s finger pauses over ‘psychics’ for a few seconds, before he shakes himself and goes on. He reminds himself that there’s not such thing as psychics or boys who can ignite things with their minds, and then calls the psychologist.
Mary spends most of the day letting Dean feel the bulge in her belly because it’s the only thing that will calm him down. He pets her stomach with firm little strokes, whispers questions to it and holds his breath like he’s expecting an answer. Once or twice, John’s almost sure that he hears the word demon, and he thinks back to his finger hovering over the name Missouri.
They both pretend hearing their son croon Sam and Sammy and little brother at the unborn baby isn’t one of the most disturbing sights they’ve ever seen.
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After that initial freak-out, Dean thinks he’s pretty calm, all things considered.
Well, he’d tried to murder both Dad and Mom the night after he woke up in freakin’ Stepford, but his stupid little tongue got mixed up in the Latin and his fingers felt fat and useless around the knife. He’d whispered “christo” at them three times each while they slept, then put a hand on Mom’s stomach and told Sammy that he better be okay in there.
He doesn’t really want to believe that Sam would be stupid enough to make a bargain with demons, to make a goddamn wish like an idiot, but it’s all around him and he figures that maybe, just maybe, Sammy got away with it.
That mean’s everything’s fine and he just has to wait for Sammy to pop out so that he can scream at him about taking stupid risks.
There’s not enough salt to do all the windows and doors, but there’s enough to do what’s going to be Sammy’s room and Mom and Dad’s. Dad doesn’t have any kind of silver knife in the entire house, and the one gun he can find is disused, grimy, not working right, and he has a whole what-the-fuck moment over his Dad, the marine, letting his gun get like this.
His head chooses that moment to pipe up that swearing was bad, and damn, he is so not going to deal with that.
He spends a good hour crouching under the desk in Dad’s office going through every swear word he can think of until that little voice decides to whither up and die. Christ.
So, yeah, he’s pretty damn calm about it all, through the shrink (what the hell?!) trying to get him to play with dolls a few days later and Dad lecturing him on swearing; a gleeful little part of his mind plays bitch and fuck and damn and cunt on repeat the entire baby-lecture, while the rest of him tries to remember if his Dad had ever talked to him like he was an idiot.
He nods in all the right places, says, “Yes, sir,” and then, belatedly, Daddy, because Dad’s looking at him like he doesn’t know what to do with him again.
All things considered, he thinks he’s pretty freakin’ calm.
He’s four years old again, his mom’s alive, his dad’s alive, and he’s going to strangle Sammy as soon as he’s born. That’s about as calm as he gets.
And he stays pretty calm until he looks at the calendar and his stupid four year old eyes take a good thirty seconds to realize that it’s May fucking sixth and Mom’s pregnant. It’s May sixth, Mom’s still pregnant, and that’s not Sammy in her stomach.
Dean’s wailing before he realizes it, reaching out for the nearest sharp object like that’s going to make the date change, make it so Sammy’s the baby in Mom. He’s stabbing the calendar before he can even rationalize it, one part of his mind stepping back and raising its eyebrows while the rest of him tries to physically change the date so it’s right.
It needs to be right.
There are arms around him, shouting above him, and a huge hand closing around his knife; Dean kicks out, loses his balance because he’s not the right height, nothing’s right. He goes to slash at the person trying to pry his knife loose, but there’s a face floating somewhere high up that he knows like breathing and he’d never hurt, so he lets the knife go and concentrates on willing the world to be him and Sammy against the evil sons of a bitches out there.
A soft hand catches him, cradles him against the belly that’s not holding Sam and he starts spitting curses at the world in general, because he can’t hate Mom.
He has this horrible sick thought that Sam had wished he’d never been born, like he used to scream when he was twelve and chubby and cute and sullen, and then he’s just screaming at the top of his lungs, brain shut down, game over, you lose.
When he comes back online, he’s embarrassed as all hell to realize he threw an honest to God temper tantrum. Mom’s still rocking him on the floor of the kitchen, gentle fingers stroking through his hair, pregnant belling forcing him to curve with her; Dad’s crouched down next to them, spattered with grease and white in the face as he holds a butter knife in one hand and the phone in the other.
Dean feels numb and weighed down and like there’s panic just sitting there on the horizon. He hates this. He hates thinking like a grown up and reacting like a child, hates that his mind immediately supplies grown up instead of adult, and he hates that he has no fucking clue where his baby brother is and his first instinct was to throw a tantrum instead of finding out.
The first thing he decides, hiccupping in his mother’s arms, is that there is no way in hell Sam would be stupid enough to wish himself dead. Not because he thought his little brother was too selfish to do it, because Sam would, just because he was a freakin’ idiot and tried to blame himself for things that weren’t his fault, but because Sam had to have known he would pull heaven and hell apart so that he could find and kill the stubborn bitch for doing that to him. No, Sam was alive. Somewhere. He had to be.
Didn’t mean Dean could find him when he was four.
So he decides to bide his time, which is something he’s not especially good at. He putters around the house, hides bits of herbs that help ward off evil under the sofa, runs his fingers along the Impala’s glossy black paint, and tries very hard to not think about the fact that Sam is out there somewhere without someone to watch is back.
He’s gets a little sister named Abigail three days later and manages to hold back the impending meltdown until he’s alone in his room.
She’s cute, in a wrinkly, red-faced, not Sam way. Cute. But not Sam.
Mom immediately starts calling her Abby and love and Dad wraps his hands in her little pink blankets and coos over her, and all Dean can think about is that it should be Sam being called Sammy. He refuses to call the baby Abby and doesn’t bother having an explanation in mind because nobody really asks a four year old why they do the things they do.
Dean calls the baby Abigail for a full three weeks, before Dad makes him sit on the couch and plops her into his arms. She waves around her little fists, scrunches up her face, and then blows an air bubble that pops spit all over his shirt; he pulls a face at her and goes to give her back to Dad, but then her eyes open and she makes a little gurgling sound.
He remembers Sammy making that noise, five, six months from now, curled up with him in a motel room while Dad goes silently crazy trying to keep them safe. It sounds like home, more than anything else that’s happened recently, and he thinks, I forgive you for not being Sam.
She gurgles again and Dean gurgles back at her.
The baby becomes Gayle after that, because he still gets stuck on Abby sounding too much like Sammy in his head.
She likes to follow him around, when she learns to toddle. It’s not a big deal, because he doesn’t do much besides wander into a library now and then and wander back out with a book about jinn tucked into his backpack. It’s slow going and frustrating and all he’s learned is what he already knows; he wants to talk to Bobby, he wants to talk to Dad, hell, he’ll even take talking to Ellen or Missouri right about now.
Nobody takes a kid seriously though, so he plods on with his work and continues to try to find Sam.
Gayle decides when he needs a break. She’ll bring him books and toys, bits of rocks and leaves, and he always squats down next to her and explains what they are in patient tones. Gayle’s a bright kid, towheaded where Sam had been dark haired, but she still likes to show her big brother things and Dean tries to treat her... almost like he’d treated Sammy.
He gets in trouble a few times for explaining to her that salt repels evil or telling her that the rosemary she'd picked out front was for protections and exorcisms, but he'll be damned if she doesn't know what to reach for in case a monster gets past his protection lines. There's bits of runes carved into her window and iron stashed under her bed, but she doesn't know how to use a gun or a knife or her teeth for that matter. That's about as far as he's willing to compromise, even if Mom and Dad don't actually know he's compromising.
His little sister can childishly lisp the Rite of Blessing and takes great pleasure in hunching next to him and whispering it over her bathtub every night, fingering the rosary beads he'd nicked from the church for her.
Most of the time, she listens to him without question. He knows Sammy never did that.
She's four the first and only time she brings him the one book in his room he’s told her repeatedly that she’s not allowed to touch. He remembers Sam at that age, how he’d nod seriously at whatever you told him and then giggle as he did it anyways, so he really shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Dean,” she calls happily, lugging a cardboard book by the cover flap as she runs to him, “Dean, read me this! No read it before, read it to me!”
Dean’s guts freeze up when he realizes she’s waving a bright orange book around, and then he’s yanking it out of her surprised little hands. “You don’t get to touch that book, remember?” he makes sure to let that sink in for a minute, waits for her mouth to pull up into a pout, “Get another one.”
"Please?" Gayle asks, big green eyes going bright and puppy-ish. She's got nothing on Sammy at that age, though, and Dean tucks the book behind his back and shakes his head until she huffs and walks away.
She drags another Dr. Seuss book to him a minute later, still pouting, and climbs into his lap so that he can read The Lorax to her. Gayle smells like syrup and her finger sticks to the book when she demands to know what a word means; he has to pry it loose and a bit of brightly colored paper sticks to the tip as he reads about the Lorax lifting himself by the seat of his pants.
When he's done reading and she's lost interest, he picks up his book. His name’s on the inside, but he’s never so much as cracked it open because it freakin' hurts to look at it sometimes; he keeps seeing some ratty headed kid with a snotty nose and a huge smile asking him to read it over and over again.
Green Eggs and Ham was always going to be Sammy’s book. He can remember Sam spending weeks telling everyone at the diners that he was Sam-I-Am.
The stupid kid had even gone so far as to hide a slice of ham for weeks in the Impala once; it had taken both him and Dad scouring the car before they found the moldy meat wedged under Sam’s car seat. And Sam had thrown a temper-tantrum when they threw it away, until Dean had leaned over and whispered that he’d make him green ham the next time Dad was out on a hunt.
A few drops of food coloring (alright, the entire damn bottle) had made Sam’s ham and eggs as green as he’d wanted them, and Dean had just shrugged and sheepishly smiled when Dad came home to Sam’s dyed mouth and hands.
His hands tighten on the book, then he gently sets it down next to him on the couch and goes back to wading his way through the Thousand and One Nights.
Mom drops it off at a local charity drive a year later and he doesn‘t even notice.
Dean’s thirteen the year Mom and Dad pressure him into joining the school baseball team. He hates it immediately, because the only reason they want him playing is because they desperately want him to find friends; he kind of knows he’s apparently filled the geek role of the family without Sammy around, but it’s not like he can’t find his own toes or anything.
He’s just the weird kid who’s always got his face buried in books about wishes.
His teammates have all been on the team longer than him; they offer snide little remarks about his hand eye coordination and Dean immediately itches to show them up.
It’s not like it’s hard to “accidentally” hit the ball a hell of a lot farther than the little fucker with the big mouth could ever dream of hitting it. And it really isn’t his fault that Fucker’s sidekick was the one closest to where the ball took off into the park behind the baseball diamond, really.
Dean watches with satisfaction as Sidekick jogs his chubby ass out into the heavy underbrush.
It’s a lot less satisfying when the lardass comes back blubbering with terror over hearing crying and seeing something that he claims is a big foot. In the middle of the damn city park, which, yeah, while a little overgrown? Would so not be up to housing a man eating yeti thing.
Dean knows Sam was never this stupid. He misses his kid brother something fierce when all he can get out of the boy later on is that the thing was crying and it ran away when he got near it.
He goes home, sidles up to the family computer when Dad and Mom aren’t paying attention because he’s got a freakin’ weekly limit on how many hours he can spend on it and he used all of those up on Sunday. There’s no history of people reporting crying in the wooded area just behind the park, and his search for anyone that could have become a Woman in White turns up empty.
By the time Dad catches him on the computer and threatens to take away his library pass (and, oh, God, he’s Sammy in this life and he kind of wants to commit ritual suicide or go bond with the Impala right the fuck now, because he’s a girl), he’s pretty much decided that Lardass is just a stupid kid with an overactive imagination.
Except that even the coach is talking about the creepy weeping in the park, so.
Mom’s got a silver letter opener that she keeps in her jewelry box. Dean takes that, and he takes Dad’s gun, and he ditches baseball practice to see if there’s a supernatural thing out in the trees.
He’s not sure if it’s an honest to God hunt, but he’s itching under his skin to kill something, anything, to feel like he’s actually doing something instead of sitting around with his head up his ass. He wants to find Sam. He’ll settle for being able to gut or burn something evil.
It’s maybe an hour before he hears the crying and zeros in on it.
The thing crying is pretty damn fugly. It's hiding its face behind gnarled, fucked-up fingers, but the rest of it is just as ear-splittingly horrible as its face must be; its skin sort of slips over its shoulders with every sob and if Dean looks too closely at that he's going to upchuck his after school snack all over the park grass. There are warts growing all along its bony little body and he's pretty sure that's slime dripping from what looks to be an open sore of some kind.
It gibbers at him when he comes closer, tries to curl into a tiny ball of disgusting flesh while it cries quietly to itself, and Dean hears Sammy at his side, waspishly telling him that their job was to hunt evil, not kill supernatural things.
So he makes himself lower his knife a little bit and hunches down into a squat a dozen feet away from it. "Hey. Ugly," Dean winces, catches himself before he can apologize when the thing squeezes its face tighter and lets out a miserable little noise, "You're scaring a buttload of kids; could you tone it down a little?"
There's an increase in the thing's ability to cry before its fingers stutter down from its face so that Dean can get a full glance at just how ugly the thing is. Dean can't really think of a way to describe it to himself, just kind of blacks out everything but the way it's mismatched, squinty eyes leak tears.
If he's ever pressed for a description, which he thinks is pretty damn unlikely, he'd have to say that it kind of looks like a frog that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every damn branch on the way down. That's if his brain doesn't chose to miraculously block the image from his mind. Self preservation instincts run strong in the Winchesters, and he'd really like to be able to keep his lunch down, thanks.
The thing hiccups a breath and then, swear to God, he thinks it smiles at him.
It is, hands down, one of the most freaky, scary ass things he's ever seen in his life. Either one of them. It feels like the thing is scarring his mind with how ugly it is; he's got his knife raised in some half-assed attempt to get it to stop doing that so he isn't forced to carve his own eyes out as his head gibbers in shock.
He's really, really insanely glad that nobody had stumbled on this thing yet, because he can see people going insane over something like this.
Just when he's made up his mind to try throwing his knife at the creature just so that it'll stop it, it melts. Literally. One minute there's a brain scarring fugly monster sitting on the ground and smiling in what he hopes to fuck is supposed to be a sweet manner, and the next there's this inoffensive puddle of water leaking into the grass.
If he had Sam to bitch to, his brother would never hear the end of this freakin' weird hunt. But he doesn't, and no one else knows jack all about what's hiding in the shadows, and Dean never does find out what the hell the thing was.
Freak Show never starts its crying routine again.
His teammates spend a week mourning the fact that they can no longer triple dog dare each other into searching for the source of the crying and then they turn their attention to just how sweet Amanda Shanks looks in a miniskirt.
Dean would be pretty down with that, if it wasn’t for the fact that he feels like a dirty old man for even looking at her.
When he‘s sixteen he kisses his first girl (again), and he pukes in the grass two seconds later. He’s dry heaving and cursing all little brothers under his breath as he upchucks his pancakes all over the damn football green, because, of course, this was Sam’s fault.
By the time he looks up, the girl’s gone, and he gently slams his head against a handy nearby bleacher.
That pretty much effectively kills any cool points he’d gotten by being the first to kiss Jean Baker, all long long legs and gorgeous smiles, but she was just so goddamn young. She’d tasted like tangerine lip-gloss and left sparkly shimmers all over his mouth and he’d felt like a cradle robber the instant he kissed her.
He is so going to get Sam for that.
Along with a bunch of other shit.
Fuck, he misses his little brother.
When Dean gets home that night, he hauls ass up the stairs then tromps back down so that he can watch Gayle and Dad and Mom flitter around the living room. They look like a family, like his family, but they can’t take the place of a gap-toothed little sissy boy who’d crawled into bed with him after nightmares until he was fourteen.
They’re not Sam. And he’s not finding anything, anywhere, on what to do if a jinn grants a wish and you want to find the one who made it.
Dean stays up most of the night and writes sixteen letters before he finally burns every single one of them and scribbles out a simple, “Sorry. Be back when I find Sam,” on the back of his algebra homework.
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They find a baby out in a field in Lawrence, Kansas. No one comes forward to claim him, but there’s something not quite right about him that keeps him from getting snatched up by all the couples wanting infants.
He watches people with too old, unfocused eyes and the more superstitious of the nurses on duty claim that they’ve seen him move things without touching them. They name him James Taylor after the officer that found him, and off he goes into foster care.
When James Taylor is five he bluntly tells his foster mother that she’s not allowed to call him James or Jamie, because that’s not his name. He thinks that maybe she thinks that he’s only playing a game, that he’s had her read him Green Eggs and Ham a few too many times, but he keeps insisting.
He’s terrified that if he starts answering to James that Sam Winchester won’t exist anymore and there’ll be nobody to protect his family later on.
Sam’s not really surprised when he ends up back in state custody after that. He just keeps telling them that his name is Sam until they start using it to humor him. He gets his own copy of Dr. Seuss before they send him to a new home, something dropped off from a charity collection, and it’s the only thing he won’t let anyone else touch.
He hides under the bed in his new temporary house and traces his fingers over the name written on the front page until it smudges into illegibility.
When James “Sam” Taylor is nine he gets into his first really bad foster home. He meets Joe Carver and his small, cowed wife Amber, and the other three fosters he’s going to be sharing a house with.
The first time it happens, Sam’s so stunned that he lets it. He goes to school with a black eye and a busted lip the next day, utters the time honored “fell down the stairs” excuse when his teacher asks about it, and he walks around in a daze.
Sam calls home after school’s let out, fishing change from the gutters until he has enough money to call Lawrence. He never knew their old house number, but he looked up the Winchester, J. and M. years ago, and he clutches the phone with sweaty fingers as it starts ringing.
“Hello?” He knows Mom’s still alive because he made it that way, but it still feels like a punch to the face (like Joe’s punch to his face) to hear her voice answering the phone when he’s only ever heard her say Dean and Sam and I’m sorry before. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
For a giddy moment, he wants to say, “Yeah. This is Sam Winchester. I‘m your son, only not really. You didn’t have me in this reality; I kind of had myself. Can you come take me home?”
Instead, he stutters and stammers until he manages: “Uh. Hi.” Sam clears his throat and almost hangs up the phone because he wants… “Can I. Is Dean there?”
“Dean’s at baseball practice right now, kiddo. I can tell him to call you when he gets home if you want?” Mary sounds cheerful and full of life, and he can’t do this to them. He can’t.
Sam hangs up the phone before he can ask what time Dean’ll be home so that he can call again.
He leans his forehead on the greasy glass of the telephone booth and tries very hard not to cry like a baby. It’s better that Dean wasn’t home, he tells himself, because then how would he have explained that he needed the other boy to call him Sammy so that he could pull himself together? It really is better.
He’s seen what happens to kids who grow up beaten down. He knows that none of these kids are psychics, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be dangerous later on; Max Miller’s bruises still swim in front of his eyes at night.
So he puts his stupid, scared nine year old self comfortably in a box in the back of his head, and pulls his wearier twenty-four year old to the front. It’s the first time he’s done that, and he can tell even before he gently closes the box that it locks from the inside and isn’t ever going to open again, but he doesn’t want to be young and stupid anymore.
He feels thirty when he’s done, which makes him snort. A hand dash across his eyes and the tears are gone and he has a plan.
Sam waits until the next time Joe decides to go after one of his kids; it’s Aaron that sets the man off, and the instant Joe’s fists start falling, Sam calmly walks into the kitchen and calls 911. He doesn’t say a word into the phone, just sets it down gently against the countertop so that the operator can hear Aaron crying and Joe screeching.
Then he hefts up the ashtray that’s been wailing its story to him for the last four days and walks back into the living room. The girls are huddled together in one corner, crying quietly into each other’s hair; Aaron’s curled into a ball on the floor and Joe’s rearing back to deliver another kick, so he’s got a pretty damn clear shot.
Dean and Dad had taught him to fight vicious when he was small; he doesn’t know if it’s because he feels so damned small or because he is, but he can hear Dean’s voice in the back of his head muttering “knees and dick, Sammy, or the eyes if you absolutely have to. Leave the grown up fighting to the grown ups.”
So he gets a good grip on the ashtray and flings it at a tempting target.
The ashtray connects with Joe’s kneecap hard enough that Sam gets a satisfying little crack for his trouble. When Joe falls over screaming and clutching his leg, Sam kicks him in the face, hard enough to knock him out but not hard enough to snap his neck (if his nine year old body could, at least.)
The police show up to find him checking Aaron’s ribs, Phoebe and Elizabeth huddled up tight against his back, and they don’t know what to do with him. That’s pretty obvious, because Sam’s sitting there calmly answering their questions while the girls cry in the arms of a policewoman and Joe is wheeled out on a stretcher. Aaron goes next, cracked ribs, nothing serious, Sam wants to tell them, but he just shrugs and says that, yeah, he did attack his foster father.
Sam gives a little nod to the ashtray when he says it, and the chunk of frosted glass wiggles in delight; there’s a ghost trapped there, a little boy who says his daddy hit him too hard with the tray one day, but as he watches a soft glow surrounds it and the ghost is gone.
Children are the easiest to appease.
When James Taylor is eleven years old he jerks his head up in the middle of class because there’s going to be a demon wreaking havoc in Garden Plains in a little under two days. It’s not the Yellow-Eyed Demon, because whatever’s left of that one gives him lovely periodic nightmares of hell, but it’s an honest to God demon tripping his visions.
He raises his hand and asks to go to the bathroom, snags his backpack on the way out the door when the teacher goes back to grading papers and is at a bus stop within the hour.
Sam’s got money he’s been saving for years, little allowances that foster parents have given him and prize money from science fairs, so he’s not worried about eating or anything for the next few days.
He exorcises the demon quickly; it’s a low level sucker that can’t even fling him around without laying hands on him. Sam’s careful not to let the power whip out, to not kill it even as it tears free and travels back to hell, because a breaking a deal with demons is a really shitty idea.
There’s not a scratch on him when he plods back to the bus station, just a grateful family and a little girl left behind who is always going to have nightmares about places she might never end up going.
His birthday’s passed already, between one Latin word and another, and he doesn’t even realize it until he sees the date on the calendar the bus station has politely provided. Sam’s twelve years old, and he makes a decision as soon as he remembers it.
He kind of knew already he wouldn’t be able to do normal. That’s why he’d made sure that Dean and Dad and Mom could.
James Taylor doesn’t go back to foster care.
James Taylor stops being James Taylor and starts being Sam Winchester again, and he gets on a bus heading to a job he can remember doing fourteen years ago.
Part 2
So. It's um. Done, for the most part, and it's a monster. I blame Seaica for being all supportive when I just wanted her to tell me the idea sucks and would I please shut up about it. And the Devil, for harrassing me into posting the second part even though I wanted to die.
Title: Secure the Blessing
Summary: Sam makes a wish. Dean is not pleased.
Rating: PG-13. Ish. PG at the least.
Pairings: None/Gen.
Word Count: Around 21,000
Warnings: Mentions of child abuse, swearing, a little bit of gore, cheesy happy endings. No, really. Cheese.
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to the CW, Kripke, and whoever else it belongs to. Not me. I'm just borrowing.
They know they're not ready for the Demon, but it's more than ready for them.
It picks off Andy first, while he and Dean are investigating a haunting in North Dakota.
Sam watches them, watches the way Andy dies screaming, trying to bend the other psychics into letting him go until they cut his tongue out and roast his brain.
It’s just cruel, needless violence, because the Generals are all immune to his power anyway, but what makes Sam start vomiting after the vision ebbs away is the fact that Ava’s there.
She’s smiling her sweet, loopy smile, and when his head clears enough that he can think, he looks at Dean and swears her eyes were locked on him the entire time.
It's the opening gamble.
Sam gets three days grace before the visions start up in earnest, a cycle of death after death after death. He’s aware, vaguely, of Dean’s white face looming in between the murders, of Dean’s hands manhandling him out of puked on clothes and into the Impala, but mostly he just lives in the violence.
Dean spends seven days driving them as far away from everything as he can while Sam’s head explodes with vision after vision, the Demon’s Chosen gutting and pillaging and burning in every city in the country. They come so quickly he can't even pinpoint a location, just finds the end of one massacre only to be led into the beginning of another.
In his more lucid moments, he realizes that Dean’s running more from the other hunters than he is from the Demon. The Demon has proved time and time again that it can track them down damn near anytime it wants to; the hunters, not so much. Everyone's looking for someone to blame, for someone to help, and both their phones are ringing off the hook.
It blends in with the shrill scream of another woman, another man, another child.
The visions don't let up so much as something in Sam's brain finally says enough. He's aware of a feeling like picking at the dead skin after a cast comes off, and between one vision and the next he finds that he can regulate them to the back of his mind with ease.
Dean bitches that it would have been a goddamned good skill to come up with seven fucking days ago, but there's relief softening the harsh edges to his face. Sam doesn't ask how many mysterious deaths have been tallied up in the last week, because he's not really sure that either of them could stand knowing.
Instead, he calls Ash, one of the few people they're still on speaking terms with. He doesn't actually get through, which doesn't surprise him, but the message he gets is tailored to them. Sam listens to it once, while Dean's sleeping in the backseat, then says Dean's name softly and puts it on speaker phone when his brother jerks awake.
"Sam'n'Dean. The activity is all over the freakin' place, man. Just pick a town." There's a long, low pause, the sound of a smoke filled breath shakily exhaled, then, "Jo's dead. Found her strung up outside the Roadhouse doors, so it'd be good to not show up here. Everyone's gettin' pretty itchy."
Dean's mouth thins out as he says, "Meg," and Sam watches the backs of his eyelids for a minute and says, "Petaluma." He opens his eyes and doesn't think about the fact that Ava has to know they're coming even before they do, that he’s got ten different ways for Dean to die just waiting behind his eyelids.
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They curl up around each other in the backseat when they have to stop. It's uncomfortable; the backseat of the Impala was too small for the both of them when they were still teenagers. They spend a good hour kicking each other each night and bitching about needing more space; Dean has a tendency to shove his cold hands up the back of Sam's shirt, and Sam drools sometimes.
But it also means that Dean doesn't have to reach as far to shake him awake from the inevitable nightmare, and Sam doesn't have to wake up with his brother draped over the back of the seat, snoring on his shoulder, so they make do.
----------------------
He’s right about them waiting.
The instant they cross into the city where the most dying is happening, something hits all three of them, Dean, the Impala, and Sam. Sam goes down nearly crying as his head explodes with pain, as the visions double and triple to the point where even not really seeing them anymore can’t stop the agony; Dean’s trying to reach for him as the Impala suddenly skitters out of control and then there’s blackness for a few blessed seconds.
When they come to, they’re being lifted out of the trashed car by a woman with Meg’s slow smile.
“Dean-o, Sammy-boy. It’s just swell to meet you two again. Would you like to see Daddy?”
Sam’s still reeling a little, but he struggles when she hands him off to a man with a really bad toupee. The man simply tightens his arms and chuffs under his breath, cuffs him lightly on the side of the head and tells him to behave like Sam’s an errant puppy.
If he could wrap his mind around the fact that a man, not possessed, because he can fucking well tell now, almost a foot and a half shorter than him is keeping him pinned to his chest, he might be fighting it a little more.
“I’m going to kill your Daddy, sweetheart,” Dean mumbles under his breath and Meg laughs as she leans in to lick the blood that’s running freely down the side of his face.
“Baby, you couldn’t kill him if you tried,” she hoist him over her shoulder, slaps his ass and easily holds down his struggles with nothing more than a small hand, “Oh. That’s right. You already have. Not very good on following through, are you?
“Does that carry over into bed?”
He hangs upside down from his own vantage point over the shoulder of bad toupee man and listens to Dean and Meg insult each other. It’s almost a relief when they get to a slaughterhouse building and the Yellow-Eyed Demon is standing there. Almost.
The relief lasts for all of the ten seconds it takes for toupee man to dump him on the floor and for the both of them to realize that there’s a familiar face in the semi-circle of people around the demon.
Ava gives them a bright smile and a thumbs up.
“... oh, that’s just all kinds of wrong, Sammy.” Sam turns his head to look at Dean, at the way he’s still hanging from Meg’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes and pulling a face at Ava’s enthusiasm. Yeah, he can understand that.
“Eyes up front, boys,” Meg says, and then Sam’s being shoved against a wall and pinned in a way that brings back memories he doesn’t need right now, not with the visions whispering that Dean could die this way or that way or he could go with a gun in his hand after he takes out a Sam that smiles almost as widely as Ava while he rips a small boy to shreds.
The Demon’s gliding to him a second later, negligently telling Meg that she’s welcome to play with Dean over Dean’s protest of hell no, she’s a disease ridden cunt.
Sam buttons down tight the minute he realizes that some of the visions insistently clattering for his attention have his eyes flashing yellow at Dean. He wants to worry about Dean, about what a demon carrying one hell of a revenge torch can do to a body, but Dean will never, ever forgive him if he gets possessed because of him.
“You’re going to be my new host, kiddo,” the Demon says, leans in to, swear to God, sniff his hair, “All that power trapped up in your head...” He nuzzles his cheek and Sam can’t help the surprised skip of his eyes over to Dean’s.
Dean’s got both eyebrows raised, paying more attention to him than the way Meg’s crooning in his ear. “What is it about you that has all the demons clamoring for a piece of your ass?”
Meg takes that as an invitation to actually start hurting him and Sam snaps his eyes back to the demon he has to deal with before it can make him feel helpless and small.
“Sammy, Sammy, Sammy,” the demon hisses, soft and low, and if he could fucking move enough to hit it he would. No one was allowed to call him that but Dean, already choking and sputtering in the grip of Meg’s newest meat puppet. “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. Just open up a little bit,” and here the Demon waits as Dean makes a little choking noise that causes Sam’s entire body flinch, “And Dean-o will be just fine.
“I would hate to undo Daddy’s touching sacrifice. Wouldn’t you?”
It’s trying to get a response out of him, trying to make his heartbeat spike so that it can pry its way in, so Sam, perversely, clamps down even tighter on everything but the anger. “You’re looking a little tense,” he lifts his lip in a snarl, tries to smile like Dean does, “Why don’t you go relax with Meg?”
There’s an almost shocked silence, the random milling of the Demon’s generals and the whispering taunts from Meg grinding to a halt with gratifying quickness.
Dean wheezes out a quiet, “Dude, demonic incest? Really?” before Meg’s got him bleeding out all over the place again and there’s suddenly a huge stream of movement that Sam’s mind can’t comprehend altogether.
He sees Ava go down out of the corner of his eye, clutching her head and almost screaming, and the Demon flicking a hand at Meg in a move that would have made Dean snort and giggle to himself if he wasn’t so busy trying not to die, and then he sees Meg shrug.
Ava’s yelling, “DON’T--!” when Dean goes flying. Sam barely hears her.
Sam’s reaching for Dean even though he knows he’s not going to make it; he’s cursing loudly, fighting the power that’s got him pinned to the wall, and in the back of his mind he’s wailing something childish and pleading, no Dean no no no n--
Dean’s looking at him, the instant before his head breaks open on the cement. Dean’s looking at him and his eyes say sorry and whoops and Sammy and Sam’s forever going to equate his powers to the sound of his brother’s skull splitting open.
It whips out of him like it did back at the Miller’s, all this energy desperately trying to do what he wants, the little kid in him babbling that Dean can’t die if his brains aren’t actually leaking out the back of his skull and it’s like he’s holding both hands to Dean’s head, only he can’t really feel the way the grey matter tries to slip slide through his phantom fingers.
That’s when the Demon leaks in, shoves its way through the cracks Sam’s feeling as Dean’s brains are literally slipping through his psychic fingers.
He’s got a moment of being shoved into a neat little box in his head, of a cage closing as the Demon whispers menace and smug sureness, and then he fucking snaps. He’s not even sure what the hell’s going on in him, but something picks up the memory of Scott Carey’s trembling voice saying that he fried the neighbor’s cat, turns it over and stares at if from a different angle, and then it clicks and he’s using it.
The Demon’s recoiling and shrieking inside him, trying to open his mouth and flee, but Sam just clamps down tight, the way he’d been told would help stave off demonic possession. He’s roasting the fucker from inside him, and okay, every inch of him feels like it’s on fire and it hurts like every loving fuck, but he’s past caring.
Meg’s interference doesn’t even really register with him; the moment he feels the demonic presence swell, he’s got everyone pinned down to the floor, easy as breathing.
He hears Ava babbling, distantly, while he’s still hunting down the last traces of the Demon in him, “You shouldn’t have killed him, oh God, you shouldn’t have done that, I tried to stop you! He’s going to burn us all, we’re going to explode oh God, oh God.”
That’s a pretty good idea, he decides. When the demon inside him stops trying to get out, he turns on the others, bares his teeth, and watches the way Ava’s face melts off in the fire that comes. Sam absently prevents Meg from slipping her leash, from pulling out of the body of some poor woman who’d been brain dead for weeks now, and just lets them all burn.
The smell of burning flesh is pretty rank in an enclosed space, but Sam just drops to his knees next to Dean and stares.
Dean’s face is looks pretty normal, a little beat up, a little bloody, but normal. The back of his head is still being held together by the stubborn part of Sam that refuses to let any part of his brother end up smeared in with the ashes of half a dozen other people. Sam trails his fingers across Dean’s forehead, apologizes softly to the air because he’s got no salt and he’s not stupid enough to think that Dean would ever rest without him.
It takes him far longer than it should to realize there’s a cloud of black smoke hovering just to the left of him.
“If you don’t leave right now, I’m going to kill you,” he tells it listlessly. “In fact, I just might do it anyway.”
The smoke wafts for a minute, pulls up into itself and spreads out again, and then it speaks. “We are prepared to offer you a deal.” Sam can’t tell if that’s actually out loud or if the black smoke he’s melted into his flesh is responding to what the demon’s thinking.
“I’m going to kill you all.” He closes Dean’s eyes, leaves his hand there so that he won’t have to see when they open again. “What makes you think there’s anything you could give me?”
“We are prepared to offer you a deal,” it says again, like he hadn’t even spoken, “It is outside our regular realm of actions, but we wish very much to not fight a war for the dead.
“You’re nemesis is dead, Sam. Why kill more when you don’t need to?”
He‘s starting to get a headache, a mother fucker of a thing behind his eyes that goes great with the general feeling of third degree burns under his skin, and Dean’s skin is already too cold. “I’m still not seeing a reason not to.”
“You are aware of the deal your father made for your brother? We are willing to offer the same deal to you.”
Sam’s shaking his head before he even thinks about it, tracing the fingers of his free hand across the amulet on Dean’s chest. “It would kill him.”
There’s mostly silence, broken only by the grating almost noise of the black cloud shifting around itself, the sound his body’s making as it tries to absorb the remains of the demon that’s plagued him all his life. Sam just strokes Dean’s hair with the hand he’s got over his eyes and wonders if black smoke burns as well as bodies do.
“We want only a token sacrifice, Sam. Say, your powers, in exchange for your brother, father, and mother. That seems like a fair deal, doesn’t it?”
Mom? Sam looks up from Dean, realizes he’s crying when he only sees a blur of dark, and furiously wipes his face on the tattered sleeve of his jacket. Mom and Dad? How the hell was that even possible?
He wants to take it, no questions asked. He really does. But demons aren’t known to play fair and no matter how much he wants to curl up into a ball next to Dean and just lie there until he dies, his brother would kill him if he did something stupid.
"If I don’t have psychic powers, what’s to keep you from going after them all anyway?” he wants to know.
“Ah. How about this then? We make a little deal. One that benefits everyone involved. You get to keep your powers. We bring your family back. You don’t kill any more demons, and we don’t touch your family,” the smoke twists into itself, expands exponentially until Sam realizes that there’s actually more than one demon whirling around in front of him.
“Of course, we can’t speak for all of the demons, so you’ll have to be extra careful, make sure not to piss anyone off, won’t you?” there’s multiple coughing sounds that might be a laughs, then a different speaker hisses out, “Winchesters. They piss everything off.”
Sam feels his brain half-heartedly track the speaker in the mass of seething demons and try to set it on fire. He doesn’t try to stop it. The demons stir a little, one separating off from the rest to curl around his back in apparent chiding, and Sam tells himself to focus, think, stop just feeling.
He’s still got his palm over Dean’s eyes and he’s still holding his head in.
“The Yellow-Eyed Demon?” he finally manages to ask.
There’s another coughing sound and Sam doesn’t even have the energy to flinch away when a tendril of that black smoke curls towards his face. It recoils a moment later anyway, and then there’s more coughing laughter and another voice says, “Oh, he’s dead. Congratulations, you’re now the proud owner of a body soaked in demon. How does it feel?”
Great. He hates the supernatural things that think they have a sense of humor. “You aren’t going to try to bring him back?”
“We’re doing this for us,” that’s a forth voice, four demons, and from the size of the cloud Sam kind of wonders what the fuck they’re so scared of. He’s wiped, ready to fall over, and feeling more energy drain out by the minute as he holds Dean’s broken body together like it still matters. “Why the fuck would we bring back the idiot who got us in this mess in the first place?
“‘Oh, we can conquer the humans, have so many suffering meat puppets at our hands. It’ll be fun! Let’s just toy with a couple hundred of the humans that could probably kill us if they ever got their shit together enough to figure it out… oops.’ Good riddance.
“So, we got a deal?”
Sam wants to tell them to fuck themselves. He really does. But Dean’s dead and Dad’s dead and Mom’s dead and Jess is dead and if there’s any way to fix that, he’s going to take it. “I don’t kill any more demons. You don’t touch my family,” Sam drops his head, hunches his shoulders as he imagines just how furious with him Dean or Dad would be, and then says, “Deal.”
“Good.”
A scuffling sound at the door makes him whip his head up to stare, makes his powers go haywire as they simultaneously try to shove the approaching figure into the nearest wall and electrocute it. He’s tired though, and now that he’s had time to go numb he can’t quite get it to work anymore, and he ends up pushing the woman back a few inches as her hair smokes warningly.
She’s got demon-black eyes and a pretty, sculpted face, and Sam’s positive that even if she wasn’t being controlled by a demon like a handy meat puppet that she would be tripping warning bells in the back of his head. She tosses her hair over her shoulder, clucks disapprovingly at the smoke still rising from it, and a moment later it smothers out like it was never there.
“That wasn’t nice,” she says. “My host is most displeased.” She pauses for a second, surveys the greasy remains of half a dozen people and then turns impressed eyes onto Sam. “She does, however, greatly appreciate this display of pyrokinesis. She feels that there should be more burnings in this time period.
“Catch, Sammy,” she says suddenly, and yeah, his reflexes aren’t really working all that great right about now either, because he can’t figure out if he wants to remove the hand that’s making sure he doesn’t have to deal with Dean’s staring eyes (green and dead and no more Dean in them at all and if he thinks about he’s going to start screaming and never stop) or the one clutching Dean’s charm.
The thing that lands on the floor just to the left of his drawn up legs is pretty much a pile of bones held together by strips of what looks like leather. He’s never been good with bones, but he’s pretty sure those are human finger bones and a bird furcula, and he starts to get a weird feeling shivering up his spine when his gaze whips back up to take in the demon-possessed woman.
There’s a general coughing sound again from his peanut gallery of demons and then the one still behind him is reaching out tendrils of smoke to pick the ugly thing up and drop it onto the back of the hand curved over Dean’s cheeks.
He lets his hand turn over and curl around the pile of bones, keeps the back of his fist pressed over Dean’s eyes and tries not to feel the way Dean’s eyes have opened again. It tingles in his palm, like there’s an electrical charge getting ready to release and then it warms almost to the point of burning.
The instant his hand closes over the bones, the demon wrenches free from the not-woman, and she’s squatting next to him with a wave of exotic smelling perfume. “That’s a dirty trick,” she says as she tilts her head up to look at the amassed demons, “You’re lucky I’m nice.”
More demon laughter, shifting in the black cloud, before she locks eyes with him and he feels like he’s just dipped his hand into fire. “You’ve got a wish coming your way.”
“You’re a jinn,” he says to her, to the gathered demons who have all fallen mostly silent, “You’re a jinn and you’re working with... demons?”
“Jinniyah, boy.” She surveys him with a squinted look and smiles. “A female jinn is called a jinniyah. What are they teaching you kids these days?” She tosses her head, makes her hair fall across her chest in a way that highlights the glittering patterns on her dress, and waves a hand up at the cloud of demons.
“I owed one of them a favor,” she wrinkles up her forehead, shrugs, and mutters darkly that she can’t tell them apart and isn’t quite sure which one she owed the favor to, “A while back someone vacated one of my pretty harem boys when I asked nicely enough. It’ll be good to balance the books again.”
The demons swirl some more. Sam’s almost finding it hypnotic and he has to shake himself and concentrate on the pain beating against his temples and the pinched feeling he’s getting from holding onto three things when he’s only got two real hands. “Why do you want to make a deal if you can possess a jinniyah?”
“Demons can’t make wishes, Sammy; that’s why we trick humans into doing it for us.” It’s the second voice again, and a lick of dark smoke towards the jinniyah, which she just nonchalantly waves her hand through like it’s nothing.
Somewhere in the back of his head, along with all the pounding and the little kid gibbering wildly for Dean to wake up, is Bobby’s voice telling him to be damn glad that anything purely evil, demonic, or dead can’t make wishes, or else the world would be a fucking hell pit to live in.
The jinniyah laughs like a crackling fire, drags her hand through the ash that’s settled all over the floor and licks it clean with a purr. “Nice burning here, Sam,” she declares, “I approve. I miss all the burnings that used to go on in this country.”
Sam’s stuck on the fact that she’s licking people and demon off of her dainty little hand. He feels his stomach rise and is vaguely surprised to find that it’s the first time all day, despite Dean being cold and dead next to him.
She notices him watching, because she guiltily puts her hand flat against her knee and smiles at him again.
“Close your eyes, kid, and make a wish. No strings attached, from my end at least,” she’s touching Dean as she says it, murmuring under her breath about a waste of a perfectly lovely man and how much she‘d love to take him back with her if only he were still alive. She’s lucky that Sam doesn’t have his knife because he’d have chopped her hand off for it.
As it is, he’s too tired.
Her hand feels like his bones do, like it’s sizzling on the inside, just about ready to burst into open flames. Sam thinks about batting it away, but leaves it there. If she’s touching him, than she’s not touching Dean. “You’ve got my talisman,” she says, nodding to his fist, “Any ridiculous old thing you want is yours.
“Make it a good one.”
The demons are seething again, coiling around each other as they wait to see what he’ll do.
So he closes his eyes, grips Dean’s amulet hard enough that it’s cutting into his palm, and he makes a wish.
I want Mom to be alive. I want Dad to be alive. I want Dean to be alive. I want them to have a home and be safe and I want to remember all of this so I’ll be able to protect them if something comes after them. I don’t want Mom to die and I don’t want Dad to ever have to teach Dean how to be a soldier and...
And I don’t want to be there with them, because supernatural shit is drawn to me.
“That’ll do, Sammy,” the jinniyah says softly and there’s a touch like a whisper against his forehead and the world stops and rearranges itself just for him.
----------------------
The jinniyah is one of her kind, all tricky phrases and fire born impulsiveness, so when the ghost touches the little bit of bone and hide that passes for her talisman right as she makes the world fall away in favor of one twenty five years ago, she grins in delight and gives him a gift.
She hopes he’s happy with it.
----------------------
John’s dreaming about his sons. He’s dreaming about a man with yellow eyes and the way his boy’s head sounds when it opens to spill grey matter that doesn’t go anywhere; he’s dreaming about the way his baby looks numb and uncaring while he sets three people on fire. He’s dreaming about Dean, all grown up and all torn down, being dead and someone he knows in his dream bones is his other boy, his stubborn “why?” son, wishing he was.
He’s dreaming about hell, about burning and burning because he had to have his vengeance, about knowing that nothing the demonic sons of a bitches down there could do to him would be worse than what he’s done to his two boys.
John’s dreaming about blood and fire, suffering and sacrifice and family, and he wakes up to the sound of screaming.
It’s not the kind of baby screams he’s come to expect from having a small child. It sounds like somebody’s dying in the room next to his, like they’ve just lost an arm or a leg and are screeching out their death throes in some foreign country filled with sun and rain.
He almost gets violently sick all over the bed, because it sounds a lot like what he was just listening to in his head, like a man holding his brother’s brains in as he waits for the world to end.
Mary’s already rolled out of the bed and running across the room, late term pregnancy be damned, by the time he stops groping around for his gun. He’s got a moment of embarrassment that the first thing he thinks of is to shoot the poor bastard to put him out of his misery and then he’s getting up to check on Dean too.
His son’s kicking and screaming on his bed, shrieking words that he has no business knowing as well as the occasional, “No, Sammy, no!” The name Sammy conjures up something, some half image of a boy with dark curly hair and a deadly pout, a man who’s ridiculously tall and still has the same puppy eyes, but it’s gone in the same minute, whisked away with the knowledge that he might have had a son named Sammy, if Mary wasn’t carrying a girl.
John’s still shocked, staring at this wild little thing when he’d put a happy, smiling little boy to bed a few hours ago, but he snaps out of it when he sees a small heel going on a direct collision course with Mary’s very pregnant belly.
It’s a minor miracle that he catches Dean’s foot before it hits Mary; no one besides him seems to notice anyway, Mary still trying desperately to gentle her boy and Dean trying just as desperately to roll off the bed and away from her. John just hovers ineffectively around the both of them, catching Dean’s fists and feet before they can do any damage, making sure Mary doesn’t fall off the bed.
He feels pretty damn useless, and pretty damn scared. John’s damn sure that most three year olds don’t wake up from nightmares screaming that they’re going to kill their mother if she doesn’t let them go find Sammy right the fuck now. He’s sure that Dean doesn’t even know language like that, and if there’s a little bit of panic curling in his stomach, he’s also damn sure he’s entitled to it.
It’s a long fifteen minutes before Mary manages to get Dean into her arms.
She’s singing softly to him, rocking him with helpless tears running down her face, but Dean sits there like a rag doll, like he‘s never been there in his life. Even then, he’s still weakly throwing out punches, hiccupping under his breath as he demands Sammy back, repeating that they’re dead and he doesn’t believe in them so they needed to go the hell away and stay dead, and give Sam back.
Dean’s voice breaks when he adds a forlorn please to the end of that sentences, and that‘s what finally breaks John out of his incredulous numbness. He curls one arm around his wife and the other around the his son’s shaking little back, and he tells him that everything’s going to be okay.
“Sammy,” Dean whimpers again, “Where’s Sammy?”
Mary rests her head on top of their sons and whispers, “It’s a bad dream, love. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
They call a child psychologist in the morning, because there’s bad dreams and then there’s what Dean had last night. John’s finger pauses over ‘psychics’ for a few seconds, before he shakes himself and goes on. He reminds himself that there’s not such thing as psychics or boys who can ignite things with their minds, and then calls the psychologist.
Mary spends most of the day letting Dean feel the bulge in her belly because it’s the only thing that will calm him down. He pets her stomach with firm little strokes, whispers questions to it and holds his breath like he’s expecting an answer. Once or twice, John’s almost sure that he hears the word demon, and he thinks back to his finger hovering over the name Missouri.
They both pretend hearing their son croon Sam and Sammy and little brother at the unborn baby isn’t one of the most disturbing sights they’ve ever seen.
----------------------
After that initial freak-out, Dean thinks he’s pretty calm, all things considered.
Well, he’d tried to murder both Dad and Mom the night after he woke up in freakin’ Stepford, but his stupid little tongue got mixed up in the Latin and his fingers felt fat and useless around the knife. He’d whispered “christo” at them three times each while they slept, then put a hand on Mom’s stomach and told Sammy that he better be okay in there.
He doesn’t really want to believe that Sam would be stupid enough to make a bargain with demons, to make a goddamn wish like an idiot, but it’s all around him and he figures that maybe, just maybe, Sammy got away with it.
That mean’s everything’s fine and he just has to wait for Sammy to pop out so that he can scream at him about taking stupid risks.
There’s not enough salt to do all the windows and doors, but there’s enough to do what’s going to be Sammy’s room and Mom and Dad’s. Dad doesn’t have any kind of silver knife in the entire house, and the one gun he can find is disused, grimy, not working right, and he has a whole what-the-fuck moment over his Dad, the marine, letting his gun get like this.
His head chooses that moment to pipe up that swearing was bad, and damn, he is so not going to deal with that.
He spends a good hour crouching under the desk in Dad’s office going through every swear word he can think of until that little voice decides to whither up and die. Christ.
So, yeah, he’s pretty damn calm about it all, through the shrink (what the hell?!) trying to get him to play with dolls a few days later and Dad lecturing him on swearing; a gleeful little part of his mind plays bitch and fuck and damn and cunt on repeat the entire baby-lecture, while the rest of him tries to remember if his Dad had ever talked to him like he was an idiot.
He nods in all the right places, says, “Yes, sir,” and then, belatedly, Daddy, because Dad’s looking at him like he doesn’t know what to do with him again.
All things considered, he thinks he’s pretty freakin’ calm.
He’s four years old again, his mom’s alive, his dad’s alive, and he’s going to strangle Sammy as soon as he’s born. That’s about as calm as he gets.
And he stays pretty calm until he looks at the calendar and his stupid four year old eyes take a good thirty seconds to realize that it’s May fucking sixth and Mom’s pregnant. It’s May sixth, Mom’s still pregnant, and that’s not Sammy in her stomach.
Dean’s wailing before he realizes it, reaching out for the nearest sharp object like that’s going to make the date change, make it so Sammy’s the baby in Mom. He’s stabbing the calendar before he can even rationalize it, one part of his mind stepping back and raising its eyebrows while the rest of him tries to physically change the date so it’s right.
It needs to be right.
There are arms around him, shouting above him, and a huge hand closing around his knife; Dean kicks out, loses his balance because he’s not the right height, nothing’s right. He goes to slash at the person trying to pry his knife loose, but there’s a face floating somewhere high up that he knows like breathing and he’d never hurt, so he lets the knife go and concentrates on willing the world to be him and Sammy against the evil sons of a bitches out there.
A soft hand catches him, cradles him against the belly that’s not holding Sam and he starts spitting curses at the world in general, because he can’t hate Mom.
He has this horrible sick thought that Sam had wished he’d never been born, like he used to scream when he was twelve and chubby and cute and sullen, and then he’s just screaming at the top of his lungs, brain shut down, game over, you lose.
When he comes back online, he’s embarrassed as all hell to realize he threw an honest to God temper tantrum. Mom’s still rocking him on the floor of the kitchen, gentle fingers stroking through his hair, pregnant belling forcing him to curve with her; Dad’s crouched down next to them, spattered with grease and white in the face as he holds a butter knife in one hand and the phone in the other.
Dean feels numb and weighed down and like there’s panic just sitting there on the horizon. He hates this. He hates thinking like a grown up and reacting like a child, hates that his mind immediately supplies grown up instead of adult, and he hates that he has no fucking clue where his baby brother is and his first instinct was to throw a tantrum instead of finding out.
The first thing he decides, hiccupping in his mother’s arms, is that there is no way in hell Sam would be stupid enough to wish himself dead. Not because he thought his little brother was too selfish to do it, because Sam would, just because he was a freakin’ idiot and tried to blame himself for things that weren’t his fault, but because Sam had to have known he would pull heaven and hell apart so that he could find and kill the stubborn bitch for doing that to him. No, Sam was alive. Somewhere. He had to be.
Didn’t mean Dean could find him when he was four.
So he decides to bide his time, which is something he’s not especially good at. He putters around the house, hides bits of herbs that help ward off evil under the sofa, runs his fingers along the Impala’s glossy black paint, and tries very hard to not think about the fact that Sam is out there somewhere without someone to watch is back.
He’s gets a little sister named Abigail three days later and manages to hold back the impending meltdown until he’s alone in his room.
She’s cute, in a wrinkly, red-faced, not Sam way. Cute. But not Sam.
Mom immediately starts calling her Abby and love and Dad wraps his hands in her little pink blankets and coos over her, and all Dean can think about is that it should be Sam being called Sammy. He refuses to call the baby Abby and doesn’t bother having an explanation in mind because nobody really asks a four year old why they do the things they do.
Dean calls the baby Abigail for a full three weeks, before Dad makes him sit on the couch and plops her into his arms. She waves around her little fists, scrunches up her face, and then blows an air bubble that pops spit all over his shirt; he pulls a face at her and goes to give her back to Dad, but then her eyes open and she makes a little gurgling sound.
He remembers Sammy making that noise, five, six months from now, curled up with him in a motel room while Dad goes silently crazy trying to keep them safe. It sounds like home, more than anything else that’s happened recently, and he thinks, I forgive you for not being Sam.
She gurgles again and Dean gurgles back at her.
The baby becomes Gayle after that, because he still gets stuck on Abby sounding too much like Sammy in his head.
She likes to follow him around, when she learns to toddle. It’s not a big deal, because he doesn’t do much besides wander into a library now and then and wander back out with a book about jinn tucked into his backpack. It’s slow going and frustrating and all he’s learned is what he already knows; he wants to talk to Bobby, he wants to talk to Dad, hell, he’ll even take talking to Ellen or Missouri right about now.
Nobody takes a kid seriously though, so he plods on with his work and continues to try to find Sam.
Gayle decides when he needs a break. She’ll bring him books and toys, bits of rocks and leaves, and he always squats down next to her and explains what they are in patient tones. Gayle’s a bright kid, towheaded where Sam had been dark haired, but she still likes to show her big brother things and Dean tries to treat her... almost like he’d treated Sammy.
He gets in trouble a few times for explaining to her that salt repels evil or telling her that the rosemary she'd picked out front was for protections and exorcisms, but he'll be damned if she doesn't know what to reach for in case a monster gets past his protection lines. There's bits of runes carved into her window and iron stashed under her bed, but she doesn't know how to use a gun or a knife or her teeth for that matter. That's about as far as he's willing to compromise, even if Mom and Dad don't actually know he's compromising.
His little sister can childishly lisp the Rite of Blessing and takes great pleasure in hunching next to him and whispering it over her bathtub every night, fingering the rosary beads he'd nicked from the church for her.
Most of the time, she listens to him without question. He knows Sammy never did that.
She's four the first and only time she brings him the one book in his room he’s told her repeatedly that she’s not allowed to touch. He remembers Sam at that age, how he’d nod seriously at whatever you told him and then giggle as he did it anyways, so he really shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Dean,” she calls happily, lugging a cardboard book by the cover flap as she runs to him, “Dean, read me this! No read it before, read it to me!”
Dean’s guts freeze up when he realizes she’s waving a bright orange book around, and then he’s yanking it out of her surprised little hands. “You don’t get to touch that book, remember?” he makes sure to let that sink in for a minute, waits for her mouth to pull up into a pout, “Get another one.”
"Please?" Gayle asks, big green eyes going bright and puppy-ish. She's got nothing on Sammy at that age, though, and Dean tucks the book behind his back and shakes his head until she huffs and walks away.
She drags another Dr. Seuss book to him a minute later, still pouting, and climbs into his lap so that he can read The Lorax to her. Gayle smells like syrup and her finger sticks to the book when she demands to know what a word means; he has to pry it loose and a bit of brightly colored paper sticks to the tip as he reads about the Lorax lifting himself by the seat of his pants.
When he's done reading and she's lost interest, he picks up his book. His name’s on the inside, but he’s never so much as cracked it open because it freakin' hurts to look at it sometimes; he keeps seeing some ratty headed kid with a snotty nose and a huge smile asking him to read it over and over again.
Green Eggs and Ham was always going to be Sammy’s book. He can remember Sam spending weeks telling everyone at the diners that he was Sam-I-Am.
The stupid kid had even gone so far as to hide a slice of ham for weeks in the Impala once; it had taken both him and Dad scouring the car before they found the moldy meat wedged under Sam’s car seat. And Sam had thrown a temper-tantrum when they threw it away, until Dean had leaned over and whispered that he’d make him green ham the next time Dad was out on a hunt.
A few drops of food coloring (alright, the entire damn bottle) had made Sam’s ham and eggs as green as he’d wanted them, and Dean had just shrugged and sheepishly smiled when Dad came home to Sam’s dyed mouth and hands.
His hands tighten on the book, then he gently sets it down next to him on the couch and goes back to wading his way through the Thousand and One Nights.
Mom drops it off at a local charity drive a year later and he doesn‘t even notice.
Dean’s thirteen the year Mom and Dad pressure him into joining the school baseball team. He hates it immediately, because the only reason they want him playing is because they desperately want him to find friends; he kind of knows he’s apparently filled the geek role of the family without Sammy around, but it’s not like he can’t find his own toes or anything.
He’s just the weird kid who’s always got his face buried in books about wishes.
His teammates have all been on the team longer than him; they offer snide little remarks about his hand eye coordination and Dean immediately itches to show them up.
It’s not like it’s hard to “accidentally” hit the ball a hell of a lot farther than the little fucker with the big mouth could ever dream of hitting it. And it really isn’t his fault that Fucker’s sidekick was the one closest to where the ball took off into the park behind the baseball diamond, really.
Dean watches with satisfaction as Sidekick jogs his chubby ass out into the heavy underbrush.
It’s a lot less satisfying when the lardass comes back blubbering with terror over hearing crying and seeing something that he claims is a big foot. In the middle of the damn city park, which, yeah, while a little overgrown? Would so not be up to housing a man eating yeti thing.
Dean knows Sam was never this stupid. He misses his kid brother something fierce when all he can get out of the boy later on is that the thing was crying and it ran away when he got near it.
He goes home, sidles up to the family computer when Dad and Mom aren’t paying attention because he’s got a freakin’ weekly limit on how many hours he can spend on it and he used all of those up on Sunday. There’s no history of people reporting crying in the wooded area just behind the park, and his search for anyone that could have become a Woman in White turns up empty.
By the time Dad catches him on the computer and threatens to take away his library pass (and, oh, God, he’s Sammy in this life and he kind of wants to commit ritual suicide or go bond with the Impala right the fuck now, because he’s a girl), he’s pretty much decided that Lardass is just a stupid kid with an overactive imagination.
Except that even the coach is talking about the creepy weeping in the park, so.
Mom’s got a silver letter opener that she keeps in her jewelry box. Dean takes that, and he takes Dad’s gun, and he ditches baseball practice to see if there’s a supernatural thing out in the trees.
He’s not sure if it’s an honest to God hunt, but he’s itching under his skin to kill something, anything, to feel like he’s actually doing something instead of sitting around with his head up his ass. He wants to find Sam. He’ll settle for being able to gut or burn something evil.
It’s maybe an hour before he hears the crying and zeros in on it.
The thing crying is pretty damn fugly. It's hiding its face behind gnarled, fucked-up fingers, but the rest of it is just as ear-splittingly horrible as its face must be; its skin sort of slips over its shoulders with every sob and if Dean looks too closely at that he's going to upchuck his after school snack all over the park grass. There are warts growing all along its bony little body and he's pretty sure that's slime dripping from what looks to be an open sore of some kind.
It gibbers at him when he comes closer, tries to curl into a tiny ball of disgusting flesh while it cries quietly to itself, and Dean hears Sammy at his side, waspishly telling him that their job was to hunt evil, not kill supernatural things.
So he makes himself lower his knife a little bit and hunches down into a squat a dozen feet away from it. "Hey. Ugly," Dean winces, catches himself before he can apologize when the thing squeezes its face tighter and lets out a miserable little noise, "You're scaring a buttload of kids; could you tone it down a little?"
There's an increase in the thing's ability to cry before its fingers stutter down from its face so that Dean can get a full glance at just how ugly the thing is. Dean can't really think of a way to describe it to himself, just kind of blacks out everything but the way it's mismatched, squinty eyes leak tears.
If he's ever pressed for a description, which he thinks is pretty damn unlikely, he'd have to say that it kind of looks like a frog that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every damn branch on the way down. That's if his brain doesn't chose to miraculously block the image from his mind. Self preservation instincts run strong in the Winchesters, and he'd really like to be able to keep his lunch down, thanks.
The thing hiccups a breath and then, swear to God, he thinks it smiles at him.
It is, hands down, one of the most freaky, scary ass things he's ever seen in his life. Either one of them. It feels like the thing is scarring his mind with how ugly it is; he's got his knife raised in some half-assed attempt to get it to stop doing that so he isn't forced to carve his own eyes out as his head gibbers in shock.
He's really, really insanely glad that nobody had stumbled on this thing yet, because he can see people going insane over something like this.
Just when he's made up his mind to try throwing his knife at the creature just so that it'll stop it, it melts. Literally. One minute there's a brain scarring fugly monster sitting on the ground and smiling in what he hopes to fuck is supposed to be a sweet manner, and the next there's this inoffensive puddle of water leaking into the grass.
If he had Sam to bitch to, his brother would never hear the end of this freakin' weird hunt. But he doesn't, and no one else knows jack all about what's hiding in the shadows, and Dean never does find out what the hell the thing was.
Freak Show never starts its crying routine again.
His teammates spend a week mourning the fact that they can no longer triple dog dare each other into searching for the source of the crying and then they turn their attention to just how sweet Amanda Shanks looks in a miniskirt.
Dean would be pretty down with that, if it wasn’t for the fact that he feels like a dirty old man for even looking at her.
When he‘s sixteen he kisses his first girl (again), and he pukes in the grass two seconds later. He’s dry heaving and cursing all little brothers under his breath as he upchucks his pancakes all over the damn football green, because, of course, this was Sam’s fault.
By the time he looks up, the girl’s gone, and he gently slams his head against a handy nearby bleacher.
That pretty much effectively kills any cool points he’d gotten by being the first to kiss Jean Baker, all long long legs and gorgeous smiles, but she was just so goddamn young. She’d tasted like tangerine lip-gloss and left sparkly shimmers all over his mouth and he’d felt like a cradle robber the instant he kissed her.
He is so going to get Sam for that.
Along with a bunch of other shit.
Fuck, he misses his little brother.
When Dean gets home that night, he hauls ass up the stairs then tromps back down so that he can watch Gayle and Dad and Mom flitter around the living room. They look like a family, like his family, but they can’t take the place of a gap-toothed little sissy boy who’d crawled into bed with him after nightmares until he was fourteen.
They’re not Sam. And he’s not finding anything, anywhere, on what to do if a jinn grants a wish and you want to find the one who made it.
Dean stays up most of the night and writes sixteen letters before he finally burns every single one of them and scribbles out a simple, “Sorry. Be back when I find Sam,” on the back of his algebra homework.
----------------------
They find a baby out in a field in Lawrence, Kansas. No one comes forward to claim him, but there’s something not quite right about him that keeps him from getting snatched up by all the couples wanting infants.
He watches people with too old, unfocused eyes and the more superstitious of the nurses on duty claim that they’ve seen him move things without touching them. They name him James Taylor after the officer that found him, and off he goes into foster care.
When James Taylor is five he bluntly tells his foster mother that she’s not allowed to call him James or Jamie, because that’s not his name. He thinks that maybe she thinks that he’s only playing a game, that he’s had her read him Green Eggs and Ham a few too many times, but he keeps insisting.
He’s terrified that if he starts answering to James that Sam Winchester won’t exist anymore and there’ll be nobody to protect his family later on.
Sam’s not really surprised when he ends up back in state custody after that. He just keeps telling them that his name is Sam until they start using it to humor him. He gets his own copy of Dr. Seuss before they send him to a new home, something dropped off from a charity collection, and it’s the only thing he won’t let anyone else touch.
He hides under the bed in his new temporary house and traces his fingers over the name written on the front page until it smudges into illegibility.
When James “Sam” Taylor is nine he gets into his first really bad foster home. He meets Joe Carver and his small, cowed wife Amber, and the other three fosters he’s going to be sharing a house with.
The first time it happens, Sam’s so stunned that he lets it. He goes to school with a black eye and a busted lip the next day, utters the time honored “fell down the stairs” excuse when his teacher asks about it, and he walks around in a daze.
Sam calls home after school’s let out, fishing change from the gutters until he has enough money to call Lawrence. He never knew their old house number, but he looked up the Winchester, J. and M. years ago, and he clutches the phone with sweaty fingers as it starts ringing.
“Hello?” He knows Mom’s still alive because he made it that way, but it still feels like a punch to the face (like Joe’s punch to his face) to hear her voice answering the phone when he’s only ever heard her say Dean and Sam and I’m sorry before. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
For a giddy moment, he wants to say, “Yeah. This is Sam Winchester. I‘m your son, only not really. You didn’t have me in this reality; I kind of had myself. Can you come take me home?”
Instead, he stutters and stammers until he manages: “Uh. Hi.” Sam clears his throat and almost hangs up the phone because he wants… “Can I. Is Dean there?”
“Dean’s at baseball practice right now, kiddo. I can tell him to call you when he gets home if you want?” Mary sounds cheerful and full of life, and he can’t do this to them. He can’t.
Sam hangs up the phone before he can ask what time Dean’ll be home so that he can call again.
He leans his forehead on the greasy glass of the telephone booth and tries very hard not to cry like a baby. It’s better that Dean wasn’t home, he tells himself, because then how would he have explained that he needed the other boy to call him Sammy so that he could pull himself together? It really is better.
He’s seen what happens to kids who grow up beaten down. He knows that none of these kids are psychics, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be dangerous later on; Max Miller’s bruises still swim in front of his eyes at night.
So he puts his stupid, scared nine year old self comfortably in a box in the back of his head, and pulls his wearier twenty-four year old to the front. It’s the first time he’s done that, and he can tell even before he gently closes the box that it locks from the inside and isn’t ever going to open again, but he doesn’t want to be young and stupid anymore.
He feels thirty when he’s done, which makes him snort. A hand dash across his eyes and the tears are gone and he has a plan.
Sam waits until the next time Joe decides to go after one of his kids; it’s Aaron that sets the man off, and the instant Joe’s fists start falling, Sam calmly walks into the kitchen and calls 911. He doesn’t say a word into the phone, just sets it down gently against the countertop so that the operator can hear Aaron crying and Joe screeching.
Then he hefts up the ashtray that’s been wailing its story to him for the last four days and walks back into the living room. The girls are huddled together in one corner, crying quietly into each other’s hair; Aaron’s curled into a ball on the floor and Joe’s rearing back to deliver another kick, so he’s got a pretty damn clear shot.
Dean and Dad had taught him to fight vicious when he was small; he doesn’t know if it’s because he feels so damned small or because he is, but he can hear Dean’s voice in the back of his head muttering “knees and dick, Sammy, or the eyes if you absolutely have to. Leave the grown up fighting to the grown ups.”
So he gets a good grip on the ashtray and flings it at a tempting target.
The ashtray connects with Joe’s kneecap hard enough that Sam gets a satisfying little crack for his trouble. When Joe falls over screaming and clutching his leg, Sam kicks him in the face, hard enough to knock him out but not hard enough to snap his neck (if his nine year old body could, at least.)
The police show up to find him checking Aaron’s ribs, Phoebe and Elizabeth huddled up tight against his back, and they don’t know what to do with him. That’s pretty obvious, because Sam’s sitting there calmly answering their questions while the girls cry in the arms of a policewoman and Joe is wheeled out on a stretcher. Aaron goes next, cracked ribs, nothing serious, Sam wants to tell them, but he just shrugs and says that, yeah, he did attack his foster father.
Sam gives a little nod to the ashtray when he says it, and the chunk of frosted glass wiggles in delight; there’s a ghost trapped there, a little boy who says his daddy hit him too hard with the tray one day, but as he watches a soft glow surrounds it and the ghost is gone.
Children are the easiest to appease.
When James Taylor is eleven years old he jerks his head up in the middle of class because there’s going to be a demon wreaking havoc in Garden Plains in a little under two days. It’s not the Yellow-Eyed Demon, because whatever’s left of that one gives him lovely periodic nightmares of hell, but it’s an honest to God demon tripping his visions.
He raises his hand and asks to go to the bathroom, snags his backpack on the way out the door when the teacher goes back to grading papers and is at a bus stop within the hour.
Sam’s got money he’s been saving for years, little allowances that foster parents have given him and prize money from science fairs, so he’s not worried about eating or anything for the next few days.
He exorcises the demon quickly; it’s a low level sucker that can’t even fling him around without laying hands on him. Sam’s careful not to let the power whip out, to not kill it even as it tears free and travels back to hell, because a breaking a deal with demons is a really shitty idea.
There’s not a scratch on him when he plods back to the bus station, just a grateful family and a little girl left behind who is always going to have nightmares about places she might never end up going.
His birthday’s passed already, between one Latin word and another, and he doesn’t even realize it until he sees the date on the calendar the bus station has politely provided. Sam’s twelve years old, and he makes a decision as soon as he remembers it.
He kind of knew already he wouldn’t be able to do normal. That’s why he’d made sure that Dean and Dad and Mom could.
James Taylor doesn’t go back to foster care.
James Taylor stops being James Taylor and starts being Sam Winchester again, and he gets on a bus heading to a job he can remember doing fourteen years ago.
Part 2
