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Summary and warnings in part 1. Or read the whole thing at my site or at the Archive of Our Own.
Back to Part 5. No longer canon-compliant.
“Sam! Sam!”
Something was shoving at his chest, pushing air into his lungs with rib-bruising force.
He coughed, then blinked. Dean’s terrified face hovered above him.
Holy fuck, he thought, then curled up as a coughing fit took him over.
Above him, Dean continued to say his name, interspersed with curses.
The fucking Trickster and his one last trick. He patted his stomach. His trembling hand came away dripping with blood, but there was no wound underneath.
Sam was going to be grateful soon—he might even cry with relief—but right now he was just shaking from his body’s continued belief in its imminent demise.
“Hey,” Sam managed after a moment, trying to tilt his head to see Dean.
Dean stopped babbling like a cork had been stuffed in his mouth. His hands were not quite gentle as they flipped Sam onto his back, patting his chest and nearly slapping his cheeks, checking him over.
“You’re here,” Sam said, dizzy with incredulity. And, because it was true and because he was still oxygen-deprived: “Missed you.”
Sam had never heard Dean make that noise, something between a whimper and a laugh. He was still trying to figure it out when Dean started pulling him to his feet. He struggled, hindering more than helping, until at last he was standing.
He stared at Dean, the face he’d never expected to see again, the crow’s feet that were the only sign of Dean’s actual age, the ocean-green eyes, the freckles like a dusting of cinnamon on top of his tanned skin. He loved Dean so much he thought he actually might crack open with it.
“Where’s Dee?” he asked.
Dean punched him, putting his shoulder into the blow.
Something split in his cheek. Dean was breathing so hard that Sam thought he was going to hyperventilate. He didn’t move forward for another punch, just stood there and looked at Sam like he’d looked at Azazel when the demon had been possessing Dad.
Sam had obviously skipped a step or two.
“I’m so sorry,” he said when he could make words come out through the pain.
“Sorry?” Dean repeated, his voice high and outraged. “Sorry’s for buying regular instead of premium. Sorry’s for forgetting the salt. Sorry’s even for leavin’ in the middle of the night so you can go practice your demon powers with your demon whore.” He stopped, opening and closing his mouth as he blinked and the tears caught in his lashes.
Sam couldn’t stop himself from grabbing Dean, holding him tight as Dean shook, too overcome to struggle. “I thought if I left you’d be happy,” he said into Dean’s shoulder. His cheek was on fire, pain like a golden vein of lava where he could already feel the swelling. He deserved that and more.
Dean made a small confused sound.
“I thought, you know, you and Dee. Hunts the way you wanted them. No more fighting about the music. No more getting dragged to libraries.”
Dean reached up and weakly cuffed Sam on the back of his head. “Dickwad. Somebody always has to go to the library.”
Put like that, Sam did feel pretty stupid.
Hold on, if the Trickster had granted his wish, then—
His smile hurt, but he intended to keep wearing it unless Dean beat it off him.
They stayed pressed together, which Dean was probably allowing because it meant he didn’t have to show his face. Dean breathed out, deep and ragged, and started talking almost directly into Sam’s neck. “We just about killed each other, tryin’ to figure it out. We got the symbols right but we couldn’t make the window open to talk to you. And then the damn thing just popped back up outta nowhere, and Samantha jumped out all bloody and told me to get my ass through, which I did. What happened, Sam?”
“We tricked Lucifer.”
He expected a demand for details, but Dean was silent. His hands wrapped around Sam’s forearms, pushing until Sam was forced half a step backwards. “That was your plan?” Dean wasn’t looking at Sam’s face, which was how Sam realized that Dean was asking something different.
Sam grabbed Dean’s shoulders. “I wanted to do the right thing for you. And you had that sword, and it felt like you wanted to—” Dean flinched, and Sam could tell that he’d said precisely the wrong words. Dean was going to blame himself for being abandoned. “I think those demon gloves fucked with my head,” he corrected. That wasn’t all of it, but sometimes scapegoats were useful. “I should’ve brought you through right off.”
“I swear I’m puttin’ you in handcuffs,” Dean said, his eyes still fixed on Sam’s chest. He made no effort to shake free of Sam’s grasp. “Every time I let you out of my sight, it’s like you shut off that big brain and do the dumbest thing possible.”
“Fine, then,” Sam said, still grinning like a jack-o-lantern, and closed the small distance between them so that he was wrapped around Dean again. “I’ll stay with you if you stay with me.”
****
Dean eventually made a couple of attempts to wriggle out of Sam’s embrace, but they were all pretty pathetic, so Sam ignored them. Then there was a moment when the world seemed to hold its breath, and when Sam raised his head from Dean’s shoulder Uriel and Castiel were there with them.
Adrenalin made his heart jolt like a target at a shooting range. He spun so that he was shoulder to shoulder with Dean, who was blinking stunned eyes at the two angels. They were examining the Winchesters like a fox might look at a distant object, trying to determine whether it was a leaf or a mouse.
Sam felt an echo of the old reverence. Half a year of terror hadn’t erased a lifetime of belief. These angels didn’t know him, but he knew them.
Dean sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Uh, we were kinda in the middle of something, so—you guys got business here?”
Uriel tilted his head, like a bird or a dinosaur. “Where are Deanna and Samantha Winchester?”
“Gone,” Dean said, almost apologetic. He was watching Castiel, but Castiel seemed indifferent to everything, a mannequin in a coat that suddenly seemed two sizes too large for him.
“You won’t find them,” Sam added, though Uriel didn’t look away from Dean. There was a slight eau de bluff about Sam’s claim, because if the angels could manage lateral thinking they might be able to come up with the same strategy Sam had used to find Dee’s reality, using Sam and Dean themselves to orient the search. Sam was hoping that confusion, and the fact that angels couldn’t perceive them properly, would protect them. That, and if it was over, maybe Heaven didn’t do revenge.
Sam didn’t see him move, but Uriel was only a few inches away, staring at Dean. Sam didn’t consider that an improvement. “What has happened here?”
“I think it’s called free will,” Sam told him.
The air in the room whipped around as if turned by a great turbine. “This was the only opportunity for the eschaton for a thousand years,” Uriel said, words dropping like stone blocks. “A millennium more of this.” Sam could hear it all in his tone, children born only to starve, mothers hit by cars, hurricanes and crematoria and famines and toxic spills. The elaborate symphony of death and suffering that God apparently could only alleviate by wiping the slate clean.
Sam guessed that it was up to the humans, then.
“A thousand years,” Dean said brightly, giving Uriel his most obnoxious grin. “Not bad.”
The air thickened and the windows buzzed with the pressure of the angel’s anger. All light seemed to draw inwards, into Uriel, until the rest of the room was ocean-dark. As the tension screwed tighter, the lightbulbs in all the lamps began to shatter, going off like popcorn.
“Castiel,” Dean called out. The angel’s face was still an angry incurious mask, but he held up a hand to Uriel and the silent current in the room ebbed. “I’ve got a message from Dee for you.”
Castiel blinked, almost like a person. “What is it?”
Dean stepped towards Castiel, and nobody but Sam would have known that he would rather have run screaming. He took hold of the lapels of Castiel’s ridiculous overcoat, pulling himself up on his toes so that he could speak into Castiel’s ear, though he didn’t lower his voice. “On the many, many occasions when you think back on how you failed, you remember how you started recruiting me with the Word of God. And when that didn’t work, you went for the threat of Hellfire. You remember how you didn’t trust God’s love to be sufficient, and you think about how great God is.”
He shoved back, like pushing off from a statue, and turned away from Castiel, dismissing the angel from his attention.
There was a noise like the beating of a thousand ravens’ wings, and the angels were gone. The glass rattled in the windows and the door slammed closed even though Sam hadn’t thought it was open.
After a moment, Dean laughed, a high disbelieving sound, and stumbled over to the bed just before his legs gave out. He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, his own voice wobbling. He decided that Dean had the right idea, and plopped down right next to him, ignoring how the bed whined beneath their combined weight. “I thought you, uh, you liked Castiel.”
“I did,” Dean admitted. “Dude tells you God loves you and has a special plan for you, kinda hard not to feel that warm glow. But that’s not—I never chose that. I liked him ‘cause if I didn’t like him I couldn’t—It was hard enough gettin’ past Hell, and hearing how I was supposed to keep you from your own blood. And he talked to me.”
Sam mulled that over for a bit. Stockholm Syndrome for angels. It made as much sense as any of the rest of it. “Did Dee really give you that message?”
Dean laughed again. “You bet your ass. I, uh, kinda think she’s smarter than I am. Also meaner.”
“Also pretty confident,” Sam added.
Dean jostled his shoulder. “Sure, dude. She knew you and the other Samantha—” Sam shoved back—“were gonna get it done.”
They sat like that, looking around the room. The carpet was a total loss, scorched where it wasn’t soaked with blood. The place smelled like a combination of slaughterhouse and gym.
“So what was Samantha like? You get along okay?” Sam checked out Dean’s profile and saw badly feigned indifference. He wouldn’t have placed the underlying emotion as jealousy if he hadn’t had inside information.
He shrugged. “Not so different from me, I guess.” And then he remembered putting her up against the wall and couldn’t fight the flush.
Dean looked at him oddly, then gaped. “The fuck you did,” he said, and shook his head in a version of his standard amused condescension that made Sam think maybe that expression was always a put-on. “Sisters,” he said, making the word itself sound lascivious.
Not that Dean hadn’t told Sam in excruciating detail about various exploits involving twins, half of which were possibly true. “Shut up, you only wish you could’ve—”
Sam stopped talking before he accidentally stepped on another conversational landmine. Dean stared at him for a moment longer before he pinked too, high on his cheeks, and flicked his eyes away.
Fortunately they had plenty of other business to do. Bits and pieces of the other Winchesters were still scattered around: books and weapons, lotions and and wadded-up tissues. Later, Sam would have to make sure their clothes went to someplace that could use them—he wasn’t about to let Dean perv on the girls’ underwear, that was for damn sure—but right now he was content to rest by Dean’s side. The rest of the world could turn inside out and it wouldn’t matter. Everything he needed was here in this room, and it was the same for Dean. Except that Dean would also list the car out in the parking lot as among his needs, but Sam was prepared to concede the point.
He wondered how Dee and Samantha were doing. If the Trickster had kept his promise, then Sam and Dean’s world was also okay. Without Dean’s sacrifice or Sam’s demon blood, maybe the world couldn’t end in Heaven’s favor or Hell’s.
“Might oughta call Bobby,” Dean suggested after a while.
Sam reluctantly rose and went to the laptop Samantha had abandoned on the kitchenette table. Sitting next to it was what must be her cellphone.
He hit redial and waited for the call to go through. He hadn’t bothered telling their Bobby goodbye. There’d been so little time, and he’d been drawn so far into himself that he’d barely seen Dean. Bobby had always reminded Sam just a hair too much of Dad anyway. But now he wondered whether Dean had called, and what he might have said. Maybe he’d tell Sam, if Sam asked.
“Samantha?” Bobby’s cautious voice answered. Sam smiled. He wouldn’t have bet much on the plan either, in Bobby’s place.
“This is Sam Winchester,” he said. “Dee and Samantha made it to the other side. It’s over, Bobby.”
There was a long pause in which Sam imagined Bobby’s skepticism curling through the air, almost like a demon, crossing the distance between them. “I suspect I’d better have a look at you boys.”
“Bring the holy water,” Sam agreed. “She told you where she was holed up?”
“I’ll be there in four hours,” Bobby said, and hung up. Sam grinned at the phone. Something—holy water. Would holy water have any effect on them in this reality?
Which reminded him to pull up his shirt and check. The Trickster had healed him, but there was a white cicatrix, a triangle of scar destroying the anti-possession symbol on his skin. “I’m going to need a new tattoo,” he informed Dean, who was still lounging on the bed.
Dean groaned and flopped backwards, splaying himself out like he was making a—heh. “This time it oughta be on your ass.”
“You’d better get a new one too, just to be safe.” Dean raised his hand in a one-fingered salute, but Sam knew he’d go along, if only so that he could deprive Sam of complaining rights.
“We’re also gonna need new gear,” Sam realized. That was nothing new. There’d been more than a few times when they’d hustled out of town with nothing more than what was in the car. He expected that the car would be well-equipped, but they’d need new clothes, and every weapon that had been customized would have to be traded in.
Having those problems at the top of his list was such an unbelievable relief that he nearly started laughing. And then he saw no reason not to laugh, so he did, until he was bent over and shaking with it.
“Sam?” Dean was there immediately, crouching down next to his chair and putting a hand on his shoulder.
Sam pulled it together. “No, I’m fine. Just happy.”
Dean didn’t look entirely convinced. “You know, you can get out now. Start over.”
He deliberately hadn’t let himself think about it, but the knowledge was sudden and complete. The best strategy, despite the humiliation factor, would be to fake high school records—much easier than college, especially because they’d be old records—and take the SATs. Even without recommendation letters, a good enough story would get him into a decent state school, and from there the world (the new world) would open up all over again.
He didn’t have funky demon powers, or even enemies who believed he had funky demon powers. He didn’t need revenge. He was completely free to choose.
He smiled at Dean, still squatting beside him. “My agenda’s more beer and wings right now.”
But Dean wasn’t smiling back. “You should do it,” he said.
“Dean—”
“Mom wanted you to,” he said, like each word had been pulled out of his gut through muscle and skin. “She didn’t want her kids hunting.”
Sam believed him, even though Dean had never before shared that tidbit about his trip to the past. It was exactly the kind of information Dean would squirrel away and pull out each night like a razor to cut himself with.
“What about you?” he asked, because he knew this variant of Dean-the-martyr. “Given that you just nearly broke my jaw for leaving you, can I expect that you’ll join me in some kind of stable, boring job?”
Sure enough, Dean shrugged and looked down. “That was ‘cause you lied and ran off and I didn’t know you were safe.”
Sam was in no position to give a good answer to that, so he didn’t try. Leaving Dean for his own good was a seriously Dad move, now that he thought about it without the overlay of terror and demon rage. He’d make it up to Dean somehow.
When Dean met his eyes again, Sam was shocked to see that Dean wasn’t even trying to hide the tears. “This, you and me hunting, was her worst nightmare, Sam. She wanted out. Don’t let—don’t let me keep you in this life, now that you get a do-over. Don’t let her down.”
How Dean managed to convince himself that Sam was the emo one was an eternal mystery.
Sam sighed, twisting in his chair so that he could grab Dean’s wrist and hold on to him, the hard lines of Dean’s bracelet cutting into his palm. “She was wrong.” Before Dean could do more than open his mouth, he barrelled on. “She wasn’t wrong about the pain and the danger. Nobody should have to hunt. But you can’t know that someone’s in trouble and not do something about it. And neither can I.”
Dean’s eyes were still wet, his face flushed and his breathing too fast. His pulse jumped under Sam’s fingers. “You could help people without hunting,” he said.
Sam tried not to smile, because Dean would just think he was being patronizing. “Maybe so,” he told Dean. “That’s something we’ll have to think about. Together.” And then, because Dean was all but begging for it, he pulled Dean up, standing as he did so, until they were hugging, again. Dean sighed and Sam could feel him rolling his eyes, but Sam was prepared to tolerate that.
He hooked his chin over Dean’s shoulder and stared at his hands, wrapped around Dean’s back. Even if they hadn’t been strong enough to pull Dean out of Hell, they’d been sufficient for the rest of it, and Castiel was nothing but a scar now. He held on to his brother and pretended he didn’t hear Dean sniffling.
****
Eventually, though, even Sam had to admit that they’d crossed the line into weird, so he let Dean go, and Dean took the opportunity to go out and grab a pizza. Pineapple and pine nuts, of all things. Dean claimed it was the special, but Sam thought he was probably just testing to see how far he could push Sam before guilt gave way to annoyance. Since the answer was, pretty fucking far, Sam didn’t even blink at bizarre toppings.
After they ate, Sam decided to check out his new computer, which was a Mac, Samantha having opted for style over economy. Samantha’s desktop picture was of a well-built guy with short brown hair and deep blue eyes, posed to highlight his arms. Sam winced and changed it to autumn leaves.
While Sam was checking her bookmarks and finding them very much like his own, only better organized, Dean wandered out to the Impala for an inventory. He came back bitching nonstop about all the details that would need to be fixed, casting aspersions on the car-related judgment of women in general and Dee in particular. “She let her Sam install a CD changer! Least it’s in the trunk,” he grumbled. Fortunately, they had enough guns to get straight to business if they needed to, though Sam was hoping for a bit of a break.
Traditionally, saviors of the world were entitled to a respite. Often there was a campfire and joyous song. Even if Sam and Dean couldn’t hope for medals from a grateful nation, he figured he could swing s’mores on his own.
“Hey,” Dean said from his position by the window. “Bobby’s truck just pulled in.” He headed towards the door and Sam rose to follow.
****
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Bobby said when they approached him, careful to stay a respectful distance away. Sam reminded himself that a hug was probably not in the cards. Their own Bobby hadn’t started with physical affection until after Sam had died. Anyway, Bobby wasn’t paying any attention to Sam.
“What?” Dean asked, squaring his shoulders and looking Bobby straight in the eye, even though Sam could hear the faint crunch of gravel as he shifted uneasily.
“It’s just—you’re the spittin’ image of John Winchester when I met him.”
Sam held his breath while Dean froze. Then Dean smiled, like a flashbulb going off. “Really?”
Bobby was shaking his head, but not in negation. “Hard to imagine John Winchester with sons. He loved those girls somethin’ fierce.”
“Then I’m sure he’d be glad to know they’re safe,” Sam said, and he thought it came out as gently as he meant it.
Bobby looked over at him and snorted. “I still don’t know how you managed to pull this one off,” he said. “But if there’s anyone stubborn enough to stop the apocalypse in its tracks, I guess it’d be a Winchester.”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Seems to me it took four of us.” And they smirked at each other for a bit before Bobby made them drink holy water (Sam decided not to mention his doubts on that score).
****
They accepted Bobby’s invitation to stay at his place while they found their feet. It would take a while to set up new identities, longer if they didn’t want to burn those identities immediately with credit card fraud. Sam was hoping to figure out a new way of making a living, now that the threat of arrest wasn’t always hanging over them.
He meant to get a move on that as soon as they arrived at Bobby’s, but first there was dinner. Bobby seemed surprised that Sam could cook. He got the feeling that Samantha had refused to do so on principle. Then there was beer, and reminiscences that weren’t quite the same between Bobby and them. Bobby stared constantly, mostly at Dean, while Dean tried not to squirm, and the whole thing just made Sam unreasonably, unquenchably happy.
Eventually he settled himself into the big couch in Bobby’s living room while Dean used a side table to start checking the guns. But before Sam could boot up the laptop, his eye was caught by the headline on the top of the stack of discarded papers at his feet: PRESIDENT CLINTON CALLS FOR ACTION. “Hillary Clinton is president?” he called out.
Bobby stuck his head out from the kitchen, looking mournful. “I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but here they only get two terms. That’s her husband.”
Sam blinked. “Hillary Clinton was president, and now Bill is?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, in a tone indicating that he was less than thrilled with that fact. Come to think of it, Sam wasn't overjoyed either.
“Dee said it was the same here!” He was aware that his voice was too loud and too high, but he didn’t feel the need to control it right at the moment.
Dean and Bobby looked at him. “Son,” Bobby said after a pause, “did you honestly think Dee cared who the president was?”
But Dean’s face wasn’t quite blank; it held a faint mixture of guilt and smugness. “Dean,” Sam said.
Dean shrugged. “I didn’t know about that,” he said. “Just, you know, some of the movies are different. Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope, dude.”
Sam’s mouth fell open.
“What, I can’t watch the classics? Seriously though: The Thing 2! George Romero’s Resident Evil! The Nicholas Cage Superman, Sam, how cool is that? And I, uh, brought the first two Terminator movies, ‘cause Lance Henriksen’s just wrong.”
“Oh my God,” Sam said.
Dean grinned at him. “Not any more.”
END.
Back to Part 5. No longer canon-compliant.
“Sam! Sam!”
Something was shoving at his chest, pushing air into his lungs with rib-bruising force.
He coughed, then blinked. Dean’s terrified face hovered above him.
Holy fuck, he thought, then curled up as a coughing fit took him over.
Above him, Dean continued to say his name, interspersed with curses.
The fucking Trickster and his one last trick. He patted his stomach. His trembling hand came away dripping with blood, but there was no wound underneath.
Sam was going to be grateful soon—he might even cry with relief—but right now he was just shaking from his body’s continued belief in its imminent demise.
“Hey,” Sam managed after a moment, trying to tilt his head to see Dean.
Dean stopped babbling like a cork had been stuffed in his mouth. His hands were not quite gentle as they flipped Sam onto his back, patting his chest and nearly slapping his cheeks, checking him over.
“You’re here,” Sam said, dizzy with incredulity. And, because it was true and because he was still oxygen-deprived: “Missed you.”
Sam had never heard Dean make that noise, something between a whimper and a laugh. He was still trying to figure it out when Dean started pulling him to his feet. He struggled, hindering more than helping, until at last he was standing.
He stared at Dean, the face he’d never expected to see again, the crow’s feet that were the only sign of Dean’s actual age, the ocean-green eyes, the freckles like a dusting of cinnamon on top of his tanned skin. He loved Dean so much he thought he actually might crack open with it.
“Where’s Dee?” he asked.
Dean punched him, putting his shoulder into the blow.
Something split in his cheek. Dean was breathing so hard that Sam thought he was going to hyperventilate. He didn’t move forward for another punch, just stood there and looked at Sam like he’d looked at Azazel when the demon had been possessing Dad.
Sam had obviously skipped a step or two.
“I’m so sorry,” he said when he could make words come out through the pain.
“Sorry?” Dean repeated, his voice high and outraged. “Sorry’s for buying regular instead of premium. Sorry’s for forgetting the salt. Sorry’s even for leavin’ in the middle of the night so you can go practice your demon powers with your demon whore.” He stopped, opening and closing his mouth as he blinked and the tears caught in his lashes.
Sam couldn’t stop himself from grabbing Dean, holding him tight as Dean shook, too overcome to struggle. “I thought if I left you’d be happy,” he said into Dean’s shoulder. His cheek was on fire, pain like a golden vein of lava where he could already feel the swelling. He deserved that and more.
Dean made a small confused sound.
“I thought, you know, you and Dee. Hunts the way you wanted them. No more fighting about the music. No more getting dragged to libraries.”
Dean reached up and weakly cuffed Sam on the back of his head. “Dickwad. Somebody always has to go to the library.”
Put like that, Sam did feel pretty stupid.
Hold on, if the Trickster had granted his wish, then—
His smile hurt, but he intended to keep wearing it unless Dean beat it off him.
They stayed pressed together, which Dean was probably allowing because it meant he didn’t have to show his face. Dean breathed out, deep and ragged, and started talking almost directly into Sam’s neck. “We just about killed each other, tryin’ to figure it out. We got the symbols right but we couldn’t make the window open to talk to you. And then the damn thing just popped back up outta nowhere, and Samantha jumped out all bloody and told me to get my ass through, which I did. What happened, Sam?”
“We tricked Lucifer.”
He expected a demand for details, but Dean was silent. His hands wrapped around Sam’s forearms, pushing until Sam was forced half a step backwards. “That was your plan?” Dean wasn’t looking at Sam’s face, which was how Sam realized that Dean was asking something different.
Sam grabbed Dean’s shoulders. “I wanted to do the right thing for you. And you had that sword, and it felt like you wanted to—” Dean flinched, and Sam could tell that he’d said precisely the wrong words. Dean was going to blame himself for being abandoned. “I think those demon gloves fucked with my head,” he corrected. That wasn’t all of it, but sometimes scapegoats were useful. “I should’ve brought you through right off.”
“I swear I’m puttin’ you in handcuffs,” Dean said, his eyes still fixed on Sam’s chest. He made no effort to shake free of Sam’s grasp. “Every time I let you out of my sight, it’s like you shut off that big brain and do the dumbest thing possible.”
“Fine, then,” Sam said, still grinning like a jack-o-lantern, and closed the small distance between them so that he was wrapped around Dean again. “I’ll stay with you if you stay with me.”
****
Dean eventually made a couple of attempts to wriggle out of Sam’s embrace, but they were all pretty pathetic, so Sam ignored them. Then there was a moment when the world seemed to hold its breath, and when Sam raised his head from Dean’s shoulder Uriel and Castiel were there with them.
Adrenalin made his heart jolt like a target at a shooting range. He spun so that he was shoulder to shoulder with Dean, who was blinking stunned eyes at the two angels. They were examining the Winchesters like a fox might look at a distant object, trying to determine whether it was a leaf or a mouse.
Sam felt an echo of the old reverence. Half a year of terror hadn’t erased a lifetime of belief. These angels didn’t know him, but he knew them.
Dean sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Uh, we were kinda in the middle of something, so—you guys got business here?”
Uriel tilted his head, like a bird or a dinosaur. “Where are Deanna and Samantha Winchester?”
“Gone,” Dean said, almost apologetic. He was watching Castiel, but Castiel seemed indifferent to everything, a mannequin in a coat that suddenly seemed two sizes too large for him.
“You won’t find them,” Sam added, though Uriel didn’t look away from Dean. There was a slight eau de bluff about Sam’s claim, because if the angels could manage lateral thinking they might be able to come up with the same strategy Sam had used to find Dee’s reality, using Sam and Dean themselves to orient the search. Sam was hoping that confusion, and the fact that angels couldn’t perceive them properly, would protect them. That, and if it was over, maybe Heaven didn’t do revenge.
Sam didn’t see him move, but Uriel was only a few inches away, staring at Dean. Sam didn’t consider that an improvement. “What has happened here?”
“I think it’s called free will,” Sam told him.
The air in the room whipped around as if turned by a great turbine. “This was the only opportunity for the eschaton for a thousand years,” Uriel said, words dropping like stone blocks. “A millennium more of this.” Sam could hear it all in his tone, children born only to starve, mothers hit by cars, hurricanes and crematoria and famines and toxic spills. The elaborate symphony of death and suffering that God apparently could only alleviate by wiping the slate clean.
Sam guessed that it was up to the humans, then.
“A thousand years,” Dean said brightly, giving Uriel his most obnoxious grin. “Not bad.”
The air thickened and the windows buzzed with the pressure of the angel’s anger. All light seemed to draw inwards, into Uriel, until the rest of the room was ocean-dark. As the tension screwed tighter, the lightbulbs in all the lamps began to shatter, going off like popcorn.
“Castiel,” Dean called out. The angel’s face was still an angry incurious mask, but he held up a hand to Uriel and the silent current in the room ebbed. “I’ve got a message from Dee for you.”
Castiel blinked, almost like a person. “What is it?”
Dean stepped towards Castiel, and nobody but Sam would have known that he would rather have run screaming. He took hold of the lapels of Castiel’s ridiculous overcoat, pulling himself up on his toes so that he could speak into Castiel’s ear, though he didn’t lower his voice. “On the many, many occasions when you think back on how you failed, you remember how you started recruiting me with the Word of God. And when that didn’t work, you went for the threat of Hellfire. You remember how you didn’t trust God’s love to be sufficient, and you think about how great God is.”
He shoved back, like pushing off from a statue, and turned away from Castiel, dismissing the angel from his attention.
There was a noise like the beating of a thousand ravens’ wings, and the angels were gone. The glass rattled in the windows and the door slammed closed even though Sam hadn’t thought it was open.
After a moment, Dean laughed, a high disbelieving sound, and stumbled over to the bed just before his legs gave out. He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, his own voice wobbling. He decided that Dean had the right idea, and plopped down right next to him, ignoring how the bed whined beneath their combined weight. “I thought you, uh, you liked Castiel.”
“I did,” Dean admitted. “Dude tells you God loves you and has a special plan for you, kinda hard not to feel that warm glow. But that’s not—I never chose that. I liked him ‘cause if I didn’t like him I couldn’t—It was hard enough gettin’ past Hell, and hearing how I was supposed to keep you from your own blood. And he talked to me.”
Sam mulled that over for a bit. Stockholm Syndrome for angels. It made as much sense as any of the rest of it. “Did Dee really give you that message?”
Dean laughed again. “You bet your ass. I, uh, kinda think she’s smarter than I am. Also meaner.”
“Also pretty confident,” Sam added.
Dean jostled his shoulder. “Sure, dude. She knew you and the other Samantha—” Sam shoved back—“were gonna get it done.”
They sat like that, looking around the room. The carpet was a total loss, scorched where it wasn’t soaked with blood. The place smelled like a combination of slaughterhouse and gym.
“So what was Samantha like? You get along okay?” Sam checked out Dean’s profile and saw badly feigned indifference. He wouldn’t have placed the underlying emotion as jealousy if he hadn’t had inside information.
He shrugged. “Not so different from me, I guess.” And then he remembered putting her up against the wall and couldn’t fight the flush.
Dean looked at him oddly, then gaped. “The fuck you did,” he said, and shook his head in a version of his standard amused condescension that made Sam think maybe that expression was always a put-on. “Sisters,” he said, making the word itself sound lascivious.
Not that Dean hadn’t told Sam in excruciating detail about various exploits involving twins, half of which were possibly true. “Shut up, you only wish you could’ve—”
Sam stopped talking before he accidentally stepped on another conversational landmine. Dean stared at him for a moment longer before he pinked too, high on his cheeks, and flicked his eyes away.
Fortunately they had plenty of other business to do. Bits and pieces of the other Winchesters were still scattered around: books and weapons, lotions and and wadded-up tissues. Later, Sam would have to make sure their clothes went to someplace that could use them—he wasn’t about to let Dean perv on the girls’ underwear, that was for damn sure—but right now he was content to rest by Dean’s side. The rest of the world could turn inside out and it wouldn’t matter. Everything he needed was here in this room, and it was the same for Dean. Except that Dean would also list the car out in the parking lot as among his needs, but Sam was prepared to concede the point.
He wondered how Dee and Samantha were doing. If the Trickster had kept his promise, then Sam and Dean’s world was also okay. Without Dean’s sacrifice or Sam’s demon blood, maybe the world couldn’t end in Heaven’s favor or Hell’s.
“Might oughta call Bobby,” Dean suggested after a while.
Sam reluctantly rose and went to the laptop Samantha had abandoned on the kitchenette table. Sitting next to it was what must be her cellphone.
He hit redial and waited for the call to go through. He hadn’t bothered telling their Bobby goodbye. There’d been so little time, and he’d been drawn so far into himself that he’d barely seen Dean. Bobby had always reminded Sam just a hair too much of Dad anyway. But now he wondered whether Dean had called, and what he might have said. Maybe he’d tell Sam, if Sam asked.
“Samantha?” Bobby’s cautious voice answered. Sam smiled. He wouldn’t have bet much on the plan either, in Bobby’s place.
“This is Sam Winchester,” he said. “Dee and Samantha made it to the other side. It’s over, Bobby.”
There was a long pause in which Sam imagined Bobby’s skepticism curling through the air, almost like a demon, crossing the distance between them. “I suspect I’d better have a look at you boys.”
“Bring the holy water,” Sam agreed. “She told you where she was holed up?”
“I’ll be there in four hours,” Bobby said, and hung up. Sam grinned at the phone. Something—holy water. Would holy water have any effect on them in this reality?
Which reminded him to pull up his shirt and check. The Trickster had healed him, but there was a white cicatrix, a triangle of scar destroying the anti-possession symbol on his skin. “I’m going to need a new tattoo,” he informed Dean, who was still lounging on the bed.
Dean groaned and flopped backwards, splaying himself out like he was making a—heh. “This time it oughta be on your ass.”
“You’d better get a new one too, just to be safe.” Dean raised his hand in a one-fingered salute, but Sam knew he’d go along, if only so that he could deprive Sam of complaining rights.
“We’re also gonna need new gear,” Sam realized. That was nothing new. There’d been more than a few times when they’d hustled out of town with nothing more than what was in the car. He expected that the car would be well-equipped, but they’d need new clothes, and every weapon that had been customized would have to be traded in.
Having those problems at the top of his list was such an unbelievable relief that he nearly started laughing. And then he saw no reason not to laugh, so he did, until he was bent over and shaking with it.
“Sam?” Dean was there immediately, crouching down next to his chair and putting a hand on his shoulder.
Sam pulled it together. “No, I’m fine. Just happy.”
Dean didn’t look entirely convinced. “You know, you can get out now. Start over.”
He deliberately hadn’t let himself think about it, but the knowledge was sudden and complete. The best strategy, despite the humiliation factor, would be to fake high school records—much easier than college, especially because they’d be old records—and take the SATs. Even without recommendation letters, a good enough story would get him into a decent state school, and from there the world (the new world) would open up all over again.
He didn’t have funky demon powers, or even enemies who believed he had funky demon powers. He didn’t need revenge. He was completely free to choose.
He smiled at Dean, still squatting beside him. “My agenda’s more beer and wings right now.”
But Dean wasn’t smiling back. “You should do it,” he said.
“Dean—”
“Mom wanted you to,” he said, like each word had been pulled out of his gut through muscle and skin. “She didn’t want her kids hunting.”
Sam believed him, even though Dean had never before shared that tidbit about his trip to the past. It was exactly the kind of information Dean would squirrel away and pull out each night like a razor to cut himself with.
“What about you?” he asked, because he knew this variant of Dean-the-martyr. “Given that you just nearly broke my jaw for leaving you, can I expect that you’ll join me in some kind of stable, boring job?”
Sure enough, Dean shrugged and looked down. “That was ‘cause you lied and ran off and I didn’t know you were safe.”
Sam was in no position to give a good answer to that, so he didn’t try. Leaving Dean for his own good was a seriously Dad move, now that he thought about it without the overlay of terror and demon rage. He’d make it up to Dean somehow.
When Dean met his eyes again, Sam was shocked to see that Dean wasn’t even trying to hide the tears. “This, you and me hunting, was her worst nightmare, Sam. She wanted out. Don’t let—don’t let me keep you in this life, now that you get a do-over. Don’t let her down.”
How Dean managed to convince himself that Sam was the emo one was an eternal mystery.
Sam sighed, twisting in his chair so that he could grab Dean’s wrist and hold on to him, the hard lines of Dean’s bracelet cutting into his palm. “She was wrong.” Before Dean could do more than open his mouth, he barrelled on. “She wasn’t wrong about the pain and the danger. Nobody should have to hunt. But you can’t know that someone’s in trouble and not do something about it. And neither can I.”
Dean’s eyes were still wet, his face flushed and his breathing too fast. His pulse jumped under Sam’s fingers. “You could help people without hunting,” he said.
Sam tried not to smile, because Dean would just think he was being patronizing. “Maybe so,” he told Dean. “That’s something we’ll have to think about. Together.” And then, because Dean was all but begging for it, he pulled Dean up, standing as he did so, until they were hugging, again. Dean sighed and Sam could feel him rolling his eyes, but Sam was prepared to tolerate that.
He hooked his chin over Dean’s shoulder and stared at his hands, wrapped around Dean’s back. Even if they hadn’t been strong enough to pull Dean out of Hell, they’d been sufficient for the rest of it, and Castiel was nothing but a scar now. He held on to his brother and pretended he didn’t hear Dean sniffling.
****
Eventually, though, even Sam had to admit that they’d crossed the line into weird, so he let Dean go, and Dean took the opportunity to go out and grab a pizza. Pineapple and pine nuts, of all things. Dean claimed it was the special, but Sam thought he was probably just testing to see how far he could push Sam before guilt gave way to annoyance. Since the answer was, pretty fucking far, Sam didn’t even blink at bizarre toppings.
After they ate, Sam decided to check out his new computer, which was a Mac, Samantha having opted for style over economy. Samantha’s desktop picture was of a well-built guy with short brown hair and deep blue eyes, posed to highlight his arms. Sam winced and changed it to autumn leaves.
While Sam was checking her bookmarks and finding them very much like his own, only better organized, Dean wandered out to the Impala for an inventory. He came back bitching nonstop about all the details that would need to be fixed, casting aspersions on the car-related judgment of women in general and Dee in particular. “She let her Sam install a CD changer! Least it’s in the trunk,” he grumbled. Fortunately, they had enough guns to get straight to business if they needed to, though Sam was hoping for a bit of a break.
Traditionally, saviors of the world were entitled to a respite. Often there was a campfire and joyous song. Even if Sam and Dean couldn’t hope for medals from a grateful nation, he figured he could swing s’mores on his own.
“Hey,” Dean said from his position by the window. “Bobby’s truck just pulled in.” He headed towards the door and Sam rose to follow.
****
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Bobby said when they approached him, careful to stay a respectful distance away. Sam reminded himself that a hug was probably not in the cards. Their own Bobby hadn’t started with physical affection until after Sam had died. Anyway, Bobby wasn’t paying any attention to Sam.
“What?” Dean asked, squaring his shoulders and looking Bobby straight in the eye, even though Sam could hear the faint crunch of gravel as he shifted uneasily.
“It’s just—you’re the spittin’ image of John Winchester when I met him.”
Sam held his breath while Dean froze. Then Dean smiled, like a flashbulb going off. “Really?”
Bobby was shaking his head, but not in negation. “Hard to imagine John Winchester with sons. He loved those girls somethin’ fierce.”
“Then I’m sure he’d be glad to know they’re safe,” Sam said, and he thought it came out as gently as he meant it.
Bobby looked over at him and snorted. “I still don’t know how you managed to pull this one off,” he said. “But if there’s anyone stubborn enough to stop the apocalypse in its tracks, I guess it’d be a Winchester.”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Seems to me it took four of us.” And they smirked at each other for a bit before Bobby made them drink holy water (Sam decided not to mention his doubts on that score).
****
They accepted Bobby’s invitation to stay at his place while they found their feet. It would take a while to set up new identities, longer if they didn’t want to burn those identities immediately with credit card fraud. Sam was hoping to figure out a new way of making a living, now that the threat of arrest wasn’t always hanging over them.
He meant to get a move on that as soon as they arrived at Bobby’s, but first there was dinner. Bobby seemed surprised that Sam could cook. He got the feeling that Samantha had refused to do so on principle. Then there was beer, and reminiscences that weren’t quite the same between Bobby and them. Bobby stared constantly, mostly at Dean, while Dean tried not to squirm, and the whole thing just made Sam unreasonably, unquenchably happy.
Eventually he settled himself into the big couch in Bobby’s living room while Dean used a side table to start checking the guns. But before Sam could boot up the laptop, his eye was caught by the headline on the top of the stack of discarded papers at his feet: PRESIDENT CLINTON CALLS FOR ACTION. “Hillary Clinton is president?” he called out.
Bobby stuck his head out from the kitchen, looking mournful. “I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but here they only get two terms. That’s her husband.”
Sam blinked. “Hillary Clinton was president, and now Bill is?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, in a tone indicating that he was less than thrilled with that fact. Come to think of it, Sam wasn't overjoyed either.
“Dee said it was the same here!” He was aware that his voice was too loud and too high, but he didn’t feel the need to control it right at the moment.
Dean and Bobby looked at him. “Son,” Bobby said after a pause, “did you honestly think Dee cared who the president was?”
But Dean’s face wasn’t quite blank; it held a faint mixture of guilt and smugness. “Dean,” Sam said.
Dean shrugged. “I didn’t know about that,” he said. “Just, you know, some of the movies are different. Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope, dude.”
Sam’s mouth fell open.
“What, I can’t watch the classics? Seriously though: The Thing 2! George Romero’s Resident Evil! The Nicholas Cage Superman, Sam, how cool is that? And I, uh, brought the first two Terminator movies, ‘cause Lance Henriksen’s just wrong.”
“Oh my God,” Sam said.
Dean grinned at him. “Not any more.”
END.
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