Chapter Text
Sam draws a tree. He’s not paying much attention to Dean at all while they sit in the hotel room and Dean asks him about his visions and this woman. The child is…a girl? The room he describes has a nightlight with ballerinas on. Dean can’t shake the feeling but at the same time he can’t reconcile the instinct that tells him it’s all related.
Four years old. His father handing him the baby. “Take your brother outside as fast as you can, and don’t look back.” He has not revisited this memory in years, this thing at the core of his being, being four years old and standing on the dew wet grass with his baby brother in his arms.
He remembers it.
He doesn’t know what happened to Sammy. He just knows that he remembers that and later, Sammy was dead and he has memories of being in the car a lot. His dad driving and driving. Over the years he has assumed that there was smoke inhalation. Baby lungs. SIDs, maybe. He doesn’t know and it wasn’t something he could ask his dad. His dad talked once in awhile about his mom and often about the yellow-eyed demon.
It is his most essential memory. In some ways it is the secret of who he is. Holding that baby, heavy and wrapped in blankets. The baby was calm, looking at him. There were firemen and policemen but he kept holding the baby until his dad took him.
He missed his mom in a way that words can’t described. But the way the baby just disappeared from their life is the thing that he learned. Things don’t just die—they are and then it is as if they never were and silence comes down.
He has fallen silent. Sam is drawing on motel stationary, slightly hunched.
Dean digs out the photos he never looks at, of mom and dad and baby and him. Of the house in Lawrence. Sam looks at the photo.
“It’s not the same tree,” he says. “But it looks like the same house, just a different color.”
“It’s the same tree,” Dean says. “Just twenty years later.”
He can not go back.
#
It thrums in his ears, like the sound of his pulse; he can not go back. Dean promised himself he would never go back. He will face any monster but he does not need to do that. Sam sleeps for several hours and Dean tells himself that they won’t leave until the morning because Sam needs the rest.
He expects Sam to be wiped. More than that he expects Sam to be—well, not great. Upset and hiding it. Traumatized. Sam wakes up and says he has a kind of after-headache but otherwise feels great.
“You’ve got a headache,” Dean points out.
“Not a headache, headache. More like a, a vision hangover,” Sam says. He looks good. His eyes are bright and clear (and a kind of green-blue at the moment, Dean notes absently.) His color is normal.
“Are you hungry?” Dean asks.
Sam nods.
Dean makes him conceal the barcode tattoo on his hand and then they head out to dinner.
Dean has a beer before the food even comes, then he’s not really interested in his burger. Sam watches him drink a couple of more beers. Sam is hungry. He eats a chicken sandwich and onion rings, and then finishes Dean’s burger. The kid is putting some muscle on. Finally doing justice to those big shoulders.
He can not go back. He can not go back. It’s not exactly the kind of fear he feels when he faces a monster. That is a bright, energizing thing that he kind of love/hates. Fighting a monster is full of a fear that he can surf, can use to propel himself into action. This fear is cancerous and diffuse. It’s deeply unsettling. Like tumors in his bones making him brittle and tired.
Back in the motel, Sam pours him a whiskey without being asked.
“You’re stiff,” Sam says and Dean leers. It’s an obligatory leer, his heart isn’t in it. He showers and flops face down on the bed.
He hears the crack of the cap on the lotion bottle. “It’s gonna be cold,” Sam says.
Dean grunts.
It isn’t cold. Sam has warmed it between his big palms. It feels wonderful, if not quite enough to shut down the thrum of anxiety, the brittleness in his bones.
“Turn on the tv?” Dean asks. It’s too quiet in the room.
Sam pours him another couple of fingers of whiskey, then turns the tv on and searches. He finds a movie. Something about a woman who saw a crime and the guy who is protecting her. They’re on the run from the mafia/spies/cops/whatever. The whiskey is a comfort, the familiar promise of warmth and a way to hopefully shut down that pulse of unease.
Sam starts on his neck and shoulders. He knows Dean’s muscles now, knows the places that tighten and hold onto all the pain and anger of the day. His thumbs crack the knots and then he works out the tightness and crackle until Dean’s whole back is a wave of warmth and ease.
Dean dozes. The crackle of gunfire from the tv is like familiar music.
Sam has him drink more whiskey, tells him to lay back down. Dean smushes his face against the pillow. It’s a little scratchy and smells clean, so he bunches it up and embraces it.
Sam works on his lower back and then his thighs. Those hands covering so much skin.
Dean blames his arousal on the whiskey.
Sam kneads the big muscles in his ass and Dean sighs. The couple on the television are locked in an embrace and Dean listens to that rather than allow himself to think.
Sam runs his fingers on the inside of Dean’s thigh in a way that is unmistakable. Dean wiggles a little.
“Turn over?” Sam suggests.
“S’okay,” Dean says.
But Sam does a thing where he barely drags his nails over Dean’s skin and Dean feels a little wave of arousal.
“Come on,” Sam says. “You’ll relax better.”
Dean resists for awhile as Sam works on his calves.
“Turn over and I’ll massage your feet,” Sam says.
Dean huffs, amused.
“No, really, try it. People have done it for me,” Sam says. “I’ve done it for friends.”
“You don’t have friends,” Dean says. He glances back over his arm to see Sam rolling his eyes. Dean laughs a little, pleased that Sam isn’t in ‘yessir’ mode, and rolls over. Turns out having his feet massaged is incredible. Sam’s thumbs digging into the ball of his foot is practically orgasmic. He is blurry with whiskey and feeling okay as long as he avoids the iceberg of thinking about anything.
“Please, Dean,” Sam says. “It’s just jerking off, really. Let me.”
“I’m not gay,” Dean says.
Sam rolls his eyes. It almost makes Dean laugh it’s such a Sam thing to do even though it’s pretty rare to actually see it. He’s beginning to get a sense of the guy. “That’s pretty obvious,” Sam says.
Dean gives in. He’s half hard already. It doesn’t feel like sex sex. Not like having it with someone else. It’s just Sam doing what Sam does. Sam cracks the cap on the lotion bottle again and Dean feels a little jump of arousal. He sips the whiskey, looking at Sam over the rim of the glass.
Sam is not flirting or anything, he’s relaxed and matter of fact as he smooths lotion between his palms. Dean puts the glass down and Sam rests his hand against Dean’s half-hard cock. It feels good and Dean lets himself close his eyes. He lets himself drift. More movie gunfire from the television.
Sam moves his hand down to gently massage Dean’s balls. He does that for awhile before wrapping a hand around Dean’s cock. Dean keeps his eyes closed and it’s not Sam, not anyone, it’s just hands, stroking, and the quiet sound of the chase scene music on the television, like a distant island. Here he floats on a tipsy sea of the sensation of his cock swelling and contact.
He is relaxed, and the sudden swell of sensation warning that he’s about to come catches him by surprise. He stutters his hips into it and the world is gone in the shatter of orgasm and he rides it, feeling Sam just holding his dick, just letting him rock through it.
Sam cleans him up with a warm washcloth afterwards.
The kid is looking at him in a way that’s hard to describe.
Devotion. That’s the word. Sam is looking at him with utter devotion.
That’s too much to deal with right now, so Dean lets himself drift off to sleep.
#
He awakes not knowing where he is, a sensation so familiar it’s not worth commenting on. For long moments he resists the call of coffee and bathroom and is just there, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. He feels pretty well rested. He remembers motel room and glances at the other bed. Sam is asleep on his stomach.
What is he going to do about Sam? Honestly, the best thing to do would be free him. Manumission, they call it. He’s worried that Dad will want to sell him. The money would be great. Might give them a year without worry. Dean thinks of hunting with Sam as temporary and part of him can’t wait to be done with it and get back to normal. Growing up alone in motels—and John left him alone a lot—was torturous in a lot of ways. Scary and lonely. Dean got in trouble a lot for staying at other kid’s houses because John thought it was a risk.
Dean used to be a people person, someone who hated to be alone, but over time it became a part of him and now, sharing a motel room with someone else is annoying. At least sometimes. Not last night. Not something he wants to think about. But he rubs the palm of his hand against his dick and stretches, then gets up for coffee and bathroom.
He kind of wants to be on his own again and stop thinking about figuring out how to use Sam to hunt. The kid has lots of potential but Dean doesn’t exactly think of himself as the mentoring type. And the slave thing is an added complication. That business with the gun. Add the visions. Sam is forcing him to go back to Lawrence.
The logical thing to do is sell the kid. Probably better for Sam. Hunting is a terrible way to live and anybody who does it should do so by choice. Sam is a civilian and a slave dragged into the life. If they can find someone who is decent, it would be better for Sam than a life where everything is illegal and Sam is at risk of Dean dying or being eaten by a werewolf.
The kid has all those certifications and shit. There’s got to be something better than a brothel in New Orleans, some autistic kid who needs someone like Sam around in his service dog specialty or… Dean knows he doesn’t believe it. Nothing the kid has told him makes him have any belief in the sanctity of slave owners. Sam is screwed if he stays and screwed if he goes. Dean doesn’t want to sell him. Doesn’t know if he can.
Now they’re going to Lawrence, to the old house, to the nursery. The thing that killed mom, the thing that his father has chased for all of Dean’s real life, might be there.
Don’t borrow trouble. Don’t think about it before you have to.
“Rise and shine, Sammy!” Dean says. “Daddy wants his coffee!”
#
Sam has come to a conclusion. Dean is going to get him killed. He’s surprisingly all right with it. He doesn’t want to be killed but he doesn’t want to give up this…this experience. This life. He’d rather die than go back. If that means that eventually something horrible is going to go wrong and he’ll end up on a factory farm to be worked to death, or even caught with a gun and executed in front of a bunch of kids and breeders, well, fuck it.
He has never met someone like Dean. Dean terrifies Sam. But he makes him feel alive.
#
At a gas station in Lawrence, Dean makes a desperate phone call out of earshot of Sam. “Dad? I know I’ve left you messages before. I don’t even know if you’ll get ‘em. But I’m with Sam. And we’re in Lawrence. And there’s somethin’ in our old house. I don’t know if it’s the thing that killed Mom or not, but... I don’t know what to do. So, whatever you’re doin’, if you could get here. Please. I need your help, Dad.”
Sam steps up more than ever. He takes the lead on talking to Jenny, explaining that Dean used to live here. Jenny clearly thinks they’re a couple and without ever touching Dean, Sam makes that feel true. Jenny introduces them to her kids; Sari, the girl with the ballerina nightly, and Ritchie the juice junkie. Sam is a little awkward around kids but he doesn’t talk to them as if they’re brain-damaged and they relax around him.
Jenny shows them around and tells them about flickering lights and Sari’s belief that there’s something in her closet.
Afterwards, Dean says they should just treat it like any other case, ignoring the rising sense that he needs to get out of here, get Sam out of here. Instead, he goes back to Dad’s journal.
“What do you remember?” Sam asks. It’s like something—Deans’ anxiety, or maybe the night before—has given Sam a kind of authority. He’s working the case. Dean could see Sam convincing someone he was a Fed or a health inspector. Sam is getting it.
“I don’t remember much. I remember the fire... the heat. And then I carried the baby out the front door.”
“You did?” Sam asks. “I thought your brother…”
“That was after. Smoke inhalation or something,” Dean says. “Then dad started seeing psychics. He must have seen every single one in town.”
“I wonder if any of them are still here,” Sam says. He pulls the phone book from the desk and flips through. “All right, so there are a few psychics and palm readers in town. There’s someone named El Divino. There’s, uh –” he laughs, “there’s the Mysterious Mister Fortinsky. Uh, Missouri Moseley—”
“Wait,” Dean says. “In his journal, the first line.”
Sam never touches the journal.
Dean flips it open and shows Sam. “First page, first sentence, read that.”
Sam reads. “I went to Missouri and I learned the truth.”
Dean shrugs. “I always thought he meant the state.”
#
The fortune teller works out of her house, a nice two story. She’s with a client and Dean expects they’ll have to wait but she tells the man his wife is true as they come and hustles him out.
Missouri is black and no nonsense. She sighs and turns. “Poor bastard. His woman is cold-bangin’ the gardener.”
Sam looks as if something went down the wrong pipe.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” Dean asks.
“He didn’t come here to be told, he came here for good news,” Missouri says. “Sam and Dean Winchester, look at the two of you.” She has a rich warm laugh, a cackle of pleasure. “Oh, you boys grew up handsome.” She points a finger at Dean. “And you were one goofy-lookin’ kid, too.”
He was not. He was cute and blond.
“Sam,” she says and grabs his hand. “Oh, honey…I’m so sorry. So glad your brother finally has you back.”
Sam looks at Dean, not sure how to explain.
“This isn’t—”
“Oh don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out. You’re soulmates, like to like. You feel it, that this is your brother.”
Dean doesn’t feel anything at the moment. He is so flabbergasted that he can’t think of a thing to say.
“I’m not—his brother died,” Sam says.
“You don’t look dead,” Missouri says. “What you think it’s a coincidence that you show up in the system the same month his brother died? Did all those years of slavery make you stupid, child?”
“No ma’am,” Sam says. “Um…we’re trying to track down Dean’s—um, we’re trying to get in touch with John.”
“He’s missing?” She shakes her head.
Dean looks at Sam. “We don’t even look alike,” he says.
“Believe me or not, it don’t change what you are. Sit, please.” Sam keeps a steady eye on Dean, Dean can feel it, as they sit down.
“Child,” Missouri snaps at Dean, “you put your foot on my coffee table, I’m ‘a whack you with a spoon!”
“I didn’t do anything!” Dean protests.
“You thought about it. So why is your brother still wearing that tattoo. You tell me you ain’t filed the paperwork to free him?"
"Dad's name is on the title," Dean says. "He needs to do it or sign it over to me." Sam is wearing cover-up. His tattoo’s not visible. How does she know?
Sam is wearing cover-up. His tattoo’s not visible. How does she know?“Because he is still wearing it in his brain,” Missouri says. “He’s still a slave in his brain.” She switches her attention to Sam. “You’ve done good, keeping some part of yourself from being owned, but you don’t need to be owned at all, Sam.”
#
She goes with them back to the house and talks to Jenny. Sam finds himself looking at the house with new eyes.
Missouri is a real psychic. He believes in her. But he doesn’t believe he is Dean’s brother. Seriously, just look at Dean who is strong and sure and takes big bites of life. Sam would give anything to be related to that but never in his fantasies could he have imagined that he came from the same family as someone like Dean.
He’s imagined the family that he came from, lots of times. He knows there was something there. Some tragedy. He has always assumed unwed mother and drugs or something, maybe prison. Occasionally, a car crash, both parents dead. Darker moments were that they simply didn’t want him. He wondered what sin lingered in his DNA, what awful thing was he capable of? Sasha, who raised him, had taught him that you are what you choose, and what you do. Slaves didn’t have much choice so he tried to be thoughtful about what choices he did have.
This house is so—kind. Juice in the fridge, not perfectly clean. There are toys and the bathroom upstairs has toys in the tub and toothpaste on the faucet. Could he possibly have come from a place like this?
No. He couldn’t. That couldn’t have been his nursery. He’d know it, he’d feel it. What he has always felt was his own essential wrongness, the rightness of him being a slave, not because slavery was right but because he deserved it.
They’re breaking holes in the wall and stuffing hex bags in them when something garrotes him and he grabs the lamp cord wrapped around his neck. Stupid, he thinks, not watching. Then he isn’t thinking anything, just trying to get his fingers under the cord, scratching his skin, but it’s so tight.
Dean is there, fingers on his neck, trying to get the cord off. Black is creeping in from the corners of Sam’s vision and Dean leaves. His ears are ringing. He’s going to die, and die alone.
The room blinding white light fills the room and Sam closes his eyes. He’s dead. He’s dead. But something is happening. He can feel something around his neck and then he can breathe. He can’t sit up but he can breathe. Dean pulls him up and against him and hugs him fiercely.
No one has hugged him since Sasha.
He can hear the sound of Dean’s heartbeat and it is as close as his own. He wants Dean to be his brother more than he has ever wanted anything in his life and he is too out of it to push the knowledge away. Wanting something always leads to pain. But he wants it, oh so much.
#
Dean is done. Done with Lawrence. Done with Kansas. He wants a motel bed. He wants the road. He wants to stop thinking about Sam strangling on the floor. He really wants to stop thinking about this house and his mom and why the fuck his dad hasn’t called him.
But Sam says he has a bad feeling.
“We killed the poltergeist. A poltergeist, Sam. Pretty serious business. What more do you want?”
Sam shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“Is this a psychic thing?”
“Maybe?” Sam says.
“Like a vision?”
“My vision didn’t happen,” Sam says.
No nursery in flames. Dean counts that as a win. They sit in silence for awhile and it feels comfortable. Is Sam his brother? Did his dad know that? Is that why he got him? Why not tell Dean?
Dean’s mind slides over memories of the night before, of Sam’s hands on him. It wasn’t real. It was…certified for hospitality in six states. Sam has been doing stuff like that for years and it was practically professional. Doesn’t count. And it’s going to stop now because if Sam is his little brother.
That’s when Jenny screams from the window.
It’s the usual insanity after that except that it’s fire, in THAT nursery. Training keep Dean moving. His body knows what to do even as his brain decides to go off line. He barely has the presence of mind to yell at Sam to get the kids. Jenny’s door won’t open so he kicks it down, cheap hollow core door splintering against his boot.
He grabs Jenny and pulls but she says, “My kids!”
“Sam’s got ‘em!” Dean yells. The fire is already loud. He remembers that sound, louder than anything.
He drags her downstairs.
Sari and her little brother Ritchie are standing outside and Sari is crying.
“Sari,” Dean says, “Where’s Sam?”
“It got him!” she says, pointing at the house. The door slams shut and Dean grabs at the handle and pulls, then slams his shoulder against it.
It takes precious seconds to think of what to do. Ax. In the trunk. Every second he’s wondering if he just found his brother to lose him again. He can’t. He grabs the ax and a rifle from the trunk. He runs back to the door and slams the ax into it; one, two, three and four and the door is splintering and he can force his way in.
What he sees is Sam, pinned against the wall, and a whirling thing of flame. He raises the rifle, pretty sure it’s not going to work.
“Wait! Don’t!” Sam yells.
He looks over his shoulder at Sam.
“I can see her now,” Sam says.
The flames die away and it’s his mom. His mom. Wearing a nightgown. She is blond and beautiful and more real than his memories. He can’t move. He wants her to hug him. Please. Please be his mom.
“Mom?” he whispers.
“Dean,” she says. She walks up to him and he’s looking down at her. Noticing things he didn’t remember, the way her hair curls, the arch of her collar bones, the white of her nightgown.
She walks past him and looks at Sam. “Sam,” she says.
Dean knows. Sam is his brother.
Sam manages to smile weakly.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?” he asks.
But she doesn’t answer. Instead she looks up and says, “You get out of my house. And let go of my son.”
There are flames wrapping around her. Flames leaping and rising up to the ceiling. Flames reaching into some other dimension and incinerating something, scorching this house clean.
Then she’s gone and Sam is free.
#
Missouri Mosley walks into her house and puts her purse on the table. “That boy…he has such powerful abilities. But why he couldn’t sense his own father, I have no idea.”
John Winchester is sitting on the couch. “Mary’s spirit –- do you really think she saved the boys?”
“I do.” She puts her hands on her hips and turns her sternest look on him. “John Winchester, I could just slap you. Why won’t you go talk to your children?”
“I want to.” He leans his head into his hands. “You have no idea how much I wanna see ‘em. But I can’t. Not yet. Not until I know the truth.”
“You need to tell that boy he’s your own.”
John shakes his head. “He shouldn’t be in this life. They told me he’d be placed in a family. Adopted.” He looked up at Missouri. “Maybe it’s better if he stays a slave.”
Missouri looks at him, a black woman making a white man recognize what he’s just said.
John has the grace to realize. “You’re right,” he says. “But I can’t face them yet.”
“I don’t know what those boys are headed for but it’s big.” Missouri sighs. “Angels and demons are working to bring them together.”
# # #