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The first aid kit is running low. Sam counts through it, slowly and methodically. They’ve got half a box of bandaids, four butterfly bandages, and a single roll of gauze. A pack of dental floss and a sewing needle. A bottle of hydrocodone with two pills left. Three little packets of medical wipes and an empty bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Sam tears one of the medical wipes open with his teeth. He rubs it over the inside of his elbow, then picks up his syringe and twists it ‘round and ‘round the needle. It’s hard, with his other hand stuck in a sling. He has to lay the syringe on the table and hold it down with his bad arm, which sends a dull, shooting pain up into his shoulder. He grimaces, but it’s not too bad. He’s done this before.
This is Dean’s seventh dose. The second-to-last dose, if the ritual works the way it’s supposed to. If it doesn’t—God. If it doesn’t, Sam doesn’t know what to do.
He doesn’t look at Dean—at the demon the Mark turned him into. He doesn’t like doing it. That thing has his brother’s face, his brother’s body, but it’s painfully obvious how off everything is. Dean never would’ve left the bathroom without his stupid, smelly hair gel, or meticulously trimming his beard into the tasteful 5-o’clock shadow he likes to pass off as all-natural. He would’ve trimmed his nails all the way down to the quick. He would’ve cried if he ever went this long without a shower, or let that many pimples develop on his jawline and temples. Dean would hate it. Dean would be horrified if anybody saw him looking like that. And, so. Sam tries not to look.
Instead, he clumsily brings the syringe to the crook of his arm, and hisses when the needle slides home.
He has to pull the plunger back with his teeth. Sam watches, carefully, as his blood slowly fills in the tick-marked milliliters, one by one. Behind him, Dean shifts. Sam can hear it; the slight rustle of fabric, the rattle of metal against wood, Dean’s quiet, frustrated exhale.
“He hated you, you know,” Dean says. Sam doesn’t take the bait, this time. He and the demon wearing Dean’s face have had this conversation before. “You ruined his life. You made him more miserable than Dad ever did.”
Sam focuses on the place where the needle pushes through his skin. It tingles and burns, and it feels so, so real. Maybe the realest thing Sam’s ever felt.
After the blood comes the words. The ritual. Whatever. Sam knows them by heart, at this point. He mumbles them carefully, holding the syringe just-so. “He should’ve let you die,” Dean calls. “Back when you had that demon blood in you. He should’ve fucking killed you!”
Sam says nothing. Dean said the same thing when he woke up chained to a chair in the bunker, and again when Sam gave him his first dose of demon cure, and again when Sam gave him his second, his fourth, and his fifth. And besides. Sam knows he doesn’t really mean it.
Sam finishes the rest of the ritual. Dean—the thing wearing Dean—doesn’t say anything else. He just watches, and then, when Sam’s finished, he tilts his head back and sighs.
“Why are you doing this, Sam?” He says. He sounds tired. Bone-deep exhausted, just like Sam.
“You know why,” Sam replies. He holds up the syringe and taps the end, just to make sure he’s gotten all the bubbles out.
“I don’t,” Dean says. “I know what I’m like. Well. What I was like.” Sam sets the syringe aside, and rips open another medical wipe. He tastes the isopropyl on his tongue, sharp and hot. “I was a dick,” Dean continues. “An obsessive, paranoid bully. A coward scared to death of his own shadow.”
“That’s not true,” Sam says, and tips Dean’s head to the side. He swipes the medical wipe over the needle-marked skin there, careful as he can. Dean tenses and squirms, but there’s nothing to do, nowhere for him to go.
“Yeah, you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you.” Dean replies. Sam spares a glance at him, but he’s staring up at the ceiling, listless and dull “You still haven’t answered my question, Sam.”
“You’re my brother,” Sam says, diplomatically. “I’m not gonna let you stay like this.” There’s a speck of blood dried on Dean’s neck. Leftover from his last dose, maybe. Sam scrubs at it, and grinds his teeth until his jaw twitches. “And besides,” he says, “you did this for me, once. I guess I’m just returning the favor.”
At that, Dean laughs until he snorts. Sam smiles, a little. He missed hearing Dean laugh like that. “Well,” Dean says. “If we’re playing What Would Dean Do, I’ll save you the trouble. If he was standing here right now, he’d tell you to carve a demon trap onto a bullet, and put that bullet in my head.”
Sam scoffs. “Yeah, well, you’re a fucking idiot.”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Maybe I am.” He shifts, like he’s trying to get comfortable. He leans his head back far enough to rest against the back of the chair he’s tied to, and closes his eyes. Sam tosses the used-up medical wipe onto the floor, and walks away, back to the table.
Like this, it’s easy to pretend that the thing in the chair is just—Dean. Normal Dean. Sleeping it off at the kitchen table because he couldn’t be bothered to crawl into bed. Passed out in the back of the car with a bottle of hooch still clutched in his sleepy, slackjawed fist.
Dean’s next dose is due in seven minutes. And so, he counts down each one of those minutes in blessed, blissful silence. He stares his watch, counting the seconds as they go by; one Mississippi, two Mississippi. He listens to Dean—to the demon—breathe slow and deep.
And then, his watch beeps. Dean bolts upright, his face pinched and afraid. “Don’t. Please don’t.” Dean begs. “I don’t—please don’t make me go back.”
Sam ignores it, and plucks the blood-filled syringe off the table. Dean starts pulling at the chains around his wrists, hard, but Sam doesn’t care. Dean can fight as much as he wants. Sam put those chains on him. He knows exactly how tight they are.
“Sam, please,” Dean cries. “I can’t—I can’t do it again. Do you know how fucking miserable it is to be human? To be your brother? That guy chases after misery like it’s an Olympic sport and he’s going for the gold. He hoards guilt and pain and grief like they’re fucking collector’s items. He’s—he’s a miserable, pathetic, alcoholic wreck of a person—“
“He’s my fucking brother, and I want him back.”
“Sammy, I can’t. I can’t. Please don’t make me.” He looks up at Sam, pleading. His eyes are all wet, like—Jesus Christ. Like he’s fucking crying. “I finally got my wish, you know? Like this, I don’t feel a goddamn thing. And it’s beautiful, Sam. It’s—it’s so fucking free.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Sam snarls. He jams the syringe into Dean’s neck, the needle stabbing down into his muscle tissue until the plastic body is pressed hard against Dean’s skin.
“No,” Dean cries. “No, please—“ and writhes against the chains wrapped around his arms, his face red with the effort, his feet straining against the cuffs linking his ankles to the chair legs. And then, Sam presses the plunger down. Dean throws back his head, his eyes flickering between demon-black and human, and he screams, and screams, and screams.
_____
It wasn’t always like this, is the thing. There used to be a time when caring about Dean was more than just a habit. There was a time, once, when seeing Dean with demon-black eyes would’ve been the worst thing in the world.
But that was a long time ago. Now, he looks at this black-eyed version of Dean—wrapped in layers of chains, in pain, sobbing quietly—and he feels nothing. Nothing at all.
“I hate you,” Dean whispers, once the screaming is over and the tremors have passed. “I wish I woulda stayed dead. I wish I never left Hell.”
Sam raises an eyebrow, and takes a swig of Gatorade. “What’s the saying? If wishes were fishes…”
Dean laughs. His fake laugh, this time. Sam’s heard it many, many times before. “We’d all swim in riches, Sammy,” he says. “I’d be outta here, you’d probably be dead…”
“Are you—are you trying to scare me?” Sam laughs, just a little, and starts meticulously cleaning the syringe and the needle. “You’re not the first thing that’s wanted me dead, Dean. Not by a long shot.”
“Nah. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about anything. But you,” Dean says. “You want to die.”
Sam goes still. His hands start to shake, just a little, and he turns away before Dean can see. He doesn’t—he isn’t supposed to let Dean get to him like that. Once Dean knows he’s found some weak spot, some crack that didn’t quite get pasted over right, he’ll just push and push and push until it splits wide open.
“C’mon, Sam,” he says, and his voice lands somewhere between cajoling and mocking. “You really think I didn’t see it? You think your brother didn’t notice? He noticed, alright. It scared him. He didn’t wanna be alone. That’s why he kept you around, you know. He was afraid of being by himself.” Sam doesn’t like the way Dean—the demon inside of Dean—is looking at him. It’s sort of how a fox looks at a rabbit, he thinks. Like how a predator watches its prey. “I’m not, though. I could help you. I could give you what you want. Set you free, little bird. Let you really flap your wings.”
Sam grits his teeth. He forms his hands into white-knuckled fists, and lets himself go tense, just to remember what it feels like. A muscle in his jaw jumps once, twice, and then he breathes out, and lets it all go. “Fuck you, Dean,” Sam says. Toneless. Dead.
Dean shifts his shoulders and grins, wide and messy. “You think about it,” he says. “And hey. If you do want my help, you know where to find me.”
_____
Sam remembers it. When—after Dean stopped him from sealing Hell forever. He remembers when Death came for him. He remembers what Gadreel said while he was wearing Dean’s face.
And after, Sam asked Dean why he did it. I wanted to die! Sam had said. I was ready for it! I just wanted to be done!
Dean just looked at him and shrugged. And then, he said yeah, well. Since when does anyone get what they want?
_____
The bunker seems emptier without Dean in it. The halls seem endless and identical, the doors periodically spaced between them like ominous black piano keys. It doesn’t feel like a home—not that it ever did, really. This place feels like a psych ward. Like a tomb, maybe, with the crypts lined up in neat little rows.
Sam makes himself a sandwich in the kitchen. He eats it slowly, methodically. He digs the duct tape out of the cardboard box of miscellaneous crap Dean keeps in the garage, and finds a mismatched sock stuck on a shelf in the laundry room. He should’ve gagged Dean a long time ago, but he didn’t want Dean to be mad, after. He can picture it so clearly: Dean, opening his eyes, fully human, groaning and cracking his jaw and saying Jesus, Sam! Next time you gotta gag me, at least use something a little nicer than that.
He doesn’t mean to go inside Dean’s room. He needs to get back to keep an eye on Dean—on the thing inside Dean—and to give him the next dose. But the door is open, and the light is on, and—and—
There’s a picture of Mom on his nightstand. Sam traces it with careful, trembling fingers. She’s holding Dean on her hip; a version of Dean too young for him to recognize. And the truth is, Dean’s room—Dean’s space, no matter where he lives—has always had a strange air to it. A funny sort of reverence, like a mausoleum or a funeral parlor. Here, in the bunker, he’s got pictures of the dead lined up on his nightstand: Mom and Dad, Ellen and Jo and Bobby. Pictures of Sam, too; Sam in his multitudes, in his childhood buzzcut, sporting his middle school pimples, corralling the gangly limbs and too-short pants that defined his early adulthood. He’s right here, mixed in with photos of Dean’s dead parents and friends. And—and—
Sometimes, Sam wonders if he’s just another one of Dean’s ghosts. If, when Dean looks at him, he sees one of those pictures lined up on his nightstand. A younger Sam, a better Sam; the version that followed him around everywhere, because when he was little, Sam worshipped Dean the way other kids worshipped celebrities and movie stars.
What if Sam started doing the same thing? What if, at some point, he started looking at Dean and choosing to see the 26-year-old Dean instead; the Dean that found him blackout drunk in their hotel room, two weeks after Jess died, and let Sam cry into his shirt for hours without saying a word. Maybe the demon was right. Maybe Sam has been deluding himself this whole time. Maybe Dean—a human Dean—is nothing more than a sad, miserable, alcoholic mess.
Dean isn’t in any of the other pictures. Just this one, wrapped up in Mom’s arms; a shy-looking grin pasted across his cheeks. Sam traces four-year-old Dean’s face. His ridiculous hair and his little-kid freckles. He looks like the sort of goofball, dorky kid Sam would’ve loved when he was four years old, briefly hated during his teens, and been horribly, terribly endeared by as an adult. And so. He has to try, right? For this Dean. For the person Dean used to be. For the person that Dean could still be, if he wanted.
Sam’s watch beeps. The sound is sharp and wavering, reverberating off the painted concrete walls in a series of disconcerting echoes. He’s spent too much time down here.
It’s time for Dean’s last dose.
_____
When he was detoxing, Sam saw so many things. None of it was real, he thinks, but sometimes—well. Sometimes, he saw Dean. Sitting beside the cot, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in his hands and a grim, awful look on his face. And he would beg and plead and scream for Dean to please, please just kill him. Just end it. To just let me go. But that Dean wouldn’t ever do it. He just sat there, looking at Sam like he was disgusting, and taking large, painful gulps of whiskey.
And, well. Sometimes, Sam thinks it might’ve been real.
_____
The chair is empty when Sam gets back. The chains that used to bind Dean to it are splayed across the ground every-which-way. From what he can see, the demon trap is untouched, but that doesn’t matter, because Dean isn’t in it anymore.
Sam goes for the syringe first. He fills it haphazardly, the plunger clutched between his teeth. If—no. When Sam finds him, he’s gonna cure him, whether Dean likes it or not.
Dean hasn’t left the bunker. Sam’s sure of it. If it was him bound and determined to stay a demon, and Dean desperately trying to cure him of it, Sam wouldn’t leave either. He’d stay, right here, and he’d kill everyone inside of this place. And then, when he was done, he’d set the bunker alight and leave the bodies to burn.
Sam cracks the door open and peers up and down the hall, but there’s nobody in sight. And so, he toes down the hall, towards the boiler room, one step at a time.
_____
Sam doesn’t remember what happened the first week after Jess died. He was just so—so young, so painfully young, and that was his first real experience with grief. He was too young when Mom died, after all. He never really missed her the way Dean did. But when Jess died, he was just so lost. He didn’t know how to live with it. All his plans had revolved around Jess; the week before, Sam had been sneaking peeks at jewelry store windows and spending most of his political science course dreaming up what-ifs and whyfores. Without her, the only thing left was hunting. And Sam was already so tired of it when he was twenty-two. He would’ve rather been dead.
So. That’s what he did. Dean had a bottle of hydrocodone stuffed in his first aid kit. Sam poured the pills out into his hand and counted them; three, six, nine in total. He waited until Dean went out, one night, and then he poured himself a glass of water and sat on the side of his motel bed, just looking at that little handful of pills.
Dean came back before he could do it. He took one look at Sam, sat there on the bed, pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other, and slapped him so hard it felt like his eardrum burst. Dean took the pills away, too, and he said don’t you ever, ever even think about doing that, low and furious. And then he tipped forwards and cried into Sam’s shirt, which was so incomprehensibly backwards that Sam just sat there like an idiot. And after that, he didn’t think about it. For a long, long time, he forgot it ever happened at all.
_____
“Come on, Sam!” Dean shouts, and beats his axe into the bathroom door. The wood is holding, for now, but Sam knows it won’t for much longer. “Stop being so fucking difficult! Just—“ Dean swings again, “—let me—“ and again, and the door starts to splinter, “—help you!”
Sam pulls out the syringe and braces himself. Dean swings again, and this time, Sam sees the axe head peeking through the white-painted wood. “Help me?” Sam cries. “You want to kill me!”
“Yeah, and you wanna die! Pretty sure that’s a win-win no matter which way you slice it.”
“Shut the fuck up! Just—just shut up!”
The door splinters, then cracks, then parts. Dean peers through the hole he made, and grins at Sam through the fringe of splinters. “Hey, Sam,” he says, and winks. He reaches through the hole and unlocks the door. Sam lets him do it. He lets Dean open it, too, and step inside the bathroom with his axe in hand.
Dean chuckles, when he sees Sam’s syringe. “Oh my god, you—you’re still trying to cure me?” Dean takes a swing at Sam’s head. He steps to the side, and nearly trips into the tub. Dean laughs, again, and strikes.
The axe makes him slow. Too slow, and overconfident. Sam steps out of the way again, and this time, Dean ends up staggering into the bathtub. He backpedals, down the hallway, coaxing Dean into following him.
“Why?” Dean cries. He raises the axe again. Two hands, this time, high over his head. A killing blow, if he can land it. “Why the fuck do you care so goddamn much? Why won’t you just let me go?”
“Because you wouldn’t let me go!” Sam shouts. Dean cries out, inarticulate and furious. He hefts the axe and swings, two-handed and heavy. Sam ducks underneath it and shoves, sending Dean stumbling. And then, while Dean is still catching his balance, Sam jabs the syringe into the back of his neck and presses the plunger home.
Dean screams and collapses—a puppet that suddenly finds itself with no strings—but this time, there’s no demonic undertone, no supernatural, eerie layered voices. It’s just a scream, surprisingly high-pitched and painfully human.
“Exorcizamus te,” Sam gasps, “amnis immundus spiritus—“
“—No,” Dean whispers. “Sam, stop. Please, stop—“
“—hanc animam redintegra. Lustra! Lustra!” Sam wrestles the axe away from Dean’s weak, fluttering fingers, and slices his palm open on the blade. He leans over Dean and presses his knee into Dean’s chest, holding him in place. And then, Sam slaps his bloody hand over Dean’s lips. Dean’s back arches. Light pours from his mouth, from his eyes, until the whole world goes white and Sam’s ears ring.
When it fades, Dean is limp beneath him. His chest shakes, shallowly, and tears drip steadily from the corners of his eyes and around the curve of his ears.
Sam keeps his hand over Dean’s mouth, just in case. “Open your eyes, Dean,” Sam says. Dean tosses his head back and forth, and bites back a sob. Sam tightens his grip on Dean’s face, and shakes him. “Dean. Look at me.”
Dean opens his eyes. His human eyes, with pupils and irises and white parts, and Sam lets out an exhale he thinks he’s been holding in for years. “Fuck you,” Sam says, hoarse and thready. “Fuck you. Fuck you. If I can’t, neither can you. You hear me?” Dean won’t look at him. He just lays there, crying softly.
Sam slaps him. The sound cracks across the concrete “You hear me?” Sam shouts, loud enough he spooks himself, just a little. And for the first time in years, Dean opens his eyes and looks at Sam. This Sam. The one that’s been here all along.
“Yeah,” Dean sniffs. “Yeah. I hear you, Sam. I hear you.” God, he sounds so—so lost, and alone, and achingly, painfully small. And Sam wants to strangle him, a little, but instead he returns the favor Dean gave him, all those years ago. He hauls Dean up by the back of his shirt, until he’s sitting slumped against the wall. He sits next to Dean, so close their shoulders rub together every time Dean breathes. He pulls Dean’s head down, onto his shoulder, and lets Dean cry into his shirt. And it’s just like before. Dean bawls his fucking eyes out, and Sam doesn’t say a word.